And the dummy lay just as the body had lain, and the door was bolted, and nothing remained but the bookcases and the spears and the position of the body to show how it was possible for a door to have been bolted from its other side.
* * *
Ellery came running back and dashed into the anteroom from the corridor. They were still glaring at the dummy and the door.
The detectives stood against the wall. The Inspector had his hand near his hip-pocket.
Some one had risen, pale as the sullen morning sky through the window, and was whispering in a cracked voice: “But I?don’t see?how you?could have known.”
“The spears told me,” said Ellery in the stupefied silence. “The spears and the position of the two bookcases flanking the doorway to the office. When I assembled the facts I saw the truth. The missionary was murdered not where we found him but in another part of the room; that was established very early by the traces of blood on the floor. So the question arose: Why had the murderer moved the body to the door? Obviously because he had a use for the body at that point. The next question was: Why had the murderer shoved the right-hand bookcase along the right-hand wall farther away from the door? The answer to that could only be: to make room in front of the right-hand wall near the door. The third question was: Why had the murderer moved the left-hand bookcase up to the hinge-side of the door and pulled the right side out into the room, making an acute angle with the door? And the answer to that puzzled me until I remembered the spears . . . .
“The spears were stuck through the victim’s clothes from shoes to head. They are solid wood; they made the body almost like an animal’s corpse strung on stout poles. They stiffened the body; they produced, in a way, artificial rigor mortis. A dead man falling from an upright position would crumple in sections to land in a shapeless heap. This dead man, with the spears to stiffen his limp corpse into one piece, would fall in one piece, rigidly. But the right-hand bookcase had been moved back to leave space on the right of the door. Then the dead man was intended to fall before the door, at least part of him coming to rest in that cleared space. And he was intended to fall parallel with the door, otherwise there would have been no necessity for clearing a space to the side of the door. What was the left-hand bookcase moved for? Why that angle, patently deliberately made? I saw then that if the dead man had been set on his feet in that angle he would, if something occurred to move his body, have had to fall roughly toward that cleared space on the other side of the doorway!
“But why should the murderer want him to fall precisely that way, let alone fall at all?” Ellery drew a long breath. “And, impossible as it seemed, the only logical answer I could give to that question was: The murderer, who had removed the body from another part of the room to the door, wanted the dead man to do something to that door in falling . . . . The rest was a matter of concentration and experiment. The only thing that can be done to a door which might conceivably be of importance to a criminal would be to lock it; in this case, to bolt it. But why, for heaven’s sake, make a dead man bolt the door when the murderer himself could have bolted it from this room and made his escape by the other door, that one leading to the corridor from this room?”
The cracked voice said: “I?never?thought?”
Ellery said deliberately: “The only possible answer was that the murderer couldn’t or wouldn’t leave this room by that corridor door. The murderer wanted to leave this room by way of the door to the office. And he wanted everyone to believe that he had left by the corridor door, that the office door had been bolted all the time, that whoever was in the office and had not appeared in the corridor outside the office therefore could not apparently have been the criminal!”
James Osborne covered his face with his hands and said: “Yes, I did it. I murdered him.”
* * *
“You see,” said Ellery a moment later, regarding the cowering man with pitying eyes as the others, transfixed by horror, stared at Osborne, “the problem resolved itself simply into a logical analysis. The use of the spears and the shifting of the bookcases and the moved body of the dead missionary proved that the murderer must have left the anteroom after the crime by the office door. The murderer, therefore, was in the office directly after the murder. But, by his own admission, Osborne was the only constant tenant of that office during the murder-period! The visitors?Macgowan, Miss Sewell, Miss Temple, Miss Diversey?were eliminated because had one of them been the murderer he or she could have left the scene of the crime by the corridor door from this room and therefore could have bolted the office door from the inside of this room without having to resort to the mechanical method Osborne used. Or, to put it another way, since any one who could have left this room by the corridor door could have bolted the office door without resorting to the mechanical method, then any one who could have used the corridor door, instead of being suspect for the crime, as we had assumed all along, became actually innocent.
“The only one who could not use the corridor door of the anteroom without being seen by Mrs. Shane as he returned to the office was Osborne. You, Osborne, were therefore the only possible suspect, the only one for whom the door trick and the spears were necessary, and the only one who benefited from the creation of the illusion that the criminal had to leave the murder-room via the corridor door. Why didn’t you leave well enough alone?leave that office door unbolted?”
“Because,” choked Osborne, “then I knew 1 would be the first one suspected. But if it was bolted from the other side, they’d?you’d never suspect me. Even now I can’t see how?”
“I thought so,” murmured Ellery. “The complex mind, Osborne. As to how, it was a matter of trial and error until I hit the winning combination; I simply put myself in your place and figured out what you would have to do . . . . Now you see, ladies and gentlemen, why it was impossible for Osborne to do the simple thing and get a necktie somewhere to put on the tieless dead man. He couldn’t use his own, of course, and he had no place to get another, because he couldn’t afford to be seen leaving that office of his in sight of Mrs. Shane, even casually. He might have slipped out by the anteroom-corridor door, but then he couldn’t risk all the time required and the almost certain eventuality that he would be seen?if, say, he went downstairs to buy a tie. He couldn’t go to Kirk’s apartment, either, for the same reason. And he didn’t live at the Chancellor?Kirk once told him in my presence to ‘go home’?so he couldn’t secure one of his own ties . . . . I suppose, Osborne, you took the dead man’s vest and secreted it in the office there somewhere until you could safely burn it with all the other things you took from his clothes?”
“Yes,” sighed Osborne in the queerest, mildest way. And Ellery noted, with a faint perplexity, that Miss Diversey looked like death and seemed about to faint.
“You see,” he murmured, “if the man was a priest and wore the clerically inverted collar and no necktie, he must also have been wearing the special clerical vest which comes up to the neck. I knew then that the murderer had to take it away with him, since a clerical vest would have given the whole thing away; but I knew it much too late to prove anything by it. The opportunity to search every one had long since gone . . . . Osborne, why did you kill an inoffensive little man?you, who aren’t the killer type at all? You did it for a poor return, Osborne; you would have had to sell the stamp under cover. But even if you could have got fifty thousand?”
“Ozzie?Osborne, for God’s sake,” whispered Donald Kirk, “I didn’t dream?”
“It was for her,” said Osborne in the same queer mild way. “I was a failure. She was the first woman who ever paid any attention to me. And I’m a poor man. She even said that she wouldn’t think of marrying a man who couldn’t provide the?the comforts . . . . When the opportunity came?” He licked his lips. “It was a temptation. He?he wrote a letter months ago addressed to Mr. Kirk from China. I opened the letter, as I open all?all Mr. Kirk’s mail. He wrote all about the stamp, about resigning from his mission, about coming to New York?he was an American originally?to sell the stamp and retire. I?I saw the opportunity. I knew that the stamp, if what he said was true, would . . . “ Osborne shuddered. No one said anything. “I planned it then, from the beginning. I corresponded with him, using Mr. Kirk’s name. I never told Mr. Kirk a word about him. I didn’t tell her . . . . We conducted a long correspondence. So I learned that he didn’t have any relatives or friends in this country who could inquire about him if he disappeared. I learned when he was coming,
