Sleuths (11 page)

The first thing he noticed was that although the rope still bound Professor Vargas to his chair, it was somewhat loose across forearms and sternum. When he lifted the limp left hand he found that it had been freed of the bonds. Vargas's right foot had also been freed. Confirmation of his suspicions in both cases. He had also more or less expected his next discovery, the two items concealed inside the sleeve of the medium's robe.

He was studying the items when Sabina said, "Just as I thought. The jar was fastened to the table with gum adhesive."

"Can you pry it loose?"

"I already have. The clapper on the bell —"

"—is either missing or frozen. Eh?"

"Frozen. Vargas used another bell to produce his spirit rings, obviously."

"This one." Quincannon held up the tiny hand bell with its gauze-muffled clapper. "Made and struck so as to produce a hollow ring, as if it were coming from the bell inside the jar. The directionless quality of sounds in total darkness, and the power of suggestion, completed the deception."

"What else have you got there?"

He showed her the second item from Vargas's sleeve.

"A reaching rod," she said. "Mmm, yes."

Quincannon said, "His left hand was holding yours on the table. Could you tell when he freed it?"

"No, and I was waiting for just that. I think he may have done it when he coughed. You recall?"

"I do."

"He was really quite cunning," Sabina said. "A charlatan among charlatans, to paraphrase Mr. Buckley."

Medium rare, Quincannon thought again, and now medium dead. Plucked and done to a turn, for a fact, though not at all in the way anticipated. "Have you a suggestion as to who stabbed him?"

"None yet, except that it wasn't Angkar or any other supernatural agency. Annabelle may believe in spirits who wield daggers, but I don't."

"Nor I."

"One of the others at the table. A person clever enough to break the circle in the same way Vargas did and then to stand up, commit the deed, and return to his chair—all in utter darkness."

"Doesn't seem possible, does it?"

"No more impossible than any of the other humbug we witnessed tonight. We've encountered such enigmas before, John."

"Too often for my liking. Well, we already have some of the answers to the evening's queer show. Find the rest and we'll solve the riddle of Vargas's death as well."

One of the missing answers came from an examination of the professor's mystic rings. The one on his left hand that he had referred to as an Egyptian Signet and Seal Talisman Ring had a hidden fingernail catch; when it was flipped, the entire top hinged upward to reveal a small sturdy hook within. Quincannon had no doubt that were he to get down on all fours and peer under the table where the medium sat, he would find a tiny metal eye screwed to the wood.

The miraculous self-playing guitar, which of course was nothing of the kind, drew him next. He already knew how its dancing levitation had been managed; a close scrutiny of the instrument revealed the rest of the gaff.

"John, look at this."

Sabina was at the sideboard, fingering a small bottle. When he'd set the guitar down and joined her he saw that she had removed the bottle's glass stopper. "This was among the others on the tray," she told him, and held it up for him to sniff its contents.

"Ah," he said. "Almond oil."

"Mixed with white phosphorous, surely."

He nodded. "The contents of the other bottles?"

"Liquor and incense oils. Nothing more than window dressing."

Quincannon stood looking at the sideboard. At length he knelt and ran his hands over its smooth front, its fancily inlayed center top. There seemed to be neither doors nor a way to lift open the top, as if the sideboard might be a sealed wooden box. This proved not to be the case, however. It took him several minutes to locate the secret spring catch, cleverly concealed as it was among the dark-squared inlays. As soon as he pressed it, the catch released noiselessly and the entire top slid up and back on oiled hinges.

The interior was a narrow, hollow space—a box, in fact, that seemed more like a child's toy chest than a sideboard. A clutch of items were pushed into one corner. Quincannon lifted them out one by one.

A yard or two of white silk.

Another yard of fine white netting, so fine that it could be wadded into a ball no larger than a walnut.

A two-foot-square piece of black cloth.

A small container of safety matches.

A theatrical mask.

And a pair of rubber gloves almost but not quite identical, both of which had been stuffed with cotton and dipped in melted paraffin.

He returned each item to the sideboard, finally closed the lid. He said with satisfaction, "That leaves only the writing on the slates. And we know now how that was done, don't we, my dear?"

"And how Professor Vargas was murdered."

"And by whom."

They smiled at each other. Smiles that gleamed wolfishly in the trembling gaslight.

Neither the Buckleys nor the Cobbs took kindly to being ushered back into the séance room, even though Quincannon had moved both Vargas's body and chair away from the table and draped them with a cloth Sabina had found in another room. There was some grumbling when he asked them to assume their former positions around the table, but they all complied. A seventh chair had been added at Vargas's place; he invited Annabelle to sit there. She, too, complied, maintaining a stoic silence.

Buckley asked, "Will this take long, Quincannon? My wife has borne the worst of this ordeal. She isn't well."

"Not long, Mr. Buckley, I assure you."

"Is it absolutely necessary for us to be in here?"

"It is." Quincannon looked around at the others. "We have nothing to fear from the dead, past or present. The spirits were not responsible for what took place here tonight. Not any of it."

Grace Cobb: "Are you saying one of us stabbed Professor Vargas?"

Annabelle: "No. It was Angkar. You mustn't deny the spirits. The penalties -"

"A pox on the penalties," Quincannon said. "Professor Vargas was murdered by a living, flesh-and-blood individual."

Dr. Cobb: "Who? If you're so all-fired certain it was one of us, name him."

"Perhaps it was you, Doctor."

"See here—! What motive could I possibly have?"

"Any one of several. Such as a discovery prior to tonight that Vargas was a fake —"

"A fake!"

"— and you were so enraged by his duplicity that you determined to put a stop to it once and for all."

"Preposterous."

Quincannon was enjoying himself now. Dramatic situations appealed to his nature; he was, as Sabina had more than once pointed out, a bit of a ham. He turned his gaze on Grace Cobb. "Or you, Mrs. Cobb. Perhaps you're the guilty party."

She regarded him haughtily. "If that is an accusation —"

"Not at all. Merely a suggestion of possibility, of hidden motives of your own." Such as an interest in the medium that had gone beyond the spiritual and ended in a spurned lover's—or even a blackmail victim's—murderous rage.

"Or it could be you, Mr. Buckley, and your hiring of Carpenter and Quincannon but a smokescreen to hide your lethal intentions for this evening."

The financier's eyes glittered with anger. Sabina said warningly, "That'll do, John."

"It had better do," Buckley said, "if you entertain any hope of receiving the balance of your fee. You know full well neither I nor my wife ended that scoundrel's life."

Dr. Cobb: "I don't see how it could have been any of us. We were all seated here—all except Annabelle, and she was on the other side of the locked door. And none of us broke the circle."

"Are you certain of that, Doctor?" Quincannon asked.

"Of course I'm certain."

"But you're wrong. Vargas himself broke it."

"That's impossible."

"Not at all. Neither impossible nor difficult to manage."

"Why would he do such a thing? For a medium to break the mystic circle is to risk the wrath of the spirits, endanger his own life. He told us so himself."

"He had already incurred the wrath of the Auras," Annabelle said fervidly. "It was Angkar, I tell you. Angkar who plunged the dagger into his body —"

Quincannon ignored her. He said to no one in particular, "You don't seem to have grasped my words to you a minute ago. Professor Vargas was a fake. The Unified College of the Attuned Impulses is a fake. He was no more sensitive to the spirit world than you or I or President Cleveland."

"That . . . that can't be true!" Margaret Buckley's face was strained, her eyes feverish. "Everything we saw and heard tonight . . . the visitations . . . my daughter . . ."

"Sham and illusion, the lot of it," Sabina said gently. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Buckley."

"But . . . but how . . ."

"We'll explain," Quincannon told her, "all of Vargas's tricks during the séance. To begin with, the way in which he freed his left hand while seeming to maintain an unbroken clasp of hands.

"The essence of that trick lies in the fact that the hand consists of both a wrist and fingers and the wrist is able to bend in different directions. The fingers of Vargas's left hand, you remember, were holding Mrs. Carpenter's wrist, while Mrs. Cobb's fingers were gripping his right wrist. By maneuvering his hands closer and closer together as he talked, in a series of small spasmodic movements, he also brought the ladies' hands closer together. When they were near enough for his own thumbs to touch, he freed his left hand in one quick movement and immediately reestablished control with his right—the same hand's fingers holding Mrs. Carpenter while its wrist was being gripped by Mrs. Cobb."

Buckley: "But how could he manage that when we were all concentrating on tight control?"

"He coughed once, rather loudly, if you recall. The sound was a calculated aural distraction. In that instant—and an instant was all it took—he completed the maneuver. He also relied on the fact that a person's senses become unreliable after a protracted period of sitting in total darkness. What you think you see, hear, feel at any given moment may in fact be partly or completely erroneous." There was a brief silence while the others digested this. Dr. Cobb said then, "Even with one hand free, how could he have rung the spirit bell? I bound him myself, Quincannon, and I am morally certain the loops and knots were tight."

"You may be certain in your own mind, Doctor, but the facts are otherwise. It is a near impossibility for anyone, even a professional detective, to securely tie a man to a chair with a single length of rope. And you were flurried, self-conscious, anxious to acquit yourself well of the business, and you are a gentleman besides. You would hardly bind a man such as Professor Vargas, whom you admired and respected, with enough constriction of the rope to cut into his flesh. A fraction of an inch of slack is all a man who has been tied many times before, who is skilled in muscular control, requires in order to free one hand."

Cobb was unable to refute the logic of this. He lapsed into a somewhat daunted silence as Quincannon went on to explain and demonstrate the bell-ringing trick.

"Next we have the table-tipping and levitation. Vargas accomplished this phenomenon with but one hand and one foot, the right lower extremity having been freed with the aid of the upper left." Quincannon had removed the Egyptian talisman ring from the medium's finger; he held it up, released the fingernail catch to reveal the hook within. "He attached this hook to a small eye screwed beneath the table, after which he gave a sharp upward jerk. The table legs on his end were lifted off the carpet just far enough for him to slip the toe of his shoe under one of them, thus creating a 'human clamp' which gave him full control of the table. By lifting with his ring and elevating his toe while the heel remained on the carpet, he was able to make the table tilt, rock, gyrate at will."

Sabina added, "And when he was ready for the table to appear to levitate, he simply unhooked his ring and thrust upward with his foot, withdrawing it immediately afterward. The illusion of the table seeming to float under our hands for a second or two before it fell was enhanced by both the circumstances and the darkness."

Buckley, with some bitterness: "Seems so blasted obvious when explained."

"Such flummery always is, Mr. Buckley. It's the trappings and manipulation that make it mystifying. The so-called spirit lights is another example." Sabina placed the stoppered glass bottle on the table and described where she'd found it and what it contained. "Mix white phosphorous with any fatty oil, and the result is a bottle filled with hidden light. As long as the bottle remains stoppered the phosphorous gives off no glow, but as soon as the cork is removed and air is permitted to reach the phosphorous, a faint unearthly shine results. Wave the bottle in the air and the light seems to dart about. Replace the stopper and the light fades away as the air inside is used up."

"The little winking lights were more of the same, I suppose?"

"Not quite," Quincannon said "Match-heads were their source. Hold a match-head between the moistened forefinger and thumb of each hand, wiggle the forefinger enough to expose and then once more quickly conceal the match-head, and you have flitting fireflies."