Death Locked In

by Douglas G. Greene (ed)

  Zyyzk no longer grinned. He scowled and his eyes were hard. “It will go,” he said, lifting his hand and rapidly tracing a cabalistic figure in the air. “And you with it!”

  “Soon?” Merlini asked.

  “Very soon. Before the hour of nine strikes again you will appear before the Lords of the Outer Darkness in far Antares. And there—”

  Gavigan had had enough. He passed a miracle of his own. He pointed a cabalistic but slightly shaking finger at the little man and roared an incantation that had instant effect. “Get him out of here!”

  In the small space of time that it took them to hurry down the corridor and around a corner, Zyyzk and the two detectives who held him both vanished.

  Gavigan turned on Merlini. “Isn’t one lunatic enough without you acting like one, too?”

  The magician grinned. “Keep our eyes on me, Inspector. If I vanish, as predicted, you may see how Keeler did it. If I don’t, Zyyzk is on the spot and he may begin to make more sense.”

  “That,” Gavigan growled, “is impossible.”

  Zyyzk, as far as I was concerned, wasn’t the only thing that made no sense. The Inspector’s men turned Grand Central station inside out and the only trace of Judge Keeler to be found were the smashed spectacles on the floor of that phone booth. Gavigan was so completely at a loss that he could think of nothing else to do but order the search made again.

  Merlini, as far as I could tell, didn’t seem to have any better ideas. He leaned against the wall opposite the phone booth and scowled darkly at its empty interior. Malloy and Hicks looked so tired and dispirited that Gavigan told them both to go home and sleep it off. An hour later, when the second search had proved as fruitless as the first, Gavigan suddenly told Lieutenant Doran to take over, turned, and started to march off.

  Then Merlini woke up. “Inspector,” he asked, “where are you going?”

  Gavigan turned, scowling, “Anywhere,” he said, “where I don’t have to look at telephone booths. Do you have any suggestions?”

  Merlini moved forward. “One, yes. Let’s eat.”

  Gavigan didn’t look as if he could keep anything in his stomach stronger than weak chicken broth, but he nodded absently. We got into Gavigan’s car and Brady drove us crosstown, stopping, at Merlini’s direction, in front of the Williston building.

  The Inspector objected. “There aren’t any decent restaurants in this neighborhood. Why—”

  “Don’t argue,” Merlini said as he got out. “If Zyyzk’s latest prediction comes off, this will be my last meal on earth. I want to eat here. Come on.” He crossed the pavement toward a flashing green and purple neon sign that blinked: Johnson’s Cafeteria. Open All Night.

  Merlini was suddenly acting almost as strangely as Zyyzk. I knew very well that this wasn’t the sort of place he’d pick for his last meal and, although he claimed to be hungry, I noticed that all he put on his tray was crackers and a bowl of soup. Pea soup at that—something he heartily disliked.

  Then, instead of going to a table off in a corner where we could talk, he chose one right in the center of the room. He even selected our places for us. “You sit there, Inspector. You there, Ross. And excuse me a moment. I’ll be right back.” With that he turned, crossed to the street door through which we had come, and vanished through it.

  “I think,” I told Gavigan, “that he’s got a bee in his bonnet.’’

  The Inspector grunted. “You mean bats. In his belfry.” He gave the veal cutlet on his plate a glum look.

  Merlini was gone perhaps five minutes. When he returned, he made no move to sit down. He leaned over the table and asked, “Either of you got a nickel?”

  I found one and handed it to him. Suspiciously, Gavigan said, “I thought you wanted to eat?”

  “I must make a phone call first,” the magician answered. “And with Zyyzk’s prediction hanging over me, I’d just as soon you both watched me do it. Look out the window behind me, watch that empty booth—the second from the right. And keep your eyes on it every second.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “If I’m not back here in exactly three minutes, you’d better investigate.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Neither did Gavigan. He started to object. “Now, wait a minute. You’re not going—” But Merlini had already gone. He moved with long strides toward the street door, and the Inspector half rose from his chair as if to go after him. Then, when Gavigan saw what lay beyond the window, he stopped. The window we both faced was in a side wall at right angles to the street, and it opened, not to the outside, but into the arcade that runs through the Williston building.

  Through the glass we could see a twenty-foot stretch of the arcade’s opposite wall and against it, running from side to side, was a row of half a dozen phone booths.

  I took a quick look at the clock on the wall above the window just as Merlini vanished through the street door. He reappeared at once in the arcade beyond the window, went directly to the second booth from the right, and went inside. The door closed.

  “I don’t like this,” I said. “In three minutes the time will be exactly—”

  “Quiet!” Gavigan commanded.

  “—exactly nine o’clock,” I finished.

  “Zyyzk’s deadline!”

  “He’s not going to pull this off,” Gavigan said. “You keep your eyes on that booth. I’m going outside and watch it from the street entrance. When the time’s up, join me.”

  I heard his chair scrape across the floor as he got up, but I kept my eyes glued to the scene beyond the window—more precisely to one section of it—the booth into which Merlini had gone. I could see the whole face of the door from top to bottom and the dim luminescence of the light inside.

  Nothing happened.

  The second hand on the wall clock moved steadily, but much too slowly. At five seconds to the hour I found myself on my feet. And when the hand hit twelve I moved fast. I went through the door, turned it, and found Gavigan just inside the arcade entrance, his eyes fixed on the booth.

  “Okay,” he said without turning his head. “Come on.”

  We hurried forward together. The Inspector jerked the door of the second booth open. The light inside blinked out.

  Inside, the telephone receiver dangled, still swaying, by its cord.

  The booth was empty.

  Except for one thing, I bent down and picked it up off the floor—Merlini’s shiny silver dollar.

  Gavigan swore. Then he pushed me aside, stepped into the booth and lifted the receiver. His voice was none too steady. He said one word into the phone.

  “Hello?”

  Leaning in behind him, I heard the voice that replied—Merlini’s voice making a statement that was twice as impossible as anything that had happened yet.

  “Listen carefully,” it said. “And don’t ask questions now. I’m at 1462-12 Astoria Avenue, the Bronx. Got that? 1462-12 Astoria. Keeler’s here—and a murderer! Hurry!”

  The tense urgency of that last command sent a cold shiver down my spine. Then I heard the click as the connection was broken.

  Gavigan stood motionless for a second, holding the dead phone. Then the surging flood of his emotions spilled over. He jiggled the receiver frantically and swore again.

  “Blast it! This phone is dead!”

  I pulled myself out of a mental tailspin, found a nickel, and dropped it in the slot. Gavigan’s verbal fireworks died to a mutter as he heard the dial tone and he jabbed savagely at the dial.

  A moment later the Telegraph Bureau was broadcasting a bowdlerized version of Gavigan’s orders to the prowl cars in the Astoria Avenue neighborhood. And Gavigan and I were running for the street and his own car. Brady saw us coming, gunned his motor, and the instant we were aboard, took off as though jet-powered. He made a banked turn into Fifth Avenue against a red light, and we raced uptown, siren screaming.

  If Zyyzk had been there beside us, handing out dire predictions that we were headed straight for the Pearly Gates, I wouldn’t have doubted him f
or a moment. We came within inches of that destination half a dozen times as we roared swerving through the crosstown traffic.

  The Astoria address wasn’t hard to find. There were three prowl cars parked in front of it and two uniformed cops on the front porch. One sat on the floor, his back to the wall, holding a limp arm whose sleeve was stained with blood. There were two round bullet holes in the glass of the door above him. As we ran up the walk, the sound of gun fire came from the rear of the house and the second cop lifted his foot, kicked in a front window, and crawled in through the opening, gun in hand.

  The wounded man made a brief report as we passed him. “Nobody answered the door,” he said. “But when we tried to crash the joint, somebody started shooting.”

  Somebody was still shooting. Gavigan, Brady, and I went through the window and toward the sound. The officer who had preceded us was in the kitchen, firing around the jamb of the back door. An answering gun blazed in the dark outside and the cop fired at the flash.

  “Got him, I think,” the cop said. Then he slipped out through the door, moved quickly across the porch and down the steps. Brady followed him.

  Gavigan’s pocket-flash suddenly sent out a thin beam of light. It started a circuit of the kitchen, stopped for a moment as it picked up movement just outside the door, and we saw a third uniformed man pull himself to a sitting position on the porch floor, look at the bloodstain on his trouser leg, and swear.

  Then the Inspector’s flash found the open cellar door.

  And down there, beside the beginning of a grave, we found Judge Keeler.

  His head had been battered in.

  But he couldn’t find Merlini anywhere in the house. It wasn’t until five minutes later, when we were opening Keeler’s suitcase, that Merlini walked in.

  He looked at the cash and negotiable securities that tumbled out. “You got here,” he said, “before that vanished, too, I see.”

  Gavigan looked up at him. “But you just arrived this minute. I heard a cab out front.”

  Merlini nodded. “My driver refused to ignore the stop lights the way yours did. Did you find the Judge?”

  “Yes, we found him. And I want to know how of all the addresses in Greater New York, you managed to pick this one out of your hat?”

  Merlini’s dark eyes twinkled. “That was the easy part. Keeler’s disappearance, as I said once before, added up to two invisible men. As soon as I knew who the second one must be, I simply looked the name up in the phone book.”

  “And when you vanished,” I asked, “was that done with two invisible men?”

  Merlini grinned. “No. I improved on the Judge’s miracle a bit. I made it a one-man operation.”

  Gavigan had had all the riddles he could digest. “We found Keeler’s body,” he growled ominously, “beside an open grave. And if you don’t stop—”

  “Sorry,” Merlini said, as a lighted cigarette appeared mysteriously between his fingers. “As a magician I hate to have to blow the gaff on such a neatly contrived bit of hocus pocus as The Great Phone Booth Trick. But if I must—well, it began when Keeler realized he was going to have to take a runout powder. He knew he was being watched. It was obvious that if he and Helen Hope tried to leave town by any of the usual methods, they’d both be picked up at once. Their only chance was to vanish as abruptly and completely as Judge Crater and Dorothy Arnold once did. I suspect it was Zyyzk’s first prediction that Miss Hope would disappear that gave Keeler the idea. At any rate, that was what set the wheels in motion.”

  “I thought so,” Gavigan said. “Zyyzk was in on it.” Merlini shook his head. “I’m afraid you can’t charge him with a thing. He was in on it—but he didn’t know it. One of the subtlest deceptive devices a magician uses is known as ‘the principle of the impromptu stooge.’ He so manages things that an unrehearsed spectator acts as a confederate, often without ever realizing it. That’s how Keeler used Zyyzk. He built his vanishing trick on Zyyzk’s predictions and used them as misdirection. But Zyyzk never knew that he was playing the part of a red herring.”

  “He’s a fraud though,” Gavigan insisted. “And he does know it.”

  Merlini contradicted that, too. “No. Oddly enough he’s the one thing in this whole case that is on the level. As you, yourself, pointed out, no fake prophet would give such precisely detailed predictions. He actually does believe that Helen Hope and Judge Keeler vanished into the Outer Darkness.”

  “A loony,” Gavigan muttered.

  “And,” Merlini added, “a real problem, at this point, for any psychiatrist. He’s seen two of his prophecies come true with such complete and startling accuracy that he’ll never believe what really happened. I egged him into predicting my disappearance in order to show him that he wasn’t infallible. If he never discovers that I did vanish right on time, it may shake his belief in his occult powers. But if he does, the therapy will backfire; he’ll be convinced when he sees me, that I’m a doppleganger or an astral double the police have conjured up to discredit him.”

  “If you don’t stop trying to psychoanalyze Zyyzk,” Gavigan growled impatiently, “the police are going to conjure up a charge of withholding information in a murder case. Get on with it. Helen Hope wasn’t being tailed, so her disappearance was a cinch. She simply walked out, without even taking her toothbrush—to make Zyyzk’s prediction look good—and grabbed a plane for Montana or Mexico or some such place where Keeler was to meet her later. But how did Keeler evaporate? And don’t you give me any nonsense about two invisible men.”

  Merlini grinned. “Then we’d better take my disappearance first. That used only one invisible man—and, of course, too many phone booths.”

  Then, quickly, as Gavigan started to explode, Merlini stopped being cryptic. “In that restaurant you and Ross sat at a table and in the seats that I selected. You saw me, through the window, enter what I had been careful to refer to as the second booth from the right. Seen through the window. that is what it was. But the line of phone booths extended on either side beyond the window and your field of vision. Viewed from outside, there were nine—not six—booths, and the one I entered was actually the third in line.”

  “Do you mean,” Gavigan said menacingly, “that when I was outside watching the second booth, Ross, inside, was watching the third—and we both thought we were watching the same one?”

  “Yes. It isn’t necessary to deceive the senses if the mind can be misdirected. You saw what you saw, but it wasn’t what you thought you saw. And that—”

  Then Gavigan did explode, in a muffled sort of way. “Are you saying that we searched the wrong phone booth? And that you were right there all the time, sitting in the next one?”

  Merlini didn’t need to answer. That was obviously just what he did mean.

  “Then your silver dollar,” I began, “and the phone receiver—”

  “Were,” Merlini grinned, “what confidence men call ‘the convincer’—concocted evidence which seemed to prove that you had the right booth, prevented any skeptical second thoughts, and kept you from examining the other booths just to make sure you had the right one.”

  I got it then. “That first time you left the restaurant, before you came back with that phony request for the loan of a nickel—that’s when you left the dollar in the second booth.” Merlini nodded. “I made a call, too. I dialed the number of the second booth. And when the phone rang, I stepped into the second booth, took the receiver off the hook, dropped the silver dollar on the floor, then hurried back to your table. Both receivers were off and the line was open.”

  “And when we looked into the second booth, you were sitting right next door, three feet away, telling Gavigan via the phone that you were in the Bronx?”

  Merlini nodded. “And I came out after you had gone. It’s a standard conjuring principle. The audience doesn’t see the coin, the rabbit, or the girl vanish because they actually disappear either before or after the magician pretends to conjure them into thin air. The audience is watching most careful
ly at the wrong time.”

  “Now wait a minute,” the Inspector objected. “That’s just exactly the way you said Keeler couldn’t have handled the phone business. What’s more he couldn’t. Ross and I weren’t watching you the first time you left the restaurant. But we’d been watching Keeler for a week.”

  “And,” I added, “Malloy and Hicks couldn’t have miscounted the booths at the station and searched the wrong one. They could see both ends of that line of booths the whole time.”

  “They didn’t miscount,” Merlini said. “They just didn’t count. The booth we examined was the fifth from the right end of the line, but neither Malloy nor Hicks ever referred to it in that way.”

  Gavigan scowled. “They said Keeler went into the booth to the right of the one that was out of order.’ And the phone in the next booth was out of order.”

  “I know, but Keeler didn’t enter the booth next to the one we found out of order. He went into a booth next to one that was marked: Out Of Order. That’s not quite the same.” Gavigan and I both said the same thing at the same time: “The sign had been moved!”

  “Twice,” Merlini said, nodding. “First, when Keeler was in the Oyster Bar. The second invisible man—invisible because no one was watching him—moved it one booth to the right. And when Keeler, a few minutes later, entered the booth to the right of the one bearing the sign, he was actually in the second booth from the one whose phone didn’t work.

  “And then our second invisible man went into action again. He walked into the booth marked out of order, smashed a duplicate pair of blood-smeared glasses on the floor, and dialed the Judge’s phone. When Keeler answered, he walked out again, leaving the receiver off the hook. It was as neat a piece of misdirection as I’ve seen in a long time.

  Who would suspect him of putting through a call from a phone booth that was plainly labeled out of order?” Cautiously, as if afraid the answer would blow up in his face, the Inspector asked, “He did all this with Malloy and Hicks both watching? And he wasn’t seen—because he was invisible?”