Karma is strangely silent.
Well, Karma is always strange, so I should say that now she is more unlike herself, or anybody else for that matter. Still she freezes in that uncanny listening position, as if someone uncanny were nearby to do the talking.
I am getting that itchy-twitchy feeling all over again. Like all over my toes and ears and tail.
"Okay, Karma! You got it. I am your most obedient servant. Just cut out communing with the out-of-normal-range and tell me where to go and what to do, and I will be out of here."
Something I said got through to her Birman brain, for she abruptly snaps her attention back to me.
"Are you still here? Tell you where to go and what to do? That is nothing that I can help you with. You must find out these things for yourself."
Time for the Twilight Zone music, could I sing. Alas, I cannot, although I do hum up quite a storm on occasion.
So, bidding an unfond farewell to the resident High Priestess of this strange exotic land on the highest plateaus of the Circle Ritz, we prepare to plunge back down the black marble mountain to less rarefied spheres, knowing little more than when we came. At least it is evident that the Grand High Karma is on another plane.
Given that, I am glad that I rarely fly, but instead depend on my feet to do the stalking.
Chapter 3
Seance, MacDuff!
Temple gazed from one impassive face of the Crystal Phoenix hotel and casino to the other, searching for signs of a joke.
"I don't think my job description includes working nights. Especially to attend a ... a high-tech haunting."
Neither Van von Rhine nor her husband, Nicky Fontana, looked as if they were kidding; as the Phoenix's manager and owner, respectively, they almost always meant business.
"You don't have a job description," Van noted, her smile quick and mechanical. "But I know how you feel. No one could compel me to dabble with the . . . occult, for love or money."
"I've got both," her dark-haired husband riposted, his smile both intimate and challenging.
Van yon Rhine's blond satin head shook. "I can't believe that managing a hotel could come to this, but then again, I never imagined myself managing a hotel in Las Vegas. You have a right to walk out on us, Temple, or to tell us to walk off a cliff--"
"Oh, I'm not scared," Temple said. "It's just that I don't see why you'd want me to participate in this, this--"
"Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead," Nicky supplied with a dazzling display of even, white teeth.
"Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead," Temple repeated, hardly able to keep from gagging on the hideously unpromotable title.
"It's for charity," Van put in halfheartedly.
"And for the Phoenix, too," Nicky said, selling hard. "The Hollywood tech people who volunteer their time setting up the attraction might be perfect for our subterranean theme park.
You did say you envisioned state-of-the-art effects."
"Yeah, but... you want me to participate in a seance on Halloween Night? To hold hands with the seriously psychic and wait for holographic hobgoblins to appear? Isn't that a bit flaky?"
Nicky sat forward on the upholstered chrome chair beside Van's crystal-topped desk. "Sure, but that's the great angle. That's why the Phoenix is sponsoring the Crystal Ball for all the haunted-house sponsors and beneficiaries afterward. High-profile hocus-pocus, Temple. The usual Las Vegas animal act with Homo sapiens in pet suits. The, uh, seance will be set smack-dab in the middle of the haunted house. Everyone who goes through can peek in."
"Oh, goody two-shoes, I'm to be a centerpiece as well as a chump."
"It's a socko publicity shtick. All the colorful psychic types between here and Hollywood getting together to do a- Halloween seance to end all seances: they're going to try to bring Harry Houdini back from the dead."
"So what's new?" Temple asked. "People have been trying to do that since ought-seven or something."
."Nineteen twenty-six," Van corrected meticulously, smoothing her already slick French twist. "He was a rabbi's son, born in Budapest, did you know that?"
Temple shook her head. She did know that Van had grown up in a suite of four-star European hostelries managed by her German-born father after her American mother died.
"He really made his reputation in Europe and is still revered there," Van went on, "so I learned all about him when I was young. Shortly after Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz in the Pest part of Budapest, the family emigrated to Appleton, Wisconsin, of all places, where Houdini grew up as Ehrich Weiss before taking his stage name. But he died in nineteen twenty-six, and quite tragically, I remember."
Nicky slid closer to the chains seat-rim. "Yeah, but he died with a code under lock and key so that if anyone claimed he had come back from the dead, there would be a way to prove it. Think of it! The greatest escape artist of all time escaping Death itself."
Nicky's voice had become a baritone vibrato of excitement. He could have sold pickled herring to a vegetarian with that face, that voice, that air of eager certitude. Temple admired the effect, as did a riveted Van across the desk, but she knew too much to fall for sizzle when steak could be had.
"Houdini was a great escape artist, yes," Temple conceded to Nicky's salesmanship, "but that doesn't give him any special qualifications for surviving death. Escaping is an art, a technique that requires practice, showmanship, physical agility and an audience willing to believe. I'd worry more about somebody nobody wanted to come back actually doing it, someone spiritually spooky like ... oh, Rasputin, say."
"Rasputin doesn't sell in Las Vegas," Nicky said quickly. "Houdini does. Besides, if you know there's not a ghost of a chance that the dead dude would actually show up, all the better, huh?
Just go along for the ride, take mental notes, watch the weird effects and let us know what you think of the people who put it together. You said you wanted the Jersey Joe Jackson Mine attraction to be a little scary. Here's a little scary in our own backyard. It should be a scream.
Hey, I wish I could do it, but I've got to escort some bigwigs around here before the shindig tonight."
Temple nodded. The Crystal Ball had been her idea. Las Vegas always loved a chance to out-glitz itself, and she had always felt Halloween lacked a certain elan as a holiday. Great costumes and effects, but no places really elegant to show them off except everybody's front porch.
She had designed the Crystal Ball as an adult Halloween fantasy, combining the elegant decadence of Mardi gras with the homespun dress-up of Halloween. The hotel's Crystal ballrooms---the Lalique, Baccarat, Orrefors, Steuben and Hawkes--had been draped in a diamond dazzle of cellophane cob-webbing and spinning crystal balls, of wands and weirdery, until the rooms were a bright, interconnecting Wonderland of the fantastic and ghostly. White Witch' craft, Van had called it on first viewing the interconnected suitescape earlier that day.
Temple considered ensnaring the notoriously superstitious hotel manager with a supernaturally themed event one of her biggest PR triumphs.
She was beginning to love planning events on a P. T. Barnum scale (especially with the Crystal Phoenix's money). So how could she refuse Nicky and Van's wanting her to sit in on some publicity-mongering stance that was likely to be as genuine as a sawed-in-half lady?
"All right. I usually need my beauty sleep, so participating in something that doesn't start until midnight isn't terribly thrilling, but at least I'll be awake for the big ball right after."
"Good." Van sounded relieved. "By the way, the Glory Hole boys are working as consultants at the haunted house, since their ghost-town attraction gives them a certain expertise. So you won't be friendless at the haunted house. Oh, and will your new Midnight Louie shoes arrive in time for the ball?"
"Yes, godmother."
Van smiled, not at all mechanically this time. "I'm so eager to see them! I can't imagine how anyone could get all of Louie on a size-five high heel."
"It isn't really Midnight Louie," Nicky explained, unnecessarily. "Just a gen
eric black cat."
"Perfect for a Crystal Ball." Van smiled conspiratorially at Temple as she rose from her desk.
"I can't wait to see what you're wearing to go with them."
"Or who's going with you, " Nicky muttered to his Armani tie as he bent to pull Temple's heavy chair away from the desktop's thick blue crystal edge.
Temple flashed him a stern look while trying not to flush as red as her hair. More people in Las Vegas were speculating on her love life these days than played the dollar slots at the Goliath.
**********
The Storm cleared its throat for a moment when she turned the ignition key in the Phoenix parking lot. Though the sun was baking down at a steady sixty-five degrees, night temperatures were growing considerably colder and Temple's bright-aqua car was getting a tad paler and a lot older. She patted the dashboard encouragingly as the engine revved, then wove through the parking-lot aisles onto the moving sheet-metal lava flow of the Las Vegas Strip.
Visions of sugar pumpkins danced in her head. Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead. That wasn't her idea. Still, the haunted house had been a particularly well-run Las Vegas staple in recent years. Adding a hokey midnight seance to the attraction didn't seem like such a hot idea to her, but if Nicky and Van wanted her to play along, play along she would. Yawn. She would have had to stay up for the Crystal Ball, anyway, but now what she wore would be a concern.
She couldn't wear party clothes to a seance in a house streaked with fake blood.
Nicky hadn't thought of that; men never did. And Van so disliked the seance topic that she hadn't tumbled that asking Temple to be on duty, like Cinderella, up until the very hour of the big ball ("from one to whenever A.M." was her own line in the promotion), meant she'd need more than a fairy godmother to get in ball gown gear. Maybe she could wear something over her ball outfit at the stance, like a pup tent. Except she'd probably be suspected of transporting concealed apparitions across haunted thresholds.
Temple shook her head as she drove. The situations public relations people got into! But a seance might be intriguing . . . and what was she going to wear to her very own Crystal Ball, anyway? Something that wouldn't obscure the Midnight Louie shoes yet would look a little like Good Witch Glinda. . . .
Temple was almost at the Circle Ritz when the UFO appeared in her rearview mirror at three o'clock low. Big and silver, it hovered behind her as if planning to land.
Yikes! A vampire already, and still three days to Halloween. She'd never seen the Hesketh Vampire from the front like this. The motorcycle was streamlined Mercury on wheels, its windscreen swept sharply back, its helmeted driver--rider, get with it! she admonished herself--an anonymous face behind a curve of smoked acrylic.
Max.
Max was back. Why wouldn't he take his favorite 'cycle for a spin? Spin that I'm in... Where did that line come from? "That Ol' Black Magic." Well, she was getting into the Halloween spirit anyway. Was silver magic as potent as black?
Keeping her eyes more on the rearview mirror than the familiar street, Temple steered the Storm into its regular parking spot. She let her key ring clank deep into her tote bag and wriggled out of the front seat.
, The classic motorcycle had paused nearby, purring like a brushed-aluminum tiger, kept upright only by the ball of its rider's foot on the ground. Riding motorcycles was a balancing act that always made Temple uneasy, like watching a wirewalker.
The rider, who wore a navy nylon windbreaker and chinos, pushed the smoked visor upward. Temple braced herself for having words with Max.
But it wasn't Max, and for a moment that fact so disoriented her that she couldn't tell who it was, especially with the shiny pumpkin of silver helmet reducing the face to a wedge of obscured features. Not Electra's, of course, but she'd already deduced that.
The men who had attacked her in the parking garage sprang to mind with the sudden palpitation of her heartbeat. Maybe they knew Max was back and wanted to pound out another message ...
"What's the matter?" the rider asked.
"Matt! You scared me."
"Sorry. I guess this helmet looks a little sinister."
"What are you doing on that thing?"
The helmeted head shook. "That's what I wanted to know, but Electra insisted on dragging me over to the Our Lady of Guadalupe playground for lessons. Says I need wheels and she hardly uses these." He eyed her for a moment. "You thought I was him."
"Well, there was a fifty-fifty possibility."
"I told Electra that I didn't like the idea."
"That wouldn't change Electra's mind."
"And she said the last thing Max would want now was to be seen on anything as high-profile as this."
"True."
He turned one handle, revving the powerful motor to a faint whine protesting its inaction.
"If the parishioners at Saint Rose of Lima could see me now--they always gave the parish priest a slightly used Volvo."
Temple's unease teetered on a fit of giggles. "Very practical. This isn't."
"I really feel silly."
"So would I."
"Maybe I'll get into it." He shrugged. "I could use a way of getting around, and beggars can't be choosy."
"Just lock it up good if you park it anywhere. It's a collector's item."
Matt shook his head again. "I'm not used to having things that anybody else wants."
This time the pause allowed the larger implications of that remark to cruise above their heads like buzzards. Max was there, the unseen dead body the buzzards circled, gone but not unnoticed all the same. Where was he really, anyway?
Electra's pink Probe turned into the parking area. She stuck an arm out the driver's window as she passed them, thumb up.
"All right!" she shouted.
"Solo flight," Matt explained to Temple modestly before putt-putting slowly to the shed behind the oleanders.
Adorable! Temple shook her head. Women would be taking him under their wings and giving him motorcycle lessons and... and dancing lessons and anything his little towheaded heart might desire from now until doomsday. So why did she resent the fact?
Electra caught up to her inside by the elevators.
"What do you think?
Temple eyed her landlady's ever-changing hair, but found nothing radically different. "About what?"
Electra shrugged and looked over her shoulder. "Letting Matt use the Vampire."
"Does he have a license?"
"He will. Quick pupil. Besides, I hate to think of the poor man making that long walk back from ConTact at three every morning now that the nights are taking a plunge."
Temple laughed.
"What? What's so funny? I'm never amusing unless I mean to be. M
"Yes you are. You are! Electra, it's gotta be a heck of a lot colder racing home on that windjamming machine than simply walking."
"Not with the proper gear, like black leather."
"You may get Matt Devine on a motorcycle, but if you get him into black leather, I'll take you to dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe."
"Done!" Electra blinked as the elevator doors opened and they stepped in. "What makes you think he'll be so resistant to black leather?"
Temple shrugged. "Black looks harsh on blond men."
"Rules are made to be broken."
"But not by Matt. Besides, I think he's had enough black in his life."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"That I don't have any concrete reason for thinking your Hell's Angel fantasies about Matt are doomed. Just an instinct," Temple finished with an exaggerated simper.
"You don't have instincts; you have ideas and inside information. FU find out, you know."
"Great, let me know if you do."
Temple whisked out of the opening elevator doors on her floor.
Chapter 4
Haunted House
Haunted-house attractions had never scared Temple. They looked too much like carnival midway sideshows. There was the usual luridly painted, cutout flat up fr
ont, with a dingy, boxy building cringing behind it.
No matter what terrifying effects were unleashed inside, Temple could never overlook the hokey outside. She felt the same way about Tunnels of Love. All those painted pastel hearts couldn't camouflage what was basically a trench of fetid water snaking through a darkened warehouse.
And this particular site, on an overgrown lot marked to spawn some massive theme hotel in the next year, looked discouragingly true to form. Old Las Vegas had been too rough and ready, and New Las Vegas too trendy, to grow a genuine haunted house naturally.
The city had no established streets now falling into disuse and lined with creepy, crumbling Victorian mansions that rambled for room after room. Temple had never heard of a ghost in Vegas except for Jersey Joe Jackson, and even his haunted hotel suite was barely fifty years old.
How much evil could accrue in a mere half century? Not enough to raise goosebumps on a public used to slasher movies and horror novels that left no stage of death and decay to the imagination.
She finally dropped her key ring inside her tote bag and minced over the urban litter that drifted down the Las Vegas Strip like the autumn leaves the city so seldom saw, given the climate's year-round vegetation.
A crude wooden sign near the sidewalk announced a schedule of "hauntings" beginning ten days before Halloween. By now the "helliday" itself was only forty-eight hours away, but the busted-flat lot looked as if no one had trespassed on it in weeks.
That was the setup's spookiest part, Temple thought: seeing an essentially empty Strip lot at a time when the Good Ship Las Vegas tossed on a feverish ocean of construction, expansion and upgrade. Temple looked back through the cyclone fencing that surrounded the open space. Cabs cruised the Strip like barges plying some latter-day asphalt Nile. The monorail between Bally's and the MGM Grand whooshed by above street level like a silver bullet, or a French supertrain.
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