The Very Best of Tad Williams (26 page)

O
kay, I admit it. If a guy wants to get drunk in the middle of a weekday afternoon, he should have a lock on his office door. Usually Tilly runs interference for me, but this day of all days she’d left early to take her mother in to have her braces loosened. (Retired ladies who get a yen for late-life orthodonture give me a pain anyway—I told Tilly her mom’s gums were too weak for such foolishness, but who listens to me?)

Anyway, Tilly is usually out there behind the reception desk to protect me. I don’t pay her all that much, but somehow, despite the fairly small difference in our ages, I bring out some grumpy but stalwart mother-bear reflex in her. Actually, that describes her pretty well: any bill collector who’s ever seen an angry Tilly come out from behind her desk, her bulky cable knit sweater and long polished nails suggesting a she-grizzly charging out of a cave, will know exactly what I mean. If Tilly moved in with Smokey the Bear, every forest arsonist in the country would move to Mexico.

Sadly, there was no lock, and for once no Tilly to play whatsisname at the bridge. Thus the fairly attractive blonde woman, finding the door to my inner office open, wandered in and discovered me in a more or less horizontal position on the carpet.

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—there 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.