The Man Who Cheated Death (Vincent Hardare)

by James Swain

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Would you like me to help you fix it?”

  “Nothing would make me happier,” Osbourne said.

  “Good. Now listen carefully. I’ve been thinking about this situation since our visit. I think I know how we can fix this, once and for all.”

  Osbourne smiled into the receiver. D.B. had guided him throughout his killing spree, and had come up with creative solutions to solving his dilemmas. He couldn’t wait to hear how his mentor planned to get rid of Hardare.

  “I’m listening,” Osbourne said.

  Hanging upside down by his ankles, Hardare struggled with the canvas straitjacket holding him prisoner when Jan came up from behind and gave him a push.

  “Hey!” he protested, his body swinging like a pendulum.

  “You’re going to be outside,” she said. “Are you ready if a stiff wind starts blowing you around?”

  No, he wasn’t, and in discomfort he managed to free his left arm, and untied the leather straps holding him prisoner.

  “Two minute, fifteen seconds,” Jan said, hitting her stopwatch. “You’ve got to speed it up.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said, throwing the straitjacket off. Doubling himself up, he released his ankles from the block and tackle that held him suspended from the ceiling, and dropped to the floor.

  For a minute he lay on a mattress on the floor and waited for the room to stop spinning. Jan plopped down beside him.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Tired and old,” he said, closing his eyes.

  “Stop it. You’ve got the body of a twenty year old.”

  “Maybe I should give it back. It’s getting wrinkled.”

  He sat up, and in answer to his prayers Jan got on her knees and massaged his aching shoulders. Sometimes he just didn’t fully think things out. The straitjacket escape had been his signature for years, but of late he had given the routine a rest, and begun to emphasize more magic in his performances. During the hiatus, age and lack of practice had caught up with him.

  “You need a good hot bath,” Jan said. She felt him stiffen, and realized she had said the wrong thing. “There’s no reason to kill yourself practicing. Think of how sore you’re going to be tomorrow.”

  “Think how sore I’ll be Wednesday night if I fall,” he said.

  He retrieved the straitjacket from the floor. When Houdini had introduced the escape into his show, it had caused a sensation. Later, his father had added the wrinkle of hanging upside-down. Hardare had further strengthened the routine by freeing himself while hanging from a burning rope.

  But the escape was both physically and emotionally draining. He could not perform it night after night without wearing himself out. And so, he had dropped it from his shows. His audiences had not seemed to mind, and neither had he.

  And now he was paying the price. The straitjacket was as torturous to remove as the first time he’d tried it on. His muscles had lost their memory, and only through constant practice was he going to make them remember.

  “One more time,” Hardare said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  He fitted himself into the straitjacket, and Jan secured the leather straps across his back. Lying on the floor, he let her attach the block and tackle to his ankles. Then, Jan began pulling him up to the ceiling. When he was as high as he could go, she tied her end of rope to a hook in the floor, and positioned the mattress directly beneath him.

  “Take the mattress away,” he said.

  Jan ignored him, stopwatch in hand.

  “It’s a false sense of security,” he said. “I won’t be hanging over a net Wednesday night.”

  “No, but you should be. Acrobats use security nets all the time.”

  “Not the great ones. Please get rid of it.”

  She slid the mattress into the corner. “Happy now?”

  “Ecstatic,” he said.

  Chapter 33

  Mr. Jellybean

  The tickets were just not selling, and by Tuesday night Hardare had the gut-wrenching feeling that he had made a mistake in talking his wife and daughter into staying in Los Angeles.

  Between rehearsals, he and Jan had run all over town, appearing on local talk shows and radio programs to get the word out. He had even gone to the L.A. Times building and with a dozen bemused reporters as witnesses, levitated Jan a full six feet in the air while standing on the roof. The reporters had cheered and applauded heartily, and someone had taken their picture, and now all he could hope was that a story would appear in the paper either tomorrow or the next day.

  There was no doubt that the publicity had helped, but early Tuesday morning the theatre manager had felt forced to call Hardare with the bad news. Less than a third of the tickets had sold, and interest seemed to be waning. The show opened Friday night, and based upon the manager’s projections, Hardare would be lucky if half the seats were filled.

  Hardare had dejectedly hung up the phone. Even before he found his calculator, he knew that fifty percent occupancy was going to lose them money. The question was, how much? He did some quick arithmetic and stared at the long, ugly number, then found the courage to multiply it by fourteen.

  He was going to lose his shirt. They needed to sell three thousand more tickets just to break even. At this rate, he would be in debt for the rest of his life within two weeks.

  His last hope was Jayne Hunter, his contact at Action 10 News. Hunter had agreed to televise his straitjacket escape, but had left the details sketchy. Hardare knew that he needed at least four minutes on air to “sell” the escape, which in turn would help sell a few more tickets. If he got lucky, word of mouth would build to the second week, where they might actually realize a profit.

  Hunter had balked at the idea of giving him that much time. “Four minutes is a lifetime on TV,” she’d said — and he’d had to sell her on the story’s unique angle, and how brave he and his family were for staying in L.A., groveling on and on until he wanted to throw up.

  Finally Hunter had compromised, and given him three minutes of air time. When he’d begged for another sixty seconds, she had flatly said no. Three minutes was her limit.

  He’d been livid when he’d hung up the phone. He deserved more than three minutes; he had earned it. The idea that one escape could make or break their two week run, especially when he considered what his family had gone through, only served to remind him how incredibly cruel show business could be.

  It was Jan who finally brought him out of his funk. “Three minutes is better than nothing,” she’d reminded him. “Think of all the acts that never get a break at all. Come on, Vince. Everything is going to work out fine.”

  Hardare was in the living room of the house in Malibu when his daughter’s heart-breaking sobs carried down the stairs. Within seconds, his wife and the three bodyguards she’d hired had their guns drawn, and were running to her aid.

  “Daddy!”

  Sobbing, Crystal ran past them and threw her arms around her father, burying her head into his chest.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  Her grief was so great that she could not speak. He gently guided her into the kitchen, and made her sit on a chair. She gulped down a glass of water before getting control of herself. Jan appeared at the doorway.

  “House is secure,” his wife said.

  Hardare nodded while staring at his daughter. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Someone killed the animals,” Crystal said, choking on the words. “One of the stagehands at the theatre called. He said the rabbits and birds… were lying upside down in their cages. He didn’t… didn’t know what to do!”

  “Maybe they got sick, honey.”

  “He said they were dead. Even Mr. Jellybean.”

  Her body became racked with sobs, and Hardare held her tightly in his arms. To Jan he said, “Call the theatre, will you, and find out what the hell is going on.”

  Twenty minutes later, Hardare was speeding down the
freeway with one of their bodyguards, a bearded, small arms specialist named Brian, when he realized the true source of his daughter’s heartbreak. Maxwell T. Jellybean, the oldest and most affectionate of the Dutch dwarf rabbits he used in his show, had been a present from his late wife to Crystal many Easters ago. It was not the type of thing that he thought a good father should forget, and decided to call his daughter once they reached the theatre.

  He parked in a back alley and they got out. Beside the backstage door sat two long rows of cages containing his rabbits and birds. Several members of his crew were moping around looking bewildered and upset. Kneeling beside the cages was a member of the union stage crew that came when you rented the theatre, a burnout with lifeless, shoulder-length blond hair.

  “They ain’t dead,” the burnout declared loudly, trying to enlist the others’ support. “Lookit. That bird tried to flap its wing. You saw that, didn’t you?”

  “It’s just the wind,” a crew member said, puffing on a cigarette. Seeing Hardare approach, he quickly stamped it out.

  The burnout looked up and got to his feet. “Mister Hardare, I don’t know what happened. I was just sitting here, minding my own business…”

  Hardare silenced him with a stare. He knelt down beside Brian, who had opened a cage and removed a lifeless fantail pigeon, cradling its stiff body gently between his palms.

  “Nobody got close to those animals,” the burnout said.

  Someone in the crew snickered, an indictment if Hardare had ever heard one. He looked at Maxwell T. Jellybean doing the back-stroke in his narrow metal cage. His daughter’s favorite pet looked very dead, and he swallowed a lump in his throat.

  Brian turned the pigeon on its stomach, and carefully combed through the thick layer of feathers, his fingertips eventually parting a small patch above the left wing. Hardare stared at the small black dart lodged in the bird’s speckled red skin.

  “It’s some kind of knockout dart,” Brian said, laying the pigeon gently back inside the cage. Shutting the door, he gave Mr. Jellybean a thorough going over, and found a tiny dart buried in its side. “Very professional looking.”

  Without hesitation Hardare said, “Osbourne did this.”

  “I think you’re right,” Brian said.

  “But why?”

  Brian looked him in the eye and said, “He used the dart gun because it was silent, and allowed him to strike safely from a distance. He knocked out your animals because he knows they mean a great deal to you.”

  “Are you saying this is some kind of psychological warfare?”

  His bodyguard shrugged his shoulders. “I think he’s trying to send you a message.”

  “Which is?”

  “That he can still hurt the things you love,” Brian said. “I think that is what this all means.”

  Chapter 34

  Atascadero

  The Bell LongRanger 206 helicopter carrying Wondero and Rittenbaugh high above L.A.’s sprawling mass picked up Highway 101 just outside of Ventura and took it up the coastline to Pismo Beach, then swung inland and followed the main drag until reaching the state mental hospital in Atascadero. The LongRanger was used primarily for drug sweeps, and able to land anywhere there was a moderately flat surface, which allowed them to set down in a dusty field just a hundred yards from the hospital. Feeling like movie cops, they marched across the field and through the swinging front doors of the main building.

  Wondero was furious with himself, and for good reason. He and his partner had been running around L.A. trying to catch Eugene Osbourne, when an important clue had been sitting on his desk in the form of a fax from the director at Atascadero. The fax had been there for two days, yet only this morning had he bothered to read it.

  A man in hospital whites manned the reception desk. He left his fingerprints all over their photo I.D.’s before picking up a phone, and announcing their arrival to the hospital’s director.

  “Dr. Cavanaugh will see you in a few minutes,” he said, putting down the phone.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions,” Wondero said.

  “Not at all.”

  “Do you know a patient named Douglas Barnhart?”

  “Sure. D.B.’s one of our lifers.”

  “Has D.B. had any visitors lately?”

  “Don’t know, but I can find out.” Flipping open a log book, the receptionist ran his finger down a column of names. “Let’s see. D. B. had a visitor… on Monday.”

  “Can you tell me who that visitor was?” Wondero asked, straining to read the upside down names in the book.

  The receptionist turned the log around so he could have a look. In the Visitor’s Box beside D.B.’s name was a capital E followed by a long, scribbly line.

  “That looks like Rodriguez’s chicken scratch,” the receptionist said, taking the log back. “He works here on Mondays. I’d call him for you, but he’s up in Frisco seeing his mother.”

  Wondero handed the receptionist his card. “Please give this to Rodriguez when he gets back. Ask him to call me. Tell him it’s urgent.”

  “Will do,” the receptionist said, pocketing the card.

  Dr. Richard Cavanaugh was a balding mid-fortyish man of few emotions. His tired eyes only hinted at the ordeal required to run a state institution for men deemed criminally insane by the courts, a job Wondero likened to being a gatekeeper in hell.

  Cavanaugh introduced the woman sitting on the couch in his office as Dr. Ruth Heller, one of his chief administrators. Heller sat with arms and legs crossed, her face a blunt wall, and Wondero sensed a problem even before he and Rittenbaugh were seated.

  “Dr. Heller has been treating D.B. for over a decade,” Cavanaugh said, pulling up a chair to complete the circle. “She’s also writing a book about him. I thought she should hear what you told me.”

  “You got a publisher?” Rittenbaugh asked innocently.

  Heller acted like she might bite Rittenbaugh’s head off. “Yes. It’s nearly finished,” the administrator said proudly. “I believe I’ve traced the origin of D.B.’s hostilities and through therapy actually cured him of his homicidal tendencies. Needless to say, it came as a shock when Dr. Cavanaugh told me that you suspected him of having master-minded a series of murders from this hospital.”

  Wondero felt like he had walked into a minefield. He hadn’t bothered to get a subpoena to question D.B.; if he didn’t handle Heller correctly, she might not let them see him.

  “You know him pretty well, then,” Wondero said.

  “I believe I know D.B. better than he knows himself,” Heller stated confidently. “I’ve conducted several hundred sessions with him, and have isolated a number of traumatic childhood incidents which even he does not remember.”

  “That’s amazing,” Wondero said. She had calmed down, and he decided to press his attack. “In your work with D.B., has the name Babita Cattrell ever come up?”

  Dr. Heller’s eyes searched the air. “No.”

  “She was a co-ed that D.B. raped at UCLA in 1995. She was the prosecution’s sole witness at D.B.’s trial, I guess because she was the only person who ever survived one of his attacks.”

  “He’s never mentioned her,” Dr. Heller said.

  “How about Eugene Osbourne? He was D.B.’s roommate five years ago. That name sound familiar?”

  “No, but that’s not surprising. D.B. has been here fifteen years. I’m sure he’s had quite a few roommates.”

  Wondero felt sorry for Heller, and her years of wasted effort. From his wallet he took an aging snapshot that had been part of him for four years: it was of an aspiring folk singer with auburn hair and a tentative smile. He handed it to Heller.

  “That was Babita Cattrell,” Wondero said.

  “And?” she said, handing the snapshot back.

  “Eugene Osbourne began killing women in L.A. four years ago,” Wondero said. “Babita was his first victim.”

  A look of dread wiped away Heller’s stoic expression. “Do you think that D.B. told Osbourne t
o do this?”

  “Yes, we do. D.B. was suspected of killing over fifty women. He picked his victims carefully. Prostitutes, women living alone, runaways. Eugene Osbourne has been doing exactly the same thing.”

  “You’re saying that D.B. trained Osbourne?” she said.

  “That’s what we think,” Wondero said.