by Mike Ashley
“Peste!” he said. “Is this another of your jokes, Dupin? It is a joke, of course?”
“If so,” replied my friend, with a severe expression, “it is a joke which has cost Monsieur Cuvillier-Millot his life. It was upon certain evidence of eyes, ears, and noses that a theory has been built up of an assassin, striking when Monsieur Gaspard – the man who stood most to gain by the dead banker’s decease – was in full sight of a dozen trustworthy witnesses. He did not fire the shot. Oh, no! How could he have done so, when the shot was fired on the other side of a locked door?
“But tell me, Monsieur le Préfet, did you not hear a shot? Do you not smell the burnt gunpowder? Did you not see an open window, and jump instantly to the conclusion – placed so cunningly by me into your head – that there must have been someone who had fired the shot, and that someone must have escaped through the window, since he was not visible within the room?
“However, now it is different, is it not? A moment’s reflection showed you the impossibility of someone’s having escaped through a window so far above the ground, and with no tree or other means by which a man, however agile, could have got away so rapidly. You asked me if this were a joke? It is not a joke. Had you asked me, was this a trick, I should have answered – yes.”
“You imply,” said G— thoughtfully, “that Monsieur Gaspard is the murderer whom we seek?”
“Monsieur Gaspard,” said Dupin decisively, “is without doubt the murderer. He had the motive, the means, and the opportunity, as I propose to demonstrate – though you will have to trick him, as he has tricked you, to extract from him the admission of guilt that you need. Did you find, in the dirty linen, a very dirty handkerchief?”
“Yes. I have it here.” G— took a packet from the tails of his coat and handed it to Dupin, who opened it eagerly, examined it, and then put his nose to it.
“Excellent! This is mere lamp-black, since it smells of burnt spermaceti, such as is consumed in lamps, and not of burnt gunpowder. Monsieur Gaspard almost deserved to succeed in his diabolical plan, he was so clever. He used, for the planned killing of his uncle, only such things as were to be found in the house. No traceable purchases of arsenic for him! Lamp-black from an ordinary lamp, to smear around the wound! No, not a single substance or object which was not readily to hand in the mansion.”
“But how in heaven’s name did he shoot his uncle!” G— cried.
Dupin smiled.
“He did not shoot his uncle. Monsieur Cuvillier-Millot was not shot. Look at this small piece of plaster-of-Paris: it is a cast of the ball extracted from the dead man’s skull.”
G— took it, and examined it.
“Why, yes, here are the indentations – the ring of indentations – that I noticed on the ball when it was first extracted by the surgeons. Now this cast shows the indentations as small teeth, sticking up. Peste! what does that ring of teeth remind me of?”
“Of this, I suggest,” said Dupin, producing the clock-key, and indicating the ratchet at the end of the small tube.
“Dupin, what are you suggesting?”
“You will find,” said Dupin calmly, “that Monsieur Gaspard, though he did not enter his uncle’s room in the morning, did take in his evening cup of spiced wine. On the evening before the discovery of the murder the wine was even more heavily spiced – with laudanum. If the dead man did not use laudanum, you will find it somewhere in the house.
“Then, at some time in the early morning – but not too early – Monsieur Gaspard entered his uncle’s bedroom, took a ball, turned the drugged man until he was face downward, and tapped the ball, using a hammer doubtless muffled in cloth, into the unconscious uncle’s brain, with the end of the clock-key. This end is about three inches long – and only to that extent was the ball driven into the head; though that was enough to cause death. He wiped the key – there will be blood as well as lamp-black on the handkerchief – and replaced the key behind the clock. He then set up an ingenious device to trick the domestics a few hours later; then, after opening the window, he left the room and locked the door.
“At his customary time of rising he ran downstairs to report the angry voices within his uncle’s room – though, of course, poor Monsieur Cuvillier-Millot had then been dead some two hours or so.
“Monsieur Gaspard, having collected all the servants as witnesses, then approached the door. The witnesses will testify that a shot was heard, and the door was then forced open.
“In strict truth, the shot was heard as Monsieur Gaspard put his hand on the door-knob; for all he did was to put his finger under the black pack-thread which had been passed through the key-hole and over the handle of the bell-pull to the side of the fire-place, and which held – by a quick-release hitch such as sailors or horsemen use – this iron door-stop I borrowed, and that you may now return to the house in the Rue Royale.
“The door-stop, released by the quick-release hitch, fell straight down into the steel-fender which surrounds the fireplace. But – and take careful note of this – it fell on to a mixture of two very ordinary substances, to be found in the medicine-chests in most homes: chlorate of potash and flowers of sulphur, a mixture so highly explosive that it takes but a light blow to detonate it.”
“Diable! Of course!”
“The bang – the smell of sulphur – the open window – who would not have sworn, on twenty Bibles, that he had heard a shot fired, and been just too late to spy the assassin, detected almost – but not quite – in flagrante delicto?
“By the way, with his commendable proclivity for using only the tools to hand, Monsieur Gaspard will have cast himself a ball with the bullet-mould to be found in the case of pistols kept in the library, or gunroom if there is one. Examination under a microscope will establish the origin of the ball taken from the dead banker’s head.”
G— coughed.
“Dupin . . . excuse me, but since you have helped me thus far, tell me: how shall I bring the fact of his guilt home to this most ingenious ruffian?”
Dupin smiled, and reached for the tobacco-jar.
“Well, my dear G—, you might begin by re-staging the charade with which I startled and annoyed you a few minutes ago. Even Monsieur Gaspard’s aplomb might be so shaken to hear another pistol-shot in his dead uncle’s bedroom that you might well obtain his confession . . .”
It was so. Three months later, despite the advocacy of those Solons of the French Bar whom Monsieur Gaspard retained to defend him, a melancholy procession set out one morning for a certain space within the Barrière de St. Jacques, and here a dastardly assassin paid the ultimate penalty.
THE GENTLEMAN FROM PARIS
John Dickson Carr
This story is another tribute to Edgar Allan Poe and is written by the world’s master of the impossible crime. Whether writing under his own name or as Carter Dickson, Carr (1906–1977) produced time and again a masterful series of locked-room mysteries, of which the following is a fine example. Carr was one of the pioneers of the historical detective novel, the best being The Bride of Newgate (1950) and The Devil in Velvet (1955), though he remains best known for his series of novels about Dr. Gideon Fell, a rather overweight and pompous detective who nevertheless had a talent for solving the impossible. The Hollow Man (1935) contains a chapter where Carr provides the definitive lecture on locked-room mysteries, a study which has yet to be bettered.
Carlton House Hotel
Broadway, New York
14 April 1849
My dear brother:
Were my hand more steady, Maurice, or my soul less agitated, I should have written to you before this. All is safe: so much I tell you at once. For the rest, I seek sleep in vain; and this is not merely because I find myself a stranger and a foreigner in New York. Listen and judge.
We discussed, I think, the humiliation that a Frenchman must go to England ere he could take passage in a reliable ship for America. The Britannia steam-packet departed from Liverpool on the second of the month, and arrived here on the se
venteenth. Do not smile, I implore you, when I tell you that my first visit on American soil was to Platt’s Saloon, under Wallack’s Theater.
Great God, that voyage!
On my stomach I could hold not even champagne. For one of my height and breadth I was as weak as a child.
“Be good enough,” I said to a fur-capped coachman, when I had struggled through the horde of Irish immigrants, “to drive me to some fashionable place of refreshment.”
The coachman had no difficulty in understanding my English, which pleased me. And how extraordinary are these “saloons”!
The saloon of M. Platt was loud with the thump of hammers cracking ice, which is delivered in large blocks. Though the hand-colored gas globes, and the rose paintings on the front of the bar-counter, were as fine as we could see at the Three Provincial Brothers in Paris, yet I confess that the place did not smell so agreeably. A number of gentlemen, wearing hats perhaps a trifle taller than is fashionable at home, lounged at the bar-counter and shouted. I attracted no attention until I called for a sherry cobbler.
One of the “bartenders,” as they are called in New York, gave me a sharp glance as he prepared the glass.
“Just arrived from the Old Country, I bet?” he said in no unfriendly tone.
Though it seemed strange to hear France mentioned in this way, I smiled and bowed assent.
“Italian, maybe?” said he.
This bartender, of course, could not know how deadly was the insult.
“Sir,” I replied, “I am a Frenchman.”
And now in truth he was pleased! His fat face opened and smiled like a distorted, gold-toothed flower.
“Is that so, now!” he exclaimed. “And what might your name be? Unless” – and here his face darkened with that sudden defensiveness and suspicion which, for no reason I can discern, will often strike into American hearts – “unless,” said he, “you don’t want to give it?”
“Not at all,” I assured him earnestly. “I am Armand de Lafayette, at your service.”
My dear brother, what an extraordinary effect!
It was silence. All sounds, even the faint whistling of the gas jets, seemed to die away in that stone-flagged room. Every man along the line of the bar was looking at me. I was conscious only of faces, mostly with whiskers under the chin instead of down the cheekbones, turned on me in basilisk stare.
“Well, well, well!” almost sneered the bartender. “You wouldn’t be no relation of the Marquis de Lafayette, would you?”
It was my turn to be astonished. Though our father has always forbidden us to mention the name of our late uncle, due to his republican sympathies, yet I knew he occupied small place in the history of France and it puzzled me to comprehend how these people had heard of him.
“The late Marquis de Lafayette,” I was obliged to admit, “was my uncle.”
“You better be careful, young feller,” suddenly yelled a grimy little man with a pistol buckled under his long coat. “We don’t like being diddled, we don’t.”
“Sir,” I replied, taking my bundle of papers from my pocket and whacking them down on the bar-counter, “have the goodness to examine my credentials. Should you still doubt my identity, we can then debate the matter in any way which pleases you.”
“This is furrin writing,” shouted the bartender. “I can’t read it!”
And then – how sweet was the musical sound on my ear! – I heard a voice addressing me in my own language.
“Perhaps, sir,” said the voice, in excellent French and with great stateliness, “I may be able to render you some small service.”
The newcomer, a slight man of dark complexion, drawn up under an old shabby cloak of military cut, stood a little way behind me. If I had met him on the boulevards, I might not have found him very prepossessing. He had a wild and wandering eye, with an even wilder shimmer of brandy. He was not very steady on his feet. And yet, Maurice, his manner! It was such that I instinctively raised my hat, and the stranger very gravely did the same.
“And to whom,” said I, “have I the honor . . .?”
“I am Thaddeus Perley, sir, at your service.”
“Another furriner!” said the grimy little man, in disgust.
“I am indeed a foreigner!” said M. Perley in English, with an accent like a knife. “A foreigner to this dram shop. A foreigner to this neighborhood. A foreigner to – ” Here he paused, and his eyes acquired an almost frightening blaze of loathing. “Yet I never heard that the reading of French was so very singular an accomplishment. ”
Imperiously – and yet, it seemed to me, with a certain shrinking nervousness – M. Perley came closer and lifted the bundle of papers.
“Doubtless,” he said loftily, “I should not be credited were I to translate these. But here,” and he scanned several of the papers, “is a letter of introduction in English. It is addressed to President Zachary Taylor from the American minister at Paris.”
Again, my brother, what an enormous silence! It was interrupted by a cry from the bartender, who had snatched the documents from M. Perley.
“Boys, this is no diddle,” said he. “This gent is the real thing!”
“He ain’t!” thundered the little grimy man, with incredulity.
“He is!” said the bartender. “I’ll be a son of a roe (i.e., biche) if he ain’t!”
Well, Maurice, you and I have seen how Paris mobs can change. Americans are even more emotional. In the wink of an eye hostility became frantic affection. My back was slapped, my hand wrung, my person jammed against the bar by a crowd fighting to order me more refreshment.
The name of Lafayette, again and again, rose like a holy diapason. In vain I asked why this should be so. They appeared to think I was joking, and roared with laughter. I thought of M. Thaddeus Perley, as one who could supply an explanation.
But in the first rush toward me M. Perley had been flung backward. He fell sprawling in some wet stains of tobacco juice on the floor, and now I could not see him at all. For myself, I was weak from lack of food. A full beaker of whisky, which I was obliged to drink because all eyes were on me, made my head reel. Yet I felt compelled to raise my voice above the clamor.
“Gentlemen,” I implored them, “will you hear me?”
“Silence for Lafayette!” said a big but very old man, with faded red whiskers. He had tears in his eyes, and he had been humming a catch called “Yankee Doodle.” “Silence for Lafayette!”
“Believe me,” said I, “I am full of gratitude for your hospitality. But I have business in New York, business of immediate and desperate urgency. If you will allow me to pay my reckoning . . .”
“Your money’s no good here, monseer,” said the bartender. “You’re going to get liquored-up good and proper.”
“But I have no wish, believe me, to become liquored up! It might well endanger my mission! In effect, I wish to go!”
“Wait a minute,” said the little grimy man, with a cunning look. “What is this here business?”
You, Maurice, have called me quixotic. I deny this. You have also called me imprudent. Perhaps you are right; but what choice was left to me?
“Has any gentleman here,” I asked, “heard of Mme Thevenet? Mme Thevenet, who lives at Number 23 Thomas Street, near Hudson Street?”
I had not, of course, expected an affirmative reply. Yet, in addition to one or two sniggers at mention of the street, several nodded their heads.
“Old miser woman?” asked a sportif character, who wore checkered trousers.
“I regret, sir, that you correctly describe her. Mme Thevenet is very rich. And I have come here,” cried I, “to put right a damnable injustice!”
Struggle as I might, I could not free myself.
“How’s that?” asked half a dozen.
“Mme Thevenet’s daughter, Mlle Claudine, lives in the worst of poverty at Paris. Madame herself has been brought here, under some spell, by a devil of a woman calling herself . . . Gentlemen, I implore you!”
“And
I bet you,” cried the little grimy man with the pistol, “you’re sweet on this daughter what’s-her-name?” He seemed delighted. “Ain’t you, now?”
How, I ask of all Providence, could these people have surprised my secret? Yet I felt obliged to tell the truth.
“I will not conceal from you,” I said, “that I have in truth a high regard for Mlle Claudine. But this lady, believe me, is engaged to a friend of mine, an officer of artillery.”
“Then what do you get out of it? Eh?” asked the grimy little man, with another cunning look.
The question puzzled me. I could not reply. But the bartender with the gold teeth leaned over.
“If you want to see the old Frenchie alive, monseer,” said he, “you’d better git.” (Sic, Maurice.) “I hearn tell she had a stroke this morning.”
But a dozen voices clamored to keep me there, though this last intelligence sent me into despair. Then up rose the big and very old man with the faded whiskers: indeed, I had never realized how old, because he seemed so hale.
“Which of you was with Washington?” said he, suddenly taking hold of the fierce little man’s neckcloth, and speaking with contempt. “Make way for the nephew of Lafayette!”
They cheered me then, Maurice. They hurried me to the door, they begged me to return, they promised they would await me. One glance I sought – nor can I say why – for M. Thaddeus Perley. He was sitting at a table by a pillar, under an open gas jet; his face whiter than ever, still wiping stains of tobacco juice from his cloak.
Never have I seen a more mournful prospect than Thomas Street, when my cab set me down there. Perhaps it was my state of mind; for if Mme Thevenet had died without a sou left to her daughter: you conceive it?
The houses of Thomas Street were faced with dingy yellow brick, and a muddy sky hung over the chimney pots. It had been warm all day, yet I found my spirit intolerably oppressed. Though heaven knows our Parisian streets are dirty enough, we do not allow pigs in them. Except for these, nothing moved in the forsaken street save a blind street musician, with his dog and an instrument called a banjo; but even he was silent too.
