French Powder Mystery (20 page)

“That’s a fact,” put in Crouther.

“Well!” The Inspector shot a keen glance toward the two men before him. “It looks mighty bad for this Carmody girl, eh? What do you think?”

Weaver looked pained and half-turned away.

“Well, I don’t know about that, Inspector,” said Crouther with heavy importance. “My own ideas about this case—”

“Eh? Your own ideas?” The Inspector looked startled, then suppressed a smile. “What
are
your own ideas, Crouther? Might be of some value—never can tell.”

Ellery, who had been sitting abstractedly at the desk, listening to the conversation with half-cocked ears, jammed his little volume into his pocket, rose, and sauntered idly over to the group.

“What’s this? A post-mortem?” he demanded, smiling. “And what do I hear, Crouther, about an idea of yours on the case?”

Crouther looked embarrassed for a moment and shuffled his feet. But then he squared his thick shoulders and lashed out into speech, openly enjoying his rôle of orator.

“I think,” he began—

“Ah!” said the Inspector.

“I think,” Crouther repeated, unabashed, “that Miss Carmody is a victim. Yes, sir, victim of a frame-up!”

“No!” murmured Ellery.

“Go on,” said the Inspector curiously.

“It’s as plain as the nose—beg pardon, Inspector—on your face. Who ever heard of a girl bumping her own mother off? It ain’t natural.”

“But the cards, Crouther—the shoes, the hat,” said the Inspector gently.

“Just hooey, Inspector,” said Crouther with confidence. “Hell! That’s no trick, to plant a pair o’ shoes and a hat. No, sir, you can’t tell me Miss Carmody did the job. Don’t believe it and won’t believe it. I go on common sense, and that’s a fact. Girl shoot her own mother! No, sir!”

“Well, there’s something in that,” remarked the Inspector sententiously. “What do you make of Miss Marion French’s scarf, while you’re analyzing the crime, Crouther? Think she’s mixed up in it anywhere?”

“Who? That little girl?” Crouther expanded, snorted. “Say, that’s another plant. Or else she left it here by mistake. Kind o’ like the plant idea, though, myself. Fact!”

“You would say, then,” interpolated Ellery, “while you’re on the Holmesian track, that this is a case of—what?”

“Don’t get you entirely, sir,” said Crouther stoutly, “but it looks darned near like a case of murder and kidnapping. Can’t see any other way to explain it.”

“Murder and kidnapping?” Ellery smiled. “Not a bad idea at that. Good recitation, Crouther.”

The detective beamed. Weaver, who had resolutely refrained from commenting; heaved a sigh of relief when a knock on the outer door interrupted the conversation.

The policeman stationed outside opened the door to admit a wizened little man, completely bald, carrying a bulging brief-case.

“Afternoon, Jimmy!” said the Inspector cheerfully. “Got anything for us in that bag of yours?”

“Sure have, Inspector,” squeaked the little old man. “Got down here as fast as I could.—Hello, Mr. Queen.”

“Glad to see you, Jimmy,” said Ellery, and the expression on his face was one of intense expectancy. At this moment the photographers and fingerprint investigators trooped into the library, hats and coats on, their apparatus stowed away. “Jimmy” greeted them all by name.

“Through here, Inspector,” announced one of the photographers. “Any orders?”

“Not at the moment.” Queen turned to the fingerprint men. “Anybody find anything?”

“Got a lot of prints,” reported one of them, “but practically all came from this room. Not a one in the card-room and none in the bedroom, except for a few stray prints of Mr. Queen’s, here.”

“Anything in the prints from this room?”

“Hard to say. If the room’s been used all morning by this Board of Directors, chances are they’re all legitimate. Well have to get hold of these people and check their prints. Okay, Inspector?”

“Go ahead. But be nice about it, boys.” He waved them toward the door. “So long, Crouther. See you later.”

“Good enough,” said Crouther cheerfully, and departed behind the police workers.

The Inspector, Weaver, the man called “Jimmy,” and Ellery were left standing in the center of the room. The detectives personally attached to Queen lounged about in the anteroom, conversing in low tones. The old man carefully closed the anteroom door and hurried back toward the group, rubbing his hands briskly together.

“Now, Mr. Weaver—” he began.

“Perfectly all right, dad,” said Ellery mildly. “No secrets from Wes. Jimmy, if you’ve anything to tell, tell it rapidly, graphically, and above all rapidly. Talk, James!”

“Okay,” responded “Jimmy,” scratching his bald pate dubiously. “What would you like to know?” His hand dived into the bag he carried and reappeared with an article painstakingly wrapped in soft tissue paper. He carefully unwrapped the package, and one of the onyx book-ends emerged. The second book-end, similarly sheathed in tissue, he placed by the side of the first on the glass top of French’s desk.

“The book-ends, eh?” muttered Queen, bending forward curiously to examine the barely visible glue lines where felt and stone met.

“In the onyx itself,” ventured Ellery. “Jimmy, what were those whitish grains I sent you in the glassine envelope?”

“Ordinary fingerprint powder,” replied “Jimmy,” at once. “The white variety. And how it got there, maybe you can answer—I can’t, Mr. Queen.”

“Not at the moment,” smiled Ellery. “Fingerprint powder, eh? Did you find any more in the glue?”

“You got nearly all of them,” said the little bald-headed man. “Did find a few, though. Found a bit of foreign matter, of course—some dust chiefly. But the grains are what I’ve told you. There’s not a print on either of them, except your own, Mr. Queen.”

Inspector Queen stared from “Jimmy” to Weaver to Ellery, a strange light dawning on his face. His hand fumbled nervously for his snuff-box.

“Fingerprint powder!” he said in a stunned voice. “Is it possible that—?”

“No, I’ve checked on what you’re thinking, dad,” said Ellery soberly. “This room was not entered by the police before I myself found the grains in the glue. As a matter of fact, I suspected their identity at once, but of course I wished to be certain. … No, if you’re thinking that one of your men sprinkled the powder on these book-ends, you’re mistaken. They couldn’t have, possibly.”

“You realize what this means, of course?” The Inspector’s voice grew shrill with excitement. He took a short turn on the rug. “I have had all sorts of experience,” he said, “with criminals who use gloves. That’s one of the accepted habits of the law-breaking profession, it seems—maybe it’s an outgrowth of fiction and newspaper exposés. Gloves, canvas, cheesecloth, felt—they’re all used either to prevent leaving fingerprints or to destroy what prints may be left. But this—this is the work of a—”

“A super-criminal?” suggested Weaver timidly.

“Exactly. A super-criminal!” replied the old man. “Sounds dime-novelish, does it, El? Coming from me, too—with comparative butchers like Tony the Wop and Red McCloskey waiting for me down at the Tombs. Most cops scoff at the mere suggestion of super-criminals. But I’ve known them—rare and precious birds when they do crop out. …” He looked at his son defiantly. “Ellery, the man—or woman, for that matter—who committed this crime is not the usual criminal. He—or she—is so careful as to do the job and then, not satisfied with possibly using gloves and letting it go at that, sprinkles the room with the policeman’s pet crime-detector, fingerprint powder, to bring out his or her
own
prints in order to wipe them out of existence! … There isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind—we’re dealing with a most unusual character, a habitual criminal who’s risen far above the stupidity of his generally dull-witted kind.”

“Super-criminal …” Ellery thought for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders lightly. “It does look that way, doesn’t it? … Commits the murder in this room, then goes about the enormously ticklish job of cleaning up afterward. Has he left prints? Perhaps. Perhaps the work he had to do was so delicate as to make it impossible for him to use gloves—there’s a thought, eh, dad?” He smiled.

“Doesn’t make sense, though—that last,” muttered Queen. “Can’t see what he might possibly have to do that he couldn’t do with gloves on.”

“I have a little idea about that,” remarked Ellery. “But to go on. He hasn’t used gloves, let us say, at least for one small but important operation, and he’s certain that there are prints of his fingers left on the book-ends—which of necessity, then, are connected with what he had to do. Very well! Does he merely wipe the surface of the onyx carefully, trusting that he’s eradicated all the tell-tale marks? He does not! He produces fingerprint powder, whisks it gently over all the surfaces of the onyx, one at a time, and where he sees a convolvular smudge, he immediately destroys it. In this way he’s
sure
there are no fingerprints left. Smart! A little painstaking, of course—but he was gambling with his life, remember, and he took no chances. No—” Ellery said slowly, “he took—no chances.”

There was a little silence, broken only by the soft swish of “Jimmy’s” hand caressing his bald head.

“At least,” said the Inspector impatiently, at last, “there’s no sense in looking for prints anywhere about. The criminal who was clever enough to go through a rigmarole like this would personalities. Jimmy, wrap those book-ends up again and take them back to Headquarters with you. Better have one of the boys go along with you—let’s take no chances on your, well, let’s say, losing em.

“Right, Inspector.” The police laboratory worker deftly rewrapped the book-ends in the tissue paper, stowed them away in his bag, and with a cheery, “So long!” disappeared from the room.

“Now, Mr. Weaver,” said the Inspector, settling himself comfortably in a chair, “have a seat and let’s hear some things about the various people we’ve met in the course of this investigation. Sit down, Ellery, you make me fidgety!”

Ellery smiled and seated himself at the desk, for which he seemed to have developed a curious passion. Weaver relaxed in one of the leather-covered chairs, resignedly.

“Anything you say, Inspector.” He looked over at Ellery. Ellery was gazing fixedly at the books on the desk-top.

“Well, for an introduction,” began the Inspector, briskly, “tell us something about that employer of yours. Mighty queer cuss, isn’t he? Anti-vice work made him daffy, perhaps?”

“I think you’ve judged the Old Man a trifle inaccurately,” said Weaver tiredly. “He’s the best and most generous soul in the world. If you can conceive a strange combination of Arthurian purity of nature with a definite narrowness of outlook, you’ll hit close to understanding him. He’s not a broad-minded man, in the generally accepted sense of the word. He has a little iron in him, too, or he wouldn’t be crusading against vice. He loathes it instinctively, I think, because certainly there’s never been the smallest element of scandal or criminality in his family. That’s why this thing has hit him so hard. He probably foresees the ravenous way in which the newspapers will pick up the choice morsel—wife of the Anti-Vice League head mysteriously murdered, and all that. And then, too, I think he loved Mrs. French dearly. I don’t think she loved him—” he hesitated, but continued loyally, “but she was always good to him in her cold, self-contained way. She was a good bit younger than he, of course.”

The Inspector coughed gently. Ellery regarded Weaver with morose eyes, but his thoughts seemed far away. Perhaps on the books, for his fingers played idly with their covers.

“Tell me, Mr. Weaver,” said Queen, “have you noticed anything—well, abnormal—in Mr. French’s actions lately? Or better still, do you know personally of anything that might have caused him secret worry in recent months?”

Weaver was silent for a long time. “Inspector,” he said at last, meeting Queen’s eyes frankly, “the truth is that I know a great many things about Mr. French and his family and friends. I’m not a scandal-monger. You must understand that this is an extremely embarrassing position for me. It’s hard to betray confidences. …”

The Inspector looked pleased. “Spoken like a man, Mr. Weaver. Ellery, answer your friend.”

Ellery regarded Weaver compassionately. “Wes, old boy,” he said, “a human being has been killed in cold blood. It is our business to punish the murderer who took that life. I can’t answer for you—it’s difficult for a straight-thinking man to spill a heap of family secrets—but if I were you, I should talk. Because, Wes”—he paused—“you’re not with policemen. You’re with friends.”

“Then I’ll talk,” said Weaver despairingly, “and hope for the best.—I believe you asked about something abnormal in the Old Man’s actions recently, Inspector? You’ve hit a truth. Mr. French
is
secretly worried and upset. Because—”

“Because—?”

“Because,” said Weaver in a spiritless voice, “a few months ago an unfortunate friendship sprang up between Mrs. French and—Cornelius Zorn.”

“Zorn, eh? Love-affair, Weaver?” asked Queen in a soothing voice.

“I’m afraid so,” replied Weaver uncomfortably. “Though what she saw in
him
—But now I’m becoming gossipy! The fact is that they were seeing each other much too often, so much so that even the Old Man, the most unsuspicious soul that ever breathed, began to realize that something was wrong.”

“Nothing definite, I suppose?”

“I don’t think there was anything radically wrong, Inspector. And of course Mr. French never breathed a word of it to his wife. He wouldn’t dream of hurting her feelings. But I know it touched him deeply, because once he let slip something in my presence that gave all his transparent broodings away. I’m reasonably certain that he was desperately hoping things would work out for the best.”

“I thought Zorn held aloof from French in that window,” mused the Inspector.

“Undoubtedly. Zorn makes no bones about his feeling for Mrs. French. She was not an unattractive woman, Inspector. And Zorn is pretty small potatoes. He broke a lifelong friendship when he began to dally with the Old Man’s wife. It’s that, I think, as much as anything, that made the Old Man feel so badly.”

“Is Zorn married?” put in Ellery suddenly.