Murder By Misdirection

by Debra Snow

  “We aren’t here for Marvell, Mister Shaut,” Chu pointed out. “We are here because of your relationship with Albert Floss.”

  “What? Yeah, I know Al. He’s been around forever. In fact, he was selling me information on a trick—an illusion.”

  “By any chance,” Pro coaxed, “the Prism?”

  Something clicked in Shaut’s mind, and his eyes became narrow as he gazed at Pro. “Hey, I know you, those blue eyes. Now I know this is a scam. You’re Max’s kid, Prophecy.” He rose up from his chair and pointed at Pro, his face growing red. “I remember seeing you backstage when you were little! What are you two trying to pull—”

  “Mister Shaut,” Chu raised his voice to silence the man. “We are here because we are investigating the murder of Albert Floss.”

  Shaut stared at Chu, unbelieving. “Al’s dead? Murdered?”

  “Yes, sir, yesterday at 11:00 AM in his shop on—”

  “I know where it is,” Shaut disclosed as he fell heavily into his chair. “Who did it? Was it Max? Is that why you brought—” He pointed an accusing finger at Pro.

  “Detective Thompson is my partner. We are the detectives assigned to the case.”

  “Thompson? Oh yeah, I heard your mom remarried,” Shaut concluded and turned to Pro. “Glad you were smart enough to change your name.”

  Pro’s mouth was a tight line as she pushed back her anger. “We are not here to discuss me, Mister Shaut. We are here to ask you about your business arrangements with Albert Floss.”

  His hands went up defensively. “Whaddaya talkin’ about? Everybody knew Al, and everybody did business with the old man.”

  Chu took over. “But you were emailing him about an item. May I ask what the item was?”

  “Sure, it was like the broad said—it was Prism.”

  “Broad?” Pro fumed and rose from her seat. Chu put a restraining hand on her shoulder, and she slowly lowered into it, her blue eyes fixed angrily on Shaut.

  “Sorry, uh…lady…uh…cop…detective, whatever you are,” Shaut offered dismissively. “If Al ended up dead, you gotta look at Max Marvell. When he found out I was interested in Prism, he started to write me emails sayin’ he was gonna sue my ass—and worse.”

  “Do you have copies of those emails?”

  “Yeah. Hey, Brent!”

  Brent stuck his head out dutifully. “Yes, sir?”

  “Can you print those nutty emails that Marvell sent me for the detectives?”

  “It would be my pleasure, Mister Shaut. It’s about time someone took that man seriously.”

  “Yeah, I don’t need the commentary, just do it!” Shaut barked and turned to his monitor. Pro and Chu could hear a laser printer hum to life in the next room.

  “Mister Shaut, while you’re doing that, can you print up the emails you sent to Albert Floss as well?” Chu coaxed.

  “Ain’t that something you need a warrant for?” Shaut asked, suspicious again.

  Chu stood and leaned across the desk. “Not if you’re willing to volunteer them. If not, and I have to get a warrant, I assure you, we will also search the entire house for anything suspicious.”

  Flustered, Shaut conceded. “Okay, okay. Brent!”

  “I am on it, sir. I heard the detective.”

  “Good, good,” Shaut responded then added snidely, “the last thing I would want to do is inconvenience the NYPD.”

  Pro pulled out her notebook. “And where were you yesterday between ten and eleven in the morning, sir?”

  “Me? Why are you asking me?”

  “It helps us eliminate people,” Chu claimed.

  “I was here, right here at this desk.”

  Pro made a note in her book. “You have anyone to verify that?”

  “Brent, was I here yesterday between ten and noon?”

  “Sorry, Mister Shaut, it was my half-day,” Brent replied from the other room. He walked in. “However you did call me at about 10:30 to make an appointment in your online calendar and check the availability for that French magician in July.”

  Shaut grumbled. “Okay, well Friday is when I send out my email flyer for the next Monday’s performance. I have to write it up.”

  “I can verify that, detectives,” Brent said helpfully. “When I came in at noon, the schedule had been finished. I just added the graphics and sent it out. It had not been ready when I left the previous night.”

  “Is there anyone else in this building?”

  Shaut shook his head. “No, it’s just Brent and me, and he doesn’t live here.”

  “Really?” Pro demanded. “And how did a man who runs a magic show end up owning a brownstone in Manhattan?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, detective,” Brent grumbled defensively, “but Mister Shaut is a renowned software developer.”

  “Calm down, Brent, they have to ask. Yeah, I sold out my company to Google years ago and decided to pursue my passion for magic. I have an entire workshop in the basement where I create my own effects.”

  Undaunted, Pro said, “When you’re not stealing from Max Marvell?”

  “Mister Shaut would never steal an effect,” Brent spat haughtily. “He pays for them.”

  “Hey, I wanted to know how it works, that’s all. I don’t know if I would actually build the damn thing. I saw Max do it in Vegas. You’re his kid; you’ve seen it.”

  Pro folded her arms. “Max and I have been estranged for years, so no, I haven’t.”

  “Really? Well, let me tell you, girlie, this was the most amazing thing I ever saw. He is out there, on a stage, pretty much empty, except for a couple of glass whatchamacallits, like triangle shapes but flat on the ends.”

  Brent piped up, “It’s a polyhedron with a triangular base.”

  “Whatever! So, he’s out there with these two prism things on two rotating platforms, and there’s a flash of rainbow light, real pretty, and he’s gone, just freakin’ gone. I watched the show from the orchestra. He’s nowhere near a wall or a box or anything with a mirror. So, next night, I watch from the balcony, figuring he uses a trap door. Nothing. He just disappears. I want to know how it was done.”

  “And Albert Floss offered to sell you the secret?” Chu asked.

  “Yeah, for fifty grand.”

  “Fifty grand?” Pro repeated. “You would spend that just to learn how a trick was done?”

  Brent once again interrupted. “You don’t understand, detective, it’s not just a trick. It is the penultimate vanish of a human being on stage.”

  “I gotta agree with Brent,” Shaut disclosed. “It’s a great effect. Floss told me he was able to get copies of Marvell’s design, and with his own information, he assured me that I could do the trick. I could even do it on a smaller scale.”

  “By the way, detectives,” Brent asked, “when you found Mister Floss, did you locate the plans?”

  Pro folded her arms again. “It’s an ongoing investigation. We are not at liberty to say.”

  Shaut grew very serious. “Well, if you don’t find ‘em, I gotta tell you, I would look very seriously at Max Marvell.”

  “Mister Marvell is not your concern,” Chu reported. “What is your concern is that you don’t have an alibi for the time in question.”

  “Detective!” Brent bellowed.

  Shaut held up his hands. “Hey, I wasn’t the only interested buyer. One of the reasons Al made the price so high is that he told me he had five guys interested.”

  “Do you know who they were?” Pro prodded.

  “Not a clue. Magicians are a pretty tight-lipped group.”

  “May we have those emails, Mister Williams?” Chu asked of Shaut’s assistant.

  “Hm? Oh, yes,” Brent mumbled and went into the side room to retrieve a sheaf of papers.

  “We appreciate your time,” Chu said. “We might be back to ask a few more questions once we’ve gone through these emails.”

  “Well, I think you realized the same thing I did,” Shaut said, as he walked the two detectives
to the door.

  “What’s that?” Pro asked.

  “That Max Marvell is a dangerous guy.”

  7. Chain Escape

  A few minutes later, Chu was driving back to the 54th Street Precinct, as Pro looked over the dozen or so pages Shaut’s assistant had given them.

  “Anything good?” Chu asked, noting the silence of his partner.

  “Nothing good for Max, I’m afraid. He makes frightening suggestions as to what he will do if Shaut doesn’t comply.”

  “Such as?”

  Pro leaned close to the paper. “I know where the bodies are buried. If you don’t want to be one of them, you won’t help Al cheat me.” She slipped the page and went to a second one. “Once I take care of AF—I guess that’s Albert Floss—you’ll be next. And so on…”

  “I sent an email to LVPD to see if there is any history of violence with your dad.”

  “Let’s just call him Max,” Pro said, her back stiffening. “He honestly is a stranger to me.”

  “A stranger who spent the night with your mom.”

  This made her even tenser. “Like I told you yesterday, my mom loses all sense when he is around. I’m still trying to deal with the fact they slept together. God! She might have slept with a murderer.”

  “Don’t get too far ahead of yourself. So far the only thing we can prove is that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “And made threats,” Pro grumbled while waving the papers.

  “We assume he did, but we still need to tie the email address to Max. It would make sense to bring him back to interview again.”

  Pro shook her head. “This is why I loved my stepdad so much. He was a rock. When he and Mom married, my life became very stable.”

  “Some people would call that boring,” Chu suggested.

  “Not me. When Max came around, everything was crazy because he always had to run off to do gigs. Schedules would change on a dime. Promised events or parties would be canceled. I had more than enough craziness when I was little. Joe was predictable. I liked that.”

  They pulled into their assigned parking space, and Chu turned off the car just as his phone rang.

  “Chu!” he spoke into his phone, then listened. “We’re on it.”

  Pro had stepped out of the car but stayed in place with the door open. She knew this meant they had been assigned another case and would be off again in a minute.

  “We got another murder,” Chu told her from the driver’s seat.

  “Of course we do,” Pro said, and got back into the car.

  “It’s at another magic shop, so they sent it to us.”

  “Do you think it was our killer?” Pro said as Chu started the vehicle.

  “According to the officers on site, he was strangled with a rope,” Chu stated as he maneuvered the car back into traffic. “And some of that special rope was lying on his chest—only this time it was blue.”

  It was a quick drive to 52nd Street near Broadway, where the pair of detectives soon walked up to the second floor of an office building a few hundred feet from Gallagher’s Steak House.

  The hallway had several similar doors, each with a different sign that listed the business. One was marked with a sign that read “Talent Agent”; another had a paper printed on a laser printer and claimed to be an “App Developer.” At the end of the hall was a laminated notice that bore a magic wand and the words, “Tanner’s Magic.”

  They walked into a much cleaner and brighter space than Albert Floss’s shop had been. Like Floss, there was shelving all along the walls of the room, but it wore a fresh coat of white and was clear of any dust. The equipment that lined the walls looked new and well-maintained, and the glass cases were undamaged with the glass polished. The cases were filled with cards, coins, and round balls made of sponge. There were also display boxes that contained tricks, the artwork was modern, and the copy printed on the boxes suggested, “Anyone can do it!”

  There was a uniformed officer carrying a roll of yellow tape that was printed with the words “CRIME SCENE” in bold black letters. She was a good-looking woman with auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail and her blue eyes watched everything. She had an impressive figure, and when Chu looked at her, she lowered her eyes and smiled a secret smile.

  “Detectives,” she said. “You got here fast.”

  “Officer Barker, good to see you.” Chu smiled. “What have we got?”

  “Without forensics, it’s just a guess.” She led them through a break between two display cases, and when she turned, they saw the body of a man on the floor between a display case and the wall shelves. The man had a full head of hair and was stout and not as tall as Floss had been. He wore a simple white shirt and black pants and lay on the floor with his mouth hanging open, exposing several gold teeth. Around his neck was a red line where something had been pulled into his flesh.

  “It appears the owner was strangled, possibly garroted with a blue rope that we found on his chest. However, there was a wit on scene who called it in. He keeps saying that it isn’t really rope. He also identified the DB as Louie Tanner.”

  Pro recognized the term “wit” as police shorthand for “witness," and all at once she had a tightness in the pit of her stomach. “Someone called it in?”

  “Yes, detective,” Barker said, turning to Pro. “Claims he found the DB, and that he didn’t touch anything. The strange thing is that he called the precinct directly instead of 9-1-1.” She gestured to a doorway behind the counter. “He’s back there with my partner, if you want to talk to him.”

  “Do you think it’s—” Chu muttered.

  “It better not be,” Pro fumed as they walked past the counter and into a storage room.

  They moved into the clean back room where two men sat. One was Barker’s partner, Officer Bailey, who was tall and well-proportioned. The top of his head was bald, and he had brown hair on the sides and around his ears.

  Sitting next to him was Max Martin, aka Max Marvell.

  He stood as the two detectives entered. “Pumpkin!” he bellowed, and immediately corrected himself. “I mean Detectives Chu and Mar—uh—Thompson.”

  The magician was now wearing dark pants, either navy blue or black, a brown jacket, and a turtle neck.

  Chu’s face grew quite stern. “Officer Bailey, please join your partner in securing the scene.”

  The officer saw the looks in the detectives’ eyes and didn’t need to be told twice. He bolted from the back room.

  “What the hell,” Pro yelled, and with a glance back at the retreating Bailey immediately lowered her voice, “are you doing here?”

  “It was like I was trying to tell you this morning—”

  “I’d rather not go into what happened this morning,” Pro interrupted.

  “But that’s just it,” Max continued, undaunted, “this was what I thought would be the next step in the chain. Lou Tanner was trying to purchase Prism from Al Floss—”

  Chu held up his hand to stop Max from talking. “Mister Martin, do you realized that this is the second murder scene where you were discovered alone with a dead body?”

  Max considered this. “Yes.”

  Chu’s mouth was a firm line. “Do you know what that means?”

  “Sure,” Max replied airily. “It means I’m on to something!”

  “No,” Chu stated emphatically. “It means you are under arrest. Please turn around.”

  Max exhaled heavily. “You can’t believe I had anything to do with—”

  Pro stepped up to her father, and in a quick movement, turned him and bent him over a nearby table that had a chipped coffee cup atop it. She took out a pair of plastic restraints and began to fasten his arms behind him. Her fury was obvious. “When my partner tells you to do something, I’d advise you to do it!”

  “Ow! Pro you’re hurting me!” Max objected.

  “Not as much as I want to, old man,” Pro seethed as she finished restraining him. “There! And these are plastic double-cuff restra
ints—they don’t use a key. Let’s see you pick those, Max.”

  Chu stepped from the room, but they could hear him talking to the uniformed officers. “Did you call this into forensics?”

  “Yes, detective,” the woman replied. “And the medical examiner.”

  “Good work,” Chu encouraged. “Detective Thompson and I are taking this suspect into custody.”

  “Roger that,” Bailey replied.

  Pro pulled her father upright and pushed him toward the doorway.

  “You’re making a mistake. I can help,” Max whined.

  “You have the right to remain silent, Max,” Pro said, pushing him along. “So shut the hell up.”

  ∞∞∞

  “Go over it again, Mister Martin,” Chu said an hour later as he rubbed his forehead and took another sip of bad coffee from a cardboard cup.

  “I told you the story, twice,” Max said, his hands still behind his back as he sat in the same interrogation room as yesterday. “And I even did it without my lawyer present. That has to show good faith.”

  “Let’s be clear, Mister Martin, you are spending tonight in a cell. If you behave, I’ll take those restraints off.”

  “Oh these?” Max brought his hands in front of his body and deposited the closed restraints onto the table. “I only stayed in them so that Pro—um—Detective Thompson wouldn’t get upset. Does she always act like this, or is it just me?”

  “It’s definitely you,” Chu affirmed, and found he couldn’t help himself. He picked up the interlocking plastic loops to examine them. “We have to cut these to release a prisoner. We have a special tool…” he muttered as he turned them over in his hands. They weren’t cut or damaged in any way that he could find.

  “Yes, that’s what makes getting out of them more difficult, but also more amazing, don’t you think?” Max suggested.

  Chu slammed the restraints onto the table. “This isn’t a joke, Mister Martin. Two people are dead, and we have copies of threatening emails sent by you to two different people. What are the odds that when our cyber unit goes through Mister Tanner’s emails they will find messages you sent to him?”

  “The odds are good. But as I tried to explain it to Pro, you have to be aware of the misdirection. Someone is doing everything they can to point suspicion to me.”