The Good Thief's Guide To Vegas

by Chris Ewan

  ‘Sure. But before we do the switch Josh has to cover the cabinet. He drapes a black curtain over the entire thing. It’s only there for, like, five seconds before I appear and pull the cover away.’

  ‘And by that time Josh is standing where I am?’

  ‘That’s right. And then he climbs out and joins me.’

  ‘In a bikini?’

  She smiled demurely. ‘No, I tend to fill a bikini better than Josh.’

  I just bet that she did. I was poised to continue when one of the twins stepped forward and placed his arm in front of his sister, as though defending her honour in a high-school corridor.

  ‘That’s enough, Caitlin. This guy is stalling us.’ He glared at me. ‘You know where Josh is, or not?’

  ‘You mean you really haven’t figured it out?’

  ‘Buddy, there’s nothing to figure. He’s gone.’

  I stepped down from the cabinet and peered at Caitlin, doing my best to gain her trust. True, I might never have cut it as a professional magician, but I was more than ready for my big reveal.

  ‘How’d you do the switch, Caitlin?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You and Josh. When you trade positions, it’s because the cabinet is gimmicked in some way, right? We tried finding a secret door after he vanished, but we didn’t look for too long. And I’m guessing if Josh had a talented carpenter build the cabinet, well, there are ways to conceal things that might otherwise be obvious.’

  Her cattish eyes narrowed and she sucked on her lips, as if wary of me all of a sudden.

  ‘With respect,’ I told her, ‘there are bigger things going on right now than your stage secrets.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ her brother added. ‘You can tell him. If he screws this up, he won’t be alive long enough for it to matter.’

  Caitlin drew a long breath through her teeth, then clasped her hands tight together and circled to the reverse of the cabinet. She dropped to her knees and flattened her palms against the base of the rear panel, just left of centre, with one hand directly above the other. She levered down on her forearms, grunting faintly, and in almost the same instant a thin join appeared between two horizontal strips of wood. The strips were hinged in the middle and they began to swing upwards, exposing an opening just large enough for a grown man to crawl inside.

  ‘Wait.’ I nudged Caitlin aside. ‘Up here?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And there’s what, a channel with enough space for someone to fit?’

  ‘Yes. But first you have to release the sand through a small opening. Then, once you’re inside, a second hatch lets you step through into the cabinet. I’m the one who has to open that.’

  I smiled glumly. ‘Can it be opened by the person inside the channel?’

  ‘No. Why do you ask?’

  ‘What about this hatch?’ I went on, rapping my knuckle against the strips of timber Caitlin had released. ‘Can it be opened from inside the channel?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But then, it’s never been an issue. Josh always made sure the hatch stayed open when we did the switch. There’s a tiny catch on the outside, see?’

  ‘I was afraid you might say something like that.’ I nodded to Ricks. ‘You might want to get a doctor in here.’

  And with that, I plunged my cuffed hands up into the darkened space above me and felt around for Josh’s heels. It had taken a while for the penny to drop, but the logic now seemed inescapable to me. If Josh had succeeded in stealing the juice list, he’d had no reason to flee without handing it to Maurice first. But Maurice hadn’t heard from Josh, and that suggested to me that he’d never left the stage.

  The way I saw it, Josh had managed to steal the list at some point in the two days prior to his show. Feeling cocky, he’d indulged in the roulette scam. But when the twins appeared during his performance, he’d panicked and assumed that he’d been rumbled. So he hid in the only place to hand.

  From what I could gather, nobody besides Caitlin knew how to access the hidden compartment, so he had only to remain quiet to escape detection. But cruelly, he had no way of getting back out. Once closed, the gimmicked hatch couldn’t be opened from inside the channel where he’d concealed himself. And if my thinking wasn’t completely flawed, I was afraid that he might well have suffocated.

  ‘Oh Lord, is he there?’ Caitlin covered her face with her hands. ‘Please tell me he’s not there.’

  I forced my hands higher, clawing desperately at the wood with my fingertips. Having my wrists bound wasn’t making the task any easier, so I pulled my arms clear and thrust my head up into the space. I scrambled and I pushed until I was half-standing in a nook just large enough to contain a grown man.

  And I was the only man inside it. Josh Masters was nowhere to be seen.

  THIRTY-SIX

  I dropped out of the cabinet and rolled onto my side, gasping for air. It had been warm and stuffy inside the opening, and I already felt light-headed. I also felt crushed. Without a body, my theory was in serious trouble, and so, very probably, was I.

  ‘That’s it?’ Ricks asked. ‘That’s your explanation? You figured Josh was dumb enough to get stuck inside one of his own tricks. Jeez, we should never have come down here.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said, half to myself. ‘I don’t understand where he went.’

  ‘No kidding. Guy was a magician. He could have vanished a hundred different ways.’

  ‘I really thought he’d be here.’

  ‘Yeah – well, he ain’t.’ Ricks turned and checked on the twins’ reactions before patting my record bag and addressing me again. ‘I think it’s time we continued this conversation in private.’ He pointed at Victoria. ‘You too, miss.’

  ‘Trapdoors,’ Victoria replied.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  She stamped her foot on the stage. ‘Charlie, when we were here before, didn’t you think he could have used one?’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible.’

  ‘Caitlin?’

  Caitlin shook her head. ‘This stage only has one trapdoor. It’s way over there.’ She jerked her chin off to the far right, close to where the twins had been standing during Josh’s performance. It didn’t seem likely that he could have made it to the trapdoor without being seen.

  Victoria offered me a dispirited heft of her shoulders, then extended her hands and pulled me to my feet. She brushed some dirt from my shoulders, mussed my hair and kissed my forehead.

  ‘Time’s running out,’ she whispered. ‘I wish you’d put those pretty grey cells of yours to work.’

  ‘I tried, Vic.’

  ‘Then try again. You of all people should know the value of a good re-write.’

  She turned from me and knocked on the rear of the cabinet with her knuckles, working downwards like a builder trying to locate a joist in a stud-wall.

  ‘I showed you the only way in,’ Caitlin told her, in an apologetic tone.

  Victoria crouched and contorted her neck to peer inside the concealed opening for herself. When she found nothing, she rocked backwards on her heels and sat on her bottom with her hands spread on the stage floor.

  ‘He must have left the theatre. But how?’

  ‘I’m not sure that it matters,’ I said. ‘He must be in Hawaii already.’

  ‘Hawaii?’ Caitlin said. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘We asked around,’ one of the twins told her. ‘People heard he was planning a trip.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘Some girls from the revue. Some of the guys from the bar. You know how Josh liked to talk.’

  ‘And there’s something else.’ I raised an eyebrow at Ricks and pointed a finger towards his blazer. ‘May I?’

  ‘May you what?’

  ‘If you’ll just pass me the wallet.’

  Ricks tucked my bag under his armpit and extracted Josh’s wallet from his pocket. He spread the leather compartments with his fingers.

  ‘Hey,’ Caitlin said, stepping closer. ‘That belongs to Josh.’<
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  ‘I kind of acquired it,’ I explained, with a heft of my shoulders. ‘Before his performance.’

  ‘He means he stole it.’ Ricks stuck out his bottom lip and looked up from the wallet with a blank expression, as though it was just another dead-end.

  ‘Oh, give it to me, will you?’ I swiped the wallet from his hand and quickly removed the torn napkin with the telephone number on it. I uncurled the napkin and passed it to Caitlin. ‘That number is for the Hawaii Airlines booking line.’

  Caitlin let go of a withering breath and flapped the napkin in the air. She closed her eyes and pinched her nose with her finger and thumb, as if she was about to jump into a swimming pool.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ she said, in a fractured voice. ‘All of you. This was for our honeymoon.’

  ‘Your what?’ demanded the second twin, stepping forward to tear the napkin from her grip. ‘What in hell are you talking about?’

  She set her jaw and turned from one brother to the next. ‘Josh asked me to marry him. The ceremony was going to be in Oahu. He was arranging it all. Some guy he knew – a producer in town – had offered him a villa. We just needed flights.’

  ‘And you said yes to the bum?’

  ‘We were going to tell you. We were just waiting for the right moment.’

  ‘After he’d ripped us off, maybe?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Perhaps he went ahead of you,’ I suggested.

  ‘No,’ she replied, peeling her lips back over her teeth. ‘Not Josh.’

  ‘Then where is he?’

  ‘The Cape,’ Victoria said, and clicked her fingers, as if snapping herself out of a trance.

  ‘Cape Cod?’ Ricks asked.

  ‘South Africa?’ I added. ‘Why would Josh have gone there?’

  ‘No, you morons, the black cape. Caitlin said that Josh concealed the cabinet with a cape before they switched positions. And I seem to remember Josh having one just before he disappeared.’

  Now that Victoria mentioned it, I could remember that too. The way he’d twirled the cape had reminded me of a bullfighter.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said.

  ‘So where is it?’

  We all looked at Caitlin. She stepped towards the rear of the cabinet and moved her foot around in an arc on the stage.

  ‘Josh didn’t use it to cover the cabinet?’

  I looked at Victoria. Victoria looked at me.

  ‘No,’ we replied, in unison.

  ‘Then it should be here.’

  ‘Could anyone have moved it?’ Victoria asked, directing her question to the Fisher Twins.

  ‘Lady, so far as we know, nobody’s been here since Josh disappeared.’

  Victoria clicked her fingers and turned to me with a light in her eyes. ‘Then that’s how he did it. Don’t you see? Instead of covering the cabinet, he shrouded himself. In the darkness, he could have crawled away without being seen.’

  ‘Crawled where?’

  ‘Anywhere. The trapdoor maybe. Or even behind this curtain.’

  Victoria paced to the black curtain at the rear of the stage, the one with the rope lighting in the shape of the Vegas skyline. She gathered the curtain near her feet and lifted it in her arms, ducking her head underneath.

  ‘Where does this lead?’

  ‘There are doors from the back,’ Ricks said. ‘Corridors that take you on a bunch of different routes.’

  ‘Then that’s how he got away.’

  ‘Neat,’ one of the twins put in. ‘But now he’s gone. And you still owe us our money.’

  As much as I didn’t want to admit it, he was right. The moment Josh left the stage, he could have gone anywhere he pleased. What puzzled me was why it hadn’t pleased him to head to Maurice’s white-on-white home and hand over the juice list. If he’d stolen the list purely for money, then I supposed it was possible that he might have tried to interest somebody else to spark a bidding war, but so far as I could tell he’d genuinely wanted to be the star turn at Magic Land. And the longer he delayed, the less likely that became.

  There had to be something else, something we’d missed that would explain what was going on. And whatever it was, I needed to find it soon.

  I felt a tug at my hand and looked down to see Caitlin prising my fingers away from Josh’s wallet.

  ‘It’s not yours,’ she told me. ‘You have no right to keep it.’

  She clutched the wallet to her chest, shielding it with her hands, as though it was a precious stone. I didn’t know what she hoped to find inside it to justify her reaction. Maybe the autographed portrait shot. Because aside from that, there was just his credit cards, his hotel key card, the cardboard sleeve with the number of his suite, and the valet ticket for his car.

  Hang on a minute . . .

  ‘I have an idea,’ I said, not for the first time.

  ‘Another one?’ Ricks groaned.

  ‘Hear me out. I really think I might be onto something.’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  We waited beneath the shade of some palm trees while one of the valets retrieved Josh’s car. It was a bright, sun-drenched afternoon, the kind of weather that didn’t fit with my mood. If I’d written the scene myself, rain would have been lashing down from a brooding grey sky, and Faulks would have been soaked clean through, with his clothes stuck to his skin like webbing.

  In fairness, my underarms were perspiring rather heavily, but it wasn’t quite the same thing. The audio didn’t help, either. Birdsong and idle fountain splatter filled the air, along with the carefree conversations of tourists waiting in line for a cab and the hum of traffic out on the Strip. Hardly the stuff of nightmares.

  At least the vintage automobiles parked behind us in the hotel foyer conjured up some of the atmosphere I might have expected. If I squinted over at the Packards and Buicks and Studebakers, I could even have believed I was in the middle of a hardboiled noir. Of course, if that was the case, I’d need to brace myself for a bittersweet ending that might not involve the neatly packaged solution for which I’d been hoping.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Victoria whispered.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Too tired to think.’

  ‘Well, that’s unfortunate, because I have a question. What do we do if the car is a dead end?’

  ‘We could run.’

  ‘Think we’d make it?’

  ‘No, but we might shed a few pounds from that breakfast buffet.’

  Victoria kicked me in the shin.

  ‘Ouch. That’s not going to make running away any easier.’

  She turned her back on me and looked over towards Ricks and the Fisher Twins. They were standing in a huddle with their hands in their pockets and their heads bowed in conference. Caitlin was close by, grinding her toe into the pavement. It might have been a good opportunity to make our escape, if only Ricks hadn’t arranged for a group of security guards to watch over us.

  ‘What about those cuffs you’re wearing?’ Victoria asked. ‘Could you loosen them?’

  ‘Not without a pencil. Or better still, one of my picks.’ I nodded towards one of the security guards who happened to be holding my record bag.

  ‘How about a biro?’

  I grinned at her. ‘That might do.’

  Victoria delved inside her handbag, then acted as if she couldn’t find what she’d been looking for and palmed a biro across to me. A purist would say she did it all wrong, but so far as I could tell, there were no purists watching.

  ‘Houdini would be proud.’

  ‘Are you going to do it now?’

  ‘Let’s just see what the car brings first.’

  I’d barely finished speaking when a gleaming Lexus sedan pulled up and a young valet stepped out in a polo-shirt and pressed shorts. He went to hand the keys to one of the Fisher Twins but Caitlin hurried forward and claimed them for herself. She scrambled inside the Lexus and scanned the interior. The rest of us crowded around and watch
ed through the open door as she searched the glove box and a selection of ashtrays and cup-holders and cubbyholes. She flipped down the sun visor. The car appeared to be empty, and one glance around the showroom-clean interior told me that things weren’t likely to improve anytime soon.

  ‘This is definitely his car?’

  Caitlin nodded.

  ‘Did he have more than one?’

  ‘Not here. He kept a Porsche in storage. And a Harley.’

  ‘Maybe we should check those?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Ricks slapped his hand on the roof of the Lexus. ‘I think we’re done here.’

  ‘Yeah, we’re done,’ one of the twins agreed. ‘Let’s go back inside and have that conversation.’

  ‘What about the boot?’ Victoria asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The trunk,’ I said to Caitlin. ‘Can you open it?’

  She searched beneath the dash for a likely mechanism, pulled a recessed handle and the fuel cap jinked out.

  ‘Wrong lever.’

  ‘I’m kinda lost here.’ She held up her hands.

  ‘Try the key.’ I turned the key in her palm, tilting the plastic casing towards the light. ‘Here.’

  I pressed a dimpled button, the indicator lamps flashed, there was a muffled clunk and the boot lid bounced up. I scurried to the rear of the Lexus and heaved at the lid with my cuffed hands. A puff of hot, moist air rolled out to greet me. It didn’t smell nearly so pleasant as the scented freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, and as I covered my mouth with my arm and peered into the boot, I was unfortunate enough to see why.

  A stiff, lifeless body had been wedged inside, legs bent at the knees. The face and torso were part covered by a black cloth, but I had a fair idea of who I was looking at. I peeled the cloth away and made absolutely certain.

  Josh Masters stared back. His eyes were fixed and sightless, the left pupil misted with blood. His tanned face and neck were speckled a deep claret, and his capped teeth were arranged in a most unfortunate grin, as though he’d just performed his ultimate illusion and was awaiting the applause that was sure to follow.