Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

Chapter 37

Ghost-talker

Wayward papers still blew across the empty lot surrounding the haunted house, but the sign was gone and the exterior spotlights were turned off.

That made the scene look truly deserted.

The gate leading to the parking lot was chained shut, so Temple left the Storm on a graveled patch off the side street, fender to fender with a provocative sprinkle of vehicles.

One of them was a jet-black Viper.

"Oooh, you'd think that owner would be afraid to leave its black beauty out here all alone in the dark," Electra said. "One of the boys isn't coming unannounced?"

"No Fontanas, just the original cast of the first supernatural farce."

"I wonder who drives the red Miata."

"Let me guess." Temple had an ugly thought. "A short, dark, dangerous man named Crawford Buchanan."

"Oh, that's right! And his cameraman will have to be here too."

"I'll bet he owns the lime-green VW bug. Photographers make almost as little money as freelance PR people."

"And the Astro van?"

"Must be.. . D'Arlene Hendrix. She's so suburban you can practically see 'Car Pool' tattooed on her forehead."

"This is fun. We'll have to watch when everybody leaves if they get into the vehicles we guessed. And the older Oldsmobile?"

"Must be Agatha Welk; that car looks elderly enough to have belonged to Lawrence."

"Lawrence?"

"The late Lawrence Welk. A joke, Electra."

"I don't know how you can joke at a time like this."

"Another obvious owner." Temple pointed to a white Camaro convertible.

Electra nodded. "Mynah Sigmund. If white's her thing, why is her first name so dark? Mynah birds are black."

"Perhaps a not-too-subtle hint that she's a whited sepulcher."

"Just because she's a self-dramatizing man-eater doesn't mean she's a murderer."

"No, but it would be so satisfying if she were, not to mention how well it would play on a TV

Movie of the Week. Tons of actresses would kill for a role like that."

"You do have murder on your mind. I hope you're wrong in thinking that death could make a return engagement tonight."

"Death always makes return engagements, just like taxes."

"What about the professor?"

"He makes return engagements?"

"I don't know about that, but what brought him here?"

"I'd bet the rent-a-car Sentra."

"Well, your little aqua Storm is the cutest."

"Please, cut out the 'cute.' The car's getting a little old in the wheel wells, I suppose, but I don't need a psychic to tell me a new one's not in my future."

"You never know," Electra answered mysteriously.

"When it comes to major purchases, I sure do know. By the time you pay off a car loan, you're yearning for a new one, which is exactly the trap they want you to fall into, so you can sign up for debt again. Not me. That car's a lot cuter now than it was new, because it's paid for."

"I meant, one's fortunes or circumstances can take a sudden turn."

"Maybe. But rarely for the better."

"My, we are pessimistic lately."

"No, just realistic." Temple stopped to gaze up at the former Hello-ween Haunted Homestead's dark exterior. "Funny, you're more scared of what might happen inside a carnival ride, and I'm more worried what is happening in the real world outside."

"When you get to my age, the immaterial seems a lot closer."

"Just what is your age?"

"Ladies of my generation are always coy about that; I think I'll keep up the tradition. Senior solidarity, you know."

"Then you're at least sixty-five, no?"

"Not necessarily. You can join the American Association of Retired Persons at age fifty. So I could be only fifty and still a senior citizen."

"Fifty! That's in ... twenty years. In twenty years I could be officially old ?"

"What an outmoded attitude. You're not old until you think so nowadays."

"Then why hide your age?"

Electra thought about it. "Maybe I go for younger men."

"Like Eightball O'Rourke."

"Nonsense."

"You said the same thing when I asked if you kept a cat. I'm beginning to think you have something to hide on every front."

"Makes a woman fascinating, my dear, at any age. And a man, for that matter. If we can't have a few secrets after living all this while, what are we early-middle-aged folks to do?"

"Attend seances and try to find out other people's secrets."

"Good idea." Electra grinned. "Let's go."

They approached the forbidding facade, which was actually spookier unlit.

Temple was thinking about the fact that most of the seance attendees had driven themselves to Las Vegas. Mobility always made murder more feasible. Someone with a car could have easily come out here ahead of time to rig the special effects, including the murder. Max had certainly come and gone at will. And that brought a truly unwelcome thought: Max could have done the murder. Wasn't that exactly what Molina suspected him of? Murder? Just who was she feeding pizzas and disks anyway?

But in general terms, if Max were right, and she had no reason to think he wasn't, even

"genuine" mediums were well aware of the traditional ways to fake manifestations. Where was Max now? Temple wondered more fondly than she would have liked. Also more nervously.

Sleeping, she hoped, as he well deserved after his marathon computer sleuthing session. She had read some printouts before coming. They were virtual tip sheets on how to rig seances, so she was a far more critical participant now than she had ever been. And Max was right.

Gandolph's book was certainly publish-able, especially when tied into his spectacular deception and death. Especially if that death were foul play. Nothing sold books like misfortune and murder.

The world was mean, and man uncouth, but at least there was always an honest buck in it.

"Do we knock?" Electra stared at the huge, snarling gargoyle-face knocker.

"I don't know how Oscar Grant arranged this, or who owns the place, but... let's see if it's open first."

Temple nudged the fake distressed wood, pushing just below an artistically crude imprint of a bloody hand.

The big door swung inward, without the interminable prerecorded creaking noise of Halloween night.

Bare bulbs lit the long narrow hall ahead of them. Torn spray-on cobwebs fluttered like ragged fish fins as Temple and Electra passed. The lurking monsters' empty niches showcased lurid painted backgrounds: cracked stone blocks, Day-Glo paint and fake grouting.

Once Temple and Electra reached the main open part, the layout had lost its earlier eeriness. Now it was simply a vast Hollywood soundstage-size space into which someone had pretzeled a not particularly spectacular roller coaster. Dodging a forest of support structures, they angled for the isolated island of the seance room atop its stalagmite of motorized scaffolding.

"This is weirder than the actual event," Electra commented, echoing Temple's mental evaluation. "We were really sitting up there in the middle of all those circling tracks? I hate to say it, but we were fish in a bowl. It wouldn't be easy for anything to get in there or out of there without being seen by somebody on the ride or in the haunted house proper. It had to be one of us who killed Gandolph. But how, when we were all holding hands?"

"Oldest trick in the business. Fake hand."

"Fake hand?"

Temple nodded. "It worked in the old days, before the Hollywood techmeisters dreamed up stunning artificial limbs. Someone connected to a television show like Dead Zones --"

"Someone like Oscar Grant!"

"--could probably get a state-of-the-art moving hand with warm flesh and everything."

"Ick! That is gross, Temple. Professor Mangel was on my right. Such a firm, warm grip. I'm sure it was his."