"I think that Orson Welles's ... spirit felt protective toward Gandolph. It also was drawn to Houdini."
"Welles called himself 'The Great Orson' when he performed magic. And he was born, forty-one years after Houdini, a month later, to the day: May sixth, nineteen-fifteen."
"And of course Halloween is a key date for him, too."
"The Martian-landing radio broadcast on Halloween in nineteen thirty-nine that half the country took for real. It was the first time he shocked the world, but not the last."
"The 'noises' heard here on Halloween night, that could have been a spectral radio replay!
And Welles, like Houdini and Gandolph, was devoted to his mother. Didn't he live mostly with her as a child?"
"Yes. She was a superb singer, a very cultured woman."
"So, given these similarities and Houdini's death on Halloween and his tremendous will, I think Orson Welles's spirit drew somehow on this conjunction offerees and learned that Gandolph could be in danger."
"Then he appeared to warn him. But he didn't save him."
"How do we know he didn't? The battle-ax might have killed him otherwise. What no one--
and maybe not even a spirit---could know was Gandolph's cardiac vulnerability. He had no history of heart disease, but I think the stress of the seance killed him."
"Hmm." Max nodded and poured more wine in his glass.
"There's something you're not telling me."
"For one thing, I've had the advantage of poking through Gary's files on mediums. He had all your seance partners on disk."
"And--?"
"They all did have motives for killing him. Obviously, Wayne Tracey might have had much more lethal feelings than he confessed to, but Oscar Grant was not simply the respected host of a rather unrespected television show, he--"
"Had a gang history in LA. Maybe drugs. Maybe still drugs today."
Max let his eyebrows lift in tribute. "Very good. Very true. And of course the treacherous bitch--"
Temple interrupted him again. "How did you know about that?"
"You think I would rig the room and neglect a microphone and tape recorder? Anyway, the lovely Mynah's extramarital affairs were legion, including a revived encounter with her own ex-husband, Oscar. I wouldn't be surprised if she was getting it on with the spirits in between more fleshly engagements. Exposure would not have helped her, and besides it could hav endangered her marriage."
"Why would she care?"
"Because William Kohler made all the money. He financed her New Age retreat."
"No! That... slouch potato? Where'd he get the money?"
"He's a stockbroker, and not a very ethical one, according to Gary's investigation. He also operates a lucrative financial newsletter. A scandal about Mynah and her New Age psychic and physical escapades would undercut his creditability."
"And the others?"
"Well, D'Arlene Hendrix seems to have done some good on the psychic front, but the reason the police took her in for questioning is that they discovered that Gandolph had been questioning police departments she worked with about her methods. That sort of thing makes the police suspicious, and his inquiries certainly weren't helping her reputation with law enforcement. Her work is her life, so..."
"So Gandolph was a real threat to her, simply by investigating. But surely Agatha and the professor--"
"Oh, tried and true, each in their own field; but Mangel is up for a prestigious chair and now soft-pedaling his approval of psychic phenomena, which made any possibility of appearing in a Gandolph investigation troublesome. In fact, he hasn't participated in a seance for two years, which makes one wonder why he would come to Las Vegas for such a public stunt just now--"
"Unless he knew Gandolph was living here and expected him to find the Houdini Halloween seance irresistible. Is anyone really that serpentine?"
"Tem-ple," Max rebuked her with great green cat-eyes.
"And Agatha? I'm afraid to ask."
"Simply put: quite crackers. She tried to poison some tea-reading subjects, under the assumption that they would make good contacts in the spirit world if she had sent them there herself. She was ultimately released from the mental hospital, but you know how overcrowding permits premature release of all sorts of people."
Temple sat bolt upright, clutching at her throat.
"Temple?"
"Poison in the tea? Max, I drank her tea, when she did her reading and warned me about a short dark man who was a secret ally. Hey, maybe she meant 'male,' not man. That could have been Midnight Louie!"
"Like all objects of predictions, you're finding ways to justify them. How long ago did you drink tea with Agatha?"
"Two days ago, but--ahh! I feel as if I'd swallowed a bug, or at least a marijuana joint; either way it's a roach."
Max patted her on the shoulders. "Two days? Drink your wine, then, and bless your lucky stars that dear Agatha didn't consider you good spirit fodder."
"Well, they all could have killed Gandolph, then."
Max topped off her glass, and then refilled his own empty one.
"Aren't you hitting that a little heavy?"
"Yes. Yes, I am. You see, there's another means and motive that could have killed Gary. I still suspect human intervention, only I can't prove it, and I doubt any trace will be found. But to explain my theory I can't research dead magicians' lives or their computer files. I can't rely on the spirit world showing me the way. I have to exhume some rather painful parts of my own life."
Max smiled a bit crookedly at Temple. "Want to help me turn over some of the auld sod?"
She just nodded.
Max stared past her, into the opium bed's farthest corner. Temple wondered what ghosts might haunt an artifact like this, what dreams, what nightmares. Maybe that was why Max liked it; it took his mind off his own dreams and nightmares.
"What you call my Interpol summer,' when I was sixteen-going-on-seventeen: our families sent my cousin Sean and me to Ireland our senior summer before college. You know my full roster of given names. Michael Aloysius Xavier. Sean got Patrick Donnell too. Our families were fourth-generation American, but their hearts were still in the homeland.
"Sean and I were best buddies. The summer was to be a last lark before hitting the books for real. I was going to major in communications and earn money on the side with magic shows.
Sean was going to become a history professor. Our families' blessings and a list of a few hundred cousins all over the auld sod accompanied us on our first big trip away from home."
"It must have been a fabulous opportunity."
"It was. Except two teenagers loose in a foreign land will try anything: passing for overage in pubs, dating every colleen that clog-dances, talking passionate politics We were appalled at the oppression in Northern Ireland. Most American sympathies are with the Irish, because so many of us fled here during the Famine.
"It's a long, sad story, so let me boil it down for you. We got to hanging around with the wrong elements; we got caught up in the uncivil war over there. It was all so involving, so eye-opening, so exotic. We didn't know how to walk the thin line between orange and green, we didn't even see it. Sean was blown up in an IRA hit."
"No!"
"I would have been there to be blown up too, except... there was a girl we both met, both flirted with. She was a bit older in years, and decades in experience. I was off with her when Sean died. We'd had a real fight about it, bloody knuckles and everything. Sean stormed off, went to the wrong pub, and that was that."
"Max, that's awful. But how did you end up suspected of being part of the IRA?"
Max swigged the expensive wine as if it were beer. "I joined the IRA, determined to find the ones who had killed Sean. Then I would turn them in."
"What? But you sympathized with the IRA."
"Not then."
"There's a name for that."
"Counterespionage. I doubt I could have spelled it then. It was a guilt-offering. I'd gone home for the funeral. Of course we'd each written home all summer, and Sean had written of our romantic triangle. I discovered he'd always taken it more seriously than me. If I'd have known I'd have bowed out, but it seemed like a game, a friendly competition. Anyway, at the funeral it was obvious that Sean's parents blamed me. My folks, of course, were fiercely partisan on my behalf. So the war came back to Wisconsin. My family didn't want me to go back to Ireland, but our two families had always been close. I couldn't stand the carnage, so I left."