Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A White Tie And Tails

“Fiction you write?” Gruetzmeyer had a slight German accent and he’d used the Yoda-like word reversal of foreign-born English speakers.

“Nonfiction. Do you mind if I come in for a few minutes? I’m not sure you’re the resource I need.”

“Step in. Sit down. How can I help you?”

Max smiled his thanks and obeyed. Psychology was a “helping profession.” Suggest that someone of that temperament couldn’t be of help and they’d be eager to prove the opposite. Max didn’t have a degree (that he remembered) in anything, but his instincts hadn’t gone missing with his shorter-term memory.

He sat in the chair opposite an impressively laden but neat desk. “I am writing,” he explained, “a book on the mystique of what some people consider a profession, others an art form, and still others an elegant con game.”

“Tasty.” The professor settled back. “Far more interesting than these earnest, labored class papers. Why come to me?”

“Because I’ve discovered that my prime source is, to put it right out there, dead.”

He pondered that. “Did I know him? Or her?”

“I’m hoping so, because, from what I know of him, I’d think you would have been compatible colleagues.”

“ Umm. Someone who used to teach here then?”

Max nodded. “I’m taking a flier on this. Pure instinct and hope.” He knew a psychologist or psychiatrist would love the combination of “motive and emotion.”

“Who is it?”

“Professor Jefferson Mangel.”

“Oh. Jeff. My God, yes. I knew him. A tragic loss. Then it’s not his field, philosophy, but his hobby, the philosophy of magic, you’re writing about?”

Max nodded.

“That wasn’t Jeff’s academic discipline, but it was his passion. He felt it should be taken on a psychological level. Yes, I do … did know Jeff quite well and his theories on the subject. In fact—” He leaned forward to click on a menu on his open laptop. “—Jeff probably has some papers in the university archives on the subject.”

“Not accessible to non-academics, I imagine.”

“I’d be happy to check them out for you, put you on a course of study on the subject of how Jeff’s mind worked. He was quite the, uh, magic trick detective, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised if he advised that fellow who does a Strip hotel show based on revealing the classic illusions’ underpinnings. The Caped Confabulator, or something.”

Max smiled. Performers on the Strip were world-famous. It was humbling and encouraging that some Las Vegas residents had such a casual knowledge of the industry that drove the city, and Nevada.

“Professor Mangel, I understand, had a mystical view of the subject.”

“Yes, yes. He was the true appreciative amateur.”

“Wasn’t his death very ironic?”

“More than ironic. Sinister. Murdered on campus. You can imagine that wasn’t something anyone official anywhere wanted to dwell on.”

“You think the murder was … magical?”

“Of course not. I said sinister. The poor man was stabbed to death among an exhibition of his collection of magic show posters old and new. He was found lying in a grotesque position on the floor, like in that insanely popular thriller novel of a few years ago about the Vatican and Mary Magdalen.”

“ The Da Vinci Code, ” Max prompted from some reviving memory synapses. “You think there’s a connection?”

“No. Of course not. Jeff didn’t have an enemy in the world. He was single, so there were no, ah, what you call hanky-panky motives.”

“A true mystery,” Max agreed. “Is anything left of the professor’s office or papers on campus?”

“Nothing I know of. That was months ago. He willed his estate to the university, so the small gallery has been named in his honor and his personal magical artifacts added to the poster display, which were a very small percentage of his collection. Jeff was ahead of his time in seeing that history of magic in Las Vegas deserved as much an academic mention as the history of the mob.”

The word “mention” was not lost on Max. “So I can visit the … shrine?”

“Next building, floor three. We have abbreviated hours, since a guard must be on site, ten A.M. to three P.M.”

“I can just make it.” Max half rose before pausing to sit back down. “Wasn’t Professor Mangel young to have made a will?”

“You can do it online now. Jeff was forty-eight, far too young to die.” Gruetzmeyer shook his shaggy head. “I made mine after the calamitous fact of his death.”

“He sounds exceptionally expert on the magic and the mantic arts. Did he advise any other magicians?”

“He had a couple of local pals. Let me see.” Gruetzmeyer squinted his eyes tight on his own command, letting relinquished memories resurface.

Max understood that technique well. He’d done it at home with a glass of Irish whiskey. Some men drink to forget, they said. He drank to loosen up his subconscious, to remember.

The prof’s striking green eyes popped open, brightening as they saw the light. “One was an older fellow. Larry Randolph, or some such.”

Max nodded, holding himself very still.

“Then there was a practicing magician, but at small clubs around Vegas, not a big shot. Still performed in full white tie, tails and top hat. I don’t think he pulled rabbits out of the top hat, though. His name was odd … ‘Topper’?”

“Topper?” Max asked. “That could refer to the top hat.”

“And Còsimo, like Còsimo di Mèdici, the Renaissance prince.”

“Cosmo.” Max muttered the word that leaped into his arbitrary brain before tying ‘Cosmo Topper’ to a character in an old TV show.

“No. Còsimo. That name is known in Europe. Còsimo and … something to do with fire.”

“Cosimo Sparks?”

“That’s it!”

“And you just recalled it now?” Max asked.

“Yes, thanks to your inquiries. Why, should it be familiar?”

“No. He was pretty much retired, as far as I can find out.”

Max was sure some mention of the man’s recent death had been in the newspaper or on TV, but Gruetzmeyer seemed the kind of old-fashioned intellectual who relied on books, not electronic media. Max recalled Temple bemoaning the ill luck of having media on hand to film the dead body as it was being discovered—her bright idea gone wrong—since she wasn’t expecting a corpse to show up for her ceremonial opening of an old underground safe.

And Cosimo Sparks, also stabbed like Jefferson Mangel, had also been found with his red-satin-lined cloak arranged in a tortured shape.

He decided not to ask Professor Gruetzmeyer if he’d heard of Ophiuchus. The big question was whether Revienne had.

Chapter 43

Alien Eyes

Poor Jeff Mangel. His honorary gallery was in an eight-foot-high space whose ceiling Max could dust with his upstretched hand, a bland former classroom sporting sound-deadening ceiling tiles spotted with tiny black holes.

The floor was covered by equally uninspiring vinyl tile in a pastel, smashed-worms-on-sidewalk pattern.

Flashback.

Max had gone to high school in exactly the same bland spaces. If he hadn’t made himself a stranger to his family in his teens, as Gandolph told him, he would know where to go to confirm these unsettling slide shows in his brain. Wisconsin, Gandolph said. Max didn’t feel like a Wisconsin sort of person … fresh air, bracing winters. More like an escapee from a Florida swamp filled with gators and snapping turtles and black mambas on the brain—oh, my.

He strolled around the perimeter to study the three-dimensional items under Plexiglas boxes.

Decks of gorgeously illustrated antique tarot cards; wood and metal coin boxes, the Okito, Boston and slot varieties; wands of all types …