The Greatest Works of S. S. Van Dine (Illustrated Edition). S.S. Van Dine

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ into the hall, he called down the stairs to Sproot. When the butler appeared Heath swung on him savagely.

      “Where’s the private mail-box?”

      “I don’t know that I exactly understand you.” Sproot’s answer was placid and unruffled. “There is a mail-box just outside the front door. Do you refer to that, sir?”

      “No! You know damn well I don’t. I want to know where the private—get me?—private mail-box is, in the house.”

      “Perhaps you are referring to the little silver pyx for outgoing mail on the table in the lower hall.”

      “ ‘Pyx,’ is it!” The Sergeant’s sarcasm was stupendous. “Well, go down and bring me everything that’s in this here pyx.—No! Wait a minute—I’ll keep you company. . . . Pyx!” He took Sproot by the arm and fairly dragged him from the room.

      A few moments later he returned, crestfallen.

      “Empty!” was his laconic announcement.

      “But don’t give up hope entirely just because your cabalistic diagram has disappeared,” Vance exhorted him. “I doubt if it would have helped you much. This case isn’t a rebus. It’s a complex mathematical formula, filled with moduli, infinitesimals, quantics, faciends, derivatives, and coefficients. Rex himself might have solved it if he hadn’t been shoved off the earth so soon.” His eyes wandered over the room. “And I’m not at all sure he hadn’t solved it.”

      Markham was growing impatient.

      “We’d better go down to the drawing-room and wait for Doctor Doremus and the men from Headquarters,” he suggested. “We can’t learn anything here.”

      We went out into the hall, and as we passed Ada’s door Heath threw it open and stood on the threshold surveying the room. The French doors leading to the balcony were slightly ajar, and the wind from the west was flapping their green chintz curtains. On the light beige rug were several damp discolored tracks leading round the foot of the bed to the hall-door where we stood. Heath studied the marks for a moment, and then drew the door shut again.

      “They’re footprints, all right,” he remarked. “Some one tracked in the dirty snow from the balcony and forgot to shut the glass doors.”

      We were scarcely seated in the drawing-room when there came a knocking on the front door; and Sproot admitted Snitkin and Burke.

      “You first, Burke,” ordered the Sergeant, as the two officers appeared. “Any signs of an entry over the wall?”

      “Not a one.” The man’s overcoat and trousers were smudged from top to bottom. “I crawled all round the top of the wall, and I’m here to tell you that nobody left any traces anywheres. If any guy got over that wall, he vaulted.”

      “Fair enough.—And now you, Snitkin.”

      “I got news for you.” The detective spoke with overt triumph. “Somebody’s walked up those outside steps to the stone balcony on the west side of the house. And he walked up ’em this morning after the snowfall at nine o’clock, for the tracks are fresh. Furthermore, they’re the same size as the ones we found last time on the front walk.”

      “Where do these new tracks come from?” Heath leaned forward eagerly.

      “That’s the hell of it, Sergeant. They come from the front walk right below the steps to the front door; and there’s no tracing ’em farther back because the front walk’s been swept clean.”

      “I mighta known it,” grumbled Heath. “And the tracks are only going one way?”

      “That’s all. They leave the walk a few feet below the front door, swing round the corner of the house, and go up the steps to the balcony. The guy who made ’em didn’t come down that way.”

      The Sergeant puffed disappointedly on his cigar.

      “So he went up the balcony steps, entered the French doors, crossed Ada’s room to the hall, did his dirty work, and then—disappeared! A sweet case this is!” He clicked his tongue with disgust.

      “The man may have gone out by the front door,” suggested Markham.

      The Sergeant made a wry face and bellowed for Sproot, who entered immediately.

      “Say, which way did you go up-stairs when you heard the shot?”

      “I went up the servants’ stairs, sir.”

      “Then some one mighta gone down the front stairs at the same time without your seeing him?”

      “Yes, sir; it’s quite possible.”

      “That’s all.”

      Sproot bowed and again took up his post at the front door.

      “Well, it looks like that’s what happened, sir,” Heath commented to Markham. “Only how did he get in and out of the grounds without being seen? That’s what I want to know.”

      Vance was standing by the window gazing out upon the river.

      “There’s something dashed unconvincing about those recurrent spoors in the snow. Our eccentric culprit is altogether too careless with his feet and too careful with his hands. He doesn’t leave a finger-print or any other sign of his presence except those foot-tracks—all nice and tidy and staring us in the face. But they don’t square with the rest of this fantastic business.”

      Heath stared hopelessly at the floor. He was patently of Vance’s opinion; but the dogged thoroughness of his nature asserted itself, and presently he looked up with a forced show of energy.

      “Go and phone Captain Jerym, Snitkin, and tell him I wish he’d hustle out here to look at some carpet-tracks. Then make measurements of those footprints on the balcony steps.—And you, Burke, take up a post in the upper hall, and don’t let any one go into the two front west rooms.”

      CHAPTER XV

       THE MURDERER IN THE HOUSE

       Table of Contents

      (Tuesday, November 30; 12.30 p. m.)

      When Snitkin and Burke had gone Vance turned from the window and strolled to where the doctor was sitting.

      “I think it might be well,” he said quietly, “if the exact whereabouts of every one in the house preceding and during the shooting was determined.—We know, doctor, that you arrived here at about a quarter past ten. How long were you with Mrs. Greene?”

      Von Blon drew himself up and gave Vance a resentful stare. But quickly his manner changed and he answered courteously:

      “I sat with her for perhaps half an hour; then I went to Sibella’s room—a little before eleven, I should say—and remained there until Sproot called me.”

      “And was Miss Sibella with you in the room all the time?”

      “Yes—the СКАЧАТЬ