Death from a Top Hat (11 page)

Gavigan said, “Bring her in, Malloy.”

LaClaire looked up quickly. “Listen, I’ve got to know. Was Sabbat killed
last night?
”

Gavigan nodded, “Yes.”

“When?”

“That’s one of the questions I’m supposed to ask.”

“You’re going to tell her I said she might have come up here?”

“If necessary, yes. I’ve got to know if she did.”

“I’d better warn you, then.” LaClaire spoke quickly. “I’ll deny it. You’ve had your hint. Use the information any way you like, but don’t ask me to back you up. Understand?”

The Inspector glanced toward Quinn bending over his notebook at the desk.

“Yes,” LaClaire said, “I know, you’ve got it on paper, but I haven’t signed it. And I won’t.”

Merlini, behind LaClaire, was frantically trying to signal the Inspector, jerking with his thumb toward the bedroom.

Gavigan scowled. “Brady, take Mr. LaClaire into the next room.”

LaClaire didn’t move from his chair until Gavigan added, “Come on, snap into it.” Then he stood up and walked out. Brady closed the door behind them.

“What’s all this thumb jerking about?” Gavigan asked suspiciously.

“The general underlying theory is that telepathists, even pseudo ones, should be questioned separately. Even then, you never know. Those two could toss hints, whole paragraphs even, back and forth right under your nose and you wouldn’t catch them at it. Not sure I could follow through myself. They all have their own variations…”

We heard Malloy’s voice. “This way, please.” Merlini stopped, watching the door.

Zelma LaClaire came in, walking toward us with considerable self-assurance and rather more sway amidships than necessary. She was the luscious type, the smoldering sort that the out-of-town buyers who frequented La Rumba would get hot about. Her evening dress encompassed an interesting assortment of curves that were, for my tastes at least, a shade too adequate. Her hair, bleached almost white, and her peaches-and-cream store complexion gave her a youthful appearance that appeared somewhat forced. She wore too much eyeshadow, and her finger nails flashed blood red as her hands moved in the light, flicking cigarette ash to the floor.

Gavigan had an astonished look on his face. “Hello, Babe,” he said, “I didn’t know you were married.”

The dark, too thin line of her eyebrows flattened. “Do you have to bring up that Babe stuff?”

“Haven’t seen you lately. Not since we had to close the Elite Burlesque house. Gentlemen, meet Babe Colette, Queen of Strippers, the gal with the Tiffany G-String. Or was that a publicity gag?”

“Skip it, Inspector! I’m not in that racket now. So lay off.”

Gavigan indicated a chair, and she sat, crossing her legs and looking up at him as if he were a news photog with a flash bulb ready.

“Okay, forget I mentioned it. Let’s hear your story.”

“My story?” she asked, her blue eyes turned on full.

“Yes. What are you doing here? Where were you when Sabbat was killed? That sort of thing. You can start with last night about this time.”

She seemed more used to policemen than had Alfred. Gavigan didn’t pull his punches, and she took it as a matter of course. Her story began like Alfred’s.

“I left ten or fifteen minutes after Al did, took the subway home, and…”

“Seventh Avenue to Times Square and change there for Queens, crosstown on 42nd?”

“Yes. I got home just before three. Al came in plastered and woke me up at 5 A.M. trying to undress himself. I got up at the usual time, around eleven, and spent the afternoon getting a permanent. At five Al and I came in to a cocktail party in Tudor City. When we left there we came over here.”

“Why did you stop in here?”

Her fingers tightened ever so slightly on the purse in her lap. “We thought maybe Sabbat might furnish another drink.”

“Known him long?”

She shook her head. “Six months, maybe. Eugene Tarot introduced us. Sabbat was interest in mental telepathy. We’ve seen him off and on since.”

“Who do you think might have killed him?”

“I haven’t the faintest notion.”

“Anything else you’d like to tell me?”

She shrugged. “What else do you want to know?”

Gavigan’s eyes were hard. “Who did you phone before you left the club last night?”

If she reacted, I didn’t catch it. “Who did I phone…? I don’t know what…”

“Listen, Babe. You’re a good actress. You always were more than just a strip artist. But don’t try it on me. I’m not guessing. Come on, spill it.”

She sat up straighter in her chair.

“Nuts! I didn’t just blow in from the sticks. I don’t have to answer questions like that. And you know it.”

“So that’s your line. Okay. Suppose I know who you phoned? What if I’ve got a witness who heard you talking to Sabbat? Anything to say to that?”

Zelma’s mouth was a thin hard line. She stood suddenly on her feet, and her voice was harsh, biting. “This washes me up with that dirty, lying———! Al handed you that line, didn’t he? I haven’t phoned Sabbat all week. Put me on the spot, will he! The…” Her phrasing was masculine.

As she slowed, Gavigan stepped in quickly. “Then you have phoned Sabbat before?”

“Yes, but it’s none of your business.”

“If you weren’t talking to him last night, who did you call?”

“No one, and that’s straight! Alfred thought I did, because…”

There would have to be an interruption at a spot like that! I should have expected as much. Merlini had wandered over to the radio and had tuned out the police calls. Mrs. LaClaire was cut short when he suddenly turned up the amplifier bringing a brassy blare of trumpets from the speaker. I glanced at my watch. It was 10:30, time for the Tarot program.

The suave voice of the announcer came into the room, meticulous, impersonal.
“This is the Xanadu program, presented to you each night at this hour by the Emmalene Motor Company, featuring the Mysterious Tarot in another thrilling adventure of mystery and magic.”

We all faced the radio now, intent.

“Have you seen the new Emmalene Eight with its Magic Motor? Visit any Emmalene Dealer and let him explain the mystery of Floating Control, that masterpiece of scientific sorcery that makes possible the thrilling adventure of a smoother ride!”

A temple gong sounded three times, and against the muted background of a few bars from Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Scheherazade
the announcer continued:

“Yesterday, Xanadu and our friends, Tom and Marian, were trapped in the subterranean cellars of the haunted castle by the Green Ghoul and his henchmen. The room is fast being filled with a deadly gas and poisonous spiders. Can Xanadu’s magic save them?”

The sound effect department supplied thunder, lightning, and hissing gas. Then Xanadu spoke.

“We’ve got just one chance! The Lascar at the door is watching us through the glass. I may be able to hypnotise him! Keep your faces covered and don’t breathe any more than you have to! I’ll try and make him open the…”

There was more to his speech, but I didn’t hear it. Merlini was frowning at the radio. Gavigan was goggling at it.

“Well, I’m damned!” he shouted. “If that’s Eugene Tarot, who in hell passed himself off on us as Tarot? The voice of the guy that was doing card tricks up here was just a poor imitation of that. Of all the impudent…”

“No,” Merlini said, “you’ve got the cart before the horse.
That’s
not Tarot’s voice.”

I agreed. It certainly wasn’t the voice of my friend with the monocle. It had a similar high hat confident air, but the timbre was different, the tempo changed.

Gavigan jumped at the phone. “Well, then, who the devil…” He reached it and dialed rapidly. Finally he managed to get someone on the wire at NBC who had some comprehension of what he was talking about.

“Is Eugene Tarot playing Xanadu on that Emmalene program, or isn’t he?…
I
want to know, dammit!…Inspector Gavigan, New York Police, Homicide Bureau…What!…Yes…That’s what I’d like to know too!” He hung up violently. “An understudy! Tarot didn’t show up. They’ve been hunting him frantically for the last hour.”

The phone, as if in protest at the Inspector’s rough treatment, rang sharply. Before the initial ring had been completed Gavigan had the receiver at his ear.

“Hello!” he said, and then: “Yes, Gavigan talking…Speak louder…This connection’s lousy…
Who’s vanished?
”

The voice in the phone took the Inspector at his word. We could all hear the reply, faint but unmistakable. It was Detective Janssen’s voice and it said,

“Tarot!”

I saw a man upon the stair,

A little man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today.

I wish he’d go away and stay.

After Hugh Mearns

I
T WAS AT THIS
point that I began to see myself writing a detective story after all. If things kept on happening at this rate, I’d only need to do a simple, straight-forward job of reporting. Even if the case fizzled at the finish, which didn’t seem indicated, I’d still have one hell of a good running start.

The remainder of Detective Janssen’s report cinched it. With a “sock” like that at the start of his story, one might have expected the rest to be anticlimatic. It wasn’t.

Gavigan glanced sharply at Captain Malloy and jerked a thumb toward Zelma LaClaire. Malloy took her out into the hall.

The Inspector scolded into the phone. “All right, Janssen. You lost him. Let’s have your alibi, and make it good.”

We could hear the blurred metallic sound of the detective’s voice, talking fast. Merlini and myself got his report in a disconnected fashion. We heard, first, the Inspector’s share of the conversation, which didn’t make sense; and then his quick resume of what Janssen had said, which didn’t make sense either. Janssen later repeated his half of the conversation for my benefit, and I report it here with the Inspector’s conversation as it occurred.

“It’s good and cockeyed, Chief. Maybe you can tell me where I went wrong. Listen. When I left you I went downstairs and told the boys at the front door to let Tarot out when he showed. Then I hiked to the corner and grabbed a cab. Just as I climbed aboard, I saw Tarot hurry out and do a line buck through the mob of reporters that had collected on the front stoop. I thought for a minute that they had him stopped, but he held one arm over his face, lowered his head, and did a line buck right through. I don’t think the pictures they got were worth much. That little fat photog from the Mirror got a poke in the slats that sent him backwards over the hedge. He landed flat on his Graflex.

“Tarot headed my way, got himself a cab, and came north. In a hurry too. I tagged along. And behind me a whole cabful of nosey Parkers.

“We turned west on 42nd Street to Grand Central. Tarot got out and paid off the driver. The rest of us dittoed. I made the newspaper boys scram, and then kept right on Tarot’s tail, because this didn’t look like Radio City to me. He went in and picked up a suitcase he had salted away in one of those dime-in-the-slot lockers near the subway entrance. It began to look like a sneak. But instead of heading for the Concourse, he goes upstairs and ducks out the Vanderbilt Avenue exit, and gets another taxi from the stand there. I followed suit.

“We cut over to Madison, uptown to 49th, and turned toward Fifth. I started to breathe easier. It looked like Radio City might be on the itinerary after all; but we sailed right past. At Eighth Avenue he started acting like a dope. He got out at the corner, paid off the cabbie, and started walking north on Eighth. That’s not such a flossy neighborhood, and everybody eyed the topper and opera cape. I stuck to my cab, just in case he took it into his head to ride again. He did. What does he do but walk once around the block and come right back to where he started. Don’t ask me why. He didn’t do a damn thing but walk; I had my eye on him every second. He didn’t even speak to anyone. When he got back near Eighth again he speeded up a bit and ducked around the corner with me right on his heels. And there was that same cab still there. He popped into it, and the driver stepped on the gas pronto, as if he’d been waiting for him. Maybe taxis make him seasick or something and he has to take the air every so often. I don’t know. The whole layout was funny as hell. I wish now I’d grabbed him then, but you said follow him, so I did. Besides, he hadn’t done anything he shouldn’t, except not go where he said he was going.

“We headed up and across town, and then over the Triborough Bridge into the Bronx. I was right behind him the whole time. After a while he started stepping it up, zigzagging crosstown, and, in general, acting as if he was trying to shake me. He didn’t have any luck at that, though. We nosed right after him. And listen, Chief, I want to say right here that from the minute old high hat got into that bus until we caught up with it, the car wasn’t out of my sight once! And my driver will ditto that.

“It began to get interesting now, and, after he’d sailed through two stop lights without noticing them I decided to pull him in. I told James to step on it, but they kept ahead of us. By this time we were going along at a pretty good clip. We sailed through another red light, and a big beer truck with the right of way came along, and smacked our car up against an El pillar! I didn’t have to be no Einstein to know damn well, by this time, that Tarot was up to something funny. After all the trouble I’d had chasing him—not to mention the cab fare—I wasn’t going to lose him like that. So I piled out and took a couple of pot shots at his cab. I planted one bull’s-eye through the little back window, and it showered glass all over the inside of the car. The driver lost control—he got cut up a good bit—and the cab did a one and a half spin, bounced off another El pillar, and rolled over on its side.

“I ran up and opened the door on top. And this is straight! There was just one guy in that hack, the driver, and he was out—cold! He had a nice big bump on his head, and he was sort of bloody. But that magician must have crawled into his silk hat and pulled it in after him!
I saw him get in; I know damn well he didn’t get out; and yet, he wasn’t there!
That’s the story, and it looks like I’m stuck with it.”