Sleuths

by Bill Pronzini

  There was another bright flash, and the lights once more went out; but we could still see Ardis before us as a kind of ghostly radiance, her white dress almost glowing in the dark. Then she dwindled before our eyes, as though receding to a great distance. Finally, the lights came on to stay, and the stage was empty, and she was gone.

  There was a shocked silence, as though the audience was collectively holding its breath. In that silence, a deep, imperious voice said, "I am here!"

  Everybody turned in their seats, including me, for the voice had come from the rear of the room.

  Incredibly, there stood the murderer–beard, denim jacket, and all.

  Several of the policemen started toward him, and one woman shrieked. At the same time, the bearded man extended his arm and pointed a long finger. "I," he said, "am you."

  He was pointing at one of the young police cadets standing near the Iron Maiden.

  The cadet backed away, startled, looking trapped. Immediately, the bearded man hunched in on himself and pulled the denim jacket over his head. When he stood up again, he was Steele–and the apparition that had been the murderer was a small bundle of clothing in his hand. Even the jeans had been replaced by Steele's black suit trousers.

  "You are the murderer of Philip Boltan," Steele said to the cadet. "You–"

  The cadet didn't wait for any more; he turned and made a wild run for the nearest exit. He didn't make it, but it took three other cops a full minute to subdue him.

  Sometime later, Steele, Ardis, Cedric, Jan, and I were sitting around the half-moon table waiting for Inspector Lupoff and Captain Dickensheet to return from questioning the murderer of Philip Boltan. The Cellar had been cleared of patrons and police, and we were alone in the large, dark room.

  Steele occupied the seat of honor: an old wooden rocking chair in the dealer's spot in the center of the half-moon. He had said little since the finale of his special midnight show. All of us had wanted to ask him how he knew the identity of the killer, and exactly how the vanishing act had been worked, but we knew him well enough to realize that he wouldn't say anything until he had the proper audience. He just sat there smiling in his enigmatic way.

  When the two officers finally came back, they looked disgruntled and morose. They sat down in the two empty chairs, and Dickensheet said grimly, "Well, we've just had an unpleasant talk with Spellman–or the man I knew as Spellman, anyway. He's made a full confession."

  "The man you knew as Spellman?" I said.

  "His real name is Granger. Robert Granger."

  Cedric frowned, looking at Steele. "Isn't that the name of Boltan's former partner, the one you told us committed suicide?"

  "It is," Steele told him. "I had an idea that might be who the young cadet was."

  "You mean he killed Boltan because of what happened to his father?" I asked.

  "Yes," Lupoff said. "He decided years ago that the perfect revenge was to kill Boltan on stage, in full view of an audience, and then disappear. He's been planning it ever since, mainly by studying and mastering the principles of magic."

  "Then he intended from the beginning to murder Boltan in circumstances such as those tonight?"

  "More or less," Dickensheet said. "He wanted to do the job during one of Boltan's regular performances, and the invitation to the Academy graduating class tonight convinced him that now was the time. It was only fitting, according to Granger, that Boltan die on stage under an aura of mystery."

  Jan said bewilderedly, "But why would a potential murderer join the police force?"

  "Spellman, or Granger, is mentally unstable. We try to weed them out, but every once in a while one slips by. He believes in meting out punishment to those who would 'do evil,' in his own words just now. God only knows what he might have done if he'd gotten away with this murder and gone on to become an officer in the field." Dickensheet shuddered at the possibility. "As if we don't have enough problems . . ."

  "I don't understand how Granger could join the force under an assumed name," Cedric said. "I mean, if his real name is Granger and you knew him as Spellman–"

  "Spellman is the name of the family who adopted him out of the orphanage he ended up in after his father died. As far as our people knew, that was his real name. I mean, you usually don't check back past a kid's sixth birthday. We might never have known he was Boltan's partner's son if he hadn't admitted it himself tonight."

  "What else did he say?" I asked.

  "Not much. He talked freely enough about who he was and his motives, but when we started asking him about the details of the murder, he closed up tight."

  So we all looked at Steele, who continued to sit there smiling to himself.

  "All right, Steele," Lupoff said, "you're on again. How did Spellman-Granger commit the murder?"

  "With a gun," Steele told him.

  "Now look -"

  Steele held up a placating hand. "Very well," he said, "although you must realize that I dislike explaining any illusion." He began to rock gently in the chair. "Granger used a clever variant on an illusion first employed by Houdini. As Houdini did it, the magician rode into an arena–this was a major effect done only in stadiums and arenas–on a white horse, dressed in flowing Arabian robes. His several assistants, clad in red work suits, would grab the horse. Houdini would then stand up in the saddle and fire a gun in the air, at which second a previously arranged action of some type would direct all eyes to another part of the arena.

  During that instant, Houdini would vanish; and his assistants would then lead the horse out."

  Dickensheet asked, "So how did he do it?"

  "By a costume change. He would be wearing, underneath the Arabian robes, a red work suit like his assistants; the robes were specially-made breakaway garments, which he could get out of in a second, roll into a ball, and hide beneath his work suit. So he became one of the assistants and went out with them and the horse.

  "Spellman's vanishing act was worked in much the same way. He probably donned his breakaway costume and false beard in the men's room just prior to Boltan's act, over his police uniform, and made sure he was picked from the audience by being there standing up when Boltan did the selecting. After he shot Boltan and ran into the dressing room through the curtain, he pulled off his breakaway costume and false hair, rolled them into a bundle and stuffed them into one of the costume trunks. Then he backed against the side of the curtain, so that when the first cadets dashed through, he immediately became one of them."

  "But we looked in all of the trunks . .

  "Yes, but you were looking for a man hiding, not for a small bundle of denim and hair stuffed in toward the bottom."

  Lupoff shook his head. "It sounds so simple," he said.

  "Much magic works that way," Steele said. "You could never in a lifetime guess how it's done, but if it's explained it sounds so easy you wonder how you were fooled. Which is one reason magicians do not like to explain their effects."

  Ardis said, "You knew all along it had to be one of the cadets, Christopher?"

  "By the logic of the situation," Steele agreed. "But I had further confirmation when I remembered that, despite his somewhat scruffy appearance, the murderer was wearing well-shined black shoes–the one item he wouldn't have time to change–just as were all the other graduating cadets."

  "But how did you know which of the cadets it was?"

  "I didn't until I was on stage. I had found the costume and the beard right before that, and I saw that the guilty man had fastened his face hair on with spirit gum, as most professionals do. It must have been very lightly tacked on so he could rip it off effectively, but the spirit gum would leave a residue nonetheless."

  "Of course!" I said. "Spirit gum fluoresces under ultraviolet light."

  Steele smiled. "Not very much, but enough for me to have detected the outline of a chin and upper lip when I looked for them in the darkness."

  Lupoff and Dickensheet seemed baffled, so I explained that there were u.v. bulbs in some of the spots because
they were necessary for Steele's spook show effects.

  They nodded. Lupoff asked Steele, "How did you manage your disappearance?"

  "The stage trap. I dropped into it, and Ardis popped out of it. Then she kept the audience's attention long enough for me to crawl to the coatroom, put on the breakaway costume, and approach the audience from the rear. When the lights went out again and she disappeared, I looked again for the outline of chin and upper lip, to make sure I would be confronting exactly the right man."

  "And now your disappearance, young lady?" Dickensheet asked Ardis.

  She laughed. "I walked off the stage in the dark."

  "But we saw you, ah, dwindle away . . ."

  "That wasn't me. It was a picture painted on an inflated balloon which was held over the stage for our show. I pulled it down with a concealed string while the lights were out, and allowed it to deflate. So you saw the picture getting smaller and seeming to recede. The method's been used for many years," Ardis explained.

  Dickensheet and Lupoff exchanged glances. The inspector said, "All of this really is obvious. But now that we know how obvious magic tricks are, we'd never fall for anything like them again."

  "Absolutely not," the captain agreed.

  "So you say," Steele said. "But perhaps–"

  Suddenly Ardis jumped up, backed off two steps, and made a startled cry. Naturally, we all looked around at her and she was pointing across the table to Steele's chair.

  When we looked back there again, after no more than a second, the chair was rocking gently and Steele had vanished.

  Dickensheet's mouth hung open by several inches. Lupoff said in a surprised voice, "He didn't have time to duck through the curtain there. Then–where did he go?"

  I know most of Steele's talents and effects, but not all of them by any means. So I closed my own mouth, because I had no answer to Lupoff's question.

  The Desperate Ones

  Carmody had never liked Algiers. It was hot, overcrowded, dirty, and seemed saturated with a permanent sweet-sour stink. But the main reason was that it was full of people you couldn't trust, people who would cut your throat for a couple of dinars and smile while they were doing it.

  In his room at the St. George, on the Boulevard Salah Bouakouir, he stood sourly looking out over the harbor and the Mediterranean beyond. It was washday, and every grillwork balcony on every stark-white, tile-roofed building was draped with laundry: a gigantic open-air dry-cleaning plant. In the hotel garden below, the palms and the olive and acacia trees had a wilted, strangulated look. Like Algiers itself, even on its best days.

  Carmody turned from the window, began to pace the room–a lean, predatory man, thirty-seven years old, with flat green eyes and shaggy graying-black hair. A sardonic mouth made him appear faintly satanic. There was a vague air of brittleness about him, as if you could hurt him physically without too much effort; but his eyes told you this was a lie, that he was as hard as a block of forged steel inside.

  The room was air-conditioned but he was sweating inside a thin yellow shirt and white ducks. A rum collins would have gone good about now, but he was supposed to go to work soon and he seldom drank when he worked. He glanced again at his watch. Almost four-thirty. The woman, Nicole, was late. He didn't care for people who weren't punctual, especially where business was concerned. He was not a patient man.

  Carmody was a freelance bodyguard, a supplier of legal and extra-legal services and material, with connections that reached into nearly every country in the world; he dealt with desperate men and desperate women, with profiteers and black marketeers, with thieves and smugglers and murderers–on his terms, according to his own brand of ethics; and he thrived on the action, adventure, danger in each of the jobs he undertook. He worked inside the law and outside it, whichever suited the occasion, and had never failed a client or been arrested for even the most minor of offenses. It wasn't cheap, going to him, but you were guaranteed results. He was good, so good that in the shadow world in which he operated his reputation commanded the highest respect.

  The job that had brought him to North Africa had to do with a quarter of a million dollars in assorted raw gems. The day before, at his villa on the island of Majorca, he had received a call from one of his contacts, an Algerian black marketeer named Achmed. Achmed had been approached by a Frenchman calling himself Paul Tobiere, the man with the gems. Tobiere had come to Algiers from the Sudan, where he had lived for several years; come by way of the Libyan Desert, Tripoli, and the coast of Tunisia. Twice en route he'd nearly been killed by former associates who wanted the stones and their ex-partner's skin as a bonus. How Tobiere had come by the gems, who the former associates were, didn't concern Carmody. What concerned him was that Tobiere was so anxious to get out of North Africa, he was willing to pay one-tenth of the gems' worth for safe passage to France and a new identity when he got there.

  Contact with the Frenchman was not to be made through Achmed, as Carmody would have preferred, but through a woman Tobiere had known in the Sudan named Nicole Moreau, now a resident of Algiers. Apparently Nicole was the one providing Tobiere with his hidey-hole here. He hadn't told Achmed where that was; he was too frightened to trust anyone with that knowledge, he'd said, except Carmody himself.

  The meeting with Nicole had been arranged for four o'clock, but there was still no sign of the woman. Carmody would give her until five o'clock. If she hadn't showed by then, the deal was off. He didn't need $25,000 that badly. It was the work that energized him anyway, not the money he got from it.

  It didn't come down to a call-off; Nicole Moreau beat the deadline by ten minutes. She was in her late twenties, tall, broad-hipped, with thick blue-black hair cropped short. Dark brooding eyes appraised him coolly as he let her into the room.

  He said, "What's the idea of keeping me waiting so long?"

  "I apologize, m'sieu. I was detained."

  "Detained how?"

  "With my profession."

  "What profession is that?"

  "I am a dancer at the Café Bulbul."

  "Yes? Why didn't you call?"

  "There was not time to use the telephone."

  "What's more important, your dancing or Tobiere's life?"

  She made a pouting face. "You are not very pleasant, m 'sieu."

  "I'm not paid to be pleasant. Where's Tobiere?"

  "A house on the Rue Kaddour Bourkika."

  "Where's that?"

  "The Casbah."

  "That figures," Carmody said. "He have the gems with him?"

  "Did he tell you where they are?"

  "No. He will tell only you."

  Carmody went to the wardrobe, strapped on his Beretta in its belt half-holster. The woman watched him without expression. He donned a lightweight cotton jacket; with the bottom button fastened, the gun didn't show at all.

  He said, "You drive here or come in a taxi?"

  "A taxi," Nicole answered.

  "Then we'll use my car."

  It was in the hotel garage, a small Fiat he'd rented at the Dar-el-Beida Airport. He knew the steep, twisting streets of Algiers only slightly, so he let Nicole direct him through the congested midday traffic. They climbed one of the hills on which the city had been built, toward the basilica of Notre Dame d'Afrique on Mt. Bouzarea high above. Two-thirds of the way up Nicole veered them to the left and into the fringes of the Casbah.

  It had a romantic image, the Casbah, thanks to the Pepé LeMoko nonsense, but the reality of it was anything but romantic. It was a vast, squalid slum in which eighty thousand Arabs were packed like cattle into ancient buildings sprawled along a labyrinth of narrow streets and blind alleys. It teemed with flies, heat, garbage, and vermin both animal and human. Europeans and Americans were safe enough there in the daytime, as long as they didn't venture too deep into the maze of back alleys. At night, not even Carmody would have gone there alone.

  The Arabs had a saying: Thwakkul' al' Allah. Rely on God. If you lived in the Casbah, Carmody thought, and you weren't a thie
f or a cutthroat, you'd have to rely on God; you wouldn't have another choice.

  The woman directed him into a bare cement plaza crowded with dark-skinned children, veiled women, old men in burnooses and striped jalabiyas. It was the nearest place where a car could be parked, she said. They went on foot down the Street of Many Steps, into the bowels of the district. On the way a rag-clad beggar accosted them, asking baksheesh; Nicole brushed by him roughly but Carmody gave him a dinar. He reserved his cruelty for those who deserved it.

  Half a dozen turns brought them into Rue Kaddour Bourkika. It was no more than three feet wide, the rough stucco walls on either side chalked and crayoned in Arabic and English, in one place marred with old bullet scars–mementoes of the French-Algerian War. They passed beneath balconies supported by wooden poles cemented in stone in the old Turkish manner–some of the buildings in the Casbah dated back to the Second Century–and went down more littered steps and finally stopped before an archway.

  "Through here," Nicole said.

  Carmody followed her through a tunnel-like passageway adorned with mosaic tile, walking hunched over to keep from cracking his head on the low stone roof. The passage opened into a small courtyard with a waterless fountain and a half-dead pomegranate tree in its middle. Doorways opened off the courtyard, off an encircling balcony above. The air here was filled with tinny Arab music, the cries of children; the hot, sweet-sour stink, sharp in this enclosed space, made Carmody's head ache.

  Nicole rapped on one of the doors beneath the balcony three times, a five-second wait, and another three times. The man who opened up was in his late thirties, muscled, dry-faced in spite of the heat. He had long blond hair and pale features, the eyes of glacial blue. His white suit was rumpled but not unclean.

  He said in English, "What took you so long?"