Sleight of Hand: A Novel of Suspense (Dana Cutler) by Phillip Margolin Page A

that the joke involved her.
    “Hey, guys,” Dana said as she walked toward them, “I’m looking for the Maltese Falcon and the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Do any of you know where I can find them?”
    Heads swung toward her, and Rene Marchand said, “Uh-oh.”
    Dana pulled a chair over to the table and sat down.
    “So, who are you really?”
    They looked at one another, unsure of what to do. Then the bodyguard shrugged.
    “I guess the cat is out of the bag.”
    Dana heard a bit of the South where his Teutonic accent had been.
    Otto Pickering held out a handbill that announced that the Queen Anne Players appeared Fridays and Sundays in LaRosa Restaurant’s Interactive Comedy Mystery Dinner Theater.
    “You’re actors?” Dana said, not really surprised.
    “Part time,” Pickering said.
    “Am I safe in guessing that none of you are who you said you were?”
    The professor held out his hand. “Ralph Finegold, at your service. I teach chemistry at the university.”
    “Patty Weiss,” said the countess without any trace of a German accent. “I’m a student.”
    “George O’Leary, accountant,” the bodyguard said.
    “And I’m Marty Draper,” said the antiques dealer. “I own an art gallery, and I do sell antiques through it.”
    “And who is Margo Laurent?” Dana asked.
    “Ah,” said Ralph Finegold. “That we can’t tell you.”
    “Can’t or won’t?” Dana asked.
    “Can’t. We have no idea who she is,” Patty said.
    “We got a call on the Queen Anne Players’ answering machine, last Thursday,” Ralph said. “The woman had a French accent and she said she was willing to pay twenty thousand dollars and expenses if we would role-play a mystery. That definitely got our attention.
    “I called her back and she said she wanted to play a practical joke on a friend who was a real private eye. She said that two of us would have to go to Isla de Muerta. One of us would wait in a summer home for you and the other person would wait outside and shoot into the house. George and I went up and Captain Leone took us across. He runs the only taxi service to the island.”
    “So he’s for real?” Dana said.
    “Yeah,” George laughed. “You couldn’t invent a character like that.”
    “The Stantons were in on the prank, too,” Ralph said. “Mr. Stanton unlocked the house where we met and hid George after he shot at you.”
    “That was pretty stupid,” Dana said to O’Leary. “You could have hurt one of us and I would have shot you for real if I’d caught up with you.”
    George shook his head. “You were never in danger. I was in the army and I’m a very good shot. If you examined the bullet holes, you would have seen that they were very high and very wide.
    “I also had the distances worked out and I left my car engine running. I was pretty sure you wouldn’t just charge out, and I was pretty certain you wouldn’t get to me before I drove off.”
    Dana didn’t challenge him. The incident was in the past and there was no way to know what would have happened if she’d reacted a little quicker.
    “What was the point of the joke?” Dana asked, still mystified.
    “We don’t know,” Marty answered. “We were just told to run you around until Friday. Then we wouldn’t have to do anything else.”
    “Why Friday?” Dana asked.
    “Laurent didn’t say,” Ralph answered.
    “How did you choose your characters?” Dana asked.
    “Laurent sent us a scenario with a sketch of every character and what we were supposed to do,” Marty said. “The condo on Victoria and the house on the island were arranged in advance. I had to find an office to rent and I had to get the stenciling put on the door. Otherwise, we just played our parts.”
    “And you did a good job,” Dana admitted.
    “Not good enough,” Patty said ruefully. “How did you figure it out?”
    “You may be phony mystery characters but I’m a real live private eye. Though I do have to admit you had me going for a while. Then I