Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

"Pay attention! I'm saying that these are massive files, both in number and capacity.

Gandolph was writing the War and Peace of psychic exposes."

"With long Russian names and everything?"

"With names, dates, places and... photo documentation, it says here."

"Photos."

"I suppose an infrared camera, concealed ... in, say, a large hat--"

"Or bosom."

"--could have seen quite a bit."

"Well, there's the motive."

"Maybe." Temple eyed the room. "I don't see any new diskette boxes around. I don't see any diskette boxes around, period."

"Taken?"

"Could be. Could be that Gandolph was like a lot of other people and had blind faith in modern technology. Maybe he didn't back much up." Temple rose. "Well. I suggest you go out first thing in the morning and buy a sultan's ransom of three-and-a-half-inch one point four-four meg double-density floppy disks. Then you sit right here and back up everything on the directories before anyone else messes with this computer."

Max looked up from jotting everything down like mad. "That sounds ... tedious."

"Did you think detective work was all second-story stuff? Black designer duds and sneaking around?"

"I'm not sure I'd find this directory again, Temple."

"I'll write' down the necessary formulas for you," she offered. "When you get me back home. If I can find a pen or pencil around the place that Midnight Louie hasn't batted to the Hoover Dam and back."

For once, Max Kinsella was out of snappy comebacks."

Chapter 22

Framed Dead Center

The morning Las Vegas Review-Journal blared all the facts on page one with an arresting headline: PSYCHIC QUESTIONED IN HALLOWEEN SEANCE DEATH.

Temple remembered when newspaper headline style had changed from capitalizing major headline words to using all lower case except for the initial letter of the first word. Her mind still visualized sensational headlines in the old, emphatic style and even added a yellow-journalism exclamation point: PSYCHIC ARRESTED FOR HALLOWEEN SEANCE MURDER!

Somehow, MALE MAGICIAN DISGUISED AS FEMALE PSYCHIC did not have the same, simple ring.

So the police had not come clean about the victim's role-playing. She couldn't blame them.

Why leak embarrassing facts when they were still investigating why a grown man would participate in seances in drag? That was a bigger puzzle than the murder, almost. And then, think of the forthcoming testimony about the ghosts, which the mediums present appeared to have taken as gospel.

Louie had come to lie on the newspaper sections Temple was not reading at the moment, one of his less endearing tricks. She had no patience this morning, not with the sleep she hadn't gotten in the past forty-eight hours, and pulled them all out from under him.

"You're lucky I made it home at all last night," she told the cat as he eyed her in comical amazement. "You're lucky that there wasn't someone else sleeping in your spot."

All untrue, of course. But if you couldn't lie to a dumb beast, who could you lie to? Temple had harbored no intentions of inviting Max to stay once he'd escorted her safely and surreptitiously home. And he had cherished no intentions of asking, for he'd let himself out almost immediately on arrival, mumbling about all-night computer stores.

Temple smiled. Imagine Max cooped up all day like a hermit, copying files onto diskettes.

Meanwhile, she was a free agent, with her current employers encouraging her to explore the outer limits of the paranormal in the name of research. She could go where her fancy took her.

Which was where ... ?

Her doorbell rang as if in answer. She scrambled to make herself presentable and yet open it in time. Meanwhile, Midnight Louie ostentatiously reclaimed every damn section of the newspaper.

At the door, Electra was waiting with an air of pent-up excitement. "One question: will you come to the seance tonight?"

"What seance? Wasn't the first one enough?"

Electra shook today's soft, magenta-sprayed curls. "Quite the opposite. The first one demands a second, a more private affair. I'm holding it in my rooms tonight."

"Your rooms? Aren't they sacrosanct or something? I've never heard of you entertaining so much as a plumber there."

"I do like my privacy, but that's why my penthouse is such an ideal site. It has not been polluted. I can promise you that no cameraman and no Crawford Buchanan will be present. Just true believers and time-tested mediums. And, of course, you too, dear; if you're willing to come."

"Why is an exception being made for me?"

Electra glanced through her half-size magnifying glasses at the floral rug as if something large, dead and insectoid lay there. "Your preeminent experience with murder. We have decided that you have extraordinary, untapped powers in that area."

"I've been elevated to presumed psychic? Won't Lieutenant Molina be sorry she has scorned my help in the past!"

"Don't be sarcastic, Temple. It puts off the spirits."

"Why not invite Max? He's the expert on magical matters."

Electra's shudder caused the huge bird-of-paradise flowers on her muumuu to sway as if in a breeze. "Just who we do not want present! One of those nasty magicians who always discredit efforts to contact the spirit world Spoilsports."

"Like Houdini," Temple pointed out.

"Exactly! Unlike the police, I am convinced that Houdini did it: the dirty deed, the murder."

"Nice of him to wait seventy years after his death to turn to homicide."

"Niceness had nothing to do with it. It was motive and opportunity," Electra added, screwing her eyes into an expression that matched Molina at her most skeptical. "Houdini hated mediums, loathed them! Here was his chance to express his innermost feelings and escape punishment. You see the devilishly clever psychology of it? He came back, all right, but to kill a psychic. It would be the most daring; two-edged escape of all time: first to elude the Afterworld long enough to show himself as material; then to draw another into the Beyond; a hated medium, best of all."

"But Gandolph wasn't a medium, that was the point. He was another Houdini, presumably out to reveal the artifice at the heart of this darkness. Houdini would never kill him."

"Ah, but Houdini didn't know his victim was Gandolph in disguise."

"If Houdini died and sat around in the Beyond twiddling his thumbscrews or handcuffs or whatever for seven decades--"

"Seven. A most significant number in mystical circles."

"Well, Houdini was almost short enough to be a dwarf, probably Grumpy. Anyway, if he comes back to commit murder after seven decades, he darn well ought to know just who was who and what was what."

"Being dead does not make one omniscient, dear. It was the sort of ironic mistake that could happen to anyone. Gandolph did make a convincing woman; one would have thought he had done the act for years. I believe even you were misled, and you sat right next to him. You even held hands with him."

"Gloves," Temple corrected. "He wore gloves, and rather wisely. That entire over-the-top persona was designed as a disguise: hat, veil, gloves, the whole works. And what about the other apparition, the poor kid looking in the candy-store window?"

"That." Electra dismissed the three faces of Everyman with a couple of finger flicks. "We feel that was a symbolic manifestation of Houdini's hatred toward mediums. Each time we saw the figure it was older and larger. You see the metaphor."

"Ever older and larger. Hmm. Sounds more like the transformation of Midnight Louie since he arrived at the Circle Ritz."

"What a quaint mind you have, dear."

"Quaint? First piquant, now quaint? Are people trying to tell me something?"