Cat In An Indigo Mood

Chapter 58

The Usual Unusual Suspects

In daylight hours, the Opium Den's brash neon marquee was a gray-white expanse as dull as dead skin cells.

The tawdry sex-and-skin-parlors on either side seemed painted on canvas by a circus circular designer.

Matt inhaled deeply. Revisiting a place where Temple had recently been so endangered, and he had been so helpless, was like walking into an elaborately unreal dreamscape. In fact, Matt felt he was entering a cartoon-factory set, with nothing behind the exaggerated facades but empty cells.

Yet the interior surprised him.

The Opium Den's gaudy lobby bristled with booths and Celtic lettering. Incense spiced the air. Bells, drums, and Moog synthesizers swelled the sound system.

Temple stood beside him, surprised too, and subdued.

She hadn't expected the scene of her most recent trauma to have been transformed into a New Age Renaissance Fair.

"Okay?" he asked.

"Okay. Hey. I kinda dig this. Maybe we can play we're tourists."

"Aren't we?"

"Gauche, but true. Now, where are our most-likely-to-murder candidates?"

"I doubt they're advertising." Matt gazed in some wonder over the scene. "This is an alternate spirituality universe," be decided. "A little Asian, a lot flaky, and kinda charming, in a naive way."

"Yes. But it has a dark underside. Never forget that."

He laughed. "Doesn't everything?"

"I guess so. So! Vere are my prey?" Temple curved her lacquered nails into exaggerated claws.

"You tell me."

So they wove through the booths and tents, pausing at appropriate stops.

"Ossss-carr Granttt," she hissed, pulling Matt to a sudden stop. Matt eyed the well-coifed, dark-haired man she indicated. He reminded Matt of a well-fed cobra who hosted a televangelist hour on the side. And maybe did faux-diamond infomercials on the other side.

"Looks like Crawford Buchanan after a personality-suction." Temple giggled. "He is too, too serious, but let's ask him some leading questions." They sidled over.

"Are you Dead Zones watchers?" the man asked them first, before he had even fully turned to acknowledge the presence he--eerily---sensed.

"Only in Las Vegas," Temple said.

"Temple Barr! The stage manager of our last, least-conclusive seance!"

Close up, Grant looked more than ever the young George Hamilton clone: razor-cut, tanned, brunette as a plump hotel-breakfast prune.

Matt felt his hackles rising, although he shouldn't have worried. Temple had a built-in sleaze detector. Still, worrying about what he shouldn't worry about was one of the best features of his current state.

"This is my friend Matt," she said, omitting his last name so no belabored greeting rituals would be necessary.

Matt didn't mind; Oscar Grant struck him as someone who was always playing a role.

"What brings you to our gathering?"

"I was going to ask you what brings you back to Las Vegas?"

"Oh, my show does quite a few episodes here. Know any good psychic phenomena l should look into?"

"Well, there's always the Crystal Phoenix Ghost suite."

"The hotel has a ghost?"

Temple nodded. "The manager swears to have seen it. Jersey Joe Jackson, a shady character around Las Vegas before it was more than four motels and a casino, lived in the seventh-floor suite of the Joshua Tree before it was remodeled into the Crystal Phoenix. Now, the hotel is adding an underground theme park and ride based on Jersey Joe's reputation for hiding treasure underground all over Vegas."

"Terrific! Kind of a dematerializing Yosemite Sam character. I could get a seven-minute segment out of that."

Temple whipped out her business card. "It so happens I'm handling publicity for the Phoenix on the project."

"Really?" Grant's ooze quotient went up several points. "It would be great to work with someone who's sensitive to psychic issues for a change."

"Speaking of psychics, l understand some of the Halloween seance gang are here."

"All of them. Somewhere." Grant's languid, beringed hand waved to the surrounding booths.

"Thanks." Temple started to leave. then, Colombo-like. turned hack to Grant. "By the way, have you ever heard of something called the 'Synth?' "

Matt was impressed by Grant's self-control, but the pupils flared suddenly in his dark eyes as if they were registering an adrenaline rush.

"Sinth when?" he joked. "Or, I should say, synth what?"

"It's supposed to have something to do with magic."

"Oh, magic. That's merely the fringe of my interest area. Some booths here have magical paraphernalia and hooks, but this show is geared mostly to genuine phenomena."

Temple thanked him and moved on.

"The only genuine phenomenon here is him," Matt remarked.

"Phenomenally fake."

"Then let me find someone l don't think is a fake." She wove ahead of him through the crowd, peering into booths.

"Aha!" Temple stopped so suddenly that Matt walked right into her, not an unpleasant experience. "Uh, sorry l didn't use my brake lights, but look: Birds of a feather flock together."

Matt studied the trio of figures Temple's red-headed nod indicated, one was behind a booth table; the other two had paused in front to talk.

If these were birds, the two in front were common sandpipers, strangely muted middle-aged women. The one behind the counter was a snowy egret: an Elvira, Mistress of the Dark clone, but all in white, from flowing long hair to flowing robes.

"The two genuine ones are in the aisle," Temple briefed him under her breath. "D'Arlene Hendrix has a pretty good record at dead bodies and will often help grieving families out at her own expense. Agatha Well: looks like she walked out of a 1930s Charlie Chan movie, but she read my tea leaves and made some eerily accurate calls."

"And the bird of paradise behind the counter?"

"I thought even you couldn't resist that presentation. Slick, huh? She has a black bird's name, but dresses to the contrary, always in white. Mynah Sigmund. She has a husband, William-something, around somewhere."

"He sounds less essential than her nail file," Matt said, eying the mother-of-pearl lacquered fingernails that telegraphed her frequent hand gestures.

"I don't see him anywhere." Temple went on her tiptoes to crane her neck around. "Let's ask the ladies."

Mynah Sigmund, despite dominating the conversation, fixated her eyes on Matt when they were still thirty feet away, and addressed him when they came within ten feet.

"Here comes someone who could no doubt enlighten us." The whites of her eyes gleamed as luminous as her fingernails.

"D'Arlene was discussing whether self-delusion projects its own positive energy, a kind of Egyptian ka, or shadow-soul."

Matt absorbed this borderline gobbledygook, trying not to show confusion. It was Temple who had met these people, not he.

Mynah's smile was sleek and self-satisfied. "You should know," she prodded him. "Mr.

Midnight."

Now that took him aback. "Are you talking about that sad incident?"

"Exactly. D'Arlene says the spirits of murder victims call to her, project some last fragment of their living selves. Who did you talk out of infanticide? The deranged girl, or some surviving fragment of her sane sell? You let her rename herself, so in a sense you were dealing with a split personality, or even a split soul."

"You . . . must have heard the actual broadcast."

"Absolutely," Mynah said. "I always listen to Ambrosia. I find her very . . . New Age."

The other women were not looking blank, as they should have at what would have been a cryptic conversation to most people.

D'Arlene, to whom Mynah had nodded earlier, was gazing harder at Matt than he was comfortable with. "You two are intimately connected with a death," she announced. "More than one. The answer is no."

Agatha, a seventyish woman with a plain, oversensitive face, was looking both fascinated and frightened.

"No?" Temple finally got over her own shock to speak up again. "No to what?"

"Whatever question plagues you surrounding the deaths that you are concerned with."

D'Arlene shook her graying Brillo-pad-permed head. She was an unassuming woman dressed in a hand-painted jogging suit, with glasses on a pearl chain.

"Does the word 'Synth' mean anything to any of you?" Temple asked.

Agatha and D'Arlene shook their heads. Mynah, unlike the bird whose name she bore, wasn't talking.

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

"Has this been a productive outing?" Matt asked when they stood outside again.

"Productive in the sense that Professor Mangel predicted no one would say anything about the Synth. I guess we're supposed to believe in something all the more because everyone denies knowing about it. Not too logical. What did you think of the psychic femmes?"

"Wierd. You say you think D'Arlene's abilities to find dead bodies may be genuine?"

Temple nodded. "Some psychics have helped some police forces in some cases, and she's one with a track record."

"She probably deduced the question about the bodies from your past encounters of the murderous kind. As for what her out-of-the-blue 'no' means, it's like all prophecies: too vague to believe, or to disprove. I sure would like to know how the Mynah-bird knew I was Mr. Midnight, though. That was rather . . . nonplusing."

"And Agatha Well: was so strangely silent, just staring at us like we shouldn't have been there, especially after l mentioned the Synth."

"So you didn't learn anything."

"Not a thing."

"But l did get an idea. If I'm supposed to be this super-counselor, Mr. Midnight, why don't I take over the regular ex-priests' meeting and pry a confession out of Nose E.'s suspect?"

"Because it's impossible to do?"

"I can call the leader, and get him to go along with the idea, I'm sure. So the taking-over isn't hard. It's the prying-out. I suppose I should record it, but it wouldn't be legal. What do you think?"

"l have a baby tape-recorder I use sometimes; cigarette-pack-size. But anything you got on a concealed tape recorder would be illegal. I think. I'll, uh, ask Max."

"Yeah. I bet he's one wired guy." Matt grinned. "I'll ask Molina."

"Can I come?"

"You don't look like an ex-priest."

Temple made a face. "I could pretend to be a reporter, wanting to do a story."

"Great cover. The suspect would be sure to blurt out incriminating evidence in front of a reporter."

"Oh."

"No. It's got to be just us guys. I can use the dynamics of the group to put pressure on him."

"You can?"

"I hope so. At least I know something none of them does, and that gives me an edge."

"Which is?"

"That one of them had to be at the dead woman's house, and left a distinguishing scent."

"Pretty thin evidence, Devine."

He smiled. "I'm an expert at extracting confessions, remember? And every suspect in that room should at least have a conscience to examine."

"Killers are conscienceless, aren't they?"

Matt shook his head. "Not in this case."

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

"Wow. Another costly little gadget I can't live without."

Matt was in Temple's apartment, examining her tiny tape-recorder that took mere thumbnails to move its Nose E.-size buttons. The casing was blush-colored metallic, rather like a cosmetic case, but the tiny cassette inside turned like it meant business.

They had practiced recording with Temple moving around the room to determine mike setting and range.

In the course of her rambling, she had dislodged Midnight Louie from his usual sprawling zone on the upholstered loveseat. When he moved to a nice sunny spot in front of the French doors, Temple's high heels had shortly after relocated to this vicinity as well.

He rose to rearrange himself on the faux goatskin rug, and shortly thereafter found himself in the path of yet another of her testing positions.

He finally lumbered off to the kitchen and jumped up on a counter.

"Poor Louie," Temple said when she noticed his defection.

"Why do cats always arrange themselves just where you are going to want to be?"

"Because they know all the comfy spots." Matt, fascinated, was still playing with the Lilliputian controls. "This is incredible. It picks up from quite a distance, even through my jacket pocket."

"Molina, or even Max, could probably get you something really professional."

"I don't need a body wire. These are fellow ex-priests. They trust me. Or they do now."