“If I had not been partway out of the cage at the time, all three bullets would have gone straight into my chest.”
Stunned, Irene stopped massaging his leg. “I don’t understand.”
“I was wrapped in a lot of chains. They looked impressive but the whole assembly was designed to fall away when I unlocked a single lock. One of the assistants slipped the key to me just as I was lowered into the cage. I tried to use it as soon as the curtain was lowered around the cage. But it was the wrong key.”
“What did you do?”
“I had never really felt comfortable relying on an assistant to slip me a key. I always carried a backup hidden in my hair. But it took me a few seconds to realize that the first key was the wrong one and then a few more seconds to get the backup key and insert it into the lock. When the masked assistant fired the first two shots, I was only partway out of the cage. I normally would have been all the way out at that point.”
“So it wasn’t an accident. The rumors were true. Someone tried to murder you.”
“It was all carefully planned, from the false key to the real bullets.”
“But who would want to kill you?” Irene paused. “That pair who eloped to Hawaii?”
“No. While I was recovering in the hospital, Chester conducted his own private investigation. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to come up with a suspect. There was only one person who hated me enough to murder me onstage in front of a packed audience.”
“Of course,” Irene said. “Your friend and partner, Geddings.”
“That is . . . very perceptive of you.”
“You became what he had always wanted to be, a brilliant magician who could thrill audiences. A star.”
“He had helped me become a skilled magician but he was jealous of his own creation.”
“Geddings didn’t create you, Oliver. Your talent is yours and yours alone. Geddings may have helped you perfect your skills, but he had to know that you would have become a success with or without him. That’s why he was consumed with jealousy. No matter how skilled he was, he would never be the star that you became.”
“Well, he made sure that my stardom came to an end.”
“What happened to him?”
“Geddings? He died a few days later, shortly after the doctors concluded that I wasn’t going to die or lose my leg.”
“How?”
“He put some more real bullets into the gun and shot himself in the head.”
“Suicide.”
“He left a wife and a son behind.”
“Do they know what he tried to do?”
“No,” Oliver said. “There was no reason to tell them. Chester and I let the accident story stand.”
“What about the other assistants? Did they figure it out?”
“I’m sure Willie did. Some of the others probably did, too. But we don’t talk about it.”
“A show business family secret?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“What happened to Geddings’s wife and son?”
“Geddings didn’t leave them much. He was never good with money.” Oliver set the empty glass aside. “I take care of his wife and son.”
Irene smiled. “Of course you do.”
Chapter 51
The following evening Julian was sharing a booth with Tremayne in the heavily shadowed hotel lounge when he heard the siren in the distance. It occurred to him that it was the first time he had been aware of a siren since his arrival in Burning Cove. One of the reasons, he reflected, was that the hotel was located nearly a mile outside of town. That lessened the odds of hearing emergency vehicles. It also increased the odds that the siren blaring in the night was headed toward the hotel.
He paused his Manhattan halfway to his mouth and glanced toward the exit he had marked the first time he walked into the lounge. It was located at the end of a darkened hallway, just past the men’s room.
Regardless of whether he was working or not, whenever he entered a confined space, he always made certain to identify at least one escape route that could be utilized in the event that things went wrong. His father had insisted that he establish the habit at the start of his career, and he had to admit that it had saved his neck on more than one occasion.
“Wonder what’s going on?” Nick said.
His voice was slurred by the cocktails he had been drinking steadily since dinner.
The wailing siren halted abruptly.
Julian checked the bar. Willie was reaching for the phone. She spoke quietly into the receiver and then replaced it.
“Nothing to be concerned about,” Willie announced calmly. “It’s not a fire. There’s been an accident in one of the villas. The ambulance has just arrived. Everything is under control.”