The Inspector’s color returned to his gray cheeks; his bird-like eyes snapped; and he darted forward into the group.
The group parted, engulfed him.
Curly’s wide shoulders hid the bowed shining head of Kit Horne.
Wild Bill Grant stared and stared at the blanket as if he could not see enough of it.
Ellery squared his shoulders, drew a long breath, and started off at a lope toward the northwestern part of the arena.
4: The Threads
As he charged across the hard-packed dirt Ellery was able to assimilate in flashes something of the activity around him. Behind him stood a silent ring of men and women, aliens in a strange land, surrounding the dead man and the sobbing girl. In the frenzied tiers above people scurried about like demented ants; there were thin screams from women’s throats, and hoarse masculine voices, and the muffled thunder of shuffling feet. At the exits dotting the distant walls minute figures in blue with brass buttons catching vagrant spears of light, had sprung up — police summoned hastily from the recesses of the building to defend the bulwarks. They were pushing people back toward the seats, allowing no one to leave the amphitheatre; an excellent notion, to Ellery’s mind, and he smiled a little as he ran on.
He scrambled faster, and then came to a stop at the trestles of the high platform on which stood the small figures of Major Kirby — pale but unruffled, quietly directing his group of wild-eyed, crouching-over-camera men.
“Major!” cried Ellery, striving to make himself heard above the din.
Major Kirby peered over the edge of the platform. “Yes? Oh... yes, Mr. Queen?”
“Don’t leave that platform!”
The Major permitted himself to smile, briefly. “Don’t bother yourself about that. God, what a break! By the way, what the devil did happen over there? Did the old chap have a fainting spell?”
“The old chap,” said Ellery grimly, “had a bullet spell, that’s what he had. He was murdered, Major — through the heart.”
“Lord!”
Ellery stared gravely upward. “Come a little closer, Major.” The newsreel man stooped, his little black eyes snapping. “Were your cameras grinding through everything?”
Something sparkled in the black eyes. “Good Lord! Good Lord!” a slight flush tinted his slick cheeks. “What a miracle, Mr. Queen, what a miracle... yes, every second!”
Ellery said rapidly: “Pluperfect, Major, simply pluperfect. An exquisite gift from the god who watches over detectives. Now listen: keep grinding, get every shot you can — I want a complete photographic record of what happens from now on until I tell you to stop. Do you understand?”
“Oh, perfectly.” The Major paused, and then said: “But how long will I have—”
“You’re worried about the film?” Ellery smiled. “I don’t think you’ve need to, Major. Your company has a really exceptional opportunity to serve the police, and considering how motion picture companies throw their money around, I think the cost of the extra film is money well spent. Well spent.”
The Major looked reflective, then touched the end of his little mustache, nodded, rose, and spoke brusquely to his men. One camera kept focused on the group surrounding the body. Another swept its eye, like a mechanical Cyclops, in a steady circle of the audience-tiers. A third picked up details in other parts of the arena. The technicians in the sound booth were working madly.
Ellery fingered his bow-tie, flicked a speck of dust off his alabaster bosom, and sped back across the arena.
Inspector Queen, that admirable executive, was surrounded by the grim halo of Work. He was the only person in New York who might be called, without intent to malign, an Ultracrepidarian critic. It was of the very nature of his job to find fault with small and insignificant details. He was the scientist of trifles, a passionate devotee of minutiae. And yet his old nose was never so closely pressed to the ground that he could not keep in perspective the broadest view of the terrain... The present task was worthy of his mettle. A murder had been committed in an auditorium peopled with twenty thousand souls. Two hundred hundred persons, any one of whom might be the murderer of Buck Horne! His bird-like gray little head was cocked fiercely forward, his fingers dipped unceasingly into his old brown snuff-box, his mouth rattled very good orders indeed, and all the while his bright little eyes were wandering about the auditorium as if disembodied, keeping in sight every intricate movement of the forces he had disposed. It was fortunate, perhaps, that while he awaited reinforcements from Headquarters — members of his own squad — he nevertheless had a large army of officers to place strategically about the spacious premises. The ushers and special officers of the Colosseum had been pressed into service, and those of the police who had been within the building at the time of the murder. All exits were grimly guarded. It was already established from relayed reports that not even a pigmy had slipped through the cordon. It was his calm intention not to permit one of the twenty thousand persons in the building to escape until the most searching investigation had been made.
Detectives from the nearby precincts had already responded to the alarm; they ringed the arena, keeping it clear as a base of operations. Hundreds of staring heads popped over the box-tier rail. The group of horsemen and horsewomen had been segregated, sent in a group to the other side of the arena; they were dismounted, and their horses, serene now, were pawing the earth and snorting quite peacefully. Their coats shone with the heat of their bodies after the short but strenuous gallop. The two special officers who had been stationed at each of the two main gates in the arena — at east and west — were on duty still, backed up by detectives. All the arena exits were fast closed, and guarded. No one was permitted either to enter or leave the arena.
As Ellery ran up, he saw his father sternly eying a diminutive cowboy with bleared eyes and convex little legs.
“Grant tells me you generally take charge of the horses,” snapped the Inspector. “What’s your name?”
The little cowboy licked his dry lips. “Dan’l — Hank Boone. I don’t savvy this shootin’ a-tall, Inspector. Honest, I—”
“Do you or don’t you take charge of the horses?”
“Yess’r, reckon I do!”
The Inspector measured him. “Were you one of that crazy yelling bunch riding behind Horne tonight?”
“Nos’ree!” cried Boone.
“Where were you when Horne fell off his horse?”
“Down yonder, behin’ that west chute gate,” mumbled Boone. “When I see ole Buck passin’ in his chips, I got ole Baldy — special at the gate — to pass me through.”
“Anybody else come through with you?”
“Nos’r. Baldy, he an’ me—”
“All right, Boone.” The Inspector jerked his head at a detective. “Take this man across the arena and let him get those horses together. We don’t want a stampede here.”
Boone grinned rather feebly, and trotted off toward the horses in company with a detective. There was a temporary row of watering-troughs set up in the dirt across the arena, and he became busy leading the horses to water. The cowboys and cowgirls near by watched him stonily.
Ellery stood quite still. This part of the job was his father’s.
He looked around. Kit Horne was a statue with dusty knees, as pale as the dying moon, staring without expression at the crumpled heap covered by the gaudy Indian blanket on the tanbark. To each side stood protection — poor protection, one would say, for Curly Grant was grotesquely like a man whose ears have been suddenly pierced and who finds himself in a frenzied soundless world; and his father, stocky marble, might be in the grip of a paralysis which had attacked him without warning and frozen him in an attitude of dazed pain where he stood. And both men, also, looked at the gaudy blanket.