The French Powder Mystery
- Автор: Куин (Квин) Эллери
- Серия: Ellery Queen #2
- Год: 1930
- Язык: английский
- Год: Frederick A. Stokes
- Жанр: Классические детективы
Электронная книга - «The French Powder Mystery». Краткое содержание книги:
“If not the window,” continued Ellery, “where then? The key pointed to the apartment — the required privacy, illumination, a logical place for the use of lipstick — certainly the apartment seemed the best possibility. So Inspector Queen, relying upon my discretion and discernment, since he himself could not leave the window-room where the preliminary investigation was still going on, asked me to go to the apartment and see what I could see. Which I did, with interesting results...
“The first thing I found in the apartment was Mrs. French’s own lipstick, lying on the bedroom dressing-table.” Ellery picked up the gold lipstick from the desk and held it up for a moment. “This lipstick proved at once, of course, that Mrs. French had been in the apartment on Monday night. The fact that it was lying under the curved edge of a mother-of-pearl tray on the dressing-table and was quite hidden, showed that it had probably been overlooked by the murderer. In fact, the murderer had no reason even to look for it, because he did not apparently observe that the lipstick in Mrs. French’s bag and the coloring on her lips were not identical.” Ellery replaced the glittering metal case on the desk.
“Now, I found the lipstick on the dressing-table. What did this mean? It seemed rather plain that Mrs. French had been using the stick at that dressing-table inside when she was interrupted. But the fact that the lipstick was still there on the table when I found it pointed, it seemed to me, to the fact that Mrs. French was not shot in the bedroom. What was the interruption, then? Obviously, either a knock on the outer door or the noise of the murderer entering the apartment. It was not the latter, for the murderer had no key to the apartment, as I shall soon prove. Then it must have been a knock at the door. Then, too, Mrs. French must have been expecting it, for it so disturbed her, or it was so important to her, that she immediately put down her lipstick, neglecting to complete the daubing of her lips, and hurried through the library and into the anteroom to admit her nocturnal visitor. Presumably she opened the door, the visitor entered, and they went into the library where Mrs. French stood behind the desk and the visitor stood to the right, facing her — that is, Mrs. French stood where I am standing now and the murderer stood about where Detective Hagstrom is sitting at this moment.
“How do I know this?” went on Ellery rapidly. “Very simply. On examining the library, I discovered that these book-ends, which lay on the desk” — he lifted the two onyx book-ends carefully and exhibited them — “had been tampered with. The green felt sheathing of one of them was lighter in shade than its mate. Mr. Weaver volunteered the information that the book-ends were only two months old, having been presented to Mr. French by Mr. Gray on the occasion of Mr. French’s last birthday, and that he had observed them at that time in perfect condition, with the felts exactly alike in color. Furthermore, the book-ends had never left the room, or in fact the desk itself. Apparently, then, the change of felt had occurred the night before. And that was proved when, on examining the felt under a powerful glass, I noted some scattered grains of a white powder stuck in the glue-line where felt and onyx met!
“The glue was still a trifle viscid,” said Ellery, “showing that it had been very recently applied. The grains, on examination, by myself cursorily and on analysis by the official fingerprint expert, proved to be ordinary fingerprint powder, such as is used by the police. But the use of fingerprint powder predicated a crime. There were no fingerprints on the onyx. That meant the fingerprints had been removed. Why the powder, then? Obviously, first to sprinkle the surface in order to bring out what fingerprints might be there, and second to remove the ones found. So much was evident.
“But the larger question arose — why were these book-ends handled at all?” Ellery smiled. “It was an important question, and its answer told an important story. Well, we now knew that they were handled in order to change the felt on one of them. But why had that felt been changed?”
His eyes challenged them mischievously. “There was only one logical answer. To hide or remove a trace of the crime. But what could such a trace be — one that would necessitate carefully ripping off a whole felt, running down to some department in the store which stocks felts and baizes (with what risk you may imagine!), bringing back the felt and some glue, and finally pasting the new protector on the book-end? It must be a damaging trace indeed. The most damaging trace of a crime which I can conceive is — blood. And that was the answer.
“For Dr. Prouty had stated positively that much blood had flowed. Then I had found the exact spot where Mrs. French’s heart-blood had poured out of her body! I proceeded to reconstruct that incident. The book-ends were on the far edge of the desk, opposite the place where I am now standing. The blood must have come, then, from a position similar to mine at this moment. If we suppose that Mrs. French had been shot as she stood here, the first bullet striking above the abdomen in the precordial region, then the blood spurted out directly on the glass top of the desk and trickled across to the book-end, soaking it in gore. Whereupon she must have collapsed in the chair, falling forward just as the second bullet, fired from the same” spot, hit her directly in the heart. This also bled a little. Only one book-end was affected — the one nearer the center of the table. It was so bloody that the murderer was compelled to remove the felt altogether and substitute a new one. Why he felt compelled to hide this trace of the crime I shall go into later. As for the different shade of the new felt — it is an optical fact that colors are more difficult to distinguish truly by artificial light than by daylight. At night, no doubt, the two shades of green seemed identical. With the aid of the sun I immediately detected the difference...
“You see now how we concluded exactly where Mrs. French was when she was murdered. As for the position of her assailant, it was determined from the angle of the wounds themselves, which were pointing to the left and quite ragged, indicating that the murderer stood rather sharply to the right.”
Ellery paused, patting his lips with a handkerchief. “I have strayed a little from the main line of my exposition,” he said, “because it was necessary to convince you that I now had genuine proof that the murder had been committed in the apartment. Until the discovery of the tampered book-ends I could not be sure, despite the fact that I found these cards and cigaret stubs” — he displayed them briefly — “in the cardroom next door.”
He put down the board on which the cards were tacked. “We found the cards lying on the table there arranged in such a manner as to indicate immediately that a game of Russian banque had been interrupted. Mr. Weaver testified that the cardroom had been tidy the evening before, that the cards had not been there. That meant, of course, that someone had used them during the night. Mr. Weaver further attested to the fact that of all the French family and their friends and acquaintances, Mrs. French and her daughter Bernice Carmody were the only ones addicted to the game of banque — that in fact it was well known in many quarters how passionately devoted to it they were.
“The cigaret stubs in the ashtray on the table bore the brand-name La Duchesse — again identified by Mr. Weaver as Miss Carmody’s brand. It was scented with her favorite odeur, violet.
“It seemed, then, that Mrs. French and Miss Carmody had both been in the apartment Monday night, that Miss Carmody had smoked her usual cigarets, and that they had played a game of their beloved banque.
“In the bedroom closet we found a hat and a pair of shoes identified by Miss Underhill, the French housekeeper, and Miss Keaton, a maid in the French employ, as having been worn by Miss Carmody on Monday, the day of the murder, when she left the house and was not seen again. Another hat and another pair of shoes were missing from the closet, seeming to indicate that the girl had changed the damp ones she was wearing for the dry ones that were missing.