Death out of Thin Air (13 page)

C
HAPTER
XV

The Man Who Wouldn't Stay Dead

I
N THE
apartment below Woody Haines heard the shot as he struggled to his feet. His head ached as if it were about to fly apart and dissolve into nothing among the pretty flashes of Technicolor light that danced around it.

Woody had found the jewels in the apartment while Fox was busy in the séance room above. Up there, when Don had put in his oar and added a few unexpected lines to the script, Fox had hastily climbed out of the window, and beat a retreat toward the room below. Don had purposely closed the window after him so that the Bat had no choice but to go back in at the open, lower window behind which Woody stood waiting.

Woody had then gotten the drop on the Bat, locked him in the bathroom, had taken the jewels up stairs and reported to Don as the wayward telegram messenger. When he returned he had spent ten or fifteen minutes searching the apartment, his reporter's nose looking for more evidence that would help convict Fox.

Finally, he had again gone to the bathroom and unlocked the door to see how his captive was faring.

He got one good look at the interior of the bathroom. Then something hard and heavy hit the back of his head and he had remembered nothing more until now. He was still wondering why the bathroom had been empty, why it was that the Bat seemed to have been able to vanish with all the mysterious ease of a Diavolo! A real Vampire, Woody knew, could magically turn himself into a yellow frog and seep through a keyhole to re-materialize himself on the door's other side. But this guy wasn't a real — Hell!

Woody didn't know what to think — and, with the headache he had, thinking hurt like blue blazes anyway. He was halfway to his feet when he heard the shot above.

Madly Woody dashed up the stairs.

A body lay just within the doorway and a figure stood over it, flashlight and gun in hand. Woody leaped at it.

“Hey!” a voice cried. “I wish you'd learn to look before you leap, Woody.” Woody's surprise stopped him almost in midair. The voice was Don Diavolo's!

Fox lay on the floor, not dead, but out so far he didn't much care. Diavolo ripped several feet of extension cord loose from a floor lamp and began to tie the fallen Bat.

Mickey watched him, still bewildered at what had happened in the dark. “Don,” she said. “I don't get it yet. You threw the Count's gun away. And I know you didn't have another. Yet, just as he started to fire, you fired first.”

“With the Count's gun,” Diavolo grinned. “If you'll look over there on the floor, you'll see that what I threw away was the flashlight!

“I was holding them both when Fox got the drop on me. The necessary sleight of hand was a cinch in the dark and I was careful to toss the flash away outside the beam of his light. He heard it land and he thought he had me.

“Woody, see if you can find the fuse box and fix us some light. Try the kitchen. Mickey, get Inspector Church on the phone. And let me talk. We're going to supply three customers for those handcuffs of his.”

Mickey and Woody both stared at Don who was now busy binding the still unconscious Count.

“Three!” Woody exclaimed. “What do you mean three?”

“What do you think I mean, Woody? Three is two plus one.” Diavolo smiled at their bewilderment and added. “You'll hear all about it. Hop to it.”

Woody went to the kitchen and unlocked the door. As he opened it, Chandler's voice came from inside, “
Put your hands up!
”

Don whirled at the sound and then laughed. “It's all right, Chandler. He's a friend of mine.”

Chandler, standing just within the kitchen door, lowered his gun. Ogden Saylor, behind him, tossed aside the rolling pin he held, and together with the two women they came out.

“We weren't sure who did all the shooting,” Chandler said, “you or the Count. And your friend — I thought he might be the Bat with his mask off.”

But Don Diavolo was talking into the phone. “Inspector Church,” he said, his voice once more covered with a thick coating of English accent. “This is His Royal Highness, the Maharajah of Vdai-Loo. I believe I have some evidence to give you concerning the murder of Marie VanReyd, the young lady who was killed in the Manhattan Music Hall this afternoon.”

The Inspector's voice coming over the phone carried half way across the room. “Damn and blast! If this is a gag I'll—I'll—”

“I know,” the Maharajah finished for him. “You will explode and vanish in a puff of smoke. But it is
not
what you Americans call a gag. I—”

Church's violent dislike for the word “vanish” was transposed into half a dozen fiery exclamations of an unprintable sort that nearly caused the phone receiver to glow with incandescence.

His Highness interrupted. “Inspector, the honorable telephone company will be greatly distressed if any of its young lady employees should overhear such extremely impolite language. I am very sorry. I forgot that the subject annoys you. I would suggest a dose of aspirin. Then, if you'll come to the Park-Forrest Hotel, Count Draco's apartments, I will give you my evidence and some prisoners.”

Before Church could begin any cross-examination, the Maharajah quickly hung up. “That,” he grinned, “ought to bring him running. While he's on his way we'll have a few past-due explanations.”

“I could use some,” Ogden Saylor said. “How the devil did Draco make the diamonds vanish from that locked safe of ours?”

“The Count didn't take them himself,” Diavolo replied. “Harry Fox did that. He climbed up into your bedroom window and got them from the safe. He didn't force the safe; you swear it was locked and that no one but yourself and your wife knew the combination. That's impossible. But the impossibility itself vanishes if we merely assume that, somehow, he
did
know that combination.”

“But how?” Mrs. Saylor asked.

“Was the Count a telepathist too? Could he read our minds?”

“Something like that, yes,” Don said. “He tricked you yourself into telling him the combination, without your knowing it! I'm certain that that silk band around your neck hides the two red marks of the Bat's bite. The Count probably gave you — and Miss LaValle — private séance sittings. At one of these the Bat appeared.

“You fainted — or thought you did — when he approached you. Afterwards you found those marks on your neck. You thought you had been bitten by a vampire, experienced its hypnotic results, and would yourselves become vampires after death. Am I right?”

Both the women nodded. Inez said, “The Bat came in at the window. He made a mysterious hypnotic pass at the Count who fell down unconscious. Then he — he—” Inez covered her face with her hands.

“That's where you're wrong,” Diavolo said. “It was an act. The Count pretended that the hypnotic gesture put him out of commission. That was his alibi. He tried to act all along as if he was frightened of the Bat he had accidentally let loose as the rest of you were.

“The Bat was his stooge. And Harry Fox knows how to apply that certain pressure in the hollows behind the ears that creates insensibility. It's an old stunt. I've seen it used in Tibet. As soon as you were really unconscious the Count came to and gave you an injection of scopolamine — the Truth Drug.
¹³
He made two injection marks so it would look like the upper and lower teeth of a bat bite.

“Scopolamine is the drug that is found in
datura stranionium
, sometimes called ‘thorn apple' or ‘jimson weed.' The gypsies of middle Europe, with their Magic Drums, still use the seeds of the datura exactly as I demonstrated. But the Thuggees of India also used those same seeds for a more deadly purpose — murder. Datura was their poison. Datura or scopolamine can be harmlessly given as the Truth Drug only in the minutest quantities. When I used the Magic Drum-datura seed hocus-pocus tonight, what I was really doing was hinting to the Count that I knew he had been doping his victims with the Truth Drug.”

“Hocus-pocus?” Mrs. Saylor asked.

She gasped and went on:

“But the seeds
did
come to rest on the Count's number?”

“That was natural, not supernatural,” Don said. “I had smeared a bit of maple syrup over the Count's number six. I found it in his refrigerator when I went to get you a glass of water. There were a number of things there that I might have used — honey, white of egg, orange marmalade and raspberry jam. The color of the syrup most nearly matched the dark, tanned color of the drumhead. So I used it.”

“You certainly do do things up brown,” Avery Chandler punned. “But what about those datura seeds? Draco surely didn't have those on hand — he wouldn't be using home-made scopolamine. It would be too dangerous.”

“I found them in the icebox just the same,” Diavolo said. “Only they weren't really datura seeds after all. It is very difficult to distinguish between the seed of the datura and the tomato.
¹⁴

“But let's go back to the Truth Drug. I suspected its use and Dr. Graf recognized the symptoms when Fox gave my assistant, Patricia Collins, a dose of it this afternoon in order to question her.

“He and Draco were worried as hell. Marie had been murdered. They didn't know why or by whom. The papers told them that I was mixed up in it; they decided to investigate. But the papers had said nothing about the bat motif of the murder and they didn't know they should have omitted that disguise.

“Since they had questioned Pat without her knowing it, through the use of a Truth Drug injection, I knew they were probably doing the same with their other victims. My first thought was that they were gathering blackmail information. They may have been doing that too — but when the thefts occurred and when the Saylor
Star of Persia
vanished as it did, it began to look as if the Count wasn't beating around any blackmail bush. He was going straight for securities and jewels that could be converted into hard, cold cash.

“And, better than the blackmail, no one could ever prove him responsible, since the theft looked so utterly impossible. It was more likely that the police wouldn't believe the Saylors' story.”

Ogden Saylor's handsome, selfish face lost for a moment its mask of indolence; his eyes rested on his wife in a look of venomous satisfaction that was the concentrated essence of all the I-told-you-sos that any husband had ever said to any foolish wife. Mrs. Saylor turned to Don Diavolo.

“You mean the Count questioned us while we were unconscious?” Mrs. Saylor asked,

“Yes, the delirious, half-conscious state induced by scopolamine is hypnoidal in effect. On awakening, you had no memory of having been questioned or of having told the Count the safe combination. The Count told you that you had been bitten by the vampire.

“The séance tonight, I suspect, was one last grand play, putting on the blackmail screws, I think. Marie had been murdered and Draco knew that, eventually, the investigators would get around to him. Before that happened he was going to be gone. He figured he had a few days, perhaps weeks, since the trail would lead from Marie into and out of Nazi Austria through oceans of red tape before it caught up with him.”

“You seem to have explained everything,” Avery Chandler said, “except one minor point. Who killed Marie VanReyd?”

Don Diavolo looked slowly around at the intent faces that watched him. “I haven't forgotten that,” he said, “Marie VanReyd was killed by another sort of vampire — another person who wouldn't stay dead — and another person who also impersonated a bat-faced vampire!

“Two minutes or so after I had seen the Bat in Chandler's offices this afternoon I got a phone call from Pat saying that the Bat was already there with her, two miles away in the Village! It looked as if perhaps he could fly after all — or as if he were able to be in two places at once. There's only one practical way to do that trick. There must be two people — doubles. Consequently I knew there must be two Bats!

“Larry Fox was the Bat who got Pat and Karl.
The bat who knocked Chandler out and stole his securities
—
the bat who killed Marie
—
was another person altogether!
”

Ogden Saylor's hands shook as he pulled himself from his chair. His face was deathly pale. “Are you insinuating that—”

Diavolo shook his head. “No, Saylor, not you. That other Bat, the other person who wouldn't stay dead, is
Charles VanReyd
, Marie's husband. Draco thought he had murdered him in a mountain climb, but his body was never found. Charles escaped — escaped and lived to find his wife and her lover again, and to take his revenge.”

Woody broke in. “But, Don, we haven't even met—”

“Ever play anagrams, Woody?” Diavolo asked. “Interesting game. Some time when you have a free minute take the name Charles VanReyd and try juggling the letters a bit. It shouldn't take you long to discover that they can also spell the name,
Avery S. Chandler!
”