CHAPTER I

PHILO VANCE AT HOME

(_Friday, June 14; 8.30 a.m._)

It happened that, on the morning of the momentous June the fourteenth
when the discovery of the murdered body of Alvin H. Benson created a
sensation which, to this day, has not entirely died away, I had
breakfasted with Philo Vance in his apartment. It was not unusual for me
to share Vance’s luncheons and dinners, but to have breakfast with him
was something of an occasion. He was a late riser, and it was his habit
to remain _incommunicado_ until his midday meal.

The reason for this early meeting was a matter of business—or, rather,
of æsthetics. On the afternoon of the previous day Vance had attended a
preview of Vollard’s collection of Cézanne water-colors at the Kessler
Galleries, and having seen several pictures he particularly wanted, he
had invited me to an early breakfast to give me instructions regarding
their purchase.

A word concerning my relationship with Vance is necessary to clarify my
rôle of narrator in this chronicle. The legal tradition is deeply
imbedded in my family, and when my preparatory-school days were over, I
was sent, almost as a matter of course, to Harvard to study law. It was
there I met Vance, a reserved, cynical and caustic freshman who was the
bane of his professors and the fear of his fellow-classmen. Why he
should have chosen me, of all the students at the University, for his
extra-scholastic association, I have never been able to understand
fully. My own liking for Vance was simply explained: he fascinated and
interested me, and supplied me with a novel kind of intellectual
diversion. In his liking for me, however, no such basis of appeal was
present. I was (and am now) a commonplace fellow, possessed of a
conservative and rather conventional mind. But, at least, my mentality
was not rigid, and the ponderosity of the legal procedure did not
impress me greatly—which is why, no doubt, I had little taste for my
inherited profession—; and it is possible that these traits found
certain affinities in Vance’s unconscious mind. There is, to be sure,
the less consoling explanation that I appealed to Vance as a kind of
foil, or anchorage, and that he sensed in my nature a complementary
antithesis to his own. But whatever the explanation, we were much
together; and, as the years went by, that association ripened into an
inseparable friendship.

Upon graduation I entered my father’s law firm—Van Dine and Davis—and
after five years of dull apprenticeship I was taken into the firm as the
junior partner. At present I am the second Van Dine of Van Dine, Davis
and Van Dine, with offices at 120 Broadway. At about the time my name
first appeared on the letter-heads of the firm, Vance returned from
Europe, where he had been living during my legal novitiate, and, an aunt
of his having died and made him her principal beneficiary, I was called
upon to discharge the technical obligations involved in putting him in
possession of his inherited property.

This work was the beginning of a new and somewhat unusual relationship
between us. Vance had a strong distaste for any kind of business
transaction, and in time I became the custodian of all his monetary
interests and his agent at large. I found that his affairs were various
enough to occupy as much of my time as I cared to give to legal matters,
and as Vance was able to indulge the luxury of having a personal legal
factotum, so to speak, I permanently closed my desk at the office, and
devoted myself exclusively to his needs and whims.

If, up to the time when Vance summoned me to discuss the purchase of the
Cézannes, I had harbored any secret or repressed regrets for having
deprived the firm of Van Dine, Davis and Van Dine of my modest legal
talents, they were permanently banished on that eventful morning; for,
beginning with the notorious Benson murder, and extending over a period
of nearly four years, it was my privilege to be a spectator of what I
believe was the most amazing series of criminal cases that ever passed
before the eyes of a young lawyer. Indeed, the grim dramas I witnessed
during that period constitute one of the most astonishing secret
documents in the police history of this country.

Of these dramas Vance was the central character. By an analytical and
interpretative process which, as far as I know, has never before been
applied to criminal activities, he succeeded in solving many of the
important crimes on which both the police and the District Attorney’s
office had hopelessly fallen down.

Due to my peculiar relations with Vance it happened that not only did I
participate in all the cases with which he was connected, but I was also
present at most of the informal discussions concerning them which took
place between him and the District Attorney; and, being of methodical
temperament, I kept a fairly complete record of them. In addition, I
noted down (as accurately as memory permitted) Vance’s unique
psychological methods of determining guilt, as he explained them from
time to time. It is fortunate that I performed this gratuitous labor of
accumulation and transcription, for now that circumstances have
unexpectedly rendered possible my making the cases public, I am able to
present them in full detail and with all their various side-lights and
succeeding steps—a task that would be impossible were it not for my
numerous clippings and _adversaria_.

Fortunately, too, the first case to draw Vance into its ramifications
was that of Alvin Benson’s murder. Not only did it prove one of the most
famous of New York’s _causes célèbres_, but it gave Vance an excellent
opportunity of displaying his rare talents of deductive reasoning, and,
by its nature and magnitude, aroused his interest in a branch of
activity which heretofore had been alien to his temperamental promptings
and habitual predilections.

The case intruded upon Vance’s life suddenly and unexpectedly, although
he himself had, by a casual request made to the District Attorney over a
month before, been the involuntary agent of this destruction of his
normal routine. The thing, in fact, burst upon us before we had quite
finished our breakfast on that mid-June morning, and put an end
temporarily to all business connected with the purchase of the Cézanne
paintings. When, later in the day, I visited the Kessler Galleries, two
of the water-colors that Vance had particularly desired had been sold;
and I am convinced that, despite his success in the unravelling of the
Benson murder mystery and his saving of at least one innocent person
from arrest, he has never to this day felt entirely compensated for the
loss of those two little sketches on which he had set his heart.

As I was ushered into the living-room that morning by Currie, a rare old
English servant who acted as Vance’s butler, valet, major-domo and, on
occasions, specialty cook, Vance was sitting in a large armchair,
attired in a surah silk dressing-gown and grey suède slippers, with
Vollard’s book on Cézanne open across his knees.

“Forgive my not rising, Van,” he greeted me casually. “I have the whole
weight of the modern evolution in art resting on my legs. Furthermore,
this plebeian early rising fatigues me, y’ know.”

He riffled the pages of the volume, pausing here and there at a
reproduction.

“This chap Vollard,” he remarked at length, “has been rather liberal
with our art-fearing country. He has sent a really goodish collection of
his Cézannes here. I viewed ’em yesterday with the proper reverence and,
I might add, unconcern, for Kessler was watching me; and I’ve marked the
ones I want you to buy for me as soon as the Gallery opens this
morning.”

He handed me a small catalogue he had been using as a book-mark.

“A beastly assignment, I know,” he added, with an indolent smile. “These
delicate little smudges with all their blank paper will prob’bly be
meaningless to your legal mind—they’re so unlike a neatly-typed brief,
don’t y’ know. And you’ll no doubt think some of ’em are hung
upside-down,—one of ’em is, in fact, and even Kessler doesn’t know it.
But don’t fret, Van old dear. They’re very beautiful and valuable little
knickknacks, and rather inexpensive when one considers what they’ll be
bringing in a few years. Really an excellent investment for some
money-loving soul, y’ know—inf’nitely better than that Lawyer’s Equity
Stock over which you grew so eloquent at the time of my dear Aunt
Agatha’s death.”[1]

Vance’s one passion (if a purely intellectual enthusiasm may be called a
passion) was art—not art in its narrow, personal aspects, but in its
broader, more universal significance. And art was not only his
dominating interest, but his chief diversion. He was something of an
authority on Japanese and Chinese prints; he knew tapestries and
ceramics; and once I heard him give an impromptu _causerie_ to a few
guests on Tanagra figurines, which, had it been transcribed, would have
made a most delightful and instructive monograph.

Vance had sufficient means to indulge his instinct for collecting, and
possessed a fine assortment of pictures and _objets d’art_. His
collection was heterogeneous only in its superficial characteristics:
every piece he owned embodied some principle of form or line that
related it to all the others. One who knew art could feel the unity and
consistency in all the items with which he surrounded himself, however
widely separated they were in point of time or _métier_ or surface
appeal. Vance, I have always felt, was one of those rare human beings, a
collector with a definite philosophic point of view.

His apartment in East Thirty-eighth Street—actually the two top floors
of an old mansion, beautifully remodelled and in part rebuilt to secure
spacious rooms and lofty ceilings—was filled, but not crowded, with
rare specimens of oriental and occidental, ancient and modern, art. His
paintings ranged from the Italian primitives to Cézanne and Matisse; and
among his collection of original drawings were works as widely separated
as those of Michelangelo and Picasso. Vance’s Chinese prints constituted
one of the finest private collections in this country. They included
beautiful examples of the work of Ririomin, Rianchu, Jinkomin, Kakei and
Mokkei.

“The Chinese,” Vance once said to me, “are the truly great artists of
the East. They were the men whose work expressed most intensely a broad
philosophic spirit. By contrast the Japanese were superficial. It’s a
long step between the little more than decorative _souci_ of a Hokusai
and the profoundly thoughtful and conscious artistry of a Ririomin. Even
when Chinese art degenerated under the Manchus, we find in it a deep
philosophic quality—a spiritual _sensibilité_, so to speak. And in the
modern copies of copies—what is called the _bunjinga_ style—we still
have pictures of profound meaning.”

Vance’s catholicity of taste in art was remarkable. His collection was
as varied as that of a museum. It embraced a black-figured amphora by
Amasis, a proto-Corinthian vase in the Ægean style, Koubatcha and
Rhodian plates, Athenian pottery, a sixteenth-century Italian holy-water
stoup of rock crystal, pewter of the Tudor period (several pieces
bearing the double-rose hall-mark), a bronze plaque by Cellini, a
triptych of Limoges enamel, a Spanish retable of an altar-piece by
Vallfogona, several Etruscan bronzes, an Indian Greco Buddhist, a
statuette of the Goddess Kuan Yin from the Ming Dynasty, a number of
very fine Renaissance wood-cuts, and several specimens of Byzantine,
Carolingian and early French ivory carvings.

His Egyptian treasures included a gold jug from Zakazik, a statuette of
the Lady Nai (as lovely as the one in the Louvre), two beautifully
carved steles of the First Theban Age, various small sculptures
comprising rare representations of Hapi and Amset, and several Arrentine
bowls carved with Kalathiskos dancers. On top of one of his embayed
Jacobean book cases in the library, where most of his modern paintings
and drawings were hung, was a fascinating group of African
sculpture—ceremonial masks and statuette-fetishes from French Guinea,
the Sudan, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and the Congo.

A definite purpose has animated me in speaking at such length about
Vance’s art instinct, for, in order to understand fully the melodramatic
adventures which began for him on that June morning, one must have a
general idea of the man’s _penchants_ and inner promptings. His interest
in art was an important—one might almost say the dominant—factor in
his personality. I have never met a man quite like him—a man so
apparently diversified, and yet so fundamentally consistent.

Vance was what many would call a dilettante. But the designation does
him injustice. He was a man of unusual culture and brilliance. An
aristocrat by birth and instinct, he held himself severely aloof from
the common world of men. In his manner there was an indefinable contempt
for inferiority of all kinds. The great majority of those with whom he
came in contact regarded him as a snob. Yet there was in his
condescension and disdain no trace of spuriousness. His snobbishness was
intellectual as well as social. He detested stupidity even more, I
believe, than he did vulgarity or bad taste. I have heard him on several
occasions quote Fouché’s famous line: _C’est plus qu’un crime; c’est une
faute_. And he meant it literally.

Vance was frankly a cynic, but he was rarely bitter: his was a flippant,
Juvenalian cynicism. Perhaps he may best be described as a bored and
supercilious, but highly conscious and penetrating, spectator of life.
He was keenly interested in all human reactions; but it was the interest
of the scientist, not the humanitarian. Withal he was a man of rare
personal charm. Even people who found it difficult to admire him, found
it equally difficult not to like him. His somewhat quixotic mannerisms
and his slightly English accent and inflection—a heritage of his
post-graduate days at Oxford—impressed those who did not know him well,
as affectations. But the truth is, there was very little of the _poseur_
about him.

He was unusually good-looking, although his mouth was ascetic and cruel,
like the mouths on some of the Medici portraits[2]; moreover, there was
a slightly derisive hauteur in the lift of his eyebrows. Despite the
aquiline severity of his lineaments his face was highly sensitive. His
forehead was full and sloping—it was the artist’s, rather than the
scholar’s, brow. His cold grey eyes were widely spaced. His nose was
straight and slender, and his chin narrow but prominent, with an
unusually deep cleft. When I saw John Barrymore recently in _Hamlet_ I
was somehow reminded of Vance; and once before, in a scene of _Cæsar and
Cleopatra_ played by Forbes-Robertson, I received a similar
impression.[3]

Vance was slightly under six feet, graceful, and giving the impression
of sinewy strength and nervous endurance. He was an expert fencer, and
had been the Captain of the University’s fencing team. He was mildly
fond of outdoor sports, and had a knack of doings things well without
any extensive practice. His golf handicap was only three; and one season
he had played on our championship polo team against England.
Nevertheless, he had a positive antipathy to walking, and would not go a
hundred yards on foot if there was any possible means of riding.

In his dress he was always fashionable—scrupulously correct to the
smallest detail—yet unobtrusive. He spent considerable time at his
clubs: his favorite was the Stuyvesant, because, as he explained to me,
its membership was drawn largely from the political and commercial
ranks, and he was never drawn into a discussion which required any
mental effort. He went occasionally to the more modern operas, and was a
regular subscriber to the symphony concerts and chamber-music recitals.

Incidentally, he was one of the most unerring poker players I have ever
seen. I mention this fact not merely because it was unusual and
significant that a man of Vance’s type should have preferred so
democratic a game to bridge or chess, for instance, but because his
knowledge of the science of human psychology involved in poker had an
intimate bearing on the chronicles I am about to set down.

Vance’s knowledge of psychology was indeed uncanny. He was gifted with
an instinctively accurate judgment of people, and his study and reading
had co-ordinated and rationalized this gift to an amazing extent. He was
well grounded in the academic principles of psychology, and all his
courses at college had either centered about this subject or been
subordinated to it. While I was confining myself to a restricted area of
torts and contracts, constitutional and common law, equity, evidence and
pleading, Vance was reconnoitring the whole field of cultural endeavor.
He had courses in the history of religions, the Greek classics, biology,
civics and political economy, philosophy, anthropology, literature,
theoretical and experimental psychology, and ancient and modern
languages.[4] But it was, I think, his courses under Münsterberg and
William James that interested him the most.

Vance’s mind was basically philosophical—that is, philosophical in the
more general sense. Being singularly free from the conventional
sentimentalities and current superstitions, he could look beneath the
surface of human acts into actuating impulses and motives. Moreover, he
was resolute both in his avoidance of any attitude that savored of
credulousness, and in his adherence to cold, logical exactness in his
mental processes.

“Until we can approach all human problems,” he once remarked, “with the
clinical aloofness and cynical contempt of a doctor examining a
guinea-pig strapped to a board, we have little chance of getting at the
truth.”

Vance led an active, but by no means animated, social life—a concession
to various family ties. But he was not a social animal.—I can not
remember ever having met a man with so undeveloped a gregarious
instinct,—and when he went forth into the social world it was generally
under compulsion. In fact, one of his “duty” affairs had occupied him on
the night before that memorable June breakfast; otherwise, we would have
consulted about the Cézannes the evening before; and Vance groused a
good deal about it while Currie was serving our strawberries and eggs
_Bénédictine_. Later on I was to give profound thanks to the God of
Coincidence that the blocks had been arranged in just that pattern; for
had Vance been slumbering peacefully at nine o’clock when the District
Attorney called, I would probably have missed four of the most
interesting and exciting years of my life; and many of New York’s
shrewdest and most desperate criminals might still be at large.

Vance and I had just settled back in our chairs for our second cup of
coffee and a cigarette when Currie, answering an impetuous ringing of
the front-door bell, ushered the District Attorney into the living-room.

“By all that’s holy!” he exclaimed, raising his hands in mock
astonishment. “New York’s leading _flâneur_ and art connoisseur is up
and about!”

“And I am suffused with blushes at the disgrace of it,” Vance replied.

It was evident, however, that the District Attorney was not in a jovial
mood. His face suddenly sobered.

“Vance, a serious thing has brought me here. I’m in a great hurry, and
merely dropped by to keep my promise. . . . The fact is, Alvin Benson
has been murdered.”

Vance lifted his eyebrows languidly.

“Really, now,” he drawled. “How messy! But he no doubt deserved it. In
any event, that’s no reason why you should repine. Take a chair and have
a cup of Currie’s incomp’rable coffee.” And before the other could
protest, he rose and pushed a bell-button.

Markham hesitated a second or two.

“Oh, well. A couple of minutes won’t make any difference. But only a
gulp.” And he sank into a chair facing us.

—–

[1] As a matter of fact, the same water-colors that Vance obtained for
$250 and $300, were bringing three times as much four years later.

[2] I am thinking particularly of Bronzino’s portraits of Pietro de’
Medici and Cosimo de’ Medici, in the National Gallery, and of Vasari’s
medallion portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici in the Vecchio Palazzo,
Florence.

[3] Once when Vance was suffering from sinusitis, he had an X-ray
photograph of his head made; and the accompanying chart described him as
a “marked dolichocephalic” and a “disharmonious Nordic.” It also
contained the following data:—cephalic index 75; nose, leptorhine, with
an index of 48; facial angle, 85°; vertical index, 72; upper facial
index, 54; interpupilary width, 67; chin, masognathous, with an index of
103; sella turcica, abnormally large.

[4] “Culture,” Vance said to me shortly after I had met him, “is
polyglot; and the knowledge of many tongues is essential to an
understanding of the world’s intellectual and æsthetic achievements.
Especially are the Greek and Latin classics vitiated by translation.” I
quote the remark here because his omnivorous reading in languages other
than English, coupled with his amazingly retentive memory, had a
tendency to affect his own speech. And while it may appear to some that
his speech was at times pedantic, I have tried, throughout these
chronicles to quote him literally, in the hope of presenting a portrait
of the man as he was.