Death from a Top Hat

by Clayton Rawson

  “Exactly.” Merlini had put aside the book and was playing with three walnut shells and a pea that lay on the counter. “Duvallo impersonated Tarot. And I don’t understand why you didn’t see it, Ross. You know that impersonation, like hypnotism and secret exits, is, in a detective novel, as hackneyed as all get out. When the gentle reader notices in Chapter Two that Lady Van Wigglebottom was a shining light in her high school dramatic society, you know immediately that she’s going to turn out to be the mysterious stranger with the red beard who was seen putting a white powder in the soup. But this time there wasn’t just one amateur actor in the case, they were all actors, most of them professionals. That was the one thing that they all really had in common. Impersonation was written all over the case. Gavigan thought of it once when what was supposed to be Tarot’s voice didn’t sound right in the Xanadu broadcast, and, for a moment, he had truth by the tail. He shouted that someone must have been impersonating Tarot. Later, when Tarot vanished, the cab driver impersonated him for a block or two; and, finally, I told you that Tarot had impersonated Duvallo in the Mystery of the Yogi. It could work just as well the other way about. And Duvallo was the only person who could possibly have played the part of Tarot!5 All the others were too short or too fat, too old or too young, the wrong sex, or they had appeared simultaneously with Tarot. But compare the descriptions of the two men in the resume Harte wrote for me. They are alike in all the fundamental essentials of build, general facial structure, same color eyes, and hair. Their differences lay in those superficialities of voice and dress that are the things most easily noticed in a dimly lit room, and the easiest to imitate.”

  “You mean to say that we never saw Tarot alive at all?” I asked.

  Merlini nodded. “We decided that Tarot couldn’t have been killed any earlier than ten o’clock because that seemed to be the earliest hour at which he could have arrived at Duvallo’s. We were wrong. He had arrived, had been admitted and killed by Duvallo almost four hours earlier. Duvallo brought him back to life for Watrous, Rappourt, and the rest of you by impersonating him and in doing so literally managed to be in two places at once. It was while I was telling you about Tarot’s impersonation of Duvallo in the Yogi-in-two-places-at-once trick that I first tumbled to it. Gradually it dawned on me that here was a hypothesis that explained away all our difficulties.”

  He checked the points off on his fingers. “One: It offered Duvallo a way of being present at Sabbat’s to throw that bolt and switch the handkerchief in the keyhole himself. Two: It would explain why Tarot avoided being fingerprinted and never removed his gloves even when doing card tricks—he couldn’t go around leaving Duvallo’s fingerprints. Three: It would explain why Tarot, who ordinarily went out of his way to get publicity, when he left Sabbat’s covered his face with his arms and bowled photographers over right and left. Four: It gave a reason for the pennies in the light sockets—the less light during the impersonation the better. And to see Duvallo as himself. Point number five concerned—”

  “Wait a minute,” I cut in. “During the time ‘Tarot’ was on the scene Duvallo said he was alone in his booking office waiting for Williams, but he heard the detectives come and knock on the door. How do you explain that?”

  Gavigan answered, “That’s easy. As Tarot, he heard me order the men to go there.”

  “And that,” Merlini added, “was the only thing that made his ‘waiting alone in the office’ story even faintly plausible. Point number five concerns the towel with the cold cream on it that was found at Tarot’s. Tarot wouldn’t have smeared a towel with cold cream putting on that sun-tan disguise, but Duvallo would have done just that removing his Tarot disguise. Six, was the mysterious suitcase which had been cached in the lockers in Grand Central. That could have held Duvallo’s own clothes, which he would need when he discarded those of Tarot. Seven: The impersonation would explain why Tarot had given a false home address—Duvallo wouldn’t have wanted the place cluttered up with cops before he’d had a chance to get there, accomplish his Tarot-to-Duvallo metamorphosis and leave Tarot’s clothes strewn about the bedroom. Point eight made me pretty sure I had something. The impersonation would answer that whopper of a question I kept insisting on why had Tarot escaped Janssen with a vanish that was as fancy as a birthday cake instead of using more ordinary bread-and-butter methods? The taxi-vanish, as worked, sent Janssen off on a wild goose chase and not only gave Duvallo time to make his change but with any sort of luck, time to get back to Sabbat’s and report to us as himself before Tarot was listed as missing. If we hadn’t penetrated that inspired bit of conjuring we would have been out on the end of a long, long limb. We would have been sure that Duvallo and Tarot were present and accounted for simultaneously, Duvallo at Sabbat’s and Tarot in the taxi. And finally, point nine. I had felt all along that Tarot acted as if he expected to be killed and knew he wouldn’t have to answer for his tall stories and mysteriously suspicious actions.”

  The Inspector said, “You had all that under your hat and you were afraid to present the impersonation theory?”

  “There wasn’t any really concrete evidence for a prosecuting attorney to get his teeth into, nothing so far but nice, neat speculation. And I couldn’t quite believe it myself until Ross convinced me with his written resume. He turned up three more things that pointed to impersonation. Ten: I discovered that Tarot had receded modestly into the background and become suddenly and unnaturally quiet as soon as the LaClaires, who knew the real Tarot, came on the scene. And eleven: he had hurriedly left Sabbat’s as soon as he heard I was on my way for the same reason.”

  Merlini placed the pea on the counter, covered it with a walnut shell, and put his hand over that. He smiled, removed his hand, and, strangely enough, the pea was still there—but the walnut shell had perversely vanished into some limbo of prestidigitation.

  “Point twelve,” he went on, “consisted in another lamentable boner by the Great Duvallo. When I read in Harte’s account that Tarot had worn a silver wrist watch, I remembered that Tarot had bribed the cab driver with a gold watch and chain. Odd assortment of timepieces for the impeccably attired Tarot to be caught out in. Added to this was the fact that no wrist watch was ever found, either on Tarot’s body or in his apartment, and the fact that Duvallo wore one. Might not Duvallo have dressed himself in Tarot’s clothes, gold watch and all, and forgotten to remove his own wrist watch? Like glasses, one is apt to forget that they class as wearing apparel.

  “Twelve points, plus one, the unlucky thirteenth, that something I wasn’t looking for at Tarot’s apartment which I didn’t find…”

  “The medicine cabinet!” I exclaimed suddenly, and Gavigan, startled, eyed me like a suspicious psychiatrist. “So that’s what was so odd—Tarot was stocked with flesh-colored sticking plaster, but no adhesive tape!”

  Merlini grinned. “Yes, Duvallo was caught out there too. He’d tried to make it too good again. The adhesive wasn’t really essential, though it did serve two purposes. It helped his disguise as Tarot, and, later, it distracted anyone’s suspicion that strangulation had changed Tarot rather too much. Same principle the conjurer uses when he has you initial the card you’ve selected. He nicked Tarot’s face just after death, applied adhesive, and then, dressing in Tarot’s clothes, put a similar strip of adhesive on his own face, but with no cut under it.”

  “And what we thought was Tarot’s disguise,” I said excitedly, “was made necessary because Duvallo, having taken his clothes, couldn’t very well leave Tarot in his underwear at Van Ness Lane, and later leave the evening dress for us to find at 50th Street. It would not only have indicated that someone else must have worn his evening dress, but it would have left us with the odd picture of Tarot, the Beau Brummel of Broadway, travelling crosstown on a cold winter’s day clad only in his unmentionables. So Duvallo dressed Eugene in an old suit of his own (minus laundry marks) glasses, and a mustache to suggest a disguise and offer a reason why the immaculately tailored Tarot should be caught dead in a suit
of old clothes. Then he smashed the lamp, put Dr. Dee’s crystal in Tarot’s pocket and the Grimorium page under the body, left the floor lamp burning, Sabbat’s dressing-gown cord around Tarot’s neck, the ladder at the window with the intervening study door left open, and all the radiators turned for the body’s rigor being so far advanced—and then he fared forth to gather up Watrous and Rappourt, and finish the kitchen door sequence. Sabbat, I suspect, hadn’t invited Watrous and Rappourt over at all; that was Duvallo’s doing. The gun he swiped when he strangled Sabbat the night before; Jones had already been given his hypnotic instructions, and the radio was set. But how did he entice Tarot into his parlor? Something as simple as inviting him over for tea, I suppose?”

  “Not quite,” Gavigan said. “It was a lot surer than that. It has to do with the motive. You said you could make a guess, Merlini. Let’s hear it.”

  “The $100,000. It was blackmail after all. I said that none of our suspects were wealthy enough to pay out that much hush money, and as I said it I was hit, all of a heap, with the realization that Duvallo could get it if he wanted to. With his knowledge of locks and how to overcome them, it would be pie…”

  “It evidently was,” Gavigan admitted. “On May 10, 1936, one hundred thousand smackers in cold cash disappeared as neatly as if it had melted from the vaults of the American Consolidated Oil and Petroleum Company. May 10th was a Sunday. The money was there Saturday night, and it wasn’t there Monday morning. There was absolutely no trace of forced entry, and six locked doors, plus the door to the vault itself, stood between that money and anyone from the outside. The officials of the company were half crazy; the treasurer slid right off into a nervous collapse. I checked all this last night with Inspector Barnes, who had charge of the investigation. Figuring it must have been an inside job, the officials pulled some wires so that Barnes got orders to keep the whole thing a deep dark secret—none of the papers carried a line. The employees were given a royal going over; they even tried the lie detector and caught two or three small-fry grafters with their pants down. But information about the missing 100 grand? Not a thing! An investigator for the insurance company took a job with the company and worked there almost six months before he gave it up, knowing exactly as much as he did when he started. Duvallo was doing his full evening show at the Majestic in Chicago that week-end. He took a plane after his Saturday night show, came here, did his burgling early Sunday morning, handed the dough over to Tarot and Sabbat, and flew back in time to give a radio talk that evening over WGN. A couple of weeks later when all seemed safe and quiet Tarot and Sabbat made their bank deposits.”

  Merlini nodded, smiling. “There’s another little sample of Dave’s attention to detail, Inspector. I remember that broadcast. He gave his usual lecture exposing the tricks of con men and crooked gamblers. It was called The Right Way To Do Wrong.”

  “He knew his subject,” Gavigan said. “He got himself into hot water first by pulling the same stunt before, in Paris in ’30. That was before he made such a rep for himself and he was stony broke. He cleaned out a back safe there one night, but he had to tangle with the night watchman on the way out. The watchman inconsiderately tumbled down a flight of stairs and fractured his skull. That story did make the papers, and Tarot and Sabbat, who were both in that neck of the woods at the time, put two and two together, particularly after he paid back loans they’d both made him. Tarot and Sabbat sneaked into his rooms one night and found the cash he hadn’t dared bank. He had to split with them, and they had him cold. Two years ago Sabbat, his money spent, returned from Europe, hunted up Tarot, and they started to work on Duvallo again. They told him he’d have to do a return engagement of his burglary act. They had him by the short hairs; he had a reputation now that he didn’t want to lose. One slip off the straight and narrow, one hint that he’d been engaged in burglary, would properly sink his professional career as an escape artist. Forced to quiet them, he got the dough, and he took what he thought was enough to keep ’em good and quiet from then on. But Sabbat promptly went off on an orgy of rare book and curio buying and Tarot’s sleight of hand was no match for that of the boys in Wall Street. In the last few weeks Sabbat, particularly, had to have more; and Tarot wasn’t averse to the idea. At least, if Duvallo was going to get more, he might as well have his cut. They put it up to him just after he got back from the road. Duvallo stalled, told them they’d had plenty and they could go to hell. But Sabbat got nasty and threatened to tell Miss Barclay. That tore it. And Duvallo realized now that Sabbat was just bats enough so that he couldn’t be trusted, even after getting more money, to keep his mouth shut. There was nothing else for it but murder—and it had to be both of them. He sat up nights trying to figure out a safe and sane method. Then, at Miss Barclay’s one evening he read one of Tarot’s Crime Doesn’t Pay scripts which she had brought home to work on. The irony of Tarot’s furnishing his murderer with an alibi didn’t escape him either. He saw that argumentative ‘the police will never know’ bit of dialogue, and he had his radio idea. I’ve seen the script, and some of the dialogue Grimm didn’t catch was even more appropriate. From there on the rest of the trickery was all in the day’s work for a magician. Tarot came running over to see him that afternoon because Duvallo said he had got the money and was ready to pay off.”

  Merlini took a cocktail shaker from one of the shelves behind him, removed its price tag, showed us that it was empty, and promptly poured out three Martinis.

  “And that,” he said, “is that.”

  “Oh, no, it isn’t,” I objected. “What was that whispering huddle you went into with Duvallo yesterday afternoon in the study? I saw you looking at that clothesline pulley and heard you mention the tree, and I was sure you had figured a seventh method of escape from that place.”

  Merlini grinned. “I had. For Duvallo’s benefit. But I didn’t know I’d misdirected you, too. I suggested that the murderer might have re-installed the clothesline—the usual endless affair running around pulleys between the window and the tree—and asked him if he thought the murderer might not have grasped the clothesline and coasted, like on of those old-time department store cash boxes, out across the yard and into the tree. He could have then cut the line, pulled it after him, and dropped over the wall into the next yard, and away. Duvallo jumped at the idea. It was a good substitute for the ladder theory he had meant us to adopt and which the snow had queered. And it left him thinking that I didn’t suspect him at all. I had to put him at ease on that, or he might not have thought it worth while to eliminate Jones. Satisfied, Ross?”

  “Then Judy of the scarlet tresses,” I said, “was just a red herring, and the LaClaires—say, why did they have to show up at Sabbat’s when they did, anyway? Got an answer for that?”

  “Yes,” Gavigan said, “I spent an hour or so this morning collecting loose ends, and I talked to her. She’d tried to reach Sabbat by phone several times with no luck and had begun to worry. It occurred to her that maybe the night before she’d flown off the handle a bit too soon when she had pounded on his door and cussed him out. Perhaps something had happened to him. She left that Tudor City cocktail party ahead of Alfred, and he trailed her, catching up just as she came in the front door. They had a bit of a scrap downstairs, and he followed her up. He says he intended to tell them both where to get off. When they found Sabbat dead, Zelma realized the sounds she’d heard inside the night before must have been made by the murderer and that she had exactly no alibi. And Alfred immediately suspected her and hinted as much to us.”

  “What about Rappourt and Watrous?” I asked. “Are they on the up and up, or not? Is she medium or fraud? And wasn’t there something more behind that fake faint she pulled when you started questioning her, Merlini?”

  “Yes, I’m glad you asked that. She’d had a good hard jolt when she saw who the corpse was, and she got another when she found me nosing around, hand in glove with the cops. Svoboda was her maiden name, and she knew that if I recognized her you would, in checking back,
discover her connection with Sabbat. The trance was for the purpose of stalling my questions and getting herself some time out to plan a course. She realized that unless she side-stepped me she was in a tough spot. As for her mediumship, I’ve had a look at her act. I’m going to do that soon somehow.”6

  “And what about the pentacle invoking Surgat and that levitation in full light that Duvallo told us about? More of his fancy embroidery—or was it?”

  “That,” Merlini said in his best ghost story voice, “is something we can never know. What strange secrets of the mystic occult, what recondite mysteries of Gnostic science Sabbat had explored, we cannot—”

  “Applesauce,” Gavigan snorted. “Tarot—I mean Duvallo—lied. Duvallo drew that pentacle on the floor just to thicken the mystery, gladden the hearts of city editors, and annoy the police. As for Sabbat floating in midair—Duvallo thought he was so damned clever he could make murder give off a byproduct. He had a new levitation illusion planned for his act. He knew he could pretend he was heir to an occult method of Sabbat’s and could broadcast the story to the reporters without anyone being able to disprove it this side of the Styx. He figured that a couple of fancy impossible murders like these would splash across every front page in the country and carry his picture with it—the policeman’s little friend, the conjurer who had explained to the dim-witted cops how the unknown murderer must have escaped from Sabbat’s apartment. And—well, does all that classify as A No. 1 publicity, or doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” Merlini admitted. “And if Jones had been killed on the stage last night, and if Duvallo had, according to plan, successfully stepped off into the wings and shucked his committeeman disguise, to reappear immediately as himself, the triple murder would have been climaxed by the most dramatic vanishing-man stunt of them all. It would have been a city editor’s dream, and Duvallo would have been able to sell standing room eight weeks in advance.”