The Great Merlini (Clayton Rawson)

Chap 10: Miracles-All in the Day's Work

LIEUTENANT DORAN OF THE HOMICIDE SQUAD NEARLY COLLIDED head-on with The Great Merlini in the doorway of the latter's place of business. Doran was on his way in; the proprietor of the Magic Shop—slogan: Nothing Is Impossible—was on his way out.

"Where," Doran asked, "are you going?"

"Jones Beach," the magician answered. "I've got to show a man how to have sixty beautiful girls dive into a swimming pool and then vanish— underwater."

"I'm glad it's nothing important," Doran said, not believing a word of it. "You're coming with me."

The Great Merlini shook his head. "If you knew the man I'm talking about, you wouldn't say that so calmly. He's the producer of the Marine Theater water show. He is also a boy genius as temperamental as any six Grand Opera stars, and he has already blown his top twice this morning because I'm late."

"A boy genius? And he thinks you can make sixty girls disappear underwater?"

Merlini grinned. "Nothing hard about that. What he doesn't know, being a boy genius, is that this underwater mass vanishing act was done three times daily at the old Hippodrome fifty years ago. The chorus line walked four abreast down a flight of steps into the big tank and never came up. All I have to do is give him the same gimmick."

"You can give it to him later. My orders are to bring you over to the Chancellor Building fast. Inspector Gavigan, who can blow his top higher than any six boy geniuses, has a job for you that nobody ever did at the Hippodrome. What we got is a murderer who just vanished into thin air— sixty-four stories up!"

The theatrical genius had to wait; Doran's next statement fixed that. "The murder was committed right under the Inspector's nose. He was there when it happened. So now we got the precinct Captain who's carrying the case firing questions at Gavigan—questions he can't answer. Neither of them are enjoying this. And when the Commissioner gets a load of it—and the newspapers ..." Doran choked. The prospect was too devastating.

Ten minutes later Doran and Merlini entered the sixty-fourth floor offices of the Hi-Fly Rod & Reel Company. The reception room was like a thousand others except that its decor was extremely fishy. On one wall hung a stuffed, mounted, five-foot marlin. This somewhat incredible specimen of the taxidermist's art seemed to have just leaped from the briny deep and now, back arched, mouth open hungrily, and with a mean look in its glassy eyes, was diving with murderous intent down at Gavigan who stood just below. Gavigan's eyes also had a glassy look.

The Inspector faced the reception desk and glared at the young lady who sat there. Rosabelle Polchek, who usually answered to "Rosie" and who was known among the salesmen as "The Dish," wore a tight blue sweater, a platinum-blonde rinse, and a harassed look. Her mascara was smudged and her nose was red.

"I know," Gavigan was saying, "that you want to go home. I know you've had a shock. I know you've answered these questions half a dozen times. But we're going through it again—and again—until it begins to make sense. You opened this office at nine o'clock. Now take it from there."

Rosie blew her nose into a damp handkerchief. "I opened the mail and put the letters Mr. Courtney would want on his desk. I was changing my typewriter ribbon when he came in."

"Time?"

"Nine thirty. And I knew right away that today was going to be a tough one. Instead of 'Hi, Rosie, how's The Dish this morning?' I get 'Phone Joe McCall and tell him to get the hell over here fast. Toledo says that last shipment of Winchester reel casings was defective.' "

A dapper young man who sat nervously on a chair in the corner angrily squashed a cigarette in the ashtray beside him, burned his thumb, swore, and said, "Winchester Fishing Supply doesn't manufacture defective—"

Gavigan snapped at him. "Quiet! I'll get to you. Go on, Miss Polchek."

Rosie dabbed at her nose again. "Harry—I mean Mr. Courtney—went into his office and I called Joe. Then a minute or so later this Humphrey Bogart type character with the dead-pan face and the Panama hat breezed in. Said his name was J. J. Hartman and that Mr. Courtney was expecting him. So I flashed the boss and he said send him in, which I did."

"Now," Gavigan said slowly, "let's get this absolutely straight. He walked through the door there next to your desk and straight into

Courtney's office? And you haven't seen him since?"

Rosie nodded. "That's right."

"And you didn't make a trip to the Ladies Room or go out for a coffee break?"

"I was right here every second. Besides, there wasn't time. Two minutes later you walked in."

Gavigan turned to Merlini. "This morning I started on the first vacation I've had in three years. And I had to make the mistake of stopping in here on my way to Grand Central and a train for the Maine woods. Courtney and I get together now and then to talk fish and I've got a nice collection of flies he helped me collect which I never get a chance to use. I should have known better. All a police inspector has to do is get set for a vacation and there's a murder, a gang war, a police department shakeup, or somebody throws a bomb at the mayor." He turned back to Rosie. "Go on."

"Then Joe came in."

"No. Don't skip. I want everything—every little detail. I asked for Courtney and then what?"

"I—I said he had someone with him and asked you to wait. You said you had a train to catch, so—" Rosie blew her nose again.

"So you rang Courtney."

Rosie nodded. "He said he'd be free in a few minutes, and you sat down and—and you know everything else that happened. You were right here all the time."

Gavigan scowled at her. "If I knew everything that happened I wouldn't be here now." He turned to Merlini. "For the next ten minutes I read a copy of Field and Stream, and Rosie did a pruning and filing job on her nails. Then McCall here blew in and tried to find out what Courtney was all steamed up about. Rosie said she didn't know, that Courtney was really burned, and advised McCall to sit tight and wait, which he didn't want to do."

"I was in a hurry," McCall said. "I had another appointment at ten—an important one. But I also had to find out what was eating Courtney. I didn't want to lose the account."

"So he sat down," Gavigan continued, "and fidgeted. Rosie finished doing her nails and then phoned a girl friend and they had an important business conference about a movie on last night's Late Show starring Bathsheba and Victor Mature. And just as this started, Courtney also got a phone call. We heard his phone ring twice, then cut off in the middle of the third ring as he picked it up."

Merlini eyed the PBX unit on Rosie's desk. "She took the call and put it through to her boss?"

"No. His call didn't come through the board. Courtney has two phones, the second is an outside line and the call came in on that. Then, after about the second reel of Rosie's movie synopsis, I began to suspect that maybe she had also stayed up to see Richard Barthelmess or Rudolph Valentino on the Late Late Show and I might miss my train. So I stood up and looked impatient.

"Rosie got the idea and cut her call short. I told her I had to go and would see Courtney later. I started for the door. She stopped me. 'I nearly forgot,' she said, and she fished in a desk drawer and came up with a little beauty of a spinning reel."

Gavigan took it from his jacket pocket. "Complete with a hundred yards of a new type nylon line. She said Courtney had asked her to give it to me if I stopped in when she was out. I thanked her and started for the door again..."

"And," McCall put in, "I told her I couldn't wait any longer and I started to go out, too."

"And I," Rosie added, "know Mr. Courtney isn't going to like it if Joe leaves, so I ask him to wait and I ring the boss." She flicked a key on her board and a phone rang beyond the closed office door. "He didn't answer, so I tried again." This time Rosie held the key down longer and the phone in the next office rang insistently.

"Still no answer," Gavigan said. "And that's where I made my mistake. I'd be halfway to Boston by now if I had kept going, but I didn't. I came back. And Rosie, who also figured something might be wrong, got up, opened Courtney's door—and screamed."

The Inspector walked to the door, opened it, and told a fingerprint man, a police photographer, and two detectives to wait outside. Then, as Merlini joined him, he said:

"This is what she saw."

There was a window in the opposite wall beyond which lay a magnificent although dizzying view of Manhattan; beside the window was a desk whose top proclaimed that Rosie's boss had been the executive type. It held a desk blotter, the morning mail stacked neatly in its center, six sharpened pencils, an onyx pen set, a framed photograph of Mrs. Courtney, and two telephones.

The businesslike efficiency of the desk top was marred by the fact that Courtney, a fortyish, rather handsome man, still seated in his chair, had fallen forward. His left hand still grasped one of the telephone receivers and his face rested on the blotter. The onyx handle of a paper knife that matched his pen set projected squarely from the center of his back.

Gavigan pointed to the phone in Courtney's hand. "I came in here about five minutes after we heard him answer that phone. During that time, while Courtney was still talking, Panama Harry picked up the knife and let him have it."

"Panama Harry?" Merlini asked.

"Didn't that description Rosie gave mean anything to you?"

Doran asked a bit incredulously. "Don't you read the newspapers?"

"I don't always read the crime news," Merlini admitted. "Too often it's not news—just the same old story with a different cast of characters."

"I could do with a lot less of the kind of news Panama Harry makes," Doran growled. "He claims no prison can hold him and he got out of his third one last week. He was one of three cons who engineered a break out of Sing Sing. He's been on all the front pages—with pictures."

"And with every cop in six states looking for him," Gavigan added, "he has the nerve to walk in here and knife Courtney. Either he just doesn't give a damn or he's stir crazy."

"Or," Merlini added, "since he seems to have learned how to vanish as abruptly and completely as a punctured soap bubble he knows he holds all the Aces." The magician pointed with his toe at a large lead fishing sinker that lay on the carpet near the desk. "What's this doing here?"

"Courtney used it as a paperweight," Gavigan said. "If he saw Panama Harry pull a knife he may have grabbed for it in self-defense and knocked it off the desk to the floor. But I doubt it. My guess is Courtney was stabbed from behind while he was talking on the phone. And Doc Peabody says he died almost instantly."

Merlini walked to a leather-covered sofa along one wall and looked down at the Panama hat that lay there. "Panama's prints are on file, of course. Find any on this that match?"

"Nothing useful. Handling a hat is an automatic action that is almost always done the same way, so all we got was a hopeless mess of superimposed prints."

Merlini surveyed the rest of the room. "Smooth plaster walls and ceiling. Nothing to hide a secret exit. Have you had the carpet up?"

"Would the Chancellor Building architects have put trapdoors in their plans?"

"I doubt it, but Courtney could have made alterations. Did you look?"

"We looked. And..."

"...didn't find one," Merlini finished. "If you had, you wouldn't have sent Doran to get me." Merlini crossed to the window. "This was unlocked?"

Doran answered. "Who locks a window this far off the ground? And what difference does it make anyway?"

Merlini raised the window, put his head out, and looked down—a sheer drop of sixty-four stories, and no ledges.

Behind him Gavigan said, "Three witnesses, including myself, will testify that no one left this room by the door—the only door. Unless you can come up with something else, it has to be the window."

Merlini pulled his head in. "Then we'll have to come up with something else. I doubt if he had a helicopter waiting outside. This time of day it would be a trifle conspicuous." He eyed the room frowning. "Panama Harry is in the wrong business. As a vanishing man I could get him nightclub bookings for two years solid." He crossed to the desk. "Why are you so sure it was this outside phone, the one Courtney is holding, that you heard ring, Gavigan? How do you know it wasn't the other? Rosie could have rung that from the board."

"Not without three hands, she couldn't. When Courtney's phone rang, she had just started on her nonstop movie synopsis. She had her phone in her left hand and was still waving her right hand to dry the nail polish. After the second ring she swiveled around in her chair looking toward Courtney's door as if wondering why he didn't answer. Her elbow knocked the bottle of nail polish off onto the floor, and she was picking that up when the phone rang again and then cut off as Courtney answered. Then, still talking, she put her polishing equipment away in a desk drawer that contains a wide assortment of bottled beauty preparations, face powder, facial tissues, bobby pins, lipstick, and a couple of paper clips that must have got there by mistake. Does that answer your question?"

Merlini, who had found a salesman's sample case on a filing cabinet in one corner of the room, had opened it and was contemplating an assortment of Hi-Fly products. "It does," he said, crossing to the desk and looking down at Courtney's body. "The hand really isn't quicker than the eye. Magicians have been telling audiences that for years to mislead them—to hide the fact that most of their miracles are the result of some form of psychological doublecross. The spectators are led to believe that something had happened which, in fact, did not happen. We seem to be faced with a vanishing man. Suppose we assume there is no such animal and work backwards looking for the twist in logic that misled us."

"He couldn't have left by the window," Gavigan said. "He didn't go out by the door. And he's not here. What's twisted about that?"

"Maybe nothing. But when you add those facts up and conclude that Panama Harry vanished like so much smoke, perhaps your arithmetic is wrong. What if that set of facts has two possible answers and you don't see one because the other is so obvious and so startling?" "You've got another answer?" Doran asked.

"I can think of one," Merlini replied. "The facts you've just listed could also mean that Panama Harry was never in this room at all. What have we got that says he was? The hat? How do we know it isn't Courtney's, or one that some absent-minded visitor left behind? We also have Rosie's testimony. But which is more likely—a vanishing man or a lying witness?"

The Inspector scowled. "We also have Courtney. He's not lying. He's not just pretending to be dead. Somebody here in this room killed him. He didn't do it himself—not with that knife where it is in the middle of his back."

"Oh, it's murder all right," Merlini admitted. "But what if the murderer vanished by leaving earlier—before there were any witnesses to see him go?"

Gavigan thought about that a moment, then said, "You mean that

Courtney was already dead when I got here?"

"Why not? At least that's easier to believe than the vanishing man."

"Is it?" Gavigan asked skeptically. "It leaves you with something just as impossible." He pointed to the phone receiver in Courtney's dead hand.

"Now you've got a dead man answering a phone."

Merlini grinned. "I know. But that may be an easier miracle to perform than the other. Suppose he should do it again?"

Under his breath Doran groaned. "Now we got a zombie!"

"Do you mean," Gavigan wanted to know, "that you can make Courtney answer a phone now—two hours after Doc Peabody declared him dead?"

"I can try." Merlini pointed to the phone. "Lieutenant, put that receiver back on the cradle and let's see what happens on an incoming call."

Doran simply looked at him. Then the Inspector said, "Okay, Doran,

do it."

The Lieutenant moved, rather like a zombie himself. He loosened the dead fingers, removed the phone, and placed it on the cradle. "If you think Doc Peabody is talking through his hat and that Courtney isn't..."

"Oh, he's dead all right," Merlini said, "Let's go outside."

He turned and went into a reception room. Gavigan scowled, hesitated, then followed. So did Doran.

Across the room the fingerprint man had laid out his equipment on the magazine table and was now taking Rosie's prints. McCall watched glumly.

Merlini said, "Let's go back a bit. Courtney, still alive, is in his office when the murderer goes in. I'll play the part of the murderer. And you—" he looked at Gavigan and Doran—"both of you stay here and keep your eyes and ears open." Then quickly, before they could object, he moved past them, back into Courtney's office, and closed the door.

Doran took a step forward, but the Inspector stopped him. "He's got something up his sleeve. Or he thinks he has. I want to see it."

"I'm not so sure I do," Doran muttered. "Not if he does what he says he's going to do."

The door opened again a moment later. "I have," Merlini announced, "just killed Courtney. And I leave the office by this door. Unseen because certain witnesses aren't here."

Merlini sat in Rosie's chair behind the receptionist's desk. "Now we skip a bit and I take over Rosie's part." He opened a desk drawer, closed it, opened another, and brought forth a bottle of nail polish which he placed on the desk. "I have just finished doing my nails." He turned to the switchboard and picked up the phone.

"Rosie then phoned a girl friend." He began to dial. "I'll phone my boy-genius producer and tell him I've been detained by a vanishing man. That'll really make him blow his top." Then, into the phone, he said, "Merlini here. Is your boss in? I want to..."

He stopped short and looked up at Gavigan who was staring at the closed door to Courtney's office. From beyond it came the sound of a telephone ringing.

Merlini swiveled in his chair. His elbow struck the nail polish bottle, knocking it to the floor.

Inspector Gavigan started forward.

The phone rang a third time—then stopped in mid-ring.

Silence.

"Dead man," Merlini said slowly, "do sometimes answer—"

Gavigan jerked the door open. Close behind him Doran stared over his shoulder.

Courtney's body, as far as they could tell, had not moved. But the receiver was now back in Courtney's hand!

Doran turned to Merlini. "Okay," he said, "let's have it. How did you get that receiver off the cradle and into his hand?"

"He put it there," Gavigan said slowly, "while he was in there for a moment with the door closed. And when he pretended to dial the boy genius he actually dialed Courtney's outside phone."

"But," Doran objected, "Courtney's phone wouldn't ring with the receiver off the cradle."

Merlini got to his feet and went through the door. "It would," he said, "if there was something else on the cradle." The lead sinker now lay on the edge of the desk. Merlini placed it on the phone cradle. "It will ring now."

"And it would go on ringing as long as the sinker is there or until you hung up." Doran looked at the switchboard phone lying on Rosie's desk where Merlini had left it. "But you didn't hang up."

"There is," Merlini said, "more than one way to skin a cat." He returned to the switchboard, clicked the hook, and dialed again. And again Courtney's phone rang.

"Hocus pocus," Merlini said, "Abracadabra!"

The phone rang a second time, then started to ring once more. What happened in the middle of the ring was almost as startling as though the dead man had moved. The lead sinker jerked suddenly with a life of its own, jumped off the phone, rolled to the edge of the desk, and fell to the floor.

The ringing stopped.

For a moment Gavigan and Doran simply stared. Then Gavigan moved, striding across the room. He picked up the weight and examined it. This got him nowhere. It was just a lead weight.

"Okay," he said. "I give up. How did you manage that—from the other room?"

"It may," Merlini said, "be just about the oldest trick in magic. Far older than the girls vanishing underwater at the Hippodrome. It probably dates from the days of the witch doctor and medicine man. And the modern form of the gimmick is one the Hi-Fly Road and Reel Company sells."

Merlini took the sinker from Gavigan, then knelt and picked up something from the floor that was nearly invisible against the beige carpet.

"Fishline," he said. He wrapped its end several times around the sinker and placed the sinker back on the phone cradle. "It crosses the room and goes out under the door to a reel in Rosie's bottom desk drawer. She knocked the nail polish bottle off her desk purposely—an excuse to reach down behind the desk, yank the line, and dislodge the sinker."

Merlini gave the line a jerk; the weight fell from the phone cradle. "Not being tied, it came loose, and under cover of putting away the rest of her polishing equipment, she reeled it in."

"Okay," Gavigan said, that wraps it up. After she killed Courtney, she set the fishline-sinker gimmick, then phoned McCall and got him over here as a witness to testify that she was sitting innocently at her desk when Courtney was killed."

"And your arrival," Merlini added, "gave her an unexpected and even better witness to her innocence."

Doran scowled thoughtfully at Merlini. "When you pretended just now to call your boy genius you actually dialed Courtney's outside phone instead. And Rosie's phone call to her girl friend was also phony."

Merlini nodded. "Just the sort of telephone trickery that a switchboard operator would dream up. She made one phone call appear to be two. Her outgoing call to a phantom girl friend and Courtney's incoming call from a mysterious stranger were one and the same. Her description of the movie she had seen was a report to a dead man."

"And then," Doran added, "Rosie the Dish dished up Panama Harry as a red herring. Since he's on the lam he's not likely to come forward and deny her story."

"And who," Merlini asked, "would believe him if he did?"

"But there's one thing the D.A. isn't going to like," the Lieutenant said dubiously. "You've pinned this on the person with the least motive. One of the boys reported that Mrs. Courtney got a divorce decree in Reno last week, and that Rosie told a girl friend that she was in line to marry her boss. Why, just when his wife steps out of the picture, does she want him out, too?"

"She might," Merlini said, "if she discovered that his promise to make an honest woman out of her was one he didn't intend to keep."

"We'll find that out right now," Gavigan said. "When she sees this alibi of hers fall apart she'll talk. Doran, tell the photographer I want pictures of that casting reel in her desk drawer. It's Exhibit A."

"Wait, Inspector," Merlini said. "That would be the wrong picture. She pulled another cute one—an impromptu stunt that may be unique in the annals of the Police Department. At least, I never heard of another murderer who gave Exhibit A to a Police Inspector hoping he'd take it away from the scene of the crime off to the wilds of Maine. The reel in her desk is one I found in the sample case there on the files. The one she really used..." Gavigan took the spinning reel from his pocket and glared at it.

"If I ever do get that vacation," he growled, "I'm going to spend it on a desert in Arizona. Somehow I don't feel much like fishing."