Magician

by Timothy C. Phillips

  Champion leaned forward in his chair. “But there has to be something, Mr. Longville. They have all missed something . . . because my daughter is still missing.”

  I started to reply, but Champion interrupted: “My daughter disappeared in the middle of her birthday party, and the only thing the police did was accuse us, my wife and I, of her murder. There are many who believe to this day that we are responsible. She was our only child, Mr. Longville. Our everything. Our world was taken from us. I want to know who did this horrendous thing. I want to know how it was done, and why it was done to my family.”

  The bossy billionaire was suddenly gone. Sitting across from me now was a father who had lost his daughter, and everything else dear to him. The barrage of media images surrounding the case, and Champion’s billions, suddenly fell away. I was able to glimpse Champion’s naked despair, and I felt a pang of sympathy. Perhaps the man put on the big show to save his sanity.

  “I’ll have to think it over, Mr. Champion. I can’t give you any guarantees. Maybe we could meet and discuss this somewhere at a later date.”

  Champion quickly pushed an embossed card across the desk. It was printed on sepia tinted paper. I caught a whiff of his cologne. I half expected the card to be scented as well, and I suppressed the urge to sniff it.

  “Excellent. This is my address. Come to my home. Show this card to the guard at the gate. Diane and I will be expecting you.” Champion immediately rose from his seat.

  After more ebullient handshaking and a tearful goodbye, the strange man was gone. It was almost as though I had imagined him, except for the card. I indulged myself in another heavy sigh. It was difficult not to feel like a thief. The odds of turning up something new were astonishingly small.

  I had nearly asked Champion to leave my office. I had considered telling him that under no circumstances would I take the case. But something changed my mind. What? Usually I would change my mind and decide to take a case because the client convinced me that their situation was different, that it wasn’t going to be just another runaway daughter or deadbeat dad. This one didn’t look that way.

  Champion himself was pretty annoying. I supposed that what I found particularly grating was his oily, yet persuasive technique. Though it was seemingly moronic and childish, I had to grudgingly admit that it had worked on me. The man was a brow-beater, but of a different order than I had ever encountered. What Champion couldn’t get by tugging at your heartstrings, he would attempt to buy off with money.

  I was angry with myself, too. I knew I was going to take the case, and I told myself it was a mistake because it was a hopeless cause—more hopeless than any I’d ever seen. This one had been the center of a media tornado. The parents were at the pinnacle of Birmingham’s polite society, and for a while they had been suspects. The unrelenting tabloid coverage had destroyed their credibility in the community. Eventually, the police had cleared them as suspects, and there had been a public apology. No other suspects were ever produced.

  I shrugged into my overcoat and went down to the street. My old brown Buick Regal was parked at the curb, and I got in and started it up. What dark figure had come into the moneyed, tiffany and teatime world that Georgia Champion called home? What monster had come from the darkness and taken her, and then vanished back into the impenetrable shadows from which it had come?

  Anyone with a television set had heard the whole story a thousand times. It was a complex web of supposed leads. The trouble was, none of them led anywhere. The police had investigated the case for months, but had found nothing. It had made the police force the butt of many harsh jokes. Cases like that often get put away, and never see the light of day again.

  I knew police work well enough to understand that the Georgia Champion case wasn’t at the top of anyone’s crime docket, nowadays. I also knew that I would have to delve into a mountain of information, and there would be nothing that the police hadn’t already been over with a fine-tooth comb. Most of it would be redundant, pointless.

  There was always hope that some overworked detective had missed something, but the smart money was that the abductor had left nothing for anyone to find. It was, after all, like taking the Champion’s money. I knew if I agreed to do it, I owed Champion results. Maybe I could at least find the girl’s body. If the result was ultimately nothing other than a body to bury, maybe I could at least give Champion the peace of mourning at her grave.

  I could see how others might find it hard not to take advantage of the man. He was eager to pay anyone who could provide him with the briefest glimmer of hope, in a situation everyone else had given up on. I thought of Horace Champion, counting out money on my desktop, and I grimaced.

  I looked at the address on the card Champion had given me, and started the car.

  The case lay in the environs of the East Precinct. Unknown territory, I mused. Immutable laws had decreed that the case files from the Champion case were stored therein. I’d been to the East Precinct, but it had been years ago. I had worked almost exclusively out of the North Precinct; many of my old police friends still worked there.

  There was no one at the East Precinct I would know.

  Time to make some new friends.

  Chapter 2

  The East Precinct was an old three-story brick building sandwiched between intersecting avenues. 84th street was slick with rain, and a couple of uniformed cops in rain gear were trying to coax a drunk out of the back of their cruiser, and into a nice warm jail cell.

  I trudged up the steps and entered the lobby. It was chilly with the air from outside. Two young officers sat behind a desk, protected by bulletproof glass that went up to the ceiling. There was a round hole in the glass. I wondered if there was a big cork they put in the hole, in case someone started shooting.

  Neither of the men acknowledged my presence. I went up and spoke into the hole where the cork ought to fit.

  “Good afternoon.”

  “Can we help you?” the younger of the two cops asked. He was a skinny blond man, whose name tag read Simpson.

  “I’m the one who called about reviewing the Champion case files.”

  “Oh, yes. The private eye.”

  The other officer behind the desk gave me a derisive smirk.

  Take your time, there, Rookie.

  I smiled back.

  “Yes, that’s me. The officer I spoke with told me that I could see the Champion case files,” I said in my most polite voice.

  “That was me. This way, please.” He jerked his head toward stairs in the corner. “Down to the dungeon.”

  Simpson led me down three flights of metal stairs to the building’s dark and cool basement. He chuckled and talked to me over his shoulder.

  “The Champion case, huh? Oh, you can see all of that stuff, all right. I just have to get you to sign first, in case something goes missing. It will be inventoried when you’re through. You don’t look the type, but a few kooks have tried to collect souvenirs. The whole case is public now, you see. Might as well be the Manson family slayings. A thousand people have looked this stuff: the newspapers, the tabloids, the cable gossip people, you name it.”

  We reached the bottom of the stairs; the lighting was meager, and the young officer’s face looked indistinct in the sullen gray of the place.

  “There’s probably nothing in here that you haven’t already heard about through the regular press. This isn’t the usual way evidence in an unclosed case gets treated, you know. This kind of thing is usually off-limits. The Champion family threatened to sue the department unless we made the evidence public. They’ve got tons of money, you know.”

  I nodded, and sighed. “Yeah, I know.”

  Officer Simpson went on, oblivious. “As for the case at present, we turned it over to our dead letter man last year, and that’s the last anybody upstairs knows about it.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Dead letter man?”

  “Yeah, you know, for the cold cases. Dead-end investigations. Well, we call them dead letters,
like in a dead letter room at the post office. The old, unsolved cases mostly just stack up, but murders and disappearances remain officially open, pretty much forever, or until they get solved. So we give them to Detective Sergeant ‘Cold Case’ Tiller, as we call him, and he picks away at them. He got injured a while back and pulled this detail. He’s pretty good, too. Every now and then he cracks one.”

  “Really, Simpson, Such glowing praise, I didn’t know you were a fan.”

  We both turned. Detective Sergeant Tiller was a squat, meditative looking man around forty, with thick glasses and dense, curly hair. He had a scruffy, close-cropped mustache and beard, and wore a tie and suspenders. His black necktie bore a small golden shield of the Birmingham Police.

  “I just jogged across the hall for a cup of Joe, and heard you two gentlemen talking. Can I help you with something, Detective Longville?”

  I must have blinked. “How did you know my name?”

  “I work old cases, remember? I also happen to watch the news. I believe you were the one who caught that Mountainbrook Slasher, about ten years ago. Also, if you don’t mind my saying, that scar on your face sort of gives you away.”

  “Good memory. Yes, that was me; I got the scar from him. But I’m not a police detective any more. I left the department about four years ago. Now I’m a private investigator.”

  I didn’t mention why I was no longer a cop; if Tiller knew, he gave no sign.

  Tiller nodded sagely. “Ah. So, some of our fine taxpaying citizens have decided they want their case reviewed by a professional detective. And what just case might that be?”

  “He’s working on the disappearance of the Champion girl,” Officer Simpson blurted out.

  Tiller stroked his chin and emitted a low hmmm. He then turned and began walking away, his voice trailing behind him. “Really, Simpson, have some couth. Whether you realize it or not, Mr. Longville here is rather distinguished company.” He pulled his eyeglasses off, and while he rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, he pointed with the glasses to a row of doors.

  “It’s all in one of these rooms over here, the crime scene photos, testimony, what have you.”

  Simpson nudged me, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder to signal that he was leaving. He retreated toward the stairwell. I turned and followed Tiller down a dark corridor of filing cabinets. The place was a library of casebooks and reference materials, stacked to the ceiling.

  Bookshelves and file cabinets sat in the middle of the floor in several long rows. Bundles of files reached almost to the ceiling. At the far end of the bookshelves was a small room, with a table and a couple of chairs inside. Behind them, the wall was lined with filing cabinets. Tiller flipped a light switch, illuminating the cold little space.

  “This room is the final resting place of the Georgia Champion case. All of the evidence is here. The testimony of the people present at the house at the time of the girl’s disappearance, pictures of the house and grounds, you name it. The higher ups decided to do it this way after the Champion’s threatened the department with a lawsuit. We also made everything public. Mr. Champion, a rather hysterical type, claimed there was a cover-up. Remember, this was an election year, so the Mayor and the Chief said, screw it, make the evidence open for public perusal. There weren’t any new leads, anyway.”

  “So, was the case well investigated in your opinion?”

  “It was extremely well done, Mr. Longville. And that despite Champion’s interference, I must say. He is a distraught father, but one with too much money. The case was handled with the utmost professionalism, nonetheless. Take a look at the crime photos. Everyone and everything that was possibly evidential at the scene was photographed. And, you will note, from every conceivable angle. Good, solid crime scene methodology was used. I happen to know some of the guys that photographed the scene. Mind you, I wasn’t involved in the original investigation, but they are good detectives, and they went all-out on this one. The department really spared no expense.”

  “So, there were a lot of cops on the case?”

  “If there was a flaw in the investigation, it could only have been that there were too many police officials involved. Horace Champion’s claims of cover up, or police ineptitude, were just hogwash. But, to answer your question, yes. Almost half the East Task Force was involved in some fashion.”

  Tiller’s voice was strangely soothing, as if he possessed some vast inner calm. I nodded and said, “To tell the truth, that was the impression I had from the media coverage. Tell me, Detective Tiller, what do you make of the girl’s disappearance?”

  “All in all, genuinely baffling. No real leads materialized. That girl was abducted while the parents were home, and there were five other adults and thirty kids milling about. Simply astounding.” As he spoke, he pulled the master case file out and threw it onto the table. It was quite thick, and made a substantial thud. He gestured with his steaming coffee cup toward a chair.

  “I’ll be of any assistance that I can. You aren’t by any means the first, though you are the first in quite some time. None of the rest found a damned thing. Most of them weren’t really looking, in my opinion. They were a bunch of reporters and horses’ asses. But you were a good cop. Maybe you’ll get lucky; but from what I see, you’ve taken on a cause, rather than a case.”

  “Well, that, at least, is nothing new.”

  Tiller sat down and flipped the file open. Inside was a glossy colored photo of Georgia, a pretty little girl with curly black hair and bright blue eyes. That same photo had been splattered over television screens and on the front pages of tabloids from coast to coast for months. Opposite, there was a page filled with her vital statistics, and a computer-enhanced age progression photo.

  Tiller busied himself digging material out of the file cabinet along the wall. I had seen men like him. He had done this work for a long time, and was good at what he did. I had seen plenty of good cops like him burn out, become those comatose soldiers who wage the hard, endless battle against the chaos until it triumphs over them, as all who wage it know it must.

  I watched Tiller go through the filing cabinets. The way he spoke and moved revealed much about him. He was an intelligent, confident, thorough professional. He had gotten lucky, in a way. His injury had forced him into this curious job, where a rational, meticulous detective like him might do some real good. It suited his nature, and his analytical mind.

  Tiller began laying additional files on the table. They accumulated into several high stacks very quickly.

  “Tell me, Detective Tiller, do you have a theory on Georgia Champion’s disappearance?” I asked the man’s back.

  Tiller paused in his digging. He sat down in the chair across from me and dragged the master file over. It was a dense slab of papers in a thick blue binder. He opened it and looked at the file photo of Georgia Champion. He nodded as though greeting an old acquaintance, which I suppose it was. He took a long sip of his coffee before he spoke again.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Longville. Before I hurt my back a few years ago, wrestling one of our fine citizens who was out of his mind on crack, I was on the Task Force, right here at the East Precinct. I worked homicide. I cracked some pretty good cases in my day, before the injury. That’s one reason the chief gave me this assignment, rather than have me wave a sign at school crossings.”

  He rubbed the sparse hairs on his chin and sipped his coffee again before continuing. “I’ve cracked some cases since then that everyone else had given up on. Ones like the Champion case, there. Missing businessmen, dead girls, unidentified victims . . . they all eventually get sent down to the Dead Letter Office, and I, Detective Sergeant Amos Tiller, pick through their mortal remains. The ones I solve aren’t miracles. I do it the old-fashioned way, by just relentlessly going over material.”

  He shifted in his chair and nodded at the massive pile of information that spilled over the table. “I do that, repeatedly, until I find something new. That would drive most people nuts
, but I sort of like it. There’s sometimes a little something that got overlooked. I like finding that little something. But don’t get your hopes up, my friend. It isn’t always there. Like with the Champion case. I have personally been over the case, and nothing jumped out at me. No wonder the tabloids had such a field day. It really seemed as if the child disappeared.”

  We both sat silently for a while.

  “Cauchemar,” Tiller suddenly said aloud.

  “Come again?” I asked him, a little disconcerted.

  “Cauchemar. That’s from the French, for nightmare. It was found, written on the wall in the Champion girl’s bedroom.” Tiller spun a photograph out of a folder with the tip of a finger. There, scrawled low on the wall, was the word.

  Cauchemar.

  I stared at it for a second. It was in a child-like script, but the initial C was written with a huge flourish. Something a child would never do. I nodded slowly. It was pretty creepy.

  “That’s right, I remember now. The girl’s mother, Mrs. Champion, is French, I believe.”

  “Correct. However, the idea was raised that Georgia had written it before she was abducted. This was an idea most people found ridiculous, myself included.”

  “But the detectives investigating were unable to determine whether the little girl wrote it. Since the mother denied any knowledge of the writing, investigators felt it might have been a clue of some kind, left by Georgia, since she knew some French.”

  Tiller shrugged.

  “Right. The handwriting analysts couldn’t be sure, because there wasn’t enough to work with. The tabloids just loved it. It’s just another one of those weird little things about this case. Little details like that have always intrigued me.”

  I cast my eyes at the huge pile of files that Tiller had placed in front of me.