Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

I didn’t like the sound of that. Neither did Gavigan. He started to object. “Now, wait a minute. You’re not going-”

But Merlini had already gone. He moved with long strides toward the street door, and the Inspector half rose from his chair as if to go after him. Then, when Gavigan saw what lay beyond the window, he stopped. The window we both faced was in a side wall at right angles to the street, and it opened, not to the outside, but into the arcade that runs through the Williston building.

Through the glass we could see a twenty-foot stretch of the arcade’s opposite wall and against it, running from side to side, was a row of half a dozen phone booths.

I took a quick look at the clock on the wall above the window just as Merlini vanished through the street door. He reappeared at once in the arcade beyond the window, went directly to the second booth from the right, and went inside. The door closed.

“I don’t like this,” I said. “In three minutes the time will be exactly-”

“Quiet!” Gavigan commanded.

“-exactly nine o’clock,” I finished. “Zyyzk’s deadline!”

“He’s not going to pull this off,” Gavigan said. “You keep your eyes on that booth. I’m going outside and watch it from the street entrance. When the time’s up, join me.”

I heard his chair scrape across the floor as he got up, but I kept my eyes glued to the scene beyond the window – more precisely to one section of it – the booth into which Merlini had gone. I could see the whole face of the door from top to bottom and the dim luminescence of the light inside.

Nothing happened.

The second hand on the wall clock moved steadily, but much too slowly. At five seconds to the hour I found myself on my feet. And when the hand hit twelve I moved fast. I went through the door, turned left, and found Gavigan just inside the arcade entrance, his eyes fixed on the booth.

“Okay,” he said without turning his head. “Come on.”

We hurried forward together. The Inspector jerked the door of the second booth open. The light inside blinked out.

Inside, the telephone receiver dangled, still swaying, by its cord.

The booth was empty.

Except for one thing. I bent down and picked it up off the floor – Merlini’s shiny silver dollar.

Gavigan swore. Then he pushed me aside, stepped into the booth and lifted the receiver. His voice was none too steady. He said one word into the phone.

“Hello?”

Leaning in behind him, I heard the voice that replied -Merlini’s voice making a statement that was twice as impossible as anything that had happened yet.

“Listen carefully,” it said. “And don’t ask questions now. I’m at 1462-12 Astoria Avenue, the Bronx. Got that? 1462-12 Astoria. Keeler’s here – and a murderer! Hurry !”

The tense urgency of that last command sent a cold shiver down my spine. Then I heard the click as the connection was broken.

Gavigan stood motionless for a second, holding the dead phone. Then the surging flood of his emotions spilled over. He jiggled the receiver frantically and swore again.

“Blast it! This phone is dead!”

I pulled myself out of a mental tailspin, found a nickel, and dropped it in the slot. Gavigan’s verbal fireworks died to a mutter as he heard the dial tone and he jabbed savagely at the dial.

A moment later the Telegraph Bureau was broadcasting a bowdlerized version of Gavigan’s orders to the prowl cars in the Astoria Avenue neighbourhood. And Gavigan and I were running for the street and his own car. Brady saw us coming, gunned his motor, and the instant we were aboard, took off as though jet-powered. He made a banked turn into Fifth Avenue against a red light, and we raced uptown, siren screaming.

If Zyyzk had been there beside us, handing out dire predictions that we were headed straight for the Pearly Gates, I wouldn’t have doubted him for a moment. We came within inches of that destination half a dozen times as we roared swerving through the crosstown traffic.

The Astoria address wasn’t hard to find. There were three prowl cars parked in front of it and two uniformed cops on the front porch. One sat on the floor, his back to the wall, holding a limp arm whose sleeve was stained with blood. There were two round bullet holes in the glass of the door above him. As we ran up the walk, the sound of gun fire came from the rear of the house and the second cop lifted his foot, kicked in a front window, and crawled in through the opening, gun in hand.

The wounded man made a brief report as we passed him. “Nobody answered the door,” he said. “But when we tried to crash the joint, somebody started shooting.”

Somebody was still shooting. Gavigan, Brady, and I went through the window and toward the sound. The officer who had preceded us was in the kitchen, firing around the jamb of the back door. An answering gun blazed in the dark outside and the cop fired at the flash.

“Got him, I think,” the cop said. Then he slipped out through the door, moved quickly across the porch and down the steps. Brady followed him.

Gavigan’s pocket-flash suddenly sent out a thin beam of light. It started a circuit of the kitchen, stopped for a moment as it picked up movement just outside the door, and we saw a third uniformed man pull himself to a sitting position on the porch floor, look at the bloodstain on his trouser leg, and swear.

Then the Inspector’s flash found the open cellar door.

And down there, beside the beginning of a grave, we found Judge Keeler.

His head had been battered in.

But he couldn’t find Merlini anywhere in the house. It wasn’t until five minutes later, when we were opening Keeler’s suitcase, that Merlini walked in.

He looked at the cash and negotiable securities that tumbled out. “You got here,” he said, “before that vanished, too, I see.”

Gavigan looked up at him. “But you just arrived this minute. I heard a cab out front.”

Merlini nodded. “My driver refused to ignore the stop lights the way yours did. Did you find the Judge?”

“Yes, we found him. And I want to know how of all the addresses in Greater New York, you managed to pick this one out of your hat?”

Merlini’s dark eyes twinkled. “That was the easy part. Keeler’s disappearance, as I said once before, added up to two invisible men. As soon as I knew who the second one must be, I simply looked the name up in the phone book.”

“And when you vanished,” I asked, “was that done with two invisible men?”

Merlini grinned. “No. I improved on the Judge’s miracle a bit. I made it a one-man operation.”

Gavigan had had all the riddles he could digest. “We found Keeler’s body,” he growled ominously, “beside an open grave. And if you don’t stop-”

“Sorry,” Merlini said, as a lighted cigarette appeared mysteriously between his fingers. “As a magician I hate to have to blow the gaff on such a neatly contrived bit of hocus pocus as The Great Phone Booth Trick. But if I must – well, it began when Keeler realized he was going to have to take a runout powder. He knew he was being watched. It was obvious that if he and Helen Hope tried to leave town by any of the usual methods, they’d both be picked up at once. Their only chance was to vanish as abruptly and completely as Judge Crater and Dorothy Arnold once did. I suspect it was Zyyzk’s first prediction that Miss Hope would disappear that gave Keeler the idea. At any rate, that was what set the wheels in motion.”

“I thought so,” Gavigan said. “Zyyzk was in on it.”

Merlini shook his head. “I’m afraid you can’t charge him with a thing. He was in on it – but he didn’t know it. One of the subtlest deceptive devices a magician uses is known as ‘the principle of the impromptu stooge.’ He so manages things that an unrehearsed spectator acts as a confederate, often without ever realizing it. That’s how Keeler used Zyyzk. He built his vanishing trick on Zyyzk’s predictions and used them as misdirection. But Zyyzk never knew that he was playing the part of a red herring.”