Psych: Mind Over Magic

by William Rabkin

  “Which is preferable to what will happen to him once he gets out,” Major Voges said.

  Henry shoved her out of the way and went to the stage, but before he could climb up, the water in the tank had changed. Before it had been perfectly still. Now it bubbled and frothed like a glass of cheap champagne. As Henry stared, he realized the bubbles were coming from his son’s body.

  Shawn raised his hands over his head, sending a storm of froth rising to the surface. As the bubbles flew from his fingertips, the crowd saw with a shock that the fingers were shrinking. No, dissolving. Within seconds, they were gone down to the first two knuckles, and quickly the hands were reduced to clublike stumps.

  Shawn lowered one deformed hand to touch his stomach, and immediately the bubbles began fizzing out of his abdomen. But they didn’t rise to the top of the tank. They spun around, as if caught in a whirlpool. And when they cleared, they had eaten a hole clear through Shawn’s midsection. Where moments before there had been a blue-checked flannel shirt over a white T, now there was a void. And it was growing in all directions, devouring his chest, his hips, his shoulders. His arms, eaten from both sides, fell off his body and dissolved into bubbles before they hit the tank floor. All that was left was the grinning head floating seven feet over the enormous black boots that still sat at the bottom of the tank.

  The bubbles were working on Shawn’s chin now. Before they could reach any higher, he opened his mouth as if to speak—or to scream. But what came out wasn’t just a blisteringly loud roaring sound. It was light—a blast of pure white light that lit up every corner of the showroom.

  Then the light went out, and the room was plunged into darkness.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  When the houselights came back on, everyone was staring at the tank, stunned. Even Gus, who’d known what was going to happen, was rendered momentarily speechless by the spectacle.

  Henry broke the silence, turning savagely on Fleck. “Where’s my son?” he demanded. “What has your machine done to my son?”

  The showroom doors flew open and Shawn strolled in. “Was someone looking for me?”

  For one brief second, a look of relief washed over Henry’s face. But he managed to get his emotions under control quickly and replaced the relieved look with a scowl.

  A mournful cry came from the center of the room. “All my life I’ve been working at my craft,” Rudge wailed, “and this punk is able to duplicate the most amazing illusion ever performed without any effort at all.”

  “There was a little bit of effort,” Shawn said. “The backstage door weighs a ton.”

  “I knew it was all a cheap trick,” Jessica Higgenbotham spit. “There was no way P’tol P’kah wasn’t a complete fraud.”

  “How did you get out of the tank?” Lassiter said.

  “Look,” Shawn said, wringing out his shirt. No water dripped out of it. The cloth was completely dry. “I was never in it.”

  “But we saw you,” Detective O’Hara said.

  “Did you?” Shawn said. “Did you really?”

  “Yes, Shawn, we all did,” Henry said. “Do you want to explain now?”

  “Or do we have to beat it out of you?” Lassiter added hopefully.

  “Gus!” Shawn called. “Show them.”

  Gus went over to the tank and picked at the glass where it met the metal frame. Scraping at it with his fingernail, he pried back a thin sheet of clear plastic, much like the sticky protective wrapping on a new iPod screen.

  “Get away from that tank,” Major Voges commanded. “That information is classified.”

  “Then we promise not to tell anyone,” O’Hara said. “Go on, Shawn.”

  “It was Augie Balustrade who gave me the clue,” Shawn said. “Because he wasn’t a crook or a hustler, he really was devoted to his craft. And it personally offended him that P’tol P’kah was perverting it.”

  Gus stepped away from the tank. “That’s why he was clutching a TV remote when he died. To send us a message from beyond the grave.”

  “What message?” Lassiter said.

  “That P’tol P’kah was not only our favorite Martian; he was actually My Favorite Martian,” Shawn said. “A TV show about a fake alien.”

  Gus pulled the plastic sheeting off the glass so that it covered only the left half of the tank. Then he ran up the airplane stairs and fiddled with something on the lid. After a second, the thin plastic came alive with the image of Shawn splashing into the tank. The plain glass showed nothing but still water behind it.

  “Hey, Henry,” Bud shouted. “If you want to get me a wedding present to make up for being such a jerk, I’ll take one of those.”

  “If you flip the latch one way, the lid opens to reveal the water below,” Shawn said. “If you flip it again, a panel in the lid slides back and opens a chamber in the back of the tank. You drop down there and step out a hidden door when the lights go out.”

  “That’s not possible,” Jessica Higgenbotham said. “We would have heard of this TV technology if it existed.”

  “Exactly what I said about the dissolving ray,” Gus said. “And the answer turns out to be the same. We never hear of it if the government wants to keep it secret.”

  “And what branch of the government would be in charge of something like this?” Shawn said.

  “I do believe that would be the Federal Communications Commission,” Gus said.

  “Specifically the Office of Engineering and Technology, Equipment Authorization Branch,” Shawn added.

  Lassiter and O’Hara swiveled toward Major Voges, who stared at them coldly.

  “I’m thinking that somewhere out there is a company that’s been waiting a long, long time for government approval of their new technology,” Shawn said. “Not realizing that the people who were supposed to be testing it had actually put it into use.”

  “At least they didn’t realize it until Augie Balustrade started phoning around, asking if something like that was possible,” Gus said. “And when they started to hear rumors, they called the agency in charge. They called Holly Voges.”

  “And she went to shut him up,” Shawn said.

  Major Voges glared at Shawn as if she were imagining what he’d look like strapped down to a board waiting for the fire hose.

  “Is this true?” O’Hara demanded. “The government organization you work for is the FCC?”

  “I never said anything else,” she said coldly.

  “You certainly implied something else.” Lassiter looked like a kid who’d just opened the giant box under the Christmas tree only to discover it contained socks.

  “I am not responsible for your assumptions, Detective,” Major Voges said, “any more than I am for your psychic’s errors in logic.”

  “I’ve got errors?” Shawn said.

  “He’s got logic?” Gus said.

  “He got part of the story right,” Major Voges said. “We were testing the stick-on TV technology, and it was stolen from our labs. My colleague, Doug Firrell, came under suspicion within the agency. He knew the only way to clear his name was to catch the real thief. Officially he took a leave of absence from the FCC; only I knew what he was really doing.”

  “Feeling up spacegirls in Las Vegas casinos,” Shawn said.

  Jessica Higgenbotham wheeled furiously on Major Voges. “That chubby dead creep worked for you?” she spit.

  “That’s why he knew all about your husband’s telecommunications company,” Gus said.

  “Hold on,” Lassiter commanded. “Are you identifying the man we found floating in the tank?”

  “Try to keep up, Lassie,” Shawn said.

  “He was a product tester for the FCC?” O’Hara said. “Then why couldn’t we find any record of him in any database?”

  “He was working undercover on a delicate issue,” Voges said. “I had his identity classified.”

  “How?” O’Hara said. “You work for the FCC, not Homeland Security.”

  “Anyone can mark anything classified these d
ays,” Shawn said. “It’s getting it unclassified that’s hard. In fact, I’ve just had Gus’ waist size marked top secret, so if anyone sells him a pair of pants, he’s going down.”

  “Doug was trying to prove P’tol P’kah, whoever he really was, had the stolen technology,” Major Voges said. “But the magician figured out who he was. He set up the private show here as a trap and used it to kill Doug, then disappeared.”

  “From the tank?” Lassiter said. “Didn’t he always do that?”

  “In a convertible,” Shawn said. “There was a police report that night of Shrek driving through downtown Santa Barbara.”

  “So now we know the identity of the dead man in the tank,” Lassiter said. “We just don’t know the identity of the man who put him there.”

  “Or how he did it,” O’Hara said.

  “I promise you, I will not stop searching until I find this man,” Major Voges said. “Once I take my fallen colleague back to Washington and see to his eternal rest, I will go after his killer.”

  “Going to be kind of hard to do from a jail cell,” Shawn said.

  “August Balustrade was dead when I got to his house,” Major Voges said. “P’tol P’kah must have gotten to him before I did.”

  “So you took off your clothes and ran into the street in your underwear,” Shawn said.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Voges said.

  Lassiter and O’Hara inched toward Major Voges. She didn’t move an inch.

  “I think we should continue this at the station,” Lassiter said.

  “This is ridiculous,” Major Voges said. “I was with you at the crime scene. P’tol P’kah set off a bomb to distract the police and he fled. He’s still out there while you’re stopping me from pursuing him.”

  “There was an explosion, but there was no bomb,” Shawn said.

  “Something exploded,” Lassiter said. “The neighbors heard it.”

  “It was P’tol P’kah,” Shawn said.

  “Wait a minute,” Jessica said. “The Martian Magician blew himself up? Why?”

  “For the answer to that, we have to return to the definitive work on all things magical,” Shawn said. “The Prestige. What that movie teaches us is that it’s easy to disappear from a cabinet. What’s hard is to reappear across the room, unless you happen to have—”

  Gus tugged on Shawn’s shirt. “I think you need to say spoiler alert here.”

  “You need spoiler alerts at a denouement?”

  “It’s just basic politeness,” Gus said.

  “Fine,” Shawn said. “Spoiler alert. You can’t make it look like you’re reappearing across the room unless you happen to have a machine for generating clones or a twin brother no one in the world has ever heard about.”

  “Hey!” Lyle Wheelock looked up from the back of the room, where he, Bud, and Henry had been talking over old times while Shawn explained the case. “You just ruined the movie for me—and it’s at the top of my Netflix queue.”

  “See?” Gus said.

  “But the next-best thing to a secret twin is somebody who looks like a secret twin,” Shawn said. “And a secret shaft from your apartment closet that leads into the ceiling of the showroom, where I have to imagine there’s a secret panel.”

  “The architect told me that was a laundry chute,” Fleck said. “No wonder it had rungs all the way down.”

  “The only problem is finding someone who looks like a seven-foot-tall Martian,” Gus said. “That would seem pretty hard to pull off.”

  “Unless you had the right tools,” Shawn said. “Hey, Lassie, did you ever get around to testing the air in that tank?”

  “I did. It was air.”

  “Not Martian air,” Shawn said. “Plain old Earth air.”

  “Plain old,” Lassiter said.

  “Why would P’tol P’kah possibly need all those tanks of compressed air?”

  Gus had retreated to the back of the stage, and came back carrying the tank that Lassiter’s men had left there for them. He took something dark and shriveled out of his pocket, then attached it to the tank’s nozzle and turned the valve. There was a loud hissing of escaped air, and Gus removed the now-filled balloon from the tank.

  “My million-dollar magician was nothing but a balloon animal?” Fleck said.

  “A little more than that,” Shawn said. “I’d guess he used a smaller version of the stick-on TV for the face. But he did have one thing in common with every other balloon animal. If he came across a sharp object . . .”

  Gus held a pin aloft so that everyone could see it, then jabbed the balloon. It exploded with a bang.

  “Which is why you should always wear clean underwear when you commit murder wearing a balloon suit,” Shawn said. “I’d guess you planned to run out of the house as P’tol P’kah to support your story that you were chasing down your partner’s killer.”

  Major Voges turned to the doors, but they were blocked by uniformed officers. Before they could move, she’d reached into her purse and pulled out her gun.

  Lassiter and O’Hara already had their guns out.

  “You can’t get away,” Lassiter said.

  “Don’t even think about it,” O’Hara said calmly.

  “I’ve already thought about it,” Major Voges said. “And there’s no way you can stop me without a bloodbath.”

  She took two steps backward to the door. Shawn shot his hand up in the air.

  “Hank!” Shawn shouted.

  A superball flew across the room right into Shawn’s palm. In one smooth motion he hurled it back, right at Major Voges’ head.

  It missed.

  “You idiot,” she snapped, and turned the gun on him. But before she could fire, the ball slammed into the door behind her, rocketed off, and blasted into the back of her head, knocking her off balance. Lassiter and O’Hara leapt across the room, grabbing her gun, spinning her around, and slapping the cuffs on her.

  “That concludes the denouement portion of this evening’s events,” Shawn said with a bow. “After a brief intermission, maybe we can persuade a special guest to stick knives in her eyeballs.”

  Shawn and Gus linked hands, took a deep bow, and started to walk off stage.

  “Hey!” Henry shouted. “What about the guy in the tank? How did he get in there?”

  Shawn stopped at the edge of the stage. “You don’t really care about how a magic trick is done, do you, Dad?”

  “I care,” Benny Fleck said. “I have a right to know.”

  Shawn sighed heavily. “Say, Gus,” he said, “what’s the first thing you need to know about any magic trick?”

  “When you finally learn the explanation, it’s much simpler than you ever could have imagined,” Gus said.

  “And what’s the simplest way Chubby Dead Guy could have gotten into the tank?” Shawn said.

  “I don’t know, Shawn,” Gus said. “What do you think it is?”

  “He climbed up those stairs and stepped into it. And you all watched him do it. Because Chubby Dead Guy was not only Doug Firrell, FCC, he was also the Martian Magician.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Shawn and Gus stood outside the Outer Space showroom, watching the exiting crowd, who were clearly stunned by the brilliant illusion they’d just seen. Shawn shook his head in amazement.

  “All these people looking like they’ve just seen a miracle,” Shawn said. “If they knew what we know, they’d tear the place to pieces.”

  “But they never will,” Gus said, looking around nervously. “Or Benny Fleck will have us torn to pieces.”

  “Worse than that,” Shawn said. “He’ll revoke our lifetime buffet pass.”

  “Which wouldn’t be an issue if you hadn’t asked for that instead of cash for solving the case,” Gus said.

  Because the case was solved. Once Major Voges had been booked for murder, it didn’t take long to get the rest of the truth from her. Doug Firrell was an amateur magician who dreamed of going pro, but could never come up with
an illusion big enough to take him beyond the children’s birthday party circuit. When the stick-on TV technology came through their office for approval, he came up with the idea for P’tol P’kah.

  The one drawback to the act was that it required a second person. Firrell turned to his coworker and lover, Holly Voges. She’d been reluctant to join him, but once she saw how eager Benny Fleck was to throw money at them, she became an enthusiastic participant.

  But never as enthusiastic as Firrell. And as the act became more popular, he seemed to lose all grasp on reality. She tried to remind him that the technology of the tank had to be approved sooner or later, that they couldn’t keep up their double life forever. But he refused to consider giving up the act.

  They began to fight, and Firrell began to change. He wasn’t the same sweet guy she’d fallen in love with. Instead, he’d become arrogant and smug. The last straw for Voges was when she “materialized” in the showroom to find him groping some tattooed spacegirl.

  She’d had enough, and she was putting an end to the act. P’tol P’kah was going to disappear for good, and the two of them were going back to Washington. He begged her to reconsider, and when she wouldn’t, he tried to persuade her into letting him continue with a new partner. But she wanted their old lives back. If he didn’t give up the act, she was going to reveal the truth and let them both face the consequences.

  Finally he agreed. All he wanted in return was the chance to do one show at the Fortress of Magic to amaze his peers before he gave it all up. She had no idea that he’d rather be dead than go back to Washington—or that he really intended to go out like Houdini in a tank of water on stage. But there was no other possible explanation for what happened to him. He must have set the latch so he would plummet into the water instead of the cabinet, and in the seconds when the tank was obscured by the video image, he burst his balloon suit, hid the scraps in the giant boots he left at the bottom, and inhaled a lungful of water. When the police finally drained the tank, they found exactly what she predicted in the boots.

  That night she fled, terrified at what had happened. But she was quickly consumed with guilt and realized that she had to protect his secret, his legacy, no matter what it cost her. Even if it meant murdering Augie Balustrade.