“Impossible. She cannot be disturbed. She must remain here with me until I see fit to discharge her. When that will be, I cannot predict. Good-day, Mr. Shayne.”
“Doc Cantrell said there was something queer about her condition. What is your diagnosis, doctor?”
Vogle banged his pencil down on the desk. “Are you a relative, sir?”
“Sorry,” said Shayne, “but this happens to be a police matter. Kara, just like you and everybody else involved, is under technical arrest pending investigation of murder.”
Vogle whipped off his glasses, wiped them with his handkerchief, perched them back on his nose. “The patient,” he said irritably, “seems to be in a state of catalepsy. Strictly speaking, though, it’s not a true cataleptic state. More of a ‘trance,’ as we say in psychical research. Sometimes it is caused by traumatic shock; sometimes, as in the case with certain types of spirit-mediumship, it is self-induced.”
Shayne ground out his cigarette in a bronze ashtray shaped like a striking cobra. “I understand you have quite a collection of magic books. Mind if I look at them?” he asked.
Vogle nodded stiffly. “They won’t help you,” he said. “They were intended for the trade only. They’re guardedly written, and in highly technical terms. You could spend a year studying the Houdini collection in the Congressional Library and still know nothing about the bullet trick. He knew about it, of course, but—” Vogle shrugged, letting the sentence hang.
“Isn’t it just barely possible that some member of his company would know?”
“Not necessarily. He was a diabolically clever man, and he trusted no one.”
Shayne rose unsteadily, his head throbbing. Then he saw the smile suddenly vanish from Vogle’s face. He was staring across the room, his expression cold as ice. Shayne turned — blinked.
Vogle remained motionless.
Posed on the stairway in the same lurid evening gown she had worn during the performance, was Kara. Her black, oblique eyes were searing him, not with hate now, as they had from the stage the night before, but with appeal and a half-accusing desperate kind of helplessness.
Her silver-slippered feet seemed scarcely to touch the floor as she moved toward him. “I warned you, Michael Shayne,” she said huskily, “but you would not believe me. Please take me away from here.”
Vogle’s face purpled with rage. “Kara! Go back to your room at once! I won’t warn you again.”
She seized Shayne’s arm, her lips tightening. “My will is stronger than yours!” she said, glaring defiantly at Vogle. “I am leaving. Come, Michael Shayne.”
Vogle jumped to his feet, “You heard what I said, Kara. If you disobey me I promise you the consequences will not be to your liking.”
“That’s for her to decide, Vogle,” Shayne cut in harshly, leading Kara to the door. “And what’s more, you’re committing an illegal act by attempting to hold her against her will. She hasn’t been certified as insane.”
V
During the drive back to the Edgemont Hotel, where she had been living with her late husband, Kara maintained a strange silence. She just stared ahead vacantly, not crying, but with tears steadily trickling down her high-boned cheeks.
At the hotel she insisted on changing back into the Gypsy garb she had worn when she had visited his office the previous morning — brass earrings, bracelets, baubles and all.
Shayne helped her check out and into a comfortable residence hotel room around the corner on Northeast Second Avenue and Eleventh Street, then took her to a nearby restaurant.
In the curtained-off privacy of a booth, Kara devoured a steak while Shayne toyed with scrambled eggs and toast. He ordered a brandy and soda for himself, and coffee for Kara at her request. When the waitress had cleared away the dinner plates he spoke sternly.
“All right, let’s have it. What made you so sure your husband was going to be murdered?”
She regarded him with swollen, red-rimmed eyes. “I told you. I am clairvoyant.”
“So you’re clairvoyant. But you knew something. What?”
A faint, disdainful smile played around the corners of her mouth. “Are you not often helped by what you call ‘hunches?’ A sudden intuition — the flash of an idea from nowhere — something that explodes in your subconscious and makes no sense at all at the time?”
“We won’t argue about that. What I don’t understand is why didn’t you warn your husband instead of me?”
“But I did!” she cried. “I did! I even threatened to leave him! But he only laughed at me.”
Shayne offered her a cigarette, which she refused. He lit one for himself, studied her through a cloud of smoke, then switched his line of attack. “Did he have any enemies?”
“No, not really. He didn’t have many friends, either.” She stirred her coffee slowly, half smiling. “He was very jealous of me.”
Shayne tugged at his left earlobe. “Tell me how he did the bullet trick.”
She leaned back with half-closed eyes. “If I only knew, Michael Shayne, if I only knew. As close as we were, he kept it a secret even from me.”
He drained his glass slowly, then spoke in an offhand manner. “Did your sixth sense tell you your husband had a bullet in his mouth when he was murdered?”
The color slowly ebbed from Kara’s face.
Suddenly she was the Gypsy woman with the tawdry aura of mystery about her again, her eyes darkly veiled. “The bullet that killed him!” she whispered. “Did you see the mark?”
Shayne decided to ignore the evasion. Let her play it her own way. She was holding back something, but perhaps it would all come out if he let her talk. Perhaps this was her way of telling him. Perhaps she had become so steeped in her own particular brand of hocus-pocus that she now firmly believed her own line.
“What about the mark?”
Kara leaned closer to him. “Stop fighting me, Michael Shayne,” she said. “Copy that mark down on a piece of paper, fold it up, and I will do the rest.”
Grudgingly, the redhead took a letter from his pocket, and tore off a small piece of the envelope. On it he jotted down the capital letter “N,” folded the paper in halves, then quarters. He placed it in the palm of her outstretched hand.
He watched her closely as she closed her eyes, and pressed the slip of paper to her forehead. Suddenly she froze. “Quickly, the car!” she exclaimed, her voice rising. “There is not a moment to lose.”
Miami’s midtown traffic was at its usual worst, and it seemed even more so to the redhead because Kara was directing him, and admittedly had no more idea of where they were going than he had.
Her eyes were closed, and she was clutching the slip of paper tightly in her right hand as she pointed straight ahead on Northeast Second Avenue. He wheeled out of the parking space, cursing inwardly, and nosed into the thick, honking traffic.
As they approached the third intersection Kara cried, “Turn right.” Four blocks further she spoke again, more quietly this time.
Left, right, left again, until they were out of the city limits and clipping along south on Flagler Highway. As they reached the outskirts of Leisure City, a bright, crisp little town some thirty miles from Miami, she told him to slow down. They made two more turns before she stopped him in front of a liquor store on the ground floor of a nondescript but tidy two-storied building a short distance from the beach.
She opened her eyes for the first time. “You thought you wrote the letter N,” she said, her eyes shining. “But when you hold it this way—” She unfolded and reversed the wad of paper — “it’s the letter Z!”’ She pointed to the sign over the store window. It read: GEN. ZAMBONI — Prop.