Death out of Thin Air (4 page)

She answered, speaking to Church. “My dressing room is around a bend in the corridor. My window is at right angles to this one and I saw a — a man. At least it was as large as a man. He climbed out the window and straight down the side of the building!”

Woody asked. “You don't seem too sure that it was a man, Pat. What did he look like? What—”

Pat's eyes which had been round and troubled grew darker. “He wore a long black cape. And a dark turned-down hat. But just once as he went past the window of the floor below and the light touched him — I glimpsed his face….”

Outside in the street below, a police siren screamed.

“Yes?” Woody prompted, as Pat hesitated.

“At the zoo, once,” she went on. “I saw a bat. Its face was horrible. The thing that climbed out the window had a face like that!”

Inspector Church groaned audibly.

In the corridor outside the elevator door slammed and running feet streaked toward the dressing room. A second later the doorway was filled with cops and detectives.

An onlooker who had never before seen the Homicide Squad in action would have thought that the next half hour was a confused bedlam of hurrying officials. Detectives combed the rooms, flash bulbs exploded, fingerprint powder flew in a haze, the medical examiner came, and the body left. But beneath it all there was the expert direction of Inspector Church and the calm confidence of men who knew their jobs.

This had been going on for perhaps five or ten minutes when Jerry, the call-boy, put his head in at the door, his eyes round with excitement.

“You're on again, next, Don,” he announced.

Diavolo nodded. “All right with you if I finish dressing?” he asked the Inspector.

Church looked at him suspiciously. “Where do you think you're going?”

“On stage. I've got a twenty minute routine to go through.”

“Not now you don't,” Church said. “You're going to headquarters with me.”

Diavolo lifted one eyebrow in a Satanic grimace. “An arrest, Inspector?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Church replied. “How did you guess?” He turned his back and threw a command at one of his detectives.

Inspector Church was a man who hated not to understand things and Don had divined that fact from his attitude. He asked quietly, “On exactly what grounds, Inspector? Just because you don't like magicians?”

“That's one good reason,” Church said. “Magicians always annoy me. The other reason is that you're the guy who bumped the dame off. You might just as well break down now and tell me why — because I'm going to find out!”

“But Miss Collins actually saw the — the bat, Inspector.”

“That won't wash, Diavolo. I wasn't born yesterday. I saw your act a few weeks ago, and I saw the mental telepathy stunt you worked with Miss Collins. She's blindfolded on the stage and, when you go into the audience and take a gander at somebody's watch or a coin, she comes out with the manufacturer's number or the date.

“If you could do that you could have tipped her off, as soon as she came in this room, to give me that spiel about a bat. I know how it's done, too. You're both hooked up with vest pocket radio sets. I saw a movie—”

“The movies aren't the best places in the world to get an education, Inspector. I'm surprised at you.”
²

The theater manager, Col. Ernst Kaselmeyer, an ex-Prussian officer with a straight back and a tummy that even the girdle he wore couldn't quite conceal, blew in from the hall where he had been quietly going mad. He had overheard the word: “Arrest.”

Kaselmeyer, tearing his already sparse hair, promptly fought a duel of words with Church. His booming voice made the Inspector retreat a bit. Finally the latter turned to Diavolo. “You do any of those vanishing tricks in this act?” he asked.

“No,” the Colonel boomed, “No vanishes. And you can have him right afterward—if you get him back in time for the eight o'clock show. I can't be losing money like this. Those people come to see Diavolo. They—”

“Okay,” Church growled. “But I'm staying right with him every minute. While he's dressing, too.”

Diavolo grinned. “But my dressing room has only the one door and no windows,” he said. “And not a single trapdoor or sliding panel. The building manager put his foot down on that.”

“I'm still not taking any chances,” the Inspector said. “I saw you get out of a steel coffin once that was locked on the outside with sixteen different kinds of locks — God knows how! I don't.”

He followed Diavolo into the dressing room and watched every move as the magician finished donning his deep-red evening clothes and scarlet mask, the costume which had given him the name of The Scarlet Wizard.

“Maybe, under some conditions, you could even get out of the Tombs.” Church added, “But
not
under the conditions you'll get this trip! I'll have a dozen guards on duty watching you every minute under bright lights. I'll sleep with you myself, if necessary. Put
that
in your pipe and smoke it!”

Diavolo smiled beneath his mask. “I don't smoke a pipe,” he said. “But you've given me a brilliant idea, Inspector. I was wondering how to dress up the old jail-escape stunt so it would really hit the headlines. We'll do it the way you've just suggested.” Don Diavolo plucked a lighted pipe from midair under the astonished Inspector's nose. He handed it to Church and added, “Put that in
your
pipe and smoke it!”
³

Don Diavolo turned on his heel and went out. Inspector Church followed, thinking to himself, “I wouldn't be surprised if he killed her just for the publicity!” He glared at the pipe he held rather as if it were a bomb with a lighted fuse.

Woody Haines ambled down the corridor with them to the elevators. “See you later, boys,” he said. “I've got to make an edition with
this
yarn.” He grinned and waved a big, amiable hand.

Church yelled after his retreating back. “If you put anything in it about bats, it'll be the last inside story you ever get out of me! That's no fooling!”

On stage, Diavolo swung into his smoothly routined parade of deceptions. He closed as usual with the production, from beneath a great Spanish cape, of The Stack of Giant Fishbowls.

He went forward to take his bow at the footlights and the curtains closed
behind
him. Inspector Church, watching from the wings said, “Damn!” and dashed out after him. But Diavolo backed through between the curtains just then, still bowing.

Church said, “I wish you wouldn't do that. Makes me nervous. I like to keep you where I can see you.”

Pat, coming forward put in: “The new finish on The Sucker Dove Vanish is a wow, Don. Did you like it, Inspector?”

Church growled peevishly. “I
don't
like that word ‘vanish.'”

Pat smiled mysteriously and, as the Inspector turned, winked once at the magician and nodded her head. Then, together the three of them returned to the dressing room.

Pat went on down the corridor toward her own. Church and the scarlet-costumed Diavolo went in to where an unhappy-looking Chan was sitting, surrounded by detectives who were laying down a rapid-fire barrage of questions.

The Scarlet Wizard preceded the Inspector into the small ten-foot cubicle that was the inner dressing room.

Suddenly he whirled, and slammed the door in the Inspector's face. They all heard the lock click over. Chan, watching them, grinned again, inscrutably.

The Manhattan Theater Building is built of solid steel and concrete according to the latest fireproof construction methods. Don Diavolo's dressing room was, just as he had said, entirely without doors, windows or concealed exits. Near the ceiling there was a small air-conditioning vent hardly large enough for an underfed kitten to squeeze through. That was all.

The door was made of fire resisting metal. It also proved supremely able to resist the frantic efforts of Inspector Church and the whole Homicide Squad.

Not a sound came through the door from inside in answer to their demands. Ten minutes later, when they had gloomily abandoned unsuccessful efforts to smash the door and were beginning to talk about blow-torches and blasting, the phone rang. Somehow its shrill, insistent peal seemed also to have in it a gay, mocking laugh.

That may have been the Inspector's heated imagination. But when he picked the phone up and put the receiver to his ear, what he heard was not imagination — it
was
a gay, mocking laugh and the voice that followed it was all too familiar.

It was a voice that the Inspector could never mistake — a deep, melodious, hypnotically compelling voice —
Don Diavolo's!

“There's that word again, Inspector,” he laughed. “Vanish. I had to do it. Sorry. I'll see you later. And don't bother to trace this call. The number is Rockefeller 8-9246. It's a booth in the waiting room of the Pennsylvania Station!”

The receiver at the other end was returned to its hook.

Church turned, the receiver still in his hand. “I don't believe it!” he gasped. “There's a phone in that dressing room and he's just trying to make me think—”

Chan's calm voice said, “No, Inspector, there is no phone there.”

But the Inspector never heard him. His jaw dropped at least a foot. He was staring at something behind and beyond the others that sent a cold shiver chasing itself up and down his spine!

The locked door of the dressing room that they had been trying to break down was swinging with a slow uncanny motion, outward on its hinges.

But nothing at all came through it.

The dressing room was utterly empty!

Except that in the center of its floor Don Diavolo's scarlet stage costume lay where it had fallen in a crumpled heap!

C
HAPTER
V

Recipe for Vanishing

A
SIXTEEN-CYLINDER
Packard, painted a flaming scarlet, waited outside a drugstore on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 71st Street, its motor running.

A man came out of a nearby bar and steered an unsteady course up the street. He fumbled awkwardly at a pack of cigarettes, finally managed to extract one, and then hunted vainly through his pockets for a match. He saw the red car, then weaved toward it and put his head in at the door.

“Shay,” he said thickly. “Could one of you girlsh shupply me with a match? I don't sheem to have—”

He stopped and gulped. He tried to get a better focus with his eyes.

“Excushe me, miss,” he said then, trying to bow and stopping just short of a somersault. “I thought there were two of you. I guessh that lasht stinger was two too many.” Forgetting the match, he wandered off again, blinking. After two bad tries he managed finally to steer his way through the door of the drugstore where he ordered, “A bromo-seltzer and go light on the soda.”

As the clerk mixed the foaming drink, his customer caught sight of the man who came from a telephone booth at the rear of the store and hurried quickly out, a man who wore
scarlet
evening clothes and no hat.

The inebriate blinked and said, “Make that
two
bromos and about a quart of your blackest coffee.”

Don Diavolo stepped into the scarlet car and said, “Let's go, girls.” The purring motor roared and the car sprang forward.

The bromo-seltzers and coffee weren't really necessary after all. There
were
two girls in the car — two girls who looked so much alike they might have been one girl — before a mirror. Patricia Collins, still in her stage costume, was one. The other was her sister, Mickey. Don called them Pat and Mike. He himself couldn't tell which was which.

The only person who could do that was Woody Haines. And the only way he could do it was to kiss them. He said that when he kissed Pat, she always kissed him back as if she meant it. When he mistakenly got Mike instead, she always grinned and said, “Wrong again, darling!”

If the reader will promise not to breathe a word of it to anyone else, we'll tell him that the twins' identical appearance was the secret of one of Don's best tricks — The Lady Who is in Two Places at Once. Offstage they were under orders not to be seen together in public — and Mickey ordinarily wore a black wig over her own golden-blond hair. But today was an exception. In accomplishing the astounding vanish into thin air that had given Inspector Church kittens, Don had needed the assistance of both girls.