Dangerous Hardboiled Magicians

by Mel Gilden

  “He had a big nose like a cauliflower?”

  “That’s him. Who is he?”

  “We’ll get back to that. Go on.”

  He glanced at the table where Marjory and her admirers were eating pizza. They weren’t paying any attention to us.

  “I approached him and ordered him to leave Misty alone. He just laughed at me. He said, ‘I might say the same to you, kid. Get a life.’”

  “The nerve.”

  “Yeah. It was the same guy I saw you chasing into the canyon yesterday just before you found Misty dead.”

  “How do you know I found her dead? The newspaper didn’t say who found her.”

  “Just a guess. It was you, wasn’t it?”

  He may have been arrogant and lovesick, but he wasn’t stupid. I nodded. “Go on.”

  “While you were chasing that guy, another guy ran from Misty’s building. He wore a costume spell that made him look like Brent Martin.”

  “The Prohibition-era movie actor?”

  Hillyer nodded.

  “You saw this second guy leaving, but you didn’t see him arrive?”

  “Maybe he was already inside when all of us got there.”

  “Or maybe he has nothing to do with Misty at all.” I rubbed the back of my neck. There were too many mysterious guys around.

  “Who is he?” Hillyer asked. “The little ugly guy.”

  “I don’t know. Down at Stilthins Mort I thought he was watching me. But maybe I was just something to look at while he waited for Misty.”

  “You were supposed to protect her,” Hillyer said, letting his anger and frustration boil over again. He set his fat hands flat on the table as if pushing it against the floor.

  “You were there, too,” I pointed out. “And you didn’t save her either.”

  His eyes got big and grew shiny with tears. He rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand while he looked anywhere but at me.

  “Did you kill her?” I demanded.

  “I loved Misty,” he said, and put his head down on his folded arms.

  I took my time sipping my beer, waiting for him to come up for air. He hadn’t looked up again by the time I finished, so I stood to leave. “Hey, Mr. Cronyn,” one of the students called as I walked across the room.

  I went back to the table where the four students were sitting. “You rang?” I said as I sat down. Most of the pizza was gone and the marks on Marjory’s face had faded. Time marches on.

  John looked from side to side dramatically, making sure the coast was clear. Then he lowered his head and whispered to the table. “I know some people who didn’t like Misty,” he confided.

  “Oh?”

  “A rumor is going around that she was working on something really big, but that she wasn’t going to sell it to PrestoCorp. She felt she could get a better deal elsewhere. If you know what I mean.”

  “I do,” I said, thinking about what Misty had told me. Apparently student rumors flew beneath the board’s radar.

  “Anything else?”

  “Somebody hired by PrestoCorp did it,” Fred said. “That’s what we think.”

  We nodded at each other, all very secret agent. I saluted the table and continued to the door. I stopped briefly at a pay phone and spent a few minutes with the phone book. I found what I wanted and went outside. Factoids in my head rattled against each other as I drove back down the hill.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AN INSULTING IDEA

  Twenty minutes later I made the big left turn on the flying ramp that looked like something from a science-fiction cover painting of a futuristic city, and went south on the San Diego Freeway. As usual, the San Diego was choking on its own traffic, and it took me another half hour to get to the Crenshaw exit.

  Driving south on Crenshaw took me past squat raw phlogiston tanks and into something called the South Bay Business Park. The neat two-story office buildings no more made a park than the tanks made a forest, but maybe real estate people have better imaginations than I do. The building I wanted looked just like all the others except that big letters on a wall spelled out PrestoCorp. I parked and went inside.

  The lobby was a big air-conditioned room made of chrome and glass. One wall was completely taken up with a photographic montage of all the PrestoCorp products. Somewhat larger than the other photos was one of this year’s Nexus that changed colors every now and then as it rolled along an empty but picturesque road. Misty Morning was important to them—oh yes she was.

  A dark-haired woman sat behind a desk that was three steps above the floor of the lobby, like the ornament on top of a wedding cake.

  I climbed her little staircase and smiled at her. She smiled back, but it was as meaningless as a facial tic. “My name is Turner Cronyn. I’m a private detective here to see Heather Hamish,” I said casually.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No. But I think she’ll want to see me. It concerns Misty Morning.”

  Her eyebrows went up, and she did calisthenics with her lips. “I’ll see if she’s in. Please have a seat.” With difficulty she recovered her smile.

  Sitting across from the photo collage I could not hear what the receptionist said into her telephone, but she was having a serious conversation with somebody.

  “Sir?”

  A woman with the figure of a hot dog was standing at the foot of a stairway. She wore a gray herringbone suit and pumps the same undistinguished brown as her hair. Glasses with black frames and thick lenses hung from a cord around her neck. She lifted the glasses and peered at me through them.

  “I am Mary Reed,” the woman said, “Dr. Hamish’s assistant. Please step this way.”

  Mary Reed and I did not speak as I followed her up the stairs to the second floor. She led me along a hallway painted and carpeted in shades of gray to another waiting room, this one somewhat smaller than the one downstairs. Next to a black door tall enough for giraffes was a floor-to-ceiling tank full of darting fish.

  “Dr. Hamish will be with you in a moment,” Mary Reed said, and walked out without waiting for me to ask her who fed the fish, or even how.

  To my surprise Dr. Hamish actually appeared in more or less a moment. She was only slightly older than Misty Morning, and the fact that she would never be beautiful no longer bothered her, if it ever had. Over her dark suit she wore an unbuttoned lab coat so clean it seemed to gleam by its own light. With a benevolent smile she watched two men and two women as they marched from her office carrying clipboards. They looked young enough to have been recruited by PrestoCorp right out of college.

  “Mr. Cronyn?” she said as she put out her hand. We shook and she invited me into her office. She indicated a wooden chair that looked as if had been carved from a single redwood burl, and I sat down in it. Her desk was empty but for a skrying ball, a telephone, and a few very clean and flat sheets of paper.

  “Mary tells me that you are a private detective who wishes to speak with me about Misty Morning,” Dr. Hamish said as she settled behind her desk. She seemed indifferent to the subject. We might have been discussing where to go for lunch. It was just a ploy. If she hadn’t been very interested in the subject, I would not now be sitting in front of her.

  “I understand that PrestoCorp holds the rights to her spell for the car-of-a-different-color.”

  Dr. Hamish nodded, her face without expression.

  “Would you happen to know what she was working on lately?”

  “No.” Her answer was as short and abrupt as the slamming of a door. “What exactly is your interest in all this, Mr. Cronyn?” She touched a paper on her desk, letting me know that she was a busy woman with better things to do than talk to idiot detectives.

  “You heard that she was dead?” I asked.

  “Murdered,” Dr. Hamish said, and shuddered. “Terrible.”

  “More terrible that you think. I was supposed to be protecting her.”

  “I see,” Dr. Hamish replied. “What has that to do with PrestoCorp?”

 
“Before she died she told me that she would not be selling you whatever she was working on.”

  “Oh?” She said the word without surprise.

  “Yes. She felt that she’d gotten a raw deal on her car-of-another-color.”

  “I’m sorry she felt that way, but I don’t see—”

  “I was hired by the members of the board at Stilthins Mort because they thought you might try to find out on your own what she was working on.”

  “If you are speaking of industrial espionage, I will say only that that’s a very insulting idea.” Like a soft sea creature, she pulled back into her big leather wing chair and crossed her arms, the picture of affronted virtue.

  “Industrial espionage happens,” I said, striving to sound reasonable.

  “Not at PrestoCorp.”

  “What about murder?”

  Dr. Hamish stood up, the tips of her fingers touching her desk. “That will be quite enough, Mr. Cronyn. I bid you good day.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest you did it personally,” I said without moving.

  She picked up her phone and said, “Send security.”

  “You can throw me out but that won’t stop me from discovering the truth!” I cried. I’d always wanted to say that. That fact that I still hadn’t moved was making Dr. Hamish crazy.

  In a minute or two a uniformed rent-a-cop came in without knocking and stood in the doorway looking a little frightened. He had iron-gray hair and a small pot belly. I don’t think he wanted to be there. He poised one hand over his pistol like a frontier gunslinger.

  I stood up before shooting began.

  “If you come back here, Mr. Cronyn,” Dr. Hamish said, “I will have you arrested.”

  “But I haven’t had a chance to ask you how you feed the fish.”

  “Good day, Mr. Cronyn.” She nodded at the security guy, and he grabbed me by the arm using a grip that was much stronger than I’d expected. I didn’t fight him. He walked me through the waiting room and into the hallway, where he let go. He pointed meaningfully at the exit and escorted me back along the hallway to the stairs, which we descended to the lobby.

  At the doors he gently put a hand on my arm. “She means it,” he said in a voice that was gravelly from a lifetime of smoking. “Don’t come back.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” I said, and went out. I’d done everything I’d meant to do at PrestoCorp. Now it was all up to Dr. Hamish.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ENOUGH ROPE

  I was halfway to Cal Thau when my cell phone played a few bars of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

  “Cronyn,” I said into the cell phone.

  “Turner Cronyn, the detective?” a woman’s voice at the other end asked.

  “That’s me,” I said. I hated to drive and talk on the cell phone at the same time, but I’d gotten the thing so clients could find me. I hoped the lady was a client and not just trying to sell a correspondence course in fingerprinting.

  “Could you please come to Enough Rope in Venice as soon as possible?”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “I’d rather discuss that with you in person, if you don’t mind.”

  The secretive type. “All right,” I said. “Give me the address.”

  She gave me an address on Abbot Kinney, and I told her I’d be there in half an hour or so, depending on traffic.

  “Ask for Miss Rule,” she said.

  We wished each other a good day and hung up.

  I still wanted to speak with a lord or two at Cal Thau and at least one of Misty’s relatives, but now that I had the possibility of a paying gig they could wait. I didn’t think Misty would mind. She would understand that even a detective has to eat.

  I made surprisingly good time up the San Diego Freeway to Washington Boulevard and then went west. As I crossed the line into Mar Vista, the sky was suddenly covered with a gray overcast thick as a sweatshirt—no magic involved, just the traditional coastal low clouds and fog. I turned onto Abbot Kinney and found Enough Rope between a tiny restaurant with two tables out in front and a gallery that seemed to specialize in art made from brightly painted car parts.

  I parked up the street and walked back. In the window of Enough Rope were wall hangings, plant holders, and other objects made from beads strung along rough brown lengths of rope all knotted together. I was a little surprised that a store specializing in macramé could stay in business. Macramé had been pretty popular about the time I’d been a student at Stilthins Mort but the craze had lasted no longer than the excitement over chia wizards.

  I opened the door and was announced by the tinkle of a single bell. The dim place was crowded with more of the same kinds of hairy projects as those in the window. I picked up a flat and tightly wound coil of rope. Coaster? High fiber cookie?

  “How may I help you today?”

  I turned to see a woman standing just in front of a counter that divided the storefront from a back room. She was handsome rather than beautiful, with a face full of intelligence and a body that was not fat but substantial and solid. Jet-black hair fell in waves to her shoulders. She wore an elegant sky-blue dress that looked like a sheet that had been artistically draped around her.

  “I’m Turner Cronyn,” I said. “I’m here to see Miss Rule.”

  “I am Miss Rule,” the woman said. The knowledge seemed to please her. She went to the front door of the shop, locked it, and turned over the card in the window so that it announced they were closed. “Come with me, please,” she said, and led me around the counter. She held aside a curtain and let me walk ahead of her.

  The back room was nearly bare and very clean, decorated with a few pieces of simple wooden furniture. The wooden floor shone in light from a chandelier that would have been more appropriate in a formal dining room. A beaded curtain hanging from another doorway told me there was at least one more room farther back. In the middle of the room was a table that was almost too large for it.

  Sitting at the table were two more women. One might have been in high school except for her expression of calm wisdom. The other could have been anywhere from 60 to 105. Her hair was a luminescent white. She wore no glasses, but she didn’t seem to have any trouble seeing. They were dressed in the same trick Greco-Roman origami-type blue dresses as Miss Rule and could have been her daughter and her mother. Miss Rule sat down between them. Unpleasantly, I was reminded of the board at Stilthins Mort.

  “Mr. Cronyn,” Miss Rule said, “this is Miss Spinner,” pointing to the very young woman, “and this is Miss Cutter,” pointing to the very old woman. The two nodded but said nothing. “We would like to hire you to help our granddaughter find the person who stole Eulalie Tortuga’s soul.”

  “She’s the granddaughter of all three of you?” I asked, confused.

  “Yes,” Miss Rule said. “Is the relationship of the clients to each other important?”

  “I suppose not. How did you happen to choose me? Did I come recommended or did you throw a dart at the phone book?”

  “One way is as good as another,” Miss Rule said.

  Her answer meant nothing, of course. I let it drift.

  She spoke again. “What are your charges, Mr. Cronyn?”

  “A hundred a day plus expenses.”

  Miss Spinner pushed a check across the table at me. I picked it up and saw that I had the same $700 back again.

  “Something wrong, Mr. Cronyn?”

  “No. Nothing. It’s just funny how things work out, that’s all. What makes you think somebody has stolen Eulalie Tortuga’s soul?”

  “This morning’s paper suggested that Ms. Tortuga was now a zombie. If that is true, it means her soul has been taken.”

  “And what exactly is your granddaughter’s interest?”

  “She and Ms. Tortuga were very good friends.”

  I was about to explain that soul-searching was a little out of my line, which at best was a mediocre pun, when a fourth woman came in through the beaded curtain and stopped me. To say she was beau
tiful was to say the Taj Mahal was a building. Her off-white skin had no flaw that I could see, and I looked plenty close. Her features had been chiseled by a master, and thinking about a figure such as hers had driven mad better men than I. Her hair was a color of light not otherwise found in nature, but only because nature couldn’t be that lucky twice. Usually, if only for my own amusement, I notice how a woman is dressed; but in this instance very little information got through to my brain except the experience of the astonishing woman herself. I’m afraid I gaped.

  “This is our granddaughter, Astraea Scales,” Miss Rule said. She didn’t seem surprised by the effect her granddaughter had on me.

  I nodded. Ms. Scales smiled. I had never received a gift half so wonderful. My body buzzed with good feelings. Whatever questions I’d been about to ask had evaporated with the woman’s arrival.

  “I will enjoy watching you work,” Ms. Scales said.

  I nodded.

  “Shall we go?” she suggested. Her voice seemed to come from far away.

  I nodded again.

  Ms. Scales got her purse, then touched cheeks with each of the three women at the table.

  Just walking Astraea Scales up the block to where I’d parked, I felt like a guy escorting the prom queen to the big dance. Nobody fainted on that short walk, but upon seeing Ms. Scales a couple of guys backed away clutching their hearts. They probably wouldn’t die. Love can be troublesome, but it is rarely fatal.

  I opened the passenger door for her and helped her get in before I slammed it. Damn! When had I washed the car last? I ran around the front of the car and got in. For the first time I noticed her legs. Perfect, of course. Long, slim, and well-formed. A Mozart sonata in stockings.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JUSTICE

  “So,” I said, “Ms. Scales—”

  “Please call me Astraea,” she said.

  I tried not to read too much into that. “Then you must call me Turner,” I said with all the gallantry of a duke in a high school play.