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-away 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 footprints.”
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.…”[*20]
“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[*21] 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.