The Last Illusion

by Unknown

  “I’m Captain Sullivan. We met briefly last night,” he said.

  “You have news for me? You’ve found him?” Her voice quavered.

  “Not a trace so far. That’s why we need your help,” Daniel said. “Do you think you’d feel strong enough to accompany us back to the theater? We haven’t touched anything since last night. I’d like you to take a look for yourself and see if you notice anything unusual that might give us a clue as to what happened.”

  “If you think it will help, I’ll come,” she said.

  He smiled at her. “Good girl,” he said. “Hurry up and get dressed, then. I’ll be waiting in the automobile outside.”

  “An automobile. Fancy that.” She looked rather impressed. “Harry was talking about buying one in Germany this year. We were even shown around the factory where they make them.”

  “Were you?” Daniel looked equally impressed. “Mercedes-Benz, you mean?”

  “Oh, yes. They adore Harry over there. He’s always so interested in the latest machines they’re making. He says they are so much more advanced than we are and of course they love showing off their superiority. They think a lot of themselves in Germany, you know.”

  “We shouldn’t waste Captain Sullivan’s time,” I said, as she appeared rather taken with him and willing to go on chatting. “Do you need me to help you get dressed or should I wait in the automobile with Captain Sullivan?”

  “You can help me if you like,” she said. “I don’t know how steady I’m going to be on my pins after what I’ve been through.”

  “We’ll see you downstairs then,” I said. Daniel nodded and closed the door behind him.

  “He’s awfully charming for a policeman, isn’t he?” she said as she stood up. “Good looking too.”

  “Not bad, I suppose,” I agreed. “Now what will you be wearing, do you think? It’s a hot day out there again.”

  “That’s one of the things I liked about England,” she said. “It was never too hot. I liked England a lot better than Germany but there’s no place like home, is there?”

  I wondered if she’d also seen that new play The Wizard of Oz where that line featured prominently, and smiled to myself.

  It took a while to lace her into her corsets, given that I wasn’t used to the process myself, and then to fix her hair to her satisfaction, but Daniel greeted us with no sign of impatience as he assisted Bess into the front seat of the automobile beside him and then me into the back.

  “Hold on to your hats, ladies,” he said and we set off at a great rate.

  “I’d like to get some details straight before we reach the theater,” he said over the pop-popping of the motor. “You’ve been away from America for a while, I gather.”

  “Three years,” she said. “Most of it in England and Germany, but we were also in Hungary and Harry went to Russia too. I stayed behind that time. Harry thought that Russia might be a dangerous place for me.”

  “Why so long away?”

  “The money,” she said. “They treat Harry like a king over there. He gets paid enormous sums to appear in the theaters and sometimes he is invited to perform for royalty and nobility too. The Tsar of Russia was so taken with him he wanted him to stay on as his adviser. And the Kaiser gave him a gold watch. We only came home this summer because Harry worries about his mother, and I hadn’t been well and was homesick. But we’re booked to sail back to Europe in a couple of weeks from now.”

  We paused to let a horse-drawn jitney cross in front of us. The driver glared as if we were a menace. Little boys ran over to examine our contraption.

  “What makes it go, mister?” one of them asked.

  “Magic!” Daniel called as the coast cleared and we moved off.

  “And I understand that last night wasn’t the first occasion that something unpleasant has happened to you during this visit?” Daniel continued.

  “It wasn’t. In fact I’ve felt uneasy from the moment we landed here. That’s why”—she glanced back at me—“I should probably tell you that this lady in the backseat is not an entertainer at all. She’s a detective, hired by me.”

  “Is she really?” Daniel said. “I suspected something of the kind.”

  “You did? Why?” Bess asked.

  “You only had to watch the way she walked across the stage to know she wasn’t a professional,” Daniel said.

  I thought I saw a smirk. I wanted to hit him but kept my self-control.

  “And why did you hire her, Mrs. Houdini?”

  “Because I thought my husband’s life was in danger.”

  “And you didn’t come to the police?”

  “You don’t know Harry,” she said. “He’s a proud man. He thinks he’s invincible. Besides, he wouldn’t admit there was anything wrong.”

  “But then I gather you yourself almost suffered a similar fate in that trunk a few nights ago,” Daniel continued. “Something went wrong and you were trapped in there?”

  “That’s right.” Bess put a handkerchief up to her mouth. “I thought I was going to suffocate.”

  “Did you have any suspicion at all about who might have done this?” Daniel asked. “You say your husband’s life was in danger, but this was you who nearly died, not your husband that time.”

  “I know. I thought it was maybe to give Harry a warning.”

  So she was a good liar when she needed to be. I resolved to have a private word about it later with Daniel, but I kept quiet for the moment.

  “Who?” Daniel asked, more sharply now. “Who wanted to give your husband such a strong warning?”

  “I’ve no idea. Honestly.” She shook her head so violently I thought her hat might come flying off in the breeze.

  “Yet you said that you recognized the dead man last night. He came to your house, you said, and made threats?”

  “They sounded like threats to me. He asked for Harry and when I said he wasn’t home he said that Harry would know who he was and to tell him that he’d be back.”

  “And what did your husband say when you related this to him?”

  “He said it was nothing to worry about. Just a spot of business.”

  “And he gave you no indication of the man’s name or where he came from?”

  “Nothing. As I told Miss Murphy, Harry was very close about business matters. He didn’t like to bother me with details.”

  “I overheard a similar conversation at the theater,” I said, leaning forward between them as we skirted the park. “Tell me, Mrs. Houdini, did you ever meet a well-dressed young man with light blond hair and light eyes and a sort of haughty air to him?”

  “I can’t say that anyone comes to mind,” she said.

  “Well, I overheard your husband speaking with such a man. They said something about it being ‘serious stuff’ and the other man said, ‘You can’t be too careful’ and that your husband should ‘hurry up and hand it over.’ ”

  “Interesting,” Daniel said. “Did you pick up any ideas about what ‘it’ was?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “And when I asked Mr. Houdini about it he said that everything would be taken care of the next day—that would have been today. So it seems that he had something that someone else wanted, and what happened last night prevented him from delivering it.”

  “Or he didn’t want to hand it over, killed the messenger who came to collect it, and quietly disappeared,” Daniel said.

  “No!” Bess said vehemently. “I keep telling everyone that Harry would never kill. Well, maybe to protect his mother or me, but not for any other reason.”

  There. She had admitted that he was capable of killing. I really didn’t know what to believe. I knew how strong he was and thought how easily he could overpower another man, especially a man like the one in the trunk who was slight of build. Houdini had said everything would be taken care of by tomorrow. So had he been planning this all along—rigging the trunk so that the accident happened to Bess and thus making himself a more likely victim in a second accident? I thought abou
t the first accident. Why hadn’t the key been in his pocket as usual that first night? Why had someone had to run to his dressing room for it, and . . . most damning of all, why did the King of Handcuffs, the man who could open any lock in the world, have to wait for an ax to release his imprisoned wife?

  “When you feel strong enough, Mrs. Houdini,” Daniel continued in the front seat, “I’d like you to jot down a complete list of the people you know in New York and your recollections of what you have done since you arrived back in the States. We have to find out how your husband was linked to the dead man.”

  “You still don’t know who the man was?” I asked.

  Daniel shook his head. “Maybe someone will come forward after his picture appears in today’s newspapers. He must have family and friends. He looked like such a normal, everyday sort of fellow, certainly not like any criminal I’ve come across.”

  “And not like anybody in the entertainment business either,” Bess said. “They usually dress with more pizzazz than that.”

  While we had been talking we had passed fashionable shopping districts and Macy’s spanking new department store that took up a whole block along Broadway. Then at last Midtown gave way to the crowded streets of the Lower East Side and we made slow progress, inching between delivery drays, trolleys, and pushcarts. Ragged children darted across the street with no apparent concern for their safety and the air rang with the cries of vendors, the clang of construction from a new building, the shrill squeals of children, and the clip-clop of horses’ hooves. A veritable cacophony, but one that I had come to love. It was the sound of a city full of life.

  We pulled up at last outside the theater, where a constable standing in attendance made a vendor of Italian ice cream move his cart so that we could place the automobile there. The Italian went, grudgingly. It was obviously a good pitch for him. Outside the theater new bills had been posted, advertising this week’s acts. ALL-NEW SPECTACULAR! was splashed across the bill along with vignettes of pretty girls posing in an acrobatic pyramid and another illusionist with a white dove in his hand.

  “Anything I should know about, O’Malley?” Daniel asked as the constable held open the door for us. “Is Detective MacAffrey back yet?”

  “No, sir. He’s over at the morgue for the autopsy.”

  Daniel nodded. “Make sure we’re not disturbed. No newspaper reporters.”

  “I’ve kept them out all morning, sir, and that doorkeeper has fended them off at the stage door.”

  “Anyone else here?”

  “No, sir. They canceled tonight’s performance, so we’ve got the place to ourselves,” he said bitterly.

  “Lucky for us. Or we’d have them clamoring to be able to use the stage.”

  “We did have a couple of new acts turn up, wanting to put their props in place, but I told them they wouldn’t be allowed in until the captain said so.”

  “What acts were they?” Daniel asked.

  “A troop of girl acrobats—the Flying Foxes, they called themselves, and another magician with his assistant.”

  The interior of the theater felt dark and cold after the overpowering heat of the street and I shivered. It was like stepping into a crypt as we picked our way down the center aisle toward the stage. Another constable was standing by the stage steps and stood aside to let us mount them. Daniel took Mrs. Houdini’s hand and escorted her up, thus ignoring me. But I wasn’t annoyed this time. I saw what he was doing. She responded well to male attention. He was softening her up.

  “So here we are, Mrs. Houdini,” he said. “Everything exactly as it was last night, except that the body has been removed. I want you to take a good look around and see if there is anything different from the usual way you perform your act—any little thing.”

  She nodded. “Of course Molly was the assistant last night, not me, but I was watching from the box and it all looked just fine to me.”

  She moved around as if on tiptoe, gently touching the frame of what they called the cabinet, then the table on which the hood and the playing cards still lay. Then she stopped, her head to one side, like a bird’s.

  “That’s a bit off,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “The trunk. We usually perform that trick over to stage left. Why did you put the trunk so close to center stage, Molly?”

  “I don’t know. Someone helped me carry it onstage and we just put it down. I didn’t think it mattered that much where it was.”

  “It doesn’t, but . . .” she stopped, then knelt beside the trunk. “Can I touch it?” she asked.

  “Go ahead. We’ve already extracted fingerprints from it.”

  She examined it briefly. “I thought something was wrong,” she said. “This isn’t our trunk.”

  Twenty-two

  Daniel squatted beside her.

  “Are you sure?”

  She looked up and nodded. “Quite sure. I already explained to Molly how we manage to pull off the switch so quickly. The back of the trunk is only held together with two screws that come out real easy, and then it swings open. This one is solid, see?” She banged on it. “Apart from that it’s an excellent copy, from what I can see.”

  Daniel continued to stare at the trunk. “So someone knew exactly what your trunk looked like and had a copy made. How easy would it have been to get a good, close-up look at the trunk?”

  “Well, you’d only have to come to the show for a couple of nights to get a good look, wouldn’t you?” she said. “And during our act it’s right there, in the wings, until it’s needed, so anybody backstage could get a good look at it then.”

  “So that’s why the keys didn’t work!” I exclaimed.

  They looked up at me. “When the trunk wouldn’t open I found the keys in Houdini’s pocket, but neither of them worked. Because it was a different trunk.”

  “Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to pull this off,” Daniel said, staring down at the empty trunk. There was no sign of bloodstains and it was hard to imagine that a body had lain in it not too long ago. “In New York there are plenty of dark alleys and hired killers if you just want to get rid of someone. And the body turns up floating down the Hudson a few days later. This person wanted to do more than kill someone. But what?”

  “I can think of several answers to that,” I said. “Either he wanted to publicly humiliate Houdini, at the same time as paying him back, or he wanted to send a strong message to the entire band of illusionists. Or—” I paused, collecting my thoughts. “He just wanted to show how clever he was.”

  “Or none of the above,” Daniel said. “There is a fourth scenario. Houdini himself finding a clever way to get rid of an annoyance.”

  “No!” Bess said again. “You’ve seen how Harry deals with his rivals. He challenges them. And he always wins. He’s an honorable man, Captain Sullivan, not a dirty trickster who stabs in the dark.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right, Mrs. Houdini, for your sake as well as mine,” Daniel said. “Now, I’d like you to show us your dressing room, where your props were kept—anything that might help us uncover where and how the trunks might have been switched. Are you up to that?”

  “I’ll try,” she said, “but Molly could show you those things.”

  “I want your perspective on this. You were the only one who could tell us that the trunks had been switched, after all. So let’s start right before your act. You stand in the wings where?”

  Bess led him through the curtains and indicated the spot.

  “And who else would be standing nearby?”

  “Stagehands. The theater manager.”

  “We’re having our men check into their backgrounds,” Daniel said, “but I don’t see that any of them could have the skill to pull this off.”

  “Besides,” I said, “we’d have noticed a second trunk. I was in Bess’s place last night, remember? I helped carry the trunk onto the stage.”

  “How heavy was it?”

  “Not too heavy. Certainly not heavy enough to have a body
in it.”

  Daniel poked around a bit. “There’s not much room back here. Nowhere to hide that second trunk, apart from among these curtains. Then the passage to the manager’s office goes off and the stairs to all the dressing rooms, is that correct?”

  “That’s right,” Bess said. “And over to your left is the way to the stage door, and around on the left side of the stage is the stage manager’s office and the props room.”

  “But you didn’t keep your props in that room?”

  “None of the illusionists do. They all have their own crate or some way of keeping their props locked up. Illusionists are always worried that a rival will see something and steal their act.”

  “But we know your husband was a whiz at opening locks. Presumably there are other illusionists who are equally skilled?”

  “Not as good as Harry, but sure, there are men who have tried to call themselves the handcuff king. Cheek, if you ask me. But none of them was working here.”

  Daniel sighed. “That’s just it. Any outsider would have been noticed. There’s just not that much room backstage and nowhere to hide, and stagehands all over the place. Now you’d better show me the way up to your dressing room. I went over it last night, but again you might notice something that we haven’t.”

  Bess led the way up the stairs, looked around her dressing room, and shook her head. “It’s all just the way it was. There’s my costume and there are Harry’s street clothes, waiting for him to change back into . . .” She burst into tears again.

  Daniel glanced over her head at me. “I’ll have one of my constables escort you home, Mrs. Houdini. You’re clearly not up to anything more here today. But I would ask you to do one thing for me when you feel a little better. Remember I asked you to write down everything you have done since you came back to America—every person you’ve seen, every person who has spoken to your husband. I’d also like a list of any illusionist you can think of who was at odds with your husband. Those famous challenges. Anybody who might have considered himself your husband’s rival.”

  “He has scrapbooks,” I said. “From what I could see, he has all of these challenges pretty well documented.”