The American Gun Mystery Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  Title Page

  PREPARATORY: SPECTRUM

  1: WORK IN PROGRESS

  2: THE MAN ON HORSEBACK

  3: REQUIESCAT

  4: THE THREADS

  5: GENTLEMAN OF THE PRESS

  6: THE FACT REMAINS

  7: 45 GUNS

  8: A MATTER OF BALLISTICS

  9: NOTHING

  10: THE SECOND GUN

  11: THE IMPOSSIBLE

  12: PRIVATE SCREENING

  13: SOME VISITS OF IMPORTANCE

  14: AGENDA

  15: GLADIATOR REX

  16: lOU

  17: CELEBRATION

  18: DEATH RIDES AGAIN

  19: IBID

  20: THE GREEN BOX

  21: ON THE SCREEN

  22: THE VANISHING AMERICAN

  23: THE MIRACLE

  24: THE VERDICT

  CHALLENGE TO THE READER

  25: BEFORE THE FACT

  26: THE FACT

  27: THE HEEL OF ACHILLES

  POSTLUDE: SPECTRUM ANALYSIS

  The

  American Gun Mystery

  (DEATH AT THE RODEO)

  A Problem in Deduction by

  ELLERY QUEEN

  Ballantine Books * New York

  Copy right 1933, by Ellery Queen

  All rights reserved.

  SBN 345-24363-3-125

  First Printing: March 1975

  Printed in the United States of Ameica

  Ballantine Books

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  201 East 50th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022

  Simultaneously published by

  Ballantine Books, Ltd., Toronto, Canada

  To

  C RAYMOND EVERITT

  for one reason

  and

  ALBERT FOSTER, jr.

  for another

  FOREWORD

  For the half-dozenth time in a quartet of years I find myself confronted with the formidable task of introducing a new work from the pen of my friend, Ellery Queen. It seems only yesterday that I sat down to write a preface to The Roman Hat Mystery, that historic case which I bullied Ellery into fictionizing—the first Queen adventure to be put between covers; and yet that was over four years ago!

  Now, so contagious is recognition of authentic genius, whether it is in the creation of a new ocracy or a new crime-story metier, Ellery Queen has become a symbol of the unusual in detective fiction in America. In England he has been hailed by no less distinguished a critic than the London Times as "the logical successor to Sherlock Holmes"; and on the Continent, where (as Vivoudiere says in his florid but earnest tribute) "M. Queen a pris d'assaut les remparts des cyniques de lettres", he has been translated into a polyglot of tongues (yea, even unto the Scandinavian), so that his bookshelves bristle with unfamiliar-sounding titles and his correspondence alone provides his son and heir with a steady supply of foreign stamps which would delight the soul of even a less enthusiastic minor philatelist.

  In the light of such recognition, therefore—I am tempted to say "fame," but that would probably cost me my friend —there is little I can offer which would not be sheer repetition. On the other hand, it should prove of interest to Ellery Queen's readers to get his personal view on the case which forms the basis of the present volume.

  I quote verbatim a letter dated some months ago:

  MY LONG-SUFFERINC J.J.:

  Now that the pestiferous Egyptian is safely tucked into his sarcophagus and the lid clamped down, perhaps I shall have time to work on a problem whose actual inception and solution you no doubt recall from history and some conversations of importance between us. For some time I've been yearning to do the Horne case. What an affair it was that centered about that salty old character, Buck Horne, and that agitated these rapacious brains some years ago!

  It isn't so much because I am endeared to my own cleverness in that fantastic brush with criminality that I propose to write my next opus around it. Oil, yes, the reasoning was interesting enough, and the investigation was not without its moments, I grant all that. But it's not these things. Rather it's the odd nature of the background.

  I am, as you know, essentially a creature of cities; even in matters of practicality I must have my feet on the asphalt rather than the turfy ground. Well, sir, the dramatic debacle at our w.k. bowl which precipitated me into that improbable adventure also succeeded in wrenching me from the familiar gasoline atmosphere of our fair city and thrusting me into a strongly scented atmosphere indeed!—of stables, horses, alkali, cattle, branding-irons, ranches. . . .

  In a word, J.J., your correspondent found himself conducting an inquiry into a murder which might have been committed a hundred years ago in—in, well, old Texas, suh, or Wyoming itself, from which so many of the principals came. At any moment I expected a yelling Piute—or is it Siwash?—to materialize out of the arena's horsy air and come galloping at me with uplifted, thirsty tomahawk. . . .

  At any rate, J.J., this florid explanation is to announce that my forthcoming chef-d'oeuvre will deal with cowpunchers, six-shooters, lariats, hoses, alfalfa, chaps—and, lest you think I have gone West of the Great Divide on you, let me hasten to add that this epic of the plains takes place—as it did—in the heart of New. York City, with that fair metropolis's not unpleasing ba-cba as a sort of Greek chorus to the rattle of musketry.

  Faithfully, etc., etc.

  I have myself read the manuscript of The American Gun Mystery with my unfailing avidity; and in my opinion the Ellery Queen 'scutcheon remains gloriously untarnished, if indeed a new gloss has not been imparted to that brave reliquf. This latest episode from the intellectual exploits of my friend is every bit as stimulating to the connoisseur as The Greek Coffin Mystery, The "Dutch Shoe Mystery, or any of the others in the Queen cycle; and possesses besides a tangy flavor pleasantly and peculiarly its own.

  J. J. McC.

  New York

  THE AMERICAN GUN MYSTERY

  ". . . . now bend thy mind to feel The first-sharp motions of the forming wheel"

  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 b
lob 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 clement, 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-esscntial colors vanished. I often wonder," he murmured, "what Father Brown or old Sherlock would have done with that case. Eh, J.J.?"

  1: WORK IN PROGRESS

  A large subterranean chamber strongly acrid with the smell of horseflesh, loud and resonant with the snorting and stamping of horses. In one corner an alcove hewn out of solid concrete, and in the alcove a smithy. Its forge was violently red, and fireflies of sparks darted about. A half-naked pigmy with oily black skin and preposterous biceps hammered like Thor's little brother on metal which curved sullenly under his rhythmic blows. The low flat ceiling, the naked walls, framed the chamber in stone. . . . This might be Pegasus, this arch-necked stallion champing in his stall, naked and sleek as the day he was foaled. His harem of mares whinnied and nickered about him; and occasionally his scarlet eyes flashed as he pawed the strawed floor with the dainty arrogance of his Arabian ancestors.

  Horses, dozens of them, scores of them; tame horses, trick horses, wild horses; saddle horses, raw horses. The sharp effluvium of dung and sweat and breath hung, an opalescent mist, in the strong atmosphere. Gear gleamed before the stalls; brass glittering on oily leather; saddles like brown satin; stirrups like shining platinum; halters like ovals of ebony. And there were coiled lariats on the posts, and Indian blankets. . . .

  For this was the stable of a king. His crown was a flaring Stetson, his sceptre a long-barreled Colt pistol, his domain the wide and dusty plains of the American West. His praetorian guard were bow-legged men who rode like centaurs, drawled in a quaint soft speech, rolled cigarets deftly, and whose brown wrinkled eyes held the calm immensities of those who scan the stars under an unadulterated vault of heaven. And his palace was a sprawling rancho—thousands of miles from this place.

  For this stable of a king with his odd crown and his strange sceptre and his extraordinary guard was not set in its proper place on the plains of a rolling country. It was not in Texas, or in Arizona, or in New Mexico, or in any of the curious lands where such kings rule. It lay under the feet of a structure endemically American; but not the America of mountains and hills and valleys and trees and sage-brush and plains; rather the America of skyscrapers, subways, rouged chorines, hotels, theatres, bread­lines, night-clubs, slums, speakeasies, radio towers, literati, and tabloids. It was as remote from its native habitat as the cots of England or the rice-fields of Japan. A stone's-throw away that equally curious domain, Broadway, speared through the humorless laughter of New York. Thirty feet above and fifty feet to the south and east roared the metropolis. Past the portals of the architectural Colossus in whose cellars it lay flew a thousand automobiles a minute.

  The Colosseum, New York's new and hugest temple of sport. . . .

  Horses, the warp and woof of the outdoors, crated like rabbits over immense distances so that West and East might meet. . . .

  It could not happen in England, where institutions take root in their proper soil and, uprooted, die. The fountains of sacred rivers flow upwards only in America. Long ago the brawny men of the West occasionally gathered from far places in a holiday mood to show off their prowess with horses and lariats and steers. It was an amusement of the West, for the West. Today it was ripped up from its alkaline soil and transplanted bodily—horses, lariats, steers, cowboys and all—to the stony soil of the East. Its name —rodeo—was retained. Its purpose—ingenuous amusement—was debased. Spectators filed through iron aisles and paid admissions to sagacious promoters. And this was the largest fruit, the horticultural apotheosis, of the West-to-East transplantation—Wild Bill Grant's Rodeo.

  Now in the stable, near the stall of the princely stallion, stood two men. The shorter of the two was an odd creature with a muscular right arm; the left was a stump above the elbow swinging in a gaudy knotted sleeve. His face was lean, his expression was saturnine; whether it had been painted by the black brush of the burning sun or was a splash of something hot in the caldron of his own nature was not easily determined. In his bearing there was something of the stallion's arrogance; on his thin lips something of the stallion's sneer. This was that bitter man, One-Arm Woody—odd nomenclature for nobility!—who in the lingo of his caste was known as the "top-rider" of the outfit; which is to say, Wild Bill Grant's featured performer. Woody, whose amber eyes were murderous, possessed the sinewy agelessness of a myth.

  The other was quite different, and in his difference equally extraordinary. He was a tall buckaroo, lean as a pine and ever so slightly stooped, as a pine stoops in the high wind. He seemed old and enduring as the Nevada hills; shaggy white on top, dark-brown underneath, and over all the glaze of sharp fresh air and time-buffeted strength. In his face one saw no outstanding feature; it was one with his strong old body, and the whole made an epic figure, like an ancient statue dimly perceived through the mists of ages. His eyelids were strong and brown, and habitually they dropped to cover all but the merest slits, through which frigid colorless chips of eyes stared un-blinkingly. This creature of another world was dressed, strangely enough, in the most ordinary of Eastern clothes.

  Old Buck Horne! Product of the acrid plains and Hollywood—yes, Hollywood, which like Moloch engulfs all; as dear to the hearts of modern American boys as that legendary buckaroo, Buffalo Bill, had been to the boys of a bygone generation. This was the man who had reanimated the old West. Not the West of Fords and tractors and gasoline-pumps, but the West of the ‘70's, of heavy six-shooters, of the James Boys and Billy the Kid, of horse-thieves and drunken Indians, of cattle-rustlers, saloons, false-fronts and board-walks and fighting sheriffs and range-wars. Buck Horne had accomplished this miracle of resurrection by the instrument of motion pictures; himself an authentic figure out of the past, he had been romantic enough to employ the silver screen to bring the past to life; and there was not a red-blooded young man alive who had not as a boy thrilled to Buck Horne's dashing exploits with horse and rope and gun in the flickering pictures which raced across a thousand screens the country over.

  Two blobs of color. One-Arm Woody, old Buck Horne. And the wheel stood still.

  One-Arm Woody shifted his curved legs, and thrust his hatchety face an inch nearer the brown face of Horne.

  "Buck, ya mangy ole breed, y'oughta go back to the flickers with the rest o' the dudes," he drawled.

  Buck Horne said nothing.

  "Pore ole Buck," said Woody, and his stump of a left arm jerked a little. "Cain't scarcely drag yore laigs aroun'."

  And Buc
k said coldly: "Meaning?"

  The one-armed man's eyes flashed, and his right hand forked the brass-studded end of his belt. "Damn you, yo're hornin' in!"

  A horse nickered, and neither man turned his head. Then from the lips of the tall old fellow came a soft stream of words. Woody's five fingers twitched, and his mouth twisted wryly. The muscular right arm darted up, and the old man crouched. . . .

  "Buck!"

  They straightened up on the instant, like puppets at the pull of a finger, and they turned their heads with the same jerky motion. Woody's arm fell to his side.

  Kit Horne stood in the door of the stable regarding them with level eyes. Buck's girl! Left an orphan, she was not of his dusty blood, but he had brought her up, and his own wife had suckled her at rich breasts. The wife was gone, but Kit remained.

  She was tall, almost as tall as Buck, and sun-tanned, and as wiry as a wild mare. Her eyes were grayest blue, and her little nostrils quivered slightly. She was dressed a la mode; her gown was smart New York, and her jaunty turban latest Fifth Avenue.

  "Buck, you ought to feel ashamed of yourself. Quarreling with Woody!"

  Woody scowled, and then smiled, and then scowled again as he flicked the brim of his Stetson. He strode off on his absurdly bowed legs; and though his lips moved no sound came from them. He disappeared behind the smithy.

  "He says I'm old," muttered old Buck Horne.

  She took his hard brown hands in hers. "Never mind, Buck."

  "Damn him, Kit, he ain't goin' to tell me—"

  "Never mind, Buck."

  He smiled suddenly and put his arm about her waist.

  Kit Horne was as well-known to the younger generation as her famous foster-father was to those who had been the younger generation ten and fifteen years before. Bred on a ranch, reared on a horse, with cowboys for playmates, a Bowie knife as a teething-ring, limitless rolling acres of range as a playground, and her foster-father a motion-picture star—around her a Hollywood press-agent contrived to drape a tinsel legend. Buck's producer had had an idea. Buck was growing old. Kit, who was more man than woman and more woman than Circe, should take his place in the films. That had been nine years before, when she was a straight-backed tomboy of sixteen. . . . The children went wild over her. She could ride, shoot, rope, swear; and, since there must always be a hero, she could kiss and cuddle too. So she became Kit Horne, the great cowgirl star, and her pictures sold at a premium while old Buck slid quietly into oblivion.