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

180-degree orbit, I could finally see inside. It was a playing card. The King of Diamonds, by the looks of it, but two things made it initially tough to identify. The first was that the face on the card had a large gash cut through it, but that wasn’t the biggest problem. The real impediment was that the face of the card was smeared with what looked to be blood; so much blood that what had once been a stiff playing card was now nearly a mushy mash of pulp.
    “It appears to be a playing card. A King of Diamonds.”
    Miles let the plastic bag continue to twirl as he held it up. “This card was found on the victim’s body. To be more specific, when he was stabbed through the eyes, this card was over one of those eyes. The right eye.” He set the clear plastic bag on the table and the card appeared to ooze a bit as it settled on the flat surface.
    “What’s interesting,” he said, “is that the deck of cards you left outside at the property desk matches this design. And it’s missing a King of Diamonds.”
    I thought this over before speaking.
    “I’ll ignore, for the moment, that you’ve gone through my personal effects, sort of nullifying the concept of personal ,” I said, looking from Miles to Homicide Detective Fred Hutton and back to Miles again. “I gave Grey that card at the end of my act last night. I put it in his breast pocket. Everybody saw me do it.”
    Miles was about to respond to that when the door to the room opened and the same, young uniformed cop from earlier entered. He made a point of not looking at me; instead, he handed a couple sheets of paper to Miles, turned on his heels and walked out. He looked like a man who was delivering bad news and didn’t want to stick around to see it presented.
    Miles paged thoughtfully through the report, taking his time. When he was done, he handed the papers over to Homicide Detective Fred Hutton and turned his attention back to me.
    “Fingerprint report,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Seems your fingerprints are on the murder weapon. A letter opener.”
    “I remember it,” I said, not liking this turn of events, but doing my best not to let that show. “I used it at the program last night. Two hundred people in the audience saw me handle it.”
    “Don’t forget it was on television as well,” Miles added. “The local PBS station.”
    “Well then, that’s at least another hundred witnesses.”
    “And then someone used it to kill Mr. Grey.” He looked at me for what felt like a long time and I did my best to hold his gaze. This stare down was interrupted when the door to the room opened again, but this time no one came in. From my position I couldn’t see who had opened it. Homicide Detective Fred Hutton looked up, instantly jumped to his feet, and walked out of the room.
    I heard some feverish whispering outside the door and a moment later Homicide Detective Fred Hutton returned. He moved to Miles’ side and bent down to whisper in the small man’s ear. Miles nodded and followed him out of the room, returning a second later to shut the door.
    The room was quiet and I couldn’t hear any sounds from outside. Perhaps it was soundproofed. I tapped my fingers on the table for a few seconds, enjoying the room’s natural reverberation, and then noticed that the digital audio recorder was still in record mode, with its LCD time counter rolling forward. I glanced at the door and then started to hum a persistent song that had come into my head about an hour before.
    After a few seconds I switched from humming to singing softly, and by the time I finished the second verse and was moving through the third I was almost to full voice. I drove, full-voiced, into the fourth and final verse and then listened to the reverb die down after I had finished singing. My timing was perfect, for at that moment the door swung open and Miles came back into the room.
    “That’s all we’ll need from you today, Mr. Marks,” he said in a practiced tone.