Mind Scrambler

35

  I turn to tell Ceepak my major news flash.

  As usual, he’s ten seconds ahead of me. In fact, he’s already standing, tilting his head to indicate that we should slip out to the lobby. Now.

  Onstage, Rock announces, “I’m going out into the casino to make us some money! Jim Bob? To the high-rollers’ room!”

  “Don’t forget your blindfold, honey!” Mrs. Rock says.

  Who knew she had so many lines?

  Ceepak and I slink through the shadows, slip past the usher, and head for the exit while Mrs. Rock places the black hood over her husband’s head.

  “Thank you, dear,” says Rock. “But if I’m going to play with the high rollers, I need to look like I belong.”

  We exit the auditorium while Rock plucks his pinky ring and white lapel rose out of the air.

  “All righty. Let’s go win us some money!”

  The door swings shut behind us.

  “Is everything all right, gentlemen?” asks a young usher.

  “Ten-four,” says Ceepak.

  “Hunh?” The usher, not being an off-duty cop, sounds confused. Ceepak is way too focused to respond.

  “We’re cool,” I say.

  The usher nods, makes his way over to the candy counter to flirt with the girl stacking her Goobers.

  “Mrs. Rock didn’t talk last night!” I whisper-blurt to Ceepak.

  “I noted that as well.”

  “That means it was probably Sherry Amour onstage when Katie was killed!”

  “Agreed.”

  “Mrs. Rock could’ve been in the room, torturing Katie! Murdering her!”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “She had the opportunity and the means! Jake Pratt’s bolo tie because he was back there waiting for her!”

  “And her motive?” Ceepak asks.

  M.O.M. Means, Opportunity, Motive. You need all three or you’ve basically got diddly.

  “I dunno. Jealousy?”

  Ceepak gives me an extremely thought-filled look. He’s not convinced Mrs. Rock did it but he’s not sure she didn’t, either.

  “What’s our play?” I ask.

  “We shadow Mr. Rock as he leaves the theater. Since Katie was killed during the performance of this illusion, I feel it is imperative that we completely unravel its secrets.”

  Makes sense.

  “Meanwhile, we alert Cyrus. Have him intensify his surveillance of Mrs. Rock. Make certain we know where she is at all times, on- or offstage.”

  “How? The camera-blocking mirror dealio is already flipped on.”

  “Perhaps Cyrus can rectify that situation.”

  Ceepak reaches for his cell. Speed dials Parker. I glance at the digits on my phone: 8:50 PM.

  “Cyrus? Ceepak. I suggest you send a uniformed member of your team to the backstage access corridor and disable the device Rock’s people attached to the lens of your PTZ camera. We have reason to suspect Mrs. Rock was involved in the murder of Katie Landry. She must not be allowed to leave the building following the conclusion of this evening’s performance. Roger that. We’re on Mr. Rock. Right.”

  The floor starts shaking because the prerecorded track about Lucky Numbers has way too much bass in it.

  That means Rock has his Shirley Temple and is headed for the door.

  “Ceepak? He’s coming.”

  He closes up his cell. “Parker’s sending a team to deal with the camera.”

  We head out of the theater and blend into the crowd of casually dressed folks strolling up and down the corridor.

  The Shalimar doors swing open and here comes Richard Rock, black sack over his head, moving like a blind Frankenstein. Jim Bob is leading him by the elbow. The camera guy with the video unit propped on his shoulder is walking backward in front of them.

  “Show Larry and the other folks where we are, Fred.”

  The cameraman swings around to take in that wide-angle view of the glittering passageway sweeping off to the casino floor. The camera guy then swishes back around to frame up Rock again.

  “All right, Fred. You can go back inside with that thing. Switch to the hotel security cameras, fellas!”

  The camera guy heads back to the lobby. Inside the theater, they’re watching the feed from the casino’s PTZ cameras.

  “Keep thinking about your lucky number, Larry! Think real hard on it, son.”

  We move past the Authorized Personnel Only door. The security guard, the guy who used to vacation up in Sea Haven every summer when his kids were younger, shoots me a wave. I vaguely wiggle a few fingers in response—I don’t want to attract too much attention.

  We’re trying to tail these people.

  So far, Jim Bob hasn’t seen us.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” Rock says as Jim Bob leads him on, “it was the ancient mathematician Pythagoras who once declared, ‘The world is built upon the power of numbers.’ Tonight, Larry, we will put his words to the ultimate test. We will witness just how powerful one number can be!”

  The casino floor is dead ahead.

  Jim Bob and Rock hang a left, head toward another side door also labeled Authorized Personnel Only. There’s another private-duty security guard in another Event Staff windbreaker stationed in front of it.

  Before the door glides shut, I can see Richard Rock whipping off his black hood and hear him say, “Do you believe one number can change your life, Larry?”

  “Fascinating,” Ceepak says, almost under his breath.

  We head for the door.

  “You can’t use this door,” says the guard, raising a hand to give us the halt sign.

  “Yes. They can.” Parker.

  Guess he and his cameras were tracking us again. He brought along more friends. About eight of them, none under two hundred pounds, all of it solid muscle. Two of the moose take hold of Mr. Event Staff’s arms, haul him away from his guard post.

  “Tail the husband,” says Parker. “We’re on the wife.”

  36

  This is so weird.

  Rock is saying all the stuff he said last night while he wound his way through the slot machines but, instead of moving across the casino floor, he’s walking with Jim Bob down a dimly lit cinder-block corridor.

  Ceepak and I are maybe thirty feet behind them, lurking in the shadows, moving as quietly as cats stalking a bottle cap.

  “We’re almost there, ladies and gentlemen. The Ming Dynasty Room,” Rock declares.

  To us, his voice sounds echoey, because it’s reverberating off the slick brick walls. But the magician has that cordless head mike so folks in the theater hear him just fine. While he rambles on about high rollers winning and losing millions of dollars on a single spin of the roulette wheel, he makes a left turn. Who knew there was such a maze of backstage passageways for the use of authorized personnel only?

  Who knew they were all connected?

  Because when we make the left, still thirty feet behind Rock, I realize we’re tippytoeing up the other end of the hallway that leads to the hotel suites reserved for the star performers—rooms AA-6 through AA-2. I can see the yellow crime-scene tape plastered on Katie’s room. The Rocks’, too. Ceepak glances at his watch again. Fortunately, the numbers on his Timex Ironman are pretty huge and sort of glow.

  2100.

  Nine PM. That means last night, around this same time, during the Lucky Numbers routine, Mr. Rock walked right past the door to his kids’ room while somebody was inside it torturing Katie.

  “Excellent,” I hear Rock say up ahead. “Guess we had a little technical difficulty.”

  Or is that when his microphone went dead? Did an audio technician hear something horrible in the background and push the mute button?

  “Glad you can hear me again,” Rock says like he said last night after the Please Stand By disappeared from the screen. “We are now in the Xanadu’s world-famous Ming Dynasty Room, Larry.”

  No, we’re not.

  Richard Rock and Jim Bob have come to a complete stop in the b
ackstage hallway—beyond the T, on the far side of the chorus boys’ dressing room. Jim Bob fishes into his dance pants and pulls out a key. He unlocks a door two down from where we tried to question him and Blaine. Rock and Jim Bob step into whatever room is behind the door. We hear a dead bolt strike its plate.

  When Ceepak and I hit the T on this side of the dressing room doors, we duck into the main corridor. Press our backs up against the wall. Take a moment.

  “Video control room,” Ceepak whispers. “It’s how they do the trick. Prerecorded. Thirty-six numbers.”

  Now I get it. We didn’t see the real Ming Dynasty Room. Just its illusion. In fact, everything we saw on the screen after the camera swish-panned to the right to “show the folks where we’re headed” then blurred back to the left was already on digital tape. They cut away to the prerecorded stuff while the live image was obscured by the motion blur.

  That’s why Rock made such a big deal about putting on the pinky ring, the boutonniere, even stopping at the cocktail bar for that stupid Shirley Temple. We saw him add those elements to his wardrobe before he left the theater and that made us believe what we saw on the screen was real when, in truth, all they had to do was pre-shoot footage using the same props.

  Remember, there are no windows in the casino. No way for us to realize what time or even what day the footage we were watching was shot.

  Even the “technical glitch,” the audio signal cutting out from his radio microphone, was probably planned. You make it a little sloppy, a little less than perfect, we think your illusion is even more real.

  Most likely, Katie already had that ball gag in her mouth at 9:00 PM because whoever was in AA-4 working her over knew Richard Rock would be strolling up the hall, armed with a live microphone. After all, Jake Pratt sent the kids out for ice cream around 8:20. The torturer had forty minutes to make Katie talk. When she wouldn’t, when the killer knew the show was almost over—maybe because they heard Richard Rock rambling on about the Ming Dynasty Room as he walked past their door—they decided to kill Katie.

  Now that we know how the trick is done, it’s not that amazing. In fact, it only worked because we fell for it. All Rock had to do to convince us we were seeing what we thought we were seeing was keep up the patter over his cordless mike and address the volunteer by name.

  Meanwhile, the JumboTron screen in the theater was showing prerecorded digital images of a fantasy high-roller room, which nobody in the audience had ever actually seen because they’re not cattle barons or oil sheiks.

  Clever.

  Then, once Rock saw what number between one and thirty-six the volunteer from the audience had written on the marker board, the control room called up the footage showing his hand—the one with the sparkling horseshoe-shaped diamond pinky ring—placing the purple chip on the appropriate square. While we were amazed by that, they cut to a different angle—the overhead shot—and showed us another chunk of prerecorded digits, one of thirty-six different files, and we saw the roulette wheel’s silver ball hop into the winning slot.

  How did Rock and the control room crew know what number the volunteer picked, since they made such a big deal about her never saying it out loud? Easy. Inside the auditorium, probably hidden up in the catwalks with all the klieg lights, they have their very own PTZ camera focused precisely on the spot where Mrs. Rock (or Sherry Amour) rolls out the easel. The Great Mandini was right.

  They hold all the cards. It was their deck to start with.

  “Fancy meeting you boys back here.”

  Ceepak and I both whip to our right.

  Parker again.

  Ceepak puts a finger to his lips.

  “Roger that,” Parker whispers.

  “Where’s their stage-door security guard?” Ceepak asks, his voice barely audible.

  “Mr. Tuiasopo is sharing a room with the other gentlemen my team escorted upstairs. Kim Hammond is asking them both a few questions about who’s been tampering with and disabling hotel property.”

  “You deactivated the mirror device mounted to the PTZ camera?”

  “Nah. We just tore it down.”

  Ceepak grins. “That’ll work.”

  “Where’s Rock?”

  “Up the hall in what I hypothesize is a video control room. That’s why, last night, Lady Jasmine was unimpressed with Lucky Numbers, why she said she could do the illusion herself with the proper funding.”

  “It’s all on tape?”

  Ceepak nods. “The seemingly live events were prerecorded, utilizing the casino’s security cameras as well as footage taped in a studio constructed to resemble your Ming Dynasty High Roller Room. Where’s Mrs. Rock?”

  “Last report, still onstage with the audience volunteer.”

  “Station a man at the stage door.”

  “Done.” Parker gestures to his right. I peer down and see a linebacker in gray slacks and a blazer moving in to stand where Mr. Tuiasopo had been standing when I came back here to talk to Katie.

  “Are there any other exits?”

  “Another door, stage right. Also covered. Trapdoors in the stage floor.”

  “Leading to?”

  “Basement. I have men down there, too.”

  “Excellent.”

  “When can we stop whispering?” Parker asks.

  Ceepak checks his watch. “Approximately ten minutes. When the Rocks take their final bows at twenty-one-fifteen.”

  That means it’s currently 2105. Katie’s time of death. She’s been gone a whole day.

  “We need to arrest Mrs. Rock!” I say.

  “What’s the charge?” asks Parker.

  “Murder!”

  “The nanny?”

  “It’s a possibility,” says Ceepak.

  “Why? What’s her motive?” Parker asks.

  “Fear of discovery,” I offer, sort of making it up as I go.

  “Come again?” says Parker.

  “We know either Mrs. Rock or Sherry Amour paid for Jake Pratt’s motel room across the street,” I explain. “We’ve seen one of them holding hands with Pratt on the elevator. Tonight, me and Ceepak figured out that Mrs. Rock wasn’t onstage during the Lucky Numbers bit last night and that’s when Katie was killed. So she did it!”

  “For real?” Parker asks. I don’t think he’s buying my closing argument.

  “Definitely! See, last night, the so-called Mrs. Rock didn’t say a word to the volunteer onstage. Tonight, she wouldn’t shut up. That’s because last night the part of Mrs. Rock was played by Sherry Amour!”

  “So Jessica Rock could come back here and kill Ms. Landry?” says Parker. “Why?”

  I look at Ceepak. He nods. Encourages me to keep taking wild stabs at the truth.

  “Well, I figure, Katie found out about Mrs. Rock’s affair with Jake Pratt. A teenager. They were both afraid that if Katie told anybody, they’d have to stop seeing each other because what they were doing over at the Motel No-Tell kind of went against the whole family-friendly image of the Rocks’ show. So, Mrs. Rock told Jake to torture Katie until she told him where she had hidden whatever it was they were looking for. I’m figuring it was a sex video. Like that one Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee made, you know?”

  Now Parker gives me the slow up-and-down head nod typically reserved for homeless people who swear the Chipmunks are planning a sneak acorn attack.

  It doesn’t slow me down.

  “When Katie wouldn’t talk, Pratt left the room at a prearranged time—probably right before Lucky Numbers started. But first, he ran into the bathroom, finally turned off the hot water pouring into the tub for Richie’s bath, and scribbled that love note on the steamed-up mirror. J luvs U.”

  “How come the tub didn’t overflow?” Parker asks.

  “Hunh?” I wasn’t expecting a plumbing sidebar.

  “How come, if the hot water’s been running since Ms. Landry came backstage with the kids, it never flooded over the sides of the tub?”

  “It never does,” I say. “Unless, you know, the
water’s totally gushing. There’s an overflow drain deal built into the latch fixture. That’s how high the waterline was.”

  “Hunh.”

  “When Lucky Numbers started, while her husband was super-busy, Mrs. Rock came back here, tried once more to convince Katie to give up the tape or whatever they thought she had. When she wouldn’t, Mrs. Rock strangled Katie with Jake Pratt’s bolo tie.”

  “I see,” says Parker. Now he turns to Ceepak seeking confirmation for my harebrained hypothesis.

  “It’s a definite possibility,” he says. “As Danny suggests, we should detain Mrs. Rock for further questioning.”

  “Wait a second,” says Parker. “What about the, you know—the pubic hair the CSI guys found?”

  “I suspect,” says Ceepak, “that the material was harvested by the killer earlier and planted to incriminate Mr. Pratt. It’s why there was a clump of it, not a strand or two.”

  Cool. Ceepak’s on board with my whole theory. Maybe. At least the part about the pubic hair being planted, which, come to think of it, I didn’t even mention.

  But, now that Ceepak mentions it, it makes sense Mrs. Rock would try to frame Jake Pratt. The lady is most likely into spider sex. According to this show I saw once on the National Geographic Channel when the Mets game got rained out, female spiders have twisted ideas about dinner dates.

  If a male hangs around too long after the sex is done, the female kills and eats him.

  Or, they hire a PI to do the killing part the next day.

  My father said “Son, we’re lucky in this town

  It’s a beautiful place to be born

  It just wraps its arms around you

  Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.

  You know that flag flying over the courthouse

  Means certain things are set in stone

  Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”

  Yeah, it’s gonna be a long walk home

  Hey pretty Darling, don’t wait up for me

  Gonna be a long walk home

  It’s gonna be a long walk home

  —Bruce Springsteen, “Long Walk Home”