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There Was an Old Woman [= The Quick And the Dead]
- Автор: Куин (Квин) Эллери
- Год: 1943
- Язык: английский
- Год: Little, Brown and Company
- Жанр: Классические детективы
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“Play it out, Dad,” was all Ellery would reply.
Eventually Thurlow returned, and the meeting was resumed. Thurlow looked smug. Something bulged in his breast pocket which Sergeant Velie, who had followed him, whispered to the Inspector was “papers, some kind of papers. He’s been racin’ all over the joint wavin’ papers.”
“Meeting will come to order again,” said Thurlow briskly. “Any other nominations? No? Then we will proceed to a vote by the showing of hands. The nominees are Simon Bradford Underhill and Thurlow Potts. All those in favor of Mr. Underhill who have a legal vote on this Board please signify by raising your hands.”
Two hands went up — Sheila’s, and Underhill’s.
“Two votes for Mr. Underhill.” Thurlow smacked his lips. “Now. I have here,” and he brought out of his pocket two envelopes, unsealed, “the absentee votes of the other members of this Board, Louella Potts and Horatio Potts. I have their votes by proxy.”
Sheila paled.
“Louella Potts.” Thurlow drew from one of the envelopes a signed statement. “Votes for Thurlow Potts.” He threw down Louella’s paper with a disdainful gesture and took up the second envelope. “Horatio Potts. Votes for Thurlow Potts.” And Thurlow Potts held up one pudgy hand triumphantly. “Tally — two votes for Underhill, three for Thurlow Potts. Thurlow Potts is elected President of the Board of Directors of the Potts Shoe Company by a plurality of one.”
Thurlow rapped on the desk. “The meeting is adjourned.”
“No,” said Sheila in a voice full of hate. “No!”
Charley gripped her shoulder.
“Finished?” Inspector Queen strode forward. “In that case, we’ll get down to business. Ellery, open this smaller envelope!”
Ellery wielded a letter knife on Cornelia Potts’s envelope, slowly. This letter was going to do something final to the Potts murder case: it would name the murderer. Why this should annoy him Mr. Queen did not quite know, except the patently outlandish reason that the naming of murderers had always been a Queen specialty.
They had forgotten the small envelope in their absorption with the Board election. Now they watched him unfold a single long typewritten sheet, and scan it, and there was no sound of anything but the pick-picking of the grandfather clock.
“Well?” cried the Inspector.
Ellery replied in a quite flat voice: “This is the letter Cornelia Potts wrote. It is dated the afternoon of her death, the time specified being 3.35 P.M. The message goes:
I, Cornelia Potts, being of sound mind and in full possession of my faculties, and knowing that I am shortly to die of my heart ailment, and in prayer that I may be forgiven in Heaven for what I have done, make this statement:
I ask not the world to judge me, for what I have done will be condemned by the world as if it were a fixed jury and I know that its judgment will be prejudiced.
Only a mother knows what motherhood is, how the mother loves the weak and hates the strong.
I have always loved my children Thurlow, Louella, and Horatio. Their weaknesses cannot be laid to them. They are what they are because of their father, my first husband. This I came to know shortly after he disappeared; and I have never forgiven him for it. May he rot. I took his name and made something of it; it is more than he ever did for me or mine.
My first children have always needed me, and I have always been their strength and their defender. The children of my second marriage have never needed me. I hated the twins for their independence and their strength; I hate Sheila for hers. Their very existence has been a daily reminder to me of the folly and tragedy of my first marriage, to Bacchus Potts. I have hated them since their childhood for their health, for their laughter, for their cleverness, for their sanity.
I, Cornelia Potts, killed my twin sons Robert and Maclyn.
It was I who substituted the bullet for the blank cartridge the police had put into Thurlow’s weapon. It was I who took the Harrington & Richardson revolver from Thurlow’s hiding place with which I held up the newspaper people and made them leave my estate. Later it was I who stole one of Thurlow’s other guns and hid it from the police and went with it into my son Maclyn’s bedroom in the middle of the night and shot him with it — yes, and whipped him.
I will be called a monster. Perhaps. Let the world cast stones at me — I shall be dead.
I confess these crimes of my own free will, and let this be an end to them. I will answer for them before my Creator.
“The letter,” continued Ellery Queen in the same even voice, “is signed in the usual soft-pencil scrawl, ‘Cornelia Potts.’ Dad,” he said, “let’s have a look at the Old Woman’s other two written signatures — the one on the big envelope and the one on the will.”
It was still in the room.
Ellery looked up. “The signature on this confession,” he announced, “is the authentic handwriting of Cornelia Potts.”
Sheila threw back her head and laughed and laughed.
“I’m glad,” she gasped. “I’m glad! Glad she was the one. Glad she’s dead. Now I’m free. Daddy’s free. We’re safe. There won’t be any more murders. There won’t be any more murders. There won’t be any...”
Charley Paxton caught her as she crumpled.
The Inspector very carefully pocketed Cornelia Potts’s will, her confession, and the two envelopes.
“For the record,” he grunted. The Inspector looked tired, but relaxed. He glanced about the empty study, the overturned chair in which Sheila had been sitting, the desk, the books twinkling their titles in the playful sun. “That’s that, Ellery. Case of Potts and Potts kaput, killed off like a case of Irish whiskey at a wake.” He sighed. “A nasty business from beginning to end, and I’m glad to be rid of it.”
“If you are rid of it,” said Ellery fretfully.
The Inspector stiffened. “If? Did you say ‘if,’ son?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Don’t go highfalutin on me, for cripe’s sake,” groaned the Inspector. “Aren’t you ever satisfied?”
“Not when there’s a ragtag end.”
“Talk English!”
Ellery lit a cigarette. He blew smoke at the ceiling without relish, swinging his leg idly against the desk on which he was perched. “One thing bothers me, Dad. I wish it didn’t but it does.” He frowned. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to sweep it out of my skull.”
“What’s that?” asked his father, almost with fear.
“There’s still a gun missing.”
Part Four
21
The Uneasiness of Heads
Now was the winter of their discontent, and that was strange, for the Potts case was solved. Wasn’t there a confession? Hadn’t the newspapers leaped upon it with venal joy? Weren’t old cuts of Landru lifted from morgues the length and breadth of the land? Didn’t the tabloids begin to serialize still again that old standby of circulation joggers, Famous Murders of Fact and Fiction? Was not Herod evoked, and Lady Macbeth?
One tabloid printed a cartoon of the Old Woman, smoking gun in hand, sons writhing at her feet, with the witty inscription: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son. (PROVERBS, XIII, 24.)” A more dignified journalist resume began with the quotation: “Innocent babes writhed on thy stubborn spear... P. B. SHELLEY, Queen Mab, VI).”
But Ellery Queen thought the Order of the Bloodstained Footprint should have been awarded to the wag who resurrected the old laborcapital cartoon of the Old Woman in the Shoe, with her six children tumbling out, across two of whom however he now painted large black X’s, and composed to explain it the following quatrain: —