Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 21

Wild Black Yonder

Temple was too tired to worry about an innocent suspect that evening, even if Electra was willing to stake her life on her acquaintance's innocence. The real hidden suspect in this case was hardly innocent of anything in the broadest sense of the word and had a long history of taking care of himself only too well; but Max's relationship to Gandolph gave Temple the willies.

If Molina should find out--! She shuddered. And Max, expert mysteriarch that he was, probably would scorn her pitiful efforts to help.

What was Temple supposed to be anyway, a gumshoe?

She contemplated that as she pulled off her clothes and tumbled into bed, sweet bed, pausing only to rear up in the covers to turn the shoe phone's ring control to "off." A gumshoe, come on! Evidently the proverbial gumshoe was a predecessor of the rubber-soled tennis shoe, back in the days when gum trees (and not synthetics) provided the raw material. Gumshoe.

Sneaker.

There was one shoe she would never, ever covet. So clunky. So terribly unchic. So cliched.

Sleep came like a sledgehammer.

So did waking. She had been dreaming--not about black panthers, and not about gumdrop trees--but about gumshoe trees: metal tree limbs dripping blossoms of tennis shoes in every color of the rainbow. Temple (wearing her new Midnight Louie Austrian-crystal heels) was standing under this footwear umbrella, waiting for gaudily ripe shoes to plummet into her hands.

She awoke with a sense that she had lost something, or that it had been stolen. The bedroom was utterly dark. What had wakened her was a hand around her upper arm. It remained there yet.

"Shhh," came next, then a finger against her mouth.

She bit it, hard and with feeling.

The following smothered but creatively obscene remarks revealed the identity of her intruder beyond a doubt.

"How did you get in?" she whispered back.

"Someone left one of the French doors ajar," Max said. "Is that what you learned in martial arts class?" he asked in the aggrieved tone of the recently bitten.

"No, it's what I learned wrestling with an arsonist. And I didn't leave the French door ajar either ... though I didn't check on it tonight."

"Why not?"

"I was thinking about the psychic fair at the Oasis, where the police took D'Arlene Hendrix downtown to interrogate her about Gandolph's death. Or murder."

"They're wrong." Max was so shocked that he spoke in a normal tone. "I guess we can speak up; no one here but us, is there? I haven't checked the other side of the bed."

"Louie is not in residence," Temple said firmly. "But I can't swear to the rest of the rooms. I didn't search the place. Too tired. And you were gone when I got back from the living room Max, what are you doing here? Again? So soon? I thought you were going to knock in future."

Her eyes struggled to decipher the darkness, especially the black-clad man within it. She felt the bed shift as he rose, and could sense him moving toward the bedroom door on hush-puppy feet.

"These are not knocking times, I'm afraid. I'll make sure that French door is locked, and that no one else is in the condo; then I'll make coffee again while you get dressed."

Temple groaned. "Max, why?"

"I want you to break into a house with me."

"Whose house is it?"

"Mine."

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

"Gee, Kinsella, we never did fun things like this when we were together before," Temple observed as she stumbled on a sprinkler spigot and went sprawling face down on the thick, dead-brown Bermuda grass.

"Hurry, the moon is bright."

"And you never used to sweet-talk me like that either," she added as he jerked her upright.

Temple wasn't sure where they were, except it was a posh gated suburban development, and they had breached a remote section of stucco wall. Actually, Max had breached it; she had been hauled up after, ever the lot in life of the vertically challenged.

"Those silver tennis shoes are a liability." Max's tone verged on loathing. He had never been a footwear connoisseur, so Temple didn't defend her snazzy shoes.

She did glimpse her tennie toes winking at the moon with every step. No one had ever told her to dress for cat burglary.

The house was dead ahead--low, sprawling and black at every opening. Max, his clothes the same light-absorbing black, ran hunched over toward it like a mobile bush. He crouched beside the house wall, where a Hollywood twist thrust spiky evergreen arms at the city-lit night sky pale as dawn. Temple slunk along after.

Max was prying at a crank-out window with a fretwork design; it snapped open moments later. He clambered in first, then leaned out to lift Temple through.

She tumbled, exhausted, to the floor inside; luckily, the carpeting was thick.

"Why do you have to break into your own house?" she wondered for the third time that evening.

This time he answered. "It used to be mine."

Max refastened the window, then crossed the shadowy room with the agile certainty of a wirewalker knowing that what he did might be dangerous, but knowing it too well to worry. He switched on a lamp that illuminated a leather-topped desk on spindly Louie-the-someteenth legs.

"Then why did we break in?"

"I left my keys on the dresser."

"You owned other property in Las Vegas and never told me?"

"I left here six years ago. I let Gary have it then."

"Gary?"

Max sat at the chair behind the desk, running his fingers into his hair. "Gandolph the Great, recently deceased, according to the news. Look, I'm taking the circumstances at their word, that you're actually good at this. I'm too close. The police didn't waste any time going over this place, but I was hoping we ... you ... could find something else."

"This is a crime scene, with tape outside and everything?"

"Technically, yes, but they were only after supporting evidence. It wasn't the murder site."

"By being here we've crossed a taped crime scene?"

"Don't worry, every window is draped, and the drapes are all blackout quality. I put them in myself. Well, do you have anything to contribute?"

"Why didn't you ask me that first? I could have stayed in bed."

"Then we'll go back." He stood, switched off the light.

"As long as I'm here and my tennies are scuffed beyond redemption ..."

The light snapped on again. "Where do you want to start?"

By the glow, Temple found her way to a tufted leather sofa and sat. "At the beginning. With some background on this house, Gandolph the Great and you."

She saw his smile quirk in the upcast glare of the brass lampshade. "I've ended where I should have begun, maybe." He rose and went to a Chinese chest along the wall. A touch opened an inlaid door. Max stood back (like a black curtain being drawn) to reveal the dim twinkle of crystal. "Care for a brandy?"

Temple shook her head. After clinking crystal for a minute, Max brought her something anyway: a whisky liqueur in a shot-glass-size cut-crystal container. Her tongue decided that a drop of this potent stuff should last her about as long as a cough lozenge.

Max sat on the sofa, cosseting the brandy snifter until his hands had warmed it enough to drink. His hands were always active, never still. Occupational hazard.

"This is a fetching house," he said. "A bit conventional, but nice for all that."

"Like me?" she wondered.

I'm not talking about us. Or about now, or about the recent past. You didn't ask for that. I'm talking about six years ago, and more than fifteen years before that, when I first met Gary. Gary Randolph. Magicians' last names vanish faster than their lady assistants from a cabinet. And, in Gary's heyday, magicians all used hokey, made-up stage names."

"Like Houdini."

Max paused to sip, then sighed. "Like Houdini. Gary's official performing title was Gandolph the Great."

"Was it from that darn book that everybody but me has read?"

Max shrugged. "Maybe. It doesn't matter. I know that, at least. Gandolph had a very respectable act. He just missed being part of the new generation that went on television: Doug Henning, real name; David Copperfield, unreal name. Ever notice how in the seventies all the performers were cadging stage names from literary and historical figures? David Copperfield, Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdinck, Jane Seymour."

"Temple Bar," she put in wryly.

"That's not a stage name, but it would make a good one."

"Subconscious recognition factor," Temple agreed. "The titular heroes of novels, a nineteenth-century composer, a wife of Henry the Eighth. I always toyed with 'Katharine Howard' as a fantasy stage name; she was another of Henry's head-losing spouses. Besides, it sounds so veddy, veddy British, RADA and all that."

"I auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London," Max noted with a certain rueful nostalgia.

"Really? Did they admit you?"

"I was a punk kid of sixteen. Hell, no."

Ah, Temple thought, a secondary lark during the IRA summer abroad. Someday would she dare ask him about that?

"Did you know that there's a Temple Bar on Lake Mead?" she asked instead.

"No!" Max's somber expression lightened. "I never saw much of anything out here but the Strip. Really? How ... piquant."

"Thanks. I haven't been called piquant since you left."

"A strange condition, piquancy." He looked around. "This house was piquant after I got done with it. Gary was planning to retire, I was due to tour, and it has four bedrooms, so I rented it to him. It has a history."

"All houses do. Even ... our place has a history."

Max leaned forward, studied the room as if it were brandy to savor. "It belonged to Orson Welles."

Temple sat straighter on the commodious sofa, as if thinking she might be impinging on Welles's generous lap. "Him? The Napa Valley wine man?"

Max laughed. "Paul Masson wines. And do you know what blasphemy it is, sitting in this house and remembering his least achievement?"

"Maybe, but when I was a kid, the Napa wine man was pretty big stuff. Yeah, that's right; the TV commercial was for Paul Masson: 'Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time,' "she declaimed in deep, rotund tones. "That's the most famous wine line since Bela Lugosi's 'I do not drink... vine' in the original Dracula movie. I used to think Welles was Paul Masson. In my immature mind, Masson' was kissing cousin to 'massive,' and that's how Orson Welles looked."

"I saw those TV commercials too, but I knew so much about Welles before then that they hardly registered on me. You do know his history?"

"Oh, sure, I learned it later, when I dabbled in theater. Boy wonder and that Martian Invasion radio broadcast just before World War Two started, and making Citizen Kane and some other classic films, peaking early and never regaining lost glory."

Max blinked and sipped. "Did you know the police were called out to this house Halloween night, before Gary ... Gandolph died at the seance?"

"No? How do you know?"

"Neighbors told me. I played the worried out-of-town owner reclaiming his property after a tragedy. Which I am."

"Won't the police--?"

"I asked after they'd made their neighborhood sweep this morning. In fact they did me a favor. They prepared my way by announcing the death; I merely had to step in afterward.

Everybody was shocked enough to spill whatever beans they had."

"And why were the police called to come out here?"

"Voices. The neighbors heard agitated voices from the house."

"At what time?"

"Between midnight and one A.M."

"But... Gandolph was at the seance all that time. The house should have been empty, unless he had relatives."

Max shook his head. "Lived alone. Stored his magic equipment in the extra bedrooms, along with mine."

"Agitated voices ... arguing?"

"Loud enough to waken or disturb the immediate neighbors. You have to understand, Temple, that people in this development are very discreet. Most of them are celebrities, or at least used to be, so their names still ring bells all over the place. They dislike publicity and attention, and they all swear none of them called the police. But a squad car did drive through and make inquiries. Perhaps your pal Molina could look up the information on the call."

"Umhmmm. She's not even on this case."

Max stroked a hair loosened by his breaking-and-entry exertions from his forehead. Under it lurked a cynically lifted eyebrow. "You must appreciate that."

"Actually, no. I now realize that I used to get tidbits of information out of Molina when we had our little verbal sparring matches. From Watts and Sacker, I get nada, though they're a lot more polite."

"Perhaps Molina is more susceptible to your considerable charm than you think."

"No. Impervious' is her middle name. And if I told you what the C in C.R. stood for--"

Max tented his long flexible fingers. "Tell me. In my position it's always useful to have an insight into members of the local constabulary."

"You don't have a position, that's the trouble. You're just a Missing Man. And 'local constabulary,' honestly, Max. Sometimes you talk like someone from an Agatha Christie play."

"I lived abroad for a while, in my youth."

"Oh, right. Your Interpol days."

"We're not here to weasel background out of each other."

"I'll need more than I have now if I'm supposed to shed any light on Gandolph's death."

Temple tasted another drop of liqueur, then let it soak into her tongue. "So it's possible someone was here while Gandolph was at the seance; more than one 'someone,' or else Voices'

wouldn't have been heard. You've looked the place over, anything moved?"

"Hard to tell; it's been a while since I saw this stuff. But... yes, the magical equipment appears to have been moved, considerably."

"Gandolph's? Or yours?"

"Both. You realize that a magician's equipment is his stock-in trade and worth thousands, his professional secrets all bundled up into a few tables and trunks and boxes?"

"You think someone was searching--?" Temple sat up. "Why do you assume it was Gandolph's things they were disturbing? Why not yours? Not too long ago, somebody was looking for you, hard. Why not for your equipment?"

"Do you really think those thugs who knocked you around would know what to do with a metamorphosis cabinet if they stumbled over one?"

Temple sat back. "No. And no one saw anything, thanks to your blackout draperies. Nice pattern, by the way." She nodded at the cinnabar brocade curtains embroidered with teal and gold birds of paradise.

"The house is Chinese in design. I tried to honor the original intent."

"Why did Welles leave this house, and when?"

"In nineteen eighty-five, when he died."

"He died? But not here?"

"No, in Los Angeles. You didn't know when he died?"

"I must have missed the announcements. I was in college and didn't always have access to a television set in the dorm." Temple eyed the room with new worry. "And you bought it?"

"Somewhat later. First flush of success. I'd always felt Orson Welles was a tragic figure, stymied by his own fearsome talent and others' fear of the truly innovative. He was a magician of sorts, you know."

"No, I didn't. Was he any good?"

Max shrugged. "Like all amateurs, he enjoyed the flourishes but lacked the foundation to achieve any truly original effects. And the physique was lacking too."

"You mean the physique wasn't lacking; too much of a good thing, or too many good things."

"He still managed some stunning effects. The Great Orson swallowed needles and flames, did the trunk substitution with Rita Hayworth as long as Harry Cohn would let him, heckled hypnotized roosters, caught a bullet between his teeth and did psychic readings."

Only one item on this eccentric list caught Temple's attention. "Psychic readings?"

"Supposedly he'd done it earlier, on the road with a touring show to make a buck But he gave up for reasons others often do: he scared himself with his own apparent accuracy. Even Houdini tried it when he was hard up early in his career, and shied away."

"Do you think Welles was psychic?"

"Not at all. Everybody who isn't a crook and toys with doing psychic readings scares themselves silly. They have no idea of the role coincidence plays in daily life. When a few of their predictions hit home, they panic, doff their turbans and head for the hills."

"You have absolutely no belief in a life beyond death, or powers beyond the normal?"

"No," Max said without hesitation. "Anybody who tries to sell somebody else stock in those notions is a fraud."

"Most religions accept inexplicable events they call 'miracles.' Most religions posit a life after death."

"I repeat, anybody or any institution that tries to sell somebody else stock in such notions is a fraud."

"We've never discussed the topic. I always assumed magicians adore the mysterious, the unexplained."

"We do, but only in our own acts. Magicians as a class abhor the spacey side of occultism.

We know the ghostly visitations and the tap-dancing tables are manipulated, and we know how such tricks are done. That's why so many magicians, irritated by watching their art used to defraud the gullible, donate their services to debunk spectral phenomena."

"How is that different from charging the public to watch you do tricks?"

"Enormously!" Max leaned forward, elbows on knees, gesturing with the now-empty brandy glass. "We magicians advertise ourselves as tricksters. We admit that we are entertainers. We don't toy with people's pasts, or their pain. We appeal to their sense of reality, we challenge them in public to catch us tricking them. Psychics and mediums pretend to superior sensitivities.

They take money in private under false pretenses, in exchange for useless and deceptive information. They prolong the process for as long as the pigeon's cash holds out. They are thieves of time as well as money, pickpockets of the soul. They are ... despicable."

"And Gandolph felt as you do?"

"More strongly."

Temple sat back. "Was that why he was in disguise at the seance? Did he plan to expose one, or all, of the psychics present?"

"I don't know. Obviously, he didn't wish to be recognized. He could have been planning a book. He had the time now. Yet it was such an obvious publicity stunt; a seance in a haunted-house attraction seems beneath his notice."

"He mentioned nothing to you of the scheme?"

Max frowned and sipped from the brandy snifter. Temple noticed it was full again, and gave him a questioning look.

Max rolled the brandy in the crystal bowl, then sipped from the second snifter in his other hand. "Quite simple. I brought two glasses over, knowing my mood and capacity, then switched to the full one when the other was empty. Being a magician, I couldn't resist doing it surreptitiously."

"Ex-magicians are like ex-actors, always on."

"That's it!" Max said. "You've hit it. Gandolph was 'always on.' He couldn't resist trying to fool the eye, even if it was with that Lady-Lavinia-at-the-seance outfit. He might have done it simply as a lark, intending to rise at the end, pull off his bonnet and reveal himself."

"Happy Halloween."

"Trick or treat, you decide."

"That's why he wouldn't have told you."

"I wasn't exactly Harry Houseguest, with slippers warming on the hearth and a nice concave dip worn in the best chair. I come ... and go. I was here if I wanted to lie low. If I wanted something else, I was gone."

"So you really don't know much about Gandolph's movements, or even his state of mind?"

"No." Max sipped again before speaking, bitterly. "I hadn't found the time yet to catch up on his fuddy-duddy retirement projects. I had life-and-death matters of my own to consider."

"Max, he might have been killed by accident. It was dark, foggy and even teary in that seance room. I could hardly see, myself. If you're going to force me to rule out the lovely ghosts we saw that night--the serial faces in the windows and Houdini in chains--then the killer was simply human, and maybe made a human error. Perhaps Gandolph was killed by mistake."

"Then what of the voices heard near the house?"

"Sound carries. It can be deceptive. Somebody leaves a window open and a television on ...

presto, eerie voices in the night, arguing."

"Somehow, I feel we're reversing roles."

"How?"

"You're talking me out of groundless suspicions. At least we can search the rooms. You might spot something that I wouldn't think anything of."

"Because I'm ignorant of magicians' tricks?"

"No, because you have no stake in seeing murderers where there are only ghosts. And this house is doubly haunted now." Max glanced up to the dark beams under the peaked roof.

"Good thing I don't believe in spooks." He bolted the brandy like a man who did.

Temple wondered what kind of "spooks" he referred to: spirits, or spies.

"Where will you stay now?" she asked, hating to open that touchy topic.

Max seemed startled by her question. His eyes widened, like Midnight Louie's when he heard a noise he didn't expect.

"Here, of course."

"Here! You can't, now."

"Why not? I own the place, under a business name, granted, but it's still mine."

"But the police have been out here searching."

"Past tense. They've got what they wanted. The best hiding place is always one that somebody's searched already." He regarded her quizzically. "Were you afraid you'd have to be a generous soul and offer me sanctuary at the Circle Ritz?"

"No! I hadn't thought of that at all. I just wondered how many hidey-holes you have in Las Vegas."

"As many as there are neon bulbs in the Strip skyline."

"I see. I'm supposed to figure things out while you continue being your usual mystifying self."

"You are the usual soul of perception." Max bowed toward her, flourishing his left hand to pluck a dinner-plate-size paper rose from thin air.

Temple laughed, as she always did, and accepted the rose. Paper roses didn't require watering, unlike relationships.

"I'll tour the premises," she conceded, getting up.

Max leaped up to conduct her.

He had been truthful: the house, while no palace, was large, spacious and crammed with magical paraphernalia. Even the spare bedroom, with its massive and priceless opium bed, was otherwise stocked with painted cabinets and boxes and tables of all description.

"You rented the place furnished?" Temple asked.

Max's sculpted face had taken on an Oriental tilt once inside this room. "If you're asking if the opium couch is mine, yes. I've even slept in it, feeling like an emperor who has very expensive dreams."

Temple eyed the cushioned structure askance: part horizontal throne, part exquisite artifact of another culture and age, part harem honeymoon suite, it was both sumptuous and decadent, but hardly romantic.

"You must have had nightmares in it."

"Not yet," Max said, with an inscrutable smile.

Temple continued down the hallway. The other two bedrooms resembled lumber rooms, they were so crammed with unused furnishings and magical appliances.

The fourth bedroom was on the opposite side of the house and uncluttered, except for a black futon on the hardwood floor, and near it a low carved cinnabar Chinese table bearing a Ming vase full of paper roses.

"It that real?" Temple asked.

"The flowers?"

"The vase."

"No comment," Max said, thereby admitting everything.

"I hope Molina doesn't get her hands on you," Temple said in mock threat. "You'd crack like Tang porcelain."

"Perhaps not." Max's smile was secret, and therefore irritating.

She paced back up the hall, struck by the fact that neither Max nor herself wore shoes that made any noise on the hardwood floors. He by habit, she by request.

She stopped again by Gandolph's bedroom door, leaning over the threshold, her fingertips clinging to the frame.

It wasn't just the fact that the bedroom's resident was dead that kept her balanced into the entrance. Something in the room's arrangement--if so much jumble could be called that--

troubled her, looked out of place. But how could something look out of place in a mess?

"Where does he plug in his computer when he's using it?"

"Right there--" Max pointed, and then he really looked at the room.

He marched right in, as if no old ghosts guarded the threshold.

Temple followed, with mental "excuse me's" to both Gary and Orson.

Max was standing by the small computer desk, his hand clutching a big pale electrical plug as if he were Hamlet contemplating mortality in the skull of Yorick.

"He always left it plugged in. There, by that wall. I told him he should get a surge protector.

What's it doing over here? It looks like it was simply shoved out of the way."

"Let's plug it in and find out."

Max and Temple both leaned into pushing the unit back to the wall, though Max pushed and Temple merely nudged a little.

Once Temple had replaced the prongs in the socket, she knelt in front of the computer table and booted the machine. Max leaned over her, studying the screen.

WordPerfect came up, but Temple exited it to try a file manager program. The baby-blue screen went black, and up one came, like magic, or like a genie sprung from a bottle.

"Marvelous," Max murmured. The vast miniworlds inside computers intrigued him, but he was oddly computerphobic, at least when it came to operating them. Or so he said.

Temple studied the network of directories, looking for any provocative names.

"It does look like he was working on a book. Look: a directory named 'Bio.'"

"Biology?"

"More likely 'biography.' " Temple exited the program, returned to the word processor and clicked into the bio directory.

A ribbon of files scrolled down the screen.

"Is this enough for a book?" Max asked.

"And then some." Excited, and yet feeling like a computer-age eavesdropper, Temple opened a file: biol2.occ.

No spell-checker had touched this text, and punctuation was as haphazard as hail, but the subject matter was crystal-clear.

"He was writing an expose," Max breathed behind her. "He was documenting the foremost psychics of today. He must have spent years gathering data--and, look! At the top: 'as Edwina Mayfair.' He was using that identity. But--"

"But what about the real Edwina Mayfair?"

"What if there wasn't a real Edwina Mayfair?"

Max's eyes narrowed in the eerie light of the computer screen. When Max's eyes narrowed, their green intensified, and usually Temple intensified too. Now, she kept wondering if he sent for them through the mail. Blasted illusions were the worst kind. Temple was actually more interested in what he was saying this time. ' "You mean, he created Edwina Mayfair from scratch?"

"He'd been in retirement for years. No legitimate psychic-- Let me rephrase that: no self-defending psychic would admit a debunking magician to a session, but if the visitor was another so-called psychic..."

Temple had been tapping keys, changing directories, looking up hard evidence: numbers and dates. "These files go back three years, and, given his computer setup, this is an upgrade. He probably has a lot on diskette."

"It is truly mysterious to me how you do all that with those nails," Max admitted, watching her fingernails kick keys all over the board.

"Pay attention! I'm saying that these are massive files, both in number and capacity.

Gandolph was writing the War and Peace of psychic exposes."

"With long Russian names and everything?"

"With names, dates, places and... photo documentation, it says here."

"Photos."

"I suppose an infrared camera, concealed ... in, say, a large hat--"

"Or bosom."

"--could have seen quite a bit."

"Well, there's the motive."

"Maybe." Temple eyed the room. "I don't see any new diskette boxes around. I don't see any diskette boxes around, period."

"Taken?"

"Could be. Could be that Gandolph was like a lot of other people and had blind faith in modern technology. Maybe he didn't back much up." Temple rose. "Well. I suggest you go out first thing in the morning and buy a sultan's ransom of three-and-a-half-inch one point four-four meg double-density floppy disks. Then you sit right here and back up everything on the directories before anyone else messes with this computer."

Max looked up from jotting everything down like mad. "That sounds ... tedious."

"Did you think detective work was all second-story stuff? Black designer duds and sneaking around?"

"I'm not sure I'd find this directory again, Temple."

"I'll write' down the necessary formulas for you," she offered. "When you get me back home. If I can find a pen or pencil around the place that Midnight Louie hasn't batted to the Hoover Dam and back."

For once, Max Kinsella was out of snappy comebacks."