The French Powder Mystery — 24 (2)

    "As a matter of fact, while there is no evidential method whereby we may tell when exactly that lighter felt appeared, there is one corroboration." Ellery stared thoughtfully at the pavement. "The book-end with the lighter felt was newly glued. That I would take my oath on. The glue, while powerful in action and already quite hard, retained a viscidity and suspicious stickiness that told the story at once. And the powder grains stuck in the glue-line—no, the evidence is there. The book-ends were handled last night by the criminal. We might suspect Mrs. French, perhaps, if not for the fact that the fingerprint powder was used. That's the work of your 'super-criminal,' dad, not of an elderly society lady." He smiled.
    "Let's try to link book-ends and crime more closely." He squinted ahead in a little tempest of silence. The old man trudged by his side, eyes on the changing street vista. "We enter the scene of the crime. We find many things of a peculiar nature there. The cards, the lipsticks, the cigarets, the shoes, the hat, the book-ends—all out of tune with normality. We have linked every element except the book-ends directly with the crime. Why, in the face of the possibilities—why not the book-ends too? I can furnish excellent hypotheses commensurate with known facts. The fingerprint powder grains, for one thing. Accessories of crime. And a crime was committed. We find the grains stuck in a newly glued felt, which is also suspiciously different in shade from its fellow. Certainly it is against all reason to say that the felts might have been differently colored from the beginning. Not with such an expensive and unique pair of book-ends. And the difference was never noticed before.... No, the human probabilities all point to the conclusion that last night some one removed the original felt from the first book-end, pasted on a new piece of felt, sprinkled fingerprint powder to bring out any prints that might be on the book-end, removed the fingerprints, and inadvertently left some minute grains in the fresh glue-line of the piece."
    "You've proved it to my satisfaction," said the Inspector. "Go on."
    "Alors! I examine the book-ends. They are of solid onyx. Furthermore, the only change in their composition is the removal of the original felt from one of them. I conclude therefore that the book-end was not repaired in order to hide something inside or because something was extracted from its interior. There is no interior. Everything is on the surface.
    "With this in mind, I ask myself: What other reason could have caused the repair of the onyx piece, if it was not to hide traces of a secretion or a removal? Well, there's the crime itself. Can we tie the crime and the fixing of the book-ends into one knot?
    "Yes, we can! Why should a felt be removed and another substituted? Because something happened to that felt which, if the felt were left as it was, would have betrayed traces of a crime. Remember that the murderer's most pressing need was to keep knowledge of the murder from every one until he had delivered the all-important message during the morning. And he knew that that library would be tenanted at nine o'clock in the morning, that if anything were wrong with the book-end it would be noticed in all probability."
    "Blood!" exclaimed the Inspector.
    "You've hit on it," replied Ellery. "It could scarcely be anything else but blood-stains. It would have to be something of a directly suspicious nature, or the murderer would not have taken all the trouble he did. The cards, the other things—these in themselves would never suggest a murder before the body was found or foul play even suspected. But blood! That's the water-mark of violence.
    "So I reasoned that in some way blood soaked the felt, and the murderer was compelled to change the felt and dispose of the tell-tale bloody one."
    They walked on in silence for a long time. The Inspector was buried in thought. Then Ellery spoke once more.
    "You see," he said, "I was progressing with commendable rapidity in the reconstruction of the physical elements of the crime. And, when I had reached the conclusion about the blood-soaked felt, immediately another isolated fact leaped into my mind.... You remember Prouty's suspicions in connection with the lack of blood on the corpse? And our instant deduction that the murder must have been committed somewhere else? Here was the missing link."
    "Good, good," murmured the Inspector, reaching excitedly for his snuff-box.
    "The book-ends," went on Ellery rapidly, "were obviously of no importance in the crime until they became blood-soaked. After that, of course, the whole chain of incident was a logical outgrowth—changing the felt, handling the book-ends, and then applying the powder to efface prints made necessary by the handling....
    "Then, I reasoned, the staining of the book-end was an accident. It was standing innocently on the glass-topped desk. How could the blood have got on it? There are two possibilities. The first is that the book-end was used as a weapon. But this is indefensible, because the wounds were the result of revolver-shots, and there are no signs of a striking blow with such a bludgeon as the book-end might have made. Then the only remaining possibility is that the blood got on it inadvertently. How might this have occurred?
    "Easily. The book-end is on the glass-topped desk. The only way blood could get on the bottom of the book-end, where the blood would show ineffaceably, would be by its trickling across the glass and soaking into the material. But you see what this gives us."
    "Mrs. French was sitting at the desk when she was shot," announced the old man gloomily. "She was shot below the heart. She fell into the chair and got another in the heart itself. The blood from the first wound gushed out before she fell. The blood from the second wound trickled out as she lay across the table—and soaked into the felt."
    "And that," said Ellery, smiling, "is a perfect recitation. Remember that Prouty is sure that the precordial type of wound particularly would bleed profusely. That's probably what happened.... Now we can further reconstruct the crime. If Mrs. French sat at the desk and was shot in the heart, then her murderer was in front of her and shot across the desk. It must have been at a distance of several feet, because there are no powder marks on the woman's clothes. We can perhaps compute the approximate height of the murderer by determining the angle at which the bullets entered the body. But I have little faith in this, because there is no exact way of judging just how far the bullets traveled, or in other words how far from Mrs. French the murderer stood when he fired. And an error of inches would throw off all our calculations as to his height, considerably. You might get your firearms expert, Kenneth Knowles, on the job, but I don't think much will come of it."
    "Neither do I," sighed the Inspector. "Nevertheless, it's comforting to be able to place the crime so precisely. It all hangs together, Ellery—a nice bit of reasoning. I'll get Knowles to work immediately. Is there anything else, son?"
    Ellery said nothing for an appreciable moment. They turned into West 87th Street. Half-way up the block stood the brownstone old house in which they lived. They quickened their steps.
    "There's a heap more, dad, that I haven't gone into, because of this and that," Ellery said absently. "The signs were all there, for the world to see. They needed intelligent assembly, however. You're probably the only one on the scene who has the mental potentiality for piecing them together. The others.... And you're exceptionally dulled by care." He smiled as they reached the brownstone steps of their dwelling.
    "Dad," he said, one foot on the lowest step, "on one phase of this investigation I am entirely at sea. And that—" he tapped the package under his arm, "is the five books I plucked from old French's desk. It seems silly to suppose that they can have anything to do with the murder, and yet—I have the queerest feeling that they can explain so much if we worm out their secret."
    "You've gone slightly daffy with concentration," growled the Inspector, laboriously ascending the stairs.
    "Nevertheless," remarked Ellery, inserting a key into the lock of the big carved old-fashioned door, "this night is dedicated to a sedulous analysis of the books."