The Greatest Works of S. S. Van Dine (Illustrated Edition). S.S. Van Dine

we’ve at least a hundred clews in our possession; but none of them has any meaning so long as it’s unrelated to the others. This affair is like one of those silly word-puzzles where all the letters are redistributed into a meaningless jumble. The task for the solver is to rearrange them into an intelligible word or sentence.”

      “Could you name just eight or ten of those hundred clews for me?” Heath requested ironically. “I sure would like to get busy on something definite.”

      “You know ’em all, Sergeant.” Vance refused to fall in with the other’s bantering manner. “I’d say that practically everything that has happened since the first alarm reached you might be regarded as a clew.”

      “Sure!” The Sergeant had lapsed again into sullen gloom. “The footprints, the disappearance of the revolver, that noise Rex heard in the hall. But we’ve run all those leads up against a blank wall.”

      “Oh, those things!” Vance sent a ribbon of blue smoke upward. “Yes, they’re clews of a kind. But I was referring more specifically to the conditions existing at the Greene mansion—the organisms of the environment there—the psychological elements of the situation.”

      “Don’t get off again on your metaphysical theories and esoteric hypotheses,” Markham interjected tartly. “We’ve either got to find a practical modus operandi, or admit ourselves beaten.”

      “But, Markham old man, you’re beaten on the face of it unless you can put your chaotic facts into some kind of order. And the only way you’ll be able to do that is by a process of prayerful analysis.”

      “You give me some facts that’ve got some sense to ’em,” challenged Heath, “and I’ll put ’em together soon enough.”

      “The Sergeant’s right,” was Markham’s comment. “You’ll admit that as yet we haven’t any significant facts to work with.”

      “Oh, there’ll be more.”

      Inspector Moran sat up, and his eyes narrowed.

      “What do you mean by that, Mr. Vance?” It was obvious that the remark had struck some chord of agreement in him.

      “The thing isn’t over yet.” Vance spoke with unwonted sombreness. “The picture’s unfinished. There’s more tragedy to come before the monstrous canvas is rounded out. And the hideous thing about it is that there’s no way of stopping it. Nothing now can halt the horror that’s at work. It’s got to go on.”

      “You feel that, too!” The Inspector’s voice was off its normal pitch. “By God! This is the first case I’ve ever had that frightened me.”

      “Don’t forget, sir,” argued Heath, but without conviction, “that we got men watching the house day and night.”

      “There’s no security in that, Sergeant,” asserted Vance. “The killer is already in the house. He’s part of the deadly atmosphere of the place. He’s been there for years, nourished by the toxins that seep from the very stones of the walls.”

      Heath looked up.

      “A member of the family? You said that once before.”

      “Not necessarily. But some one who has been tainted by the perverted situation that grew out of old Tobias’s patriarchal ideas.”

      “We might manage to put some one in the house to keep an eye on things,” suggested the Inspector. “Or, there’s a possibility of prevailing upon the members of the family to separate and move to other quarters.”

      Vance shook his head slowly.

      “A spy in the house would be useless. Isn’t every one there a spy now, watching all the others, and watching them with fear and suspicion? And as for dispersing the family: not only would you find old Mrs. Greene, who holds the purse-strings, an adamantine obstacle, but you’d meet all manner of legal complications as a result of Tobias’s will. No one gets a dollar, I understand, who doesn’t remain in the mansion until the worms have ravaged his carcass for a full quarter of a century. And even if you succeeded in scattering the remnants of the Greene line, and locked up the house, you wouldn’t have stamped out the killer. And there’ll be no end of this thing until a purifying stake has been driven through his heart.”

      “Are you going in now for vampirism, Vance?” The case had exacerbated Markham’s nerves. “Shall we draw an enchanted ring around the house and hang garlic on the door?”

      Markham’s extravagant comment of harassed discouragement seemed to express the hopeless state of mind of all of us, and there was a long silence. It was Heath who first came back to a practical consideration of the matter in hand.

      “You spoke, Mr. Vance, about old man Greene’s will. And I’ve been thinking that, if we knew all the terms of that will, we might find something to help us. There’s millions in the estate, all of it left, I hear, to the old lady. What I’d like to know is, has she a full right to dispose of it any way she likes? And I’d also like to know what kind of a will the old lady herself has made. With all that money at stake, we might get on to a motive of some kind.”

      “Quite—quite!” Vance looked at Heath with undisguised admiration. “That’s the most sensible suggestion that’s been made thus far. I salute you, Sergeant. Yes, old Tobias’s money may have some bearing on the case. Not a direct bearing, perhaps; but the influence of that money—the subterranean power it exerts—is undoubtedly tangled up in these crimes.—How about it, Markham? How does one go about finding out about other people’s wills?”

      Markham pondered the point.

      “I don’t believe there’d be any great difficulty in the present instance. Tobias Greene’s will is a matter of record, of course, though it might take some little time to look it up in the Surrogate’s files; and I happen to know old Buckway, the senior partner of Buckway & Aldine, the Greene solicitors. I see him here at the club occasionally, and I’ve done one or two small favors for him. I think I could induce him to tell me confidentially the terms of Mrs. Greene’s will. I’ll see what can be done to-morrow.”

      Half an hour later the conference broke up and we went home.

      “I fear those wills are not going to help much,” Vance remarked, as he sipped his high-ball before the fire late that night. “Like everything else in this harrowin’ case, they’ll possess some significance that can’t be grasped until they’re fitted into the final picture.”

      He rose and, going to the book-shelves, took down a small volume.

      “And now I think I’ll erase the Greenes from my mind pro tempore, and dip into the ‘Satyricon.’ The fusty historians pother frightfully about the reasons for the fall of Rome, whereas the eternal answer is contained in Petronius’s imperishable classic of that city’s decadence.”

      He settled himself and turned the pages of his book. But there was no concentration in his attitude, and his eyes wandered constantly from the text.

Two days later—on Tuesday, November 30—Markham telephoned Vance shortly after ten o’clock in the morning, and asked him to come at once to the office. Vance was preparing to attend an exhibition of negro sculpture at the Modern Gallery,¹⁸ but this indulgence was postponed in view of the District Attorney’s urgent call; and in less than half an hour we were at the Criminal Courts Building.

      “Ada Greene called up this morning, and asked to see me without delay,” explained Markham. “I offered to send Heath out and, if necessary, to come myself later on. But she seemed particularly anxious that I shouldn’t do that, and insisted on coming here: said it was a matter she could speak of more freely away from the house. She seemed somewhat upset, so I told her to come ahead. Then I phoned you and notified Heath.”

      Vance settled himself and lit a cigarette.

      “I don’t wonder she’d grasp at any chance to shake the atmosphere of her surroundings.