“When the lights went out the other night,” said Blackstone, “Calvin Ott pulled something very like this from his satchel, snapped it on his neck, and put his head on the table just as I did now.”
Phil and I looked at each other. Ott had come to our office not to make a sincere bet but because he wanted to establish why he would be carrying the black satchel at the testimonial dinner.
Blackstone looked around the room and continued, “I think he planned to be sitting here when we all returned from our wild goose chase. I think he had something ready to say about having fooled me with his illusion, but … someone else had the perfect conclusion to Calvin Ott’s illusion.”
“The killer, who was part of Ott’s scheme, came to the podium as he was supposed to do, stood behind Ott, and when the device was removed, stabbed Ott in the neck. The victim had inadvertently participated in his own murder. The killer dropped the device with the fake knife into the satchel and ran.”
“Where?” asked one of the magicians. “Who is he?”
“Some of you know Melvin Rand,” said Blackstone.
There were murmurs around the room.
“Melvin Rand was a waiter that night,” said Blackstone, looking at the ballroom door.
Jimmy Clark, who had turned out the lights at Blackstone’s cue and then run through the door, came back into the ballroom. Blackstone smiled and nodded at him. Jeremy said something, and then Jimmy went back out the door.
“Rand killed Ott?” asked someone.
“And Rand is now dead. There was a suicide note, a confession,” said Blackstone, looking at Cawelti who stood impassively, arms still folded. “The case appears to be closed. The illusion revealed. The show is over.”
The magicians applauded and rose. Some headed for the door, including Leo Benz. Others went up to congratulate Blackstone.
“Too easy,” I heard one lean man say.
“Best illusions always are when you find out how they’re done,” said the tall man to whom he was talking.
The congratulating of Blackstone went on for about ten minutes. Cornel Wilde also made his way to Blackstone, who reached out to shake the actor’s hand.
When almost everyone had cleared the room, Cawelti shook his head, went through the door, and disappeared. Phil, the Butlers, Shelly, Gunther, and I stood in a half circle in front of Blackstone and his brother.
“Something is missing,” said Blackstone. “Something doesn’t feel right, but.…”
Blackstone shrugged and picked up the satchel. I went with Wilde to the door.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
“I enjoyed it,” said Wilde.
“Well,” I said. “Too bad he wasn’t here, the man who was with Rand at Columbia.”
“He was,” said Wilde.
“Wait,” I said. “When everyone was inside the room and the doors were closed, you let me know he wasn’t here.”
“He didn’t come through the door,” Wilde said.
Besides Blackstone and his brother no one had been in the room except….
“Jimmy?” I said.
“The young man with the limp,” said Wilde. “That’s Jimmy?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It was him,” said Wilde, looking at his watch. “I’ve got to hurry. As I said, I enjoyed it.”
He shook my hand and was gone. I hurried over to Phil to tell him what Wilde had said. I then turned to Pete Bouton and asked, “Do you know where Jimmy is?”
Before he could answer, Jeremy said, “I do.”
Phil and I looked at him.
“He’s babysitting Natasha,” said Alice.
“I thought you said Violet was watching Natasha,” I said.
“Until Jimmy could relieve her,” said Jeremy. “She had to catch the last red car home at nine.”
Okay. I had choices to make and fast. Did I just turn and run the three blocks to the Farraday Building? Did I tell Jeremy and Alice what was happening? Maybe nothing was happening. Did I have time to explain it to Phil?
I motioned to my brother as I moved fast across the floor and out the door. The phones were in the lobby on a wall to the right near the registration desk. I fished for a nickel as I reached for the phone.
“What’s going on?” Phil asked behind me.
I held up a hand for him to wait while I called Jeremy’s apartment.
“Toby?” Phil insisted. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
The phone rang.
“Jimmy Clark was with Rand when he went to Columbia to try to blackmail Cornel Wilde,” I said.
The phone rang.
“Jimmy was backstage when Cunningham was murdered,” I said. “Jimmy was handling the lights here when Ott was murdered. Jimmy …”
Someone picked up the phone and said, “Hello.”
“Why the hell …?” Phil started, but I said,
“Juanita?”
“Toby?”
“What are you doing there?” I asked.
“I was working late,” she said. “The Scoufas sisters wanted an emergency session, get in touch with their dead brother, you know. So I said to myself, they’re good Greek ladies. How can it hurt if I give them a little support, though, in truth, I can no more talk to the dead than I can turn myself into Rita Hayworth or …”
“Juanita, is Natasha there? Is a kid named Jimmy Clark there? He’s supposed to be sitting with Natasha.”
“Nice kid,” Juanita said. “He saw me going down the elevator and asked if I could sit with Natasha for a little while. He had to do something. How do you say no? Know what I mean?”
“Where did he go?” I asked, looking at Phil who stood with his fists clenched and his feet apart.
“Who knows? Am I a mind reader?” Juanita snapped, with a distinct return of her New York City roots.
“Yes, you are,” I said.
“No, I’m a seer, a clairvoyant, I beg your pardon. I don’t know what people are thinking,” she said. “I’ve told you all this before. There was something I felt about that young man. Something was heavy on his mind. You didn’t need special gifts to see that.”
“Where’s Natasha?” I asked.
“Asleep in bed I guess,” Juanita said.
“You guess? You haven’t seen her?”
“No, I’m sitting here listening to Big Town on the radio, playing a little solitaire.”
“Juanita,” I said calmly. “Go look at Natasha and come back on the phone and tell me she’s alright.”
Something in my voice got through to Juanita. She said “Sure,” clunking the phone down on the wooden coffee table in the Butler apartment as she went to check.
“Where’s Clark staying? What hotel?” Phil asked.
I told him, and then Juanita came back on.
“Toby, she’s not there!”
Chapter 18
Take a piece of paper. Fold it evenly in thirds. Write the name of three people in the room on each third. Tear the paper along the creases. Have someone fold the sheets in half and drop them into a hat. Have someone say one of the names in the hat. Reach in, pull out a folded sheet, open it, and show the name chosen. Solution: Simply remember where the paper is torn. If the piece with the name on it is the centerpiece, it will be torn on top and bottom. For the other two, be sure that when you make the tear on one that you very slightly nip it off in a corner so that you can feel where you made the nip.
—From the Blackstone, The Magic Detective radio show
PHIL BARRELED ACROSS THE LOBBY and out the door. I went back in the ballroom, took a deep breath, and went to the place on the platform where Blackstone had stood.
“Listen,” I said.
Jeremy and Alice were near the door talking to Gunther. Shelly and Pancho were a few feet in front of me, talking to Blackstone and his brother.
“When you smile,” said Shelly, pointing at Blackstone’s mouth. “I can see a little turn, a twist in your upper right … that one there.”
“I’ve never n
oticed it,” said Blackstone.
“Trust me,” said Shelly. “Come and see me tomorrow. I’ll take care of it. No charge. I’ll throw in a cleaning and exam. All I ask is that if I do a good job you let me do an ad with your picture. And, right under your picture, it’ll say, ‘Sheldon Minck Will Do Magic With Your Teeth.’”
“Listen,” I repeated loudly.
Everyone stopped talking and looked at me.
“We just got some information that gives us pretty good reason for thinking that Jimmy Clark knows something about what’s been happening.”
“What?” shouted Alice.
“Phil’s on his way to your apartment to try to find him,” I said.
“Try to …,” Alice said. “He’s there with Natasha.”
I shook my head and started to explain, but Jeremy and Alice were out the door and gone before I got two words out.
“Jimmy Clark?” said Pete Bouton. “I can’t believe it.”
Everyone began talking, and I raised my voice. “Hold it! Hold it!”
Nobody listened. Blackstone moved to my side and said quietly, “Listen.”
They all stopped talking. Blackstone turned to me, indicating the floor was mine.
“I’ll call the police,” I said. “Gunther, go to the hotel where people in the show are staying. Shelly, you and Pancho get back to the Farraday and wait by your phone.”
I looked at Blackstone and his brother and said, “Does Clark know anyone in Los Angeles?”
“No relatives, no friends,” said Pete. “Just the people in the show. So far as I know.”
“We’ll get back to the theater,” Blackstone said. “We’ll check with everyone in the show about where Jimmy might be. You say he has a child with him?”
“Looks that way,” I said.
Blackstone grabbed the satchel and hurried across the room and out the door with his brother.
“Let’s move,” I said.
I called the Wilshire Station from the Roosevelt lobby and was unlucky enough to find that Cawelti was still there. When he came on the line, he said, “Make it fast, Peters. I don’t want to talk to you.”
I explained what had happened. He was quiet. When I finished, a Cawelti voice I had never heard before said, “Spell the kid’s name.”
I did.
“You say he’s from Decatur, Illinois?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Tell me everything you know about him,” said Cawelti.
I told him. It wasn’t much.
“Let me know if Blackstone has his photograph,” he said when I finished. “I know what he looks like so I’ll put out a description.”
“Don’t forget the limp,” I said.
“I won’t. Photograph of the girl?”
“I’ve got one,” I said.
“I’ll send someone to the Butler’s apartment to pick it up. How old is she?”
“Two,” I said.
Cawelti was silent.
“Two,” he repeated softly. “Where can I reach you?”
“Shelly’s in his office. I’ll check in with him.”
“Tell Butler …,” he began. “No, I’ll go over to the Farraday and talk to him and his wife. It goes APB as soon as I hang up the phone.”
He hung up the phone.
I probably could have gotten to the Farraday faster by running, but I might need the car later. It was parked half a block down in front of the Roosevelt.
When I got to the Farraday and through the front door, I could hear voices echoing from above. Voices at night in the cavern of a lobby were always indistinct and a little ghostly. The elevator was up on another level. I didn’t want it, anyway. I went up the stairs as fast as I could and tried not to pant when I went through the door of the Butler apartment.
Juanita was the only one sitting.
“He called,” Phil said. “Jeremy talked to him.”
“What’d he say?”
“Natasha is alright,” said Jeremy, his arm around his wife’s ample shoulder. “He hasn’t hurt her, will not hurt her. He saw you talking to Wilde before he left to come here. He knew by Wilde’s face that he’d recognized him.”
“He was right,” I said.
“What does he want?”
“Time,” said Phil.
“Time,” said Jeremy. “Which is what we all want. He said he needs time to decide. I don’t think he’ll hurt her.”
“I agree,” I said, not mentioning that the freckled young fellow with the big grin and touching limp may well have murdered three men in the last three days.
Alice turned away to face the window and then turned back. “If he touches her or even frightens her, if he … I’ll.…”
No one in the room, including her husband, doubted that she would make Jimmy Clark a very sorry young man if she ever got within reach of his neck.
“And you,” she said, pointing at me. “I’ve warned you. Jeremy got involved with all this because of you. He met Jimmy Clark because of you.”
I doubted if the combined efforts of Jeremy and my brother could have stopped her from getting to me if she had decided to tear off any part of my anatomy. She took one step toward me and stopped. Juanita had said something.
“High,” Juanita said.
She was sitting in a straight-back wooden chair.
“High,” she repeated. “He’s some place high, looking up at the stars, crying. Natasha is sleeping in his arms.”
There was nothing eerie, distant, or ghostly in Juanita’s words. She had her head turned a little to the right, and she held up a single finger of her right hand. She was trying to see something. She gently bit her lower lip.
“You’ll run and run and look,” she said. “In darkness and light, searching for a secret where there isn’t a secret. It’s all simple.”
“What’s simple?” I asked.
“Huh?” asked Juanita.
“What’s simple?” I repeated.
“Whatever you’re all making complicated,” she said, waving her bangle-covered left arm.
“We’ll find her,” came a voice from the open door behind me.
I turned. It was Cawelti. He looked at Phil. Neither man spoke, but something passed between them—a truce.
“He needs a photograph of Natasha,” I said. “I’ve got one downstairs.”
“Wait,” said Jeremy.
He moved to the door to the bedroom on his right. The rest of us stood: Alice looking at me, me looking at Juanita, Juanita looking at her hand, pursing her lips and then getting up.
Juanita moved to Alice and touched her shoulder gently.
“Tea, I could use some tea. You got some?”
Alice didn’t want to stop looking at me.
“Tea?” Juanita repeated. “I’ll make it myself if you tell me where it is.”
Alice turned toward the smaller woman and said, “It’s in the cupboard over the sink. I’ll get it.”
As Alice moved toward the kitchen, Juanita stage-whispered to me, “I hate tea. My husband, Sol, loved the stuff. Never has any taste as far as I’m concerned.”
Jeremy came out of the bedroom with a photograph in his hand about the size of a book. He handed it to Cawelti who repeated, “We’ll find her.”
“It’s odd,” Jeremy said. “The only poetry that comes to mind is that of Poe, and it gives me no solace. There are times when even poetry will not suffice or comfort.”
After a last glance at Phil, Cawelti was out the door and gone.
I started to look at the watch on my wrist, my father’s watch, the watch that never had the right time, that lived in a time world of its own. I’ve heard people say that even a stopped watch was right twice a day. But my father’s watch just kept on ticking as long as it was kept wound and it kept on turning at its own pace.
“It’s a little after ten,” Phil said, looking sadly at his own watch, a birthday gift from Ruth.
It was going to be a long night.
And it was.
Phil wen
t down to our office to call home. I went to Shelly’s office. In the small reception room, Shelly was seated behind Violet’s desk, phone to his ear. Pancho was in the one chair of the cramped space, an old Look magazine in his lap.
Shelly removed the cigar from his mouth, crinkled his nose in the hope of pushing his glasses up without touching them, nodded at me, and said, “Yeah. He just walked in. Here.”
Shelly handed me the phone.
“Toby,” said Gunther. “I am at the hotel. I have spoken with all members of the Blackstone troupe I could locate. None of them knows where Jimmy Clark might go. All they can say is that he’s a friendly, helpful young man who appears to be completely devoted to Blackstone. One young woman says that he told her he would give his life for Blackstone.”
“Why?”
“No one seems to know. They all say that Gwen knew him best. Perhaps I should go and talk to her.”
“Okay. You know where she is right?”
“Yes, at her sister’s apartment.”
“Call in if you get something from her, anything.”
“I shall,” said Gunther.
He hung up.
“How’s the tooth?” asked Shelly.
“Perfect, I said.”
“When we find Natasha, we should make an appointment to do complete x-rays and see what else is going on.”
“I’ll think about it, Shel.”
“Pancho’s working on the script,” he said.
I looked at Pancho who was dozing. The Look magazine was slipping from his lap.
“I see,” I said.
“Now he needs rest,” said Shel, smiling at Pancho. “Creativity is draining. He needs lots of food and rest. I’m learning a lot about the screenwriting game.”
“Great,” I said, turning to the door.
“Dentist in Disguise,” said Shelly.
“What?”
I turned.
“The name of the script about me,” he said. “Remember, I told you before.”
Pancho was snoring now. Shelly looked at him benevolently and pointed at the little man with the stub of his cigar.
“Bad alignment,” he said. “I’ve got a device that can take care of that, eliminate snoring. I’ll just get a cast of his teeth and make one for him.”
Now You See It: A Toby Peters Mystery Page 19
