The Chinese Orange Mystery

His topcoat, hat, gloves, and woolen scarf lay on a chair near the table in a tumbled heap. Ellery sauntered to the chair and picked up the scarf. On one edge in the middle of the scarf were several bloodstains. A tiny stain, hardened to a crust, also existed at the back of the topcoat collar. Ellery dropped the garments with a frown and bent low, searching the floor. He could find nothing. No¯yes, there was a splatter that might have been blood on the hardwood surface of the floor beyond the edge of the rug! Near the chair . . . He went quickly to the far side of the room and bent over the dead man. The floor about him was clean. Ellery rose and stood back, followed by the dull glances of the two men. The dead man lay parallel with the sill of the door, roughly between the two bookcases which flanked the doorway. The case to the left, as he faced the door, had been pulled from its original position flat against the wall so that its left side touched the hinges of the door and its right side swung out into the room, the shifted bookcase forming an acute angle with the door. The body lay half behind it. The case to the right had been moved farther to the right.

“What do you make of it, Brummer?” asked Ellery suddenly, turning around. There was no irony in his tone.

“I tell you it’s nuts,” exploded Brummer. “I never seen notliin’ like it in all my born days, an’ I pounded a beat, Mr. Queen, when your father was a Captain in his precinct days. Whoever pulled this ought to been put in the booby-hatch.”

“Indeed?” said Ellery thoughtfully. “If not for one remarkable fact, Brummer, I should be tempted to agree . . . . And the gentleman’s horns? You explain those, also, bv the general irrationality of the murderer?”

“Horns?”

Ellery gestured toward the two iron points protruding from beneath the dead man’s coat at his back. They were the broad flat pointed blades of African spears. As the man lay face down, the outline of the hafts bulged under his clothes. Apparently the spears had been thrust up his trousers at the back of the foot, one to each leg, rammed up and out at the waist, and pushed under the reversed coat at the man’s back until they emerged from the V-shaped lapels. The butts of the spears were flush with the dead man’s rubber heels. Each weapon was at least six feet in length, and the blades gleamed high above the bald bloody skull. The spears under the tightly buttoned trousers and coat gave the dead man a curious appearance: for all the world like a slain animal which had been trussed up and slung upon two poles.

Brummer spat out the window. “Cripe! Gives you the creeps. Spears . . . . Say, listen, Mr. Queen, you got to admit it’s nuts.”

“Please, Brummer,” murmured Ellery with a wince, “spare us these repetitions. The spears, I confess, are difficult. And yet I’ve found that nothing in this world is incapable of explanation if only one is smart enough or lucky enough to think of it. Mr. Nye, are these Impi stickers the property of the hotel? I’d no idea our better hostelries went in for primitive decoration.”

“Heavens, no, Mr. Queen,” said the manager quickly. “They’re Mr. Kirk’s.”

“Stupid of me. Of course.” Ellery glanced at the wall above the fireplace. The African shield had been turned face to the wall. Four lines of lighter shade than the paint on the wall came out behind the inverted shield like the arms of an X. The spears had undoubtedly hung there, and the murderer had wrenched them from the wall.

“If I had any doubts about the nuttiness of this bird,” growled Brummer doggedly, “I’d lose ‘em when I took a look at the furniture, Mr. Queen. You can’t get around that, can you? Only a lunatic would ‘a’ tossed all this fine expensive stuff around this way. Now, what the hell for, I ask you? Everything’s cockeyed. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, as the feller says.”

“Brummer’s right,” said Nye with another groan. “This is the work of a madman.”

Ellery regarded the house detective with honest admiration. “Brummer, you’ve placed that horny finger of yours on the precise point. Rhyme and reason. Exactly.” He began to pace up and down. “That’s exactly it. It stuck in my craw from the moment I walked onto this fantastic scene. Rhyme!” He snatched off his pince-nez and waved them about, as if he were trying to convince himself more than Brummer and Nye. “Rhyme! There’s rhyme here that utterly defies analysis, that staggers the imagination. If there were no rhyme I should be pleased, very pleased. But rhyme¯there’s so much of it, it’s so complete and so perfect, that I doubt whether there has ever been a more striking example of it in the whole history of logic!”

Nye looked bewildered. “Rhyme?” he echoed stupidly. “I don’t see what you mean.”

“You mean about the furniture, Mr. Queen?” asked Brummer, knitting his black brows painfully. “It just looks all¯well, all messed up to me. Some nut went to a hell of a lot of trouble to wreck this room. I don’t see¯”