Chapters (39)
- Cover
- Title
- TheLastIllusion
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- HISTORICAL NOTE
She nodded. “Of course Molly was the assistant last night, not me, but I was watching from the box and it all looked just fine to me.”
She moved around as if on tiptoe, gently touching the frame of what they called the cabinet, then the table on which the hood and the playing cards still lay. Then she stopped, her head to one side, like a bird’s.
“That’s a bit off,” she said.
“What is?”
“The trunk. We usually perform that trick over to stage left. Why did you put the trunk so close to center stage, Molly?”
“I don’t know. Someone helped me carry it onstage and we just put it down. I didn’t think it mattered that much where it was.”
“It doesn’t, but . . .” she stopped, then knelt beside the trunk. “Can I touch it?” she asked.
“Go ahead. We’ve already extracted fingerprints from it.”
She examined it briefly. “I thought something was wrong,” she said. “This isn’t our trunk.”
Twenty-two 
Daniel squatted beside her.
“Are you sure?”
She looked up and nodded. “Quite sure. I already explained to Molly how we manage to pull off the switch so quickly. The back of the trunk is only held together with two screws that come out real easy, and then it swings open. This one is solid, see?” She banged on it. “Apart from that it’s an excellent copy, from what I can see.”
Daniel continued to stare at the trunk. “So someone knew exactly what your trunk looked like and had a copy made. How easy would it have been to get a good, close-up look at the trunk?”
“Well, you’d only have to come to the show for a couple of nights to get a good look, wouldn’t you?” she said. “And during our act it’s right there, in the wings, until it’s needed, so anybody backstage could get a good look at it then.”
“So that’s why the keys didn’t work!” I exclaimed.
They looked up at me. “When the trunk wouldn’t open I found the keys in Houdini’s pocket, but neither of them worked. Because it was a different trunk.”
“Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to pull this off,” Daniel said, staring down at the empty trunk. There was no sign of bloodstains and it was hard to imagine that a body had lain in it not too long ago. “In New York there are plenty of dark alleys and hired killers if you just want to get rid of someone. And the body turns up floating down the Hudson a few days later. This person wanted to do more than kill someone. But what?”