Other People's Baggage (18 page)

FOOL'S GOLD: TEN

  

“You forgot you were dating someone?” I asked Astrid.

“You were gushing about him yesterday,” Daniella said, followed by a small hiccup.

“Are you two the good-girlfriend police?” Astrid said, her bright red lips set in a pout. “There's got to be some real royalty here somewhere. I'll leave two prudes to yourselves.”

She stormed off, several men turning to watch her as she walked by.

“What's the matter with her?” Daniella asked.

“How well do you know her?” I asked.

“You think
Astrid
stole the chess set?” She shook her head. “But I was with her.”

“She could have hired someone.”

“She doesn't have that much imagination,” Daniella said. “Oh God! That sounded awful, didn't it? Maybe I've had too many of these.” She set her empty champagne class on a nearby side table. “No, I know Astrid can be difficult, but she's not a criminal.”

  

Back at the hotel, I had to squeeze out the rest of the contents of the clutch to find the key to my room. How did women use these things? When I pushed open the door, my breath caught in my throat. The light of the room was on. I was certain I'd left it off.

“It's about time,” Sanjay said.

“You were about this close to getting my knee in a very uncomfortable place.” I flung my key at him. I wasn't surprised that he caught it. It disappeared from sight in the palm of his hand.

“You didn't leave me a choice.” Sanjay placed the rematerialized key on the bed stand and sat down in the one chair in the small room. “You weren't answering your cell.”

Sanjay was still wearing his tuxedo from his performance. His bow tie hung loose around his neck, and his bowler hat rested on the bed stand.

“My phone barely fit in this little clutch. I thought if I opened it I'd never get it shut again.”

“You own a clutch? What happened to the messenger bag that goes everywhere with you?”

“It's not mine. I found it in the suitcase. I didn't think my messenger bag would fit in too well at the gala.”

“You're stealing from this poor woman's suitcase?”

“
Borrowing
,” I said. “Where do you think I got this dress? But I bet she's drinking the American whiskey I brought as a gift for Daniella and having the historical letter appraised.”

Sanjay leaned back on his elbows and watched me.

“What?” I said, smoothing out the dress. “Do I have a big chunk of lint on me? God, please don't tell me I've got remnants of canapé stuck in my teeth.”

“
You
were eating fancy food? Where's Jaya and what have you done with her?”

“Very funny.”

Sanjay shook his head slowly but didn't say anything. “I was admiring your dress,” he said finally. “You look…”

“Silly?” I said, slipping off my heels and flinging them into the corner of the small room. “I know. It's not really my style.”

“That's not the word I was thinking of,” Sanjay said. “Stunning is more like it. You look absolutely stunning.”

“In this?” I looked down at the vintage black and white dress. “It's all wrong for my shape.”

“Did anyone ever tell you that you don't know how to take a compliment?”

“It's hardly a fair assessment coming from a good friend.”

Sanjay cleared his throat. “Why don't you dress like that more often?”

“I'm a professor, you know. Or at least I will be in two weeks. This dress doesn't exactly say “authority figure.” I can't very well go around looking like a nightclub singer.”

“I don't know. It has its charm. So who is this woman you stole it from?”

“Borrowed,” I corrected him. “I have no idea. She didn't answer the phone number tucked into the suitcase. But she has great taste. The case was full of dresses like this. She's not as short as me, but she's thin, so this one worked pretty well since it has a belt.”

I gave a little pirouette. Sanjay laughed.

“Sounds like your show went well,” I said.

“Even better than expected. A woman fainted.”

“Oh no!”

“No, that's a good thing,” Sanjay said.

“It is?”

“Weren't you paying attention earlier?” he asked.

“Apparently not.”

“You were supposed to be scared when the whisky barrel caught fire with me inside it. I cut short the effect when you were there, but with the fully drawn-out presentation, I was brilliant.” He grinned as I rolled my eyes.

“What about that poor woman?” I asked.

“She's fine. She came to as soon as Ewan gave her smelling salts. The diversion allowed me to heighten the drama of the illusion.”

“I'm sure she's traumatized.”

“That's what people pay to see. If people didn't think I was truly putting my life at risk, I wouldn't sell out nearly as many shows as I do. Why do you think Houdini was so famous? He was a mediocre illusionist, but he understood the value of drama. Close-up magic baffled him, but give him the grand venue of an outdoor stage with a challenge to escape from a straitjacket while hanging upside down hundreds of feet above a crowd, and the public ate it up. But enough about my sell-out performances.” He paused. “That's not why I'm here. How did the gala go?”

“No fainting was involved,” I said, “but Daniella did get fall-down drunk. And even more interesting—Astrid is hiding something.”

I sat down on the bed and tucked my legs under me. I went over the little I'd learned about the publicity for both the play and the chess set growing exponentially because of the press surrounding the theft, and I thought about Astrid lying about whatever she had to do away from the group the morning before the theft took place.

“Interesting,” Sanjay said.

“That's it? That's all you're going to say? Aren't you going to say something about turning Astrid over to the police for the third degree?”

“That,” Sanjay said, “would be jumping the gun.” He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. After glancing briefly at the screen, he put it back and looked up at me. “It's late enough,” he said.

“Late enough for what? I'm too wound up to sleep. My sneakers are in my missing suitcase so I haven't been able to go running, so I doubt I'll ever sleep again.”

“That's not what I'm talking about. Let's go check out the room.”

“You're not serious. The scene of the crime? I'm sure it's off limits.”

“Of course I'm serious. How else are we going to solve this?”

“I'm sure the police have the room locked up.”

Sanjay's forehead crinkled as he raised his eyebrows.

“Right,” I said with a sigh. “The lock of that room won't be much different from this one.”

“Exactly. You think I let myself into your room for kicks? The hotel is booked up, so I needed to practice on a door to a room I knew was empty.”

“How long did it take you?”

Sanjay cleared his throat. “Let's not sit around discussing the details of how long it took to open what should have been a straightforward lock.”

“Touchy, touchy.”

“I've got jet lag.” He yawned. “At least this hotel is proud enough of its historic roots that it still uses real old-fashioned keys. Those modern key cards aren't nearly as easy to break into with the set of skills I've got at my disposal.”

“I'll remember that the next time I book a hotel room.”

“Shall we?” Sanjay said.

I hesitated.

“You can either leave this to the police and see your friends go to jail,” Sanjay said, “or we can take a look.”

“I'm not going to talk you out of this, am I?”

“If you don't come with me, I'll do it on my own.”

“Let me change,” I said.

Sanjay's face fell. “Can't you go in that?”

“This is hardly cat burglar attire.”

“Exactly. It's the perfect cover. If we're caught, our excuse is that we've just come from one of the festival's parties and we're drunk. That way we'll only get a drunk-and-disorderly warning—or whatever its British equivalent is—rather than being charged with what we're really up to.”

I opened my mouth but Sanjay kept speaking.

“But we're not going to get caught,” he said. “Especially with you as my lookout. Coming?”

I picked up the white clutch, slipped my heels back on, and followed Sanjay out the door.

  

“Three minutes, forty two seconds,” Sanjay said.

I turned toward him from where I stood a few paces away in the hallway, holding my heels in my hand and trying to look tipsy to anyone who might see us skulking around the burgled room. Sanjay turned the handle and opened the door.

The room was completely dark. We locked the door behind us and Sanjay turned on the light.

“There's nothing more suspicious than flashlights,” Sanjay said.

“You mean if we happened to have flashlights,” I pointed out.

“Touché.”

The suite wasn't much bigger than a standard hotel room in the US. The door opened into a small hallway. To the right, a bathroom that would have been at home in an airplane. To the left, two bedrooms that looked like they were previously one larger room. Straight ahead, a sitting room barely big enough to fit two chairs, a coffee table, and a loveseat in a tartan print matching the furniture in the lobby. The loveseat faced a television mounted on the wall, and next to the television was a hole where the wall safe had been. The wallpapered wall surrounding the safe was blackened, and the remnants of the safe's metal door hung askew.

In addition to the evidence of the explosion around the safe, the room showed other scars of the theft: the furniture was soaking wet. The sprinkler on the ceiling had done its job.

Neither the sitting room nor the bathroom had a window. That luxury was reserved for the two bedrooms on the opposite side of the hallway, each with one small window. Each bedroom had enough room for two twin-size beds—that looked smaller than standard twin-size to me—about two feet apart. The tall, narrow windows were in the space between the beds. Neither room had built-in closets, but instead had antique wooden wardrobes.

Sanjay ran his fingers along the edging of the floorboards through the whole suite, then did the same thing along the walls. While he did two slow, meticulous circles, I studied the windows. They were small, almost like the openings for archers in a castle. There was no reason to have bigger windows for a view, since the windows faced another old building a few yards away. I looked around the edges of both windows. Typical of hotel windows, these windows didn't open. How had the police thought someone could have gotten out through one of them?

Sanjay came up behind me at the window and rested his chin on my head. I moved out of the way and let him examine the window.

“Nothing out of the ordinary here,” he said. “Thick stone walls, solid construction.”

“You thought there would be a secret passageway?”

“Not really. But one has to be thorough. Damn. This window doesn't open, either,” he said, frowning. He pressed his forehead to the glass and looked down, and then up.

“Fifth floor,” he mumbled to himself, staring out the window. “Sprinklers…no fire escape. Even if the thief could have altered one of these windows to open and get out, squeeze through the opening, and slide down a rope—or walk across one to the opposite building, if we want to entertain really outrageous ideas—there wouldn't have been time. They'd need to replace the window to its present state. No, the only way out of this place is that front door.”

“Which a whole group of German tourists say didn't happen.”

“Nobody got out through these windows,” Sanjay said. “I don't like this at all, Jaya.”

FOOL'S GOLD: ELEVEN

  

Sanjay locked the suite behind us. We walked back to my hotel room in silence. I left Sanjay in the room while I used the bathroom to change.

“I've been thinking about the witnesses,” Sanjay said when I emerged in my bright pink t-shirt and leggings.

“Unless this is an amazingly huge conspiracy we're stuck in the middle of, the tour group of Germans isn't lying.”

“But what if they weren't lying,” Sanjay said. “What if there was a way for the thief to get out of that suite through the door and have the witnesses think they never saw anyone come through the door?”

I eyed Sanjay skeptically. He was again seated in the desk chair, his elbows resting on his knees as he leaned forward and spoke earnestly.

“Don't you see?” he said. “A
diversion
.”

“You mean like one of your stage tricks with smoke and mirrors.”

“Something like that,” he said. “Not smoke and mirrors literally, but an illusion of the same kind.”

“You think they all looked away at a cute puppy at the same exact moment, right after an explosion sounded?”

“What if—” he leaned forward even farther. “What if the thief changed the room numbers?” He sat back and clasped his hands behind his head.

I thought about it for a minute. Could the thief have made a simple switch that made him invisible without being invisible?

“Brilliant, isn't it?” Sanjay said.

But it wasn't. Not in this case.

“You're forgetting something,” I said. “The Germans didn't care about the room number—they heard the room the explosion came from. So unless this thief is a mastermind genius who has figured out how to move the sound of an explosion and the accompanying smoke from one floor to another, that explanation doesn't work.”

Sanjay dropped his hands and grabbed his bowler hat. He ran his fingers along the rim like he always did when he was thinking.

“I don't like this,” he said again.

“I don't either. This whole thing is a big mess for Daniella's play and Feisal's business.”

“Not just that,” Sanjay said. He stopped tracing the hat with his fingers. “This isn't a normal crime. I don't like that we don't know what we're dealing with—and that you're wrapped up in it.”

“What do you mean? You think I'm in danger?” I hadn't stopped to consider the possibility. I don't think of myself as easily frightened, but a wave of mild panic came over me as Sanjay spoke in a more serious tone than I'd ever heard him use before.

“I shouldn't have asked you to investigate with Daniella and Astrid tonight,” Sanjay said. “Since it seems like Astrid is somehow involved—”

“Weren't you listening?” I said, trying to convince myself as much as Sanjay. “Astrid was with Daniella during the theft.”

“Your point being?”

“You know what my point is,” I snapped. “That would mean Daniella is lying, too, and that she's involved. Then why would she ask for our help? We already went through this.”

“I know,” Sanjay said. “But we're missing something important. Maybe she wanted to throw suspicion off of herself.”

“She already has an alibi of Astrid,” I said. “Why would she risk us figuring out she was involved if she was already in the clear?”

“She could be a dupe,” Sanjay said.

“Of Astrid, you mean? So what do you want to do?”

Sanjay and I stared dumbly at each other for a full minute, neither of us attempting to speak.

“Police?” I said.

“Police,” Sanjay agreed.

“Now?”

“It's almost three o'clock in the morning.”

“Good point.” I yawned. “We can go in the morning. Meet me back here an hour before your show.”

“Not enough time. But that doesn't matter. I'm sleeping here.”

“
Excuse me?
”

“I'll sleep on the sofa. Until we know what's going on, I'd feel a lot better keeping you in my sight.”

“I repeat: excuse me?”

“I said that badly. But you know what I mean.”

“Do I? Why don't you enlighten me?”

Since I'm only five feet tall in thick socks, my dad made sure I could take care of myself. He drove me in his VW van all around the greater Berkeley area to every kind of martial arts class that existed. I stuck with jui-jitsu the longest, and I was fairly certain I could overpower Sanjay. I hate it when people underestimate me.

Sanjay swallowed hard. “I mean…you're handy to have around. If we get cornered, I can make myself disappear and you can arm wrestle the bad guy.” He looked at me expectantly.

I smiled and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I know that's not what you were going to say,” I said, “but thank you. Together, I think we'll be fine. And sure, to save time, that makes the most sense for you to stay here. That's stupid for you to sleep on the tiny sofa, though. The bed is big enough for both of us.”

“Uh…”

“What? You're like my brother, Sanjay. Why does it matter?”

“I'll be fine on the sofa,” he snapped. He stepped into the bathroom and shut the door harder than was necessary.

What was the matter with him?

  

The next thing I remembered, something was tugging on my foot. I opened my eyes. It was Sanjay. He stood at the foot of the bed in his tuxedo trousers and a fitted white undershirt, his normally perfect thick black hair standing at all angles like he'd been struck by a bold of lightning. I had assumed Sanjay's hair his fans swooned over was effortlessly perfect, but clearly that wasn't the case.

“We overslept,” he said. “I only have half an hour before I'm supposed to be at the theater. We're going to have to go to the police after the show.”

“Damn.”

“Look, I'm going to catch a cab back to my hotel to take a quick shower and grab a new tux—”

“You travel with multiple tuxedos?”

“Of course. At least six. Magic is dangerous business.” He winked at me, then turned serious again as he glanced at the time on his phone. “Catch a cab to my show, okay?”

“But it's only a few blocks from here.”

“Humor me,” he said.

“Fine,” I said. I had no intention of taking a cab for what would be a five-minute walk, but Sanjay didn't need to know that and worry for no reason.

Sanjay sighed. “All right. Don't take a cab. But be careful, okay?”

With that mind reading, he was out the door. Maybe there really was some magic in the air. If there was, I definitely needed it. I didn't know what I was doing. This wasn't the relaxing vacation I'd imagined.

  

On my walk to the theater I stopped at a take-out fish and chips shop to grab some fried food to placate my growling stomach. The cashier's accent was so thick that I'm not sure what it was that I ordered, but the fried breading made up the largest percentage of the meal wrapped in newspaper, and it was delicious. The magic show was sold out by the time I got there, but the ticket taker had been left with a note from Sanjay to allow me backstage.

The lights flickered as I entered the theater, the sign that the show would begin shortly and everyone should take their seats. I didn't walk through the seats to get to backstage, so I couldn't see the crowd, but I could hear the overlapping excited voices with accents from across the world. I reached the dark backstage area near the stage as the curtain went up.

A solitary stage light illuminated the stage. Or rather, it illuminated a small part of the stage. Sanjay stood at the back of the stage in the shadows, his bowler hat resting on his head. He began to chant in a slow, rhythmic voice. He spoke in Punjabi, so I didn't understand what he was saying. But one didn't need to understand the words to feel what he was saying. As he spoke, one more light turned on, and a series of shadows flashed across the back of the stage. He was telling a story with simple cut-out figures that danced along the wall.

“Do you like it?” a soft voice asked in my ear.

Sanjay's voice. I think I jumped about a foot into the air.

“Jesus, Sanjay,” I whispered back. “I thought you were on stage.”

“What, that voice over? Do you like it? It's new.” He straightened his bow tie. “That's just a shadow of me. A little more detailed than the projection of the stick figures, but pretty simple.”

“That's not even another person up there?” My heart rate slowed closer to normal as I looked between the real Sanjay and the shadow on stage that I could have sworn was him.

“Nope. Just a projection. People see what they want to see. In this context, people assume it's me. The key to shows at the Fringe Festival is to keep things simple. Things are crazy enough putting on a complex show with bare bones staff. That's how I came up with this idea. The whisky barrel escape is the most complex of the illusions I'm doing here, but even that one is pretty simple—if you know the trick.”

I gasped. It must have been a bit loud. Sanjay put his finger to his lips.

“Sanjay,” I said. “I know how the thief did it.”

“You do?”

“Sanjay,” another voice whispered. I jumped again. I really hated how dark it was backstage. Ewan, the red-headed stagehand, came up beside us. “Cutting it close, aren't you?”

Sanjay swore. “Don't go anywhere,” he said to me.

He turned and took the few steps to the edge of the stage. The stage lights shifted and the shadow I had assumed was Sanjay disappeared a fraction of a second before the real man stepped onto the stage. Applause sounded as I ran further backstage to think.

Just as Sanjay had led the audience to believe he was on that stage, the thief had done the same thing in that hotel room. Sanjay had been on the right track when he suggested a diversion that was an illusion.

The safe exploding was the illusion. By the time the explosion blew open the door of the safe, the chess set was already gone.

That meant the theft was no longer tied to an exact time we knew of. It could have been Astrid. But it could have been any of them. Our list of suspects with alibis was wrong. All wrong.