“Sit down,” Merlini answered. “We’re staying for the concert. Yes, we can get another; but even if we have Keith wire for it tonight, the mail wouldn’t bring it in until late tomorrow at the earliest.”
“But the murderer would know we could get one eventually. What is it, a play for time?”
“Looks like it. And that might mean he has something else planned.”
The climax of the exhibition of rodeo stunts was supposed to be Tex Mayo’s trick and fancy shooting with a .22 target rifle. His marksmanship was fancy enough, but it could have been a bit more accurate. He fired from a variety of positions at glass balls and toy balloons hanging suspended from the underside of a six-foot circular backstop which was hanging in the top of the tent. He seemed sober enough at the moment, and I suspected that his reaction to Pauline’s fall was probably causing the misses. If, as Mac had told us, he was in love with her, I didn’t blame him for giving a rather ragged performance.
I noticed that Merlini watched the show with one eye on his wrist watch. And, as we finally got up to go with the rest of the audience, he commented, “If Tex worked the concert last night he seems to have an alibi for the Major’s death as well.”
Then he nodded toward the tent’s far end, where the side walls had been dropped and a crowd of working men had dismantled and cleared away most of the unreserved seat section. Some of them were now stacking the flats in a truck that had been driven in, and others began at once on the seats the crowd was leaving.
“And the top,” he said, “will be down in no time at all. If our friend Inspector Gavigan had a finger in this pie, he’d be purple in the face. I can hear him explode. A murder case where the murder room is taken down every night, neatly rolled up, tucked into trucks, carted eighty miles away, and set up again the next morning!”
“Yes,” I agreed glumly. “I’ve been thinking about that. And I can see rough water ahead. Instead of a nice tight little matter of half a dozen suspects cooped up in an isolated mansion out at the end of nowhere, we’ve got a hundred or more all in the open and moving rapidly across-country. Tomorrow morning the Major’s body will be somewhere in Indiana, the scene of his auto smash will be 172, and the scene of Pauline’s tumble 80 miles, behind us. Clues, if any, scattered halfway across the state! Are we going to have a picnic!”
“And, instead of Inspector Gavigan and his metropolitan homicide squad to help, there’ll be a brand-new set of hick cops every day, unless the state troopers deal themselves in.”
“The Rover Boys Behind the Eight Ball would do for a title,” I said. “And I suppose you’ve cooked up a plan of action that eliminates all possibility of sleep tonight.”
“You never know,” he grinned. “The next item on the program is a chat with the Headless Lady.”
“Sounds interesting. Does she talk with her fingers?”
On the side-show bally platform the two cooch dancers stood with the side-show manager and treated the crowd to a few sample wriggles as he announced, “A final and complete show for the price of one thin dime, ten cents!”
Inside, Merlini asked Gus, “What act was working in here when the big-top lights went out?”
Gus replied promptly, “The Headless Lady.”
Merlini sighed. “I might have expected that. Look, Gus, I want to meet her.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Gus said doubtfully. “She ain’t what you’d call sociable. I haven’t met her myself. She practically never leaves her trailer except to come in here for her act. Then she ducks right up into her booth from under the side wall, and she leaves the same way so the customers won’t see her with a head. You could waylay her there afterward, I suppose. She’s getting set in her booth now. She goes on after the mummy.”
The lecturer, as Gus said this, led the crowd toward a platform on which an upright coffin rested before a red velvet backdrop.
“The assassin of Abraham Lincoln, Ladies and Gentlemen, was not killed in Garrett’s barn in Virginia in 1865, as some of your history books have it. He escaped and he lived, under the name of John St. Helen, in Texas and Oklahoma until 1903, when he committed suicide by arsenic. In those days they also used arsenic in the embalming fluid. Arsenic is an excellent preservative — though I don’t advise you to mix your drinks with it.” (Laughter by the speaker.) “Thus it happens that we are able to present to you the mummified body of John Wilkes Booth in an excellent state of preservation.”
He opened the upper half of the coffin and exposed to view the age-darkened desiccated torso of a man. The skin of the chest and shoulders was leathery and wrinkled; on the face it stretched tightly across the cheekbones. The open eyes stared fishily. The curly hair and drooping mustache of the Booth pictures were still there, tough sparser. As far as visual evidence went, there was a resemblance; this might have been Booth, grown 37 years older than his pictures.
The lecturer indicated numerous legal documents that hung on the backdrop on either side of the coffin, and a tall stack of them that lay on a chair. “We have literally thousands of affidavits proving that this is the real genuine body of John Wilkes Booth. They are signed, as you can see, by college professors, historians, criminologists, and doctors. This X-ray photo shows you the fractured leg Booth sustained when he leaped to the stage of the Ford Theatre from the President’s box after his murderous deed. You can see the scar above his right eyebrow, the memento of a blow from the sword of another actor who slashed him while playing the duel scene from Richard the Third. This small piece of gold ring, which bears the initial B, was removed a few years ago, after X-rays had shown its presence, from the stomach of the mummy. On some occasion, fearing capture, Booth evidently swallowed the ring to avoid exposure of his identity. You will also notice …”
“What’s the lowdown on this, Merlini?” I asked. “Wax, I suppose?”
“You suppose wrong,” he replied, “though you’re warm. It’s papier mâchè. John Harkin, who used to be the tattooed man on the Hagenbeck show, owns and exhibits a mummy of which this is an imitation. He has a ton or two of real affidavits that say his mummy is actually Booth. Though, affidavits or not, it’s still pretty much a moot point. Izola Forester, in her book, This One Mad Act, says that she is Booth’s granddaughter and presents evidence to show that Booth lived for many years after his supposed death in the barn. The War Department, she says, has never admitted that this might be so because, among other things, they had already paid out the rewards for Booth’s capture and naturally disliked to admit that they’d bought spurious merchandise. Carl Sandburg, on the other hand, says that Booth died in the barn. So you can take your choice. At any rate, Harkin’s mummy is a first rate side-show attraction — enough so that a man in Chicago has been lately turning out papier mâchè Booths like this one for the trade. You’ll probably find a union label on his feet.”
According to Miss Forester, five alleged skulls of Booth have been on exhibition at various times, and there are records of some twenty men who have claimed to be Booth.
“I must admit,” said, “that the exhibits in this particular side show are intriguing as hell. The replica of a mummy of a famous murderer, a Headless Lady with what there is left of her as nice as anything I ever saw in the Scandals, and Hoodoo, a headhunter from the Amazon. That’s an idea. Perhaps, if we looked at his collection of heads, we might find the Headless Lady’s. I’m not so sure about that train accident story.”
“Don’t be too sure about the headhunter,” Merlini said. “He’s never been within miles of the Amazon. He hails from Harlem. And his right name, speaking of Booth, really is a strange coincidence. It’s Abraham Lincoln Jones, no less! I was introduced to him once at Coney Island.”