Tabloid
Terrors
(Opening Chapter)
More Adventures of Maxi & Moxie
Teel
James Glenn
BooksForABuck.com
2016
Copyright
2010/2016 by Teel James Glenn, all rights reserved. No portion of this work may
be copied or duplicated in any form without express written permission from the
publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people or events is strictly coincidental.
Dedication:
To
Rob Preece who has had the faith in the
Donovans and me to back my play…
Acknowledgements:
To
my Wonderful Canadian, who is there for me constantly and gives me hope for the
future.
Table of
Contents:
Foreword: The World of the Dovovans
Prologue: A Hard
Act to Follow
Chapter One: The
Hand is Not So Quick
Chapter Two:
Thinking Outside The Box
Chapter Three:
Celebration/Misdirection
Chapter Four:
After Dinner Treats
Chapter Five:
Where There is a Will...
Chapter Six: Smoke
Gets in Your Eyes
Chapter Seven:
Memories Can Hurt
Chapter Eight:
Death from the Past
Chapter Nine: How
to Disappear a Body
Chapter One: A
Close Death with Brush
Chapter Two: In
Between and Out of It
Chapter Three:
Meet The Neighbors
Chapter Four: A
Lot on the Lot
Chapter Five: Duck
Ala Le’blonde
Chapter Six: The
Bite of it All
Chapter Eight:
Scoping Things Out
Chapter Nine:
Orange you glad I stopped by?
Chapter Ten: Hiding in PlainJane Sight
Chapter Eleven:
Not so Obscura.
Prologue: Things
outside the Cage…
Chapter One: Not
only skeletons in the closet…
Chapter Two: Sawdust Joe Donovan
Chapter Three:
Sawdust and Skullduggery
Chapter Five: The
Circus of the Darned
Chapter Seven:
Things in a Hole…
Epilogue: Square Truth from a Round Hole
Chapter Three: A
Tattoo is also Beat
Chapter Seven: The
Weighting Game.
Chapter Eight:
Fire when you see their monocles...
1938 was a lynchpin year in the world. In many ways it was the last of an ‘old world’ and the beginning of a new. The depression was fading, the crippling horror of the rampant poverty that followed the crashes of 1929 and 1933 and the world was slipping inevitably toward World War Two.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President, Benny Goodman and his band became the first jazz band to play at Carnegie Hall.
A loaf of bread was nine cents, a hamburger thirteen cents and admission to the movies a nickel, for which one got to see a newsreel, a cartoon, a short, a second feature and an A picture. This was the year that the prototype Bugs Bunny premiered in a cartoon short.
People still read the papers as a daily ritual; radio shows like The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet and Sergeant Preston were the heroes on the airwaves and the public got to see the Republic film serial of the Lone Ranger up on the screen.
Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre of the Air launched a real panic with his fake invasion from Mars on the radio.
The Long Island Express—a devastating hurricane—cut a path of destruction of the east coast of the U. S.
But while America was on the upswing from the recession of ‘37 the world around it was in turmoil.
Mexico nationalized all the foreign oil wells within its borders.
Hitler and his National Socialist Party were escalating their persecution of the Jews and had successfully bluffed Europe and fooled Chamberlain of ‘peaceful intentions’ while ‘annexing’ the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.
In the Far East the Land of the Rising Sun was entrenched in Manchuria and had already begun the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians considered ‘inferior’ and sub-human by the Japanese conquerors
In America the Nazi Bund was still a powerful force and beginning to alarm many in Washington because, as much as there were isolationists in many quarters, there were those that knew the ravaging winds of war were about to blow again.
This then is the world reporter Michael (Moxie) Aloysius Donovan and his actress wife Maxi live in. They meet the high and low, the famous and the infamous.
The first story in this collection takes place earlier in the lives of our hero and heroine (between The Beast of Governors Island and The Deadly Puppets for those keeping score), and the rest carry their adventures forward.
Come with us to those days not so long ago when there was hope and horror in equal parts, action and adventure and where a hero (or heroine) could always resort to a good right cross to dispatch an evil goon.
Teel James Glenn,
2/22/16
Usually I come in late to things like
murders and mysteries, often playing catch up to make my deadlines with the
scoop, but this time I was sitting front row and center when long twisting
threads wove together and death came to Broadway.
It as a
warm June night and the Majestic Theatre on West Forty Fourth Street was
packed. It was for a special variety fundraiser for the Actor’s Relief Fund on
Monday, which was the ‘dark night’ for the Great White Way.
I was
seated right in front of the orchestra, the best seat in the house but this
time not because of my press pass. This time I’d paid for my ticket, both
because it was a worthy cause and because my best girl Maxine Keller (aka
Maxine Gladys Kellerman of the Bronx) was traipsing around on the stage, dancing,
singing and acting as assistant to Greystone the Great in his magic act.
Any
chance to see her in tights was worth it, but more so because I’d missed her
last show, The Cat and the Canary
that only had a nine performance run. I was out of town for the whole thing
chasing a story that turned out to be the one that got away. Her play had
closed in the same theatre as the benefit two nights before but it didn’t stop
my red haired siren. She had already gotten the lead in another show.
On
either side of me in the front row were a who’s who of the magic trade, come to
see a rare New York performance by the dean of the Mandrake trade—Greystone himself.
He was
everything you’d expect from a distinguished elder statesman of the conjuring
crowd, with a Van Dyke beard, silver hair swept back from a high forehead and
often wore white tie and tails when performing. He used to travel with a large
and sizable cast of uniformed male and female assistants and for a number of
years he toured in the Midwest, often performing throughout the day between
film showings.
He’d
retired a couple of years ago and settled down to a little castle on Long
Island. I had actually met him when I worked in Kansas City years before and
the old bird took a liking to me. When he decided to do the benefit, he’d
called me to ask if I knew anyone who was reliable and a quick study to be his
main assistant. That sounded like Maxi to me.
We’d
been dating for about seven months and this reporter, one Moxie Donovan, was
about as smitten as smit can be.
Greystone
remained silent during much of his big stage show, which was presented to the
accompaniment of a pit orchestra and such lively tunes of the time as “Who”, “I Know That You Know”, and “Chinatown.”
Among
his especially effective illusions was one in which Maxi was lying on a couch
and covered with a gossamer shroud. He did some passes over her and she
appeared to float high in the air and then vanish at the moment that Greystone
pulled off the covering.
It was
hocus pocus at its finest and all my reporter cynicism went out the window when
my redhead vanished. I clapped and oohed and awed with everyone else. The magic
mavens seated with me clapped politely but I suspected they were staring not in
awe but jealousy at the maestro’s work, trying to figure out how he did it.
At the
moment I didn’t even try ‘cause
I knew I didn’t have a prayer of figuring it out. I might even quiz him on how
he did it afterward—though
I knew he wouldn’t tell me—when
I used to get him soused in Kansas City he still honored the magician’s code
and was mum.
It was
like when Maxi said she enjoyed my company—I just accepted it even though I didn’t really
believe it. She could have done a lot better: I was the one trading up.
Maxi did
a little dance routine with a muscular chorus boy while the next piece of
apparatus was rolled out onto stage. The orchestra struck up a scary tune and
my doll stepped into a cabinet in front of many bright, clear, tubular
incandescent light bulbs.
Greystone
smiled at the audience and I thought he shot a look at the three other
conjurors that had an awful lot of ‘you
wish you could do this’ in it. He looked my way and it made me wonder why
he had asked me to be sure to have time to talk after the show. “I have a
writer question for you,” he had said. My curiosity was piqued.
The
magician suddenly pushed the perforated front of the cabinet backward. The
light bulbs protruded through the holes in the front of the box (to the
accompaniment of my lady’s blood-curdling scream). I knew it was a trick but
hearing her scream almost got me on my feet. I’d heard that scream before when
she and I had met.
I
normally worked the crime beat for the New York Star and not the Broadway beat
but I’d drawn the short straw one day last winter and had to cover a film being
shot on Governors Island. Maxi was the star with old mumble mouth himself, Bela
Lugosi.
A madman
had killed several of the crew and almost killed Maxi and yours truly. I heard
her scream then and it sounded a bit too much like the one from the stage.
Greystone
gestured and the cabinet revolved so that the audience seemed to see that Maxi
seemed to be impaled by the blinding filaments.
I knew
it was a trick but a chill went up my spine.
The
master magician smiled with a devilish grin, flashing me a special
acknowledgement of my terror, then dropped a curtain over the horrific sight.
He clapped his hands and suddenly Maxi jumped out, fully intact and smiling.
It was a
great trick and the house approved with thunderous applause.
The
master magician then moved on to what he called ‘his most dangerous ‘illusion’.
Sawing a woman in half!
And that
was my woman up there!
I was on
the edge of my seat again as his assistants rolled out a big electric circular
saw some three or four feet in diameter that was mounted on a swing-down arm.
Greystone, with many expansive gestures, demonstrated the efficacy of the
device by sawing noisily through a piece of very real looking lumber.
That’s
when Maxi, in the role of his faithful assistant allowed herself to be placed
on the saw table in full view, as wide metal restraints were clamped on her
midsection. She flashed a smile at the audience then, for theatrical effect,
her expression changed to one of apprehension.
At least
I hoped it was for theatrical effect.
The
blade whirred and with a very mischievous looking Greystone appeared to pass
the steel saw through her body. A ripping a sound went through the entire
theatre and I felt suddenly sick to my stomach that wasn’t helped when she let
out a blood curdling shriek, and particles of what looked like cloth from her
costume were scattered by the whirring blade.
When the
blade stopped she, of course, rose unharmed and took a bow. I let out my breath
and relaxed a bit, hoping that my honey wasn’t going to be subjected to any
more faux abuse.
Again applause, even from the three magic mavens seated near me.
I
eyeballed the Mandrake wanna-bes and thought about
what Greystone had told me about them. They were the top three below him on the
pyramid hierarchy of the magic game and I suppose they were a bit worried he
might eclipse them with this rare return from retirement.
Gunter
Halsted was much in the mold of Greystone, a silver
haired and sharp featured Teutonic and was a decade younger than the maestro.
Jonny Bolt (who billed himself as The Amazing Bolt) was as flashy as his name
and looked more like an auburn haired lounge singer than the classical image of
a stage illusionist. He was barely thirty, which made him the upstart in the
trio.
The last
of the Musketeers was ‘Count’ Hideki Tagora, a Japanese who was a round-faced member of his race with
dark intelligent eyes that were riveted to every move Greystone made.
“Ladies
and gentlemen,” the British prestidigitator said in his cultured accent. His
assistants moved the saw off leaving just him and Maxi alone on stage. “I now
present, for your edification my most deadly illusion; the Bullet Catch!”
An
audible gasp went up from the crowd and the three watching magicians leaned
forward like children at a matinee.
Even I
knew that the bullet catch was one of the tricks of the biz that most wannabe
wizards would never even attempt; it was the one they called ‘The cursed trick!’
A target
and a pane of glass was wheeled out onto the stage and one of the uniformed men
brought out an old fashioned flintlock rifle in a firing vice, and a powder
horn which he handed to Greystone.
“I will
now load and fire this rifle to show you that it works just fine,” he smiled at
the audience. The orchestra played a slow, tense tune and the magician
proceeded to put powder, wadding and a musket ball into the barrel. He tamped
it down.
“As you
can see,” Greystone continued. “This is a very real gun.” He turned quickly and
fired at the target across the stage. The target shuddered with the obvious
impact of the ball.
There
was tense applause as the audience took in the importance of what they were
witnessing. A sense of apprehension spread through the house as the magician
set about reloading the rifle, repeating the process of powder, wadding and
tamping the bullet down.
Now I
felt my palms sweating and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I was sure
my heart pounding in my chest would drown out the orchestra and I was not sure
I could sit there quietly if the magician pointed the loaded rifle at my gal.
He
didn’t. Instead, Greystone set the rifle in the aiming rack and stepped across
the stage to stand before the target. His male assistant slid the glass pane
between him and the rifle.
“I will
now attempt to catch the bullet between my teeth,” Greystone said. “Which my lovely assistant Maxine will fire.” He smiled at
my lady and waved a relaxed hand to her. “Go ahead, my dear, I feel particularly
hungry today; I think I need some iron in my diet!”
Maxi
smiled nervously at him and then stepped up to the clamped and pre-aimed rifle.
I could tell she was uneasy with her job though I’m sure she looked poised and
professional to the rest of the house.
The
orchestra stopped playing except for a timpani drum roll.
“Go
ahead, my dear,” the magician assured her. “These good folks are waiting.”
Maxi
swallowed, gave a game smile then pulled the trigger.
The
explosion seemed particularly loud. The glass pane shattered and the magic
master staggered back.
Everyone
in the theatre held their breath.
Then
Greystone stood up straight and smiled to reveal what appeared to be the bullet
held in his teeth!
The
house went wild with applause, Maxi looked relieved and I gave a little laugh
of relief.
Just
then the white shirt front of the master magician’s shirt turned red, his face
went pale and he fell over looking very, very dead!
The whole of the Majestic Theatre was
too stunned to move for a long moment save for a collective gasp. Then the
women screamed, men began to yell and chaos rippled through the house.
On stage
Greystone lay still on the stage and my redhead raced over to him, yelling
“Curtain!” at the top of her singer lungs.
I was
out of my seat and did a dive over the orchestra pit to roll onto the stage
just as the fire curtain came down.
I went
straight for the fallen illusionist but still managed to shoot my gal a glance.
Her eyes were filled with terror but I saw a moment of thankfulness for my
arrival.
Greystone
was in a bad way. His shirt was stained crimson and I pulled back his jacket to
see a hole cleanly through into his chest. He still had a musket ball in his
teeth which he spit out as I knelt.
“Michael,”
he whispered, using my given name. “Not an accident.”
“Easy, Aleister, “I said. “Well talk about it later.”
“No
time,” he murmured. His face was ghastly white. “The book.
This to protect the secret.”
I had
pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and was pressing it against the wound,
barely listening to him. “Get a doctor, now!” I yelled.
Maxi was
right beside me, loosening Greystone’s tie and stroking a hand along his pale
cheek.
“I don’t
understand what went wrong,” she whispered. “It was just like in rehearsal.”
Greystone
made an attempt to shake his head. “He did it.” He whispered. “Not you.” His
eyes darted from her face to mine. “Take care of him.”
The
wounded magic man then took a deep breath, his whole body shuddered and then he
was completely still.
“Moxie—”Maxi said. “is—”
“Yeah,
babe, he’s gone.”
She
collapsed against me in a torrent of tears and I’m not ashamed to say I teared
up as well, but I stopped myself from losing it completely, choosing to let my
anger well up instead. Us Irish folk can do that—anger now, pain later.
Two
doctors who had been rounded up from the audience were attending to the fallen
mage.
The
stage was swarming with other performers now and the three magicians from the
first row were standing like vultures at the edge of the curious and horrified
crowd. I spotted a couple of other newsies in the
group and was sure that more had already run to the lobby phones to call the
story in but I wasn’t even thinking about getting a scoop.
“Moxie,”
my gal said as she hugged tight to me. “He can’t be gone.”
“He is,
doll, but I’ll make sure he doesn’t go quietly.” I was thinking about what he
said, ‘Not an accident.’ and ‘He did it.”
My
friend’s death was not an accident; he was murdered, and I was going to find
out who did it and make them pay!
****
“The
bullet catch is arguably the most dangerous illusion that a magician can
attempt, even when performed in a controlled situation. Legends say that more
than over a dozen magicians have been killed while performing it. Like many
magic illusions,” the gnome behind the counter said, “there is no single way
the bullet catch is performed. The method a magician may use will vary from
performer to performer. Not surprisingly the gun or the bullet is rigged in
some way.”
My
lecture was courtesy of Digger Tome who was Lord of the Stacks in the little
bookstore on Thompson Street that he owned called “The Tome Tomb.”
Rumor
had it he’d done the carnival/vaudeville circuit with a memory act until he’d
saved up enough to open his bookstore. True or not he was a wealth of every
kind of information a low-life tabloid reporter like me could use. He was my
secret weapon to get good copy in record time. This time, though, I was there
for personal reasons, not to please my editor.
“Aleister said he had developed his own way,” Maxi said,
“But that it involved switching the real musket ball with a wax one.”
“A
traditional version, to be sure,” Digger pontificated. It was amazing to me
that he could form words at all the way his eyes devoured my redhead. To be
fair to the little troll, she looked amazing in a tailored black dress that she
was wearing to Greystone’s funeral later that day. Digger was a scowling
gargoyle of a man, with thinning hair slicked back, wearing thick glasses and
with the pallor of an undertaker though Maxi’s presence seemed to give color to
his cheeks.
“If the
gun is to be loaded in front of the audience,” Digger continued, “a wax bullet
is loaded into the firearm. The spray of liquid wax from the barrel of the gun
is more than enough to break the pane of glass and convince the audience a
‘real’ bullet is being used. A good magician is able to use misdirection to
exchange the bullet he shows to the crowd with one made of wax and place the
marked bullet into his or her mouth.”
“That’s
what Aleister did,” Maxi said. “He even demonstrated
me how he switched the wax ball for the steel ball he showed. There was a
magnet on the end of the tapping rod that he used to pull the steel ball out.”
“The
coroner said he was killed by a sliver of iron that entered his chest near the
heart and spun like a top or a dum-dum bullet and cut him up inside.” I said to
add cheer to the conversation. “They think it was a sliver of metal from inside
the barrel of the gun.”
Maxi
gave me an accusing look so I quickly added, “I don’t think that, though.”
“How do you
explain it then?” She asked.
“I can’t—yet.”
“I think
I might be able to,” Digger said. His pumpkin face split into a wide
Jack-o-lantern grin. Me and my gal both turned to stare at him and waited but
he wanted to stretch out his moment in the spotlight.
“In the
simplest form of the bullet catch, the gun fires nothing at all, just blanks.”
He said, “The glass pane is actually destroyed using a squib. All the performer
has to do in that case is keep the bullet in their mouth. But your friend chose
the wax ‘bullet’, correct?”
“Yes,”
Maxi said with a little annoyed tone in her voice. “I told you that.”
“I
think,” he continued, not the least bit cowed by my red haired gal, “that what
happened was that someone put that sliver of metal inside the wax ball that
Mister Greystone used.”
“Inside of it?” I asked.
“Yes.”
He nodded which caused his glasses to slip down his nose. “It would not be the
first thing that hit the glass pane-but would continue on tumbling just like a
dum-dum bullet would.”
I stared
at him as I considered his theory. “Wow,” I said. “That’s diabolical—but brilliant.” Then I
thought about it. “It wouldn’t be fool proof, of course—it might have missed him or just wounded him but, unless
you were looking for it to be deliberate, you would conclude it was just what
the police did. Brilliant.”
“Any
time, Moxie,” he said accepting the compliment I meant for the killer. “Mister
Greystone was a class act; you don’t see his kind anymore; a real hero for what
he did in Turkey during the war.”
“What
did he do?” Maxi asked.
“He did his act for the hill tribesmen,” I said. “Aleister had told me a bit about it in one of our evening pub crawls.”
When she
looked at me like I’d grown a second head I laughed. “Really; he was able to
sway a lot of the hill tribes of the Kurds and Arabs to the British cause. Much
like Neville Maskelyne did in the Sudan the generation before. Those isolated
tribes were a very superstitious lot, you know. He turned down a citation from
the King for his work. He was a great man.”
I smiled
thinking of the old fellow telling me tales of his adventures charming the
natives like he had charmed so many paying audiences in a fifty year career on
the stage.
The
three of us stood there in silence for a long moment considering what we had
deduced. Then Digger reached behind his counter and brought out an old style
glass flask.
“A
little nip to keep the brain sharp?” He held the flask up and offered it to
Maxi who looked at me. I nodded and she took it and, after a quick sniff took a
stiff drink.
“Wow!”
She said. “Smooth single malt!” She handed it to me and I took a pull before
handing it back to the archivist.
“To
friends,” he said before he took his snort. “Here and
absent.”
Poignant
little gargoyle almost got me teary eyed again over Greystone.
“We had
better get going or we’ll be late for the funeral,” Maxi reminded me.
“Yeah,”
I said putting a fin on the counter for Digger. “I’ll bring you a bottle of Glenfiddich to follow this, Digger. Thanks.”
I left
with Maxi on my arm and hailed a cab to take us up to St. Patrick’s Cathedral
where the funeral for the old magician would be held. Once in the cab we both
lit up cigarettes.
“What
now?” she asked me as the hack wove its way up Lexington Avenue.
“Well,” I said taking a long drag on the coffin nail. “Now we know the how. Next step is to find the who and make them pay.”
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Teel James Glenn was born in Brooklyn and has traveled the world for forty years as a stuntman, fight choreographer, swordmaster, jouster, book illustrator, playwright, storyteller, bodyguard, ballyhoo for a haunted house and actor.
His stories have appeared in scores of
magazines like Sherlock Holmes, Mad, Weird Tales, Black Belt, Blazing!Adventures, Steampunk Tales, Silverbalde
Quarterly Spinetingler and Fantasy Tales. He has over three-dozen books in print in multiple
genres.
He was awarded Best Pulp Writer by the 2012 Pulp Ark.
You can keep up on his adventures at theurbanswashbuckler.com.
Adventures in Otherwhen
Deadline Zombies*
Headline Ghouls*
Manchurian Shadows**
Shadows of New York**
Tabloid Terrors*
Three Deadly Shadows
Weird Tales of the Skullmask
* Moxie and Maxie Adventures
** Doctor Shadows Adventures