Cat with an Emerald Eye

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  And what would a cut-rate reading be worth anyway?

  "I get my most amazing results through the leaves. Tea is ingestible, you see. It becomes part of us, it touches our innermost being."

  Creepy, when you thought of it that way, like swallowing one of those high-tech medical cameras. Temple lifted her heavy cup and sipped, trying not to make a face when the bitter tea scalded her taste buds.

  Agatha Welk laughed, a bell-like sound, some nineteenth-century novelist would have put it.

  "Really! Strong medicine is good for the soul, and strong tea is good for the psyche. Drink up; I'm sure you've ingested far more bitter brews in the name of imported beer, my dear."

  "True." Temple set her cup back down. "But I don't like dark beer." Max, of course, had. Did.

  "It's an acquired taste."

  "Have you acquired it?"

  "Only on trips abroad."

  Max of course, had been abroad, and then some, from the evidence of his past.

  Why was she thinking about Max! Temple admonished herself.

  "Tell me about your ghost attraction," Agatha suggested, only a faint disapproval showing at linking the words "ghost" and "attraction."

  "It's inspired by Jersey Joe Jackson. Have you ever heard of him?"

  Agatha shook her head, highlights making her gray hair look blue. She sipped slightly but steadily from the rim of her clumsy cup.

  "Local character," Temple explained. "Built up a pretty good fiefdom here back in the forties, then lost his grip. Died, oh, twenty-some years ago in a suite at the hotel I represent. The Crystal Phoenix."

  "Oh, yes! That lovely fountain of neon I can see from my window each night. I took it for the late Duchess of Windsor's famous flamingo pin."

  "There's no Iron Duchess hotel here, just the Crystal Phoenix."

  "Actually," Agatha said with a slow, reminiscent smile that made her absence of a chin moot,

  "I first took the neon sign for some kind of tree. I suppose the tail feathers fanned like a tree, only ... this was no full, apple-orchard tree, but a stubby, few-limbed specimen. To my imagination. Perhaps some of the lights were out that first night here."

  "Actually," Temple answered, "few lights are allowed to dim in Las Vegas, and the Crystal Phoenix used to be called the Joshua Tree hotel. You ever seen a Joshua tree?"

  "Not in Philadelphia."

  "Well, it's a stubby, little-limbed desert plant that resembles a tree, sort of."

  "Really?" Agatha Welk ducked her gray head to sip gray tea from a white cup.

  "Anyway," Temple went on, unsettled as well as interrupted, "Jersey Joe apparently lost most of his wealth and died in his last home, a two-room suite at the Joshua Tree. Except he's rumored to have stashed lots of treasure all over old Las Vegas, and into the desert beyond."

  "Local characters often are rumored to have done that. So you want to revive the Jersey Joe Jackson heyday in some sort of museum?"

  "More of a live-action ride, a subterranean Jersey Joe Jackson mine ride, with different sights along the way. I thought a ghostly vignette of old Las Vegas, including Jersey Joe's forebears and contemporaries might be fun--and educational."

  "Let us always be educational. Part of the new appeal to the family trade, isn't it?"

  "I thought you lived in Philadelphia."

  "Don't look so surprised. We read in Philadelphia too. But what gave you the ghost idea?"

  "Supposedly old J.J.'s ghost haunts the Crystal Phoenix."

  "Have you seen it?"

  "Not I. Although my cat acts like he has, but he's a black cat and they have a spooky reputation to keep up."

  "All cats act like they have a reputation to keep up. You should put your cat in the attraction."

  "He'd love it; fancies himself some sort of freelance operator."

  "As do all cats, again. So how can I help you?"

  Temple sipped some tea, so eager to address her investigation that she took a big gulp of tea she barely tasted. "It's about the Hal-loween seance. How much of that was real, and how much staged?"

  The woman's sweet, unassuming smile froze as a harder expres-sion took over inch by descending inch, as if she were channeling Eric the Red or somebody.

  "That was a dire occasion. I'd prefer not to talk about it. A spirit was quenched that night.

  Besides, the entire event was manipulated in the extreme. There is fakery, and there is bald fakery."

  "But you were there--?"

  She looked down at her jacket, then fingered one of many small, fabric covered buttons marching down the "flaccid placket. "I am ... overoptimistic. I have a rather foolish ambition. I am convinced that I alone can draw Houdini's energy from the prison of the final trap he built for himself. If you only knew how tormented he was to be truly locked up! How his whole life was an escape from that eventuality. How cruel it is that his last wish to elude the immaterial gate between the living and dead and astound us all one last time has not yet been honored.

  "Once or twice in his life, someone boxed up Houdini as a joke, in a place and at a time when he was not prepared to escape. He nearly went mad with frustration. I think of that man, that spirit, fluttering at the doors to life like a moth seeking light for seventy years. I was born the year Houdini died, so that period of imprisonment is all of my lifetime. I have had some ...

  unsettling encounters with spirits in the past. I hoped I could be the path to Houdini's brief moment of freedom before sinking into the inevitable incarceration of death. I was proud, foolish and so misled."

  "Then you don't accept the figure in the chimney as Houdini?"

  "Houdini dropping down the chimney, like Santa Claus? Please, Miss Barr. You may be a mere commercial exploiter of the paranormal, but even you could hardly be taken in by that cheap projected image--"

  "As a matter of fact, I wasn't," Temple said hastily. "I just wanted to know what you thought of it."

  "I hardly saw it. I did make contact with... Another who wished to break free, whose will--or whose ego--was strong enough to almost accomplish that feat for a few moments."

  "Was that the little boy who became an old man?"

  Agatha Welk set her teacup down so swiftly it almost broke against the saucer. "You? You saw ... something?"

  "Didn't everybody?"

  "No." She put her right hand to the center of her forehead, as if reversing or turning on some mental movie camera. "No. They all said they had seen nothing but that laughable Houdini, although not all agreed the Houdini sighting was laughable."

  "When you say 'all,' who do you mean?"

  "Oscar. D'Arlene. That Mynah woman. Jeff. I never had a chance to ask Edwina."

  "But you didn't ask Electra, or myself?"

  "You were amateurs, mere observers! You couldn't possibly have--" She stared at Temple, those limpid gray eyes widening until they seemed to match the two, dark, bitter wells of filled teacups hiding fortunes in their tepid depths. "But you say you did. You saw the boy? The old man?"

  "I assumed that everybody did."

  "What about this Electra?"

  "I never asked her."

  "Do so. At the first opportunity.*'

  Nothing wavery about Agatha Welk now, Temple noticed as she mulled that snapped directive. She tapped her own recall in the ordinary way, by thinking back and visualizing.

  "The Other Apparition. He appeared in different windows, so not everybody might have seen if the angle was wrong."

  "Angles! Those are the concerns of magicians, not mediums. Viewing angles had nothing to do with it. You and I were opposite each other, don't you remember? I saw the boy in the window behind you."

  "He was in the window behind you! " .

  "No doubt, to your view. And the old man--?"

  "Was behind Gandolph."

  Agatha nodded, picking up her cup again for a good, long bracing swallow.

  "What about the man in midlife?" Temple asked.

  Agatha regarded her with icy suspicion. "I never saw him." />
  "But I did. He was... over to the left, between the boy and the old man. But they never appeared together."

  "I saw no adult male but the old man, and the ridiculous projection of Houdini bound for one of his escape challenges. You know how he arranged those?"

  Temple shook her head.

  "Well, he was first a master of self-promotion. Frankly, a better promoter than he was an accomplished stage magician, though no one could top him for 'escapeology.' He was desperate earlier in his career, I suppose. Fixated on escaping, but no one found the notion of a magician getting out of handcuffs compelling; obviously the cuffs were phonies, or a key was concealed on the magician. But Houdini was a former locksmith obsessed with breaking bonds by apparently mystical means. He needed an audience that would share and even applaud his obsession. So he went to policemen in the various cities in which he was booked. He challenged them to lock and bind him however they could, and he would escape. Then he proceeded to do it, so successfully that policemen felt this was a bad example. They strived to produce truly escape-proof chains, cuffs, crates, cells--every manner of confinement. Houdini once even had himself sewn into the washed-up partial carcass of a whale."

  "Ooooh!" Temple wrinkled her nose and every other feature that could crinkle in disgust.

  "Dead meat. "

  "Exactly. Houdini almost became your 'dead meat' as well. Some scientists had preserved the carcass with chemicals: formaldehyde; the closed atmosphere inside was so toxic that he couldn't remain conscious long enough to escape."

  "But he got out?"

  "His associates realized something was wrong and pulled him out, much to Houdini's humiliation. Another of those cases where he bit off more than he could chew."

  "Or would want to chew!" Temple sipped tea to remove the bad taste imagination had put in her mouth, glad she hadn't chosen green tea, rot-green tea.... "That stunt was gross."

  "Grossly egocentric. That's why Houdini's death is so pitiful. Felled by a moment's inattention, then denying it by ignoring all danger signals and pain until it was too late and the infected appendix--a tiny entity scarce the size of his little finger--destroyed him slowly."

  "He died on Halloween."

  "But only after fighting death for several days. Such a personality, such an ego, would find extinction particularly galling. That's why, if any psychic shard of himself exists, in any form, anywhere, he would be the one to return. He even left a strongbox with coded ritual words that his wife would recognize; except that after his death they were revealed in various autobiographies, so they be-came worthless."

  "How would you know any phenomenon was Houdini, then?"

  "My instinct. I have raised remnants before."

  Remnants. To Temple, that expression was redolent of animated strips of rotting whale flesh, pieces of dead bodies: Wanda the Whale-stripper singing "Don't Get Around Much Any More" while Houdini's marvelous talking appendix pops out from a split seam to huckster a new tell-all book: How I Did In the Master. Or maybe the revived remnant would come in purely auditory form, like a few last words from Thomas Edison, recorded in The Twilight Zone with Rod Sterling singing backup.

  "This is more gruesome than the actual stance," Temple noted.

  "A proper seance shouldn't be gruesome; it should be effective. Honestly effective. But I still can't imagine why you would see what I saw, and no one else."

  "Perhaps the others just didn't admit to it."

  "Why would they deny it?"

  "Whoever that was, he wasn't on the guest list. So the others are prepared to accept Houdini on the half shell."

  "Houdini on the half shell--? Whatever does that mean?"

  "Like Venus on the half shell, he sure wasn't wearing much."

  "My dear, no one cares if a ghost is naked, although the vast majority of ghosts sighted are indeed clothed."

  "Makes you wonder who the couturier in Beyond is."

  "I don't wonder any such thing. Once you accept that the soul's energy can survive, you understand how that energy can preserve the image of the dead person as it was in life. Very few... decayed ghosts are reported also."

  "Thank heaven this Houdini didn't decide to do his Jonah routine right this time and materialize inside the rotting blubber!"

  "You do have a way of putting things in their most sensational form. No wonder you're a publicist."

  "At least I'm not going around swearing that Houdini is back."

  "Are any of the others?"

  "Not... yet. But they're busy with the fair."

  Agatha sat forward, extending a bony forearm to tip up Temple's teacup. "Are you done yet?"

  Regrettably no. She chugalugged the last of the now-cold tea, then surrendered her cup.

  "No. You must swirl the dregs three times, then upend the cup on your saucer and tap three times."

  Temple followed these instructions while her tongue worked large leaf flakes from her teeth. This kind of tea-drinking was as messy as smoking. She refrained from tapping her heels together three times and hoping for Kansas.

  "No one brews the proper large-leaf tea anymore," Agatha said. "The art of geomancy is a dying one. Such a reading has become a rarity."

  Silently thanking her good luck, Temple hoped that the tea would not lead to the good fortune of an emergency-room stomach-pumping. In fact, here she was interviewing possible murderers ... and she had just consumed a beverage so strong-tasting that it could mask Liquid Plumber. Did she feel a bit... light-headed? Mildly anxious? Somewhat sweaty? What had she done?

  Miss Welk had pulled a jeweler's loupe from one of her jacket pockets and now bent over the cup. Temple wondered what jewels of misinformation the medium would find among the damp tea leaves.

  "This is fascinating," the woman murmured. "Absolutely fascinating."

  "What?"

  "Apparently you are a very brash young lady. I see you menaced on all sides by danger. No wonder a spirit would appear to you. Someone needs to warn you!"

  "Any particular kind of danger?"

  "Well, I see several men, all of them capable of bringing you much misery and woe."

  "No kidding."

  "But you have a secret ally!"

  "Really?"

  "I don't pick up much about him: a short fellow with dark hair."

  "Anybody we know?"

  "One of the men at the seance, you mean? Well, Professor Mangel is short and his hair was dark, when he had most of it, but no ... I sense prior acquaintance. Still, at least you have a champion, and he was at the seance, yes! Though not in the usual sense."

  "Could this be Houdini?"

  "He fits the description, but we had agreed that the pitiful display put on can only be cardboard and trick lighting ... no, this is someone you are not used to turning to for emotional support, but he is there, never fear."

  Short. Dark. At the seance and not a medium or a medium-booster. Oh, no! Crawford Buchanan, Say it ain't so, leaves!

  "Usually the hero is a tall, dark stranger," Temple pointed out.

  "Sorry, no strangers in your fortune at the moment. And I may be old enough to be your grandmother, but I am not your mother. Still, I think you should reconsider dating the Hell's Angel."

  "Hell's Angel?"

  "You may be able to fool your nearest and dearest, but not the leaves," Agatha Welk chided.

  "I see a motorcycle."

  Temple was flummoxed, until she remembered the recent loan of the Hesketh Vampire and its new, uneasy rider.

  "Amazing!" She tried not to smile. "You're quite right; I do know someone who rides a

  'cycle." She supposed that Matt on a motorcycle was a sort of "hell's angel," after all. Amazing how you could skew your life to fit a fortune-telling.

  "Examine your so-called friends and their lifestyles well. Things are often not what they seem."

  Indeed, Temple said silently. And such a pity too. And they often are not exactly what the tea leaves say either.

  "I see another dark man, or perh
aps the first one in another role. A romantic role." Agatha's voice lilted with satisfaction on the last two words, as if expecting Temple to rise up and sing with joy.

  Instead, Temple felt wary. Bad enough that the gray tea wanted to cast Crawford Buchanan as an ally; now who did it want her to cozy up to?

  Agatha's voice grew wavery with optimism. "I see a nightclub, a tete-a-tete, a man with something vital on his mind, and you the focus of it."

  "What does he look like?" '

  "My dear, the leaves are not a scrying glass. I only pick up vibrations. You seem to know a good many dark-haired men."

  "A few. No light-haired men in my future?"

  "Ummm, possibly. I sense trouble with a tax return next year. You may be meeting a blond auditor."

  "Oh, great!"

  "Listen, these are merely indications. It could be I'm reading everything wrong today. I am ...

  upset."

  "Why is that?"

  "Need you ask?" Agatha looked indignant. "The real and false manifestations at the seance. I hate to be manipulated like that, by the living or the dead. The passing of Edwina Mayfair. Most distressing to have some man die, and then to know he was a notorious debunker of psychic phenomena... well, it makes one wonder why he died just then and there."

  "Because he knew some fakery was going on?"

  Agatha's gray pupils widened until they floated like over poached egg yolks in the watery whites of her eyes. "Because he may have caused some fakery to have something to debunk!

  These crusaders will stop at nothing, and their activities verge on persecuting some poor medium. We are not claiming our visions are exact or our predictions certain. But we do, many of us, receive honest signals, even if we may misread them. We only try to pass on the word, and for that we are often humiliated and hunted. That this man, this ... failed magician should go to such lengths to try to trap us is most upsetting. I had heard of Edwina Mayfair for years! How could he continue such an unnatural masquerade? Honestly, if I had known of his presence and his purpose, I only wish Houdini had come back to confound him. Perhaps he did, and frightened the pathetic soul to death."