The American Gun Mystery (Death At the Rodeo)

Postlude: Spectrum Analysis

“In fine,” said Ellery Queen, “the non-essential colors vanished from our imaginary color-wheel, leaving — what? An iris of unmistakable spectrum-lines which clearly told the whole story.”

“Your obscure metaphor,” I said with some irritation, “leaves me rather more than cold. I’ll confess it’s still a deep, dark puzzle to my feeble brain. I know all the facts now, but I’ll be hanged if I can make any sense out of them.”

Ellery smiled. It was weeks after the solution of the Horne case; the reverberations had echoed off into the limbo of all forgotten crimes; the amazing and pitiful denouement was a thing of merely professional interest. For some reason which I could not fathom little was printed by the avid press that was comprehensible. Buck Horne had committed two murders in a remarkably clever manner; why, and a good deal of how, remained a mystery. And then there was the matter of the detective work which had led to the solution; nothing appeared in the papers concerning this, either, and I had been unable to find out why.

“What is it,” murmured Ellery, “that mystifies you?”

“The whole blasted business! But particularly how you solved the problem. And I might add,” I continued with some malice, “if you ever did solve those two minor problems you were in the dark about. For instance, what really did happen to the automatic in both crimes?”

Ellery chuckled and puffed away at his cigaret. “Oh, come now, J. J., surely you know me better than to accuse me at this stage in my career of faulty craftsmanship. Of course, I knew the essential answer — the interchange of personalities — only a few hours after the first body was found...”

“What!”

“Oh, yes. It was really the result of an elementary series of deductions, and I’m astounded at the blindness of the people who worked with me.” He sighed. “Poor dad! He’s an excellent policeman, but he has no vision, no imagination. You need imagination in this business.” Then he shrugged and settled back comfortably. Djuna came in with an urn of coffee, and a platter of excellent brioches. “Suppose I begin,” said Ellery, “at the beginning.

“You see, despite the presence of thousands of persons at the scene of the crime, any one of whom might have been the criminal — and despite the unique and puzzling circumstances of the crime itself, I’m talking about the ‘Horne’ murder now — there were six facts which stood out prominently—”

“Six facts?” I said. “That seems like a lot of facts, Ellery.”

“Yes, this case provided me with a plethora of clues, J.J. As I say, these six facts stood out prominently during the first night’s investigation as significant clues. Two of them — one physical, the other psychological — combined to tell me something that I alone knew from the very inception of the investigation. Suppose I take them up in order, drawing the inferences as I go — inferences which brick by brick built up the only possible theory that covered all the facts.”

He stared into the fire with a quizzical half-smile on his lips. “First,” he murmured, “the trouser belt around the dead man’s waist. Amazing thing, J.J. It told such a clear story! There were five buckle-holes, the second and third of which were characterized by-deep ridges in the leather running vertically across the holes — ridges left, patently, by repeated bucklings at those holes. Now Kit Horne — poor kid! — had told me that Buck had been in failing health for some time in the recent past, and in fact had lost weight. Mark that!

“Loss of weight — buckling-marks on the belt. Interesting juxtaposition of facts, eh? The significance struck me immediately. What did “Horne’s recent loss of weight mean in relation to the two buckle-ridges on the belt? Surely this: In normal times Horne had obviously buckled his belt at the second hole, as evidenced by the welt across the second hole; when later he began to lose weight he was constrained to buckle his belt at the third hole — that is, drawing his belt tighter as his girth lessened. Yet what did we find on the night of the murder of, presumably, Buck Horne? That the victim was wearing the belt, which fitted snugly, buckled at the first hole!”

He paused to ignite a fresh cigaret, and again — as I had so many times in the past — I reflected on the remarkable keenness of his perceptions. Such an unimportant little detail! I believe I remarked something to this effect.

“Hmm,” he said, drawing his brows together, “it’s perfectly true that the business of the buckle-holes was trivial. And not only trivial in appearance, but trivial in significance. It was just an indication. It didn’t prove anything. But it showed the way.

“Now I’ve just demonstrated that Horne normally buckled his trouser belt at the second hole, and later as he lost weight at the third hole; yet the man whose dead body we found was wearing the belt buckled at the first hole. This was an unaccostumed position, for the simple reason that the only ridges or welts were across the second and third holes; in other words there was no ridge at all across the first hole, where the dead man had actually buckled the belt. But here was a puzzling set-of facts. How was I to explain the phenomenon that Horne, who habitually buckled at the second notch, and then for some time was forced to tighten his belt to the third notch, suddenly on the night of his murder buckled at the first notch — that is, loosened his belt to the extent of two full notches? Well, what usually makes a man loosen his belt? A heavy meal, you say — eh?”

“That was in my mind,” I confessed, “although I can’t see a man dining so heartily before a strenuous performance; or even if he did, dining so heartily that he would have to let out his belt two notches.”

“I agree. But the logical possibility existed. So I took the logical step. I asked Dr. Prouty, who was to perform the autopsy, to ascertain the contents of the corpse’s stomach. In due course he reported that the corpse’s stomach was quite empty; apparently, he said, the victim had not taken food for six hours or so before his death. So that was out as a possible explanation for the sudden switch to the first buckle-hole.

“What remained? Only one thing; deny it if you can: I was forced to the conclusion that the belt which the dead man wore that night didn’t belong to him. Ah, but it was Buck Horne’s belt: it was monogrammed with his initials, and Grant — his closest friend — testified to Horne’s ownership. But see where this leads us! For if the belt did not belong to the man who was wearing it, but did belong to Buck Horne, then Buck Horne was not the man who was wearing it. But the man who was wearing it was the dead man. Then the dead man was not Buck Horne! What could be simpler, J.J.?”

“And that gave you the whole story?” I muttered. “It sounds horribly weak and unconvincing, somehow.”

“Weak, no,” Ellery smiled. “Unconvincing, yes. For the excellent reason that the human mind refuses to accept large explanations from small facts. Yet isn’t most of our progress in science the result of insignificant observations, brought about by this very process of induction? I’ll admit that at the moment I wasn’t free from the mental cowardice of the herd. The conclusion seemed incredible. I shied away from it. I didn’t believe it. It flew in the face of the normal. Yet what other explanation could there be?”

Ellery stared thoughtfully into the fire. “And then there was something else to strengthen the doubt. The dead man had had contact — although it must have been fleeting, for the testimony ran that ‘Horne’ had dashed into the Colosseum late — with the rodeo troupe. And after the death of the rider presumed to be Horne, Kit — Horne’s foster-daughter, mind — had actually seen the victim’s face when she lifted the blanket from the dead body; as had Grant, Horne’s lifelong friend. And the face itself had not been mutilated, JJ. — only the skull and body. These facts seemed to render my conclusion that the dead man wasn’t Horne even less convincing. But I didn’t discard my conclusion, as perhaps another might have been tempted to do under the circumstances. On the contrary, I said to myself: ‘Well, unconvincing or not, the point is that if the dead man isn’t Horne, as my first deduction indicates, then the dead man certainly bears a most remarkable resemblance to Horne in face and figure.’ Inescapable inference, J J., if you accept’ my first premise. At any rate, I wasn’t satisfied, not mentally easy at all. I looked about for confirmation of my conclusion. I found it almost at once, and that brings me to the second of the half-dozen clues I mentioned.”

“Something that confirms the conclusion that the dead man wasn’t Horne?” I said blankly. “For the life of me—”

“Don’t gamble your life so carelessly, J.J.,” chuckled Ellery. “It’s so incredibly simple. It revolved about the ivory-handled revolver found in the dead man’s right hand — right hand, remember — the twin of which I found in Horne’s hotel room later.

“Now both weapons had been used by Horne for many years; Kit said they were her foster-father’s favorite weapons, and so did Grant and Curly. Again no question of ownership, please note; the initials on the butts, and both Kit’s and Grant’s instant acceptance. So the guns were Horne’s; of that much I could be sure.

“What were the new indications? The first gun was found still clutched in the dead man’s hand — right hand — even after his fall from the horse. I myself had seen him draw this weapon from his right holster and wave it with his right hand as he set the horse to galloping around the oval; and the newsreel confirmed these observations. But when I examined the revolver itself I noticed an extremely odd thing.” He wagged his head lightly. “Follow carefully. The handle, or butt, or grip — whatever the technical term is — was inlaid with ivory on both flat surfaces, and the ivory was yellow and worn with age and use, except for a narrow portion on the right side of the butt. As I held the gun in my left hand, this patch of. lighter ivory came between the tips of my curled fingers and the heel of my hand. Later that night I held the twin in my right hand and noticed that, although the ivory inlays were just as worn and yellow as in the first gun, there was again one portion comparatively fresh-looking — this time on the left side of the butt between the tips of my coiled fingers and the heel of my hand. What did all this mean? That the second gun — the one from the hotel room — was the gun Buck Horne had habitually gripped in his right hand, for when I held it in my right hand the strip of unworn ivory came on the left side of the butt, where it should come in a right-hand grip. The other gun, the first one, which the dead man had been clutching in his right hand, was obviously the weapon gripped by Horne for many years in his left hand, for the unworn strip of ivory came on the right side, where it should come in a left-hand grip.” He drew a deep breath. “In other words, to reduce it to its simplest form, Buck Horne, who used twin guns, always gripped one in his right hand and the other in his left, never changing, for if he had used them indiscriminately for either hand there would be no unworn patches at all. Remember this.

“Further, Horne was undoubtedly an ambidextrous marksman; that is, he fired — judging from the identically worn muzzles, sights, and butts — equally often with either hand; and inferentially, then, equally well. This habit of Buck’s using a specific weapon for each of his two hands was later confirmed by a small point; I had Lieutenant Knowles weigh the two guns and found that one was some two ounces lighter than the other. Apparently then each was perfectly balanced to the strength, grip, and ‘feel’ of the particular hand in which he habitually held it.

“Now then, to return to the important discrepancy. The murdered man was gripping with his right hand the weapon Buck Horne always gripped with his left. It struck me immediately that Horne would never have wielded that gun with the wrong hand. And—”

“But suppose,” I objected, “that by accident he had taken the left-hand gun with him that night to the Colosseum?”

“It wouldn’t have made a particle of difference to my deductions. By every dictate of habit, weight, feel, he would have recognized it the instant he picked it up as his left-hand gun, would have automatically placed it in his left holster, and would have performed with it gripped in his left hand. Remember, there was no compulsion for him to use his right hand that night while he fired blank cartridges into the air; he was merely holding the reins with his left, or waving his hat at one point; either hand would have served for the normal little activities it was called upon to engage in.

“So! Since the dead man had gripped Horne’s left-hand, gun with his right hand, had even used the right holster, when Horne would have gripped the weapon in his left hand and used the left holster — here was startling confirmation that it wasn’t Buck Horne at all who was murdered that night!”

He paused to sip some coffee. How simple — as he said — it was when he explained it!

“I now,” continued Ellery serenely, “had two perfectly interlocking, or complementary, reasons for questioning the identity of the victim; and while either one, alone, might have formed the basis for no more than a strong presumption, the combination of both removed all doubt from my mind. The dead man was not Buck Horne. Squirm as much as I might at the odd conclusion, I was compelled to accept it.

“But since it was not Buck Horne’s body which had tumbled to the tanbark that night, I said to myself: In the name of a merciful God, whose body was it? Well, as I’ve already suggested, it was obviously the body of someone whose physique, with the scarcely perceptible exception of a larger waist-line, was similar to Horne’s; someone who looked amazingly like Horne in features, who could ride and shoot expertly, and who probably could approximate the timbre of Buck’s voice. As for this last point, I might say here that the voice did not play an important role that night; for the supposed Buck Horne arrived late for the performance; merely waved a greeting to Grant, as Grant himself related, went at once to his dressing room, and appeared shortly thereafter on the field astride Rawhide. Probably then he never actually spoke to anyone at all; or if he did, it was a monosyllable.”

“So far,” I agreed, “it’s clear, Ellery. But, as I said, some things stick in my craw. For instance, I know from having read the newspapers the actual identity of the man who was murdered in that first crime; but how the dickens could you have worked it out so early in the case?”

“There,” murmured Ellery, snuggling more deeply into the armchair, “you touch on a sore spot. I didn’t know. I didn’t know exactly. But I knew generally enough to advance my theory to a solution. Let me go on, and you’ll see.

“I naturally asked myself: Who could this man — this dead man — be who so closely resembled Buck Horne in face and figure? My instinctive thought was a twin brother; but Miss Horne and Grant both asserted that Buck had no blood-kin of any kind alive. Then in mulling over Horne’s background the answer came to me in a flash. It was a perfect development of the man’s history, a perfect and indeed inevitable explanation of the resemblance between Buck Horne, ex-movie star, and an unknown man. For Buck had been an actor who specialized in outdoor roles, roles that called for all sorts of strenuous activity and at times even feats of acrobatics — as anyone who has seen Western movie heroes leap from windows into saddles, hurtle horses over cliffs — the usual folderol — knows. But what do motion picture companies resort to when their stars cannot perform these daredevil stunts — or, more pertinently, how do producers avert the physical hazards, the risks to life and limb, to a Western star — after all valuable property? It’s a common practice with which everyone today is familiar through the so-called ‘fan’ magazines and newspaper exploitation. They use doubles.”

I gasped, and Ellery chuckled again. “Shut your mouth, J.J. — you look disagreeably like a fish out of water... What on earth strikes you as so amazing about that? It was a perfectly logical line of reasoning. It matched the facts superbly. Producers use doubles for more reckless feats of daring; these doubles are selected primarily for two qualifications. First, in physique they must resemble the stars they impersonate. Second, they must be able not only to accomplish the feats of which the stars are capable, but to do even more, since it’s they who perform the really perilous stunts. In a Western-star situation, the double would undoubtedly be a good horseman, a roper, perhaps even a marksman. Now, facial resemblance is not absolutely essential in most cases, for the particular shots of action can be so filmed that the double’s face is not caught by the camera; but there are notable instances of doubles who can not only do what the stars can do, but who look amazingly like the stars as well... Yes, the more I thought about it the more positive I was that the man murdered in the arena was Buck Horne’s old movie double. As a matter of confirmation I wired a confidential source in Los Angeles to find out from the studio whether there had been such a double. I received a reply a few days later; I had been right.[5] There had been such a double, but the studio had not been in touch with him since Buck’s last picture some three or four years before and had no idea where the man might be found. The man’s name, which the wire supplied, was obviously a screen name, and of no use to me. But even had I not checked with Hollywood I should have been morally certain that the theory of a movie double was the correct solution of the victim’s identity.”

I threw up my hands.

“Shall I stop?” asked Ellery.

“Lord, no! I’m just genuflecting to the god of reason. If you stop now I’ll brain you. Go on, for heaven’s sake.”

He looked embarrassed. “I shall stop,” he said sternly, “if you spout any more bilgewater like that... Where was I? Yes! The next question was inevitable: Why had Buck Horne secretly re-engaged his old-time double to take his place in the rodeo performance without mentioning it to either Grant or Kit? — for their stupefaction and grief at sight of Horne’s supposedly dead body could not have been anything but genuine. Well, there are two innocent reasons conceivable: one, that Buck had become suddenly ill, or worse; that he did not wish to disappoint his audience, and furthermore was too proud to confess his condition to Kit, to his best friend Grant, or to Mars the promoter; or two, that his performance included some feat or feats which Buck was unable to perform. But Buck had not become suddenly ill; he had been examined by the rodeo doctor the day of the performance and pronounced fit, according to Kit Horne and the doctor himself. Had he possibly taken ill between the doctor’s examination and the performance itself? This would mean that he would have had to arrange for the deception on the spur of the moment, very shortly before the performance. Yet everything indicated that the deception was planned not the day of the performance, but the day before. For one thing, he had had a mysterious visitor to his hotel room the previous night. For another, he had withdrawn from his bank the previous day most of his balance. It seemed fairly clear that he had, then, called in his double the night before the opening, and turned over to this man one of the twin guns plus a payment for the man’s services — all of the three thousand dollars which Horne withdrew that very day, or part. His clothes, too, in all probability — remember Grant said that at the last rehearsal before the opening Buck had performed not in costume, despite the fact that all the others were in costume... The fact that everything was planned at least a day in advance of the doctor’s examination eliminated the theory that the double had been engaged because Horne was taken ill after the examination.”

“Sounds reasonable,” I muttered.

“Is reasonable. Now, as for Buck’s routine during the show being too difficult for him — just as untenable. The last rehearsal was held the afternoon of the opening and it was unquestionably Horne himself who performed. Why do I say that Horne himself was at the rehearsal, not the double? Well, he had actually spoken to many intimates that afternoon: Woody, Grant, Kit — who no matter how remarkable the double’s resemblance would not have been deceived in any prolonged tête-a-tête conversation. For another, he had actually written out a check, before Grant’s eyes, immediately after the rehearsal, Grant cashing it for him; and I found that the check had been passed through the bank. The signature, ipso facto, then, was genuine; from all these things it was apparent that it must have been Horne himself who went through the rehearsal. But since a rehearsal is a duplicate of the real thing, and since Horne went through the rehearsal without a hitch, as Grant and Curly both testified, then obviously there was nothing in the performance beyond Horne’s capacity.

“Now, if Buck hadn’t taken ill suddenly, and there was nothing in his rodeo routine which he could not, or was afraid to, do — why had he summoned his old movie double out of the past and paid the man to substitute for him? Even aside from that — why, when his double was murdered, didn’t Horne come forward and reveal himself, offering an explanation and his services to the police? If he were innocent of implication in the crime, he would feel dutybound to come forward.

“Two explanations came to mind for Horne’s not coming forward — providing he were innocent. The first is that he had an enemy of whose intentions he was aware in advance, that he hired the double to take his place, knowing that an attempt would be made on his life and thereby offering up the double as a sort of sacrifice; that after the murder he refrained from coming forward to insure his continued safety, since as long as Horne’s enemy believed Horne dead, Horne was secure. But in this case, wouldn’t Horne have managed to notify his own closest kin, Kit, or his best friend, secretly? This was one of the reasons that prompted me to insist upon Grant’s and Kit’s being watched every moment, their letters intercepted and read, and their phones tapped. But nothing came of it — no message from Horne, as far as could humanly be discovered. The apparent failure of Horne to get in touch with his foster-daughter or friend made me discard the theory of a voluntary disappearance because of a known enemy; and suggested the only other possible theory of innocence that would account for Horne’s disappearance and the death of a man taken to be Horne. That was that on the eve of the opening Horne had been kidnaped by his enemy or enemies, that Horne’s place had been taken by the double for some purpose unknown; that the double was murdered, either by his own gang or a friend of Horne’s who had somehow discovered the deception. But this was such a loose and unsatisfactory theory, there was so little to bolster it — no communication from the kidnapers, for example, no apparent motive (for if it was to extort money from Horne’s daughter or friends wouldn’t there have been a communication?) — that, although I could not definitely discard the theory as impossible, it was so weak that I could justifiably drop it to work on a more promising tack. At the same time, it was the vague possibility of the truth of this theory or the other that kept me from disclosing what I knew about the dead man; had I done so prematurely, without a definite decision as to the facts, I realized that I might be wrong and might bring about the death of Horne. I could not, of course, foresee the murder of Woody.”

He was silent for a long moment, and from his frown I could see that the entire Woody incident was distasteful to him. I knew how incensed he always became at the blithe practice of detective-story writers who permitted their detectives to sit by being suave and witty while characters fell dead all about them.

He sighed. “At that stage, then, I raised the pertinent question: Since innocent explanations of Horne’s disappearance and the murder of his double were barren, was it possible that Horne himself had killed the double that night? And now I come to the four other major clues which were apparent to me the first night of the investigation. They not only narrowed the field of possibilities but placed upon the murderer two definite qualifications which Horne, if he were the murderer, had to satisfy.

“The first two concerned the topography of the Colosseum amphitheatre, and the nature of the death wound. The arena is the lowest part of the bowl, naturally; even the first tier of seats, the boxes, are higher by ten feet than the floor of the arena. Now the bullet in both murders had penetrated the victims’ torsos, according to Dr. Prouty, on a distinctly downward fine. On the surface this would indicate that the shots in both instances were fired from above — that is to say, from the seats, the audience. But while this, was accepted as verity by everyone concerned, I saw that there was one question which had to be settled before we could say with positiveness that the murderer had shot from above. And that was: What was the exact position of the victim’s body at the instant the bullet pierced his flesh? For the conclusion that the shot came from above would be correct only if the victim’s torso at the instant of the bullet’s entry were in a normally erect position; that is, normally at right angles to the floor — erect on the horse’s back; that is, not slumped forward obliquely or tiled obliquely backward or sideways.”

I knit my brows. “Hold on; that’s a little hard to follow.”

“Here. I’ll illustrate. Djuna, be a good child and get me some paper and pencil.” Djuna, who had been sitting wide-eyed and still during the whole colloquy, jumped up and eagerly supplied the requested articles. Ellery scrawled quickly on the paper for some time. Then he looked, up. “It’s impossible, as I say, to determine the angle of fire until one knows the exact position of the body at the time of the bullet’s entry. The specific cases will clarify the point. Enlargements of the film which showed the position of both victims’ torsos at the instant of impact revealed that both were leaning sideways from the saddle to the right at angles of about thirty degrees from the vertical. (It’s left from the standpoint of the victims, but right from the standpoint of the observer, or camera; I’ll call it right consistently to avoid confusion.) Now follow these diagrams.”

I rose and went to his chair. He had drawn four little pictures, which looked like this:

“The first diagram,” he said, “shows the victim’s torso in the normal erect position, as Dr. Prouty visualized it. The little arrow over the figure’s heart represents the bullet’s course in the body; Prouty said it was a downward line making a thirty-degree angle with the floor. Diagram two shows the figure still in the same position; that is, if the torso was precisely at right angles to the horse’s back; with the extension of the arrow in a dotted line to make clearer the angle of fire. The line is definitely” downward, as you see, and seems to support the conclusion that the bullet was fired from above. Well, that conclusion would be correct if the victim had been erect in the saddle, as the drawing shows him. But the victim wasn’t erect in the saddle; according to the film enlargement he was leaning to the right at an angle of thirty degrees, as the third diagram shows!

“In diagram three, then, we bend the figure to the right, as it actually was; retaining, as we must, the bullet course in the body. For, once the bullet is in the body, whether we look at the body on the floor, sitting up, bent backwards, or leaning sideways, the bullet course will always be the same in relation to the torso; if the torso swings, the bullet course swings with it; they are unchangeable elements in relation to themselves... And in diagram four we extend the line of direction from the bullet as it is lodged in the right-ward-leaning torso, and what do we find? That the line of direction, the course of the bullet, is virtually parallel to the floor! In other words, with the double’s torso and Woody’s torso (for both were approximately the same) leaning at an angle of thirty degrees to the right, the bullet wound shows a horizontal, not a downward, direction! Showing that the shot was fired not from above, but from virtually a level!”

I nodded. “And, of course, the reason Prouty said it was a downward angle of thirty degrees was that he assumed the men were riding straight as statues in the saddle. It was the thirty-degree angle of lean, so to speak, that caused the thirty-degree angle of bullet course.”

“Rather complexly put,” laughed Ellery, “but substantially correct. Now, when I knew this, I automatically ruled out two classes of suspects — and what a sweeping elimination that was! One, all those who sat in the audience, including even the first tier of seats, the boxes; for the floor of the boxes were ten feet from the floor of the arena, and anyone sitting in a box would therefore be some thirteen feet or more from the floor of the arena. A shot from this height directed at a man leaning thirty degrees sideways from a horse would have caused an even more pronounced downward angle, penetrating at more than sixty degrees, if you care for mathematics; it would have looked superficially as if the victim had been shot from the roof! And group-elimination two — the men working on the newsreel platform in the arena itself, the platform also being elevated ten feet from the level of the arena. Anyone shooting from this height would be shooting for one thing head-on rather than from the right — the head-on views of the camera prove that; and moreover the line again would be more than thirty degrees downward.

“But the line of entry was parallel to the floor, as I’ve shown. Then the murderer, in order to have been able to shoot a horseman in the breast on a line parallel to the floor, must himself have been a horseman! Do you follow that?”

“I’m not an idiot,” I retorted.

He grinned. “Don’t be so sensitive. I’m not quite sure it’s immediately understandable. Yet it’s a clear-cut deduction. Had the murderer been standing on the floor of the arena, the course of the bullet would have shown a slight upward direction. Had the murderer been in the audience the course of the bullet would have shown a sharp downward direction. So for the bullet to enter the victim’s body on a perfectly straight line the murderer must, as I’ve said, be at the same height from the floor as the victim, and shooting on a straight line, too. But since the victim was a horseman, the murderer must have been a horseman, too, shooting with his pistol raised to the level of his own heart.

“The only logical suspects, then, I saw at once, were the horsemen in the arena, the troupe of riders following the victim in each instance. There was one other person on horseback besides the troupe: Wild Bill Grant. But Grant couldn’t possibly have fired the shots; both times he was in the exact center of the arena at the time of the murder. The camera snapped the victims head-on, which meant that the shots, which pierced the victims’ bodies from the right, must have been fired from the specific direction of the Mars box, nearly at right angles to the victims. But Grant was virtually facing the victims, like the cameras. Grant, then, couldn’t have fired the shots. But the entire troupe was directly under the Mars box at the instant the shots were fired; this checked with my deduction about a horseman having been the murderer. From the standpoints of direction and angle of entry I could now make the positive assertion.”

“I see that, all right,” I said, “but what I can’t understand is why you permitted twenty thousand innocent people to go through the embarrassment and annoyance of being detained and searched for the weapon, when you knew perfectly well not one of them could be the murderer.”

Ellery squinted quizzically at the flames. “There you go, J.J., falling into the common error of confusing, definitions. The carrier of the weapon wasn’t necessarily the murderer. There are such creatures as accomplices, you know. It would have been relatively simple, in the confusion following both murders, for one of the suspect horsemen to have thrown the weapon to some spectator in the audience — over the rail above his head. And, of course, it was imperative that we find the murder weapon. Ergo, the heroic measure.

“Now, if the murderer was one of the riders in the arena, then Horne — on the hypothesis that he was the murderer — must have been acting as a member of the troupe! Now how could he have been? Simply enough. I said to myself: Naturally he isn’t Buck Horne now, but someone else. He’s made up, disguised. Not at all a difficult task for an ex-actor. What did Horne look like? I knew he had white hair. Obviously, then, if he wanted to disguise himself, he would dye his hair. Then by a change of costume, slight alterations of posture, walk, voice, he could easily have deceived people who had known him as Buck Horne only superficially. And then, too, observe the cleverness of his psychological action in assuming a hideous scar. A mutilation like that catches all the attention, for one thing, and tends to make people neglect the other features; and then too, as I saw myself, people’s tendency is to avoid looking at a mutilated face for fear of giving offense to the unfortunate afflicted. I rather applaud Horne’s shrewdness there.”

“Hold on,” I snapped. “I think I can charge you with a serious blunder; I hope you didn’t neglect to do it wilfully. If you were so sure Horne was acting as a member of the troupe, why didn’t you line ’em up and give ’em the once-over — eh?”

“Reasonable question,” agreed Ellery. “But the answer is also reasonable. I didn’t line up the troupe and attempt to uncover the impostor because it was evident that Horne was playing some sort of game. It isn’t often that you’ll find a murderer willing to hang about the scene of his crime. Why was Horne doing it? Why, if he wanted to commit murder, did he choose this complicated and perilous method? A dark street, a shot, a quick getaway — it would have been very easy for him to have killed his victim in the usual way. But he chose the hard way: why? I meant to find out. I wanted to give him enough rope to hang himself. Actually, he had to wait. There was something he still had to do, which was to kill Woody. I’ll explain that in a moment.

“In addition,” continued Ellery with a little frown, “there were a number of factors which challenged my curiosity and, I suppose, my intellect. Aside from motive, which was a complete mystery to me — what the devil had happened to the automatic? That was a real poser. And then, too, without a complete case — if I unmasked Horne and he stubbornly refused to talk — we should probably not have been able to secure a conviction.

“So I delayed exposing Horne, never anticipating — having no earthly reason for anticipating — another murder.” He sighed. “I spent some uncomfortable moments over that, J. J. At the same time, in the most innocent way I could contrive, I began to hang around the troupe — trying to spot Horne without arousing his suspicions. Well, I was unsuccessful. They were a clannish group, and I could get nothing out of them. The man’s personality was submerged in the larger personality of the troupe. I cultivated Kit Horne socially in the vain hope that Horne might communicate with her.

“But after the murder of Woody — immediately after, the next day — one of the troupe disappeared. A man who had called himself Benjy Miller. A man moreover who had been given employment on the eye of the original performance a month before on the written recommendation of Horne himself! A man who superficially, at least, if you discarded the color of his hair and his scar, might have been Horne. A man who — and this proved to be the clincher, as I shall demonstrate in a moment — had been ‘authorized’ by Horne in the letter of introduction to ride Horne’s own favorite horse, Injun; despite the fact that there was no really sound reason for ‘Horne’ not to have ridden his favorite mount himself on the opening night. From these facts I could not doubt that the vanished Miller was in reality Buck Horne; and therefore Buck Horne satisfied the first qualification of my murderer: he was in the arena on horseback in the case of both crimes.” I sighed.

“The second qualification of the criminal was deducible from the fifth and sixth of my major half-dozen clues. The fifth was something I was conscious of as a spectator, and it was confirmed by the newsreel sound pictures taken by Major Kirby’s unit, and by Lieutenant Knowles’s report. After Grant signaled the beginning of the ride I recalled but one volley of shots from the guns of the charging horsemen behind the supposed Horne. Only a few seconds elapsed between the riders’ volley and the fall of the dead man to the tanbark — so few that there was not time for more than that single very slightly ragged fusillade, and then the horses and men became a milling mob, preventing further shooting. There could be no question about the fact that only one volley had been fired: in proof we found that each of the revolvers of the troupe proper had been shot off just once.

“Now the sixth and last fact was that each of these revolvers, as well as Horne’s and Grant’s and that mad chap Ted Lyons’s, could not have fired the fatal shot; Lieutenant Knowles said undeniably that only a .25 calibre automatic pistol could have fired the fatal shot, and all but one of the weapons collected from the troupe were of .38 calibre and over. And ballistics tests proved that the exception, Lyons’s .25, could not have been the murder weapon.

“What did these two facts, juxtaposed, signify? Well, fundamentally enough, if the murderer was one of the troupe and yet the examined guns of the troupe couldn’t have fired the fatal shot, then the murderer had used a weapon which we had not examined. But how is this possible? you ask. You say: These people were thoroughly searched and the murder weapon not found. I answer: The murderer hid the weapon somewhere. Let me leave that for a moment; the immediate point is that use a .25 automatic he did, and since there was only one fusillade, he must have used it at the time the guns of the troupe went off. In other words, the murderer carried a second weapon, loaded with lethal bullets, and had discharged it at the same time he fired the blank-filled revolver. Used, then, both hands in shooting. Was this, I asked, an indication that the murderer was ambidextrous?”

“I’m not quite sure,” I objected, “that you were justified in assuming the murderer shot both weapons off at the same time. It was a ragged fusillade, didn’t you say?”

“Yes. But remember that the hands of the troupe were raised — they were shooting their blanks at the roof. I reasoned that the murderer would have been constrained not to make himself conspicuous; he would have had to shoot his blank at the roof with the others, as we know he did. But since after the single fusillade there were no other shots, I was justified in assuming that his other hand had held the lethal weapon and fired it at approximately the same time.

“But to return to this very curious little question of ambidexterity. Was it possible? Certainly, although not necessarily. But since it was possible, the trail again led back to Buck Horne, who for years had used twin guns. A two-gun man is, as far as shooting is concerned, ambidextrous. Buck was not only the logical suspect on other counts, then, but satisfied the qualifications of the murderer on two new counts. Not only was he a two-gun man, but he was a remarkable marksman also — testimony. The man who fired the fatal shots was a remarkable marksman — had disdained to fire more than once when, in fact, it would have been simple for him to have fired the entire magazine of the automatic before the echoes of the fusillade had died away. Check again.

“But how had he rid himself of that second weapon so cleverly that the most minute search failed to turn it up? The disappearance of the weapon was the most baffling feature of both crimes.” He paused. “I was to penetrate to the secret only after the one-armed braggart, Woody, died.”

“That’s certainly been puzzling me,” I said eagerly. “Far as I know, not one word of explanation has been written in the newspaper accounts. How the deuce did he do it? Or didn’t you discover it before the end?”

“I knew the answer the day after Woody died,” he replied grimly. “Let me go back for a moment. It was apparent that both murders had been committed by the same culprit; the circumstances were identical and the extraordinary disappearance of the weapon, despite another exhaustive search, indicated that the same method had been used to dispose of the weapon in the second murder as the first. The very vanishment of the weapon in the Woody murder was reasonable proof that we were dealing with the same murderer.

“Now, why had Horne killed Woody, the top-rider, before disappearing? The fact that the men were more or less professional rivals surely was too feeble to explain the act; as a matter of fact Woody had more motive — on the surface — to kill Horne than Horne had to kill Woody, for it was Woody who was the aggrieved, since Horne had appropriated what Woody considered his own spotlight. No, there was only one probable explanation: somehow Woody had discovered Horne’s deception, and guessed that it was Horne who had committed the first crime. Had he confronted ‘Miller’ with his knowledge that Miller was really Horne, Horne would have had to kill Woody to save his own skin.”

“It’s all very well to theorize on possibilities,” I said smartly, “but I thought you work only on demonstrable proof.”

“I make that effort,” murmured Ellery. “And I believe I can provide a confirmation of this theory that will convince even you, you skeptical money-changer. Where’s the confirmation? In the ten thousand dollars that, having been stolen from Curly Grant’s green box, was almost immediately after found in Woody’s room.”

“How does that confirm it?” I demanded, puzzled.

“In this way. An examination of the rifled box indicated that Woody hadn’t stolen that money. Ah, a tall conclusion, I hear you say. Not at all. The two locks of the box had been twisted until the eye-hinges had snapped off. Both had been twisted in the same direction; specifically, toward the back of the box. There was a hinge on each side, remember; none at the front. Do you see now?”

“No,” I said in all honesty.

“It’s so reasonable,” said Ellery plaintively. “By habit a man will twist consistently in one direction and with the same hand, the hand he favors, particularly if the twisting requires muscle. If he has two hasps to twist, he will twist the one on the right side first with his right hand (if he is right-handed), and then turn the box around and twist the left-hand hasp. By turning the box around he automatically puts himself again in a position to twist toward the right with the right hand. In such case the twists in the strained metal would appear in opposite directions rather than the same direction, as we found in the case of the Grant box. But we’re talking now of normal people with two hands who favor one of the hands, as most people do. Consider Woody; he had only one hand altogether! He certainly would twist the right-hand hasp first, and then turn the box around to twist the left-hand hasp, in which case the twistings would appear in opposite directions. But the twistings actually appeared in the same direction. So the hasps were not twisted by Woody. Therefore Woody didn’t steal the money.

“Had Woody been the thief, moreover, would he have hidden the loot in an unlocked drawer of his own dressing-room table, to be found by even the most casual search? The fact that the cash was openly left in an unlocked drawer of a table in Woody’s room proves that, if he put it there himself, he did not know the money was stolen; if he did not put it there himself, then he knew nothing of the theft at all and the money was planted in his drawer to make him appear the thief.

“But to return to the rifled box. The fact that the hasps were twisted in the same direction rather than in opposite directions tends to show that the two hasps were twisted simultaneously — that is, the thief grapsed each hasp in one hand and twisted both toward the back of the box in the same operation. Ah, but what have we here? Two strong hands, it appears! This was metal — granted, weak poor metal, but metal nevertheless; it would take strength to twist one of the hasps with even a favored, or stronger, hand; yet here the thief had exerted equal strength with both hands. Indication? Certainly of an ambidextrous thief. Yes, yes, I know,” he continued hastily, checking the objection on my lips, “I know you’re going to say it’s not a foolproof conclusion. Perhaps not. All I call it is an indication, and that you can’t deny. If the thief was ambidextrous, and the murderer, Buck Horne, was ambidextrous — certainly a remarkable coincidence, eh? I was completely justified in theorizing that it was Horne who had stolen Curly Grant’s money.

“But why the deuce should Horne, or Miller, or whatever you choose to call him, have stolen Curly’s money — the money of his best friend’s son? Desperation? Dire need? Cupidity overwhelming friendship? But see; if Horne stole that money how does it transpire that the money turns up the same day in Woody’s room? Horne, then, whatever the explanation was, didn’t steal the money out of cupidity; I think it is simple to reconstruct the situation. Woody having discovered Horne’s identity as Miller in some way — perhaps by penetrating his disguise — confronted Horne with his knowledge. What would a man like Woody do in such a case?”

“Demand blackmail, of course — hush money,” I muttered.

“Quite so. He had to appease Woody until he was able to silence him forever. He seized the opportunity presented by Grant’s settlement of Curly’s legacy. He stole the money, gave it to Woody — who, having no time to suspect it was Curly’s, no reason to hide it — put it away in his dressing-table drawer. Horne knew that by the time the theft was discovered Woody would be dead, the money would be found, returned to Curly, and no one — except Woody, naturally! — would suffer. How clever Horne was! Had he paid Woody off with his own money, Horne could never have retrieved that money later even if it was found in Woody’s drawer; as Miller he would have had no claim to it. But by using Curly’s money temporarily he held on to his own wad, and Curly got his back... Everything fits for Buck Horne as the criminal. He satisfies all the qualifications logically as well as plausibly.”

“He was running a fearful risk, though,” I said, shivering. “What could he have done had he been recognized as Horne?”

“It’s hard to say,” replied Ellery thoughtfully. “Yet the risk was not so great as you think. Aside from Woody only two persons, really, might recognize him because they knew him so well. Kit and Wild Bill Grant. Even Kit had been seeing her foster-father very infrequently of late years, as she told me herself. But if she did by chance penetrate the Miller disguise, Horne was sure he could depend on her loyal silence. The same was undoubtedly true of Grant, who had been Horne’s closest friend from their boyhood days. All along I suspected that Grant became aware of the truth not long after the first murder; the man was a nervous wreck. The afternoon of Woody’s murder he seemed to catch sight of someone, and he turned pale as a ghost; I’ve no doubt he saw Miller’s face there — a reminder that Miller was Horne.”

Ellery lit another cigaret and puffed slowly at it. “It was this very friendship with Grant — on which Horne relied — that provided the trap to draw Horne back after his disappearance in the Miller identity. I knew that only one thing would bring him back; danger that Grant, his best friend, or Kit, whom he considered his daughter, would be accused of his own crimes.” He paused. “I suppose it was a wretched trick, but I couldn’t help myself. I chose Grant as living bait for self-evident reasons, knowing that the old-timer’s prime virtue of loyalty to a friend would not permit Horne to let that friend suffer for crimes of which he was innocent. But how to frame Grant so that he might be arrested? The only thing that would force a quick arrest would be concrete evidence — obviously the best evidence in any case is the weapon found in possession, presumably, of a suspect. The fact that Grant couldn’t have committed the crime for pure reasons of position I knew would make no difference; apparently no one else had analyzed correctly the matters of direction and angle of entry. And I knew that action would be swift after Grant’s arrest.

“At any rate, I had to find that automatic. I did find it — by accident, you say? Perhaps not quite by accident. Look at it this way. Why had Miller disappeared at all? Well, his crimes were committed, he was through, he now had to look out for his future safety. But Miller was not Miller; Miller was really Buck Horne; Miller was a name and an identity manufactured for a temporary and specific purpose. Poor dad — he wondered why he could find no trace of this Benjy gentleman’s past! There wasn’t any. So I put myself in Horne’s place. If Miller disappeared, for whom would the police search? Obviously, for Miller. The thing to do, then, was to disappear as Miller, and immediately discard the Miller disguise and identity forever. The police would then look for Miller forever without the slightest success. But if he was going to put the police on an eternally false trail in an eternal search for a nonexistent person, it would not hurt — would help, in fact — to have the police believe that the vanished Miller was the murderer of Buck Horne and Woody. The weapon plus the disappearance would be enough for the police. So I figured that Miller, or Horne, had left that weapon somewhere to be found by the police after his disappearance. Where could he leave it? In one of two places: his hotel room, or the dressing room he had occupied in the Colosseum. I chose the dressing room first and, sure enough, there was the automatic.

“Having found it, that very night I myself — don’t look at me that way, stranger! — I myself planted the automatic in Grant’s room, first making sure that he would be out for the evening. You know the rest. I steered the Inspector there, we found the weapon, Grant was arrested, the papers obligingly broadcast the news for me — and Horne showed up, per schedule, to keep his friend, as he thought, from being convicted of the crimes. Showed up, incidentally, with the Miller disguise on, I suppose, to prove that he had been Miller. And that,” said Ellery with a wry smile, “spells finis. Pretty, eh?”

Djuna refilled the coffee cups, and we drank in silence for some time. “Very pretty,” I said after a while. “Very pretty indeed. But not complete. You still haven’t solved the mystery of how Horne secreted the weapon so beautifully in the first place.”

Ellery started from a reverie. “Oh, that!” he said with a little deprecatory wave of his hand. “After putting it off to the last, I quite forgot to clear it up. Interesting, of course. But again mere child’s play.” I grunted. “Oh, yes, J.J., it was very simple — once you knew. It’s always the simplest mystery that appears to be the deepest. Our old friend Chesterton employs the psychology of the simple mystery so very cleverly! It seems a shame — Father Brown couldn’t have been here” He laughed, and wriggled in his chair. “Well, what was the problem? The problem was: Where had that automatic been all the time after the first murder, and second murder, too? What had Miller, or Horne, done with it to have made it apparently vanish so that not even an exhaustive search by scores of detectives turned it up?

“In Major Kirby’s projection room the second time — after the Woody affair, you know — I discovered that the first newsreel scenes of the Horne murder did not constitute all the film shot at the Colosseum that night, but was a shortened version for theatre distribution.

“When the Major ran the deleted scenes for me, we saw things we could not have seen except on the night of the murder, and then of course we were incapable physically and emotionally of panoramic observation. In one scene after the murder the camera caught that bibulous little cowboy, Boone, leading the string of riderless horses to water, at one end of the arena. One horse was balky, refused to drink. Boone, rather drunker than usual, committed the unforgivable sin of lashing the animal; and lo! into the field of the lens rushed a cowboy, snatched the whip from Boone, and at once soothed the balky horse. I learned from Boone that this angry, horse-calming gentleman from the wide open spaces was none other than our friend Miller! And the horse? The horse was a canny chunk of precious old meat named Injun. And who was Injun? Injun was Buck Horne’s animal! Do you get the implications? Well, for one thing Miller’s ability to quiet an irate beast who belonged to Horne confirmed the theory that Miller was Horne. For another, the odd reaction of the horse, his refusal to drink when all the other animals quite eagerly lapped up the water, gave me an equally odd thought, which was fed by the fact that ‘Miller’ had leaped across the arena and prevented Boone from — what, J.J.?”

“From lashing the horse,” I said.

“No. From forcing the horse to drink.” Ellery chuckled as I gaped. “The automatic, remember, had not been found anywhere in the bowl. The premises from roof to cellar had been ransacked, all the humans searched to the point of nausea. Even the horses’ rigging had been scrupulously gone over. Yet there was one thing, strange as it sounds, which had not been searched.” He paused. “The horses themselves.” He paused again.

I tortured my brain. “I’m afraid,” I confessed at last, “I don’t get you.”

He waved a cheerful hand. “Because it’s ridiculous, eh? Yet examine it. Was it possible that the automatic had been hidden, not on a horse, but in a horse?”

I stared incredulously.

“Yes,” he said with a broad grin, “you’ve guessed it. I remembered that Injun was not an ordinary animal. Oh, no. Boone — and Kit, too — had said that Injun was Buck’s old trick movie horse. And there it was. Injun, by refusing to drink, as well as told me that at that very moment he had the pestiferously elusive automatic — a small weapon only four and a half inches long, mind, and flat to the bargain — in his mouth.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I gasped.

“You may well be,” murmured Ellery. “From that conclusion a reconstruction of events was simple. Horne, after shooting his double, had merely leaned forward and slipped the automatic into Injun’s mouth. Oh, Injun knew who was on his back! — a little paint on the cheek, and dyed hair, wouldn’t fool an old detective with such sharp senses as a horse. All Horne had to do, then, was wait until all the searching was over, knowing that Injun would keep the gun in his mouth and keep his mouth shut; and then, after the string of horses had been taken to the Tenth Avenue stables to be bedded down for the night, he retrieved the pistol from Injun’s mouth. The ruse had been so successful that Horne had no hesitation in repeating the procedure in the second crime, using, of course, the same weapon.”

“But wasn’t there a fearful danger that Injun would get tired of keeping the gun in his mouth,” I said, “and would drop it right on the scene of the crime? What a debacle that would have been!”

“I fancy not. If Horne had decided on that method of disposing of his weapon, he must have been certain there wouldn’t be a slip-up. Which automatically makes you conclude that Injun, trained in tricks by Horne from colt-hood, must also have been taught to keep his mouth closed over whatever Horne slipped into it until Horne himself ordered him to open it. You can do it with dogs, you know; and horses are certainly just as intelligent, if not more so... Incidentally, I now knew why Horne had, against all habit, employed a .25 calibre automatic as the murder weapon. He needed the tiniest weapon which would be fatal; a weapon which was least bulky, least weighty, considering its depository.”

Ellery rose, stretched, and yawned. But I was sitting there by the fire still puzzled; and he looked down at me with a quizzical grin. “What’s the matter, O Rain-in-the-Face?” he asked. “Something still bothering you?”

“Decidedly. Everything’s been so dashed mysterious about this problem,” I complained. “I mean — the papers ran just the barest details of the story, and nobody seems to know much about anything. I remember a few weeks ago when the story came out, after Horne shot himself—”

“In this very room,” murmured Ellery lightly; but his eyes were pained. “That was a moment, my masters! Poor Djuna fainted. Don’t think so much of blood and thunder now, do you, Djuna, old son?”

Djuna became a little pale about the jowls; he smiled in a sickly fashion and crept out of the room.

“What I meant to say,” I went on, irritated, “is that I hunted through every darned sheet in the City and I couldn’t find a solitary word about motive.”

“Ah, motive,” said Ellery thoughtfully; and then very quickly he went to his secretary and stopped short, frowning down upon his desk set.

“Yes, motive,” I repeated doggedly. “What the devil’s all the secrecy about? Why did Horne kill this poor chap who’d been his movie double years back? There must be a reason. Man doesn’t plan a complicated crime and forfeit his rightful identity forever just for fun. And I’m sure Horne was no maniac.”

“Maniac? Oh, no, not a maniac.” Ellery seemed to be having unusual difficulty in expressing himself. “Ah — you see, granted that he had to kill somebody, the question arose as to ways and means. Should he kill the double openly, and allow himself to be arrested, tried, and executed? Self-preservation, and a shrinking from the shame which would be heaped upon Kit’s head, made him decide against this. Should he kill the double and commit suicide? The same reasons said no. So he took the intricate but really only way out, according to his lights. You might say—”

“I do say,” I interrupted severely.

“—that it was silly for Horne so to have planned his crime that in working it out he lost his identity as Horne. But actually was it so silly? What was he losing — his money? He had taken practically all of it with him! His career? Ah, but that was just a pleasant fiction, he must have realized at the last; an old man for years he had stubbornly refused to bow to Time, chafing against the inevitable, and now at last he saw that there was no movie career in the offing, that he was a useless old husk, that Grant’s proposed investment of money in Horne’s comeback was merely a friendly gesture, nothing more. I repeat: What was he losing by dying as Buck Horne in — I might point out — a last blaze of publicity?”

“Yes, but what was he gaining?” I asked dryly.

“A good deal, from his point of view. He was gaining peace of mind, he was satisfying his peculiar code of honor, and he was making a sacrifice for the good of Kit. Kit told the Inspector and me that Horne was carrying a hundred thousand dollar insurance policy, of which she was the only beneficiary. Now mark this. He had contracted an enormous debt by his gambling losses at Hunter’s place; forty-two thousand dollars! How was he to pay it? And yet pay it he must, according to his code. With his movie career blasted, with his personal wealth insufficient to cover the debt — unless he sold his ranch, and this I suppose he could not bring himself to do, desiring it to remain Kit’s — how was he to pay Hunter? It was literally true that he was worth more dead than alive. So, by passing out of the picture as Horne, he made the hundred thousand available, liquid — available to pay off the gambling debt (he knew Kit well enough to foresee that she would take care of that), and the balance he knew would safeguard Kit’s future. If you grant him the desire to accomplish these things and still live out the few remaining years of his life, even if anonymously, then surely it is apparent that Horne, as Horne, had to die — that in achieving the death of his double Horne had to go through the whole complicated plan of presumably dying himself.”

“Yes, yes,” I said impatiently, “that may all be very true, but you’re evading the important point. You’ve wandered far, my lad! You said before: ‘Granted that he had to kill somebody.’ Well, I don’t grant any such thing! That’s what’s bothering me. Why did he have to kill somebody? Specifically, why did he have to kill his double?”

“Oh, I imagine there was a reason,” muttered Ellery, without turning.

“You imagine?” I cried. “Don’t you know?”

Ellery faced about and I saw something very grave and determined in his eyes. “Yes, J.J., I do know. I didn’t know until Horne himself told me. Told me and the Inspector...”

“But I thought Miss Horne and the Grant fellow were here, too, that night,” I said.

“Horne sent them away.” He paused again. “And before he shot himself he told us.”

“Does Grant know?” I asked abruptly. “Old man Grant?”

He tapped a cigaret on his thumbnail. “Grant knows.”

I mumbled: “He sent the girl away... Hmm. I suppose she meant everything to him, and he would do anything to protect her — his foster-daughter — her safety, her reputation... If there had been something — well, doubtful, about her parentage and the double knew it and was threatening to tell Kit... She’s an orphan, didn’t you say?”

Ellery was silent. For so long a time that I thought he had not heard me. Then he said, in a very sharp tone: “What did you think of the new Nobel award for literature, J.J.? It seems to me—”

But to my vague and gossipy conjectures he preserved a loud and stubborn silence.

A silence, appropriately enough, that was Buck Horne’s epitaph.