The Seventh Bullet Read Online Free PDF Page B

I must admit to having been a bit startled to hear a woman of Mrs. Frevert’s refined nature speaking so intimately about firearms.
    “Don’t you understand, Mr. Holmes? That’s seven shots! Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, my brother’s alleged lone assassin, carried a single revolver that held only six bullets.”
    One needn’t have been Sherlock Holmes to see the anomaly once the facts were made known; but allowing himself a restrained smile, my friend got up, walked into his library, and returned amoment later with a small box full of as-yet unfiled newspaper cuttings. He rummaged through them for a moment until he found what he was looking for. “Allow me to read the following, Mrs. Frevert, from your own New York Times dated January 24, 1911:
    “David Graham Phillips, the novelist, was shot six times yesterday afternoon by Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough. ... After sending six bullets into Mr. Phillips’s chest, abdomen and limbs with a .32 calibre automatic revolver, Goldsborough put the weapon up to his own right temple and fired one of the four remaining bullets in the magazine, killing himself instantly.”
    “A ten-chamber, automatic revolver quite satisfactorily accounts for the six wounds to your brother and the assassin’s suicide, I should expect.”
    “It would, Mr. Holmes, except for Algeron Lee, the witness who said Goldsborough had been firing a six-shooter.” *
    For a brief moment Holmes was speechless. Only the cries of the birds above seemed a commentary on Mrs. Frevert’s assertion. “Even so, Mrs. Frevert,” he said finally, “the number of bullets could have been miscounted. Perhaps the doctors weren’t sure.”
    “They tracked the paths of all six bullets, Mr. Holmes. They were quite sure. And nearby witnesses confirmed there were six shots. As did the most authoritative witness of them all—my brother! Remember, he said that he could have beaten four bullets but that six were too many.”
    “An interesting theory, but merely hearsay,” Holmes said.
    “There is also the matter of Goldsborough’s diary, Mr. Holmes.The evidence that the police used to identify Goldsborough’s motive came from his journal, a notebook that was found by some person on the street.”
    “Yes,” Holmes said, “careless detective work. The journal presented the singular notion that Phillips was some kind of literary vampire sucking out Mr. Goldsborough’s identity. Phillips was becoming Goldsborough or Goldsborough, Phillips. I forget which. Hence the peculiar telegram your brother received. A belief based on the melodramatic novel The House of the Vampire by one George Sylvestre Viereck, I think.”
    “You’re absolutely correct, Mr. Holmes. And that diary, which was so conveniently found at the scene of the crime and in which all of this nonsense was discovered, was then handed over to an assistant district attorney who kept it the entire day of the murder. He held it so long that even the coroner was furious. What’s more, Mr. Holmes, the diary was written in a crooked and shaky handwriting sprinkled with blots of ink. Those jottings could have been made by anyone.”
    This latest charge certainly seemed a possibility to me. It also seemed to have piqued the curiosity of Sherlock Holmes. Instead of replying immediately as he had been doing, he sat rapt in thought.
    Sensing his vulnerability, Mrs. Frevert was quick to exploit her advantage. “Say you’ll help me, Mr. Holmes. Graham was too courageous a man to allow his murder to be dismissed so casually. In point of fact, he ruined the careers of many a fraud and changed the course of American history. Oh, that Goldsborough shot my brother I have no doubt. But that he acted alone I cannot believe. At the very least I want to know who put him up to it. Who hired him? And that seventh bullet raises an obviousquestion: If Goldsborough shot himself with one of the six, and Graham was struck six times, who fired the seventh? Who was the other assassin?