Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

The woman's antique air did not seem feigned, but Professor Mangel had warned her about that. Agatha Welk reminded Temple of the first silent-film actresses, those tiny, big-eyed waifs who were always tucking their chins into their chests and dropping their eyelids in shy reaction.

Lucky thing, too, they had such gestures; like Miss Welk, their chins were both short and receding, a fact that enhanced large wounded-doe eyes and an air of girlish reticence.

Although Temple had seen women whose dress and appearance perpetuated the styles of their youth, it was usually 1970's Flower Child, which even in extremis was a youthful model; Agatha Welk's image seemed mired in the 1930's. Even if she was a well-preserved seventy, the thirties wouldn't have quite been her heyday. Yet she wore the period's drooping crepes and chiffons, wan florals dragged down by limp ruffles; shapeless, flour-sack styles with nary a pad anywhere to keep the wearer from looking round-shouldered and flat-chested, beaten by life into a paper doll of her own image. Even spirits would seem too robust company for such a personality.

"Not my kind of china," Agatha Welk said dryly, handing Temple the thick restaurant-ware cup.

Temple saw the steam rising like a curtain, and set the cup on its heavy cream ceramic saucer. The tea had been brewed molasses-dark, and the cup was filled almost to the brim.

"If you like," the medium added, "I can read your leaves when we're done."

Oh, no! Temple thought . I'll have to slog down all this strong tea to find my future! Not that she believed in tea-leaf reading. Jeff Mangel had listed it last, as the least significant mantic art.

And what would a cut-rate reading be worth anyway?

"I get my most amazing results through the leaves. Tea is ingestible, you see. It becomes part of us, it touches our innermost being."

Creepy, when you thought of it that way, like swallowing one of those high-tech medical cameras. Temple lifted her heavy cup and sipped, trying not to make a face when the bitter tea scalded her taste buds.

Agatha Welk laughed, a bell-like sound, some nineteenth-century novelist would have put it.

"Really! Strong medicine is good for the soul, and strong tea is good for the psyche. Drink up; I'm sure you've ingested far more bitter brews in the name of imported beer, my dear."

"True." Temple set her cup back down. "But I don't like dark beer." Max, of course, had. Did.

"It's an acquired taste."

"Have you acquired it?"

"Only on trips abroad."

Max of course, had been abroad, and then some, from the evidence of his past.

Why was she thinking about Max! Temple admonished herself.

"Tell me about your ghost attraction," Agatha suggested, only a faint disapproval showing at linking the words "ghost" and "attraction."

"It's inspired by Jersey Joe Jackson. Have you ever heard of him?"

Agatha shook her head, highlights making her gray hair look blue. She sipped slightly but steadily from the rim of her clumsy cup.

"Local character," Temple explained. "Built up a pretty good fiefdom here back in the forties, then lost his grip. Died, oh, twenty-some years ago in a suite at the hotel I represent. The Crystal Phoenix."

"Oh, yes! That lovely fountain of neon I can see from my window each night. I took it for the late Duchess of Windsor's famous flamingo pin."

"There's no Iron Duchess hotel here, just the Crystal Phoenix."

"Actually," Agatha said with a slow, reminiscent smile that made her absence of a chin moot,

"I first took the neon sign for some kind of tree. I suppose the tail feathers fanned like a tree, only ... this was no full, apple-orchard tree, but a stubby, few-limbed specimen. To my imagination. Perhaps some of the lights were out that first night here."

"Actually," Temple answered, "few lights are allowed to dim in Las Vegas, and the Crystal Phoenix used to be called the Joshua Tree hotel. You ever seen a Joshua tree?"

"Not in Philadelphia."

"Well, it's a stubby, little-limbed desert plant that resembles a tree, sort of."

"Really?" Agatha Welk ducked her gray head to sip gray tea from a white cup.

"Anyway," Temple went on, unsettled as well as interrupted, "Jersey Joe apparently lost most of his wealth and died in his last home, a two-room suite at the Joshua Tree. Except he's rumored to have stashed lots of treasure all over old Las Vegas, and into the desert beyond."

"Local characters often are rumored to have done that. So you want to revive the Jersey Joe Jackson heyday in some sort of museum?"

"More of a live-action ride, a subterranean Jersey Joe Jackson mine ride, with different sights along the way. I thought a ghostly vignette of old Las Vegas, including Jersey Joe's forebears and contemporaries might be fun--and educational."

"Let us always be educational. Part of the new appeal to the family trade, isn't it?"

"I thought you lived in Philadelphia."

"Don't look so surprised. We read in Philadelphia too. But what gave you the ghost idea?"

"Supposedly old J.J.'s ghost haunts the Crystal Phoenix."

"Have you seen it?"

"Not I. Although my cat acts like he has, but he's a black cat and they have a spooky reputation to keep up."

"All cats act like they have a reputation to keep up. You should put your cat in the attraction."

"He'd love it; fancies himself some sort of freelance operator."

"As do all cats, again. So how can I help you?"

Temple sipped some tea, so eager to address her investigation that she took a big gulp of tea she barely tasted. "It's about the Hal-loween seance. How much of that was real, and how much staged?"

The woman's sweet, unassuming smile froze as a harder expres-sion took over inch by descending inch, as if she were channeling Eric the Red or somebody.

"That was a dire occasion. I'd prefer not to talk about it. A spirit was quenched that night.

Besides, the entire event was manipulated in the extreme. There is fakery, and there is bald fakery."

"But you were there--?"

She looked down at her jacket, then fingered one of many small, fabric covered buttons marching down the "flaccid placket. "I am ... overoptimistic. I have a rather foolish ambition. I am convinced that I alone can draw Houdini's energy from the prison of the final trap he built for himself. If you only knew how tormented he was to be truly locked up! How his whole life was an escape from that eventuality. How cruel it is that his last wish to elude the immaterial gate between the living and dead and astound us all one last time has not yet been honored.

"Once or twice in his life, someone boxed up Houdini as a joke, in a place and at a time when he was not prepared to escape. He nearly went mad with frustration. I think of that man, that spirit, fluttering at the doors to life like a moth seeking light for seventy years. I was born the year Houdini died, so that period of imprisonment is all of my lifetime. I have had some ...

unsettling encounters with spirits in the past. I hoped I could be the path to Houdini's brief moment of freedom before sinking into the inevitable incarceration of death. I was proud, foolish and so misled."

"Then you don't accept the figure in the chimney as Houdini?"

"Houdini dropping down the chimney, like Santa Claus? Please, Miss Barr. You may be a mere commercial exploiter of the paranormal, but even you could hardly be taken in by that cheap projected image--"

"As a matter of fact, I wasn't," Temple said hastily. "I just wanted to know what you thought of it."

"I hardly saw it. I did make contact with... Another who wished to break free, whose will--or whose ego--was strong enough to almost accomplish that feat for a few moments."

"Was that the little boy who became an old man?"