The Philo Vance Megapack. S.S. Van Dine

shot himself!”

      “Fancy that,” said Vance.

      “You—you knew he was going to do that?” Markham spluttered.

      “It was rather obvious, don’t y’ know.”

      Markham’s eyes flashed angrily.

      “And you deliberately interceded for him—to give him the opportunity?”

      “Tut, tut, my dear fellow!” Vance reproached him. “Pray don’t give way to conventional moral indignation. However unethical—theoretically—it may be to take another’s life, a man’s own life is certainly his to do with as he chooses. Suicide is his inalienable right. And under the paternal tyranny of our modern democracy, I’m rather inclined to think it’s about the only right he has left, what?”

      He glanced at his watch and frowned.

      “D’ ye know, I’ve missed my concert, bothering with your beastly affairs,” he complained amiably, giving Markham an engaging smile; “and now you’re actually scolding me. ’Pon my word, old fellow, you’re deuced ungrateful!”

36 The treatise referred to by Vance was Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik.

37 Recently I ran across an article by Doctor George A. Dorsey, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, and author of “Why We Behave Like Human Beings,” which bore intimate testimony to the scientific accuracy of Vance’s theory. In it Doctor Dorsey said: “Poker is a cross-section of life. The way a man behaves in a poker game is the way he behaves in life.… His success or failure lies in the way his physical organism responds to the stimuli supplied by the game.… I have studied humanity all my life from the anthropologic and psychological viewpoint. And I have yet to find a better laboratory exercise than to observe the manners of men as they see my raise and come back at me.… The psychologist’s verbalized, visceral, and manual behaviors are functioning at their highest in a poker game.… I can truthfully say that I learned about men from poker.”