“Are you pulling my leg?” I asked. But Merlini had turned to follow the lecturer toward the curtains that concealed the Headless Lady.
We listened again to the lecturer’s talk; and then, just before he concluded, we ducked under the side wall and stationed ourselves where the Headless Lady would come out. “If she’ll tell me what I want to know,” said Merlini, “I’ll buy her a hat.”
He made that crack inadvertently, and when he realized its implications was so delighted with it that his attention was diverted, and we muffed our chance. We had miscalculated slightly. When the side wall lifted, and the Headless Lady (with head now), emerged, she was further away than we had expected. She moved altogether too quickly toward her trailer, which was parked less than 20 feet away.
Merlini and I started after her. Then Merlini stopped me, holding my arm. The shadowy figure of a man, who had been waiting unnoticed by the trailer door, joined her as she came up, and went into the trailer with her. We waited a moment, but no glow of light came from inside.
“Suspicious,” Merlini murmured.
We closed in, quietly circled the trailer, looking for an open window beneath which we could eavesdrop. They were, in spite of the warm, moist night, all tightly closed. And from within all that we could hear was an indistinguishably low murmur of voices.
“Looks as if we were foiled again, Ross,” Merlini said. “Apparently an assignation, and I doubt if a social call would be welcome at the moment. What do you think?”
“Barging in to catch people in flagrante delicto ain’t etiquette,” I said. “We’re not after divorce evidence. And it isn’t my forte anyway. I suggest we skip it. But I could bear to know who the man is.”
“So could I. But I’m not going to sit here till dawn to find out. Let’s go get some shut-eye.”
This suggestion, coming from Merlini, was unusual, but it was one that I wasn’t going to vote down. We got the car and drove into town. I needed cigarettes and stopped for them at a drugstore. Merlini went to the drug counter and made a mysterious purchase that I cross-questioned him about with no success.
“Just a hunch I have,” he said. “Wait until I’ve tested it.”
Waterboro’s only hotel, the Chesterfield, is an ancient and dusty firetrap with a desk clerk who fits the same description. He showed us to a room that was as home-like and comfortably inviting as a barn, and nearly as large. It was furnished with a brass bedstead, a tired rocking chair, and an early Sears Roebuck dresser.
We left a call for seven and prepared to turn in. When I trekked back from a safari to the bathroom at the far end of the hall, I found Merlini in vivid green pajamas pulling on a pair of red rubber gloves.
“So that’s what you bought,” I said. “I don’t care for the color scheme. The accessories should be in matching shades. If we can find some ice skates, you’ll be all set to pose for a portrait by Dali.”
Without replying, Merlini drew his gloved hand down across the side of his cheek and then, moving to the window, placed his fingertips against the pane.
I began to catch wise. “So,” I said. “The whorlless fingerprints. Is that it?”
Merlini squinted at the glass, moving his head about to get the right light. “Yes, I think it is.”
“But fingers leave prints because the pores exude an oily substance, and rubber gloves—”
“Can do the same, if they’ve touched the face, for instance. They pick up the oil and redeposit it, an offset fingerprint job, as it were. If the gloves have any cuts, or abrasions they’d show up, but the ones we saw in the Major’s trailer were, like these, quite without distinguishing marks. We only know that the person who cut the windowpane wore rubber gloves, a fact which may or may not be of help. We’ll file it, however. “Merlini stripped off the gloves and turned out the light.
As he got into bed, I asked, “Are you nursing a theory as to what did happen in the Major’s trailer? I figured that the burglar story you outlined was invented to trap Pauline into admitting she had gone to the trailer with her father. She could have done him in and moved the body; she has no alibi and enough motive. But she turns out to be victim number two. Where do we go from there?”
“Back to the burglar theory,” Merlini said. “There’s nothing wrong with it. The prowler could have come in before Pauline and her father. When they interrupted his search for whatever it was he was after, he took cover in the wardrobe in the Pattison manner and sat tight until Pauline had gone. (I found a bit of mud from someone’s shoe on the wardrobe floor.) Then the Major opened the door to get the slicker he came for, and—”
Suddenly Merlini’s feet hit the floor, and I heard him racing through the dark across the room. He twisted the key, jerked the door open, and peered out into the dimly lighted hall.
“What is it?” I asked, half out of bed myself and ready for anything.
Merlini closed the door quietly and answered in a lowered voice, “Someone with big ears. There’s a fairly wide streak of light creeps in under this door, and for the past minute or two I’d been wondering what made the shadow smack in the center of it. When the shadow walked off I thought I had better take a closer look. I should have started sooner. The hall is quite empty.”
He got back into bed. “I think that from now on we would do well to include Mr. Stuart Towne in our calculations.”
“Towne?” I asked. “How do you figure that?”
“His name’s on the registry book downstairs, for one thing. And I don’t understand why he was having me on when he pretended not to know any of that gun talk I gave him.”
“Um,” I mused. “The underworld backgrounds in his books are damned authentic. That why?”
“Yes, that and — you read his first one, The Man with the Purple Face, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Remember the blurb about the author on the back of the jacket?”
“Rental library,” I said. “I don’t think my copy had its jacket.”
“The publishers proudly pointed out,” said Merlini, “that his realistic underworld background derived from the fact that the name Towne is a pseudonym, and that the author is an ex-bank-robber who turned writer during a stretch in Sing Sing. He has also authored several technical and very informative magazine articles bearing such titles as ‘The Gentle Art of Safe Cracking,’ ‘Con-Men I Have Known,’ ‘Hoboes and Their Habits,’ and the like.”
“Well, well,” I said. “Now I lay me down to sleep with a mind washed free of care and worry. Mr. Stuart Towne, the Emily Post of the underworld, does articles on the technique and proper use of rubber gloves and glass cutters. And our mysterious burglar—”
Chapter Nine
Impossible Arrow
My subconscious mind wasn’t as easily satisfied. Sleep was a long time coming, and when it arrived at last it brought dreams that were anything but carefree. All night long I fled endlessly, like a caged squirrel, around an enormous circus ring, pursued with grim and evil intent by cowboys, bank robbers, sword swallowers, the mummy of John Wilkes Booth, and a thundering herd of madly charging elephants. My escape was blocked on every side by a great audience which filled the seats and overflowed onto the arena track — a silently intent, sadistic, sinister, and impossibly grinning audience the members of which were all quite headless.
Finally Merlini’s voice came, penetrating faintly through the heavy layers of sleep to send the phantoms flying. But as his syllables slowly coalesced to form words and then sense, they only called up a greater menace, a Hydra-headed monster that even Barnum might have shied from.