Jean Backus - Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

“Wait a minute,” Keating interrupted. “ You’re not supposed to look in the pockets. You’re not supposed to touch the body. No one’s supposed to move it until the coroner can get here.”

“When those folks wrote the lawbooks,” the sheriff interrupted, “they didn’t have in mind a case where it would take hours for a coroner to arrive and where it might be necessary to get some fast action.”

“The law is the law,” Keating announced, “and it’s not for us to take into consideration what was in the minds of the law makers. We read the statutes and have no need to interpret them unless there should be some latent ambiguity, and no such latent ambiguity seems to exist in this case. However, what’s done now is done. Let’s look around here.”

“I’ve already looked around,” the sheriff said.

“I know,” Keating snapped, “but we’ll take another look around the place. You say it rained here yesterday afternoon?”

“A little before sundown it started raining steady. Before then we’d had a thunderstorm. The rain kept up until around ten o’clock. The man was killed before the first rain. I figure he was killed early in the afternoon.”

Keating looked at him.

“What makes you think so?”

“Well, he’d been hiking, and he was trying to establish an overnight camp here. Now, I’ve got a hunch he came in the same way you did — by airplane, only he didn’t have any horses to meet him.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well,” the sheriff said, “he brought in what stuff he brought in on his back. There’s a pack board over there with a tumpline, and his roll of blankets is under that tree. His whole camp is just the way he’d dropped it. Then he’d gone up to get some wood, and the way I figure it, he’d wanted to get that big log so he could keep pushing the ends together and keep a small fire going all night. He didn’t have a tent. His bedroll is a light down sleeping bag, the whole thing weighing about eight pounds. But he had quite a bit of camp stuff, maybe a thirty-five pound pack.”

“What does all that have to do with the airplane?” Keating asked impatiently.

“Well, now,” Eldon said, “I was just explaining. He carried this stuff in on his back, but you look at the leather straps on that pack board and you see that they’re new. The whole outfit is new. Now, those leather straps are stained a little bit. If he’d had to bring that stuff in from up the valley, he’d have done a lot of sweating.”

“Humph,” Keating said. “I don’t see that necessarily follows. Are there no roads into this back country?”

The sheriff shook his head. “This is a primitive area. You get into it by trails. There aren’t any roads closer than twenty miles. I don’t think that man carried that camp outfit on his back for twenty miles uphill. I think he walked not more than three or four miles, and I think it was on the level. I’ve already used Olney’s telephone at the ranger station to get my under-sheriff on the job, checking with all charter airplanes to see if they brought a man like this into the country.”

Keating said, “Well, I’ll look around while the coroner goes over the body. There’s a chance you fellows may have overlooked some clues that sharper — and younger — eyes will pick up.”

Logan bent over the body. Keating skirmished around through the underbrush, his lean, youthful figure doubled over, moving rapidly as though he were a terrier prowling on a scent. He soon called out.

“Look over here, gentlemen. And be careful how you walk. The place is all messed up with tracks already, but try not to obliterate this piece of evidence.”

“What have you got?” Olney asked.

“Something that has hitherto been overlooked,” Keating announced importantly.

They bent over to look, and Keating pointed to a crumpled cloth tobacco sack which had evidently been about a quarter full of tobacco when the drenching rain had soaked through to the tobacco, stiffening the sack and staining it all to a dark brown which made it difficult to see against the ground.

“And over here,” Keating went on, “just six or eight inches from this tobacco sack you’ll find the burnt ends of two cigarettes rolled with brown rice paper, smoked down to within about an inch of the end and then left here. Now I’m no ex-cattleman,” and he glanced meaningly at Bill Eldon, “but I would say there’s something distinctive about the way these cigarettes are rolled.”

“There sure is,” Bill Eldon admitted ruefully.

“Well,” Keating said, “that’s my idea of a clue. It’s just about the same as though the fellow had left his calling card. Here are those cigarettes, the stubs showing very plainly how they’re rolled and folded. As I understand it, it’s quite a job to roll a cigarette, isn’t it, sheriff, that is, to do a good job?”

“Sure is,” Bill Eldon observed, “and these were rolled by a man who knew his business.”

“Don’t touch them now,” Keating warned. “I want to get a photograph of them just the way they were found, but you can see from just looking at this end that the paper has been rolled over and then there’s been a trick fold, something that makes it hold its shape when it’s rolled.”

“That’s right,” Olney said — there was a new-found respect in his voice.

“Let’s get that camera, coroner,” Keating announced, “and take some pictures of these cigarettes. Then we’ll carefully pick this evidence up so as not to disturb it. Then I think we’d better go check on the telephone and see if there are any leads to the inquiries Sheriff Eldon put out about someone bringing this chap in by airplane. I have an idea that’s where we are going to get a line on him.”

“What do you make of this evidence, Bill?” the ranger asked Eldon.

It was Keating who answered the question. “There’s no doubt about it. The whole crime was deliberately premeditated. This is the thing that the layman might overlook. It’s something that shows its true significance only to the legal mind. It establishes the premeditation which makes for first-degree murder. The murderer lay here waiting for his man. He waited while he smoked two cigarettes.”

“How do you suppose the murderer knew the man was going to camp right here?” Bill Eldon asked.

“That’s a minor matter,” Keating said “The point is, he did know. He was lying here waiting. He smoked two cigarettes. Probably the man had already made his camp here and then gone up the hill for firewood, dragging that log down the hill along the trail that you pointed out.”

Eldon’s nod was dubious.

“Don’t you agree with that?” Keating demanded truculently.

“I was just wondering if the fellow that was killed wasn’t pretty tired from his walk,” Eldon said.

“Why? You said he only had to walk three or four miles from an airfield and it was pretty level ground all the way.”

“I know,” Eldon said, “but if he’d already established his camp here and then gone up the hill to get that firewood and dragged it down, the murderer must have moved into ambush after the man went up to get that log.”

“Well?”

“The victim certainly must have been aw fully tired if it took long enough getting that log for the murderer to smoke two cigarettes.”

“Well, perhaps the murderer smoked them after the crime, or he may have been waiting for his man to get in just the right position. There’s no use trying to account for all these little things.”

“That’s right,” Eldon said.

“This evidence,” Keating went on significantly, “would have been overlooked if I hadn’t been prowling around, crawling on my hands and knees looking for any little thing that might have escaped observation.”