“His coat is on as if he’d got into it the wrong way, as if somebody held it open facing him and he wriggled into the sleeves and then buttoned himself up the back.”
“Masterly! Although not necessarily an exclusive diagnosis. Go on, sir.”
Brummer said peevishly: “Why in hell should a man put his coat on backwards? It’s nuts.”
“A strong word, Brummer, but inept. ‘Improbable’ would be more to the point. Did you ever try to put
“I don’t see?” began the detective belligerently.
“Apparently not. I should explain that the improbability lies not in the donning of the coat, but in the buttoning.”
“How d’ye figure that?”
“Do you think you could put your coat on backwards and button it up yourself, with the buttons studding the vertebrae along your spinal column? And the inverted, wrongly placed sleeves hampering the elevating possibilities of your arms?”
“I got you. Sure I could.”
“Well, perhaps so,” sighed Ellery. “Proceed, Doctor. Pardon the aside.”
“You’ll have to excuse me,” said the doctor abruptly. “I merely wished to call your attention?”
“But I assure you, Doctor?”
“If the police want me,” continued the cold-eyed man with a faint emphasis on the third word, “I shall be in my office. Good evening!” And he stumped past Ellery out of the room.
“A clear case of the frustration psychosis,” said Ellery. “Fool!”
The door clicked behind the physician in a dismal silence. They regarded the corpse with varying expressions?Nye glassily, Brummer gloomily, and Ellery with a furious frown. The pervading impression of unreality persisted. Not only was the dead man’s coat on backwards, but his trousers were inverted and buttoned up behind as well. As were his white madras shirt and vest. His narrow stiff collar similarly was turned about, clamped with a shiny gold collar-button at the nape. His undergarments apparently exhibited the same baffling inversion. Of all his clothing only his shoes remained in the orthodox position.
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
“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
“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
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?”
“Oh, heavens,” exclaimed Ellery, “you’re blind, both of you. What do you mean, Brummer, by ‘messed up’?”
“You can see, can’t you? Knocked around, shoved out of place.”
“Is that all? Lord! You don’t see anything broken, do you? Smashed? Demolished?”
Brummer coughed. “Well, no, sir.”
“Of course you don’t! Because this wasn’t the work of a wrecker. It was the work of some one with a cold purpose, man, with a purpose worlds removed from mere stupid destruction. Don’t you see that yet, Brummer?”
The detective looked miserable. “No, sir.”
Ellery sighed and replaced his glasses upon his thin nose. “In a way,” he muttered half to himself, “this becomes valuable exercise. Lord knows I need . . . Look here, Brummer, old fellow. Tell me what you see about the bookcases that strikes you as?ah?’messed up.’”
“Bookcases?” The house detective regarded them doubtfully. They were sectional cases of unfinished oak; the odd thing about them was that they stood, for the most part neatly, arrayed on all three walls with their closed backs facing into the room. “Why, they’re turned around to face the walls, Mr. Queen.”
“Admirable, Brummer. Including,” Ellery frowned in a puzzled way, “the two sections flanking the doorway to the office there; although I note with baffled interest that the section to the left of the door has been pulled in front of the door and turned on an acute angle into the room for a bit. And that the one to the right has been shoved off to the right. Well! How about the rug?”
“It’s been turned over, Mr. Queen.”
“Precisely. You’re gazing at the back. And the pictures on the walls?”
