The French Powder Mystery

“Then, I reasoned, the staining of the book-end was an accident. It was standing innocently on the glass-topped desk. How could the blood have got on it? There are two possibilities. The first is that the book-end was used as a weapon. But this is indefensible, because the wounds were the result of revolver-shots, and there are no signs of a striking blow with such a bludgeon as the book-end might have made. Then the only remaining possibility is that the blood got on it inadvertently. How might this have occurred?

“Easily. The book-end is on the glass-topped desk. The only way blood could get on the bottom of the book-end, where the blood would show ineffaceably, would be by its trickling across the glass and soaking into the material. But you see what this gives us.”

“Mrs. French was at the desk when she was shot,” announced the old man gloomily. “She was shot below the heart. She fell into the chair and got another in the heart itself. The blood from the first wound gushed out before she fell. The blood from the second wound trickled out as she lay across the table — and soaked into the felt.”

“And that,” said Ellery, smiling, “is a perfect recitation. Remember that Prouty is sure that the precordial type of wound particularly would bleed profusely. That’s probably what happened... Now we can further reconstruct the crime. If Mrs. French was at the desk and was shot in the heart, then her murderer was in front of her and shot across the desk. It must have been at a distance of several feet, because there are no powder marks on the woman’s clothes. We can perhaps compute the approximate height of the murderer by determining the angle at which the bullets entered the body. But I have little faith in this, because there is no exact way of judging just how far the bullets traveled, or in other words how far from Mrs. French the murderer stood when he fired. And an error of inches would throw off all our calculations as to his height, considerably. You might get your firearms expert, Kenneth Knowles, on the job, but I don’t think much will come of it.”

“Neither do I,” sighed the Inspector. “Nevertheless, it’s comforting to be able to place the crime so precisely. It all hangs together, Ellery — a nice bit of reasoning. I’ll get Knowles to work immediately. Is there anything else, son?”

Ellery said nothing for an appreciable moment. They turned into West 87th Street. Half-way up the block stood the brownstone old house in which they lived. They quickened their steps.

“There’s a heap more, dad that I haven’t gone into, because of this and that,” Ellery said absently. “The signs were all there, for the world to see. They needed intelligent assembly, however. You’re probably the only one on the scene who has the mental potentiality for piecing them together. The others... And you’re exceptionally dulled by care.” He smiled as they reached the brownstone steps of their dwelling.

“Dad,” he said, one foot on the lowest step, “on one phase of this investigation I am entirely at sea. And that—” he tapped the package under his arm, “is the five books I plucked from old French’s desk. It seems silly to suppose that they can have anything to do with the murder, and yet — I have the queerest feeling that they can explain so much if we worm out their secret.”

“You’ve gone slightly daffy with concentration,” growled the Inspector, laboriously ascending the stairs.

“Nevertheless,” remarked Ellery, inserting a key into the lock of the big carved old-fashioned door, “this night is dedicated to a sedulous analysis of the books.”