2 
2 “HARRY,” I SAID, AS WE TROTTED UP TOWARD FIFTH AVENUE. “YOU really need to fill me in on the details. How was he murdered? Why do they need you there?”
He pulled the collar of his shaggy astrakhan cloak up around his ears, pretending not to have heard.
“Who sent the telegram? Why won’t you tell me anything?”
My brother closed his eyes and lowered his chin to his chest, apparently lost in thought.
We were riding in a horse-drawn calash, jostling hard as the driver maneuvered around the evening theater traffic. Harry had said little since we’d left the theater—nothing, in fact, apart from a single line: “It is a case for the Great Houdini!” He delivered this sentiment while throwing his cloak around his shoulders.
Now, sitting back against the leather seat with his brow furrowed and his fingers steepled at his chin, he looked for all the world like the hero of some stage melodrama.
“Harry—” I began again.
“Dash,” he said impatiently, “you cannot expect me to divulge the particulars. It is traditional that the detective remain tight-lipped until he reaches the scene of the crime.”
Ah. Suddenly it made sense. “Harry,” I said, “you’re thinking of detective stories, not real detective work. And anyway, you’re a performer, not a detective.”
“Performer!” he snorted. “I am no mere performer! I am Houdini! I have talents and knowledge that other men do not! At least our New York City police seem to appreciate this, if the theatrical community does not.”
We rode in silence for a moment. “At least let me see the telegram,” I said.
Wordlessly, he passed it over. It read: “Need Houdini Urgent Home Branford Wintour Stop Murder Investigation Stop Lt. Murray.”
“Harry, this doesn’t tell us much. Apart from the fact that this Lieutenant Murray is careful with his pocket change. Ten words exactly.”
“It tells us a great deal,” he said.
“Such as?”
He gave me a corner-of-the-eye look. “It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts.”
“Harry,” I said. “For God’s sake.”
I should explain something. My brother was not a great reader, but he dearly loved his detective stories. He would read them on trains, backstage, in the bath—virtually anywhere. His favorite was Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures he followed religiously in Harper’s Weekly until the detective’s tragic death at the hands of Professor Moriarty, an event that left him despondent for some weeks. Harry read the Sherlock Holmes stories many times over. Our late father could jab a pin into a random passage of the family Talmud and call out each word it had pierced on the subsequent pages. Harry could do the same with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
“Harry,” I said, starting again, “this is a police investigation. You can’t barge in there and expect to lead them around by their noses. There’s no Inspector Lestrade in the New York Police Department.”
“I will merely give them the benefit of my acknowledged expertise.”
I muttered something under my breath.
“Pardon me?” Harry said. “Would you please repeat that?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“No one will be dropping me over a waterfall anytime soon, Dash,” he said. “And anyway, it was the Reichenbach Falls, not Rickenstoff.”
I folded my arms and fell silent until we pulled up to the Wintour mansion.
Branford Wintour’s home had always been something of an architectural curiosity. I remember that when they had built the place a few years earlier there were jokes about whether Manhattan would sink under its weight. It took up a good chunk of land and was lousy with gables and mansards and spires and all sorts of other features that you don’t see much on Fifth Avenue these days, including a three-story aviary. Wintour had chosen a spot directly across the avenue from the Vanderbilt pile, and for a time it seemed as if he might put his neighbor in the shade.
Harry and I scrambled out of the calash and faced a brilliant white expanse of marble that might have given Nansen and Peary some uneasy moments. We crossed the vast forecourt and had just finished climbing the steps when the front door swung open. I had expected a butler but instead we found a uniformed patrolman in a blue greatcoat and leather helmet.
“Which one of you is this Houdini character?” he asked.
“I am Houdini,” my brother answered, puffing himself up to an impressive five-foot-four.
“The lieutenant wants you to wait here.”
We followed him into a vaulted two-story entry hall. “Harry,” I whispered. “This room is bigger than the last theater I worked.” Sad to say, I wasn’t joking.
A pair of mahogany double doors opened and a big, beefy man in a rumpled brown suit stepped toward us. “Name’s Patrick Murray,” he said in a voice not long out of Dublin. “I’m the detective in charge of this case. Appreciate your answering my wire.”
“Hmm,” said Harry, stepping back to appraise our new acquaintance. “Patrick Murray. You are Irish, I perceive.”
Strange to say, Harry wasn’t kidding either. Murray looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I shrugged. “I can see you’re going to be a big help to us, Mr. Houdini,” he said.
“I shall certainly do my best to assist in whatever way possible,” said my brother, who was a bit tone deaf when it came to irony. “Now, perhaps it would help if you showed me to the murder scene. I trust your men haven’t been tramping about in their muddy boots, obscuring clues, damaging valuable—”
“My men are doing their jobs as instructed,” Murray said firmly. “And I believe we’ll be able to manage the murder investigation on our own. We’ve asked you here because there’s an aspect of the crime that seems to fall under your area of expertise.”
“Oh?”
“The murder weapon.”
“The murder weapon? That is most gratifying. In what way does the murder weapon fall under my area of expertise?”
Murray sighed. “Branford Wintour seems to have been murdered by a magic trick.”
Harry glanced at me with shining eyes, struggling to conceal his pleasure at this news. “Please continue,” he said.
Lieutenant Murray motioned to a very tall, somewhat stooped elderly gentleman who had been standing quietly by the mahogany doors. “This is Phillips, Mr. Wintour’s butler,” Murray said as the old man stepped forward. “I wonder if I might ask you to repeat what you’ve just told me for these gentlemen?”
“Of course, sir,” the butler said, clearing his throat. He turned to us and began to speak in a flat, toneless manner, as though instructing a new member of the staff on the placement of finger bowls. “It is Mr. Wintour’s habit of an evening to spend an hour or so answering correspondence in his study. He customarily takes a glass of Irish whiskey at five-thirty, but there was no response when I knocked at the door this evening.”
“Did you break down the door?” Harry asked.
“Certainly not.”
“What did you do?”
“I did nothing. I assumed that Mr. Wintour did not wish to be disturbed. It was only when he failed to appear for dinner that I grew concerned. He had arranged a small dinner party for this evening. When the guests began to assemble at six o’clock, Mr. Wintour had still not emerged.”
“So you broke down the door?”
A pained expression crossed the old butler’s face. “I saw no need to break down the door. I decided to telephone, in the event that he might have fallen asleep on the settee. It would not have been the first time. There is only one telephone in the house and that is in Mr. Wintour’s study. I stepped across to a neighboring house to telephone.”
Harry nodded. “But he didn’t answer?”
“No, sir. By now I had begun to grow alarmed. On the advice of Mrs. Wintour, I telephoned a nearby locksmith, a Mr.—”
“Featherstone,” Harry said. “A reliable, but unimaginative craftsman.”
Lieutenant Murray’s eyebrows went up at this, but he said nothing. Phillips carried on as if he hadn’t heard. “Mr. Featherstone arrived some moments later and managed to open the door using a skeleton key.”
“Is that the study over there?” Harry asked, gesturing at the heavy mahogany doors.
“It is.”
“It’s a routine Selkirk dead-bolt with a three-wheel ratchet. My sainted Mama could open that lock with her darning needle.”
Phillips dipped his chin and peered at Harry over his half-glasses. “We had not known that your mother was available, sir,” he said.
“Please continue, Phillips,” said Lieutenant Murray.
“Once Mr. Featherstone had opened the door, I found Mr. Wintour at his desk.”
“Dead?” Harry asked.
“I still believed he was asleep, but I could not rouse him. That was when I summoned the police.”
“That’ll do, Phillips,” Lieutenant Murray said. “Gentlemen, if you’ll follow me.” He led us across the foyer to the study doors. There were a number of uniformed officers milling around, and to my surprise Harry appeared to know most of them. He nodded at a stocky young man sitting by the doors, and received a casual salute in return.
“Harry,” I whispered, “how do you know—”
“Later,” he answered.
One of the doors to the study was partially open, and I could see the bustle of plain-clothes men as they examined, measured, traced, and sketched along the edges of the scene. Then Murray pushed open the door and we saw the rest.
The study reeked of culture and old money, though I knew perfectly well that Wintour had made his loot within the past decade. Shelves of books with leather spines stretched across the left side of the room, broken only by a tall marble fireplace. Ancestral portraits and richly colored tapestries covered the other walls, and there were a number of marble busts sprouting up on alabaster pedestals throughout the room, creating a museum effect. A pair of club chairs, a settee, and a couple of Chesterfields were positioned just so in front of a flat-top, marble-inlay desk, the surface of which could easily have accommodated six or seven of the performers from Huber’s Museum.
Though the furnishings imparted a certain baronial splendor to the room, it was clear that the occupant, who had made his fortune in the manufacture of children’s toys, had never entirely put aside the playthings of youth. In one corner, the head of an outsize jack-in-the-box bobbed back and forth. A spectacular collection of wind-up animals, clockwork figures, and tin soldiers littered the surface of a library table, and a tall cylindrical zoetrope stood on a special display stand nearby. Most impressive of all, an enormous two-tiered model train set was arrayed on an oblong slab of polished wood. The track ran in a cloverleaf pattern perhaps five feet in each direction, with a web of heavy cording leading to a black control panel on the floor.
I confess that I might have spent the entire evening admiring that wondrous train set, but there were more urgent calls on our attention. “Gentlemen?” said Lieutenant Murray. “If I could ask you to step this way.” A set of white hospital screens had been erected behind the desk. Three of Wintour’s dinner guests— two men and a woman—were arranged on the Chesterfields, and I guessed that the screens had been placed to shield them from an unseemly spectacle. The lieutenant motioned us to step behind the partition. Although I had prepared myself, the sight of the dead man caught me by the throat.
Wintour lay on his back, stretched out upon a deep red Oriental rug. He wore a gray brushed flannel suit, a white cotton cambric shirt, a wide boating club tie, and the face of a man in torment. His eyes bulged and his tongue jutted, and patches of dark purple were spreading across his cheeks. I don’t know what Mr. Wintour’s views on the afterlife may have been, but he had the look of a man who had seen his destination and didn’t much care for it.
“How old was he?” Harry asked softly.
“Fifty-three,” Lieutenant Murray answered. He waited another moment while my brother and I recovered ourselves, then led us out from behind the screens. “You’ll notice that this is an interior room,” he said. “No windows. No other entrance apart from the doors we used. Those doors were locked from the inside and show no sign of tampering. Mr. Wintour seems to have been alone in his study at the time of his death. No one in the household heard anything unusual, nor had there been any unexpected visitors this afternoon. We expect that—”
“The fireplace,” Harry said.
“What about it?”
“Has the fire been burning all day?”
“The butler laid it one hour before Mr. Wintour entered the room.”
“I only ask because in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, the murderer was found to have entered by means of—”
“The chimney. Yes, Mr. Houdini. ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue.’” Lieutenant Murray scratched his chin. “Our investigation is as yet in its earliest stages, but we’ve managed to rule out homicidal orangutans.”
Harry colored slightly. “It’s just that—”
“If I could ask you to direct your attention to the murdered man’s desk, Mr. Houdini. That’s why I’ve asked you here this evening.”
A thick white cloth was spread over the center of the murdered man’s desk. We could see the outlines of a squat, lumpy object beneath it. Murray motioned to an officer standing to the side. “Carter, mind showing our guests the, uh, device?”
With an anxious expression, the young officer stepped to the desk and gingerly pinched the edges of the cloth. Cautiously, as though a sleeping snake might be coiled underneath, he lifted the cloth and eased it to one side.
Harry sprang forward. “Le Fantôme!” he cried, thrusting his chin forward across the desk. “Do you see it, Dash? It’s magnificent!”
The object was a small wooden figure, perhaps twelve inches high, draped in a Chinese silk kimono. It sat cross-legged on a square wooden pedestal, gazing intently at five ivory tiles at its feet, each bearing the image of a green dragon. In one hand, the figure held a tiny flute; the other clutched at the folds of its robe. A black, braided pigtail ran down the figure’s back, and its face was painted with Kabuki markings.
“I would not have believed that it still existed,” Harry said. “Look at the articulation of the joints! See the pinpoint mechanism of the jaw hinge?”
At the front of the pedestal was a set of small lacquered doors. Extending his index finger, Harry poked at the tiny latch. A uniformed officer moved forward to stop him, but Lieutenant Murray waved him off. Harry flicked the latch and the doors swung outward to expose an array of ancient cogwheels and drive bands.
“Astonishing!” he declared. “Look at the gears! They are made of—of—” He leaned in close and sniffed at the workings. “Yes! The gears are made of cork! And the shafts, they are hollow bamboo! How extraordinary that they should have survived all this time. And see the weights and counterweights? They are nothing more than tiny bags of silk, each one filled with sand. The craftsman who created this device can only have been a genius! It is even more beautiful than I imagined!”
“I’m glad you think so,” said Lieutenant Murray. “But can you tell us what it is?”
“It’s an automaton,” Harry said, keeping his eyes fixed on the small figure. “One of the most exquisite ever made.”
“An automaton,” Lieutenant Murray said. “A little doll that moves and does tricks. Like a child’s toy. We knew that much. And it’s supposed to be worth a fortune because it’s from the collection of some French guy with the same name as you. That’s one reason we called you.”
Harry straightened and set his mouth in a tight line. “Dash,” he said, “perhaps you’d better enlighten them about the ‘French guy.’”
The lieutenant folded his arms. “Just tell me about automatons,” he said to me. “I’ve never seen one before tonight. What are they? What do they do?”
There must have been a dozen people in the room—police officers, medical workers, and a small knot of people in evening dress who appeared to be the dead man’s dinner guests. All of them stopped what they were doing to listen to me. I was momentarily stage-struck. “Well,” I began. “Um, let me see...”
“Begin with Jacob Philadelphia,” Harry said.
“Well,” I said again, “there was a magician named Jacob Philadelphia who was active in the eighteenth century, and he—”
“Born in 1734,” my brother said.
“Thank you, Harry, that was very illuminating. This magician liked to display automatons—or automata, if you will. Little clockwork figures like this one. These figures, which resembled ordinary dolls, could move and perform in amazingly lifelike ways. At the magician’s command, they did tricks for the audience. One changed water into wine; another gave answers to mathematical problems. Sometimes these figures were designed to look like animals. There was a very famous peacock that strutted around the stage, spread its feathers, and even gave a nice little screech.”
I paused and surveyed the room. People appeared to be listening, so I continued. “Bear in mind, many of the people who came to see these devices had never seen a mechanical device more sophisticated than a clock. So a little doll that could play cards, or a monkey that could smoke cigarettes, would have seemed quite miraculous. Jacob Philadelphia made a good living with his automatons, and they didn’t require a whole lot of effort from him. He basically turned a key, set the machines going, and collected his money.”
I glanced around again to take the crowd’s pulse. There was a regal-looking lady sitting on one of the Chesterfields who kept nodding and smiling, as though giving encouragement to a clumsy piano student. I took a deep breath. “Sometimes these devices weren’t all they seemed,” I continued. “There was a German magician named Herr Alexander who had a magic bell. you asked it a question—for instance: ‘What’s two plus two?’— and the bell would chime out the answer. Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, came to believe that Alexander had devised some new telegraphic system. Actually, the bell was rung by a bird hidden inside the workings.”
This drew an appreciative smile from the Chesterfield, so I persevered. “Then there was the Kempelen Chess Player, from Austria. It looked like a much larger version of our friend here,” I pointed at the device on the desk, “but it had Turkish robes and a turban. There was a chess board on top of the gear cabinet, and the figure sat behind it. At the turn of a key the figure not only pushed its own chess pieces across the board, but also moved its head to follow the play of opponents. Benjamin Franklin played it twice—and lost. Edgar Allen Poe was so impressed that he wrote a long article trying to explain how it worked. Poe guessed wrong on some of the finer points, but his basic theory was correct—a human chess player, hidden inside the cabinet, controlled the movements.”
Lieutenant Murray looked at his watch. “This is all very edifying, young man, but we have a body decomposing here, and I’d really like—”
“You must forgive my brother,” Harry said, breaking in. “Sometimes he forgets himself.” He turned to me as if reprimanding a schoolboy. “Dash, tell them about the Frenchman.”
I shrugged. “Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin was a French magician—”
“Born in 1805,” said Harry.
“—born in 1805—who started out as a clock maker. He was a genius with mechanical apparatus, and his effects made use of electricity and modern innovations in a way no one had ever seen before. At the time, magicians tended to wear long Merlin robes and conical hats, as though they were sorcerers of some kind. Robert-Houdin appeared in normal dress clothes, and presented himself as a man of science, rather than superstition. Over the course of his career he amassed an enormous collection of automatons. He was fascinated by them and studied their workings to help create his own mysteries.”
I could see Lieutenant Murray’s eyes glazing over, so I tried a different tack. “Imagine if Thomas Edison had a big warehouse and he gathered up historical inventions like Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and Samuel Morse’s telegraph. The objects would be important and valuable for their own sake, but all the more so because Edison had taken inspiration from them. That’s what Robert-Houdin’s collection was like, and that’s why people are so fascinated by it.”
Lieutenant Murray glanced at the little Japanese figure on the dead man’s desk. “So where is this collection now?”
“That’s just it. It’s supposed to have been destroyed. Near the end of his life, Robert-Houdin’s workshop burned down. It’s believed that the entire collection was lost.”
“Or so they say,” Harry added.
“There were rumors at the time that the fire had been set by a jealous rival, who stole the collection and set the fire to cover his tracks. Any time an automaton turns up that’s known to have belonged to Robert-Houdin, it sends up those rumors all over again.”
“And this one belonged to him?” Murray asked.
“Absolutely,” said Harry. “It’s called Le Fantôme. One of Robert-Houdin’s jewels. Le Fantôme in French means—”
“The phantom,” Murray said, bending over the little figure. “Strange thing to call it. It looks Oriental to me. Japanese.”
“But Robert-Houdin was French.”
“Ah. And was he a relation of yours, Mr. Houdini?”
Harry bristled at the suggestion. “He was perhaps the greatest charlatan in all of—”
“No relation,” I said, quickly. It had been a touchy point for some little while. Robert-Houdin had, in fact, been my brother’s boyhood idol, ever since the fateful day when a copy of the Frenchman’s memoirs fell into Harry’s hands. But as he got older, and his ego reached its maturity, he came to regret having chosen his stage name to appear “like Houdin.” In time he would write a book about Robert-Houdin intended to expose the Frenchman as “a mere pretender, a man who waxed great on the brain work of others, a mechanician who had boldly filched the inventions of the master craftsmen among his predecessors.” These sorts of things mattered very deeply to Harry, if not to anyone else.
“Tell me something,” Lieutenant Murray continued. “Are these things really so valuable? If this French guy’s collection still exists, what would it be worth to-day?”
Harry considered for a moment. “Possibly as much as ten or twelve thousand dollars.”
A respectful silence fell over the room.
“Perhaps that was the motivation for his murder,” Harry said.
Lieutenant Murray looked at Harry with amused delight. “I don’t know, Mr. Houdini. If I were the murderer, it would seem a waste of effort to kill Mr. Wintour over the phantom doll here, and then leave it behind when I made my escape.”
My curiosity got the better of me. “How was he killed, Lieutenant?”
“That’s why I asked you here. He was killed with this. With the doll.”
Harry’s eyes widened. “Killed with Le Fantôme? How is it possible?”
“Somebody hit him over the head with it?” I asked.
“No, the doll itself—I’ll get the doc to explain. Dr. Peterson?”
A short, stocky man with an impressive mane of white hair had been busying himself near the white hospital screens, jotting notes with a gold pencil in a leather notebook. He turned toward us and withdrew a folded handkerchief from his breast pocket. “He was killed with this,” he said, unfolding the white cloth.
“With a handkerchief?” Harry asked.
“Look closer,” Peterson said.
“It’s nothing. A splinter.”
“A splinter tipped with poison, unless I’m very much mistaken. I took it from the dead man’s neck.”
“How did it get there?”
Lieutenant Murray gestured at Le Fantôme. “That thing.”
“I’m not sure I get you,” I said. “It plays the flute. It doesn’t kill people.”
The detective shook his head. “That thing in its hand is a blow gun, not a flute.”
I looked at Harry. He nodded.
“The way we figure it,” Murray continued, “Mr. Wintour had locked himself into his study to have a look at his latest acquisition. While he was poking around, the gears suddenly started cranking and it raised the blow gun to its lips and shot a poison dart into his neck.”
Harry opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it again, apparently lost in thought. Slowly, he circled the desk, examining the automaton from all sides. Then he peered behind the hospital screens to have another look at the unfortunate Mr. Wintour. Emerging again, he dropped to his knees and began a minute examination of the Oriental rug. Occasionally he issued a soft grunt of surprise or satisfaction, but gave no other clue as to what he might be doing.
“Mr. Houdini?” Lieutenant Murray stepped back as Harry, still on his hands and knees, rounded a corner of the dead man’s desk. “Mr. Houdini? Is there something in particular you’re looking for down there?”
Harry simply grunted and continued his circuit of the desk. I looked at the Chesterfield, where the two men in evening dress were looking on with great amusement.
“Harry,” I said, “this might not be the proper time for—”
“Silence, Dash! I am like a bloodhound on the scent!”
“Look, Mr. Houdini,” Lieutenant Murray said with some asperity. “We don’t need you to tell us whether Wintour is dead or not. We figured you’d know something about how the doll worked, seeing as how you and this Robert-Houdin have the same name.”
Harry ignored the remark. “Dr. Peterson?” he called from the floor. “Was Mr. Wintour already dead when he was found?”
“Oh, absolutely,” answered the police physician. “Though perhaps you should ask my colleague Dr. Blanton. He examined the body before I did.”
“Dr. Blanton?” Harry asked, his head bobbing up from behind the desk. “Who is Dr. Blanton?”
One of the dinner guests rose from a club chair. He was a small, rotund man perhaps sixty years of age, with heavy dewlaps and large, moist eyes. His long, delicate hands seemed to be in constant motion, whether fiddling with the pearl buttons of his waistcoat or adjusting the pince nez he wore at the end of a chain. “I’m Percy Blanton,” he said, clipping the spectacles onto his nose. “I’ve been a friend of Bran’s for more years than I care to count. I was just arriving when—how shall I say it?—when the door to the study was opened, so of course I was the first to examine the—let me see—so of course I was the first to examine the subject.”
Harry sprang to his feet. “And was Mr. Wintour dead when you examined him?”
“Mr. Houdini—,” Lieutenant Murray stepped between my brother and Dr. Blanton.
“No, it’s quite all right, Lieutenant,” the doctor said. “I don’t mind repeating my account.”
“That’s kind of you, sir, but this man is not an investigator.”
It finally dawned on Harry that Lieutenant Murray was exasperated with him. “I do not wish to hamper your investigation or inconvenience Mr. Wintour’s guests,” he said, adopting a more diplomatic tone, “but what you say concerning Le Fantôme seems incredible to me, knowing its workings as I do. I am merely trying to fix the scene in my mind, so as to judge whether the automaton could have acted in the manner you describe.”
The lieutenant’s hands dropped to his sides. He nodded at Blanton to continue. He didn’t look happy about it, though.
“As I told the police,” Dr. Blanton said, “Bran—that is, Mr. Wintour—was seated at his desk when I entered the room. His head was forward on the desk and I naturally supposed that he was asleep. It was only when we stepped forward—”
“Pardon me, sir,” Harry interrupted. “Who was with you in the room?”
“Why, all of us. Myself, of course. Phillips, the butler. Mr. Hendricks and his wife. And Margaret, naturally.”
“Margaret?”
“Mrs. Wintour.”
“His wife? Where is she now?”
“I had to take her upstairs and give her a sleeping powder. She was distraught, as you can well imagine.”
“I see. And who is Mr. Hendricks?”
“I am,” said the gentleman who had been seated on the Chesterfield. He was tall and gaunt-faced, with brown curly hair and a Vandyke beard covering what looked to be a jutting chin. I guessed his age to be fifty or so, though his lined forehead and the dark hollows beneath his eyes made it difficult to judge.
“When Bran invited me here tonight he said he’d made the find of a lifetime,” Hendricks said. “If what you say about the automaton is true, I’d say he wasn’t exaggerating. I’ve often heard stories about the Blois collection, but I never dreamed I’d actually see any of it.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Lieutenant Murray said. “What did you call the collection?”
“The Blois collection,” Hendricks said, giving a careful pronunciation. “That’s what it’s always been called. Blois is the name of the city where Robert-Houdin lived.”
“You know something of these devices, then?” The lieutenant seemed to be choosing his words carefully.
“I own a great many automatons, Lieutenant. I dare-say that’s why Bran invited me here this evening—to gloat over his prize.”
“Have you, ah, any experience of how they work?”
“Indeed I do. I’m in the toy business myself. One doesn’t run a manufacturing concern without picking up a thing or two. I doubt if I’m as knowledgeable as Mr. Houdini, but I have a decent understanding of the basic mechanics. Don’t look so alarmed, Lieutenant. I’m well aware that this makes me a suspect.”
The woman sitting at his side—whose kindly face had encouraged me in my earlier recitation—laid a hand on his arm. “Surely you don’t suspect my husband, do you, Lieutenant?”
“Of course he does, Nora,” Hendricks said, not unkindly. “I dare say I’m at the very top of the list. There are only a handful of men in New York who could get Le Fantôme to work after all these years. Three of us are in this room, and one of us is dead. I can’t speak for Mr. Houdini, but I certainly have my share of motives. As soon as you begin to do a little digging, Lieutenant, you’ll discover that I’m a business rival of the dead man.”
“But the two of you are friends,” Mrs. Hendricks protested. “You used to be partners.”
“We used to be, darling,” her husband said, patting her hand. “I’m afraid that’s the point.” He turned back toward the desk. “There is something I’ve been wondering, Lieutenant. Are you certain it was murder? Couldn’t it have been an accident, like a gun going off during a cleaning? Who knows how long it’s been since anyone has tinkered with those old gears.”
“We’re looking into that, sir,” the detective admitted. “The man who sold the doll to Mr. Wintour is answering questions downtown.”
Harry, who had resumed his study of the carpet, looked up in surprise. “You don’t mean Josef Graff, do you?”
Lieutenant Murray consulted his notebook. “Yes, Josef Graff. Runs a toy shop, I believe. On the side he arranges purchases for collectors such as Mr. Wintour.”
“A fine fellow,” offered Hendricks. “I deal with him myself on occasion. you mean to say Josef sold Le Fantôme to Bran without offering it to me first?”
“In the circumstances,” Lieutenant Murray said, “I should think you’d be grateful.”
“You don’t suspect old Graff of having a hand in this?” Mr. Hendricks appeared genuinely dismayed.
“I’ve known the man for years!”
“As have I,” Harry said quietly.
“He sold the doll to Wintour,” the lieutenant said flatly. “Now Wintour is dead. I think it’s reasonable to ask him a few questions.”
“Is he being detained?” Hendricks spoke as if dealing with an impertinent houseboy. “Has Josef Graff been placed under arrest in this matter?”
I glanced at Harry. His face had gone deathly pale.
“So far as we know, he was last to see the murdered man alive,” Lieutenant Murray said. “We would be remiss if we did not treat him with some measure of suspicion.”
“See here!” Hendricks was on his feet now. “Graff is a feeble old man! you can’t just bung him in jail because—”
“With respect, sir,” Lieutenant Murray interrupted, “there are elements of this investigation with which you are not familiar. I would ask that you defer to my judgement for the time being.” The policeman’s tone was even and deferential, but there was no mistaking the core of iron.
Hendricks studied Lieutenant Murray’s face for a moment and saw that it was pointless to argue. “I just don’t understand the point of detaining Mr. Graff, that’s all,” he said, sitting down beside his wife. “He’s a harmless old man.”
My brother had been silent during this exchange. Now he rose from his contemplation of the floor and carefully brushed at the knees of his trousers. “I have completed my examination of the carpet,” he announced.
“Have you?” Lieutenant Murray turned to face my brother, his lips pressed together in amusement.
“I am prepared to announce my conclusions,” Harry continued.
“Your conclusions?” The lieutenant was smiling broadly now. “Look, Mr. Houdini, as I said before, we just want you to show us how the automaton works.”
“I will do so, of course. At the same time, I will also demonstrate that Josef Graff had nothing whatever to do with Mr. Wintour’s death.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Josef Graff had nothing whatever to do with Mr. Wintour’s death. He may have sold Le Fantôme to the dead man, but he is completely innocent of any wrong-doing. I promise you that on my mother’s life.”
“And how can you be so certain of that?”
“Because Le Fantôme did not kill Branford Wintour.”
All traces of amusement drained from Lieutenant Murray’s face. His eyes became very still, the way a terrier’s will when he’s about to take a chunk out of your hand. “May I ask how you arrived at that conclusion, Mr. Houdini?”
“Because there is no red dot,” said my brother.
Dr. Peterson, the police physician, perked up at this. “No blood, you mean? There was a bit, if you looked closely, but the puncture wasn’t deep enough to cause any serious bleeding.”
Dr. Blanton, Mr. Wintour’s friend, nodded his head in vigorous agreement. “In some cases, the poison need not even enter the bloodstream directly. The smallest scratch is sufficient to—”
“I did not mean blood,” Harry said. “I refer to a red dot of a very different kind. A red dot that only Houdini would think to look for. I have made an exhaustive search, gentlemen, and there is no red dot on the body, or on the floor, or on the desk.”
Lieutenant Murray locked his hands behind his back. “I think you’ll have to explain yourself for us, Mr. Houdini.”
“Of course,” my brother said, warming to the role. “You and your men cannot be faulted if you are slow to grasp this. It is a matter where only the rarefied knowledge of Houdini can be of service.”
“Uh, Harry—?” I began.
“That’s all right,” Lieutenant Murray said to me. “Please, Mr. Houdini, we’d be ever so grateful if you could put us on the right track here.” He held up his hands for silence. “Boys? Could I ask you to stop with all this unnecessary police work for a moment? It seems our visitor here has stumbled upon the solution to our little problem, and I think we should all give him our attention.”
There was general laughter from the men in uniform, and even Mr. Hendricks and Dr. Blanton appeared amused. A lesser man might have resented the lieutenant’s facetious tone. Harry, with his steel-plated vanity, did not notice. Instead, he puffed out his chest and smoothed his lapels, a gesture he invariably made when he was about to take the stage.
“Thank you, Lieutenant Murray,” he said. “I must first correct a misstatement in the lieutenant’s kind introduction. I do not claim to have solved the murder.” A ripple of mock protest went up among the officers. “No, no,” Harry said. “I only wish to demonstrate that Le Fantôme is blameless. you see, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
He surveyed the group of young officers. “First, I will need a volunteer from the audience. You, sir” —he pointed to a strapping patrolman— “may I prevail upon you to join me here at the front of the desk?”
The officer received a desultory round of applause as he stepped forward.
Harry reached into his pocket. “Your name is—? Robbins? Very good. Now, Mr. Robbins, I hold here in my hands a perfectly ordinary pack of playing cards—”
Lieutenant Murray gave a loud cough. “Look here, Houdini—”
I put a hand on his arm to restrain him. “Give him three minutes,” I said in a low whisper. “He’s on to something.”
He gave me a look that suggested I had just staked my life on the fact.
“officer Robbins,” Harry continued, “will you examine the cards and confirm that they are all different? you may shuffle them, if you like.” Grinning nervously, the young patrolman gave the cards an awkward shuffle.
“Thank you,” said Harry. “Now I will ask you to deal five cards off the top. Do you see the five ivory tiles in front of Le Fantôme? I want you to place one card face down on top of each tile.”
Robbins bent over the desk, biting his lower lip as he dealt out the five cards.
“Very good,” said Harry. “Now, while my back is turned, select one of the five cards and show it to the aud—to the other gentlemen.”
Robbins lifted a card—the five of clubs—off the desk and held it up for inspection.
“Now replace the card,” Harry continued, “but remember what it was. you are finished now? Excellent. Now, with the help of Le Fantôme, I shall attempt to locate the card you selected.”
“See here, Houdini,” said Lieutenant Murray, “you can’t tamper with that thing—it killed a man tonight.”
“I assure you it did not.”
“Besides, there’s no key to turn it on.”
“It does not require a key,” Harry said. “Observe.” He stretched his finger across the desk and depressed a glass bead on the figure’s headdress. We heard a faint click, and slowly the tiny figure stirred. In spite of himself, Lieutenant Murray watched in fascination as the cross-legged figure slowly moved its head from side to side, as if studying the five cards spread out before it. We heard a soft creak as Le Fantôme’s left arm bent and its hand rose to stroke its temple, as though lost in contemplation. Abruptly, the figure’s head snapped upward and its mouth opened in a crude simulation of a smile. I cannot claim that it was a pleasant smile. In fact, it was downright spooky. Then the left arm straightened and pointed to the middle card in the row of five.
From the Chesterfield, Mrs. Hendricks began applauding at the apparent conclusion of the effect. Her husband and Dr. Blanton joined in, as did a handful of the policemen. Le Fantôme nodded its head as if to acknowledge the applause.
“You see?” Harry cried. “It is a harmless trick, a simple effect with cards. Officer Robbins, you may now turn over the card that Le Fantôme has indicated. It is the card you selected, is it not?”
Robbins looked at the card, hesitated, and looked again. “Uh, no, sir,” he said. “I picked the five of clubs. This is the nine of diamonds.”
“What? Impossible!” Harry darted forward and snatched the card from the patrolman’s hand, glaring at it with undisguised annoyance. “This cannot be!” He winced at the sound of sniggering from the back of the room. “Le Fantôme is foolproof! Possibly its workings have become fouled through the years of disrepair, or perhaps I failed to—”
We never learned what Harry might have failed to do. Throughout his tirade, a remarkable change had come over Le Fantôme. Unseen by Harry, who had his back to the desk, the automaton stirred to life once again. This time, its right hand—which held the tiny bamboo tube—rose from the folds of its robe. With a swift, sure movement, the figure raised the tube to its lips in the manner of a blow gun. Lieutenant Murray gave a cry of warning and hurled himself across the desk at my brother. The pair of them crashed to the floor just as some ten or twelve of New York’s finest dove for cover.
No poison dart came. Instead we heard a gentle puff of air and the sound of a wet splotch. Very deliberately, my brother disentangled himself from Lieutenant Murray, dusted off his trousers, and rose to his feet.
“I appreciate your concern for my safety,” he said, “but I assure you it was not necessary. you will see that one of the remaining cards is now marked with a spot of red pigment.” He held up the card to show a blob of red coloring. “This is what Le Fantôme expels from its pipe—and the only thing it is capable of expelling. So you see, Le Fantôme cannot be the culprit. Therefore, someone else must have slipped into this room, killed Mr. Wintour, and slipped out again without disturbing the locks or arousing the suspicions of the household. I suspect, Lieutenant Murray, that this will alter the direction of your inquiries.”
The lieutenant said nothing. He stared down at Le Fantôme’s wooden smile while the tendons in his neck worked back and forth.
“Oh, and one last thing,” my brother said. He held up the card with the red splotch. “officer Robbins, would you care to show our friends the card which Le Fantôme has marked?”
Robbins flipped the card face-front to show the five of clubs.
From the desk, we heard a soft wooden creak as Le Fantôme’s lips pulled back in a chilling smile.