French Powder Mystery (34 page)

There was a little flurry of conversation as Ellery Queen and his companions stood near the desk at the head of the room. Inspector Queen indicated one of the leather-padded conference chairs immediately to the right and a little behind the desk, as the seat to be occupied by the Commissioner. Welles seemed a sadder and wiser man—he sat down without a word, his eyes on Ellery’s quiet figure before the desk.

The three guards disposed themselves with the other detectives at the side of the room.

Inspector Queen himself sat down in a big chair to the left of the desk, with Cronin at his side. The District Attorney dropped into a chair next to the Commissioner. Desk in the center, its varied articles beckoning attention. On either side two chairs with official occupants. And dominating the scene …

The stage was set.

Ellery Queen cynically examined the room and its occupants once more, expressed himself as satisfied at the Commissioner’s brusque question. Ellery stepped behind the desk and stood with his back to the dormer-windows. His head was lowered, his eyes on the desk-top. His hand strayed to the glass, hovered over the book-ends, played with the jar of white powder. … He smiled, straightened, raised his head, removed his pince-nez glasses, looked calmly at his hushed audience, waited. … Not until there was absolute silence did he speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” Prosy beginning! Yet something vaguely eerie shivered through the air; it was a simultaneous sigh from many breasts.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Sixty hours ago Mrs. Winifred French was shot to death in this building. Forty-eight hours ago her body was found. This morning we have assembled at a private Waterloo to name her murderer.” Ellery had spoken quietly; now he paused for the slightest instant. …

But after that sigh
en masse
even breaths seemed to be drawn with care. No one spoke; no one whispered. They merely sat and waited.

A cutting edge slipped into the tone of Ellery’s voice. “Very well! A few preliminary explanations are required. Commissioner Welles—” he turned slightly toward Welles, “it is with your permission that I conduct this unofficial inquest?”

Welles nodded once.

“Then let me explain,” continued Ellery, turning back to his auditors, “that I am merely taking the place of Inspector Queen, who is unable to take charge because of a minor throat ailment which makes long speaking difficult and painful. Correct, sir?” He bowed very solemnly in the direction of his father. The Inspector grew even paler than before, nodded wordlessly. “Further,” Ellery went on, “if I shall at any time use the personal ‘I’ in my discourse this morning, you are to understand that it is merely for convenience—that in reality I shall be describing the investigatory processes of Inspector Queen himself.”

He halted abruptly, threw a challenging glance about the room, met nothing but wide eyes and ears, and plunged at once into an analysis of the French murder case.

“I shall take you through our investigation of this crime, ladies and gentlemen,” he began in a sharp decisive tone, “step by step, deduction by deduction, observation by observation, until I arrive at what is an inevitable conclusion. Hagstrom, you are taking this down?”

Eyes followed the direction of Ellery’s glance. At the side of the room where the detectives were congregated, Detective Hagstrom was seated, pencil poised above a stenographic notebook. Hagstrom bobbed his head.

“What transpires here this morning,” explained Ellery pleasantly, “will become part of the official dossier of the case. Enough of asides!” He cleared his throat.

“Mrs. Winifred Marchbanks French was discovered dead—killed by two bullets, one in the heart and one in the
precordial
region below the heart—on Tuesday at fifteen minutes or so past noon. When Inspector Queen arrived upon the scene he noted several facts which led him to believe that”—he paused—“the exhibition-window on the main floor was
not
in effect the place where the crime was committed.”

The room was deathly still. Fascination, fear, aversion, grief—the gamut of emotions played upon those intent white faces. Ellery Queen went on, rapidly.

“There were five component elements in this initial investigation,” he said, “that pointed to the conclusion that the murder was not committed in the window.

“The first was the fact that, while on Monday night Mrs. French had in her possession her personal key to this apartment, the key was missing from her person and effects Tuesday morning, on the discovery of her dead body. O’Flaherty, the head nightwatchman, testified that she had the key at eleven-fifty Monday night when she left his cubbyhole to take the elevator upstairs. Yet it was gone. Search of the store and premises left the key still unfound. What was the inference? That the key and the crime were in some way connected. How? Well, the key appertained to the apartment. If it was missing, wasn’t there an indication that the apartment also entered into the crime somewhere? At least there was enough suspicion to be gleaned from the missing key to warrant a belief that the apartment
might have been
the scene of the crime.”

Ellery paused; his lips twitched with fleeting amusement at the frowning faces before him.

“Captious reasoning? I see the disbelief on your faces. Yet bear it in mind. The fact of the key’s being missing meant nothing of itself—but when it was added to the four other facts of which I shall speak, it took on significance indeed.”

He swung back into his main narrative.

“The second element was a grotesque and even amusing one—you will see, incidentally, that the detection of crime is not built upon weighty salient factors, but upon just such incongruities as I shall have occasion to mention this morning. … I refer to the fact that the crime must have been committed a short time after midnight. This was simply calculated from Dr. Prouty’s report—Dr. Prouty is the Assistant Medical Examiner—that Mrs. French had been dead some twelve hours when she was found.

“If Mrs. French had been shot to death in the window-room at a little past midnight, ladies and gentlemen,” continued Ellery, with a twinkle in his eye, “her murderer must have committed his crime either in total darkness or by the feeble illumination of a pocket-torch! For there were no lighting fixtures that worked in the room—in fact, no bulbs—and the room was not even wired. Yet we were forced to suppose that the murderer met his victim, talked with her, perhaps quarreled with her, then shot her unerringly in two vital spots, disposed of her body in the wall-bed, cleaned up the blood-stains and what not—all in a room at best illuminated by a flashlight! No, it was not reasonable. Wherefore Inspector Queen, quite logically, I believe, concluded that the crime was not committed in the exhibition-window.”

There was a little rustle of excitement Ellery smiled, continued.

“This, however, was not the only reason for his belief. There was a third point. And that was the lipstick—the long, silver-chased lipstick—monogrammed
C,
found in Mrs. French’s handbag by her body. That this lipstick obviously was not Mrs. French’s I shall not discuss at this point. The pertinent factor was that it contained lip-rouge of a decidedly darker shade of red than the lip-rouge on the dead woman’s lips. But this meant that Mrs. French’s own lipstick—with which she daubed the lighter rouge on her lips—should be somewhere about. But it was not! Where could it be? Perhaps the murderer took it? That sounded rather nonsensical. The most plausible explanation seemed to be that the missing lipstick was somewhere else in the building. … Why somewhere else in the building?—why not at Mrs. French’s home, or at least outside the store?

“For this very good reason. That Mrs. French’s lips—her dead mute lips—which were painted with the lighter shade of red, indicated that she had not completed her application of the rouge! There were two dabs on either side of her upper lip, and another small dab in the center of her lower lip. The rouge had not been smeared—it had patently been applied with a finger and left that way. …” Ellery turned toward Marion French. He said gently, “How do you apply your lip-rouge, Miss French?”

The girl whispered: “Just as you described, Mr. Queen. Three pats, one on each side of the upper lip and one in the center of the lower lip.”

“Thank you.” Ellery smiled. “We had, then, visible evidence of a case where a woman began to paint her lips and did not complete the operation. But this was unnatural, remarkable. There are very few things that will keep a woman from finishing this delicate task. Very, very few! One of them might be a violent interruption of some kind. A violent interruption? But there was murder committed! Was that the interruption?”

He changed his tone, forged ahead. “It seemed likely. But in any case, those lips had not been painted in the window-room. Where was the lipstick? That we found it later in the apartment was merely confirmation. …

“Point number four was physiological. Dr. Prouty was puzzled by the fact that there was so little blood on the corpse. Both wounds—one particularly—should have bled considerably. The
precordial
region contains many blood-vessels and muscles which would have been badly torn by the passage of the bullet, which left a ragged wound. Where was the blood? Had the murderer cleaned it up? But in the dark, or semi-darkness, he could not possibly have removed all traces of the copious blood-flow from those wounds. Whereupon we were compelled once more to conclude that that blood had flowed—
somewhere else.
Which meant that Mrs. French had been shot somewhere else than in the window-room.

“And the fifth point was a psychological one which I fear”—he smiled sadly—“would not carry much weight in a court of law. Nevertheless to me it was quite overwhelming in its indication. For the mind rebelled at the thought that the window-room was the scene of the crime. It was preposterous, dangerous, asinine from the point of view of a potential murderer. A meeting and a murder connote secrecy, privacy—any number of exact requirements. The window-room afforded none of these. The room is not fifty feet away from the head nightwatchman’s office. That area is well-patrolled at periodic intervals. Revolver-shots had to be fired—and none was heard. No! Both Inspector Queen and myself felt—for the five reasons I have given you, no single one of which was conclusive, but which were collectively significant—that the crime was not committed in the window-room.”

Ellery paused. His audience was following the story with eager, panting concentration. Commissioner Welles regarded Ellery with a new light in his small eyes. The Inspector was sunk deeply in thought.

“If not the window,” continued Ellery, “where then? The key pointed to the apartment—the required privacy, illumination, a logical place for the use of lipstick—certainly the apartment seemed the best possibility. So Inspector Queen, relying upon my discretion and discernment, since he himself could not leave the window-room where the preliminary investigation was still going on, asked me to go to the apartment and see what I could see. Which I did, with interesting results. …

“The first thing I found in the apartment was Mrs. French’s own lipstick, lying on the bedroom dressing-table.” Ellery picked up the gold lipstick from the desk and held it up for a moment. “This lipstick proved at once, of course, that Mrs. French had been in the apartment on Monday night. The fact that it was lying under the curved edge of a mother-of-pearl tray on the dressing-table and was quite hidden, showed that it had probably been overlooked by the murderer. In fact, the murderer had no reason even to look for it, because he did not apparently observe that the lipstick in Mrs. French’s bag and the coloring on her lips were not identical.” Ellery replaced the glittering metal case on the desk.

“Now, I found the lipstick on the dressing-table. What did this mean? It seemed rather plain that Mrs. French had been using the stick at that dressing-table inside when she was interrupted. But the fact that the lipstick was still there on the table when I found it pointed, it seemed to me, to the fact that Mrs. French was not shot in the bedroom. What was the interruption, then? Obviously, either a knock on the outer door or the noise of the murderer entering the apartment. It was not the latter, for the murderer had no key to the apartment, as I shall soon prove. Then it must have been a knock at the door. Then, too, Mrs. French must have been expecting it, for it so disturbed her, or it was so important to her, that she immediately put down her lipstick, neglecting to complete the daubing of her lips, and hurried through the library and into the anteroom to admit her nocturnal visitor. Presumably she opened the door, the visitor entered, and they went into the library where Mrs. French stood behind the desk and the visitor stood to the right, facing her—that is, Mrs. French stood where I am standing now and the murderer stood about where Detective Hagstrom is sitting at this moment.

“How do I know this?” went on Ellery rapidly. “Very simply. On examining the library, I discovered that these book-ends, which lay on the desk”—he lifted the two onyx book-ends carefully and exhibited them—“had been tampered with. The green felt sheathing of one of them was lighter in shade than its mate. Mr. Weaver volunteered the information that the book-ends were only two months old, having been presented to Mr. French by Mr. Gray on the occasion of Mr. French’s last birthday, and that he had observed them at that time in perfect condition, with the felts exactly alike in color. Furthermore, the book-ends had never left the room, or in fact the desk itself. Apparently, then, the change of felt had occurred the night before. And that was proved when, on examining the felt under a powerful glass, I noted some scattered grains of a white powder stuck in the glue-line where felt and onyx met!

“The glue was still a trifle viscid,” said Ellery, “showing that it had been very recently applied. The grains, on examination, by myself cursorily and on analysis by the official fingerprint expert, proved to be ordinary fingerprint powder, such as is used by the police. But the use of fingerprint powder predicated a crime. There were no fingerprints on the onyx. That meant the fingerprints had been removed. Why the powder, then? Obviously, first to sprinkle the surface in order to bring out what fingerprints might be there, and second to remove the ones found. So much was evident.