The Ambitious Card

by John Gaspard

  She looked up, concerned. “You didn’t call him that name, did you?” she asked tentatively.

  “No, I was able to restrain myself.”

  “Good. He hates that name and using it isn’t going to make things go any easier for you.”

  Ah, yes. That name. Let me explain. Once Deirdre’s tawdry and clandestine affair with Homicide Detective Fred Hutton had come to light, followed quickly by our divorce and her subsequent remarriage—where Deirdre Sutton took on the hysterical…at least to me…hyphenated name of Deirdre Sutton-Hutton—I had begun the habit of referring to her new beau not simply as Fred, but instead as Mediocre Fred.

  The fault is not entirely my own. I blame my Uncle Harry and his love of comedy albums. Throughout his career, Harry had made a point of tracking down the record albums of those comedians he had had the pleasure of performing with, from the well-known to the truly obscure. Harry had worked many of the top nightclubs during the sixties, so as a result he had a truly massive and impressive comedy album collection. Victor Borge, Shelly Berman, Woody Woodbury, Mort Sahl, Henny Youngman, Rodney Dangerfield, even Bill Cosby and Bob Newhart, were artists I listened to over and over again as a child. And, of course, The Smothers Brothers. One song of theirs in particular was a personal favorite of mine, a charming ditty entitled Mediocre Fred.

  Given the emotionally painful conditions under which I first met Homicide Detective Fred Hutton, there are a plethora of other names I could have assigned to him. Under the circumstances, he could have done a lot worse than Mediocre Fred. Apparently, though, he disagrees and it’s been the primary sore spot among many sore spots between us.

  “So am I an actual suspect in Grey’s murder?” I asked, changing the subject and cutting to the chase.

  Deirdre saw that Cora was approaching, so she held off speaking until after the unsmiling waitress had filled her empty coffee cup, topped off mine, and then returned to her crossword puzzle across the room. Deirdre spoke in a quiet voice, one I hadn’t heard in a good long time, as many of the final conversations of our marriage had been pitched at a considerably higher decibel level.

  “They don’t have enough evidence to charge you, at least not yet,” she said. “There’s no clear motive and this particular victim was not particularly well-liked, in either the real estate world or the psychic world. So holding you now could potentially hurt the case, particularly when you consider the personal connection between you and the arresting officer —”

  “— and the Assistant District Attorney,” I said, completing the triangle.

  “Yes,” she said. “There is that.”

  “So, who else do they suspect?”

  “Well, now that I’ve taken you off the short list, at least for the time being, they’re beginning to widen the net. We’ve watched the tape of last night’s performance for leads, and they’ve already talked to Grey’s assistant from the show. Apparently, several witnesses saw them having quite the screaming argument in the parking lot around eleven.”

  “Which one?” I asked.

  “Which parking lot?”

  “Which assistant?” Once it registered, the question nearly made Deirdre do a spit take with her coffee. Which, admittedly, would have been a great sight gag, but since I was sitting directly across from her, I’m glad she was able to control the spew.

  “What do you mean, which assistant?” she said, coughing a bit and wiping her mouth with her napkin. “I watched the tape. There’s just the one, the scary dark-haired chick.”

  “Nova,” I added. “Yes, she was on-stage with him. But he clearly had another assistant working backstage. Grey was wearing some sort of hidden earpiece and receiving information during the show. How do you think he did the magazine and book bit? Second sight?”

  “I don’t know,” Deirdre shrugged. “Mirrors?”

  “Tsk, tsk,” I said, wagging a finger at her. “And you, the ex-wife of a magician, falling for an old routine like that.”

  Deirdre rolled her eyes as she grabbed her purse. She hurriedly burrowed through it and pulled out her cell phone, hitting the speed dial. “It’s me,” she said to whoever answered, although I have a pretty good idea who it was. “Grey had two assistants, not just the one. Yes, someone backstage.” She glanced over at me, then turned her attention back to the phone. “I just know, that’s all. There’s another assistant.”

  She ended the conversation by closing the cell phone, although I think I detected a small voice still coming out of the phone as it was snapped shut.

  “I think you cut him off,” I said, holding back a smile.

  “Yeah, probably,” she said as she tossed the phone back into her purse. We were both silent for a moment, just looking at each other. I can’t say for sure what she was thinking, but I couldn’t help wondering what it was that had gotten us to this point, and what I could have done earlier that would have changed the outcome.

  “So, they stabbed him in the eyes,” she said, breaking my train of thought. “That’s a little weird, don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps they were making a point,” I suggested. “Something about his second sight.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, taking another sip of her coffee. “Or perhaps the killer was referencing the card trick you did. With the knife through the King of Diamonds’ eyes.”

  “Perhaps,” I cautiously agreed.

  She set the cup down and gave me a hard look. “I’m not kidding around here, Eli,” she said firmly. “And neither is Homicide. You’re a legitimate suspect, until…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Until I’m not,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Until you’re not.”

  She finished her coffee in one gulp, then set the cup back in its saucer and pushed it away. She stood up to leave.

  “One last question,” I said. “The audio recording of the interrogation I just went through. What happens to that?”

  She grabbed her purse off the corner of the chair and began to dig through it. “They burn it to a disc and then have it transcribed,” she said.

  “And then?”

  “Then the interrogating officers sign off on it and it goes into the file. If it’s needed in court, they pull it out and send it over.”

  “So the interrogating officers read everything that was on the recording?”

  She had found her sunglasses. “They’re supposed to,” she said. “Why do you want to know?”

  “No particular reason,” I said casually. She gave me a puzzled look and then turned and headed toward the door, disappearing out of the dim room into the bright sunshine on the street outside.

  I sat back and sipped my coffee, smiling with the understanding that, at some point in the near future, Homicide Detective Fred Hutton was going to read a transcript of me, singing all four verses of The Smothers Brothers’ song, Mediocre Fred.

  You can’t buy satisfaction like that.

  Chapter 7

  “A murder suspect?” Harry said again, this time more indignantly than the first.

  “The term they used was ‘Person of Interest,’ but I think it comes down to the same thing.”

  “Bunch of imbeciles,” Harry mumbled as he pushed another length of rope and a printed receipt into a box and slid it across the worktable to me.

  We were in the back room of the magic shop, filling Internet orders for one of Harry’s most popular and bestselling illusions, a self-tying rope trick. I taped the box shut and added the address and return address labels, and then tossed it in a bin that I’d take to the post office later. It was mindless work, but for some reason I really enjoyed it.

  I’d loved doing it as a kid, when Harry gave me five cents per order while he regaled me with stories of the magicians he’d worked with in his career. And I still enjoyed doing it as an adult, when just as often it was now me giving him an account of some recent stage triumph. Or sometimes we’d work for hours and barely say ten words. It was still fun.

  We packaged a few more of the se
lf-tying ropes and were moving on to his equally popular Screaming Dice when we heard the bell ring on the other side of the wall in the shop. Neither one of us made a move to get up.

  “It’s your turn,” I said finally as I added labels to a sealed box.

  “Like hell it is,” he snapped back. “I got the last three, and two of those times it was that terrible student of yours.”

  “Pete’s not all that bad.”

  “He’s a wretched, graceless magician. If he were a dog, I’d have him put down to take me out of my misery.”

  “I’ll go,” I said, getting up. “We really can only handle one murder suspect in the family at a time.”

  I parted the red velour curtain that separated the back room from the store and stepped into the shop, surprised to see Clive Albans, the British writer I’d met in The Caves. Although Halloween had come and gone, you wouldn’t know it by looking at Clive. Flared bell-bottom pants and a silk shirt were covered by a long, flowing raincoat, a London Fog knock-off in a deep violet hue. It made me think of Willy Wonka.

  “Hello.”

  “Ah, yes, brilliant,” he said, looking up from one of the glass display cases he had been peering into. “Eli, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Clive?”

  “Spot on,” he said. “Impressive memory. You must teach me your method sometime.”

  “No trick, really. You say your name, I remember it. That’s really all there is to it.”

  “Clever bit, that. Well done.”

  “Yes.” There was a pause just this side of pregnant. “So, how can I help you, Clive?”

  “Yes, well, the interview? With yourself. And your uncle, if he’s so inclined.” He took a few steps toward me, removing his rich, red leather gloves and placing them on the display case. “I believe I mentioned the article I’m doing for the London Times, on charlatan psychics.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You did.”

  “Your uncle, being as renowned as he is in the field, would be the ideal candidate. Nothing extensive, mind you. Just a few juicy quotes. His thoughts on the current state of the field, that sort of thing.” He had taken out his notebook and flipped it open to a blank page. He pulled out a pen from his inside breast pocket and gave it a click, then made a quick jot on the paper to ensure its viability.

  “Let me check and see if Harry is interested in taking part,” I said as I turned back toward the red curtain.

  “Not interested,” came Harry’s reply from through the thick fabric before I had walked two feet. I turned back to Clive.

  “I’m afraid that my uncle isn’t currently available for an interview,” I said. “Perhaps another time.”

  “Fat chance,” was Harry’s muffled response.

  Clive was certainly a pro, because Harry’s curt reaction didn’t faze him for a second.

  “Well, perhaps I could get you to talk on the record,” he said, turning his attention toward me. “What has your experience been with charlatan psychics? I saw how you dealt with the late Mr. Grey last evening…terrible business, that, by the way,” he added, clucking his tongue sympathetically. “Grisly stuff. Anyway, is that how you usually deal with them, give them a bit of their own medicine, a bit of the hair of the dog, that sort of thing?”

  He lowered his tall frame onto one of the stools in front of the display case, not-so-subtly signaling that we were going to have a conversation of some duration. I sat on the other stool.

  “Well, in that particular instance,” I said, “I was dealing with a performer who was doing, as I mentioned at the time, a very traditional mentalist routine, which is in many ways part and parcel with what magicians do in their acts. With other types of psychics…palm readers, astrologists, healers, spoon benders, and that sort…you have to adjust your techniques in order to uncover their methods.”

  I was feeling tongue-tied and remembered how much I hated being interviewed.

  “Excellent,” he said as he made some indecipherable notes about my blathering on his pad. “Now then,” he said. He leaned back as far as he could on the stool and bit down thoughtfully on the tip of his pen.

  “Back in the day of Houdini, it was not uncommon for highly-educated people to be completely taken in by paranormal charlatans. Even Arthur Conan Doyle himself was famously fooled by two teenage girls and their fake fairy photos,” he said, hitting the alliteration hard as he spoke. “Do you think people are, as a rule, more sophisticated today?”

  “Well, yes, I’d like to think that people are better educated and less susceptible to sham—”

  I was cut off by Harry, who burst through the red curtain like a freight train. He had his head down, a man on a mission. He didn’t look in our direction as he spoke. “Nonsense. People never change. They are the same today as they have always been,” he declared as he ducked behind a counter and stooped down to open a drawer. I could hear him digging through the drawer as he spoke, his disembodied voice bellowing up from behind the display case. “They aren’t any more sophisticated and neither, for that matter, are the psychics who consistently fool them. And it’s the very fact that they think they’re more sophisticated that gets them into trouble in the first place. Take it from me…people are idiots.”

  He popped up from behind the counter holding three boxes of Screaming Dice, looked at the boxes, glanced at us for a split second, and then disappeared back behind the red curtain. I suppressed a smile, because I knew for a fact that there were four cases of Screaming Dice in the back room sitting on the worktable.

  I looked back at Clive, who sat frozen for a moment. Then he jerked into action and began to furiously jot down what Harry had just said.

  “Excellent,” he murmured as he scribbled.

  “So, what spurred the idea for this article?” I asked while he wrote, hoping to turn his attention away from me. “Is it just some kind of an assignment or is there a more personal reason for your interest?”

  He stopped writing and looked up at me. I couldn’t read the expression on his face and a moment later I didn’t have to, as his countenance had returned to his earlier bright, smiling appearance.

  “Oh, it’s a freelance piece, to be sure,” he said, offhandedly. “I’ve had a couple run-ins with the psychics back in London, in Belgrade Square, but nothing to speak of. Just always interested in the topic and thought there might be a story in it.”

  “So the article isn’t what brought you to the U.S.?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, I’ve been here for years, on and off. I’m afraid I’m a bit of a whirligig. I file reports from all over. It suits me.”

  He looked back at his notes and then spoke again before I could interject another question. “So what is it about magicians and psychics? Harry Houdini railed against them in his time. And your uncle’s work is, in a word, legendary. Why the antipathy? I mean, aren’t you all basically the same when it comes right down to it? You’re both just fooling people, isn’t that so?”

  “Well, not exactly,” I said. “The difference is —”

  “The difference is,” Harry said, once again bursting out of the back room, “that a magician stands in front of an audience and tells them, in effect, ‘Everything I’m about to do is a lie.’ We are, at our core, honest about our contract with the audience. The psychic, on the other hand, stands in front of his crowd and says, ‘Everything I’m about to tell you is the truth.’ And then he proceeds to lie to them. It’s as different as night and day.”

  As soon as he finished speaking, Harry realized that, in his enthusiasm, he hadn’t established a sufficient ruse for coming out of the back room. He looked around the immediate area. He finally spotted a paper clip on a nearby counter.

  “There it is,” he said with fake relief as he picked it up and pushed his way back through the red curtain.

  I looked at Clive, who was smiling as he scribbled. He finished, adding a flourish to the last word, and looked up at me. “So, Eli, have you ever experienced a paranormal event personally? An occurrence y
ou couldn’t explain with your traditional methods?”

  I looked over at the back room, expecting another dramatic, exasperated entrance from Harry, but the red curtain remained strangely motionless. I waited a couple of seconds, and then turned back to Clive.

  “Well, I certainly have experienced odd coincidences,” I said finally. “I think everyone has at some point.”

  “Like the phone ringing and you know who it is before you pick it up?” he offered.

  “Well, that’s not a paranormal experience,” I said. “That’s just Caller ID.” Clive laughed politely, which in my world is more painful than no laugh at all.

  “But, seriously,” he continued, “you must have had experiences that you, as a person and as a magician, cannot adequately explain.”

  “I’m sure I have,” I said. “But I’m a skeptic. I’m not a debunker. I don’t make the presumption that every supernatural occurrence has been faked in some way. As a skeptic, I am more inclined to look for a natural explanation before leaping to a supernatural conclusion.”

  “Would you like to encounter a true, paranormal experience?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Who wouldn’t? It would be cool. But that desire doesn’t cloud the part of my brain that first looks for the rational explanation. How about you?” I asked, turning it back on him. “Have you ever experienced something you couldn’t explain?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “I’ve yet to find anything that has completely mystified me, with the exception of your Electoral College. But hope springs eternal, doesn’t it?”

  That seemed to conclude the formal part of the interview, but at his request, I spent the next few minutes giving Clive a tour of the shop. In addition to demonstrating some of the most popular illusions, I also took care to point out a few of the classic effects that Harry had created.

  I also indicated the photos of Harry with celebrities that had been taken over the years. Clive seemed genuinely interested in everything he saw and he spent a long time examining the old framed photos that hung on the walls.