The Philo Vance Megapack
Page 203
“I always was,” the other returned dryly.
Markham was still standing like a man in a daze. His face was pale, and there were large globules of perspiration on his forehead. He managed now to speak.
“You’re—you’re sure you’re all right, Vance?”
“Oh, quite.” Vance smiled. “Never better. I’ll have to die some time, alas! But, really. I wouldn’t let a pathological degenerate like Llewellyn choose the time for my demise.” His eyes turned to Markham contritely. “I’m deuced sorry to have caused you and Van all this agitation. But I had to get Llewellyn’s confession on the records. We didn’t have any overwhelming evidence against him, don’t y’ know.”
“But—but—” Markham stammered, still apparently unable to accept the astonishing situation.
“Oh, Llewellyn’s revolver had nothing but blank cartridges in it,” Vance explained. “I saw to that this morning when I visited the Llewellyn domicile.”
“You knew what he was going to do?” Markham looked at Vance incredulously and rubbed his handkerchief vigorously over his face.
“I suspected it,” said Vance, lighting a cigarette.
Markham sank back into his chair, like an exhausted man.
“I’ll get some brandy,” Kinkaid announced. “We can all stand a drink.” And he went out through the door which led to the bar.
Markham’s eyes were still on Vance, but they had lost their startled look.
“What did you mean just now,” he asked, “when you said you had to get Llewellyn’s confession on the records?”
“Just that,” Vance returned. “And that reminds me. I’d better disconnect the dictaphone now.”
He went to a small picture hanging over Kinkaid’s desk and took it down, revealing a small metal disk.
“That’s all, boys,” he said, apparently addressing the wall. Then he severed the two wires attached to the disk.
“You see, Markham,” he elucidated, “when you told me this morning of the supposed telephone call from Kinkaid I couldn’t understand it. But it soon came to me that it was not Kinkaid at all who had phoned, but Llewellyn. It was from Llewellyn that I was expecting some move, after the remarks I had poured indirectly into his ear last night. I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting anything quite as forthright and final as this little act: that’s why I was puzzled at first. But once the idea dawned on me, I could see that it was both a logical and subtle move. Premise: you and I were in the way. Conclusion: you and I would have to be put out of the way. And, inasmuch as we were being lured to the Casino, it was not particularly difficult to follow Llewellyn’s syllogism. I was pretty sure he had actually gone to Atlantic City to make the telephone call—it’s difficult, don’t y’ know, to simulate a long-distance call from a local station. Therefore, I knew I had several hours in which to make arrangements. I called Kinkaid at Atlantic City at once, told him all the circumstances, and asked him to come immediately to New York. I also found out from him how I could get into the Casino to install a dictaphone. That’s why I called on the doughty Sergeant. He and some of the boys from the Homicide Bureau and a stenographer are in an apartment of the house next door, and have taken down everything that has been said here this afternoon.”
He sat down in a chair facing Markham and drew deeply on his cigarette.
“I’ll admit,” he went on, “that I wasn’t quite sure what method Llewellyn would use to put us out of his way and throw suspicion on his loving uncle. So I warned you and Van not to drink anything,—there was, of course, the possibility that he would use poison again. But I thought that he might use his revolver; and so I purchased a box of blanks, went to his home this morning on a perfectly silly pretext, and when I was alone in his bedroom I substituted the blanks for the cartridges in his revolver. There was the chance that he would have noticed this substitution if he examined the gun from the front; but I saw that the blanks were in place before I took my seat beside you a while ago. Otherwise I would have practised a bit of jiu-jitsu on the johnnie immediately.…”
Kinkaid reentered the office with a bottle of brandy and four glasses. Setting the tray on his desk, he filled the glasses and waved his hand toward them, inviting us to help ourselves.
“Shall I, Vance?” Markham asked, with a grim smile. “You told us not to drink anything here.”
“It’s quite all right now.” Vance sipped his Courvoisier. “From the very first I have regarded Mr. Kinkaid as our most valuable ally.”
“The hell you say!” Kinkaid grumbled good-naturedly. “After all you put me through!”
At this moment there came to us the sound of a slamming door, followed by heavy, hurrying footsteps on the stairs. Kinkaid stepped to the office door leading into the Gold Room, and opened it. On the threshold stood Heath, a Colt revolver in his hand. Behind him, crowding forward, were Snitkin, Hennessey and Burke. Heath’s eyes, fixed on Vance, were wide in childlike amazement.
“You’re not dead!” he almost shouted.
“Far from it, Sergeant,” Vance returned. “But please put away that gun. Let’s not have any more shootin’ today.”
Heath’s hand dropped to his side, but his astonished eyes did not leave Vance’s face.
“I know, Mr. Vance,” he said, “you told me that I wasn’t to get upset at anything I heard over the dictaphone, and to stay on the job till you gave me the sign-off. But when I heard what that baby said, and then the shots and you falling, I beat it right over.”
“It was sweet of you,” returned Vance. “But unnecess’ry.” He waved his hand toward the limp figure of Lynn Llewellyn. “There’s the chappie. No trouble. Shot through the heart. Quite dead. You’ll have to get him to the morgue, of course. But that’ll be that. Everything worked out beautifully. No pother. No trial. No jury. Justice triumphant nevertheless. Life goes on. But why?”
I doubt if Heath heard anything Vance said. He continued to stare open-mouthed.
“You’re sure—you’re not hurt?” The words seemed to come from his lips in an automatic expression of his apprehension.
Vance set down his cognac glass and, going to Heath, put his hand affectionately on the other’s shoulder.
“Quite sure,” he said softly. Then he wagged his head in mock commiseration. “Frightfully sorry to disappoint you, Sergeant.”
* * * *
The murder of Virginia Llewellyn, as you perhaps remember, occupied the front pages of the country’s press for several days, but it soon gave way to other scandals. Most of the major facts of the case became public property. But not all of them. Kinkaid was, of course, exonerated for the shooting of Lynn Llewellyn: Markham saw to it that the affair was not even brought before the Grand Jury.
The Casino was permanently closed within a year, and the beautiful old gray-stone house was torn down to make way for the construction of a modern skyscraper. By that time Kinkaid had amassed a small fortune; and the manufacture of heavy water has occupied him ever since.
Mrs. Llewellyn recovered from the shock of her son’s death in far shorter time than I had thought possible. She threw herself more energetically than ever into social-welfare work, and I see her name frequently in the papers in connection with her philanthropic activities. Bloodgood and Amelia Llewellyn were married the week after Kinkaid had closed the doors of the Casino for all time, and they are now living in Paris. (Mrs. Bloodgood, incidentally, has given up her artistic career.) I met Doctor Kane on Park Avenue recently. He had an air of great importance, and informed me he was rushing to his office to give a woman patient a diathermic treatment.
207 This was the same restaurant to which Vance took us during the investigation of the Kennel murder case, and where he bored Markham almost to the point of distraction with a long dissertation on Scottish terrier characteristics, blood-lines and pedigrees.
208 Doctor Hildebrandt, in answering Vance’s question, mentioned specifically several poisons which leave no trace in the human body, but I am purposely not recording them here. Modern medic
al scientists and toxicologists will know those referred to; and I deem it both unnecessary and unwise to make such dangerous knowledge public property.
209 As I write this record of the Casino murder case, I note, in a dispatch to The New York Times, that the Imperial Chemical Industries, an important British organization, have begun the commercial production of heavy water and hope in time to be able to supply it to chemists, physicists and physicians the world over, at about fifty dollars a teaspoonful.
THE GARDEN MURDER CASE (Part 1)
An two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind.
—Much Ado About Nothing.
CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK
PHILO VANCE
JOHN F.-X. MARKHAM
District Attorney of New York County.
ERNEST HEATH
Sergeant of the Homicide Bureau.
EPHRAIM GARDEN
Professor of chemistry.
MARTHA GARDEN
Professor Garden’s wife.
FLOYD GARDEN
Their son.
WOODE SWIFT
Nephew of the Gardens.
ZALIA GRAEM
Young sportswoman, and friend of Floyd Garden.
LOWE HAMMLE
An elderly follower of horse-racing.
MADGE WEATHERBY
A woman with dramatic aspirations.
CECIL KROON
Another of Floyd Garden’s friends.
BERNICE BEETON
A nurse in the Garden home.
DOCTOR MILES SIEFERT
The Gardens’ family physician.
SNEED
The Garden butler.
HENNESSEY
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
SNITKIN
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
SULLIVAN
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
BURKE
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
DOCTOR EMANUEL DOREMUS
Medical Examiner.
CAPTAIN DUBOIS
Finger-print expert.
DETECTIVE BELLAMY
Finger-print expert.
PETER QUACKENBUSH
Official photographer.
JACOB HANNIX
A book-maker.
CURRIE
Vance’s valet.
CHAPTER I
THE TROJAN HORSES
(Friday, April 13; 10 P.M.)
There were two reasons why the terrible and, in many ways, incredible Garden murder case—which took place in the early spring following the spectacular Casino murder case210—was so designated. In the first place, the scene of this tragedy was the penthouse home of Professor Ephraim Garden, the great experimental chemist of Stuyvesant University; and secondly, the exact situs criminis was the beautiful private roof-garden over the apartment itself.
It was both a peculiar and implausible affair, and one so cleverly planned that only by the merest accident—or, perhaps I should say a fortuitous intervention—was it discovered at all. Despite the fact that the circumstances preceding the crime were entirely in Philo Vance’s favor, I cannot help regarding it as one of his greatest triumphs in criminal investigation and deduction; for it was his quick uncanny judgments, his ability to read human nature, and his tremendous flair for the significant undercurrents of the so-called trivia of life, that led him to the truth.
The Garden murder case involved a curious and anomalous mixture of passion, avarice, ambition and horse-racing. There was an admixture of hate, also; but this potent and blinding element was, I imagine, an understandable outgrowth of the other factors. However, the case was amazing in its subtleties, its daring, its thought-out mechanism, and its sheer psychological excitation.
The beginning of the case came on the night of April 13. It was one of those mild evenings that we often experience in early spring following a spell of harsh dampness, when all the remaining traces of winter finally capitulate to the inevitable seasonal changes. There was a mellow softness in the air, a sudden perfume from the burgeoning life of nature—the kind of atmosphere that makes one lackadaisical and wistful, and, at the same time, stimulates one’s imagination.
I mention this seemingly irrelevant fact because I have good reason to believe these meteorological conditions had much to do with the startling events that were imminent that night and which were to break forth, in all their horror, before another twenty-four hours had passed.
And I believe that the season, with all its subtle innuendoes, was the real explanation of the change that came over Vance himself during his investigation of the crime. Up to that time I had never considered Vance a man of any deep personal emotion, except in so far as children and animals and his intimate masculine friendships were concerned. He had always impressed me as a man so highly mentalized, so cynical and impersonal in his attitude toward life, that an irrational human weakness like romance would be alien to his nature. But in the course of his deft inquiry into the murders in Professor Garden’s penthouse, I saw, for the first time, another and softer side of his character. Vance was never a happy man in the conventional sense; but after the Garden murder case there were evidences of an even deeper loneliness in his sensitive nature.
But these sentimental side-lights perhaps do not matter in the reportorial account of the astonishing history I am here setting down, and I doubt if they should have been mentioned at all but for the fact that they gave an added inspiration and impetus to the energy Vance exerted and the risks he ran in bringing the murderer to justice.
As I have said, the case opened—so far as Vance was concerned with it— on the night of April 13. John F.-X. Markham, then District Attorney of New York County, had dined with Vance at his apartment in East 38th Street. The dinner had been excellent—as all of Vance’s dinners were— and at ten o’clock the three of us were sitting in the comfortable library, sipping Napoléon 1809—that famous and exquisite cognac brandy of the First Empire.211
Vance and Markham had been discussing crime waves in a desultory manner. There had been a mild disagreement, Vance discounting the theory that crime waves are calculable, and holding that crime is entirely personal and therefore incompatible with generalizations or laws. The conversation had then drifted round to the bored young people of post-war decadence who had, for the sheer excitement of it, organized crime clubs whose members tried their hand at murders wherein nothing was to be gained materially. The Loeb-Leopold case naturally was mentioned, and also a more recent and equally vicious case that had just come to light in one of the leading western cities.
It was in the midst of this discussion that Currie, Vance’s old English butler and major-domo, appeared at the library door. I noticed that he seemed nervous and ill at ease as he waited for Vance to finish speaking; and I think Vance, too, sensed something unusual in the man’s attitude, for he stopped speaking rather abruptly and turned.
“What is it, Currie? Have you seen a ghost, or are there burglars in the house?”
“I have just had a telephone call, sir,” the old man answered, endeavoring to restrain the excitement in his voice.
“Not bad news from abroad?” Vance asked sympathetically.
“Oh, no, sir; it wasn’t anything for me. There was a gentleman on the phone—”
Vance lifted his eyebrows and smiled faintly. “A gentleman, Currie?”
“He spoke like a gentleman, sir. He was certainly no ordinary person. He had a cultured voice, sir, and—”
“Since your instinct has gone so far,” Vance interrupted, “perhaps you can tell me the gentleman’s age?”
“I should say he was middle-aged, or perhaps a little beyond,” Currie ventured. “His voice sounded mature and dignified and judicial.”
“Excellent!” Vance crushed out his cigarette. “And what was the object of this dignified, middle-aged gentleman’s call? Did he ask to speak to me or give you his name?”
A worried look came into Currie’s eyes as he shook head.
“No, sir. Th
at’s the strange part of it. He said he did not wish to speak to you personally, and he would not tell me his name. But he asked me to give you a message. He was very precise about it and made me write it down word for word and then repeat it. And the moment I had done so he hung up the receiver.” Currie stepped forward. “Here’s the message, sir.” And he held out one of the small memorandum sheets Vance always kept at his telephone.
Vance took it and nodded a dismissal. Then he adjusted his monocle and held the slip of paper under the light of the table lamp. Markham and I both watched him closely, for the incident was unusual, to say the least. After a hasty reading of the paper he gazed off into space, and a clouded look came into his eyes. He read the message again, with more care, and sank back into his chair.
“My word!” he murmured. “Most extr’ordin’ry. It’s quite intelligible, however, don’t y’ know. But I’m dashed if I can see the connection…”
Markham was annoyed. “Is it a secret?” he asked testily. “Or are you merely in one of your Delphic-oracle moods?”
Vance glanced toward him contritely.
“Forgive me, Markham. My mind automatically went off on a train of thought. Sorry—really.” He held the paper again under the light. “This is the message that Currie so meticulously took down: ‘There is a most disturbing psychological tension at Professor Ephraim Garden’s apartment, which resists diagnosis. Read up on radioactive sodium. See Book XI of the Aeneid, line 875. Equanimity is essential.’…Curious—eh, what?”
“It sounds a little crazy to me,” Markham grunted. “Are you troubled much with cranks?”
“Oh, this is no crank,” Vance assured him. “It’s puzzlin’, I admit; but it’s quite lucid.”
Markham sniffed skeptically.
“What, in the name of Heaven, have a professor and sodium and the Aeneid to do with one another?”
Vance was frowning as he reached into the humidor for one of his beloved Régie cigarettes with a deliberation which indicated a mental tension. Slowly he lighted the cigarette. After a deep inhalation he answered.