years old.”
“I’m not the dark-haired woman.”
“No, you’re not. You’re somebody she helped one time. There never was a Katie Mullen. She helped you disappear from someplace, so you helped her.”
She leaned against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest. “So who did I used to be?”
He shrugged. “I don’t care. All I want to know is who the dark-haired woman is.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Then good night.” She pushed off the wall and took a step toward the corridor.
Seaver’s hand closed on her forearm, and she looked down at it icily until Seaver began to wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. He loosened his grip until it was too loose, and she snatched it away. “What now?”
“I want you to take one minute to think about what Vincent Bogliarese would feel if he knew what we were talking about.”
She looked at Seaver with a sense of wonder. She had underestimated him. She turned to face him. Her impossibly golden hair had dried into a wild mane, the skin of her sculpted face was still covered with a makeup that had little metallic sparkles in it. She didn’t look quite human. The big, unblinking blue eyes acquired the mischievous look they wore on stage.
“The back elevator over there goes up to my suite. By now, Vincent is up there waiting for me. Maybe he knows everything you know. Maybe he doesn’t. Come with me.” She took two steps toward the elevator, then stopped, turned, and looked back at him. Her face was a blank, like a portrait of a woman, but the eyes were burning him.
Seaver tried to decide. If he had been anything but positive, he would never have come here. She had once been in some kind of trouble. She had escaped because she’d had the help of a professional, who had given her false papers and set off whatever changes had transformed her into the Miraculous Miranda. She would not have slipped Pete Hatcher out for any other reason. Who would have the money to pay a performer like her to do anything? It must have been to return a favor, and a big one, at that. Now that he had met her, he was even more certain.
The incarnations he could trace were unbroken for about eight years: first Katie Mullen, the pretty assistant in the brief costume who opened trap doors and distracted the audience for a past-his-prime magician in worn tailcoat named Mister Zenobia; then Magical Miranda, playing kids’ birthday parties in the daytime and, at night, doing gigs at supper clubs where part of the deal was waiting on tables. Then, three years ago, the Miraculous Miranda had materialized in Las Vegas.
But Seaver had miscalculated. The eight years should have made him at least suspect it. He had assumed that she had been running from some woman problem—maybe an arrest or two for soliciting, maybe a stint starring in pornographic movies.
Seaver studied her face, and was suddenly lost in amazement at her perfidy. She was trying to look as though she were bluffing, but she wasn’t. She had already shown all her cards to Vincent. What she had been hiding was a whole lot worse than Seaver had imagined. She wasn’t hiding some embarrassing period of her past from her boyfriend. That wasn’t it at all.
She had told Vincent all about it, and that meant it wasn’t that there were some videotapes of her going down on one of those pimply-faced druggies that were the foot soldiers of the porn trade. That would have driven a man like Vincent nuts. What she was hiding was a charge that wouldn’t get stale after eight years—a class-one felony, like armed robbery or homicide. And of all the men in the world, Vincent Bogliarese would be the last one to write her off for homicide. His own father had a homicide conviction. Whatever Miranda had done in her early twenties, Vincent Senior had done more in his. For that matter, Seaver had always heard that these old families still expected a son to make his bones before he could be trusted with business matters, and Vincent Junior had been running the Inside Straight for at least ten years.
She was trying to get him to think she was bluffing, so he would go up there with her and get himself killed. There was no way in the world he was going to step into that elevator. He had never relished the idea, and now there was no reason to consider it. What he had come for was safe in his coat pocket. When he had handed her the papers, his purpose wasn’t to show her he knew nothing. He had just wanted her to touch them. He would have to get one of his old buddies on the L.A.P.D. to run the fingerprints before he knew what it was he had. But he had something. Now it was his turn to let her think he had been bluffing.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think I’d like to speak with Mr. Bogliarese at this time. You go on without me.”
Miranda’s smile grew. She winked, spun around with a speed and grace that an ordinary woman would not have imitated, even if she could, because she had no excuse to be bigger than life. Miranda stepped into the elevator and let the doors close on her.
Seaver decided not to take the time to get upstairs and walk out the front door with the customers. Miranda wasn’t predictable enough for that. Right now she might be giving her boyfriend some version of what had just happened. Seaver walked straight to the steel door at the back of the stage area and said to a stagehand, “Can you let me out?” There was a sign on it that said, EMERGENCY ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND, but he knew they must have keys to it, because that was the way Pete Hatcher had slipped out. The stagehand opened it and let him out onto a long narrow asphalt strip beside the building where a few employees’ cars were parked.
It took Seaver at least five minutes to walk all the way to the front of the building, then another ten to walk down the covered mall and out the other side to the lot where his car was parked. He patted the envelope in his coat pocket three times during the walk.
He got into his car and started the engine. He had already begun to back out when he realized that patting the envelope was not going to be enough. He stopped the car, pulled forward a little, and slipped it into neutral. He had watched Miranda touch the papers, so he knew exactly where her prints were, and he wouldn’t make the mistake of smudging them. She had been hot and sweaty from the show, so the prints would be oily and clear. But thinking of Miranda’s show during his walk had prompted a small twinge of uneasiness in him. This was a woman who was world famous for sleight of hand. Could he really be sure that what he had seen was her tucking the papers back into the envelope before she had handed it back to him? The same set of papers?
Seaver reached into the inner pocket of his coat and pulled out the envelope. He held it on his lap where no bystander could see it, placed only the nails of his thumbs in the slot and made sure that they touched only the envelope, then pushed the envelope’s sides outward just enough.
There was a blinding flash of light, a sound like an indrawn breath, and a choking smell as though a whole box of matches were burning. A thin, jagged line of orange fire streaked from the bottom of the envelope up both sides until his thumbs held nothing, and a pile of black powder was settling onto his lap. He rolled to the side out of the car, slapping his pants furiously.
In a few seconds, he was sure his clothes had not ignited, and nothing had reached his skin. He stood beside the car for a moment and closed his eyes. He could still see a bright green patch floating behind his eyelids from the flash. He hated that woman. He knew exactly how she had done it. All of the big pyrotechnics in her act had been fired electronically by her technicians, but not the little ones. Somewhere in her costume she must have carried a supply of flash powder, so she could use it when she wanted it. Probably it was in pea-sized, airtight capsules. That way it would be safe and inert, until the mixture was exposed to oxygen and a tiny trace of white phosphorous ignited whatever else was in there. It had to be something like that, anyway, or it would have gone off before he opened the envelope.
He got into the car, opened all the windows, and drove out into the night. He was not going to stick a knife into the Miraculous Miranda. He was not even going to fabricate anything about her to send to Vincent Bogliarese. He was going to forget her. All she had ever been was one avenue to find the dark-haired woman who had made Pete Hatcher disappear. There were others.
15
