A tall, blond man, one of the three persons Brady had ushered into the room as Foyle was speaking, said coldly, “Who wouldn’t be startled? I heard shots, entered a dark room to find a body, and then turned to discover a man I’d never seen before barking at me over a gun.”
“Kingsley,” Gavigan said. “I’m not satisfied with your story at all. You say you were downstairs when you heard the first shot, that you ran up, heard the second shot as you reached the top of the stairs, and that no one came out through the study door before you got to it.”
The novelist nodded. “That’s correct. I opened the door, pushed the light switch just inside without result, and saw the overturned wheel-chair. I went across and found Lasko—dead.” Kingsley looked at the private detective. “But I had no intention of leaving by the window. It was locked on the inside, and I went toward it because I heard someone outside trying to get in.”
“Everybody,” Gavigan growled, “tried to get in. And you want me to believe nobody ever went out—that Lasko’s murderer vanished into thin air like a soap bubble. Miss Dawn, how long had you been out there on the sundeck?”
Miss Dawn’s tone of voice said that she didn’t like cops—not even inspectors. “Ten minutes,” she said frostily. “I told you that before. And don’t ask me again if anyone came out through that window. No one did. You might try asking something important. Such as where Mr. Kingsley was when he heard that first shot.”
The novelist frowned. “I was in the library reading.”
Miss Dawn smiled. “You never told me you could read Braille, my dear.”
“Braille? I can’t. Why—”
“I could see the library windows from the sundeck. They were dark. There were no lights there at all!”
“Well, Kingsley,” Gavigan said. “That eliminates our invisible man. You were in here with Lasko. You’re the only person who could possibly—”
Marie Lasko spoke suddenly, her voice tense and angry. “Just a minute, Inspector. Harold was in the library. I know. You see—I was with him.”
Dorothy Dawn smiled again. “Reading aloud to you, I suppose—in the dark?”
“Don’t look now, Inspector,” Merlini said. “But that invisible man is back again.”
“No!” Gavigan growled. “Don’t give me that.” He faced his three suspects. “Somebody is lying like hell. And I’m going to find out—”
“I know who’s lying,” Merlini said. “I’ll demonstrate. Which one of you people called the police?”
It was Marie Lasko who answered. “I did. Harold told me to stay in the library, but when I heard the second shot I followed him upstairs.” She indicated Foyle. “And this man told me to phone Spring 7-3100. I went down again to the library and did so.
“You see, Inspector?” Merlini said. “Together with Lasko’s broken legs, that tells you who has been lying and explains the mystery of the vanishing blackmailer.”
The Inspector scowled. “Oh, it does, does it?”
“After disarming and shooting Lasko,” Merlini explained, “the blackmailer had to vanish. And with Miss Dawn on the sundeck outside the window and running footsteps approaching the only door, that was something of a trick. His first step was to shoot out the light, thus insuring that it couldn’t be turned on again too soon. Then he dropped the gun by the body and flattened himself against the wall by the door. After Kingsley ran in, he merely stepped into the doorway behind him, pretended he’d just arrived, and—”
Foyle shook his head. “Theories are a dime a dozen.”
“All right,” Merlini said. “Here are some facts. Fact Number One: the other suspects are all in the high income tax brackets, leaving you as the only decent candidate for the blackmailer role. Fact Number Two: the blackmail payments began six months ago when you got Lasko his divorce evidence and discovered something that—”
“The D.A.,” Foyle said, “will need a hell of a lot more than that.”
“The best,” Merlini smiled, “is yet to come. When you had to explain your presence here, you couldn’t very well admit you came to blackmail Lasko. So—Fact Number Three—you said he’d phoned and asked for protection. But the telephone, as Brady and Marie both clearly stated, is downstairs in the library. At shortly after five, when you claim Lasko phoned you, he was confined with two broken legs to a wheel-chair in his study on the second floor. And that puts you, Mr. Foyle, in a chair of a different kind.”
The Clue of the Missing Motive
I WONDERED IF YOU’D BE QUESTIONING ME,” THE GREAT MERLINI said as he opened the door at 13½ Washington Square North and admitted a scowling Inspector Gavigan and an even glummer Lieutenant Malloy. Merlini indicated a headline in the newspaper he had been reading:
PHANTOM GUNMAN SHOOTS
UNIDENTIFIED MAN
$30,000 in Cash Found on Corpse
“A man gets killed at dusk last evening just across the street in the park—a hundred feet or so from my front door. Scores of people there, as usual, and one man actually saw the victim as he fell. Yet no one saw the murderer or heard the shot. I’m a magician. So I suspected you might suspect me.”
Gavigan sat down wearily. “Have you,” he asked, “ever been in Hillsdale, Oklahoma?”
“Of course,” Merlini admitted. “I’m an old circus man. When I was with the Kelley & Edwards Combined Shows in ’18 we had a bad ‘Hey Rube’ in Hillsdale and—”
“That,” Malloy said in a tired voice, “makes you our No. 1 suspect. None of the others ever heard of the burg before.”
“What,” Merlini asked, “does Hillsdale, Oklahoma have to do with an invisible gunman taking potshots at an unidentified man in New York City’s Washington Square park?”
“If,” Gavigan said, “I knew the answer to that I’d know what the missing motive was and which of the suspects next door is guilty.”
“Next door?”
“Yes. You see, James J. Vanpool, the man who was in the park and saw the victim fall, phoned the police—”
“The paper,” Merlini put in, “says he lives across the park on Washington Square South. I think I’ve seen him going in next door. Is he a short, fat, middle-aged man—the jolly, effervescent type—horn-rimmed glasses, military mustache?”
“That’s him. Son of old man Vanpool, the Wall Street Wizard, who left James and his sister, Mrs. Elsa Blackwell, a couple of million dollars apiece. She lives next door—an invalid widow who’s been bed-ridden for years. Vanpool comes over nearly every evening and plays cribbage with her. And this morning he showed up in my office with a single-shot target pistol equipped with a silencer. Said he suspected it might be the death weapon. Ballistics checked it. It was.”
“He says,” Malloy added, “that he figured the absence of a report at the time of the shooting indicated a silencer. He had seen one on a gun in his sister’s house; he looked, found the gun had been fired recently, and trotted in to us with it. Apparently no one saw the killer because he fired from a window in the Blackwell house.”
“And the gun,” Merlini said, “belongs to Elsa’s daughter and Vanpool’s niece—Diana Blackwell.”
“Yeah,” Malloy nodded. “But how did you—”
“I read the papers,” Merlini explained. “Diana’s a leading light in café society and holder of the women’s skeet shooting championship.”
The Lieutenant nodded. “A glamour girl and an Annie Oakley combined. And she’s engaged to Count Alexis Corvoisier, a fashion designer with an accent and waves in his hair. Uncle James wants us to throw him in the can because he was in the house when the shooting occurred and could have used the gun. But that goes for Diana and her mother too.”
“Why,” Merlini asked, “does he put the finger on the Count?”
“Claims he’s a fortune hunter,” Gavigan said. “Says he checked up and discovered the Count has a wife and three children in Biarritz. He ordered Corvoisier to clear out a couple of days ago, threatening, if he didn’t, to tell Diana.”
“Which means,�
� Merlini said, “that the Count has reason to take a potshot at Uncle James. And Uncle, to save the family honor, might be tempted to do the same to the Count.”
“And that’s not the half of it,” Gavigan added. “Mrs. Blackwell’s will leaves everything to Diana, and the old lady claims her daughter and the Count have been trying to poison her. Diana says her mother has delusions, that ten years of confinement in a bed has given her a Grade-A persecution complex. Could be. The old lady won’t let anyone come up to the third floor where she lives, except brother James.”
“That dough,” Malloy said, “is a terrific motive just the same—two million bucks worth. And if the old lady thinks Diana and her boy friend are trying to get her, she has a motive too; she might try to save herself by getting them first. Also, if Diana has heard, as Uncle James has, that her fiancé is already married, I can see her giving the Count the business.”
“A situation,” Merlini said, “almost as explosive as nuclear fission. Vanpool, Diana, and her mother have motives to kill the Count; the Count has reason to knock off Vanpool, and Diana and her mother each have a reason to polish off the other. But you said something about a missing motive, Inspector? Seems to me you’ve got more motives now than you can use.”
“I know,” Gavigan growled. “Motives for a lot of people who didn’t get killed—at least not yet. But wait until you hear who the victim was.”
“I’ve been wondering when you’d get to that. You’ve identified him?”
Gavigan looked unhappier than ever. “I’m afraid so. We showed the old lady a photo and had the others view the body. They all swear they never set eyes on the guy before. So we gave them all lie-detector tests and got exactly the same answer, plus the fact that none of them has ever been in or anywhere near Hillsdale, Oklahoma.”
“And that,” Merlini asked, “is where the victim hails from?”
“Yes. When we found the guy’s mustache was a phony and his hair was dyed grey, we figured his glasses might be part of a disguise too. Then Malloy remembered a teletype message describing a wanted embezzler: Name: Wilbur Sloan; Age: 49; Height: 5 foot 2 inches; Weight: 193; sandy hair, mole on left hip, and so on. It all checked. Wilbur took it on the lam out of Hillsdale with thirty grand a week ago just one jump ahead of the bank examiners. They found his accounts shy another fifty thousand over the last six months and evidence that some of his best friends were bookmakers. We’ve established that he arrived in New York the morning of the day he was murdered and it’s the first time in his life he’s ever been out of Oklahoma.”
“I see now,” Merlini said, “what you mean by a missing motive. Nearly everybody next door has motives for killing off each other but nobody has one for killing Wilbur. And yet one of them shot him dead. But what bothers you, Inspector? That obviously means that he lost his life for the same reason he lost all that money on the horses. And, of course, that tells you who killed him.”
“Huh?” Gavigan shook his head dizzily. “I don’t get it…”
“Wilbur Sloan,” Merlini explained, “lost money on the horses for the same reason anybody does—because he was unlucky. Since none of the persons with opportunity and means had any reason to kill Wilbur and yet one of them did just that, it obviously means that Wilbur, as unlucky as ever, was killed by accident—because in the dusk and from across the street the killer mistook him for someone else!”
“Five foot two,” Gavigan said. “Weight, 193. That makes him short and fat. He was wearing a mustache, glasses, and grey hair. The only other person who fits that description is—”
“Vanpool,” Malloy finished.
“Yes.” Merlini nodded. “But it’s even simpler than that. Uncle James was the only one of the lot who, like Wilbur, was out there in the park—on his way across for his evening game of cards with his sister. Therefore, he was the only one of the lot for whom the bank embezzler could have been mistaken. The killer, waiting at the window for Vanpool, shot and killed the wrong man—the one who merely looked like Vanpool.”
Gavigan was already on his feet as Merlini finished. “The murderer is, therefore, the one and only person in the house who had a motive for killing Uncle James J. Vanpool—”
“Excuse us,” Malloy said, grabbing his hat. “We’ve got to go and arrest a Count!”
From Another World
IT WAS UNDOUBTEDLY ONE OF THE WORLD’S STRANGEST ROOMS. The old-fashioned roll-top desk, the battered typewriter, and the steel filing cabinet indicated that it was an office. There was even a calendar memo-pad, a pen and pencil set, and an overflowing ashtray on the desk, but any resemblance to any other office stopped right there.
The desk top also held a pair of handcuffs, half a dozen billiard balls, a shiny nickel-plated revolver, one celluloid egg, several decks of playing cards, a bright green silk handkerchief, and a stack of unopened mail. In one corner of the room stood a large, galvanized-iron milk-can with a strait jacket lying on its top. A feathered devil mask from the upper Congo leered down from the wall above and the entire opposite wall was papered with a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey twenty-four sheet poster.
A loose-jointed dummy-figure of a small boy with pop-eyes and violently red hair lay on the filing cabinet together with a skull and a fish-bowl filled with paper flowers. And in the cabinet’s bottom drawer, which was partly open and lined with paper, there was one half-eaten carrot and a twinkly-nosed, live white rabbit.
A pile of magazines, topped by a French journal, l’Illusioniste, was stacked precariously on a chair, and a large bookcase tried vainly to hold an even larger flood of books that overflowed and formed dusty stalagmites growing up from the floor—books whose authors would have been startled at the company they kept. Shaw’s Joan of Arc was sandwiched between Rowan’s Story of the Secret Service and the Memoirs of Robert Houdin. Arthur Machen, Dr. Hans Gross, William Blake, Sir James Jeans, Rebecca West, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ernest Hemingway were bounded on either side by Devol’s Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi and Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft.
The merchandise in the shop beyond the office had a similar surrealistic quality, but the inscription on the glass of the outer door, although equally strange, did manage to supply an explanation. It read: Miracles For Sale—THE MAGIC SHOP, A. Merlini, Prop.
And that gentleman, naturally, was just as unusual as his place of business. For one thing, he hadn’t put a foot in it, to my knowledge, in at least a week. When he finally did reappear, I found him at the desk sleepily and somewhat glumly eyeing the unopened mail.
He greeted me as though he hadn’t seen another human being in at least a month, and the swivel chair creaked as he settled back in it, put his long legs up on the desk, and yawned. Then he indicated the card bearing his business slogan—“Nothing Is Impossible”—which was tacked on the wall.
“I may have to take that sign down,” he said lazily. “I’ve just met a theatrical producer, a scene designer, and a playwright all of whom are quite impossible. They came in here a week before opening night and asked me to supply several small items mentioned in the script. In one scene a character said, ‘Begone!’ and the stage directions read: ‘The genie and his six dancing girl slaves vanish instantly.’ Later an elephant, complete with howdah and princess, disappeared the same way. I had to figure out how to manage all that and cook up a few assorted miracles for the big scene in heaven, too. Then I spent thirty-six hours in bed. And I’m still half asleep.” He grinned wryly and added, “Ross, if you want anything that is not a stock item, you can whistle for it.”
“I don’t want a miracle,” I said. “Just an interview. What do you know about ESP and PK?”
“Too much,” he said. “You’re doing another magazine article?”
“Yes. And I’ve spent the last week with a queer assortment of characters, too—half a dozen psychologists, some professional gamblers, a nuclear physicist, the secretary of the Psychical Research Society, and a neurologist. I’ve got an appointment in half an
hour with a millionaire, and after that I want to hear what you think of it.”
“You interviewed Dr. Rhine at Duke University, of course.”
I nodded. “Sure. He started it all. He says he’s proved conclusively that there really are such things as telepathy, mind-reading, clairvoyance, X-Ray vision, and probably crystal-gazing as well. He wraps it all up in one package and calls it ESP—meaning Extra Sensory Perception. “
“That,” Merlini said, “is not the half of it. His psychokinesis, or PK for short, is positively miraculous—and frightening.” The magician pulled several issues of the Journal of Parapsychology from the stack of magazines and upset the whole pile. “If the conclusions Rhine has published here are correct—if there really is a tangible mental force that can not only reach out and influence the movements of dice but exert its mysterious control over other physical objects as well—then he has completely upset the apple-cart of modern psychology and punctured a whole library of general scientific theory as well.”
“He’s already upset me,” I said. “I tried to use PK in a crap game Saturday night. I lost sixty-eight bucks.”
My skepticism didn’t disturb Merlini. He went right on, gloomier than ever. “If Rhine is right, his ESP and PK have reopened the Pandora’s box in which science thought it had forever sealed Voodoo and witchcraft and enough other practices of primitive magic to make your hair stand on end. And you’re growling about losing a few dollars—”
Behind me a hearty, familiar voice said, “I haven’t got anything to worry about except a homicidal maniac who has killed three people in the last two days and left absolutely no clues. But can I come in?”
Inspector Homer Gavigan of the New York City Police Department stood in the doorway, his blue eyes twinkling frostily.
Merlini, liking the Cassandra role he was playing, said, “Sure, I’ve been waiting for you. But don’t think that PK won’t give you a splitting headache, too. All a murderer would have to do to commit the perfect crime—and a locked room one at that—would be to exert his psychokinetic mental force from a distance against the gun trigger.” He pointed at the revolver on the desk. “Like this—”
The Great Merlini Page 2