tantaliz (42 page)

"I don't understand how Granger could join the force under an assumed name," Cedric said. T mean, if his real name is Granger and you knew him as Spellman—"

"Spellman is the name of the family who adopted him out of the orphanage he ended up in after his father died As far as our people knew, that was his real name. I mean, you usually don't check back past a kid's sixth birthday. We might never have known he was Boltan's partner's son if he hadn't admitted it himself tonight."

"What else did he say?" I asked.

"Not much. He talked freely enough about who he was and his motives, but when we started asking him about the details of the murder, he closed up tight"

So we all looked at Steele, who continued to sit there smiling to himself.

"All right, Steele," Lupoff said, "you're on again. How did Spell-man-Granger commit the murder?" "With a gun," Steele told him. "Now look-"

Steele held up a placating hand. "Very well," he said, "although you must realize that I dislike explaining any illusion." He began to rock gently in the chair. "Granger used a clever variant on an illusion first used by Houdini. As Houdini did it, the magician rode into an arena—this was a major effect only done in stadiums and arenas—on a white horse, dressed in flowing Arabian robes. His several assistants, clad in red work suits, would grab the horse. Houdini would then stand up in the saddle and fire a gun in the air, at which second a previously arranged action of some type would direct all eyes to another part of the arena. During that instant, Houdini would vanish; and his assistants would then lead the horse out"

Dickensheet asked, "So how did he do it?"

"By a costume change. He would be wearing, underneath the Arabian robes, a red work suit like his assistants; the robes were specially-made breakaway garments, which he could get out of in a second, roll into a ball, and hide beneath his work suit So he became one of the assistants and went out with them and the horse.

"Spellman's vanishing act was worked in much the same way. He probably donned his breakaway costume and false beard in the men's room just prior to Boltan's act,
over
his police uniform, and made sure he was picked from the audience by being there standing up when Boltan did the selecting. After he shot Boltan and ran into the dressing room through the curtain, he pulled off his break away costume and false hair, rolled them into a bundle and stuffed them into one of the costume trunks. Next he backed against the side of the curtain, so that when the first cadets dashed through, he immediately became one of them." "But we looked in all of the trunks . . ."

"Yes, but you were looking for a man hiding, not for a small bundle of denim and hair stuffed in toward the bottom.''

Lupoff shook his head. "It sounds so simple," he said.

"Much magic works like that," Steele said. "You could never in a lifetime guess how it's done, but if it's explained it sounds so easy you wonder how you were fooled. Which is one reason magicians do not like to explain their effects."

Ardis said, "You knew all along it had to be one of the cadets, Christopher?"

"By the logic of the situation," Steele agreed. "But I had further confirmation when I remembered that, despite his somewhat scruffy appearance, the murderer was wearing well-shined black shoes—the one item he wouldn't have time to change—just as were all the other graduating cadets."

"But how did you know which of the cadets it was?"

"I didn't until I was on stage. I had found the costume and the beard right before that, and I saw that the guilty man had fastened his face hair on with spirit gum, as most professionals do. It must have been very lightly tacked on so he could rip it off effectively, but the spirit gum would leave a residue nonetheless."

"Of course!" I said. "Spirit gum fluoresces under ultraviolet light"

Steele smiled. "Not very much, but enough for me to have detected the outline of a chin and upper Up when looked for them in the darkness."

Lupoff and Dickensheet seemed baffled, so I explained that there were u.v. bulbs in some of the spots because they were necessary for Steele's spook show effects.

They nodded. Lupoff asked Steele, "How did you manage your disappearance?"

"The stage trap. I dropped into it, and Ardis popped out of it Then she kept the audience's attention long enough for me to crawl to the coatroom, put on the breakaway costume, and approach the audience from the rear. When the lights went out again and she disappeared, I looked again for the outline of chin and upper Up, to make sure I would be confronting exactly the right man."

"And now your disappearance, young lady?" Dickensheet asked Ardis.

She laughed. "I walked off the stage in the dark." "But we saw you, ah, dwindle away. . ."

"That wasn't me. It was a picture painted on an inflated balloon which was held over the stage for our show. I pulled it down with a concealed string while the lights were out, and allowed it to deflate. So you saw the picture getting smaller and seeming to recede. The method's been used for many years," Ardis explained.

Dickensheet and Lupoff exchanged glances. The inspector said, "All of this really is obvious. But now that we know just how obvious magic tricks are, at least, we'd never fall for anything like them again."

"Absolutely not," the captain agreed. "So you say," Steele said. "But perhaps—"

Suddenly Ardis jumped up, backed off two steps, and made a startled cry. Naturally, we all looked around at her—and she was pointing across the table to Steele's chair.

When we looked back there again, after no more than a second, the chair was rocking gently and Steele had vanished.

Dickensheet's mouth hung open by several inches. Lupoff said in a surprised voice, "He didn't have time to duck through the curtain there. Then—where did he go?"

I know most of Steele's talents and effects, but not all of them by any means. So I closed my own mouth, because I had no answer to Lupoff's question.