Magicide (24 page)

CHAPTER 63             

Sunday, August 14, 8:00 a.m.
 

Cheri awoke later than usual. She’d only had a few hours sleep, yet she felt wide awake and alert. She rolled over, thinking about Larissa.

How much longer could Larissa perform as a topless magicienne? Here she was in middle age, for all practical purposes, and the love of her life had turned out to be an A number one asshole who had probably provoked their son’s suicide.

In her heart she knew this case would end, but would she ever be able to face Larissa again? What a sad mess.

Her mind on a gerbil wheel around the Maxwell case, she decided to get up. She relived in Technicolor detail the previous evening’s events as she showered and threw on jeans and a clean tee shirt.

When she entered the kitchen, Tom was at the microwave heating up a cup of milk to make hot chocolate.

“Mornin’ Mom,” he said.

“You’re up early.”

“Couldn’t sleep.” He sounded especially cheery.

Instead of heading straight for the coffee counter, she remained in the doorway. “You know we have unfinished business.”

The look he gave her was pure teen-aged innocence. “What?” he asked.

“About that flash pot—“

“I know. I know.” Tom held up both hands in mock surrender. “It’s illegal for anyone under 18.”

“You’ve put me in an awkward position. As your mother, I’m just incredibly relieved that you’re okay, though I feel angry that you got into that situation with Robert the Great in the first place.”

The microwave chimed. Tom removed the cup and went to the counter where the chocolate tin lay open. “That was pretty cool, though, you have to admit,” he said. “Did you see the look on his face when the flames went off? Was he surprised, or what?”

She expelled air from her mouth in astonishment. “He had a
knife
at your throat!”

“Yeah, but still—Dragon’s Breath! What a trick. I-I wasn’t sure… but it worked really well.”

Tom’s pride in successfully performing the effect seemed to have completely cancelled out his fear of dying at the hand of Robert the Great.

Kids! No matter what, they think they’re invincible. Cheri summoned her police voice. “As a law enforcement person, I have to advise you to get rid of that apparatus—”

Before she could get out the rest of her official statement, he said, “Oh, Pizza wants you to call him.”

She knew when she’d been effectively side-tracked. “He called? When?”

“Half hour ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I yelled upstairs. Think you were in the shower.”

She was already picking up the telephone from its wall cradle and dialing Pizzarelli’s number. Tom stirred his chocolate and retreated to the table to read the morning paper, as if nothing unusual had happened in their lives. As she listened to the rings she changed her mind and hung up. What she had to say had to be said now. “We have to talk about your father.”

“Mmmm,” Tom said.

She went to the table, pulled out a chair and sat down next to him. She put the flat of her hand on the paper under his nose and said, “You can read this later. I need to tell you about your father.”

He looked at her and her heart constricted. His face questioned, but she thought she saw a glimmer of acceptance as well.

“So, tell.”

She took a deep breath. “You know Larissa and I were roommates when we were dancers, before you were born.”

“Yeah, you said.”

“Then she married Maxwell.” Images swirled in her head, images she needed to edit. She had to say this simply, with as little detail as possible. “She had a show out of town, and Maxwell invited me over one evening for dinner, and—well—one thing led to another… I had a lot to drink, but I know that’s no excuse.”

The breath Tom let out sounded tense. She squinted her eyes and rubbed her face with her hand. “It was just that one time, but later I found out I was pregnant. I never said a word to Maxwell, but Larissa knew I didn’t have a boyfriend at the time. She figured out that Maxwell was your father. We never talked about it, but it colored our friendship. After you were born we quickly drifted apart.”

“And you never told me this because?”

She took his hand in hers. “Honey, I didn’t know what to say. I made up the traveling musician thing because I didn’t want to seem like one of those crazy women who come out of the woodwork saying Elvis is the father of her child.”

A faint smile played at Tom’s mouth. “Elvis? Yuck! Not cool as a father. Maxwell’s cool.”

Was he really going to take this that well? Cheri wondered. “I know you may need some time to absorb this. You may have more questions, but there’s not much to tell. Maxwell was never a part of our lives after that. And I guess his murder just made me fearful of you growing up to be a magician, to be part of that crazy world. You know I want the best for you.”

He leaned back in his chair and let his hand slide out from his mother’s. “I don’t know if I’m going to be a magician. It’s a lot of work. I like computers and was thinking about how they’re applied in police work. Maybe I’ll just always have magic as a hobby. I dunno.”

She rose from the table, heart feeling a hundred pounds lighter, and said. “Are we okay with this, then?”

Tom sipped his chocolate. “Yeah, sure.”

A picture of Larissa floated into her mind. Larissa, whose son was dead. She leaned over and placed her arms around Tom’s shoulders. “Love ya,” she said, and kissed him on the forehead.

Her hug brought a childish smile to his face. “You, too,” he mumbled.

At the counter she picked up her cell phone to return Pizzarelli’s call.

Behind her she heard her son say, “Hey. I’m glad you told me.”

CHAPTER 64             

Sunday, August 14, 9:15 a.m.
 

Pizzarelli answered and Cheri said, “What’s up?”

“Coffee at Vente A-Go-Go? Got some great info.”

“What?” she asked.

“9:30 okay?”

“You’re gonna keep me in suspense, aren’t you?”

“Yup. See ya.”

It was only a ten-minute drive to Vente A-Go-Go where she and Pizzarelli liked to fortify themselves before they drank police station coffee. She pulled into the parking lot and found a vacant space next to his ‘87 El Camino with the dented rear fender.

He waved when he saw her walk through the door. She waved back and moved into the short line to order her coffee. They picked a table by the window, where they could watch the Sunday morning traffic speed down Sahara Avenue.

“Okay, don’t make me beg,” Cheri said.

Her partner was wearing his Cheshire-cat grin, the one that made her feel she’d forgive him anything. He told her that a telephone trace on incoming calls to Peter’s cell phone revealed the call he received on the day he committed suicide emanated from the Cook Islands. “Where Trudy Schwartz said Maxwell stashed the money he conned out of Edmund Meiner,” he added, dunking a corner of a pumpkin scone into his coffee.

“His own money, remember? Meiner embezzled it from him in the first place.”

Pizzarelli, his mouth full, said, “Snow business.”

“Show business?”

He swallowed. “No. Snow business. All these magicians are snowing each other.”

She laughed. “Guess you could put it that way. So, likely it was Maxwell who called Peter. Things weren’t going well and Peter was already suicidal so whatever his father said to him pushed him over the edge.”

He eyed the glass display case as if he lusted after a second pumpkin scone. “How’s Tom?”

“I considered grounding him for a month, taking his car keys away, let him take the bus. But I’m just so happy he’s okay, I didn’t have the heart. He’s probably too old for that sort of thing, anyway.”

“How’d he do that thing with the flame?”

“He had a finger flint flasher and ball of flash cotton stashed in his pocket. That’s another issue. He’s under eighteen, so legally he can’t perform fire magic.”

Pizzarelli grinned, revealing crumbs of scone on his lower lip. “He’ll be a great magician.”

“Stow, it Pizza. I don’t want to hear that. Anyway now he says he’s thinking of computers and police work. Can you believe it?” She sliced her cinnamon roll into bite-sized pieces and shook her head.

“Sad about Peter,” he said. “He was the best of the lot. My nephews loved his show. Once they even got to watch it while they were having their teeth worked on. The dentist had a TV hanging from the ceiling of his office to distract the kids with videos.”

She snapped her fingers. “They shared the same dentist!”

“Who?”

“Maxwell sent Dayan Franklyn to his dentist. He could have found out through the dentist that Dayan was diabetic, so by fiddling with his medication, Dayan’s senses would be off-kilter. He wouldn’t be able to concentrate as well on removing the handcuffs. I imagine his reflexes and mental timing would have been slowed down as a result.” She paused to take a sip of her coffee. “And our ATL never produced him. He’s still missing.”

“We thought the other prints on the cuffs were the killer’s. We weren’t surprised to find Maxwell’s prints ‘cause we thought he was the one murdered. Betcha that other set of prints are Franklyn’s.”

She forked the last bite of her cinnamon roll into her mouth and crumpled up the napkin. She wanted to leave right now for the dentist’s office, but since it was Sunday the office would be closed and the detectives were restricted on their days off from interviewing outside the office. “Tomorrow. First thing, we have a dental appointment—”

“But wait, there’s more,” he said. “You gonna love this.” The Cheshire grin had widened so much that she noticed a space between his back molars she’d never noticed before.

“The biggest stunt in the magic world wasn’t Maxwell’s death by roller coaster,” he continued, “but his disappearance. He had a second passport in the name of James Porter. It was traced at McCarran on a red-eye to New York at 1:15 Tuesday morning after the stunt. From there to Bangkok. Trail disappears there.”

“So he could be in the Cook Islands, or he could be in Japan.”

“Yup. He faked his own death by substituting Dayan Franklyn. Great way to get back at his son for being ga
y⎯
kill his lover.”

Cheri sighed. “And at the same time duck out of the contract with Regine’s friends, and a contract on his life.”

He dunked the last piece of the pumpkin scone in his coffee, leaving little swirling lumps of soggy crumbs floating on the surface. “I think he planned this for a long time. The video gave him a way to lord it over Meiner and Digbee, in case he needed them to help him.”

“So when he discovered the affair between Dayan and Peter, Dayan became the logical substitute.”

Pizzarelli swirled the mixture in his half-full coffee cup. “So why do you think the bad hamburger, switching the trick cuffs, maybe fooling with Dayan’s meds? Just switching the cuffs seems like it would be enough.”

“I think he wasn’t taking any chances. Maxwell was methodic. Three is sometimes considered a lucky number. Three guarantees the ending would be exactly as he’d choreographed it.”

“Well, three turned out to not be lucky for Dayan Franklyn. I don’t think Maxwell had any more feeling for Dayan than he did for Scott Liebold.”

“Sick man,” Cheri said, sipping her coffee. “In any case, with Maxwell out of the country, he’s gotten away with magicide. We have to turn everything over to Interpol.”

“Yup.”

She watched her partner sweep crumbs from his scone into a tidy pile on the edge of his paper napkin and dump them into his coffee. “Pizza, you believe in karma?”

“Karma? Why d’ you ask?”

She shrugged. “Well, I just thought, being a vegetarian and all, you might—”

“I don’t go in for that airy-fairy stuff,” he said. “But if you mean, what goes around, comes around, yeah, I believe in that.”

“Me, too.”

EPILOGUE

At sunset on the beach near the village of Manuhanga, in the northern group of the Cook Islands, the old man carefully picked among the seaweed at the water’s edge.

His sharp eyes searched for the mussels attached to ocean greenery that often washed ashore. Beneath dark skin his arms and legs were wiry with stringy muscles. He wore a faded pair of khaki cargo pants that were too large for his frame and had tied back his gray-streaked hair with a length of woven sisal.

Around his waist he wore a mesh bag of the same material which nearly touched the ground each time he bent to glean a mussel from the tangled seaweed at his feet.

The edge of the ocean rolled in to nip and swirl around his ankles and he muttered to himself. Once others had done this work for him, and it angered him that now he was obliged to search for his own food. Once a powerful shaman, he had lost favor in the village and could no longer sit in his painted wooden house while the women took turns cooking for him and presenting the meals.

All his life he’d known he would be the shaman. His father had been shaman before him and had taught him all the secrets of animus and plant and ritual. He knew the power of healing and what plants enhanced child-making and how to commune with the dead.

The village was his world and his neighbors were his family, friends, and sole means of support. It was a good life in which he had enjoyed all the pleasures that went with knowledge and power.

He thought of the white man who had taken it all away and his gestures as he searched for mussels among the seaweed became rough with his anger.

Taller than anyone in Manuhanga, the white man was secretive about where he came from. But the shaman knew he came from America, that distant world where everyone was white and tall and rich. He knew because years before he’d seen pictures of Americans in a tattered magazine that had been passed around the village of Tongatea down the coast. He feared for Manuhanga and his people because he knew this usurper did not understand the responsibility that went with being the wise man of the village.

On his mother’s side the old man was descended from a long line of influential
ariki
, female chieftans of the highest power. He knew it had not been easy for his father and grandfather before him to protect the people.

Yet they had managed to resist the missionary influences that in the previous century had swept the islands. They had resisted kidnap by Peruvian slavers, intermarriage with white New Zealanders, and the influences of democracy and tourism.

And now here came this giant of a white man, impressing the adults and amusing the children by making coins appear from behind the ear or out of the mouth.

The old shaman shook his head back and forth in wild jerks. How could they be so beguiled as to believe this white man had true magical power? Since the man had arrived in the village and set up his household, he had yet to predict the sex of an unborn child or heal an old woman’s painful bones.

The old shaman knew that his greatest challenge lay before him, to protect his people from this new evil.

His pouch filled with the bounty of the lagoon, he moved farther up the beach to where a grove of wide-leafed paw paw trees made a wide expanse of shade. His eyes swept the surrounding area to be sure he was alone, and then he removed his pouch and set it at the base of a tree. The ground around him was littered with the dark-green leaves blown down in the last rainstorm.

At his standing height a low-drooping branch offered several clusters of the paw paw fruit. He was selecting three pale green fruits from a cluster that had developed the blackish splotches indicating ripeness when he heard a rustling movement at the far edge of the grove. He turned and squinted his eyes in the direction of a melodious sound.

A little girl wandered into the grove, singing. She stopped when she saw the old shaman.

“Grandfather,” she said in greeting.

He didn’t want her here. He wanted to sit alone at the base of the paw paw tree and feel sorry for himself. He needed to think about the monumental task before him, his newly-lowered status in the village, and what he might do to change it.

“Go back to your mother,” he growled.

The child peered at him, perplexed. She pointed to the fruits in his hand. “Can I have one?”

Why, she was so like his own great-granddaughter. He separated one of the paw paw fruits and handed it to her. Once children had been in awe of him, but not this child.

“Good-bye, grandfather,” she said, turned and ran out of the grove.

Grandfather. Once they called him
aupuna
, learned one. Now they called him simply, grandfather.

A feral bitterness swept through him. Overhead a seabird flew past, its cry mocking him. Even the wild things had turned against him. A white man had claimed his position in the village and now he felt old and useless and frightened.

He sat down against the base of the tree, took a cloth from his pouch, spread the cloth on the ground and laid out his fruit and mussels.

When he bit into the thin skin of the paw paw fruit he didn’t taste its soft, fleshy sweetness; he tasted the sour gall of humiliation and hatred. Before his eyes he saw the image of his neighbors bringing food to the American and washing his feet. He saw his own feet, brown and weathered from years of walking barefoot, dirty with dried salt and fringes of seaweed.

Before his eyes he relived the sight that had driven him from the village this morning: his own daughter preparing to steam the
andora
fish to make the dish that was his favorite. Only she was not preparing it for him—it was for the tall American who could make gold coins appear from thin air.

He ate his fruit and mussels and a plan came to him.

He gazed out across the lagoon. With withered lips he mumbled the names of each medicinal plant he knew that caused a man to dispel all the fluids in the body before wasting away in a black liquid death.

He knew of a spot not far from where he sat where he could gather what he needed. The roots would not even need to be dried.

He saw himself grind them carefully, return to his daughter’s house and slip them into the dish, where they would not be noticed among the vegetables.

A simple solution. Why had it not come to him sooner?

He raised his head and squinted at the light sparkling between the leaves of the tree overhead and mumbled words of thanks to the gods for sending the seabird flying past to sow in his head this solution that would restore him to his rightful position as the most powerful person in the village of Manuhanga.

THE END