The Greatest Murder Mysteries of S. S. Van Dine - 12 Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). S.S. Van Dine
Читать онлайн книгу.
Brenner followed Heath, without looking to right or left, and, taking the jewel-case, went silently to the window and began to examine it. Vance, whose interest seemed suddenly to be reawakened, came forward and stood watching him.
For fully five minutes the little expert inspected the case, holding it within a few inches of his myopic eyes. Then he lifted his glance to Heath and winked several times rapidly.
“Two instruments were used in opening this case.” His voice was small and high-pitched, but there was in it an undeniable quality of authority. “One bent the lid and made several fractures on the baked enamel. The other was, I should say, a steel chisel of some kind, and was used to break the lock. The first instrument, which was blunt, was employed amateurishly, at the wrong angle of leverage; and the effort resulted only in twisting the overhang of the lid. But the steel chisel was inserted with a knowledge of the correct point of oscillation, where a minimum of leverage would produce the counteracting stress necessary to displace the lock-bolts.”
“A professional job?” suggested Heath.
“Highly so,” answered the Inspector, again blinking. “That is to say, the forcing of the lock was professional. And I would even go so far as to advance the opinion that the instrument used was one especially constructed for such illegal purposes.”
“Could this have done the job?” Heath held out the poker.
The other looked at it closely, and turned it over several times.
“It might have been the instrument that bent the cover, but it was not the one used for prying open the lock. This poker is cast iron and would have snapped under any great pressure; whereas this box is of cold rolled eighteen-gauge steel plate, with an inset cylinder pin-tumbler lock taking a paracentric key. The leverage force necessary to distort the flange sufficiently to lift the lid could have been made only by a steel chisel.”
“Well, that’s that.” Heath seemed well satisfied with Inspector Brenner’s conclusion. “I’ll send the box down to you, Professor, and you can let me know what else you find out.”
“I’ll take it along, if you have no objection.” And the little man tucked it under his arm and shuffled out without another word.
Heath grinned at Markham. “Queer bird. He ain’t happy unless he’s measuring jimmy marks on doors and windows and things. He couldn’t wait till I sent him the box. He’ll hold it lovingly on his lap all the way down in the subway, like a mother with a baby.”
Vance was still standing near the dressing-table, gazing perplexedly into space.
“Markham,” he said, “the condition of that jewel-case is positively astounding. It’s unreasonable, illogical—insane. It complicates the situation most damnably. That steel box simply couldn’t have been chiselled open by a professional burglar . . . and yet, don’t y’ know, it actually was.”
Before Markham could reply, a satisfied grunt from Captain Dubois attracted our attention.
“I’ve got something for you, Sergeant,” he announced.
We moved expectantly into the living-room. Dubois was bending over the end of the library-table almost directly behind the place where Margaret Odell’s body had been found. He took out an insufflator, which was like a very small hand-bellows, and blew a fine light-yellow powder evenly over about a square foot of the polished rosewood surface of the table-top. Then he gently blew away the surplus powder, and there appeared the impression of a human hand distinctly registered in saffron. The bulb of the thumb and each fleshy hummock between the joints of the fingers and around the palm stood out like tiny circular islands. All the papillary ridges were clearly discernible. The photographer then hooked his camera to a peculiar adjustable tripod and, carefully focusing his lens, took two flash-light pictures of the hand-mark.
“This ought to do.” Dubois was pleased with his find. “It’s the right hand—a clear print—and the guy who made it was standing right behind the dame. . . . And it’s the newest print in the place.”
“What about this box?” Heath pointed to the black document-box on the table near the overturned lamp.
“Not a mark—wiped clean.”
Dubois began putting away his paraphernalia.
“I say, Captain Dubois,” interposed Vance, “did you take a good look at the inside door-knob of that clothes-press?”
The man swung about abruptly, and gave Vance a glowering look.
“People ain’t in the habit of handling the inside knobs of closet doors. They open and shut closets from the outside.”
Vance raised his eyebrows in simulated astonishment.
“Do they, now, really?—Fancy that! . . . Still, don’t y’ know, if one were inside the closet, one couldn’t reach the outside knob.”
“The people I know don’t shut themselves in clothes-closets.” Dubois’s tone was ponderously sarcastic.
“You positively amaze me!” declared Vance. “All the people I know are addicted to the habit—a sort of daily pastime, don’t y’ know.”
Markham, always diplomatic, intervened.
“What idea have you about that closet, Vance?”
“Alas! I wish I had one,” was the dolorous answer. “It’s because I can’t, for the life of me, make sense of its neat and orderly appearance that I’m so interested in it. Really, y’ know, it should have been artistically looted.”
Heath was not entirely free from the same vague misgivings that were disturbing Vance, for he turned to Dubois and said:
“You might go over the knob, Captain. As this gentleman says, there’s something funny about the condition of that closet.”
Dubois, silent and surly, went to the closet door and sprayed his yellow powder over the inside knob. When he had blown the loose particles away, he bent over it with his magnifying-glass. At length he straightened up, and gave Vance a look of ill-natured appraisal.
“There’s fresh prints on it, all right,” he grudgingly admitted; “and unless I’m mistaken they were made by the same hand as those on the table. Both thumb-marks are ulnar loops, and the index-fingers are both whorl patterns. . . . Here, Pete,” he ordered the photographer, “make some shots of that knob.”
When this had been done, Dubois, Bellamy, and the photographer left us.
A few moments later, after an interchange of pleasantries, Inspector Moran also departed. At the door he passed two men in the white uniform of internes, who had come to take away the girl’s body.
9. It is an interesting fact that for the nineteen years he had been connected with the New York Police Department, he had been referred to, by his superiors and subordinates alike, as “the Professor.”
CHAPTER V
THE BOLTED DOOR
(Tuesday, September 11; 10.30 a. m.)
Markham and Heath and Vance and I were now alone in the apartment. Dark, low-hanging clouds had drifted across the sun, and the gray spectral light intensified the tragic atmosphere of the rooms. Markham had lighted a cigar, and stood leaning against the piano, looking about him with a disconsolate but determined air. Vance had moved over to one of the pictures on the side wall of the living-room—Boucher’s “La Bergère Endormie,” I think it was—and stood looking at it with cynical contempt.
“Dimpled nudities, gambolling Cupids and woolly clouds for royal cocottes,” he commented. His distaste for all the painting of the