A Mysterious Note
(Saturday, April 2; 2 p. m.)
Markham sat down resolutely before the centre-table.
“Suppose, Sergeant, we overhaul the two servants now.”
Heath stepped into the hall and gave an order to one of his men. A few
moments later a tall, sombre, disjointed man entered and stood at
respectful attention.
“This is the butler, sir,” explained the Sergeant. “Named Pyne.”
Markham studied the man appraisingly. He was perhaps sixty years old.
His features were markedly acromegalic; and this distortion extended
to his entire figure. His hands were large, and his feet broad and
misshapen. His clothes, though neatly pressed, fitted him badly; and
his high clerical collar was several sizes too large for him. His
eyes, beneath gray, bushy eyebrows, were pale and watery, and his
mouth was a mere slit in an unhealthily puffy face. Despite his utter
lack of physical prepossession, however, he gave one the impression of
shrewd competency.
“So you are the Dillard butler,” mused Markham. “How long have you
been with the family, Pyne?”
“Going on ten years, sir.”
“You came, then, just after Professor Dillard resigned his chair at
the university?”
“I believe so, sir.” The man’s voice was deep and rumbling.
“What do you know of the tragedy that occurred here this morning?”
Though Markham put the question suddenly, in the hope, I imagine, of
surprising some admission, Pyne received it with the utmost stoicism.
“Nothing whatever, sir. I was unaware that anything had happened until
Professor Dillard called to me from the library and asked me to look
for Mr. Sperling.”
“He told you of the tragedy then?”
“He said: ‘Mr. Robin has been murdered, and I wish you’d find Mr.
Sperling for me.’—That was all, sir.”
“You’re sure he said ‘murdered,’ Pyne?” interjected Vance.
For the first time the butler hesitated, and an added astuteness crept
into his look.
“Yes, sir—I’m sure he did. ‘Murdered’ is what he said.”
“And did you see the body of Mr. Robin when you pushed your search?”
pursued Vance, his eyes idly tracing a design on the wall.
Again there was a brief hesitation.
“Yes, sir. I opened the basement door to look out on the archery
range, and there I saw the poor young gentleman. . . .”
“A great shock it must have given you, Pyne,” Vance observed drily.
“Did you, by any hap, touch the poor young gentleman’s body?—or the
arrow, perhaps?—or the bow?”
Pyne’s watery eyes glistened for a moment.
“No—of course not, sir. . . . Why should I, sir?”
“Why, indeed?” Vance sighed wearily. “But you saw the bow?”
The man squinted, as if for purposes of mental visualization.
“I couldn’t say, sir. Perhaps, yes; perhaps, no. I don’t recall.”
Vance seemed to lose all interest in him; and Markham resumed the
interrogation.
“I understand, Pyne, that Mr. Drukker called here this morning about
half past nine. Did you see him?”
“Yes, sir. He always uses the basement door; and he said good-morning
to me as he passed the butler’s pantry at the head of the steps.”
“He returned the same way he came?”
“I suppose so, sir—though I was up-stairs when he went. He lives in
the house at the rear——”
“I know.” Markham leaned forward. “I presume it was you who admitted
Mr. Robin and Mr. Sperling this morning.”
“Yes, sir. At about ten o’clock.”
“Did you see them again, or overhear any of their remarks while they
waited here in the drawing-room?”
“No, sir. I was busy in Mr. Arnesson’s quarters most of the morning.”
“Ah!” Vance turned his eyes on the man. “That would be on the second
floor rear, wouldn’t it?—the room with the balcony?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Most interestin’. . . . And it was from that balcony that Professor
Dillard first saw Mr. Robin’s body.—How could he have entered the room
without your knowing it? You said, I believe, that your first
intimation of the tragedy was when the professor called you from the
library and told you to seek Mr. Sperling.”
The butler’s face turned a pasty white, and I noticed that his fingers
twitched nervously.
“I might have stepped out of Mr. Arnesson’s room for a moment,” he
explained, with effort. “Yes—it’s quite likely. In fact, sir, I recall
going to the linen-closet. . . .”
“Oh, to be sure.” Vance lapsed into lethargy.
Markham smoked a while, his gaze concentrated on the table-top.
“Did any one else call at the house this morning, Pyne?” he asked
presently.
“No one, sir.”
“And you can suggest no explanation for what happened here?”
The man shook his head heavily, his watery eyes in space.
“No, sir. Mr. Robin seemed a pleasant, well-liked young man. He wasn’t
the kind to inspire murder—if you understand what I mean.”
Vance looked up.
“I can’t say that I, personally, understand exactly what you mean,
Pyne. How do you know it wasn’t an accident?”
“I don’t, sir,” was the unperturbed answer. “But I know a bit about
archery—if you’ll pardon my saying so—and I saw right away that Mr.
Robin had been killed by a hunting arrow.”
“You’re very observin’, Pyne,” nodded Vance. “And quite correct.”
It was plain that no direct information was to be got from the butler,
and Markham dismissed him abruptly, at the same time ordering Heath to
send in the cook.
When she entered I noticed at once a resemblance between father and
daughter. She was a slatternly woman of about forty, also tall and
angular, with a thin, elongated face and large hands and feet.
Hyperpituitarism evidently ran in the Pyne family.
A few preliminary questions brought out the information that she was a
widow, named Beedle, and had, at the death of her husband five years
before, come to Professor Dillard as the result of Pyne’s
recommendation.
“What time did you leave the house this morning, Beedle?” Markham
asked her.
“Right after half past ten.” She seemed uneasy and on the alert, and
her voice was defensively belligerent.
“And what time did you return?”
“About half past twelve. That man let me in”—she looked viciously at
Heath—“and treated me like I’d been a criminal.”
Heath grinned. “The time’s O. K., Mr. Markham. She got sore because I
wouldn’t let her go down-stairs.”
Markham nodded non-committally.
“Do you know anything of what took place here this morning?” he went
on, studying the woman closely.
“How should I know? I was at Jefferson market.”
“Did you see either Mr. Robin or Mr. Sperling?”
“They went down-stairs to the archery-room past the kitchen a little
while before I went out.”
“Did you overhear anything they said?”
“I don’t listen at keyholes.”
Markham set his jaw angrily and was about to speak when Vance
addressed the woman suavely.
“The District Attorney thought that perhaps the door was open, and
that you might have overheard some of their conversation despite your
commendable effort not to listen.”
“The door might’ve been open, but I didn’t hear anything,” she
answered sullenly.
“Then you couldn’t tell us if there was any one else in the
archery-room.”
Beedle narrowed her eyes and gave Vance a calculating look.
“Maybe there was some one else,” she said slowly. “In fact, I thought
I heard Mr. Drukker.” A note of venom came into her voice, and the
shadow of a hard smile passed over her thin lips. “He was here to call
on Mr. Arnesson early this morning.”
“Oh, was he, now?” Vance appeared surprised at this news. “You saw him
perhaps?”
“I saw him come in, but I didn’t see him go out—anyway, I didn’t
notice. He sneaks in and out at all hours.”
“Sneaks, eh? Fancy that! . . . By the by, which door did you use when
you went a-marketing?”
“The front door. Since Miss Belle made a club-room out of the
basement, I always use the front door.”
“Then you didn’t enter the archery-room this morning?”
“No.”
Vance raised himself in his chair.
“Thanks for your help, Beedle. We won’t need you any more now.”
When the woman had left us Vance rose and walked to the window.
“We’re expending too much zeal in irrelevant channels, Markham,” he
said. “We’ll never get anywhere by ballyragging servants and
questioning members of the household. There’s a psychological wall to
be battered down before we can begin storming the enemy’s trenches.
Everybody in this ménage has some pet privacy that he’s afraid will
leak out. Each person so far has told us either less or more than he
knows. Disheartenin’, but true. Nothing that we’ve learned dovetails
with anything else; and when chronological events don’t fit together,
you may rest assured that the serrated points of contact have been
deliberately distorted. I haven’t found one clean joinder in all the
tales that have been poured into our ears.”
“It’s more likely the connections are missing,” Markham argued; “and
we’ll never find them if we don’t pursue our questionings.”
“You’re much too trustin’.” Vance walked back to the centre-table.
“The more questions we ask the farther afield we’ll be taken. Even
Professor Dillard didn’t give us a wholly honest account. There’s
something he’s keeping back—some suspicion he won’t voice. Why did he
bring that bow indoors? Arnesson put his finger on a vital spot when
he asked the same question. Shrewd fella, Arnesson.—Then there’s our
athletic young lady with the muscular calves. She’s entangled in
various amat’ry meshes, and is endeavoring to extricate herself and
her whole coterie without leaving a blemish on any one. A praiseworthy
aim, but not one conducive to the unadulterated truth.—Pyne has ideas,
too. That flabby facial mask of his curtains many an entrancin’
thought. But we’ll never probe his cortex by chivyin’ him with
questions. Somethin’ rum, too, about his matutinal labors. He says he
was in Arnesson’s room all morning; but he obviously didn’t know that
the professor took a sunnin’ on Arnesson’s verandah. And that
linen-closet alibi—much too specious.—Also, Markham, let your mind
flutter about the widowed Beedle’s tale. She doesn’t like the
over-sociable Mr. Drukker; and when she saw a chance to involve him,
she did so. She ‘thought’ she heard his voice in the archery-room. But
did she? Who knows? True, he might have tarried among the slings
and javelins on his way home and been joined later by Robin and
Sperling. . . . Yes, it’s a point we must investigate. In fact, a bit
of polite converse with Mr. Drukker is strongly indicated. . . .”
Footsteps were heard descending the front stairs, and Arnesson
appeared in the archway of the living-room.
“Well, who killed Cock Robin?” he asked, with a satyr-like grin.
Markham rose, annoyed, and was about to protest at the intrusion; but
Arnesson held up his hand.
“One moment, please. I’m here to offer my exalted services in the
noble cause of justice—mundane justice, I would have you understand.
Philosophically, of course, there’s no such thing as justice. If there
really were justice we’d all be in for a shingling in the cosmic
wood-shed.” He sat down facing Markham and chuckled cynically. “The
fact is, the sad and precipitate departure of Mr. Robin appeals to my
scientific nature. It makes a nice, orderly problem. It has a
decidedly mathematical flavor—no undistributed terms, you understand;
clear-cut integers with certain unknown quantities to be
determined.—Well, I’m the genius to solve it.”
“What would be your solution, Arnesson?” Markham knew and respected
the man’s intelligence, and seemed at once to sense a serious purpose
beneath his attitude of sneering flippancy.
“Ah! As yet I haven’t tackled the equation.” Arnesson drew out an old
briar pipe and fingered it affectionately. “But I’ve always wanted to
do a little detective work on a purely earthly plane—the insatiable
curiosity and natural inquisitiveness of the physicist, you
understand. And I’ve long had a theory that the science of mathematics
can be advantageously applied to the trivialities of our life on this
unimportant planet. There’s nothing but law in the universe—unless
Eddington is right and there’s no law at all—and I see no sufficient
reason why the identity and position of a criminal can’t be determined
just as Leverrier calculated the mass and ephemeris of Neptune from
the observed deviations in the orbit of Uranus. You remember how,
after his computations, he told Galle, the Berlin astronomer, to look
for the planet in a specified longitude of the ecliptic.”
Arnesson paused and filled his pipe.
“Now, Mr. Markham,” he went on; and I tried to decide whether or not
the man was in earnest, “I’d like the opportunity of applying to this
absurd muddle the purely rational means used by Leverrier in
discovering Neptune. But I’ve got to have the data on the
perturbations of Uranus’s orbit, so to speak—that is, I must know all
the varying factors in the equation. The favor I’ve come here to ask
is that you take me into your confidence and tell me all the facts. A
sort of intellectual partnership. I’ll figure out this problem for you
along scientific lines. It’ll be bully sport; and incidentally I’d
like to prove my theory that mathematics is the basis of all truth
however far removed from scholastic abstractions.” He at last got his
pipe going, and sank back in his chair. “Is it a bargain?”
“I’ll be glad to tell you whatever we know, Arnesson,” Markham replied
after a brief pause. “But I can’t promise to reveal everything that
may arise from now on. It might work against the ends of justice and
embarrass our investigation.”
Vance had sat with half-closed eyes, apparently bored by Arnesson’s
astonishing request; but now he turned to Markham with a considerable
show of animation.
“I say, y’ know; there’s really no reason why we shouldn’t give Mr.
Arnesson a chance to translate this crime into the realm of applied
mathematics. I’m sure he’d be discreet and use our information only
for scientific purposes. And—one never knows, does one?—we may need
his highly trained assistance before we’re through with this
fascinatin’ affair.”
Markham knew Vance well enough to realize that his suggestion had not
been made thoughtlessly; and I was in no wise astonished when he faced
Arnesson and said:
“Very well, then. We’ll give you whatever data you need to work out
your mathematical formula. Anything special you want to know now?”
“Oh, no. I know the details thus far as well as you; and I’ll strip
Beedle and old Pyne of their contributions when you’re gone. But if I
solve this problem and determine the exact position of the criminal,
don’t pigeon-hole my findings as Sir George Airy did those of poor
Adams when he submitted his Neptunean calculations prior to
Leverrier’s. . . .”
At this moment the front door opened, and the uniformed officer
stationed on the porch came in, followed by a stranger.
“This gent here says he wants to see the professor,” he announced with
radiating suspicion; and turning to the man he indicated Markham with
a gesture of the head. “That’s the District Attorney. Tell him your
troubles.”
The newcomer seemed somewhat embarrassed. He was a slender,
well-groomed man with an unmistakable air of refinement. His age, I
should say, was fifty, though his face held a perennially youthful
look. His hair was thin and graying, his nose a trifle sharp, and his
chin small but in no way weak. His eyes, surmounted by a high broad
forehead, were his most striking characteristic. They were the eyes of
a disappointed and disillusioned dreamer—half sad, half resentful, as
if life had tricked him and left him unhappy and bitter.
He was about to address Markham when he caught sight of Arnesson.
“Oh, good-morning, Arnesson,” he said, in a quiet, well-modulated
voice. “I hope there’s nothing seriously wrong.”
“A mere death, Pardee,” the other replied carelessly. “The proverbial
tempest in a teapot.”
Markham was annoyed at the interruption.
“What can I do for you, sir?” he asked.
“I trust I am not intruding,” the man apologized. “I am a friend of
the family,—I live just across the street; and I perceived that
something unusual had happened here. It occurred to me I might be of
some service.”
Arnesson chuckled. “My dear Pardee! Why clothe your natural curiosity
in the habiliments of rhetoric?”
Pardee blushed.
“I assure you, Arnesson——” he began; but Vance interrupted him.
“You say you live opposite, Mr. Pardee. You have perhaps been
observing this house during the forenoon?”
“Hardly that, sir. My study, however, overlooks 75th Street, and it’s
true I was sitting at the window most of the morning. But I was busy
writing. When I returned to my work from lunch I noticed the crowd and
the police cars and also the officer in uniform at the door.”
Vance had been studying him from the corner of his eye.
“Did you happen to see any one enter or leave this house this morning,
Mr. Pardee?” he asked.
The man shook his head slowly.
“No one in particular. I noticed two young men—friends of Miss
Dillard—call at about ten o’clock; and I saw Beedle go out with her
market basket. But that’s all I recall.”
“Did you see either of these young men depart?”
“I don’t remember.” Pardee knit his brows. “And yet it seems to me one
of them left by the range gate. But it’s only an impression.”
“What time would that have been?”
“Really, I couldn’t say. Perhaps an hour or so after his arrival. I
wouldn’t care to be more specific.”
“You recall no other person whatever either coming or going from the
house this morning?”
“I saw Miss Dillard return from the tennis courts about half past
twelve, just as I was called to lunch. In fact, she waved her racket
to me.”
“And no one else?”
“I’m afraid not.” There was unmistakable regret in his quiet response.
“One of the young men you saw enter here has been killed,” Vance told
him.
“Mr. Robin—_alias_ Cock Robin,” supplemented Arnesson, with a comic
grimace which affected me unpleasantly.
“Good Heavens! How unfortunate!” Pardee appeared genuinely shocked.
“Robin? Wasn’t he the Champion Archer of Belle’s club?”
“His one claim to immortality.—That’s the chap.”
“Poor Belle!” Something in the man’s manner caused Vance to regard him
sharply. “I hope she’s not too greatly upset by the tragedy.”
“She’s dramatizing it, naturally,” Arnesson returned. “So are the
police, for that matter. Awful pother about nothing in particular. The
earth is covered with ‘small crawling masses of impure carbohydrates’
like Robin—referred to in the aggregate as humanity.”
Pardee smiled with tolerant sadness,—he was obviously familiar with
Arnesson’s cynicisms. Then he appealed to Markham.
“May I be permitted to see Miss Dillard and her uncle?”
“Oh, by all means.” It was Vance who answered before Markham could
reach a decision. “You’ll find them in the library, Mr. Pardee.”
The man left the room with a polite murmur of thanks.
“Queer fellow,” commented Arnesson, when Pardee was out of hearing.
“Cursed with money. Leads an indolent life. His one passion is solving
chess problems. . . .”
“Chess?” Vance looked up with interest. “Is he, by any chance, John
Pardee, the inventor of the famous Pardee gambit?”
“The same.” Arnesson’s face crinkled humorously. “Spent twenty years
developing a cast-iron offensive that was to add new decimal points to
the game. Wrote a book about it. Then went forth proselytizing like a
crusader before the gates of Damascus. He’s always been a great patron
of chess, contributing to tournaments, and scurrying round the world
to attend the various chess jousting-bouts. Consequently was able to
get his gambit tested. It made a great stir among the infra-champions
of the Manhattan Chess Club. Then poor Pardee organized a series of
Masters Tournaments. Paid all the expenses himself. Cost him a
fortune, by the way. And of course he stipulated that the Pardee
gambit be played exclusively. Well, well, it was very sad. When men
like Doctor Lasker and Capablanca and Rubinstein and Finn got to
combating it, it went to pieces. Almost every player who used it lost.
It was disqualified—even worse than the ill-fated Rice gambit.
Terrible blow for Pardee. It put snow in his hair, and took all the
rubber out of his muscles. Aged him, in short. He’s a broken man.”
“I know the history of the gambit,” murmured Vance, his eyes resting
pensively on the ceiling. “I’ve used it myself. Edward Lasker* taught
it to me. . . .”
* The American chess master—sometimes confused with Doctor Emanuel
Lasker, the former world champion.
The uniformed officer again appeared in the archway and beckoned to
Heath. The Sergeant rose with alacrity—the ramifications of chess
obviously bored him—and went into the hall. A moment later he returned
bearing a small sheet of paper.
“Here’s a funny one, sir,” he said, handing it to Markham. “The
officer outside happened to see it sticking outa the mail-box just
now, and thought he’d take a peep at it.—What do you make of it, sir?”
Markham studied it with puzzled amazement, and then without a word
handed it to Vance. I rose and looked over his shoulder. The paper was
of the conventional typewriter size, and had been folded to fit into
the mail-box. It contained several lines of typing done on a machine
with élite characters and a faded blue ribbon.
The first line read:
Joseph Cochrane Robin is dead.
The second line asked:
Who Killed Cock Robin?
Underneath was typed:
Sperling means sparrow.
And in the lower right-hand corner—the place of the signature—were the
two words, in capitals:
THE BISHOP.