Chinese Orange Mystery Read Online Free PDF

moment. Sorry, Queen, old man. Why don’t you go into the apartment?”
    Ellery grinned. “No hurry. Besides, I’m hopelessly shy. I’ll wait.”
    “There’s always somebody wanting to see me,” grumbled Kirk, going to the office-door which led to the anteroom, in the wide crack at the bottom of which a line of light was visible. “If it isn’t about books, it’s about stamps, and if it isn’t about stamps, it’s about gems. … What’s this, Ozzie? Door locked?” He looked around impatiently; the door did not budge.
    “Locked?” said Osborne blankly. “That can’t be, Mr. Kirk.”
    “Well, it is. The fool, whoever he is, must have bolted it from the other side.”
    Osborne hurried forward and tried the door. “That’s funny,” he muttered. “You know yourself, Mr. Kirk, I never keep that door bolted. Why, there isn’t even a key to it. Just the bolt on the anteroom side. … Why in the world should he have bolted it, I wonder?”
    “Anything valuable in there, Kirk?” drawled Ellery, coming forward.
    Kirk started. “Valuable? You think—”
    “It sounds remarkably like a case of common burglary.”
    “Burglary!” cried Osborne. “But there’s nothing in there that’s valu—”
    “Let’s have a peep.” Ellery flung his topcoat, hat, and stick on a nearby chair and knelt before the door on a paper-thin Indian mat. He closed one eye and peered through the unobstructed keyhole. Then he rose, very quickly. “Is this the only door into that room?”
    “No, sir. There’s another from the other corridor, the one around the corner opposite Mr. Kirk’s suite. Is there anything wrong?”
    “I don’t know yet,” said Ellery with a frown. “Certainly there’s something deucedly odd. … Come along, Kirk. This will bear investigation.”
    The three men hastened out of the office, to the astonishment of Mrs. Shane, and darted down the corridor. They turned the corner and ran to the left, stopping at the first door across the hall from the Kirk suite, the door Miss Diversey had used more than an hour earlier.
    Ellery grasped the knob and turned. It moved, and he pushed; the door was unlocked. It swung inward slowly.
    Ellery stood still, impaled by shock. Over his shoulder the faces of Donald Kirk and James Osborne worked spasmodically.
    Then Kirk said in a flat shrinking voice: “Good God, Queen.”
    The room looked as if some giant hand had plucked it bodily from the building, shaken it like a dice-cup, and flung it back. At first glance it seemed in a state of utter confusion. All the furniture had been moved. There was something wrong with the pictures on the wall. The rug looked odd. The chairs, the table, everything. …
    The goggling human eyes could not encompass more than a certain degree of destruction in one transfixed glimpse. There was primarily an impression of ruthless havoc, of furious dismantlement. But the impression was ephemeral; it could not withstand the single dreadful reality.
    Their eyes were dragged to something lying across the room on the floor before the bolted door leading to the office. It was the stiff body of the stout middle-aged man, his bald skull no longer pink but white spattered with carmine, streaks of caked jelly radiating from a blackish depression at the top. He was lying face down, his short fat arms crumpled under him. Two unbelievable iron things, like horns, stuck out from under his coat at the back of his neck.

The Topsy-Turvy Murder
    “D EAD?” WHISPERED KIRK.
    Ellery stirred. “Well, what do you think?” he said harshly and took a forward step. Then he stopped, and his eyes flashed from one incredible part of the room to another as if they could not believe 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