He started with Chantel, an invalid gypsy whose dreams often foretold the future. Her letter was dated last Thursday. In it, she spoke of seeing a young prostitute with her throat slashed. She would be found in an apartment and not a hotel room, Chantel said, and she would be beaten around the face. She vaguely described other injuries.
He picked through the letter. Chantel was warm, but her location was a good five miles outside the circle. He put her letter aside and made a note on a yellow pad to check if Sybil Blanchard had any arrests for soliciting.
Next up was a black spiritualist named Omen. Omen had come highly recommended by the Marine patrol after successfully finding a corpse hidden in a marina, and Omen’s first predictions for Wondero were so accurate that for a brief period he had become a prime suspect. Scrawled in pencil, Omen’s sheet simply said A CHILD WILL BE KILLED, no date, no location. There was a big difference between a child and a young woman, and Wondero put the sheet back in the folder.
The next prediction was totally off. Wondero wondered if he should have its medium — a Tarot card shuffler named Madame Marie — taken off her weekly retainer. Weeding out phonies was another of his responsibilities, since the contingency budget for this project was minimal, and unknown to everyone outside of Homicide. Early on, Madame Marie had made a few hits. Since then, she had come up with air, and Wondero decided it was time for a judgment call. He decided that Madame Marie was history.
He worked through the remaining predictions, and hit a home run on the very last. Jack Pathfinder, a pony-tailed Mojave who claimed he rode into the future while ingesting psilocybin mushrooms, had come through for the third time in two months. His location was less than a mile off, his description of Sybil Blanchard close enough to be considered accurate. He had written Hair Color—? and Wondero remembered Sybil’s premature gray. Picking up the phone on his desk, he gave Jack a call.
The call went through. Maybe Jack had seen a little more that Wondero could pry out of him. Did the killer have any scars? How about tattoos or facial hair? Flying through the heavens at warp speed could be hard on a man’s memory. Think hard, Jack.
An automated voice answered Jack’s phone, said the number was a thing of the past. Wondero nestled the receiver into the cradle and took the last swallow of beer. Running a trace on him would take weeks. Shit.
At midnight, he decided to call it quits. As was his custom, he checked each room in the downstairs, making sure the windows and doors were securely fastened, and the security system was on. After trailing the same killer for four years, it had occurred to him that there was a chance that he had stumbled across his man, and that Death now knew him. The thought routinely haunted him.
He decided to watch some TV before he went to sleep. He surfed the channels, and finally stopped on The Tonight Show. Jay Leno’s face lit up the screen, and he settled back in the couch, hoping to be entertained.
“Our next guest is considered one of the world’s foremost magicians and escape artists,” Leno read off a card. “He is currently headlining at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, and starting May 10 will be performing a two week, one man show at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre here in Los Angeles. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the amazing Vincent Hardare.”
As the Tonight Show band played “It’s Impossible” the tuxedoed magician appeared in a small pond of light on the large soundstage. With his dark coloring and athletic build, his engaging good looks were instantly familiar to the studio audience. His widely televised “Escapes from Death” had made him a popular media figure, and like his uncle Houdini before him, given him a reputation he often found a challenge to measure up to.
“Thank you. Tonight, I would like to test your imagination, and present a feat truly beyond explanation. First, may I have the assistance of a young lady from the audience?”
Stepping forward, Hardare chose a photogenic blond sitting on the second row aisle. “... if you don’t mind. Your name please.”
The girl excitedly jumped up, all but blinding the cameraman and eclipsing the magician. Long luxurious legs, black leather mini skirt, red silk blouse halfway unbuttoned, she blew a teased curl out of her china doll face and said, “Samantha Droop.”
Hardare escorted her on the stage. An assistant had brought out two folding metal chairs, onto which he’d placed a thin board.
“Samantha, have you ever been levitated before?”
“No.” She took the board and flipped it over, letting the audience see it was unprepared. “Will I need flight insurance?”
The audience laughed. Hardare requested a little floating music from the bad, and had Samantha lie on the board.
“Please lay perfectly still,” he said.
She complied, and the magician raised his arms. There was a drum roll, then the haunting notes from a clarinet. There were oohs and aahs as Samantha mysteriously ascended a foot above the two chairs. She continued upward, and was soon chest high with the magician. Turning her head, she made a goofy face for the camera.
Hardare waved his arms around the thin board. “No wires, mirrors or invisible threads. Nothing at all.”
“Then what is it,” she said loudly. “Christian Science and rubber bands?”
The audience’s laughter completely drowned out the band’s playing.
“Take a look into the monitor,” Hardare said, raising his hands so she floated higher and was hovering directly above his forehead. “You be the judge.”
“Who believes anything they see on television?” she said skeptically, hardly glancing at the monitor. “They say magicians don’t use trick photography, but I think it’s a bunch of hooey.”
While she talked, Hardare moved beneath her. With a wave he sent her higher as she continued to ramble.
“Girls turning into lions and the Statue of Liberty disappearing — who buys that stuff, anyway? Not me, that’s for sure; I’m a realist, and magic isn’t real. If I were really floating wouldn’t my voice be getting higher?” By now she had floated past the overhead mikes and into the curtains and was invisible to the studio audience. “If people could float, wouldn’t NASA be onto it? Come on, let’s be real.”
The cameras had followed Samantha’s ascent and now lowered onto Hardare. He raised his arms apologetically and with a sly grin said, “Well, I suppose you can’t fool everyone. Thank you very much.”
With the applause the magician’s grin grew into a broad smile. He glanced at the ceiling and then shrugged his shoulders. On cue the lights dimmed on the small soundstage.
Moments later Hardare was shaking hands with his host. He sat down beside Leno’s first guest, a young singer who had snubbed him backstage during the rehearsal. Being slighted by a kid no one had heard of six months ago had raised Hardare’s ire — he had worked his first professional show at age ten, and now at forty-two, was close to reaching the pinnacle of his profession — and was still angry an hour before taping. In exasperation his wife had asked him the name of the foul-mouthed comic who’d given him the same treatment on The Tonight Show a few years back. He couldn’t remember it, and his wife had said, “Neither can anyone else.”
“Was that your daughter?” Leno asked during the break. “I remember when she was just a little kid.”
“That was her,” Hardare said.
“They grow up fast.”
They came back on the air. Reading off a printed card, Leno said, “Next week, the amazing Hardare will be doing a two-week engagement at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre here in LA. I’m told you’ll be presenting quite a different act.”