Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

"No." Max sipped again before speaking, bitterly. "I hadn't found the time yet to catch up on his fuddy-duddy retirement projects. I had life-and-death matters of my own to consider."

"Max, he might have been killed by accident. It was dark, foggy and even teary in that seance room. I could hardly see, myself. If you're going to force me to rule out the lovely ghosts we saw that night--the serial faces in the windows and Houdini in chains--then the killer was simply human, and maybe made a human error. Perhaps Gandolph was killed by mistake."

"Then what of the voices heard near the house?"

"Sound carries. It can be deceptive. Somebody leaves a window open and a television on ...

presto, eerie voices in the night, arguing."

"Somehow, I feel we're reversing roles."

"How?"

"You're talking me out of groundless suspicions. At least we can search the rooms. You might spot something that I wouldn't think anything of."

"Because I'm ignorant of magicians' tricks?"

"No, because you have no stake in seeing murderers where there are only ghosts. And this house is doubly haunted now." Max glanced up to the dark beams under the peaked roof.

"Good thing I don't believe in spooks." He bolted the brandy like a man who did.

Temple wondered what kind of "spooks" he referred to: spirits, or spies.

"Where will you stay now?" she asked, hating to open that touchy topic.

Max seemed startled by her question. His eyes widened, like Midnight Louie's when he heard a noise he didn't expect.

"Here, of course."

"Here! You can't, now."

"Why not? I own the place, under a business name, granted, but it's still mine."

"But the police have been out here searching."

"Past tense. They've got what they wanted. The best hiding place is always one that somebody's searched already." He regarded her quizzically. "Were you afraid you'd have to be a generous soul and offer me sanctuary at the Circle Ritz?"

"No! I hadn't thought of that at all. I just wondered how many hidey-holes you have in Las Vegas."

"As many as there are neon bulbs in the Strip skyline."

"I see. I'm supposed to figure things out while you continue being your usual mystifying self."

"You are the usual soul of perception." Max bowed toward her, flourishing his left hand to pluck a dinner-plate-size paper rose from thin air.

Temple laughed, as she always did, and accepted the rose. Paper roses didn't require watering, unlike relationships.

"I'll tour the premises," she conceded, getting up.

Max leaped up to conduct her.

He had been truthful: the house, while no palace, was large, spacious and crammed with magical paraphernalia. Even the spare bedroom, with its massive and priceless opium bed, was otherwise stocked with painted cabinets and boxes and tables of all description.

"You rented the place furnished?" Temple asked.

Max's sculpted face had taken on an Oriental tilt once inside this room. "If you're asking if the opium couch is mine, yes. I've even slept in it, feeling like an emperor who has very expensive dreams."

Temple eyed the cushioned structure askance: part horizontal throne, part exquisite artifact of another culture and age, part harem honeymoon suite, it was both sumptuous and decadent, but hardly romantic.

"You must have had nightmares in it."

"Not yet," Max said, with an inscrutable smile.

Temple continued down the hallway. The other two bedrooms resembled lumber rooms, they were so crammed with unused furnishings and magical appliances.

The fourth bedroom was on the opposite side of the house and uncluttered, except for a black futon on the hardwood floor, and near it a low carved cinnabar Chinese table bearing a Ming vase full of paper roses.

"It that real?" Temple asked.

"The flowers?"

"The vase."

"No comment," Max said, thereby admitting everything.

"I hope Molina doesn't get her hands on you," Temple said in mock threat. "You'd crack like Tang porcelain."

"Perhaps not." Max's smile was secret, and therefore irritating.

She paced back up the hall, struck by the fact that neither Max nor herself wore shoes that made any noise on the hardwood floors. He by habit, she by request.

She stopped again by Gandolph's bedroom door, leaning over the threshold, her fingertips clinging to the frame.

It wasn't just the fact that the bedroom's resident was dead that kept her balanced into the entrance. Something in the room's arrangement--if so much jumble could be called that--

troubled her, looked out of place. But how could something look out of place in a mess?

"Where does he plug in his computer when he's using it?"

"Right there--" Max pointed, and then he really looked at the room.

He marched right in, as if no old ghosts guarded the threshold.

Temple followed, with mental "excuse me's" to both Gary and Orson.

Max was standing by the small computer desk, his hand clutching a big pale electrical plug as if he were Hamlet contemplating mortality in the skull of Yorick.

"He always left it plugged in. There, by that wall. I told him he should get a surge protector.

What's it doing over here? It looks like it was simply shoved out of the way."

"Let's plug it in and find out."

Max and Temple both leaned into pushing the unit back to the wall, though Max pushed and Temple merely nudged a little.

Once Temple had replaced the prongs in the socket, she knelt in front of the computer table and booted the machine. Max leaned over her, studying the screen.

WordPerfect came up, but Temple exited it to try a file manager program. The baby-blue screen went black, and up one came, like magic, or like a genie sprung from a bottle.

"Marvelous," Max murmured. The vast miniworlds inside computers intrigued him, but he was oddly computerphobic, at least when it came to operating them. Or so he said.

Temple studied the network of directories, looking for any provocative names.

"It does look like he was working on a book. Look: a directory named 'Bio.'"

"Biology?"

"More likely 'biography.' " Temple exited the program, returned to the word processor and clicked into the bio directory.

A ribbon of files scrolled down the screen.

"Is this enough for a book?" Max asked.

"And then some." Excited, and yet feeling like a computer-age eavesdropper, Temple opened a file: biol2.occ.

No spell-checker had touched this text, and punctuation was as haphazard as hail, but the subject matter was crystal-clear.

"He was writing an expose," Max breathed behind her. "He was documenting the foremost psychics of today. He must have spent years gathering data--and, look! At the top: 'as Edwina Mayfair.' He was using that identity. But--"

"But what about the real Edwina Mayfair?"

"What if there wasn't a real Edwina Mayfair?"

Max's eyes narrowed in the eerie light of the computer screen. When Max's eyes narrowed, their green intensified, and usually Temple intensified too. Now, she kept wondering if he sent for them through the mail. Blasted illusions were the worst kind. Temple was actually more interested in what he was saying this time. ' "You mean, he created Edwina Mayfair from scratch?"

"He'd been in retirement for years. No legitimate psychic-- Let me rephrase that: no self-defending psychic would admit a debunking magician to a session, but if the visitor was another so-called psychic..."

Temple had been tapping keys, changing directories, looking up hard evidence: numbers and dates. "These files go back three years, and, given his computer setup, this is an upgrade. He probably has a lot on diskette."

"It is truly mysterious to me how you do all that with those nails," Max admitted, watching her fingernails kick keys all over the board.