into his mouth and withdrew a large, whole walnut in its shell. “My mouth is empty,” he said, turning to my brother to allow a brief examination, “and I shall take a sip of tea to demonstrate that my esophageal passages are clear. But see!” With a sweep of his hand he withdrew a second walnut, placing it beside the first on the edge of the kitchen table.
This peculiar display was repeated four more times until there was a neat row of six walnuts arrayed before him. “What do you think?” he asked, waving a hand over the harvest. “Rather good, is it not?”
I should perhaps explain that Mr. Patrell’s exhibition was not without precedent. At that time the sideshows and carnivals were experiencing a modest vogue of what was called the “regurgitator act,” an outgrowth of sword- swallowing and water-spouting. The regurgitator act would take many curious forms before the fad had run its course. Some regurgitators would swallow and then reproduce small stones and rocks, while other even hardier souls turned their skills to goldfish and frogs. One inventive practitioner found a means of swallowing assorted small objects-coins, thimbles, and the like-only to reproduce them in the order called for by his audience. It must be said that regurgitators were not my favorite class of entertainer, and I disliked sharing a stage with them. The act, depending as it did upon grotesquerie, tended to put the audience in a skittish, even hostile frame of mind. Worse yet, it produced a foul odor.
My sister-in-law shared my sense of distaste. “Mr. Patrell,” said Bess, “I have always found acts of this type to be unseemly.”
“Still,” I said, eager not to offend a potential employer, “six walnuts! That’s rather good.”
“I can do seven,” said Harry. “Plus a potato.”
“Can you?” asked Patrell, looking a touch crestfallen. “Well, I’m still something of a novice. My difficulty is this accursed arm sling. I can’t juggle with one arm, and if I can’t juggle, how am I going to get the marks to pony up their dimes?”
It was a fair question. The sight of Gideon Patrell juggling a set of Indian clubs was a familiar one in New York City. He would stand on the sidewalk outside of his Wonder Emporium before each show doing wondrous cascades and showers as a crowd gathered to watch. This was his version of the time-honored “bally,” the free act performed outside a carnival tent while the outside talker-we didn’t call them “barkers” in those days-enticed the crowd to “step right up” and pay their admission. I was a competent juggler myself at that stage of my career, but Patrell was an artist. His overhand-eight pattern was a wonder to behold.
“Mr. Patrell,” said Bess, folding her hands, “I am truly sorry for your difficulty, but surely there are better options than this? Do you honestly believe that coughing up a handful of walnuts will bring in paying customers?”
Patrell’s face clouded. “What am I to do?” he asked. “I need something to go along with the spiel.”
“I could do my handcuff act,” said Harry. “That will bring them running!”
“God, Harry, don’t start blathering on about that handcuff act again! What do I need with a-what do you keep calling yourself? An escapitator?”
“An escapologist.”
“Whatever. Nobody’s ever going to want to see a guy slip out of a pair of handcuffs, Harry. Stick with your magic act.”
Harry folded his arms.
“You’ll forgive me for asking, Mr. Patrell,” I said, “but if you don’t want Harry to do his escape act, why are you here?”
“I need a magician-I need a ‘King of Kards.’”
“What happened to Addison Tate?” I asked. “Only last month you were telling me that he was the best card mechanic you’ve ever had.”
“Tate!” Patrell’s face darkened. “I took that man into my troupe when no one else would have him! Gave him two slots on the bill! And this is how he repays me!”
Harry leaned forward. “He skipped out on you?”
“Skipped out on me! No, Houdini-he shot me!”
Bess and I were too startled to speak, but Harry appeared delighted by this news.
“Ah!” he cried, bridging his fingertips. “A mystery!”
“A mystery? There’s no mystery about it,” cried Patrell. “He took out a gun and shot me! And when I get my hands on him, he’ll regret the day he crossed my path. Even with one arm, I’ll give him a thrashing.”
“Your case fills me with interest,” said my brother. “Pray give us the essential facts from the commencement, and I can afterwards question you as to those details which seem to me to be most important. Omit nothing. It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
Patrell stared. “I must say, Houdini, you’re acting very strangely. What in the world are you going on about?”
The answer, of course, was Sherlock Holmes. My brother, though not a great reader, was a devoted admirer of the Great Detective, whose adventures he followed religiously in the pages of
If anything, Harry’s enthusiasm had increased since the Great Detective’s passing. The previous year we had been thrown quite inadvertently into the investigation of the murder of a Fifth Avenue tycoon, under a set of circumstances, as Dr. Watson might have said, that I have recorded elsewhere. Our unexpected success in this matter left Harry with the distinct, if unwarranted, impression that he had been anointed as the heir apparent to Sherlock Holmes.
“Perhaps you
Patrell sighed and fingered one of the walnuts lined up on the table in front of him. “There isn’t much to tell,” he began. “Addison Tate joined the troupe in late July. He’s a fine performer, and he is willing to step in wherever he is needed, but I had my doubts about him. We’ve all heard rumors that he served a stretch in prison as a young man. They say he shot a man in a gambling hall.”
“He denies it,” I said. “I’ve played cards with the man on many occasions. He says a crooked dealer got shot and the police arrested everyone at the table. He insists he had no part in any wrongdoing.”
“I know what he says, Dash.” Patrell picked up a table knife and began tapping at the shell of a walnut. “And I believed him. Truly I did. But almost from the first he began pumping me for more money. He told me his mother needed an operation! Of all the cock-and-bull-”
“I am sorry to learn that his mother is unwell,” said Harry.
“Unwell? Houdini, his mother doesn’t need an operation! That’s the oldest line of patter in the book! I’m surprised he didn’t try to sell me a share in a gold mine.” Using his bandaged arm as a buttress, Patrell wedged the blade of his table knife into the seam of the walnut and pried it open.
“This still does not explain how you came to be shot,” Harry said.
Patrell picked out several pieces of walnut and began chewing. “The night before last, Tate brought every single member of the troupe to my office after the final show-the whole lot of them, even the bearded lady. He knew that I would be tallying the receipts for the week and preparing the pay packets. We’d had a fairly good draw, so there was a considerable pile of money sitting on my desk. Tate came to me with his hat in his hand and begged me to give him the entire week’s receipts. He made a good show of it, I’ll grant you. He said he had spoken with everyone and they had all agreed to put their salaries toward his mother’s operation.”
“The entire troupe was willing to do this?” I asked.
Patrell nodded. “I couldn’t believe it. He said he would pay them all back as soon as he was able. He must have been remarkably convincing.”
“It does seem extraordinary,” said Bess, “but, if you’ll forgive me, Mr. Patrell, what business is it of yours if your employees chose to give their wages to Mr. Tate?”
“You’re quite right about that, Mrs. Houdini, but that wasn’t all he was after. He wanted me to surrender the entire gate-every last dime I made for the week. It was quite impossible. I have overhead. It would have shut us
