Death From a Top Hat

Chapter 3 Suspects in the Dark

Time stretched itself out intolerably while we stood there, staring. The draught from the open door snatched at the candle flames, and the body almost seemed to move as the dark shadows beneath it crawled on the floor. At last Watrous broke the straining silence.

“Sabbat!”

His voice now was harsh, cracked, and his hands trembled. No one else spoke.

I rubbed my palms against my trousers, wiping away the dampness, and glanced quickly around the room. On the left, beyond Sabbat’s feet, a heavy marble fireplace towered, dominating that end of the room. Above it dull gleams of coppery light picked out the raised portions of a great circular plaque and traced a complex design of intersecting circles and unfamiliar symbols. To the right of the hearth a folding screen partially concealed what appeared to be a large worktable bearing the scattered glint of glassware.

On the floor near me, against the high, carved legs of the davenport, lay a black carpet, neatly rolled. On the side of the room opposite the door dark hangings, closely drawn before a large studio window, reached from ceiling to floor. The right half of the room was lined shoulder high with solidly filled bookshelves. The savage, eyeless faces of half a dozen ceremonial masks peered with feverish distortion from the walls and contrasted violently with the businesslike desk and steel filing cabinets in one corner, which, with several chairs, low tables, and a floor lamp or two comprised the remaining furniture. In the center of the right hand wall, slicing into the rampart of shelves, I saw the black rectangle of an arched doorway that led, I suspected, as did my own, into a short inner hall from which opened the entrances to kitchenette, bedroom, and bath.

Watrous was incredulous. “Is — is he — dead?”

Tarot took his eyes from the body and narrowed them on the Colonel. His voice, except for an incisive sarcasm, was emotionless.

“What do you think? ’S a damn funny place to sleep!”

“But I,” Watrous jerked, “I don’t… understand. There’s no gas.”

“Gas?” Tarot looked puzzled.

“Yes — the stuffed keyholes. This smell is incense — from that burner.” He indicated a squat bronze object on the mantelpiece. “It’s not—”

“Use your eyes, man!” Tarot snapped. “Look at that face. Asphyxiation, yes. But not gas. He’s been strangled.”

The thought had crossed my mind, yet I started when I heard the words. Rappourt moved and caught my attention. I saw that her rigidity and labored respiration had gone. She was bending forward, keenly alert, her eyes wide, with white showing beneath the black staring pupils.

I said, “There’d be marks of some sort on his throat, wouldn’t there?”

Tarot stepped over the chalked circle closer to the body and looked down. “There should be — and there aren’t. But that’s no queerer than the rest of this… ” He was starting to kneel.

“Maybe you’d better not touch him,” I warned. “The police are on their way.”

Tarot straightened. Somehow I felt that I had put a dent in that colossal self-confidence of his which was so annoying. His monocle flashed at me.

“While we were smashing in the door, eh?”

I nodded, watching him.

“But,” Watrous argued doubtfully, “you’re saying that Sabbat—”

“Was murdered!” Tarot finished. “And since these windows look directly on to the river, it’s quite possible that the murderer… ” His voice had lowered and was speculative. Leaving his thought half expressed, he turned to face the now forbidding darkness of the inner doorway. Together with his turning I saw a smooth motion of hand to pocket, and then blue metal highlights glittered in his hand. He held a square-nosed automatic.

“Get some lights, somebody! That switch by the door.”

I jumped at it. I flicked it with my thumb… once… twice… Thin metallic clicks came, but that was all. Tarot yanked a candle from its socket and moved toward the black hall. I grabbed the next nearest and started after him. He looked over his shoulder, stopped short and spun around. His gun, held stiffly before him, seemed to point at me.

“You stay where you are!”

I kept on going, partly because I disliked Tarot’s self-appointed leadership, partly because I felt that he was being a bit too melodramatic. The odds were against finding a murderer hidden on the scene of his crime.

“All right, sap!” he said. “Take the bedroom.”

He slipped into the doorway ahead of me, turned right, and vanished through a swinging door into the kitchen. I went on several paces and stopped before the single door on the left. Kicking it open, I held my candle high and fumbled inside for the switch. I found it and got another empty, ineffective click. I hesitated for an instant on the black brink, and then stepped in, suddenly, as if entering a cold shower.

My candle flame dipped precariously at the quick motion, and I slowed cautiously. The room contained a bed, dresser, and chair. The bed was made. I looked under it and then investigated a clothes closet. That exhausted the hiding places. There were two windows; one faced the blank rear wall of another apartment house and overlooked a bare stone court three stories below; the other, on the river side, dropped sheer to the water. Both were securely fastened.

“Tarot!”

I had one hand on the window catch, trying it, when I heard Watrous yell. I turned around so fast my candle flapped out. One bound took me through the door into the hall where I smacked solidly against Tarot as he shot out of the bathroom. We both swore.

Watrous ran at us, blurted excitedly, “She’s fainted! Give me that.” He snatched Tarot’s candle, which was miraculously still alight, and popped into the kitchen. I heard running water splash in the sink as we hurried back into the living room.

Darkness had moved in threateningly on the two remaining candles. Madame Rappourt was a limp huddle on the floor. We lifted her into a large armchair. Her head rolled, mouth open. Watrous came with a glass of water, and Tarot leaned forward to support the medium’s head as the Colonel tipped the glass against her pale lips. Water dribbled down the side of her face and neck, and she began to come out of it, choking.

She moaned slightly and mumbled indistinguishably in a blurred, fuzzy voice. Her eyelids fluttered and then stayed open. She looked at the Colonel, who had put aside the glass and was bent over, awkwardly rubbing her wrists.

“I’ll be all right in a moment,” she said thinly. “Then you must take me home.”

Watrous nodded and opened his mouth.

Tarot spoke first. “Mr. Harte’s friends, the police, won’t like that, you know, Watrous.”

I let that crack pass and spoke to Watrous. “You might take her across to my room where it’s light, and there isn’t any… ” I gestured at the body.

“Perhaps I’d better,” he assented. But he made no move. He frowned thoughtfully and inclined his head toward the inner hall. “In there, you found nothing?”

I shook my head. Tarot put the gun back in his pocket and said, “No.”

Watrous nodded, one hand holding Rappourt’s arm, and looked across at the body. “That would have been disappointing. You know, this business is beginning to interest me highly. The authorities all state that unless very precise and proper precautions are taken during an evocation the demon may turn on the sorcerer and wring his neck. Many such instances have been recorded, though I haven’t yet found any well-authenticated modern ones. I’m beginning to think that maybe the police are going to have a bit of a job on their hands.”

“Slow down for the corners, Colonel,” Tarot said cynically. “Your imagination’s running wild again. Maybe the dead can return to jiggle tables and blow trumpets, though I should think they’d feel damned silly doing it. But when you insinuate that some demon twisted Sabbat’s neck for him… eyewash! And you know it.”

That was the wrong way to rub the Colonel’s fur. He argued, “But if there’s no one else here, and the doors were all locked and bolted, and the windows… ”

I walked over and pulled back the velvet hangings. A pale hint of moonlight filtered in. I glanced at the window fastening. “The windows in the other room and in here,” I announced, “are all locked.”

“You see,” Watrous said. “What else… ”

“At the moment I don’t know what else,” Tarot snorted. “But there’s some way out of here. Duvallo should be able… ” He stopped thoughtfully.

“Duvallo!” Watrous exclaimed. “I wonder what’s delaying him. He should be here by now.”

“That is queer.” Tarot pushed back his cuff and glanced at a silver wrist watch. “It’s six-forty-five.”

“Is Duvallo expected?” I asked, moderately thunderstruck.

Watrous nodded. “He was to meet us here.”

This was getting “curiouser and curiouser.” The Society of American Magicians would shortly have enough members present to constitute a quorum.

With Watrous’ help, Rappourt rose. He had started with her toward the door when a voice said:

“Hello, folks. What’s up? Why all the dim religious light? Sabbat giving one of his séances?”

A man in evening clothes, topcoat on arm, hat tipped far back on his head, stood just inside the door at the end of the davenport. A woman stood beside him. She wore an evening gown that shimmered in the light and a white fur jacket with a high collar. The slightly foolish smiles on their faces indicated that they were both half seas over. The woman rocked a bit and hung more tightly to her companion’s arm. “LaClaire!” Watrous piped. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, why not? We — er — thought there might be a cocktail in the shaker.” His eyes strayed unsteadily around the room. “Where’s Sabbat?” Then he saw the thing on the floor, and the bottom dropped out of his voice. A blank look of consternation washed the alcoholic grin from his face. The woman said, “Oh!” and I could hear her suck in her breath.

“Strangled!” Watrous said, with a consummate absence of tact. As they stood there, staring, he blurbled a quick, condensed story of our breaking in. Tarot walked to the window and stood with his back to us looking out. His fingers tapped impatiently on the pane. Rappourt dropped back into her chair. A vague psychic sense I didn’t know I had responded to a faint hint of some new quality in the room’s atmosphere and sent an uneasy shiver wavering within me, a cold feeling of danger near-by and waiting.

I looked at the newcomers and saw the bleached platinum blondness of the woman and the dark, long-lashed eyes that were now almost perfect circles. I saw the man’s oddly disturbing combination of green eyes and blond hair, and noticed, when he nervously drew his right hand across his jaw, that the forefinger was missing and that the others were strangely twisted. He turned, his uncertainty suddenly gone.

“Come on, Zelma, let’s get the hell out of here.”

Zelma, however, had been oppositely affected by the sight. Hand at her mouth she ran quickly toward the bathroom. Her face had a pallid sickly color. LaClaire blinked at her comprehendingly and followed.

“Aren’t there any lights in this joint?” he threw back.

“They’re out of order,” Watrous explained. We heard them fumble at the bathroom door, and then it slammed.

“You’d better stick around, Alfred,” Watrous began, as LaClaire came back into the room. “Harte here has called the police.”

“Harte?” LaClaire asked, giving me a suspicious scowl.

“Mr. Harte, Mr. LaClaire,” the Colonel officiated. He was a sucker for etiquette, and it occurred to me that he’d probably go around introducing people at a fire. “Harte lives across the hall.” And to me, “The LaClaires have a most interesting mental routine presenting Mrs. LaClaire as The Woman with the Radio Mind. I doubt if anyone, even the Zancigs, have ever attained as high a degree of skill in the presentation of the second-sight trick.”

The Colonel was a natural public relations counsel. I groaned inwardly when I heard this bit of ballyhoo. Another brace of magicians! If Duvallo, when he showed up, would only bring along a couple of acrobats and a man who could play Humoresque on the saw, we could go to town with a full evening’s show. I could do my trick with the matches.

“Listen,” LaClaire said to Watrous. “We’re going to beat it. We’re playing a date tonight and if the cops get here… ”

We all heard it. The muted wail of a siren from the street outside.

“Well, that’s that,” LaClaire said and was silent. A moment later there were running footsteps on the stairs. We watched the door. Two red-faced cops came through it. The scent of cold air still clung to their uniforms. Halting just inside, they looked at us, their badges and buttons winking like stars in the candlelight.

I heard a second siren, its pitch rising as it came nearer.