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with ectoplasm, which I consider merely disgusting. I mean, who wants to have some kind of slimy junk all over his table, or the floor? I know some people thought that producing ectoplasm was a great way to prove you were in communication with the dead, but not me. Ick. However, I digress.
           After another few minutes Rolly appeared, God bless him. I love Rolly, and not merely because he’d served me well for so many years. The story between Rolly and me, you see, is that we had been soul mates approximately a thousand years ago in Scotland. His spirit had stayed with me through all my incarnations ever since. You’ve got to love a guy with that much sticking power. Besides, given the state of my own marriage, it was comforting to think that some man, even if he was a figment of my own imagination and dead for a millennium, would love me through time and all eternity. It sure didn’t look as though that sort of love would be mine in this life. Not only that but Rolly, who was ostensibly a Scotsman, had an accent all his own, which I’d pretty much mastered. Because of his built-in accent, I didn’t have to fiddle with other types of accents. I wasn’t sure how I’d handle an Italian mobster, for example.
           Anyhow, Rolly had showed up, and we were just getting into the meat of the séance, during which Carmine “The Hand” Bennadutto was going to speak through Rolly to his godson, Vicenzo Maggiori, when a door opened, completely shattering the mood.
           Maggiori said, “Huh!”
           Totally disconcerted, I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there, sagging. It was a most uncomfortable position. Until that evening, none of the séances I’d ever conducted had been interrupted at just that point—the point at which everything’s going to begin to happen but hasn’t yet.
           A man silently slithered over and bent to whisper in Maggiori’s ear. I felt the big boss stiffen and wondered what the heck was going on and when it would stop. And then something happened that totally floored me. Maggiori released my hand, which flopped onto the table, and stood up.
           He said softly, “I’m awful sorry, youse guys, but Jinx and me, we gotta go. But I want to do dis again later.” On my other side, Jinx, too, let go of me, and there I was, supposedly in a trance and communing with spirits, but with no living human being connected to me.
           Well, golly! Since, to all intents and purposes, the séance was over, I made up my role of a medium deserted in mid-trance extemporaneously, having had no practice in the part. No one was seated next to me, so I remained slumped over, wondering how long I should take to recover my senses.
           The matter was taken out of my hands when all of a sudden the door burst open, lights flared on in the room, and a booming voice hollered, “Cheese it! Da cops!”
           In less than a second, Harold, Stacy, Flossie, and I were alone in the room, blinded by a flood of light, and trying to shade our eyes against it. I don’t think I spoke a single word, being too astounded by events. I remember Harold saying something like “Shit!” or “Damn!” but I didn’t hold his bad language against him. If I’d thought of it, I’d probably have sworn, too.
           The lousy place was being raided!
           * * * * *
           Approximately an hour later, Harold, Stacy Kincaid, Flossie Mosser, and I sat in Detective Samuel Rotondo’s office at the Pasadena Police Station, which was situated behind the Court House on the corner of Fair Oaks and Walnut. I was still shaking with leftover panic and trying not to cry. Harold was grinning, Stacy was pouting, Flossie seemed resigned to her fate, and Sam looked like a volcano about to erupt. Where Jinx and Vicenzo Maggiori were was anybody’s guess.
           And I was done for. My goose was cooked. I was a goner.
           “I-I thought