Markham nodded with undisguised satisfaction.
“We’ve no reason to question your findings, doctor. In fact, suicide fits perfectly with what we already know. It brings this whole Bishop orgy to a logical conclusion.” He got up like a man from whose shoulders a great burden had been lifted. “Sergeant, I’ll leave you to arrange for the removal of the body for the autopsy; but you’d better drop in at the Stuyvesant Club later. Thank Heaven to-day is Sunday! It gives us time to turn round.”
That night at the club Vance and Markham and I sat alone in the lounge-room. Heath had come and gone, and a careful statement had been drawn up for the press announcing Pardee’s suicide and intimating that the Bishop case was thereby closed. Vance had said little all day. He had refused to offer any suggestion as to the wording of the official statement, and had appeared reluctant even to discuss the new phase of the case. But now he gave voice to the doubts that had evidently been occupying his mind.
“It’s too easy, Markham—much too easy. There’s an aroma of speciousness about it. It’s perfectly logical, d’ ye see, but it’s not satisfyin’. I can’t exactly picture our Bishop terminating his debauch of humor in any such banal fashion. There’s nothing witty in blowin’ one’s brain out—it’s rather commonplace, don’t y’ know. Shows a woeful lack of originality. It’s not worthy of the artificer of the Mother-Goose murders.”
Markham was disgruntled.
“You yourself explained how the crimes accorded with the psychological possibilities of Pardee’s mentality; and to me it appears highly reasonable that, having perpetrated his gruesome jokes and come to the end of his rope, he should have done away with himself.”
“You’re probably right,” sighed Vance. “I haven’t any coruscatin’ arguments to combat you with. Only, I’m disappointed. I don’t like anticlimaxes, especially when they don’t jibe with my idea of the dramatist’s talent. Pardee’s death at this moment is too deuced neat—it clears things up too tidily. There’s too much utility in it, and too little imagination.”
Markham felt that he could afford to be tolerant.
“Perhaps his imagination was exhausted on the murders. His suicide might be regarded merely as a lowering of the curtain when the play was over. In any event, it was by no means an incredible act. Defeat and disappointment and discouragement—a thwarting of all one’s ambitions—have constituted cause for suicide since time immemorial.”
“Exactly. We have a reasonable motive, or explanation, for his suicide, but no motive for the murders.”