The Greene Murder Case
by S. S. Van Dine
[Frontispiece: The Greene mansion, New York, as it appeared at the
time of the notorious Greene murder case. From an old woodcut by
Lowell L. Balcom. The woodcut shows a mansion, Gothic in style, built
next to a river and surrounded by a tall stone wall. The grounds are
covered in snow and the branches of the surrounding maple trees are
leafless.]
Contents
I. A Double Tragedy
II. The Investigation Opens
III. At the Greene Mansion
IV. The Missing Revolver
V. Homicidal Possibilities
VI. An Accusation
VII. Vance Argues the Case
VIII. The Second Tragedy
IX. The Three Bullets
X. The Closing of a Door
XI. A Painful Interview
XII. A Motor Ride
XIII. The Third Tragedy
XIV. Footprints on the Carpet
XV. The Murderer in the House
XVI. The Lost Poisons
XVII. The Two Wills
XVIII. In the Locked Library
XIX. Sherry and Paralysis
XX. The Fourth Tragedy
XXI. A Depleted Household
XXII. The Shadowy Figure
XXIII. The Missing Fact
XXIV. A Mysterious Trip
XXV. The Capture
XXVI. The Astounding Truth
to
Norbert L. Lederer
Άγαθὴ δἑ παράφασίς έστιν έταίρου
Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange and unnatural.
—Hamlet.
Characters of the Book
Philo Vance
John F.-X. Markham
District Attorney of New York County.
Mrs. Tobias Greene
The mistress of the Greene mansion.
Julia Greene
The eldest daughter.
Sibella Greene
Another daughter.
Ada Greene
The youngest daughter.
Chester Greene
The elder son.
Rex Greene
The younger son.
Dr. Arthur Von Blon
The Greene family physician.
Sproot
The Greene butler.
Gertrude Mannheim
The cook.
Hemming
The senior maid.
Barton
The junior maid.
Miss Craven
Mrs. Greene’s nurse.
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.
Snitkin
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Burke
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Captain Anthony P. Jerym
Bertillon expert.
Captain Dubois
Finger-print expert.
Dr. Emanuel Doremus
Medical Examiner.
Dr. Drumm
An official police surgeon.
Marie O’Brien
A Police nurse.
Swacker
Secretary to the District Attorney.
Currie
Vance’s valet.
CHAPTER I.
A Double Tragedy
(Tuesday, November 9; 10 a. m.)
It has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading
criminological writers—men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H. B. Irving,
Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton—have
not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy; for here, surely, is one
of the outstanding murder mysteries of modern times—a case practically
unique in the annals of latter-day crime. And yet I realize, as I read
over my own voluminous notes on the case, and inspect the various
documents relating to it, how little of its inner history ever came to
light, and how impossible it would be for even the most imaginative
chronicler to fill in the hiatuses.
The world, of course, knows the external facts. For over a month the
press of two continents was filled with accounts of this appalling
tragedy; and even the bare outline was sufficient to gratify the
public’s craving for the abnormal and the spectacular. But the inside
story of the catastrophe surpassed even the wildest flights of public
fancy; and, as I now sit down to divulge those facts for the first
time, I am oppressed with a feeling akin to unreality, although I was
a witness to most of them and hold in my possession the incontestable
records of their actuality.
Of the fiendish ingenuity which lay behind this terrible crime, of the
warped psychological motives that inspired it, and of the strange
hidden sources of its technic, the world is completely ignorant.
Moreover, no explanation has ever been given of the analytic steps
that led to its solution. Nor have the events attending the mechanism
of that solution—events in themselves highly dramatic and unusual—ever
been recounted. The public believes that the termination of the case
was a result of the usual police methods of investigation; but this is
because the public is unaware of many of the vital factors of the
crime itself, and because both the Police Department and the District
Attorney’s office have, as if by tacit agreement, refused to make
known the entire truth—whether for fear of being disbelieved or merely
because there are certain things so terrible that no man wishes to
talk of them, I do not know.
The record, therefore, which I am about to set down is the first
complete and unedited history of the Greene holocaust.* I feel that
now the truth should be known, for it is history, and one should not
shrink from historical facts. Also, I believe that the credit for the
solution of this case should go where it belongs.
* It is, I hope, unnecessary for me to state that I have
received official permission for my task.
The man who elucidated the mystery and brought to a close that
palimpsest of horror was, curiously enough, in no way officially
connected with the police; and in all the published accounts of the
murder his name was not once mentioned. And yet, had it not been for
him and his novel methods of criminal deduction, the heinous plot
against the Greene family would have been conclusively successful. The
police in their researches were dealing dogmatically with the
evidential appearances of the crime, whereas the operations of the
criminal were being conducted on a plane quite beyond the
comprehension of the ordinary investigator.
This man who, after weeks of sedulous and disheartening analysis,
eventually ferreted out the source of the horror, was a young social
aristocrat, an intimate friend of John F.-X. Markham, the District
Attorney. His name I am not at liberty to divulge, but for the
purposes of these chronicles I have chosen to call him Philo Vance. He
is no longer in this country, having transferred his residence several
years ago to a villa outside of Florence; and, since he has no
intention of returning to America, he has acceded to my request to
publish the history of the criminal cases in which he participated as
a sort of _amicus curiæ_. Markham also has retired to private life;
and Sergeant Ernest Heath, that doughty and honest officer of the
Homicide Bureau who officially handled the Greene case for the Police
Department, has, through an unexpected legacy, been able to gratify
his life’s ambition to breed fancy wyandottes on a model farm in the
Mohawk Valley. Thus circumstances have made it possible for me to
publish my intimate records of the Greene tragedy.
A few words are necessary to explain my own participation in the case.
(I say “participation,” though, in reality, my rôle was that of
passive spectator.) For several years I had been Vance’s personal
attorney. I had resigned from my father’s law firm—Van Dine, Davis &
Van Dine—in order to devote myself exclusively to Vance’s legal and
financial needs, which, by the way, were not many. Vance and I had
been friends from our undergraduate days at Harvard, and I found in my
new duties as his legal agent and monetary steward a sinecure combined
with many social and cultural compensations.
Vance at that time was thirty-four years old. He was just under six
feet, slender, sinewy, and graceful. His chiselled regular features
gave his face the attraction of strength and uniform modelling, but a
sardonic coldness of expression precluded the designation of handsome.
He had aloof gray eyes, a straight, slender nose, and a mouth
suggesting both cruelty and asceticism. But, despite the severity of
his lineaments—which acted like an impenetrable glass wall between him
and his fellows—, he was highly sensitive and mobile; and, though his
manner was somewhat detached and supercilious, he exerted an
undeniable fascination over those who knew him at all well.
Much of his education had been acquired in Europe, and he still
retained a slight Oxonian accent and intonation, though I happen to be
aware that this was no affectation: he cared too little for the
opinions of others to trouble about maintaining any pose. He was an
indefatigable student. His mind was ever eager for knowledge, and he
devoted much of his time to the study of ethnology and psychology. His
greatest intellectual enthusiasm was art, and he fortunately had an
income sufficient to indulge his passion for collecting. It was,
however, his interest in psychology and his application of it to
individual behaviorism that first turned his attention to the criminal
problems which came under Markham’s jurisdiction.
The first case in which he participated was, as I have recorded
elsewhere, the murder of Alvin Benson.* The second was the seemingly
insoluble strangling of the famous Broadway beauty, Margaret Odell.†
And in the late fall of the same year came the Greene tragedy. As in
the two former cases, I kept a complete record of this new
investigation. I possessed myself of every available document, making
verbatim copies of those claimed for the police archives, and even
jotted down the numerous conversations that took place in and out of
conference between Vance and the official investigators. And, in
addition, I kept a diary which, for elaborateness and completeness,
would have been the despair of Samuel Pepys.
* “The Benson Murder Case” (Scribners, 1926).
† “The ‘Canary’ Murder Case” (Scribners, 1927).
The Greene murder case occurred toward the end of Markham’s first year
in office. As you may remember, the winter came very early that
season. There were two severe blizzards in November, and the amount of
snowfall for that month broke all local records for eighteen years. I
mention this fact of the early snows because it played a sinister part
in the Greene affair: it was, indeed, one of the vital factors of the
murderer’s scheme. No one has yet understood, or even sensed, the
connection between the unseasonable weather of that late fall and the
fatal tragedy that fell upon the Greene household; but that is because
all of the dark secrets of the case were not made known.
Vance was projected into the Benson murder as the result of a direct
challenge from Markham; and his activities in the Canary case were due
to his own expressed desire to lend a hand. But pure coincidence was
responsible for his participation in the Greene investigation. During
the two months that had elapsed since his solution of the Canary’s
death Markham had called upon him several times regarding moot points
of criminal detection in connection with the routine work of the
District Attorney’s office; and it was during an informal discussion
of one of these problems that the Greene case was first mentioned.
Markham and Vance had long been friends. Though dissimilar in tastes
and even in ethical outlook, they nevertheless respected each other
profoundly. I have often marvelled at the friendship of these two
antipodal men; but as the years went by I came more and more to
understand it. It was as if they were drawn together by those very
qualities which each realized—perhaps with a certain repressed
regret—were lacking in his own nature. Markham was forthright,
brusque, and, on occasion, domineering, taking life with grim and
serious concern, and following the dictates of his legal conscience in
the face of every obstacle: honest, incorruptible, and untiring.
Vance, on the other hand, was volatile, debonair, and possessed of a
perpetual Juvenalian cynicism, smiling ironically at the bitterest
realities, and consistently fulfilling the rôle of a whimsically
disinterested spectator of life. But, withal, he understood people as
profoundly as he understood art, and his dissection of motives and his
shrewd readings of character were—as I had many occasions to
witness—uncannily accurate. Markham apprehended these qualities in
Vance, and sensed their true value.
It was not yet ten o’clock of the morning of November the 9th when
Vance and I, after motoring to the old Criminal Courts Building on the
corner of Franklin and Centre Streets, went directly to the District
Attorney’s office on the fourth floor. On that momentous forenoon two
gangsters, each accusing the other of firing the fatal shot in a
recent pay-roll hold-up, were to be cross-examined by Markham; and
this interview was to decide the question as to which of the men would
be charged with murder and which held as a State’s witness. Markham
and Vance had discussed the situation the night before in the
lounge-room of the Stuyvesant Club, and Vance had expressed a desire
to be present at the examination. Markham had readily assented, and so
we had risen early and driven down-town.
The interview with the two men lasted for an hour, and Vance’s
disconcerting opinion was that neither was guilty of the actual
shooting.
“Y’ know, Markham,” he drawled, when the sheriff had returned the
prisoners to the Tombs, “those two Jack Sheppards are quite sincere:
each one thinks he’s telling the truth. _Ergo_, neither of ’em fired
the shot. A distressin’ predicament. They’re obvious
gallows-birds—born for the gibbet; and it’s a beastly shame not to be
able to round out their destinies in proper fashion. . . . I say,
wasn’t there another participant in the hold-up?”
Markham nodded. “A third got away. According to these two, it was a
well-known gangster named Eddie Maleppo.”
“Then Eduardo is your man.”*
* This was subsequently proved correct. Nearly a year later
Maleppo was arrested in Detroit, extradited to New York, and
convicted of the murder. His two companions had already been
successfully prosecuted for robbery. They are now serving long
terms in Sing Sing.
Markham did not reply, and Vance rose lazily and reached for his
ulster.
“By the by,” he said, slipping into his coat, “I note that our
upliftin’ press bedecked its front pages this morning with head-lines
about a pogrom at the old Greene mansion last night. Wherefore?”
Markham glanced quickly at the clock on the wall, and frowned.
“That reminds me. Chester Greene called up the first thing this
morning and insisted on seeing me. I told him eleven o’clock.”
“Where do _you_ fit in?” Vance had taken his hand from the door-knob,
and drew out his cigarette-case.
“I don’t!” snapped Markham. “But people think the District Attorney’s
office is a kind of clearing-house for all their troubles. It happens,
however, that I’ve known Chester Greene a long time—we’re both members
of the Marylebone Golf Club—and so I must listen to his plaint about
what was obviously an attempt to annex the famous Greene plate.”
“Burglary—eh, what?” Vance took a few puffs on his cigarette. “With
two women shot?”
“Oh, it was a miserable business! An amateur, no doubt. Got in a
panic, shot up the place, and bolted.”
“Seems a dashed curious proceeding.” Vance abstractedly reseated
himself in a large armchair near the door. “Did the antique cutlery
actually disappear?”
“Nothing was taken. The thief was evidently frightened off before he
made his haul.”
“Sounds a bit thick, don’t y’ know.—An amateur thief breaks into a
prominent home, casts a predat’ry eye on the dining-room silver, takes
alarm, goes up-stairs and shoots two women in their respective
boudoirs, and then flees. . . . Very touchin’ and all that, but
unconvincin’. Whence came this caressin’ theory?”
Markham was glowering, but when he spoke it was with an effort at
restraint.
“Feathergill was on duty last night when the call was relayed from
Headquarters, and accompanied the police to the house. He agrees with
their conclusions.”*
* Amos Feathergill was then an Assistant District Attorney. He
later ran on the Tammany ticket for assemblyman, and was
elected.
“Nevertheless, I could bear to know why Chester Greene is desirous of
having polite converse with you.”
Markham compressed his lips. He was not in cordial mood that morning,
and Vance’s flippant curiosity irked him. After a moment, however, he
said grudgingly:
“Since the attempted robbery interests you so keenly, you may, if you
insist, wait and hear what Greene has to say.”
“I’ll stay,” smiled Vance, removing his coat. “I’m weak; just can’t
resist a passionate entreaty. . . . Which one of the Greenes is
Chester? And how is he related to the two deceased?”
“There was only one murder,” Markham corrected him in a tone of
forbearance. “The oldest daughter—an unmarried woman in her early
forties—was killed instantly. A younger daughter, who was also shot,
has, I believe, a chance of recovery.”
“And Chester?”
“Chester is the elder son, a man of forty or thereabouts. He was the
first person on the scene after the shots had been fired.”
“What other members of the family are there? I know old Tobias Greene
has gone to his Maker.”
“Yes, old Tobias died about twelve years ago. But his wife is still
living, though she’s a helpless paralytic. Then there are—or rather
were—five children: the oldest, Julia; next, Chester; then another
daughter, Sibella, a few years under thirty, I should say; then Rex, a
sickly, bookish boy a year or so younger than Sibella; and Ada, the
youngest—an adopted daughter twenty-two or three, perhaps.”
“And it was Julia who was killed, eh? Which of the other two girls was
shot?”
“The younger—Ada. Her room, it seems, is across the hall from Julia’s,
and the thief apparently got in it by mistake while making his escape.
As I understand it, he entered Ada’s room immediately after firing on
Julia, saw his error, fired again, and then fled, eventually going
down the stairs and out the main entrance.”
Vance smoked a while in silence.
“Your hypothetical intruder must have been deuced confused to have
mistaken Ada’s bedroom door for the staircase, what? And then there’s
the query: what was this anonymous gentleman, who had called to
collect the plate, doing above-stairs?”
“Probably looking for jewellery.” Markham was rapidly losing patience.
“_I_ am not omniscient.” There was irony in his inflection.
“Now, now, Markham!” pleaded Vance cajolingly. “Don’t be vindictive.
Your Greene burglary promises several nice points in academic
speculation. Permit me to indulge my idle whims.”
At that moment Swacker, Markham’s youthful and alert secretary,
appeared at the swinging door which communicated with a narrow chamber
between the main waiting-room and the District Attorney’s private
office.
“Mr. Chester Greene is here,” he announced.