O’Halloran’s car was parked near by, and as we went toward it he whispered in a low voice, “You and Merlini may have to spend the night in jail, but I think I can spring you by morning. I’ve got some ideas about this case.”
“You know who the murderer is?”
“If you’d read the papers the last few days that might not bother you so much. He—”
“What are you two chewing the rag about?” Stevens, who had come up behind us, demanded heavily.
Neither O’Halloran nor I made any answer. O’Halloran got into his car behind the wheel and put his ignition key in the lock.
Stevens said, “No, you don’t, Mister. I’ll drive. Robbins, you take the other one in back, and keep your eyes peeled. If you ask me, these two look suspicious as hell.”
Under the circumstances our conversation from there on didn’t amount to much. I saw the Captain’s white patrol car swing in behind us as we left the lot.
We drew up a few minutes later on a quiet elm-shaded street before a brand-new jail, a hoosegow so neat and fresh that I looked down the street half-expecting to catch a glimpse of the masons as they left for home. Although the workmanlike solid construction of the walls and the heavily barred windows weren’t exactly inviting, I was reassured by the newness of the building because I had had visions of a jerk-water jail with hot and cold running rats in each cell.
Even the interior hadn’t yet attained the official coating of dust and grime which is standard decoration in jails, courtrooms and statehouses.
The Captain arrived a moment later, took over the Chief’s office and said, “You first, Towne.”
Merlini and I remained in an anteroom under the eyes of Troopers Palmer and Stevens and Officer Robbins. Palmer had removed the cuff from his wrist, and Merlini now wore them both. He was practicing his vanishing half-dollar trick and appeared pleased that he was still able to accomplish it though handcuffed. The law eyed him with more suspicion than ever. He vanished the half-dollar for keeps, twisted his arms about, and succeeded in reaching a back pocket from which he drew a deck of cards in a case.
“Palmer,” he said, “name a card. Any card in the deck.”
Palmer asked, “Why?”
Merlini gave him a startled glance. “Come to think of it, I don’t know,” he said. “But take a chance.”
Palmer scowled, and his tone of voice was the one he saved for humoring nuts. “The jack of spades.”
Merlini took the cards from their case and started to run through them, backs up.
“I’m not sure why this is, either,” he said, “but a magician always does things the hard way. When he wants to find a card he does it by looking at the backs rather than the faces. Sometimes it works.”
As he said that, one lone card suddenly showed face up among all the other face-down ones. It was, of course, Palmer’s jack of spades.
Merlini’s audience had started to sit up and take some notice. They sat all the way up a moment later.
“And to show you,” Merlini continued, “that I didn’t, in spite of these handcuffs, use some sort of invisible sleight-of-hand to turn that card over as I came to it — to show you that I knew what card you would choose before you named it, when I put it in this deck face up the day before yesterday, I used a jack of spades from another deck!”
He removed the jack from among the others and turned it over. The design on its back was red, that on all the other cards was blue.
“That’s known to the trade as the Brainwave, an invention of my friend, Dai Vernon. It’s a magician’s dream.”
Palmer and Robbins both had dreamlike expressions on their faces. Stevens did too for a moment. Then, suddenly, he woke up.
“It’s a gag,” he said deprecatingly. “You had Palmer primed to call for the jack. You fixed it on the way over.”
Palmer’s face gave the lie to this; but Stevens, a realistic soul, insisted that it wasn’t magic, only a low sort of practical joke.
“I’ve heard that one before,” Merlini countered. “And I know the answer. Suppose you name one, Stevens. Take your time about selecting it, and make it tough as you can for me. While you’re doing that I’ll discard the joker. It sometimes causes trouble.”
He turned the cards, face toward himself, went rapidly through them, removed one, and dropped it face down on the floor. Then he waited for Stevens to name his card.
“The four of clubs,” Stevens said skeptically, choosing one of the more undistinguished cards in the deck.
Without saying anything Merlini ran through the face-down cards once more. This time none showed up reversed. Stevens grinned.
So did Merlini. “The four of clubs,” he said, “is face down like the others. But it’s not where you think.” He turned up the deck’s top card and showed it. “This is the joker. The card I pretended was the joker and discarded before you named your card is the four of clubs!”
Using the joker as a lever so as to avoid touching the card on the floor with his hands, he flipped it over face up. It was, as he had said, the four of clubs. “Never try to outguess a magician,” he advised. “If he performs much, he’s sure to have met the situation before, and he is consequently prepared for it.”
I’ve seen him do that trick at least a dozen times; it has never failed yet and the cards named are invariably different. I’ve tried to solve it using bribery and threats; but with no success.
“That’s an additional wrinkle of my own,” said Merlini. “Here’s another.”
For the next fifteen minutes, in spite of his manacled condition, he entertained the cops. There was only one interruption. Chief Hooper arrived while Merlini, his hands clasped to his forehead and his eyes tightly closed, was summoning up his powers of clairvoyance in an endeavor to discover what card it was Sergeant Robbins had, while out of the room, secretly selected and sealed in an envelope.
Hooper glowered at Merlini as he went on through to his office. “Watch him closely, boys,” he ordered, not knowing that the closeness of attention Merlini had been receiving made him perhaps the most carefully guarded prisoner of all time. As he went through the door, he added, “He’s the kind who’s likely to try suicide.”
“Cheerful man, your boss,” Merlini commented, coming out of his trance. “And you’re an ornery cuss too, Robbins. You didn’t put a playing card in the envelope as I asked. It’s a traffic ticket.”
A few minutes later a call came from within the office. “Stevens! Bring Harte in here.”
Stevens led me up to the lion’s cage, shoved me in, and closed the door firmly behind me. The Chief, with his heavy face and his shock of sandy hair, looked remarkably like a lion — and a hungry one. Had he been equipped with a tail, it would have been switching angrily. Captain Schafer was more like a Bengal tiger — ambushed and waiting. There wasn’t as much roar to him, but his teeth were just as sharp and when he pounced you knew something had happened.
O’Halloran was still there, and there was another man, a lean little fellow with spectacles who turned out to be the scientific fly in the Chief’s ointment, Lester Burns. He began the proceedings by taking my fingerprints. Then he started to get intimate. He asked for my name, address, place of birth, age, sex, color, height, weight, color of eyes, and for any identifying scars or marks.