“Yeah,” Gavigan said, “he didn’t miss any tricks, did he?”
“No, but a couple of them misfired.” Merlini lit a cigarette and, turning, began to make some adjustment in the strings of a marionette that hung on the wall. Over his shoulder he said, “By the way, Inspector, did you take the precautions I advised?”
“Yes,” Gavigan answered. “He’s in the tightest cell we’ve got. Doc Hesse stripped him stark naked and examined him thoroughly. No picklocks in his mouth, hair, on the soles of his feet, or in any of the body orifices. We kept his clothes and gave him others. There’s a light outside his cell door that burns nights and day, and two guards on duty every minute. He escaped from the Tombs once, but in the face of conditions like those.”
“That sounds pretty thorough, but just the same I’d keep a sharp eye out. He’s as slippery as—uh oh! I forgot!”
Merlini snapped his fingers with a sharp click. He wheeled to face Gavigan and the cigarette, hanging forgotten from his lips, bobbed as he spoke.
“Houdini, when he was about to get a particularly stiff going over, used to conceal his picklock by a method he’d learned from the old-time carnival freaks, the men who ate frogs and poisons, who swallowed glass and stones. He swallowed the picklock and regurgitated it when needed. Mediums have also been known to conceal and produce fake ectoplasm in the same—”
“Hand me that phone!” Inspector Gavigan ordered in a thunderous voice. “I’ll get an X-Ray outfit down there and—”
Rapidly, furiously, he dialed Spring 7-3100.
The weather outside was mild. Through the room’s one window, raised two or three inches, came a sound that always sends a tingle of excitement stirring with me. Mingled with the cough and rattle of the traffic that swirled about Times Square, but rising on a higher pitch, I heard the long drawn cry of newsboys.
“Extry! Extry! Uhx-treee!”
1Chung Ling Soo (William Elsworth Robinson) was killed while performing the Bullet Trick at the Wood Empire Theatre in London in 1918. A verdict of Accidental Death was returned at the inquest, although some commentators have pointed to certain evidence, still unexplained, that would seem to indicate suicide or even murder. Of the dozen performers who have featured the trick, half were killed, the others injured. The only present-day performer who dares it is Theodore Anneman.
2See pp. 125-126.
3Modern Criminal Investigation, Funk & Wagnall’s, 1935, p. 31. Hypnotism was one of the two things Duvallo could have done that none of the other suspects were able to do. See p. 12.
4See pp. 31 and 40.
5See p. 12.
6He did, sooner than he thought. We were to meet Colonel Watrous and Madame Rappourt again, later, in the strange case of The Footprints on the Ceiling.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1938 by Clayton Rawson, renewed 1965
cover design by Heather Kern
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Death from a Top Hat Page 28