The Girl Who Knew Too Much

  Oliver winced. “Right.”

  She reached across the small table and patted his arm. “Thanks, anyway. I appreciate the offer. But don’t worry about me. I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time. I’ll be fine.”

  Something grim and edgy sparked in his eyes.

  “Let’s think about that statement for a moment,” he said. “A few months ago you were forced to drive all the way across the country and change your name because your previous boss was a professional hotel thief who managed to steal a secret notebook that got her killed. And now the man whom we think murdered her is sitting down there on the dance floor in the same booth as the leading man you suspect of killing your colleague. You call that taking care of yourself?”

  Annoyed, she was about to respond, when she saw Nick Tremayne extricate himself from the booth.

  “Tremayne is leaving,” she whispered.

  Oliver turned to follow her gaze. “I don’t think so.”

  They watched Nick cross to a nearby booth where two young, attractive women sat. He evidently invited one of them to dance. She slipped out from behind the table and eagerly followed him onto the dance floor. It was clear, even from a distance, that she was starstruck.

  “She’ll be dining out on this story for months,” Irene said.

  Julian Enright rose and walked purposefully up the aisle. He paused midway to speak to a waiter. A few seconds later Enright changed direction.

  “He’s coming our way,” Oliver said. “This will be interesting.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Irene said.

  “I can. The arrogant son of a bitch can’t resist.”

  Julian came to a halt in front of the table. Irene’s pulse jumped and her breath got tight. If she and Oliver were right, she was face-to-face with Helen Spencer’s killer.

  For his part, Oliver seemed to go preternaturally still.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Julian said in an easy manner that implied he didn’t give a damn. He smiled at Irene. “Allow me to introduce myself. Julian Enright. You must be Irene Glasson, the reporter for Whispers. My friend Nick told me all about you. Evidently you managed to annoy his studio.”

  “Evidently his studio was very annoyed,” she said, “because I am now a former reporter.”

  “Miss Glasson is with me tonight,” Oliver said.

  Irene could have sworn that the temperature in the room dropped to a glacial chill.

  “Is that so?” Enright did not take his eyes off Irene. “It occurs to me, Miss Glasson, that you could improve your relationship with Tremayne’s studio by dancing with me. After all, he and I are friends. If we dance together, it will make people think that you are no longer hounding Tremayne.”

  Irene sensed that Oliver was about to intervene. She used the toe of her shoe to send a subtle under-the-table message to keep him quiet and simultaneously gave Julian a cool smile.

  “Did Mr. Tremayne send you over here for that purpose, Mr. Enright?” Irene asked.

  “I insist you call me Julian. And I must admit it was my own idea.”

  “Why?” Irene said.

  “Because I’m curious about the woman who has the guts to take on a powerful movie studio.”

  “As it happens, I lost the fight, Mr. Enright. You can tell Nick Tremayne that he has nothing more to fear from me.”

  “I’ll do that. I’m sure he’ll be relieved to hear the news. But it doesn’t mean we can’t dance.”

  “You heard Mr. Ward. I’m here with him tonight.”

  “In that case, it looks like you won’t be having much fun, will you? A cripple doesn’t make a very good dance partner. Oh well, Irene, perhaps we’ll have another opportunity to get to know each other later.”

  Julian glided away into the shadows. Irene remembered to breathe.

  “I can’t believe the gall of that man,” she said.

  “I can. We’re right about him. He’s here because of you and the notebook.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I am now.”

  Irene watched Julian return to the booth he shared with Nick Tremayne.

  “You seem very sure of your read on Julian Enright,” she said. “But what about Tremayne? You haven’t said too much about him.”

  “At the moment, Enright is the more dangerous of the two. Tremayne isn’t as smart but he’s far more cautious. He may be a killer but if that’s the case, he’s got a clear motive—to protect his career. It’s probably the only thing he cares about. He won’t take chances unless he thinks he has no alternative. Right now he’s hoping the studio has things under control.”

  “You know, when I came to Burning Cove, I never expected to spend an evening in a fancy nightclub watching a couple of killers drink and dance.”

  Oliver tasted his martini and lowered the glass. He watched Tremayne and Enright with an unreadable expression.

  “Enright was correct about one thing,” he said after a moment.

  “What?”

  “I’m no good on the dance floor.”

  She smiled.

  “Lucky for you, you’ve got other talents,” she said.

  Chapter 50

  She awoke to find herself alone in the bed. The sheets were still warm from Oliver’s body heat. She waited a moment to see if he would return. But the clink of crystal on glass in the living room told her that he expected to be gone for a while.

  She pushed aside the covers, stood, and pulled on her robe. She made her way down the darkened hall and stopped at the entrance of the moon-shadowed living room. At first she did not see him.

  “Didn’t mean to wake you,” he said.

  He spoke from the depths of the big, leather-upholstered reading chair. He was wearing a dark robe. His feet were bare. The moonlight slanted across his injured leg propped on the hassock.

  She moved across the room and sat down in the other reading chair.

  “How bad is it?” she asked.

  “No worse than usual,” Oliver said.

  He swallowed some of the whiskey in his glass. It was clear that her question had irritated him.

  She started to apologize for inquiring about the level of his discomfort but stopped herself in the nick of time.

  “It wasn’t the leg that woke me,” he said after a while. “It was Enright.”

  “Do you think we’re wrong about him?”

  “No. What I’m thinking is that we need to move fast if we’re going to trap him. We need to come up with a way to force his hand. Can’t risk letting him take the initiative.”

  “What if there’s nothing to our suspicions?” Irene said. “What if he really is just a rich, starstruck tourist who managed to charm a famous star?”

  “If that’s the case, he won’t take the bait.”

  “What bait?”

  “The notebook. He won’t want to take the chance of losing it again. We’ll need to set the stage. Get the props and the lighting in place. I’ll talk to Chester and Luther in the morning.”

  “And me,” Irene said. “You’ll talk to me, too. This is my problem and my story.”

  “Don’t worry, you will be a critical part of the act.”

  “You’ve got a plan?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  He did. When he was finished, she took a deep breath and released it slowly.

  “That is . . . very daring,” she said. “And risky.”

  “Like any good illusion, it is actually very simple technically.”

  “It relies on your read of Enright. If you’re wrong—”

  “No.” Oliver drank some more whiskey and lowered the glass. “Tonight he confirmed everything I sensed about him. He’s cold-blooded, arrogant, and impulsive.”

  Irene shivered. “I wonder how many people he has murdered.?
??

  “We’ll probably never know,” Oliver said, “but I very much doubt that Helen Spencer was the first.”

  He swallowed a sip of his whiskey, set the glass aside, and absently started to massage his left leg. Irene watched him for a moment and then she got up, knelt beside his chair, and put her hands on his thigh. She could feel the pain-tautened muscles and sinews beneath the fabric of his robe.

  “Let me do this,” she said.

  “Forget it.”

  She ignored him and started to massage his leg, applying gentle but firm pressure.

  To her surprise he stopped arguing. After a while he even seemed to relax.

  “Have you ever told anyone what went wrong in your final performance?” she asked.

  “Accidents sometimes happen when you mess around with dangerous things like guns.”

  “I don’t think it was an accident.”

  He went very still.

  “What makes you so sure?” he finally asked.

  “The fact that you won’t talk about it.”

  “No one likes to talk about a failure, certainly not a career-killing mistake.”

  “You’ve got a right to your secrets,” she said.

  “You had a right to your secrets, too, but now I know some of them.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “My secrets are dead and buried,” Oliver said. “But sometimes I find myself dealing with a ghost.”

  She didn’t ask any more questions, just continued to knead his leg. After a time he started to talk.

  “It was the Cage of Death illusion,” he said. “Geddings created the original version but Uncle Chester and I made a few changes to enhance the audience appeal.”

  “Who is Geddings?”

  “He was a friend and one of the most skilled magicians I have ever known. He taught me a great deal. He went by the title of the Great Geddings.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “That was his problem. He was incredibly talented when it came to the technical aspects of an illusion but he wasn’t much of a performer. Success on the stage is all about telling a story. The ability to draw the audience into the magic—make people willing participants in the illusion—is what separates the stars from the merely competent. For all his skill, Geddings couldn’t read a crowd. He couldn’t establish the rapport that’s needed onstage. But he taught me a great deal and we made a good team.”

  “What happened?”

  “We started out as partners. Billed the act as Geddings and Ward. But it soon became clear that, although I wasn’t better than Geddings in the technical sense, I was the one who could attract and hold an audience’s attention. We changed the name of the show to the Amazing Oliver Ward Show.”

  “Which became famous.”

  “We did quite well. Then the disaster occurred.”

  “That would have been about two years ago?”

  “Right.” Oliver was silent for a moment. “We were in San Francisco. We had a full house. After being suitably locked up in the usual flashy chains and manacles, I was lowered into a steel cage. The cage was hoisted several feet off the floor.”

  “To show the audience that you couldn’t get out through a trapdoor at the bottom.”

  “You learn fast.” Oliver drank a little more whiskey. “A curtain was lowered. The lights were focused on the draped cage. All standard effect stuff but the audience loved it. At that point a mysterious figure wearing a cape and a mask appeared. He circled the cage a few times, took out a pistol, and fired three shots into the drapery. Naturally the pistol was supposed to fire blanks.”

  “Obviously that wasn’t the case.”

  “The pistol was loaded with real bullets. Two of them caught me in the thigh. Did a lot of damage to muscle and tissue but just barely missed an artery. I was lucky.”

  “Lucky? How can you say that?”

  “If I had not been partway out of the cage at the time, all three bullets would have gone straight into my chest.”

  Stunned, Irene stopped massaging his leg. “I don’t understand.”

  “I was wrapped in a lot of chains. They looked impressive but the whole assembly was designed to fall away when I unlocked a single lock. One of the assistants slipped the key to me just as I was lowered into the cage. I tried to use it as soon as the curtain was lowered around the cage. But it was the wrong key.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I had never really felt comfortable relying on an assistant to slip me a key. I always carried a backup hidden in my hair. But it took me a few seconds to realize that the first key was the wrong one and then a few more seconds to get the backup key and insert it into the lock. When the masked assistant fired the first two shots, I was only partway out of the cage. I normally would have been all the way out at that point.”

  “So it wasn’t an accident. The rumors were true. Someone tried to murder you.”

  “It was all carefully planned, from the false key to the real bullets.”

  “But who would want to kill you?” Irene paused. “That pair who eloped to Hawaii?”

  “No. While I was recovering in the hospital, Chester conducted his own private investigation. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to come up with a suspect. There was only one person who hated me enough to murder me onstage in front of a packed audience.”

  “Of course,” Irene said. “Your friend and partner, Geddings.”

  “That is . . . very perceptive of you.”

  “You became what he had always wanted to be, a brilliant magician who could thrill audiences. A star.”

  “He had helped me become a skilled magician but he was jealous of his own creation.”

  “Geddings didn’t create you, Oliver. Your talent is yours and yours alone. Geddings may have helped you perfect your skills, but he had to know that you would have become a success with or without him. That’s why he was consumed with jealousy. No matter how skilled he was, he would never be the star that you became.”

  “Well, he made sure that my stardom came to an end.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Geddings? He died a few days later, shortly after the doctors concluded that I wasn’t going to die or lose my leg.”

  “How?”

  “He put some more real bullets into the gun and shot himself in the head.”

  “Suicide.”

  “He left a wife and a son behind.”

  “Do they know what he tried to do?”

  “No,” Oliver said. “There was no reason to tell them. Chester and I let the accident story stand.”

  “What about the other assistants? Did they figure it out?”

  “I’m sure Willie did. Some of the others probably did, too. But we don’t talk about it.”

  “A show business family secret?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “What happened to Geddings’s wife and son?”

  “Geddings didn’t leave them much. He was never good with money.” Oliver set the empty glass aside. “I take care of his wife and son.”

  Irene smiled. “Of course you do.”

  Chapter 51

  The following evening Julian was sharing a booth with Tremayne in the heavily shadowed hotel lounge when he heard the siren in the distance. It occurred to him that it was the first time he had been aware of a siren since his arrival in Burning Cove. One of the reasons, he reflected, was that the hotel was located nearly a mile outside of town. That lessened the odds of hearing emergency vehicles. It also increased the odds that the siren blaring in the night was headed toward the hotel.

  He paused his Manhattan halfway to his mouth and glanced toward the exit he had marked the first time he walked into the lounge. It was located at the end of a darkened hallway, just past the men’s room.

  Regardless of whether he w
as working or not, whenever he entered a confined space, he always made certain to identify at least one escape route that could be utilized in the event that things went wrong. His father had insisted that he establish the habit at the start of his career, and he had to admit that it had saved his neck on more than one occasion.

  “Wonder what’s going on?” Nick said.

  His voice was slurred by the cocktails he had been drinking steadily since dinner.

  The wailing siren halted abruptly.

  Julian checked the bar. Willie was reaching for the phone. She spoke quietly into the receiver and then replaced it.

  “Nothing to be concerned about,” Willie announced calmly. “It’s not a fire. There’s been an accident in one of the villas. The ambulance has just arrived. Everything is under control.”

  But she looked troubled, Julian decided.

  “Fuck,” Nick muttered. “If it’s another dead woman, I’ve been with you all evening, right?”

  “Right,” Julian said.

  It was the truth.

  He kept his eye on Willie, who was doing her best to look cool and professional. He could tell she was concerned, though. She kept glancing out the window. There was nothing to be seen because the high hedges and the stucco walls that enclosed the hotel gardens blocked the view.

  A few curiosity seekers wandered outside with their drinks to find out what was going on. Willie disappeared briefly, as well. When she returned, she was grim-faced.

  The siren started to scream again.

  Several of the people who had left a few minutes earlier returned. The rumors circulated swiftly through the crowd. Two men crowded up to the bar to order fresh drinks. Both were in their mid-thirties. One was going bald. The other wore a badly tailored jacket.

  An attractive woman in a snug black dress and high heels slipped between the two men.

  “What was all the excitement about?” the woman asked in a sultry voice.

  The two men almost fell over themselves in an attempt to answer the question.

  “Someone said the ambulance went to Oliver Ward’s villa,” Baldy announced with authority, trying to impress the woman. “Heard he fell down the stairs.”