BLONDE blushes. SHELLY kisses her hand.
BLONDE
Oh, yes.
SHELLY leads her to the door. BLONDE exits. SHELLY turns on the radio, finds classical music, and cleans his instruments. The door suddenly opens. A MAN dressed like a sea captain, his cap pulled forward over his eyes, staggers in. Under his arm is a bundle about the size of a large ham. It is wrapped in brown paper and tied with a thin rope. MAN tries to say something, hands the package to SHELLY and then collapses. SHELLY touches the man’s neck to be sure he is dead and then SHELLY puts the package down on his instrument table, unwraps it, and discovers a foot-high white statue of an owl.
It ended there. I looked at the door waiting for the knock I was reasonably sure would come. It did.
“Come in.”
Pancho Vanderhoff came timidly in, his yellow scarf wrapped around his neck.
“You read it?”
“I did,” I said, holding the few pages out for him to take.
“You’re not angry? I mean about the way I depicted you?”
I smiled.
“Change the name,” I said. “Or I’ll break both your arms.”
“But Dr. Minck wants real names,” he said, taking the few pages of script.
“He’ll have to make an exception in this case,” I said.
“But he wants to say this movie is based on a true story.”
“Pancho, you took the last page right out of The Maltese Falcon.”
“It’s a white owl, not a black falcon,” he said.
I didn’t answer. He clutched the few script pages to his thin breast.
“I ran out of ideas,” he said. “And Dr. Minck likes it. He wants to know what comes next.”
“Peter Lorre walks in with a gun and tells him to please put up his hands.”
“I’m desperate,” Pancho said. “I’m bereft of ideas.”
“You’ll come up with something,” I said. “Steal from Shakespeare.”
A light went on in Pancho’s eyes, a dim light but definitely a light.
“MacBeth,” he said. “Witches, magic, ghosts. A floating dagger like Blackstone’s floating lightbulb.”
“My goal in life is to inspire,” I said.
He thanked me and hurried away.
I called my brother’s house. His sister-in-law Becky answered.
“It’s me, Toby. Everyone alright.”
“Fine,” she said.
“Mind if I drop by?”
“Come over for lunch,” she said.
“I’ll be there.”
I finished opening my mail and started to make out the bill for Blackstone. Knock at the door. The magician appeared holding a package in his hands.
“We’re leaving for San Diego tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “We’ve got two shows to do there, for the troops sailing out. If you have your bill ready by this evening before six, bring it to the hotel, and I’ll give you a check.”
He placed the package on the desk in front of me.
“Care to guess what’s inside?” he asked.
“The Maltese Falcon.”
“Open it.”
I did and pulled out an ornate Chinese box about the size of two cigar boxes. I reached over to lift the cover.
“Stop.”
I stopped.
“Open it when I’m gone,” he said.
He touched his right hand to his forehead in a salute like the one James Cagney gave in The Public Enemy. Then he was gone.
I opened the box slowly, half expecting white pigeons to come flying in my face, or a rabbit to peek over the side twitching its nose in my direction.
There was nothing in the blue velvet lined box, nothing but a lightbulb. The lightbulb, though, wasn’t lying on the bottom of the box. It was floating. And then it turned on.