The Ambitious Card (An Eli Marks Mystery) by John Gaspard Page B

Harry said without looking up from his in-depth perusal of the daily paper. I get all my news, and the comics to boot, online, but Harry is a diehard in many ways. One of those included the addictive need to feel newsprint between his fingertips at least once a day. I poured myself a cup of coffee and picked up the sports page to be convivial.
    “How was the show last night?” he asked casually, although I knew he was deeply interested in any opportunity to expose mediums, psychics, and other frauds.
    “About what you’d expect,” I said. “Some mind reading. Some One-Ahead stuff. The Armpit Tourniquet.”
    “Ah, that old chestnut,” Harry said. “And who was the alleged spiritualist?”
    “Grey,” I answered, as I added some cream to buffer the bitter coffee that Harry favored.
    Harry shuddered. “That one gives me the creeps. Always has.” He turned the page and scanned the fresh columns of print. “Did you give him a run for his money?”
    “Well,” I shrugged, “so much of his act is traditional magic that I really wasn’t in a position to expose his methods. Not without exposing the methods of just about every working magician.”
    Harry grunted in understanding without looking up from his reading.
    “So I just did some comparable stuff,” I continued, absently paging through the paper. “Which, at the very least, took some of the shimmer off of his act.”
    “You pulled the rug out from under him?” he asked.
    “I think I honored the family tradition,” I said.
    “And the audience hated you for it?”
    “For a while,” I said. “Although I think they warmed to me as things progressed. Then, just for fun, for my finale I did an ambitious card routine, which I ended with a nicely-executed Malini card stab, if I do say so myself.”
    This got his attention. His eyes peered at me over the top of the newspaper. One eyebrow slowly rose, like it was being pulled upward on a wire.
    “Did you now?” he said, giving a low whistle. He set the newspaper down. “The Malini card stab was always one of my favorites. Did I ever tell you about the time I did that as the wrap-up of my act on the Sullivan show?”
    He had told me that story on a number of occasions, but I shook my head and he launched into a blow-by-blow account of how Ed Sullivan himself had watched the act during rehearsal and made the decision—right there, on the spot—to move Harry’s position in the show, in order to feature him more prominently. “It was a glorious evening,” he said, stroking his thick white beard and smiling warmly.
    “We should break out the video of that some night and look at it again,” I suggested.
    “Yes,” he agreed. “Yes, we should do that. Some night.”
    I knew that he had been avoiding watching any of the old videos, as Alice would appear alongside him in every one of them, and he wasn’t really ready for that. Not yet.
    Of course, it wasn’t as if she had entirely disappeared from his surroundings. Her smiling face, like a silent screen star, peered out at us from all the photos, posters and playbills on the walls up here—they lined the walls down in the store as well. Her clothes still hung in their closet. Her toothbrush and comb lay on the counter in the bathroom. Her needlepoint sat unfinished on the small table next to her chair in the living room, as if she had just stepped out to the kitchen for some tea and would return in a few moments to pick up where she left off. She was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.
    I could tell that he was sinking into a similar reverie, so I got up and brought my cup to the counter. “It’s November first,” I said with a little too much forced cheer. “If you want, I can walk the rent down to the landlord.”
    “What?” he asked, as he snapped back to the present. I noticed that his eyes had begun to water, just a bit. “No, that’s fine,” he said finally, shaking his head. “I can walk it down. The stroll will do me good.” With this