Chinese Orange Mystery (4 page)

“Why, Mr. Osborne!” murmured Jo. “You’re positively clairvoyant. How did you know I wanted Donald?”

An unwilling grin came to Osborne’s lips. “Well, you’re the fourth in a short time, Miss Temple. This seems to be Mr. Kirk’s busy day—and he’s ducking it.”

“And do you think Mr. Kirk would duck me, too?” she murmured, dimpling.

“I’m sure he wouldn’t, Miss Temple.”

“Now you’re merely being polite. Oh, dear! I did so want to speak to him before … Bother! Well, thanks, Mr. Osborne. I suppose it can’t be helped.”

“I’m sorry. If there’s anything I can do—”

“Really, it’s nothing at all.” She smiled and went out.

And just as Osborne sat down with a sigh of relief, the telephone rang.

He snatched it ferociously and barked: “Well?”

“Donald? Felix. Sorry I—”

“Oh,” said Osborne. “This is Osborne, Mr. Berne. How are you, sir. Welcome home. Did you have a nice crossing?”

Berne said dryly: “Lovely.” There was a faintly foreign something in his voice. “Isn’t Kirk there?”

“I expect him any minute now, Mr. Berne.”

“Well, tell him I’ll be late for dinner, Osborne. Unavoidably detained.”

“Yes, sir,” said Osborne submissively. And then he shouted in an excess of repressed passion: “Well, why the devil don’t you call the apartment?” But he had already hung up.

And then, at 6:45 to the minute, Donald Kirk came striding out of the elevators accompanied by a tall young man in evening clothes who wore
pince-nez
glasses.

There was nothing about Kirk to suggest the young millionaire man-about-town, owner of The Mandarin Press, socially one of New York’s most desirable young bachelors. He was dressed in a dowdy tweed suit; his topcoat was unpressed; there was an ink-smudge on one of his thin nostrils; his shoulders drooped; and his hat was a shapeless felt crushed into one of his topcoat pockets. He looked harassed as no young millionaire is popularly supposed to look, and he was smoking a pipe which made Mrs. Shane sniff with disdain.

“Evening, Mrs. Shane. Come along, Queen. Lucky I bumped into you downstairs. Mind if I step into my office for a moment? Be with you in a jiffy.”

“Not at all,” drawled Mr. Ellery Queen. “I’m just a cog in the machine. Yours to command. What’s it all about, anyway, Kirk, old fellow?”

But Kirk was dashing into the office. Ellery sauntered after and leaned against the jamb.

Osborne’s frown changed magically to a smile. “Mr. Kirk! Thank heaven you’ve come back. I’m almost crazy. It’s been the busiest afternoon—”

“Detained, Ozzie.” Kirk dashed to his desk, shuffled through a heap of opened letters. “Anything important? Oh, excuse me. Queen, meet Jimmy Osborne, my right hand. Mr. Ellery Queen, Ozzie.”

“How do you do, Mr. Queen. … Well, I don’t know, Mr. Kirk. Only a few minutes ago Miss Llewes stopped in—”

“Irene?” The papers slipped from Kirk’s fingers. “And what did she want, Ozzie?” he asked slowly.

Osborne shrugged. “She didn’t say. Nothing special. Then Miss Temple was in, too.”

“Oh, she was?”

“Yes. She just said she’d like to talk to you before dinner.”

Kirk frowned. “All right, Ozzie. Anything else? Be with you in a second, Queen.”

“Take your time.”

Osborne scratched his sandy head. “Oh, yes! Mr. Macgowan was in about twenty minutes or so ago.”

“Glenn?” Kirk seemed genuinely surprised. “You mean he dropped in early for dinner, I suppose.”

“No, sir. He said he wanted to see you about something urgent. In fact, he left a note for you with me.” Osborne dug the envelope out of his pocket.

“’Scuse me, Queen. I can’t imagine—” Kirk tore open the envelope and pulled the paper out. He unfolded it quickly and devoured the message with his eyes. And as he read the most extraordinary expression came over his face. It disappeared as swiftly as it had come. He frowned and crushed the paper into a ball, stuffing it into his lefthand jacket pocket.

“Anything wrong, Kirk?” drawled Ellery.

“Eh? Oh, no, no. Just something—” He did not finish. “All right, Ozzie. Close up shop and go home.”

“Yes, sir. I almost forgot. Mr. Berne telephoned a few minutes ago and said he’d be a little late. Detained, he said.”

“Late for his own party,” said Kirk with a wry grin. “That’s Felix all over. All right, Ozzie. Come along, Queen. Sorry to have kept you waiting.”

They were in the corridor when they were stopped by an exclamation from Osborne. Kirk poked his head back. “What’s the matter, for goodness’ sake?”

Osborne looked embarrassed. “I’m frightfully sorry. Just slipped my mind. There’s a man been waiting in the anteroom there for the Lord knows how long, Mr. Kirk. Came about an hour ago, in fact. He wouldn’t tell me who he was or what he wanted, so I stuck him in there to wait.”

“Who is he?” asked Kirk impatiently. Ellery strolled back into the room with his friend.

Osborne threw up his hands. “Don’t know. Never saw him before. He’s certainly never been in this office on business. Tight as they make them. Very confidential matter, he said.”

“What’s his name? Damn it all, I can’t stop to chin now. Who is he?”

“He didn’t say.”

Kirk gnawed his sunburned upper lip for a moment. Then he sighed. “Well, I’ll get rid of him in a moment. Sorry, Queen, old man. Why don’t you go into the apartment?”

Ellery grinned. “No hurry. Besides, I’m hopelessly shy. I’ll wait.”

“There’s always somebody wanting to see me,” grumbled Kirk, going to the office-door which led to the anteroom, in the wide crack at the bottom of which a line of light was visible. “If it isn’t about books, it’s about stamps, and if it isn’t about stamps, it’s about gems. … What’s this, Ozzie? Door locked?” He looked around impatiently; the door did not budge.

“Locked?” said Osborne blankly. “That can’t be, Mr. Kirk.”

“Well, it is. The fool, whoever he is, must have bolted it from the other side.”

Osborne hurried forward and tried the door. “That’s funny,” he muttered. “You know yourself, Mr. Kirk, I never keep that door bolted. Why, there isn’t even a key to it. Just the bolt on the anteroom side. … Why in the world should he have bolted it, I wonder?”

“Anything valuable in there, Kirk?” drawled Ellery, coming forward.

Kirk started. “Valuable? You think—”

“It sounds remarkably like a case of common burglary.”

“Burglary!” cried Osborne. “But there’s nothing in there that’s valu—”

“Let’s have a peep.” Ellery flung his topcoat, hat, and stick on a nearby chair and knelt before the door on a paper-thin Indian mat. He closed one eye and peered through the unobstructed keyhole. Then he rose, very quickly. “Is this the only door into that room?”

“No, sir. There’s another from the other corridor, the one around the corner opposite Mr. Kirk’s suite. Is there anything wrong?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Ellery with a frown. “Certainly there’s something deucedly odd. … Come along, Kirk. This will bear investigation.”

The three men hastened out of the office, to the astonishment of Mrs. Shane, and darted down the corridor. They turned the corner and ran to the left, stopping at the first door across the hall from the Kirk suite, the door Miss Diversey had used more than an hour earlier.

Ellery grasped the knob and turned. It moved, and he pushed; the door was unlocked. It swung inward slowly.

Ellery stood still, impaled by shock. Over his shoulder the faces of Donald Kirk and James Osborne worked spasmodically.

Then Kirk said in a flat shrinking voice: “Good God, Queen.”

The room looked as if some giant hand had plucked it bodily from the building, shaken it like a dice-cup, and flung it back. At first glance it seemed in a state of utter confusion. All the furniture had been moved. There was something wrong with the pictures on the wall. The rug looked odd. The chairs, the table, everything. …

The goggling human eyes could not encompass more than a certain degree of destruction in one transfixed glimpse. There was primarily an impression of ruthless havoc, of furious dismantlement. But the impression was ephemeral; it could not withstand the single dreadful reality.

Their eyes were dragged to something lying across the room on the floor before the bolted door leading to the office. It was the stiff body of the stout middle-aged man, his bald skull no longer pink but white spattered with carmine, streaks of caked jelly radiating from a blackish depression at the top. He was lying face down, his short fat arms crumpled under him. Two unbelievable iron things, like horns, stuck out from under his coat at the back of his neck.

“D
EAD?” WHISPERED KIRK.

Ellery stirred. “Well, what do you think?” he said harshly and took a forward step. Then he stopped, and his eyes flashed from one incredible part of the room to another as if they could not believe what they saw.

“Why, it’s murder,” said Osborne in a queer interrogatory voice. Ellery could hear the man swallowing rapidly and unconsciously behind him.

“A man doesn’t wallop himself over the head with a poker, Osborne,” said Ellery, unmoving. They all looked at it without expression; a heavy brass poker, apparently from the rack of firetools before the ornamental fireplace, lay on the rug a few feet from the body. It was daubed with the same red jelly that smeared the stout little man’s skull.

Then Ellery stepped forward, walking lightly as if he were afraid to disturb even the molecules of the air in the room. He knelt by the prone figure. There was so much to see, so much more to assimilate mentally. … He shut his eyes to the astounding condition of the still little man’s clothes and felt beneath the body for the heart. No quiver of arterial life responded to his fingertips. He withdrew his own chilled hand and touched the skin of the man’s bland pale face. It was cold with the unearthly cold of death.

There was a suspicion of purple on the face. … Ellery touched the dead chin with his fingers and tilted the head. Yes, there was a purplish patch of bruise on the left cheek and the left side of the nose and mouth. He had fallen like a stone to receive the hard kiss of the floor on that side of his face.

Ellery rose and silently retreated to his former position inside the doorway. “It’s a question of perspective,” he said to himself, never taking his eyes from the dead man. “You can’t see much close up. I wonder—” A fresh surge of astonishment flooded his brain. In all the years that he had seen dead men in the fixed surroundings of violence he had never witnessed anything so remarkable as this dead man and the things that had been done to him and to his last resting-place. There was something uncanny about the whole thing, uncanny and horrifying. The sane mind shrank from acceptance. It was unholy, blasphemous. …

How long they stood there, the three of them, none of them knew. The corridor at their backs was very quiet. Only occasionally they heard the clang of the elevator-door and the cheerful voice of Mrs. Shane. From the street twenty-two stories below came the whispering sounds of traffic, wafted past the blowing curtains of one of the windows. For a weird moment the thought struck them simultaneously that the little man was not dead but merely taking a humorous rest on the floor, having selected his odd position and the extraordinary disruption of his surroundings out of some inscrutable whim. The thought was born of the benevolent smile on the dead man’s fat lips, for his face was turned toward them. Then the impression faded, and Ellery cleared his throat noisily, as if to grasp something real, if only a sound.

“Kirk, have you ever seen this fellow before?”

The tall young man’s breath whistled through his nostrils behind Ellery’s back. “Queen, I swear I’ve never seen him before. You’ve got to believe me!” He clutched Ellery’s arm with a muscular convulsiveness. “Queen! It’s a ghastly mistake, I tell you. Strangers are always coming to see me. I never saw—”

“Tch,” murmured Ellery, “get a stranglehold on your nerve’s, Kirk.” Without turning he patted Kirk’s rigid fingers. “Osborne.”

Osborne said with difficulty: “I can vouch for that, Mr. Queen. He’s never been here before. He was a total stranger to us. Mr. Kirk doesn’t know—”

“Yes, yes, Osborne. With all the other appalling things about this crime, I can well believe …” He tore his eyes from the prone figure and swung about, a businesslike note springing into his voice, “Osborne, go back to your office and ’phone down for the physician, the manager, and the house detective. Then call the police. Get Centre Street; speak to Inspector Richard Queen. Tell him I’m on the scene and to hurry over at once.”

“Yes, sir,” quavered Osborne, and slipped away.

“Now, close that door, Kirk. We don’t want any one to see—”

“Don,” said a girlish voice from the corridor. Both men swung about instantly, blocking her line of vision. She was staring in at them—a girl as tall as Kirk, with a slender immature figure and great hazel eyes. “Don, what’s the trouble? I saw Ozzie running. … What’s in there? What’s happened?”

Kirk said in a quick hoarse voice: “Nothing, nothing at all, ’Cella,” and jumped out into the hall and placed his hands on his sister’s half-bare shoulders. “Just an accident. Go back to the apartment—”

Then she saw the dead man lying on the floor in the anteroom. The color washed out of her face and her eyes rolled over like a dying doe’s. She screamed once, piercingly, and tumbled to the floor as limply as a rag-doll.

At once, as if her scream had been a signal, bedlam howled about them. Doors across the corridor flew open and spewed forth people with glaring eyes and moving mouths. Miss Diversey, her cap askew, came padding down the hall. Behind her rolled the tall, hollow-boned, emaciated figure of Dr. Hugh Kirk, his wheelchair trundling swiftly; he was collarless and coatless, and his stiff-bosomed shirt lay open above his gray-haired chest. The tiny black-gowned woman, Miss Temple, came flying out of nowhere to drop on her knees beside the unconscious girl. Mrs. Shane puffed around the corner screeching questions. A bellboy sped past her, looking about wildly. A small bony British-looking man in butler’s panoply stared pasty-faced out of one of the Kirk doors as the others milled about the fallen girl, blundering into one another.