Page 19 of Tightrope

“Makes sense,” Luther admitted. “All of the legends about Smith emphasize that he likes to control the territory as much as possible. We also know that he always stays deep in the shadows. It’s possible that he manipulated Pickwell into booking a room at the Hidden Beach, but we can’t rule out other explanations, such as the possibility that Miss Vaughn is somehow involved in this thing.”

“No,” Matthias said.

“Why do I have the feeling that you don’t want to consider Miss Vaughn a suspect?”

“You must be psychic.”

Luther was silent for a moment.

“I thought I had the trap all set,” he said after a while. “Lure Pickwell to Burning Cove with the promise of the demonstration at the Palace. Arrange for the sale of the Ares to take place in the parking lotof the Paradise Club. Grab Smith when he arrived to take the machine. But he somehow got out ahead of us. How the hell did he do it?”

“It was a deal arranged by a broker who handles underworld business transactions,” Matthias said. “If you’re right about Smith, he’s been in the weapons trade for years. That means he has mob connections, too.”

Chapter 8

Willa Platt was perched on a stool in a diner near the Redondo Beach pier, trying to make a cup of bad coffee last long enough for her to finish perusing the Help Wanted listings in the newspaper, when she got distracted by the story of the robot that had murdered its inventor.

She started reading out of curiosity but when she got to the last two paragraphs she could hardly believe her eyes.

... While in town, Dr. Pickwell was staying at the Hidden Beach Inn on Ocean View Lane. The establishment, now owned by Miss Amalie Vaughn, is well-known to residents of Burning Cove as the scene of a recent, mysterious tragedy.

Not long ago, Madam Zolanda, the celebrity known as the Psychic to the Stars, leaped to her death from the roof of the mansion. This event occurred hours after the psychic had predicted death onstage at the very same theater, thePalace, where Pickwell was giving the demonstration when he was murdered by the robot...

Willa folded the paper and got to her feet. The Abbotsville disaster had been the final straw for the Ramsey Circus. Already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the show had collapsed a few weeks later. It could not survive without its star attraction, the Flying Princess. In the wake of the mysterious death of the rigger, the rumors that had circulated through the circus world had crushed any hope that Amalie Vaughn could continue to perform. After Abbotsville, no aerialist would work with her.

By rights, Amalie Vaughn should have been living in some decrepit boardinghouse trying to eke out a living as a lunch-counter waitress.Likeme,Willa thought. Instead, the Flying Princess was living in a posh seaside resort town and running her own business.

While I sit here drinking rotgut coffee and trying to land another job.

Willa opened her purse and took out her wallet. She had just enough money for a train ticket to Burning Cove. When you were down on your luck, you turned to family. They had to take you in.

Chapter 9

His name was Eugene Fenwick. He was sitting at a lunch counter in a farm town in California, hunched over a plate of meat loaf and lima beans, when he saw the front-page story. He lost interest in the killer robot when he got to the end of the piece and saw the name of the woman with whom he had been obsessed for months: Amalie Vaughn. The flyer who had murdered Marcus.

The Flying Princess was only about four hundred miles away, living in a fancy coastal town while he was sweating in the hot sun of the northern portion of California’s Central Valley, picking crops and doing odd jobs.

For a couple of minutes the rage threatened to overwhelm him. He almost gagged on the meat loaf. He forced himself to swallow and take a couple of deep breaths. Gradually the mad fury subsided.

He had joined a circus when he was a kid, working as a roustabout until he learned how to rig the trapeze and high wire acts. He’d considered himself a pretty good rigger until he met Marcus Harding.

Marcus had possessed an instinctive feel for calculating loads,counterbalances, and tension. He could figure out the best anchor points. He knew how to make the pretty aerialists and the handsome catchers fly and he knew how to make the high wire performers seemingly walk on air. Harding had movie-star looks and a build like Johnny Weissmuller. He had no trouble getting the beautiful flyers into bed. It was just a game to him.

But Marcus had been crazy for thrills. Crazy in other ways, as well. He’d had another name at one time and been a catcher in a trapeze act, but after he’d dropped a flyer, no one would work with him.

He had changed his name to Harding and started drifting, following the trains that took the circuses, carnivals, and aerialists to towns across the country. Like Eugene, he got by picking up rigging and roustabout work wherever he could get it.

Once, when the two of them were sharing a bottle of cheap whiskey, Marcus had confided that he’d deliberately let the pretty flyer slip out of his grasp. It had been an impulse, he said. But the look of shock on the flyer’s face as she realized she was going to fall had excited him like nothing else he’d ever experienced.

What made it even more thrilling, he said, was that he had been having an affair with her. Watching her fall had been a thousand times better than the sex.

The flyer had survived because there had been a net but Marcus told Eugene that he’d often wondered what it would be like to drop an aerialist who was working without a net. The problem was that it meant he would have to work without a net, as well. He no longer wanted to take that kind of risk.

Eugene had started to think about all the pretty flyers who had refused to sleep with him, and he, too, began to wonder what it would be like to watch one fall all the way to the ground.

He’d also started drinking, and his rigging had gotten sloppy.

One afternoon on a hot summer day in a small midwestern town, a flyer he had hung went down. She had landed safely in the net but theboss had figured out fast that she had fallen because of a failure in the rigging. Eugene and Marcus were both fired.

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