told Arthur Smith exactly what had happened, with one omission—his speculations about Olivia. It helped that Smith was much more interested in the minutiae of his encounter with Rachel Goldthorpe.
“How often had you seen her before?” Smith asked.
Manfred had looked up the details soon after he’d gotten back to Midnight. Now he went to fetch the printout and handed it to his guest. “Those were the times I saw her in person,” he said. “I talked to her a few times on the phone, too, but she really liked the in-person conferences.”
“So what do you do at one of these conferences?” Smith leaned back with the air of someone who had all the time in the world to listen.
Manfred sighed. “The client has paid a deposit to reserve a time slot, of course.”
“Of course,” the sheriff said, a bit dryly.
“So when he or she gets to my hotel room, we’re ready to go. I always get a suite, so the bedroom isn’t visible, to keep it professional. Besides, there’s almost always some kind of dining table in a suite. On that table I place several means of foreseeing the future of the client, or looking into any question he or she brings me.”
Smith got out his notepad. “Like what means are those?” He was serious. Manfred was relieved. This was hard enough without dealing with the usual attitude the law showed psychics.
“Like . . . a set of tarot cards, a sort of crystal ball . . .”
“You have got to be shitting me.” Now Smith gave him an exasperated look.
“Nope.” Manfred gave him a tight smile. “Of course, I don’t claim to look into it and see the future. But it is a helpful focus object. I can use my gift more easily if I have it in front of me.”
“Your gift.”
“I’m not a fraud all the time, Arthur.” Manfred was nettled enough to use Smith’s first name. “I’m the real deal.”
“Right. Well, go on with your story.”
Manfred told Smith everything in meticulous detail. He had a good memory, which was helpful in his job, and he remembered almost everything Rachel had said.
“She had a big handbag with her?”
“Yes, she did.”
“What size would you say?”
Manfred shrugged and held up his hands, defining a space approximately fourteen inches by twelve inches, and four to five inches wide. “I guess around that big? It was full of stuff. She’d been sick, she told me. Pneumonia. I think she had to dig around in the purse to find her little package of tissues.”
“Did she always carry a bag that large?”
Manfred tried to remember. Finally, he shrugged. “I don’t notice purses, I guess.”
“When she came for previous sessions with you, did she open and close her purse a lot?”
Manfred stared at him blankly for a few seconds while he plumbed his memories. “She didn’t need to,” he said slowly. “She got out pictures of her family the first time, I remember. A picture of her deceased husband. Morton. But she hadn’t only prepaid her reservation fee, she’d prepaid in full, so she didn’t need to write a check. She didn’t ever ask me to do the touch psychometry. She liked the classic séance.”
“Which would be what?”
Manfred sighed, but he tried to keep it quiet. He didn’t like explaining himself, and he hated the incredulous looks he got from nonbelievers. But he couldn’t afford to be too righteous about it; he often made up findings that were not the result of any affinity for the world of the dead but the product of astute observation of the living. He believed that painters didn’t always have the inspiration for painting, writers wrote whole passages that were not muse-inspired, and that therefore it was natural that he, Manfred, didn’t achieve a connection with the supernatural every time he was asked to do so. But without a product, he didn’t get paid. So he did the best he could, and he always left the door open for genuine revelations. Manfred was pretty sure the sheriff wouldn’t see this in the same tolerant light that another practitioner would. With an inward shrug, he began his canned explanation.
“Normally, I hold hands with the person for whom I’m doing the reading,” Manfred said. “And they ask to speak to someone who’s gone over. I summon that person. It’s like flipping a switch to start a beacon flashing. Then I wait to see who comes. It’s not always the right person. Sometimes that person isn’t there. Sometimes there’s someone else who