Chinese Orange Mystery (16 page)

“And other collectors didn’t know he had it?” asked Ellery.

“I’m not sure, but I don’t think any one did, Mr. Queen. Father didn’t know many collectors, and after a while he lost most of his interest in his own collection. … It just mouldered away in our attic. I remember my
amah
used to speak to me reproachfully about it.”

“Imagine that,” muttered Macgowan. “That’s the way the great rarities are lost. Lord, that’s—that’s almost criminal negligence! I beg your pardon, Miss Temple.”

“Oh, it’s all right, Mr. Macgowan,” said Jo with a sigh. “I suppose it was. When father died I sold most of the collection—it didn’t bring much, but I needed money, you see. Somehow, though, I couldn’t bring myself to sell the Foochow. It was the only item that father ever talked about with anything like enthusiasm, and I—I suppose I held on to it out of silly sentiment.”

“To whom,” demanded Ellery, “did you sell the others?”

“Oh, to some dealer in Pekin. I forget his name.”

“Tso Lin?” asked Macgowan curiously.

“I believe that was the one. Why, do you know him?”

“I’ve corresponded with him. Perfectly honest Chinaman, Queen.”

“Hmm. You didn’t tell him about the Foochow, Miss Temple?”

She frowned prettily. “I don’t think so. At any rate, when I began to correspond with Mr. Kirk about my literary plans, somehow it came out that—well, he can tell you about that.”

Kirk said eagerly: “It all came about very naturally, Queen. I happened to write once that I collected Chinese stamps, and Miss Temple wrote me about her father’s Foochow. I was enormously interested, of course and—” his face darkened—“I was a little better off financially than I am now. While the Foochow, being a local, wasn’t in my line, it sounded so extraordinary that I decided I must have it. To make a long story short, I persuaded Miss Temple to part with it.”

“It wasn’t so hard,” said the tiny woman softly. “I realized that I was selfish to hold on to it, since I’ve not the faintest interest in philately. I suppose I share the usual feminine stupidity about such things. And then, too, I needed money badly. Mr. Kirk offered such an unbelievable sum for it that at first I was suspicious—thought he had sinister designs on the unsophisticated girl from China.”

“But then,” grinned Ellery, “I suppose his honest letters turned the tide. Well! How much did you pay Miss Temple for it, Kirk?”

“Ten thousand. It’s worth it. Isn’t it, Glenn?”

Macgowan started slightly out of a reverie. “Oh, unquestionably, or I shouldn’t have bought it.”

“And that’s all,” sighed Miss Temple. “Now do you see, Mr. Queen? Perfectly innocent story, and I’m sure your suspicions are all banished; aren’t they, Mr. Queen?”

“A plethora of Mr. Queens, Miss Temple,” said Ellery, rising with a smile, “but it would seem so, wouldn’t it? By the way, didn’t it occur to you, either, after the crime that there was something backwards about the stamp?”

“I do believe,” said Jo ruefully, “that I completely forgot the whole thing. You can’t remember everything, you know.”

“I suppose not,” drawled Ellery. “Especially the important things. Well, good day to you all; I’m afraid I’ve wasted your time as well as mine. Don’t worry, Macgowan; as they say in Silver Gulch, ‘It all comes out in the wash.’”

“Ha, ha,” said Macgowan.

“Well,” grinned Ellery, “at least that was appreciation. Good-bye.”

When Hubbell had let him out of the Kirk apartment, Mr. Ellery Queen seemed neither in an unsuspicious temper nor of a disposition to depart. He stood still in the corridor, musing and frowning and chewing a mental cud that apparently offered stubborn resistance.

“Damned funny business, all of it,” he muttered to himself. “I’ll be switched if I can see light anywhere.”

The door across the corridor caught his attention, and he sighed. It did seem like a century ago that he had opened that door and found a room turned topsy-turvy and a dead man in inverted clothing. Struck by a sudden thought, he crossed the hall and tried the door. But it was locked.

He shrugged and was about to turn the corner and proceed toward the elevators when a movement far down the corridor caused him to jump like a startled kangaroo around the corner and stand still without breathing. He took off his hat and peered cautiously out.

A woman had appeared from the fire-escape stairway beyond and at the other side of the door to Dr. Kirk’s study; and she was acting very queerly indeed.

In her arms there was a bulky bundle wrapped in brown paper—a heavy bundle, to judge from the labored progress she made. She was trying to tread softly, and there was no question of the nervousness that animated her, since she kept jerking her head from side to side like a wary animal. It was very odd to see a tall young woman in a modish fur-trimmed suit and a rakish toque and trim gloves staggering under the weight of a badly wrapped bundle of that size. There was something almost humorous about it.

But Ellery did not smile. He watched with a breath-suspended concentration, tingling in every nerve. “Lord,” he thought, “what luck!”

The woman turned her head to look his way, and Ellery dodged back out of sight. When he looked again she was fumbling with the knob of Dr. Kirk’s door in a sort of desperate haste. Then it swung open and she vanished inside the room.

Ellery sped down the corridor like the wind, topcoat-tails flying. But he made no noise and reached the door without incident. He looked up and down the hall; it was deserted. Dr. Kirk was presumably not in the apartment; he was probably being wheeled about the roof of the Chancellor by Miss Diversey for his morning constitutional, grumbling and cursing in his usual ill-temper. … Ellery knelt and peered through the keyhole. He could see the woman moving quickly about the study, but the view was too narrow for panoramic observation.

He scrambled up the corridor to the next door, which he remembered led to Dr. Kirk’s bedroom. If the irascible old gentleman was out … He tried the door; it was unlocked, and he stole into the room. He flew to the door at his right, which led to another bedroom, and bolted it; and then he hurried to the closed door leading to the study. It took him many seconds to turn the knob and open the door to a crack without making any noise.

The woman was almost finished. The brown wrapping-paper lay on the floor. With feverish haste she was placing the contents of the bundle—huge heavy books—on the shelf from which Dr. Kirk’s Hebrew books had been stolen.

When she was gone, crushing the brown paper into a ball and carrying it with her, Ellery stepped calmly into the study.

The books which the woman had just put upon the shelf were, as he had suspected, all volumes of Hebrew commentaries. Unquestionably they were the books which had been stolen from the old scholar.

Ellery quietly retraced his steps, unbolted the farther door of the bedroom, went out by the bedroom door, and slipped down the corridor just as he heard the foyer door of the Kirk suite slam.

He stood very still in the elevator all the way down to the lobby, his brow creased in many corrugations of thought.

It was perfectly amazing. Of all developments! Another incomprehensible thread in the fabric of the most puzzling mystery he had ever faced. … And then something sparked in his brain and he grew very thoughtful indeed. Yes, it was possible. … A theory which covered the facts; at least on the surface. … If that was the case, there was another—

He shook his head impatiently. It would bear thinking about.

For the woman had been Marcella Kirk.

P
ERHAPS THE MOST PRECISE
development in the science of policing is the uncanny ability of the modern detective to trace the movements and establish the identities of so-called unknown persons. Since he is not infallible his score is imperfect; but his percentage of successes is remarkably high, considering the Minotaur’s maze of difficulties. The whole complicated mechanism of the police chain hums along on oiled bearings.

And yet, in the case of the mysterious little man who was murdered in the Hotel Chancellor, the police encountered no success whatever. Even in instances of the normal failures something is found—a clue, a trace, a wisp of connection, some last movement which has left its imprint on a casual mind. But here there was nothing but the darkness of space. It was as if the little man had dropped to earth from another planet, accompanied by the chill mysteries of the void.

Inspector Queen, in whose hands—since he was in charge of the murder investigation—the threads of identification refused to assemble, clung to his task with the tenacity of a leech. He refused to concede failure even after the regular channels were drained: the publicized photographs of the dead man, the descriptions and pleas sent to police officials of other cities, the tireless check-up with the records of the Identification Bureau, the unceasing search by plainclothesmen for the last trail of the dead man, the pumping of underworld informers on the theory that the victim might have had criminal affiliations.

The Inspector gritted his teeth and flung more men into the search. The reports of—
Nothing. No Trace. Unknown Here. No Fingerprints
—continued to pour in. All lines of investigation ended in a
cul-de-sac
. The blank wall of mystery leered down, apparently insurmountable.

The Missing Persons Bureau, experts in searches of this kind, formed the inevitable theory. Since all the routine investigations had met with no success, it was not untenable, they said, that the victim was not a New Yorker at all; indeed, perhaps not even an American.

Inspector Queen had shaken his head. “I’m ready to try anything,” he said to the weary-eyed official in charge of the Bureau, “but I tell you it’s not that. There’s something awfully screwy about this business. … He may have been a foreigner as you claim, but I doubt it, John. He didn’t look foreign. And the people who spoke to him before he died—this woman Mrs. Shane and this man Osborne, and even that nurse on duty at the Kirk place who heard him say a few words—they all insist that he didn’t have a foreign accent of any kind, just a funny sort o’ soft voice. And that was probably just a speech defect, or a habit.” Then he set his little jaw. “However, it won’t hurt to try; so go to it, John.”

And so the enormous task of notifying the police departments of all the major cities of the world, which had been begun tentatively before, was pushed ahead with thoroughness and dispatch. Full description and fingerprints were forwarded, with due emphasis on the soft-voice characteristic. The dead man’s photograph was exhibited to employees of air lines, of Atlantic Ocean liners, of coast steamers, of railroads. And the reports came bouncing back with the hopeless inevitability of a rubber ball:
No Identification. Man Unknown. No Recollection of Appearance on This Line
. Nothing.

It was three days after Miss Temple’s confession of ownership of the Foochow stamp that Inspector Queen growled to Ellery: “It may be that we’re up against a situation that hits us on the snoot every once in a while. I’ve found from experience that periodically these transportation people go into a fit of the doldrums if doldrums have fits—and can’t remember anything further back than their last yawn. Because we’ve met with failure along this angle so far doesn’t mean that bird—damn his soul!—didn’t use a liner, or a train, or a ’plane. Darn it all, he must have got to New York
some
way!”

“If he got to New York at all,” said Ellery. “I mean—if he hasn’t been in New York all the time.”

“There are a lot of ‘ifs’ in this business, my son. I’m not claiming anything. May’ve been born and brought up in the city here and never left the Bronx once, for all I know. Or this may have been his first visit to New York. But I’m betting he wasn’t a New Yorker.”

“Probably not,” drawled Ellery. “I just made the point to get it on the record. I think you’re right, myself.”

“Oh, you do?” snapped the Inspector. “When you use that tone of voice I get suspicious. Come on—what d’ye know?”

“Nothing that you don’t know,” laughed Ellery. “I’ve told you every little thing that’s happened so far when you weren’t around. Can’t I agree with you once in a while without being jumped like a horse-thief?”

The Inspector tapped his snuff-box absently, and for some time there was no sound but the shrill whistle of the uniformed officer two floors below who was addicted to
The Sidewalks of New York
out of loyalty to the administration. Ellery stared gloomily through the bars on his father’s office-window.

And then something brought his eyes around, and he gaped at his father, who was glaring at him with the mania of discovery. As he watched, the old gentleman leaped out of his swivel-chair and almost fell over trying to press one of his push-buttons.

“Of course!” he cried in a strangled voice. “What a dope, what a dope I am. … Billy,” he howled at the deskman who ran in, “is Thomas out there?” The desk-man vanished and a moment later Sergeant Velie barged in.

The Inspector inhaled snuff, muttering to himself. “Sure, sure, that’s the ticket. … ’Lo, Thomas. Why didn’t I think of it before? Sit down.”

“What is this?” demanded Ellery. “What’s the brainstorm?”

The Inspector ignored him elaborately and sat down at his desk, chuckling and rubbing his hands. “How you doin’ on the stamp and jewelry lead, Thomas?”

“Not so good,” rumbled the Sergeant lugubriously.

“Nothing, hey?”

“Not a smell. They don’t know him, any of ’em. I’m sure of that now.”

“Curious,” murmured Ellery, frowning. “There’s something else that baffles me.”

“Go baffle a buffalo,” said the Inspector jovially. “This is hot. Listen, Thomas. Did you get the last full report on the hotels?”

“Sure. He wasn’t registered at any hotel in the city. Dead sure now.”

“Hmm. Well, listen here, Thomas, my boy. And you too, son, if you aren’t too busy with those grand bafflements of yours. Let’s say the little guy wasn’t a New Yorker. We’re all convinced of that?”

“
I
think he comes from Mars or some place,” grumbled Velie.

“I’m not convinced,” drawled Ellery, “but it’s probably so.”