The Bishop Murder Case

by S. S. Van Dine

  “ ’Pon my word, old man, I’m suggesting nothing.” Vance shrugged his shoulders slightly. “I’m merely jotting down, so to speak, a few facts in connection with the case. As the matter stands now: a Mr. Joseph Cochrane Robin—to wit: Cock Robin—has been killed by a bow and arrow.—Doesn’t that strike even your legal mind as deuced queer?”

  “No!” Markham fairly spat the negative. “The name of the dead man is certainly common enough; and it’s a wonder more people haven’t been killed or injured with all this revival of archery throughout the country. Moreover, it’s wholly possible that Robin’s death was the result of an accident.”

  “Oh, my aunt!” Vance wagged his head reprovingly. “That fact, even were it true, wouldn’t help the situation any. It would only make it queerer. Of the thousands of archery enthusiasts in these fair states, the one with the name of Cock Robin should be accidentally killed with an arrow! Such a supposition would lead us into spiritism and demonology and whatnot. Do you, by any chance, believe in Eblises and Azazels and jinn who go about playing Satanic jokes on mankind?”

  “Must I be a Mohammedan mythologist to admit coincidences?” returned Markham tartly.

  “My dear fellow! The proverbial long arm of coincidence doesn’t extend to infinity. There are, after all, laws of probability, based on quite definite mathematical formulas. It would make me sad to think that such men as Laplace* and Czuber and von Kries had lived in vain.—The present situation, however, is even more complicated than you suspect. For instance, you mentioned over the phone that the last person known to have been with Robin before his death is named Sperling.”

  “And what esoteric significance lies in that fact?”

  “Perhaps you know what Sperling means in German,” suggested Vance dulcetly.

  “I’ve been to high school,” retorted Markham. Then his eyes opened slightly, and his body became tense.

  Vance pushed the German dictionary toward him.

  “Well, anyway, look up the word. We might as well be thorough. I looked it up myself. I was afraid my imagination was playing tricks on me, and I had a yearnin’ to see the word in black and white.”

  Markham opened the book in silence and let his eye run down the page. After staring at the word for moments, he drew himself up resolutely, as if fighting off a spell. When he spoke his voice was defiantly belligerent.

  “Sperling means ‘sparrow.’ Any schoolboy knows that. What of it?”

  “Oh, to be sure.” Vance lit another cigarette languidly. “And any schoolboy knows the old nursery rhyme entitled ‘The Death and Burial of Cock Robin,’ what?” He glanced tantalizingly at Markham, who stood immobile, staring out into the spring sunshine. “Since you pretend to be unfamiliar with that childhood classic, permit me to recite the first stanza.”

  A chill, as of some unseen spectral presence, passed over me as Vance repeated those old familiar lines:

  “Who killed Cock Robin?

  ‘I,’ said the sparrow,

  ‘With my bow and arrow.

  I killed Cock Robin.’ ”

  Footnotes

  *“The Greene Murder Case”

  *Mr. Joseph A. Margolies of Brentano’s told me that for a period of several weeks during the Bishop murder case more copies of “Mother Goose Melodies” were sold than of any current novel. And one of the smaller publishing houses reprinted and completely sold out an entire edition of those famous old nursery rhymes.

  *The book Vance referred to was that excellent and comprehensive treatise, Archery, by Robert P. Elmer, M.D.

  *“The Benson Murder Case”

  †“The ‘Canary’ Murder Case”

  *Though Laplace is best known for his Méchanique Céleste, Vance was here referring to his masterly work, Théorie Analytique des Probabilités, which Herschel called “the ne plus ultra of mathematical skill and power.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  On the Archery Range

  (Saturday, April 2; 12.30 p.m.)

  SLOWLY MARKHAM BROUGHT his eyes back to Vance.

  “It’s mad,” he remarked, like a man confronted with something at once inexplicable and terrifying.

  “Tut, tut!” Vance waved his hand airily. “That’s plagiarism. I said it first.” (He was striving to overcome his own sense of perplexity by a lightness of attitude.) “And now there really should be an inamorata to bewail Mr. Robin’s passing. You recall, perhaps, the stanza:

  “Who’ll be chief mourner?

  ‘I,’ said the dove,

  ‘I mourn my lost love;

  I’ll be chief mourner.’ ”

  Markham’s head jerked slightly, and his fingers beat a nervous tattoo on the table.

  “Good God, Vance! There is a girl in the case. And there’s a possibility that jealousy lies at the bottom of this thing.”

  “Fancy that, now! I’m afraid the affair is going to develop into a kind of tableau vivant for grown-up kindergartners, what? But that’ll make our task easier. All we’ll have to do is to find the fly.”

  “The fly?”

  “The Musca domestica, to speak pedantically… My dear Markham, have you forgotten?—

  “Who saw him die?

  ‘I,’ said the fly,

  ‘With my little eye;

  I saw him die.’ ”

  “Come down to earth!” Markham spoke with acerbity. “This isn’t a child’s game. It’s damned serious business.”

  Vance nodded abstractedly. “A child’s game is sometimes the most serious business in life.” His words held a curious, faraway tone. “I don’t like this thing—I don’t at all like it. There’s too much of the child in it—the child born old and with a diseased mind. It’s like some hideous perversion.” He took a deep inhalation on his cigarette and made a slight gesture of repugnance. “Give me the details. Let’s find out where we stand in this topsy-turvy land.”

  Markham again seated himself. “I haven’t many details. I told you practically everything I know of the case over the phone. Old Professor Dillard called me shortly before I communicated with you—”

  “Dillard? By any chance, Professor Bertrand Dillard?”

  “Yes. The tragedy took place at his house.—You know him?”

  “Not personally. I know him only as the world of science knows him—as one of the greatest living mathematical physicists. I have most of his books.—How did he happen to call you?”

  “I’ve known him for nearly twenty years. I had mathematics under him at Columbia and later did some legal work for him. When Robin’s body was found he phoned me at once—about half past eleven. I called up Sergeant Heath at the homicide bureau and turned the case over to him—although I told him I’d come along personally later on. Then I phoned you. The sergeant and his men are waiting for me now at the Dillard home.”

  “What’s the domestic situation there?”

  “The professor, as you probably know, resigned his chair some ten years ago. Since then he’s been living in West 75th Street, near the Drive. He took his brother’s child—a girl of fifteen—to live with him. She’s around twenty-five now. Then there’s his protégé, Sigurd Arnesson, who was a classmate of mine at college. The professor adopted him during his junior year. Arnesson is now about forty, an instructor in mathematics at Columbia. He came to this country from Norway when he was three, and was left an orphan five years later. He’s something of a mathematical genius, and Dillard evidently saw the makings of a great physicist in him and adopted him.”

  “I’ve heard of Arnesson,” nodded Vance. “He recently published some modifications of Mie’s theory on the electrodynamics of moving bodies…And do these three—Dillard, Arnesson, and the girl—live alone?”

  “With two servants. Dillard appears to have a very comfortable income. They’re not very much alone, however. The house is a kind of shrine for mathematicians, and quite a cénacle has developed. Moreover, the girl, who has always gone in for outdoor sports, has her own little social set. I’ve been at the house several times, and there
have always been visitors about—either a serious student or two of the abstract sciences upstairs in the library or some noisy young people in the drawing room below.”

  “And Robin?”

  “He belonged to Belle Dillard’s set—an oldish young society man who held several archery records…”

  “Yes, I know. I just looked up the name in this book on archery. A Mr. J. C. Robin seems to have made the high score in several recent championship meets. And I noted, too, that a Mr. Sperling has been the runner-up in several large archery tournaments.—Is Miss Dillard an archer as well?”

  “Yes, quite an enthusiast. In fact, she organized the Riverside Archery Club. Its permanent ranges are at Sperling’s home in Scarsdale; but Miss Dillard has rigged up a practice range in the side yard of the professor’s 75th-Street house. It was on this range that Robin was killed.”

  “Ah! And, as you say, the last person known to have been with him was Sperling. Where is our sparrow now?”

  “I don’t know. He was with Robin shortly before the tragedy; but when the body was found, he had disappeared. I imagine Heath will have news on that point.”

  “And wherein lies the possible motive of jealousy you referred to?” Vance’s eyelids had drooped lazily, and he smoked with leisurely but precise deliberation—a sign of his intense interest in what was being told him.

  “Professor Dillard mentioned an attachment between his niece and Robin; and when I asked him who Sperling was and what his status was at the Dillard house, he intimated that Sperling was also a suitor for the girl’s hand. I didn’t go into the situation over the phone, but the impression I got was that Robin and Sperling were rivals, and that Robin had the better of it.”

  “And so the sparrow killed Cock Robin.” Vance shook his head dubiously. “It won’t do. It’s too dashed simple; and it doesn’t account for the fiendishly perfect reconstruction of the Cock Robin rhyme. There’s something deeper—something darker and more horrible—in this grotesque business.—Who, by the by, found Robin?”

  “Dillard himself. He had stepped out on the little balcony at the rear of the house and saw Robin lying below on the practice range, with an arrow through his heart. He went downstairs immediately—with considerable difficulty, for the old man suffers abominably from gout—and, seeing that the man was dead, phoned me.—That’s all the advance information I have.”

  “Not what you’d call a blindin’ illumination but still a bit suggestive.” Vance got up. “Markham old dear, prepare for something rather bizarre—and damnable. We can rule out accidents and coincidence. While it’s true that ordin’ry target arrows—which are made of soft wood and fitted with little beveled piles—could easily penetrate a person’s clothing and chest wall, even when driven with a medium-weight bow, the fact that a man named ‘Sparrow’ should kill a man named Cochrane Robin, with a bow and arrow, precludes any haphazard concatenation of circumstances. Indeed, this incredible set of events proves conclusively that there has been a subtle, diabolical intent beneath the whole affair.” He moved toward the door. “Come, let us find out something more about it at what the Austrian police officials eruditely call the situs criminis.”

  We left the house at once and drove uptown in Markham’s car. Entering Central Park at Fifth Avenue, we emerged through the 72nd-Street gate, and a few minutes later were turning off of West End Avenue into 75th Street. The Dillard house—number 391—was on our right, far down the block toward the river. Between it and the Drive, occupying the entire corner, was a large fifteen-story apartment house. The professor’s home seemed to nestle, as if for protection, in the shadow of this huge structure.

  The Dillard house was of gray, weather-darkened limestone, and belonged to the days when homes were built for permanency and comfort. The lot on which it stood had a thirty-five-foot frontage, and the house itself was fully twenty-five feet across. The other ten feet of the lot, which formed an areaway separating the house from the apartment structure, was shut off from the street by a ten-foot stone wall with a large iron door in the center.

  The house was of modified Colonial architecture. A short flight of shallow steps led from the street to a narrow brick-lined porch adorned with four white Corinthian pillars. On the second floor a series of casement windows, paned with rectangular leaded glass, extended across the entire width of the house. (These, I learned later, were the windows of the library.) There was something restful and distinctly old-fashioned about the place: it appeared like anything but the scene of a gruesome murder.

  Two police cars were parked near the entrance when we drove up, and a dozen or so curious onlookers had gathered in the street. A patrolman lounged against one of the fluted columns of the porch, gazing at the crowd before him with bored disdain.

  An old butler admitted us and led us into the drawing room on the left of the entrance hall, where we found Sergeant Ernest Heath and two other men from the homicide bureau. The sergeant, who was standing beside the center table smoking, his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat, came forward and extended his hand in a friendly greeting to Markham.

  “I’m glad you got here, sir,” he said; and the worried look in his cold blue eyes seemed to relax a bit. “I’ve been waiting for you. There’s something damn fishy about this case.”

  He caught sight of Vance, who had paused in the background, and his broad, pugnacious features crinkled in a good-natured grin.

  “Howdy, Mr. Vance. I had a sneaking idea you’d be lured into this case. What you been up to these many moons?” I could not help comparing this genuine friendliness of the sergeant’s attitude with the hostility of his first meeting with Vance at the time of the Benson case. But much water had run under the bridge since that first encounter in the murdered Alvin’s garish living room; and between Heath and Vance there had grown up a warm attachment, based on a mutual respect and a frank admiration for each other’s capabilities.

  Vance held out his hand, and a smile played about the corners of his mouth.

  “The truth is, Sergeant, I’ve been endeavorin’ to discover the lost glories of an Athenian named Menander, a dramatic rival of Philemon’s. Silly, what?”

  Heath grunted disdainfully. “Well, anyhow, if you’re as good at it as you are at discovering crooks, you’ll probably get a conviction.” It was the first compliment I had ever heard pass his lips, and it attested not only to his deep-seated admiration for Vance but also to his own troubled and uncertain state of mind.

  Markham sensed the sergeant’s mental insecurity and asked somewhat abruptly: “Just what seems to be the difficulty in the present case?”

  “I didn’t say there was any difficulty, sir,” Heath replied. “It looks as though we had the bird who did it dead to rights. But I ain’t satisfied, and—oh, hell! Mr. Markham…it ain’t natural. It don’t make sense.”

  “I think I understand what you mean.” Markham regarded the sergeant appraisingly. “You’re inclined to think that Sperling’s guilty?”

  “Sure, he’s guilty,” declared Heath with overemphasis. “But that’s not what’s worrying me. To tell you the truth, I don’t like the name of this guy who was croaked—especially as he was croaked with a bow and arrow… ” He hesitated, a bit shamefaced. “Don’t it strike you as peculiar, sir?”

  Markham nodded perplexedly. “I see that you, too, remember your nursery rhymes,” he said, and turned away.

  Vance fixed a waggish look on Heath.

  “You referred to Mr. Sperling just now as a ‘bird,’ Sergeant. The designation was most apt. Sperling, d’ ye see, means ‘sparrow’ in German. And it was a sparrow, you recall, who killed Cock Robin with an arrow… A fascinatin’ situation—eh, what?”

  The sergeant’s eyes bulged slightly, and his lips fell apart. He stared at Vance with almost ludicrous bewilderment.

  “I said this here business was fishy!”

  “I’d say, rather, it was avian, don’t y’ know.”

  “You would call it something nobody’d under
stand,” Heath retorted truculently. It was his wont to become bellicose when confronted with the inexplicable.

  Markham intervened diplomatically. “Let’s have the details of the case, Sergeant. I take it you’ve questioned the occupants of the house.”

  “Only in a general way, sir.” Heath flung one leg over the corner of the center table and relit his dead cigar. “I’ve been waiting for you to show up. I knew you were acquainted with the old gentleman upstairs; so I just did the routine things. I put a man out in the alley to see that nobody touches the body till Doc Doremus arrives,*—he’ll be here when he finishes lunch.—I phoned the fingerprint men before I left the office, and they oughta be on the job any minute now—though I don’t see what good they can do—”

  “What about the bow that fired the arrow?” put in Vance.

  “That was our one best bet; but old Mr. Dillard said he picked it up from the alley and brought it in the house. He probably gummed up any prints it mighta had.”

  “What have you done about Sperling?” asked Markham.

  “I got his address—he lives in a country house up Westchester way—and sent a coupla men to bring him here as soon as they could lay hands on him. Then I talked to the two servants—the old fellow that let you in, and his daughter, a middle-aged woman who does the cooking. But neither of ’em seemed to know anything, or else they’re acting dumb.—After that I tried to question the young lady of the house.” The sergeant raised his hands in a gesture of irritated despair. “But she was all broke up and crying; so I thought I’d let you have the pleasure of interviewing her.—Snitkin and Burke”—he jerked his thumb toward the two detectives by the front window—“went over the basement and the alley and backyard trying to pick up something but drew a blank.—And that’s all I know so far. As soon as Doremus and the fingerprint men get here, and after I’ve had a heart-to-heart talk with Sperling, then I’ll get the ball to rolling and clean up the works.”

  Vance heaved an audible sigh. “You’re so sanguine, Sergeant! Don’t be disappointed if your ball turns out to be a parallelopiped that won’t roll. There’s something deuced oddish about this nursery extravaganza; and, unless all the omens deceive me, you’ll be playing blindman’s-buff for a long time to come.”