Death from a Top Hat (24 page)

“As if he what?” Gavigan prodded.

Merlini shook his head. “No, that doesn’t make sense at all.” He looked up at Gavigan and changed the subject. “What was that you said about making an arrest, Inspector? Let’s hear. You aren’t going to put cuffs on Rappourt just because her alibi looks too good to be true, are you? And I don’t see anything much in what you’re reported that would warrant actually arresting anyone except Tarot.”

“Oh, you don’t, don’t you?” There was the beginning of a baleful gleam in the Inspector’s eye. “You might tell me why I shouldn’t arrest
you
as an accessory. Just why have you been keeping to yourself the fact that—”

Abruptly Merlini jerked from his sleepy lounging pose in the chair to a stiff upright attitude. He threw up a warning hand and leaned forward, his body tense, his gaze fixed intently on the door.

“Listen!” he exclaimed softly.

We heard nothing, and Gavigan started, “What—”

Merlini said, “In the hall—”

Then we heard it. A low confused murmur, rising louder, and then, sharply, in a queer strained voice that was flat and in deadly earnest, “…
I’ve got you covered! You’ve seen my face and you’ll have to take the
—”

The habitual nonchalance was washed off Merlini’s face, exposing an expression of blank astonishment. Gavigan sprang to his feet, and Grimm, who was nearest, flung himself headlong at the door.

A gun flashed in his right hand as his left yanked at the doorknob. The door swung inward violently, and the opening framed Detective Brady, a quiet picture of repose, sitting balanced, somewhat precariously, on a chair tipped back against the further wall. His head bobbled up from the
Daily Mirror
he held, and he stared, jaw slack.

Grimm skidded to a stop, stared back at Brady, and then looked quickly to right and left along the hall. His gun held ready, pointed at Brady’s midriff. The latter, eyeing the weapon nervously and Grimm with bewilderment, started to get out of his chair. The legs scraped on the floor and slid away from the wall. Brady grabbed the air convulsively; the chair’s motion accelerated. Chair, Brady and all hit the floor together with a reverberating smack.

“What the hell’s going on out here?” Grimm roared.

Brady emitted several words, none especially printable, and tossed Grimm one not very accurate word in reply.

“Nothing!” he said, and then, rolling over, began disentangling himself from the chair. He stood up, felt the back of his head experimentally, and grunted, “What the hell’s going on in there? Did you see a ghost or somethin’?”

Grimm goggled at him. “Were you sitting there, reading that paper, and…didn’t you hear anything?”

Brady’s eyebrows rose. “Place quiet as a graveyard until you made such a racket.”

Gavigan had settled back in his chair and was scowling at Merlini. Grimm said, “Maybe I’m crazy, but—” Turning quickly he caught Merlini’s wide grin of amusement. He frowned uncertainly. “I smell a rat. What is this, another parlor trick?”

“Is that what you had in mind, Inspector?” Merlini asked.

Gavigan nodded. “Exactly. Thanks for the demonstration.

I was afraid it might be a little fantastic, but you’ve cinched it.

Grimm, you had better take this sitting down. Your pal, Jones—he’s a ventriloquist.”

I could see the idea penetrate Grimm’s skull and begin to circulate. “So that was it,” he muttered finally. “Last night when we stood outside that door—” He spoke slowly, picturing it to himself. “Jones threw his voice in here, same as you just threw yours out.”

“I think the Inspector has some such idea, Grimm. Only you can’t treat your voice as if it were a boomerang. That’s a popular fallacy. Ventriloquists don’t throw their voices. It only sounds that way.”

“Well, it sounded all right to me. But I thought ventriloquists used a dummy. Charlie McCarthy…”

“That’s only one way. And the easier. Almost anyone can do it passably with a little practice. It’s merely a matter of talking without moving the lips. Only a few of the consonants offer any difficulty and those can be satisfactorily approximated by substituting similar sounds, such as
eng
for M,
fee
for P, or
duggle-you
for W. Of course, you use a voice that contrasts with your own and is the sort your dummy would have if he could talk. The ear depends on the eye for the localization of sound, and when the dummy’s mouth is synchronized with his patter it
looks
and, thus, sounds as if he were speaking. Talking pictures utilize the same principle, and…”

“Yeah, but what about this behind-the-door business?” Grimm asked.

“That’s the same thing, a bit more advanced. I drew your attention to the door and led you to expect something from that direction. Then I imitated a voice as it would sound coming from behind a door at about that distance. That’s the hard part. It’s done by tensing the diaphragm and speaking from deep down in the throat; it’s known technically as the ‘far-away voice.’ The word ventriloquism literally means belly-speaking, from the Latin
venter
, belly, and
loquor
, to speak. Naturally Brady heard nothing. The sound was all on this side of the door.”

Grimm’s face indicated that deductive processes were simmering behind it. “Then Tarot,” he said slowly, “was already dead when Jones and I came up the front stoop. Jones had already strangled Tarot, and he came back to stage his voice-throwing exhibition for an alibi!”

Merlini cocked an eyebrow at the Inspector. “That what you had in mind?”

There was a vague hint of skepticism in Merlini’s tone that made the Inspector pause. “Well,” the latter said truculently, “why not?”

“But I thought we’d decided that Tarot would have had to step on it to get here as much as five minutes before the snow and Grimm’s arrival. And Jones, when the snow began, was still at 23rd Street with Ching. If he strangled Tarot, then he must have gotten in and out of this place in spite of Grimm and the snow. You explain the voices, but not the lack of footprints. You aren’t going to try my
Lung-Gom-Pa
theory on a jury, are you?”

“Ching might be lying about the time Jones left. I’ve heard of stranger things.”

“All right, suppose we suppose that. What then?”

“Well, say Jones left 23rd Street only twenty minutes earlier. He could have walked in here before the snow, and before Tarot arrived. Tarot shows and catches Jones red-handed at whatever he’s at. Jones kills him and then, finding Grimm out front, leaves via the ladder before there’s enough snow to matter.”

“So. If Ching can be proved a liar, then the absent footprints are explained. Now if you’ll tell us why Jones waited a half hour before confronting Grimm with his ventriloquism? Seems as if the logical thing to do would be to get it over with at once.”

Gavigan sniffed at Merlini’s objection. “Does a murderer have to be logical? I’ve met a few, and most of them didn’t know the meaning of the word. You’ve got a point there, but we’ll get the answer from the guy that knows it.”

The Inspector walked to the phone and lifted the receiver.

As he began to dial, Merlini said, “Suppose he won’t admit knowing it?”

“I can get it out of him.”

“Inspector, I wish you’d leave that phone alone; you make me nervous. You see, I know that Jones couldn’t possibly have left this room by that ladder.”

“You what?” Gavigan held the phone limply.

“No one has used that ladder since it’s been put against the side of this house except myself.”

The Inspector threw the receiver back on the phone rest; and then, before he could get too hot under the collar, Merlini went on: “I got in here via that ladder this morning. But before I put foot on it I took a good look at the ground beneath. It hasn’t frozen really hard yet, and the foot of the ladder rests in what was a flower bed. I marked the spot, moved the ladder a foot nearer the building, and came up a few rungs. My weight caused the ladder to make quite an obvious depression in the earth, a good quarter of an inch. There wasn’t anything of the sort where the ladder had rested before.”

“Grimm, you get out there and check on that. And, if it’s as he says, see about getting pictures.”

Gavigan walked away from us toward the far end of the room. He went ten feet or so and then turned quickly. “The more we know the less sense it makes. If no one used that ladder last night, then why was it there?”

“Well,” Merlini said hesitantly, shifting his gaze to the floor, “perhaps someone intended using it and then didn’t.”

Gavigan apparently didn’t think that answer worth much. He stood for a moment indecisively rubbing his chin. Then he strode toward the phone again. “I’m going to have Jones over the rocks anyway, dammit. He’s still the only suspect with no alibi for either murder.”

“Inaccessibility can’t count as an alibi for everyone. As you say, Inspector, since Tarot actually was murdered, the impossibility of access and exit must be only apparent, and you’ve got to find out how it was done if you’re going to make the District Attorney happy.”

“We can’t prove it, but we know damn well.…It’s like sawing the lady in two. I can’t prove it, but I know damn well that it’s not done by witchcraft. If I had an ordinary list of suspects, I’d almost admit that there was such a bugaboo as Surgat roaming around loose, twisting necks and slithering out through keyholes. But what have I got? A whole stage full of magicians, people who make a business of escaping from lead coffins, vanishing bird cages, reading minds, pulling rabbits out of thin air, and pushing weejee boards.” Gavigan was excited. “Inaccessibility, bah! And why shouldn’t Jones, for instance, know a trick or two that you don’t?”

He picked up the phone.

“And what,” Merlini asked of no one in particular, “if there is someone else who, like Jones, has no alibi for either murder?”

Some minutes before I had taken out my alibi list and had been staring idly at it. When Merlini said that I saw it.

“There is!” I said, suddenly sitting up very straight. “Look! As soon as you assume that Tarot was killed at some other time than 10:30, then
all
the alibis on that side of the list go blooie. And with only three alibis for the time of Sabbat’s death checked as good, that gives us five live suspects.”

Gavigan stopped midway in his dialing. “Hey, not so fast,” he protested. “We know that…”

“Wait, Inspector,” Merlini said, “this is going to be good. I’ll top that, Harte. Suppose you cross out Judy’s alibi for the first murder, too.”

“Reason, please,” I insisted.

“On my way over here this morning I stopped and had a chat with her mother. She swears Judy was safely in bed long before 3 A.M., and she told the detectives you sent around the same thing, Inspector. But she’s not the most logical old lady in the world. She saw Judy go to bed at midnight and she woke her the next morning. But they do sleep in separate rooms, and the old lady is a bit hard of hearing. Judy could have gone out and come back. Her alibi won’t do.”

Merlini paused, and then, “That leaves us Rappourt, hog-tied in her cabinet, and Watrous holding hands in the dark. Suppose we cross out his alibi too.”

Gavigan stuttered a bit. “Listen,” he argued, “we’ve got two witnesses, and they both swear that they had a tight grip on him every minute.”

“Yes, I know, but Watrous, you remember, said he was the one who turned out the lights. Suppose in the dark the two members on either side of him get each other’s hands rather than Watrous’. That’s one of the commonest ways for a medium to escape the circle. It’s easier if one of the persons is an accomplice, but it’s been known to happen without. It’s such an old and such a good stunt that Harry Price, Secretary of the London Psychic Society, has gone to the trouble of devising an arrangement in which the sitters wear gloves, joined with wire and having contacts, so that when everyone joins hands an electrical circuit is completed, and no one can leave the circle without an immediate warning being sounded. The lights are controlled by an outside observer having no connection with and completely isolated from the circle.
¹

“Okay, but you can’t break Rappourt’s alibi. I never saw such a—”

“Who says I can’t?” Merlini grinned.

Gavigan sighed and sat down. “I’m having the best time!” he said, scowling fiercely. “All right, Professor, bring on your rabbits. As I remember, that woman was inside a triple-locked cabinet, sitting in a canvas bag that was drawn tightly around her neck and tied to the chair behind her. She was roped to the chair, and her audience held the other ends of the tapes that were sewn around her wrists. Maybe she could get out of that, but it would take her an hour to get out and another hour to get back in. Or am I wrong?”

“You are, by about fifty-nine and a half minutes. She would have gotten out of everything except the cabinet, while they were locking that up. And, since a medium’s cabinet has trickery as its only excuse for being, she could be out a cleverly concealed rear door in half a minute, before the audience had gotten itself properly seated.”

“What about the sack? She could cut her way out, sure. But she’s got to get back in again without any traces.”

“Suppose the seam around the mouth of the bag through which the drawstring ran had a small slit on its inner surface. She could reach in with a finger, catch the drawstring, and pull it a foot or two down into the bag before they got it drawn tight around her neck. Later, when she released the slack, the sack that had been drawn so tightly about her neck would simply drop around her. When she pushed the ends of the tapes that were sewn around her wrists out through the buttonhole slits in the bag, she could have pushed out duplicate ones. The tapes that the sitters held, instead of having Rappourt securely fastened to their nether ends, were merely tied to a couple of short pieces of dowel stick that were there to prevent the tapes from being pulled free of the sack.”

“But how could she get any slack in the ropes that tied her to the chair outside the bag?” Gavigan asked weakly.

“She wouldn’t need any. Her hands were free. She could merely cut the ropes free from herself and the chair. At the finish of the séance she steps back into the sack, ties herself anew with duplicate ropes that have been secreted, either in the cabinet or on her person, pulls in the slack of the drawstring, and then, when the tapes that the audience has been holding are released, she quickly draws them back inside the bag. While the cabinet is being unlocked she rolls them up and hides them. The more locks on the cabinet, the more time she has—seems to me I explained that principle once before this morning.”