Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

"Am I to take it that you are also prepared to deal with them, then?"

Oscar's sad, superior smile made his mustache crooked. "We are prepared to win them over, with the truth. That is our only object, our only weapon. Now if you will excuse me; I have acolytes to address."

Temple turned. Another clutch of tanned, desperately casual women covered in cubic zirconia and crystals were lined up behind her. She gave way gracefully, trying not to be blinded by the light.

"Oh," fretted Electra, digging in her canvas bag, "now he lumps me in with the Enemy. Can't you show a little tact and sensitivity? I was hoping to get one of his singing crystal stickpins, which he gives now and then to the odd acolyte."

"You have no place to put a stickpin. And investigators have no tact."

"Oh."

Temple took her arm. "But Grant admits to knowing who Gandolph was, and did you catch what he really was?"

"A crusading magician who tried to unmask psychics. Houdini was one of those himself. The magical has always attacked the mystical, yet who is the true fake? Everybody knows that magicians are nothing but a bag of tricks."

"Yes, and some of them admit it, including Houdini, from what I've read. In fact, Houdini's friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came to an abrupt end when Houdini couldn't endorse Lady Conan Doyle's psychic claims to having channeled his mother in Houdini's own presence.

But although Sir Arthur insisted Houdini used dematerialization to accomplish some of his illusions, Houdini steadfastly denied it. And it would have been tempting for the age's greatest mystifier to claim supernatural powers with such a respected endorser of them behind him."

Temple stopped walking and stood puzzled. "Then why is Houdini, of all people, reputed to have sworn to come back from death?"

"He never did. That line was from the scriptwriter of a cheap film he made," a voice answered behind her.

The women turned to see D'Arlene Hendrix sitting on a folding chair before a plain booth with a table covered by beige brochures.

Temple nodded approval. This setup looked like it was selling dental hygiene. She instantly trusted D'Arlene Hendrix a hundred percent more than she trusted Oscar Grant. Then she realized that the low-key approach could be just as deceptive.

"You seem to know a lot about Houdini."

"Why not? I read the books and watch the movies." D'Arlene smiled. "No, I didn't get my info on the telepathic telegraph. He was a textbook case of something: death wish, mother fixation, sexual hang-ups, quite literally; did an awful lot of his tricks suspended upside down, or cramped in incredibly tight spaces and swathed with chains. The mother thing is true; he worshiped her. When she died, he tormented himself that she had some last, undelivered message meant just for him."

"Then ... he would have tried to bring her back, not promised to return himself." Temple waited for an explanation.

"True." D'Arlene pushed an invisible hair behind her ear. "And he did hunt sincerely for a medium who could do that. Finding only frauds, he became an anti-medium crusader. And he didn't promise to return from the dead, merely made provisions that if anyone claimed he did, there was evidence around to rebut the phonies. But the public wanted Houdini back as much as he would have wanted to recall his mother. Who besides sonny wanted to see Mama Cecelia Weiss in the transparent flesh? It's Houdini who has the sex appeal. All five feet four of him, bowed legs and everything. An incredible athlete, nonetheless. Actually, Houdini's wife, Bess, started the tradition of the annual Halloween seance to make contact. After a decade, she gave up, but the Spiritualists, who would have loved to bring back the time's most notorious skeptic of post-death communication, never gave up, they just faded away."

"Are you convinced? That figure we saw last night, the chained man--"

"Looked just like Houdini in one of his most famous photographs."

"Photograph?" Electra echoed, crestfallen.

"Exactly," said Temple. "We saw nothing that couldn't have been faked."

D'Arlene smiled. "No, we never do. But I have seen things at seances that could have been faked and that could not be proved to have been faked."

"What about Gandolph?"

"What about him?"

"He's the one who died last night."

D' Arlene Hendrix was suddenly speechless. "I hadn't heard that it wasn't Edwina Mayfair.

Gandolph the Great? In that ridiculous hat? What a way to die, dressed as a laughingstock! Poor man. Quite sincere, in his way. I understood that he was retired."

"He is now," Temple said grimly, ready to move on.

Down the aisle, under an ethereal canopy of white and silver silks, she had recognized a shining silver head. She was dying to uv terrogate Mynah Sigmund about the poor, dear, dead deceiver. Temple paused to hunt for her own hidden motive. All right. She was dying to find out what made this New Age Barbie Doll tick.

"Come on," she told Electra, hitching her tote bag up on her shoulder and pushing her glasses back on the bridge of her nose. "I want you to make sure that this next one doesn't pull the ectoplasm over my eyes."

"Ectoplasm over your eyes?" D'Arlene rolled hers. "You wouldn't like that. In the old days, spirit ectoplasm was often made of regurgitated luminous cheesecloth."

Temple blanched. "What a way to get your minimum daily calcium requirement!"

"I don't know much about Mynah Sigmund," Electra said between huffs and puffs that wouldn't blow a marshmallow over as she hoofed along in Temple's wake. "She's local, and she used to do a show downtown at the Gilded Calf."

"Magic?"

"No, medium. She's never done magic, that I know of. Oh, and she came here from Sedona, Arizona."

"Figures." Temple gritted her teeth as she pushed against a crowd that was all going in the opposite direction.

"And she used to be married to Oscar Grant."

"No!" That stopped Temple in her tracks, which were made by Anne Klein Kelly-green pumps. "Talk about opposites attracting. Look at who she's married to now!"

"Um, that big quiet guy, what's-his-name."

"Yeah, that big guy made about as much impression on me as a bowl of haggis too." Temple glanced at the woman's tent. It looked fashioned from lame and Lurex, and today's long, clingy white gown looked half spandex. "Odd that a purist about the paranormal from the New Age capital of Arizona should wear so much artificial fabric."

"Oh, Temple." Electra seemed glad to stand still for a while. "These people are ... odd to begin with."

"And yet you believe they're for real?"

"Sure. People who hear and see things other people don't are bound to get a bit... strange."

"Include us, then, because we seem to have seen everything everyone else did at the seance."

"Yes, and I'm so disappointed. I was hoping Aunt Min would show up just for me."

"Aunt Min? Anything like my aunt Kit?"

"Heavens, no. She was a turn-of-the-century lady; never wore a skirt shorter than her anklebone in her life. The twenties just passed her by, and so did bathtub gin and even the occasional medicinal glass of wine. But she was a great advocate of Spiritualism."

"Spiritualism was still around in the twenties? I thought Spiritualism was overstuffed late-nineteenth-century parlors, with mists forming on the bell jar and apparitions mussing the antimacassars."

"My dear young thing, Spiritualism may have started back then, but it was still roaring by the twenties. Ouija boards were really sheik."

Temple nodded. Being a post-1950's baby, she tended to forget how fast the twentieth century had changed. "Let's hit the Great White Way before the next New Age Lothario stops by,"

"Mynah does seem popular for a gal who's gone gray early," Electra commented, patting her cheerful shag.