Headless Lady

by Clayton Rawson

  “Don’t be too sure about the headhunter,” Merlini said. “He’s never been within miles of the Amazon. He hails from Harlem. And his right name, speaking of Booth, really is a strange coincidence. It’s Abraham Lincoln Jones, no less! I was introduced to him once at Coney Island.”

  “Are you pulling my leg?” I asked. But Merlini had turned to follow the lecturer toward the curtains that concealed the Headless Lady.

  We listened again to the lecturer’s talk; and then, just before he concluded, we ducked under the side wall and stationed ourselves where the Headless Lady would come out. “If she’ll tell me what I want to know,” said Merlini, “I’ll buy her a hat.”

  He made that crack inadvertently, and when he realized its implications was so delighted with it that his attention was diverted, and we muffed our chance. We had miscalculated slightly. When the side wall lifted, and the Headless Lady (with head now), emerged, she was further away than we had expected. She moved altogether too quickly toward her trailer, which was parked less than 20 feet away.

  Merlini and I started after her. Then Merlini stopped me, holding my arm. The shadowy figure of a man, who had been waiting unnoticed by the trailer door, joined her as she came up, and went into the trailer with her. We waited a moment, but no glow of light came from inside.

  “Suspicious,” Merlini murmured.

  We closed in, quietly circled the trailer, looking for an open window beneath which we could eavesdrop. They were, in spite of the warm, moist night, all tightly closed. And from within all that we could hear was an indistinguishably low murmur of voices.

  “Looks as if we were foiled again, Ross,” Merlini said. “Apparently an assignation, and I doubt if a social call would be welcome at the moment. What do you think?”

  “Barging in to catch people in flagrante delicto ain’t etiquette,” I said. “We’re not after divorce evidence. And it isn’t my forte anyway. I suggest we skip it. But I could bear to know who the man is.”

  “So could I. But I’m not going to sit here till dawn to find out. Let’s go get some shut-eye.”

  This suggestion, coming from Merlini, was unusual, but it was one that I wasn’t going to vote down. We got the car and drove into town. I needed cigarettes and stopped for them at a drugstore. Merlini went to the drug counter and made a mysterious purchase that I cross-questioned him about with no success.

  “Just a hunch I have,” he said. “Wait until I’ve tested it.”

  Waterboro’s only hotel, the Chesterfield, is an ancient and dusty firetrap with a desk clerk who fits the same description. He showed us to a room that was as home-like and comfortably inviting as a barn, and nearly as large. It was furnished with a brass bedstead, a tired rocking chair, and an early Sears Roebuck dresser.

  We left a call for seven and prepared to turn in. When I trekked back from a safari to the bathroom at the far end of the hall, I found Merlini in vivid green pajamas pulling on a pair of red rubber gloves.

  “So that’s what you bought,” I said. “I don’t care for the color scheme. The accessories should be in matching shades. If we can find some ice skates, you’ll be all set to pose for a portrait by Dali.”

  Without replying, Merlini drew his gloved hand down across the side of his cheek and then, moving to the window, placed his fingertips against the pane.

  I began to catch wise. “So,” I said. “The whorlless fingerprints. Is that it?”

  Merlini squinted at the glass, moving his head about to get the right light. “Yes, I think it is.”

  “But fingers leave prints because the pores exude an oily substance, and rubber gloves—”

  “Can do the same, if they’ve touched the face, for instance. They pick up the oil and redeposit it, an offset fingerprint job, as it were. If the gloves have any cuts, or abrasions they’d show up, but the ones we saw in the Major’s trailer were, like these, quite without distinguishing marks. We only know that the person who cut the windowpane wore rubber gloves, a fact which may or may not be of help. We’ll file it, however. “Merlini stripped off the gloves and turned out the light.

  As he got into bed, I asked, “Are you nursing a theory as to what did happen in the Major’s trailer? I figured that the burglar story you outlined was invented to trap Pauline into admitting she had gone to the trailer with her father. She could have done him in and moved the body; she has no alibi and enough motive. But she turns out to be victim number two. Where do we go from there?”

  “Back to the burglar theory,” Merlini said. “There’s nothing wrong with it. The prowler could have come in before Pauline and her father. When they interrupted his search for whatever it was he was after, he took cover in the wardrobe in the Pattison manner and sat tight until Pauline had gone. (I found a bit of mud from someone’s shoe on the wardrobe floor.) Then the Major opened the door to get the slicker he came for, and—”

  Suddenly Merlini’s feet hit the floor, and I heard him racing through the dark across the room. He twisted the key, jerked the door open, and peered out into the dimly lighted hall.

  “What is it?” I asked, half out of bed myself and ready for anything.

  Merlini closed the door quietly and answered in a lowered voice, “Someone with big ears. There’s a fairly wide streak of light creeps in under this door, and for the past minute or two I’d been wondering what made the shadow smack in the center of it. When the shadow walked off I thought I had better take a closer look. I should have started sooner. The hall is quite empty.”

  He got back into bed. “I think that from now on we would do well to include Mr. Stuart Towne in our calculations.”

  “Towne?” I asked. “How do you figure that?”

  “His name’s on the registry book downstairs, for one thing. And I don’t understand why he was having me on when he pretended not to know any of that gun talk I gave him.”

  “Um,” I mused. “The underworld backgrounds in his books are damned authentic. That why?”

  “Yes, that and—you read his first one, The Man with the Purple Face, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Remember the blurb about the author on the back of the jacket?”

  “Rental library,” I said. “I don’t think my copy had its jacket.”

  “The publishers proudly pointed out,” said Merlini, “that his realistic underworld background derived from the fact that the name Towne is a pseudonym, and that the author is an ex-bank-robber who turned writer during a stretch in Sing Sing. He has also authored several technical and very informative magazine articles bearing such titles as ‘The Gentle Art of Safe Cracking,’ ‘Con-Men I Have Known,’ ‘Hoboes and Their Habits,’ and the like.”

  “Well, well,” I said. “Now I lay me down to sleep with a mind washed free of care and worry. Mr. Stuart Towne, the Emily Post of the underworld, does articles on the technique and proper use of rubber gloves and glass cutters. And our mysterious burglar—”

  *His nickname derives from the fact that he once owned a deep-sea show, an exhibition of marine monsters. Ed is a man of various talents and wide experience. He also once specialized in window-sleeps, a stock type of exhibition in which the performer goes into a trance in a local store window and apparently remains there motionless for a week or two without food or water.

  Chapter Nine

  Impossible Arrow

  MY SUBCONSCIOUS MIND WASN’T as easily satisfied. Sleep was a long time coming, and when it arrived at last it brought dreams that were anything but carefree. All night long I fled endlessly, like a caged squirrel, around an enormous circus ring, pursued with grim and evil intent by cowboys, bank robbers, sword swallowers, the mummy of John Wilkes Booth, and a thundering herd of madly charging elephants. My escape was blocked on every side by a great audience which filled the seats and overflowed onto the arena track—a silently intent, sadistic, sinister, and impossibly grinning audience the members of which were all quite headless.

  Finally Merlini’s voice came, penetrating faintly thr
ough the heavy layers of sleep to send the phantoms flying. But as his syllables slowly coalesced to form words and then sense, they only called up a greater menace, a Hydra-headed monster that even Barnum might have shied from.

  “The desk clerk,” Merlini was saying, “has been murdered!”

  I sat up instantly, fully awake. “Wh-wh—what!”

  “Well,” Merlini laughed, his words having had their intended effect, “either that or the service furnished by the Hotel Chesterfield is lamentably lax. We weren’t called at seven. It’s nearly nine, and I’m expecting a busy day. Come, stir yourself.”

  Merlini’s powers of divination were not operating with their accustomed accuracy. His prediction of a busy day was far short of the mark. It turned out to be an incredibly hectic day filled with an army of incidents whose advancing shock troops, in the person of Stuart Towne, met us as we left the room a few minutes later. We encountered him in the hall, clad in pajamas and carrying soap and towel. He greeted us pleasantly and with some surprise.

  “Hello,” he said. “Staying on for more circus?”

  “Yes,” Merlini answered, “I think so. There were parts of last night’s performance that we missed.”

  If Towne appreciated the double-entendre he didn’t admit it. “Good. I’ll see you on the lot, then.”

  He disappeared into the bathroom and Merlini, as the door closed behind him, scowled at it. Then quickly he took a notebook from his pocket, tore out a sheet, held it against the wall, and rapidly drew on it in pencil these characters:

  He hurried with it to the bathroom door and knocked.

  “Yes?” Towne’s voice asked.

  “Sorry to bother you now,” Merlini said, “but something extremely odd happened last night. It’s just occurred to me that you might be able to explain it.”

  Towne unlocked the door and stepped part way out, shaving brush in hand. “Something odd?” he asked.

  “Yes. And in your line. Do you think the Hotel Chesterfield could possibly harbor a nest of international spies?” Merlini’s voice was completely serious.

  Towne looked vaguely alarmed. He frowned, glanced sharply across at me, and then grinned. “Sure,” he said. “In a Hitchcock movie, but this isn’t that. Or is it? What do you mean?”

  “I suspect that most detective-story writers,” Merlini went on, “like their literary ancestor, Poe, have some interest in codes and ciphers. Do you?”

  Towne’s slow nod was puzzled. “Yes, I’ve looked into the subject a bit. I know Yardley’s book. But—” His eye caught the slip of paper Merlini held out.

  “Some person unknown,” Merlini explained, serious as an owl, “shoved this note under our door last night. It looks distinctly ominous, and I don’t know whether it’s a warning, a threat, a pictographic description of the Army’s newest bomber, or a joke. In any case, it seems to have been delivered at the wrong door. It’s quite incomprehensible. Can you shed any light?”

  Towne scowled at the penciled characters, turned the paper over to examine its blank obverse side, hesitated, apparently still not quite convinced of Merlini’s seriousness, and then studied the inscription again.

  I waited almost breathlessly. His hesitation was highly suspicious. I knew what three of those symbols meant, and I was very sure that Towne knew, too. I didn’t know why Merlini had set this little trap; but it looked as if he was going to make a catch. Towne was so close to putting his foot in it that I almost uttered an involuntary: Careful!

  Then he spoke—and the trap clicked.

  “No,” he said doubtfully, “I can’t rattle off a translation for you offhand. It must be a joke of some sort, but I’d like to have a try at it. May I have a copy?”

  “You can have the original,” Merlini said. “You’re probably quite right about the joke. I’m incurably romantic. I’ll inquire downstairs if there’s a boy about the place. Age fifteen. One who’s been reading The Goldbug. We’ll see you later, then. If you do make anything of it, let us know.”

  Towne nodded, and we left him standing in the doorway, frowning intently at the paper, his puzzled air, I was certain now, completely false.

  “His acting,” I told Merlini once we were out of ear shot down the stairs, “is amateurish. But why does he pretend not to know those last three signs, the common proofreader’s symbols for delete, insert quotes, and period? And why did you suspect he might react that way? And what are those other characters?”

  “Hobo hieroglyphics,” Merlini answered. “The first means Tough on tramps. Bad dog; the second, Follow this street; and the third is an English criminal sign signifying A buyer of stolen goods lives here. The dot within the circle, the proofreader’s manner of indicating the insertion of a period, is also a hobo mark that means You can count on a thirty-day jolt for vagrancy in this town!”

  “Um,” I said. “The intriguing reactions of Mr. Towne. They become more cryptic by the minute. Last night he pretended to know nothing about pickpocket language. Now he won’t admit knowing anything about hobo graphic signs—or, what’s even more amazing—proofreader’s symbols. Yet, knowing them, he must suspect that the note is a phony and that you were trying to test him. But he denies all knowledge just the same. Why? It’s almost as if he were trying to make us regard him with deep suspicion. I don’t get it.”

  Merlini looked pained. “Ross, your before-breakfast logic is something to behold. Pythagoras, Hegel, Kant, Descartes, Spinoza, and some others must be whirling like electric dynamos in their graves. I’m reminded of Isadore Cohen, traveling salesman for Cohen, Cohen and Cohen, cloaks and suits. He met a bitter business rival on the train. ‘Ver are you goink?’ he asked. The rival replied politely, ‘Buffalo.’ Isadore grew angry. ‘Buffalo!’ he growled disgustedly. ‘You tell me Buffalo so that I think you’re goink to Schenectady, ven I know it’s Buffalo you’re goink to all the time. Vy do you lie to me that way, Jacob?’”

  “Does that little parable,” I asked, surprised, “mean that our author, bank-robber friend—”

  “Hist,” Merlini warned, “the desk clerk.”

  That gentleman came hastily through the door beyond the desk, his shirt tail inadequately tucked in behind, his fingers fumbling sleepily at a wrinkled tie. Seeing us, he apologized nervously.

  “Just coming up to call you. I’m afraid I slept right through my alarm. Four times I got into bed last night, and then something happened. I got up when you arrived. After that another gentleman checked in, and at two this morning when the plumbing in Room 33 sprung a leak, Mr. Goudge, the cream-separator salesman in the room below, was nearly drowned, and—”

  Merlini cut in on this tale of woe. “You’re the day and the night clerk, as well?”

  The harried man nodded. “Day clerk, night clerk, general manager, bellboy, and some other things. Twenty-four hours a day. Of course most nights we don’t get any business after that 10:40 train, but last night with the circus here and all—”

  “The gentleman who checked in after we did.” Merlini was examining the register. “Is he still here?”

  “Oh, Lord! And he wanted to be called at six!” The desk clerk scuttled from behind his enclosure and started for the stairs.

  “Wait,” Merlini stopped him. “According to the register you put him in Room 26—down the hall from us. This looks like his key with some money here on the desk.”

  “Oh.” The clerk looked at the objects. “He must have gone.”

  I took a quick look at the register. The name signed beneath ours in a large hasty scrawl was Keith Atterbury’s.

  Merlini ignored the look I gave him, calmly tore two dollar bills several times across, neatly folded the pieces, and handed them to the clerk. I turned and followed him out as the clerk started to protest, then stopped, having found that the bills, unfolded, were fully restored.

  Merlini, anxious to make up for lost time, wanted to skip breakfast altogether, but I persuaded him to stop at a lunch wagon long enough for orange juice, roll, and coffee. I made an attem
pt at conversation, but he would have none of it. “Eat,” he said, “and be quick about it.”

  It wasn’t until we were some ten miles out on the road to Norwalk, following the arrow-marked poles, that he spoke again.

  “Ross,” he commanded, “stop the car. I want out.”

  He spoke so suddenly and urgently that I obeyed automatically, jamming on the brakes with an abruptness that made the tires screech.

  “Hannum poster on a pole we just passed,” he said, getting out. “I want it for my collection. I won’t be a minute.”

  I watched him as he ran back and started to detach the brightly colored “one-sheet” from the telephone pole. He carefully lifted two corners free from the tacks that held them; then, unaccountably, seemed to change his mind. For a space of half a dozen seconds he stood as motionless as a wooden Indian. Slowly he replaced the poster as it had been. He turned, and, suddenly all action, sprinted for the car. He jumped in, slammed the door violently, and barked at me:

  “That crossroad just ahead, Ross. Turn right, and step on it!” He sounded as if he meant it.

  I let the clutch in and trod heavily on the gas.

  For once he explained without prompting. “There’s an arrow chalked on that pole beneath the poster, but the bill-posting crew travels a good ten days ahead of the show, and the arrows are placed the morning the show moves. It isn’t possible.”

  “Perhaps some other show”

  “No. The arrow is a nice fresh one.”

  “But if it’s covered by the poster—”

  “It means—and for once I use the phrase quite literally—it means dirty work at the crossroads.”

  The car took a corner on two wheels. Mentally I did the same, wondering all at once if the fact had any significance that this road, like the one on which the Major had been found, was a little-used side road. The macadam, in contrast to the smooth concrete of the highway we had just left, was bumpy and the unbanked curves were sharp and numerous. I trod still harder on the accelerator, and we flew, bouncing and swerving like a roller coaster running wild.