Ears and whiskers pop out around the chair sides, mostly on tuxedos and spotteds and stripes.
I snort. "And how many Blacks do you have?"
"Two, including you."
"Two?" I think of Midnight Louise and stiffen.
Instead, the face that peeps around another chair is none other than that of my esteemed sire. I am surprised the old man would stick around for some New Age folderol, and tell him so.
"Well, lad," he says, leaping to the floor so as to be better seen and to project his voice further. What an old ham! "Me years on the sea have taught me a respect for Nature in her most whimsical ways. And just last night on this very site, I, too, witnessed a human now dead sending back a shade of itself. It seems to me that with our species' special psychic powers we can concoct an even more impressive parade of ghosts, and I owe my fellows the benefit of my wider travels and insights."
Methinks the sire has absorbed a bit of pomposity while abroad and aboard. Nor does he mention seeing any of the other visiting apparitions, which I find curious.
I see it is too late. I have been lured into this truly hair-brained enterprise. So I leap upon the nearest empty chair and say no more. In moments we assume our positions, moving atop the seance table, facing outward and linking tails. There is nothing our kind cannot accomplish while atop a table. Of course, in this position, the forelimbs do not know what the hind limbs are doing, but that is always the best stance to take in a seance, anyway.
I thrill as that communal hum begins anew. A sympathetic thrum vibrates through the conjoined tails. This is the true purpose of these elegant extremities, and one no human would ever guess just from looking at us waving them back and forth like elegant inkwell appendages.
In fact, if humans were to see us now, they would be so blind as to our true potency that they would simply shout at us to get down from the table.
Now our kind's purr is unique in the animal kingdom. We purr for many reasons: we purr in pleasure and we purr in pain. Consider the purr a variety of audible tranquilizer. So it also affects humans. My kind purrs in kitten birth, and kits purr as they suckle. We purr when we are sleeping, we purr when we are awake. We purr by ourselves and we purr together. We purr when being petted, we purr when being played with. For a few of us, there is one more purr, a secret purr. When we combine our secret purrs, we produce the Purr of Power. And that is simply the amplified amity we feel as furred and purred beings.
In that state, on occasion, we can lure the unusual. The out of the ordinary. The out of this world. Ghosts. Apparitions. Revenants. Spooks.
That is what we see when we peer so intently into a shadowed corner. That is what we hear when we sit atop the grandfather clock and cock our heads at the ceiling. That is what we sense when we run swift and intent to a night-darkened window. The human who comes after us may see, hear, sense nothing. Or the human may see, hear, sense a mouse or a cricket. But many times, we have glimpsed the unseeable, the unsensible.
What do we do with this inestimable gift? Most often, nothing. One of the great pleasures of not being a dominant species is the right to ignore our potential.
But this is a signal occasion. This is a deliberate calling-together, aimed at a specific specter.
I wonder why Karma wishes to participate in the resurrection of the escape artist known as Houdini. I wonder what vision we will raise today. For we will see something. I wonder if it will see us?
Chapter 21
Wild Black Yonder
Temple was too tired to worry about an innocent suspect that evening, even if Electra was willing to stake her life on her acquaintance's innocence. The real hidden suspect in this case was hardly innocent of anything in the broadest sense of the word and had a long history of taking care of himself only too well; but Max's relationship to Gandolph gave Temple the willies.
If Molina should find out--! She shuddered. And Max, expert mysteriarch that he was, probably would scorn her pitiful efforts to help.
What was Temple supposed to be anyway, a gumshoe?
She contemplated that as she pulled off her clothes and tumbled into bed, sweet bed, pausing only to rear up in the covers to turn the shoe phone's ring control to "off." A gumshoe, come on! Evidently the proverbial gumshoe was a predecessor of the rubber-soled tennis shoe, back in the days when gum trees (and not synthetics) provided the raw material. Gumshoe.
Sneaker.
There was one shoe she would never, ever covet. So clunky. So terribly unchic. So cliched.
Sleep came like a sledgehammer.
So did waking. She had been dreaming--not about black panthers, and not about gumdrop trees--but about gumshoe trees: metal tree limbs dripping blossoms of tennis shoes in every color of the rainbow. Temple (wearing her new Midnight Louie Austrian-crystal heels) was standing under this footwear umbrella, waiting for gaudily ripe shoes to plummet into her hands.
She awoke with a sense that she had lost something, or that it had been stolen. The bedroom was utterly dark. What had wakened her was a hand around her upper arm. It remained there yet.
"Shhh," came next, then a finger against her mouth.
She bit it, hard and with feeling.
The following smothered but creatively obscene remarks revealed the identity of her intruder beyond a doubt.
"How did you get in?" she whispered back.
"Someone left one of the French doors ajar," Max said. "Is that what you learned in martial arts class?" he asked in the aggrieved tone of the recently bitten.
"No, it's what I learned wrestling with an arsonist. And I didn't leave the French door ajar either ... though I didn't check on it tonight."
"Why not?"
"I was thinking about the psychic fair at the Oasis, where the police took D'Arlene Hendrix downtown to interrogate her about Gandolph's death. Or murder."
"They're wrong." Max was so shocked that he spoke in a normal tone. "I guess we can speak up; no one here but us, is there? I haven't checked the other side of the bed."
"Louie is not in residence," Temple said firmly. "But I can't swear to the rest of the rooms. I didn't search the place. Too tired. And you were gone when I got back from the living room Max, what are you doing here? Again? So soon? I thought you were going to knock in future."
Her eyes struggled to decipher the darkness, especially the black-clad man within it. She felt the bed shift as he rose, and could sense him moving toward the bedroom door on hush-puppy feet.
"These are not knocking times, I'm afraid. I'll make sure that French door is locked, and that no one else is in the condo; then I'll make coffee again while you get dressed."
Temple groaned. "Max, why?"
"I want you to break into a house with me."
"Whose house is it?"
"Mine."
****************
"Gee, Kinsella, we never did fun things like this when we were together before," Temple observed as she stumbled on a sprinkler spigot and went sprawling face down on the thick, dead-brown Bermuda grass.
"Hurry, the moon is bright."
"And you never used to sweet-talk me like that either," she added as he jerked her upright.
Temple wasn't sure where they were, except it was a posh gated suburban development, and they had breached a remote section of stucco wall. Actually, Max had breached it; she had been hauled up after, ever the lot in life of the vertically challenged.
"Those silver tennis shoes are a liability." Max's tone verged on loathing. He had never been a footwear connoisseur, so Temple didn't defend her snazzy shoes.
She did glimpse her tennie toes winking at the moon with every step. No one had ever told her to dress for cat burglary.
The house was dead ahead--low, sprawling and black at every opening. Max, his clothes the same light-absorbing black, ran hunched over toward it like a mobile bush. He crouched beside the house wall, where a Hollywood twist thrust spiky evergreen arms at the city-lit night sky pale as dawn. Temple slunk along after.
; Max was prying at a crank-out window with a fretwork design; it snapped open moments later. He clambered in first, then leaned out to lift Temple through.
She tumbled, exhausted, to the floor inside; luckily, the carpeting was thick.
"Why do you have to break into your own house?" she wondered for the third time that evening.
This time he answered. "It used to be mine."
Max refastened the window, then crossed the shadowy room with the agile certainty of a wirewalker knowing that what he did might be dangerous, but knowing it too well to worry. He switched on a lamp that illuminated a leather-topped desk on spindly Louie-the-someteenth legs.
"Then why did we break in?"
"I left my keys on the dresser."
"You owned other property in Las Vegas and never told me?"
"I left here six years ago. I let Gary have it then."
"Gary?"
Max sat at the chair behind the desk, running his fingers into his hair. "Gandolph the Great, recently deceased, according to the news. Look, I'm taking the circumstances at their word, that you're actually good at this. I'm too close. The police didn't waste any time going over this place, but I was hoping we ... you ... could find something else."
"This is a crime scene, with tape outside and everything?"
"Technically, yes, but they were only after supporting evidence. It wasn't the murder site."
"By being here we've crossed a taped crime scene?"
"Don't worry, every window is draped, and the drapes are all blackout quality. I put them in myself. Well, do you have anything to contribute?"
"Why didn't you ask me that first? I could have stayed in bed."
"Then we'll go back." He stood, switched off the light.
"As long as I'm here and my tennies are scuffed beyond redemption ..."
The light snapped on again. "Where do you want to start?"
By the glow, Temple found her way to a tufted leather sofa and sat. "At the beginning. With some background on this house, Gandolph the Great and you."
She saw his smile quirk in the upcast glare of the brass lampshade. "I've ended where I should have begun, maybe." He rose and went to a Chinese chest along the wall. A touch opened an inlaid door. Max stood back (like a black curtain being drawn) to reveal the dim twinkle of crystal. "Care for a brandy?"
Temple shook her head. After clinking crystal for a minute, Max brought her something anyway: a whisky liqueur in a shot-glass-size cut-crystal container. Her tongue decided that a drop of this potent stuff should last her about as long as a cough lozenge.
Max sat on the sofa, cosseting the brandy snifter until his hands had warmed it enough to drink. His hands were always active, never still. Occupational hazard.
"This is a fetching house," he said. "A bit conventional, but nice for all that."
"Like me?" she wondered.
I'm not talking about us. Or about now, or about the recent past. You didn't ask for that. I'm talking about six years ago, and more than fifteen years before that, when I first met Gary. Gary Randolph. Magicians' last names vanish faster than their lady assistants from a cabinet. And, in Gary's heyday, magicians all used hokey, made-up stage names."
"Like Houdini."
Max paused to sip, then sighed. "Like Houdini. Gary's official performing title was Gandolph the Great."
"Was it from that darn book that everybody but me has read?"
Max shrugged. "Maybe. It doesn't matter. I know that, at least. Gandolph had a very respectable act. He just missed being part of the new generation that went on television: Doug Henning, real name; David Copperfield, unreal name. Ever notice how in the seventies all the performers were cadging stage names from literary and historical figures? David Copperfield, Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdinck, Jane Seymour."
"Temple Bar," she put in wryly.
"That's not a stage name, but it would make a good one."
"Subconscious recognition factor," Temple agreed. "The titular heroes of novels, a nineteenth-century composer, a wife of Henry the Eighth. I always toyed with 'Katharine Howard' as a fantasy stage name; she was another of Henry's head-losing spouses. Besides, it sounds so veddy, veddy British, RADA and all that."
"I auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London," Max noted with a certain rueful nostalgia.
"Really? Did they admit you?"
"I was a punk kid of sixteen. Hell, no."
Ah, Temple thought, a secondary lark during the IRA summer abroad. Someday would she dare ask him about that?
"Did you know that there's a Temple Bar on Lake Mead?" she asked instead.
"No!" Max's somber expression lightened. "I never saw much of anything out here but the Strip. Really? How ... piquant."
"Thanks. I haven't been called piquant since you left."
"A strange condition, piquancy." He looked around. "This house was piquant after I got done with it. Gary was planning to retire, I was due to tour, and it has four bedrooms, so I rented it to him. It has a history."
"All houses do. Even ... our place has a history."
Max leaned forward, studied the room as if it were brandy to savor. "It belonged to Orson Welles."
Temple sat straighter on the commodious sofa, as if thinking she might be impinging on Welles's generous lap. "Him? The Napa Valley wine man?"
Max laughed. "Paul Masson wines. And do you know what blasphemy it is, sitting in this house and remembering his least achievement?"
"Maybe, but when I was a kid, the Napa wine man was pretty big stuff. Yeah, that's right; the TV commercial was for Paul Masson: 'Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time,' "she declaimed in deep, rotund tones. "That's the most famous wine line since Bela Lugosi's 'I do not drink... vine' in the original Dracula movie. I used to think Welles was Paul Masson. In my immature mind, Masson' was kissing cousin to 'massive,' and that's how Orson Welles looked."
"I saw those TV commercials too, but I knew so much about Welles before then that they hardly registered on me. You do know his history?"
"Oh, sure, I learned it later, when I dabbled in theater. Boy wonder and that Martian Invasion radio broadcast just before World War Two started, and making Citizen Kane and some other classic films, peaking early and never regaining lost glory."
Max blinked and sipped. "Did you know the police were called out to this house Halloween night, before Gary ... Gandolph died at the seance?"
"No? How do you know?"
"Neighbors told me. I played the worried out-of-town owner reclaiming his property after a tragedy. Which I am."
"Won't the police--?"
"I asked after they'd made their neighborhood sweep this morning. In fact they did me a favor. They prepared my way by announcing the death; I merely had to step in afterward.
Everybody was shocked enough to spill whatever beans they had."
"And why were the police called to come out here?"
"Voices. The neighbors heard agitated voices from the house."
"At what time?"
"Between midnight and one A.M."
"But... Gandolph was at the seance all that time. The house should have been empty, unless he had relatives."
Max shook his head. "Lived alone. Stored his magic equipment in the extra bedrooms, along with mine."
"Agitated voices ... arguing?"
"Loud enough to waken or disturb the immediate neighbors. You have to understand, Temple, that people in this development are very discreet. Most of them are celebrities, or at least used to be, so their names still ring bells all over the place. They dislike publicity and attention, and they all swear none of them called the police. But a squad car did drive through and make inquiries. Perhaps your pal Molina could look up the information on the call."
"Umhmmm. She's not even on this case."
Max stroked a hair loosened by his breaking-and-entry exertions from his forehead. Under it lurked a cynically lifted eyebrow. "You must appreciate that."
"Actually, no. I now realize that I u
sed to get tidbits of information out of Molina when we had our little verbal sparring matches. From Watts and Sacker, I get nada, though they're a lot more polite."
"Perhaps Molina is more susceptible to your considerable charm than you think."
"No. Impervious' is her middle name. And if I told you what the C in C.R. stood for--"
Max tented his long flexible fingers. "Tell me. In my position it's always useful to have an insight into members of the local constabulary."
"You don't have a position, that's the trouble. You're just a Missing Man. And 'local constabulary,' honestly, Max. Sometimes you talk like someone from an Agatha Christie play."
"I lived abroad for a while, in my youth."
"Oh, right. Your Interpol days."
"We're not here to weasel background out of each other."
"I'll need more than I have now if I'm supposed to shed any light on Gandolph's death."
Temple tasted another drop of liqueur, then let it soak into her tongue. "So it's possible someone was here while Gandolph was at the seance; more than one 'someone,' or else Voices'
wouldn't have been heard. You've looked the place over, anything moved?"
"Hard to tell; it's been a while since I saw this stuff. But... yes, the magical equipment appears to have been moved, considerably."
"Gandolph's? Or yours?"
"Both. You realize that a magician's equipment is his stock-in trade and worth thousands, his professional secrets all bundled up into a few tables and trunks and boxes?"
"You think someone was searching--?" Temple sat up. "Why do you assume it was Gandolph's things they were disturbing? Why not yours? Not too long ago, somebody was looking for you, hard. Why not for your equipment?"
"Do you really think those thugs who knocked you around would know what to do with a metamorphosis cabinet if they stumbled over one?"
Temple sat back. "No. And no one saw anything, thanks to your blackout draperies. Nice pattern, by the way." She nodded at the cinnabar brocade curtains embroidered with teal and gold birds of paradise.
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