Shell Game

by Carol O’Connell

  „But the simple murder is the smartest one,“ said Mallory. „This one was damn near perfect.“

  „And that’s the problem with it.“ Charles laid the crossbow aside and picked up another. „It doesn’t fit the profile of a narcissist. Switching the keys is hardly a challenge. Simple sleight of hand. No, if Nick was planning a crime as large as a murder, he’d do something more convoluted. So he’s probably your worst suspect.“ Charles held up a screw with obvious rust, then reached for a can of oil. „You know, Malakhai was right. This apparatus won’t help you work out the Lost Illusion.“

  „What’s to work out?“ She looked up at the target. „He was supposed to get the cuffs off before the arrows hit him.“

  „A cut-and-dried escape routine?“ Charles shook his head. „Oliver was trying to re-create a Max Candle illusion. An accident was built into the act – Max’s trademark. Oliver explained that to the policemen and the reporter. He didn’t want them to rescue him when he started screaming. When the first arrow drew blood, they wouldn’t let me up on the stage. I guess they thought I was acting, too.“

  Charles stood up and dusted off his jeans. „Unlocking manacles and dodging arrows.“ He threw his hands up. „Where’s the magic? If you’d ever seen one of Max’s illusions, you’d understand.“

  „Okay, show me.“

  „Well, that’s a snag. I don’t know how the major illusions were done.“

  But Charles’s intelligence scores went right off the charts. Was he holding out on her? No, that would show on his face. „Do you know how any of them work?“

  „I could show you a trick Max designed for a children’s party. The illusion is called matter through matter.“ He climbed to the top of the platform. After pulling the target from the slots between the two posts, he laid it on the floor at the edge of the stage. „This illusion uses the lazy tongs. Remember when Oliver spread out his cape, and it fell to the floor – empty?“

  „That metal thing that comes up through the trapdoor?“

  „Right.“ Charles descended the stairs. „At least you’ll see how that works.“ He bent over an open crate and lifted out a large flat object covered in quilted material. After propping it against the wall of the platform, he pulled the wrapping away to expose a mirror in a thick frame of maple. It was the size and oval shape of the target, with the same black support pegs at the sides. The glass surface wildly distorted every object in its field. It reminded her of a carnival mirror that alternately made giants and midgets from the reflections of ordinary people.

  „I learned this trick when I was nine years old. I’m going to pass through this glass.“ He carried the mirror up the stairs and fitted the frame into the slots of the standing poles, suspending it three feet above the floorboards. „Max created this illusion for a children’s Halloween party, so it’s a bit of a departure from the regular routine.“ He pulled on the red velvet drapes, drawing them closer to the mirror, almost touching the support posts. „He didn’t die in this act.“

  „Why not? Kids love stuff like that.“ She walked to the foot of the staircase. „Halloween is supposed to be scary.“

  „No, he wouldn’t die for an audience of children.“ Satisfied with the setup, Charles came down the stairs again and moved slowly through the mass of cartons, reading all the labels. „I was accustomed to watching Max die onstage. The other kids weren’t.“ He opened a box and pulled out four brass pipes and disks. „You still don’t understand. Realism was his priority. An adult audience really believed he died in the finale of every act.“

  „Lots of blood and gore?“ She sat down on the bottom step.

  „Nothing that crude.“ He quickly assembled the parts into freestanding poles, then screwed metal loops into the heads of each one. „The audience never saw any actual blood, but the mind’s eye supplied it – lots of it.“

  „Didn’t he ever worry that somebody in the audience would try to save him and ruin the act?“

  „No, never. I think Houdini had that problem in the thirties. I guess the world changed.“ Charles set out the brass poles to form the four corners of a square near the foot of the staircase. He connected the poles with lengths of red velvet rope hooked onto the brass loops. „Max could always count on a few good Samaritans rushing the stage. They added some drama to the act. But they were always too slow, too late. Most people just sat and watched him die.“

  Charles was looking at the cafe table and the chair that Malakhai had used last night. „Max had no degrees in psychology, but he understood the darkest things about his audience.“ Charles picked up the chair and set it in the center of the velvet-roped square. He dipped one hand into another carton and retrieved a long cape of scarlet silk, an exact copy of the one Oliver Tree had worn.

  „You think it’s like herd instinct? Is that what keeps them in their seats?“

  „Yes, but there’s more to it.“ He examined the material and draped it on a pedestal. „I understood the phenomenon better when I was at school. I did a paper on crowd behavior. My best case study was a small town in New Jersey. A clothing store caught fire. A schoolgirl was trapped in a room fronted by a plate-glass window.“

  His face was somber as he unchained one of the velvet ropes and entered the square. This was not a pleasant memory. „Her name was Mary Kent. She was fifteen years old.“ Standing behind the chair, he glanced up at the platform. „There were broken bones in Mary’s hands. That’s how hard she beat on the window, but the plate glass was too thick. She was a tiny little thing, not strong enough to break it. This was a Saturday afternoon, and there were lots of pedestrians passing by on the street. They gathered in front of the window, completely mesmerized by the fire – and the girl who was screaming and beating on the glass. I suppose the window was a lot like a giant television screen. They formed an audience and watched her die.“

  „Where was the fire department?“

  „No one called them. Eventually, a fireman saw the smoke from the other side of town. But they were too late for Mary. Not their fault.“

  He stepped outside the square and walked up the platform staircase. „I interviewed all the witnesses – the audience. They blamed the firemen for Mary Kent’s death – actually ragged them for being too slow with the fire truck. They all believed that someone else had called in the fire – or that’s what they told me. I asked why no one had thought to pick up a rock and break the glass so Mary could escape. ‘Never thought of it,’ they said. Just never occurred to any of them.“

  „Did you believe the witnesses?“

  „No, I didn’t.“ He pointed down to the roped-off square. „You’re going to sit there. Remember, this illusion was staged for an intimate audience and a narrow field. That’s because of the mirror. So don’t move outside the ropes.“

  Charles checked the reflection of the chair in the mirror. „Max arranged the Halloween party for me.“ He touched a switch on the side of the left post. A lightbulb glowed from its submerged socket in the crossbeam. „The other guests were children of magicians – a very tough audience.“

  Mallory took her seat inside the ropes as Charles ran down the stairs, two at a time, and retrieved the scarlet cape. She glanced at the nearby carton filled with the same material. „Why so many?“

  „Real silk.“ He turned off the floor lamp near the base of the platform. „Sometimes the material ripped when the metal tongs came up through the floor. So Max needed a large supply.“

  He disappeared around the dragon screen. And now the lights were going out all over the basement. The bulb in the crossbeam made a dull halo around the mirror.

  „Ready?“ Charles returned, wearing the scarlet cape. A monk’s hood covered his hair and shadowed his face as he walked toward the platform.

  The mirror reflected only the black shadows of the space behind her chair. When Charles neared the top of the staircase, she could see his face climbing in the wavy distortion of the glass, elongating and compressing in grotesque caricatures. He stood center stage a
nd spread his arms wide. The material of the cape concealed the entire mirror and touched the curtains on either side of the posts. After a few moments, the silk collapsed. Charles had vanished, but the red material was not falling to the floor. It was slipping through the center of the mirror in a thinning stream of scarlet silk.

  And now the cape had disappeared into the looking glass, and Charles’s disembodied head was floating inside the oval frame. The light shone all around the mirror, no feet, no physical man to make that image. His nose elongated in the carnival glass, turning to a snout, and his eyes widened to saucers. When he bared his teeth, they grew longer in the distortion of the mirror, turning into fangs as he mouthed a silent howl.

  Two white hands appeared beside the floating monster head. He snapped his fingers, and the mirror revolved on its pivots, spinning end over end between the posts. When the oval frame stopped revolving and righted itself again, Charles was no longer trapped inside the glass. The mirror was empty and black.

  A finger tapped Mallory’s shoulder, and she jumped, startled.

  Charles stood behind her.

  And that must be the scary part.

  He was grinning, utterly pleased with himself. „What did you think of it?“

  „Good trick.“ She glanced back at the platform. „So tell me if I’ve got this right. The cape was tied to a wire that fed through a hinged opening in the mirror. That’s why he used a carnival mirror, right? So the distortion would hide the imperfection?“

  Charles nodded, not smiling anymore. He was turning on the lamps.

  „The drapes are lined in black,“ said Mallory. „I know you can’t move the support posts. But the mirror frame is thick enough to reposition the glass inside it. When the lazy tongs spread the cape, you pushed the glass out of alignment and stepped behind the curtain. And then you were reflected in the mirror from a different angle.“

  „Well, yes.“ He turned to her with a face full of disappointment. „But what about the effect? The illusion – “

  „I got the mechanics right?“

  Charles didn’t answer her. He walked back to the platform and climbed the steps, moving slowly, as if suddenly very tired. When he stood before the oval frame, he pressed on one side of the glass to reposition it. And now he found her face in the wavy distortion. Their eyes met, and he stared at her with his unhappy reflection. In this new angle, the carnival mirror shortened Charles’s nose and contracted his bulbous eyes to more normal proportions.

  Mallory sipped in a breath and held it.

  In the distortion of the mirror, Charles was reborn as an incarnation of his famous cousin. Mallory’s eyes were riveted to the beautiful man inside the glass – alive and a hundred times more compelling than any of the old photographs. The man in the mirror was touching her insides with chemistry and flooding her face with heat. It was a fight to remain still, to keep the fragile illusion in place. One move would destroy it, but she had the sense of levitating with a lightness of head and body, almost hollow now, rising slowly.

  So beautiful.

  This was what Louisa saw the day she met Max Candle. In that first second, Malakhai was doomed to lose his young wife. This man was so -

  And then Max was gone, vanished in the moment when the mirror was lifted from the post slots. Charles turned to her with his more familiar face, his large nose and the eyes of a sad but charming frog, unaware that he had resurrected the dead.

  „Magic is wasted on you,“ he said.

  After Charles had left the basement, Mallory continued to prowl through the boxes until she found the missing leg irons for the Lost Illusion.

  All four crossbows were fixed on their pedestals and angling up toward the target. She cocked the weapon nearest the staircase. Very smooth operation, no problems. No need to run the pedestal gears again. Every weapon had fired in good working order. Now she only needed to work out the rest of the mechanics.

  With a cape slung over one shoulder, she climbed to the top of the platform and stood before the target. She had watched the crossbows work from every angle on the ground below. Now she planned to see the trick from Oliver Tree’s point of view on the stage.

  She knelt on the floor and attached a leg iron to the ring at the base of each post. The shackles had no locks, only catches to keep them closed. In her mind, she was replaying the tape she had watched a hundred times. These irons were exactly like the ones Oliver had worn on his ankles when he hung spread-eagle across the face of the target.

  Mallory reached down to unhook a pair of NYPD handcuffs from her belt. Oliver had used two pairs, but there had been only one key. She had blown up segments of his film performance and found the piece of the broken key extension falling against the gray backdrop of the band shell. There had been no sign of a second key when the fingers of his left hand splayed wide with sudden pain.

  Out of habit, she pulled out her own cuff key. Of course, it would never work. When her hand was bound to the posts and stretched out, this one would be too short to undo the lock. She set her key ring down on the floor and reached into the back pocket of her jeans for the relic from Faustine’s Magic Theater. She unscrewed the bulb at the top of the extension rod and selected a post with teeth to match her own cuff key.

  Mallory stood up and closed one of the bracelets around the iron ring on the right-hand post. The handcuff chain dangled the open bracelet within easy reach – easier for her than Oliver. His corpse was five inches short of her own height of five ten.

  And now she was confronted with her first problem. This platform was made for Max Candle, a man seven inches taller than Oliver. Yet there was no difference in the post-ring positions. On Oliver’s replica, the iron loops appeared to be the same distance from the top of the posts.

  Mallory shook the dust off the silk cape and draped it across her shoulders, then pulled the hood over her hair. The long hem trailed on the stage behind her. She looked down at the outline of the trapdoor. The foot pedal was in plain view, and when she stepped on it, a square of wood dropped open behind the heels of her running shoes.

  The mechanical framework rose out of the floor, slowly coming up beneath the trailing material, silently spreading its metal bones to fill out the cape in the form of raised arms. A curved metal dish imitated the top of a human skull beneath the hood. She stepped away from the cape, and spread her legs to attach the floor shackles to her ankles. Reaching up, she slipped her right wrist into the handcuff dangling from the iron ring. It took a bit of fiddling to close the bracelet with one hand while holding on to the skeleton key. Oliver Tree had done this much faster with two sets of handcuffs.

  It was the first tick of the pedestal that made her drop the key.

  Her mouth went dry as she watched the piece of metal clatter to the floorboards, landing beside her own discarded key ring.

  The spread cape blocked her view of the crossbows. Mallory stretched one foot the length of the leg-iron chain, but she could not reach the floor pedal to drop the cape and give her a clear view of the weapons. How had Oliver Tree done this?

  Bound by both legs and one hand, she listened to the ticking, the gears grinding. The noise was coming from her left side. She imagined the peg rising, moving closer to the crossbow trigger.

  What is the crossbow aiming at?

  She had seen Oliver die so many times, and she knew each trajectory by heart. The test firing of Max’s crossbows had agreed with the tapes of the park death.

  The pedestal was ticking, ticking.

  Think! Where is the arrow going to strike?

  She saw Oliver clearly now. The left-hand bows fired arrows into his thighs. There was only time to frame this thought, to shift one leg. The ticking stopped. The arrow ripped through the spread silk and pinned her to the target.

  No pain.

  Mallory looked down at the arrow that had torn through the blue jeans and missed her skin by a hair’s breadth. Her breathing was slow and shallow, the better to listen for the movements of company in the baseme
nt, sounds of a would-be assassin. She had so little faith in accidents these days.

  The gun was in her free left hand, but Mallory had no memory of pulling it from the holster. She had been that intent on the sound of footsteps on the staircase.

  The red material was pulled to one side.

  Malakhai.

  He was looking down at the arrow pinning her leg to the target. He glanced at the open trapdoor and stepped on the floor pedal in front of it. „The lazy tongs work in slow gear. They’ll go down in another minute.“ He ignored the gun in her hand and pointed at the floor pedal. „You’re supposed to step on that before you put on the cuffs and leg irons. Timing is everything, Mallory.“ He was mildly distracted by the rising muzzle of her gun. It was harder to miss, now that she was aiming at his face.

  „Point taken,“ he said. „I’m forgetting my manners. Good evening. You’re looking well.“

  „You missed me by an inch.“

  He glanced down at the arrow in the denim material. „I’d say it was closer than that. You probably jarred the pedestal gears when you cocked the crossbow.“ He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and extracted a pack of cigarettes, acting as if this were perfectly normal, holding a casual conversation with a chained woman. „You did cock the bow. Am I right, Mallory?“

  „Am I supposed to believe this was another accident?“

  His slow smile implied that this might be the more charitable view – an accident instead of a stupid mistake. „I told you not to walk in front of a loaded crossbow.“

  Had the weapon been loaded when she cocked it? She could not recall checking the magazine for an unfired arrow from her test round. Was she going to own up to an oversight like that?

  Well, no.

  She pulled on the handcuff bracelet that bound her wrist – a not too subtle suggestion for him to unlock it, and right now.

  Malakhai lit a cigarette. „The pedestals are as delicate as Swiss timepieces. In fact, the gears are Swiss.“ He exhaled a slow stream of smoke – portrait of a man at leisure. „It takes some finesse to do this illusion.“