Read Murder by Magic for Free Online

was the deepest he’d felt in some time. “I don’t understand it. It’s not magic like I know it. I need to—”
    “I understand need,” she said, cutting him off as if uninterested in the sudden flood of genuine feeling that engulfed him. “I’ll show you how the trick works.”
    “A million dollars,” he repeated, awash in a foreign wave of gratitude.
    He really had to know, more than anything in his life. What life? It was all magic show. She’d probably give the million to some foundation for the disease that had killed her son. So he’d have helped her, after all. Life was strange, but magic was even stranger.
    It would be quite an event. She would only reveal her illusion by using him in it. He was to be the stooge hauled from the front rows of the audience. His hotel and her hotel had agreed to copromote the onetime union of two major Strip magicians as if they were world-class boxers having a ballyhooed rematch.
    Maybe they were.
    She also stipulated that he wear his stage costume: glittering black sequined vest and satin cummerbund, the vaguely frock-coat-style jacket with the capelet in the back. Even his corset. He had felt like blushing when she mentioned it. How did she know?
    It was obvious, though, that she had to know the stooge’s apparel before the illusion began. He knew he had no twin, but maybe she could make one. No one came to take an impression of his face beforehand, but makeup people could do incredible masks even from photos these days. More and more it was special effects instead of old-fashioned magic, like everywhere else in the entertainment industry.
    He was even announced on the program, a parchment flyer tucked into the glossy photo-book about Majika and her show that cost the marks nine bucks a throw: “Special Guest Appearance by Merlin the Magnificent by arrangement with the Goliath Hotel and Casino.”
    He sat down front, cricking his neck to look up at the stage he was used to looking down on people from. He felt like a kid dragged to a cultural outing, the local symphony maybe. There was a lot of show to sit through, and for a pro, it was all routine stuff, although the audience around him gasped and applauded.
    He patted his palms together; no stinging claps from him. The racket, music to his ears when he was onstage, only hurt them now, especially the enthusiastically shrill whistles. His act never got whistles, but that was because it offered an old-fashioned dignity. He shrank a little in the disconcertingly mobile seat. Old-fashioned dignity did not sound like where it was at these days. He wouldn’t outright copy Majika’s mirror illusion, but borrow the best of it. And being part of it, going through it, was the easiest way to master another magician’s illusion. You saw how it was done in an instant. Amazing that none of her audience stooges had been tempted to give away the trick, since it was the talk of Vegas and exposing it would cause a media frenzy. He was surprised that the Cloaked Conjuror at the New Millennium, who specialized in laying bare the mechanisms behind the magic, hadn’t touched Majika’s Mirror Image illusion.
    When the mirrored cabinet was finally whisked onstage by the black-spandexed minions, Marlon stared hard at the space above the wheels. No mirror halfway back to reflect the front wheels as if they were the back ones and disguise an escape or entrance through the stage floor. In fact, Majika writhed underneath the cabinet like a sex kitten—or Eartha Kitt in heat—just to show the space was open and empty.
    But not to worry. He’d soon know the way his “twin” would enter the box, although how she got that “two melt into one before your eyes” effect would be interesting to know. Probably mirrors again. So embarrassingly often, it was mirrors.
    When she singled him out in the audience, he stood, nervous as a schoolboy at his first magic show. He was used to being in control, the king of the board, not a pawn.
    As he headed