The Scarab Murder Case

by S. S. Van Dine

  Vance Makes a Discovery

  (Friday, July 13; 4.45 p.m.)

  VANCE STOOD FOR a long time in uneasy silence. At length he lifted his eyes to Hennessey.

  “I wish you’d run up-stairs,” he said, “and take a post where you can watch all the rooms. I don’t want any communication between Mrs. Bliss and Salveter and Hani.”

  Hennessey glanced at Heath.

  “Those are orders,” the Sergeant informed him; and the detective went out with alacrity.

  Vance turned to Markham.

  “Maybe that priceless young ass actually wrote the silly letter,” he commented; and a worried look came over his face. “I say; let’s take a peep in the museum.”

  “See here, Vance,”—Markham rose—“why should the possibility of Salveter’s having written a foolish letter upset you?”

  “I don’t know—I’m not sure.” Vance went to the door; then pivoted suddenly. “But I’m afraid—I’m deuced afraid! Such a letter would give the murderer a loophole—that is, if what I think is true. If the letter was written, we’ve got to find it. If we don’t find it, there are several plausible explanations for its disappearance—and one of ’em is fiendish… But come. We’ll have to search the museum—on the chance that it was written, as Salveter says, and left in the table-drawer.”

  He went swiftly across the hall and threw open the great steel door.

  “If Doctor Bliss and Guilfoyle return while we’re in the museum,” he said to Snitkin, who stood leaning against the front door, “take them in the drawing-room and keep them there.”

  We passed down the steps into the museum, and Vance went at once to the little desk-table beside the obelisk. He looked at the yellow pad and tested the color of the ink. Then he pulled open the drawer and turned out its contents. After a few minutes’ inspection of the odds and ends, he restored the drawer to order and closed it. There was a small mahogany waste-basket beneath the table, and Vance emptied it on the floor. Going down on his knees he looked at each piece of crumpled paper. At length he rose and shook his head.

  “I don’t like this, Markham,” he said. “I’d feel infinitely better if I could find that letter.”

  He strolled about the museum looking for places where a letter might have been thrown. But when he reached the iron spiral stairs at the rear he leaned his back against them and regarded Markham hopelessly.

  “I’m becoming more and more frightened,” he remarked in a low voice. “If this devilish plot should work!…” He turned suddenly and ran up the stairs, beckoning to us as he did so. “There’s a chance—just a chance,” he called over his shoulder. “I should have thought of it before.”

  We followed him uncomprehendingly into Doctor Bliss’s study.

  “The letter should be in the study,” he said, striving to control his eagerness. “That would be logical…and this case is unbelievably logical, Markham—so logical, so mathematical, that we may eventually be able to read it aright. It’s too logical, in fact—that’s its weakness…”

  He was already on all fours delving into the spilled contents of Doctor Bliss’s waste-basket. After a moment’s search he picked up two torn pieces of yellow paper. He glanced at them carefully, and we could see tiny markings on them in green ink. He placed them to one side, and continued his search. After several minutes he had amassed a small pile of yellow paper fragments.

  “I think that’s about all,” he said, rising.

  He sat down in the swivel chair and laid the torn bits of yellow paper on the blotter.

  “This may take a little time, but since I know Egyptian hieroglyphs fairly well I ought to accomplish the task without too much difficulty, don’t y’know.”

  He began arranging and fitting the scraps together, while Markham, Heath and I stood behind him looking on with fascination. At the end of ten minutes he had reassembled the letter. Then he took a large sheet of white paper from one of the drawers of the desk and covered it with mucilage. Carefully he transferred the reconstructed letter, piece by piece, to the gummed paper.

  “There, Markham old dear,” he sighed, “is the unfinished letter which Salveter told us he was working on this morning between nine-thirty and ten.”

  The document was unquestionably a sheet of the yellow scratch-pad we had seen in the museum; and on it were four lines of old Egyptian characters painstakingly limned in green ink.

  Vance placed his finger on one of the groups of characters.

  “That,” he told us, “is the ankh hieroglyph.” He shifted his finger. “And that is the was sign… And here, toward the end, is the tem sign.”

  “And then what?” Heath was frankly nonplussed, and his tone was far from civil. “We can’t arrest a guy because he drew a lot of cock-eyed pictures on a piece of yellow paper.”

  “My word, Sergeant! Must you always be thinkin’ of clappin’ persons into oubliettes? I fear you haven’t a humane nature. Very sad… Why not try to cerebrate occasionally?” He looked up and I was startled by his seriousness. “The young and impetuous Mr. Salveter confesses that he has foolishly penned a letter to his Dulcibella in the language of the Pharaohs. He tells us he has placed the unfinished billet-doux in the drawer of a table in the museum. We discover that it is not in the table-drawer, but has been ruthlessly dismembered and thrown into the waste-basket in Doctor Bliss’s study… On what possible grounds could you regard the Paul of this epistle as a murderer?”

  “I ain’t regarding nobody as anything,” retorted Heath violently. “But there’s too much shenanigan going on around here to suit me. I want action.”

  Vance contemplated him gravely.

  “For once I, too, want action, Sergeant. If we don’t get some sort of action before long, we may expect something even worse than has already happened. But it must be intelligent action—not the action that the murderer wants us to take. We’re caught in the meshes of a cunningly fabricated plot; and, unless we watch our step, the culprit will go free and we’ll still be battling with the cobwebs.”

  Heath grunted and began poring over the reconstructed letter.

  “That’s a hell of a way for a guy to write to a dame,” he commented, with surly disdain. “Give me a nice dirty shooting by a gangster. These flossy crimes make me sick.”

  Markham was scowling.

  “See here, Vance,” he said; “do you believe the murderer tore up that letter and threw it in Doctor Bliss’s waste-basket?”

  “Can there be any doubt of it?” Vance asked in return.

  “But what, in Heaven’s name, could have been his object?”

  “I don’t know—yet. That’s why I’m frightened.” Vance gazed out of the rear window. “But the destruction of that letter is part of the plot; and until we can get some definite and workable evidence, we’re helpless.”

  “Still,” persisted Markham, “if the letter was incriminating, it strikes me it would have been valuable to the murderer. Tearing it up doesn’t help any one.”

  Heath looked first at Vance and then at Markham.

  “Maybe,” he offered, “Salveter tore it up himself.”

  “When?” Vance asked quietly.

  “How do I know?” The Sergeant was nettled. “Maybe when he croaked the old man.”

  “If that were the case, he wouldn’t have admitted having written it.”

  “Well,” Heath persevered, “maybe he tore it up when you sent him to find it a few minutes ago.”

  “And then, after tearing it up, he came here and put it in the basket where it might be found… No, Sergeant. That’s not entirely reasonable. If Salveter had been frightened and had decided to get rid of the letter, he’d have destroyed it completely—burned it, most likely, and left no traces of it about.”

  Markham, too, had become fascinated by the hieroglyphs Vance had pieced together. He stood regarding the conjoined bits of paper perplexedly.

  “You think, then, we were intended to find it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” Vance’s far-a
way gaze did not shift. “It may be…and yet… No! There was only one chance in a thousand that we would come across it. The person who put it in the waste-basket here couldn’t have known, or even guessed, that Salveter would tell us of having written it and left it lying about.”

  “On the other hand,”—Markham was loath to relinquish his train of thought—“the letter might have been put here in the hope of involving Bliss still further—that is, it might have been regarded by the murderer as another planted clew, along with the scarab pin, the financial report, and the foot-prints.”

  Vance shook his head.

  “No. That couldn’t be. Bliss, d’ye see, couldn’t have written the letter,—it’s too obviously a communication from Salveter to Mrs. Bliss.”

  Vance picked up the assembled letter and studied it for a time.

  “It’s not particularly difficult to read for any one who knows something of Egyptian. It says exactly what Salveter said it did.” He tossed the paper back on the desk. “There’s something unspeakably devilish behind this. And the more I think of it the more I’m convinced we were not intended to find the letter. My feeling is, it was carelessly thrown away by some one—after it had served its purpose.”

  “But what possible purpose—?” Markham began.

  “If we knew the purpose, Markham,” said Vance with much gravity, “we might avert another tragedy.”

  Markham compressed his lips grimly. I knew what was going through his mind: he was thinking of Vance’s terrifying predictions in the Greene and the Bishop cases—predictions which came true with all the horror of final and ineluctable catastrophe.

  “You believe this affair isn’t over yet?” he asked slowly.

  “I know it isn’t over. The plan isn’t complete. We forestalled the murderer by releasing Doctor Bliss. And now he must carry on. We’ve seen only the dark preliminaries of his damnable scheme—and when the plot is finally revealed, it will be monstrous…”

  Vance went quietly to the door leading into the hall and, opening it a few inches, looked out.

  “And, Markham,” he said, reclosing the door, “we must be careful—that’s what I’ve been insisting on right along. We must not fall into any of the murderer’s traps. The arrest of Doctor Bliss was one of those traps. A single false step on our part, and the plot will succeed.”

  He turned to Heath.

  “Sergeant, will you be so good as to bring me the yellow pad and the pen and ink from the table in the museum?… We, too, must cover up our tracks, for we are being stalked as closely as we are stalking the murderer.”

  Heath, without a word, went into the museum, and a few moments later returned with the requested articles. Vance took them and sat down at the doctor’s desk. Then placing Salveter’s letter before him he began copying roughly the phonograms and ideograms on a sheet of the yellow pad.

  “It’s best, I think,” he explained as he worked, “that we hide the fact that we’ve found the letter. The person who tore it up and threw it in the basket may suspect that we’ve discovered it and look for the fragments. If they’re not here, he will be on his guard. It’s merely a remote precaution, but we can’t afford to make a slip. We’re confronted by a mind of diabolical cleverness…”

  When he had finished transcribing a dozen or so of the symbols, he tore the paper into pieces of the same size as those of the original letter, and mixed them with the contents of the waste-basket. Then he folded up Salveter’s original letter and placed it in his pocket.

  “Do you mind, Sergeant, returning the paper and ink to the museum?”

  “You oughta been a crook, Mr. Vance,” Heath remarked good-naturedly, picking up the pad and ink-stand and disappearing through the steel door.

  “I don’t see any light,” Markham commented gloomily. “The farther we go, the more involved the case becomes.”

  Vance nodded sombrely.

  “There’s nothing we can do now but await developments. Thus far we’ve checked the murderer’s king; but he still has several moves. It’s like one of Alekhine’s chess combinations—we can’t tell just what was in his mind when he began the assault. And he may produce a combination that will clean the board and leave us defenseless…”

  Heath reappeared at this moment, looking uneasy.

  “I don’t like that damn room,” he grumbled. “Too many corpses. Why do these scientific bugs have to go digging up mummies and things? It’s what you might call morbid.”

  “A perfect criticism of Egyptologists, Sergeant,” Vance replied with a sympathetic grin. “Egyptology isn’t an archæological science—it’s a pathological condition, a cerebral visitation—dementia scholastica. Once the spirillum terrigenum enters your system, you’re lost—cursed with an incurable disease. If you dig up corpses that are thousands of years old, you’re an Egyptologist; if you dig up recent corpses you’re a Burke or a Hare, and the law swoops down on you. It all comes under the head of body-snatching…”*

  “Be that as it may,”—Heath was still troubled and was chewing his cigar viciously—“I don’t like the things in that morgue. And I specially don’t like that black coffin under the front windows. What’s in it, Mr. Vance?”

  “The granite sarcophagus? Really, I don’t know, Sergeant. It’s empty in all probability, unless Doctor Bliss uses it as a storage chest—which isn’t likely, considerin’ the weight of the lid.”

  There came a knock on the hall door, and Snitkin informed us that Guilfoyle had arrived with Doctor Bliss.

  “There are one or two questions,” Vance said, “that I want to ask him. Then, I think, Markham, we can toddle along: I’m fainting for muffins and marmalade…”

  “Quit now?” demanded Heath in astonished disgust. “What’s the idea? We’ve just begun this investigation!”

  “We’ve done more than that,” Vance told him softly. “We’ve avoided every snare laid for us by the murderer. We’ve upset all his calculations and forced him to reconstruct his trenches. As the case stands now, it’s a stalemate. The board will have to be set up again—and, fortunately for us, the murderer gets the white pieces. It’s his first move. He simply has to win the game, d’ye see. We can afford to play for a draw.”

  “I’m beginning to understand what you mean, Vance.” Markham nodded slowly. “We’ve refused to follow his false moves, and now he must rebait his trap.”

  “Spoken with a precision and clarity wholly unbecoming a lawyer,” returned Vance, with a forced smile. Then he sobered again. “Yes, I think he will rebait the trap before he takes any final steps. And I’m hopin’ that the new bait will give us a solution to the entire plot and permit the Sergeant to make his arrest.”

  “Well, all I’ve gotta say,” Heath complained, “is that this is the queerest case I was ever mixed up in. We go and eat muffins, and wait for the guilty guy to spill the beans! If I was to outline that technic to O’Brien* he’d call an ambulance and send me to Bellevue.”

  “I’ll see that you don’t go to a psychopathic ward, Sergeant,” Markham said irritably, walking toward the door.

  Footnotes

  *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.

  *Chief Inspector O’Brien was at that time in charge of the entire Police Department of the City of New York.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A Call After Midnight

  (Friday, July 18; 5.15 p.m.)

  WE FOUND DOCTOR Bliss in the drawing-room, slumped in a deep sprawling chair, his tweed hat pulled down over his eyes. Beside him stood Guilfoyle smirking triumphantly.

  Vance was annoyed, and took no pains to hide the fact.

  “Tell your efficient bloodhound to wait outside, will you, Sergeant?�
��

  “O.K.” Heath looked commiseratingly at Guilfoyle. “Out on the cement, Guil,” he ordered. “And don’t ask any questions. This ain’t a murder case—it’s a Hallowe’en party in a bug-house.”

  The detective grinned and left us.

  Bliss lifted his eyes. He was a dejected-looking figure. His face was flushed, and apprehension and humiliation were written on his sunken features.

  “Now, I suppose,” he said in a quavering voice, “you’ll arrest me for this heinous murder. But—oh, my God, gentlemen!—I assure you—”

  Vance had stepped toward him.

  “Just a moment, doctor,” he broke in. “Don’t upset yourself. We’re not going to arrest you; but we would like an explanation of your amazin’ action. Why should you, if you are innocent, attempt to leave the country?”

  “Why…why?” The man was nervous and excited. “I was afraid—that’s why. Everything is against me. All the evidence points toward me… There’s some one here who hates me and wants me out of the way. It’s only too obvious. The planting of my scarab pin beside poor Kyle’s body, and that financial report found in the murdered man’s hand, and those terrible foot-prints leading to my study—don’t you think I know what it all means? It means that I must pay the price—I, I.” He struck his chest weakly. “And other things will be found; the person who killed Kyle won’t rest content until I’m behind the bars—or dead. I know it—I know it!… That’s why I tried to get away. And now you’ve brought me back to a living death—to a fate more awful than the one that befell my old benefactor…”

  His head dropped forward and a shudder ran through his body.

  “Still, it was foolish to attempt to escape, doctor,” Markham said gently. “You might have trusted us. I assure you no injustice will be done you. We have learned many things in the course of our investigation; and we have reason to believe that you were drugged with powdered opium during the period of the crime—”

  “Powdered opium!” Bliss almost leapt out of his chair. “That’s what I tasted! There was something the matter with the coffee this morning—it had a curious flavor. At first I thought Brush hadn’t made it the way I’d instructed him. Then I got drowsy, and forgot all about it… Opium! I know the taste. I once had dysentery in Egypt, and took opium and capsicum—my Sun Cholera Mixture* had run out.” His mouth sagged open, and he gave Markham a look of terrified appeal. “Poisoned in my own house!” Suddenly a grim vindictiveness shone in his eyes. “You’re right, sir,” he said, with metallic hardness. “I shouldn’t have attempted to run away. My place is here, and my duty is to help you—”