Dangerous Hardboiled Magicians

by Mel Gilden

  Sunset became more hip, advertising the hot rock star and the hot actor and the hot movie with big animated billboards that were nothing but distractions. We passed supper clubs with valet parking, small music clubs without it, all closed and looking much too gaudy this early in the evening.

  Suddenly we crossed over into Beverly Hills and the street became awfully residential, lined with miniature mansions and long, low-slung ranch-style houses, each having enough lawn in front to play nine holes. We passed the big pink tit of the Beverly Hills Hotel and turned up into the hills along Benedict Canyon.

  The houses were much closer together here, the wall of one on top of the hedge of another. Little cottages sat primly near gigantic estates, each of which had its own sweeping drive and damned near its own weather. The road turned and twisted back on itself, so I was busy steering.

  “The next time you can turn right, do so,” Misty directed.

  I nodded, but almost missed the turn because I thought it was a private driveway. Misty yelped and pointed and I turned onto a narrow lane called Rigby Court, which wound down into a canyon shaded by big pepper trees. There were no sidewalks—the houses on this street bellied right up to the street with sherbet-colored walls, each with a scattering of windows.

  “Slow down,” Misty said, “we’re about there.”

  I’d probably have spotted it even if I’d been going faster, but at the speed I was maneuvering along Rigby Court I couldn’t miss it—the burgundy car that had been following us was now parked facing the way we’d come. It might have been some other burgundy car, but I didn’t think so, not with those scrapes on the front bumper. Either the driver was one terrific tail, or he’d guessed where we were going all along. Either way, it was my problem, not Misty’s. I said nothing about it to her. There would always be time for that.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A FUNNY SHADE OF PALE GREEN

  At Misty’s direction I pulled into a tiny lot that had been carved out of the hillside. My front bumper gently touched a banana tree that looked as if it had been bumped before.

  “You go on in,” I said. “I have a little professional security stuff to do.” I glanced along the street and could see someone sitting in the burgundy car. I was too far away to see who it was.

  She followed my eyes. “Burgundy car,” she said.

  “Yes. Go on inside where you’ll be safe. Lord Slex would be very angry if I let you come with me.”

  She nodded once with fear in her eyes. I hadn’t thought she was the type of client who would want to help me play detective, but you never know.

  Misty walked up a serpentine cement path that led under a keyhole arch hung with bougainvillaea. I was about to stroll across the street to see what was what when she ran back and pushed a key into my hand. “It’s my front door key,” she said. “Number six. I give keys to a lot of people I trust. I’m always locking myself out.” She ran off again like Alice’s White Rabbit.

  I slipped her key into my pocket and walked across the street. The little burgundy car was a Honda Augury. And unless two of them had most of the paint on the front bumper scraped off just this way, this was the car that had been following us. The driver was still sitting behind the wheel. I was about halfway to it when I saw something that caused me to rethink my plan. Trying to hide himself behind a bush that was much too small for the purpose was the red-faced man with the cauliflower nose I’d seen watching me up at Stilthins Mort. He was a little conspicuous to be a spy, his red suit not being exactly camouflage, but maybe that was part of his charm.

  I kept walking as if I hadn’t seen him, but as I passed his bush I grabbed him by the arm and yanked him onto the sidewalk. He howled, wriggled free, and ran along the street. I followed.

  The street curved a few times, but not violently. I never lost sight of him until suddenly he was gone. I kept running, thinking he was hidden by a turn or had ducked behind another bush, and shortly came to a dead end—not just a sign announcing it, but a high rock wall spotted with hummocks of grass. I stepped into a zone of fresh sea air, unlike the rest of the thick warm air at the bottom of Rigby Court, but before I had a chance to enjoy it, the breeze whirled it around and it was gone.

  The guy would have had to be an orangutan to climb over that wall before I got to the dead end. I was collecting a fine zoo of disappearing guys—first a fish and now an ape. Silverwhite said that the fish guy hadn’t used magic to disappear. Maybe the guy with the cauliflower nose hadn’t either. The more I knew the less I understood.

  I walked slowly back up the street, searching behind trees and under shrubs. I might as well have been searching for the guy in my closet at home for all the good it did me.

  I came to the place where the burgundy Honda Augury had been parked. It was gone now. Pretty good, Cronyn, losing two suspects in less than ten minutes. Only a real professional could do that. Don’t try it at home.

  Still grumbling to myself, I walked along the serpentine path under the bougainvillaea arch and entered the courtyard of Misty’s building. The path wound under overhanging trees and past colorful beds of flowers. On either side, curved walls rose to a second floor, and above that were the traditional terracotta pantiles. Open doorways led into small round anterooms. There was not a straight line anywhere. In the center of the courtyard was an open patio paved in flagstone, with Adirondack chairs casually scattered about. The whole courtyard was pleasantly cool. None of it seemed quite real.

  I found number six through a two-story atrium and up a couple of narrow steps. I used the lion-head knocker on the door and waited, but all I got for my trouble was silence. She should have opened the door right away, full of concern and curiosity. I grew more uncomfortable and at last used the key Misty had given me.

  I unlocked the door and pushed it open with one finger. The door swung open easily, making the soft complaint of an old man settling into a chair.

  “Misty?” I called. I don’t know why. If she hadn’t answered my knock, she probably would not answer my call. Fear entered the apartment with me and climbed onto my back. I carried him with me as I searched the bottom floor. The living room was neat and clean and furnished with a few pieces of dark heavy furniture. A TV stood off to one side, as if she didn’t watch it much. Bookcases full of books lined the walls. The tiny kitchen was neat, too, and organized like a ship’s galley—crowded with jars, canisters, and appliances. Both rooms were filled with more silence. Fear grew heavier as I carried him up the dark stairs to the second floor. There I found a bedroom, feminine but not fussy, a bathroom, and a large room that looked like Misty’s laboratory.

  The laboratory had a faint musty chemical smell. A cement table dominated the center of the room, with a battered but serviceable-looking desk pushed against one end of it. Glassware and Bunsen burners lined the middle of the cement table, ready for use. The desk was piled with papers held down by colorful rocks. Standing on one corner of the desk was a big three-way mirror, a main mirror with a smaller mirror on each side that could swing away. It was a false note, given what I had seen of her décor so far. Misty didn’t seem like the type who would pluck her eyebrows during business hours.

  Golden late-afternoon sunlight poured in through a big window that had a standing electric box fan in front of it. One whole wall was shelves full of reagent bottles, and another was taken up with a blackboard that had been wiped clean with a wet rag. I wondered what had been written there, and whether I would have understood it if I knew. If Misty was as advanced as Lord Slex said she was, maybe I wouldn’t have been alone in my ignorance.

  “Misty?” I called again, sure it would do no good.

  I circled the cement table and found what I had known I would find eventually—Misty’s body on the floor. She looked peaceful, like a little girl dreaming about unicorns and fairy princesses, but her skin was a funny shade of pale green. I quickly knelt beside her and tried artificial respiration. I didn’t enjoy touching my lips to hers—she was too dead.

  I
went downstairs and called the police, then went back to the laboratory to sit with the body until they arrived.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BACK ON THE BICYCLE

  For a while I sat in the chair at Misty’s desk thinking about how badly I had screwed things up. It was no longer just a matter of losing a couple of suspects on a dead-end street. I had broken rule number one of the private eye biz—I had failed to protect the client. My mood got darker as the sun went down, and pretty soon I was good and disgusted with myself. Then I decided that being disgusted wasn’t doing either of us any good, not me or Misty.

  But as I continued staring into the gathering gloom, I began to notice things. Hanging in the air in three places, each in one corner of the room, were round areas like lenses—space puckers, if you will. Each was about a foot across, maybe less—and it distorted the area behind it a little. I wanted to see them better. I don’t know why. It was just something to do.

  By all rights I should have just sat there chewing my cud until the official boys arrived because the place might be lousy with clues: fingerprints, cigarette ashes, aura glimmers, hair clippings. Who knew? But instead I got up, used the eraser at the end of a pencil to click on the lights, and nosed around.

  I looked closely at one of the space puckers. From one side it distorted space, and from the other it wasn’t even there. I wondered whether these puckers had anything to do with Misty’s big secret project. I tapped the surface of the pucker with my pencil, encountering no resistance and making no sound. But some force nearly took my arm off as it pulled the pencil into the pucker. I let go just in time and breathed hard as I stood looking at the distortion. It hung there as before. Why didn’t it suck up all the air in the world? Maybe Misty could have told me. I sighed. I was just glad the puckers were out of the way in corners, rather than where somebody was likely to walk into one.

  I wandered around her apartment trying to see everything, because I didn’t know what I was looking for. I checked all the windowsills and door frames and saw no sign of forced entry. There was no back door. Was she murdered by somebody who had a key? A “friend?” Or had the murderer entered and exited through one of the space puckers?

  And then there were my two suspects: first, some guy in a burgundy Honda Augury with a scraped front bumper who probably knew where Misty lived and certainly guessed that’s where we were going; second, some guy with a cauliflower nose, a guy who could either climb like a monkey or had a lot of wizard training. My murderer could be either of them or somebody else entirely. I rubbed my face with both hands. Motive, means, and opportunity were all mysteries.

  I went back up to the laboratory and searched it again. I riffled the papers on her desk, hoping that something she’d written in her small neat handwriting would leap out at me. I recognized some of the symbols in her calculations, and a few of the doodles—she drew a killer Starship Enterprise—but that was all. The top drawer contained paper, clips, pens, and pencils of various colors. The center drawer contained nothing but a couple of Milky Ways. The bottom drawer was locked. I shook it because that’s what you always do with something that’s locked, then studied it. The keyhole looked like a keyhole in a cartoon. How old-fashioned of her. I wondered whether it actually locked the drawer or was just for show.

  I tried a couple of unlocking spells Silverwhite had taught me, but I might as well have been reciting dirty limericks, so I took a ring of slim skeleton keys from a pocket. I’d barely touched the lock with the first key when imps leaped up around me. Each one was a black ball about five inches across with a demonic face. The ball had arms and legs that were thin but strong. The hands had long grasping fingers. “Hey, bud. Lay off. That ain’t yours,” one of them said in an irritating scratchy voice. “Ain’t yours,” the others echoed. Each voice was different, but all were as irritating as the first—Munchkins who had gone over to the Dark Side.

  I ignored them and kept working. No one had ever won an argument with an imp, mainly because there was nothing to argue with. An imp was no more than a single-minded physical manifestation of a spell, designed to do a specific job in a specific way. Silverwhite might have been able to finesse them with magic eventually, but I wasn’t that good.

  “Ain’t yours,” the imps said and plucked at me. Others got in my way. I kept trying keys as best I could, but it was like working in a rain of gravel; soon more of the imps popped into existence and they became rougher. Their fingers were like pins. Their voices bored into my ears like the hard harsh whine of a dentist’s drill.

  “All right!” I cried and leaped back, breathing hard.

  “Ain’t yours,” one of the imps said, and suddenly every one of them was gone.

  I contemplated the drawer from a distance. I’d made a few scratches around the keyhole, but that was all. If Misty had put something in there to be safe, it was still safe.

  I had more luck with the wastebasket next to the desk. In it were two packets of commercial rat-killing spell, the kind of thing you could purchase at Spell-Mart. I lifted them gently out of the basket and set them on the cement table. Each of them had a corner torn off. After having been emptied, each had been twisted in the middle so it had a girlish figure with a narrow waist—it looked like a party favor. I put one of them into my pocket and dropped the other back into the wastebasket. I would share my clues with the police. I was that kind of guy.

  Three loud demanding bangs punctured the silence of the apartment. That would be the police. I went downstairs to let them in.

  Two big men entered—football-player types, each a little past his prime. Each wore a business suit and a conservative tie. Three uniformed cops came in behind them. More uniformed cops looked busy outside. The plainclothesman with wavy blond hair introduced himself as Detective Fotheringay. His assistant, a man with dark hair plastered with too much goo, was Siltz. Siltz nodded when Fotheringay introduced him and then took out a pen and spiral-bound notebook, ready for business. Nobody introduced the men in uniform.

  “You call it in?” Fotheringay asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s the stiff?” Fotheringay asked brusquely as he glanced everywhere but at me.

  “Upstairs,” I said, and led the way. I didn’t like him calling Misty a stiff, not even if she was dead, but I let it alone. Sometimes making an enemy of the police department is unavoidable, but it’s never a good idea.

  We entered the laboratory, and the uniformed cops spread out to look for clues. Even with all the lights on, the space puckers were almost invisible. I wasn’t sure they were important, but that wasn’t the reason I didn’t feel obligated to point them out. Someone with a more finely tuned conscience than mine, someone who had only one concern and that for justice, might have done all he could to help the police. What did it matter who solved the crime as long as somebody solved it? But I wasn’t quite that open-minded. I figured I had done my duty by calling them. I felt responsible for getting Misty killed, so her murder was my problem. I wanted to bring the murderer to justice myself. Besides, I wasn’t stopping the police from seeing the puckers.

  I led Fotheringay and Siltz to where Misty lay. Siltz rested his notebook on the cement table while Fotheringay got down on one knee and studied the body. He touched her cheek, then picked up her arm and let it fall. We all watched it fall.

  “Dead for less than an hour, I’d say,” Fotheringay commented.

  “I could have told you that,” I said, a little irritated that he hadn’t asked.

  “I guess you could have,” Fotheringay admitted. “What’s your story?”

  I told them who I was, and that I was a private detective hired by the board of Stilthins Mort to protect Misty Morning. Fotheringay commented with a single rude guffaw. Siltz wrote as I spoke. I showed him my license, and he noted the serial number.

  “She’d been threatened?” Siltz asked.

  “Not that I know of,” I said. “The board was just concerned because she was working on an important project. They fel
t that someone might try to steal it.”

  “What was the project?” Siltz asked.

  “I don’t know. The man who hired me claimed not to know either.”

  Fotheringay nodded. “We’ll look around,” he said. “Maybe she left notes.”

  After the experience I’d had with the imps, I wished them luck. “Look,” I said, “I had no reason to believe she was in any physical danger. Industrial spies and jealous colleagues aren’t usually up for murder. In theory, I was here just to make sure nobody walked off with her project.”

  “We don’t know whether you were successful,” Fotheringay said thoughtfully. “I mean, not knowing what the project is, we don’t know whether it’s missing. Where were you when she got it?” he asked.

  I told them about the guy in the burgundy Honda and the guy with the cauliflower nose.

  “So you get hired as a bodyguard,” Siltz said as if he were trying to work out a problem, “and the first thing you do is abandon the client.”

  I got a little hot then. “You weren’t here,” I said, “and you don’t know how it was. The guy in the car or the other man could have been the murderer. Maybe they were working together. The point is nobody knows. As far as I could tell, when I stayed outside to speak to the guy in the car and to chase the man with the cauliflower nose, I was doing my job. You try being in two places at once.”

  “Cool off, Cronyn,” Fotheringay said. “Nobody’s accusing you of anything.”

  “Does that include Siltz?” I asked.

  Gently and with great deliberation, Siltz set down his pen on the cement table, the better to glare at me. “You watch your mouth,” he said. “A little police brutality could come in here.”

  I smiled at him.

  Before he had a chance to make another threat, a man carrying a black bag entered the room. “Morton, coroner’s office,” he announced at the doorway.

  “Come join our sewing circle,” Fotheringay said. He got to his feet, and Morton took his place at Misty’s side.