Harry Houdini Mysteries (21 page)

“We’re here to see our attorney, Mr. Hawkins,” I said, coming up behind Harry and Bess.

“Do you have an appointment, sir?” he asked, pulling out a heavy leather logbook.

“No,” I said amiably, “although I mentioned it to him last night at the Peacock. We’ll just go on up, if you don’t mind.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but my orders are very clear. No one may be admitted without an appointment in the book.”

“I see,” I said, leaning forward in a confidential manner. “It’s a bit embarrassing, I’m afraid. My brother, you see, needs to make a certain amendment to his marriage certificate. Needs to bring the date forward a bit, if you take my meaning. Wants to get it done before the blessed event. To save a bit of embarrassment later. I mentioned it to Phillip last night and he promised that it wouldn’t be any bother.”

The attendant winked to indicate that he, too, was a man of the world. “I understand you perfectly, sir, but I’m afraid I can’t let you simply go in without an appointment, though I’d be happy to—madam? Are you all right?”

My sister-in-law had made a sudden lurching motion, and was now gripping the edge of the reception desk in an effort to steady herself. “I’m fine. Don’t fuss over me, Harry. I’m quite all right.” She straightened herself and turned to the desk attendant. “Young man, are you married?”

“No, ma’am.”

“If you were, would you wish to see your wife standing about in this condition while your private affairs were discussed with a stranger?”

“No, ma’am, but—”

“Very well, then.” Without bothering to wait for a reply, Bess swept past the desk toward the stairway, with Harry trailing behind her. I gave an apologetic shrug to the attendant and followed after them.

She waited until she had rounded a pair of stair landings and then slumped against the railing, her body shaking with laughter. “Amendment to the marriage certificate!” she cried. “Dash, that was priceless!”

“Well, the only other offices on the same floor with Mr. Grange are those of an accounting firm, and I couldn’t think of what use they might be.”

“I don’t understand,” Harry said. “What amendment? Why should we need to consult a lawyer if we intended to have a child?”

Bess dabbed her eyes with a square of linen and patted Harry’s hand. “It, er, it is simply a matter of having the child added to the marriage certificate,” she said gently. “Just as my name must be added to your passport before we travel abroad.”

Harry pondered this information. “I don’t see why this amuses you so.”

Bess composed herself and continued up the stairs. “Don’t give it a second thought,” she said with a toss of her head. “A woman in my condition is entitled to her humors.”

Harry and I followed as Bess climbed past the magazine offices to the fourth floor of the building. We pushed through a set of swinging doors into an executive suite, noting the legal offices of Mr. Phillip Hawkins to our left.

A wooden police barricade to our right advised us that the area was off limits. Beyond it we could see a glass door with the name “Edgar Grange” etched on a pebbled glass panel. Harry squeezed past the police barrier while Bess and I kept watch, pulling out his leather wallet of lockpicks as he knelt beside the door to Grange’s office.

“Look at these marks and scratches!” he cried as he examined the lock. “What a barbarian!”

“The burglar tried to force the lock?” I asked.

“Worse,” said Harry. “He used a crowbar. What sort of heathen uses a crowbar? A lock such as this should be treated with respect. A crowbar requires no finesse or—”

I could hear footsteps approaching from around the corner. “Someone’s coming, Harry,” I said.

With a show of nonchalance, he selected a coiled hook-head from his wallet and slipped it into the lock. “Then perhaps we
should step inside,” he said, as the mechanism gave a sharp click. Harry turned the door handle and pushed the door inward. Bess and I squeezed past the barricade and hurried through the door. Harry pulled it shut behind us, and we remained motionless until the sounds of the footfalls had faded.

We found ourselves in a well-furnished reception area, with a pair of Sheraton chairs placed before an oval clerk’s desk. Oil portraits depicting sea battles were hung in ornate frames on the walls, a brass sextant and a barometric gauge sat upon a shelf behind the desk.

“Weather instruments,” I said. “Jasper Clairmont had weather instruments and navigational tools in his study.”

“Hardly surprising,” Harry said. “The man was in the shipping business. Mr. Grange appears to have shared an interest in the sea.”

“So it seems. Maybe that’s how they came to be in business together.” I stepped behind the desk and fingered an open appointment ledger.

“What are you doing there, Dash?” Harry asked. “That’s a private—”

“Mr. Grange is dead, Harry,” I reminded him. “It would be useful to know if any of our suspects have visited him in the past few days.” I scanned the columns of appointment listings. “There’s nothing here.” I flipped back a few pages. “No, it looks as if—wait! This is interesting!”

“What’s that?” Bess asked.

“There’s an appointment here with Jasper Clairmont, and the notation says it has to do with filing papers at City Hall.”

Bess glanced down at the line I indicated. “What’s so unusual about that, Dash?”

“It’s the day Jasper Clairmont died.”

“Is that really so significant?” Bess ran her finger along the adjacent page. “There are no fewer than seven listings for Jasper Clairmont here.”

“It may be nothing. Let’s see what we can find inside.”

A door behind the desk led into Mr. Grange’s office. This was a much larger room, with a map table at one end and a heavy Selden desk at the other. Law books lined one entire wall of the office, their spines bound in uniform leather. A low bank of wooden file drawers ran halfway along the opposite wall, with an array of loose papers grouped into piles on top of them.

“Where do we start?” asked Bess.

“The cabinets,” I said. “Harry, see what you can do about those locks.”

Each cabinet was fastened by a metal rod running through security hasps that held the drawers fast. The metal rods themselves were secured with small padlocks that looped through a crossplate.

“I see no great difficulty about that,” Harry said, pulling out his leather lockpick wallet again. “Let’s just have a look at—oh, dear.”

“What’s the problem, Harry?”

“These locks. They’re half-sized. The sort of thing one might find on a cash register or deposit box. The opening is too small for my picks. I require a set of jewelers’ tools.”

“Or a crowbar,” I suggested.

“Never.” He frowned over the lock for a moment. “There must be something here I can use.” He glanced around the room. “What’s that?” He pointed to a copper tray on Grange’s desk.

“A letter opener,” I said.

“Too big. What’s that?” He indicated a brass cube atop the cabinets.

“An anemometer, I believe.”

“A what?”

“It measures wind.”

Harry picked it up to see if there were any small pieces of metal he might be able to scavenge. “No good,” he said, setting it down again. “How about that thing over there?” He pointed to a wood and glass cabinet near the map table.

“I have no idea what that is,” I said, lifting the cabinet lid.
“There are quite a few gears and glass tubes in here. I presume it’s another navigational device, but for the life of me I can’t imagine—”

“Are there any metal springs?”

“Not small enough for our purposes.”

“This is intolerable!” Harry began pacing back and forth. “The Great Houdini bested by a jeweler’s lock? Absurd!”

“Harry,” said Bess, “might I make a suggestion?” She bent down and slipped off one of her shoes. “Would this be of any use?”

Harry’s eye fell on the delicate buckle at the vamp of the shoe. “My dear, you are a genius!”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Bess said mildly, “but I’m a useful person to have along on a burglary.”

Harry wasn’t listening. He crouched over the first of the locks and worked at it with the metal tongue of the shoe buckle. In a moment, it snapped open, and Harry pulled out the metal rod holding the drawers shut. He repeated the procedure on each of the subsequent locks, and soon we were thumbing through Mr. Grange’s legal files.

“I suppose we should start with his file on Lucius Craig,” Harry said.

“I don’t see that he has one,” I said, riffling through the headings in the drawer marked
C
. “Let’s see if there’s anything useful in the Clairmont file.”

As it happened, there were seven bulging files devoted to Jasper Clairmont and his various concerns, and we spent the better part of two hours examining them at the map table. Most contained dry legal documents and shipping manifests, and I felt no great confidence that I would recognize anything untoward or out of place if I happened to come across it.

“This is hopeless, Dash,” said Bess, paging through a fat file of correspondence between Grange and a manufacturer of builders’ cranes. “We’re not lawyers. We have no idea what we’re after.”

“There has to be something that incriminates the murderer,” I said. “Why else would he have attempted to break in here?”

“Perhaps he has a tremendous curiosity about builders’ cranes,” Bess said.

“I think we’re wasting our time,” said Harry. He jumped up from the table and made his way back to the file drawers. “I’m going to look elsewhere. There must be files here for the others. Dr. Wells. Sterling Foster. Perhaps those would be more illuminating.”

“Help yourself, Harry,” I said, “but I already checked. No one else has a file.”

“Not even Kenneth?”

“There’s no separate file for him, if that’s what you mean. I assume that anything relevant to his interests in the family business would be here in his father’s file.” I gestured at the untidy piles of paper on the table. “Somewhere. “

“I suppose so.” Harry walked over to the desk and threw himself into Edgar Grange’s chair. “Maybe we should have left this to Lieutenant Murray after all. It’s exactly the sort of dry and methodical work at which he excels.” He picked up the letter opener and twirled it across his knuckles.

“Perhaps we should check under the carpet,” said Bess.

“Under the carpet?” I asked. “Why?”

“That’s where. Harry keeps his drawings when he doesn’t want me to see them.”

“Really?” I turned back to the desk. “What sort of drawings, Harry?”

“Certain items of importance for which the world is not yet prepared,” he said, his cheeks darkening.

“Nothing particularly saucy, if that’s what you mean, Dash,” Bess said. “The last time I checked there was a set of illustrations showing how to escape from a regulation United States postal bag.”

I looked at Harry. “Why do you keep such things hidden? Are you afraid Bess is going to steal your secrets?”

“Certainly not! It’s just that when I am working on a new routine I like to conceal the method from her until I have perfected the technique. That way she will be properly surprised when I perform it for the first time.”

“Under the carpet, huh?”

Harry glanced at the floor. There was a round, violet-hued carpet at the center of the room. “Why not?” he asked. He walked to the middle of the room and folded back the carpet. “There is nothing here,” he said dejectedly.

“Well, maybe Mr. Grange had a different hiding place,” said Bess. “Try behind that seascape over there.”

“No,” said Harry, peering behind the painting. “There is nothing here.”

“What about under the cushions of that chair?”

“Nothing. Bess, this is hopeless.”

“Nonsense. Look beneath that carriage clock.”

“Bess, this is a waste of—ah ha!” Harry snatched up a sheaf of papers. “I knew it!”

“What do you have there, Harry?” I asked, hurrying to his side.

“It’s hard to say. It’s a blueprint of some type, but I couldn’t tell you what it’s supposed to represent.”

I looked over his shoulder. The illustration was fairly crude, showing a short tube linked to a dish that appeared to be covered with marbles. Alongside was a mosaic of spirals, zigzags, and wavy lines. The pattern was duplicated in miniature at one end of the tube.

“What the devil is that supposed to be?” I asked.

Bess studied the paper carefully. “Possibly it’s a technique for escaping from a regulation United States postal bag,” she said. “What’s on the other pages?”

“Technical details,” Harry said, “and a patent application. The tube looks to have a series of glass disks and mirrors inside. There’s a great deal here about ‘optical refraction.’ Could it be a telescope of some kind?”

“Possibly,” I said. “What’s the dish of marbles for? It seems familiar somehow.”

“I should think so,” said Bess. “It’s a kaleidoscope.”

“A kaleidoscope?”

“Of course! A tube with mirrors and glass marbles at the end! You see how the marbles are arranged in a spiral pattern? What else could it be? The end rotates and the marbles catch the light to form patterns. That’s what all those lines and swirls are meant to show.”

“There has to be more to it than that, Bess,” I said. “Why should Edgar Grange have a drawing of a child’s toy hidden beneath his clock?”

“Why should Harry hide his escape plans?”

“But there’s a patent application. Why would anyone file a patent application on a kaleidoscope? I find it hard to believe that someone would have tried to break into this office for the sole purpose of stealing these plans. Are you suggesting that Edgar Grange was killed over a toy? There has to be more to it than that.”

“If memory serves, that’s precisely what you said about Branford Wintour and that curious little automaton of his,” Bess reminded me. “ ‘No one gets killed over a toy,’ you said, ‘no matter how valuable.’”

“And I was correct, as I recall. It turned out that there was a great deal more to—Harry? You’ve gone awfully quiet. What’s the matter?”

He had been standing with the letter opener dangling from his fingers for some moments, gazing at the far wall with an expression of intense thought. “What’s the matter?” he asked, turning to smile at us. “Nothing is the matter. Now that you mention it, I am quite well.” He twirled the letter opener across his knuckles as though it were a magic wand. “In fact, I have solved the crime!”