It was almost ten before Merlini could get away. And by then I was really bothered. I took the wheel, prayed that whatever traffic cops were abroad would be looking the other way, and stepped on the gas. Merlini tried to fold his six-foot length into a comfortable sleeping position on the back seat.
“Whipping up a Broadway show,” he said, “is one of the things that doth murder sleep. Investigating haunted houses is another. I’m going to get forty winks while I can. Wake me when you sight land.”
“No you don’t,” I protested. “Not just yet. There’s one thing I want to know first. How come you’re in Dudley Wolff’s little black book, too? What was this ‘last time’ you and Kay mentioned?”
“Oh that wasn’t anything much. Dudley and I had a little argument about some ectoplasm. He lost. He didn’t like it much. That’s all. Be quiet and let me—”
“No. Any time Wolff loses an argument that’s news. I want to hear about it. Come on. Give.”
He answered with a snore. I flicked the radio switch on the dashboard, got a news broadcast, and turned the volume on full.
“All right, Ross,” he said. “If you’re going to be difficult, I’ll make a deal with you. I’ve got a question too. Give me the answer and I’ll tell you the story.”
I turned the radio off. “Sure. Let’s have it.” I spoke too soon and said too much. I knew I had been doublecrossed as soon as he began.
“A man is rowing upstream,” he said. “He passes two mile markers. At the second his hat blows off into the river. But he isn’t very quick-witted and doesn’t notice his loss until ten minutes later. Then he turns around and rows back to retrieve the hat. He fishes it out of the water at the first mile marker. His name was J. Wellington Sloop and the hat was size 7⅜. Wake me when you’ve figured out the speed of the current.”
“Sold,” I groaned. “And down the river too.” I didn’t even try to dope out the answer. I had heard Merlini propound puzzles before. They were always hand-picked stickers. I flipped the radio switch again.
“Ross,” he objected. “You gave me your word of honor. You promised—”
“I know you,” I replied. “I had my fingers crossed. Give up?”
“Yes. You win. Turn off that infernal machine.”
I obeyed. He said, “The speed of the current can be obtained by simply—”
“Hey! I don’t give a damn about the current speed under an escaped lunatic in a rowboat. I want to know—”
“You and your single-track mind! All right. Remember Jeanne Veiller?”
I nodded. “The name’s familiar, but I don’t place the face.”
“She was Dudley Wolff’s 1934 candidate for the psychic Pulitzer Prize: She specialized in ectoplasmic forms. Best grade too. She produced ’em at the drop of a hat and under the most rigid test conditions. Wolff and Galt gave her a thorough going over, applied all the usual tests for fraud and a lot of new ones. Result: negative. And then, finally, they climbed way out on a limb and announced that the ectoplasm was the genuine McCoy. Francis Galt knows a thing or two about mediumistic monkeyshines and his okay isn’t easy to get. Jeanne knew that, and she figured that if she got a passing grade from him she could do as well with any tests I might think up. So she put in a claim for the American Scientist challenge money.”
I began to remember some of the headlines now. “She came close to getting it, too, didn’t she?”
“Yes. Too close for comfort. I was on the spot. Every spiritualist in the country was grinning from ear to ear, baying at my heels, and ready to laugh out loud if I failed to upset the psychic applecart. I went over the séance photos Galt had taken with a fine-toothed magnifying glass at least a dozen times before I found anything that even looked like a clue — a faint dark line along the edge of one ghost form that looked suspiciously like a selvage.”
“Meaning that the ectoplasm really was all wool and a yard wide?”
“Yes, but not wool. Cheesecloth, the old standby. The trouble was that Galt had searched the lady so thoroughly that producing cheesecloth was nearly as good a trick as producing the real thing in ectoplasm. It was a better trick than taking a rabbit from a hat. She seemed to be doing it without a hat. I had to find out where she was hiding it. I went through all the motions Galt had gone through. I saw to it that she disrobed completely in the presence of a medical man who gave her a thorough physical search. He signed an affidavit swearing that she wasn’t hiding as much as a hairpin on her person. Then she went into a bathing suit that had been supplied by the committee and into a séance room where no ectoplasm could have previously been planted because no one even remotely connected with her had been informed of its location until the last minute. The spectators — committeemen, newspapermen, Wolff, and Galt watched from another room, through glass. No one had a ghost of a chance to slip her anything.
“And the ectoplasm showed up right on schedule just the same! She even rubbed it in by producing more than usual. And then, after posing for a few pictures, it dematerialized. She took her rabbit from a top hat and then put it back in again, only she didn’t have a top hat, or did she?”
“Are you asking me?”
“Yes.”
“Look, suppose we go back to that one about the lunatic in the rowboat. I’d just as soon—”
“It’s too late now. You asked for this. There were two possibilities. One, the ten-thousand-dollar answer: the ectoplasm was a visible manifestation of spirit substance that came from and returned to an astral fourth-dimensional plane — or something. Two, the answer I seemed to be stuck with: it was still cheesecloth no matter how thin it was sliced, and it came from and returned to some hiding place all the previous investigators, including my doctor, had overlooked. There was such a place, and I knew it. But I also knew I was going to have the devil’s own time getting a look into it. So I tried a spot of misdirection.
“The séance was over. Miss Veiller looked happy and confident. Wolff and Galt were as pleased as Punch. I pretended to look worried. The doctor began taking a few temperature, pulse, and blood-pressure readings in the interest of medical science. And then, when he tipped her head back and began giving her eyes a once-over, I gave Burt the high sign. He wheeled in a portable X-ray machine we had waiting and got a quick candid shot of her midriff.
“That tore it. The photo showed the dark silhouette of a safety pin in her tummy. She had balled up the cheesecloth, held it together with the pin, swallowed it prior to the séance, regurgitated it for its ectoplasmic appearance, then gulped it down again. That was the hat her rabbit came from. What Jeanne hadn’t counted on was the fact that as an ex-circus man I’ve seen quite a few sword swallowers in action. Also human ostriches who swallow lemons, watches, white mice—”
“Uh huh,” I said. “And I can see next day’s headlines: Merlini Can’t Swallow Spooks but Medium Does.”
“Yes. They had a lot of fun with it. Wolff and Galt found themselves neck-deep in the wrong sort of publicity. Inside Story on Exposé. Medium Lunches on Ectoplasm. Wolff and Galt Eat Crow. I felt sorry for them — as much as I could, remembering that if I hadn’t been able to blow the gas the laugh would have been on the other foot.”
“They admitted they’d been bamboozled then?”
“No. Not Wolff. He’d stuck his neck out so far he couldn’t pull it in gracefully. He hinted for publication that the evidence of fraud had been faked, that I had added the pin to the back of the medium’s bathing suit by sleight of hand, and Galt suggested that it could have been double exposed on the X-ray plate. I tried to counter that by asking for another séance and permission to use a stomach pump. Jeanne pretended that she didn’t hear. And that’s why we’ve got such a tough row to hoe tonight. We’ve not only got to catch our ghost with its shroud down, but prove at the same time, with no possible probable shadow of doubt whatever that our evidence isn’t tailor-made for the occasion.”