The Broken Vase

Chapter 9

I wouldn’t call it a bargain at any price,” Inspector Damon declared in a tone of complete disrelish. “It looks to me like the worst damn mess I ever saw in my life.”

He was seated at an end of the big table, with Fox at his right and Detective Kossoy, his brow puckered in concentration at his notebook, at his left. They had been there nearly an hour. There had been a few interruptions — among them a phone call from the laboratory to say that a high percentage of potassium cyanide had been found in the whisky in the medicine dropper which had been retrieved from the dent in the top of the sedan, and one from the assistant medical examiner also reporting cyanide — but mostly Fox had talked. It was all down in Kossoy’s notebook, all that Fox had seen and heard; he had even relinquished to the inspector an envelope containing the morsel of varnish he had scraped from the violin.

Fox got up and stretched his legs, sat down again, and said, “It may be a mess, but still you got a bargain. People have paid good money for a report like that.”

Damon nodded. He looked at Fox obliquely. “One thing you haven’t mentioned. Where do you come in?”

“I’m not in. Not professionally.” Fox smiled at the morose eyes and prizefighter’s jaw. “Really, you can cross me off. I haven’t held out a thing. That is, no facts. Of course I may have made a few deductions, as Schaeffer would call them...”

“Yeah. Why the hell don’t a big strong man like that get a job? What kind of deductions, for instance?”

“Deductions come much higher than reports.”

“I thought you said you weren’t in this. What do you want?”

“Nothing. Frankly, Inspector, you’re perfectly welcome to this case, including the murder — if not legally murder, still murder — of Jan Tusar. Don’t forget that item, because it’s a part of your problem. I was having a try at it, but it felt dead in my hands. I was leery of it. It was too slick and too subtle. To kill a man by spilling varnish into a violin! Can you construe the mind that thought of that? I hope you can. You’ll have to, if you’re going to get the murderer of Perry Dunham.”

“You think the two are connected. You think Dunham knew something about the varnish in the violin, and you let the cat loose when you told about him going for the violin when he thought you had gone, and that’s why he was killed.” Damon grunted. “You may be right, but if that’s one of the deductions you’re holding for a rise in the market—”

“Oh, that’s nothing to brag about,” Fox conceded. “But here’s a nice little trick.” He got a memo pad from his pocket and uncapped his pen. “Look here.” With the others leaning over to watch, he made two drawings on the pad:

“Quite a trick,” Damon said sarcastically. “Do you think you could learn to do it, Kossoy?”

Fox, ignoring him, requested, “Let me have that thing Miss Tusar gave you.” He took the envelope Damon handed him, removed the sheet of paper, and put it on the table beside the pad. “Now. Which one of my swastikas is like the one on the note from the Nazi? You see the difference, of course.”

“Certainly. The one on the left.”

“Correct. And that’s the traditional design of the swastika, the design that the Chinese have used for centuries as a good luck symbol. But when Hitler took it for a trademark, he either made a mistake or deliberately switched it — anyhow, the Nazi swastika is like the one on the right. No Nazi would ever make one like the one on the left. So it wasn’t a Nazi that sent that thing to Miss Tusar. It’s a phony.”

“I’m a son of a gun,” Kossoy muttered. “Can I have that?”

Fox tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to him, and put the note in the envelope and returned it to Damon. “That,” he remarked, “will help a little. At least you won’t have to waste time trying to connect one of them with Berlin or the Bund. I only hope it’s not the only mistake the weasel made. If it is, you’re more than welcome.”

Damon was frowning at him. “You heard me tell my office to put twenty men on a check up and give special attention to the Nazi angle.”

“I did,” Fox admitted, “and it made me envious. An army like that ready to go!”

“Have you got any more nice little tricks?”

“Well...” Fox considered. “They go over better when they’re spaced out. Of course you’re going to get a pack of lies, as usual, but in my opinion you’ll get none from Miss Mowbray. She would lie in an emergency — naturally, anybody would — but I doubt if she has anything to lie about, and I believe her story about the paper that had the poison in it. Diego Zorilla is a friend of mine. That doesn’t convince you that he didn’t poison Dunham, but it does me — till further notice. You can have the rest of them except Mrs. Pomfret, I suppose, but even that carries no written guarantee.”

“I know the multiplication tables myself. I mean tricks.”

Fox shook his head. “The bag’s empty. If I were going to work on this, which I’m not, thank God, I’d have to start on a blank page.” He returned the pad and pen to his pockets, pushed back his chair, and arose.

“Where you going?”

“That depends. If you’ll give me a passport I’ll go home. If not, I suppose I’ll have to join—”

The inspector snorted in disbelief. “Sure you’d like to go home. And leave this hanging here? Not if I know you. And I do know you. If I send you in there with the crowd — you stay here. Sit down. There by Kossoy.”

Fox smiled at him. “I’m not making any contract. In case I do happen to think of a trick.”

“Neither am I.” Damon turned to a man in uniform who was seated by the door: “Ask Mrs. Pomfret to come here.”

It was a few minutes short of seven o’clock when Mrs. Pomfret entered the library. It was after midnight when the cook’s assistant, the last of the procession, left. When the door had closed behind him, Inspector Damon muttered in weary legato a string of the most impressive and pungent terms of profanity, and, his eyes bloodshot with strain, glared with savage repugnance at the two notebooks in front of Detective Kossoy which were filled with scratches from cover to cover.

“Anyway,” Fox sighed, “the smoked turkey sandwiches were good.”

“One of those people,” Damon growled, “poisoned that man.”

Which certainly was not much of a show for six hours’ hard work, but that was as far as they had got. No one had been able to furnish a conjecture regarding a breast that might have harbored a desire to kill Perry Dunham. Many of them had confessed to various degrees of dislike for him. Though it was now established that the poison had been put in the whisky, not after their return from the library but during their preliminary assemblage in the yellow room, it had not been possible to eliminate anyone from the list; no one was positive that any other one had not gone near the bar. On the other hand, no one had admitted observing any suspicious action by anyone else — any handling of the bourbon bottle, or prolonged lingering at the bar, or telltale tension or agitation. In sum, if anyone had seen anything which might have guided ever so slightly the finger of accusation, he had not disclosed it. Even Garda admitted that there had been nothing furtive or wary about Dora’s movements when she dropped the ball of paper into the bowl; she had merely, openly, gone to the stand and tossed it in.

Three of them — Koch, Dora, and Henry Pomfret — were sure that Perry had not had a drink before they left the yellow room for the library, and that left wide open the question of when the bourbon had been poisoned. It was not even positive, though of course highly probable, that it had been done in the yellow room. The servants stated that the bourbon had been kept, along with other liquors, in an unlocked cupboard in the pantry; and Schaeffer said that he had outfitted the bar there and wheeled it directly to the yellow room. The question of when a drink had last been poured from the bourbon bottle was also open; no one knew with certainty.

The one known and admitted action that would normally have been at least a starting point for a trail had apparently been an incredible and fantastic bizarrerie; by the time it came Hebe’s turn in the library, all memory of throwing the bottle from the window had passed from her mind. That’s what she said. Her session had ended with Damon staring speechless into her glorious eyes, and Fox had mercifully intervened and instructed the policeman to take her out.

The police commissioner had come, stayed an hour, and departed. The district attorney had arrived around nine o’clock and left at midnight. Fuller reports had been received from the laboratory and the morgue; Sergeant Craig and his squad of experts had finished and gone; the gaping jaws of the press had been given bones to close on; men had been sent with a key to Perry’s bachelor apartment on 51st Street to examine his papers and belongings for a possible hint; the police captain who had investigated Tusar’s suicide had been hustled out of bed for a visit to the district attorney’s office.

Still the most that could be said was what Inspector Damon growled from a tired throat at 12:40 A.M., “One of those people poisoned that man.”

Fox abandoned his chair and jerked himself into shape. “Well,” he declared, “if you still think I wouldn’t like to go home, try me. As a matter of fact, I’m ready to give an imitation of an indignant citizen. Would you care to see it?”

Damon shook his head, rubbed his eyes with his fingers, blinked at the incense bowl to recover a focus, and stood up. “Okay,” he said disgustedly. “Bring your notebooks, Kossoy, I guess there’s nothing else in here we want.” He started for the door, speaking to the man in uniform: “Show me where they are.”

Fox followed them, down the corridor and across the reception hall into the vast chamber which Pomfret had called the cathedral. It might, on that occasion, have been better called a mausoleum, or an even more dismal term if there is one. Even the two policemen on guard, one at each end of the room, seemed to have succumbed to the pervasive miasma of gloom. Seven haggard faces — for the Pomfrets were not there — turned to the entrance as the inspector appeared; Koch from a chair near one occupied by Hebe Heath, Diego from a window at the far side where he stood with Felix Beck, Dora from a divan on which she was stretched out, Ted Gill from under a lamp where he sat with a newspaper, Garda from a seat near one of the pianos. Koch started to blurt something, but Damon raised a hand:

“We’re leaving here,” he announced curtly. “You folks can go. I may need one or all of you again in the morning, and I’ll expect you to be available at the addresses you have given. None of you is to leave the city. If you ladies would like to be escorted home...”

Ted’s newspaper had dropped to the floor and he was on his feet. “I’ll take Miss Mowbray,” he said aggressively, striding to the divan. “If I may?”

She was sitting up. She protested feebly, “It isn’t necessary...”

“And me?” Hebe Heath inquired tragically. Disheveled and forlorn, she was more ravishing than ever. “Oh, Ted!”

“If you’ll allow me the pleasure, Miss Heath.” Adolph Koch was bowing to her with admirable social grace, under the circumstances.

“You, Miss Tusar?” Damon asked.

“I’ll take her,” Diego Zorilla offered gruffly, with no social grace whatever.

“No, you won’t,” Garda declared. Blear though her eyes were, they still could flash. “I’ll take a taxi...”

Diego shrugged and turned to Fox. “Are you going? For God’s sake, let’s get out of here.” He headed for the arch.

Fox followed him. In the reception hall a manservant got their things for them while a plain-clothes man looked on. They had to wait a moment for word from Damon to pass them. The elevator man abandoned all decorum and discipline and stared at them all the way down. The night lobby staff also stared, as did the members of a little group under the canopy on the sidewalk: the doorman, two policemen, and two or three young fellows, one of whom pounced on Fox.

“Listen, Mr. Fox, I’ve been waiting for you, this is a natural for two columns with a by-line...”

It took a block of brisk walking and brisk words to shake him off.

“My gloves are in my right pocket,” Diego grumbled. “I always put them in the left.”

“Sure,” Fox nodded, “they went through everything. My car’s around the corner in Sixty-ninth. Can I give you a lift?”

“I want a drink.”

“You’ve had nothing to do but drink for the past seven hours.”

“I couldn’t, not there. I swallowed a little Scotch and damn near threw it up. My stomach isn’t settled yet. How about coming down to my place for a sandwich?”

“I can tell you what you want to know in one sentence. The police have no more idea who killed Dunham than you have.”

But Diego protested that he wanted more than that, he wanted the company of his friend with a sandwich and a drink, and though Fox objected that he had sixty miles to drive and needed eight hours sleep and intended to prune grape vines in the morning, he consented. They drove in his car, stopping at an all-night delicatessen on the way to get sandwiches, to Diego’s address on 54th Street, an old brownstone house, and mounted two flights of stairs to his apartment. Even with its polygenetic and rather shabby furnishings, the medium-sized living room was comfortable and not unattractive, and Diego did the honors with a Spanish flourish, taking Fox’s hat and coat and disposing of them in the closet.

“I’ll serve the feast,” he proposed. “Soda with yours?”

“I don’t suppose I could have coffee?”

“Sure. I make mine for breakfast. Ten minutes.”

“That’ll be marvelous. You’d make some woman a good wife. I want to wash my hands.”

“That door over there.”

Fox went to the bathroom. Behind the closed door he permitted himself the luxury of a wanton yawn, succeeded by a scowl of dissatisfaction. He did intend to prune grape vines in the morning, but when he did that kind of work he liked to enjoy it, to taste it, and he knew his mind too well to suppose that under the present circumstances it would be content to devote itself to the questions of spurs and fruiting canes. Even now, when he was sleepy or should be, only by a sustained effort of the will could he prevent it from diving into the fascinating problem of the cerebral processes of Hebe Heath...

He got his hands washed with soap, and his face doused, and looked for a towel. There was none on the rack, nor on the hook on the door. At the left was a smaller door, and he opened it, disclosing shelves with towels aplenty as well as a miscellany of other objects. He took a turkish, preferring them always to smooth ones, got his face dried, and, as he wiped his hands, ran his eyes over the array of articles on the shelves. But in spite of that display of idle curiosity, and of his trained capacity of observation, he would not have seen it but for his remarkably sharp vision, for the closet was dim. As it was, he did see it, the upper side of it, behind a pile of washcloths, peered in at it, and finally reached in and brought it to the light.

Under the light he examined it with a gathering frown. The pure black glaze. The delicate decorations in white enamel at the bottom. The golden yellow dragons and flowers in the middle, interspersed with the feathery green twigs and leaves. The odd, even unique, shape — Pomfret had said “unique.”

There could be no doubt about it. It was Pomfret’s Wan Li black rectangular, a picture of which he had shown to Fox, and which Mrs. Pomfret was convinced had been stolen by Hebe Heath.