by Chris Ewan
I wasn’t sure what to search for exactly, but in the end I tried the following collection of words: Josh Masters Vegas Show Vanishing Holiday Cabinet. Right away, I scored a bunch of hits for the self-same magician, and top of the list was the very thing I’d been looking for. Setting the speaker volume to low, I clicked Play on the video clip.
The footage had been shot from the rear of the Fifty-Fifty theatre and it was poorly focused and unsteady, and quite obviously illegal. The back of somebody’s head blocked the bottom left of the screen, at least until the camera zoomed into the stage, and I could barely hear the music, let alone what Masters was saying into his microphone bud. Even so, the routine was recognisable as the one Victoria had been involved in, the only difference being that Masters’ flame-haired assistant was on stage too.
Dressed in a short, gossamer-thin, babydoll negligée, she wore very high heels and showed an awful lot of leg. Something glittered in her hair – a tiara, perhaps – but it was nowhere near as bright as her stage smile. She fixed the audience with her teeth as she gestured towards the open cabinet, waving her hands at the blackened interior.
I increased the volume on the laptop but I still couldn’t hear what Masters was saying. Not that it mattered. I was fairly certain that his patter wouldn’t change much between performances and I was far more interested in what the redhead was up to. Currently, she was lowering a hula-hoop down over the cabinet, presumably to show that there was nothing attached to it. And now she had hold of a long white ribbon, and was prancing around and around the cabinet with the ribbon floating behind her, binding the cabinet in such a way that any attempt to open the doors would cause the ribbon to tear. The low res video gave her movements a mechanical quality, as though she was a clockwork ballerina in a musical jewellery box.
As Masters kept up his monologue, the redhead raised a finger to her pursed lips and bunched her shoulders theatrically before tiptoeing in an exaggerated fashion around to the back of the cabinet. It was only a matter of seconds before Masters caught up with her disappearance and went in search of his girl. When he couldn’t find her, he scratched his head and tapped his feet, acting completely bamboozled. He even interrogated the front row of the audience without success.
He shrugged and spun the cabinet around in a half-turn to check the reverse. No sign of her. Then he turned the cabinet frontwards, revealing the redhead’s mischievous face poking out through the circular porthole in the double doors.
The moment he saw her, Masters clicked his fingers as if she’d outwitted him one time too many, and then he smiled wickedly and danced across to the wings, returning to centre-stage with a pair of steel blades. He slapped the blades together and held them above his head. He contemplated his reflection in the mirrored surface and he kissed the cold steel. Then he turned quite abruptly, spun the cabinet around so that the redhead’s face was hidden from view, and rammed both blades through the side.
The audience gulped and turned to face one another, but before my mystery cameraman had fainted in his seat, Masters twirled the cabinet back around to a crescendo of music that made the laptop thrum. I peered hard at the screen and waited for the stage-lights to dip until I could see that the redhead was still grinning through the circular hole in the front of the cabinet.
The audience howled with laughter, to Masters’ evident disgust. He stamped his foot and shook his head, wagging his finger at this pesky young upstart. She wiggled her nose and rolled her eyes, goading the master magician until he could take no more.
Masters turned back to the crowd, sneering and snarling like an utter ham, and then he rubbed his hands with glee before bending down to the stage and lifting a large black cape for all to see. He turned the cape in his hands, showing us the front and the reverse. He wafted it before his beautiful assistant. Then he snapped his wrists and flicked the cape up into the air, allowing it to fall down over the cabinet. Quickly now, he twirled the cabinet around and around on its castors at a dizzying pace, and while the audience were suitably distracted, he stepped behind.
I watched closely, waiting for Masters to re-emerge, but to my genuine surprise, he wasn’t the one to do so. The cabinet had barely quit spinning when the redhead skipped out, sporting a rather eye-catching bikini and straw sunhat, and sipping gamely from the pink daiquiri in her hand. Before the audience had even begun to applaud, she whipped the black cape away to reveal Josh Masters trapped in her stead. Playfully, cheekily, she snapped the white ribbon with a long, outstretched finger, withdrew the steel blades, and finally threw open the wooden doors to reveal the colourful beach mural. And then good old Josh leaped out, his jeans, white T-shirt and leather jacket replaced with Bermuda shorts and a floral Hawaiian shirt, golden sand spilling from around his feet, and that million-dollar grin fixed smack in the middle of his stupid, fake-tanned face.
The video clip stopped just as Masters and the girl took their bow. I rewound the footage, trying to see how they’d done it, but it was hopeless. Even if it might have been possible to catch a glimpse of the secrets behind the trick, the images available to me were far too grainy to help. But I had at least learned something – I hadn’t been completely nuts to think there was a hidden way in and out of the cabinet.
Now obviously, Josh hadn’t got as far as discussing any of that with Victoria, or she would have told me about it. After all, I didn’t believe she was a paid-up member of the Magic Circle, and I liked to think she would have trusted me with the information even if she was. And besides, it was quite clear that Josh had reworked the cabinet trick to make it a lot less ambitious with Victoria involved.
The thing that really puzzled me was whether Josh had always planned to vanish during his show. On balance, I didn’t buy it, because it would have been a hell of a lot simpler to walk away from his dressing room before he got up on stage. It seemed to me that the appearance of the Fisher Twins was what had caused him to run, and the only question that remained was: where had he gone?
Well, that wasn’t the only question, but it was the most pertinent one from my point of view, and it was certainly something to ponder. And ponder it was just what I intended to do, once I’d slipped the laptop away and finished the task at hand.
Before closing the laptop, I called up the browser history. The history showed the YouTube video I’d just watched, and to be prudent, I thought I’d better delete it. Perhaps there was a way to delete just that one record, but since I didn’t know how to set about it, I ended up wiping the entire history instead. Mind you, I didn’t think the owner of the laptop would be inclined to complain, since the majority of his links related to the kind of material he could have watched on the flat-screen television, if only he’d been prepared to opt for the pay-per-view channels.
With the evidence of my web activity deleted, I powered down the laptop and returned it to the briefcase. Then I closed the briefcase and spun the dials at random and set the case back down on the desk.
There was a suitcase next to the bed and it was half-full of clothes. The clothes belonged to a man (or a seriously butch female). I sorted through Y-fronts and ankle-length socks, khaki trousers and pastel polo-shirts, round-neck sweaters and handkerchiefs. There was a charging device that most probably fitted the BlackBerry or the laptop, and a battery-operated razor and a pack of travel tissues.
Leaving the suitcase as I’d found it, I approached the closet on the other side of the bed. I slid the louvred door to one side and passed my torch beam over a couple of creased business shirts hanging from the rail before focusing in on the safe.
The safe was the same make and model as the one on Floor 8, and it was every bit as susceptible to the same approach. Armed with my tools, I opened the thing up and had a good look inside. And almost immediately I was prepared to forgive the guy his porn habit because the only thing in the safe was a brown, padded envelope, and the only thing inside the padded envelope was good old-fashioned cash. The bundle of crisp notes had been secured together with a bulldog clip
, and since the note on top happened to be a fifty, and the bundle was at least an inch thick, I had a very good feeling about it.
Of course, time was getting on, and despite the sudden urge I had to count how much money I’d just found, the most important thing was for me to get out of the room while the getting was still good. So I tossed the padded envelope down onto the cabinet beside the bed, gripped my penlight in my teeth and set about securing the safe. Before very long, I was done with the battery and the paperclip, and after screwing the manufacturer’s badge back into position, I put my gear away in my spectacles case and fairly glided across the room to gather up my empty suitcases. I was just in the process of unzipping one of them to place the padded envelope inside when I heard a sudden noise of the kind that members of my profession are inclined to heed.
The noise was the high, wheezy snigger of a man’s laugh, and the raucous counterpoint of a woman’s cackle, and it was coming from just outside in the corridor. Now, on any other night I’d have taken house odds that they couldn’t possibly be heading for the one room I happened to be inside. But somehow, given everything that had already befallen me in Vegas, I just knew that they were. I knew before I heard a thud against the door, and before I heard the bark of the woman’s laugh again, and before I heard the sound of a key card being slid home. And I sure as hell knew before the door burst open and the man tumbled inside and fell hard onto the floor, because I’d long since grabbed my suitcases, ducked inside the closet and slid the louvred door closed behind me.
SEVENTEEN
The lights came on, bright and startling, and I watched through the slatted bars in the closet as a skinny man crawled on his hands and knees towards the foot of the bed. He hauled himself up onto the mattress, rolled onto his side and laughed a high, giddy laugh. He was dressed in a cheap brown suit with a tie that had been loosened off at the collar and a yellowing shirt with the top button undone. His left foot was missing a shoe and there was a ragged, wet graze on the side of his face that looked as though he had fallen on gravel.
‘Sit up, Harry,’ drawled a brassy, full-bodied voice.
The voice wasn’t the only thing that was full-bodied. So was the woman who tottered into view. She was a brunette, with coils of thick hair that fell down from a severe centre parting and framed a face that reminded me of a moderately famous television wrestler. She had an ample waist and an even more ample bosom, barely contained by a blouse that appeared to have been styled on the coat of a Dalmatian. Her stockings were fishnet, her skirt was unseasonably short, and if any doubts lingered as to what her profession happened to be, it wouldn’t be long before she dispelled them.
‘You don’t look like a Harry,’ she growled, and snatched at the man’s tie to hoist him upright. ‘That really your name?’
He swayed and gurgled before slumping forwards into her voluminous chest.
‘Hey.’ She yanked his head back by the roots of his hair. ‘Money first, doll.’
Harry didn’t seem capable of reaching inside his pocket, so she took it upon herself to assist. Evidently, she wasn’t a practitioner of the light-fingered approach I’d favoured with Josh Masters. I’d seen cops frisk suspects with more care, and she was equally brazen about counting his money. Not a single note found its way back to his wallet, and I watched with some amazement as she removed a high-heeled shoe and poked the bundle of dollars down towards the toe.
I glanced at the envelope full of cash on the bedside cabinet. So far, it had gone unnoticed, and I just hoped things would stay that way.
‘Now take off your pants.’
The man fumbled listlessly at his belt buckle, blowing bubbles from his lips.
‘You want me to do it?’
‘Yessss . . . ma’am,’ he slurred.
‘So lay back, why don’t you?’
She pushed him so hard that he almost went clean through the bed and wound up on Floor 11. Loosening his belt, she then unzipped his fly, braced her foot against the end of the mattress and heaved at his trousers. Once she had his underwear down as far as his shins, she hitched up her skirt and straddled his chest, pinning his lean arms with her knees while she unbuttoned her blouse.
I suppose I could go on, but titillating you with details of their coupling really isn’t my style. For starters, it’s tricky for a hack like myself not to sound like a pervert when describing a big sex scene (and believe me, they really couldn’t get much bigger than the one I was being compelled to witness). But there are plenty of other pitfalls too. Do you try for a romantic vibe, and risk using a whole bunch of clichéd metaphors? Do you aim for graphic realism, at the cost of alienating readers of a more chaste disposition? Or do you opt for summing it all up in a few neat lines, and run the danger of sounding like a medical textbook?
I’ve never been able to settle on a particular technique, and as a result, I tend to avoid writing love scenes in my mystery novels. As I recall, the very most that Michael Faulks has ever experienced is a smouldering look, followed by a snappy stage direction and a sudden break in the text. Like this.
Now granted, the carnal intricacies that an educated reader such as yourself might impose on that white space are anyone’s to guess, but I’ve always thought it must be seriously frustrating for poor Faulks. Until now. Because let me tell you, if there was any way that I could have blanked out the sights and sounds of the beguiling coitus I was forced to endure, I would have gladly done whatever it took.
True, to begin with I watched with an avid, if somewhat mortified, curiosity. But as their thrusting and grunting and groaning and clutching dragged on, my interest soon began to wane. Sadly, they showed no sign of following suit. I had a feeling that had a lot to do with how drunk the skinny guy happened to be, and I suspected his partner’s engagement list wasn’t as full as perhaps she would have liked. During a particularly loud and energetic phase I took the opportunity to sit down on one of the suitcases and rest my head against the wall. I’d heard of people feeling like a spare part in a threesome, but this was plain ridiculous.
I closed my eyes and did my best to block the lovebirds out. To begin with, I focused on how I might extricate myself from the closet and grab the envelope full of cash, soon concluding that it would be a hell of a lot simpler if the closet was gimmicked like the cabinet in Masters’ show. That got me thinking of Josh again – of his performance and his disappearance and his possible next moves. I asked myself where he could have gone, and if there was a clue to his whereabouts that I’d missed, and then I thought of the redhead in his bath, of the way she’d smiled and joked on the internet video, and of how she wouldn’t be doing that again in a hurry. I thought of Victoria sharing the stage with a murderer, and of our interrogation by Terry Ricks of Carson Associates, and of the borderline psychotic behaviour of the Fisher Twins, and of the oddball partnership of the high-pitched little chap and the Eastern European giant. I asked myself whether they’d been involved in the murder and the gambling scam, and the gambling angle got me wondering how Victoria was doing at blackjack. For all I knew, she might have enjoyed a run of good fortune that would balance out all of my bum luck. She might even have won enough to pay off the Fisher Twins and enable us to leave Vegas in one piece, in which case I’d owe her much more than a dumb short story.
Maybe, I thought, I’d wind up writing her a story based on some of the things that had happened to us. Maybe I’d use my exact predicament in the closet, or maybe I’d do something with the illusionist angle. My Faulks novel with the magician in it had received some favourable write-ups when it first came out, so perhaps there was more mileage to be had from the character. I could picture myself crowded over my laptop writing about him again, and as so often in the past, the version of me doing the typing appeared to have a cigarette in his hand. Damn. I shouldn’t have thought about cigarettes. Now I couldn’t get my mind off the pack in my pocket. I could feel the edge of the carton poking into my thigh. Would it be so bad to try and smoke one? The way Dirty Harry and his ga
l were carrying on, they might not even notice. Then again, maybe the cigarettes were my way out. Perhaps I could wait for them to conclude their lovemaking and emerge from the closet to offer them a smoke?
I smirked in the darkness, readjusted my weight on the suitcase and checked the time on my digital watch. Almost 2 a.m. I thought of the watch on my other wrist, and to be honest I felt pretty good that I’d stolen it from Josh. It was a nice timepiece, and maybe it held some sentimental value for him, and maybe I didn’t altogether care if he never saw it again.
Thinking of the watch made me think of Josh’s wallet. I felt plenty smug about that too. Without his credit cards, he might find it harder to run. Was there anything else in his wallet that could make things difficult for him? Well, there was the signed colour photograph, and the key card, and the torn napkin with the telephone number scrawled on it.
Hang on a minute. The torn napkin with the telephone number scrawled on it. The note the little guy had left in Masters’ room had told him to call someone called Maurice. Could the number on the napkin belong to the same person? And if it did, how long would it be until I could do anything about it?
I felt for Masters’ wallet inside my pocket, but there was really no sense in removing the napkin because I couldn’t risk being heard by either of my naked playmates over on the bed. The bed. Hmm. That made me think of my own bed back at the Fifty-Fifty. The mattress was well-sprung, the cotton sheets were luxurious, the feather pillows were plump and soft and inviting . . .
Boy, was I tired. So tired, in fact, that my head was beginning to loll and my thoughts were becoming vague and confused. My eyes fairly burned with fatigue and my lids were drooping. I blinked once. I blinked twice. I blinked three times and finally allowed my eyes to rest for just a few pleasant seconds.
