Philo Vance Omnibus Vol 1

by S. S. Van Dine

  "He is dead?" the Egyptian lifted his eyebrows slightly.

  "Oh, quite, Hani. Anûbis fell on him as he leaned over the end cabinet. A most effective death. But there was a certain justice in it. Doctor Bliss was guilty of Mr. Kyle's murder."

  "You and I knew that all along, effendi." The man smiled wistfuly at Vance. "But I fear that the doctor's death may have been my fault. When I unpacked the statue of Anûbis and set it in the corner, I noticed that the ankles were cracked. I did not tell the doctor, for I was afraid he might accuse me of having been careless, or of having deliberately injured his treasure."

  "No one is going to blame you for Doctor Bliss's death," Vance said casually. "We're leaving you to inform Mrs. Bliss of the tragedy. And Mr. Salveter will be returning early to-morrow morning. . . . Es-salâmu alei-kum."

  "Ma es salâm, effendi."

  Vance and Markham and I passed out into the heavy night air.

  "Let's walk," Vance said. "It's only a little over a mile to my apartment, and I feel the need of exercise."

  Markham fell in with the suggestion, and we strolled toward Fifth Avenue in silence. When we had crossed Madison Square and passed the Stuyvesant Club, Markham spoke.

  "It's almost unbelievable, Vance. It's the sort of thing that makes one superstitious. Here we were, confronted by an insoluble problem. We knew Bliss was guilty, and yet there was no way to reach him. And while we were debating the case he stepped into the museum and was accidentally killed by a falling statue on practically the same spot where he murdered Kyle. . . . Damn it! Such things don't happen in the orderly course of the world's events. And what makes it even more fantastic is that you suggested that he might meet with an accident."

  "Yes, yes. Interestin' coincidence." Vance seemed disinclined to discuss the matter.

  "And that Egyptian," Markham rumbled on. "He wasn't in the least astonished when you informed him of Bliss's death. He acted almost as if he expected some such news—"

  He suddenly drew up short. Vance and I stopped, too, and looked at him. His eyes were blazing.

  "Hani killed Bliss!"

  Vance sighed and shrugged.

  "Of course he did, Markham. My word! I thought you understood the situation."

  "Understood?" Markham was spluttering. "What do you mean?"

  "It was all so obvious, don't y' know," Vance said mildly. "I realized, just as you did, that there was no chance of convicting Bliss; so I suggested to Hani how he could terminate the whole silly affair—"

  "You suggested to Hani?"

  "During our conversation in the drawing-room. Really, Markham old dear, I'm not in the habit of indulgin' in weird conversations about mythology unless I have a reason. I simply let Hani know there was no legal way of bringing Bliss to justice, and intimated how he could overcome the difficulty and incidentally save you from a most embarrassin' predicament. . . ."

  "But Hani was in the hall, with the door closed." Markham's indignation was rising.

  "Quite so. I told him to stand outside the door. I knew very well he'd listen to us. . . ."

  "You deliberately—"

  "Oh, most deliberately." Vance spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. "While I babbled to you and appeared foolish no doubt, I was really talking to Hani. Of couse, I didn't know if he would grasp the opportunity or not. But he did. He equipped himself with a mace from the museum—I do hope it was the same mace that Bliss used on Kyle—and struck Bliss over the head. Then he dragged the body down the spiral stairs and laid it at the feet of Anûbis. With the mace he broke the statue's sandstone ankles, and dropped the figure over Bliss's skull. Very simple."

  "And all that rambling chatter of yours in the drawing-room—"

  "Was merely to keep you and Heath away in case Hani decided to act."

  Markham's eyes narrowed.

  "You can't get away with that sort of thing, Vance. I'll send Hani up for murder. There'll be finger-prints—"

  "Oh, no there won't, Markham. Didn't you notice the gloves on the hat-rack? Hani is no fool. He put on the gloves before he went to the study. You'd have a harder time convicting him than you'd have had convicting Bliss. Personally, I rather admire Hani. Stout fella!"

  For a time Markham was too angry to speak. Finally, however, he gave voice to an ejaculation.

  "It's outrageous!"

  "Of course it is," Vance agreed amiably. "So was the murder of Kyle." He lighted a cigarette and puffed on it cheerfully. "The trouble with you lawyers is, you're jealous and blood-thirsty. You wanted to send Bliss to the electric chair yourself, and couldn't; and Hani simplified everything for you. As I see it, you're merely disappointed because some one else took Bliss's life before you could get round to it. . . . Really, y' know, Markham, you're frightfully selfish."

  I feel that a short postscript will not be amiss. Markham had no difficulty, as you will no doubt remember, in convincing the press that Bliss had been guilty of the murder of Benjamin H. Kyle, and that his tragic "accidental" death had in it much of what is commonly called divine justice.

  Scarlett, contrary to the doctor's prediction, recovered; but it was many weeks before he could talk rationally. Vance and I visited him in the hospital late in August, and he corroborated Vance's theory about what had happened on that fatal night in the museum. Scarlett went to England early in September,—his father had died, leaving him an involved estate in Bedfordshire.

  Mrs. Bliss and Salveter were married in Nice late the following spring; and the excavations of Intef's tomb, I see from the bulletins of the Archaeological Institute, are continuing. Salveter is in charge of the work, and I am rather happy to note that Scarlett is the technical expert of the expedition.

  Hani, according to a recent letter from Salveter to Vance, has become reconciled to the "desecration of the tombs of his ancestors." He is still with Meryt-Amen and Salveter, and I'm inclined to think that his personal love for these two young people is stronger than his national prejudices.

  Footnotes

  [1] Doctor Mindrum W. C. Bliss, M.A., A.O.S.S., F.S.A., F.R.S., Hon. Mem. R.A.S., was the author of "The Stele of Intefoe at Koptos"; a "History of Egypt during the Hyksos Invasion"; "The Seventeenth Dynasty"; and a monograph on the Amen-hotpe III Colossi.

  [2] According to the Bliss-Weigall chronology the period between the death of Sebknefru-Rê and the overthrow of the Shepherd Kings at Memphis was from 1898 to 1577 B.C.—to wit: 321 years—as against the 1800 years claimed by the upholders to the longer chronology. This short chronology is even shorter according to Breasted and the German school. Breasted and Meyer dated the same period as from 1788 to 1580. These 208 years, by the way, Vance considered too short for the observable cultural changes.

  [3] As legal adviser, monetary steward and constant companion of Philo Vance, I kept a complete record of the principal criminal cases in which he participated during Markham's incumbency. Four of these cases I have already recorded in book form—"The Benson Murder Case," "The 'Canary' Murder Case," "The Greene Murder Case," and "The Bishop Murder Case."

  [4] Sergeant Ernest Heath, of the Homicide Bureau, had worked with Markham on most of his important cases. He was an honest, capable, but uninspired police officer, who, after the Benson and the "Canary" murder cases, had come to respect Vance highly. Vance admired the Sergeant; and the two—despite their fundamental differences in outlook and training—collaborated with admirable smoothness.

  [5] Kha-ef-Rê was the originator of the great Sphinx, and also of one of the three great Gizeh pyramids—Wer Kha-ef Rê (Kha-ef-Rê is mighty), now known as the Second Pyramid.

  [6] Popularly, and incorrectly, called the Memnon Colossi.

  [7] Captain Dubois was then the finger-print expert of the New York Police Department; and Doctor Emanuel Doremus was the Medical Examiner.

  [8] The daughter of this particular Pharaoh—Nefra—incidentally is the titular heroine of H. Rider Haggard's romance, "Queen of the Dawn." Haggard, following the chronology of H. R. Hall, placed Intef
in the Fourteenth Dynasty instead of the Seventeenth, making him a contemporary of the great Hyksos Pharaoh, Apopi, whose son Khyan—the hero of the book—marries Nefra. The researches of Bliss and Weigall seem to have demonstrated that this relationship is an anachronism.

  [9] The ancient Egyptian name of Heracleopolis.

  [10] This unusual name, I learned later, was the result of his father's interest in Egyptian mythology while in Maspero's service.

  [11] I learned from Vance that Doctor Bliss had read, in the British Museum, the Abbott Papyrus of the Twentieth Dynasty, which reported the inspection of this and other tombs. The report stated that, in early times, Intef V's tomb had been entered but not robbed: the raiders had evidently been unable to penetrate to the actual grave chamber. Bliss, therefore, had concluded that the mummy of Intef would still be found in the original tomb. An old native named Hasan had showed him where two obelisks had stood in front of the pyramid of Intef (Intef-o); and through this information he had succeeded in locating the pyramid, and had excavated at that point.

  [12] This colored portrait (with the Queen's name spelled Nefertiti) appears in "Kings and Queens of Ancient Egypt."

  [13] I learned subsequently from Scarlett that Mrs. Bliss's mother had been a Coptic lady of noble descent who traced her lineage from the last Saïte Pharaohs, and who, despite her Christian faith, had retained her traditional veneration for the native gods of her country. Her only child, Meryt-Amen ("Beloved of Amûn"), had been named in honor of the great Ramses II, whose full title as Son of the Sun-God was Ra-mosê-su Mery-Amûn. (The more correct English spelling of Mrs. Bliss's name would have been Meryet-Amûn, but the form chosen was no doubt based on the transliterations of Flinders Petrie, Maspero, and Abercrombie.) Meryet-Amûn was not an uncommon name among the queens and princesses of ancient Egypt. Three queens of that name have already been found—one (of the family of Ah-mosè I) whose mummy is in the Cairo Museum; another (of the family of Ramses II) whose tomb and sarcophagus are in the Valley of the Queens; and a third, whose burial chamber and mummy were recently found by the Egyptian Expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the hillside near the temple of Deir el Bahri at Thebes. This last Queen Meryet-Amûn was the daughter of Thut-mosè III and Meryet-Rê, and the wife of Amen-hotpe II. The story of the finding of her tomb is told in Section II of the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for November 1929.

  [14] I am not quite sure why Vance added this parenthetical phrase, unless it was because the word simoon comes from the Arabic samma (meaning to be poisoned), and he thought that Hani would better recognize the word in its correct etymological form.

  [15] The irrigation to which Scarlett referred was the system that resulted in the Aswân Dam, the Asyût Weir, and the Esneh Barrage.

  [16] Sir E. A. Wallis Budge defines ka (or, more correctly, ku) both as "the double of a man" and "a divine double." Breasted, explaining the ka, says it was the "vital force" which was supposed to animate the human body and also to accompany it into the next world. G. Elliot Smith calls the ka "one of the twin souls of the dead." (The other soul, ba, became deified in identification with Osiris.) Ka was the spirit of a mortal person, which remained in the tomb after death; and if the tomb were violated or destroyed, the ka had no resting-place. Our own word "soul" is not quite an accurate rendition of ka, but is perhaps as near as we can come to it in English. The German word Doppelgänger, however, is an almost exact translation.

  [17] An old Arabic proverb meaning: "The only answer to a fool is silence."

  [18] Guilfoyle, I recalled, was the detective of the Homicide Bureau who was set to watch Tony Skeel in the "Canary" murder case, and who reported on the all-night light at the Drukker house in the Bishop murder case.

  [19] The prism referred to by Salveter was the terra-cotta one acquired by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago during its reconnoitering expedition of 1919-20. The document was a variant duplicate of the Taylor prism in the British Museum, written about two years earlier under another eponym.

  [20] Vance was here indulging in hyperbole, and believed it no more than John Dennis believed that "a man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket." Vance knew several Egyptologists and respected them highly. Among them were Doctor Ludlow Bull and Doctor Henry A. Carey of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had once generously assisted him in his work on the Menander fragments.

  [21] Chief Inspector O'Brien was at that time in charge of the entire Police Department of the City of New York.

  [22] The Sun Cholera Mixture for dysentery (a recipe of Doctor G. W. Busteed) was so named because its formula had been published by the New York Sun during the cholera excitement in New York in June, 1849. It was admitted to the first edition of the National Formulary in 1883. Its constituents were tincture of capsicum, tincture of rhubarb, spirits of camphor, essence of peppermint, and opium.

  [23] Sir E. A. Wallis Budge was for many years Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum.

  [24] Swacker, a bright, energetic youth, was Markham's secretary.

  [25] A similar dagger was found on the royal mummy in the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amûn by the late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, and is now in the Cairo Museum.

  [26] Vance was referring jocularly to the declaration of Sakhmet in the Chapter of Opening the Mouth of Osiris Ani in the Egyptian Book of the Dead:

  "I am the Goddess Sakhmet, and I take my seat upon the side of the great west (wind?) of the skies."

  [27] Salveter was here referring to the Earl of Carnarvon, Colonel the Honorable Aubrey Herbert, General Sir Lee Stack, George J. Gould, Woolf Joel, Sir Archibald Douglas Reid, Professor Lafleur, H. G. Evelyn-White, and Professor Georges-Aaron Bénédite. Since that time two more names have been added to the fatal list—those of the Honorable Richard Bethell, secretary to Howard Carter, and Lord Westbury.

  [28] Theogonius was a friend of Simon Magus, who, because of his fear of the Emperor Caligula, pretended imbecility in order to hide his wisdom. Suetonius refers to him as Theogonius, but Scaliger, Casaubon and other historians give "Telegenius" as the correct spelling.

  [29] Vance of course was referring to the French Fête Nationale which falls on July 14th.

  [30] This was my guess during Vance's operation. Later I calculated the weight of the lid. It was ten feet long, four feet wide, and was surmounted by a large carved figure. A conservative estimate would give us ten cubic feet for the lid; and as the density of granite is approximately 2.70 grams per cubic centimeter, or 170 pounds per cubic foot, the lid would have weighed at least 1,700 pounds.

  [31] The actual dedication reads: "I inscribe this book of adventure to my son, Arthur John Rider Haggard, in the hope that in days to come he, and many other boys whom I shall never know, may in the acts and thoughts of Allan Quartermain and his companions, as herein recorded, find something to help him and them to reach to what, with Sir Henry Curtis, I hold to be the highest rank whereto we can obtain—the state of dignity of English gentlemen."

  [32] Nor did I. But while this record of mine was running serially in the American Magazine several readers wrote to me pointing out the inconsistency.

  [33] It will be recalled in the Greene murder case the murderer, pretending to be frightened at the sinister danger lurking in the dim corridors of the old Greene mansion, made a similar error in psychological judgment by descending to the pantry in the middle of the night for no other reason than to gratify a mild appetite for food.

  [34] Vance was here referring to the famous passage in the Chapter—"Das Judentum"—in Otto Weininger's "Geschlecht und Charakter": "Der Engländer hat dem Deutschen als tüchtiger, Empiriker, als Realpolitiker im Praktischen wie im Theoretischen, imponiert, aber damit ist seine Wichtigkeit für die Philosophie auch erschöpft. Es hat noch nie einen tieferen Denker gegeben, der beim Empirismus stehen geblieben ist; und noch nie einen Engländer, der über ihn selbstständig hinausgekommen wäre."

  THE KEN
NEL MURDER CASE

  First Published 1933

  TO

  THE SCOTTISH TERRIER CLUB

  OF AMERICA

  CONTENTS

  1. The Bolted Bedroom

  2. The Dead Man

  3. A Startling Discovery

  4. A Strange Interruption

  5. The Wounded Scottie

  6. The Ivory-Headed Stick

  7. The Missing Man

  8. The Ting Yao Vase

  9. A Threat of Arrest

  10. "Needles and Pins"

  11. More Bloodstains

  12. The Chinese Chest

  13. The Scented Lip-stick

  14. Vance Experiments

  15. The Dagger Strikes

  16. The Den Window

  17. The Six Judges

  18. The Scottie's Trail

  19. Death and Revelations

  20. The Startling Truth

  CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK

  Philo Vance

  John F.-X. Markham—District Attorney of New York County.

  Ernest Heath—Sergeant of the Homicide Bureau.

  Archer Coe—A collector of Chinese ceramics.

  Brisbane Coe—His brother.

  Raymond Wrede—A dilettante and friend of the Coes.

  Hilda Lake—Archer Coe's niece.

  Signor Eduàrdo Grassi—An officer in the Milan Museum of Oriental Antiquities.

  Liang Tsung Wei—The Coe cook.

  Gamble—The Coe butler.

  Luke Enright—An importer.

  Major Julius Higginbottom—Sportsman and dog breeder.

  Annie Cochrane—A maid.

  Hennessey—Detective of the Homicide Bureau.

  Burke—Detective of the Homicide Bureau.

  Snitkin—Detective of the Homicide Bureau.

  Sullivan—Detective of the Homicide Bureau.