Free The Player on the Other Side by Ellery Queen

I’m the child of your loins and I’m starving! What nourishment have you brought me from downtown?’
    Inexplicably, each began to laugh. Their laughter did not last long, but it sufficed. Where that laughter came from, words could not reach.
    The Inspector shifted his wiry body a little and reached into a side pocket. ‘Fellow got himself slaughtered the other night. Person or persons as yet unknown. In fact, everything as yet unknown.’
    â€˜So?’
    â€˜So. This came in the mail for him just before he was clobbered.’ The Inspector produced something from the pocket he had been exploring and rose and went over to the coffee table and dropped his find before Ellery.
    Ellery leaned forward at the waist. His eyebrows drew ever so lightly toward each other as he studied what the Inspector had produced for his inspection.
    It was a five-sided white card of peculiar proportions, with a capital J stamped on it in what seemed to be black stamping-pad ink.
    The Inspector said, ‘That was the first one.’

9
    Y’s Gambit Accepted
    â€˜Never saw anything like it,’ Inspector Queen was saying. ‘That house, I mean. It’s laid out like a surgeon’s tray. Chair in a corner had to be checked with a draftsman’s triangle for exact placement. Big picture mathematically centered on the wall, with two little pictures the same size flanking it exactly the same distance away. Just so much floor could show at each end of the carpet. Whole house is like that except the secretary’s room — I don’t mean his room’s grubby, just that it looks as if someone lives there, which the rest of the house doesn’t. You’ll see for yourself, Ellery.’
    Ellery made no commitment. He was staring at the card.
    â€˜But he — the lord and master of all this … this exactitude — he was the godawfulest mess you ever saw, I ever saw,’ the old man went on. ‘I’ve seen accident cases spread out over half a block didn’t look as messy as that patio. I s’pose that’s what gave me the feeling right off that this case is going to be a wrongo — your kind of wrongo, Ellery. He was lying on a steel-framed chaise on the patio just outside his impeccable dining room. Except for his head, I mean. That was scattered to hell and gone. Someone’d shoved a two-hundred-pound granite block off the top of the tower forty feet above him … onto his head.’
    â€˜This is Robert York you’re talking about,’ Ellery said suddenly. ‘Of York Square.’
    â€˜How did you know that? Oh, the papers. Yump,’ the Inspector said, ‘it’s the Robert York case, all right.’
    â€˜May I handle the card?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    Ellery picked up the white card, turned it over, turned it back. ‘What’s this J?’
    â€˜You tell me, son. There isn’t a John, Jack, Jim, Joan or Jehoshaphat in all of York Square. Or a Johnson, Jackson, or Jimson, either.’
    Ellery replaced the card on the coffee table and began to hypnotize it. ‘Go on. It couldn’t have been an accident?’
    â€˜Not unless somebody accidently chipped away all the mortar around the stone, accidently cracked it loose with a pinch bar and then accidently swept up all the stone dust. Velie got up there like lightning, and I wasn’t far behind. Nobody’d have had time to do that thorough a clean-up job after the push off. So it had to have been done beforehand — maybe days before, weeks. And that makes it premeditated murder.’
    â€˜How was the granite block tipped off the tower?’
    â€˜By a good hard push. That stone wasn’t teetering in the balance up there, Ellery. It was a solid block with a dead-flat seat under it. Even without the mortar it would have stayed put during a hundred years of hurricanes.’
    â€˜So all the block-buster had to do was wait until York happened to be directly