The Philo Vance Megapack

by S. S. Van Dine

  “What I want to know, Mr. Vance,” said Heath, “is how she worked this scheme. Was there anyone else in on the deal?”

  “No, Sergeant. Ada planned and executed every part of it.”

  “But how, in God’s name—?”

  Vance held up his hand.

  “It’s all very simple, Sergeant—once you have the key. What misled us was the fiendish cleverness and audacity of the plot. But there’s no longer any need to speculate about it. I have a printed and bound explanation of everything that happened. And it’s not a fictional or speculative explanation. It’s actual criminal history, garnered and recorded by the greatest expert on the subject the world has yet known—doctor Hans Gross, of Vienna.”

  He rose and took up his coat.

  “I phoned Currie from the hospital, and he has a belated dinner waiting for all of us. When we have eaten, I’ll present you with a reconstruction and exposition of the entire case.”

  CHAPTER XXVI

  THE ASTOUNDING TRUTH

  (Monday, December 13th; 11 P.M.)

  “As you know, Markham,” Vance began, when we were seated about the library fire late that night, “I finally succeeded in putting together the items of my summary in such a way that I could see plainly who the murderer was. Once I had found the basic pattern, every detail fitted perfectly into a plastic whole. The technique of the crimes, however, remained obscure; so I asked you to send for the books in Tobias’s library—I was sure they would tell me what I wanted to know. First, I went through Gross’s Handbuch fur Untersuchungsrichter, which I regarded as the most likely source of information. It is an amazing treatise, Markham. It covers the entire field of the history and science of crime; and, in addition, is a compendium of criminal technique, citing specific cases and containing detailed explanations and diagrams. Small wonder it is the world’s standard cyclopaedia on its subject. As I read it, I found what I was looking for. Ada had copied every act of hers, every method, every device, every detail, from its pages—from actual criminal history! We are hardly to be blamed for our inability to combat her schemes; for it was not she alone who was deceiving us; it was the accumulated experience of hundreds of shrewd criminals before her, plus the analytic science of the world’s greatest criminologist Doctor Hans Gross.”66

  He paused to light another cigarette.

  “But even when I had found the explanation of her crimes,” he continued, “I felt that there was something lacking, some fundamental penchant— the thing that made this orgy of horror possible and gave viability, so to speak, to her operations. We knew nothing of Ada’s early life or of her progenitors and inherited instincts; and without that knowledge the crimes, despite their clear logic, were incredible. Consequently, my next step was to verify Ada’s psychological and environmental sources. I had had a suspicion from the first that she was Frau Mannheim’s daughter. But even when I verified this fact I couldn’t see its bearing on the case. It was obvious, from our interview with Frau Mannheim, that Tobias and her husband had been in shady deals together in the old days; and she later admitted to me that her husband had died thirteen years ago, in October, at New Orleans after a year’s illness in a hospital. She also said, as you may recall, that she had seen Tobias a year prior to her husband’s death. This would have been fourteen years ago—just the time Ada was adopted by Tobias. I thought there might be some connection between Mannheim and the crimes, and I even toyed with the idea that Sproot was Mannheim, and that a dirty thread of blackmail ran through the situation. So I decided to investigate. My mysterious trip last week was to New Orleans; and there I had no difficulty in learning the truth. By looking up the death records for October thirteen years ago, I discovered that Mannheim had been in an asylum for the criminally insane for a year preceding his death. And from the police I ascertained something of his record. Adolph Mannheim—Ada’s father—was, it seems, a famous German criminal and murderer, who had been sentenced to death, but had escaped from the penitentiary at Stuttgart and come to America. I have a suspicion that the departed Tobias was, in some way, mixed up in that escape. But whether or not I wrong him, the fact remains that Ada’s father was homicidal and a professional criminal. And therein lies the explanat’ry background of her actions…”

  “You mean she was crazy like her old man?” asked Heath.

  “No, Sergeant. I merely mean that the potentialities of criminality had been handed down to her in her blood. When the motive for the crimes became powerful, her inherited instincts asserted themselves.”

  “But mere money,” put in Markham, “seems hardly a strong enough motive to inspire such atrocities as hers.”

  “It wasn’t money alone that inspired her. The real motive went much deeper. Indeed, it was perhaps the most powerful of all human motives—a strange, terrible combination of hate and love and jealousy and a desire for freedom. To begin with, she was the Cinderella in that abnormal Greene family, looked down upon, treated like a servant, made to spend her time caring for a nagging invalid, and forced—as Sibella put it—to earn her livelihood. Can you not see her for fourteen years brooding over this treatment, nourishing her resentment, absorbing the poison about her, and coming at length to despise everyone in that household? That alone would have been enough to awaken her congenital instincts. One almost wonders that she did not break forth long before. But another equally potent element entered the situation. She fell in love with Von Blon—a natural thing for a girl in her position to do—and then learned that Sibella had won his affections. She either knew or strongly suspected that they were married; and her normal hatred of her sister was augmented by a vicious and eroding jealousy…

  “Now, Ada was the only member of the family who, according to the terms of old Tobias’s will, was not compelled to live on the estate in event of marriage and in this fact she saw a chance to snatch all the things she craved and at the same time to rid herself of the persons against whom her whole passionate nature cried out in deadly hatred. She calculated to get rid of the family, inherit the Greene millions, and set her cap for Von Blon. There was vengeance, too, as a motivating factor in all this; but I’m inclined to think the amatory phase of the affair was the prim’ry actuating force in the series of horrors she later perpetrated. It gave her strength and courage; it lifted her into that ecstatic realm where everything seemed possible, and where she was willing to pay any price for the desired end. And there is one point I might recall parenthetically—you remember that Barton, the younger maid, told us how Ada sometimes acted like a devil and used vile language. That fact should have given me a hint; but who could have taken Barton seriously at that stage of the game? …

  “To trace the origin of her diabolical scheme we must first consider the locked library. Alone in the house, bored, resentful, tied down—it was inevitable that this pervertedly romantic child should play Pandora. She had every opportunity of securing the key and having a duplicate made; and so the library became her retreat, her escape from the gruelling, monotonous routine of her existence. There she ran across those books on criminology. They appealed to her, not only as a vicious outlet for her smouldering, repressed hatred, but because they struck a responsive chord in her tainted nature. Eventually she came upon Gross’s great manual, and thus found the entire technique of crime laid out before her, with diagrams and examples—not a handbook for examining magistrates, but a guide for a potential murderer! Slowly the idea of her gory orgy took shape. At first perhaps she only imagined, as a means of self- gratification, the application of this technique of murder to those she hated. But after a time, no doubt, the conception became real. She saw its practical possibilities; and the terrible plot was formulated. She created this horror, and then, with her diseased imagination, she came to believe in it. Her plausible stories to us, her superb acting, her clever deceptions—all were part of this horrible fantasy she had engendered. That book of Grimms’ Fairy Tales!—I should have understood. Y’ see, it wasn’t histrionism altogether on her part; it was a kind o
f demoniac possession. She lived her dream. Many young girls are like that under the stress of ambition and hatred. Constance Kent completely deceived the whole of Scotland Yard into believing in her innocence.”

  Vance smoked a moment thoughtfully.

  “It’s curious how we instinctively close our eyes to the truth when history is filled with substantiating examples of the very thing we are contemplating. The annals of crime contain numerous instances of girls in Ada’s position who have been guilty of atrocious crimes. Besides the famous case of Constance Kent, there were, for example, Marie Boyer, and Madeliene Smith, and Grete Beyer. I wonder if we’d have suspected them.”67

  “Keep to the present, Vance,” interposed Markham impatiently. “You say Ada took all her ideas from Gross. But Gross’s handbook is written in German. How did you know she spoke German well enough—?”

  “That Sunday when I went to the house with Van I inquired of Ada if Sibella spoke German. I put my questions in such a way that she could not answer without telling me whether or not she, too, knew German well. Incidentally, I wanted her to think that I suspected Sibella, so that she would not hasten matters until I returned from New Orleans. I knew that as long as Sibella was in Atlantic City she was safe from Ada.”

  “But what I want to know,” put in Heath, “is how she killed Rex when she was sitting in Mr. Markham’s office.”

  “Let us take things in order, Sergeant,” answered Vance. “Julia was killed first because she was the manager of the establishment. With her out of the way, Ada would have a free hand. And, another thing, the death of Julia at the start fitted best into the scheme she had outlined; it gave her the most plausible setting for staging the attempted murder on herself. Ada had undoubtedly heard some mention of Chester’s revolver, and after she had secured it she waited for the opportunity to strike the first blow. The propitious circumstances fell on the night of November 8th; and at half past eleven, when the house was asleep, she knocked on Julia’s door. She was admitted, and doubtless sat on the edge of Julia’s bed telling some story to explain her late visit. Then she drew the gun from under her dressing-gown and shot Julia through the heart. Back in her own bedroom, with the lights on, she stood before the large mirror of the dressing-table, and, holding the gun in her right hand, placed it against her left shoulder-blade at an oblique angle. The mirror and the lights were essential, for she could thus see exactly where to point the muzzle of the revolver. All this occupied the three-minute interval between the shots. Then she pulled the trigger—”

  “But a girl shooting herself as a fake!” objected Heath. “It ain’t natural.”

  “But Ada wasn’t natural, Sergeant. None of the plot was natural. That was why I was so anxious to look up her family history. But as to shooting herself; that was quite logical when one considers her true character. And, as a matter of fact, there was little or no danger attaching to it. The gun was on a hair-trigger, and no pressure was needed to discharge it. A slight flesh wound was the worst she had to fear. Moreover, history is full of cases of self-mutilation where the object to be gained was far smaller than what Ada was after. Gross is full of them…”

  He took up Volume I of the “Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter,” which lay on the table beside him, and opened it at a marked page.

  “Listen to this, Sergeant. I’ll translate the passage roughly as I read: ‘It is not uncommon to find people who inflict wounds upon themselves; such are, besides persons pretending to be the victims of assaults with deadly weapons, those who try to extort damages or blackmailers. Thus it often happens that, after an insignificant scuffle, one of the combatants shows wounds which he pretends to have received. It is characteristic of these voluntary mutilations that most frequently those who perform them do not quite complete the operation, and that they are for the most part people who manifest excessive piety, or lead a solitary life.’68 … And surely, Sergeant, you are familiar with the self- mutilation of soldiers to escape service. The most common method used by them is to place their hand over the muzzle of the gun and blow their fingers off.”

  Vance closed the book.

  “And don’t forget that the girl was hopeless, desperate, and unhappy, with everything to win and nothing to lose. She would probably have committed suicide if she had not worked out the plan of the murders. A superficial wound in the shoulder meant little to her in view of what she was to gain by it. And women have an almost infinite capacity for self- immolation. With Ada, it was part of her abnormal condition. No, Sergeant; the self-shooting was perfectly consistent in the circumstances…”

  “But in the back!” Heath looked dumbfounded. “That’s what gets me. Whoever heard—?”

  “Just a moment.” Vance took up Volume II of the “Handbuch” and opened it to a marked page. “Gross, for instance, has heard of many such cases—in fact, they’re quite common on the Continent. And his record of them indubitably gave Ada the idea for shooting herself in the back. Here’s a single paragraph culled from many pages of similar cases: ‘That you should not be deceived by the seat of the wound is proved by the following two cases. In the Vienna Prater a man killed himself in the presence of several people by shooting himself in the back of the head with a revolver. Without the testimony of several witnesses nobody would have accepted the theory of suicide. A soldier killed himself by a shot with his military rifle through the back, by fixing the rifle in a certain position and then lying down over it. Here again ‘the position of the wound seemed to exclude the theory of suicide.’”69

  “Wait a minute!” Heath heaved himself forward and shook his cigar at Vance. “What about the gun? Sproot entered Ada’s room right after the shot was fired, and there wasn’t no sign of a gun!”

  Vance, without answering, merely turned the pages of Gross’s “Handbuch” to where another marker protruded, and began translating:

  “‘Early one morning the authorities were informed that the corpse of a murdered man had been found. At the spot indicated the body was discovered of a grain merchant, A. M., supposed to be a well-to-do man, face downward with a gunshot wound behind his ear. The bullet, after passing through the brain, had lodged in the frontal bone above the left eye. The place where the corpse was found was in the middle of a bridge over a deep stream. Just when the inquiry was concluding and the corpse was about to be removed for the post-mortem, the investigating officer observed quite by chance that on the decayed wooden parapet of the bridge, almost opposite to the spot where the corpse lay, there was a small but perfectly fresh dent which appeared to have been caused by a violent blow on the upper edge of the parapet of a hard and angular object. He immediately suspected that the dent had some connection with the murder. Accordingly he determined to drag the bed of the stream below the bridge, when almost immediately there was picked up a strong cord about fourteen feet long with a large stone at one end and at the other a discharged pistol, the barrel of which fitted exactly the bullet extracted from the head of A. M. The case was thus evidently one of suicide. A. M. had hung the stone over the parapet of the bridge and discharged the pistol behind his ear. The moment he fired he let go the pistol, which the weight of the stone dragged over the parapet into the water.’70… Does that answer your question, Sergeant?”

  Heath stared at him with gaping eyes.

  “You mean her gun went outa the window the same like that guy’s gun went over the bridge?”

  “There can be no doubt about it. There was no other place for the gun to go. The window, I learned from Sproot, was open a foot, and Ada stood before the window when she shot herself. Returning from Julia’s room she attached a cord to the revolver with a weight of some kind on the other end, and hung the weight out of the window. When her hand released the weapon it was simply drawn over the sill and disappeared in the drift of soft snow on the balcony steps. And there is where the importance of the weather came in. Ada’s plan needed an unusual amount of snow; and the night of November 8th was ideal for her grisly purpose.”

  �
�My God, Vance” Markham’s tone was strained and unnatural. “This thing begins to sound more like a fantastic nightmare than a reality.”

  “Not only was it a reality, Markham,” said Vance gravely, “but it was an actual duplication of reality. It had all been done before and duly recorded in Gross’s treatise, with names, dates, and details.”

  “Hell No wonder we couldn’t find the gun.” Heath spoke with awed disgust. “And what about the footprints, Mr. Vance? I suppose she faked ’em all.”

  “Yes, Sergeant—with Gross’s minute instructions and the footprint forgeries of many famous criminals to guide her, she faked them. As soon as it had stopped snowing that night she slipped downstairs, put on a pair of Chester’s discarded galoshes, and walked to the front gate and back. Then she hid the galoshes in the library.”

  Vance turned once more to Gross’s manual.

  “There’s everything here that one could possibly want to know about the making and detection of footprints, and—what is more to the point—about the manufacturing of footprints in shoes too large for one’s feet.—Let me translate a short passage: ‘The criminal may intend to cast suspicion upon another person, especially if he foresees that suspicion may fall upon himself. In this case he produces clear footprints which, so to speak, leap to the eyes, by wearing shoes which differ essentially from his own. One may often in this way, as has been proved by numerous experiments, produce footprints which deceive perfectly.’71… And here at the end of the paragraph, Gross refers specifically to galoshes72—a fact which very likely gave Ada her inspiration to use Chester’s overshoes. She was shrewd enough to profit by the suggestions in this passage.”

  “And she was shrewd enough to hoodwink all of us when we questioned her,” commented Markham bitterly.

  “True. But that was because she had a folie de grandeur, and lived the story. Moreover, it was all based on fact; its details were grounded in reality. Even the shuffling sound she said she heard in her room was an imaginative projection of the actual shuffling sound she made when she walked in Chester’s huge galoshes. Also, her own shuffling, no doubt, suggested to her how Mrs. Greene’s footsteps would have sounded had the old lady regained the use of her legs. And I imagine it was Ada’s original purpose to cast a certain amount of suspicion on Mrs. Greene from the very beginning. But Sibella’s attitude during that first interview caused her to change her tactics. As I see it, Sibella was suspicious of little sister, and talked the situation over with Chester, who may also have had misgivings about Ada. You remember his sub-rosa chat with Sibella when he went to summon her to the drawing-room. He was probably informing her that he hadn’t yet made an accusation against Ada, and was advising her to go easy until there was some specific proof. Sibella evidently agreed, and refrained from any direct charge until Ada, in telling her grotesque fairy-tale about the intruder, rather implied it was a woman’s hand that had touched her in the dark. That was too much for Sibella, who thought Ada was referring to her; and she burst forth with her accusation, despite its seeming absurdity. The amazing thing about it was that it happened to be the truth. She named the murderer and stated a large part of the motive before any of us remotely guessed the truth, even though she did back down and change her mind when the inconsistency of it was pointed out to her. And she really did see Ada in Chester’s room looking for the revolver.”