Another voice, just as authoritative, yelled, “Jordan, Bendy, Cullen — cover the exits! Let no one out of here!”
I could see the stage area exit beyond the Spirit Cabinet, the one from the dressing room area stage right to the club floor; in fact, I had kept my eyes on it from the moment the bearded man had run off, because that was the only other way out of that dressing room. But no one appeared there. Steele and the cops pushed their way through the stage right curtain just as several other cadets reached the exit I was watching. Any second now they would drag the bearded man out, I thought, and we could start to make sense out of what had just happened.
Only they didn’t emerge, and I heard shouts of surprise and confusion instead.
“He’s got to be in here somewhere.”
“He’s not here, damn it, you can see that.”
“Another exit...”
“there isn’t any other exit,” Steele’s voice said.
“Well, he’s hiding in here somewhere.”
“Where? There’s no place for a man to hide.”
“Those costume trunks—”
“They’re too small to hold a man, as you can plainly see.”
“Then where the hell is he? He can’t have vanished into thin air!”
Subsequently, however, it appeared that the man who had shot The Amazing Boltan in full view of more than thirty cops had done just that.
Half an hour later I was again sitting at the comer table, along with Steele, Ardis, a harassed looking Cedric, and Ced’s slender and attractive wife Jan. The contingent of police had managed to quiet the frightened patrons, who were now all sitting at the tables or in the grandstand, or clustered along the walls, or bellied up to the bar for liquid fortification; they looked nervous and were mostly silent. Blue uniforms and business suits — the cadets and their officers, and several regular patrolmen and Homicide people — stood guard or moved about the room examining things and asking questions and doing whatever else it is cops do at the scene of a violent crime.
A number of things had occurred in that half hour.
Item: Boltan had died of the gunshot wounds, probably instantaneously.
Item: The gun which the murderer had dropped, a Smith & Wesson M39, had been turned over to the forensic lab men. If they had found any fingerprints on it, we hadn’t heard of it yet.
Item: The police cadets who had covered the Cellar’s two street exits immediately after the shooting swore that no one had left.
Item: The entire stage area and the remainder of the club had been thoroughly searched without turning up any sign of the bearded killer.
Conclusions: The Amazing Boltan had been shot to death by a man who could not have left the Magic Cellar, was therefore still here, and yet, seemingly, was not here at all.
All of us were baffled, as we had said to each other several times in the past few minutes. Or, rather, Ardis and Cedric and Jan and I had said so; Steele sat in silence, which was unusual for him, and seemed to be brooding. When I asked him how he thought it had been done, since after all he was a master illusionist and a positive fanatic when it came to “impossible challenges,” he gave me a meditative look and declined comment.
We had considered, of course, the trapdoor in the stage, and had instantly ruled it out. For one thing, it was located in the middle of the stage itself — right behind where Boltan had fallen, as a matter of fact — and all of us had seen the killer exit stage right through the side curtain; there was no trap in that dressing room area. The tunnel leading from under the stage trap to the coatroom had been searched anyway, but had been empty.
I dredged my memory for possible illusions which would explain the bearded man’s vanishing act, but they all seemed to demand a piece of apparatus or specific condition which just wasn’t present. Houdini once vanished an elephant off the stage of the Hippodrome, but he had a large, specially made cage to do it. What did seem clear was that the murderer knew, and had applied, the principles of stage magic to come up with a brilliant new effect, and then had used it to commit a coldblooded homicide on the stage of the Magic Cellar.
Captain Dickensheet approached our table and leaned across it, his palms hard on the edge. “Everybody,” he said pointedly to Cedric, “has to be somewhere. Don’t you have any ideas where the killer got to — and how?”
Cedric shook his head wearily. “There’s just no other way out of that dressing room besides the curtain onto the stage and the curtain next to the Spirit Cabinet,” he said. “The Cabinet is solid down to the floor, and the other walls are brick.”
“No gimmick or gizmo to open that Cabinet’s back wall?”
“No, none.”
“Even if there were,” Steele said, “it would merely propel the killer into the audience. The fact is, Captain, he could not have gotten out of the dressing room unseen. You have my professional word on that.”
Dickensheet straightened up, glaring. “Are you telling me, then, that what we all saw couldn’t have happened?”
“Not at all.” Steele stood abruptly and squeezed past my chair to the aisle. “I can assure you that what you saw is exactly what happened. Exactly.” Then, nodding to the table, he headed back to the stage left dressing room
Dickensheet lowered his lanky frame into the aisle chair and stared across at the Carter the Great poster on the wall facing him. It depicted Carter astride a camel, surrounded by devils and imps, on his way to “steal” the secrets of the Sphinx and the marvels of the tomb of old King Tut. “Magicians!” the captain said, with feeling.
Cedric asked, “How much longer will you be holding everyone here?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Well, can’t you just take all their names and addresses, and let them go home?”
“That’s not up to me,” Dickensheet said sourly. “You’ll have to talk to Lupoff, the homicide inspector in charge of the investigation.”
“All right.” Cedric sighed, and got up to do that.
I decided to leave the table too, because I was wondering what Steele was up to backstage. I excused myself and went into the left dressing room where I found Steele sitting in front of the mirror, carefully applying his stage makeup.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
“It’s twenty till twelve, Matthew,” he said. “I’m on at midnight.”
“You don’t think they’re going to let you do your show now, do you?”
“Why not?”
“Well, they just took Boltan’s body off the stage fifteen minutes ago.”
“Ah yes,” Steele said. “Life and death, the eternal mysteries. My audience is still here, I note, and I’m sure they’d like to be entertained. Not that watching the police poking and prying into all the comers big enough to conceal a man isn’t entertaining.”
“I don’t understand why you’d even want to go on tonight,” I said. “There’s no way you can top the last performance. Besides, a spook show would hardly be in good taste right now.”
“On the contrary, it would be in perfect taste. Because during the course of it, I intend to reveal the identity of the murderer of Philip Boltan.”
“What!” I stared at him. “Do you mean you know how the whole thing was done?”
“I do.”
“Well — how? How did the killer disappear?”
“The midnight show, Matthew,” he said firmly.
I looked at him with sufferance, and then nodded. Steele never does anything the easy way. As well, here was an opportunity to put on a kind of show of shows, and Steele is first and foremost a showman. Not that I objected to this, you understand. My business is publicity and public relations, and Steele’s flair for drama is the best kind of both. If he named the killer during his midnight show, and brought about the capture of the bearded man, the publicity would be fantastic.