The spell was broken by the sound of flushing, and a moment later Molly Cadigan stepped out of her private bathroom. Behind me the girl left the room, leaving the door ajar. "Nice view, eh, Sweetbuns?" Molly said.
Not exactly a formal opening. "Yeah," I said, "it's beautiful."
Molly didn't sound Irish any more than most Americans who have Irish names. I decided I'd been met by a domestic instead of her daughter or niece. Cadigan was a big woman—six feet and 240 pounds, at a guess, and maybe fifty years old. With red hair that would have been carroty before it was diluted by encroaching gray. "Sit down," she said, and motioned to a chair. "You like coffee? Or tea?"
I sat. "Coffee," I told her.
She went to a stainless-steel urn on a sideboard. One of the spigots showed coffee in the glass, the other hot water, both near full. This, I thought, is a serious coffee drinker. The Insulmugs she filled held about a pint; she put one down in front of me. "Cream and sugar?"
"Both." My diet needed a break.
She put them on the table by my mug. "Doughnuts?"
I hesitated.
"They're good for you," she honked. "Chockful of vitamin sucrose."
I poured cream in my coffee—real cream by the look of it, and decided what the hell. "A doughnut would be nice."
"KATEY!" The abrupt volume almost made my ears ring. "BRING SOME DOUGHNUTS FOR MY GUEST!" Then to me: "You like chocolate?"
I sipped my pale brown coffee. It had hair on its chest. "Chocolate's my favorite," I told her.
"CHOCOLATE, KATEY!"
She looked at me again and sat down, picked up her own mug, and sipped the strong brew straight. Her eyes were interesting. Redheads most often have blue eyes, or green. Hers were chestnut brown, almost the color of Gerald Williams'.
"So you're interested in what might have happened to Ray Christman." I almost missed what she said. I was trying to picture what she might have looked like maybe twenty-five years earlier, to attract the sexual interest of the young guru. He was still a good-looking guy in news pictures as recently as a year ago.
"Uh, yeah. I'm accumulating a lot of information, but none of it points anywhere yet. One informant says Christman may simply have blown with a ton of money, and be living somewhere as an anonymous rich American."
She snorted. "Not likely. Ray was broad-spectrum greedy. He wanted a lot of things in life, and one of them was admiration—or adoration. He wanted to be something very special, and be appreciated for it."
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Try this one for size. Ray liked to live well—good food, good booze, good-looking women, and he smoked like a fireplace with a dead buzzard in the flue. He stayed in halfway decent shape with steam baths, vitamins, massage, occasional dieting, and periodic fits of riding an exercise bike while reading.
"He may have just dropped dead. Stroke, heart attack, something like that. If he did, and it wasn't in public, Lonnie and Evanson would sure as hell try to hide it. Ray Christman, dying of a physical illness? It would ruin his mystique! The church would have to cover it—smuggle the body out, dispose of it, and release some kind of cover story."
Katey came in with the doughnuts, each about five inches across and loaded with chocolate frosting, a whole damn platter of them, about a thousand calories each, mostly fat. She set them down between Molly and me, then left. I eyed them carefully, then took one, broke it, and dunked. I was pretty sure Molly Cadigan wouldn't mind my dunking. It tasted as good as I'd known it would.
"What do you think of the theory that someone inside the church killed him?" I asked.
"Hell, honey, anything's possible, but that's one of the less likely. I knew Ray when he was still young. Knew him well; you could even say we were close friends. People were already claiming he was psychic, but that was bullshit. He ran a bunch of interesting procedures on himself after that, but I'll bet you dollars against rabbit turds he wasn't any more psychic a year ago than he was in 1990.
"What he was was damned observant. He noticed things that even I didn't, and I'm one of the most observant people I know. He could pretty much read your emotions, even if you were good at hiding them. By things like slight eye movements, pupil dilation, subtle color changes in your skin and the white of your eyes. Along with more obvious things like facial expression, fidgeting, and sweat. He taught me some of it. If someone around him was hostile toward him, or was trying to conceal things from him, he'd know it, Sweetbuns, he'd know it."
I knew some of those techniques. My dad taught them to me when I was still a preadolescent. They were part of what made him such a good lawman. But I couldn't do the sort of thing with them that Molly Cadigan was claiming for Ray Christman, not reliably, and I doubted that Christman could either.
"Incidentally," she said, "if you want to know what he saw in me, that's me over there. And that's Ray's Corvette behind me." She pointed at a framed photo on the cluttered wall, showing a long-legged, shapely young woman in shorts, with a pretty face and hair like red gold. The car was an old gas-driven machine from before geogravitic power converters. And scarlet! Tuuli would love it.
Molly kept talking. "He used that talent to play people. It helped make him such a great salesman. And cocksman. Like I said, he loved the ladies, but he didn't waste his time or cause upsets by making passes at someone who wasn't already interested. Or at married women. He isn't—wasn't a bastard, just self-indulgent. And most of the people around him, including Lonnie Thomas, damn near worshiped the man.
"So no, I don't think someone inside killed him. Not unless they'd been PDHed, and killed him without any advance awareness themselves of what they'd been programed to do." She paused. "You know what PDH stands for, don't you?"
I nodded; I'd had a period of reading spy thrillers. PDH meant treatment by Pain, Drugs, and Hypnosis. To condition someone to do something, usually murder someone, when triggered by some word, or maybe music, or something that happened. I didn't know whether such things were possible, except in theory.
"It wouldn't be easy," she went on. "It may not even be possible to PDH someone that precisely, not without leaving them visibly strange, anyway. Maybe, just maybe, some outfit like the OSS could, but I can't see them taking Ray Christman or the church that seriously. I think they got over that sort of bullshit with Leif Haller and his Institute of Noetic Technology."
Which reminded me: Hamilton had said Molly'd been a Noetie first. "Could the Noeties have had someone kill Christman?" I asked.
She frowned. "Maybe, but I doubt it. Like I said, lots of things are possible, some of them things neither of us has thought of and probably won't.
"I was a Noetie once myself, but back in Rochester, New York, where things were different than here. And I'm way out of date on them. Matter of fact, I don't know who isn't. But I know a couple of people who may have kept some attention on them. They might have some insights for you."
She gave me two names, with addresses and phone numbers. One was a Dr. Winifred Landau Sproule—Molly gave me all three names plus the title, as if that was how the woman was referred to. She'd not only been a member of the Noetie's board of directors. Later she'd been on the board of directors of the Church of the New Gnosis, and a math professor at LACC. Now she was a research associate at the Hypernumbers Institute—the so-called "Beverly Glen Church by the Numbers." She'd also known Ray Christman "as well as anyone had," according to Molly. The other name was Olaf Sigurdsson, whom I'd heard of, a well-known psychic. Like Winifred Sproule, Sigurdsson had worked directly with the Noetie founder, Leif Haller, and eventually became estranged from him.