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

think there were many to match it in the neighborhood. Stone gargoyles stood on either side of the entrance. Their heads were turned so their blank eyes would meet approaching guests. The high doorway itself was made of dark wood. Cut deeply into the wood was the figure of another gargoyle. There was no handle that I could see. No knocker and no bell.
    I raised my hand to knock, but before I could, a deep voice from above the door said,
    “Your name?”
    “Toby Peters.”
    “Say the magic words that opens the door of the cave.”
    “Open sesame,” I tried.
    “No,” came the voice.
    “Give me a hint.”
    “It’s ‘abracadabra,’” came the voice.
    “Abracadabra,” I said.
    The door opened. A thin man in a white suit, white shirt, white shoes, and black tie stood in front of me. He had a glass of clear liquid in his left hand. His face was smooth and pink, his hair receding. He was about forty.
    “Calvin Ott?” I asked.
    “Maurice Keller,” he said, with a shake of his finger to suggest that I was being intentionally naughty. “Come in.”
    The brightly lit wood paneled hallway was covered with large, colorful eye-level posters, evenly spaced.
    “That one,” Ott said beaming as he closed the door behind me, “is my favorite.”
    The poster showed a nearly bald man sitting in a wooden chair. The man’s head was floating away from him. The words on the poster read: Keller In His Latest Mystery. Self-Decapitation.
    “A favorite,” Ott said, pointing to the poster. “The master. A brilliant illusion.”
    “Impressive,” I said as he led me down the hallway past more posters.
    On my left was the wide-eyed face of a man wearing a large turban with a bright emerald green stone in the middle of it. The words on the sign read: Alexander. The Man Who Knows .
    On the right was a poster of a smiling man with cartoonlike ghosts floating around him: Do Spirits Return? Houdini Says No And Proves It .
    We moved past colorful posters of Brush the Mystic and His Hindu Box; Carter The Great Beats The Devil; Floyd, King of Magic; Dante; Levante, Long Tak Sam.
    Ott stopped and faced the last one on the left at the end of the hallway.
    “Probably my favorite of all.”
    It was a color illustration, depicting a clean-shaven smiling man in a tux with a white flower in his buttonhole walking next to a white shrouded skeleton looking at him. A pot of fire sat next to them with little drawings of someone in an electric chair, a guillotine, and a man about to be lowered into a glass vat of water. The name Steen ran across the top of the poster, and there a phrase in French on the bottom.
    “The man who is amused by death,” Ott translated, stepping into a large white-carpeted living room with ceiling-to-floor windows at the end.
    The matching plush furniture included two armchairs and a sofa, with a large low round table between them. On the table was a skull nestled on a well-polished dark wooden base. The room was lined with shelves filled with gadgets.
    Ott pointed to one of the chairs. I sat. It was comfortable. He clapped his hands and the chair began to shake. I held onto the arms to keep from falling.
    “Spirits?” he asked, eyes widening.
    He clapped again and the shaking stopped.
    “Spirits?” he repeated. “Sherry? Something stronger? A beer?”
    “Pepsi,” I said. “If you have it.”
    The skull had turned slightly and was looking at me.
    “That’s the skull of Bombay The Great,” Ott said, a small smile on his face. “Bombay perfected the flying carpet illusion. He lost his head in a train wreck outside of Turin in 1883. I gained his head forty years later. Pepsi?”
    “Yeah,” I said, meeting Bombay the Great’s hollow gaze.
    “Be right back,” Ott said, his grin growing, his eyebrows raised. “Amuse yourself, but don’t touch.”
    When he left I got up and looked at the gizmos on shelves. There were glasses—both the kind you drink from and the kind you wear—books, lamps, an open straight