“I’ve never told a falsehood in my life!” Harry insisted. “The very idea is insulting!”
“Is it?” Lieutenant Murray asked. “Were the two of you being strictly candid when you represented yourselves as employees of the Cairo Club last night?”
“We never actually said that we—”
“Be that as it may, Lord Wycliffe won’t be volunteering any more information, and there’s very little I can do about it.”
“Where does that leave us, Lieutenant?” I asked.
“Same place we were last night. Three bodies. No way of knowing if their deaths are even connected to one another.”
“Harrington,” Harry said grimly. “He killed them all.”
“So you say, Mr. Houdini, but we have precious little evidence of that. All we know is that he approached Lord Wycliffe about brokering a deal for Le Fantôme. That’s not a crime, so far as we know. I’m telling you, boys, my superiors would be very happy to see this problem vanish.” He fingered his empty glass. I stood up and went to the bar for another round.
“Lord Wycliffe mentioned Wilson’s saloon on Mott Street,” I said when I returned. “He told us that he met Harrington there.”
“So you said this morning. I’m afraid Wilson’s isn’t the type of establishment where they put out the red carpet for the police.”
“How do you mean?” Harry asked.
“You’ve heard of Jake Stein?”
“The notorious criminal?” Harry’s eyes brightened. “The nefarious gangland chieftain?”
“Yes, Houdini,” said the lieutenant, rolling his eyes slightly. “That’s the one.”
“Jake Stein is a habitue of Wilson’s saloon?”
“Hardly. No one’s seen Jake Stein in years. But he runs every bar and disorderly house down there. A clean officer can’t get anything out of those people, and the dirty ones aren’t about to bite the hand that feeds them.”
“How intriguing,” said Harry. “A genuine den of iniquity. Tell me, Lieutenant, if I wanted to have someone killed, is Wilson’s saloon the sort of place I might turn?”
“Pardon me?” The lieutenant’s mouth twitched with amusement. “You and the wife not getting along, Houdini?”
“My wife is the very center of my existence, sir. Let’s say I wished to remove a troublesome business rival. My brother, for instance.”
“I don’t think you want to have me killed, Harry,” I said. “Mother would be very cross.”
“I mean a truly first-rate job,” Harry continued, ignoring me. “Something that might confuse the police and obscure the motive.”
“You’re talking about the Graffs,” said Lieutenant Murray flatly.
“I am.”
He sighed heavily. “You think the Graffs were killed by a hired gun?”
“It seems apparent to me that they were.”
“I’m sorry, Houdini, I know these people were important to you, but in all candor—”
“Oh, I don’t argue that it was artfully done,” my brother said. “That was the reason for my question. Where would I go if I wanted to find someone who could perform such a task?”
“Someone who could kill both of them and make it look like a gang killing and a suicide?”
“Exactly.”
“Why, that would take a real magician, wouldn’t it, Houdini?”
My brother considered for a moment. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose it would.”
The two of them debated the matter for some time, with Lieutenant Murray probing us rather more skillfully than we questioned him. I jotted down a good many notes over the course of the discussion, but I noticed that the lieutenant filled many more pages of his pad than I did. He also managed to put away an uncommon amount of whiskey at my expense.
After an hour or so, Lieutenant Murray closed his notebook and rose to take his leave.
“One last thing,” Harry said. “If my brother and I should happen across Mr. Harrington, would you be interested in speaking with him?”
The lieutenant’s face turned hard. “Don’t be a jackass, Houdini. Stay out of my road.”
“We meet a good many people in our travels. It’s not impossible that we should make his acquaintance.”
Lieutenant Murray leaned across the table and thrust his index finger under Harry’s nose. “Houdini,” he said, “you are quite possibly the biggest son of a bitch I’ve ever—”
“Lieutenant,” said Harry primly, “I will thank you to leave my sainted mother out of this.”
The anger drained from the lieutenant’s face. “All right,” he said with his short, barking laugh, “but you are the most pigheaded, irritating bas—er—individual I’ve ever come across.”
“You are welcome to your opinion,” Harry said.
“I’m grateful for that, Mr. Houdini.” The lieutenant settled his hat on his head. “Thanks for the drinks, gentlemen. Now go back to pulling bunnies from top hats. Leave the police work to me.” He turned and headed for the door.
Harry watched him go, rolling a coin across his knuckles. “What a most unreasonably stubborn man,” he said. “One must be more open to opposing views in this world.”
“You don’t say.”
“Oh, indeed! As our late father often said, ‘Toleration is good for all or it is good for none.’”
“I don’t recall him ever saying that.”
“No? Someone else, perhaps.”
“Harry, Lieutenant Murray has just shot down virtually every theory and idea you’ve had about this business. And he’s ordered us to mind our own affairs. you seem to be taking this in remarkably good spirits.”
“The lieutenant is not the only source of information in this town,” Harry said, smiling happily.
“No,” I said, tilting my glass back to finish up the last swallow of whiskey, “there’s also the library.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of Mr. Jake Stein.”
A hot jet of whiskey went down the wrong pipe. “Harry,” I coughed. “No.”
“Why not?” he asked, patting me on the back. “If one cannot get satisfaction from the law, he must turn to the outlaw.”
“Harry, this is Jake Stein you’re talking about. you don’t just pop in for tea with Jake Stein.”
“Fine,” said Harry brightly. “No tea, then. Just polite conversation.” He continued rolling the coin across his knuckles.
Jake Stein is forgotten today, but in our boyhood he was a figure of awe in the neighborhood, a son of immigrants who rose to control much of the criminal activity of the Lower East Side. As children we spoke of him in hushed tones, as though the mere mention of his name would call down fearsome acts of vengeance upon ourselves and our families. “Careful what you say,” the older boys would tell us. “Jake’s men can hear you.”
I studied my brother’s open, smiling face. “So, Harry, you want to march into Jake Stein’s office, wherever it might be, and ask him if he killed the Graffs?”
“Well, no,” he answered, “that might be imprudent. I want to ask him if he knows of anyone else who might have killed the Graffs.”
“You know, Harry, I’ve seen you do a lot of crazy things. I’ve seen you sink to the bottom of the East River with one hundred pounds worth of manacles hanging off you. I’ve seen you—”
“I just want to ask him a question. The man knows everything that goes on around him. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.”
“I believe you’re thinking of Professor Moriarty. Tell me, why should Jake Stein even agree to see us?”
“Why not? I just want to know if he recognizes the work of a certain killer. He may have an appreciation of such things.” He took the coin he had been rolling, held it at his fingertips and then—with a sharp, twitch of a motion—caused it to vanish. “You see that? A perfect back palm. When I see that, I think instantly of the work of T. Nelson Downs, the ‘King of Koins.’ I have a
n appreciation of such things. Perhaps it is the same with Mr. Stein.”
“You think Stein is a connoisseur of murder?”
He seemed to consider it seriously. “Perhaps, yes. In any event, we must find out or our investigation is at a standstill.” He stood up and reached for his coat.
We continued this strange conversation all the way to Mott Street, with Harry refusing to listen to any of my sensible arguments in favor of health and longevity.
“If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times,” Harry said, as we stood outside Wilson’s saloon, “you have—”
“—no imagination. I know, Harry, I know.”
He turned and pushed through the clouded glass doors. I hesitated for a moment, gave a shrug, and followed him in.
At first glance, Wilson’s appeared to be a rather nicer establishment than the one we had just left. The floor was clean and the brasswork gleaming, and a row of polished mirrors and gas jets on the far wall gave the room a bright, rosy glow. Only the clientele gave any indication of a less salubrious atmosphere. The scattering of sullen men at the bar, and clustered around the low round tables, gave an unmistakable air of menace.
Incongruously, Harry whistled a happy tune and marched to the bar, where the bartender was mopping the counter with a rag. “I say, good fellow,” Harry said brightly, “would you happen to know where we might call upon Mr. Jake Stein?”
The barman stopped polishing the counter. Conversations died. Heads turned toward my brother. If there had been swinging saloon doors, we’d have heard them creak.
“I—I’m afraid I can’t help you there, sir,” said the barman.
“Not to worry!” said the magnanimous Harry. “But if you should happen to see him—or any of his acquaintances—I would be obliged if you would pass along a message. Tell him that the Great Houdini is looking for him. Good day!”
Harry headed for the door. I followed four steps behind, hoping no one had noticed that we came in together.
“I think that went very well,” he said on the sidewalk outside. He pointed to another saloon. “Let’s try in here!”
“Harry—” I grabbed his arm but he shrugged it off.
“Honestly, Dash. Sometimes I don’t know who fusses over me more—you or Mama.”
And so we repeated the scene in every saloon and flop house for three streets running. In each instance Harry would saunter up to the bar, slap his hand on the counter and announce his interest in Jake Stein—”the notorious criminal,” as he took to describing him.
The reactions ranged from shock to bemusement to outright laughter, but Harry soldiered on with dogged persistence. “Tell him the Great Houdini is looking for him!” he called at each stop.
We were just exiting a gambling house on Humphrey Street when I noticed that we were no longer alone in our wanderings. There were two of them, stocky rough-hewn characters wearing gray cloth coats and peaked caps. They dogged us through five more stops, keeping a fair distance, but paying close attention. At last, as we worked our way over to Bowery Street, the taller of the pair stepped up and tapped Harry on the shoulder. “Understand you’re looking for Mr. Stein?” His cap made it difficult to make out his features, except for his nose. It was clear he had put in some time in a boxing ring.
“Why, yes,” said my brother. “Would you happen—?”
Our friend put a finger to his lips. “This way,” he said, motioning down an alley.
“Uh, Harry—” I began.
“Come along, Dash!” Harry called over his shoulder, gaily. “Mustn’t keep Mr. Stein waiting! Honestly—” he turned to deliver some comment on the intransigence of younger brothers, but the remark was cut short by the thud of a fist to the solar plexus. Harry went down hard, gasping violently for breath. Rough hands twisted my arms behind my back and shoved me against a brick wall. “Not—not fair,” Harry gasped, raising himself up on one elbow. “I wasn’t—I wasn’t set.”
Our two attackers glanced at each other, amused by the pluck of the little man with the tidy bow tie. “Did you hear that?” said the one who had floored Harry. “He wasn’t set.” He grinned and said it again. That turned out to be a mistake.
My brother and I had been fairly green when we arrived in New York some ten years earlier. We did not stay green for long. We learned to make our way with our fists, and there were few neighborhood hooligans and bullies who had not mixed it up with the Brothers Houdini now and again. We were tough boys who grew into tough young men. My brother could bend iron bars in his bare hands. Me, I was just plain scrappy.
“He wasn’t set,” said the one pinning my arms, still enjoying a nice chuckle over it.
“I wasn’t either,” I said, and I drove the heel of my shoe into his instep. His grip loosened and I bought some fighting room with an elbow to the windpipe. Harry, meanwhile, plowed his head into the stomach of the shorter man. A metal pipe clattered onto the paving stones.
“Now, my man,” Harry said, “we shall see how you do in a fair contest!”
“Harry,” I said, fending off a rabbit punch, “just shut up and fight.”
“Very well,” he said, somewhat exasperated. He cocked his arm and hurled his thunderbolt—a right hand straight to the other man’s jaw hinge. It made a sound like a cracking walnut off the hard bone. The man’s head snapped back but his feet never moved. He was out before he hit the ground.
This put a healthy scare into the taller one. I saw his hand move under his coat and I figured I didn’t want to know what was under there. I sent a kick to the knee and hopped back while his legs melted under him. He dropped to a kneeling position as I grabbed the back of his head and brought it smashing down on my knee, which happened to be shooting upward at the time. His head made a funny sound, too, but his was a whole lot wetter. I let go and he flopped backward in a heap.
Harry examined his knuckles for bruising, in much the way he might have chosen an apple from the corner vendor’s cart. “I wasn’t set,” he said.
“So I gathered. Come on.”
We turned and walked toward the mouth of the alley, and that’s when we ran into the man with the Smith and Wesson. He was small, red-haired, and he had three friends with him. One of them was cracking his knuckles, another had a length of chain wrapped around his first, and the third had a knife that he kept flicking open and closed.
“Which one of you is the Great Houdini?” asked the man with the gun.
“I am,” my brother said.
“Mr. Stein will see you now.”
9
THE GLASS-EATER
THE RED-HAIRED MAN KEPT THE GUN TRAINED ON US WHILE HIS associates dragged our two unconscious sparring partners out of the alley. The pair were loaded roughly into a waiting carriage. When they returned, one of the men held a hank of coarse bailing rope. “Hands behind your backs,” said the red-haired man. His voice was strangely high and musical.
“You’re tying up the Great Houdini?” Harry asked incredulously. “This is—”
“Shut up, Harry,” I said, as a blindfold was slipped over my eyes and tied roughly at the back.
“Nobody needs to get hurt,” said the high voice. “We’re just taking a little ride.”
It’s fortunate that gangster movies were still some years away, or I imagine that phrase would have filled me with dread. I wouldn’t say I was thrilled about “taking a little ride” in any case, but I didn’t know enough to conjure visions of cement overshoes. Harry, for his part, was busy muttering about the indignity of having his hands tied in a “saucy little half-hitch.” Happily, our captors seemed to be ignoring him.
We were bundled into a covered carriage and I heard a rap on the roof to signal the driver, who whipped the horses to a brisk trot. In spite of my blindfold, which smelled faintly of salted fish, I was able to hold onto a loose thread of where we were going. I knew the area well, and could track our progress by a variety of sounds bobbing up through the constant clatter of the wooden wheels on granite slabs—the
shrill cry of a fruit vendor, the gaseous roar of the elevated train, the tinny wheeze of an organ grinder. Aromas, too, seemed much stronger to me as I sat blindfolded in the back of the carriage. The warm balm of roasting nuts mingled horribly with the sickly stench of an open sewer; the all-pervading funk of horse effluvia blended with the gritty bite of burning coal. Gradually these gave way to the sounds of birds and water, and I realized we were nearing the East River. The granite beneath our wheels now yielded to wooden planking. “We’re getting out,” the high voice said as the carriage drew to a halt. “Don’t even think about giving us the slip.” Mercifully, my brother said nothing.
Rough hands pushed me out of the carriage and I stumbled badly as I misjudged the step. Someone took hold of me at the elbow and led me forward, with the ludicrous warning “Watch your step.” A change in wind signalled our progress along a dock.
“Step up,” I was told. I realized with a shock, as I climbed a shallow set of stairs, that I was being helped aboard a boat of some kind. Several pairs of hands half-lifted, half-pushed me a short distance through the air, and my feet came down with a thump onto a wooden deck. I felt the gentle roll of the water beneath me. I scarcely had time to register these new sensations when I heard the thud of my brother’s feet hitting the deck, and a shouted instruction to “bring ’em below.”
Someone pushed my head from behind. I bent forward, passing through what was evidently a low doorway. I heard latches working and doors creaking as we passed along a short corridor, then down a steep set of step rungs.
Finally we appeared to reach our destination. I heard a low murmur of voices, and a clinging whiff of stale cigars reached my nostrils. A voice said, “Take off the blindfolds.”
We were in a large but sparsely appointed ship’s cabin. The furnishings were those of a warehouse rather than a sailing vessel—seven wooden filing cabinets, a dozen packing crates, four ladder-stools, and a flat, highly-polished deal table. Maps of the city covered the wall opposite us, with a spray of yellow-headed pins jabbed in at various points. Four or five young men were arrayed along the map wall, some of them standing, the others perched on stools. A much older man sat in a cane-backed swivel chair behind the deal table. He was squat and pudgy, with cool gray eyes that regarded us from behind a pair of round spectacles. A coil of white hair swept forward from the back of his head, struggling to conceal a wrinkled and spotted pate. A heavy shading of bluish stubble covered his jawline. He waited a moment as we took in our surroundings, then removed a wet panatela from his teeth. “Sorry about the rough treatment,” he said. “I’m Jake Stein.”
The Dime Museum Murders Page 16