Chinese Orange Mystery (27 page)

“And then,” murmured Ellery, “I saw how simple it was, how easily I had led myself astray. I had made a mistake. I had misread the facts. My logic had been imperfect. I hadn’t taken into consideration the startling fact that there were two general explanations for the backwardnesses, not one!”

“I can’t say I understand this Ciceronian oration,” said Felix Berne suddenly. “Is this something characteristically esoteric, or do you know what you’re talking about?”

“The gentleman from The Mandarin,” said Ellery, “will please to observe the amenities and preserve the peace. You’ll find out soon enough, Mr. Berne. … For you see, I found on reconsideration that there were two possible answers to the riddle. The first I’ve already related: that everything had been turned backwards
to point to
something backwards about somebody in the case. Its alternative, which had escaped me,” continued Ellery, leaning forward, “was that everything was turned backwards
to conceal
something backwards about somebody in the case!”

He paused to light a fresh cigaret. Cupping his hands about a match, he scrutinized their faces. But he saw only bewilderment.

“I see expansion is required,” he drawled, puffing away. “The first possibility led
away
from the crime; the second led
to
the crime. The first possibility involved
re
vealment; the second
con
cealment. Perhaps I can make it clearer by asking you: By everything about the body and the crime-scene being turned backwards,
against whom
could concealment have conceivably been directed? What about whom in the case could have been meant to be hidden, camouflaged, disguised?”

“Well, if everything was turned backwards on the body,” ventured Miss Temple in a low voice, “then it must have been the victim about whom something was being concealed, I should think.”

“
Brava
, Miss Temple. You’ve put your finger on the precise point. There was only one person in the case against whom concealment could have been effected by turning everything backwards. And that was the victim himself. In other words, instead of seeking a backwards significance involving the murderer, or a possible accomplice, or a possible witness to the crime, it was necessary to look for a backwards significance
involving the victim.”

“That sounds pat when you say it fast, and all that,” said Berne, “but I fail to see—”

“As Homer said,” murmured Ellery: “‘Give me to see, and Ajax asks no more.’ Classics to the classical, Mr. Berne. … The obvious question was: What could this backwards significance be which centers about the victim? Was it something backwards
about him
literally? Yes, from our theorem something backwards about the victim which the murderer wanted to conceal, to disguise, to cover up. That is to say, if the victim had something, some one thing, backwards about him, then the murderer by turning
everything else about him
backwards would conceal the backwardness of that one thing!—would make it very difficult indeed to discern what that backwards element about the victim had been to begin with.”

A startled expression sprang into the publisher’s eye, and he sank back with compressed lips. Thereafter he studied Ellery in a new and faintly puzzled way.

“Once I had reached that stage of my cogitations,” continued Ellery with a quizzical look, “I knew I was on solid ground at last. I had something to work on—the most tangible thing in the world: a positive clue. It at once confirmed everything that had gone before and dissipated the fog like magic. For I had merely to ask myself if there was any indication on the victim’s body that pointed to the possible nature of the
original
backwards phenomenon, the one that was meant to be concealed by the murderer’s turning everything else backwards. No sooner asked than answered. There was.”

“Clue?” muttered Macgowan.

“I saw the body myself,” began Donald Kirk in a wondering voice.

“Please, gentlemen. The hour ageth. What was this indication, this clue?
The fact that there was no necktie on the man’s body or on the scene of the crime!”

If Ellery had uttered in a loud voice the word: “Abracadabra!” he could not have evoked a more general expression of dazed inquiry than flickered from the faces of his audience.

“No necktie?” gasped Donald. “But what—”

“Our instinctive presumption,” said Ellery patiently, “was that the victim
had
worn a necktie, but that the murderer had taken it away because somehow it permitted identification of the victim or traceability. But it was evident to me now
that there never was a necktie;
that the victim had not worn a tie at all! Remember, when he spoke to Mrs. Shane, and to Mr. Osborne in the presence of Miss Diversey, he wore a scarf bundled closely about his neck. In other words, there was no tie for the murderer to take away!”

“But at best,” protested Dr. Kirk, fascinated despite himself, “that was a pragmatic conclusion, Queen. It was a theory, but not necessarily the truth.”

“A theory, my dear Doctor, resulting inevitably from the argument that the backwards process had been employed to conceal something. But I agree that, as it stood, it was unsatisfactory. Fortunately, a fact existed which offered positive corroboration.” Ellery related briefly the incident of the canvas valise, and listed its contents. “For there were the necessary garments of the victim—everything from a suit to shoes—and yet the only familiar article of apparel missing from the bag was—
a necktie
. I felt certain then that the reason it was missing was that the owner of the bag habitually
did not wear
neckties. You see?”

“Hmm,” muttered Dr. Kirk. “Corroboration indeed. A man who didn’t wear neckties …”

“The thing was child’s play after that,” Ellery shrugged, waving his cigaret about. “I asked myself: What type of man never wears a necktie with ordinary street-clothes?”

“A priest!” burst out Marcella. She sank back, blushing.

“Precisely, Miss Kirk. A Catholic priest—or, to be accurate, either a Catholic priest or an Episcopalian clergyman. And then I remembered something else. All three of the witnesses who had seen and spoken with the victim remarked about the peculiar quality of his voice. It had a soft queer timbre, almost unctuous in its sugary tones. And while this was by no means conclusive, or for that matter even a good clue, it did fit with the character of a priest after I’d deduced one. And then there was the very worn breviary in the bag, and the religious tracts … I couldn’t doubt it any longer.

“So here I had the kernel of the entire process of inversion. For to what backwards phenomenon—meant to be obscured, buried among the irrelevant backwardnesses—did the necktie-clue point? And then it struck me like a physical blow that a Catholic or Episcopalian man-of-God wears his collar turned around.
Backwards
!”

There was a stifling silence. Inspector Queen, at the corridor door, did not stir. He had his eyes fixed oddly upon the door opposite him, the door to the office which stood shut.

“So I had finally smelled out the backwards significance of the crime,” sighed Ellery. “Everything had been turned backwards by the murderer to conceal the fact that his victim was a priest, to conceal the fact that his victim wore no necktie and wore a turned-around collar.”

They erupted all at once, springing into life as if some one had given a signal. But it was Miss Temple’s soft voice which somehow caught on. “There must be something wrong, Mr. Queen. It was an ordinary collar, wasn’t it? Couldn’t the murderer have merely turned the collar around on the dead man’s neck into the usual lay position?”

“Excellent objection,” smiled Ellery. “Naturally that occurred to me, as it certainly occurred to the murderer. I should point out, incidentally, that the cravatless victim must have been a great shock to the murderer. For it is true that no one in this case, including the murderer himself, had ever actually seen that stout little man before he emerged quietly from the elevator on this floor. Muffled up to the chin in the scarf, he was killed before the murderer realized that he was a priest. … But to reply to your question. If the murderer had turned the collar around—that is, turned it into the lay position—it would have stood out like a sore thumb. And the missing tie would have only called further attention to the one thing about the victim the murderer wanted to conceal.”

“But why the devil,” objected Macgowan, “didn’t this murderer solve the whole problem by getting a tie somewhere and putting it on the dead man’s neck?”

“Why indeed?” said Ellery, his eyes gleaming. “And that question, too, occurred to me. In fact, it was one of the most important indications in the whole logical structure! I shan’t answer it fully now, but you’ll see later why the murderer
couldn’t
get a necktie. Of course he couldn’t use his own—” Ellery smiled maliciously, “if he were a man, since he had to meet other people; and if he, so to speak, were a woman he naturally, also so to speak, couldn’t provide one from his own person. But most important, he couldn’t get out of the anteroom, as I’ll show you later. At any rate, take my word for it at this point that his best course was to leave the collar as it was—turned around—and then as a blind to turn everything else on the body and in the room around, thereby concealing the significance of the inverted collar and the lack of a necktie and thereby leading the police astray.” Ellery paused, and continued thoughtfully. “As a matter of fact, at this point in my deductions it was evident that we were dealing with a person of great imagination, even brilliance, and also with a large cranial capacity and a strictly methodical temperament. It took genius of a sort to conceive the idea of inverting all the clothes; and it took brain-power and logic to foresee that to turn
only
the clothes about was not sufficient, since the very strangeness of the appearance of the clothes would call dangerous attention to them. So he turned the furniture and everything else movable around as well, diverting attention from the clothes and therefore from the collar—the whole thing a perfectly inspired logical chain of reasoning. And it very nearly worked.”

“But even so, even if you knew the victim was a priest—” began Donald.

“Where did it get me?” Ellery grimaced. “It’s true that merely knowing the victim was a priest, while it narrowed the field of search, was hardly vital. But then there was the business of the valise.”

“Valise?”

“Yes. I didn’t visualize baggage myself; Inspector Queen did, to his eternal credit. But the murderer knew all along what he was up against. When he emptied the priest’s pockets he found the baggage-check, bearing the inscription of the Hotel Chancellor itself. Since his main objective was to prevent identification of the victim, it was apparent that he had to get hold of the luggage held by the Chancellor checkroom to prevent its falling into the hands of the police. Yet he was afraid. The Chancellor was under close surveillance. He dillydallied, apprehensive, timid, worried, until it was too late. Then he conceived the scheme of gaining possession of the valise by way of the falsely signed note, the five-dollar bill, and the instructions to the Postal Telegraph office. As it happened, we caught the trail instantly; he was watching and saw the game was spoiled, made no effort to claim the bag in Grand Central, and the bag fell into our hands.

“Now observe what that fatal procrastination of the murderer led to. When the bag was opened we found the dead man’s clothing with Shanghai labels in them. Since the clothes were all fairly new those garments must have been purchased recently in China. I put this together with the fact that despite the most thorough search no trace of the man had been found in this country. Had the priest lived in the United States but was merely returning from a visit to China, I reasoned that some one in this country would have come forward to identify him—a friend, a relative. But no one did. So it was not at all improbable that he had been a permanent resident in the East. But if he was a Catholic priest
from
China, what did we have? There is only one great class of Christian men-of-God in the land of Buddhism and Taoism.”

“A missionary,” said Miss Temple slowly.

Ellery smiled. “Right again, Miss Temple. I felt convinced that our benevolent-appearing, soft-speaking little corpse with the breviary and religious tracts in his bag had been a Catholic missionary from China!”

Some one rapped thunderously on the door against which Inspector Queen’s slender shoulderblades were resting, and the old man turned quickly and opened the door. The visitor was Sergeant Velie, hard-bitten and grim as usual.

Ellery murmured: “I beg your pardon,” and hurried to the door. They watched the three men conferring with open expressions of anxiety and apprehension. The Sergeant was rumbling something ominous-sounding, the Inspector was looking triumphant, and Ellery was nodding vigorously at every murmur. Then something passed from Velie’s beefy hand to Ellery’s, and Ellery turned his back and examined it, and turned and smiled and put what he was holding into his pocket. The Sergeant leaned back against the door, towering beside Inspector Queen.

“I’m sorry about the interruption,” said Ellery placidly, “but Sergeant Velie has made an epochal discovery. Where was I? Oh, yes. I knew then roughly who Donald Kirk’s visitor was. A little thought then convinced me that I had found the key to—as it were the
casus belli
—to the direct motive which inspired the murderer. It was quite obvious that the priest himself, as a flesh-and-blood personality, was unknown to any one in this room. Yet he had come to visit Donald Kirk, asking for him by name. Only three classes of persons frequent Mr. Kirk’s office here; stamp people, gem people, and people on publishing business, chiefly authors. Yet the priest had refused to tell Mr. Osborne, Kirk’s confidential assistant, anything about his business; not even his name. This did not sound like a publishing contact, and it struck me that it was most probable the point of contact between Kirk and the priest was one of Kirk’s two hobbies: stamps or gems.

“Now I reasoned that, if this was true, the missionary had come either to sell stamps or jewels, or to buy them—the two all-inclusive classifications. The cheapness of the man’s attire, his vocation, the long journey he had made, convinced me that he was not a buyer. Then he was a seller. This fitted well, too, with his general air of secrecy. He had something in a stamp or jewel to sell Donald Kirk, something valuable, to judge from his reticent attitude. It was therefore evident that he must have been murdered for possession of the stamp or jewel he had come all the way from China to sell. It was even possible to infer that, since Kirk is a specialist on stamps of China, the missionary was probably the owner of a Chinese stamp rather than a jewel. This wasn’t certain, but it seemed the better possibility. Ergo, having solved the case in my own way, I instructed Sergeant Velie to ransack the premises of the murderer with an eye to finding this Chinese stamp; although I did tell him to look out for a jewel.” Ellery paused to light another cigaret. “I was right, and the Sergeant reports success. He has found the stamp.”