The Floating Lady Murder Page 6

  “I am certain of it,” said Harry firmly. “It is only a matter of time.”

  “You seem a very confident young man, Mr. Houdini.” Kellar sipped at his bourbon. “That’s all to the good. Confident and brave in the bargain.”

  Harry brushed aside the compliment. “As I have already said, Mr. McAdow has made entirely too much of my exploit at the theater. No doubt you would have done the same.”

  Kellar examined the white ash at the end of his cigar. “I doubt it, young man, but you are kind to say so. However, I wasn’t referring to your little dust-up with Boris.”

  “Ah! You have seen me perform!” Harry’s cheeks glowed with pleasure. “Perhaps you came to see me at Huber’s Museum the last time you passed through New York? I thought I spotted you. Or perhaps you’ve had occasion to witness my turn with the Marco Company?” Harry jumped to his feet and began pacing the compartment, barely able to contain his excitement. “I assure you, those performances gave only the merest suggestion of the Great Houdini’s talents. In the proper circumstances, there is no limit to what I might achieve. Why, with my skills and your resources, I might at last be able to—”

  “Please, Mr. Houdini,” said Kellar, holding up his palm, “I’m afraid I’ve not yet had the honor of seeing your stage act.”

  “No?” Harry’s face fell. “Then how do you know of my remarkable skills and abilities?”

  “I’ve had reports, my friend.” Kellar frowned at his cigar, as if deciding whether it could be trusted with a confidence. “You see, I’ve made a few inquiries about you, Mr. Houdini. You and your brother.”

  “Inquiries?”

  “Josef Graff was a friend of mine.”

  Harry’s lips twitched. “He was a friend of mine, as well,” he said, sitting down again. “Such a loss.”

  “Branford Wintour was also my friend.”

  “I did not have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Wintour before— that is to say—”

  “Before his murder?” Kellar gazed through the picture window as the train slowed to pass through the Poughkeepsie station. “I suppose you wouldn’t have. But you certainly came to know the circumstances of his death well enough, didn’t you?”

  Mr. Kellar was referring to an unhappy affair in which Harry and I had become entangled the previous year, when our friend Josef Graff, the owner of a New York magic shop, had been accused of the murder of a reclusive millionaire named Branford Wintour. Harry and I, through a combination of native cunning and dumb luck, had managed to stumble across the real killer, though the discovery nearly cost us our own lives.

  “Mr. Kellar.” I said, setting down my cigar, “the authorities were careful to withhold any mention of the role that Harry and I played in the Wintour murder. Our names never appeared in any of the newspapers.”

  “An outrage!” Harry grumbled. “The police would still be chasing their own shadows if I had not—”

  “Be that as it may, Harry, the information was considered confidential. How did you come to know of it, Mr. Kellar?”

  Our host studied my face closely for a moment, evidently finding something there that he had not noticed before. “It seems I am not allowed to keep any of my secrets these days,” he sighed. “Very well, Mr. Hardeen. I play cards with Senator Bibbs. He was there at the resolution of the matter, I believe, and he’s a rather indiscreet fellow once he’s had a few bottles of wine poured down his throat. I made it my business to find out why Josef’s death had been hushed up in such a strange manner.”

  I set down my glass and rose from my chair. “I’m afraid we can say nothing further on this matter, Mr. Kellar. Harry and I were sworn to—”

  “Sit down, Mr. Hardeen,” Kellar said with a dry chuckle. “I wouldn’t think of asking you to betray a confidence. It pleases me to learn that you and your brother can be trusted to keep a secret. I wonder if I might presume to entrust you with one of mine?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Henry,” came a woman’s voice, “can’t you set aside the theatrics even for a moment?” We looked up to see a tall, extremely elegant woman standing in the entryway. “Sometimes I think your talents are wasted as a magician. You should have been an actor in a melodrama!”

  Kellar threw back his head with laughter. “Gentlemen, Mrs. Houdini,” he said, rising to his feet. “Allow me to present my wife, Eva.”

  I had seen Mrs. Kellar often enough serving as an assistant to her husband when he was a younger man. Then as now, I was struck by her proud bearing and graceful carriage, but in person there was a pleasant sense of mischief playing about her features, as though she had just been told a rather wicked joke. The lovely auburn hair that I remembered from her touring days was now shot through with grey, and she wore it off her shoulders in the fashion of the day.

  “It’s fortunate that I came when I did,” she told Bess as she took a seat near her husband. “Otherwise Henry might have spent the rest of the journey making those strange, cryptic remarks. He’s a great one for dramatic pronouncements.”

  Bess gave a sidelong glance at Harry. “A professional hazard, I suspect.”

  My brother leaned forward. “Why does Mrs. Kellar call you by the name of ‘Henry’? I thought—”

  “My given name is Heinrich,” Kellar said. “Never much cared for the name. What about you? You don’t strike me as a man who was born ‘Harry.’ ”

  “No,” my brother admitted. “I was born Ehrich Weiss.”

  “So you chose your stage name to echo that of a great performer from the past. Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin becomes Harry Houdini. Makes good—”

  “Gentlemen,” said Mrs. Kellar firmly, “there will be plenty of time to exchange pedigrees in the coming weeks. Before we reach Albany, Henry, I think you had better say what’s on your mind.”

  Kellar nodded. “Eva has a habit of coming to the point,” he said, making his way to the far end of the car. He paused before a framed handbill, from the early years of his career, announcing an exhibition of ‘Curious and Utterly Baffling Surprises.’ Beneath it stood a wide captain’s desk with a number of wooden cubbyholes. Kellar fished out a key on the end of his watch chain and unlocked a drawer at the back of the desk. Reaching in, he withdrew a heavy Babson church lock which had evidently been prised from a wooden door.

  “You say you’re clever with locks, Mr. Houdini,” said Kellar. “What do you make of this one?”

  Harry took the lock and turned it over in his hands several times, examining it from all angles. Then he carried it over to one of the wall sconces and held it up to the light. “Interesting,” he said, passing the lock to me. “What do you think, Dash?”

  “It’s obvious that the lock has been interfered with,” I said, after a moment’s examination. “I would say that at least five of the pins have been filed down.”

  “Exactly so,” Harry agreed. “Rather sloppy work, by the look of it, but it would get the job done. One would have only to put his shoulder to the door and it would fly open. Probably the work of an amateur burglar. Was anything taken?”

  “No, nothing is missing.” Kellar folded his hands. “Gentlemen, I pried that lock from the bars of the lion cage only three hours ago.”

  Bess let out a gasp as her hand flew to her mouth. Harry and I merely stared at our host in disbelief, as though he might be playing some sort of prank. “You cannot be serious, Mr. Kellar,” Harry said, his voice rising. “Do you really mean to say that the lion was set free deliberately?”

  “That is precisely what I mean.”

  Harry took the lock from my hands and peered again into the keyhole. “But who would do such a thing?”

  “I’m afraid I have no idea, Mr. Houdini.” Kellar rose and began refilling his glass at the sideboard. He turned to me and raised his eyebrows. I passed over my empty glass.

  “Mr. Kellar,” I said, “if what you say is true, you are suggesting that someone intended for the lion to escape during yesterday’s rehearsal. But what we saw was an accident. There can be no question about i
t. One of your stagehands fell from a platform and knocked a scenery flat onto the cage. It could hardly have been staged. It was just bad luck.”

  “Actually, I believe it was a stroke of good luck,” he answered, handing me a fresh bourbon and soda. “I believe that it was a perverse good fortune that you and your brother happened to be there when Boris escaped. If what I believe is true, then whoever tampered with this lock did not expect that the lion would break out of the cage until tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “During the performance in Albany. At the opening of the Lion’s Bride illusion, I cause Boris’s cage to appear in a puff of smoke. I use a pair of smudgepots to cover the workings, and the flash as the pots go off usually causes the lion to startle. In fact, we planned it that way so that Boris would roar and swipe at the bars of the cage—good, dramatic stuff —just to show that it wasn’t a man in a lion suit or some such fakery. But if Boris had knocked against the bars with this lock on the door—”

  “—The cage would have sprung open,” Harry said.

  “Exactly. And a ferocious, hungry lion would have been turned loose.”

  My sister-in-law made a curious noise and seemed in danger of fainting. Harry took her hands and rubbed them. “I’m all right, Harry,” she insisted. “I just couldn’t help but picture the scene in my mind. It was frightening enough when the theater was relatively empty, but a full house—”

  “Exactly,” said Kellar.

  “But what about your safety measures?” I asked. “Surely you have your handlers standing ready backstage in case anything goes wrong?”

  “Of course,” Kellar replied. “But you saw how long it took them to respond to your dilemma yesterday. If he had escaped during a live performance, the creature might well have been loose for two or three minutes before we could bring him under control.”

  “He might have killed as many as a dozen people in that time,” said Harry. He turned to Kellar, as though considering an even more grim prospect. “Your career would have been ruined,” he added.

  “My life would have been ruined,” Kellar said emphatically. “I don’t see how I could have lived with the knowledge that I had caused such carnage.”

  Harry picked up the lock and examined it a second time. “When was the last time you performed the Lion’s Bride?”

  “We’ve not yet done it before an audience. We bought it from the Great Lafayette when it became clear that the Floating Lady wouldn’t be ready in time. Lafayette can take it right back as far as I’m concerned.”

  “But you’ve rehearsed the effect?”

  “Of course. The day before yesterday. We ran it seven times.”

  “I take it the lock was in working order at the time?”

  “Unquestionably. Boris rattled the bars of the cage several times during each rehearsal. Boris is usually a very docile creature. Under normal conditions, the flashing of the smudge pots is required to rouse him to a show of anger.”

  “Falling scenery appears to have the same effect,” Harry noted.

  “Just so,” Kellar said.

  “When did the rehearsals end?” I asked.

  Kellar glanced at his wife. “It must have been before six o’clock. Eva and I kept a dinner engagement in the city. Yes, six o’clock or so.”

  “So sometime between the end of rehearsals and the mishap the following afternoon, someone must have tampered with the lock.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Boris doesn’t spend all of his time in the cage, does he?”

  “No. At the end of rehearsals he was taken off to an exercise pen in Brooklyn.”

  Harry banged the lock mechanism against his open palm once or twice. “Who would have access to the cage once rehearsals had ended?”

  “That’s just it, Mr. Houdini. I run a very tight ship. You know what steps one must take to protect secrets in this business. My equipment is held under lock and key whenever it is not in use.”

  “At the theater?” I asked.

  “Yes. Under guard. A fellow named Danbury. Been with me for some years. A very reliable person, you may be assured. Old army man.”

  I set down my glass. “Are there any members of your company who might get access to your equipment after hours without rousing the suspicions of the guard?”

  “No, Mr. Hardeen. I trust the members of my company, but I find it best not to place temptation in their way. Danbury keeps me informed if there is anyone poking about where they shouldn’t be.”

  “Have there been any unusual comings and goings?”

  “None.”

  “So whoever tampered with the cage must have done so during the course of a normal rehearsal.”

  “Yes,” said Kellar.

  “But that means—”

  “Yes, Mr. Houdini. Whoever rigged that lock is a member of my own company.”

  I stubbed out my Havana in a crystal ashtray. “You don’t sound entirely surprised, Mr. Kellar.”

  He rubbed his forehead wearily. “I’m afraid I’ve been expecting something of the sort, now that we’re so close to debuting the Floating Lady. I’ve spent a fortune developing that illusion, and you can’t imagine what Le Roy would do to get his hands on it. I must hold the copyright to the Floating Lady at all—”

  Harry looked up from the locking mechanism. “I thought I understood that Mr. Maskelyne held the copyright to the Floating Lady. Was I misinformed?”

  Kellar’s eyes flashed with sudden anger. “Sir,” he said with considerable heat, “Mr. Maskelyne is a fine magician, a clever inventor and an excellent showman. The Egyptian Hall in London is an ornament to the conjuror’s craft and we would do well to emulate its success here in America. But for all his many talents, Mr. Maskelyne cannot claim to own the patent on inspiration. He has devised a very engaging little illusion called Asrah, and it is a commendable effort, so far as it goes. But it is not the Floating Lady that I have in mind. It is not the Floating Lady that I have dreamed of since boyhood. And by God it is not the Floating Lady that I plan to present in New York City in four days’ time!”

  Kellar’s voice had risen steadily during these remarks, and by the time he concluded his face had turned an alarming shade of red. “You must forgive my husband,” said Mrs. Kellar in a tone of mild reproach, as though he had dropped a dinner roll. “It is one of the few subjects upon which he has absolutely no sense of humor.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Kellar, struggling to master his temper, “I—”

  “Do you mean to say,” Harry broke in, brushing aside the social proprieties, “that you have been working on a Floating Lady illusion since the beginning of your career?”

  “I have. It was a lifelong dream of my mentor, the Wizard of Kalliffa.” His eyes drifted toward a small portrait in a gilt frame. It showed a steely-eyed older man with mutton chop whiskers, a dimpled chin and a sweep of dark hair across a heavily-lined forehead. “He always said that this trick would bring fame and fortune to the man who perfected it. I believe that even he had no real conception of what the idea would be worth. I estimate that the man who introduces the Floating Lady to America stands to make well over one million dollars.”

  “One million!”

  “It’s true, Mr. Hardeen. My bookings have fallen off a touch during recent years, but a headline grabber such as this one would put me back in the money. Moreover, I could send out four or five touring companies, each one carrying an authorized version of the effect. Make no mistake, one of us is going to make a fortune—me or Servais Le Roy.” He leaned back and drew on his cigar. “Fame and fortune does not matter to me so much as it once did,” he continued, “but I confess that I will not consider my career complete until I have mastered this one last illusion. I feel that I owe it to my old mentor.”

  “He was really an Englishman, wasn’t he? The Wizard of Kalliffa?”

  “A Scot, Mr. Houdini. Duncan McGregor. I knew him as Mac. He and Mrs. McGregor were like second parents to me, and I have tried to honor th
eir memory by becoming the kind of magician he wanted me to be.”

  Harry studied the face in the portrait. “How did a Scot named Duncan McGregor come to be known as the ‘Wizard of Kalliffa’?”

  “In those days, every Scottish magician had to take pains to avoid comparisons with the great John Henry Anderson. I think Mac might have done better without the exotic trappings, however. He was born too soon, really. He had brilliant ideas, just brilliant. The Floating Lady was like the holy grail to him. He nearly got there.”

  “But surely in his day there was little hope of perfecting such an ambitious illusion? It is only recently that we’ve developed the necessary mechanics.”

  Kellar chuckled. “It may amuse you to know that Mac created and discarded no fewer than five methods of floating a lady, including the one that Mr. Maskelyne is taking such great pains to protect. Mac simply wasn’t satisfied with any of them. He invented the apparatus you may know as a ‘levitation banquette’—the piece of furniture upon which the assistant is resting as she begins to rise. It’s a wonderfully clever idea. The banquette appears to be so innocent, and yet—well, I suppose you know all about it. In any case, Mac discovered a means of causing the assistant to rise from the banquette and hover about five feet off the stage. I thought it was a thing of beauty, but he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted her to float out over the heads of the audience. ‘Got to get her off the stage and into the audience,’ he would say. ‘Knock down the artifice of the thing.’ ”

  “Floating over the heads of the audience,” Harry said, with a note of reverence in his voice. “That would be one for the ages.”

  “Exactly. Mac planned to debut the effect at the old Lyceum, which had a magnificent high dome, so that Mrs. McGregor could rise clear up to the top.” Kellar paused, gazing long and hard at the framed portrait. “Mac even had his patter all scripted. ‘Cast your eyes heavenward, my friends, and watch as she rises, rises, rises. Now she flings aside the high-flown theories of gravity and science like so much useless chaff. See how she floats, as though on a gentle zephyr, borne aloft by the hypnotic force of animal magnetism.’ ”