Douglas, Nelson: Cat with an Emerald Eye

"You? You're going to be there, too?"

"You, too? But why?"

"Van and Nicky are holding the After-the-Fall ball at the Phoenix, and they wanted me to get some insight into subterranean attractions by sitting in."

"Seances are not an event for casual sit-ins, Temple." Electra's head shook in disapproval, spraying Temple with droplets that stung. "Only true believers should be present. I can't believe someone in our club okayed your attendance. You don't fool with Mother Ectoplasm."

"Well, I was thinking it would be nice to know someone there."

"Sorry if I sounded cross. I've got a wedding in forty minutes and I can't do a thing with my follicles! I'm just so upset with the con-stant, crass commercialization of what should be a fine and private exercise between sympathetic psyches. Promise me that you'll keep your mind open."

"And my eyes shut?"

"Oh, look for whatever you can see. Just don't be surprised if you see something you shouldn't."

"You really believe in seances?"

"Listen." Electra stepped out into the dimly lit hall, closing the door behind her.

But, Temple thought, there was no one inside to overhear her, was there? No one except Temple's fictitious gentleman caller.

Electra took Temple's hand, although her own was still gloved in pink gel.

"Listen, dear. If you're going to be present, you must be sincere. You must believe that Houdini is out there, and that he badly wants to be back here."

Temple nodded meekly. Houdini would have loved to play Vegas, if only it had existed in his time.

"You must have faith in powers greater than the normal. You must be convinced of the strength of Houdini's will when he was living, and dying, and of the gathered psychics'

powerful mental presence. You must realize that--this time--unsuspected powers may unite enough to wrest aside the Veil and reveal the unthinkable. You must give death a chance!"

"Ah ... of course. I'm always open-minded. And it would be a great story--"

"It would be earth-shaking." Electra's arm suddenly saluted the pale hall sconce as she squinted at her wristwatch. "Ten minutes! Golly, I've got to wash this gook off or my hair will come out brown!"

Electra scurried back into her digs like the Little Pink Hen whose falling blue sky was turning brown. Temple ambled to the elevator area on dragging heels. She certainly wasn't going through a haunted house solo, and Electra's unavailability meant Temple would have to try Plan B, which normally would have been Plan A, had Temple not been a chicken of another sort on a certain issue.

She paused in a mellow aura of hall light to squint at her own watch. Manage to dawdle any longer, and Matt would be off to work. It would be too late to ask him.

Temple vacillated between taking the poky elevator down a floor, or seizing the moment to trot downstairs and right up to the door of number eleven.

She did the latter, her forefinger pinioning the button to its mechanism before her cold feet could turn around and tippy-toe away.

This door opened much too quickly, making her jump like an eavesdropper. "Oh!"

"Temple."

Unlike Electra, who often came to her door in a state of mid-grooming, Matt Devine always looked as if he had just come from the hand of his Maker perfectly composed, washed, brushed, combed and told right from wrong.

"I know you have to go to work soon," she said, "but my work means I have to go to a haunted house Halloween night, and I need to go through first so I don't get any surprises. If you could go on the six o'clock tour, I could drop you at work and you'd only be a few minutes late.

Electra can't go."

He smiled at her machine-gun burst of nervous explanation. "Nothing makes sense, except that you need someone to hold your hand, and you don't want to look like you're asking me out.

Sounds like a haunted house is more up the other fella's alley."

"I see that I have created my own monster. Just say yes, or no."

"Sure. Sounds like fun before another night of misery monologues courtesy of Sprint phone company."

"Meet you down by my car at five-thirty?"

"I was going to suggest we take the Vampire. Appropriate transportation, given the occasion."

"My car. I'll breeze you back here in time to jet to work on the Vampire."

"Five," he answered. "We can grab a drive-through something on the way."

"That's beginning to sound like a date."

"Don't tell anybody I know." He shut the door, still smiling.

Temple retreated over the dusty mauve carpeting to the elevator. True, Max Kinsella would have been a more apt escort for her excursion, though he would have exposed all the tricks and she would have had no faith left at all by the time she sat down at the seance table.

Date! Temple snorted to herself. She hated being hamstrung between two men. She hated dates. In fact, she was so disgusted with her own uneasy social situation that if Harry Houdini had the good grace to actually show up at midnight Thursday night, she'd elope with him and be done with it!

Chapter 5

If a Body Meet a Body...

I love these vague assignments.

It is fairly simple to sit in a posh penthouse and declaim "the sky is falling" to one and all. It is another thing to go out into the grimy streets and find out where the sky is falling, on whom and how fast.

Of course, here in Las Vegas the sky seldom falls in the physical sense. The desert climate keeps us all high and dry most of the time. That is okay with me. When I lived on the streets, it was nice not have to deal with much rain, sleet and snow. I am not a postman, though I have been known to carry a message now and then.

The last time the Sublime Karma word-whipped me out onto the streets of Las Vegas on errands of a dangerous nature she was just as vague. I think she knows that this gets my goat, and relies upon my instinctive nose for the nefarious to unearth some evildoing, which she then can take credit for predicting. Though there are more things in heaven and earth than most people suspect, I have seen most of them on my travels and they are fairly ordinary evils: poverty, hunger and dirt. And the meanness of one to another, no matter the breed. Oh, and maybe Free-to-be-Feline without dressing.

Like life's little pleasures, evil also most often comes in teaspoon-size servings, though I must admit that I have become hooked on Miss Temple's occasional dollop of murder most foul.

There is nothing like having a mitt in righting the ultimate wrong to feel all is correct with the world.

Murder is an interesting human concept. Among my breed, there is no such thing. There is killing, of course, to eat, and humans do it too, on a grand scale, not one-on-one so much. And they have the edge of weapons and technology. I am a bare-knuckle kind of guy; I only carry the weapons Ma Nature gave me, tooth and nail, just like any predator since Adam had a little lion.

What happened to humans I cannot say, not being an anthropologist, and, given human history, I can see why these people have developed a scientific system that studies how to make apologies for the species' horrific history of mayhem and murder. I believe it is all based on overcompensation for inadequate equipment from the species' infancy.

Have you ever really examined human teeth and nails? Pretty pathetic. Obviously, these were a bunch of weed-eaters from the git-go, destined to stand and chew and watch the clawed and fanged crowd do all the dirty work.

Then they got tired of us saber-toothed tigers getting all the glory (not to mention the gory) and invented fang and claw substitutes. They are ingenious when it comes to inflicting damage, I will say that for them, as thousands of my ancestors found out during the Mid-Evil Ages, when we served as kindling for witch hunts.