“This is no time for evasion.” Markham’s voice was cold and inexorable. “I want an explanation.”
Vance made a resigned gesture.
“Oh, well. Attend. My idea, as I’ve explained to you, was to fall in with the professor’s plan and appear to suspect Arnesson. This morning I purposely let him see that we had no evidence, and that, even if we arrested Arnesson, it was doubtful if we could hold him. I knew that, in the circumstances, he would take some action—that he would try to meet the situation in some heroic way—for the sole object of the murders was to destroy Arnesson utterly. That he would commit some overt act and give his hand away, I was confident. What it would be I didn’t know. But we’d be watching him closely.… Then the wine gave me an inspiration. Knowing he had cyanide in his possession, I brought up the subject of suicide, and thus planted the idea in his mind. He fell into the trap, and attempted to poison Arnesson and make it appear like suicide. I saw him surreptitiously empty a small phial of colorless fluid into Arnesson’s glass at the sideboard when he poured the wine. My first intention was to halt the murder and have the wine analyzed. We could have searched him and found the phial, and I could have testified to the fact that I saw him poison the wine. This evidence, in addition to the identification by the child, might have answered our purpose. But at the last moment, after he had refilled all our glasses, I decided on a simpler course—”
“And so you diverted our attention and switched the glasses!”
“Yes, yes. Of course. I figured that a man should be willing to drink the wine he pours for another.”
“You took the law in your own hands!”
“I took it in my arms—it was helpless.… But don’t be so righteous. Do you bring a rattlesnake to the bar of justice? Do you give a mad dog his day in court? I felt no more compunction in aiding a monster like Dillard into the Beyond than I would have in crushing out a poisonous reptile in the act of striking.”
“But it was murder!” exclaimed Markham in horrified indignation.
“Oh, doubtless,” said Vance cheerfully. “Yes—of course. Most reprehensible.… I say, am I by any chance under arrest?”
The “suicide” of Professor Dillard terminated the famous Bishop murder case, and automatically cleared Pardee’s reputation of all suspicion. The following year Arnesson and Belle Dillard were married quietly and sailed for Norway, where they made their home. Arnesson had accepted the chair of applied mathematics at the University of Oslo; and it will be remembered that two years later he was awarded the Nobel prize for his work in physics. The old Dillard house in 75th Street was torn down, and on the site now stands a modern apartment house on whose façade are two huge terra-cotta medallions strongly suggestive of archery targets. I have often wondered if the architect was deliberate in his choice of decoration.
95 Colonel Benjamin Hanlon, commanding officer of the Detective Division attached to the District Attorney’s office.
96 Louise was Vance’s favorite modern opera, but he greatly preferred Mary Garden to Farrar in the title rôle.
97 It may be recalled that the World’s accounts of the Bishop case were the envy of the other metropolitan newspapers. Sergeant Heath, though impartial in his statements of facts to the press, nevertheless managed to save several picturesque bonnes-bouches for Quinan, and permitted himself certain speculations which, while having no news value, gave the World’s stories an added interest and color.
98 Guilfoyle, it may be remembered, was one of the detectives who shadowed Tony Skeel in the Canary murder case.
99 Hennessey had kept watch with Doctor Drumm over the Greene mansion from the Narcoss Flats, in the Greene murder case. Snitkin also had taken part in the Greene investigation, and had played a minor rôle in both the Benson and the Canary case. The dapper Emery was the detective who had unearthed the cigarette stubs from beneath the fire-logs in Alvin Benson’s living-room.
100 An important step toward the solution of these complex problems was taken a few years later by the de Broglie-Schrödinger theory as laid down in de Broglie’s “Ondes et Mouvements” and Schrödinger’s “Abhandlungen zur Wellenmechanik.”
101 For the benefit of the expert chess-player who may be academically interested I append the exact position of the game when Pardee resigned:—WHiTE: King at QKtsq; Rook at QB8; Pawns at QR2 and Q2. BLACK: King at Q5; Knight at QKt5; Bishop at QR6; Pawns at QKt7 and QB7.
102 The final five unplayed moves for Black to mate, as I later obtained them from Vance, were:—45. RxP; KtxR. 46. KxKt; P—Kt8 (Queen). 47. KxQ; K—Q6. 48. K—Rsq; K—B7. 49. P—Q3; B—Kt7 mate.
103 I am obviously unable to set down Vance’s exact words, despite the completeness of my notes; but I sent him a proof of the following passages with a request that he revise and edit them; so that, as they now stand, they represent an accurate paraphrase of his analysis of the psychological factors of the Bishop murders.
104 Vance was here using the English connotation of “trillion,” which is the third power of a million, as opposed to the American and French system of numeration which regards a trillion as a mere million millions.
105 Lumen was invented by the French astronomer to prove the possibility of the reversal of time. With a speed of 250,000 miles per second, he was conceived as soaring into space at the end of the battle of Waterloo, and catching up all the light-rays that had left the battlefield. He attained a gradually increasing lead, until at the end of two days he was witnessing, not the end, but the beginning of the battle; and in the meantime he had been viewing events in reverse order. He had seen projectiles leaving the objects they had penetrated and returning to the cannon; dead men coming to life and arranging themselves in battle formation. Another hypothetical adventure of Lumen was jumping to the moon, turning about instantaneously, and seeing himself leaping from the moon to the earth backwards.
106 Vance requested me to mention here A. d’Abro’s recent scholarly work, “The Evolution of Scientific Thought,” in which there is an excellent discussion of the paradoxes associated with spacetime.
107 Vance’s M. A. thesis, I recall, dealt with Schopenhauer’s Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde.
108 I do not know whether Vance was here referring to “Mars and Its Canals” or “Mars as the Abode of Life.”
109 Pardee left in his will a large sum for the furtherance of chess; and in the autumn of that same year, it will be remembered, the Pardee Memorial Tournament was held at Cambridge Springs.
110 Of the Wagnerian operas this was Vance’s favorite. He always asserted that it was the only opera that had the structural form of a symphony; and more than once he expressed the regret that it had not been written as an orchestral piece instead of as a conveyance for an absurd drama.
111 Vance’s set was the William Archer copyright edition, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
112 I admit that the name of Rhazis was unfamiliar to me; and when I looked it up later I found that the episode to which Vance referred does not appear in the Anglican Bible, but in the second book of Maccabees in the Apocrypha.
113 “One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. The death which takes place in the most contemptible circumstances, the death that is not free, the death which occurs at the wrong time, is the death of a coward. We have not the power to prevent ourselves from being born; but this error—for sometimes it is an error—can be rectified if we choose. The man who does away with himself, performs the most estimable of deeds; he almost deserves to live for having done so.”
114 It was discovered later that the large weighted gold handle, which was nearly eight inches long, was loose and could be easily removed from the stick. The handle weighed nearly two pounds and, as Vance had observed, constituted a highly efficient “black jack.” Whether or not it had been loosened for the purpose to which it was put, is of course wholly a matter of conjecture.
THE SCARAB MURDER CASE (Part 1)
La vérité n’a point cet air i
mpétueux.
—Boileau
DEDICATED
WITH APPRECIATION
TO
AMBROSE LANSING
LUDLOW BULL
AND
HENRY A. CAREY
OF THE EGYPTIAN DEPARTMENT OF
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
OF ART
CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK
PHILO VANCE
JOHN F.-X. MARKHAM
District Attorney of New York County.
ERNEST HEATH
Sergeant of the Homicide Bureau.
DR. MINDRUM W. C. BLISS
Egyptologist; head of the Bliss Museum of Egyptian Antiquities.
BENJAMIN H. KYLE
Philanthropist and art patron.
MERYT-AMEN
Wife of Dr. Bliss.
ROBERT SALVETER
Assistant Curator of the Bliss Museum; nephew of Benjamin H. Kyle.
DONALD SCARLETT
Technical Expert of the Bliss Expeditions in Egypt.
ANÛPU HANI
Family retainer of the Blisses.
BRUSH
The Bliss butler.
DINGLE
The Bliss cook.
HENNESSEY
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
SNITKIN
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
EMERY
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
GUILFOYLE
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
CAPTAIN DUBOIS
Finger-print expert.
DETECTIVE BELLAMY
Finger-print expert.
DR. EMANUEL DOREMUS
Medical Examiner
CURRIE
Vance’s valet.
CHAPTER 1
MURDER!
(Friday, July 13; 11 A.M.)
Philo Vance was drawn into the Scarab murder case by sheer coincidence, although there is little doubt that John F.-X. Markham—New York’s District Attorney—would sooner or later have enlisted his services. But it is problematic if even Vance, with his fine analytic mind and his remarkable flair for the subtleties of human psychology, could have solved that bizarre and astounding murder if he had not been the first observer on the scene; for, in the end, he was able to put his finger on the guilty person only because of the topsy-turvy clews that had met his eye during his initial inspection.
Those clews—highly misleading from the materialistic point of view—eventually gave him the key to the murderer’s mentality and thus enabled him to elucidate one of the most complicated and incredible criminal problems in modern police history.
The brutal and fantastic murder of that old philanthropist and art patron, Benjamin H. Kyle, became known as the Scarab murder case almost immediately, as a result of the fact that it had taken place in a famous Egyptologist’s private museum and had centred about a rare blue scarabaeus that had been found beside the mutilated body of the victim.
This ancient and valuable seal, inscribed with the names of one of the early Pharaohs (whose mummy had, by the way, not been found at the time), constituted the basis on which Vance reared his astonishing structure of evidence. The scarab, from the police point of view, was merely an incidental piece of evidence that pointed somewhat obviously toward its owner; but this easy and specious explanation did not appeal to Vance.
“Murderers,” he remarked to Sergeant Ernest Heath, “do not ordinarily insert their visitin’ cards in the shirt bosoms of their victims. And while the discovery of the lapis-lazuli beetle is most interestin’ from both the psychological and evidential standpoints, we must not be too optimistic and jump to conclusions. The most important question in this pseudo-mystical murder is why—and how—the murderer left that archaeological specimen beside the defunct body. Once we find the reason for that amazin’ action, we’ll hit upon the secret of the crime itself.”
The doughty Sergeant had sniffed at Vance’s suggestion and had ridiculed his scepticism; but before another day had passed he generously admitted that Vance had been right, and that the murder had not been so simple as it had appeared in first view.
As I have said, a coincidence brought Vance into the case before the police were notified. An acquaintance of his had discovered the slain body of old Mr. Kyle, and had immediately come to him with the gruesome news.
It happened on the morning of Friday, July 13th. Vance had just finished a late breakfast in the roof-garden of his apartment in East Thirty-eighth Street, and had returned to the library to continue his translation of the Menander fragments found in the Egyptian papyri during the early years of the present century, when Currie—his valet and majordomo—shuffled into the room and announced with an air of discreet apology:
“Mr. Donald Scarlett has just arrived, sir, in a state of distressing excitement, and asks that you hasten to receive him.”
Vance looked up from his Work with an expression of boredom.
“Scarlett, eh? Very annoyin’.… And why should he call on me when excited? I infinitely prefer calm people.… Did you offer him a brandy-and-soda—or some triple bromides?”
“I took the liberty of placing a service of Courvoisier brandy before him,” explained Currie. “I recall that Mr. Scarlett has a weakness for Napoleon’s cognac.”
“Ah, yes—so he has.… Quite right, Currie.” Vance leisurely lit one of his Régie cigarettes and puffed a moment in silence. “Suppose you show him in when you deem his nerves sufficiently calm.”
Currie bowed and departed.
“Interestin’ johnny, Scarlett,” Vance commented to me (I had been with Vance all morning arranging and filing his notes.) “You remember him, Van—eh, what?”
I had met Scarlett twice, but I must admit I had not thought of him for a month or more. The impression of him, however, came back to me now with considerable vividness. He had been, I knew, a college mate of Vance’s at Oxford, and Vance had run across him during his sojourn in Egypt two years before.
Scarlett was a student of Egyptology and archaeology, having specialized in these subjects at Oxford under Professor F. Ll. Griffith. Later he had taken up chemistry and photography in order that he might join some Egyptological expedition in a technical capacity. He was a well-to-do Englishman, an amateur and dilettante, and had made of Egyptology a sort of fad.
When Vance had gone to Alexandria Scarlett had been working in the Museum laboratory at Cairo. The two had met again and renewed their old acquaintance. Recently Scarlett had come to America as a member of the staff of Doctor Mindrum W. C. Bliss, the famous Egyptologist, who maintained a private museum of Egyptian antiquities in an old house in East Twentieth Street, facing Gramercy Park. He had called on Vance several times since his arrival in this country, and it was at Vance’s apartment that I had met him. He had, however, never called without an invitation, and I was at a loss to understand his unexpected appearance this morning, for he possessed all of the well-bred Englishman’s punctiliousness about social matters.
Vance, too, was somewhat puzzled, despite his attitude of lackadaisical indifference.
“Scarlett’s a clever lad,” he drawled musingly. “And most proper. Why should he call on me at this indecent hour? And why should he be excited? I hope nothing untoward has befallen his erudite employer.… Bliss is an astonishin’ man, Van—one of the world’s great Egyptologists.”115
I recalled that during the winter which Vance had spent in Egypt he had become greatly interested in the work of Doctor Bliss, who was then endeavoring to locate the tomb of Pharaoh Intef V who ruled over Upper Egypt at Thebes during the Hyksos domination. In fact, Vance had accompanied Bliss on an exploration in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. At that time he had just become attracted by the Menander fragments, and he had been in the midst of a uniform translation of them when the Bishop murder case interrupted his labors.
Vance had also been interested in the variations of chronology of the Old and the Middle Kingdoms of Egypt—not from the historical standpoint but from t
he standpoint of the evolution of Egyptian art. His researches led him to side with the Bliss-Weigall, or short, chronology116 (based on the Turin Papyrus), as opposed to the long chronology of Hall and Petrie, who set back the Twelfth Dynasty and all preceding history one full Sothic cycle, or 1,460 years. After inspecting the art works of the pre-Hyksos and the post-Hyksos eras, Vance was inclined to postulate an interval of not more than 300 years between the Twelfth and Eighteenth Dynasties, in accordance with the shorter chronology. In comparing certain statues made during the reign of Amen-emhêt III with others made during the reign of Thut-mosè I—thus bridging the Hyksos invasion, with its barbaric Asiatic influence and its annihilation of indigenous Egyptian culture—he arrived at the conclusion that the maintenance of the principles of Twelfth-Dynasty aesthetic attainment could not have been possible with a wider lacuna than 300 years. In brief, he concluded that, had the interregnum been longer, the evidences of decadence in Eighteenth-Dynasty art would have been even more pronounced.
These researches of Vance’s ran through my head that sultry July morning as we waited for Currie to usher in the visitor. The announcement of Scarlett’s call had brought back memories of many wearying weeks of typing and tabulating Vance’s notes on the subject. Perhaps I had a feeling—what we loosely call a premonition—that Scarlett’s surprising visit was in some way connected with Vance’s aesthetico-Egyptological researches. Perhaps I was even then arranging in my mind, unconsciously, the facts of that winter two years before, so that I might cope more understandingly with the object of Scarlett’s present call.
But surely I could have had not the slightest idea or suspicion of what was actually about to befall us. It was far too appalling and too bizarre for the casual imagination. It lifted us out of the ordinary routine of daily experience and dashed us into a frowsty, miasmic atmosphere of things at once incredible and horrifying—things fraught with the seemingly supernatural black magic of a Witches’ Sabbat. Only, in this instance it was the mystic and fantastic lore of ancient Egypt—with its confused mythology and its grotesque pantheon of beast-headed gods—that furnished the background.
The Philo Vance Megapack Page 112