The Egyptian Cross Mystery

“And there it was. Van had murdered Krosac. How, under what circumstances? The story can be pieced together. He knew Krosac was after him and his brothers. In some way he discovered where Krosac was — traveling with the old lunatic, Stryker. He himself must have baited Krosac into coming to Arroyo by an anonymous letter. Krosac, seeing that his dream of vengeance was actually on the brink of fulfillment, swallowed the bait — not questioning the source of his information in his eagerness — and maneuvered the movements of his dupe, Stryker, so that the caravan came to the neighborhood of Arroyo. Then Krosac — Krosac himself, for the one and only time he actually appeared in the case as an active participant — hired the car from Croker, the Weirton garage-man, and had himself driven to the crossroads. Krosac carried no valise, you recall, in Weirton — significant when you consider that the murderer did carry a valise in the subsequent crimes. Why didn’t Krosac carry a valise that first time — that only time, for him? Because he had no intention of making chop-meat out of his victim; he was probably a sane, if determined, avenger who would have been satisfied by the mere death, not the butchery, of his enemies. If Krosac’s plan had succeeded, we should have found the body of the Arroyo schoolmaster, quite unmutilated, probably shot to death.

“But Van, the instigator of the entire chain of events, was lying in wait for the unsuspecting avenger, and killed him. Having already bound up and hidden the living body of the unfortunate Kling, Van proceeded to dress the dead Krosac in his own clothes, then decapitated the corpse, and so on and so on.

“It’s evident that this was the plot of Van, or Andreja Tvar, from the beginning. A crime of years in the making. He planned the series of murders in such a way that they appeared to be the vengeance of a man, Krosac, who might very well have become crazed by years of brooding. He hid Kling away for the express purpose of using his body at the end to appear his own. Then his plot made it seem that Krosac, after killing an innocent man first, murdered two of the Tvar brothers and finally the third — a correction of the apparent error seven months before. As for Van, this last deceptive murder made it seem as if he, too, had been caught by the monomaniac’s revenge; while he himself actually made an escape with his life’s savings and the tidy sum which he had craftily managed to worm out of his brother Stephen. Meanwhile the police would search eternally for the phantasmal, long-dead Krosac... The deceptions in the bodies were easily contrived; remember that Van himself hired Kling in the Pittsburgh orphan asylum, and so could select a servant whose physical appearance was similar to his own. As for the first deception — making Krosac’s body seem to be his own — it was probably the similarity in physique between himself and Krosac — a similarity he discovered when he first located the Montenegrin, before sending the anonymous letter — that helped inspire the entire plot.”

“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.