Death from a Top Hat

by Clayton Rawson

  “Yeah,” the Inspector replied, “if Merlini’s psychoanalyst friend had hypnotized Jones, Duvallo knew we’d find out that—”

  “Hold it, Inspector,” Merlini broke in. “If you’re going to let Ross in on the pay-off, don’t begin with your climax. Build up to it.”

  I reached over the counter and picked up one of the heavy glass spheres that were labeled “Finest Crystal Gazing Globes. Specially Priced. $6.50.” I hefted it menacingly.

  Gavigan said, “All right, you take it. And while you’re at it, I want to know how you doped it. I still don’t see what the tip-off was. You weren’t even there yet when Tarot—”

  “There you go again,” Merlini objected. He served Peter Rabbit another carrot. “Let’s begin at the beginning, with Sabbat’s murder. The main problem there was one of escape. The Inspector wouldn’t have Surgat, and both of you thoroughly snowed under my davenport suggestion with obviously valid objections. And, anyway, I’d found no traces under the davenport, as I’d previously admitted. There was nothing left except Duvallo’s hanky-panky with the string.”

  “Damn!” I said heartily. I know enough never to believe a magician and, in spite of all his protestations to the contrary, I’d half expected him to come through at the last with a nice new escape for that apartment. “But if Duvallo’s explanation is correct,” I went on, “the murderer had to be in the apartment to throw that bolt sometime between our breaking in and the arrival of the police. Duvallo doesn’t qualify.”

  “Take it easy, Ross. Forget Duvallo for a moment. Just assume that the murderer must have been there, and put yourself in his place. Suppose you were the murderer and had yet to finish off your monkey business with the kitchen door. First, you’d go over there supplied with a couple of witnesses. Secondly, you’d not welcome any unpredictable elements in your little act, and when neighbor Harte from across the hall put in his two cents’ worth you’d not be pleased. And you would certainly object to his phoning the cops before you had even broken into the place. Furthermore, you’d try to keep yourself in command of the situation, directing and controlling the actions of others, and, most important of all, you’d damn well see to it that you, and you only, were the first person into that kitchen. Right?”

  “It sounds swell. But it was Tarot who did all those things!”

  Merlini smiled mysteriously. “And you gave him a couple of nasty moments. Your announcement that you had already called the police, for instance. They might burst in at any moment, and he hadn’t even started for the kitchen. He went into action at once. He suggested that the murderer might still be lurking about, and, to emphasize the danger, and to provide a good reason for his being the only one to go look, he pulled out that gun and waved it about. Then, you rushed in where angels wouldn’t have poked their noses. He had to think fast and shunt you off into the bedroom. All those things were highly indicative. Tarot was the only suspect of the lot who acted at every turn as if he wanted to get that kitchen door.”

  “And with his alibi he couldn’t possibly have been the murderer,” I said, wondering where the hell this was taking us.

  “But, as far as we knew at that time, he might have been the murderer’s accomplice. It looked very much, in fact, as if he and the murderer were trying to frame Duvallo. There were all those heavy-handed clues cocked and aimed at Duvallo, the business card, his picklocks, and the fact that the crime seemed to call for an escape artist.”

  “Yeah,” Gavigan put in, “I thought that, too, until Tarot began acting up, not leaving his fingerprints, vanishing from that taxi, having Sabbat’s gun, giving the wrong address, and all that. It didn’t make sense. When you’re trying to frame someone it’s customary to try and keep your own skirts clean. But I never thought—”

  “And then,” Merlini interposed hastily, “the apple cart was up-dumped properly. Duvallo walked in, nice as you please, and two things happened that were as subtly suspicious as all the evidence against him was overly obvious. The business card turned out to implicate not Duvallo, but Tarot. That was bad. As long as it pointed at Duvallo, his position was relatively sound, but when it about-faced and we discovered it had been pointing at Tarot all along, Duvallo was in dutch.”

  “Do you have your own private brand of logic?” I objected. “Take those paradoxical jumps a bit slower, please. I’m falling off.”

  Merlini scratched the rabbit’s ears. “The card was planted, of course. Gavigan told Duvallo as much, and he was dead right. If it was not planted and was a straight-forward clue, we’d have had to assume that the man it implicated, Duvallo, was a sixteen-carat bungling idiot. But the crime itself gave the lie to that.

  “The only question was, did the murderer plant the card in order to throw suspicion on Duvallo, or did Duvallo plant it in order to give the appearance of being framed by some murderer not himself? Duvallo wanted us to think he was being framed, and that phony, phony phone-call from a mysterious Mr. Williams was for the same purpose. Duvallo got a jolt when Gavigan surprised him by going straight to the truth. He hadn’t given the cops credit for that much penetration.”

  “He’d probably read too many detective stories,” Gavigan muttered.

  “Not only that,” Merlini went on, “but he suspected the police might be so obtuse that they wouldn’t deduce that he was being framed. He was performing that most dangerous trick, murder, and he became over-cautious. He used a card which had Tarot’s erased writing on it—a card, by the way, which he could have filed away for future use as easily as Tarot might have done. The erasure was fairly obvious, and if the police hadn’t seen it, he’d have pointed it out. That was where he made his mistake. As soon as I realized that the card had never really implicated him, I was sure he had planted it. If anyone else had wanted to implicate Tarot they’d have left Tarot’s calling card, not Duvallo’s. There would be no reason for a delayed action clue.”

  The Inspector said, “You don’t mean to tell me, Merlini, that you knew Duvallo was guilty because of any highfalutin’ complicated reasoning like that?”

  “No, but it made me good and suspicious. Besides, the business card was only a subtle error in reasoning alongside the glaring blunder that followed. He tried to prove, without damaging his professional reputation, that he couldn’t possibly have gotten out of that apartment. What sent me into a tail spin was the fact that he did exactly that. He did prove that he couldn’t have been the one to bolt the kitchen door, and at the same time he admitted that he was the murderer!”

  “He did what!” Gavigan was startled.

  “He gave himself away completely. He explained far too much. More than he should have known. He borrowed the Inspector’s handkerchief to use in demonstrating how the key-holes might have been plugged up, and he put the pencil marks on it before he had been told that any were found on Sabbat’s handkerchief!”2

  The Inspector stared, his blue eyes popping. Then he growled, “Damn!”

  “But,” I wanted to know, “why the pencil marks anyway? If the murderer had only poked the cloth into the keyholes with the eraser end of the pencil, he wouldn’t have needed to switch the handkerchief later. The bolting of the door wasn’t really necessary; it was locked. The murderer wouldn’t have needed to come back, or send an assistant at all. Sounds screwy to me.”

  “Sure, it would. You’re a simple and more direct person than Duvallo. He’s a magician and his wiles are devious. He’s in love with mystery, and a Grade A impossibility wasn’t good enough for him. He had to make it a super-production—and it boomeranged. He began with a sound original idea. He’d commit two murders, make it clear to the dumbest nitwit of a cop that they were—that they must have been—committed by the same person, and then he’d be prepared with an unshakable alibi for one of them. You might commit a whole series of crimes using that technique; just be sure that your one alibi is strong enough. His was. It consisted in being with the police when Tarot was murdered. He should have left it at that, but he didn’t; he tried to cook up an
alibi for Sabbat’s murder too. He over-elaborated. The pencil marks made the switching of the torn handkerchief necessary, and that proved that the murderer must have come back to the apartment during a time when it seemed fairly obvious that Duvallo had not been present.”

  “I don’t follow that,” I said. “If you two have jugged the right man, if Duvallo is the murderer, then the pencil marks prove, not that the murderer came back, but that he had an assistant, Tarot. But that doesn’t…I don’t see—”

  “And at that point,” Merlini continued, “neither did I. If those two were in cahoots, why in the name of sanity did Tarot accuse Duvallo and vice versa? That certainly didn’t look like teamwork. And they couldn’t both be double-crossing each other. A murderer and his accomplice usually prefer hanging together to hanging separately. One line of reasoning said that they must be colleagues in crime, and another equally valid chain of logic said the exact opposite. The logical snarl that left us in was as bad as any rope-tie Duvallo ever escaped from. And then,” Merlini flung his hands wide, fingers spread, “the whole set piece exploded right in my face with a loud Whoosh! The incomprehensible Tarot is killed, and his body is surrounded on all sides by evidence—the method of murder, Sabbat’s dressing-gown cord, Dr. Dee’s crystal, the Grimorium page, the very position of the body—evidence which could only mean that there was but one killer. And at the time of Tarot’s death Duvallo was in plain sight talking to us, busily curving the suspicion back toward Tarot! Even if we supposed that he had really learned the neatest trick of the Tibetan week—being in two places at once—and had admitted that his astral double killed Tarot in order to remove a double-crossing accomplice, we should still have to explain Tarot’s damnably inconsistent actions. On top of all that, Tarot dead presented us with a new puzzler—his disguise. Each new discovery was a setback. Our retrograde motion was a sight to behold. In spite of his giveaway blunder, the Great Duvallo drew further ahead of the bloodhounds every minute.”

  “Merlini,” Gavigan kibitzed, “stop blowing up toy balloons so they’ll make a big bust when your devastating logic starts to pop ’em.”

  “But, Inspector,” Merlini argued, “they weren’t toy balloons at the time; they were more like stone walls. You’ll have to admit that.”

  I broke in peevishly, “You’re forgetting that I don’t know the answers. Get on with it. I’m a nervous wreck.”

  Merlini went on calmly: “I’d had a quick peek behind the scenes, a passing glimpse of the rabbits hiding in the hat, and still he fooled me. The mystery got progressively deeper until finally we resolved one impossibility. We found the gimmicked radio, and we knew that the murder had taken place earlier—apparently a half hour earlier—sometime between Tarot’s arrival and the beginning of the snowfall. We knew then why there were no footprints in the snow. But did that help any? The murder took place in Duvallo’s own rooms; he had by far the best opportunity to hocus that radio; and I was sure that, not expecting the snow, he’d left that ladder against the open window so that we’d think someone had gone down it—someone not an escape artist. But his alibi was as ironclad as ever. A half hour before, at ten o’clock, he had already arrived at Sabbat’s and placed himself where there could be no doubt of his presence, right under our noses.”

  “And then Jones turned out to be the guy who started the radio,” Gavigan added disgustedly.

  “Yes, he looked like off-stage assistant number two, only he was the wrong man for the part. Not being a complete idiot, he wouldn’t go down there at Duvallo’s request and poke that light button, knowing that his ventriloquial ability would put him smack on the spot. But I felt morally certain that somehow, in spite of Space and Time, Duvallo had managed to strangle Tarot. So I asked myself this: could Duvallo have made Jones stop in and flick that light switch at precisely the proper moment, without Jones realizing that he was acting in any way except of his own free will and by chance? Put that way, I saw it. The answer could be yes.”

  Merlini grinned maliciously, looked at Gavigan and said, “Ross, here, is going to sit right up on his hind legs and howl that it’s too shilling-shockerish, that it’s too trite and whiskered a device to go well in the story he’s itching to write. My answer to that is: why, those criticisms being true, didn’t he tumble to it? We talked about the method enough, both during the investigation and now, just a few minutes ago.”

  I tried, not very successfully, to cover my chagrin with nonchalance. “I’ll be damned! Duvallo hypnotized him!”

  “Exactly.” Merlini chuckled. “That’s the only thing that could have happened other than a ridiculously impossible coincidence. Duvallo persuaded Jones to try a hypnotic experiment, and, during the trance, double-crossed him. He gave Jones a post-hypnotic command to show up and turn on that light at 10:30 sharp, and then told him that on awakening he’d not remember having been hypnotized at all. That’s what the absent-minded suspect forgot, and that’s what Duvallo knew that another spot of hypnosis would uncover. Duvallo admit that, Inspector?”

  “Yes. I thought for a minute he was coked up when he confessed that. But then I remembered something I’d read in Sodermann and O’Connell’s book.3 They mention a case in which two young men hypnotized a girl, raped her, and then, through suggestion, compelled her to forget what had happened. If that’s possible, then I guess Duvallo could have made Jones push a light switch.”

  “Go on,” I prodded. “How do you get over the next hurdle? You’ve still got to get Tarot killed.”

  Merlini got down off the counter and put the rabbit in his pen on the floor. “I know,” he said. “That’s what gave me the jitters. Somewhere along the line Duvallo had pulled a fast one. The murders were tricks, and he was a magician. If my pet theory of deduction was true, we must have slipped up somewhere along the line; we hadn’t caught the tell-tale manoeuver when the rabbit was loaded into the hat. I’d caught him out over those pencil marks, and that something I didn’t find that I wasn’t looking for at Tarot’s apartment held intriguing possibilities, but it was all too vague and uncertain. I needed something more conclusive. So I had Ross write down in full detail what had gone before, what I had until then only heard verbally. It worked. The clue was there, and suddenly all the trap doors and the secret springs were laid bare. Duvallo’s house of cards fell, flat as yesterday’s uncapped seltzer water. But since the evidence still wouldn’t be sure-fire

  with a jury, and I wasn’t certain that you’d accept it, I set the Bullet Trick trap.”

  Merlini had that half dollar out again, and as it twinkled in his hands, I saw that he’d worked out a new one. He balanced the coin on the tips of his fingers and slapped it into the palm of his left hand, which he shut tightly. Gesturing cabalistically at the closed fist, he slowly opened it, and in pretended amazement poured out change for the half dollar—a quarter, a dime, two nickels, and five pennies.

  The Inspector carefully took no notice. “Was it something I saw, too?” he asked appehensively.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. It was a common enough action, ordinarily quite innocent, but this time it was positively pregnant with possibilities. Harte’s report said—and he mentioned it twice—Tarot pushed back his cuff and glanced at a silver wrist watch.”4

  I saw comprehension creeping over the Inspector’s face, but I didn’t feel any yet on my own.

  Merlini turned and pulled down a book from the shelves. “Harte doesn’t get it, Inspector. Do you mind, now that it’s all over and the culprit has been apprehended, if I help him out with just one last spot of witchcraft?”

  I had never expected to see Inspector Gavigan smile at the mention of that subject, but he did now. “I haven’t figured out any way of stopping you, Merlini, short of assault and battery.”

  “I see no objection to that,” I said acidly.

  Merlini grinned and ignored me. “We’ve had occasion,” he said, riffling through the book and finding a turned down corner, “to mention this work before. It is Madame David-Neel’s Magic and M
ystery in Tibet. There’s a description here titled ‘Rolang, the corpse who dances.’ ” He read quickly:

  The celebrant is shut up alone with a corpse in a dark room. To animate the body, he lies on it, mouth to mouth, and while holding it in his arms, he must continually repeat mentally the same magic formula, excluding all other thoughts.

  After a certain time the corpse begins to move. It stands up and tries to escape; the sorcerer, firmly clinging to it, prevents it from freeing itself. Now the body struggles more fiercely. It leaps and bounds to extraordinary heights, dragging with it the man who must hold on, keeping his lips upon the mouth of the monster, and continue mentally repeating the magic words.

  At last the tongue of the corpse protrudes from its mouth. The critical moment has arrived. The sorcerer seizes the tongue with his teeth and bites it off. The corpse at once collapses.

  Failure in controlling the body, after having awakened it, means certain death for the sorcerer.

  The tongue carefully dried becomes a powerful weapon for the triumphant ngagspa.

  “And,” he added, closing the book, “Duvallo failed to control the body of Tarot after he had awakened it!”

  “What the blue blazing hell!” I thought, and scowling said, “If you’re all very good boys and girls tomorrow I’ll tell you all about how Uncle Wiggley outwitted the Skillery Sealery Alligator and the nasty, bad old Werewolf. Boo! And nuts!”

  “Go ahead, laugh, but that’s what happened. It’s the only way to untie all the water-soaked knots that snarled up that alibi list. We couldn’t escape the dilemma by assuming two murderers—two people working as one—because of the evidence. But there wasn’t anything to prevent the assumption that one person had worked as two. Duvallo killed Tarot and then brought him back to life. Our not so triumphant ngagspa had two accomplices; Jones, who wasn’t aware of it, and Tarot, who was dead.”

  “My God, a zombie!” I groaned.