Remembering the brave way Barclay had charged up those stairs last night, I said, “You leave him alone.”
“Do I have a rival?”
“Barclay’s a good boy.”
“Damned with faint praise,” Lopez said.
“It wasn’t faint! It was…Never mind. You let Barclay and Max go,” I noted. “Does that mean you’re done with them? They’re not under suspicion for anything?”
“No, it just means that there’s no law against being nutty and naive.”
“Are you still investigating them? Us? Me?” I asked.
He lowered his lashes over his eyes. “You left the New View Venue in costume the night you ‘became ill’ during the performance. And you were still dressed as Virtue hours later, when you turned up at the Pony Expressive.”
“How do you know…Never mind.” He’d followed up, of course.
“So tell me, Esther. If I canvassed the neighborhood, would I find out that someone saw a woman in a glittery costume and an old man in a fedora and a duster lurking around the theater after hours that night?”
“No,” I said firmly, praying I was right. Then I realized what he’d said. “You haven’t canvassed the neighborhood?”
“Luckily for you, I suspect, I don’t have much time to devote to a vandalism case where no one got hurt and only one well-insured item got damaged.”
“It’s insured? All that bitching Matilda’s been doing about the cost of repairs, and it’s insured?”
“Since the crystal cage has been destroyed twice in one week, I’m guessing her premiums are about to skyrocket,” he said dryly.
“But you questioned Barclay and Max for hours,” I pointed out. “You are devoting a lot of time to this.”
“I’m looking for Golly Gee and Clarisse Staunton.”
“Oh. I see.” Then I said, “But so are Barclay and Max! You must realize that, after talking to them for so long?”
He sat back, folded his arms and studied me. “You’re in cahoots with them?”
“Yes. And they must have told you that. Though not in those exact words, I hope.”
“Esther…” He looked at a loss for words.
“You think Max is crazy,” I said.
“Don’t you?”
“But do you think he’s dangerous?” I prodded, worried about Lopez hounding Max.
“I don’t know. He doesn’t seem dangerous. Crazy, but not dangerous. But I’m no psychiatrist. And I can’t request he be evaluated by a psychiatrist unless I find evidence that he’s done something more than just talk a lot. And although his theories about Golly Gee and Clarisse Staunton make me want to stick my head in a bucket of cold water and keep it there until someone else solves this case—”
“I sometimes feel that way, too,” I admitted.
“—bizarre talk about involuntary mystical translocation, combined with a fervently expressed desire to protect people from the mysterious forces of Evil doesn’t qualify as evidence. Or even as probable cause.”
“Exactly! So you’ll leave him alone?”
“You know I can’t promise you that.”
“You have no right to harass him,” I insisted.
“Why are you so protective of him? You don’t—Oh my God.” He rubbed his forehead. “You do believe it, don’t you? All that bizarre crap he was spouting? He implied you believed it, but I hoped he was just deluding himself. I mean, sure, you’re a little off the wall, but mostly you seem pretty sane to me.”
“Go on,” I said sourly, “lay on the flattery with a trowel.”
“How can you possibly believe…Wait, no, never mind.” He held up his hand and seemed to be gathering his patience. “Okay. Let’s go back a step. The point I want to make—”
“Oh, there’s a point to this?”
“The point,” he said doggedly, “is that I’m not as convinced as you are, I gather, that Max Zadok isn’t dangerous. At least, to you.”
“To me?” I blurted, stunned.
“He convinced you to vandalize the crystal cage, didn’t he?”
Lopez had caught me off guard again. “You need to go now,” I said, my voice faint.
He pulled me back down into my chair when I tried to stand up. “Esther, what else has he got you involved in?”
“We had nothing to do with what happened to the crystal cage.”
“I know you’re lying,” he said. “I’m a cop, Esther. I’m good at this. I know.”
“I want you to go now.”
“What if someone gets hurt the next time Max talks you into some crazy act?” Lopez persisted.
“You’re way out of line, Detective!”
He took my hand between both of his. “Please, Esther, stay away from him. Please.”
“Lopez…Don’t.” This was not how I had wanted things to be, the first time he held my hand.
“Promise me,” he insisted.
“Okay!” I said. “I promise! I promise I’ll stay away from Max! Now just stop, would you?”
He let go of my hand, sighed and looked away. “You’re lying. You have no intention of staying away from him.”
“Of course I’m lying! Four people are missing—no, five! And I want to get them back. So does Max!”
Lopez rested his forehead on the table and mumbled, “God, I wish my transfer would come through. I wish I could just leave today. Dump this case. Dump the whole thing. Dump you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Just in a professional sense.”
“Oh, right. In the personal sense, I’m the woman you’re hoping to get your mother to hate.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “And that can’t happen until you and I stop going round and round about this case.”
“Or until you stop suspecting me of being a criminal?”
“That would help, too.”
“Sit up.” I shoved at his shoulder.
He slowly sat up. His face looked tired now, the freshness of the morning already worn off. He picked up his coffee cup and peered into it. “You drank it all.”
“Sorry.”
“You could offer to make some,” he said hopefully.
“You won’t be staying that long.”
“Oh.”
Studying the slump of his shoulders, I asked something that probably should have occurred to me before now. “Why don’t you have a partner? Don’t cops usually work in pairs?”
“He quit last month. Now he’s making six figures a year in private security consulting and has weekends off. And I,” Lopez said morosely, “I am interviewing dim-witted society boys and nutty bookshop owners, looking for girls who reputedly vanished during magic acts, and trying—with less and less success every day—not to flirt with a woman I may have to arrest. And I’m doing all this despite understandable pressure from my increasingly exasperated lieutenant,” he added bitterly, “to devote all my attention to more concrete matters.”
“Well,” I said. “I guess that was some stuff you needed to get off your chest.”
“Yes, it was.”
He looked sulky. The same expression that usually made me want to wallop Hieronymus looked kind of cute on Lopez.
“It’s not easy being you,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” he agreed. “And, of course, you already know about my mother.”
“We should just call you Job.”
“Now you’re ridiculing me.”
“‘Now’?” I said. He smiled. But I suddenly realized with a sinking heart what he’d said earlier. “You’ve applied for a transfer?”
“Yes.”
“You’re leaving New York?” I asked plaintively.
He squinted at me. “No, of course not.”
“Oh!” I smiled with relief. I didn’t want him investigating me—let alone arresting me—but I’d be upset if he just left.
“I’ve applied to join the Organized Crime Control Bureau.” He sighed. “But with my partner having left suddenly, the squad’s already short one guy, and I can’t go while
I’d be leaving them short by two. So I’m working my cases alone, and also working my way through a mountain of paperwork on some cold cases the boss has suddenly decided we should reopen.”
“All that paperwork I saw on your desk, the first time I came to the squad room,” I said, remembering.
“Uh-huh.”
“When do you expect your transfer to come through?”
“Soon, I pray to God.” His tone was heartfelt. “But not until they get one or two guys transferred into the squad and bring them up to speed.” After a pause, he added, “But if you’re hoping I’ll leave and someone else will take over this case, Esther—”
“Wouldn’t that be for the best? I mean—”
“I know what you mean. But no one else will cut you the slack that I have.”
“But I haven’t done anything—”
“Stop. If you’re not going to tell me the truth, could you at least stop lying to me?” There was a long silence, since I didn’t know what to say in response to that. Then he surprised me by asking, “What did you mean, five?”
“Huh?”
“Five people are missing?”
Another instance where I’d said a little too much to him in the heat of the moment. “Um…”
“Golly Gee, Clarisse Staunton…and those other two names that Max was so careful to avoid mentioning in the station house yesterday.” He frowned. “The names are in my notes…they sounded like strippers, I remember that.”
“They’re not strippers!”
He lifted his brows.
I sighed. “Sexy Samson and Dolly the Dancing Cowgirl.”
“Ah. Yeah. Those were the names.”
“They vanished, too. Onstage. During their acts.”
“Just to clarify…We’re talking about real human beings now?”
“Yes! But, um, come to think of it, I don’t know what their legal names are.”
“I can find out.”
“I’d rather you didn’t. Max would rather you didn’t. Even your lieutenant, I gather, would rather you didn’t.”
He ignored that. “Who’s the fifth?”
“We don’t know.”
“Esther.”
“No, we really don’t know. We’re just sure it’s happened.”
“What makes you sure?”
I sighed, knowing what he’d think. “There’s been another localized disturbance in the fabric of this dimension.”
“I see.”
“Max can sense these things.” It sounded silly when I said it to Lopez, even though I knew it was true.
“But you can’t sense it?”
“No.”
He thought it over. “Okay, let’s focus on the part of the problem that matters. You really believe these people have vanished—in an unusual sense, shall we say?”
“Yes.”
“You and Max really want to find them?”
“Yes.”
“Then maybe my looking into it can help,” he said reasonably.
“But you don’t believe what we believe,” I said.
“So what? Is that going to matter to the vanished ladies—?”
“They’re not all ladies.”
“Now is that nice?” he admonished.
“I mean, Samson’s a man.”
“And I mean, if they’re really missing, will it matter to them what I believe, if I can find them? Or help you find them?”
“I don’t think you can find them,” I said honestly. “I think what you believe—or don’t believe—will stop you.”
“To be perfectly honest,” he said, “I never believed in transubstantiation, but that didn’t stop me from being a pretty good altar boy.”
“You were an altar boy?”
“And I’m not positive that marijuana and prostitution should be illegal, but that’s never stopped me from being a good cop.”
“Speaking of being a cop…” I felt a little Evil stir in me as I smiled. “Whoopsy Daisy says—”
“Whoopsy Daisy?”
“Seymour Barinsky,” I clarified. “He told me last night that you looked very sexy in uniform.”
“How flattering.”
“And Khyber Pass thinks you’re hot. He has a thing for uniforms. He says if you’d wear yours, he’d do you in a New York minute.”
“In his dreams.” Our eyes held as we grinned at each other. After a moment, he said, “I don’t mean this to sound critical—”
“Now what?”
“Why is your face all dirty?”
“Oh. The Exposé. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to wash off that damn ink.”
“You read The Exposé?”
“Not habitually. There was a story about Golly’s disappearance in it yesterday.”
“Anything accurate?”
“More than you’d expect.” I scrubbed at my face, then ran a hand over my tangled hair. “I really need a shower.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
“You’re getting better at the not-flirting thing.”
He grinned. “I could join you.”
“You haven’t even taken me out for dinner yet. Showers are way out of your league.” Getting more serious, I said, “Look, I know I can’t stop you from pursuing this business—”
“That’s right, you can’t.”
“Though I’m guessing your boss can stop you—and probably will, if you put much time into it.”
“That’s right, too,” he admitted.
“But I wish you’d trust us.”
“And I wish you’d stay away from Max.”
We stared at each other, both realizing this was as far as negotiations were going to get today—or perhaps at all.
My cell phone rang. I excused myself and rose to answer it. A moment later, I said, “Hi, Mom. No. Yes. I know. Okay.” I put my hand over the receiver. “This is going to be a long call.”
He took the hint. “I should go.” He rose to his feet. “I’ll be seeing you.”
“Okay.” I watched him head for the door. “Thanks for breakfast.”
“My pleasure. Next time, I’ll bring more coffee.”
I was letting a sexy, employed, straight, single man whom I really liked leave my apartment with a brief wave and no plans for a date. It was just barely possible, I mused, that I wasn’t running my life as well as I might.
After I heard his footsteps going down the stairs in the hall, I said, “Okay, Khyber, he’s gone.”
Upon realizing I wasn’t alone, when I’d said “Hi, Mom,” Khyber had immediately guessed who my company was.
“Did he spend the night there?” Khyber asked with interest.
“No! Even I didn’t spend the night here. He brought me breakfast, that’s all.”
“Did he grill you?”
“A little. But it’s okay.” I omitted mentioning that I’d told Lopez about Samson and Dolly. It wasn’t as if he wouldn’t have picked up that trail on his own, anyhow.
“He’s hot,” Khyber said with reluctant approval. “Have you seen him with his clothes off yet?”
“No!”
“Or in his uniform?”
“Why did you call?”
“I’ve found last night’s victims.”
“You found them?” I said in surprise.
“Yeah. Lots of online chatter. Are you decent? Dr. Zadok told me to stop by your place in a cab and bring you with me. He’s already on his way there.”
“Where?”
“To meet Garry Goudini. Last night, one of his assistants vanished during the act. So did his white Bengal tiger.”
CHAPTER
12
“Things have gone wrong before, of course,” Garry Goudini admitted, gazing out over Times Square from the window of his hotel suite. “You’ve got to expect that in this business. For example, there was that time I was levitating a Toyota onstage. It was supposed to go up eight feet in the air. Well, it got to about four feet, then fell. With a big crash.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “I
f it had gotten up to eight feet, I’d have been standing under it when it fell. My God, man, I could have been killed that night!”
Khyber and I exchanged glances as Goudini took another gulp of his whiskey and soda. This was the magician’s second drink since we’d arrived barely fifteen minutes ago.
Max said, “How dreadful for you, Mr. Goudini. Now, about last night—”
“Then there was the time I tried to make a girl disappear as she dived from a high platform down through a ball of fire,” Goudini said. “Well, she simply hit the ground with a thud one night in Vegas. It was so embarrassing.”
“Did she survive?” Khyber asked in appalled fascination.
“Hmm?” Goudini looked over his shoulder at us. “Oh, yes. The hospital bills nearly killed me, though.” He took another sip of his drink, then drew some more smoke into his lungs.
Goudini’s thick, wavy, black hair, with its faint streaks of gray at the temples, looked as if it was made of patent leather and wouldn’t get ruffled by a stiff wind. His deep, even-all-over tan had the faintest orange tinge to it. His eyebrows were shaped into dramatic arches, and he wore a touch of eyeliner. He was clad in black leather pants, and a black silk shirt that he left unbuttoned halfway down his hairy, slightly orange chest.
According to Khyber, who’d done the research online and briefed me on the way here, Goudini had done very well in Vegas for a few years, about a decade ago, but gradually got squeezed out of the limelight by other acts. He hadn’t given a performance anywhere in at least two years; last night’s gig, the opening night of a pre-tour, one-week appearance in Manhattan, was intended to launch his comeback. He’d been rehearsing the new act for several months at his home outside the city.
Max tried again. “About last night, Mr. Goudini…”
But Goudini launched into a rambling reminiscence of yet another onstage mishap, this one involving a water tank in which he’d nearly drowned. I started feeling glad that the man I was interested in these days was in a nice, safe profession like police work.
“I nearly died that night,” Goudini said, concluding his anecdote about being chained up underwater. “So it’s not as if I’m not used to surprises onstage. It’s not as if I lack experience in dealing with emergencies before a live audience.”
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