“I’d cut it up into smaller pieces for easier packing.”
Merlini shivered. “Okay, Butch. If the body’s there, you’ve convicted yourself. Then I’ll imagine I’m Chief Hooper and arrest you.”
He went over to the mummy, lifted it slightly, and gave it a shake.
“No,” he decided. “Light as a feather and nary a rattle. He’s empty enough. I wish you’d take that morbid imagination of yours out for a walk — and lose it.”
Farmer came up just then, and before you could say Hey Rube he and Merlini were involved in a technical discussion of three-card-monte, and were trying their damnedest to fool each other with it. Merlini demonstrated a positively diabolical magician’s version in which a corner of the ace bearing a pip was torn off and left lying face up. Then he threw out the three cards face down and asked me to put my money on the ace. Like a chump I chose the torn card and lost. It proved to be the three-spot, while the ace, its corners all intact, was one of the others!
Then Farmer started what Merlini tells me is known as “cutting up old scores”—talking over old times.
“I was tossing broads on the backstretch at Saratoga,” he said, apparently not realizing that the Romance languages I’d been exposed to were all the orthodox sort. “There was a fly gee in the tip with a big mittful of folding scratch. He thought he could pick me up, so I let him see me take out the crimp. Then I crossed him up by putting it back in the same broad! He was all set to spring when Paper-Collar Ed, who was weeding the sticks, rumbled the gaff trying to duke the cush back to me. Another savage blowed it, sneaked out, and beefed to the fuzz. The mark knew the big fellow, and the coppers had to turn on the heat. Ed and I were squeezed before we could slough the joint, and then the fix curdled. The robe was all set to hand us a ninety-day jolt when—”[3]
I was interested, but I don’t like foreign films without English subtitles dubbed in, so I wandered off and took in the freaks. My association with Merlini had taught me just enough about the principles of misdirection so that I caught one thing some of the other onlookers missed. Swede Johnson, the sword-swallower, handed out a razor-sharp sword for examination. After it had been returned, he laid it aside for a moment while he swallowed and regurgitated a lemon and a live white mouse. Then, when he picked up the sword again, he really took another apparently identical, but much duller, one. When he had finished his act, I saw him duck out under the side wall and head toward the cookhouse in search of something more digestible.
I also caught the Headless Lady again. It was operating now with one of the cooch dancers doubling for the missing girl. After that, as the lecturer was about to blow the performance off with the last presentation, the Oriental Dancing Girl Review, for men only, and just as I had paid out the extra quarter that entitled me to an eyeful, Merlini and Farmer announced their intention of putting on the feedbag. I was still full of hamburgers, but I was afraid that if I didn’t stick to Merlini I might miss something even more interesting than “the little lady’s graceful and astonishing exhibition of muscular control.” I wrote the two bits off as a loss and went with them. Joy Pattison joined the party when we met her in the back yard.
According to custom, the performers and white-collar workers were seated before the long oilcloth-covered tables at one end of the cookhouse, the workingmen at the other. An excited conversational buzzing arose from both groups. The activities of the troopers had let the cat out of the bag. The Major’s murder, Pauline’s fall, and the missing lady were being given a thorough going-over.
Merlini said little as he ate, his attention directed at the fragments of talk that floated our way. We were having our coffee when Keith made a belated arrival and announced that the troopers had just started on a search of all the cars and trailers.
“Mac’s sputtering about it some,” he said. “But not too much. He knows he has to play ball, or this show’ll never get off the lot in the morning. Schafer holds the high card there. By the way, Merlini, I hope you and Ross have a full set of ironclad alibis?”
“The Chief still after our heads?”
“Yes. I heard him say that he wouldn’t like any alibi that you turned in. When I said that you and Ross were with me when the lights went out, he told the Captain, ‘So what? The guy’s a magician. He could rig up some sort of hocus-pocus that would douse the lights when he was some place else!”
Merlini frowned. “They’re concentrating on the alibi situation, then?”
“Looks that way,” Keith replied. “And I don’t like it at all. The only person who doesn’t have a single solitary corroborated alibi—” His voice came to a slow stop, and he scowled angrily at his plate.
“Yes?” Merlini asked.
“Well, it’s Joy, isn’t it?” Keith looked across at her. Joy’s fingers playing with her cheap spoon had bent it into a complete circle. “If they try to arrest her I’ll probably go along too, charged with assault and battery. It looks as if someone was fixing it for her to take the rap. I’m going to know who or—”
“No,” Merlini contradicted, “I don’t think suspicion is being directed at her — if it were, we’d probably have found the rubber gloves planted in her trailer instead of where we did. Besides, you know that the person who doesn’t have any alibi at all is usually an innocent bystander, while the murderer always tries to be prepared with one or more nice slick ones.”
Joy asked, “But is the Captain going to figure it that way? Sounds a little advanced for the ordinary copper.”
“I’ve a notion,” Merlini said, “that Schafer isn’t just an ordinary cop; and Hooper, who is, seems to be concentrating on me. Perhaps we’d better run through the alibis once, set them up, and see if we can crack any. Ross, you’ve been taking notes on this affair, I hope. How do they stand?”
The back of an envelope in my pocket carried a chart with just that information on it. I got it out.
“There are three separate items that call for alibis,” I stated. “The Major’s murder in his trailer and the subsequent moving of his body to the scene of the phony accident — time: between 10:30 and 11:30 Monday night. Two: the monkey business with the lights that caused Pauline’s fall and the swiping of the evidence immediately afterward — time 9:30 to 9:45 last night. We can omit for the moment the eavesdropping at the hotel, since we can’t prove that person and the murderer are the same. Three—”
“I’ll take an exception there, Judge,” Merlini said. “We’ll discuss it later. Proceed.”
“Eavesdropper at the hotel?” Keith wanted to know. “What’s this? I hadn’t heard.”
“Someone snooped around our door,” Merlini explained, “and listened to Ross and myself discussing the case after we’d gone to bed last night.”
“Oh,” Keith said with a flat sound. “That’s why you were quizzing me about staying at the Hotel Chesterfield, was it? I see. But if you think that was the murderer, then it lets Joy out, doesn’t it?”
Merlini shook his head. “It’s not that simple. The desk clerk was in bed. Anyone could have walked in from outside, taken a peek at the register to see what room we had, and put his ear to our keyhole.”
Joy looked at the spoon she had now pulled back into something approximating its original shape. “Keith, my boy,” she said quietly, “if you and I went into conference with that Justice of the Peace, as you’ve been suggesting, maybe, next time there’s a murder, I’d have a witness to my innocence; I wouldn’t be sleeping alone.”
3
Merlini later furnished this translation: “I was running a three-card-monte game at the races in Saratoga. There was a wise guy in the crowd who knew how the swindle was worked. He had a fistful of paper money. He thought he could beat me at my own game, so I let him see me straighten out the bent corner.” (In monte one of the operator’s assistants in the crowd bends the corner of the winning card slightly so that the sucker thinks he can spot it and is betting on a sure thing. Knowing how the swindle usually worked, the sucker would expect the operator to put it in