Harry Houdini Mysteries Read online

  “I don’t understand,” Harry said. “What amendment? Why should we need to consult a lawyer if we intended to have a child?”

  Bess dabbed her eyes with a square of linen and patted Harry’s hand. “It, er, it is simply a matter of having the child added to the marriage certificate,” she said gently. “Just as my name must be added to your passport before we travel abroad.”

  Harry pondered this information. “I don’t see why this amuses you so.”

  Bess composed herself and continued up the stairs. “Don’t give it a second thought,” she said with a toss of her head. “A woman in my condition is entitled to her humors.”

  Harry and I followed as Bess climbed past the magazine offices to the fourth floor of the building. We pushed through a set of swinging doors into an executive suite, noting the legal offices of Mr. Phillip Hawkins to our left.

  A wooden police barricade to our right advised us that the area was off limits. Beyond it we could see a glass door with the name “Edgar Grange” etched on a pebbled glass panel. Harry squeezed past the police barrier while Bess and I kept watch, pulling out his leather wallet of lockpicks as he knelt beside the door to Grange’s office.

  “Look at these marks and scratches!” he cried as he examined the lock. “What a barbarian!”

  “The burglar tried to force the lock?” I asked.

  “Worse,” said Harry. “He used a crowbar. What sort of heathen uses a crowbar? A lock such as this should be treated with respect. A crowbar requires no finesse or—”

  I could hear footsteps approaching from around the corner. “Someone’s coming, Harry,” I said.

  With a show of nonchalance, he selected a coiled hook-head from his wallet and slipped it into the lock. “Then perhaps we should step inside,” he said, as the mechanism gave a sharp click. Harry turned the door handle and pushed the door inward. Bess and I squeezed past the barricade and hurried through the door. Harry pulled it shut behind us, and we remained motionless until the sounds of the footfalls had faded.

  We found ourselves in a well-furnished reception area, with a pair of Sheraton chairs placed before an oval clerk’s desk. Oil portraits depicting sea battles were hung in ornate frames on the walls, a brass sextant and a barometric gauge sat upon a shelf behind the desk.

  “Weather instruments,” I said. “Jasper Clairmont had weather instruments and navigational tools in his study.”

  “Hardly surprising,” Harry said. “The man was in the shipping business. Mr. Grange appears to have shared an interest in the sea.”

  “So it seems. Maybe that’s how they came to be in business together.” I stepped behind the desk and fingered an open appointment ledger.

  “What are you doing there, Dash?” Harry asked. “That’s a private—”

  “Mr. Grange is dead, Harry,” I reminded him. “It would be useful to know if any of our suspects have visited him in the past few days.” I scanned the columns of appointment listings. “There’s nothing here.” I flipped back a few pages. “No, it looks as if—wait! This is interesting!”

  “What’s that?” Bess asked.

  “There’s an appointment here with Jasper Clairmont, and the notation says it has to do with filing papers at City Hall.”

  Bess glanced down at the line I indicated. “What’s so unusual about that, Dash?”

  “It’s the day Jasper Clairmont died.”

  “Is that really so significant?” Bess ran her finger along the adjacent page. “There are no fewer than seven listings for Jasper Clairmont here.”

  “It may be nothing. Let’s see what we can find inside.”

  A door behind the desk led into Mr. Grange’s office. This was a much larger room, with a map table at one end and a heavy Selden desk at the other. Law books lined one entire wall of the office, their spines bound in uniform leather. A low bank of wooden file drawers ran halfway along the opposite wall, with an array of loose papers grouped into piles on top of them.

  “Where do we start?” asked Bess.

  “The cabinets,” I said. “Harry, see what you can do about those locks.”

  Each cabinet was fastened by a metal rod running through security hasps that held the drawers fast. The metal rods themselves were secured with small padlocks that looped through a crossplate.

  “I see no great difficulty about that,” Harry said, pulling out his leather lockpick wallet again. “Let’s just have a look at—oh, dear.”

  “What’s the problem, Harry?”

  “These locks. They’re half-sized. The sort of thing one might find on a cash register or deposit box. The opening is too small for my picks. I require a set of jewelers’ tools.”

  “Or a crowbar,” I suggested.

  “Never.” He frowned over the lock for a moment. “There must be something here I can use.” He glanced around the room. “What’s that?” He pointed to a copper tray on Grange’s desk.

  “A letter opener,” I said.

  “Too big. What’s that?” He indicated a brass cube atop the cabinets.

  “An anemometer, I believe.”

  “A what?”

  “It measures wind.”

  Harry picked it up to see if there were any small pieces of metal he might be able to scavenge. “No good,” he said, setting it down again. “How about that thing over there?” He pointed to a wood and glass cabinet near the map table.

  “I have no idea what that is,” I said, lifting the cabinet lid. “There are quite a few gears and glass tubes in here. I presume it’s another navigational device, but for the life of me I can’t imagine—”

  “Are there any metal springs?”

  “Not small enough for our purposes.”

  “This is intolerable!” Harry began pacing back and forth. “The Great Houdini bested by a jeweler’s lock? Absurd!”

  “Harry,” said Bess, “might I make a suggestion?” She bent down and slipped off one of her shoes. “Would this be of any use?”

  Harry’s eye fell on the delicate buckle at the vamp of the shoe. “My dear, you are a genius!”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Bess said mildly, “but I’m a useful person to have along on a burglary.”

  Harry wasn’t listening. He crouched over the first of the locks and worked at it with the metal tongue of the shoe buckle. In a moment, it snapped open, and Harry pulled out the metal rod holding the drawers shut. He repeated the procedure on each of the subsequent locks, and soon we were thumbing through Mr. Grange’s legal files.

  “I suppose we should start with his file on Lucius Craig,” Harry said.

  “I don’t see that he has one,” I said, riffling through the headings in the drawer marked C. “Let’s see if there’s anything useful in the Clairmont file.”

  As it happened, there were seven bulging files devoted to Jasper Clairmont and his various concerns, and we spent the better part of two hours examining them at the map table. Most contained dry legal documents and shipping manifests, and I felt no great confidence that I would recognize anything untoward or out of place if I happened to come across it.

  “This is hopeless, Dash,” said Bess, paging through a fat file of correspondence between Grange and a manufacturer of builders’ cranes. “We’re not lawyers. We have no idea what we’re after.”

  “There has to be something that incriminates the murderer,” I said. “Why else would he have attempted to break in here?”

  “Perhaps he has a tremendous curiosity about builders’ cranes,” Bess said.

  “I think we’re wasting our time,” said Harry. He jumped up from the table and made his way back to the file drawers. “I’m going to look elsewhere. There must be files here for the others. Dr. Wells. Sterling Foster. Perhaps those would be more illuminating.”

  “Help yourself, Harry,” I said, “but I already checked. No one else has a file.”

  “Not even Kenneth?”

  “There’s no separate file for him, if that’s what you mean. I assume that anything relevan
t to his interests in the family business would be here in his father’s file.” I gestured at the untidy piles of paper on the table. “Somewhere. “

  “I suppose so.” Harry walked over to the desk and threw himself into Edgar Grange’s chair. “Maybe we should have left this to Lieutenant Murray after all. It’s exactly the sort of dry and methodical work at which he excels.” He picked up the letter opener and twirled it across his knuckles.

  “Perhaps we should check under the carpet,” said Bess.

  “Under the carpet?” I asked. “Why?”

  “That’s where. Harry keeps his drawings when he doesn’t want me to see them.”

  “Really?” I turned back to the desk. “What sort of drawings, Harry?”

  “Certain items of importance for which the world is not yet prepared,” he said, his cheeks darkening.

  “Nothing particularly saucy, if that’s what you mean, Dash,” Bess said. “The last time I checked there was a set of illustrations showing how to escape from a regulation United States postal bag.”

  I looked at Harry. “Why do you keep such things hidden? Are you afraid Bess is going to steal your secrets?”

  “Certainly not! It’s just that when I am working on a new routine I like to conceal the method from her until I have perfected the technique. That way she will be properly surprised when I perform it for the first time.”

  “Under the carpet, huh?”

  Harry glanced at the floor. There was a round, violet-hued carpet at the center of the room. “Why not?” he asked. He walked to the middle of the room and folded back the carpet. “There is nothing here,” he said dejectedly.

  “Well, maybe Mr. Grange had a different hiding place,” said Bess. “Try behind that seascape over there.”

  “No,” said Harry, peering behind the painting. “There is nothing here.”

  “What about under the cushions of that chair?”

  “Nothing. Bess, this is hopeless.”

  “Nonsense. Look beneath that carriage clock.”

  “Bess, this is a waste of—ah ha!” Harry snatched up a sheaf of papers. “I knew it!”

  “What do you have there, Harry?” I asked, hurrying to his side.

  “It’s hard to say. It’s a blueprint of some type, but I couldn’t tell you what it’s supposed to represent.”

  I looked over his shoulder. The illustration was fairly crude, showing a short tube linked to a dish that appeared to be covered with marbles. Alongside was a mosaic of spirals, zigzags, and wavy lines. The pattern was duplicated in miniature at one end of the tube.

  “What the devil is that supposed to be?” I asked.

  Bess studied the paper carefully. “Possibly it’s a technique for escaping from a regulation United States postal bag,” she said. “What’s on the other pages?”

  “Technical details,” Harry said, “and a patent application. The tube looks to have a series of glass disks and mirrors inside. There’s a great deal here about ‘optical refraction.’ Could it be a telescope of some kind?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “What’s the dish of marbles for? It seems familiar somehow.”

  “I should think so,” said Bess. “It’s a kaleidoscope.”

  “A kaleidoscope?”

  “Of course! A tube with mirrors and glass marbles at the end! You see how the marbles are arranged in a spiral pattern? What else could it be? The end rotates and the marbles catch the light to form patterns. That’s what all those lines and swirls are meant to show.”

  “There has to be more to it than that, Bess,” I said. “Why should Edgar Grange have a drawing of a child’s toy hidden beneath his clock?”

  “Why should Harry hide his escape plans?”

  “But there’s a patent application. Why would anyone file a patent application on a kaleidoscope? I find it hard to believe that someone would have tried to break into this office for the sole purpose of stealing these plans. Are you suggesting that Edgar Grange was killed over a toy? There has to be more to it than that.”

  “If memory serves, that’s precisely what you said about Branford Wintour and that curious little automaton of his,” Bess reminded me. “ ‘No one gets killed over a toy,’ you said, ‘no matter how valuable.’”

  “And I was correct, as I recall. It turned out that there was a great deal more to—Harry? You’ve gone awfully quiet. What’s the matter?”

  He had been standing with the letter opener dangling from his fingers for some moments, gazing at the far wall with an expression of intense thought. “What’s the matter?” he asked, turning to smile at us. “Nothing is the matter. Now that you mention it, I am quite well.” He twirled the letter opener across his knuckles as though it were a magic wand. “In fact, I have solved the crime!”

  “You have?” Bess asked. “You know who killed Edgar Grange?”

  “I do, indeed,” said Harry, smoothing the points of his bow tie. “You needn’t look so downcast, Dash. I’m sure you would have figured it out eventually. You’re quite clever at these things as well. But this time, I fear, the honor must go to the Great Houdini.”

  “Well, then,” I said, “don’t keep us in suspense. Who did it?”

  He waved a cautionary finger in my direction. “Now, now. That would never do. A magician must wait for the proper moment before he lifts the cloth on his effect. First, we must notify the good Lieutenant Murray. I shall enjoy that. Then we must notify the suspects that they are to assemble in Mr. Clairmont’s study at eight this evening.” He rubbed his hands together. “This will be very gratifying.”

  “You want to assemble the suspects in the drawing room? You don’t think that’s a bit melodramatic?”

  “Of course not! The only question is how I shall address them, to bring them to the very peak of anticipation.” He stood up and linked his hands behind his back. “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight the Great Houdini invites you to witness his most spectacular triumph.” Harry paused to consider the matter. “I suppose that might be a bit too bold, don’t you think?”

  “Harry,” said Bess, “are you quite sure you know who the killer is? Wouldn’t you like to tell us, just to be sure your theory is sound?”

  “No need, my dear,” Harry answered with a cheery wink. “I have reached my solution by means of the same flawless reasoning that guides my escape routines. There can be no possibility of error.”

  “Still,” I said, “it wouldn’t hurt to let us hear what—”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Harry intoned, ignoring us, “tonight the Great Houdini asks you stand in wonder as he unveils his latest miracle of pure thought.” He turned to Bess. “Better?”

  “You might consider toning it down a shade.”

  “Nonsense!” he cried. “I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. Ladies and gentlemen, you are fortunate to be present at the very pinnacle of the Great Houdini’s career in detection.” He paused and stroked his chin. “Well, I suppose something will occur to me when the moment comes.”

  Bess cast an anxious look at me. “I can hardly wait,” she said.

  “And now,” Harry said, “we must go home to dress.”

  Bess and I exchanged a look. “You’re expecting everyone in formal attire?” she asked. “To hear you name Edgar Grange’s killer?”

  “Of course,” Harry said. “It wouldn’t do for me to be the only one.”

  “But—”

  “It is essential that I wear ray stage attire. My entire plan hinges upon it.”

  “But Harry,” I said, “you haven’t told us what your plan is.”

  “Is it not obvious?” he cried, thrusting his finger in the air. ‘Tonight is to be a very special night. It marks the return of Professor Harry Houdini, the Celebrated Psycrometic Clairvoyant, giving a spiritual séance in the open light. Weird happenings presided over by the Man Who Sees All.”

  With that, he turned and swept from the room.

  Bess turned to me and sighed.

  “Weird happenings,�
�� she said.

  10

  THE MIND-READING MACHINE

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” SAID HARRY, RUNNING HIS HANDS over the points of his bow tie, “I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve asked you here this evening.”

  Standing behind him at the séance table, I could not quite conceal my surprise. “That’s it?” I asked, leaning over to whisper in his ear. “That’s your big line?”

  “It was the only thing that came to me,” he murmured. “In any case, my actions will speak far more forcefully than my words.”

  “Let’s hope so,” I said, straightening up to survey the room. Glancing around, I could see that all of the others were, in fact, wondering why he had asked them there that evening. Mrs. Clairmont and Kenneth had agreed to the gathering readily enough, but Lucius Craig and Richardson Wells were decidedly cool to the idea of another gathering in the room where Edgar Grange had died. The butler, Brunson, had been pressed into service once again, and Lieutenant Murray, looking quite resplendent in the formal pigeon-breasted coat he usually wore to the opera, had reluctantly agreed to fill the chair Edgar Grange had occupied on the night in question.

  “I don’t see what’s to be gained by holding another séance,” Dr. Wells grumbled as he took his place at the table. “We’ve had quite enough of that nonsense in this house, if you ask me.”

  “Mr. Houdini assures us that he has new information,” said Lieutenant Murray, “and he insists that this information can only be appreciated in these circumstances.” He fixed my brother with a significant stare. “I am very much hoping that he will not disappoint me.”

  Lieutenant Murray’s tone made it clear that anything less than a total success would not be in Harry’s best interests. The lieutenant was conducting himself with his usual decorum in the presence of Mrs. Clairmont and the others, though he had all but kicked and screamed when Harry asked him to assemble the suspects at the scene of the crime. Harry was told in no uncertain terms that the New York City Police Department was not his to command. After considerable discussion, the lieutenant had grudgingly agreed, because the prospect of seeing the suspects at the séance table suited his own agenda. I hoped, for Harry’s sake, that he had something better planned for us than setting fire to the day’s newspapers.