glass in the saucer over the coin. The glass will suck up the water. The coin will be dry and can be picked up.
Calvin Ott lived in Sherman Oaks. I had called him and said I was on Blackstone’s staff and wanted to make arrangements for the reception.
He readily agreed to see me and said to come right over. He sounded happy to hear from me.
My cramped Crosley made its constipated and reluctant way up the winding roads, threatening to slip backward into the hillside oblivion when the road was too steep for its refrigerator engine.
I listened to the radio and drove through modern Los Angeles, a mess of architectural styles and convulsive growth. There were survivors of the post-Civil War era with their cupolas and curlicues, brownstones from the 1880s with elaborate ornaments and great bay windows with colored glass, and a never-ending number of frame bungalows and boxlike office buildings from the first two decades of the twentieth century. Not to mention the pseudo-Spanish homes and apartment buildings from the boom back in the ’20s that also brought skyscrapers, movie palaces, and bizarre restaurant designs. There was a restaurant shaped like a derby hat, another one shaped like a rabbit, a third like an old shoe, another like a fish and one like a hot dog sandwich. There were also modern houses and steel, concrete and glass buildings. The landscape was also dotted in much of the County of Los Angeles by huge gas tanks, gaunt and grimy oil derricks, and silver power lines.
KMTR radio news told me the Chinese had stormed the Japanese North Burma base of Mogaung. The Soviets were closing in on Minsk. French patriots had killed the Vichy Minister of Information and Propaganda, Phillipe Henriot, in his bed in Paris, and the Chicago Cubs were at the bottom of the National League standings with an 18– 34 record.
I passed houses with wrapped bundles of scrap paper pilled on the narrow sidewalks for pickup. The day was clear. Wet paper wasn’t accepted. I didn’t know why.
Near the top of the hillside, the baritone voice on the radio told me that a Mrs. Elizabeth Koby of Whiting, Indiana, a $24-a-week Standard Oil employee, had received her two-week check. It was for $99,999.52. She returned it.
In Augusta, Maine, Ralph E. Mosher, who’d won the nomination for state senator on both party tickets, reported his total campaign expenses as eighteen cents including ten cents for a beer to “relax tension.”
In Los Angeles, a few miles down from where I was driving to the domicile of Calvin Ott, the police were investigating the robbery of $251 from Jim Dandy’s Market. The robber left one clue, his heel prints.
Now well informed, I pulled onto the cobblestone driveway I was looking for and parked alongside a heavy blue four-door Pontiac.
The house wasn’t big, not for this neighborhood, but I didn’t think there were many to match it in the neighborhood. Stone gargoyles stood on either side of the entrance. Their heads were turned so their blank eyes would meet approaching guests. The high doorway itself was made of dark wood. Cut deeply into the wood was the figure of another gargoyle. There was no handle that I could see. No knocker and no bell.
I raised my hand to knock, but before I could, a deep voice from above the door said,
“Your name?”
“Toby Peters.”
“Say the magic words that opens the door of the cave.”
“Open sesame,” I tried.
“No,” came the voice.
“Give me a hint.”
“It’s ‘abracadabra,’” came the voice.
“Abracadabra,” I said.
The door opened. A thin man in a white suit, white shirt, white shoes, and black tie stood in front of me. He had a glass of clear liquid in his left hand. His face was smooth and pink, his hair receding. He was about forty.
“Calvin Ott?” I asked.
“Maurice Keller,” he said, with a shake of his finger to suggest that I was being intentionally naughty. “Come in.”
The brightly lit wood paneled hallway was covered with large, colorful eye-level posters, evenly spaced.
“That one,” Ott said beaming as he closed the door behind me, “is my favorite.”
The poster showed a nearly bald man sitting in a wooden chair. The man’s head was floating away from him. The words on the poster read: Keller In His Latest Mystery. Self-Decapitation.
“A favorite,” Ott said, pointing to the poster. “The master. A brilliant illusion.”
“Impressive,” I said as he led me down the hallway past more posters.
On my left was the wide-eyed face of a man wearing a large turban with a bright emerald green stone in the middle of it. The words on the sign read:
On the right was a poster of a smiling man with cartoonlike ghosts floating around him:
We moved past colorful posters of Brush the Mystic and His Hindu Box; Carter The Great Beats The Devil; Floyd, King of Magic; Dante; Levante, Long Tak Sam.
Ott stopped and faced the last one on the left at the end of the hallway.
“Probably my favorite of all.”
It was a color illustration, depicting a clean-shaven smiling man in a tux with a white flower in his buttonhole walking next to a white shrouded skeleton looking at him. A pot of fire sat next to them with little drawings of someone in an electric chair, a guillotine, and a man about to be lowered into a glass vat of water. The name Steen ran across the top of the poster, and there a phrase in French on the bottom.
“The man who is amused by death,” Ott translated, stepping into a large white-carpeted living room with ceiling-to-floor windows at the end.
The matching plush furniture included two armchairs and a sofa, with a large low round table between them. On the table was a skull nestled on a well-polished dark wooden base. The room was lined with shelves filled with gadgets.
Ott pointed to one of the chairs. I sat. It was comfortable. He clapped his hands and the chair began to shake. I held onto the arms to keep from falling.
“Spirits?” he asked, eyes widening.
He clapped again and the shaking stopped.
“Spirits?” he repeated. “Sherry? Something stronger? A beer?”
“Pepsi,” I said. “If you have it.”
The skull had turned slightly and was looking at me.
“That’s the skull of Bombay The Great,” Ott said, a small smile on his face. “Bombay perfected the flying carpet illusion. He lost his head in a train wreck outside of Turin in 1883. I gained his head forty years later. Pepsi?”
“Yeah,” I said, meeting Bombay the Great’s hollow gaze.
“Be right back,” Ott said, his grin growing, his eyebrows raised. “Amuse yourself, but don’t touch.”
When he left I got up and looked at the gizmos on shelves. There were glasses-both the kind you drink from and the kind you wear-books, lamps, an open straight razor, a package of gum, a long knife with a fancy ivory handle and a curved blade, matchboxes, a typewriter, cigar boxes, small statues of African figures and Greek warriors. A glassed-in cabinet held neatly arranged pistols and knives.
I was looking at a compact wooden radio when Ott returned with my Pepsi glass and a glass of something amber for himself.
“That’s the Anderson Surprise Radio,” he said, sitting and crossing his legs. “You turn it on and it works. You turn the dial and the top pops open with a loud electrical sizzle and a shower of spring-activated colorful balls. The company went out of business two years ago. An old man tried to get H.V. Kaltenborn on that radio, had a heart attack instead of the news.”
“Fascinating,” I said, raising my glass.
“Isn’t it?” he said, raising his.
“And the guns?”
