Death from a Top Hat

by Clayton Rawson

This was getting “curiouser and curiouser.” The Society of American Magicians would shortly have enough members present to constitute a quorum.

  With Watrous’ help, Rappourt rose. He had started with her toward the door when a voice said:

  “Hello, folks. What’s up? Why all the dim religious light? Sabbat giving one of his séances?”

  A man in evening clothes, topcoat on arm, hat tipped far back on his head, stood just inside the door at the end of the davenport. A woman stood beside him. She wore an evening gown that shimmered in the light and a white fur jacket with a high collar. The slightly foolish smiles on their faces indicated that they were both half seas over. The woman rocked a bit and hung more tightly to her companion’s arm. “LaClaire!” Watrous piped. “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, why not? We—er—thought there might be a cocktail in the shaker.” His eyes strayed unsteadily around the room. “Where’s Sabbat?” Then he saw the thing on the floor, and the bottom dropped out of his voice. A blank look of consternation washed the alcoholic grin from his face. The woman said, “Oh!” and I could hear her suck in her breath.

  “Strangled!” Watrous said, with a consummate absence of tact. As they stood there, staring, he blurbled a quick, condensed story of our breaking in. Tarot walked to the window and stood with his back to us looking out. His fingers tapped impatiently on the pane. Rappourt dropped back into her chair. A vague psychic sense I didn’t know I had responded to a faint hint of some new quality in the room’s atmosphere and sent an uneasy shiver wavering within me, a cold feeling of danger near-by and waiting.

  I looked at the newcomers and saw the bleached platinum blondness of the woman and the dark, long-lashed eyes that were now almost perfect circles. I saw the man’s oddly disturbing combination of green eyes and blond hair, and noticed, when he nervously drew his right hand across his jaw, that the forefinger was missing and that the others were strangely twisted. He turned, his uncertainty suddenly gone.

  “Come on, Zelma, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Zelma, however, had been oppositely affected by the sight. Hand at her mouth she ran quickly toward the bathroom. Her face had a pallid sickly color. LaClaire blinked at her comprehendingly and followed.

  “Aren’t there any lights in this joint?” he threw back.

  “They’re out of order,” Watrous explained. We heard them fumble at the bathroom door, and then it slammed.

  “You’d better stick around, Alfred,” Watrous began, as LaClaire came back into the room. “Harte here has called the police.”

  “Harte?” LaClaire asked, giving me a suspicious scowl.

  “Mr. Harte, Mr. LaClaire,” the Colonel officiated. He was a sucker for etiquette, and it occurred to me that he’d probably go around introducing people at a fire. “Harte lives across the hall.” And to me, “The LaClaires have a most interesting mental routine presenting Mrs. LaClaire as The Woman with the Radio Mind. I doubt if anyone, even the Zancigs, have ever attained as high a degree of skill in the presentation of the second-sight trick.”

  The Colonel was a natural public relations counsel. I groaned inwardly when I heard this bit of ballyhoo. Another brace of magicians! If Duvallo, when he showed up, would only bring along a couple of acrobats and a man who could play Humoresque on the saw, we could go to town with a full evening’s show. I could do my trick with the matches.

  “Listen,” LaClaire said to Watrous. “We’re going to beat it. We’re playing a date tonight and if the cops get here…”

  We all heard it. The muted wail of a siren from the street outside.

  “Well, that’s that,” LaClaire said and was silent. A moment later there were running footsteps on the stairs. We watched the door. Two red-faced cops came through it. The scent of cold air still clung to their uniforms. Halting just inside, they looked at us, their badges and buttons winking like stars in the candlelight.

  I heard a second siren, its pitch rising as it came nearer.

  Chapter 4

  The Locked Room

  From goolies and ghosties,

  From long-legged beasties,

  From things that go bump in the night,

  Good Lord deliver us.

  Old Scottish Prayer

  THERE WAS A SMALL CLICK, and we blinked stupidly at the light which an electric torch poured into our faces. The policeman that held it said nothing, but swung it in a slow circle, washing the walls with brilliance. The masks on the wall jutted out in sharp relief and revealed details of caricatured line, form, and color that were starkly exotic. Hanging with them, I now saw framed reproductions of Peter Breughel’s Mad Meg and Hieronymus Bosch’s The Mouth of Hell, two painted medieval imaginings that would make any psychiatrist stop and think twice—uneasily. In another place, near the faded colors of a Tibetan prayer flag, the light glowed yellow as it touched upon a gold crucifix whose inverted position was distinctly ominous.

  The light reached the floor, jerked and stopped. The straining lifeless face centered in that bright theatric circle might have been a mask fallen from the wall.

  The cop, moving swiftly, knelt by the body and touched the cheek. Again he turned the flashlight on us.

  “What’s wrong with the lights?” he demanded.

  The Colonel, somewhat shakily and with an uncharacteristic lapse into understatement, explained that they didn’t seem to be working. He started to plunge from there into an account of what had happened, but his introductory sentence was cut short by the arrival of a white-coated intern carrying a pulmotor. Outside another siren screamed hoarsely.

  The man with the flashlight stood up. “We won’t need you, Doc. You’re way too late. The medical examiner can handle this one. Joe, you run down and tell one of the boys who just rolled in to keep an eye on the door. Phone the station and get the Homicide Squad started. Then see about these lights.”

  Joe said, “Okay, Steve,” and left.

  Steve went on, “You people stay where you are at that end of the room, and you,” he poked a finger toward Tarot who stood in the dark shadow at one side of the window, “join ’em.” Tarot obeyed, leisurely. Steve looked at us a moment in an uncertain way and then placed his torch on the edge of the desk. Its bright rounded eye looked at us with inappropriate gaiety.

  “Who phoned headquarters?” Steve inquired finally, unbuttoning his coat and extracting a notebook and pencil.

  I pleaded guilty to that and then quickly gave him the rest of the story. Steve interrupted several times with questions, and just as I finished Joe came back and got busy on the phone. He was followed by a third man in uniform. To him Steve said:

  “Find the light box, Nick.” And then, notebook ready and pointing his pencil at Rappourt, he added, “Now, I’ll have all your names please.”

  But before Madame Rappourt could answer, Nick’s voice came back from the inner hall into which he had disappeared. His words were hard and brittle. “I’ve got you covered!…Come outta there and keep your hands up.” Steve’s gun came from its holster before Nick had finished speaking. He peered past us into the hallway, his eyebrows lifting.

  Nick backed out, grinning. “Look what I found! A blonde!”

  Zelma LaClaire followed him, hands half raised. “Say,” she said, “can’t a lady go to the bathroom…”

  “How long you been in there?” Steve cut in.

  Alfred LaClaire answered. “That’s my wife, Officer. We came to pay a social call, just before you arrived. And—and we’d like to go and come back for the questions later. We’re in the floor show at La Rumba and due to go on at—”

  “Forget it, Mister,” Steve cut in. “You’ll stay put until the Homicide Squad gets here. Then you can tell it to the Inspector.”

  Alfred subsided, and Nick, gun in hand this time, resumed his investigation. Joe, leaving the phone, reported that the light company was sending a man and then joined Nick in the kitchen, where I shortly heard them at work on the light meter.

  Steve licked the point of
his pencil and again began collecting names and addresses. I watched my companions. Madame Rappourt shook her head and Watrous replied for them both. He also tried to interpolate extraneous information which Steve calmly ignored. Alfred LaClaire spoke for himself and his wife, impatiently. Zelma, somewhat steadier since her visit to the bathroom, stood with her back against the book shelves and stared at the corpse fascinated, as if expecting it to move. Tarot was smoking a cigarette, and I remember wishing I had noticed whether he had produced it from mid-air, already lighted, or whether he had merely fished it from a crumpled package like any other mortal. He briefly supplied his name and address in a voice that, though low, was filled with an irritating condescension, all of which was quite lost on Steve.

  Suddenly, without benefit of siren, there were steps outside, and two men came through the door, three more crowding behind them. Even in that half light there was a vague indefinable something about them that said detectives—the un-civilian squareness of their shoulders, perhaps, or the quietly confident way in which they strode in.

  I recognized one of the men. He wore a belted topcoat with the collar turned up, a smartly fresh hat, and a brown tweed suit. Quotation marks at the corners of his straight mouth indicated a capacity for humor that softened the hard, angular set of his jaw. Heavy eyebrows shaded frosty blue eyes. It was Inspector Homer Gavigan, one of the department’s brighter lights.

  Steve said, “I’m glad to see you, Inspector. This looks like one of those rip-snorters. There’s the body.”

  Gavigan nodded, his sharp eyes busy and interested. “Lights?” he asked.

  “Officers Hunter and Forelli are working on that now, sir. And the Edison Company is sending a man.”

  “Right. Check with them, will you? If it’s going to take long, we’ll rig a temporary light. Malloy, let’s have the torch.”

  One of the other detectives deposited a large black suitcase on the davenport and, opening it, took out a large electric torch which he passed to the Inspector. The latter clicked it, and the body was again circled with light. The detectives stood looking down at it.

  Steve returned, reporting, “Forelli says it’s just a blown fuse and he’ll have it right in a minute or so.”

  Gavigan nodded. “And who are all these people?”

  Steve handed over his notebook. “Those are the names. Four of ’em broke in and found the body. The other two showed up just after. They were all here when we arrived.” Steve then proceeded to rattle off a quick resume of what he had found and of what I had told him. When he mentioned the triply sealed door and exhibited the torn blue fabric that lay on the desk, Gavigan went over to look at it.

  “What other doors are there?” he asked.

  “I think there’s one in the kitchen. I haven’t had time to look at it yet.”

  “There’s a job for you, Brady.”

  The dick who had brought in the suitcase went toward the kitchen. As he did so the floor lamps gave a bright, short flicker. Hunter’s voice in the kitchen kibitzed, “I thought you said you were an electrician, Nick.”

  A cop stepped in from the hallway and reported, “The Edison man is here, sir.”

  “Let’s have him,” Malloy said. “The boys seem to be having their troubles.”

  The repairman came in and went through to the kitchen, stepping aside for Brady as he returned, a Five Star Final expression on his face.

  “The kitchen door is bolted on the inside and there’s some blue cloth, like that other, in the keyhole!”

  Gavigan removed his topcoat and tossed it at the davenport. “It looks like work, Malloy,” he said. Then, looking at me, “I suppose you’ve already phoned a flash to your paper, Harte?”

  He rather startled me with that. I had never talked to him except at mass interviews and then only once or twice. His reputation for possessing one of those legendary headwaiter memories evidently had foundation.

  I reassured him. “No, I’m an ex-newspaperman now. Mr. Hearst and I didn’t get along. I write for the magazines now, the pages in the back. ‘They Laughed When I Ate Off the Mantel. Drive a Straight Eight; It’s Kind to Your Fanny.’ That sort of thing.”

  “Oh, better hours, I suppose,” he commented, little knowing what a howler that was. “Well, if you start itching to call a rewrite man—would you mind not doing it until I say yes?”

  I assented and then added a hasty amendment, “If you’ll sort of keep me up to date.”

  He grinned. “Blackmailer!” Then he nodded, “Okay, but be good. And now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to put some of these people on ice in your apartment for a while.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Go right ahead.”

  He turned to Malloy. “Captain, put them across the hall and have O’Connor go along.”

  Alfred LaClaire spoke up. “Inspector, my wife and I are due to go on in the floor show at La Rumba down on Sheridan Square. If we could leave and come back later…”

  “Sorry. That’s impossible. O’Connor will phone the club for you and tell them you’ll be delayed. And, Malloy, on the way out see that no one touches that davenport or disturbs the present position of that door. That’s all.” He turned away, and Malloy and O’Connor began shooing them out.

  The Inspector caught my eye. “You stick around,” he said; and then, his voice rising, “What’s the delay on these lights?”

  Nick came out. “Looks like monkey business. New fuses blow as fast as we put ’em in. The electrician says there’s a short somewhere and it may take a while.”

  “Well, we’re not owls. Tell him to come in here first, run an extension from Harte’s apartment, and connect up a couple of these floor lamps. Have Hunter go out and stay on the door, and you go find out who else lives in this building and what they know, if anything. The medical examiner…” Gavigan stopped. He was looking toward the desk in the corner. Then he said, “Okay, Forelli, get at it.”

  Nick did a right-about-face while the Inspector scowled in an annoyed way at Tarot, who, instead of leaving with the others, had seated himself on the edge of the desk. He sat there idly swinging one leg. Steve, who had evidently counted noses and found himself one shy, poked his head back in the door and said ominously, “The parade went up this street, Mister.”

  Tarot ignored that with a practiced air and spoke quickly. “A little light does seem to be indicated around here, Inspector. In more ways than one. I think I can help you, but if you want to hear it before I leave, it’ll have to be now. I broadcast over a national network from WJZ five night a week. This is one of them. The Xanadu program goes on the air at ten, and the previous hour is devoted to rehearsal. I need ten minutes to get there. You can’t dismiss that as lightly as Alfred’s night club date.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “I can give you fifteen minutes.”

  Gavigan put his hands in his pockets. Without turning, he said, “I’ll handle this one, O’Connor. Go keep your eye on the rest.”

  O’Connor went. Gavigan eyed Tarot for a moment as if he were something in a store window. A sound at the other end of the room attracted our attention, and we saw in front of the hearth a rear elevation of Detective Brady. He was bent over, the upper half of his torso projecting into the fireplace, and poking with his torch up the chimney.

  “What are you looking for, Brady?” Gavigan asked brusquely. “Chimney swallows?”

  The detective produced his invisible upper section and straightened. There was a smear of soot across his nose.

  “I was hoping I’d find one of those P. T. Barnum signs reading ‘This way to the Egress.’ ” He dusted his hands. “But no such luck. Every cockeyed window in this joint looks out on a sheer wall. Two of them drop smack into the drink. And if you suggest a rope let down from the roof, or ladders being poked up from private yachts, it’s a waste of breath. First, all the windows are bolted on the inside. Second, none of the panes have been removed and replaced—all the putty is old and cracked. Third, the bolt are so stiff it’d take a hammer to knock ’em loose. The la
te deceased must have been a nut on the subject of ventilation.”

  “He was,” Tarot said. “He used to bundle up like a deep-sea diver before going out, which wasn’t any oftener than he could help. He once fired a maid when he caught her trying to open a window in order to shake a rug. That was just one of his large collection of batty notions.”

  Brady went on. “A cat could get out of this flue, maybe, but nothing any larger. At the moment there’s just one way out of this place. Through there.” He gestured with his light at the hall door with its splintered panel. “If that was locked too, I give up. I took a peek at the inside of the lock. And it shows picklock scratches, which jibes with Mr. Harte’s story about breaking in. I haven’t found anything else as yet.”1

  At that moment one of the floor lamps blossomed light, and the electrician moved toward a second.

  The Inspector said, “Take the fingerprint outfit, Brady, and go get the prints off that mob across the hall. No use dusting around here until we get a lot more light; and Quinn, you’d better get your pencil out.”

  Brady departed, and Quinn went to a chair under the lamp and opened a steno’s notebook across his knee. Hunter’s voice outside the door said, “Hello, Doc. Go right in.”

  A gnome-like man with abnormally rounded shoulders entered, following a huge cigar.

  “Been wondering where you were, Hesse,” the Inspector greeted him. “Go to it, if you can see anything. There’s very little light on your subject.”

  The medical examiner smiled wearily, as if used to such conditions, the Inspector’s puns included. He took off his coat and, picking up the flash light that Malloy had left on the davenport, stepped carefully over the chalked design on the floor and busied himself at the body.

  “I want an estimate of the time of death as soon as possible,” Gavigan said, and then turned to face Tarot once more.

  The examiner mumbled, “Haven’t I told you and told you that. “oh, all right!”

  Hunter at the door announced, “The identification squad is here, sir.”

  “Send the photographer in. Have the rest of them wait. And don’t let anyone else in unless it’s the D.A. himself.” Gavigan addressed Tarot. “You can begin by telling me how you and those others happened to stop up here tonight.”