The American Gun Mystery (Death At the Rodeo)

21: On the Screen

Ellery awoke to the accompaniment of a vigorous shaking.

“Git up!” shouted Djuna in his ear. “There’s a feller here.”

Ellery blinked the drowse out of his eyes and groped for his dressing gown.

The visitor proved to be a brash young man bearing a large manila envelope. “From Major Kirby, Mr. Queen,” he said. “Just printed ’em, he said to tell you.”

He tossed the envelope on the table and left, whistling.

Ellery tore open the brown packet. Inside were a dozen damp, curly photographic prints. They depicted the last earthly moments of the late unlamented One-Arm Woody.

“Ah,” said Ellery with satisfaction. “That Major chap’s a prince, Djuna, simply priceless. He anticipates your every wish. Hmm.” He examined the series of infinitesimally differing photographs with scrupulous attention... It was amazing how faithfully these pictures coincided with those earlier pictures of Buck Horne’s demise. Except for the figure of Woody himself, with its distinguishing characteristic of the left-arm stump, these might be the same photographs the Queens had examined in the Major’s projection room a month before.

Again the camera had caught horse and rider at the instant of the bullet’s impact. Again the horse’s brawny length was parallel to the track, and again the series showed Woody leaning to the left as his horse crept by micrometric degrees around the northeastern turn of the oval.

“Nothing wünderlich there,” muttered Ellery to himself. “An exact duplication of conditions. Naturally the phenomena would repeat themselves. Horsemen obey natural laws — I hope.” He spent some time studying the key photograph — that in which, clearly, Woody had died. In the head-on view of the photograph, the one-armed rider’s body was leaning a sharp thirty degrees off the perpendicular toward the southern side of the arena. Quite as Buck Horne’s had leaned. Due to the mottled pattern of Woody’s ponyskin vest and the obtrusion of his left-arm stump, it was difficult to make out the bullet hole. But from the expression on the man’s face it was quite apparent in which picture he had died.

Ellery put the photographs thoughtfully away in his secretary, and went about the mechanical business of consuming Djuna’s breakfast.

“When did the Inspector leave?” he mumbled out of a mouthful of shirred egg.

“Long time ago,” asserted Djuna. “Say, when you goin’ to turn’m up?”

“Turn whom up?”

“The murd’rer!.. Goes around murd’rin’ people,” said Djuna darkly. “Seems to me he ought to fry.”

“Fry?”

“In th’ electric chair! You goin’ to let him git away with it?”

“Am I God?” demanded Ellery. “Djuna, you place the weight of a fearful responsibility on my frail shoulders. And yet I think — no, I know — that the race is quite run. Well, the coffee, old son. Did dad say he’d pop in at the projection room this afternoon?”

Early afternoon found Ellery seated in the projection room of Major Kirby’s newsreel offices by the side of a stoop-shouldered Inspector with circled eyes and at least half a dozen newly etched wrinkles. Major Kirby had disappeared for a moment.

“Maybe we’ll see something in these newsreel shots they took last night,” grunted the Inspector out of a vast discouragement.

“The .25 hasn’t been found?”

The old man stared at the white screen. “I tell you it’s just not possible... No.”

“I’ll admit that’s the prime poser now,” murmured Ellery. “It has a simple explanation. I’m convinced of it. Apparently everything humanly possible has been done, and still... Did Dr. Prouty confirm his hasty diagnosis about the angle of the Woody bullet?”

“This mornin’. As he said. Downward angle, practically like the Horne bullet.”

Major Kirby came in smiling. “Ready, gentlemen?”

The Inspector nodded sourly.

“Shoot, Joe.” And the Major seated himself by Ellery.

The room darkened at once and sounds came out of the amplifier near the screen. On the screen flashed the newsreel insignia of the Major’s company, and then the first tide announcing the second murder in four weeks at the Colosseum “under exactly the same circumstances.”

They watched in silence. The scenes and sounds flowed on. They saw Grant, heard his announcement, saw the opening of the eastern gate, the entrance of Woody and the troupe, the short dash around the track, the halt, heard Grant’s further announcement and signal, Woody’s answering shot, saw the beginning of the charge... It was all very clear and very dull. Not even the sight of Woody falling to the track, of the trampling confusion of horses stamping over the body, of the wild scenes that followed, aroused them from their lethargy.

And when it was all over and the lights flashed on again, they sat wearily contemplating the blank screen.

“Well,” said the Inspector with a groan, “that turned out a frost! Might have known. Sorry, Major, to’ve bothered you. I guess we’ll just have to resign ourselves...”

But there was something profoundly agitated in Ellery’s eyes of a sudden. He turned sharply to Kirby. “Was it my imagination, Major, or is this film longer than the one you ran for us after the Horne affair?”

“Eh?” The Major stared. “Oh! Much longer, Mr. Queen. At least twice as long.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, you see, when we sat in here a month ago and took a look at the Horne scenes, you were seeing the fully prepared theatre version of the newsreel. That is, fully cut, edited, titled, assembled, and so on. But this is just a working print. Uncut.”

Ellery sat up straighter. “Would you mind elucidating? I’m not quite sure I grasp the niceties of the difference.”

“What the deuce has that to do with it?” demanded the Inspector in an aggrieved tone. “Suppose we did—”

“Please, dad. Eh, Major?”

“Why,” said the Major, “when we shoot a scene we film practically everything that happens. That consumes a lot of celluloid — much more than we could possibly confine within the limits of a newsreel, which of course contains perhaps six or eight different subjects in the same reel. So when the film is developed and dried here, our cutter gets busy. He’s the fellow who goes over the film frame by frame and cuts out whatever he thinks unnecessary or less necessary than the rest. Snips the superfluous footage away, you see. Then he takes what’s left — the meat of the film — and assembles them in a short, snappy, episodic film version of what took place.”

Ellery blinked at the white screen. “And that means,” he said in a curiously unstable voice, “that what we saw in the Horne reel in this room didn’t represent everything your crew photographed on the night of the Horne murder?”

“Why, certainly not,” said the Major, surprised.

“Oh, Lord!” groaned Ellery, seizing his head. “That’s what comes of being unscientific. By heaven, this almost converts me to rule by technologists. There we may suppose such elementary mechanical knowledge as the function and routine of a film-cutter will be common... Dad, do you realize—! Major, what in the name of Moses happens to the excess film that your cutter clips off the original celluloid?”

“Well,” said Major Kirby, with a puzzled frown, “I can’t see what— The old saw is that it’s left on the cutting-room floor. Actually, we save it. There are miles and miles of that cut stuff stowed away in our library. We—”

“Enough, enough!” shouted Ellery, springing to his feet. “What an ignoramus... Major, I want to see those deleted scenes!”

“Easy,” said the Major. “You’ll have to give us a little time, though. Cement the scenes together. They’ll be jerky...”

“We’ll wait all night if necessary,” said Ellery grimly.

But it was necessary to wait in the projection room little more than an hour. The Inspector, who had left divers tasks dangling at Headquarters, spent most of the hour on the telephone. Ellery spent the hour in consuming cigarets and enforcing a severe patience upon his leaping pulses. Then the Major returned, signaled to the operator, and the tiny theatre darkened for the second time.

There was no sound this time. The scenes were, as the Major had predicted, jerky and quite without continuity. But the Queens watched this extraordinary film as if it represented the high-water mark of the cinema art.

It was most confusing at first, as if some madman had assembled the scenes, the lack of continuity an echo of his own disordered brain. A few glimpses of the pandemonium in the bowl... these recurred frequently, showing scurrying thousands in the audience, distant shots of police attempting to preserve order, craning necks, staring eyes, unrhythmic mass movements of the audience which seemed inspired by a demented director whose aim was a nightmarish chaos in the handling of enormous numbers of supernumeraries. There was a long scene which showed the deleted details of Curly Grant’s dexterity with his revolver. Then, unexpectedly, a long shot of the Mars box — apparently taken with a telescopic lens, for the figures were quite distinct. Ellery and the Inspector saw themselves sitting quietly; and Djuna, and Kit Horne, and Mara Gay and Tommy Black, and Tony Mars, and at the rear Julian Hunter. This was before the death of Horne, and the scene was placid... They returned to this scene a little later, and found themselves watching themselves apparently only a moment before the fatal shot. Tony Mars had just risen, perhaps in excitement, and for a second or two the seated figure of Julian Hunter was blotted out. Then Mars moved, and Hunter was still there, quietly seated... Some of the scenes were “atmospheric” — apparently scrapped by the cutter because of their relative unimportance. One of these showed bow-legged Hank Boone, that illustrious son of the plains, scuttling after the restive horses just after the murder; Boone led them one by one to the trough where, under the spell of water, they magically quieted; one horse was balky and refused to drink; he furnished a diversion, rearing and bucking with fine abandon. He was a magnificent old stallion with intelligent eyes; Boone slapped his flanks smartly with a quirt and a cowboy pushed into the field of the camera and snatched the whip from Boone’s hand, patting the horse and quieting him in short order, whereupon a detective clumped into the scene and ordered the cowboy — from his gestures — curtly back into the group; and Boone, staggering a little, continued his task... There was one startling shot of Wild Bill Grant, half his body caught by the camera at the time of the murder; perhaps a moment or so later, for he was urging his mount furiously from the center of the arena across the dirt to the track upon which the rearing, milling horses ground the fallen man’s body to mash... There were several flashes of “persons of prominence” who had prevailed upon the newsreel company on the plea of “unfortunate and ill-advised publicity” to delete those portions of the reel which revealed their faces. And much to-do about the later stages of the investigation:

The Queens sat in the projection room for almost three-quarters of an hour; and when the lights came on suddenly and the screen went blank, neither they nor the Major had anything to say. Ellery’s inspiration, it appeared, had proved barren. And the Inspector, who considered an hour of his precious time had been cruelly wasted, rose and jabbed such an inordinate ration of snuff up his nostrils that he was seized by a fit of sneezing which brought crimson to his face and tears to his eyes.

“Tchu!” he exploded in a last blast, and wiped his nose viciously. Then he glared at Ellery. “And that’s that. Ellery, I’m going.”

Ellery’s eyes were closed, and his long lean legs reached comfortably under the seat in front of him.

“I’m going, I said,” repeated the Inspector huffily.

“I heard you the first time, honorable ancestor,” said Ellery in a clear voice, and he opened his eyes. Then he rose slowly and shook himself like a man coming out of a dream. His father and the Major stared at him.

He began to smile, and he put his hand out to Kirby. “Do you know what you’ve done today, Major?”

Kirby took the hand bewilderedly. “What I’ve done?”

“You’ve restored my faith in the movies. What’s today? Sunday? There’s a day for restoration of faith! Almost makes you believe in old Jahweh, the Mosaic God. No, that would make it Shabboth, wouldn’t it? I believe I’m all mixed up. Small wonder!” And he grinned broadly, pumping the astonished Major’s hand up and down like an ansa. “Major, good day and a benediction upon the head of whoever invented the cinema. May he be thrice blessed... Dad, don’t stand gawping! There’s work to do. And such work!”