Cat with an Emerald Eye

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  "Sometimes you can run so hard to avoid something that you bump right into it."

  "Yes, I noticed."

  They observed a decent moment's silence while the applications of that dialogue to their current situation sunk in uncommented upon.

  "Gandolph wasn't a real dirty old man," Max finally said. "He just never stopped appreciating women. So Gandolph's persona did not buy the night's special effects."

  "Not at all, especially the distorted face that hung in the window behind him and mouthed untranslatable little nothings. The way the place is set up--"

  "I know how it's set up. I looked it over."

  "When?"

  "After the ... death."

  "Max, they closed the attraction, how did you--?"

  He shrugged with a boyish innocence that didn't quite wash. I'm an illusionist." He smiled at the floor as if consulting a silent partner. "Like Midnight Louie. I have my ways."

  "Don't you just!" Temple leaned over the bed's edge to see that the displaced cat had found floor side accommodations.

  "Shall I demonstrate?" Max asked in a way that made Temple scoot up against her pillow and rest her elbows on her knees.

  "Never mind." She blew steam off the top of her coffee before sipping gingerly. Max always used to say he liked his Java "hot as hell, strong as the Devil, and black as sin."

  Midnight Louie, displaced to the fuzzy white bedside rug, rolled onto his side and began licking his hind leg, perhaps preparing to point a less polite area of his anatomy in Max the Usurper's direction.

  "Okay, I'm thinking," she told Max. "The face in the window be-hind Gandolph appeared just before the dwarf in the fireplace showed up."

  "Quasimodo too. You had a busy seance."

  "No, I'm told it was Houdini himself. All the psychics present recognized him. An ugly apparition, really. Hunched over, muscle-bound, and this was a short man to begin with."

  "Five feet four," Max put in promptly. He was a fountain of knowledge about Houdini.

  Temple suspected that Houdini was a lot of boy-magicians' hero.

  "These cuffs and chains weighed him down," she added. "Naked, too, sinewy beyond his stature. I mean, he must have worn some-thing, but it was hard to see through the mist. He looked like some primitive specimen, captured and brought out for display."

  "Houdini wanted to make that impression. Lone, naked man against all of civilized society's locks and chains. He may have had a repressed bondage fantasy."

  " 'Gorilla in the Mist,' huh? Did they know about bondage fan-tasy in those days?"

  "Someone did."

  "What do you think about the mist?"

  "Obfuscation. Piped in. Vents all over the room. Part of the 'haunted' effect during shows."

  Temple nodded, not surprised. "The usual dry ice. Were we supposed to be lost in London fog, though?"

  "Doubt it. The dry ice was blown into various pipes, and was on a programmable timer.

  Anyone who has ever left town and used a light timer could have reset the mechanism to cloud the seance. It didn't take the expertise level of someone who knows how to set the VCR. By the way, who's been setting yours since I've been gone?"

  "Haven't used it," Temple confessed. "Easier not to."

  Max shook his head. "What did Gandolph do during the Hou* dini appearance?"

  "He muttered stuff about believing nothing of what you see and only half of what you hear."

  Max smiled. "A cynic... to the last."

  "Was he right?"

  "Of course! The whole thing was a joke. That visitation of Houdini, for instance. You described a famous photographic pose. Did the apparition move? No, except to advance closer and retreat, which you can do with a projection. This wasn't even a state-of-the-art hoax. It was contemptuous, and contemptible. I suspect the entire charade was conceived as a cover to kill Gandolph, by someone who wanted the world to know it."

  "Why?"

  "Because Gandolph hated humbug. Because he couldn't resist unveiling the phony. Because he was an old man with little to do, and he poked his nose into one ugly business too many."

  "And why do you have to decipher this?"

  Max finished his coffee with one, long, scalding gulp, never tak-ing his adulterated green eyes from Temple's. "I owe him. I don't like humbug myself. And ..." He sighed. "Where do you think I was staying in Vegas, since I wasn't here? Who else could I stay with? Who do you think will look damn suspicious if the police find out, and who do you think can't afford to let them find out? I've got to solve Gandolph's murder, because he mattered to me, and, as a perk, to save my own damn skin."

  Temple nodded. She had avoided speculating where Max might be staying, maybe out of guilt that she couldn't welcome him with open bed sheets, maybe out of fear that he knew another woman or two or three in town. Of course the notion of Max rooming with a cross-dressing older guy ... ridiculous!

  "Want some more coffee?"

  When she nodded, he headed for the kitchen. She followed, sticking her feet into the oversize burgundy velour mukluks by the bed, which did nothing to enhance the caftan's sophistication. She was relieved to be out of the bedroom. Midnight Louie, in turn, fol-lowed her out like a feline chaperon.

  Max was waiting for the microwave to ping, so she had a chance to compare his unguarded rear to Oscar Grant's. Not for Max the other man's styled, flowing shoulder-length locks. That's what they were: locks, not mere hair. Max's new long hair was sleeked into a ponytail that blended with his turtleneck to the point of disappearing. The black garb was the same gunfighter uniform, but the effect was less theatrical. Max was much taller, though as lean; his turtle-neck and slacks had the same silky ease that cried out "expensive designer togs," but Max's fabrics suffered no touch of sheen. He wore the more effacing matte black, as if he wished to make himself into the invisible sable background curtain on a theater stage.

  Matt black. He wore Matt black, Temple found herself thinking. Ex-Father Matt-black.

  Comparing Max Kinsella with a priest made her smile, then made her think again. Magicians onstage assumed a ceremonial, priestly role, didn't they, albeit of a priest from some exotic, alien culture? Say, some ancient Eastern culture. She wondered, out of the blue (or maybe out of the black) what it would be like to make love with a man who had long hair, and immediately censored her unconscious: yikes, she was thinking like one of those supposedly love-starved females who gawk at romance-novel cover hunks and stockpile their calendars!

  The microwave oven ping'd politely. Shortly after, Max turned with two hot mugs of coffee and a penetrating glance. "You don't look too spooked today, despite the ... death."

  Temple took her mug before the handle got too hot for him to hold. She moved quickly into the living room to set it down on the sofa table.

  "I'm not spooked. Maybe I'm jaded. But... Gandolph didn't die brutally. Just slipped away.

  One of the other women swooned, so I wasn't surprised to see 'her' slumped over after the Houdini routine. It took everyone there a while to realize he was dead."

  She sat on one end of the couch, Max coming toward her. Midnight Louie jumped up to stretch out full-length on mid-couch. Max paused, then sat on the opposite end.

  "I'm not much for house pets."

  "Louie is not a pet."

  "What is he, then?"

  "An old friend who wanders in and out. He had his haunts, excuse the expression, before I ever brought him home, and he likes to visit them."

  "Not the haunted house, though?"

  "I don't know. He could have shown up there before."

  "Does he always follow you somehow?"

  "No, sometimes he asks to ride along. Other times he's there before me."

  "He 'asks' to ride along?"

  She sipped and nodded. "Cats ask for things, just like dogs. Only they don't bark."

  "That's an advantage," Max admitted. He leaned back into the sofa. "This would feel like Sunday morning if we had the funny papers."

  Temple nodded, n
ot trusting herself to deliver the next line and afraid what it might lead to.

  Aw, heck, why not find out what it might lead to? They both admitted that they were still monogamous. The morality police had other crimes of the libido to pursue. ...

  The doorbell rang. Max jumped up. Louie didn't.

  Max was in the bedroom before Temple could say, "Three, four, open the door."

  In that many seconds, she did, still carrying her mug.

  Matt stood there.

  Saved by the bell and Devine intervention, Temple thought with a rueful smile.

  Chapter 19

  Double-talk

  "You look surprisingly chipper," Matt said, meaning it and trying not to stare at the gauzy grass-green robe that underlined Temple's rusty coloring. "After hearing Electra's harrowing version of your Halloween seance in the laundry room, I thought I'd better rush up to see if you required spiritual counseling."

  I'm fine." Temple stepped back to admit him. "I'm just hung over from a reversed sleep pattern. Just got up. You know how that is."

  "And Midnight Louie was there too?" Matt eyed the lounging cat with respect, but then, he always had.

  "In the fur. He was the least of our apparitions."

  Matt sat in the only spot on the sofa Louie left him, the corner opposite Temple. She regarded him a bit edgily, as if she saw a ghost of someone else sitting there.

  "I was on my way to ConTact," he added, feeling a sudden need to justify his presence.

  "Do you have time for coffee?" She lifted her own mug. Matt's glance fixed on the steaming, full mug on the coffee table right in front of his place.

  "Oh!" Temple looked flustered. "I had my cup in the bedroom when you rang. I must have been so dopey I'd made another one, set it down out here and forgot about it. You like it? Its yours."

  "Thanks."

  He picked up the pottery handle. Still too hot to hold for long. Temple, he noticed, had quickly set down her own mug for the same reason, obviously. Why would an abandoned and forgotten extra mug still be so piping hot? Matt dismissed that line of thought. He was starting to think like a detective.

  Or a jealous lover.

  "Want to tell me about the seance?" he asked.

  "Where to begin?"

  She actually paused to gather her impressions, unlikely behavior in rush-ahead Temple. The green gown madly complemented her raucous red hair, an attractive collision of curls. Even without the light makeup she used, Temple would never give morning a bad name.

  "You must be on my hours today," he remarked.

  She nodded. "Without being used to them. But, back to the skullduggery at the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead."

  "I still can't believe they named the place that."

  "Indeed. In a nutshell, the woman next to me--who was really a man, but who, I'm told on good authority, was not normally a cross-dresser, or abnormally a cross-dresser--fainted after the last apparition. No one thought anything of it until we noticed her picture hat had slipped and he had a bald head."

  Matt laughed at Temple's patented rat-a-tat delivery of the facts, which always sounded jumbled but also always added up to exactly what had happened. He could see why the methodical Carmen Molina had no patience with Temple's communication style.

  "Still, death next door is traumatic," he said sympathetically.

  "It was more traumatic to find out the motherly woman who'd been squeezing my hand all night was really a man."

  "Why the disguise, if not for dysfunctional reasons?"

  "Well, not everyone is sure transvestites are dysfunctional. Most are otherwise straight-arrow heterosexuals. I have found a hint, however. The dead man is ... was ... a retired stage magician named Gandolph."

  Matt nodded.

  "You don't find that name strange? Don't tell me you've read The Lord of the Rings! "

  "Several times, why?"

  "I haven't. Am I way out of the loop! Can you loan it to me?"

  "Sure, in paperback. But it's really three books, three long books." I'm up for it. Anyway, the dead man was not named after that Gandalf, at least overtly. He spelled it G-a-n-d-o-l-p-h, as in Rudolph et cetera, and his hobby was exposing false mediums."

  "Uh-oh. Then any false medium present would have motive to kill him."

  "Don't you mean 'every false medium present'?"

  "I'm trying to keep an open mind, but you keep slamming the door shut on me. So the night's special effects were disappointing."

  "More like puzzling, I'd say. The fellow who turned up before we actually saw an image of Houdini was more interesting. At least he went though some ghostly metamorphoses."

  "Such as?"

  "We first saw him as a boy, maybe six years old. Then he popped up in different windows, which were actually glass walls with wall-paper patterns etched into them, but he was older each time. Bigger. Way bigger. At the end, he was this sad, massive old man with a raging face, but we couldn't hear any of the words. Kind of reminded me of a pantomime King Lear, actually."

  "The play?"

  "No, the part. This guy would have been a natural, in his last incarnation, that is. Seeing him made me feel so ... sorry. That was the only spooky part of the seance, these visions of this sad man from virtually boyhood to old-coothood. He wanted to communicate so much, but something was holding him back."

  "What about Houdini?"

  "Gross! Grotesque. The others say the image duplicated a photograph of him nearly naked and chained into a crouch. It gave me the creeps!"

  "Better drink some hot coffee; your arms are growing a record batch of goosebumps."

  She shot him a glance that was both flustered and flattered before he realized that he had been observing her too closely again, like a detective. Or like a jealous lover.

  He finished the coffee and set it down. Temple nervously noticed his action, rubbing her chilled forearms, then glanced behind him. To her bedroom. She looked nervous.

  In the silence, the uncertainty was catching. He became acutely aware of the bedroom. He'd been in it briefly once, to help her put on some pierced earrings before the Gridiron show. Now it loomed at the back of her mind for some reason, which he could either interpret as embarrassing or flattering.

  Would-be detective or would-be lover, which part was he playing today? No matter, he was what Temple would call a "bloody amateur" in both roles. Matt stood.

  I'd better go."

  She didn't argue. She didn't rush him, but she stood also. "Thanks for stopping by. When I find out more, I'll let you know."

  "Not 'if?"

  "Nooo ... I'll be stuck reading or listening to the news like everybody else. No dropped clues from Molina this time. She's not on the case."

  Matt felt surprise. He'd come to think of Lieutenant Molina as the conduit through which all matters of murder in Las Vegas flowed. For some reason, he felt disappointment.

  "I did have an 'in' with her," Temple went on, "by virtue of her suspicion of me, if nothing else. Watts and Sacker are perfectly professional, and they don't suspect me of being anything more than an innocent bystander, but that means they're not intrigued enough to spend time chitchatting with me."

  "Poor Temple, on the outside looking in, like the spectral fat man."

  They were at the door now, and she was opening it to show him out.

  "That's just it, Matt." Her voice grew low, confessional-confidential. "He looked so solid for a ghost. Nobody would fake something like that so straightforwardly. That's the only thing in the evening that truly gives me the chills. I think he was-- Oh, Lord, I sound like Tommy Rettig on old Lassie reruns--'trying to tell us something,"

  Matt recognized a troubled mind when he heard it. Impulsively, he put a hand on her icy forearm, reassured her.

  "Don't blame yourself, Temple. You do, you know. You assume that if you had known that the person next to you was who he really was, you might have been able to prevent whatever happened. I haven't seen anything on the TV news or in the paper that the police are
calling it murder. Why are you so sure that it was?"

  Her gray-blue eyes softened with unspoken appeal. "I--I can't tell you why, Matt. I just suspect that it was on the usual groundless instincts. Thanks for listening."

  She went on her toes to kiss his cheek. He caught her other arm before her stretch reversed itself and kissed her mouth, tasting strong coffee, surprise, response and reservation.

  "Don't worry, Temple," he told her, not knowing why. He managed to retreat without trying to gauge her reaction.

  In the hall, he felt a wave of self-disgust. He didn't need anything else to obsess about, but he was tired of her always making the first moves.

  Maybe he also had a nagging feeling that he ought to stake his claim.

  He went down the stairs to the rhythm of his footsteps, and headed for the shed to confront his trusty steed.

  The Hesketh Vampire gave him the willies, kind of like Stephen King's murderous vintage car, Christine.

  Only the fact that Electra rode it had lured him into practice sessions and ultimately a license. Only that, and the bottom line that he needed transportation and couldn't afford it.

  While he might lecture Temple during martial-arts sessions that tackling new skills is vital, when it came to himself he had discovered that Matt Devine was remarkably conservative.

  He unlocked the padlock shed door and stared at the Vampire, standing sleek-flanked and shining in the bar of daylight he had ad-mitted.

  He hoped it wasn't the fact that the motorcycle had been Max Kinsella's toy, his pride and joy, that bothered him, although living up to his imagined persona of Max Kinsella did.

  Matt walked around the massive machine, now so startlingly passive.

  His entire religious life as a priest had been disciplined and dedicated to withdrawing from the material, to not needing what most other people require as a right: good salaries, good clothes, a nice place to live, money for luxuries, for status merchandise, for marriage, kids, mortgages, speed in the sense of velocity, sex in the sense of appetite.