Death From a Top Hat

Chapter 1 The Voice in the Hall

There were times during the investigation of the case of the Dead Magicians when the New York Police Department’s official attitude toward the infernal arts of witchcraft and sorcery was damnably inconvenient. It had the annoying disadvantage of leaving us with no explanation at all.

Some of the evidence in the case would have seemed vastly more appropriate had it been reported from the forbidden interior of Tibet or from that other famous home of magic, mystery, and tall stories — India. A murderer who apparently leaves the scene of his crimes by walking straight through solid walls of brick and plaster and by floating in midair out of second story windows would, however, be uncanny enough even in Lhassa or Hyderabad. In modern Manhattan he becomes doubly incredible and rather more frightening.

As recently as two hundred and fifty years ago the authorities would have ended the matter by simply applying those bloody and infamous instruments for crime detection, the pincers and the rack, and obtained a confession of sorcerous activity from the nearest innocent bystander. But this easy technique was denied us, and we were left, armed with logic alone, to do battle with irrational dragon shapes.…

Inspector Gavigan’s ordinarily jovial and assured blue eyes held an angry worried look that stayed there until Merlini finally exorcised the demons and produced a solution that satisfied the Inspector except as to one thing: he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t seen it all along. I knew exactly how he felt. I was in the same boat. All we need have done, as Merlini pointed out, was to realize exactly what it was that all the suspects had in common and just what the two things were that one of them was able to do that no one else could possibly have done.

Except for a number of things the murderer had already accomplished, the action began on a Monday evening. I had worked all week-end and through Sunday night until five in the morning on a free-lance job of advertising copy at Blanton, Dunlop & Hartwick’s, one of those madhouse advertising agencies in the Graybar Building. Their star client, after a full week of agonizing indecision, had made up his mind at 4:30 on Friday afternoon that the proposed national campaign for Sudzex Soap Flakes was lousy. He didn’t know what was wrong with it — clients never do — but his wife said it wouldn’t sell her any soap flakes, and his secretary didn’t like the illustrations. So would B. D. & H. please show him a new set of comprehensives on Monday morning.

My phone rang as I was dressing for a dinner date, and Paul Dunlop had to jack his price twice before I said yes. Always after one of those incredibly hectic and sleepless jobs I promised myself it would be the last time, yet always, somehow, I managed to think of something I could do with that much money.

When I left the agency, a crew of bleary-eyed layout men and artists were still at it, putting a bit of everything into those damned ads, including, in this case, that usually excluded item, the kitchen sink. After toast and coffee at an all-night cafeteria I walked the few blocks to my apartment on East 40th Street, took a warm shower, drew the shade against the first gray streaks of dawn, and got into bed.

I awoke to see the alarm clock scowling at me reproachfully, the corners of its mouth turned down and indicating 5:40. Reaching out an arm, I flipped up the shade and then lay there for a moment enjoying the warmth of the bed, reluctant to face the cold air breezing in at the window. Warm squares of yellow light shone out from the dark face of the apartment house opposite. I heard the deep moan of a foghorn from the near-by river that moved, dark and silent, between Manhattan and the twinkling wilderness of Long Island. In the northwestern sky a faint blur of red glowed sullenly where low-lying clouds reflected the neon brilliance of Times Square.

Presently I got up, showered, shaved, dressed, and went to the corner restaurant where I ate leisurely with a book propped up against the sugar bowl. Returning to the apartment, I folded myself up in the big armchair and tried to enjoy having nothing to do but read. I soon found, however, that I couldn’t relax comfortably so soon after the nervous, driving pace of the past few days. The book seemed pallid and dull. I dropped it, went to the kitchen and put together a Scotch and soda.

In the living room once more, I switched on the light at my desk, placed my glass on a coaster beside the typewriter, and tore open a new package of copy paper. I twisted a sheet into the machine and lit a cigarette. From the top drawer I took out a small loose-leaf notebook and removed the half dozen pages on which I had scribbled notes for a magazine article. Luncheon the week before with Dave Merton, editor of Greenbook, had resulted in a commission to do two thousand words on the state of the modern detective story. At the top of the sheet I typed off a tentative head, Death Takes a Holiday, x’d it out, and wrote two more, Murder Is Hackneyed and The Corpse on the Publisher’s Hands. I left them to age a bit and began to click off a rough outline of my main argument, a listing of my reasons for not writing detective fiction.

I stopped for a moment and, drink in hand, reviewed my listing of detective talent. With a pencil I made several additions in the margin: Nick Charles, the Baron Maxmilian Von Kaz, and Drury Lane. Lighting a new cigarette, I continued.

I broke off and glanced up from my typewriter with a frown. Someone out in the corridor was pounding on the door of the apartment across from mine; and now and then I could hear the low buzz of a doorbell. Two or three voices, fusing in a jumbled excited chatter, filtered through my door. I sat back helplessly to wait until they would decide to give it up and go away. Once, when I had worked on a newspaper, I had been able to write under all sorts of conditions, most of them noisy. There is something about the rhythmic clatter of a newsroom that is conducive to work, but this disturbance was merely aggravating.

Someone was evidently anxious to see the occupant of the apartment which shared the third floor with my own, though I couldn’t quite understand why. The tenant was a crusty, antisocial old so-and-so who never seemed pleased to see anyone, as far as I knew. After a tentative “good morning” once that elicited a black scowl as its sole response, I gave up trying to be neighborly. New York isn’t the town for that, anyhow. And this bird was probably as unneighborly a specimen as could be found in the whole metropolitan area.

He was tall and had Cassius’ lean and hungry look. His slicked dark hair came forward to a sharp V above his high forehead, and his eyes, wet and shiny black like an insect’s, peered coldly from a face that might have been carved from soap. In spite of all that, his erect carriage and the incisively hewn symmetry of his face made him almost handsome in a strange foreign way. He had an annoying habit of looking suspiciously back over his shoulder when I passed him in the dark hall that made me think of Count Dracula. He was, somehow, just a shade too fantastic; and his name, which I had noticed on a card at the bell push, was equally odd. It was Dr. Cesare Sabbat.

Suddenly I swung around in my chair. The voices outside took on a quickened tempo, a new throb of excitement — one of them, a woman’s, lifted above the rest. It was a curiously flat voice, charged with hysteria, a slow hypnotic tenseness, and a touch of what, oddly enough, sounded like studied horror. Six words came wading through the silence that instantly ensued and hung trembling in the air over my desk.

“There is death in that room!”

It was too much. I got up, scowling, and jerked open my door.

“What is this?” I protested. “A game?”