CHAPTER I

A DOUBLE TRAGEDY

(_Tuesday, November 9; 10 a. m._)

It has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological
writers—men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H. B. Irving, Filson Young,
Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton—have not devoted more
space to the Greene tragedy; for here, surely, is one of the outstanding
murder mysteries of modern times—a case practically unique in the
annals of latter-day crime. And yet I realize, as I read over my own
voluminous notes on the case, and inspect the various documents relating
to it, how little of its inner history ever came to light, and how
impossible it would be for even the most imaginative chronicler to fill
in the hiatuses.

The world, of course, knows the external facts. For over a month the
press of two continents was filled with accounts of this appalling
tragedy; and even the bare outline was sufficient to gratify the
public’s craving for the abnormal and the spectacular. But the inside
story of the catastrophe surpassed even the wildest flights of public
fancy; and, as I now sit down to divulge those facts for the first time,
I am oppressed with a feeling akin to unreality, although I was a
witness to most of them and hold in my possession the incontestable
records of their actuality.

Of the fiendish ingenuity which lay behind this terrible crime, of the
warped psychological motives that inspired it, and of the strange hidden
sources of its technic, the world is completely ignorant. Moreover, no
explanation has ever been given of the analytic steps that led to its
solution. Nor have the events attending the mechanism of that
solution—events in themselves highly dramatic and unusual—ever been
recounted. The public believes that the termination of the case was a
result of the usual police methods of investigation; but this is because
the public is unaware of many of the vital factors of the crime itself,
and because both the Police Department and the District Attorney’s
office have, as if by tacit agreement, refused to make known the entire
truth—whether for fear of being disbelieved or merely because there are
certain things so terrible that no man wishes to talk of them, I do not
know.

The record, therefore, which I am about to set down is the first
complete and unedited history of the Greene holocaust.[1] I feel that
now the truth should be known, for it is history, and one should not
shrink from historical facts. Also, I believe that the credit for the
solution of this case should go where it belongs.

The man who elucidated the mystery and brought to a close that
palimpsest of horror was, curiously enough, in no way officially
connected with the police; and in all the published accounts of the
murder his name was not once mentioned. And yet, had it not been for him
and his novel methods of criminal deduction, the heinous plot against
the Greene family would have been conclusively successful. The police in
their researches were dealing dogmatically with the evidential
appearances of the crime, whereas the operations of the criminal were
being conducted on a plane quite beyond the comprehension of the
ordinary investigator.

This man who, after weeks of sedulous and disheartening analysis,
eventually ferreted out the source of the horror, was a young social
aristocrat, an intimate friend of John F.-X. Markham, the District
Attorney. His name I am not at liberty to divulge, but for the purposes
of these chronicles I have chosen to call him Philo Vance. He is no
longer in this country, having transferred his residence several years
ago to a villa outside of Florence; and, since he has no intention of
returning to America, he has acceded to my request to publish the
history of the criminal cases in which he participated as a sort of
_amicus curiæ_. Markham also has retired to private life; and Sergeant
Ernest Heath, that doughty and honest officer of the Homicide Bureau who
officially handled the Greene case for the Police Department, has,
through an unexpected legacy, been able to gratify his life’s ambition
to breed fancy wyandottes on a model farm in the Mohawk Valley. Thus
circumstances have made it possible for me to publish my intimate
records of the Greene tragedy.

A few words are necessary to explain my own participation in the case.
(I say “participation,” though, in reality, my rôle was that of passive
spectator.) For several years I had been Vance’s personal attorney. I
had resigned from my father’s law firm—Van Dine, Davis & Van Dine—in
order to devote myself exclusively to Vance’s legal and financial needs,
which, by the way, were not many. Vance and I had been friends from our
undergraduate days at Harvard, and I found in my new duties as his legal
agent and monetary steward a sinecure combined with many social and
cultural compensations.

Vance at that time was thirty-four years old. He was just under six
feet, slender, sinewy, and graceful. His chiselled regular features gave
his face the attraction of strength and uniform modelling, but a
sardonic coldness of expression precluded the designation of handsome.
He had aloof gray eyes, a straight, slender nose, and a mouth suggesting
both cruelty and asceticism. But, despite the severity of his
lineaments—which acted like an impenetrable glass wall between him and
his fellows—, he was highly sensitive and mobile; and, though his
manner was somewhat detached and supercilious, he exerted an undeniable
fascination over those who knew him at all well.

Much of his education had been acquired in Europe, and he still retained
a slight Oxonian accent and intonation, though I happen to be aware that
this was no affectation: he cared too little for the opinions of others
to trouble about maintaining any pose. He was an indefatigable student.
His mind was ever eager for knowledge, and he devoted much of his time
to the study of ethnology and psychology. His greatest intellectual
enthusiasm was art, and he fortunately had an income sufficient to
indulge his passion for collecting. It was, however, his interest in
psychology and his application of it to individual behaviorism that
first turned his attention to the criminal problems which came under
Markham’s jurisdiction.

The first case in which he participated was, as I have recorded
elsewhere, the murder of Alvin Benson.[2] The second was the seemingly
insoluble strangling of the famous Broadway beauty, Margaret Odell.[3]
And in the late fall of the same year came the Greene tragedy. As in the
two former cases, I kept a complete record of this new investigation. I
possessed myself of every available document, making verbatim copies of
those claimed for the police archives, and even jotted down the numerous
conversations that took place in and out of conference between Vance and
the official investigators. And, in addition, I kept a diary which, for
elaborateness and completeness, would have been the despair of Samuel
Pepys.

The Greene murder case occurred toward the end of Markham’s first year
in office. As you may remember, the winter came very early that season.
There were two severe blizzards in November, and the amount of snowfall
for that month broke all local records for eighteen years. I mention
this fact of the early snows because it played a sinister part in the
Greene affair: it was, indeed, one of the vital factors of the
murderer’s scheme. No one has yet understood, or even sensed, the
connection between the unseasonable weather of that late fall and the
fatal tragedy that fell upon the Greene household; but that is because
all of the dark secrets of the case were not made known.

Vance was projected into the Benson murder as the result of a direct
challenge from Markham; and his activities in the Canary case were due
to his own expressed desire to lend a hand. But pure coincidence was
responsible for his participation in the Greene investigation. During
the two months that had elapsed since his solution of the Canary’s death
Markham had called upon him several times regarding moot points of
criminal detection in connection with the routine work of the District
Attorney’s office; and it was during an informal discussion of one of
these problems that the Greene case was first mentioned.

Markham and Vance had long been friends. Though dissimilar in tastes and
even in ethical outlook, they nevertheless respected each other
profoundly. I have often marvelled at the friendship of these two
antipodal men; but as the years went by I came more and more to
understand it. It was as if they were drawn together by those very
qualities which each realized—perhaps with a certain repressed
regret—were lacking in his own nature. Markham was forthright, brusque,
and, on occasion, domineering, taking life with grim and serious
concern, and following the dictates of his legal conscience in the face
of every obstacle: honest, incorruptible, and untiring. Vance, on the
other hand, was volatile, debonair, and possessed of a perpetual
Juvenalian cynicism, smiling ironically at the bitterest realities, and
consistently fulfilling the rôle of a whimsically disinterested
spectator of life. But, withal, he understood people as profoundly as he
understood art, and his dissection of motives and his shrewd readings of
character were—as I had many occasions to witness—uncannily accurate.
Markham apprehended these qualities in Vance, and sensed their true
value.

It was not yet ten o’clock of the morning of November the 9th when Vance
and I, after motoring to the old Criminal Courts Building on the corner
of Franklin and Centre Streets, went directly to the District Attorney’s
office on the fourth floor. On that momentous forenoon two gangsters,
each accusing the other of firing the fatal shot in a recent pay-roll
hold-up, were to be cross-examined by Markham; and this interview was to
decide the question as to which of the men would be charged with murder
and which held as a State’s witness. Markham and Vance had discussed the
situation the night before in the lounge-room of the Stuyvesant Club,
and Vance had expressed a desire to be present at the examination.
Markham had readily assented, and so we had risen early and driven
down-town.

The interview with the two men lasted for an hour, and Vance’s
disconcerting opinion was that neither was guilty of the actual
shooting.

“Y’ know, Markham,” he drawled, when the sheriff had returned the
prisoners to the Tombs, “those two Jack Sheppards are quite sincere:
each one thinks he’s telling the truth. _Ergo_, neither of ’em fired the
shot. A distressin’ predicament. They’re obvious gallows-birds—born for
the gibbet; and it’s a beastly shame not to be able to round out their
destinies in proper fashion. . . . I say, wasn’t there another
participant in the hold-up?”

Markham nodded. “A third got away. According to these two, it was a
well-known gangster named Eddie Maleppo.”

“Then Eduardo is your man.”[4]

Markham did not reply, and Vance rose lazily and reached for his ulster.

“By the by,” he said, slipping into his coat, “I note that our upliftin’
press bedecked its front pages this morning with head-lines about a
pogrom at the old Greene mansion last night. Wherefore?”

Markham glanced quickly at the clock on the wall, and frowned.

“That reminds me. Chester Greene called up the first thing this morning
and insisted on seeing me. I told him eleven o’clock.”

“Where do _you_ fit in?” Vance had taken his hand from the door-knob,
and drew out his cigarette-case.

“I don’t!” snapped Markham. “But people think the District Attorney’s
office is a kind of clearing-house for all their troubles. It happens,
however, that I’ve known Chester Greene a long time—we’re both members
of the Marylebone Golf Club—and so I must listen to his plaint about
what was obviously an attempt to annex the famous Greene plate.”

“Burglary—eh, what?” Vance took a few puffs on his cigarette. “With two
women shot?”

“Oh, it was a miserable business! An amateur, no doubt. Got in a panic,
shot up the place, and bolted.”

“Seems a dashed curious proceeding.” Vance abstractedly reseated himself
in a large armchair near the door. “Did the antique cutlery actually
disappear?”

“Nothing was taken. The thief was evidently frightened off before he
made his haul.”

“Sounds a bit thick, don’t y’ know.—An amateur thief breaks into a
prominent home, casts a predat’ry eye on the dining-room silver, takes
alarm, goes up-stairs and shoots two women in their respective boudoirs,
and then flees. . . . Very touchin’ and all that, but unconvincin’.
Whence came this caressin’ theory?”

Markham was glowering, but when he spoke it was with an effort at
restraint.

“Feathergill was on duty last night when the call was relayed from
Headquarters, and accompanied the police to the house. He agrees with
their conclusions.”[5]

“Nevertheless, I could bear to know why Chester Greene is desirous of
having polite converse with you.”

Markham compressed his lips. He was not in cordial mood that morning,
and Vance’s flippant curiosity irked him. After a moment, however, he
said grudgingly:

“Since the attempted robbery interests you so keenly, you may, if you
insist, wait and hear what Greene has to say.”

“I’ll stay,” smiled Vance, removing his coat. “I’m weak; just can’t
resist a passionate entreaty. . . . Which one of the Greenes is Chester?
And how is he related to the two deceased?”

“There was only one murder,” Markham corrected him in a tone of
forbearance. “The oldest daughter—an unmarried woman in her early
forties—was killed instantly. A younger daughter, who was also shot,
has, I believe, a chance of recovery.”

“And Chester?”

“Chester is the elder son, a man of forty or thereabouts. He was the
first person on the scene after the shots had been fired.”

“What other members of the family are there? I know old Tobias Greene
has gone to his Maker.”

“Yes, old Tobias died about twelve years ago. But his wife is still
living, though she’s a helpless paralytic. Then there are—or rather
were—five children: the oldest, Julia; next, Chester; then another
daughter, Sibella, a few years under thirty, I should say; then Rex, a
sickly, bookish boy a year or so younger than Sibella; and Ada, the
youngest—an adopted daughter twenty-two or three, perhaps.”

“And it was Julia who was killed, eh? Which of the other two girls was
shot?”

“The younger—Ada. Her room, it seems, is across the hall from Julia’s,
and the thief apparently got in it by mistake while making his escape.
As I understand it, he entered Ada’s room immediately after firing on
Julia, saw his error, fired again, and then fled, eventually going down
the stairs and out the main entrance.”

Vance smoked a while in silence.

“Your hypothetical intruder must have been deuced confused to have
mistaken Ada’s bedroom door for the staircase, what? And then there’s
the query: what was this anonymous gentleman, who had called to collect
the plate, doing above-stairs?”

“Probably looking for jewellery.” Markham was rapidly losing patience.
“_I_ am not omniscient.” There was irony in his inflection.

“Now, now, Markham!” pleaded Vance cajolingly. “Don’t be vindictive.
Your Greene burglary promises several nice points in academic
speculation. Permit me to indulge my idle whims.”

At that moment Swacker, Markham’s youthful and alert secretary, appeared
at the swinging door which communicated with a narrow chamber between
the main waiting-room and the District Attorney’s private office.

“Mr. Chester Greene is here,” he announced.

—–

[1] It is, I hope, unnecessary for me to state that I have received
official permission for my task.

[2] “The Benson Murder Case” (Scribners, 1926).

[3] “The ‘Canary’ Murder Case” (Scribners, 1927).

[4] This was subsequently proved correct. Nearly a year later Maleppo
was arrested in Detroit, extradited to New York, and convicted of the
murder. His two companions had already been successfully prosecuted for
robbery. They are now serving long terms in Sing Sing.

[5] Amos Feathergill was then an Assistant District Attorney. He later
ran on the Tammany ticket for assemblyman, and was elected.