"The house is Chinese in design. I tried to honor the original intent."
"Why did Welles leave this house, and when?"
"In nineteen eighty-five, when he died."
"He died? But not here?"
"No, in Los Angeles. You didn't know when he died?"
"I must have missed the announcements. I was in college and didn't always have access to a television set in the dorm." Temple eyed the room with new worry. "And you bought it?"
"Somewhat later. First flush of success. I'd always felt Orson Welles was a tragic figure, stymied by his own fearsome talent and others' fear of the truly innovative. He was a magician of sorts, you know."
"No, I didn't. Was he any good?"
Max shrugged. "Like all amateurs, he enjoyed the flourishes but lacked the foundation to achieve any truly original effects. And the physique was lacking too."
"You mean the physique wasn't lacking; too much of a good thing, or too many good things."
"He still managed some stunning effects. The Great Orson swallowed needles and flames, did the trunk substitution with Rita Hayworth as long as Harry Cohn would let him, heckled hypnotized roosters, caught a bullet between his teeth and did psychic readings."
Only one item on this eccentric list caught Temple's attention. "Psychic readings?"
"Supposedly he'd done it earlier, on the road with a touring show to make a buck But he gave up for reasons others often do: he scared himself with his own apparent accuracy. Even Houdini tried it when he was hard up early in his career, and shied away."
"Do you think Welles was psychic?"
"Not at all. Everybody who isn't a crook and toys with doing psychic readings scares themselves silly. They have no idea of the role coincidence plays in daily life. When a few of their predictions hit home, they panic, doff their turbans and head for the hills."
"You have absolutely no belief in a life beyond death, or powers beyond the normal?"
"No," Max said without hesitation. "Anybody who tries to sell somebody else stock in those notions is a fraud."
"Most religions accept inexplicable events they call 'miracles.' Most religions posit a life after death."
"I repeat, anybody or any institution that tries to sell somebody else stock in such notions is a fraud."
"We've never discussed the topic. I always assumed magicians adore the mysterious, the unexplained."
"We do, but only in our own acts. Magicians as a class abhor the spacey side of occultism.
We know the ghostly visitations and the tap-dancing tables are manipulated, and we know how such tricks are done. That's why so many magicians, irritated by watching their art used to defraud the gullible, donate their services to debunk spectral phenomena."
"How is that different from charging the public to watch you do tricks?"
"Enormously!" Max leaned forward, elbows on knees, gesturing with the now-empty brandy glass. "We magicians advertise ourselves as tricksters. We admit that we are entertainers. We don't toy with people's pasts, or their pain. We appeal to their sense of reality, we challenge them in public to catch us tricking them. Psychics and mediums pretend to superior sensitivities.
They take money in private under false pretenses, in exchange for useless and deceptive information. They prolong the process for as long as the pigeon's cash holds out. They are thieves of time as well as money, pickpockets of the soul. They are ... despicable."
"And Gandolph felt as you do?"
"More strongly."
Temple sat back. "Was that why he was in disguise at the seance? Did he plan to expose one, or all, of the psychics present?"
"I don't know. Obviously, he didn't wish to be recognized. He could have been planning a book. He had the time now. Yet it was such an obvious publicity stunt; a seance in a haunted-house attraction seems beneath his notice."
"He mentioned nothing to you of the scheme?"
Max frowned and sipped from the brandy snifter. Temple noticed it was full again, and gave him a questioning look.
Max rolled the brandy in the crystal bowl, then sipped from the second snifter in his other hand. "Quite simple. I brought two glasses over, knowing my mood and capacity, then switched to the full one when the other was empty. Being a magician, I couldn't resist doing it surreptitiously."
"Ex-magicians are like ex-actors, always on."
"That's it!" Max said. "You've hit it. Gandolph was 'always on.' He couldn't resist trying to fool the eye, even if it was with that Lady-Lavinia-at-the-seance outfit. He might have done it simply as a lark, intending to rise at the end, pull off his bonnet and reveal himself."
"Happy Halloween."
"Trick or treat, you decide."
"That's why he wouldn't have told you."
"I wasn't exactly Harry Houseguest, with slippers warming on the hearth and a nice concave dip worn in the best chair. I come ... and go. I was here if I wanted to lie low. If I wanted something else, I was gone."
"So you really don't know much about Gandolph's movements, or even his state of mind?"
"No." Max sipped again before speaking, bitterly. "I hadn't found the time yet to catch up on his fuddy-duddy retirement projects. I had life-and-death matters of my own to consider."
"Max, he might have been killed by accident. It was dark, foggy and even teary in that seance room. I could hardly see, myself. If you're going to force me to rule out the lovely ghosts we saw that night--the serial faces in the windows and Houdini in chains--then the killer was simply human, and maybe made a human error. Perhaps Gandolph was killed by mistake."
"Then what of the voices heard near the house?"
"Sound carries. It can be deceptive. Somebody leaves a window open and a television on ...
presto, eerie voices in the night, arguing."
"Somehow, I feel we're reversing roles."
"How?"
"You're talking me out of groundless suspicions. At least we can search the rooms. You might spot something that I wouldn't think anything of."
"Because I'm ignorant of magicians' tricks?"
"No, because you have no stake in seeing murderers where there are only ghosts. And this house is doubly haunted now." Max glanced up to the dark beams under the peaked roof.
"Good thing I don't believe in spooks." He bolted the brandy like a man who did.
Temple wondered what kind of "spooks" he referred to: spirits, or spies.
"Where will you stay now?" she asked, hating to open that touchy topic.
Max seemed startled by her question. His eyes widened, like Midnight Louie's when he heard a noise he didn't expect.
"Here, of course."
"Here! You can't, now."
"Why not? I own the place, under a business name, granted, but it's still mine."
"But the police have been out here searching."
"Past tense. They've got what they wanted. The best hiding place is always one that somebody's searched already." He regarded her quizzically. "Were you afraid you'd have to be a generous soul and offer me sanctuary at the Circle Ritz?"
"No! I hadn't thought of that at all. I just wondered how many hidey-holes you have in Las Vegas."
"As many as there are neon bulbs in the Strip skyline."
"I see. I'm supposed to figure things out while you continue being your usual mystifying self."
"You are the usual soul of perception." Max bowed toward her, flourishing his left hand to pluck a dinner-plate-size paper rose from thin air.
Temple laughed, as she always did, and accepted the rose. Paper roses didn't require watering, unlike relationships.
"I'll tour the premises," she conceded, getting up.
Max leaped up to conduct her.
He had been truthful: the house, while no palace, was large, spacious and crammed with magical paraphernalia. Even the spare bedroom, with its massive and priceless opium bed, was otherwise stocked with painted cabinets and boxes and tables of all description.
"You rented the place furnished?" Te
mple asked.
Max's sculpted face had taken on an Oriental tilt once inside this room. "If you're asking if the opium couch is mine, yes. I've even slept in it, feeling like an emperor who has very expensive dreams."
Temple eyed the cushioned structure askance: part horizontal throne, part exquisite artifact of another culture and age, part harem honeymoon suite, it was both sumptuous and decadent, but hardly romantic.
"You must have had nightmares in it."
"Not yet," Max said, with an inscrutable smile.
Temple continued down the hallway. The other two bedrooms resembled lumber rooms, they were so crammed with unused furnishings and magical appliances.
The fourth bedroom was on the opposite side of the house and uncluttered, except for a black futon on the hardwood floor, and near it a low carved cinnabar Chinese table bearing a Ming vase full of paper roses.
"It that real?" Temple asked.
"The flowers?"
"The vase."
"No comment," Max said, thereby admitting everything.
"I hope Molina doesn't get her hands on you," Temple said in mock threat. "You'd crack like Tang porcelain."
"Perhaps not." Max's smile was secret, and therefore irritating.
She paced back up the hall, struck by the fact that neither Max nor herself wore shoes that made any noise on the hardwood floors. He by habit, she by request.
She stopped again by Gandolph's bedroom door, leaning over the threshold, her fingertips clinging to the frame.
It wasn't just the fact that the bedroom's resident was dead that kept her balanced into the entrance. Something in the room's arrangement--if so much jumble could be called that--
troubled her, looked out of place. But how could something look out of place in a mess?
"Where does he plug in his computer when he's using it?"
"Right there--" Max pointed, and then he really looked at the room.
He marched right in, as if no old ghosts guarded the threshold.
Temple followed, with mental "excuse me's" to both Gary and Orson.
Max was standing by the small computer desk, his hand clutching a big pale electrical plug as if he were Hamlet contemplating mortality in the skull of Yorick.
"He always left it plugged in. There, by that wall. I told him he should get a surge protector.
What's it doing over here? It looks like it was simply shoved out of the way."
"Let's plug it in and find out."
Max and Temple both leaned into pushing the unit back to the wall, though Max pushed and Temple merely nudged a little.
Once Temple had replaced the prongs in the socket, she knelt in front of the computer table and booted the machine. Max leaned over her, studying the screen.
WordPerfect came up, but Temple exited it to try a file manager program. The baby-blue screen went black, and up one came, like magic, or like a genie sprung from a bottle.
"Marvelous," Max murmured. The vast miniworlds inside computers intrigued him, but he was oddly computerphobic, at least when it came to operating them. Or so he said.
Temple studied the network of directories, looking for any provocative names.
"It does look like he was working on a book. Look: a directory named 'Bio.'"
"Biology?"
"More likely 'biography.' " Temple exited the program, returned to the word processor and clicked into the bio directory.
A ribbon of files scrolled down the screen.
"Is this enough for a book?" Max asked.
"And then some." Excited, and yet feeling like a computer-age eavesdropper, Temple opened a file: biol2.occ.
No spell-checker had touched this text, and punctuation was as haphazard as hail, but the subject matter was crystal-clear.
"He was writing an expose," Max breathed behind her. "He was documenting the foremost psychics of today. He must have spent years gathering data--and, look! At the top: 'as Edwina Mayfair.' He was using that identity. But--"
"But what about the real Edwina Mayfair?"
"What if there wasn't a real Edwina Mayfair?"
Max's eyes narrowed in the eerie light of the computer screen. When Max's eyes narrowed, their green intensified, and usually Temple intensified too. Now, she kept wondering if he sent for them through the mail. Blasted illusions were the worst kind. Temple was actually more interested in what he was saying this time. ' "You mean, he created Edwina Mayfair from scratch?"
"He'd been in retirement for years. No legitimate psychic-- Let me rephrase that: no self-defending psychic would admit a debunking magician to a session, but if the visitor was another so-called psychic..."
Temple had been tapping keys, changing directories, looking up hard evidence: numbers and dates. "These files go back three years, and, given his computer setup, this is an upgrade. He probably has a lot on diskette."
"It is truly mysterious to me how you do all that with those nails," Max admitted, watching her fingernails kick keys all over the board.
"Pay attention! I'm saying that these are massive files, both in number and capacity.
Gandolph was writing the War and Peace of psychic exposes."
"With long Russian names and everything?"
"With names, dates, places and... photo documentation, it says here."
"Photos."
"I suppose an infrared camera, concealed ... in, say, a large hat--"
"Or bosom."
"--could have seen quite a bit."
"Well, there's the motive."
"Maybe." Temple eyed the room. "I don't see any new diskette boxes around. I don't see any diskette boxes around, period."
"Taken?"
"Could be. Could be that Gandolph was like a lot of other people and had blind faith in modern technology. Maybe he didn't back much up." Temple rose. "Well. I suggest you go out first thing in the morning and buy a sultan's ransom of three-and-a-half-inch one point four-four meg double-density floppy disks. Then you sit right here and back up everything on the directories before anyone else messes with this computer."
Max looked up from jotting everything down like mad. "That sounds ... tedious."
"Did you think detective work was all second-story stuff? Black designer duds and sneaking around?"
"I'm not sure I'd find this directory again, Temple."
"I'll write' down the necessary formulas for you," she offered. "When you get me back home. If I can find a pen or pencil around the place that Midnight Louie hasn't batted to the Hoover Dam and back."
For once, Max Kinsella was out of snappy comebacks."
Chapter 22
Framed Dead Center
The morning Las Vegas Review-Journal blared all the facts on page one with an arresting headline: PSYCHIC QUESTIONED IN HALLOWEEN SEANCE DEATH.
Temple remembered when newspaper headline style had changed from capitalizing major headline words to using all lower case except for the initial letter of the first word. Her mind still visualized sensational headlines in the old, emphatic style and even added a yellow-journalism exclamation point: PSYCHIC ARRESTED FOR HALLOWEEN SEANCE MURDER!
Somehow, MALE MAGICIAN DISGUISED AS FEMALE PSYCHIC did not have the same, simple ring.
So the police had not come clean about the victim's role-playing. She couldn't blame them.
Why leak embarrassing facts when they were still investigating why a grown man would participate in seances in drag? That was a bigger puzzle than the murder, almost. And then, think of the forthcoming testimony about the ghosts, which the mediums present appeared to have taken as gospel.
Louie had come to lie on the newspaper sections Temple was not reading at the moment, one of his less endearing tricks. She had no patience this morning, not with the sleep she hadn't gotten in the past forty-eight hours, and pulled them all out from under him.
"You're lucky I made it home at all last night," she told the cat as he eyed her in comical amazement. "You're lucky that there wasn't someone else sleeping in your spot."
All untrue, of course. But if you couldn't lie to a dumb beast, who could you lie to? Temple had harbored no intentions of inviting Max to stay once he'd escorted her safely and surreptitiously home. And he had cherished no intentions of asking, for he'd let himself out almost immediately on arrival, mumbling about all-night computer stores.
Temple smiled. Imagine Max cooped up all day like a hermit, copying files onto diskettes.
Meanwhile, she was a free agent, with her current employers encouraging her to explore the outer limits of the paranormal in the name of research. She could go where her fancy took her.
Which was where ... ?
Her doorbell rang as if in answer. She scrambled to make herself presentable and yet open it in time. Meanwhile, Midnight Louie ostentatiously reclaimed every damn section of the newspaper.
At the door, Electra was waiting with an air of pent-up excitement. "One question: will you come to the seance tonight?"
"What seance? Wasn't the first one enough?"
Electra shook today's soft, magenta-sprayed curls. "Quite the opposite. The first one demands a second, a more private affair. I'm holding it in my rooms tonight."
"Your rooms? Aren't they sacrosanct or something? I've never heard of you entertaining so much as a plumber there."
"I do like my privacy, but that's why my penthouse is such an ideal site. It has not been polluted. I can promise you that no cameraman and no Crawford Buchanan will be present. Just true believers and time-tested mediums. And, of course, you too, dear; if you're willing to come."
"Why is an exception being made for me?"
Electra glanced through her half-size magnifying glasses at the floral rug as if something large, dead and insectoid lay there. "Your preeminent experience with murder. We have decided that you have extraordinary, untapped powers in that area."
"I've been elevated to presumed psychic? Won't Lieutenant Molina be sorry she has scorned my help in the past!"
"Don't be sarcastic, Temple. It puts off the spirits."
"Why not invite Max? He's the expert on magical matters."
Electra's shudder caused the huge bird-of-paradise flowers on her muumuu to sway as if in a breeze. "Just who we do not want present! One of those nasty magicians who always discredit efforts to contact the spirit world Spoilsports."
Cat with an Emerald Eye Page 18
