The Ambitious Card (An Eli Marks Mystery) (12 page)

She was using a torn scrap of a bread roll to clean the surface of the plastic plate she was holding. She popped the bread into her mouth and chewed contentedly.

“Which fish?” I asked, gesturing to the shrimp salad, which was next to the scallops, which were next to a large plate of artfully-displayed clams.

“All of it. It’s a good general life rule…stay away from the seafood. I’ll take hormones in beef over mercury in seafood any day. Of course, in the end, it’s all poison.”

“The real killer is sugar,” another voice added. “Processed sugar. And don’t get me started on corn syrup.”

This opinion had issued forth from Arianna, the harpist from the memorial, who was standing across the center island from me. Her plate was piled high with two dark chocolate brownies, several variations of cookies, and a heavily-frosted piece of cake. She was daintily adding two small carrot sticks to the pile when she looked over at me and laughed a high, girlish giggle.

“Do as I say,” she said, “not as I do.”

“I’m a big believer in moderation in everything,” I said. “Including moderation.” I picked up two cookies and added them to my plate.

“I like the way you think,” she said as she extended a fleshy hand across the counter to me. “You’re Eli Marks, right?”

“Yes I am,” I said, as I shifted my plate from my right hand to my left to free up a hand for her to clasp.

“He didn’t do it, Arianna,” Franny said in a bored voice. “I did a quick reading. He’s clean.”

“There’s nothing wrong with getting a second opinion, Franny.” Arianna held my hand for a long moment as she stared blankly at the ceiling.

Her hand was warm and moist and just a little bit sticky. She squinted for a moment and then furrowed her brow pensively. She released my hand and returned to her meticulous process of adding more layers to the small mountain of food on her plate. “Yes, I agree. He didn’t do it.”

“I’m glad you both concur on that,” I said, as I surreptitiously wiped my right hand on my coat before I picked up my plate again. “What I don’t understand is why you both seemed disappointed to come to that conclusion?”

“Well, I can’t speak for Franny,” Arianna said. “But if you were the one who killed Grey, I’d want to shake your hand. Good riddance to bad garbage, as my mother used to say.”

“Hear, hear,” Franny added. “Arianna, I love your bracelet.”

Arianna paused her hunting and gathering for a moment to look down at the large silver bracelet that fit snugly around her wide right wrist. She held it up to the light.

“Isn’t it delicious? I found it online and just had to have it. It took a lot of cleaning, but in the end it was worth it.” She admired it for another long moment, then returned to picking at the food options on the counter.

“Does anyone know if these olives are pitted or not?” she asked the room at large. She didn’t wait for a response, but instead scooped several olives onto her plate, ignoring the one or two that evaded capture and ended up on the floor. She held up one of the green olives she had just plucked and looked over at me.

“They say the green ones are aphrodisiacs,” she said slyly before popping it into her mouth. Her eyes sparkled with a slightly naughty twinkle.

“I believe you’re thinking of M&Ms,” I said as tactfully as possible. She considered this for a moment, then shrugged and continued chewing.

“Whatever.” She took her completed plate, grabbed a fancy napkin off a stack and breezed out of the room. I watched her go and then noticed that Franny was watching me watch her.

“Careful of that one,” Franny said dryly.

“How do you mean?”

“Trouble follows her like kids following an ice cream truck.” She clucked her tongue. “I’d like to do a reading of you someday,” she said, deftly changing the subject.

“I thought you already did that,” I said, returning my attention to the amazing spread of food in front of me.

“That was a quick scan. I mean something more in-depth. You might be surprised by what we find.”

“I’m sure I would be. Where do you work and how do I make an appointment?”

“I only do phone readings these days. They’re more conducive to my lifestyle,” Franny said, moving to the center island and picking at the tray of cookies until she found one she wanted. “Lifestyle being a euphemism for ‘sitting around in my bathrobe all day.’”

“That’s a lifestyle I can get behind.”

“It’s one of the benefits of age, of which there are precious few,” she said with a weary smile. She handed me a card, which held only her first name and phone number. “Thanks again for the ride. And don’t worry…Tonight there will be no snow.”

With her chosen cookie in hand, she gave me a smile and a wink and headed back into the living room.

In order to keep my distance from Pete and Megan, I took my time contemplating my food options.

The crowd in the kitchen had thinned out and I could now see that the far end of the room opened out into a glass porch. A couple was standing out there and from their body language and the muffled sounds coming from the room, it was apparent that they were in the throes of a serious argument.

I was about to look away so as not to appear a voyeur, when I recognized the woman in the pair and she recognized me.

It was Nova, and when she saw me she immediately stopped the argument and broke into an excited smile. She waved me over and then appeared to laugh when I looked around to make sure I was, in fact, the one she was waving at. She smiled and waved again, so I finished filling my plate, grabbed a fork and napkin and headed toward the porch.

“Settle a bet,” were the first words out of her mouth when I stepped out onto the porch.

I hesitated for a moment, because not only were the walls all glass, but I was also surprised to discover that the floor was transparent as well. This provided a vertiginous view of the patio two stories below and the lake beyond.

I gingerly stepped into the room, which was basically a floating transparent cube jutting from the house. In order to steady my walk across the small room, my hand instinctively reached out to touch the wall, as if driven by some primal force. I did my best not to look down.

“I will if I can. What’s the bet?”

Nova was standing next to a beefy guy in his late twenties. She held a nearly empty glass of what looked like red wine in her hand. The guy was holding a large can of beer in his. He was wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt, which helped to mask a bulky frame that looked to be the result of many, many nights of holding large cans of beer. His head was covered with stringy blonde hair that barely hid a rapidly-receding hairline.

“That one thing you did the other night, where you used all of our psychic powers to find specific cards,” she said. “That’s really a psychic experiment and not a card trick, right?”

Her companion shook his head derisively. “It’s a stupid card trick,” he grumbled.

She looked to me for contradiction. “Let him say.”

I shook my head sadly. “Sorry to burst your bubble,” I said. “But it’s a card trick, and, yes, not a very sophisticated one at that.”

“You don’t use psychic powers in your act?” she asked quietly.

I shook my head again. “Not that I know of.”

“And neither did Grey,” the guy said, building off my comment. “And that’s my point, know what I mean? In three years I never saw him do anything that wasn’t a sham or put-on. When are you going to face facts on that?”

“I don’t think we’ve met,” I said, having a pretty good idea who this guy was. “Did you know Grey?”

He grunted a response that sounded like “Did I ever.”

“This is Boone. He and I worked for Grey,” Nova said, picking up the introductory slack. “Although Boone was with him a lot longer than I was.”

“Were you working with him the other night?”

“Yeah,” Boone said. “That was going to be my last show with him, know what I mean? And, as it turned out, it was.” He chuckled in a humorless manner.

“You were going to quit?”

“I figured I might as well before he fired me, know what I mean?”

I was marveling at his ability to turn virtually any statement into a question when I glanced down and realized I had an untouched plate of food in my hand.

I extended the plate to Boone and Nova. “Anyone want some?” I asked.

She passed on it, but Boone didn’t hesitate, taking the entire plate from me in one quick movement.

“I got the sense the other night,” I said, looking sadly at my now-empty hands, “that there was some friction between you and Grey during the show. You were on the other end of his earpiece, during the book and magazine bit, right?”

“That was me,” Boone said, and he began to snicker. “Grey got pissed off because I started demanding a raise, right in the middle of the show. Which might not have been as professional as he would have liked,” he added with a grin, “but it was a great time to put the screws to him, know what I mean? You know what they say, ‘When you have them by the balls…’”

“‘Their hearts and minds will follow.’ Yes, I can see that mid-show would make for a perfect time to renegotiate one’s contract.”

“Aw, I knew he’d never go for it,” Boone said, licking his fingertips and then taking another quick swig of beer. “I just wanted to screw with him one last time before calling it quits, know what I mean?”

“Why did you want to quit?”

Boone shrugged, which I soon realized was his go-to form of communication.

“I dunno,” he said finally. “I was getting really tired of sitting in a cramped little room listening to Grey screw with people. And he was a pain in the ass. Plus my DJ business is really starting to take off.”

“Boone is an amazing DJ,” Nova added.

“It seems like a lot of people didn’t like Grey,” I said.

“You got that right,” Boone agreed, taking one final gulp from the beer can and crushing the empty in his fist.

“Do you think anyone disliked him enough to kill him?”

Boone gave me a long look.

“Well, yes, Columbo,” he said. “Obviously one person did. That’s why he’s dead. Know what I mean?” He snorted and shook his head contemptuously.

“Can I get you some more wine?” I asked Nova, deftly changing the topic away from just how stupid I was. She smiled and held out her glass.

“That would be sweet,” she said. “I think this was a Shiraz. But, you know, whatever.”

Before I could take the glass, Boone had moved in and cut off the exchange, taking the glass from her. “You’ve had enough,” he said curtly.

“No I haven’t,” she said, trying to pull the glass back. “I’ve only had two.”

“You’ve had four by my count.”

“And how many beers have you had?” she asked, still struggling to regain ownership of the wine glass.

“Me and the amount of beer I’ve had are not the problem,” he said. “I don’t get stupid when I drink beer.”

“That’s because you start out stupid,” she said. “In fact, I think the beer actually makes you smarter.”

I started backing away.

“I’ll just let you two discuss this on your own,” I said, although I’m not sure either one of them heard me. The volume of their voices was still on the upswing when I shut the glass door, and the muffled sounds continued to reverberate in the glass cube as I made my way to the kitchen.

I considered grabbing another plate of food, but that same idea must have occurred to a lot of people simultaneously, because the counter that held the catering was now surrounded two-deep on all sides.

I squeezed my way through the kitchen and was turning to head back to the living room when I slammed into a woman who was just coming around the corner.

“Oh, excuse me,” I said, jumping back to let her pass. It was then that I realized it was Megan.

“There you are,” she said. “You went to get food and you never came back. Are you avoiding me?” She gave me a playful slap on the arm.

“Yes,” I said, a bit tongue-tied. “I mean, no. I ran into some other people. Back there. On that porch-thing.” I pointed vaguely in the general direction of the porch and nearly poked a passing woman right in the eye. “Oh, sorry.”

Megan and I each squeezed back against our respective walls to let the woman through. The woman gave me a careful stare as she wiggled between us on her way to the living room.

“Oh, I love that porch. Isn’t this house just wild?” she said, smiling widely. “It’s so open and clear.”

“Yes, but you know what they say about people who live in glass houses.”

“They go through a lot of Windex?”

It took me a second to realize that she was joking with me, and then I recognized the humor in what she had said. I laughed and she joined me. Then I immediately realized that the laugh I had emitted might have been out of proportion to the quality of her joke.

In fact, I was sure it was. So I throttled the laugh down and then it petered out awkwardly. We stood there quietly for a moment as people struggled to get past and around us.

“Maybe we should find someplace else to talk,” Megan suggested. “Where we won’t be in the way.”

Without waiting for a response, she turned and headed back toward the living room, but where everyone else was turning left, she veered right. The flow of traffic prevented me from following her immediately, and it was all I could do to not get pulled into the undertow that was sucking people back into the living room.

As I struggled to follow Megan, I recognized Clive Albans across the room. He was surrounded by a group of young women and it looked like he was demonstrating Scotch and Soda for them. They laughed and applauded his efforts when he finished the trick. He spotted me and gave me a smile and a wink. I smiled back at him and continued to work at making my way through the throng.