“Strange coincidence about that. Or, mayhap, just a vagary of mine.” Vance spoke as if he were merely making some matter-of-fact point. “Pellinzi died last Saturday afternoon, shortly after he would have had time to reach New York. At about that time I happened to be wandering in the woods in Riverdale. And as I started to retrace my steps homeward, a large car drove swiftly by. Later I learned that a lighted cigarette had been thrown from that car, almost at the very spot where I had stood. It was a most peculiar cigarette. Miss Del Marr. Only a few puffs had been taken on it. But that wasn’t its only peculiarity. There was a deadly poison in it, too—the modern equivalent of the fabulous poisoned flowers that figured in medieval tragedies. And yet, it had been carelessly tossed away on a public highway…”
“A stupid act,” came in soft, caustic tones from Owen.
“Fortuitous, let us say—from the finite point of view. Inevitable, really.” Vance also spoke softly. “There is only one pattern in all the universe.”
“Yes,” said Owen with arctic vagueness. “Stupidity is one of the compositional lines.”
Vance did not turn. He was still scrutinizing the woman.
“May I continue, Miss Del Marr?” he asked. “Or does my story bore you?”
She gave no indication that she had heard his query.
“The cigarette-case I mentioned,” Vance went on, “was found on Pellinzi’s body. But there were no cigarettes in it. And it had no pungent aroma of the bitter almond—only the sweet scent of jonquille and rose… But Pellinzi was poisoned as by the smelling of a scent. And again there crops up the deadly agent of ancient romance… Strange—is it not?—how the fancy conjures up such remote associations… Poor Pellinzi must have believed and trusted in his assassin. But all that his faith encountered was treachery and death.”
Vance paused. There was a tenseness in the small room. Only Owen seemed unconcerned. He looked straight ahead, with a hopeless detached expression, a sneer distorting his cruel mouth.
When Vance spoke again, his manner had changed: there was brusque severity in his voice.
“But perhaps I am not so fanciful, after all. Whom else but you, Miss Del Marr, would Pellinzi first have told of his safe arrival in New York? And how could he have known, these past few years, that someone else had sought and found a response in a heart which had once belonged to him? You have a large enclosed car, Miss Del Marr—a secret trip to Riverdale would have been an easy matter for you. The cigarette-case, with your subtle fragrance, was found on him. Love changes, and is cruel…”
An icy chuckle came from Owen. His eyebrows went up slightly. The sneer on his lips changed to the faint semblance of a smile.
“Very clever, Mr. Vance,” he muttered. “Admirable, in fact. Patterns within patterns. How easily man is deceived by fantasms!”
“The deceptive order of chaos,” said Vance.
Owen nodded almost imperceptibly. His face again became a satirical mask.
“Yes,” he breathed. “You, too, have a sense of esoteric humour.”
“I doubt,” murmured Vance, “that Miss Del Marr appreciates the humour of death.”
A strangled moan burst from the woman’s throat. She collapsed into a chair and covered her face with her hands.
“Oh, God!” It was the first break in her metallic composure.
A long silence followed. Mirche looked for a moment at Vance and back again at the woman. His face had regained some of its colour, but a haunted fear shone in his eyes—a fear as of a malignant ghost whose shape he could not determine. I knew that questions he dared not utter were crowding to his lips. Slowly the woman raised her head; her hands dropped to her lap and lay there in an attitude of listless dejection. The venomous hardness of her nature regained control. She was about to speak; but she, too, checked the impulse, as if the gauge of her emotions had not yet reached the point of release.
Vance slowly lighted one of his Regies. After one or two puffs, he spoke again to the woman, and his words sounded lackadaisical, as if he were putting a question of no particular moment.
“There is still one thing that puzzles me. Miss Del Marr… Why did you bring the dead Pellinzi back here to this office?”
The woman sat like a marble image, while a disdainful cackle broke from Mirche.
“Are you referring, Mr. Vance,” he asked, in his erstwhile pompous manner, “to the man found dead in this office? I’m beginning to understand your interest in the unfortunate episode here Saturday night. But I fear you have permitted your imagination to get the better of you. The body found here was that of one of the cafe helpers.”
“Yes, I know whom you mean, Mr. Mirche. Philip Allen.” Vance spoke smoothly. “As you said that night. And I have no doubt that you believed it, and still believe it. But seeming facts act strangely at times. A pattern is prone to change its design in the most incredible manner… Is it not true, Mr. Owen?”
“Always true,” replied the quiet spectator in the chair. “Confusion. We are victims…”
“What are you two driving at?” asked Mirche, half rising from his chair, as a dawning fear came into his eyes.
“The truth is, Mr. Mirche,” said Vance, “Philip Allen is quite alive. After you had discharged him and he accidentally left a cigarette-case here which did not belong to him, Philip Allen did not return to this office.”
“Ridiculous!” Mirche had lost his suavity. “How else could he—?”
“It was Benny Pellinzi who lay dead here that night!”
At this announcement Mirche dropped suddenly back into his chair, and stared with hopeless defiance at the man before him. But the facts had not yet arranged themselves in his mind; and he began to protest anew.
“That’s absurd—utterly absurd! I saw Allen’s body myself. And I identified it.”
“Oh, I don’t question the sincerity of your identification.” Vance moved closer to the dazed man. His tone was almost honeyed. “You had every reason to think that it was Philip Allen. He is the same size as Pellinzi. He has the same facial contours and colouring, and that day he was wearing the same kind of unobtrusive black clothes in which Pellinzi was sent to his death. You had just talked with Philip Allen in your office a few hours earlier, and, as you said to me yesterday, you were not surprised that he should have come back here. Moreover, death by poison changes the look in the eyes, the whole general appearance of the face. And, furthermore, wasn’t Pellinzi the last person in the world you would have expected to find in your office on that particular night? Yes, the last person in the world…”
“But why—,” stammered Mirche, “why should Pellinzi have been the last person I would have expected? I knew by the papers that the man had escaped. And it was wholly possible that he would have been fool enough to come to me for help.”
“No—oh, no. I do not mean just that, Mr. Mirche,” Vance returned quietly. “I had another and more cogent reason for knowing you would not expect to find Pellinzi here that night… You knew he was dead in Riverdale.”
“How could I have known that he was dead?” shouted the frantic man, leaping to his feet. “You yourself said it was Dixie Del Marr to whom he would have appealed first, and—her car—her trip to Riverdale—Bah!… You can’t intimidate me!”
“Then take it more calmly, Dan,” said Owen petulantly. “There’s far too much upheaval in this putrid world. Confusion wearies me.”
“Again I fear you have misunderstood me, Mr. Mirche.” Vance ignored Owen’s complaint to his frightened henchman. “I meant merely that Miss Del Marr must have informed you. I am sure you two have no secrets from each other. Complete mutual trust, even in crime. And, knowing that Pellinzi was dead in Riverdale, and that your—shall we say, partner?—would hardly bring the body here, how could you imagine that the dead man in this office that night was Pellinzi? How natural to make a mistake in identity! Y’ see: it couldn’t be Pellinzi; therefore, it must be someone else. And how readily—and logically—Philip Allen came to your mind… But it wa
s Pellinzi.”
“How do you know it was Benny—?” Mirche was floundering, dazed by some inner mental vision. “You’re trying to trick me.” Then he almost shrieked: “I tell you, it couldn’t have been the Buzzard!”
“Ah, yes. An error on your part.” Vance spoke with quiet authority. “No possible doubt. Fingerprints don’t lie. You may ask Sergeant Heath, or the District Attorney. Or you may phone the Police Department and satisfy yourself.”
“Fool!” snapped Owen, his drowsy eyes on Mirche with a look of unutterable disgust. He turned to Vance. “After all, how futile it is—this devilish dream—this shadow across…” His voice trailed off.
Mirche was staring at some distant point beyond the confines of the room, alone with his thoughts, striving to assemble a disrupted mass of facts.
“But,” he mumbled, as if protesting weakly against some inevitable shapeless nemesis, “Miss Del Marr saw the body here, and…”
He lapsed again into calculating silence; and then a deep flush slowly mounted his features, gradually intensifying in colour till it seemed the blood must suffocate him. The muscles of his neck tightened; globules of sweat suddenly appeared on his forehead.
Stiffly, and as if with effort, the man turned toward Miss Del Marr, and in a voice of seething hatred, spat out at her a foul and bestial epithet.
CHAPTER XIX
THROUGH THE SHADOW
(Tuesday, May 21; 4 pm.)
Again some powerful emotion broke through Dixie Del Marr’s stony calm. A violent primitive passion blazed in her. She rose and faced Mirche, and her words came like an ineluctable torrent.
“Of course, you filthy creature, I let them think that the dead man in this office—the man you had killed—was Philip Allen. A few more days of doubt and torture for you—what did it matter? I had already waited years to avenge Benny. Oh, I knew only too well your treachery had sent him to prison for twenty years. And I could say nothing to save him. There was only one way for me to square the injustice. I must wait silently, patiently—I knew the moment would come some day… You liked me—you wanted me. That thought was already in your beastly mind when you let Benny get sent up. So I played up to you—I helped you in your rotten schemes. I flattered you. I did what you told me to. And all the time I loved Benny. But I waited…”
She gave a bitter laugh.
“Three years is a long time. And the moment for which I had waited came too late. But I console myself with the thought that Benny’s death was a merciful end. He couldn’t hope for anything, even when he had managed to break jail. He’d always have been hounded by the police. But he went mad in his cell, mad enough to think he could find real freedom from the prison where your dirty double-crossing had put him.”
Irresistible fury drove her on.
“But Benny never knew of your treachery. He thought you his friend. And he came to you for help. But, thank God, he called me too when he got back last Saturday. He told me he had phoned you before he reached the city. You had said that you would help him; and I knew it was a lie. But what could I do? I tried to warn him. But he wouldn’t listen. He thought that perhaps, after all these years, I might have reason to keep you two apart. He wouldn’t listen to me. He would tell me nothing of his plans, except that you were going to help him…”
“You’re insane,” Mirche managed to say.
“Shut up, fool,” sighed Owen. “You can’t change the pattern.”
“So I followed you, Dan—in the car you gave me, and with the chauffeur you supplied from your own crooked gang.” She laughed again, with the same bitterness. “He hates you as much as I do—but he’s afraid of you, for he knows how dangerous you can be… I followed you from the time you left here Saturday afternoon. I knew you wouldn’t let Benny come to you,—in spite of your vicious cruelty, you’re a coward. And I followed you uptown, and saw you go to Tony’s place… Too bad Rosa didn’t squint in her crystal and warn you!… And then I knew what a dirty deal you planned for Benny. But I didn’t think you had the guts to do it as you did. I thought that Benny was to die only when you yourself were safely back here. How could I tell that you had chosen Tony’s cigarettes for the job? I thought I could still warn Benny before it was too late—I thought I could still save him. So I followed you. I saw you pick him up from where he was hiding, far up in the park; I saw you drive north through Riverdale; I saw you stop at a lonely spot around a bend, where you thought no one could see you. And then I saw you place his body quickly beside the road and drive off.”
She swept us with a burning glance. “Oh, I’m not lying!” she cried. “Nothing matters any more—except the punishment of this creature.”
Mirche seemed paralyzed, unable to speak. Owen, still with his cynical detached smile, had not moved. “Please continue, Miss Del Marr,” Vance requested.
“I took Benny’s body into my own car, and I brought him back here when I knew Mirche would be upstairs. I came into the driveway, as I always do, and stopped close to the side door at the end of that passage.” She pointed toward the rear of the room. “No one could see from the street—not with the car door open. And the ivy helped, too. Then I went inside to make sure no one was in the hall beyond, and I gave the signal. My driver carried poor Benny in here, as I had instructed him, through that secret door; and placed him in the cabinet where I keep the cafe records locked. Yes! I brought Benny back and placed him at the very feet of his murderer!… You didn’t know, did you, Owl, that a dead man was in that cabinet when you sat here talking with me that night?”
“What of it?” There was no change in Owen’s expression.
“And when you went out, Owl, I moved Benny to the desk and telephoned the police.”
I now realized that Vance had deliberately provoked the woman’s frantic outburst. As she was speaking he had made a sign to the Sergeant; and Heath and Hennessey had surreptitiously closed in on Mirche, so that they now stood guard on either side of him.
“But how, Miss Del Marr,” asked Vance, “does your story account for the fact that the jonquille-scented cigarette-case was found in Pellinzi’s pocket?”
“Fear!—the conscience of this animal,” she retorted, pointing defiantly at Mirche. “When he saw what he thought was Allen’s body, his muddled, frightened brain remembered that in his own pocket was that man’s cigarette-case; and as he knelt beside the body, I saw him slip the case into the dead man’s coat. The impulsive act of a coward, by which he meant to rid himself of all association with what he thought a second death. He shrank from any possible connection with another dead man.”
“A reasonable version,” murmured Vance. “Yes. A rather subtle analysis… And you were content to let the truth regarding the dead man emerge through natural channels?”
“Yes! After I informed the police of Allen’s address, I knew they’d find out the truth sooner or later. And in the meantime this creature would worry and suffer—and I’d have plenty of ways of torturing him.”
“The ethics of woman…” Owen began; then lapsed into silence.
“Have you anything to say before we arrest you, Mirche?” Vance’s tone was low, but it cut like a lash.
Mirche stared hideously, and his flabby figure seemed to shrink. Suddenly, however, he drew himself up, and shook a quivering finger at Owen. His veins stood out like cords.
Owen made a small contemptuous noise.
“Your blood-pressure, fool,” he scoffed. “Don’t cheat the gibbet.”
I doubt if Mirche heard the biting words. Vituperation and profanity poured from him. His wrath seemed to surpass all human bounds. His venom left him a mere automaton—insensate, contorted, repulsive.
“You think I’ll take the rap for you—without a word! I have knuckled under too long already to your bidding. I carried out your dirty schemes for you. I’ve shut my mouth whenever they tried to twist from me the filthy truth about you. I may go to the chair, Owl—but not alone! I’ll take you and your poisoned, hypnotic brain along with me!”
“There’s the twisted mind behind it all!… I warned him of the Buzzard’s arrival, and he sent me for the cigarettes. He told me what I must do. I was afraid to refuse—I was in his power…”
Owen looked at the man with calm derision: he was still aloof and scornful. The play was drawing to a close, and his contemptuous boredom had not abated.
“You’re an unclean spectacle, Dan.” His lips barely moved. “You think I haven’t prepared myself against this moment? You are the fool—not me. I’ve kept every record—names, dates, places—all! For years I’ve kept them. I’ve hidden them where no one can find them. But I know where to find them! And the world will know—”
Those were the last words Mirche ever spoke.
There was a shot. A small black hole appeared on Mirche’s forehead between the eyes. Blood trickled from it. The man fell forward over the desk.
Heath and the two officers, their automatics drawn, started swiftly across the room to the passive Owen who sat without moving, one hand lying limply in his lap, holding a smoking revolver.
But Vance quickly intervened. His back to the silent figure in the chair, he faced Heath with a commanding gesture. Leisurely he turned, and extended his hand Owen glanced up at him; then, as if with instinctive courtesy, he turned the revolver round and held it out with meek indifference. Vance tossed the weapon into an empty chair and, looking down again at the man, waited.
Owen’s eyes were half closed and dreamy. He no longer seemed to be aware of his surroundings or of the sprawled body of Mirche whom he had just killed. Finally he spoke, his voice seeming to come from far off.
“That would have meant ripples.”
Vance nodded.
“Yes. Cleanliness of spirit… But now there’s the trial, and the chair, and the scandal—indelibly written…”
A shudder shook Owen’s slight frame. His voice rose to a shrill cry.
“But how can one escape the finite—how cut through the shadow—clean?”
Vance took out his cigarette-case and held it for a moment in his hand; but he did not open it.
The Philo Vance Megapack Page 259
