Now You See It: A Toby Peters Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

stopped, suddenly out of his reverie and said, “That’s a ridiculous idea. That dentist is infectious.”
    “He can be,” I said. “I suggest when you leave here you hurry past his door before he convinces you that you need bridgework.”
    We fixed a fee, forty dollars a day plus expenses plus a two hundred-dollar retainer, shook hands, and Blackstone and Phil headed for the door. As they were about to leave, I said,
    “Sure you don’t want to just call off Ott’s party?”
    “I’m looking forward to it,” Blackstone said, with more than just a twinkle in his eye.

Chapter 3
     
             Place a saucer and a drinking glass 1/4 full of water on a table. Drop a coin in the saucer. Pour 1/2-inch of water from the glass into the saucer. Ask a member of your audience to remove the coin with his or her fingers and not get the fingers wet without lifting the saucer. Solution: Take a piece of paper. Hold it over the empty glass. Strike a match. Drop the burning paper in the glass. As soon as the paper is finished burning, place the inverted glass in the saucer over the coin. The glass will suck up the water. The coin will be dry and can be picked up .
—From the Blackstone, The Magic Detective radio show
     
    C ALVIN O TT LIVED IN S HERMAN O AKS . I had called him and said I was on Blackstone’s staff and wanted to make arrangements for the reception.
    He readily agreed to see me and said to come right over. He sounded happy to hear from me.
    My cramped Crosley made its constipated and reluctant way up the winding roads, threatening to slip backward into the hillside oblivion when the road was too steep for its refrigerator engine.
    I listened to the radio and drove through modern Los Angeles, a mess of architectural styles and convulsive growth. There were survivors of the post-Civil War era with their cupolas and curlicues, brownstones from the 1880s with elaborate ornaments and great bay windows with colored glass, and a never-ending number of frame bungalows and boxlike office buildings from the first two decades of the twentieth century. Not to mention the pseudo-Spanish homes and apartment buildings from the boom back in the ’20s that also brought skyscrapers, movie palaces, and bizarre restaurant designs. There was a restaurant shaped like a derby hat, another one shaped like a rabbit, a third like an old shoe, another like a fish and one like a hot dog sandwich. There were also modern houses and steel, concrete and glass buildings. The landscape was also dotted in much of the County of Los Angeles by huge gas tanks, gaunt and grimy oil derricks, and silver power lines.
    KMTR radio news told me the Chinese had stormed the Japanese North Burma base of Mogaung. The Soviets were closing in on Minsk. French patriots had killed the Vichy Minister of Information and Propaganda, Phillipe Henriot, in his bed in Paris, and the Chicago Cubs were at the bottom of the National League standings with an 18-34 record.
    I passed houses with wrapped bundles of scrap paper pilled on the narrow sidewalks for pickup. The day was clear. Wet paper wasn’t accepted. I didn’t know why.
    Near the top of the hillside, the baritone voice on the radio told me that a Mrs. Elizabeth Koby of Whiting, Indiana, a $24-a-week Standard Oil employee, had received her two-week check. It was for $99,999.52. She returned it.
    In Augusta, Maine, Ralph E. Mosher, who’d won the nomination for state senator on both party tickets, reported his total campaign expenses as eighteen cents including ten cents for a beer to “relax tension.”
    In Los Angeles, a few miles down from where I was driving to the domicile of Calvin Ott, the police were investigating the robbery of $251 from Jim Dandy’s Market. The robber left one clue, his heel prints.
    Now well informed, I pulled onto the cobblestone driveway I was looking for and parked alongside a heavy blue four-door Pontiac.
    The house wasn’t big, not for this neighborhood, but I didn’t