Death out of Thin Air Read online

  A call-boy stood there in the hall less than twenty feet from the door. He was reading a copy of Racing Dope.

  “Jerry,” Diavolo said. “You were where you are now when I came offstage and Chan met me at the elevators. Where’ve you gone since then?”

  Jerry looked up. “No place at all. I’ve been right here trying to pick up a gee-gee in the fifth at Belmont. How’s about squinting in that crystal ball of yours and picking a horse for me?”

  Don made a quick, smooth motion with his empty right hand and a quarter appeared in it as if from nothing. He flipped it toward the boy. “Forget the horses for a minute. This is important. Who came in after we did?”

  “There was a real hot looking dame with a funny hat. Thought for a minute it was Dorothy Lamour. I’ll take either of ’em. She—”

  “All right. Now forget the dames, too.” Diavolo scowled impatiently. “Who else came in?”

  “Nobody.” The boy looked at him curiously, wondering at the rapid-fire seriousness of Diavolo’s questions. “Why?”

  “You’re sure of that?” Don insisted. “Myself, Chan and the girl. No one else?”

  “That’s right. Nobody at all. I’ll swear to that on a whole stack of—”

  “I know — Racing Dopes. And who left after that?”

  “Say, what is this?” Jerry asked, finally beginning to realize that something was up. “A new trick of yours? How could anybody else come out if you were the only ones that—”

  By now, however, Jerry was talking to a closed door. He stopped, scratching his head. Then his eye fell on his dope sheet and he grinned. “That’s it!” he said. “Screwball in the ninth!” He started for a phone, whistling.

  There was no whistling inside the dressing room. Instead Diavolo frowned grimly, first at the girl’s still body and then at Chan. He was thinking that getting out of this predicament promised to be even more difficult than the nerve-racking experience of his Great Underwater Bank-Safe escape.

  As Chan had done, he strode across to the window and leaned out. The traffic, five stories below, moved slowly in the five o’clock jam. Lights in the buildings opposite were beginning to come on.

  “With that locked door of mine,” he said, “and Jerry on guard outside, it leaves just one exit from this room. The window.”

  Chan said, puzzled, “But isn’t that just how the bat—”

  “The bat?” Diavolo asked. He shook his head. “Vampire bats, Chan, suck the blood of their prey like leeches. But that’s a slow death, not the quick one this girl got. She seemed all right when she came in, didn’t she?”

  Chan nodded.

  “Then the bat didn’t kill her,” Don went on. “Anyway, it would have to be much larger….” He stopped, scowling. Then slowly, as if talking to himself, he added, “Maybe I’m crazy. I thought this was New York City, not 17th century Middle Europe.”

  He blinked and shook his head as if discarding some thought that he would rather not believe. But his glance was worried. “Chan,” he said then. “We’ve got work to do. The publicity this will get us is not the kind we want. Get Woody Haines on the phone. We’ll call the police as soon as I’ve had a look around.”

  Chan went to the phone and Diavolo flipped a handkerchief from his pocket. He wrapped it around his hand and stooped to the green suede purse that lay where it had fallen near the body. He unsnapped the catch and looked inside. He fished gingerly among the usual contents of a woman’s bag and then brought out one thing that was distinctly unusual.

  It was a slip of paper torn from a memo book and one side was covered with a fine feminine script.

  Diavolo read it aloud. Even Chan’s Oriental calm was faintly disturbed.

  About 1732 a veritable epidemic of vampirism terrorized Hungary. It was reported that in many villages shadowy figures haunted the churchyards and even penetrated into houses, sucking the blood of their victims who were mysteriously thrown into a hypnotic sleep.

  — Summers, The Geography of Witchcraft.

  Don looked across at Chan, a strange expression on his bronzed face. Chan regarded him in turn, immobile now; but his coal-black slanted eyes glistened.

  Diavolo looked at the paper again, and reread it.

  Chan, at the phone was saying, “Thank you. Please have Mr. Haines call Don Diavolo at the Manhattan Music Hall as soon as he comes in.”

  Don’s fingers turned the sheet of paper over. His glance rested on the half dozen words that were written there just as a sharp rapping came from the corridor door.

  A voice called, “Open Sesame! The majesty and power of the Press awaits without.”

  Diavolo’s eyes studied the new inscription on the paper. Without looking up he said. “That’s Woody. Let him in.”

  Chan crossed to the door and swung it inward. J. Haywood Haines came in. He was known to his friends as “Woody” and to most of Broadway as the reporter whose Behind the Scenes column in the New York Press usually had the lowdown on inside stories.

  He nodded gaily at Chan, sailed his fifteen dollar pearl-gray hat across to the divan and announced:

  “Don Diavolo, I want you to meet the star deducer of the New York Homicide Department, Inspector Church.”

  Don Diavolo, squatting on his heels by the body, the girl’s open purse at his side, was remembering the time his parachute had nearly failed to open. He felt that way now.

  Inspector Church never acknowledged that introduction. He was too busy staring at the body. He was, to put it, mildly, pop-eyed.

  Then he said, “Oh, I see. You’re rehearsing.”

  Diavolo stood up, palming the slip of paper. “I only wish I were, Inspector,” he said calmly. “You couldn’t have dropped in at a better time.”

  He really meant worse time, but he thought he’d better not admit it. He knew why the Inspector was there. Woody was helping to arrange a jail break publicity stunt and he had brought the Inspector along to discuss it. Fate had apparently decided that now was a good time for them to arrive. Don didn’t agree with her.

  Church stepped nearer the girl, got a look at her white face and barked, “Haines! Get a doctor. You” — he pointed at Chan — “phone headquarters!”

  Then he knelt beside the body, touched it and saw the marks on her neck. He sent a sudden lightning scowl at Diavolo and from the side of his mouth said, “Never mind the doc, Woody. The medical examiner can take care of this one.”

  Church looked at Diavolo a moment. “Well,” he growled then. “Out with it! What happened?”

  Don groaned inwardly. This was going to be anything but a cinch. When the Inspector heard the story he had to tell, Hell was going to pop.

  It did. It not only popped — it exploded with seventeen different kinds of colored fire and a detonation that was heard at Centre Street. Within thirty seconds, police cars were converging on the Manhattan Music Hall from all directions.

  Inspector Church had to believe some of the story — he had a dead body before him to prove it. But when Don mentioned the bat, Church made a half move as if to phone Bellevue’s psychiatric department and report the capture of an escaped lunatic.

  “Somebody is bats, right enough,” he growled. “You say that you and Chan here were all alone. Nobody else came in and no one left.” He snorted again, “Except for a bat. Maybe you want me to arrest the bat for murder?”

  “Murder?” Haines asked, startled. The events of the past few minutes had shaken even his reporter’s aplomb. And the memory of a certain cablegram he had received from London two months before didn’t add anything to his peace of mind.

  “Yes,” Church said. “Murder. Poison, I think. She—”

  A bright gleam on the floor caught his eye and he knelt and picked up a gold-cased lipstick pencil. He started to rise again, but stopped, glimpsing something beneath the edge of the girl’s silver-fox cape. His hand lifted the edge of the cape and drew it aside.

  His eyebrows went up abruptly, and just as quickly flattened into a frown. His right hand move
d quickly inside his coat toward a shoulder holster. It came out holding a thirty-eight automatic.

  For the second time within twenty minutes, Chan Chandara Manchu found himself on the wrong end of a gun that meant business.

  “All right,” Church said flatly. “You just stay where you are. Woody, frisk him. And you might look up his sleeve for a knife. These Orientals …”

  Diavolo cut in. “Aren’t you being a bit hasty, Inspector? There’s no reason to—” He stepped forward.

  “Oh, no? You stay put. I’ve had all the hocus-pocus from you I want. This case is solved right now!”

  Woody Haines and Diavolo leaned together above the body and stared at what the Inspector had found beneath the cape.

  There, on the floor, in scarlet — not blood as Diavolo thought at first, but lipstick — were four letters of the alphabet, scrawled in hasty, wavering strokes that matched the handwriting on the paper Don had concealed.

  The letters spelled the single word: “Chan!”

  The Maharajah (Don Diavolo to you)

  Woody

  Mickey

  Pat Collins (we think)

  Inspector Church

  Karl

  CHAPTER IV

  The Man is Quicker than the Eye

  DIAVOLO objected strongly. “Look here, Inspector,” he argued. “Chan wasn’t in the room alone with her for more than a minute.”

  Church wasn’t impressed. He still held the gun on Chan. “So what?” he asked. “I could poison half a dozen people in less time than that. Are you trying to tell me he didn’t do it?”

  Diavolo’s answer was positive. “I am. Exactly that.”

  “But there was no one in here with the girl except the two of you. What are you doing? Confessing you did it?” The Inspector’s gun swerved slightly toward Don.

  “No. I didn’t do it. I never saw the girl before.”

  “Then who do you want me to think did, for the gossake?” Church asked. “And don’t mention bats!”

  Diavolo made a nonchalant, somewhat absent-minded gesture with his empty hand and produced from the thin air at his fingertips, a lighted cigarette — a long Cuban one. He puffed at it thoughtfully a moment. Then he said. “There was someone — or something — else in this room.”

  Woody Haines sat on the divan staring with an odd look at Diavolo. But he said nothing.

  Inspector Church growled, “Okay. There was someone else here. All right. You’re the magician who thinks he’d like to escape from the Tombs. You tell me yourself that only three people know how that door unlocks — yourself, Chan and a guy named Hartz. If this other person that was here went out by the door Hartz must be it.”

  Diavolo shook his head. “No, Karl didn’t do it. You wouldn’t say that if you knew him, Inspector.”

  “I’ll decide what he did or didn’t do for myself, but as long as you don’t want it to be him — and you do want me to believe someone else was here, suppose you tell me how he got out.”

  Diavolo indicated the open window. “That was closed when Chan and I came in,” he said. “It was open when we found the girl. He must have both come and gone that way.”

  “In what?” Church demanded, “A balloon?”

  Don shrugged and, going to the window, looked out again. “That’s the trouble. It’s five stories up and there’s hardly foothold for a fly. He’d have to be an acrobat Alpine climber who didn’t care a damn. I think perhaps I could manage it — I climbed a building that was nearly this bad for a movie once — but we had nets.”

  “If I had a net now,” Church said scornfully, “I’d give it to you and you could go chase some butterflies! So she was killed by a movie stunt-man, was she? A human-fly who climbs straight up the sides of buildings!”

  Behind them a voice said, “That’s right, Inspector, I saw him!”

  Diavolo, Chan, Woody, and especially Inspector Church all whirled toward the voice. Patricia Collins, the Princess who had vanished with the elephant, stood just within the door. She came toward them, her graceful figure dressed now in the black, brief costume that she wore through the remainder of the Scarlet Wizard’s act.

  Inspector Church roared — like Niagara Falls! “How the blue blazes did you get through that door!” He turned to Don angrily. “So! A lot of people can work the trick lock, can they?”

  Patricia said, “You left the door ajar yourself, Inspector — when Don opened it for you and you sent for Jerry.”

  Woody Haines who had jumped from the divan as she entered took her arm. “Pat,” he asked quickly. “What did you see?”

  She answered, speaking to Church. “My dressing room is around a bend in the corridor. My window is at right angles to this one and I saw a — a man. At least it was as large as a man. He climbed out the window and straight down the side of the building!”

  Woody asked. “You don’t seem too sure that it was a man, Pat. What did he look like? What—”

  Pat’s eyes which had been round and troubled grew darker. “He wore a long black cape. And a dark turned-down hat. But just once as he went past the window of the floor below and the light touched him — I glimpsed his face….”

  Outside in the street below, a police siren screamed.

  “Yes?” Woody prompted, as Pat hesitated.

  “At the zoo, once,” she went on. “I saw a bat. Its face was horrible. The thing that climbed out the window had a face like that!”

  Inspector Church groaned audibly.

  In the corridor outside the elevator door slammed and running feet streaked toward the dressing room. A second later the doorway was filled with cops and detectives.

  An onlooker who had never before seen the Homicide Squad in action would have thought that the next half hour was a confused bedlam of hurrying officials. Detectives combed the rooms, flash bulbs exploded, fingerprint powder flew in a haze, the medical examiner came, and the body left. But beneath it all there was the expert direction of Inspector Church and the calm confidence of men who knew their jobs.

  This had been going on for perhaps five or ten minutes when Jerry, the call-boy, put his head in at the door, his eyes round with excitement.

  “You’re on again, next, Don,” he announced.

  Diavolo nodded. “All right with you if I finish dressing?” he asked the Inspector.

  Church looked at him suspiciously. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “On stage. I’ve got a twenty minute routine to go through.”

  “Not now you don’t,” Church said. “You’re going to headquarters with me.”

  Diavolo lifted one eyebrow in a Satanic grimace. “An arrest, Inspector?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Church replied. “How did you guess?” He turned his back and threw a command at one of his detectives.

  Inspector Church was a man who hated not to understand things and Don had divined that fact from his attitude. He asked quietly, “On exactly what grounds, Inspector? Just because you don’t like magicians?”

  “That’s one good reason,” Church said. “Magicians always annoy me. The other reason is that you’re the guy who bumped the dame off. You might just as well break down now and tell me why — because I’m going to find out!”

  “But Miss Collins actually saw the — the bat, Inspector.”

  “That won’t wash, Diavolo. I wasn’t born yesterday. I saw your act a few weeks ago, and I saw the mental telepathy stunt you worked with Miss Collins. She’s blindfolded on the stage and, when you go into the audience and take a gander at somebody’s watch or a coin, she comes out with the manufacturer’s number or the date.

  “If you could do that you could have tipped her off, as soon as she came in this room, to give me that spiel about a bat. I know how it’s done, too. You’re both hooked up with vest pocket radio sets. I saw a movie—”

  “The movies aren’t the best places in the world to get an education, Inspector. I’m surprised at you.”2

  The theater manager, Col. Ernst Kaselmeyer, an ex-Prussi
an officer with a straight back and a tummy that even the girdle he wore couldn’t quite conceal, blew in from the hall where he had been quietly going mad. He had overheard the word: “Arrest.”

  Kaselmeyer, tearing his already sparse hair, promptly fought a duel of words with Church. His booming voice made the Inspector retreat a bit. Finally the latter turned to Diavolo. “You do any of those vanishing tricks in this act?” he asked.

  “No,” the Colonel boomed, “No vanishes. And you can have him right afterward—if you get him back in time for the eight o’clock show. I can’t be losing money like this. Those people come to see Diavolo. They—”

  “Okay,” Church growled. “But I’m staying right with him every minute. While he’s dressing, too.”

  Diavolo grinned. “But my dressing room has only the one door and no windows,” he said. “And not a single trapdoor or sliding panel. The building manager put his foot down on that.”

  “I’m still not taking any chances,” the Inspector said. “I saw you get out of a steel coffin once that was locked on the outside with sixteen different kinds of locks — God knows how! I don’t.”

  He followed Diavolo into the dressing room and watched every move as the magician finished donning his deep-red evening clothes and scarlet mask, the costume which had given him the name of The Scarlet Wizard.

  “Maybe, under some conditions, you could even get out of the Tombs.” Church added, “But not under the conditions you’ll get this trip! I’ll have a dozen guards on duty watching you every minute under bright lights. I’ll sleep with you myself, if necessary. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

  Diavolo smiled beneath his mask. “I don’t smoke a pipe,” he said. “But you’ve given me a brilliant idea, Inspector. I was wondering how to dress up the old jail-escape stunt so it would really hit the headlines. We’ll do it the way you’ve just suggested.” Don Diavolo plucked a lighted pipe from midair under the astonished Inspector’s nose. He handed it to Church and added, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”3