The Chinese Orange Mystery

Inspector Queen was a little bird of a man¯a gray-plumed and rather aged bird with a bird’s uncanny unwinking eyes and a stiff gray mustache under a small beak that might have been chiselled out of horn. He possessed, too, something of the bird’s capacity for freezing into stone when the occasion called for immobility, and a quick pattering gait like the hop of a bird when action was demanded. And at those times when he stepped out of character and did not growl, he even cheeped. Large red men had been known to quail at his gentlest chirp, however, since there was something formidable about the old gentleman’s very birdliness, as it were; so that the detectives under his wing feared as well as loved him.

Now they feared far more than they loved, for his chirp had a harsh crackle in it that bespoke irritation. It was all very well for the due process of a murder investigation to be under way, with his men running over the room like a pack of sniffing dogs; but the annoying puzzle of the crime that was backwards kept staring him disagreeably in the face. He felt an unaccustomed futility.

He directed operations absently, from long habit; and all the while the fingerprint detail were spraying the room, the official photographer was snapping the body and the furniture and the door, Assistant Medical Examiner Prouty was kneeling beside the dead man, and the homicide men under Sergeant Velie were gathering names and statements, the old gentleman was wondering how on earth a mere cop could be expected to find plausible reasons for the shockingly implausible phenomena of this murder-case. He was too cautious to dismiss without reflection the topsy-turvy nature of the clues as purposeless vagaries of an insane mind. But what else was a man to think?

“What do you think, son?” he snapped to Ellery while his men filled the room with their clatter.

“I don’t think anything yet,” Ellery said impatiently. He was staring morosely at his cigaret as he leaned against the sill of the open window. “No, that’s not honest. I’m thinking a host of things, most of them so abominably far-fetched that even I hesitate to go to work on them.”

“Must be pretty far-fetched in that case,” grunted the Inspector. “I’m going to forget all about this crazy backwards business. It’s too much for my simple brain. I’ll go to work the usual way¯identity, connections, motive, alibis, availability, possible witnesses.”

“Good luck,” murmured Ellery. “That’s sensible. But if you should collar the chap who did this amazing job right now I’d still want to know what the reason for the backwards folderol is.”

“You and me and the Commissioner, too,” said the Inspector grimly. “Ah, Thomas. What have you got from those people?”

Sergeant Velie loomed before them. “This thing,” he announced in his cavernous voice, which held a note of wonder, “is the darbs.”

“Well?”

“This bird Nye, the house manager, never saw the stiff before, he says. Nor any of the clerks or hops. He wasn’t stayin’ at the Chancellor here, that much is sure. One of the elevator-men remembered takin’ him up in his car around a quarter to six, and this fat old dame Mrs. Shane on the floor here directed him to Kirk’s office. He asked for Kirk by name¯Donald Kirk, he said.”

“Kirk’s always receiving strangers,” said Ellery absently. “He uses these two rooms as an auxiliary office. He’s a collector of postage stamps and precious stones, dad.”

“One of them,” sniffed the Inspector. “Publisher, isn’t he?”

“The Mandarin Press was founded by his father¯that howling old buzzard with chronic rheumatism¯but the old man’s been retired for years and Kirk and Felix Berne, who was taken into partnership by Dr. Kirk toward the end of his regime, run the Press now. Don handles all the really private matters connected with The Mandarin right here.”

“Sweet layout! Books, stamps, and bawbies. Well, Thomas, what are you waiting for?”

“Well,” said the gigantic Sergeant hastily, “Mrs. Shane told the fat little duck where to go and he went. Miss Diversey, Dr. Kirk’s nurse, was in the office with Osborne, Kirk’s assistant. She heard the little guy ask for Kirk, then she lammed. He wouldn’t tell Osborne what he wanted or anything, so Osborne showed him in here through the communicatin’ door there and left him, closin’ the door. And that’s the end of the little fat guy.”

“You know the rest, dad,” said Ellery with a gloomy nod. “We found the door bolted when we tried it from the office side. Bolted from inside this room, as you can see.”

The Inspector eyed the only other door, the one to the corridor, and then looked over Ellery’s shoulder. “Nothing doing on the windows,” he muttered. “Only a human fly could climb up here from that setback, and human flies aren’t murderin’ anybody this season. Not even a ledge out there. So it’s the corridor-door. Did you take a good look at that bolt, Thomas?”