“O’Halloran’s gun,” he said. “That does it. There’ll be prints on that ivory handle.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Blow-Off
“Ladeez and Gentulmen, the big show is all out and all over! We now present the last performance of the evening, the Oriental Dancing Girl Revue! They shake it in the East and they shake it in the West, and then they’re going to shake it where the shaking is the best. If you can stand to hear the old cannon roar, smell the smoke, and see the flame, here’s the place to go. It’ll clean and press your suit, curl up the brim of your hat, restore your hair, and put ants in your pants. The boys like it and the girls learn. The red-hot jamboree is stahting ri — ght awaaay…”
Chief of Police Hooper was still not completely sold on Merlini’s innocence. However, after he had been assured that the next day’s headlines would give credit for the murderer’s apprehension to the local authorities and would contain no whisper of anything concerning a jail-escape, he led his captive off.
The rest of us crowded into Pauline’s trailer. We were a dripping, water-soaked crew; but the story Merlini had to tell made us forget that. He pulled back the covers on the bed and exposed the mummy of John Wilkes Booth. He showed us the length of white thread attached to the bandages covering the chin, and, kneeling by the bed as he had done before, demonstrated how the thread led invisibly down across the bed covers and ended in a loop around his right forefinger. When he pulled the thread the gauze over the mummy’s chin moved and Pauline’s voice, not nearly so illusive now that we knew it came from Merlini’s mouth, said:
“The principle of the ventriloquial dummy. The thread pulls the bandage down, and a rubber band beneath pulls it back again so that in the half-light enough apparent chin movement is created to attract the attention and complete the illusion. Ventriloquists, as I’ve said before, don’t throw their voices; they simply create that appearance.
“The joker in the whole business is, of course, the fact that Pauline never was an eyewitness to her father’s murder. She didn’t know who the murderer was until I told her when we were moving her over into Tex Mayo’s trailer. She not only didn’t stay behind to listen at the trailer window, but she admits now that Irma King did not go to the Major’s trailer Monday night. When Pauline accused her of that, she did so because she was burned up by Irma’s attempt to grab the show and by Irma’s public accusations of illegitimacy.”
“Well, anyway,” I said disappointedly, “I was right about the girl in the bandages not being Pauline. If only she had turned out to be Paula instead of a mummy my theory would have crossed the finish line. I still want to know why you were so sure Pauline wasn’t the culprit. Tex may not have been in love with Paula, as I had it, but he is in love with Pauline. Together they could have done it all.”
Merlini shook his head. “They couldn’t have accomplished Pauline’s fall from the high perch, Ross. With Tex’s presence at the back door established, it would have meant still another assistant to douse the lights. You can always solve a crime if you parcel out the various bits of dirty work to enough different people. But that’s not only bad fiction; it’s also bad practice from the murderer’s viewpoint. Too many criminal accomplices are dangerous because one of them might trip and get caught out, or might break down and confess. If you want to see that murder is done right, don’t delegate your dirty work — do it yourself.”
“Maybe they didn’t know that,” I said stubbornly. “And besides, their motive is much stronger than—”
“No,” Merlini contradicted even more stubbornly, “that’s not so. I was suspicious all along that the inheritance of a circus — the outdoor show business being what it has been lately — was hardly motive enough for two murders and an attempted third. Circus management today is mostly a first-class headache — too much competition from movies and radio, I suspect — and no one in his right mind is going to undertake wholesale murder in order to inherit a headache. The real murderer’s motive is right here.”
Merlini turned the stiff figure of the mummy over on its face and exposed a gaping hole between its shoulder blades.
“You knew that the mummy was papier mâché and hollow,” he said, reaching in and bringing out neatly banded packets of United States currency by the handful. “This particular mummy classes as one of the most valuable side-show draws ever exhibited. He’s nearly filled with cash, and I haven’t seen a bill in the lot yet that is smaller than a C note. Most of them are grands.” Inspector Gavigan stepped forward and probed the body’s interior. His operative technique might have been open to professional criticism, but it got results. Merlini held a pillowcase, and Gavigan filled it with banknotes. Finally he produced two account ledgers, and his face beamed as he leafed through them.
“The Weissman evidence,” he said. “More motive. To certain people these books are worth twice that cash. It means curtains for some of Maxie’s racketeer pals whom we haven’t been able to pin anything on. Especially Jerry O’Bryen, the Brooklyn real-estate operator — the two-faced crook who throws a smoke screen over his underworld connections by his donations to charity. The D.A.’s been hoping to get him with his pants down for a long time — and this does it. Maxie didn’t trust O’Bryen, and he’s put enough evidence in these books to send Jerry up the river until about the year 4000.”
“Motive enough for half a dozen murders,” Merlini commented. “O’Bryen would pay plenty to get his hands on those books.” He paused a moment, and then continued, “Since you know who the murderer is, it’s obvious why the technique of the crimes was so expert, why so few clues that one could really get one’s teeth into were left.”
“I don’t see them,” I said. “If, at this late date, you are going to turn into one of those psychic detectives who solve their cases by character analysis or plain and fancy hunches, you can find yourself a new Boswell, starting now.”
“Do you think the Inspector would have let me pull anything as dramatic, anything that smelled as much of the footlights, as that ventriloquism stunt, if I had only hunches? There were just three really decent clues, but they were whoppers. It’s a practical possibility, even in this day and age of scientific detection and F.B.I. trained detectives with their spectroscopes, their moulage methods, and their vacuum cleaners, to commit one murder, perhaps even two, without a slip. It happens every day, somewhere. But if you try it with the investigators sitting right in your lap, and are forced to attempt a third and then a fourth murder, even a Napoleon of crime can be excused for making a misstep. It’s pretty nearly impossible, unless the investigators are complete dunderheads. The law of averages gets you eventually.”
“Oh, so! Dunderhead, is it? Some day I’m going to cross you up and report one of your cases with you on the short end. It may be my last assignment, but I’ll have fun writing it.”
Merlini looked down his nose at me, said, “Sour grapes,” and then continued on his explanatory way. If asked to explain one of his own tricks, the man is as close-mouthed as a clam, but when he begins describing the inner workings of a murderer’s hocus-pocus, he lectures in extenso, complete with prefaces, marginal notations, footnotes, and appendices.
“The law of averages,” he repeated, “gets you in the end. Complications creep in, unforeseen hitches occur, snap decisions must be made. I doubt if even a lightning calculator could run that gamut. Our murderer, though an experienced criminal tight-wire walker, took three bad falls. Even then Lady Luck still smiled, because the evidence, though it completely exposed the criminal’s identity, was still not quite the sort that a good trial lawyer couldn’t fog with a lot of reasonable doubt. That was why I set the trap I did. That and the desire to avoid a messy court trial which would have put the fact of Pauline’s illegitimacy on all the front pages.”