Death from a Top Hat Read online

  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.

  Chapter 6

  The Great Merlini

  …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

  INSPECTOR GAVIGAN 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 accommodati
on 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.

  As the light came up Merlini looked at me and started to speak, when his eye caught the rigmarole of words and circles traced on the floor. His eyebrows lifted the tiniest bit, and then flattened in a frown. He glanced swiftly around the room. His eyes came back to the chalked diagram, and he asked,

  “What the devil have you—or rather, what have you and the devil been up to, Ross?”

  “Breaking and entering, for one thing. Discovering a corpse for another.”

  That announcement got me some attention.

  “That doesn’t sound like a gag.”

  “It isn’t. Look behind you.”

  He turned and saw the covered form on the davenport.

  “The gentleman’s name,” I went on, “is—or rather was—Cesare Sabbat. He—”

  “Who?” Merlini’s steady calm evidenced a slight wobble.

  “Dr. Cesare Sabbat. Know him?”

  Merlini took two steps and lifted a corner of the dressing gown. He looked at the face a moment.

  “Yes, but—” He regarded me thoughtfully. “The face doesn’t exactly suggest an easy death, and, judging from the numbers of the forces of law and order outside, I’d guess it was far from normal.”

  “He was strangled,” I explained. “And since there was no noose of any sort found, he could hardly have accomplished it unaided.”

  “And yet you had to force an entrance.” He eyed the splintered door panel. “This is an interesting contradiction. Quite, particularly since the dressing gown is incomplete.”

  “The dressing gown—what’s the matter with it?”

  “There are loops on each side which indicate that it’s built to tie around the middle. I don’t see the cord. By the way, what am I wanted for?”

  I stared at the dressing gown and answered, “Not for murder—at least, not yet. I think Inspector Gavigan of the Homicide Bureau would like you to explain how the Walking-Through-A-Brick-Wall Trick is done. It looks as if Sabbat’s murderer knew the answer. So far, the Homicide Squad hasn’t been able to discover any other way out of this apartment. The doors, both of them, were locked, bolted, and the keyholes stuffed, from the inside. The windows haven’t been opened in months.”

  “You’re off to a swell start, Ross. Don’t stop.”

  With studied calm I produced another thunderbolt. “What’s more, all the witnesses hereabouts seem to be customers of yours. There are so many magicians floating around that they positively get in your hair.”

  “Some of them do that, singly,” Merlini said dryly, and then with entreaty, “Harte, will you please stop running on in this Scheherazade manner and tell me what’s happened? And don’t put all your climaxes in the first scene. It’s bad theater. Besides, I’m punch drunk already.”

  “So you can’t take it?” Gavigan’s voice preceded him into the room. They shook hands and the Inspector asked, “Have you met the corpse?”

  “Yes,” Merlini answered, “Ross did the honors. But I knew him before, some ten years ago. He used to be rated tops as an anthropologist in the magic and primitive religion line. Then he dropped out of sight so suddenly and completely that I rather thought he must have gone to continue his other-world researches closer to their source.”

  “What caused the sudden eclipse?” Gavigan asked interestedly.

  “His subject ran away with him. He began taking such things as vampires, werewolves—and maybe pixies, for all I know—seriously. He even hung the traditional sword and sprigs of garlic on his door as a vampire preventive. Odd, because he looked a bit vampirish himself. There was a Lon Chaney-Boris Karloff feel to him. You almost expected him to bare a set of yellow fangs at any moment and say boo! Last time I talked with him, he was full of some new experiments in what he called modern alchemy.”

  Merlini gestured toward the worktable and the bottle-laden shelves in the further corner of the room. “Still at it, evidently. Then he began writing books and articles that his scholarly colleagues couldn’t swallow. Lycanthropy Today and The Secret Heresies were two of the titles I remember. The latter book treated Telekinesis, Cryptesthesia, and Astral Projection as established facts. The editors of scientific journals began sending him rejection slips, and his scholarly reputation nosed over into a power dive.”1

  “But what about his disappearance? What did he do, start pouting and go hide?” Gavigan asked impatiently.

  “He had a frightful temper, and he nearly killed an eminent German archeologist at a scientific congress by clubbing the poor man over the head with his own umbrella. He’d been trying to convince the old boy that Pyramidology was an exact science. The Herr Doktor swore out a warrant for his arrest and Sabbat skipped. No one ever seemed to know where.”

  “Pyramidwhatsis wasn’t taught at Public School 67, as I remember. What is it?”

  Merlini shucked his overcoat and dropped it with his hat on a nea
r-by chair.

  “It’s one of the fancier divination systems and is based upon certain measurements of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, notably those made in 1864 by Piazzi-Smyth, the Astronomer Royal of Scotland. The occultists say that this is the world’s oldest existing structure and was built 100,000 years ago by the Atlantaeans just prior to the sinking of their continent, as a repository of learning and a temple for the initiation of adepts. Similar temples are said to have been set up somewhere in the unexplored—oh, always the unexplored—portions of either Brazil or Yucatan—the authorities disagree—and in Tibet, where the Great White Lodge of the Himalayas is supposed to be today the one remaining active chapter of this ancient priesthood.2 Their thesis is that if a pyramid inch—they invent their own inches—is taken as a year of our time, then the course of the Pyramid’s inner passageways predicts the course of world history and civilization. According to that science the world came to an end at 4 A.M. on September 16, 1936. Did you know?”

  “Sabbat,” the Inspector broke in, finally, “was trying to convert the German professor to that theory?”

  Merlini nodded.

  “Well,” Gavigan said emphatically, “we know one thing then. He was as batty as they come. Which explains a lot of things in this room.” He scowled up at a Balinese devil mask on the wall, whose varnished fury, glistening in the light, showed that its owner had been a discriminating connoisseur of the hideous.

  “There are people who would dispute that conclusion, Inspector. Even in this streamlined Twentieth Century there are plenty of people outside of nut houses who believe firmly in that sort of thing. Southern California is full of them. I could name you a dozen books issued quite lately by reputable publishing houses whose authors state their belief in all sorts of black magic, from teleportation to levitation, werewolves to banshees. Sir Oliver Lodge, William Crookes, and Professor Zoellner were convinced of the truth of spiritism. Conan Doyle took photographs of fairies—the winged variety—and Dr. Alexander Cannon, a member of the British Medical Association’s Executive Council, says he has made thought take objective form and seriously warns his readers to beware of the evil forces set up in the ether by black magicians. And he cites instances. Madame Blavatsky still has her followers, and Evangeline Adams’ writings on that hardy perennial of the divinatory systems, astrology, are still best sellers. A recent convention of the National Association of Fortune Tellers in Trenton, New Jersey, voted to picket all tearooms employing non-association tea-leaf readers. They also introduced to a waiting world a new method of divination or skrying, beer suds reading. Pennsylvania still has its witches, the rite of exorcism for diabolic possession has by no means fallen into complete disuse and Satanic Masses are still—”3