“I am floored by your erudition,” declared Markham, as he signaled to a passing attendant and ordered another cigar. “I console myself, however, with the fact that, as a rule, murder will leak out.”
Vance smoked his cigarette in silence, looking thoughtfully out through the window up at the hazy June sky.
“Markham,” he said at length, “the number of fantastic ideas extant about criminals is pos’tively amazing. How a sane person can subscribe to that ancient hallucination that ‘murder will out’ is beyond me. It rarely ‘outs,’ old dear. And, if it did ‘out,’ why a homicide bureau? Why all this whirlin’-dervish activity by the police whenever a body is found?… The poets are to blame for this bit of lunacy. Chaucer probably started it with his ‘Mordre wol out,’ and Shakespeare helped it along by attributing to murder a miraculous organ that speaks in lieu of a tongue. It was some poet, too, no doubt, who conceived the fancy that carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer.… Would you, as the great Protector of the Faithful, dare tell the police to wait calmly in their offices, or clubs, or favorite beauty parlors—or wherever policemen do their waiting—until a murder ‘outs’? Poor dear!—if you did, they’d ask the governor for your detention as particeps criminis, or apply for a de lunatico inquirendo.”13
Markham grunted good-naturedly. He was busy cutting and lighting his cigar.
“I believe you chaps have another hallucination about crime,” continued Vance, “namely, that the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. This weird notion is even explained on some recondite and misty psychological ground. But, I assure you, psychology teaches no such prepost’rous doctrine. If ever a murderer returned to the body of his victim for any reason other than to rectify some blunder he had made, then he is a subject for Broadmoor—or Bloomingdale.… How easy it would be for the police if this fanciful notion were true! They’d merely have to sit down at the scene of the crime, play bezique or Mah Jongg until the murderer returned, and then escort him to the bastille, what? The true psychological instinct in anyone having committed a punishable act is to get as far away from the scene of it as the limits of this world will permit.”14
“In the present case, at any rate,” Markham reminded him, “we are neither waiting inactively for the murder to out, nor sitting in Benson’s living room trusting to the voluntary return of the criminal.”
“Either course would achieve success as quickly as the one you are now pursuing,” Vance said.
“Not being gifted with your singular insight,” retorted Markham, “I can only follow the inadequate processes of human reasoning.”
“No doubt,” Vance agreed commiseratingly. “And the results of your activities thus far force me to the conclusion that a man with a handful of legalistic logic can successfully withstand the most obst’nate and heroic assaults of ordin’ry common sense.”
Markham was piqued. “Still harping on the St. Clair woman’s innocence, eh? However, in view of the complete absence of any tangible evidence pointing elsewhere, you must admit I have no choice of courses.”
“I admit nothing of the kind,” Vance told him, “for, I assure you, there is an abundance of evidence pointing elsewhere. You simply failed to see it.”
“You think so!” Vance’s nonchalant cocksureness had at last overthrown Markham’s equanimity. “Very well, old man; I hereby enter an emphatic denial to all your fine theories; and I challenge you to produce a single piece of this evidence which you say exists.”
He threw his words out with asperity, and gave a curt, aggressive gesture with his extended fingers, to indicate that, as far as he was concerned, the subject was closed.
Vance, too, I think, was pricked a little.
“Y’know, Markham old dear, I’m no avenger of blood or vindicator of the honor of society. The role would bore me.”
Markham smiled loftily but made no reply.
Vance smoked meditatively for a while. Then, to my amazement, he turned calmly and deliberately to Markham, and said in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice, “I’m going to accept your challenge. It’s a bit alien to my tastes; but the problem, y’ know, rather appeals to me; it presents the same diff’culties as the Concert Champêtre affair—a question of disputed authorship, as it were.”15
Markham abruptly suspended the motion of lifting his cigar to his lips. He had scarcely intended his challenge literally; it had been uttered more in the nature of a verbal defiance; and he scrutinized Vance a bit uncertainly. Little did he realize that the other’s casual acceptance of his unthinking and but half-serious challenge was to alter the entire criminal history of New York.
“Just how do you intend to proceed?” he asked.
Vance waved his hand carelessly. “Like Napoleon, je m’en gage, et puis je vois. However, I must have your word that you’ll give me every possible assistance and will refrain from all profound legal objections.”
Markham pursed his lips. He was frankly perplexed by the unexpected manner in which Vance had met his defiance. But immediately he gave a good-natured laugh, as if, after all, the matter was of no serious consequence.
“Very well,” he assented. “You have my word.… And now what?”
After a moment Vance lit a fresh cigarette and rose languidly. “First,” he announced, “I shall determine the exact height of the guilty person. Such a fact will, no doubt, come under the head of indicat’ry evidence—eh, what?”
Markham stared at him incredulously.
“How, in Heaven’s name, are you going to do that?”
“By those primitive deductive methods to which you so touchingly pin your faith,” he answered easily. “But come; let us repair to the scene of the crime.”
He moved toward the door, Markham reluctantly following in a state of perplexed irritation. “But you know the body was removed,” the latter protested; “and the place by now has no doubt been straightened up.”
“Thank Heaven for that!” murmured Vance. “I’m not particularly fond of corpses; and untidiness, y’ know, annoys me frightfully.”
As we emerged into Madison Avenue, he signaled to the commissionnaire for a taxicab, and without a word, urged us into it.
“This is all nonsense,” Markham declared ill-naturedly, as we started on our journey uptown. “How do you expect to find any clues now? By this time everything has been obliterated.”
“Alas, my dear Markham,” lamented Vance, in a tone of mock solicitude, “how woefully deficient you are in philosophic theory! If anything, no matter how inf’nitesimal, could really be obliterated, the universe, y’ know, would cease to exist—the cosmic problem would be solved, and the Creator would write Q.E.D. across an empty firmament. Our only chance of going on with this illusion we call Life, d’ ye see, lies in the fact that consciousness is like an inf’nite decimal point. Did you, as a child, ever try to complete the decimal one-third by filling a whole sheet of paper with the numeral three? You always had the fraction one-third left, don’t y’ know. If you could have eliminated the smallest one-third, after having set down ten thousand threes, the problem would have ended. So with life, my dear fellow. It’s only because we can’t erase or obliterate anything that we go on existing.”
He