A woman’s scream, muffled but high-pitched and panicked, filled the silence that followed. A hidden catch inside the suitcase that Bell hadn’t shot through clicked open and a woman wearing a skintight black bodysuit of elastic chiffon climbed her way out like a spider. She’d folded herself so tightly that the mind rejected the very idea that someone could have hidden within the valise, so her emergence had a macabre, unsettling feeling. As Bell had mentioned, her left leg was missing from high up on the thigh. Had she not been an amputee, she never would have managed the contortions needed to stow away inside the bag.
Latang made for the door while the police officers were distracted, but then he realized Bell wasn’t paying her the slightest attention. He had anticipated this and so was ever vigilant. The gun’s aim was centered between the magician’s eyes.
The young woman was barely five feet tall and rail thin, with pretty blond hair and a pleasant face, though once she’d gathered her wits, anger flushed her cheeks. She suddenly leapt across the room with amazing speed and slapped Isaac Bell across the face.
“You could have killed me,” she said in a thick Cockney accent. “You should be arrested for attempted murder.”
She tried to slap him again, but Bell deflected the shot adroitly. And once the contortionist was off balance, her cramped muscles refused to hold her upright and she fell to the floor. She started sobbing.
“How in the devil . . . ?”
Bell holstered his .45. McCallister had moved to restrain Latang while his partner readied a pair of handcuffs.
Bell said, “I figured early on that the thefts were done by someone hiding in the locked rooms, but since I didn’t get a look at any of the luggage that had been removed, I was forced to rely on clerks’ memories and estimates, which are generally unreliable. Still, it seemed there were few man-sized steamer trunks recalled, so I deduced it was an inside man”—he looked to the crying woman on the floor—“or lady, as it turns out, who was either a child or a contortionist. That is what prompted me to check if any circuses had been in the area of the crimes and, lo and behold, I discover the Fraunhofer & Fraunhofer Circus had been near them all.”
The detective turned his attention to the seething mad magician, Latang. “When I watched your performance, I was particularly interested in any tricks you did involving boxes, placing someone in them atop a table. You had an illusion where you saw a lady in half, but your variation was to cut off a leg first. Your regular assistant was the woman who initially stepped into the coffin-sized box in front of the entire audience. All could plainly see she had the proper number of limbs. When you first raised that curtain for a moment, she slipped out the bottom and her twin”—he pointed to the woman on the floor—“crawled in, sticking a realistic-looking foot prosthesis through one hole in the bottom of the box and her own foot through the other.
“Then you used your saw to hack off one leg and allow the box surrounding it to fall to the floor. I noted that the fake foot was kept pointed away from the audience while the woman continued to move her own leg to heighten the effect. While you were distracting the audience by flailing the saws around and shielding the bottom of the box from view, she withdrew her foot, plugged the hole with a second, fake leg, and curled her body into the top portion of the box with her head still exposed. You cut the box in half even higher up than the leg cut, and the audience believes you’ve just sawn a woman into three pieces.
“Then it’s a simple matter of reversing everything, including the sisters switching places under the table, and, presto, you are Rudolfo the Magnificent.”
“And you figured this all out by watching his act once?” Northrop was duly impressed.
“I know how the standard illusion is played out. This variation was an intriguing one, but there was only one possible explanation for how it could be executed. Since Latang didn’t remove her limb and magically reattach it, it must not have been there in the first place. And since I saw the assistant step into the box on her own two shapely legs, there had to be a second person with only one leg. Confirmation came the next day when I saw the two women working together to help dismantle the circus venue. One walked perfectly normal, the other with a severe limp.
“After that, I followed Latang. I was actually in line at another postal branch when he shipped these trunks here. I managed to chalk an X on the one he hadn’t double-checked that he had the key for. That’s how I knew to
shoot the other one.”
“The money,” Northrop cried. Previously, he’d implied that he could open Latang’s trunks without a warrant, but that wasn’t true. Now, considering the circumstances, he felt justified, and he was sure he could square it with a judge. He glowered at the magician. “Give me the key.”
“I don’t have it,” the man replied, his bravado waning with each passing moment. He knew he’d been beaten.
“She has it,” Bell said. “She was shipped from the one branch to this one last night stowed away in the larger trunk. Even for her, hiding in the smaller one for more than a few minutes, a half hour tops, would be impossible. The big trunk, though, would be nice and cozy. After the branch closed yesterday afternoon, she let herself out and transferred all the clothes and props from the smaller two steamers into the larger one and relocked it. Then she had all night to find the payroll shipments from San Francisco, remove the cash, and reseal the packages. I suspect she had fake wads of bills to replace the cash with so the weights remained consistent and the robbery wouldn’t be discovered until the following payday.
“Just before the post office reopens, she locks up the money trunk and folds herself into the other. I hadn’t noticed yesterday when I followed Latang, but I saw this morning that the lock mechanism on her trunk is fake. It can’t be locked from the outside, only latched shut from within.” Bell held his hand down to the contortionist. She pulled a leather thong up from under her tighter-than-tight body stocking and over her head. Dangling from it was a tiny steamer trunk key.
Bell handed it to Northrop. The postal inspector shot Latang a look. Defeated, the magician merely nodded, and the D.C. inspector turned the key. Though the trunk seemed much too small to hold a person, it looked more than sufficiently large to store a million dollars in cash. The dull-green bills were still banded and packed as neatly as sardines in a tin. One stack, though, did have an ugly black hole shot through the middle of it.
Northrop fingered the destroyed legal tender.
Bell gave a little smile. “Van Dorns always get their man. Always. But sometimes there is a cost to doing business.”
2
When staying over in Denver, Isaac Bell always roomed at the Brown Palace, the city’s premier hotel. While it was already nearing its twentieth year of operation, it had yet to be surpassed in luxury, style, or comfort. And was located just a stone’s throw from the state capitol building.
He had finished dining and found himself in the Marble Bar, the site of the infamous murder the previous May of Tony Von Phul and an innocent bystander by Frank Henwood. Von Phul had been carrying on an affair with Isabel Springer, the wife of Henwood’s friend John Springer. He had come to confront Von Phul and put an end to the illicit assignation. The sordid matter had the opposite effect and the Springers divorced five days after the double homicide. It was still the talk of the town, Bell had learned.
That, and the deaths of nine miners two days prior out near Central City. He’d read an evening paper about the efforts by Bill Mahoney, the foreman at a nearby mine, to reach the trapped men. He and his fellow rescuers had been turned back by severe flooding. Mahoney had also been the person first informed about the disaster when a mysterious and unsigned note saying there had been an accident was slid under his cabin door. That last detail was something Bell knew well. People were reluctant to come forward with information, especially about something as macabre as a mine accident, or have their name associated with so much death. It was human nature.
He had made reservations for the morning train to Chicago and then on east to New York and was just about to enjoy the last of his drink and call it a night when a middle-aged man in a decent suit came into the bar, swept it once like a searchlight, and made straight for Isaac. He took the stool at Bell’s side.
“You wouldn’t be Isaac Bell, by chance?”
Wary, Bell said, “Who’s asking?”
“Sir, my name is Hans Bloeser.” He handed Bell a business card. Bound by etiquette, Bell returned to him one of his own. “I took a chance you were still in town and either at the Oxford Hotel or here. You are Bell?”