The Bishop murder case

by S. S. Van Dine

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Then came that ominous signature, in capitals: THE BISHOP.

CHAPTER XVII.
An All-Night Light

(Saturday, April 16; 9.30 a. m.)

When Heath had got rid of Quinan with promises such as would have gladdened any reporter’s heart,[²⁴] there were several minutes of tense silence in the office. “The Bishop” had been at his grisly work again; and the case had now become a terrible triplicate affair, with the solution apparently further off than ever. It was not, however, the insolubility of these incredible crimes that primarily affected us; rather was it the inherent horror that emanated, like a miasma, from the acts themselves.

Vance, who was pacing sombrely up and down, gave voice to his troubled emotions.

“It’s damnable, Markham—it’s the essence of unutterable evil. . . . Those children in the park—up early on their holiday in search of dreams—busy with their play and make-believe . . . and then the silencing reality—the awful, overpowering disillusion. . . . Don’t you see the wickedness of it? Those children found Humpty Dumpty—their Humpty Dumpty, with whom they had played—lying dead at the foot of the famous wall—a Humpty Dumpty they could touch and weep over, broken and twisted and never more to be put together. . . .”

He paused by the window and looked out. The mist had lifted, and a faint diffusion of spring sunlight lay over the gray stones of the city. The golden eagle on the New York Life Building glistened in the distance.

“I say; one simply mustn’t get sentimental,” he remarked with a forced smile, turning back to the room. “It decomposes the intelligence and stultifies the dialectic processes. Now that we know Drukker was not the capricious victim of the law of gravity, but was given a helpin’ hand in his departure from this world, the sooner we become energetic, the better, what?”

Though his change of mood was an obvious tour de force, it roused the rest of us from our gloomy apathy. Markham reached for the telephone and made arrangements with Inspector Moran for Heath to handle the Drukker case. Then he called the Medical Examiner’s office and asked for an immediate post-mortem report. Heath got up vigorously, and after taking three cups of ice-water, stood with legs apart, his derby pulled far down on his forehead, waiting for the District Attorney to indicate a line of action.