The Philo Vance Megapack

by S. S. Van Dine

  The true story of this crime, as it eventually came to light after a disheartening period of utter darkness and confusion, revealed many strange and bizarre ramifications, many dark recesses of man’s unexplored nature, and the uncanny subtlety of a human mind sharpened by desperate and tragic despair. And it also revealed a hidden page of passional melodrama which, in its essence and organisms, was no less romantic and fascinating than that vivid, theatrical section of the Comédie Humaine which deals with the fabulous love of Baron Nucingen for Esther van Gobseck, and with the unhappy Torpille’s tragic death.

  Margaret Odell was a product of the bohemian demimonde of Broadway—a scintillant figure who seemed somehow to typify the gaudy and spurious romance of transient gaiety. For nearly two years before her death she had been the most conspicuous and, in a sense, popular figure of the city’s night life. In our grandparents’ day she might have had conferred upon her that somewhat questionable designation “the toast of the town”; but today there are too many aspirants for this classification, too many cliques and violent schisms in the Lepidoptera of our cafe life, to permit of any one competitor being thus singled out. But, for all the darlings of both professional and lay press agents, Margaret Odell was a character of unquestioned fame in her little world.

  Her notoriety was due in part to certain legendary tales of her affairs with one or two obscure potentates in the backwashes of Europe. She had spent two years abroad after her first success in The Bretonne Maid—a popular musical comedy in which she had been mysteriously raised from obscurity to the rank of “star”—and, one may cynically imagine, her press agent took full advantage of her absence to circulate vermilion tales of her conquests.

  Her appearances went far toward sustaining her somewhat equivocal fame. There was no question that she was beautiful in a hard, slightly flamboyant way. I remember seeing her dancing one night at the Antlers Club—a famous rendezvous for postmidnight pleasure-seekers, run by the notorious Red Raegan.22 She impressed me then as a girl of uncommon loveliness, despite the calculating, predatory cast of her features. She was of medium height, slender, graceful in a leonine way, and, I thought, a trifle aloof and even haughty in manner—a result, perhaps, of her reputed association with European royalty. She had the traditional courtesan’s full, red lips, and the wide, mongoose eyes of Rossetti’s “Blessed Damozel.” There was in her face that strange combination of sensual promise and spiritual renunciation with which the painters of all ages have sought to endow their conceptions of the Eternal Magdalene. Hers was the type of face, voluptuous and with a hint of mystery, which rules man’s emotions and, by subjugating his mind, drives him to desperate deeds.

  Margaret Odell had received the sobriquet of Canary as a result of a part she had played in an elaborate ornithological ballet of the Follies, in which each girl had been gowned to represent a variety of bird. To her had fallen the role of canary; and her costume of white and yellow satin, together with her mass of shining golden hair and pink and white complexion, had distinguished her in the eyes of the spectators as a creature of outstanding charm. Before a fortnight had passed—so eulogistic were her press notices, and so unerringly did the audience single her out for applause—the “Bird Ballet” was changed to the “Canary Ballet,” and Miss Odell was promoted to the rank of what might charitably be called premiere danseuse, at the same time having a solo waltz and a song23 interpolated for the special display of her charms and talents.

  She had quitted the Follies at the close of the season, and during her subsequent spectacular career in the haunts of Broadway’s night life she had been popularly and familiarly called the Canary. Thus it happened that when her dead body was found, brutally strangled, in her apartment, the crime immediately became known, and was always thereafter referred to, as the Canary murder.

  My own participation in the investigation of the Canary murder case—or rather my role of Boswellian spectator—constituted one of the most memorable experiences of my life. At the time of Margaret Odell’s murder John F.-X. Markham was district attorney of New York, having taken office the preceding January. I need hardly remind you that during the four years of his incumbency he distinguished himself by his almost uncanny success as a criminal investigator. The praise which was constantly accorded him, however, was highly distasteful to him; for, being a man with a keen sense of honor, he instinctively shrank from accepting credit for achievements not wholly his own. The truth is that Markham played only a subsidiary part in the majority of his most famous criminal cases. The credit for their actual solution belonged to one of Markham’s very close friends, who refused, at the time, to permit the facts to be made public.

  This man was a young social aristocrat, whom, for purposes of anonymity, I have chosen to call Philo Vance.

  Vance had many amazing gifts and capabilities. He was an art collector in a small way, a fine amateur pianist, and a profound student of aesthetics and psychology. Although an American, he had largely been educated in Europe, and still retained a slight English accent and intonation. He had a liberal independent income, and spent considerable time fulfilling the social obligations which devolved on him as a result of family connections; but he was neither an idler nor a dilettante. His manner was cynical and aloof; and those who met him only casually set him down as a snob. But knowing Vance, as I did, intimately, I was able to glimpse the real man beneath the surface indications; and I knew that his cynicism and aloofness, far from being a pose, sprang instinctively from a nature which was at once sensitive and solitary.

  Vance was not yet thirty-five, and, in a cold, sculptural fashion, was impressively good-looking. His face was slender and mobile; but there was a stern, sardonic expression to his features, which acted as a barrier between him and his fellows. He was not emotionless, but his emotions were, in the main, intellectual. He was often criticized for his asceticism, yet I have seen him exhibit rare bursts of enthusiasm over an aesthetic or psychological problem. However, he gave the impression of remaining remote from all mundane matters; and, in truth, he looked upon life like a dispassionate and impersonal spectator at a play, secretly amused and debonairly cynical at the meaningless futility of it all. Withal, he had a mind avid for knowledge, and few details of the human comedy that came within his sphere of vision escaped him.

  It was as a direct result of this intellectual inquisitiveness that he became actively, though unofficially, interested in Markham’s criminal investigations.

  I kept a fairly complete record of the cases in which Vance participated as a kind of amicus curiae, little thinking that I would ever be privileged to make them public; but Markham, after being defeated, as you remember, on a hopelessly split ticket at the next election, withdrew from politics; and last year Vance went abroad to live, declaring he would never return to America. As a result, I obtained permission from both of them to publish my notes in full. Vance stipulated only that I should not reveal his name; but otherwise no restrictions were placed upon me.

  I have related elsewhere24 the peculiar circumstances which led to Vance’s participation in criminal research, and how, in the face of almost insuperable contradictory evidence, he solved the mysterious shooting of Alvin Benson. The present chronical deals with his solution of Margaret Odell’s murder, which took place in the early fall of the same year, and which, you will recall, created an even greater sensation than its predecessor.25

  A curious set of circumstances was accountable for the way in which Vance was shouldered with this new investigation. Markham for weeks had been badgered by the antiadministration newspapers for the signal failures of his office in obtaining convictions against certain underworld offenders whom the police had turned over to him for prosecution. As a result of prohibition a new and dangerous, and wholly undesirable, kind of night life had sprung up in New York. A large number of well-financed cabarets, calling themselves nightclubs, had made their appearance along Broadway and in its side streets; and already there had been an appalling number of serio
us crimes, both passional and monetary, which, it was said, had had their inception in these unsavory resorts.

  At last, when a case of murder accompanying a holdup and jewel robbery in one of the family hotels uptown was traced directly to plans and preparations made in one of the nightclubs, and when two detectives of the Homicide Bureau investigating the case were found dead one morning in the neighborhood of the club, with bullet wounds in their backs, Markham decided to pigeonhole the other affairs of his office and take a hand personally in the intolerable criminal conditions that had arisen.26

  CHAPTER 2

  FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW

  (Sunday, September 9)

  On the day following his decision, Markham and Vance and I were sitting in a secluded corner of the lounge room of the Stuyvesant Club. We often came together there, for we were all members of the club, and Markham frequently used it as a kind of unofficial uptown headquarters.27

  “It’s bad enough to have half the people in this city under the impression that the district attorney’s office is a kind of high-class collection agency,” he remarked that night, “without being necessitated to turn detective because I’m not given sufficient evidence, or the right kind of evidence, with which to secure convictions.”

  Vance looked up with a slow smile and regarded him quizzically.

  “The difficulty would seem to be,” he returned, with an indolent drawl, “that the police, being unversed in the exquisite abracadabra of legal procedure, labor under the notion that evidence which would convince a man of ordin’ry intelligence, would also convince a court of law. A silly notion, don’t y’ know. Lawyers don’t really want evidence; they want erudite technicalities. And the average policeman’s brain is too forthright to cope with the pedantic demands of jurisprudence.”

  “It’s not as bad as that,” Markham retorted, with an attempt at good nature, although the strain of the past few weeks had tended to upset his habitual equanimity. “If there weren’t rules of evidence, grave injustice would too often be done innocent persons. And even a criminal is entitled to protection in our courts.”

  Vance yawned mildly.

  “Markham, you should have been a pedagogue. It’s positively amazin’ how you’ve mastered all the standard oratorical replies to criticism. And yet, I’m unconvinced. You remember the Wisconsin case of the kidnapped man whom the courts declared presumably dead. Even when he reappeared, hale and hearty, among his former neighbors, his status of being presumably dead was not legally altered. The visible and demonstrable fact that he was actually alive was regarded by the court as an immaterial and impertinent side issue.28… Then there’s the touchin’ situation—so prevalent in this fair country—of a man being insane in one state and sane in another.… Really, y’ know, you can’t expect a mere lay intelligence, unskilled in the benign processes of legal logic, to perceive such subtle nuances. Your layman, swaddled in the darkness of ordin’ry common sense, would say that a person who is a lunatic on one bank of a river would still be a lunatic if he was on the opposite bank. And he’d also hold—erroneously, no doubt—that if a man was living, he would presumably be alive.”

  “Why this academic dissertation?” asked Markham, this time a bit irritably.

  “It seems to touch rather vitally on the source of your present predicament,” Vance explained equably. “The police, not being lawyers, have apparently got you into hot water, what?… Why not start an agitation to send all detectives to law school?”

  “You’re a great help,” retorted Markham.

  Vance raised his eyebrows slightly.

  “Why disparage my suggestion? Surely you must perceive that it has merit. A man without legal training, when he knows a thing to be true, ignores all incompetent testimony to the contr’ry, and clings to the facts. A court of law listens solemnly to a mass of worthless testimony, and renders a decision not on the facts but according to a complicated set of rules. The result, d’ ye see, is that a court often acquits a prisoner, realizing full well that he is guilty. Many a judge has said, in effect, to a culprit, ‘I know, and the jury knows, that you committed the crime, but in view of the legally admissible evidence, I declare you innocent. Go and sin again.’”

  Markham grunted. “I’d hardly endear myself to the people of this country if I answered the current strictures against me by recommending law courses for the police department.”

  “Permit me, then, to suggest the alternative of Shakespeare’s butcher: ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers.’”

  “Unfortunately, it’s a situation, not a utopian theory, that has to be met.”

  “And just how,” asked Vance lazily, “do you propose to reconcile the sensible conclusions of the police with what you touchingly call correctness of legal procedure?”

  “To begin with,” Markham informed him, “I’ve decided henceforth to do my own investigating of all important nightclub criminal cases. I called a conference of the heads of my departments yesterday, and from now on there’s going to be some real activity radiating direct from my office. I intend to produce the kind of evidence I need for convictions.”

  Vance slowly took a cigarette from his case and tapped it on the arm of his chair. “Ah! So you are going to substitute the conviction of the innocent for the acquittal of the guilty?”

  Markham was nettled; turning in his chair, he frowned at Vance. “I won’t pretend not to understand your remark,” he said acidulously. “You’re back again on your favorite theme of the inadequacy of circumstantial evidence as compared with your psychological theories and aesthetic hypotheses.”

  “Quite so,” agreed Vance carelessly. “Y’ know, Markham, your sweet and charmin’ faith in circumstantial evidence is positively disarming. Before it, the ordin’ry powers of ratiocination are benumbed. I tremble for the innocent victims you are about to gather into your legal net. You’ll eventually make the mere attendance at any cabaret a frightful hazard.”

  Markham smoked awhile in silence. Despite the seeming bitterness at times in the discussions of these two men, there was at bottom no animosity in their attitude toward each other. Their friendship was of long standing, and, despite the dissimilarity of their temperaments and the marked difference in their points of view, a profound mutual respect formed the basis of their intimate relationship.

  At length Markham spoke. “Why this sweeping deprecation of circumstantial evidence? I admit that at times it may be misleading; but it often forms powerful presumptive proof of guilt. Indeed, Vance, one of our greatest legal authorities has demonstrated that it is the most powerful actual evidence in existence. Direct evidence, in the very nature of crime, is almost always unavailable. If the courts had to depend on it, the great majority of criminals would still be at large.”

  “I was under the impression that this precious majority had always enjoyed its untrammeled freedom.”

  Markham ignored the interruption. “Take this example: A dozen adults see an animal running across the snow, and testify that it was a chicken; whereas a child sees the same animal, and declares it was a duck. They thereupon examine the animal’s footprints and find them to be the webfooted tracks made by a duck. Is it not conclusive, then, that the animal was a duck and not a chicken, despite the preponderance of direct evidence?”

  “I’ll grant you your duck,” acceded Vance indifferently.

  “And having gratefully accepted the gift,” pursued Markham, “I propound a corollary: A dozen adults see a human figure crossing the snow, and take oath it was a woman; whereas a child asserts that the figure was a man. Now, will you not also grant that the circumstantial evidence of a man’s footprints in the snow would supply incontrovertible proof that it was, in fact, a man, and not a woman?”

  “Not at all, my dear Justinian,” replied Vance, stretching his legs languidly in front of him; “unless, of course, you could show that a human being possesses no higher order of brain than a duck.”

  “What have brains to do with it?” Markham asked impatiently. “Bra
ins don’t affect one’s footprints.”

  “Not those of a duck, certainly. But brains might very well—and, no doubt, often do—affect the footprints of a human being.”

  “Am I having a lesson in anthropology, Darwinian adaptability, or merely metaphysical speculation?”

  “In none of those abstruse subjects,” Vance assured him. “I’m merely stating a simple fact culled from observation.”

  “Well, according to your highly and peculiarly developed processes of reasoning, would the circumstantial evidence of those masculine footprints indicate a man or a woman?”

  “Not necessarily either,” Vance answered, “or, rather, a possibility of each. Such evidence, when applied to a human being—to a creature, that is, with a reasoning mind—would merely mean to me that the figure crossing the snow was either a man in his own shoes or a woman in man’s shoes; or perhaps, even, a long-legged child. In short, it would convey to my purely unlegal intelligence only that the tracks were made by some descendant of the Pithecanthropus erectus wearing men’s shoes on his nether limbs—sex and age unknown. A duck’s spoors, on the other hand, I might be tempted to take at their face value.”

  “I’m delighted to observe,” said Markham, “that at least you repudiate the possibility of a duck dressing itself up in the gardener’s boots.”

  Vance was silent for a moment; then he said, “The trouble with you modern Solons, d’ ye see, is that you attempt to reduce human nature to a formula; whereas the truth is that man, like life, is infinitely complex. He’s shrewd and tricky—skilled for centuries in all the most diabolical chicaneries. He is a creature of low cunning, who, even in the normal course of his vain and idiotic struggle for existence, instinctively and deliberately tells ninety-nine lies to one truth. A duck, not having had the heaven-kissing advantages of human civilization, is a straightforward and eminently honest bird.”