Magician (3 page)

We reached the bottom of the stairs; the lighting was meager, and the young officer’s face looked indistinct in the sullen gray of the place.

“There’s probably nothing in here that you haven’t already heard about through the regular press. This isn’t the usual way evidence in an unclosed case gets treated, you know. This kind of thing is usually off-limits. The Champion family threatened to sue the department unless we made the evidence public. They’ve got tons of money, you know.”

I nodded, and sighed. “Yeah, I know.”
 

Officer Simpson went on, oblivious. “As for the case at present, we turned it over to our dead letter man last year, and that’s the last anybody upstairs knows about it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Dead letter man?”

“Yeah, you know, for the cold cases. Dead-end investigations. Well, we call them dead letters, like in a dead letter room at the post office. The old, unsolved cases mostly just stack up, but murders and disappearances remain officially open, pretty much forever, or until they get solved. So we give them to Detective Sergeant ‘Cold Case’ Tiller, as we call him, and he picks away at them. He got injured a while back and pulled this detail. He’s pretty good, too. Every now and then he cracks one.”

“Really, Simpson, Such glowing praise, I didn’t know you were a fan.”

We both turned. Detective Sergeant Tiller was a squat, meditative looking man around forty, with thick glasses and dense, curly hair. He had a scruffy, close-cropped mustache and beard, and wore a tie and suspenders. His black necktie bore a small golden shield of the Birmingham Police.

“I just jogged across the hall for a cup of Joe, and heard you two gentlemen talking. Can I help you with something, Detective Longville?”

I must have blinked. “How did you know my name?”

“I work old cases, remember? I also happen to watch the news. I believe you were the one who caught that Mountainbrook Slasher, about ten years ago. Also, if you don’t mind my saying, that scar on your face sort of gives you away.”

“Good memory. Yes, that was me; I got the scar from him. But I’m not a police detective any more. I left the department about four years ago. Now I’m a private investigator.”

I didn’t mention why I was no longer a cop; if Tiller knew, he gave no sign.

Tiller nodded sagely. “Ah. So, some of our fine taxpaying citizens have decided they want their case reviewed by a
professional
detective. And what just case might that be?”

“He’s working on the disappearance of the Champion girl,” Officer Simpson blurted out.

Tiller stroked his chin and emitted a low
hmmm.
He then turned and began walking away, his voice trailing behind him. “Really, Simpson, have some couth. Whether you realize it or not, Mr. Longville here is rather distinguished company.” He pulled his eyeglasses off, and while he rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, he pointed with the glasses to a row of doors.

“It’s all in one of these rooms over here, the crime scene photos, testimony, what have you.”

Simpson nudged me, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder to signal that he was leaving. He retreated toward the stairwell. I turned and followed Tiller down a dark corridor of filing cabinets. The place was a library of casebooks and reference materials, stacked to the ceiling.

Bookshelves and file cabinets sat in the middle of the floor in several long rows. Bundles of files reached almost to the ceiling. At the far end of the bookshelves was a small room, with a table and a couple of chairs inside. Behind them, the wall was lined with filing cabinets. Tiller flipped a light switch, illuminating the cold little space.

“This room is the final resting place of the Georgia Champion case. All of the evidence is here. The testimony of the people present at the house at the time of the girl’s disappearance, pictures of the house and grounds, you name it. The higher ups decided to do it this way after the Champion’s threatened the department with a lawsuit. We also made everything public. Mr. Champion, a rather hysterical type, claimed there was a cover-up. Remember, this was an election year, so the Mayor and the Chief said, screw it, make the evidence open for public perusal. There weren’t any new leads, anyway.”

“So, was the case well investigated in your opinion?”

“It was extremely well done, Mr. Longville. And that despite Champion’s interference, I must say. He is a distraught father, but one with too much money. The case was handled with the utmost professionalism, nonetheless. Take a look at the crime photos. Everyone and everything that was possibly evidential at the scene was photographed. And, you will note, from every conceivable angle. Good, solid crime scene methodology was used. I happen to know some of the guys that photographed the scene. Mind you, I wasn’t involved in the original investigation, but they are good detectives, and they went all-out on this one. The department really spared no expense.”

“So, there were a lot of cops on the case?”

“If there was a flaw in the investigation, it could only have been that there were
too many
police officials involved. Horace Champion’s claims of cover up, or police ineptitude, were just hogwash. But, to answer your question, yes. Almost half the East Task Force was involved in some fashion.”

Tiller’s voice was strangely soothing, as if he possessed some vast inner calm. I nodded and said, “To tell the truth, that was the impression I had from the media coverage. Tell me, Detective Tiller, what do you make of the girl’s disappearance?”

“All in all, genuinely baffling. No real leads materialized. That girl was abducted while the parents were home, and there were five other adults and thirty kids milling about. Simply astounding.” As he spoke, he pulled the master case file out and threw it onto the table. It was quite thick, and made a substantial thud. He gestured with his steaming coffee cup toward a chair.

“I’ll be of any assistance that I can. You aren’t by any means the first, though you are the first in quite some time. None of the rest found a damned thing. Most of them weren’t really looking, in my opinion. They were a bunch of reporters and horses’ asses. But you were a good cop. Maybe you’ll get lucky; but from what I see, you’ve taken on a cause, rather than a case.”

“Well, that, at least, is nothing new.”

Tiller sat down and flipped the file open. Inside was a glossy colored photo of Georgia, a pretty little girl with curly black hair and bright blue eyes. That same photo had been splattered over television screens and on the front pages of tabloids from coast to coast for months. Opposite, there was a page filled with her vital statistics, and a computer-enhanced age progression photo.

Tiller busied himself digging material out of the file cabinet along the wall. I had seen men like him. He had done this work for a long time, and was good at what he did. I had seen plenty of good cops like him burn out, become those comatose soldiers who wage the hard, endless battle against the chaos until it triumphs over them, as all who wage it know it must.
 

I watched Tiller go through the filing cabinets. The way he spoke and moved revealed much about him. He was an intelligent, confident, thorough professional. He had gotten lucky, in a way. His injury had forced him into this curious job, where a rational, meticulous detective like him might do some real good. It suited his nature, and his analytical mind.

Tiller began laying additional files on the table. They accumulated into several high stacks very quickly.

“Tell me, Detective Tiller, do you have a theory on Georgia Champion’s disappearance?” I asked the man’s back.

Tiller paused in his digging. He sat down in the chair across from me and dragged the master file over. It was a dense slab of papers in a thick blue binder. He opened it and looked at the file photo of Georgia Champion. He nodded as though greeting an old acquaintance, which I suppose it was. He took a long sip of his coffee before he spoke again.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Longville. Before I hurt my back a few years ago, wrestling one of our fine citizens who was out of his mind on crack, I was on the Task Force, right here at the East Precinct. I worked homicide. I cracked some pretty good cases in my day, before the injury. That’s one reason the chief gave me this assignment, rather than have me wave a sign at school crossings.”

He rubbed the sparse hairs on his chin and sipped his coffee again before continuing. “I’ve cracked some cases since then that everyone else had given up on. Ones like the Champion case, there. Missing businessmen, dead girls, unidentified victims . . . they all eventually get sent down to the Dead Letter Office, and I, Detective Sergeant Amos Tiller, pick through their mortal remains. The ones I solve aren’t miracles. I do it the old-fashioned way, by just relentlessly going over material.”

He shifted in his chair and nodded at the massive pile of information that spilled over the table. “I do that, repeatedly, until I find something new. That would drive most people nuts, but I sort of like it. There’s sometimes a little something that got overlooked. I like finding that little something. But don’t get your hopes up, my friend. It isn’t always there. Like with the Champion case. I have personally been over the case, and nothing jumped out at me. No wonder the tabloids had such a field day. It really seemed as if the child disappeared.”

We both sat silently for a while.

“Cauchemar,”
Tiller suddenly said aloud.

“Come again?” I asked him, a little disconcerted.

“Cauchemar. That’s from the French, for nightmare. It was found, written on the wall in the Champion girl’s bedroom.” Tiller spun a photograph out of a folder with the tip of a finger. There, scrawled low on the wall, was the word.

Cauchemar.
 

I stared at it for a second. It was in a child-like script, but the initial C was written with a huge flourish. Something a child would never do. I nodded slowly. It was pretty creepy.

“That’s right, I remember now. The girl’s mother, Mrs. Champion, is French, I believe.”

“Correct. However, the idea was raised that Georgia had written it before she was abducted. This was an idea most people found ridiculous, myself included.”

 
“But the detectives investigating were unable to determine whether the little girl wrote it. Since the mother denied any knowledge of the writing, investigators felt it might have been a clue of some kind, left by Georgia, since she knew some French.”

Tiller shrugged.

“Right. The handwriting analysts couldn’t be sure, because there wasn’t enough to work with. The tabloids just loved it. It’s just another one of those weird little things about this case. Little details like that have always intrigued me.”

I cast my eyes at the huge pile of files that Tiller had placed in front of me.

“That’s a lot of material,” I said quietly.

“Yes, it is.”

“But nothing in there explains the disappearance,” I said.

Tiller nodded. “That’s right.”

“And we both know what that means.” I looked across the files at Tiller.

Tiller leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Yes. It means we must have missed something.”

Chapter 3

Birmingham is a city of many parts, a checkerboard of rich and poor. This peculiar patchwork is the remnant of good times and bad times, economic booms, and sudden deadfalls. Projects have sprung up mere blocks from mansions, as old neighborhoods prospered, or slid into long decline. Some sections are old money, some new. Many more had none at all. Westmoreland Heights was one of the places, and it was the part of Birmingham I had grown up in. Later, as a policeman, I had worked a beat there. Later still, I had worked those same streets as a detective.

Mountain Brook, Homewood, Cahaba heights, those were the places the yuppie middle class congregated. They played a mindless game of one-upsmanship, each trying to definitively become the best place in town to live.
 

The Champion family’s neighborhood was far removed from all of that. They lived in Park Place, the most exclusive section of the metropolitan area. I had been there on two occasions, once as a cop and once as a private detective. Both occasions had been very bad ones.

The guard at the gate took one look at me and acted as if he’d never seen a black man before. He was courteous after I presented Champion’s sepia card. When no one was looking, I had checked; it wasn’t scented.
 

I eased my old Buick up the circular drive. The Champion’s home was of a modest size, for a Zeppelin hanger. I was mildly surprised when no valet appeared.

I parked and walked to the front door, where I was met by a Hispanic woman in her mid-forties. She wore a white apron, and carried a dust mop. She didn’t really look at me, but silently took my coat and gestured down the long hall to a dimly-lit room, a sitting room by all appearances.

I had a seat on an exquisitely comfortable leather sofa. The air was quite fragrant, some sort of incense I couldn’t quite place. The walls of the room were decorated with pictures of about sixty-two generations of the Champion line, most of them looking like the present Mr. Champion to some degree, although none wore big furry hats.

In a few minutes, Champion appeared through the side door. With him was a short, swarthy woman, with thick, black hair. Mrs. Champion. They made a rather odd couple. Whereas Mr. Champion stood over six feet, his wife was perhaps an inch or two over five. His skin was doughy and white, whereas his wife’s was a dusky olive tone. She was also rather pretty, and looked twenty years his junior. She was dressed gaudily, her hair down. Around her neck were several strings of beads, and she was dressed in a black lace dress that covered her from her wrists to her ankles. She looked like a gypsy fortune-teller, her husband the beleaguered seeker of advice.