Psych: Mind Over Magic

by William Rabkin

  “He was the fugitive from justice who was cannily hiding out from the law by painting himself green and appearing in front of a thousand people every night, right?” Gus said.

  “And twice on Sunday.”

  “And Chubby Dead Guy’s been looking for him,” Gus said.

  “Exactly,” Shawn said. “He’s been searching the country with no luck. But just when he’s about to give up the hunt, he happens to read about the hot new act on the Strip. It sounds like something Mellish used to do, or to talk about, back before he did whatever terrible thing he did. So he plays a hunch, buys a ticket to Vegas, and comes to the show every night, looking for some bit of evidence that will be enough to get a judge to issue a warrant to let him look under the green paint.”

  “Somebody must have wanted this Mellish pretty bad, because Chubby Dead Guy has already racked up a thousand bucks on show tickets just in the first five tapes we pulled,” Gus said.

  “That’s the trouble with law enforcement today,” Shawn said. “All this obsession with money. Did anyone ever ask Inspector Gerard for receipts when he was tracking Dr. Richard Kimble? Did Jack McGee need to submit expense reports when he was closing in on the Incredible Hulk?”

  “Jack McGee was a reporter,” Gus said.

  “That’s it!” Shawn said suddenly.

  “What’s it?”

  “The dead guy,” Shawn said. “He’s Jack McGee. And the green guy isn’t a Martian at all. He’s the Incredible Hulk.”

  “The Hulk. P’tol P’kah is the Incredible Hulk.”

  “You said yourself the act was incredible,” Shawn said.

  “I also said it was amazing, but that doesn’t make him Spiderman,” Gus said. “In fact, I’m going to state categorically that simply because I use an adjective to describe something, that doesn’t mean it shares all the properties of every other thing anyone has ever used that adjective about.”

  “Really?” Shawn said. “I’m giving you a chance to track down a killer superhero and you want to quibble about grammar?”

  “What I want is to figure out what happened to P’tol P’kah,” Gus said. “And how Chubby Dead Guy ended up that way.”

  “I suspect half of that comes from too many between-meal snacks.”

  Shawn ejected the videotape and slapped a new one into the player. He searched backward through the entire tape, but neither of them could see a hint of a bowler anywhere.

  “Maybe it’s before the chubby guy tracked him down,” Gus said.

  “No way to tell,” Shawn said, “because Rudge’s unique system of dating his tapes seems to consist of measuring the decay of any radioactive particles that might have wandered into the plastic.”

  Gus flipped through the pile of tapes on the floor. None of them was dated, or labeled in any way. He grabbed one at random and handed it to Shawn.

  “Maybe we’ll have better luck with this one.”

  Shawn ejected the Chubby Dead Guy-free tape and tossed it back on the desk, then inserted a new one into the player. Unlike the rest of them, this one wasn’t wound quite to the end, as if Rudge had finally gotten sick of torturing himself by watching the trick he could never hope to master. Shawn pressed PLAY and then FAST-FORWARD so they could zip through most of the act. Even at top speed, Gus was astonished by the Dissolving Man, although he was quick to point out to himself that this in no way was meant to suggest that P’tol P’kah was one of the X-Men. As he had seen happen in each of the previous five tapes, the Martian Magician dissolved in a final burst of light and sound, and then reappeared on the ceiling. This must have been recorded during one of Rudge’s later visits, because he knew exactly where to point the camera to catch the entire descent. Constant practice gave the image a smooth flow as it tracked P’tol P’kah down to the ground.

  But when the Martian Magician reached the floor, something was very different. This time the green man didn’t lift his arms to encourage a new wave of applause. Instead, he landed heavily on his enormous black boots and, staring at a spot across the showroom floor, bared his sharpened teeth in a terrifying growl.

  “What’s that about?” Shawn said.

  Gus’ first instinct was to turn the TV so that they could see whatever had made P’tol P’kah so angry. Fortunately, Rudge apparently shared that instinct. The camera swiveled so fast, the entire audience was reduced to a blur of color, then swung back to find its target—and the Martian’s.

  Chubby Dead Guy, in all his Chubby Aliveness, stood rooted to his spot on the floor, staring across the room with a look of fear on his face. No doubt this was the result of being confronted by P’tol P’kah’s fierce grimace. It looked like he was so scared he was actually crying. Tears dripped down his face. But as Gus leaned closer to the TV, he realized there was too much liquid for it to be tears, especially since it seemed to be running down from his hairline.

  “Is it raining in there?” Gus said.

  “If it is, it’s only because the hailstorm has stopped,” Shawn said, pointing at the top of Chubby Dead Guy’s head, where two small cubes of ice were zipping around the brim of his bowler.

  “Then either he’s been bobbing for apples with his hat on, or someone threw a drink in his face,” Gus said.

  “And I can guess who that might have been.” Shawn froze the image and then framed it back until Gus could see a flash of spacegirl silver right where Chubby Dead Guy’s hand was disappearing out of the frame.

  “Jack McGee is a lech?” Gus said.

  “Let’s find out.”

  Shawn pressed the FRAME ADVANCE button and let the tape jerk forward. Chubby Dead Guy blinked water out of his eyes, but he couldn’t stop staring across the showroom at the spot where Shawn and Gus knew P’tol P’kah was brandishing fangs at him. He was so shocked, he seemed not to notice his hand, which, as the camera jiggled, was revealed to still be planted on the silver derriere of his space waitress. And then the camera swiveled back to the Martian Magician, who stomped his enormous black boots as he snarled.

  “I don’t understand what we’re seeing,” Gus said.

  “If I had to make a stab at it, I’d say that Chubby Dead Guy was taking advantage of the green guy’s surprise appearance to cop a feel from the cocktail waitress,” Shawn said.

  “And she threw a drink at him, right,” Gus said. “But why is P’tol P’kah so angry?”

  “This goes back to my original theory,” Shawn said.

  “He’s the Phantom of the Opera and Chubby Dead Guy stole his music so he could make the cocktail waitress a star?”

  “Okay, not exactly my original theory,” Shawn conceded. “But a refinement of it. The green guy is running from the police because he committed a crime, but it was a crime for the greater good. He stole a meat loaf to feed his starving child. But he was caught and sentenced to prison, where he suffered for many long years. Then, when he was released, he went back to his life of crime, pursued by an obsessed detective. At the end of his rope, he was given shelter by a kindly priest, but he repaid this generosity by stealing all his silver. But when he was caught, the priest told the police—”

  “This is not a refinement of any theory you’ve had so far,” Gus said. “It’s a brand-new theory. Except it’s not really new because you’re stealing it from Les Misérables.”

  “What country was Les Miz published in?” Shawn said.

  “France.”

  “And Phantom of the Opera?”

  “Also France,” Gus said. “So what?”

  “So it’s the same theory. I just grabbed the wrong book off the French literature shelf,” Shawn said. “Like that’s never happened to you.”

  “Maybe you could theorize that P’tol P’kah is actually a red balloon or Babar, King of the Elephants,” Gus said. “They’re from French books, too. And they’ve got about as much to do with this case as anything you’ve said.”

  “Only because you’re not paying attention,” Shawn said. “Here’s what I’m saying: The green guy is a fugitive from ju
stice, but he’s actually a good guy. And the one thing that makes him angry is seeing the poor and weak being preyed on by the rich and powerful.”

  “Then he’s got to be in a bad mood pretty much all the time, living in Las Vegas,” Gus said.

  “Anyway, he’s out there, doing his act, lowering himself into the audience on his lamp cord, and what does he see? Some creep in a three-piece suit and a bowler hat, the very essence of upper-class snobbery, grabbing the ass of a poor cocktail waitress, using sexuality as a weapon to assert his socioeconomic status over hers.”

  Gus stared at him. “Where did you get that from?”

  “One of the beat cops always leaves his copy of The Nation in the police station men’s room,” Shawn said.

  “And you read it?”

  “Sure. And I learned a lot from the experience,” Shawn said.

  “Like what?”

  “That it actually is possible for a magazine to be so boring you can’t even read it on the toilet,” Shawn said. “Anyway, the green guy sees this terrible atrocity happening across the showroom and he flies into a rage.”

  Gus thought that one over for a moment, then shook his head. “A cocktail waitress in one of those outfits is going to get her ass grabbed every thirty seconds in a casino showroom,” Gus said. “If P’tol P’kah flew into a rage every time he witnessed it, he’d never have a moment free to dissolve.”

  “Good point,” Shawn said. “And it’s hard for me to imagine this entire case revolving around gender politics, anyway, no matter what Katrina vanden Heu vel might think. So maybe I got it backward. Chubby Dead Guy grabs the waitress; she throws her drink in his face; a big chunk of the crowd turns to see what’s going on—”

  Gus tried to visualize the scene and immediately understood what Shawn was suggesting. “P’tol P’kah sees that half his audience isn’t paying attention to him the way they should, so he turns to find out what’s taking their eyes off him—” Gus broke off, feeling excitement flooding through his body. This case was actually beginning to make sense for the first time.

  “And he sees the man who’s been chasing him for all these months,” Shawn said. “He’s caught. So now he’s got a choice. He’s built up this new life for himself, he’s making ridiculous amounts of money, he’s got the biggest act on the Strip, and now it’s all going to come to an end. He’s got to flee, or be exposed.”

  “But he’s got to know if Chubby Dead Guy was able to track him down here, there’s nowhere he’ll ever be able to hide completely,” Gus said. “He’ll be giving everything up, and he’ll get nothing in return.”

  “Which is when he hatches the plan,” Shawn said. “He arranges the performance at the Fortress of Magic, knowing that Chubby Dead Guy is going to follow him there. He sets a trap for his victim and kills him, leaving the body in his tank as his final salute to the world of stage magic. And then he takes off his makeup and slips away into the night.”

  It felt good. It felt right. It felt like victory. Shawn and Gus enjoyed the glow.

  “I think we’ve solved this puppy,” Shawn said.“Chalk up another win for the home team.”

  Gus felt his glow start to slip away. “You do realize we haven’t actually solved anything yet.”

  “I’m willing to concede there are still a few loose ends.”

  “Like who P’tol P’kah really is and what he was running from,” Gus said.

  “Details.”

  “And who Chubby Dead Guy worked for and why he was searching for him.”

  “Technicalities,” Shawn said.

  “How he managed to kill Chubby Dead Guy and disappear in front of a hundred witnesses with no one witnessing anything.”

  “Trifles.”

  “Why the federal government is involved in this case.”

  “I’m running out of different ways to minimize your point,” Shawn said. “Could you just lump the rest of your objections into one?”

  Gus could. “How about the one thing we were specifically hired to find out,” he said. “Where P’tol P’kah is.”

  “Okay, so there are a few loose middles to go along with the loose ends,” Shawn said. “But we have a working theory, and that’s half the battle.”

  “We’ve already had about ten working theories,” Gus said. “So that means we’ve won five battles. And we’re still no closer to figuring this out than we were before.”

  “Not true at all,” Shawn said. “For the first time we can question someone who’s actually talked to Chubby Dead Guy and can tell us who he was.”

  “We can?”

  Shawn nodded. “The cocktail waitress.”

  “They must have a million cocktail waitresses at Outer Space,” Gus said. “And they’re all dressed exactly alike. So how are we going to figure out which one this is?”

  “We already know,” Shawn said.

  Before Gus could object, Shawn framed the tape forward. At first Gus couldn’t understand what Shawn was trying to show him. And then, after a half dozen frames, Gus saw it. As the camera started to whir back over to P’tol P’kah, it caught a brief flash of the spacegirl’s arm.

  The spacegirl’s arm and the tattooed reptiles running up and down it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Who knew there was so much money in the human freak show business?” Shawn said. “How many eyeballs do you have to poke out to buy a three-million-dollar castle?”

  They were parked in Gus’ Echo, outside a grand Spanish mansion high on a hill overlooking the sparkling Pacific.

  “Maybe we’ve got the wrong house,” Gus said, checking the paper in his hand against the tiled address sign set into the long white wall. They matched, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a mistake earlier in the information chain.

  “Impossible,” Shawn said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it was too hard to get this one,” Shawn said. “If it’s wrong, we have to start all over again and I refuse to do that.”

  It had been hard—much harder than either of them would have guessed. It seemed like a safe bet that a woman who was covered in tattoos, called herself Phlegm, the Human Freak Show, and made her living by plunging knives into her eyes would be fairly easy to track down. At least there wouldn’t be too much trouble confusing her with any of the other Phlegm, the Human Freak Shows in the phone book. And odds were she’d probably have a pretty good Web presence so that America’s legion of knife-in-the-eyeball fans would know where to look for her next performance.

  But aside from a couple of fleeting mentions in articles lamenting the failure of the New Vaudeville movement back in the mid-1990s—and a couple more celebrating that failure—they couldn’t find any trace of her. They tried to get her information from the membership secretary at the Fortress of Magic, but that august executive insisted she was sworn to secrecy. Even after Shawn and Gus had successfully bribed her with a coupon for two dollars off two pizzas that had come in the mail that day—apparently the Fortress of Magic was not generous with its employees’ paychecks—she had been unable to find any listing for Phlegm. Gus had insisted she try a long list of alternate spellings of the word, but the closest the records came was someone named Don Flegman, and he’d died around the same time as disco. They even trolled the seedier parts of State Street on the off chance that she was performing next to the buskers, three-card monte dealers, and charcoal artists peddling sketches of Jimi Hendrix, but no one they talked to had ever heard of an act anything like hers.

  Finally, Shawn announced that they would have to call their client. After all, he had employed Phlegm as a cocktail waitress. Gus was nervous about the prospect, figuring that if they didn’t bother Fleck, he might forget he’d hired any detectives and not feel compelled to destroy them if they were unable to solve the case to his satisfaction. But as Shawn pointed out cheerfully, a mogul who once sued a contractor into bankruptcy for using the wrong brand of Navajo White paint on his maid’s room’s ceiling was probably not going to forget about the two privat
e detectives who’d eaten his lobster and purpled his white carpet.

  Fortunately for Gus’ nerves, when they called the number Fleck had given them, the line was answered by one of his many assistants, an efficient-sounding young woman who introduced herself as Sandy Butler, Associate Assistant to the Assistant Associate. And when they explained what they were looking for, the AAttAA assured them it would be neither necessary nor wise to trouble the big man over something this minor. She could handle it herself. All she needed was a name.

  That, of course, was the sticking point, because there was little chance that their subject had applied for—and gotten—a cocktail waitress position under the name Phlegm, the Human Freak Show. Sandy ran a check of the personnel files just to make sure, but there were no listings for Phlegm or any other type of mucus in the system.

  They were stuck. One woman seemed to hold their first major clue in this case, and they had no way to find her—or at least no way that wasn’t going to require a huge amount of work.

  “I guess we’re going to have to do this the hard way,” Shawn said into the speakerphone. “If we give you a couple of dates, can you send us a list of all the cocktail waitresses who were working then? We’ll track them all down until we find the right one.”

  “I can,” Sandy said. “But maybe you’d like me to narrow that list down a little first?”

  “Narrow it how?” Gus said.

  “Hair color, eye color, height, weight, bra size, place of residence, distinguishing physical characteristics, marital status, citizenship status, food allergies, medical history, legal history, educational history, financial history, sexual history, birth date, birth weight, astrological sign, number of parking tickets paid or unpaid, associations, clubs, political party, Netflix queue, fashion sense, common sense, pets by breed, pets by name, siblings, race, religion, church attendance, favorite book, favorite movie—”

  “Wait a minute,” Gus said. “Fleck keeps that much information on his employees?”

  “Our background investigations are extremely thorough,” Sandy said, a hint of pride leaking through her businesslike tone. “Speaking of which, you might want to pop down to Santa Barbara City Hall today. And bring cash. The parking ticket you received at 1637 State Street is exactly one month old, and after tomorrow, late fees are going to kick in.”