The Kennel Murder Case

by S. S. Van Dine

  Doremus turned his head and let his indifferent eyes rest on the dead man for several moments.

  “The door was bolted on the inside, doctor,” Markham volunteered. “We had to break it in.”

  Doremus drew a deep sigh and turned back to Heath with a grunt of disgust.

  “Well, what about it?” he asked impatiently. “Couldn’t you have let me finish my breakfast? All you needed was an order to remove the body.” He reached in his pocket and drew out a small pad of printed blanks. “If you’d have given me the lowdown, I’d have sent an assistant.” His voice had become peevish.

  “Mr. Markham told me to call you personally, doc,” Heath explained. “It ain’t my funeral.”

  Doremus, holding his fountain-pen poised, cocked an eye at Markham.

  “Straight case of suicide,” he announced breezily. “Nothing to worry about. I’ll give you the approximate time of death, if you want it. And the routine autopsy…”

  Vance was lighting another cigarette leisurely.

  “I say, doctor,” he asked languidly; “would it be unprofessional if you looked at the body?”

  Doremus spun round.

  “I’m going to look at the body,” he snapped. “I’m going to dissect it—I’m going to give it a post mortem. What more do you want?”

  “Just why, doctor,” pursued Vance, “do you jump at the conclusion that it’s suicide?”

  Doremus sighed impatiently.

  “The gun’s in his hand; the bullet wound is in the right place; and I know a dead man when I see one. Furthermore, the door—”

  “Was bolted on the inside,” Vance finished. “Oh, quite. But what about the body?”

  “Well, what about it?” Doremus began filling in the order. “There’s the body—look at it yourself.”

  “I have looked at it, don’t y’ know.”

  “You see, doc,” Heath explained, with a grin of satisfaction, “Mr. Vance and I made a bet. I said you’d say suicide; and he said you’d say murder.”

  “I’m a doctor, not a detective,” Doremus returned acidly. “The guy’s dead, with a bullet hole in his right temple. He’s holding a gun in his right hand. It’s just the kind of wound that could have been self-inflicted. His position is natural—and the door was locked on the inside. The rest of it is up to you fellows in the Homicide Bureau. If the bullet from the gun don’t fit, the autopsy’ll show it. You’ll get all the data tomorrow. Then you can draw your own conclusions.”

  Vance had sat down in a chair near the west wall and was smoking placidly.

  “Would you mind, doctor, taking a close look at that bullet hole before you return to your hot-cakes and sausages? And you might also scrutinize the dead man’s mouth.”

  Doremus stared at Vance a moment; then he approached Archer Coe’s body and bent over it. He inspected the wound carefully, and I saw his eyebrows go up. He lifted the hair from the left temple, and there was visible to all of us a dark bruised indentation on the scalp along the hair line. Doremus touched it with delicate fingers, and for the first time I got a distinct impression of the man’s professional competency. Then he lifted Coe’s upper lip slightly, and seemed to inspect his teeth, which appeared blood-stained from where I stood. After a close inspection of the dead man’s mouth, he again focused his attention on the bullet wound in the right temple.

  Presently he stood up straight, pushed his derby even farther back on his head, and fixed a calculating gaze on Vance.

  “What’s in your mind?” he asked truculently.

  “Nothing at all—the brain’s a mere vacuum.” Vance took his cigarette from his lips and yawned. “Did you find anything illuminatin’?”

  Doremus nodded, his eyes still on Vance.

  “Yeah. Plenty!”

  “Oh, really, now?” Vance smiled ingratiatingly. “And you still think it’s suicide?”

  Doremus crammed his hands into his pockets and made a wry face.

  “Hell, no!… There’s something queer here—something damned queer.” His eyes shifted to Coe’s body. “There’s blood in his mouth, and he’s got a slight fracture of the skull on the left frontal. He’s had a dirty blow by a blunt instrument of some kind… Damned queer!”

  Markham, his eyes mere slits, came forward.

  “What about that bullet wound in his right temple?”

  Doremus looked up, took one hand from his pocket, and pointed toward the dead man’s head.

  “Mr. Markham,” he said with precise solemnity, “that baby had been dead for hours when that bullet entered his head!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Strange Interruption

  (Thursday, October 11; 10 a.m.)

  THE ONLY PERSON in the room who was not staggered by this unexpected announcement was Vance. Heath stood staring at the corpse as if he almost expected it to rise. Markham slowly took his cigar from his mouth and looked vaguely back and forth between Doremus and Vance. As for myself, I must admit that a cold chill ran up my spine. The sight of a dead man sitting with a revolver in his hand and a bullet wound in his temple, coupled with the knowledge that the bullet had been fired into him after death, affected me like a piece of African sorcery. Its unreality and unnaturalness aroused in me those obscure primordial fears that are hidden deep in even the most civilized organisms.

  Vance, as I say, was unaffected. He merely nodded his head slightly and lighted another cigarette with steady fingers.

  “Interestin’ situation—eh, what?” he murmured. “Really, Markham, a man doesn’t ordinarily shoot himself after death… I fear you simply must eliminate the suicide theory.”

  Markham frowned deeply.

  “But the bolted door—”

  “A dead man doesn’t ordinarily bolt doors either,” Vance returned.

  Markham turned, with slightly dazed eyes, to Doremus.

  “Can you determine what killed him, doctor?”

  “If given time.” Doremus had become sullen: he did not like the turn of events.

  “I say, doctor,” drawled Vance, “what’s the state of rigor mortis in our victim?”

  “It’s well advanced.” Doremus, as if to verify his statement, again leaned over Coe’s body and, after attempting to move the head, grasped the arm hanging over the chair and then kicked Coe’s outstretched feet. “Yep, well advanced. Dead eight to twelve hours.”

  “Can’t you come closer than that?” asked Heath sourly.

  “Give me a chance.” The Medical Examiner was irritable. “I’m going to take a closer look at this guy before I go… Lend me a hand, Sergeant, and we’ll put him on the bed…”

  “Just a moment, doctor.” Vance spoke peremptorily. “Take a look at the hand on the desk. Is it clutching the revolver tightly?”

  Doremus shot the other an angry look, hesitated, and then, bending over Coe’s hand, fumbled with the dead man’s fingers.

  “He’s clutching the gun tight, all right.” With difficulty he bent Coe’s fingers and removed the revolver, taking great care not to make finger-prints on it.

  Heath came forward and gingerly inspected the weapon. Then he wrapped it in a large pocket handkerchief, and placed it on the blotter.

  “And, doctor,” pursued Vance, “was Coe’s finger pressed directly against the trigger?”

  “Yep,” was Doremus’s curt answer.

  “Then we may assume that the revolver was placed in Coe’s hand before rigor mortis set in, what?”

  “Assume anything you like!”

  Markham’s diplomacy again came to the fore.

  “We can’t assume anything without help from you, doctor,” he said graciously. “The point Mr. Vance raises may prove an important one. We’d like your opinion.”

  Doremus partly curbed his irritation.

  “Well, I’ll tell you. He”—pointing to Coe’s body—“may have had the gun in his hand when he died. I wasn’t present, y’ understand. And if the gun was already in his hand, then nobody put it there later.”

  “In that cas
e how could it have been fired?”

  “It couldn’t. But how do you know it was fired? There’s no way of telling until the post mortem whether the bullet in his head came from the gun he was holding.”

  “Do the calibre of the revolver and the wound correspond?”

  “Yes, I’d say so. The gun’s a .38, and the wound looks the same size.”

  “And,” put in Heath, “one chamber of the gun’s been fired.”

  Markham nodded, and looked again at the Medical Examiner.

  “If it should prove to be true, doctor, that the revolver in Coe’s hand fired the shot in his head, then we could assume, could we not, as Mr. Vance suggested, that the revolver had been placed in the dead man’s hand before rigor mortis set in?”

  “Sure you could.” Doremus’s tone was greatly modified. “Nobody could have forced the gun into his hand and made it appear natural after rigor mortis had set in.”

  Though Vance’s eyes were moving idly about the room, he was listening closely to this conversation.

  “There is,” he remarked, in a low voice, “another possibility. Far-fetched, I’ll admit, but tenable… Men have been known to do queer things after death.”

  We all looked at him with questioning astonishment.

  “Don’t go spiritualistic on us, Vance,” Markham snapped. “Just what do you mean by dead men doing queer things?”

  “There are recorded instances of suicides who have shot themselves and then thrown the weapon thirty feet away. Dr. Hans Gross in his ‘Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter’—”

  “But that hardly applies here.”

  “No-o.” Vance drew deeply on his cigarette. “Quite so. Just a fleeting thought.”

  Markham studied Vance a moment; then turned back to Doremus.

  “Did Coe die of that blow on the head?”

  The Medical Examiner once more teetered on his toes, and pursed his lips. Then, without a word, he made another examination of Coe’s head. Straightening up, he looked Markham in the eye.

  “There’s something funny here. There’s been an internal hemorrhage—what might be expected from a severe blow on the head. Blood in the mouth and all that… But, Mr. Markham,”—Doremus spoke impressively—“that blow on the left frontal wasn’t powerful enough to kill a man. A slight fracture, but nothing serious—just enough to stun him… Nope, he didn’t die of concussion or a fractured skull.”

  “And he didn’t die of the revolver shot,” added Vance. “Most fascinatin’!… Still, the johnny’s dead, don’t y’ know.”

  Doremus swung jerkily about to Heath.

  “Come on, Sergeant.”

  He and Heath lifted Coe’s body and carried it to the bed. Together they removed the clothes from the dead man, hung them over a chair by the bed, and Doremus began his examination. He went over the body carefully from head to foot for abrasions and wounds, and ran his fingers over the bones in search of a possible fracture. The body was lying on its back, and as Doremus pressed his hand over the right side we could see him pause and bend forward.

  “Fifth rib broken,” he announced. “And a decided bruise.”

  “That’s certainly not a serious injury,” ventured Markham.

  “Oh, no. Nothing at all. He might not even have known it, except for a little soreness.”

  “Did it happen before or after death?”

  “Before. Otherwise there’d be no epidermal discoloration.”

  “And that blow on the head was also before death, I take it.”

  “Sure thing. He got a little bunged up before he died, but that isn’t what killed him.”

  “Perhaps,” suggested Vance, “the blow on the head and the broken rib are related. He may have been stunned and, in falling, struck his rib against some object.”

  “Possibly.” Doremus nodded without looking up. He was now inspecting the palms of Coe’s hands.

  “Was the blow on the head powerful enough to have rendered him unconscious?” Vance was looking around the room at the various pieces of furniture, and there was a veiled interest in his eyes.

  “Oh, yes,” Doremus told him. “More than likely.”

  Vance’s gaze came to rest on a heavy teak-wood chest near the east windows. Going to it he opened the lid and looked in. Then he closed it almost immediately.

  “And,” pursued Vance, turning back to the Medical Examiner, “would Coe have regained consciousness very soon after that blow on his head?”

  “That’s problematical.” Doremus straightened and screwed up his face into a perplexed frown. “He might have remained unconscious for twelve hours, and he might have come to in a few minutes. All depends… But that’s not what’s bothering me. There are a couple of small abrasions on the inside of the right-hand fingers and a slight cut on the knuckle—and they’re all fresh. I’d say he’d put up a scrap with whoever cracked him over the head. And yet his clothes were certainly neat—no sign of having been mussed—and his hair’s combed and slicked down…”

  “Yeah, and there was a gun in his hand, and he was sitting restful-like and looking peaceful,” added Heath with puzzled disgust. “Somebody musta dolled him up after the battle. A swell situation.”

  “But they didn’t change his shoes,” put in Markham.

  “Which explains his still wearing his street shoes with his bathrobe.” Heath addressed this remark to Vance.

  Vance gazed mildly at the Sergeant for a moment.

  “Why should any one re-dress a person he has just knocked unconscious, and then comb his hair? It’s a sweet, kind-hearted thought, Sergeant, but somehow it’s not the usual procedure… No, I’m afraid we’ll have to account for Coe’s coiffure and sartorial condition along other lines.”

  Heath studied Vance critically.

  “You mean he changed his clothes himself and combed his hair after his head was bashed in?”

  “It’s not impossible,” said Vance.

  “In that case,” Markham asked, “why did he not also change his shoes?”

  “Something intervened.”

  During this speculation Doremus had turned Coe’s body over so that it now lay on its face. I was watching him and I saw him suddenly lean forward.

  “Aha! Now I’ve got it!”

  His exclamation brought us all up short.

  “Stabbed, by George!” he announced excitedly.

  We all drew close to the bed and looked down at the area on the body at which Doremus was pointing.

  Just below Coe’s right shoulder-blade and near the spine was a small diamond-shaped wound about half an inch in diameter. It was a clean-cut wound etched with black coagulated blood. Apparently there had been no external bleeding. This fact struck me as unusual, and Markham must have received the same impression, for, after a moment’s silence, he asked Doremus about it.

  “All wounds do not bleed externally,” Doremus explained. “This is especially true of clean, quick stabs that pass through thin membranes into the viscera: they frequently show little or no external blood. Like contusions. The bleeding is internal… This stab closed immediately and the lips of the wound adhered. An internal hemorrhage was caused. Very simple… Now we have an explanation of everything.”

  Vance smiled cynically.

  “Oh, have we, now? We have only an explanation of the cause of Coe’s death. And that explanation complicates the situation horribly. It makes the case even more insane.”

  Markham shot him a quick glance.

  “I can’t see that,” he said. “It at least clarifies one point we have been discussing. We now know what stopped him in the middle of changing his clothes.”

  “I wonder…” Vance crushed out his cigarette in an ash-tray on the night-table, and picked up the silk-wool dressing-gown which Coe had been wearing when we found him. He held it up to the light and inspected it minutely. There was no cut or hole of any kind in it. We all looked on in stupefied silence.

  “No, Markham,” Vance said, placing the gown over the foot of the bed. “Coe di
dn’t have on his dressing-gown when he was stabbed. That change was made later.”

  “Still and all,” Heath argued, “the guy mighta had his hand under the robe when he did the stabbing.”

  Vance shook his head ruefully.

  “You forget, Sergeant, that the gown was buttoned tightly and that the belt was neatly tied around Coe’s middle… But let us see if we can verify the matter.”

  He walked quickly to the clothes-closet in the west wall, whose door was slightly ajar. Opening the door wide, he stepped inside. A moment later he emerged with a clothes-hanger from which depended a coat and waistcoat of the same sombre gray material as that of the trousers Coe had been wearing.

  Vance ran his fingers over the coat in the vicinity of the right shoulder, and there was revealed a slit in the material the exact size of the wound in Coe’s back. There was a similar slit in the back of the waistcoat, coinciding with the one in the coat.

  Vance held the two articles of clothing close to the light and touched the slits with his fingers.

  “These holes,” he said, “are slightly stiffened at the edges, as if some substance had dried on them. I think that substance will be found to be blood… There’s no doubt that Coe was fully dressed when he was stabbed, and that the blood on the dagger, or knife, soiled the edges of these two cuts when it was withdrawn.”

  He replaced the hanger in the closet.

  After a moment Markham expressed the thought uppermost in all our minds.

  “That being the case, Vance, the murderer must have taken Coe’s coat and vest off, hung them in the closet, and then put the dressing-gown on the stabbed man.”

  “Why the murderer?” Vance parried. “The indications are that some one else came here after Coe was dead and sent a bullet through his head. Couldn’t this other hypothetical person have made the change in the corpse’s habiliments?”

  “Does that theory help us any?” Markham asked gruffly.

  “Not a bit,” Vance cheerfully admitted, “even if it were true—which, of course, we don’t know. And I’ll admit it sounds incredible. I merely made the suggestion by way of indicating that, at this stage of the game, we should not jump at conclusions. And the more obvious the conclusion, the more cautious we should be. This is not, my dear Markham, an obvious case.”