Chinese Orange Mystery (25 page)

And yet the Inspector felt chagrined. There all the time! “What gave you the tip-off, then?” he demanded with irritation. “I’m not the world’s biggest dope, and yet I’ll be switched if I can see—”

“The bag.”

“The bag!” The Inspector looked at the top of his desk in bewilderment. “But I thought you said the answer was there all the time. And we only found the bag a couple of hours ago.”

“True,” said Ellery, “but the bag served the double purpose of setting off the spark of association and confirming what went before when the result of the conflagration was assimilated.” He went to the door thoughtfully.

“Talk English, will you? Just how much
do
you know? Who is the dead man?”

Ellery laughed. “Don’t let me dazzle you with my display of mental pyrotechnics. I’m not a crystal-gazer. His. name is the least important part of the solution. On the other hand, his title—”

“His title!”

“Precisely. I think I know why he was murdered, too, although I haven’t given that phase of it sufficient thought. The big thing bothering me at the moment is
how
, not who or why.”

The Inspector gasped. “Do you realize what you’re—. What d’ye mean, El, for jiminy’s sake? Have you gone batty?”

“Not at all. There’s a vital problem tied up there somehow; I don’t know exactly how at the moment. That’s going to be my job until I get the answer.”

“But you
do
know how he was murdered!”

“Strangely enough, I don’t.”

The Inspector bit his fingernails in a fever of baffled uncertainty. “You’ll be the death of me yet with your damn’ puzzles. Why, you act as if you didn’t even care what the American consul is going to cable me!”

“I don’t.”

“Cripe! You mean to say it doesn’t make any difference to you what he finds out about the dead man?”

“Not,” said Ellery with a smile, “a particle.” He opened the door. “I could tell you right now, as a matter of fact, what his reply in substance will be.”

“Either I’m crazy or you are.”

“Isn’t lunacy a question of point of view? Now, now, dad, you know how I am. I’m not entirely sure of my ground yet.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to burn up waiting. You’re sure, now, you
do
know who pulled the murder? You haven’t gone off half-cocked on some wild notion?”

Ellery tugged at the brim of his hat. “Know who did it? What put that idea in your head? Of course I don’t know who did it.”

The Inspector sank back, utterly overwhelmed. “All right, I give up. When you start lying to me—”

“But I’m not lying,” said Ellery in a hurt voice. “I really don’t know. Oh, I might hazard a guess, but. … That doesn’t say, however,” he went on, his lips compressing, “that I
won’t
know. I’ve a remarkable start; simply unbelievable. I must find the answer now. It would be unthinkable that after this—”

“According to what you say,” said the Inspector bitterly, “you don’t know any of the really important things. I thought you had something.”

“But I have,” said Ellery in a patient tone.

“Well, what the devil did those two African spears sticking up the dead man’s backside mean, then?” The Inspector half-rose from his chair, shocked by the look on Ellery’s face. “For the love of Mike! What’s the matter now?”

“The spears,” muttered Ellery, staring blindly at his father. “The spears.”

“But—”

“Now I do know how. …”

“I know, but—”

Ellery’s face came alive. His cheeks screwed up, and his eyes blazed, and his lips trembled. Then he howled like a maniac: “Eureka! That’s the answer! Those blessed spears!”

And with a whoop he dashed out of the office, leaving a dazed and collapsed Inspector behind.

CHALLENGE TO THE READER—

Somewhere along the trail, during the creation of my past novels, I lost a good idea. Those kindly persons who—it seems ages ago—discovered that there was a gentleman named Queen writing detective stories and who continued to read that worthy’s works will recall that in the early books I made a point of injecting at a strategic place in each hook a challenge to the reader.

Well, something happened. I don’t know precisely what. But I remember that after one novel was completed and set up and the galleys corrected some one at the publisher’s—a discerning soul indeed—called my attention to the fact that the usual
CHALLENGE
was missing. It seems that I had forgotten to write one. I supplied the deficiency hastily, rather abashed, and it was stuck into the offending volume at the last moment. Then conscience pricked me and I engaged in a little research. I found that I had forgotten the
CHALLENGE
in the book
BEFORE
that, too.
LONGA DIES NON SEDAVIT VULNERA MENTIS
, either, believe me.

Now my publisher is very firm about the integrity of the Queen books, and so I give you … the
CHALLENGE
. It’s really a simple matter. I maintain that at this point in your reading of
THE CHINESE ORANGE MYSTERY
you have all the facts in your possession essential to a clear solution of the mystery. You should be able, here, now, henceforward, to solve the puzzle of the murder of the nameless little man in Donald Kirk’s anteroom. Everything is there; no essential clue or fact is missing. Can you put them all together and—not make them spell “mother,” to be sure—by a process of logical reasoning arrive at the one and only possible solution?

ELLERY QUEEN.

T
HE HUMAN BRAIN IS
a curious instrument. It is remarkably like the sea, possessing deeps and shallows—cold dark profundities and sunny crests. It has its breakers dashing in to shore, and its sullen backwashes. Swift currents race beneath a surface ruffled by minor winds. And there is a constant pulsing rhythm in it very like the tides. For it possesses periods of ebb, when all inspiration recedes into the blind spumy distance; and periods of flow, when strong thoughts come hurtling in, resistless and supreme.

In another metaphor Daniel Webster once said that mind is the great lever of all things; that human thought is the process by which human ends are alternately answered. But a lever suggests action, which inevitably suggests reaction; and Webster points out by indirection that the entire process is one of alternation, of fluctuation between a period of inertia and a period of activity.

Now Mr. Ellery Queen, who labored habitually within the confines of his skull, had long since found in his researches that this was a universal law, and that to achieve intellectual light it was mandatory that he struggle through a phase of intellectual darkness. The problem of the queer little dead man was a singular example in his experience. For days on end his brain wrestled through a slippery fog, groping for signposts; willing, even eager, but impotent. And suddenly there was the light staring coldly into his puckered eyes.

He wasted no time or breath on gratitude to the Wielder of the Cosmic Balance. The reaction had come. The light was there. But the light was still obscured by the whipping tails of the fog. The fog must be dissipated, and it could be dissipated by only one process—concentration.

And so, being a logical man, he concentrated.

Ellery spent the rest of that momentous day draped in his favorite dressing-gown, a fetid garment redolent of old nicotine and haphazardly studded with tiny brown-edged holes, the visible signs of thousands of long-perished cigaret sparks. He lounged on the nape of his neck before a fire in the living-room, his toes toasting cosily, eying the ceiling with bright distant eyes and automatically flinging cigaret-butts into the flames as they burned down to his fingertips. There was no pose in this; for one thing, there was no one to pose for, since the Inspector was sulkily occupied with another case at Headquarters and Djuna was seated somewhere in the musty darkness of a motion picture theatre following the hectic fortunes of one of his innumerable bowlegged heroes. For another, Ellery was not thinking of himself.

It was curious, for instance, that occasionally he screwed his eyes downward a little to study the long crossed swords hanging above the fireplace. They were aged relics of his father’s past—a gift to the Inspector from a German friend harking back to student days in Heidelberg. Certainly they could have no connection with the case in hand. And yet he studied them long and earnestly; although it is to be confessed that to his transfiguring eyes they assumed the menacing shape of
Impi
spears, broad-bladed and wicked.

Then the period of inspection passed, and he snuggled deeper into the chair and gave himself up wholly to disembodied thought.

At four in the afternoon he sighed, roused himself, creaked out of the chair, flung another cigaret into the fire, and went to the telephone.

“Dad?” he croaked when Inspector Queen answered. “Ellery. I want you to do something for me.”

“Where are you?” snapped the Inspector.

“Home. I—”

“What the devil are you doing?”

“Thinking. Look here—”

“About what? I thought you’d settled the whole business in your mind.” The Inspector sounded faintly bitter.

“Now, now,” said Ellery in a weary voice, “don’t be that way. I didn’t mean to offend you, you sensitive old coot. I really have been working. Anything new, by the way?”

“Not a blessed thing. Well, what is it? I’m busy. Some tramp was shot up on Forty-fifth Street and I’ve got my hands full.”

Ellery gazed dreamily at the wall above the fireplace. “Have you any connections with some reliable theatrical costumer who can be trusted to do a confidential job and keep his mouth shut?”

“Costum—! What’s up now, for cripe’s sake?”

“An experiment in the interests of justice. Well, have you?”

“I suppose I can rustle one,” grumbled the Inspector. “You and your experiments! Johnny Rosenzweig over on Forty-ninth once did a job for me. I guess you can rely on him. What’s the dope?”

“I want a dummy.”

“A what?”

“A dummy. Not the human kind,” chuckled Ellery. “A stuffed shirt, inarticulate, will do. Here, I’m confusing you. Get this Rosenzweig friend of yours to make up a dummy of the same general size and height as the murdered man.”

“Now I know you’ve gone nuts,” complained the Inspector. “You sure this is for the case? Or are you workin’ on some far-fetched, crazy detective-story idea for a book? If it’s that, El, I can’t take time off to bother—”

“No, no, I assure you this will prove a stepping-stone toward the high place in which New York justice sits enthroned. Can you get him to work fast?”

“I s’pose so. Just a dummy the size and height of the dead man, hey?” The old gentleman sounded sarcastic. “Anything else? How about a little bridgework? Or some artistic modelling on the nose?”

“No, seriously. There
is
something else. You’ve got the weight of the dead man, haven’t you?”

“Sure. It’s in Doc Prouty’s report.”

“Very good. I want the all-over weight to be identical with the victim’s. He’ll have to do a clever job. See if he can’t approximate the same weight of limbs, torso, and head. Especially the head. That’s most important. Think he can do it?”

“Might. He’ll probably have to get Prouty’s help in the weights.”

“Be sure to tell him to keep the dummy flexible—”

“What d’ye mean?”

“I mean I don’t want it in one stiff straight piece. Whatever he uses for the weighting—iron, lead—should not run in a single piece from head to foot. Let him use separate weights for the feet, the legs, the torso, the arms, and the head. In that way we’ll have a dummy which in virtually every particular will be a facsimile of the dead man’s body. That’s vital, dad.”

“I guess he can string ’em together with wire or something,” muttered the Inspector, “which’ll bend. Anything else?”

Ellery chewed his lower lip. “Yes. Have the dummy dressed in the dead man’s clothes. That’s the theatre in me coming out.”

“Put on backwards?”

“Good heavens, yes! The dummy should look precisely like our little corpse.”

“Say,” snapped the Inspector, “don’t tell me you’re going to pull one of those old psychological gags of confronting the suspects with what seems to be the corpse risen from the dead! By thunder, El, that’s—”

“Now that,” said Ellery sadly, “is the most unkindest cut of all. Have you really such a low estimate of my mentality? Of course I haven’t any such notion. This is an experiment in the name of science, dear father. No hocus-pocus about it. The theatre I referred to was an afterthought. Understood?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I guess so. Where d’ye want the thing?”

“Have it sent up here, to the apartment. I have work for it.”

The Inspector sighed. “All right.
All
right. But sometimes I think that all that thinking you say you do has gone to your head. Ha, ha!” And with a sad chuckle he hung up.

Ellery smiled, stretched, yawned, wandered into the bedroom, flung himself on his bed, and fell asleep within sixty seconds.

The dummy was delivered by Sergeant Velie at 9:30 that night.

“Ah!” cried Ellery, seizing the end of the long heavy crate. “Lord, that’s heavy! What’s in this, a gravestone?”

“Well, the Inspector said it was supposed to weigh as much as the stiff, Mr. Queen,” said the Sergeant. “All right, bud,” and he nodded to the man who had helped him carry the crate upstairs. The man touched his cap and went away. “Here. Let’s dig him out of that.”

They set to work and under Djuna’s awestruck eyes removed something that might have been a man. It was swathed in brown paper like an Egyptian mummy. Ellery stripped the wrappings away and gasped in astonishment. The dummy slipped out of his arms and promptly proceeded to crumple section by section in a heap on the living-room rug, quite like a dead man.

“Lord, it’s—it’s
he
!”

For there, smiling up at them, was the unctuous face of the stout little man.

“Papeer mashay,” exclaimed the Sergeant, gazing proudly at the dummy. “This guy Rosenzweig knows his onions. Reconstructed that there face from the photos and did one swell job with his paints and brushes. Look at that hair!”