“No complaints, Lieutenant. I ran for eight weeks at the Roof Garden. Packed ‘em in every night.”
“I’ll bet you did. But, don’t be thinking the law’s got short arms in this town. We just reached right up into your front parlor.”
“Boys in blue’re always welcome here.” Houdini gestured toward the best chair in the room, indicating that the lieutenant should take a seat. When Bremmer did so, the magician perched on the overstuffed arm of a nearby couch. “Say, you want something to drink? Did Lee offer you anything?”
“You mean the Chink?”
“He’s from Siam.” Houdini no longer smiled.
“Whatever… . Yeah, he offered some tea. Not exactly my favorite beverage.”
“Well, we run a dry household, Officer, and that’s not just a line I hand out only to the law. How about coffee or some fresh-squeezed orange juice?”
Bulldog Bremmer shook his head. He looked as out of place in the chintz-covered easy chair as a toad on a slice of lemon meringue pie. “This ain’t exactly a social call, Mr. Houdini.” The lieutenant felt uncomfortable with the seating arrangements. He didn’t like the magician looming over him from the arm of the couch; his authority felt diminished by occupying the inferior position. “It’s more in the line of a murder investigation,” he said, getting to his feet.
“Murder…?”
Now the subject looked up at him. Much more to the lieutenant’s liking. One thing he knew backwards and forwards was how to conduct a proper interrogation. “I guess you must’ve heard about these so-called Poe killings?”
Houdini endeavored to keep any trace of scorn out of his voice when he said, “Mary Rogers was a member of my company.”
“What can you tell me about James L. Vickery?”
“You’ve found him?”
“Not yet. That’s why I’m here. What do you know about it?”
“Jim’s my second assistant. We’ve been pretty busy the past couple of weeks, getting ready for our summer tour. It’s two tours, actually. A short one here in the east, then ten weeks out west. This means plenty of long days for the crew, so when Emma—that’s Mrs. Vickery—when she called the other day to say Jim hadn’t been home that night, at first I didn’t think anything of it. Figured Jim’d been working late and just camped out on a cot in the shop.”
“Your men do that often? Sleep in the shop?”
“Not often. Sometimes. In this instance, I had it wrong. When my first assistant, Jim Collins, checked over at the shop yesterday morning there was no one there. The place was locked up tight. The other Jim remained behind when the crew knocked off. Last they saw of him. Collins said it looked like he’d finished his work and closed up for the night.”
“How many have keys to your shop?”
“Just me and the Jims.”
“Come again?”
“Collins and Vickery. Both named Jim. So, when we couldn’t find Jim the next morning, I told Emma to call the police.”
“Officially, this is still missing persons.” Lieutenant Bremmer toyed with his watch fob, a bronze medallion advertising the Stutz Motor Car Company. “I wouldn’t even’ve known about it, except for a pal of mine over there gave me a call when he made the connection with Mary Rogers. Not everyone in the department’s got shit for brains.”
Houdini, who never used profanity, made a slight face of displeasure. “Don’t sell your own side short,” he said.
“Never do. But you know how it goes. Most get by just doing their job and marking time. Going the extra distance is something special.” The lieutenant deliberately cultivated a confidential manner, a technique developed over years of dealing with liars and hard cases. When he asked the tough questions they almost always came out of left field. He gave the magician a knowing wink. “So,” he said, “your man Vickery? Did he fool around?”
“What?” Houdini didn’t get it.
“I know he’s married, a regular upstanding guy and solid citizen. Just wondering if he liked to get a little extra piece of tail on the side.”
The magician felt stabbed straight to the heart and his pained expression showed it. To cover up, he assumed an earnest display of self-righteous indignation. “Just because a man is in show business, Lieutenant, it doesn’t mean he’s a two-timing louse.”
“I was thinking about this Mary Rogers. I understand she was some kind of looker.”
“All the women in my troupe are the bee’s knees. It hardly makes sense to hire ugly ones.”
“Vickery ever flirt with any of ‘em?”
“Jim is a fun-loving guy. Likes to joke around. So, if you’ve heard any stories about him cracking wise to the ladies, talk is as far as it went. I’ll swear to that, but you know how some people have to gossip.”
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“In my experience, when someone gets gossiped about he usually deserves it.”
Houdini jumped to his feet. “What’ve you heard about Jim Vickery?”
“Relax. I ain’t heard nothing. Not yet anyway. I was hoping you might fill me in. Tell me about your assistant and this Mary Rogers.”
The magician’s anger boiled. “There’s nothing to tell. Jim was a loyal husband.”
“Was…?”
“Stop putting words in my mouth!” Houdini sagged onto the couch like a fighter exhausted between rounds. “A better man than Jim Vickery hasn’t been born.”
“What about Mary Rogers?”
“I hardly knew her. She was hired for our Palace run. Two weeks in April. What I remember most was she was sloppy about her work. Missed her cues. Always forgetting parts of her costume. I had pretty much decided not to include her in the company for the summer tours.”
“You were gonna give her the sack?”
“She wasn’t on the payroll after the Palace. I didn’t need to can her. Just wasn’t going to ask her back.”
Bulldog Bremmer leaned over the dejected magician. “Because you caught her at some kind of hanky-panky?”
Houdini’s voice betrayed his utter emotional weariness. “Because she wasn’t any good,” he droned. “I already told you that.”
“Vickery ever have any special dealings with her?”
“Jim’s my second assistant. A swell guy. Helps run the rehearsals, looks after the costumes and props, handles transport and travel arrangement, designs new equipment, fills in onstage when needed. The list of his duties is a mile long. Any ‘dealings’ he might have had with Mary Rogers were strictly business.”
Lieutenant Bremmer shrugged. “Okay. I’m sold. He’s aces far as I’m concerned. Everything’s jake. Except one of your people’s been murdered and another turns up missing, and me, I feel like I’m getting the runaround.”
Houdini’s fierce eyes blinked, blunted by sadness. “Lieutenant,” he said, “I pray to God nothing’s happened to Jim Vickery. If I knew anything more, I’d tell you. Anything at all to help.”
“Fine.” Bremmer pulled a calling card from a compartment in his billfold. He handed it to the magician. “Here’s how to get in touch with me. In case something comes up.” Houdini stared silently at the cheaply printed card. “No need to see me to the door,” the lieutenant said, leaving the room. “I know the way out.”
Houdini listened to the glass in the entrance rattle as the front door slammed with somewhat more force than necessary. Why hadn’t he mentioned Ingrid Esp to the detective? Who was he trying to protect?
18
GHOST OF A CHANCE
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE stood on the curb of Pennsylvania Avenue watching a parade. The lure of martial band music had proved irresistible to the subject of an empire fond of public spectacle and he followed a gathering crowd across the Mall, toward what he assumed would be the sort of regimental pomp and circumstance so dear to English hearts. Instead, he found a procession more bizarre than anything encountered in a lifetime of exotic travel. In ranks straight as the trolley tracks, tw
enty thousand hooded members of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan marched with military precision, their white robes flapping like acres of laundry hung out to dry.
The Capitol dome towered above legions of small-town druggists and accountants, lawyers and dentists, community leaders, church-goers, a battalion of family men parading toward the White House dressed like spooks. In place of the torches used to set flaming crosses alight, they carried American flags, the bold stripes and bright stars fluttering past peaked, dunce-cap hoods.
How banal, Sir Arthur thought, aghast at the procession of organized bigotry. He contrasted this sorry spectacle with his memories of the perverse nobility depicted in D. W. Griffith’s grand motion picture Birth of a Nation. These klansmen resembled nothing so much as a pack of poorly costumed ghosts in some provincial amateur theatrical. Bumpkin bully-boys whose benign comic appearance camouflaged true blackshirt Fascisti menace.
Walking away across the Mall, Conan Doyle had occasion to meditate upon Benito Mussolini’s recent appearance on the spring Honor’s List. The Italian dictator was now a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. What had King George been thinking of, conferring a G.C.B. on such a brute? He remembered the KKK also called themselves knights. How sad a reflection of the chivalrous ideal.
Sir Arthur meandered past the Gothic Revival turrets of the Smithsonian Institution with no particular destination in mind. The puzzling murders in New York occupied more and more of his mental attention. He regretted slighting the demands of his mission but felt it couldn’t be helped. Not when the safety of his family remained at risk. Every afternoon recently, instead of napping as Jean recommended, he took long solitary walks, smoking pipe after pipe as he cogitated on the baffling conundrum.
Twenty minutes of aimless wandering led him to a grove of trees planted along the bank of the Tidal Basin. Philadelphia had been an excellent walking city and Washington promised to go it one better. Due back at the Madison Hotel at four to discuss the logistics of tonight’s lecture in the ballroom, he savored his solitude and introspection.
Although the morning had bloomed bright and sunny, by noontime storm clouds had gathered and the sky darkened with the threat of rain. A brisk wind corrugated the slate gray surface of the Basin, erasing reflections of the government buildings on the opposite shore. The dim penumbral light gave an unearthly feeling of twilight to the elm grove. Sir Arthur strolled between the trees, puffing on his briar pipe, troubled about what he had read of the Esp murders. Did the killer dress as a gorilla because his madness required the masquerade, or was this a deliberate stunt, some piece of macabre theater? The evidence suggested the former, yet a nagging doubt persisted.
As he pondered, the knight failed to notice a shadowy figure leaning against the pale gray bark of a slender elm. Sudden, extravagant flailing caught Conan Doyle’s attention. Arms windmilling, the stranger lurched into an open space and seemed to vanish in the dull metallic sheen reflecting off the wind-riffled water. Sir Arthur gasped. The figure reappeared, racked by spastic shudders and staggering blindly through a narrow rectangle of shadow. Poe’s ghost shimmered like gossamer.
“I say …” The knight took a tentative step forward. “Poe…?”
The specter glanced up at him, face pale as moonlit ivory. Dark hollows encircled the pain-blunted eyes. “Go away,” he said, the haunted voice a distant echo resonating from the depths of a bottomless well. “Leave me alone.”
“Do you remember me?” asked Sir Arthur.
“All too well.” Poe’s ghost groaned, wrapping its misty arms around a tree trunk. He stared up at the knight after a seizure of violent retching. “God… . What breed of monster are you, to take such pleasure in my shame?”
Conan Doyle stood dumbfounded. Although he neither saw nor smelled any illness, the apparition clearly vomited before him, contradicting everything he believed about the beyond. Ghostly nausea violated the basic tenets of his faith. The afterlife as he conceived it was not a place of illness or passion or regret. Earthbound woes remained behind forever. Or so he wished with all his heart.
On closer inspection, the knight took note of Poe’s disheveled appearance. Cravat undone and waistcoat unbuttoned, the specter lurched about in torn shirtsleeves, having somehow lost his jacket. “You still here?” he bellowed, swaying unsteadily. “Have you nothing better to do?”
The distant, hollow voice sounded slurred and Sir Arthur recognized with chilling certainty that Poe was in an advanced state of inebriation. How could a spirit be drunk? His very soul rebelled at the thought. “Are you not well?” he asked softly.
“I am … indeed, indisposed …” Poe’s ghost sagged, slumping onto a cast-iron bench overlooking the Tidal Basin. “This pestilential city… . Capital of despair.”
“Why are you here?” Conan Doyle’s brain reeled with confusion.
“What business is it of yours, Sir?”
“I … I am a friend.”
The specter laughed, a sound as dreadful and shrill as the scream of a dying animal. “There are no friends … only sycophants and damned leeches. Why, I was to see Rob Tyler today, the president’s son himself.” Poe stared at Conan Doyle with malevolence, silently challenging him to dispute his boast.
“That certainly … is a great honor,” Sir Arthur stammered, unsure of what to say.
“It is utter humbug!” The ghost staggered to his feet. Unsettling to see so ethereal a creature move with such total lack of grace. “The man was not at home to me, Sir… . He, who had pledged to secure me an appointment … at the Philadelphia Custom House… . He … refused to see me …”
Poe wandered off, strangling a sob.
The knight started after him. “Don’t you remember me from Philadelphia?”
“I don’t want to remember.” The ghost’s doleful eyes brimmed with despair. “I want to forget. I crave oblivion!”
The spectral melancholy proved contagious. Sir Arthur felt the first pangs of ineffable sadness enter his spirit like an infection. “Is there not sufficient oblivion after dying?” he asked, his voice weary and dull.
“Presumably… . I’ll let you know when I’m dead.”
“Damn it, man. You are dead!”
The ghost laughed, shrill as breaking glass. “How true … How pathetic and true. I can picture my epitaph, carved on a cold marble slab: ‘Here lies Eddie Poe, / Wearing yet a new disguise. / He lived a life so full of woe, / Thus welcomed death as no surprise …’ “
Mind near blank with morbid despair, Sir Arthur silently watched the phantom drift off between the trees, dissolving like fog in a sudden shaft of sunlight piercing the ragged storm clouds.
The Friars Club in Manhattan, founded in 1904 by a group of Broadway press agents who wanted a place to conduct business while letting off a little steam, became a favored watering hole of actors and journalists looking to grab some midnight supper or find a friendly gin rummy game. Harry Houdini was not a member, but frequently dined late at the Monastery with friends who were longtime Friars. Tonight, he planned to join his lawyer and the songwriter Billy Rose, whose most recent Tin Pan Alley hit was a catchy little ditty about Barney Google, the comic-strip con man.
Houdini entered the Tudor-Gothic building at 110 West Forty-eighth Street whistling the Billy Rose tune more than slightly off-key. He was notoriously tone deaf. Heading for the grill room, he spotted Sidney Rammage waving a newspaper at him from across the wood-paneled lobby. “Harry! What an unexpected coincidence.” The slight, bald-headed man hurried to his side. “Just reading about you.”
Houdini beamed. “Never hurts to get your name in the paper.”
“Depends what they say, I suppose.”
“As long as it sells tickets, they can say anything they like.”
“Righty-o …” Rammage indicated his seriousness of purpose with a deliberate frown. “I gather then you haven’t seen this morning’s American?”
“I’m taking my show on the road end of next week. Think I’ve got time to sit
around all morning reading the papers?” Houdini said this with a certain malicious pleasure, knowing full well his underwater stunt at the Biltmore had closed down Rammage’s buried alive act.
“Just thought you might be interested because of your friendship with Conan Doyle.” The little Englishman’s smile revealed more than a trace of smugness.
Houdini took the bait. “Sir Arthur had something nice to say about me?”
Rammage shrugged. “It’s about your mother, really. Some séance he claims put you in touch with her spirit. Says you deny the truth only to further your own vendetta against mediums.”
“Gimme that!” The magician grabbed the newspaper out of his rival’s hands. His brow wrinkled in furious concentration as he devoured the brief article. “That bastard,” he muttered. “Dirty limey rat!”
“I take it you’re not pleased?” Rammage suppressed a grin.
“Damn him. I’m gonna tell my side of this.”
“Thought you already did?”
Houdini ignored the jibe. “He wants to tell the truth? I’ll give him the truth!”
“Well, you won’t have to wait long for that.”
“What’re you talking about?”
Sidney Rammage positively gloated. “Damon Runyon’s sitting in the bar right now, even as we speak. It’s his byline.”
The magician’s intense eyes gleamed. “Runyon, eh? Never met him. What’s he look like?”
“A little man.” Rammage caught Houdini’s raised eyebrow. “Well, he’s taller than I,” he conceded. “Wears cheaters. Round lenses. Nicely dressed; gray sharkskin suit. Say, you know Bill Fields?”
“The juggler? Of course. Worked the three-a-day with him years ago.”
“Righty-o. Then you’ll spot Runyon straight away. He’s sitting with Fields and another guy with a uke who I—”
Houdini made a beeline for the bar before Rammage could finish what he had to say. He stood in the doorway a moment, looking over the crowd, and found his party right away. W. C. Fields he knew by sight, and there sat the little man strumming a ukulele. Houdini made out the lively strains of “I Want What I Want When I Want It.” The third man with the eyeglasses and narrow smile must be Runyon.
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