Now You See It (18 page)

“Sheriff?” Max inquired.

Plum remained quiet, pressing harder at the inside padding of the casket, poking it and plucking at it.

The approaching thunder rumble sounded ominous to me. Like a drumroll prior to some explosive finale.

Now Plum reached into his right-hand trouser pocket and removed a folding knife.

“What are you doing?” Max asked quickly.

Plum opened the knife.

“What are you doing?”
Max repeated, now more urgently.

Plum reached into the casket, the open knife in his right hand.

Max grabbed his arm. “You aren’t going to do this,” he declared

“Let go of me,”
Plum said. His tone was threatening.

Max swallowed and withdrew his hand. “You’ll regret this,” he said.

Ignoring him, Plum began to cut away the padding on the bottom of the casket.

“You’re going to pay for this,” Max told him.

Cassandra watched in silence as the Sheriff hacked at the casket padding, pulling it up in handfuls.

Suddenly, Cassandra looked inside the casket in shock.

“Oh, my God,” she murmured.

What is it?
cried my mind.

The Sheriff was pulling something up from an apparent cavity in the bottom of the casket.

Something heavy.

Oh, no, Max, no
, I thought.

The Sheriff hauled up what appeared to be a cloth sack.

Cassandra (and I) choked on breath as the Sheriff yanked the heavy bag up higher and it toppled from the casket, landing on the floor with a soggy thump.

Dripping blood.

Cassandra made a sickened noise; somewhere in my vegetated bowels, I did alike.

The Sheriff swallowed, throat dry.

Bracing himself, he reached down with both hands and cut open the sack with his knife.

He pulled apart the edges.

And cried out hoarsely—simultaneously with Cassandra—as a giant paper moth flew upward from inside the sack, flapped around in erratic circles, then performed an abrupt nosedive to the floor.

“I told you you’d regret it,” Max reminded the Sheriff.

What was that hollow sound inside my chest? Could it have been a chuckle? I felt like chuckling. From relief. From (damn my magicianly hide!) appreciation and delight at a trick well done.

“The weight is dirt,” Max told them. “The blood is fake.”

Both looked at him with virtually the same expression—one of incredulous revulsion.

“I also told you it was my casket,” Max continued
blithely. “It
is
. I had a few small gimmicks put in, that’s all. To entertain the audience at my funeral. Why let them sit there morosely when I can do a postmortem performance?”

“Morosely?” Cassandra responded, glaring at him. “Don’t you mean
joyously?”

“Only you,” said Max.

To their surprise (and mine, need I add?) he started climbing into the casket.

“Let me demonstrate,” he said. He closed the lower lid, locking it into place.

“You’ll get a boot out of this, Grover,” he told the Sheriff.

He lay back against the padding, his head on the sewn-in pillow.

“I’m in my casket, see?” he said. “Laid out in my finest bib and tucker, hair combed, beard trimmed, teeth all brushed; why not?

“The service is near concluded. Get the picture? Lights are dimmed. All heads are lowered reverently.”

“Murderer!”
Cassandra snarled.

Lunging at the casket, she slammed shut the upper lid, locking it. Max cried out. Max’s father felt a surge of dread.

Cassandra seemed to be uncertain as to whether she felt shock or elation. She trembled visibly as she watched Plum attempt to open the casket.

“You bitch!” screamed Max. His voice was muffled.

“Where’s the key?” the Sheriff asked him loudly.

“In my
pocket
, you idiot!” shrieked Max, furious and terrified at the same time.

Oh, my God, she’s done him in
, I thought.

Plum was staring blankly at the casket.

He looked at Cassandra, stunned, as she emitted a sound of half-mad pleasure.

“I’m going to
smother
in here!” Max shouted.

“Your breath is steaming up the faceplate, darling,” Cassandra said, smiling.

“Mrs.
Delacorte,”
said Plum, aghast.

“I hope his death is
slow,”
she said.

Which concluded my appraisal of Cassandra Delacorte.

Not a positive one.

The Sheriff was staring at her as though he couldn’t believe what he’d heard.

I stared at her with no difficulty at all in believing what I’d heard.

Max started pounding on the inside of the lid (unbreakable glass), screaming with enraged terror.

The Sheriff looked around, gaze settling on the trophy board above the mantelpiece.

Running there, he grabbed the African spear.

Seeing this, Cassandra quickly levered down the casket to a horizontal position.

“What are you doing?”
Max shouted; he sounded deranged now.

When the Sheriff started to return with the spear, Cassandra pushed the rolling-casket base away from him.

“You mustn’t touch his casket, Sheriff,” she said breathlessly. “You heard him.”

It was a manic chase, my friends. A farce enacted in a madhouse.

Visualize: Cassandra Delacorte shoving the
casket around the room (no Magic Room now; rather, an insane asylum), a look of unhinged amusement on her face.

Max inside, howling, pounding.

Plum—the Kikuyu spear clutched tightly in his right hand—gasping, “Mrs. Delacorte!”

And Potato Familias ensconced, unmoving, in his wheelchair, watching like the helpless tuber he was.

“Mrs. Delacorte!” Plum cried again.

“No, no, it’s his final resting place!” she protested. She
was
insane; I note this in retrospect.

A frenetic giggle pulled back her lips as she yawed thecasket around the guillotine, turning so fast that it “did a wheelie,” as they say.

“Damn it!” cried the Sheriff.

He put on a burst of speed and managed to catch up to her, forcing her to stop.

Immediately, she backed off, panting.

Plum attempted to pry the spearhead under the lid.

Max’s pounding was weaker now. He sobbed with dread.

“Get me out of here!” he begged. “For Christ’s sake, get me out of here!”

The glass plate, I could see now, was completely steamed up by his breath.

“Damn!” Plum was grimacing angrily. He couldn’t seem to force the spear in to open the lid.

I wanted to close my eyes. The sight was unnerving me; and my nerves were half dead, remember.

Plum struggled harder. Finally, he forced the point in and started pulling down on the shaft.

Which promptly broke.

“Oh,”
Cassandra said, her tone nine steps below sincerity.
“Drat.”

She smiled benignly at the casket. “Sorry, Max,” she said.

“You bitch!” he shrieked.

Cassandra clucked and shook her head. “How disparaging,” she said, leaning across the casket as Sheriff Plum ran back toward the fireplace.

“Now you’ll pay for killing Harry,” she said. “Whether we find him or not.”

“Damn
you!” cried my son, his voice sounding faint.

The Sheriff snatched the Spanish pike from the trophy board and started running back, gasping for breath.

“He’s going to try the pike now, Max,” Cassandra told my son. “If that doesn’t work, we’ll send out for some dynamite.”

“Look out,”
said Plum.

Cassandra jumped aside as the Sheriff reached the casket, brandishing the pike to drive it at the casket lock.

“Avaunt!”
cried Max.

My heart jumped (it was nice to have
something
that could jump) as the casket side sprang open and my son stood up, arms raised to halt the Sheriff’s move.

“Don’t do it!”
he ordered.

They stared at him in shock; while my body considered indulging in a second stroke.

Max gestured toward the casket.

“It is, of course, an apparatus,” he confessed. “An interior release making possible solid-through-solid penetration.”

He looked at Cassandra darkly.

“Although this
person
didn’t know that,” he said.

He looked over at me. “Had the apparatus built by Needlebaum,” he told me. “He’s still the best, at eighty-four.”

His expression softened as he saw (or sensed) my distress. He came over to me.

“I know, I’ve made you suffer again,” he said. “I regret that,
Padre
, but I wanted you to see these things and not be shut away from them. This is still your home.”

He laid his hand on my right shoulder and squeezed it.
Dear, oh, dear
, my muddled brain remarked. My emotions were dangling at the end of a yo-yo, moving up and down, out and in, in circles, winging, spinning, penduluming.

Turning, Max went back to Cassandra and Plum. (Good name for a vaudeville team, it occurred to me.) They stared at him, still—I took it—recovering from the shock of his unexpected appearance.

He chuckled at their expressions.

“Now I ask you,” he said. “Would I have a real casket in my father’s home? Do I strike you as the morbid type?”

He addressed the Sheriff.

“As you know,” he said, “—or maybe not—a magician always provides an alternative ending to an illusion in the event something goes wrong.”

Again, the icy look at Cassandra.

“Like some
person
slamming down the lid of one’s casket, locking one inside with the key.”

He smiled at her, the smile as icily malignant as the look had been.

“Well, it was worth it,” he declared. “Now I know exactly where your head is at.”

He made a sound of derisive amusement.

“Even if you don’t know where Harry’s is at,” he said.

The Sheriff finally found his voice; the casket effect seemed to have rendered him temporarily speechless.

“You let us think that you were suffocating just to play a
trick
on us?” he asked, appalled.

“Just to play a trick?”
echoed Max.
“Sang-de-boeuf
, what greater achievement
is
there?”

His expression hardened suddenly.

“Speaking of that,” he went on, “you’ve been fooled completely, Sheriff. Utterly deceived.

“Harry Kendal isn’t here. He left at twelve-fifteen. I
have
been playing a game with you. Not a stupid game, as this
person
described it, but a game nonetheless.”

The Sheriff’s expression was as hard as Max’s now, his lips pressed together so tightly they were barely visible.

“If you’d like to call a lawyer, Mister Delacorte,” he said, “I advise you to do it now. I’m taking you in.”

Max looked taken aback. “But I just told you—” he began.

The Sheriff cut him off. “I know what you told me,” he said.

He moved to the chair in which Harry had been sitting and reaching into the narrow opening beneath it, slid out an attaché case.

“I also know that this is here,” he said.

He pointed to the monogram. “And that H.K. doesn’t stand for Maximilian Delacorte.”

My son looked blank. He’d overlooked
that?

“How long have you known it was there?” he asked. Plum’s smile was arctic.

“I can play a game too
, Mister Delacorte,” he said.

Max mumbled,
“Nom de Dieu.”

He nodded, impressed, then said, “I don’t suppose I could convince you that Harry left the case behind, could I?”

“I don’t suppose you could,” said Plum coldly.

“Hmm.” Max looked uncertain.
He seems to have lost focus
, I thought. “I appear to be at a loss here,” he said. “Although I might remind you that you haven’t found a body yet.”

Weak, Max, weak
. The thought oppressed me.

Throughout this brief exchange, Cassandra had been gazing fixedly at Max, a look of bewilderment on her face. Clearly she had little notion of what was going on at the moment. Neither did I.

Sheriff Plum reached into his back pocket and removed a pair of handcuffs.

My son protested. “Oh now, wait a moment—”

Plum did not reply. Walking over to Max, he tucked the attaché case under his left arm and deftly snapped the cuffs into place around Max’s wrists.

“I don’t usually put these on people,” he said. “It humiliates them too much.”

Max recognized the dig and nodded once in mute appreciation.
Is it over now?
I wondered. What, in fact, had actually been accomplished here?

As Cassandra (and I) watched in confusion, the Sheriff started to lead Max toward the entry hall, holding the attaché case with his left hand.

“I’ll be back with a warrant, Mrs. Delacorte,” he told her.

He glanced at Max in disgust. “At which time, we will tear this room apart until we find the body. And if the body isn’t here, we’ll tear the goddam house apart.”

“Grover, I
told
you it was in this room,” said Max.
Is he
already
backing down?
I thought.

The Sheriff didn’t respond.

“Wait a second,”
said my son as though a bulb had just been switched on in his brain. “It’s the
body
you want?”

Plum’s face tightened—as did his grip on Max’s arm, making my son wince.

“Well,”
said my son, “if
that’s
all you want—”

He made a sudden twisting movement, and before Plum knew what was happening, he was staring down the barrel of his own pistol, which Max had, with great celerity, jerked from the Sheriff’s holster. (Despite everything, I had to admire Max’s still-impressive dexterity.)

Plum held out his right hand.

“Hand it over, Delacorte,” he said.

Max edged back. “You said you wanted the body,” he responded.

“Delacorte.”
The Sheriff advanced a step.

Froze in his tracks as Max thrust out the pistol threateningly.

“What have I got to lose, Grover?” Max asked. (Was it my imagination, or was there a crazed sound in his voice?) “Can they execute me twice for two murders?”
Cassandra shrank away from him as he passed nearby—backing toward the Egyptian burial case.