The Benson Murder Case
by S. S. Van Dine
[Frontispiece: Philo Vance, from a drawing by Herbert Stoops. A sketch
of a seated gentleman in evening dress and wearing an monocle.]
Contents
I. Philo Vance at Home
II. At the Scene of the Crime
III. A Lady’s Hand-bag
IV. The Housekeeper’s Story
V. Gathering Information
VI. Vance Offers an Opinion
VII. Reports and an Interview
VIII. Vance Accepts a Challenge
IX. The Height of the Murderer
X. Eliminating a Suspect
XI. A Motive and a Threat
XII. The Owner of a Colt-.45
XIII. The Grey Cadillac
XIV. Links in the Chain
XV. “Pfyfe—Personal”
XVI. Admissions and Suppressions
XVII. The Forged Check
XVIII. A Confession
XIX. Vance Cross-examines
XX. A Lady Explains
XXI. Sartorial Revelations
XXII. Vance Outlines a Theory
XXIII. Checking an Alibi
XXIV. The Arrest
XXV. Vance Explains His Methods
“Mr. Mason,” he said, “I wish to thank you for
my life.”
“Sir,” said Mason, “I had no interest in your
life. The adjustment of your problem was the
only thing of interest to me.”
—Randolph Mason: Corrector of Destinies.
Publisher’s Note
It gives us considerable pleasure to be able to offer to the public
the “inside” record of those of former District Attorney Markham’s
criminal cases in which Mr. Philo Vance figured so effectively. The
true inwardness of these famous cases has never before been revealed;
for Mr. S. S. Van Dine, Mr. Vance’s lawyer and almost constant
companion, being the only person who possessed a complete record of
the facts, has only recently been permitted to make them public.
After inspecting Mr. Van Dine’s voluminous notes, we decided to
publish “The Benson Murder Case” as the first of the series—not
because it was the most interesting and startling, nor yet the most
complicated and dramatic from the fictional point of view, but
because, coming first chronologically, it explains how Mr. Philo
Vance happened to become involved in criminal matters, and also
because it possesses certain features that reveal very clearly Mr.
Vance’s unique analytic methods of crime detection.
Introductory
If you will refer to the municipal statistics of the City of New
York, you will find that the number of unsolved major crimes during
the four years that John F.-X. Markham was District Attorney, was far
smaller than under any of his predecessors’ administrations. Markham
projected the District Attorney’s office into all manner of criminal
investigations; and, as a result, many abstruse crimes on which the
Police had hopelessly gone aground, were eventually disposed of.
But although he was personally credited with the many important
indictments and subsequent convictions that he secured, the truth is
that he was only an instrument in many of his most famous cases. The
man who actually solved them and supplied the evidence for their
prosecution, was in no way connected with the city’s administration,
and never once came into the public eye.
At that time I happened to be both legal advisor and personal friend
of this other man; and it was thus that the strange and amazing facts
of the situation became known to me. But not until recently have I
been at liberty to make them public. Even now I am not permitted to
divulge the man’s name, and, for that reason, I have chosen,
arbitrarily, to refer to him throughout these _ex-officio_ reports as
Philo Vance.
It is, of course, possible that some of his acquaintances may,
through my revelations, be able to guess his identity; and if such
should prove the case, I beg of them to guard that knowledge; for
though he has now gone to Italy to live, and has given me permission
to record the exploits of which he was the unique central character,
he has very emphatically imposed his anonymity upon me; and I should
not like to feel that, through any lack of discretion or delicacy, I
have been the cause of his secret becoming generally known.
The present chronicle has to do with Vance’s solution of the
notorious Benson murder which, due to the unexpectedness of the
crime, the prominence of the persons involved, and the startling
evidence adduced, was invested with an interest rarely surpassed in
the annals of New York’s criminal history.
This sensational case was the first of many in which Vance figured as
a kind of _amicus curiæ_ in Markham’s investigations.
S. S. Van Dine.
New York.
Characters of the Book
Philo Vance
John F.-X. Markham
District Attorney of New York County.
Alvin H. Benson
Well-known Wall Street broker and man-about-town, who was
mysteriously murdered in his home.
Major Anthony Benson
Brother of the murdered man.
Mrs. Anna Platz
Housekeeper for Alvin Benson.
Muriel St. Clair
A young singer.
Captain Philip Leacock
Miss St. Clair’s fiancé.
Leander Pfyfe
Intimate friend of Alvin Benson’s.
Mrs. Paula Banning
A friend of Leander Pfyfe’s.
Elsie Hoffman
Secretary of the firm of Benson and Benson.
Colonel Bigsby Ostrander
A retired army officer.
William H. Moriarty
An alderman, Borough of the Bronx.
Jack Prisco
Elevator-boy at the Chatham Arms.
George G. Stitt
Of the firm of Stitt and McCoy, Public Accountants.
Maurice Dinwiddie
Assistant District Attorney.
Chief Inspector O’Brien
Of the Police Department of New York City.
William M. Moran
Commanding Officer of the Detective Bureau.
Ernest Heath
Sergeant of the Homicide Bureau.
Burke
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Snitkin
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Emery
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Ben Hanlon
Commanding Officer of Detectives assigned to District Attorney’s
office.
Phelps
Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Tracy
Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Springer
Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Higginbotham
Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Captain Carl Hagedorn
Fire-arms expert.
Dr. Doremus
Medical Examiner.
Francis Swacker
Secretary to the District Attorney.
Currie
Vance’s valet.
CHAPTER I.
Philo Vance at Home
(Friday, June 14; 8.30 a.m.)
It happened that, on the morning of the momentous June the fourteenth
when the discovery of the murdered body of Alvin H. Benson created a
sensation which, to this day, has not entirely died away, I had
breakfasted with Philo Vance in his apartment. It was not unusual for
me to share Vance’s luncheons and dinners, but to have breakfast with
him was something of an occasion. He was a late riser, and it was his
habit to remain _incommunicado_ until his midday meal.
The reason for this early meeting was a matter of business—or, rather,
of æsthetics. On the afternoon of the previous day Vance had attended
a preview of Vollard’s collection of Cézanne water-colors at the
Kessler Galleries, and having seen several pictures he particularly
wanted, he had invited me to an early breakfast to give me
instructions regarding their purchase.
A word concerning my relationship with Vance is necessary to clarify
my rôle of narrator in this chronicle. The legal tradition is deeply
imbedded in my family, and when my preparatory-school days were over,
I was sent, almost as a matter of course, to Harvard to study law. It
was there I met Vance, a reserved, cynical and caustic freshman who
was the bane of his professors and the fear of his fellow-classmen.
Why he should have chosen me, of all the students at the University,
for his extra-scholastic association, I have never been able to
understand fully. My own liking for Vance was simply explained: he
fascinated and interested me, and supplied me with a novel kind of
intellectual diversion. In his liking for me, however, no such basis
of appeal was present. I was (and am now) a commonplace fellow,
possessed of a conservative and rather conventional mind. But, at
least, my mentality was not rigid, and the ponderosity of the legal
procedure did not impress me greatly—which is why, no doubt, I had
little taste for my inherited profession—; and it is possible that
these traits found certain affinities in Vance’s unconscious mind.
There is, to be sure, the less consoling explanation that I appealed
to Vance as a kind of foil, or anchorage, and that he sensed in my
nature a complementary antithesis to his own. But whatever the
explanation, we were much together; and, as the years went by, that
association ripened into an inseparable friendship.
Upon graduation I entered my father’s law firm—Van Dine and Davis—and
after five years of dull apprenticeship I was taken into the firm as
the junior partner. At present I am the second Van Dine of Van Dine,
Davis and Van Dine, with offices at 120 Broadway. At about the time my
name first appeared on the letter-heads of the firm, Vance returned
from Europe, where he had been living during my legal novitiate, and,
an aunt of his having died and made him her principal beneficiary, I
was called upon to discharge the technical obligations involved in
putting him in possession of his inherited property.
This work was the beginning of a new and somewhat unusual relationship
between us. Vance had a strong distaste for any kind of business
transaction, and in time I became the custodian of all his monetary
interests and his agent at large. I found that his affairs were
various enough to occupy as much of my time as I cared to give to
legal matters, and as Vance was able to indulge the luxury of having a
personal legal factotum, so to speak, I permanently closed my desk at
the office, and devoted myself exclusively to his needs and whims.
If, up to the time when Vance summoned me to discuss the purchase of
the Cézannes, I had harbored any secret or repressed regrets for
having deprived the firm of Van Dine, Davis and Van Dine of my modest
legal talents, they were permanently banished on that eventful
morning; for, beginning with the notorious Benson murder, and
extending over a period of nearly four years, it was my privilege to
be a spectator of what I believe was the most amazing series of
criminal cases that ever passed before the eyes of a young lawyer.
Indeed, the grim dramas I witnessed during that period constitute one
of the most astonishing secret documents in the police history of this
country.
Of these dramas Vance was the central character. By an analytical and
interpretative process which, as far as I know, has never before been
applied to criminal activities, he succeeded in solving many of the
important crimes on which both the police and the District Attorney’s
office had hopelessly fallen down.
Due to my peculiar relations with Vance it happened that not only did
I participate in all the cases with which he was connected, but I was
also present at most of the informal discussions concerning them which
took place between him and the District Attorney; and, being of
methodical temperament, I kept a fairly complete record of them. In
addition, I noted down (as accurately as memory permitted) Vance’s
unique psychological methods of determining guilt, as he explained
them from time to time. It is fortunate that I performed this
gratuitous labor of accumulation and transcription, for now that
circumstances have unexpectedly rendered possible my making the cases
public, I am able to present them in full detail and with all their
various side-lights and succeeding steps—a task that would be
impossible were it not for my numerous clippings and _adversaria_.
Fortunately, too, the first case to draw Vance into its ramifications
was that of Alvin Benson’s murder. Not only did it prove one of the
most famous of New York’s _causes célèbres_, but it gave Vance an
excellent opportunity of displaying his rare talents of deductive
reasoning, and, by its nature and magnitude, aroused his interest in a
branch of activity which heretofore had been alien to his
temperamental promptings and habitual predilections.
The case intruded upon Vance’s life suddenly and unexpectedly,
although he himself had, by a casual request made to the District
Attorney over a month before, been the involuntary agent of this
destruction of his normal routine. The thing, in fact, burst upon us
before we had quite finished our breakfast on that mid-June morning,
and put an end temporarily to all business connected with the purchase
of the Cézanne paintings. When, later in the day, I visited the
Kessler Galleries, two of the water-colors that Vance had particularly
desired had been sold; and I am convinced that, despite his success in
the unravelling of the Benson murder mystery and his saving of at
least one innocent person from arrest, he has never to this day felt
entirely compensated for the loss of those two little sketches on
which he had set his heart.
As I was ushered into the living-room that morning by Currie, a rare
old English servant who acted as Vance’s butler, valet, major-domo
and, on occasions, specialty cook, Vance was sitting in a large
armchair, attired in a surah silk dressing-gown and grey suède
slippers, with Vollard’s book on Cézanne open across his knees.
“Forgive my not rising, Van,” he greeted me casually. “I have the
whole weight of the modern evolution in art resting on my legs.
Furthermore, this plebeian early rising fatigues me, y’ know.”
He riffled the pages of the volume, pausing here and there at a
reproduction.
“This chap Vollard,” he remarked at length, “has been rather liberal
with our art-fearing country. He has sent a really goodish collection
of his Cézannes here. I viewed ’em yesterday with the proper reverence
and, I might add, unconcern, for Kessler was watching me; and I’ve
marked the ones I want you to buy for me as soon as the Gallery opens
this morning.”
He handed me a small catalogue he had been using as a book-mark.
“A beastly assignment, I know,” he added, with an indolent smile.
“These delicate little smudges with all their blank paper will
prob’bly be meaningless to your legal mind—they’re so unlike a
neatly-typed brief, don’t y’ know. And you’ll no doubt think some of
’em are hung upside-down,—one of ’em is, in fact, and even Kessler
doesn’t know it. But don’t fret, Van old dear. They’re very beautiful
and valuable little knickknacks, and rather inexpensive when one
considers what they’ll be bringing in a few years. Really an excellent
investment for some money-loving soul, y’ know—inf’nitely better than
that Lawyer’s Equity Stock over which you grew so eloquent at the time
of my dear Aunt Agatha’s death.”*
* As a matter of fact, the same water-colors that Vance
obtained for $250 and $300, were bringing three times as
much four years later.
Vance’s one passion (if a purely intellectual enthusiasm may be called
a passion) was art—not art in its narrow, personal aspects, but in its
broader, more universal significance. And art was not only his
dominating interest, but his chief diversion. He was something of an
authority on Japanese and Chinese prints; he knew tapestries and
ceramics; and once I heard him give an impromptu _causerie_ to a few
guests on Tanagra figurines, which, had it been transcribed, would
have made a most delightful and instructive monograph.
Vance had sufficient means to indulge his instinct for collecting, and
possessed a fine assortment of pictures and _objets d’art_. His
collection was heterogeneous only in its superficial characteristics:
every piece he owned embodied some principle of form or line that
related it to all the others. One who knew art could feel the unity
and consistency in all the items with which he surrounded himself,
however widely separated they were in point of time or _métier_ or
surface appeal. Vance, I have always felt, was one of those rare human
beings, a collector with a definite philosophic point of view.
His apartment in East Thirty-eighth Street—actually the two top floors
of an old mansion, beautifully remodelled and in part rebuilt to
secure spacious rooms and lofty ceilings—was filled, but not crowded,
with rare specimens of oriental and occidental, ancient and modern,
art. His paintings ranged from the Italian primitives to Cézanne and
Matisse; and among his collection of original drawings were works as
widely separated as those of Michelangelo and Picasso. Vance’s Chinese
prints constituted one of the finest private collections in this
country. They included beautiful examples of the work of Ririomin,
Rianchu, Jinkomin, Kakei and Mokkei.
“The Chinese,” Vance once said to me, “are the truly great artists of
the East. They were the men whose work expressed most intensely a
broad philosophic spirit. By contrast the Japanese were superficial.
It’s a long step between the little more than decorative _souci_ of a
Hokusai and the profoundly thoughtful and conscious artistry of a
Ririomin. Even when Chinese art degenerated under the Manchus, we find
in it a deep philosophic quality—a spiritual _sensibilité_, so to
speak. And in the modern copies of copies—what is called the
_bunjinga_ style—we still have pictures of profound meaning.”
Vance’s catholicity of taste in art was remarkable. His collection was
as varied as that of a museum. It embraced a black-figured amphora by
Amasis, a proto-Corinthian vase in the Ægean style, Koubatcha and
Rhodian plates, Athenian pottery, a sixteenth-century Italian
holy-water stoup of rock crystal, pewter of the Tudor period (several
pieces bearing the double-rose hall-mark), a bronze plaque by Cellini,
a triptych of Limoges enamel, a Spanish retable of an altar-piece by
Vallfogona, several Etruscan bronzes, an Indian Greco Buddhist, a
statuette of the Goddess Kuan Yin from the Ming Dynasty, a number of
very fine Renaissance wood-cuts, and several specimens of Byzantine,
Carolingian and early French ivory carvings.
His Egyptian treasures included a gold jug from Zakazik, a statuette
of the Lady Nai (as lovely as the one in the Louvre), two beautifully
carved steles of the First Theban Age, various small sculptures
comprising rare representations of Hapi and Amset, and several
Arrentine bowls carved with Kalathiskos dancers. On top of one of his
embayed Jacobean book cases in the library, where most of his modern
paintings and drawings were hung, was a fascinating group of African
sculpture—ceremonial masks and statuette-fetishes from French Guinea,
the Sudan, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and the Congo.
A definite purpose has animated me in speaking at such length about
Vance’s art instinct, for, in order to understand fully the
melodramatic adventures which began for him on that June morning, one
must have a general idea of the man’s _penchants_ and inner
promptings. His interest in art was an important—one might almost say
the dominant—factor in his personality. I have never met a man quite
like him—a man so apparently diversified, and yet so fundamentally
consistent.
Vance was what many would call a dilettante. But the designation does
him injustice. He was a man of unusual culture and brilliance. An
aristocrat by birth and instinct, he held himself severely aloof from
the common world of men. In his manner there was an indefinable
contempt for inferiority of all kinds. The great majority of those
with whom he came in contact regarded him as a snob. Yet there was in
his condescension and disdain no trace of spuriousness. His
snobbishness was intellectual as well as social. He detested stupidity
even more, I believe, than he did vulgarity or bad taste. I have heard
him on several occasions quote Fouché’s famous line: _C’est plus qu’un
crime; c’est une faute._ And he meant it literally.
Vance was frankly a cynic, but he was rarely bitter: his was a
flippant, Juvenalian cynicism. Perhaps he may best be described as a
bored and supercilious, but highly conscious and penetrating,
spectator of life. He was keenly interested in all human reactions;
but it was the interest of the scientist, not the humanitarian. Withal
he was a man of rare personal charm. Even people who found it
difficult to admire him, found it equally difficult not to like him.
His somewhat quixotic mannerisms and his slightly English accent and
inflection—a heritage of his post-graduate days at Oxford—impressed
those who did not know him well, as affectations. But the truth is,
there was very little of the _poseur_ about him.
He was unusually good-looking, although his mouth was ascetic and
cruel, like the mouths on some of the Medici portraits*; moreover,
there was a slightly derisive hauteur in the lift of his eyebrows.
Despite the aquiline severity of his lineaments his face was highly
sensitive. His forehead was full and sloping—it was the artist’s,
rather than the scholar’s, brow. His cold grey eyes were widely
spaced. His nose was straight and slender, and his chin narrow but
prominent, with an unusually deep cleft. When I saw John Barrymore
recently in _Hamlet_ I was somehow reminded of Vance; and once before,
in a scene of _Cæsar and Cleopatra_ played by Forbes-Robertson, I
received a similar impression.†
* I am thinking particularly of Bronzino’s portraits of
Pietro de’ Medici and Cosimo de’ Medici, in the National
Gallery, and of Vasari’s medallion portrait of Lorenzo de’
Medici in the Vecchio Palazzo, Florence.
† Once when Vance was suffering from sinusitis, he had an
X-ray photograph of his head made; and the accompanying
chart described him as a “marked dolichocephalic” and a
“disharmonious Nordic.” It also contained the following
data:—cephalic index 75; nose, leptorhine, with an index
of 48; facial angle, 85°; vertical index, 72; upper facial
index, 54; interpupilary width, 67; chin, masognathous,
with an index of 103; sella turcica, abnormally large.
Vance was slightly under six feet, graceful, and giving the impression
of sinewy strength and nervous endurance. He was an expert fencer, and
had been the Captain of the University’s fencing team. He was mildly
fond of outdoor sports, and had a knack of doings things well without
any extensive practice. His golf handicap was only three; and one
season he had played on our championship polo team against England.
Nevertheless, he had a positive antipathy to walking, and would not go
a hundred yards on foot if there was any possible means of riding.
In his dress he was always fashionable—scrupulously correct to the
smallest detail—yet unobtrusive. He spent considerable time at his
clubs: his favorite was the Stuyvesant, because, as he explained to
me, its membership was drawn largely from the political and commercial
ranks, and he was never drawn into a discussion which required any
mental effort. He went occasionally to the more modern operas, and was
a regular subscriber to the symphony concerts and chamber-music
recitals.
Incidentally, he was one of the most unerring poker players I have
ever seen. I mention this fact not merely because it was unusual and
significant that a man of Vance’s type should have preferred so
democratic a game to bridge or chess, for instance, but because his
knowledge of the science of human psychology involved in poker had an
intimate bearing on the chronicles I am about to set down.
Vance’s knowledge of psychology was indeed uncanny. He was gifted with
an instinctively accurate judgment of people, and his study and
reading had co-ordinated and rationalized this gift to an amazing
extent. He was well grounded in the academic principles of psychology,
and all his courses at college had either centered about this subject
or been subordinated to it. While I was confining myself to a
restricted area of torts and contracts, constitutional and common law,
equity, evidence and pleading, Vance was reconnoitring the whole field
of cultural endeavor. He had courses in the history of religions, the
Greek classics, biology, civics and political economy, philosophy,
anthropology, literature, theoretical and experimental psychology, and
ancient and modern languages.* But it was, I think, his courses under
Münsterberg and William James that interested him the most.
* “Culture,” Vance said to me shortly after I had met him,
“is polyglot; and the knowledge of many tongues is
essential to an understanding of the world’s intellectual
and æsthetic achievements. Especially are the Greek and
Latin classics vitiated by translation.” I quote the
remark here because his omnivorous reading in languages
other than English, coupled with his amazingly retentive
memory, had a tendency to affect his own speech. And while
it may appear to some that his speech was at times
pedantic, I have tried, throughout these chronicles, to
quote him literally, in the hope of presenting a portrait
of the man as he was.
Vance’s mind was basically philosophical—that is, philosophical in the
more general sense. Being singularly free from the conventional
sentimentalities and current superstitions, he could look beneath the
surface of human acts into actuating impulses and motives. Moreover,
he was resolute both in his avoidance of any attitude that savored of
credulousness, and in his adherence to cold, logical exactness in his
mental processes.
“Until we can approach all human problems,” he once remarked, “with
the clinical aloofness and cynical contempt of a doctor examining a
guinea-pig strapped to a board, we have little chance of getting at
the truth.”
Vance led an active, but by no means animated, social life—a
concession to various family ties. But he was not a social animal.—I
can not remember ever having met a man with so undeveloped a
gregarious instinct,—and when he went forth into the social world it
was generally under compulsion. In fact, one of his “duty” affairs had
occupied him on the night before that memorable June breakfast;
otherwise, we would have consulted about the Cézannes the evening
before; and Vance groused a good deal about it while Currie was
serving our strawberries and eggs _Bénédictine_. Later on I was to
give profound thanks to the God of Coincidence that the blocks had
been arranged in just that pattern; for had Vance been slumbering
peacefully at nine o’clock when the District Attorney called, I would
probably have missed four of the most interesting and exciting years
of my life; and many of New York’s shrewdest and most desperate
criminals might still be at large.
Vance and I had just settled back in our chairs for our second cup of
coffee and a cigarette when Currie, answering an impetuous ringing of
the front-door bell, ushered the District Attorney into the
living-room.
“By all that’s holy!” he exclaimed, raising his hands in mock
astonishment. “New York’s leading _flâneur_ and art connoisseur is up
and about!”
“And I am suffused with blushes at the disgrace of it,” Vance replied.
It was evident, however, that the District Attorney was not in a
jovial mood. His face suddenly sobered.
“Vance, a serious thing has brought me here. I’m in a great hurry, and
merely dropped by to keep my promise. . . . The fact is, Alvin Benson
has been murdered.”
Vance lifted his eyebrows languidly.
“Really, now,” he drawled. “How messy! But he no doubt deserved it. In
any event, that’s no reason why you should repine. Take a chair and
have a cup of Currie’s incomp’rable coffee.” And before the other
could protest, he rose and pushed a bell-button.
Markham hesitated a second or two.
“Oh, well. A couple of minutes won’t make any difference. But only a
gulp.” And he sank into a chair facing us.