The Philo Vance Megapack

by S. S. Van Dine

  Von Blon appeared surprised.

  “Why, a sort of paraplegia dolorosa—that is, a paralysis of the legs and lower part of the body, accompanied by severe pains due to pressure of the indurations on the spinal cord and nerves. No spasticity of the limbs has supervened, however. Came on very suddenly without any premonitory symptoms about ten years ago—probably the result of transverse myelitis. There’s nothing really to be done but to keep her as comfortable as possible with symptomatic treatment, and to tone up the heart action. A sixtieth of strychnine three times a day takes care of the circulation.”

  “Couldn’t by any chance be a hysterical akinesia?”

  “Good Lord, no! There’s no hysteria.” Then his eyes widened in amazement. “Oh, I see! No; there’s no possibility of recovery, even partial. It’s organic paralysis.”

  “And atrophy?”

  “Oh, yes. Muscular atrophy is now pronounced.”

  “Thank you very much.” Vance lay back with half closed eyes.

  “Oh, not at all.—And remember, Mr. Markham, that I always stand ready to help in any way I can. Please don’t hesitate to call on me.” He bowed again, and went out.

  Markham got up and stretched his legs.

  “Come; we’ve been summoned to appear.” His facetiousness was a patent effort to shake off the depressing gloom of the case.

  Mrs. Greene received us with almost unctuous cordiality.

  “I knew you’d grant the request of a poor old useless cripple,” she said, with an appealing smile; “though I’m used to being ignored. No one pays any attention to my wishes.”

  The nurse stood at the head of the bed arranging the pillows beneath the old lady’s shoulders.

  “Is that comfortable now?” she asked.

  Mrs. Greene made a gesture of annoyance.

  “A lot you care whether I’m comfortable or not! Why can’t you let me alone, nurse? You’re always disturbing me. There was nothing wrong with the pillows. And I don’t want you in here now anyway. Go and sit with Ada.”

  The nurse drew a long, patient breath, and went silently from the room, closing the door behind her.

  Mrs. Greene reverted to her former ingratiating manner.

  “No one understands my needs the way Ada does, Mr. Markham. What a relief it will be when the dear child gets well enough to care for me again! But I mustn’t complain. The nurse does the best she knows how, I suppose. Please sit down, gentlemen …yet what wouldn’t I give if I could only stand up the way you can. No one realizes what it means to be a helpless paralytic.”

  Markham did not avail himself of the invitation, but waited until she had finished speaking and then said “Please believe that you have my deepest sympathy, madam… You sent for me, Doctor Von Blon said.”

  “Yes!” She looked at him calculatingly. “I wanted to ask you a favour.”

  She paused, and Markham bowed but did not answer.

  “I wanted to request you to drop this investigation. I’ve had enough worry and disturbance as it is. But I don’t count. It’s the family I’m thinking of—the good name of the Greenes.” A note of pride came into her voice. “What need is there to drag us through the mire and make us an object of scandalous gossip for the canaille? I want peace and quiet, Mr. Markham. I won’t be here much longer; and why should my house be overrun with policemen just because Julia and Chester have—suffered their just deserts for neglecting me and letting me suffer here alone? I’m an old woman and a cripple, and I’m deserving of a little consideration.”

  Her face clouded, and her voice became harsh.

  “You haven’t any right to come here and upset my house and annoy me in this outrageous fashion! I haven’t had a minute’s rest since all this excitement began, and my spine is paining me so I can hardly breathe.” She took several stertorous breaths, and her eyes flashed indignantly. “I don’t expect any better treatment from my children—they’re hard and thoughtless. But you, Mr. Markham—an outsider, a stranger: why should you want to torture me with all this commotion? It’s outrageous— inhuman!”

  “I am sorry if the presence of the officers of the law in your house disturbs you,” Markham told her gravely; “but I have no alternative. When a crime has been committed it is my duty to investigate, and to use every means at my disposal to bring the guilty person to justice.”

  “Justice!” The old lady repeated the word scornfully. “Justice has already been done. I’ve been avenged for the treatment I’ve received these many years, lying here helpless.”

  There was something almost terrifying in the woman’s cruel and unrelenting hatred of her children, and in the cold-blooded satisfaction she seemed to take that two of them had been punished by death. Markham, naturally sympathetic, revolted against her attitude.

  “However much gratification you may feel at the murder of your son and daughter, madam,” he said coldly, “it does not release me from my duty to find the murderer. Was there anything else you wished to speak to me about?”

  For a while she sat silent, her face working with impotent passion. The gaze she bent on Markham was almost ferocious. But presently the vindictive vigilance of her eyes relaxed, and she drew a deep sigh.

  “No; you may go now. I have nothing more to say. And, anyway, who cares about an helpless woman like me? I should have learned by this time that nobody thinks of my comfort, lying here all alone, unable to help myself— a nuisance to everyone…”

  Her whining, self-pitying voice followed us as we made our escape.

  “Y’ know, Markham,” said Vance, as we came into the lower hall, “the Empress Dowager is not entirely devoid of reason. Her suggestion is deserving of consideration. The clarion voice of duty may summon you to this quest, but—my word!—whither shall one quest? There’s nothing sane in this house—nothing that lends itself to ordin’ry normal reason. Why not take her advice and chuck it? Even if you learn the truth, it’s likely to prove a sort of Pyrrhic vict’ry. I’m afraid it’ll be more terrible than the crimes themselves.”

  Markham did not deign to answer; he was familiar with Vance’s heresies, and he also knew that Vance himself would be the last person to throw over an unsolved problem.

  “We’ve got something to go on, Mr. Vance,” submitted Heath solemnly, but without enthusiasm. “There’s those foot-tracks, for instance; and we’ve got the missing’ gun to find. Dubois is upstairs now taking finger- prints. And the reports on the servants’ll be coming along soon. There’s no telling what’ll turn up in a few days. I’ll have a dozen men working on this case before night.”

  “Such zeal, Sergeant! But it’s in the atmosphere of this old house—not in tangible clues—that the truth lies hidden. It’s somewhere in these old jumbled rooms; it’s peering out from dark corners and from behind doors. It’s here—in this very hall, perhaps.”

  His tone was fraught with troubled concern, and Markham looked at him sharply.

  “I think you’re right, Vance,” he muttered. “But how is one to get at it?”

  “’Pon my soul, I don’t know. How does one get at spectres, anyway? I’ve never had much intimate intercourse with ghosts, don’t y’ know.”

  “You’re talking rubbish!” Markham jerked on his overcoat, and turned to Heath. “You go ahead, Sergeant; and keep in touch with me. If nothing develops from your inquiries, we’ll discuss the next step.”

  And he and Vance and I went out to the waiting car.

  CHAPTER XII

  A MOTOR RIDE

  (November 12th-November 25th.)

  The inquiry was pushed according to the best traditions of the Police Department. Captain Carl Hagedorn, the fire-arms expert, made a minute scientific examination of the bullets.50 The same revolver, he found, had fired all three shots: the peculiar rifling told him this; and he was able to state that the revolver was an old Smith & Wesson of a style whose manufacture had been discontinued. But, while these findings offered substantiation to the theory that Chester Greene’s missing gun was the one used b
y the murderer, they added nothing to the facts already established or suspected. Deputy Inspector Conrad Brenner, the burglar-tools expert, had conducted an exhaustive examination of the scene for evidential signs of a forced entrance, but had found no traces whatever of a housebreaker.51

  Dubois and his assistant Bellamy—the two leading finger-print authorities of the New York Police Department—went so far as to take finger-prints of every member of the Greene household, including Doctor Von Blon; and these were compared with the impressions found in the hallways and in the rooms where the shootings had occurred. But when this tedious process was over not an unidentified-print remained; and all those that had been found and photographed were logically accounted for.

  Chester Greene’s galoshes were taken to Head-quarters and turned over to Captain Jerym, who carefully compared them with the measurements and the patterns made by Snitkin. No new fact concerning them, however, was discovered. The tracks in the snow, Captain Jerym reported, had been made either by the galoshes given him or by another pair of the exact size and last. Beyond this statement he could not, he said, conscientiously go.

  It was established that no one in the Greene mansion, with the exception of Chester and Rex, owned galoshes; and Rex’s were number seven—three sizes smaller than those found in Chester’s clothes-closet. Sproot used only storm-rubbers, size eight; and Doctor Von Blon, who affected gaiters in winter, always wore rubber sandals during stormy weather.

  The search for the missing revolver occupied several days. Heath turned the task over to men trained especially in this branch of work, and supplied them with a search-warrant in case they should meet with any opposition. But no obstacle was put in their way. The house was systematically ransacked from basement to attic. Even Mrs. Greene’s quarters were subjected to a search. The old lady had at first objected, but finally gave her consent, and even seemed a bit disappointed when the men had finished. The only room that was not gone over was Tobias Greene’s library. Owing to the fact that Mrs. Greene never let the key go out of her possession, and had permitted no one to enter the room since her husband’s death, Heath decided not to force the issue when she refused point-blank to deliver the key. Every other nook and corner of the house, however, was combed by the sergeant’s men. But no sign of the revolver rewarded their efforts.

  The autopsies revealed nothing at variance with Doctor Doremus’s preliminary findings. Julia and Chester had each died instantaneously from the effects of a bullet entering the heart, shot from a revolver held at close range. No other possible cause of death was present in either body; and there were no indications of a struggle.

  No unknown or suspicious person had been seen near the Greene mansion on the night of either murder, although several people were found who had been in the neighbourhood at the time; and a bootmaker, who lived on the second floor of the Narcoss Flats in 53rd Street, opposite to the house, stated that he had been sitting at his window, smoking his bedtime pipe, during the time of both shootings, and could swear that no one had passed down that end of the street.

  However, the guard which had been placed over the Greene mansion was not relaxed. Men were on duty day and night at both entrances to the estate, and everyone entering or leaving the premises was closely scrutinized. So close a watch was kept that strange tradesmen found it inconvenient and at times difficult to make ordinary deliveries.

  The reports that were turned in concerning the servants were unsatisfactory from the standpoint of detail; but all the facts unearthed tended to eliminate each subject from any possible connection with the crimes. Barton, the younger maid, who had quitted the Greene establishment the morning after the second tragedy, proved to be the daughter of respectable working people living in Jersey City. Her record was good, and her companions all appeared to be harmless members of her own class.

  Hemming, it turned out, was a widow who, up to the time of her employment with the Greenes, had kept house for her husband, an iron-worker, in Altoona, Pa. She was remembered even there among her former neighbours as a religious fanatic who had led her husband sternly and exultantly in the narrow path of enforced rectitude. When he was killed by a furnace explosion she declared it was the hand of God striking him down for some secret sin. Her associates were few; they were in the main members of a small congregation of East Side Anabaptists.

  The summer gardener of the Greenes—a middle-aged Pole named Krimski—was discovered in a private saloon in Harlem, well under the benumbing influence of synthetic whisky—a state of beatific lassitude he had maintained, with greater or lesser steadfastness, since the end of summer. He was at once eliminated from police consideration.

  The investigation into the habits and associates of Mrs. Mannheim and Sproot brought nothing whatever to light. Indeed, the habits of these two were exemplary, and their contacts with the outside world so meagre as to be regarded as almost non-existent. Sproot had no visible friends, and his acquaintances were limited to an English valet in Park Avenue and the trades-people of the neighbourhood. He was solitary by nature, and what few recreations he permitted himself were indulged in unaccompanied. Mrs. Mannheim had rarely left the premises of the Greene house since she had taken up her duties there at the time of her husband’s death, and apparently knew no one in New York outside of the household.

  These reports dashed whatever hopes Sergeant Heath may have harboured of finding a solution to the Greene mystery by way of a possible accomplice in the house itself.

  “I guess we’ll have to give up the idea of an inside job,” he lamented one morning in Markham’s office a few days after the shooting of Chester Greene.

  Vance, who was present, eyed him lazily.

  “I shouldn’t say that, don’t y’ know, Sergeant. On the contrary, it was indubitably an inside job, though not just the variety you have in mind.”

  “You mean you think some member of the family did it?”

  “Well—perhaps: something rather along that line.”

  Vance drew on his cigarette thoughtfully. “But that’s not exactly what I meant. It’s a situation, a set of conditions—an atmosphere, let us say— that’s guilty. A subtle and deadly poison is responsible for the crimes. And that poison is generated in the Greene mansion.”

  “A swell time I’d have trying to arrest an atmosphere—or a poison either, for the matter of that,” snorted Heath.

  “Oh, there’s a flesh-and-blood victim awaiting your manacles somewhere, Sergeant—the agent, so to speak, of the atmosphere.”

  Markham, who had been conning the various reports of the case, sighed heavily, and settled back in his chair.

  “Well, I wish to Heaven,” he interposed bitterly, “that he’d give us some hint as to his identity. The papers are at it hammer and tongs. There’s been another delegation of reporters here this morning.”

  The fact was that rarely had there been in New York’s journalistic history a case which had so tenaciously seized upon the public imagination. The shooting of Julia and Ada Greene had been treated sensationally but perfunctorily; but after Chester Greene’s murder an entirely different spirit animated the newspaper stories. Here was something romantically sinister—something which brought back forgotten pages of criminal history.52 Columns were devoted to accounts of the Greene family history. Genealogical archives were delved into for remote tit-bits. Old Tobias Greene’s record was raked over, and stories of his early life became the common property of the man in the street. Pictures of all the members of the Greene family accompanied these spectacular tales; and the Greene mansion itself, photographed from every possible angle, was used regularly to illustrate the flamboyant accounts of the crimes so recently perpetrated there.

  The story of the Greene murders spread over the entire country, and even the press of Europe found space for it. The tragedy, taken in connection with the social prominence of the family and the romantic history of its progenitors, appealed irresistibly to the morbidity and the snobbery of the public.

  It was natur
al that the police and the District Attorney’s office should be hounded by the representatives of the press; and it was also natural that both Heath and Markham should be sorely troubled by the fact that all their efforts to lay hands on the criminal had come to naught. Several conferences had been called in Markham’s office, at each of which the ground had been carefully reploughed; but not one helpful suggestion had been turned up. Two weeks after the murder of Chester Greene the case began to take on the aspect of a stalemate.

  During that fortnight, however, Vance had not been idle. The situation had caught and held his interest, and not once had he dismissed it from his mind since that first morning when Chester Greene had applied to Markham for help. He said little about the case, but he had attended each of the conferences; and from his casual comments I knew he was both fascinated and perplexed by the problem it presented.

  So convinced was he that the Greene mansion itself held the secret to the crimes enacted there that he had made it a point to call at the house several times without Markham. Markham, in fact, had been there but once since the second crime. It was not that he was shirking his task. There was, in reality, little for him to do; and the routine duties of his office were particularly heavy at that time.53

  Sibella had insisted that the funerals of Julia and Chester be combined in one service, which was held in the private chapel of Malcomb’s Undertaking Parlours. Only a few intimate acquaintances were notified (though a curious crowd gathered outside the building, attracted by the sensational associations of the obsequies); and the interment at Woodlawn Cemetery was strictly private. Doctor Von Blon accompanied Sibella and Rex to the chapel, and sat with them during the services. Ada, though improving rapidly, was still confined to the house; and Mrs. Greene’s paralysis of course made her attendance impossible, although I doubt if she would have gone in any case, for when the suggestion was made that the services be held at home she had vetoed it emphatically.

  It was on the day after the funeral that Vance paid his first unofficial visit to the Greene mansion. Sibella received him without any show of surprise.