Trio of Sorcery (8 page)

He spent a lot of time explaining how some of that stage magic worked—levitation, misdirection, table tapping and tilting, the “medium” managing to get free of the restraints put on him. In theory, Di knew how these things worked, but not the mechanics, and it was fascinating. To be honest, it made her admire stage magicians even more. So far as she was concerned, knowing how something was done didn't bother her—in fact, knowing how a trick was worked was only going to increase her appreciation of the skill involved in making it “invisible.”

“Houdini spent a big chunk of his time showing these crooks up for what they were and you'd think by now no one would believe in them, but they're worse than ever. Like cockroaches. You stomp on one, but there's a zillion under the cabinets.”

He finished his beer with a frown. Di prompted him into describing some of the ways that Houdini and others had caught the phonies, and took a lot of mental notes.

“Those are the old-style mediums. A lot of times these days the mediums and psychics do away with the stage magic—hell, most of 'em don't have the skills to pull it off anyway—and just concentrate on hot readings.”

“What's a hot reading?” Zaak asked.

“What I told you about earlier. They get their information way in advance. Most of these people talk to each other, okay? They swap files. It's to their advantage to cooperate with each other. So you get tired of going to Madame Zuzu, and decide you want to visit Psychic Clarabell instead, well, Clarabell is going to call up Zuzu, offer to split the take, and get Zuzu's file on you, and when you walk in thinking she knows nothing about you, bingo! What amazing revelations! How could she know these things?” He snorted. “Then Clarabell ponies over part of what she got from you to your old psychic, and you think she's got a better connection than Zuzu.”

“I don't get why you're so
mad
at these people though,” Em put in. “I mean, aren't they offering a kind of comfort? Like a priest would?”

“Well, even at their best they're still offering comfort for money,” Marshal pointed out, frowning. “And it's dishonest comfort.
They
don't want to comfort you, they just want your money. If you believe in all that psychic energy stuff, you know, and karma? They're giving you something that's counterfeit when it all comes down to it. It's not real, and when people find out it's not real, they are just shattered. At their worst, well…there are the outright
crooks. Besides having pickpockets and thieves going through your pockets for information, they have pickpockets and thieves getting a couple checks out of your checkbook to forge, stealing your credit card numbers, and lifting your cash. And then, they get into the ‘curse' scams.”

This was the sort of thing Di knew about, and she watched the others' jaws drop as Marshal told them about the “cursed money” fraud, the “psychic surgeons,” and all of the ways people were convinced that they needed to be rid of non ex is tent “demonic influences.” These were what she and Memaw had debunked, but it was all new to Marshal's friends.

“Hey, look, let me just show you something. Gimme a couple of seconds in your fridge, okay? Then you'll see what I'm talking about.” With Emory's wave of a go-ahead, Marshal rummaged around a bit and came back. “Zaak, you're going to be my patient. Pull up your shirt, okay?”

Embarrassed, Zaak did so, revealing a bit of a belly. Marshal kneaded at it for a minute with his fingers, then suddenly seemed to plunge his hand halfway into Zaak's stomach! Even more astonishing, a few seconds later, Marshal pulled out—

A meatball…

“I'm telling you, Zaak, you really have to start chewing your food before you swallow it,” he deadpanned. All of them laughed, even Zaak.

“That was all sleight of hand. If I had time to prepare, I'd have some blood in the tip of a surgical glove, or even
just some cotton soaked in blood that I palmed along with what I was going to remove. Usually that's a piece of liver. Liver looks generic and really icky, and it's not hard to believe it's a tumor. And this is how I did it.” He took the meatball and hid it in the palm of his hand. He kneaded the surface of the couch, creating a crease. This time though, he did the “plunge” in slow motion, and
without
concealing what he was doing with his other hand, so they could see all he did was fold his fingers up into his palm, then “withdraw them” with the meatball in them.

He did a slam dunk with the poor abused meatball into the trash. “Those guys are the worst. They make you think you're possessed by demons. They take all your money, a little at a time. They keep you scared to death. And you just might actually be sick, with cancer or something, and by the time you find it out, you've got no money and you're probably so far gone you die.”

Evidently this was the first time Marshal had ever expanded on his particular hobbyhorse, and even Zaak was leaning forward to listen, his embarrassment mostly forgotten—except for a flush, once or twice, that suggested to Di that he'd fallen for some of those tricks.

Eventually, though, Di's reading assignments overrode her intense interest in Marshal's stories. She finished the last of her beer, put the bottle down on the table—the good thing about using a door for a table was that no one cared about bottle rings—and stood up.

“I really need to get,” she said regretfully. “College is a
lot more intense than I thought it would be. And this is
my
dime I'm dropping here, so I'm not into pouring it down the drain….”

“The voice of conscience,” Marshal said with a laugh. “Tell you what, I'll walk you to the stairs. I'm 4A, right by the stairwell.”

She clasped her hands under her chin. “Oh,
thank
you, gallant sir!” she said in a breathless voice. “However will I repay you?”

“Don't answer that, Marshal.” Em laughed. “I'll kick your ass.”

Marshal put his hand over his heart. “I swear, I had no intention of—”

“Yeah, right.” Emory snorted. “Get outta here. See you tomorrow.”

As soon as the apartment door closed behind them, Marshal lost every semblance of even mild intoxication, and turned to her with an intense look on his face. “All right, you wanted to know waaaaaay too much about psychic debunking. What's going on?”

Di hesitated for a very long time. Should she trust this guy she'd just met?

On the other hand, nothing about any of these four had set internal alarm bells going off. And he knew more than she did by a good mile.
Intuition sez—

Before she could answer, Marshal persisted, a worried look on his face. “Someone you know getting scammed?
Friend? Relative? Seriously, if I can help—you know, use the powers only for good?”

That decided her. “Come on down to my place,” she said. “This is going to take a while.”

The next day, she wasn't alone when she was waiting for Joe O'Brian; Marshal was with her.

The library seemed to be frozen somewhere in the fifties, with hard upholstered chairs and sofas with spindly little Swedish-modern wooden legs, covered in beige fabric and what might have been leather. They clashed with the Victorian architecture, but then, Dudley House was, well…not the typical Harvard House. As the painting of Karl Marx downstairs, and the fact that for years in the sixties the SDS had kept a mimeograph machine in one of the bathrooms, might have told you.

Joe eyed Marshal, but didn't say anything as Di introduced them. When they all sat down, however, he leaned forward over his knees. “I thought I was just meeting you, Miss Tregarde—”

“Marshal's a stage magician,” Di interrupted him. “I don't know enough about the situation yet to know what questions to ask, but he knows about the sorts of stage magic deceptions that this Tamara might be using, so I thought I'd bring him along to help us both out.”

She gestured to Marshal, then sat back and listened as the two men slowly pooled their knowledge. Finally Marshal shook his head. “All right. This one just might beat me. Partly. I can't see immediately either her angle, or where she's getting her information; she isn't extorting money from the mom, and she's not getting publicity out of this.”

“If she's really smart,” Di said slowly, “she's got a confederate. Someone posing as a cop or a reporter, who can get at least some of the detail about Melanie from school-mates or playmates or their parents. I'd bet on posing as a reporter, everyone wants to get his name in the paper, not everyone is comfortable talking to a cop.”

Marshal nodded. “But what's her angle? That's the question.” He drummed his fingers on the table beside him. “Thinking aloud here…I'd think she was just throwing random stuff out as these ‘leads,' figuring to get some publicity if one of them actually pans out, except that from what you're telling me, the leads are anything but random. Most of them are typically vague, but they don't seem random, and they do seem to mean something to the mom. Nothing to the cops, but either mom is convinced that there's a hidden message there, or your phony is just doing a combination of hot and cold reading and coming up with things that mom zeros in on.”

“Yeah, I don't get it either.” Joe tried to get comfortable in the hard chair, failed, and tried another position. “That's what's so frustrating.”

“So go at it another way,” Di said. “Follow up on these so-called ‘leads.' Prove they're dead ends.”

Joe shook his head vehemently. “We'd look like a bunch of idiots, the papers would have a field day if they found out we were spending man-hours on a psychic's tips. And we can't waste the time—”

“Not you,” Di interrupted. “Me. And Marshal, if he wants to.”

“I'm in,” Marshal said instantly. “I've done some searching for lost kids, so I kind of know what to look for and if we find anything that looks right or wrong, we'll stop and phone you. And no one is going to know we're associated with the cops. Come on! A couple of Harvard kids? Helping the
cops
? Never happen. Right? If we actually find a lead, which I very much doubt, and the press asks, you can call us ‘private investigators for the family.'”

Joe sucked on his lower lip for a moment, then gave in. He got out his note pad and case file, and made a copy of the list of “leads” that Tamara had so far pressed on Chris Fitzhugh; Di made a second copy and gave it to Marshal. The lanky junior glanced at his watch and shrugged. “I've got a lab,” he said. “I'll catch you back at the apartment, Di. We'll figure out what we can do with this, if anything.”

Only when he was well gone did Joe turn back to Diana. “How much does he know?” the cop asked. “About—” he wiggled his fingers in a way probably intended to convey “the supernatural.”

“Nothing,” Di said. “But Lavinia said
you
—”

The silence hung between them for a moment, interrupted only by the sizzle of a fluorescent bulb somewhere in the library stacks. Then Joe sighed.

“Cops don't like things they can't explain,” he said sourly. “So when they find things they can't explain, they make a little division of people who don't quite fit, people they can't actually
fire,
and they shove the things they don't want to think about at those people. And they hope that if the people in question can't make those things go away, they will at least be—or become—people that no one will listen to. In my case, I had the misfortune to be the guy who solved a murder because a ghost told him who did it.”

“A ghost.” Di nodded. “I can see where that would be a problem.”

“It was worse because the ghost told me where to find the murder weapon, which was
not
what the lab said it would be, and which was right in plain sight in the home of someone who wasn't a suspect.” Joe grimaced. “So I got put in
that
department, where we're all considered borderline loonies. And if we actually aren't borderline loonies to begin with, we sure are after we see a few cases. So we're the ones who deal with psychics. Such a treat.”

“I'll do my best for you,” Di promised. “It's entirely possible that if we treat these things as serious, and investigate them completely, then this Tamara will dry up and blow away. I…” She hesitated, then plunged on. “However, there's one angle to this that I didn't want to go into in front of Marshal. I went by the address you gave
me for her, and I have to tell you, without even seeing this woman, she gave me the creeps. And I can think of something she
might
be getting from Chris Fitzhugh that would be as good as money.”

Joe's brow furrowed. “Which is?”

“Despair. Some people…they can feed off that. It's a powerful emotion—and feeding off it is more common than you might think. You ever know anyone who would start an argument for no good reason, get people so angry they're about ready to kill something, then cut the argument off with some sort of apology, and walk away looking like they just had a turkey dinner?” She waited. She was pretty certain that Joe
had
had an experience like that. Maybe more than one. When she saw the light of reluctant agreement in his eyes, she continued. “And I'll bet that at least once, everyone except that person winds up feeling exhausted.”