Aldo, who had picked up his shirt, nearly dropped it. “You are a magician?” He wasn’t smiling now.
“I do a little magic,” Merlini said. “I liked that Poker deal of yours, but I can top it. You shuffle, cut, and deal four Bridge hands. I won’t touch the cards at all and yet I’ll get a perfect hand.”
“The Bridge?” Aldo said slowly. “I do not know the Bridge so well.”
“Four players,” Merlini told him. “The complete deck is dealt, and a perfect hand is all the cards of one suit. The odds against getting it by chance are 158,753,389,899 to 1.”
Aldo sat on the floor again, picked up the deck, and began shuffling slowly. He looked thoughtful. “You want to make a little bet on that?”
“Sure,” Merlini said. “At those odds I can bet you between two and three ten-thousandths of a cent against the missing half million in diamonds.”
“I think,” Aldo said, “that you lose.” He dealt rapidly but stopped after four cards had been dealt to each hand, and turned those in front of Merlini face up. “How can you get thirteen cards of one suit when the first four are Aces?”
“You might give me a square deal,” Merlini said. “Suppose I shuffle the cards once first.” He held out his hand.
Aldo wasn’t interested. “Non! The trick is impossible. You are talking through the hat.”
George Hurley suddenly lost patience in a battle of magicians that might even have made hocus-pocus history.
He exploded. “You can play games with this character in his cell! I want to know where this hiding place is you say we missed—and right now!”
“Pierre,” Merlini said of the French magician, “is much too uninterested in the impossible trick I offered to do; any other magician or gambler would have demanded to see it at once.
And why does a card man of his calibre claim to know so little about Bridge? Most important, why is he so reluctant to finish dealing out four full hands of Bridge?”
“What’s so different about Bridge?” the glum Customs Agent asked. “He’s been dealing fancy Poker hands.”
“Yes. Five hands of five cards each. That’s less than half the deck. I want to see him deal the rest of the deck!”
“The rest of it?” Hurley said. “But… but he’s been shuffling that deck all morning.” The Customs chief reached for the deck and an unsmiling Aldo shrugged and let it go.
“He’s been doing card tricks all the time” Merlini went on, “because he didn’t want to let the deck out of his hands. The shuffling was the misdirection that made you decide, without really thinking about it, that the deck must be innocent. And yet every trick he did cried out that his shuffle couldn’t possibly be legitimate.”
When Hurley tried to spread the cards across the floor half of them stuck solidly together. He picked the solid half of the deck up, inserted a fingernail under the top card, and pulled. It peeled off reluctantly.
“Glued together,” Gavigan said, “and hollowed out!”
The tightly-packed gems that filled the hole in the half-deck blazed brilliantly in the light.
“A perfect hand,” Merlini smiled, “in diamonds!”
Merlini and the Sound Effects Murder
THE SECOND-FLOOR APARTMENT IN THE OLD BROWNSTONE FRONT on East 68th Street consisted of a living room, bedroom, kitchenette, bathroom, and study. Entering this last room, The Great Merlini found an imposing array of instruments for capturing and reproducing sound—a complication of hi-fi equipment, microphones, amplifiers, and tape recorders. Shelves that covered one wall were filled to overflowing with neatly catalogued records and rolls of tape. The room also held one weary and worried F.B.I. agent, a tired and disgruntled Inspector Gavigan, and, on the gray-green carpet before the divan, a large irregular dark stain.
“At two in the morning.” Merlini said, “I’m not too alert. But on the phone you seemed to be saying something highly uncomplimentary about—an invisible man.”
“It was an understatement,” Gavigan growled. “Did you, by any chance, happen to know Jerome Kirk?”
The magician nodded. “Sound Services, Incorporated. A complete line of offstage noises, bird calls, train whistles, tribal drums, thunderstorms—you name it, we have it. He was also the man who invented the phantom woodchopper.”
F.B.I.-man Fred Ryan said, “Phantom what?”
“Woodchopper. The apartment owners in this block got together a few years back and had a dozen trees planted along the curb to give the street a Parisian touch. Real proud of them they were. At three A.M. one morning, with neat theatrical timing, Kirk aimed a loudspeaker out through his window and let the neighbors listen to a hi-fi recording of a lumberjack in the Maine woods. It was a nice clear recording—you could even hear the axe bite into the wood and the chips fly. After a few minutes of this busy and efficient chopping heads were poked out of every window on the block. And then, loud and clear, came the clarion cry ‘Timber!’—followed by the crack of splitting wood and the long slow crash as a giant of the forest toppled and fell with a final earth-shaking boom.”
“I wonder,” Gavigan said, still glum, “how he managed to escape shooting until now. When Kirk didn’t show up this afternoon to supervise the sound effects on an NBC telecast they sent a man after him.” The inspector looked toward the bloodstain. “He was lying there with four bullet holes in him.”
“Four?” Merlini asked. “That seems a lot. Noisy, too.”
“Not here. This room is soundproofed. At exactly 2:44 P.M. someone stepped in through the door from the living room and started blasting. Kirk took the first shots standing up.”
Gavigan pointed to the liquor cabinet at the end of the divan. The jagged lower half of a bottle of whiskey stood there with several highball glasses. Another glass, curiously intact, lay amid the splintered fragments of a soda bottle that had fallen and smashed on the stone hearth of the fireplace.
“One shot, a miss, plowed through the glassware. One got him in the arm, and the third hit him dead center in the chest. The last two entered his back. They were fired after he had fallen face down on the floor. Somebody wasn’t taking any chances.”
“Somebody,” Ryan added disgustedly, “who never entered this building, never left it, and who isn’t here now. Either that or he’s invisible. And I can’t write up a report with anything like that in it.” The F.B.I.-man got to his feet and faced Merlini belligerently. “This building has three floors. The super and his wife, who occupy the ground-floor apartment, spent the day in Jersey visiting relatives. The third floor is occupied by a sexy dish who sings in a Village night club under the name of June Barlow.”
“She’s a refugee,” Gavigan added, “from a church choir in East Orange where she was billed as Gertrude Schwartzkopf. I talked to the minister and he speaks highly of her. I didn’t tell him we found a pair of Kirk’s pajamas in her bedroom closet.”
“On those grounds,” Ryan said, “Gavigan would have her downtown now sweating out a third degree—except for one thing. Even if she sometimes sounds like four people she can’t be in two places at the same time.”
“Sounds like four people?” Merlini asked.
Ryan nodded. “She admits being here in this room with Kirk from noon until nearly two. She says they were recording—making one of those Les and Mary Ford multiple jobs. She puts a song on tape. Then it’s played back, she harmonizes with it, and a second recorder gets the combination. Repeat that routine twice more and you’ve got a quartet—all the voices hers. Could be that’s what she and Kirk were doing—there are a couple of tapes like that here. But what we do know for sure is that she was seen getting into a cab out front a few minutes after two o’clock. She says she went to a Carnegie Hall studio for a vocal lesson. Her voice teacher and an elevator operator both agree she got there at 2:20 and was in the Carnegie Hall studio for over an hour.”
“Kirk,” Gavigan put in, “was shot to death nearly half an hour after she got there. And this building, from the time she left it until the bo
dy was found, was empty—except for Kirk and three F.B.I. men.”
“One,” Ryan continued unhappily, “was on the roof. Two were in the front room, ground floor. We’ve had them there for forty-eight hours. One of the mob who shot up that bank in Queens and killed two tellers last week has been holed up across the street—Joe the Chopper. We were waiting for his two pals to show so we could take them all at once. If Kirk was one of them it’s a new wrinkle for Joe—he’s always worked with professionals only. On the other hand, it looks like his kind of a killing. He’s trigger-happy and, like most crooks, a lousy shot. But he’s also six-foot-three and weighs over two hundred pounds—about as invisible as a circus elephant.”
“Joe,” Merlini asked, “was across the street all afternoon?”
“He hasn’t shown his ugly face since he checked in there two days ago. And he was there early this evening when we went in with tear gas and brought him out.”
“And he couldn’t have shot Kirk from across the street—this room has no windows. Is there a back entrance?”
“One door, two windows,” Gavigan said, “all locked on the inside. And anybody coming that way would have stumbled smack over the two F.B.I.-men in the front room trying to get through to the hall. We’ve also searched the joint three times—every last broom closet.”
“And I take it the two F.B.I.-men had a good view of the front door of this building as well as the one across the street?”
“It was right under their noses,” Ryan said. “No one came near it going either way.”
“And of course the two F.B.I.-men alibi each other,” Merlini said slowly. “Which means that the only person who could have killed Kirk is the F.B.I.-man who had access to the trapdoor on the roof.”
Ryan turned and glared at Gavigan. “And you said this magician might be able to help!”
For the first time the Inspector almost smiled. “Merlini,” he said, “I have a hunch Ryan won’t buy that. It happens that he took the afternoon shift on the roof himself.”
“The report he is going to have to write is a problem, isn’t it? Mr. J. Edgar Hoover isn’t going to like any part of it.”
“And the Commissioner,” Gavigan added, “is already breathing fire. If the only answer you can come up with is Ryan himself—”
“A policeman’s lot is not a happy one,” Merlini said. “But what about the magician who is routed out of bed at 2 A.M. and asked to conjure an invisible man out of thin air?” He scowled at the dark stain on the carpet. “I doubt if it will help much, but there’s one thing I’m curious about. You said that Kirk was shot at exactly 2:44 P.M. I know very well the Medical Examiner didn’t take a look at the body and come up with a time of death as precise as that. How do you know…”
“We didn’t have to ask him,” Gavigan replied. He turned to a console radio and the tape recorder on its top. “When we got here both these machines were running. At two o’clock Kirk tuned in WQXY and began taping a symphonic concert. The tape is good for ninety minutes—we know because we played it back. After the concert there was a station break at three o’clock with a time announcement, then news, weather, an interview program, and some other stuff that Kirk never heard. Now listen.”
The Inspector turned a switch. The plastic reels on the recorder slowly revolved and orchestral music filled the room. “Just sixteen minutes before that three o’clock time announcement—at exactly 2:44—we get this. Listen.”
The symphony was Haydn’s, but suddenly a quiet passage exploded as though Honegger or Copland had tampered with the score. A shot blasted from the speaker. Softly, serenely the strings continued for a bar or two. Another shot cracked out and the music flowed imperturbably on. A third time the invisible gun spoke and, after a longer interval, twice more. A distant horn piped faintly and the brasses slowly began to come to life. Then came another sound—as unexpected as the shots but with a different quality, distinctly recognizable—the sudden, forceful slam of a door.
A moment later Gavigan turned the switch and the music stopped in mid bar.
“We got the station program director up here,” he said, “with the tape they made for their file. It’s exactly the same, except no shots. This tape was made this afternoon and Kirk was shot by someone who came quietly through that door at exactly 2:44, started shooting before Kirk could open his mouth, fired five times, then left, slammed the door—and vanished. Or walked out past the F.B.I.-men without being seen. What I want to know…”
“Wait, Merlini broke in. “Not so many conclusions all at once. I’m beginning to suspect your invisible man may be a close relative of the phantom woodchopper.” The magician crossed to the tape recorder and looked down at it. “Suppose,” he said slowly, “I shot Kirk before the radio program began. Then I put a clean tape on the recorder—clean except for an inch or two halfway through on which I have already recorded five shots and the slamming of a door. I turn on the radio and recorder and ease out, being careful not to slam the door on my exit. Then I establish my alibi—by keeping an appointment for a voice lesson at Carnegie Hall.”
There was complete silence.
Then Gavigan spoke. “She didn’t dare record only one shot in advance—she knew she might miss. And that’s why she put two slugs into Kirk’s back after he’d fallen—the number of shots had to match what was already on the tape.”
Ryan shook his head. “A good try, gentlemen, but it won’t work. As they record, these machines automatically erase anything already on the tape.”
“Do we know this one does that?” Merlini asked. “Kirk was an engineer and I never met one yet who could resist revamping a piece of equipment. For that matter, a singer like June Barlow could know enough about tape recorders to—”
“It’ll take about two minutes to find out,” Gavigan said, “We simply put on a clean tape, record something, rewind, and record again.”
Ryan was already doing it. He spoke briefly, “Testing, one, two, testing, one, two.” Then he rewound the tape, whistled a few bars of Yankee Doodle Dandy, rewound once more, and played it back. Both recordings were there, one superimposed on the other.
“Well,” Gavigan said. “That was a lucky guess that paid off.”
“Lucky guess, my antenna!” Merlini objected. “As soon as I heard the shots on that tape I knew they hadn’t been recorded at the same time Kirk was killed.”
“I don’t believe it,” Gavigan said. “I’ve heard that tape half a dozen times. There’s nothing on it that tells you that.”
Merlini grinned. “That’s right. Nothing. Something that should be there—isn’t.”
Merlini turned away from the tape recorder and crossed the room. “If June Barlow had been a better marksman she might have managed a perfect crime. But she taped five shots in advance because, as you said, Inspector, she couldn’t know how many she would need. Under the circumstances I doubt if she even heard the commotion caused by the shot that missed Kirk.”
Merlini stood by the fireplace looking down at the broken bottle on the liquor cabinet and the shattered pieces of the bottle that had smashed on the stone hearth. “Even a magician,” he said, “would have trouble breaking all that glassware without making a sound. That’s what was missing on the tape—the sound of breaking glass.”
Nothing is Impossible
ALBERT NORTH HAD LOOKED FORWARD TO RETIREMENT. AN EARLY pioneer in aviation design and the founder of Northair Corporation, he had promoted himself to Chairman of the Board and turned the active management of the company over to his son-in-law, Charles Kane.
A week later he was bored, irritable, and unhappy. He had been much too active for too long. He turned a small room off the study in his Fifth Avenue apartment into a workshop and, for a while, made airplane models. This was better than lying in the sun at Miami but it still didn’t satisfy him.
Then he found a hobby that ran away with him. It was a curious hobby, and a magazine editor whom I queried agreed that there was a story in it. At first I intended to give
it the light touch, but after listening to North talk for a couple of hours I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t know if he was pulling my leg or fooling himself, or if I had stumbled on the biggest story in the history of journalism.
I decided to get some expert professional advice. And I knew just where to go to find out if any deception was involved—a place that sold the very best grade in quantity lots. I walked into The Great Merlini’s Magic Shop just at closing time.
The proprietor was totaling the day’s receipts and he was not in a good mood. He had covered several sheets of paper with mathematics and had failed to find out why he had $3.17 more cash on hand than the register total showed. In view of the fact that he designed, performed, and sold miracles, his annoyance at this situation was understandable.
“Obviously,” he growled, giving the cash register a dark look, “that machine needs overhauling.”
Since the shiny gadget he referred to was the latest IBM model, installed only the week before, I thought this conclusion somewhat unlikely. Not being an electronics engineer, however, I didn’t say so.
“What,” I asked instead, “do you know about flying saucers?” I didn’t really expect to surprise him with that; he’s a hard man to surprise. But I certainly didn’t expect the answer I got.
“Would you like to see our deluxe model—the one with invisible, double-action suspension and guaranteed floating power?” His straight face and deadpan delivery didn’t fool me; I’d met that technique before.
I shook my head. “I know. You sell rising cards and floating ladies, and the Levitation section of your catalogue offers a couple of dozen methods of defying gravity, but don’t tell me—”
The Great Merlini pointed to the neatly lettered business slogan on the wall behind the counter: Nothing Is Impossible. “You should know by now, Mr. Harte,” he said, “that anything can happen here. Come with me.”
He led me into the back room that serves as workshop and shipping department. I threaded my way through a maze of milk cans (for escaping from), walked around a guillotine (guaranteed to be harmless), and saw Merlini pick up a tin pie plate from the workbench.
The Great Merlini Page 10