Death from a Top Hat (35 page)

“It evidently was,” Gavigan admitted. “On May 10, 1936, one hundred thousand smackers in cold cash disappeared as neatly as if it had melted from the vaults of the American Consolidated Oil and Petroleum Company. May 10th was a Sunday. The money was there Saturday night, and it wasn’t there Monday morning. There was absolutely no trace of forced entry, and six locked doors, plus the door to the vault itself, stood between that money and anyone from the outside. The officials of the company were half crazy; the treasurer slid right off into a nervous collapse. I checked all this last night with Inspector Barnes, who had charge of the investigation. Figuring it must have been an inside job, the officials pulled some wires so that Barnes got orders to keep the whole thing a deep dark secret—none of the papers carried a line. The employees were given a royal going over; they even tried the lie detector and caught two or three small-fry grafters with their pants down. But information about the missing 100 grand? Not a thing! An investigator for the insurance company took a job with the company and worked there almost six months before he gave it up, knowing exactly as much as he did when he started. Duvallo was doing his full evening show at the Majestic in Chicago that week-end. He took a plane after his Saturday night show, came here, did his burgling early Sunday morning, handed the dough over to Tarot and Sabbat, and flew back in time to give a radio talk that evening over WGN. A couple of weeks later when all seemed safe and quiet Tarot and Sabbat made their bank deposits.”

Merlini nodded, smiling. “There’s another little sample of Dave’s attention to detail, Inspector. I remember that broadcast. He gave his usual lecture exposing the tricks of con men and crooked gamblers. It was called
The Right Way To Do Wrong
.”

“He knew his subject,” Gavigan said. “He got himself into hot water first by pulling the same stunt before, in Paris in ’30. That was before he made such a rep for himself and he was stony broke. He cleaned out a back safe there one night, but he had to tangle with the night watchman on the way out. The watchman inconsiderately tumbled down a flight of stairs and fractured his skull. That story did make the papers, and Tarot and Sabbat, who were both in that neck of the woods at the time, put two and two together, particularly after he paid back loans they’d both made him. Tarot and Sabbat sneaked into his rooms one night and found the cash he hadn’t dared bank. He had to split with them, and they had him cold. Two years ago Sabbat, his money spent, returned from Europe, hunted up Tarot, and they started to work on Duvallo again. They told him he’d have to do a return engagement of his burglary act. They had him by the short hairs; he had a reputation now that he didn’t want to lose. One slip off the straight and narrow, one hint that he’d been engaged in burglary, would properly sink his professional career as an escape artist. Forced to quiet them, he got the dough, and he took what he thought was enough to keep ’em good and quiet from then on. But Sabbat promptly went off on an orgy of rare book and curio buying and Tarot’s sleight of hand was no match for that of the boys in Wall Street. In the last few weeks Sabbat, particularly, had to have more; and Tarot wasn’t averse to the idea. At least, if Duvallo was going to get more, he might as well have his cut. They put it up to him just after he got back from the road. Duvallo stalled, told them they’d had plenty and they could go to hell. But Sabbat got nasty and threatened to tell Miss Barclay. That tore it. And Duvallo realized now that Sabbat was just bats enough so that he couldn’t be trusted, even after getting more money, to keep his mouth shut. There was nothing else for it but murder—and it had to be both of them. He sat up nights trying to figure out a safe and sane method. Then, at Miss Barclay’s one evening he read one of Tarot’s
Crime Doesn’t Pay
scripts which she had brought home to work on. The irony of Tarot’s furnishing his murderer with an alibi didn’t escape him either. He saw that argumentative
‘the police will never know’
bit of dialogue, and he had his radio idea. I’ve seen the script, and some of the dialogue Grimm didn’t catch was even more appropriate. From there on the rest of the trickery was all in the day’s work for a magician. Tarot came running over to see him that afternoon because Duvallo said he had got the money and was ready to pay off.”

Merlini took a cocktail shaker from one of the shelves behind him, removed its price tag, showed us that it was empty, and promptly poured out three Martinis.

“And that,” he said, “is that.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t,” I objected. “What was that whispering huddle you went into with Duvallo yesterday afternoon in the study? I saw you looking at that clothesline pulley and heard you mention the tree, and I was sure you had figured a
seventh
method of escape from that place.”

Merlini grinned. “I had. For Duvallo’s benefit. But I didn’t know I’d misdirected you, too. I suggested that the murderer might have re-installed the clothesline—the usual endless affair running around pulleys between the window and the tree—and asked him if he thought the murderer might not have grasped the clothesline and coasted, like on of those old-time department store cash boxes, out across the yard and into the tree. He could have then cut the line, pulled it after him, and dropped over the wall into the next yard, and away. Duvallo jumped at the idea. It was a good substitute for the ladder theory he had meant us to adopt and which the snow had queered. And it left him thinking that I didn’t suspect him at all. I had to put him at ease on that, or he might not have thought it worth while to eliminate Jones. Satisfied, Ross?”

“Then Judy of the scarlet tresses,” I said, “was just a red herring, and the LaClaires—say, why did they have to show up at Sabbat’s when they did, anyway? Got an answer for that?”

“Yes,” Gavigan said, “I spent an hour or so this morning collecting loose ends, and I talked to her. She’d tried to reach Sabbat by phone several times with no luck and had begun to worry. It occurred to her that maybe the night before she’d flown off the handle a bit too soon when she had pounded on his door and cussed him out. Perhaps something
had
happened to him. She left that Tudor City cocktail party ahead of Alfred, and he trailed her, catching up just as she came in the front door. They had a bit of a scrap downstairs, and he followed her up. He says he intended to tell them both where to get off. When they found Sabbat dead, Zelma realized the sounds she’d heard inside the night before must have been made by the murderer and that she had exactly no alibi. And Alfred immediately suspected her and hinted as much to us.”

“What about Rappourt and Watrous?” I asked. “Are they on the up and up, or not? Is she medium or fraud? And wasn’t there something more behind that fake faint she pulled when you started questioning her, Merlini?”

“Yes, I’m glad you asked that. She’d had a good hard jolt when she saw who the corpse was, and she got another when she found me nosing around, hand in glove with the cops. Svoboda was her maiden name, and she knew that if I recognized her you would, in checking back, discover her connection with Sabbat. The trance was for the purpose of stalling my questions and getting herself some time out to plan a course. She realized that unless she side-stepped me she was in a tough spot. As for her mediumship, I’ve had a look at her act. I’m going to do that soon somehow.”
⁶

“And what about the pentacle invoking Surgat and that levitation in full light that Duvallo told us about? More of his fancy embroidery—or was it?”

“That,” Merlini said in his best ghost story voice, “is something we can never know. What strange secrets of the mystic occult, what recondite mysteries of Gnostic science Sabbat had explored, we cannot—”

“Applesauce,” Gavigan snorted. “Tarot—I mean Duvallo—lied. Duvallo drew that pentacle on the floor just to thicken the mystery, gladden the hearts of city editors, and annoy the police. As for Sabbat floating in midair—Duvallo thought he was so damned clever he could make murder give off a byproduct. He had a new levitation illusion planned for his act. He knew he could pretend he was heir to an occult method of Sabbat’s and could broadcast the story to the reporters without anyone being able to disprove it this side of the Styx. He figured that a couple of fancy impossible murders like these would splash across every front page in the country and carry his picture with it—the policeman’s little friend, the conjurer who had explained to the dim-witted cops how the unknown murderer must have escaped from Sabbat’s apartment. And—well, does all that classify as A No. 1 publicity, or doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Merlini admitted. “And if Jones had been killed on the stage last night, and if Duvallo had, according to plan, successfully stepped off into the wings and shucked his committeeman disguise, to reappear immediately as himself, the triple murder would have been climaxed by the most dramatic vanishing-man stunt of them all. It would have been a city editor’s dream, and Duvallo would have been able to sell standing room eight weeks in advance.”

“Yeah,” Gavigan said, “he didn’t miss any tricks, did he?”

“No, but a couple of them misfired.” Merlini lit a cigarette and, turning, began to make some adjustment in the strings of a marionette that hung on the wall. Over his shoulder he said, “By the way, Inspector, did you take the precautions I advised?”

“Yes,” Gavigan answered. “He’s in the tightest cell we’ve got. Doc Hesse stripped him stark naked and examined him thoroughly. No picklocks in his mouth, hair, on the soles of his feet, or in any of the body orifices. We kept his clothes and gave him others. There’s a light outside his cell door that burns nights and day, and two guards on duty every minute. He escaped from the Tombs once, but in the face of conditions like those.”

“That sounds pretty thorough, but just the same I’d keep a sharp eye out. He’s as slippery as—uh oh! I forgot!”

Merlini snapped his fingers with a sharp click. He wheeled to face Gavigan and the cigarette, hanging forgotten from his lips, bobbed as he spoke.

“Houdini, when he was about to get a particularly stiff going over, used to conceal his picklock by a method he’d learned from the old-time carnival freaks, the men who ate frogs and poisons, who swallowed glass and stones. He swallowed the picklock and regurgitated it when needed. Mediums have also been known to conceal and produce fake ectoplasm in the same—”

“Hand me that phone!” Inspector Gavigan ordered in a thunderous voice. “I’ll get an X-Ray outfit down there and—”

Rapidly, furiously, he dialed Spring 7-3100.

The weather outside was mild. Through the room’s one window, raised two or three inches, came a sound that always sends a tingle of excitement stirring with me. Mingled with the cough and rattle of the traffic that swirled about Times Square, but rising on a higher pitch, I heard the long drawn cry of newsboys.

“Extry! Extry! Uhx-treee!”

¹
Chung Ling Soo (William Elsworth Robinson) was killed while performing the Bullet Trick at the Wood Empire Theatre in London in 1918. A verdict of Accidental Death was returned at the inquest, although some commentators have pointed to certain evidence, still unexplained, that would seem to indicate suicide or even murder. Of the dozen performers who have featured the trick, half were killed, the others injured. The only present-day performer who dares it is Theodore Anneman.

²
See pp. 125-126.

³
Modern Criminal Investigation,
Funk & Wagnall’s, 1935, p. 31. Hypnotism was one of the two things Duvallo could have done that
none
of the other suspects were able to do.
See p.
12.

⁴
See
pp. 31 and 40.

⁵
See
p. 12.

⁶
He did, sooner than he thought. We were to meet Colonel Watrous and Madame Rappourt again, later, in the strange case of The Footprints on the Ceiling.

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copyright © 1938 by Clayton Rawson, renewed 1965

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