I could see he was fairly simmering with impotent anger at having let himself be goaded into issuing his challenge. But there was no retreating now. As he told me afterward, he was fully convinced he had been dragged forth out of a comfortable chair on a patent and ridiculous fool’s errand.
CHAPTER 9
THE HEIGHT OF THE MURDERER
(Saturday, June 15; 5 P.M.)
When we arrived at Benson’s house, a patrolman leaning somnolently against the iron paling of the areaway came suddenly to attention and saluted. He eyed Vance and me hopefully, regarding us no doubt as suspects being taken to the scene of the crime for questioning by the district attorney. We were admitted by one of the men from the homicide bureau who had been in the house on the morning of the investigation.
Markham greeted him with a nod.
“Everything going all right?”
“Sure,” the man replied good-naturedly. “The old lady’s as meek as a cat—and a swell cook.”
“We want to be alone for a while, Sniffin,” said Markham, as we passed into the living room.
“The gastronome’s name is Snitkin, not Sniffin,” Vance corrected him, when the door had closed on us.
“Wonderful memory,” muttered Markham churlishly.
“A failing of mine,” said Vance. “I suppose you are one of those rare persons who never forget a face but just can’t recall names, what?”
But Markham was in no mood to be twitted. “Now that you’ve dragged me here, what are you going to do?” He waved his hand depreciatingly and sank into a chair with an air of contemptuous abdication.
The living room looked much the same as when we saw it last, except that it had been put neatly in order. The shades were up, and the late afternoon light was flooding in profusely. The ornateness of the room’s furnishings seemed intensified by the glare.
Vance glanced about him and gave a shudder. “I’m half inclined to turn back,” he drawled. “It’s a clear case of justifiable homicide by an outraged interior decorator.”
“My dear aesthete,” 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 command 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 ‘sorrows’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,”—Vance smiled—“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 caliber. 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,