Carole douglas - Cat in an Indigo Mood

"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?"