Death from a Top Hat

by Clayton Rawson

  “The first class includes such devices as,” he ticked them off on his fingers,

  “1. Accident that looks like murder.

  2. Suicide that does the same.

  3. Murder by remote control, in which the victim meets death violently, and apparently by someone’s hands, but in reality through poison, gas, or at his own hands, being forced to it by outside suggestion.

  4. Murder by a long list of mechanical lethal devices, some of which, as they occur in detective fiction, are pretty silly.

  5. Murder by means of an animal, usually a snake, insect, or monkey.

  6. Murder by someone outside the room, but which looks as if the murderer must have been inside; dagger fired through windows from air guns—that sort of thing.

  7. Murder by illusion, or the Cockeyed Time Sequence. The room is sealed, not with locks and bolts, but because it is watched. The murderer kills his victim and walks out; then, when the observer has taken up his place before the only door, he makes it appear that the victim is still alive. Later, when he is discovered foully done in, it appears impossible.

  8. The reverse of 7. The victim is made to appear dead while he is still alive, and the murderer enters the room just in advance of the others, and accomplishes his dirty work then.

  And, finally, No. 9 is perhaps the neatest trick of them all, because essentially it is the simplest. The victim receives his mortal wound elsewhere, in the conservatory or the music room; and then, still traveling under his own power, enters the room in question, preferably a library, and manages to lock himself securely in before popping off.”

  “They don’t do that when they’ve been strangled,” Gavigan protested.

  “No,” Merlini agreed. “Sabbat’s murder doesn’t seem to fall in Class A, unless you can conceive of some mechanical contraption that will strangle a man and then evaporate. Icicle daggers or bullets that vanish by melting may be practical, but offhand I’d say a man couldn’t be strangled very efficiently with a piece of ice.”

  “You forgot method No. 10,” Gavigan added quietly. “Murder by the supernatural, which includes such damn foolishness as homicidal pixies who can dematerialize and Watrous’ theory of strangulation by etheric vibrations. Proceed, professor. Get the rest of it out of your system.”

  “You’ve got the patter down very well, Inspector.” Merlini grinned. “It begins to get interesting now. Class B, the hermetically sealed room that only looks that way because the murderer has tampered with the doors, transoms, windows, or chimneys; or because he has been thoughtfully provided with a sliding panel or secret passageway. The last contingency is so whiskered a device that we’ll pass it without comment. Doors and windows, however, can be hocused by

  “1. Turning the key which is on the inside from the outside with pliers or string. The same goes for bolts and catches on windows.

  2. Leaving at the hinge side of the door, without disturbing either lock or bolt, and replacing the screws.

  3. Removing a pane of glass and reaching through from outside to lock the window, and replacing the glass from the outside.

  4. Accomplishing some acrobatic maneuver that overcomes the seeming inaccessibility of a window—hanging by one’s teeth from the eaves or walking a tightrope.

  5. Locking the door on the outside, and then replacing the key or throwing the bolt on the inside, after breaking in with the others to discover the body.

  “Duvallo’s explanation is a neat combination of methods 1 and 5. The kitchen door was locked from the outside with some sort of picklock, and the stuffing was pulled into the locks with a string from the outside, while the bolt was thrown and the cloth switched from the inside after the discovery of the murder.”

  “We don’t seem to have any choice,” Gavigan said. “We’ve eliminated all the other methods. Duvallo’s must be right. But, Merlini, wouldn’t you say that it was just a little too complicated for him to have figured out as quickly as he did?”

  “You forget that he’s an escape artist and he’s trained himself to think quickly along exactly those lines. Suppose something goes wrong when he’s inside a locked milk can filled with water? He has to be able to think fast. Besides, I’d figured that method out myself before he came through with it. And I’m not claiming any superior deductive ability. It’s merely that since I’m a magician, I have to know something about the mechanics and technique of deception. I stalled you off because I wanted to hear what Duvallo had to offer.”

  “You agree then that Duvallo’s answer is correct? You seem to have mentioned all the possible methods and a lot of highly improbable ones.”

  “Improbable!” Merlini sat up. “Improbable, Inspector? Perhaps you can tell me something that, on close examination, isn’t improbable. This afternoon I would have considered it eminently improbable that I should now be veering across town in a police car expounding locked-room theory to an Inspector of Police! Some people think detective fiction is improbable. Sure! So is all fiction. So is life. Hmmpf! Have you ever studied the life history of the liver fluke? Did you ever see a wilde-beeste, a spiral nebula, a fly under magnification or…or a bustle? They’re all as improbable as hell. And what have the physicists been doing these last few years but reducing matter itself to a vague improbability…an improbability so utterly—”

  “Hey!” the Inspector yelled. “Stop it! Just consider I didn’t mention the subject.”

  Merlini spluttered a bit, then calmed down. “There is,” he announced unexpectedly, “one more class of locked-room flim-flam. Class C.”

  The Inspector gaped. I chuckled to myself. When the Great Merlini rolled up his sleeves and started coaxing surprised rabbits out of a hat, he really worked at it.

  “Class C,” he continued calmly, “completes the outline. C’est finis! Kaput! There is no Class D, and matters are thus simplified. We’ve just two and only two possible methods—”

  “The hell with Class D!” the Inspector thundered. “What is Class C?”

  “It’s something Dr. Fell didn’t mention, as I remember. Superintendent Hadley was always interrupting him in the most interesting places.”

  “If this Fell person always had to work up a lather of suspense on his listeners before he came out with it, I don’t blame the Superintendent. Get on with it!”

  “Class C includes those murders which are committed in a hermetically sealed room which really is hermetically sealed and from which no murderer escapes, not because he wasn’t there, but because he stays there, hidden—”

  “But—” Gavigan and I both started to protest. “Stays there hidden until after the room has been broken into, and leaves before it is searched!”

  “Harte!” Gavigan turned on me. “What about it?”

  “Not a chance,” I said, and then, almost before my words had traveled a foot, I saw it. I grimaced; it was so ridiculously simple. Our attention had been so occupied with the triplicate sealing of the doors, the locking, bolting, and keyhole stuffing, that we had overlooked the obvious. Gavigan saw me start. “Now what?” he asked. “It’s easy as pie,” I said excitedly. “The movies’ mildewed old gag of hiding behind the door and walking out after someone comes in, behind them. Only this time the murderer crawled under the davenport when he heard us in the corridor, and when we pushed into the room he wriggled out the opposite side, straight into the hall. Even if we’d been actually watching the door we couldn’t have seen him, and the rolled-up rug would have screened him in the unlikely event that anyone had his face down at floor level.”

  The Inspector scowled at Merlini. “So that’s why you were poking around under that davenport!” He was silent a moment Then he said, “No. I don’t think so. Would any murderer be such a confounded ass as to stay in a locked room for sixteen solid hours, with only the body of his victim for company, waiting for someone to come and please let him out? If he did, we’ve got a loony to hunt for.”

  “Of course,” Merlini said, “we must remember that this isn’t the usual garden variety of
murder case, and that we do not have the ordinary run-of-the-mine grade of suspects. It’s not entirely out of bounds to suppose that the murderer knew just when someone would show up…and perhaps even who. Maybe he arranged for it. Then again he may not originally have planned to have the murder occur so early. Or perhaps the person or persons he expected didn’t show up on schedule. I don’t know. I’m just letting the possibilities crowd in. I understand it’s bad form not to examine all the possibilities. Sometimes the least likely one turns—”

  “You’re being trite now,” Gavigan criticised, “and besides, those aren’t possibilities you’re letting crowd in, they’re improba—” He caught himself too late.

  Merlini sighed exaggeratedly. “Yes, of course. Have it your own way. So what? You’ve got an improbable kettle of suspects, and you’ve got a devilishly improbable murder. An improbable method would, at least, be consistent. It’s a damn sight better than a downright impossibility, which is what has had us on our ears all evening.”

  “But look, Merlini,” I said, as an idea occurred to me, “suppose we had entered by the kitchen door instead. There’s Mr. Murderer, all nicely curled up under the davenport, and no place to go. And how would he plan on accounting for that sixteen hours? It’s hard enough to fake a good alibi covering sixteen minutes. All we’d have to do is locate someone who can’t give a corroborated account of his whereabouts from 3 A.M. to 6 P.M.”

  “Can you?” Merlini asked.

  “The Inspector’s already checked that. I was working until 5 A.M. and I’ve got a dozen witnesses.”

  “Inspector?”

  There was a mildly thunderstruck expression on Gavigan’s face. He blinked rapidly. “Damn you, Merlini,” he growled. “No, I can’t. When I hit the hay at midnight I was shy two nights’ sleep after finishing off that Bryant Park case. I slept all day and arrived at the station just a few minutes before the call came through that brought us to Sabbat’s. I didn’t see a soul I knew the whole time!”

  Merlini roared.

  “Funny, is it?” Gavigan said testily.

  “Yes, it’s so damned improbable. I’m in the same fix. Mrs. Merlini is visiting relatives in Philadelphia. I spent the day at home working on a new Guillotine illusion. I made two phone calls, but I could have done that from Sabbat’s. I don’t understand, though. I didn’t see you under the davenport, Inspector.”

  1Harper & Bros. 1936.

  Chapter 14

  The Man Who Laughed

  “He flew through the air with the greatest of ease…”

  VAN NESS LANE IS a shrunken, lost little backwash of a street, its only connection with the outside world a dark arched opening, iron-grilled, squeezed uncomfortably in between two elderly apartment buildings. Several squad cars, an ambulance, and a small but growing crowd clustered about the entrance when we arrived.

  Inspector Gavigan spoke briefly to an officer standing by one of the cars, and we went in, down several steps, to meet an India-ink blackness that was only accentuated by the thin artificial glow from Quinn’s torch. The yellow splash of the light moved before us and disclosed a pattern of dark splotches on the thin carpet of white, a hurried trail of footprints leading inward.

  Fifty or sixty feet back the walls on either side fell away, and we emerged into the Lane proper. On our right a large lonely house slept behind the blank eyelessness of shade-drawn windows. Two smaller buildings were on the left, one a low brick carriage house and the other, No. 36, a three-story, red brick building in the obsolete Village style. The Lane ended in a high blank wall.

  From the partly opened door of No. 36 a narrow oblong panel of light came hesitatingly forth and fell crookedly down across a flight of stone steps. At the left of the door, and on the same level, were a pair of large French windows opening out on to a narrow wrought-iron balcony. Two of the several sets of footprints continued on up the steps and in at the door, only to come out again and join with the others that made a confused track toward the windows. Below the balcony they stopped.

  Burke leveled his light at the window. The right half was just slightly ajar, and near its center edge where the catch would be one pane had been smashed. A thin sliver of light streaked the opening, and the sound of voices came from behind heavy drawn curtains.

  “I guess we go in by the window,” Gavigan said, “but keep clear of those prints.”

  Inside the voices stopped, the window swung inward, and the black shape of a man stepped on to the balcony. “Don’t worry about those tracks,” he said, “they’re ours.”

  “Oh, it’s you, Grimm,” Gavigan replied.

  Leaning over, Grimm offered his arm to each of us in turn as we hoisted ourselves up and swung over the railing.

  Merlini and I followed the Inspector into the room, stepping carefully past a small end table that lay overturned just inside. On the floor around it lay the shattered pieces of what had been a lamp with a pottery base. Light sparkled in the deep-piled rug from the bits of glass that had formed the bulb, and the parchment shade was crushed and torn.

  Beyond a davenport that stood a few feet in from the window, back toward us, were four men, facing us. Three of them were uniformed officers from the squad cars, the fourth, a young ambulance intern. Gavigan started around the end of the sofa, stopped short, and stood looking down at something it concealed. I followed Merlini as he stepped forward.

  At first I saw only the face; I couldn’t take my eyes away. It was dark with a deep tan, and horn rimmed glasses were wildly askew on a sharp nose. There was a small mustache, shiny black hair worn somewhat long, and that same horrible constriction of facial muscles that we had already seen on another face. The eyes bulged, and the mouth, with its swollen tongue protruding, gaped as if still gasping for that last agonizing breath of air. The lips, drawn far back, exposed the teeth in an ugly, inverted grin.

  But what really brought us up short was the position of the body. Flat on its back on the floor, arms and legs spread wide, feet toward a fireplace, it lay in exactly the same position as had the body of Sabbat.

  The man’s clothing was shabby, ill kept, and disordered, as if death had been accompanied by a struggle. There was a ragged tear in the trousers at the knee, and a battered black hat lay crushed on the floor, stepped on.

  I pulled my eyes away, finally, trying hard to retain control over the uneasy roller-coaster feeling in my stomach.

  Gavigan said, “Who found him?”

  Grimm, from behind me, answered, “I did.”

  “Who is it?”

  “We don’t know. Haven’t looked at his pockets yet. Headquarters said you were on the way, and to hold everything.”

  Gavigan looked at Merlini. “You know?” he asked.

  Merlini still watched the body. For a moment he made no answer, then, at last, he shook his head in a slow negative and turned abruptly to frown at the debris on the floor.

  I looked around at the rest of the room, and saw, suddenly, a sixth man sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a low divan beyond the fireplace. He was a small, furtive-looking individual with a pallid, washed-out face and a shock of wiry, sand-colored hair. He sat stiffly and gazed with a curious, frowning intensity at Merlini’s back.

  Gavigan saw him too. “Who’s that?” he demanded, pointing as if the little man were something for sale.

  “Says his name’s Jones,” Grimm replied.

  Merlini swung around and returned the man’s stare with a surprised lift of his eyebrows. He seemed about to speak, but Grimm continued, “He was with me when we broke in.”

  The Inspector dropped to one knee and began a closer examination of the body. I looked about the room. It was large, perhaps twenty by forty feet. Two tall glass cabinets stood at the far end of the room and had shelves that were filled with a strange array of metal and wooden shapes, locks, keys, handcuffs, leg irons. Against the black wall, between two windows, sat an exceptionally odd affair, the dummy, life-sized figure of a bearded man wearing the turban and native dress of
a Turk. He sat, cross-legged, behind a desk-like cabinet in the front side of which were numerous doors. From under lowered lids he gazed solemnly down at the cabinet’s top which was laid out as a chessboard and on which chessmen stood. The fingers of his left hand were closed about a Bishop while the right hand held a clay pipe of extraordinary length.

  Old playbills and faded, but still exciting, posters announcing the magical performances and listing the repertoires of famous conjurers lined the walls: Breslaw, Pinetti, Houdin, Anderson, Alexander, DeKolta, Herrman, Kellar, Houdini, Thurston. The largest poster, a three sheet in full color, hung above a radio on the mantelpiece. It depicted Duvallo and his Chinese Water Torture Cell Escape.

  The Inspector got to his feet. “All right, Grimm, let’s have the story.”

  Grimm began, talking rapidly, with a matter-of-fact assurance that was flatly contradicted by the puzzled look in his eyes. He spoke as if sure of what he had seen, but as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

  “You had headquarters send a car here looking for Duvallo. They reported no one home. I was sent along from the Charles Street Station, with orders to stick around in case he showed up. It began to snow just as I got here, at ten o’clock. Regular blizzard. Everything was quiet until just a couple of minutes before ten-thirty when this guy,” he indicated Jones, “came into the Lane. I waited until he had gone up the steps and was putting his key in the lock. I said, ‘Just a minute, Mr. Duvallo,’ and followed him up the steps. He said, ‘Sorry, it doesn’t look as if Mr. Duvallo is in. You’d better stop back later.’ He stepped inside, snapped on the hall light, and tried to close the door in my face; but I eased in after him and flashed my shield. He started to get on his high horse, said it wasn’t his house, he couldn’t let me in and would I go away. I told him, ‘Sorry, I’m already in, and, if you’re not Duvallo, how come you’re letting yourself in with a key, this time of night?’ Before he could think up a good answer to that—”

  “Inspector,” Jones blurted angrily, “I don’t have to stand for that. I can explain. You see—”