The cries led her to the kitchen in the rear of the house. Unlike the other rooms, it was brightly lit, the sunlight streaming in from a pair of double windows over the sink. With a blanket draped over his body, Eugene lay across the kitchen floor, an empty bottle of pain killers beside him. He was shivering, his face and shoulders glistening with sweat.
“Eugene... can you hear me?” Slowly he opened his eyes, then tried to sit, the blanket falling off his naked body.
“Oh my lord,” Myrtle Jones exclaimed.
His left ankle was swollen and had turned a sickening blue. A festering wound lay in the calf of his left leg, the skin crudely sewn together with a needle and thread. Thinking she might be sick, she placed her hand against the refrigerator for support.
“Eugene — what on earth happened?”
“I went out running, and fell down.”
“Why didn’t you go to an emergency room?”
“I hate hospitals. Please help me, Myrtle. Please.”
He said her name like a little boy. Regaining her composure, she picked the blanket up off the floor, and draped it over him.
“You need to see a doctor.”
“No doctor.”
“But I insist. Your ankle looks broken, and that cut might be infected. I used to be a nurse, Eugene. I know what I’m talking about. Now, where’s your phone?”
His hands grasped her thin arms, pulled her close to him. He was amazingly strong, even in his weakened stage. “Go upstairs, and get my medicine from the bathroom. I have morphine.”
“But—”
He began to sob, his fingers squeezing the strength out of her arms. “Please say yes... please, Myrtle. Say you will.”
“Only if you’ll promise me that you’ll let me take you to the hospital.”
“All right. I promise.”
“Good. Sit tight, and I’ll be right back.”
Myrtle climbed the rickety stairs to the second floor. Down a short hallway she walked to a tiny bathroom. The appliances were old — it had been ages since she’d seen a claw-footed tub. She rifled through the medicine cabinet and read the labels. Eugene had enough pills in his medicine cabinet to open a pharmacy.
She found the morphine and headed for the stairs. In the hallway sat an old dresser with a glass bowl sitting on top. Normally, Myrtle minded her own business, but something about the bowl struck her as odd, and she stopped to have a look.
The bowl was filled with women’s jewelry. Necklaces, ear rings, and a number of thin lady’s watches. It was not the kind of collection she would have expected to find in a single man’s house. From down below, she heard Eugene moan.
“I’m coming,” she said.
“Did you find the morphine?”
She glanced at the bottle in her hand. “Not yet.”
“It’s in the medicine cabinet.”
“Be right there.”
“Hurry.”
Her curiosity had been peaked, and she pulled open the top drawer of the dresser. It was filled with women’s undergarments. She noticed they were all different brands and sizes.
This was not right. These things did not belong in this man’s house. She played back everything she knew about Eugene, and a sickening wave of nausea overcame her.
She went for the stairs. Her eyes fell upon a cracked door at the hallway’s end. She could not help herself, and stuck her head in to have a look.
She gagged. A naked light bulb dangled from the cracked plaster ceiling. In one long, slow motion sweep, her eyes saw everything that Eugene did not want her or anyone else to see: The sea of 8 x 10 black and white glossies of the dead and dying women that went up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the opposite wall, the bed with handcuffs decorating the headboard, the video camera on a tripod.
She spun around and went to the stairwell. Eugene was at the bottom, dragging his leg as he climbed the stairs.
“You shouldn’t have gone in there, Myrtle,” he said.
Chapter 30
The Last Show
Jan sat with her husband in the emergency room of St. Francis Medical Center, staring at the monitors that showed Vince’s blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen intake. Considering that her husband had been buried beneath several hundred tons of rubble for over an hour, he was in remarkably good shape.
Crystal entered the room with a can of diet soda, and handed it to her. Jan mouthed the word thanks and popped the top. They had been visited by several nurses but had yet to see a doctor.
“How you feeling,” Crystal asked her father.
“Never better,” Hardare said.
They both found the strength to laugh. Jan had seen her husband cheat death on a number of occasions, and always came away from the experience feeling as if she’d gone through it herself.
“Where are the police?” Hardare asked.
“Outside,” Jan said. “I already gave them a statement. They’ll probably want one from you later, as well.”
“I’ll give it to them now.” He started to get out of the bed, and Jan put her hand on his chest, and shoved him back down.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“Yes, I am. We have work to do.”
“Work?”
“Yes. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
She placed her hand against his forehead, just to make sure he wasn’t running a fever. His scalp felt perfectly normal.
“I’m all in favor of getting out of here,” Jan said, “but first I want to know what you’re thinking.”
Hardare leaned back in the hospital bed and gave them a little smile. “What would you say if I told you I wanted to stay in Los Angeles, and fulfill our engagement at the Wilshire Ebell?”
She looked at him in bewilderment. “But the spirit show is a disaster. You said so yourself.”
“I’m not talking about doing the spirit show,” he said.
“Then what are you planning to do?”
“We rented the theatre for two weeks, so it’s still legally ours to use. Why not do our Vegas show and bill it as our last U.S. engagement.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. Look, if we don’t do the show, we’re financially in the hole. I’ve already spent our savings on salaries, programs, even tee shirts to be sold in the lobby. If we walk away, the idea of starting our own circus will have to be shelved indefinitely.”
Jan looked at Crystal. Her stepdaughter was beaming. She looked back at her husband.
“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” Jan said. “But how do we sell it? There isn’t enough money left to buy a decent sized advertisement in the L.A. Times, let alone run a TV campaign. We can’t fill the Wilshire Ebell for two weeks by word of mouth.”
“Houdini never advertised his shows. Neither did my father. I think I know how to sell a few tickets.”
“Wait a minute, Vince. Are you talking about doing the rollercoaster escape to get publicity?”
“I sure am,” he said emphatically. “Doing escapes is how I made my reputation. They always sell tickets.”
“But why the rollercoaster escape? Why not something else?”
“We need something big. The rollercoaster escape fits the bill. We’ll get one of the TV stations to cover it. They always do. Then the newspapers will fall in line. Bingo, free publicity.”
“But it’s dangerous.”
“All my escapes are dangerous.”
Vince was absolutely right. All of his escapes were dangerous. Only this stunt was in a category all by itself. While bound from a straitjacket, her husband would hang upside down from a rope that was tied to the track of a rollercoaster. The rollercoaster would be set in motion, and he would have exactly two minutes to free himself before the rollercoaster passed over the rope, and sent him hurtling to his death.