Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 6, April 16, 1938
- Автор: Трит Лоуренс, Вулрич Корнелл
- Год: 1938
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 6, April 16, 1938». Краткое содержание книги:
Flannagan saw. A tall sinewy man lying on a hospital bed, telling feebly how his best friend had tried to kill him. Deliberately. Then Flannagan had to go out. Lamport was weak and couldn’t talk much. Doctor’s orders.
As for the man Glidden, all he could do was shake his head and say nothing with a butler’s accent. He’d been chopping wood. He hadn’t heard anything. When he came back, Lamport was lying there and telling Seely he shouldn’t have done it.
The gun? None except the one in Seely’s pocket. Seely had cleaned it, oiled it and loaded it, standing next to Lamport who was measuring his ingredients for the pudding.
Pudding again. Little Flannagan let loose a few pounds of steam and marched out to the shack. Seely had called it a shack, anyhow. It had all the modern conveniences except a stove. Seely had funny ideas about roughing it.
Sightseers had messed up most of the evidence, if there’d been much in the first place. Flannagan found merely a couple of dried bloodstains and then the ashes in the fire. He shoveled the ashes into a paper bag and took them back to the sheriff’s office to study under a portable microscope. Ashes and the bullet that Sheriff Reveneau had locked in his safe, in a carefully labeled envelope.
Reveneau, big and grizzled and matter-of-fact, sat on the edge of the desk and nursed his bewilderment. Flannagan stared at the bullet for a long, long time. He had to believe it, and at the same time it was almost impossible. A smooth-bore pistol. A modern bullet without rifling marks.
After a while Reveneau couldn’t keep it to himself any more. “Of all the gosh-darned foolishment,” he growled. “They all of ’em admit there wasn’t nobody else around, so Seely must have done it. And one bullet missing from his gun. You can’t worm out of it, fella, no matter how much money ye git.”
Flannagan held the little lead pellet in his hand, flipped it thoughtfully and caught it. Reveneau was six inches higher and five inches wider, but a man is as big as the inside of his head.
Flannagan said, “Let’s iron this out. Who do you think I am, anyhow?”
“Reckon you’re asking for it. Seely, he’s got more money than’d fill this here room, so he hired you to twist things round his way. Trouble is, you can’t twist. This shooting happened in my jurisdiction and you can’t buy me neither. Seely goes up for it next court. Gimme back that bullet. Doc Jervis dug it out’n Lamport’s side and I don’t feel right ’bout lettin’ you nor anybody else handle it.”
Flannagan dropped it on the desk. “You have me wrong, Sheriff. Neither Seely nor anybody else hired me.”
“Come up for the fun of it, hey?”
Flannagan beamed amiably and looked like the bright boy of the class. He had his favorite cue. “In a way, yes. The university has a police school — the Academy of Police Science, it’s called — and my job is to tackle the tough ones and show that the scientific methods get results where the old ones don’t. Then I send a line in to the papers to the effect that the Academy cracked another one. I’m paid for getting publicity, but my job is to find the truth regardless.”
“Science,” muttered Sheriff Reveneau slowly. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with it if you use your plain common sense. Only when you use your common sense, ain’t no need for science.”
“I’ll make a bet with you, Sheriff. I’ll bet Seely didn’t shoot Lamport and that Lamport didn’t do it himself either, and I’ll prove it with this sort of thing.” He tapped the microscope. “If I’m wrong, I’ll come up here and work under you for three months. But if I’m right, you come down to the Academy and take a three months’ course in police work. Is it a bet?”
Reveneau scratched his head thoughtfully, then extended a great bearlike paw. “My hand on it,” he said. “But I’ll tell you one thing. Even if you proved somethin’ with this scientific stuff o’ yourn, they wouldn’t believe it up here. You got to show a jury what a man instead of a microscope tells.”
Paul Flannagan gripped the hand and hardly listened. He was already building up the publicity in his head. “County Sheriff Comes Out For Science.” The papers would eat it up.
Arthur Tannick went down on the train with Flannagan. Tannick took care of the legal end of the Seely interests and made enough out of it to have to juggle his own income tax. He was tall, smooth, with a nose that looked as if it were made for his pince-nez glasses rather than the glasses for it.
Tannick lit a cigar that smelt of tobacco and perfume. “It’s a mess,” he said irritably. “I told Seely as soon as he got out on bail to hop the jurisdiction. There’s no case unless Lamport takes the stand, and I can persuade him not to.”
“I told Seely if he jumped bail he’d practically admit he was guilty.”
“Well, isn’t he?”
“How do I know? About this Lamport — he’s a lawyer?”
Tannick nodded. “Doesn’t practise, though. More of a promoter than a lawyer.”
Flannagan said, “Seely and Lamport came up for some shooting and now they got a shooting and they don’t like it. I could feel sorry for that pair. All alone in the woods with nothing between them and the cold except a five-thousand-dollar shack, and nothing between them and starvation except Seely’s valet. Think of it, Tannick — two men and only one valet. The way I look at it, they should have brought along the chef from the Waldorf and then there wouldn’t have been any trouble.”
“No need of being facetious. They had angry words over a pudding, and though the statement sounds ludicrous, it was merely the excuse, the casus belli. If Lamport goes on the stand they’re bound to bring in a verdict of guilty. Even Lamport couldn’t explain how he shot himself and then disposed of the gun. Seems to me that’s the strongest point against Seely.”
Flannagan shrugged. “One point in Seely’s favor balances everything else you can possibly say.”
“What’s that?”
“Why in hell would he call me in if he were guilty? He knows I’ll get the truth, no matter what it is.”
“Maybe you overrate yourself, Flannagan.”
And little Flannagan snapped back, “Impossible!” and looked vastly pleased with himself.
But it was sheer bravado. The same bravado with which he’d talked himself into his job three months ago. The university had had a million dollars worth of police school and laboratory equipment but no pupils and no prestige. Flannagan had erupted with the idea that practical work, practical success was the answer. Solve a few murders, make the world know the Academy was cracking cases, and the Academy was made. He’d wrangled a trial for his scheme, with himself as publicity director.
Maybe it was luck, maybe it was little Flannagan’s liberal sprinkling of Academy funds, but the next important murder case was an Academy triumph. The papers stated that the police had arrested the murderer “in cooperation with the Scientific Academy of the University” and the police commissioner admitted he had had “invaluable help.” Thereafter Flannagan was made.
But it was a precarious making. One boner and the opposition would be on his neck. The jealous police officials who didn’t like to divide credit: the reactionaries who believed in the old-fashioned methods; the crooked politicians who were secretly connected with crime.
As soon as Flannagan reached New York, he walked into the Academy laboratory and put down the bag of ashes he’d collected from the fireplace of Seely’s cabin.
“Have a look at this stuff,” he said, “and let me know what you find.”
Stettinus, the laboratory wizard, tall, stooped, with a yellow wrinkled face and a mouth wide enough to grace a cartoon, said, “What’ll I look for?”