The Mystery of the Vanished Victim
Read The Mystery of the Vanished Victim Online
Authors: Ellery Queen Jr.
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Ellery Queen Jr.
1.
KATAL!
T
HAT
fateful morning Gulliver Queen was doing an unusual thing for a teenager spending his summer vacation with city relatives. Other boys were out in the park or headed for the beach, but Gully was hanging around his uncle’s study hoping the telephone would ring.
Gully had no particular reason to believe that it would ring. But when your grandfather is Inspector Queen of the New York police department and your uncle is Ellery Queen, the famous private detective and author, anything could happen—and Gulliver Queen meant to be right there when it did.
The trouble with cases was that they sometimes sneaked up on a fellow.
As this one did.
The telephone did not ring at all. Someone knocked on the apartment door.
It’s probably a grocery delivery, Gully thought in disgust; and he trudged through the living room to the foyer shouting to the Queens’ housekeeper, who was working in the kitchen, “I’ll answer it, Mrs. Butterly!”
And Gulliver Queen opened the door to find Mr. Jarvis standing there.
Gully’s jaw dropped.
Now ordinarily there was nothing about Mr. Jarvis to amaze anyone. Mr. Jarvis was one of the Queens’ neighbors, a pleasant elderly gentleman who earned his living as a traveling salesman and frequently dropped in to play checkers with Inspector Queen.
It was not Mr. Jarvis who amazed Gully, but what was sitting on Mr. Jarvis’s right shoulder.
It was a bird. A bird about the size of a crow, and just as black. But unlike a crow, this bird had a white patch on each wing and a pair of flat yellow wattles on its head.
“Why, Mr. Jarvis,” Gully exclaimed, “I didn’t know you owned a mynah bird.”
“Is that what it is?” Mr. Jarvis said. He was looking a little alarmed and keeping his head very still. “I’m glad you told me, Gully. I wouldn’t know a mynah bird from a Fiji Island whatzis. It’s not mine, by the way. May I come in?”
“Oh, yes,” Gully said. “Please!”
Mr. Jarvis walked very carefully into the Queens’ sunny living room. The mynah bird kept digging its sharp toenails into Mr. Jarvis’s shoulder as if it were afraid of falling off.
“Won’t you sit down?” Gully asked.
“I don’t think I’d better chance it,” Mr. Jarvis said. “Is your Uncle Ellery home?”
“No, sir.” Gully was fascinated by the bird, and it stared back at him with equal interest. “If it isn’t yours, Mr. Jarvis, whose is it?”
“That’s what I wanted Ellery Queen to find out,” Mr. Jarvis replied. “He’s a detective, isn’t he? When will he be back, Gully?”
“Not for a week at least. But Mr. Jarvis, I don’t understand. Did you find the bird?”
“It found me,” the Queens’ neighbor said helplessly. “I was just going to sit down to breakfast when this character zoomed into my dinette through the open window. He started right in on my scrambled eggs. Or is he a she?”
“I don’t know,” Gully confessed. He stepped toward Mr. Jarvis for a closer look. The strange bird promptly took off from the man’s shoulder, just missing a floor lamp. Then it swooped, banked on its dark wings, and dropped neatly on Gully’s head. The tall teenager grinned nervously, screwing his eyes ceilingward in an impossible effort to see the top of his own head. The mynah first tried to find a comfortable position on Gully’s blond crewcut, then hopped onto his shoulder and settled down there, to Gully’s secret relief.
Mr. Jarvis chuckled at Gully’s nervous expression. “He seems to like you,” he said hopefully.
“Well …” Gully began, and then he almost jumped.
From the little body of the bird perched on his shoulder came a surprisingly deep voice—deep and very clear.
And the mynah bird’s voice said,
“Katal! Katal!”
“He’s a hill mynah,” Gully said excitedly. “They’re the best talkers. But what’s he saying, Mr. Jarvis? What does
‘katal’
mean?”
“That’s what I was hoping your Uncle Ellery could tell me,” Mr. Jarvis said. “It’s been saying that word over and over, and I thought it might be a clue to where it comes from.”
“It might be, at that,” Gully said thoughtfully. But then he sighed. “I don’t suppose it would be honest to keep him. Why don’t you advertise for his owner, Mr. Jarvis?”
“I would, except that I have to leave on a sales trip to the Coast this morning,” Mr. Jarvis explained. “What would I do with it in the meantime?”
“You could call the A.S.P.C.A.,” Gully suggested, not too enthusiastically. Somehow, the thought of the mynah on his shoulder being turned over even to the kind people at the A.S.P.C.A. made him unhappy.
Mr. Jarvis’s long experience as a salesman had made him a shrewd judge of people’s facial expressions. “I can think of a better idea, Gully. It seems to have taken a real shine to you. Why don’t
you
keep it till your uncle gets back? Meanwhile, maybe you can find its owner.”
Gully immediately felt relieved. “I don’t know how my grandfather will feel about it, Mr. Jarvis.”
“The inspector?” Mr. Jarvis said heartily. “Why, he’ll love having a talking bird around, Gully. And you can tell him I said so!”
And Mr. Jarvis, smiling, made for the apartment door.
“But Mr. Jarvis—”
But Mr. Jarvis, with a friendly wave, was gone.
The bird said in its fiercest bass,
“Katal!”
, hopped up on Gully’s blond head again, and dropped onto his other shoulder, where it once more settled down.
“Well,” Gully said to the mynah, “it looks as if we’re stuck with each other, doesn’t it?”
“Katal! Katal!”
the talking bird replied.
For some reason, Gully felt good. He cautiously sat down in his grandfather’s favorite chair near the fireplace. The mynah, perfectly balanced, sat down with him.
“Katal!”
the bird said in Gully’s ear.
Could Katal be his name? Gully wondered. It was possible, of course. But it didn’t
sound
like a name. Even a foreign name.
Gully repeated the word to himself several times. It was certainly no foreign word he had ever heard, although that didn’t prove anything. Languages had never been Gully’s best subjects at school.
“Well, even if I can’t make sense out of what you’re saying,” Gully commented to the mynah, “I can jot it down. In fact, that’s the best reason
for
jotting it down.”
As he got out his pocket notebook—the new red leather one he had run out to buy the moment he knew that his uncle was intending to go away—Gully suddenly recalled the conversation they had had two days ago.
“Hand me those socks, Gully,” Ellery Queen had said, busy over an open suitcase.
Gully had tossed the socks over. “Any instructions for while you’re away, Uncle Ellery?”
“The usual,” his famous uncle had replied. “Wash behind your ears, keep out from under Mrs. Butterly’s feet, and be sure not to turn on a TV mystery show when your grandfather’s home. They raise his blood pressure.”
“Yes, sir,” Gully said. “But I didn’t mean that kind of instructions. I meant about—well, cases and things.”
“Oh, cases and things. Of course, of course, Gully. You make notes of any calls. Pertinent details, and so forth.”
“Yes,
sir!
” Gully said, brightening. “Now suppose it’s important, Uncle Ellery, an emergency or something. Where can I reach you?”
“Ah! That is the question, and the answer is that you won’t be able to, because I’m not going to tell you,” Ellery Queen said, folding a sports jacket.
“But Uncle Ellery! Why?”
“Gully, let’s face it,” his uncle said sadly. “Your poor old uncle’s in a jam.”
“On a case?” Gully cried. “Somebody after you, a gangster or somebody?”
“Somebody’s after me, all right, but he’s not a gangster. He’s my publisher.”
“Oh,” Gully said, disappointed.
“My novel’s way overdue, and I have to finish it. So—no interruptions. Would you hand me those swim trunks?”
“Yes, sir,” Gully said. “But if you’re going away to work, Uncle Ellery, why do you need swim trunks?”
“Because people are arrested for going swimming without them.”
“It doesn’t sound much like work to me,” Gully said suspiciously. “After you swim, you always lie on the beach for hours.”
“Of course I do. I have to dry off, don’t I?”
“Then when will you be working?”
“While I’m drying off.”
“With your eyes closed, Uncle Ellery?”
“I think better that way.”
Gully grinned. “Between snores?”
“You ask too many questions, Gulliver Queen! Let me have the rest of that stuff.”
Gully handed his uncle a diving mask, a pair of rubber flippers and a beach robe. The open suitcase now held a mountain of clothes, beach gear, typewriter paper, and manuscript notebooks.
Ellery Queen regarded it critically. Then he glanced at his nephew. “Over here, Gully. Put that beef to work.”
“Beef?” Gully said indignantly. He was proud of his trim figure and worked hard at keeping in shape.
“Muscle, muscle,” his uncle soothed him. “Park your muscles on this suitcase.”
Between them they managed to shut the suitcase and secure it. Then Ellery Queen grabbed the case with one hand and his portable typewriter with the other and made for the apartment door.
“I’ll help you downstairs, Uncle Ellery—”