“But we don’t all have the coldly rational, scientific attitude you do, and we wouldn’t all have realized so quickly that there was one very simple but drastic way to prevent it—murder. You are much too rational. You believe that one man’s life is less important than the good his death might bring, and you believed that sufficiently to act upon it. The knife was there, all too handy, in your little black case. And so—Drake died. Am I right, doctor?”

Doran didn’t like this as a motive. “He’s still a killer,” he objected. “And he tried to frame Rosa, didn’t he?”

Merlini said, “Do you want to answer that, doctor?”

Garrett hesitated, then glanced at the magazine Merlini still held. His voice was tired. “You are also much too rational.” He turned to Doran. “Rosa Rhys was a cheap fraud who capitalized on superstition. The world would be a much better place without such people.”

“And what about your getting that job as the head of the medical foundation?” Doran was still unconvinced. “I don’t supposed that had anything to do with your reasons for killing Drake?”

The doctor made no answer. And I couldn’t tell if it was because Doran was right or because he knew that Doran would not believe him.

He turned to Merlini instead. “The fact still remains that the cancer foundation has been made possible. The only difference is that now two men rather than one pay with their lives.”

“A completely rational attitude,” Merlini said, “does have its advantages if it allows you to contemplate your own death with so little emotion.”

Gavigan wasn’t as cynical about Garrett’s motives as Doran, but his police training objected. “He took the law into his own hands. If everyone did that, we’d all have to go armed for self-protection. Merlini, why did Ross think he heard paper tearing when he opened that door?”

“He did hear it,” Merlini said. Then he turned to me. “Dr. Garrett stood behind you and Miss Drake when you broke in the door, didn’t he?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

Merlini opened the medical journal and riffled through it. Half a dozen loose pages, their serrated edges showing where they had been torn in half, fluttered to the floor.

Merlini said, “You would have made an excellent magician, doctor. Your deception was not visual, it was auditory.”

“That,” Gavigan said, “tears it.”

Later I had one further question to ask Merlini.

“You didn’t explain how Houdini got out of that Scottish jail, nor how it helped you solve the enigma of the unsealed door.”

Merlini lifted an empty hand, plucked a lighted cigarette from thin air and puffed at it, grinning.