“You mean,” said Heath, “that she saw somebody else, and imagined it was her mother because she was thinking so hard of the old woman?”
“It’s by no means improbable.”
“Still, there was that detail of the Oriental shawl,” objected Markham. “Ada might easily have mistaken the person’s features, but her insistence on having seen that particular shawl was fairly definite.”
Vance gave a perplexed nod.
“The point is well taken. And it may prove the Ariadne’s clew that will lead us out of this Cretan labyrinth. We must find out more about that shawl.”
Heath had taken out his note-book and was turning the pages with scowling concentration.
“And don’t forget, Mr. Vance, “he said, without looking up, “about that diagram Ada found in the rear of the hall near the library door. Maybe this person in the shawl was the one who’d dropped it, and was going to the library to look for it, but got scared off when she saw Ada.”
“But whoever shot Rex,” said Markham, “evidently stole the paper from him, and therefore wouldn’t be worrying about it.”
“I guess that’s right,” Heath admitted reluctantly.
“Such speculation is futile,” commented Vance. “This affair is too complicated to be untangled by the unravelling of details. We must determine, if possible, who it was that Ada saw that night. Then we’ll have opened a main artery of inquiry.”
“How are we going to find that out,” demanded O’Brien, “when Ada was the only person who saw this woman in Mrs. Greene’s shawl?”
“Your question contains the answer, Inspector. We must see Ada again and try to counteract the suggestion of her own fears. When we explain that it couldn’t have been her mother, she may recall some other point that will put us on the right track.”
And this was the course taken. When the conference ended, O’Brien departed, and the rest of us dined at the club. At half past eight we were on our way to the Greene mansion.
We found Ada and the cook alone in the drawing-room. The girl sat before the fire, a copy of Grimm’s “Fairy-Tales” turned face down on her knees; and Mrs. Mannheim, busy with a lapful of mending, occupied a straight chair near the door. It was a curious sight, in view of the formal correctness of the house, and it brought forcibly to my mind how fear and adversity inevitably level all social standards.
When we entered the room Mrs. Mannheim rose and, gathering up her mending, started to go. But Vance indicated that she was to remain, and without a word she resumed her seat.
“We’re here to annoy you again, Ada,” said Vance, assuming the role of interrogator. “But you’re about the only person we can come to for help.” His smile put the girl at ease. “We want to talk to you about what you told us the other afternoon....”
Her eyes opened wide, and she waited in a kind of awed silence.
“You told us you thought you had seen your mother—”
“I did see her—I did!”
Vance shook his head. “No; it was not your mother. She was unable to walk, Ada. She was truly and helplessly paralyzed. It was impossible for her even to make the slightest movement with either leg.”
“But—I don’t understand.” There was more than bewilderment in her voice: there was terror and alarm such as one might experience at the thought of supernatural malignancy. “I heard Doctor Von tell mother he was bringing a specialist to see her this morning. But she died last night—so how could you know? Oh, you must be mistaken. I saw her—I know I saw her.”
She seemed to be battling desperately for the preservation of her sanity. But Vance again shook his head.
“Doctor Oppenheimer did not examine your mother,” he said. “But Doctor Doremus did—to-day. And he found that she had been unable to move for many years.”
“Oh!” The exclamation was only breathed. The girl seemed incapable of speech.
“And what we’ve come for,” continued Vance, “is to ask you to recall that night, and see if you cannot remember something—some little thing—that will help us. You saw this person only by the flickering light of a match. You might easily have made a mistake.”
“But how could I? I was so close to her.”
“Before you woke up that night and felt hungry, had you been dreaming of your mother?”
She hesitated, and shuddered slightly.
“I don’t know, but I’ve dreamed of mother constantly—awful, scary dreams—ever since that first night when somebody came into my room...”
“That may account for the mistake you made.” Vance paused a moment and then asked: “Do you distinctly remember seeing your mother’s Oriental shawl on the person in the hall that night?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, after a slight hesitation. “It was the first thing I noticed. Then I saw her face...”
A trivial but startling thing happened at this moment. We had our back to Mrs. Mannheim and, for the time being, had forgotten her presence in the room. Suddenly what sounded like a dry sob broke from her, and the sewing-basket on her knees fell to the floor. Instinctively we turned. The woman was staring at us glassily.
“What difference does it make who she saw?” she asked in a dead, monotonous voice. “She maybe saw me.”
“Nonsense, Gertrude,” Ada said quickly. “It wasn’t you.”
Vance was watching the woman with a puzzled expression.
“Do you ever wear Mrs. Greene’s shawl, Frau Mannheim?”
“Of course she doesn’t,” Ada cut in.
“And do you ever steal into the library and read after the household is asleep?” pursued Vance.
The woman picked up her sewing morosely, and again lapsed into sullen silence. Vance studied her a moment and then turned back to Ada.
“Do you know of anyone who might have been wearing your mother’s shawl that night?”
“I—don’t know,” the girl stammered, her lips trembling.
“Come; that won’t do.” Vance spoke with some asperity. “This isn’t the time to shield anyone. Who was in the habit of using the shawl?”
“No one was in the habit...” She stopped and gave Vance a pleading look; but he was obdurate.
“Who, then, besides your mother ever wore it?”
“But I would have known if it had been Sibella I saw—”
“Sibella? She sometimes borrowed the shawl?”
Ada nodded reluctantly. “Once in a great while. She—she admired the shawl... Oh, why do you make me tell you this!”
“And you have never seen any one else with it on?”
“No; no one ever wore it except mother and Sibella.”
Vance attempted to banish her obvious distress with a whimsical reassuring smile.
“Just see how foolish all your fears have been,” he said lightly. “You probably saw your sister in the hall that night, and, because you’d been having bad dreams about your mother, you thought it was she. As a result, you became frightened, and locked yourself up and worried. It was rather silly, what?”
A little later we took our leave.
“It has always been my contention,” remarked Inspector Moran, as we rode down-town, “that any identification under strain or excitement is worthless. And here we have a glaring instance of it.”
“I’d like a nice quiet little chat with Sibella,” mumbled Heath, busy with his own thoughts.
“It wouldn’t comfort you, Sergeant,” Vance told him. “At the end of your tête-à-tête you’d know only what the young lady wanted you to know.”
“Where do we stand now?” asked Markham, after a silence.
“Exactly where we stood before,” answered Vance dejectedly, “—in the midst of an impenetrable fog.—And I’m not in the least convinced,” he added, “that it was Sibella who Ada saw in the hall.”
Markham looked amazed.
“Then who, in Heaven’s name, was it?”
Vance sighed gloomily. “Give me the answer to that one question, and I’ll complete the saga.”
; That night Vance sat up until nearly two o’clock writing at his desk in the library.
Footnotes
* Chief Inspector O’Brien, who was in command of the entire Police Department, was, I learned later, an uncle of the Miss O’Brien who was acting officially as nurse at the Greene mansion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREEThe Missing Fact
(Saturday, December 4; 1 p.m.)
SATURDAY WAS THE District Attorney’s “half-day” at the office, and Markham had invited Vance and me to lunch at the Bankers Club. But when we reached the Criminal Courts Building he was swamped with an accumulation of work, and we had a tray-service meal in his private conference room. Before leaving the house that noon Vance had put several sheets of closely written paper in his pocket, and I surmised—correctly, as it turned out—that they were what he had been working on the night before.
When lunch was over Vance lay back in his chair languidly and lit a cigarette.
“Markham old dear,” he said, “I accepted your invitation to-day for the sole purpose of discussing art. I trust you are in a receptive mood.”
Markham looked at him with frank annoyance.
“Damn it, Vance, I’m too confounded busy to be bothered with your irrelevancies. If you feel artistically inclined, take Van here to the Metropolitan Museum. But leave me alone.”
Vance sighed, and wagged his head reproachfully.
“There speaks the voice of America! ‘Run along and play with your æsthetic toys if such silly things amuse you; but let me attend to my serious affairs.’ It’s very sad. In the present instance, however, I refuse to run along; and most certainly I shall not browse about that mausoleum of Europe’s rejected corpses, known as the Metropolitan Museum. I say, it’s a wonder you didn’t suggest that I make the rounds of our municipal statuary.”
“I’d have suggested the Aquarium—”
“I know. Anything to get rid of me.”
Vance adopted an injured tone. “And yet, don’t y’ know, I’m going to sit right here and deliver an edifying lecture on æsthetic composition.”
“Then don’t talk too loud,” said Markham, rising; “for I’ll be in the next room working.”
“But my lecture has to do with the Greene case. And really you shouldn’t miss it.”
Markham paused and turned.
“Merely one of your wordy prologues, eh?” He sat down again. “Well, if you have any helpful suggestions to make, I’ll listen.”
Vance smoked a moment.
“Y’ know, Markham,” he began, assuming a lazy, unemotional air, “there’s a fundamental difference between a good painting and a photograph. I’ll admit many painters appear unaware of this fact; and when color photography is perfected—my word! what a horde of academicians will be thrown out of employment! But none the less there’s a vast chasm between the two; and it’s this technical distinction that’s to be the burden of my lay. How, for instance, does Michelangelo’s ‘Moses’ differ from a camera study of a patriarchal old man with whiskers and a stone tablet? Wherein lie the points of divergence between Rubens’s ‘Landscape with Château de Stein’ and a tourist’s snap-shot of a Rhine castle? Why is a Cézanne still-life an improvement on a photograph of a dish of apples? Why have the Renaissance paintings of Madonnas endured for hundreds of years whereas a mere photograph of a mother and child passes into artistic oblivion at the very click of the lens shutter?...”
He held up a silencing hand as Markham was about to speak.
“I’m not being futile. Bear with me a moment.—The difference between a good painting and a photograph is this: the one is arranged, composed, organized; the other is merely the haphazard impression of a scene, or a segment of realism, just as it exists in nature. In short, the one has form; the other is chaotic. When a true artist paints a picture, d’ ye see, he arranges all the masses and lines to accord with his preconceived idea of composition—that is, he bends everything in the picture to a basic design; and he also eliminates any objects or details that go contr’ry to, or detract from, that design. Thus he achieves a homogeneity of form, so to speak. Every object in the picture is put there for a definite purpose, and is set in a certain position to accord with the underlying structural pattern. There are no irrelevancies, no unrelated details, no detached objects, no arbitr’ry arrangement of values. All the forms and lines are interdependent; every object—indeed, every brush stroke—takes its exact place in the pattern and fulfils a given function. The picture, in fine, is a unity.”
“Very instructive,” commented Markham, glancing ostentatiously at his watch. “And the Greene case?”
“Now, a photograph, on the other hand,” pursued Vance, ignoring the interruption, “is devoid of design or even of arrangement in the æsthetic sense. To be sure, a photographer may pose and drape a figure—he may even saw off the limb of a tree that he intends to record on his negative; but it’s quite impossible for him to compose the subject-matter of his picture to accord with a preconceived design, the way a painter does. In a photograph there are always details that have no meaning, variations of light and shade that are harmonically false, textures that create false notes, lines that are discords, masses that are out of place. The camera, d’ ye see, is deucedly forthright—it records whatever is before it, irrespective of art values. The inevitable result is that a photograph lacks organization and unity; its composition is, at best, primitive and obvious. And it is full of irrelevant factors—of objects which have neither meaning nor purpose. There is no uniformity of conception in it. It is haphazard, heterogeneous, aimless, and amorphous—just as is nature.”
“You needn’t belabor the point.” Markham spoke impatiently. “I have a rudimentary intelligence.—Where is this elaborate truism leading you?”
Vance gave him an engaging smile.
“To East 53rd Street. But before we reach our destination permit me another brief amplification.—Quite often a painting of intricate and subtle design does not at once reveal its composition to the spectator. In fact, only the designs of the simpler and more obvious paintings are immediately grasped. Generally the spectator has to study a painting carefully—trace its rhythms, compare its forms, weigh its details, and fit together all its salients—before its underlying design becomes apparent. Many well-organized and perfectly balanced paintings—such as Renoir’s figure-pieces, Matisse’s interiors, Cézanne’s water-colors, Picasso’s still-lives, and Leonardo’s anatomical drawings—may at first appear meaningless from the standpoint of composition; their forms may seem to lack unity and cohesion; their masses and linear values may give the impression of having been arbitrarily put down. And it is only after the spectator has related all their integers and traced all their contrapuntal activities that they take on significance and reveal their creator’s motivating conception...”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted Markham. “Paintings and photographs differ; the objects in a painting possess design; the objects in a photograph are without design; one must often study a painting in order to determine the design.—That, I believe, covers the ground you have been wandering over desultorily for the past fifteen minutes.”
“I was merely trying to imitate the vast deluge of repetitive verbiage found in legal documents,” explained Vance. “I hoped thereby to convey my meaning to your lawyer’s mind.”
“You succeeded with a vengeance,” snapped Markham. “What follows?”
Vance became serious again.
“Markham, we’ve been looking at the various occurrences in the Greene case as though they were the unrelated objects of a photograph. We’ve inspected each fact as it came up; but we have failed to analyze sufficiently its connection with all the other known facts. We’ve regarded this whole affair as though it were a series, or collection, of isolated integers. And we’ve missed the significance of everything because we haven’t yet determined the shape of the basic pattern of which each of these incidents is but a part.—Do you follow me?”
“My dear fellow!”
“I see your point,” said Markham slowly. “But how does it help us? We know all the external facts; and they certainly don’t fit into any intelligible conception of a unified whole.”
“Not yet, perhaps,” agreed Vance. “But that’s because we haven’t gone about it systematically. We’ve done too much investigating and too little thinking. We’ve been sidetracked by what the modern painters call documentation—that is, by the objective appeal of the picture’s recognizable parts. We haven’t sought for the abstract content. We’ve overlooked the ‘significant form’—a loose phrase; but blame Clive Bell for it.”*
“And how would you suggest that we set about determining the compositional design of this bloody canvas? We might dub the picture, by the way, “Nepotism Gone Wrong.’” By this facetious remark, he was, I knew, attempting to counteract the serious impression the other’s disquisition had made on him; for, though he realized Vance would not have drawn his voluminous parallel without a definite hope of applying it successfully to the problem in hand, he was chary of indulging any expectations lest they result in further disappointments.
The Greene Murder Case Page 25