Death from a Top Hat

by Clayton Rawson

  MERLINI WASN’T LISTENING TO the Inspector. He said, half to himself, “And so we know that Tarot wasn’t killed because he knew too much. The radio indicates preparation so far in advance that the murderer must have planned Tarot’s death even before Sabbat was killed. Hmmm. What did you say, Inspector?”

  “I asked if you realized that Jones was the man who started that infernal machine talking? He pushed that light switch.”

  “Yes, of course,” Merlini said, eyeing Gavigan warily. “Jones was the man. And so what?”

  The Inspector snorted. “Don’t ‘and so what’ me! Goddallmighty, man! Jones is a liar, that’s all. He couldn’t have ‘just happened’ to stop in here. He set those voices going; therefore, he came for just that purpose. No murderer’s going to put together a setup like this and then trust to luck, to a million-to-one chance that someone will pull the trigger for him. Jones is either the murderer or an accomplice. There’s no other answer.”

  “No?” Merlini asked significantly. “Suppose the murderer did make arrangements for himself or an accomplice to poke that light button? Jones may have entered accidentally and too soon, the unpredictable human element no criminal can foresee.”

  “And the next person who entered after Jones, other than ourselves, was Miss Barclay. No, this isn’t a woman’s crime. All this expert vanishing and slipping out through keyholes sounds like someone with narrower hips. Women aren’t magicians; they don’t saw people in two; they’re always the sawees.”

  “Yes,” Merlini admitted, “conjuring is largely a male pursuit; woman’s love of mystery is concerned with something else. But you mustn’t forget that the great majority of mediums are female and that the magic profession has the fraudulent ones among them to thank for some of the best and subtlest conjuring devices in the whole field of deception. Besides, this present vanishing and escaping isn’t necessarily a question of rope ladders and flying leaps. I’ve told you about misdirection. It may not be safe to rule out everyone who’s not an acrobat.”

  The Inspector shook his head slowly. “No, Miss Barclay’s out. You’re clutching at straws. If it had been anyone but Jones at that door…The fact that he’s a ventriloquist makes the irony too perfect, the coincidence appalling. And that radio dialogue Grimm caught; it was far too appropriate. The odds are a hundred to one that if the radio had been turned on by accident and too soon, he would have heard Cab Calloway, or cooking recipes, or—or Charlie McCarthy.” Gavigan faced Malloy, “Find out what that program was. Get me the scripts of all programs that went on the air from stations in this area at 10:30 last night.” He started to turn away when a thought struck him. “Oh…er, you might try NBC first.”

  “I’m prostrate under the Juggernaut of your logic, Inspector,” Merlini admitted, inclining his head slightly. “But aren’t you forgetting that Grimm was there? Can you account for that?”

  “Say!” Grimm burst out, “is he insinuating that I turned that radio on?”

  “No, not that,” Merlini said. “I merely want to know how Jones, or, if he’s only an accomplice, the murderer could have predicted that Grimm would be there as a witness. If Jones is an accomplice, he wouldn’t start the radio and simply expect us to take his word that he heard voices. He could simply lie about them, and there would be no need for the radio. If he’s the murderer the same holds true, though I don’t know why a ventriloquist would bother with the much clumsier device of the radio. The point is, in either case he’d supply himself with at least one witness. He might have brought Ching along. But he didn’t. He came alone.”

  “But Grimm had been out front for a good half hour before. The murderer could have known that far in advance.” Gavigan objected half heartedly.

  “Now you’re clutching at straws, Inspector. The gimmicked radio proves that the murderer’s plans were laid well in advance of Grimm’s arrival. No, the fact that Jones was the man who pushed that light switch merely takes us up another blind alley—a damned dark one, too. I know who the murderer is, Inspector. I’ve known for some time. But the mystery is still there, and almost every time we discover something it gets deeper. Perhaps the murderer is too smart for us, perhaps…”

  He paused discouragedly; then suddenly his head jerked up, his shoulders straightened. “Inspector,” he said, “I’ve got to get out of here and think. Somewhere along the line there has been some A No. 1 misdirection, some smooth criminal slight of hand. I haven’t caught all of it, and I don’t like it. I’m supposed to know about such things.” He picked up his hat and jammed it on his head. “Come on, Harte. I’ll need you.”

  Gavigan stood between Merlini and the door. “So you know who the murderer is, do you? I’ll call that little bluff. Let’s have it.”

  Merlini shook his head obstinately. “As long as I can’t prove it, it’s slander. I’ll keep it under my hat until I can. Besides, you wouldn’t believe me; and I know better than to try to sell you a bill of goods that doesn’t make sense.”

  Gavigan hesitated, measuring Merlini with his eyes. Then he stepped aside. “I wondered how long it was going to take you to find that out. All right. Go on. Take your run-out powder, but think fast, Captain Flagg. Eliminating suspects by letting the murderer kill them off may be all right for rental library fiction, but it isn’t department procedure.”

  Merlini stopped in the doorway. “You won’t do anything drastic without calling me, will you? We’ll be at my place.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Gavigan said.

  Merlini said nothing until we had let ourselves in at 13½ Washington Square North. Then he said, “What logic there is in this case is about as neat and tidy as a tornado. And the trouble is dat ole debbil, faulty observation. We’re going to work on that. There’s a chance you may have seen something, Ross, which, in your hasty recitals to Gavigan and myself, you overlooked because it seemed small or unimportant. I want you to sit down at that typewriter and put on paper in minute detail everything that happened from the time you heard Rappourt’s voice outside your door until I arrived. And I mean everything.”

  I jerked off my tie, rolled up my sleeves, and, lighting the first of a chain of cigarettes, went at it. While the typewriter was warming up, Merlini hunted up Scotch and soda. The pages fell from the typewriter in swift succession while Merlini waited hungrily, reading them as they came.

  I had been typing for perhaps an hour and was halfway down on a new page when I noticed that Merlini had not leaped to pick the last one from the floor. He held the penultimate sheet unnoticed in his lap, and was lying in his chair, long legs thrust out, eyes closed. I thought he was asleep. But as the rattle of the typewriter stopped he raised his head and looked at me, a bright sparkle dancing in his eyes.

  “Ross,” he said, “you’ve done it. The solution I’ve been shying from because I couldn’t quite believe it isn’t all airy logic any more. You’ve given it a solid base of observed fact. But don’t stop. I want more.”

  He snatched at the page on the floor and read avidly. I retrieved the sheet he had held and ran through it. So, I’d done it, had I? I read it a second time. I didn’t see it, and if he suspected the person I’d just been writing about, then something was screwy as hell. I knew better than to ask for explanations, so I began pounding again at the keyboard, slower now, my thoughts circling like Sonja Henie.

  I typed for another half hour until the phone interrupted, ringing with a nervous uneasy jangle. While Merlini answered it, I took time out and filled my glass again.

  He came back. “Gavigan’s just discovered that the radio program was broadcast from WJZ. The dialogue Grimm caught was the beginning of a sustaining program, one of those blood and thunder serials for the kiddies called Crime Doesn’t Pay. And it was written by Tarot himself!”

  “Oh, for Crissake!” I said. “It would be. Every interesting lead we get takes us straight to a dead man, and they don’t talk. If Rappourt’s the real McCoy, it looks as if she’d be the one to solve this case.”

  “You
forget, I’ve solved it. Though you’re right about Rappourt in one way. If she could bring back Sabbat or Tarot, I could get some evidence I badly need. But the radio program isn’t what has the Inspector all atwitter and agog. He’s just found out who Mrs. Joseph Vanek is. Ching supplied the information, said he thought it might be pertinent. It is.”

  “Just a minute,” I said. I reached for my glass and killed the rest of the drink. “All right. Let’s have it. Another surprise package, I suppose.”

  Merlini poured three fingers of Scotch into my glass and the same in his own. “Better have another, Ross. Mrs. Josef Vanek is Madame Eva Rappourt!” Merlini drained his glass and added, “Gather up those papers and let’s go. Gavigan is rounding up all the suspects. He has a bee buzzing in his bonnet, and unless we’re there I’m afraid he may get stung.”

  A police car stopped before Van Ness Lane as we came abreast of it. The LaClaires got out, accompanied by several detectives. We went in with them. Entering the hall, we heard the Inspectors voice:

  “I’d like to see that trick with the business card, Duvallo. It sounds—Oh, hello. Come in.”

  Duvallo, Judy, Ching, and Jones, along with Malloy, Grimm, and Quinn were already there.

  When we had taken seats, Duvallo said, “Yes, of course, Inspector. Do you have a card?”

  “Suppose we use yours.”

  “Sure. I usually borrow one; it looks better. That wasn’t necessary when I did it for Tarot because he knew the trick and it was more of a technical demonstration than a performance.” He drew a card from his billfold and passed it to Gavigan. “Write a word or draw any simple design on the back of the card.”

  The Inspector took a pencil and sketched something quickly.

  “Now, I can discover what you’ve written by using either clairvoyance or telepathy. The latter is a little more certain, but you have to help by broadcasting a few thought waves. You can do that by freeing your mind as far as possible of all else and concentrating on the word or diagram. I shall try to reproduce it.”

  “Never mind the ballyhoo,” Gavigan objected. “What is it?”

  Duvallo smiled. “Careful, you might have to eat those words. Hold the card, back toward me, up before your eyes, and give me a break by concentrating on it, anyway. Just to make quite sure I couldn’t possibly see what you’ve written—here.” He drew out his handkerchief and dropped it over Gavigan’s hands, covering the card. Then he stepped back some distance from the Inspector, took another of the business cards from his pocket, and held a pencil over it, frowning. The Inspector didn’t play fair. He watched Duvallo like a hawk.

  Then, slowly, Duvallo began drawing on his card. Suddenly he made two or three last quick strokes and looked up.

  “Are you trying to scare someone, Inspector?” he said, turning the card so that we all could see.

  On it there was a drawing of a gallows.

  The Inspector dropped his hands and nodded resignedly. “Okay. I don’t get it. How’s it done?”

  “Keep your illusions and stay young, Inspector,” Merlini said. “The truth would disappoint you. Here, drop that card and pencil into this envelope.” He produced a plain, white, letter-size envelope and held it open. Gavigan complied, and Merlini immediately closed the flap and sealed it. Then, holding the envelope at his finger tips and always in full view before him, he said, “Give me a number, five or six digits.”

  Glumly Gavigan said, “Six eight nine two four.”

  “Added, they total what, Inspector?”

  “Twenty nine.”

  Merlini winked broadly at Duvallo. “There are unseen forces in the air about us, Inspector, imps from some fourth dimension who have strange powers.” He ripped the end from the envelope. “Hold out your hand.”

  Gavigan did so and Merlini shook the pencil and card out on to his palm. Gavigan took one look and said, “Goddammit!”

  I’d seen Merlini do that little stunt before so I knew, without looking, that Gavigan had found, pencilled on the card, the figure 29. I was standing quite near and directly behind him, however, and I saw that, this time, something more was written there in Merlini’s uneven script: “Ask hall light but don’t mention radio.”

  The Inspector put the card in his pocket just as the front door banged. Colonel Watrous came in, protesting every step of the way. He was followed quietly by Madame Rappourt and two detectives. The latter stopped on the threshold, and Gavigan dismissed them with a wave of his hand. Watrous stomped toward the Inspector like a turkey cock with its tail feathers ruffled. His voice was angry and rose too high in a strident, almost feminine pitch.

  “You’ll regret this, Inspector. I intend to sue. I want to call my lawyer.”

  Gavigan looked down at the little red-faced man. “Sue for what?”

  “False arrest, and what’s more—”

  “Skip it, Colonel. I haven’t arrested you…yet.”

  “Then just what do you mean by this high handed—this—” Watrous’ choler seemed to have retarded his mental responses. As the meaning of that “yet” finally penetrated he left the rails and plowed to an uncertain stop.

  “Grimm,” the Inspector said, “put the Colonel over there on the divan and treat him gently, but if he starts to yap, take him across your knee.” Gavigan seemed a bit fed up with the Colonel.

  Watrous flounced across and sat down with his outraged dignity next to Madame Rappourt, who was already seated there. She sat quietly, only the black eyes moving restlessly in the white stillness of her face. I glanced at her hand, looking for a wedding ring, and saw none.

  “This is a familiar looking scene, in detective fiction, at least,” Duvallo said. “All the suspects present and accounted for. Are we about to unmask the murderer?”

  Gavigan looked at him thoughtfully and then glanced at the others, his gaze travelling slowly. Duvallo’s question hung suspended over us. Judy sat in the armchair, apparently at ease, but as the Inspector’s eyes met hers she looked down and fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. Ching Wong Fu MacNeil, the customary grin missing from his found face, was furtively eyeing Zelma, who in turn watched the Inspector cat-like. There was a clouded expression in her eyes, and she shifted uneasily in her chair.

  “The murderer,” Gavigan said slowly and in a way that made me wonder why he should criticise Merlini for building up suspense, “is, I have reason to believe, in this room.”

  If you have ever stood in a room filled with purring dynamos and inhaled the crackling pungency of ozone, you know what the atmosphere in that room was like. Alfred LaClaire took his cigarette slowly from his lips. Duvallo was sitting on the arm of Judy’s chair, and his right leg, which had been swinging, stopped. Jones stood in the shadowed background, leaning with Merlini against the bookcases. He was like the rest of us, tense, but I caught no other reaction. Merlini alone seemed at ease, his eyes half closed, apparently gazing in abstraction at the floor. But some sixth sense told me that he was watching someone, waiting for some histrionic flaw, some tell-tale false action.

  Having allowed his preamble to sink in, Gavigan said suddenly, “Duvallo, do you use that hall light out there in the daytime?”

  Duvallo raised an eyebrow. “No, there’s enough light from the glass transom above the door. Why?”

  “When was the last time you used it?”

  “Night before last when I came in, I suppose.” He looked curiously at the door to the hall and then back at Gavigan.

  “You gave Jones a key to this apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might have gone to the trouble of making a duplicate key to your front door? There are traces of paraffin on the wards of the lock.”

  “Oh? Perhaps that’s how Tarot got in. I’ve been wondering about that.”

  “I doubt it. He would have planned on using those picklocks of yours that he had. And since Grimm was out front within a few minutes after Tarot’s arrival, i
t looks as if the murderer was already here. He could have let Tarot in.”

  “Inspector,” Jones said hesitantly, “I can tell you about the paraffin.” Heads turned, looking at him. “I made the duplicate key. While I was staying here during Duvallo’s absence, I mislaid the one he gave me and locked myself out. I took a paraffin impression on a blank key and had a locksmith cut it out.”

  “Where’d you lose it?” This, Gavigan’s tone said, began to look interesting.

  “That’s what worried me. I’ve said nothing about it before, because, well, it was the day after the party that I missed it. But I found it this morning in a pocket of this suit. I thought I had looked there, but I guess—”

  “Party?” Gavigan growled. “What party?”

  “Tarot, Ching, the LaClaires, and Judy were here one Friday night. It was just an end of the week party.”

  The Inspector’s face was stormy. “If you people would tell me things as they happen we’d get ahead a lot faster.” Everyone looked at him so damned innocently that he got mad. “You, for instance, Madame Rappourt.”

  “I?” Her voice had that full deep-throated quality again.

  “You heard me. I’m not talking to myself.”

  She looked straight ahead at nothing and said, “I know nothing at all about your murders, nor do I care to.”

  Watrous started up. “I warn you, Inspector, that—”

  Grimm’s hand shot out and hooked into the Colonel’s collar. He pulled and Watrous flopped back on his fanny. “Sit down, you!” Grimm said.

  “But you do know quite a lot about Cesare Sabbat, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, without moving her lips.

  Gavigan followed through, quickly. “Tell me about it.”

  The trance-like monotone she used gave her voice the flat, dead feel of a legal document. “I married him in Paris five years ago. He called himself Josef Vanek. I didn’t know until yesterday that that wasn’t his right name. I lived with him two years. Then we separated. I had not seen him since, until I walked into that room and saw him lying there on the floor.”