"Like Houdini," Temple pointed out.
"Exactly! Unlike the police, I am convinced that Houdini did it: the dirty deed, the murder."
"Nice of him to wait seventy years after his death to turn to homicide."
"Niceness had nothing to do with it. It was motive and opportunity," Electra added, screwing her eyes into an expression that matched Molina at her most skeptical. "Houdini hated mediums, loathed them! Here was his chance to express his innermost feelings and escape punishment. You see the devilishly clever psychology of it? He came back, all right, but to kill a psychic. It would be the most daring; two-edged escape of all time: first to elude the Afterworld long enough to show himself as material; then to draw another into the Beyond; a hated medium, best of all."
"But Gandolph wasn't a medium, that was the point. He was another Houdini, presumably out to reveal the artifice at the heart of this darkness. Houdini would never kill him."
"Ah, but Houdini didn't know his victim was Gandolph in disguise."
"If Houdini died and sat around in the Beyond twiddling his thumbscrews or handcuffs or whatever for seven decades--"
"Seven. A most significant number in mystical circles."
"Well, Houdini was almost short enough to be a dwarf, probably Grumpy. Anyway, if he comes back to commit murder after seven decades, he darn well ought to know just who was who and what was what."
"Being dead does not make one omniscient, dear. It was the sort of ironic mistake that could happen to anyone. Gandolph did make a convincing woman; one would have thought he had done the act for years. I believe even you were misled, and you sat right next to him. You even held hands with him."
"Gloves," Temple corrected. "He wore gloves, and rather wisely. That entire over-the-top persona was designed as a disguise: hat, veil, gloves, the whole works. And what about the other apparition, the poor kid looking in the candy-store window?"
"That." Electra dismissed the three faces of Everyman with a couple of finger flicks. "We feel that was a symbolic manifestation of Houdini's hatred toward mediums. Each time we saw the figure it was older and larger. You see the metaphor."
"Ever older and larger. Hmm. Sounds more like the transformation of Midnight Louie since he arrived at the Circle Ritz."
"What a quaint mind you have, dear."
"Quaint? First piquant, now quaint? Are people trying to tell me something?"
"Nine P.M.," Electra said with a forefinger-wag that threatened to dislodge her pineapple-gold-painted nail. Unlike Temple's, Electra's long nails were false. "Be there, or be sorry."
She bustled down the short neck of hallway leading to Temple's unit. Temple knew how it must feel to have Woody Woodpecker as your local neighborhood enforcer.
Of course she would go, if only to get another look at psychics in action. If an act of God or Houdini hadn't killed Gary "Gandolph" Randolph, then maybe someone else at the table had.
Then, too, she was extremely interested in seeing Electra's digs from the inside out. Temple had one of her psychic serial-killer-hunter hunches that there were hidden reasons for holding the seance in Electra's penthouse. In a way, she wished that Max could attend. If there was one area in which she was still willing to trust him implicitly, it was in knowing what was real and what was not at a seance.
Meanwhile, there was another method, less glamorous but more reliable. Why didn't she just ask the special effects whizzes?
***************
Six semi-trailer rigs lined up in front of the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead when Temple parked the Storm in the huge trucks' intimidating shadows. Those iron-pumping tires were as tall as her car.
She knew that stagehands and rock-band roadies could strike sets in record time, but she hadn't expected to see the inside of the haunted house stripped of its ghosties and ghouls already.
"Are the people who designed this attraction still around?" she asked the first scurrying workman she could stop. He was a she on closer inspection, a burly woman in denim overalls with dirty blond hair pulled into what had become a unisex ponytail under an orange hard hat.
"Yeah, but you shouldn't be in here without a hard hat."
"Show me the special effects crew and I'm sidelined forever."
"The boyos in body paint." The woman pointed to a wall-hugging trio that looked like a rock band whose act was being disbanded.
Temple joined them in the tortuous hallway that she had wound through twice in recent days.
"Are the police letting you dismember the seance room too?"
"Dismember. Cool expression." The one with a tattoo of a spider web veiling half his face shook his head. "Nope. We never unplug that ski-lift room. It's our centerpiece. Not that the police care that much. Why do you?"
"I'm interested in your tricks and technology. I represent a Strip hotel--"
"Strip hotel?" Even the guy's spider web was smiling. "Hear that, Crash? Guess sudden death hasn't frozen our act yet."
Crash looked like he had been in a few, all nearly terminal. He was bearish, beefy and pierced on all visible folds of flesh. Despite the biker body armor, Temple thought she detected the sweet souls of asocial computer nerds beneath an exterior of warriors trying to escape the latest update of the arcades' most gruesome and gory game, Fatal Wombat.
"You guys designed all this, really? Holograms and everything?"
Flattery will get you information.
"Sure."
"This is nothin'."
"Want something really cutting edge? You should see our studio, man."
"Well, I'd love to, but mostly what I'd like to know now is what the moneybags at the hotel want to find out."
"Yeah?"
"Did you guys, you know, skew the seance effects just to shake things up a little, with Hot Heads there? I hear those nasty weapons and a few uninvited spirits were really jumpin"
"Hey." All three shook their untidy hands. Two, she noticed, had tatooed knuckles that read
"Dweeb" and "Dreck." She wondered if those were their nicknames. Crash, Dweeb and Dreck Productions, Ltd. had a certain crude appeal.
"We didn't tweak a timer," Crash said.
"In fact," Dweeb added, scratching his topiary buzz-cut with dirty fingernails, "our stuff was all screwed up. Those spirits must have been playing Ouija board with our master panels, I tell you. And that's what we told the police."
"What did the police say?"
"Nothin'." Dreck swigged from a can of... Gatorade? "The police think we're punks."
"We are," Dweeb said promptly.
"That doesn't mean we can't put on a bitchin' show for your hotel, lady." Crash, the ever-alert salesman, added an invitation impossible to refuse. "Come over to our studio and we'll knock your socks off, or whatever else you put on that passes for underwear."
"Where is your studio?"
"North Las Vegas."
"And you've been doing this Halloween attraction--?"
"Since we were in high school," Dreck said, still swigging.
"Which was--?"
Crash shrugged shoulders the size of a polar bear's. "Couple years ago."
"Thanks, guys. I'll definitely keep you in mind."
Temple edged out on that vague promise, slipping into a stream of grunting laborers who seemed as inclined to smash her like a bug, with the heavy equipment they were toting, as not.
As murderous riggers, Crash, Dweeb and Dreck were as likely suspects as Grumpy, Doc and Dopey, but they were also just the types to let "art" sweep them away into malicious mischief.
Heigh ho, heigh ho, it was off to work in other suspect-mines she would go. Maybe Electra's mysterious homemade seance would prove more productive than any performance at this madhouse from Helloween.
Chapter 23
End of the Line
Matt almost hung up the phone three times, at each unanswered ring on the line's other end.
The irony of a phone counselor freezing when making his own critical calls struck home.
Beh
ind his cubicle, the buzz of other voices lulled him. Of course the party he sought wouldn't be there at this time of night, but he had to try now, while the impulse was too intense to ignore.
At last he heard a voice, a woman's voice. Though he was calling for a woman, this wouldn't be her.
"I'm trying to reach Lieutenant Molina."
"Is this an emergency?"
"No. I have some information."
"Can you call back during working hours tomorrow?
"Not until after noon."
"Just a minute." , She was gone, and Matt wondered if they were tracing the call.
He knew it was being recorded.
"Your name."
He gave it. Gave the address, the work phone number, home phone number. When it came to what the call was about, he simply said, "Cliff Effinger."
After he hung up, he felt wrung out. He shared sudden empathy with the people who called ConTact. People pitched to the breaking point. People uncertain. People hoping for help. People lost.
His hands were clammy as he rubbed them on each other. How critical a phone call could be only a veteran of ConTact--or of calling the police department--could testify to.
"It's cold out," a voice noted over his shoulder. "Like some coffee?"
He turned. Sheila was hanging over him, looking helpful, looking hopeful. Steam rose from the mug in her hand in separate puffs like messages from an Indian blanket.
"Something's bothering you," she said, quite accurately. She was a hot-line counselor too, after all.
He recalled all the brusque denial that kind of accuracy merited over the ConTact lines . No.
I don't need anything! I just happened to call. You can't help me ... so help me!
"Yeah." Matt wrapped icy fingers around the hot ceramic mug. "Unseasonably cold."
"That's the trouble. It is seasonal. Even Las Vegas has to go through a touch of fall and winter." Her smile didn't do much for that face, that voice, and he never used to notice such disparities. Why did feminine wiles in such an unfeminine face irritate so? "It's Halloween. This time of year the temperature can drop nights."
He nodded, then jumped as the phone rang.
"You're still on break, want me to get it?"
"No. I will." Though why he thought that Lieutenant C. R. Molina was anywhere out there on her time off, just waiting to take a call from him ... "Hello."
"Molina."
She sounded as official as if she'd just alighted from a squad car. Matt wondered where she was, what she was wearing, if her daughter was anywhere nearby.
"What about Cliff Effinger?"
He could afford to speculate at leisure; she couldn't. She zeroed in. The call, the name, the need to know. Matt could jerk her chain anytime, with just that one magical name. A dead man linked to another dead man, and both linked to a missing magician, now back from the dead.
Only one dead man was linked, as yet, to an ex-Chicago -boy, ex-priest with his own need to know.
No hello, no frosting, just need to know. He could understand that, but in Molina's case, he didn't understand why.
"I think I saw him."
"At the morgue? You're convinced now it was him?"
"No. I'm less convinced than ever. I think I saw him on the street, just now."
"Now? Where?"
"Tonight. Three hours ago, crossing the Strip at Sahara."
An accusing silence. "Why did you wait so long to call?"
"I... wasn't sure. He looks different. But the walk. I've never seen anybody walk quite that way."
"The walk."
"I know it sounds--"
"It sounds ... like this man, whoever he was, is long gone from the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara. What are you calling me now for?"
"Now" was rife with accusation: I'm a single mother, it said; I'm off duty. I don't need to be given false hopes any more than one of your pathetic callers does.
"I want to know what you'd want to know, what you'd need if he were alive, and in Las Vegas."
She laughed, not a very humorous sound. Not a sound that someone who loved to sing the old blues classics would make if she'd been listening to anything with swing.
"Fingerprints. Chase the guy down and wrap his fingers around a nice clean water glass, like they do on Murder, She Wrote. Or fly back to Chicago and dig up some extant examples, 'cause the Motor Vehicles Department here and there don't have any, the schools don't have any, the military doesn't have any, and right now, Mr. Devine, I'm not having any. Walks don't cut it in a court of law. Happy Halloween, but I'm even out of pennies."
She hung up.
He stared at the cup cooling between his hands. He was warm now, all over. With embarrassment, and something else. With anger. God damn it, and he meant the words as few do, he knew what---who--he had seen. He had hoped someone else, this detective, cared as much as he did, for her own reasons and in her own way. But she didn't. , He would have to track down this ghost on his own.
Chapter 24
Calling All Cats. . .
Temple was in a tizzy. She had to admit that, at least to herself alone, often the best person to confide in.
She hesitated in the hall outside of Electra's penthouse, wondering who besides her hostess would be inside. Certainly not the obnoxious Mynah. Perhaps poor D'Arlene Hendrix, fresh from her grilling downtown. Temple could certainly compare notes and sympathies about that!
And the professor, probably. Agatha Welk was a maybe; a little fragile for Electra's taste, Temple thought. No Oscar Grant. No Crawford Buchanan. No Max, boo hoo. But . . . maybe Matt?
Temple sighed and lowered her shoulders so she had a soldierlike posture when she rang the doorbell. This should be fascinating.
As usual, it took the requisite Ice Age for the door to open, and then it opened just to peeking width, despite the magnifying peephole the resident could rely on.
Electra peered out, her hair in a condition Temple had never seen before: obscured.
The obscuring mechanism, however, was even more brash than Electra's round of washable spray-on hair colorizers. It was a gold lame scarf arranged like an Egyptian pharaoh's headdress.
Electra checked the usually deserted hall before admitting Temple.
"No one followed you?"
" Nope. Louie's resting comfortably on my bed downstairs."
Electra nodded solemnly.
Standing in her circular entry hall, with the mirrored vertical blinds reflecting slices of each of them, felt oddly like the hall-of-mirrors scene in some old intrigue movie, say The Lady from Shanghai, with Orson Welles and then-wife Rita Hayworth.
In the spirit of the evening already, Temple could hardly wait to penetrate the heart of darkness beyond, often glimpsed but never explored. Already she could see light gleaming from the huge green ball atop Electra's vintage TV set.
Electra turned and led the way into the inner sanctum.
"Does that work?" Temple couldn't help gushing the minute they were in the large room.
Electra glanced at the TV set surmounted by what resembled a huge green glass turban.
"Like a top."
"Really? You can pick up contemporary signals with no trouble?"
"Contemporary, old-time, anything your heart desires."
"Cable even?"
Electra frowned and turned halfway to the television set.
"Cable? Do you mean 'Gable'? I've never been one to try for the celebrity spirit, dear. I've been tempted, but that's kind of amateurish, if you know what I mean."
She lifted the green globe by its complicated brass base. "Clear that end table and we'll sit right down here and get to work."
Temple obediently swept away several alternative health magazines, an issue of Modem Maturity and ... a Frederick's of Hollywood catalog?
Well, she was learning something, albeit nothing unworldly yet.
"Sit," Electra said, beaming, as if instructing a favorite Pekingese.
Temple sat.
"Is this it, Electra? Just us? We're the only 'true believers'?"
"Almost. Our most important seance partner has not arrived yet."
" I'm breathless with suspense. Let me guess."
"No, don't! Expectations can destroy a seance. While we're waiting you can fill me in on the latest developments in your love life."
"Electra! Why would I do that?"
"I have gingersnap cookies, with icing. And raspberry zinger tea. And it does one good to unburden one's soul."
"You can't bribe me with tea and cookies."
"Besides, you might get some good advice from the spirits if you come clean."
"What spirits? You might conjure up Bluebeard. Not my idea of Ann Landers."
"Well, while we're waiting for our special link, we could at least discuss my fascinating tenants."
"Get the cookies and tea, then."
"All right!"
Electra bustled off to what must be the kitchen, allowing Temple time to give her place a long look.
Wow. The sofa she sat on was almost seven feet long, upholstered in a nubbly fabric with gilt threads here and there. The big green glass ball was not entirely smooth, but nubbly in its own right. Must be sixties glass, when wavy-everything was decoratively chic, especially in pole-lamp shades. Ooof. Speaking of pole lamps, a rather rank example held up a corner, its lights aimed hither and yon.
This place was a paradise of the Truly Tacky. Kitsch in Full Flower. As Temple looked around, she even discovered a brandy snifter filled with colored marbles, an aquarium occupied by multicolored crystal growths, a black-and-chrome institutional cigarette snuffer, a stuffed squirrel on a very inauthentic-looking tree branch (the squirrel was absolutely true-to-life) and, well, lots of unbelievable junk. The odd decorative marble lay scattered here and there. In fact, two of them glowed a desultory green from under the very sofa she sat on.
And then they moved.
Temple lifted her feet from the floor and shrieked in the lady-like manner of a vintage cartoon lady who had seen a mouse.
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