He stopped suddenly and looked at Blackstone.
“Can I trust this guy?”
“Minck, go away,” said Phil.
Shelly got up.
“I just told the biggest secret of my life to a stranger,” Shelly bleated.
“I’m accustomed to keeping secrets,” Blackstone said, obviously amused.
“I can believe this guy?” Shelly asked, looking at me and readjusting his glasses.
“You can.”
Shelly turned to the magician, looked at him, and suddenly placed him.
“Blackstone,” he said.
Blackstone nodded.
“The magician. Hey, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Maybe we’ve got something here. Fate. Something. You’re here. Fate. I figure out the Grieg stuff. Fate. Juanita says when things like this happen, it means something.”
“Juanita?” questioned Blackstone.
Shelly ignored him and said,
“I’ve got it. Magical dentistry. The Blackstone amp; Minck secret of painless dentistry.”
“Minck, get the hell out of here,” Phil said, rising from his chair.
Phil’s face was pink. Soon it would turn red. When it did, it would mean disaster for one babbling dentist.
“Go,” I said. “Now, Sheldon.”
“But …”
“Now,” I insisted.
“Fine, fine, fine,” he said, moving to the door. “A revolution in dentistry comes through your portals and you turn it away.”
Phil was standing and facing him now.
“I’m going,” said Shelly, his hand palm out at Phil to hold him back. “Mr. Blackstone, I’m right down the hall. Let’s talk.”
And Shelly was gone.
“Sorry,” I said.
“No,” said Blackstone. “That was the funniest performance I’ve seen since I was on a bill with Raymond Hooey, the comic chiropractor, in Provo, Utah.”
Phil refilled his coffee cup and mine and offered Blackstone some. Blackstone declined, lost in thought.
“A dental illusion,” he said. “A man, no, a woman strapped into a dental chair. A few people from the audience onstage. A dental drill making that familiar drilling sound. It looks as if I’m drilling. They would swear I was drilling or even removing teeth. Yes, I remove the teeth, show them, and put them in a small urn. The patient opens his mouth to a few people from the audience who have come onstage. Front teeth are missing. The patient’s mouth is closed and when it opens, the teeth are all back, no longer in the urn and then the patient.…”
Blackstone stopped, suddenly out of his reverie and said, “That’s a ridiculous idea. That dentist is infectious.”
“He can be,” I said. “I suggest when you leave here you hurry past his door before he convinces you that you need bridgework.”
We fixed a fee, forty dollars a day plus expenses plus a two hundred-dollar retainer, shook hands, and Blackstone and Phil headed for the door. As they were about to leave, I said,
“Sure you don’t want to just call off Ott’s party?”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Blackstone said, with more than just a twinkle in his eye.
Chapter 3
Place a saucer and a drinking glass 1/4 full of water on a table. Drop a coin in the saucer. Pour 1/2-inch of water from the glass into the saucer. Ask a member of your audience to remove the coin with his or her fingers and not get the fingers wet without lifting the saucer. Solution: Take a piece of paper. Hold it over the empty glass. Strike a match. Drop the burning paper in the glass. As soon as the paper is finished burning, place the inverted glass in the saucer over the coin. The glass will suck up the water. The coin will be dry and can be picked up.
Calvin Ott lived in Sherman Oaks. I had called him and said I was on Blackstone’s staff and wanted to make arrangements for the reception.
He readily agreed to see me and said to come right over. He sounded happy to hear from me.
My cramped Crosley made its constipated and reluctant way up the winding roads, threatening to slip backward into the hillside oblivion when the road was too steep for its refrigerator engine.
I listened to the radio and drove through modern Los Angeles, a mess of architectural styles and convulsive growth. There were survivors of the post-Civil War era with their cupolas and curlicues, brownstones from the 1880s with elaborate ornaments and great bay windows with colored glass, and a never-ending number of frame bungalows and boxlike office buildings from the first two decades of the twentieth century. Not to mention the pseudo-Spanish homes and apartment buildings from the boom back in the ’20s that also brought skyscrapers, movie palaces, and bizarre restaurant designs. There was a restaurant shaped like a derby hat, another one shaped like a rabbit, a third like an old shoe, another like a fish and one like a hot dog sandwich. There were also modern houses and steel, concrete and glass buildings. The landscape was also dotted in much of the County of Los Angeles by huge gas tanks, gaunt and grimy oil derricks, and silver power lines.
KMTR radio news told me the Chinese had stormed the Japanese North Burma base of Mogaung. The Soviets were closing in on Minsk. French patriots had killed the Vichy Minister of Information and Propaganda, Phillipe Henriot, in his bed in Paris, and the Chicago Cubs were at the bottom of the National League standings with an 18–34 record.
I passed houses with wrapped bundles of scrap paper pilled on the narrow sidewalks for pickup. The day was clear. Wet paper wasn’t accepted. I didn’t know why.
Near the top of the hillside, the baritone voice on the radio told me that a Mrs. Elizabeth Koby of Whiting, Indiana, a $24-a-week Standard Oil employee, had received her two-week check. It was for $99,999.52. She returned it.
In Augusta, Maine, Ralph E. Mosher, who’d won the nomination for state senator on both party tickets, reported his total campaign expenses as eighteen cents including ten cents for a beer to “relax tension.”
In Los Angeles, a few miles down from where I was driving to the domicile of Calvin Ott, the police were investigating the robbery of $251 from Jim Dandy’s Market. The robber left one clue, his heel prints.
Now well informed, I pulled onto the cobblestone driveway I was looking for and parked alongside a heavy blue four-door Pontiac.
The house wasn’t big, not for this neighborhood, but I didn’t think there were many to match it in the neighborhood. Stone gargoyles stood on either side of the entrance. Their heads were turned so their blank eyes would meet approaching guests. The high doorway itself was made of dark wood. Cut deeply into the wood was the figure of another gargoyle. There was no handle that I could see. No knocker and no bell.
I raised my hand to knock, but before I could, a deep voice from above the door said,
“Your name?”
“Toby Peters.”
“Say the magic words that opens the door of the cave.”
“Open sesame,” I tried.
“No,” came the voice.
“Give me a hint.”
“It’s ‘abracadabra,’” came the voice.
“Abracadabra,” I said.
The door opened. A thin man in a white suit, white shirt, white shoes, and black tie stood in front of me. He had a glass of clear liquid in his left hand. His face was smooth and pink, his hair receding. He was about forty.
“Calvin Ott?” I asked.
“Maurice Keller,” he said, with a shake of his finger to suggest that I was being intentionally naughty. “Come in.”
The brightly lit wood paneled hallway was covered with large, colorful eye-level posters, evenly spaced.
“That one,” Ott said beaming as he closed the door behind me, “is my favorite.”
The poster showed a nearly bald man sitting in a wooden chair. The man’s head was floating away from him. The words on the poster read: Keller In His Latest Mystery. Self-Decapitation.
“A favorite,” Ott said, pointing to the poster. “The master. A brilliant illusion.”