“Please allow me to apologize for my dishwasher,” Shawn said. “On behalf of the entire Little Hills Country Club, on whose hallowed ground he will never be allowed to tread again.”
Shawn held out a hand to David, who took it and gave it a hearty shake. Then he turned to Jessica. She reluctantly extended a hand to him, and he took it in both of his. As he did, Gus heard a squooshing sound and saw Jessica staring at Shawn with a look of pure bafflement.
“I am so sorry,” Shawn said as he pulled back his hands, revealing the squort of orange goo he’d squished onto the back of her hand. “I forgot I was holding that. Please, let me help get it off.”
Before she could pull her hand away, Shawn was rubbing at the spot with the tail of his untucked flannel shirt. Wherever he rubbed, Gus could see brightly colored snakes emerging like chicks out of their eggs. With a jolt, Gus realized that what Shawn had oozed onto her hand was not orange goo but Orange Goo, the grease remover used in mechanics’ shops. Apparently it was just as efficient in removing spray-on tan as it was on motor oil. That’s why he’d made Gus drive him down to the cart repair bay.
Jessica realized it at the same time Gus did. She snatched her hand away and buried it deep inside her purse. Her face, which had gone white just moments before, flared red with rage. And yet her arms were still the same golden shade of tan.
“I’m sorry, did I hurt you?” Shawn said. “Let me see that.”
He reached for her hand, but she shoved it deeper into her purse.
“Is everything okay, honey?” David’s voice quavered with concern. It was hard for Gus to imagine this soft, sweet soul hurling knives in a traveling carnival.
“I’m fine,” she said firmly. “Why don’t you go ahead and let the committee know I’ll be right in. I’ll just clear up any loose ends with these gentlemen.”
David gave her a questioning look, then turned and trotted toward the clubhouse.
“Who the hell are you and what do you want?” she hissed at Shawn as soon as David was out of earshot.
“Just who we said we are,” Shawn said.
“Except for me being a dishwasher,” Gus added. “I also work for Psych Investigations.”
“Oh, and that thing about working for the country club,” Shawn said. “We don’t do that.”
“What a shock,” Jessica said. “So what is your main line of work? Blackmail? Extortion? Or just ruining innocent people who’ve never hurt you?”
“We saw you at the Fortress of Magic,” Gus said. “And we have you on tape working as a cocktail waitress so you could get close to P’tol P’kah. So I’m not sure how innocent that makes you.”
“Me?” She spit out the word like a curse. “I’m not innocent. I’m a born carny. But David. He’s the real thing. All he wants is for us to be members here. And you’ve come along to ruin it.”
Shawn stared off into the distance, then pressed his fingertips to his forehead. “I see a young woman, touring the country, performing acts that fascinate and repel. And in the crowd, a sweet young man who comes to every performance. One day he-”
“Knock off the psychic crap, will you?” she snapped. “I’m sure I’m an open book to all your really special magical powers. So yes, David came from a good family. They were shocked when he told them he was dropping out of college because he’d fallen in love with, well, me. I even tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted on joining the troupe. He started off as a knife thrower, but when the full extent of his talent became known, we started calling him the Amazing Bleeding Man.”
“And then you fell in love with him,” Shawn said. “So much so that you agreed to give up performing so that his family would accept you. You even had your tattoos removed.”
“They seem to have grown back, though,” Gus said.
“I couldn’t do it,” Jessica said. “As much as I loved him-love him-the stage was in my blood. So I told a couple of little white lies.”
“And a lot of big tan ones,” Shawn said.
“And everybody’s happy,” Jessica said. “We’ve got the life David’s always dreamed of, complete with a set of anecdotes that will conquer any cocktail party, and I’ve got a couple of hobbies he doesn’t have to know about.”
“He didn’t notice you were in Vegas three or four nights a week?” Gus said.
“He travels a lot for his job,” Jessica said. “No one knew.”
“Except for one chubby guy in a three-piece suit and a bowler hat,” Shawn said. “And a drink in his face.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jessica said.
“It’s on tape, too,” Gus said. “And I’m sure the police would like to know why you denied having ever seen him before he showed up floating in a tank of water.”
“I doubt they’d be able to charge you with his murder, though,” Shawn said. “They’d probably even have to drop the obstruction of justice charges after a thorough investigation. And I’m sure the membership committee here would be proud to know that at least one of their new members had been completely cleared of any felonious actions.”
Jessica looked like one of her knives had slipped clear through the eyeball and penetrated her frontal lobe. “I didn’t kill him,” she said.
“We know you didn’t,” Shawn said, “because whoever did must have known the secret of the Dissolving Man. And since you’re joining a country club instead of booking a Vegas showroom, you don’t.”
“We just need to know what he said to you that night,” Gus said.
“If I tell you, will you promise to leave David out of it?”
“We’ll do our best,” Shawn said.
She sighed heavily. “I used to see him there on nights when I waitressed. There was always something creepy about him-and I’m used to people who pay money to watch me stick knives in my eyeballs. That night as I was passing by, he grabbed my arm and started telling me how sexy I was, and how he wanted to see if my tattoos covered my entire body.”
“Bet you’d never heard that one before,” Shawn said.
“Only from every man I’d ever met before I discovered the wonders of spray-on tan,” she said. “I tried to pull away, but he squeezed harder. So I threw the drink in his face, which I hated to do, because they charge us for that. And then he threatened me-and David.”
“He knew you were married?” Gus said.
“He knew who I was married to,” she said. “He knew everything about me. My real name, David’s family, David’s business.”
“How?” Shawn said.
“He said he worked for the government.” Jessica was near tears remembering it. “He worked for the government, and if I didn’t do exactly what he wanted me to, he’d make sure the next cocktail I served would be a Mojito at Guantanamo Bay.”
Chapter Eighteen
Gus’ mind reeled. The dead man floating in the magician’s tank was a federal agent. No wonder the police hadn’t been able to identify him in any database. He was probably deep undercover, his identity carefully hidden. And no wonder Major Holly Voges had been so eager to shut down the SBPD’s investigation.
But like every other revelation they’d come across in the investigation, this one seemed to raise far more questions than it answered. At least when Major Voges showed up at the Fortress, there was a murder to solve. Chubby Dead Fed had been following P’tol P’kah for weeks, maybe months. Why? What possible interest could Homeland Security, or some other, even more secret agency, have in a Vegas magician?
“What else did he say?” Shawn asked.
“Nothing,” she said bitterly. “He wouldn’t even tell me his name, just said to think of him as Uncle Sam. And that if I didn’t do exactly what he said, he would have David’s telecommunications firm shut down as a threat to national security and us both locked away as enemies of the state.”
“Did he say which agency he worked for?” Shawn asked.
“No, but he made it pretty clear it was something big, important, and unquestionable,” she said. “And that he had the authority to do whatever he wanted to me.”