The Bullets Lied

When Robert Gaylin, owner, of the Atlas Automobile Agency, was found on a Monday morning in February, shot to death as he sat behind his desk at his office at the agency, I noticed in the afternoon paper that my friend. Lieutenant John Darmody, Deputy Chief of the Homicide Detail, was in charge of the case.

At breakfast the next morning I read that a Ralph Burnett, one of the agency salesmen, had been arrested and charged with the murder. There was a picture of him, a young man with a rather open, pleasant face. I thought he did not look particularly murderous, but few murderers do. The news item stated that ballistics evidence had figured in the arrest.

John Darmody phoned me at the college at three on Thursday afternoon and asked, all too casually, if he could stop around to see me that evening. We settled on eight-thirty as a time convenient for both of us.

To some, our friendship may seem incongruous: the friendship of a lean, dark, nervous career cop with a plump and placid bachelor logician in his middle years, a man who abhors violence and physical effort. The key to it is perhaps that the cop’s hobby is applied logic and the logician’s hobby is criminology.

Darmody sat, as usual, on the edge of my least comfortable chair, and he briefed me quickly.

“This Mr. Gaylin was well known and well liked around town. He owned his automobile agency free and dear. His credit was good. No health or money problems. No enemies anybody could think of. He had over two hundred bucks in his wallet, so it wasn’t theft. He was a widower. His wife died a long time ago.

“He’s got one daughter, named Ann. Twenty-one. Lovely looking kid. Got out of school last June. This has really jolted her. She lives in an apartment with two other girls, and the three of them work at the Crown and Lofting Advertising Agency.

“I got my first break from the service manager at the agency, a fellow named Barrow. He’s the one who found the body. He told me Gaylin and his daughter had been scrapping about a car salesman at the agency named Ralph Burnett. Burnett and Ann Gaylin had been going together for about six months. Gaylin didn’t think any car salesman was good enough for his daughter, but Barrow says Burnett is a good kid.

“Gaylin lived at his club, downtown. He left there at nine o’clock Sunday night. He often went over to the agency at night and went in and worked for a while. The time of death was about eleven. It isn’t a residential area. Nobody heard any shots. He ended up with two 38-caliber slugs in him, both in the chest, one nicking the heart. We got the slugs. One hit bone hard enough to be badly deformed. The other is in good shape.

“I moved in on this Ralph Burnett. He lives in a one-room apartment. He was a drifter until two years ago, when he settled down here. No folks. He claims he was in his room from eight o’clock on, until he left for work Monday morning. He is a gun bug. Modern hand guns. He has a gun case hanging on his wall that he built. Glass front, a good lock, the guns hanging from hooks on perforated board. Magnums, Lugers, Walthers, Colts. He was in the army for the Korea thing and he says he got interested in guns then.

“Now get this. He claims he was home cleaning his collection. I took him in, along with the five guns the slugs could have come from. We got test slugs and matched them. He has a Smith and Wesson .38 Chief that gives us an absolutely perfect match with the undeformed slug from Gaylin. Under the comparison microscope it couldn’t be more perfect. That gun shot the slugs that were taken out of Gaylin.”

I knocked my pipe out into the fireplace. “Now you’ve told me everything but the problem, John.”

He wore a crooked and guilty smile. “I should like this kid for it. But I don’t, somehow. He’s a bright kid. He’s been around. He reacts all right. He didn’t believe what I was telling him. I look him to the lab and let him take a look for himself. Ever since then he’s been acting as if somebody hit him on the head. He says he has the only key to the gun case. It’s a good lock. He says he didn’t go to bed until midnight. Nobody could have taken the gun. He says he didn’t use it.”

“When was the last time he did use it?”

“He’s been teaching Ann Gaylin to shoot. There’s a sand pit near Willisville they go to when the weather’s good. He thinks he took the S and W along when they went out three weeks ago on a Sunday.”

“Does the girl inherit the business?”

“Yes. The works. And Gaylin had other interests, too. He was pretty well off.”

“I imagine you’ve talked to the girl. Was this a serious thing between her and Burnett?”

“Apparently. As I said, this has hit her hard. She doesn’t know what to think. She did say it was possible her father might have called Burnett to come in so he could talk to him about his daughter.”

“Who did the young lady go with before Burnett came on the scene?”

“A man named Bill Derren. He is Gaylin’s right-hand man, a sort of a manager. He’s pretty busted up about it. He’s about thirty. I’d say. Good-looking guy.”

“What gives you your reservations about Burnett?”

“He is a gun bug. He’d know about comparative ballistics. He insists on giving evidence that puts him right in the bag. The District Attorney’s office says to go ahead. I’ve stalled turning over the file.”

I leaned back, took off my glasses and pinched the bridge of my nose. Nearly all human equations can be reduced to a rude form of symbolic logic, though it is of a sort that might make its nineteenth century inventor, George Boole, twitch in his dusty grave. Here were two mutually exclusive factors. The bullets had come from the gun. The gun had not been used in the murder.

I could express these mutually exclusive facts in the form of a rough symbolic equation. The bullets had come from the gun and the gun had not been used in the murder. By a distortion of the time factor, intrinsic in the original statements. I could make an equation that would fit the disparate factors. The bullets had been fired from the gun and the gun was not used in the murder because the murder took place, in time sequence, after the gun had been fired. This equation solved readily. The bullets, once fired by the gun, were later used in the murder.

I opened my eyes. John was looking at me hungrily. “Got anything?”

“I don’t really know. But you might try to find out if there is any device which will propel used lead slugs at sufficient velocity to kilt a man.”

It took him a frowning moment to comprehend what I meant. I saw the skepticism. The Goddess of Ballistics was being violated. Skepticism faded. He left quickly.

Lieutenant John Darmody came to see me on the following Friday evening, to tell me what I read the next morning in the papers. I knew when he came in that he had arrived at a solution that satisfied him. There is something of the feline in John Darmody. When he has caught his man, there is a sleepy, lazy, sated air about him. He held a large wooden case on his lap, a beautiful thing of Circassian walnut with brass fittings and the warm deep patina of age.

“It was Derren,” he said with a certain smugness. “He signed a complete confession two hours ago. He figured he had Ann all sewed up, and in the happy future he’d own and operate the agency. Then Burnett cut him out. He knew Gaylin was upset about it. So if Burnett killed Gaylin, then he’d get the girl and the business all at once, he figured. It was even better than waiting.”

He brought the case over to the table by my chair and opened it. There were two slim and deadly pistols fitted into purple velvet, with pieces for an ivory powder flask, mallet, cap case, ramrod and cleaning rods.

“Belgian duelling pistols,” he said. “Forty-eight caliber, made in 1830. Pretty, aren’t they? Derren followed the kids, sifted slugs out of the sand bank, selected two that had not been deformed by impact. He loaded those slugs into these pistols, wadding the slugs with tissue. These are smooth bore pistols, and just a tenth of an inch larger in bore diameter than Burnett’s S and W. He bought these in New York a month ago, along with caps, black powder and a manual on loading and firing. He took the cased pistols to the office on Sunday night. He went over to a file cabinet behind Gaylin, set the case down, took out the loaded pistols and shot Gaylin in the back. He picked up the pieces of smoldering tissue from the floor and left.”

By the look on his face I knew he was wailing for me to ask a question, and I knew what the question was.

“Didn’t he have time to dispose of these?”

“Sure. Plenty of time. But we found them in the back of his closet under a bunch of junk. If he’d dropped them in the river, we’d have been in sad shape.”

“Why didn’t he?”

John’s grin was feral and quite frightening. “He wasn’t a gun bug like Burnett. Not until he got these. He fell in love with them and he couldn’t throw them away, so he decided to take a chance and keep them.”

I looked at the deadly perfection of the handmade weapons. “What will become of them?”

Darmody touched the gleam of walnut grip with his fingertips. “After the trial,” he said, “they might turn up missing. You can imagine how they’d get to look after a month in my house with our four kids taking them out of the case every ten minutes.”

He turned and looked beyond me, and I knew he was looking at the two shelves of the bookcase that held the macabre souvenirs of our joint adventures — the ring, the chain, the axe and the scorpion.

“It will fit,” I said. I took one of the pistols into my hand. It felt as unique and alive as an adder. I looked up at Darmody. “Did the first shot only wound him?”

“Killed him dead.”

I frowned. I sensed a departure from logic. “Then why...”

Darmody’s grin was a thing truly evil.

“Like a kid with new toys,” he said. “He had to use them both.”