Lupoff and Dickensheet seemed baffled, so I explained that there were u.v. bulbs in some of the spots because they were necessary for Steele’s spook show effects.
They nodded. Lupoff asked Steele, “How did you manage your disappearance?”
“The stage trap. I dropped into it, and Ardis popped out of it. Then she kept the audience’s attention long enough for me to crawl to the coatroom, put on the breakaway costume, and approach the audience from the rear. When the lights went out again and she disappeared, I looked again for the outline of chin and upper lip, to make sure I would be confronting exactly the right man.”
“And now your disappearance, young lady?” Dickensheet asked Ardis.
She laughed. “I walked off the stage in the dark.”
“But we saw you, ah, dwindle away...”
“That wasn’t me. It was a picture painted on an inflated balloon which was held over the stage for our show. I pulled it down with a concealed string while the lights were out, and allowed it to deflate. So you saw the picture getting smaller and seeming to recede. The method’s been used for many years,” Ardis explained.
Dickensheet and Lupoff exchanged glances. The inspector said, “All of this really is obvious. But now that we know how obvious magic tricks are, we’d never fall for anything like them again.”
“Absolutely not,” the captain agreed.
“So you say,” Steele said. “But perhaps—”
Suddenly Ardis jumped up, backed off two steps, and made a startled cry. Naturally, we all looked around at her — and she was pointing across the table to Steele’s chair.
When we looked back there again, after no more than a second, the chair was rocking gently and Steele had vanished.
Dickensheet’s mouth hung open by several inches. Lupoff said in a surprised voice, “He didn’t have time to duck through the curtain there. Then — where did he go?”
I know most of Steele’s talents and effects, but not all of them by any means. So I closed my own mouth, because I had no answer to Lupoff’s question.