“No, Van old dear,” he explained languidly, “I am not becoming sentimental or even human, as that word is erroneously used to-day. I can not say with Terence, ‘Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto’[41], because I regard most things that are called human as decidedly alien to myself. But, y’ know, this little flurry in crime has proved rather int’restin’, or, as the magazine writers say, intriguing—beastly word! … Van, you really should read this precious interview with Sergeant Heath. He takes an entire column to say ‘I know nothing’. A priceless lad! I’m becoming pos’tively fond of him.”
“It may be,” I suggested, “that Heath is keeping his true knowledge from the papers, as a bit of tactical diplomacy.”
“No,” Vance returned, with a sad wag of the head; “no man has so little vanity that he would delib’rately reveal himself to the world as a creature with no per’ceptible powers of human reasoning—as he does in all these morning journals—for the mere sake of bringing one murderer to justice. That would be martyrdom gone mad.”
“Markham, at any rate, may know or suspect something that hasn’t been revealed,” I said.
Vance pondered a moment.
“That’s not impossible,” he admitted. “He has kept himself modestly in the background in all this journalistic palaver. Suppose we look into the matter more thoroughly—eh, what?”
Going to the telephone he called the District Attorney’s office, and I heard him make an appointment with Markham for lunch at the Stuyvesant Club.
“What about that Nadelmann statuette at Stieglitz’s,” I asked, remembering the reason for my presence at Vance’s that morning.
“I ain’t[42] in the mood for Greek simplifications to-day,” he answered, turning again to his newspapers.
To say that I was surprised at his attitude is to express it mildly. In all my association with him I had never known him to forgo his enthusiasm for art in favor of any other divertisement; and heretofore anything pertaining to the law and its operations had failed to interest him. I realized, therefore, that something of an unusual nature was at work in his brain, and I refrained from further comment.
Markham was a little late for the appointment at the Club, and Vance and I were already at our favorite corner table when he arrived.
“Well, my good Lycurgus,” Vance greeted him, “aside from the fact that several new and significant clues have been unearthed and that the public may expect important developments in the very near future, and all that sort of tosh, how are things really going?”