Magicide (20 page)

CHAPTER 51

Saturday, August 13, 8:30 a.m.

Peter lay naked and facedown on a turquoise-flowered chaise by his mother’s swimming pool, hoping the sun’s rays on his naked body would calm his inner turmoil. It would have been unbearable to lie beside the swimming pool even in the early morning sun if it hadn’t been for the misters installed along the edge of the patio roof. Even so, the fine spray from the tiny jets evaporated before it hit the glass surface of the cocktail table where his coffee sat, untouched.

What did his future hold now?

After all the insipid words of appreciation and encouragement, even from the producer, his children’s show had not been renewed.
Not renewed
—showbiz bullshit for
cancelled
. Worst of all, he’d not been informed first by any of the executive
s⎯
he’d heard it in the men’s room at the TV station. From the janitor, no less.

“My kids’ll be real disappointed,” the man had said. “They just love Peter Parrot.” He’d gone on, raving that their favorite trick was when he pulled coins from behind people’s ears and out from their noses, but Peter had stopped listening. He’d fled the lavatory, leaving the janitor’s words echoing off the tile walls.

He raised his head and opened his eyes just enough to take in the glittering surface of the turquoise pool.

Maybe submerged in the water his brain would no longer hear his father’s words on his tenth birthday.” How can you follow in my footsteps when you can’t even keep from dropping the coins?”

This said in front of the other children invited by his parents for the celebration. He hadn’t cared that much about the children, because they weren’t really his friends. Except for Carter.

Now his childhood friend had betrayed him. He’d given the DVD to Carter in trust and confidence, and with Maxwell dead, Carter would turn it over to the police. From there it would make its way into the hands of the media, and the disgusting details would liven up every news program on every TV channel in town.

How much of it would they dare to air? There could be copies of it circulating all over town right now. Eventually Dayan would be named by the other two as the one who had held the camera. Dayan—who had abandoned him—why should he care now what happened to Dayan?

And why should he care, really, if his father’s name was ruined? There was no answer from the sun or the water, but he knew he did care. He cared for both of them with an ache that made every bone in his body sensitive and vulnerable.

“Luv?”

He sighed and turned his head in the direction of his mother’s voice. She stood next to him and held out a frosted pilsner glass. “Maria made lemonade. Want some?”

“Sure—just set it down,” he murmured. “What are you doing up so early?”

Larissa frowned. “You could say, thank you.” She set the drink on the glass tabletop next to his cell phone, picked up the coffee cup and went back into the house.

Peter turned his head back to stare at the swimming pool. Lemonade wouldn’t fix his life any more than the sun assaulting his back. He didn’t want lemonade. He wanted Dayan. He remembered the day they’d gone on a picnic to Red Rock Canyon. Dayan had brought a thermos of lemonade heavily laced with Midori. Afterwards they’d gone back to Dayan’s apartment. It was the first time they’d made love. His chest tightened with the sweet memory.

The cell phone peeped. He didn’t want to answer it. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. But it could be Dayan, finally returning his frantic calls. He reached out, picked it up, flipped it open. He stared at the number on the read-out, unfamiliar and too long for a local call.

“Hello?” He sat up suddenly. “No! N
o⎯
n
o⎯
no
!” He slapped his hand against his forehead, and an intense pain flashed behind his eyes. His throat constricted, strangling his breath.

He stood and with a forceful heave flung the cell phone into the swimming pool. He panted, mesmerized by the image that flickered through the water as it plummeted to the bottom, where it laid like something silvery and dead.

He fled naked into the coolness of the house, passed his mother where she sat in a window nook reading a magazine, and sprinted up the winding stairs to the sanctity of his suite of rooms. Once inside he closed the door and stared at the keyhole. In his mind he locked it, but his hands didn’t perform the act.

He walked to the bed, thinking to lay down for awhile. Dayan’s photo, hung on the wall next to the lamp, caught his attention. Personally autographed, it read, “To my darling Peter, who makes magical dreams come true. With Love, Dayan.”

Too much, too much. What horror his father had conjured.

The truth of what must have happened overwhelmed him. He turned from the bed and Dayan’s smiling, impish face, and slumped down in a wing-back chair. He stared at his feet. He stayed that way for a long time before it came to him what to do.

A tremendous numbness spread from his feet to his throat. When it was time, with a dream-like movement he rose from the chair. Peace and warmth were within his reach.

He went to the trunk where he kept every magic trick he’d ever performed and no longer used. He kneeled on the carpet, opened the lid and rummaged inside until he found the apparatus he was searching for.

He rose and went into the bathroom. Under the sink he found a bottle of household bleach.

He came out and walked over to the antique armoire with the full-length oval beveled mirror, where he’d stood a thousand times before, perfecting this expression and that posture for a particular magic performance. In the mirror he didn’t see the adult man. The little boy performing his first effect smiled back.

Peter shook the bottle of bleach so that the liquid would contain air bubbles and then opened it. With intense precision, he pulled back the plunger to let the liquid enter the syringe, selected a vein in his left arm, pressed the sharp needle in, and slowly depressed the hypodermic.

Fire shot up his arm. A great buzzing circled his head, like the first audience he’d seen when his father performed in Albert Hall.

Five minutes later his naked body collapsed to the floor.

* * *

“Peter, luv?” Larissa stood at the foot of the stairs and stared upward. She’d been lost in her reading and hadn’t realized how much time had passed. She’d been aware that Peter had gone upstairs, and she hadn’t seen him come down.

Since the funeral they’d hardly spoken, and she had questions that just wouldn’t go away. If only he would talk to her, tell her what was going through his mind. Maybe then she could squash the rising, painful suspicion that Peter killed Maxwell.

The new powder blue jacket he’d bought last week still hung on the dining room door in its Neiman’s plastic bag. It wasn’t like Peter to leave a new piece of clothing untouched. He was meticulous that way. Why hadn’t Maria taken it upstairs and put it away in his closet? Saturdays and Sundays were Maria’s days off, and on Monday she would have some words with her.

She would take it upstairs herself. She removed the custom wooden hanger from the top of the door, folded the jacket over her arm and climbed the stairs. At the top she paused, a heavy pulse in her throat.

“Luv?” she called again.

She knocked on the closed door to his suite. No answer. No sound from inside. Her left arm began to ache from the weight of the sports jacket and wooden hanger. In annoyance she shifted the burden to her right arm.

“I’m comin’ in,” she announced and opened the door.

The plastic rustled as the sports jacket fell from her hand to the floor.

Her scream echoed throughout the house.

CHAPTER 52

Saturday, August 13, 8:00 a.m.

Sleeping in on Saturday morning was not an option. Not that Cheri wouldn’t have liked to sleep in, but her body clock sprang to life between 6:30 and 7 a.m. She’d lain awake for an hour, thinking she should try to go back to sleep, but afraid to.

The dream. Or rather, the nightmare, again.

She shook her head, willing the ghosts away. May as well get up and make herself a pot of coffee.

She threw a light robe over her sleep tee and went barefoot down the stairs into the kitchen. The house was so quiet, but then it was Saturday morning and still early. As she measured the coffee into the pot and filled the receptacle with water she realized her hands were shaking. She shuddered at the clarity of the dream experience.

She and Maxwell in the apartment she shares with Larissa. His dark eyes, soft with desire as he stares at her naked body. She is ready, willing, though she knows Larissa could return at any minute. Just as he welcomes her into his arms, the sound of the door opening. Larissa’s face, puzzled, not wanting to understand what she’s seeing. Cheri, opening her mouth to deny the obvious.

Dear god, where does that dream come from? It didn’t happen exactly like that. She pushed the button, heard the coffee maker’s familiar gurgling, and took a deep breath. Strange what the mind could create when you felt guilt. And she’d thought she was over that. It’d been a long time—years?—since she’d had that dream.

A door sound, startling her. Tom entered the kitchen, a sullen crouch to his shoulders. “Can I have my car keys?”

No
good morning
, just
can-I-have-my-car-keys
? She felt vulnerable, defensive, irritable. “Got somewhere to go?”

“Matter of fact, yeah. I have somewhere to go.”

Numbly, She reached into the kitchen drawer for Tom’s car keys. She’d grounded him for last night, and as much as she’d like to she couldn’t keep him home forever. She wondered where he was off to that he made sound so important. As she asked the question she felt raw with her own helplessness. “Where are you going?”

Tom raised his head, chin forward, that new look of his that implied he dared you to challenge him. “Rabbit & The Hat. Robert the Great’s going to show me some new magic stuff.”

“I thought it wasn’t open on weekends.” She heard Bon’s voice saying,
it’s none of your business. He’s a young man, now.

“Not. But he said I could come by any time and I told him I’d be there this morning.”

In her heart, needles stabbed. Like a fast-forward movie, all the reasons Robert the Great could be a killer flashed through her mind. She couldn’t let him go. Yet how much could she tell him about Robert Digbee, mentor to Maxwell and major suspect in a high-profile murder investigation?

“You’re spending way too much time on magic. It’s affecting your schoolwork.” The pain in her stomach rose to her head. “You’ll stay home today.”

Too late. He already had the car keys in his hand. His eyes narrowed as if he were weighing his dearest desire against the consequences of disobeying his mother. He squared off his shoulders. When had he grown two inches taller than her?

He opened the door to the carport. “I said I’d be there and I’ll be there.”

Desperation took hold of her. Her voice rose. Without thought the words tumbled out. “No! I don’t want you to be a magician!”

“Robert says I have talent!” His expression was defiant. “Why would you say that?”

To calm herself, she tried to focus on pouring coffee into her cup and spilled half of it on the tile counter. “You—you have a great intelligence. I want better for you in life.”

“I thought you liked magic.”

She set the pot down, got a sponge and wiped at the spill. “I hate magic. I hate everything about the profession of magic.” Her voice broke as Maxwell’s face appeared in front of Tom’s, as she saw how Tom would look in another fifteen years. The pain in her head morphed to a sinus pressure that filled her eyes with tears. She wailed, “I can’t have my only son grow up to be a magician.
I just can’t
.”

Tom was staring at her now, clearly perplexed by this outburst. This wasn’t the moment she’d planned, the moment for truth, yet she heard herself cry, “
Maxwell was your father!”

Tom’s stunned face said everything she didn’t want to hear.
Dear God, she’d done it.
The walls of the kitchen curved and closed in on her, as if they’d been waiting for this moment to smother her to death. Pain shot through the fingers that grasped her coffee cup.

His voice was a whisper. “I’m outta here.”

She heard the door slam, heard the car door open and close, heard the garage door roll up, heard the engine start. None of it seemed to be happening in her garage, but somewhere else far away. She wanted to say, “Honey,
wait
. Let me explain!” but there was no one left in the house to say it to.

The wall phone rang, jarring her, forcing her to move. She picked up the receiver and mumbled, “Hello,” but there was no one on the other end. She continued to stare at the receiver until the dial tone turned into the strident beeping that warned a phone has been left off its hook. Startled, she placed it back in its hanging cradle with such force that it bounced. She caught it before it hit the counter, and replaced it more carefully.

“Jeez,” she said to the empty kitchen. “Cher, get ahold of yourself.”

Almost as soon as she replaced the phone, she heard the urgent tone of her cell phone ringing in the living room. She ran to catch it; maybe Tom was calling to say he’d changed his mind and was coming home. “Hello?” On the other end she heard a frantic Dawn Cunningham.

“What’s wrong?” she said, feeling awkward with her disappointment. “Dawn, slow down. What about Peter?” She needed to pay close attention to Dawn’s words. “
Listen to me.
Call 911, right now.”

She pressed
End
and punched the quick-dial number for her partner.

“Pizza. Dawn Cunningham called. Says Larissa called her in hysterics. She went upstairs and found Peter collapsed in his bedroom. Says she thinks he’s dead.”

He said he’d call dispatch to log in for the case and go to the scene. She grabbed her duty bag and car keys, jumped into the Explorer and headed for the Seven Hills house.

She wanted to help Larissa, but what could she say, really? How could you comfort a mother who may have just lost her only son? A mother who would look at her and see—no, over the years a lot of water had gone under that bridge. All their relationships had changed. And now her relationship with her own son had forever changed.
Can’t think about that now.
Focus on the case.

She arrived to find Pizzarelli just getting out of his car. He’d parked in front of the red and white Emergency Medical Services van.

The front door to the house was open. A sniffling Maria led them upstairs to Peter’s bedroom, where they found Larissa sobbing in a chair by the window. Black circles under her eyes said she hadn’t been sleeping well before this happened. Dawn sat on the floor, holding Larissa’s hand to her cheek, murmuring. Cheri had a Fellini moment where she saw Dawn talking to Larissa’s hand.

Peter’s nude body lay crumpled in front of a mirrored antique armoire. One of the paramedics unfolded a blue sheet and spread it over the body. Told her the coroner had been called.

“The guy’s gone,” the paramedic said. “Appears he injected a hypodermic full of something into his blood stream. Heart stopped.”

Cheri took her electronic notebook from her pocket, turned it on and began tapping. She was afraid that if she looked anyone in the eye, she might begin to cry.

“Suicide?” Pizzarelli asked.

“Looks that way.”

“Leave a note?”

The paramedic nodded in the direction of the mirrored wardrobe. “Not exactly.”

Scrawled on the glass in lipstick were the words, “I loved you—why couldn’t you love me back?”