The Headless Lady

Chapter Eight Eavesdropper

Dr. Leonidas Tripp nodded in answer to Merlini’s query and replied in a dry, precise voice, “Why, yes. I believe I did see a young woman in blue tights. She came into the trailer while I was busy with my patient. She seemed somewhat excited and had apparently made an error. She excused herself and withdrew rather hurriedly.” He frowned. “Now that I think of it, it does seem odd that, being a performer, she shouldn’t know—”

“By what door did she enter, doctor? Do you remember?”

“Door?” Dr. Tripp asked. He turned and scowled at the trailer. “But the trailer only has one, doesn’t it? I don’t see—”

“Thank you very much.”

Before the doctor could turn again to face us, Merlini had gone, myself after him. Merlini headed for the big-top entrance. “We’re getting action for our money,” he said. “Not ten minutes ago I was afraid I had too many alibis. Two of them are already dust and ashes.”

“Alibis for the monkey business with the lights and for the stolen evidence?”

“Yes. Mac Wiley is in the clear on both counts; he was hobnobbing with Sheriff Weatherby. Keith, when the lights went out, was with us; but he left the trailer after we did and, from all you can tell me, could have wiped those prints from the windowpane and scooped up hat, photo, and envelope of glass particles on his way out. Joy—”

“Here, here,” I objected. “Keith’s the white-haired boy who put the match to those fireworks. He started this investigation.”

“Yes, I know,” Merlini said. He magically produced two dimes, bought two bags of peanuts, handed me one, and found seats on the lowest tier before the center ring. “But I seem to remember a case or two — one that we were mixed up in — where the murderer did just that.”

“Okay,” I admitted. “That’s your point. And Joy?”

“Joy Pattison,” Merlini said, thoughtfully cracking a peanut, “deposes that she was engaged in her curious hobby of hiding in a wardrobe cupboard. And further states that she tried to make the doctor think that she had entered the trailer from the outside. For all he knows that is what she did do. And consequently it’s not impossible that that is just what she did.”

“But why?” I asked.

“Why?” he said. “Why what?”

“Well, if she pulled the light plug and swiped the evidence, why should she go stick her nose in at Pauline’s trailer, pretend she’d made a mistake, and back out again? Sounds silly to me.”

“A magician, in performing a trick, often does the exact opposite of what he says he is doing. She may have done that. She said she entered from the wardrobe and tried to deceive the doctor into believing she had come from outside. But suppose that she did enter from outside, and was trying to make him believe that she came from the wardrobe. If she could do that, she’d have an alibi.”

I shook my head. “I don’t follow. If she wants it established that she was in the wardrobe, why, in God’s name, did she tell us she came from outside?”

“Because she hadn’t put it over. The doctor turned too quickly, before she could get the wardrobe door open, and she realized she hadn’t fooled him.”

“No, dammit,” I objected heatedly. “You’re assuming that her mind works like yours, like a trick calculating-machine. And besides, what if she had put it over? What if she did fool the doctor into thinking she had been hiding in the wardrobe? He’d ask Mac or Pauline: Who was that lady I seen hiding in the cupboard? How would she explain that?”

“Same explanation she gave us. She was hunting for the will. The charge would be attempted burglary, not attempted murder.”

I thought about that for a moment, but I still didn’t like it. “Why,” I asked, “are you trying so hard to pin this on Joy — and Keith. There are others we might ask for alibis. Lots of them. What about Irma King, for instance? It was her elephant hook. And Tex Mayo?”

“I’ve seen to that. I talked to Deep-Sea Ed, the elephant boss.[2] I met him when he was on the Big Show a few seasons back. The acts that were scheduled to follow Pauline’s perch act were: Tex Mayo’s announcement and then the bulls, in that order. Tex, Ed says, was on his horse at the entrance when the lights failed, waiting to go on. And Ed, with Irma King, was lining up the bulls to follow Tex.”

“You have been busy,” I admitted. “But there are plenty of other people on this lot. Performers, working-men, ticket takers, ushers, side-show freaks, pop-sellers, and half a tentful of audience. It would take Inspector Gavigan and half a dozen squads of detectives working all night to check them. And I hate to think how many wouldn’t have alibis.”

Merlini scowled at the menage horses, who were bowing and prancing through a musical ride. “That, Ross,” he said, “is exactly what is giving me gray hairs. You see, at the moment it looks as if every last one of those people do have alibis!”

He paused, and I swallowed hard trying to get the dizzy feeling out of my ears. “Say that again,” I demanded.

“You heard me. Alibis for everyone except Keith and Joy. If you’ll relax and think about it for as much as two minutes, you’ll see why. That’ll give you something to do while I meditate on a course of action. When you get the answer raise your hand, but don’t interrupt me… Boy! This way with that pop.”

Two minutes was an underestimate. When the chariot races thundered around the hippodrome track and brought the performance to a close, the three-ring circus under my hat was still in full swing. The answer to the alibi riddle, obvious as it turned out to be, still eluded me. As I got up to go I made a suggestion.

“That photo,” I said. “We could get another print, couldn’t we?”

“Sit down,” Merlini answered. “We’re staying for the concert. Yes, we can get another; but even if we have Keith wire for it tonight, the mail wouldn’t bring it in until late tomorrow at the earliest.”

“But the murderer would know we could get one eventually. What is it, a play for time?”

“Looks like it. And that might mean he has something else planned.”

The climax of the exhibition of rodeo stunts was supposed to be Tex Mayo’s trick and fancy shooting with a .22 target rifle. His marksmanship was fancy enough, but it could have been a bit more accurate. He fired from a variety of positions at glass balls and toy balloons hanging suspended from the underside of a six-foot circular backstop which was hanging in the top of the tent. He seemed sober enough at the moment, and I suspected that his reaction to Pauline’s fall was probably causing the misses. If, as Mac had told us, he was in love with her, I didn’t blame him for giving a rather ragged performance.

I noticed that Merlini watched the show with one eye on his wrist watch. And, as we finally got up to go with the rest of the audience, he commented, “If Tex worked the concert last night he seems to have an alibi for the Major’s death as well.”

Then he nodded toward the tent’s far end, where the side walls had been dropped and a crowd of working men had dismantled and cleared away most of the unreserved seat section. Some of them were now stacking the flats in a truck that had been driven in, and others began at once on the seats the crowd was leaving.

“And the top,” he said, “will be down in no time at all. If our friend Inspector Gavigan had a finger in this pie, he’d be purple in the face. I can hear him explode. A murder case where the murder room is taken down every night, neatly rolled up, tucked into trucks, carted eighty miles away, and set up again the next morning!”

“Yes,” I agreed glumly. “I’ve been thinking about that. And I can see rough water ahead. Instead of a nice tight little matter of half a dozen suspects cooped up in an isolated mansion out at the end of nowhere, we’ve got a hundred or more all in the open and moving rapidly across-country. Tomorrow morning the Major’s body will be somewhere in Indiana, the scene of his auto smash will be 172, and the scene of Pauline’s tumble 80 miles, behind us. Clues, if any, scattered halfway across the state! Are we going to have a picnic!”

“And, instead of Inspector Gavigan and his metropolitan homicide squad to help, there’ll be a brand-new set of hick cops every day, unless the state troopers deal themselves in.”

“The Rover Boys Behind the Eight Ball would do for a title,” I said. “And I suppose you’ve cooked up a plan of action that eliminates all possibility of sleep tonight.”

“You never know,” he grinned. “The next item on the program is a chat with the Headless Lady.”

“Sounds interesting. Does she talk with her fingers?”

On the side-show bally platform the two cooch dancers stood with the side-show manager and treated the crowd to a few sample wriggles as he announced, “A final and complete show for the price of one thin dime, ten cents!”

Inside, Merlini asked Gus, “What act was working in here when the big-top lights went out?”

Gus replied promptly, “The Headless Lady.”

Merlini sighed. “I might have expected that. Look, Gus, I want to meet her.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Gus said doubtfully. “She ain’t what you’d call sociable. I haven’t met her myself. She practically never leaves her trailer except to come in here for her act. Then she ducks right up into her booth from under the side wall, and she leaves the same way so the customers won’t see her with a head. You could waylay her there afterward, I suppose. She’s getting set in her booth now. She goes on after the mummy.”

The lecturer, as Gus said this, led the crowd toward a platform on which an upright coffin rested before a red velvet backdrop.

“The assassin of Abraham Lincoln, Ladies and Gentlemen, was not killed in Garrett’s barn in Virginia in 1865, as some of your history books have it. He escaped and he lived, under the name of John St. Helen, in Texas and Oklahoma until 1903, when he committed suicide by arsenic. In those days they also used arsenic in the embalming fluid. Arsenic is an excellent preservative — though I don’t advise you to mix your drinks with it.” (Laughter by the speaker.) “Thus it happens that we are able to present to you the mummified body of John Wilkes Booth in an excellent state of preservation.”

He opened the upper half of the coffin and exposed to view the age-darkened desiccated torso of a man. The skin of the chest and shoulders was leathery and wrinkled; on the face it stretched tightly across the cheekbones. The open eyes stared fishily. The curly hair and drooping mustache of the Booth pictures were still there, tough sparser. As far as visual evidence went, there was a resemblance; this might have been Booth, grown 37 years older than his pictures.

The lecturer indicated numerous legal documents that hung on the backdrop on either side of the coffin, and a tall stack of them that lay on a chair. “We have literally thousands of affidavits proving that this is the real genuine body of John Wilkes Booth. They are signed, as you can see, by college professors, historians, criminologists, and doctors. This X-ray photo shows you the fractured leg Booth sustained when he leaped to the stage of the Ford Theatre from the President’s box after his murderous deed. You can see the scar above his right eyebrow, the memento of a blow from the sword of another actor who slashed him while playing the duel scene from Richard the Third. This small piece of gold ring, which bears the initial B, was removed a few years ago, after X-rays had shown its presence, from the stomach of the mummy. On some occasion, fearing capture, Booth evidently swallowed the ring to avoid exposure of his identity. You will also notice …”

“What’s the lowdown on this, Merlini?” I asked. “Wax, I suppose?”

“You suppose wrong,” he replied, “though you’re warm. It’s papier mâchè. John Harkin, who used to be the tattooed man on the Hagenbeck show, owns and exhibits a mummy of which this is an imitation. He has a ton or two of real affidavits that say his mummy is actually Booth. Though, affidavits or not, it’s still pretty much a moot point. Izola Forester, in her book, This One Mad Act, says that she is Booth’s granddaughter and presents evidence to show that Booth lived for many years after his supposed death in the barn. The War Department, she says, has never admitted that this might be so because, among other things, they had already paid out the rewards for Booth’s capture and naturally disliked to admit that they’d bought spurious merchandise. Carl Sandburg, on the other hand, says that Booth died in the barn. So you can take your choice. At any rate, Harkin’s mummy is a first rate side-show attraction — enough so that a man in Chicago has been lately turning out papier mâchè Booths like this one for the trade. You’ll probably find a union label on his feet.”

According to Miss Forester, five alleged skulls of Booth have been on exhibition at various times, and there are records of some twenty men who have claimed to be Booth.

“I must admit,” said, “that the exhibits in this particular side show are intriguing as hell. The replica of a mummy of a famous murderer, a Headless Lady with what there is left of her as nice as anything I ever saw in the Scandals, and Hoodoo, a headhunter from the Amazon. That’s an idea. Perhaps, if we looked at his collection of heads, we might find the Headless Lady’s. I’m not so sure about that train accident story.”

“Don’t be too sure about the headhunter,” Merlini said. “He’s never been within miles of the Amazon. He hails from Harlem. And his right name, speaking of Booth, really is a strange coincidence. It’s Abraham Lincoln Jones, no less! I was introduced to him once at Coney Island.”

“Are you pulling my leg?” I asked. But Merlini had turned to follow the lecturer toward the curtains that concealed the Headless Lady.

We listened again to the lecturer’s talk; and then, just before he concluded, we ducked under the side wall and stationed ourselves where the Headless Lady would come out. “If she’ll tell me what I want to know,” said Merlini, “I’ll buy her a hat.”

He made that crack inadvertently, and when he realized its implications was so delighted with it that his attention was diverted, and we muffed our chance. We had miscalculated slightly. When the side wall lifted, and the Headless Lady (with head now), emerged, she was further away than we had expected. She moved altogether too quickly toward her trailer, which was parked less than 20 feet away.

Merlini and I started after her. Then Merlini stopped me, holding my arm. The shadowy figure of a man, who had been waiting unnoticed by the trailer door, joined her as she came up, and went into the trailer with her. We waited a moment, but no glow of light came from inside.

“Suspicious,” Merlini murmured.

We closed in, quietly circled the trailer, looking for an open window beneath which we could eavesdrop. They were, in spite of the warm, moist night, all tightly closed. And from within all that we could hear was an indistinguishably low murmur of voices.

“Looks as if we were foiled again, Ross,” Merlini said. “Apparently an assignation, and I doubt if a social call would be welcome at the moment. What do you think?”

“Barging in to catch people in flagrante delicto ain’t etiquette,” I said. “We’re not after divorce evidence. And it isn’t my forte anyway. I suggest we skip it. But I could bear to know who the man is.”

“So could I. But I’m not going to sit here till dawn to find out. Let’s go get some shut-eye.”

This suggestion, coming from Merlini, was unusual, but it was one that I wasn’t going to vote down. We got the car and drove into town. I needed cigarettes and stopped for them at a drugstore. Merlini went to the drug counter and made a mysterious purchase that I cross-questioned him about with no success.

“Just a hunch I have,” he said. “Wait until I’ve tested it.”

Waterboro’s only hotel, the Chesterfield, is an ancient and dusty firetrap with a desk clerk who fits the same description. He showed us to a room that was as home-like and comfortably inviting as a barn, and nearly as large. It was furnished with a brass bedstead, a tired rocking chair, and an early Sears Roebuck dresser.

We left a call for seven and prepared to turn in. When I trekked back from a safari to the bathroom at the far end of the hall, I found Merlini in vivid green pajamas pulling on a pair of red rubber gloves.

“So that’s what you bought,” I said. “I don’t care for the color scheme. The accessories should be in matching shades. If we can find some ice skates, you’ll be all set to pose for a portrait by Dali.”

Without replying, Merlini drew his gloved hand down across the side of his cheek and then, moving to the window, placed his fingertips against the pane.

I began to catch wise. “So,” I said. “The whorlless fingerprints. Is that it?”

Merlini squinted at the glass, moving his head about to get the right light. “Yes, I think it is.”

“But fingers leave prints because the pores exude an oily substance, and rubber gloves—”

“Can do the same, if they’ve touched the face, for instance. They pick up the oil and redeposit it, an offset fingerprint job, as it were. If the gloves have any cuts, or abrasions they’d show up, but the ones we saw in the Major’s trailer were, like these, quite without distinguishing marks. We only know that the person who cut the windowpane wore rubber gloves, a fact which may or may not be of help. We’ll file it, however. “Merlini stripped off the gloves and turned out the light.

As he got into bed, I asked, “Are you nursing a theory as to what did happen in the Major’s trailer? I figured that the burglar story you outlined was invented to trap Pauline into admitting she had gone to the trailer with her father. She could have done him in and moved the body; she has no alibi and enough motive. But she turns out to be victim number two. Where do we go from there?”

“Back to the burglar theory,” Merlini said. “There’s nothing wrong with it. The prowler could have come in before Pauline and her father. When they interrupted his search for whatever it was he was after, he took cover in the wardrobe in the Pattison manner and sat tight until Pauline had gone. (I found a bit of mud from someone’s shoe on the wardrobe floor.) Then the Major opened the door to get the slicker he came for, and—”

Suddenly Merlini’s feet hit the floor, and I heard him racing through the dark across the room. He twisted the key, jerked the door open, and peered out into the dimly lighted hall.

“What is it?” I asked, half out of bed myself and ready for anything.

Merlini closed the door quietly and answered in a lowered voice, “Someone with big ears. There’s a fairly wide streak of light creeps in under this door, and for the past minute or two I’d been wondering what made the shadow smack in the center of it. When the shadow walked off I thought I had better take a closer look. I should have started sooner. The hall is quite empty.”

He got back into bed. “I think that from now on we would do well to include Mr. Stuart Towne in our calculations.”

“Towne?” I asked. “How do you figure that?”

“His name’s on the registry book downstairs, for one thing. And I don’t understand why he was having me on when he pretended not to know any of that gun talk I gave him.”

“Um,” I mused. “The underworld backgrounds in his books are damned authentic. That why?”

“Yes, that and — you read his first one, The Man with the Purple Face, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Remember the blurb about the author on the back of the jacket?”

“Rental library,” I said. “I don’t think my copy had its jacket.”

“The publishers proudly pointed out,” said Merlini, “that his realistic underworld background derived from the fact that the name Towne is a pseudonym, and that the author is an ex-bank-robber who turned writer during a stretch in Sing Sing. He has also authored several technical and very informative magazine articles bearing such titles as ‘The Gentle Art of Safe Cracking,’ ‘Con-Men I Have Known,’ ‘Hoboes and Their Habits,’ and the like.”

“Well, well,” I said. “Now I lay me down to sleep with a mind washed free of care and worry. Mr. Stuart Towne, the Emily Post of the underworld, does articles on the technique and proper use of rubber gloves and glass cutters. And our mysterious burglar—”