Page 4 of Tightrope

“What’s that thing doing?” Hazel whispered.

“I have no idea,” Amalie said.

They watched along with everyone else as the robot opened the suitcase that it had just placed on the bench. Pickwell finally realized that he had lost the attention of the crowd. He turned away from the podium to see what was going on at the bench.

Futuro reached into the suitcase and took out a gun.

There was a collective gasp from the audience.

“No,”Pickwell shouted. “Futuro, I command you to put down the gun.”

The robot pulled the trigger. Twice. The shots boomed throughout the theater.

Pickwell jerked under the impact of the bullets. He opened his mouth to cry out but he could not speak. He collapsed onto his back.

Futuro calmly clanked offstage, disappearing behind the curtain.

Stunned, Amalie stared at the unmoving figure on the stage. It was a trick, she thought. It had to be some sort of bizarre charade designed to shock the audience.

Most of the crowd evidently believed the same thing. The majority of the people in the seats did not move. They appeared stunned.

But not everyone was frozen in shock. Amalie glimpsed motion out of the corner of her eye. When she turned to look, she saw that Luther Pell and the stranger who had accompanied him to the theater had left their seats and were making their way to the stage steps. They were moving fast, almost as if they had been anticipating trouble.

When they reached the stage, they were joined by Oliver Ward, who had managed to move with surprising speed, considering that he had a noticeable limp and was obliged to use a cane. His wife, Irene, was not far behind. She had her notebook in one hand.

Luther Pell and the stranger vanished behind the curtain. Ward crouched beside Pickwell and unfastened the inventor’s tuxedo jacket to expose a blood-soaked white shirt.

The theater manager had evidently been watching the demonstration from the last row. He rushed down the center aisle toward the stage.

“Is there a doctor in the house?” he shouted.

Amalie saw a middle-aged man in the center section make his way quickly down the aisle.

“I’m a doctor,” he said in a loud voice. “Call an ambulance.”

The manager disappeared through a side door, presumably in search of a telephone.

Onstage, Ward was using both hands to try to stanch the bleeding. The doctor arrived and quickly took charge.

Luther Pell reappeared from behind the curtain. He looked at Oliver Ward and shook his head. Ward looked grim.

The stranger finally emerged from behind the curtain. He was in the act of reaching inside his white evening jacket. Amalie caught a glimpse of something metallic just before the elegantly tailored coat fell neatly back into place.

It took her a couple of seconds to comprehend what she had just seen. Then understanding struck. Like any self-respecting mobster, Luther Pell’s friend from out of town had come to the theater armed with a gun.

Chapter 3

“This is a disaster,” Hazel announced. “We are ruined. Utterly destroyed. We can’t possibly survive such a catastrophe.”

“We will figure it out,” Amalie said. “We have to figure it out.”

“No,” Hazel wailed, “we’re finished. Mark my words, by tomorrow morning everyone in town will be saying this place really is cursed. We can’t survive rumors like that.”

She strode across the grandly furnished front room of the villa and came to a halt at the black lacquer liquor cabinet. Seizing a bottle of brandy, she yanked out the stopper and splashed a liberal amount of the contents into a glass. She downed a fortifying swallow and surveyed the surroundings.

“Damn,” she said. “It all seemed so perfect.”

When it came to high drama, Amalie reflected, no Hollywood actress could outshine Hazel Vaughn. She had once been a star attraction in the Ramsey Circus, one of the Fabulous Flying Vaughns. She haddazzled crowds with her daring tricks. She was middle-aged now but she still knew how to command an audience.