The Flimflam Affair

15 Quincannon

There were shocked exclamations from the doctor’s wife and Winthrop Buckley, overridden by a shriek from Margaret Buckley. Out of the corner of his eye Quincannon saw the woman swoon in her husband’s arms as he ran to where Sabina stood staring down at the slumped body in the chair. Her expression of startled incredulity matched that of the others in the room. His own, too, no doubt. This was no piece of mediumistic fakery like the other alleged wonders he’d just witnessed. One look at the dagger jutting from the back of Vargas’s neck and the blindly staring eyes made that abundantly clear.

Stabbed, for a fact. And not once but twice. The weapon, whose ornate hilt bore a series of hieroglyphics, had been plunged deep — whether the death blow or a coup de grâce he couldn’t tell. The other, first-struck wound, still oozing blood, showed through a rent in Vargas’s robe lower down, between the shoulder blades.

Ashen-faced, Dr. Cobb was feeling for a pulse in one limp wrist. He shook his head and announced unnecessarily, “Expired.”

“It isn’t possible,” Mrs. Cobb whispered in a stricken voice. “How could he have been stabbed?”

Buckley had lowered his unconscious wife into one of the chairs and was fanning her flushed face with his hand. He said shakily, “How — and by whom? Surely not any of us...”

Quincannon caught Sabina’s eye. She wagged her head to tell him she didn’t know, or couldn’t be sure, what had taken place in those few seconds of darkness.

The psychic assistant, Annabelle, was still beating on the door, clamoring for admittance. Quincannon went to the cabinet. The brass key lay where Vargas had set it down before the séance began; he used it to unlock the door. The woman rushed in from the dark hallway, her eyes wide and fearful. She gave a little moan when she saw Vargas, ran to his side and knelt to peer into his dead face.

When she straightened again her own face looked even more bloodless than before. She said with tremulous outrage, “Which one of you did this?”

“It couldn’t have been one of us,” Dr. Cobb told her. “No one broke the circle until after the professor was stabbed.”

“Then... it must have been a malevolent spirit.”

Malevolent spirit, Quincannon thought sourly. Bah!

“He did perceive antagonistic waves tonight,” Cobb said. “But why would such a spirit—?”

“He made the Auras angry at times. I warned him to be more cautious but he wouldn’t listen.”

Sabina said, “How did he make the Auras angry?”

Annabelle shuddered and shook her head. Then her eyes shifted into a long stare across the room. “The slates,” she said.

“What about the slates?”

“Is there a spirit message? Have you looked?”

Quincannon swung around to the cabinet; the others, except for Margaret Buckley, crowded close behind him. The tied slates were in the center of the stack where Vargas had placed them. He left those two out, undid the knot in his handkerchief, parted the slates and held them up side by side.

Murmurs, and a mildly blasphemous exclamation from Buckley.

In a ghostlike hand beneath the “John Milford” signatures on each, one message upside down and backward as if it were a mirror image of the other, was written: I Angkar destroyed the offensive one.

“Angkar!” Cobb said. “Why would the professor’s guide and guardian turn on him in such a terrible way?”

“The spirits are not mocked,” Annabelle said. “They know wickedness when it is done in their name. Guardian then becomes avenger.”

“Madam, what are you saying?”

“I warned him,” she said again. “He would not listen and now he has paid the price. His torment will continue on the Other Side, until his spirit has been cleansed of all wickedness.”

Quincannon had had all he could stand of this nonsense. He said, “Enough talk and speculation,” in a sharp authoritarian voice that swiveled all heads in his direction. “There will be time for that later. Now there’s work to be done.”

“Quite right,” Cobb agreed. “The police—”

“Not the police, Doctor. Not yet.”

“Here, Mr. Milford, who are you to take charge?”

“The name isn’t Milford, it’s Quincannon. John Quincannon. Of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services.”

Cobb gaped at him. “A detective? You?”

“Two detectives.” He gestured to Sabina at his side. “My partner, Mrs. Carpenter.”

“A woman?” Grace Cobb said. She sounded as shocked as if Sabina had been revealed as a soiled dove.

Sabina, testily: “And why not, pray tell?”

Annabelle, angrily: “Blasphemy! The presence of unbelievers served only to increase the wrath of the spirits.”

Dr. Cobb: “Who hired you? Who brought you here under false pretenses?”

Quincannon and Sabina both looked at Buckley. To the man’s credit, he wasted no time in admitting he was their client.

“You, Winthrop?” Margaret Buckley had revived and was regarding them dazedly. “I don’t understand. Why would you engage detectives?”

Before her husband could reply, Quincannon said, “Mr. Buckley will explain in the parlor. Be so good, all of you, as to go there and wait.”

“For what?” Cobb demanded.

“For Mrs. Carpenter and myself to do what no other detective, police officer, or private citizen can do half so well. Solve a baffling crime.”

No one protested, although Dr. Cobb wore an expression of disapproval and Annabelle said, “What good are earthly detectives when it is the spirits who have taken vengeance?” as they left the séance room. Within a minute Quincannon and Sabina were alone with the dead man. He turned the key in the lock to ensure their privacy.

“Murder,” she said, shaking her head. “That is the last thing I expected to happen tonight. And in such a bizarre fashion, in total darkness.”

“Indeed. A pretty puzzle, eh?”

“Mm.” She straightened her shoulders. The events had unnerved her initially, but she was never unflappable for long. Nor squeamish in the presence of violent death. “Now we’ll see if we can make good on your boast.”

They proceeded, first extinguishing the incense burner and opening one of the locked windows so that cold night air could refresh the room. Then they carefully examined walls, fireplace, and floor. All were solid; there were no secret openings, crawlspaces, hidey-holes, or trapdoors. Quincannon then went to inspect the corpse, while Sabina gave her attention to the jar-encased bell on the table.

The first thing he noticed was that although the rope still bound Vargas to his chair, it was somewhat loose across forearms and sternum. When he lifted the limp left hand he found that it had been freed of the bonds. The right foot had also been freed. Confirmation of his suspicions in both cases. His next discovery was also more or less expected: the two items concealed inside the sleeve of the medium’s robe.

He was studying these when Sabina said, “No surprise here. The jar was fastened to the tabletop with gum adhesive to hold it in place during the tipping business.”

“Can you pry it loose?”

“I already have. The clapper on the bell—”

“Is either missing or frozen. Eh?”

“Frozen. Vargas used another bell to produce his spirit rings.”

“This one.” Quincannon held up the tiny hand bell with its gauze-muffled clapper. “Made and struck so as to produce a hollow ring, as if it were coming from the bell inside the jar. The directionless quality of sounds in total darkness, and the power of suggestion, completed the deception.”

“All just as Madame Louella explained the trick. What else have you there?”

He showed her the second item from Vargas’s sleeve.

“A reaching rod,” she said. “Mmm, yes.”

Quincannon said, “His right hand was holding your left wrist on the table. Could you tell when he freed it?”

“No, and I was waiting for it to happen. I think he may have done it when he coughed. You recall?”

“I do.”

“He must have practiced that bit of deception hundreds of times in order to perfect it,” Sabina said. “Quite cunning in his warped way.”

“And now quite dead.”

“Have you a suggestion as to who stabbed him?”

“Not as yet, except that it wasn’t the fictitious Angkar or any other supernatural agency. Annabelle may believe in spirits who wield daggers, but I don’t.”

“Nor I. I suppose our client could be responsible — he made no bones about his anger toward Vargas when I last spoke to him in his office — but he doesn’t seem the type of man to resort to violence, particularly not in circumstances such as these.”

“We don’t know him well enough to discount hidden depths,” Quincannon pointed out. “Nor the Cobbs. You noticed the way Mrs. Cobb petted Vargas in the parlor earlier?”

“And the look that passed between them, yes. I expect Dr. Cobb noticed it, too. Jealousy is a strong motive for murder, the more so if there was infidelity involved.”

“A woman scorned is another strong motive.”

Sabina nodded. “Annabelle would also qualify in both cases,” she said. “Except that she wasn’t in the room when Vargas was stabbed and the door was securely locked. The guilty person must be one of the four at the table.”

“So it would seem. One clever enough to break the circle in the same way Vargas did and then to stand up, commit the deed, and return to his chair — all in utter darkness.”

“Doesn’t seem possible, does it.”

Quincannon said, “No more impossible than any of the other humbug we witnessed tonight.”

“True. This isn’t the first such enigma we’ve encountered.”

“Indeed. We already have some of the answers to the evening’s queer show. Find the rest and I’ll soon have the solution to the riddle of Vargas’s death.”

“We’ll soon have the solution, you mean.”

He knew better than to argue the point.

One of the missing answers came from an examination of the dead man’s mystic rings. The one on his left hand that Sabina said he’d referred to as an Egyptian signet and seal talisman ring had a hidden fingernail catch; when it was flipped, the entire top hinged upward to reveal a small sturdy hook within. Quincannon had no doubt that were he to drop down on all fours and peer under the table in front of Vargas’s chair, he would find a tiny metal eye screwed to the wood.

The miraculous self-playing guitar, which of course was nothing of the kind, drew him next. He already knew how its dancing levitation had been managed; a close scrutiny of the instrument revealed the rest of the trick.

“John, look at this.”

Sabina was at the cabinet, fingering a small bottle. When he’d set the guitar down and joined her, he saw that she had removed the bottle’s glass stopper. “This was among the others on the tray,” she told him, and held it up for him to sniff its contents.

“Ah,” he said. “Almond oil.”

“Mixed with white phosphorous, no doubt.”

“The contents of the other bottles?”

“Liquor and incense oils. Nothing more than window dressing.”

Quincannon stood looking at the cabinet. At length he knelt and ran his fingers over its smooth front, its fancily inlayed center top. There seemed to be neither doors nor a way to lift open the top, as if the cabinet might be a sealed wooden box. This proved not to be the case. It took him a few minutes to locate the secret spring catch, cleverly concealed as it was among the dark-squared inlays. As soon as he pressed it, the catch released noiselessly and the entire top slid up and back on oiled hinges.

The interior was a narrow, hollow space — a box, in fact, that seemed more like a child’s toy chest than a cabinet. A clutch of items were pushed into one corner. Quincannon lifted them out one by one.

More than a yard of white silk.

Another yard of fine white netting, so fine that it could be wadded into a ball no larger than a walnut.

A two-foot-square piece of black cloth.

A small container of safety matches.

A theatrical mask.

And a pair of rubber gloves almost but not quite identical, both of which had been stuffed with cotton and dipped in melted paraffin.

He returned each item to the cabinet, finally closed the lid. He said with satisfaction, “That leaves only the writing on the slates. And we know how that was done, don’t we, my dear.”

“We also know now how Vargas was murdered,” Sabina said. “And by whom. Don’t we, my dear.”

Quincannon elevated an eyebrow. “You have the answer, too?”

“Naturally. Did you really believe you’re the only one of us adept at solving seemingly impossible crimes?”