“What’s happening?” Gus asked. “I can’t see anything.”
That wasn’t entirely true. He could still see the stage. But the tank was empty-no chubby corpses this time-and the stage itself was deserted. What was it the crowd was seeing?
Even Shawn looked frustrated. “Come on, you moron,” he muttered to the cameraman. “Show us something.”
As if responding to Shawn’s irritation, the camera jerked around the showroom, giving them a good view of the audience, all of whom were staring up at the ceiling. Some were pointing. Finally the camera lens followed their gaze and tilted straight up.
P’tol P’kah hung by his palms from the ceiling, his hands apparently adhering to the slick surface. To the gasps of the crowd, he pulled one hand free and reached out to grab one of the free-hanging lights. It gently lowered him to the floor, where he stood perfectly still while the audience went wild around him.
“Wow,” Gus said. “It’s even better when he finishes it.”
“You really think so?” Shawn said. “I kind of like the dead guy. You don’t see that in a lot of acts.”
“And you do see this?”
Shawn stared at the screen. “What’s that?”
“Umm, a giant green man dissolving in a tank of water and reappearing on the ceiling, thirty feet in the air?” Gus said.
“No, that.” Shawn froze the image, then walked over to the TV. He pointed at the bottom-right corner, which was filled by an out-of-focus black blob.
“Somebody’s head?” Gus guessed. The fact was, it could have been almost anything.
“Give me another tape,” Shawn commanded, and when Gus was too slow to move, he grabbed the entire stack off the desk and brought them over to the TV. He ejected the tape they’d been watching and slapped in another one. This one, too, hadn’t been rewound. Shawn hit PLAY, and before it could begin to rewind automatically, he began searching manually.
After a moment of static, the image resolved into a scene almost identical to what they’d just seen, only this time a reversed P’tol P’kah was riding the light fixture back up to the ceiling. Shawn studied the image closely, and then froze it.
“There,” he said, rapping a spot near the bottom of the screen. “What does that look like to you?”
Gus squinted at the TV. There was something black and rounded blocking part of the camera’s view. “It looks like the top part of an igloo,” Gus said after careful and serious study.
“Yes, Gus, that’s exactly what it is,” Shawn said. “Someone came to see a magic show with an igloo on his head. You’ve really cracked this case wide open.”
“On his head?” Gus peered at the TV again. From the angle of Rudge’s camera, of course this thing had to be on the head of another spectator, which meant that it couldn’t be an igloo. It had to be.. . “A hat?”
“A bowler hat,” Shawn said, hitting the EJECT button and slapping in another tape. “I’d be willing to bet that it’s the bowler hat.”
Shawn claimed to see the bowler in the crowd on the next two tapes as well, although Gus wasn’t completely sure. But on the third, as P’tol P’kah took his bows in the crowd, a cocktail waitress dressed as a spacegirl passed close enough to Rudge to jostle the camera, and in the fleeting instant that the lens was pointed away from the Martian, they got a clean shot.
“That’s him,” Gus said, staring at the living image of the man they’d last seen being hauled out of the water tank. He was wearing the same three-piece suit along with the bowler and he was every bit as chubby in life as he was in death.
“Yes, it is,” Shawn said. “Just like it was on the last five tapes.”
“So whoever this guy was, he showed up at every performance,” Gus said. “Just like the other magicians. Do you think he was one of them, and he drowned trying to figure out the secret of the trick?”
“None of the others recognized him,” Shawn said.
“None of the others admitted they recognized him,” Gus corrected. “Maybe they were covering up for him.”
“Covering up for what?” Shawn said. “Whether or not they said anything, he was still going to be dead. No, I believe they never saw him before.”
“But he was at this show all the time, just like the rest of them,” Gus said. “They would have seen him in the audience.”
“Not if they were focusing all their attention on trying to figure out how P’laster of P’aris was doing his trick,” Shawn said. “Or at least whichever part of their attention they weren’t focusing on themselves.”
“So who is he and what’s he doing there?” Gus said, studying the man.
“Looking for Tucker Mellish.”
Gus tried to remember where he had heard that name before, but for some reason when he tried, his mind was filled with the image of an exploding purple ink blot. “Who?”
“Tucker Mellish, the guy I made up,” Shawn said. “Remember the acid in the face?”
Gus did remember now, although he almost hated to admit it. He would have liked to be able to banish Shawn’s most ludicrous flights of fantasy from his head forever, instead of carting them around with all the other bits of trivia that had stuck there.
“He was the fugitive from justice who was cannily hiding out from the law by painting himself green and appearing in front of a thousand people every night, right?” Gus said.
“And twice on Sunday.”
“And Chubby Dead Guy’s been looking for him,” Gus said.
“Exactly,” Shawn said. “He’s been searching the country with no luck. But just when he’s about to give up the hunt, he happens to read about the hot new act on the Strip. It sounds like something Mellish used to do, or to talk about, back before he did whatever terrible thing he did. So he plays a hunch, buys a ticket to Vegas, and comes to the show every night, looking for some bit of evidence that will be enough to get a judge to issue a warrant to let him look under the green paint.”
“Somebody must have wanted this Mellish pretty bad, because Chubby Dead Guy has already racked up a thousand bucks on show tickets just in the first five tapes we pulled,” Gus said.
“That’s the trouble with law enforcement today,” Shawn said. “All this obsession with money. Did anyone ever ask Inspector Gerard for receipts when he was tracking Dr. Richard Kimble? Did Jack McGee need to submit expense reports when he was closing in on the Incredible Hulk?”
“Jack McGee was a reporter,” Gus said.
“That’s it!” Shawn said suddenly.
“What’s it?”
“The dead guy,” Shawn said. “He’s Jack McGee. And the green guy isn’t a Martian at all. He’s the Incredible Hulk.”
“The Hulk. P’tol P’kah is the Incredible Hulk.”
“You said yourself the act was incredible,” Shawn said.
“I also said it was amazing, but that doesn’t make him Spiderman,” Gus said. “In fact, I’m going to state categorically that simply because I use an adjective to describe something, that doesn’t mean it shares all the properties of every other thing anyone has ever used that adjective about.”
“Really?” Shawn said. “I’m giving you a chance to track down a killer superhero and you want to quibble about grammar?”
“What I want is to figure out what happened to P’tol P’kah,” Gus said. “And how Chubby Dead Guy ended up that way.”
“I suspect half of that comes from too many between-meal snacks.”
Shawn ejected the videotape and slapped a new one into the player. He searched backward through the entire tape, but neither of them could see a hint of a bowler anywhere.
“Maybe it’s before the chubby guy tracked him down,” Gus said.
“No way to tell,” Shawn said, “because Rudge’s unique system of dating his tapes seems to consist of measuring the decay of any radioactive particles that might have wandered into the plastic.”
Gus flipped through the pile of tapes on the floor. None of them was dated, or labeled in any way. He grabbed one at random and handed it to Shawn.