The Floating Lady Murder (11 page)

“...
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
...” Valletin struggled to remember the lines.

“You wouldn’t be the first,” Collins said to me. “There’s hardly a man in the company who hasn’t offered his heart on a platter to that one.”

“...
And all that’s best of dark and bright
...”

“She’s not married, then?”

“She’d hardly be chasing across the country with us if she were married, would she? No, she was with the Kendall
Brothers for three years, walking the high wire. Then Mr. Kellar found her. She’s never been married, so far as I know, though no doubt there have been offers.”

“...
Meet in her aspect and her eyes
...”

Collins rolled his eyes. “You must forgive Valletin. Last night it was Keats.” He turned and clapped Valletin on the back. “Why don’t you save the poetry for someone who might return the sentiment? How about Miss Perdita Wynn? There’s nothing wrong with her, not that I can see.”

“Never you mind about Miss Perdita,” said Valletin darkly.

“I’ve not had the pleasure,” I said.

“Pretty as a spring day,” said Collins. “And smart, in the bargain. Clever way of speaking. Always has a smile and a kind word. I’d have said you were making great strides with Miss Perdita, Malcolm. Trouble in paradise?”

“She’s nothing more than a friend.”

“Poor man is hooked and he doesn’t even know it.”

“I told you. She’s just a friendly girl. I enjoy talking with her.”

“Is that so?” asked Collins, winking at me in the bar mirror. “I don’t suppose you’ll mind if Mr. Hardeen here takes his chances, will you? He’s a handsome enough sort. Our Miss Perdita might just take a shine to him.”

“Now, look,” I said, “the last thing I want to do is—”

“Just a friend,” Valletin said, a little less confidently. “Nothing more.”

I tapped the ash from my cigar. “Do you think there’ll be any stage work for me?” I asked, eager to change the subject. “Mr. Kellar mentioned something about needing jugglers.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Collins. “Valletin here is the worst juggler in the world.” He looked down the bar at Silent Felsden, who nodded in emphatic agreement.

“Well, perhaps not the absolute worst,” Valletin said. “But I can’t quite seem to master the overhand pass. I still say it wasn’t my fault that night in Springfield.”

“What happened in Springfield?” I asked.

“I dropped a flaming torch,” he said. “Set fire to the forward curtain.”

“Good lord!”

“It wasn’t serious. Collins got there with a bucket of sand before any real damage was done. I swear the handles were too slick that night. I doubt if Bellman himself could have kept those torches in the air.”

“Hell of a thing,” Collins agreed. “If I didn’t know better...” His voice trailed off as he stared down into his glass.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Nothing. Not really. Just that there have been quite a few queer things going on lately.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, nothing to trouble about.”

I shifted my weight on the bar stool. “Come on now, Collins. My brother went nose to nose with an escaped lion yesterday. Now you’re telling me that there have been other strange goings-on?”

Collins signaled the bar man for another drink. “I first began to notice it last month in Chicago. The old man’s Vanishing Lamp began to go squiffy. One night it wouldn’t vanish at all. After the show, he took an axe to it. Then there were the doves. Dying one right after the other. Thought there might be some disease running through them, so we split ’em up into three separate cages. Kept on dying. Every last one.”

“Don’t forget the smudgepots,” Valletin said.

“What about them?” I asked.

“Well, they kept going off at the wrong times. There’s nothing terribly complicated about a smudge pot—bit of powder, a length of fuse—makes a nice little flash and a puff of smoke. But for a week or so they kept going off too soon. Then one night one of them exploded into a million bits. Would have singed the old man’s hair, if he had any.”

“Mr. Kellar never mentioned any of this,” I said.

“Half the things that go on he never hears about,” Collins
insisted. “We keep things to ourselves, most of the time. After the smudgepot exploded, Mr. Kellar talked about shutting the show down for a couple of months.” Collins swirled his drink in its glass. “He can afford not to work for a couple of months. I can’t.”

“You say there are things Mr. Kellar doesn’t know about?”

Valletin nodded. “Plenty of things. Like the time I was breaking down the gimmicks for ‘Through the Looking Glass.’ The damn mirror shattered all over me! Could have torn me to ribbons! Then there was the time Felsden fell through the lighting platform in Wichita. Might have broken his neck. I’m telling you, it makes a man think.” He examined his cigar, which had now burned down to a stump. “Makes a man think,” he repeated.

“It sounds like a bad string of accidents,” I allowed, “but surely nothing more than that?”

“I might have thought so,” Valletin continued, grinding the cigar stump into a glass ashtray, “but there’s too many of them. Too many accidents in a row. Too close together. Some of the fellows are talking about jumping ship.”

“Is that so?”

“Sure. There’s always the opera. I wouldn’t mind settling down to a bit of culture.”

“What about you, Collins? Will you be leaving for greener pastures?”

“I’ll finish the season,” he said. “Don’t want to walk out in the middle of a job. Of course, that’s assuming I don’t get eaten by a lion in the—God! What’s he doing here? Doesn’t he ever sleep?”

“What?” I asked. “Who?”

Collins gestured toward a corner table where Mr. Lyman, the newspaper man that Kellar had mentioned, was sitting by himself scribbling furiously on a note pad.

“We call him ‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’ ” said Valletin in a lowered tone. “Always writing in that pad of his. Makes me nervous.”

“If you ask me, he’s a strange bird,” Collins said.

“How so?”

“Hard to say, exactly, but he’s always making strange remarks. The other day he told me to instruct the company that from that day forward we were to refer to the old man as ‘the great and powerful Kellar.’ On stage and off. When I refused, he called me a ‘nasty old humbug.’ What can you do with a fellow like that?”

“To be candid, my brother constantly refers to himself as ‘The Great Houdini,’ and he has even been known to introduce me as ‘the brother of the Great Houdini,’ as though I had no name of my own.”

“Well, I’m sure you and Lyman will get along famously, then,” Valletin said. “He seems to have taken a shine to you already.”

I glanced at the mirror behind the bar. Sure enough, Mr. Lyman was bent forward staring at the back of my head with an expression of the utmost fascination, while his hand moved in an unceasing motion over the pages of his notebook.

6

THE NEXT FOUR DAYS PASSED QUICKLY AS HARRY, BESS AND I FELL
into the routine of life with the Kellar show. We set about to learn our performance roles as quickly as possible, and happily took on whatever backstage duties came our way.

As expected, I was given a turn as a juggler during the novelty interlude between acts, and I blush to recall that Mr. Kellar was greatly impressed by my ability to handle clubs, balls and sharp knives with equal facility. I also appeared in Japanese garb and make-up during a routine called ‘The Mikado’s Foulard,’ which involved the production of a great many strange items from within the folds of an apparently innocent handkerchief. I made a second appearance—in evening dress, carrying a silver tray— during ‘The Spiritual Decanters,’ a clever puzzlement in which any spirit or liquid called for by a member of the audience was poured from a mysterious jeweled vessel.

My small roles suited me quite well, and I was honored to have the opportunity to watch Mr. Kellar perform at such close proximity. Bess, for her part, made no fewer than seven appearances each evening. It was discovered that she was of a similar size and build to a young lady named Mabel, the singer who had recently decamped with a tuba player, leaving behind a trunk filled with elaborate costumes. Bess happily assumed all of Mabel’s vacant roles, most of which involved smiling and
gesticulating at the successful conclusion of each effect. Within two days, Bess’s fine, clear soprano voice had won her a leading spot with “Kellar’s Kanaries,” who stood before the curtain during scene changes to serenade the audience with popular songs of the day. “Isn’t it wonderful, Dash?” she whispered to me one night as she came off stage. “And I don’t even have to escape from handcuffs!”

Harry was somewhat less pleased with his role in the company. His appearance as Brakko the strongman in the ‘Circus of Wonders’ tableau required him to don a leopard-pattern loin cloth and make a series of grunting noises. Later, he would refine the role by swinging a knobbled club. “So it has come to this!” he would exclaim each night as he strapped on his leather sandals. “The Great Houdini is reduced to a mere carnival player!”

I did not share my brother’s restiveness. Perhaps I am lacking in ambition, but I cheerfully admit that if things had evolved differently I might have been content to remain with the Kellar show until the great man retired. There would have been enough money to keep me, the duties were interesting but not overly demanding, and there was the prospect of travel to faraway lands. Even then, however, I realized that my fortunes were bound up with those of my brother, whose aspirations had already set him on a more difficult path, carrying lesser souls along in his wake.

I had never been in Albany before, and I found myself anxious to see something of the city. Our mornings were generally free, so I passed the time in taking long, exploratory walks, a habit I developed during our travels with the Welsh Brothers Circus. I believed—and I continue to believe—that there was something to be gained at each stop along the route of a traveling show. One never knew if the opportunity to pass through such places as Newburyport, Massachusetts, or Findlay, Ohio, would ever come again, and no matter how small the town might be I made some effort to get to know it. I always made a special point of
trying to sample the local cuisine, a habit that had not yet taken its toll on my waistline. Some of the most pleasant memories I have of my touring days are of the beef and oyster sausages in Wisconsin, and the salty tang of Minnesota’s lutefisk.

It was not an interest my brother shared. Throughout his life, no matter where he was in the world, Harry’s movements seldom deviated. His tracks ran from the theater to the hotel and back again, with occasional side trips to visit the gravesites of famous magicians. I recall that on one occasion, when he returned from his first tour of France, our mother asked how he had enjoyed Paris. “Not so much,” my brother replied. “The dressing room smelled of rotting fish.”

Albany was a pleasant city to explore on foot, and a dusting of winter snow lent an especially picturesque aspect. At that time there were many handsome new buildings in various stages of construction—including, I believe, the state capitol— but on the whole the city retained much of the hardy character of its original Dutch founders. I seem to remember that Albany was unusually well supplied with stove manufacturing concerns, which interested me not at all, but also a number of breweries, which merited closer study.

Returning from my walk on our third morning in the city, I found Miss Perdita Wynn seated on one of the quilted pillar-benches in the hotel lobby. At that stage I had met her only once—a brief exchange of greetings during rehearsals, but she had made a forceful impression. She was, as Collins had noted, an exceedingly handsome woman—slim-waisted and fair-skinned—with flowing hair of an arresting shade of red. Her rich, throaty laughter made a delightful accompaniment to each day’s rehearsal.

Miss Wynn’s face brightened as I came through the revolving door. “Mr. Hardeen!” she cried. “My hero! My absolute hero!”

I lifted my hat, sending a swirl of melting snow onto the maroon carpet. “Miss Wynn,” I said, “may I ask how I came to achieve such esteem in your eyes?”

“Because you’re just in time!” She stood up and tugged at the hem of her fitted wool jacket. “I’m positively gasping for a cup of tea. And now here you are! Mr. Hardeen to the rescue!”