The Chinese Orange Mystery

by Ellery Queen

  "For some time, comparatively speaking, this most essential point escaped me. I knew the answer was there, if only I could spot it. Then I remembered one or two apparently inexplicable phenomena of the crime which no one, including myself, had been able to interpret. An impetus was provided by a chance question of the Inspector's. And an experiment revealed the whole thing."

  Without warning he stooped and removed the lid of the crate. Sergeant Velie silently stepped forward; and between them they raised the dummy to a sitting position in the crate.

  Marcella Kirk uttered a faint shriek and shrank against Macgowan beside her. Miss Diversey gulped noisily. Miss Temple lowered her eyes. Mrs. Shane breathed a prayer and Miss Llewes looked sickish. Even the men had turned pale.

  "Don't be alarmed," murmured Ellery, rising. "Just a pleasant fancy of mine, and a rather interesting sample of the dummy-maker's art. Please pay the very closest attention."

  He went to the door leading to the adjoining office, opened it, vanished, and an instant later reappeared with the paper-thin Indian mat which had lain in front of the door on the office side. This he deposited carefully over the threshold, one-third in the anteroom and the other two-thirds in the office. Then he got to his feet, took from his right pocket a coil of thin tough-looking cord, and held it up for their inspection. He nodded, smiled at them, and proceeded to measure off one-third the length of the cord. He then wound the cord at that point about the protruding metal knob of the bolt on the anteroom side of the door. The cord now dangled from the knob—a short length and a long length, held to the metal protrusion by the single winding. There was no knot of any kind, as he demonstrated in pantomime. Ellery took up the short end and passed it through the crack under the door, over the mat into the office beyond. He closed the door without touching the knob. It was shut but unbolted.

  They were watching him like children at a puppet-show, wide-eyed, eager, puzzled. No one spoke, and all that could be heard were the soft sounds of Ellery's movements and the heavy uneven breathing.

  Ellery continued his demonstration in the same pregnant silence. He stepped back and surveyed the two sections of bookcase which flanked the doorway. He studied them for a moment, and then sprang forward and began to tug at the case to his right as he faced the door. He pulled the case back along the right-hand wall about four feet. He returned and began to move the bookcase on the left of the doorway, as they saw it. He tugged and shoved until he had it jutting out into the room—pulled toward the door until its left side at the rear touched the hinges of the door, its right side swung outward into the room a short way, the whole bookcase forming an acute angle with the door. Then he stepped back with a nod of satisfaction.

  "You will observe," he said briskly in the silence, "that both bookcases are now exactly as we found them when the body was discovered."

  As if this were a signal, Sergeant Velie stooped and lifted the dummy out of the crate. Despite its weight he carried it as he might have borne a child. They saw now that the dummy was dressed in the dead man's garments, and that they were on backwards. Ellery said something to the Sergeant in a low voice and Velie set the body upright on its feet. He balanced it erect, grotesquely, with one huge splayed finger.

  "Let go, Sergeant," drawled Ellery.

  They stared. Velie withdrew his finger and the body collapsed, sinking vertically until it lay in a heap on the floor where an instant before it had been standing.

  "The muscleless inertia of the very dead," said Ellery cheerfully. "Good work, Sergeant. We assume that rigor mortis has not yet set in. Our demonstration has proved it. Now for the second stage."

  Velie lifted the dummy and Ellery went to the crate and came up with the two impi spears which had been found on the body. These he thrust up the dummy's trouser-legs and under the coat until they emerged from behind the head, their wicked blades far above the papier-mache skull. Then the Sergeant carried the dummy over and propped it up in the angle made by the door and the left-hand bookcase, facing toward the right. It stood erect very stiffly, the two spearheads jutting like horns from the coat. The feet barely rested on the edge of the Indian mat.

  Sergeant Velie stepped back with a hard grin on his lips.

  Then Ellery proceeded about a curious business. He took the dangling end of the cord—the long end—and began carefully to wind it about the haft of the spear nearer the door, just below the blade. He wound it about the spear twice. They saw then that there was a slight slack in the length leading from the spear to the bolt of the door—a graceful dip in the suspended cord.

  "Observe, please, that there is no knot or noose in the cord about the spear," said Ellery. Then he stooped and pushed the remaining end now dangling from the spear—pushed it, as he had pushed the short end some time before—through the crack between the mat on the threshold and the bottom of the door until its end vanished into the office.

  "Don't move, any one," snapped Ellery, rising. "Just keep your eyes on that dummy and the door."

  He reached over, grasped the knob, and gently pulled the door to him. As he pulled, the slack in the cord grew looser. When the door was sufficiently ajar, Ellery very cautiously stooped, wriggled under the cord, and squeezed through the narrow opening, disappearing from view. Then the door softly clicked back—shut but unbolted.

  They watched.

  For thirty seconds nothing happened.

  And then the mat under the door moved. It was being jerked out of the anteroom into the office beyond the door.

  It caught them completely off guard. Their mouths opened and remained open. They strained to see what was apparently a miracle. It happened so quickly that it was over almost before they could realize the significance of the process.

  For with the jerk of the mat several things occurred simultaneously. The dummy trembled, began to topple, and its stiffly speared body began to slide along the top edge of the jutting bookcase in the direction of and a little outward from the door. But a split-second later something happened to correct the sideward slip. The slack in the cord from the spear to the bolt tightened and pulled the dummy back, halting it. For a moment it swayed, then started to fall rigidly forward on its face parallel with the door. The slack in the cord from the spear to the bolt diminished until the head was about a foot from the floor. At this point the cord became taut and the miracle occurred. With the tightening, the pull of the dummy's weight exerted as the dummy fell forward caused the bolt to slide in the same direction, from left to right as they viewed it, into the catch on the jamb)

  The door was securely bolted.

  And while they gaped, incredulous, they saw something else that was in itself almost as profound a miracle. They saw the short end of the cord begin to move, as if it were being pulled from the other side of the door. There was a moment of resistance at the coil about the bolt-knob, and then the cord broke at the point of resistance. Since there was no knot there, the broken piece—still attached to the spear—fell dangling to the floor between the dummy and the door. The remaining piece, whose end had been jerked, vanished under the door as it was pulled from the other side.

  And then they saw the other length—the two-thirds length wound about the spear—tighten about the haft of the spear for a moment and then very smoothly begin to slide around, the dangling end which had just broken off from the knob of the bolt growing shorter and shorter as the same invisible hand pulled the two-thirds length into the office from the other side of the door. And finally the dangling end reached the haft, and glided around, and fell free, and in its turn vanished through the crack under the door. A moment later the mat which had caused the body to fall in the first place also vanished.

  And the dummy lay just as the body had lain, and the door was bolted, and nothing remained but the bookcases and the spears and the position of the body to show how it was possible for a door to have been bolted from its other side.

  Ellery came running back and dashed into the anteroom from the corridor. They were still glaring at
the dummy and the door.

  The detectives stood against the wall. The Inspector had his hand near his hip-pocket.

  Some one had risen, pale as the sullen morning sky through the window, and was whispering in a cracked voice: "But I—don't see—how you—could have known."

  "The spears told me," said Ellery in the stupefied silence. "The spears and the position of the two bookcases flanking the doorway to the office. When I assembled the facts I saw the truth. The missionary was murdered not where we found him but in another part of the room; that was established very early by the traces of blood on the floor. So the question arose: Why had the murderer moved the body to the door? Obviously because he had a use for the body at that point The next question was: Why had the murderer shoved the right-hand bookcase along the right-hand wall farther away from the door? The answer to that could only be: to make room in front of the right-hand wall near the door. The third question was: Why had the murderer moved the left-hand bookcase up to the hinge-side of the door and pulled the right side out into the room, making an acute angle with the door? And the answer to that puzzled me until I remembered the spears. . . .

  "The spears were stuck through the victim's clothes from shoes to head. They are solid wood; they made the body almost like an animal's corpse strung on stout poles. They stiffened the body; they produced, in a way, artificial rigor mortis. A dead man falling from an upright position would crumple in sections to land in a shapeless heap. This dead man, with the spears to stiffen his limp corpse into one piece, would fall in one piece, rigidly. But the right-hand bookcase had been moved back to leave space on the right of the door. Then the dead man was intended to fall before the door, at least part of him coming to rest in that cleared space. And he was intended to fall parallel with the door, otherwise there would have been no necessity for clearing a space to the side of the door. What was the left-hand bookcase moved for? Why that angle, patently deliberately made? I saw then that if the dead man had been set on his feet in that angle he would, if something occurred to move his body, have had to fall roughly toward that cleared space on the other side of the doorway!

  "But why should the murderer want him to fall precisely that way, let alone fall at all?" Ellery drew a long breath. "And, impossible as it seemed, the only logical answer I could give to that question was: The murderer, who had removed the body from another part of the room to the door, wanted the dead man to do something to that door in falling. . . . The rest was a matter of concentration and experiment. The only thing that can be done to a door which might conceivably be of importance to a criminal would be to lock it; in this case, to bolt it. But why, for heaven's sake, make a dead man bolt the door when the murderer himself could have bolted it from this room and made his escape by the other door, that one leading to the corridor from this room?"

  The cracked voice said: "I—never—thought—"

  Ellery said deliberately: "The only possible answer was that the murderer couldn't or wouldn't leave this room by that corridor door. The murderer wanted to leave this room by way of the door to the office. And he wanted every one to believe that he had left by the corridor door, that the office, door had been bolted all the time, that whoever was in the office had not appeared in the corridor outside the office therefore could not apparently have been the criminal!"

  James Osborne covered his face with his hands and said: "Yes, I did it. I murdered him."

  "You see," said Ellery a moment later, regarding the cowering man with pitying eyes as the others, transfixed by horror, stared at Osborne, "the problem resolved itself simply into a logical analysis. The use of the spears and the shifting of the bookcases and the moved body of the dead missionary proved that the murderer must have left the anteroom after the crime by the office door. The murderer, therefore, was in the office directly after the murder. But, by his own admission, Osborne was the only constant tenant of that office during the murder-period! The visitors—Macgowan, Miss Sewell, Miss Temple, Miss Diversey—were eliminated because had one of them been the murderer he or she could have left the scene of the crime by the corridor door from this room and therefore could have bolted the office door from the inside of this room without having to resort to the mechanical method Osborne used. Or, to put it another way, since any one who could have left this room by the corridor door could have bolted the office door without resorting to the mechanical method, then any one who could have used the corridor door, instead of being suspect for the crime, as we had assumed all along, became actually innocent.

  "The only one who could not use the corridor door of the anteroom without being seen by Mrs. Shane as he returned to the office was Osborne. You, Osborne, were therefore the only possible suspect, the only one for whom the door trick and the spears were necessary, and the only one who benefited from the creation of the illusion that the criminal had to leave the murder-room via the corridor door. Why didn't you leave well enough alone—leave that office door unbolted?"

  "Because," choked Osborne, "then I knew I would be the first one suspected. But if it was bolted from the other side, they'd—you'd never suspect me. Even now I can't see how—"

  "I thought so," murmured Ellery. "The complex mind, Osborne. As to how, it was a matter of trial and error until I hit the winning combination; I simply put myself in your place and figured out what you would have to do. . . . Now you see, ladies and gentlemen, why it was impossible for Osborne to do the simple thing and get a necktie somewhere to put on the tieless dead man. He couldn't use his own, of course, and he had no place to get another, because he couldn't afford to be seen leaving that office of his in sight of Mrs. Shane, even casually. He might have slipped out by the anteroom-corridor door, but then he couldn't risk all the time required and the almost certain eventuality that he would be seen—if, say, he went downstairs to buy a tie. He couldn't go to Kirk's apartment, either, for the same reason. And he didn't live at the Chancellor—Kirk once told him in my presence to 'go home' —so he couldn't secure one of his own ties. ... I suppose, Osborne, you took the dead man's vest and secreted it in the office there somewhere until you could safely burn it with all the other things you took from his clothes?"

  "Yes," sighed Osborne in the queerest, mildest way. And Ellery noted, with a faint perplexity, that Miss Diversey looked like death and seemed about to faint.

  "You see," he murmured, "if the man was a priest and wore the clerically inverted collar and no necktie, he must also have been wearing the special clerical vest which comes up to the neck. I knew then that the murderer had to take it away with him, since a clerical vest would have given the whole thing away; but I knew it much too late to prove anything by it. The opportunity to search every one had long since gone. . . . Osborne, why did you kill an inoffensive little man—you, who aren't the killer type at all? You did it for a poor return, Osborne; you would have had to sell the stamp undercover. But even if you could have got fifty thousand—"

  "Ozzie—Osborne, for God's sake," whispered Donald Kirk, "I didn't dream—"

  "It was for her," said Osborne in the same queer mild way. "I was a failure. She was the first woman who ever paid any attention to me. And I'm a poor man. She even said that she wouldn't think of marrying a man who couldn't provide the —the comforts. . . . When the opportunity came—" He licked his lips. "It was a temptation. He—he wrote a letter months ago addressed to Mr. Kirk from China. I opened the letter, as I open all—all Mr. Kirk's mail. He wrote all about the stamp, about resigning from his mission, about coming to New York—he was an American originally—to sell the stamp and retire. I—I saw the opportunity. I knew that the stamp, if what he said was true, would . . ." Osborne shuddered. No one said anything. "I planned it then, from the beginning. I corresponded with him, using Mr. Kirk's name. I never told Mr. Kirk a word about him. I didn't tell her. . . . We conducted a long correspondence. So I learned that he didn't have any relatives or friends in this country who could inquire about him if he disappeared. I learned when he was coming, t
old him when to come, gave him—sort of—advice. I never knew till he actually showed up—till I had killed him, when his scarf fell off—that he was a priest, with no tie, with a turned-around collar. I'd thought he was just a missionary—an ordinary missionary. Methodist, maybe, or Baptist."

  "Yes?" prompted Ellery gently, as the man fell silent.

  "When I let him into this room I went back after a white, told him I hadn't realized it before, but he must be the man from China, and that I knew all about the stamp, that Mr. Kirk had told me, and all that. Then he got friendly and unbent and said that his brother-missionaries at the Chinese mission knew all about the stamp and that he had gone to America to sell it to Mr. Kirk. So when I killed him I had to make sure nobody could find out who he was."

  "Why?" asked Ellery.

  "Because if the police could trace him to that Chinese mission—it was very likely they could if they knew he was a priest and just arrived—they'd learn from the other priests about the stamp and why he had come—and they'd investigate Mr. Kirk and me, and Mr. Kirk really wouldn't know about the stamp and I'd be accused. . . . Maybe they'd find some of my letters, and trace the handwriting of the signatures back to me. . . . I—I couldn't face all that. I'm not an actor. I knew I'd give way. ... So I thought of all that backwards business in a flash. But about the door and the cord and the body and things I—I'd figured out long before and had everything ready. When it was all over and I had him—him dead standing there, I tried to get it to work, but it wouldn't at first—the cord wasn't just right—and I tried and tried until finally it worked. I couldn't get a tie. . . ." His voice was growing fainter and fainter until it died away entirely. There was a dazed expression on his face; he seemed unable to grasp the horror of his position.

  Ellery turned aside, sick at heart. "The woman was Miss Diversey?" he murmured. "If you didn't tell her, then she couldn't have had anything to do with this, of course."