Dangerous Hardboiled Magicians

by Mel Gilden

  “It is unethical, yes?”

  “Yes. And apparently Marjory is just part of a pattern. Lyda Firebough tells me that Lord Philpot dated Misty while she was an undergraduate student.”

  Astraea carefully considered this piece of news. “Misty was not inept,” Astraea said. “My understanding is that few were more ept.”

  I chuckled. “You’re beginning to talk like me,” I said. “She was still his student,” I went on more seriously. “And also a blonde babe—he seems to have a weakness for blondes. It would be difficult to believe he kept her around just for her magical abilities.”

  “But he did not kill her?”

  “It’s possible, but no. First, so far I haven’t heard anything like a motive. Second, a man in his position would be afraid that a murder investigation would shine a bright light onto his whole life, maybe revealing his dirty little secret.”

  Astraea nodded. “We will speak to him this evening at the Magic Vault.”

  “If he’s there. And we’ll talk to Lord Trask, too.”

  Astraea turned south on LaBrea. “Lord Trask also has a dirty little secret?”

  “Yes, indeed. Even dirtier, maybe, depending on your point of view. But let me start at the beginning. After spending the night in the basement of the Abracadabra frat house, the janitor brought me breakfast. I knew who he was because I eventually remembered seeing his photo in the newspapers a few years ago. His name is X Marks, and he’s a notorious small-time pen man last caught working in San Francisco.”

  “What is a pen man?” Astraea asked.

  “A specialist in counterfeiting signatures and other fancy artwork. He was working with a man named Ian Tahern, currently known as Lord Trask, a con man who is no more a wizard than he is a doctor or an oil baron. I’m still trying to figure out how he got onto the board of Stilthins Mort. Did he drop a big donation of worthless stocks and bonds on the school, or did he cut to the chase and invent a background paper trail? According to the San Francisco cops, he can be very convincing.”

  “He arranged for some of his fraternity boys to abduct you,” Astraea said as she turned right onto Sixth Street and we tooled west past four-story brick apartment buildings that looked as permanent as redwood trees. Immediately the air seemed cooler, though I probably just imagined it.

  “He did. What concerns me personally is how long he was going to keep me in that basement.”

  “Maybe he thought he could eventually convince you that investigating the people closest to Misty was not in your best interest. Eventually, perhaps he would kill you.”

  “Then I must be a real disappointment to him,” I said. The white buildings of the La Brea Towers came up on our right. After another block or two I had Astraea turn into the complex. It had taken about half an hour to get me home, so apparently she hadn’t used any of her “ways” to get us there. She found a place to park, but neither of us got out of the sedan chair.

  “If those two lords hadn’t been so damned paranoid and cagey I might not have bothered to make all these connections. But the dragon coming out of the tar pits suggested that if I was wrong about any little detail in their backgrounds, that detail would be replaced by something even worse. The whole kidnapping scene convinced me that I was right.”

  “You have no need to call the police,” she announced. “I am Justice.”

  “Reading my mind?” I asked with surprise. I had, in fact, been thinking about turning in the lords Trask and Philpot.

  “No. Just guessing.”

  “The police might have a different viewpoint,” I suggested.

  “They might. Ultimately it will not matter. I am Justice. Now that you have revealed criminals to me, I will take care of everything.”

  “We still don’t know who killed Misty or who stole Eulalie’s soul,” I reminded her.

  “Everything in its time.”

  I chuckled a little. “I guess if you live with the Fates long enough, you learn to be philosophical.”

  “Go. You have things to do, as do I,” Astraea said with sudden energy.

  I pushed back the peach-colored curtain on my side. Around us life went on: old folks tottered along with shopping bags, kids chased each other and played ball, gardeners herded their enchanted sheep. “I’ll pick you up at eight,” I said.

  “The Magic Vault. Of course,” she said as if she had forgotten.

  I got out of the sedan chair, and it soared away, gone in no time. I entered my building under the appraising eyes of some old folks sitting on a sunny bench at the building’s entrance. In my apartment I did a few personal hygiene spells—I would rather have used hot water, but there wasn’t time—and then changed clothes.

  When I was once again clean and splendid I called Silverwhite to apologize for not appearing last night, and suggested that we try again this evening. I spoke to his phone imp. Hoping for the best, I left my message and went out again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  PUCKER UP

  Eulalie Tortuga’s home was nearby in miles, almost walking distance, but measured in terms of class and style it might as well have been in Oz. It was between Third and Beverly on a block of Highland that was divided by a grassy median. Down the center of the median a row of tall old palm trees grew like a picket fence.

  Like a lot of dwellings in that neighborhood, Eulalie’s was a weathered pile of red brick that was too big to be a house and too small to be a mansion. It was wrapped as a gift in thick tattered layers of ivy tinted a million shades of green, leaving only the doors and windows uncovered. I took a chance and parked in the half-moon of cement driveway that had replaced the front lawn.

  As I approached the front door I ran into an invisible wall and red letters appeared in the air saying Police Line—Do Not Cross. With one hand on the invisible wall I followed it around the side of the house, looking in through windows as I passed them. Some were curtained, but others were clear and let me look into big rooms with hardwood floors; hanging from walls were fanciful paintings full of brush strokes and color, and resting on tables were odd bits of metal, glass, and wood that didn’t look like anything and so must have been art, too. Probably important, expensive art—right up to the minute stuff. I had to wonder who was kidding who.

  The backyard was a square plot of grass that hadn’t been cut in a week or two. In one corner of the yard was a forlorn tree that was so twisted and gnarled, it looked as if it had dropped in from the fairy kingdom of Griffith Park. Under it was a wrought-iron bench one would sit on only as penance. In the other corner was a two-car garage that was closed and padlocked. At the back of the main house I came to a pair of French doors through which I could see the machinery of a home gymnasium. I crossed the flagstones, getting as close to the house as the police line would let me, and peered into the room.

  A treadmill, a stairstep machine, and a couple of weight-lifting gadgets rested on gray indoor-outdoor carpeting. The machines were dark now, their spells faded. The wall opposite the French doors was all mirrored so that I could look at myself looking in. I was about to continue on to the other side of the house when I caught a distortion in the air up in one corner of the gym. I wasn’t surprised the police had missed it. I would never have seen it myself if I hadn’t known exactly what to look for.

  It was one of those space puckers I’d seen in Misty Morning’s laboratory, but there was something different about it, too. I stared at it trying to decide what the difference was. Suddenly, I noticed that the pucker was bigger than the others I’d seen. Assuming they all started out the same size, and that the ones in Misty’s lab were the oldest, the difference in size might mean the puckers slowly dissipated over time. Great. Disappearing evidence.

  I crossed the grass to sit on the wrought iron bench, which was as cold and uncomfortable as it appeared. The bench fit my mood exactly. I didn’t want to be comfortable, I wanted to think.

  Either the thing that made the puckers was portable or Eulalie owned one. If she owned one, had she gotten th
e machine from Misty, or had they each gotten one from somewhere else? How many pucker-makers were there? Was some underworld character turning out puckers like fake ID? I hadn’t ever heard of such a thing, but you never know. I may have missed the memo.

  Of course, Misty had not had her soul stolen, she had been murdered. Why would somebody bother to create a pucker if he or she wasn’t going to use it? To confuse the police? If so, the criminal would have made the puckers more obvious. No. Misty had made the puckers herself using some method of her own, for reasons of her own. The person who stole the method could have killed her to get it. That would make a nice motive. Okay. One pucker-maker, then, and somebody had stolen it.

  Was the person who stole the pucker-maker the same person who had taken the souls of Eulalie and the three guys? That would make sense. Who else would want it? Had this person also murdered Misty? Probably, but not necessarily. Like Lord Slex and Vic Tortuga, the space puckers seemed to be a connection between Misty’s murder and the taking of the souls. But even with access to the space puckers, removing a soul in the first place seemed impossible for anybody but a keres. The only suspect I knew for sure wasn’t a keres was Vic Tortuga—and even he might have hired one if he’d had the chance.

  The longer I sat on the iron bench, the less I thought about the case and the more I thought about how hard the bench was. I went back to my car still turning things over in my mind but not making much progress.

  As I drove around the driveway and out onto Highland, I noticed a car begin to move at nearly the same time. It was a small sporty Circe painted a deep purple. The driver seemed to be a big mouse—which couldn’t be right. I looked again while I waited for the traffic to clear and it was still a mouse: big ears like ping-pong paddles, long nose with a thing like a black olive at the tip, bristly whiskers. Whoever was driving was wearing a masquerade spell, of course: Fashion victim.

  I drove up to Melrose Avenue and turned left. Starting in the mid 1980s the hipper element had slowly migrated up there from Fairfax. Now Melrose was crowded with stores full of outrageous clothing for the youth market and holes in the wall where, for a price, one could get any part of the body pierced or tattooed, even parts I didn’t care to think about. Spells that would horrify the parents were also available. Above it all the Hollywood Hills continued looking down without concern. The occasional white stucco house glared out from the hillside like a hunk of ice.

  I turned onto Genesee, a street so narrow a car with an extra coat of paint would have trouble passing a car going the other way. Four-story buildings in fruit colors lined it like teeth, each one squatting on a lot that fit it exactly. Nobody had died and left me a parking space at the crowded curb, and I eventually had to put money into a meter on Melrose.

  I walked back to the building I wanted, a dusty lime-green cube. I mounted three red steps and walked into the cool dim hallway. A heavy odor compounded partly of aging wood and plaster, and partly of immigrant cooking, gathered me into a warm paw. Rising to the second floor was a long stairway carpeted with the same aggressive pattern of big flowers that covered the first floor hall. Under the stairway I found a row of mailboxes. Lupinsky was in number 27.

  While I walked up the creaking stairs, a woman behind one of the doors below yelled angrily in a guttural language. A child shrieked and began to cry. A door slammed and all noise stopped as if a playback had been interrupted. On the second floor I knocked on a wide brown door with a 27 on it.

  The door was opened by a tall, fat man with a great fuzzy black beard. His features were large and fleshy. He scowled at me, which didn’t make him any more beautiful. Suspenders rolled like tire tracks over his sparkling white shirt, the ends hooked to the waistband that rode high over his big belly.

  “Yes?” he said as if I’d already insulted him.

  “My name is Turner Cronyn. I’m investigating what happened to Merv Lupinsky.”

  “The police were already here.”

  “I’m making an independent investigation connected with another matter.”

  “What other matter?”

  I saw that he and I could play Twenty Questions all afternoon. I was about to push past him into the apartment when an older woman came up behind him wiping her hands with a dishrag. Time had not been kind to her. She rubbed her nose with a tissue she took from a pocket in an apron that looked as if it had once been part of a cheap cotton dress very much like the one she now wore. “Let the man in, Irv,” she said in a tired voice. “Maybe he can help.”

  After a moment Irv stood aside, allowing me to enter a living room full of old furniture covered in plastic. “Thank you, Mrs. Lupinsky,” I said, guessing who she was. Two floor-to-ceiling windows, now open to let in a slight breeze, looked down on the street. Mrs. Lupinsky settled with a sigh onto the couch, crackling the plastic that covered it, and immediately began to sniffle. Tears welled in her eyes.

  “My son didn’t know me this morning,” the woman said. “He didn’t know anything. Why would anybody do that to Merv?”

  Irv stared at me angrily. “This guy doesn’t know anything either, Mama,” he said accusingly.

  I tried a smile on him, without effect. “Irv is almost right,” I said. “I know very little. If you read the papers, you know as much as I do. That’s why I need your help. Did Merv know anybody named Renaldo Duncan, Joe Flynn, or Eulalie Tortuga?”

  Mrs. Lupinsky worried over that question. Slowly, she shook her head.

  “Tortuga?” Irv asked. “Does she have something to do with that writer, Vic Tortuga? He writes smut. Nobody in this family would have anything to do with him; no good person would.”

  “Understandable,” I said, just trying to get along. I opened my hands. “You see how little I know? That’s why I was hoping you could tell me something about your son, anything that might give me a clue who did this to him and why.”

  “We already talked to the police,” Irv reminded me.

  Going around that particular mulberry bush again seemed pointless. I looked at Mrs. Lupinsky. “Anything you could tell me might help.”

  The old woman opened up, then. Trivial information gushed from her—little domestic details about what a swell person Merv was, how he was kind to animals and to his mother, and did his best to get along with his brother, Irv. At the moment he was under observation at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. “He was a technical writer, you know.”

  “So I understand. Do you know what he was working on?”

  She looked at Irv with her sad watery eyes. “Please, Irv.”

  Without a word Irv stalked heavily from the room and returned a moment later with a manila folder that he thrust into my hands.

  The plastic couch cover crinkled beneath me as I sat down to read the contents of the folder. But I didn’t even have to open the cover to be jolted. Stamped in big red letters on the front were the words PROPERTY OF PRESTOCORP. PRIVILEGED INFORMATION FOR THOSE WHO NEED TO KNOW ONLY. The fact that Merv had been working for PrestoCorp when his soul was stolen may have been only a coincidence, but it was interesting—perhaps even suggestive. That was something else I’d have to discuss with Harold Silverwhite.

  Obviously the folder had a security spell on it because I couldn’t open it. Even if I could have taken a look at the papers inside I probably wouldn’t get more than a general drift. I set the folder onto a coffee table that ran the length of the couch and was covered for most of that length with old women’s magazines.

  Mrs. Lupinsky held up a framed photograph. “Such a good boy,” she said. “So smart and good-natured.”

  Like his brother, Merv was a chubby boy with a black beard. I stared at the photo and tried to mentally subtract the beard and add some hair atop his head. I’m not that good. He might have looked like me, maybe not.

  I thanked her for showing me the picture. She turned it around and, looking at it herself, got a little hysterical. She pleaded with me to find out what had happened to her boy and to make him the way he had been.

  “L
ook,” Irv shouted. “You made her cry! Get out! Get out!” He pulled open the front door so hard that it banged against the wall and swung back the other way.

  I was already moving toward the doorway when I noticed something near the corner of the ceiling. It was a space pucker, of course, the biggest one I’d seen so far. Which might mean it was also the newest. I don’t think they’d noticed it or Mrs. Lupinsky, at least, would have mentioned it. I went out without mentioning it either. If Irv climbed a ladder to get a better look at it before it faded back into the fabric of the universe, Mrs. Lupinsky would probably lose another son.

  * * * *

  A guy with a green Mohawk haircut and an extra set of eyes looking out of his forehead was leaning against my car smoking a cigarette. His earlobes dripped like water from a leaky faucet into nothing at all, to make a nice ripple effect at the level of his chin. When I got into my car, he saluted me and walked off without a word, clip-clopping like a horse. Wearing shorts to show them off, he had the hooves and shaggy legs of a goat—even his knees were on backward. On Melrose he wasn’t worth a second look.

  A car waited behind me, blocking traffic as I pulled out. I thought it would dive into the space I’d just vacated but instead it followed me up the street. It was a Circe, similar to the car I’d seen outside Eulalie Tortuga’s house, but cornflower blue instead of purple, and the driver was a woman, a little over-made-up, with hair so blonde it was incandescent.

  The Circe stuck within a block of me as I drove across town to Renaldo Duncan’s restaurant in Culver City. Whether it was the same car and the same driver I’d seen before was difficult to know in a world where spells to make cars a different color, and to disguise one’s self, are available to anybody with a few extra bucks.

  I parked in the lot next to Renaldo’s and waited a moment for the Circe, now blue, to pull in after me. But it went on down the block and rounded the corner. I shrugged. It wasn’t the first time I’d been wrong about somebody following me.