Ellery Queen
The Door Between
KAREN LEITH, an Oriental-minded literary light who planned a platonic marriage and died violently in her quiet Greenwich Village hideaway.
KINUMÉ, her close-tongued Japanese maid.
ELLERY QUEEN, a cerebral sleuth, who explained in logical manner an “impossible crime”.
BUESCHER, Karen’s publisher.
DR. JOHN MACCLURE, Karen’s fiancé; a cancer specialist with his own gnawing secret.
EVA MACCLURE, his daughter, who found that death, persecution, and despair could end in happiness.
ESTHER LEITH, Karen’s sister; a sad and beautiful memory from long-ago Japan.
DR RICHARD SCOTT, the fashionable darling of the hypochondriac society set and Eva’s fiancé.
GENEVA O’MARA, a dissatisfied maid.
TERRY RING, a private detective who kept so many secrets he finally shouted his own to the world.
GUILFOYLE, who had a date with a corpse.
INSPECTOR QUEEN, a mild-mannered father, driven to snuff-sniffing fury by his son’s antics.
SERGEANT VELIE, his large, tough right hand.
DR. PROUTY, a sardonic police medico whose reports kept the case from getting too easy.
FLINT, PIGGOTT, HAGSTROM, RITTER, of the New York Police Department.
DJUNA, the Queens’ familiar spirit.
MOREL, Karen’s fluttery and anxious lawyer.
Part One
1
When Karen Leith won the major American prize in literature her grateful publisher surprised everyone, including himself, by successfully wheedling his prima donna into a public appearance.
Even more surprising was Miss Leith’s permission to stage the insubstantial pageant in her own Japanese garden behind the prim house in Washington Square.
A great many important people came, studding the unimportant ones like raisins in a cake; and everybody was happy, none more so than Miss Leith’s publisher, who had never dreamed his most difficult piece of property would consent to put herself on exhibition — and in her own garden, too!
But winning the literary award seemed to do something to the small, shy, still-pretty woman who had come quietly out of Japan in 1927 and sequestered herself behind the opaque walls of the house in Washington Square, from whose sanctuary she sent forth incredibly enameled and beautiful novels; and the handful who had met her before swore they had never seen her so excited and friendly.
But most of the crowd had never seen Karen Leith at all, which made her party more of a début than a triumph. For a woman reputed to be as scary as a bird, she stood the ordeal well. In fact, she seemed to challenge attention, for she had draped her frail figure in a gorgeous Japanese kimono and brushed her blue-black hair back in the loose sleek bulging Nipponese style. Even the more critical gentry present were disarmed, however; Karen carried herself so gracefully in the quaint costume that they knew what seemed a challenge was nothing of the sort and that she was simply more at ease in Japanese garb than she would have been in a Fifth Avenue modiste’s gown. Ivory and jade pins lay in her hair like crown jewels; and indeed Karen was royalty that evening, receiving her guests with that bloodless excitement under disciplined calm of a queen at her coronation.
The celebrated author of Eight-Cloud Rising was a tiny creature of such feathery structure that, as one poetic gentleman remarked, a delicate wind would have rocked her and a gale swept her bodily away. Her cheeks were pale hollows under the curious and careful cosmetics. In fact, she looked ill; and there was a floating quality in her gestures that suggested the fatigue of neurasthenia.
Only her eyes were vivacious: they were gray and Caucasian, aglitter and yet a little masked in their violet settings, as if they had somewhere in her rather mysterious past learned to shrink from blows. The ladies all agreed with unusual magnanimity that she possessed a rather fantastic prettiness, more on the ethereal side and quite ageless; almost like a ceramic of the East or one of her strange ceramic novels.
Karen Leith was what she was, everyone agreed; and what she was nobody knew, for she never went out and she kept to her house and garden like a nun. And since the house was inaccessible and the garden wall high, biographical details were maddeningly scanty: she was the daughter of an obscure American expatriate who until his death had taught comparative literature at the Imperial University in Tokyo, and she had spent most of her life in Japan. And that was nearly all.
Karen was holding court in a small pavilion at the center of the alien garden, preparing tea according to a Japanese ceremony she called Cha no yu. She sing-songed the peculiar sounds with such ease it seemed almost as if English were an acquired language rather than her heritage. Her girlish hands were busy with a whisk stirring powdered green tea in a rather rudely fashioned Korean bowl of thick, aged pottery. A very ancient Oriental woman dressed in Japanese costume stood silently behind her, like a protecting deity.
“Her name is Kinumé,” explained Karen in answer to a question concerning the old woman. “The dearest, gentlest soul. She’s been with me for — oh, centuries.” And for an instant Karen’s pretty, exhausted face darkened unaccountably.
“She looks Japanese and yet she doesn’t,” said one of the group in the pavilion. “Isn’t she tiny!”
Karen hissed something in what they all took to be Japanese, and the old woman bowed and pattered away.
“She understands English quite well,” said Karen apologetically, “although she’s never learned to speak it fluently... She doesn’t come from Japan proper. She comes from the Loo-choo Islands. That’s the group, you know, that lies on the edge of the East China Sea, between Taiwan — Formosa, you know — and the mainland. They’re even a smaller people than the Japanese, but better-proportioned.”
“I thought she didn’t look quite Japanese.”
“There’s some question among ethnologists about the stock. It’s been said that the Loo-chooans have Ainu blood — they’re hairier and have better noses and less flattened cheeks, as you saw. And they’re the gentlest people in the world.”
A tallish young man with pince-nez glasses remarked: “Gentle is as gentle does. How gentle is that, Miss Leith?”
“Well,” said Karen with one of her rare smiles, “I don’t believe there’s been a lethal weapon used in Loo-choo for three hundred years.”
“Then I’m all for Loo-choo,” said the tallish young man ruefully. “A murderless Eden! It sounds incredible.”
“And not exactly typical of the Japanese, I should say,” put in Karen’s publisher.
Karen glanced at him. Then she passed the bowl of tea around. A literary reporter asked a question.
“Taste it... No, I don’t remember Lafcadio Hearn. I was barely seven when he died. But my father knew him well — they taught together at the Imperial University... Isn’t it delicious?”
It was delicious irony, not tea. For the first recipient of the bowl was the tallish young man with the pince-nez glasses, whose name was Queen and who was present unimportantly as a writer of detective stories.
But Mr. Queen could not have been expected to detect the irony then; recognition was to come later, under less pleasant circumstances. At the moment he remarked that the tea was delicious, although privately he thought it a nasty mess, and passed the bowl on to his neighbor, a middle-aged male gorilla with the stoop of a student, who refused it and sent it on its way.
“I’ll share everything with you,” explained the big man pathetically to Karen, “but germs.”