The Murder Artist

by John Case

  Sometimes, I’m forced to climb over rocks and boulders. A few times I have to backtrack because I took a wrong turn and ended up on a cliff edge. Ten minutes later, I roll an ankle. It hurts, but it’s not serious. A little farther on, the terrain is so rough I don’t know if I’m still on the trail.

  I’m still enjoying the effort of the hike, but I realize I’m out of shape and unprepared. I should have popped for a guide… or at least a topo map.

  The sun will become an issue before long. I can feel the heat behind the temporary cool, waiting to lock on as soon as the sun gets a direct shot at me. Already, the air is warmer, and sunlight lasers off the rocks, slicing in through the open sides of my sunglasses. When I’m not in shadow, the rocks are warming up right under my hands.

  Once I reach the floor of Icebox Canyon, the sun becomes less of a problem and I decide to climb a little way up, picking a route toward a shelf of rock where a piñon tree twists out of the stone. It’s a tougher climb than I thought it would be, and by the time I get there, I’m huffing for breath and glad to sit down. Right away, I can see that I’m not the first to find this spot. A crumpled Juicy Fruit gum wrapper nestles against the piñon’s roots, and someone’s jammed four cigarette butts into a crevice. I pull out my bottle of lukewarm water and tear off a bite of Clif Bar.

  So here I am, only slightly the worse for wear, perched on the side of the canyon that Josh Gromelski chose for his climb. I look up, toward the place where he found the remains of Clara Gabler. But the crime scene is not – how did Holly Goldstein put it? – it’s not speaking to me. I finish the Clif Bar, thinking so what?

  So the killer chose an inaccessible spot. So he cut Clara Gabler in half while she was alive. So he used a rotary saw. So he went to a lot of trouble to haul a bunch of stuff to a remote site. So the girls were auditioning for a magic act. So what? What does any of this have to do with Sean and Kev?

  I pick up the Juicy Fruit wrapper and the four cigarette butts and twist them up in the Clif Bar wrapper, then stick the trash in my pocket along with the empty water bottle. Picking my way back down toward the canyon floor, I can’t believe I’m here, in the wilderness outside Las Vegas, chasing… I don’t know what. What am I doing? Liz is right. This is just another version of the gerbil wheel. I’m wasting time. I’m wasting money. This whole trip is self-indulgent.

  I’m mad at myself, descending a tumble of boulders at a reckless speed, jumping from rock to rock in a knee-jarring, risky way, going down toward the canyon floor as fast as I can.

  And then it hits me. Hits me with so much force that I lose concentration for a moment. The next thing I know I’m putting my foot down wrong, and then I’m falling, careening through space. I touch off one boulder, and then manage to launch myself toward a flat rock. A clumsy three-point landing rips the skin off my knees. I’m sprawled on a ledge above a twenty-foot drop-off. I watch my sunglasses cartwheel down the rocky slope, then lower my head and close my eyes.

  I stay there for a few moments, the rock hot against my cheek, as a rush of sensation sweeps up my forearms. The prickly residue of adrenaline may come from the fall, but the fall itself came from the realization that hit me during my reckless descent.

  Where were the Gablers found?

  Conjure Canyon.

  What were the Gabler girls auditioning for?

  A magic act.

  The crime scene photos of the women’s bodies pop into my mind’s eye, the upper and lower halves of Clara. Clara Gabler, cut in two. Severed by a power rotary saw, Chisworth guessed, a sweep from left to right across the torso.

  In other words, not cut in half. Sawn in half.

  They were on stage. That’s why they were wearing their costumes. It was a performance.

  During which Clara Gabler was sawn in half. The blood seeping out of the box was real, the screams not the work of an actress but cries of pain and terror. Sawing a lady in half. And then the real live girl emerges, her two halves magically reunited.

  Only in this case the trick was: there was no trick. There was a double. A twin.

  I sit on my ledge, staring across the desert, across the sprawl toward the Strip. I pick gravel out of my shredded palm, doing my best to keep my mind focused on the Gabler girls. So Ezme Brewster was right. It was entertainment. A live show.

  I stand up, ankle aching, rivulets of blood running down from my knees. My mouth is dry, my head hurts, the world before me seems to shimmer in and out of focus. I’m dehydrated. I squint against the glare, look for the best way down, start off toward the desert floor.

  But motion doesn’t do the trick. I can’t keep my thoughts from cohering forever. I can’t really hold off the memory of the Sandling twins telling me their captor did tricks for them. What kind of tricks? Card tricks and coin tricks. “He made coins disappear.” Magic tricks.

  Card tricks. Sawing a lady in half.

  Twins in the first case, twins in the second.

  Stumbling along the desert floor toward the parking area, I feel like a blind man on a cliff. I’m trying to hang on to my confusion and ignore the jolt of foreboding that hit me on my way down from the piñon tree.

  But when I reach my car, open the windows, stand outside in the blast-furnace heat, there’s nothing for it. I can’t hold it off. The link is tenuous on the surface, but in my heart I know that Shoffler’s hunch was correct. There is a connection between the Gabler twins and the Sandlings and my sons, and the link is magic.

  For the first time since the boys disappeared, I have an inkling of what might be in store for them and it drops me into a bleak despair. If I’m right, and the man who grabbed them is the same man who killed the Gabler sisters, The Piper isn’t just a killer, but a sadist. And not just a sadist, but an entertainer with a gift for pain and misdirection.

  My sons are the raw material for a murder artist.

  CHAPTER 25

  I put in a call to Shoffler to tell him that I think his hunch may have been right on the money, that the link between the Gablers and my sons is one that we never would have come up with in a thousand years: magic. I want to talk it through with the detective, get his advice. But it turns out he’s in France for some kind of security conference. I leave a message.

  I can intuit some of his advice, anyway. While I’m in Vegas, I should try to determine if The Piper worked here as a magician and follow out whatever other local leads I have.

  Turns out, if it’s about magic, Vegas is the place to be. After three days, I’ve seen more doves and lighted candles materialize and disappear than I can count. It’s beginning to seem routine to me that a man in a tuxedo snaps his fingers and a dove or a duck – or a goose! – flutters into existence out of thin air. Or that he might turn a top hat upside down, thump it to show it’s empty, even call a volunteer to thrust a hand into its vacant interior. And then, with a wave of his wand, voilà! A rabbit. A real rabbit, which hops around on the stage, bewildered.

  I’ve seen scarves and ropes and pieces of paper torn into shreds and restored to amazing intactness with the help of a few magic words. I’ve witnessed feats of mind reading, miraculous escapes, levitations, and dozens of transformations (a shred of paper into a bird, a ball into a rabbit, a doll into a woman, a piece of rope into a snake).

  Any number of times, I’ve seen leggy beauties disappear, after which they step out, preening and smiling, from impossible and unexpected locations – the rear of the theater, for instance. At the San Remo, Showgirls of Magic (topless in the evening) are just what they sound like: leggy beauties doing tricks with cards and coins and, yes, bunnies.

  After the shows, there are opportunities to buy merchandise; shops sell mementos of the performing magician, along with standard tricks and magic kits, reproduction posters, biographies of Houdini, books about magic.

  It’s in these shops that I show my sketches of The Piper to magician clerks and cashiers, who perform card tricks and sleight of hand while they make change. I tell them the man in the sketch is a magi
cian. Do they recognize him? A couple “think so,” but no one can put a name or place to the memory.

  I’m getting myself a beer before the Lance Burton show when a bear of a man approaches me. “Boyd Veranek,” he says, “with a V. Pleased to meet you. Watch this.”

  I get it – the guy’s going to do a magic trick. I don’t want to be his audience, but it’s crowded and without being rude, I can’t get away from him. He cups his huge pawlike hands together and pulls them slowly apart. In between his palms, a paper rose hovers and trembles in midair. He abruptly jerks his hands wide apart and the flower drifts toward the floor. He plucks it out of the air, holds it by the stem, and with a little bow, presents it to me.

  It’s made from a Lance Burton napkin, its petals ingeniously scalloped, the stem tightly coiled paper. Veranek beams at me.

  “You just made this… here? That’s pretty good.”

  “Works better with the ladies, I guess,” Veranek says with a smile. “Hey – I saw you at Showgirls of Magic, saw you at Penn and Teller. Figured you’re a fellow illusionist. Am I right?”

  “Not exactly – but I can see that you are.”

  Veranek smiles, shrugs. “You might say. I’m a retired engineer. I used to do magic as a hobby, but it’s become a second career. I do kids’ parties, bar and bat mitzvahs, the occasional cruise or trade show. Helps, given what happened to my portfolio. Now, that was a disappearing act.” He laughs and I join him. “So if you’re not a magician,” he says, “you’re what? A magic junkie?”

  I tell him that I’m a private investigator. That I’m looking into a murder. I no longer bring up my kids if I can help it, hoping to sidestep the predictable sequence that follows disclosure of my nightmare. Recognition and the obligatory expression of sympathy give way to fascination and then to a barely disguised repugnance. The fascination is easy to understand: it’s the instinct that makes us stare at car crashes. The repugnance is similar to what cancer victims or the disabled must recognize: Despite the fact that whatever is wrong is not contagious, there’s nevertheless a fear of contagion. A terrible thing happened to me: No one wants to catch my bad luck.

  “A murder?” Boyd Veranek squints at me, as if he’s not sure whether I’m joking or not. “And all of these magic shows fit into this investigation… how? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “I think the killer is a magician.”

  “Oh, boy. There goes the neighborhood. A professional? An amateur?”

  I shake my head. “Don’t know. But I have some sketches. Mind taking a look?”

  “By all means.” He squints, studies the sketches, shakes his head. “The murder was here? In Vegas?”

  “Nearby. It was about three years ago. Showgirls murdered out in the Red Rock Canyon. You might have heard of it.”

  He frowns, but any memory of the murders has been replaced by some fresher brutality. “Boy. I’m hitting all these shows to see if I can get a new wrinkle or two for my act, and you’re doing it… wow… to track a killer.”

  I nod.

  “You really want to know about magic – you ought to talk to Karl Kavanaugh,” Veranek says. “He lives here in Vegas and he knows everything.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s a magician, although he doesn’t perform much anymore. He works for Copperfield – who has a museum of magic here.”

  “Really.”

  “It’s a private museum, but the point is Karl knows everything about magic – A to Z. He’s a magician’s magician. He might be able to help you. Might even recognize your guy.”

  “You have his number?”

  “I don’t. Not on me. He’s probably in the book – Karl with a K, Kavanaugh, also with a K. If not, give me a call, because I can probably track down his number for you. I’m at the Luxor. Veranek, with a V.”

  “Okay, thanks a lot.”

  It’s only a few minutes until showtime and the crowd begins to drift into the auditorium. I’m about to join them when Veranek thrusts a glass into my hands. “Here comes my wife. Would you hold this for a sec?”

  He’s fiddling with his program, doing something fast and furious with his hands. Moments later, a sweet-faced woman squeezes through the crowd and appears at his side.

  “There was a line,” she says, “in the little girls’ room.”

  “I’d say you just got out in time,” Veranek says. “Look what you picked up in there. Must have come outta the plumbing.” He plucks something from her shoulder and holds it in his cupped hand. An ingeniously fashioned frog crouches there. Somehow, he makes it jump.

  “Oh, Boyyyyyd.” The woman giggles like a teenager.

  I stare at the frog, which reminds me powerfully of the origami rabbit I found on the boys’ bureau.

  A jolt of paranoia hits me. This guy approached me, not the other way around. He looks nothing like my sketch of The Piper, but he is tall. He makes folded animals. He does magic tricks.

  “That’s amazing,” I hear myself say. “That frog, that’s really good.”

  “Nah – it’s not very good. I’m way rusty. Mostly I do balloon art these days. Origami’s kind of faded. Too bad, in a way. Folding has a very long history in magic. It kind of figures – you know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For one thing, it requires dexterity,” Veranek says, “and if nothing else, magicians are good with their hands. Also – it’s a transformation. Just a few folds and you turn a flat piece of paper into a bird, an animal. People like that. But you don’t see much folding anymore. It’s all balloons these days.” He smiles. “Same idea, though.”

  I feel a sense of pressure in my head, as if I’m underwater. “Can you do a rabbit?”

  “Boyd,” the sweet-faced woman says, “I don’t want to miss the beginning of Lance.”

  “Don’t worry, honey; I can make a rabbit in thirty seconds flat.”

  And he does. With impressive manual dexterity, Veranek tears the back of his program into a square. Seconds later, he’s transformed it into a cute little bunny. It looks nothing like the rabbit I found in the boys’ room. I tell myself that it proves nothing, not really, but my suspicion of Boyd Veranek evaporates.

  The lights in the foyer begin to flash.

  “That’s amazing,” I say, admiring the rabbit perched on the back of Veranek’s hand.

  “Boyd,” his wife says. “Come on.”

  Veranek executes a little bow and – I don’t see it happen – makes the rabbit disappear.

  CHAPTER 26

  Karl Kavanaugh is in the book, and I arrange to meet him the following morning. He suggests the Peppermill, which he tells me is on the upper Strip across from Circus Circus.

  The restaurant occupies a shaggy shingled building, vintage Seventies, that seems to be crouching between its massive neighbors. Inside, blue velvet banquettes are shaded by faux cherry trees.

  Kavanaugh waits for me just inside the entrance, a tall graceful man in a blue suit. “I’m in my sixties,” he told me on the phone. “I wear aviator sunglasses.”

  We shake. Kavanaugh’s hand is large and strong, with long, elegant fingers.

  “Boyd likes to lay it on,” he says. “But I’m no magician’s magician or whatever he told you. What I would claim is that I’m a student of magic.”

  A young woman escorts us to a table. She wears a short pleated jumper and white blouse, a kind of sexualized version of a Catholic school uniform.

  “Do you perform here in Vegas?” I ask him.

  “No. I’m retired, more or less. I came here – well, I came here because I was following the craft.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, some industries stay put,” Kavanaugh says, “geographically speaking – like the motion picture industry, or maybe steelworking or shipbuilding, but magic keeps changing its capital. And right now it’s here in Vegas.”

  “And before?”

  Karl’s eyes brighten. “At the turn of the century, it was New York,” he says, “which
makes sense. The stages were there, theatrical agents, gossip columnists, magic shops, vaudeville. Not to mention the big audiences. Remember, movies didn’t exist yet, so live entertainment was the only entertainment. So you’d get someone like Houdini, he’d draw huge crowds. As would his competitors and imitators. There was no copyrighting or trademarking back then, so there were plenty of Howdinis and Hondinis and Houdins – and they drew big crowds, too.”

  “Howdinis? You’re kidding.”

  “Not at all. That’s one reason so much advertising from that era harps on establishing identity: ‘the one and only.’ The genuine! The real! The authentic! There was room for all these competitors because magic was flourishing. But then the movies really started to come on, and vaudeville began to die out. And a lot of magic acts went down with the ship.”

  “How come?”

  “Magic couldn’t make the transition to film. It just doesn’t play on the screen. Not the big screen, and later down the road – not on TV, either.”

  “Hunh.”

  “So then the epicenter of magic relocated to Chicago. This was in the twenties and Chicago was where all the rail lines met, the home away from home for fleets of traveling salesmen. You had the merchandise mart, and all that. Magicians got a kind of second wind working trade shows – still probably the biggest employers of magicians.”

  “Trade shows? You’re kidding.”

  “Oh, no. Because trade shows are essentially live entertainment. Say you’re trying to attract attention to your booth. Nothing like a magician. People will stop and watch.”

  “Where else do magicians work these days – besides Vegas and trade shows?”

  “Cruise ships – there’s quite a bit of work there. Birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, adult residences.” He taps his fingers on the table.

  I start taking notes. There must be associations for cruise ships, for trade shows, for magicians. I could paper them all with the Piper sketch.