Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Smoking Chimney

Gramps lay flat on his back, his arms slightly outstretched, his eyes closed, simulating a corpse, giving rapid-fire directions, however, in his high-pitched, nervous voice.

“Nope, you ain’t quick enough,” Gramps said as Duryea hesitated. “You’ve got to be scared. Pretend you’re a police car, Milred, driving up in front. Scare him.”

Milred made a sound like a siren.

“Come on,” Cramps said to Duryea. “Get scared... Make heavy steps on the porch, Milred.”

Milred banged her feet on the floor. Grinning, Duryea leaned over Gramps, opened the fingers of the old man’s hand, shoved in the butt of the gun, and said: “There you are.”

Milred, making her voice sound gruff, said, in her best hardboiled manner to her husband: “Hey, you! What the hell’s coming off here?”

Duryea, almost whining, said: “Honest, officer, I didn’t do it! I didn’t have anything to do with it! I just came in here a few minutes ago and found the body lying on the floor, just the way you see it now. The poor old geezer wore himself out and committed suicide.”

“That’s what you say,” Milred gruffed, stamping her feet over to stand looking down at the supine Gramps. “How do I know you didn’t shoot him, and then stick the gun in his hand?

“No, no,” Duryea said. “He committed suicide, officer. He suddenly realized how much sleep he’d made people lose, and he killed himself.”

Milred said: “Gimme a cigarette, buddy.”

Duryea handed her one.

“Hell of a sounding story!” Milred went on. “Every time I bust in on a murder, I hear that same old gag. Why can’t you guys think up a new one?”

“Honestly, officer, this is the truth!”

“I’ll bet it is,” Milred said sarcastically. “You don’t look to me like an honest guy. You look like the sort that would cheat on your wife. I’ll bet you—”

Gramps abruptly sat up. “You’re a hell of an officer,” he said to Milred.

“Shut up,” she announced. “I’m giving him a third degree. I’m just about to find out if he’s true to me.”

Gramps said: “You’re cock-eyed. You’re both cock-eyed. Don’t you see what he did?”

“Sure. He murdered you,” Milred said.

“That’s right,” Gramps admitted, “and then leaned over me to stick the gun in my hand, to make it look like I committed suicide. And what did he do? Don’t you get it? Don’t you get the thing that is the absolute payoff?”

“What?” Duryea asked.

“You stuck the gun in my left hand ,” Gramps shrilled excitedly.

Duryea said: “No, I didn’t I—” Abruptly, he checked himself.

“You did so,” Gramps insisted, “and you’ll do it every time. When a man lies on his back, he’s facing you, just like you can see yourself in a mirror. A man gets accustomed to looking in a mirror and shaving and brushing his hair and tying his necktie, and the figure in the mirror is always left-handed... What I mean is that the hand that’s raised by the reflection in the mirror is always the hand that’s directly opposite the hand of the man who’s standing in front of the mirror... Well, that’s what happens. You get scared, and in a hurry, and go to push a gun in a man’s hand when he’s lying on the floor on his back, staring straight up, and nine times out of ten you’ll stick it in his left hand.”

Duryea was thoughtful. “It is,” he admitted, “an interesting experiment.”

“Interesting!” Gramps said. “Hell’s whiskers, it’s the pay cheque! It shows absolutely the guy was murdered! The corpse was holdin’ that there gun in his left hand. The gun was planted there by a murderer.”

“Well, we’ve about come to that conclusion, anyway,” Duryea said.

“Good thing you did,” Gramps told him. “I was afraid you might get thrown off on that suicide theory... But I still don’t think you got the point.”

Duryea said: “All right, tell me the point, and then let me settle back and enjoy my pipe.”

“The point,” Gramp Wiggins said, “is that a man only pulls a boner like that when he’s in a hurry, when he’s startled... I was crowdin’ you into movin’ fast. You weren’t exactly scared, but what with Milred and me talkin’, you were bein’ heckled so you moved faster an’ thought less than you would have otherwise.”

“All right,” Duryea said tolerantly, winking at his wife. “I was moving faster than I otherwise would have moved. So what?”

“Don’t you get it?” Gramps shrilled. “If you’d had time to stop and think things over, you’d have switched the gun over to my right hand. We were all kidding, but we made you hurry.”

“Go ahead,” Milred announced. “Get it over with, because I’ve got to supervise a cocktail and dinner.”

Gramps said: “The man that murdered Pressman was in a hurry. Something happened to scare him. It wasn’t all done on the spur of the moment. It was carefully planned. Then right when he was in the middle of puttin’ things into execution, something happened to frighten him.”

Duryea settled down in his chair, reached for his pipe, said: “You may have something there, Gramps.”

“You’re gol-derned right I got somethin’ there,” Gramp Wiggins said, “an’ I got something else, too.”

“What?”

“I can tell you the exact time the murder was committed — almost.”

“That,” Duryea conceded, “would be very very interesting,” but added dubiously: “—if you can do it.”

“There was a clock in that room that told the time of the murder,” Gramps said.

“What?”

“That oil lamp.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

Gramps said proudly: “I did a little snoopin’ around, son, lookin’ through the windows there. I don’t know whether you saw me or not, but I wasn’t missing a thing. I prowled around the house and peeked through all the windows... Well, I’m going to tell you something. The man that lived in that house may have wanted to look like some old hermit in case the people he wanted to see came to talk with him, but he was neat as a pin, neat and orderly.”

“It doesn’t need a detective to tell that, Gramps. If you’re going to—”

“Wait a minute,” Gramps interrupted, “let me finish this thing. I say he was neat as a pin. He was orderly and methodical in his habits... Now, he wouldn’t have filled one oil lamp without filling both oil lamps. There was an oil lamp in the kitchen and one in that room where the body was found. The one in the kitchen was chock-full of oil and the chimney cleaned up so it was sparkling.”

“I don’t get it,” Duryea said.

“You wouldn’t,” Gramps said, “because you’re too young to know anything about oil lamps. You never had to use ’em. I’ve used ’em. I know all about ’em. Filling lamps and trimming the wicks and keeping the chimneys clean is a chore. Don’t make any difference how you figure it, it’s a chore... When a man fills one lamp, he fills ’em all. Ask anybody that ever monkeyed around with oil lamps.

“Now then, I figure that lamp in the kitchen was filled yesterday, sometime during the day, because it hadn’t been used any — and all the cookin’ would have been done out there in the kitchen. That would mean the oil lamp in the other room was filled at the same time. So I went down and bought me a lamp of that exact make and model, filled her up with oil, put her in my trailer, started her burning, and watched her burn... A lamp uses up just about so much oil every hour, and I was pretty careful to mark right where the oil was in the bowl of that lamp at the house when you was lookin’ at the body... Bet you and the sheriff never even thought of that, did you now?”