I heard the great weight behind the door roll back on creaking wheels. The portal drifted wide.
I saw an immense woman in an immense crimson velvet queen’s robe receding on roller wheels in a metal throne across the hardwood floor to the far side of the room. She stopped by a table on which rested not one, but four crystal balls, corus-cant with light from a green-and-amber Tiffany lamp. Queen Califia, astrologer, palmist, phrenologist, past and futurist, sank inside three hundred mountainous pounds of too-too-solid flesh, her stare flashing X rays. A vast iron safe hulked in the shadows.
“I don’t bite.”
I stepped in. Crumley followed.
“But leave the door open,” she added.
I heard the peacock scream in the yard and dared to hold out my other hand.
Queen Califia reared back as if burned.
“You know Greene, the novelist?” she gasped. “Graham Greene?”
I nodded.
“Wrote about a priest who lost faith. Then witnessed a miracle he himself had caused. The shock at his renewed faith almost killed him.”
“So?”
“So.” She stared at my hand as if it were disconnected from my arm. “Lord.”
“Is it happening to you?” I said. “What happened to that priest?”
“Oh, God!”
“Did you lose your faith, your power to heal?”
“Yes,” she murmured.
“And now, just now, it all came back?”
“Dammit! Yes!”
I crushed my hand to my chest to blind it.
“How’d you guess that?” I said.
“No guess. Scares the hell out of me.”
She saw the wedding invitation and the newspaper in my outstretched hand.
“You’ve been up to see him,” she said.
“You looked. That’s cheating.”
That brought a half smile and then a snort. “People ricochet off him and end up here.”
“Not often enough, I think. May I sit?” I said. “I’ll fall if I don’t.”
She nodded at a chair a few feet away, a safe distance. I fell into it.
Crumley, ignored, looked peevish.
“You were saying?” I said. “People don’t visit old Rattigan often. No one knows he’s alive on Mount Lowe. But someone went there and yelled at him today.”
“She yelled?” The great mountain almost melted in remembrance. “I wouldn’t let her in.”