Death from a Top Hat (6 page)

As we watched he produced another handful of cards in a neat fan, and he repeated the gesture twice more with easy precision until he was holding a full deck. It was a slick performance, marred only by the fact that he did it with his gloves on. This variation, Merlini had once told me, was originated by Cardini, and the number of small fry who have pirated it are merely admitting their own lack of originality. I wondered why Tarot, a top-notch card man in his own right, descended to that sort of thing.

Gavigan, I saw, was consciously suppressing an openmouthed attitude. I suspected that he was one of those persons who dislike being fooled, whose alibi is always, “Oh, well, of course the stage is riddled with trap doors,” and who get a bit of a jolt when a conjurer for the first time comes right up close, and with no trap doors about, hoodwinks them just the same.

Tarot came forward, fanned the cards in front of Gavigan, and voiced the conjurer’s stock request, “Take a card, please.”

The Inspector half hypnotically put forth his hand, and then withdrew it, scowling.

“For crissake!” he flared. “This is no time for parlor tricks!”

Tarot shrugged and dropped the cards into his pocket.

“Sorry!” he said, “I must be going anyhow. I’m late now.” He headed toward the door.

“Not so fast!” Gavigan said quickly. “I won’t take a card, but I’ll have something else. Those picklocks, please.”

He held out his hand.

Tarot stopped, grinned, and bringing out the key ring he tossed them at the Inspector. They jingled and flashed in the light as the latter caught them.

“Quite a professional assortment,” Gavigan said. “Let’s hear about them.”

“Poor Dave even has circumstance working against him. They’re his. I borrowed them Saturday night to work on a trunk whose key I had mislaid. I intended to return them to him tonight. Perhaps you’ll see that he gets them.”

“He’ll see them all right. And now the gun, please.”

“I’ve a permit for that, Inspector.”

“Let’s see it.”

“It’s at my hotel.”

“Okay, then I want the gun.” Gavigan’s hand went out again. “You can have it back when I see the permit.”

Tarot shrugged and held it out. “I hope you’ll leave me some small change, Inspector. I need carfare. Anything else?”

Without replying, the Inspector crooked his little finger through the trigger guard and with the gun hanging crossed the room and placed it carefully on the blotter pad at the desk.

“Yes,” he answered, “leave your fingerprints with Brady across the hall on your way out. I’ll expect you back after the broadcast, and don’t stop to look in any store windows on the way. Understand? Hunter,” Gavigan raised his voice, “go downstairs and tell the boys to let Mr. Tarot out.”

Hunter’s voice came from outside, “Right,” and we heard him go down the hall.

Tarot nodded. “Okay, Inspector. I wish you luck.” He bowed slightly, stepped quickly through the door, and pulled it to after him.

Gavigan scowled at the place where he had been and said, “Damn him anyway! I wonder if he did that purposely.”

I didn’t get it for a moment; then I remembered Gavigan’s orders, delivered in Tarot’s presence, that the door was not to be touched.

“Janssen,” Gavigan ordered, “you go tail him. I want a full and detailed report, and God help you if you lose him.”

“Yes, sir.” Janssen started off in high, then stalled as the Inspector warned, “Careful of that knob!”

The detective turned the knob carefully, grasping the shank between forefinger and thumb.

“Well, Doc,” Gavigan began, “what’s the…” He stopped short as if someone had clapped a hand over his mouth. I have since seen the Inspector conceal his surprise, and I have seen him when he couldn’t conceal it, but this was the only time I’ve even seen his jaw literally hanging. It sagged as if the maxillary muscles had suddenly been severed. I looked where he was looking and understood. Sabbat’s body lay on the davenport, and Dr. Hesse, standing near it, held a playing card, the ace of spades, between his right forefinger and thumb. Watching it intently, he made a quick throwing gesture and the card vanished, his open, empty palm stretched flat. He reached down and pulled the card from behind his right knee. With grave concentration he repeated the maneuver, twice more.

Gavigan bellowed, “Dr. Hesse! What the blazing hell are you doing?”

The card, which the doctor was again producing from behind his right knee, slipped from his startled fingers and fell to the floor. Dr. Hesse looked up foggily and said, “What?”

The Inspector couldn’t think of any more words, and Hesse, noting the amazement in his face, realized its cause.

“Sorry, Inspector,” he said, a bit shamefacedly. “I couldn’t refrain from practicing that one while it was fresh in my mind. Standing behind Tarot as he produced those cards, I could see some things that you couldn’t. I noticed that he has an original variation on the basic sleight used in that manipulative series, an improvement on the standard Thurston method. It’s so simple I can’t think why it had never occurred to me…”

“But that card…what…where?”

“Oh, I always have a deck in my pocket. Sleight of hand is my hobby. Nothing unusual in that, you know. The medical profession is represented in the ranks of amateur conjurers to a greater degree than any other, more doctors being enrolled in the Society of American Magicians than any other single profession. The practice of surgery, I suppose, predisposes us toward a hobby that is so largely pure manual dexterity.”

Gavigan began to recover. “Oh, dissection leads to deception, does it?” He groaned. “Since you know, how did Tarot pull those cards out of nothing and how do you—”

Dr. Hesse grinned and shook his head. “Magicians, even amateurs, aren’t in the habit of divulging their secrets to idle curiosity seekers. Of course, if you’re seriously interested in acquiring the art…?”

“God forbid! And besides, Mrs. Gavigan wouldn’t allow rabbits in the house,” Gavigan said, and added, “Maybe you knew Sabbat, or know some of the witnesses we’ve collected. Tarot, the LaClaires, Colonel Watrous, Madame Rappourt, Duvallo?”

“Hmmm, that’s a pretty good bill. I don’t know Watrous and Rappourt. The others I am acquainted with slightly, having met them at S.A.M. meetings. I don’t, however, attend very regularly any more. The murder rate in this town keeps me too busy.”

“Well, I’ll hear what you know about ’em later. Let’s have your report.”

Dr. Hesse picked up his ace of spades and placed it in his coat pocket. “The present corpse,” he said, “met death by strangulation. The usual soft marks are present. If you look closely you’ll notice a pale groove in the neck with a slight surrounding suggilation. It indicates that the strangulation was accomplished with the aid of some soft material such as a woman’s hose or a towel. Find anything of that sort?”

“No. The body was just as you found it.”

“Murder then, of course. But that’s odd.”

“What is?”

“There aren’t any bruises on the body. When a person is strangled it almost always entails a struggle that leaves some sort of trace. Usually bruises on the back. Their absence suggests that he was drugged or stunned first, though I see no outward signs of that. Something to look for in the post mortem.”

“The time of death, Doctor?” Gavigan asked.

Dr. Hesse sighed. “I wish it were compulsory for the victim’s watch to be broken and stopped during the death struggle. That makes it so much simpler.”

“Come on, quit stalling, Doc. You make pretty good guesses.”

“Well, rigor mortis is quite complete, no signs of decomposition yet, and the interior body temperature—well, say around three this morning, with the usual margin for error. That do?”

Gavigan nodded. “Thanks,” he said, and began investigating the pockets of Sabbat’s dressing gown. He took out a bunch of keys, a piece of white chalk, an indelible pencil, and then, just as Malloy came into the room, the torn half of a blue-bordered handkerchief.

“Spence was the only one in the house with any information, Inspector,” Malloy reported. “The old maid downstairs wears one of those amplifying gadgets hung on her ear, and she could live right under a bowling alley and not know it. I’ve got ten men pushing doorbells on this street trying to scare up witnesses that might have noticed something. Merlini is on his way and…oh, yes. Tarot’s alibi checks and double checks. The Knowltons gave me half a dozen names, and they all swear he was the life of the party every minute. There doesn’t seem to be any question about—”

Brady came in, carrying his fingerprint paraphernalia. “I’ve got their prints—all except…” He looked around in a surprised way. “Where’s the swell with the monocle?”

Gavigan choked. “Haven’t you…didn’t he come in there and let you ink him?”

Brady replied with an open-mouthed no.

Inspector Gavigan emitted a crackling, neon-colored stream of high-voltage profanity. Malloy jumped for the hall, and I heard him going down the stairs, two steps at a time.

…only to the privileged few has that precious link been given, that transcendent rapport with the Unseen World been made manifest. These chosen ones are outside the Law; their confluence with the Astral Force makes possible all those Dark Things which earthlings pretend are mere flights of imaginative fancy, all those thaumaturgie realities of Abaddon which would swathe their pigmy minds, their shriveled souls with Insensate Fear.

Dr. Cesare Sabbat:
The Secret Heresies

I
NSPECTOR
G
AVIGAN WAS PHONING
headquarters and still throwing out intermittent bursts of lava when Malloy came back and reported that Tarot had last been seen in a taxi headed north, Detective Janssen in his wake.

Gavigan barked into the phone, “Send a couple of men to NBC at once and pick up a guy named Eugene Tarot. He’s on the ten o’clock program, and I don’t care how many million people are waiting to hear him. I want him at once! Bring him directly here and hurry it!”

He banged the receiver. “Malloy, Headquarters is sending more men. You can put them to work collecting data on those people in the next room. Quinn, you nose through the desk and filing cabinets. I want to know lots more about the cadaver.”

Malloy went out followed by Dr. Hesse, and Gavigan, motioning Brady to follow, moved toward the kitchen. “I want to see that other door for myself,” he said as they disappeared.

I lit a cigarette and stood for a moment or two by the window, listening to the foghorns and watching the lighted outline of a ferry boat that moved slowly across the dark nothingness of the river. I heard a step behind me and turned to see a tall figure come through the door and move toward me around the end of the davenport. Then, as at some stage manager’s cue, the ceiling lights and the green shaded desk lamp flicked on, chasing the darkness at last from the corners of the room and with bright accommodation giving Merlini a good entrance. As he stood there, blinking a bit in the light, I half expected him to take a bow and proceed with his opener, in which one of his white gloves, tossed into the air, became a dove that circled and disappeared into the wings.

Merlini’s off-stage appearance is, for a magician, oddly lacking in peculiarity. Those rubber stamp stigmata of the conjurer, the curling mustachios and the unharvested crop of bushy hair, have little existence today, save in the cartoonist’s imagination. Merlini’s face was clean shaven and his haircut altogether normal.

At first you do not suspect him of any connection with show business. This despite the fact that the Riding Merlinis have been one of circusdom’s top equestrian acts here and abroad for five generations. You would not guess that Phineas T. Barnum had been his godfather, that his initial entrance on to this earthly stage was made in a circus car en route somewhere between Centralia and Peoria, Illinois; or that he made his first public appearance at the age of three in the role of a small, burnt-corked Nubian, who held grimly to the side of a swaying howdah as it was borne around the arena on the back of the immortal Jumbo.

It is not until he speaks that you suspect his profession. His voice belongs to the theater; richly resonant, it exhibits an unusual range of depth and tone. Merlini can be, and at times is, completely self-effacing, then suddenly he speaks and in that instant has captured everyone’s complete attention. If he is “working” he proceeds at once to double-cross his listeners with smooth misdirection. His speech, habitually dry, ironic, and humorous, has a habit of shifting with subtle celerity to a compelling delivery that is not far short of hypnotic. It is utterly impossible to tell when he is being serious and when he is pattering in preparation for a minor miracle. He could sell you anything; and he does sell you impossibilities.

The planes of his face are forceful though asymmetric, one wayward ear projecting with rakish nonconformity considerably further than the other. His hair and eyes are black; and the latter shine with an intense curiosity. The good-humored crinkles at the corners of his mouth often bracket a faintly lopsided smile. He carries his tall, spare body with an almost conceited air of confidence. At rest his hands look large and masculinely awkward; in motion they take on that special grace and delicately co-ordinated economy that spells long discipline.

There is no predicting his dress. At times it is as impeccable off stage as it always is on; and at other times it achieves an inimitable disorganization, as comfortable as it is slack. His pockets are always loaded with the smaller appurtenances of his profession—cards, thimbles, silk handkerchiefs, and, I suspect, other gadgets of a more secret sort.

Merlini likes surf bathing, table tennis, puzzles, Times Square, and Mrs. Merlini. He can smell any circus that approaches within a radius of one hundred miles, and he promptly disappears in that direction. He dislikes subways, beer, inactivity, grand opera, and golf. I suppose that he sleeps, but I have never caught him at it. He has authored three books:
Legerdemainiacs, The Psychology of Deception,
and
Sawdust Trails
. He is the proprietor of a shop which supplies the conjuring fraternity with its illusive paraphernalia.