"We're going to the psychic fair, to see what we can learn there."
"Now you're talking like Nostradamus."
"I've never claimed prophetic powers," Electra demurred modestly.
"I meant the local rhyming bookie." Temple sighed. "I suppose we should see what the fortune-tellers all think about being taken in by a wolf in ewe's clothes."
"Psychics are not fortune-tellers; they would get very upset if you called them that."
Electra was pursuing Temple to the bedroom, anxiously explicating.
Temple shut the door before Electra could follow her in.
"Brew up some coffee while I'm dressing," she suggested from within. "It should put me in a better mood."
Electra's footsteps ran, not walked, over the parquet to the kitchen tile, from where shortly came a great clangor.
Temple sighed again, then rummaged in her closet for something to wear. Unfortunately, Midnight Louie had already found it, pulled it down and made it into a nest to curl up on.
She squatted down to study his cozy arrangement.
"The late lady was a lad, Louie. Imagine that. Named Gandolph. Why is that name familiar?"
Chapter 17
Parsley, Sage Rosemary and Crime
The Oasis was Las Vegas's answer to the Taj Mahal.
In fact, the gazebo by the pool out back was the Taj Mahal The symbolic curbside greeters were a sculptured pair of immense palanquin-bearing elephants flashing polyurethane tusks long enough, and strong enough, to seat the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for a photo opportunity.
Inside was an exotic jungle landscape chattering with monkeys and birds, among whom the ringing of slot machines chimed like distant temple bells.
"This is Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra," Temple declared, "but our Crystal Phoenix attraction will be Spencer Tracy's Katharine Hepburn: not as big as a back lot, but what's there will be choice."
"Do Van and Nicky approve of your moonlighting as a psychic detective these days?" Electra asked.
"I'm not a psychic detective: I'm investigating psychics. There's a big difference. You bet they approve. I called to find out how the Crystal Ball went--a smash, boo hoo, that l couldn't bask in--but Nicky and Van were mostly agog about the fatality at the seance. They're dying to know if the haunted house organizers are irresponsible enough to play fast and loose with their special effects, and maybe commit manslaughter. Such loose cannons wouldn't be on the Crystal Phoenix team, I can tell you. So I have carte blanche to snoop."
"Eightball did offer the opinion that these punk kids that dream up special effects nowadays are technological giants and, emotional dwarves."
"When did you see Eightball?"
"I can use my telephone, too," Electra said airily, "even if it isn't a cute red spike shoe like yours. Now let's boogie."
Electra eagerly led Temple to the ballrooms, her vivid muumuu for once fading into the hothouse background.
After they had paid their stiff entry fees (apparently sister seance attendees received no discounts), they were allowed into a ma-harajah's pleasure dome draped with imported fabrics.
Sheer silks impressed with gold designs tented every exhibitor's stand.
"Isn't this sublime?" Electra clasped chubby, beringed hands before her floral breast. "I feel like I'm in Ali Baba's bazaar."
"I feel like I'm in Ali Baba's harem," Temple remarked, watching a pair of babes in chain-mail bikinis jingle by. Or did she mean jiggle? "Or on the set of Bay Watch. "
"Hmm? Body Watch? What's that, dear?"
"Nothing much," she said. "Do psychic fairs always stir up so much atmosphere?"
"Oh, my, no. They're usually rather dreary affairs at off-the-beaten-path motels that smell of disinfectant and dripping pipes. This is the pinnacle of the paranormal marketplace. The Everest of extrasensory perception, the--"
"The Mount Rainier of the mountebank," Temple finished caustically.
"What do Monte Carlo's Prince Rainier and Monty Hall have to do with it?"
"Probably as much as goodness," Temple said obscurely, privately invoking the ghost of Mae West again. "Where are our friends from last night?"
"Oh, scattered among the booths." Electra waved garnet- and amethyst-ringed fingers tipped with pale orange polish at the array. "Do you want to get a bite to eat first? They have food booths."
"Perhaps. I'm feeling an insatiable craving for a fig, at the mo-ment."
"Oh. I doubt they have figs, not even one. More like Orangeade and Coke and nachos."
"Nachos are the native food?"
"No, but it's popular. New Age people like strong flavors, you know."
"I didn't know."
"We want to experience life in all its zest and foreign spice."
"Even death?"
"Oh, especially death. Death is so interesting! The tunnel, the light, the little people at the end of the tunnel."
"It sounds rather like a haunted house."
"What a nice analogy, dear! Yes, the House of Life is haunted by all who have gone before.
We who walk through the walls of reality may glimpse the wonder beyond. I hadn't thought of it before, but a haunted house is the perfect site for a seance."
"Just show me the way to someone who might know more than we do about the death of Gandolph last night."
"Any one of these prognosticators and mysteriarchs might know that." Another wave of tangerine fingernails.
"Mysteriarchs?"
"Like Houdini. Like Max." Electra beamed at Temple with an arch expression. "You know, like a patriarch, only a master of the arts of magic."
"Have you seen Max lately?"
"Me? No. He appears to have vanished again. And you?"
"Not lately," Temple said, choosing to define "lately" as in the past twelve hours. "Oh, great.
The brunet bombshell has set up his tent. Shall we go drop our bombshell on him? I doubt any of these people were gawking at the noon news if they had to put out their wares this morning."
"Temple, have you considered that the police will be mad at you for telling everybody who the dead man was?"
"It was on TV. Besides, shouldn't they all have gotten the news telepathically? Even our master of ceremonies there."
"He is pretty cute, isn't he?" Electra hustled after Temple toward the table where Oscar Grant was enchanting a mostly female audience.
"Cute" was not the word Temple would apply to Grant. He was an ingratiatingly slight man, with a slightly effeminate air, which by no means meant he was gay. Such a man would always do well with women, combining an oily masculinity with the chummy camaraderie of a massage salesman.
His long dark hair, mustache and solid-black dress gave him a foreign air that was quite probably undeserved. Temple had seen his type at the front of classrooms, in seaside art galleries, on cable TV infomercials and in front of carnival midway sideshows.
She suspected that they always sold something that sounded, tasted, smelled or felt too good to be true, and that also cost too much to be genuine.
"The tapes," he was saying now, "are only one hundred and eighty-five dollars, and of course you also get a watermelon tourmaline pendant, my video and nine hundred number in case you have any questions. Ladies? "
The watching women bubbled over with questions, as eager as high-schoolers. Temple studied their sun-creased necks and hands, their cubic-zirconia-emblazoned wrists and fingers, their freckled chests and sinewy golf-playing calves and forearms. This guy could sell Retin-A to cloistered monks, and here he had an audience already sold on his snake oil, which was half mysticism and half mumbo jumbo.
"Remember," he urged as they reluctantly moved on, "to think is to know, but to be is to believe."
Wow. Temple stepped right up, intercepting his melting look of greeting before he recognized her and washed it right off.
"Did you know," she began without fanfare, sounding alarmingly like Lieutenant C. R. Molina to herself, "that Edwina Mayfair was really a man named Gandolph? And, if not
, why not?"
Not for her the hot-fudge glance, the supple vocal tone and expressive eyebrows. "You must be joking!" he sputtered. "You were at the seance last night, some flack, I remember--"
"Flack" was a fighting word. "You set yourself up as the expert on psychics. If you're so expert, how come you were taken in by Edwina Mayfair? Didn't you know her by sight? Or foresight?"
"I have never met the lady. We work on different coasts."
"Surely an insignificant gap given the intercommunication possible on a higher, less physical plane?"
"Your attitude stinks," he said. "We're not omnipotent, simply gifted."
"Still, you admit not meeting Edwina Mayfair. What about this Gandolph?"
"Gandolph? I've heard of him. A malcontent. A failed stage magician who took insane relish in attempting to slander truer talents. A bitter old man who probably died of a suffocated heart.
I can't say I'm surprised, now that I learn the dead person's real identity. Gandolph was choking on his own failures and trying to pin them oh us. Bile killed him, then; an excess of bile. No doubt his rank presence drove away the only solid apparition of Houdini the world has seen since nineteen twenty-six."
"Had you ever met him?"
Oscar Grant paused to calm himself one muscle at a time. When he spoke again, it was with detached serenity.
"Houdini, or this dead charlatan? Why should I answer your questions? The police have been enough skeptics for me to deal with in twelve hours. But, no, I never met the man, although I have read about him, and have seen photographs. In none of those photographs was he wearing women's garb, so I wouldn't have recognized him. That was his intent, wasn't it? To infiltrate our gathering as apparently you have done? We are used to vilification and skepticism. We are used to enemies among us."
"Am I to take it that you are also prepared to deal with them, then?"
Oscar's sad, superior smile made his mustache crooked. "We are prepared to win them over, with the truth. That is our only object, our only weapon. Now if you will excuse me; I have acolytes to address."
Temple turned. Another clutch of tanned, desperately casual women covered in cubic zirconia and crystals were lined up behind her. She gave way gracefully, trying not to be blinded by the light.
"Oh," fretted Electra, digging in her canvas bag, "now he lumps me in with the Enemy. Can't you show a little tact and sensitivity? I was hoping to get one of his singing crystal stickpins, which he gives now and then to the odd acolyte."
"You have no place to put a stickpin. And investigators have no tact."
"Oh."
Temple took her arm. "But Grant admits to knowing who Gandolph was, and did you catch what he really was?"
"A crusading magician who tried to unmask psychics. Houdini was one of those himself. The magical has always attacked the mystical, yet who is the true fake? Everybody knows that magicians are nothing but a bag of tricks."
"Yes, and some of them admit it, including Houdini, from what I've read. In fact, Houdini's friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came to an abrupt end when Houdini couldn't endorse Lady Conan Doyle's psychic claims to having channeled his mother in Houdini's own presence.
But although Sir Arthur insisted Houdini used dematerialization to accomplish some of his illusions, Houdini steadfastly denied it. And it would have been tempting for the age's greatest mystifier to claim supernatural powers with such a respected endorser of them behind him."
Temple stopped walking and stood puzzled. "Then why is Houdini, of all people, reputed to have sworn to come back from death?"
"He never did. That line was from the scriptwriter of a cheap film he made," a voice answered behind her.
The women turned to see D'Arlene Hendrix sitting on a folding chair before a plain booth with a table covered by beige brochures.
Temple nodded approval. This setup looked like it was selling dental hygiene. She instantly trusted D'Arlene Hendrix a hundred percent more than she trusted Oscar Grant. Then she realized that the low-key approach could be just as deceptive.
"You seem to know a lot about Houdini."
"Why not? I read the books and watch the movies." D'Arlene smiled. "No, I didn't get my info on the telepathic telegraph. He was a textbook case of something: death wish, mother fixation, sexual hang-ups, quite literally; did an awful lot of his tricks suspended upside down, or cramped in incredibly tight spaces and swathed with chains. The mother thing is true; he worshiped her. When she died, he tormented himself that she had some last, undelivered message meant just for him."
"Then ... he would have tried to bring her back, not promised to return himself." Temple waited for an explanation.
"True." D'Arlene pushed an invisible hair behind her ear. "And he did hunt sincerely for a medium who could do that. Finding only frauds, he became an anti-medium crusader. And he didn't promise to return from the dead, merely made provisions that if anyone claimed he did, there was evidence around to rebut the phonies. But the public wanted Houdini back as much as he would have wanted to recall his mother. Who besides sonny wanted to see Mama Cecelia Weiss in the transparent flesh? It's Houdini who has the sex appeal. All five feet four of him, bowed legs and everything. An incredible athlete, nonetheless. Actually, Houdini's wife, Bess, started the tradition of the annual Halloween seance to make contact. After a decade, she gave up, but the Spiritualists, who would have loved to bring back the time's most notorious skeptic of post-death communication, never gave up, they just faded away."
"Are you convinced? That figure we saw last night, the chained man--"
"Looked just like Houdini in one of his most famous photographs."
"Photograph?" Electra echoed, crestfallen.
"Exactly," said Temple. "We saw nothing that couldn't have been faked."
D'Arlene smiled. "No, we never do. But I have seen things at seances that could have been faked and that could not be proved to have been faked."
"What about Gandolph?"
"What about him?"
"He's the one who died last night."
D' Arlene Hendrix was suddenly speechless. "I hadn't heard that it wasn't Edwina Mayfair.
Gandolph the Great? In that ridiculous hat? What a way to die, dressed as a laughingstock! Poor man. Quite sincere, in his way. I understood that he was retired."
"He is now," Temple said grimly, ready to move on.
Down the aisle, under an ethereal canopy of white and silver silks, she had recognized a shining silver head. She was dying to uv terrogate Mynah Sigmund about the poor, dear, dead deceiver. Temple paused to hunt for her own hidden motive. All right. She was dying to find out what made this New Age Barbie Doll tick.
"Come on," she told Electra, hitching her tote bag up on her shoulder and pushing her glasses back on the bridge of her nose. "I want you to make sure that this next one doesn't pull the ectoplasm over my eyes."
"Ectoplasm over your eyes?" D'Arlene rolled hers. "You wouldn't like that. In the old days, spirit ectoplasm was often made of regurgitated luminous cheesecloth."
Temple blanched. "What a way to get your minimum daily calcium requirement!"
"I don't know much about Mynah Sigmund," Electra said between huffs and puffs that wouldn't blow a marshmallow over as she hoofed along in Temple's wake. "She's local, and she used to do a show downtown at the Gilded Calf."
"Magic?"
"No, medium. She's never done magic, that I know of. Oh, and she came here from Sedona, Arizona."
"Figures." Temple gritted her teeth as she pushed against a crowd that was all going in the opposite direction.
"And she used to be married to Oscar Grant."
"No!" That stopped Temple in her tracks, which were made by Anne Klein Kelly-green pumps. "Talk about opposites attracting. Look at who she's married to now!"
"Um, that big quiet guy, what's-his-name."
"Yeah, that big guy made about as much impression on me as a bowl of haggis too." Temple glanced at the woman's tent. It looked fashioned from l
ame and Lurex, and today's long, clingy white gown looked half spandex. "Odd that a purist about the paranormal from the New Age capital of Arizona should wear so much artificial fabric."
"Oh, Temple." Electra seemed glad to stand still for a while. "These people are ... odd to begin with."
"And yet you believe they're for real?"
"Sure. People who hear and see things other people don't are bound to get a bit... strange."
"Include us, then, because we seem to have seen everything everyone else did at the seance."
"Yes, and I'm so disappointed. I was hoping Aunt Min would show up just for me."
"Aunt Min? Anything like my aunt Kit?"
"Heavens, no. She was a turn-of-the-century lady; never wore a skirt shorter than her anklebone in her life. The twenties just passed her by, and so did bathtub gin and even the occasional medicinal glass of wine. But she was a great advocate of Spiritualism."
"Spiritualism was still around in the twenties? I thought Spiritualism was overstuffed late-nineteenth-century parlors, with mists forming on the bell jar and apparitions mussing the antimacassars."
"My dear young thing, Spiritualism may have started back then, but it was still roaring by the twenties. Ouija boards were really sheik."
Temple nodded. Being a post-1950's baby, she tended to forget how fast the twentieth century had changed. "Let's hit the Great White Way before the next New Age Lothario stops by,"
"Mynah does seem popular for a gal who's gone gray early," Electra commented, patting her cheerful shag.
Despite the stretchy modern fabrics, at close view Mynah's tent revealed itself as an albino chapel to the ghost of Art Nouveau. This was a pale, calm oasis amid the color and hullabaloo, a moon suspended over the gaudy rainbow.
Sickle-shaped mirrors hung against the flimsy curtains. An old trunk gaped open in the middle of the booth, with an artistic tidal wave of glittering fabrics. Vintage kaleidoscopes and stereopticons peeked from between pallid folds. On the booth's long front table, glitter-dotted white cotton batting played backdrop for moonstone jewelry in sinuous silver settings.
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