Death from a Top Hat (13 page)

C
APTAIN
M
ALLOY CAME IN
, answering the Inspector’s summons.

“What did Spence say about Mrs. LaClaire?” Gavigan asked.

“Not much,” Malloy answered. “He says that if you’ll make her kick and scream a bit and cuss some, maybe he could tell. He was two floors below, and all he’ll swear to is that it was a woman’s voice and she was mad. He’s stuck at that.”

“All right. Send her in again.”

Merlini settled himself on the davenport and crossed his long legs. “This suspense about Spence is terrific,” he said. “Who might he be?”

“Reporter.” Gavigan glanced in my direction. “House seems to be crawling with ’em. I ought to report it to the Department of Health. Spence lives on the first floor. When he let himself in at three this morning, he heard some female, up on this floor, pounding on a door and cussing like a longshoreman. Seemed to be mad at somebody. I’d hoped he would recognize Rappourt’s or Mrs. LaClaire’s voice, but his answers aren’t promising. It could have been Zelma. She could have left the subway at Grand Central and stopped up here on her way home. Or it may have been some girl friend of Harte’s banging on
his
door?” He inspected me questioningly.

“No,” I protested, “I don’t know any longshorewomen. Sorry.”

“And when Spence came down the street,” Gavigan added, “he saw a man leave this building. Everyone else in the place says they were sound asleep at that hour and, except for the spinster on the floor below, they all sleep in pairs and back each other up. She could have been entertaining him, I suppose, only Malloy says that Spence describes the guy as walking, and in his opinion any male that left her apartment at three A.M. would be running like hell.”

“Description?” Merlini asked.

“Short, maybe forty-five, round face, decked out in derby, carnation, spats, and cane.”

Merlini lifted an eyebrow at that description, but Gavigan didn’t notice. He had turned toward the doorway through which Zelma LaClaire came, swaying. The light glinted coldly on the platinum brightness of her hair and hotly on the full red mouth. Her poise was smooth and unruffled.

Gavigan wasted no time. “Let’s have the rest of that fairy tale. You’ve had time to polish it up and round off the edges. So it should be good. You were saying that you didn’t phone Sabbat, but your husband thinks you did because—?”

She scowled. “If you don’t believe it before you hear it, what the hell chance have I got?”

“Get on with it,” he said shortly.

“Anybody got a cigarette?” Her voice was calm, confident.

I supplied a cigarette and held a match for her. She puffed absently, without inhaling.

“Al,” she said, talking through the smoke, “thought I was calling Cesare, because I wanted him to. I
had
intended to phone him, but I caught a glimpse in my mirror of Al listening at the door, so I kept my finger on the hook and carried on a one-way conversation. I only intended to give him something to worry about. Maybe I gave him too much.”

Gavigan’s nose wrinkled as if at a bad smell.

“You see!” she said, “I knew you wouldn’t like it. But it’s true.”

Merlini was playing with that half dollar again, watching it speculatively as it flickered in his fingers, vanishing and reappearing like an uncertain ghost.

“Malloy!” the Inspector snapped. “Get LaClaire in here.”

Merlini’s coin fell floorward, spinning. He grabbed quickly, snatching it from the air. “Wait, Inspector!” he said quickly. “May I ask a question first?”

Gavigan didn’t take his eyes away from Zelma. “Shoot,” he said.

She half turned toward Merlini, waiting, alert.

“Mrs. LaClaire, is the phone in that dressing room a wall phone or a desk set?”

“It’s—it’s a hand phone.”

“And a dial phone, of course.” Merlini still eyed his coin. With a quick motion he made it invisible, and then, a second later, extracted it deftly from nowhere.

Zelma and Gavigan both watched him now, frowning. I wasn’t so clear about things myself.

“How would you like to go back with the circus, Mrs. LaClaire?” he went on solemnly. “Billed as ‘The Woman With Three Hands’? That’s what your story amounts to. It’s the only way you could hold a receiver to your ear, dial a number, and keep a finger on the hook all at the same time. With a wall phone, the hand holding the receiver can double in brass. With a desk phone—perhaps you’ll show us how it’s done?” He indicated the phone on Sabbat’s desk.

“You go to hell!” she said briskly.

“All right, Babe!” Gavigan threatened. “That tears it. Start talking, and make it mean something!”

She tilted her face up at the Inspector and switched on the sex appeal. “Okay, what if I did twist things a bit? I don’t want to get mixed up in a murder case.”

“You missed a train, Babe. You
are
mixed up in one, and you’re going in the wrong direction for an exit. Come on. You told Sabbat you were coming up. What happened when you got here?”

Suddenly her eyes were wide, startled. “Say, is that when he was killed, at—at about three this morning?”

“Maybe you should tell me?”

She took an uncertain step or two backward, away from us, and then, feeling the chair against her legs, she sat down slowly. Her body was tense, her eyes wide.

“Well?” Gavigan persisted.

She focused on him, and then abruptly relaxed, leaning back in the chair and drawing deeply at her cigarette.

“Okay,” she said easily, “but you might have said so before. I did call Sabbat, but I didn’t come up here—and—and I can prove it. Sabbat put me off. He’d been doing that lately. Cesare and I argued a bit, then made a date for tonight, after the show. After that I went straight home.”

“And how do you go about proving it?”

“Alfred phoned me just after I had got there. It was just three o’clock. Ask him. He was checking up on me. Maybe he does want a divorce. But his luck wasn’t so hot. I was home, and that means I didn’t have any time left over to stop off on the way. I don’t understand why—why he didn’t tell you…unless—” She drew the back of one hand slowly across the bright red of her mouth. “—unless he doesn’t intend to—
Inspector!
” She was on her feet clutching at his arm and gripping it desperately. Her purse and cigarette dropped to the floor. “Inspector! He’s framing me…you…you’ve got to make him tell…you must—”

“Get him, Malloy!” Gavigan snapped.

Zelma still clung to his arm. The last female witness had fainted. This one was about to have hysterics. The Inspector pushed her toward the chair and got her into it.

“You sit there and keep quiet,” he ordered.

Malloy brought Brady and LaClaire from the bedroom. The latter threw a swift inquisitive glance toward Zelma, faced Gavigan, and stood waiting. His underlip had a tight, drawn look.

Zelma, leaning far forward in her chair, pleaded in a voice that, though low, had all the piercing quality of a scream, “Alfred, for God’s sake…you must tell him…you can’t hate me like that! You know I couldn’t—”

Gavigan stepped in front of her, swiftly, took her by the shoulders and shoved her back into the chair.

“Another word out of you, and I’ll smack you one. I’m running this show. Now calm down.”

He swung on Alfred. “You said you had no idea what time your wife got home last night?”

Alfred looked at the Inspector for a second, steadily. Then he said, “Pardon me, Inspector; I don’t think so. You didn’t ask me that.”

“All right, I’m asking now.”

“She was home at three o’clock, I know that. I phoned the house and she said she had just come in.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Yes.”

The Inspector looked at them both grimly, his jaw hard. He threw a hopeful glance at Merlini, but that gentleman was back at his coin tricks. Wearily, he said, “Brady, get these two out of here. Have somebody take ’em downtown in one of the cars.”

Mrs. LaClaire went out hurriedly. Alfred hesitated just slightly, then followed her.

Gavigan said, “Any idea what all that means, Merlini?”

The latter tucked his coin away in his vest pocket. “Well, for one thing,” he replied, “it would seem that Sabbat was still alive and kicking at 2:00.”

“I got that. What else?”

“I rather got the impression that Zelma LaClaire is considerably more quick-witted and imaginative than the general run of platinum-blonde burlesque queens. She’s also a good liar and an accomplished actress.”

“Can you pick out the lies?”

“Most of them, I think. She didn’t know Alfred was outside her door when she dialed Sabbat. When we told her he’d heard, she pretended she had known and presented us with the ‘pretending to call’ version. She hadn’t warmed up yet, and that was a foul ball. If she had pretended to call her lover in order to get her husband’s goat, she wouldn’t say, I’m coming up,’ and then let herself be argued out of it. She’d give him something worth listening to. Check?”

“I never try to predict what a woman will do. But that sounds all right.”

“Just to be sure, I took that long shot with the question about dialing a French phone while holding down the receiver rest. If she
had
only been pretending to call Sabbat, she’d have known the right answer. But since she wasn’t, and since she was under a bit of a strain, she didn’t think of it.”

“And how do
you
do it?”

“Receiver in the left hand, dial with the right, any number, and then break the connection with the right hand. You don’t have to do all three at once. Or you can dial your own number and not have to break the connection at all.”

“The voice of experience speaking?”

“Maybe.” Merlini grinned. “It’s not a criminal offense, is it?”

“Depends on whom you’re pretending to call. But go on. What about that alibi? Alfred checked with her on it. If she invented it as she went along…how come he had the same story? They had no chance to…Damnation!”

“Exactly, Inspector. I warned you to keep that pair in separate cages. You must catch their act sometime. He goes down into the audience and takes a peek at someone’s watch. Standing on the stage, blindfolded, she immediately begins spouting a description that includes the make, the number of jewels, the inscription on the cover, and so forth. She clutched at your arm and got hysterical so you wouldn’t think to shoo her out of the room before getting him in. Then she cued him and transmitted the whole alibi. She was playing a long shot too, unless he’s scared of her and she knows it. Anyway, he played up and she won.”

“Why’d you ask Zelma if she wanted to go
back
in the circus? They don’t have strip-tease artists, or at least not when I was a boy.”

“No,” Merlini grinned, “no strip artists yet. The pink tights are scantier, but they’re still relatively modest. Zelma and Alfred both used to work with the Al G. Robinson Combined Shows. Believe it or not, she did one of those hanging by her teeth butterfly acts. He was a trapeze artist, one of the best until he fell and smashed that hand of his. They left the circus then, and she got a job with Minsky. He was unemployed for a couple of years. Then he worked up this second sight routine.”

“That’s what’s meant by checkered careers, isn’t it?” Gavigan said. “If Spence could only identify the dame he heard. Zelma’s a two-to-one shot unless—oh, the hell with it! I’ll take them over the bumps again later. Malloy, chase Duvallo in here. I’ve been saving him for dessert.”

I sat up and opened my eyes all the way.

The man that followed Malloy through the door carried a faded blue overcoat on his arm and held a battered black felt hat. He stopped just inside and glanced quickly around the room, his gaze resting interestedly on the pentacle and candlesticks. His movements were all impatient, alert ones that indicated abundant vitality, and his poise held the assured self-confidence of the athlete. His face, even when he smiled, was taut with the obstinate determination that one might expect to see in a man who made his living escaping from impossible situations. He was of average height, in his late thirties; and I was sure, somehow, that I had seen him before, probably on the stage, though I had no remembrance of it.

In looking us over he saw Merlini.

“Hello!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

Merlini nodded. “Hello, Dave.” Then he introduced the Inspector, Malloy, and myself. Duvallo bowed and waited. Gavigan began:

“You know what’s happened up here?”

“I’ve got a hazy idea, yes. The reporters outside seem to be under the impression that Sabbat has been murdered. Judging from the number of squad cars and cops cluttering up the neighborhood, I’d guess there was something in it.”

“There is,” Gavigan informed him.

Duvallo indicated the splintered door panel and asked, “I see you had to break in. Door locked?”

“And bolted. But before we go into that…I understand you knew Sabbat quite well. Maybe you can tell us what all this is about?” Gavigan motioned toward the chalk marks.

Duvallo walked over and took a closer look. “Strikes you as screwy, I suppose. Well, Sabbat was screwy, pretty much. I knew him well enough to know that. Though I wasn’t a close friend by any means. He didn’t have ’em. Not the sociable type, unless it was with the ladies.”

“Who, for instance?”

Duvall shrugged. “Different ones. He liked variety.”

“Mrs. LaClaire, maybe?”

He lifted an eyebrow delicately. “You’ve been reading Winchell.”

“Well, is it so?”

“Yes. But I’d rather not be quoted.”

“How long have you known him?”

“A couple of months. I met him through Tarot.”

“Was he in the habit of rolling back his rug and marking up his floor like this?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. He was apt to do most anything. The circles are obviously for the conjuration of some demon named Surgat. I’ve heard Sabbat talk about such things as if he believed in them. But he wasn’t altogether batty. He put across one or two fast ones that had me guessing. That’s why I persuaded him to ask Watrous…by the way, Watrous was here, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he and your other friends found the body.”