Death from a Top Hat

by Clayton Rawson

  Grimm skidded to a stop, stared back at Brady, and then looked quickly to right and left along the hall. His gun held ready, pointed at Brady’s midriff. The latter, eyeing the weapon nervously and Grimm with bewilderment, started to get out of his chair. The legs scraped on the floor and slid away from the wall. Brady grabbed the air convulsively; the chair’s motion accelerated. Chair, Brady and all hit the floor together with a reverberating smack.

  “What the hell’s going on out here?” Grimm roared.

  Brady emitted several words, none especially printable, and tossed Grimm one not very accurate word in reply.

  “Nothing!” he said, and then, rolling over, began disentangling himself from the chair. He stood up, felt the back of his head experimentally, and grunted, “What the hell’s going on in there? Did you see a ghost or somethin’?”

  Grimm goggled at him. “Were you sitting there, reading that paper, and…didn’t you hear anything?”

  Brady’s eyebrows rose. “Place quiet as a graveyard until you made such a racket.”

  Gavigan had settled back in his chair and was scowling at Merlini. Grimm said, “Maybe I’m crazy, but—” Turning quickly he caught Merlini’s wide grin of amusement. He frowned uncertainly. “I smell a rat. What is this, another parlor trick?”

  “Is that what you had in mind, Inspector?” Merlini asked.

  Gavigan nodded. “Exactly. Thanks for the demonstration.

  I was afraid it might be a little fantastic, but you’ve cinched it.

  Grimm, you had better take this sitting down. Your pal, Jones—he’s a ventriloquist.”

  I could see the idea penetrate Grimm’s skull and begin to circulate. “So that was it,” he muttered finally. “Last night when we stood outside that door—” He spoke slowly, picturing it to himself. “Jones threw his voice in here, same as you just threw yours out.”

  “I think the Inspector has some such idea, Grimm. Only you can’t treat your voice as if it were a boomerang. That’s a popular fallacy. Ventriloquists don’t throw their voices. It only sounds that way.”

  “Well, it sounded all right to me. But I thought ventriloquists used a dummy. Charlie McCarthy…”

  “That’s only one way. And the easier. Almost anyone can do it passably with a little practice. It’s merely a matter of talking without moving the lips. Only a few of the consonants offer any difficulty and those can be satisfactorily approximated by substituting similar sounds, such as eng for M, fee for P, or duggle-you for W. Of course, you use a voice that contrasts with your own and is the sort your dummy would have if he could talk. The ear depends on the eye for the localization of sound, and when the dummy’s mouth is synchronized with his patter it looks and, thus, sounds as if he were speaking. Talking pictures utilize the same principle, and…”

  “Yeah, but what about this behind-the-door business?” Grimm asked.

  “That’s the same thing, a bit more advanced. I drew your attention to the door and led you to expect something from that direction. Then I imitated a voice as it would sound coming from behind a door at about that distance. That’s the hard part. It’s done by tensing the diaphragm and speaking from deep down in the throat; it’s known technically as the ‘far-away voice.’ The word ventriloquism literally means belly-speaking, from the Latin venter, belly, and loquor, to speak. Naturally Brady heard nothing. The sound was all on this side of the door.”

  Grimm’s face indicated that deductive processes were simmering behind it. “Then Tarot,” he said slowly, “was already dead when Jones and I came up the front stoop. Jones had already strangled Tarot, and he came back to stage his voice-throwing exhibition for an alibi!”

  Merlini cocked an eyebrow at the Inspector. “That what you had in mind?”

  There was a vague hint of skepticism in Merlini’s tone that made the Inspector pause. “Well,” the latter said truculently, “why not?”

  “But I thought we’d decided that Tarot would have had to step on it to get here as much as five minutes before the snow and Grimm’s arrival. And Jones, when the snow began, was still at 23rd Street with Ching. If he strangled Tarot, then he must have gotten in and out of this place in spite of Grimm and the snow. You explain the voices, but not the lack of footprints. You aren’t going to try my Lung-Gom-Pa theory on a jury, are you?”

  “Ching might be lying about the time Jones left. I’ve heard of stranger things.”

  “All right, suppose we suppose that. What then?”

  “Well, say Jones left 23rd Street only twenty minutes earlier. He could have walked in here before the snow, and before Tarot arrived. Tarot shows and catches Jones red-handed at whatever he’s at. Jones kills him and then, finding Grimm out front, leaves via the ladder before there’s enough snow to matter.”

  “So. If Ching can be proved a liar, then the absent footprints are explained. Now if you’ll tell us why Jones waited a half hour before confronting Grimm with his ventriloquism? Seems as if the logical thing to do would be to get it over with at once.”

  Gavigan sniffed at Merlini’s objection. “Does a murderer have to be logical? I’ve met a few, and most of them didn’t know the meaning of the word. You’ve got a point there, but we’ll get the answer from the guy that knows it.”

  The Inspector walked to the phone and lifted the receiver.

  As he began to dial, Merlini said, “Suppose he won’t admit knowing it?”

  “I can get it out of him.”

  “Inspector, I wish you’d leave that phone alone; you make me nervous. You see, I know that Jones couldn’t possibly have left this room by that ladder.”

  “You what?” Gavigan held the phone limply.

  “No one has used that ladder since it’s been put against the side of this house except myself.”

  The Inspector threw the receiver back on the phone rest; and then, before he could get too hot under the collar, Merlini went on: “I got in here via that ladder this morning. But before I put foot on it I took a good look at the ground beneath. It hasn’t frozen really hard yet, and the foot of the ladder rests in what was a flower bed. I marked the spot, moved the ladder a foot nearer the building, and came up a few rungs. My weight caused the ladder to make quite an obvious depression in the earth, a good quarter of an inch. There wasn’t anything of the sort where the ladder had rested before.”

  “Grimm, you get out there and check on that. And, if it’s as he says, see about getting pictures.”

  Gavigan walked away from us toward the far end of the room. He went ten feet or so and then turned quickly. “The more we know the less sense it makes. If no one used that ladder last night, then why was it there?”

  “Well,” Merlini said hesitantly, shifting his gaze to the floor, “perhaps someone intended using it and then didn’t.”

  Gavigan apparently didn’t think that answer worth much. He stood for a moment indecisively rubbing his chin. Then he strode toward the phone again. “I’m going to have Jones over the rocks anyway, dammit. He’s still the only suspect with no alibi for either murder.”

  “Inaccessibility can’t count as an alibi for everyone. As you say, Inspector, since Tarot actually was murdered, the impossibility of access and exit must be only apparent, and you’ve got to find out how it was done if you’re going to make the District Attorney happy.”

  “We can’t prove it, but we know damn well.…It’s like sawing the lady in two. I can’t prove it, but I know damn well that it’s not done by witchcraft. If I had an ordinary list of suspects, I’d almost admit that there was such a bugaboo as Surgat roaming around loose, twisting necks and slithering out through keyholes. But what have I got? A whole stage full of magicians, people who make a business of escaping from lead coffins, vanishing bird cages, reading minds, pulling rabbits out of thin air, and pushing weejee boards.” Gavigan was excited. “Inaccessibility, bah! And why shouldn’t Jones, for instance, know a trick or two that you don’t?”

  He picked up the phone.

  “And what,” Mer
lini asked of no one in particular, “if there is someone else who, like Jones, has no alibi for either murder?”

  Some minutes before I had taken out my alibi list and had been staring idly at it. When Merlini said that I saw it.

  “There is!” I said, suddenly sitting up very straight. “Look! As soon as you assume that Tarot was killed at some other time than 10:30, then all the alibis on that side of the list go blooie. And with only three alibis for the time of Sabbat’s death checked as good, that gives us five live suspects.”

  Gavigan stopped midway in his dialing. “Hey, not so fast,” he protested. “We know that…”

  “Wait, Inspector,” Merlini said, “this is going to be good. I’ll top that, Harte. Suppose you cross out Judy’s alibi for the first murder, too.”

  “Reason, please,” I insisted.

  “On my way over here this morning I stopped and had a chat with her mother. She swears Judy was safely in bed long before 3 A.M., and she told the detectives you sent around the same thing, Inspector. But she’s not the most logical old lady in the world. She saw Judy go to bed at midnight and she woke her the next morning. But they do sleep in separate rooms, and the old lady is a bit hard of hearing. Judy could have gone out and come back. Her alibi won’t do.”

  Merlini paused, and then, “That leaves us Rappourt, hog-tied in her cabinet, and Watrous holding hands in the dark. Suppose we cross out his alibi too.”

  Gavigan stuttered a bit. “Listen,” he argued, “we’ve got two witnesses, and they both swear that they had a tight grip on him every minute.”

  “Yes, I know, but Watrous, you remember, said he was the one who turned out the lights. Suppose in the dark the two members on either side of him get each other’s hands rather than Watrous’. That’s one of the commonest ways for a medium to escape the circle. It’s easier if one of the persons is an accomplice, but it’s been known to happen without. It’s such an old and such a good stunt that Harry Price, Secretary of the London Psychic Society, has gone to the trouble of devising an arrangement in which the sitters wear gloves, joined with wire and having contacts, so that when everyone joins hands an electrical circuit is completed, and no one can leave the circle without an immediate warning being sounded. The lights are controlled by an outside observer having no connection with and completely isolated from the circle.1

  “Okay, but you can’t break Rappourt’s alibi. I never saw such a—”

  “Who says I can’t?” Merlini grinned.

  Gavigan sighed and sat down. “I’m having the best time!” he said, scowling fiercely. “All right, Professor, bring on your rabbits. As I remember, that woman was inside a triple-locked cabinet, sitting in a canvas bag that was drawn tightly around her neck and tied to the chair behind her. She was roped to the chair, and her audience held the other ends of the tapes that were sewn around her wrists. Maybe she could get out of that, but it would take her an hour to get out and another hour to get back in. Or am I wrong?”

  “You are, by about fifty-nine and a half minutes. She would have gotten out of everything except the cabinet, while they were locking that up. And, since a medium’s cabinet has trickery as its only excuse for being, she could be out a cleverly concealed rear door in half a minute, before the audience had gotten itself properly seated.”

  “What about the sack? She could cut her way out, sure. But she’s got to get back in again without any traces.”

  “Suppose the seam around the mouth of the bag through which the drawstring ran had a small slit on its inner surface. She could reach in with a finger, catch the drawstring, and pull it a foot or two down into the bag before they got it drawn tight around her neck. Later, when she released the slack, the sack that had been drawn so tightly about her neck would simply drop around her. When she pushed the ends of the tapes that were sewn around her wrists out through the buttonhole slits in the bag, she could have pushed out duplicate ones. The tapes that the sitters held, instead of having Rappourt securely fastened to their nether ends, were merely tied to a couple of short pieces of dowel stick that were there to prevent the tapes from being pulled free of the sack.”

  “But how could she get any slack in the ropes that tied her to the chair outside the bag?” Gavigan asked weakly.

  “She wouldn’t need any. Her hands were free. She could merely cut the ropes free from herself and the chair. At the finish of the séance she steps back into the sack, ties herself anew with duplicate ropes that have been secreted, either in the cabinet or on her person, pulls in the slack of the drawstring, and then, when the tapes that the audience has been holding are released, she quickly draws them back inside the bag. While the cabinet is being unlocked she rolls them up and hides them. The more locks on the cabinet, the more time she has—seems to me I explained that principle once before this morning.”

  “If Rappourt left the hotel,” Gavigan asked, not quite convinced, but weakening, “and took a three-block side excursion for the purpose of killing Sabbat, who is responsible for the manifestations that occurred during her absence? Her Indian control. Chief Rain-Water, or whoever she uses?”

  “Watrous could have covered for her there, and he could also have thrown the bolt the next evening when he went to Sabbat’s kitchen for a glass of water—for her, too, you notice.”

  “But why—oh, hell! I never saw such a mess.” Gavigan’s blue eyes twinkled, but the sparks that flew were fiery and hot. “Every time I draw a breath this case does a lightning change act and turns up wearing a set of false whiskers and a putty nose. Last night we were stymied because, at one time, though we had four possible outs from this room, all the suspects were alibied for one murder or the other. And now, after we’ve eliminated all four methods, you throw cold water on a fifth one and then blow holes in every single alibi! Who told you that was any way to solve a murder case?” Gavigan gave a good imitation of a dark thundercloud about to unleash crashing jolts of atomic force. He growled stubbornly, “I still think Jones did it.”

  Grimm echoed somewhat less emphatically, like a second carbon, “And so do I.”

  “And you can’t prove he didn’t,” Gavigan scowled and then, in his best cross-examining voice, argued, “Another thing, Harte was a bit hasty when he threw out some of those alibis—and you know it.” He poked a thick forefinger at Merlini. “Why are you trying to cover up for Jones?”

  “I’m not trying to cover up for anyone. I only know that you don’t have a case against Jones—and—” Merlini spoke seriously and straight at Gavigan, “the person who murdered those two men isn’t the sort who is going to cry ‘Kamerad’ as soon as a police inspector speaks harshly to him. Someone has planned this thing so carefully and so cold-bloodedly that it’s a bit frightening. Particularly since we don’t know the motive nor who else it includes. You aren’t going to make this murderer cry ‘Nuff!’ until you have a nice near airtight case, and don’t forget it.”

  Gavigan stuck out his chin. “Are you trying to tell me how to investigate this case?”

  “No,” Merlini said, “but if you were to ask me nicely, I might.”

  Hoping that it would break the tension, I introduced a question. “What,” I asked, “is all this loose talk about my being hasty?”

  Gavigan answered, still scowling at Merlini, “If the murder took place just after Tarot’s arrival, before the snowfall, then both the LaClaires do have an alibi. They were in the squad car en route from Sabbat’s to La Rumba. And Duvallo was explaining his string hocus-pocus to us at Sabbat’s. Judy’s alibi is uncorroborated, and Watrous and Rappourt didn’t have any. Ching Wong Fu and Jones say they were together at his apartment, but…if Ching is lying, or perhaps is mistaken about the time Jones left by twenty minutes or more, then we have one possible way of explaining how one of our suspects could have accomplished both murders.”

  “Ching didn’t happen to inform you last night, did he, Inspector, that the latter half of his act consists of a very able ventriloquial routine? And did you notice the vent d
ummy downstairs on the table? Duvallo began as a ventriloquist at Coney Island. And Tarot was tops at it. It’s merely a special type of magic—auditory conjuring, and many magicians fool around with it.”

  “So what? Jones was the guy outside the door, wasn’t he? Don’t tell me Ching can throw his voice twenty blocks, or that Duvallo can throw his a mile. And if you so much as hint that it was Tarot’s ghost throwing his voice from the astral sphere…” Gavigan snorted, made up his mind, and went determinedly toward the phone again. “I’m going to put Jones through the mill.”

  “And,” Merlini said, talking fast, “just how does that theory explain the baffling presence of the unused ladder? Can you tell us, then, why Jones remained, as he must have, in Sabbat’s apartment with his victim for sixteen hours? Why did he leave Duvallo’s card with Tarot’s writing on it under the body? Why did Rappourt think there was death in that room? Why did Tarot avoid being fingerprinted? Why did he come to Duvallo’s; why was he disguised, and why—oh why, as I’ve insisted before, did he have to vanish from that taxi so spectacularly? And do you think that Jones is so dumb he’d try to create an alibi using ventriloquism, when it’s common knowledge that that is his profession?”

  The first few questions slowed Gavigan’s phoneward progress, and the rest brought him to a halt. His eyes, on Merlini, suddenly had in them a new spark of interest.

  “You sound as if you had an idea. Suppose you get it off your chest. If Jones didn’t do it, then we have to explain how Watrous, Rappourt, or Duvallo could have worked the voices. Even at that, we’re right back where we started, and there must be a sixth way out of this room.”

  Merlini sat very still, and his face had a ventriloquial calm as he said:

  “There is!”

  1Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter, Putnam, 1936.

  Chapter 20

  The Garrulous Ghosts

  THE INSPECTOR EXPELLED A fervent “Oh, my God!” and subsided weakly into an armchair. He sat there quietly, looking as if he had at least decided that it might be a good idea to allow Merlini’s conversational flow an unobstructed channel. Merlini, sensing this attitude, took immediate and full advantage of it. He deliberately recited another limerick. The smoothness of his delivery, however, made me suspect that it was one he had previously composed and carefully hoarded against the proper moment.