“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
He fitted himself into the straitjacket, and Jan secured the leather straps across his back. Lying on the floor, he let her attach the block and tackle to his ankles. Then, Jan began pulling him up to the ceiling. When he was as high as he could go, she tied her end of rope to a hook in the floor, and positioned the mattress directly beneath him.
“Take the mattress away,” he said.
Jan ignored him, stopwatch in hand.
“It’s a false sense of security,” he said. “I won’t be hanging over a net Wednesday night.”
“No, but you should be. Acrobats use security nets all the time.”
“Not the great ones. Please get rid of it.”
She slid the mattress into the corner. “Happy now?”
“Ecstatic,” he said.
Chapter 33
Mr. Jellybean
The tickets were just not selling, and by Tuesday night Hardare had the gut-wrenching feeling that he had made a mistake in talking his wife and daughter into staying in Los Angeles.
Between rehearsals, he and Jan had run all over town, appearing on local talk shows and radio programs to get the word out. He had even gone to the L.A. Times building and with a dozen bemused reporters as witnesses, levitated Jan a full six feet in the air while standing on the roof. The reporters had cheered and applauded heartily, and someone had taken their picture, and now all he could hope was that a story would appear in the paper either tomorrow or the next day.
There was no doubt that the publicity had helped, but early Tuesday morning the theatre manager had felt forced to call Hardare with the bad news. Less than a third of the tickets had sold, and interest seemed to be waning. The show opened Friday night, and based upon the manager’s projections, Hardare would be lucky if half the seats were filled.
Hardare had dejectedly hung up the phone. Even before he found his calculator, he knew that fifty percent occupancy was going to lose them money. The question was, how much? He did some quick arithmetic and stared at the long, ugly number, then found the courage to multiply it by fourteen.
He was going to lose his shirt. They needed to sell three thousand more tickets just to break even. At this rate, he would be in debt for the rest of his life within two weeks.
His last hope was Jayne Hunter, his contact at Action 10 News. Hunter had agreed to televise his straitjacket escape, but had left the details sketchy. Hardare knew that he needed at least four minutes on air to “sell” the escape, which in turn would help sell a few more tickets. If he got lucky, word of mouth would build to the second week, where they might actually realize a profit.
Hunter had balked at the idea of giving him that much time. “Four minutes is a lifetime on TV,” she’d said — and he’d had to sell her on the story’s unique angle, and how brave he and his family were for staying in L.A., groveling on and on until he wanted to throw up.
Finally Hunter had compromised, and given him three minutes of air time. When he’d begged for another sixty seconds, she had flatly said no. Three minutes was her limit.
He’d been livid when he’d hung up the phone. He deserved more than three minutes; he had earned it. The idea that one escape could make or break their two week run, especially when he considered what his family had gone through, only served to remind him how incredibly cruel show business could be.
It was Jan who finally brought him out of his funk. “Three minutes is better than nothing,” she’d reminded him. “Think of all the acts that never get a break at all. Come on, Vince. Everything is going to work out fine.”
Hardare was in the living room of the house in Malibu when his daughter’s heart-breaking sobs carried down the stairs. Within seconds, his wife and the three bodyguards she’d hired had their guns drawn, and were running to her aid.
“Daddy!”
Sobbing, Crystal ran past them and threw her arms around her father, burying her head into his chest.
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
Her grief was so great that she could not speak. He gently guided her into the kitchen, and made her sit on a chair. She gulped down a glass of water before getting control of herself. Jan appeared at the doorway.
“House is secure,” his wife said.
Hardare nodded while staring at his daughter. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Someone killed the animals,” Crystal said, choking on the words. “One of the stagehands at the theatre called. He said the rabbits and birds... were lying upside down in their cages. He didn’t... didn’t know what to do!”
“Maybe they got sick, honey.”
“He said they were dead. Even Mr. Jellybean.”
Her body became racked with sobs, and Hardare held her tightly in his arms. To Jan he said, “Call the theatre, will you, and find out what the hell is going on.”
Twenty minutes later, Hardare was speeding down the freeway with one of their bodyguards, a bearded, small arms specialist named Brian, when he realized the true source of his daughter’s heartbreak. Maxwell T. Jellybean, the oldest and most affectionate of the Dutch dwarf rabbits he used in his show, had been a present from his late wife to Crystal many Easters ago. It was not the type of thing that he thought a good father should forget, and decided to call his daughter once they reached the theatre.
He parked in a back alley and they got out. Beside the backstage door sat two long rows of cages containing his rabbits and birds. Several members of his crew were moping around looking bewildered and upset. Kneeling beside the cages was a member of the union stage crew that came when you rented the theatre, a burnout with lifeless, shoulder-length blond hair.
“They ain’t dead,” the burnout declared loudly, trying to enlist the others’ support. “Lookit. That bird tried to flap its wing. You saw that, didn’t you?”
“It’s just the wind,” a crew member said, puffing on a cigarette. Seeing Hardare approach, he quickly stamped it out.
The burnout looked up and got to his feet. “Mister Hardare, I don’t know what happened. I was just sitting here, minding my own business...”
Hardare silenced him with a stare. He knelt down beside Brian, who had opened a cage and removed a lifeless fantail pigeon, cradling its stiff body gently between his palms.
“Nobody got close to those animals,” the burnout said.
Someone in the crew snickered, an indictment if Hardare had ever heard one. He looked at Maxwell T. Jellybean doing the back-stroke in his narrow metal cage. His daughter’s favorite pet looked very dead, and he swallowed a lump in his throat.
Brian turned the pigeon on its stomach, and carefully combed through the thick layer of feathers, his fingertips eventually parting a small patch above the left wing. Hardare stared at the small black dart lodged in the bird’s speckled red skin.
“It’s some kind of knockout dart,” Brian said, laying the pigeon gently back inside the cage. Shutting the door, he gave Mr. Jellybean a thorough going over, and found a tiny dart buried in its side. “Very professional looking.”
Without hesitation Hardare said, “Osbourne did this.”
“I think you’re right,” Brian said.
“But why?”
Brian looked him in the eye and said, “He used the dart gun because it was silent, and allowed him to strike safely from a distance. He knocked out your animals because he knows they mean a great deal to you.”
“Are you saying this is some kind of psychological warfare?”
His bodyguard shrugged his shoulders. “I think he’s trying to send you a message.”
“Which is?”
“That he can still hurt the things you love,” Brian said. “I think that is what this all means.”