This story marked the first appearance of Alan Priest, the one-handed journalist who is the protagonist of my mystery series, The Skyline Murder Mysteries. The first in the series, Floor 24, will be available September 17.
A Very Entertaining Death, Mystery Magazine, March 2016.
A Very Entertaining Death
Martin Hill Ortiz
While waiting for the spectacle to begin, I cut and shuffled a deck of cards with my left hand, keeping the ace on top, practicing a skill I would never again use. I stopped mid-cut: the goose-honk of a squeeze-bulb car-horn announced the arrival of the hearse. I dropped the deck into my jacket pocket.
Giggling bathing beauties stood planted on the running boards of the approaching lemon-yellow Packard. Its nose-end acted as a ship's bow, parting the crowd which swept back in rippling waves. Curtains cloaked the windows of its stretched-out cargo hold. The vehicle rolled to a stop at the brink of a neatly-carved rectangular pit.
Flappers in their tube-like dresses, the tassels on their knee-high hems shimmying, strained against the cordoned-off perimeter. Some blew kisses. Dandies, resuscitated after a night of celebrating Prohibition—genteel gentlemen for whom daylight was a curse word—balanced on their toes to witness the hullabaloo. Young nippers roosted on tombstones; some braved the roofs of mausoleums.
With dainty back-kicks, the beauties sprang from the running boards. The front and back cabin doors swung open and five beefy men climbed out. They glared at the offensive sun, tugged at their cuffs and screwed on their top hats. After delivering indifferent waves to the audience, they rounded the hearse. One opened the rear compartment, grabbed the handle at the head of the coffin within and hauled it backwards on its rollers. The others took hold of the side grips and lifted. They lugged the pine box, carrying it over to and setting it down beside the gaping grave. The casket lid flipped and presto! Richard French, The Famous Frenchini, popped up to the cheers of the crowd.
"Hello, my fine admirers!" the magician called out, his arms spread wide as though he could embrace the entire breadth of the mob. "Prepare yourselves to bear witness the single greatest feat in the history of mankind: An escapade not to be beheld by those of feeble in breast or weak in constitution. I, the Famous Frenchini, will slip free from the bony fingers of the merciless reaper and escape the bonds of death!"
I had to hand it to Richard: he knew how to throw a funeral. Lurking in the shadows cast by the spotlight of Houdini's fame was a pack of aspiring escape artists who hungered to be the latest -ini. French had risen above the ambitious rabble. With the bonny good looks of a photoplay star and the bombast of P.T. Barnum, his celebrity had swelled well beyond his mediocre skills as an illusionist.
Not fair. Showmanship is a crucial part of the magic trade, and Frenchini was a master of pure audacious theater. I was a master of jealousy.
"Alan!" Someone recognized me and slipped through the crowd, heading my way. It was Mark Buchanan, the Amazing Something or Other. He had an act so forgettable even those who knew him couldn't remember his stage name. Nice guy, though. He reached out to shake my right hand and, in a moment of shock I'd seen hundreds of times before, noticed it was not there. I shoved the stub of my wrist into his hand.
"What . . .?" he couldn't even finish his question.
"I lost it during the Great War," I told him. "I checked the Army's Lost and Found. Lots of body parts, none of them mine."
He didn't know what to make of my sense of humor or whether it was humor, and not just angry spitting in the sand.
"I thought you were here with the magician's crowd," he said.
"Forced retirement. I'm covering this event for the Evening World." I tapped a knuckle on the top page of note papers taped around the forearm of my right sleeve. "I usually handle the city hall beat, but Cobb, my boss, knows about my pre-war stage act, so he sent me here. He wants a front page scoop on how it's done."
Under normal circumstances, I'd never rat out an illusionist, but Frenchini dared his fellow artists to do just that, offering a five hundred dollar reward to the first person who could show how he performed his miracle—how he had escaped being buried alive. He vowed the coffin and all items devised to secure him would be made available afterwards for inspection. In my estimation, that seemed like too reckless a promise: the Famous, not-even-great, Frenchini was begging to be exposed.
A pair of policemen in brass-buttoned coats affixed handcuffs to French's wrists. "Tighter!" Frenchini shouted and, as the manacles pinched his flesh, the magician grimaced and demanded again, "Tighter!"
With his wrists suitably crushed, Frenchini lofted his hands over his heads, saying, "To prove I have no key in my possession I ask that my clothes and my body should now be thoroughly searched." One of the bluecoats patted him down and poked a finger in his mouth. The search was laughably brief.
"He possesses not a key," the policeman announced in a brogue so thick he had to be a vaudevillian shill. "I swear by me dear Mother Molly's soul!" So phony. The crowd loved it.
The first principle of any magic trick is misdirection. While the crowd watched the pallbearers wrap The Famous Frenchini in a chain so bulky each link was as big as a fist, I watched the real show. The other magicians and escape artists, a sullen group, milled about in a roped off corner, covetous of the five-hundred-dollar reward.
They all hated French. Prominent was Jim Crandall, who had publicly accused Frenchini of stealing his illusions. Standing in back and a head taller than the rest was Devlin Rastofsky, the Red Devil, whom Frenchini had humiliated on stage. Along for the show was Jon Ketcham, The Toymaker. A genius at fashioning elaborate contraptions, he could transform a second-rate illusionist into a first-class star. He held a grudge against most every magician, penny-pinchers all of them, who gave him neither proper payment nor recognition. Now, in his eighties, the left side of his face drooped from a recent stroke. Hell, even Benny, the Evening World's photo boy was bitter from the time Frenchini had smashed his camera gear after taking an unflattering picture.
With the chain cocooning Frenchini's arms and torso, a padlock the size of a wall clock was snapped in place in front, connecting the two end links. Its keyhole was roomy enough to stick a thumb inside.
Frenchini took this opportunity to make a speech. "I do hereby pledge this oath before all of you and before the ever-listening ears of the Almighty. In one hour, when you seek me in this pine vessel, you shall find neither my body nor my bones. I will have crossed over. Shakespeare, the majestic versifier, declared death to be 'the undiscovered country.' I am its explorer! The Egyptian pharaoh, Cheops, nay, even Ramses himself, whose very daughter plucked the castaway Moses from the hinterland of bulrushes, spoke of the City of the Dead. The secret entrance to this necropolis has been passed on to me by the venerable calif of Khartoum. In my hours free of this world's shackles, I shall promenade that purgatorial city's boulevards, brushing shoulders with Lincoln and Socrates, history's greats and its lesser-knowns. The fortunate among you will witness my resurrection at the Hardy Theater on 44th and 9th at the hour of eight this evening. That is, those of you who have purchased tickets."
The five pallbearers hefted the immobile magician and his chains into the wooden box. At this moment, I fully expected the pallbearers to shut the casket before lowering him into the grave. The magician's number one rule about being buried alive: don't do it. Instead, make sure you have an escape hatch and get out of the coffin before you go below. Houdini escaped from a six-foot deep sandy grave in 1915 and it almost killed him, the weight of the sand crushing his chest. This soil was moist, loamy and heavier and Frenchini possessed maybe half of Houdini's strength. Possessing more bravura than brains, French ignored common sense. Ropes were looped through the coffin's handles and the still-open casket was lowered into the earth.
Lying there in the death box, wrapped in chains, Frenchini called for the photographers. "Time to fill your front pages, boys." With the depth of the grave and its block of shadows, it was hard for the cameramen to angle their cameras and flash plates. Flames blazed, shutters snapped and the soot of flash powder drifted down.
The ropes were detached. A pallbearer lowered the end of a pole into the grave, hooked a latch on the lid and swung it shut. The Toymaker, leaning heavily on a cane carved with the figures of gargoyles, flipped over a big-bellied hourglass. The five pallbearers made quick work of shoveling dirt. Even the bathing beauties helped toss in handfuls. A four-piece band began playing Sousa, heavy on the tuba and kettledrum, light on the rhythm and melody. The crowd didn't know what to do. The shuffling of feet became milling about, muttering became groaning. Resurrection makes for good entertainment but it needs a warm-up act.
I tore the top sheet off of the notepad taped to my sleeve, creased the page and sunk it in my jacket pocket then used my Ever-Sharp pencil to continue to jot down some more colorful phraseologies for the evening edition.
After twenty-some minutes, when my thoughts ran dry, I wandered over to the magician's clique to collect some quotes. "Have you figured out the trick?" I asked Rastofsky.
The Red Devil tweaked the point on his beard. "He hasn't escaped yet, has he? I suspect after an hour we'll dig him up and he'll jump out of the coffin and claim the joke is on us."
Jim Crandall said, "He went down with the coffin. If he does disappear, you can lay odds you'll find this grave is set over a sewer pipe. A trap door out and a slimy crawl through the muck. That would be his class."
Huh. I had suspected comments along the lines of, "I'm saving my solution for the prize money." Instead, both seemed disturbed for the same reason I was: Frenchini really did bury himself alive.
I took the illusion apart, piece by piece. Handcuffs? Easy. The frisking was amateur at best. His policeman confederate could easily have slipped the key into Frenchini's palm. Even with the stricture of the chains, he could pop the manacles open before the thump of the closing coffin lid had time to fade.
The chains? They looked heavy and gave a hefty clunk as they were wrapped around him. I supposed some links could be painted balsa wood. No—he had promised we could inspect the materials afterwards. While the handcuffs were tight, the chains were just thick and heavy. He would need to pop the big padlock on top of the chains to get some wiggle room. A second key. Then he could squirm his way free of the chains. A painstaking task, a true athletic feat considering the size of his enclosure.
And then what? Opening the lid with a half a ton of dirt on top? Impossible. No, no, no. He had promised to disappear and reemerge on stage, not claw his way up through the soil. Maybe Crandall was right: a trap door down to a sewer. But wouldn't that show up on inspection?
"Oh, crap," I muttered. I recognized the central lie in the illusion. The reward. No matter how well-conceived, a magic act could be figured out. Five hundred dollars? Three months wages? Frenchini must have arranged in advance to have a confederate who would declare how the trick was done. He'd probably pay the guy ten bucks. My hopes at striking pay dirt were dead and buried.
I noticed the Toymaker eyeing the hourglass, glancing at his watch and wrinkling one side of his nose. He cast a droopy eye my way. I smelled a story.
"Al-an," the Toymaker said. His voice was thick, Hungarian. His name Ketcham came as a gift from the folks on Ellis Island. "You are not the same as these riffraff. You are a straight shooter. Can I hold you to a truth?"
"I'm a news hack now. I can't afford truth." He looked at me with his sagging miserable face, the corner of his lip trembling. "But, okay, I'll hold on to your secret, just you and me. Off the record."
"It is past thirty minutes. Now, thirty-seven. Mr. French said he would signal me in one-half an hour if all went as planned.
"What kind of signal?"
"He said he would be free and in fresh clothes and disguise, standing in the Henderson crypt. He is not. If his escape is blocked, then his life is in peril and he needs our rescue. But . . . if he is merely delayed, he will damn me for my efforts which revealed his trick."
"How long can he hold out with the air down there?"
"In the practice session, forty minutes and then he blacked out."
The Toymaker looked to me to make the life-or-death decision. I knew what my paper wanted: Wait out the hour. Hope for a last-minute rescue, settle for a dramatic death.
I knew what I had to do. I snuck up behind the vaudeville policeman and picked his pocket. Then I held the phony police badge over my head and called out: "We have an emergency here. I need the pallbearers to grab their shovels and dig up the grave as fast as they can!"
The crowd rustled to life, surging forward, roaring and yelping. The hemp and post barrier that cordoned them off toppled as they pressed on to the edge of the gravesite. One of the bathing beauties fainted.
As the pallbearers dug furiously they hurled flung fresh dirt into the crowd of onlookers. One swung his shovel to scare back the mob which threatened to spill into the ever-deepening pit. When the tip of a spade thumped against the wooden box, all but one of the gravediggers climbed out. The last stood at the margin of the casket and raised its lid.
Richard French lay there, the handcuffs to one side, the padlock open, the heavy chains spread out as though he had squirmed halfway free. In his chest was a hole, a gunshot wound. Benny, God bless him, snapped a photo.
Now the crowd surged the other way as if the gunman were still present and ready to strike. "Is there a doctor?" I yelled but with the noise and confusion I doubt I was heard beyond the inner ring of the crowd. I had rudimentary medical training from my days in the army, most of it involving what to do when your comrade met with a bullet. I jumped down into the pit, landing beside the body.
French lay in a puddle of his blood. His chest was not moving. I couldn't find a pulse. The Red Devil bounded into the grave next to me. He concentrated on freeing French, tossing the handcuffs and padlock out of the grave, loosening the chains and hauling him out. With the help of the pallbearer, he heaved the body up and laid it out on a patch of grass.
"I'm a doctor." The man appeared too young for that to be true, but, as he bent over the body, he seemed to know what he was doing. He felt for a pulse, parted an eyelid, and banged tendons, checking for any reflex or response. He lit a match, pinched French's nose, and held the flame over his mouth to check for a whisper of breath.
I mulled over the chest wound. I'd seen enough of them. This was a gaping maw speckled with the shrapnel of a bullet shell, the blast of a dumdum. But how? When?
French was alive and unharmed when the coffin lid fell. He had bled to death by the time the coffin was opened. If he had managed to direct a gun at himself, where was the gun? I inspected the inside of the coffin lid: no hidden panels, no space to hide a pistol that would shoot him when it closed. I searched for any kind of hiding place. None.
The baby-faced doctor pronounced him dead. I didn't know medicine, but I'd seen enough death to concur with his diagnosis. The doctor was not playing the shill. This was not part of the magic act.
Crandall appeared beside me. His smile was rapturous. "Finally, the Famous Frenchini has performed a worthwhile illusion!" He leaned in and whispered. "He went into the coffin with an explosive bullet already implanted in his chest. That had to be the case."
Suicide? An elaborately staged death? Not Frenchini. The man was a narcissist of the first order, not someone wishing to die. He didn't just want acclaim, he had to be around to hear the applause.
That's when I made the connection: noise. Noise was the weak link. How was it possible to not hear the gunshot? There wasn't space beneath the coffin lid to point a gun barrel, much less one with a Maxim Silencer. I recalled a wire story of a lady in South Carolina where the packed dirt on top of her grave wasn't enough to muffle the sound of the still-alive occupant beating on her coffin. Which led me to the question. . . What kind of four-piece band has a tuba and a kettle-drum?
The tuba player leaned against his instrument smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. I introduced myself as a scribe for the Evening World.
"Do you know Heywood Broun?" he asked. "I really like his column."
"Yeah, great guy. I thought I'd ask you for your thoughts on all this."
"Me? Don't got none. Long as I get paid."
"Who's paying you?"
He told me and then the tumblers clicked into place. I walked over to the killer and invited him to meet me at Lindy's, up Broadway: great cheesecake and they make you check your gun at the door.
***
While the waiters were rude, the owner's wife served as a charming hostess and the cheesecake made life worth living. I was not alone in these opinions, Jon Ketcham agreed with me on each point.
"I was born in Budapest in 1838," he told me. "I sometimes visited Houdini's family, the Weiszes. I knew the great illusionist when I was in my thirties and he was too young to escape a diaper."
"You're friends with Houdini?"
"No. He was too much the idol when I met him again."
I set down my mechanical pencil. "I figured you for the killer when I thought about that wretched Souza band. With the pains he took to present such a well-choreographed spectacle, no way French would have hired them. Along with five feet of dirt to act as muffling, the bang of a kettledrum and a tuba were just the right sounds to drown out the explosion of a gunshot."
He cast down his gaze but remained mute, so I went on. "It took a master engineer to come up with a device that would shoot French while in his coffin. I've sorted through several reasons why you chose to kill him. He was a detestable man. You made his illusions work, but he stole the glory."
"Did you consider money? I am old. I have no family on this continent. My apoplexy has made my art a near-impossible effort. Because I was too slow with my handiwork, Richard seized my schematics for his coffin escape and presented them to another craftsman to build them. I threatened to expose his trick. In response, he devised a swindle: the five hundred dollar reward. Since he knew I would reveal his secret, he sold the method to the Herald, which they promised to run only after the feat was completed. Their paper paid him for it and yet he was ready to announce they had won the reward. I have been cheated once too many times and I vowed this would be the last. I could have sold that illusion to others." He took a long, wheezing inhalation through his flaring nostrils. "One of my lungs has shut down. I cannot breathe and I cannot walk without a cane. In my situation, five hundred dollars would have seen me through to the end of my life."
The Herald paid for the scoop on the coffin escape—only the joke was on them. The illusion never took place. That was no longer the story. I was sitting across from the story. I said, "The World pays for confessions all the time. Yours will be a sensation, two-inch tall letters in front page headlines. I'll guarantee you they'll pay you in the hundreds."
"Such money will serve me no use on the electric chair."
"We'll pony up for a lawyer who'll have you out on bail and who will delay the trial for long enough to let you die at home."
"You will do that and pay me five hundred dollars."
It would be a hard sell to the Pulitzer boys but this story would double circulation. For a day. "Agreed."
The Toymaker inhaled as though it were the first time he had breathed fresh air in years. "When the casket lid shut on Mr. French he had four tasks: open the handcuffs, open the padlock, slip free of the chain and kick open the panel at the foot of the coffin. That panel was sealed with only the most gossamer of nails and beyond a veneer of dirt was a slender earthen tunnel. After passing out of the coffin, he would reattach the panel with sturdier nails, slide further down the tunnel and cause the ceiling of dirt behind him to collapse. The end of the tunnel connected to a nearby family crypt."
The collapsed tunnel, the thicker nails: he had rigged not only an ingenious escape, but the perfect cover-up.
We both sat in silence as he finished his cheesecake. He clinked the fork against the plate, signaling "more." I passed my half-finished slice over to him. Food seemed unimportant to me right now and, besides, I was scribbling as fast as I could so as to not miss a word. "But how did you manage to shoot him inside the coffin?" I asked.
"The padlock was rigged so the same small key which opened the handcuffs also opened it. However, I had time to plan. I substituted a similar-looking lock in its place. Hmmph. I overheard that fool, Crandall. He was half-right. The bullet was never shot. When the Famous Frenchini turned his key in the padlock, it was a trigger. A slot opened in the base of the lock and a spring-action bullet was propelled into Richard's chest. The bullet point was sharpened so it entered like the tip of a syringe. The impact initiated a chemical reaction and soon the bullet exploded, ensuring its deadly mission and disguising its odd shape. To all appearances, he had been shot with a hollow-point bullet." He smiled as much as his half-dead face would allow.
Sometimes I get a ghost pain, a message from the hand I no longer possess. It spoke to me now, reminding me of the blast that had taken it away. My left hand, my only physical hand, froze up in a spasm. I had had enough of this confession. I'd keep my promise and make sure The World paid Ketcham. Working together, they would manipulate the legal system and keep him alive and free until he died a cozy death at home. And yet I couldn't help but feel The World and the Toymaker were part of some deadly machine. The same machine which dug trenches and lobbed grenades.
I'd once seen a man lose his hand in the wheels of a printing press.
I looked around the restaurant. There was Damon Runyon, writer for The American, sitting across the table from his gangster buddy, Otto Berman. Charles Luciano wielded his utensils like they were weapons. Jolson and his pals were celebrating his latest Broadway sensation, Bombo. Scattered about were newshounds from the Tribune and the Daily Express, from the Times and the Daily News.
Maybe the waiters should roll out a cart. For tonight's special: the fresh meat of Richard French. All of the hungry would dig in.
Floor 24. Available September 17.
