Now You See It: A Toby Peters Mystery Read online

  We both had to wait. There was a knock at the door. Before we could answer Calvin Ott, a.k.a. Marcus Keller, stepped into the office and closed the door behind him.

  Chapter 9

  Put a dozen pennies, each with a different date, in a hat. Turn your back and tell someone to pick a coin, hold it to his forehead, and put it back in the hat. Have them shake the hat. Turn around. Take each penny and put it to your forehead until you come to the penny the person has selected. Show them the penny they have chosen. Solution: Chill all the pennies. The penny the person selects and puts to his or her forehead will be warmer than the others. Go through the pennies. The warm one you press to your forehead is the one selected. Note: The trick works best if you do it rather quickly so the coins do not have time to warm to room temperature.

  —From the Blackstone, The Magic Detective radio show

  OTT WAS WEARING DARK SLACKS, a blue blazer, a white shirt, and a red tie. He was also wearing a smile. In his right hand was a black pebble-leather satchel with a gold clasp.

  “Good morning,” he said cheerfully, placing his satchel on the conference table.

  “You look like Calvin Ott,” I said.

  “Keller, Marcus Keller,” he corrected, still smiling.

  “But you don’t sound like the Ott, excuse me, Keller we disagreed with last night,” I said.

  “It’s a new day,” he said, snapping the gold clasp and opening the satchel. “And I’ve come to present you with an offer.”

  “Get out,” Phil said.

  Phil did not like games. Phil did not like banter. Phil most definitely did not like Calvin Ott.

  Ott paused and looked at Phil.

  “I have a civilized offer,” he said.

  “You’re a weasel,” Phil answered, taking a step toward him.

  I sat back down in the chair at the table where I had sat a few minutes earlier.

  “Not very colorful,” Ott said with a smile. “Not very creative. Weasel, weasel. How about marmoset? Or reptile. No, you should be more specific. Cobra?”

  “To increase the possibility of your survival,” I said as Phil took another step toward Ott, “I think you should close your bag, pick it up, go out the door, and call for an appointment.”

  “You don’t want to hear my offer?” he said with less of a smile now that Phil was about four feet away from him and definitely not smiling.

  “Not particularly,” I said.

  Actually, I did want to hear what he had to say. He was our prime suspect in a murder and an attempted murder. He was the one who had threatened our client and was planning a surprise party for Blackstone. He was the one with the big fat ego that might make him say something that would help us and hurt him.

  Phil was now almost in Ott’s face.

  “Look,” Ott said with something that was supposed to be a let-bygones-be-bygones little laugh. “I’m not a bad person. I’ve got a mother, a sister. I give to charity. I follow the war news. I read Captain Easy in the comics.”

  Phil said, “Out.”

  Phil’s right hand was now around Ott’s tie.

  “When you tickle me,” said Ott, “do I not laugh?”

  “How the hell should I know?” said Phil.

  “Well then, when I tickle you, do you not laugh?” asked Ott, trying to decide whether it would be a good idea to reach up and try to remove my brother’s hand from the red tie.

  “He doesn’t laugh when you tickle him,” I said. “Never did.”

  This was definitely not going the way the great Marcus Keller had planned. Good entrance. Nice bit with the satchel. Good line about an offer. But he had the wrong audience.

  “When you torture him, does he not cry?” Ott said, looking into Phil’s eyes.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Now take me. You torture me and I make a funny sound. Something like uhh-uhh. Drawing in my breath. Not loud. Do you cry when you’re tortured?”

  “Ten thousand dollars,” Ott said, looking at the satchel.

  I reached over for the satchel and looked inside. It was filled with green bills in neatly wrapped bundles.

  “Phil,” I said. “Let’s listen.”

  “It’s some full-of-shit trick,” said Phil, eyes fixed on Ott who must by now be thinking that he had made a very big mistake.

  “Sure,” I said. “But the money’s real.”

  “He’s trying to pay us off,” Phil said.

  “No,” said Ott, his voice a little reedy like a clarinet played wrong. “May I speak?”

  Phil removed his hand from Ott’s tie. Ott adjusted the tie and said, “If you prevent me from doing what I have planned for the dinner tonight,” he said. “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars. This ten thousand dollars.”

  “If we stop you from killing Blackstone?” I said.

  “I didn’t say anything about killing Blackstone,” said Ott.

  “You threatened him,” Phil said.

  “No, I …”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why?” Ott repeated.

  “Why do you want to give us all that money to stop you?” I said.

  “I don’t,” said Ott. “I’m offering it. I’m confident you won’t collect it. I intend to let every magician who will be at the dinner, newspaper, every radio station know that I’ve made this challenge. But my goal isn’t to pay you ten thousand dollars. My goal is to make that strutting, pompous Blackstone look like a fool. This offer will give the moment of his humiliation publicity and poignancy. He won’t be able to live it down.”

  Ott was looking from me to Phil now, his eyes darting. He was smiling again. He was most definitely a little nuts.

  “How do we know you’ll pay if we stop you?” I asked.

  “With all that publicity? I wouldn’t dare not pay. I’ll have this satchel with me. Stop me, and I’ll present it in front of everyone in the hall.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  “Toby,” Phil warned, looking at me.

  I didn’t say anything, but he knew what I was thinking. He had three kids, had just started a new career with a brother who lived on the edge of poverty. He shook his head and backed away from Ott.

  Ott closed the satchel and snapped the gold clasp shut.

  “Tonight,” he said, satchel in hand.

  With his free hand, he reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out his white handkerchief and waved it in the air. Then he snapped the handkerchief and a small bird flew out from under it. The bird flapped past Phil, made a small circle, and perched on my desk.

  Ott nodded as if he were waiting for applause.

  “How’d you like to see me pull a rabbit out of your ass?” Phil said, his face red moving back toward Ott.

  “I don’t have a …”

  “Well we can just check to be sure,” Phil said.

  “Phil,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, trying to sound like Lewis Stone as Judge Hardy telling Andy to curb his enthusiasm.

  Phil paused just long enough for Ott to make it through the door. The slam it made as he exited started the bird fluttering around the office over our heads.

  “Open the window,” Phil said, moving to his desk.

  I got up and did as he asked.

  “Tell the bird to get the hell out of here,” he said as he sat down.

  I chased the bird around the room two or three times before it found the open window and dived into the smog.

  Phil got out of the chair, went to the window, and closed it. He turned to me.

  “People are dying,” he said. “Thousands of people. Kids. There’s a war going on. And that grinning rich monkey in a fifty-dollar jacket is playing games with people’s lives.”

  His fists were clenched.

  “If he comes back …” Phil began and then changed his mind.

  “He won’t come back,” I said. “He’s saving his next trick for tonight.”

  “I’m going home,” Phil said.

  “I’ll tell Blackstone what’s been going on,
” I said.

  “Do that,” said Phil, heading for the door.

  “See you at the Roosevelt,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve never seen you in a tux,” I said.

  “You’re in for a treat,” Phil said, slamming the door as he left.

  When he was gone, I called the Pantages and found out from Pete Bouton that his brother had gone to the hospital to see Gwen.

  I turned off the lights, went in the hall, locked the door, and listened to the late morning sounds of the Farraday: The muffled whimper of Shelly’s patient. From above, the badly tuned piano of Irwin Duncan, “voice teacher to the stars,” as he batted out Rum and Coca Cola and his latest off-key client tried to mimic Patty Andrews.

  I took the stairs, hearing a typewriter clacking on the third floor, a drum beating on the second floor, and a floor polisher on the lobby floor. Jeremy was pushing the polisher gently and evenly. He saw me and flipped it off.

  “I just saw Calvin Ott leaving,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “And Phillip was not far behind,” Jeremy said, rubbing the side of his bald head with two fingers.

  “Ott offered to pay out ten thousand dollars if we succeed in stopping him from doing whatever it is he plans to do to Black-stone tonight. Like a challenge.”

  “We’ll stop him,” said Jeremy confidently.

  I tried to imagine Jeremy in a tuxedo. I couldn’t.

  “You have a moment?” he asked, reaching into his pocket.

  I knew what was going to come out, but I really had no choice.

  “Sure,” I said. “A poem?”

  “It isn’t long,” he said, unfolding the sheet. “It’s called Magic.”

  The Farraday did not suddenly go silent, but the persistent clatter and clang didn’t stop Jeremy Butler from his poem.

  “It is not real magic we expect

  but the illusion. We desire to be fooled,

  are pleasured to know the miracle

  we are about to witness is a trick

  inside of which are hidden wheels.

  ‘How did he do that?’ we ask.

  But do we really want to know?

  In theater darkness, looking up,

  we are transported to a Camelot

  where belief is truth and truth belief.

  A man told me he knew there was a God.

  ‘Miracles prove this truth.’

  ‘Today I believe there is no God,’ I said.

  ‘How do you know there is no God?’

  ‘I do not know, I tell you what I believe.

  You tell me what you believe

  and declare that it is truth.’

  The magician asks us to believe

  for only the space and time of illusion.

  He does not ask for endless faith.

  We need more magicians.”

  He folded the sheet of paper neatly and put it back in his pocket.

  “We need more magicians,” I said.

  I didn’t understand most of Jeremy’s poems and this one was no exception.

  “I have to revise it,” he said, moving back to his floor polisher. “I fear there are too many magicians like Mr. Ott and they are not all on the theater stage. Many of them are on the stage of life.”

  “Yep,” I said, feeling the rumble of forgotten taco in my stomach, the hole in my molar, the slight but distinct ache in my shoulder. “You going to publish it?”

  “When I revise it,” he said. “Perhaps it should rhyme.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “You make it rhyme, and people know for sure that it’s poetry. See you tonight.”

  I headed for the door. Behind me, the polisher rattled back to life.

  “He’s right.” I heard a familiar voice say behind me as I stepped onto Hoover.

  I turned my head to see Juanita.

  “I heard the poem,” she said. “He’s right. At least about some of it.”

  Juanita was a seer. Born seventy years earlier in Brooklyn, she had grown up as a nice Jewish housewife with a solid husband, and, when he died, a second solid husband who also died. She had not chosen to have visions, but they had come—on her fiftieth birthday, to be exact. She had then migrated to Los Angeles, rented an office in the Farraday, and handed out little printed cards. Now she had a running clientele, mostly Mexicans and Eastern European refugees. Juanita could see into the future.

  “It comes in little flashes, like waking dreams or just words,” she had once told me. “I don’t know.”

  The problem with Juanita’s visions was that they almost never made sense till they had taken place, and, by then, it was too late to do anything about them.

  “Gift, curse, who the hell knows, you know what I mean?”

  Now overly made-up, gypsy dressed, with bangled earrings tinkling, the slightly pudgy Juanita stood at my side and looked at the passing parade of cars, servicemen on leave, people going out to late lunch. She sighed.

  “I was looking for you,” she said.

  “Juanita,” I almost pleaded.

  She shrugged.

  “You don’t want to hear, you don’t want to hear. Who’s going to force you?”

  “You are,” I said.

  “Force is too strong a word,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “He’s going to be dead, but he isn’t going to be dead, but he is going to be dead,” she said, looking at me.

  “What?”

  “Soon,” she said. “And the other guy. In what my first husband used to call a penguin suit.”

  “Tuxedo,” I said.

  “Whatever,” she said with a dismissive wave of her heavily ringed and scarlet-nailed hand. “He’s here. Darkness. Light. He’s there. Darkness. Light. He’s back over here again. You’ll see. You’ll be there. Lots of penguins. You’re a penguin, too.”

  “Very helpful.”

  “My pleasure,” she said. “No, my duty. Got no choice in the matter. I was heading to Manny’s for a taco. I’ll buy you one.”

  “Just ate a couple, thanks,” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” said Juanita. “Just watch out for that dead penguin.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Juanita took a few steps toward Manny’s and then turned around suddenly.

  “Don’t wait for the pain,” she said earnestly.

  “What pain?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But you’ll have warnings. You won’t listen to them, but you’ll have warnings.”

  “If I won’t listen to them,” I said, “why tell me not to wait for the pain?”

  “You think I know?” she said with a shrug and a shake of her head. “I see it. I tell you. It happens. I’m a seer, not a magician.”

  “I know a magician,” I said. “Maybe he can help me.”

  “You’re kiddin’ me Toby,” she said, “but, kiddin’ aside, your magician’s got his own worries, let me tell you. I’m hungry like an ox.”

  This time she did move toward Manny’s. I considered calling after her to be careful of pebbles in her taco, but decided she might think I was making fun of her.

  I headed for the car and was at County Hospital about twelve minutes later.

  Blackstone was standing next to Gwen’s bed when I went through the door of her room. He was wearing a blue suit with a red bow tie. She was laughing. He was smiling. He held a rabbit in his hand. He handed it to her and she looked up at me.

  “Look,” she said, cuddling the white ball of nose-twitching fluff. “He’s mine. He pulled him right out from under my pillow.”

  “We haven’t given him a name yet,” said Blackstone.

  “I’ll call him Tyrone,” Gwen said. “After Tyrone Power.”

  She was sitting up, a little pale, but not the least like someone who had been shot the night before. She stroked the animal and rubbed her nose against his.

  “We’ve been talking about what happened last night,” Black-stone said. “Very curious.”


  “Very curious,” I agreed.

  The magician pursed his lips and looked at his hands before he said,

  “The killer of Mr. Cunningham used a 9mm weapon, correct?”

  “Correct,” I said.

  “But Gwen was shot at close range with a pellet gun,” he went on. “As were you.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Which suggests that the killer switched guns and chose one unlikely to kill Gwen,” he said.

  “Or,” I said, “there were two shooters.”

  “Working together?” he asked.

  “Could be. Another thought,” I threw in. “Our shooter only wanted to make it look like he was trying to kill the witness. He shot Gwen because it made sense to go for the one person who could identify him.”

  “But he didn’t want to kill her,” said Blackstone. “Suggesting that he wanted her alive to identify him. But why would he want to be …”

  “You got it?”

  “Got what?” Gwen asked looking up from the rabbit.

  “Describe the man who shot you again,” I said. “Was it the same man you saw shoot Cunningham in the dressing room?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Well, I think so. Tux, beard, turban.”

  “That’s what you told the police?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you saw him shoot Cunningham?” I asked. “You’re sure.”

  “No,” said Gwen. “I was on the landing. I heard a shot. I saw him come out of the dressing room.”

  “With a gun in his hand?”

  “Yes, no. I think so,” she said. “I turned and ran.”

  “Calvin Ott?” said Blackstone.

  “But Ott couldn’t have been the one who shot Gwen. He was at the Pantages talking to the police when Gwen was shot,” I said.

  “True. He made a scene,” Blackstone said. “There was something definitely theatrical about it, but then again Ott is always theatrical.”

  “He wanted to establish an alibi while someone else was shooting Gwen,” I said.

  “But he still could have been the one who shot Cunningham in the dressing room,” Blackstone said.

  “Okay,” I tried. “He shoots Cunningham. There’s Gwen. He’s out in the open now. Gwen runs. He follows. She runs out of the theater. He sends someone after her and goes into the theater to set up an alibi for when she gets shot by someone wearing the beard and turban.”