The Dime Museum Murders (5 page)

"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 Rei-chenbach 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. Win-tour'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
flattop, 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 al! 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."