Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

"Those silver tennis shoes are a liability." Max's tone verged on loathing. He had never been a footwear connoisseur, so Temple didn't defend her snazzy shoes.

She did glimpse her tennie toes winking at the moon with every step. No one had ever told her to dress for cat burglary.

The house was dead ahead--low, sprawling and black at every opening. Max, his clothes the same light-absorbing black, ran hunched over toward it like a mobile bush. He crouched beside the house wall, where a Hollywood twist thrust spiky evergreen arms at the city-lit night sky pale as dawn. Temple slunk along after.

Max was prying at a crank-out window with a fretwork design; it snapped open moments later. He clambered in first, then leaned out to lift Temple through.

She tumbled, exhausted, to the floor inside; luckily, the carpeting was thick.

"Why do you have to break into your own house?" she wondered for the third time that evening.

This time he answered. "It used to be mine."

Max refastened the window, then crossed the shadowy room with the agile certainty of a wirewalker knowing that what he did might be dangerous, but knowing it too well to worry. He switched on a lamp that illuminated a leather-topped desk on spindly Louie-the-someteenth legs.

"Then why did we break in?"

"I left my keys on the dresser."

"You owned other property in Las Vegas and never told me?"

"I left here six years ago. I let Gary have it then."

"Gary?"

Max sat at the chair behind the desk, running his fingers into his hair. "Gandolph the Great, recently deceased, according to the news. Look, I'm taking the circumstances at their word, that you're actually good at this. I'm too close. The police didn't waste any time going over this place, but I was hoping we ... you ... could find something else."

"This is a crime scene, with tape outside and everything?"

"Technically, yes, but they were only after supporting evidence. It wasn't the murder site."

"By being here we've crossed a taped crime scene?"

"Don't worry, every window is draped, and the drapes are all blackout quality. I put them in myself. Well, do you have anything to contribute?"

"Why didn't you ask me that first? I could have stayed in bed."

"Then we'll go back." He stood, switched off the light.

"As long as I'm here and my tennies are scuffed beyond redemption ..."

The light snapped on again. "Where do you want to start?"

By the glow, Temple found her way to a tufted leather sofa and sat. "At the beginning. With some background on this house, Gandolph the Great and you."

She saw his smile quirk in the upcast glare of the brass lampshade. "I've ended where I should have begun, maybe." He rose and went to a Chinese chest along the wall. A touch opened an inlaid door. Max stood back (like a black curtain being drawn) to reveal the dim twinkle of crystal. "Care for a brandy?"

Temple shook her head. After clinking crystal for a minute, Max brought her something anyway: a whisky liqueur in a shot-glass-size cut-crystal container. Her tongue decided that a drop of this potent stuff should last her about as long as a cough lozenge.

Max sat on the sofa, cosseting the brandy snifter until his hands had warmed it enough to drink. His hands were always active, never still. Occupational hazard.

"This is a fetching house," he said. "A bit conventional, but nice for all that."

"Like me?" she wondered.

I'm not talking about us. Or about now, or about the recent past. You didn't ask for that. I'm talking about six years ago, and more than fifteen years before that, when I first met Gary. Gary Randolph. Magicians' last names vanish faster than their lady assistants from a cabinet. And, in Gary's heyday, magicians all used hokey, made-up stage names."

"Like Houdini."

Max paused to sip, then sighed. "Like Houdini. Gary's official performing title was Gandolph the Great."

"Was it from that darn book that everybody but me has read?"

Max shrugged. "Maybe. It doesn't matter. I know that, at least. Gandolph had a very respectable act. He just missed being part of the new generation that went on television: Doug Henning, real name; David Copperfield, unreal name. Ever notice how in the seventies all the performers were cadging stage names from literary and historical figures? David Copperfield, Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdinck, Jane Seymour."

"Temple Bar," she put in wryly.

"That's not a stage name, but it would make a good one."

"Subconscious recognition factor," Temple agreed. "The titular heroes of novels, a nineteenth-century composer, a wife of Henry the Eighth. I always toyed with 'Katharine Howard' as a fantasy stage name; she was another of Henry's head-losing spouses. Besides, it sounds so veddy, veddy British, RADA and all that."

"I auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London," Max noted with a certain rueful nostalgia.

"Really? Did they admit you?"

"I was a punk kid of sixteen. Hell, no."

Ah, Temple thought, a secondary lark during the IRA summer abroad. Someday would she dare ask him about that?

"Did you know that there's a Temple Bar on Lake Mead?" she asked instead.

"No!" Max's somber expression lightened. "I never saw much of anything out here but the Strip. Really? How ... piquant."

"Thanks. I haven't been called piquant since you left."

"A strange condition, piquancy." He looked around. "This house was piquant after I got done with it. Gary was planning to retire, I was due to tour, and it has four bedrooms, so I rented it to him. It has a history."

"All houses do. Even ... our place has a history."

Max leaned forward, studied the room as if it were brandy to savor. "It belonged to Orson Welles."

Temple sat straighter on the commodious sofa, as if thinking she might be impinging on Welles's generous lap. "Him? The Napa Valley wine man?"

Max laughed. "Paul Masson wines. And do you know what blasphemy it is, sitting in this house and remembering his least achievement?"

"Maybe, but when I was a kid, the Napa wine man was pretty big stuff. Yeah, that's right; the TV commercial was for Paul Masson: 'Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time,' "she declaimed in deep, rotund tones. "That's the most famous wine line since Bela Lugosi's 'I do not drink... vine' in the original Dracula movie. I used to think Welles was Paul Masson. In my immature mind, Masson' was kissing cousin to 'massive,' and that's how Orson Welles looked."

"I saw those TV commercials too, but I knew so much about Welles before then that they hardly registered on me. You do know his history?"

"Oh, sure, I learned it later, when I dabbled in theater. Boy wonder and that Martian Invasion radio broadcast just before World War Two started, and making Citizen Kane and some other classic films, peaking early and never regaining lost glory."

Max blinked and sipped. "Did you know the police were called out to this house Halloween night, before Gary ... Gandolph died at the seance?"

"No? How do you know?"

"Neighbors told me. I played the worried out-of-town owner reclaiming his property after a tragedy. Which I am."

"Won't the police--?"

"I asked after they'd made their neighborhood sweep this morning. In fact they did me a favor. They prepared my way by announcing the death; I merely had to step in afterward.

Everybody was shocked enough to spill whatever beans they had."

"And why were the police called to come out here?"

"Voices. The neighbors heard agitated voices from the house."

"At what time?"

"Between midnight and one A.M."

"But... Gandolph was at the seance all that time. The house should have been empty, unless he had relatives."

Max shook his head. "Lived alone. Stored his magic equipment in the extra bedrooms, along with mine."