Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

Maurice shook his head, dislodging the lopsided halo of light outlining his ears.

"Never cared for carp. I think they go where the birds go. Fish and birds have the same ancestral tree, you know, so that is where they go."

"Which is?"

"I have no idea. You will have to ask when Maurice Two sends you over."

"No, thanks. I will have to call you up on my friend Karma's crystal ball when I send Maurice Two over, and ask both of you, if you two can manage to get along in the Afterlives. Now, have you got any new angles on the human manifestations here Halloween night?"

"Oh, I had nothing to do with that, even though I tried to get through to you then.

Unfortunately, a priority haunting with interference was already in progress. I was put on hold. I only broke through just now behind some party with a power line. I think he was trying to reach you too, but remember, my case comes first. We felines have to help each other, dead or alive."

"Remember that when I call in my IOU. Okay, scram before these airheads think they saw something."

Maurice, dead ham actor that he is, cannot resist making an exit. He fades away stripe by stripe, like a famous Cheshire cat of everyone's acquaintance, only it is not his teeth that are the last thing

left visible, but another, less mentionable article of his anatomy, An ego is a terrible thing to waste.

I shudder to think what I will have to tell the hummers when they snap out of their trance and want to know what happened. I have got a lead from Beyond on a murder all right, only it is not about the matter at hand, but feline felony of the past degree.

It is not the Mauricent , but the more recent death in this very room that is still very much a mystery.

Chapter 28

Cameraman

On a cool early November Monday morning, Temple Barr called the offices of the Las Vegas Scoop to make an appointment with one of its employees.

She once swore that it would be a cold day in Hell before she'd need anything from anyone at what she privately called the Las Vegas Pooper Scooper , but pride goeth before a frigid fall in temperature. And Gandolph the late Great's death was growing very cold, very fast.

When Temple reached the office, she was almost disappointed to find her quarry not only on the job, but reasonably ready and willing to receive her.

She had donned her most washable clothes and expendable shoes. She had confined makeup and nail polish to funereal pales.

She would have worn sackcloth and dumped ashes in her flagrant hair, if she'd had them.

Unfortunately, in this secular age, sackcloth and ashes weren't the staples of life they once were.

Despite the seasonal cold snap, Las Vegas refused to wallow in an autumnal funk. The desert sky was Lake Mead-blue with scat-tered clouds afloat on its surface like icebergs. On a more down-to-earth level, hardy flowers still blossomed among the greenery.

Temple parked the Storm at the weekly papers strip-shopping-center offices, its front wheels on preflattened front pages saturated with oil-pan drip.

Temple entered through a glass door so smudged with fingerprints that it looked opaque.

Why were fingerprints always so obvious when it didn't matter?

Inside was instant chaos--the click and clatter of computer keyboards, and the chatter of people scurrying to pull another Gutenberg miracle out of their heads, hands and hats.

Newsroom noise always made Temple nostalgic for her WCOL-TV days, but the receptionist was never like this.

"Help you?" he asked, sweeping a mailing list aside and showing off a nail polish job far less subtle than Temple's. His spaniel-blond hair was all one length to the tops of his ears, then shaved to the skin below. He wore one tasteful aurora borealis crystal stud in his right ear, and eyeliner on both eyes.

Temple asked for the man she wanted, or rather, the man she didn't want, but needed to see.

The receptionist tossed his hair toward the large room's far wall. "Photo desk. Over there."

Temple headed in the direction indicated. Like all foot soldiers dispatched by duty to foreign turf, she hoped that it would soon be over over there. She kept an edgy eye out for another Scoop employee, whom she was even less eager to encounter.

The photo desk was presided over by a squat, graying man who looked more like Ed Asner with a hangover than Asner himself ever could.

" I've got an appointment with Wayne Tracey," she told him.

"Aren't we fancy now? Appointments and everything. Wayne!" he bawled over his shoulder.

A revolving door only big enough for one customer at a time, with opaque black dividers, slowly thumped around until it disgorged a harried guy of thirty in rolled-up shirtsleeves.

"Come on in," he said. "Im souping some stuff and can't stop now."

Cranky at the desk nodded brusque encouragement, so Temple jumped for the revolving door's next empty compartment. She shuffled along in complete darkness, like someone in a small, circular haunted house, until she found the only way out on the other side: the eerie, dim, infrared atmosphere of a development chamber.

She edged up to the only man inside, who was submerging paper in solution until an image appeared. This was not unlike being at a seance, Temple realized, though in the past she had taken photo studios and their processes for granted.

Yet, when you came to think of it, there was something spooky about the entire process.

First you caught people's essences--their frozen images--in reverse light-and-dark. Then you projected them on paper. And finally, you let those encoded vestiges stew in a strong chemical soup until the person begins to peer out from the developing pan like a shy spirit. Instant ectoplasm.

"Yeah?" the photographer asked without looking up.

"Wayne Tracey?"

"Right."

"You must remember me from the haunted-house seance you shot the other night."

He glanced at her, surprised. "Why should I? I shoot a few dozen photos a day, and when I'm videotaping for out-of-town media, I shoot thousands of feet. I don't pay much attention to exactly who's in front of my lens, just as long as the reporter gets the names and faces right, and clues me in on what's happening so I know where to point."

"Oh. Well, I was there. I wondered if any of the spooky effects showed up on your live footage."

He tonged a dripping wet photo of a mangled van surrounded by even more mangled passengers into another chemical bath.

"What was to show up? Fog. No different from when it shows up outside along the road, though we don't get much fog out here. Not wet enough."

"Did the police see your film?"

"First thing. Confiscated it. Only let me have a copy of my own stuff, period. And for what?

The film just shows these shifting patches of fog, and the people sitting around the seance table look like wooden Indians playing ring-around-the-rosy."

"Not a lot of activity to warrant a live camera," Temple agreed sympathetically. "We were instructed to be still and concentrate. But didn't you catch the action when the person keeled over? You, know, the man who died?"

"So someone faints. An Oscar it ain't. And it's a guy under that wig and Hedda Hopper hat, yet, can you figure it? He reminded me of our work-in-progress receptionist. These psychics are ultra weird, man, and I see plenty of weirdos every day in this job."

"If you're an expert, maybe you could say whether this seemed like a normal seance."

"A normal seance? Hey, they're no fun unless everything's abnormal." He shook his head.

"Nope, nothing out of the ordinary but the usual hazy theatrics."

"You mean the knife dance and the woman fainting, then Gandolph keeling over?"