I stared at her ankles for a moment or two. They were perfectly nice ankles, but because of all the blood that had run to one side of my head, I wasn’t really in optimum viewing mood.
“Um,” I said at last. “’Scuse me. I’m just looking for a contact lens.” I would have been more convincing if my face hadn’t been pressed too closely against the carpet to locate anything on a larger scale than the subatomic.
“And I’m looking for Dalton Pinnard,” she said. “Otherwise known as ‘Pinardo the Magnificent.’ See anybody by that name down there among the contact lenses?” She had a voice that, while not harsh, was perfectly designed to make ten-year-old boys goofing in the back of a classroom cringe. Or to make drunken magicians feel like brewery-vat scum. If she wasn’t a teacher, she’d missed her calling.
“I have a note from a doctor that says I’m allergic to sarcasm,” I growled. “If you don’t want a whopping lawsuit on your hands, you’d better leave.” Admittedly, I was still at a slight conversational disadvantage—this riposte would have been more telling if it hadn’t been spoken through a mouthful of carpet fuzz—but how can you expect someone who’s just finished off his tenth Rolling Rock to be both witty and vertical?
“I’m not going to go away, Mister Pinnard. I’m here about something very important, so you might as well just stop these shenanigans.”
I winced. Only a woman who thinks that two pink gins at an educational conference buffet evening constitutes wild living would dismiss something of the profound masculine significance of a solo drunk as “shenanigans.” However, she had already ruined my mood, so I began the somewhat complicated process of getting into my chair.
I made it without too much trouble—I’d be saying a permanent goodbye to the office soon anyway, so what difference did a few spilled ashtrays make? I was buoyed slightly by the knowledge that, however irritating this woman might be right now, at least she wouldn’t be around for the hangover. Not that she was unpleasant to look at. Except for a slightly sour look around the mouth (which turned out to be temporary) and a pair of glasses that belonged on one of those old women who wears garden gloves to play the slot machines, she looked pretty damn good. She had a slight tendency to go in and out of focus, but I suspected that might have something to do with what I’d had for lunch.
“Well,” I said brightly once I had achieved an upright position. I paused to scrabble beside the chair rollers for one of the cigarette butts that still had a good amount of white left on it. “Well, well, well. What can I do for you, Miss...?”
“It’s Ms., first of all. Ms. Emily Heltenbocker. And I’m increasingly less sure that you can do anything for me at all. But my father sent me to you, and I’m taking him at his word. For about another forty-five seconds, anyway.”
I hadn’t managed to get my lighter going in three tries, so I set it down in a way that suggested I had merely been gauging the length of spark for some perfectly normal scientific purpose. “Heltenbocker...? Wasn’t that Charlie Helton’s real name?”
“I’m his daughter.”
“Oh.” Something kicked a little inside me. In all the years I knew Charlie, I had never met his only child, who had been raised by her mother after she and Charlie divorced. It was too bad we were finally meeting when I was...well, like I was at the moment. “I heard about your dad last week. I’m really sorry. He was a great guy.”
“He was. I miss him very much.” She didn’t unfreeze, but she did lower herself into the chair opposite me, showing a bit more leg than one expected from a schoolteacher-type, which inspired me to assay the cigarette lighter again. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said at last, then pulled a lighter out of her purse and set it blazing under my nose. Half the foreshortened cigarette disappeared on my first draw as she dropped the lighter back in her bag. Emily Heltenbocker struck me as the kind of woman who might tie your shoes for you if you fumbled at the laces too long.
“So...Charlie sent you to me?” I leaned back and managed finally to merge the two Ms. Heltenbockers into one, which made for more effective conversation. She had a rather nice face, actually, with a strong nose and good cheekbones. “Did you want to book me for the memorial service or something? I’d be honored. I’m sure I could put together a little tribute of some kind.” Actually, I was trying desperately to decide which of the tricks I did at the children’s parties which constituted most of my business would be least embarrassing to perform in front of a gathering of my fellow professionals. I couldn’t picture the leading lights of the magic world getting too worked up about balloon animals.
“No, it’s not for the memorial service. We’ve already had that, just for the family. I want to talk to you about something else. Did you hear what happened to him?”
I couldn’t think of any immediate response except to nod. In fact, it was despondency over Charlie’s passing, and the awareness of mortality that comes with such things, that had been a large part of the reason for my little afternoon session. (Maybe not as large a part as the foreclosure notice on the office I had received that morning, but it had certainly fueled my melancholy.)
What can you say about an old friend for whom the Basket and Sabers Trick went so dreadfully wrong? That, at a time when he was down on his luck financially, and on a day when he happened to be practicing without an assistant, it looks a little like your old friend may have been a suicide? Of course, a honed steel saber sounds more like a murder weapon than a tool for self-slaughter, and most people don’t choose to bow out inside a four-foot rattan hamper, but the door to his workroom was locked, and the only key was in Charlie’s blood-soaked pocket. According to the respectable papers, he was working inside the basket and somehow must have turned the wrong way: the sharp blade had sliced his carotid artery, just beneath the ear. “Accident” was the verdict most of them came up with, and the police (perhaps tactfully) agreed. Some of the lower-rent tabloids did hint at suicide, and ran lurid pictures of the crime scene under headlines like “The Final Trick!” and “Basket of Blood!”
(I would heap even more scorn on such journals except my most recent interview—only two years before—had been courtesy of Astrology and Detective Gazette, which shows they are not entirely without discernment.)
“Yeah, I read about it,” I said at last. “I was really shaken up. A horrible accident.”
“It was murder.” Phone-the-time ladies announce the hour with less certainty.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Murder.” She reached into her bag, but this time she didn’t produce a lighter. The envelope hit my desk with the loud smack of a card trick going wrong. “I went to see the lawyer yesterday. I expected Dad to be broke.”
I was suddenly interested. She was here to hire me for something, even if I didn’t know what. “And you were wrong?”
“No, I was exactly right. His net assets are a few hundred moth-eaten magic books, some tattered posters, a few old props, and an overdue bill for rental of his top hat. And that envelope. But I expected to receive something else too, and I didn’t get it.”
I was already reaching for the envelope. She stilled me with a glance. Yeah, just like they say in books. And if any of you has ever received a note in class illustrated with a dirty cartoon of your teacher and looked up to find her standing over you, you’ll know what I mean. Real rabbit-in-the-headlights stuff. “Uh, you...you said you didn’t get something you expected?”
“Dad had been writing his memoirs for years. He wouldn’t let me read them, but I saw the manuscript lots of times. When I didn’t find it around the house after...after...” For a brief moment her composure slipped. I looked away, half out of sympathy, half to escape the momentarily suspended gorgon stare. She cleared her throat. “When I couldn’t find it, I assumed he’d given it to his lawyer for safekeeping. He’d fired his agent years earlier, and he doesn’t talk to Mom, so it couldn’t be with anyone else. But the lawyer didn’t know anything about it. It’s just...vanished. And here’s the suspicious part—th
ere was a lot of interest in that manuscript, especially from some of Dad’s rivals in the business. They were concerned that he might tell some tales they’d rather weren’t made public.”
I straightened up. Repeated doses of her sit-up-properly-class voice were beginning to take a toll on my natural slouch; also, the effects of my liquid lunch were wearing off. “Listen, Ms. Heltenbocker, I’m not a cop, but that doesn’t seem like grounds enough to suspect murder.”
“I know you’re not a cop. You’re an out-of-work magician. Look in the envelope.”
“Hey. I have a nice little thing going with birthdays and bar mitzvahs, you know.”
That sort of defensive thrust works best when followed by a quick retreat, so I picked up the envelope. It had her name on it, written in an old man’s shaky hand. The only thing inside was an old photograph: two rows of young men, all dressed in top hats and tailcoats, with a placard in front of them reading: “Savini’s Magic Academy, Class of ’48.” Three of the faces had been circled in ink. None of the three was Charlie himself; I discovered him smiling in the front row, looking like a young farm boy fresh off the bus. Which in 1948, as I recalled, he pretty much would have been.
“This doesn’t mean anything to me,” I said. “How could it? I wasn’t even born.”
“Look on the back.”
On the flip-side of the photo, that same shaky hand had scrawled across the top: “If something happens to me or my book, investigate these three.” At the bottom, also in ink but kind of faint, the same person had written: “Trust Pinardo.”
“Yes, it’s all my dad’s handwriting. It took me a while to find out who ‘Pinardo’ was and to track you down. Apparently, you haven’t been playing many of the big venues lately.” She smiled, but I’ve seen more warmth from Chevrolet grillwork. “So far my dad’s judgement looks pretty awful, but I’m willing to give you a chance for his sake. I still think it’s murder, and I do need assistance.”
I shook my head. “Okay, your father was a friend, but we hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Even granting that it’s a murder, only for the sake of argument, what do you—what did he—expect me to do, for Chrissakes?”
“Help me. My father suspected something about these three men who all went to the magic academy with him. His book has disappeared. I’m going to confront them, but I need somebody who understands this world.” The facade slipped again and I found myself watching her face move. The human woman underneath that do-it-yourself Sternness Kit was really quite appealing. “My mom and dad split up when I was little. I didn’t grow up with him, I don’t know anything about stage magic. I’m a teacher, for goodness sake!”
“Aha!” I said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Nothing, really.” I pondered. “Okay. I don’t buy any of this, but I’ll do what I can. Charlie was a good guy and he was there for me when I was starting out. I suppose that whatever I have, I owe to him.”
“Hmmm,” she said. “Maybe I trusted you too fast. You’ve certainly got a pretty good murder motive right there.”
“Very funny. We’d better discuss my fee, because as it turns out, I can help you already. I’ve just recognized one of these guys.” Quite pleased with myself, I pointed at a thin young man with a thin young mustache standing in the back row. “His name is Fabrizio Ivone, and he’s working tonight at the Rabbit Club.”
My none-too-sumptuous personal quarters are a suite of rooms—well, if a studio with a kitchenette and bathroom constitutes a suite—over my place of business. Thus, it was easy enough to grab a bite to eat and a couple hours’ sleep, then shower and get back downstairs well before Ms. Heltenbocker returned to pick me up. If my head was starting to feel like someone was conducting folk-dancing classes inside it, I suppose that was nobody’s fault but my own.
Tilly was again holding down the front desk, eating a take-out egg foo yung and going over the books. She was frowning, and no surprise: matching my income against my outgo was like trying to mend the Titanic with chewing gum and masking tape.
“Hey, you were supposed to have the day off.” I scrabbled in the filing cabinet for the aspirin. “How’s your mom?”
Tilly gave me one of her looks. She’d probably noticed the pyramid of beer bottles I’d made on my desk. “If I stayed away from here a whole day, this place would just disappear under the dust like Pompeii. Mom’s fine. Her gums are still sore. I’ve been overheating the blender making her milkshakes all afternoon.” She paused to contemplate a noodle that had fallen onto her sweater, where it lay like a python that had died climbing Everest. “By the way, who the hell is Emily Heltenbocker?”
“Client.” I said it casually, although it was a word that had not been uttered within those walls for some time. “Also Charlie Helton’s daughter. Why?”
“She left a message for you. Poor old Charlie—that was a real shame. Anyway, she says she’ll be here at seven, and you should wear a clean shirt.”
I did not dignify this with a reply.
“Oh, and two different reporters called—someone from The Metropolitan, and a guy from Defective Astronomer Gazette.”
“Astrology and Detective,” I said absently, wondering what could have made me the center of such a media whirlwind. The Metropolitan was actually a rather high-toned organ: they only printed their car-accident pictures in black and white, and they ran tiny disclaimers underneath the alien abduction stories. I swallowed a few more aspirin and went to meet the press.
A couple of quick calls revealed that both had contacted me about the Charlie Helton Mystery, aka “The Magical Murder Manuscript.” Apparently the missing book angle had been leaked by Charlie’s lawyer and was developing into a fair bit of tabloid froth. Some hack from The Scrutinizer called while I was still working my way through the first two. By the time I had finished my bout of semi-official spokesmanship—not forgetting to remind them all that Pinnard was spelled with two “n”s, but Pinardo (as in “the Magnificent”) with only one—Tilly leaned in the door to tell me “my date” was waiting.
(There is a certain hideous inevitability to what happens when Tilly meets one of my female clients, at least if that client is under sixty years of age. It is useless to protest that I have no romantic interest in them—Tilly only takes this as evidence of my hopelessly self-deluding nature. As far as she’s concerned, any roughly nubile woman who has even the most cursory business relationship with me falls into one of two categories: shallow gold-diggers prospecting in my admittedly rather tapped-out soil, or blindingly out-of-my-league “classy ladies” over whom I am fated to make a dribbling fool of myself. Only the sheer lack of recent clients of any sort had caused me to forget this, otherwise I would have been sure to meet Charlie’s daughter downstairs in front of the laundromat, at whatever cost to dignity.)
All unknowing, Emily Heltenbocker had greatly increased the likelihood of such a reaction by wearing a rather touchingly out-of-date cocktail frock for our nightclub sojourn. The black dress showed an interesting but not immodest amount of cleavage, so Tilly had immediately sized her up as a Number One.
“I’ll just stick around for a while to keep out the repossession people,” she informed me helpfully as I emerged. “Don’t worry, boss. I won’t let them take that urn with your mother’s ashes like they did last time you went bust.” She turned to Emily. “Call me sentimental, but I think however far in debt someone is, those loan sharks should stick to reclaiming furniture, not late relations.”
I winced, not so much at the all-too-true reference to my financial state as at the unfortunate subject of dead relatives, but Emily appeared to take no notice of my assistant’s faux pas. “What a loyal employee,” she cooed. I thought I detected a touch of acid beneath the sweetness. “She’s clearly been with the firm forever. Well, she should still get back in time for Ovaltine and the evening news—even if the repo men drop by tonight, it shouldn’t take them long to collect this lot.”
Tilly raised an eyebrow in gru
dging approval—she liked an opponent who could return serve. Before some thundering new volley was delivered, I grabbed Emily’s arm and pulled her toward the stairs.
Did I mention that there’s been a slight problem with the elevator lately?
“At least the shirt looks like it was ironed at some point,” she said. “Mid-seventies, maybe?”
She was driving. Her style refuted my ideas of what a schoolteacher would be like behind the wheel, and in fact rather enlarged the general concept of “driving.” Apparently, many of the other motorists felt the same: we had traveled across town through an 1812 Overture of honking horns, squealing brakes, and occasional vivid remarks loud enough to be heard even through our rolled-up windows.
I chose to ignore her comment about my shirt and concentrated instead on clinging to my seat with one hand while using the other to leaf through the autopsy report which Emily had somehow procured. (Privately, I suspected a coroner’s clerk with guilty schoolboy memories.)
Nothing in the report seemed to differ greatly from what I had read in the papers. Karl Marius Heltenbocker, aka Charlie Helton, had been in his early sixties but in good physical health. Death was due to exsanguination, the agent of same having been a large and very sharp steel sword of the type known as a cavalry saber. A few rough drawings showed the position of the body as it had been found inside the basket, and a note confirmed that paramedics had declared the victim dead at the scene. The verdict was death by misadventure, and both autopsy and summary report were signed by George Bridgewater, the county’s coroner-in-chief. If anyone in authority suspected it was a murder, it certainly wasn’t reflected in the official paperwork.
“It sure looks like an accident,” I said, wincing slightly as a pedestrian did a credible Baryshnikov impression in his haste to give Emily right-of-way through a crosswalk.
“Of course it does. If you were going to murder someone and steal his manuscript to protect yourself, Mister Pinnard, wouldn’t you want it to look like an accident?” She said this with an air of such logical certainty that I was reminded of my firm conviction during my student years that all teachers were extraterrestrials.