The Very Best of Tad Williams (29 page)

“Did he? He made enemies?” Emily was leaning forward, giving the old guy that penetrating would-you-like-to-share-that-with-the-class gaze that made me cringe even when it wasn’t aimed at me. I refrained from pointing out that her elbow was in a puddle of catsup. Purely because I didn’t want to distract her, of course.

“Not enemies, no. Not really.” Sandor Nagy stopped to think, a process that clearly needed some ramping-up time. It was a good half-minute before he came up with: “He was just...he bragged a lot. Told a lot of stories. Played tricks on people.”

Now it was my turn to lean forward. My backfired-prank theory was sounding better. “Anyone in particular that he upset?”

Nagy shook his head. “Not that I could tell you—it’s been a long time. He just pissed a lot of people off. Pardon my French, Miss.”

I chewed on my straw, disgusted with myself for taking the idea of murder seriously for even a second. “Let me ask you another question,” I said. “Are you really Hungarian? Because you don’t have an accent.”

Nagy frowned at me and squinted his bloodshot eyes. Starve Popeye the Sailor Man for a few weeks, then strap him into an extremely musty tux, and you basically had Nagy. “I sure as hell am! Both my parents were from the old country, even if I ain’t been there. At least I got a family connection. One of those punks at the Academy called himself ‘Il Mysterioso Giorgio,’ and he wasn’t even Italian! Some chump kid from Weehawken!”

We left the Hungarian Houdini muttering angrily at his hash browns.

I had mixed feelings when I got downstairs to the office the next day. I was more convinced than ever that we were wasting our time, and that Emily—who was actually a pretty okay person—was going to get her feelings hurt. On the other hand, she’d paid me a nice little fee, and the story was playing big and bold in the tabloids.

It wasn’t front page in
The Scrutinizer
, but it was near the front, and a full-page spread to boot. There was an artist’s rendition of
“The Death Basket”
(which included far more swords than were actually involved in Charlie’s demise), a photo of Charlie in his stage outfit, and one of the coroner and the police chief at a news conference, looking very serious. (In fact, the photo had been taken during some other and far more important case, but I must admit it gave the thing an air of drama.) The only item conspicuously missing was one of the publicity photos of Yours Truly I’d sent to them (there’s no such thing as bad PR, especially when you’ve been stuck on the birthday party circuit for a few years), but I was mentioned prominently in all the articles, even if
The Metropolitan
managed to spell my name “Pinrod.” So, all in all, it could have been worse.

Emily didn’t seem to think so, though. When I called her, she sounded tired and depressed. “I’m beginning to think you’re right,” she said. “Whatever was in the manuscript, it’s gone. The tabloid reporters won’t leave me alone. After I finish paying you, I’ll be broke—my savings have gone on Dad’s funeral. I think it’s time to go fishing.”

“Huh?” I had a sudden and disconcerting vision of Emily in hip-waders.

“It’s just a family expression. When times are bad, when the bill collectors are after you, you say ‘I think I’ll go fishing.’ And that’s how I feel right now.”

I was still thinking about the hip-waders. In a certain kind of way they can be a pretty sexy garment. I suppose it has something to do with my reading
Field & Stream
too much during my adolescence. In any case, distracted as I was, I did a wildly foolish and uncharacteristic thing.

“Listen, Emily,” I said. “I don’t want your money.”

“What does that mean?” She sounded angry.

“I mean, I don’t want any more of your money, and you can have back what I haven’t spent yet. But we’ll still go see O’Neill this afternoon. On the house, okay?”

She didn’t say anything right away. I assumed she had been struck dumb by gratitude, but I wasn’t sure. Charlie’s daughter had proven herself a mite unpredictable. While I waited for the verdict, I re-scrutinized
The Scrutinizer
. It was too bad they hadn’t run a picture of Emily, I thought—she was a very good-looking woman.

I frowned. Something in the paper’s coverage had been nagging at me since I’d read it, some little connection I couldn’t make that was now bidding heavily for my attention, but between certain thoughts of an imaginary Emily in a fishing-gear pictorial and then the sudden reappearance of the actual Emily’s voice, it didn’t have much of a chance.

“That’s...that’s very kind of you, Dalton. You’re a really nice person.”

She’d never called me by my first name before. That nagging detail was abruptly heckled off the Amateur Night stage of my consciousness.

“And you’re a nice person too, Emily.” I hung up, feeling oddly as though I might be blushing.

Tilly was standing in my office doorway. She’d heard the whole conversation. Her expression of amused contempt was probably similar to what ancient Christians saw on the faces of Roman lions.

“Your gills are showing, Pinrod,” she said. “What an idiot—hook, line, and sinker.”

I summoned up great reserves of inner strength and ignored her.

I spent all of O’Neill’s performance trying to decide what Emily would do if I put my arm around her. I’d like to say we were paying close attention to the show, but we weren’t. (I’m reasonably certain that murder investigators don’t date each other, or that if they do, they keep the dates separate from the actual investigations. I hope so.)

Not that Gerry O’Neill’s routine was the kind of thing that invited close attention. It was a mixture of old gags and fairly lame sleight-of-hand. Only the fact that it was a charity performance in front of a ward full of sick children made it something more than tiresome. And, to be fair, the kids seemed to like it.

O’Neill, it turned out, was the only one of the three who’d been on good terms with Charlie: he’d kept in loose touch with him over the years. As we walked him out to his car, O’Neill wiped the perspiration from his round face and walrus mustache and told us with impressive sincerity how upset he’d been when he heard the news.

“He was a good guy, Charlie was. A little loco sometimes, but basically a heart of gold.” He stuffed several feet of colored kerchief back into his pocket and patted Emily’s arm. “You got my real best wishes, missy. I was broken up to hear about it.”

Emily’s questions were perfunctory. She seemed a lot more cheerful than she’d been on the phone, but she seemed to be losing interest in the investigation. I wasn’t really surprised—it was pretty difficult to feature any of our three suspects as the Fu Manchu criminal mastermind-type.

“When you say Charlie was a little loco sometimes,” I asked, “what do you mean? His practical jokes?”

O’Neill grinned. “I heard about some of those. What a card. But I mostly meant his stories. He was full of stories, and some of ’em were pretty crazy.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, you know, places he said he’d been, things he’d seen. He told me once he’d been in China and some old guy there taught him how to talk to birds. Man, if you listened to him, he’d done everything! Snuck into a sultan’s harem somewhere, hung out with voodoo priests in Haiti, tamed elephants in Thailand, you name it. Crazy stories.”

Emily rose to her father’s defense. “He did travel quite a bit, Mister O’Neill. He toured in a lot of places, took his show all over the world—Asia, South America, the Caribbean—especially when he was younger. He was a pretty big star.”

O’Neill was a gallant man. “Then maybe all them stories were true, missy. In any case, I’m sorry he’s gone. He was a helluva guy.”

We watched O’Neill drive off. As we strolled back across the parking lot, Emily took my hand.

“Maybe it
was
an accident,” she said, and turned to look at me. The sunset brought out the deep gold colors in her hair. “Maybe that stuff he wrote on the photo was just another of his stories or silly tricks. But at least I did my best to find out.” She sighed. “Talking to these people reminded me of all the parts of his life I missed out on. I didn’t see a lot of him while I was growing up.”

I didn’t say anything. I was concentrating on the feeling of her warm skin beneath my fingers, and thinking about what I was about to do. I stopped, pulled her toward me, and carefully removed her glasses.

“Why, Miss Heltenbocker,” I said, as if in surprise, “you’re beautiful. Do you mind if I kiss you?”

She snatched them back and jammed them into place, brow furrowed in annoyance. “I hate it when everything’s blurry. Kiss me with my goddamn glasses on.”

What was it like? Do I have to tell you?

Magic.

I woke up in the middle of the night. The thing that had been bothering me had come back. Boy, had it ever come back.

I ran downstairs to my office, not bothering with a bathrobe. This should show you how excited I was—even though Tilly lived on the other side of town, wouldn’t be in for hours, and the office was effectively part of my home, going there naked even at 4 am made me feel queasily disrespectful. But the yammering in my brain wouldn’t wait for anything.

A few minutes later I ran back upstairs and woke Emily.

(Look, just because she was a schoolteacher doesn’t mean you should make old-fashioned assumptions.)

“Get up, get up!” I was literally jumping up and down.

“What the hell is going on, Pinnard?” She sat up, rubbing her eyes and looking utterly gorgeous. After the night we’d just spent, I wasn’t at all worried about her use of my last name.

“I’ve solved it! And you’re never going to believe it!” I grabbed her arm, almost dragging her toward the stairs. She very firmly pulled free, then went to get her glasses from the bedside table. Next—and clearly second in order of importance—she found my bathrobe and put it on. In a gesture of solidarity, I pulled my underwear off the ceiling light (don’t ask), donned it, and led her to my office.

“Brace yourself,” I said. “This is very weird.” I took a breath, trying to think of the best way to explain. “First of all, you were right—it wasn’t an accident.”

Emily sat up straight. “Somebody
did
murder him?” A strange look came over her face. “Or are you going to tell me it was suicide?”

I was suddenly reluctant. Waking someone up in the middle of the night to give them the kind of news I was about to give Emily could have a number of shocking effects, and I felt very protective of her—and of what we suddenly seemed to have together. “Well, see for yourself ” I spread the copy of
The Scrutinizer
on the desktop, then laid the graduation picture on top of it. “Something was bothering me about this article, but with everything else that happened today, well, I sort of forgot about it. Then, about fifteen minutes ago, I woke up and I knew.” I pointed at the picture, at one of the faces that Charlie hadn’t circled. “See this kid? You know who that is?”

Emily stared, then shook her head.

“That’s ‘Il Mysterioso Giorgio’—the one Nagy mentioned. You know, the fake Italian from Weehawken.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“You will. Remember Fabrizio Ivone talking about those delinquent friends of your dad’s who didn’t graduate the Academy? Well, he was wrong—one of them did. It was young ‘Giorgio’ here. Although he never made it as a working magician.”

“How do you know that?”

I lifted the graduation picture and pointed to
The Scrutinizer
. “Because he would have had trouble being a stage magician
and
holding down the job of Chief Coroner.” I put the graduation picture beside the news photo for comparison. “Meet ‘Il Mysterioso Giorgio’ today—George Bridgewater.”

She stared at the two photos, then looked up at me. “My God, I think you’re right. But I still don’t understand. What does it mean? Did he cover up something about my dad’s death?”

This was the hard part. Suddenly, under the bright fluorescent lights, my certainty had dwindled. It would be unutterably cruel if I turned out to be wrong. I took her hand.

“Emily,” I said. “I think your dad’s alive.”

She pulled away from me, stepping back as though I’d slapped her. The tears that suddenly formed in her eyes made me want to slap myself. “What are you saying? That’s crazy!”

“Look, you said it yourself—Charlie’d never be a suicide. And he wasn’t the type to have an accident. But you said he’d traveled in the Caribbean, and he told O’Neill he’d studied with voodoo priests! They have chemicals they use in voodoo that make people look like they’re dead. That’s where the zombie legends come from. It’s true—I read about it!”

She laughed, angry, frightened. “Where? In
Astrology and Detective Gazette
?”

“In a science magazine. Emily, they’ve done studies. Voodoo priests can use this stuff to put people in a kind of temporary coma. All the vital signs disappear. No paramedic struggling to keep your dad alive would know the difference, not if he’d made a real but shallow cut and spread a lot of blood around. It wouldn’t even have to be human blood, since nobody would think of testing it when he was locked in a room by himself with the key in his pocket. But you’d have to have a confederate in place for later, ’cause nobody could live through a real autopsy. Chief Coroners hardly ever do actual examinations, so it’s a little bit of a coincidence he was writing the report at all. Even weirder that he wouldn’t step aside when he found out it was an old school chum.”