Shell Game

by Carol O’Connell

  Riker looked up from his plate. „So the cops weren’t in the original routine?“

  „Well, yes,“ said Prado. „But they’re just window dressing. A police presence assures the audience that the weapons and handcuffs are real. Charles only means that Max did away with Edith. She was his assistant when he had that accident in Los Angeles. Remember that, Emile? It laid him up for a year. That’s when he built the platform.“

  Mallory sat up a little straighter. „You think Max’s wife tried to do him in?“

  Prado seemed to be considering this. „That would explain a lot.“

  Charles’s knife and fork clattered to the plate. „Mallory, that’s enough. First Oliver, and now Max. Sometimes people do have accidents.“

  Mallory wasn’t listening. She was assessing her suspects by their tailoring or the lack of it. Nick Prado was obviously doing well, and so was Emile St. John. But Franny Futura’s tuxedo did not fit him properly. Perhaps it was rented. He might be hard-pressed for cash. She loved money motives best of all.

  „So none of you liked Edith Candle,“ said Riker.

  „Well, no.“ Prado sipped his wine. „But I’m not sure Max liked her all that much either. Sorry again, Charles.“ He lifted his glass higher. „It’s the wine talking.“

  „But Max stood by her,“ said Futura. „He was very big on keeping promises – vows. Deserting a wife wasn’t his style.“

  „Well, he did have an affair with another man’s wife,“ said Prado. „He was no saint.“

  Charles dropped his fork again. This was news to him.

  St. John pushed his chair back from the table. He pulled a platinum cigar case from his breast pocket and tactfully changed the subject. „Mallory, I gather you don’t think Oliver died by accident. Can you prove it?“

  „It would help if I knew how his crossbow trick was supposed to work.“

  „But nobody knows,“ said Futura. „The Lost Illusion was only performed one time.“ He pulled out a cheap cigarette lighter for his friend’s cigar. „That was what, Emile? Forty years ago?“

  St. John nodded, exhaling blue smoke. „A lot of magicians tried to trace that performance, but Max was very careful about staging out-of-town tryouts. The ideal town would be remote and too small to support a newspaper. Sensible precaution – no critical reviews while he was working out the bugs in a new act.“

  Smoke was swirling in shafts of late-afternoon sun. Mallory sipped her wine and watched the white-haired men. They were full of food and wine, content and drowsy – vulnerable.

  „Did anyone think Oliver’s invitation was a little strange?“ Mallory had their attention as she feigned a moment of forgetfulness. She pulled Charles’s copy from the pocket of her blazer and read the lines aloud, as if she had not memorized them, „ ‘You are invited to the solution of Max Candle’s Lost Illusion, and more than one deadly mystery will be revealed.’ The wording is odd, isn’t it?“

  And ominous?

  Obviously Riker thought so. He was staring at her, not too happy at the moment, his suspicious eyes saying, You’ve been holding out on me again.

  Mallory shrugged a silent, Yeah. So?

  He shook his head to tell her he didn’t deserve this, not from her. They were partners.

  But where had her partner been when she was left hanging and twisting in the squad room today? He had been with Jack Coffey behind the glass – watching the show.

  „This invitation.“ She turned to the old men at the other end of the table. „What does it mean? What’s the other mystery?“

  „Nothing odd about the wording,“ said the unflappable Emile St. John. „Oliver worked out quite a few of Max’s old routines, and they were all deadly. He gave them away as gifts to old friends. I got instructions for the hangman illusion and a replica of Max’s old gallows.“

  „I got a set of plans and crate of props,“ said Nick Prado.

  Franny Futura was nodding. „I got Max’s pendulum illusion. I’m going to do it in Oliver’s little theater.“

  Mallory’s partner smiled to say, There goes your new theory – endgame.

  Not yet, Riker. „But the illusions were left to you in Oliver’s will.“ Mallory was not asking them, she was telling them. „None of you knew what the invitation meant – not till after he died.“ She looked at Riker, ripping her game point back from his side of the table.

  „Oh, I knew what it meant,“ said Nick Prado. „That invitation is months old. The instructions for my illusion arrived long before I left Chicago.“

  The others were nodding in agreement. So they had also received the explanatory letters and illusions before Oliver died. Well, maybe one of them was lying – or all of them were.

  „Of course,“ said Futura, „I can’t do the pendulum illusion with Oliver’s plans. I’m afraid he botched it – just like he screwed up the trick that killed him.“

  Without looking at Riker, she knew he was grinning, a prelude to laughing out loud. He must be loving this, watching her get everything wrong. But he was at a disadvantage: he didn’t know there was a gunman at the parade this morning. If he had believed her, he wouldn’t have confiscated her favorite revolver.

  And Riker wondered why she didn’t like to share.

  Now she did look at him, surprised that he was not smiling as he stubbed out his cigarette. „You can’t win ‘em all, kid.“

  Mallory nodded. Yeah, right. Did he really believe she would take the fall for the balloon shooting and face a charge of reckless endangerment? Not a shot in hell, Riker.

  She moved on to another prospect for her gunman, the man missing from this company, the one who lived with a dead woman. Though lunatics seldom made her short list, she was already planting the blame on Malakhai. How did your wife die, old man? And where were you when that gun went off this morning?

  Chapter 4

  This morning, in a rare departure from his Harvard Club uniform, Charles Butler was not wearing a three-piece suit and tie. His blue jeans and denim shirt were a concession to practicality; wading through three decades of dust would be a dirty job.

  Mallory pushed up the sleeves of her sweatshirt. Because firearms made civilians nervous and she wore no blazer to cover the holster, she had left her police-issue.38 in the upstairs office. This was a severe breach of her own dress code, which usually included a larger gun.

  The rectangle of harsh light from the stairwell extended across four feet of the basement floor, and beyond that was impenetrable darkness. Mallory continued their yearlong argument. „Why don’t I just rewire the wall switch?“

  „All that trouble? What for?“ He reached up to the top of the fuse box and pulled down a flashlight. „I think it’s charming this way.“

  Yeah, right.

  Charles the antique lover thought every broken old thing was charming, even the electrical wiring. Mallory decided to refrain from any more suggestions. It was better to simply wait for him to trip and break his neck in the dark. She was that patient with her friends.

  Guided by the flashlight, they walked down a haphazard corridor of packing crates and trunks. The yellow beam roved over a broken rocking ; chair, which might be the source for a trace of wood rot in the air. The smell of dust was everywhere, and now she detected a whiff of mold. Stacks of barrels and cardboard boxes massed in dark towers on all sides. As she skirted around a headless dressmaker’s dummy, part of her mind was still working on the wiring problem.

  Originally, this space had been a manufacturing plant with the proportions of a hotel ballroom. But Charles, the giant hobbit, longed for cozier human scale. Maybe he preferred to use the flashlight because it didn’t show the true size of the basement.

  „I pulled out the crates last night,“ he said. „All the major parts are accounted for. I couldn’t find the leg irons, but I’m sure they’ll turn up. The platform has to be assembled. That might take a while.“

  „I’ve got lots of time. Jack Coffey put me on indefinite leave.“ She didn’t mention that the lieutenan
t had also taken away her favorite gun. That was still a source of humiliation.

  „Not a vacation, I take it.“

  „No, but we’re calling it that.“ She followed him to the wall of tall wooden panels joined by hinges. It spanned the entire basement and closed off the area where Max Candle’s illusions were stored – and where the electricity still worked.

  Charles stood before the two center panels that passed for a doorway.

  They were chained together and padlocked. „The platform hasn’t been unpacked since Cousin Max died. That was thirty years ago. The mechanisms may not be in very good shape.“

  Mallory stared at the lock with disdain. It was an oversized antique as large as an alarm clock. „I just want to see how the trick works.“

  „I can’t help you with that.“ Charles worked a key in the lock, and the freed chains slid through circles in the wood. „No one knows how the trick was done. That’s why they call it the Lost Illusion.“

  He used both hands to spread the pleated segments of the wall. The panels creaked as they shifted back on metal tracks, accordion style, opening to a cavernous space. A gray diffusion of morning light came from a window set high in the wall and level with the floor of the air shaft. Beyond the dirty glass and the iron bars, trash cans of a neighboring building were spilling over with garbage – rodent heaven. One small dark animal slithered up to the window for a better look at her. This creature was too bold to go on living, and Mallory resolved to continue another argument with Charles over the traps that would break this rat’s back.

  „There was only one performance with all four crossbows in play,“ said Charles. „That was the out-of-town tryout.“

  She turned away from the dark thing at the window. „So it was a bad act?“

  „A dangerous act.“ He bent down and touched a globe. It came to life with a soft yellow glow. Alternating current made it grow bright and dim in the natural rhythm of breathing. Above the globe, a painted dragon flowed across three rice paper panels of a folding screen. By a trick of oscillating lamplight, the dragon’s breath was a flickering fire.

  Twenty feet away, in a shallow canyon of shelves and cartons, a vertical row of tiny stars were shimmering, forming a bright crack in a patch of solid black shadow. While Charles walked around the dragon screen, Mallory drifted toward the sparkles. Pausing by a floor lamp with a fringed shade, she pulled its chain to cast a circle of light around an old wardrobe trunk standing on end. It had been opened to expose a narrow slit of flashing sequins. Its cracked leather exterior was papered with the faded colors of foreign shipping labels.

  The cover of an old record album lay over the opening at the top of the wardrobe. Judging by the even coat of thick grime on the rotting cardboard and the surface of the trunk, neither had been disturbed in decades. At her feet were impressions of large squares. Their wide, hard-edged tracks led off across the floor to the area behind the screen, where Charles was turning on more lamps. So the narrow opening had been protected by the crates he had moved last night. That would explain why the sequins still shimmered, when they should be dulled with a film of dust.

  Mallory put her hands into the opening of the wardrobe and spread the sides, using force, for the hinges were frozen with rust. Inside the left half of the trunk was a narrow chest of drawers, and on the right was a rack of tightly packed clothing on hangers. Her eyes passed over gaudy colors and Dangles to settle on the plainest material. She pulled a suit from the rack nd held it up to the light of the floor lamp. The off-white satin had not yellowed, but it did seem richer for the aging. The jacket and trousers were styled for a man, but altered and refitted to a slender figure with a small waist. She looked at the stitching. This was the work of a very good tailor. It rivaled every bit of clothing in her closet.

  Charles was walking toward her as she pressed the suit against her own tall body. „Lovely,“ he said. „Where did it come from?“

  She nodded toward the trunk. „I know it didn’t belong to your cousin’s wife. Edith was too short.“

  His hand grazed one of the shipping labels. „Faustine’s Magic Theater. I remember this. It was part of a large shipment from an abandoned theater in Paris. Max bought up the entire stock after the war. The costumes must have belonged to one of the performers. When I was a little boy, this trunk was always locked.“

  Mallory riffled through the lingerie in the top drawer. Her hand touched a flat object, and she pulled out a passport. The name on the inside page was clear, but the photograph had been mutilated, the face scratched away with a sharp object. Turning to the other side of the trunk, where the clothes were racked, she prowled through them, pocket by pocket, until she found a card with French text and the same name. „The trunk belonged to Louisa Malakhai. I wonder what Edith thought of her husband keeping another woman’s clothes?“

  „If you’re thinking she might have been jealous, you couldn’t be more wrong,“ said Charles. „Louisa died years before Max even met Edith.“

  „Another accident?“ Mallory looked down at the lock. It had been forced, but long ago. Rust filled the marks made by a tool twisting the metal catch. Charles had said it was always locked when he was a child, but perhaps Max Candle was still alive when his wife had broken it open.

  She casually handed him Louisa Malakhai s open passport. As he looked down at the inside page, his face was suddenly grim. Perhaps he was drawing his own conclusions about who had vandalized the photograph and why. And now he was looking at the obvious damage to the lock. His freakish brain could add up evidence faster than hers.

  „Accidents happen,“ said Charles, setting the passport on the top of the trunk, pretending he had not seen that bit of wifely violence in the scratches across the face of another woman. „In fact, that’s why Max retired the crossbow trick after one performance. Someone died attempting it.“

  „But it’s all a cheat,“ said Mallory. „You’d have to work at it to get killed in a magic act.“

  „In most cases, you’d be right,“ said Charles. „Even Houdini was no Houdini. But Max wasn’t like any other magician.“

  She followed him to the other side of the dragon screen, where more globe lights and another old floor lamp illuminated the plastic drapes of metal wardrobe racks. Inside the protective cover of cellophane, a thousand rhinestones threw back a riot of light. Silk and satin materials gleamed in every color. Beyond the racks were rows of sturdy metal shelving material, and this was all that Mallory approved of. She cared nothing for the contents of the shelves, the dust-gathering clutter of leather hatboxes and giant playing cards, ornate painted canisters and small trunks. There were so many cartons and loose goods spread across the rest of the floor, it would take years to inventory Charles’s inheritance.

  The lamp farthest from the dragon screen illuminated the familiar guillotine. High in the air, a wicked metal blade hung waiting between tall stocks of wood. She pointed to it. „I know that’s a cheat.“

  „Well, Max created the guillotine back in the days when Edith was in the act, losing her head every night. She wasn’t inclined to take risks.“

  Charles looked over the large wooden boxes ganged together on the floor. Tall panels of thick wood were propped up against one wall of shelves. „As I recall, the platform is peg-and-groove construction, like a giant Erector set.“

  Two hours later, the shell had been assembled into a box nine feet square and fronted with stairs. The other three sides were paneled in dark rosewood. Thirteen steps led to a stage and two standing posts of light maple. Mallory looked up at the oval target hanging between them. The pegs at the sides of the target were painted black, and so it appeared to float in space. „Looks just like the one Oliver Tree used.“

  „It should.“ Charles stood by the side of the platform. „Oliver did most of the work on this one. He was a fine carpenter. There is one difference in the target – the pegs that fit into the post slots. Max’s are wooden. Oliver’s are steel.“

  She looked down at the s
quare metal wells sunk into the first step, a pair on each side. They were made to receive the matching brass posts at the bases of the four pedestals. „That’s different, too. In the news clips from Oliver’s act, it looked like the pedestals were bolted down.“

  „He was always improving on things. Probably thought it was safer that way. From what I saw of his replica, everything else was the same. But I never had a look at his interior room.“ One hand brushed the center panel of a side wall to the right of the staircase. „The pressure lock should be here.“

  He pushed on a slat of wood. The panel opened, and now they could see into the hollow heart of the platform. Overhead, the open trapdoors provided dim light. Charles walked in and pulled the chain of a hanging lamp. The round metal shade cast a bright circle of light on the floor and left the ceiling in shadows.

  „Amazing,“ he said. „That bulb is at least thirty years old.“

  Mallory leaned into the small room and surveyed the walls of slots, pegs and grooves awaiting their matching parts.

  „I never saw Max load the mechanisms.“ Charles stood in the doorway looking over the stacks of unopened crates. „It’s going to be a bit like assembling a Chinese puzzle block.“ He walked over to the nearest box and read the label. „Lazy tongs. I know where this one goes – under the center trapdoor. No other place for it.“

  Mallory walked around to the staircase as Charles and the box disappeared into the shell.

  He called out, „If you’re ever down here alone, remember there’s no knob on the inside. I got locked in once when I was a little boy.“

  „What about the trapdoors?“

  „You can’t work them from the inside. They open with the foot levers on the stage.“

  „Sounds like careless carpentry.“

  „Well, if there is another way to open them, Max never told me. He didn’t want me playing down here alone. Too dangerous, he said.“

  Yeah, right.

  Mallory was halfway up the platform steps when she heard Riker’s voice calling out, „Hey, where is everybody?“