Headless Lady Read online

  Merlini was preoccupied. “What?” he said.

  I repeated my question.

  He gazed thoughtfully at his magazine for a moment, and said, “No. That won’t be necessary.” He removed the page that had caught his interest, folded it carefully, and placed it in his billfold. “I think I know—yes, Burt?”

  “Corridor peaceful and deserted,” the latter reported, “except for the guy that ducked into the men’s washroom down the hall just as I went out. The door didn’t quite close behind him, so I figured maybe I was being watched. I proceeded to go powder my nose, but he took cover just as I got there. So I didn’t get a look at much except his feet. Number nines or thereabouts. I don’t suppose that’s a lot of help?”

  “It’s a beginning,” Merlini said. “We’ll go on from there, and we’ll give him something to think about. We’ll close up shop—nearly time anyhow. Burt will go first, wait in the lobby downstairs, and sit tight. Ross and I will stall a few minutes, then lock up and follow after. That will give him a vanishing lady to worry about. Burt will see what he does about it. Tail him when he comes down.”

  Burt put on his tie and went out. Merlini and I locked up and followed a few minutes later. I glanced along the corridor out of the corner of one eye. The washroom door was suspiciously ajar. Merlini didn’t appear to notice, but he gave me a wink and said, for the benefit of any listening ears. “That vanishing cabinet will have to be worked over. It’s impractical as it stands. We put the girl in; she disappears and then doesn’t come back. Won’t do at all. Can’t use a new girl every time. It’ll have to work both ways …”

  He kept that up until the elevator door had closed behind us.

  We took a taxi, made a stop at my apartment on East 41st Street while I packed a toothbrush, and then went on to Merlini’s at 13 ½ Washington Square North. The schedule we planned consisted of a cold shower apiece, a change of clothes, cocktail, dinner.

  Merlini was in the shower, and I was working with the cocktail shaker when the phone rang. I took it.

  The phone said, “Burt speaking. Ask the boss what I do now. I’m at the drugstore, Eighth and Fifth, just around the corner. The subject tailed you and I tailed him. All we lacked coming down Fifth Avenue in our three taxis was a parade permit, confetti, and a band. He’s in the park across from you.”

  “Hold everything.” I put the phone down, stepped to the window without going too near, and peered out between the curtains. The running splash of the shower had stopped, and Merlini asked, “Yes, Ross?”

  Across the street, not directly opposite, but somewhat, to the left, a man sat on a park bench. He held a newspaper spread before him that concealed all the upper part of his body except the dark felt hat that projected above its top edge. I suspected that his eyes were not on the print, but rather were aimed in my direction, surveying the house through the narrow space between the paper’s top and the lower edge of the hat’s brim.

  I told Merlini what Burt had reported and what I saw.

  “Perhaps he thinks we cut the girl up in little pieces,” Merlini said, “and brought her—”

  I interrupted, jumping for the phone. “He’s shoving off. Want Burt to carry on?”

  Merlini hurried from the bathroom, toweling himself and leaving wet tracks across the carpet. He looked out the window. “Yes,” he said, “have him do that.”

  “Step on it, Burt. He’s coming your way.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Burt said. The receiver clicked.

  A half-hour later, as we were about to leave in search of a restaurant, our special investigator phoned again. “Operative Q-X9 reporting,” he said. “The subject proceeded to 19 West 31st Street. Business building. Small. The lobby directory lists the following: The Sylph Brassière Co.; Gerald L. Kaufman, Architect; A. Shapiro, Dresses; and The Acme Detective Agency, Martin O’Halloran, Prop. Tell Merlini I think so, too.”

  I relayed that and added, “Burt thinks our man is a brassière salesman. Now what?”

  “Tell him to eat and then wait for us at the shop. As soon as we’ve dined, we’ll pick up the car, load the luggage, and head for Albany.”

  That wasn’t at all what I expected. Merlini saw it on my face. “Go on, tell him,” he repeated.

  I did.

  Burt didn’t get it either. “Doesn’t sound right to me;” he commented. “Merlini not feeling well?”

  “Too well. He’s master-minding again, pretending he’s way ahead of us. Wants us to think he’s solved the curious case of the Vanishing Lady and the Disappointed Shadow. But don’t believe all the rumors you hear. We’ll be seeing you.”

  Merlini grinned. “Your tactics are crude. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I’ll tell you who the real Millie Christine was. Knowing that, you may be able to figure out who Miss H is. I did.”

  “Well?” I said suspiciously, afraid with good reason that any information he gave away free at this point was going to be cryptic.

  “The real Millie Christine,” he said, “was one person who would have had a really practical use for a Headless Lady Illusion. She was a freak in Barnum’s Museum—a two-headed girl. Come on. I’m starved.”*

  It wasn’t until dinner was over and we had started uptown in Merlini’s car that I was able successfully to get him back on the subject.

  “Why don’t you send Burt to the convention with your bag of tricks?” I said. “We’ll stay here and snoop.”

  “I thought you wanted those proofs checked?”

  “Hell with ’em,” I said. “I want to know—”

  “So do I,” he grinned. “Convention first. Check proofs on Monday. And Tuesday we snoop. In Waterboro, New York.”

  “Waterboro, New York. Oh, I see.”

  Merlini grinned again. “You do not,” he contradicted.

  We parked the car and went on up to the shop and the remaining surprise that lay in wait for us that night. Burt supplied it the moment we entered.

  “Thriving little business we have here,” he said. “It flourishes even while we sleep. Like an automat.”

  “What,” Merlini asked, “does that mean?”

  Burt led us to the inner room and pointed a finger at the window on the fire escape. Merlini, I remembered, had closed and locked it before we left. But it was open now, and there was a jagged hole in the pane above the window catch.

  Merlini sent a swift glance around the room. “Miss Christine,” he said then, “is undoubtedly one of the most determined young ladies I’ve ever encountered.” Three hundred-dollar bills lay beneath a paper weight on the desk. The cases that contained the Headless Lady apparatus were gone.

  *Millie-Christine (1851-1912) were really two Negro girls, Siamese twins of the ordinary Chang and Eng type, whose manager always spoke of them and often advertised them as one girl with two heads. They were given musical instruction, one girl singing alto, the other soprano; and their vocal duets and performances upon musical instruments were, from all accounts, quite creditable. They also appeared in side shows with Adam Forepaugh’s, Coup’s, Batcheller & Doris’, Barnum’s, and other circuses, as well as making a European tour.

  The closest nature has ever come to a freak having two heads on one body, which lived and was on exhibition, was the Locano prodigy, Johann and Jacob Tocci, born in 1881, in Turin, Italy. They had one body, one pair of legs; but above the sixth rib the body became double with two heads and two pairs of arms.

  Chapter Two

  Side Show

  “… This great combined outside show and international congress of weird people, the most amazing, Gargantuan, awe-inspiring, cataclysmic collection of strange oddities, living freaks, and curious wonders ever assembled under one canvas! The show starts right away! No waits. No delays. No extra charge on the inside. Step right up to the ticket boxes on either side! Fifteen cents to all … ”

  CONVENTIONS are uninhibited, haywire affairs. I imagine that even the annual conclaves of the Society of Ancient Historians, the United Association of Embalmers, a
nd, possibly, the left wing section of the D.A.R. have their moments. But a convention of magicians, coin kings, card manipulators, illusionists, mind readers, hypnotists, and ventriloquists is an experience. The Mad Hatter’s well-known tea party was, by comparison, as humdrum, staid, and decorous as a seminar in quantum mathematics.

  The nimble-fingered delegates practiced their deceptive skill in the corridors, the elevators, and at the table. I think I saw every accepted scientific axiom of physics and logic shattered beyond all mending. The effect was rather like living in a room paneled with the curved distorting mirrors from an amusement park’s Fun House. After two days and nights of concentrated trickery I essayed a little vanishing act of my own. At 3:00 a.m. on Sunday morning I sneaked quietly off to the room Merlini and I shared, locked the door with the only key, and crawled into bed.

  I woke less than an hour later to find the door wide open, the room full of smoke, shop talk, and magicians. Several of them sat on the edge of my bed playing a curious kind of game with a deck of cards, never dealing but passing the complete deck from hand to hand, each man as he reached for it, saying, “That reminds me— have you seen this one,” or, “Here’s another way of doing that.”

  I sat up, swearing sleepily, only to have the cards spread in an expert fan beneath my nose with the command, “Here, take one, any card at all.”

  Automatically I obeyed, looked at the card, and then shuffled it back into the deck as directed. The magician, a fat little man with a bland grin, took the cards, held the deck between forefinger and thumb, and gave it a smart rap with the edge of his right hand. The cards fell in a shower to the floor, all except one, which remained in his fingers. “And your card,” he said confidently, making ready to turn it face up, “was—?”

  There is, I knew, one thing that makes a magician feel like going into retirement. I supplied it.

  “I couldn’t say,” I replied. “You didn’t ask me to remember it.”

  “Oh, it’s him!” someone else said in a tone that made me feel as if I had six legs and lived in a drain. “Here, take this and be quiet.” He handed me a highball. I couldn’t smell any bitter almond odor, so I drank it.

  There were more tricks on Sunday, and a banquet. I met a blonde who was sawed in two twice a day for a living, discovered that she didn’t require more than the usual amount of care in handling, and had a pretty good time. Monday morning we caught up on sleep, and in the afternoon Merlini packed what miracles remained unsold and we took them to the Express office.

  Monday night we had a session with the proofs. Merlini’s job was to check them for facts, but I had the devil’s own time trying to keep him from adding a lot of fiction. On nearly every other galley he’d say, “Of course, I know it didn’t happen just that way, but don’t you think it would have more punch if—” I managed to stop some of his “improvements”; but at that there were enough facts to be trued up so that I spent most of Tuesday madly rewriting. I finished just in time to make the post office before it closed, and sent the proofs off by registered mail. Then, finally, after giving the car a feed of gas and oil, we pulled out and headed west on Route 20—smack into trouble.

  Waterboro, according to the road map, is a wide spot in the road (Pop.: 5,000 to 10,000) some 75 miles out of Albany in the middle of nowhere, and noted as far as I knew for exactly nothing at all. I’d never heard of the place until Merlini had pulled it out of his hat on Thursday night, and I’d long since given up trying to figure out how the mysterious Miss H—, her unholy desire for a headless lady, and her use of the name of a two-headed freak had suggested it.

  I said as much, and insisted, with some annoyance, on an answer.

  “Circus,” Merlini replied. “The Mighty Hannum Combined Shows is playing Waterboro today. And I’ll drink all the pink lemonade on the lot if we don’t find the headless illusion of mine working in their side show.”

  “A particle of dried mud that I didn’t notice on Miss Christine’s left shoe, I suppose,” I said. “An unusual type of red clay that you immediately recognized as coming from nowhere else but the northeast corner of the circus lot in Waterboro, New York.”

  “You don’t know my methods, Watson,” he paraphrased. “No. Hardly that. The show plays one-day stands. Last Thursday when Miss H, as I prefer to call her, made her brief appearance, the show was playing Newark, New Jersey.”

  “Take it from there,” I said. “I’m listening.”

  “The Headless Lady is this season’s wow exhibit in the open-air amusement world. Miss H’s healthy tan, her too-contrasty make-up, and her athletic manner taken together, suggested outdoor show business. Circus, carnival, or exposition. There were half a dozen playing within a two-hundred-mile radius of New York City. Then, when Burt asked her name, she gave a phony. She’s too quick-witted to give out something like Mary Smith or Jane Johnson, but she found herself hesitating, and she popped out with the first other name that entered her head, Mildred Christine. Simple matter of association. We were discussing a headless lady, and she thinks of a two-headed girl. My deduction that she knew her circus history was elementary. I consulted Billboard for circus routes. There were three shows in the neighborhood. One, I knew, had the illusion; one was a dog-and-pony show that couldn’t afford it; and the other, the one nearest New York at that, was the Hannum show. It looked possible.”

  “Then you added in the H monogram on her purse, I suppose?”

  “Exactly. At the beginning of the season, Billboard prints lists of the personnel of the various shows as they leave winter quarters. Major Rutherford Hannum, an old-time circus man who dates from the wagon-show days, owns the show, and one of its featured performers is his daughter, Pauline. I haven’t seen the Major for years, and I failed to recognize Pauline because the last time I saw her she was in pigtails and short dresses. She’s changed.”

  “She performs, you say?” I asked.

  “Wire-walker,” Merlini replied. “And good, so I hear. She also doubles this season in the swinging ladders, perch, and double traps.”

  “Perch and double traps?”

  “Perch act. The girl who does the hand and headstands atop a pole balanced on the head of the under-stander. You’ve seen the Walkmirs with the Big Show. Double traps means double trapeze. You’ll have to learn the language.”

  “So,” I said, “she didn’t really need that fire escape at all. She could have gone into a human-fly act down the side of the building. But why does their side show need a headless lady so badly and so quickly that she commits an illegal entry to get one?”

  “That,” he said, “is what I’m going to find out.”

  “Three-ring outfit?”

  “Yes. It works out of Peru, Indiana and ordinarily sticks to the Middle West, which is why I haven’t caught it lately. It’s one of the largest truck shows, though if you’re polite when you’re on the lot, you refer to it as a motorized show. And don’t call the tents, tents; they are tops except for the one you eat in. That’s the cookhouse. A mitt camp is the fortune-teller’s booth; zebras are convicts; barkers are never called that, but talkers, openers, or grinders; show elephants are all female, but are referred to as bulls; a rubber man is not a freak—he sells balloons; the picture gallery is the tattooed man; a mush is an umbrella and a skinned mush, consequently, a cane. A grab joint is a hot-dog stand; a grease joint is a lunch wagon or stand; a juice joint, the lemonade—”

  “That,” I said, breaking in on the foreign language broadcast, “is a good idea.” I pulled off the road before a white house with a neatly dignified sign that read, Ye Old-Fashioned Cookie Jar—Chicken and Waffles, Our Specialty. “This grease joint do?” I asked.

  We reached Waterboro at eight o’clock and, as I braked before the town’s one traffic light, I hailed a boy on the corner. “Which way to the show grounds?”

  Merlini’s voice beside me answered. “Turn right, here.”

  “Oh. You know the town, then?” I asked, turning.

  “No. Never set eye
s on it before. Now turn left.”

  “Clairvoyance?”

  “Something like that,” he said. “Just give the car its head. I’ve had it so long that it turns in at circus lots automatically. Force of habit.”

  I could believe that. Merlini, as I should have explained before now, was born to calliopes, elephants, spangles, and sawdust. His mother was turning somersaults on a resin-back as late as five months before he was born and within a couple of weeks after. At one time or other when you were in knee-pants or short dresses you probably saw the Riding Merlinis, an equestrian act that circus people still talk about. Merlini, himself, began his career of mystification as a side-show sorcerer, and he still has a very warm spot in his heart for the whitetops. I’m fairly certain that he’d have found himself at Waterboro that night even though the headless lady incident had never happened.

  We made one more turn at his direction and came onto a street at the town’s edge lined on either side with parked cars. At its farther end there were lights and music, the gay, thumping, nostalgic sound of brasses that held all the old gala promise of excitement, color, and pageantry. As we came closer, I glimpsed the bellying, pennon-topped silhouettes of the tents rising above the brightly lighted side-show banners with their hot, garish splashes of color. We were downwind, and all at once I got the first whiff of that inimitable circus odor, the complex blended smell of elephants, cats, horses, hay, sawdust, crackerjack, hot peanuts, and candy floss.

  “Is that your secret?” I asked. “Hypersensitive sense of smell?”

  “The telephone poles were chalked,” he explained, sitting forward expectantly in his seat. “When the show moves, the crew on the first truck out puts arrows on the poles, marking the turns so that the following drivers can dispense with maps or having to ask questions.”

  We turned right, up over the curb and onto the lot, pulling in and parking near several trailers behind the side-show top. Merlini was out almost before she stopped rolling.

  He didn’t bother to circumnavigate the tent, but went directly to the side wall. His tall figure, silhouetted against the lighted canvas, stooped as if to lift its lower edge, then stopped. I hurried toward him as he picked something from the grass at his feet.