Harry Houdini 1 - The Dime Museum Murders by Daniel Stashower

Author:Daniel Stashower [Stashower, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Mystery, v5.0, 19th century
ISBN: 9780857682840
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 1999-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

7

THE HUMAN TELESCOPE

“ALL RIGHT, HOUDINI,” LIEUTENANT MURRAY SAID. “LET’S HAVE IT from the beginning.”

Harry laced his fingers around the coffee cup he had been clutching for three hours. “I can add nothing to what I have already told you.”

The lieutenant turned to me. “How about you, Hardeen? Anything to add?”

“I’m happy to go over the details again, if I can be helpful.”

He looked at us both, his expression wavering between dark suspicion and genuine curiosity. We had been sitting at a table in the police interview room for the better part of the night, relating the events of the evening for perhaps seven different officials. The lieutenant had listened attentively to each reiteration, apparently uncertain as to our motives and trustworthiness. Two floors below us, a team of police investigators combed through the cell where Josef Graff had died.

“Tell me again how you knew that the old man was in danger,” Murray said.

“It was obvious,” Harry replied. “Mrs. Graff had been killed. Clearly the murderer felt it necessary to silence her. He would not kill the wife and leave the husband to talk.”

The lieutenant nodded. “So you’ve said. But with respect, Houdini, Mrs. Graff’s murder looks a whole hell of a lot like the work of a gang. Hit over the head, cut up the side. Gang boys. Irish. Italian. We see this sort of thing often enough, though it doesn’t always make the papers. All those immigrant neighborhoods packed together. There’s always a bad element, always young people looking to make trouble.”

Harry stared listlessly at a map of the city pinned to the wall across from him.

“And Mr. Graff,” Murray continued, “that looks to have been a suicide. There was even a note pinned to his chest. ‘Forgive,’ it said. It would have been natural enough for the old man to take his own life. He felt disgraced—you said it yourself, Houdini—and his wife’s death would have pushed him over the edge. My superiors are tempted to close the book on the whole thing. Chalk up Graff’s suicide as an admission of guilt in the Wintour killing.”

“You don’t believe that, Lieutenant,” Harry said with quiet certainty.

The lieutenant let out a heavy sigh. “No, I don’t.” He stood up, linking his hands behind his back as he walked to a grimy window. “I might have believed it, if you two hadn’t stirred up the waxworks. But now? The timing is wrong.”

“Timing is very important in my business,” Harry said.

“No one was due to check the cells until tomorrow morning. By then, there might have been time for Graff to have heard about his wife. Possibly. If her body had been discovered last night, one of his neighbors might have brought him word; shouted it up to him through the alley window. We would have had no way of knowing one way or the other. It probably would have been ruled a suicide.”

“I’m not sure I see the problem,” I said. “The killer must have been seen entering the building. Mr. Graff was dead when we got there, so he must have been killed sometime before midnight.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.