The American Gun Mystery (Death At the Rodeo)

Preparatory: Spectrum

“To me,” said Ellery Queen, “a wheel is not a wheel unless it turns.”

“That sounds suspiciously like pragmatism,” I said.

“Call it what you like.” He took off his pince-nez and began to scrub its shining lenses vigorously, as he always does when he is thoughtful. “I don’t mean to say that I cannot recognize it as a material object per se; it’s simply that it has no meaning for me until it begins to function as a wheel. That’s why I always try to visualize a crime in motion. I’m not like Father Brown, who is intuitional; the good padre — bless his heart! — has only to squint dully at a single spoke... You see what I’m driving at, J.J.?”

“No,” I said truthfully.

“Let me make it clearer by example. You take the case of this preposterous and charming creature, Buck Horne. Well, certain things happened before the crime itself. I found out about them later. But my point is that, even had I — by some miraculous chance — been an invisible spectator to those little preambulatory events, they should have had no significance for me. The driving force, the crime, was lacking. The wheel was at rest.”

“Still obscure,” I said, “although I begin to grasp your meaning dimly.”

He knit his straight brows, then relaxed with a chuckle, stretching his long lean limbs nearer the fire. He lighted a cigaret and puckered smoke at the ceiling. “Permit me to indulge that rotten vice of mine and play the metaphor out... There was the case, the Horne case, our wheel. Imbedded in each spoke there was a cup; and in each cup there was a blob of color.

“Now here was the blob of black — Buck Horne himself. There the blob of gold — Kit Horne. Ah, Kit Horne.” He sighed. “The blob of flinty gray — old Wild Bill, Wild Bill Grant. The blob of healthy brown — his son Curly. The blob of poisonous lavender — Mara Gay, that... what did the tabs call her? The Orchid of Hollywood. My God!.. And Julian Hunter, her husband, the dragon-green of our spectroscope. And Tony Mars — white? And the prizefighter Tommy Black — good strong red. And One-Arm Woody — snake-yellow for him. All those others.” He grinned at the ceiling. “What a galaxy of colors! Now observe those little blobs of color, each an element, each a quantity, each a miniscule to be weighed and measured; each distinct in itself. At rest, inanimate, each by itself — what did they mean to me? Precisely nothing.”

“And then, I suppose,” I suggested, “the wheel began to spin?”

“Something of the sort. A tiny explosion, a puff of the cosmic effluvium — something applied the motive-power, the primal urge of motion; and the wheel turned. Fast, very fast. But observe what happened.” He smoked lazily and, I thought, not without satisfaction. “A miracle! For where are those little blobs of color, each a quantity, an element, a miniscule to be weighed and measured — each distinct in itself, as distinct as the component suns of a fixed universe? They’ve merged; they’ve lost their prismatic quality and become a coruscating whole; no longer distinct, you will observe, but a flowing symmetrical pattern which tells the whole story of the Horne case.”

“How you go on,” I said, holding my aching head. “You mean that they all had something to do with the death of—”

“I mean,” he replied, and his fine features sharpened, “that the non-essential colors vanished. I often wonder,” he murmured, “what Father Brown or old Sherlock would have done with that case. Eh, J.J.?”