Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

"So they seek the hunt-and-peck of psychic work."

"I can't argue with you." D'Arlene Hendrix picked a cellophane bag of dried apricots from the plain-Jane bedside table and offered some to Temple. "My ... intuitions hit like bolt lightning.

Here. There. Close to the ground. Up in the air." She chewed meditatively on an apricot skin.

"I've learned to accept the ambiguous nature of my gift. The police want predictability.

Programming. Some, though, do recognize my flashes of insight, if they don't respect them."

"You sound like a latter-day Joan of Arc."

She shook her head and rolled up the apricot bag. "I'm no crusader, but my families are."

"Your families?"

"A perquisite of my often unsung work. My clients become foster families. Usually they bring me in at their own expense, much against local law enforcement preferences. I'm always unwanted. And when I do find the missing one's body, my 'success' is proof of everlasting sorrow to those who begged to have me on the case. By then I often feel it as much as they."

Temple nodded slowly. "How does your ... intuition work?"

"Like a car that was the biggest lemon you ever owned."

Temple smiled.

"It's true. All fits and starts. It's like I eavesdrop on one of those early telephone party lines.

I'll just get snatches of this and that: a place or person I see; a voice I hear; a gut feeling when I look at a map, or a mother's face."

"Do you have any children of your own?"

D'Arlene's face saddened. "No. Couldn't. I sometimes think that's why I get intuitions about missing children."

"Do you ever find them alive?"

"Yes. Yes, I do. Twice in almost eighteen years. Then the press ... oh, yeah, everyone's ready to admit the possibility of more than we know out there. After the fanfare fades, the cases come and go, the dead are buried and I'm forgotten. Until the next time."

"You sound like a burnt-out cop."

D'Arlene tilted her head toward Temple like a curious squirrel. "You must have a few

'instincts' of your own. Yes, I'm really kicking myself for coming along for this. First the police decide I'm the one person worth questioning in Gandolph's death--"

"Why?"

"Who knows? Maybe someone pointed them in my direction. But you'll notice they threw me back. Then I had booked myself into this modest motel because I'm so used to them. I never could see charging families for fancy accommodations when they're under the kind of stress that brings us together. But the show is paying my way, and I realize now I was dumb not to have taken advantage of an entertainment hotel like the Camelot. At least there I could wander the casino or the shopping arcades or the Strip. But, no, D'Arlene the Tightfisted has to stay on in Las Vegas at police say-so in the equivalent of a Nowhere, Kansas, motel. Want some wine?"

The final sentence's abrupt change of subject made Temple blink, but she nodded, more curious to see what D'Arlene Hendrix was swigging in her motel room than anything else.

Out from the bathroom sink came a screw-top brand that must match the room rate of a Hi-Lo-Motel. Certainly Temple had never laid eyes on Olde Grapevine wine before.

"Plastic glass offend you?" D'Arlene asked.

"Not at all. I do some of my best work on plastic ... plastic keyboard, plastic credit cards--"

D'Ariene laughed and propped herself up against the standard-size bed's headboard. "You didn't come here to hear about the frustrations of my job."

"Actually, I did. The frustrations of every profession or job are pretty much the same: standoffish co-workers, associates who don't recognize your talent and bosses who give you no respect. What's interesting about your gripes is the offbeat job you do. What about that seance?

I'm green, but I... sensed something going on."

"Don't get me wrong. I said it was a phony mess, but I never said something wasn't going on.

There was a lot of pain in that room." She shook her head and sipped some red. "A lot."

"Psychic pain?"

"Psychic pain, mental pain, emotional pain; that's the only kind I pick up. At least I'm not tuning in every hammer-hit fingernail."

"And this was before Gandolph died?"

"Oh, my, yes." D'Ariene set her plastic glass on the nightstand and gazed up at the opposite wall as if screening a movie there. "Maybe that's why I'm so depressed. Maybe it's not just that poor man's death, and in such a silly getup too. That seance was a Palace of Pain. My skin ...

ached just from being there."

"And your feelings were genuine?"

"You can't fake thin skin, honey, even when it's psychic skin."

Olde Grapevine had really relaxed D'Ariene Hendrix. Even her tight permanent wave seemed to be coming unsprung. Temple felt like an uneasy neighbor at a coffee klatch where the hostess was suddenly spiking the Postum with Kahlua.

"So where was all the pain coming from?"

"My 'impressions' don't wear name tags. I sensed a terrific anger. And will, incredible will. All these violent emotions snapped from person to person, like electricity. Didn't you feel it?"

"I felt more than I expected, that's for sure. And I saw--"

"The wildman in the chimney?"

"Sure, I saw that; I guess anyone who's read a book about Hou-dini has probably seen that photograph."

D'Arlene nodded and retrieved her plastic wine glass in a limp-fingered hand.

"So you don't believe that was Houdini either?" Temple pressed.

"Houdini wouldn't come back bare like that. Any spirits I've ever heard of that have a ghost of a chance of being genuine are always quite decently clothed. Unlike my poor victims."

Temple blanched at the reference, but blundered on.

"I didn't know about that then, ghosts preferring to appear fully dressed. But I did see another ... person. A little boy and later an old man I thought was the same boy grown up and old."

A nod. "Terrible pain, terrible rage."

"You saw those figures too?"

This time her head shook. "No. The only thing I 'see' are death sites, and nobody had died in that bizarre room ... yet. I felt the emotions, like other people hear music. A whole symphony was playing that night."

"Who played what instrument?"

D'Arlene nodded, prodded by Temple's analogy. "Each person had his or her own tone. The bassoon, that was hard to place; I never quite did. But the cello was Gandolph, deeply dark music, quite sad."

"Who else?"

"There was a whistle. A melancholy low whistle. The other man, I think, besides Oscar Grant, an obvious, and the professor."

"William Kohler."

"The women were a pilgrim's chorus, all wanting something lost quite desperately."

"Who, though, broadcast the kind of pain you were talking about?"

D'Arlene's eyes were quite unfocused now. Her whole face had deadened. Temple realized she was watching someone strip-mine her psychic senses, peel back the outer layers one by one until she dug deeper and deeper into her own protective emotional epidermis.

"You did, for one."

"Me? I'm not in pain."

D'Arlene's slack lips tried to smile. Her eyes were slits as she peered through the veil of her lashes.

"Painful confusion at least. I can still hear that agitated flute trying to calm its pulse."

"I was working, that's all, and thinking about reality and illusion."

"Illusion. Much illusion that night. Gandolph's. Yours, I think ... you are working an illusion now, you are no more simply what you say or seem, as Gandolph was not that night. And That Creature. Oh, my God. Born to give the occult a bad name, as if it weren't maligned enough without posing witches on the wing. And around you all, this slipstream of Will. Pure Will. And Anger, white-hot anger. Oscar Grant was the bassoon perhaps, though he sounded more like a tenor sax. Slippery. Tenor sex. She didn't sing, that one."