Death From a Top Hat

Chapter 5 Sleight of Hand

“That,” Tarot said slowly, “would seem to be that.”

The Inspector, watching him intently, hinted, “You dislike the man?”

“On the contrary, we see a good bit of each other. But if he’s going to go around strangling people… ” Tarot made a helpless gesture. “Even though Sabbat may have had it coming to him.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Tarot glanced toward the davenport where Dr. Hesse was working over the body. “Sabbat was a candidate for a sanitarium. Damnedest psychopath I ever met. His persecution complex was a honey. He was always accusing his friends of the most fantastic plots against himself. When his friends naturally got fewer, that only aggravated the condition.”

“Who were his friends?”

“Zelma, of course, and myself. I was interested in him because, though he was bats, he did have lucid streaks, and he could be an excellent conversationalist. I introduced Dave to him recently, and he’s been nosing around the old boy a bit, hoping to catch on to some of the inner workings of Sabbat’s parlor Voodoo tricks. Watrous, I think, knows him, and Alfred, though those two didn’t pal around much, naturally. I think Sabbat’s psychopathic ailments included the one called satyriasis, so you may have to question some blondes. You know, Inspector, the papers are going to have a Roman holiday with this case. It has everything. An impossible mystery romantically trimmed with magic and witchcraft, and a cast of characters picked right from the headlines. Then, when Dr. Casanova Sabbat’s sex-life gets an airing — what a dish to set before a city editor!”

“Know any of the women?”

“No. I prefer amateur talent myself.” Tarot grinned and lit a cigarette. I noticed this time; he didn’t produce it from airy nothing, but took it from a gold cigarette case.

“Then you think Duvallo killed Sabbat and the card cinches it? What about motive?”

Tarot shook his head. “I don’t know. You’ve got a situation that cries aloud for an escape artist, and then you find Dave’s card. But I don’t quite understand why the Great Duvallo should fumble it so badly. He squirms out of packing cases that have been nailed shut and dropped in the harbor, and now here he is all tangled up in a revolving door. Rather out of character, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t decide whether Tarot just liked to run off at the mouth or whether he couldn’t resist this unique chance to play the Great Detective. I felt an urge to do the latter myself, only I realized that the first act on the program would be to explain the locked doors, and somehow I didn’t feel so confident about that.

Gavigan let Tarot run down, and then he brought him back to the starting point.

“Suppose you tell me why you, Watrous, and Rappourt showed up here when you did, Mr. Tarot.”

“Oh, yes, of course. He said he could photograph thought, and he wanted to try it on Rappourt when she was in a trance state. That was the immediate reason for the gathering, I think.”

Malloy came back just then, and I saw him, behind Tarot’s back, spread his hand in the manner of a baseball umpire signalling “safe.” I took that to mean that Tarot’s alibi had been checked and not found wanting.

Tarot continued, “Dave and I were here Saturday night, and Sabbat mentioned Madame Rappourt. He’d been reading some report on her mediumship that Watrous had published in one of the psychic journals. Dave knew Rappourt and Watrous, and Sabbat wanted him to bring them up. Dave said… ”

Gavigan interrupted. “I thought you said Watrous and Sabbat knew each other.”

“Yes, but I gathered they haven’t been speaking for the last ten years or so. I don’t know why. Sabbat told Dave he was willing to bury the hatchet in order to meet Rappourt, and Dave promised to relay the invitation. This afternoon Dave phoned me, said they’d accepted but that he was unavoidably detained, and would I pick them up and escort them over to Sabbat’s. He’d follow along as soon as he could. I discovered then that the party had gotten rather elaborate and that they were all having dinner together at Lindy’s. I hadn’t intended to stop in until after my broadcast; but, since Duvallo asked me, I went over, introduced myself to the Colonel and Rappourt, and brought them here, intending to eat with them, go to the broadcast, and return in time for the monkey business. It looks as if I don’t eat at all now.”

“What’s detaining Duvallo?”

“I don’t know. He acted as if he was in a hell of a hurry and said he’d explain when he saw us.”

“Janssen,” Gavigan said, turning to one of the other detectives, “get headquarters on to it. I want him at once. Have them try his home, his office, Lindy’s, and — and put some men on the railroad stations.”

“You might warn them,” Tarot added with a grin, “that they’ll be fooling with an escape artist and that handcuffs don’t mean a thing.”

Janssen got busy on the phone. Hunter poked his head in at the door and was joined by Gavigan for a whispered conference. Both Hunter’s gestures and Gavigan’s evident interest indicated developments. When the Inspector finally sent him off and turned back into the room, I took the opportunity to get something off my chest. I’d been impatiently waiting a proper opening and this seemed as good as any.

“May I suggest something, Inspector?” I asked.

He nodded and I took the plunge.

“I don’t want you to think I’m telling you how to run your business, but — you don’t do any parlor tricks yourself, do you? As a hobby?”

“No. Aren’t there enough magicians around here now?”

“That’s just it. There are far too many. And I’d suggest getting in one more. The cure this time might be a hair of the dog that’s chewing us.” I talked fast trying to stave off objections. “So far the suspects are all conjurers of one sort or another. Madame Rappourt’s the worst of the lot. She claims to be the real honest-to-goodness McCoy, a magician in the original sense of one who has supernatural power — a twentieth-century witch.

“I don’t know if Watrous practices sleight of hand, but he does know how — plenty. I wrote an article once on the spiritualistic community at Lilydale, and for background I skipped through four hundred pages of concentrated trickery entitled Fraudulent Mediumistic Methods. Watrous wrote the book. I’m not trying to belittle the ability of yourself or the Homicide Department, but I’ll place a little bet with you that a technical expert who knows all the tricks of the trade will come in darned handy. You couldn’t lose anything, and you might… ”

“You have someone in mind?” Gavigan asked.

“Yes. Merlini.”

Tarot said, “You think he’d do better than I, Mr. Harte?” His voice was refrigerated, each word a hard, frosty ice cube.

I rebutted that, addressing myself to Gavigan. “What we’d want, I should think, would be a disinterested expert, one who’s not mixed up in the case.” I was rather pleased with that thrust, especially when I saw Tarot’s scowl.

“I know the man, Inspector,” he argued, “and I’d advise against it. How do you know he’s not mixed up in it? He knows all these people, and he might very well have a motive—”

The Inspector was, I think, pretty well fed up with Tarot as a self-appointed amateur detective and with his snooty superior air. His objection bounced off Gavigan’s Irish temperament and boomeranged.

“I happen to know him myself,” Gavigan said, “and I agree with Harte. If he knows all these people that’s another good reason for having him here.”

I stood slightly behind the Inspector, and I answered Tarot’s dirty look by pantomiming the business of laughing up my sleeve. Gavigan was still talking.

“As it happens, I’d already thought of it. Merlini gave some lectures and demonstrations at Police College a couple of years ago explaining the tricks of card sharps and con men. He knows his business. Try and get him on the phone, Malloy.”

Tarot dismissed the subject and said, “I’ve got to be going, much as I’d like to be here when Duvallo arrives — if he does. I’d like to hear his explanation for that card and to know why he made such a hash of things. It’s really not so hard to fool people, you know — even policemen.”

“Oh, so?” Gavigan asked coolly.

“Yes. Watch.”

He turned his left side toward us and held out his right hand, which was still gloved. He turned it showing back and front. Then, with a swift, deft movement, he seemed to pick from the air a fan of about a dozen playing cards. He transferred them to his left hand and squared them up. His face now wore its professional smile, a disarming one, so apparently good-natured that it sugar-coated any chagrin his audience might feel at this double-crossing of their senses. It was the conventional grin conjurers use to nullify the conceit such an exhibition of superiority implies. But on Tarot’s sardonic countenance it worked a startling transformation. He hardly seemed to be the same person who had been scowling at me so blackly a moment before.

As we watched he produced another handful of cards in a neat fan, and he repeated the gesture twice more with easy precision until he was holding a full deck. It was a slick performance, marred only by the fact that he did it with his gloves on. This variation, Merlini had once told me, was originated by Cardini, and the number of small fry who have pirated it are merely admitting their own lack of originality. I wondered why Tarot, a top-notch card man in his own right, descended to that sort of thing.

Gavigan, I saw, was consciously suppressing an openmouthed attitude. I suspected that he was one of those persons who dislike being fooled, whose alibi is always, “Oh, well, of course the stage is riddled with trap doors,” and who get a bit of a jolt when a conjurer for the first time comes right up close, and with no trap doors about, hoodwinks them just the same.

Tarot came forward, fanned the cards in front of Gavigan, and voiced the conjurer’s stock request, “Take a card, please.”

The Inspector half hypnotically put forth his hand, and then withdrew it, scowling.

“For crissake!” he flared. “This is no time for parlor tricks!”

Tarot shrugged and dropped the cards into his pocket.

“Sorry!” he said, “I must be going anyhow. I’m late now.” He headed toward the door.

“Not so fast!” Gavigan said quickly. “I won’t take a card, but I’ll have something else. Those picklocks, please.”

He held out his hand.

Tarot stopped, grinned, and bringing out the key ring he tossed them at the Inspector. They jingled and flashed in the light as the latter caught them.

“Quite a professional assortment,” Gavigan said. “Let’s hear about them.”

“Poor Dave even has circumstance working against him. They’re his. I borrowed them Saturday night to work on a trunk whose key I had mislaid. I intended to return them to him tonight. Perhaps you’ll see that he gets them.”

“He’ll see them all right. And now the gun, please.”

“I’ve a permit for that, Inspector.”

“Let’s see it.”

“It’s at my hotel.”

“Okay, then I want the gun.” Gavigan’s hand went out again. “You can have it back when I see the permit.”

Tarot shrugged and held it out. “I hope you’ll leave me some small change, Inspector. I need carfare. Anything else?”

Without replying, the Inspector crooked his little finger through the trigger guard and with the gun hanging crossed the room and placed it carefully on the blotter pad at the desk.

“Yes,” he answered, “leave your fingerprints with Brady across the hall on your way out. I’ll expect you back after the broadcast, and don’t stop to look in any store windows on the way. Understand? Hunter,” Gavigan raised his voice, “go downstairs and tell the boys to let Mr. Tarot out.”

Hunter’s voice came from outside, “Right,” and we heard him go down the hall.

Tarot nodded. “Okay, Inspector. I wish you luck.” He bowed slightly, stepped quickly through the door, and pulled it to after him.

Gavigan scowled at the place where he had been and said, “Damn him anyway! I wonder if he did that purposely.”

I didn’t get it for a moment; then I remembered Gavigan’s orders, delivered in Tarot’s presence, that the door was not to be touched.

“Janssen,” Gavigan ordered, “you go tail him. I want a full and detailed report, and God help you if you lose him.”

“Yes, sir.” Janssen started off in high, then stalled as the Inspector warned, “Careful of that knob!”

The detective turned the knob carefully, grasping the shank between forefinger and thumb.

“Well, Doc,” Gavigan began, “what’s the… ” He stopped short as if someone had clapped a hand over his mouth. I have since seen the Inspector conceal his surprise, and I have seen him when he couldn’t conceal it, but this was the only time I’ve even seen his jaw literally hanging. It sagged as if the maxillary muscles had suddenly been severed. I looked where he was looking and understood. Sabbat’s body lay on the davenport, and Dr. Hesse, standing near it, held a playing card, the ace of spades, between his right forefinger and thumb. Watching it intently, he made a quick throwing gesture and the card vanished, his open, empty palm stretched flat. He reached down and pulled the card from behind his right knee. With grave concentration he repeated the maneuver, twice more.

Gavigan bellowed, “Dr. Hesse! What the blazing hell are you doing?”

The card, which the doctor was again producing from behind his right knee, slipped from his startled fingers and fell to the floor. Dr. Hesse looked up foggily and said, “What?”

The Inspector couldn’t think of any more words, and Hesse, noting the amazement in his face, realized its cause.

“Sorry, Inspector,” he said, a bit shamefacedly. “I couldn’t refrain from practicing that one while it was fresh in my mind. Standing behind Tarot as he produced those cards, I could see some things that you couldn’t. I noticed that he has an original variation on the basic sleight used in that manipulative series, an improvement on the standard Thurston method. It’s so simple I can’t think why it had never occurred to me… ”

“But that card… what… where?”

“Oh, I always have a deck in my pocket. Sleight of hand is my hobby. Nothing unusual in that, you know. The medical profession is represented in the ranks of amateur conjurers to a greater degree than any other, more doctors being enrolled in the Society of American Magicians than any other single profession. The practice of surgery, I suppose, predisposes us toward a hobby that is so largely pure manual dexterity.”

Gavigan began to recover. “Oh, dissection leads to deception, does it?” He groaned. “Since you know, how did Tarot pull those cards out of nothing and how do you—”

Dr. Hesse grinned and shook his head. “Magicians, even amateurs, aren’t in the habit of divulging their secrets to idle curiosity seekers. Of course, if you’re seriously interested in acquiring the art…?”

“God forbid! And besides, Mrs. Gavigan wouldn’t allow rabbits in the house,” Gavigan said, and added, “Maybe you knew Sabbat, or know some of the witnesses we’ve collected. Tarot, the LaClaires, Colonel Watrous, Madame Rappourt, Duvallo?”

“Hmmm, that’s a pretty good bill. I don’t know Watrous and Rappourt. The others I am acquainted with slightly, having met them at S.A.M. meetings. I don’t, however, attend very regularly any more. The murder rate in this town keeps me too busy.”

“Well, I’ll hear what you know about ’em later. Let’s have your report.”

Dr. Hesse picked up his ace of spades and placed it in his coat pocket. “The present corpse,” he said, “met death by strangulation. The usual soft marks are present. If you look closely you’ll notice a pale groove in the neck with a slight surrounding suggilation. It indicates that the strangulation was accomplished with the aid of some soft material such as a woman’s hose or a towel. Find anything of that sort?”

“No. The body was just as you found it.”

“Murder then, of course. But that’s odd.”

“What is?”

“There aren’t any bruises on the body. When a person is strangled it almost always entails a struggle that leaves some sort of trace. Usually bruises on the back. Their absence suggests that he was drugged or stunned first, though I see no outward signs of that. Something to look for in the post mortem.”

“The time of death, Doctor?” Gavigan asked.

Dr. Hesse sighed. “I wish it were compulsory for the victim’s watch to be broken and stopped during the death struggle. That makes it so much simpler.”

“Come on, quit stalling, Doc. You make pretty good guesses.”

“Well, rigor mortis is quite complete, no signs of decomposition yet, and the interior body temperature — well, say around three this morning, with the usual margin for error. That do?”

Gavigan nodded. “Thanks,” he said, and began investigating the pockets of Sabbat’s dressing gown. He took out a bunch of keys, a piece of white chalk, an indelible pencil, and then, just as Malloy came into the room, the torn half of a blue-bordered handkerchief.

“Spence was the only one in the house with any information, Inspector,” Malloy reported. “The old maid downstairs wears one of those amplifying gadgets hung on her ear, and she could live right under a bowling alley and not know it. I’ve got ten men pushing doorbells on this street trying to scare up witnesses that might have noticed something. Merlini is on his way and… oh, yes. Tarot’s alibi checks and double checks. The Knowltons gave me half a dozen names, and they all swear he was the life of the party every minute. There doesn’t seem to be any question about—”

Brady came in, carrying his fingerprint paraphernalia. “I’ve got their prints — all except… ” He looked around in a surprised way. “Where’s the swell with the monocle?”

Gavigan choked. “Haven’t you… didn’t he come in there and let you ink him?”

Brady replied with an open-mouthed no.

Inspector Gavigan emitted a crackling, neon-colored stream of high-voltage profanity. Malloy jumped for the hall, and I heard him going down the stairs, two steps at a time.