The Ventriloquist
As the overworked, underpaid emcee crossed the stage and approached the microphone, he clapped his hands and urged the audience to give a big round of applause to the standup comic who had just finished his act. The response was lukewarm at best, but nothing much had been expected from the crowd. After all, Paulie's Lounge was a third-rate nightclub in one of New York's less-fashionable neighborhoods, and the talent was not anywhere near the caliber of that in the uptown establishments. The customers who frequented the club were not looking to be entertained with jokes. Most were only there for the booze or the scantily clad exotic dancers.
The air conditioning was on the fritz again, so the perspiring emcee took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow before introducing a man who was debuting a new act that night.
"Ladies and gents, our next performer is a real dummy," he jested. "But, then, he'd have to be to play this place."
There was enough gratuitous laughter to make the club's manager reconsider his decision to replace the emcee at the end of the week.
"Put your hands together for Arlen Hackus and Company."
Only a few people in the audience actually clapped, and that was mainly out of courtesy. Most of the club's patrons kept their attention focused on either their drinks or their companions.
When Arlen appeared on stage rolling a large canvas laundry bin behind him, no one paid much attention. The ventriloquist quietly took his seat on a stool behind a shortened microphone stand, reached into the bin and removed his dummy. It was no Charlie McCarthy, Jerry Mahoney or Knucklehead Smith. The wooden man sitting on the ventriloquist's lap was a convict in an old-fashioned black-and-white striped prison suit.
"So, tell me, Oscar," Arlen addressed his dummy, "what are you in for?"
What followed was a fast-paced, humorous repartee that soon captured and held the audience's interest and had them laughing uproariously. Roughly seven minutes into the act, a muffled female voice seemed to come from the bin.
"Who do you suppose that is?" Arlen asked Oscar.
"Don't ask me," the convict dummy replied, "I ain't no stoolie."
The ventriloquist reached his free hand into the laundry bin and took out a second dummy: an overly made-up female with platinum blond hair, wearing a diaphanous robe over a metallic gold G-string and a pair of sequined pasties. At the sight of the stripper dummy, the convict's head rose six inches from its shoulders and rapidly spun in four complete revolutions.
"Hubba, hubba, hubba!" Oscar exclaimed when his head returned to its normal position.
The audience roared.
For the next ten minutes, Arlen kept a three-way conversation going, having to change from his own New England accent, to Oscar's Brooklyn accent, to the falsetto voice of Cookie, the stripper. When his act finally came to an end, the ventriloquist was rewarded with a standing ovation, which was a first for Paulie's Lounge.
* * *
During the next two years, Arlen Hackus gained a considerable following on the East Coast. Then, one November evening he was booked into a club in Boston, at a time when the city was recovering from a devastating blow: the Red Sox had lost the American League Pennant to their archrivals from New York. It was the perfect opportunity, the ventriloquist believed, to introduce his newest dummy.
After five minutes with Oscar, Arlen reached into his rolling laundry bin and took out a mechanical wooden replica of one of the most hated creatures in all of Beantown: a Yankee fan. Attired in a stained, pinstriped T-shirt and a navy blue baseball cap, both emblazed with the familiar NY logo, the dummy was greeted with catcalls and boos throughout the audience.
"I see you recognize my friend, Vinnie from the Bronx," Arlen said.
"Aaaah, shuddup, ya bums," hollered Vinnie, who sounded like he was auditioning for a role in a Martin Scorsese organized crime film.
Within ten minutes of introducing the irascible Vinnie, the ventriloquist won the Boston audience over, especially after cracking some saucy jokes about Derek Jeter, A-Rod and the Bronx Bombers, in general.
After receiving rave reviews in Boston, Arlen sold out shows in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Atlantic City. Then, during the height of the busy holiday season, the ventriloquist returned to New York. His manager had booked him into a popular nightspot in the Village during the second week of December. Hackus toyed with the idea of dressing one of his dummies in a Santa Claus suit but decided against it. New Yorkers, he was sure, would prefer the convict, the stripper and the Yankee fan. He was right. The audience loved his regular characters.
One man sitting about twenty feet from the stage was particularly impressed by Oscar, the convict dummy.
That face looks familiar, he thought.
He tried to recall the circumstances, but the nebulous memory would not gel. After the show, he carefully studied the publicity photographs hanging on the wall in the club's lobby.
"Come on," his wife urged heading toward the exit. "We've got to get home. We're paying the sitter by the hour."
Like an obedient child, New York City police detective Denny McMullin followed his spouse out the door and into a waiting taxi.
I know I've seen that mug before. But where? he wondered as he headed back to his home in Brooklyn.
It was not until the following morning that McMullin finally remembered where he had seen the face. It belonged to a loan shark that had been missing and presumed dead for the past four years. Once he arrived at the station house, the detective retrieved the missing persons file from the cold case room and made a photocopy of the last known picture of the missing man.
Later that same afternoon, he paid a visit to the ventriloquist's Manhattan apartment.
"What can I do for you, Detective?" Arlen asked when McMullin flashed his badge.
"Have you ever seen this man before?" the cop asked as he handed over the Xerox copy of the photo of the missing loan shark.
"No, I haven't," Arlen replied and handed back the picture after a cursory examination.
The detective returned the photograph and asked that the ventriloquist take a closer look.
"I was at your show last night, and I got a good look at your dummy, the convict, the one you call Oscar. You wanna tell me why that dummy is the spitting image of this man?"
Arlen shrugged his shoulders and coolly replied, "Coincidence."
"You're sure you never saw this guy? You don't know where he is?"
"I have no idea where or even who he is."
As the detective pocketed the loan shark's mug shot, he glanced around the large, well-furnished apartment.
"Nice place you got here. The rent must cost you an arm and a leg."
"I don't rent," Arlen explained. "It's a condo. I own it."
McMullin whistled.
"It must have set you back a million or two."
"I've been lucky to get some high-paying gigs during the past few years. I decided to invest the money in real estate."
When McMullin showed no sign of leaving, Arlen asked, "Will there be anything else, Detective?"
Denny thanked the ventriloquist for his time and left. Although Hackus had not appeared in the least bit nervous, the policeman's instincts told him the man had something to hide.
* * *
In January, Arlen Hackus took his act down to Miami, where the Florida sun beat the snow and freezing temperatures of the Northeast. Not long after migrating to the South, he added a new dummy to his bin: Mrs. Agnes Mertz, the mother-in-law from hell. She was every man's worst nightmare, and the audience ate her up.
In early April, came the break Arlen had been waiting for since he started in the business: an invitation to play Las Vegas. He was to open at the Bellagio in July, which meant he had only a few months to finish up his East Coast commitments.
After playing the Foxwoods and the Mohegan Sun, Arlen returned to New York. He decided to take a few days off to prepare for the Vegas show and write some new material. He was hard at work at his laptop when his buzzer rang.
"Yes?" he answered.
It was Detective Denny McMullin, the cop who had questioned him in December about the missing loan shark.
"Can I have a word with you, Mr. Hackus?" the policeman asked.
"I'm rather busy right now," the ventriloquist replied.
"I promise not to take up too much of your time."
"All right, come on up," Arlen said with a sigh.
A few minutes later, there was a firm knock on the door.
"Are you still looking for that missing man?" Hackus asked after he opened the door for the detective.
"Yup. He's still missing."
Without waiting for an invitation, McMullin rudely walked into the living room and sat down on the couch.
"What is it you want?" Arlen asked.
"After our last meeting, I did a little checking on you," the detective explained. "You weren't always a ventriloquist."
"That's right. I began my stage career as a magician."
"Quite a good one, too, I understand. Yet you gave it up and became a ventriloquist?"
"I had personal reasons for folding the magic act," Arlen said, not caring to discuss them with the detective.
"You had an assistant," McMullin continued, putting his feet up on the ventriloquist's coffee table. "A real looker, she was. Rumor is you and her got married."
"I assume you've already checked into our relationship," Arlen said, taking a seat in the wing chair across from the sofa.
"Damn right, I did. I found a marriage certificate in Baltimore."
McMullin took a small notepad out of his pocket to refresh his memory.
"You were married on May 13. The marriage lasted for only four months, and then the act broke up. Afterward, you moved to New York. I can't find any further trace of your wife, though. Why is that?"
Arlen raised his eyebrows and calmly replied, "I haven't the slightest idea."
McMullin went back to his notes.
"When you got to New York, you ran up quite a lot of bills. Credit cards were maxed out. You applied for a loan but were refused. Then two months later you were out of debt. How did you manage that?"
"Careful budgeting."
If the detective had hoped to intimidate Hackus, he was not succeeding.
"Is that so? Well, I think you borrowed the money from the missing loan shark."
"I don't suppose you have any proof to back up your wild accusations?"
"No. I have no proof you borrowed money from him and then killed him because you couldn't repay the loan. Just as I have no proof you killed your wife when you found out she was cheating on you with her old flame. And then there was your wife's ex-boyfriend. I got no proof you killed him either. But I'll keep looking, and you can bet I'll find the bodies. Unless ...."
McMullin let the word hang in the air, hoping Arlen would take the bait. He didn't.
"I said I'll find the bodies, wherever you hid them. And then I'll ...."
"Why don't you quit wasting time and come to the point?" the ventriloquist said with disgust. "This is getting boring, and I have a lot of work to do."
"Okay. I know you killed those three people, and I'll find the proof unless you agree to pay me fifty thousand dollars."
Arlen stood up, walked over to the bar and poured himself a drink.
"Fifty thousand dollars, huh? Why would I pay you anything?"
"Because if you don't, I'll see you go to jail for the rest of your life. You can't make three people disappear without a trace."
"Four," Arlen corrected him. "I also eliminated my wife's mother when she accused me of murdering her daughter and threatened to go to the police. She was much greedier than you. She wanted a hundred thousand for her silence."
"You just confessed," the policeman laughed.
"Did I? You can search until you're old and gray, but you'll never find a single body because I didn't kill anyone."
The ventriloquist reached into his pocket and took out a coin.
"You've seen my act, have you? Did you like it?"
"Yeah, it wasn't bad," the detective grudgingly admitted.
"You should have seen my magic act then. It was downright amazing."
Arlen made the coin vanish and reappear several times.
"That's nothing special," McMullin said. "David Copperfield once made an airplane disappear on his television special."
"That's illusion, not magic," the former stage magician contended.
"What's the difference?" the detective asked, beginning to lose his patience. "Look. I'm not interested in your silly tricks. I wanna know if you're gonna pay me the money."
Arlen was intent on flipping the coin in the air and ignored the detective's question.
"Illusion involves misdirection. Magic, on the other hand ...."
The ventriloquist pointed his finger, and the coin took flight. It hovered in the air for a few moments and then danced above Denny's head.
"How are you doin' that?" McMullin asked.
"It's magic."
Arlen raised his finger, and the marble ashtray on the coffee table joined the coin, soon followed by the television remote control.
McMullin began to look nervous.
"Okay, you've made your point, now make all these things stop circling above my head."
"All right, Detective, playtime is over."
The ventriloquist raised his finger again, and pointed it directly at the other man.
"What're you doing?" McMullin cried as he felt his muscles stiffen and his limbs and torso start to shrink. "Whatever it is, cut it out. I don't ...."
Those were the last words New York City Detective Denny McMullin would ever speak of his own accord.
* * *
Arlen Hackus stepped out on the Las Vegas stage, wearing a new Gucci silk suit. After he took his seat, a sequin-bedecked showgirl rolled out the elaborately decorated wooden cart that had replaced the old canvas laundry bin in his act.
When the ventriloquist reached into the cart and pulled out Oscar and Cookie, the audience applauded. Apparently, Arlen's reputation preceded him. For ten minutes, he entertained the customers with a risqué conversation between the convict and the stripper, and then Hackus replaced the dummies with Vinnie, the Yankee fan, and Agnes Mertz, the mother-in-law from hell. He closed his act with a new dummy: a drunken, dishonest Irish policeman, who, unbeknownst to the members of the audience, bore a striking resemblance to a missing New York City police detective.
Doesn't Salem look right at home in a room full of dummies?
