are enough still open to keep me busy,” said Markham, pushing back his plate and calling for the check. He rose; then pausing, regarded Vance meditatingly. “Are you sufficiently interested to want to come along?”
“Eh, what? My word!… Charmed, I’m sure. But, I say, sit down just a moment—there’s a good fellow!—till I finish my coffee.”
I was considerably astonished at Vance’s ready acceptance, careless and bantering though it was, for there was an exhibition of old Chinese prints at the Montross Galleries that afternoon, which he had planned to attend. A Riokai and a Moyeki, said to be very fine examples of Sung painting, were to be shown; and Vance was particularly eager to acquire them for his collection.
We rode with Markham to the Criminal Courts building and, entering by the Franklin Street door, took the private elevator to the district attorney’s spacious but dingy private office, which overlooked the gray-stone ramparts of the Tombs. Vance seated himself in one of the heavy leather-upholstered chairs near the carved oak table on the right of the desk and lighted a cigarette with an air of cynical amusement.
“I await with anticipat’ry delight the grinding of the wheels of justice,” he confided, leaning back lazily.
“You are doomed not to hear the first turn of those wheels,” retorted Markham. “The initial revolution will take place outside of this office.” And he disappeared through a swinging door which led to the judge’s chambers.
Five minutes later he returned and sat down in the high-backed swivel chair at his desk, with his back to the four tall narrow windows in the south wall of the office.
“I just saw Judge Redfern,” he explained—“it happened to be the midday recess—and he verified Spotswoode’s statement in regard to the poker game. The judge met him outside of the club at ten minutes before midnight, and was with him until three in the morning. He noted the time because he had promised his guests to be back at half past eleven and was twenty minutes late.”
“Why all this substantiation of an obviously unimportant fact?” asked Vance.
“A matter of routine,” Markham told him, slightly impatient. “In a case of this kind every factor, however seemingly remote to the main issue, must be checked.”
“Really, y’ know, Markham”—Vance laid his head back on the chair and gazed dreamily at the ceiling—“one would think that this eternal routine, which you lawyer chaps worship so devoutly, actually got one somewhere occasionally; whereas it never gets one anywhere. Remember the Red Queen in ‘Through the Looking-Glass—’”
“I’m too busy at present to debate the question of routine versus inspiration,” Markham answered brusquely, pressing a button beneath the edge of his desk.
Swacker, his youthful and energetic secretary, appeared at the door which communicated with a narrow inner chamber between the district attorney’s office and the main waiting room.
“Yes, Chief?” The secretary’s eyes gleamed expectantly behind his enormous horn-rimmed glasses.
“Tell Ben to send me in a man at once.”32
Swacker went out through the corridor door, and a minute or two later a suave, rotund man, dressed immaculately and wearing a pince-nez, entered, and stood before Markham with an ingratiating smile.
“Morning, Tracy.” Markham’s tone was pleasant but curt. “Here’s a list of four witnesses in connection with the Odell case that I want brought down here at once—the two phone operators, the maid, and the janitor. You’ll find them at 184 West 71st Street. Sergeant Heath is holding them there.”
“Right, sir.” Tracy took the memorandum, and with a priggish, but by no means inelegant, bow went out.
During the next hour Markham plunged into the general work that had accumulated during the forenoon, and I was amazed at the man’s tremendous vitality and efficiency. He disposed of as many important matters as would have occupied the ordinary businessman for an entire day. Swacker bobbed in and out with electric energy, and various clerks appeared at the touch of a buzzer, took their orders, and were gone with breathless rapidity. Vance, who had sought diversion in a tome of famous arson trials, looked up admiringly from time to time and shook his head in mild reproach at such spirited activity.
It was just half past two when Swacker announced the return of Tracy with the four witnesses; and for two hours Markham questioned and cross-questioned them with a thoroughness and an insight that even I, as a lawyer, had rarely seen equaled. His interrogation of the two phone operators was quite different from his casual questioning of them earlier in the day; and if there had been a single relevant omission in their former testimony, it would certainly have been caught now by Markham’s grueling catechism. But when, at last, they were told they could go, no new information had been brought to light. Their stories now stood firmly grounded: no one—with the exception of the girl herself and her escort, and the disappointed visitor at half past nine—had entered the front door and passed down the hall to the Odell apartment from seven o’clock on; and no one had passed out that way. The janitor reiterated stubbornly that he had bolted the side door a little after six, and no amount of wheedling or aggression could shake his dogged certainty on that point. Amy Gibson, the maid, could add nothing to her former testimony. Markham’s intensive examination of her produced only repetitions of what she had already told him.
Not one new possibility—not one new suggestion—was brought out. In fact, the two hours’ interlocutory proceedings resulted only in closing up every loophole in a seemingly incredible situation. When, at half past four, Markham sat back in his chair with a weary sigh, the chance of unearthing a promising means of approach to the astonishing problem seemed more remote than ever.
Vance closed his treatise on arson and threw away his cigarette.
“I tell you, Markham old chap”—he grinned—“this case requires umbilicular contemplation, not routine. Why not call in an Egyptian seeress with a flair for crystal-gazing?”
“If this sort of thing goes on much longer,” returned Markham dispiritedly, “I’ll be tempted to take your advice.”
Just then Swacker looked in through the door to say that Inspector Brenner was on the wire. Markham picked up the telephone receiver, and as he listened he jotted down some notes on a pad. When the call had ended, he turned to Vance.
“You seemed disturbed over the condition of the steel jewel case we found in the bedroom. Well, the expert on burglar tools just called up; and he verifies his opinion of this morning. The case was pried open with a specially-made cold chisel such as only a professional burglar would carry or would know how to use. It had an inch-and-three-eighths beveled bit and a one-inch flat handle. It was an old instrument—there was a peculiar nick in the blade—and is the same one that was used in a successful housebreak on upper Park Avenue early last summer.… Does that highly exciting information ameliorate your anxiety?”
“Can’t say that it does.” Vance had again become serious and perplexed. “In fact, it makes the situation still more fantastic.… I could see a glimmer of light—eerie and unearthly, perhaps, but still a perceptible illumination—in all this murkiness if it wasn’t for that jewel case and the steel chisel.”
Markham was about to answer when Swacker again looked in and informed him that Sergeant Heath had arrived and wanted to see him.
Heath’s
