“The fireplace,” Harry said.
“What about it?”
“Has the fire been burning all day?”
“The butler laid it one hour before Mr. Wintour entered the room.”
“I only ask because in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, the murderer was found to have entered by means of—”
“The chimney. Yes, Mr. Houdini. ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue.’” Lieutenant Murray scratched his chin. “Our investigation is as yet in its earliest stages, but we’ve managed to rule out homicidal orangutans.”
Harry colored slightly. “It’s just that—”
“If I could ask you to direct your attention to the murdered man’s desk, Mr. Houdini. That’s why I’ve asked you here this evening.”
A thick white cloth was spread over the center of the murdered man’s desk. We could see the outlines of a squat, lumpy object beneath it. Murray motioned to an officer standing to the side. “Carter, mind showing our guests the, uh, device?”
With an anxious expression, the young officer stepped to the desk and gingerly pinched the edges of the cloth. Cautiously, as though a sleeping snake might be coiled underneath, he lifted the cloth and eased it to one side.
Harry sprang forward. “Le Fantôme!” he cried, thrusting his chin forward across the desk. “Do you see it, Dash? It’s magnificent!”
The object was a small wooden figure, perhaps twelve inches high, draped in a Chinese silk kimono. It sat cross-legged on a square wooden pedestal, gazing intently at five ivory tiles at its feet, each bearing the image of a green dragon. In one hand, the figure held a tiny flute; the other clutched at the folds of its robe. A black, braided pigtail ran down the figure’s back, and its face was painted with Kabuki markings.
“I would not have believed that it still existed,” Harry said. “Look at the articulation of the joints! See the pinpoint mechanism of the jaw hinge?”
At the front of the pedestal was a set of small lacquered doors. Extending his index finger, Harry poked at the tiny latch. A uniformed officer moved forward to stop him, but Lieutenant Murray waved him off. Harry flicked the latch and the doors swung outward to expose an array of ancient cogwheels and drive bands.
“Astonishing!” he declared. “Look at the gears! They are made of—of—” He leaned in close and sniffed at the workings. “Yes! The gears are made of cork! And the shafts, they are hollow bamboo! How extraordinary that they should have survived all this time. And see the weights and counterweights? They are nothing more than tiny bags of silk, each one filled with sand. The craftsman who created this device can only have been a genius! It is even more beautiful than I imagined!”
“I’m glad you think so,” said Lieutenant Murray. “But can you tell us what it is?”
“It’s an automaton,” Harry said, keeping his eyes fixed on the small figure. “One of the most exquisite ever made.”
“An automaton,” Lieutenant Murray said. “A little doll that moves and does tricks. Like a child’s toy. We knew that much. And it’s supposed to be worth a fortune because it’s from the collection of some French guy with the same name as you. That’s one reason we called you.”
Harry straightened and set his mouth in a tight line. “Dash,” he said, “perhaps you’d better enlighten them about the ‘French guy.’”
The lieutenant folded his arms. “Just tell me about automatons,” he said to me. “I’ve never seen one before tonight. What are they? What do they do?”
There must have been a dozen people in the room—police officers, medical workers, and a small knot of people in evening dress who appeared to be the dead man’s dinner guests. All of them stopped what they were doing to listen to me. I was momentarily stage-struck. “Well,” I began. “Um, let me see...”
“Begin with Jacob Philadelphia,” Harry said.
“Well,” I said again, “there was a magician named Jacob Philadelphia who was active in the eighteenth century, and he—”
“Born in 1734,” my brother said.
“Thank you, Harry, that was very illuminating. This magician liked to display automatons—or automata, if you will. Little clockwork figures like this one. These figures, which resembled ordinary dolls, could move and perform in amazingly lifelike ways. At the magician’s command, they did tricks for the audience. One changed water into wine; another gave answers to mathematical problems. Sometimes these figures were designed to look like animals. There was a very famous peacock that strutted around the stage, spread its feathers, and even gave a nice little screech.”
I paused and surveyed the room. People appeared to be listening, so I continued. “Bear in mind, many of the people who came to see these devices had never seen a mechanical device more sophisticated than a clock. So a little doll that could play cards, or a monkey that could smoke cigarettes, would have seemed quite miraculous. Jacob Philadelphia made a good living with his automatons, and they didn’t require a whole lot of effort from him. He basically turned a key, set the machines going, and collected his money.”
I glanced around again to take the crowd’s pulse. There was a regal-looking lady sitting on one of the Chesterfields who kept nodding and smiling, as though giving encouragement to a clumsy piano student. I took a deep breath. “Sometimes these devices weren’t all they seemed,” I continued. “There was a German magician named Herr Alexander who had a magic bell. you asked it a question—for instance: ‘What’s two plus two?’— and the bell would chime out the answer. Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, came to believe that Alexander had devised some new telegraphic system. Actually, the bell was rung by a bird hidden inside the workings.”
This drew an appreciative smile from the Chesterfield, so I persevered. “Then there was the Kempelen Chess Player, from Austria. It looked like a much larger version of our friend here,” I pointed at the device on the desk, “but it had Turkish robes and a turban. There was a chess board on top of the gear cabinet, and the figure sat behind it. At the turn of a key the figure not only pushed its own chess pieces across the board, but also moved its head to follow the play of opponents. Benjamin Franklin played it twice—and lost. Edgar Allen Poe was so impressed that he wrote a long article trying to explain how it worked. Poe guessed wrong on some of the finer points, but his basic theory was correct—a human chess player, hidden inside the cabinet, controlled the movements.”
Lieutenant Murray looked at his watch. “This is all very edifying, young man, but we have a body decomposing here, and I’d really like—”
“You must forgive my brother,” Harry said, breaking in. “Sometimes he forgets himself.” He turned to me as if reprimanding a schoolboy. “Dash, tell them about the Frenchman.”
I shrugged. “Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin was a French magician—”
“Born in 1805,” said Harry.
“—born in 1805—who started out as a clock maker. He was a genius with mechanical apparatus, and his effects made use of electricity and modern innovations in a way no one had ever seen before. At the time, magicians tended to wear long Merlin robes and conical hats, as though they were sorcerers of some kind. Robert-Houdin appeared in normal dress clothes, and presented himself as a man of science, rather than superstition. Over the course of his career he amassed an enormous collection of automatons. He was fascinated by them and studied their workings to help create his own mysteries.”
I could see Lieutenant Murray’s eyes glazing over, so I tried a different tack. “Imagine if Thomas Edison had a big warehouse and he gathered up historical inventions like Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and Samuel Morse’s telegraph. The objects would be important and valuable for their own sake, but all the more so because Edison had taken inspiration from them. That’s what Robert-Houdin’s collection was like, and that’s why people are so fascinated by it.”
Lieutenant Murray glanced at the little Japanese figure on the dead man’s desk. “So where is this collection now?”
“That’s just it. It’s supposed to have b
een destroyed. Near the end of his life, Robert-Houdin’s workshop burned down. It’s believed that the entire collection was lost.”
“Or so they say,” Harry added.
“There were rumors at the time that the fire had been set by a jealous rival, who stole the collection and set the fire to cover his tracks. Any time an automaton turns up that’s known to have belonged to Robert-Houdin, it sends up those rumors all over again.”
“And this one belonged to him?” Murray asked.
“Absolutely,” said Harry. “It’s called Le Fantôme. One of Robert-Houdin’s jewels. Le Fantôme in French means—”
“The phantom,” Murray said, bending over the little figure. “Strange thing to call it. It looks Oriental to me. Japanese.”
“But Robert-Houdin was French.”
“Ah. And was he a relation of yours, Mr. Houdini?”
Harry bristled at the suggestion. “He was perhaps the greatest charlatan in all of—”
“No relation,” I said, quickly. It had been a touchy point for some little while. Robert-Houdin had, in fact, been my brother’s boyhood idol, ever since the fateful day when a copy of the Frenchman’s memoirs fell into Harry’s hands. But as he got older, and his ego reached its maturity, he came to regret having chosen his stage name to appear “like Houdin.” In time he would write a book about Robert-Houdin intended to expose the Frenchman as “a mere pretender, a man who waxed great on the brain work of others, a mechanician who had boldly filched the inventions of the master craftsmen among his predecessors.” These sorts of things mattered very deeply to Harry, if not to anyone else.
“Tell me something,” Lieutenant Murray continued. “Are these things really so valuable? If this French guy’s collection still exists, what would it be worth to-day?”
Harry considered for a moment. “Possibly as much as ten or twelve thousand dollars.”
A respectful silence fell over the room.
“Perhaps that was the motivation for his murder,” Harry said.
Lieutenant Murray looked at Harry with amused delight. “I don’t know, Mr. Houdini. If I were the murderer, it would seem a waste of effort to kill Mr. Wintour over the phantom doll here, and then leave it behind when I made my escape.”
My curiosity got the better of me. “How was he killed, Lieutenant?”
“That’s why I asked you here. He was killed with this. With the doll.”
Harry’s eyes widened. “Killed with Le Fantôme? How is it possible?”
“Somebody hit him over the head with it?” I asked.
“No, the doll itself—I’ll get the doc to explain. Dr. Peterson?”
A short, stocky man with an impressive mane of white hair had been busying himself near the white hospital screens, jotting notes with a gold pencil in a leather notebook. He turned toward us and withdrew a folded handkerchief from his breast pocket. “He was killed with this,” he said, unfolding the white cloth.
“With a handkerchief?” Harry asked.
“Look closer,” Peterson said.
“It’s nothing. A splinter.”
“A splinter tipped with poison, unless I’m very much mistaken. I took it from the dead man’s neck.”
“How did it get there?”
Lieutenant Murray gestured at Le Fantôme. “That thing.”
“I’m not sure I get you,” I said. “It plays the flute. It doesn’t kill people.”
The detective shook his head. “That thing in its hand is a blow gun, not a flute.”
I looked at Harry. He nodded.
“The way we figure it,” Murray continued, “Mr. Wintour had locked himself into his study to have a look at his latest acquisition. While he was poking around, the gears suddenly started cranking and it raised the blow gun to its lips and shot a poison dart into his neck.”
Harry opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it again, apparently lost in thought. Slowly, he circled the desk, examining the automaton from all sides. Then he peered behind the hospital screens to have another look at the unfortunate Mr. Wintour. Emerging again, he dropped to his knees and began a minute examination of the Oriental rug. Occasionally he issued a soft grunt of surprise or satisfaction, but gave no other clue as to what he might be doing.
“Mr. Houdini?” Lieutenant Murray stepped back as Harry, still on his hands and knees, rounded a corner of the dead man’s desk. “Mr. Houdini? Is there something in particular you’re looking for down there?”
Harry simply grunted and continued his circuit of the desk. I looked at the Chesterfield, where the two men in evening dress were looking on with great amusement.
“Harry,” I said, “this might not be the proper time for—”
“Silence, Dash! I am like a bloodhound on the scent!”
“Look, Mr. Houdini,” Lieutenant Murray said with some asperity. “We don’t need you to tell us whether Wintour is dead or not. We figured you’d know something about how the doll worked, seeing as how you and this Robert-Houdin have the same name.”
Harry ignored the remark. “Dr. Peterson?” he called from the floor. “Was Mr. Wintour already dead when he was found?”
“Oh, absolutely,” answered the police physician. “Though perhaps you should ask my colleague Dr. Blanton. He examined the body before I did.”
“Dr. Blanton?” Harry asked, his head bobbing up from behind the desk. “Who is Dr. Blanton?”
One of the dinner guests rose from a club chair. He was a small, rotund man perhaps sixty years of age, with heavy dewlaps and large, moist eyes. His long, delicate hands seemed to be in constant motion, whether fiddling with the pearl buttons of his waistcoat or adjusting the pince nez he wore at the end of a chain. “I’m Percy Blanton,” he said, clipping the spectacles onto his nose. “I’ve been a friend of Bran’s for more years than I care to count. I was just arriving when—how shall I say it?—when the door to the study was opened, so of course I was the first to examine the—let me see—so of course I was the first to examine the subject.”
Harry sprang to his feet. “And was Mr. Wintour dead when you examined him?”
“Mr. Houdini—,” Lieutenant Murray stepped between my brother and Dr. Blanton.
“No, it’s quite all right, Lieutenant,” the doctor said. “I don’t mind repeating my account.”
“That’s kind of you, sir, but this man is not an investigator.”
It finally dawned on Harry that Lieutenant Murray was exasperated with him. “I do not wish to hamper your investigation or inconvenience Mr. Wintour’s guests,” he said, adopting a more diplomatic tone, “but what you say concerning Le Fantôme seems incredible to me, knowing its workings as I do. I am merely trying to fix the scene in my mind, so as to judge whether the automaton could have acted in the manner you describe.”
The lieutenant’s hands dropped to his sides. He nodded at Blanton to continue. He didn’t look happy about it, though.
“As I told the police,” Dr. Blanton said, “Bran—that is, Mr. Wintour—was seated at his desk when I entered the room. His head was forward on the desk and I naturally supposed that he was asleep. It was only when we stepped forward—”
“Pardon me, sir,” Harry interrupted. “Who was with you in the room?”
“Why, all of us. Myself, of course. Phillips, the butler. Mr. Hendricks and his wife. And Margaret, naturally.”
“Margaret?”
“Mrs. Wintour.”
“His wife? Where is she now?”
“I had to take her upstairs and give her a sleeping powder. She was distraught, as you can well imagine.”
“I see. And who is Mr. Hendricks?”
“I am,” said the gentleman who had been seated on the Chesterfield. He was tall and gaunt-faced, with brown curly hair and a Vandyke beard covering what looked to be a jutting chin. I guessed his age to be fifty or so, though his lined forehead and the dark hollows beneath his eyes made it difficult to judge.
“When Bran invited me here tonight he said he’d made the find of
a lifetime,” Hendricks said. “If what you say about the automaton is true, I’d say he wasn’t exaggerating. I’ve often heard stories about the Blois collection, but I never dreamed I’d actually see any of it.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Lieutenant Murray said. “What did you call the collection?”
“The Blois collection,” Hendricks said, giving a careful pronunciation. “That’s what it’s always been called. Blois is the name of the city where Robert-Houdin lived.”
“You know something of these devices, then?” The lieutenant seemed to be choosing his words carefully.
“I own a great many automatons, Lieutenant. I dare-say that’s why Bran invited me here this evening—to gloat over his prize.”
“Have you, ah, any experience of how they work?”
“Indeed I do. I’m in the toy business myself. One doesn’t run a manufacturing concern without picking up a thing or two. I doubt if I’m as knowledgeable as Mr. Houdini, but I have a decent understanding of the basic mechanics. Don’t look so alarmed, Lieutenant. I’m well aware that this makes me a suspect.”
The woman sitting at his side—whose kindly face had encouraged me in my earlier recitation—laid a hand on his arm. “Surely you don’t suspect my husband, do you, Lieutenant?”
“Of course he does, Nora,” Hendricks said, not unkindly. “I dare say I’m at the very top of the list. There are only a handful of men in New York who could get Le Fantôme to work after all these years. Three of us are in this room, and one of us is dead. I can’t speak for Mr. Houdini, but I certainly have my share of motives. As soon as you begin to do a little digging, Lieutenant, you’ll discover that I’m a business rival of the dead man.”
“But the two of you are friends,” Mrs. Hendricks protested. “You used to be partners.”
The Dime Museum Murders Page 4