The Headless Lady

Chapter Fifteen Murder Charge

This time there was no trick or illusion to it. One quick look at the severed stump of white flesh projecting from the open shirt collar was more than enough. I raised my eyes and kept them up.

Derisively Hooper said, “And I thought you were going to be a tough baby. Not so blamed smart for a city slicker after all, are you?”

“Apparently not,” said Merlini. “I should know better than to leave my trunk compartment unlocked, even when it’s empty.” He turned to the Captain. “Find anything else?”

Schafer regarded him darkly. “This is plenty, isn’t it?”

“That depends on the point of view. If you think this proves I’m the murderer, then it’s quite a bit. Otherwise not.”

Hooper’s snort was pure disgust.

The Captain asked, “You aren’t going to tell me it means anything else?”

“Afraid I am,” said Merlini. “I’ve been dealt a cold hand. And I’d like to know just how many jokers there are in the deck.”

“So that’s going to be your angle, is it?” Schafer said truculently. “Yes, I’ve got more — a damn sight more than I need. The missing photo of the auto smash for one thing, and a couple of suitcases and a hat box full of clothes. The side-show manager says they’re the Headless Lady’s. There’s also a .32 Smith and Wesson automatic.”

“Oh?” Merlini said interestedly. “One shot fired, I suppose? And no fingerprints.”

“I don’t know about the prints yet. You were probably careful about that. The gun’s fully loaded and, offhand, it doesn’t look as if it had been fired lately. You either cleaned it or used another.” Schafer took a forward step toward Merlini. “You haven’t got the chance of a snowball in hell, so why don’t you spill it? Leibowitz and a dozen more like him couldn’t get you out from under this rap.”

“Did you ever hear that one about appearances being deceptive, Captain?” Merlini smiled a bit wryly. “Someone seems to have given me a good dose of my own medicine. Was there any identification on the body or clothing that tells us who the Headless Lady was?”

Schafer looked at him silently for a moment. Then he said, “You’re a cool one, all right. Yes, there are clothing labels from a couple of New York shops. Classy ones. We’ll have her name in a couple of hours. That’ll give me your motive. Palmer, put the cuffs on him. We’ll go into town and have this out.”

Palmer slipped a bright steel bracelet around Merlini’s right wrist, pulled the ratchet tight, and locked it. The other cuff he snapped on his own arm. Merlini, thoughtfully surveying the objects at his feet, the open trunk compartment, and the car hardly seemed to be aware of the action.

“Do me a favor, Captain,” he asked. “Dust my car for prints — around the compartment lid there. I doubt if you’ll find any but mine. The person who’s responsible for this isn’t likely to trip up over anything as primary as fingerprints. Just the same, it’s high time he turned in at least one error. His batting average is way too high to last. Even a tight-wire walker takes a tumble once in awhile.”

I had just decided it was time I put my oar in when O’Halloran beat me to it, and with the same idea.

“Captain,” he said, “don’t you think this is all a little too obvious?”

Schafer scowled at him nervously as if the thought had crossed his mind and, though not acceptable, was still a nuisance, “I’ll ask you one,” he replied. “Why’d he slice her head off?”

“Well—” O’Halloran began uncertainly.

“It wasn’t to keep us from identifying her. He’d have ditched the clothes. Even cutting out the labels would have been lots simpler and a helluva lot less gruesome. I know the answer too — he’s off his chump. Not enough that he can duck the chair, but just nuts enough to keep a body in the wrong place. They do things like that.”

“I think you’re wrong there,” O’Halloran said. “And, crazy or not, I’ve got a hunch that if he committed a murder you wouldn’t find evidence by the bushel like this. You got enough exhibits here to outfit a complete crime museum. Besides, he wasn’t even on the show when the Major had his accident. Or are you figuring someone else for that?”

“No. He’ll do.”

I did come to bat then, indignantly. “He was with me in Albany 80 miles away Monday night. I told you that.”

“Yeah, I know,” Schafer said obstinately. “And the two of you were holed up all day working on some manuscript — so you say. You’re his only witness. That’s why you’re coming along to the station house, too.”

“Charged with what?” I asked, trying to make it sound confident and having to fake most of it.

“Nothing — yet. You’re being held as a material witness. There’ll be a charge quick enough — as soon as I get a confession. If you’d like to talk now, it’ll save a lot of wear and tear and maybe draw you a couple of years less. I can’t make any promises, but I’ll see what I can do. How about it?”

Before I could reply that in that case I guessed I’d have to take the full stretch, Merlini spoke. “Mind explaining how I removed the head with that sword when I was in the cookhouse all the time it was missing?”

“I been waiting for that,” Hooper snapped instantly. “You weren’t! You could’ve swiped the sword. That Swede left the side-show tent a few minutes ahead of you. Maybe you didn’t have time to use it, but that don’t mean a damn thing. You had already cut her up — with something else. You’re playing the sword for an alibi, but it limps like hell!” His voice rose, as he demanded, “What did you do with the head?”

Merlini’s poker face only increased the Chief’s irritation, and his calm, unruffled voice added still more fuel to the fire. “When you get your teeth into the seat of someone’s pants you hang on like grim death, don’t you, Hooper? Very commendable trait. But if I knew where the head was, I wouldn’t have a worry in the world. When you do find it, you really will have a case.”

“We’ve got one now,” Hooper growled. Then, noticing the crowd that was rapidly collecting around us, he stooped quickly and drew the cover over the body again. “Let’s take them in, Schafer,” he added. “This is no place to chew the fat.”

Schafer nodded and ordered, “Palmer, frisk Merlini and get his car key. Give it to the Chief. He’ll see to bringing in the body, and the other stuff and the car. Stevens—”

Merlini turned quickly and said, “O’Halloran, you had a story up your sleeve back there. I’d like to hear—”

“Forget it,” Schafer commanded sharply. “You’re under arrest if you didn’t know it. I’ll look after O’Halloran. He’s coming, too. I think he’s got more story than he gave me this afternoon, and I’m still checking his credentials. Get going, Palmer. Stevens, take Harte and come with O’Halloran in his car. Robbins, you go with them. Chief, have some of your men stick around here and keep an eye on this circus. It doesn’t move until I say so, and nobody with it leaves the lot.”

As Trooper Palmer started off with Merlini at his side, the latter did something that I think would have convinced the Chief and the Captain more than ever, had they heard it, that he was completely loco. He looked straight ahead at nothing and, as if talking to himself, said in a quick low voice:

“Cop a heap, Farmer, and case the can. I’ll light a rag!”

Palmer gave him a puzzled, apprehensive look. Then, as one of the flashlights sent its beam across the crowd that was moving back to let them pass, I saw the faintest ghost of a smile flicker briefly across Farmer’s lean face. Promptly, unobtrusively, he edged backward among the others and vanished.

I gathered that the maestro was not going to be caught short without a trick up his sleeve; this was obviously a bit of off-stage preparation. I decided that, once out of the Captain’s clutches, I had better query Columbia University as to whether their Romance Language Department offered a seminar in advanced Grifter’s Argot, and, if so, what the prerequisites were. Foreign languages have always been my bète noire (except for a few residual phrases like that one); but if Merlini was going to make a habit of consorting with underworld folk, it was obvious that I would have to go back and get more education. Cop a heap and case the can — I’ll light a rag might just as well have been idiomatic Sanskrit. It was nearly as clear as mud.

O’Halloran’s car was parked near by, and as we went toward it he whispered in a low voice, “You and Merlini may have to spend the night in jail, but I think I can spring you by morning. I’ve got some ideas about this case.”

“You know who the murderer is?”

“If you’d read the papers the last few days that might not bother you so much. He—”

“What are you two chewing the rag about?” Stevens, who had come up behind us, demanded heavily.

Neither O’Halloran nor I made any answer. O’Halloran got into his car behind the wheel and put his ignition key in the lock.

Stevens said, “No, you don’t, Mister. I’ll drive. Robbins, you take the other one in back, and keep your eyes peeled. If you ask me, these two look suspicious as hell.”

Under the circumstances our conversation from there on didn’t amount to much. I saw the Captain’s white patrol car swing in behind us as we left the lot.

We drew up a few minutes later on a quiet elm-shaded street before a brand-new jail, a hoosegow so neat and fresh that I looked down the street half-expecting to catch a glimpse of the masons as they left for home. Although the workmanlike solid construction of the walls and the heavily barred windows weren’t exactly inviting, I was reassured by the newness of the building because I had had visions of a jerk-water jail with hot and cold running rats in each cell.

Even the interior hadn’t yet attained the official coating of dust and grime which is standard decoration in jails, courtrooms and statehouses.

The Captain arrived a moment later, took over the Chief’s office and said, “You first, Towne.”

Merlini and I remained in an anteroom under the eyes of Troopers Palmer and Stevens and Officer Robbins. Palmer had removed the cuff from his wrist, and Merlini now wore them both. He was practicing his vanishing half-dollar trick and appeared pleased that he was still able to accomplish it though handcuffed. The law eyed him with more suspicion than ever. He vanished the half-dollar for keeps, twisted his arms about, and succeeded in reaching a back pocket from which he drew a deck of cards in a case.

“Palmer,” he said, “name a card. Any card in the deck.”

Palmer asked, “Why?”

Merlini gave him a startled glance. “Come to think of it, I don’t know,” he said. “But take a chance.”

Palmer scowled, and his tone of voice was the one he saved for humoring nuts. “The jack of spades.”

Merlini took the cards from their case and started to run through them, backs up.

“I’m not sure why this is, either,” he said, “but a magician always does things the hard way. When he wants to find a card he does it by looking at the backs rather than the faces. Sometimes it works.”

As he said that, one lone card suddenly showed face up among all the other face-down ones. It was, of course, Palmer’s jack of spades.

Merlini’s audience had started to sit up and take some notice. They sat all the way up a moment later.

“And to show you,” Merlini continued, “that I didn’t, in spite of these handcuffs, use some sort of invisible sleight-of-hand to turn that card over as I came to it — to show you that I knew what card you would choose before you named it, when I put it in this deck face up the day before yesterday, I used a jack of spades from another deck!”

He removed the jack from among the others and turned it over. The design on its back was red, that on all the other cards was blue.

“That’s known to the trade as the Brainwave, an invention of my friend, Dai Vernon. It’s a magician’s dream.”

Palmer and Robbins both had dreamlike expressions on their faces. Stevens did too for a moment. Then, suddenly, he woke up.

“It’s a gag,” he said deprecatingly. “You had Palmer primed to call for the jack. You fixed it on the way over.”

Palmer’s face gave the lie to this; but Stevens, a realistic soul, insisted that it wasn’t magic, only a low sort of practical joke.

“I’ve heard that one before,” Merlini countered. “And I know the answer. Suppose you name one, Stevens. Take your time about selecting it, and make it tough as you can for me. While you’re doing that I’ll discard the joker. It sometimes causes trouble.”

He turned the cards, face toward himself, went rapidly through them, removed one, and dropped it face down on the floor. Then he waited for Stevens to name his card.

“The four of clubs,” Stevens said skeptically, choosing one of the more undistinguished cards in the deck.

Without saying anything Merlini ran through the face-down cards once more. This time none showed up reversed. Stevens grinned.

So did Merlini. “The four of clubs,” he said, “is face down like the others. But it’s not where you think.” He turned up the deck’s top card and showed it. “This is the joker. The card I pretended was the joker and discarded before you named your card is the four of clubs!”

Using the joker as a lever so as to avoid touching the card on the floor with his hands, he flipped it over face up. It was, as he had said, the four of clubs. “Never try to outguess a magician,” he advised. “If he performs much, he’s sure to have met the situation before, and he is consequently prepared for it.”

I’ve seen him do that trick at least a dozen times; it has never failed yet and the cards named are invariably different. I’ve tried to solve it using bribery and threats; but with no success.

“That’s an additional wrinkle of my own,” said Merlini. “Here’s another.”

For the next fifteen minutes, in spite of his manacled condition, he entertained the cops. There was only one interruption. Chief Hooper arrived while Merlini, his hands clasped to his forehead and his eyes tightly closed, was summoning up his powers of clairvoyance in an endeavor to discover what card it was Sergeant Robbins had, while out of the room, secretly selected and sealed in an envelope.

Hooper glowered at Merlini as he went on through to his office. “Watch him closely, boys,” he ordered, not knowing that the closeness of attention Merlini had been receiving made him perhaps the most carefully guarded prisoner of all time. As he went through the door, he added, “He’s the kind who’s likely to try suicide.”

“Cheerful man, your boss,” Merlini commented, coming out of his trance. “And you’re an ornery cuss too, Robbins. You didn’t put a playing card in the envelope as I asked. It’s a traffic ticket.”

A few minutes later a call came from within the office. “Stevens! Bring Harte in here.”

Stevens led me up to the lion’s cage, shoved me in, and closed the door firmly behind me. The Chief, with his heavy face and his shock of sandy hair, looked remarkably like a lion — and a hungry one. Had he been equipped with a tail, it would have been switching angrily. Captain Schafer was more like a Bengal tiger — ambushed and waiting. There wasn’t as much roar to him, but his teeth were just as sharp and when he pounced you knew something had happened.

O’Halloran was still there, and there was another man, a lean little fellow with spectacles who turned out to be the scientific fly in the Chief’s ointment, Lester Burns. He began the proceedings by taking my fingerprints. Then he started to get intimate. He asked for my name, address, place of birth, age, sex, color, height, weight, color of eyes, and for any identifying scars or marks.

I told him that I was a female, colored, and had a three-inch scar that hurt me when I sat down. “I had a scissors lock on an F.B.I. agent,” I said. “He bit me.”

This was not, I well knew, the proper approach for a wild-animal trainer to take, but I was annoyed. I wanted very much to be out there on that showground when what was going to happen next happened — and I could plainly see that my chances were not good.

Schafer said, “All right, Burns; that’ll do. Harte, Chief Hooper wants to test out a new rubber hose he has. If you keep that up, I’ll let him.”

“Sure,” I replied. “Go ahead. But when your names hit the news teletypes tomorrow morning, I’ll see to it that they’re spelled wrong. And that won’t be all.”

The way Hooper jumped from his chair, I thought it must have kicked him. The lion’s tail switched in earnest now. “Are you a goddamned reporter?”

“In my spare moments I do little pieces for the papers, if that’s what you mean, yes. I’ve got a Guild card and I usually get a by-line. What’s the matter? Have you been bitten too — by a newspaper?”

“Hell!” he said disgustedly and sat down again. His broad fingers nervously hefted the inkwell on his desk; a psychoanalyst would have diagnosed a repressed urge to throw it.

Schafer said, “That complicates matters some, but not as much as you’d like to think. I want some straight answers out of you — now!”

“Shoot,” I replied. “But skip the questions you asked this afternoon. The answers you got then were straight — all of them.”

The Captain didn’t act as if he had heard me. He started in right at the beginning and slowly and carefully worked his way down to date without skipping a thing. He asked all the questions he’d asked before and twice as many new ones. I gave him the same answers as before, though I had to say “No” and “I don’t know” and “Okay, I’m lying then” to some of the new ones — too many of them to suit him.

The Chief and O’Halloran listened to the inquisition without speaking. They both scowled a good bit, though not always at the same things. Burns, with a notebook at a desk in the corner, industriously transcribed our talk into rows of little pothooks. He glanced up now and then and fixed me with a bright, beady eye as if I were some new and especially virulent species of bacillus.

The Captain’s supply of questions finally gave out. He had obtained very little new information, considering the large amount of expended effort, and his manner was getting harsher by the minute.

“Stevens!” he rapped. “Send in the other one.”

As he entered, Merlini dropped his cards into his pocket and asked, “May I smoke?”

“Yes,” Schafer growled. “If it’ll make you more talkative. Take his prints, Burns.”

Merlini drew a cigarette from his breast pocket. O’Halloran started to toss him a paper of matches, but Merlini shook his head.

“No thanks.” He put the cigarette to his lips, inhaled and blew forth a cloud of smoke. The cigarette seemed to be already lighted!

Quickly then, while the Captain and the Chief were a bit off balance, he said, “I’d like to hear that story of yours, O’Halloran. I suspect it’s important.”

“No,” Schafer contradicted. “We’re going to hear yours — the revised version.”

Merlini let Burns take his fingers and roll them across the inked sheet of glass. “I haven’t made any revisions,” Merlini said flatly. “I don’t intend to.”

“Maybe not,” Schafer said, “but I think you will. Why did you show up on this circus in the first place?”

Merlini shrugged. “Because, as I’ve told you, Miss Pauline Hannum took a Headless Lady illusion from my shop under very odd circumstances. I wanted to know why.”

“And you found out—”

“I haven’t yet. Miss Hannum hasn’t been exactly cooperative. I’ve got a theory, but there’s too much plain and fancy guesswork built into it, so I won’t bother you with it yet.”

“Merlini”—Schafer’s voice suddenly had a knife-edge sharpness—“did you ever hear of Duke Miller?”

“Duke Miller?” Merlini gave a perceptible start. “Yes, of course. Maxie Weissman’s lawyer. But what—”

“Oh, you know Maxie? Rather well, maybe?”

Merlini gave him an intent look; then his eyes shifted toward O’Halloran. “I’m completely floored,” he said, in what sounded to me like genuine surprise. “What would the Racketeer King and his mouthpiece have to do with me or this case? Is this some of your story, O’Halloran?”

“You’re overdoing the surprised innocence,” said Schafer icily. “It won’t wash. What’s your real racket? A magician might be a handy guy to have around to juggle policy numbers or betting odds. You might as well tell us about it.”

Merlini made no reply. He stood very still, and I had the feeling as I watched him that inside his head a multitude of little wheels and curiously shaped gears were spinning rapidly in a busy whirl.

The Captain, catlike, extended his claws in a threatening gesture. “Sitting tight won’t do you any good,” he added. “Inspector Gavigan is coming up here himself with all the dope. We’ll have the goods on you as soon as he arrives. You might just as well give.”

Merlini looked interested. “You’ve talked to him?”

“I have. Long distance. Bridgeport, New York. He’s on his way now.”

“Oh, at Bridgeport, was he? Did he say anything about removing these shackles and letting Harte and myself go?”

“Yes, he did. And you had a nerve this afternoon to tell me he’d vouch for you! He said we were to throw you both into the best cell we had. He’s been hunting you ever since Sunday.”

If Burns had tried to express in his notebook the speechless looks on both Merlini’s and my faces, he’d have had to use a double row of exclamation marks and a colored pencil.

“Blast the man!” Merlini exploded, and followed that with several heated remarks about certain medieval customs that had to do with boiling oil, drawing and quartering, iron boots, the rack, and the thumbscrew.

The Chief, watching Merlini as a young doctor watches his first patient, issued a terse clinical bulletin.

“More homicidal tendencies!”