Club Deception

by Sarah Skilton

  Jonathan’s body had been found in a hotel room at the Chateau Marmont. He’d apparently been living there the past six weeks, separated from Claire. He wore a mask over his eyes and skinny jeans that didn’t really fit, just like the ones worn by the Hipster Magician. On the table in front of him was an empty bottle of beer.

  He’d been poisoned.

  The police’s theory was that Cal must have figured out Jonathan was the Hipster Magician and gone after him for exposing his show the night it aired. The guest log in the hotel’s lobby held Cal’s signature, and the empty bottle of beer in Jonathan’s room had Cal’s fingerprints on it.

  The part that baffled investigators: The glass beer bottle contained its own bottle cap inside, and no one could figure out how to extract it. This was of course Cal’s signature trick, which the Hipster Magician had taken such delight in ruining.

  The final kicker was that an entire roomful of people had witnessed Cal attack Jonathan the night before.

  Motive, method, means.

  He had no alibi during the hour of death. He told the police over and over that he hadn’t gone near Jonathan, didn’t know he was living at that hotel, and had no idea he was the online prankster who’d tanked his show. He explained that he’d walked to the Liquor Cabinet on Sunset, where he paid in cash, no receipt. He’d wandered aimlessly, drinking gin out of a paper bag until he rode the bus to Silver Lake.

  The Cabinet’s security camera was strictly for show, so there was no video confirmation to back up Cal’s story. He’d already hired counsel, and Jessica should expect a visit from the police sometime that morning.

  “What should I tell them? Should I say you were with me all night? That you didn’t leave once, not even for a second? I’ll say anything you tell me to say—” She gripped the phone so tightly her entire arm shook.

  “No, tell the truth—they already know I went to Claire’s, that’s where they picked me up this morning.”

  “I love you. We’ll get through this,” she said, though she had no clue how.

  His arraignment was set for Friday, two days away.

  News outlets tried to outdo one another’s headlines.

  Variety: “Cursed Conjurer Accused of Calamitous Crime”

  LA Times: “Magic, Mayhem, and Murder at the Marmont”

  LA Weekly: “TV Wizard Calum Clarke Can’t Make These Murder Charges Disappear”

  Facedown on the floor of the living room, crying into her arms, Jessica heard her phone chime. She crawled slowly toward it, sore-muscled and dizzy. The alert said a new video from the Hipster Magician was up.

  But how could that be, if Jonathan was supposed to be him?

  She rubbed her damp face, took a deep breath, and tapped the link.

  A young man wearing an eye mask, T-shirt, skinny jeans, and bright kicks stood alone in a stark white room. “Rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated,” he said. “For we are legion.”

  In a blink, the original guy was surrounded by twenty other Hipster Magicians, all male, of differing ages, shapes, and sizes, in the white room. All wore the same outfit. The camera swooped and swirled around them before rising above them and shooting straight down.

  “However,” said one, looking up at the camera,

  “Jonathan,” said another,

  “Fredericksson,” said another,

  “Is not,” said another,

  “And was not,” said another,

  “One of us.”

  The effect was eerie, like they were part of a hive.

  Reset camera, back to the main guy, solo again: “Our sincere condolences to Mrs. Fredericksson and the members of Club Deception. We regret your loss. Out of respect we will be taking a month off from posting new videos. Be good to each other.”

  Blackout.

  Jessica’s pulse raced. This would change everything for Cal’s case, wouldn’t it? It had to! She emailed the video to Cal’s lawyer.

  The lawyer responded within five minutes. Thanks for the tip but unfortunately it doesn’t matter whether or not the victim was the Hipster Magician. It only matters if prosecution can prove Cal believed he was, and that he acted on that belief. Why else would Jonathan Fredericksson be dressed in that outfit?

  TO FRAME HIM, Jessica wrote back in all caps before she threw her phone against the wall, cracking the screen straight down the middle.

  Claire

  “Mrs. Fredericksson, I think you’re in shock,” Lieutenant Douglas said. He was tall, with thick, slightly graying hair, and a wide nose and wide stance. “It’s understandable. Can I get you anything? Coffee, water, cigarette? Of course, we’d have to go outside for that.”

  She desperately wanted a cigarette but she’d promised Eden (again) that she would quit. It was the least she could do for her now. The very, absolute least.

  She shook her head. “No, better not.”

  “You sure?”

  She ran a tired hand through her messy blond hair. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  They went back and forth for a little while until she told him to find the other magician, the one who hated Jonathan. Find that man, and in that way he would find the killer.

  Killer.

  But that wasn’t the right word, it couldn’t be.

  Wasn’t it only yesterday she’d seen him? Nothing could change that fast since yesterday.

  But now he was…

  Her brain shut down that line of thought. Everything was fine. None of this was real, none of this was happening. Everything was fine. Everything was okay.

  “A lot of magicians—the good ones, anyway—lead a double life,” she told the lieutenant. “On the other hand…he might make us float. He might make us fly.”

  “Is that why you married Jonathan?” he asked.

  “No. I wanted to disappear. And that was the only way I knew how.”

  * * *

  During the ride to Robbery/Homicide (as though the two were comparable; as though the two could be slashed in half as equals) she’d sat next to Cal, who was handcuffed. Not for long, of course. She’d prepared for that. When she entered the opposite side of the sedan, she leaned her head down toward him and he pulled a bobby pin from her hair. Immediately the arresting officer barked at her to sit up properly and put on her seat belt. Cal used the bobby pin to undo his handcuffs.

  It wasn’t a dramatic prelude to a daring escape and life on the run. He just wanted to hold hands with Claire. They reached for each other in unison. When he gripped her hand with his, it was as if a crank turned, cords pulled tight throughout her body and locked into place, tethering her to the world.

  She remembered the first words he’d ever spoken to her, twenty years ago, at the library in Cambridge: “Would you like to see a magic trick?”

  She’d fallen in love with magic that day, and with him, too, though not in a conventional sense…Perhaps she should have kept his existence to herself, but she’d told Brandy about him, and Brandy had demanded an introduction. Suddenly all Claire could do was watch from the sidelines as they intertwined into a co-dependent mess.

  If she’d never met Cal, or if she’d somehow met Jonathan first, would magic have captured her attention in the same way? Was the message more important than the messenger?

  “I swear I didn’t do this,” he murmured out of the corner of his mouth.

  “I know you didn’t.”

  She thought now of the night she’d met Jessica. How she’d told her that WAGs stood for “widows and girlfriends.” She’d meant it as a joke, but what if the act of saying it out loud had worked as an incantation, a spell? After all, a woman with a deck of cards was essentially a witch. A tarot reader.

  Was she a witch? A danger to the townsfolk, cackling into her cauldron, something to be burned alive or drowned?

  Was that the real reason so few women pursued or felt any interest in magic? Men performing magic were untrustworthy, but women doubly so, simply because they were women.

  Making potions.
<
br />   Making poisons.

  * * *

  “Tell me about Felix Vicario,” said the lieutenant.

  “Hmm?”

  “The car parked outside your house is registered to one Felix Vicario. Seems you had quite a few male callers last night.”

  “Two hardly constitutes ‘quite a few.’ Cal’s a friend, and Felix is…also a friend.”

  He gave her bed-head hair a once-over that suggested he didn’t believe her. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you admit he…spent the night? Were you lovers?”

  “Sure.” Barely one night, but sure.

  “Some of the guys are working on an alternative theory. Me, I don’t buy it, I think Cal’s the one, through and through, but…some of the other guys have a theory and it goes like this: You got your lover boy to do the dirty work for you. Or maybe you didn’t know about it, but he did it for you, thinking now you can be together, the lawsuit goes away, you keep the money from the stolen magic show.”

  “It wasn’t stolen,” she gritted out.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So tell me. Did Felix have something to do with this?”

  “He’s not smart enough.”

  Lieutenant Douglas raised his eyebrows.

  “Felix is pulchritudinous and sweet but not much else,” she said.

  Pulchritudinous was one of her favorite words with which to test people. Did the lieutenant think it was an insult or a compliment? It sounded like an insult, but of course it meant physically attractive.

  She didn’t actually know if Felix was sweet in general, but he was sweet to her. She craved his sweetness like a cloak she could wrap around herself. He would save her, protect her from whatever was going on right now. She wanted to return to last night, bury her face in his hard, warm belly. He wasn’t El Gato, a cute tabby—he was a jungle cat, and she liked his simpleness, his suppleness. His lack of ulterior motives.

  “Could Felix have tipped Cal off, had a hand in it, or conspired to do something on your behalf?”

  She snapped out of her daydream. “I really don’t think so. You know, I like the other definition of smart better. ‘To be painful.’ I think to be smart sometimes is to be painful,” she said.

  He shot her a confused look. “Well, speaking of painful, can I ask…why are you wearing these shoes? Why not sneakers? Flip-flops? Officer Cleary told me you insisted. Those must have taken five minutes apiece to lace up, and they look uncomfortable.”

  “Jonathan hates it when I wear shoes that make me taller than him,” she said.

  And if I do something he hates, that means he’s still around to hate it, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. It made perfect sense. She would wear the shoes every day from now on if she had to. “He wishes I weren’t so tall,” she added.

  The lieutenant’s voice was soft but emphatic. “I think we’re done for today, Mrs. Fredericksson. Stay close to your phone. Are you planning on doing any traveling? Because if so, you’ll need to cancel those plans.”

  * * *

  Outside the station—it was already afternoon; how long had she been in there?—she pulled out her phone and dialed Felix.

  “Are you okay? It’s me. Where are you? Why’d you run out?”

  He acted like she was nuts. “Everyone knows you gotta book ass when the cops show up.”

  “Well, now they think you had something to do with this.”

  “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “What’s wrong? They’re not right, are they?”

  “Uh…”

  Her eyes widened. “Felix?”

  “So I kind of…asked my roommates to do something for me. As a precaution.”

  “What did you ask them?”

  “I told them where he’s been staying, what room number at the Marmont—I knew I’d be with you last night, see, like an alibi, and—”

  “How’d you know his room number?”

  “I told the concierge we were supposed to session and I’d forgotten the number. I figured that’s probably been happening a lot the last month, magicians going to hang out in his room and work on stuff, and that she’d be used to it.”

  Claire was weirdly impressed.

  “So then I asked them—my roommates—to put on masks, grab a baseball bat, whatever, and go over there and screw with his head a little. Tell him to back off from us.”

  “You what?”

  “They weren’t going to jack him up, just scare him. And anyway they didn’t do it. Look, I’m home right now and they just told me they didn’t do any of it. They got stoned and watched Stranger Things. Unreliable motherfu—”

  “This is good. You’re in the clear. But you have to come in, right now, and tell them all this.”

  “If I come in, I might never come out! You don’t get it, you’re rich, you’re white…”

  “Please, offer yourself up for questioning. Make it easier on everyone. You have to help yourself here, Felix, I’m begging you.”

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” he said quietly, reluctantly.

  * * *

  She walked back inside the police building and looked around for Lieutenant Douglas. She felt like she was hovering outside her body, watching herself go through the motions. It was not unlike stage fright.

  When she found him at the coffee machine, she told him she was picking up Eden at LAX that evening and that someone could accompany her if they wanted; if they were worried she was a flight risk. In fact, she’d like someone to accompany her. She wasn’t sure she could drive. Would that be possible? A police escort? She could even pay them…

  The truth was, she was terrified of being alone with Eden.

  Jessica

  At home after the bail hearing, Jessica succumbed to another bout of stomach-heaving sobs. She’d kept it together at the courthouse because she wanted Cal to see her being strong for him, but when she emerged alone from the building, TV news reporters and their camera crews chased her to her car.

  TMZ was the first to post: “Poof Goes the Bail! Killer Magician Denied Bond.”

  Standard bail in murder cases was one million dollars. She’d hoped to put the boat and loft up as collateral, or use her share of the Erdnase money to bring him home before the trial, but the judge believed the evidence against Cal was too strong. On the drive back she’d had to pull over twice in case she was sick. What if Cal never came home? What if the night his show aired was the last night they ever spent together? Our last moments as a couple, and we argued.

  She scrubbed lightly at her face and took a long drink of water. Then she called Kaimi and Landon. Both of their cell phones went immediately to voicemail.

  She called Cal’s producer and asked him to email her the raw footage of Cal’s show. She regretted invading his privacy by viewing the videotape of Cal and Brandy, but this was different. This was life and death.

  The man was reluctant to send them over. “What do you need them for?”

  “He performed the Bottle Cap routine all over the country, and I was thinking, That’s how someone could get their hands on a bottle with his fingerprints, because he lets the volunteers keep the bottle as a souvenir. Right? If I watch them all maybe I’ll recognize someone, or the police will.”

  It was the eighteenth version of the trick that did it.

  Claire

  The second time Lieutenant Douglas brought Claire in for questioning, she glimpsed Landon the Libertine and his girlfriend being escorted into a separate room. What did they have to do with anything?

  This time, Douglas was less prone to tangents. Less curious about Claire’s life with Jonathan and whether she was privy to his magic secrets. He had a partner with him, a younger man with a smattering of acne on his cheeks and neck. Had he been brought in to provide a counterpoint to Douglas’s questioning? She couldn’t imagine the younger cop intimidating anyone.

  The room, though: That was intimidating. Sparse, uncomfortably small, and blindingly
white, with a single fluorescent rectangle on the ceiling and a black camera mounted in the upper right corner, Claire felt herself shrinking down into nothing. She had nowhere to hide, nowhere to look, nothing else to focus on. She’d read somewhere that LAPD interrogation rooms employed the same proportions as the confessional at the Santa Barbara Mission. Both projected the same effect:

  Confess.

  Confess.

  “You’ve been holding out on us,” Douglas said. “Turns out you were the last person to see him alive.”

  “We spoke that day,” she conceded. “At Ca’Del Sole, I’m sure they have a record of it…”

  Her mind wandered. She didn’t even hear the words she was saying. They were drowned out by another voice.

  I don’t understand, Mom. Why was he at a hotel? Why wasn’t he at home?

  Because…well, because he…

  Why was he at a hotel? They said he was there for weeks, Mom. Why was he at a hotel?

  Well…It’s just that…there are things that…

  Mom. Mom! Why wasn’t he at home? Why wasn’t he at home, safe, with you?

  The baby-faced cop chimed in, startling Claire out of her painful recollection. “Your boy Felix had a lot to say. How it wasn’t fair that Jonathan was going after you, because you were the one who came up with Jonathan’s act. That you’ve come up with a lot of his material over the years.”

  She sat ramrod-straight in her chair. Didn’t blink. Didn’t move.

  The original lieutenant, Douglas, took over. “Do you know what I think?” He inched closer to her. “I think you’re the magician. The one who hates him. Isn’t that what you told me? That if we found that person, we’d find our killer.”

  Before she realized they were forming, tears dripped down her cheeks, and she took several rapid, gulping breaths.

  The younger cop seemed alarmed. He looked to Douglas for his cue on how to react.

  Douglas placed a light hand on her shoulder. “Is there something you want to tell me, Claire? Mrs. Fredericksson. Do you have something to say?”

  No matter how fast she wiped at her face, the tears replenished. She cried, hard, for a straight minute, until she felt emptied out. Until she felt certain she couldn’t produce a single tear more.