The bizarre murders, p.25
The Bizarre Murders, page 25
Ellery was after her in a flash. The smoke and fire made him reel back, coughing and choking. He called urgently, called and coughed and called again in the inferno before him. There was no reply.
And so, after a while, he pushed the door shut and crammed the fragments of Ann Forrest’s dress back in the crack at the bottom. The Inspector staggered up with more water, a stumbling automaton.
“Why,” whispered Miss Forrest with surprise, “she’s—she’s …” She laughed hysterically and flung herself into Dr. Holmes’s arms, sobbing and laughing and choking in horrible sequence.
The Queens came slowly down the stairs.
“But, El,” croaked the Inspector plaintively, like a child, “how—why—I don’t understand.” He passed his sooty hand over his forehead, wincing.
“It was there all the time,” muttered Ellery; his own eyes were dead. “John Xavier loved trinkets, had drawers full of them. But not a single ring. Why?” He licked his lips. “It could only have been, when I thought of kleptomania, because the one nearest and dearest to him—who but his wife? was the kleptomaniac. He was keeping her particular temptation away from her.”
“Mrs. Xavier!” shrilled Mrs. Wheary suddenly, rigid on the coal heap. Her body was shaking spasmodically.
Ellery sank upon the bottom step and buried his face in his hands. “The futility of the whole damned thing,” he said bitterly. “You were right from the beginning, dad—right for the wrong reasons. The extraordinary thing is that when she was accused of her husband’s murder the other day she confessed. Good God, don’t you understand? She confessed! Her confession was sincere. She wasn’t shielding anybody. She caved in, poor weak creature that she—was.” He shivered. “What an idiot I was. By demonstrating that the evidence upon which she was accused was false evidence, I cleared her and gave her the opportunity of capitalizing her exoneration, of feeding our suspicion that she was shielding somebody. How she must have laughed at me!”
“She isn’t laughing—now,” said Mrs. Carreau hoarsely.
Ellery did not hear. “But I was right about the frame-up,” he muttered. “She was framed—by Mark Xavier, as I explained. But the amazing thing about it—the most remarkable part of it all—was that Mark Xavier in framing Mrs. Xavier was unconsciously framing the real murderer! By sheer accident. Don’t you see the ghastly irony of that? Putting the noose about the neck of the guilty person when he thought her innocent! Oh, he really thought the twins guilty when he first framed her, I’m convinced of that. Maybe later on he came to suspect the truth; I think he did. Remember that day we saw him trying to get into Mrs. Xavier’s bedroom? He had realized, from her manner when she had confessed to the crime, that by accident he had framed the right one, and wanted to implicate her even more by leaving some other damaging clue. We’ll never know. It was she who left the jack of diamonds in Mark’s hand after poisoning him; he never had a chance. I never believed that—that a dying man would … could …” He stopped, his head hanging.
Then he looked up and stared at them. He tried to smile. Smith had sunk into a terrified stupor, and Mrs. Wheary was thrashing about on the coal, moaning piteously.
“Well,” he said, with an effort. “I’ve got that off my chest. I suppose now …”
He stopped again, and even as he stopped they all jumped to their feet, babbling: “What was that? What was that?”
It had been a reverberating clap, a sound that shook the house to its foundations and echoed faintly against the surrounding hills.
The Inspector was up the stairs in three bounds. He jerked open the door, shielding his eyes with his arm from the flames. He peered out and up.
He caught a glimpse of the sky—the upper floors had tumbled in long before, charred ruins. Before his feet there was the most peculiar phenomenon—a boiling of millions of little spears. From their sharp points came a steady hissing. Clouds of vapor, more evanescent than smoke, were rising all about.
He closed the door and came down the stairs with infinite care, as if every step were a prayer and a benediction. When he got to the bottom they saw that his face was whiter than paper and that there were tears in his eyes.
“What is it?” croaked Ellery.
The Inspector said brokenly: “A miracle.”
“A miracle?” Ellery gasped with stupid open mouth.
“It’s raining.”
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copyright © 1933, 1961 by Ellery Queen
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The Chinese Orange Mystery
Ellery Queen
Contents
FOREWORD
THE IDYLL OF MISS DIVERSEY
STRANGE INTERLUDE
THE TOPSY-TURVY MURDER
MR. NOBODY FROM NOWHERE
ORANGES AND SPECULATIONS
DINNER FOR EIGHT
TANGERINE
TOPSY-TURVY LAND
FOOCHOW ERROR
THE QUEER THIEF
UNKNOWN QUANTITIES
A GIFT OF GEMS
BOUDOIR SCENE
THE MAN FROM PARIS
THE TRAP
CHALLENGE TO THE READER
THE EXPERIMENT
LOOKING BACKWARD
Cast of Characters: In the order of their appearance
MISS DIVERSEY: who nursed a sick man—and a hope
DR. HUGH KIRK: septuagenarian scholar, who was often buried—in a book
MRS. SHANE: the Hotel Chancellor’s floor clerk
JAMES OSBORNE: Donald Kirk’s secretary
“MR. NOBODY FROM NOWHERE”
HUBBELL: a gentleman’s gentleman—but no gentleman
GLENN MACGOWAN: who proved that a friend in need is a friend in deed
IRENE LLEWES: who played her part in the taming of the shrewd
JO TEMPLE: whose knowledge of Chinese helped Ellery get oriented
DONALD KIRK: publisher of books and collector of gems, stamps—and trouble
ELLERY QUEEN: who collared the criminal—and his victim
MARCELLA KIRK: who fainted or feinted when she saw the corpse
NYE: the hotel manager
BRUMMER: the hotel detective
INSPECTOR RICHARD QUEEN: of the Homicide Squad
DR. PROUTY: Assistant Medical Examiner
SERGEANT VELIE: of the Homicide Squad
FELIX BERNE: the man who came late to dinner
Foreword
I AM NATURALLY PREJUDICED in favor of my friend Mr. Ellery Queen. Friendship aborts the critical faculties; especially friendship which has been invited to partake of fame. And yet, ever since those ancient days when I was first persuading Ellery to whip his notes into fiction form—through all the exciting novels that followed that first adventure—I cannot recall being more genuinely impressed than I was as I read the manuscript of The Chinese Orange Mystery.
It might well have been subtitled: The Crime That Was Backwards. With a further addendum: The Most Remarkable Murder-Case of Modern Times. But, as I say, I am prejudiced and perhaps that is a modest overstatement. The point is that if the crime itself was extraordinary, the mentality that went to work upon it was gigantic. Even now, knowing the answer, I sometimes disbelieve. And yet it was all so simple, indeed so inevitable. … The trouble is, as Ellery likes to point out, that all puzzles are irritatingly cryptic until you know the answer, and then you wonder why you were baffled so long. But I cannot quite subscribe to that; it took genius to solve the crime that was backwards, and I will stick to that opinion tho’ Hell freeze over and I lose my friend—which is a potent possibility.
Sometimes, too, I feel secretly glad that I had nothing to do with that case. Ellery, who is in many ways a thinking machine, is no respecter of friendships when logic points an accusing finger. And it might very well have been that had I been in some way involved—if even as, let us say, Donald Kirk’s attorney—Ellery might have caused good Sergeant Velie to clap the cuffs on my poor wrists. For it is remarkable that when I was at college I achieved a definitely fleeting fame in two athletic fields: I was my class backstroke swimming champion, and I rowed stroke-oar on the crew.
How these innocent facts would have made me a potential—no, no, a very active—suspect in the murder with which these pages are concerned I shall leave you to discover—unquestionably with pleasure—for yourself.
J. J. McC.
NEW YORK
“The detection—or rather the solution—of crime calls for a combination of scientist and seer in the completest development of the detective. The genius for prophesying from events is a very special endowment of Nature and has been granted in its highest form only to a favored few. …
“I might paraphrase that interesting observation in Schlegel’s Athenæum which goes:
‘Der Historiker ist ein rückwärts gekehrter Prophet?’
by pointing out that: ‘The detective is a prophet looking backwards.’ Or Carlyle’s more subtle observation about history by agreeing that: The process of detection (as opposed to History) is ‘a distillation of rumor.’”
—Excerpt from an Anonymous Article in Esoterica Americana, Attributed by Some to Matsoyuma Tahuki, the Noted Japanese Authority on the Occident.
The Idyll of Miss Diversey
MISS DIVERSEY FLED DR. Kirk’s study followed by a blistering mouthful of ogrish growls. She stood still in the corridor outside the old gentleman’s door, her cheeks burning and one of her square washed-out hands pressed to the outraged starch of her bosom. She could hear the angry septuagenarian scuttling about the study in his wheel chair like a Galapagos turtle, muttering anathemas upon her white-capped head in a fantastic potpourri of ancient Hebrew, classic Greek, French, and English.
“The old fossil,” thought Miss Diversey fiercely. “It’s—it’s like living with a human encyclopedia!”
Dr. Kirk made Jovian thunder from behind the door: “And don’t come back, do you hear me?” He thundered other things, too, in the argot of strange tongues which filled his scholar’s brain; things which, had Miss Diversey been possessed of the dubious advantages of higher culture, would have made her very indignant indeed.
“Slush,” she said defiantly, glaring at the door. There was no reply; at least, no reply of a satisfactory nature. There’s nothing, she thought with dismal consternation, you can say to a ghostly chuckle and the slam of a dusty book dug out of somebody’s grave. He was the most exasperating old—She almost said it. For a moment, in fact, it trembled upon the brink of utterance. But her better nature triumphed and she closed her pale lips sternly. Let him dress himself if he wanted to. She had always hated dressing old people, anyway. … She stood irresolute for a moment; and then, her color still high, clumped down the corridor with the firm unhurried steps of the professional nurse.
The twenty-second floor of the Hotel Chancellor was pervaded, by inflexible regulation, with the silent peace of the cloister. The quiet soothed Miss Diversey’s ruffled soul. There were two compensations, she thought, to playing nurse to a creaking, decrepit, malicious old devil afflicted—thank heaven there was justice!—with chronic rheumatism and gout. One was the handsome salary young Donald Kirk paid her for the difficult task of taking care of his father; the other was that the Kirk ménage was situated in a respectable hotel in the heart of New York City. The money and the geography, she thought with morbid satisfaction, made up for a lot of disadvantages. Macy’s, Gimbel’s, the other department stores were only minutes away, movies and theatres and all sorts of exciting things at one’s doorstep. … Yes, she would stick it out. Life was hard, but it had its compensations.
Not that they weren’t a trying lot at times. Lord knows she had crawled to the whims of plenty of nasty people in her day. And that old Dr. Kirk was nasty; there was no pleasing him. You’d think a body would be pleasant and human and grateful sometimes; give a person a “please” here or a “thank you” there. But not old Beelzebub. A tyrant, if ever there was one. He had eyes that gave a person the shivers; and his white hair stood on end as if it were trying to get as far away from him as it possibly could. He wouldn’t eat when you wanted him to. He refused massages and threw shoes about. He would totter around the suite when Dr. Angini said he mustn’t walk and refuse to budge when Dr. Angini said he must exercise. About the only good thing about him was that when his purple old nose was buried in a book he was quiet.
And then there was Marcella. Marcella! Snippy little fluff she was; in fifty years she’d be the feminine counterpart of her father. Oh, she had her good points, reflected Miss Diversey grudgingly; but then so have criminals. Adding her up, good and bad, you wouldn’t have much. Of course, conceded Miss Diversey, who had a strong sense of justice, she couldn’t really be as worthless as all that; not with that nice tall pink-cheeked Mr. Macgowan so crazy about her. It certainly did take all kinds of people to make a world! Now, Miss Diversey was sure that if Mr. Macgowan had not happened to be Mr. Donald Kirk’s best friend there never would have been an engagement between Mr. Macgowan and Mr. Kirk’s young sister. That’s what comes of having a brother and pots of money, thought Miss Diversey darkly. You go out and snare just about the best catch—Miss Diversey read the society-gossip columns critically—in the social whirl. Well, maybe when they were married he’d find out. They generally do, thought Miss Diversey, who possessed among other admirable qualities a decided strain of cynicism. The stories she could tell about these society people! … As for Donald Kirk, he was all right in his way; but his way was not Miss Diversey’s way. He was a snob. That is, he treated people like Miss Diversey with a certain good-humored, absent tolerance.
It did seem, reflected Miss Diversey as she trudged down the corridor, that the easiest way to bury the woman part of a person was to become a trained nurse. Here she was, thirty-two—no, one must be honest with oneself; it was closer to thirty-three—and what were her prospects? That is to say, her romantic prospects? Nothing, simply nothing. The men she met in the travails of her profession were roughly of two kinds, she thought bitterly: those who paid no attention to her at all, and those who paid far too much. In the first category were doctors and male relatives of rich patients; in the second were internes and male employees of rich patients. The first class didn’t recognize her as a woman at all, just a machine; Donald Kirk belonged to that class. The second kind wanted to—to take her apart with their grubby fingers to see what made her tick. That groveling little Hubbell, now, she thought with a curl of her lip—Mr. Kirk’s butler and valet and Lord knows what else. When he was with his betters he was the soul of self-effacement and rectitude; but still and all she’d had to slap that pasty face of his only this morning. Patients, of course, didn’t count. You could hardly get goo-goo about a person when you fetched bedpans and that sort of thing. Now, Mr. Osborne was different. …
A gentle vagueness settled upon Miss Diversey’s hard features; almost a girlish smile. Thoughts of Mr. Osborne were—there was no denying it—pleasant. First of all, he was a gentleman; none of Hubbell’s low tricks for him. Come to think of it, he was in a third class, sort of in a class by himself. Not rich, and yet not a servant. As Mr. Kirk’s confidential assistant he was in between. Like one of the family and yet not like one of the family, as you might say; he worked on a salary like herself. That made it—somehow—very, very satisfying to Miss Diversey. … She wondered if she really hadn’t overstepped the bounds of propriety weeks and weeks ago, when she’d only just met Mr. Osborne. How had the talk drifted around to—she blushed faintly—marriage? Oh, nothing personal, of course; she’d merely said that she would never marry a man who couldn’t provide a good—a more than good—living. Oh, no. She’d seen too many marriages break up because of money; that is, lack of it. And Mr. Osborne had seemed so distressed, as if she’d hurt him; now, could that mean anything? Surely he wasn’t thinking …
