The Philo Vance Megapack
Page 138
“You suggested to Hani?”
“During our conversation in the drawing-room. Really, Markham old dear, I’m not in the habit of indulgin’ in weird conversations about mythology unless I have a reason. I simply let Hani know there was no legal way of bringing Bliss to justice, and intimated how he could overcome the difficulty and incidentally save you from a most embarrassin’ predicament.…”
“But Hani was in the hall, with the door closed.” Markham’s indignation was rising.
“Quite so. I told him to stand outside the door. I knew very well he’d listen to us.…”
“You deliberately—”
“Oh, most deliberately.” Vance spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. “While I babbled to you and appeared foolish no doubt, I was really talking to Hani. Of couse, I didn’t know if he would grasp the opportunity or not. But he did. He equipped himself with a mace from the museum—I do hope it was the same mace that Bliss used on Kyle—and struck Bliss over the head. Then he dragged the body down the spiral stairs and laid it at the feet of Anûbis. With the mace he broke the statue’s sandstone ankles, and dropped the figure over Bliss’s skull. Very simple.”
“And all that rambling chatter of yours in the drawing-room—”
“Was merely to keep you and Heath away in case Hani decided to act.”
Markham’s eyes narrowed.
“You can’t get away with that sort of thing, Vance. I’ll send Hani up for murder. There’ll be finger-prints—”
“Oh, no there won’t, Markham. Didn’t you notice the gloves on the hat-rack? Hani is no fool. He put on the gloves before he went to the study. You’d have a harder time convicting him than you’d have had convicting Bliss. Personally, I rather admire Hani. Stout fella!”
For a time Markham was too angry to speak. Finally, however, he gave voice to an ejaculation.
“It’s outrageous!”
“Of course it is,” Vance agreed amiably. “So was the murder of Kyle.” He lighted a cigarette and puffed on it cheerfully. “The trouble with you lawyers is, you’re jealous and blood-thirsty. You wanted to send Bliss to the electric chair yourself, and couldn’t; and Hani simplified everything for you. As I see it, you’re merely disappointed because some one else took Bliss’s life before you could get round to it.… Really, y’ know, Markham, you’re frightfully selfish.”
I feel that a short postscript will not be amiss. Markham had no difficulty, as you will no doubt remember, in convincing the press that Bliss had been guilty of the murder of Benjamin H. Kyle, and that his tragic “accidental” death had in it much of what is commonly called divine justice.
Scarlett, contrary to the doctor’s prediction, recovered; but it was many weeks before he could talk rationally. Vance and I visited him in the hospital late in August, and he corroborated Vance’s theory about what had happened on that fatal night in the museum. Scarlett went to England early in September,—his father had died, leaving him an involved estate in Bedfordshire.
Mrs. Bliss and Salveter were married in Nice late the following spring; and the excavations of Intef’s tomb, I see from the bulletins of the Archaeological Institute, are continuing. Salveter is in charge of the work, and I am rather happy to note that Scarlett is the technical expert of the expedition.
Hani, according to a recent letter from Salveter to Vance, has become reconciled to the “desecration of the tombs of his ancestors.” He is still with Meryt-Amen and Salveter, and I’m inclined to think that his personal love for these two young people is stronger than his national prejudices.
132 Guilfoyle, I recalled, was the detective of the Homicide Bureau who was set to watch Tony Skeel in the “Canary” murder case, and who reported on the all-night light at the Drukker house in the Bishop murder case.
133 The prism referred to by Salveter was the terra-cotta one acquired by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago during its reconnoitering expedition of 1919-20. The document was a variant duplicate of the Taylor prism in the British Museum, written about two years earlier under another eponym.
134 Vance was here indulging in hyperbole, and believed it no more than John Dennis believed that “a man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.” Vance knew several Egyptologists and respected them highly. Among them were Doctor Ludlow Bull and Doctor Henry A. Carey of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had once generously assisted him in his work on the Menander fragments.
135 Chief Inspector O’Brien was at that time in charge of the entire Police Department of the City of New York.
136 The Sun Cholera Mixture for dysentery (a recipe of Doctor G. W. Busteed) was so named because its formula had been published by the New York Sun during the cholera excitement in New York in June, 1849. It was admitted to the first edition of the National Formulary in 1883. Its constituents were tincture of capsicum, tincture of rhubarb, spirits of camphor, essence of peppermint, and opium.
137 Sir E. A. Wallis Budge was for many years Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum.
138 Swacker, a bright, energetic youth, was Markham’s secretary.
139 A similar dagger was found on the royal mummy in the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amûn by the late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, and is now in the Cairo Museum.
140 Vance was referring jocularly to the declaration of Sakhmet in the Chapter of Opening the Mouth of Osiris Ani in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
141 Salveter was here referring to the Earl of Carnarvon, Colonel the Honorable Aubrey Herbert, General Sir Lee Stack, George J. Gould, Woolf Joel, Sir Archibald Douglas Reid, Professor Lafleur, H. G. Evelyn-White, and Professor Georges-Aaron Bénédite. Since that time two more names have been added to the fatal list—those of the Honorable Richard Bethell, secretary to Howard Carter, and Lord Westbury.
142 Theogonius was a friend of Simon Magus, who, because of his fear of the Emperor Caligula, pretended imbecility in order to hide his wisdom. Suetonius refers to him as Theogonius, but Scaliger, Casaubon and other historians give “Telegenius” as the correct spelling.
143 Vance of course was referring to the French Fête Nationale which falls on July 14th.
144 This was my guess during Vance’s operation. Later I calculated the weight of the lid. It was ten feet long, four feet wide, and was surmounted by a large carved figure. A conservative estimate would give us ten cubic feet for the lid; and as the density of granite is approximately 2.70 grams per cubic centimeter, or 170 pounds per cubic foot, the lid would have weighed at least 1,700 pounds.
145 The actual dedication reads: “I inscribe this book of adventure to my son, Arthur John Rider Haggard, in the hope that in days to come he, and many other boys whom I shall never know, may in the acts and thoughts of Allan Quartermain and his companions, as herein recorded, find something to help him and them to reach to what, with Sir Henry Curtis, I hold to be the highest rank whereto we can obtain—the state of dignity of English gentlemen.”
146 Nor did I. But while this record of mine was running serially in the American Magazine several readers wrote to me pointing out the inconsistency.
147 It will be recalled in the Greene murder case the murderer, pretending to be frightened at the sinister danger lurking in the dim corridors of the old Greene mansion, made a similar error in psychological judgment by descending to the pantry in the middle of the night for no other reason than to gratify a mild appetite for food.
148 Vance was here referring to the famous passage in the Chapter—“Das Judentum”—in Otto Weininger’s “Geschlecht und Charakter”: “Der Engländer hat dem Deutschen als tüchtiger, Empiriker, als Realpolitiker im Praktischen wie im Theoretischen, imponiert, aber damit ist seine Wichtigkeit für die Philosophie auch erschöpft. Es hat noch nie einen tieferen Denker gegeben, der beim Empirismus stehen geblieben ist; und noch nie einen Engländer, der über ihn selbstständig hinausgekommen wäre.”
THE KENNEL MURDER CASE (Part 1)
DEDICATION
TO
THE SCOTTISH TERRIER CLUB
OF AMERICA
CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK
PHILO VANCE
JOHN F.-X. MARKHAM
District Attorney of New York County.
ERNEST HEATH
Sergeant of the Homicide Bureau.
ARCHER COE
A collector of Chinese ceramics.
BRISBANE COE
His brother.
RAYMOND WREDE
A dilettante and friend of the Coes.
HILDA LAKE
Archer Coe’s niece.
SIGNOR EDUÀRDO GRASSI
An officer in the Milan Museum of Oriental Antiquities.
LIANG TSUNG WEI
The Coe cook.
GAMBLE
The Coe butler.
LUKE ENRIGHT
An importer.
MAJOR JULIUS HIGGINBOTTOM
Sportsman and dog breeder.
ANNIE COCHRANE
A maid.
HENNESSEY
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
BURKE
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
SNITKIN
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
SULLIVAN
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.
PETER QUACKENBUSH
Official photographer.
DOCTOR EMANUEL DOREMUS
Medical Examiner.
SWACKER
Secretary to the District Attorney.
CURRIE
Vance’s valet.
CHAPTER I
THE BOLTED BEDROOM
(Thursday, October 11; 8.45 a. m.)
It was exactly three months after the startling termination of the Scarab murder case149 that Philo Vance was drawn into the subtlest and the most perplexing of all the criminal problems that came his way during the four years of John F.-X. Markham’s incumbency as District Attorney of New York County.
Indeed, so mystifying was this case, so apparently inexplicable were its conflicting elements, that the police were for adding it to their list of unsolved murder mysteries. And they would have been justified in their decision; for rarely in the annals of modern crime has there been a case that seemed to reverse so completely the rational laws by which humanity lives and reasons. In the words of the doughty and practical Sergeant Ernest Heath of the Homicide Bureau, the case “didn’t make sense.” On the surface it smacked of strange and terrifying magic, of witch-doctors and miracle-workers; and every line of investigation ran into a blank wall.
In fact, the case had every outward appearance of being what arm-chair criminologists delight in calling the perfect crime. And, to make the plotting of the murderer even more mystifying, a diabolical concatenation of circumstances was superimposed upon the events by some whimsical and perverse god, which tended to strengthen every weak link in the culprit’s chain of ratiocination, and to turn the entire bloody affair into a maze of incomprehensibility.
Curiously enough, however, it was the very excess of ardor on the part of the murderer when attempting to divert suspicion, that created a minute hole in the wall of mystery, through which Vance was able to see a glimmer of light. In the process of following that light to the truth, Vance did what I believe was the shrewdest and profoundest detective work of his career. It was his peculiar knowledge of special and out-of-the-way facts, combined with his almost uncanny perception of human nature, that made it possible for him to seize upon apparently unimportant clues and resolve them into a devastating syllogism.
Vance for years had been a breeder of Scottish terriers. His kennels were in New Jersey, an hour’s ride from New York, and he spent much of his time there studying pedigrees, breeding for certain characteristics which he believed essential to the ideal terrier, and watching the results of his theories. Sometimes I think he manifested a greater enthusiasm in his dogs than in any other recreative phase of his life; and the only time I have seen evidences of a thrill in his eyes comparable to that when he had unearthed and acquired a magnificent Cézanne water-color or discovered a rare piece of Chinese ceremonial jade in a mass of opaque modern recuttings, was when one of his dogs went up to Winners.
I mention this fact—or idiosyncrasy, if you prefer—because it so happened that Vance’s ability to look at a certain stray Scottish terrier and recognize its blood-lines and show qualities, was what led him to one phase of the truth in the remarkable case which I am now recording.
That which led Vance to another important phase of the truth was his knowledge of Chinese ceramics. He possessed, in his home in East 38th Street, a small but remarkable collection of Chinese antiquities—museum pieces he had acquired in his extensive travels—and had written various articles for Oriental and art journals on the subject of Sung and Ming monochrome porcelains.
Scotties and Chinese ceramics! A truly unusual combination. And yet, without a knowledge of these two antipodal interests, the mysterious murder of Archer Coe, in his old brownstone house in West 71st Street, would have remained a closed book for all time.
The opening of the case was rather tame: it promised little in the line of sensationalism. But within an hour of the telephone call Markham received from the Coe butler, the District Attorney’s office and the New York Police Department were plunged into one of the most astounding and baffling murder mysteries of our day.
It was shortly after half-past eight on the morning of October 11, that Vance’s door-bell rang; and Currie, his old English valet and majordomo, ushered Markham into the library. I was temporarily installed in Vance’s duplex roof-garden apartment at the time. There was much legal and financial work to be done—an accumulation of months, for Vance had insisted that I accompany him on the Mediterranean cruise he took immediately after the solving of the Scarab murder. For years, almost since our Harvard days, I had been Vance’s legal adviser and monetary steward (a post which included as much of friendship as of business) and his affairs kept me fairly busy—so busy, in fact, that a two months’ interregnum meant much overtime labor afterwards.
On this particular autumn morning I had risen at seven and was busily engaged with a mass of cancelled checks and bank statements when Markham arrived.
“Go ahead with your chores, Van Dine,” he said, with a perfunctory nod. “I’ll rout out the sybarite myself.” He seemed a trifle perturbed as he disappeared into Vance’s bedroom, which was just off the library.
I heard him call Vance a bit peremptorily, and I heard Vance give a dramatic groan.
“A murder, I presume,” Vance complained through a yawn. “Nothing less than gore would have led your footsteps to my boudoir at this ungodly hour.”
“Not a murder—” Markham began.
“Oh, I say! What time might it be, then?”
“Eight forty-five,” Markham told him.
“So early—and not a murder!” (I could hear Vance’s feet hit the floor.) “You interest me strangely.… Your wedding morn perhaps?”
“Archer Coe has committed suicide,” Markham announced, not without irritation.
“My word!” Vance was now moving about. “That’s even stranger than a murder. I crave elucidation.… Come, let’s sit down while I sip my coffee.”
Markham re-entered the library, followed by Vance clad in sandals and an elaborate Mandarin robe. Vance rang for Currie and ordered Turkish coffee, at the same time settling himself in a large Queen Anne chair and lighting one of his favorite Régie cigarettes.
Markham did not sit down. He stood near the mantelpiece, regarding his host with narrowed, inquisitive eyes.
“What did you mean, Vance,” he asked, “by Coe’s suicide being stranger than murder?”
“Nothing esoteric, old thing,” Vance draw
led languidly. “Simply that there would be nothing particularly remarkable in any one’s pushing old Archer into the Beyond. He’s been inviting violence all his life. Not a sweet and love-inspiring chappie, don’t y’ know. But there’s something deuced remarkable in the fact that he should push himself over the border. He’s not the suicidal type—far too egocentric.”
“I think you’re right. And that idea was probably in the back of my head when I told the butler to hold everything till I got there.”
Currie entered with the coffee, and Vance sipped the black, cloudy liquid for a moment. At length he said:
“Do tell me more. Why should you be notified at all? And what did the butler pour into your ear over the phone? And why are you here curtailing my slumbers? Why everything? Why anything? Just why? Can’t you see I’m bursting with uncontrollable curiosity?” And Vance yawned and closed his eyes.
“I’m on my way to Coe’s house.” Markham was annoyed at the other’s attitude of indifference. “Thought maybe you’d like to—what’s your favorite word?—‘toddle’ along.” This was said with sarcasm.
“Toddle,” Vance repeated. “Quite. But why toddle blindly? Do be magnanimous and enlighten me. The corpse won’t run away, even if we are a bit latish.”
Markham hesitated, and shrugged. Obviously he was uneasy, and obviously he wanted Vance to accompany him. As he had admitted, something was in the back of his head.
“Very well,” he acquiesced. “Shortly after eight this morning Coe’s butler—the obsequious Gamble—phoned me at my home. He was in a state of nerves, and his voice was husky with fear. He informed me, with many hems and haws, that Archer Coe had shot himself, and asked me if I would come to the house at once. My first instinct was to tell him to notify the police; but, for some reason, I checked myself and asked him why he had called me. He said that Mr. Raymond Wrede had so advised him—”
“Ah!”
“It seems he had first called Wrede—who, as you know, is an intimate family friend—and that Wrede had immediately come to the house.”