principle. The audience doesn’t see the coin, the rabbit, or the girl vanish because they actually disappear either before or after the magician pretends to conjure them into thin air. The audience is watching most carefully at the wrong time.”
“Now wait a minute,” the Inspector objected. “That’s just exactly the way you said Keeler couldn’t have handled the phone business. What’s more he couldn’t. Ross and I weren’t watching you the first time you left the restaurant. But we’d been watching Keeler for a week.”
“And,” I added, “Malloy and Hicks couldn’t have miscounted the booths at the station and searched the wrong one. They could see both ends of that line of booths the whole time.”
“They didn’t miscount,” Merlini said. “They just didn’t count. The booth we examined was the fifth from the right end of the line, but neither Malloy nor Hicks ever referred to it in that way.”
Gavigan scowled. “They said Keeler went into the booth ‘
“I know, but Keeler didn’t enter the booth next to the one we found out of order. He went into a booth next to one that was marked: Out of Order. That’s not quite the same.”
Gavigan and I both said the same thing at the same time: “The sign had been moved!”
“Twice,” Merlini said, nodding. “First, when Keeler was in the Oyster Bar. The second invisible man – invisible because no one was watching him – moved it one booth to the right. And when Keeler, a few minutes later, entered the booth to the right of the one bearing the sign, he was actually in the second booth from the one whose phone didn’t work.
“And then our second invisible man went into action again. He walked into the booth marked out of order, smashed a duplicate pair of blood-smeared glasses on the floor, and dialed the Judge’s phone. When Keeler answered, he walked out again, leaving the receiver off the hook. It was as neat a piece of mis-direction as I’ve seen in a long time. Who would suspect him of putting through a call from a phone booth that was plainly labelled out of order?”
Cautiously, as if afraid the answer would blow up in his face, the Inspector asked, “He did all this with Malloy and Hicks both watching? And he wasn’t seen – because he was invisible?”
“No, that’s not quite right. He was invisible – because he wasn’t suspected.”
I still didn’t see it. “But,” I objected, “the only person who went anywhere near the booth next to the one Keeler was in-”
Heavy footsteps sounded on the back porch and then Brady’s voice from the doorway said, “We found him, Inspector. Behind some bushes the other side of the wall. Dead. And do you know who-”
“I do now,” Gavigan cut in. “Sergeant Hicks.”
Brady nodded.
Gavigan turned to Merlini. “Okay, so Hicks was a crooked cop and a liar. But not Malloy. He says he was watching that phone booth every second. How did Hicks switch that Out-of-Order sign back to the original booth again without being seen?”
“He did it when Malloy wasn’t watching quite so closely –
“Will you,” Gavigan growled, “stop lecturing on the theory of deception and just explain when Hicks moved that sign.”
“All right. Remember what Malloy did next? He was near the information booth in the center of the floor and he ran across toward the phones. Malloy said, ‘I did some fancy open-field running through the commuters.’ Of course he did. At fivetwenty the station is full of them and he was in a hell of a hurry. He couldn’t run fast and keep his eyes glued to Hicks and that phone booth every step of the way; he’d have had half a dozen head-on collisions. But he didn’t think the fact that he had had to use his eyes to steer a course rather than continue to watch the booth was important. He thought the dirty work – Keeler’s disappearance – had taken place.
“As Malloy ran toward him through the crowd, Hicks simply took two steps sideways to the left and stared into the phone booth that was tagged with the Out-of-Order card. And, behind his body, his left hand shifted the sign one booth to the left – back to the booth that was genuinely out of order. Both actions took no more than a second or two. When Malloy arrived, ‘the booth next to the one that was out of order’ was empty. Keeler had vanished into Zyyzk’s Outer Darkness
“And he really vanished,” Gavigan said, finally convinced, “by walking out of the next booth as soon as he had spoken his piece to Molloy on the phone.”
“While Malloy,” Merlini added, “was still staring goggle-eyed at the phone. Even if he had turned to look out of the door, all he’d have seen was the beefy Hicks standing smack in front of him carefully blocking the view. And then Keeler walked right out of the station. Every exit was guarded – except one. An exit big enough to drive half a dozen trains through!”
“Okay,” the Inspector growled. “You don’t have to put it in words of one syllable. He went out through one of the train gates which Malloy himself had been covering, boarded a train a moment before it pulled out, and ten minutes later he was getting off again up at 125th Street.”
“Which,” Merlini added, “isn’t far from Hick’s home where we are now and where Keeler intended to hide out until the cops, baffled by the dead-end he’d left, relaxed their vigilance a bit. The judge was full of cute angles. Who’d ever think of looking for him in the home of one of the cops who was supposed to be hunting him?”
“After which,” I added, “he’d change the cut of his whiskers or trim them off altogether, go to join Miss Hope, and they’d live happily ever after on his ill-gotten gains. Fadeout.”
“That was the way the script read,” Merlini said. “But Judge Keeler forgot one or two little things. He forgot that a man who has just vanished off the face of the earth, leaving a deadend trail, is a perfect prospective murder victim. And he forgot that a suitcase full of folding money is a temptation one should never set before a crooked cop.”
“Forgetfulness seems to be dangerous,” I said. “I’m glad I’ve got a good memory.”
“I have a hunch that somebody is going to have both our scalps,” Merlini said ominously. “I’ve just remembered that when we left the shop-”
He was right. I hadn’t mailed Mrs Merlini’s letter.
MURDER STRIPS OFF by
