The Greatest Works of S. S. Van Dine (Illustrated Edition). S.S. Van DineЧитать онлайн книгу.
to turn back,” he drawled. “It’s a clear case of justifiable homicide by an outraged interior decorator.”
“My dear æsthete,” Markham urged impatiently, “be good enough to bury your artistic prejudices, and to proceed with your problem. . . . Of course,” he added, with a malicious smile, “if you fear the result, you may still withdraw, and thereby preserve your charming theories in their present virgin state.”
“And permit you to send an innocent maiden to the chair!” exclaimed Vance, in mock indignation. “Fie, fie! La politesse alone forbids my withdrawal. May I never have to lament, with Prince Henry, that to my shame I have a truant been to chivalry’.”
Markham set his jaw, and gave Vance a ferocious look.
“I’m beginning to think that, after all, there is something in your theory that every man has some motive for murdering another.”
“Well,” replied Vance cheerfully, “now that you have begun to come round to my way of thinking, do you mind if I send Mr. Snitkin on an errand?”
Markham sighed audibly and shrugged his shoulders.
“I’ll smoke during the opéra bouffe, if it won’t interfere with your performance.”
Vance went to the door and called Snitkin.
“I say, would you mind going to Mrs. Platz and borrowing a long tape-measure and a ball of string. . . . The District Attorney wants them,” he added, giving Markham a sycophantic bow.
“I can’t hope that you’re going to hang yourself, can I?” asked Markham.
Vance gazed at him reprovingly.
“Permit me,” he said sweetly, “to commend Othello to your attention:
‘How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?’
Or—to descend from a poet to a platitudinarian—let me present for your consid’ration a pentameter from Longfellow: ‘All things come round to him who will but wait.’ Untrue, of course, but consolin’. Milton said it much better in his ‘They also serve—‘. But Cervantes said it best: ‘Patience and shuffle the cards.’ Sound advice, Markham—and advice expressed rakishly, as all good advice should be. . . . To be sure, patience is a sort of last resort—a practice to adopt when there’s nothing else to do. Still, like virtue, it occasionally rewards the practitioner; although I’ll admit that, as a rule, it is—again like virtue—bootless. That is to say, it is its own reward. It has, however, been swathed in many verbal robes. It is ‘sorrow’s slave,’ and the ‘sov’reign o’er transmuted ills,’ as well as ‘all the passion of great hearts.’ Rousseau wrote, La patience est amère mais son fruit est doux. But perhaps your legal taste runs to Latin. Superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est, quoth Vergil. And Horace also spoke on the subject. Durum! said he, sed levius fit patientia——”
“Why the hell doesn’t Snitkin come?” growled Markham.
Almost as he spoke the door opened, and the detective handed Vance the tape-measure and string.
“And now, Markham, for your reward!”
Bending over the rug Vance moved the large wicker chair into the exact position it had occupied when Benson had been shot. The position was easily determined, for the impressions of the chair’s castors on the deep nap of the rug were plainly visible. He then ran the string through the bullet-hole in the back of the chair, and directed me to hold one end of it against the place where the bullet had struck the wainscot. Next he took up the tape-measure and extending the string through the hole, measured a distance of five feet and six inches along it, starting at the point which corresponded to the location of Benson’s forehead as he sat in the chair. Tying a knot in the string to indicate the measurement, he drew the string taut, so that it extended in a straight line from the mark on the wainscot, through the hole in the back of the chair, to a point five feet and six inches in front of where Benson’s head had rested.
“This knot in the string,” he explained, “now represents the exact location of the muzzle of the gun that ended Benson’s career. You see the reasoning—eh, what? Having two points in the bullet’s course—namely, the hole in the chair and the mark on the wainscot—, and also knowing the approximate vertical line of explosion, which was between five and six feet from the gentleman’s skull, it was merely necess’ry to extend the straight line of the bullet’s course to the vertical line of explosion in order to ascertain the exact point at which the shot was fired.”
“Theoretically very pretty,” commented Markham; “though why you should go to so much trouble to ascertain this point in space I can’t imagine. . . . Not that it matters, for you have overlooked the possibility of the bullet’s deflection.”
“Forgive me for contradicting you,” smiled Vance; “but yesterday morning I questioned Captain Hagedorn at some length, and learned that there had been no deflection of the bullet. Hagedorn had inspected the wound before we arrived; and he was really pos’tive on that point. In the first place, the bullet struck the frontal bone at such an angle as to make deflection practically impossible even had the pistol been of smaller calibre. And in the second place, the pistol with which Benson was shot was of so large a bore—a point-forty-five—and the muzzle velocity was so great, that the bullet would have taken a straight course even had it been held at a greater distance from the gentleman’s brow.”
“And how,” asked Markham, “did Hagedorn know what the muzzle velocity was?”
“I was inquis’tive on that point myself,” answered Vance; “and he explained that the size and character of the bullet and the expelled shell told him the whole tale. That’s how he knew the gun was an army Colt automatic—I believe he called it a U. S. Government Colt—and not the ordinary Colt automatic. The weight of the bullets of these two pistols is slightly different: the ordinary Colt bullet weighs 200 grains, whereas the army Colt bullet weighs 230 grains. Hagedorn, having a hypersensitive tactile sense, was able, I presume, to distinguish the difference at once, though I didn’t go into his physiological gifts with him,—my reticent nature, you understand. . . . However, he could tell it was a forty-five army Colt automatic bullet; and knowing this, he knew that the muzzle velocity was 809 feet, and that the striking energy was 329—which gives a six-inch penetration in white pine at a distance of twenty-five yards. . . . An amazin’ creature, this Hagedorn. Imagine having one’s head full of such entrancing information! The old mysteries of why a man should take up the bass-fiddle as a life work and where all the pins go, are babes’ conundrums compared with the one of why a human being should devote his years to the idiosyncrasies of bullets.”
“The subject is not exactly an enthralling one,” said Markham wearily; “so, for the sake of argument, let us admit that you have now found the precise point of the gun’s explosion. Where do we go from there?”
“While I hold the string on a straight line,” directed Vance, “be good enough to measure the exact distance from the floor to the knot. Then my secret will be known.”
“This game doesn’t enthrall me, either,” Markham protested. “I’d much prefer ‘London Bridge’.”
Nevertheless he made the measurement.
“Four feet, eight and a half inches,” he announced indifferently.
Vance laid a cigarette on the rug at a point directly beneath the knot.
“We now know the exact height at which the pistol was held when it was fired. . . . You grasp the process by which this conclusion was reached, I’m sure.”
“It seems rather obvious,” answered Markham.
Vance again went to the door and called Snitkin.
“The District Attorney desires the loan of your gun for a moment,” he said. “He wishes to make a test.”
Snitkin stepped up to Markham and held out his pistol wonderingly.
“The