“You have indeed, Harry,” I said.
“Am I not the man whom the Milwaukee Sentinel called the ‘most captivating entertainer in living memory’?”
Bess and I exchanged a look. “You are indeed, Harry,” I said.
“Europe is rich with opportunity for a talented man such as myself, but I am determined to succeed in America, the land of my birth. And yet, here in the city of New York, the place I love above all others, I am regarded as a simple conjurer. A mere magician! It is madness, is it not?”
“It is indeed, Harry,” I said.
“Intolerable,” he said. “You may walk with me to my dressing room.”
You may wonder why I put up with him. To be frank, I’d long since learned to lower the volume on him when he launched one of his tirades. Had I actually been listening, I might have pointed out to him that America was not, in fact, the land of his birth. Hungary was the land of his birth. Budapest, to be specific. America was the land of my birth, which explained many of the differences between us.
He led me into the dank back room of the butcher shop, toward a small equipment closet that he had commandeered as a dressing area. His mirror and makeup kit were neatly laid out on a block table that—judging by the ragged grooves on its surface—had once been used to saw carcasses. Harry sat down on a rickety stool and faced the mirror.
“Why won’t they let me do the trunk trick, Dash?” he asked. “It was such a hit on the road. I could be the finest escape artist who ever lived. You see that, don’t you?”
“As far as we know, Harry, you’re the only escape artist who ever lived. So there isn’t a whole lot of demand for it just yet. Everybody knows what a magician does. Nobody’s ever heard of an escape artist.”
He looked at himself in the mirror. For some reason, he insisted on wearing full stage makeup on the sideshow platform, and spent half an hour troweling on heavy foundation each morning. The dark penciling on his eyebrows and the orange tint of his cheeks made him look like a stern carrot. He dipped his fingers into a wooden tub and began slathering his face with butterfat, which was what we used for makeup remover in those days.
“Why don’t we have some posters made up?” he asked. “That might help. We could show me struggling with chains and handcuffs. ‘Will He Escape?’ It would be very dramatic.”
“Posters cost money, Harry.”
He sighed and rubbed his face with a scrap of coarse wool. “What about Sing-Sing? That would be free.”
Harry had come up with the idea of breaking out of a cell at Sing-Sing prison, figuring that such a stunt would grab a fair number of headlines. “I’ve spoken to the warden three times,” I said. “He doesn’t want you anywhere near the place.” Actually, the warden’s exact words had been somewhat more explicit, and involved many repetitions of the phrase “brass-plated nut case.” I saw no reason why Harry needed to hear that.
“They are afraid of Houdini,” he said. “It will make them look bad if Houdini breaks free of their brand-new jail.”
Bess crept past me and squeezed onto the stool next to Harry. “I asked Albert about doing the trunk trick,” she announced.
“You did?” Harry looked at her in the mirror. “What did he say?”
She reached down and began untying the ballet slippers she wore on stage. “You won’t like it, Harry.”
He laid his hands on the table. “Tell me.”
Bess pulled off her slippers and began winding the ribbons. “Albert says that watching you is only slightly more interesting than watching a cigar store Indian. He says that your patter stinks. I believe he had much the same conversation with Dash.”
Harry turned to me. “Is this true?”
“He may have mentioned something of the sort.”
He looked into the mirror and fell silent, his face a study in dejection. Bess stood behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Well,” he said after a time. “I don’t suppose I’ve ever heard—”
“Mr. Houdini?” We heard a voice coming from the main room.
“In here, Jack,” Harry called, turning toward the door.
Jack Hawkins, the errand boy from Thornton’s across the street, poked his head through the doorway. He wore the red and gold uniform of a theater usher, complete with a round chin-strap hat that concealed most of his bright red hair. Alert and eager to please, Jack must have been all of eleven years old at the time. Harry and I took an interest in him because we’d both also worked as bellhops at his age, and like Jack, we’d always been willing to jump through hoops for a nickel tip.
“Evening, Mrs. Houdini,” Jack said, tugging at his cap. He thrust an envelope at Harry. “Telegram came for you at the box office, sir.”
“Good lad,” said Harry. He was always saying things like “Good lad” and “There’s a good fellow” to Jack. He also liked to tousle the boy’s hair, which Jack endured with ill-concealed annoyance.
Harry unfolded the telegram and scanned the contents. “It seems that I am moving up in the world, Dash,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “I’ve been invited to the home of Branford Wintour. On Fifth Avenue, no less.”
I whistled. “Branford Wintour? What’s he want with you?”
“Who’s Branford Wintour?” Jack asked.
“They call him the King of Toys,” I explained. “There’s hardly a boy in America who hasn’t played with one of his whirly tops. He has a big factory in New Jersey—wooden soldiers, paper novelties, train sets. Anything you can imagine.”
“I don’t have much time for wooden soldiers,” Jack said in a husky voice.
“What’s he want with you, Harry?” I repeated. “Some sort of society wing ding?”
“I think not,” Harry said. “It seems that Mr. Wintour has been murdered, and only Houdini can tell the police how it was done.”
Bess and I looked at each other. Harry’s patter—Albert’s opinion notwithstanding—was getting better by the minute.
2
THE HUMAN PIN-CUSHION
“HARRY,” I SAID, AS WE TROTTED UP TOWARD FIFTH AVENUE. “YOU really need to fill me in on the details. How was he murdered? Why do they need you there?”
He pulled the collar of his shaggy astrakhan cloak up around his ears, pretending not to have heard.
“Who sent the telegram? Why won’t you tell me anything?”
My brother closed his eyes and lowered his chin to his chest, apparently lost in thought.
We were riding in a horse-drawn calash, jostling hard as the driver maneuvered around the evening theater traffic. Harry had said little since we’d left the theater—nothing, in fact, apart from a single line: “It is a case for the Great Houdini!” He delivered this sentiment while throwing his cloak around his shoulders.
Now, sitting back against the leather seat with his brow furrowed and his fingers steepled at his chin, he looked for all the world like the hero of some stage melodrama.
“Harry—” I began again.
“Dash,” he said impatiently, “you cannot expect me to divulge the particulars. It is traditional that the detective remain tight-lipped until he reaches the scene of the crime.”
Ah. Suddenly it made sense. “Harry,” I said, “you’re thinking of detective stories, not real detective work. And anyway, you’re a performer, not a detective.”
“Performer!” he snorted. “I am no mere performer! I am Houdini! I have talents and knowledge that other men do not! At least our New York City police seem to appreciate this, if the theatrical community does not.”
We rode in silence for a moment. “At least let me see the telegram,” I said.
Wordlessly, he passed it over. It read: “Need Houdini Urgent Home Branford Wintour Stop Murder Investigation Stop Lt. Murray.”
“Harry, this doesn’t tell us much. Apart from the fact that this Lieutenant Murray is careful with his pocket change. Ten words exactly.”
“It tells us a great deal,” he said.
“Such as?”
He gav
e me a corner-of-the-eye look. “It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts.”
“Harry,” I said. “For God’s sake.”
I should explain something. My brother was not a great reader, but he dearly loved his detective stories. He would read them on trains, backstage, in the bath—virtually anywhere. His favorite was Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures he followed religiously in Harper’s Weekly until the detective’s tragic death at the hands of Professor Moriarty, an event that left him despondent for some weeks. Harry read the Sherlock Holmes stories many times over. Our late father could jab a pin into a random passage of the family Talmud and call out each word it had pierced on the subsequent pages. Harry could do the same with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
“Harry,” I said, starting again, “this is a police investigation. You can’t barge in there and expect to lead them around by their noses. There’s no Inspector Lestrade in the New York Police Department.”
“I will merely give them the benefit of my acknowledged expertise.”
I muttered something under my breath.
“Pardon me?” Harry said. “Would you please repeat that?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“No one will be dropping me over a waterfall anytime soon, Dash,” he said. “And anyway, it was the Reichenbach Falls, not Rickenstoff.”
I folded my arms and fell silent until we pulled up to the Wintour mansion.
Branford Wintour’s home had always been something of an architectural curiosity. I remember that when they had built the place a few years earlier there were jokes about whether Manhattan would sink under its weight. It took up a good chunk of land and was lousy with gables and mansards and spires and all sorts of other features that you don’t see much on Fifth Avenue these days, including a three-story aviary. Wintour had chosen a spot directly across the avenue from the Vanderbilt pile, and for a time it seemed as if he might put his neighbor in the shade.
Harry and I scrambled out of the calash and faced a brilliant white expanse of marble that might have given Nansen and Peary some uneasy moments. We crossed the vast forecourt and had just finished climbing the steps when the front door swung open. I had expected a butler but instead we found a uniformed patrolman in a blue greatcoat and leather helmet.
“Which one of you is this Houdini character?” he asked.
“I am Houdini,” my brother answered, puffing himself up to an impressive five-foot-four.
“The lieutenant wants you to wait here.”
We followed him into a vaulted two-story entry hall. “Harry,” I whispered. “This room is bigger than the last theater I worked.” Sad to say, I wasn’t joking.
A pair of mahogany double doors opened and a big, beefy man in a rumpled brown suit stepped toward us. “Name’s Patrick Murray,” he said in a voice not long out of Dublin. “I’m the detective in charge of this case. Appreciate your answering my wire.”
“Hmm,” said Harry, stepping back to appraise our new acquaintance. “Patrick Murray. You are Irish, I perceive.”
Strange to say, Harry wasn’t kidding either. Murray looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I shrugged. “I can see you’re going to be a big help to us, Mr. Houdini,” he said.
“I shall certainly do my best to assist in whatever way possible,” said my brother, who was a bit tone deaf when it came to irony. “Now, perhaps it would help if you showed me to the murder scene. I trust your men haven’t been tramping about in their muddy boots, obscuring clues, damaging valuable—”
“My men are doing their jobs as instructed,” Murray said firmly. “And I believe we’ll be able to manage the murder investigation on our own. We’ve asked you here because there’s an aspect of the crime that seems to fall under your area of expertise.”
“Oh?”
“The murder weapon.”
“The murder weapon? That is most gratifying. In what way does the murder weapon fall under my area of expertise?”
Murray sighed. “Branford Wintour seems to have been murdered by a magic trick.”
Harry glanced at me with shining eyes, struggling to conceal his pleasure at this news. “Please continue,” he said.
Lieutenant Murray motioned to a very tall, somewhat stooped elderly gentleman who had been standing quietly by the mahogany doors. “This is Phillips, Mr. Wintour’s butler,” Murray said as the old man stepped forward. “I wonder if I might ask you to repeat what you’ve just told me for these gentlemen?”
“Of course, sir,” the butler said, clearing his throat. He turned to us and began to speak in a flat, toneless manner, as though instructing a new member of the staff on the placement of finger bowls. “It is Mr. Wintour’s habit of an evening to spend an hour or so answering correspondence in his study. He customarily takes a glass of Irish whiskey at five-thirty, but there was no response when I knocked at the door this evening.”
“Did you break down the door?” Harry asked.
“Certainly not.”
“What did you do?”
“I did nothing. I assumed that Mr. Wintour did not wish to be disturbed. It was only when he failed to appear for dinner that I grew concerned. He had arranged a small dinner party for this evening. When the guests began to assemble at six o’clock, Mr. Wintour had still not emerged.”
“So you broke down the door?”
A pained expression crossed the old butler’s face. “I saw no need to break down the door. I decided to telephone, in the event that he might have fallen asleep on the settee. It would not have been the first time. There is only one telephone in the house and that is in Mr. Wintour’s study. I stepped across to a neighboring house to telephone.”
Harry nodded. “But he didn’t answer?”
“No, sir. By now I had begun to grow alarmed. On the advice of Mrs. Wintour, I telephoned a nearby locksmith, a Mr.—”
“Featherstone,” Harry said. “A reliable, but unimaginative craftsman.”
Lieutenant Murray’s eyebrows went up at this, but he said nothing. Phillips carried on as if he hadn’t heard. “Mr. Featherstone arrived some moments later and managed to open the door using a skeleton key.”
“Is that the study over there?” Harry asked, gesturing at the heavy mahogany doors.
“It is.”
“It’s a routine Selkirk dead-bolt with a three-wheel ratchet. My sainted Mama could open that lock with her darning needle.”
Phillips dipped his chin and peered at Harry over his half-glasses. “We had not known that your mother was available, sir,” he said.
“Please continue, Phillips,” said Lieutenant Murray.
“Once Mr. Featherstone had opened the door, I found Mr. Wintour at his desk.”
“Dead?” Harry asked.
“I still believed he was asleep, but I could not rouse him. That was when I summoned the police.”
“That’ll do, Phillips,” Lieutenant Murray said. “Gentlemen, if you’ll follow me.” He led us across the foyer to the study doors. There were a number of uniformed officers milling around, and to my surprise Harry appeared to know most of them. He nodded at a stocky young man sitting by the doors, and received a casual salute in return.
“Harry,” I whispered, “how do you know—”
“Later,” he answered.
One of the doors to the study was partially open, and I could see the bustle of plain-clothes men as they examined, measured, traced, and sketched along the edges of the scene. Then Murray pushed open the door and we saw the rest.
The study reeked of culture and old money, though I knew perfectly well that Wintour had made his loot within the past decade. Shelves of books with leather spines stretched across the left side of the room, broken only by a tall marble fireplace. Ancestral portraits and richly colored tapestries covered the other walls, and there were a number of marble busts sprouting up on alabaster pedestals throughout the room, creating a museum effect. A pair of club chairs, a settee, and a couple of Chesterfields were positioned just so i
n front of a flat-top, marble-inlay desk, the surface of which could easily have accommodated six or seven of the performers from Huber’s Museum.
Though the furnishings imparted a certain baronial splendor to the room, it was clear that the occupant, who had made his fortune in the manufacture of children’s toys, had never entirely put aside the playthings of youth. In one corner, the head of an outsize jack-in-the-box bobbed back and forth. A spectacular collection of wind-up animals, clockwork figures, and tin soldiers littered the surface of a library table, and a tall cylindrical zoetrope stood on a special display stand nearby. Most impressive of all, an enormous two-tiered model train set was arrayed on an oblong slab of polished wood. The track ran in a cloverleaf pattern perhaps five feet in each direction, with a web of heavy cording leading to a black control panel on the floor.
I confess that I might have spent the entire evening admiring that wondrous train set, but there were more urgent calls on our attention. “Gentlemen?” said Lieutenant Murray. “If I could ask you to step this way.” A set of white hospital screens had been erected behind the desk. Three of Wintour’s dinner guests— two men and a woman—were arranged on the Chesterfields, and I guessed that the screens had been placed to shield them from an unseemly spectacle. The lieutenant motioned us to step behind the partition. Although I had prepared myself, the sight of the dead man caught me by the throat.
Wintour lay on his back, stretched out upon a deep red Oriental rug. He wore a gray brushed flannel suit, a white cotton cambric shirt, a wide boating club tie, and the face of a man in torment. His eyes bulged and his tongue jutted, and patches of dark purple were spreading across his cheeks. I don’t know what Mr. Wintour’s views on the afterlife may have been, but he had the look of a man who had seen his destination and didn’t much care for it.
“How old was he?” Harry asked softly.
“Fifty-three,” Lieutenant Murray answered. He waited another moment while my brother and I recovered ourselves, then led us out from behind the screens. “You’ll notice that this is an interior room,” he said. “No windows. No other entrance apart from the doors we used. Those doors were locked from the inside and show no sign of tampering. Mr. Wintour seems to have been alone in his study at the time of his death. No one in the household heard anything unusual, nor had there been any unexpected visitors this afternoon. We expect that—”
The Dime Museum Murders Page 3
