Cat In A Leopard Spot

Chapter 2

Bad News Breakfast

Dreams are only in your head.

Max woke up slowly, his dead cousin’s face and voice fading too fast.

Dreams are only in your head.

His cousin Sean hadn’t said that. Bob Dylan had said that in a long-ago song, using the wrong verb tense, is. Mock ignorant. Mock wise. Mockingly.

That was the mantra adults crooned at kids with nightmares, dreams are only in your head. True, but a true lie, also. And even scarier when you think about it, because when you grow up you find out that the only reality that matters is what’s in your head. Or what everyone else put there.

A lot scared Max, who had lived a mostly dreamless life of deception and danger, but Sean in his dreams didn’t scare him. Sean in his dreams was eternally seventeen, his features still blurred by baby fat, but the bones starting to push through to make a statement…until they had pushed through on a blast of explosive to make a final statement no one had expected, least of all Sean.

Sean in his dreams was whole and as precise as a class photo. Senior-high grin, polished mahogany-colored hair and the freckles that went with it. All-American boy via a Celtic pedigree. A middle-class, modern Huck Finn. Or Opie from Mayberry with size twelve feet treading on the brink of manhood. Full of pranks and daring. Class clown. Aching to kiss the girls and make them reveal the sweet mystery of sex. Adolescence personified.

And still that way in dreams.

Much as Max blamed himself for Sean’s death, Sean in his dreams never haunted him. Never showed the bombed-out fracture of a face he might have flaunted. Max always awoke in calm nostalgia, almost as if he had received a benediction.

But then other remnants of his dreams began paying court to his dawning consciousness. A nameless man in a leopard-spotted mask. The Cloaked Conjurer, obviously, seen far more recently than Sean Patrick Donnell Kelly.

Max found the Cloaked Conjuror’s memory erasing the pleasant tension of his smile as Sean’s never had. In the dream the Cloaked Conjuror had transformed into Gandolph, Max’s dead mentor in the art and illusion of magic. Gandolph had been all the family Max had allowed himself to have. Since Sean. He wished the old man were still here, in this house that Max rattled around in alone like a single die on an empty baize-covered table.

He wished Temple were here. He never had dreams like this when he slept with Temple.

But he hadn’t slept with Temple—routinely, all night, with nowhere to go before and/or after—for months. Sean had died too young to understand why “sleeping with” was a euphemism for having sex, for making love. Sleep and the satisfying security that came afterward made having sex into making love.

Max’s memory jolted him with another unpleasant dream image from the motherland, that long-ago Ireland that he and Sean had visited as naive returning sons.

A memory of having sex. First sex. With an Irish colleen named Kathleen O’Connor.

And then, with a dream shift that was only in his head, he finally remembered the dream’s parting illusion. Peace dissolved. He had awakened not seeing Sean but copulating with a corpse.

Max left the coffeemaker clucking and drooling under the kitchen fluorescent lights and went into the dark yard to retrieve the newspaper.

Only 4:00 A.M., but the newspaper lay there like a dirty leg bone, a pale oblong encased in clear plastic that reflected the distant streetlight.

Max never ventured outside without scanning for lurkers. Sometimes he wished he owned a dog that could fetch. Leaving the house in the predawn dark was the most dangerous thing he did all day. A man on his front lawn in the wee hours was like an astronaut on a space walk: isolated, vulnerable, cut off from shelter and safety, so near and yet so far.

Millions of suburbanites did it every morning, but they didn’t have Max’s past.

Inside the house, he poured the black coffee into a white mug, then sat on a stool at the huge island counter and spread the paper wide as he skipped the usual front-page headlines—endless foreign talks and sports results—and paged through the rest.

Las Vegas papers always sizzled with entertainment news. Max found himself perusing small items on openings and closings and newly contracted acts, the longer features on the old standbys, as if he were still an up-and-coming performer with a professional interest in these constant comings and goings. As if he still harbored the unsinkable illusion of a career.

He missed the intense physical, mental, and social stimulus of doing his magic act, almost as much as he missed sleeping nightly with Temple. For the year they had lived together at the Circle Ritz apartment building while Max performed nightly at the Goliath Hotel, his life had seemed real for the first time since Sean. Imagine…the surreal atmosphere of Las Vegas making him feel so normal.

The next steps, and he had seen them clearly then, marriage. With children? A house, he could afford a nice one. A long-term contract with one of the spectacular megahotels always rising from the Vegas sands these days like the new Atlantis exchanging a watery mythological grave for a gravy train run on the glittering sandbox of the Strip here and now. What a magic show he could dream up for a place called the Atlantis! More than a magic show, a post—Cirque du Soleil and Eau mélange of sophisticated circus acts with a futuristic accent….

Max sipped a fragrant distillation of the other, legal, and less lethal export of Colombia: the innocuous bean. His career had always been a cover, not his real job. He was dreaming to think he could resurrect it. Dreams are only in your head. With Sean.

Still, he felt a bit…wistful? Envious? Professionally curious? He reread a veteran columnist’s spiel about the latest hot Strip magician, who happened to be someone Max had introduced himself to only recently in the line of his other work. And had dreamed about only minutes before. According to Gene Igo, the Cloaked Conjuror’s brand of now-you-see-it, now-you-know-how-it’s-done magic show violated every unspoken tenet of the magician’s code but was packing them in at the New Millennium Hotel and Casino.

Max read about the multimillion-dollar, multiyear contract, the CC’s desert retreat/fortress and dedication to “unmasking the mystery of magic” in a “thrilling, dramatic fashion.”

The next paragraph outlined the other magicians’ wrath at the CC flaunting trade secrets for fun and profit.

And then Max read his own name. The familiar letters exploded in his mind like Fourth of July rockets. The Mystifying Max Kinsella. Stage name and real name in one marquee-spanning phrase.

The bloody fool! It was true, CC said in Igo’s column, as was now being reported, that the Cloaked Conjuror’s act was literally death-defying, that he’d received many death threats. The columnist suggested that surely these couldn’t be serious.

“Of course they’re serious,” the CC had “snapped,” wrote the columnist, who had greater latitude in description than a fact-tied, objective-voiced news reporter. “The Mystifying Max Kinsella retired from magic a year ago because of death threats. Just vanished.”

At this point the magician who appears everywhere in what amounted to almost armor snapped his leather-gloved fingers. “Like that. Gone. No magic involved. The Synth had caught up with him.”

At first we thought he’d said “the Syndicate,” as in old-time crime organizations, but the CC explained that the word was “Synth,” and even spelled it for us: an ancient secret society of magicians formed to protect trade secrets.

This is why he uses no name and wears a leopard-spotted mask with a built-in voice modifier that hides his head completely. The gloves he wears constantly prevent leaving even fingerprints as a trail. The effect is a cross between Darth Vader and a protected witness, if you ask us.

“What about baths?” this reporter joked.

“I dry-clean,” he said wryly. And seriously.

The Cloaked Conjuror also said he isn’t married, for which the ladies must be very grateful.

Max shook his head and rattled the open pages, as if to shake sense into what he was reading. “The fool!”

Like most fools, the Cloaked Conjuror had managed to pull a boatload of others into the dangerous currents of his folly with this one interview. Not only Max but Temple and God knew who else. Never name an enemy. You warn him. Or her. Or it.

“‘The Mystifying Max Kinsella.’ Well, well, well.”

Lieutenant C. R. Molina wasn’t prone to gloating over her high-fiber breakfast cereal. She wasn’t even used, at that early hour, to being anyone more than Carmen Molina, working single mom, until she donned her clip-on leather paddle holster and left the house for police headquarters. But the morning paper had snapped her from domestic to professional mode in the crunch of a bran nugget.

“Is it a show?” her daughter Mariah asked, eyes still glued to the comics page. “This ‘Max’ thing?”

“Was a show. Mostly a no-show now.” Molina, muttering, stared at the newsprint until it went out of focus. “Death threats. That’s something Little Miss Red didn’t mention.”

“Mom! You’re talking to yourself again. I was supposed to remind you not to do that.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.” Molina eyed her daughter over the crinkle-cut edge of the newsprint. “Are you supposed to be wearing that to school?”

“That” was an assembly of beads and fishline that hung over the top of one twelve-year-old ear.

“I’m giving a report on TitaniCon.”

“With visual aids?”

“Yeah.” Mariah liked that idea. “Right.”

Carmen saw that she had inadvertently given her daughter an excuse instead of an objection, so she just dropped the discussion. “You walking to school with Yolanda?”

“Like always.”

“Watch out for bogeymen. There were two cases of guys trying to grab school kids last week.”

“Those were little kids, Ma. Do I have to hear about every creep on the streets? I know what to do.”

“So do police officers, and sometimes even they get caught sleeping.”

“Anyway, I gotta get going if I’m not gonna be late.”

Carmen nodded, her eyes back on the newsprint. She heard Mariah’s dishes slide into the sink, and tap water rinsing them. Then a hasty “ ’Bye,” and the slam of the front door before her maternal mouth could open to forestall the bang.

Molina was still shaking her head as the frown she’d kept Mariah from seeing settled into her features like an old friend into a favorite rocking chair.

Death threats. First motive for Kinsella’s disappearance she’d heard. And what was this “Synth”? Magical nonsense, she’d bet. A catchword that meant nothing, like “presto.”

But she was familiar with the man quoted. At least she’d seen the Cloaked Conjuror up close at TitaniCon. Speaking of creepy guys who weren’t out on the street…that animalistic mask, the mechanically altered voice…at least the Mystifying Max had performed bare-faced, which she supposed suited a congenital liar like him.

What did the Cloaked Conjuror know about Max Kinsella? She’d just have to find out someday.

Whatever this Synth was, she could well understand why it would issue death threats to the irritatingly mysterious Max Kinsella.

The clock hadn’t even touched 8:00 A.M., but Temple’s doorbell rang as if suffering a knockout punch. The mellow ’50s melody continued through its changes as if it had ODed on caffeine. She swam her way through morning grogginess to the door.

“Electra!” Temple was shocked to find that her friendly neighborhood sixty-something landlady owned the right jab behind the doorbell abuse. “What’s happened?”

Electra’s floor-length cotton chintz muumuu, apparently a nightgown, rustled as she hurried in. “Now I know why that black-haired rascal hasn’t been sleeping here nights.”

“Louie likes to go out on the town, but he’s home now.” Temple nodded to her living room loveseat, on which the midnight black cat in question lounged like a sphinx who had been tarred, if not feathered, his forelegs stretched out magisterially.

“Midnight Louie nothing,” Electra said, sitting beside the large cat with a nod of greeting. “No offense, Your Highness.” She eyed Temple fiercely. “You know I meant Max.”

Temple crossed her arms over her chest, a gesture meant to lend stern authority to her five-foot frame, which looked particularly lacking with stuffed bunny-head slippers on her feet. “No, I don’t know any such thing. And why are you keeping track of where Max sleeps?”

“You two used to share the unit, remember?” But Electra’s good-humored face was looking sheepish. She patted the confetti-colored ringlets that matched the flora fluorescing against the muumuu’s black background. “Anyway, now I understand why he didn’t move back in when he came back from, from wherever he disappeared to. Death threats! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Maybe it was none of your business.”

Electra’s ovine expression grew owlish.

“And maybe I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Temple added, “so I can’t tell you.”

The landlady flourished the rolled-up news section in her hand as if jousting with a fly.

Beside her, Louie’s ears came to attention as his green eyes began searching the room’s upper air.

“Well, all Las Vegas knows about it now,” Electra said.

Temple went to take the paper and unroll it, turning to avoid Louie’s big black paw batting it as if begging for a look-see.

She studied the inside feature-section page. The text in question was some show biz interview continued from the section front. Words like “audience” and “popular” leaped up at her. And then, “Max” and “Kinsella,” preceded by the oft-repeated phrase “death threats.”

Temple sat on the sofa arm, eyes still glued to the Roman type, her rear almost mashing the end of Louie’s now twitching tail.

Before she could make much sense of the context, a knock sounded on her door.

“You must have jammed the bell pounding it,” Temple accused her landlady as she went to answer the summons.

If she hadn’t been concentrating so hard on the article, she would have figured out who it was. The blond man who stood in the private hallway, reading his folded copy of the morning paper by the faint glow of Temple’s entry wall lamp, always knocked, not rang.

“Did you know about—?” He stopped as he saw past her to Paula Revere on the couch.

“I do now,” Temple said. “Come in and join the pajama party.”

That seemed to be his first clue that Temple was indeed attired in something skimpy and cotton knit.

“I should have called,” Matt said, hesitating on the threshold.

“Why? Electra didn’t. I can’t believe you two got to the morning paper ahead of me. I’m an absolute news junkie. Oh, wait! Don’t tell me it was on the early TV news.”

“Well—” Matt looked sheepish, just as Electra had only minutes earlier.

Temple closed the door after him, wondering why Matt seemed a little punch-drunk this morning, and why a professional night owl was up so early anyway. Wondering also what full frontal news coverage would do to Max’s cover.

While Electra leaped up to greet her favorite tenant, Temple took a side trip into her tiny black-and-white kitchen to see what she could offer her surprise guests.

“Coffee, tea, or cranapple juice?” she asked, sticking her head around the barrier wall.

“Coffee,” they caroled obligingly. If Temple could cook anything, it was coffee. She filled the coffeemaker higher than she had since Max had inadvertently moved out a year ago by vanishing from the Goliath Hotel, and pulled a trio of mugs down from the cupboard.

“Does it say anything else?” she yelled into the other room. Cooks were always kept busy in the kitchen and had to miss all the good conversation, another thing she had against the culinary art.

“Just that,” Electra yodeled back in the fruity register of late middle age.

“Isn’t that enough?” Matt put in.

“You’ve got it.” Temple shuffled out on her cozy but Disneyesque bunny slides. Her mother had sent them one Christmas, and they were too small to pass along to anybody else along the bunny trail on the gift chain. Temple wondered what Freud would make of the mother of a thirty-year-old daughter who still shopped in children’s and junior departments for her daughter. Probably that the daughter was a shrimp.

“You two rip that article to shreds while I go change,” Temple suggested. “And if the coffeemaker makes strange choking noises, go to its aid.”

They nodded, the blond and multicolored heads lowered over Max’s first ink in over a year.

Louie nosed his way between them as if to join the confab.

In five minutes Temple’s cherry-amber waves of chin-length hair resembled a style and she was dressed in a two-piece knit outfit. The bunny slippers had been replaced by svelte Onyx platform sandals with clear plastic uppers embellished by silver studs.

Donning the right shoes was as magical for her as Dorothy’s red sequin numbers. She returned to the main room, her mood upbeat, to find the coffeemaker docile and her guests still rapt over the story.

In two more minutes the ritual mugs were steaming on the coffee table and Temple had retrieved her own copy of the morning paper from the hall to study the story for herself.

A silence broken only by sipping noises finally cried for a major interruption.

Matt went first. “Do you think Max Kinsella knows about this?”

The phone rang.

“He does now.”