“Smith,” Kay answered in an awed voice. “He came out. He may even have found her with the gun in her hands!”
“Go on. And then—”
“Then,” I said, “it’s stalemate. He’s got her cold on two charges of attempted murder and one successful one. But if she can escape conviction, he can blackmail her for the lion’s share of what she’ll get under Wolff’s will. Or he could if he wasn’t trapped there in her room. The moment he’s found, he’s going to have to talk fast and confess to attempted blackmail and assault in order to pin the murder rap on her before she tries to pin it on him.”
Merlini nodded. “The only possible chance of escaping that many-horned dilemma is for him to get out of that room and clear of the house. Mrs. Wolff, who has tried so hard all along to kill Smith, now has no choice but to help him escape. They wait until the upper hallway is clear for a moment, a long and nerve-racking wait because that doesn’t happen until just before dawn when Flint’s men have finished their examination of the study. Then Mrs. Wolff slips out and goes after a flashlight. It may be a bit awkward if she’s spotted, since Haggard’s sedative is supposed to have put her out of action, but it’s their only chance. Smith can’t try to leave by that route because if anyone gets the smallest glimpse of him the fat really would be in the fire.
“I can imagine that Smith, knowing all too well by now that he can’t trust her out of his sight, doesn’t like this procedure one little bit. But he has no choice and, not being able to see just how she can double-cross him without putting her own neck in a noose, he underestimates her once again. During that three-hour wait she has figured out a way. She knows that even if he escapes, it still leaves her holding the bag. She can expect him to bleed her of every cent of the inheritance she’ll get and she has no guarantee at all that even then he may not some day turn her in as revenge for the twice she’s tried to kill him. When she goes down the hall she puts plan number three for the elimination of the phoenixlike Mr. Smith into action. She makes for the kitchen, picks up the dry ice, and goes down through the basement to the garage.”
“Wait,” I broke in. “Her experience as a medium made the vanishing-gun trick possible, but what about the dry ice? Why would she think of a stunt like that?”
“Same reason, Ross. The cold breezes that sometimes waft themselves through a séance room are not the ghostly emanations from the Beyond the medium pretends, but result much more prosaically from a concealed blowing mechanism and dry ice, which is exactly the setup she used this time. She knew that in the small space of a closed car the ghostly breezes would be deadly ones. The printed warnings on a dry-ice container are enough to indicate that. She could have put the ice in her own car, given Smith the keys, and said later that she had left them in the car. But, since that’s just what Kay had done, it was simpler and more misleading to use her car instead. She planted the murder gun there too, partly as a means of getting it out of the house and partly so that suspicion would fall and this time remain on what, she hoped would at last be a dead Mr. Smith. That would close the case.
“Then she took Kay’s flash and returned to her room either by the way she had left, or now that she had a light, more probably by the more direct and less risky trellis route. She threw a scare into Smith by reporting that the estate was overrun with police and convinced him that, since it’s daylight, his best chance of running the gantlet is to make a quick break for it in the car. It was good advice as far as it went, and Smith’s one thought by then was to get as far away as fast as possible. When Dunning nearly caught him at it in the garage, that only hastened his flight.”
“Okay, Mastermind,” I growled, still annoyed at the way he had crossed me up, “that answers everything except the one about the escaped lunatic and the speed of the river under his rowboat.5 But if you had it figured out as neatly as all that you could have talked Flint into agreeing—”
Merlini shook his head. “I’m not so sure, Ross. He might have asked me question number five, the one I didn’t ask you because I don’t have the answer. And if he didn’t ask it, she would have.”
“Question number five?”
“Yes. Mrs. Wolff tried to get Smith with the trap gun, she shot her husband, and she succeeded finally in getting Smith with the dry ice. Her motive each time was desperation. She was trying frantically to save her own neck. But what about that first time when she tried to kill Smith by leaving him in the grave? We haven’t got a motive for that.”
“What’s wrong with the one I gave you? She couldn’t trust him not to turn around later and blackmail her?”
“If she couldn’t trust him, why use him as an accomplice at all? She had more sense—”
“Who else could she use? Shallow-breathing burial-alive experts don’t grow on every bush.”
“All right. That brings up question number six. Why did she have to try to blackmail her husband in that very unusual manner? You talked very glibly and fast to the effect that it wasn’t much fun being married to Dudley. You said that if she tried to cut loose by any of the usual means he’d blow up in his customary manner and see to it that she didn’t get away with any cash. That’s weak. I don’t like it. She’s clever enough to have thought of some way that didn’t include murder. Yet she didn’t. Why not? We know all her motives except the most important one—the original one that set the whole train of fireworks off.”
Lieutenant Flint’s voice came suddenly from the doorway. “I hope we get it, but our chances aren’t good.”
“She got away?” asked Merlini.
“No. We got her. Tucker was bright enough to have Ryan stick with the cars when they parked them down the drive, just in case. When he heard the shots and I heard the getaway car coming he swung one of the police cars out across the drive. She came around a curve and smacked into it head on. Doctor Haggard says she won’t be answering any questions for some time, if then.”
Flint got the answer though. He brought it backstage a week later, just before the first performance of Merlini’s Hocus-Pocus Revue which was opening on schedule, courtesy of an angel named Kathryn Wolff.
“Here’s the motive you wanted,” he said, laying out on Merlini’s dressing-room table a large scrapbook, a newspaper clipping, and a telegram.
The latter read: Man answering Zareh Bey description operated religious cult racket here until three months ago under name Zorah the Mystic. Wanted on charges of using the mails to defraud.—Capt. J. J. O’Connor, Los Angeles Police Department.
“That’s what he’s been up to since he died on the Morro Castle,” Flint said. “When the going got rough he ducked out and came East. He was staying in a cheap hotel over on Tenth Avenue. When we searched his room we found this.”
The lieutenant picked up the newspaper clipping which I recognized as part of one of the picture layouts in the series of articles I had written about Wolff. It was a shot of Mr. and Mrs. Wolff at the annual banquet of the National Association of Chemical Trades and Industries. Dudley, who had just been elected president, was beaming. Mrs. Wolff, caught off guard by the photographer, was plainly bored stiff.
“And then,” Flint continued, “I located the booking agent who handled Zareh Bey back in ’33 and ’34.” Flint opened the big scrapbook, across the cover of which was lettered: Zareh Bey, The Man Who Cannot Die—Press Notices. “The dates on these clippings tell a good bit of the story. The agent gave me the rest. Zareh blew in to the country in ’29 just after Rahman and Hamid started the burial-alive ball rolling. They were all featured vaudeville headliners for a year or two, but then the supply of fakirs began to exceed the demand, the novelty wore off, vaudeville died on its feet, and by ’33 Zareh is playing two-bit carnivals. In ’34 he decided to have a go at the South American circuit, but he was working on a shoestring and somebody slapped an attachment on his show before he got any farther than Havana. He was head over heels in debt, and then his wife walked out on him. He took the Morro Castle back. You can see why he didn’t deny the newspaper rep
orts of his—”
“Did you say wife?” Merlini put in.
Flint turned a few more pages of the scrapbook and then put his finger on a one-column half-tone cut. The caption beneath read: Medium Produces Strange Spirit Lights in Séance.
“She was the added attraction that entertained the customers while Zareh Bey took his underground nap. Recognize the lady?”
“Yes. She was still married to him at the time of the fire?”
Flint nodded. “You get the idea. And she never got a divorce before marrying Wolff because she didn’t know she needed one.”
“But,” I said, “she finds out when husband number one sees her picture in the papers and discovers who she’s married. He returns from the dead and threatens to tell Wolff that his wife is guilty of bigamy unless she can give him a few good reasons why not—preferably in unmarked bills of large denomination. She can’t pay off because she has no money of her own and Dudley is distinctly not the sort who’d give her any such amount and no questions asked. Zareh Bey won’t take that for an answer. She has to think up another one. So she suggests that they blackmail Wolff together. And, since he doesn’t scare easily except on one count, they play upon his fear of death and get him to believe he has killed a man by staging the phony death and burial of Mr. Smith.”
“A scheme,” Merlini added, “having possibilities that intrigue Zareh Bey. And a few that he doesn’t notice. Mrs. Wolff had a talent for schemes that worked two ways. This one would not only give her the lever she needed to handle Wolff, but would, at the same time, cancel out husband number one by putting him back in the grave she thought he had been in all along. If the man who could not die had only stayed dead he might still be alive.”
“And the real joker,” Flint said, “is that Zareh Bey didn’t actually have anything on her at all. It she believed he was dead when she married Wolff, she did it in good faith and it doesn’t count as bigamy. But she doesn’t know enough law. She tries to kill him off, and because he’s the world’s champion zombi, she has to strike three times before he’s out and shoot husband number two as well. If I ever get another case like it, I’m going to crawl into a hole, pull it in after me, and do some shallow breathing myself.”
Burt Fawkes hurried in. “Overture’s on,” he announced. “Let’s go.”
Merlini stood up, made a gesture with his empty hand and produced a theater ticket from nothing. “Fifth row, center aisle,” he said, handing it to Flint. “We bury ’em alive, burn ’em alive, and saw ’em in two. Just the sort of thing every policeman should know. Go out front and enjoy yourself. I have to finish dressing. Burt, hand me those rabbits.”
A few minutes later, as I waited in the wings with Kay for her first cue, I gave her a kiss for good luck.
“Now go out there and disappear into thin air. But don’t you dare fail to come back.”
“I won’t,” she promised. “I’m going to haunt you for a long time to come. Scared?”
“Well maybe just a little. But I like it.”
5. The answer, in which Ross doesn’t seem greatly interested somehow, is three miles per hour. Since the current hinders the rower when he goes upstream just as much as it later aids him going downstream, its effect on the boat cancels out and does not need to be considered. Therefore, if he rows ten minutes away from the hat, it also takes him ten minutes to row back down to it. Total rowing time: twenty minutes during which the current has carried the hat one mile—a speed of three miles per hour.
—Merlini
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