The Philo Vance Megapack

by S. S. Van Dine

  Though Beedle and Pyne were questioned by Heath several times, nothing new was learned from them. Pyne insisted that he had been up-stairs the entire morning in Arnesson’s room, except for a few brief absences to the linen-closet and the front door, and clung tenaciously to his denial that he had touched either the body or the bow when sent by Professor Dillard to find Sperling. The Sergeant, however, was not entirely satisfied with the man’s testimony.

  “That bleary-eyed old cormorant has got something up his sleeve,” he told Markham disgustedly. “But it would take the rubber hose and the water cure to make him spill it.”

  A canvass of all the houses in 75th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive was made in the hope of finding a tenant who had noticed some one entering or emerging from the Dillard wall gate during the forenoon. But nothing was gained by this tedious campaign. Pardee, it seemed, was the only resident within view of the Dillard house who had observed any one in the neighborhood that morning. In fact, after several days of arduous inquiries along this line the Sergeant realized that he would have to proceed without any outside or fortuitous assistance.

  The various alibis of the seven persons whom Vance had tabulated in his notation for Markham, were gone into as thoroughly as circumstances would permit. It was obviously impossible to check them completely, for, in the main, they were based solely on the statements of the individuals involved. Moreover the investigation had to be made with the utmost care lest suspicion be aroused. The results of these inquiries were as follows:

  1. Arnesson had been seen in the university library by various people, including an assistant librarian and two students. But the time covered by their evidence was neither consecutive nor specific as to the hour.

  2. Belle Dillard had played several sets of tennis at the public courts at 119th Street and Riverside Drive, but because there had been more than four in her party she had twice relinquished her place to a friend; and none of the players could state positively that she had remained at the courts during these periods.

  3. The time that Drukker departed from the archery-room was definitely determined by Sperling; but no one could be found who had seen him thereafter. He admitted he had met no one he knew in the park, but insisted he had stopped for a few minutes to play with some strange children.

  4. Pardee had been alone in his study. His old cook and his Japanese valet had been in the rear of the house, and had not seen him until lunch time. His alibi therefore was purely a negative one.

  5. Mrs. Drukker’s word had to be accepted as to her whereabouts that morning, for no one had seen her between nine-thirty, when Drukker went to call on Arnesson, and one o’clock, when the cook brought up her luncheon.

  6. Beedle’s alibi was checked with fairly satisfactory completeness. Pardee had seen her leave the house at 10.35; and she was remembered by several of the hucksters at the Jefferson Market between eleven and twelve.

  7. The fact that Sperling had taken the 11.40 train to Scarsdale was verified; therefore he would have had to leave the Dillard house at the time he stated—namely: 11.15. The determination of this point, however, was merely a matter of routine, for he had been practically eliminated from the case. But if, as Heath explained, it had been found that he had not taken the 11.40 train, he would have again become an important possibility.

  Pursuing his investigations along more general lines, the Sergeant went into the histories and associations of the various persons involved. The task was not a difficult one. All were well known, and information concerning them was readily accessible; but not one item was unearthed that could be regarded as even remotely throwing any light on Robin’s murder. Nothing transpired to give so much as a hint to the motive for the crime; and after a week’s intensive inquiry and speculation the case was still cloaked in seemingly impenetrable mystery.

  Sperling had not been released. The prima facie evidence against him, combined with his absurd confession, made impossible such a step on the part of the authorities. Markham, however, had held an unofficial conference with the attorneys whom Sperling’s father had engaged to handle the case, and some sort of a “gentleman’s agreement” had, I imagine, been reached; for although the State made no move to apply for an indictment (despite the fact that the Grand Jury was sitting at the time), the defense lawyers did not institute habeas corpus proceedings. All the indications pointed to the supposition that both Markham and Sperling’s attorneys were waiting for the real culprit to be apprehended.

  Markham had had several interviews with the members of the Dillard household, in a persistent effort to bring out some trivial point that might lead to a fruitful line of inquiry; and Pardee had been summoned to the District Attorney’s office to make an affidavit as to what he had observed from his window on the morning of the tragedy. Mrs. Drukker had been interrogated again; but not only did she emphatically deny having looked out of her window that morning, but she scoffed at the idea that she had screamed.

  Drukker, when re-questioned, modified somewhat his former testimony. He explained that he might have been mistaken as to the source of the scream, and suggested that it could have come from the street or from one of the court windows of the apartment house. In fact, he said, it was highly unlikely that his mother had uttered the scream, for when he went to her door a moment later she was humming an old German nursery song from Humperdinck’s “Hänsel and Gretel.” Markham, convinced that nothing further was to be learned from either him or Mrs. Drukker, finally concentrated on the Dillard house itself.

  Arnesson attended the informal conferences held in Markham’s office; but for all his voluble and cynical observations, he appeared to be as much at sea as the rest of us. Vance chaffed him good-naturedly about the mathematical formula that was to solve the case, but Arnesson insisted that a formula could not be worked out until all the factors of the theorem were available. He appeared to regard the entire affair as a kind of Juvenalian lark; and Markham on several occasions gave vent to his exasperation. He reproached Vance for having made Arnesson an unofficial confrère in the investigation, but Vance defended himself on the ground that sooner or later Arnesson would supply some piece of seemingly irrelevant information that could be used as an advantageous point de départ.

  “His crimino-mathematical theory is of course rubbish,” said Vance. “Psychology—not abstract science—will eventually reduce this conundrum to its elements. But we need material to go on, and Arnesson knows the inwardness of the Dillard home better than we can ever know it. He knows the Drukkers, and he knows Pardee; and it goes without saying that a man who has had the academic honors heaped on him that he has, possesses an unusually keen mind. As long as he gives his thought and attention to the case, there’s the chance that he’ll hit upon something of vital importance to us.”

  “You may be right,” grumbled Markham. “But the man’s derisive attitude gets on my nerves.”

  “Be more catholic,” urged Vance. “Consider his ironies in relation to his scientific speculations. What could be more natural than that a man who projects his mind constantly into the vast interplanet’ry reaches, and deals with light-years and infinities and hyperphysical dimensions, should sniff derisively at the infinitesimals of this life?… Stout fella, Arnesson. Not homey and comfortable perhaps, but dashed interestin’.”

  Vance himself had taken the case with unwonted seriousness. His Menander translations had been definitely put aside. He became moody and waspish—a sure sign that his mind was busy with an absorbing problem. After dinner each night he went into his library and read for hours—not the classic and aesthetic volumes on which he generally spent his time, but such books as Bernard Hart’s “The Psychology of Insanity,” Freud’s “Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten,” Coriat’s “Abnormal Psychology” and “Repressed Emotions,” Lippo’s “Komik und Humor,” Daniel A. Huebsch’s “The Murder Complex,” Janet’s “Les Obsessions et la Psychasthènie,” Donath’s “Uber Arithmomanie,” Riklin’s “Wish Fulfillme
nt and Fairy Tales,” Leppman’s “Die forensische Bedeutung der Zwangsvorstellungen,” Kuno Fischer’s “Uber den Witz,” Erich Wulffen’s “Kriminalpsychologie,” Hollenden’s “The Insanity of Genius,” and Groos’s “Die Spiele des Menschen.”

  He spent hours going over the police reports. He called twice at the Dillards’, and on one occasion visited Mrs. Drukker in company with Belle Dillard. He had a long discussion one night with Drukker and Arnesson on de Sitter’s conception of physical space as a Lobatchewskian pseudosphere, his object being, I surmised, to acquaint himself with Drukker’s mentality. He read Drukker’s book, “World Lines in Multidimensional Continua”; and spent nearly an entire day studying Janowski’s and Tarrasch’s analyses of the Pardee gambit.

  On Sunday—eight days after the murder of Robin—he said to me:

  “Eheu, Van! This problem is unbelievedly subtle. No ordin’ry investigation will ever probe it. It lies in a strange territ’ry of the brain; and its superficial childishness is its most terrible and bafflin’ aspect. Nor is the perpetrator going to be content with a single coup. Cock Robin’s death serves no definitive end. The perverted imagination that concocted this beastly crime is insatiable; and unless we can expose the abnormal psychological mechanism back of it there will be more grim jokes to contend with.…”

  The very next morning his prognostication was verified. We went to Markham’s office at eleven o’clock to hear Heath’s report and to discuss further lines of action. Though nine days had passed since Robin had been found murdered, no progress had been made in the case, and the newspapers had grown bitter in their criticisms of the police and the District Attorney’s office. It was therefore with considerable depression that Markham greeted us that Monday morning. Heath had not yet arrived; but when he came a few minutes later it was obvious that he, too, was discouraged.

  “We run up against a brick wall, sir, every way we turn,” he repined, when he had outlined the results of his men’s activities. “There ain’t a sign of a motive, and outside of Sperling there’s nobody on the landscape that we can hang anything on. I’m coming to the conclusion that it was some stick-up man who ambled into the archery-room that morning and messed things up.”

  “‘Stick-up’ men, Sergeant,” countered Vance, “are deuced unimaginative, and they’re without a sense of humor; whereas the johnny who sent Robin on the long, long trail had both imagination and humor. He wasn’t content merely to kill Robin: he had to turn the act into an insane joke. Then, lest the public wouldn’t see the point, he wrote explanat’ry letters to the press.—Does that sound like the procedure of an itinerant thug?”

  Heath smoked unhappily for several minutes without speaking, and at length turned a gaze of exasperated dismay upon Markham.

  “There’s no sense in anything that’s breaking round this town lately,” he complained. “Just this morning a guy named Sprigg was shot in Riverside Park, up near 84th Street. Money in his pocket—nothing taken. Just shot. Young fella—student at Columbia. Lived with his parents; no enemies. Went out to take his usual walk before going to class. Found dead half an hour later by a bricklayer.” The Sergeant chewed viciously on his cigar. “Now we got that homicide to worry about; and we’ll probably get hell from the newspapers if we don’t clear it up pronto. And there’s nothing—absolutely nothing—to go on.”

  “Still, Sergeant,” said Vance consolingly, “shooting a man is an ordin’ry event. There are numerous commonplace reasons for that sort of crime. It’s the scenic and dramatic appurtenances of Robin’s murder that play havoc with all our processes of deduction. If only it wasn’t a nursery affair—”

  Suddenly he stopped speaking, and his eyelids drooped slightly. Leaning forward he very deliberately crushed out his cigarette.

  “Did you say, Sergeant, that this chap’s name was Sprigg?”

  Heath nodded gloomily.

  “And I say,”—despite Vance’s effort, there was a note of eagerness in his tone—“what was his first name?”

  Heath gave Vance a look of puzzled surprise; but after a brief pause he drew forth his battered notebook and riffled the pages.

  “John Sprigg,” he answered. “John E. Sprigg.”

  Vance took out another cigarette, and lighted it with great care.

  “And tell me: was he shot with a .32?”

  “Huh?” Heath’s eyes rounded, and his chin shot forward. “Yes, a .32.…”

  “And was he shot through the top of his head?”

  The Sergeant sprang to his feet, and stared at Vance with ludicrous bewilderment. Slowly his head moved up and down.

  “That’s right.—But how in hell, sir?”

  Vance held up a silencing hand. It was, however, the look on his face, rather than his gesture, that cut short the query.

  “Oh, my precious aunt!” He rose like a man in a daze and gazed fixedly before him. Had I not known him so well I would have sworn he was frightened. Then going to the tall window behind Markham’s desk he stood looking down on the gray stone walls of the Tombs.

  “I can’t credit it,” he murmured. “It’s too ghastly.… But of course it’s so!…”

  Markham’s impatient voice sounded.

  “What’s all this mumbling about, Vance? Don’t be so damned mysterious! How did you happen to know that Sprigg was shot through the crown with a .32? And what’s the point, anyway?”

  Vance turned and met Markham’s eyes.

  “Don’t you see?” he asked softly. “It’s the second act of this devilish parody!… Have you forgotten your ‘Mother-Goose’?” And in a hushed voice that brought a sense of unutterable horror into that dingy old office he recited:

  “‘There was a little man,

  And he had a little gun,

  And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead;

  He shot Johnny Sprig

  Through the middle of his wig,

  And knocked it right off of his head, head, head.’”

  CHAPTER IX

  THE TENSOR FORMULA

  (Monday, April 11; 11.30 A.M.)

  Markham sat staring at Vance like a man hypnotized. Heath stood rigid, his mouth partly open, his cigar held a few inches from his lips. There was something almost comic in the Sergeant’s attitude, and I had a nervous inclination to laugh; but for the moment my blood seemed frozen, and all muscular movement was impossible.

  Markham was the first to speak. Jerking his head backward, he brought his hand down violently on the desk-top.

  “What new lunacy of yours is this?” He was fighting desperately against Vance’s dumbfounding suggestion. “I’m beginning to think the Robin case has affected your mind. Can’t a man with the commonplace name of Sprigg be shot without your trying to turn it into some grotesque hocus-pocus?”

  “Still, you must admit, Markham old dear,” returned Vance mildly, “this particular Johnny Sprigg was shot with ‘a little gun’, through ‘the middle of his wig’, so to speak.”

  “What if he was?” A dull flush had crept into Markham’s face. “Is that any reason for your going about babbling Mother-Goose rhymes?”

  “Oh, I say! I never babble, don’t y’ know.”

  Vance had dropped into a chair facing the District Attorney’s desk. “I may not be a thrillin’ elocutionist; but really, now, I don’t babble.” He gave Heath an ingratiating smile. “Do I, Sergeant?”

  But Heath had no opinion to express. He still held his astonished pose, though his eyes had now become mere slits in his broad, pugnacious face.

  “Are you seriously suggesting—?” began Markham; but Vance interrupted him.

  “Yes! I’m seriously suggesting that the person who killed Cock Robin with an arrow has vented his grim humor upon the hapless Sprigg. Coincidence is out of the question. Such repetitive parallels would knock the entire foundation out from all sanity and reason. ’Pon my soul, the world is mad enough; but such madness would dissipate all science and rational thinking. Sprigg’s death is rather hideous; but it must be faced. And
however much you may force yourself to protest against its incredible implications you’ll eventually have to accept them.”

  Markham had risen, and was pacing nervously up and down.

  “I’ll grant there are inexplicable elements in this new crime.” His combativeness had gone, and his tone had moderated. “But if we assume, even tentatively, that some maniac is at large reconstructing the rhymes of his nursery days, I can’t see how it will help us. It would practically close all routine lines of investigation.”

  “I shouldn’t say that, don’t y’ know.” Vance was smoking meditatively. “I’m inclined to think that such an assumption would supply us with a definite basis of inquiry.”

  “Sure!” snapped Heath with ponderous sarcasm. All we gotta do is to go out and find one bug among six million people. A cinch!”

  “Don’t let the fumes of discouragement overcome you, Sergeant. Our elusive jester is a rather distinctive entomological specimen. Moreover, we have certain clews as to his exact habitat.…”

  Markham swung round. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Merely that this second crime is related to the first not only psychologically, but geographically. Both murders were committed within a few blocks of each other,—our destructive demon at least has a weakness for the neighborhood in which the Dillard house is situated. Furthermore, the very factors of the two murders preclude the possibility of his having come from afar to give rein to his distorted humor in unfamiliar surroundings. As I learnedly pointed out to you, Robin was translated into the Beyond by some one who knew all the conditions obtaining at the Dillard house at the exact hour the grisly drama was performed; and surely it’s obvious that this second crime could not have been so tidily staged had not the impresario been acquainted with Sprigg’s ambulat’ry intentions this morning. Indeed, the entire mechanism of these weird playlets proves that the operator was intimately cognizant of all the circumstances surrounding his victims.”