Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

"Right! That's where I heard the name before ... maybe once! If you two were such buddies, why were he and I never introduced?"

"You were last night," Max said grimly.

"Max, I'm worrying about gnats in the face of tarantulas. I'm sorry."

He didn't quite look at her. "Don't worry. I don't want to hear about Gandolph's last moments. I do need to know what happened."

"So much did, Max! I still can't sort it out. I think we all saw a ghost, only I doubt it was the ghost we were supposed to see. Louie dropped in, yes, quite literally. Down the chimney, like a sooty feline Santa. Maybe you'd like to question him?"

Max smiled, dropped the remote control on the zebra-patterned coverlet, and stood.

"I'll brew some instant espresso in the kitchen. It's almost five P.M. Why don't you slip into something ... less comfortable."

Temple eyed her purple fuzzie jogging suit while he was gone. "Something less comfortable," really. Where was her chicest potato sack when she needed it, anyway?

She found a sort of caftan she'd forgotten about, emerald-green gauze with gilt lettuce-leaf edges, and managed to be wide awake and changed before he returned with two mugs of murky Instant Sludge.

"You mean it?" she asked after her first heady sip. "Gandolph was a friend of yours?"

Max prowled to the French doors overlooking the acute end of the triangular patio. He'd talked about putting a spa out there, but they'd never gotten around to it. It would have been nice, a mini-version of Van and Nicky's penthouse Jacuzzi.

Max's mind had been somewhere else Temple had never seen. "Maybe 'mentor' is a better word for Gandolph," he said. "I had the most contact with him at the beginning, and the end, of my career."

"Max, don't say that. Your career isn't over."

"Isn't it? I walked out on a half-dozen engagements, two for charity, without a word. I knew what I was doing. I didn't want to do it, but I had to. I'm a poor man now, Temple."

"What about all the dough you raked in when you were the toast of the Continent?"

He turned, grinning. "We're not counting the Swiss bank accounts and Cayman condominiums, are we?" She couldn't tell if he was kidding, or not. "So, you sat next to him. Tell me what happened."

Ordinarily, that wouldn't have been a big order. It was now, given the confusions of that midnight seance on the crux of Halloween and All Saints' Day, suspended between two worlds, the real and the really weird.

"I don't know, Max." Temple was glad she had ditched the glasses. This coffee was hot enough to steam up retinas. "I bought his act: this ditsy old gal in a funny hat. He must have been good at it. Only one thing struck me as unusual: 'she' kept warning me not to take anything that happened seriously. I thought that was odd behavior for a psychic at a seance."

Max was chuckling. "I'm sure he didn't know who you were, but, believe me, if Gandolph were taking advantage of you in any way, it would definitely be heterosexual."

"That old goat in granny clothing! And here I was all hot and bothered about Awful Crawford, meanwhile holding hands with the worst dirty old man in the bunch!"

"Sometimes you can run so hard to avoid something that you bump right into it."

"Yes, I noticed."

They observed a decent moment's silence while the applications of that dialogue to their current situation sunk in uncommented upon.

"Gandolph wasn't a real dirty old man," Max finally said. "He just never stopped appreciating women. So Gandolph's persona did not buy the night's special effects."

"Not at all, especially the distorted face that hung in the window behind him and mouthed untranslatable little nothings. The way the place is set up--"

"I know how it's set up. I looked it over."

"When?"

"After the ... death."

"Max, they closed the attraction, how did you--?"

He shrugged with a boyish innocence that didn't quite wash. I'm an illusionist." He smiled at the floor as if consulting a silent partner. "Like Midnight Louie. I have my ways."

"Don't you just!" Temple leaned over the bed's edge to see that the displaced cat had found floor side accommodations.

"Shall I demonstrate?" Max asked in a way that made Temple scoot up against her pillow and rest her elbows on her knees.

"Never mind." She blew steam off the top of her coffee before sipping gingerly. Max always used to say he liked his Java "hot as hell, strong as the Devil, and black as sin."

Midnight Louie, displaced to the fuzzy white bedside rug, rolled onto his side and began licking his hind leg, perhaps preparing to point a less polite area of his anatomy in Max the Usurper's direction.

"Okay, I'm thinking," she told Max. "The face in the window be-hind Gandolph appeared just before the dwarf in the fireplace showed up."

"Quasimodo too. You had a busy seance."

"No, I'm told it was Houdini himself. All the psychics present recognized him. An ugly apparition, really. Hunched over, muscle-bound, and this was a short man to begin with."

"Five feet four," Max put in promptly. He was a fountain of knowledge about Houdini.

Temple suspected that Houdini was a lot of boy-magicians' hero.

"These cuffs and chains weighed him down," she added. "Naked, too, sinewy beyond his stature. I mean, he must have worn some-thing, but it was hard to see through the mist. He looked like some primitive specimen, captured and brought out for display."

"Houdini wanted to make that impression. Lone, naked man against all of civilized society's locks and chains. He may have had a repressed bondage fantasy."

" 'Gorilla in the Mist,' huh? Did they know about bondage fan-tasy in those days?"

"Someone did."

"What do you think about the mist?"

"Obfuscation. Piped in. Vents all over the room. Part of the 'haunted' effect during shows."

Temple nodded, not surprised. "The usual dry ice. Were we supposed to be lost in London fog, though?"

"Doubt it. The dry ice was blown into various pipes, and was on a programmable timer.

Anyone who has ever left town and used a light timer could have reset the mechanism to cloud the seance. It didn't take the expertise level of someone who knows how to set the VCR. By the way, who's been setting yours since I've been gone?"

"Haven't used it," Temple confessed. "Easier not to."

Max shook his head. "What did Gandolph do during the Hou* dini appearance?"

"He muttered stuff about believing nothing of what you see and only half of what you hear."

Max smiled. "A cynic... to the last."

"Was he right?"

"Of course! The whole thing was a joke. That visitation of Houdini, for instance. You described a famous photographic pose. Did the apparition move? No, except to advance closer and retreat, which you can do with a projection. This wasn't even a state-of-the-art hoax. It was contemptuous, and contemptible. I suspect the entire charade was conceived as a cover to kill Gandolph, by someone who wanted the world to know it."

"Why?"

"Because Gandolph hated humbug. Because he couldn't resist unveiling the phony. Because he was an old man with little to do, and he poked his nose into one ugly business too many."

"And why do you have to decipher this?"

Max finished his coffee with one, long, scalding gulp, never tak-ing his adulterated green eyes from Temple's. "I owe him. I don't like humbug myself. And ..." He sighed. "Where do you think I was staying in Vegas, since I wasn't here? Who else could I stay with? Who do you think will look damn suspicious if the police find out, and who do you think can't afford to let them find out? I've got to solve Gandolph's murder, because he mattered to me, and, as a perk, to save my own damn skin."

Temple nodded. She had avoided speculating where Max might be staying, maybe out of guilt that she couldn't welcome him with open bed sheets, maybe out of fear that he knew another woman or two or three in town. Of course the notion of Max rooming with a cross-dressing older guy ... ridiculous!