The Benson Murder Case Read online

  THE BENSON MURDER CASE

  S.S. Van Dine

  Editor’s Note

  Mr. S. S. Van Dine has, so to speak, patented a particular type of title for a number of his novels of which this title is perhaps the most popular.

  Owing to the extraordinary power and lucidity of his graphic pen he has been spoken of as the “newest and greatest mystery writer in the world.”

  This story is concerned with the elucidation of the murder of Alvin Benson on the night of June 13th:—“His body was found reclining in a large wicker lounge chair with a high fan-shaped back in an attitude so natural that one almost expected him to turn and ask why his privacy was being intruded upon. His head was resting against the chair’s back. His right leg was crossed over his left in a position of comfortable relaxation. His right arm was resting easily on the centre-table and his left arm lay along the chair’s arm.”

  You will notice how carefully these details are given: the exact position of the body, the head, the arms and the accurate description of the chair, even to its high fan-shaped back.

  The whole book, just like its predecessor, “The Canary Murder Case,” has that professional air about it which makes one feel the crime has really happened and that one is not reading a piece of pure fiction.

  It is in this exciting and brilliantly written story that the clever detective, Philo Vance, gives his views about circumstantial evidence, a subject which has received a good deal of publicity recently on account of several murder cases that have attracted an enormous amount of attention. He says:

  “Circumst’ntial evidence, Markham, is the utt’rest tommy-rot imag’nable. Its theory is not unlike that of our present-day democracy. The democratic theory is that if you accumulate enough ignorance at the polls you produce intelligence; and the theory of circumst’ntial evidence is that if you accumulate a sufficient number of weak links you produce a strong chain.”

  Philo Vance, the brilliant detective, an outstanding character in “The Canary Murder Case,” who elucidated the murder of Margaret Odell, conducts this Benson inquiry with, if possible, even greater ingenuity.

  To follow the close, clear-cut reasoning of the analytical mind of this latest and most up-to-date “Sherlock Holmes” is a sheer delight.

  It is also in this book that Van Dine divulges how he first came in contact with Vance at Harvard. In contrast with the gruesome nature of his calling, he indulges in a passion for art. He is not only a dilettante but also a man of unusual culture and refinement, who detests stupidity more than vulgarity. He often quotes Fouché’s famous line: “It is more than a crime; it is a fault.”

  The name Van Dine, as we have said in the Editor’s Note of his preceding book, hides the identity of a well-known novelist who used this nom-de-plume when he turned his attention to writing detective novels.

  During a long and serious illness he had been compelled to give up writing works of philosophy. He began to read detective mystery stories and so was led to study serious crime and its detection. The result has been that he has become the finest living writer of this class of fiction.

  The Editor.

  Contents

  1. Philo Vance at Home

  2. At the Scene of the Crime

  3. A Lady’s Handbag

  4. The Housekeeper’s Story

  5. Gathering Information

  6. Vance Offers an Opinion

  7. Reports and an Interview

  8. Vance Accepts a Challenge

  9. The Height of the Murderer

  10. Eliminating a Suspect

  11. A Motive and a Threat

  12. The Owner of a Colt ·45

  13. The Grey “Cadillac”

  14. Links in the Chain

  15. “Pfyfe—Personal”

  16. Admissions and Suppressions

  17. The Forged Cheque

  18. A Confession

  19. Vance Cross-Examines

  20. A Lady Explains

  21. Sartorial Revelations

  22. Vance Outlines a Theory

  23. Checking an Alibi

  24. The Arrest

  25. Vance Explains His Methods

  Footnotes

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter I

  Philo Vance at Home

  (Friday, June 14th; 8.30 a.m.)

  It happened that, on the morning of the momentous June the fourteenth when the discovery of the murdered body of Alvin H. Benson created a sensation which, to this day, has not entirely died away, I had breakfasted with Philo Vance in his apartment. It was not unusual for me to share Vance’s luncheons and dinners, but to have breakfasted with him was something of an occasion. He was a late riser, and it was his habit to remain incommunicado until his midday meal.

  The reason for this early meeting was a matter of business—or, rather, of æsthetics. On the afternoon of the previous day Vance had attended a preview of Vollard’s collection of Cézanne water-colours at the Kessler Galleries, and having seen several pictures he particularly wanted, he had invited me to an early breakfast to give me instructions regarding their purchase.

  A word concerning my relationship with Vance is necessary to clarify my rôle of narrator in this chronicle. The legal tradition is deeply embedded in my family, and when my preparatory school days were over I was sent, almost as a matter of course, to Harvard to study law. It was there I met Vance, a reserved, cynical and caustic freshman who was the bane of his professors and the fear of his fellow-classmen. Why he should have chosen me, of all the students at the University, for his extra-scholastic association, I have never been able to understand fully. My own liking for Vance was simply explained: he fascinated and interested me, and supplied me with a novel kind of intellectual diversion. In his liking for me, however, no such basis of appeal was present. I was (and am now) a commonplace fellow, possessed of a conservative and rather conventional mind. But, at least, my mentality was not rigid, and the ponderosity of the legal procedure did not impress me greatly, which is why, no doubt, I had little taste for my inherited profession—and it is possible that these traits found certain affinities, in Vance’s unconscious mind. There is, to be sure, the less consoling explanation that I appealed to Vance as a kind of foil, or anchorage, and that he sensed in my nature a complementary antithesis to his own. But whatever the explanation, we were much together; and, as the years went by, that association ripened into an inseparable friendship.

  Upon graduation I entered my father’s law firm—Van Dine and Davis—and after five years of dull apprenticeship I was taken into the firm as the junior partner. At present I am the second Van Dine of Van Dine, Davis and Van Dine, with offices at 120 Broadway. At about the time my name first appeared on the letterheads of the firm, Vance returned from Europe, where he had been living during my legal novitiate, and, an aunt of his having died and made him her principal beneficiary, I was called upon to discharge the technical obligations involved in putting him in possession of his inherited property.

  This work was the beginning of a new and somewhat unusual relationship between us. Vance had a strong distaste for any kind of business transaction, and in time I became the custodian of all his monetary interests and his agent at large. I found that his affairs were various enough to occupy as much, of my time as I cared to give to legal matters, and as Vance was able to indulge the luxury of having a personal legal factotum, so to speak, I permanently closed my desk at the office, and devoted myself exclusively to his needs and whims.

  If, up to the time when Vance summoned me to discuss the purchase of the Cézannes, I had harboured any secret or repressed regrets for having deprived the firm of Van Dine, Davis and Van Dine of my modest legal talents, they were permanently banished on that eventf
ul morning; for, beginning with the notorious Benson murder, and extending over a period of nearly four years, it was my privilege to be a spectator of what I believe was the most amazing series of criminal cases that ever passed before the eyes of a young lawyer. Indeed, the grim dramas I witnessed during that period constitute one of the most astonishing secret documents in the police history of this country.

  Of these dramas Vance was the central character. By an analytical and interpretative process which, as far as I know, has never before been applied to criminal activities, he succeeded in solving many of the important crimes on which both the police and the District Attorney’s office had hopelessly fallen down.

  Due to my peculiar relations with Vance it happened that not only did I participate in all the cases with which he was connected, but I was also present at most of the informal discussions concerning them which took place between him and the District Attorney; and being of methodical temperament, I kept a fairly complete record of them. In addition, I noted down (as accurately as memory permitted) Vance’s unique psychological methods of determining guilt, as he explained them from time to time. It is fortunate that I performed this gratuitous labour of accumulation and transcription, for now that circumstances have unexpectedly rendered possible my making the cases public, I am able to present them in full detail and with all their various sidelights and succeeding steps—a task that would be impossible were it not for my numerous clippings and adversaria.

  Fortunately, too, the first case to draw Vance into its ramifications was that of Alvin Benson’s murder. Not only did it prove one of the most famous of New York’s causes célèbres, but it gave Vance an excellent opportunity of displaying his rare talents of deductive reasoning, and, by its nature and magnitude, aroused his interest in a branch of activity which heretofore had been alien to his temperamental promptings and habitual predilections.

  The case intruded upon Vance’s life suddenly and unexpectedly, although he himself had, by a casual request made to the District Attorney over a month before, been the involuntary agent of this destruction of his normal routine. The thing, in fact, burst upon us before we had quite finished our breakfast on that mid-June morning, and put an end temporarily to all business connected with the purchase of the Cézanne paintings. When, later in the day, I visited the Kessler Galleries, two of the water-colours that Vance had particularly desired had been sold; and I am convinced that, despite his success in the unravelling of the Benson murder mystery and his saving of at least one innocent person from arrest, he has never to this day felt entirely compensated for the loss of those two little sketches on which he had set his heart.

  As I was ushered into the living-room that morning by Currie, a rare old English servant who acted as Vance’s butler, valet, major-domo and, on occasions, speciality cook, Vance was sitting in a large arm-chair, attired in a surah silk dressing-gown and grey suède slippers, with Vollard’s book on Cézanne open across his knees.

  “Forgive my not rising, Van,” he greeted me casually. “I have the whole weight of the modern evolution in art resting on my legs. Furthermore, this plebeian early rising fatigues me, y’know.”

  He rifled the pages of the volume, pausing here and there at a reproduction.

  “This chap Vollard,” he remarked at length, “has been rather liberal with our art-fearing country. He has sent a really goodish collection of his Cézannes here. I viewed ’em yesterday with the proper reverence, and, I might add, unconcern, for Kessler was watching me; and I’ve marked the ones I want you to buy for me as soon as the Gallery opens this morning.”

  He handed me a small catalogue he had been using as a book-mark.

  “A beastly assignment, I know,” he added, with an indolent smile. “These delicate little smudges with all their blank paper will prob’bly be meaningless to your legal mind—they’re so unlike a neatly-typed brief, don’t y’know. And you’ll no doubt think some of ’em are hung upside-down—one of ’em is, in fact, and even Kessler doesn’t know it. But don’t fret, Van, old dear. They’re very beautiful and valuable little knick-knacks, and rather inexpensive when one considers what they’ll be bringing in a few years. Really an excellent investment for some money-loving soul, y’know—inf’nitely better than that Lawyer’s Equity Stock over which you grew so eloquent at the time of my dear Aunt Agatha’s death.”1

  Vance’s one passion (if a purely intellectual enthusiasm may be called a passion) was art—not art in its narrow, personal aspects, but in its broader, more universal significance. And art was not only his dominating interest, but his chief diversion. He was something of an authority on Japanese and Chinese prints; he knew tapestries and ceramics; and once I heard him give an impromptu causerie to a few guests on Tanagra figurines, which, had it been transcribed, would have made a most delightful and instructive monograph.

  Vance had sufficient means to indulge his instinct for collecting, and possessed a fine assortment of pictures and objets d’art. His collection was heterogeneous only in its superficial characteristics: every piece he owned embodied some principle of form or line that related it to all the others. One who knew art could feel the unity and consistency in all the items with which he surrounded himself, however widely separated they were in point of time or métier or surface appeal. Vance, I have always felt, was one of those rare human beings, a collector with a definite philosophic point of view.

  His apartment in East Thirty-eighth Street—actually the two top floors of an old mansion, beautifully remodelled and in part rebuilt to secure spacious rooms and lofty ceilings—was filled, but not crowded, with rare specimens of oriental and occidental, ancient and modern, art. His paintings ranged from the Italian primitives to Cézanne and Matisse; and among his collection of original drawings were works as widely separated as those of Michelangelo and Picasso. Vance’s Chinese prints constituted one of the finest private collections in this country. They included beautiful examples of the work of Ririomin, Rianchu, Jinkomin, Kakei and Mokkei.

  “The Chinese,” Vance once said to me, “are the truly great artists of the East. They were the men whose work expressed most intensely a broad philosophic spirit. By contrast the Japanese were superficial. It’s a long step between the little more than decorative souci of a Hokusai and the profoundly thoughtful and conscious artistry of a Ririomin. Even when Chinese art degenerated under the Manchus, we find in it a deep philosophic quality—a spiritual sensibilité, so to speak. And in the modern copies of copies—what is called the bunjinga style—we still have pictures of profound meaning.”

  Vance’s catholicity of taste in art was remarkable. His collection was as varied as that of a museum. It embraced a black-figured amphora by Amasis, a proto-Corinthian vase in the Ægean style, Koubatcha and Rhodian plates, Athenian pottery, a sixteenth-century Italian holy-water stoup of rock crystal, pewter of the Tudor period (several pieces bearing the double-rose hall-mark), a bronze plaque by Cellini, a triptych of Limoges enamel, a Spanish retable of an altar-piece by Vallfogona, several Etruscan bronzes, an Indian Greco Buddhist, a statuette of the Goddess Kuan Yin from the Ming Dynasty, a number of very fine Renaissance wood-cuts, and several specimens of Byzantine, Carolingian and early French ivory carvings.

  His Egyptian treasures included a gold jug from Zakazik, a statuette of the Lady Nai (as lovely as the one in the Louvre), two beautifully carved steles of the First Theban Age, various small sculptures comprising rare representations of Hapi and Amset, and several Arrentine bowls carved with Kalathiskos dancers. On top of one of his embayed Jacobean bookcases in the library, where most of his modern paintings and drawings were hung, was a fascinating group of African sculpture—ceremonial masks and statuette-fetishes from French Guinea, the Sudan, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and the Congo.

  A definite purpose has animated me in speaking at such length about Vance’s art instinct, for, in order to understand fully the melodramatic adventures which began for him on that June morning, one must have a general idea of the m
an’s penchants and inner promptings. His interest in art was an important—one might almost say the dominant—factor in his personality. I have never met a man quite like him—a man so apparently diversified, and yet so fundamentally consistent.

  Vance was what many would call a dilettante. But the designation does him injustice. He was a man of unusual culture and brilliance. An aristocrat by birth and instinct, he held himself severely aloof from the common world of men. In his manner there was an indefinable contempt for inferiority of all kinds. The great majority of those with whom he came in contact regarded him as a snob. Yet there was in his condescension and disdain no trace of spuriousness. His snobbishness was intellectual as well as social. He detested stupidity even more, I believe, than he did vulgarity or bad taste. I have heard him on several occasions quote Fouché’s famous line: C’est plus qu’un crime; c’est une faute. And he meant it literally.

  Vance was frankly a cynic, but he was rarely bitter: his was a flippant, Juvenalian cynicism. Perhaps he may best be described as a bored and supercilious, but highly conscious and penetrating, spectator of life. He was keenly interested in all human reactions; but it was the interest of the scientist, not the humanitarian. Withal he was a man of rare personal charm. Even people who found it difficult to admire him, found it equally difficult not to like him. His somewhat quixotic mannerisms and his slightly English accent and inflection—an heritage of his post-graduate days at Oxford—impressed those who did not know him well, as affectations. But the truth is, there was very little of the poseur about him.

  He was unusually good-looking, although his mouth was ascetic and cruel, like the mouths on some of the Medici portraits;2 moreover, there was a slightly derisive hauteur in the lift of his eyebrows. Despite the aquiline severity of his lineaments his face was highly sensitive. His forehead was full and sloping—it was the artist’s, rather than the scholar’s, brow. His cold grey eyes were widely spaced. His nose was straight and slender, and his chin narrow but prominent, with an unusually deep cleft. When I saw John Banymore recently in Hamlet I was somehow reminded of Vance; and once before, in a scene of Cœsar and Cleopatra played by Forbes Robertson, I received a similar impression.3