Toured to Death

Toured to DEATH

HY CONRAD

KENSINGTON BOOKS
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

Toured to DEATH

T
he fussy little man held out a legal-size manila envelope.

Fanny Abel accepted it, weighing it in her hand. “That's it?” Disapproval tinged her words. More than tinged. After all, this was Fanny. “It can't be more than thirty pages.”

“Forty-three. But it's double-spaced.” The man actually seemed amused. Fanny wondered if she might be losing her touch.

She tried again. “This is supposed to keep our mystery fanatics occupied for the next two weeks? For all the money we're paying you . . .” She let the words dangle.

“I e-mailed a copy to your daughter in Monte Carlo. It's all she'll need to start the game, I assure you.” There was a certain condescension in his calm, as if he were explaining things to a very dense child. It was a trick Fanny recognized from her own arsenal. This guy was good. “She followed my previous packet of instructions?” He tilted his head quizzically. “If not . . .”

“Of course she did.” Fanny hated not being in control. Unlike her daughter, she had rules to avoid such situations. Rule number one? Never do business with people you didn't know during your husband's lifetime or to whom you aren't related, preferably by blood. Otto failed on both counts. She had known him for only . . . how long? A minute? Two at the most, since the eccentric figure had walked through the door of their Greenwich Village travel agency.

Owlish
was the word Amy had used to describe him—the small stature (no taller than Fanny herself), the pear-like shape, the thick, round glasses that tried their best to add substance. Fringes of white, wispy hair wreathed his face. If Fanny squinted, they could be feathers.

Otto was decked out—
dressed
didn't do him justice—in a suit of gray wool tweed. The cut was almost Edwardian, so old-fashioned it could almost be trendy, some London design that had yet to make it across the Atlantic except for a few isolated outbursts, like the arrival of a flu strain. But the material showed signs of age. Food stains peppered the sleeves. And the details were of such poor quality that Fanny decided the suit had never been fashionable.

Fanny resented that Amy couldn't be in two places at once. Any considerate daughter would figure out how to be in Monte Carlo, dealing with the tour, and in New York, dealing with this strange animal that she'd discovered in some article and then tracked down on the Internet.

The illusion of a ruffled breast was accomplished by a wrinkled white shirt accented by a clip-on bow tie that bobbed so dramatically when Otto spoke—so irritatingly hypnotic—that it had to be deliberate. Intimidation by annoyance, an advanced ploy that she herself rarely dared.

“The entire game is written and ready to play.” Bob, bob, bob. Fanny had to force her gaze down to the envelope. “Every day your daughter will receive new instructions. All taken care of.” He was reaching across and tapping at the final invoice, paper clipped to the corner.

“What about the ending?” Fanny contorted her own squat frame, hunching down and trying once again to force her opponent into eye contact. “Shouldn't we know how it comes out? You know. Killer? Motive?” With a bit of eye contact, she might just regain her footing. “What if no one can solve it or if a clue gets lost? Amy says she would feel more comfortable . . .” Were his eyes peering up at hers through the bushy eyebrows? She couldn't tell.

“That's not the way I work. You'll notice the item listed as ‘assistant fee.'” Another reach and a tap, and this time Fanny couldn't help glancing at the invoice. The glance turned into a gape.

“Oh, my lord!”

Otto chuckled. “My assistant will be keeping tabs on the tour, at great expense to me and greater expense to you. Amy didn't advise you of this?”

“Yes, of course. But . . .”
But such an expense.

“Mrs. Abel, I have been constructing mysteries for nearly thirty years. The best of the best. And no one knows the ending beforehand—not the organizers, not the actors, no one. I once designed a game at which the vice president was in attendance. And if I won't tell the Secret Service, I certainly won't tell you.” Here he preened, smoothing back his head feathers with a fat left claw. “As for something going wrong . . . My assistant will be on-site, observing every step. You don't need to know anything more.”

“Well . . . I guess that makes it okay.” Fanny straightened the tan, pleated blouse that Stan had told her—in one of those rare romantic moments when her late husband knew he had to say something—so perfectly set off her auburn pageboy. Now, three years after his death, the blouse, a bit tattered around the cuffs, was still her first choice out of the closet. With a sigh, she opened the center drawer of the Chippendale-style desk that had once stood in the corner of Stan's den, took out the company checkbook, and began to write.

Why couldn't Amy have opened a normal travel agency? Between them they knew enough New Yorkers seeking European culture or sunny beaches. But no. Despite Amy's timid nature, she'd wanted to specialize in the exotic. Amy's Travel. Simple but personal. Fanny liked it.

Their agency would be different, Amy had vowed, shunning the usual low-risk, high-volume stuff. The Internet had already destroyed that end of the market. No, they would concentrate on customized excursions.

Fanny suspected the idea had been inspired by Amy's fiancé. Eddie McCorkle, bless his soul, had been the adventurous half of the relationship. He had always been dragging Amy someplace new, talking her into a trek on the Inca Trail instead of a walk on a Caribbean beach. Amy would fret for weeks beforehand and wind up loving every minute. They'd even fantasized about writing travel books. To work together, to travel and see new things. Someday.

Someday
had ended two years ago with Eddie's death, just a week after he'd popped the question.

Stan gone and then Eddie in less than a year, leaving a widow and an almost widow, both of them too young not to start over. But was this the way to start? Fanny wondered. It was as if Amy was pushing herself to become someone else.

The Monte Carlo to Rome Mystery Road Rally—Fanny knew she didn't like this name—was a perfect example of the new Amy. A high-risk, high-profile venture that put them at the mercy of the bank—and of an eerie bird of prey named Otto.

“What if something happens to your assistant? He or she or whatever. God forbid you should divulge the sex.”

Otto's grin was unnecessarily rude, considering that she hadn't finished signing the check. “If my assistant should unluckily be hit by a bus, then I shall personally take over the game. No extra charge.” He eyed the checkbook. “That's Ingo, i-n-g-o, an anagram for
goin',
which is what I must be doin', my dear. Thank you.”

She wrote as slowly as she could.

 

Otto took the 1 train from Christopher Street to Times Square. From there it was a short walk to the dingy two-room depressant that had been home ever since his bedridden wife had gone on to her much-deserved reward.

Their life had been a simple one. Mary Ingo had brought in a regular paycheck as a Brooklyn borough clerk, while Otto had written a succession of unpublishable mystery novels. The response from literary agents was always the same—good, twisty plots; poor character development. It was only a matter of time and luck before one of the agents, a member of the same church, asked Otto if he could write a mystery game for a charity event. After the rousing success of
The Deadly Communion Wafer,
one thing led to another.

It was on the day of Mary's funeral that he placed on the market the Brooklyn row house that he'd been born in, married in, and grown old and stout in. Over the following week, the sanitation department carted away dozens of pieces of heavy walnut furniture left out at the curb. Otto was throwing out anything and everything that might remind him of that unhappy eternity. And although his simpering niece—his wife's niece, actually—had begged him to save her the photo albums and the dinette set, out they had gone with the rest. His books—the research books, the classic mysteries from which he mercilessly stole plot twists, plus the prized bound scripts from his own games—all of these went with him.

Along Eighth Avenue, a breeze stirred the street debris into curbside cyclones. Otto joined the crowds elbowing past the cheap storefronts that asserted their stalls halfway out into the bustling sidewalk.

Ignoring the chaos, Otto concentrated on the game he'd just delivered, mentally reviewing the twists and turns, imagining the players' reactions and pre-guessing their second guesses. Designing mystery games was a specialized skill. But within this nearly invisible world, Otto was a living legend. Who else could have carried off The Guggy Murders, a charity event at the Guggenheim that had four hundred of New York's wealthiest racing up and down the spiral ramp in gowns and tuxedos, trying to discover who was impaling the museum staff on a slew of “priceless” mobiles?

A block south of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Otto used his key on a reinforced steel door and began to wheeze his way up four flights to the mystery king's lair. One step at a time. Arduous minutes later and he was depositing his overstuffed body into the deep, formfitting depressions in his overstuffed sofa.

It was only as his own gasps were fading from his ears that Otto realized he wasn't alone. He glanced up at the outer door, the door that he, in his oxygen deprivation, had neglected to shut behind him.

On the two windows that faced Eighth Avenue, the blinds were lowered, permitting a few slivers of dusty light to squeeze between the venetian slats. Otto had not yet switched on a lamp, and the naked bulb dangling from the stairwell ceiling turned the figure into the blackest of silhouettes. The figure glided in and closed the door, plunging the living room into darkness.

The owl's eyes blinked and adjusted. Among the shadows, a profile, and then the outline of eye sockets, cheekbones, and a mouth came into focus. The face was vaguely familiar. “What are you doing . . .” He stopped when he saw the gun. “Oh, my.”

Otto regarded the firearm with a curious eye. He knew his guns—and his bombs and his poisons and just about anything else that could maim or kill. Even in this light, he recognized it as a .22 pistol with a silencer, a muffler, as the English called it, screwed onto the muzzle.

Good choice,
he thought in an oddly dispassionate way. A silencer would be useless on a revolver due to the gaps around the chamber, from which air, and therefore noise, could escape. The smallness of the .22 and the fact that it was a pistol meant that the explosion would be minimal. Just the kind of weapon he himself would have written in.

“The walls are very thin,” Otto panted. “My neighbors are nosy.” He wondered if he had enough breath left in him to scream. At the same time, he was fascinated by his assailant's face. So familiar, yet not. “What do you want?”

The intruder didn't reply. Not a good sign.

“I have a few hundred dollars.” But he instinctively knew money wasn't the object. “I have a credit card.” He didn't. At this point he was just looking for a response.

The figure didn't move but seemed to be waiting—nerveless, emotionless. Waiting for what? The only sounds in the stale, greasy room were Otto's labored breaths and the normal abuse from Eighth Avenue: the blare of taxis as they jockeyed for position by the Port Authority, the rhythmic
clunk-a-clunk
of tires passing over an ill-fitting construction plate. It was during one of these
clunk-a-clunks
that the figure fired.

Otto had read about thousands of fictional deaths, had personally staged dozens of them, but had never before been on the scene of a real murder. In his rare moments of self-doubt, he had wondered if his re-creations might be too clichéd or unrealistic. Did shooting victims really convulse with the impact, then go limp in their chairs as the life drained out of them?

Yes, they did. And with a certain degree of satisfaction, he convulsed and slumped and drained.
Of course, I could be reacting this way because that's how I think I'm supposed to,
he thought, then discarded the notion.
No, this is accurate, as far as I can tell. I should be spending my last moments thinking up a deathbed clue, shouldn't I? Some clever, unmistakable lead . . .

He slid from the sofa to the floor, leaving a smeared trail of red against the dirty corduroy cushions as he fell to his knees and collapsed forward. His brain was far too woozy now. Besides, he truly had no idea who had killed him, which was annoying on both a personal and professional level.

Otto's next thoughts were of the regrettable differences between factual and fictional murders and how, even discounting his current situation, he much preferred the fictional.

I wonder if this will ever be solved,
he mused dryly.
How very like me to leave a murder mystery in my wake. How fitting.