“Doctor Bliss’s study,” interjected Scarlett, “is at the rear of this hall.” He pointed to a curtained door at the end of the wide corridor.
“He should be able to hear us now,” remarked Markham.
“No, the door is padded,” Scarlett explained. “The study is his sanctum sanctorum; and no sounds can reach him from the house.”
The butler, his eyes like two glittering pin-points, had started to move away.
“Just a moment, Brush.” Vance’s voice halted him. “Who else is in the house at this time?”
The man turned, and when he answered it seemed to me that his voice quavered slightly.
“Mr. Hani is up-stairs. He has been indisposed—”
“Oh, has he, now?” Vance took out his cigarette-case. “And the other members of the household?”
“Mrs. Bliss went out about nine—to do some shopping, so I understood her to say.—Mr. Salveter left the house shortly afterward.”
“And Dingle?”
“She’s in the kitchen below, sir.”
Vance studied the butler appraisingly.
“You need a tonic, Brush. A combination of iron, arsenic and strychnine would build you up.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve been thinking of consulting a doctor… It’s lack of fresh air, sir.”
“Just so.” Vance had selected one of his beloved Régies, and was lighting it with meticulous care. “By the by, Brush; what about Mr. Kyle? He called here this morning, I understand.”
“He’s in the museum now… I’d forgotten, sir. Doctor Bliss may be with him.”
“Indeed! And what time did Mr. Kyle arrive?”
“About ten o’clock.”
“Did you admit him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And did you notify Doctor Bliss of his arrival?”
“No, sir. Mr. Kyle told me not to disturb the doctor. He explained that he was early for his appointment, and wished to look over some curios in the museum for an hour or so. He said he’d knock on the doctor’s study door later.”
“And he went direct into the museum?”
“Yes, sir—in fact, I opened the door for him.”
Vance drew luxuriously on his cigarette for a moment. “One more thing, Brush. I note that the latch on the front door has been set, so that any one from the outside could enter the house without ringing…”
The man gave a slight start and, going quickly to the door, bent over and inspected the lock.
“So it is, sir… Very strange.”
Vance watched him closely.
“Why strange?”
“Well, sir, it wasn’t unlatched when Mr. Kyle came at ten o’clock. I looked at it specially when I let him in. He said he wished to be left alone in the museum, and as members of the house sometimes leave the door on the latch when they go out for a short time, I made sure that no one had done so this morning. Otherwise they might have come in and disturbed Mr. Kyle without my warning them.”
“But, Brush,” interjected Scarlett excitedly; “when I got here at half past ten the door was open—”
Vance made an admonitory gesture.
“That’s all right, Scarlett.” Then he turned back to the butler. “Where did you go after admitting Mr. Kyle?”
“Into the drawing-room.” The man pointed to a large sliding door half-way down the hall on the left, at the foot of the stairs.
“And remained there till when?”
“Till ten minutes ago.”
“Did you hear Mr. Scarlett come in and go out of the front door?”
“No, sir… But then, I was using the vacuum cleaner. The noise of the motor—”
“Quite so. But if the vacuum cleaner’s motor was hummin’, how do you know that Doctor Bliss did not leave his study?”
“The drawing-room door was open, sir. I’d have seen him if he came out.”
“But he might have gone into the museum and left the house by the front door without your hearing him. Y’know, you didn’t hear Mr. Scarlett enter.”
“That would have been out of the question, sir. Doctor Bliss wore only a light dressing-gown over his pyjamas. His clothes are all up-stairs.”
“Very good, Brush… And now, one more question. Has the front door-bell rung since Mr. Kyle’s arrival?”
“No, sir.”
“Maybe it rang and Dingle answered it… That motor hum, don’t y’know.”
“She would have come up and told me, sir. She never answers the door in the morning. She’s not in presentable habiliments till afternoon.”
“Quite characteristically feminine,” Vance murmured… “That will be all for the present, Brush. You may go down-stairs and wait for our call. An accident has happened to Mr. Kyle, and we are going to look into it. You are to say nothing…understand?” His voice had suddenly become stern and ominous.
Brush drew himself up with a quick intake of breath: he appeared positively ill, and I almost expected him to faint. His face was like chalk.
“Certainly, sir—I understand.” His words were articulated with great effort. Then he walked away unsteadily and disappeared down the rear stairs to the left of Doctor Bliss’s study door.
Vance spoke in a low voice to Markham, who immediately beckoned to the officer in the street below.
“You are to stand in the vestibule here,” he ordered. “When Sergeant Heath and his men come, bring them to us at once. We’ll be in there.” He indicated the large steel door leading into the museum. “If any one else calls, hold them and notify us. Don’t let any one ring the bell.”
The officer saluted and took up his post; and the rest of us, with Vance leading the way, passed through the steel door into the museum.
A flight of carpeted stairs, four feet wide, led down along the wall to the floor of the enormous room beyond, which was on the street level. The first-story floor—the one which had been even with the hallway of the house we had just quitted—had been removed so that the room of the museum was two stories high. Two huge pillars, with steel beams and diagonal joists, had been erected as supports. Moreover, the walls marking the former rooms had been demolished. The result was that the room we had entered occupied the entire width and length of the house—about twenty-five by seventy feet—and had a ceiling almost twenty feet high.
At the front was a series of tall, leaded-glass windows running across the entire width of the building; and at the rear, above a series of oak cabinets, a similar row of windows had been cut. The curtains of the front windows were drawn, but those at the rear were open. The sun had not yet found its way into the room, and the light was dingy.
As we stood for a moment at the head of the steps I noted a small circular iron stairway at the rear leading to a small steel door on the same level as the door through which we had entered.
The arrangement of the museum in relation to the house which served as living quarters for the Blisses, was to prove of considerable importance in Vance’s solution of Benjamin H. Kyle’s murder, and for purposes of clarity I am including in this record a plan of the two houses. The floor of the museum, as I have said, was on the street level—it had formerly been the “basement” floor. And it must be borne in mind that the rooms indicated on the left-hand half of the plan were one story above the museum floor and half-way between the museum floor and the ceiling.
My eyes at once searched the opposite corner of the room for the murdered man; but that part of the museum was in shadow, and all I could see was a dark mass, like a recumbent human body, in front of the farthest rear cabinet.
Vance and Markham had descended the stairs while Scarlett and I waited on the upper landing. Vance went straightway to the front of the museum and pulled the draw-cords of the curtains. Light flooded the semi-darkness; and for the first time I took in the beautiful and amazing contents of that great room.
In the centre of the opposite wall rose a ten-foot obelisk from Heliopolis, commemorating an expedition of Queen Hat-shepsut of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and bearing
her cartouche. To the right and left of the obelisk stood two plaster-cast portrait statues—one of Queen Teti-shiret of the Seventeenth Dynasty, and the other a black replica of the famous Turin statue of Ramses II—considered one of the finest pieces of sculptured portraiture in antiquity.
Above and beside them hung several papyri, framed and under glass, their faded burnt-orange backgrounds—punctuated with red, yellow, green and white patches—making splashes of attractive color against the dingy gray plaster of the wall. Four large limestone bas-reliefs, taken from a Nineteenth-Dynasty tomb at Memphis and containing passages from the Book of the Dead, were aligned above the papyri.
Beneath the front windows stood a black granite Twenty-second-Dynasty sarcophagus fully ten feet long, its front and sides covered with hieroglyphic inscriptions. It was surmounted by a mummy-shaped lid, showing the soul bird, or Ba—with its falcon’s form and human head. This sarcophagus was one of the rarest in America, and had been brought to this country by Doctor Bliss from the ancient necropolis at Thebes. In the corner beyond was a cedar-wood statue of an Asiatic, found in Palestine—a relic of the conquests of Thut-mosè III.
Near the foot of the stairs on which I stood loomed the majestic Kha-ef-Rê statue from the Fourth Dynasty. It was made of gray plaster of Paris, varnished and polished in imitation of the original diorite. It stood nearly eight feet high; and its dignity and power and magistral calm seemed to dominate the entire museum.*
To the right of the statue, and extending all the way to the spiral stairs at the rear, was a row of anthropoid mummy cases, gaudily decorated in gold and brilliant colors. Above them hung two enormously enlarged tinted photographs—one showing the Colossi of Amenhotep III,† the other depicting the great Amûn Temple at Karnak.
Around the two supporting columns in the centre of the museum deep shelves had been built, and on them reposed a fascinating array of shawabtis—beautifully carved and gaily painted wooden figures.
Extending between the two pillars was a long, low, velvet-covered table, perhaps fourteen feet in length, bearing a beautiful collection of alabaster perfumery and canopic vases, blue lotiform jars, kohl pots of polished obsidian, and several cylindrical carved cosmetic jars of semi-translucent and opaque alabaster. At the rear of the room was a squat coffer with inlays of blue glazed faience, white and red ivory and black ebony; and beside it stood a carved chair of state, decorated in gesso and gilt, and bearing a design of lotus flowers and buds.
Across the front of the room ran a long glass show-case containing pectoral collars of cloisonné, amulets in majolica, shell pendants, girdles of gold cowries, rhombic beads of carnelian and feldspar, bracelets and anklets and finger-rings, gold and ebony fans, and a collection of scarabs of most of the Pharaohs down to Ptolemaic times.
Around the walls, just below the ceiling, ran a five-foot frieze—a sectional copy of the famous Rhapsody of Pen-ta-Weret, commemorating the victory of Ramses II over the Hittites at Kadesh in Syria.
As soon as Vance had opened the heavy curtains of the front windows he and Markham moved toward the rear of the room. Scarlett and I descended the stairs and followed them. Kyle was lying on his face, his legs slightly drawn up under him, and his arms reaching out and encircling the feet of a life-sized statue in the corner. I had seen reproductions of this statue many times, but I did not know its name.
It was Vance who enlightened me. He stood contemplating the huddled body of the dead man, and slowly his eyes shifted to the serene sculpture—a brown limestone carving of a man with a jackal’s head, holding a sceptre.
“Anûbis,” he murmured, his face set tensely. “The Egyptian god of the underworld. Y’know, Markham, Anûbis was the god who prowled about the tombs of the dead. He guided the dead through Amentet—the shadowy abode of Osiris. He plays an important part in the Book of the Dead—he symbolized the grave; and he weighed the souls of men, and assigned each to its abode. Without Anûbis’s help the soul would never have found the Realm of Shades. He was the only friend of the dying and the dead… And here is Kyle, in an attitude of final and pious entreaty before him.”
Vance’s eyes rested for a moment on the benignant features of Anûbis. Then his gaze moved dreamily to the prostrate man who, but for the hideous wound in his head, might have been paying humble obeisance to the underworld god. He pointed to the smaller statue which had caused Kyle’s death.
This statue was about two feet long and was black and shiny. It still lay diagonally across the back of the murdered man’s skull: it seemed to have been caught and held there in the concavity made by the blow. An irregular pool of dark blood had formed beside the head, and I noted—without giving the matter any particular thought—that one point of the periphery of the pool had been smeared outward over the polished maple-wood floor.
“I don’t like this, Markham,” Vance was saying in a low voice. “I don’t like it at all… That diorite statue, which killed Kyle, is Sakhmet, the Egyptian goddess of vengeance—the destroying element. She was the goddess who protected the good and annihilated the wicked—the goddess who slew. The Egyptians believed in her violent power; and there are many strange legend’ry tales of her dark and terrible acts of revenge…”
Footnotes
*As legal adviser, monetary steward and constant companion of Philo Vance, I kept a complete record of the principal criminal cases in which he participated during Markham’s incumbency. Four of these cases I have already recorded in book form—“The Benson Murder Case” (Scribners, 1926); “The Canary Murder Case” (Scribners, 1927); “The Greene Murder Case” (Scribners, 1928); and “The Bishop Murder Case” (Scribners, 1929).
†Sergeant Ernest Heath, of the Homicide Bureau, had worked with Markham on most of his important cases. He was an honest, capable, but uninspired police officer, who, after the Benson and the “Canary” murder cases, had come to respect Vance highly. Vance admired the Sergeant; and the two—despite their fundamental differences in outlook and training—collaborated with admirable smoothness.
*Kha-ef-Rê was the originator of the great Sphinx, and also of one of the three great Gîzeh pyramids—Wer Kha-ef-Rê (Kha-ef-Rê is mighty), now known as the Second Pyramid.
†Popularly, and incorrectly, called the Memnon Colossi.
CHAPTER THREE
Scarabæus Sacer
(Friday, July 13; noon)
VANCE FROWNED SLIGHTLY and studied the small black figure for a moment.
“It may mean nothing—surely nothing supernatural—but the fact that this particular statue was chosen for the murder makes me wonder if there may be something diabolical and sinister and superstitious in this affair.”
“Come, come, Vance!” Markham spoke with forced matter-of-factness. “This is modern New York, not legendary Egypt.”
“Yes…oh, yes. But superstition is still a ruling factor in so-called human nature. Moreover, there are many more convenient weapons in this room—weapons fully as lethal and more readily wielded. Why should a cumbersome, heavy statue of Sakhmet have been chosen for the deed?… In any event, it took a strong man to swing it with such force.”
He looked toward Scarlett, whose eyes had been fastened on the dead man with a stare of fascination.
“Where was this statue kept?”
Scarlett blinked.
“Why—let me see…” He was obviously trying to collect his wits. “Ah, yes. On the top of that cabinet.” He pointed unsteadily to the row of wide shelves in front of Kyle’s body. “It was one of the new pieces we unpacked yesterday. Hani placed it there. You see, we used that end cabinet temporarily for the new items, until we could arrange and catalogue ’em properly.”
There were ten sections in the row of cabinets that extended across the rear of the museum, each one being about two and a half feet wide and a little over seven feet high. These cabinets—which in reality were but open shelves—were filled with all manner of curios: scores of examples of pottery and wooden vases, scent bottles, bows and arrows, adzes, sword
s, daggers, sistra, bronze and copper hand-mirrors, ivory game boards, perfume boxes, whip handles, palm-leaf sandals, wooden combs, palettes, head rests, reed baskets, carved spoons, plasterers’ tools, sacrificial flint knives, funerary masks, statuettes, necklaces, and the like.
Each cabinet had a separate curtain of a material which looked like silk rep, suspended with brass rings on a small metal rod. The curtains to all the cabinets were drawn open, with the exception of the one on the end cabinet before which the dead body of Kyle lay. The curtain of this cabinet was only partly drawn.
Vance had turned round.
“And what about the Anûbis, Scarlett?” he asked. “Was it a recent acquisition?”
“That came yesterday, too. It was placed in that corner—to keep the shipment together.”
Vance nodded, and walked to the partly curtained cabinet. He stood for several moments peering into the shelves.
“Very interestin’,” he murmured, almost as if to himself. “I see you have a most unusual post-Hyksos bearded sphinx… And that blue-glass vessel is very lovely…though not so lovely as yon blue-paste lion’s-head… Ah! I note many evidences of old Intef’s bellicose nature—that battle-ax, for instance… And—my word!—there are some scimitars and daggers which look positively Asiatic. And”—he peered closely into the top shelf—“a most fascinatin’ collection of ceremonial maces.”
“Things Doctor Bliss picked up on his recent expedition,” explained Scarlett. “Those flint and porphyry maces came from the antechamber of Intef’s tomb…”
At this moment the great metal door of the museum creaked on its hinges, and Sergeant Ernest Heath and three detectives appeared at the head of the stairs. The Sergeant immediately descended into the room, leaving his men on the little landing.
He greeted Markham with the usual ritualistic handshake.
“Howdy, sir,” he rumbled. “I got here as soon as I could. Brought three of the boys from the Bureau, and sent word to Captain Dubois and Doc Doremus* to follow us up.”
The Scarab Murder Case Page 3