The Chinese Orange Mystery

by Ellery Queen

  "Or in the coat either," reported the Sergeant.

  "No vest," said the Inspector thoughtfully. "Well, there wouldn't be with this summer suit Don't see many of 'em in these parts."

  The next series of exhibits consisted of shirts—linen and cotton, all with collarless neckbands and all, from their crisp appearance, fairly new.

  The next pile was of hard collars, narrow and shiny and old-fashioned.

  Beside it lay handkerchiefs.

  A little heap of clean, light tropical underwear.

  A half-dozen pairs of black cotton socks.

  A pair of worn black shoes, knobby and old.

  "That's Doc Prouty's corn-and-bunion diagnosis," murmured Ellery.

  All the garments from the bag were cheap. And all, with the exception of the suit and shoes, were new and bore the label of a Shanghai haberdasher.

  "Shanghai," said the Inspector thoughtfully. "That's China, El," in a wondering tone. "China!"

  "So I see. What's remarkable about that? Bears out the Missing Persons Bureau's guess that the man didn't hail from the United States."

  "I still think—" Then the Inspector stopped with a curious light in his eyes. "Say, this couldn't be a plant!"

  "Is that a question or an assertion?"

  "1 mean, is it possible it is?"

  Ellery raised his eyebrows. "I don't see how, if that clerk in the Chancellor checkroom maintains that it was really the victim who checked the bag."

  "I guess you're right. S'pose I'm just naturally suspicious." The Inspector sighed and looked over the assortment of clothing on his desk. "Well, it gives us something to work on, anyway. Sa-a-ay!" He eyed Ellery shrewdly. "What's coming off here? I thought it was you who were always so soft on that China tie-up in this case. Now you say it's not remarkable, or something. How come?"

  Ellery shrugged. "Don't interpret everything I say literally. Let's see that Bible."

  He delved among the miscellaneous objects from the bag and fished out a torn, worn, coverless book. It looked as if it had been used as ammunition in a major conflict.

  "Not a Bible. Ordinary cheap little breviary," he muttered. "Hmm. And those pamphlets—ah, religious tracts! We seem to have struck a very godly old gentleman, dad."

  "Godly old gentlemen rarely get themselves bumped off," said the Inspector dryly.

  "And this." Ellery put down the book and picked up another. "An ancient edition—London—of Hall Caine's The Christian. And here's Pearl Buck's The Good Earth in the original American edition that looks as if it had been kicked from here to Peiping. Who says that never the twain shall meet? . . . Queer."

  "What's queer about it? He'd probably read that Buck book if he came from China."

  Ellery started from a reverie. "Oh, certainly! I'm just communing with myself. I didn't mean the books." He fell silent, sucking his thumb and staring at the littered desk.

  "Might 'a' known," grumbled Sergeant Velie, looking disgusted, "that this would be a dud. Not even a clue to his monicker."

  "Oh, I wouldn't say that," said the Inspector with a faraway expression. "It's not so bad, Thomas. We'll know soon enough who he is." He sat down at his desk and pressed a button. "Ill cable the American consul in Shanghai right off, and I'll bet you it won't be long before we've got the whole story of this bird's life. After that it ought to be a cinch."

  "How d'ye figure that?"

  "The killer took the devil of a lot of pains to keep the dead man's identity a secret. So when we find it out I figure we'll strike something real hot. Oh, come in, come in. Take a cable to the American consul in Shanghai, China—"

  While the Inspector was dictating his cable Sergeant Velie drifted out of the office. Ellery folded his lean length in the Inspector's best chair and pulled out a cigaret and lighted it and smoked away with a deep frown. There was the most extraordinary expression on his face. Once he opened his eyes and re-examined what lay on the desk. Then he closed them again. He snuggled back in the chair until he rested on the nape of his neck—-a favorite position with him, which he assumed chiefly during his more passionately concentrative moments—and he remained that way without stirring until his father's deskman went out and the old gentleman turned back with a chuckle, rubbing his hands briskly together.

  "Well, well, it won't be long now," said the Inspector genially. "Just a question of time. I'm sure we've got it now, EL Everything clears itself up, when you think it out. For instance, that business of our check-up with all the shipping people. We concentrated on the Atlantic. That was a mistake. He probably came by the Pacific route and then took a train across the continent from San Francisco."

  "Then why," murmured Ellery, "didn't some genius like your Chancellor clerk remember him? I thought you'd rather thoroughly canvassed the railroad people."

  "I told you once that that's a tough job. Nothing wrong there. He was an ordinary-looking little coot, and I s'pose nobody noticed him, that's all. These people see thousands of faces every day. In a story I guess he'd have been spotted. But things don't always work out that way in real life." He leaned back, gazing dreamily at the ceiling. "Shanghai, eh? China. Guess you were right."

  "About what?"

  "Oh, nothing, nothing. I was just thinking. ... I s'pose we were wrong, at that, about this guy Cullinan. Can't sort of connect Paris and Shanghai. We'll be hearing from Chipper soon, and then we'll know definitely." He chattered on.

  He was brought to an abrupt realization of his surroundings by a sudden crash. He jerked upright, startled, to find Ellery on his feet.

  "What's the matter, for God's sake?"

  "Nothing's the matter," said Ellery. There was a rapt expression on his face. "Nothing at all. God's in his heaven, the morning's dew-pearled, all's right with the world. Good old world. Best little world. . . . I've got it."

  The Inspector gripped the edge of his desk. "Got what?"

  "The answer. The ruddy, bloody answer!"

  The Inspector sat still. Ellery stood rooted to the spot, his eyes clear and excited. Then he nodded to himself several times, vigorously. He smiled and went to the window and looked out.

  "And just what," said the Inspector in a dry voice, "is the answer?"

  "Most remarkable thing," drawled Ellery without turning round. "Perfectly amazing how things come to you. All you have to do is think about them long enough and, pop! something bursts and there it is. It's been there, staring us in the face from the very beginning. All the time! Why, it's so simple it's childish. The whole thing. I can scarcely believe it yet, myself."

  There was a long silence. Then Inspector Queen sighed. "I suppose that long string of chatter means you don't want to tell me."

  "I haven't begun to glimpse all the possibilities as yet. It's just that I've discovered the key to the whole business. It explains—"

  The Inspector's deskman came in with an envelope. Ellery Sat down again.

  "Well, the dead man isn't Cullinan," growled the old gentleman. "Here's a wire from the Prefect of Police in Paris. Chipper says Celina’s in Paris. On his uppers, but alive right enough. So that's that. What were you saying?"

  "I was saying," murmured Ellery, "that the key explains virtually every important mystery."

  The Inspector looked skeptical. "All that turning-around business—the clothes, the furniture in the room, all that?"

  "All that."

  "Just one little key, hey?"

  "Just one little key."

  Ellery rose and reached for his hat and coat. "But there's still something eluding me. And until I figure it out I can't do anything drastic, you see. So I'm going home, mon pere, and I shall get into my slippers and root myself before the fire and dig in until I catch that slippery fugitive. I've got only part of the answer now."

  There was another silence, this time distinctly awkward. It had always been a bone of contention between them that Ellery was stubbornly uncommunicative until the very denouement of a case. Neither pleas nor wild horses could drag a single explanatory word out
of him until he was mentally satisfied that he had built up a flawless and impenetrable argument. So there was really no point in asking questions.

  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 of! 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 bum 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 book 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 sedavtt 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.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE EXPERIMENT

  The 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."