Some Buried Caesar (28 page)

McMillan said, “I still say it’s a trick. And a damn dirty trick. What else?”

“That’s all.” Wolfe sighed. “That’s all, sir. I ask you to consider whether it isn’t enough. Let us suppose that you are on trial for the murder of Clyde Osgood. Mr. Goodwin testifies that while I was on the rock he saw me looking at the bull and sketching on my pad. Miss Rowan testified as you have just heard. I testify that at that time, of that bull, I made those sketches, and the jury is permitted to compare them with the official sketches of Caesar and Buckingham. Wouldn’t that satisfactorily demonstrate that Buckingham was in the pasture, and Caesar wasn’t and never had been?”

McMillan merely gazed at him.

Wolfe went on, “I’ll answer your charge that it’s a trick. What if it is? Are you in a position to condemn tricks? As a matter of fact, I do know, from the evidence of my own eyes, that the bull was Buckingham. I had the opportunity to observe him minutely. Remember that I have studied the official sketches. Buckingham had a white patch high on his left shoulder; Caesar had not. The bull in the pasture had it.
The white shield on Buckingham’s face extended well below the level of the eyes; on Caesar it was smaller and came to a point higher up. Not only did I see the face of the bull in the pasture on Monday afternoon, but that night I examined it at close range with a flashlight. He was Buckingham. You know it; I know it; and if I can help a jury to know it by performing a trick with sketches I shall certainly do so. With Mr. Goodwin and Miss Rowan to swear that they saw me making them, I think we may regard that point as established.”

“What else?”

“That’s all. That’s enough.”

McMillan abruptly stood up. I was on my feet as soon as he was, with my gun in sight. He saw it and grinned at me without any humor, with his gums showing. “Go ahead and stop me, son,” he said, and started, not fast but not slow, for the door. “Make it good though.”

I dived past him and got to the door and stood with my back against it. He halted three paces off.

Wolfe’s voice came, sharp, “Gentlemen! Please! If you start a commotion, Mr. McMillan, the thing is out of my hands. You must realize that. A wrestling match would bring people here. If you get shot you’ll only be disabled; Mr. Goodwin doesn’t like to kill people. Come back here and face it. I want to talk to you.”

McMillan wheeled and demanded, “What the hell do you think I’ve been doing for the past month except face it?”

“I know. But you were still struggling. Now the struggle’s over. You can’t go out of that door; Mr. Goodwin won’t let you. Come and sit down.”

McMillan stood for a minute and looked at him.
Then slowly he moved, back across the room to his chair, sat, put his elbows on his knees, and covered his face with his hands.

Wolfe said, “I don’t know how you feel about it. You asked me what else. If you mean what other proof confronts you, I repeat that no more is needed. If you mean can I offer salve to your vanity, I think I can. You did extremely well. If I had not been here you would almost certainly have escaped even the stigma of suspicion.”

Wolfe got his fingers laced again. I returned the gun to my pocket and sat down. Wolfe resumed: “As I said, I suspected Monday afternoon that the bull in the pasture was not the champion Caesar. When Clyde offered to bet Pratt that he would not barbecue Hickory Caesar Grindon, he opened up an amusing field for conjecture. I diverted myself with it while listening to Pratt’s jabber. How did Clyde propose to win his bet? By removing the bull and hiding him? Fantastic; the bull was guarded, and where could he be hid against a search? Replace the bull with one less valuable? Little less fantastic; again, the bull was guarded, and while a substitute might be found who would deceive others, surely none would deceive you, and you were there. I considered other alternatives. There was one which was simple and plausible and presented no obstacles at all: that the bull in the pasture was not Hickory Caesar Grindon and Clyde had detected it. He had just come from the pasture, and he had binoculars, and he knew cattle. I regarded the little puzzle as solved and dismissed it from my mind, since it was none of my business.

“When the shots fired by Mr. Goodwin took us all to the pasture Monday night, and we found that Clyde
had been killed, it was still none of my business, but the puzzle gained in interest and deserved a little effort as an intellectual challenge. I examined the bull, looked for the weapon and found it, and came to this room and sat in this chair and satisfied myself as to the probabilities. Of course I was merely satisfying myself as a mental exercise, not the legal requirements for evidence. First, if the bull wasn’t Caesar you certainly knew it, and therefore you had swindled Pratt. How and why? Why, to get $45,000. How, by selling him Caesar and then delivering another bull, much less valuable, who resembled him. Then where was Caesar? Wouldn’t it be highly dangerous for you to have him in your possession, since he had been legally sold, and cooked and eaten? You couldn’t call him Caesar, you wouldn’t dare to let anyone see him. Then you didn’t have him in your possession. No one did. Caesar was dead.”

Wolfe paused, and demanded, “Wasn’t Caesar dead when you took the $45,000 from Pratt?”

McMillan, his face still covered with his hands, was motionless and made no sound.

“Of course he was,” Wolfe said. “He had died of anthrax. Pratt mentioned at dinner Monday evening that he had first tried to buy Caesar from you, for his whimsical barbecue, more than six weeks ago, and you had indignantly refused. Then the anthrax came. Your herd was almost entirely destroyed. One morning you found that Caesar was dead. In your desperation an ingenious notion occurred to you. Buckingham, who resembled Caesar superficially but was worth only a fraction of his value, was alive and well. You announced that Buckingham had died, and the carcass was destroyed; and you told Pratt that he could have
Caesar. You couldn’t have swindled a stockman like that, for the deception would soon have been found out; but the swindle was in fact no injury to Pratt, since Buckingham would make just as good roast beef as Caesar would have made. Of course, amusing myself with the puzzle Monday evening, I knew nothing of Buckingham, but one of the probabilities which I accepted was that you had delivered another bull instead of Caesar, and that Caesar was dead.

“Clyde, then, had discovered the deception, and when you heard him propose the bet to Pratt, and the way he stated its terms, you suspected the fact. You followed him out to his car and had a brief talk with him and got your suspicions confirmed, and he agreed to return later that evening and discuss it with you. He did so. You were supposed to be asleep upstairs. You left the house secretly and met Clyde. I am giving you the probabilities as I accepted them Monday evening. Clyde informed you that he knew of the deception and was determined to expose it in order to win his bet with Pratt. You, of course, faced ruin. He may have offered a compromise: for instance, if you would give him $20,000 of the money Pratt had paid you he would use half of it to settle his bet, keep the other half for himself, and preserve your secret. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What happened was that you knocked him unconscious, evolved a plan to make it appear that he had been killed by the bull, and proceeded to execute it. I was inclined to believe, looking at the bull’s horns Monday night, that you had smeared blood on them with your hands. You should have been much more thorough, but I suppose you were in a hurry, for you had to wash off the pick and get back to the house and into the upstairs room
unobserved. You didn’t know, of course, whether the thing would be discovered in 5 minutes or 5 hours—since Mr. Goodwin was on the other side of the pasture talking to Miss Rowan.”

Wolfe opened his eyes. “Do I bore you or annoy you? Shall I stop?”

No movement and no response.

“Well. That was the way I arranged the puzzle Monday evening, but, as I say, it was none of my business. It didn’t become my business until the middle of Tuesday afternoon, when I accepted a commission from Mr. Osgood to solve the murder, having first demonstrated that there had been one. At that moment I expected to have the job completed within a few hours. Only two things needed to be done to verify the solution I had already arrived at: first, to question everyone who had been at Pratt’s place Monday evening, for if it turned out that you could not have left the house secretly—for instance, if someone had been with you constantly—I would have to consider new complexities; and second, to establish the identity of the bull. The first was routine and I left it to Mr. Waddell, as his proper province, while I investigated Clyde’s background by conversing with his father and sister. The second, the proof that the bull was not Caesar, I intended to procure, with Mr. Bennett’s assistance, as soon as I heard from the district attorney, and that delay was idiotic. I should not have postponed it one instant. For less than 3 hours after I had accepted the case I learned from your own lips that the bull was dead and his carcass was to be immediately destroyed. I tried; I phoned Mr. Bennett and learned that there was no single distinguishing mark or brand on Guernsey bulls, and Mr. Goodwin
rushed over to take photographs; but the bull was already half consumed by fire. You acted quickly there, and in time. Of course you gave him the anthrax yourself. It would be … perhaps you would tell me how and when you did it.”

McMillan said nothing.

Wolfe shrugged. “Anyhow, you were prompt and energetic. As long as the bull was destined to be cooked and eaten—this was to be the day for that, by the way—you ran little risk of exposure. But when all thought of the barbecue was abandoned, and it was suspected that Clyde had been murdered, the bull’s presence, alive or dead, was a deadly peril to you. You acted at once. You not only killed him, you did it by a method which insured that his carcass would be immediately destroyed. You must have been prepared for contingencies.

“As for me, I was stumped. You had licked me. With all trace of the bull gone but his bones, there seemed no possible way of establishing your motive for murdering Clyde. I had no evidence even for my own satisfaction that my surmise had been correct—that the bull was not Caesar. Tuesday evening I floundered in futilities. I had an interview with you and tried to draw you out by suggesting absurdities, but you were too wary for me. You upbraided me for trying to smear some of the mess on you, and left. Then I tried Bronson, hoping for something—anything. That kind of man is always impervious unless he can be confronted with facts, and I had no facts. It’s true that he led me to assumptions: that Clyde had told him how and why he expected to win the bet, and that Bronson therefore knew you were guilty—might
even have been there himself, in the dark—and that he was blackmailing you. I assumed those things, but he admitted none of them, and of course I couldn’t prove them.

“Yesterday morning I went for Bennett. I wanted to find out all I could about identifying bulls. He was busy. Mr. Goodwin couldn’t get him. After lunch I was still waiting for him. Finally he came, and I got a great deal of information, but nothing that would constitute evidence. Then came the news that Bronson had been murdered. Naturally that was obvious. Suspecting that he was blackmailing you, I had told the man he was a fool and he had proved me correct. There too you acted promptly and energetically. Men like you, sir, when once calamity sufficiently disturbs their balance, become excessively dangerous. They will perform any desperate and violent deed, but they don’t lose their heads. I wouldn’t mind if Mr. Goodwin left me with you in this room alone, because it is known that we are here; but I wouldn’t care to offer you the smallest opportunity if there were the slightest room for your ingenuity.”

McMillan lifted his head and broke his long silence. “I’m through,” he said dully.

Wolfe nodded. “Yes, I guess you are. A jury might be reluctant to convict you of first degree murder on the testimony of my sketches, but if Pratt sued you for $45,000 on the ground that you hadn’t delivered the bull you sold, I think the sketches would clinch that sort of case. Convicted of that swindle, you would be through anyway. About the sketches. I had to do that. 3 hours ago there wasn’t a shred of evidence in existence to connect you with the murders you committed.
But as soon as I examined the official sketches of Buckingham and Caesar I no longer surmised or deduced the identity of the bull in the pasture; I knew it. I had seen the white patch on the shoulder with my own eyes, and I had seen the extension of the white shield on his face. I made the sketches to support that knowledge. They will be used in the manner I described, with the testimony of Miss Rowan and Mr. Goodwin to augment my own. As I say, they will certainly convict you of fraud, if not of murder.”

Wolfe sighed. “You killed Clyde Osgood to prevent the exposure of your fraud. Even less, to avoid the compulsion of having to share its proceeds. Now it threatens you again. That’s the minimum of the threat.”

McMillan tossed his head, as if he were trying to shake something off. The gesture looked familiar, but I didn’t remember having seen him do it before. Then he did it again, and I saw what it was: it was the way the bull had tossed his head in the pasture Monday afternoon.

He looked at Wolfe and said, “Do me a favor. I want to go out to my car a minute. Alone.”

Wolfe muttered, “You wouldn’t come back.”

“Yes, I would. My word was good for over 50 years. Now it’s good again. I’ll be back within 5 minutes, on my feet.”

“Do I owe you a favor?”

“No. I’ll do you one in return. I’ll write something and sign it. Anything you say. You’ve got it pretty straight. I’ll do it when I come back, not before. And you asked me how I killed Buckingham. I’ll show you what I did it with.”

Wolfe spoke to me without moving his head or his eyes. “Open the door for him, Archie.”

I didn’t stir. I knew he was indulging himself in one of his romantic impulses, and I thought a moment’s reflection might show him its drawbacks; but after only half a moment he snapped at me, “Well?”

I got up and opened the door and McMillan, with a heavy tread but no sign of the blind staggers, passed out. I stood and watched his back until the top of his head disappeared on his way downstairs. Then I turned to Wolfe and said sarcastically, “Fortune-telling
and
character-reading. It would be nice to have to explain—”