Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

"Do Van and Nicky approve of your moonlighting as a psychic detective these days?" Electra asked.

"I'm not a psychic detective: I'm investigating psychics. There's a big difference. You bet they approve. I called to find out how the Crystal Ball went--a smash, boo hoo, that l couldn't bask in--but Nicky and Van were mostly agog about the fatality at the seance. They're dying to know if the haunted house organizers are irresponsible enough to play fast and loose with their special effects, and maybe commit manslaughter. Such loose cannons wouldn't be on the Crystal Phoenix team, I can tell you. So I have carte blanche to snoop."

"Eightball did offer the opinion that these punk kids that dream up special effects nowadays are technological giants and, emotional dwarves."

"When did you see Eightball?"

"I can use my telephone, too," Electra said airily, "even if it isn't a cute red spike shoe like yours. Now let's boogie."

Electra eagerly led Temple to the ballrooms, her vivid muumuu for once fading into the hothouse background.

After they had paid their stiff entry fees (apparently sister seance attendees received no discounts), they were allowed into a ma-harajah's pleasure dome draped with imported fabrics.

Sheer silks impressed with gold designs tented every exhibitor's stand.

"Isn't this sublime?" Electra clasped chubby, beringed hands before her floral breast. "I feel like I'm in Ali Baba's bazaar."

"I feel like I'm in Ali Baba's harem," Temple remarked, watching a pair of babes in chain-mail bikinis jingle by. Or did she mean jiggle? "Or on the set of Bay Watch. "

"Hmm? Body Watch? What's that, dear?"

"Nothing much," she said. "Do psychic fairs always stir up so much atmosphere?"

"Oh, my, no. They're usually rather dreary affairs at off-the-beaten-path motels that smell of disinfectant and dripping pipes. This is the pinnacle of the paranormal marketplace. The Everest of extrasensory perception, the--"

"The Mount Rainier of the mountebank," Temple finished caustically.

"What do Monte Carlo's Prince Rainier and Monty Hall have to do with it?"

"Probably as much as goodness," Temple said obscurely, privately invoking the ghost of Mae West again. "Where are our friends from last night?"

"Oh, scattered among the booths." Electra waved garnet- and amethyst-ringed fingers tipped with pale orange polish at the array. "Do you want to get a bite to eat first? They have food booths."

"Perhaps. I'm feeling an insatiable craving for a fig, at the mo-ment."

"Oh. I doubt they have figs, not even one. More like Orangeade and Coke and nachos."

"Nachos are the native food?"

"No, but it's popular. New Age people like strong flavors, you know."

"I didn't know."

"We want to experience life in all its zest and foreign spice."

"Even death?"

"Oh, especially death. Death is so interesting! The tunnel, the light, the little people at the end of the tunnel."

"It sounds rather like a haunted house."

"What a nice analogy, dear! Yes, the House of Life is haunted by all who have gone before.

We who walk through the walls of reality may glimpse the wonder beyond. I hadn't thought of it before, but a haunted house is the perfect site for a seance."

"Just show me the way to someone who might know more than we do about the death of Gandolph last night."

"Any one of these prognosticators and mysteriarchs might know that." Another wave of tangerine fingernails.

"Mysteriarchs?"

"Like Houdini. Like Max." Electra beamed at Temple with an arch expression. "You know, like a patriarch, only a master of the arts of magic."

"Have you seen Max lately?"

"Me? No. He appears to have vanished again. And you?"

"Not lately," Temple said, choosing to define "lately" as in the past twelve hours. "Oh, great.

The brunet bombshell has set up his tent. Shall we go drop our bombshell on him? I doubt any of these people were gawking at the noon news if they had to put out their wares this morning."

"Temple, have you considered that the police will be mad at you for telling everybody who the dead man was?"

"It was on TV. Besides, shouldn't they all have gotten the news telepathically? Even our master of ceremonies there."

"He is pretty cute, isn't he?" Electra hustled after Temple toward the table where Oscar Grant was enchanting a mostly female audience.

"Cute" was not the word Temple would apply to Grant. He was an ingratiatingly slight man, with a slightly effeminate air, which by no means meant he was gay. Such a man would always do well with women, combining an oily masculinity with the chummy camaraderie of a massage salesman.

His long dark hair, mustache and solid-black dress gave him a foreign air that was quite probably undeserved. Temple had seen his type at the front of classrooms, in seaside art galleries, on cable TV infomercials and in front of carnival midway sideshows.

She suspected that they always sold something that sounded, tasted, smelled or felt too good to be true, and that also cost too much to be genuine.

"The tapes," he was saying now, "are only one hundred and eighty-five dollars, and of course you also get a watermelon tourmaline pendant, my video and nine hundred number in case you have any questions. Ladies? "

The watching women bubbled over with questions, as eager as high-schoolers. Temple studied their sun-creased necks and hands, their cubic-zirconia-emblazoned wrists and fingers, their freckled chests and sinewy golf-playing calves and forearms. This guy could sell Retin-A to cloistered monks, and here he had an audience already sold on his snake oil, which was half mysticism and half mumbo jumbo.

"Remember," he urged as they reluctantly moved on, "to think is to know, but to be is to believe."

Wow. Temple stepped right up, intercepting his melting look of greeting before he recognized her and washed it right off.

"Did you know," she began without fanfare, sounding alarmingly like Lieutenant C. R. Molina to herself, "that Edwina Mayfair was really a man named Gandolph? And, if not, why not?"

Not for her the hot-fudge glance, the supple vocal tone and expressive eyebrows. "You must be joking!" he sputtered. "You were at the seance last night, some flack, I remember--"

"Flack" was a fighting word. "You set yourself up as the expert on psychics. If you're so expert, how come you were taken in by Edwina Mayfair? Didn't you know her by sight? Or foresight?"

"I have never met the lady. We work on different coasts."

"Surely an insignificant gap given the intercommunication possible on a higher, less physical plane?"

"Your attitude stinks," he said. "We're not omnipotent, simply gifted."

"Still, you admit not meeting Edwina Mayfair. What about this Gandolph?"

"Gandolph? I've heard of him. A malcontent. A failed stage magician who took insane relish in attempting to slander truer talents. A bitter old man who probably died of a suffocated heart.

I can't say I'm surprised, now that I learn the dead person's real identity. Gandolph was choking on his own failures and trying to pin them oh us. Bile killed him, then; an excess of bile. No doubt his rank presence drove away the only solid apparition of Houdini the world has seen since nineteen twenty-six."

"Had you ever met him?"

Oscar Grant paused to calm himself one muscle at a time. When he spoke again, it was with detached serenity.

"Houdini, or this dead charlatan? Why should I answer your questions? The police have been enough skeptics for me to deal with in twelve hours. But, no, I never met the man, although I have read about him, and have seen photographs. In none of those photographs was he wearing women's garb, so I wouldn't have recognized him. That was his intent, wasn't it? To infiltrate our gathering as apparently you have done? We are used to vilification and skepticism. We are used to enemies among us."