Ellery Queen's Eyewitnesses

by Ellery Queen

  He hung up, about-faced to Wolfe, and growled, “You knew all this Wednesday afternoon, two days ago.”

  Wolfe nodded. “And you have known it since yesterday morning. It’s a question of interpretation, not of knowledge. Will you please sit? As you know, I like eyes at my level. Thank you. Yes, as early as Wednesday afternoon, when Miss McLeod left, I was all but certain of the identity of the murderer, but I took the precaution of seeing those three men that evening because it was just possible that one of them would disclose something cogent.

  “When you came yesterday morning with that warrant, I gave you that document for two reasons: to keep Mr. Goodwin out of jail, and to share my knowledge with you. I wasn’t obliged to share also my interpretation of it. Any moment since yesterday noon I have rather expected to hear that Mr. McLeod had been taken into custody, but no.”

  “So you decided to share your interpretation with him instead of me.”

  “I like that,” Wolfe said approvingly. “That was neat. I prefer to put it that I decided not to decide. Having given you all the facts I had, I had met my obligation as a citizen and a licensed private detective. I was under no compulsion, legal or moral, to assume the role of a nemesis. It was only conjecture that Faber had told Mr. McLeod that he had debauched his daughter, but he had told others, and McLeod must have had a potent motive, so it was highly probable. If so, the question of moral turpitude was moot, and I would not rule on it.

  “Since I had given you the facts, I thought it only fair to inform Mr. McLeod that he was menaced by a logical conclusion from those facts; and I did so. I used Mr. Panzer as my messenger because I chose not to involve Mr. Goodwin. He was unaware of the conclusion I had reached, and if I had told him there might have been disagreement regarding the course to take. He can be—uh—difficult.”

  Cramer grunted. “Yeah. He can. So you deliberately warned a murderer. Telling him to have answers ready. Nuts. You expected him to lam.”

  “No. I had no specific expectation. It would have been idle to speculate, but if I had, I doubt if I would have expected him to scoot. He couldn’t take his farm along, and he would be leaving his daughter in mortal jeopardy. I didn’t consciously speculate, but my subconscious must have, for suddenly, when I was busy at the potting bench, it struck me.

  “Saul Panzer’s description of McLeod’s stony face as he read the memorandum; the stubborn ego of a self-righteous man; dynamite for stumps and rocks; corn; a closed carton. Most improbable. I resumed the potting. But conceivable. I dropped the trowel and went to the elevator, and within thirty seconds after I emerged in the hall the carton came.”

  “Luck,” Cramer said. “Your damn incredible luck. If it had made mincemeat of Goodwin you might have been willing to admit for once—okay, it didn’t.” He got up. “Stick around, Goodwin. They’ll want you at the D.A.’s office, probably in the morning.” To Wolfe: “What if that phone call had said the carton held corn, just corn? You think you could have talked me off, don’t you?”

  “I could have tried.”

  “By God. Talk about stubborn egos.” Cramer shook his head. “That break you got on the carton. You know, any normal man, if he got a break like that, coming down just in the nick of time, what any normal man would do, he would go down on his knees and thank God. Do you know what you’ll do? You’ll thank you. I admit it would be a job for you to get down on your knees, but—”

  The phone rang. I swiveled and got it, and a voice I recognized asked for Inspector Cramer. I turned and told him, “Purley Stebbins,” and he came and took it. The conversation was even shorter than the one about the carton, and Cramer’s part was only a dozen words and a couple of growls. He hung up, went and got his hat, and headed for the hall, but a step short of the door he stopped and turned.

  “I might as well tell you,” he said. “It’ll give you a better appetite for dinner, even if it’s not corn. About an hour ago Duncan McLeod sat or stood or lay on a pile of dynamite and it went off. They’ll want to decide whether it was an accident or he did it. Maybe you can help them interpret the facts.” He turned and went.

  One day last week there was a party at Lily Rowan’s penthouse. She never invites more than six to dinner—eight counting her and me—but that was a dancing party and around coffee time a dozen more came and three musicians got set in the alcove and started up. After rounds with Lily and three or four others, I approached Sue McLeod and offered a hand.

  She gave me a look. “You know you don’t want to. Let’s go outside.”

  I said it was cold, and she said she knew it and headed for the foyer. We got her wrap)—a fur thing which she probably didn’t own, since topflight models are offered loans of everything from socks to sable—went back in, on through, and out to the terrace. There were evergreens in tubs, and we crossed to them for shelter.

  “You told Lily I hate you,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “Not ‘hate,’” I said. “She misquoted me or you’re misquoting her. She said I should dance with you and I said when I tried it a month ago you froze.”

  “I know I did.” She put a hand on my arm. “Archie. It was hard, you know it was. If I hadn’t got my father to let him work on the farm—it was my fault, I know it was—but I couldn’t help thinking if you hadn’t sent him that—letting him know you knew—”

  “I didn’t send it, Mr. Wolfe did. But I would have. Okay, he was your father, so it was hard. But no matter whose father he was, I’m not wearing an armband for the guy who packed dynamite in that carton.”

  “Of course not. I know. Of course not. I tell myself I’ll have to forget it. . .but it’s not easy.” She shivered. “Anyway, I wanted to say I don’t hate you. You don’t have to dance with me, and you know I’m not going to get married until I can stop working and have babies, and I know you never are, and even if you do, it will be Lily, but you don’t have to stand there and let me really freeze, do you?”

  I didn’t. You don’t have to be rude, even with a girl who can’t dance, and it was cold out there.

  “Q”

  Brian Garfield

  The Glory Hunter

  On the evening when the kid came to kill him, the man returned from the day’s labor at his usual time.

  The man and the woman went out each morning from the ruined fort to the cliff. It was about a half-mile walk. They worked side by side inside the mountain.

  In the course of four years of work they had tunneled deep into the quartz. Hardrocking was not easy work, especially for a man and a woman both in their fifties and neither of them very large in size; but they accepted the arduous work because it had a goal and the goal was in sight.

  Inside the tunnel they would crush the rock together and shovel it into the wooden dumpcart. They would wheel the cart out of the tunnel and dump it into the sluice that the man had designed in the second year to replace the rocker-box they’d begun with. The sluice carried water at high speed. This was water that came down through a wooden flume from a creek 70 yards above them, above the top of the low cliff. The floor of the sluice was rippled with wooden barriers; these were designed to separate the particles and retain the heaviest ones—the gold flakes—while everything else washed away downstream.

  It was a good lode and during the four years they had washed a great deal of gold out of the mountain, flake by flake. Most of it was hidden in various caches. When they made the forty-mile muleback ride to Florence Junction for stocking up, they would take only enough gold dust to pay for their purchases; the town knew they had a claim back in the Superstitions but from the amount they spent it appeared they were barely making ends meet. They had never been invaded by gold-rush crowds.

  They’d started working the claim when the man was 51 and the woman 48 and he figured to quit when he was 56, at which time they should have enough money to live handsomely in one of those big new gabled houses over in San Jose or Palo Alto or San Francisco. They’d be able to afford all the genteel things. In the meantime they worked hard t
o pay for it, pitting their muscles and pickaxes against the hard skeleton of the mountain.

  The mountain was called Longshot Bluff because it was topped by a needle-shaped pinnacle like the spike on a Prussian helmet; from up there you could command everything in sight with an unobstructed circle of fire and because of the altitude you could make a bullet travel an extremely long distance.

  The cavalry, back in 1879, had chased a small band of warriors onto the mountain and the Apaches had taken up positions on top of the spire. There were only five Apaches; there were 40 soldiers in the troop but the Indians barricaded themselves and there was no way the army could get at them. A siege had ensued and finally the Apaches were starved out.

  After that the army built the little outpost on a hilltop about a mile out from the base of Longshot Bluff. Troops had occupied the post for five years; then the Indian wars came to an end and the camp was abandoned. It was the ruins of this fort that the man and the woman used as their home.

  The abandoned camp had no stockade around it; the simple outpost consisted merely of a handful of squat adobes built around a flat parade ground. There had been a post-and-rail corral, but travelers had consumed the rails for firewood over the twelve years since the camp had been decommissioned by the army. The man and the woman had kept their four mules loose-hobbled for the first few weeks of their residence; after that they let the animals graze at will because this had become home and the mules had nowhere else to go.

  When you sat on the veranda after supper, as the man and the woman often did, you faced the east. You looked down a long easy hardpan slope dotted with a spindle tracery of desert growth—catclaw and ocotillo, manzanita and cholla and sage. The foot of the slope was nearly a half-mile away.

  At that point you saw the low cliff where the man and the woman had drilled their mining tunnel. Beyond it lofted the abrupt mass of Longshot Bluff. The pinnacle was perhaps 800 feet higher than the fort. From this angle the spire appeared as slender as a lance, sharp enough to pierce the clouds. It stood, as the crow flies, perhaps three miles from the veranda.

  They came in from work in the late afternoon and the man packed his pipe on the veranda while he waited for supper. Over on the southern slope of Longshot Bluff he saw briefly the movement of an approaching horseman. From the window the woman must have seen it as well; she appeared on the veranda. “He’ll be too late for supper unless we wait on him.”

  “Then we’ll wait on him,” the man said.

  It would take the rider at least an hour to get here and it would be about 45 minutes short of sunset by then. But the man went inside immediately and opened the threadbare carpetbag that he kept under the bed.

  The woman said, “I hope he’s not another glory hunter.” She said it without heat; when the man glanced at her she cracked her brief gentle smile.

  He unwrapped his revolver from the oiled rags that protected it. The revolver was a single-action Bisley model with a 7½-inch barrel, caliber .45 Long Colt. It had been designed for match target competition and the Colt people had named it after the shooting range at Bisley in England where marksmen met every year to decide the championship.

  The man put the revolver in his waistband and snugged it around until it didn’t abrade his hipbone.

  On his way to the door he glanced at the woman. She was, he thought, a woman of rare quality. When he’d met her she’d been working in a brothel in Leadville. After they’d known each other a few years the man had said, “We’re both getting kind of long in the tooth,” and they’d both left their previous occupations and gone out together looking for gold.

  At the door he said, “I’ll be back directly,” and walked down toward the cliff.

  He covered the distance briskly; it took some 15 minutes and when he reached the mouth of the tunnel he ran the empty ore cart out past the sluice and pushed it up onto a little hump of rocky ground. In the debris of the tailings dump he found two cracked half-gallon jugs they’d discarded. He set the jugs on two corners of the ore cart; they balanced sturdily and nothing short of a direct blow would knock them off.

  Then he walked back up toward the fort, but he moved more slowly now, keeping to cover because it wasn’t certain just when the approaching horseman would come into sight down along the far end of the base of the mountain.

  The man laid up in a clump of manzanita about 30 feet from the veranda and kept his eye on the little stand of cottonwoods a mile away. That was where the creek flowed off the mountain. The creek went underground there but you could trace the line of its passage out onto the desert plain by the deep green row of mesquite and scrub sycamore. The rider would appear somewhere along there; he’d have to cross the creek.

  After a little while the visitor came across the creek and rode along the slope toward the ruined fort.

  Coming in straight up, the man observed; but still he didn’t show himself.

  Halfway up to the house the horseman drew his rifle out of the saddle scabbard and laid it across his pommel, holding it that way with one hand as he approached without hurry.

  The man lay in the brush and watched.

  He saw that the rider was just a kid. Maybe 18, maybe 20. A leaned-down kid with no meat on him and a hungry narrow face under the brim of a pretentious black hat.

  The horse went by not ten feet from the man’s hiding place. Just beyond, the kid drew rein, not riding any closer to the fort.

  “Hello the house. Anybody home?”

  The man stood up behind him. “Right back here. Drop the rifle first. Then we’ll talk.”

  The man was braced for anything; the kid might be a wild one. The man had the Bisley Colt cocked in his fist. The kid’s head turned slowly until he picked up the man in the corner of his vision; evidently he saw and recognized the revolver because he let the rifle slide to the ground.

  “Now the belt gun,” the man said, and the kid stripped off his gunbelt and let it drop alongside the rifle. The kid eased his horse off to one side away from the weapons and the man said, “All right, you can speak your piece.”

  “Ain’t rightly fair coming up from behind me like that,” the kid said.

  He had a surprisingly deep voice.

  “Well you came calling on me with a rifle across your saddle-bow.”

  “Place like this, how do I know what to expect? Could be rattlers in there. Place could be crawling with road agents for all I know.”

  “Well, that’s all right, son. You won’t need your weapons. You want to come inside and share a bit of supper?”

  The kid looked uncertainly at the man’s Bisley revolver. The man walked over to the discarded weapons and picked them up. Then he uncocked the revolver and put it back in his waistband. He went up to the house and the woman came out onto the veranda and shaded her eyes to look at the visitor. She smiled a welcome, but when she glanced at the man he saw the knowledge in her face.

  The kid had come to kill the man, right enough. All three of them knew it, but nobody said anything.

  The kid ate politely; somebody had taught him manners. The woman said, to make conversation, “You hail from Tucson?”

  “No, ma’am. Laramie, Wyoming.”

  “Long way off,” the man said.

  “I reckon.”

  After supper the three of them sat on the veranda. The sun was behind the house and they were in shadow; another ten minutes to sundown. The hard slanting light struck the face of Longshot Bluff and made the spire look like a fiery signal against the dark sky beyond it. The man got his pipe going to his satisfaction, broke the match, and contemplated the kid who had come to kill him. “How much they paying you for my scalp, son?”

  “What?”

  “The last one they sent, it was two thousand dollars they offered him.”

  “Mister, I ain’t quite sure what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s a powerful grudge they’re carrying, two thousand dollars’ worth. It happened a long while back, you know.”

  The woman said
, “But I suppose two thousand dollars looks like the world of money to a young man like you.”

  The man said, “It’s not legal any more, you know, son. No matter what they told you. There was a fugitive warrant out on me from the state of Wyoming, but that was some years back. The statute of limitations expired three years ago.”

  “I’m sorry, mister, I just ain’t tracking what you mean.”

  “The cattlemen up there were hiring range detectives like me to discourage homesteaders,” the man explained. “This one cattleman had an eager kind of streak in him. I told him to keep out of the way but he had to mess in things. Got in the way of a bullet. My bullet, I expect, although I’ve never been whole certain about that.

  “Anyhow, that cattleman’s been in a wheelchair ever since. Accused me of backshooting him, said I’d sold out to the homestead crowd. It wasn’t true, of course, but it’s what he believes. All he does is sit in that wheelchair and brood over it. He’s sent seven bounty men after me, one time or another. He just keeps sending them. Reckon he won’t give it up till one of us dies of old age. You’re number eight now. Maybe you want to think on that—think about the other seven that came after me, pretty good professionals some of them. I’m still here, son.”

  The kid just watched him, not blinking, no longer protesting innocence.

  The man said, “That fellow in the wheelchair, how much did he offer you?”

  The kid didn’t answer that. After a moment the woman said, “You probably want the money for some good purpose, don’t you, young fellow?”

  “Ma’am, I expect anybody could find his own good purpose to turn money to if he had it.”

  “You got a girl back in Laramie, Wyoming?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”