Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 22

Framed Dead Center

The morning Las Vegas Review-Journal blared all the facts on page one with an arresting headline: PSYCHIC QUESTIONED IN HALLOWEEN SEANCE DEATH.

Temple remembered when newspaper headline style had changed from capitalizing major headline words to using all lower case except for the initial letter of the first word. Her mind still visualized sensational headlines in the old, emphatic style and even added a yellow-journalism exclamation point: PSYCHIC ARRESTED FOR HALLOWEEN SEANCE MURDER!

Somehow, MALE MAGICIAN DISGUISED AS FEMALE PSYCHIC did not have the same, simple ring.

So the police had not come clean about the victim's role-playing. She couldn't blame them.

Why leak embarrassing facts when they were still investigating why a grown man would participate in seances in drag? That was a bigger puzzle than the murder, almost. And then, think of the forthcoming testimony about the ghosts, which the mediums present appeared to have taken as gospel.

Louie had come to lie on the newspaper sections Temple was not reading at the moment, one of his less endearing tricks. She had no patience this morning, not with the sleep she hadn't gotten in the past forty-eight hours, and pulled them all out from under him.

"You're lucky I made it home at all last night," she told the cat as he eyed her in comical amazement. "You're lucky that there wasn't someone else sleeping in your spot."

All untrue, of course. But if you couldn't lie to a dumb beast, who could you lie to? Temple had harbored no intentions of inviting Max to stay once he'd escorted her safely and surreptitiously home. And he had cherished no intentions of asking, for he'd let himself out almost immediately on arrival, mumbling about all-night computer stores.

Temple smiled. Imagine Max cooped up all day like a hermit, copying files onto diskettes.

Meanwhile, she was a free agent, with her current employers encouraging her to explore the outer limits of the paranormal in the name of research. She could go where her fancy took her.

Which was where ... ?

Her doorbell rang as if in answer. She scrambled to make herself presentable and yet open it in time. Meanwhile, Midnight Louie ostentatiously reclaimed every damn section of the newspaper.

At the door, Electra was waiting with an air of pent-up excitement. "One question: will you come to the seance tonight?"

"What seance? Wasn't the first one enough?"

Electra shook today's soft, magenta-sprayed curls. "Quite the opposite. The first one demands a second, a more private affair. I'm holding it in my rooms tonight."

"Your rooms? Aren't they sacrosanct or something? I've never heard of you entertaining so much as a plumber there."

"I do like my privacy, but that's why my penthouse is such an ideal site. It has not been polluted. I can promise you that no cameraman and no Crawford Buchanan will be present. Just true believers and time-tested mediums. And, of course, you too, dear; if you're willing to come."

"Why is an exception being made for me?"

Electra glanced through her half-size magnifying glasses at the floral rug as if something large, dead and insectoid lay there. "Your preeminent experience with murder. We have decided that you have extraordinary, untapped powers in that area."

"I've been elevated to presumed psychic? Won't Lieutenant Molina be sorry she has scorned my help in the past!"

"Don't be sarcastic, Temple. It puts off the spirits."

"Why not invite Max? He's the expert on magical matters."

Electra's shudder caused the huge bird-of-paradise flowers on her muumuu to sway as if in a breeze. "Just who we do not want present! One of those nasty magicians who always discredit efforts to contact the spirit world Spoilsports."

"Like Houdini," Temple pointed out.

"Exactly! Unlike the police, I am convinced that Houdini did it: the dirty deed, the murder."

"Nice of him to wait seventy years after his death to turn to homicide."

"Niceness had nothing to do with it. It was motive and opportunity," Electra added, screwing her eyes into an expression that matched Molina at her most skeptical. "Houdini hated mediums, loathed them! Here was his chance to express his innermost feelings and escape punishment. You see the devilishly clever psychology of it? He came back, all right, but to kill a psychic. It would be the most daring; two-edged escape of all time: first to elude the Afterworld long enough to show himself as material; then to draw another into the Beyond; a hated medium, best of all."

"But Gandolph wasn't a medium, that was the point. He was another Houdini, presumably out to reveal the artifice at the heart of this darkness. Houdini would never kill him."

"Ah, but Houdini didn't know his victim was Gandolph in disguise."

"If Houdini died and sat around in the Beyond twiddling his thumbscrews or handcuffs or whatever for seven decades--"

"Seven. A most significant number in mystical circles."

"Well, Houdini was almost short enough to be a dwarf, probably Grumpy. Anyway, if he comes back to commit murder after seven decades, he darn well ought to know just who was who and what was what."

"Being dead does not make one omniscient, dear. It was the sort of ironic mistake that could happen to anyone. Gandolph did make a convincing woman; one would have thought he had done the act for years. I believe even you were misled, and you sat right next to him. You even held hands with him."

"Gloves," Temple corrected. "He wore gloves, and rather wisely. That entire over-the-top persona was designed as a disguise: hat, veil, gloves, the whole works. And what about the other apparition, the poor kid looking in the candy-store window?"

"That." Electra dismissed the three faces of Everyman with a couple of finger flicks. "We feel that was a symbolic manifestation of Houdini's hatred toward mediums. Each time we saw the figure it was older and larger. You see the metaphor."

"Ever older and larger. Hmm. Sounds more like the transformation of Midnight Louie since he arrived at the Circle Ritz."

"What a quaint mind you have, dear."

"Quaint? First piquant, now quaint? Are people trying to tell me something?"

"Nine P.M.," Electra said with a forefinger-wag that threatened to dislodge her pineapple-gold-painted nail. Unlike Temple's, Electra's long nails were false. "Be there, or be sorry."

She bustled down the short neck of hallway leading to Temple's unit. Temple knew how it must feel to have Woody Woodpecker as your local neighborhood enforcer.

Of course she would go, if only to get another look at psychics in action. If an act of God or Houdini hadn't killed Gary "Gandolph" Randolph, then maybe someone else at the table had.

Then, too, she was extremely interested in seeing Electra's digs from the inside out. Temple had one of her psychic serial-killer-hunter hunches that there were hidden reasons for holding the seance in Electra's penthouse. In a way, she wished that Max could attend. If there was one area in which she was still willing to trust him implicitly, it was in knowing what was real and what was not at a seance.

Meanwhile, there was another method, less glamorous but more reliable. Why didn't she just ask the special effects whizzes?

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

Six semi-trailer rigs lined up in front of the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead when Temple parked the Storm in the huge trucks' intimidating shadows. Those iron-pumping tires were as tall as her car.

She knew that stagehands and rock-band roadies could strike sets in record time, but she hadn't expected to see the inside of the haunted house stripped of its ghosties and ghouls already.

"Are the people who designed this attraction still around?" she asked the first scurrying workman she could stop. He was a she on closer inspection, a burly woman in denim overalls with dirty blond hair pulled into what had become a unisex ponytail under an orange hard hat.

"Yeah, but you shouldn't be in here without a hard hat."

"Show me the special effects crew and I'm sidelined forever."

"The boyos in body paint." The woman pointed to a wall-hugging trio that looked like a rock band whose act was being disbanded.

Temple joined them in the tortuous hallway that she had wound through twice in recent days.

"Are the police letting you dismember the seance room too?"

"Dismember. Cool expression." The one with a tattoo of a spider web veiling half his face shook his head. "Nope. We never unplug that ski-lift room. It's our centerpiece. Not that the police care that much. Why do you?"

"I'm interested in your tricks and technology. I represent a Strip hotel--"

"Strip hotel?" Even the guy's spider web was smiling. "Hear that, Crash? Guess sudden death hasn't frozen our act yet."

Crash looked like he had been in a few, all nearly terminal. He was bearish, beefy and pierced on all visible folds of flesh. Despite the biker body armor, Temple thought she detected the sweet souls of asocial computer nerds beneath an exterior of warriors trying to escape the latest update of the arcades' most gruesome and gory game, Fatal Wombat.

"You guys designed all this, really? Holograms and everything?"

Flattery will get you information.

"Sure."

"This is nothin'."

"Want something really cutting edge? You should see our studio, man."

"Well, I'd love to, but mostly what I'd like to know now is what the moneybags at the hotel want to find out."

"Yeah?"

"Did you guys, you know, skew the seance effects just to shake things up a little, with Hot Heads there? I hear those nasty weapons and a few uninvited spirits were really jumpin\"

"Hey." All three shook their untidy hands. Two, she noticed, had tatooed knuckles that read

"Dweeb" and "Dreck." She wondered if those were their nicknames. Crash, Dweeb and Dreck Productions, Ltd. had a certain crude appeal.

"We didn't tweak a timer," Crash said.

"In fact," Dweeb added, scratching his topiary buzz-cut with dirty fingernails, "our stuff was all screwed up. Those spirits must have been playing Ouija board with our master panels, I tell you. And that's what we told the police."

"What did the police say?"

"Nothin'." Dreck swigged from a can of... Gatorade? "The police think we're punks."

"We are," Dweeb said promptly.

"That doesn't mean we can't put on a bitchin' show for your hotel, lady." Crash, the ever-alert salesman, added an invitation impossible to refuse. "Come over to our studio and we'll knock your socks off, or whatever else you put on that passes for underwear."

"Where is your studio?"

"North Las Vegas."

"And you've been doing this Halloween attraction--?"

"Since we were in high school," Dreck said, still swigging.

"Which was--?"

Crash shrugged shoulders the size of a polar bear's. "Couple years ago."

"Thanks, guys. I'll definitely keep you in mind."

Temple edged out on that vague promise, slipping into a stream of grunting laborers who seemed as inclined to smash her like a bug, with the heavy equipment they were toting, as not.

As murderous riggers, Crash, Dweeb and Dreck were as likely suspects as Grumpy, Doc and Dopey, but they were also just the types to let "art" sweep them away into malicious mischief.

Heigh ho, heigh ho, it was off to work in other suspect-mines she would go. Maybe Electra's mysterious homemade seance would prove more productive than any performance at this madhouse from Helloween.