The Great Merlini (Clayton Rawson)

Chap 11: Merlini and the Photographic Clues

TWO MEN LIFTED THE GIRL'S RIGID BODY AND PLACED IT IN A BOX shaped like a coffin. Her head projected at one end, her feet at the other. A tall lean gentleman in evening dress placed a large cross cut saw, whose jagged teeth glinted ominously in the light, across the center of the box. He smiled and began sawing through both box and girl.

This murderous process was half completed when a stout red-faced man suddenly erupted from the wings and shot onstage as if jet-propelled. It was George J. Boyle, the producer of Magic and Music, and he was living up to his name. He was boiling with all the hot bubbling intensity of a fresh batch of volcanic lava.

"House lights!" he roared. The light man was no fool; the house lights came up instantly and the dress rehearsal came to a full stop.

The Great Merlini stepped forward, leaving the box and the girl half severed. His voice, usually urbane and good-humored, now had a cutting edge as sharp as the saw's steel teeth.

"If we're going to get the opening night curtain up at eight thirty—"

Boyle moved in on him with all the grace and unshakable determination of an army tank. "You," he rumbled, shaking a fat forefinger under Merlini's nose, "are going to produce the leading lady out of a hat."

Merlini shook his head. "No. I'm not. You've been rewriting lines, changing scenes, and adding new business all day. If you think I'm going to whip up another miracle two hours before curtain time—"

Boyle boiled over. "Curtain time!" he howled. "There isn't going to be any curtain. There isn't going to be an opening night. There isn't going to be any show! Not without Inez Latour!" Then, thunderously, came the final explosion. "She has just been arrested for murder!"

Merlini is a magician, but that stopped even him. Boyle got the rest of it out without interruption. He fumed at such white heat that his story wasn't too coherent. But, once the pieces had been jigsawed together, the general idea seemed to be that the nationally famous Broadway gossipcolumnist, Lester Lee, had been shot and killed, and a delegation of cops had just raided the theater, gathered up Inez Latour, and taken her away for questioning.

"She deserves a medal," Boyle spluttered. "But why does she have to kill that rat-faced, longnosed Peeping Tom at a time like this? Merlini, you know the homicide boys. You sent Inspector Gavigan a pair of openingnight tickets. Get busy! Get her back here—before curtain time!"

Merlini groaned. "Whenever something impossible needs to be done, everybody seems to think that just because I'm a magician—"

"You won't be a magician tonight if you stand there muttering," the producer bellowed. "You'll be an actor out of work. Get out of here! And bring Miss Latour back!"

Arguing with George J. Boyle was always tough. Right now it was impossible—even for a magician. Merlini turned and walked into the wings toward the stage door.

Much too late the girl in the box who was half sawed in two called after him "Hey! What about me?"

But Merlini was already at a phone dialing Spring 7-3100. He talked briefly to headquarters and then, outside, hailed a cab. A few minutes later,

Lieutenant Malloy of the Homicide Squad let him into an office on the third floor of the Chandler Building on 45th Street. Inez Latour, tall, beautiful, blonde and nervous as a cat, sat in a low armchair facing the menacing bulk of Inspector Homer Gavigan.

"So you only know Lester Lee casually," Gavigan was saying. "And you haven't seen him for weeks. You're quite sure about that?"

There was nothing nervous about her voice. She made it sound very convincing. "Yes," she said flatly. "I am."

The Inspector was not an actor, but he sounded just as convincing and twice as confident. "Lester Lee was shot in this office at 1:25 this afternoon. We have witnesses who heard the shot. We also have witnesses who saw you in the lobby downstairs on your way out at 1:30. And don't tell me you were here visiting your hairdresser." He turned and pointed toward the blood-soaked blotter on the broad mahogany desk. "Your fingerprints are on that desk top." Silence.

When the actress finally spoke, her voice was flat and dead, all the self-confidence gone. "All right. I saw him here. But I left at a quarter after one. And he was still alive. Inspector, you've got to believe that. You—"

"And why did it take you fifteen minutes to get downstairs?"

"I stopped in a phone booth in the lobby. I—"

"The person you called can confirm that?"

Miss Latour's voice was only a whisper now. "I made two calls. Neither person answered."

"I see," Gavigan said without any inflection whatever. "Now tell me what you talked to Lee about."

The actress shook her head. "No." Then she said it again. "No. I want my lawyer."

"You'll need one," Gavigan told her. "I hope he's a good one. When we got Lester Lee's safe open we found a very interesting collection of photos. Candid shots of celebrities who didn't know they were being photographed at the time, but who found out about it later—from Lester Lee."

Lieutenant Malloy handed the Inspector two glossy eight-by-ten prints and he held them before Miss Latour. "I don't need to tell you that the man who is with you in these pictures is the underworld bigshot, Frank Barnett. And the best lawyer in town isn't going to convince any jury, after they've seen these photos, that you didn't know Frankie very well indeed."

The well-publicized Latour temper had been well concealed up to this point. Now it exploded. "The dirty double-crossing little rat! I paid him ten grand for those negatives!"

Gavigan followed through quickly. "And he held out an extra set of prints so he could shake you down again later. What was he doing? Threatening to show them to your social-register, millionaire fiancé, Harvey Vankyll?"

But she had finished talking. Further questions were all met with the repeated demand: "I want my lawyer."

Gavigan gave up temporarily. "Take her outside," he told Malloy. "But keep her on ice."

As she went out, Merlini's empty right hand reached up and took a lighted cigarette from thin air. "Inspector," he said, "you've got a one-track mind. If Lee ran a blackmail business on the side, she's a long way from being your only suspect. What about Barnett? Lester Lee has been riding him in his column, accusing him of pulling all sorts of political strings behind the scenes at City Hall. I doubt if Barnett likes that very much. What if he warned Lee to lay off and Lee refused?

"And what about Ram Singh, the Hindu radio mind reader? Lee has been hinting pretty broadly in print that Singh's telepathic demonstrations aren't the real McCoy, that he can prove the whole act is a trick, and that Singh is a fraud. If he did, that would queer Singh's pitch and lose him his sponsor. And what about—"

"If you think you're pulling rabbits out of hats," Gavigan broke in, "you're mistaken. I'm way ahead of you."

"Yes," Merlini admitted as the door opened. "I see."

The man Lieutenant Malloy ushered in, a swarthy-faced, expensively dressed, hard-eyed individual, was Frankie Barnett in the flesh—a smooth character whose actions said clearly that he wasn't afraid of anything in a cop's uniform. He sauntered in, eyed the bloodstained desk top and the Inspector with an equal lack of interest, then waited for someone else to make the first move. 

Gavigan made it. "Where were you between one and two this afternoon?"

Frankie took his time about answering. Then he said, "This is embarrassing. I spent most of the afternoon, from twelve on, with a certain city official who wouldn't want it mentioned."

"And if you named him," Gavigan said, "he'd deny it quicker than you can say 'Not Guilty.' Frankie, if that's the best you can do you're in a spot."

Barnett wasn't so sure. "Maybe," he said. "And maybe not. Let me ask you one, copper. Just how dumb do you think I am? If I bumped a guy wouldn't I come up with a better alibi than that?"

"You usually do," the Inspector said. "But mistakes can happen. You don't do the dirty work yourself, you leave that to the hired help. And this time one of your boys pulled the job at the wrong time—when you weren't set with an alibi."

Frankie grinned and said, "Prove it, copper," just as a bright flash of light exploded in the doorway.

The look the Inspector threw in that direction would have shriveled anyone else; but "Doc" Reilly, the free-lance news photographer who stood there with his camera, had armor plate for skin. And the order Gavigan gave Malloy to toss him out on this ear had no effect.

"You'll be sorry, Inspector," the photographer said cheerfully, before Malloy could reach him. "I brought you a present. How would you like to see a photo of the scene of the crime only a minute or two after Lee was shot—in technicolor?"

"And just how do you know exactly when he was killed?" Gavigan asked suspiciously. "I gave orders—"

"You didn't give me any," Reilly answered as he side-stepped Malloy and came into the room. "I heard the shot. I was in the New York Courier building right across the street and I'd just loaded my camera with some new color film that I was itching to try. I couldn't tell what office in this building the shot came from, but I figured maybe a photographic record of the people who lammed out of here between then and the time the prowl-car boys arrived might come in handy. So I grabbed a few." He laid a color print on the desk. "This one is a lulu."

Inspector Gavigan scowled at it. Merlini took one quick look and said, "I wonder if you know just how much of a lulu it is. The dark-skinned man in the turban who is walking out the front door is—Ram Singh!"

For perhaps ten seconds no one said a word. Then Malloy, who had answered the phone while Reilly was speaking, dropped an even heavier blockbuster. "That tears it," he said. "The boys grabbed the Hindu at LaGuardia. He was trying to check out on the plane to the Coast. But they turned him around and he's on his way up here now—in handcuffs."

He arrived ten minutes later between two detectives—a slender, hollow-eyed man who looked, except for the steel cuffs on his wrists, as if he had just stepped out of "Doc" Reilly's photo. But his famed mindreading powers didn't seem to be working too well; he expressed surprise at Lee's death and denied knowing anything at all about it.

"I flew in from Hollywood last night," he said. "And I've got to be back there in time for my broadcast tomorrow. I'll admit that I did have an interview with Lester Lee in this office at ten this morning. I came directly here right after I landed at the airport. I talked to him for half an hour. I haven't seen him since."

"You talked about what?" Gavigan asked.

The Hindu scowled. "He had been threatening to print a—a libelous story about me. I talked him out of it."

"How much did it cost you?"

Singh raised an eyebrow. "Cost me? Nothing. I read his mind and he had to admit that my supernormal powers are genuine."

"Oh, yeah?" Gavigan said with vast skepticism. "If you're such a good mind reader you should know what I'm thinking. We found a little agreement in Lee's safe bearing your signature. You promised to cut him in for fifty percent of your take as long as your show remains on the air. Now tell me what happened when you came back again this afternoon."

The mind reader shook his head. "I did not come back."

"No?" Gavigan held up Reilly's photo. "Take a good look at this. There's a clock in that picture. The time is 1:27. Lee was shot at 1:25. I want to see your supernormal powers get you out of that one."

The Hindu frowned momentarily, then slowly shook his head. "Inspector," he said, "if you ever try to introduce that photograph in court you are going to run into trouble. It just happens that there are several hundred thousand witnesses who can swear that I was in another place at that time."

Gavigan sounded as if this were the first time in his life anyone had ever mentioned such a figure. "Several hundred thousand—"

"Perhaps more," Ram Singh added. "I was a guest star on a television program broadcast live from the downtown studios of WNX-TV—at least two miles from the place where this picture was taken."

Lieutenant Malloy didn't have to be told. He began dialing the phone before Ram Singh had finished. But he didn't like the answers he got.

"The studio confirms it," he said, eyeing the Hindu as if he were a sideshow exhibit with two heads. "They say he was busy reading minds in front of a studio audience and two television cameras from 1:15 to 1:30.

How the devil did he do a trick like that?"

"Easy," Gavigan replied. "He pulled a fast one at the studio. Someone impersonated him on that broadcast."

"And gave an exhibition of mind reading, too?" Singh asked. "I don't think so. It would have been much easier for someone to have impersonated me leaving this building at 1:27. That photo was taken from across the street. Some suntan makeup and a turban is all that would have been needed."

"Barnett," Malloy muttered, "is the same size and build—"

Then, suddenly, The Great Merlini snapped his fingers and a silver dollar appeared instantly at his fingertips. "It's a good trick, Inspector, a very good trick. The mystery of the murderer who could be in two places at once." A second coin appeared from nowhere in the magician's other hand. "But the miracle is less than perfect. It has one glaring flaw."

Merlini dropped both coins into his left hand, then slowly opened his fingers to show—nothing at all. He picked up the color photo. "The clues that tell us how the miracle was done, and, for good measure, tell us which of the people you've just questioned killed Lester Lee are right here— staring us in the face in this photo."

"I don't get it," Gavigan said. Merlini placed a long forefinger on the photo. "Notice anything odd about the Chandler Building?"

Malloy suddenly grunted. "Yeah! It's moved! It's on the wrong corner of the street!"

Merlini grinned. "It seems to have moved quite a distance, too. Apparently a trans-Atlantic jump! Look at the car in the foreground—the steering wheel is on the wrong side. And the driver seems to think he's in London—he's driving on the left-hand side of the street. Forty-fifth Street is a one-way street going in the opposite direction. If some giant poltergeist moved the Chandler Building from 45th St. to Fleet Street for a few hours and then returned it, this photo may be evidential proof of the most startling and incredible feat in the whole history of 'things that go bump' in the night."

Gavigan sputtered, "What the blazes are you talking about? All I know is you're making a mountain out of a molehill—and I don't even like the molehill."

"I'm talking," Merlini explained, "about a trick that might have been done with mirrors. When Reilly made this print he simply flopped the negative."

"He what—?" Malloy asked.

"He simply turned the negative over and made the print from the wrong side. That reversed everything. Look at Ram Singh's jacket. It buttons on the wrong side. You're looking at a mirror image."

He reached into thin air and, like the silver dollars, a small round pocket mirror winked into being at his fingertips.

"Take a look at the photo in this," Merlini said. "Then you'll see the scene as the camera really saw it."

Gavigan snatched the mirror and held the photo in front of it. "The clock!" he exclaimed. "It doesn't read 1:27. It says 10:33!"

"And that," Merlini added, "solves your case, Ram Singh was telling the truth. He saw Lee this morning and the photo was taken as he left the building at 10:33, when Reilly was trying out his new color film. Reilly lied when he said he took the picture this afternoon a minute or two after the crime. He shot it nearly three hours before he shot Lee. When he printed the photo, he noticed the clock and realized that a reversed print would make it appear that he was in the Courier building at 1:25 and not in Lee's office. He knew that unless he had a solid alibi, it wouldn't take you long to dig out that he was the man who had been taking Lee's blackmail pictures.

"A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it doesn't always tell the truth. Actually, at 1:25, Reilly came across to this room and shot Lee.

With a gun—not a camera."