“Get on with the story of Ada’s plot, Vance.” This time it was Markham who was impatient.
“The rest seems pretty obvious, don’t y’ know. It was unquestionably Ada who was listening at the library door the afternoon we were there. She realized we had found the books and galoshes; and she had to think fast. So, when we came out, she told us the dramatic yarn of having seen her mother walking, which was sheer moonshine. She had run across those books on paralysis, d’ ye see, and they had suggested to her the possibility of focusing suspicion on Mrs. Greene—the chief object of her hate. It is probably true, as Von Blon said, that the two books do not deal with actual hysterical paralysis and somnambulism, but they no doubt contain references to these types of paralysis. I rather think Ada had intended all along to kill the old lady last and have it appear as the suicide of the murderer. But the proposed examination by Oppenheimer changed all that. She learned of the examination when she heard Von Blon apprise Mrs. Greene of it on his morning visit; and, having told us of that mythical midnight promenade, she couldn’t delay matters any longer. The old lady had to die—before Oppenheimer arrived. And half an hour later Ada took the morphine. She feared to give Mrs. Greene the strychnine at once lest it appear suspicious...”
“That’s where those books on poisons come in, isn’t it, Mr. Vance?” interjected Heath. “When Ada had decided to use poison on some of the family, she got all the dope she needed on the subject outa the library.”
“Precisely. She herself took just enough morphine to render her unconscious—probably about two grains. And to make sure she would get immediate assistance, she devised the simple trick of having Sibella’s dog appear to give the alarm. Incidentally, this trick cast suspicion on Sibella. After Ada had swallowed the morphine, she merely waited until she began to feel drowsy, pulled the bell-cord, caught the tassel in the dog’s teeth, and lay back. She counterfeited a good deal of her illness; but Drumm couldn’t have detected her malingering even if he had been as great a doctor as he wanted us to believe; for the symptoms of all doses of morphine taken by mouth are practically the same during the first half-hour. And, once she was on her feet, she had only to watch for an opportunity of giving the strychnine to Mrs. Greene...”
“It all seems too cold-blooded to be real,” murmured Markham.
“And yet there has been any number of precedents for Ada’s actions. Do you recall the mass murders of those three nurses, Madame Jegado, Frau Zwanzigger, and Vrouw Van der Linden? And there was Mrs. Belle Gunness, the female Bluebeard; and Amelia Elizabeth Dyer, the Reading baby-farmer; and Mrs. Pearcey. Cold-blooded? Yes! But in Ada’s case there was passion too. I’m inclined to believe that it takes a particularly hot flame—a fire at white heat, in fact—to carry the human heart through such a Gethsemane. However that may be, Ada watched for her chance to poison Mrs. Greene, and found it that night. The nurse went to the third floor to prepare for bed between eleven and eleven-thirty; and during that half-hour Ada visited her mother’s room. Whether she suggested the citrocarbonate or Mrs. Greene herself asked for it, we’ll never know. Probably the former, for Ada had always given it to her at night. When the nurse came down-stairs again Ada was already back in bed, apparently asleep, and Mrs. Greene was on the verge of her first—and, let us hope, her only—convulsion.”
“Doremus’s post-mortem report must have given her a terrific shock,” commented Markham.
“It did. It upset all her calculations. Imagine her feelings when we informed her that Mrs. Greene couldn’t have walked! She backed out of the danger nicely though. The detail of the Oriental shawl, however, nearly entangled her. But even that point she turned to her own advantage by using it as a clew against Sibella.”
“How do you account for Mrs. Mannheim’s actions during that interview?” asked Markham. “You remember her saying it might have been she whom Ada saw in the hall.”
A cloud came over Vance’s face.
“I think,” he said sadly, “that Frau Mannheim began to suspect her little Ada at that point. She knew the terrible history of the girl’s father, and perhaps had lived in fear of some criminal outcropping in the child.”
There was a silence for several moments. Each of us was busy with his own thoughts. Then Vance continued:
“After Mrs. Greene’s death, only Sibella stood between Ada and her blazing goal; and it was Sibella herself who gave her the idea for a supposedly safe way to commit the final murder. Weeks ago, on a ride Van and I took with the two girls and Von Blon, Sibella’s venomous pique led her to make a foolish remark about running one’s victim over a precipice in a machine; and it no doubt appealed to Ada’s sense of the fitness of things that Sibella should thus suggest the means of her own demise. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Ada intended, after having killed her sister, to say that Sibella had tried to murder her, but that she had suspected the other’s purpose and jumped from the car in time to save herself; and that Sibella had miscalculated the car’s speed and been carried over the precipice. The fact that Von Blon and Van and I had heard Sibella speculate on just such a method of murder would have given weight to Ada’s story. And what a neat ending it would have made—Sibella, the murderer, dead; the case closed; Ada, the inheritor of the Greene millions, free to do as she chose! And ’pon my soul, Markham!—it came very near succeeding.”
Vance sighed, and reached for the decanter. After refilling our glasses he settled back and smoked moodily.
“I wonder how long this terrible plot had been in preparation. We’ll never know. Maybe years. There was no haste in Ada’s preparations. Everything was worked out carefully; and she let circumstances—or, rather, opportunity—guide her. Once she had secured the revolver, it was only a question of waiting for a chance when she could make the footprints and be sure the gun would sink out of sight in the snow-drift on the balcony steps. Yes, the most essential condition of her scheme was the snow... Amazin’!”
There is little more to add to this record. The truth was not given out, and the case was “shelved.” The following year Tobias’s will was upset by the Supreme Court in Equity—that is, the twenty-five-year domiciliary clause was abrogated in view of all that had happened at the house; and Sibella came into the entire Greene fortune. How much Markham had to do with the decision, through his influence with the Administration judge who rendered it, I don’t know; and naturally I have never asked. But the old Greene mansion was, as you remember, torn down shortly afterward, and the estate sold to a realty corporation.
Mrs. Mannheim, broken-hearted over Ada’s death, claimed her inheritance—which Sibella generously doubled—and returned to Germany to seek what comfort she might among the nieces and nephews with whom, according to Chester, she was constantly corresponding. Sproot went back to England. He told Vance before departing that he had long planned a cottage retreat in Surrey where he could loaf and invite his soul. I picture him now, sitting on an ivied porch overlooking the Downs, reading his beloved Martial.
Doctor and Mrs. Von Blon, immediately after the court’s decision relating to the will, sailed for the Riviera and spent a belated honeymoon there. They are now settled in Vienna, where the doctor has become a Privat-docent at the University—his father’s Alma Mater. He is, I understand, making quite a name for himself in the field of neurology.
Footnotes
* I later asked Vance to rearrange the items for me in the order of his final sequence. The distribution, which told him the truth, was as follows: 3, 4, 44, 92, 9, 6, 2, 47, 1, 5, 32, 31, 98, 8, 81, 84, 82, 7, 10, 11, 61, 15, 16, 93, 33, 94, 76, 75, 48, 17, 38, 55, 54, 18, 39, 56, 41, 42, 28, 43, 58, 59, 83, 74, 40, 12, 34, 13, 14, 37, 22, 23, 35, 36, 19, 73, 26, 20, 21, 45, 25, 46, 27, 29, 30, 57, 77, 24, 78, 79, 51, 50, 52, 53, 49, 95, 80, 85, 86, 87, 88, 60, 62, 64, 63, 66, 65, 96, 89, 67, 71, 69, 68, 70, 97, 90, 91, 72.
* Tendency.
* We later learned from Mrs. Mannheim that Mannheim had once saved Tobias from criminal prosecution by taking upon himself the entire blame of one of T
obias’s shadiest extra-legal transactions, and had exacted from Tobias the promise that, in event of his own death or incarceration, he would adopt and care for Ada, whom Mrs. Mannheim had placed in a private institution at the age of five, to protect her from Mannheim’s influence.
* An account of the cases of Madeleine Smith and Constance Kent may be found in Edmund Lester Pearson’s “Murder at Smutty Nose”; and a record of Marie Boyer’s case is included in H.B. Irving’s “A Book of Remarkable Criminals.” Grete Beyer was the last woman to be publicly executed in Germany.
* Megalomania.
* Private.
For more of S. S. Van Dine’s “Philo Vance” series
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All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.
THE GREENE MURDER CASE
A Felony & Mayhem “Vintage” mystery
PUBLISHING HISTORY
First print edition (Scribner’s): 1928 Felony & Mayhem print and digital editions: 2019
Copyright © 1928 by Charles Scribner’s Sons
Copyright renewed 1954 by Claire R. Wright
All rights reserved
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63194-190-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Van Dine, S. S., author.
Title: The Greene murder case / S.S. Van Dine.
Description: Felony & Mayhem edition. | New York : Felony & Mayhem Press, 2019. | Series: A Felony & Mayhem mystery
Identifiers: LCCN 2018058547| ISBN 9781631941825 (trade pbk.) | ISBN 9781631941894 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Vance, Philo (Fictitious character) | Murder--Investigation--Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3545.R846 G74 2019 | DDC 813/.52--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058547
The Greene Murder Case Page 31