The Oxford Book of American Det (72 page)

It took us only thirty minutes to find old Mr. Pritchel’s body. It was under the feed room in the stable, in a shallow and hurried trench, scarcely covered from sight. His hair had not only been dyed, it had been trimmed, the eyebrows trimmed and dyed too, and the moustache and beard shaved off. He was wearing the identical garments which Flint had worn to the jail and he had been struck at least one crushing blow on the face, apparently with the flat of the same axe which had split his skull from behind, so that his features were almost unrecognisable and, after another two or three weeks underground, would perhaps have been even unidentifiable as those of the old man.

And pillowed carefully beneath the head was a big ledger almost six inches thick and weighing almost twenty pounds and filled with the carefully pasted clippings which covered twenty years and more. It was the record and tale of the gift, the talent, which at the last he had misapplied and betrayed and which had then turned and destroyed him. It was all there: inception, course, peak, and then decline—the handbills, the theatre programs, the news clippings, and even one actual ten-foot poster: SIGNOR CANOVA Master of Illusion

He Disappears While You Watch Him

Management Offers One Thousand Dollars

in Cash to Any Man or Woman or

Child Who...

Last of all was the final clipping, from our Memphis-printed daily paper, under the Jefferson date line, which was news and not press-agentry. This was the account of that last gamble in which he had cast his gift and his life against money, wealth, and lost—the clipped fragment of news-sheet which recorded the end not of one, life but of three, though even here two of them cast but one shadow: not only that of the harmless dim-witted woman but of Joel Flint and Signer Canova too, with scattered among them and marking the date of that death too, the cautiously worded advertisements in Variety and Billboard, using the new changed name and no takers probably, since Signer Canova the Great was already dead then and already serving his purgatory in this circus for six months and that circus for eight—bandsman, ringman, Bornean wild man, down to the last stage where he touched bottom: the travelling from country town to country town with a roulette wheel wired against imitation watches and pistols which would not shoot, until one day instinct perhaps showed him one more chance to use the gift again.

“And lost this time for good,” the sheriff said. We were in the study again. Beyond the open side door fireflies winked and drifted across the summer night and the crickets and tree-frogs cheeped and whirred. “It was that insurance policy. If that adjuster hadn’t come to town and sent us back out there in time to watch him try to dissolve sugar in raw whiskey, he would have collected that check and taken that truck and got clean away. Instead, he sends for the adjuster, then he practically dares you and me to come out there and see past that wig and paint—“

“You said something the other day about his destroying his witness too soon,” Uncle Gavin said. “She wasn’t his witness. The witness he destroyed was the one we were supposed to find under that feed room.”

“Witness to what?” the sheriff said. “To the fact that Joel Flint no longer existed?”

“Partly. But mostly to the first crime, the old one: the one in which Signer Canova died. He intended for that witness to be found. That’s why he didn’t bury it, hide it better and deeper. As soon as somebody found it, he would be at once and forever not only rich but free, free not only of Signer Canova who had betrayed him by dying eight years ago, but of Joel Flint too. Even if we had found it before he had a chance to leave, what would he have said?”

“He ought to have battered the face a little more,” the sheriff said.

“I doubt it,” Uncle Gavin said. “What would he have said?”

“All right,” the sheriff said. “What?”

“’Yes, I killed him. He murdered my daughter.’ And what would you have said, being, as you are, the Law?”

“Nothing,” the sheriff said after a time.

“Nothing,” Uncle Gavin said. A dog was barking somewhere, not a big dog, and then a screech-owl flew into the mulberry tree in the back yard and began to cry, plaintive and tremulous, and all the little furred creatures would be moving now—the field mice, the possums and rabbits and foxes and the legless vertebrates—creeping or scurrying about the dark land which beneath the rainless summer stars was just dark: not desolate. “That’s one reason he did it,” Uncle Gavin said.

“One reason?” the sheriff said. “What’s the other?”

“The other is the real one. It had nothing to do with the money; he probably could not have helped obeying it if he had wanted to. That gift he had. His first regret right now is probably not that he was caught; but that he was caught too soon, before the body was found and he had the chance to identify it as his own; before Signer Canova had had time to toss his gleaming tophat vanishing behind him and bow to the amazed and stormlike staccato of adulant palms and turn and stride once or twice and then himself vanish from the pacing spotlight—gone, to be seen no more. Think what he did: he convicted himself of murder when he could very likely have escaped by flight; he acquitted himself of it after he was already free again, Then he dared you and me to come out there and actually be his witnesses and guarantors in the consummation of the very act which he knew we had been trying to prevent. What else could the possession of such a gift as his have engendered, and the successful practising of it have increased, but a supreme contempt for mankind? You told me yourself that he had never been afraid in his life.”

“Yes,” the sheriff said. “The Book itself says somewhere,
Know thyself.
Ain’t there another book somewhere that says,
Man, fear thyself, thine arrogance and vanity and
pride?
You ought to know; you claim to be a book man. Didn’t you tell me that’s what that luck-charm on your watch chain means? What book is that in?”

“It’s in all of them,” Uncle Gavin said. “The good ones, I mean. It’s said in a lot of different ways, but it’s there.”

CLAYTON RAWSON (1906-1971)

The mystery writer is often described as an entertainer who possesses a bag of tricks.

Inside the bag are devices designed to deceive: sleights of hand, least likely suspects, and apparently impossible situations like locked rooms. Any writer can play with these tricks in a workaday manner; any hack can pull the wool over readers’ eyes. But Clayton Rawson proved that the mystery writer who has actual experience as a working magician can trick readers even while urging them to keep their eyes wide open. In so doing, Rawson demonstrated that he could work magic on the page as well as on the stage.

Under the stage and pen name The Great Merlini, Rawson earned the admiration of the best magicians, mystery writers, and mystery editors in the business. Born in Elyria, Ohio, he graduated from Ohio State University and then studied at the Chicago Art Institute before beginning his multiple careers as performing magician, inventor of magic tricks, writer on the subject of magic, and editor and author of detective novels and short stories.

An inventor of some fifty original magic tricks, he is known among magicians for perfecting the gimmick that enables the performance of the famous ‘floating-lady trick’ in one’s own backyard. Rawson used his experience to turn out practical volumes on magic, including
How to Entertain Children with Magic You Can Do
and
The Golden Book of Magic.
He also wrote a column for
Hugard’s Magic Monthly.

Rawson’s best-known magazine work, however, was in the detective field. After serving as both associate editor of
True Detective Magazine
and editor of
Master
Detective Magazine
during the 1940’s, he became a director of the Unicorn Mystery Book Club and then editor of the
Inner Sanctum Mysteries
series at Simon and Schuster. In the mid-1940’s, his Great Merlini stories began to appear in
Ellery
Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
where they were first published without solutions so that readers could compete to solve them. Rawson eventually became the managing editor of that magazine.

In four novels and a dozen short stories featuring The Great Merlini, the magician-sleuth uses his expertise to see through the misleading clues that dumbfound the police. Not only are the solutions discovered through the magician’s skills, but the clues themselves are laid out with a professional awareness of how to deceive the reader, as
From Another World
ably demonstrates.

From Another World

It was undoubtedly one of the world’s strangest rooms. The old-fashioned rolltop desk, the battered typewriter, and the steel filing cabinet indicated that it was an office.

There was even a calendar memo pad, a pen and pencil set, and an overflowing ashtray on the desk, but any resemblance to any other office stopped right there.

The desk top also held a pair of handcuffs, half a dozen billiard balls, a shiny nickel-plated revolver, one celluloid egg, several decks of playing cards, a bright green silk handkerchief, and a stack of unopened mail. In one corner of the room stood a large, galvanized-iron milk can with a strait jacket lying on its top. A feathered devil mask from the upper Congo leered down from the wall and the entire opposite wall was papered with a Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey twenty-four sheet poster.

A loose-jointed dummy figure of a small boy with popeyes and violently red hair lay on the filing cabinet together with a skull and a fish-bowl filled with paper flowers. And in the cabinet’s bottom drawer, which was partly open and lined with paper, there was one half-eaten carrot and a twinkly-nosed, live white rabbit.

A pile of magazines, topped by a French journal,
I’lllusioniste,
was stacked precariously on a chair, and a large bookcase tried vainly to hold an even larger flood of books that overflowed and formed dusty stalagmites growing up from the floor—

books whose authors would have been startled at the company they kept. Shaw’s
Saint
Joan
was sandwiched between Rowan’s
Story of the Secret Service
and the
Memoirs
of Robert Houdin.
Arthur Machen, Dr. Hans Gross, William Blake, Sir James Jeans, Rebecca West, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ernest Hemingway were bounded on either side by Devol’s
Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi
and Reginald Scott’s
Discoverie of Witchcraft.

The merchandise in the shop beyond the office had a similar surrealist quality, but the inscription on the glass of the outer door, although equally strange, did manage to supply an explanation. It read: Miracles For Sale—THE MAGIC SHOP, A. Merlini, Prop.

And that gentleman, naturally, was just as unusual as his place of business. For one thing, he hadn’t put a foot in it, to my knowledge, in at least a week. When he finally did reappear, I found him at the desk sleepily and somewhat glumly eying the unopened mail.

He greeted me as though he hadn’t seen another human being in at least a month, and the swivel chair creaked as he settled back in it, put his long legs up on the desk, and yawned. Then he indicated the card bearing his business slogan—NOTHING is IMPOSSIBLE—which was tacked on the wall.

“I may have to take that sign down,” he said lazily. “I’ve just met a theatrical producer, a scene designer, and a playwright all of whom are quite impossible. They came in here a week before opening night and asked me to supply several small items mentioned in the script. In one scene a character said ‘Begone!’ and the stage directions read: ‘The genie and his six dancing girl slaves vanish instantly.’ Later an elephant, complete with howdah and princess, disappeared the same way. I had to figure out how to manage all that and cook up a few assorted miracles for the big scene in heaven, too. Then I spent thirty-six hours in bed. And I’m still half asleep.” He grinned wryly and added, “Ross, if you want anything that is not a stock item, you can whistle for it.”

“I don’t want a miracle,” I said. “Just an interview. What do you know about ESP and PK?”

“Too much,” he said. “You’re doing another magazine article?”

“Yes. And I’ve spent the last week with a queer assortment of characters, too—half a dozen psychologists, some professional gamblers, a nuclear physicist, the secretary of the Psychical Research Society, and a neurologist. I’ve got an appointment in half an hour with a millionaire, and after that I want to hear what you think of it.”

“You interviewed Dr. Rhine at Duke University, of course?” I nodded. “Sure. He started it all. He says he’s proved conclusively that there really are such things as telepathy, mind reading, clairvoyance, X-ray vision, and probably crystal gazing as well. He wraps it all up in one package and calls it ESP—meaning extrasensory perception.”

“That,” Merlini said, “is not the half of it. His psychokinesis, or PK for short, is positively miraculous—and frightening.” The magician pulled several issues of the
Journal of Parapsychology
from the stack of magazines and upset the whole pile. “If the conclusions Rhine has published here are correct—if there really is a tangible mental force that can not only reach out and influence the movements of dice but exert its mysterious control over other physical objects as well—then he has completely upset the apple cart of modern psychology and punctured a whole library of general scientific theory as well.”

“He’s already upset me,” I said. “I tried to use PK in a crap game Saturday night. I lost sixty-eight bucks.”

My scepticism didn’t disturb Merlini. He went right on, gloomier than ever. “If Rhine is right, his ESP and PK have reopened the Pandora’s Box in which science thought it had forever sealed voodooand witchcraft and enough other practices of primitive magic to make your hair stand on end. And you’re growling about losing a few dollars—“

Behind me a hearty, familiar voice said, “I haven’t got anything to worry about except a homicidal maniac who has killed three people in the last two days and left absolutely no clues. But can I come in?”

Inspector Homer Gavigan of the New York City Police Department stood in the doorway, his blue eyes twinkling frostily.