The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 41

The Magic Castle is a moldering Victorian mansion in the hills above Hollywood. And John DeLand looks right at home in it. His hair is white and wispy, his eyes pale blue and sharp. Half-glasses perch on his long nose. He’s dressed in a shiny black suit with an old-fashioned cut and a vest with a watch fob. The word waistcoat comes to mind. The only anomalous note is the big blue digital watch with a velcro strap on his left wrist.

He meets me downstairs and takes me up a winding staircase to his office. “I’ve got just about an hour,” he tells me, “although certainly we can talk more tomorrow. If I can talk, that is. I’ve got an appointment with the periodontist. He’s promised to scour my gums into submission.”

The door creaks open automatically when he speaks into a little brass grille: “Harry Houdini.”

His office is straight out of Dickens: a cavernous space furnished with heavy Victorian antiques – lots of columns and curlicued wood and threadbare velvet. It’s entirely cluttered, every surface covered: books, globes, crystal balls, cards, statues, skulls, plants, automata, crates, gadgets, papers, pamphlets, objets of every sort. Antique posters advertising various magic acts and magicians hang from every available patch of wall, with magic wands, jeweled scepters, and so on interspersed between them. Cats repose on the windowsills.

DeLand gestures toward a heavy carved wooden chair. “Not very comfy, but the felines don’t like it, so you’ll be spared the decorative dusting of cat hair.”

He moves behind his huge black desk, which is two inches deep in paper, picking up a long-haired black cat from his chair before he sits down. He holds the cat in his arms and strokes her. “So you’re here about Carrefour. And your interest, Karl tells me, is a murder case?”

“That’s right. A series of murders.”

“Oh, dear. And you think Carrefour is involved?”

“Yes.”

He sits back in his chair and regards me with his pale blue eyes. “You don’t say. And you’re… what? A police detective? I only ask because we magicians are a kind of… oh… a brotherhood, I guess you’d say. If I’m to contribute to your effort to find Carrefour, I’d like to know to what end. And I’d like to know, as well, exactly how your inquiries brought you to the Magic Castle.” He smiles his detached smile and strokes the cat, which purrs loudly.

“I’m not with the police,” I start. “My interest is personal.” As I tell him the compressed version of my story, DeLand’s detached smile fades into a look of alarm.

“How terrible,” he says, in a shaky voice. “I’m so very sorry. Of course I’ll help you in any way I can.” He picks up a black telephone. “Starting with a word to bookkeeping and the Society of Magicians. Obviously Carrefour was a member of SAM, as well as a member of the Castle. He’ll have paid dues and literature will have been sent to him – we ought to have an address and telephone number.”

When he’s finished shouting instructions over the phone, he replaces the handset and strokes the cat. “Now, what can I tell you?”

“Why don’t you just talk about Carrefour? Whatever you remember.”

“I’m not certain how he came to perform here,” DeLand starts. “Someone else might remember. Could be he came reputation in hand, already booked for a night or two. There’s an equally good chance that he just… came to a show, and went on from there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Magicians come to the Castle from everywhere – either as a destination, or just because they happen to be in town. The Castle is a kind of a pilgrimage site for magicians. We do have something like five thousand members.”

“Really.”

“Oh, yes. So, let’s say a magician’s in town and he comes to the Castle for an evening of magic. He wants to check out the competition, maybe pick up a new wrinkle for an effect, or maybe just show the wife or girlfriend a good time. Before the show – say, in the bar – or in the interval after dinner, or waiting in line for one of the performances – people take advantage of those times to perform. Show their stuff, you know. You’ll see guys standing in the bar doing sleight of hand, or performing card or coin tricks while waiting in line. At times, someone will even pull off a rather elaborate illusion.”

“So it’s like an audition?”

“Well, it can be. It’s one way to get your foot in the door. And then… maybe a scheduled performer falls ill or has a conflict and a slot opens up in one of the rotations. The visiting magician might get a chance to fill in. After that, who knows?”

“So Carrefour ended up as a regular.”

“Yes. And deservedly so. He’s quite a gifted performer, brilliant stage presence. Really, everything he did was amazing. And, at first, very much in the tradition here.”

“And what’s that?”

“Well, obviously, we don’t have the resources to stage the really big illusions – the sort of thing they do in Vegas. Most of those acts have specially built venues, just for the magician and his act. That allows for a good deal of technological gadgetry, elaborate trapdoors and substage tunnels and black lighting, not to mention wires and catwalks to enable levitation effects. Our stages are just… stages. There’s a minimal use of lights and mirrors and gadgets and atmospheric distractions. Not only would our revenue not support it, we like to think of this as a virtue – that we present classical magic. Carrefour was no different from most of our performers, at least at first.”

“And then?”

“Well, as time went on, he revamped his act. He reached back and began performing some of the tricks from earlier centuries, particularly from the Indian tradition. Amazing stuff, stunning effects… but…” He frowns, his hand lifting from the black cat and seesawing in the air.

“What?”

“Well, tastes have changed. His new act wasn’t very popular.”

“What do you mean? What tastes?”

“Tastes in what people want to see on the stage. They don’t want to be terrified anymore. Amazed, baffled, delighted – but not horrified or scared out of their wits. And more to the point where Carrefour was concerned, people have lost their appetite for gore. His act, as it matured – was… well… it was quite gory, actually. Very much in the tradition, but…” The curator shrugs.

“You don’t think people like gore? Hollywood would disagree.”

The curator shrugs. “I concede the point. Spilled guts, gouts of blood, staggering body counts. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre kind of thing. And all of it terrifyingly realistic – but still…” He tilts his head to the side. “A movie is a movie. No matter how realistic, it’s all been shot months ago and pieced together, and we all know that. It’s been previewed and advertised, the stars have made their promo rounds. And then we see this product, and what we see is projected on a screen in two dimensions.”

“Right. But even on the stage, you still know it’s… staged.”

“That’s true, but it’s quite another experience to see realistic violence in person, at close range, in real time. Even in the theater, there’s a tendency to stylize violence. For one thing, it’s very difficult to pull it off. Even a good fistfight – it’s hard to make it look real. The truth is most people don’t want to see violence that seems real. Good Lord, I was in Amsterdam once at some kind of arty theater and one of the actors dismembered a plant, ripped it to shreds on the stage – and I mean a potted philodendron – and some members of the audience were so shocked they walked out.”

“Hunh.”

“Spend a night at the Castle and go to the shows. You’ll see that the performance venues are fairly small. Even the largest stage only seats a hundred or so. The magicians are right on top of the audience – as they need to be for close-up magic. Some of Carrefour’s illusions – good heavens – you were afraid of spatter. Like sitting ringside at a boxing match with a bleeder in the ring. Not the kind of thing popular with the ladies, no matter how carnivorous.”

“But Carrefour was allowed to continue?”

“Well, before he revamped his act, he was very popular. His shows were jammed; he went straight onto our biggest stage. So even when he redid his act, there was some carryover. He was a tremendous performer. And although our public didn’t much like his act as it evolved, there was a lot of support for what he was doing within the ranks of the Castle.”

“Oh?”

“The effects he performed were famous within the history of magic, really storied illusions and, as I said, brilliantly done. Part of the Castle’s raison d’être, if you will, is to preserve the history of magic as an art form. So it was nice to see some of these effects revived, if only as historical curiosities. It wasn’t until one saw the performances that one realized how much tastes have changed. A century ago, the audience was quite bloodthirsty and no one would have batted an eye at any of what Carrefour did.”

“That big a change.”

“Lord, yes. Forget something as tame as a magic show which only appeared to shed blood. A century ago, bearbaiting and dog- and cock-fighting were hugely popular. Not to mention public executions. Lynchings. People simply flocked. Real blood? The more the better.”

“But now it turns people off.”

I nod, remembering Karl Kavanaugh commenting on this change in taste.

“Yes, even when they know it’s an illusion. When this young magician David Blaine pulled his heart out of his chest on television – I mean, reached into his shirt and yanked out this bloody, dripping, grisly hunk of meat – the network wanted to cut the footage. And that was televised.”

“What kind of thing would Carrefour do?”

“Well, let’s see. One of his standbys was the basket trick. An old, old trick, really ancient. Do you know it?”

I shake my head.

“Well, it’s quite in the old tradition to put the magician’s assistant in peril. You might see something stagy and antiseptic these days along that line: knives thrown around the pretty assistant, or a gadgety effect with the lady trapped or caged or sawn in half. No real sense of danger, though. This was not the case with the older tricks. The danger was emphasized. Everything possible was done to hype the peril to the assistant.”

“I see.”

“For tricks of the vintage Carrefour was working in, the magician would have had a child to assist him. Often, it was actually his son. We didn’t get to the pretty girls until a bit later. Whether it’s a pretty girl or a child, in both cases, the assistants are subservient to the magician and serve to reinforce his power. Really the advent of the female assistant represented a change in the dynamic. The magician and beautiful assistant are a kind of sexualized pair, really. With the young boy, you had instead a simulacrum of family life.”

“Father-son.”

“Exactly. The magician’s power was that of a patriarch, although in some cases, it was more like a master-slave relationship or some would say god-human. One of the assistant’s jobs, of course, is to serve as an agent of misdirection. You want to get the audience to look away from whatever you’re doing, so the magician might toss a ball, say, to the assistant. The eyes will follow the ball – it’s instinctive. As a source of misdirection, the scantily clad woman works well – it’s also instinctive to look at such creatures – but she doesn’t enlist empathy nearly as well as a child. She doesn’t get the audience on her side the way a child does.”

“I see what you mean.”

“A child has other wonderful attributes as an assistant. He’s small and can fit into smaller spaces. But mostly, he’s far more vulnerable than a woman. Plus, he wears a mantle of innocence, so the audience never thinks of a child as in on it, so to speak, as part of the deception. You can’t employ children now because of legal constraints, so Carrefour did the next best thing. He employed a young man – quite slight and youthful in appearance, but actually of legal age.”

“Interesting. So, how did the act go?”

“The basket trick was only the finale of Carrefour’s hour, mind you. There were many other effects and illusions. But in the basket trick itself, somewhere toward the end of the act, the boy blunders, does something clumsy with one of the props or acts defiantly.

“He’s forced into the basket as a punishment by the master. Often the basket is placed on an openwork pedestal so the audience can see there’s no trapdoor or anything of the sort, no way for the child to escape. So” – DeLand claps his hands together – “the boy’s inside and the magician is carrying on with the rest of his act, but the boy won’t shut up, just keeps whining and complaining. Finally, the magician loses his temper. He’s in the midst of some effect requiring swords and he impulsively picks one up and thrusts it into the basket. The boy cries out – ‘That really hurt! You really stabbed me!’ – but this just enrages the magician further. With bloodcurdling screams emerging from the basket, the magician thrusts more swords into it, crisscrossing them in such a way that it seems no one inside could survive. He’s in a fury, you see – interrupted in the midst of the ring trick or whatever. He returns to his act, greeting the screams of the boy with derision. ‘Go ahead and scream, it won’t help you. I’m not impressed. My Lord, what a baby.’ The screams weaken, turn into moans, and then finally, there’s silence.

“The audience is nervous. The magician heaves a sigh of relief and returns his full attention to his act – materializing rabbits, joining and separating rings, doing other tricks in his routine.

“The audience becomes concerned at the appearance of a pool of blood gathering beneath the basket. At their shouts – a plant is in the audience in case they don’t do their job here – the magician stops what he’s doing and crosses to the basket and sees the pool of blood. He yanks off the top of the basket and he’s overcome with remorse. It takes a good actor to pull this off, mind you, but Carrefour is a good actor. He begins the process of removing the swords, a gingerly process with much hesitation and wincing and gritting of the teeth. Then the magician exhorts the audience to help him bring the assistant back to life.”

The skin on my neck begins to crawl. I’m thinking of the detective from Big Sur, talking about the Ramirez twins. He was telling me that they’d put the pieces of the one kid back together, that the kid had been stabbed multiple times, run through.

And then I remember exactly what he said: The kid was a pincushion.

“You all right?” DeLand asks.

“Go ahead,” I manage.

“Well, the thing about the basket trick – the swords are real, the thrusts hard. The trick works because the assistant has rehearsed how to squeeze his body here and there on cue and in sequence, so he’s never touched. You can see why children are not permitted to perform such tricks nowadays. Like many of the old tricks, the basket trick can go wrong.”

“Hunh.”

“Some illusions are very dangerous. The basket trick relies on absolute adherence to a series of moves by two different individuals. There’s no margin of error. Bullet catching is another risky one. It used to be a standard part of many acts, but it’s quite dangerous. A famous magician died performing it in London in 1930 or so.”

I’m only half listening as DeLand goes on. Boudreaux performed the sawing-the-lady-in-half illusion with the Gabler twins, the basket trick with the Ramirez twins. But what the Sandling boys told me didn’t sound like preparation for either of these tricks.

“Penn and Teller,” DeLand is saying, “do a simultaneous bullet catch – but Houdini, for instance, for all the different ways he put himself in harm’s way, never caught bullets. His role model, Robert-Houdin, the very famous French magician of the mid-eighteenth century, performed the bullet catch quite famously in helping to quell an uprising in Algeria.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. He was sent to Algeria by the French government because some Marabouts were fomenting an uprising, using simple bits of magic to stir up the locals. Robert-Houdin staged – in open air – a demonstration of his powers, and by extension the powers of the French – to show the locals, you know, whose magic was more powerful. The pièce de résistance of Robert-Houdin’s demonstration occurred when he was challenged to a duel by one of the marabouts. He caught the bullet fired at him in his teeth and then discharged his own still-loaded gun at the whitewashed wall of a building abutting the street where the duel took place. Upon the bullet’s impact, the white wall was stained with a huge crimson splash of blood. That was the deal breaker for the Algerians. Robert-Houdin’s French magic was more potent than the Marabouts’ magic. The Algerians lost faith in the rabble-rousers and the resistance faded.”

“The French government hired him?”

“Oh, there are more ancient and far more recent examples of governments hiring magicians. Our CIA, for instance, hired the magician John Mulholland to school spies in how to avoid detection. Mulholland did demonstrations, workshops, and he wrote a series of manuals for the Agency.”

“Manuals?”

“On misdirection, sleight of hand, surprise.”

“Really!”

“Think about it. What do spies do? It’s all about illusion and deception. A spy appears to be something or someone he or she is not. A spy has to perform tasks in such a way as to remain undetected. What better skills to have for these tasks than sleight of hand and techniques of misdirection? If you can get the fellow to look the other way, or simply not to notice you…” He shrugs.

As interesting as this is, I want to return DeLand’s attention to Carrefour. “So – the basket trick was dangerous.”

“Yes. If the assistant didn’t squirm about just in the perfect sequence – or the magician forgot the sequence, or had a muddy moment – the assistant could be killed.” He stops, draws in a breath. “Good Lord, are you worried that your boys…?”

“I think that Boudreaux might be using the boys in some kind of act.”

“I do apologize for any… zeal… in describing the effects. I wouldn’t want my grandson to perform the basket trick.”

I nod and DeLand continues. “Where was I?”

“The grief-stricken magician was pleading with the audience to bring the boy back to life.”

“Right, yes. Then he does some chanting, something to concentrate his power. Finally, the magician is ready, he removes the top from the basket and voilà! – the boy climbs out, good as new.”

“Hunh.”

“It’s a resurrection, you see, a person brought back from the dead. Really, this is the basis of an enormous number of tricks, a tradition that goes back as far as we can go in the history of magic. I suppose such tricks hearken back to the days when magicians were priests. Even Houdini’s stunts, where he’d be lowered into the sea, manacled and in chains, would be classified as this type of effect. Or at least I’d argue that point.”

“Really?”

“A symbolic, if not a real death. The lone figure, inviting death to take him, the crowd holding its breath in tandem with the submerged magician, waiting impossibly long minutes with no sight of him. Would this be the time he went too far? Would this be the time death claimed him? And then, at last, the heroic resurfacing. That was received as a kind of miracle, a sort of resurrection.”

“Resurrection or not, people didn’t like Carrefour’s basket trick?”

“No, they didn’t. As I said, Carrefour is a gifted actor, and I’m afraid it was just too powerful. His rage, the blood, the screams – it was all too real. That was his entire problem. He scared people. Of course he did have his admirers.”

“What admirers?”

DeLand frowns. “Hmmm. Let me think. I remember a little Thai fellow and a Russian woman. Olga something. There was a sheikh. A few Goth types – quite harmless really, but they do like blood.” He sighs. “This was years ago and I don’t remember names. Maybe somebody would. I could ask. Oh, except one: Mertz. I almost forgot Mertz – and he was Carrefour’s biggest fan. A real devotee. I don’t think he ever missed a night when Carrefour was on. And they usually left together, after the show. I only noticed because they were quite the odd couple.”

“What do you mean?”

“Carrefour, you know, he’s a tall fellow and quite striking to look at. Mertz, on the other hand, is short and powerfully built, bald as an egg and almost as wide as he is tall. Rich as hell. Drove a Rolls. ’Course they were both Europeans, so that was a bond.”

“What do you mean? Carrefour’s real name is Byron Boudreaux, and he’s not European. He’s from Louisiana.”

DeLand is shocked. “No. He’s French.”

I shake my head.

“You never knew Carrefour was a stage name?”

“Alain Carrefour – that was the only name I ever knew him by. Well, I’ll be damned. I’ve been around the block a few times, even spent a couple of years in France. I never would have suspected… I told you Carrefour was a gifted actor.” He shakes his head. “Maybe Mertz is a gringo, too,” he says, with a little laugh.

“Was Mertz a member of the Castle?”

The curator shakes his head. “I don’t know. I can check. He didn’t perform, but he may have been an associate member. Certainly, he was a regular. And he was quite serious about magic. And I don’t think, by the way, that he was really an American unless he, too, was a brilliant actor. French or something. Maybe Belgian.”

“How was he… serious about magic?”

“He collected rare books on the subject. Mostly about the old Indian rope trick. We talked about it a couple of times. He had some exceptional books in his collection. Things that were hard to find. And extremely expensive.”

“The rope trick?”

“Ah, yes,” DeLand says. “The legendary Indian rope trick. Marco Polo mentioned it in his journal – that’s thirteenth century, but it’s thought to be much older than that. Originated in China, probably, then brought to India on the Silk Road.”

The watch on his wrist emits a series of sharp beeps, and he peers through his reading glasses to find the right button to turn it off. A sigh. “I have to go. My periodontist beckons.”

DeLand stands. “Why don’t you come back tonight?” he says. “You can take in the show if you like. I’ll be back here in time to put together whatever info we have in the archives about Carrefour. Mertz, too, if we’ve got anything. I’ll have it ready – you can pick it up.”

DeLand’s phone rings. It’s his taxi. I follow him down the stairs. “And there’s a fellow who knew Carrefour – he’s on stage tonight: Kelly Mason. You might want to talk to him. He probably knew Mertz as well, because they had an interest in common.”

“What was that?”

“The rope trick – Mason’s written several articles about it and I believe Mertz allowed him access to his collection. So he might know where Mertz is, and then if you find Mertz…”

“Right,” I tell him. “Look – Mr. DeLand…”

“Oh, please. John.”

“John. Look, I really, really appreciate your help. This information about Carrefour and Mertz and any addresses you might have – that would be just great. And I’d be very interested to talk to Kelly Mason.”

“Happy to help,” DeLand says. I’ve followed him down the steps and outside. His taxi waits in the oval drive. “I’ll arrange a ticket for you,” he says. “You can pick it up at the box office.”

“What time?”

“Earliest show is at seven, but shall we say… eight? I’ll meet you in the bar.”

“Fine.”

“I should warn you,” DeLand says. “We have a dress code. Suit and tie.”

I lift my hand as the taxi rolls off, then watch the bright yellow car, now visible, now invisible, as it winds down the hill.

I’m thinking about Mertz as I get into my rental and head down the hill myself. I drive toward my hotel, which is way down Santa Monica near Venice, thinking about the whole idea of Boudreaux having fans.

And then it hits me. Boudreaux has fans, of course he has fans – and not just for performances at the Magic Castle.

I remember the medical examiner in Vegas telling me he thought Clara Gabler’s body had been severed by a table saw, and how odd that had seemed to him because a chain saw would have done the job. Barry Chisworth – he sat across from me, mojito in hand, speculating about how hard it would have been to transport the table saw, a platform to hold it, and a power source to run it, all the way up to Conjure Canyon. The M.E. had been baffled. Why would anyone bother? Even when I puzzled it out – that the murderer went to all that trouble because the Gabler twins were killed in the course of a performance – I never gave a thought to a key element of any performance.

The audience.

Byron Boudreaux may have stopped performing magic in public. But he didn’t stop performing. There would have been an audience on hand to see Clara Gabler sawn in half. A circle of spectators to witness the murders of Julio and Wilson Ramirez. Just as there will be an audience on hand to witness the spectacle when he murders my sons.

It must be that these hideous inversions of standard magic tricks are what Byron meant on his postcard to Diment, what he meant by the phrase real magic.

Do the members of this audience know that the illusions are not illusions? That lives are sacrificed in the course of the show? I think they do. I think they must. I think that’s the point.

Mertz. Mertz. What had DeLand said about him? He was French or something and rich and he collected books about the rope trick.

The rope trick. What I know about the rope trick could be written on the back of a postage stamp: It’s something they used to do in India. They threw a rope into the air, and it hung there. Then they climbed it or something.

And then I have a terrible sequence of thoughts. Mertz is Boudreaux’s biggest fan. Mertz is obsessed with the rope trick. And what did the Sandling boys tell me about what they did in the “humongous house” before they escaped? They exercised. For hours, every day. They… climbed… ropes.