The Philo Vance Megapack Page 10

  “I’ve read about ’em. Int’restin’ toys. They can no doubt indicate a certain augmented emotional stress when the patient transfers his attention from the pious platitudes of Dr. Frank Crane to a problem in spherical trigonometry. But if an innocent person were harnessed up to the various tubes, galvanometers, electromagnets, glass plates, and brass knobs of one of these apparatuses, and then quizzed about some recent crime, your indicat’ry needle would cavort about like a Russian dancer as a result of sheer nervous panic on the patient’s part.”

  Markham smiled patronizingly.

  “And I suppose the needle would remain static with a guilty person in contact?”

  “Oh, on the contr’ry,” Vance’s tone was unruffled. “The needle would bob up and down just the same—but not because he was guilty. If he was stupid, for instance, the needle would jump as a result of his resentment at a seemingly newfangled third-degree torture. And if he was intelligent, the needle would jump because of his suppressed mirth at the puerility of the legal mind for indulging in such nonsense.”

  “You move me deeply,” said Markham. “My head is spinning like a turbine. But there are those of us poor worldlings who believe that criminality is a defect of the brain.”

  “So it is,” Vance readily agreed. “But unfortunately the entire human race possesses the defect. The virtuous ones haven’t, so to speak, the courage of their defects.… However, if you were referring to a criminal type, then, alas! we must part company. It was Lombrosco, that darling of the yellow journals, who invented the idea of the congenital criminal. Real scientists like DuBois, Karl Pearson, and Goring have shot his idiotic theories full of holes.”12

  “I am floored by your erudition,” declared Markham, as he signaled to a passing attendant and ordered another cigar. “I console myself, however, with the fact that, as a rule, murder will leak out.”

  Vance smoked his cigarette in silence, looking thoughtfully out through the window up at the hazy June sky.

  “Markham,” he said at length, “the number of fantastic ideas extant about criminals is pos’tively amazing. How a sane person can subscribe to that ancient hallucination that ‘murder will out’ is beyond me. It rarely ‘outs,’ old dear. And, if it did ‘out,’ why a homicide bureau? Why all this whirlin’-dervish activity by the police whenever a body is found?… The poets are to blame for this bit of lunacy. Chaucer probably started it with his ‘Mordre wol out,’ and Shakespeare helped it along by attributing to murder a miraculous organ that speaks in lieu of a tongue. It was some poet, too, no doubt, who conceived the fancy that carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer.… Would you, as the great Protector of the Faithful, dare tell the police to wait calmly in their offices, or clubs, or favorite beauty parlors—or wherever policemen do their waiting—until a murder ‘outs’? Poor dear!—if you did, they’d ask the governor for your detention as particeps criminis, or apply for a de lunatico inquirendo.”13

  Markham grunted good-naturedly. He was busy cutting and lighting his cigar.

  “I believe you chaps have another hallucination about crime,” continued Vance, “namely, that the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. This weird notion is even explained on some recondite and misty psychological ground. But, I assure you, psychology teaches no such prepost’rous doctrine. If ever a murderer returned to the body of his victim for any reason other than to rectify some blunder he had made, then he is a subject for Broadmoor—or Bloomingdale.… How easy it would be for the police if this fanciful notion were true! They’d merely have to sit down at the scene of the crime, play bezique or Mah Jongg until the murderer returned, and then escort him to the bastille, what? The true psychological instinct in anyone having committed a punishable act is to get as far away from the scene of it as the limits of this world will permit.”14

  “In the present case, at any rate,” Markham reminded him, “we are neither waiting inactively for the murder to out, nor sitting in Benson’s living room trusting to the voluntary return of the criminal.”

  “Either course would achieve success as quickly as the one you are now pursuing,” Vance said.

  “Not being gifted with your singular insight,” retorted Markham, “I can only follow the inadequate processes of human reasoning.”

  “No doubt,” Vance agreed commiseratingly. “And the results of your activities thus far force me to the conclusion that a man with a handful of legalistic logic can successfully withstand the most obst’nate and heroic assaults of ordin’ry common sense.”

  Markham was piqued. “Still harping on the St. Clair woman’s innocence, eh? However, in view of the complete absence of any tangible evidence pointing elsewhere, you must admit I have no choice of courses.”

  “I admit nothing of the kind,” Vance told him, “for, I assure you, there is an abundance of evidence pointing elsewhere. You simply failed to see it.”

  “You think so!” Vance’s nonchalant cocksureness had at last overthrown Markham’s equanimity. “Very well, old man; I hereby enter an emphatic denial to all your fine theories; and I challenge you to produce a single piece of this evidence which you say exists.”

  He threw his words out with asperity, and gave a curt, aggressive gesture with his extended fingers, to indicate that, as far as he was concerned, the subject was closed.

  Vance, too, I think, was pricked a little.

  “Y’know, Markham old dear, I’m no avenger of blood or vindicator of the honor of society. The role would bore me.”

  Markham smiled loftily but made no reply.

  Vance smoked meditatively for a while. Then, to my amazement, he turned calmly and deliberately to Markham, and said in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice, “I’m going to accept your challenge. It’s a bit alien to my tastes; but the problem, y’ know, rather appeals to me; it presents the same diff’culties as the Concert Champêtre affair—a question of disputed authorship, as it were.”15

  Markham abruptly suspended the motion of lifting his cigar to his lips. He had scarcely intended his challenge literally; it had been uttered more in the nature of a verbal defiance; and he scrutinized Vance a bit uncertainly. Little did he realize that the other’s casual acceptance of his unthinking and but half-serious challenge was to alter the entire criminal history of New York.

  “Just how do you intend to proceed?” he asked.

  Vance waved his hand carelessly. “Like Napoleon, je m’en gage, et puis je vois. However, I must have your word that you’ll give me every possible assistance and will refrain from all profound legal objections.”

  Markham pursed his lips. He was frankly perplexed by the unexpected manner in which Vance had met his defiance. But immediately he gave a good-natured laugh, as if, after all, the matter was of no serious consequence.

  “Very well,” he assented. “You have my word.… And now what?”

  After a moment Vance lit a fresh cigarette and rose languidly. “First,” he announced, “I shall determine the exact height of the guilty person. Such a fact will, no doubt, come under the head of indicat’ry evidence—eh, what?”

  Markham stared at him incredulously.

  “How, in Heaven’s name, are you going to do that?”

  “By those primitive deductive methods to which you so touchingly pin your faith,” he answered easily. “But come; let us repair to the scene of the crime.”

  He moved toward the door, Markham reluctantly following in a state of perplexed irritation. “But you know the body was removed,” the latter protested; “and the place by now has no doubt been straightened up.”

  “Thank Heaven for that!” murmured Vance. “I’m not particularly fond of corpses; and untidiness, y’ know, annoys me frightfully.”

  As we emerged into Madison Avenue, he signaled to the commissionnaire for a taxicab, and without a word, urged us into it.

  “This is all nonsense,” Markham declared ill-naturedly, as we started on our journey uptown. “How do you expect to find any clues now? By this time everything has b
een obliterated.”

  “Alas, my dear Markham,” lamented Vance, in a tone of mock solicitude, “how woefully deficient you are in philosophic theory! If anything, no matter how inf’nitesimal, could really be obliterated, the universe, y’ know, would cease to exist—the cosmic problem would be solved, and the Creator would write Q.E.D. across an empty firmament. Our only chance of going on with this illusion we call Life, d’ ye see, lies in the fact that consciousness is like an inf’nite decimal point. Did you, as a child, ever try to complete the decimal one-third by filling a whole sheet of paper with the numeral three? You always had the fraction one-third left, don’t y’ know. If you could have eliminated the smallest one-third, after having set down ten thousand threes, the problem would have ended. So with life, my dear fellow. It’s only because we can’t erase or obliterate anything that we go on existing.”

  He made a movement with his fingers, putting a sort of tangible period to his remarks, and looked dreamily out of the window up at the fiery film of sky.

  Markham had settled back into his corner and was chewing morosely at his cigar. I could see he was fairly simmering with impotent anger at having let himself be goaded into issuing his challenge. But there was no retreating now. As he told me afterward, he was fully convinced he had been dragged forth out of a comfortable chair on a patent and ridiculous fool’s errand.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE HEIGHT OF THE MURDERER

  (Saturday, June 15; 5 P.M.)

  When we arrived at Benson’s house, a patrolman leaning somnolently against the iron paling of the areaway came suddenly to attention and saluted. He eyed Vance and me hopefully, regarding us no doubt as suspects being taken to the scene of the crime for questioning by the district attorney. We were admitted by one of the men from the homicide bureau who had been in the house on the morning of the investigation.

  Markham greeted him with a nod.

  “Everything going all right?”

  “Sure,” the man replied good-naturedly. “The old lady’s as meek as a cat—and a swell cook.”

  “We want to be alone for a while, Sniffin,” said Markham, as we passed into the living room.

  “The gastronome’s name is Snitkin, not Sniffin,” Vance corrected him, when the door had closed on us.

  “Wonderful memory,” muttered Markham churlishly.

  “A failing of mine,” said Vance. “I suppose you are one of those rare persons who never forget a face but just can’t recall names, what?”

  But Markham was in no mood to be twitted. “Now that you’ve dragged me here, what are you going to do?” He waved his hand depreciatingly and sank into a chair with an air of contemptuous abdication.

  The living room looked much the same as when we saw it last, except that it had been put neatly in order. The shades were up, and the late afternoon light was flooding in profusely. The ornateness of the room’s furnishings seemed intensified by the glare.

  Vance glanced about him and gave a shudder. “I’m half inclined to turn back,” he drawled. “It’s a clear case of justifiable homicide by an outraged interior decorator.”

  “My dear aesthete,” Markham urged impatiently, “be good enough to bury your artistic prejudices and to proceed with your problem.… Of course,” he added, with a malicious smile, “if you fear the result, you may still withdraw and thereby preserve your charming theories in their present virgin state.”

  “And permit you to send an innocent maiden to the chair!” exclaimed Vance, in mock indignation. “Fie, fie! La politesse alone forbids my withdrawal. May I never have to lament, with Prince Henry, that ‘to my shame I have a truant been to chivalry.’”

  Markham set his jaw and gave Vance a ferocious look. “I’m beginning to think that, after all, there is something in your theory that every man has some motive for murdering another.”

  “Well,” replied Vance cheerfully, “now that you have begun to come round to my way of thinking, do you mind if I send Mr. Snitkin on an errand?”

  Markham sighed audibly and shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll smoke during the opéra bouffe, if it won’t interfere with your performance.”

  Vance went to the door and called Snitkin.

  “I say, would you mind going to Mrs. Platz and borrowing a long tape measure and a ball of string.… The district attorney wants them,” he added, giving Markham a sycophantic bow.

  “I can’t hope that you’re going to hang yourself, can I?” asked Markham. Vance gazed at him reprovingly. “Permit me,” he said sweetly, “to command Othello to your attention:

  ‘How poor are they that have not patience!

  What wound did ever heal but by degrees?’

  Or—to descend from a poet to a platitudinarian—let me present for your consid’ration a pentameter from Longfellow: ‘All things come round to him who will but wait.’ Untrue, of course, but consolin’. Milton said it much better in his ‘They also serve—.’ But Cervantes said it best: ‘Patience and shuffle the cards.’ Sound advice, Markham—and advice expressed rakishly, as all good advice should be.… To be sure, patience is a sort of last resort—a practice to adopt when there’s nothing else to do. Still, like virtue, it occasionally rewards the practitioner; although I’ll admit that, as a rule, it is—again like virtue—bootless. That is to say, it is its own reward. It has, however, been swathed in many verbal robes. It is ‘sorrows’s slave,’ and the ‘sov’reign o’er transmuted ills,’ as well as ‘all the passion of great hearts.’ Rousseau wrote, La patience est amère mais son fruit est doux. But perhaps your legal taste runs to Latin. Superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est, quoth Vergil. And Horace also spoke on the subject. Durum! said he, sed levius fit patientia—”

  “Why the hell doesn’t Snitkin come?” growled Markham.

  Almost as he spoke the door opened, and the detective handed Vance the tape measure and string.

  “And now, Markham, for your reward!”

  Bending over the rug Vance moved the large wicker chair into the exact position it had occupied when Benson had been shot. The position was easily determined, for the impressions of the chair’s castors on the deep nap of the rug were plainly visible. He then ran the string through the bullet hole in the back of the chair and directed me to hold one end of it against the place where the bullet had struck the wainscot. Next he took up the tape measure and, extending the string through the hole, measured a distance of five feet and six inches along it, starting at the point which corresponded to the location of Benson’s forehead as he sat in the chair. Tying a knot in the string to indicate the measurement, he drew the string taut, so that it extended in a straight line from the mark on the wainscot, through the hole in the back of the chair, to a point five feet and six inches in front of where Benson’s head had rested.

  “This knot in the string,” he explained, “now represents the exact location of the muzzle of the gun that ended Benson’s career. You see the reasoning—eh, what? Having two points in the bullet’s course—namely, the hole in the chair and the mark on the wainscot—and also knowing the approximate vertical line of explosion, which was between five and six feet from the gentleman’s skull, it was merely necess’ry to extend the straight line of the bullet’s course to the vertical line of explosion in order to ascertain the exact point at which the shot was fired.”

  “Theoretically very pretty,” commented Markham; “though why you should go to so much trouble to ascertain this point in space I can’t imagine.… Not that it matters, for you have overlooked the possibility of the bullet’s deflection.”

  “Forgive me for contradicting you,”—Vance smiled—“but yesterday morning I questioned Captain Hagedorn at some length and learned that there had been no deflection of the bullet. Hagedorn had inspected the wound before we arrived; and he was really pos’tive on that point. In the first place, the bullet struck the frontal bone at such an angle as to make deflection practically impossible even had the pistol been of smaller caliber. And in the second place, the pistol with whic
h Benson was shot was of so large a bore—a point-forty-five—and the muzzle velocity was so great, that the bullet would have taken a straight course even had it been held at a greater distance from the gentleman’s brow.”

  “And how,” asked Markham, “did Hagedorn know what the muzzle velocity was?”

  “I was inquis’tive on that point myself,” answered Vance; “and he explained that the size and character of the bullet and the expelled shell told him the whole tale. That’s how he knew the gun was an army Colt automatic—I believe he called it a U.S. Government Colt—and not the ordinary Colt automatic. The weight of the bullets of these two pistols is slightly different: the ordinary Colt bullet weighs 200 grains, whereas the army Colt bullet weighs 230 grains. Hagedorn, having a hypersensitive tactile sense, was able, I presume, to distinguish the diff’rence at once, though I didn’t go into his physiological gifts with him—my reticent nature, you understand.… However, he could tell it was a .45 army Colt automatic bullet; and knowing this, he knew that the muzzle velocity was 809 feet, and that the striking energy was 329—which gives a six-inch penetration in white pine at a distance of twenty-five yards.… An amazin’ creature, this Hagedorn. Imagine having one’s head full of such entrancing information! The old mysteries of why a man should take up the bass fiddle as a life work and where all the pins go are babes’ conundrums compared with the one of why a human being should devote his years to the idiosyncrasies of bullets.”

  “The subject is not exactly an enthralling one,” said Markham wearily; “so, for the sake of argument, let us admit that you have now found the precise point of the gun’s explosion. Where do we go from there?”

  “While I hold the string on a straight line,” directed Vance, “be good enough to measure the exact distance from the floor to the knot. Then my secret will be known.”

  “This game doesn’t enthrall me, either,” Markham protested. “I’d much prefer ‘London Bridge’”

  Nevertheless he made the measurement.

  “Four feet, eight and a half inches,” he announced indifferently.