The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas (22 page)

THIRTY-FIVE

I experienced a mixture of emotions as I stepped inside the Fisher Twins’ private elevator. On the one hand, I felt relieved, perhaps even elated, to have got the twins away from their office without Sal being discovered. True, I had no way of knowing how he’d moved from behind the chair without any of us seeing him, let alone whether he’d be able to escape without being caught, but at least something had gone my way, and more to the point, I had a little more flexibility in what I could say to try and dig myself out of the pit of trouble I seemed to be in.

On the other hand, my wrists had been bound in front of my waist with a pair of plastic tie-cuffs, the twins and Ricks were surrounding me, and I was about to lead them all to Victoria. I was tired and beaten up and more than a little scared, and I wasn’t at all sure that I was capable of thinking very clearly.

‘What happened to your golf game?’ I asked, if only to break the awkward silence in the elevator.

The twins turned and looked past me at one another.

‘It’s just that I heard you play golf at four o’clock every day,’ I went on. ‘That’s why I thought it would be safe to be in your office.’

The twin on my left (the one who’d kicked the mosaic hatch and had limped as we’d entered the elevator) cleared his throat. ‘Today is our birthday.’

‘We don’t play golf on our birthday,’ added his brother.

‘Your birthday? Wow.’ I stuck out my bottom lip. ‘I did not know that.’

‘We like to keep it low-key.’

‘Huh.’ I shuffled my feet. ‘Well, Happy Birthday, I guess.’

‘Yeah,’ Ricks said, hefting my record bag awkwardly. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Appreciate it,’ the twins responded, just as a timely
ping!
and a sudden loss of momentum signalled that we’d arrived at our chosen floor.

The theatre was in complete darkness, aside from a collection of dusty footlights pointed in at the stage itself. Otherwise, everything was as it had been when Josh had abandoned his show. The battered cabinet was still in the centre of the stage, its doors flung open to reveal the beach mural and the coarse sand spilling out from its base. The straw sunhat Victoria had worn was hanging over the top of one of the doors. Her other prop, the pink daiquiri glass, was resting on the wooden floorboards close by.

Victoria was sitting at the front of the stage with her legs dangling over the blackened auditorium below. She glanced around skittishly when she heard us approach, and so did the redhead sitting alongside her. The redhead was really quite something. Sure, I might have seen the YouTube video of her performance, and I might even have stood over her while she lay naked in the bath, but nothing could have prepared me for my first real glimpse of her face.

Her skin was creamy white and seemed almost to glow in the glare of the stage lights. Her lips were full and lush, her nose lean and neatly upturned, and her sparkling green eyes had an almost feline quality. Her hair topped it all. It fell around her face in luxurious loops and curls, collecting around her shoulders and her delicate neck like a blood-red shawl.

She had on a scooped yellow top over a pair of admirably pert breasts and some figure-hugging jeans. True, I’d only seen her rear profile in the bath, but there was no doubt in my mind that this was the same woman.

As we drew near, the redhead stood and wiped the dust from her hands. She treated me to a watchful assessment, then glanced at Victoria before finally flicking her eyes towards her brothers. Bewilderment clouded her features and I thought I could understand why. How could a beauty like this be related to the Fisher Twins?

‘Charlie, my God,’ Victoria said. ‘Are you all right? What have they done to you?’

She hurried across the stage and cupped my bruised face in her hands, yanking my head towards the light and prodding a finger at the swollen welt on my temple. I winced, then moaned as my rib flared with pain.

‘I’m fine,’ I told her through gritted teeth. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘Don’t worry about it? Are you mad?’ She spun to confront Ricks. ‘Are you responsible for this?’ She did a double-take when she noticed that my record bag was knotted in his fist. ‘You’re despicable.’

‘Is that right?’ Ricks said flatly. ‘And what do you suppose he was doing upstairs when we found him?’

‘Nothing that could have justified this, I’m sure.’

‘How sure?’

Victoria paused, then re-doubled her attack. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. You should be locked up.’

‘It wasn’t him.’ I touched her arm, as if to confirm the information, and then I stepped towards the redhead, aiming to take control of the situation before somebody else did it for me. ‘You must be Caitlin. My name’s Charlie. I’d offer to shake your hand, only . . .’ I lifted my cuffed wrists and spread my fingers.

‘I guess that’s okay,’ she replied. ‘Victoria told me you might know where Josh is at.’

Her voice was cautious, a lot like her manner. She looked past me and checked on her brothers, as if she expected them to forbid her from saying any more.

‘Actually, I was rather hoping you could explain his whereabouts.’

‘Me?’ She raised her hand to her chest and opened her mouth, as though breathless. ‘But I don’t have any idea where he’s gotten to. I wasn’t at the show when he went missing.’

‘Believe me, that much I’m aware of.’

She backed off a fraction, perhaps unnerved by my response and only half-sure she wanted to know the reasons behind it. I gestured at the scarred wooden cabinet in the middle of the stage.

‘I’m guessing you know your way around this thing better than anyone.’

I approached the cabinet, my footsteps echoing out into the auditorium. I reached for one of the doors with my bound hands and stroked the lacquered wood.

The Fisher Twins stood blinking against the stage lights, peering fixedly at me with grim expressions. I didn’t doubt that they were annoyed with me for involving their sister in the entire mess, and from the way they were leaning forward on their toes, I got the impression they weren’t inclined to grant me a whole lot of time to explain myself.

Hell, they could crowd me all they liked. Standing on that theatre stage, in front of the magic cabinet, I felt a sudden rush of confidence. It wasn’t simply a renewed belief in the theory I’d been developing. It was also that I’d done this kind of thing before – in my burglar novels as well as real life – and there was something oddly fitting about gathering together the key players in a mystery before explaining what had happened and why. It was like a magic trick, in a way. First the build-up – the confusion, and the misdirection. Then the puzzle – the confounding of your audience. And now, the final flourish – the delivery of a solution so elegant that my culpability for what had happened might just be overlooked.

‘The last moment that anyone saw Josh,’ I announced, in a clear, confident voice, ‘he walked around the back of this cabinet in the middle of his show.’

‘Jeez,’ Ricks said. ‘Enough with the routine. You told us you knew where he was at. Let’s hear it.’

‘Patience.’ I stepped inside the cabinet on the coarse sand and turned to face my audience. ‘Victoria, when Josh disappeared, you were in my current position, helping out with the show. You were quite helpless inside the cabinet. You’d been strapped in securely and steel blades had been inserted on either side of you.’

‘The blades are just a diversion,’ Caitlin explained, walking closer to me.

I nodded. ‘I suspected as much. And normally, you’d be the one in the cabinet, correct?’

‘That’s right.’

I smiled at her. ‘Do you mind my asking why you weren’t performing last night? Josh told us you were ill – but that was less than a day ago, and you look perfectly healthy to me.’

I could feel Victoria’s eyes boring into the side of my head, but I willed myself not to glance in her direction.

‘I wasn’t sick.’

‘No?’

The young woman threw up her hands. ‘I was just beat, I guess. I’d been bitching about doing another show since the matinée. And Josh, well, he told me to take a break. Said he didn’t want me to give a flat performance. Plus, I’ve been working on a new act, a water stunt for the show. I was kind of glad to have the opportunity to do some training.’

‘Indeed.’ I straightened my shoulders and lifted my chin, bracing myself against the rear of the cabinet. ‘Just so that I understand, you’d normally be standing where I am now, and at a certain point in time Josh would move behind the cabinet. Then, very quickly, the two of you would switch positions. That’s the pay-off, as it were?’

‘Sure. But before we do the switch Josh has to cover the cabinet. He drapes a black curtain over the entire thing. It’s only there for, like, five seconds before I appear and pull the cover away.’

‘And by that time Josh is standing where I am?’

‘That’s right. And then he climbs out and joins me.’

‘In a bikini?’

She smiled demurely. ‘No, I tend to fill a bikini better than Josh.’

I just bet that she did. I was poised to continue when one of the twins stepped forward and placed his arm in front of his sister, as though defending her honour in a high-school corridor.

‘That’s enough, Caitlin. This guy is stalling us.’ He glared at me. ‘You know where Josh is, or not?’

‘You mean you really haven’t figured it out?’

‘Buddy, there’s nothing to figure. He’s gone.’

I stepped down from the cabinet and peered at Caitlin, doing my best to gain her trust. True, I might never have cut it as a professional magician, but I was more than ready for my big reveal.

‘How’d you do the switch, Caitlin?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You and Josh. When you trade positions, it’s because the cabinet is gimmicked in some way, right? We tried finding a secret door after he vanished, but we didn’t look for too long. And I’m guessing if Josh had a talented carpenter build the cabinet, well, there are ways to conceal things that might otherwise be obvious.’

Her cattish eyes narrowed and she sucked on her lips, as if wary of me all of a sudden.

‘With respect,’ I told her, ‘there are bigger things going on right now than your stage secrets.’

‘Go ahead,’ her brother added. ‘You can tell him. If he screws this up, he won’t be alive long enough for it to matter.’

Caitlin drew a long breath through her teeth, then clasped her hands tight together and circled to the reverse of the cabinet. She dropped to her knees and flattened her palms against the base of the rear panel, just left of centre, with one hand directly above the other. She levered down on her forearms, grunting faintly, and in almost the same instant a thin join appeared between two horizontal strips of wood. The strips were hinged in the middle and they began to swing upwards, exposing an opening just large enough for a grown man to crawl inside.

‘Wait.’ I nudged Caitlin aside. ‘Up here?’

She nodded.

‘And there’s what, a channel with enough space for someone to fit?’

‘Yes. But first you have to release the sand through a small opening. Then, once you’re inside, a second hatch lets you step through into the cabinet. I’m the one who has to open that.’

I smiled glumly. ‘Can it be opened by the person inside the channel?’

‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘What about this hatch?’ I went on, rapping my knuckle against the strips of timber Caitlin had released. ‘Can it be opened from inside the channel?’

‘I don’t think so. But then, it’s never been an issue. Josh always made sure the hatch stayed open when we did the switch. There’s a tiny catch on the outside, see?’

‘I was afraid you might say something like that.’ I nodded to Ricks. ‘You might want to get a doctor in here.’

And with that, I plunged my cuffed hands up into the darkened space above me and felt around for Josh’s heels. It had taken a while for the penny to drop, but the logic now seemed inescapable to me. If Josh had succeeded in stealing the juice list, he’d had no reason to flee without handing it to Maurice first. But Maurice hadn’t heard from Josh, and that suggested to me that he’d never left the stage.

The way I saw it, Josh had managed to steal the list at some point in the two days prior to his show. Feeling cocky, he’d indulged in the roulette scam. But when the twins appeared during his performance, he’d panicked and assumed that he’d been rumbled. So he hid in the only place to hand.

From what I could gather, nobody besides Caitlin knew how to access the hidden compartment, so he had only to remain quiet to escape detection. But cruelly, he had no way of getting back out. Once closed, the gimmicked hatch couldn’t be opened from inside the channel where he’d concealed himself. And if my thinking wasn’t completely flawed, I was afraid that he might well have suffocated.

‘Oh Lord, is he there?’ Caitlin covered her face with her hands. ‘Please tell me he’s not there.’

I forced my hands higher, clawing desperately at the wood with my fingertips. Having my wrists bound wasn’t making the task any easier, so I pulled my arms clear and thrust my head up into the space. I scrambled and I pushed until I was half-standing in a nook just large enough to contain a grown man.

And I was the only man inside it. Josh Masters was nowhere to be seen.

THIRTY-SIX

I dropped out of the cabinet and rolled onto my side, gasping for air. It had been warm and stuffy inside the opening, and I already felt light-headed. I also felt crushed. Without a body, my theory was in serious trouble, and so, very probably, was I.

‘That’s it?’ Ricks asked. ‘That’s your explanation? You figured Josh was dumb enough to get stuck inside one of his own tricks. Jeez, we should never have come down here.’

‘I don’t get it,’ I said, half to myself. ‘I don’t understand where he went.’

‘No kidding. Guy was a magician. He could have vanished a hundred different ways.’

‘I really thought he’d be here.’

‘Yeah – well, he ain’t.’ Ricks turned and checked on the twins’ reactions before patting my record bag and addressing me again. ‘I think it’s time we continued this conversation in private.’ He pointed at Victoria. ‘You too, miss.’

‘Trapdoors,’ Victoria replied.

‘Excuse me?’

She stamped her foot on the stage. ‘Charlie, when we were here before, didn’t you think he could have used one?’

‘I suppose it’s possible.’

‘Caitlin?’

Caitlin shook her head. ‘This stage only has one trapdoor. It’s way over there.’ She jerked her chin off to the far right, close to where the twins had been standing during Josh’s performance. It didn’t seem likely that he could have made it to the trapdoor without being seen.

Victoria offered me a dispirited heft of her shoulders, then extended her hands and pulled me to my feet. She brushed some dirt from my shoulders, mussed my hair and kissed my forehead.

‘Time’s running out,’ she whispered. ‘I wish you’d put those pretty grey cells of yours to work.’

‘I tried, Vic.’

‘Then try again. You of all people should know the value of a good re-write.’

She turned from me and knocked on the rear of the cabinet with her knuckles, working downwards like a builder trying to locate a joist in a stud-wall.

‘I showed you the only way in,’ Caitlin told her, in an apologetic tone.

Victoria crouched and contorted her neck to peer inside the concealed opening for herself. When she found nothing, she rocked backwards on her heels and sat on her bottom with her hands spread on the stage floor.

‘He must have left the theatre. But how?’

‘I’m not sure that it matters,’ I said. ‘He must be in Hawaii already.’

‘Hawaii?’ Caitlin said. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘We asked around,’ one of the twins told her. ‘People heard he was planning a trip.’

‘People?’

‘Some girls from the revue. Some of the guys from the bar. You know how Josh liked to talk.’

‘And there’s something else.’ I raised an eyebrow at Ricks and pointed a finger towards his blazer. ‘May I?’

‘May you what?’

‘If you’ll just pass me the wallet.’

Ricks tucked my bag under his armpit and extracted Josh’s wallet from his pocket. He spread the leather compartments with his fingers.

‘Hey,’ Caitlin said, stepping closer. ‘That belongs to Josh.’

‘I kind of acquired it,’ I explained, with a heft of my shoulders. ‘Before his performance.’

‘He means he stole it.’ Ricks stuck out his bottom lip and looked up from the wallet with a blank expression, as though it was just another dead-end.

‘Oh, give it to me, will you?’ I swiped the wallet from his hand and quickly removed the torn napkin with the telephone number on it. I uncurled the napkin and passed it to Caitlin. ‘That number is for the Hawaii Airlines booking line.’

Caitlin let go of a withering breath and flapped the napkin in the air. She closed her eyes and pinched her nose with her finger and thumb, as if she was about to jump into a swimming pool.

‘You’re wrong,’ she said, in a fractured voice. ‘All of you. This was for our honeymoon.’

‘Your
what
?’ demanded the second twin, stepping forward to tear the napkin from her grip. ‘What in hell are you talking about?’

She set her jaw and turned from one brother to the next. ‘Josh asked me to marry him. The ceremony was going to be in Oahu. He was arranging it all. Some guy he knew – a producer in town – had offered him a villa. We just needed flights.’

‘And you said yes to the bum?’

‘We were going to tell you. We were just waiting for the right moment.’

‘After he’d ripped us off, maybe?’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘Perhaps he went ahead of you,’ I suggested.

‘No,’ she replied, peeling her lips back over her teeth. ‘Not Josh.’

‘Then where is he?’

‘The Cape,’ Victoria said, and clicked her fingers, as if snapping herself out of a trance.

‘Cape Cod?’ Ricks asked.

‘South Africa?’ I added. ‘Why would Josh have gone there?’

‘No, you morons, the black cape. Caitlin said that Josh concealed the cabinet with a cape before they switched positions. And I seem to remember Josh having one just before he disappeared.’

Now that Victoria mentioned it, I could remember that too. The way he’d twirled the cape had reminded me of a bullfighter.

‘You’re right,’ I said.

‘So where is it?’

We all looked at Caitlin. She stepped towards the rear of the cabinet and moved her foot around in an arc on the stage.

‘Josh didn’t use it to cover the cabinet?’

I looked at Victoria. Victoria looked at me.

‘No,’ we replied, in unison.

‘Then it should be here.’

‘Could anyone have moved it?’ Victoria asked, directing her question to the Fisher Twins.

‘Lady, so far as we know, nobody’s been here since Josh disappeared.’

Victoria clicked her fingers and turned to me with a light in her eyes. ‘Then that’s how he did it. Don’t you see? Instead of covering the cabinet, he shrouded himself. In the darkness, he could have crawled away without being seen.’

‘Crawled where?’

‘Anywhere. The trapdoor maybe. Or even behind this curtain.’

Victoria paced to the black curtain at the rear of the stage, the one with the rope lighting in the shape of the Vegas skyline. She gathered the curtain near her feet and lifted it in her arms, ducking her head underneath.

‘Where does this lead?’

‘There are doors from the back,’ Ricks said. ‘Corridors that take you on a bunch of different routes.’

‘Then that’s how he got away.’

‘Neat,’ one of the twins put in. ‘But now he’s gone. And you still owe us our money.’

As much as I didn’t want to admit it, he was right. The moment Josh left the stage, he could have gone anywhere he pleased. What puzzled me was why it hadn’t pleased him to head to Maurice’s white-on-white home and hand over the juice list. If he’d stolen the list purely for money, then I supposed it was possible that he might have tried to interest somebody else to spark a bidding war, but so far as I could tell he’d genuinely wanted to be the star turn at Magic Land. And the longer he delayed, the less likely that became.

There had to be something else, something we’d missed that would explain what was going on. And whatever it was, I needed to find it soon.

I felt a tug at my hand and looked down to see Caitlin prising my fingers away from Josh’s wallet.

‘It’s not yours,’ she told me. ‘You have no right to keep it.’

She clutched the wallet to her chest, shielding it with her hands, as though it was a precious stone. I didn’t know what she hoped to find inside it to justify her reaction. Maybe the autographed portrait shot. Because aside from that, there was just his credit cards, his hotel key card, the cardboard sleeve with the number of his suite, and the valet ticket for his car.

Hang on a minute . . .

‘I have an idea,’ I said, not for the first time.

‘Another one?’ Ricks groaned.

‘Hear me out. I really think I might be onto something.’