The Greatest Murder Mysteries of S. S. Van Dine - 12 Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). S.S. Van Dine
Your vaunted penetration amounts only to that, does it? Well, well! Here and now I become a professor of the higher mental sciences, and I pronounce solemnly that Doctor Crippen murdered the Odell girl. To be sure, Crippen’s dead; but that fact doesn’t interfere with my newly adopted psychological means of deduction. Crippen’s nature, you see, fits perfectly with all the esoteric and recondite indications of the crime. To-morrow I’ll apply for an order of exhumation.”
Vance looked at him with waggish reproachfulness, and sighed.
“Recognition of my transcendent genius, I see, is destined to be posthumous. Omnia post obitum fingit majora vetustas. In the meantime I bear the taunts and jeers of the multitude with a stout heart. My head is bloody, but unbowed.”
He looked at his watch, and then seemed to become absorbed with some line of thought.
“Markham,” he said, after several minutes, “I’ve a concert at three o’clock, but there’s an hour to spare. I want to take another look at that apartment and its various approaches. Spotswoode’s trick—and I’m convinced it was nothing more than a trick—was enacted there; and if we are ever to find the explanation, we shall have to look for it on the scene.”
I had got the impression that Markham, despite his emphatic denial of the possibility of Spotswoode’s guilt, was not entirely unconvinced. Therefore, I was not surprised when, with only a half-hearted protest, he assented to Vance’s proposal to revisit the Odell apartment.
CHAPTER XXIX
BEETHOVEN’S “ANDANTE”
(Tuesday, September 18; 2 p. m.)
Less than half an hour later we again entered the main hall of the little apartment building in 71st Street. Spively, as usual, was on duty at the switchboard. Just inside the public reception-room the officer on guard reclined in an easy chair, a cigar in his mouth. On seeing the District Attorney, he rose with forced alacrity.
“When you going to open things up, Mr. Markham?” he asked. “This rest-cure is ruinin’ my health.”
“Very soon, I hope, officer,” Markham told him. “Any more visitors?”
“Nobody, sir.” The man stifled a yawn.
“Let’s have your key to the apartment.—Have you been inside?”
“No, sir. Orders were to stay out here.”
We passed into the dead girl’s living-room. The shades were still up, and the sunlight of midday was pouring in. Nothing apparently had been touched: not even the overturned chairs had been righted. Markham went to the window and stood, his hands behind him, surveying the scene despondently. He was laboring under a growing uncertainty, and he watched Vance with a cynical amusement which was far from spontaneous.
Vance, after lighting a cigarette, proceeded to inspect the two rooms, letting his eyes rest searchingly on the various disordered objects. Presently he went into the bathroom and remained several minutes. When he came out he carried a towel with several dark smudges on it.
“This is what Skeel used to erase his finger-prints,” he said, tossing the towel on the bed.
“Marvellous!” Markham rallied him. “That, of course, convicts Spotswoode.”
“Tut, tut! But it helps substantiate my theory of the crime.” He walked to the dressing-table and sniffed at a tiny silver atomizer. “The lady used Coty’s Chypre,” he murmured. “Why will they all do it?”
“And just what does that help substantiate?”
“Markham dear, I’m absorbing atmosphere. I’m attuning my soul to the apartment’s vibrations. Do let me attune in peace. I may have a visitation at any moment—a revelation from Sinai, as it were.”
He continued his round of investigation, and at last passed out into the main hall, where he stood, one foot holding open the door, looking about him with curious intentness. When he returned to the living-room, he sat down on the edge of the rosewood table, and surrendered himself to gloomy contemplation. After several minutes he gave Markham a sardonic grin.
“I say! This is a problem. Dash it all, it’s uncanny!”
“I had an idea,” scoffed Markham, “that sooner or later you’d revise your deductions in regard to Spotswoode.”
Vance stared idly at the ceiling.
“You’re devilish stubborn, don’t y’ know. Here I am trying to extricate you from a deuced unpleasant predicament, and all you do is to indulge in caustic observations calculated to damp my youthful ardor.”
Markham left the window and seated himself on the arm of the davenport facing Vance. His eyes held a worried look.
“Vance, don’t get me wrong. Spotswoode means nothing in my life. If he did this thing, I’d like to know it. Unless this case is cleared up, I’m in for an ungodly walloping by the newspapers. It’s not to my interests to discourage any possibility of a solution. But your conclusion about Spotswoode is impossible. There are too many contradictory facts.”
“That’s just it, don’t y’ know. The contradict’ry indications are far too perfect. They fit together too beautifully; they’re almost as fine as the forms in a Michelangelo statue. They’re too carefully co-ordinated, d’ ye see, to have been merely a haphazard concatenation of circumstances. They signify conscious design.”
Markham rose and, slowly returning to the window, stood looking out into the little rear yard.
“If I could grant your premise that Spotswoode killed the girl,” he said, “I could follow your syllogism. But I can’t very well convict a man on the grounds that his defense is too perfect.”
“What we need, Markham, is inspiration. The mere contortions of the sibyl are not enough.” Vance took a turn up and down the room. “What really infuriates me is that I’ve been outwitted. And by a manufacturer of automobile access’ries! . . . It’s most humiliatin’.”
He sat down at the piano and played the opening bars of Brahms’s Capriccio No. 1.
“Needs tuning,” he muttered; and, sauntering to the Boule cabinet, he ran his finger over the marquetry. “Pretty and all that,” he said, “but a bit fussy. Good example, though. The deceased’s aunt from Seattle should get a very fair price for it.” He regarded a pendent girandole at the side of the cabinet. “Rather nice, that, if the original candles hadn’t been supplanted with modern frosted bulbs.” He paused before the little china clock on the mantel. “Gingerbread. I’m sure it kept atrocious time.” Passing on to the escritoire, he examined it critically. “Imitation French Renaissance. But rather dainty, what?” Then his eye fell on the waste-paper basket, and he picked it up. “Silly idea,” he commented, “—making a basket out of vellum. The artistic triumph of some lady interior decorator, I’ll wager. Enough vellum here to bind a set of Epictetus. But why ruin the effect with hand-painted garlands? The æsthetic instinct has not as yet invaded these fair States—decidedly not.”
Setting the basket down, he studied it meditatively for a moment. Then he leaned over and took from it the piece of crumpled wrapping-paper to which he had referred the previous day.
“This doubtless contained the lady’s last purchase on earth,” he mused. “Very touchin’. Are you sentimental about such trifles, Markham? Anyway, the purple string round it was a godsend to Skeel. . . . What knickknack, do you suppose, paved the way for the frantic Tony’s escape?”
He opened the paper, revealing a broken piece of corrugated cardboard and a large square dark-brown envelope.
“Ah, to be sure! Phonograph records.” He glanced about the apartment. “But, I say, where did the lady keep the bally machine?”