"Have you ever wondered why, Louie?"
"Why we formed our association? I got Miss Temple eating out of the palm of my pad, that is why. I saw a soft touch and I went for it. Call me manipulative, but it is a tradition with our kind."
"I know why you have come to reside at the Circle Ritz. You needed shelter." Before I can object to this humiliating review of the con job of the century, the sublime Karma goes on. "No, Louie. I was asking another question: do you know why your mistress encounters so many instances of murder?"
"For one thing, Vegas is not exactly known for a nonviolent lifestyle, at least on and around the Strip. Then, I guess that Miss Temple, being a publicist whose job it is to make clients look good, has no liking for untidy situations that attract bad publicity. Murder certainly qualifies as that. Miss Temple cannot help herself. She is a compulsive fixer-upper."
"No. The reason is you, Louie."
"Me? What do I have to do with it, other than saving Miss Temple's Bandolinos every so often, and solving the murder without ever getting any credit for my intrepid investigations? Call me the Deep Throat of catdom."
"You have always been a big eater, but it was not until you came in contact with someone whose job took her into the city's dark heart that crime became an avocation. You are the Jinx personified, the unlucky element that brings your mistress to the razor's edge of danger time and time again."
"Me?" I am shocked. I have always seen myself as a debonair, happy-go-lucky charming kind of dude. Now I am told that I am no more than an unlucky charm.
"You have an obligation to counter your unlucky influence."
"I do my own investigations, do I not?"
"Yes, but that is after the crime. Now I am asking you to anticipate a crime, a terrible miscarriage of justice."
"And what do I get for it?"
This relevant question the Sublime Karma ignores.
"The crime will not be obvious." Karma cocks her head and dark-tipped ears as if listening to someone... someone who is not present in the penthouse. Or, at least, someone who is not visible.
I follow the direction of her azure glance and see only the shy dance of stray light off reflective surfaces in Miss Electra Lark's eclectically furnished living room. There is the dull gray gleam of the picture tube on her blond fifties television console. A more lurid spark lights the huge green glass ball that sits atop a base formed from some brass elephants with hemorrhoids doing the lambada. On second thought, I am glad that I do not "see" anything. What is said to be invisible, I think, often has good reason for that condition.
Karma is strangely silent.
Well, Karma is always strange, so I should say that now she is more unlike herself, or anybody else for that matter. Still she freezes in that uncanny listening position, as if someone uncanny were nearby to do the talking.
I am getting that itchy-twitchy feeling all over again. Like all over my toes and ears and tail.
"Okay, Karma! You got it. I am your most obedient servant. Just cut out communing with the out-of-normal-range and tell me where to go and what to do, and I will be out of here."
Something I said got through to her Birman brain, for she abruptly snaps her attention back to me.
"Are you still here? Tell you where to go and what to do? That is nothing that I can help you with. You must find out these things for yourself."
Time for the Twilight Zone music, could I sing. Alas, I cannot, although I do hum up quite a storm on occasion.
So, bidding an unfond farewell to the resident High Priestess of this strange exotic land on the highest plateaus of the Circle Ritz, we prepare to plunge back down the black marble mountain to less rarefied spheres, knowing little more than when we came. At least it is evident that the Grand High Karma is on another plane.
Given that, I am glad that I rarely fly, but instead depend on my feet to do the stalking.
Chapter 3
Seance, MacDuff!
Temple gazed from one impassive face of the Crystal Phoenix hotel and casino to the other, searching for signs of a joke.
"I don't think my job description includes working nights. Especially to attend a ... a high-tech haunting."
Neither Van von Rhine nor her husband, Nicky Fontana, looked as if they were kidding; as the Phoenix's manager and owner, respectively, they almost always meant business.
"You don't have a job description," Van noted, her smile quick and mechanical. "But I know how you feel. No one could compel me to dabble with the . . . occult, for love or money."
"I've got both," her dark-haired husband riposted, his smile both intimate and challenging.
Van yon Rhine's blond satin head shook. "I can't believe that managing a hotel could come to this, but then again, I never imagined myself managing a hotel in Las Vegas. You have a right to walk out on us, Temple, or to tell us to walk off a cliff--"
"Oh, I'm not scared," Temple said. "It's just that I don't see why you'd want me to participate in this, this--"
"Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead," Nicky supplied with a dazzling display of even, white teeth.
"Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead," Temple repeated, hardly able to keep from gagging on the hideously unpromotable title.
"It's for charity," Van put in halfheartedly.
"And for the Phoenix, too," Nicky said, selling hard. "The Hollywood tech people who volunteer their time setting up the attraction might be perfect for our subterranean theme park.
You did say you envisioned state-of-the-art effects."
"Yeah, but... you want me to participate in a seance on Halloween Night? To hold hands with the seriously psychic and wait for holographic hobgoblins to appear? Isn't that a bit flaky?"
Nicky sat forward on the upholstered chrome chair beside Van's crystal-topped desk. "Sure, but that's the great angle. That's why the Phoenix is sponsoring the Crystal Ball for all the haunted-house sponsors and beneficiaries afterward. High-profile hocus-pocus, Temple. The usual Las Vegas animal act with Homo sapiens in pet suits. The, uh, seance will be set smack-dab in the middle of the haunted house. Everyone who goes through can peek in."
"Oh, goody two-shoes, I'm to be a centerpiece as well as a chump."
"It's a socko publicity shtick. All the colorful psychic types between here and Hollywood getting together to do a- Halloween seance to end all seances: they're going to try to bring Harry Houdini back from the dead."
"So what's new?" Temple asked. "People have been trying to do that since ought-seven or something."
."Nineteen twenty-six," Van corrected meticulously, smoothing her already slick French twist. "He was a rabbi's son, born in Budapest, did you know that?"
Temple shook her head. She did know that Van had grown up in a suite of four-star European hostelries managed by her German-born father after her American mother died.
"He really made his reputation in Europe and is still revered there," Van went on, "so I learned all about him when I was young. Shortly after Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz in the Pest part of Budapest, the family emigrated to Appleton, Wisconsin, of all places, where Houdini grew up as Ehrich Weiss before taking his stage name. But he died in nineteen twenty-six, and quite tragically, I remember."
Nicky slid closer to the chains seat-rim. "Yeah, but he died with a code under lock and key so that if anyone claimed he had come back from the dead, there would be a way to prove it. Think of it! The greatest escape artist of all time escaping Death itself."
Nicky's voice had become a baritone vibrato of excitement. He could have sold pickled herring to a vegetarian with that face, that voice, that air of eager certitude. Temple admired the effect, as did a riveted Van across the desk, but she knew too much to fall for sizzle when steak could be had.
"Houdini was a great escape artist, yes," Temple conceded to Nicky's salesmanship, "but that doesn't give him any special qualifications for surviving death. Escaping is an art, a technique that requires practice, showmanship, physical agility and an audience willing to believe. I'd worry more about somebody nobody wanted to come back actually doing it, someone spiritually spooky like ... oh, Rasputin, say."