Headless Lady

by Clayton Rawson

  “Palmer,” he said, “name a card. Any card in the deck.”

  Palmer asked, “Why?”

  Merlini gave him a startled glance. “Come to think of it, I don’t know,” he said. “But take a chance.”

  Palmer scowled, and his tone of voice was the one he saved for humoring nuts. “The jack of spades.”

  Merlini took the cards from their case and started to run through them, backs up.

  “I’m not sure why this is, either,” he said, “but a magician always does things the hard way. When he wants to find a card he does it by looking at the backs rather than the faces. Sometimes it works.”

  As he said that, one lone card suddenly showed face up among all the other face-down ones. It was, of course, Palmer’s jack of spades.

  Merlini’s audience had started to sit up and take some notice. They sat all the way up a moment later.

  “And to show you,” Merlini continued, “that I didn’t, in spite of these handcuffs, use some sort of invisible sleight-of-hand to turn that card over as I came to it—to show you that I knew what card you would choose before you named it, when I put it in this deck face up the day before yesterday, I used a jack of spades from another deck!”

  He removed the jack from among the others and turned it over. The design on its back was red, that on all the other cards was blue.

  “That’s known to the trade as the Brainwave, an invention of my friend, Dai Vernon. It’s a magician’s dream.”

  Palmer and Robbins both had dreamlike expressions on their faces. Stevens did too for a moment. Then, suddenly, he woke up.

  “It’s a gag,” he said deprecatingly. “You had Palmer primed to call for the jack. You fixed it on the way over.”

  Palmer’s face gave the lie to this; but Stevens, a realistic soul, insisted that it wasn’t magic, only a low sort of practical joke.

  “I’ve heard that one before,” Merlini countered. “And I know the answer. Suppose you name one, Stevens. Take your time about selecting it, and make it tough as you can for me. While you’re doing that I’ll discard the joker. It sometimes causes trouble.”

  He turned the cards, face toward himself, went rapidly through them, removed one, and dropped it face down on the floor. Then he waited for Stevens to name his card.

  “The four of clubs,” Stevens said skeptically, choosing one of the more undistinguished cards in the deck.

  Without saying anything Merlini ran through the face-down cards once more. This time none showed up reversed. Stevens grinned.

  So did Merlini. “The four of clubs,” he said, “is face down like the others. But it’s not where you think.” He turned up the deck’s top card and showed it. “This is the joker. The card I pretended was the joker and discarded before you named your card is the four of clubs!”

  Using the joker as a lever so as to avoid touching the card on the floor with his hands, he flipped it over face up. It was, as he had said, the four of clubs. “Never try to outguess a magician,” he advised. “If he performs much, he’s sure to have met the situation before, and he is consequently prepared for it.”

  I’ve seen him do that trick at least a dozen times; it has never failed yet and the cards named are invariably different. I’ve tried to solve it using bribery and threats; but with no success.

  “That’s an additional wrinkle of my own,” said Merlini. “Here’s another.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, in spite of his manacled condition, he entertained the cops. There was only one interruption. Chief Hooper arrived while Merlini, his hands clasped to his forehead and his eyes tightly closed, was summoning up his powers of clairvoyance in an endeavor to discover what card it was Sergeant Robbins had, while out of the room, secretly selected and sealed in an envelope.

  Hooper glowered at Merlini as he went on through to his office. “Watch him closely, boys,” he ordered, not knowing that the closeness of attention Merlini had been receiving made him perhaps the most carefully guarded prisoner of all time. As he went through the door, he added, “He’s the kind who’s likely to try suicide.”

  “Cheerful man, your boss,” Merlini commented, coming out of his trance. “And you’re an ornery cuss too, Robbins. You didn’t put a playing card in the envelope as I asked. It’s a traffic ticket.”

  A few minutes later a call came from within the office. “Stevens! Bring Harte in here.”

  Stevens led me up to the lion’s cage, shoved me in, and closed the door firmly behind me. The Chief, with his heavy face and his shock of sandy hair, looked remarkably like a lion—and a hungry one. Had he been equipped with a tail, it would have been switching angrily. Captain Schafer was more like a Bengal tiger—ambushed and waiting. There wasn’t as much roar to him, but his teeth were just as sharp and when he pounced you knew something had happened.

  O’Halloran was still there, and there was another man, a lean little fellow with spectacles who turned out to be the scientific fly in the Chief’s ointment, Lester Burns. He began the proceedings by taking my fingerprints. Then he started to get intimate. He asked for my name, address, place of birth, age, sex, color, height, weight, color of eyes, and for any identifying scars or marks.

  I told him that I was a female, colored, and had a three-inch scar that hurt me when I sat down. “I had a scissors lock on an F.B.I. agent,” I said. “He bit me.”

  This was not, I well knew, the proper approach for a wild-animal trainer to take, but I was annoyed. I wanted very much to be out there on that showground when what was going to happen next happened—and I could plainly see that my chances were not good.

  Schafer said, “All right, Burns; that’ll do. Harte, Chief Hooper wants to test out a new rubber hose he has. If you keep that up, I’ll let him.”

  “Sure,” I replied. “Go ahead. But when your names hit the news teletypes tomorrow morning, I’ll see to it that they’re spelled wrong. And that won’t be all.”

  The way Hooper jumped from his chair, I thought it must have kicked him. The lion’s tail switched in earnest now. “Are you a goddamned reporter?”

  “In my spare moments I do little pieces for the papers, if that’s what you mean, yes. I’ve got a Guild card and I usually get a by-line. What’s the matter? Have you been bitten too—by a newspaper?”

  “Hell!” he said disgustedly and sat down again. His broad fingers nervously hefted the inkwell on his desk; a psychoanalyst would have diagnosed a repressed urge to throw it.

  Schafer said, “That complicates matters some, but not as much as you’d like to think. I want some straight answers out of you—now!”

  “Shoot,” I replied. “But skip the questions you asked this afternoon. The answers you got then were straight—all of them.”

  The Captain didn’t act as if he had heard me. He started in right at the beginning and slowly and carefully worked his way down to date without skipping a thing. He asked all the questions he’d asked before and twice as many new ones. I gave him the same answers as before, though I had to say “No” and “I don’t know” and “Okay, I’m lying then” to some of the new ones—too many of them to suit him.

  The Chief and O’Halloran listened to the inquisition without speaking. They both scowled a good bit, though not always at the same things. Burns, with a notebook at a desk in the corner, industriously transcribed our talk into rows of little pothooks. He glanced up now and then and fixed me with a bright, beady eye as if I were some new and especially virulent species of bacillus.

  The Captain’s supply of questions finally gave out. He had obtained very little new information, considering the large amount of expended effort, and his manner was getting harsher by the minute.

  “Stevens!” he rapped. “Send in the other one.”

  As he entered, Merlini dropped his cards into his pocket and asked, “May I smoke?”

  “Yes,” Schafer growled. “If it’ll make you more talkative. Take his prints, Burns.”

  Merlini drew a cigarette from his breast pocket. O’Hal
loran started to toss him a paper of matches, but Merlini shook his head.

  “No thanks.” He put the cigarette to his lips, inhaled and blew forth a cloud of smoke. The cigarette seemed to be already lighted!

  Quickly then, while the Captain and the Chief were a bit off balance, he said, “I’d like to hear that story of yours, O’Halloran. I suspect it’s important.”

  “No,” Schafer contradicted. “We’re going to hear yours—the revised version.”

  Merlini let Burns take his fingers and roll them across the inked sheet of glass. “I haven’t made any revisions,” Merlini said flatly. “I don’t intend to.”

  “Maybe not,” Schafer said, “but I think you will. Why did you show up on this circus in the first place?”

  Merlini shrugged. “Because, as I’ve told you, Miss Pauline Hannum took a Headless Lady illusion from my shop under very odd circumstances. I wanted to know why.”

  “And you found out—”

  “I haven’t yet. Miss Hannum hasn’t been exactly cooperative. I’ve got a theory, but there’s too much plain and fancy guesswork built into it, so I won’t bother you with it yet.”

  “Merlini”—Schafer’s voice suddenly had a knife-edge sharpness—“did you ever hear of Duke Miller?”

  “Duke Miller?” Merlini gave a perceptible start. “Yes, of course. Maxie Weissman’s lawyer. But what—”

  “Oh, you know Maxie? Rather well, maybe?”

  Merlini gave him an intent look; then his eyes shifted toward O’Halloran. “I’m completely floored,” he said, in what sounded to me like genuine surprise. “What would the Racketeer King and his mouthpiece have to do with me or this case? Is this some of your story, O’Halloran?”

  “You’re overdoing the surprised innocence,” said Schafer icily. “It won’t wash. What’s your real racket? A magician might be a handy guy to have around to juggle policy numbers or betting odds. You might as well tell us about it.”

  Merlini made no reply. He stood very still, and I had the feeling as I watched him that inside his head a multitude of little wheels and curiously shaped gears were spinning rapidly in a busy whirl.

  The Captain, catlike, extended his claws in a threatening gesture. “Sitting tight won’t do you any good,” he added. “Inspector Gavigan is coming up here himself with all the dope. We’ll have the goods on you as soon as he arrives. You might just as well give.”

  Merlini looked interested. “You’ve talked to him?”

  “I have. Long distance. Bridgeport, New York. He’s on his way now.”

  “Oh, at Bridgeport, was he? Did he say anything about removing these shackles and letting Harte and myself go?”

  “Yes, he did. And you had a nerve this afternoon to tell me he’d vouch for you! He said we were to throw you both into the best cell we had. He’s been hunting you ever since Sunday.”

  If Burns had tried to express in his notebook the speechless looks on both Merlini’s and my faces, he’d have had to use a double row of exclamation marks and a colored pencil.

  “Blast the man!” Merlini exploded, and followed that with several heated remarks about certain medieval customs that had to do with boiling oil, drawing and quartering, iron boots, the rack, and the thumbscrew.

  The Chief, watching Merlini as a young doctor watches his first patient, issued a terse clinical bulletin.

  “More homicidal tendencies!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Cells for Two

  THE CHARACTER OR, PERHAPS better, the lack-of-character reference supplied by our old friend Chief Inspector Homer Gavigan was obviously less than no help at all. Detective Lester Burns, who had disappeared with Merlini’s fingerprint card, came back into the room and made a report that didn’t improve matters.

  “The prints on the trunk compartment lid,” he said, “are being photographed now. As soon as I can get them developed and have some enlargements run off I can give you a final report. But I just gave them a quick once-over, and I haven’t any doubt that they’ll check with these.” He indicated the black smudges on Merlini’s card. “And there are a couple that fit Mr. Harte.”

  “Good,” Schafer said. “What about that glossy photo of the accident? Any prints there?”

  “No. That’s clean.”

  Merlini asked, “Did you make that nitrate test on the gloves, Burns?”

  Burns didn’t reply, but Schafer said, “Show him.”

  The detective went to his desk in the corner and came back with several paraffin molds which he placed before the Captain on the blotter. Merlini and I stepped forward to look. O’Halloran and Hooper did the same.

  “I put the gloves on and made paraffin molds in the usual manner rather than apply the reagent directly to the gloves,” Burns said, displaying his technical knowledge rather proudly for the Chief’s benefit. “Rubber contains some combined nitrate that might, just possibly, react positively and spoil the test.”*

  He had gotten his positive reaction on one of the molds. A dozen or so nitrate specks which the invisible backfire of the gun had deposited on the glove had been lifted off by the mold and now, due to the application of the reagent, showed as blue specks against the milky white paraffin near the crotch of the thumb and along the upper edge of the forefinger.

  Paraffin Mold Showing the Nitrate Specks Developed by Detective Burns

  Merlini looked at the mold a moment, then said, “Funny, isn’t it, that, if I used gloves when I shot the girl and when I handled the photo, I was so careless when I loaded the body and the other stuff into my car?”

  “I don’t think so,” Chief Hooper put in. “In the first place, you’d already given us the gloves to test. And besides, you’d know that if anyone found the body in the car, the lack of fingerprints on the lid wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. You’re guilty as hell either way.”

  “If my prints weren’t on the car,” Merlini insisted, “I might have an easier time selling you on the idea that someone planted that stuff there. Not much easier, but some.”

  “No,” Hooper contradicted, “not even some.”

  Merlini fished for some more information. “The glove-wearer fired a shot, all right. But we still don’t know if the Headless Lady was shot—or do we? Are there any bullet wounds on the body?”

  “The medical examiner is having a look at it now,” Schafer answered. “I doubt if he’ll find any. I think you got her in the head.”

  “I hope you’re going to make a strenuous effort to find that head.”

  Schafer nodded. “The boys I left at the lot are doing that, and there’s a search in progress where you found the trailer. But you don’t really want us to find it, do you?”

  “Yes, I do,” Merlini said earnestly. “Because once you find it, you’ll know that I’m not the murderer. And without it, unless the medical examiner does find some evidence of violent death on or in the body, you or anyone else is going to have the devil’s own time proving that she was murdered.”

  “Now I know you’re nuts,” the Chief said. “Her head was sawed off, wasn’t it? You don’t think that was an accident, or suicide, or death from natural causes, do you—for God’s sake?”

  “The fact that her head was removed certainly doesn’t prove murder. There was very little blood on either the body or the sword. I think your medical examiner may tell you that the head was removed quite a while after death. My guess would be about twelve hours—death at 7:00 a.m., head removed at 7:00 p.m. You can prove mutilation of a dead body; you can’t positively prove that her death was not accidental, natural, or suicidal.”

  “It ain’t very likely to be one of those, is it?” the Chief said.

  “Maybe not,” Merlini said. “But ‘It ain’t likely,’ won’t be good enough when you get into court. You’ll do a lot better if you hunt like hell for the head and hope it’ll give you the evidence that will prove cause of death.”

  The Captain reached for the phone. I’m still wondering why the phone’s mouthpiece didn’t shrivel
up or at least blister when he spoke into it. The exchange operator was startled enough so that she gave him his number in record time.

  “Byrd,” he howled. “What have you done on that autopsy so far?”

  We could hear the doctor’s voice coming angrily in reply. “For God’s sake, man! The body just came in. What do you think I use, a high-speed buzz saw?”

  “It’d help,” Schafer said. “Are there any surface indications of the cause of death?”

  The doctor’s voice was sarcastic. “Why, yes,” he said. “There’s one little thing. Her head’s missing.”

  Schafer glanced at Merlini and spoke again into the phone. “That what killed her?”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t I tell you the body just got here?”

  “Well, go look, dammit,” Schafer said. “I’ll wait.”

  We all waited. Schafer’s left hand played with a pen on the desk and dug savagely with its point into the blotter. Hooper took an angry bite from a plug of tobacco. No one spoke.

  Finally the Captain dropped the pen and said, “Yes?”

  We heard the doctor’s first words. “There is no exterior indication of what caused death. The head was removed several hours after death.” Then, more puzzled now than angry, he stopped shouting and the rest of what he said came to us as an indistinct muttering.

  In the middle of it Schafer suddenly sat bolt upright and barked. “Say that again!”

  He listened very briefly; and then, while the doctor’s voice still continued faintly, Schafer reached out and slammed the receiver back on its hook. He swiveled around in his chair to face Merlini.

  “For a murderer,” he said in an awed and baffled voice, “even a batty one, you do some of the goddamnedest things. Burns, get me those hair samples I gave you.”

  Burns at his desk produced the envelope containing the hair combings Merlini had found in the trailer that morning. Schafer hurriedly opened the envelope, tipped the contents out onto a sheet of paper before him, and pulled the goose-neck desk light down close above them. He stared at them a moment, then slowly looked up. “Merlini,” he said, “how do I know you found these in that trailer?”