The Headless Lady

1

Millie-Christine (1851–1912) were really two Negro girls, Siamese twins of the ordinary Chang and Eng type, whose manager always spoke of them and often advertised them as one girl with two heads. They were given musical instruction, one girl singing alto, the other soprano; and their vocal duets and performances upon musical instruments were, from all accounts, quite creditable. They also appeared in side shows with Adam Forepaugh’s, Coup’s, Batcheller & Doris’, Barnum’s, and other circuses, as well as making a European tour.

The closest nature has ever come to a freak having two heads on one body, which lived and was on exhibition, was the Locano prodigy, Johann and Jacob Tocci, born in 1881, in Turin, Italy. They had one body, one pair of legs; but above the sixth rib the body became double with two heads and two pairs of arms.

2

His nickname derives from the fact that he once owned a deep-sea show, an exhibition of marine monsters. Ed is a man of various talents and wide experience. He also once specialized in window-sleeps, a stock type of exhibition in which the performer goes into a trance in a local store window and apparently remains there motionless for a week or two without food or water.

3

Merlini later furnished this translation: “I was running a three-card-monte game at the races in Saratoga. There was a wise guy in the crowd who knew how the swindle was worked. He had a fistful of paper money. He thought he could beat me at my own game, so I let him see me straighten out the bent corner.” (In monte one of the operator’s assistants in the crowd bends the corner of the winning card slightly so that the sucker thinks he can spot it and is betting on a sure thing. Knowing how the swindle usually worked, the sucker would expect the operator to put it in another card.) “Then I double-crossed him by replacing the bend in the same card! He was all ready to bet when Paper-Collar Ed, who was retrieving the money that other members of the mob had been allowed to win as a come-on, wasn’t successful in concealing the fact that he was passing the money back to me. Another sucker saw it, sneaked out, and called the cops. The sucker had a pull, and the police were forced to take action. Ed and I were arrested before I could stop the game and clear out, and then the protection money that had been paid out to the authorities didn’t do its work. The magistrate was about to give us a ninety-day sentence when … ”

4

Melted paraffin is dropped over the fingers and hand until a thick coating is obtained. This is slightly reinforced by a thin layer of cotton, which in turn is covered with hot wax. After the paraffin has set, it is cut around the sides and removed in two halves. The resulting negative cast or mold is then tested for the presence of nitrates.

5

Forty-some-odd: A gun, so called by con-men who seldom, if ever, use them and pretend, as the phrase indicates, not to know even the proper caliber designation. The Farmer, Merlini tells me, gives himself away on several occasions by using rather more big-con argot than a short-con grifter should.

6

The mold pictured in Chapter Sixteen, being concave and negative, is plainly that of the back of a rubber-gloved left hand. Noting this, Merlini remembered which suspect had an idle right hand and was thus left-handed.

7

O’Halloran was probably aware of the fact that his Metzger .32 not only had an individual ivory grip, but also, as I discovered later, could be easily matched with any bullet fired from it, since it is the only left leed (rifling twist) pistol made that has but five lands (raised surfaces between the spiral grooves). All other pistols known so far to have left leed have six lands.

8

O’Halloran, signaling Merlini with his right hand, is therefore holding his cigarette in his left. I accused Merlini later of having taken a terrific chance when he let O’Halloran fire at the mummy. The man might have taken pot-shots at the rest of us. Merlini’s answer was that, on the ride back from the jail when he had been in possession of O’Halloran’s gun, he had removed all but one bullet.

9

O’Halloran, once on the force, had been a member of the pickpocket squad. Most dicks or cops, however, are not familiar with the argot since criminals seldom choose them to confide in. You can test the truth of this by trying Farmer’s argot anecdote from Chapter Fourteen on your official friends.

10

Schafer’s suspicion proved correct. The head, containing a bullet that matched O’Halloran’s gun, was found beneath the hood. Gavigan’s guess that the bullet might possibly have ricocheted inside the skull also proved good. The bullet, entering the right temple at an oblique angle, had made a nearly complete semi-circle inside the skull over the vertex, producing a gutter on the surface of the cerebral hemispheres, tearing the dura, and perforating the longitudinal sinus. The bullet was found in the petrous portion of the left temporal bone with its base upward.