When he joined us, after a moment, in the bedroom, I said, “So, it was a trap door after all.”
He grinned. “No, Ross. Cross my heart. No trap doors.” He looked at Wolff and Galt. “Well, what price ghost now? Will you admit that maybe our mysterious visitor doesn’t need to assay one hundred percent ectoplasm?”
Galt growled. “Never mind the prologue. Let’s have it.”
Merlini shook his head. “Not so fast. The escape from this room is a good trick. My business is selling tricks. I’m afraid I’ll have to make a charge.” He was looking at Wolff.
The latter grunted. “I’ll be damned! All right. What do you want?”
“Information. I want to know who this alleged ghost pretends to be, when he died, and how. I want to examine that study, and I want you to report the unexplained absence of your boatkeeper to the police.”
Wolff glared at him, silent for a long moment. Then he snapped, “That’s all, is it?”
“For the moment, yes. Is it a deal?”
There was nothing ambiguous about Wolff’s answer. He said, “No!” explosively.
I didn’t like the way things were shaping up at all. When Dudley Wolff reacted that way blasting powder wouldn’t budge him. Unless Merlini came down off his high horse we were stymied.
But he only grew more reckless. “Wolff,” he said, “you’ve been investigating psychic phenomena and you’ve picked up a red-hot poker. I think I can help you. But not unless I get some co-operation.”
Wolff went into his steam-roller act. “How,” he demanded thunderously, “did you get out of this room?”
Merlini stood pat. “I’m a ghost. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it as long as you keep saying no. Come on, Ross. We’re leaving.”
He turned on his heel and started out. I opened my mouth to protest. But he threw me a wink as he turned and, although I knew it wasn’t going to work, there was little I could do but follow his lead. Galt started to give Wolff an argument as we left, but the latter cut him off angrily.
Merlini walked slowly down the hall, giving Wolff a chance to change his mind. Wolff didn’t take it. Instead, he called down and told Phillips to give us our hats and coats.
“This,” I complained feelingly as the door closed behind us, “is just swell! God knows what will happen in there next. And you have to get us tossed out on our ears! Don’t you know that Dudley Wolff is six times as stubborn as an army mule, that trying to force him to do something is decidedly not the way to handle him, that—”
“Yes, I know all that,” Merlini said. “But I’ve developed a ‘How to Handle Dudley Wolff’ system. I thought it worked rather well.”
“Oh you do, do you? I suppose you wanted to get us thrown out.”
“That was the general idea. I had to avoid telling Wolff how I got out of that room for one thing. There wasn’t a lot more we could do there anyway. We’ve got to find out what he’s holding back. We can’t do it under his eagle eye. But if he thinks we’ve gone, if we drive off noisily in the car, and then return on the q.t.—”
I didn’t get any of this. I said so. “Maybe I’m crazy, but what kind of an investigation can we carry on when we’re locked out?”
Merlini grinned. “You forget, Ross. I’m a magician. Put your faith in the Magic Shop slogan: Nothing Is Impossible. Stop fussing, and get that car going.”
“Okay. But whatever it is you’ve got up your sleeve, it had better be good”
I started the car, racing the motor a bit as we moved off so that Wolff could hear it. Two or three hundred yards from the house I turned off the drive at Merlini’s direction and parked under the trees. We left the car there and made our way cautiously back toward the house, keeping a weather eye peeled for Leonard in case he had resumed his patrol. We found a place from which we could watch the house without being seen and settled down to wait.
Merlini tried, mysteriously, to parry all my questions, but I finally wore him down. “Listen,” I objected, “if you don’t tell me how you managed that escape act I’ll — I’ll—”
“You’ll what?”
“I haven’t decided yet, but it will be drastic. I’m in the mood for an ax murder.”
“How do you think it was done?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. I only know that when you did it, you ruined a perfectly lovely disappearing ghost theory that I had just finished piecing together. It even explains the mystery of the study.”
“It must have been a honey if it did that. What do you think is in the study?”
“A set of false whiskers and a dark overcoat. I suspect Wolff is right about our ghostly friend being a dead one. That’s why it gives him the willies. Therefore, Dudley Wolff to the contrary, someone has been masquerading. And, with that burglar alarm operating, it has to be someone in the house. You, Wolff, Kay, and I were together when His Nibs appeared. That lets us out. Galt, Dunning, and Phillips are all minus alibis, since they were all separately searching each other’s rooms.
“But they were all in the wrong end of the house. That leaves Mrs. Wolff. There’s no real evidence to back up her story that someone or something came in through the locked door into her room. In fact, the whole yarn sounds distinctly phony. She could have put on the ghost act at the head of the stairs, tossed her costume into the study in passing, and created that rumpus in her room as misdirection. That’s why Dudley won’t open up the study. He’s covering her. And it explains the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t haunt. Or it did up until you spoiled it by proving that there’s some sort of secret exit out or that room after all.
Merlini didn’t like it. “Ross, you’ve got a comic-magazine mind. She’d have to be a wizard at make-up and a lightning-change artist. She couldn’t shed her disguise as quickly as all that. You forget that she was in Florida last week when the poltergeist phenomena occurred, and that this morning she was with the others in the hall downstairs when the ghost appeared on the landing. Also, it happens that there is evidence that someone or something else was in her room. I found a couple of nice clear thumbprints on the inside of one pane of that unlocked window above the trellis. They’re not hers.”
I gave that some thought. “The ghost’s appearance this morning gives everybody an out except Galt and Leonard. And Galt’s appearance this morning just after the ghost disappeared was almost too pat. Suppose he put on the disguise and slipped up those back stairs. We didn’t see which direction the ghost came from. Then, when Wolff takes a pot shot at him, he high-tails it down the hall and into Mrs. Wolff’s room. He ducks her barrage, vanishes according to your recipe, whatever that is, and reappears—” I stalled.
Merlini said, “What’s wrong?”
“He reappeared on that back stairs too quickly. Or can you manage that by your vanishing method too?”
“I’m afraid I can’t. You see I went out the window and down the trellis!”
I groaned. “Do you mean that Wolff’s pet burglar alarm is a pushover, that our nicely isolated house has been wide open all this time to anyone who happened to come along?”
“Well not exactly, but it’s not infallible. The alarm is designed to trip up the unsuspecting prowler and would probably serve that purpose very well. But when one knows that it’s there and knows how it operates, getting past it isn’t too hard. I had Galt’s flashlight and I simply centered it on the photoelectric cell while I crossed the sill. As long as the cell gets light, black or white, the alarm is a sleeping dog.”
“So,” I said, “Friend Leonard again. He had a Hash. And you sent him along with me to hunt the ghost!”
“I wanted him out of the way while I snooped. I rather thought he had possibilities. After I climbed down the trellis, I picked the lock on the garage door. It’s on the same side of the house, basement floor. I edged in past the electric eye again and I found Leonard’s room. I gave it a quick once-over without turning up anything suspicious. And then, not having asked him for a sample of his prints because I didn’t want him to know I had doubts about his alibi, I looked for some. I found several on his shaving mirror. The pattern of the print on the window classes as a twin loop. But Leonard’s is a whorl.”