The Golden Goose by Ellery Queen Page A

in a talent for pursuing the questionable while remaining just inside the purlieus of the law. There was a certain poetic unity in the revelation that the victim of a fancy murderer had engaged the services of a shyster lawyer, but Lieutenant Grundy did not warm to it. Grundy’s lack of empathy with art in whatever form has already been remarked.
    Consequently, he rose from his desk with a scowl; and he covered his head with a hat and left his office, Selwyn Fish-bound.
    It was a short walk from police headquarters. The shyster’s office was located over a cheap-john clothing store in the seediest section of old Cibola City, on a crooked side street with gaps in its cobbles, like broken teeth. The two-story frame building leaned a little on its foundations, and its ancient dirt-colored walls always reminded Grundy of the scaling hide of a dying old dwarf elephant. It was twenty years past its just deserts of condemnation, a fate it successfully avoided by the fact that it was owned by the most influential member of the Cibola City Council.
    The lieutenant pushed open the street door, which screamed feebly, and he groped through the sour dimness of a flight of narrow creaking stairs to the upper floor. Here, lurking along the grimy little hall, were grimy little offices, their half-pebbled glass doors announcing a chiropractor, the headquarters of a local sect known as The Sublime Order of the Sons of the Sun, a public stenographer, and finally—in scabby gilt lettering—Selwyn Fish, Attorney-at-Law.
    Grundy walked in. He found himself in a sort of closet, presided over by a desiccated female with a new purple pimple on the end of her nose and a shroudlike black dress over her bones. All Grundy could think of was a disinterment order.
    â€œYes” this lady snapped. Then she noticed who it was, and she said, this time in a wary tone, “Yes?”
    â€œLieutenant Grundy, police,” Grundy said. “Mr. Fish in?”
    â€œPolice?” she repeated, as if she had not noticed. “Mr. Fish has a client with him. Is there anything I can do for you?”
    â€œNo,” said Grundy; and he looked around for a chair. There was none except the chair occupied by the talking corpse. He leaned against the door and waited.
    He waited twenty minutes. Then the inner door of the closet opened and a woman with dried-out yellow straw for hair and an improbable chest measurement appeared. At sight of Grundy she froze like an alley cat. Then she tiptoed across the closet floor, Grundy politely held the door open for her, and she clattered down the hall and down the stairs on her three-inch heels as if she expected him to come racing after her, gun in hand. Grundy knew her well. Her name was Big Suzy.
    â€œCome in, Lieutenant, come in,” called a boomy voice; Grundy shut the hall door and went into the inner office. Selwyn Fish was on his feet behind his desk, showing his crystal teeth in what Grundy supposed was intended as a smile. “Sit down, sit down. What can I do for you?”
    Grundy sat down in an armchair with a broken spring. He placed his hat precisely in his lap, taking his time about it; accommodated his lean buttocks to the lumpy seat; then deliberately sat back and looked Selwyn Fish over. Fish had been fashioned in the same remarkable workshop that had produced Twig O’Shea. He had a long thick torso set on short bandy legs, so that when he stood he looked like a dwarf and when he sat down—as he now rather uncertainly did—he seemed gigantic. Above the enormous shoulders wobbled a pin-head, without a hair on it, but whose contents, Grundy knew, were out of all proportion to its container. The whole effect was that of an android made up out of spare parts by a drunken workman of the year 2783. The lawyer’s only savory feature were his eyes—large, black, brilliantly beautiful, like some gorgeous flower growing in a swamp.
    â€œI understand,” began Grundy,