Magic 101 (A Diana Tregarde Investigation)

by Mercedes Lackey

  She might have said something more, except that there was a knock at the door, and when Emory answered it, the newcomer turned out to be none other than Marshal, the guy whose “thing” was stage magic.

  Zaak was only too pleased to get the heat taken off of himself and quickly introduced her to Marshal, and vice versa.

  Marshal was not as good-looking as Emory, but he was attractive in a mismatched-features, cute-like-a-hound-dog way. He also had a sense of self-confidence about him, not cocky, just that he wasn’t naïve and he generally knew what he was doing. Emory had that sense too, but not to the extent that Marshal did.

  “I should probably go,” she began, shoving herself out of the couch, which was no easy feat since it had tried to swallow her the moment she got off the edge of it.

  “Hey, stick around, you’re the first person to talk sense at Zaak since he started in on this magic kick,” Emory replied cheerfully. “If you haven’t got anything you have to do tonight, that is.”

  “Or someone you need to meet,” Marshal added, looking at her with thinly disguised hope.

  Marshal was someone else she was beginning to think she needed to talk to. “Well, the rest of my reading eventually, but…”

  “Great! Let me get the beers.” She managed to conceal a wince. Of course. These were college guys. College guys and beer went together like peanut butter and jelly. Where there was one, there would be the other.

  She didn’t much like beer, but on the other hand, a little lubrication might help her interrogation. And since she didn’t care if her beer was warm, she could make one last quite a long time.

  And at least they aren’t breaking out the roach clips and the rolling papers. If there was one thing that a practicing magician shouldn’t mess with, or at least, not without a lot of preparation and safeguards, it was drugs. Of any kind. A magician was all about control, and when you smoked, or dropped…your control went right out the window.

  And that was bad, because when your control went, sometimes your protections did too.

  Which was a little like being a drunk white guy, staggering into Bed-Stuy, wearing a Dixie-flag t-shirt with twenty dollar bills hanging out of his pockets. You were bound to attract attention, and most of it wouldn’t be friendly.

  Not a good idea. Oh no.

  Emory came back with both hands full of open bottles; she took hers, and settled in for the next few hours as the couch slowly pulled her into its saggy depths.

  It didn’t take much to get Marshal going, either. He loved stage magic. And like his idol Houdini, he loved debunking, or at least the idea of it. He didn’t bad-mouth Zaak’s magic, though; he confined his ire to the “mediums” and “psychic readers.”

  After two beers she was able to steer him right in the direction she wanted, which was to tell her the stage-magician’s perspective on how they did what they did. “The best and least harmful of ‘em are no more than good psychologists,” he said with a shrug. “They tell you what you’d get from a good shrink, but they wrap it up in a much more palatable package, palatable for people that don’t believe in psychiatrists, that is. Like, if the good advice is coming from the Great Beyond, they’re more likely to follow than if it came from the guy on the chair next to the couch.”

  “Especially if you believe in the Great Beyond and not in shrinks,” Di replied dryly. She shifted, and held on tight to the bottle. There was nowhere safe to put it down, so eventually she was keeping it clamped between her knees.

  “Exactly. Not to put down religion! But—” He shrugged. “I go along with Ben Franklin. ‘The Lord helps those that help themselves.’ You know? And even when it’s done with good intentions, how ethical is it to toy with peoples’ feelings about the ones they’ve lost? How ethical is it to give them ‘false contact?’ I think it’s immoral, personally. Even Houdini said that he had to stop proving to people that mediums were phoney by working the same tricks, then revealing he wasn’t a medium and showing them the trick. He saw that they’d have such hope, such happiness to think they were in contact with a loved one before he pulled the reveal. And even though they learned not to get tricked by mediums again, fooling with their feelings like that was a crime.”

  “So what about the bad mediums?” Em asked the question that Di wanted to, and Di silently blessed her for it. “I mean, what is it that they do that has you so riled up about them? If someone wants to just waste money getting their palms read, is that so bad?”

  Marshal’s homely face darkened. “I’d like to string them up by their thumbs,” he growled. “They’re parasites. They’re worse than—than—Nixon! Worse than the Mafia. They give people hope, and rob them blind, and it’s all a lie.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Look, there’s all kinds of scams. Some mediums, they research you, or get someone to do it for them, then they use stage magic to make you think that they’re actually bringing in ghosts. These days, they’ll have microphone pickups in the waiting rooms, have a stooge in there pretending to be another client who’s there to dig for information. Sometimes they’ll make you leave everything in the waiting room and the stooge will go through pockets of coats and purses. Then, wow, you get in the dark room, and there’s stuff floating around, there’s noises, you might even see the dead person! Right, what you’re seeing is a projection of a photocopy of the personal photo they got out of your wallet. And the rest, that’s all sleight of hand, escape tricks, even some of the kinds of special effects you see on stage shows.”

  He spent a lot of time then, explaining how some of that stage magic worked—levitation, misdirection, table-tapping and tilting, the “medium” managing to get free of the restraints put on him. In theory, Di knew how these things worked, but not the mechanics, and it was fascinating. To be honest, it made her admire stage magicians even more. So far as she was concerned, knowing how something was done didn’t bother her—in fact, knowing how a trick was worked was only going to increase her appreciation of the skill involved in making it “invisible.”

  “Houdini spent a big chunk of his time showing these crooks up for what they were and you’d think by now no one would believe in them but they’re worse than ever. Like cockroaches. You stomp on one, but there’s a zillion under the cabinets.”

  He finished off his beer with a frown. Di prompted him into describing some of the ways that Houdini and others had caught the phonies, and took a lot of mental notes.

  “Those are the old-style mediums. A lot of times these days the mediums and psychics just do away with the stage-magic—hell, most of ’em don’t have the skills to pull it off anyway—and just concentrate on hot readings.”

  “What’s a hot reading?” Zaak asked.

  “Just what I told you earlier. They get their information way in advance. Most of these people talk to each other, okay? They swap files. It’s to their advantage to cooperate with each other. So you can get tired of going to Madame Zuzu, and decide you want to visit Psychic Clarabell instead, well, Clarabell is going to call up Zuzu, offer to split the take, and get Zuzu’s file on you, and when you walk in thinking she knows nothing about you, bingo! What amazing revelations! How could she know these things?” He snorted. “Then Clarabell ponies over part of what she got to your old psychic, and you think she’s got a better connection than Zuzu.”

  “I don’t get why you’re so mad at these people though,” Em put in. “I mean, aren’t they offering a kind of comfort? Like a priest would?”

  “Well even at their best they’re still offering comfort for money,” Marshal pointed out, frowning. “And it’s dishonest comfort. They don’t want to comfort you, they just want your money. If you believe in all that psychic energy stuff, you know, and karma? They’re giving you something that’s counterfeit when it all comes down to it. It’s not real, and when people find out it’s not real, they are just shattered. At their worst, well…then there are the outright crooks. Besides having pickpockets and thieves going through your pockets for information, they have pickpockets and th
ieves getting a couple checks out of your checkbook to forge, credit card numbers, lifting your cash. And then, they get into the ‘curse’ scams.”

  This was the sort of thing Di knew about, and she watched the others’ jaws drop as Marshal told them about the “cursed money” fraud, the “psychic surgeons,” and all of the ways people were convinced that they needed to be rid of non-existent “demonic influences.” These were what she and Memaw had debunked, but it was all new to Marshal’s friends.

  “Hey, look, let me just show you something. Gimme a couple of seconds in your fridge, okay? Then you’ll see what I’m talking about.” With Emory’s wave of a “go-ahead,” Marshall rummaged around a bit and came back. “Zaak, you’re going to be my patient. Pull up your shirt, okay?”

  Embarrassed, Zaak did so, revealing a bit of a belly. Marshal kneeded at it for a minute with his fingers, then suddenly seemed to plunge them halfway into Zaak’s stomach! And even more astonishing, a few seconds later, Marshal pulled out—

  A meatball…

  “I’m telling you, Zaak, you really have to start chewing your food before you swallow it,” he deadpanned, as all four of them laughed, even Zaak.

  “That was all sleight of hand. If I had time to prepare, I’d have some blood in the tip of a surgical glove, or even just some cotton soaked in blood that I palmed along with what I was going to remove. Usually that’s a piece of liver. Liver looks generic and really icky, and it’s not hard to believe it’s a tumor. And this is how I did it.” He took the meatball and hid it in the palm of his hand. He kneaded the surface of the couch, creating a crease. This time though, he did the “plunge” in slow motion, and without concealing what he was doing with his other hand, so they could see all he did was fold his fingers up into his palm, then “withdraw them” with the meatball in them.

  He did a “slam-dunk” with the poor abused meatball into the trash. “These guys are the worst. They make you think you’re possessed by demons. They take your money until you don’t have any more. You’re scared to death. And you just might actually be sick, with cancer or something, and by the time you find it out, you’ve got no money and you’re probably so far gone you die.”

  Evidently this was the first time Marshal had ever expanded on his particular hobby-horse, and soon even Zaak was leaning forward to listen, his embarrassment mostly forgotten—except for a flush, once or twice, that suggested to Di that he’d fallen for one of those tricks.

  Eventually, though, the reading assignments overrode her intense interest in Marshal’s stories. She finished the last of her beer, put the bottle down on the table—the good thing about using a door for a table was that no one cared about bottle-rings—and stood up.

  “I really need to get,” she said regretfully. “College is a lot more intense than I thought it would be. And this is my dime I’m dropping here, so I’m not into pouring it down the drain…”

  “The voice of conscience,” Marshal said, with a laugh. “Tell you what, I’ll walk you to the stair. I’m 4A, right by the stairwell.”

  She clasped her hands under her chin. “Oh thank you, gallant sir!” she said in a breathless voice. “How ever will I repay you?”

  “Don’t answer that, Marshal,” Em laughed. “I’ll kick your ass.”

  Marshal put his hand over his heart. “I swear, I had no intention of—”

  “Yeah right.” Emory snorted. “Get outa here. See you tomorrow.”

  But as soon as the apartment door closed behind them, Marshal lost every semblance of even mild intoxication, and turned to her with an intense look on his face. “All right, you wanted to know waaaaaay too much about psychic debunking. What’s going on?”

  Di hesitated for a very long time. Should she trust this guy she’d just met?

  On the other hand, nothing about any of these four had set internal alarm bells going off. And he knew more than she did by a good mile. Intuition sez—

  Before she could answer, Marshal persisted, a worried look on his face. “Someone you know getting scammed? Friend? Relative? Seriously, if I can help—you know, use the powers only for good?”

  That decided her. “Come on down to my place,” she said. “This is going to take a while.”

  #

  The next day, she wasn’t alone when she was waiting for Joe O’Brian; Marshal was with her.

  The library seemed to be frozen somewhere in the ’50s, with hard-upholstered chairs and sofas with spindly little Swedish-modern wooden legs, covered in beige fabric and what might have been leather. They clashed with the Victorian architecture, but then, Dudley house was, well…not the typical Harvard House. As the painting of Karl Marx downstairs, and the fact that for years in the ’60s the SDS had a mimeograph machine in one of the bathrooms might have told you.

  Joe eyed Marshal, but didn’t say anything as Di introduced them. When they all sat down, however, he leaned forward over his knees. “I thought I was just meeting you, Miss Tregarde—”

  “Marshal’s a stage magician,” Di interrupted him. “I don’t know enough about the situation yet to know what questions to ask, but he knows about the sorts of stage-magic deceptions that this Tamara might be using, so I thought I’d bring him along to help us both out.”

  She gestured to Marshal, then sat back and listened as the two men slowly pooled their knowledge. Finally Marshal shook his head. “All right. This one just might beat me. Partly. I can’t see immediately either her angle, or where she’s getting her information; she isn’t extorting money from the mom, and she’s not getting publicity out of this.”

  “If she’s really smart,” Di said slowly, “She’s got a confederate. Someone that can go around, maybe posing as a cop or a reporter, and get at least some of the detail about Melanie from schoolmates or playmates or their parents. I’d bet on posing as a reporter, everyone wants to get his name in the paper, not everyone is comfortable talking to a cop.”

  Marshal nodded. “But what’s her angle? That’s the question.” He drummed his fingers on the table beside him. “Thinking aloud here…I’d think she was just throwing random stuff out as these ‘leads,’ figuring to get some publicity if one of them actually pans out, except that from what you’re telling me, the leads are anything but random. Most of them are typically vague, but they don’t seem random, and they do seem to mean something to the mom. Nothing to cops, probably, but either mom is convinced that there’s a hidden message there, or your phony is just doing a combination of hot and cold reading and coming up with things off the cuff that mom zeros in on.”

  “Yeah, I don’t get it either.” Joe tried to get comfortable in the hard chair, failed, and tried another position. “That’s what’s so frustrating.”

  “So go at it another way,” Di said, finally. “Follow up on these so-called ‘leads.’ Prove they’re dead-ends.”

  Joe shook his head vehemently. “We’d look like a bunch of idiots, the papers would have a field day if they found out we were spending men on a psychic’s tips. And we can’t waste the time—”

  “Not you,” Di interrupted. “Me. And Marshal, if he wants to.”

  “I’m in,” Marshal said instantly. “I’ve done some searching for lost kids, so I kind of know what to look for and if we find anything that looks right or wrong, we’ll stop and phone you. And no one is going to know we’re associated with the cops. Come on! A couple of Harvard kids? Helping the cops? Never happen. Right? If we actually find a lead, which I very much doubt, if the press asks you can call us ‘private investigators for the family.’”

  Joe sucked on his lower lip for a moment, then gave in. He got out his notepad and case-file, and made a copy of the list of “leads” that Tamara had so far pressed on Chris Fitzhugh; Di made a second copy and gave it to Marshal. The lanky junior glanced at his watch, and shrugged. “I’ve got a lab,” he said. “I’ll catch you back at the apartment, Di. We’ll figure out what we can do with this, if anything.”

  Only when he was well gone, did Joe turn bac
k to Diana. “How much does he know?” the cop asked. “About—“” he wiggled his fingers in a way probably intended to convey “the supernatural.”

  “Nothing,” Di said. “But Lavinia said you—”

  The silence hung between them for a moment, interrupted only by the sizzle of a fluorescent overhead bulb going out somewhere in the library stacks. Then Joe sighed.

  “Cops don’t like things they can’t explain,” he said, sourly. “So when they find things they can’t explain, they make a little division of people that don’t quite fit, people they can’t actually fire, and they shove the things they don’t want to think about at those people. And they hope that if the people in question can’t make those things go away, they will at least be—or become—people that no one will listen to. In my case—I had the misfortune to be the guy on the beat that solved a murder because a ghost told him who did it.”

  “A ghost.” Di nodded. “I can see where that would be a problem.”

  “It was worse because the ghost told me where to find the murder weapon, which was not what the lab said it would be, and which was right in plain sight in the home of someone who wasn’t a suspect.” Joe grimaced. “So I got put in that little department, and we are all considered borderline loonies. And if we actually aren’t borderline loonies to begin with, we sure are after we see a few cases. This means we get to be the ones that deal with psychics. Such a treat.”

  “I’ll do my best for you,” Di promised. “It’s entirely possible if we treat these things as serious, and investigate them completely, and give you all of that, this Tamara will dry up and blow away. I—” She hesitated, then plunged on. “However, there’s one angle to this that I didn’t want to go into in front of Marshal. I went by the address you gave me for her, and I have to tell you, without even seeing this woman, she gave me the creeps. And I can think of something she might be getting from Chris Fitzhugh that would be as good as money.”

  Joe’s brow furrowed. “Which is?”

  “Despair. Some people…they can feed off that. It’s a powerful emotion—and feeding off it is more common than you might think. You ever know anyone who would start an argument for no good reason, get people so angry they’re about ready to kill something, then cut the argument off with some sort of apology and walk away looking like they just had a turkey dinner?” She waited. She was pretty certain that Joe had had an experience like that. Maybe more than one. And when she saw the light of reluctant agreement in his eyes, she continued. “And I’ll bet at least one person you’ve seen pull that particular stunt leaves everyone that was involved in the argument feeling exhausted.”