Disappearing Nightly (2 page)

I grunted. “It’s being repaired.”

“I see.”

“Listen,” I prodded, “can’t you at least turn this note over to the lab and see what they can find out?”

He looked at it for a moment, then shook his head. “We have no proof that a crime has been committed, Miss Diamond. Unless further evidence comes to light, I can’t submit this for forensic examination. Besides, it’s not a threat, it’s a warning.”

“Should that comfort me?”

“It’s probably from a superstitious fan or a religious fanatic—someone who believes that Golly Gee really did vanish into thin air and that anyone else who does that trick will follow her into oblivion.”

“You’ve been a real help, Detective.” I stuffed the note into my purse and turned to go.

“Uh, Miss Diamond?”

“What?” I said over my shoulder.

“If the show does reopen…”

“Yes?”

He hesitated, then lowered coal-black lashes over those deep blue eyes as he said, “I’d like to come see you in it.”

“Book your seat,” I said. “The show must go on.”

I returned to the theater for a musical run-through with the cast and orchestra. Without Joe, there wasn’t much else we could do. Then, ignoring the dirty looks I received, I slipped out of the Equity meeting early and went to Joe’s place. He and Matilda had the entire second floor of a brownstone all to themselves on the Upper West Side. Everyone knew it was her money, not his, that paid for this luxury. He wasn’t a successful magician, and I suspected that only his recent second marriage to an ambitious producer had provided him with an opportunity like
Sorcerer!
He was in his late t
hirties, an age at which many performers feel time is running out for them to achieve success in our youth-oriented society. I knew Joe craved name recognition, national tours and television specials. Just like me, he was hoping that
Sorcerer!’s
initial run would be successful enough for us to move the show to a major Broadway theater where we’d enjoy a higher profile.

His behavior baffled me. Joe was neurotic, sure, but I knew how much the show meant to him. If he blew this chance—and cost our backers a bundle in the process—he could probably count on playing nothing but birthday parties and Renaissance fairs for the next thirty years. If I let him live, that was. With Golly gone, this was my big chance, and no high-strung, rabbit-in-the-hat asthmatic was going to ruin it for me. That’s why I had to talk to him. We both wanted the same thing. I was sure I could get thro
ugh to him, reason with him, convince him to go on with the show. And if reason didn’t work, then I’d make sure he understood that whatever he feared might happen onstage was nothing compared to what
I
would do to him if he closed down the show.

It was obvious upon arriving at Joe’s place that I was desperately needed there. No wonder Matilda wasn’t making any progress. Why do married people behave in ways specifically designed to drive each other crazy?

“Darling, Esther’s here,” Matilda crooned loudly as she let me into the foyer. She turned to me and added in a stage whisper that they could probably hear as far away as Cleveland, “Try not to upset him. He’s very sensitive about the whole subject right now.”

“Tough,” I said.

“What subject?” Joe demanded, shouting at us from three rooms away.

“Why don’t you come here and greet Esther, darling?”

“No!
What
subject?”

“He’s been like this since Saturday night,” she mega-whispered at me again.

“Like what?” Joe shouted. “
What
have I been like?”

Luckily, the phone rang. The combatants went to their separate corners, so to speak, while Matilda answered it. Unfortunately, she came out swinging only a moment later, and this time she was aiming for both of us.

“Darling, it’s Magic Magnus’s shop calling,” she bellowed down the hallway. “The crystal cage—you know, the one Esther smashed to bits and pried apart? It’s ready to be picked up. Isn’t that wonderful, darling? You can rehearse with it tomorrow!”

While Joe screamed an emphatic negative, she turned to me and added, “It was horribly expensive to repair, Esther.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Considerably more than your salary.”

“That’s easy to believe.”

She frowned at me, then bellowed, “Shall I tell them you’re coming, dear?”

I don’t think Joe heard her. He was still shouting. So I said, “Tell them someone will come for it. If he won’t go, I will.”

“Well, yes, I suppose it’s the least you can do.”

“Look, Matilda, someone had to get Golly out of—”

“She wasn’t
in
there, if you recall,” Matilda said through clenched teeth.

Joe heard that. “Go on, remind me, remind me, just keep
reminding
me.” He hurled the words at her, coming down the hallway toward us. “Just keep rubbing it in that I made a woman vanish!”

Matilda glared at him and went back to her telephone conversation. I stared at Joe, thunderstruck.

“Wait a minute! Wait just a minute!” I realized I was shouting, too, and lowered my voice. “W
hat’s going on here, Joe? Are you having delusions of godhood? Do you honestly believe—do you even entertain the possibility—that Golly really vanished? Abracadabra, a puff of smoke and oblivion? Do you believe all your own hocus-pocus publicity?”

He had the good grace to look sheepish. “You don’t understand, Esther. She…I felt…There was…”

I took him by the shoulders and shook him hard. “Joe! Pull yourself together! Let’s have a reality check here!”

Matilda put down the phone. “The shop closes at six o’clock. You’ll have to hurry.”

“But she
did
vanish,” Joe insisted.

“She didn’t vanish!” I snapped. “She…wandered away. Maybe she felt an urgent need to speak to Robert Kennedy Junior. Maybe she thought she saw Elvis. Maybe she was abducted by one of those plastic surgeons she owes so much money to.”

“Huh?” Joe said.

“Or maybe she’s just trying to get a raise,” Matilda said.

I stared at her. “Good God, there
is
evil among us.”

“Excuse me?”

“Forget it. Give me the keys to your truck. I’m going to go get the crystal cage,” I said. “It, and I, will be at the theater tomorrow morning at ten o’clock sharp for a full dress rehearsal. And so will you, Joe, or I will come here and get you—and this time the beautiful assistant will saw the
magician
in half!”

“Beautiful assistant” is an exaggeration in my case. Indeed, being fitted into Golly’s wardrobe that morning had driven that point home like a wooden stake: her costumes were all a little too large in the chest and extremely tight everywhere else. I figured the girl must never eat. The wardrobe mistress advised me to suck in my stomach—and give up the Ben & Jerry’s.

At five foot six, I was also shorter than Golly, so all the costumes had to be hemmed. Some of the colors would never look quite right on me, since I’m fair-skinned and brown-haired. I wondered if I’d be given a wig to play Virtue, since my simple shoulder-length hairstyle didn’t resemble Golly’s waist-length blond ringlets (which, in my darker moments, I had described as “hooker hair”).

I inherited my father’s brown eyes and my mother’s good cheekbones. The result is a face which, as one of my acting teachers put it, is more versatile than beautiful. Still, I was rather flattered when Golly asked if I’d had cheek implants. (The feeling wore off when she told me she knew a doctor who could fix my nose.)

As I drove downtown, I wondered how a young woman Golly’s age knew so much about fake body parts. She must have had a pretty dreadful life. Now that she wasn’t around to irritate me, I felt kind of sorry for her.

I guess I felt kind of guilty, too. Except
for a few stunned moments Saturday night, I hadn’t worried about Golly at all since her disappearance. Mostly I’d gloated over getting her job.

Now I tried to imagine what could have happened to her. How had she disappeared like that? And why? And where was she now?

And what about that note? Lopez was unmoved by it; but then Lopez was an overworked cop with other cases on his mind. Besides, he half suspected
me
of perpetrating Golly’s disappearance. And his smile wasn’t charming enough to make up for that insinuation, I thought grumpily. Anyhow, easy for him to make reckless accusations—he wasn’t the one being threatened. Or warned. Or whatever.

He was right about one thing, though. The notion of “Evil among us” did suggest an unbalanced person. But was I right, too—did it suggest a
dangerous
person? Anyhow, just because someone’s unbalanced doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Do not go into the crystal cage.

Why the cage? I wondered. Did the author of the note mean that the prop itself was dangerous? Did he think that Golly’s disappearance was due to its faulty mechanism rather than to a mental breakdown or foul play?

I shook my head to clear it as I double-parked the truck outside Magic Magnus’s shop on Worth Street, in Tribeca. I felt a headache coming on
and decided to forget the whole mess for a while. If I kept up this merry-go-round of speculation, I’d wind up beating my head against hard objects before long, just like Lopez. And that habit didn’t seem to be doing him any good.

I had assumed Magic Magnus’s shop would be a dusty little storefront selling tricks and supplies. I was surprised to discover that the magic business filled an entire five-story building. The structure was one of those nineteenth-century relics of cast-iron architecture, when they found that buildings could be built more quickly and cheaply by using iron beams rather than heavy walls to hold the weight of the floors. This left more space for windows, not to mention fabulously decorative facades. Inside even the grubbiest and most run-down buildings in this area, you can find
Renaissance columns, baroque balustrades and Second Empire ornamentation. I know all this because I once went on a blind date with one of the Friends of Cast-Iron Architecture.

Tribeca isn’t quite as gentrified as Soho, but many of the buildings down here have been renovated. Magic Magnus’s place wasn’t one of them. In fact, as I pushed open the door and entered the vast ground floor showroom, I thought even the dust looked nineteenth century. I assumed that Magnus must be doing good business if he could afford to operate in this part of town, but I doubted he did much trade with walk-in customers. A couple of dusty display cases held
old-fashioned props: wands, hats, cards, false-bottom cups, that sort of thing. One wall was lined with a long row of costumes of astonishing vulgarity. The rest of the showroom was filled with a bewildering variety of poorly displayed props and many boxes, crates and cartons. Judging by the markings on these containers, Magnus got shipments from all over the world.

I looked around for a shopkeeper or clerk but saw no one. Walking toward the main counter, I tripped over something on the floor and nearly flew headfirst into an Iron Maiden. A little stunned, I examined the thing and realized it was just a grisly version of something Joe used in
Sorcerer!
You stick a girl inside and run swords through her. I shook my head in disgust. This whole business of magic tricks always seemed to involve mutilating a half-naked woman.

There was a wall behind the counter. A doorway at its center was covered by a red velvet curtain.

“Hello?” I called.

No response.

I noticed a small bell sitting on the counter. A sign propped up next to it said Ring For Assistance. I did. A moment later there was a small
pop!,
a puff of smoke and the smell of sulfur.

I found myself facing one of the biggest men I’d ever seen. Easily six and a half feet tall, broad and beefy without being fat, he displayed a remarkable set of tattoos on both bare arms. He had wild red
hair and a well-trimmed beard. He grinned at me. His teeth were very long. One of them was gold.

I took a step back. He gave a full-throated laugh, booming and lusty.

I said, “Magic Magnus, I presume?”

“The one and only!” He reached across the counter, seized one of my hands and brought it to his lips. “And who might you be, fair wench?”

“I’m Esther Diamond. I came to get Joe Herlihy’s prop. The crystal cage that—”

“Ah, yes. You’re the actress who tore the thing apart with her bare hands.”

“He told you about me?”

“His wife did.”

“Oh.”

“I like a woman with spirit. Are you free Friday evening?”

“I hope not. I mean—I should be performing then.”

“And afterward?”

“Magnus, you overwhelm me.”

“I have that effect on women.” He smoldered at me.

“Or it may be the dust.” I sneezed.

“Sorry about that.”

“Don’t you ever clean in here?”

“I had a cleaning woman, but she vanished.”

“That’s not funny,” I said. “You heard about Golly Gee?”

He nodded. “Joe swore me to secrecy.”

“Yeah, we’re trying to keep it out of the papers.”

“So the official story is that she just ran off?”

I shrugged. “Or ran amuck.” I leaned forward. “What do you think happened?”

Magnus shrugged, too, making his tattoos dance. “Who knows? We’re dealing with other realms when we venture into the magical arts. If Friday’s bad for you, how about Sunday?”

“Magical arts, my foot. It’s mechanics, timing and performance skill. I’m Golly’s understudy. I know how to do every trick she’s involved in.”

“Trick?” He looked outraged. “Please, love, at least say
illusion.
”

Joe always said that to me, too. I found it pretentious. “Trick, illusion, what’s the difference?”

“The difference is in perception.” Magnus waved a hand and a little bird appeared, nestled in his palm. It looked ruffled and surprised. “After all, what is a trick, fair one?”

“I’m a brunette.”

“It is deceit. It is a fake, a fraud, a hoax.” He folded his fist gently over the little bird and covered the fist with a handkerchief drawn from his pocket. “But an illusion—ah, that is a fantasy, a mirage, a flight of fancy. An illusion is the edge of a dream we cannot enter. It is the essence of imagination, that very quality which makes men different from animals.” He drew away the handkerchief and opened
his fist. The bird was gone. In its place was a lovely crystal wrapped in a fine thread of silver and dangling from a silver chain. “Illusion is the shadow of the world as it might be, if you only believe in it.”