Death from a Top Hat (34 page)

“Go on,” I prodded. “How do you get over the next hurdle? You’ve still got to get Tarot killed.”

Merlini got down off the counter and put the rabbit in his pen on the floor. “I know,” he said. “That’s what gave me the jitters. Somewhere along the line Duvallo had pulled a fast one. The murders were tricks, and he was a magician. If my pet theory of deduction was true, we must have slipped up somewhere along the line; we hadn’t caught the tell-tale manoeuver when the rabbit was loaded into the hat. I’d caught him out over those pencil marks, and that something I didn’t find that I wasn’t looking for at Tarot’s apartment held intriguing possibilities, but it was all too vague and uncertain. I needed something more conclusive. So I had Ross write down in full detail what had gone before, what I had until then only heard verbally. It worked. The clue was there, and suddenly all the trap doors and the secret springs were laid bare. Duvallo’s house of cards fell, flat as yesterday’s uncapped seltzer water. But since the evidence still wouldn’t be sure-fire

with a jury, and I wasn’t certain that you’d accept it, I set the Bullet Trick trap.”

Merlini had that half dollar out again, and as it twinkled in his hands, I saw that he’d worked out a new one. He balanced the coin on the tips of his fingers and slapped it into the palm of his left hand, which he shut tightly. Gesturing cabalistically at the closed fist, he slowly opened it, and in pretended amazement poured out change for the half dollar—a quarter, a dime, two nickels, and five pennies.

The Inspector carefully took no notice. “Was it something I saw, too?” he asked appehensively.

“Yes, I’m afraid so. It was a common enough action, ordinarily quite innocent, but this time it was positively pregnant with possibilities. Harte’s report said—and he mentioned it twice—
Tarot pushed back his cuff and glanced at a silver wrist watch.
”
⁴

I saw comprehension creeping over the Inspector’s face, but I didn’t feel any yet on my own.

Merlini turned and pulled down a book from the shelves. “Harte doesn’t get it, Inspector. Do you mind, now that it’s all over and the culprit has been apprehended, if I help him out with just one last spot of witchcraft?”

I had never expected to see Inspector Gavigan smile at the mention of that subject, but he did now. “I haven’t figured out any way of stopping you, Merlini, short of assault and battery.”

“I see no objection to that,” I said acidly.

Merlini grinned and ignored me. “We’ve had occasion,” he said, riffling through the book and finding a turned down corner, “to mention this work before. It is Madame David-Neel’s
Magic and Mystery in Tibet
. There’s a description here titled ‘Rolang, the corpse who dances.’ ” He read quickly:

The celebrant is shut up alone with a corpse in a dark room. To animate the body, he lies on it, mouth to mouth, and while holding it in his arms, he must continually repeat mentally the same magic formula, excluding all other thoughts.

After a certain time the corpse begins to move. It stands up and tries to escape; the sorcerer, firmly clinging to it, prevents it from freeing itself. Now the body struggles more fiercely. It leaps and bounds to extraordinary heights, dragging with it the man who must hold on, keeping his lips upon the mouth of the monster, and continue mentally repeating the magic words.

At last the tongue of the corpse protrudes from its mouth. The critical moment has arrived. The sorcerer seizes the tongue with his teeth and bites it off. The corpse at once collapses.

Failure in controlling the body, after having awakened it, means certain death for the sorcerer.

The tongue carefully dried becomes a powerful weapon for the triumphant
ngagspa
.

“And,” he added, closing the book, “Duvallo failed to control the body of Tarot after he had awakened it!”

“What the blue blazing hell!” I thought, and scowling said, “If you’re all very good boys and girls tomorrow I’ll tell you all about how Uncle Wiggley outwitted the Skillery Sealery Alligator and the nasty, bad old Werewolf. Boo! And nuts!”

“Go ahead, laugh, but that’s what happened. It’s the only way to untie all the water-soaked knots that snarled up that alibi list. We couldn’t escape the dilemma by assuming two murderers—two people working as one—because of the evidence. But there wasn’t anything to prevent the assumption that one person had worked as two. Duvallo killed Tarot and then brought him back to life. Our not so triumphant
ngagspa
had two accomplices; Jones, who wasn’t aware of it, and Tarot, who was dead.”

“My God, a zombie!” I groaned.

“Exactly.” Merlini had put aside the book and was playing with three walnut shells and a pea that lay on the counter. “Duvallo impersonated Tarot. And I don’t understand why you didn’t see it, Ross. You know that impersonation, like hypnotism and secret exits, is, in a detective novel, as hackneyed as all get out. When the gentle reader notices in Chapter Two that Lady Van Wigglebottom was a shining light in her high school dramatic society, you know immediately that she’s going to turn out to be the mysterious stranger with the red beard who was seen putting a white powder in the soup. But this time there wasn’t just one amateur actor in the case,
they were all actors,
most of them professionals.
That was the one thing that they all really had in common.
Impersonation was written all over the case. Gavigan thought of it once when what was supposed to be Tarot’s voice didn’t sound right in the Xanadu broadcast, and, for a moment, he had truth by the tail. He shouted that someone must have been impersonating Tarot. Later, when Tarot vanished, the cab driver impersonated him for a block or two; and, finally, I told you that Tarot had impersonated Duvallo in the Mystery of the Yogi. It could work just as well the other way about.
And Duvallo was the only person who could possibly have played the part of Tarot!
⁵
All the others were too short or too fat, too old or too young, the wrong sex, or they had appeared simultaneously with Tarot. But compare the descriptions of the two men in the resume Harte wrote for me. They are alike in all the fundamental essentials of build, general facial structure, same color eyes, and hair. Their differences lay in those superficialities of voice and dress that are the things most easily noticed in a dimly lit room, and the easiest to imitate.”

“You mean to say that we never saw Tarot alive at all?” I asked.

Merlini nodded. “We decided that Tarot couldn’t have been killed any earlier than ten o’clock because that seemed to be the earliest hour at which he could have arrived at Duvallo’s. We were wrong. He had arrived, had been admitted and killed by Duvallo almost four hours earlier. Duvallo brought him back to life for Watrous, Rappourt, and the rest of you by impersonating him and in doing so literally managed to be in two places at once. It was while I was telling you about Tarot’s impersonation of Duvallo in the Yogi-in-two-places-at-once trick that I first tumbled to it. Gradually it dawned on me that here was a hypothesis that explained away all our difficulties.”

He checked the points off on his fingers. “One: It offered Duvallo a way of being present at Sabbat’s to throw that bolt and switch the handkerchief in the keyhole himself. Two: It would explain why Tarot avoided being fingerprinted and never removed his gloves even when doing card tricks—he couldn’t go around leaving Duvallo’s fingerprints. Three: It would explain why Tarot, who ordinarily went out of his way to get publicity, when he left Sabbat’s covered his face with his arms and bowled photographers over right and left. Four: It gave a reason for the pennies in the light sockets—the less light during the impersonation the better. And to see Duvallo as himself. Point number five concerned—”

“Wait a minute,” I cut in. “During the time ‘Tarot’ was on the scene Duvallo said he was alone in his booking office waiting for Williams, but he heard the detectives come and knock on the door. How do you explain that?”

Gavigan answered, “That’s easy. As Tarot, he heard me order the men to go there.”

“And that,” Merlini added, “was the only thing that made his ‘waiting alone in the office’ story even faintly plausible. Point number five concerns the towel with the cold cream on it that was found at Tarot’s. Tarot wouldn’t have smeared a towel with cold cream
putting on
that sun-tan disguise, but Duvallo would have done just that
removing
his Tarot disguise. Six, was the mysterious suitcase which had been cached in the lockers in Grand Central. That could have held Duvallo’s own clothes, which he would need when he discarded those of Tarot. Seven: The impersonation would explain why Tarot had given a false home address—Duvallo wouldn’t have wanted the place cluttered up with cops before he’d had a chance to get there, accomplish his Tarot-to-Duvallo metamorphosis and leave Tarot’s clothes strewn about the bedroom. Point eight made me pretty sure I had something. The impersonation would answer that whopper of a question I kept insisting on why had Tarot escaped Janssen with a vanish that was as fancy as a birthday cake instead of using more ordinary bread-and-butter methods? The taxi-vanish, as worked, sent Janssen off on a wild goose chase and not only gave Duvallo time to make his change but with any sort of luck, time to get back to Sabbat’s and report to us as himself
before Tarot was listed as missing
. If we hadn’t penetrated that inspired bit of conjuring we would have been out on the end of a long, long limb. We would have been sure that Duvallo and Tarot were present and accounted for simultaneously, Duvallo at Sabbat’s and Tarot in the taxi. And finally, point nine. I had felt all along that Tarot acted as if he expected to be killed and knew he wouldn’t have to answer for his tall stories and mysteriously suspicious actions.”

The Inspector said, “You had all that under your hat and you were afraid to present the impersonation theory?”

“There wasn’t any really concrete evidence for a prosecuting attorney to get his teeth into, nothing so far but nice, neat speculation. And I couldn’t quite believe it myself until Ross convinced me with his written resume. He turned up three more things that pointed to impersonation. Ten: I discovered that Tarot had receded modestly into the background and become suddenly and unnaturally quiet as soon as the LaClaires, who knew the real Tarot, came on the scene. And eleven: he had hurriedly left Sabbat’s as soon as he heard I was on my way for the same reason.”

Merlini placed the pea on the counter, covered it with a walnut shell, and put his hand over that. He smiled, removed his hand, and, strangely enough, the pea was still there—but the walnut shell had perversely vanished into some limbo of prestidigitation.

“Point twelve,” he went on, “consisted in another lamentable boner by the Great Duvallo. When I read in Harte’s account that Tarot had worn a
silver
wrist watch, I remembered that Tarot had bribed the cab driver with a gold watch and chain. Odd assortment of timepieces for the impeccably attired Tarot to be caught out in. Added to this was the fact that no wrist watch was ever found, either on Tarot’s body or in his apartment, and the fact that Duvallo wore one. Might not Duvallo have dressed himself in Tarot’s clothes, gold watch and all, and forgotten to remove his own wrist watch? Like glasses, one is apt to forget that they class as wearing apparel.

“Twelve points, plus one, the unlucky thirteenth, that something I wasn’t looking for at Tarot’s apartment which I didn’t find…”

“The medicine cabinet!” I exclaimed suddenly, and Gavigan, startled, eyed me like a suspicious psychiatrist. “So that’s what was so odd—Tarot was stocked with flesh-colored sticking plaster, but no adhesive tape!”

Merlini grinned. “Yes, Duvallo was caught out there too. He’d tried to make it too good again. The adhesive wasn’t really essential, though it did serve two purposes. It helped his disguise as Tarot, and, later, it distracted anyone’s suspicion that strangulation had changed Tarot rather too much. Same principle the conjurer uses when he has you initial the card you’ve selected. He nicked Tarot’s face just after death, applied adhesive, and then, dressing in Tarot’s clothes, put a similar strip of adhesive on his own face, but with no cut under it.”

“And what we thought was Tarot’s disguise,” I said excitedly, “was made necessary because Duvallo, having taken his clothes, couldn’t very well leave Tarot in his underwear at Van Ness Lane, and later leave the evening dress for us to find at 50th Street. It would not only have indicated that someone else must have worn his evening dress, but it would have left us with the odd picture of Tarot, the Beau Brummel of Broadway, travelling crosstown on a cold winter’s day clad only in his unmentionables. So Duvallo dressed Eugene in an old suit of his own (minus laundry marks) glasses, and a mustache to suggest a disguise and offer a reason why the immaculately tailored Tarot should be caught dead in a suit of old clothes. Then he smashed the lamp, put Dr. Dee’s crystal in Tarot’s pocket and the
Grimorium
page under the body, left the floor lamp burning, Sabbat’s dressing-gown cord around Tarot’s neck, the ladder at the window with the intervening study door left open, and all the radiators turned for the body’s rigor being so far advanced—and then he fared forth to gather up Watrous and Rappourt, and finish the kitchen door sequence. Sabbat, I suspect, hadn’t invited Watrous and Rappourt over at all; that was Duvallo’s doing. The gun he swiped when he strangled Sabbat the night before; Jones had already been given his hypnotic instructions, and the radio was set. But how did he entice Tarot into his parlor? Something as simple as inviting him over for tea, I suppose?”

“Not quite,” Gavigan said. “It was a lot surer than that. It has to do with the motive. You said you could make a guess, Merlini. Let’s hear it.”

“The $100,000. It was blackmail after all. I said that none of our suspects were wealthy enough to pay out that much hush money, and as I said it I was hit, all of a heap, with the realization that Duvallo could get it if he wanted to. With his knowledge of locks and how to overcome them, it would be pie…”