Cat In A Diamond Dazzle

Chapter 3

A Fight for Love and Glory...

Winking neon from the sign outside cast pink and blue stripes into the large, darkened room. Pink for girls, blue for boys. The garish pastel light lashed many pale, motionless faces, but each time it struck Temple's cheek she blinked.

Still, the rhythmic wink of obscenely cheery neon had a hypnotic effect she found peaceful. She edged down the seat so the lucent tattoo beat across her knee instead of her face, slightly dislodging a bench partner in the process.

"Sorry," she whispered in automatic apology, though doing so was ridiculous. A Las Vegas wedding chapel, particularly one as eccentric as the Lovers' Knot, was not really a church.

Yet the silence remained profound, the atmosphere oddly serene. Pulsing neon flashed like heat lightning on the lattice archway at the room's front. Silk flowers intertwined the slats.

Temple appreciated the comfortable, well-stuffed bulk of the woman on her left. Her face under a broad-brimmed straw hat was unreservedly lumpy as well as quiet. A rhinestone beauty mark on the woman's cheekbone gleamed like a frozen tear.

Sitting among the congregation, staring at the blinking bars of light like a slot-machine junkie, made Temple feel like Goldilocks. She had found a "just right" place to be.

The side door creaked, then admitted an expanding bar of or-dinary incandescent light. Temple jumped like an experimental gerbil, then huddled against the commodious woman beside her, almost dislodging the hat.

Sorry, she didn't quite whisper aloud. She seldom found it necessary to make herself smaller than usual.

Whoever had opened the door wasn't about to stop with a quick glance around. Footsteps ground over a floor gritty from dozens of rice-strewing.

Temple watched the shadow explore the room's fringes, feeling as stupid as a kid playing the game of

"statue" and forced to hold stock still, or maybe feeling more like "It" in a game of hide and seek that she was much too old for. The longer she kept her presence quiet, the more idiotic she would look if she were discovered.

Still she said nothing, and moved no more than her neighbors.

The shadow paused by the dark hummock of the organ.

Temple bit her lip. Surely Matt hadn't come down again, perhaps seeking the same ersatz solace that she did?

The shadow, sure-footed, reached the room's ceremonial center, just an empty space meant for two, or three at most. It stopped dead center in the arch, head sweeping left and right like a spotlight.

"What on earth--?" Electra Lark's voice interrogated herself. "I never finished the Erica Kane figure that's supposed to go there. And poor old Sophie's hat has slipped."

She came scurrying down the center aisle, not about to be fooled by a living body among all these mannequins of her own making.

"It's me." Temple sat forward. The bracketing soft-sculpture people collapsed into each other behind her.

"Temple! Oh, my great-aunt Gilda's garters! You nearly scared the frost out of my hair. I thought it might be a burglar, or some sort of sex fiend."

"Just your local PR person," Temple confirmed in a foolish found-out voice.

Electra lifted the woman dubbed Sophie into the pew ahead, and then took her place on the seat, settling some papers on her lap.

"I was looking for you, I admit, but I'd given up and decided to see if everything was ship-shape here.

What are you doing in the chapel?"

"I thought it would be quiet."

"So it was," Electra said, chuckling. "No wedding's scheduled for a week. Now, listen. I told Max he could house-sit the Kellers's condo while they're in Nova Scotia."

"Oh, Electra! That isn't fair. My condo is half his."

"He hasn't exactly been paying his half of the maintenance and mortgage lately, has he? Besides, Louie might not make him real welcome."

"Louie is not the issue."

"I know, dear. Obviously, you two need a little time--"

Temple snorted in despair at Electra's understatement.

"Anyway, the upshot is that Max wants nothing to do with the Circle Ritz. Says it's too public for him.

So you're off the hook."

"Am I?"

"For the moment. You and Max will still have to sit down and talk things over."

"And over and over . .. how do I get in such messes? I'd rather be confronting a murderer right now."

"I hope not, because that would make me a rather nasty customer, not to mention dangerous to be with alone in the dark."

"It's not quite dark."

"No, it isn't, dear, and you can't see that yet."

Electra sighed and settled against the hard seat, a human replica of the soft-sculpture figure she had dislodged.

"How did Matt take the resurrection of the Mystifying Max?" she asked.

"Like a plaster saint. So calm and so concerned about me. I could have kicked him."

"How did Max take Matt?"

"Like indigestion. Max and Louie don't get along either. I could kick them both. But since I abhor senseless violence, I think I'll relocate to Point Barrow, Alaska, instead."

"No, you won't." Electra rattled her papers. "That's why I was looking for you. That's why the chapel is closed for a week. I need a roommate for a conference I'm attending and you need to get away from all this. Best part is it starts tomorrow."

"Conference? I've had it up to here with stage-managing those events, and I can't leave town with my Crystal Phoenix renovation commitments."

"That's the beauty part. The conference is right here in town, at the Phoenix. What more could you ask for a convenient getaway? You and I can bunk at your home-away-from-home for six stress-free days and let the males in your life--Max, Louie, and Matt--rethink their absurdly territorial positions."

"Well, there's hope for Louie, but I doubt that Matt or Max will be bellying up to the bar together anytime soon. What kind of conference is this, anyway? For Justices of the Peace?"

"Hardly. A dull lot, you know. Quit sulking in the pews and come on into the light, dear."

Temple slid along the varnished wooden bench to follow Electra to the wall-hugging organ, where she fanned out her papers, then snapped on the music lamp atop the console.

"Voila!"

Temple blinked at the sudden bright light, trying to read a glossy brochure and flyer. But no text, however clever and copious, could compete with the lush four-color image of a hotly embracing, half-dressed couple.

"What kind of conference is this?" she asked suspiciously.

"G.R.O.W.L.--Great Readers Of Wonderful Literature. Just think, they're holding this year's deal right here in Vegas! At the Crystal Phoenix. Six days of glamour at a classy hotel, Crystal days and Crystal nights. Balls, banquets, cocktail receptions and lots of daytime panels on the how and why of the romance novel. All the big-time authors will attend, and the hunkiest cover models. They have a costume show, a cover model pageant, even a 'star search' writing contest for readers who want to write."

"Electra! You don't read this stuff?"

Electra inserted her muumuu between Temple and her precious papers. "It isn't 'stuff,' and I do. In fact, I plan to enter the writing contest. Why are you so sure it's junk?"

"I didn't say that. It's just that the grocery store rack romance covers are so lurid. Talk about selling raw meat."

"Not all of the covers are like that. And what's wrong with a little sensuality, anyway?"

"Nothing, but it shouldn't be packaged so embarrassingly like sausage, and that's what those muscle-bound, semi-nude, male cover models look like."

"Aha! So you've looked."

"Who could miss them?"

"But you've never read a romance novel?"

"Not since ... oh, Wuthering Heights."

"I can't believe that." Electra glared at her over the concentrated gleam of the music lamp until Temple felt like she was being grilled by a cop. Romance patrol on your tail "Okay," Temple said, thinking hard and trying to be honest. "I read some Georgette Heyer Regency romances in high school.

You know, romantic farce among the upper classes, skirting the indiscreet but very proper after all, as discreet as Jane Austen. Those male cover models all looked like Bob Cratchet in Beau Brummell clothes."

"Heyer is a classic author," Electra said reverently, "but a bit prim by today's standards. Even the Regency romance has caught up with the times. Face it, the period is historically more correct with a peek behind the bedcurtains. The Regency rake had a high old time."

"I don't know why I'm standing here debating books I haven't read with you when my life is last week's powdered milk without water at the moment."

"You see! You haven't kept up with the romance field. You need to get acquainted with modern times between the covers. You might learn something that would help your current situation." Electra finished with a significant waggle of her silvery eyebrows that made her resemble a demonic fairy godmother beckoning an innocent to a night at the erotomaniac's ball.

Temple laughed, which was an improvement on her previous mood. "Honestly. You think I could learn something from a paperback romance novel? Please. Life is earnest, life is real. Life is nothing like a date with Fabio on a really good hair day--his, not yours. That kind of self-deceptive escapism has zilch to do with my . . . domestic dilemma."

"A Domestic Dilemma," Electra parroted, assuming a strange, simpering demeanor Temple had never seen before. "A Regency romance by Henrietta Hayfield under the, ah, old Garnet imprint." She bit a lip.

"Published in the late seventies, I think. The heroine is a runaway heiress who disguises herself as a chimney sweep and marries an earl with an allergy to soot. Stunning romantic tension, but no sensual fireworks in either the hearth or the bedroom. Did I mention that the conference is going to have a trivia contest, too?" she finished modestly.

"How appropriate!" Temple said, steaming. "I know you mean well, Electra, but the last thing I need now is visions of Scarlet Pimpernels or scarlet women dancing in my girlish imagination. I need my feet on the ground, not my head in the clouds. I'm going to my . . . rooms."

Electra thrust the bundle of papers at Temple. "At least look over the conference materials, dear. I've never known you to have a closed mind. It might be fun."

"Fun is not in my game plan at the moment."

Temple stomped out of the wedding chapel on her noisome sandals, enjoying shattering the silence that she had sought, and so soon lost.

Still, the encounter with Electra had eased her emotional shell shock. A lethargy of despair lifted with her as she jolted upward in the creaking elevator.

She pulled the door key from her jumpsuit pocket and entered the condominium, flipping on the kitchen switch. Fluorescent light burned the black-and-white decor kitchen into etched sharpness. It oozed just far enough into the living room beyond to reveal the sofa and its two occupants.

One end was again in the possession of Midnight Louie, his eyes glowing green in the semi-dark; at the other end sat Max Kinsella. His eyes did not glow green.

Temple wasn't surprised to find him there this time, but she did feel the lover's knot in her gut kink again. Max, seeing her, reached up a long arm to turn on the reading lamp over the sofa, bathing himself and his Hawaiian shirt in an incandescent spill of buttery light.

Temple set the materials Electra had given her on the edge of the kitchen counter and went to face the music.

"This time," Max said, "I was perfectly house-trained. I used my key." He leaned forward, the object in hand. When Temple didn't take the key, he set it down on the coffee table.

With both ends of the sofa occupied, Temple didn't relish putting herself in the middle. So she sat on the coffee table facing the sofa, something only a lightweight like herself could do without tipping it over.

Maybe it was the downpour of light from above, but Max looked worried, or, rather, he looked like he was trying not to look worried.

"I don't understand," she said for openers.

He shrugged. "My breaking and entering via the balcony seemed to upset you. I can be civil and use a door like anyone else. You can keep that." He nodded at the key on the glass-topped table.

Temple felt like another fictional little-girl-lost, only this time it was Alice confronting tables bearing alien objects that could abruptly change her perceptions of herself and the world around her. Did her reaction to current events make her a mature Big Girl, or an emotionally shrunken Little Girl? Go ask Alice.

"It's your key," she finally said.

"You can give it back when you really believe that."

"Electra said you won't stay at the Circle Ritz."

"Can't," Max corrected. "This was meant to be a flying visit to let you know I was alive."

"Thanks, I guess."

He was silent. At the sofa's other end, Louie maintained his noncommittal stare. Then he suddenly hiked a hind leg over one shoulder and began grooming his business end, all the while keeping a glaring eye on Max.

Temple had never before seen a cat give anyone the finger, and laughed. Max deserved a feline finger, at least.

"He doesn't like me," Max noted.

"Oh, I doubt Louie is reacting in terms of like or dislike. He's just not sure you won't commit an indiscretion on his sofa.

"He must know my history." Max directed a significant, and searing, look at Temple.

That look could have made a nun blush, but Temple was drained of frivolous blood. She looked at the floor.

"Temple, what's happened with us?" he wanted to know.

"Max! What usl You were gone, without word or warning, for over five months. Lieutenant Molina even implied that you might be dead, although Lieutenant Molina mostly implied that you were an escaped murderer whose whereabouts she wanted to know."

"Electra clued me in on your recent crime-solving exploits, but she didn't mention this Molina bozo.

He had no right planting nonsense in your mind--"

"Is your Interpol record nonsense?"

"My Interpol record--?"

"Play innocent, but your hidden baby blues won't fool me, and they are baby blues. I saw it right there on the Interpol card in black and white: six-foot-two, eyes of blue. Sure, you could grow an extra inch or two, but your eyes wouldn't change color. Would you trust somebody who even lied about their eye color?"

Max's frown was still worrying at the Interpol news. "What the devil could that damned interfering lieutenant have dug up?

"How about IRA involvement? That bring back any forgotten chapters and verses? You know, following the black velvet band for the good of dear auld Ireland and all that. I didn't even know that you were Irish-born."

"I wasn't."

"Then what were you doing in Ireland at the tender age of seventeen, being suspected of IRA activities?"

"I was a tourist! That whole business was a mix-up. This Molina didn't have anything more recent than that old Interpol bulletin, did he?"

"No ..." Temple found Max's assumption that Molina was male as irritating as a hovering gnat, yet it was not worth swatting down when much bigger issues were swarming en masse. "That still doesn't explain why your local disappearing act became semi-permanent. Or why you never said good-bye. Or called. Nor does it explain away the body in the ceiling of the Goliath casino. Or the other body in the ceiling of the Crystal Phoenix casino just a couple of days ago ... or why you wear those damn green contact lenses that I've never seen you putting in or taking out. That took premeditation, Max, and plenty of it! What did you take me for, a loyal and gullible audience of one?"

"Temple." He leaned forward to put his hands on her arms. "We've got lots to talk about. We can't possibly catch up on five months all at once."

"Not just months, Max, years! After you left, when Lieutenant Molina came around asking questions, I realized that I knew hardly anything about your past."

"That works both ways," he pointed out. "We did get carried away with ourselves."

"Me? You're saying I have a past worth exploring? Hah!"

"The past five months certainly sound eventful." He was smiling.

"Why is Lieutenant Molina so anxious to find you? And what about those men who--?"

Max's hands slid down her forearms until they enclosed her fingers. His touch was as warm as always.

If "cold hands, warm heart" was a truism, did "warm hands, cold heart" apply?

"Temple, that assault on you never should have happened. That's why I left, why I never contacted you, no matter how much I wanted to. My disappearing act was supposed to draw them away from you."

"Then you know who they are; you know why they want you."

"No." He considered. "I suspected that someone like them might be after me, that's true enough. I can even guess why, but I can't tell you. If you know anything, you're in danger."

"I'm in danger ignorant, too. I might as well know why."

Max shook his head, releasing her hands. "I can't say. It's not only my decision--and certainly not my inclination--to keep you in the dark, believe that. And I can't stay here right now to sort all this out."

"All what? Me? The condominium? The hotel casino murders? Who Jack the Ripper really was? Don't tell me you're confessing to all or any of the above?"

His features both softened and sharpened. All of his attention focused on her. "Exasperation is the last resort of the uncertain, Temple."

While she contemplated that, he reached out and drew her onto the sofa, into the lean-back corner with him, so she was tucked between the crook of his arm and his shoulder like a jigsaw puzzle piece slipping into its well-worn dovetail.

Tension evaporated.

"You're all that I care about," he said simply, "but unfortunately not all that I have to be concerned about."

Max sighed, which wasn't like the Max she knew, but then she had apparently never known the real Max (maybe the complete Max would be a better way to put it).

"I suppose I was naive," he said, almost to himself, and that didn't sound like the old Max either. "I had no business getting involved with you."

"Now's a great time to figure that out."

"With anyone, really. But you changed my mind--fast."

"I thought you changed me, and my life."

His arms tightened around her and he rested his head on top of hers. Their position gave Temple that same seductive, cozy feeling you get bundled up with someone you love on a toboggan, poised atop an exhilarating hill, on the brink of a thrilling but familiar ride. Toboggan rides, she reminded herself, hadn't done much for Mattie Silver and Ethan Frome.

"We may have made a fast merge on the highway of love, but it wasn't a whim," he said wryly. "And it wasn't undertaken lightly, by either of us. Remember how we exchanged our 'papers,' how we rigorously practiced safe sex for six months? We did everything right."

"I remember rigorous, and it certainly didn't feel like practice, or that safe, even if it was," she said, remembering also the sweet anticipation of sex in the slow lane. "We were so cute and quaint, kind of like in the Dark Ages, when engaged couples waited until they were married. It actually was a lot more exciting that way."

"We were responsible," he said. "We took care that we didn't hurt each other. Temple, I've been faithful. I haven't thrown that away."

"I've been celibate, too." A bittersweet thought clothed in ambivalence shrouded the naked truth.

Did her attraction to Matt in his absence add up to infidelity? Why did honesty so often unravel at the edges?

His embrace tightened. "Then there's nothing to stop us starting where we left off."

"Not exactly. There's nobody to stop us . . . except us. I tried not to listen to other people's doubts, but you were gone, and, after a while, I didn't have glib answers anymore."

"Maybe you shouldn't discuss me in absentia."

"Aha, so that's where you were all this time: off on a foreign junket in Absentia."

After a shocked moment, Max laughed, the free-wheeling spree of delight that always made her smile. She was smiling now.

He pulled her on top of him. "God, I've missed that."

"What?" Still smiling, and backsliding into that half-audible, almost-coy lover's Q&A session.

"My paprika girl." His big hand tousled her hair. "Always surprising, and full of spunk."

"Thank you," Temple said, as expected.

"I hate spunk," he answered with feeling, on cue.

And they laughed again.

Because they were back, in Max's Loring Park resident hotel, a quaint rambling old place painted ersatz-Victorian yellow, filled with actors and other artsy itinerants. They were on the lumpy living room sofa, while the small television set droned reruns of Mary Tyler Moore's old seventies sitcom, and she was playing Mary and he was Mr. Grant for an acerbic moment, and they were beginning to get very well acquainted indeed.

Temple couldn't say whether Max kissed her, or she kissed him, and that had been the way it had always been, too. And she couldn't say when it started or when it stopped, but they were still doing it when Midnight Louie rose and walked pointedly over their lower legs, all twenty-some pounds of him stalking indignantly off now that things had gotten mushy.

The cat's withdrawal brought her to her senses, or away from them. She pushed herself up and away, but slowly.

"What is it? What's really come between us?" Max asked.

"Time. Truth. It can't be the same, Max. It just can't. I'm not the same."

"Is it Devine? He's damn good-looking, and damnably nice. I can see--"

"No, you can't see. Not a thing." She put a hand on his shoulder, assuring, consoling. "Matt's not the threat you think."

"Why not? Is he married?"

"No, but he's not free."

"Then he's divorcing. ..."

"Not in the way you think."

"What way?"

"I can't say."

But she wanted to, wanted to explain why their association could look so romantic and be so platonic thus far, despite some fairly adolescent tangos in the dark. But she couldn't expose Matt like that. Max watched her with that patented judicious, astute Max look. They were so different, and so much the same.

"Divided loyalties." The ruefulness in Max's voice reflected his own acquaintance with such struggles of the conscience. "You can't betray a confidence. Your silence means you're committed elsewhere to some degree, Temple."

"So does yours."

They regarded each other sadly. Telling the truth, yet saying nothing.

Temple moved back to her side of the sofa; actually Louie's, but even he had walked out on this painful impasse. From the kitchen she heard the astounding sound of Free-to-be-Feline pellets being crunched. Either nothing else was set out to eat, or he was making an unprecedented statement.

"It's not Matt," she said finally, not expecting Max to believe her. "It's the mystery. We all have a right to our own mysteries, but yours are too deep. I have to wonder now if I've been misled. Taken.

Used."

Three little words, and she could see him conceal an internal wince at each one. He lashed out in turn, but not at her.

"Then it's that damnable police lieutenant Molina, planting poisonous seeds, but doing what?

Arresting me? No, not even if I walked up and held my wrists out for the cuffs. Because I'm not... guilty of anything arrest able. You're going to let some pathologically suspicious detective come between us?"

"Frank is coming between us--"

"Frank? That's his name?"

Temple smiled at his latest erroneous conclusion. "Frank Ness, maybe a relative of Elliot, do you think? Molina's just a messenger, Max. An unwelcome one, but a bit player, believe me. You've got to accept responsibility. You said earlier that maybe you shouldn't have let' us happen, that you had no right."

"But I had an inclination, a need."

"What I need to know, what I have a right to know, is what you can't tell me about yourself, bad or good or indifferent. That's the sad thing, if you'd just trust me--"

"There's no trust in what began in Ireland all those innocent years ago, Temple, only serial suspicion.

It's not that I don't trust you, or myself, it's the whole mean and uncouth world out there. I suppose I should be grateful you have someone around to look after you," he added in a bitter mumble, as if accusing himself of dereliction of duty.

"Yeah," Temple said assertively. "Me."

"Temple, I have always respected your independence."

"Good, because I've had to develop a bit more of it lately."

"Good."

"Fine. Then everybody's happy. Max, if you really knew what kind of danger I've faced and survived lately, you'd stop acting like a knight errant and offer me a job as a bodyguard."

"If I knew, I'd probably ship you back to your family in Minneapolis."

Temple shook her head. "Too late. Can't go back, and I'm glad. I thank you for that. Can't go back to being a professional innocent, either."

"Too bad. Absence is overrated; it doesn't make the heart grow fonder."

Resignation had settled on his expressive form like an invisible cloak. He was a mime at heart; despite his phenomenal emotional and facial control, his body language always gave him away, at least to her.

Temple felt her uncertainty and resolve melting into compassion, anguish, the vague grip of chronic misery.

"Max, you idiot, this wouldn't be so bloody bewildering if I didn't want to just jump right back to where we were! Maybe with some time, some talk--"

"I haven't got time! And talk is academic." He sat forward on the couch, staring at the bare glass top of her coffee table as if studying his faint reflection. "Temple, your suspicions are absolutely right, in a way. That ancient Interpol card marked the beginning of the whole mess. It began with a death. There have been more, and will be more. So maybe that means that I don't deserve a life. But you ... I won't risk you, even if that means I must risk losing you."

"Will you stay in Las Vegas?"

His fingers entwined tightly, making his two hands into one bare-knuckled, white-capped mountain range, like some Oriental form of isometric exercise symboling intense inner conflict. "I can't say."

"Will you come up and see me sometime?" A suggestion of Mae West in the delivery barely disguised her underlying seriousness.

He glanced up from contemplating some dark well in his past and future, truly startled. Temple just smiled. One didn't often shock the Mystifying Max.

She managed to keep the smile light and bright. "I didn't say it was hopeless, Max. Just use the door now and again. And knock first."