The Dime Museum Murders

TITAN BOOKS BY DANIEL STASHOWER

THE HARRY HOUDINI MYSTERIES

The Dime Museum Murders

The Floating Lady Murder

The Houdini Specter

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF

SHERLOCK HOLMES

The Ectoplasmic Man

THE HARRY HOUDINI MYSTERIES: THE DIME MUSEUM MURDERS

Print edition ISBN: 9780857682840

E-book edition ISBN: 9780857686190

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

First edition: February 2012

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2000, 2012 by Daniel Stashower

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CONTENTS

The Bally

The Human Pin-Cushion

The Inside Talker

Turning the Tip

The Worm-Shaft Man

The King of Kards

The Human Telescope

The Living Sponge

The Glass-Eater

Return of the Graveyard Ghouls

The Upside-Down Man

The Minotaur

Buried Alive

The Justly-Celebrated Self-Liberator

Oh, You Wonder!

About the Author

THE

DIME MUSEUM MURDERS

1

THE BALLY

COULD IT REALLY BE THAT TIME OF THE YEAR AGAIN? ANOTHER Halloween, already? It must be, the old man told himself. There were reporters in the downstairs parlor, and that only happened at Halloween.

How long had it been now? Twenty-seven years? Twenty-eight? Yes, twenty-eight. It hardly seemed possible. Harry had been dead for nearly three decades.

Even now, the old man was particular in matters of dress. He had spent fifty-three minutes polishing his black Riderstone wing-tips that morning, applying a second coat of EverBlack with an oil-soaked chamois, and buffing the stitch-work with his late wife’s eyebrow pencil. His best suit, the double-breasted tick-weave, got a vigorous brushing, and his black onyx shirt studs received a last-minute spit-shine. A brisk dousing with Jenkinson’s Lime Pomade completed his toilette. On his way downstairs, he paused at the mirror. Not bad for a man of eighty-four. In the old days, they called him Dash.

Seated in the parlor, he waited quietly for the interview to begin. The photographer, a man named Parker, fussed and clucked over his light meter while the reporter glanced at his notes. Matthews, he said his name was. Call me Jack.

Very little changed about this ritual from year to year. The cameras seemed to get smaller, and the reporters younger, but each interview crept along in the same weary way. One year, there had been a man with a moving picture camera, crouching beneath a black cloth while his hand turned a crank. Another year there had been a recording device with two large spools of silver wire. Matthews, a plump-faced youth with thinning ginger hair, seemed content with the traditional pad of paper and a well-chewed pencil.

Always the same questions, though. Tell us what you remember about your brother, Mr. Hardeen. If your brother were alive today, Mr. Hardeen, what sorts of escapes do you suppose he would be performing? Can you tell us how he made that elephant vanish, Mr. Hardeen?

And every year, come what may, the big wrap-up question: Do you suppose, Mr. Hardeen, that your brother will ever make good on his promise to send a message from the spirit world?

He had not yet made up his mind how to play the interview this year. For a few moments he considered reprising his Wily Codger routine from the year before. This entailed a great deal of thigh-slapping and many repetitions of the phrase I kid you not, Sonny Boy... It played well and traveled wide, bringing a harvest of clips from all over the map—Louisville’s Courier-Journal, Toledo’s Evening Bee. He couldn’t remember them all, but they were in the press book.

Or perhaps he would give them the Wistful Trouper. This involved lengthy patches of misty-eyed reminiscence about gaslit stages, Bertrand’s Alum Face Paint, and the great days of the sideshows and dime museums. He had a heartwarming anecdote about Emma Shaller, the Ossified Girl, that could always be counted on for three or four column inches.

Parker, the photographer, was now frowning over a troublesome shadow. The old man folded his legs and ran his hand across his shirt front, checking the red silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. There had been a time, the winter season of 1931–32, when his show traveled with 612 props. Today, he needed only one. Tell me, Mr. Hardeen, the reporter would ask, were you and your brother close at the time of his death? At this, the old man would sit back in his chair as if surprised by the question, and impressed by the reporter’s insight. Clearing his throat, he would begin to answer but then stop himself, as though seized by a sudden rush of feeling. He would smile faintly and shake his head at this—such emotion! After so many years!—and clutch at his handkerchief to dab his moistening eyes.

And here was the beauty of the thing. As he plucked the red silk from his pocket, a small metallic object would fall heavily to the floor, perhaps rolling to the reporter’s feet. I’m sorry, at my age it’s difficult to bend—would you... ? The reporter would pick it up. A heavy gold medallion with a strange insignia. Did this belong to your brother, Mr. Hardeen? And the Great Hardeen would fold his hands and allow a wry smile to play across his lips. In a sense, young man.

You see, it’s a memento from the very first time that Harry Houdini ever died.

I’m sorry? Well, Mr. Matthews, it’s a long story, and I know that you and young Parker want to get back to the city. Maybe some other—?

No? You want to hear it? Well, let’s see how much of it I remember. I’ve never told this story before. In fact, they made us swear an oath on the Wintour family Bible, which was a bit of a laugh, if you must know. The Brothers Houdini, sons of Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss, taking a solemn vow on a Bible. But we gave our word and I’ve held to it. I know Harry did, too. Never even told Bess, so far as I know. Still, there’s been a lot of water under the Williamsburg Bridge since then. I read the other day—in the Herald, you’ll be gratified to hear—that Lady Wycliffe has finally passed. The last great society hostess. Folded her last napkin, you might say. I’ve kept my mouth shut all these years out of respect for her. She was a fine woman, and she deserved better than that goggle-eyed bastard she—

But I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself. Would you mind drawing those blinds just a bit? My cataracts. The light, it troubles me a bit.

Thank you. Now, gentlemen, you’re certain that you’d like to hear about this? You don’t—? Very well.

It must have been September, or perhaps October, of 1897. I turned twenty-one that year. Harry would have been twenty-three. My brother was going through a rough time. He’d worked like a dog, but try as he might, he couldn’t quite break out of the small time. He was strictly a novelty act—traveling circuses, the midway, that sort of thing. He and I had done an act together from the time we were kids, but that changed when he married Bess. From that point on, she did the act with him and I did the booking and advance work. Truth be told, the duties were pretty light. There wasn’t a tremendous demand for appearances by the Great Houdini at that stage, but I was always on hand, behind the scenes. Nowadays you would call me a theatrical agent and pay me a fat commission. Back then, we literally worked for food.

We’d been traveling quite a bit that year—sometimes with the Welsh Brothers Circus, sometimes with the Marco Company. We did all right trailing through such places as Cherokee, Kansas and Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where people seemed grateful for most any form of entertainment. Harry’s escape act hadn’t quite taken shape yet, but he did a passable magic routine. He fancied himself a master manipulator, and billed himself as the King of Kards. Bess worked as his assistant, and also pulled an occasional spot as a singer. The Melodious Little Songster, we called her. She had a wonderful voice and—I don’t mind telling you—she was easy on the eyes.

In a traveling show just about everyone takes a turn on stage, and I did my share as a juggler and an acrobat. I also worked as a spotter for the trapeze team, and occasionally I put on a gorilla suit for the Beasts of All Nations tableau. I liked circus life. The work suited me and I enjoyed the travel and the small towns, which reminded me of my boyhood in Wisconsin. If not for my brother, I might well have spent the rest of my working life touring the sticks. Even my modest talents were sufficient to earn a living. Nobody ever got famous working town fairs and medicine shows, but nobody ever worked himself into an early grave either.

In those days, you could make a living without ever setting foot in a big city. For that matter, you could do well without ever touring America. Carter the Great, one of the best magic acts of all time, spent years overseas, just to stay out of Kellar’s way. You’ve never heard of Kellar? He was king back then. But the road show wasn’t enough for Harry. He had to make it big. And to do that, he had to conquer New York.

New York didn’t want to know from Harry Houdini. I was with him when he went calling on a booking agent named Arthur Berg, who was a big fish in those days. They called him Snaps, because he could make or break a career with a click of his fingers. Harry had been sending him stacks of clippings from small town newspapers, most of which had been planted—and sometimes even written—by yours truly. Houdini Astounds Residents of Kennesaw. Houdini A Delight, Say Audiences in Lynchburg. Personally, I didn’t put a whole lot of stock in the good opinion of papers like the Brattleboro Gazette, but Harry did. He preserved each clipping as though it were edged in gold. Gathered them all up in a shiny leather binder, which he proudly laid out in front of Mr. Berg when we finally got in to see him. Snaps barely looked up from his desk. Very nice, Mr. Houdini, he said. "But what have you done locally?"

It just about killed Harry. It was too late to hook up with another traveling show that season, and the small cash reserves we’d managed to build up on the road were draining rapidly. I finally got him a job at Huber’s Fourteenth Street Museum. The dime museum. The ten-in-one.

You’re too young to remember the ten-in-one. Some people called it the freak show, but it wasn’t a freak show—not really. Human curiosities, they called them. Marvels of the natural world. Peerless prodigies of physical phenomena. You paid a dime, you got to see ten different acts. They say Barnum himself got it going. Gather ’round, all—the show is about to begin.

Just about every circus in America had a show like that on its midway. you paid a little extra, they lifted up the flap and let you in. It was supposed to make you feel sort of daring. The whole point was to turn the tip as quickly as possible. Sorry? The tip. That’s the crowd. Turning the tip meant getting the crowd gathered, taking their money, and herding them through the tent as quick as you could. The acts were lined up on a platform, one after the other, and the talker would hustle the audience from one to the next as though pushing them with a broom.

Harry worked dozens of these places. In fact, they used to call him Dime Museum Harry, and even after he’d made it big, he was always afraid that he might have to go back. It was no kind of life for Bess, I’ll say that. She used to sell toothpaste to the other performers on the road, just to keep us fed.

Dime museums in New York were a whole lot different from dime museums on the road. For one thing, there were enough people in New York to keep the show running year round. On the road, stopping in the burgs and backwaters, pretty much everyone within twenty miles who had a dime would have seen the show after three days. In New York, with its constant supply of fresh marks, the shows tended to set up in storefronts and theater lobbies, rather than in tents or circus wagons. It made for more pleasant working conditions, and there was always a chance that a real live booker might catch your act. Or so we hoped.

There was only one spot open at Huber’s Museum, so Harry and Bess did the act while I beat the bushes. I called on agents and managers with Harry’s beloved press book, and talked a good line about his fabulous drawing power in central Illinois. I guess we’d been back in New York for about three weeks by then, and I had worked my way pretty much to the bottom of the pecking order. I seem to recall showing the book to a guy behind the screens of a Punch and Judy show. He didn’t even bother to take the puppets off his hands, he just had me turn the pages for him. Even he couldn’t use us.

It must have been around six in the evening when I caught the elevated train to Huber’s. It was raining, and I can remember cradling the press book under my coat to protect the leather. I wasn’t especially looking forward to seeing Harry. He’d just about reached the end of his tether, and I had no good news for him.

I left the train at Fourteenth Street and walked east toward Union Square. When I got to Huber’s I found Albert Sandor leaning against the wall outside with a cigar clamped between his teeth, cleaning his nails with a toothpick. Albert was the outside talker at Huber’s, the guy who kept up a fast-running patter to attract a crowd and move them through the Hall of Curiosities. It was a rare thing to see Albert with his mouth shut, and I guessed that the talent was taking a doniker break.

Albert looked me up and down and gave a two-tone whistle. Hot date? he asked.

I was wearing a double-breasted wool suit that a tailor in Kansas City had assured me was the latest European fashion. A banker’s gray with a windowpane check if you looked real close, wide lapels, and a nipped-in waist. I also had a cream-colored shirt with a fresh collar and cuffs, and a wide pukka silk tie which, if I’d unbuttoned my jacket, would have displayed a portrait of the late General Gordon. The haberdasher made me a deal. For good measure, I also had on a good pair of brown leather oxfords that still held their shine, though they no longer kept out water.

Who’s the lucky girl? Albert asked.

There’s no girl, I said. I wear my best suit when I go calling on bookers. It doesn’t show the wear at the knees. I jerked my head toward the platform. How’s the draw?

Running at about three-quarter capacity, he said. Not bad for a Tuesday.

A tribute to the drawing power of the Great Houdinis, wouldn’t you say? Might be time for Mr. Beckman to move them up to the main stage. Mr. Beckman was the guy who managed Huber’s at that time. He also happened to do the booking for a big variety palace called Thornton’s across the street, a fact that was not lost on my brother.

Albert grinned and knocked the ash from his cigar. Dancing girls, Dash. That’s what brings the crowds, and that’s what Mr. Beckman wants. ‘Charming young ladies in revealing fashions.’ That’s what it says out front. The crowd at Thornton’s wouldn’t know what to make of an escapodontist.

Escapologist.

Whatever. Your brother is better off on the platform.

We’ll see, I said. What sort of a mood is the justly celebrated self-liberator in this evening?

Albert grinned and continued grooming his fingernails. He was in a lovely humor when he came off after the three o’clock. Came up to me and demanded I deliver hot water and fresh towels to his dressing room after each performance.

He has a dressing room?

Seems he’s marked out some territory at the back. Near the boiler.

Imagine that.

So now he wants fresh towels, seeing as how he has a fancy dressing room.

I’m sorry, Albert, he can be—

He waved his toothpick. Not a problem. I told him to take it up with the wardrobe mistress.

Since when do we have a wardrobe mistress?

We don’t.

I shifted the clipping book under my arm. I’ll talk to him.

Do that.

Any chance of giving him the extra time he wants? He wants to try out a new bit. Two audience members come up and tie his hands, then Harry—

I know, Dash. He told me all about it. He gets three minutes, just like everybody else.

It could be a great act. He gets out of the ropes, and also a bag and a trunk. But the kicker is that—

—when it’s all over, Bess is inside the trunk. I know, Dash. They’ve switched places. In the twinkling of an eye. But he still only gets three minutes. Just like everybody else.

I turned and gazed across the street at the marquee of Thornton’s Theater, which was emblazoned with the name of Miss Annie Cummings, the Songbird from Savannah. You know, I said, my brother really is as good as he says he is.

Sure, Dash. And one day it’ll be his name up there in tall letters. And shortly after that, I’ll be elected president of the United States.

What a gruff and crusty fellow you are, Albert.

I’m a realist, Dash. I know your brother is talented, but it’s not enough. His timing stinks. His delivery stinks. His patter stinks. His—

All of those things will get better. I’m telling you, he’s a natural showman. He has a real instinct for drama. I’ve seen people literally holding their breath waiting to see if he’ll find a way to escape from an old nailed-up packing crate. All he needs is a chance to show what he can do. Now, if Mr. Beckman should give him one of the warm-up spots at Thornton’s, just a few minutes at the top of the show, I know Harry could—

Dash. It’s a dance hall. Burleycue.

Harry’s worked burlesque halls before.

Really? I wouldn’t have thought he had the legs for it. Albert looked at his watch and tossed away the stump of his cigar. Do me a favor, wouldja? Run the bally for me? Chester’s down with the grippe.

The bally, I should probably explain, is an act performed outside the tent or the theater to lure the marks inside. A crowd gathers to see the act—whatever it is—and the talker launches into an elaborate spiel, describing the many miracles and marvels to be found just beyond the ticket window. If the talker is any good—and Albert was one of the best—the marks will just about knock him over in their haste to get inside. Sometimes the bally would be a sword-swallower; sometimes a fire-eater. The absent Chester was an accomplished blockhead—meaning that he could drive three-inch spikes into his nose with a hammer.

Happily, Albert didn’t expect anything quite that exotic from me. There was a set of heavy wooden Indian clubs sitting by the entrance. I picked them up and started juggling—an easy overhand pass routine—while Albert delivered his grind. I don’t remember exactly how the patter went, but I do recall that it began with the words Step right up, folks, and that it promised a world of wonders such as mortal eyes have never beheld.

Between Albert’s grind and my juggling, it wasn’t long before we’d gathered a crowd of perhaps fourteen or fifteen people, about as many as could be expected on a chilly Tuesday evening. Albert collected a handful of coins, issued paper tickets, and ushered our small audience through the door.

The so-called Palace of Wonders had been established on the ruins of a failed butcher’s shop, and the smell of salty meats still hung about the room. Mr. Beckman had used red and gold hanging banners to cover the walls and display windows, but otherwise the space was much as it had been—a long, dingy room with high windows along the left-hand wall. No one had even bothered to sweep the sawdust from the floor.

A