Cat In A Leopard Spot

Chapter 28

K as in Karrot Stick

The Big Town felt a planet away.

Matt, hauling his down jacket over his arm, unlocked his apartment and breathed in the air-conditioned oxygen with relief.

Weather-clogged traffic, slush, raw winds, rain, bad memories.

Who needed it?

He dumped his duffel bag and the mail from the downstairs mailbox on a living-room cube table. First thing, he went to check his answering machine in the bedroom, his latest purchase before this out-of-town trip.

The next thing he knew, he’d own a cell phone and computer.

Well, he had the money for it now. Seven thousand dollars for a two-day trip, and a chance to get together with his mother. Sometimes life was too generous.

The machine’s red light was blinking, but Matt didn’t have the energy to sit down and take notes, which was what his schedule required nowadays.

Back in the living room, he noticed that one of his pieces of mail had somehow landed on the matching empty cube table.

This was a small padded mailer, exactly like the fateful one in which he had gotten the tape from what would become his on-air home, WCOO, “talk radio with heart.”

He still didn’t have a letter opener. Maybe he needed to get a small desk to sit by the door. Where to buy such a thing? Temple would know. He could call her, ask her.

The thought of contacting Temple always gave him a queasy push-pull in his gut, part guilty pleasure, part pure guilt. No. Be a big boy. He didn’t need a spirit guide for every step of his life, even the small interior-decorating ones.

He fetched a table knife from the kitchen and opened the lone mailer first, out of sentimentality and weird expectation. What life-altering surprise would this one hold? He supposed lottery winners who still bought tickets often felt that way.

An irregular lump deformed this package, but too small to be a cassette. A single die, maybe? Key chain? Some Strip joint gambling promotion?

A small golden object tumbled into his palm. A sculpture? A snake biting its own tail. He recognized the motif. The worm Ouroboros, ancient symbol of eternity; destruction and renewal. A single potent image of the cycle of creation: it begets, weds, impregnates, and slays itself, like nature. Over and over.

In centuries past, worms, snakes, and dragons all intertwined into a quasi-fantastic, quasi-religious symbolism. You had St. George and the dragon. The worm Ouroboros. The serpent in the Garden of Eden. The new religion chasing the tail of established superstition and biting it. He took the object to the French doors. Now he needed—yes, needed!—a magnifying glass. Who did he think he was, Sherlock Holmes? Why be a piker? A whole brass desk set for his yet-unbought new desk: letter opener, magnifying glass, stamp holder…

He squinted at the bantam-size chicken scratchings inside the snake. A K as in karat. But was it a 12-, 14-, or 18-K item? All he could tell was that it was purportedly real gold. And some Greek letters:

He picked up the envelope to study its exterior. His name hand printed on the outside. No return address.

Finally, he pushed his fingers into the small envelop until he pulled out a plum. An ordinary Post-it note. Its adhesive edge had clung to the bubble-pack lining the envelope.

Green rollerball ink slanted across the pink rectangular surface.

“Wear me!” Underlined.

He lifted the snake to the light. Well crafted, but weird.

Wear? How? Why?

As he stared at it, his blood slowed, then chilled. The room’s temperature hadn’t budged, but he felt as reptilian as a hibernating rattler himself.

This was a worm Ouroboros, all right, but it was also a ring.

The last ring he had worn had been the simple gold wedding band of a Catholic priest, a symbol of his commitment to celibacy, of his marriage to the Church. He hesitated, but he had to know: he jammed the ring onto a finger—the middle finger on his right hand.

It fit perfectly.

Wear me.

An order from…he knew who.

Drink me.

And Alice had shrunk.

Matt stared at Kitty O’Connor’s ring. At the order that came with it.

Wear me.

Or else.

And if he did, he’d shrink too.

Just like Alice.

He went to the bedroom to call Temple after all.

“You want Max?” she asked, incredulous, after two minutes of the usual banalities with which he had prefaced his request.

“I need to talk to him, or maybe vice versa. Can you ask him to get in touch with me?”

“Sure. I can ask.”

“That’s all that I ask.”

“There’s nothing you want to tell me?”

“I…had a good time in Chicago. Saw my mother.”

“Oh. I didn’t know you were gone.”

“Speaking engagement.” The word “engagement” suddenly took on a sinister new resonance. “Temple. Call him right away.”

“You got it.” She hesitated, didn’t want to say good-bye, wanted to ask a few questions. He didn’t want to answer any.

“Thanks,” he said quickly. “ ’Bye.”

It was ironic that he was rushing to hang up on Temple. Usually it was the other way around. A nasty thought had surfaced. Maybe his phone was tapped. He should have called Temple and made his unprecedented request from somewhere else.

Kitty O’Connor was the last person in the world he wanted to know that he was calling in Max Kinsella.

Matt tried to watch TV, then to listen to his new stereo. He went to the bedroom and looked for a book he hadn’t read before, or one he had and that he could count on to distract him.

Nothing worked.

The gold snake ring lay coiled on the otherwise empty gray cube table. All he needed was an apple to make an apropos still life. And maybe a naked woman. God knew there were a few in Las Vegas.

Probably his mother had been right. It was a godless town.

It takes a thief to catch a thief. To catch a stalker, did it take…Max Kinsella?

No. To catch a stalker, stalk the stalker’s past.

He ought to know that by now.

At 8:10 P.M., his doorbell rang.

Matt approached the coffered door with uncustomary caution.

When he opened it, Max Kinsella was leaning against the opposite wall, the illumination from Matt’s doorbell-level lamp uplighting his face into a Boris Karloff mask.

“I thought you’d call first.” Matt almost stuttered.

Max Kinsella, tall, dark, and all in black, including a long Western duster, on your doorstep was not a reassuring sight. Especially in eerie lamplight.

“I’m not a vampire.” His mocking, deep voice sounded very much like Bela Lugosi without the accent. “You don’t have to invite me in. But it would be nice.”

Matt stepped out into the small hall separating his unit from the building’s circling arterial hallway. He left the apartment door ajar.

“Maybe it’s better you turned up out here,” Matt said. “The place may be bugged. I thought of that after I called Temple.”

“Calling Temple seems to be a knee-jerk reaction with you.”

“It was the only way I knew to reach you.”

“Bugged. Curiouser and curiouser.” Kinsella pushed himself away from the wall in a motion as fluid as India ink. “Say nothing until I’m done.”

Matt let Kinsella precede him into the apartment, then sat on the red Kagan sofa that Temple had spied at a thrift shop and insisted he buy.

Spotting it stopped Kinsella cold, but then he moved to the bedroom, not making a sound.

Gumshoe, Matt thought, noticing his leather-soled shoes that resembled costly Italian loafers, but were probably a knockoff chosen for their quiet, downscale soles.

Kinsella was back in the main room like an apparition, passing through en route to the spare bedroom that Matt kept practically nothing in. Matt glimpsed an ebony ghost standing on a chair seat to check the ceiling light fixture.

Then Kinsella visited the kitchen and inspected all of the cupboards as well as the lighting fixtures. The living room, under and over everything, including behind light switch and electric plug outlet covers. The phone, of course, and all the electronic equipment Matt had so reluctantly purchased in the last couple of months.

Then the French doors to the patio, the patio, and back to the living room and bedroom for a second check.

It took thirty-five minutes.

When Kinsella came to sit on the Kagan sofa, he spoke at ordinary volume.

“A good thing you have such a spare design for living. Hard to bug. And no one has. Yet, I take it. You should check the phones, though, like I did, after I go, and every day. If you know what’s supposed to be in there, you recognize what isn’t. So what’s going on?”

“I wouldn’t have bothered you—”

“You have never bothered me.” Kinsella’s smile was so slight it was anorexic.

His face was angular and arresting, rather than handsome, but Matt guessed that women didn’t notice the difference.

“You wouldn’t call on me unless something was drastically wrong,” Kinsella went on. “What?”

Matt pointed to the snake ring.

Kinsella’s long, spidery fingers plucked it like a grape, then held it up to the light as if his fingertips were a bezel for a jewel.

“Good quality. Craftsman made. Perhaps not in this country. Not very valuable. A few hundred dollars maybe. The worm Ouroboros, of course. It symbolizes eternity.”

“Is that all?”

“Probably not. More would take research.” He held the ring toward Matt.

Matt couldn’t help it; he drew back as from a live snake.

“Speak,” said Kinsella, as if addressing a trained dog.

“I thought it came in the mail when I got back from out of town. But I dumped all the mail on that table.” He pointed to the matching cube still covered in unopened letters. “I now think this was ‘delivered’ earlier. When I was gone.”

“Someone surreptitiously entered your unit, that’s why you suspected bugging. But who? Who’d want to bug you?”

“An acquaintance of yours.”

Max’s gaze shifted to Matt’s midriff. “Kitty the Cutter. Temple does have a way with words, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, she does, and this Kitty woman is your auld acquaintance not-to-be-forgot, not mine. She’s…attached herself to me, I don’t know why, but she’s getting dangerous.”

“Not ‘getting,’ my lad. She always was.”

“Drop that phony brogue. This is not Ireland, north or south. This is not twenty years ago, and this is not my problem.”

“Why would Kitty O’Connor send you a worm Ouroboros?”

Matt picked up the Post-it note and handed it to Kinsella.

“Don’t you have tweezers?”

“No.”

“Pliers?”

“No.”

“Sugar tongs?”

“For the love of God, no! What has that to do with anything?”

“Only that we shouldn’t be handling these artifacts. Pieces of physical evidence, in fact. In case we need the police to take fingerprints.”

“I don’t have any pincerlike devices. You saw the place.”

“Then get on the phone, call Temple, and ask her to bring up some tweezers.”

“Do we have to involve Temple?”

“You called her in the first place.”

“I don’t want her to know about this.”

“All right. Go down, come up with whatever story it takes to get them, and borrow some tweezers.”

Matt rose, left the apartment door open, took the stairs beside the elevator a floor down, then headed for the small private hallway to Temple’s apartment.

Before he rang the bell, he put his palm on the door, like a medium reading the scene of a haunting. This was the scene of a haunting, all right, his own haunting.

He rang the bell, waiting on pins and needles for her to answer.

“I need a pair of tweezers,” he blurted out on sight.

Temple blinked, signifying polite mystification that he should be eager to dispel. She knew something was up. He didn’t dispel anything. She was more suspicious than ever.

“Tweezers? Has Max—?

“I’ve got a…domestic emergency. Have you got some tweezers or not? Quick!”

Still blinking, Temple disappeared. She reappeared a moment later with tweezers rampant in a raised, closed right hand. A fist, as it were.

“Will these work?”

“Thanks.” Matt snatched them before he had to look into her soft steel blue eyes too long. He was bound to start saying more than he should. “I’ll bring ’em back…tomorrow or sometime.”

He raced down the little hall, around the big circular hall, and up the stairs again.

In his apartment, Kinsella was bending over the cube table staring at the Post-it note.

He looked up to say, “Plastic baggie?”

“That I’ve got.” Matt went to the kitchen to fetch a big one.

Taking Temple’s tweezers, Kinsella placed the manila envelop and the Post-it note in the baggie. “A present for Molina. She’ll do anything for you, right? It would be best not to mention the suspected source. Tell her a demented female fan is stalking you.”

“It’s the truth.”

Kinsella cocked his head. “Sit down and tell me about it.”

Matt sat, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak for a moment. He still felt like a body double for the real actor in this instance.

“I don’t get it,” he exploded finally to Kinsella. “She’s a demon from your past. What’s she doing in my present?”

“Bad luck, I guess. What does this phrase mean, ‘Wear me’?”

“I think the snake is a ring. She’s approached me a couple of times again recently.”

“To maim again?”

“No. She knows I’d never let her get that close again.” Matt felt his hand go to his scarred side, despite himself. “This TitaniCon I took Mariah Molina to—”

“And how did that happen, I wonder?”

“That has nothing to do with this. Temple showed up there, and a woman I used to work with at the volunteer hotline, ConTact. And all three…females were somehow attacked during the convention, including Mariah.”

Kinsella became very intent. “I didn’t know that.”

“You don’t know everything, after all, I guess.”

He smiled. “No, I just act like I do. Part of the magician’s code of behavior. I know you hate coming to me with this, but it’s better than Temple, isn’t it? Why?”

“Because this Kathleen threatened Temple. And Sheila, the ConTact employee, and Mariah, and even poor Janice.”

“Janice?”

“You don’t know her. I hope. She’s an artist, does sketches for the police sometimes.”

“Hmmm. The talented portraitist of Miss Kitty. I did see that piece of work.”

“The fact is, this woman has threatened everybody. And now she sends me this…token. Like she’s daring me to not do as she says, or she’ll take it out on the people around me.”

“Why you?”

“Because you’re not available, right? You’re Mr. Invisible. You’re her real target, you have to be. But you’re holing up somewhere no one can find you, except Temple probably, so the rest of us have been turned into targets. She is your old girlfriend, after all.”

“Besides my professional services, what do you want?”

“I want you to tell me everything about her and your relationship with her.”

“Sorry, Father, I’m not about to confess my youthful sins to you.”

“I’m not a priest anymore, and you’re not a kid anymore. Whatever happened in Northern Ireland twenty years ago triggered what’s happening here and now. I’ve got to figure out what’s driving her. Don’t you understand? Temple is in danger. We’re all in danger. Except you.”

Kinsella smiled and turned the Ouroboros ring in his fingers.

“No, I’m in danger too. It’s just not obvious yet.” He glanced at Matt. “I suppose she’s targeting you because you’re the equivalent of the seventeen-year-old boy I was all those years ago. You’re a virgin, right? Don’t bother denying or claiming it. I don’t care about your sex life, or lack of it, as long as Temple isn’t involved. You’re me seventeen years ago. An overeager innocent trying to right global wrongs in a single summer. You don’t come across greenhorns like that every day, or at least Miss Kitty doesn’t, not with the role she’s played for the IRA all these years, seducing rich old men for gun money. Guns and roses, that’s been her specialty. Fortunately, she’s spent most of her time in Central and South America. Until now.

“But I doubt the rich old guys have done anything for her ego. It’s poor young men she really likes to prey on. I don’t doubt that she’s been trying to track me down, and she wouldn’t have if I hadn’t settled with Temple here in Vegas for a few months. So you’re right; it’s my fault she found us all.

“That’s all I can tell you. She seems to want to replay that deadly summer in Londonderry, when my cousin Sean was blown up in a pub bombing by the IRA. I lived to tell the tale only because I was losing my innocence to Kathleen O’Connor at the very moment he died.”

“You realize,” Matt said, “that if she’s repeating a pattern, and if I’m right in suspecting that she sent your cousin into that pub bombing deliberately, that she’ll need to kill one of us…again?”

“Will she? What does she want now? Right now? From you. Best guess.”

“To torment me.” Matt thought that was obvious. “To force me to do what she says by threatening the people around me.”

“But not me.”

“She’s never mentioned you to me.”

“Hmmm.”

Matt hesitated. He couldn’t tell Kinsella Kitty’s stated price: Matt’s body and soul, i.e., his body would do because the soul went with it. Kinsella would probably laugh, and say, “Screw her, then, and save us all.” Kinsella would probably just laugh.

He wouldn’t understand the price Matt had paid, that his soul did ride on his priestly purity, even now that he was no longer a priest.

Especially, he couldn’t tell Kinsella that emotionally, spiritually, he was utterly married to Temple. That she was the only woman he could see sharing his first sexual moments with, that in his heart, reality aside, he was still saving himself for Temple.

He remembered teaching virginity to preteens, using Saint Maria Goretti, the forgiving rape victim, as a model. That was going too far; that was woman as eternal victim. But the violation of rape or molestation was real, for a child, and for an adult. For a woman, and for a man.

Matt still had innocence to lose, long beyond the age most people are permitted to be innocent.

If Kitty O’Connor coerced that hope and dream from him, she had done something worse to him than Cliff Effinger had managed in years of daily domestic tyranny. He couldn’t let her do it and still be whole.

And, of course, she knew that.

Max Kinsella could never understand that. Except possibly Matt’s hopeless devotion to Temple. That he would understand only too well, and too personally.

Where could Matt go, who could help him, who would understand what he was up against?

Which was a devil in human guise.

He looked at the serpentine ring.

Beware of beautiful women bearing gifts.

And old grudges.

And golden chains.