“There’s hundreds of guys with that kind of loot just in Manhattan,” says Benny. “It’s like finding a blonde in a haystack.”
“Don’t you mean a needle?” I ask.
“I found a needle in a haystack once,” he answers. “I’ve never found a blonde.”
I couldn’t argue with that, so I went back to the subject at hand. “We can work it from either end,” I say. “We can narrow it down by finding someone who could afford all three wizards, or we can narrow it down by finding out just which wizards have the power to pull these stunts off.”
“Too many either way,” says Benny, as Gently Gently comes back into the room. “There’s a third way.”
“Oh?” I say. “What it is?”
“Pound the hell out of Big-Hearted Milton until he tells you who gave him the money.”
“It could have passed through four or five hands before it got to Milton,” I say.
“That narrows it down,” says Gently Gently. “Who do we know who has four or five hands?”
I send him out to a chili parlor.
“You know,” I say when he is gone, “I think the money is the key to it all.”
“Of course it is,” agrees Benny. “No money, no hexes.”
“No,” I say. “I mean, I think you hit on something before. There are hundreds of possible plungers, and dozens of possible wizards, but there’s only one pay-off, and that’s the one I have to make to Milton.”
“You’re going to pay him?”
“Tomorrow,” I say. “Tonight there’s something I have to do. Get me Morris the Mage’s phone number.”
I talk to Morris, and we agree on a price, and he casts his spell and gives me the magic word, and the next morning I hunt up Milton in the men’s room at Joey Chicago’s, where he is sitting fully clothed on one of the toilets, his nose covered in bandages, reading an ancient book of magic.
“Good morning, Milton,” I say pleasantly.
“I ab nod talkig to you,” he says through the bandages.
“That’s too bad,” I say. “Because I have sought you out to pay my debt of honor.”
I pull out the money and hand it to him.
He smiles, gets up, puts the money in a pocket, and walks to the door.
“Thag you, Harry,” he says. “I god to deliver this. I’ll see you lader.”
He walks out of the men’s room, through the tavern, and out the front door, and I go back to the apartment, where Benny and Gently Gently have spent the night. (Well, Benny spent the whole night; Gently Gently made four more trips out for nine-thousand-calorie snacks.)
“Is it accomplished?” asks Benny.
“Let’s give it an hour,” I say.
Benny spends the time staring at his watch and counting down minute by minute. Finally it is time.
“He’s got to have delivered it by now,” I say, “and whoever he’s delivered it to hasn’t had time to get to a bank. So let’s make sure he thinks twice before trying to rob Harry the Book again.” I pause for dramatic effect, and then say: “Abracadabra.”
“That’s it?” asks Benny. “Nothing’s happened.”
“It’s not going to happen here,” I say. “Turn on the news in another hour and we’ll see if it worked.”
Benny counts down from sixty to zero once more, and then turns on the television. The news is on all the channels: The estate of Mafia don Boom-Boom Machiavelli has spontaneously caught fire and burned to the ground.
“And that’s that!” says Benny, rubbing his hands together gleefully.
“Not quite,” I say.
“Oh?”
“ Milton never used a bank or a safe in his life, which means his share caught fire in his pocket. Find out what hospital he’s in and send him some flowers.”
“Any note with it?” asks Benny.
“Yeah,” I say. “Tell him that if God had meant pianos to fly, He’d have given them wings.”
Gently Gently looks surprised. “You mean He didn’t?”
If Vanity Doesn’t Kill Me by Michael A. Stackpole
For a guy who squeezed into a rubber nun’s habit before hanging himself in a dingy motel room closet, Robert Anderson didn’t look so bad. Sure, his face was still livid, especially that purple ring right above the noose, and his neck had stretched a bit, but with his eyes closed you couldn’t see the burst blood vessels. He looked peaceful.
I glanced back over my shoulder at Cate Chase, the Medical Examiner. “I’ve seen worse. Is that a good thing?”
“Let’s not start comparing instances.” With her red hair, blue eyes, and cream complexion, Cate should have been a heartbreaker. She would have been, save she was built like a legbreaker. One glance convinced most men that she could hurt them badly, and not in a good way. She jerked a thumb at the room’s vanity table. “What do you think?”
I shrugged. Dragging it along had tipped over a can of soda, and a half-eaten sandwich had soaked most of it up. The Twinkie had resisted the soda, being stale enough you could have pounded nails with it. “Looks like he unscrewed it from the wall, shifted it so he could watch himself. Autoerotic asphyxiation?”
She nodded. “Suffocating as you climax is supposed to take the orgasm off the charts. You pass out, you can strangle to death.”
“Not my idea of fun.”
“There go my plans for the rest of our afternoon.” She flicked a finger at Anderson. “Take another look.”
I caught her emphasis and breathed in. I closed my eyes for a second, then reopened them. I peered at him through magick. He was a silhouette, all black and drippy. Corpses tend to look like that. I’d seen it before.
“Something special I’m supposed to see?” I faced her as I asked the question, and magick rendered her in shades of red gold, much like her hair. It put color into everything, save for that Twinkie. It was neither alive nor dead.
Cate shook her head. “Something, I hoped. Anything.”
I waited for her to expand on her comment, but she never got a chance.
Detective Inspector Winston Prout charged into the room and thrust a finger into my chest. “What the hell are you doing here, Molloy?”
“I invited him, Prout,” Cate said.
I smiled. “Coffee date.”
He glared at the both of us, about a heartbeat from arresting us for indecent urges. He was one of those skinny guys who’d look better as a corpse. He wouldn’t have to keep his parts all puckered and pinched tight. He habitually dressed in white from head to toe, and he had exchanged his skimmer for a fedora after his recent promotion to Inspector.
“Civilians aren’t allowed in a crime scene, Molloy.”
“My prints, my DNA are on record. I haven’t touched anything.”
“If you don’t have a connection to this case, get the hell out of here.”
I hesitated just a second too long.
He raised an eyebrow. “You connected?”
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “A little.”
“Spill it.”
“Your vic?” I nodded toward the man in the closet. “He’s married to my mother.”
That little revelation had Prout’s eyes bugging out the way Anderson ’s must have at the end. I’d have enjoyed poking them back into his face, but he got control of himself pretty quickly. He was torn between wanting to arrest me right that second and fear that I’d already set a trap for him. He’d wanted a piece of me since before his stint in the Internal Affairs division. He saw it as a divine mission, and getting me tossed from the force for bribery hadn’t been enough.
He punted the two of us, leaving a tech team to do the crime scene. Cate and I retreated through a hallway where painters were trying to cover years of grime in a jaunty yellow to a nearby coffee joint. We ordered in java-jerkese, then sat on the patio amid lunch-bunnies catching a post-Pilates, pre-spa jolt.
“You didn’t know about Anderson, did you?”
Cate shook her head. “Should I say I’m sorry for your loss?”
“If it will make you feel better.”