Cat In An Indigo Mood

Chapter 34

I Get a Kick from Champagne . . .

"Come into my parlor," the grinning bald man invited, pulling aside a curtain embroidered with the zodiac.

Temple hesitated. "I didn't know professors had parlors."

"Well, only in Las Vegas. Here, the study of magic is both philosophy and practicality. I'm sorry, did my crypt-keeper act scare you?"

"No, Professor Mangel. It's just that I had a close encounter with a magic act recently that was rather unsettling."

"Oh? And call me Jeff, remember?"

"I do remember, which is why I came to you. But I thought you said you only went by

'Jefferson.' "

"I did, but you so charmingly defied me that I liked you immediately. All tyrants cherish cheek, and a professor is a class-room tyrant."

"Lou Grant didn't cherish cheek. He hated it."

"He hated spunk. There's a difference between spunk and cheek."

"What is it?"

"Everything, except the fact that they both end in k."

He grinned like a genie glad to be out of a bottle and led her through a maze of mounted posters, display cases, and free-standing magician's cabinets.

"Maybe l should call you Dr. Caligari," she added, shivering at the upright coffin like structures and remembering that she had once been incarcerated in one.

"Listen. I'll give you some herbal tea and you'll see it all for the flummery it is."

He led her into a small staff kitchen equipped with a microwave, sink. cupboards, and stained mugs. "Is this better for our talk?"

"Oh, yes."

He ran water into two mugs and set the microwave wheezing.

"What's unnerved you? That fatal seance at the haunted house didn't do it, but something obviously has now."

Temple sat at the Danish modern table, hefting her trusty tote bag to the teak top. "A friend of mine has been shot at. A magician friend."

"Shot at, where?"

"In Las Vegas. On the Strip at rush hour."

"I meant, anatomically."

"Oh." Temple winced. "The bullet creased the back of his skull. He was stopped at a red light."

"Gracious! Have the police been notified?"

"I don't know. The thing is, he's working on a book. An expose."

"Expose of what?"

"Fake psychics who manipulate seances and gullible clients."

"Hmm."

"Why do you say that?"

" 'Hmm' isn't saying much." Mangel smiled, then jumped up when the microwave timer pinged.

Soon steaming mugs of fragrant tea were wafting into their nostrils like Vick's VapoRub into the nasal passages of cold sufferers.

"Peppermint," he said after savoring the first sip. "What is your main concern?"

"I'm wondering if it's true that magicians--and psychics by extension--are so protective of their special effects that they would kill to protect their secrets." Mangel sipped again from the steaming mug, then puckered his lips thoughtfully. "You know those 'magic acts revealed' specials on TV lately ?"

"With the 'masked magician' explaining everything? Kind of hokey. Yeah." Mangel shook his head, the overhead fluorescent light polishing his bald pate to cue-hall brilliance. "No. Not hokey. Not hocus pocus. Serious. There have been . . . death threats."

"Death threats? So it's well-known."

"The gentleman's agreement that is magic goes back centuries.

Each magician honed his special tricks, his equipment. He expected his brother magicians to honor the secrets of his invention. Toward the end of his life. he would pass on his secrets and his equipment to a younger magician. It was a form of Masonry."

"A secret society?"

"Don't whisper, dear girl. We're on the University of Las Vegas campus, drinking tea. But, yes, the loose brotherhood of magicians is a kind of special society. They have their own rules and expectations. They abhor those who violate them."

"And there have been actual death threats over those hokey TV specials?'

"More than threats. There's a price on the head of the masked magician."

"In this day and age?"

He nodded. "Of course, the price is for revealing his actual identity, so he can be subjected to questions and have to answer them. Still, who can say when the self-protective urge becomes the other-destructive urge?"

"If this magician's compact goes back that far, could anyone be honoring it today?"

He nodded. "The art is even more in need of protection now that high-tech media techniques can dissect every millisecond of every move."

"But . . . a magic act. Surely no one takes it that seriously today?"

"The point is that it was taken 'that seriously' yesterday. That's when the unwritten rules were established."

"If they're unwritten, why would they have influence even today?"

"The weight of time. Leave your tea here, and I'll show you something in the exhibit."

Temple reluctantly abandoned her homey, steaming cup of tea.

Even though the building on the Las Vegas campus was thoroughly modern, the magic exhibition area had a certain disarming aura that spoke of secrets long kept and practices that would not bear close examination.

Jeff showed her a book, a huge, thick, ancient-looking book, closed with a metal clasp that resembled an elaborate hinge. Its thick parchment pages revealed ragged gilt edges, faded ink, and odd drawings.

"This is the syllabus, so to speak, of an organization we believe was called the Synth."

"S-S-Synth?" Temple stuttered, for she had come across that word before.

"l know; it sounds like lisping," Jeff admitted with a rueful smile. "But, believe me, it was taken very seriously by generations of magicians."

"Are there magic tricks in here?"

"Hardly. Those were too guarded to be sketched out and written down. No. this book is mumbo-jumbo. It delineates all the secrets and strictures that pertained to being a magician.

Blood oaths, ceremonial rituals, lists of professional names--"

"You mean they didn't even go by their right names in there?"

"What magician does ?"

"Is there a Shangri-La in the register of magicians?"

"You mean a practicing magician? Contemporary?"

Temple nodded. "She did a disappearing act at the Opium Den downtown." Mangel's frown emphasized his polished Wizard-of-Oz baldness. "For that," he said, "we need an arcane and infallible method of divination. Follow me."

Temple wondered what weird room they would enter next, but heaved a sigh of relief when she saw it was just an office, equipped with serious stacks of unfiled papers and a computer on and ready.

"This I understand," she said, plopping down in the molded wood visitor's chair, rote bag beside her.

"I'll search some data hanks." The computer keys chuckled at the tickling of his blunt-nailed fingertips. Mangel's head thrust toward the screen.

Temple squealed her chair legs around the comer of the desk so she could watch.

The words Shangri-La sat center-screen, along with some dates and a place.

"That's the Las Vegas gig," Temple said. "This troupe appear anywhere else recently?"

His fingers made Shangri-Las disappear at the click of a few keys. A blinking cursor marked time.

"Nothing in Europe."

More clicks.

"Nothing in Asia."

"Nothing? Not even in Asia? Shangri-La?"

"Well, not under that name. I'm sure that eastern magicians don't go to James Hilton and Lost Horizon for their names. Hmm."

"Hmm?"

He peered at the screen. "One reference. In Rio of all places."

"Rio de Janeiro?'"

"Brazil." He nodded. "Two years ago."

"Then it's a legitimate act."

"How could a magic act be legitimate? In a sense they are all frauds."

"I mean a known act."

"Even known acts come and go. Look at one of the greatest." Temple waited expectantly.

"In this very city, not many months ago, the Mystifying Max played his last night at the Goliath and was seen no more."

"Oh."

"You don't seem impressed."

"Was he really one of the greatest? Magician-wise?" Temple hated use "wise" in this make-fashion manner, but sometimes there was no way around bad syntax.

Mangel nodded. "Original. Always original. No practitioner of what l call the 'elephant effect'

You know, making pachyderms and helicopters and major American landmarks disappear. But an elegant sleight-of-hand and happenstance artist." The professor leaned back in his chair and chuckled without using the computer keys. "No muss, no fuss, that could have been his motto. I find it oddly fitting that he just . . . stopped. No more appearance dates, no retirement announced. It was as if he had never been there. An apt withdrawal for a magician. Either make a production of it, like Houdini lingering on his deathbed for days until dying on Halloween. Or make nothing of it at all."

Temple nodded, sobered. She knew the bleak necessity behind the mysterious career

"withdrawal" of the Mystifying Max.

On the computer screen the words Shangri-La blinked like a theater marquee. Her withdrawal had hardly been the low-profile disappearing act that Max had managed, though Mangel couldn't kkow about the dead body Max had left in his wake at the Goliath Hotel.

She found her fingers massaging the base of her third finger, left hand. Where was the ring?

In Rio? Nothing elegant about out-and-aout theft. A wave of rage threatened to clog Temple's throat.

A shill, Max had called Shangri-La and all her works. A cover for a drug-smuggling operation.

But a shill had ripped off, ripped away, the only engagement ring Temple had ever had. Or almost-engagement ring. She thought. Sort of. Max had never exactly made clear what the ring had represented. Another elegant withdrawal?

Temple suddenly realized that the rage she felt wasn't just for herself. The past had ripped away Max's profession. She'd always thought he had been good at it; now the professor's elegy on Max's career added a serious second to Temple's instincts. Max was used to losing, she realized- Relatives, identities, professions. One golden ring would be the least of it.

"What's the matter? Are you being hypnotized by the computer screen?"

Temple blinked. "No, l was just thinking how fascinating it all is. So this Shangri-La could work under many different names?'"

"Doing many different acts."

"What about the . . . supporting cast? The ninja acrobats--"

"Ninja acrobats? You make me sorry I missed this show."

Temple shrugged. "It was pretty predictable, really, but I'd appreciate your letting me know if she turns up in your database again."

He shut down the computer search, then turned to face her seriously. "You were never fully satisfied, were you?"

"What do you mean?" The question seemed highly personal.

"About Gandolph's--Garry Randolph's--death during the Halloween seance."

"Oh, that. It was rather amazing. All those different psychics claiming to have disrupted the seance for their own motives and in their own ways."

"Sort of like gang assault. No one did it, and everyone did it.

I did hear Garry was working on his memoirs about his psychic- busting days." Mangel's lively eyebrows did a caterpillar cha-cha.

"Maybe somebody else did too."

"You believe it was murder, after all?"

"Let's just say the jury's not in."

"I'll say! Especially since no one was charged."

"I bet you'd get a kick out of looking at my Gandolph collection. Did you ever see him perform?"

"As a magician? No."

"Come on, we'll collect our cooling tea mugs--it was too hot to drink right away, wasn't it?

And then l can show you. I have a large ephemera collection."

Temple rose to follow him.

The professor had been right. The tea had cooled nicely. She cosseted the mug, her tote bag straps slung over her shoulder and staying there for once, while they wandered through a gallery of framed performance posters and circus bills and other transitory paper trails of magical careers from the early 1800s until the 1990s.

Huge but light frames swung out from the wall like the leaves of oversize books, offering an album of the art's latter practitioners.

"That's Gandolph?"

"Back in the days when even I had hair."

"He was a distinguished looking man."

"Magicians need that maitre d' sort of dignity. That's why all the tails and white ties."

"And I thought they were there to hide concealed doves."

"The profession was not in high repute in the early days. Gandolph's heyday was the late sixties, before the tie-dyed brigade took over for a while, before psychedelic drugs gave onstage illusion a run for the money. Here he is, performing at the old Dunes."

"Wait! Don't flip that frame!"

"It is a rather good photograph of him."

"Maybe, but . . . who's she?"

"Ah, Gloria. Gloria Fuentes. What they used to call a 'doll.' Look at those long-stemmed legs.

They don't make even chorus girls like that anymore, and Gloria was never that. Always a magician's assistant, and Gandolph's main lady until he retired in 'eighty-four."

"Oh my. Do you have a smaller photograph of her I could copy?

Any newspaper clippings?"

"I suppose so. Why?"

"I know someone who's been looking for someone just like her."

"A theatrical historian?"

Temple mulled it over. "l guess you could say that." When singing at the Blue Dahlia, Molina was theatrical, and you could call a homicide cop a historian of sorts.

Gloria Fuentes was neither of those.

But she was a much younger version of the sketched face of a dead woman in today's newspaper.

**************

"You wanted to see me?" Temple asked demurely over the telephone.

"No," Molina said. "There's something I want you to see."

"What a coincidence. I was about to tell you the same thing."

"I suppose you had better come downtown."

"Always such a treat!"

"Your voice sounds a little husky. You don't have a head cold or anything, do you?" Molina sounded solicitous, almost motherly.

"No. It's always husky. And I've been drinking peppermint tea."

"I see." Molina clearly didn't, but wasn't about to admit it.

They made a date for later that afternoon, and Temple hung up. She had called from the lobby of the university building, a sheaf of papers hot off the brand-name copier still warm in her hand.

What Temple herself had to show and tell, she guessed, would be much more interesting than what Molina wanted with her.