The Great Merlini (Clayton Rawson)

Chap 9: Merlini and the Sound Effects Murder

THE SECOND-FLOOR APARTMENT IN THE OLD BROWNSTONE FRONT on East 68th Street consisted of a living room, bedroom, kitchenette, bathroom, and study. Entering this last room, The Great Merlini found an imposing array of instruments for capturing and reproducing sound—a complication of hifi equipment, microphones, amplifiers, and tape recorders. Shelves that covered one wall were filled to overflowing with neatly catalogued records and rolls of tape. The room also held one weary and worried F.B.I. agent, a tired and disgruntled Inspector Gavigan, and, on the gray-green carpet before the divan, a large irregular dark stain.

"At two in the morning." Merlini said, "I'm not too alert. But on the phone you seemed to be saying something highly uncomplimentary about— an invisible man."

"It was an understatement," Gavigan growled. "Did you, by any chance, happen to know Jerome Kirk?"

The magician nodded. "Sound Services, Incorporated. A complete line of offstage noises, bird calls, train whistles, tribal drums, thunderstorms— you name it, we have it. He was also the man who invented the phantom woodchopper."

F.B.I.-man Fred Ryan said, "Phantom what?"

"Woodchopper. The apartment owners in this block got together a few years back and had a dozen trees planted along the curb to give the street a Parisian touch. Real proud of them they were. At three A.M. one morning, with neat theatrical timing, Kirk aimed a loudspeaker out through his window and let the neighbors listen to a hi-fi recording of a lumberjack in the Maine woods. It was a nice clear recording—you could even hear the axe bite into the wood and the chips fly. After a few minutes of this busy and efficient chopping heads were poked out of every window on the block. And then, loud and clear, came the clarion cry 'Timber!'—followed by the crack of splitting wood and the long slow crash as a giant of the forest toppled and fell with a final earth-shaking boom."

"I wonder," Gavigan said, still glum, "how he managed to escape shooting until now. When Kirk didn't show up this afternoon to supervise the sound effects on an NBC telecast they sent a man after him." The inspector looked toward the bloodstain. "He was lying there with four bullet holes in him."

"Four?" Merlini asked. "That seems a lot. Noisy, too."

"Not here. This room is soundproofed. At exactly 2:44 P.M. someone stepped in through the door from the living room and started blasting. Kirk took the first shots standing up."

Gavigan pointed to the liquor cabinet at the end of the divan. The jagged lower half of a bottle of whiskey stood there with several highball glasses. Another glass, curiously intact, lay amid the splintered fragments of a soda bottle that had fallen and smashed on the stone hearth of the fireplace.

"One shot, a miss, plowed through the glassware. One got him in the arm, and the third hit him dead center in the chest. The last two entered his back. They were fired after he had fallen face down on the floor. Somebody wasn't taking any chances."

"Somebody," Ryan added disgustedly, "who never entered this building, never left it, and who isn't here now. Either that or he's invisible. And I can't write up a report with anything like that in it." The F.B.I.-man got to his feet and faced Merlini belligerently. "This building has three floors. The super and his wife, who occupy the ground-floor apartment, spent the day in Jersey visiting relatives. The third floor is occupied by a sexy dish who sings in a Village night club under the name of June

Barlow."

"She's a refugee," Gavigan added, "from a church choir in East Orange where she was billed as Gertrude Schwartzkopf. I talked to the minister and he speaks highly of her. I didn't tell him we found a pair of Kirk's pajamas in her bedroom closet."

"On those grounds," Ryan said, "Gavigan would have her downtown now sweating out a third degree—except for one thing. Even if she sometimes sounds like four people she can't be in two places at the same time."

"Sounds like four people?" Merlini asked.

Ryan nodded. "She admits being here in this room with Kirk from noon until nearly two. She says they were recording—making one of those Les and Mary Ford multiple jobs. She puts a song on tape. Then it's played back, she harmonizes with it, and a second recorder gets the combination. Repeat that routine twice more and you've got a quartet—all the voices hers. Could be that's what she and Kirk were doing—there are a couple of tapes like that here. But what we do know for sure is that she was seen getting into a cab out front a few minutes after two o'clock. She says she went to a Carnegie Hall studio for a vocal lesson. Her voice teacher and an elevator operator both agree she got there at 2:20 and was in the Carnegie Hall studio for over an hour."

"Kirk," Gavigan put in, "was shot to death nearly half an hour after she got there. And this building, from the time she left it until the body was found, was empty—except for Kirk and three F.B.I. men."

"One," Ryan continued unhappily, "was on the roof. Two were in the front room, ground floor. We've had them there for forty-eight hours. One of the mob who shot up that bank in Queens and killed two tellers last week has been holed up across the street—Joe the Chopper. We were waiting for his two pals to show so we could take them all at once. If Kirk was one of them it's a new wrinkle for Joe—he's always worked with professionals only. On the other hand, it looks like his kind of a killing. He's triggerhappy and, like most crooks, a lousy shot. But he's also six-foot-three and weighs over two hundred pounds—about as invisible as a circus elephant."

"Joe," Merlini asked, "was across the street all afternoon?"

"He hasn't shown his ugly face since he checked in there two days ago. And he was there early this evening when we went in with tear gas and brought him out."

"And he couldn't have shot Kirk from across the street—this room has no windows. Is there a back entrance?"

"One door, two windows," Gavigan said, "all locked on the inside.

And anybody coming that way would have stumbled smack over the two F.B.I.-men in the front room trying to get through to the hall. We've also searched the joint three times—every last broom closet."

"And I take it the two F.B.I.-men had a good view of the front door of this building as well as the one across the street?"

"It was right under their noses," Ryan said. "No one came near it going either way."

"And of course the two F.B.I.-men alibi each other," Merlini said slowly. "Which means that the only person who could have killed Kirk is the F.B.I.-man who had access to the trapdoor on the roof."

Ryan turned and glared at Gavigan. "And you said this magician might be able to help!"

For the first time the Inspector almost smiled. "Merlini," he said, "I have a hunch Ryan won't buy that. It happens that he took the afternoon shift on the roof himself."

"The report he is going to have to write is a problem, isn't it? Mr. J. Edgar Hoover isn't going to like any part of it."

"And the Commissioner," Gavigan added, "is already breathing fire. If the only answer you can come up with is Ryan himself—"

"A policeman's lot is not a happy one," Merlini said. "But what about the magician who is routed out of bed at 2 A.M. and asked to conjure an invisible man out of thin air?" He scowled at the dark stain on the carpet. "I doubt if it will help much, but there's one thing I'm curious about. You said that Kirk was shot at exactly 2:44 P.M. I know very well the Medical Examiner didn't take a look at the body and come up with a time of death as precise as that. How do you know..."

"We didn't have to ask him," Gavigan replied. He turned to a console radio and the tape recorder on its top. "When we got here both these machines were running. At two o'clock Kirk tuned in WQXY and began taping a symphonic concert. The tape is good for ninety minutes—we know because we played it back. After the concert there was a station break at three o'clock with a time announcement, then news, weather, an interview program, and some other stuff that Kirk never heard. Now listen."

The Inspector turned a switch. The plastic reels on the recorder slowly revolved and orchestral music filled the room. "Just sixteen minutes before that three o'clock time announcement—at exactly 2:44—we get this. Listen."

The symphony was Haydn's, but suddenly a quiet passage exploded as though Honegger or Copland had tampered with the score. A shot blasted from the speaker. Softly, serenely the strings continued for a bar or two.

Another shot cracked out and the music flowed imperturbably on. A third time the invisible gun spoke and, after a longer interval, twice more. A distant horn piped faintly and the brasses slowly began to come to life. Then came another sound—as unexpected as the shots but with a different quality, distinctly recognizable—the sudden, forceful slam of a door.

A moment later Gavigan turned the switch and the music stopped in mid bar.

"We got the station program director up here," he said, "with the tape they made for their file. It's exactly the same, except no shots. This tape was made this afternoon and Kirk was shot by someone who came quietly through that door at exactly 2:44, started shooting before Kirk could open his mouth, fired five times, then left, slammed the door—and vanished. Or walked out past the F.B.I.-men without being seen. What I want to know..."

"Wait, Merlini broke in. "Not so many conclusions all at once. I'm beginning to suspect your invisible man may be a close relative of the phantom woodchopper." The magician crossed to the tape recorder and looked down at it. "Suppose," he said slowly, "I shot Kirk before the radio program began. Then I put a clean tape on the recorder—clean except for an inch or two halfway through on which I have already recorded five shots and the slamming of a door. I turn on the radio and recorder and ease out, being careful not to slam the door on my exit. Then I establish my alibi—by keeping an appointment for a voice lesson at Carnegie Hall." There was complete silence.

Then Gavigan spoke. "She didn't dare record only one shot in advance —she knew she might miss. And that's why she put two slugs into Kirk's back after he'd fallen—the number of shots had to match what was already on the tape."

Ryan shook his head. "A good try, gentlemen, but it won't work. As they record, these machines automatically erase anything already on the tape."

"Do we know this one does that?" Merlini asked. "Kirk was an engineer and I never met one yet who could resist revamping a piece of equipment. For that matter, a singer like June Barlow could know enough about tape recorders to—"

"It'll take about two minutes to find out," Gavigan said, "We simply put on a clean tape, record something, rewind, and record again."

Ryan was already doing it. He spoke briefly, "Testing, one, two, testing, one, two." Then he rewound the tape, whistled a few bars of Yankee Doodle Dandy, rewound once more, and played it back. Both recordings were there, one superimposed on the other.

"Well," Gavigan said. "That was a lucky guess that paid off."

"Lucky guess, my antenna!" Merlini objected. "As soon as I heard the shots on that tape I knew they hadn't been recorded at the same time Kirk was killed."

"I don't believe it," Gavigan said. "I've heard that tape half a dozen times. There's nothing on it that tells you that."

Merlini grinned. "That's right. Nothing. Something that should be there—isn't."

Merlini turned away from the tape recorder and crossed the room. "If June Barlow had been a better marksman she might have managed a perfect crime. But she taped five shots in advance because, as you said, Inspector, she couldn't know how many she would need. Under the circumstances I doubt if she even heard the commotion caused by the shot that missed

Kirk."

Merlini stood by the fireplace looking down at the broken bottle on the liquor cabinet and the shattered pieces of the bottle that had smashed on the stone hearth. "Even a magician," he said, "would have trouble breaking all that glassware without making a sound. That's what was missing on the tape—the sound of breaking glass."