“I won’t,” Merlini agreed. “Whatever it is, it’s not coincidence. Where’s Zyyzk now? Could you hold him after that psychiatric report?”
“The D.A.,” Gavigan replied, “took him into General Sessions before Judge Keeler and asked that he be held as a material witness.” The Inspector looked unhappier than ever. “It would have to be Keeler.”
“What did he do?” I asked. “Deny the request?”
“No. He granted it. That’s when Zyyzk made his second prediction. Just as they start to take him out and throw him back in the can, he makes some funny motions with his hands and announces, in that confident manner he’s got, that the Outer Darkness is going to swallow Judge Keeler up, too!”
“And what,” Merlini wanted to know, “is wrong with that? Knowing how you’ve always felt about Francis X. Keeler, I should think that prospect would please you.”
Gavigan exploded. “Look, blast it! I have wished dozens of times that Judge Keeler would vanish into thin air, but that’s exactly what I don’t want to happen right now. We’ve known at headquarters that he’s been taking fix money from the Castelli mob ever since the day he was appointed to the bench. But we couldn’t do a thing. Politically he was dynamite. One move in his direction and there’d be a new Commissioner the next morning, with demotions all down the line. But three weeks ago the Big Guy and Keeler had a scrap, and we get a tip straight from the feed box that Keeler is fair game. So we start working overtime collecting the evidence that will send him up the river for what I hope is a ninety-nine year stretch. We’ve been afraid he might tumble and try to pull another Judge Crater.’ And now, just when we’re almost, but not quite, ready to nail him and make it stick, this has to happen.”
“Your friend, Zyyzk,” Merlini said, “becomes more interesting by the minute. Keeler is being tailed, of course?”
“Twenty-four hours a day, ever since we got the word that there’d be no kickback.” The phone on Merlini’s desk rang as Gavigan was speaking. “I get hourly reports on his movements. Chances are that’s for me now.”
It was. In the office, we both watched him as he took the call. He listened a moment, then said, “Okay. Double the number of men on him immediately. And report back every fifteen minutes. If he shows any sign of going anywhere near a railroad station or airport, notify me at once.”
Gavigan hung up and turned to us. “Keeler made a stop at the First National and spent fifteen minutes in the safety-deposit vaults. He’s carrying a suitcase, and you can have one guess as to what’s in it now. This looks like the payoff.”
“I take it,” Merlini said, “that, this time, the Zyyzk forecast did not include the exact hour and minute when the Outer Darkness would swallow up the Judge?”
“Yeah. He sidestepped that. All he’ll say is that it’ll happen before the week is out.”
“And today,” Merlini said, “is Friday. Tell me this. The Judge seems to have good reasons for wanting to disappear which Zyyzk may or may not know about. Did Miss Hope also have reasons?”
“She had one,” Gavigan replied. “But I don’t see how Zyyzk could have known it. We can’t find a thing that shows he ever set eyes on her before the night of that party. And her reason is one that few people knew about.” The phone rang again and Gavigan reached for it. “Helen Hope is the girl friend Judge Keeler visits the nights he doesn’t go home to his wife!”
Merlini and I both tried to assimilate that and take in what Gavigan was telling the telephone at the same time. “Okay, I’m coming. And grab him the minute he tries to go through a gate.” He slammed the receiver down and started for the door.
“Keeler,” he said over his shoulders, “is in Grand Central. There’s room in my car if you want to come.”
He didn’t need to issue that invitation twice. On the way down in the elevator Merlini made one not very helpful comment.
“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “if the Judge does have a reservation on the extra-terrestrial express—destination: the Outer Darkness—we don’t know what gate that train leaves from.”
We found out soon enough. The Judge stepped through it just two minutes before we hurried into the station and found Lieutenant Malloy exhibiting all the symptoms of having been hit over the head with a sledge hammer. He was bewildered and dazed, and had difficulty talking coherently.
Sergeant Hicks, a beefy, unimaginative, elderly detective who had also seen the thing happen looked equally groggy.
Usually, Malloy’s reports were as dispassionate, precise, and factual as a logarithmic table. But not today. His first paragraph bore a much closer resemblance to a first-person account of a dope-addict’s dream.
“Malloy,” Gavigan broke in icily. “Are you tight?”
The Lieutenant shook his head sadly. “No, but the minute I go off duty, I’m going to get so plas—”
Gavigan cut in again. “Are all the exits to this place covered?”
Hicks replied, “If they aren’t, somebody is sure going to catch it.”
Gavigan turned to the detective who had accompanied us in the inspector’s car. “Make the rounds and double-check that, Brady. And tell headquarters to get more men over here fast.”
“They’re on the way now,’’ Hicks said. “I phoned right after it happened. First thing I did.”
Gavigan turned to Malloy. “All right. Take it easy. One thing at a time—and in order.”
“It don’t make sense that way either,” Malloy said hopelessly. “Keeler took a cab from the bank and came straight here. Hicks and I were right on his tail. He comes down to the lower level and goes into the Oyster Bar and orders a double brandy. While he’s working on that, Hicks phones in for reinforcements with orders to cover every exit. They had time to get here, too; Keeler had a second brandy. Then, when he starts to come out, I move out to the center of the station floor by the information booth so I’m ahead of him and all set to make the pinch no matter which gate he heads for. Hicks stands pat, ready to tail him if he heads upstairs again.
“At first, that’s where I think he’s going because he starts up the ramp. But he stops here by this line of phone booths, looks in a directory and then goes into a booth halfway down the line. And as soon as he closes the door, Hicks moves up and goes into the next booth to the left of Keeler’s.” Malloy pointed. “The one with the Out-of-Order sign on it.” Gavigan turned to the Sergeant. “All right. You take it.” Hicks scowled at the phone booth as he spoke. “The door was closed and somebody had written ‘Out of Order’ on a card and stuck it in the edge of the glass. I lifted the card so nobody’d wonder why I was trying to use a dead phone, went in, closed the door and tried to get a load of what the Judge was saying. But it’s no good. He was talking, but so low I couldn’t get it. I came out again, stuck the card back in the door and walked back toward the Oyster Bar so I’d be set to follow him either way when he came out. And I took a gander into the Judge’s booth as I went past. He was talking with his mouth up close to the phone.”
“And then,” Malloy continued, “we wait. And we wait. He went into that booth at five ten. At five twenty I get itchy feet. I begin to think maybe he’s passed out or died of suffocation or something. Nobody in his right mind stays in a phone booth for ten minutes when the temperature is ninety like today. So I start to move in just as Hicks gets the same idea. He’s closer than I am, so I stay put.
“Hicks stops just in front of the booth and lights a cigarette, which gives him a chance to take another look inside. Then I figure I must be right about the Judge having passed out. I see the match Hicks is holding drop, still lighted, and he turns quick and plasters his face against the glass. I don’t wait. I’m already on my way when he turns and motions for me.”
Malloy hesitated briefly. Then, slowly and very precisely, he let us have it. “I don’t care if the Commissioner himself has me up on the carpet, one thing I’m sure of—I hadn’t taken my eyes off that phone booth for one single split second since the Judge walked into it.”
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br /> “And neither,” Hicks said with equal emphasis, “did I. Not for one single second.”
“I did some fancy open-field running through the commuters,” Malloy went on, “skidded to a stop behind Hicks and looked over his shoulder.”
Gavigan stepped forward to the closed door of the booth and looked in.
“And what you see,” Malloy finished, “is just what I saw. You can ship me down to Bellevue for observation, too. It’s impossible. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t believe it. But that’s exactly what happened.”
For a moment Gavigan didn’t move. Then, slowly, he pulled the door open.
The booth was empty.
The phone receiver dangled off the hook, and on the floor there was a pair of horn rimmed spectacles, one lens smashed.
“Keeler’s glasses,” Hicks said. “He went into that booth and I had my eyes on it every second. He never came out. And he’s not in it.”
“And that,” Malloy added in a tone of utter dejection, “isn’t the half of it. I stepped inside, picked up the phone receiver Keeler had been using, and said, ‘Hello’ into the mouthpiece. There was a chance the party he’d been talking to might still be on the other end.” Malloy came to a full stop.
“Well?” Gavigan prodded him. “Let’s have it. Somebody answered?”
“Yes. Somebody said: ‘This is the end of the trail, Lieutenant.’ Then—hung up.”
“You didn’t recognize the voice?”
“Yeah, I recognized it. That’s the trouble. It was—Judge Keeler!”
Silence.
Then, quietly, Merlini asked, “You are quite certain that it was his voice, Malloy?”
The Lieutenant exploded. “I’m not sure of anything anymore. But if you’ve ever heard Keeler—he sounds like a bullfrog with a cold—you’d know it couldn’t be anyone else.” Gavigan’s voice, or rather, a hollow imitation of it, cut in. “Merlini. Either Malloy and Hicks have both gone completely off their chumps or this is the one phone booth in the world that has two exits. The back wall is sheet metal backed by solid marble, but if there’s a loose panel in one of the side walls, Keeler could have moved over into the empty booth that is supposed to be out of order . . .”
“Is supposed to be . . .” Malloy repeated. “So, that’s it! The sign’s a phony. That phone isn’t on the blink, and his voice—” Malloy took two swift steps into the booth. He lifted the receiver, dropped a nickel, and waited for the dial tone. He scowled. He jiggled the receiver. He repeated the whole operation.
This specimen of Mr. Bell’s invention was definitely not working.
A moment or two later Merlini reported another flaw in the Inspector’s theory. “There are,” he stated after a quick but thorough inspection of both booths, “no sliding panels, hinged panels, removable sections, trapdoors, or any other form of secret exit. The sidewalls are single sheets of metal, thin but intact. The back wall is even more solid. There is one exit and one only—the door through which our vanishing man entered.”
“He didn’t come out,” Sergeant Hicks insisted again, sounding like a cracked phonograph record endlessly repeating itself. “I was watching that door every single second. Even if he turned himself into an invisible man like in a movie I saw once, he’d still have had to open the door. And the door didn’t budge. I was watching it every single—”
“And that,” Merlini said thoughtfully, “leaves us with an invisible man who can also walk through closed doors. In short—a ghost. Which brings up another point. Have any of you noticed that there are a few spots of something on those smashed glasses that look very much like—blood?”
Malloy growled. “Yeah, but don’t make any cracks about there being another guy in that booth who sapped Keeler—that’d mean two invisible men . . .”
“If there can be one invisible man,” Merlini pointed out, “then there can be two.”
Gavigan said, “Merlini, that vanishing gadget you were demonstrating when I arrived. . . It’s just about the size and shape of this phone booth. I want to know—”
The magician shook his head. “Sorry, Inspector. That method wouldn’t work here under these conditions. It’s not the same trick. Keeler’s miracle, in some respects, is even better. He should have been a magician; he’s been wasting his time on the bench. Or has he? I wonder how much cash he carried into limbo with him in that suitcase?” He paused, then added, “More than enough, probably, to serve as a motive for murder.”
And there, on that ominous note, the investigation stuck. It was as dead an end as I ever saw. And it got deader by the minute. Brady, returning a few minutes later, reported that all station exits had been covered by the time Keeler left the Oyster Bar and that none of the detectives had seen hide nor hair of him since.
“Those men stay there until further notice,” Gavigan ordered. “Get more men—as many as you need—and start searching this place. I want every last inch of it covered. And every phone booth, too. If it was Keeler’s voice Malloy heard, then he was in one of them, and—”
“You know, Inspector,” Merlini interrupted, “this case not only takes the cake but the marbles, all the blue ribbons, and a truck load of loving cups too. That is another impossibility.”
“What is?”
“The voice on the telephone. Look at it. If Keeler left the receiver in this booth off as Malloy and Hicks found it, vanished, then reappeared in another booth and tried to call this number, he’d get a busy signal. He couldn’t have made a connection. And if he left the receiver on the hook, he could have called this number, but someone would have had to be here to lift the receiver and leave it off as it was found. It keeps adding up to two invisible men no matter how you look at it.”
“I wish,” Malloy said acidly, “that you’d disappear, too.” Merlini protested. “Don’t. You sound like Zyyzk.”
“That guy,” Gavigan predicted darkly, “is going to wish he never heard of Judge Keeler.”
Gavigan’s batting average as a prophet was zero. When Zyyzk, whom the Inspector ordered brought to the scene and who was delivered by squad car twenty minutes later, discovered that Judge Keeler had vanished, he was as pleased as punch.
An insterstellar visitor from outer space should have three eyes, or at least green hair. Zyyzk, in that respect, was a disappointment. He was a pudgy little man in a wrinkled gray suit. His eyes, two only, were a pale, washed-out blue behind gold-rimmed bifocals, and his hair, the color of weak tea, failed miserably in its attempts to cover the top of his head.
His manner, however, was charged with an abundant and vital confidence, and there was a haughty, imperious quality in his high, thin voice which hinted that there was much more to Mr. Zyyzk than met the eye.
“I issued distinct orders,” he told Gavigan in an icy tone, “that I was never, under any circumstances, to be disturbed between the sidereal hours of five and seven post-meridian. You know that quite well, Inspector. Explain why these idiots have disobeyed. At once!”
If there is any quicker way of bringing an inspector of police to a boil, I don’t know what it is. The look Gavigan gave the little man would have wrecked a Geiger counter. He opened his mouth. But the searing blast of flame which I expected didn’t issue forth. He closed his mouth and swallowed. The Inspector was speechless.
Zyyzk calmly threw more fuel on the fire. “Well,” he said impatiently tapping his foot. “I’m waiting.”
A subterranean rumble began deep in Gavigan’s interior and then, a split second before he blew his top, Merlini said quietly, “I understand, Mr. Zyyzk, that you read minds?”
Zyyzk, still the Imperial Roman Emperor, gave Merlini a scathing look. “I do,” he said. “And what of it?”
“For a mindreader,” Merlini told him, “you ask a lot of questions. I should think you’d know why you’ve been brought here.”
That didn’t bother the visitor from Outer Space. He stared intently at Merlini for a second, glanced once at Gavigan, then closed his eyes. The fingertips of one white h
and pressed against his brow. Then he smiled.
“I see. Judge Keeler.”
“Keeler?” Gavigan pretended surprise. “What about him?”
Zyyzk wasn’t fooled. He shook his head. “Don’t try to deceive me, Inspector. It’s childish. The Judge has vanished. Into the Outer Darkness—as I foretold.” He grinned broadly. “You will, of course, release me now.”
“I’ll—I’ll what?”
Zyyzk spread his hands. “You have no choice. Not unless you want to admit that I could sit in a police cell surrounded on all sides by steel bars and cause Judge Keeler to vanish off the face of the earth by will power alone. Since that, to your limited, earthly intelligence, is impossible, I have an impregnable alibi. Good day, Inspector.”
The little man actually started to walk off. The detectives who stood on either side were so dazed by his treatment of the Inspector that Zyyzk had gone six feet before they came to life again and grabbed him.
Whether the strange powers he claimed were real or not, his ability to render Gavigan speechless was certainly uncanny. The Inspector’s mouth opened, but again nothing came out.
Merlini said, “You admit then that you are responsible for the Judge’s disappearance?”
Zyyzk, still grinning, shook his head. “I predicted it. Beyond that I admit nothing.”
“But you know how he vanished?”
The little man shrugged. “In the usual way, naturally. Only an adept of the seventh order would understand.” Merlini suddenly snapped his fingers and plucked a shiny silver dollar from thin air. He dropped it into his left hand, closed his fingers over it and held his fist out toward Zyyzk.
“Perhaps Judge Keeler vanished—like this.” Slowly he opened his fingers. The coin was gone.
For the first time a faint crack appeared in the polished surface of Zyyzk’s composure. He blinked. “Who,” he asked slowly, “are you?”
“An adept,” Merlini said solemnly, “of the eighth order. One who is not yet satisfied that you are what you claim to be.” He snapped his fingers again, almost under Zyyzk’s nose, and the silver dollar reappeared. He offered it to Zyyzk. “A test,” he said. “Let me see you send that back into the Outer Darkness from which I summoned it.”
Death Locked In Page 49
