The Greatest Murder Mysteries of S. S. Van Dine - 12 Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). S.S. Van Dine
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sense of authority. Markham had listened with interest, though it could be seen that he did not regard Vance’s theorizing seriously.
“Your system ignores motive altogether,” he objected.
“Naturally,” Vance replied, “—since it’s an irrelevant factor in most crimes. Every one of us, my dear chap, has just as good a motive for killing at least a score of men, as the motives which actuate ninety-nine crimes out of a hundred. And, when anyone is murdered, there are dozens of innocent people who had just as strong a motive for doing it as had the actual murderer. Really, y’ know, the fact that a man has a motive is no evidence whatever that he’s guilty,—such motives are too universal a possession of the human race. Suspecting a man of murder because he has a motive is like suspecting a man of running away with another man’s wife because he has two legs. The reason that some people kill and others don’t, is a matter of temp’rament—of individual psychology. It all comes back to that. . . . And another thing: when a person does possess a real motive—something tremendous and overpowering—he’s pretty apt to keep it to himself, to hide it and guard it carefully—eh, what? He may even have disguised the motive through years of preparation; or the motive may have been born within five minutes of the crime through the unexpected discovery of facts a decade old. . . . So, d’ ye see, the absence of any apparent motive in a crime might be regarded as more incriminating than the presence of one.”
“You are going to have some difficulty in eliminating the idea of cui bono from the consideration of crime.”
“I dare say,” agreed Vance. “The idea of cui bono is just silly enough to be impregnable. And yet, many persons would be benefited by almost anyone’s death. Kill Sumner, and, on that theory, you could arrest the entire membership of the Authors’ League.”
“Opportunity, at any rate,” persisted Markham, “is an insuperable factor in crime,—and by opportunity, I mean that affinity of circumstances and conditions which make a particular crime possible, feasible and convenient for a particular person.”
“Another irrelevant factor,” asserted Vance. “Think of the opportunities we have every day to murder people we dislike! Only the other night I had ten insuff’rable bores to dinner in my apartment—a social devoir. But I refrained—with consid’rable effort, I admit—from putting arsenic in the Pontet Canet. The Borgias and I, y’ see, merely belong in different psychological categ’ries. On the other hand, had I been resolved to do murder, I would—like those resourceful cinquecento patricians—have created my own opportunity. . . . And there’s the rub:—one can either make an opportunity or disguise the fact that he had it, with false alibis and various other tricks. You remember the case of the murderer who called the police to break into his victim’s house before the latter had been killed, saying he suspected foul play, and who then preceded the policemen indoors and stabbed the man as they were trailing up the stairs.”11
“Well, what of actual proximity, or presence,—the proof of a person being on the scene of the crime at the time it was committed?”
“Again misleading,” Vance declared. “An innocent person’s presence is too often used as a shield by the real murderer who is actu’lly absent. A clever criminal can commit a crime from a distance through an agency that is present. Also, a clever criminal can arrange an alibi and then go to the scene of the crime disguised and unrecognized. There are far too many convincing ways of being present when one is believed to be absent—and vice versa. . . . But we can never part from our individualities and our natures. And that is why all crime inev’tably comes back to human psychology—the one fixed, undisguisable basis of deduction.”
“It’s a wonder to me,” said Markham, “in view of your theories, that you don’t advocate dismissing nine-tenths of the police force and installing a gross or two of those psychological machines so popular with the Sunday Supplement editor.”
Vance smoked a minute meditatively.
“I’ve read about ’em. Int’restin’ toys. They can no doubt indicate a certain augmented emotional stress when the patient transfers his attention from the pious platitudes of Dr. Frank Crane to a problem in spherical trigonometry. But if an innocent person were harnessed up to the various tubes, galvanometers, electro-magnets, glass plates, and brass knobs of one of these apparatuses, and then quizzed about some recent crime, your indicat’ry needle would cavort about like a Russian dancer as a result of sheer nervous panic on the patient’s part.”
Markham smiled patronizingly.
“And I suppose the needle would remain static with a guilty person in contact?”
“Oh, on the contr’ry.” Vance’s tone was unruffled. “The needle would bob up and down just the same—but not because he was guilty. If he was stupid, for instance, the needle would jump as a result of his resentment at a seemingly newfangled third-degree torture. And if he was intelligent, the needle would jump because of his suppressed mirth at the puerility of the legal mind for indulging in such nonsense.”
“You move me deeply,” said Markham. “My head is spinning like a turbine. But there are those of us poor worldlings who believe that criminality is a defect of the brain.”
“So it is,” Vance readily agreed. “But unfortunately the entire human race possesses the defect. The virtuous ones haven’t, so to speak, the courage of their defects. . . . However, if you were referring to a criminal type, then, alas! we must part company. It was Lombroso, that darling of the yellow journals, who invented the idea of the congenital criminal. Real scientists like DuBois, Karl Pearson and Goring have shot his idiotic theories full of holes.”12
“I am floored by your erudition,” declared Markham, as he signalled 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 a 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