Egyptian Cross Mystery (38 page)

“You said something before,” remarked the Inspector thoughtfully as he dipped again into his snuff box, “about having been on the right trail in the beginning but going off it. What did you mean?”

“And not only in the beginning,” said Ellery mournfully. “It kept recurring throughout the case, and I kept throwing it aside. It wasn’t sufficiently exclusive. … For, observe. Even in the very first murder one point stood out: the head of the corpse had been severed and taken away. Why? There seemed to be no answer then except the one of the killer’s mania. Later we discovered the business of the Tvars and the surface meaning of the T’s as the symbol of Krosac’s vengeance. So, of course, we said the heads were lopped off to give the dead bodies the physical appearance of a capital T. But that old doubt …

“For after all there was an alternative explanation for the severing of the heads—a remarkable theory. That the body was made to resemble a T, that the other T elements—the crossroads, signpost, and scrawled T in the first crime; the totem post in the second; the antenna mast in the third (the scrawled T kept recurring, of course—in the fourth crime as well)—that all these conglomerate T elements had been strewn about the scenes of the crimes for only one purpose:
to cover up the fact that the heads had been cut off.
Other means of identification being unknown, the head, or face, is the most marked means of identifying a corpse. So, I said to myself, it is logically possible that these are the crimes not of a monomaniac with a T obsession, but of a perfectly lucid (if unbalanced) plotter
who cut off heads for the purpose of falsifying identification.
There seemed to be a confirmation of this: none of the heads were found. Why didn’t the murderer leave the heads at the scenes of his crimes, or nearby, getting rid of them as soon as possible—which would be the natural impulse of a murderer, insane or not? The bodies would still form T’s, still satisfying his T complex. But the heads were irretrievably gone. It seemed possible to me that all was not exactly as it should have been; yet because this was only a theory, and because all the other facts pointed so damningly to a crazed vendettist as the murderer, I kept discarding what was in reality the truth.

“But when, at the investigation of the fourth murder, I knew Andreja Tvar to be
deus ex machina,
the whole motif was plain. In his first murder—the killing of Krosac—he was forced to decapitate Krosac to prevent identification of the body and to permit an acceptance of the initial idea that the body was Van’s, and the subsequent idea that the same body was Kling’s. Yet merely to sever the heads would have been to invite suspicion and disaster; any investigator would have swung into the right track. So Van manufactured the brilliant and objectively irrational conception of maniac-conceived T’s—T shapes of every description and with no possible interrelationship. These so confused the main issue that he was sure no one would grasp the real significance of the missing heads; which was, of course, to permit false identifications of the first and last bodies.

“Once started, naturally, he was forced to continue the vagaries of the nightmarish T’s. He had to cut off Brad’s head and Megara’s head to maintain the continuity of a Krosac-T-phobia interpretation. At the last murder, of course, the head-severing served a genuine purpose again. It was a damnably clever plot, both psychologically and in execution.”

“About the last murder,” said Isham, swallowing. “Er—was it just my imagination, or was the set of footprints leading into the hut deeper than the set coming out?”

“Excellent, Mr. Isham!” cried Ellery. “I’m glad you brought that up—a good point. It served as a prime confirmation of the entire recapitulation of the case. I noticed, as you say, that the murderer’s footprints approaching the shack were deeper than those departing from it. Explanation? A simple enough syllogism in logic. Why should the identical footprints in the identical earth be heavier in one case than the other? Because in one case the murderer was carrying something heavy; in the other he was not—the only argument which will logically explain the strange difference in weight of the same individual in approximately the same period. This fitted admirably. I knew that Kling’s was the last body found. Where had Van kept Kling? Not in the hut; then it must have been somewhere in the vicinity. Constable Luden once said that the hills in West Virginia are riddled with natural caves; Van himself at one point said that he had found the abandoned hut while he was on a little
cave-exploring
expedition! (Probably with this very thought in mind!) So Van went to the cave where he had kept Kling a prisoner for long months, got Kling, and
carried
him into the hut. The rain must have stopped after Van left the hut to get Kling, but before he returned carrying Kling; it wiped out his outgoing footprints, but took the impression of his returning footprints. So the deep prints were made when he lugged Kling into the shack; and the shallower ones when he left the hut after the murder, for the last time.”

“Why didn’t he make Kling
walk
into the hut?” demanded Isham.

“Obviously because he intended from the first to leave a trail to a
limping
man, Krosac. By carrying Kling and limping he achieved the double end of getting the victim into the house and also making it appear that one man—Krosac—had entered. By limping away he clinched the illusion of Krosac’s escape. He made only one mistake: he forgot that, weighted down, the impressions in soft earth would be deeper.”

“I can’t get it through my thick skull,” muttered the Professor. “The man must have been—must be—a genius. Perverted, and all that; but that plot of his required a brilliant brain.”

“Why not?” asked Ellery dryly. “An educated man, with years in which to plan. But brilliant nevertheless. For example: Van was faced throughout with this problem: he had to arrange matters so that there was always a legitimate reason for Krosac to have done the very things that he himself, Van, had to do. That business of the pipe, for instance, and the turned-about rug with the bloodstain on it, and the deliberate leaving of Brad’s note. I’ve already related to you
Krosac’s
reason for wanting a delay in the discovery of the real scene of the crime—which was to have it discovered only when Megara arrived on the scene, so that Megara could seemingly lead Krosac to Van, who from the note Krosac supposedly learned was still alive.

“But Van, while he provided us with this ingenious
Krosac
reason, as the real murderer had even better reasons for causing the delay. If the police searched the library at once they would have found Brad’s note—undoubtedly suggested to Brad by Van himself—long before Megara’s return. They would know at once, then, that Van was still alive. If any slip-ups in Van’s activities caused the police to suspect that Old Pete was Van, then Van’s position became precarious. Suppose Megara never returned, died on shipboard somewhere. Then there would be no one left alive to confirm for the police the fact that Old Pete, or Van, was actually a brother of Brad and Megara. By causing the delay he insured a confirmation of his brotherhood at precisely the time Megara returned. On his unsupported word he might come under suspicion; with Megara to corroborate every statement he made, he looked like an innocent man.

“But why should he want to reappear on the scene at all? Ah, but here we see the real end achieved by his complicated arrangement of a delay until Megara returned. By contriving beforehand that Brad leave the note that instituted the whole chain of events which ended with the return to the scene of Andrew Van as an accredited brother of the Tvars,
Van clinched his inheritance.
By that I mean: Van could have made the police believe he actually had been murdered in the first crime, and could have remained legally dead thereafter, while he continued his plot of killing his brothers from the dark of the Krosac guise. But if he had remained legally dead, how was he to collect the money which Brad was leaving him by will? So he had to come back—
alive.
And at a time when Megara could confirm the fact that Van
was
a brother. In this way he collected the five thousand dollars due him with perfect safety. Incidentally, his constraint was commendable. Do you recall that Megara, touched by his ‘frightened’ brother’s plight and his own conscience, actually offered Van an additional five thousand—and Van refused? He wanted only what was coming to him, he said. … Yes, a clever rogue. He knew that refusal would cement the illusion of the eremetic character he had so carefully built up.

“And finally, by means of the note and the story he told on his return to the scene, he prepared the police for an acceptance of his own second murder, since now they knew that a vendettist was on the trail of the Tvars and had discovered that he had made a mistake in the first murder. Devilish, really.”

“Too deep for me,” said Vaughn, shaking his head.

“That’s what I’ve been up against ever since I became a father,” murmured Inspector Queen. He sighed, and looked happily out of a window.

But Professor Yardley had no paternity to feed his ego, and he did not look even remotely happy. He was pulling at his short beard with powerful if abstracted fingers. “Granted all that,” he said. “I’m an old hand at puzzles—chiefly ancient, I confess—so another example of man’s ingenuity doesn’t precisely amaze me. But one thing does. … You say Andreja Tvar, blood-brother to Stefan and Tomislav Tvar, partner in their family and personal iniquities, planned for years the extermination of these same brothers. Why? In the name of a merciless God, why?”

“I can see what’s troubling you,” said Ellery thoughtfully. “It’s the horrible complexion of the crimes. Aside from motive, there’s an explanation for
that.
You will grant two things? For the whole plan to be successful, it was necessary that Andreja Tvar do various unpleasant things—cut people’s heads off (including his brothers’), nail dead hands and feet to makeshift crosses, spill an uncommon quantity of blood. … And second, that Andreja Tvar is a madman. He must be. If he was sane when he conceived this grotesque plan, he was insane when he began to carry it out. Then the whole thing clarifies—a madman spills oceans of the divine ichor, part of which comes from the bodies of his own brothers.” Ellery stared at Yardley. “Wherein essentially does the difference lie? You were ready to accept Krosac as a madman—why not Van? The only distinction is the fine one of mutilating strangers as against mutilating brothers. But surely even your unprofessional knowledge of crime includes the sordid stories of husbands incinerating wives, of sisters chopping sisters into little bloody pieces, of sons battering out the brains of their mothers, of incest and degeneracy and every form of intra-familial crime. It’s hard for a normal human being to understand; but you ask my father, or Inspector Vaughn—you’ll hear true stories of atrocities that would make that beard of yours curl up in horror.”

“True,” said Yardley, “I can understand such things even on a basis of repressed sadism. But the motive, my boy, the motive? How the devil could you have known Van’s motive if up to the fourth crime you yourself considered Velja Krosac the culprit?”

“The answer to which,” smiled Ellery, “is that I didn’t know Van’s motive, and that I don’t know it this minute. Actually, what difference does it make? A madman’s motive—it may be as evanescent as air, as hard to crystallize as a pervert’s. When I say madman, of course, I don’t necessarily mean a raving maniac. Van, as you yourself saw, is apparently in full possession of his sanity. His mania is a quirk, a twist in his brain—in everything but one he is sane. My father or Inspector Vaughn can quote you scores of cases in which murderers are apparently as normal as you or I, but actually are the most vicious psychopathic cases.”

“I can tell you the motive,” said Inspector Queen, sighing. “Too bad you weren’t present last night, son, or you, Professor, while the Commissioner and Vaughn, here, had Van on the griddle. Most interesting examination I’ve ever attended. He almost had an epileptic fit, but finally he calmed down and told it—between the curses on the heads of his two brothers.”

“Which, incidentally,” remarked Isham, “he said he had sunk in the Sound with weights. The other heads he buried in the hills.”

“His motive against his brother Tomis—Tomis—Tom,” continued the old man, “was the usual thing—a woman. It seems that in the old country Van had loved a girl, but his brother Tom stole her away from him—the old story. That was Brad’s first wife who, says Van, died through Brad’s ill-treatment. Whether that’s true or not we’ll probably never know; but that’s what he says.”

“And against Megara?” asked Ellery. “He seemed a decent, if saturnine, sort of chap.”

“Well, it’s a little foggy,” replied Vaughn, scowling at his cigar-tip. “It seems that Van was the youngest of the three brothers, and as such wasn’t entitled to any of the old man Tvar’s estate. Seems that Megara and Brad did Van out of his dough, or something. Megara was the eldest, and he controlled the old exchequer. And then they didn’t give Van a cent of the money they stole from the Krosacs—told him he was too young, or something. Did he show them!” Vaughn grinned sardonically. “He couldn’t squeal, of course, because he was in on it. But all this explains why, when the three brothers came to this country, Van broke away from the other two and kept by himself. Brad must have felt a little conscience-stricken, because he left Van that five grand. Fat lot of good it did both of ’em!”

They were all silent for a long time. The Twentieth Century thundered across New York State.

But Professor Yardley was a bulldog. He refused to loosen his grip on his perplexities. He sucked at his pipe for many minutes, turning something over in his mind. Then he said to Ellery: “Tell me this, O Omniscience. Do you believe in coincidence?”

Ellery sprawled on his spine and blew smoke-rings. “The Professor’s in trouble. … No, I do not—not in murder, old chap.”

“Then how do you explain the tormenting fact,” demanded Yardley, his pipe waggling in rhythm, “that friend Stryker—another lunatic; heavens! there’s a coincidence in itself!—appeared both on the scene of the Arroyo crime and on the scene of the subsequent crimes so far away? For, since Van is the culprit, poor old Ra-Harakht the sun-god must be innocent. … Isn’t his presence in the second murder an appalling coincidence?”