The Man Who Cheated Death (Vincent Hardare)

by James Swain

  “I should have known,” Silverman said. “What’s the rush Harry? We’re dealing in corpses, right? Nothing I learned in medschool can change that.”

  Wondero put his finger on the fresh spot of jam on Silverman’s shirt, then into his mouth. “Strawberry. Let me guess. IHOP, or Burger King?”

  “Never a minute’s peace with you.” Silverman got his pen started on a clipboard. “What have we got?”

  “Three Chicano males, ages ranging between twenty and thirty, shot at close range with an automatic weapon. Two of them had their ankles and wrists bound together with copper wire. The third got shot taking a bath. No sign of struggle or forcible entry.”

  “Any discernable motive?”

  “Bag of ludes, a mirror with a few anthills of coke and a couple grand in cash strewn around the apartment. Casey also found a modified Uzi with a hundred rounds of ammo. Luckily no one had a chance to use it.”

  “If they had,” Silverman said, still busy writing, “maybe one of your corpses would be talking.”

  “Bullet from an Uzi can pass through three, sometimes four walls,” Wondero said, forgetting he wasn’t talking to another cop. “Instead of three stiffs you could have had ten. Then you would have had to skip breakfast and lunch.”

  “You could stand to miss a couple meals yourself.”

  Silverman followed him into the open apartment lobby and waited in silence for the elevator. Wondero had long ago stopped talking at moments like these, no longer able to find a rationale for the random acts of violence he encountered. As the peeling elevator doors opened, the photographer called to him. “Radio call for you, Harry.”

  “Tell her I’m up to my ass at the moment.”

  “I already took the liberty.”

  Wondero got ugly. “And?”

  “Dispatcher said this was really important.”

  “Someone ought to start giving these broads urine tests.” Getting behind the wheel of his car, Wondero identified himself to the dispatcher, then listened. Saucers of water filled his eyes and made ribbons down his cheeks.

  “Be there in twenty,” he said.

  The two rookie cops guarding Sybil Blanchard’s apartment carefully examined Wondero’s credentials before letting him pass. Once inside, Wondero saw the same scene as before, the same familiar faces, and he supposed, the same conclusions. Four years of work had drawn him no closer to this killer than the day he’d started, and he no longer looked at each new victim as a possible solution to what had become an endless string of senseless homicides.

  There was considerable activity inside the spacious apartment. Two technicians busily dusted the furniture and glasses for fingerprints, while another vacuumed the carpet for hair and minuscule clothing fibers. Down a hall in the bedroom an Asian man was taking photographs of the corpse, whose pink toes pointed to the ceiling.

  The apartment, like so many in L.A., said a great deal about Sybil Blanchard’s dreams and aspirations, yet almost nothing about her past, as if part of becoming an actress or singing star required shelving your upbringing. In the same glance, Wondero saw what had probably attracted their killer to Sybil. She lived alone, no pets, and was often home during the day. He was good at speculating, and guessed that Sybil was young and impressionable. Smart, but not street smart. Otherwise she wouldn’t have opened her door to a stranger.

  On the dining room table sat a flower box. Flowers are a way to a girl’s heart, he thought. He looked inside and saw the dead bird. It had been dusted and looked sugar coated.

  He pushed himself down the hall to the bedroom. A detective named Marstello was taking notes while one of Silverman’s pupils examined the corpse. Standing in the doorway, Wondero halted. From the floor Sybil’s terrified eyes stared up, forever frozen.

  “Close them,” he said.

  The CSI tech closed Sybil’s eyes with his fingertips. He spoke slowly, his voice a monotone. “The victim appears to have died from a massive coronary. I found these in the bathroom.” He shook a bottle of pills in Wondero’s face. “Seems she had a bad ticker. The perpetrator jumped her in the hallway and they struggled on the bedroom floor, which resulted in her having a heart attack. She died almost instantly.”

  “Good for you,” Wondero said to the corpse.

  Marstello gave him a funny look. The tech said, “Let me show you something,” and motioned Wondero to kneel beside him. He gently parted Sybil’s fluffy brown curls and pointed at the graying roots dotting her scalp.

  “It’s dyed,” Wondero said. “So what?”

  “She didn’t dye her hair,” the ME explained. “I did a quick test of several strands. She was a natural brunette.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “She just started going gray.”

  “So did I,” Wondero said sarcastically.

  “Not in the last two hours.”

  Wondero looked to Marstello for help. “I’m on the wrong wavelength. What’s our friend here trying to say?”

  “We think she was frightened to death,” Marstello explained, being careful as he walked around the corpse. “Like the lady in Malibu last year. You remember, the rich broad with the poodles. Something scared her bad enough to cause a stroke.”

  “That was the coroner’s speculation,” Wondero reminded him, remembering the case clearly, and how her dogs, locked up in a closet, had attacked the first officer on the scene.

  “This isn’t speculation Harry.” From a night table Marstello picked up a pillow wrapped in a ziplock and handed it to him. A note cut and pasted from a newspaper was impaled to the pillow with a railroad spike, and Wondero read the twisted message silently.

  I LeT MySeLf In.

  BE bAck bEForE YOu

  knoW IT.

  DeAtH

  Wondero sat on the bed. What had Sybil seen? He thought he knew. A killer that lacked internal control that might allow him to spare his victims the sadistic pleasures that dominated his murderous sprees. A killer that hacked up his victims and scattered their remains, a leg in the fireplace, an arm on the wet bar, the fingers clutching a beer bottle. Insanity — letters that spoke of blackness and despair that often reversed themselves, becoming wicked and perverse. Cruelty — a killer who preyed on the vulnerable and the old. A plague in human form. Sybil had met Death and surrendered to him.

  “You ought to go outside Harry. Get some air.”

  Wondero stared vacantly through a window. “I once read that when you die all experience is reversed. You feel the pain you inflicted during your lifetime, and suffer the way you made others suffer. Atonement for all sins. And you get an eternity to pay for what you’ve done.” He looked up at Marstello. “Do you believe that Ray?”

  Marstello thought about it. “No.”

  “Neither do I,” Wondero said. “But I want to.”

  Chapter 2

  Jay

  Wondero waited until after dinner before retiring to his study to consult with his psychics.

  He left his son glued to Monday night football, his wife in the kitchen making tomorrow’s casserole, his daughter in the bathroom on the phone. He liked his home this way, filled with arresting smells and lots of activity, and on the way to his study he grabbed a beer and stole a kiss from his wife.

  “Rough day?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Did you really tell that nasty loan officer to kiss your ass?”

  “I told him to kiss my sweet ass.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  Two years back, when his work began disrupting their family life, Corey had started selling real estate, for no other reason than having something normal to talk about around the dinner table. Except she was great at it. Every night she told stories that put the Arabian nights to shame, and had allowed the focus of the family’s conversations to steer clear from his investigations.

  Wondero went to his study and shut the door. To reduce his long work days, he often spent his nights studying evidence, with only a portable radio for company.

  From a file
cabinet he removed a folder marked PSI. The LAPD had put on retainer fifteen of the city’s most prominent psychics, and each week they sent Wondero their predictions as to where Death might strike again. The psychics used a variety of methods to glean their information, and it had become his job to interpret their musings and determine what might be useful.

  Wondero had never believed in psychics, and thought they were all quacks. That had changed when he’d started working with them. They had predicted when Death would strike enough times to make him a believer. With their help, and a little luck, he hoped to catch their killer.

  A map of downtown LA lay across his desk. Using a blue marking pen, he made an X on the street where Sybil Blanchard had died. Using a protractor, he drew a perfect circle around the blue X that had a radius of three inches. He worked off a simple formula. Any prediction that fell outside the circle was dismissed, anything within a direct hit, and worth a phone call to the psychic who’d made it to see if he or she could elaborate on their particular prediction.

  He started with Chantel, an invalid gypsy whose dreams often foretold the future. Her letter was dated last Thursday. In it, she spoke of seeing a young prostitute with her throat slashed. She would be found in an apartment and not a hotel room, Chantel said, and she would be beaten around the face. She vaguely described other injuries.

  He picked through the letter. Chantel was warm, but her location was a good five miles outside the circle. He put her letter aside and made a note on a yellow pad to check if Sybil Blanchard had any arrests for soliciting.

  Next up was a black spiritualist named Omen. Omen had come highly recommended by the Marine patrol after successfully finding a corpse hidden in a marina, and Omen’s first predictions for Wondero were so accurate that for a brief period he had become a prime suspect. Scrawled in pencil, Omen’s sheet simply said A CHILD WILL BE KILLED, no date, no location. There was a big difference between a child and a young woman, and Wondero put the sheet back in the folder.

  The next prediction was totally off. Wondero wondered if he should have its medium — a Tarot card shuffler named Madame Marie — taken off her weekly retainer. Weeding out phonies was another of his responsibilities, since the contingency budget for this project was minimal, and unknown to everyone outside of Homicide. Early on, Madame Marie had made a few hits. Since then, she had come up with air, and Wondero decided it was time for a judgment call. He decided that Madame Marie was history.

  He worked through the remaining predictions, and hit a home run on the very last. Jack Pathfinder, a pony-tailed Mojave who claimed he rode into the future while ingesting psilocybin mushrooms, had come through for the third time in two months. His location was less than a mile off, his description of Sybil Blanchard close enough to be considered accurate. He had written Hair Color — ? and Wondero remembered Sybil’s premature gray. Picking up the phone on his desk, he gave Jack a call.

  The call went through. Maybe Jack had seen a little more that Wondero could pry out of him. Did the killer have any scars? How about tattoos or facial hair? Flying through the heavens at warp speed could be hard on a man’s memory. Think hard, Jack.

  An automated voice answered Jack’s phone, said the number was a thing of the past. Wondero nestled the receiver into the cradle and took the last swallow of beer. Running a trace on him would take weeks. Shit.

  At midnight, he decided to call it quits. As was his custom, he checked each room in the downstairs, making sure the windows and doors were securely fastened, and the security system was on. After trailing the same killer for four years, it had occurred to him that there was a chance that he had stumbled across his man, and that Death now knew him. The thought routinely haunted him.

  He decided to watch some TV before he went to sleep. He surfed the channels, and finally stopped on The Tonight Show. Jay Leno’s face lit up the screen, and he settled back in the couch, hoping to be entertained.

  “Our next guest is considered one of the world’s foremost magicians and escape artists,” Leno read off a card. “He is currently headlining at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, and starting May 10 will be performing a two week, one man show at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre here in Los Angeles. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the amazing Vincent Hardare.”

  As the Tonight Show band played “It’s Impossible” the tuxedoed magician appeared in a small pond of light on the large soundstage. With his dark coloring and athletic build, his engaging good looks were instantly familiar to the studio audience. His widely televised “Escapes from Death” had made him a popular media figure, and like his uncle Houdini before him, given him a reputation he often found a challenge to measure up to.

  “Thank you. Tonight, I would like to test your imagination, and present a feat truly beyond explanation. First, may I have the assistance of a young lady from the audience?”

  Stepping forward, Hardare chose a photogenic blond sitting on the second row aisle. “… if you don’t mind. Your name please.”

  The girl excitedly jumped up, all but blinding the cameraman and eclipsing the magician. Long luxurious legs, black leather mini skirt, red silk blouse halfway unbuttoned, she blew a teased curl out of her china doll face and said, “Samantha Droop.”

  Hardare escorted her on the stage. An assistant had brought out two folding metal chairs, onto which he’d placed a thin board.

  “Samantha, have you ever been levitated before?”

  “No.” She took the board and flipped it over, letting the audience see it was unprepared. “Will I need flight insurance?”

  The audience laughed. Hardare requested a little floating music from the bad, and had Samantha lie on the board.

  “Please lay perfectly still,” he said.

  She complied, and the magician raised his arms. There was a drum roll, then the haunting notes from a clarinet. There were oohs and aahs as Samantha mysteriously ascended a foot above the two chairs. She continued upward, and was soon chest high with the magician. Turning her head, she made a goofy face for the camera.

  Hardare waved his arms around the thin board. “No wires, mirrors or invisible threads. Nothing at all.”

  “Then what is it,” she said loudly. “Christian Science and rubber bands?”

  The audience’s laughter completely drowned out the band’s playing.

  “Take a look into the monitor,” Hardare said, raising his hands so she floated higher and was hovering directly above his forehead. “You be the judge.”

  “Who believes anything they see on television?” she said skeptically, hardly glancing at the monitor. “They say magicians don’t use trick photography, but I think it’s a bunch of hooey.”

  While she talked, Hardare moved beneath her. With a wave he sent her higher as she continued to ramble.

  “Girls turning into lions and the Statue of Liberty disappearing — who buys that stuff, anyway? Not me, that’s for sure; I’m a realist, and magic isn’t real. If I were really floating wouldn’t my voice be getting higher?” By now she had floated past the overhead mikes and into the curtains and was invisible to the studio audience. “If people could float, wouldn’t NASA be onto it? Come on, let’s be real.”

  The cameras had followed Samantha’s ascent and now lowered onto Hardare. He raised his arms apologetically and with a sly grin said, “Well, I suppose you can’t fool everyone. Thank you very much.”

  With the applause the magician’s grin grew into a broad smile. He glanced at the ceiling and then shrugged his shoulders. On cue the lights dimmed on the small soundstage.

  Moments later Hardare was shaking hands with his host. He sat down beside Leno’s first guest, a young singer who had snubbed him backstage during the rehearsal. Being slighted by a kid no one had heard of six months ago had raised Hardare’s ire — he had worked his first professional show at age ten, and now at forty-two, was close to reaching the pinnacle of his profession — and was still angry an hour before taping. In exasperation his wife had asked him the name of the foul-mouthe
d comic who’d given him the same treatment on The Tonight Show a few years back. He couldn’t remember it, and his wife had said, “Neither can anyone else.”

  “Was that your daughter?” Leno asked during the break. “I remember when she was just a little kid.”

  “That was her,” Hardare said.

  “They grow up fast.”

  They came back on the air. Reading off a printed card, Leno said, “Next week, the amazing Hardare will be doing a two-week engagement at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre here in LA. I’m told you’ll be presenting quite a different act.”

  “That’s right,” Hardare said. “My uncle, Harry Houdini, presented the first psychic theatre in the United States. I’ve spent years studying Houdini’s notes, and will present an updated version of this show.”