by John Gaspard
“The thing is,” I continued tentatively, recognizing the lady with the gun had just told me to zip it, “if you shoot him, then his death won’t match the wording in Archie’s suicide note.”
She turned to me, rolling her eyes at the level of annoyance I was providing.
“The suicide note said, ‘You pushed me over the edge,’ right?” I continued. “It didn’t say, ‘You shot me, and I collapsed on the roof, at which point you had to roll my dead body over the edge.’”
“I am no slave to symmetry,” she said, turning her attention back toward Baxter.
“But—” I continued, not at all sure what might come out of my mouth next.
“You,” she barked at me. “On the ground.” She waved the gun at the grass in front of me, in case for some reason I didn’t understand what “ground” meant.
I nodded in consent, still holding my hands high as I began to lower myself to the ground. My feet were standing on asphalt, but in front of me—and spreading across the rest of the roof—was a sea of green grass.
At that moment, I remembered what Baxter had told me about the pseudo-lawn that covered his mansion’s roof. It wasn’t grass at all but some form of Astroturf. He had said something about drainage issues precluding the use of real grass. As I got down on my knees, I glanced up and could see Miss Hess was watching me closely. I looked down again and was thrilled to see what I had hoped would be there: seams.
Like the sod it hoped to emulate, this fake turf had been laid out on the roof in long strips. I scanned the grass, looking from where I was about to kneel to where Miss Hess was standing. She was poised atop the same strip of grass that began right in front of me.
I was suddenly reminded of a favorite phrase of my Uncle Harry’s, one he used anytime a trick did an outstanding job of fooling an audience. “I really pulled the rug out from under them!” he would say with glee. As this thought flashed through my mind, I also remembered that at one point in the midst of a dangerous situation, Harry had pulled an actual rug out from under someone and in so doing had saved his own life.
With that image fully formed in my mind, I followed Miss Hess’ instructions and knelt down. I lowered my hands to the ground and, as unobtrusively as possible, gripped the edge of the fake grass, which easily peeled up from the asphalt. In this crouching position, I took a deep breath and then gave the fake strip of grass a strong and sudden yank.
If my goal had been to distract her, I was utterly and completely successful.
However, if my goal had been to pull the grass out from under her feet, I was less so.
Sadly, this had been my aim.
I yanked with all my might, and all I got for my effort was a handful of fake grass, which tore away from the main Astroturf like wet newspaper. This sent me sprawling backwards, and I crashed into the door to the roof, slamming it shut with a loud thud. My actions and the resulting tumble were bizarre enough to make Miss Hess actually turn toward me, almost taking a step in my direction as I struggled to get up.
This was just the distraction Laurence Baxter had, apparently, been waiting for. His hands, which had been stuck deep into his suit coat pockets, suddenly came out. One hand was empty. In the other he held a deck of cards.
I’ve been in my share of situations where a magician pulled out a deck of cards at an inopportune time, but this was one for the record books.
Peeling the top card from the deck, Baxter flung it with consummate skill and force directly at Miss Hess’s head. She turned just in time for the hurtling card to strike her squarely in the forehead.
After it did that, the card fell to the ground. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of Miss Hess, the flying card having had no appreciable effect on its target.
In fact, Miss Hess looked down at the fallen card with the same look I’ve seen countless people give when they were on the receiving end of a lame card trick. Baxter, undeterred, continued to flick card after card at her, as if she were a watermelon that refused to play along.
She just stood there, with cards bouncing off her like bullets off of Superman. To be honest, it was so annoying and ineffectual, even I couldn’t understand why she didn’t just shoot him to put an end to it.
But Baxter’s ploy accomplished at least one goal: it gave me the break I needed. I pushed off from my position on the ground and hurled myself at the old woman with all the force I could muster. I crashed into her at a full run, and the two of us slammed into the ground. Given her small size and general brittleness, I was convinced when she hit the grass she would explode into a cloud of gray dust.
Turns out, I was wrong.
Forget any notions of her being a fragile, weak wisp of a woman. She was a fierce and brutal fighter and was evidently determined to take me out at the beginning of round one. What little strength I possessed I put toward holding her gun arm at bay. But that was difficult, as she was using all her other limbs—and her teeth—in ways which would have given the Marquess of Queensberry an aneurism. In short, Miss Hess did not fight fair.
I’m not really sure what Laurence Baxter was doing during all this. For all I knew, he continued to flick cards at us in the hopes of producing a really intense paper cut. My focus was entirely on keeping this crazy old lady from killing me, and it was not a foregone conclusion that I would be successful.
She pounded a fist against the side of my head, while at the same time hammering me in the kidneys with a knee. I struggled to pull her pounding fist away from my head, and she took this opportunity to sink her teeth into my wrist. Just as I pulled my wrist out of her mouth, she head-butted me—smacking me hard in the nose. She must have done a good job of it, as I immediately saw drops of blood appearing on her face, apparently from my now-bloody nose. She head-butted me again, smacking me hard in the forehead, and this one really connected. I started to see stars, and my field of vision began to narrow. The only thing that kept me from passing out was another helpful hard slam from her knee into my kidneys.
In the midst of this struggle, I was reminded of my late Aunt Alice and some advice she had given me years before. At the time, I had been sent home from school with a note from the principal, because I had been involved in a fight on the playground. She quizzed me on the circumstances and then proffered the following advice.
“Eli,” she had said, “you are a very smart boy and you don’t need to resort to using your fists. You have a gift for language and a strong imagination. Use those skills properly and I guarantee you can forestall nearly any future antagonistic situations.”
I wasn’t sure why my brain had chosen this moment to bring that memory to the surface, as I figured I was well beyond the discussion phase with Miss Hess. But I wasn’t gaining any ground in the fight and had come into this battle already winded, so I figured I had little to lose. I looked into the face of this raging, angry old woman and decided I needed to hit her where she lived.
“Archie Banks was a terrible magician,” I said, my voice raspy but firm. “He was the worst. Just the worst. The man couldn’t do a double lift to save his life.”
It took a second for my words to register.
“You are wrong,” she spit back at me. “He was a genius. A genius magician.”
“On the contrary,” I said, feeling very much like William F. Buckley going after a liberal opponent. “Archie Banks was undoubtedly a hack. He was a hack’s hack. He sucked.”
Okay, maybe I wasn’t working with Buckley’s lexicon, but I was making an impact.
“You lie, you lie, you lie,” she screamed.
“He was such a failure, he even botched up his attempted suicide,” I shot back, remembering Harry’s description of Archie’s unsuccessful effort to merely attempt suicide, with its disastrous results.
She froze, stopped thrashing around, and stared up at me, her mouth agape. I continued.
“What an idiot he was. He pla
nned to be discovered before he could finish the job. And he couldn’t even get that right.”
She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. “Nein, nein, nein. It was my fault. It was all my fault. I got busy, lost track of the time. And when I get home, it was too late.”
She repeated the words “too late” over and over, and I could tell the fight had gone out of her. I reached for the gun, and she let me take it from her limp hand. She continued to whimper and began to curl into a fetal position as I pulled myself to my feet. Baxter was standing next to me, with several untossed cards still in his hand.
“Brutal stuff,” he said quietly.
“Yes, she put up quite a fight.”
“No,” he said with a sad shake of his head. “Those things you said about Archie Banks. Mocking a magician’s double lift? Brutal, old man, just brutal.”
Chapter 20
The scene the police discovered on the roof was, at best, perplexing.
I stood next to Baxter, my face bloodied, my clothes rumpled and torn. He held Miss Hess’s gun gingerly by two fingers, while in his other hand he gripped the rest of his trusty deck of cards. On the ground below us lay a little old lady, curled up in a ball and still whining, “too late, too late, too late” along with indecipherable Germanic mutterings. Scattered randomly on the fake grass around her were numerous playing cards.
Baxter took it upon himself to bring the police up to date while I continued to catch my breath. When Megan saw me, she gasped, and ran to get some first aid implements while Harry questioned me on the details of the preceding few minutes.
“I read this phrase in Jake’s lecture notes tonight that really seems to apply to this situation,” I said after I had recounted the details of my fight with the surprisingly scrappy Miss Hess.
“Something Jake North wrote is germane?” Harry said with surprise. “Do tell.”
“He clearly had a ghostwriter helping him,” I explained. “Anyway, the phrase was something like, ‘One wrong piece of information can color an entire trick in the minds of the audience.’”
Harry nodded in agreement at the concept. “Yes, we made some wrong assumptions on this one, that’s for sure.”
“Like the idea that Archie Banks had no heirs,” I suggested. “When he clearly had a devoted girlfriend. I’m not even sure if devoted is a strong enough word. And speaking of strong, Miss Hess fooled me on that one.”
“She fooled all of us,” Harry said, looking over at the old woman. She was now handcuffed, and the police were about to take her back into the house and, presumably, off to jail for a good long time. McHugh, who had been Harry’s second phone call after calling the police, was consulting with one of the young constables. He finished his chat and headed over to us.
“Well, she won’t say a word about her situation,” McHugh said quietly. “Very tight-lipped that one. I suspect the few words she said in front of Eli and Laurence Baxter are all we’ll hear on the topic from her.”
“But they certainly have enough evidence on her, just for the attack on Baxter alone, don’t you think?” Harry asked.
McHugh nodded. “Most certainly. But it would be helpful, if not deeply instructive, to get the details out of her. They’ll piece most of it together, little doubt about that, but it’s always better to get it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.”
We all looked over at her. Her back was straight, her expression grim. A few hairs were out of place, but you otherwise wouldn’t peg her as a recent Ultimate Fighting contender and near champion. She looked to be the perfect candidate for assistance from a Boy Scout at the nearest street corner. If you ignored the handcuffs.
One constable was holding the roof access door open while two others were escorting the old woman toward it. She turned and gave us one final, icy glare. I can’t speak for the others, but she still had the ability to produce chills up and down my spine.
“Talk about holding a grudge,” I said with a certain amount of reluctant admiration. “Over thirty years, just waiting for the right moment to get back at all of you.”
“You have to admire her patience,” Harry agreed.
“As Richard III so eloquently put, via our friend Mr. Shakespeare,” McHugh added, “‘What traitor hears me and says not “Amen”? England hath long been mad and scarred herself.’”
With that, the mad and barely scarred Miss Hess disappeared through the door and into the dark stairway.
“I’m afraid this hasn’t been much of a vacation,” I said.
Megan shrugged. “I don’t know, I think we’ll be talking about this trip to London for years to come! And we don’t need to bore our friends with photos—we’ll have newspaper clippings and police reports.”
We were seated in Laurence Baxter’s dining room, enjoying what was likely to be one of our last breakfasts under his kind hospitality. I was once again partaking in a picture-perfect English breakfast, while Megan dined on scones and hot tea. We had the dining room to ourselves, either because we were the first ones up...or the last.
It may have been my imagination, but the entire household staff seemed lighter and happier now that they were no longer under Miss Hess’ oppressively boney thumb. Even Gwendolyn, who had seemed so timid all week, was actually humming when she brought in my breakfast. When she put the plate in front of me, I once again flashed back to our first breakfast in London, at the Fawlty Towers-style hotel where we’d spent our first couple of nights. I looked down at the beautiful English breakfast in front of me and thought back with a smile at the nightmarish plate I had seen that first morning. And then another memory began to rise to the surface—something intrinsically connected to that breakfast, but I couldn’t quite grab it.
“Am I the last? Or are you two the first?” Harry asked as he came into the dining room, pulling me out of my reverie. Before we could answer, his phone beeped, and he stopped in his tracks to retrieve it. It took a few moments to find which pocket he had left it in. Once located, he pressed the button on the front of the phone and squinted at it. He then started digging through his pockets again, this time for his glasses. After a few moments of fruitless search, he handed the phone to me.
“Eli, can you read this to me?”
I set down my fork and turned my attention to the phone while he crossed the room and grabbed a coffee cup, quickly filling it from the urn Gwendolyn had just replenished.
“It’s from De Vries,” I said as I scrolled through the messages on his phone.
“Is he already up and gone?”
“Apparently,” I said, scrolling to the most recent text. Harry’s blind futzing with the device had backed up the stream to several texts earlier, and I sorted through a lot of “Dr., what time is rehearsal?” and “Dr., I am on my way,” and so on. I finally found the most recent communication from De Vries.
“It says ‘At The Magic Circle, can you meet me? Need help with the illusion,’ although it looks like spellchecker has changed the last word to ‘delusion.’”
“Sometimes spellchecker is more correct than we give her credit for,” Harry quipped as he pulled out a chair and sat across from us.
“He goes on to say it will just take a few minutes,” I added.
“Oh, I suppose that’s fine. I had no firm plans this morning. What are you two up to today?”
“We haven’t had much chance to do any of the standard, touristy things this week,” Megan said. “I was hoping to get to the Tower of London.”
“To see the Crown Jewels?” Harry asked.
“Well, that’s what I’ll tell them if they ask, but I really want to see where Richard III had his two nephews killed.”
“I think the events of this week may be rubbing off on you,” I said, surprised at her interest in such a gory tale but not opposed to it. “How soon do you want to leave?”
“I’d rather not rush,” she said. “We have al
l day, and I’d love to spend a few more minutes in the greenhouse and take a final bath in the amazing tub in our bathroom.”
Realizing I would be hanging around for at least two hours with nothing to do, I offered to accompany Harry down to The Magic Circle, with the idea of Megan joining us there in time for lunch.
I handed the phone back and Harry pocketed it.
Fifteen minutes later, we found ourselves on the Overground Line, headed toward Highbury, where we switched to the Victoria Line to take us to Warren Station. The first leg of the trip was devoted to Harry’s explanation of why Warren was the preferred stop and that only a fool would use the Euston Square station or—God forbid!—the larger Euston Station.
“There’s too much monkeying around if you go to Euston Square, but no one believes me,” he said, repeating nearly verbatim a speech he had made earlier in the week to Angus Bishop. “Warren is my stop. Out the door, cross the street, take a right, take a left, take a right, and you’re there. No monkeying around.”
I found little to disagree with about this route, although his tone suggested he was ready to argue the point at length if necessary. Recognizing the futility of it, I changed the subject.
“Any word from McHugh about our Miss Hess?” I asked, pointing out adjoining seats that had just opened up in the subway car. “She still clamming up?”
We moved quickly from our standing position near the door and scored the seats.
“She is indeed,” he said as we settled in. “Not a peep out of her. But they’ve got a new, interesting theory about Borys and his teabags. Very clever stuff.”
“What’s the theory?”
“Well,” Harry said, moving into storyteller mode, “you remember how Borys basically kept his precious teabags under lock and key? His stash no one else had access to?”
I nodded. “Because of that, the police theorized the poison must have been put in the tea kettle. And, at that time of night, Borys was the only one likely to need or use the kettle. When he was finished, the kettle would be washed and readied for the next day, destroying all evidence of the poison.”