Nevermore (26 page)

There had been no contact with the magician since their chance meeting at Mrs. Astor’s gala. Twice, after reading Houdini’s continued attacks on spiritualism in the newspapers, Sir Arthur started to write angry letters. Both times, he’d thought better of it. As long as no mention had been made of him personally, there seemed little point in retaliating.

“If thinking pained me as much as it looks like it does you, I’d give it up.”

An unexpected voice interrupted Sir Arthur’s musing. The knight turned and saw a sad-faced man staring dolefully from behind the wheel of a sporty yellow two-seater Pierce-Arrow runabout parked at the curb. There was something familiar about the fellow, and although Sir Arthur couldn’t immediately pin a name on him, he answered without hesitation. “If you must know, I was thinking about the magician, Harry Houdini.”

The stranger nodded, his woeful countenance unchanged. “Small world,” he said. “Houdini’s my godfather.”

“Are you serious?” Sir Arthur masked his suspicion with a jovial smile.

“Don’t I look serious?” the stranger deadpanned. “I was born in a trunk, as the saying goes. A vaudeville brat. My parents worked a double on the same bill with Harry and Bess. It was him named me Buster.”

Of course. Conan Doyle immediately recognized the dour comic actor. He also detected the fruity aroma of alcohol. The man was drunk. The knight decided not to introduce himself. No point in getting embroiled in any inebriated misunderstandings.

Conan Doyle was unaware that he too had been recognized. Buster Keaton spotted the author from familiarity with his photo in the Sunday rotogravure of the
Los Angeles Times.
The coincidental meeting struck the comedian as an almost divinely inspired stroke of luck. For weeks, he’d been wrestling with the scenario for a new motion picture, an off-kilter fantasy about a projectionist who walks into the movie he’s showing, stepping through the screen like an electric Alice to join the other characters in a detective plot. The working title was “Sherlock, Jr.”

Keaton’s company owned the production; he was both director and star of the five-reeler. With the start of principal photography scheduled for next week, he had yet to decide on an ending: a problem of ulcer-inducing proportions. The comic had fled to the old
Intolerance
set to drink and brood. Conan Doyle arrived like a gift from heaven.

“What brings a proper English gentleman like yourself down to the corpse of this colossal flop?” Keaton asked.

Sir Arthur gestured at the framework towering above them. “ ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ “

Keaton’s face remained impassive. The appraising hangdog eyes never missed a trick. This blowhard’s more Watson than Sherlock, he thought. Just what the doctor ordered.

When Houdini’s troupe embarked by train for their ten-week Western tour, the magician remained behind in New York. He told Bess certain business matters required his immediate attention, promising to rejoin her in two or three days. When she insisted on staying, he dissuaded her, explaining he needed her to manage the company accounts in his absence. “Without Jim Vickery, poor Collins has his hands full. He won’t have time to look after the books.” In the end, Bess did as Harry wished, just like always.

Houdini had a busy schedule in the city. He spent most of the first morning at the Pine Street offices of Dumphry, Hale, and Simmons, his accounting firm in the financial district. The magician spoke with those who had known Ingrid Esp, asking many of the same questions the police had asked back in April. The secretaries and stenographers cooperated because they knew him to be a famous man and an important client.

Secretly, they wondered what point there was in going over it all again. He repeatedly inquired about clairvoyants or mediums or whatever. Ingrid had been a quiet Norwegian girl who kept pretty much to herself. She lived with her mother and didn’t have any beaux, as far as anyone could recall. One thing sure, she wasn’t the sort to waste her hard-earned paycheck on fortune-tellers.

After a quick lunch on the fly, grabbing a hot dog and a dope from a pushcart vendor, Houdini set about tracking down “Dapper Dave” Conrad, first stopping at the Palace, where the house manager obliged him by searching through his April booking sheets for the name and address of the hoofer’s agent.

Arnold Small’s office consisted of a single dusty room above a pawnshop on Forty-fifth Street. The agent was a lean, nervous man with springy red hair thick as an Airedale’s. His natural arrogance transformed instantly into obsequious flattery upon recognizing the eminent magician. Small assumed his client was up for a job and Houdini did nothing to correct that misapprehension.

“Call it luck, call it fate,” Small gushed, “Dave Conrad is at this very moment auditioning just around the corner for the chorus in the ‘Vanities.’ “

Despite Houdini’s protests, Arnold Small insisted on walking him to the Earl Carroll Theater. They entered by the stage door and waited in the wings, watching a succession of energetic tap-dancing young men buck-and-wing and shuffle-off-to-Buffalo. Dapper Dave’s turn came at last and he was half a minute into his triple-time step when an unseen voice in the darkened house called, “Next!”

The disgruntled hoofer stalked offstage scowling. He brightened into a smile immediately upon spotting his agent. By the time introductions were made, the three men were out in the street. Small proved harder to shake than a summer cold, but Houdini managed to give him a polite brush-off, saying he needed to speak with the client alone. Never one to queer a deal, the agent motioned them off, standing on the corner of Fiftieth and Seventh, waving like someone left behind on the station platform after the train pulls out.

The magician and the hoofer walked across Times Square to the Automat on the west side of Broadway between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh Streets. This was the first of Horn & Hardart’s popular novelty cafeterias. Since it opened a decade before, a dozen others were flourishing around town. They entered the gleaming white-tiled room beneath the two story stained-glass window designed by Nicola D’Ascenzo. A poor man’s palace with grinning plaster gargoyles and elaborate frondescent moldings, the white marble-topped tables hosted an early afternoon crowd of out-of-work vaudevillians nursing mugs of cold Java and leafing through the
New York Star
or the daily
Variety.
Many of these old-timers recognized Houdini and stood to shake his hand as he headed for the chrome-plated coffee urn.

“Look,” the magician said, dropping two nickels in the slot to fill a pair of cups with the steaming brew spouting from dolphin-shaped spigots, “let me level with you. This isn’t about a job. I want to ask you some questions about Violette Speers.”

“That bitch!” sneered Dapper Dave. “What d’you give a damn about her for?”

“Curious about her murder.”

“Whoever knocked her off did the world a favor.”

“That kind of talk can get you in big trouble.”

“You’re telling me. The cops tried to frame me at first because it’s no secret we hated each other’s guts. They figured I was sore because she broke up the act. Bitch was going on the road with a new partner. Lucky thing I had an iron-clad alibi.”

“What was that?”

“I was in the hospital close to a month. Appendix operation. She was still alive when I went in and they found the body before my discharge.”

“Good break for you.”

Dapper Dave sipped his coffee. “In more ways than one. They caught that appendix just in the nick of time.”

“So, listen.” Houdini leaned forward, his intense, burning stare locked on Dave Conrad. “What can you tell me about Mrs. Speers?”

“Anything you want to know. She was no Mrs., for one thing. She never married Freddy Speers. Slot in church, anyhow.”

“What about him? This Speers? Think he might’ve had it in for her?”

“Not a chance. Freddy shook my hand and wished me luck when she jilted him. Turns out, cutting in on his gal was the best favor I could’ve done him.”

“She broke up your romance and your act at the same time. Sounds like enough motive for playing outpatient with an axe.”

“You’re all wet, brother. There was no more romance. Not for better’n three years. It was a business arrangement, pure and simple. Can’t even tell you the names of the cake-eaters she was screwing. Didn’t give a damn.”

Houdini winced at the profanity, his reaction occasioned more by guilt at the thought of his own screwing around than from inherent prudery. “Okay. I don’t see this as any crime of passion.”

“Some crazy maniac with a library card.”

“Maybe… . Maybe crazy like a fox.” Houdini patted the edge of the table. “This might seem like a funny kind of question, but, what do you know about her beliefs?”

“You mean like how did she vote and what church didn’t she go to…?”

“Actually, I was thinking about ghosts.”

“Did she believe in ghosts…?”

“Mediums… . Palm readers… . Crystal balls… . Did she go in for that kind of thing?”

Dapper Dave scratched behind his ear and grinned in unconscious imitation of Will Rogers. “Now that you mention it, she was goofy that way,” he said. “Used to get her horoscope done. You know, couldn’t make a decision without checking on her stars.”

“What about séances?” Houdini’s eyes gleamed with anticipation.

“Well, I didn’t exactly follow her around.” Dave Conrad silently shook his head at the absurdity of this thought. “I remember once she told me about going to a spook show at some spiffy Fifth Avenue joint. There was this stage-door Johnny squiring her around. Must’ve been twice her age, but ultra swank. He took her someplace very hoity-toity.”

“Opal Crosby Fletcher?”

Dapper Dave looked puzzled at the magician’s enthusiastic outburst. “Who’s that?”

“The medium. Was she called Isis?”

“Search me. All I recall is how gaga Violette was telling me about it. Said all the other guests were these top-drawer blue bloods. Said it was like dying and going to heaven. I guess she knows more about that stuff now.”

A flush of excitement tinged Houdini’s cheeks. “Did she say anything about her hostess being the medium?”

“Maybe. To be honest with you, I didn’t pay much attention. It was just Vi, hogging the spotlight, like always.”

“But you remember her saying Fifth Avenue?”

“I wouldn’t swear an oath on it. Maybe it was Park. What difference does it make?”

Houdini looked grim. “Perhaps the difference between life and death,” he said, one showman to another, milking the moment for all it was worth.

A fresh, crisp breeze whipped in across the harbor, making whitecaps dance around a Staten Island-bound ferry. Gulls wheeled shrieking above a tug-towed garbage scow heading for the Narrows. The salty sea air tasted clean and invigorating to Sgt. James Patrick Heegan, accustomed to breathing a poisonous midtown miasma composed of equal parts truck exhaust and coal furnace fumes. He sat on a park bench behind the aquarium in Castle Clinton, staring out at the Jersey shore and the distant, arsenic-green Statue of Liberty.

The sergeant had arranged to meet Damon Runyon in Battery Park. It wasn’t far from headquarters on Centre Street and he wanted the reporter to come see him for a change. At the same time, it seemed a little too close for comfort, being as he was in uniform. Rather than some more convenient spot near City Hall, Heegan suggested the park as neutral territory, not wanting another cop to see him talking to the press.

The sergeant clutched a rolled copy of a novelty publishing experiment, a weekly news magazine called
Time.
The first issue had appeared five months earlier. Heegan didn’t give it much chance of success. He only bought the magazine as a silent rebuke for Damon Runyon. Give the arrogant bastard a clue. Let him see maybe his future wasn’t all that secure.

The reporter strolled into Battery Park after walking down Broadway from Trinity Church, where he’d mistakenly asked the cabby to drop him. This wasn’t his part of town. The last time he’d been down on Wall Street had been three years before when anarchists exploded a junk cart full of scrap metal in front of the House of Morgan, killing thirty. Although Runyon considered himself a sportswriter, William Randolph Hearst liked having him cover certain big stories of a criminal nature. In 1916 he’d even jogged along on muleback beside Black Jack Pershing at the head of the Thirteenth Cavalry, chasing after Pancho Villa in Old Mexico.

Runyon dressed like a sporty racetrack tout in two-tone tan-and-white shoes, a pale blue linen suit, and polka-dot bow tie. His heartless eyes swept the benches behind Castle Clinton, spotting the bulky blue figure of Sergeant Heegan alone by the iron rail at the water’s edge. The taxpayer’s burden, he thought.

“What have you got for me today Sergeant?” asked Damon Runyon, settling himself on the opposite end of the bench.

Heegan fixed the reporter with his sternest third-degree stare. “The question is, Mr. Runyon, what’ve you got for me?”

Time to nip this deal in the bud. Behind the implacable round-lensed glasses, the Westerner’s eyes narrowed with anger. “Don’t confuse newspaper work with how you coppers conduct business,” he said. “I don’t pay for favors.”

The policeman affected a pained expression. “I’m not asking for grift. What I want is a favor from you.”

“Name it.”

“Well, I been feeding you all the lowdown for some time. That Ed Poe caper come from me. Seems like you’ve been scoring big points with that one.” He waved the copy of
Time,
a pen-and-ink portrait of treasury secretary Andrew W. Mellon staring furtively off the cover.

“Give it to me straight, Heegan.”

“Look. I read the papers every day, year in and year out. I see how you put your friends in your column. Make a big deal up out of nothing …”

“You’d like to see your name in the paper?”

“Sure would tickle my wife and kids.”

“Heegan. You’re on.” Damon Runyon sprang to his feet and clapped the sergeant on his shoulder. “In two paragraphs, I’ll make you the biggest hero in the city. The little woman and all the rug rats will fight for the privilege of bringing your pipe and slippers.”