Chinese Orange Mystery Part 20

THE HUMAN BRAIN IS a curious instrument. It is remarkably like the sea, possessing deeps and shallows-cold dark profundities and sunny crests. It has its breakers dashing in to sh.o.r.e, and its sullen backwashes. Swift currents race beneath a surface ruffled by minor winds. And there is a constant pulsing rhythm in it very like the tides. For it possesses periods of ebb, when all inspiration recedes into the blind spumy distance; and periods of flow, when strong thoughts come hurtling in, resistless and supreme.

In another metaphor Daniel Webster once said that mind is the great lever of all things; that human thought is the process by which human ends are alternately answered. But a lever suggests action, which inevitably suggests reaction; and Webster points out by indirection that the entire process is one of alternation, of fluctuation between a period of inertia and a period of activity.

Now Mr. Ellery Queen, who labored habitually within the confines of his skull, had long since found in his researches that this was a universal law, and that to achieve intellectual light it was mandatory that he struggle through a phase of intellectual darkness. The problem of the queer little dead man was a singular example in his experience. For days on end his brain wrestled through a slippery fog, groping for signposts; willing, even eager, but impotent. And suddenly there was the light staring coldly into his puckered eyes.

He wasted no time or breath on grat.i.tude to the Wielder of the Cosmic Balance. The reaction had come. The light was there. But the light was still obscured by the whipping tails of the fog. The fog must be dissipated, and it could be dissipated by only one process-concentration.

And so, being a logical man, he concentrated.

Ellery spent the rest of that momentous day draped in his favorite dressing-gown, a fetid garment redolent of old nicotine and haphazardly studded with tiny brown-edged holes, the visible signs of thousands of long-perished cigaret sparks. He lounged on the nape of his neck before a fire in the living-room, his toes toasting cosily, eying the ceiling with bright distant eyes and automatically flinging cigaret-b.u.t.ts into the flames as they burned down to his fingertips. There was no pose in this; for one thing, there was no one to pose for, since the Inspector was sulkily occupied with another case at Headquarters and Djuna was seated somewhere in the musty darkness of a motion picture theatre following the hectic fortunes of one of his innumerable bowlegged heroes. For another, Ellery was not thinking of himself.

It was curious, for instance, that occasionally he screwed his eyes downward a little to study the long crossed swords hanging above the fireplace. They were aged relics of his father's past-a gift to the Inspector from a German friend harking back to student days in Heidelberg. Certainly they could have no connection with the case in hand. And yet he studied them long and earnestly; although it is to be confessed that to his transfiguring eyes they a.s.sumed the menacing shape of Impi spears, broad-bladed and wicked.

Then the period of inspection pa.s.sed, and he snuggled deeper into the chair and gave himself up wholly to disembodied thought.

At four in the afternoon he sighed, roused himself, creaked out of the chair, flung another cigaret into the fire, and went to the telephone.

"Dad?" he croaked when Inspector Queen answered. "Ellery. I want you to do something for me."

"Where are you?" snapped the Inspector.

"Home. I-"

"What the devil are you doing?"

"Thinking. Look here-"

"About what? I thought you'd settled the whole business in your mind." The Inspector sounded faintly bitter.

"Now, now," said Ellery in a weary voice, "don't be that way. I didn't mean to offend you, you sensitive old coot. I really have been working. Anything new, by the way?"

"Not a blessed thing. Well, what is it? I'm busy. Some tramp was shot up on Forty-fifth Street and I've got my hands full."

Ellery gazed dreamily at the wall above the fireplace. "Have you any connections with some reliable theatrical costumer who can be trusted to do a confidential job and keep his mouth shut?"

"Costum-! What's up now, for cripe's sake?"

"An experiment in the interests of justice. Well, have you?"

"I suppose I can rustle one," grumbled the Inspector. "You and your experiments! Johnny Rosenzweig over on Forty-ninth once did a job for me. I guess you can rely on him. What's the dope?"

"I want a dummy."

"A what?"

"A dummy. Not the human kind," chuckled Ellery. "A stuffed shirt, inarticulate, will do. Here, I'm confusing you. Get this Rosenzweig friend of yours to make up a dummy of the same general size and height as the murdered man."

"Now I know you've gone nuts," complained the Inspector. "You sure this is for the case? Or are you workin' on some far-fetched, crazy detective-story idea for a book? If it's that, El, I can't take time off to bother-"

"No, no, I a.s.sure you this will prove a stepping-stone toward the high place in which New York justice sits enthroned. Can you get him to work fast?"

"I s'pose so. Just a dummy the size and height of the dead man, hey?" The old gentleman sounded sarcastic. "Anything else? How about a little bridgework? Or some artistic modelling on the nose?"

"No, seriously. There is something else. You've got the weight of the dead man, haven't you?"

"Sure. It's in Doc Prouty's report."

"Very good. I want the all-over weight to be identical with the victim's. He'll have to do a clever job. See if he can't approximate the same weight of limbs, torso, and head. Especially the head. That's most important. Think he can do it?"

"Might. He'll probably have to get Prouty's help in the weights."

"Be sure to tell him to keep the dummy flexible-"

"What d'ye mean?"

"I mean I don't want it in one stiff straight piece. Whatever he uses for the weighting-iron, lead-should not run in a single piece from head to foot. Let him use separate weights for the feet, the legs, the torso, the arms, and the head. In that way we'll have a dummy which in virtually every particular will be a facsimile of the dead man's body. That's vital, dad."

"I guess he can string 'em together with wire or something," muttered the Inspector, "which'll bend. Anything else?"

Ellery chewed his lower lip. "Yes. Have the dummy dressed in the dead man's clothes. That's the theatre in me coming out."

"Put on backwards?"

"Good heavens, yes! The dummy should look precisely like our little corpse."

"Say," snapped the Inspector, "don't tell me you're going to pull one of those old psychological gags of confronting the suspects with what seems to be the corpse risen from the dead! By thunder, El, that's-"

"Now that," said Ellery sadly, "is the most unkindest cut of all. Have you really such a low estimate of my mentality? Of course I haven't any such notion. This is an experiment in the name of science, dear father. No hocus-pocus about it. The theatre I referred to was an afterthought. Understood?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, but I guess so. Where d'ye want the thing?"

"Have it sent up here, to the apartment. I have work for it."

The Inspector sighed. "All right. All right. But sometimes I think that all that thinking you say you do has gone to your head. Ha, ha!" And with a sad chuckle he hung up.

Ellery smiled, stretched, yawned, wandered into the bedroom, flung himself on his bed, and fell asleep within sixty seconds.

The dummy was delivered by Sergeant Velie at 9:30 that night.

"Ah!" cried Ellery, seizing the end of the long heavy crate. "Lord, that's heavy! What's in this, a gravestone?"

"Well, the Inspector said it was supposed to weigh as much as the stiff, Mr. Queen," said the Sergeant. "All right, bud," and he nodded to the man who had helped him carry the crate upstairs. The man touched his cap and went away. "Here. Let's dig him out of that."

They set to work and under Djuna's awestruck eyes removed something that might have been a man. It was swathed in brown paper like an Egyptian mummy. Ellery stripped the wrappings away and gasped in astonishment. The dummy slipped out of his arms and promptly proceeded to crumple section by section in a heap on the living-room rug, quite like a dead man.

"Lord, it's-it's he!"

For there, smiling up at them, was the unctuous face of the stout little man.

"Papeer mashay," exclaimed the Sergeant, gazing proudly at the dummy. "This guy Rosenzweig knows his onions. Reconstructed that there face from the photos and did one swell job with his paints and brushes. Look at that hair!"

"I'm looking," murmured Ellery, fascinated. It was, as the Sergeant had said, a most artistic job. The pink smooth skull with its fringe of gray hair was quite life-like. Even the crushed blackish area where the bra.s.s poker had struck was there, and the jelly-like radiations of dried blood.

"Look," whispered Djuna, stretching his thin neck. "He's got his pants on backwards. An' his coat 'n' everything!"

"Quite in order. Well!" Ellery breathed deeply. "Rosenzweig, my friend, I salute you. I'm certainly in the debt of that genius, whoever he is. Couldn't have conceived a more perfect dummy for my purposes. Here. Let's get him-"

"Gonna throw a scare into them?" growled Velie, stooping and tugging at the dummy's shoulders.

"No, no, Velie; nothing so crude as that. Let's sit him in that chair near the bedroom door. There. That's the idea. ... Now, Sergeant." He straightened, flushed a little, and stared into the giant's hard eyes. The Sergeant scratched his chin and looked suspicious.

"You want me to do somethin'," he said accusingly, "somethin' you don't want no one to know about."

"Exactly. Now-"

"Not even the Inspector, I bet."

"Oh," said Ellery airily, "why not surprise him? He doesn't get much fun out of life, Velie." He took the giant's arm and steered him into the foyer. Djuna, a little hurt, stalked back to his kitchen. He kept his sharp ears c.o.c.ked, however, and he could hear Ellery murmur earnest words and at least once an explosive exclamation from the mountainous Sergeant. The Sergeant, it appeared, was stupefied. Then there was the slam of the front door and Ellery was back, smiling and rubbing his hands.

"Djuna!"

Before the name was out of his mouth Djuna was at his side, panting and eager as a charger.

"You gonna do somepin'?"

"And, my chief of the Baker Street Division," said Ellery, eying the smiling face of the dummy thoughtfully, "how. You're hereby appointed First Special Laboratory a.s.sistant, young man. We're alone, there are no prying eyes and ears-" He fixed a stern eye on Djuna. "You take your oath as a Romany gentleman that what pa.s.ses between us this night is henceforth and forever a secret, writ in words of blood? Cross your heart and hope to die?"

Djuna crossed his heart hastily and hoped to die.

"Settled! Now, first." Ellery sucked his thumb. "Ah, yes! That small mat from the storage-closet, Djuna."

"Mat?" Djuna's eyes opened wide. "Yes, sir." And he sped away, to return a moment later with the commandeered mat.

"Next," said Ellery, crossing the room and gazing up at the wall above the fireplace, "the step-ladder."

Djuna brought the step-ladder. Ellery mounted it and with the solemnity and dignity of a high priest performing a sacred rite unhooked the somewhat dusty long swords from their brackets on the wall and brought them down. These he placed beside the rolled mat and smote his palms together, chuckling.

"We progress, Djuna. Finally, a commission."

"Com-"

"An errand. Don your legate's robes, O a.s.sistant."

Djuna frowned a moment, and then grinned and vanished and reappeared in hat and coat. "Where to?"

"The hardware store on St. Nicholas Avenue. That monstrous emporium."

"Yes, sir."

Ellery handed him a bill. "Procure, O a.s.sistant, a small roll of every kind of cord and twine in the establishment."

"Yep."

"And," added Ellery, frowning, "also thin pliable wire-a few lengths. We must overlook no possibility in our quest for the Holy Grail in which truth lies enshrined. Comprends?"

Djuna ran.

"A moment, young limb. Perhaps you'd better buy us a new broom, too."

"Why?"

"I might say plat.i.tudinously because it sweeps clean, but that would be aborting the facts. Rest content, my friend, with the bare wording of the commission."

Djuna shook his head stubbornly. "But we got a new broom."

"We must have another. Nothing's happened to our saw, Djuna, I trust?"

"It's in the tool-chest in the storage-closet."

"Superb. The brooms may serve if the swords fail us. Alors, avaunt, then, my fine churl; science waits upon the vigor of your muscles!"

Djuna set his small mouth in desperate lines, stuck out his thin chest, and scudded out of the apartment. Ellery sat down and stretched his legs.

Then Djuna popped his head back. "You won't do nothin' till I get back, will you, Mr. El?" he asked anxiously.

"My dear Djuna," said Ellery in a reproachful voice. And then Djuna was gone again, and Ellery leaned back and closed his eyes and laughed aloud.

At 11:15, when Inspector Queen tramped wearily into the apartment, he found Djuna and Ellery in excited discussion before the fire-a discussion which ended abruptly with his entrance. The dummy was packed in his coffin and laid out in the center of the room. The mat, the a.s.sorted rolls of twine, and the brooms were not in evidence. Even the long swords had found their way back to their accustomed places above the fireplace.

"Well, what's the whispering about?" grunted the old man, flinging his hat and coat down and coming to the fire to chafe his hands.

"We found a-" Djuna began hotly, when Ellery clapped his hands over the boy's mouth.

"Is that the way, O a.s.sistant," he said severely, "you keep to your sacred oath? Dad, I beg to report-we beg to report-success. Complete, utter, final success."

"'Zat so?" said the Inspector dryly.

"You don't seem immoderately elated."

"I'm worn out."

"I'm sorry." There was a little silence. Djuna, sensing intrafamiliar trouble, slipped off to his bedroom. "I mean it, though."

"Glad to hear it." The Inspector sat down, groaning. He cast a long sidewise glance at the coffin-like crate in the middle of the room. "I see you got the dummy all right."

"Oh, yes. Thanks loads." There was another silence. Ellery's spirits seemed dampened; he rose and went to the mantelpiece and rather nervously fingered one of the iron candlesticks on it. "How did your Forty-fifth Street tramp come out?"