“You expect the assistant to fight off an enraged magician with her bare hands?” Shawn said. “Anyway, now you’re horribly deformed and you’re wanted for murder. If you ever want to be seen in public-which is really all you’ve ever wanted-you need to come up with some kind of disguise.”
“If only to hide from the copyright lawyers.” Gus felt a wave of disappointment crashing through him. For a moment there he really thought Shawn had figured out something significant. “Because you’ve lifted your entire life story from The Phantom of the Opera.”
“First of all,” Shawn said as Gus turned back to exploring the cabinetry, “ The Phantom of the Opera was written more than a thousand years ago, so it’s long out of copyright-”
“Gaston Leroux published his original novel in 1910,” Gus said as he slammed shut a cabinet holding an unused espresso machine, a blender still in its original packaging, and a George Foreman grill that had clearly never met a piece of meat. “So yes, that is in the public domain. But in that book, as in several film adaptations and the longest running show in Broadway history, the phantom was deformed at birth. The story you just stole was invented for the 1943 Claude Rains movie, and if you want to tangle with the powerful and brilliant intellectual property lawyers at NBC/Universal, you can do it without me.”
“You’re getting bogged down in details,” Shawn said. “You have to listen to the broader point.”
“A point can’t be broad,” Gus said. “That’s what makes it a point.”
“Whatever,” Shawn said. “This guy Tucker Mellish-”
“This guy that you invented.”
“This guy I didn’t invent with a name I did,” Shawn continued. “Forget about the acid. Forget about the stolen plans. He’s on the run.”
“From what?”
“Could be anything,” Shawn said. “Maybe he owes money to the mob. Maybe he owes a fortune in child support. Maybe he’s wanted by the police.”
“Sure, for drowning chubby men in his disappearing tank.” Gus opened and slammed a couple more cabinets, finding nothing of interest inside.
“It could be,” Shawn said. “Maybe he’s a serial killer. But whatever he is, he couldn’t stand the thought of not performing in public anymore, so he concocted this entire Martian persona to allow himself to be seen in public without being identified.”
“So why make Fleck build him this apartment?” Gus said.
“Misdirection,” Shawn said. “The magician’s best tool. Everyone who’s the slightest bit interested in P’stuffed P’imento-”
“P’tol P’kah,” Gus repeated by rote.
“Right, that guy,” Shawn said. “Anyone who’s interested in him is never going to take his eyes off the one place they’re certain he’ll be. And that lets Tucker Mellish run around without anyone watching him.”
Gus had to admit the theory made sense. At least he had to admit it to himself. He wasn’t convinced he felt like admitting it to Shawn, whose behavior had been so appalling, it didn’t deserve the reward. Besides, that still left one big question unanswered.
“So who’s the dead guy? Gus asked, bending down to check the last few cabinets.
“I have no idea.”
“You told me you did,” Gus said.
“I thought if I kind of ramped up to it, the solution would come to me,” Shawn said. “And it might have, if you hadn’t distracted me with all that endless blather about mayonnaise.”
Gus was about to respond with a retort so perfect it would have sealed Shawn’s mouth through the next leap year. But before he could utter the words, he opened one last cabinet and what he saw there froze his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
“I mean, really,” Shawn said. “I’m trying to solve the most baffling murder of this or any other generation, and you keep going on about condiments. And I get thrown off my point, I lose track of my thought, and bang zoom, a killer walks free. So I hope that you and Miracle Whip are happy.”
Gus stared into the cabinet, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. He recognized the shapes, of course. They were tall, thin tubes, flat on the bottom and rounded on top, with a smaller tube extending from the apogee. They were gray metal, flecked with nicks and scratches. He had seen these things a million times before. He knew exactly what they were. But they shouldn’t be here. There was no earthly reason for them to be here.
“Are you sure about your theory?” Gus finally asked.
“Why, you have a better one?”
“Yes, but it’s not mine. It’s Fleck’s,” Gus said.
“Fleck didn’t have a theory,” Shawn said. “Unless you mean when he said that his client was a real Martian. You’re not suggesting you believe that?”
“I’m not suggesting anything,” Gus said. He hoisted one of the scuba tanks out of the cabinet. “I’m just wondering why anyone who was born on this planet would need to bring his own air with him.”
Chapter Twelve
As a physical barricade, the seal was completely useless. It was just a piece of paper-slick green paper backed with some kind of sticky stuff. A box cutter would go through it like a spoon through whipped cream. Even a butter knife would be enough to tear it open.
But as a moral barrier, the seal was inviolable. It wasn’t a piece of paper; it was the entire American system of justice. It was the triumph of order over chaos, of civilization over savagery. It was proof that mankind was capable of understanding that there are societal obligations more important than any one man’s desires. It was everything Detective Carlton Lassiter believed in.
That was why his hand shook so badly as he lifted his Swiss army knife to cut through it.
Lassiter didn’t want to break the seal. He was the one who ordered it slapped on the door to the showroom at the Fortress of Magic, and he was the one who vowed to track down and incarcerate anyone who even thought about tampering with it. Because as much as he wanted access to the magician’s machinery inside, he knew a judge had sent down an order prohibiting anyone from examining it. And even though Lassiter had strong reason to believe the judge was motivated by his own personal issues and not by the rational pursuit of justice, the detective could not use that suspicion as an excuse to ignore the order. To do so would be to invite anarchy.
Instead, Lassiter put all his years of experience to work for him. If he couldn’t study the scene, he’d find another way to solve the crime.
Only there wasn’t another way.
It had been thirty-six hours since Lassiter had finished interviewing the last of the magicians, and as he stared at the black print on the electric green seal, his head was still pounding from the experience. It wasn’t the fact that none of them knew how the green giant had disappeared that bothered him. He expected that. It wasn’t even that none of them would admit knowing anything about the dead man. It was possible that they really had never met him, or that if they had, they weren’t used to seeing him floating dead in a tank of water, and the new circumstances made recognition impossible.
What was making his head continue to throb was the way that each of the self-styled magicians insisted that P’tol P’kah was a talentless hack who wasn’t capable of shuffling a deck of cards, and whose disappearance was the most obvious kind of trickery. And yet every time he asked one of them to give him a clue how the missing man had accomplished his disappearance, they all suddenly swore an oath of allegiance to something they called the Magician’s Code. Apparently that was a sacred oath that forbade them to reveal the secrets of a fellow prestidigitator’s tricks.
Right.
Carlton Lassiter hadn’t become head detective of the Santa Barbara Police Department because he was stupid or gullible. He had clawed his way to that position by virtue of his superior intellect and keen instincts, along with a city budget crisis that resulted in a hiring freeze shortly after his employment, eliminating many potential competitors. He knew when he was being lied to, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.