Gus turned to Shawn and saw that his friend was staring straight at the stage, a look of pure fascination on his face.
“A-ha!” Gus said. “You can’t even pretend you’re not amazed. That was much better than you thought it would be, and you can’t figure out how he did it.”
“I am amazed,” Shawn said. “But I don’t think I’m amazed by the same thing you’re amazed by.”
“You mean the fact we just saw a giant green man dissolve into bubbles?” Gus said. “That’s not what you’re amazed by?”
“No.”
Even for Shawn this was a ludicrous level of stubbornness. Gus wanted to shake him until the truth dropped out onto the floor. “If you’re not amazed by the sight of a giant green man dissolving into bubbles, then would you please be so kind as to explain exactly what does amaze you?”
Somewhere in the auditorium, a woman screamed. “Oh my God, he’s. ..”
Gus whirled around and saw that the woman was pointing at the stage. The rest of the crowd was turning to see what she was pointing at. Gus followed them.
The tank was simple, a glass rectangle ten feet tall and four feet across with steel brackets reinforcing the corners and a metal lid on the top. It towered over the audience in the middle of an empty stage that was raised three feet above the showroom’s threadbare rug.
On the tank’s floor stood a pair of enormous, empty black boots. And at the top of the tank floated a bowler hat. This might have been only of passing interest, except that the hat sat on a head, and that head was attached to a portly body clad in a three-piece suit. And the head and body were both obviously dead.
“That’s what amazes me,” Shawn said.
Chapter Seven
Detective Carlton Lassiter hated the full moon.
Not the moon itself, of course. The head detective of the Santa Barbara Police Department knew that it was nothing more than a hunk of rock spinning in orbit around Earth, and aside from a moment of weakness during Apollo XIII when he shed a tear for the astronauts who were never going to reach it alive, he’d never been able to work up any kind of emotional reaction to it.
It wasn’t the psychological effect the full moon had on people that he hated, either. He knew that there was no way that human psyches could be affected by the percentage of shadow Earth cast on its lone satellite in a given time of the month.
What Lassiter hated was the belief shared by so many losers and lowlifes that the full moon had some bizarre power over their behavior. He hated the way they used the monthly lunar phase to justify abandoning the inhibitions they barely managed to hold in check the other twenty-nine or thirty days. And while there was only a relative handful of miscreants who felt compelled to submit to the lunacy, there were far more people who believed that crazy things happened when there was a large orb shining down instead of a thin sliver, so they started seeing them-and worse, reporting them to the police.
To Lassiter, this was all nonsense. And the head detective was one hundred percent No Nonsense. A stern, dogged investigator who worked his cases with the unrelenting rigor of a bloodhound in full tracking mode, he refused to be distracted by anything he considered less than serious. He’d been like this all his life. In his high school yearbook, under a photo of Lassiter wearing his hall monitor sash, he was called the “least likely to put up with nonsense,” and his patience with the stuff had only grown shorter over the years.
That meant he was going to be extremely annoyed by the time this night was finally over. It was barely ten o’clock, the full moon was entirely invisible behind a thick wall of fog, and he’d already fielded calls from one citizen who had seen Charles Manson buying yogurt at the Shop King, a homeowner who insisted that the gophers in her lawn were holding a meeting on her front steps and that they kept pointing at her and laughing, and a group of teenage girls who claimed that Shrek was cruising down State Street in a convertible. Two guys had turned themselves in at the police station, begging to be locked up before they transformed into werewolves, and then gotten into a fistfight over the question of which one would lead the pack.
And now, this. On a night when the crazies were all out to play, Lassiter had been called to a crime scene where almost everyone was a nut-job: the Fortress of Magic, or, as he liked to call it, the Kingdom of Clowns. As a rookie officer, he’d been called here innumerable times to break up fights between two self-styled wizards who’d gotten liquored up and started revealing the secrets of each other’s illusions. This wasn’t hard, because there were apparently all of three unique magic tricks in the world, and everything else was a variation of one or another.
And now he’d been dragged out again, this time to investigate a drowning-some investigation. As he strode determinedly up the steep path to the Fortress, he guessed that the only mystery here would be how a grown man could drown in two inches of vodka.
Somewhere on the landscaped hill, a guard dog growled angrily. Lassiter’s partner, Detective Juliet O’Hara, stopped on the path, her hand instinctively reaching for the gun in her purse.
“Did you hear that?” she said, trying to peer into the darkness.
Lassiter sighed wearily. There were many things he admired about his partner. Although she was the youngest detective on the Santa Barbara force, she was also one of the smartest cops in the country. She looked like she had just graduated from a high school cheerleading squad, but those looks hid a powerful mind-and she knew how to use her appearance as a key tool in her casework.
The one thing he didn’t admire about his partner was her willingness to put up with nonsense. Behavior that Lassiter would simply forbid as foolishness, O’Hara chose to dignify with her attention. To be fair, that often gave her an understanding of human nature that had helped them solve many cases. But it also ate up valuable time Lassiter could use for more serious purposes.
“Keep up, O’Hara. We’ve got to pull a drunken magician out of a whiskey bottle,” Lassiter snapped, not pausing on his way to the top.
The growl was joined by several others. O’Hara’s hand tightened on her gun’s grip. “There are dogs. We can’t just-”
Lassiter didn’t slow down. “Turn that thing off or I’ll arrest you all for disturbing the peace and interfering with a police officer.” The growling stopped. He took a second to cast a glance back at his partner. “You just need to know the magic words.”
By the time the detectives reached the entrance to the fortress, uniformed officers had corralled the spectators in the two large parlors.
“We’ve segregated them into members and guests,” Officer McNab volunteered as soon as Lassiter and O’Hara stepped through the door. “The guests were all attending a couple of different parties, and they’re in the East Parlor. A lot of them want to know when they can go home. The members are in the West Parlor. They all want to know when they can go to the bar.”
“There’s a surprise,” Lassiter sighed. “Get statements from the guests; then send them on their way. I want your primary focus on the magicians. Find out which ones had a grudge against the victim.”
“I’ve already done that, sir,” McNab said. “It seems they all did.”
“Of course,” Lassiter said. “I’ll get to them as soon as I can. See if you can separate the childish, petty grudges from the substantial issues. If you can find any substance. Oh, and track down whoever’s in charge and tell him if he doesn’t disconnect that dog machine, I am going to spay and neuter it personally.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, where’s the body?”
“Still in the tank, sir,” McNab said.
“Don’t you mean the bottle?”
“Um, no,” McNab said. “You really need to see this. But there’s one thing you should probably know first.”