He refused with a smile on three separate occasions during the afternoon to offer an explanation of the solution. He shook his head at District Attorney Sampson, three newspapermen from syndicates, and the Commissioner himself. At no time did he quite lose his head-cocked, waiting air.
But nothing out of the ordinary happened all day.
At six he and the Inspector left Headquarters and took the subway uptown.
At six-thirty they were sitting at a silent repast, and it was apparent that neither had his usually robust appetite.
At seven the doorbell rang and Ellery sprang to his feet. The visitor was Kit Horne — pale, distrait, very nervous.
“Come in,” said Ellery gently. “And sit down, Miss Horne. I’m glad you decided to come.”
“I... I scarcely know what to do or think,” she said in a low voice, as she slowly sat down in the armchair. “I don’t know where to turn. I’m completely... completely...”
“Don’t blame you,” said the Inspector sympathetically. “It’s hard finding out the real streak in a man who’s seemed to be a friend. If I were you, though, I wouldn’t let this interfere with my feelings in — well, in other people.”
“You mean Curly?” She shook her head. “Impossible. Oh, it’s not his fault, but—”
The doorbell rang again, and Djuna jumped into the foyer. A moment later the tall figure of Curly Grant appeared in the doorway.
“What did you want me—?” he began; and saw Kit. They stared at each other wordlessly. Then she colored and half-rose. The man looked miserable, hung his head.
“No,” said Ellery in a fierce whisper, and she looked at him, startled. “I want you here. I want you here particularly. Don’t take it out on poor Curly. Please sit down, Miss Horne.”
She sat down.
Djuna, coached in advance, appeared with a tray. The awkward moment was bridged by the cheerful clink of ice and glasses; as if by tacit consent the talk turned to light things, and in ten minutes Ellery had them faintly smiling.
But as the minutes passed, lengthening into an hour, and then two hours, the talk languished; and even the Inspector began to grow restless. Ellery was in a fever. He was everywhere at once, speaking quickly, smiling, frowning, smoking, offering cigarets — quite as unlike the normal Ellery as it would be possible to conceive. Despite — perhaps because of — all his efforts, the gloom deepened. Each passing moment now seemed a year. Until finally even Ellery ceased his valiant efforts to disseminate cheer, and no one said anything at all.
It was “precisely at nine o’clock that the doorbell rang for the third time.
Without warning. It came in the midst of a heavy silence. It twitched the Inspector’s mustache, shocked Kit and Curly into rigidity, and raised Ellery from his chair like a yanked rope.
“No, Djuna,” he said quietly to the boy, who as usual had made for the door. “I’ll go myself. Excuse me,” and he darted into the foyer.
They heard the opening of the door. They heard a man’s deep tones. And they heard Ellery say, in a voice steady and dangerous: “Ah, come in, come in. I’ve been expecting you.”
Ellery loomed in the archway from the foyer, his face white as his linen. An instant later a tall man — taller than Ellery — appeared beside him on the sill.
There was an eternal moment, such a moment as life meets infrequently on the normal stream of time. Time for that moment gathered its energies and leaped, exploding, into the brain.
They all stared at the man in the archway, and the man in the archway stared back at them.
It was the man of the frightfully burnt cheek, the ill-clothed shambling Westerner who had vanished so mysteriously from the Colosseum the day before... Benjy Miller. Under the brown skin of his unmutilated right cheek there was a deathlike pallor that matched the pallor of his worn knuckles as he clutched the jamb.
“Miller,” said the Inspector in bewilderment. “Miller,” and rose uncertainly from his chair.
Kit Horne gave vent to a formless choking sound that brought all eyes upon her. She was staring at Miller. The man in the doorway met her eyes for a brief instant, and then looked away, taking a quick step into the room. Kit bit her lip, looked from side to side, drew in her breath spasmodically, eyes filled with a terror that was beyond quelling.
“But what th’ devil—?” muttered Curly in an astonished way.
Ellery said in a barely audible voice: “Tell them.”
Miller paused a yard from the archway, his big hands clenched tightly. He licked his lips and said: “Inspector Queen, I killed — I killed—”
“What!” shouted the Inspector, springing to his feet. He flashed a furious look at Ellery. “You — What d’ye mean? You killed Buck Horne and Woody?”
Curly Grant swore softly to himself.
Miller’s fists unclenched, and clenched again.
Kit began quietly to sob.
And Ellery said: “He killed Woody, but he did not kill Buck Horne!”
The Inspector pounded the table in his fury. “By God, I’ll have the truth now if I go crazy tryin’ to get it! What’s all this foolishness? What d’ye mean — Miller killed Woody but didn’t kill Horne? The same gat was used!”
“And the same hand used it,” said Ellery wearily. “But Miller couldn’t have killed Buck Horne. You see, MILLER’S BUCK HORNE!”
Postlude: Spectrum Analysis
“In fine,” said Ellery Queen, “the non-essential colors vanished from our imaginary color-wheel, leaving — what? An iris of unmistakable spectrum-lines which clearly told the whole story.”
“Your obscure metaphor,” I said with some irritation, “leaves me rather more than cold. I’ll confess it’s still a deep, dark puzzle to my feeble brain. I know all the facts now, but I’ll be hanged if I can make any sense out of them.”
Ellery smiled. It was weeks after the solution of the Horne case; the reverberations had echoed off into the limbo of all forgotten crimes; the amazing and pitiful denouement was a thing of merely professional interest. For some reason which I could not fathom little was printed by the avid press that was comprehensible. Buck Horne had committed two murders in a remarkably clever manner; why, and a good deal of how, remained a mystery. And then there was the matter of the detective work which had led to the solution; nothing appeared in the papers concerning this, either, and I had been unable to find out why.
“What is it,” murmured Ellery, “that mystifies you?”
“The whole blasted business! But particularly how you solved the problem. And I might add,” I continued with some malice, “if you ever did solve those two minor problems you were in the dark about. For instance, what really did happen to the automatic in both crimes?”
Ellery chuckled and puffed away at his cigaret. “Oh, come now, J. J., surely you know me better than to accuse me at this stage in my career of faulty craftsmanship. Of course, I knew the essential answer — the interchange of personalities — only a few hours after the first body was found...”
“What!”
“Oh, yes. It was really the result of an elementary series of deductions, and I’m astounded at the blindness of the people who worked with me.” He sighed. “Poor dad! He’s an excellent policeman, but he has no vision, no imagination. You need imagination in this business.” Then he shrugged and settled back comfortably. Djuna came in with an urn of coffee, and a platter of excellent brioches. “Suppose I begin,” said Ellery, “at the beginning.