Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

“Somebody noticed. And I’ll admit I don’t know the man and you do, and sometimes I do jump to conclusions. He’s got to be smart to have the job he has, and a smart man isn’t going to think we’d mistake a thirty-eight slug for a twenty-two. Even if he panicked, he’d tell a better lie than that. And if he was too shocky to remember what happened, he’d admit it. So — I want to know what really happened.”

“He’s shocky,” I said. “But he knows what he did and what he saw. So...” I broke off, turned back to my search.

Sergeant Collins leaned forward. “Back up, that record you just tipped out, what’s—”

I was way ahead of him, and I intercepted his hand, automatically taking command of the scene because I’d done it so many times before. “Don’t touch it until I’ve photographed it.”

It was an R.G. twenty-two. It contained two rounds, both empty. Sergeant Collins, holding it gingerly, so as not to disturb fingerprints, sniffed at it. “Umm-hmm,” he said.

“I told you—”

“All right, you told me, but the fact remains she was killed with a thirty-eight and it’s about a hundred percent sure it was his. Anyhow, if that gun was fired in here, where’d the bullets go? For that matter, where’d they come from? I didn’t find any twenty-two ammo here, and if you had, you’d have told me already.”

I looked slowly around the room, up at the ceiling, across the walls, down at the bloody mess on the couch and the floor, and quite suddenly I knew what happened, knew exactly what happened just as well as if I’d been here watching. Now all I had to do was prove it, but that depended on a lot of things. “Did they do a gunpowder residue on her hands?” I asked.

“No, just on his. Do you want one on her? You don’t usually get anything from a twenty-two, don’t you know that?”

“An R.G. you will,” I answered. “And you’re lucky if it’s not shaving lead.” I had a long scar across my thumb from test-firing a misaligned R.G. 22. I would not soon forget the gunpowder that accompanied the sliver of lead thrown backwards toward my hand.

“So you want me to have somebody—”

“Not now,” I said, standing again. “I’ll do it myself. Come on, I know what happened here. Have you got—” And I went on giving orders, as I had done for years up until seven months ago, and neither the sergeant nor I quite noticed. “I don’t know what kind of equipment you have here, do you have a trace-metal kit, because if you don’t we’re going to have to—”

“We have one,” Sergeant Collins said slowly, “but I don’t think I ever saw it used. What do you mean, you know what happened?”

“I’ll tell you later. Let’s get a gunpowder-residue kit and a trace-metal kit and go to the morgue.”

“What are you trying to prove?”

“You’d never believe me, so I’m just going to have to show you.”

“You want me to turn off all the lights in the morgue?” the attendant asked incredulously, thirty minutes later. “What are you, some kind of—” He shut up then, catching the sergeant’s eye fixed on him.

“After I spray this stuff on her hands and turn on the black light,” I said, “I sure do. Okay, now — look.”

In the darkness, the dead woman’s hands glowed eerily. On her right palm, outlined with the glow, were the initials “R.G.” from the metal inset on the plastic grips of an R.G. 22. And on her left palm, also glowing, was the horse insignia of a Colt .38. Her right index finger and left thumb both glowed with the outlines of triggers.

“She shot herself,” I said.

“But how?” Steve demanded an hour later, sitting at the sergeant’s desk in blue jail coveralls.

“Once we knew what we were looking for, it was easy to find,” I told him. “She knew theater. She knew props. You load a bullet with soft wax and a primer, and it makes a satisfactory pop and does little or no damage. In a box that had been opened and resealed, we found an entire case of prop bullets — and she’d used at least two. The wax was spattered on the wall about three feet from the front door, and on the ceiling above the couch. You can fill a balloon with animal blood and puncture it — we got the lab people out of bed, and they said the blood on the couch was beef blood.”

“But how—”

I went on to tell him how I’d pulled the balloon and the nail file she’d used to puncture it out from under the cushions. “She’d disabled the phone on purpose, after she called you. Her fingerprints were on the roll the tape came from; we found them as soon as we thought to look. She knew where you always put your gun when you came in. She knew how you’d react, thinking she was hurt. When you ran for the phone, she stuffed the balloon behind the sofa cushions and threw the twenty-two behind the records — it’s got her prints on it and nobody else’s. Then she grabbed your gun — her prints are on it too, overlaying yours — and sat on the couch facing in towards the back of it, held the pistol at arm’s length so there wouldn’t be muzzle burns and so that the gun would be on the couch when she landed on the floor, and pulled the trigger.”