Death out of Thin Air

by Clayton Rawson

  Healy slid back in his chair and disengaged his hand. The man seemed to be about to kiss him on both cheeks. “Wait a minute,” Healy said. “I haven’t found any little girls lately. Who were you looking for?”

  The happy father bent forward looking closely at the sergeant. “You — you are not Lieutenant Farello? I am so sorry. My eyes—” He gestured toward the round tinted spectacles he wore.

  “No,” Healy said. “I’m not the lieutenant. You’ll find him three doors down the hall.”

  Healy’s visitor, flustered, apologized in Italian and backed out into the corridor, closing the door after him. Healy frowned as the thought passed through his mind that the man didn’t look particularly Italian. But he had weightier matters bothering him and he turned again to the phone.

  That was where he made his mistake. His last one….

  He asked the operator to connect him with Inspector Church, and when that gentleman’s booming “Hello” came over the wire he said, “Sergeant Healy speaking. I’ve got a report to make in the Dr. Palgar case. I think I’d better give it to you verbally and do the written report later. It needs action immediately.”

  “Did you get any trace of Palgar?” the Inspector wanted to know.

  “No, not yet. But I found that machine of his and something else. Something that looks like a big headache. Can I come up now and give it to you?”

  “No. I’m on the way out. The boys just fished one of Dutch Kutzman’s gunmen out of the East River. He was weighted down with machine-gun slugs. I’ve got to go take a look. I’ll stop by your office on the way and you can give me a quick once over. See you in half a minute.”

  Healy said, “Yes sir,” and replaced the phone receiver.

  Inspector Church’s office was on the floor above and it wasn’t much more than a minute later when he walked down the stairs and along the corridor toward Healy’s office. The inspector, in his years of service, had never done the sort of undercover work that Healy did. He looked too much like a dick; a movie director would never have cast him as anything else.

  He had the heavy, broad shouldered build, the flat feet that came from his long apprenticeship of pavement-pounding on the uniformed force, and the brusque, cocksure, suspicious manner of a policeman. His jutting, square-cut jaw had a determined forcefulness about it that a good many lawbreakers had discovered was the real thing.

  But now, halfway down the corridor toward Healy’s door, his jaw suddenly dropped and the determined look was replaced by one of amazement. The Inspector’s quick walk abruptly became a wild dash.

  He had heard behind Healy’s closed door the familiar heavy crack of a gunshot.

  Church’s own gun was in his hand by the time he reached the door. As he grasped the doorknob, he heard a sound that made him throw his full weight against the door in a frantic smash. He was too late. The door was locked and the sound he had heard was the metallic click of the bolt sliding over.

  Someone, inside that room had locked the door. There was no other exit except for the window five stories above Centre Street. Church pounded on the door and shouted, “Healy! What the hell is going on in there?”

  He got no answer whatever. Quickly, then, he put his gun to the door’s lock, fired twice, and threw himself against the door again. The lock still held. Church fired once more, stepped back and this time really hit the door a hard smash. It gave suddenly.

  The Inspector, falling inward, took a quick step, recovered his balance and stared at what he saw, the smoking gun in his hand lifted and ready but finding no target. Sergeant Lester Healy lay slumped forward in his chair, a streaming flow of blood moving down across his face and making a widening pool on the green desk blotter.

  Sergeant Healy was there, the chair he sat in, a desk, a hat rack, and on the Inspector’s right, behind the door, a table that bore a single-drawer filing cabinet. There was a tin wastebasket and one other chair. But that was all. Except for the Inspector himself, there was nothing and no one else in that room.

  Church, a baffled angry look in his eye, looked quickly behind the door, under the table and the desk, found nothing, and made for the window. That was closed and locked on the inside.

  Church stared at it with unbelief. Then he grabbed at the phone. As he did so, he heard a quick taunting voice behind him say, “See you later Inspector.”

  He whirled like a top and saw the door through which he had come swinging shut! He had turned in time to catch a glimpse of it end-on, and for a moment he saw both the inner and outer sides of it at once. The door was apparently closing of its own volition!

  This uncanny sight made the Inspector hang fire for nearly a full second. Then, as the door slammed against the jamb, he sprang for it and yanked it open. There were men in the corridor outside, running toward him. Two detectives coming from the left; Inspector McShean, a uniformed cop and a secretary from the right. Church goggled at them.

  “Who,” he bellowed, “came out of this door just now?”

  He got blank looks all around as the reinforcements reached him.

  “No one at all, Church,” McShean said. “What the—”

  Inspector Church didn’t answer. He turned back into the room, took a quick close look for the first time at Sergeant Healy.

  “He’s still alive,” he said grabbing at the phone. Savagely he pounded an impatient tattoo on the receiver rest. “Operator, operator, dammit why doesn’t….” His voice trailed off as he became aware that the phone cord was dangling uselessly over the side of the desk, its cut end attached to nothing at all.

  Church put the phone down slowly. McShean rapped, “Kramer, get Pepper.” Kramer left on the double quick.

  McShean’s bright quick eyes moved around the room. Suddenly he reached out and took the gun which Inspector Church still held. Church was thinking fast and furiously of something else. He let it go, then suddenly realizing what was happening, he blurted, “Hey, what’s the idea of that?”

  McShean was examining Church’s revolver with an intent interest.

  “Three shots fired,” he said. “I heard four. But I don’t see any other gun.” He lifted Healy’s body slightly and reached beneath the man’s coat. He took a revolver from the holster there and examined it. “Full,” he said. “It has to be suicide, but—”

  “But,” Church cut in, “it can’t be suicide. “It — Brophy get on a phone. Hurry like hell! See that men are stationed down stairs at every exit to this building at once! No one goes in or out until I say so.” He turned to McShean. “Someone — or — or something locked that door from the inside just as I reached it — after the first shot! Healy couldn’t have done it — not with that wound. It’s murder. It has to be and yet—”

  McShean didn’t like the nervous glitter in Inspector Church’s eyes, nor the jerky excited way he talked and acted. A suspicion was beginning to form in his mind that perhaps Church had been working too hard, that possibly he was sliding off in a nervous breakdown with hallucinations.

  “And yet what?” McShean asked watching Church carefully, a clinical eye peeled for further symptoms.

  “And yet,” Church answered, “it can’t be murder unless the murderer is invisible!” As Church said the word he knew that there could be no other answer.

  Just as Dr. Pepper hurried into the room, Sergeant Healy’s body made a slight convulsive motion and a moment later the doctor pronounced him dead.

  Sergeant Healy had convinced Inspector Church that there might be such a thing as an invisible man after all.

  CHAPTER II

  Invitation to a Burglary

  Don Diavolo, The Scarlet Wizard, looked out across the footlights at the applauding audience that filled the great Manhattan Music Hall. His dark eyes beneath the scarlet half-mask held an engaging, devilish twinkle and his lips bore a mysterious half smile. His lithe, athletic figure bowed formally from the waist and the spotlight that centered on him made the red of his faultlessly tailored evening clothes glow like flame.

&nbs
p; Diavolo had just finished his suavely deceptive routine of streamlined sorcery in which impossibilities crowded on to the stage with smooth rapidity, each one a little more astounding than the last.

  Now, slowly, he turned and made a nonchalant gesture that took the great curtain behind him up out of sight to expose, in the exact center of the great bare stage, a small cabinet curtained with deep ultramarine drapes scattered with silver stars. A blue spotlight bathed it in a mysterious light; the orchestra played softly an exotic melody that had been born in the magic East.

  Don Diavolo approached the cabinet. Its floor was three feet above the stage, supported on slender legs that permitted an unobstructed view beneath. The magician walked once around it, his hands weaving slow mystic passes in the air. Then, as the tempo of the music began to accelerate and grow louder he clapped his hands once, sharply. The curtains at the cabinet’s front parted slightly and a dancer in the fluffy skirted traditional costume of the Imperial ballet stepped through and danced lightly, on her toes, down the short flight of glass steps that descended to the stage.

  A spotlight picked her up as she pirouetted daintily. Then a second dancer came forth, and was caught by another bright circle of moving light as she followed the first. A third, fourth and fifth followed. And in a few moments a dozen dancers moved slowly and gracefully on the stage. But the audience no longer saw them. All eyes were fastened on the opening in the curtain through which the girls emerged.

  The cabinet, four and one half feet at the most, had already been emptied of more girls than it could possibly hold— and they continued to come. Now and again there was a slight pause as if the girl who had just come out were the last — but each time the music only grew more excited and more girls streamed forth. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one …

  The audience was sure now that each one must be the last. Then Don Diavolo clapped his hands once more as the dancers formed a line on either side of him stretching across the stage.

  He moved to the cabinet, hesitated briefly as he threw his enigmatic smile at the audience and then quickly flung the curtains aside. The audience looked intently, hoping to penetrate the secret of the inexhaustible cabinet. Instead of emptiness, the space within was filled with dancers, nine more who descended to the stage and joined the others. As the music suddenly changed and the whole chorus began to move through one of the beautifully synchronized precision routines for which they are famous, the audience looked around for the magician only to find that, having produced thirty chorus girls from a space which could have held no more than nine, he had himself vanished.

  Chan Chandar Manchu, Don Diavolo’s dresser and general boy-of-all-work waited in the wings and walked with Diavolo toward the elevator that would take them to the dressing room upstairs. He carried a valise, one of whose ends was fitted with a wire netting and inside which were the six white rabbits Diavolo had earlier produced from a silk hat.

  “Those two card kings still at it?” Don asked.

  Chan smiled, his almond eyes laughing, “Yes,” he answered in his impeccable Oxford accent. “They are trying poker deals on each other now. They have me shuffle the deck and nobody ever gets anything less than four aces. I think that perhaps poker is not a good game for heathen Chinee to risk his money on.”

  Don chuckled. “Wily Oriental catches wise quick. Playing poker with those two guys allee same like imparting hard-earned cash to Four Winds of Heaven.”

  “Game of fan-tan might have different outcome,” Chan said somewhat wistfully. “But they wouldn’t play.”

  As Don pushed in the door of his dressing room he said, “Hello Horseshoe. Hello Larry. Chan says you won’t take him on at fan-tan.”

  The Horseshoe Kid, an open-faced, guileless-looking gentleman shuffled a deck of cards with one hand and said, “What does he think we are, chumps? I make a living off guys who don’t know no better than to place bets on the other man’s game. Fan-tan! I’d probably lose my back teeth.”

  Larry Keeler said, “I’ve got an idea. What about a game — poker, bridge, blackjack, anything you like — with no holds barred? First man whose sleight-of-hand slips is out of the game and his chips go into the pot. How about it, Horseshoe?”

  The Horseshoe Kid, otherwise known as Melvin Skinner, John B. Crooks, H.C. Orville and numerous other names, none of them his own, growled, “You’ve got big ideas, shorty. You’re a magician, not a gambler. That stuff of yours would look swell on a stage, but across a card table it is phony as hell. Even a lop-eared fink would rumble those fancy shuffles of yours.”

  Keeler replied, “Says you,” and calmly cut the deck that the Horseshoe Kid had just shuffled. He turned up the Ace of Hearts.

  The Horseshoe Kid said, “That’s nothing. Look.” He lifted off the ace and threw it face down on the table. He gave the deck a quick shuffle and said, “I can cut to the Ace of Hearts even when it’s not in the deck.” He promptly did so. Chan reached out and flipped over the face down card only to discover that it was now the joker.

  Keeler didn’t care for it. “Your throwdown is antiquated,” he criticized. “You’re way back in the Dark Ages, still using the Erdnase method. Watch this.”

  The cardplayers in the audience outside would have blinked dazedly at this competition in dirty work. And though both the Horseshoe Kid and Larry Keeler were pretty evenly matched, Larry would probably have raised the most eyebrows. Horseshoe on the other hand would have taken away their shirts in a game.

  He was a professional gambler whose trickery with cards was necessarily accomplished with a minimum of suspicion that it was anything of the sort. Larry was a magician who let his audiences know that he was using trickery and dared them to catch him at it. His card manipulations were more amazing to the lay audience than those of many of his competitors because the average person mistakenly supposes that sleight-of-hand consists mainly in the ability to palm cards.

  Larry left them gaping because it was obvious from the start that he couldn’t hope to palm a card of the regular size. His hands were several sizes too small. Larry is a cocky little man, known along Broadway as “Half Pint the Great” though few people have ever dared to call him that to his face. He is a dwarf, four feet tall at the outside, and sensitive as the devil about it.

  His lack of stature has always prevented his debut on the legitimate stage as a serious magician because a conjurer of that size is more humorous than mysterious. Instead he plays circus sideshows and museums billed as “Wizzo, the World’s Smallest Prestidigitator.”

  Don Diavolo went on into the inner dressing room and started to change. “You boys will get conjurer’s cramp or break an arm one of these days trying to out-maneuver each other.”

  Larry had just finished his trick and the Horseshoe Kid had taken the cards and started to try and top it when Woody Haines arrived. He nodded to the card players and went on in to where Don was seated before his dressing table removing the makeup from his face.

  Woody had the build of an All-American back, which he had been, the amiable and ingenious brashness of a small boy crashing a circus, which he had done, and the breezy morale of a newspaper columnist, which he was. Running his Behind the Scenes stuff in the New York Press was his job. Tagging Don Diavolo like a large and persistent sheepdog puppy was his hobby. Don Diavolo always made news. Besides, Woody liked the guy.

  Don saw him in the mirror and greeted him. “Hello, Woody. How’s the keyhole business? You look as if you had just corralled a front page story that’ll need an eight column head.”

  “Eight column head,” Woody exclaimed excitedly. “Hellfire, yes. And 72 point caps printed in four colors — or the city desk is nuts. Listen, Don. Last night Detective-sergeant Lester Healy was murdered in his office down at headquarters, and you’ve got to tell me how.”

  “In his office at headquarters?” Don asked in surprise. “That’s hitting close to home isn’t it? And why are you so late with it? I thought you were always Johnny-on-the-spot?”

 
“I’m the only reporter in town who knows about it yet,” Woody answered. “I’ve got me a nice pipeline right into Inspector Church’s office, but even that almost failed me. The birdie who whispers things my way almost let me down altogether. He was afraid he’d be thrown out on his ear. I never saw a lid clamped down so tight as the one that’s on at Headquarters today.

  “D.A. is so burned up he steams, and Inspector Church nearly put me in the jug for saying good morning in a cheery tone of voice. That’s what made me suspicious that something was up. So I put the thumbscrews on.”

  “Yes,” Don said, “I can see why they’d be touchy about it. Who are the main suspects?”

  “Most of the dicks say the only person that could have possibly killed Healy is Inspector Church!”

  “What!” Don nearly exploded. The Horseshoe Kid and Larry Keeler crowded into the doorway, their eyes popping.

  “You heard me,” Woody added. “And Inspector Church says that Healy was killed by an invisible man!”

  The Horseshoe Kid grunted, “And he’s the cop who always says my alibis limp. Boy, wait until I tell him what I think of that one.”

  Don Diavolo was astonished, but he didn’t appear to think it was funny. He was scowling. “Woody,” he said slowly. “Let’s have the story. All of it.”

  Woody pushed his hat back on his tawny head and obliged. “Church went down to Healy’s office last night shortly before five o’clock. He heard a shot inside, someone locked the door in his face, he shot the lock off and broke in. Nobody there but Healy with a slug in his head. Then a voice came out of thin air and said, ‘See you later, Inspector’ and the door closed.

  “Church swears he saw it closing all by itself. A flock of dicks, in the corridor outside, swear that nobody came out the door. They couldn’t find a gun. And that’s that. Except for this.”

  Woody threw a five-by-seven sheet of paper down on the dressing table before Don. “Photostat,” he said, “of a note that Inspector Church found an hour or so later. He and McShean chewed the rag in Healy’s office for half an hour and watched the fingerprint men mess the place up. Then they went out for a few minutes to interview some men that had been stationed to guard the exits from headquarters immediately after the shooting. They all swear no one got by them.