P’tol P’kah raised his hands over his head, sending a storm of froth rising to the surface. As the bubbles flew from the green fingertips, Gus saw with a shock that the fingers were shrinking. No, dissolving. Within seconds, they were gone down to the first two knuckles, and quickly the hands were reduced to clublike stumps.
The green man lowered one deformed hand to touch his stomach, and immediately the bubbles began fizzing out of his abdomen. But they didn’t rise to the top of the tank. They spun around, as if caught in a whirlpool. And when they cleared, Gus could see they had eaten a hole clear through P’tol P’kah’s midsection.
This has to be a trick, Gus told himself. Shawn must be right. But he didn’t see a trick. What he saw was a giant man dissolving like an Alka-Seltzer tablet. Where moments before there had been rock-hard green abs, now there was a void. And it was growing in all directions, devouring his chest, his hips, his shoulders. His arms, eaten from both sides, fell off his body and dissolved into bubbles before they hit the tank floor. All that was left was the grinning green head floating seven feet over the enormous black boots.
The bubbles were working on P’tol P’kah’s chin now. Before they could reach any higher, the green man opened his mouth as if to speak—or to scream. But what came out wasn’t just a blisteringly loud roaring sound. It was light, a blast of pure white light that lit up every corner of the showroom, blinding Gus temporarily—but not before he could see the stunned faces of everyone in the audience.
Then the light went out, and the room was plunged into darkness.
For a moment the room was so silent, Gus thought he might have been struck deaf as well as blind. And then he heard a sound from across the room. He was so stunned by what he had just seen, it took his brain a few seconds to understand that what he was hearing was the clapping of hands. At first, it was just one person, but soon the entire auditorium had erupted into wild applause and cheers.
Gus knew exactly what he should be doing at this very moment. He should be constructing the perfect pithy phrase to shoot at Shawn, something that would take all his friend’s premiracle jibes and throw them back in his face
But Gus didn’t feel like lording it over Shawn. He didn’t want to win an argument or grab a few well-deserved points. All he wanted was to luxuriate in the moment. Before he even started the inevitable—and inevitably futile—process of trying to figure out how P’tol P’kah had achieved this impossibility, Gus wanted to replay the moments in his mind and marvel over the vision.
As the cheering started to subside, the houselights flickered on. Gus turned instinctively to the spot in the crowd where P’tol P’kah had promised to materialize. He wanted to see the giant take his much-deserved bows.
But P’tol P’kah wasn’t where he said he would be. No one was. The magicians surrounding the spot had kept it clear, just in case, and the entire audience was staring at the empty hole in the crowd, but the giant hadn’t materialized. The applause faded away to a confused muttering.
Gus tried to ignore the minor disappointment. After all, the Martian Magician had dissolved in a tank of water. If he didn’t stick the landing, that didn’t take anything much away from the rest of the performance. But he knew that Shawn was going to start mocking the show any minute now.
“If you’ve figured it out, you can say anything you want,” Gus said, not even casting a glance at Shawn. “Until then, I don’t want to hear that it was cheap or cheesy or fake. Because I’ll know you’re not telling the truth.”
Shawn didn’t answer. Which was odd, because in all the years they’d been best friends, Gus couldn’t remember a single time when Shawn didn’t answer a taunt. Even when he’d had strep throat and couldn’t talk for days, he’d scrawl a response on a piece of paper, or at least hit Gus with a rolled-up magazine.
Gus turned to Shawn and saw that his friend was staring straight at the stage, a look of pure fascination on his face.
“A-ha!” Gus said. “You can’t even pretend you’re not amazed. That was much better than you thought it would be, and you can’t figure out how he did it.”
“I am amazed,” Shawn said. “But I don’t think I’m amazed by the same thing you’re amazed by.”
“You mean the fact we just saw a giant green man dissolve into bubbles?” Gus said. “That’s not what you’re amazed by?”
“No.”
Even for Shawn this was a ludicrous level of stubbornness. Gus wanted to shake him until the truth dropped out onto the floor. “If you’re not amazed by the sight of a giant green man dissolving into bubbles, then would you please be so kind as to explain exactly what does amaze you?”
Somewhere in the auditorium, a woman screamed. “Oh my God, he’s . . .”
Gus whirled around and saw that the woman was pointing at the stage. The rest of the crowd was turning to see what she was pointing at. Gus followed them.
The tank was simple, a glass rectangle ten feet tall and four feet across with steel brackets reinforcing the corners and a metal lid on the top. It towered over the audience in the middle of an empty stage that was raised three feet above the showroom’s threadbare rug.
On the tank’s floor stood a pair of enormous, empty black boots. And at the top of the tank floated a bowler hat. This might have been only of passing interest, except that the hat sat on a head, and that head was attached to a portly body clad in a three-piece suit. And the head and body were both obviously dead.
“That’s what amazes me,” Shawn said.
Chapter Seven
Detective Carlton Lassiter hated the full moon.
Not the moon itself, of course. The head detective of the Santa Barbara Police Department knew that it was nothing more than a hunk of rock spinning in orbit around Earth, and aside from a moment of weakness during Apollo XIII when he shed a tear for the astronauts who were never going to reach it alive, he’d never been able to work up any kind of emotional reaction to it.
It wasn’t the psychological effect the full moon had on people that he hated, either. He knew that there was no way that human psyches could be affected by the percentage of shadow Earth cast on its lone satellite in a given time of the month.
What Lassiter hated was the belief shared by so many losers and lowlifes that the full moon had some bizarre power over their behavior. He hated the way they used the monthly lunar phase to justify abandoning the inhibitions they barely managed to hold in check the other twenty-nine or thirty days. And while there was only a relative handful of miscreants who felt compelled to submit to the lunacy, there were far more people who believed that crazy things happened when there was a large orb shining down instead of a thin sliver, so they started seeing them—and worse, reporting them to the police.
To Lassiter, this was all nonsense. And the head detective was one hundred percent No Nonsense. A stern, dogged investigator who worked his cases with the unrelenting rigor of a bloodhound in full tracking mode, he refused to be distracted by anything he considered less than serious. He’d been like this all his life. In his high school yearbook, under a photo of Lassiter wearing his hall monitor sash, he was called the “least likely to put up with nonsense,” and his patience with the stuff had only grown shorter over the years.
That meant he was going to be extremely annoyed by the time this night was finally over. It was barely ten o’clock, the full moon was entirely invisible behind a thick wall of fog, and he’d already fielded calls from one citizen who had seen Charles Manson buying yogurt at the Shop King, a homeowner who insisted that the gophers in her lawn were holding a meeting on her front steps and that they kept pointing at her and laughing, and a group of teenage girls who claimed that Shrek was cruising down State Street in a convertible. Two guys had turned themselves in at the police station, begging to be locked up before they transformed into werewolves, and then gotten into a fistfight over the question of which one would lead the pack.
And now, this. On a night when the crazies were all out to play, Lassiter had been
called to a crime scene where almost everyone was a nut-job: the Fortress of Magic, or, as he liked to call it, the Kingdom of Clowns. As a rookie officer, he’d been called here innumerable times to break up fights between two self-styled wizards who’d gotten liquored up and started revealing the secrets of each other’s illusions. This wasn’t hard, because there were apparently all of three unique magic tricks in the world, and everything else was a variation of one or another.
And now he’d been dragged out again, this time to investigate a drowning—some investigation. As he strode determinedly up the steep path to the Fortress, he guessed that the only mystery here would be how a grown man could drown in two inches of vodka.
Somewhere on the landscaped hill, a guard dog growled angrily. Lassiter’s partner, Detective Juliet O’Hara, stopped on the path, her hand instinctively reaching for the gun in her purse.
“Did you hear that?” she said, trying to peer into the darkness.
Lassiter sighed wearily. There were many things he admired about his partner. Although she was the youngest detective on the Santa Barbara force, she was also one of the smartest cops in the country. She looked like she had just graduated from a high school cheerleading squad, but those looks hid a powerful mind—and she knew how to use her appearance as a key tool in her casework.
The one thing he didn’t admire about his partner was her willingness to put up with nonsense. Behavior that Lassiter would simply forbid as foolishness, O’Hara chose to dignify with her attention. To be fair, that often gave her an understanding of human nature that had helped them solve many cases. But it also ate up valuable time Lassiter could use for more serious purposes.
“Keep up, O’Hara. We’ve got to pull a drunken magician out of a whiskey bottle,” Lassiter snapped, not pausing on his way to the top.
The growl was joined by several others. O’Hara’s hand tightened on her gun’s grip. “There are dogs. We can’t just—”
Lassiter didn’t slow down. “Turn that thing off or I’ll arrest you all for disturbing the peace and interfering with a police officer.” The growling stopped. He took a second to cast a glance back at his partner. “You just need to know the magic words.”
By the time the detectives reached the entrance to the fortress, uniformed officers had corralled the spectators in the two large parlors.
“We’ve segregated them into members and guests,” Officer McNab volunteered as soon as Lassiter and O’Hara stepped through the door. “The guests were all attending a couple of different parties, and they’re in the East Parlor. A lot of them want to know when they can go home. The members are in the West Parlor. They all want to know when they can go to the bar.”
“There’s a surprise,” Lassiter sighed. “Get statements from the guests; then send them on their way. I want your primary focus on the magicians. Find out which ones had a grudge against the victim.”
“I’ve already done that, sir,” McNab said. “It seems they all did.”
“Of course,” Lassiter said. “I’ll get to them as soon as I can. See if you can separate the childish, petty grudges from the substantial issues. If you can find any substance. Oh, and track down whoever’s in charge and tell him if he doesn’t disconnect that dog machine, I am going to spay and neuter it personally.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, where’s the body?”
“Still in the tank, sir,” McNab said.
“Don’t you mean the bottle?”
“Um, no,” McNab said. “You really need to see this. But there’s one thing you should probably know first.”
Lassiter didn’t wait to be told. He marched down the corridor as quickly as he could. Detective O’Hara gave McNab a sympathetic smile.
“Don’t take it personally,” O’Hara said. “Detective Lassiter likes to come into a crime scene cold so his first impressions aren’t colored by anyone else’s.”
“I just wanted to say there’s something you’re not going to like in—”
O’Hara held up a hand to cut him off, the sympathy gone from her face. “All good detectives like to come into a crime scene cold.”
She turned and scurried to catch up to Lassiter, who had slowed enough to let her catch up with him at the closed doors to the showroom.
“You didn’t let him color your impression, did you?” Lassiter snapped.
“Not a tint,” O’Hara said.
“Good. Let’s solve this puppy.” As Lassiter threw open the doors to the showroom, he also opened the doors to his mind, letting out all his prejudices and preconceptions, even the well-earned ones about magicians. He was a blank slate, waiting to be filled by the sight in front of him.
What he saw first was an enormous glass and steel tank, filled with water—and with the floating corpse of a chubby man in a three-piece suit and bowler hat. In front of the tank stood a small man, half a step above a midget, dressed immaculately in expensive designer clothes. His arms were crossed angrily, as if he expected somehow to use the force of his will to keep an army of normal-sized people from removing him from his spot in front of the tank.
And it seemed to be working. The night guy from the coroner’s office stood next to the near-midget, a pleading look on his face, two uniformed officers lined up behind him. But somehow they couldn’t bring themselves to push past the little guy to get to the body.
Something was wrong here; Lassiter could sense it. No, worse than wrong. There was nonsense in the air, and the detective would have none of that. This was a serious business, and he was going to treat it seriously.
Officer McNab appeared in the doorway behind them. “I’m sorry, Detective, but I really thought you should know—”
“That there’s nonsense afoot, McNab?” Lassiter snapped. “I can figure that out for myself. And you know I will brook no nonsense.”
A cheery voice called out from the other side of the room. “I’ll brook no trout, myself. Not that I have any idea what that means.”
Lassiter felt every muscle in his body tightening. He had heard that voice so many times, and whenever he did, it guaranteed that the next few hours would be filled with nothing but nonsense. Well, nonsense and occasionally the solution to a crime that had baffled the entire SBPD, but Lassiter wasn’t entirely sure that catching a few murderers was worth tolerating such a level of drivel.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you, sir,” McNab said. “Shawn Spencer and Burton Guster are here.”
“I can see why you thought I might have missed that,” Lassiter said. “Since they’re usually so quiet and unobtrusive.”
“Hi, Jules! Lassie!” Shawn strode up to them, Gus following right behind him.
“What I don’t understand, McNab,” Lassiter continued without even a glance in Shawn and Gus’ direction, “is why you felt compelled to admit them to the crime scene.”
“He didn’t have to, Lassie,” Shawn said. “We were already here.”
“Saw the whole thing,” Gus said.
“Did you now?” Lassiter said. “That’s very good to know. If you’ll follow Officer McNab, he’ll put you somewhere until I can take your statement.”
Detective O’Hara stepped in front of Lassiter. “Hey, guys,” she said. “So, what’s going on here?”
Lassiter was surprised to discover that his muscles could tighten even further than they already had without starting to snap like overstretched violin strings. When he complained that his partner was willing to tolerate nonsense, it was her friendly attitude toward these two that was his primary complaint.
“Not much,” Shawn said.
“Unless you count the disappearing Martian,” Gus said.
“Oh yeah,” Shawn said.
“And the dead guy who mysteriously appeared in that tank,” Gus said.
“Good point,” Shawn said.
“And the short dude who won’t let anyone near the body,” Gus said.
“Right,” Shawn said. “But aside from that, not much. What’s up with you two?”
“We’re here to investigate a murder,” Lassiter said.
Shawn slapped his forehead. “I knew I forgot something,” he said. “The murder.”
“What about it?”
“We solved it.”
Chapter Eight
Everyone was staring at Shawn. Even Gus.
“Excuse us for a second,” Gus said. He dragged Shawn a few steps away and whispered furiously at him. “We solved it?”
“Didn’t we?”
“Do you know who the dead guy is?”
“It’s the twenty-first century,” Shawn said. “How many men wear bowler hats? It won’t take long to track them all down, and then we just have to pick him out.”
“Do you know how he got into the tank?”
“I know it wasn’t magic,” Shawn said. “And once you know what it wasn’t, you’re halfway to knowing what it was.”
“That’s great,” Gus said. “Do you have any idea where the green guy went?”
Shawn thought that one over for a moment, then stepped back to the police. “Small correction, just a tiny point,” he said. “When I announced that we had solved this case, what I meant to say—”
“Was that you’re completely useless and should get out of my way.” Lassiter pushed past him and strode up to the night-shift coroner. “Hey, body snatcher. Why aren’t you snatching that body?”
The coroner’s assistant was barely twenty-five years old. No doubt a medical student earning near-minimum wage to fill in when the grown-ups were sleeping, Lassiter thought.
“He won’t let me,” the kid said, pointing at the little man.
“And what’s he using to stop you?” Lassiter demanded. “A gun? A knife? A light saber?”
“That.” The kid pointed at the short man’s hand, which was wrapped tightly around a glowing iPhone.
Psych: Mind Over Magic Page 6
