Ellery rose, stretched, and yawned. But I was sitting there by the fire still puzzled; and he looked down at me with a quizzical grin. “What’s the matter, O Rain-in-the-Face?” he asked. “Something still bothering you?”
“Decidedly. Everything’s been so dashed mysterious about this problem,” I complained. “I mean — the papers ran just the barest details of the story, and nobody seems to know much about anything. I remember a few weeks ago when the story came out, after Horne shot himself—”
“In this very room,” murmured Ellery lightly; but his eyes were pained. “That was a moment, my masters! Poor Djuna fainted. Don’t think so much of blood and thunder now, do you, Djuna, old son?”
Djuna became a little pale about the jowls; he smiled in a sickly fashion and crept out of the room.
“What I meant to say,” I went on, irritated, “is that I hunted through every darned sheet in the City and I couldn’t find a solitary word about motive.”
“Ah, motive,” said Ellery thoughtfully; and then very quickly he went to his secretary and stopped short, frowning down upon his desk set.
“Yes, motive,” I repeated doggedly. “What the devil’s all the secrecy about? Why did Horne kill this poor chap who’d been his movie double years back? There must be a reason. Man doesn’t plan a complicated crime and forfeit his rightful identity forever just for fun. And I’m sure Horne was no maniac.”
“Maniac? Oh, no, not a maniac.” Ellery seemed to be having unusual difficulty in expressing himself. “Ah — you see, granted that he had to kill somebody, the question arose as to ways and means. Should he kill the double openly, and allow himself to be arrested, tried, and executed? Self-preservation, and a shrinking from the shame which would be heaped upon Kit’s head, made him decide against this. Should he kill the double and commit suicide? The same reasons said no. So he took the intricate but really only way out, according to his lights. You might say—”
“I do say,” I interrupted severely.
“—that it was silly for Horne so to have planned his crime that in working it out he lost his identity as Horne. But actually was it so silly? What was he losing — his money? He had taken practically all of it with him! His career? Ah, but that was just a pleasant fiction, he must have realized at the last; an old man for years he had stubbornly refused to bow to Time, chafing against the inevitable, and now at last he saw that there was no movie career in the offing, that he was a useless old husk, that Grant’s proposed investment of money in Horne’s comeback was merely a friendly gesture, nothing more. I repeat: What was he losing by dying as Buck Horne in — I might point out — a last blaze of publicity?”
“Yes, but what was he gaining?” I asked dryly.
“A good deal, from his point of view. He was gaining peace of mind, he was satisfying his peculiar code of honor, and he was making a sacrifice for the good of Kit. Kit told the Inspector and me that Horne was carrying a hundred thousand dollar insurance policy, of which she was the only beneficiary. Now mark this. He had contracted an enormous debt by his gambling losses at Hunter’s place; forty-two thousand dollars! How was he to pay it? And yet pay it he must, according to his code. With his movie career blasted, with his personal wealth insufficient to cover the debt — unless he sold his ranch, and this I suppose he could not bring himself to do, desiring it to remain Kit’s — how was he to pay Hunter? It was literally true that he was worth more dead than alive. So, by passing out of the picture as Horne, he made the hundred thousand available, liquid — available to pay off the gambling debt (he knew Kit well enough to foresee that she would take care of that), and the balance he knew would safeguard Kit’s future. If you grant him the desire to accomplish these things and still live out the few remaining years of his life, even if anonymously, then surely it is apparent that Horne, as Horne, had to die — that in achieving the death of his double Horne had to go through the whole complicated plan of presumably dying himself.”
“Yes, yes,” I said impatiently, “that may all be very true, but you’re evading the important point. You’ve wandered far, my lad! You said before: ‘Granted that he had to kill somebody.’ Well, I don’t grant any such thing! That’s what’s bothering me. Why did he have to kill somebody? Specifically, why did he have to kill his double?”
“Oh, I imagine there was a reason,” muttered Ellery, without turning.
“You imagine?” I cried. “Don’t you know?”
Ellery faced about and I saw something very grave and determined in his eyes. “Yes, J.J., I do know. I didn’t know until Horne himself told me. Told me and the Inspector...”
“But I thought Miss Horne and the Grant fellow were here, too, that night,” I said.
“Horne sent them away.” He paused again. “And before he shot himself he told us.”
“Does Grant know?” I asked abruptly. “Old man Grant?”
He tapped a cigaret on his thumbnail. “Grant knows.”
I mumbled: “He sent the girl away... Hmm. I suppose she meant everything to him, and he would do anything to protect her — his foster-daughter — her safety, her reputation... If there had been something — well, doubtful, about her parentage and the double knew it and was threatening to tell Kit... She’s an orphan, didn’t you say?”
Ellery was silent. For so long a time that I thought he had not heard me. Then he said, in a very sharp tone: “What did you think of the new Nobel award for literature, J.J.? It seems to me—”
But to my vague and gossipy conjectures he preserved a loud and stubborn silence.
A silence, appropriately enough, that was Buck Horne’s epitaph.