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 finger tips. 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?”
“Tc/i,” murmured Ellery, “get a stranglehold on your nerves, 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 wheel-chair 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.
In the confusion Ellery, who had not stirred from the doorway, sighed and retreated, closing the door of the anteroom behind him. The sounds became live echoes. He stood guard with his back to the door, just looking at the dead man and the furniture and back at the dead man again. He made no move to touch anything.
* * *
The house doctor, a broad squat cold-eyed man, got to his feet with amazement written all over his stony face. Nye, the manager, an elegant creature in a cutaway with a gardenia in his lapel as depressed-looking as himself, was biting his lips beside Ellery at the door. Brummer, the burly house detective, scraped his blue jaws rather pathetically at the open window.
“Well, Doctor?” said Ellery abruptly.
The man started. “Oh, yes. You want to know, I suppose, how long he’s been dead. I should say he died at about six?a little over an hour ago.”
“From the effects of the blow on his head?”
“Unquestionably. The poker shattered the skull, causing instant death.”
“Ah,” said Ellery. “That’s a most vital point, Doctor?”
“Generally is,” said the doctor with a grim smile.
“Ha, ha. There’s no doubt in your mind about death having been instantaneous?”
“My dear sir!”
“I beg your pardon, but we must be sure. And the bruise on his face?”
“Caused by his fall, Mr. Queen. He was dead when he struck the floor.” Ellery’s eyes flickered, and the physician moved toward the door. “I’ll be glad, of course, to repeat my opinion to your Medical Examiner?”
“Scarcely necessary. By the way, there couldn’t be a different cause of death, I suppose?”
“Nonsense,” said the squat man with asperity. “I can’t say without a physical examination and autopsy what other signs of violence exist, but death occurred from the effects of the cranial blow, take my word for it. All the external indications?” Something gleamed in his cold eyes. “See here, you mean that the blow on the skull may have been inflicted
“Some such idiotic notion,” muttered Ellery, “was in my mind.”
“Then get it out of your mind.” The physician hesitated, struggling with an ingrained professional reticence. Then he shrugged. “I’m not a detective,
Mr. Queen, and this sort of thing is decidedly out of my line. But if you’re looking for something odd, may I point out the condition of this man’s clothing?”
“Clothing? Yes, yes, point it out, by all means. I can’t say, at this stage of the game, that I should disdain the viewpoint of even a layman.”
The doctor eyed him sharply. “Of course,” he said in a steel-barbed rasp, “with all your experience?I’ve heard of you, Queen?I suppose the condition of this man’s clothing and its possible significance is childishly clear. But to my infantile mind it seems rather remarkable that?he’s
“Backwards?” said Nye with a groan. “Oh, good Lord.”
“Didn’t you notice, Mr. Nye?” rumbled Brummer, scowling. “Damnedest thing I ever saw.”
“Please, gentlemen,” murmured Ellery. “Specifically, Doctor?”
