The Philo Vance Megapack

by S. S. Van Dine

  We found Ada and the cook alone in the drawing-room. The girl sat before the fire, a copy of Grimms’ “Fairy Tales” turned face down on her knees; and Mrs. Mannheim, busy with a lapful of mending, occupied a straight chair near the door. It was a curious sight, in view of the formal correctness of the house, and it brought forcibly to my mind how fear and adversity inevitably level all social standards.

  When we entered the room Mrs. Mannheim rose, and gathering up her mending, started to go. But Vance indicated that she was to remain, and without a word she resumed her seat.

  “We’re here to annoy you again, Ada,” said Vance, assuming the rôle of interrogator. “But you’re about the only person we can come to for help.” His smile put the girl at ease, and he continued gently: “We want to talk to you about what you told us the other afternoon…”

  Her eyes opened wide, and she waited in a kind of awed silence.

  “You told us you thought you had seen your mother—”

  “I did see her—I did!”

  Vance shook his head. “No; it was not your mother. She was unable to walk, Ada. She was truly and helplessly paralyzed. It was impossible for her even to make the slightest movement with either leg.”

  “But—I don’t understand.” There was more than bewilderment in her voice: there was terror and alarm as one might experience at the thought of supernatural malignancy. “I heard Doctor Von Blon tell mother he was bringing a specialist to see her this morning. But she died last night— so how could you know? Oh, you must be mistaken. I saw her—I know I saw her.”

  She seemed to be battling desperately for the preservation of her sanity. But Vance again shook his head.

  “Doctor Oppenheimer did not examine your mother,” he said. “But Doctor Doremus did—today. And he found that she had been unable to move for many years.”

  “Oh!” The exclamation was only breathed. The girl seemed incapable of speech.

  “And what we’ve come for,” continued Vance, “is to ask you to recall that night, and see if you cannot remember something—some little thing—that will help us. You saw this person only by the flickering light of a match. You might easily have made a mistake.”

  “But how could I? I was so close to her.”

  “Before you woke up that night and felt hungry, had you been dreaming of your mother?”

  She hesitated and shuddered slightly.

  “I don’t know, but I’ve dreamed of mother constantly—awful, scarey dreams—ever since that first night when somebody came into my room…”

  “That may account for the mistake you made.” Vance paused a moment and then asked: “Do you distinctly remember seeing your mother’s Oriental shawl on the person in the hall that night?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, after a slight hesitation. “It was the first thing I noticed. Then I saw her face…”

  A trivial but startling thing happened at this moment. We had our back to Mrs. Mannheim and, for the time being, had forgotten her presence in the room. Suddenly what sounded like a dry sob broke from her, and the sewing-basket on her knees fell to the floor. Instinctively we turned. The woman was staring at us glassily.

  “What difference does it make who she saw?” she asked in a dead, monotonous voice. “She maybe saw me.”

  “Nonsense, Gertrude,” Ada said quickly. “It wasn’t you.”

  Vance was watching the woman with a puzzled expression.

  Do you ever wear Mrs. Greene’s shawl, Frau Mannheim?”

  “Of course she doesn’t,” Ada cut in.

  “And did you ever steal into the library and read after the household is asleep?” pursued Vance.

  The woman picked up her sewing morosely, and again lapsed into sullen silence. Vance studied her a moment and then turned back to Ada.

  “Do you know of anyone who might have been wearing your mother’s shawl that night?”

  “I—don’t know,” the girl stammered, her lips trembling.

  “Come; that won’t do.” Vance spoke with some asperity. “This isn’t the time to shield anyone. Who was in the habit of using the shawl?”

  “No one was in the habit…” She stopped and gave Vance a pleading look; but he was obdurate.

  “Who, then, besides your mother ever wore it?”

  “But I would have known if it had been Sibella I saw—”

  “Sibella? She sometimes borrowed the shawl?”

  Ada nodded reluctantly. “Once in a great while. She—she admired the shawl… Oh, why do you make me tell you this!”

  “And you have never seen anyone else with it on?”

  “No; no one ever wore it except mother and Sibella.”

  Vance attempted to banish her obvious distress with a whimsical reassuring smile.

  “Just see how foolish all your fears have been,” he said lightly. “You probably saw your sister in the hall that night, and, because you’d been having bad dreams about your mother, you thought it was she. As a result, you became frightened, and locked yourself up and worried. It was rather silly, what?”

  A little later we took our leave.

  “It has always been my contention,” remarked Inspector Moran, as we rode downtown, “that any identification under strain or excitement is worthless. And here we have a glaring instance of it.”

  “I’d like a nice quiet little chat with Sibella,” mumbled Heath, busy with his own thoughts.

  “It wouldn’t comfort you, Sergeant,” Vance told him. “At the end of your tête-à-tête you’d know only what the young lady wanted you to know.”

  “Where do we stand now?” asked Markham, after a silence.

  “Exactly where we stood before,” answered Vance dejectedly, “in the midst of an impenetrable fog.— And I’m not in the least convinced,” he added, “that it was Sibella whom Ada saw in the hall.”

  Markham looked amazed.

  “Then who, in Heaven’s name, was it?”

  Vance sighed gloomily. “Give me the answer to that one question, and I’ll complete the saga.”

  That night Vance sat up until nearly two o’clock writing at his desk in the library.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  THE MISSING FACT

  (Saturday, December 4th; 1 P.M.)

  Saturday was the District Attorney’s “half-day” at the office, and Markham had invited Vance and me to lunch at the Bankers Club. But when we reached the Criminal Courts Building he was swamped with an accumulation of work, and we had a tray-service meal in his private conference room. Before leaving the house that noon Vance had put several sheets of closely-written paper in his pocket, and I surmised—correctly, as it turned out—that they were what he had been working on the night before.

  When lunch was over Vance lay back in his chair languidly and lit a cigarette.

  “Markham, old dear,” he said, “I accepted your invitation today for the sole purpose of discussing art. I trust you are in a receptive mood.”

  Markham looked at him with frank annoyance.

  “Damn it, Vance, I’m too confounded busy to be bothered with your irrelevancies. If you feel artistically inclined, take Van here to the Metropolitan Museum. But leave me alone.”

  Vance sighed, and wagged his head reproachfully.

  “There speaks the voice of America! ‘Run along and play with your aesthetic toys if such silly things amuse you; but let me attend to my serious affairs.’ It’s very sad. In the present instance, however, I refuse to run along; and most certainly I shall not browse about that mausoleum of Europe’s rejected corpses, known as the Metropolitan Museum. I say, it’s a wonder you didn’t suggest that I make the rounds of our municipal statuary.”

  “I’d have suggested the Aquarium—”

  “I know. Anything to get rid of me.” Vance adopted an injured tone. “And yet, don’t y’ know, I’m going to sit right here and deliver an edifying lecture on aesthetic composition.”

  “Then don’t talk too loud,” said Markham, rising; “for I’ll be in the next room working.�
�

  “But my lecture has to do with the Greene case. And really you shouldn’t miss it.”

  Markham paused and turned.

  “Merely one of your wordy prologues, eh?” He sat down again. “Well, if you have any helpful suggestions to make, I’ll listen.”

  Vance smoked a moment.

  “Y’ know, Markham,” he began, assuming a lazy, unemotional air, “there’s a fundamental difference between a good painting and a photograph. I’ll admit many painters appear unaware of this fact; and when colour photography is perfected—my word! What a horde of academicians will be thrown out of employment! But none the less there’s a vast chasm between the two; and it’s this technical distinction that’s to be the burden of my lay. How, for instance, does Michelangelo’s ‘Moses’ differ from a camera study of a patriarchal old man with whiskers and a stone tablet? Wherein lie the points of divergence between Rubens’s ‘Landscape with Château de Stein’ and a tourist’s snapshot of a Rhine castle? Why is a Cézanne still life an improvement on a photograph of a dish of apples? Why have the Renaissance paintings of Madonnas endured for hundreds of years whereas a mere photograph of a mother and child passes into artistic oblivion at the very click of the lens shutter? …”

  He held up a silencing hand as Markham was about to speak.

  “I’m not being futile. Bear with me a moment. The difference between a good painting and a photograph is this: the one is arranged, composed, organized; the other is merely the haphazard impression of a scene, or a segment of realism, just as it exists in nature. In short, the one has form; the other is chaotic. When a true artist paints a picture, d’ ye see, he arranges all the masses and lines to accord with his preconceived idea of composition—that is, he bends everything in the picture to a basic design; and he also eliminates any objects or details that go contr’ry to, or detract from, that design. Thus he achieves a homogeneity of form, so to speak. Every object in the picture is put there for a definite purpose, and is set in a certain position to accord with the underlying structural pattern. There are no irrelevancies, no unrelated details, no detached objects, no arbitr’ry arrangement of values. All the forms and lines are interdependent; every object—indeed, every brush stroke—takes its exact place in the pattern and fulfils a given function. The picture, in fine, is a unity.”

  “Very instructive,” commented Markham, glancing ostentatiously at his watch. “And the Greene case?”

  “Now, a photograph, on the other hand,” pursued Vance, ignoring the interruption, “is devoid of design or even of arrangement in the aesthetic sense. To be sure, a photographer may pose and drape a figure— he may even saw off the limb of a tree that he intends to record on his negative; but it’s quite impossible for him to compose the subject-matter of his picture to accord with a preconceived design, the way a painter does. In a photograph there are always details that have no meaning, variations of light and shade that are harmonically false, textures that create false notes, lines that are discords, masses that are out of place. The camera, d’ ye see, is deucedly forthright—it records whatever is before it, irrespective of art values. The inevitable result is that a photograph lacks organization and unity; its composition is, at best, primitive and obvious. And it is full of irrelevant factors—of objects which have neither meaning nor purpose. There is no uniformity of conception in it. It is haphazard, heterogeneous, aimless, and amorphous— just as is nature.”

  “You needn’t belabour the point.” Markham spoke impatiently. “I have a rudimentary intelligence.—Where is this elaborate truism leading you?”

  Vance gave him an engaging smile.

  “To East 53rd Street. But before we reach our destination permit me another brief amplification.—Quite often a painting of intricate and subtle design does not at once reveal its composition to the spectator. In fact, only the designs of the simpler and more obvious paintings are immediately grasped. Generally the spectator has to study a painting carefully—trace its rhythms, compare its forms, weigh its details, and fit together all its salients—before its underlying design becomes apparent. Many well-organized and perfectly balanced paintings—such as Renoir’s figure-pieces, Matisse’s interiors, Cezanne’s water-colours, Picasso’s still lifes, and Leonardo’s anatomical drawings—may at first appear meaningless from the standpoint of composition; their forms may seem to lack unity and cohesion; their masses and linear values may give the impression of having been arbitrarily put down. And it is only after the spectator has related all their integers and traced all their contrapuntal activities that they take on significance and reveal their creator’s motivating conception—”

  “Yes, yes,” interrupted Markham. “Paintings and photographs differ; the objects in a painting possess design; the objects in a photograph are without design; one must often study a painting in order to determine the design.—That, I believe, covers the ground you have been wandering over desultorily for the past fifteen minutes.”

  “I was merely trying to imitate the vast deluge of repetitive verbiage found in legal documents,” explained Vance. “I hope thereby to convey my meaning to your lawyer’s mind.”

  “You have succeeded with a vengeance,” snapped Markham. “What follows?”

  Vance became serious again.

  “Markham, we’ve been looking at the various occurrences in the Greene case as though they were the unrelated objects of a photograph. We’ve inspected each fact as it came up; but we have failed to analyze sufficiently its connection with all the other known facts. We’ve regarded this whole affair as though it were a series, or collection, of isolated integers. And we’ve missed the significance of everything because we haven’t yet determined the shape of the basic pattern of which each of these incidents is but a part.—Do you follow me?”

  “My dear fellow!”

  “Very well.—Now, it goes without saying that there is a design at the bottom of this whole amazin’ business. Nothing has happened haphazardly. There has been premeditation behind each act—a subtly and carefully concocted composition, as it were. And everything has emanated from that central shape. Everything has been fashioned by a fundamental structural idea. Therefore, nothing important that has occurred since the first double shooting has been unrelated to the predetermined pattern of the crime. All the aspects and events of the case, taken together, form a unity—a co-ordinated, interactive whole. In short, the Greene case is a painting, not a photograph. And when we have studied it in that light— when we have determined the inter-relationship of all the external factors, and have traced the visual forms to their generating lines-then, Markham, we will know the composition of the picture; we will see the design on which the perverted painter has erected his document’ry material. And once we have discovered the underlying shape of this hideous picture’s pattern, we’ll know its creator.”

  “I see your point,” said Markham slowly. “But how does it help us? We know all the external facts; and they certainly don’t fit into any intelligible conception of a unified whole.”

  “Not yet, perhaps,” agreed Vance. “But that’s because we haven’t gone about it systematically. We’ve done too much investigating and too little thinking. We’ve been side-tracked by what the modern painters call documentation—that is, by the objective appeal of the picture’s recognizable parts. We haven’t sought for the abstract content. We’ve overlooked the ‘significant form’—a loose phrase; but blame Clive Bell for it.”63

  “And how would you suggest that we set about determining the compositional design of this bloody canvas? We might dub the picture, by the way, ‘Nepotism Gone Wrong.’” By this facetious remark, he was, I knew, attempting to counteract the serious impression the other’s disquisition had made on him; for, though he realized Vance would not have drawn his voluminous parallel without a definite hope of applying it successfully to the problem in hand, he was chary of indulging any expectations lest they result in further disappointments.

  In answer to Markham’s question,
Vance drew out the sheaf of papers he had brought with him.

  “Last night,” he explained, “I set down briefly and chronologically all the outstanding facts of the Greene case—that is, I noted each important external factor of the ghastly picture we’ve been contemplating for the past few weeks. The principal forms are all here, though I may have left out many details. But I think I have tabulated a sufficient number of items to serve as a working basis.”

  He held out the papers to Markham.

  “The truth lies somewhere in that list. If we could put the facts together—relate them to one another with their correct values—we’d know who was at the bottom of this orgy of crime; for, once we determined the pattern, each of the items would take on a vital significance, and we could read clearly the message they had to tell us.”

  Markham took the summary and, moving his chair nearer to the light, read through it without a word.

  I preserved the original copy of the document; and, of all the records I possess, it was the most important and far-reaching in its effects. Indeed, it was the instrument by means of which the Greene case was solved. Had it not been for this recapitulation, prepared by Vance and later analyzed by him, the famous mass murder at the Greene mansion would doubtless have been relegated to the category of unsolved crimes.

  Herewith is a verbatim reproduction of it:

  GENERAL FACTS

  1. An atmosphere of mutual hatred pervades the Greene mansion.

  2. Mrs. Greene is a nagging, complaining paralytic, making life miserable for the whole household.

  3. There are five children—two daughters, two sons, and one adopted daughter—who have nothing in common, and live in a state of constant antagonism and bitterness toward one another.

  4. Though Mrs. Mannheim, the cook, was acquainted with Tobias Greene years ago and was remembered in his will, she refuses to reveal any of the facts in her past.

  5. The will of Tobias Greene stipulated that the family must live in the Greene mansion for twenty-five years on pain of disinheritance, with the one exception that, if Ada should marry, she could establish a residence elsewhere, as she was not of the Greene blood. By the will Mrs. Greene has the handling and disposition of the money.