Pay no attention...
An autopsy indicates that Maleeni's head was slowly sawed off -- and that he was dead over a month before the show.
Meanwhile, LaBonge approaches a thuggish man named Alvarez in a pool hall. Alvarez doesn't remember or care that the two of them once did time together, but seems more interested when LaBonge offers him a way to retrieve his $20,000 debt from the late Maleeni -- times ten. How? By "helping me do magic," says LaBonge, his hand suddenly aflame.
Scully and Mulder go to a bank to visit the office of Albert Pinchbeck, the Amazing Maleeni's twin brother. Pinchbeck's neck is in a brace -- the result of a car accident in Mexico, he claims. He and his brother, more mundanely known as Herman, were both magicians, but Albert gave up the profession years ago and they'd spoken little since. Yet he never really stopped -- pick a card, he says.
Needless to say, Mulder has a theory, and offers it to Pinchbeck and Scully. What if Maleeni died of heart disease, and his twin performed his amazing last act to ensure Herman's posterity?
"I so wish that were true," says Pinchbeck, who sits back to reveal he has no legs -- also, he says, due to that crash in Mexico.
Can a magician lose at cards?
The agents enlist LaBonge to help look through Maleeni's possessions.
The young man has contempt for the older magician's tricks -- such as a gun that shoots a flag saying "Bang!" -- but is unable to explain where Maleeni or his murderer could have hidden the dead body required for the head-spinning trick. Among Maleeni's possessions, Mulder finds a note recording the $20,000 gambling debt.
Pinchbeck, meanwhile, hangs around the cash-filled vault at the bank where he works. Still in his wheelchair, he asks a guard what kind of gun he has -- he'd been thinking of buying one, he says -- and then handles the gun for a few moments.
The guards leave in an armored truck. Then Alvarez, who has tattoos on his hands, enters the bank and menacingly tells Pinchbeck he must pay off his brother's debt.
Soon, the guards hear strange noises in the back of the truck and pull over. They find a man back there with tattoos on his hands standing amid bags of cash. A guard fires directly at the intruder, but when the fracas is over, no one is inside the truck.
Back at the pool hall, Scully and Mulder pay Alvarez a visit. After they show him the debt note, which has his handwriting and prints, Alvarez denies wrongdoing. It was just a friendly poker game and Maleeni was a lousy player, he says.
"Don’t leave town," says Scully.
The Great Muldereeni
Outside, on the street, Mulder does a coin trick for Scully, another example of the misdirection so crucial in magic. Speaking of which, he wonders, is Maleeni really dead?
LaBonge makes a phone call to 911, says there's a man with a gun, then leaves the receiver dangling, apparently to attract police attention. He walks into the pool hall and confronts Alvarez, who accuses LaBonge of trying to frame him. Alvarez's thugs converge on LaBonge, but the young magician pulls out a gun and runs outside. The police are now there, and they arrest him.
LaBonge fires his gun skyward. It shoots a flag that says "Bang!"
Mulder and Scully return to Pinchbeck's office, ignoring his plea that he's too busy to see them. Mulder dumps the banker out of his wheelchair. It turns out Pinchbeck has legs. Moreover, he promptly acknowledges that he is in fact the Great Maleeni.
"Call me Herman," he says, then explains that he recently found his brother Albert dead. Not only did the discovery remind him of his own mortality and failures in life, it gave him a gruesome prop for use in performing the memorable head-spinning trick.
Herman also contrived a phony car accident and injuries for Albert, subsequently exploiting the sympathy of women in the banker's workplace. Mulder slaps handcuffs onto this con man.
In an attempt to analyze the full extent of Maleeni's criminal actvities, the agents bring in a senior bank executive while the wily magician amuses himself by picking the locks on his handcuffs. Pinchbeck did not have access to codes for electronic funds transfer, the senior banker observes with relief.
A plant in the audience
Maleeni goes to jail, were we soon see him taking to the man in the next cell -- his "rival," LaBonge.
"How'd it go?" says the younger man.
"Swimmingly," says Maleeni.
The next day, the bank boss opens the vault and finds it empty.
A guard recalls that the robber had tattoos on his hands, leading to the arrest of Alvarez. While the pool-playing malconent protests his innocence, Mulder pokes the pool hall ceiling with a cue stick and large quantities of cash come tumbling down.
Maleeni and LaBonge, meanwhile, are about to be released on bail when the agents show up. Mulder applauds the magicians' skill at ensnaring Alvarez -- vengeance for Alvarez's abuse of LaBonge when they shared a cellblock eight years ago.
Don't give the trick away
Mulder explains further: Maleeni had handled the bank guard's gun, filling it with blanks and thus enabling LaBonge, in disguise, to rob the armored car with impunity. Then, the two magicians had used their skills to briefly escape from jail and rob the bank vault in the night.
Despite all this, the magicians are allowed to go free -- "provided that the magic's over," as Mulder puts it.
"The great ones always know when to leave the stage," says Maleeni. "Billy, let's get the hell out of here."
After they leave, Mulder holds up a wallet -- it's Maleeni's, swiped from the evidence locker. Mulder patiently explains that he's found a card with his own fingerprint, which along with his badge number would have allowed the magicians to conduct a vast theft through electronic funds transfer.
The one thing Mulder doesn't know is how the head-spinning trick was done. Scully then gets down on hands and knees, and does the wrist-spinning trick, but won't tell Mulder how. He says it's not the same anyway; spinning a wrist is not the same as spinning a head.
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