by John Gaspard
“What’s wrong?”
I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said, trying to put my thoughts into words and giving up. “Nothing at all.”
I was still thinking about that coincidence as we made the short drive back to our neighborhood.
“Lucky thing you found her,” I said, breaking the silence which had enveloped us since leaving the hospital.
“If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else. I mean, people walk up and down that sidewalk all day.”
“Still, you were there. You made the call. Speed is imperative in these things,” I said.
“It was a good thing I had my phone. Because as you know, I don’t always carry it.”
We both smiled at this admission, as my inability to reach her by phone had been an ongoing sore point in our relationship. She shook her head, then the smile faded away.
“Oh, Eli, there was so much blood. Who would do something like that, I mean, just run up and do that?”
I shook my head. “Lot of wacko people in the world,” I said, patting her leg ineffectually, the physical equivalent of saying “there, there.”
The mention of blood brought me back again to Tyler’s body in the projection booth. I searched for a connection with Tracy’s fall and with my literal run-in with a car the other night and came up short on both fronts.
“How’s everything at the store?” I said, trying to steer us into more innocuous territory.
Megan’s store, Chi & Things, occupied the corner of Chicago and 48th Street and offered a full complement of crystals, aromatherapies, healing balms and other holistic tchotchkes and doodads.
Megan had inherited the entire block from her grandmother and took over the empty corner shop, making her first fledgling attempt into the often stormy and unpredictable waters of retail. The inheritance also made her my landlady, a fact which never ceased to amuse me.
“It’s okay. We’ve had a sudden influx of used New Age books,” she said, apparently relieved to be talking about something more mundane. “Without an equal increase in sales of new New Age books.”
“People are unloading old books, but not buying new books?”
“I guess,” she said. “I have no idea what it means.” Several more moments went by, and then Megan made a conversational stab of her own.
“Anything going on in the magic shop?” she said.
I considered this. “We finally had a black guy come in and ask if we had any black thumb tips,” I said. “That was nice. So I was able to prove to Harry it had made sense to make that small investment in our inventory.”
“That’s great,” she said with a tad more enthusiasm than was really required. “How many did he buy?”
I thought back on the encounter. “None. But I feel it was a small, inclusionary victory for the world of Chicago Magic.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
We drove in silence and then she suddenly perked up. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. At breakfast with Q, he said I could be part of his stage act this week. He’s going to cut me in half or thirds or something. Isn’t that cool?”
“Excuse me?” It took great effort on my part, but those were the only words I could make my mouth produce which weren’t inflammatory or obscene or both.
“He’s doing a corporate show this week and said he was looking for an assistant for a trick of some kind, a Ziggy or a Zaggy or something.”
“Zig Zag?” I suggested through gritted teeth.
“That’s it, Zig Zag. He says it’s like sawing a woman in half, but different.”
“Yes, it’s a very famous effect. A staple among magicians,” I said coldly. “And you’re going to be part of his act?” I continued as calmly as possible.
“Yes, I think it’s downtown somewhere on Thursday night.”
“You are going to be part of his act,” I repeated. “You who have vehemently and heatedly objected if I ever accidentally revealed or even hinted at how a trick is done. You who, and I am quoting here, ‘Never, ever wants to know how a trick is done.’ This same person is going to rehearse and perform the Zig Zag as part of Quinton Moon’s act. Did I get that right?”
I think my tone must have gotten through to her, for her response was now as cold as mine. “I don’t understand what the problem is,” she said sharply. “You’ve asked me to help out with your act in the past.”
“Yes, and every time—let me repeat, every single, blessed time—you have declined, on the grounds that you, and again I quote, ‘don’t want to know how the trick is done.’ But apparently you have no such compunction with Mr. Hot Shot Eurotrash magician.”
“Who? Oh, right,” she said, realizing I was talking about Quinton. “Eli, I don’t see why you’re getting so upset. Do you want me to say no?”
“I would love for you to say no,” I said quickly.
“Fine, I’ll say no,” she said as I pulled up in front of her building.
“Is that what you want?” I said, trying to take some of the emotion out of my voice.
“No, but apparently it’s what you want.”
We stared at each other for a long moment and then she turned and stepped out of the car.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
“Good—” But she never heard my final words, as the slamming of the car door cut off the rest of my sentence.
“How would you feel if your girlfriend performed in another magician’s act?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Hypothetically, then.”
Nathan considered the question thoughtfully.
“If I had a hypothetical girlfriend, I’d be so grateful I probably wouldn’t mind if she performed in another, hypothetical magician’s hypothetical act.” This conclusion reached, he looked across the counter at me. “But that’s not the answer you were looking for, was it?”
We were hanging out in the magic shop and I had brought him up to speed on Quinton Moon’s breach of magic etiquette.
Harry hadn’t gotten up yet when I stopped in for our morning breakfast ritual. He begged off for “just a few more minutes or maybe an hour” of sleep, so I ate a bowl of Cheerios over the sink and opened the store early. Nathan stopped by to refill his stock of balloons for a kid’s party, complaining how nowadays the kids were always asking for weird animal breeds when he took requests.
“I understand not every kid is going to make my day easier by asking for a wiener dog,” he explained. “But what the heck am I supposed to do with a request for a Golden-Doodle?”
We commiserated about this and Quinton’s betrayal for several minutes and could have continued for several more when we were interrupted by a phone call. I knew it was from my ex-wife before I had even taken the phone from my pocket, signaled by the ringtone I’d assigned to her: The Stones’ “It’s All Over Now.”
“We’re visiting the final suspect Mr. Lime provided later this morning,” she said without any greeting or fanfare. “How did it go with Mr. Cavanaugh?”
I thought back on the sad millionaire and his hidden and highly-suspect art collection. “Nothing to report except to say he’s a bit of an odd duck. But you probably already gathered as much. Who was it who said that quote about the rich? ‘They are different from you and me.’”
“I think it was Fitzgerald.”
“Barry or Geraldine?”
“No, you movie geek idiot. F. Scott. And he was right. They are a whole different breed. And if you don’t believe me, wait ’til you meet the next one on your list.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just wait,” was all she said before hanging up.
Chapter 11
“You have not met a serious collector, my friend, until you’ve come face to face with a comic book collector.”
I felt I had, in fact, come face to face with a couple of serious co
llectors in the past week, but the large crowd which browsed excitedly throughout the Glendower Comics store seemed to establish the veracity behind his statement.
“Are you having a sale today?” I asked, surveying the large crowd with something akin to envy.
“Today? No, this is pretty typical. You should be here on a Wednesday.”
I looked over at him and he answered my question before I could ask it. “New comics always come out on Wednesday,” he explained. “When does new magic come out?”
I had only been talking to Randall Glendower for five minutes but we were already at a point in our relationship where he felt it was okay to kid me about the lowly status of magic in the world today, at least compared to the seemingly endless popularity of comic books.
Randall was, to put it kindly, a striking individual.
Nearly as round as he was tall, he was wearing a multi-colored t-shirt which gave him the appearance of a beach ball with stubby legs.
His head was covered with a shaggy mess of dirty blond hair, which morphed seamlessly into a disheveled, dirty blond beard, providing his head with an odd, shaggy nimbus.
Glendower Comics took up the prime center spot in a block-long strip mall in Bloomington, a first-ring suburb best known as the home of the Mall of America.
The store was a bright explosion of color and images and posters and toys, with a dizzying amount of inventory and a large, t-shirted staff. Classic rock played through the speakers and was interrupted on a nearly constant basis by the ringing of cash registers.
“Let’s go down to my office to talk,” Randall suggested as he started waddling toward an adjoining room. “It’s a little tough to have a real conversation in this environment.”
It would have been equally difficult to have a conversation in the next environment as well. The second room was full of gamers, seated at long tables around game boards and playing cards and figurines. Some gamers were in the midst of heated, but muted, play, while others sat quietly painting their game pieces or reading up on the latest strategy. The room had the look and feel of a gothic library and was in stark contrast to the circus-like feeling of the main room. Randall continued forward toward a door on the far wall and moments later we had descended a wood-paneled staircase and entered the strangest environment yet.
“Is this your parents’ basement?” I asked, looking around at what appeared to be a large-scale version of the basement of a suburban geek kid.
“Almost exactly,” he said, beaming with pride. “I’ve supersized it, of course, but it’s exactly what it looked like when I was a teenager, right down to the same harvest gold shag carpet.”
“As a teenager you had life-sized models of Yoda, C-3PO and R2-D2?” I asked, gesturing to the trio of figures looking back at us from the far corner.
“Actually, no, but I dreamed about it,” he said with a laugh as we moved through the room. “I have more resources at my disposal these days.”
The source of those assets was visible in the next room, a small, dark office with a computer desk, keyboard and two large monitors. He gestured me into an overstuffed armchair as he settled into the seat in front of the screens.
“The comic book store, the game store, it all pretty much just breaks even. This,” he said, pointing to the website visible on one monitor, “is what pays for everything else.”
By “this” he meant the GeekintheKnow website, the most-visited and most-debated site on the internet for information, rumors and opinions on the latest and greatest movies, TV shows, comic books, graphic novels and games of interest to geeks, fan boys and other mere mortals.
“And it all started in your parents’ basement, right?”
Randall nodded. “That’s the legend, but in this case you can print the legend, ’cause it’s true. Just me and a laptop, recycling—and early on, manufacturing—rumors about the top upcoming genre movies.”
“And now,” I said, “an empire.”
He nodded in thoughtful agreement. “I suppose so. Never underestimate the power of anticipation and disappointment as a valid economic model.”
He’d lost me with the last statement and my face must have indicated this confusion, so he pointed at the website on the screen.
“Sixty percent of the content on the site is about movies and TV shows that are in production, or might be in production, or might go into development, or might, might, might. Endless energy is exerted by our readers as they conjecture and debate and argue about how a project might turn out, or why a project is doomed to failure, or the finer points of why a particular project should never even have been considered.”
He reached under the computer desk and popped open a cabinet door, which revealed a small refrigerator within. He rummaged around and pulled out a soda for himself and then gestured to me.
I nodded and he tossed a can to me before continuing his explanation. I was surprised to see it was a vintage brand I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.
“Where’d you find this?” I asked, turning the can over and inspecting it. It looked exactly like I remembered. “I thought they stopped making it like twenty years ago.”
“I got a bottling plant in Thailand to start manufacturing them for me. I sell them on the internet to cover costs, but that’s basically a break-even proposition.”
He turned his attention back to the computer monitors. “Anyway, what ‘might be’ takes up about sixty percent of the site. The other forty percent of the content consists of readers complaining about those same movies and TV shows once they’ve been completed; how they don’t live up to their expectations, how the story has been mangled, or—again—how they never should have been made in the first place.” He took a long sip from his pop can. “Anticipation and disappointment,” he declared with a satisfied sigh. “The yin and yang of internet success.”
“That’s a unique business model,” I said.
I held the can an arm’s length away and popped it open. A mild but manageable amount of soda sprayed harmlessly into the air. “But how does a person make money at it?”
“The bulk of the income comes from advertising,” he continued. “You know, banners and pop-up windows. Plus anytime a reader clicks on a link, we harvest that information and sell it to advertisers. We also take a small percentage from sales on the Marketplace.”
“Marketplace?”
“That’s a section on the site where people can sell memorabilia or put up requests for things they’re looking for. If a sale happens, we get a small cut.”
“Would someone like Tyler James place items for sale in the Marketplace?”
Randall shrugged. “He might have, but most of what passes through the Marketplace would be pretty small change for a broker like Tyler.”
He leaned forward with sudden speed and hit some keys on the keyboard. One of the two screens instantly switched images, becoming a window into a series of moving lines and flashing red dots.
“These are real-time metrics of traffic on the sites and sub-sites,” he said, pointing to the ever-changing lines and blinking lights. The cosmic light show on the screen was mesmerizing and it was apparent the site was far more popular than I had imagined.
“It’s very busy,” I said, not taking my eyes off the screen.
“Oh, this is nothing. I can make it spike like mad if I want.” He got a devilish look in his eyes. “For example, we’ve got a rumor we’re releasing today for one of the studios. There are plans to remake a famous movie,” he said, going on to name the classic film.
I gasped. “That’s ridiculous,” I said, feeling outrage beginning to grow from deep within. “That movie is a classic. To touch it, to remake it, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
My voice had risen an octave and I turned to Randall, who was beaming at me.
“Never underestimate,” he said, “the power of anticipation and disapp
ointment.” He tapped some keys on the keyboard. “Let’s see what happens when we release that rumor,” he said, giving one key a final flourish as he tapped it.
We waited for several long seconds, quietly looking at the metrics screen. For a moment I thought nothing was going to happen.
And then the lights started to flash. Lines spiked up. More red lights. Lines went higher. The screen began to resemble a pinball machine on overload. I turned to Randall. I’m sure my mouth was hanging open.
“And that,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “is how I can afford to do business with someone like Tyler James.”
“Did you do a lot of business with him?”
Randall shrugged. “A little here, a little there. I mean, he presented more stuff to me than I ever bought. But he knew where my interests lay and wasn’t afraid to let me know what was out there.”
“Did he approach you about London After Midnight?”
Randall nodded. “He did indeed, and I told the police that.”
“Really. Even though it was technically stolen merchandise?”
“I didn’t care about that,” he said, finishing his soda and reaching into the fridge for another. “If my offer had been accepted, I planned to turn it over to the National Film Registry or the Library of Congress and let them deal with the paper trail.”
“You didn’t want to own it?”
“Oh, sure, what are you, nuts?” He laughed. “Of course I wanted to own it. But I didn’t need to own it. I really just wanted to make sure it was preserved, so people could actually see it.”
“But your offer wasn’t accepted?”
He shook his head, still clearly disappointed by the outcome. “I got outbid.”
“Can I ask what your bid was?”
“Half a million. Ten percent down.”
“That means the winner offered $750,000, with $75,000 down.”
“That’s what I’m guessing, and the police seemed to agree.”
Our conversation was interrupted by a jittery, squeaking sound coming from down the hall. I leaned toward the doorway and was surprised when a small, brown, excited monkey suddenly came leaping into the room. It jumped past me and climbed up into Randall’s lap, causing him to nearly spill his soda on the computer keyboard. He set the can aside and turned his attention to the pint-sized creature, which was about the size of a tiny dog.
