Philo Vance Omnibus Vol 1
Page 52
He paused and drew a deep inspiration.
"I have never been partial to halfway measures," he continued impassively. "I have no talent for compromise. Perhaps I am a victim of my heritage. But my instinct is to play out a hand to the last chip—to force whatever danger threatens. And for just five minutes, a week ago, I understood how the fanatics of old could, with a calm mind and a sense of righteousness, torture their enemies who threatened them with spiritual destruction. . . . I chose the only course which might save those I love from disgrace and suffering. It meant taking a desperate risk. But the blood within me was such that I did not hesitate, and I was fired by the agony of a tremendous hate. I staked my life against a living death, on the remote chance of attaining peace. And I lost."
Again he smiled faintly.
"Yes—the fortunes of the game. . . . But don't think for a minute that I am complaining or seeking sympathy. I have lied to others perhaps, but not to myself. I detest a whiner—a self-excuser. I want you to understand that."
He reached to the table at his side and took up a small limp-leather volume. "Only last night I was reading Wilde's 'De Profundis.' Had I been gifted with words, I might have made a similar confession. Let me show you what I mean so that, at least, you won't attribute to me the final infamy of cravenness."
He opened the book, and began reading in a voice whose very fervor held us all silent:
"'I brought about my own downfall. No one, be he high or low, need be ruined by any other hand than his own. Readily as I confess this, there are many who will, at this time at least, receive the confession sceptically. And although I thus mercilessly accuse myself, bear in mind that I do so without offering any excuse. Terrible as is the punishment inflicted upon me by the world, more terrible is the ruin I have brought upon myself. . . . In the dawn of manhood I recognized my position. . . . I enjoyed an honored name, an eminent social position. . . . Then came the turning-point. I had become tired of dwelling on the heights—and descended by my own will into the depths. . . . I satisfied my desires wherever it suited me, and passed on. I forgot that every act, even the most insignificant act of daily life, in some degree, makes or unmakes the character; and every occurrence which transpires in the seclusion of the chamber will some day be proclaimed from the housetops. I lost control of myself. I was no longer at the helm, and knew it not. I had become a slave to pleasure. . . . One thing only is left to me—complete humility.'"
He tossed the book aside.
"You understand now, Mr. Markham?"
Markham did not speak for several moments.
"Do you care to tell me about Skeel?" he at length asked.
"That swine!" Spotswoode sneered his disgust. "I could murder such creatures every day and regard myself as a benefactor of society. . . . Yes, I strangled him, and I would have done it before, only the opportunity did not offer. . . . It was Skeel who was hiding in the closet when I returned to the apartment after the theater, and he must have seen me kill the woman. Had I known he was behind that locked closet door, I would have broken it down and wiped him out then. But how was I to know? It seemed natural that the closet might have been kept locked—I didn't give it a second thought. . . . And the next night he telephoned me to the club here. He had first called my home on Long Island and learned that I was staying here. I had never seen him before—didn't know of his existence. But, it seems, he had equipped himself with a knowledge of my identity—probably some of the money I gave to the woman went to him. What a muck heap I had fallen into! . . . When he phoned, he mentioned the phonograph, and I knew he had found out something. I met him in the Waldorf lobby, and he told me the truth: there was no doubting his word. When he saw I was convinced, he demanded so enormous a sum that I was staggered."
Spotswoode lit a cigarette with steady fingers.
"Mr. Markham, I am no longer a rich man. The truth is, I am on the verge of bankruptcy. The business my father left me has been in a receiver's hands for nearly a year. The Long Island estate on which I live belongs to my wife. Few people know these things, but unfortunately they are true. It would have been utterly impossible for me to raise the amount Skeel demanded, even had I been inclined to play the coward. I did, however, give him a small sum to keep him quiet for a few days, promising him all he asked as soon as I could convert some of my holdings. I hoped in the interim to get possession of the record and thus spike his guns. But in that I failed; and so, when he threatened to tell you everything, I agreed to bring the money to his home late Saturday night. I kept the appointment, with the full intention of killing him. I was careful about entering, but he had helped me by explaining when and how I could get in without being seen. Once there, I wasted no time. The first moment he was off his guard I seized him—and gloried in the act. Then, locking the door and taking the key, I walked out of the house quite openly, and returned here to the club.—That's all, I think."
Vance was watching him musingly.
"So when you raised my bet last night," he said, "the amount represented a highly important item in your exchequer."
Spotswoode smiled faintly. "It represented practically every cent I had in the world."
"Astonishin'! And would you mind if I asked you why you selected the label of Beethoven's Andante for your record?"
"Another miscalculation," the man said wearily. "It occurred to me that if anyone should, by any chance, open the phonograph before I could return and destroy the record, he wouldn't be as likely to want to hear the classics as he would a more popular selection."
"And one who detests popular music had to find it! I fear, Mr. Spotswoode, that an unkind fate sat in at your game."
"Yes. . . . If I were religiously inclined, I might talk poppycock about retribution and divine punishment."
"I'd like to ask you about the jewelry," said Markham. "It's not sportsmanlike to do it, and I wouldn't suggest it, except that you've already confessed voluntarily to the main points at issue."
"I shall take no offense at any question you desire to ask, sir," Spotswoode answered. "After I had recovered my letters from the document box, I turned the rooms upside down to give the impression of a burglary—being careful to use gloves, of course. And I took the woman's jewelry for the same reason. Parenthetically, I had paid for most of it. I offered it as a sop to Skeel, but he was afraid to accept it; and finally I decided to rid myself of it. I wrapped it in one of the club newspapers and threw it in a wastebin near the Flatiron Building."
"You wrapped it in the morning Herald," put in Heath. "Did you know that Pop Cleaver reads nothing but the Herald?"
"Sergeant!" Vance's voice was a cutting reprimand. "Certainly Mr. Spotswoode was not aware of that fact—else he would not have selected the Herald."
Spotswoode smiled at Heath with pitying contempt. Then, with an appreciative glance at Vance, he turned back to Markham.
"An hour or so after I had disposed of the jewels, I was assailed by the fear that the package might be found and the paper traced. So I bought another Herald and put it on the rack." He paused. "Is that all?"
Markham nodded.
"Thank you—that's all; except that I must now ask you to go with these officers."
"In that case," said Spotswoode quietly, "there's a small favor I have to ask of you, Mr. Markham. Now that the blow has fallen, I wish to write a certain note—to my wife. But I want to be alone when I write it. Surely you understand that desire. It will take but a few moments. Your men may stand at the door—I can't very well escape. . . . The victor can afford to be generous to that extent."
Before Markham had time to reply, Vance stepped forward and touched his arm.
"I trust," he interposed, "that you won't deem it necess'ry to refuse Mr. Spotswoode's request."
Markham looked at him hesitantly.
"I guess you've pretty well earned the right to dictate, Vance," he acquiesced.
Then he ordered Heath and Snitkin to wait outside in the hall, and he and Vance and I went into the adjoining r
oom. Markham stood, as if on guard, near the door; but Vance, with an ironical smile, sauntered to the window and gazed out into Madison Square.
"My word, Markham!" he declared. "There's something rather colossal about that chap. Y' know, one can't help admiring him. He's so eminently sane and logical."
Markham made no response. The drone of the city's midafternoon noises, muffled by the closed windows, seemed to intensify the ominous silence of the little bedchamber where we waited.
Then came a sharp report from the other room.
Markham flung open the door. Heath and Snitkin were already rushing toward Spotswoode's prostrate body, and were bending over it when Markham entered. Immediately he wheeled about and glared at Vance, who now appeared in the doorway.
"He's shot himself!"
"Fancy that," said Vance.
"You—you knew he was going to do that?" Markham spluttered.
"It was rather obvious, don't y' know."
Markham's eyes flashed angrily.
"And you deliberately interceded for him—to give him the opportunity?"
"Tut, tut, my dear fellow!" Vance reproached him. "Pray don't give way to conventional moral indignation. However unethical—theoretically—it may be to take another's life, a man's own life is certainly his to do with as he chooses. Suicide is his inalienable right. And under the paternal tyranny of our modern democracy, I'm rather inclined to think it's about the only right he has left, what?"
He glanced at his watch and frowned.
"D' ye know, I've missed my concert, bothering with your beastly affairs," he complained amiably, giving Markham an engaging smile; "and now you're actually scolding me. 'Pon my word, old fellow, you're deuced ungrateful!"
Footnotes
[1] The Antlers Club has since been closed by the police; and Red Raegan is now serving a long term in Sing Sing for grand larceny.
[2] Written especially for her by B. G. De Sylva.
[3] "The Benson Murder Case"
[4] The Loeb-Leopold crime, the Dorothy King case, and the Hall-Mills murder came later; but the Canary murder proved fully as conspicuous a case as the Nan Patterson-"Caesar" Young affair, Durant's murder of Blanche Lamont and Minnie Williams in San Francisco, the Molineux arsenic-poisoning case, and the Carlyle Harris morphine murder. To find a parallel in point of public interest one must recall the Borden double-murder in Fall River, the Thaw case, the shooting of Elwell, and the Rosenthal murder.
[5] The case referred to here was that of Mrs. Elinor Quiggly, a wealthy widow living at the Adlon Hotel in West 96th Street. She was found on the morning of September 5 suffocated by a gag which had been placed on her by robbers who had evidently followed her home from the Club Turque—a small but luxurious all-night cafe at 89 West 48th Street. The killing of the two detectives, McQuade and Cannison, was, the police believe, due to the fact that they were in possession of incriminating evidence against the perpetrators of the crime. Jewelry amounting to over $50,000 was stolen from the Quiggly apartment.
[6] The Stuyvesant was a large club, somewhat in the nature of a glorified hotel; and its extensive membership was drawn largely from the political, legal, and financial ranks.
[7] The case to which Vance referred, I ascertained later, was Shatterham v. Shatterham, 417 Mich., 79—a testamentary case.
[8] Heath had become acquainted with Vance during the investigation of the Benson murder case two months previously.
[9] It is an interesting fact that for the nineteen years he had been connected with the New York Police Department, he had been referred to, by his superiors and subordinates alike, as "the Professor."
[10] His full name was William Elmer Jessup, and he had been attached to the 308th Infantry of the 77th Division of the Overseas Forces.
[11] "Ben" was Colonel Benjamin Hanlon, the commanding officer of the Detective Division attached to the district attorney's office.
[12] Vance was here referring to the famous Molineux case, which, in 1898, sounded the death knell of the old Knickerbocker Athletic Club at Madison Avenue and 45th Street. But it was commercialism that ended the Stuyvesant's career. This club, which stood on the north side of Madison Square, was razed a few years later to make room for a skyscraper.
[13] Abe Rubin was at that time the most resourceful and unscrupulous criminal lawyer in New York. Since his disbarment two years ago, little has been heard from him.
[14] I sent a proof of the following paragraphs to Vance, and he edited and corrected them; so that, as they now stand, they represent his theories in practically his own words.
[15] The treatise referred to by Vance was Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik.
[16] Recently I ran across an article by Doctor George A. Dorsey, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, and author of "Why We Behave Like Human Beings," which bore intimate testimony to the scientific accuracy of Vance's theory. In it Doctor Dorsey said: "Poker is a cross-section of life. The way a man behaves in a poker game is the way he behaves in life. . . . His success or failure lies in the way his physical organism responds to the stimuli supplied by the game. . . . I have studied humanity all my life from the anthropologic and psychological viewpoint. And I have yet to find a better laboratory exercise than to observe the manners of men as they see my raise and come back at me. . . . The psychologist's verbalized, visceral, and manual behaviors are functioning at their highest in a poker game. . . . I can truthfully say that I learned about men from poker."
THE GREENE MURDER CASE
First Published 1928
CONTENTS
1. A DOUBLE TRAGEDY
2. THE INVESTIGATION OPENS
3. AT THE GREENE MANSION
4. THE MISSING REVOLVER
5. HOMICIDAL POSSIBILITIES
6. AN ACCUSATION
7. VANCE ARGUES THE CASE
8. THE SECOND TRAGEDY
9. THE THREE BULLETS
10. THE CLOSING OF A DOOR
11. A PAINFUL INTERVIEW
12. A MOTOR RIDE
13. THE THIRD TRAGEDY
14. FOOTPRINTS ON THE CARPET
15. THE MURDERER IN THE HOUSE
16. THE LOST POISONS
17. THE TWO WILLS
18. IN THE LOCKED LIBRARY
19. SHERRY AND PARALYSIS
20. THE FOURTH TRAGEDY
21. A DEPLETED HOUSEHOLD
22. THE SHADOWY FIGURE
23. THE MISSING FACT
24. A MYSTERIOUS TRIP
25. THE CAPTURE
26. THE ASTOUNDING TRUTH
1. A DOUBLE TRAGEDY
(Tuesday, November 9; 10 a.m.)
IT has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological writers—men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H. B. Irving, Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton—have not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy; for here, surely, is one of the outstanding murder mysteries of modern times—a case practically unique in the annals of latter-day crime. And yet I realize, as I read over my own voluminous notes on the case, and inspect the various documents relating to it, how little of its inner history ever came to light, and how impossible it would be for even the most imaginative chronicler to fill in the hiatuses.
The world, of course, knows the external facts. For over a month the Press of two continents was filled with accounts of this appalling tragedy; and even the bare outline was sufficient to gratify the public's craving for the abnormal and the spectacular. But the inside story of the catastrophe surpassed even the wildest flights of public fancy; and, as I now sit down to divulge those facts for the first time, I am oppressed with a feeling akin to unreality, although I was a witness to most of them and hold in my possession the incontestable records of their actuality.
Of the fiendish ingenuity which lay behind this terrible crime, of the warped psychological motives that inspired it, and of the strange hidden sources of its technique, the world is completely ignorant. Moreover, no explanati
on has ever been given of the analytic steps that led to its solution. Nor have the events attending the mechanism of that solution— events in themselves highly dramatic and unusual—ever been recounted. The public believes that the termination of the case was a result of the usual police methods of investigation; but this is because the public is unaware of many of the vital factors of the crime itself, and because both the Police Department and the District Attorney's office have, as if by tacit agreement, refused to make known the entire truth—whether for fear of being disbelieved or merely because there are certain things so terrible that no man wishes to talk of them, I do not know.
The record, therefore, which I am about to set down is the first complete and unedited history of the Greene holocaust.[1] I feel that now the truth should be known, for it is history, and one should not shrink from historical facts. Also, I believe that the credit for the solution of this case should go where it belongs.
The man who elucidated the mystery and brought to a close that palimpsest of horror was, curiously enough, in no way officially connected with the police; and in all the published accounts of the murder his name was not once mentioned. And yet, had it not been for him and his novel methods of criminal deduction, the heinous plot against the Greene family would have been conclusively successful. The police in their researches were dealing dogmatically with the evidential appearances of the crime, whereas the operations of the criminal were being conducted on a plane quite beyond the comprehension of the ordinary investigator.
This man who, after weeks of sedulous and disheartening analysis, eventually ferreted out the source of the horror, was a young social aristocrat, an intimate friend of John F.-X. Markham, the District Attorney. His name I am not at liberty to divulge, but for the purposes of these chronicles I have chosen to call him Philo Vance. He is no longer in this country, having transferred his residence several years ago to a villa outside Florence; and, since he has no intention of returning to America, he has acceded to my request to publish the history of the criminal cases in which he participated as a sort of amicus curiae. Markham also has retired to private life; and Sergeant Ernest Heath, that doughty and honest officer of the Homicide Bureau who officially handled the Greene case for the Police Department, has, through an unexpected legacy, been able to gratify his life's ambition to breed fancy Wyandottes on a model farm in the Mohawk Valley. Thus circumstances have made it possible for me to publish my intimate records of the Greene tragedy.