Shadow Woman (22 page)

It was a big painting from one
of the collapsed walls. It was a painting of Lady Godiva riding on
her white horse.

Miranda looked down at her
bright orange bathing suit, then at the audience. Now her smile was
naughty. The audience roared, urging her to do whatever she was
contemplating. She propped the painting against the table, picked up
the old leather-bound book that still sat beside the bottle. She
quickly leafed through the pages, found the right one and read it,
and set the book down.

Miranda stepped back a few
paces, gestured portentiously at the painting, and then, with a final
mischievous glance at the audience, slowly raised her hand and
pointed down at her own head.

There was a brilliant flash, a
puff of smoke, and Miranda was gone. In her place stood a graceful
white Arabian horse. Braided into its mane was a swatch of bright
orange cloth that could have been the top of Miranda’s bathing
suit, and into its long tail, the second piece of orange cloth. The
audience was laughing, shrieking, applauding its approval: if Miranda
had been a horse, this was the horse she would be.

The horse walked to the table,
nosed the old book thoughtfully, as though it were Miranda trying to
discover her mistake, then turned to face the audience, extended its
foreleg, and lowered its head in a final bow. There was another flash
and puff of smoke, and when it cleared, the horse too was gone.

Seaver sat on the folding chair
beside Miranda’s technician and watched him engage the
hydraulic lift, bringing the white horse the rest of the way down
under the stage. The gleaming ten-inch cylinder shortened as the hole
in the stage floor above snapped shut, the noise of it covered by the
deafening music of Miranda’s exit. As the black platform moved
down to eye level, he saw Miranda was standing on it with the horse.
She swung her leg up over the horse’s back and mounted it, but
she didn’t sit up. Instead she clung to it, her hands caressing
the horse’s face, patting its neck while she spoke into its
ear, crooning soft words into its dumb animal brain to keep it from
remembering to panic.

When the hydraulic lift reached
the level of the concrete floor she swung down from the horse, and
now he could hear her words. “Great job, baby. Wonderful show.
You made mama have a lot of fun.”

A woman who had to be the
horse’s handler stepped forward with a halter in one hand and a
few lumps of sugar in the other. Miranda took the sugar and watched
the horse’s big prehensile lips nibble them off her palm, then
hugged the horse again.

Like a wild animal, Miranda
seemed to smell the unfamiliar presence. Her eyes swept the dim
concrete enclosure filled with machinery and electronic devices and
found him unerringly. Her voice hardened. “Take the horse,
Judy.” She stepped to Seaver and stopped. The wardrobe mistress
expertly slipped the black velvet robe up her arms and onto her
shoulders, then receded. Miranda brought the belt around her and
cinched it, hard.

She did not speak to him, but
her sharp, angry eyes never left him as she called out to her staff,
“Who is this?”

Seaver stood up and smiled.
“Calvin Seaver. Vice president for security at Pleasure
Island.” He had known she would be difficult, so he already had
in his hand his plastic-coated identification card, along with the
backstage visitor’s badge he had been issued at the Inside
Straight “Will King and I sometimes get together to check out
each other’s operations. Professional courtesy.”

She studied the badges and
looked back up at his face. “Sorry. You could have been a
reporter or a trick thief. Real magicians don’t do that to each
other. Professional courtesy. If you saw anything you didn’t
know already, please keep it to yourself.” She took a step
away.

Miranda’s stagehands and
technicians all seemed to have been held frozen in a spell, not
breathing. Now she released them. “Great show, everybody.”
They relaxed and began working again, moving around each other
without pausing.

Miranda took a second step.
“Your secrets are safe with me,” said Seaver. “For
the moment, anyway.”

She turned on her heel and faced
him. “What do you want?”

“Three minutes,” he
said. “Five at the most.”

“Come on.” She
walked to the far end of the area below the stage, around two more
hydraulic lifts and a console that seemed to have been set up to
control the explosive charges wired on stage. She stopped. “What’s
your pitch?”

“I’m looking for a
woman.”

“Smile more. They’ll
like you better.”

“A particular woman. Dark
hair, pretty, in very good physical condition. Three months ago she
helped a gentleman named Pete Hatcher disappear. You might recall the
evening, because you slipped him out the back door for her at the
start of your midnight show.”

Her left eyebrow arched. “Did
I?”

“Yes. At first, I thought
the dark-haired woman might be you. What you do on stage makes
strolling out the door in a dark wig and getting two security men to
look the wrong way seem like a small thing.”

He reached into his coat pocket,
snatched out an envelope, and handed it to her. “So I did a
background investigation. All of your legal papers – licenses,
birth records, Social Security – say your real name is supposed
to be Katie Mullen. Even your union records and personnel file.
You’re from Ohio. But – funny tiling – there’s
nothing on Katie Mullen that goes back more than eight years.”

He watched her look at the
credit report, then at the Social Security earnings report, then at
the two lists of avenues checked, with “none” or “not
found” beside them. She shrugged. “Not much happened to
me before then.” She folded the papers, tucked them in the
envelope, and handed them back to him.

Seaver slipped them into the
inner pocket of his coat. “No record of enrollment in a high
school class in Ohio.”

“You can’t get
that.”

“I use a company that
arranges class reunions. They feed all the names into their computer
for mailing lists. They ran three years of them for me.”

“I lie about my age.”

“Your birth certificate
says what you say. But I’ll bet the paper the original is
printed on isn’t more than eight years old.”

“I’m not the
dark-haired woman.”

“No, you’re not.
You’re somebody she helped one time. There never was a Katie
Mullen. She helped you disappear from someplace, so you helped her.”

She leaned against the wall with
her arms crossed over her chest. “So who did I used to be?”

He shrugged. “I don’t
care. All I want to know is who the dark-haired woman is.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Then good night.”
She pushed off the wall and took a step toward the corridor.

Seaver’s hand closed on
her forearm, and she looked down at it icily until Seaver began to
wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. He loosened his grip
until it was too loose, and she snatched it away. “What now?”

“I want you to take one
minute to think about what Vincent Bogliarese would feel if he knew
what we were talking about.”

She looked at Seaver with a
sense of wonder. She had underestimated him. She turned to face him.
Her impossibly golden hair had dried into a wild mane, the skin of
her sculpted face was still covered with a makeup that had little
metallic sparkles in it. She didn’t look quite human. The big,
unblinking blue eyes acquired the mischievous look they wore on
stage.

“The back elevator over
there goes up to my suite. By now, Vincent is up there waiting for
me. Maybe he knows everything you know. Maybe he doesn’t. Come
with me.” She took two steps toward the elevator, then stopped,
turned, and looked back at him. Her face was a blank, like a portrait
of a woman, but the eyes were burning him.

Seaver tried to decide. If he
had been anything but positive, he would never have come here. She
had once been in some kind of trouble. She had escaped because she’d
had the help of a professional, who had given her false papers and
set off whatever changes had transformed her into the Miraculous
Miranda. She would not have slipped Pete Hatcher out for any other
reason. Who would have the money to pay a performer like her to do
anything? It must have been to return a favor, and a big one, at
that. Now that he had met her, he was even more certain.

The incarnations he could trace
were unbroken for about eight years: first Katie Mullen, the pretty
assistant in the brief costume who opened trap doors and distracted
the audience for a past-his-prime magician in worn tailcoat named
Mister Zenobia; then Magical Miranda, playing kids’ birthday
parties in the daytime and, at night, doing gigs at supper clubs
where part of the deal was waiting on tables. Then, three years ago,
the Miraculous Miranda had materialized in Las Vegas.

But Seaver had miscalculated.
The eight years should have made him at least suspect it. He had
assumed that she had been running from some woman problem –
maybe an arrest or two for soliciting, maybe a stint starring in
pornographic movies.

Seaver studied her face, and was
suddenly lost in amazement at her perfidy. She was trying to look as
though she were bluffing, but she wasn’t. She had already shown
all her cards to Vincent. What she had been hiding was a whole lot
worse than Seaver had imagined. She wasn’t hiding some
embarrassing period of her past from her boyfriend. That wasn’t
it at all.

She had told Vincent all about
it, and that meant it wasn’t that there were some videotapes of
her going down on one of those pimply-faced druggies that were the
foot soldiers of the porn trade. That would have driven a man like
Vincent nuts. What she was hiding was a charge that wouldn’t
get stale after eight years – a class-one felony, like armed
robbery or homicide. And of all the men in the world, Vincent
Bogliarese would be the last one to write her off for homicide. His
own father had a homicide conviction. Whatever Miranda had done in
her early twenties, Vincent Senior had done more in his. For that
matter, Seaver had always heard that these old families still
expected a son to make his bones before he could be trusted with
business matters, and Vincent Junior had been running the Inside
Straight for at least ten years.

She was trying to get him to
think she was bluffing, so he would go up there with her and get
himself killed. There was no way in the world he was going to step
into that elevator. He had never relished the idea, and now there was
no reason to consider it. What he had come for was safe in his coat
pocket. When he had handed her the papers, his purpose wasn’t
to show her he knew nothing. He had just wanted her to touch them. He
would have to get one of his old buddies on the L.A.P.D. to run the
fingerprints before he knew what it was he had. But he had something.
Now it was his turn to let her think he had been bluffing.

“No,” he said. “I
don’t think I’d like to speak with Mr. Bogliarese at this
time. You go on without me.”

Miranda’s
smile grew. She winked, spun around with a
speed and grace that an ordinary woman would not have imitated, even
if she could, because she had no excuse to be bigger than life.
Miranda stepped into the elevator and let the doors close on her.

Seaver
decided not to take the time to get upstairs and walk out the front
door with the customers. Miranda wasn’t predictable enough for
that. Right now she might be giving her boyfriend some version of
what had just happened. Seaver walked straight to the steel door at
the back of the stage area and said to a stagehand, “Can you
let me out?” There was a sign on it that said, emergency only,
alarm will sound, but he knew they must have keys to it, because that
was the way Pete Hatcher had slipped out. The stagehand opened it and
let him out onto a long narrow asphalt strip beside the building
where a few employees’ cars were parked.

It took Seaver at least five
minutes to walk all the way to the front of the building, then
another ten to walk down the covered mall and out the other side to
the lot where his car was parked. He patted the envelope in his coat
pocket three times during the walk.

He got into his car and started
the engine. He had already begun to back out when he realized that
patting the envelope was not going to be enough. He stopped the car,
pulled forward a little, and slipped it into neutral. He had watched
Miranda touch the papers, so he knew exactly where her prints were,
and he wouldn’t make the mistake of smudging them. She had been
hot and sweaty from the show, so the prints would be oily and clear.
But thinking of Miranda’s show during his walk had prompted a
small twinge of uneasiness in him. This was a woman who was world
famous for sleight of hand. Could he really be sure that what he had
seen was her tucking the papers back into the envelope before she had
handed it back to him? The same set of papers?

Seaver reached into the inner
pocket of his coat and pulled out the envelope. He held it on his lap
where no bystander could see it, placed only the nails of his thumbs
in the slot and made sure that they touched only the envelope, then
pushed the envelope’s sides outward just enough.

There was a blinding flash of
light, a sound like an indrawn breath, and a choking smell as though
a whole box of matches were burning. A thin, jagged line of orange
fire streaked from the bottom of the envelope up both sides until his
thumbs held nothing, and a pile of black powder was settling onto his
lap. He rolled to the side out of the car, slapping his pants
furiously.

In a few seconds, he was sure
his clothes had not ignited, and nothing had reached his skin. He
stood beside the car for a moment and closed his eyes. He could still
see a bright green patch floating behind his eyelids from the flash.
He hated that woman. He knew exactly how she had done it. All of the
big pyrotechnics in her act had been fired electronically by her
technicians, but not the little ones. Somewhere in her costume she
must have carried a supply of flash powder, so she could use it when
she wanted it. Probably it was in pea-sized, airtight capsules. That
way it would be safe and inert, until the mixture was exposed to
oxygen and a tiny trace of white phosphorous ignited whatever else
was in there. It had to be something like that, anyway, or it would
have gone off before he opened the envelope.