Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 18

Maxnapping

A Friday-afternoon nap.

What a luxury.

Temple stretched as she awoke, ghosts and panthers circling in her subconscious.

Louie was an out-of-focus lump curled up on the end of her bed.

At least he was safe at home. Again. How she would love to interrogate him!

She stretched again, blinking at the black haze on her bed.

Louie was putting on a lot of weight.

She patted the bedside table for her glasses, unfolded the earpieces and pushed them on.

Oh.

Midnight Louie had morphed into Max Kinsella, who did not have to lose weight, and who--

while sitting on the end of her bed--could by no means be described as "curled up." Unless it was as in: "curled up like a steel spring" and ready to pounce.

Temple wished that she was really awake. She wished she had not put her glasses on. She wished she was wearing Chanel No. 5 and a Victoria's Secret chemise, say in teal silk satin. She wished she was wearing a potato sack. She wished she was not here. She wished he was not here.

She smiled.

"Max! What on earth brought you back?"

He just shook his head. "Tell me about the murder."

" We don't know it was a murder."

"Too bad 'we' don't. I do." - "You do? How? Did I miss the news?"

He found the television remote control she was patting the covers to corral, then clicked on a station. A group of hundred-year-old teenagers, pierced on every visible inch of skin, except on their ears, seemed to be speaking out passionately on the benefits of purple hair.

"No news on yet this afternoon but bad news." Max clicked the talk show off. "Tell me what happened. You were holding hands with Gandolph, after all."

"I was not! I did not know the woman was Gandolph. I was happy to be not holding hands with Crawford Buchanan, unaware that I had been cruelly deceived and was actually pressing palms with an elderly, cross-dressing male magician nobody had heard of in a cat's nine lives."

"Lots of people had heard of Gandolph the Great. He was retired, true."

"Retired to transvestism."

"He was a showman," Max said. "He was ... a Don Quixote. He was there because he had something to prove, not because he wanted to pass as female."

"How do you know?"

"Because it's an honored tradition in the seance-exposing game. Even Houdini wore wigs in disguise when he was investigating mediums. Possibly women's clothes as well. And, besides, I know Gandolph. He was ... my friend."

"Max--" Temple was shocked. Max had never mentioned having a friend before, come to think of it. "He must have lived in Las Vegas when we moved here, but you never mentioned him."

"Yes, I did, but not often."

"Right! That's where I heard the name before ... maybe once! If you two were such buddies, why were he and I never introduced?"

"You were last night," Max said grimly.

"Max, I'm worrying about gnats in the face of tarantulas. I'm sorry."

He didn't quite look at her. "Don't worry. I don't want to hear about Gandolph's last moments. I do need to know what happened."

"So much did, Max! I still can't sort it out. I think we all saw a ghost, only I doubt it was the ghost we were supposed to see. Louie dropped in, yes, quite literally. Down the chimney, like a sooty feline Santa. Maybe you'd like to question him?"

Max smiled, dropped the remote control on the zebra-patterned coverlet, and stood.

"I'll brew some instant espresso in the kitchen. It's almost five P.M. Why don't you slip into something ... less comfortable."

Temple eyed her purple fuzzie jogging suit while he was gone. "Something less comfortable," really. Where was her chicest potato sack when she needed it, anyway?

She found a sort of caftan she'd forgotten about, emerald-green gauze with gilt lettuce-leaf edges, and managed to be wide awake and changed before he returned with two mugs of murky Instant Sludge.

"You mean it?" she asked after her first heady sip. "Gandolph was a friend of yours?"

Max prowled to the French doors overlooking the acute end of the triangular patio. He'd talked about putting a spa out there, but they'd never gotten around to it. It would have been nice, a mini-version of Van and Nicky's penthouse Jacuzzi.

Max's mind had been somewhere else Temple had never seen. "Maybe 'mentor' is a better word for Gandolph," he said. "I had the most contact with him at the beginning, and the end, of my career."

"Max, don't say that. Your career isn't over."

"Isn't it? I walked out on a half-dozen engagements, two for charity, without a word. I knew what I was doing. I didn't want to do it, but I had to. I'm a poor man now, Temple."

"What about all the dough you raked in when you were the toast of the Continent?"

He turned, grinning. "We're not counting the Swiss bank accounts and Cayman condominiums, are we?" She couldn't tell if he was kidding, or not. "So, you sat next to him. Tell me what happened."

Ordinarily, that wouldn't have been a big order. It was now, given the confusions of that midnight seance on the crux of Halloween and All Saints' Day, suspended between two worlds, the real and the really weird.

"I don't know, Max." Temple was glad she had ditched the glasses. This coffee was hot enough to steam up retinas. "I bought his act: this ditsy old gal in a funny hat. He must have been good at it. Only one thing struck me as unusual: 'she' kept warning me not to take anything that happened seriously. I thought that was odd behavior for a psychic at a seance."

Max was chuckling. "I'm sure he didn't know who you were, but, believe me, if Gandolph were taking advantage of you in any way, it would definitely be heterosexual."

"That old goat in granny clothing! And here I was all hot and bothered about Awful Crawford, meanwhile holding hands with the worst dirty old man in the bunch!"

"Sometimes you can run so hard to avoid something that you bump right into it."

"Yes, I noticed."

They observed a decent moment's silence while the applications of that dialogue to their current situation sunk in uncommented upon.

"Gandolph wasn't a real dirty old man," Max finally said. "He just never stopped appreciating women. So Gandolph's persona did not buy the night's special effects."

"Not at all, especially the distorted face that hung in the window behind him and mouthed untranslatable little nothings. The way the place is set up--"

"I know how it's set up. I looked it over."

"When?"

"After the ... death."

"Max, they closed the attraction, how did you--?"

He shrugged with a boyish innocence that didn't quite wash. I'm an illusionist." He smiled at the floor as if consulting a silent partner. "Like Midnight Louie. I have my ways."

"Don't you just!" Temple leaned over the bed's edge to see that the displaced cat had found floor side accommodations.

"Shall I demonstrate?" Max asked in a way that made Temple scoot up against her pillow and rest her elbows on her knees.

"Never mind." She blew steam off the top of her coffee before sipping gingerly. Max always used to say he liked his Java "hot as hell, strong as the Devil, and black as sin."

Midnight Louie, displaced to the fuzzy white bedside rug, rolled onto his side and began licking his hind leg, perhaps preparing to point a less polite area of his anatomy in Max the Usurper's direction.

"Okay, I'm thinking," she told Max. "The face in the window be-hind Gandolph appeared just before the dwarf in the fireplace showed up."

"Quasimodo too. You had a busy seance."

"No, I'm told it was Houdini himself. All the psychics present recognized him. An ugly apparition, really. Hunched over, muscle-bound, and this was a short man to begin with."

"Five feet four," Max put in promptly. He was a fountain of knowledge about Houdini.

Temple suspected that Houdini was a lot of boy-magicians' hero.

"These cuffs and chains weighed him down," she added. "Naked, too, sinewy beyond his stature. I mean, he must have worn some-thing, but it was hard to see through the mist. He looked like some primitive specimen, captured and brought out for display."

"Houdini wanted to make that impression. Lone, naked man against all of civilized society's locks and chains. He may have had a repressed bondage fantasy."

" 'Gorilla in the Mist,' huh? Did they know about bondage fan-tasy in those days?"

"Someone did."

"What do you think about the mist?"

"Obfuscation. Piped in. Vents all over the room. Part of the 'haunted' effect during shows."

Temple nodded, not surprised. "The usual dry ice. Were we supposed to be lost in London fog, though?"

"Doubt it. The dry ice was blown into various pipes, and was on a programmable timer.

Anyone who has ever left town and used a light timer could have reset the mechanism to cloud the seance. It didn't take the expertise level of someone who knows how to set the VCR. By the way, who's been setting yours since I've been gone?"

"Haven't used it," Temple confessed. "Easier not to."

Max shook his head. "What did Gandolph do during the Hou* dini appearance?"

"He muttered stuff about believing nothing of what you see and only half of what you hear."

Max smiled. "A cynic... to the last."

"Was he right?"

"Of course! The whole thing was a joke. That visitation of Houdini, for instance. You described a famous photographic pose. Did the apparition move? No, except to advance closer and retreat, which you can do with a projection. This wasn't even a state-of-the-art hoax. It was contemptuous, and contemptible. I suspect the entire charade was conceived as a cover to kill Gandolph, by someone who wanted the world to know it."

"Why?"

"Because Gandolph hated humbug. Because he couldn't resist unveiling the phony. Because he was an old man with little to do, and he poked his nose into one ugly business too many."

"And why do you have to decipher this?"

Max finished his coffee with one, long, scalding gulp, never tak-ing his adulterated green eyes from Temple's. "I owe him. I don't like humbug myself. And ..." He sighed. "Where do you think I was staying in Vegas, since I wasn't here? Who else could I stay with? Who do you think will look damn suspicious if the police find out, and who do you think can't afford to let them find out? I've got to solve Gandolph's murder, because he mattered to me, and, as a perk, to save my own damn skin."

Temple nodded. She had avoided speculating where Max might be staying, maybe out of guilt that she couldn't welcome him with open bed sheets, maybe out of fear that he knew another woman or two or three in town. Of course the notion of Max rooming with a cross-dressing older guy ... ridiculous!

"Want some more coffee?"

When she nodded, he headed for the kitchen. She followed, sticking her feet into the oversize burgundy velour mukluks by the bed, which did nothing to enhance the caftan's sophistication. She was relieved to be out of the bedroom. Midnight Louie, in turn, fol-lowed her out like a feline chaperon.

Max was waiting for the microwave to ping, so she had a chance to compare his unguarded rear to Oscar Grant's. Not for Max the other man's styled, flowing shoulder-length locks. That's what they were: locks, not mere hair. Max's new long hair was sleeked into a ponytail that blended with his turtleneck to the point of disappearing. The black garb was the same gunfighter uniform, but the effect was less theatrical. Max was much taller, though as lean; his turtle-neck and slacks had the same silky ease that cried out "expensive designer togs," but Max's fabrics suffered no touch of sheen. He wore the more effacing matte black, as if he wished to make himself into the invisible sable background curtain on a theater stage.

Matt black. He wore Matt black, Temple found herself thinking. Ex-Father Matt-black.

Comparing Max Kinsella with a priest made her smile, then made her think again. Magicians onstage assumed a ceremonial, priestly role, didn't they, albeit of a priest from some exotic, alien culture? Say, some ancient Eastern culture. She wondered, out of the blue (or maybe out of the black) what it would be like to make love with a man who had long hair, and immediately censored her unconscious: yikes, she was thinking like one of those supposedly love-starved females who gawk at romance-novel cover hunks and stockpile their calendars!

The microwave oven ping'd politely. Shortly after, Max turned with two hot mugs of coffee and a penetrating glance. "You don't look too spooked today, despite the ... death."

Temple took her mug before the handle got too hot for him to hold. She moved quickly into the living room to set it down on the sofa table.

"I'm not spooked. Maybe I'm jaded. But... Gandolph didn't die brutally. Just slipped away.

One of the other women swooned, so I wasn't surprised to see 'her' slumped over after the Houdini routine. It took everyone there a while to realize he was dead."

She sat on one end of the couch, Max coming toward her. Midnight Louie jumped up to stretch out full-length on mid-couch. Max paused, then sat on the opposite end.

"I'm not much for house pets."

"Louie is not a pet."

"What is he, then?"

"An old friend who wanders in and out. He had his haunts, excuse the expression, before I ever brought him home, and he likes to visit them."

"Not the haunted house, though?"

"I don't know. He could have shown up there before."

"Does he always follow you somehow?"

"No, sometimes he asks to ride along. Other times he's there before me."

"He 'asks' to ride along?"

She sipped and nodded. "Cats ask for things, just like dogs. Only they don't bark."

"That's an advantage," Max admitted. He leaned back into the sofa. "This would feel like Sunday morning if we had the funny papers."

Temple nodded, not trusting herself to deliver the next line and afraid what it might lead to.

Aw, heck, why not find out what it might lead to? They both admitted that they were still monogamous. The morality police had other crimes of the libido to pursue. ...

The doorbell rang. Max jumped up. Louie didn't.

Max was in the bedroom before Temple could say, "Three, four, open the door."

In that many seconds, she did, still carrying her mug.

Matt stood there.

Saved by the bell and Devine intervention, Temple thought with a rueful smile.