“The whole thing, Nikki, was a conspiracy hatched by the president of Barlowe, his two favorite professors, and their good friend the campus bookseller—a conspiracy to put old Chipp’s first detective story over with a bang!”
And now the little wind blew warm, bringing the blood of shame to six male cheeks.
“Mr. Queen—” began the president hoarsely.
“Mr. Queen—” began the bio-chemistry professor hoarsely.
“Mr. Queen—” began the bookseller hoarsely.
“Come, come, gentlemen!” cried Ellery. “All is not lost! We’ll go through with the plot! I make only One condition. Where the devil is Chipp? I want to shake the old scoundrel’s hand!”
Barlowe is an unusual college.
The Adventure of The Dead Cat
The square-cut envelope was a creation of orange ink on black notepaper; by which Ellery instantly divined its horrid authorship. Behind it leered a bouncy hostess, all teeth and enthusiastic ideas, who spent large sums of some embarrassed man’s money to build a better mousetrap.
Having too often been one of the mice, he was grateful that the envelope was addressed to “Miss Nikki Porter.”
“But why to me at your apartment?” wondered Nikki, turning the black envelope over and finding nothing.
“Studied insult,” Ellery assured her. “One of those acid-sweet women who destroy an honest girl’s reputation at a stroke. Don’t even open it. Hurl it into the fire, and let’s get on with the work.”
So Nikki opened it and drew out an enclosure cut in the shape of a cat.
“I am a master of metaphor,” muttered Ellery.
“What?” said Nikki, unfolding the feline.
“It doesn’t matter. But if you insist on playing the mouse, go ahead and read it.” The truth was, he was a little curious himself.
“Fellow Spook,” began Nikki, frowning.
“Read no more. The hideous details are already clear—”
“Oh, shut up,” said Nikki. “There is a secret meeting of The Charmed Circle of Black Cats in Suite 1313, Hotel Chancellor, City, Oct. 31.”
“Of course,” said Ellery glumly. “That follows logically.”
“You must come in full costume as a Black Cat, including domino mask. Time your arrival for 9.05 P.M. promptly. Till the Witching Hour. Signed — G. Host. How darling!”
“No clue to the criminal?”
“No. I don’t recognize the handwriting...”
“Of course you’re not going.”
“Of course I am!”
“Having performed my moral duty as friend, protector, and employer, I now suggest you put the foul thing away and get back to our typewriter.”
“What’s more,” said Nikki, “you’re going, too.”
Ellery smiled his Number Three smile—the toothy one. “Am I?”
“There’s a postscript on the cat’s—on the reverse side. Be sure to drag your boss-cat along, also costumed.”
Ellery could see himself as a sort of overgrown Puss-in-Boots plying the sjambok over a houseful of bounding tabbies all swilling Scotch. The vision was tiring.
“I decline with the usual thanks.”
“You’re a stuffed shirt.”
“I’m an intelligent man.”
“You don’t know how to have fun.”
“These brawls inevitably wind up with someone’s husband taking a poke at a tall, dark, handsome stranger.”
“Coward.”
“Heavens, I wasn’t referring to myself—!”
Whence it is obvious he had already lost the engagement.
Ellery stood before a door on the thirteenth floor of the Hotel Chancellor, cursing the Druids.
For it was Saman at whose mossy feet must be laid the origins of our recurrent October silliness. True, the lighting of ceremonial bonfires in a Gaelic glade must have seemed natural and proper at the time, and a Gaelic grove fitting rendezvous for an annual convention of ghosts and witches; but the responsibility of even pagan deities must surely be held to extend beyond temporal bounds, and the Druid lord of death should have foreseen that a bonfire would be out of place in a Manhattan hotel suite, not to mention disembodied souls, however wicked. Then Ellery recalled that Pomona, goddess of fruits, had contributed nuts and apples to the burgeoning Hallowe’en legend, and he cursed the Romans, too.
There had been Inspector Queen at home, who had intolerably chosen to ignore the whole thing; the taxi driver, who had asked amiably: “Fraternity initiation?”; the dread chorus of miaows during the long, long trek across the Chancellor lobby; and, finally, the reeking wag in the elevator who had tried to swing Ellery around by his tail, puss-pussying obscenely as he did so.
Cried Ellery out of the agony of his mortification: “Never, never, never again will I—”
“Stop grousing and look at this,” said Nikki, peering through her domino mask.
“What is it? I can’t see through this damned thing.”
“A sign on the door. If You Are a Black Cat, Walk In!!!!! With five exclamation points.”
“All right, all right. Let’s go in and get it over with.”
And, of course, when they opened the unlocked door of 1313, Darkness.
And Silence.
“Now what do we do?” giggled Nikki, and jumped at the snick of the door behind them.
“I’ll tell you now what,” said Ellery enthusiastically. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
But Nikki was already a yard away, black in blackness.
“Wait! Give me your hand, Nikki.”
“Mister Queen. That’s not my hand.”
“Beg your pardon,” muttered Ellery. “We seem to be trapped in a hallway...”
“There’s a red light down there! Must be at the end of the hall — eee!”
“Think of the soup this would make for the starving.” Ellery disentangled her from the embrace of some articulated bones.
“Ellery! I don’t think that’s funny at all.”
“I don’t think any of this is funny.”
They groped toward the red light. It was not so much a light as a rosy shade of darkness which faintly blushed above a small plinth of the raven variety. “The woman’s cornered the Black Paper Market,” Ellery thought disagreeably as he read the runes of yellow fire on the plinth:
“And into, I take it,” he growled, “the great unknown.” And, indeed, having explored to the left, his hand encountered outer space; whereupon, intrepidly, and with a large yearning to master the mystery and come to grips with its diabolical authoress, Ellery plunged through the invisible archway, Nikki bravely clinging to his tail.
“Ouch!”
“What’s the matter?” gasped Nikki.
“Bumped into a chair. Skinned my shin. What would a chair be doing—?”
“Pooooor Ellery,” said Nikki, laughing. “Did the dreat bid mad hurt his — Ow!”
“Blast this—Ooo!”
“Ellery, where are you? Ooch!”
“Ow, my foot,” bellowed Ellery from somewhere. “What is this—a tank-trap? Floor cluttered with pillows, hassocks—”
“Something cold and wet over here. Feels like an ice bucket... Owwwww!” There was a wild clatter of metal, a soggy crash, and silence again.
“Nikki! What happened?”
“I fell over a rack of fire tongs, I think,” Nikki’s voice came clearly from floor level. “Yes. Fire tongs.”
“Of all the stupid, childish, unfunny—”