The Dragon Murder Case

by S. S. Van Dine

  “I think I know what he meant,” Vance said with a slight nod. “That part of the city has given rise to many strange and grotesque legends—old wives’ tales and superstitions that have come down from the Indians and early settlers.”

  “Well, anyway,”—Heath dismissed Vance’s comments as irrelevant—“after the party had gone down to the pool, this fellow Montague walked out on the spring-board and took a fancy dive. And he never came up...”

  “How could the others be so sure he didn’t come up?” asked Markham. “It must have been pretty dark after the rain: it’s cloudy now.”

  “There was plenty of light at the pool,” Heath explained. “They’ve got a dozen flood-lights on the place.”

  “Very well. Go on.” Markham reached impatiently for his champagne. “What happened then?”

  Heath shifted uneasily.

  “Nothing much,” he admitted. “The other men dove after him and tried to find him, but after ten minutes or so they gave up. Leland, it seems, told ’em that they’d all better go back to the house and that he’d notify the authorities. Then he called the Homicide Bureau and spilled the story.”

  “Queer he should do that,” ruminated Markham. “It doesn’t sound like a criminal case.”

  “Sure it’s queer,” agreed Heath eagerly. “But what I found was a whole lot queerer.”

  “Ah!” Vance blew a ribbon of smoke upward. “That romantic section of old New York is at last living up to its reputation. What were these queer things you found, Sergeant?”

  Heath moved again with uneasy embarrassment.

  “To begin with, Stamm himself was cock-eyed drunk, and there was a doctor from the neighborhood trying to get him to function. Stamm’s young sister—a good-looker of about twenty-five—was having hysterics and going off into faints every few minutes. The rest of ’em—there was four or five—were trying to duck and making excuses why they had to get away pronto. And all the time this fellow Leland, who looks like a hawk or something, was going round as cool as a cucumber with lifted eyebrows and a satisfied grin on his brown face, as if he knew a lot more than he was telling.—Then there was one of those sleezy, pasty-faced butlers, who acted like a ghost and didn’t make any noise when he moved...”

  “Yes, yes,” Vance nodded whimsically. “Everything most mystifyin’... And the wind moaned through the pines; and an owl hooted in the distance; and a lattice rattled in the attic; and a door creaked; and there came a tapping—eh, what, Sergeant?... I say, do have another spot of Scotch. You’re positively jittery.” (He spoke humorously, but there was a shrewd, interested look in his half-closed eyes and an undercurrent of tension in his voice that made me realize that he was taking the Sergeant far more seriously than his manner indicated.)

  I expected the Sergeant to resent Vance’s frivolous attitude, but instead he wagged his head soberly.

  “You got the idea, Mr. Vance. Nothing seemed on the level. It wasn’t normal, as you might say.”

  Markham’s annoyance was mounting.

  “The case doesn’t strike me as peculiar, Sergeant,” he protested. “A man dives into a swimming pool, hits his head on the bottom, and drowns. And you’ve related nothing else that can’t be explained on the most commonplace grounds. It’s not unusual for a man to get drunk, and after a tragedy of this kind a hysterical woman is not to be regarded as unique. Naturally, too, the other members of the party wanted to get away after an episode like this. As for the man Leland: he may be just a peculiar officious character who wished to dramatize a fundamentally simple affair. And you always had an antipathy for butlers. However you look at the case, it doesn’t warrant anything more than the usual procedure. It’s certainly not in the province of the Homicide Bureau. The idea of murder is precluded by the very mechanism of Montague’s disappearance. He himself suggested a swim in the pool—a rational enough suggestion on a night like this—and his plunge into the pool and his failure to come to the surface could hardly be indicative of any other person’s criminal intent.”

  Heath shrugged and lighted a long black cigar.

  “I’ve been telling myself the same things for the past hour,” he returned stubbornly; “but that situation at the Stamm house ain’t right.”

  Markham pursed his lips and regarded the Sergeant meditatively.

  “Was there anything else that upset you?” he asked, after a pause.

  Heath did not answer at once. Obviously there was something else on his mind, and it seemed to me that he was weighing the advisability of mentioning it. But suddenly he lifted himself in his chair and took his cigar deliberately from his mouth.

  “I don’t like those fish!” he blurted.

  “Fish?” repeated Markham in astonishment. “What fish?”

  Heath hesitated and contemplated the end of his cigar sheepishly.

  “I think I can answer that question, Markham,” Vance put in. “Rudolph Stamm is one of the foremost aquarists in America. He has a most amazin’ collection of tropical fish—strange and little-known varieties which he has succeeded in breeding. It’s been his hobby for twenty years, and he is constantly going on expeditions to the Amazon, Siam, India, the Paraguay basin, Brazil and Bermuda. He has also made trips to China and has scoured the Orinoco. Only a year or so ago the papers were full of his trip from Liberia to the Congo...”

  “They’re queer-looking things,” Heath supplemented. “Some of ’em look like sea-monsters that haven’t grown up.”

  “Their shapes and their colorings are very beautiful, however,” commented Vance with a faint smile.

  “But that wasn’t all,” the Sergeant went on, ignoring Vance’s æsthetic observation. “This fellow Stamm had lizards and baby alligators—”

  “And probably turtles and frogs and snakes—”

  “I’ll say he has snakes!” The Sergeant made a grimace of disgust. “Plenty of ’em—crawling in and out of big flat tanks of water...”

  “Yes.” Vance nodded and looked toward Markham. “Stamm, I understand, has a terrarium along with his fish. The two often go together, don’t y’ know.”

  Markham grunted and studied the Sergeant for a moment.

  “Perhaps,” he remarked at length, in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, “Montague was merely playing a practical joke on the other guests. How do you know he didn’t swim under water to the other side of the pool and disappear up the opposite bank? Was it dark enough there so the others couldn’t have seen him?”

  “Sure it was dark enough,” the Sergeant told him. “The flood-lights don’t reach all across the water. But that explanation is out. I myself thought something of the kind might have happened, seeing as how there had been a lot of liquor going round, and I took a look over the place. But the opposite side of the pool is almost a straight precipice of rock, nearly a hundred feet high. Across the upper end of the pool, where the creek runs in, there’s a big filter, and not only would it be hard for a man to climb it, but the lights reach that far and any one of the party could have seen him there. Then, at the lower end of the pool, where the water has been dammed up with a big cement wall, there’s a drop of twenty feet or so, with plenty of rocks down below. No guy’s going to take a chance dropping over the dam in order to create a little excitement. On the side of the pool nearest the house, where the spring-board is, there’s a concrete retaining wall which a swimmer might climb over; but there again the floodlights would give him dead away.”

  “And there’s no other possible way Montague could have got out of the pool without being seen?”

  “Yes, there’s one way he might have done it—but he didn’t. Between the end of the filter and the steep cliff that comes down on the opposite side of the pool, there’s a low open space of about fifteen feet which leads off to the lower part of the estate. And this flat opening is plenty dark so that the people on the house side of the pool couldn’t have seen anything there.”

  “Well, there’s probably your explanation.”

  “No, it isn’t, Mr. Markh
am,” Heath asserted emphatically. “The minute I went down to the pool and got the lay of the land, I took Hennessey with me across the top of the big filter and looked for footprints on this fifteen-foot low bank. You know it had been raining all evening, and the ground over there is damp anyway, so that if there had been any kind of footprints they would have stuck out plain. But the whole area was perfectly smooth. Moreover, Hennessey and I went back into the grass a little distance from the bank, thinking that maybe the guy might have climbed up on a ledge of the rock and jumped over the muddy edge of the water. But there wasn’t a sign of anything there either.”

  “That being the case,” said Markham, “they’ll probably find his body when the pool is dragged... Did you order that done?”

  “Not tonight I didn’t. It would take two or three hours to get a boat and hooks up there, and you couldn’t do anything much at night anyway. But that’ll all be taken care of the first thing in the morning.”

  “Well,” decided Markham impatiently, “I can’t see that there’s anything more for you to do tonight. As soon as the body is found the Medical Examiner will be notified, and he’ll probably say that Montague has a fractured skull and will put the whole thing down as accidental death.”

  There was a tone of dismissal in his voice, but Heath refused to be moved by it. I had never seen the Sergeant so stubborn.

  “You may be right, Chief,” he conceded reluctantly. “But I got other ideas. And I came all the way down here to ask you if you wouldn’t come up and give the situation the once-over.”

  Something in the Sergeant’s voice must have affected Markham, for instead of replying at once he again studied the other quizzically. Finally he asked:

  “Just what have you done so far in connection with the case?”

  “To tell the truth, I haven’t done much of anything,” the Sergeant admitted. “I haven’t had time. I naturally got the names and addresses of everybody in the house and questioned each one of ’em in a routine way. I couldn’t talk to Stamm because he was out of the picture and the doctor was working over him. Most of my time was spent in going around the pool, seeing what I could learn. But, as I told you, I didn’t find out anything except that Montague didn’t play any joke on his friends. Then I went back to the house and telephoned to you. I left things up there in charge of the three men I took along with me. And after I told everybody that they couldn’t go home until I got back, I beat it down here... That’s my story, and I’m probably stuck with it.”

  Despite the forced levity of his last remark, he looked up at Markham with, I thought, an appealing insistence.

  Once more Markham hesitated and returned the Sergeant’s gaze.

  “You are convinced there was foul play?” he queried.

  “I’m not convinced of anything,” Heath retorted. “I’m just not satisfied with the way things stack up. Furthermore, there’s a lot of funny relationships in that crowd up there. Everybody seems jealous of everybody else. A couple of guys are dotty on the same girl, and nobody seemed to care a hoot—except Stamm’s young sister—that Montague didn’t come up from his dive. The fact is, they all seemed damn pleased about it—which didn’t set right with me. And even Miss Stamm didn’t seem to be worrying particularly about Montague. I can’t explain exactly what I mean, but she seemed to be all upset about something else connected with his disappearance.”

  “I still can’t see,” returned Markham, “that you have any tangible explanation for your attitude. The best thing, I think, is to wait and see what tomorrow brings.”

  “Maybe yes.” But instead of accepting Markham’s obvious dismissal Heath poured himself another drink and relighted his cigar.

  During this conversation between the Sergeant and the District Attorney, Vance had lain back in his chair contemplating the two dreamily, sipping his champagne cup and smoking languidly. But a certain deliberate tenseness in the way he moved his hand to and from his lips, convinced me that he was deeply interested in everything that was being said.

  At this point he crushed out his cigarette, set down his glass, and rose to his feet.

  “Really, y’ know, Markham old dear,” he said in a drawling voice, “I think we should toddle along with the Sergeant to the site of the mystery. It can’t do the slightest harm, and it’s a beastly night anyway. A bit of excitement, however tame the ending, might help us forget the weather. And we may be affected by the same sinister atmospheres which have so inflamed the Sergeant’s hormones.”

  Markham looked up at him in mild astonishment.

  “Why in the name of Heaven, should you want to go to the Stamm estate?”

  “For one thing,” Vance returned, stifling a yawn, “I am tremendously interested, d’ ye see, in looking over Stamm’s collection of toy fish. I bred them myself in an amateur way once, but because of lack of space, I concentrated on the color-breeding of the Betta splendens and cambodia—Siamese Fighting Fish, don’t y’ know.”*

  Markham studied him for a few moments without replying. He knew Vance well enough to realize that his desire to accede to the Sergeant’s request was inspired by a much deeper reason than the patently frivolous one he gave. And he also knew that no amount of questioning would make Vance elucidate his true attitude just then.

  After a minute Markham also rose. He glanced at his watch and shrugged.

  “Past midnight,” he commented disgustedly. “The perfect hour, of course, to inspect fish! Shall we drive out in the Sergeant’s car or take yours?”

  “Oh, mine, by all means. We’ll follow the Sergeant.” And Vance rang for Currie to bring him his hat and stick.

  Footnotes

  * The Bishop Murder Case.

  * At one time Vance had turned his sun-parlor into an aquarium and devoted several years to breeding these beautiful veil-tailed fish. He succeeded in producing corn-flower blue, deep maroon, and even black specimens; and he won several awards with them at the exhibitions of the Aquarium Society at the Museum of Natural History.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Startling Accusation (Sunday, August 12; 12.30 a.m.)

  A FEW MINUTES LATER we were headed up Broadway. Sergeant Heath led the way in his small police car and Markham and Vance and I followed in Vance’s Hispano-Suiza. Reaching Dyckman Street, we went west to Payson Avenue and turned up the steep winding Bolton Road.* When we had reached the highest point of the road we swung into a wide private driveway with two tall square stone posts at the entrance, and circled upward round a mass of evergreen trees until we reached the apex of the hill. It was on this site that the famous old Stamm residence had been built nearly a century before.

  It was a wooded estate, abounding in cedar, oak, and spruce trees, with patches of rough lawn and rock gardens. From this vantage point could be seen, to the north, the dark Gothic turrets of the House of Mercy, silhouetted against a clearing sky which seemed to have sucked up the ghostly lights of Marble Hill a mile distant across the waters of Spuyten Duyvil. To the south, through the trees, the faintly flickering glow of Manhattan cast an uncanny spell. Eastward, on either side of the black mass of the Stamm residence, a few tall buildings along Seaman Avenue and Broadway reached up over the hazy horizon like black giant fingers. Behind and below us, to the west, the Hudson River moved sluggishly, a dark opaque mass flecked with the moving lights of boats.

  But although on every side we could see evidences of the modern busy life of New York, a feeling of isolation and mystery crept over me. I seemed infinitely removed from all the busy activities of the world; and I realized then, for the first time, how strange an anachronism Inwood was. Though this historic spot—with its great trees, its crumbling houses, its ancient associations, its rugged wildness, and its rustic quietude—was actually a part of Manhattan, it nevertheless seemed like some hidden fastness set away in a remote coign of the world.

  As we turned into the small parking space at the head of the private driveway, we noticed an old-fashioned Ford coupé parked about fifty yards from the wide
balustraded stone steps that led to the house.

  “That’s the doctor’s car,” Heath explained to us, as he hopped down from his machine. “The garage is on the lower road on the east side of the house.”

  He led the way up the steps to the massive bronze front door over which a dim light was burning; and we were met by Detective Snitkin in the narrow panelled vestibule.

  “I’m glad you’re back, Sergeant,” the detective said, after saluting Markham respectfully.

  “Don’t you like the situation either, Snitkin?” Vance asked lightly.

  “Not me, sir,” the other returned, going toward the inner front door. “It’s got me worried.”

  “Anything else happen?” Heath inquired abruptly.

  “Nothing except that Stamm has begun to sit up and take notice.”

  He gave three taps on the door which was immediately opened by a liveried butler who regarded us suspiciously.

  “Is this really necessary, officer?” he asked Heath in a suave voice, as he reluctantly held the door open for us. “You see, sir, Mr. Stamm—”

  “I’m running this show,” Heath interrupted curtly. “You’re here to take orders, not to ask questions.”

  The butler bowed with a sleek, obsequious smile, and closed the door after us.

  “What are your orders, sir?”

  “You stay here at the front door,” Heath replied brusquely, “and don’t let any one in.” He then turned to Snitkin, who had followed us into the spacious lower hallway. “Where’s the gang and what are they doing?”

  “Stamm’s in the library—that room over there—with the doctor.” Snitkin jerked his thumb toward a pair of heavy tapestry portières at the rear of the hall. “I sent the rest of the bunch to their rooms, like you told me. Burke is sitting out on the rear doorstep, and Hennessey is down by the pool.”