Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A White Tie And Tails

“Guess who’s missing right now? Max Kinsella,” the Thin Woman pointed out. “We stole the formal-wear heisters idea from his act, but he conjured a whole new illusion for us.”

“So we were betrayed. What’s new,” Hal asked. “We should slit our wrists? You’re a medium, Czarina Catharina,” he added bitterly. “What do you see in our future?”

The woman spun around on her barstool. The lighting from above made her face into a cratered dark side of the moon, excessive weight, age, and defeat evident in every highlight and shadow.

Temple glimpsed a giant bubble glass behind her, almost empty, with booze the color of C. R. Molina’s electric blue eyes at the bottom. Had Czarina been drinking that much Blue Curaçao straight? Temple checked the bottle on the bar. Yes. Oh, the calories!

“I see dead people, Hal,” Czarina intoned.

“Oh, shut up.” The Thin Woman straightened her sharp shoulders and half spun to address Czarina. “Nobody died today. Just dreams died today. The Cloaked Conjuror is a bigger sensation than ever, the big, fat, rich, anonymous bully. He’s okay, but we shed our Vader skins to escape and are okay too.”

“Maybe not, Ramona.” Hal spun to face into the deserted room, elbows pushed back to lean on the bar.

Oh, great. Temple was once again an unseen eavesdropper on the Synth at work and play, or, actually, idle and in despair. She was a witness. They’d recognize her from the last time she’d shown up at their headquarters, would know she wasn’t just a “lost customer.” She wished she’d been foolish enough to carry a gun here again.

Would Max really invite her to this Synth pity party and not show up? Just how muddled was his memory?

She considered bending out of sight below the table, planning to crawl out in the darkness, a tactic both humiliating and scary.

A clinking sound stirred the banks of shelved liquor bottles behind the bar. The trio snapped their heads to the rear, spinning back around to face the mirror behind the wall of booze that reflected shards of their unhappy faces.

Temple froze in place. Any motion now would attract them.

“Poltergeists,” Czarina intoned.

“The building settling,” Hal said. “Why shouldn’t it fall apart too? You just said ‘nobody died’ today, Ramona. What about yesterday? Just few days ago.”

“Cosimo, sure,” she answered. “Maybe one of the Vaders did it.”

“Or one of us,” Hal said.

“What? Are you crazy?” Czarina jerked half around to look him in the eye past the intervening presence of Ramona.

Hal shrugged and turned away. “A couple of our would-be recruits didn’t make it either.”

“Who?” Czarina demanded.

Temple noticed Ramona’s long nails caressing the sides of her martini glass.

“Gandolph,” Hal said.

The word almost made Temple’s heart stop. She had to hear this.

Then she thought, Which death is he talking about? Gandolph’s fake death or the recent real one? Max. You wouldn’t take this almost-confession lying down. Where are you?

“Gandolph? He’s been out of the picture for … months and months.” Czarina stretched for the tall blue bottle and poured more liquid sapphire into her glass.

Ramona smiled as she turned around to hold her martini glass at her breastbone. “He died at that Halloween séance to channel Harry Houdini. He died disguised as a fat old female medium, the rumor went,” she said maliciously. “Was he gay, or just crazy?”

“He was a longtime friend of Cosimo’s.” Hal lifted his highball glass in a solo unspoken toast. “Old-school magicians like those two will never come again. I thought at the time maybe you had killed him, Czarina.”

“Me?”

“He’d outed you as a fake medium only months before. He may have lifted your likeness for the Houdini gig. That’s a lot of hurt for your professional reputation, not to mention personal ridicule, Czarina. And now someone’s killed Cosimo too.”

“Hmm.” Ramona lifted her glass like a chalice and sipped before speaking. “I’d always wondered if it was you, Hal.”

“That séance death? Surely not Cosimo’s.”

Ramona shrugged, which did great things for her décolletage, especially in the dramatic overhead lights. “Both, maybe.”

“So.” Czarina was starting to sound soused. “Hal thought I killed Gandolph and you thought he killed Gandolph and Cosimo. Who do you think I thought you killed?”

“Are there any more deaths to go around, Czarina?”

“You bet, Ramona. You almost won the Cloaked Conjuror’s assistant to our cause. What a coup that would have been. Then Barry tragically ‘fell’ from the stage catwalk during that TitaniCon science fiction convention.”

“I don’t do straight-up ladders for three stories with these shoes, Czarina.” Ramona kicked up her slinky hem to showcase a high-arched foot wearing a killer spike heel. “Now, if he’d been stabbed to death … It was an accident. No police were on it.”

“Then what about those would-be recruits Hal was mentioning, Czarina?”

“I happen to know, Ramona,” Hal put in, “from Cosimo’s own lips, that you tried to seduce that university professor to our side and he wouldn’t seduce. How much about us did you tell him? Because he ended up dead in his classroom.”

“That was an exhibition area,” Ramona said, her face and body stiff with control. “Jeff was an … engaging man, more interested in my mind than my body, true, but I seldom encounter men like that.”

“You don’t give them a chance to skip over the obvious, rather,” Hal said.

“I … was sorry he died.” Ramona took another oh-so-controlled sip of her straight-up martini. “He had a genuine love for magic and those who made it their lives. He studied the mystification, the surprise, the delight of the audience. He had theories from old, old books. I’d never realized the history … He made me feel like a kid again, wanting to believe, to be believed.”

Temple, the lone unacknowledged audience member in the dark, believed her.

“Someone jealous of your intellectual infatuation with your professor killed him,” Czarina decided. “Hal? Did you contribute to Professor Mangel’s ‘study’?”

He nodded. “You too, I imagine. We’re all suspects.” He frowned. “I suppose you thought I killed Gandolph’s female assistant as well. That I was attempting to seduce her to our cause and failed.”

“Gloria?” Ramona was surprised. “She was a done deal. She was eager to join us. She disapproved of Gandolph’s retirement quest of exposing mediums as fakes. She nattered on about people needing faith, needing spiritual guidance from the spirit world. I might have killed her myself to shut her up.”

“But people do need that!” Czarina turned passionate. “It’s not just a scam. We mediums are … deep-sea divers. We’re trying to take our clients to a deeper level of their memories and emotions so they can see those they love are always with them in some way. Everybody mocks now. Everyone’s a cynic. Everyone gets to see the man behind the curtain. That’s why I hate the Cloaked Conjuror. He’s wrenched the magic out of our lives.”

“But you wouldn’t kill him?” Hal asked.

“Knowing what I do of the spirit world? Creating such a black hole of injustice in the universe as murder? I want my powers to heal, not destroy. I want recognition, yes, but not revenge. That’s so poisoning.”

“Hmm,” Hal said. “So our heartless seductress became an acolyte of a mild-mannered professor and our ridiculed medium would never besmirch her afterlife with a destructive act and, frankly, ladies, I’m too old and honest with myself to care to kill anyone. So who did the crimes?”