Cat In A Midnight Choir

“I take it you’re describing the Synth.”

“I take it that’s how the Synth describes itself.”

Max nodded. “Members of a secret cabal of magicians might flatter themselves that way. The snake has always been considered a symbol of guile, wisdom, and evil.” He frowned for a moment. “I wonder if it’s a parallel image of the Worm Ouroboros.”

“The Worm Ouroboros?”

“You’ve seen the image: a snake devouring its own tail. A symbol of eternity and entropy: the way things fall apart and unite at one and the same time, over and over.”

“How do you know about this stuff?”

Max smiled. “While you were dabbling in horoscopes, I was dabbling in mystical mumbo-jumbo. In some forms it’s called philosophy. In others, superstition.”

“We both must have had a very weird adolescence.”

“Perfectly and normally abnormal, I’m afraid.” Max touched the crude five-sided “house” that pinpointed the stars of the constellation Ophiuchus. “Like all secret occult societies, the Synth needs to leave a trail. That means it needs someone to follow and find it.”

“Why?”

“Why does anything lethal leave a trail? To entrap. To destroy.”

Temple looked at the book in which she’d found such a perfect clue.

She didn’t feel like a mouse, but she could smell the strong, lilting odor of sharp cheddar.

Max saw her to the door, his arm draped over her shoulder like a comforting shawl.

“Good detective work,” he said. He squinted out the door. “And you did an excellent job of hiding your car.”

“Ah, thanks…but actually I did a good job of changing my car.”

He looked again.

“That ’s yours?”

“What?” she asked innocently.

“Not the Odyssey next door. The little red thingamajig.”

“It’s a Miata.”

Max’s arm left her shoulders. “A Miata. Is that a good investment?”

“I don’t know. It’s a fun car.”

“A convertible? For a redhead? In Las Vegas?”

“I’ll get a big hat.”

“Temple.” Max turned her to look at him. “This is the first major purchase you’ve made since we’ve been together without asking me about it.”

“Well, yeah. I suppose so.”

“I really can’t fit into a Miata.”

“You can’t? Oh. I didn’t think of that.”

“Oh.”

“But…we always drive places in your car. Or cars. Or whatever They leave for you.”

“It won’t always be like that. Haven’t you been listening to me?”

“Yes, but the Storm was worn out and I finally had some real income from my semipermanent floating PR work for the Crystal Phoenix and the Jersey Joe Jackson attraction is done and open and a big success and I thought I deserved something…and this seemed like fun at the moment.”

“You used to think that what we did was fun at the moment. You used to consult me about big decisions.”

“It’s a…little car.”

“It’s a big issue. I don’t fit in it. Are you sending me a message?”

“Max, no! Don’t be paranoid. I wasn’t even thinking about you.”

The words hung there, an intended reassurance hoisted on its own petard.

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” Temple said.

“No one ever does,” Max said, and shut the door on any further discussion.

Temple felt awful. She wanted to blame Molina for it, but that was too simple.

The car looked like a toy as she approached it. Silly. Too small for anyone but a shrunken Alice in Wonderland. Eat me. Humble pie, that’s what she should eat. She felt about two inches tall, and short stature was such an issue with her that feeling small meant she felt really, really guilty. Because she was.

She’d only been thinking of herself when she’d bought the Miata, and maybe not very maturely at that.

Despite the sun-warmed sidewalk, her feet in their Mootsie’s Tootsies high-rise slides felt ice cold. This was a lot of money to spend on a whim. An impractical whim. A whim that hurt a significant other’s feelings. Max always acted so strong she sometimes forgot that he had feelings to hurt.

She got in, arranged herself and her tote bag, glanced at Max’s stoic house facade. Here she sat, in a brand-new car, with a brand-new clue in her tote bag, and she felt horrible.

The only thing to do when troubled was to get on with the routine of life. She started the car and headed back toward the Circle Ritz. She needed to stop at the Lucky’s store first. Buy groceries. Her least favorite chore. She saw a lot more chocolate in her future than was healthy for her figure.

Forty-five minutes later Temple stood on a sun-baked asphalt parking lot, her arms cradling brown paper bags, bulging plastic bags dangling from both wrists, wondering where to put her groceries.

One brown bag could share the passenger seat with her tote bag if she squeezed them together and belted them in. The second brown bag and a couple plastic bags could crowd into the well behind the seats. The other two plastic bags full of bottled water could go in the trunk, such as it was.

Now. What would hold the groceries down while she whizzed along the street? Time to put up the top, roll up the windows, and turn on the AC. This would be one buttoned-down convertible for the trip home.

Misgivings nagged her the whole way. How could she have bought a car that Max didn’t fit in, much less a few bags of groceries? She had bought in to a sales pitch without considering the practicalities. She had been suckered.

Her back straightened against the seat back as the AC wafted the curls off her face.

Maybe the car wasn’t the bill of goods she’d been sold.

Maybe it was Molina who was the slippery saleswoman. Maybe her whole mood had shifted at the woman’s dire predictions about Max, and her cruel revelation of the whereabouts of the ring. Come on, the Storm hadn’t been just Max’s size, either, although she had bought that car before she knew him.

No, the question was why Molina was bearing down so hard on Max right now. Why was she warning Temple? To get her to do something. What? Question Max. Break up with him. Throw him off balance. Distract him from Molina’s moves against him.

Max had warned her. Had said Molina could have motives Temple might not even guess at.

That he wouldn’t say more only meant that Temple had many more puzzles than Ophiuchus to solve.

Smoke Signals

Hoping this was the about-to-be-perfect end of a perfectly dreadful day, Temple zoomed into the Circle Ritz lot. She parked the Miata as close to the door as she could while still sheltering it under the big old palm tree’s erratic shade.

As she stood beside the car extracting her groceries from various nooks and crannies, she heard another engine pull into the lot: Electra’s old pink Probe, now Matt’s, and now painted the color of a white sepulcher.

Temple brightened as she balanced the two brown bags, her tote bag’s considerable weight swinging from the crook of her right elbow. Her key ring was in her right fist.

Great. Matt was here just in time to help her with the bags.

He exited the Probe, locked it, and thrust his keys into the pocket of his khaki pants. Looking neither right nor left, but at the ground, he rapidly crossed the asphalt to the building’s side door.

Temple opened her mouth to hail him, except that his haste, his almost deliberate avoidance of looking anywhere near her direction made her freeze in chill indecision.

In those moments of hesitancy, Matt was through the door and gone.

Talk about being the Invisible Woman! How could he have missed the sight of a strange red Miata in the almost-empty lot?

Fact was, he couldn’t have. He must have spotted it as he turned in, and he could hardly miss her.

But he had.

Temple trudged toward the building’s glass door, the darkness inside allowing the glass to reflect her overburdened figure.

She looked like Little Orphan Annie disguised as a bag lady. Or maybe Typhoid Mary. Matt had seemed distracted lately, and he did work late hours and travel out of state for speaking engagements. He was semifamous now. Guess Mr. Midnight no longer had time to hobnob with the locals.

She shifted the bags to one side as she prepared to grab the door handle and shoulder her way into the cool darkness beyond.

It opened of its own invisible accord, like the eerie door at Max’s house. Temple dodged inside before her bags slipped and she found them lifting out of her arms.

“Sorry,” Matt said, scanning the parking lot behind her as the door swung shut. “I was busy thinking about tonight’s show and I didn’t notice you out there. Is that a new car or something?”

“Ye-es! Thanks. You like the car?”

“Fine,” he said, juggling grocery bags. Not the kind of tribute that the new owner of a racy red convertible expected. Matt still seemed in a hurry. “Can you press the elevator button? Thanks.”

“Well,” Temple commented, “everyone around here was switching cars — Electra with your Elvismobile and you with her Probe, so I thought I’d trade the Storm for a Miata.”

He nodded, looking over her shoulder, then at the bronze pointer above the door that showed what floor the elevator was on.

Forget about Matt not paying proper attention to her new car, Temple thought. He wasn’t paying any attention to her!

What was she today, a poor cousin of Typhoid Mary, Miss Poison Ivy?

Before she could say anything, the elevator door ground open and Matt leaped aboard. “Hit the floor button, would you?” he instructed.

No, she was Miss Elevator Operator.

They both seemed stunned into silence on the brief ride up one floor.

But once the elevator doors parted, Matt was again peering up and down the hall like a wary Doberman.

It was like he was afraid to be seen with her.

Surely he didn’t think that her resumed relationship with Max meant she couldn’t have male friends? That was the problem. She didn’t have a clue as to what was going on with Matt these days. Something had come between them, and she didn’t know what or why, only that she felt horribly left out on all fronts: with Lieutenant C. R. Molina, the Mystifying Max Kinsella, and now Mr. Midnight Matt Devine.

Temple was the youngest of a family of five brothers and the only girl. She ought to be used to feeling left out by now, but in fact the older she got the worse she felt about it. Would she never count? Was she always “too little” to tell, to take along, to trust, to treat like a mature adult?

“Temple?”

Matt was looking down at her, peering into her face as if reading some of her distress. Professional PR lady couldn’t allow that!

“Yeah, what?”

“Uh, could you take your keys and open the door before I drop these jam-packed bags.”

“Oh. I guess I overdid it at the store. I was…distracted.”

“You? Buy groceries when you’re distracted?”

“Well, you’ve been pretty distracted yourself lately.”

“Busy,” he said quickly.

“Right. Me too.”

She still didn’t move toward the door, but he started to brush past her as if expecting it to open on its own. Open sesame, wasn’t that the formula? But Temple didn’t think any magic phrases would work anymore, certainly not on her door, and maybe not on her, ever again.

j

The grocery bags ended up crushed between them so they actually had to look each other in the eye — eyes, which were so evasive and edgy and anxious that Matt took a giant step backward against the opposite wall and stood there like the boy with his finger in the dyke keeping out all the floodwaters of the North Sea, except he looked more like a carry out boy from Lucky’s.

“Put…the…bags…down,” she paraphrased Gene Wilder from Young Frankenstein.

Matt just looked bewildered. It was a vintage movie and Temple imagined one didn’t see many movies in a Roman Catholic seminary unless they were about Lourdes or Joan of Arc.

But he put the bags down on the floor, propped up by the wall, and he put his hands in his pants pockets. And stood there, looking Brad Pitt-adorable if Brad Pitt had been really, really good-looking.

Temple leaned against her opposite wall and looked away. “It’s been a bad day.”

“I got that.”

“First I had to listen to Molina tell me the sky was falling and then my new car decided it wouldn’t even hold my groceries.”

“Groceries? There won’t be that many groceries if you return to your usual ways. You’re not exactly Wolfgang Puck, you know.”

“You mean Martha Stewart.”

“If I was referring to your whole domestic mise-en-scène, yes, I would have meant that.”

“‘Mise-en-scène’? That is giving my life way too high a profile. How about misery-en-scène?”

“Temple, what’s wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing. Max is in trouble so deep he won’t talk to me about it, though Molina will, but nothing’s wrong. You’re running around with a sketch artist and won’t talk to me, or even look at me, but nothing’s wrong. Molina’s gloating like a vampire at a blood bank and she won’t tell me anything except that I’m moving in all the wrong directions, but nothing’s wrong.

“There.” Temple folded her arms and stared sullenly at her grocery bags slumping against the opposite wall next to Matt’s khaki-clad legs. “Nothing’s wrong.”

He was silent for so long she was almost tempted to look up at him, but resisted. She felt very rebellious all of a sudden.

“I can see,” he said finally, “why you’d think I was avoiding you, but it’s just that late-night schedule of mine and the travel.”

“That’s a lie, Matt. You don’t lie well. You want to avoid me.”

“I don’t want to —”

“Listen, you’re free to do whatever you need to. I just thought that we were friends —”

“No.”

She paused, startled into looking up.

“We might have been friends once, we might be friends once again. But now. Friends. We are not friends.”

The wave of disbelief, of unallayed hurt that struck like the opposite wall moving and smashing her between it and the plaster at her back, was a tsunami.

Nothing, she saw, was what she had thought it was.

Lives were being lived apart from her, separate from her, and they were not what she assumed them to be.

Molina was right. She knew nothing.

Signals Received

Matt watched Temple’s usual wall of blithe good cheer crumble into a shimmer of plaster dust around her.

He suddenly realized that of all of them, she knew nothing of the pervasive threats of Kitty the Cutter. He had confided in Molina. He had confided in Max Kinsella, of all penances the most painful. He had not breathed a word to Temple.

It was in the name of her own protection, but it had isolated her, infantalized her. His enemies and acquaintances he could tell. Temple, whom he most feared and most feared for, he had kept in the dark. And she knew it, sensed it, felt it.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’ll open the door. I can get the groceries in myself.”

“We are not friends —”

She looked away again, in that heartbreakingly unfocused way too proud to show distress.

“— because we are too close to being something else. You know that. It’s always been true.”

Now she didn’t dare look at him, and he found his hopeful, craven brain thinking, thinking…here, this tiny hallway. Not even she would, could have it bugged. Here. Now. Up against the wall. It would solve every dilemma but sin, and sin seemed such a small fault when hearts and souls were at stake.

“Not friends,” she was saying faintly. “Oh, that’s part of it, you know.”

“I do know. Know more than I ever did before. And now I know that friends is not enough.”

She stared at him, against her better judgment.

He understood he had the power. Just had to use it. He stepped forward, brought himself close to her. She didn’t blink, didn’t flinch, couldn’t.

She’d always known, but had hoped he wouldn’t, because then there’d be no one to say stop. No. The known norm is better than the imagined nirvana.

She knew more than he about what could be. He felt it, though, as he never had before, and his own self-interest was so strong, both subjugated to her and dominant over her, it was like sensing a hurricane in his heart.

His fingertips touched her shoulders.

Just that.

It seemed they stood in some still center while an electric dervish whirled around them.

Impulse mattered, not thought. Feeling, not fear.

He bent his head to hers.

She turned away.

He turned away.

They were closer than ever.

He turned.

She turned.

They couldn’t avoid each other.

Always, always, turning, turning until they came round right.

Temple closed her eyes.

Anything, anything could happen. He could make it happen.

Suddenly the magnetism reversed itself. Or he did. He could make anything happen now, and he chose reversal.

They drew apart, leaned against their separate walls, said nothing.

“I don’t understand,” Temple said, her always dusky voice hoarse now. “But I will someday, won’t I?”

“I hope so.”

“Will I —” She hesitated, almost braced herself for something. “Will I ever understand why you knew that Molina had found my lost ring at a crime scene, and she told you and not me? And why you never told me that she had it?”

If she had wanted to throttle a moment and its aftermath, she had committed bloody murder right now.

“Ring?” he repeated, suddenly remembering the loathed object on his key ring: his own crime-scene memento. Only that crime scene had been his apartment.

“My ring. You know, the gorgeous opal-and-diamond-studded band Max got me in New York, that you both saw me wearing when you went together to the Opium Den to see Shangri-La perform.”

“That ring.”

“You make it sound so…common.”

“I don’t mean to. It was police business. Molina told me in confidence. She wanted me to distrust Kinsella more than I did already, maybe use it against him. I wouldn’t be manipulated to hurt you. And then, the circumstances…it was a professional confidence. I didn’t feel I could pass it on.”

“The privilege of the confessional! Great. You were already with Molina that evening. Hand in glove. Why should I ever think you owed anything to me, even honesty?”

“She browbeat me into going with her that night. You know how she’s always dogged both of us about Kinsella, trying to get us to crack, betray him. It was all part of her game plan.”

“That Dragon Lady magician calling me up on stage and then making my ring disappear wasn’t part of Molina’s game plan.”

“No, neither was your complete disappearance from the onstage chamber right after that.”

“The one time I get to be part of audience participation at something,” Temple went on bitterly, “and it turns out to be a kidnap attempt.”

“Maybe worse,” Matt said, his voice darkening. “Nothing we’re talking about is anything to underestimate. You were abducted and that magician and her whole crew vanished. Then your ring was found later near where a woman had been strangled, an ex-magician’s assistant, no less. Molina’s games are not for the heck of it. She’s trying to close down a lot of unsolved cases, and, like it or not, Max Kinsella seems to be at the heart of most of them.”

“So. You’re so busy now, with your own life and times, you should care about any of this, about me?”

“I care more than I can —”

“Wait. Let me finish. Or you do care, hallelujah, you care so much you’d like to see Max slapped in irons and taken away to death row, because then he’d be out of your way.”

“No, Temple. What I care about or don’t care about doesn’t matter. It’s what I’d do. I’d never hurt anyone for my own gain. But I can’t betray a confidence either. Molina told me a piece of police business. I didn’t want to know it. I understood that she was using me, that she was hoping I’d tell you and undermine your confidence in Max, don’t you see? But I didn’t do that. I honored her confidence and by doing that, I avoided being manipulated by her.”

“You didn’t avoid betraying me!” Temple’s eyes burned with anger. “If we really were friends, you wouldn’t try to protect me by concealing things from me. Maybe Molina was trying to drive you and me apart. Telling one person a secret that leaves another person out is a pretty time-tested way to do that.”

“Molina has no personal interest in all this.”

“Are you sure?”

“Molina? She’s the Great Stone Mountain of the Metropolitan Police Department.”

“Are you sure?”

Matt let his mind pull back, start wondering.

“Why is she so down on Max? Why does she never let up? Does she need a fall guy? Why does she try to use you to split Max and me apart? Does she really want Max? You? You’ve been thinking of her as a job, a function, a career, not as a human being. As a woman. Maybe she has agendas you haven’t even imagined.”

“And if she does, what was her agenda in showing you the ring? Now?”

They both paused, breathless, to consider their own charges.

“‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’” Temple quoted Sir Walter Scott.

“‘When first we practice to deceive’? That’s not what we have here. I don’t think anyone wants to deceive,” Matt said. “But to protect.”

“Protecting means you put yourself above the protected. You know better.”

“It’s a parental role, yes.”

“Or a priest’s?”

“Or an undercover operative’s?”

“Or a policewoman’s?” Temple, laughed, not happily. “I guess lowly PR flacks are stuck being the protectees. Nothing noble and elevating about my job.”

“Temple.”

“I am tired of being protected by people meddling in my life for my own good. It’s my life. I’m allowed to mess it up all by myself.”

“But not to lose it.”

“That’s what you’re really worried about?”

He nodded, unable to speak, to voice the anxiety.

She relaxed a little.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, too. Just like Max and the lieutenant. Join the club. I hate what people do to you for your own good. I hated it when I was five years old and I hate it worse now.”

“It’s worse when they think about doing something to you for their own good, and not yours.”

Her eyes grew suddenly shrewd. “That’s what almost happened a little while ago with you, didn’t it?”

He nodded miserably.

That seemed to cheer her up considerably. “You were being selfish, really?”

“Irresponsible,” he admitted. Almost lethally irresponsible.

“So it wasn’t my own good you were thinking of?”

“For a few, unforgivable seconds, no.”

Temple let out a huge breath. “Well. At last! Somebody who’s acting like a human being around me. What a relief!” Her voice grew mischievous, if not quite flirtatious. “We’ll have to try it again sometime.”

Matt bent to pick up her groceries.

“I’ll take the stuff in. Just go while you’re ahead. That’s what they say at the craps tables.”

He did.

He had never been so close to the perfect end of the fairy tale, but he realized that the witch would have been waiting to extract her price anyway. Temple wasn’t his way out, no matter that she was the most tempting way out. He’d have to find another one.

That’s when he knew that there were no perfect endings, just endless wishes that there were.

Disappearance Inc.

I have spent the night not panicking.

This is hard to do when you are locked in a closet in a strange house that is hidden behind a forgotten cemetery. Especially when sharing said closet with you is a bunch of spooky magician’s gear and a stiff stretched out on the floor like a rug du jour.

I mean this guy — and I have pussyfooted enough over the corpus delicti in the dark to know that it is a guy — is harder than the concrete they wrapped around Ugly Hugo Manicotti’s tootsies before taking him to diving school in Lake Mead back in ’59.

Eventually I settle down to the head’s-up detecting I am noted for and realize that my closet corpse is so wooden for a reason: he is a giant-size Pinocchio, a mere dummy probably used in some body-switching illusion or another.

This is what comes of taking a supposed relative for a partner: the usually canny operative loses all sense of proportion when the partner in question goes missing.

I revise my previous conclusions. If Miss Louise had figured out the dead guy is really just deadwood, she would have had no compunction about moving on from our point of entry to other, more interesting, and thus more perilous, places. We two need to have a serious talk about not pressing forward on our own, leaving the senior partner in the dark quite literally.

I tromp over Dead Fred’s nose, which is not prevaricatingly long (although the dummy maker must have had a sick sense of humor as something else on this anatomically correct stiff is), and nose the door open a smidge with my own admirably proportioned schnoz.

That it obliges my nudge tells me Miss Louise has gone this way. I slip out into the semidark and pull the door almost shut again.

Of course I am at a loss, while Miss Louise has obviously scouted this terrain previously.

I am really going to bawl her out for numerous acts unbecoming to a partner when I find her. I eye the room. It is vast, shadowy, and smells of mothballs and dustballs. I am guessing it is a mostly unused storeroom. The Cloaked Conjuror had hit Las Vegas like a leopard-spotted tornado only months ago. I imagine clandestinely finding and purchasing this hideout was a difficult job, and did not leave much time for dusting every nook and cranny.

Housekeeping is such a bore anyway, which is why it is better done by the female of the species. I note with disgust that my particular female of the species has carefully used her fluffy rear member to blur her distinctive footprints across the wood-plank flooring.

I must follow in her footsteps, but more slowly, lacking the builtin feather duster, as my aft member is long, strong, and buzz-cut. See what I mean about females being suited for domestic tasks?

After backing to the door and doctoring my trail with dust-busting swipes from my front mitts, I am able to nose another door open and survey a long hallway with the kind of railing that nasty Damien kid from the Omen films would love to push an unwary relative over.

I am nobody’s unwary relative, not even Miss Louise’s, so I look sharp both ways before pulling the door almost shut behind me — I believe in rapid retreats — and tiptoeing down the long, thread-bare carpet that looks like something Queen Elizabeth tossed out at Windsor Castle. After the fire.

Wherever my wandering waif has gone, it is somewhere in a decaying mansion filled with the ancient traces of — I sniff the air — rats, bats, and…cats!

Somehow I do not believe that Miss Midnight Louise all by her lovely self in a few hours has accounted for the distinct attar of cats I sense in the air. Nor is that a lingering scent of days gone by, as is the essence of rat and bat.

These are contemporary cats. Alarmingly current cats, and of a strange, potent, malodorous breed I have not encountered before, not even in my wide and long travels.

That darn brat! She has rushed in where her elders would hesitate to tread, and now I have to get her out of trouble before anything drastic happens. I sniff again, though I am sadly lacking the specialized skills of even the smallest breed of dog. Ah! A waft of willfulness. An odor of the nunnery. A scent of superiority. Midnight Louie has his quarry and he will hunt her down.

Easier vowed than done.

I soon discover that the house is vast and rambling, a shadowed stucco labyrinth accessorized with enough black wrought-iron railings and lighting fixtures and hardware to supply the Spanish Inquisition for a couple hundred years.

Corners that aren’t occupied by vintage magical artifacts are the property of empty suits of armor or such wall ornaments as fully loaded medieval cross-bows.

While human occupation seems distinctly sparse, I scent enough passing cat tracks to make me think the place is haunted by unseen felines. Maybe Los Muertos are really Los Gatos Muertos.

The hair rises on my hackles at that encouraging thought.

Worse, with all the Big Cat spoor, I cannot detect the delicate trail of Midnight Louise. It had been a black day (excuse the expression from the senior partner of Midnight Inc.) when she had undergone the politically correct procedure: it had neutered her scent trail as well as her feminine nature. Not that Miss Midnight Louise had ever displayed much of a feminine sensibility, before or after her operation.

I rest in the shadow of another of the empty-headed knightly guards and ponder what to do next. This joint must have as many rooms as a yuppie has flavors of exotic coffee to brew in the granite-kitchen-countertop Krups.

I think like a crook.

What would be the creepiest, most inaccessible, unsuspected part of this mausoleum where I could get up to nefarious doings uninterrupted?

There is only one answer. Well, two. Either the attic or the basement.

Now, basements are a rarity in Las Vegas. Hot climates don’t lend themselves to cramped, damp, clay-walled holes in the ground. Most homes here are built on concrete slabs. Residents know that there is nothing creepier under their toes than some flattened scorpions crushed during construction.

Myself, I will take a dusty, dry old attic over a dank, dark basement any day,

Which is why I suspect this joint is old enough, and was lavish enough in its heyday, to have supported such a nice, builtin set decoration as a basement. I mean, the place already is a perfect setting for a slasher movie.

The only nice part about hunting for a basement is that the entrance is usually near my favorite part of any domicile: the kitchen.

So I pad over cool tile, keeping near the walls where I can always slink under a piece of furniture at a moment’s notice. I finally find the stairs, snaking up the wall like a boa constrictor up a banana tree trunk.

And there I finally hear something: sound and motion in what has seemed until now a dark and deserted house.

It looks like I will be visiting the attic, after all.

And then I freeze, so still my whiskers would snap like whips if I were to move again.

I am not alone.

Not only that but the presence I now sense is not one of the many domestic cat trails I have crossed during my wanderings. It is not feline at all, which is odd in this house so marked by the presence of my kind, small or gigantic.

It is man. One man. As black as the night we share. I watch him move like a tide of shadow up the staircase, always rising, never seeming to move much, yet eating up steps like the ocean swallows sand.

I allow one whisker to twitch in recognition. Or tribute. It is the only human I would consider for a partnership in Midnight Inc. It is the incomparable cat burglar in the midnight cat suit. It is Mr. Max Kinsella himself out for an undercover stroll, right where I have decided all the action is. Or where it would be did either of us know what most of this action was about.

I wonder if Miss Temple knows that he goes wandering around at night without her.

I suppose she does. She is a very modern lady. She certainly knows that I do, and what is good for the Tomcat is good for the Maxman.

Frankly, I am pretty impressed by Mr. Max’s savvy and nerve. He is a lot bigger and thus easier to spot than I am.

I decide to follow his lead and pour myself up the stairs like a sinuous Slinky toy defying gravity and going up, not down.

No one notices Mr. Max, and Mr. Max does not notice me.

That is the way it should be.

If only Miss Midnight Louise was not a loose cannon somewhere in the vicinity, I would not have a thing to worry about.

Not that I ever worry.

Vamp…

Shaken by the imagined lethal consequences of his own scenario, Matt dialed Molina’s office as soon as he got back to his apartment.

She had said “later.” Now was later. Maybe too late.

“I’ve really got to talk to you privately right away,” he said as soon as she answered, skipping the usual greetings, not even saying who he was. He sounded more like her than himself, but none of the usual social chatter seemed necessary anymore. “Right away.”

“That’s obvious,” she said. “Where? You’re apparently too freaked to tolerate a police station meeting.”

“Freaked.” The word made his mind speed down emotional dead ends like a rat navigating a maze of brain tissue. “I guess you could call it that. Some place where no one could draw the wrong conclusions. Some place…happenstance.”

The other end of the line went silent. Finally: “One of the hotels?”

“No, a lot of bad stuff has happened in the hotels around here.”

“You’re not kidding.”

“How about —?” He knew she wouldn’t like it, but he did. “The Blue Dahlia.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t shown up there in ages.”

“Why not?”

“Because…none of your business.”

“Because a woman’s body was dumped in the parking lot, and it became your business, that’s why. You really need to get back on that particular horse, Carmen.”

“You’re telling me what I need? You’re the one with a stalker who won’t let you breathe without looking in your rearview mirror.”

“They must miss you at the club.”

“I always came and went when it suited me. That was part of the deal.”

“Part of the charm. You don’t want to lose that outlet.”

“Singing?”

“That, and being unpredictable.”

“You think I’ve been predictable?”

“Lately? Yes.”

A long silence on the phone. It wasn’t just that being predictable was insulting. In her line of work it was dangerous.

“You oughta be a psychologist, Matt, anybody ever tell you that?”

“My guidance counselor in high school, and look where it got me.”

“Okay, Mr. Midnight. Carmen rides the high C’s again. The Blue Dahlia. Tonight. After nine. Watch your back.”

Matt was smiling as he hung up. He felt the same satisfaction as when sweet reason had encouraged a radio caller to take a baby step past some personal stumbling block.

He understood why Lieutenant C. R. Molina needed to moonlight as the semianonymous jazz singer Carmen. No last name. Molina always said she sang because she could, and she was right: her voice was a terrible thing to waste, a smoky contralto born to carry ’40s torch songs to the Casbah and back. But there was much more to her clandestine singing career than that.

Somewhere, far in the past, young Carmen had died a necessary death, resurfacing as the gender-neutral C. R. The only time her birth name came out to play was on the tiny stage of the Blue Dahliaand only when Lieutenant Molina decided to loosen the leash. Carmen showed up when she showed up. The trio that backed her knew that, and most often played sans vocals. The Blue Dahlia management knew that. The customers knew that.

And they all liked it that way. In her fashion, Molina was a magician, appearing when and where least expected, then vanishing again. It was odd she so detested Max Kinsella, since they had that arbitrary magical showmanship in common. But sometimes Like loathes Like just because it recognizes itself through a fun-house mirror darkly.

Matt found his thoughts jerked back toward the woman he really had to worry about: Kathleen O’Connor. Did he detest her because somehow, in some way, they had too much in common?

It made his skin crawl to consider such a hateful soul akin to his in any way, but the years as a priest had shown him that evil was almost always a distortion of good. Evildoers always had a self-justification. And so did inveterate do-gooders. Which made them closer relatives than either would care to admit. Killing and kissing cousins.

Matt decided it was time, a little late in fact, to search his rooms again for listening devices. Every time he left home, Kitty the Cutter could pay him a surreptitious visit. Would she have bugged Temple’s hallway? The notion seemed ludicrous, but what would she do if she had heard, or seen, that surreptitious scene? Matt studied his sparely furnished three rooms, hunting hidden cameras. Having a stalker was like having a ghost for a roommate, a malign, murderous ghost with a license to kill in physical form.

THE BLUE DAHLIA.

The words were etched like acid on the black-velvet Las Vegas night: on the classic, cursive, lurid neon sign that made every bar in every podunk town across the country a little Las Vegas for the evening.

If Matt loved anything about Las Vegas, it was its neon. And the Blue Dahlia owned the epitome of the art form: a lush magenta blossom arching over the cool blue words like an orchid corsage from a long-ago prom, a 1940s prom, when girls wore shoulder pads and their hair rolled high at the sides to match, and guys wore fedoras and boutonnieres.

The parking lot asphalt should have been rained into patent-leather slickness to complete the film noir setting, but this was Las Vegas, the desert Disneyland. The best it could do for any atmosphere was ersatz everything.

Matt parked the Hesketh Vampire near but not under one of the glaring security lights. He hadn’t ridden the motorcycle in weeks, but he wanted any pursuer to dismiss this as a solitary outing. A man on a motorcycle traveled solo. Miss Kitty had shown a disconcerting interest in anyone he might pair up with.

Inside, the hostess, a wispy nineteen-year-old, mounted on those clunky Minnie Mouse platform shoes they all wore nowadays, showed him to a small round table for one. His chair faced the token parquet dance floor in front of the tiny stage. A trio as classic as a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou occupied the tiny stage: a bassist, a saxophonist, and an electric keyboarder.

The music broadcast the relaxed yet jazzy insistence of updated Bach by Louis Armstrong. Be-Bach. You could let it be background Muzak, or get lost in the fascinating rhythms.

Matt used the oversize menu as a cover to study who was already there. He ordered a scotch on the rocks while he apparently dithered over the menu. His watch read 8:45 P.M.

No one had come in after him and only a scattering of customers littered the tables on a weeknight.

The quiet made him edgy. Expecting someone dangerous was more nerve-wracking than seeing him — her. It wasn’t Molina’s entrance that was the question mark but whether Miss Kitty would show up. And she might not look exactly as she had the last time he had seen her. He’d hope not! She’d worn motorcycle leathers then, like a punk London messenger boy. Before that…he’d always remember the day he’d first seen her at the Circle Ritz poolside, immaculate in a green silk pantsuit that matched her eyes, her Snow White coloring as startling as a billboard of a chorus girl in its high-colored photogenic perfection.

A new instrument was harmonizing with the trio, meaningless syllables riffing up and down the scale in inspired improvisation.

Matt shot a look at the stage. She was there now. Appeared from nowhere like a musical magician. Carmen. In the soft single spotlight, a portable mike in hand, she wore her draping long black velvet gown like a ’30s socialite in a Marx Brothers movie, a flash of bare arm through the shoulder slits the only pale spot on her figure besides her face in its dark helmet of hair.

Oddly enough, Matt found the feminine side of Molina more intimidating than the plain-Jane facade she wore on the job. She was a big woman, just shy of six feet, and there was nothing delicate about her bones or her blandly practical manner and manner of dress. But here she donned some of that ’40s dame toughness, even as her voice toyed with and tortured the rainy day lyrics and throaty sounds of Gershwin.

Matt could guess why she kept her songtress side under wraps. A singer sells raw emotion and that can make a performer seem vulnerable, especially throbbing out the torch songs Carmen was born to croon.

Matt didn’t see vulnerability as a weakness, but as a strength. Being human made it possible to rise above human fears. Molina was one of the few people in the world he felt was competent to handle anything, whatever she called herself, or whatever she wore. And despite the words of woe she sang so eloquently.

So he relaxed more deeply at the Blue Dahlia than he had allowed himself to do for days. When the waiter returned he ordered the sirloin tips in béarnaise sauce, a baked potato, as if he was actually going to enjoy this excuse for a secret meeting.

And he did. Everything had arrived and been savored by the time Carmen’s set ended at ten o’clock.

Matt studied the tables. Ebbing diners had been replaced by ranks of drinkers, who chattered now that the music was instrumental again.

No one who could have been Kathleen O’Connor in disguise or out of it remained in the room.

Matt left cash in the padded leather bill holder, got up, and followed Carmen’s exit through a narrow green velvet curtain spotted with fingerprints.

The short hall beyond led past a cigarette machine and the restrooms to a couple of closed doors. It smelled of cooking oil and spilled Coca-Cola.

Matt knocked softly at each door. The second produced a muffled “Come in.”

The room beyond wasn’t large but the huge circular mirror on a vintage dressing table reflected almost his full figure in the doorway.

He looked out of place in his khakis and lightweight navy nylon jacket. No fedora. No striped suit. No red carnation in his button hole.

Molina wasn’t sitting at the table but leaned against one of the pillars of drawers on either side.

“I’m going to kill you,” she announced.

“Not you, too.”

“My threat is serious. Do you know what you’ve done? My voice is creaky, the range is shaky. I can’t believe that a few weeks off could work such ruin.”

“You sounded great. Very Barbara Stanwick.”

“Yeah, thanks. She didn’t sing.” Molina shook her head. Her no-fuss bob wasn’t quite in period but somehow seemed to match the shabby nightclub ambiance. She pulled the blue silk dahlia from the side of her hair. It contrasted dramatically with the only visible makeup she wore, a dark-lipsticked ’40s mouth, but a moment later it lay on the pedestal like a crumpled blue tissue, frail and expendable looking, like a dead stripper.

Matt knew that the recent unsolved death of just such a blossom in the dust was gnawing at Molina’s professional and personal life.

“Odd,” he said.

“What?”

“We’ve both got similar problems.”

She arched her dark eyebrows that Temple always fussed could use a plucking. Matt saw them as a strong frame for the remarkable blue-zdahlia eyes that were her most memorable feature, as coolly hot as neon.

“You’ve got a killer who just barely eludes you,” Matt explained, “and I’ve got a killer I can’t quite manage to elude.”

“So what’s your nemesis up to now?”

“A nemesis is an avenger seeking justice. Kitty O’Connor isn’t that. She doesn’t even know me. She’s a…persecutor.”

“What’s she done now?” Molina looked like she should be lighting an unfiltered cigarette, but she wasn’t.

“She showed up where I work.”

“The radio station.”

“Yeah. I was leaving for the night, the morning, actually. About one-thirty, with my producer. And this figure came racing in on a Kawasaki Ninja, leather-wrapped from neck to toe. She charged us like a bull on that cycle, tore a necklace right off Letitia’s neck, then went roaring off flourishing it as a trophy.”

“Intimidation.”

“I know what it was. I want to know how to stop it.”

“What did you do then?”

“Tried to keep between her and Letitia. Tried to grab a handlebar and tip the cycle over. Not much that worked.”

“She’s just harassing you at this point, not doing any real damage.”

“She did real damage her first time out.”

Molina glanced at his side. Matt could feel the scar, the tightness, if he thought about it. He felt it when he made any major move. A razor slash, now a faint long, thin, white line, like a wound just before the blood wells to the surface and overflows.

“She seemed to be taking something out on your producer,” Molina said finally. “Showing off to you and hassling the lady.”

“Right. She doesn’t like me to associate with any females. That’s pretty clear.”

“What sort of female is your producer?”

Matt hesitated at the impossibility of summarizing Letitia. “Gorgeous black woman, maybe thirty, maybe three hundred pounds.”

“Three hundred pounds. And this psycho chick was jealous?”

“I don’t know if it’s jealousy exactly. It’s more like…possession. Yeah, I know that’s a form of jealousy, but Kitty O’Connor is more like a demon than a woman.”

“Whoa! You are spooked. She’s a sick chick with issues, that’s all. I am not in the demon-exorcizing business and I think you’d know better than that by now.”

Matt stuffed his hands in his pockets to keep the fists his frustration made from showing. “This O’Connor woman is a wasteland of spiritual desolation. You can’t reach her by any human means. So don’t call her a demon, although that works for me. Call her a psychopath.”

“She hasn’t done anything you could even get a restraining order for. You can’t prove the slash.”

“It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s what she might do to someone around me.”

“Listen, this town is teeming with dangerous types. You have no idea what you’re brushing up against as you amble down the Strip on a Friday night. If the police are doing their job, and we mostly are, you and the tourists will never know.”

Matt held his tongue for a while. It ached to pour out the strangehistory of Kitty O’Connor. If he could only tell Molina about her connection to Max Kinsella…. But Molina bared her teeth like a Rottweiler when any scent of Kinsella tainted the air. And those confidences weren’t Matt’s to share. Though he wasn’t still a priest, he was used to keeping the seal of the confessional, to keeping everybody’s secrets in their individual, sacrosanct boxes, like little coffins containing rotting lilies left over from the thousand natural wakes a human being holds for all past sins and uncertainties.

All he could say was, “I know she was fanatically involved in the IRA. She would seduce wealthy men for money to buy weapons. I imagine she was downsized from her job during the recent seesaw of peace accords. I’d guess she’s an unemployed terrorist looking for a victim.”

Molina nodded seriously, but her eyes narrowed. “We’re all taking that pretty seriously nowadays. How do you know about her international terrorism history?”

Matt wasn’t about to blurt out, “Max Kinsella.” He flailed for a logical dodge that would still salve his Catholic conscience for truth at all costs. “Ah, Bucek. Frank Bucek at the FBI. He was in seminary with me. We’ve talked on the phone a little. He looked her up.”

“Bucek looked her up for you when he couldn’t give me diddly?”

“Fellow ex-priests…”

“Fellow guys, you mean.”

Before Molina could wind up some feminist rant, someone knocked on the door. “Bar call,” a man’s jovial voice caroled.

Molina looked inquiringly at Matt.

“Scotch on the rocks,” he finally thought to say. She yodeled a double order of same through the door.

“Sit down.” She pointed to one of those round-seated wooden chairs with the bentwood backs that was stained so dark it looked like it had been sitting here awaiting him for decades. Probably had.

Matt took the seat, though it was uncomfortable, and Molina finally sat in a matching chair placed before the dressing table.

She shook her head at herself, her face as sharp-boned as Lauren Bacall’s in the time-spotted mirror. “Sometimes I expect Bogey to stroll in here asking about Maltese falcons. Those were the days: treacherous greedy crooks, psychopaths disguised as cheap hoods, and manipulative dames. Okay.” She scraped the chair legs on the concrete floor to turn her back to the mirror.

As she braced her elbows on the matching pillars, Matt was startled to see in the mirror the black velvet curtain of her dress part in back from neck to waist. She couldn’t have been wearing, well, anything under it. This was not something he wanted to think about here and now, or anywhere at any time, really.

A knock at the door.

“Enter!” Molina called out grandly.

The barman came in carrying one of those small, round, scuffed brown trays that have held drinks since Methuselah was a wine steward.

“Thanks, Steve.” Molina watched him set the tray on the opposite drawer pillar like an offering. “I love to impress company with my lavish backstage perks.”

Steve, a toothy guy with receding gray hair, grinned. “Courtesy of the management. We’re glad to have you back.”

He winked at them both in the mirror as he left.

“They pay you for this?” Matt asked suddenly.

“Yeah, they pay me for this.” Molina sounded indignant. “I wouldn’t do an amateur gig. Lots of cops moonlight. This is less conflict of interest than most.”

“I didn’t mean…what I meant is they’re happy to pay to have you back.”

She leaned forward to hand him a lowball glass richly amber with about three ounces of scotch. He sipped. Johnnie Walker Black. Very happy to have her back.

He sipped again, feeling tension drain down his arms like a blood-letting. “This is the first time I’ve felt out of that woman’s reach for two weeks.”

Molina lifted her own glass in a distant toast. “Happy to hear that. What’s the reason?”

“A bodyguard?” he said, laughing.

“You aren’t kidding.” She crossed her legs.

The motion would have been coy in another woman clothed in floor-length vintage black velvet, but now it simply revealed the small, lethal-looking gun attached to her ankle by some industrial-strength black holster of nylon webbing.

Matt almost choked on a quarter ounce of scotch too good to spray on the concrete floor. “Do you always do that?”

“Always,” she said. “Nobody’s going to die because I was in a Luby’s Cafeteria with my gun in the car.”

He nodded, remembering the case, another massacre in a public place by a single psycho gone ballistic. And that brought them back to Miss Kitty. “I can’t carry a gun. I can’t shoot her. So that makes me a perpetual victim?”

Molina nodded while she savored her drink. “This ought to oil the old pipes for the next set. You are keeping me up late tonight, Mr. Midnight.” She twisted to check a small clock on the dressing table.

“No problem. I’m not due at work for a couple of hours.”

She glanced at his glass. “Can you drive —?”

“I had a heavy meal.”

“Then enjoy. I imagine you haven’t enjoyed much lately. Back to your…bête noir? Is that better than ‘nemesis’? Here’s the deal. Here’s what every woman with an abusive ex on her tail finds out. Nothing and nobody can help you. If you were a woman, I’d advise you to get a gun and shoot the guy the next time he showed up. No, I wouldn’t. I can’t. But that’s the only defense they’ve honestly got, a lot of them. I am so damn sick of picking up the phone and hearing some woman was blown away in the parking lot of her office, or a grocery store, or a fast-food joint, or a day-care facility, or a school by some maniac man who can’t let go because he can’t live without a victim.

“And it’s always just when the woman finally gets a little starch and tries to get away, when she’s defending her kids where she couldn’t defend herself, when she’s being a heroine instead of a whipping girl, and then they kill her.

“Enough about my job frustrations. Now, about yours. Your job is to foil this woman. You can’t give her what she wants.”

“That’s what Letitia said.”

“Letitia.”

“My producer.”

“Oh, right. The Lane Bryant black Venus. You know, this Kitty woman is nuts. She really wants you.”

“Thanks.”

“No.” Molina leaned forward, elbows on her knees, a hoydenish posture for the elegant gown. She sipped premium scotch. “She’s dead serious about that. She wants you untouched by any woman. Weird. It’s not an uncommon attitude among abusive men, but women aren’t usually so…macho.”

“That biker outfit was plenty macho.”

“Why you?”

Matt wanted to shout, Because she can’t torment Max Kinsella. She can’t even find Max Kinsella.

But he couldn’t. He did have a few clues as to why he was the designated Kinsella standin, though.

“She likes to corrupt priests.”

“You know the answer then.”

He nodded. “Letitia laid it out for me, too.”

Molina sipped. Her electric blue eyes were softening to the color of natural blue topaz, Virgin Mary Blue, mild and misty. “You need an understanding woman who will remove that which Miss Kitty covets.”

“Who won’t get killed for the honor,” Matt added drily. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

“I don’t think so. She’s nervous. That’s why she’s darting around, threatening these women. Once the deed is done, you’re worth nothing to her. The whole house of cards falls down. Anticipate her, disarm her. Hell, sleep with her then, if you want to. It would kill her.”

“Carmen. I’m not like that. I don’t do these things lightly.”

“That’s where she’s got you! You want to be got, cling to your odor of sanctity. You want to live, do what you must.”

“‘And do it well.’”

“Huh?”

“A quote from a songwriter you’d never sing. Well, maybe you would.” Matt took a deep, burning swallow of scotch.

“Any candidates to predate Miss Kitty?” Molina probed, perhaps a bit too curious.

“Nobody I’m willing to endanger,” he said shortly, swallowing without the benefit of scotch, the afternoon’s interlude in the Circle Ritz hallway returning on aching waves of might-have-been.

“No volunteers?” she pressed. Matt noticed that her lipstick had left a red half-moon on the edge of her glass, decided through a veil of pleasant haze that they were both relaxing too much, discussing things too dangerous to act on. Guns and sex and psychosis. “A good-looking guy like you?

“Janice? Letitia?” She left one name hanging until he thought he’d strangle on it. Why had he ever thought Molina might become an ally? She was a policewoman. She always needed to know the full story.

“No woman strong enough to risk.”

“Ah.” She leaned back, elbows braced on the twin pillars of the dressing table, the drink glowing topaz against the black of her gown.

Molina?

God, he must be drunk.

But the idea started caroming through his brain. She was armed and dangerous. She just said she thought he was good-looking. Lots of people did, but Molina saying it…thinking it.

If he was caught in some sexless limbo because of his religious past, she was a single mother in a man’s world. What kind of personal life did she have? Did she dream, as Janice did, of an Invisible Man who would come through her window, a puppet with no strings attached, like Errol Flynn on a rope, and go away leaving no traces, no obligations, no guilt, like a dream?

But there were always hordes of swordsmen after Errol Flynn as Don Juan or as Robin Hood, and a dalliance with a wanted man always backfired on the woman, even if her ankle was armed. Molina was not invulnerable, just professional.

She was not strong enough to risk, but he didn’t dare tell her that.

“I can’t. I can’t involve any woman in this who might be the object of Kitty’s murderous attention.”

“Hmm,” said Molina. Carmen. Looking lazy and contemplative, looking pretty luscious, as a matter of fact, maybe because of what she was thinking. He was thinking it too. Where had his friendly neighborhood earth mother gone? Luscious? He must be deranged.

Matt set the half-full glass of scotch on the small table near the wall. He had to be on live radio in under two hours.

“I just came here for some professional advice.”

Her eyes suddenly focused in points like acetylene torch flames.

“Professional. From the mouths of babes. That’s it, Matt!”

“What?”

“You need a professional. Someone Kitty wouldn’t even notice. A pro.”

“With a gun?”

“No! Listen. This is Las Vegas. Las Vegas. You get yourself a six-hundred-dollar-a-night room at the Oasis. The Goliath. Whatever. You tip everyone in sight, and you ask the bellman to send up some private entertainment. Tip him a hundred.”

“Carmen!”

“Listen. I know this town. A hundred. You can afford it to save your virtue for the right wrong girl, right? Okay. For that you’ll get a thousand-dollar call girl. She’ll be beautiful, intelligent, gorgeously dressed, consider herself a sex industry professional, not some cheap, downtrodden hooker. She’ll argue her right to sell her services with such sophistication that you won’t have an answer. You’ll tell her your problem, not about Kitty the Cutter but your personal history. She will love helping you out. She considers herself a mental-health field worker and, besides, you’re not hard to help out. You will walk out of there much poorer, but not what Kathleen O’Connor wants: an innocent man. You will have endangered no one. The call girl will vanish from the hotel as she always does, with a great story to entertain another john. You will be absolutely…adequate, right? You will have taken advantage of no one, as talking to one of these awesome sexual entrepreneurs will convince you. They are nobody’s victims, believe me, and consider themselves worth every c-note. It’ll be Pretty Woman all over again, only with this strange role reversal all the way through. Make sense?”

“Carmen. No.”

“Why not? It’s brilliant. It’s a scam. You out-sting the stinger. Why not?”

“Because…it’s a sin.”

“So is caving in to a sexual blackmailer. So…confess it afterward. You believe in absolution, don’t you? Don’t you have to?”

“Yes. But —”

“‘Yes, but’ are the two most dangerous words in the language. Do it or pay for not doing it. Wait to see which innocent woman will pay. Maybe Temple Barr. This Kitty doesn’t sound blind, just demented.”

Matt fingered the key ring in his pocket, feeling the hard cold, gold circle of the snake ring spinning against his skin. He remembered how it had appeared in his apartment, with the equivalent of an Alice in Wonderland note: Wear me. The controlling Miss Kitty clandestinely invading his space again, claiming his attention.

It reminded him of Molina’s cold-blooded investigative strategy in keeping the whereabouts of Temple’s ring secret. In then sharing its whereabouts with him so he became complicit in her cruelty. He wanted to protest their conspiracy of silence he had only broken when Temple had figured it out. To accuse her, excuse himself.

But the damage had been done. To Temple, not to Kinsella, whom Molina really ached to hurt, nor to him, who had been the stooge, the patsy.

Temple’s ring was recorded history now. The ring Kitty O’Connor had forced him to install on his keyring was still a secret, still an issue, still lethal.

Still the eternal threat, the Worm Ouroboros, wanting to slip onto a finger like greased lightning and burn him, and never, ever come off.

…and Revamp

“I’ll think about it,” Matt said. He already had, far too long. “I suppose it’d be easy to lose Kathleen if I dodged into a megahotel.”

“Use a phony name. Pay cash at the front desk like a big winner. Take one room there and then call down and change it. Find something wrong. Somebody smoked in a nonsmoking suite, that kind of thing.”

“You’ve got some tricky ideas.”

“Not me. Everybody I’ve ever arrested. So.” Molina’s wild-blue-yonder gaze softened with scotch and satisfaction. “You gonna take my professional advice?”

“I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

He stood, took one last sip of the very fine scotch and left.

In the hall he could hear the trio killing time until Carmen’s next set with jazzy crescendoes. He kind of liked this place, right here. Alone in the hall, between the dressing room and the stage, the public. Ignored, invisible.

He moved along, wove through the clotted round tables, arranged to be intimate and now in the way.

It was a weeknight. He had dragged Carmen in for a half-empty house, but she probably appreciated warming up with only chairs to hear her rusty voice. Most of the chairs were empty now.

So was the parking lot when he pushed open the big door with the round porthole window. Round windows seemed so decadent, as if blocking out a sinister subaquatic world.

He homed on the familiar tilted shape of the Hesketh Vampire, appreciating its sleek lines from a distance, savoring a fondness you’d feel more for a horse than a vehicle.

A nondescript black car sat between the faded white lines a few spots away. That was all. Matt knew the staff parking lot was on the other side of the building. This lot was for customers and, a few weeks ago, the dumped body of a dead woman.

He winced a bit to recall her. Killed for not being quite Catholic enough in someone else’s warped view, when he might be killed for being too Catholic.

Why dumped here? Because the killer had associated The Blue Dahlia with nightlife and corruption.

He reached in his pants pockets for the cycle keys, eyed the waiting helmet, almost craving its anonymity, its implied safety.

A small click in the night.

Maybe the touch of a high heel on the asphalt.

Maybe the snick of a switchblade.

Maybe the mechanism of an opening car door.

Maybe all three.

Matt whirled to face the dark car with its windows black-tinted like a limousine’s. It was a boxy, anonymous vehicle. He couldn’t even name the model and maker.

It looked like a cut-rate hearse to him.

Someone was stepping out of it.

Stepping out with my baby…

A woman.

…a face in the misty light…

No, not Laura from forties film noir…just Kathleen. Kitty. Any haunting songs written for such a common name or nickname? Only raucous Irish ditties and a soulful Celtic ballad or two.

I’ll take you home again, Kathleen…

She wore something long, dark, and glittering. It hung from rhinestone straps on her shoulders. She was done up like a disco prom queen. Her high heels clicked on the pavement as she approached. Scarlet rhinestones dripped like blood from her earlobes. Not rhinestones maybe, rubies…

She clutched not a gun but a small, bejeweled purse shaped like a kumquat. The innocuous bag was more suggestive, more chilling. What was in it? A folded razor? A tiny automatic pistol? A lipstick case? A vial of poison? Or of holy water?

“Don’t be in such a hurry,” she said. “The Midnight Hour is still a lifetime away.”

He was alone this time. He didn’t have to worry about her hurting anybody else. He moved toward the motorcycle again. It could outrun any car.

“You’ve come here before,” she called after him, softly as a song. Her voice still held the faintest musical lilt of Ireland, a siren’s lure. “I was wondering why.”

He didn’t pause.

“Actually, I was wondering who.”

He turned, stopped, spoke. “What a small world you occupy, Kathleen O’Connor. There is not always a why, or a who. Sometimes there’s a what. Not for you, though. You’re hooked on whys and whos. That’s what makes you so ignorant.”

“Me! Ignorant? I’ve lived all over the world, visited casinos that make Las Vegas look like Disneyland for the double-wide set. I’ve drunk the finest wines, worn designer jeans that cost more than that whole damn motorcycle —”

“Impressive,” Matt said without stopping or turning.

“If you really want to be impressed, maybe you should peek in the backseat of my car.”

Her voice wasn’t musical anymore, but raw, as metallic as a zipper slowly opening, grating. Kitty was sure that what she was about to reveal was raunchy but irresistible.

Matt knew it was a mistake not to resist, but her voice had become so smugly threatening…

He turned. Kitty O’Connor cut a sophisticated figure in the blue-green parking lot glow. The car behind her was a shiny black box. He remembered sensing it as a hearse. Whose hearse?

He started toward it, she spinning and clicking on those high heels to reach it first, as if now they were in a race. Her staccato steps reminded him of Temple, but he didn’t want even her name crossing his mind in the presence of Kitty O’Connor.

The woman had paused by the back door on the driver’s side of the four-door sedan to unlatch the hard little jeweled bag. She brought out something black and oblong. A remote control. The car’s rear window opened with a can-opener whirr.

It sliced open on a band of red hair. Matt’s heart stopped, but the window kept descending until a third of the way down. He saw frightened eyes and a duct-taped mouth, like a robot’s featureless silver orifice pasted onto a human face.

Matt’s heart throbbed like a jungle drum as he recognized not the fractured face but the mane of red hair: the teenaged fan from last night at the radio station parking lot.

The window was rising again like a dry dark tide, obscuring the terrified eyes and obscenely cheerful red hair. Had Kitty chosen the girl because she had been there, or because her hair was red?

“She’s just an —” he began.

“Innocent bystander?” Kitty tucked the remote control back into her purse as casually as if it was a cigarette case. “My favorite kind. Besides, I don’t buy your assumption that anyone is innocent. Even you.”

“I never claimed I was.”

“You claimed you were a good priest.”

“A good priest isn’t innocent. A priest needs knowledge of evil.”

“You must be an even better priest now,” she said, slithering forward like vamp on a nighttime soap opera.

“A priest needs knowledge of evil,” he repeated, “like a seductress needs a touch of innocence to be believable. Seducing me won’t work.”

“Just remember the girl in the backseat. Next time she might be somebody you really know.”

He choked back his anger at her constant threats, her theatricality. Did she need to be the star of her own show this much? Apparently. And what did that tell him about her?

“Relax,” she was saying. “I’ve planned a quiet evening for just the two of us. And” — her dark head jerked over her shoulder toward the closed window — “she can’t see us. No one inside the car can see out except the driver. Aren’t you wondering who the driver is?”

He hadn’t considered that. If Kitty was not alone tonight, if she had a hostage, she might also have an accomplice. An accomplice was needed for what? Chauffeuring? Ferrying captives…carrying bodies?

“A quiet evening —?” he repeated to gain time.

“Sure.” She walked around to the car’s front passenger side.

He heard the heavy metal door open, then Kitty began unloading objects onto the car’s long black hood. Two champagne flutes. A silver ice bucket. A green bulbous bottle of Perrier-Jouët twined by painted art nouveau flowers.

“Come here,” she said.

He didn’t, of course.

“Come here or I’ll have to get my petite straight razor from my purse and attempt to cut that poor child’s duct tape off.”

She poured one tall flute too full of champagne, and waited.

He moved in her direction, around the front of the car, wondering if her anonymous driver had orders to run him down.

But the engine stayed dormant and only the bubbles in the long tall glass moved.

They spun frantically for the lip of the glass, pearly strings and ropes twirling up like deep sea divers trying to outrun the bends. Bubbles, tiny bubbles of frantic, tiny final breaths.

A tearful bound girl trapped in a stranger’s car with her mouth taped, breathing anxiously through her nose, fighting for each breath as congestion clogged her sinuses and nostrils.

“Let her go.”

“No.”

“Let her go, or I go.”

“You wouldn’t. You couldn’t.”

He shrugged, walked away, turned his back on the bubbles.

“You don’t dare risk it,” her hoarse whisper called after him.

He heard furious heel clicks, rapid, angry.

The whirr of a car window opening. The driver showing himself? Pointing a gun?

He kept walking.

Heard a muffled cry.

Turned.

Kitty stood beside the rear car door, now gaping open, the young woman tumbled to the asphalt in a fetal position, still bound, still gagged. Eyes still wide open.

“There. She’s out. On her own. I’ll leave her here. Now, come back.”

Kitty strode around to the car’s long front hood gleaming like a black steel coffin and lifted the heavy champagne bottle, a hostess as impervious as patent leather.

“It’s rude to walk away when you’re the guest of honor.”

At least now the car couldn’t take off with the girl captive.

Matt obeyed, or, rather, did what he thought was best at the moment, which was to seem to obey.

She poured another shaft of champagne trembling with manic bubbles as he approached and handed him the glass, her hand rock steady.

She sipped. He followed suit, wondering what playing her game would get him or cost him.

Her payoff was instantly obvious. Satisfaction. She fairly purred with it, arched her dark eyebrows, licked the smoothly rolled glass rim of the flute as if it were jagged and she had a taste for blood, even, perhaps, her own. Or perhaps mostly her own.

Matt rolled that idea around on his tongue as he swallowed the madly fizzing wine. He’d never thought of champagne as a hyperactive beverage before, manic, bipolar, as ready to go flat as erupt.

Like Miss Kitty?

Could he drag her down to the dark side of her nature? Depress her? Paralyze her?

“This is a joke,” he said. “A scene out of a B movie.”

“My movie, not yours.”

So control was everything. She unholstered the remote again and aimed it at The Blue Dahlia, at the roofline along the building’s side.

Instantly, a few blue notes of sound came rolling over the parking lot.

“‘Someone to watch over me’,” crooned a homicide lieutenant, spreading her vocal wings after too long in a cramped cage.

Matt couldn’t help turning his head to puzzle out the illusion; the band sounded as if it had moved outdoors.

“How’d you do that? Never mind. Not telling me is half the fun. But why the sound effects?”

“You come here to hear the music, right? Can’t be the food?”

“It’s not too bad.”

Her shiny dark head shook. “Must be the music. Tell me the truth.”

“The music,” he agreed. “The name of the place. Getting away from anyone who knows me. I don’t know.”

“Liar!”

He kept quiet, wondering if she’d already figured out the connection between him and Molina.

“You’re trying to get away from someone you know,” she accused instead. “Someone who watches over you.”

Her smile emphasized a mouth painted rambling rose red, a pretty mouth, small and pointed, not particularly sensual, almost pleasant peeling back over those small pearly teeth.

Oh, the shark, dear…

“Is that what you think you’re doing? Protecting me?”

“Protecting my investment.” She came nearer, set her champagne flute down on the hood. “Let’s dance.”

“I don’t.”

“You will.”

“When someone’s lying helpless and terrified only feet away?”

“Of course. The whole world dances when someone’s lying helpless and terrified only feet away. Haven’t you watched the evening news? But don’t ruin our outing with politics. Aren’t you glad I didn’t come in and upset the help? We can have our evening out here, under the stars.”

She took the glass from his fingers and set it on the hood. The surface curved, so everything on it tilted, faced imminent falling, destruction. The whole world tilted, facing the same fate, particularly his tiny corner of it.

Had Kitty somehow learned of his long-ago “prom” expedition into the desert with Temple? But how? Impossible. Yet she was duplicating it in some devilish way. Maybe that was how; she was the demon Molina would never believe in.

Molina.

She might be closing down her set and coming out soon, but to a different parking lot.

Did he want Molina to come to the rescue? Could she end up a captive?

While he worried, Kitty had insinuated herself against him, broadcasting an elusive, probably expensive perfume. Her curled hand rested on his shoulder like a fallen blossom. Her other hand was slipping into his palm where the champagne flute had been.

…a face on a passing train

This was so bizarre, and to hear Molina’s voice wafting over the empty parking lot…

Kitty started swaying against him, seductive no doubt. Besides his deep disinclination to respond to anything she offered, despite the haunting image of that innocent girl as a mute witness to this insane scene, the real turn-off was her choice of music to seduce by, her Mantovani and Iglesias and Rod Stewart all rolled into one was a moonlighting homicide lieutenant’s dusky contralto.

“You don’t dance,” she was saying. “I’d shuffle a few steps, if I were you. Your faithful fan is out of the car but not out of reach.” She prodded a long fingernail into his chin.

Matt shuffled, resenting the infringement of her body, relieved that he felt absolutely no interest in mere proximity.

“Let’s do talk politics,” he said.

“As long as you dance.”

“You must sincerely believe in the Irish cause.”

“Must I? I mustn’t do anything, haven’t you figured that out by now? I could have a folded razor in the hand that’s on your shoulder. It would take a millisecond to cut your face to shreds.”

Her sensed her hand, a loose fist at the corner of his eye. It could indeed hold a weapon.

He suddenly took control of her other hand, so lightly laid in his, and spun her out, away from him. “Maybe we should swing dance.”

The sudden move surprised her, maybe even pleased her. She caught her breath like a teenager, laughing a little.

He suppose it had felt like being on a thrill ride, and Kitty the Cutter liked thrills. Maybe needed them.

She tried to close in again, but he took her other hand off his shoulder and kept moving away, remembering patterns he’d seen on PBS shows about jazz and swing music. That kind of dancing was a constant tension: pull close, push away. Not so different from the choreographed discipline of the martial arts. With Kitty the Cutter, dancing was a martial art and Matt had just figured out the steps.

Luckily, Molina had swung into an up-tempo song.

Jeepers, creepers.

She wasn’t kidding, and that kid’ll eat ivy, too.

“Apparently,” Kitty said, not unhappily, “you like fast dancing.” “I like anything that keeps you at arm’s length.”

“You can’t keep me there forever.”

“No, but this’ll do for now, while we talk.”

“What’s to talk about?”

“That girl. You’ll leave her here, unharmed?”

“This time.”

“So what do you want tonight?”

“Where’s your ring? I should say my ring? The deal is you have to wear it.”

“It’s here. In my pocket.” “That’s not ‘wearing’.” “I’m wearing it on my key ring. You didn’t say where I had to wear it. I suppose I could wear it around my neck.”

“Splitting meanings, just like a damn politician. Or a priest. How many angels dance on the head of a red-haired girl?”

Matt’s heart stopped, hoping that Kitty meant only the unknown girl she’d kidnapped from the radio station. Had she held her captive since then? Or only taken her tonight? How many angels danced on the head of Temple Barr? An entire chorus.

“Just one,” Matt answered Kitty, more blithely than he felt. “One guardian angel.”

“Who?” The jeer twisted her beautiful features — Snow White, the fairest of them all, suddenly the Wicked Stepmother. “You? You can’t even protect yourself from me.”

“Guardian angels are invisible, Kathleen. Don’t you remember that from catechism? No one can see them, not even the soul they guard. You have one, you know.”

“Fairy tales! Like Santa Claus.”

She was getting breathless from spinning in close and out far. Matt kept it up, relentlessly. She wanted contact, she would get it. He was in control, her hands in his, unable to wound. She had only her voice.

“I don’t believe in Santa Claus,” he said as they seesawed in and out, moving in small, furious circles on the asphalt. What would make her let him go, so he could help the young woman?

“The music’s stopped, so can we,” she said.

“Has it? I hear music.”

He moved to an unheard rhythm, like telling the beads on an endless rosary, rote motion. The car sat as if abandoned with the battery dead. He doubted there was a driver. Only Kathleen O’Connor, a one-woman terrorism squad. And now she was breathless putty in his hands.

She craved control. To use it and perhaps to feel the object of it, as well.

“They’ll be coming out. The band,” she said. “Now that they’ve stopped.”

“What do you care?”

“You…you’re crazy.”

“That’s projection.”

She tried to wrench her hands out of his. “Psychoshit! You’re all full of it.”

“All who? I’m only one guy.”

“No, you’re not. Your name is legion.”

He laughed. “Now I’m the demon.” He spun her quickly 360 degrees, lifting his arm so she twirled, a human top. Her long, snaky earrings flashed like comets.

She reeled a little as he resumed the relentless step in, step out, pull her close, push her away motions.

“You mean my ex-profession,” he said, a little breathless himself. “We priests are all alike.”

“Yes! Liars and hypocrites.”

“Some, I suppose. There are some of those everywhere. Are you so perfect then?”

“No, but I admit I’m bad. I know I’m bad. I don’t pretend to try to be good.”

“Sometimes pretending to be something is the only way to become it.”

“A liar’s way. Is that what you are, someone who pretended to be a priest?”

She glared as he pulled her in, her eyes pure hatred now, the seductive veneer rubbed away like a cloud of silver polish on a mirrored tray.

“And are you pretending to be a temptress, an assassin? I don’t think so. I think you’ve done all that. I think you’re exactly what you want the world to think of you as: a very bad girl.”

She finally was able to pull one hand free, although it must have hurt.

He let the other go. She was dizzy now, not only from the dance but from something inside of her he had released. It wasn’t pretty, but at least her actions were hurting her for a change, instead of somebody else.

“Then don’t mess with me. Don’t make me do something you’ll regret.”

“Either way, I’ll regret it.”

She smiled, tilted her small, dainty head. “Now you understand. It’s a lose-lose situation. You might as well get it over with.”

“Maybe you’re right. Where? When?”

She backed up, went around to the passenger side of the car. She downed the rest of her champagne in a long-throated gesture. Then finished his mostly full glass. She started stashing the equipment in the car’s rear seat.

“No. You don’t get to plan. To prepare. The next time you see me. I choose. If you want to enjoy it, you’re allowed, you know. But I think you’ll hate it. All I can say is just think of England. Or your landlady or that island mama you work for, or this little carrot-top wetting her Gap capris.” She gestured at the other side of the car, where Matt didn’t dare look because he didn’t want to remind her she was leaving him with another woman.

“What if I surprised you?”

“You can’t. That’s what’s so delicious about it. You couldn’t surprise me in a hundred years. So keep that ring warm for me.”

She darted into the front passenger seat and slammed the car door shut.

The engine started with a quick, quiet hum. The car pulled away, the tires peeling like black Band-Aids from the loose gravel on the surface.

Matt rushed to pull the girl away from the departing tires. Her ankles and wrists were circled in duct tape.

She mewed behind the silver gag.

“It’s all right. It’ll take a while to get this tape off without hurting you.” He looked around the deserted lot, then pushed his arms under her knees and back, picked her up, and headed toward the Blue Dahlia.

Main Course

“It’s a good thing they trust me to lock up,” Molina said, pouring lighter fluid onto a cleaning rag she had found behind the hall door, the one that didn’t lead to her dressing room but to a maintenance closet.

“If they couldn’t trust you to lock up, who could they trust?”

She gave Matt a look — a long, hard Molina look — then soaked the tape over the girl’s chin. “There you go. I know you want to sing out right now like Britney Spears, but ripping this tape off would give you a rug burn for a week. In the movies, they just tear away duct tape, but that’s make-believe. There. It’s coming. Just a bit more, and don’t lick your lips unless you like the taste of kerosene.”

While Molina calmed the captive and eased the gag off, Matt dowsed the girl’s wrists with fluid.

The reek was stomach-turning. He watched her pale face turn delicately green.

“Off!” Molina announced the obvious.

She squatted beside the girl they had propped on a restaurant chair, looking like a den mother in her jeans and vaguely Native American suede jacket with odd bits of beads and fringe.

“What’s your name?”

No “dear,” no “honey,” Matt noticed. Nothing infantalizing. She wanted this victim to feel like an adult. In charge again. Able to answer. Able to point fingers.

Matt started untwining gummy duct tape that had adhered to him as it released her.

The girl noticed the phenomenon. Her lips trembled into a small smile. “Guess I got Mr. Midnight into a bit of a jam.”

“You were in a bit of a jam,” Molina said, sympathetic but not enabling. “Your name? It’s okay. You’ve lucked into an off-duty cop.”

“You?”

“Yeah, me. Lieutenant Molina. Now…you.”

“Vicki. Vicki Jansen.” She glanced at Matt, almost apologetically. “I never expected to see you again so soon.”

“Same here,” he said.

“Who was that witch?”

Molina eyed Matt, curious to see what he’d tell an innocent bystander.

“A…rabid fan, I guess.”

“Kinda like me.”

“You weren’t rabid.”

“A little.” She flushed. Redheads had that tendency. “It made her mad. That I kissed you.”

Molina’s frowning eyebrows told Matt what she thought of that.

“You were just impulsive,” he said. She shouldn’t blame herself.

To him guilt was an untallied cardinal sin. He didn’t want to lay it on anybody else. But he wished Vicki hadn’t confessed her indiscretion outside the radio station. Still, Molina had to know. A gushing nineteen-year-old throws herself at him at 1:00 A.M. one night. The next night she’s a captive audience for Kitty the Cutter’s elaborate revenge.

“Are you all right, other than sticky?” Molina was asking, working on the ankle tape. “Anybody you need to call? You’ll have go to the police station to make a statement. Don’t worry. I’ll take you. It’ll be very discreet.”

“I just have a couple roommates at UNLV. I dropped my purse in the dorm parking lot there when she…held that gun on me.”

“What’s the address?” Molina picked up her cell phone. “I’ll have a patrolman drive by, try to get the purse. What time did this happen?”

“Gosh, eight P.M. or so. What time is it now?”

Matt jumped up. “It’s after eleven. I’ve —”

“I know.” Vicki smiled up at him despite the reddened skin the gesture aggravated. “You’ve got to get to the station. Thanks so much. It was really wonderful the way you distracted her and made her let me out of the car.”

He could tell Molina was itching to hear his version of the encounter and shuddered to think what Vicki might tell her while he was off doing his job.

“Sorry.” He pulled out his key ring, immediately spotting the ugly reminder of Kitty’s ring. “I guess I’m making everybody have a late night.”

“That’s your job.” Vicki smiled again, this time with tremulous, fannish adoration. “Keeping us all up late.”

“She’ll be fine.” Molina sounded brisk and possibly annoyed. “I guess we all just love being kept up late.” Definitely annoyed.

Matt rushed out to the parking lot, mounting the Vampire and donning his gloves and helmet, looking for lurkers and finding none. He peeled out of the lot. He had a lot of anonymous listeners to think about. And one no-longer-anonymous tormenter.

The Laddy and the Vamp

In no time flat, or round, or oblong, we are up on the third floor.

Only if this upper chamber is an attic, then my refound mama is Mae West in drag.

This is a ballroom.

Or was.

It is a wide room, but six times longer than it is wide. Arched windows with a mosaic of glass set into wooden struts fracture the night into a faceted jet-black mirror that will reflect even our dark presence if we do not watch ourselves.

It is easy for me to whisk under a settee by the wall. Mr. Max does not whisk, but he can melt, and he ducks into a pool of shadow thrown by a pedestal surmounted by a fern as big as a weeping willow tree.

Everything up here is big, like a movie set that predates the Edsel.

Speaking of big, so is the other cat dude that unknowingly shares this space: a leopard. While I was taking the scenic route, Leopard Boy was imported here by the actual residents.

There are two humans in the room, but they are less interesting, at least to my sniffer. I see that they have the Mystifying Max’s undivided, though covert, attention, however.

Osiris, for it is he, the only leopard I have a nodding personal acquaintance with, lets his huge nostrils fan like bat wings. He knows Mr. Max’s scent and my own, but since we were both involved in his recent rescue, I trust he has the smarts to keep his animal edge to himself and let the scent-blind humans with him do business as usual. Which is to say, remain in the dark.

I have, of course, seen the Cloaked Conjuror before, from a distance. He is garbed like a hero or a villain in one of these science fiction/martial arts/Arnold/Jean-Claude films. Big, but enhanced even more by built-up boots and body building and impressively padded armor, wearing a leopardlike face mask that disguises his voice as well as his features.

Him I have seen and heard before, and he does not scare me. I happen to know that some of the magicians in this town, and beyond, have taken issue with his best-selling act: debunking the tricks that magicians have used to hoodwink audiences for decades. The brotherhood of the cape and the cane do not take kindly to being outed. Whew. The brotherhood of the cape and the cane sounds like they are tap-dancing vampires, but that is too amusing a characterization to convey the menace that a cadre of lethally annoyed magicians could evoke.

So let us look at the lady present.

I have seen her up close once before, and when I realize who, and what, she is, it is all I can do to swallow a betraying hiss.

This witch took my Miss Temple’s fancy new opal ring Mr. Max had given her, took it right from her finger onstage at the Opium Den and then saw to it that Miss Temple, and I, who was rushing to the rescue, and the ring, all disappeared from that stage, perhaps never to be seen or heard of again.

Happily, we resurfaced, thanks to a little help from our friends and a couple of enemies. All except Miss Temple’s ring.

I must admit I am not surprised to see Miss Shangri-La in attendance on the Cloaked Conjuror. He had admitted to Mr. Max in a private conversation earlier, which I made certain to overhear, that he was hooking up with this female magician-thief. Seems he thought his act could use some sex appeal.

I cannot for the life of me see how a Dragon Lady in the mandarin-nailed, oddly berobed getup of a ghost from a Chinese opera adds sex appeal to anything. She is wearing a mask, but it is all makeup: chalk-white paint that blushes blood-red high on the cheekbones and makes a mask over the slanted black-drawn lines of her eyes and eyebrows. The painted lines draw her features tauter than a plastic surgeon’s scalpel. She looks mean, and wind blown, as if a demon held her captive by the end of her long, black hair and was fighting to pull her back into hell.

If this is sexy, I am Father Christmas.

However, I long ago gave up trying to understand what humans find enthralling, other than my own breed, which is quite understandable.

I can see that they are hard at work here: the masked man and woman and the barefaced, hair-faced leopard.

It is a trick as old as illusion: the lady becomes a leopard and the leopard becomes a lady.

Shangri-La’s elegantly tattered robes (they look like my pal Osiris has used her for a scratching post recently) part as she moves to reveal a glittering leopard catsuit beneath the frills.

This sight gives me a chill, I admit. I am always chary of humans in catsuits. To me, it bespeaks a primitive need to hunt us for our hides. Although I call Mr. Max’s second-story outfit a catsuit, it is merely black slacks and turtleneck sweater. But Miss Shangri-La wears the real thing, like a second skin, except for me the mottled pattern is more reminiscent of a large, suffocating snake than of an elegant jungle cat.

I wonder if she is wearing Miss Temple’s ring, and then I do not wonder much more, because a sharp nail taps me on the shoulder, and it is not one of Miss Shangri-La’s four-inch nail-fangs, as she is still across the room.

You cannot call what I have just then so much a premonition as a sick headache all over.

I glance over my shoulder to see the baby-Bluebeard blue eyes in their own lavender-brown mask of velvet fur. (Okay, Bluebeard was a guy monster, but just pretend he had a sex change operation and you would have Hyacinth.) I glance to check the color painted on those lethal toenails so close to my jugular vein: not tinted blood red or poison green today, but gangrene teal.

Once again the evil Hyacinth has found me before I found her.

I just hope Miss Midnight Louise is still lost, because I would never want a maybe-relation of mine to be found in company such as this. Especially me.

The only good thing about this revolting situation is that Hyacinth only has eyes for me.

She has missed Mr. Max Kinsella entirely.

I guess that is the price of living in a cat-centric world. I have long accustomed myself to dwelling among humans, and while some street dudes would consider me a traitor to the Code of the Road, I have always found it more of an advantage than a disadvantage.

So my path is clear here: I must keep Miss Hyacinth distracted and allow Mr. Max to do his strange, solo, human nosing around.

“You just cannot seem to keep away from me, Louie,” Hyacinth purrs in the odious way of a female sure of her lures.

Vanity, thy name is feline fatale!

“Who could?” I reply.

Now I must confess, privately, that I have never been much attracted to these lean, mean ladies of an Eastern persuasion. They make like they are so demure and all the while they are practicing kamasutra violin or sushi tiramisù, a lethal variety of either marital or martial arts (sometimes they are the same, in my humble observation) nobody else in the world has ever heard of or knows any more about than they do Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s baritsu, an Oriental art so obscure it has never been heard of again. If only I could say the same for Hyacinth.

But I make the chitchat with the cat-lady while watching her petite mistress curl herself into a box until she seems to disappear. Osiris obediently crouches in a matching box, ready for the cloth to be flourished away and reveal him in her “place.”

“You enjoy watching these laborious delusions?” Hyacinth asks.

“This house does not seem to be equipped with cable,” I say with a shrug. “Do you have something more provocative in mind worth watching?”

“Besides me?”

“There is no one besides you,” I flatter outrageously. “I see that you have forsaken the film world for the live stage.”

“Not permanently. I’m up for the lead in a cat food commercial.”

“Really?”

“They are searching for the perfect partner for me. A Bombay is the leading candidate.”

I shake my head. “Too rangy, too shorthaired. Your unique appeal would be better enhanced by contrast, not a competitor.”

“What did you have in mind?”

I polish my nails on my exquisitely groomed vest. “Sophisticated dude about town, formal black coat, luxurious satin lapels. The Cary Grant type.”

“Hmmm. You must come up and see me sometime.”

“Ah…I think I have done so already. I mean, an attic is ‘up,’ right?”

“This is no attic.” Hyacinth shows me her scrawny tail as she turns and slinks along the wall toward the stairs.

I follow, as I wish to give Mr. Max free rein.

“This,” Hyacinth goes on, “was a ballroom, screening room, and assignation room for the late great film star Carissa Caine.”

“Now it is rehearsal hall,” I note.

“All things decay with time.”

We are retracing my steps down the stairs. I wonder if we are headed for the basement. Oh, joy. No doubt that is not a basement but a wine cellar, film vault, and temporary dungeon.

Above us, behind us, I hear man, woman, and cat debating their various roles in an illusion.

So where is Midnight Louise?

“As I was saying,” Hyacinth goes on, her lisping purr reminiscent of Peter Lorre in his more pussyfooted impersonations, “I might be able to put in a good word for you on the TV commercial circuit.”

“I have other fish to fry, or chow down at least. I could not care less about being an Á La Cat spokescat.”

“Other fish! You refer to your dubious appearance on the TV court show, no doubt, where you made a spectacle of yourself with that pallid little tart of a Persian.”

I bite my tongue. Literally. Such a description of the Divine Yvette is blasphemy to Bastet herself. But let the Goddess take her revenge in her own time. I am working undercover and must not betray my true purpose, which should be easy because I am not quite sure what it is yet.

“Yvette is a good match to her mistress, I suppose, although I do not think Savannah Ashleigh is of the Persian persuasion. And your own lovely mistress, what breed is she?”

“Shangri-La?” Hyacinth sits to add lip gloss to her already gleaming and unnaturally painted nails. “I have never seen her without her mask of makeup. We are both members of masked breeds, perhaps that is why we understand each other. She is small and lithe, like myself, and I flatter myself that she is of a similar kind, an ancient race from the East, wise and inscrutable.”

“Hmmm,” say I, who loathe the word inscrutable. To me it is a synonym for “stuck-up.”

“Ommmm, Louie?” Hyacinth mistakenly quotes me. “Are you meditating? That is a very enlightened thing to do, perhaps more Indian than Asian.”

I am not about to remind her of the glorious Persian’s roots in Afghanistan, just above India. She does not seem capable of appreciating the many attributes of the Divine Yvette.

“Ommm, hmmm,” I reply diplomatically, managing to straddle both East and West. I am not convinced that Hyacinth even knows the origins of her deceptive mistress. I suppose I will have to leave solving that mystery up to Mr. Max.

I chafe, sorry to be no longer eavesdropping on the humans and the leopard upstairs.

Miss Hyacinth mistakes my unease for other urges.

“I am working,” she says shortly. “I do not have time for dalliances.”

Hallelujah!

“Now that we have met again, without prison bars between us,” I gabble like the lovesick swain.

“The bars between us were always of my doing, Louie. I am devoted to my role in life. My mistress has plans for us that are so much more ennobling than making fools of ourselves on stage or on sets. I realize that you have developed a hopeless passion for me, but you must realize that it is midlife crisis on your part. I am too far above you to encourage your pathetic attentions. I cannot allow myself to be distracted from my mission by personal concerns. You may kiss my hand before you go.”

Right. Like smack her in the kisser with my mitt. But she has handed me an advantage, however odious. So. I am an obsessed admirer, am I? Gives me an excuse to turn up where I need to. We obsessive types do not give up, do we? I get the impression this dame likes it that way. I let my eartips dip.

“I am desolate, chèr Hyacinth, but I understand, my dear llsa. I will remain here in Las Vegas, hunted and haunted, while you fly away to more elevated planes.”

She bats her demon blue eyes. (They look a lot like Lieutenant Molina’s peepers, come to think of it.) They wink like the three rows of faux blue topazes in her collar. (She wears a dog collar, of course, like any self-respecting subversive dominatrix rock diva.)

My eyes fasten on something below the collar…not her chest hairs! A gold charm dangles below the crystals and the shape is oddly familiar. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my avid interest is taken as personal rather than professional.

Hyacinth’s true-blue eyes cross with self-satisfaction. “Console yourself with that low-bred Persian, if you must, Louie. That would be for the best, rather than aspiring beyond your means. There is a certain tragic nobility in your dedication to such shopworn goods.”

My shivs are itching to show Hyacinth some dedication she has never encountered before, but such is the role of the undercover operator. You must sometimes play Caspar Milquetoast. So I bat playfully at her neck instead, a clumsy gesture that she blocks with a right cross.

“I must truly leave?” I mew piteously.

“Alas, yes. And now!”

Yes, sir! She has shown me to an open window onto the dark, wide lawn leading back to the deceptive barrier of the cemetery.

I leap to the ledge. In like smoke, out like Flynn.

“Adieu, my lady fair.”

I pound down to the ground and hotfoot it across the sward before somebody unleashes the hounds of Hell that guard this weird outfit.

I sense Miss Hyacinth’s eyes upon my exit all the way to the exterior wall.

Good. More time bought for my partner-in-crime, Mr. Max Kinsella.

I just wish I knew where Miss Louise was.

Somewhere cushy, no doubt.

She can’t possibly have gotten into bigger trouble than I have.

Magicians at Work

Max found an upright curtained box to slip into like a man donning a cape.

Some people found upright, coffin-narrow boxes claustrophobic. To Max, they were home. Children were supposed to be seen but not heard.

He needed to be un seen, and unheard.

Gimme shelter. Put me on a stage, the invisible man incarnate.

Max eavesdropped, nostalgic, on the intermittent murmurs performance professionals make when they are rehearsing, as they consult one another.

The cage closer? You stand here? No, there. What about the cat? He’s fine where he is for now. And this turns when…? On a count of eight. And you are —? Here.

Max had worked solo, so his constant Q and A had been with a technical crew, not costars. Still, the ritual, the mind-numbing, boring repetitiveness of it, offered a stability and comfort he had found in nothing else. He wondered if that was what Matt Devine missed in saying the mass. He knew Matt Devine missed saying the mass. He had to.

You don’t give up a leading role in the theater, or the Church, without losing a primal connection to something bigger than yourself, something more than tradition, something intimate and sacred….

Max cut off his thoughts.

His role of magician had been only a cover. The real role was hidden beneath the illusion. He was here to play his real role: spy, protector, thief of other people’s secrets.

Booted footsteps finally announced the arrival of groundsmen ready to collect the leopard. They sounded like storm troopers among a ballet troupe.

Osiris snarled, grumpy. Max smiled unseen in his upright coffin. The leopard reveled in his role, in work. Max had sensed that when he had “liberated” him from the Animal Oasis. This particular caged beast was not exploited, but occupied that rare boundary between wild animal and animal that had learned to enjoy a degree of domestication. The only problem was that so few people were fit to interact properly with such an animal. Better that this truce between the species had never been negotiated.

Still, Max knew the Cloaked Conjuror, trapped as he was behind the mask of his own stage persona, himself caged, loved the leopard and would protect him as he would a human colleague.

Shangri-La he could not speak for.

She was quick, a talented illusionist, and a conundrum. Why would she bother playing second banana in a major Las Vegas act? How deeply involved was she in the drug transportation scheme that had been used to kidnap Temple? And Midnight Louie, although he was obviously an afterthought.

When Max heard the light retreat of footsteps now that the leopard was gone, he tensed, his hand on the curtain. Exit Shangri-La. Enter the Mystifying Max. It would be best to surprise and confuse the Cloaked Conjuror, to convince the magician that the magician-turned-spy’s illusions were superior.

Max waited, listened, timed himself.

When CC had turned away to deal with the equipment, Max slipped out of the box, climbed atop it and jumped to catch onto one of the huge wrought-iron chandeliers marching down the center of the ballroom.

He swung for a minute, silent as a pendulum, then used his remarkable upper body strength to pull himself up among the swaying branches.

In seconds he was arranged like a deus ex machina in a Greek drama, the god descending from the heavens at the play’s end, thanks to a creaking stage mechanism that playgoers chose to consider part of the Olympian miracle.

“Osiris is ready to work again,” Max commented casually.

CC spun away from his props, stared at the blank-eyed rows of windows, looked toward the stairs leading to the ballroom.

“Heavens, no,” Max said sardonically.

Of course CC looked up at that. Even his expressionless mask seemed to frown when he spotted Max.

“You! How —? I’m the debunker, not you! But you keep turning up where you’re not supposed to be.”

“I saved your rear, and your leopard, the last time I ‘turned up,’ didn’t I?”

Max swung to the floor, lithe as a chimpanzee, despite out-of-condition muscles that protested. The illusionist landed as lightly as thistledown, or Tinker Bell.

Clap if you believe in fair play.

“What are you doing here?” CC said.

“Curious.” Max dusted off his palms and prowled among the equipment. “Curious about your new partner, for instance. I had considered getting a female partner, before I…retired.”

“You? You always worked alone. It was your hallmark.”

“Times change. Why did you hire Shangri-La?”

“To spice up the act, I guess. She’s masked herself, in her way. You don’t think we make a good team?”

“You make a provocative onstage statement together.”

“Thanks. That’s why, I suppose. Just any other female magician wouldn’t have been worth recasting the act for. But she’s, ah, well, you’ve seen her. Highly feminine but not blatant about it, small enough to manage the usual acrobatic illusions, and she brings multi-cultural dimension to the act, not to mention that incredible performing Siamese of hers. It’s uncanny! You’d almost think that scrawny little devil could think. Rather sinister in its way —”

“Almost like a witch’s familiar? If you believed in witches.”

“Why do I think you just might?”

Max laughed. “I’m a fifteenth-century kind of guy? Seriously, I agree Shangri-La’s a great match for your act. Her and her cat. How’d you find her?”

“She found me. Pulled a surprise visit at the theater, like you did the first time. Came swinging down from the flies like Peter Pan in that Jackie Chan-in-Chinese-drag getup of hers.”

“So you’ve never seen her face, without makeup.”

“No, and I like it that way. She’s probably as ordinary as I am underneath the costume.”

“Just Clark Kent and Lois Lane?”

“Not even that interesting. Listen, there’s nothing…whatever between us. It’s a working partnership, like with the big cats.”

“And you like her little cat?”

“Hell, no. That thing gives me the creeps. Have you seen the painted claws on it? Reminds me more of a monkey than a cat sometimes. Besides, I’m partial to the big boys. Those are the real cats. These domestic versions are like toy dogs, a perversion of the original.”

“Hmmm.”

“You can’t say you’ve seen a street cat that could compare to Osiris or Mr. Lucky.”

“As a matter of fact, I have. But then I know a better breed of street cat than you.” Max smiled, stretched. Like a cat. “Speaking of Osiris, how is he doing now that he’s out of captivity again?”

“He’s one happy cat.”

“I see that. Quite an operation you have here.”

“And how the hell did you find it? I’ve spent millions keeping my residence secret.”

“And I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to find out what I need to know. How do you suppose I got Osiris back for you?”

“I paid you well.”

“True. But we both know that the story isn’t over. Osiris was taken to damage you. Your enemies are still out there.”

“Everybody successful has enemies.”

“Not enemies like these. Rogue magicians. You think I can surprise you? I know they can surprise you more.”

“And you?”

“They can surprise me, too.”

“Why do you think I’m the key to whatever will-o-the-wisp you’re chasing?”

“Because my prey are your enemies. They flutter around you like fireflies. Taking Osiris was just an opening shot. Besides —” Max grinned. “You’re about the only person in Las Vegas who can afford to fight them. And you’ll need to.”

“And I’ll need you to do it, I suppose.”

Max nodded. “If I found you here, don’t you suppose that they already have?”

The mask he wore hid the Cloaked Conjuror’s every expression, but his body language spoke for him. His massive form was still, mute. Max’s point had stabbed home.

Nowhere was safe.

In the distance outside, one of the big cats roared, a deep, ragged, sharp sound like nothing on earth.

“Do you hire out as a bodyguard?” CC asked at last.

“No. I’m just a guardian angel. I’m not allowed to be on anyone’s payroll, but I’d be interested in who’s on yours. Let me guess. I bet you just hired a new guy, a new bodyguard, am I right?”

Could a mask pale?

No.

But it could nod, very faintly, “Yes.”

“I’m feeling lucky.” Max paused to pick up a large painted globe. With a twist of the wrist, he separated it into halves filled with colored scarves. “Is the new bodyguard’s name Nadir? Rafi Nadir?”

“I’ll get rid of him,” vowed the Cloaked Conjuror’s growling mechanical voice, flat and lethal.

“A mistake. I’d rather know than not where that particular gentleman is.”

“I’d rather not be surrounded by treachery.”

“You already are. Better to not let anyone know that you realize that. How many people do you employ?”

“Here?”

“Here and at the hotel.”

CC strode impressively toward the dainty ballroom chairs that lined the room and had come with the house, lemon yellow Louis XV fripperies, and sat on one. It was as if Darth Vader had perched on an egg crate.

“Here,” he said, sighing. His sigh sounded like a lizard’s hiss through the voice-altering mask. “About sixteen, indoors and out. But they are all investigated.”

“Who does your investigations?”

Had he a lip visible to bite, CC would have bit it then. “I see what you mean. Any system is corruptible. And another twenty at the theater.”

“They are less likely to be corruptible.”

“Because they’re attached to a bigger institution, like the hotel?”

“No.” Max folded his arms and leaned against the wall between two lavish swags of drapery. “Because they’re union.”

When CC was silent, he went on. “Union stagehands are paid well enough to have something to protect. They don’t like anybody messing with their jobs. They feel they have enough muscle on their side to resent outside muscle telling them what to do, which is simply their job. That’s probably why your stagehand was killed up in the flies during TitaniCon. Have you figured out who it was?”

“Of course. With days off and such it took us a few days to realize.”

“You tell the police?”

The massive feline head shook. “I couldn’t maintain my own security if I let the police in on it. Robbie Weisel was a divorced guy, no kids, kind of a loner. He was a pretty loyal guy, like you guessed. Straight-shooter. If he got killed because somebody was trying to move in on me and he stood in their way, I’m not going to undo his sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice is right. He probably was mistaken for you. You had him wear a backup costume, right? When he was up in the flies getting ready to unleash a leopard illusion on the people below? Part of your scheme to embarrass the science fiction TV show that had ripped off your look for its alien race of baddies.”

“So it was a juvenile stunt! I resented the hell out them making my individual stage look part of a damned hive. Suing ’em would have taken years. One big splash of embarrassment would have gotten me ink all over the world.”

“Only it got your man killed.”

The Cloaked Conjuror’s mask hid all human expression, but his gloved hands clenched and unclenched in the rhythm of a big cat pumping its claws in and out. With the cats, it was a sign of pleasure and security. With the Cloaked Conjuror, it signified guilt and impotence.

Max knew he was being fairly merciless, but he had to convince the man to go along with his master plan for unmasking the people behind a whole slew of Las Vegas mayhem and murder.

And besides, he wasn’t entirely sure that the murder of Ron Weisel didn’t cut the other way too: some resentful science fiction convention attendee could have mistaken the magician’s disguise for the TV show alien.

CC was talking again. “You say this magician’s coven who hates my work is behind this stuff. Okay, I don’t want to blow unmasking them. I want to turn these Synth bastards over to the police, all wrapped up.”

“You also want enough evidence on them from other sources so your personal security and privacy aren’t compromised.”

“Is that so despicable?”

Max shrugged. “I can see that in your case it’s necessary. And I see that you need me to do it.”

CC nodded. “I have a lot of money. I can pay you when it’s done, when the Synth’s teeth are pulled.”

“Can you give me what I need now?”

“What is that?”

“Whatever I ask for.”

“To…a degree.”

“You mean to the degree that you can see sense in it. Here’s what I want now. It doesn’t cost a thing, except self-control and discretion.” Max came close, braced his bare, bony hands on the lemon-silk-upholstered arms of the dainty chairs, confined the Cloaked Conjuror to a temporary witness box in an empty court of law.

“I want you to tell no one. Not a long-lost relative, not a trusted associate of decades, not a woman in your bed. No one. Your life depends on it. And mine. And if you’re ever tempted, or ever that thoughtless, just remember Robbie’s lifeless body hanging like a puppet from the flywalk. He saw too much, he could have talked. He paid the price.”

“My God, my life is already circumscribed. I have no face to most people I deal with, no true voice, no body. You’re saying I should be a prisoner within this costume, not relax my guard for a moment.”

Max straightened. “Not every moment. You can work and play with the big cats. But don’t share your troubles with them. Someone might be listening. Someone might have bugged their collars, the environment. Trust no one. No place. No time. Nothing.”

“A man can’t live like that.”

“Yes, he can. If he must.”

“You?”

“Sometimes. For a long time. Again.”

“You think this is a…conspiracy.”

Max nodded. “Conspiracies are big, clumsy, well-aged anachronisms, but don’t underestimate the elephant. It’s the largest surviving land animal, and it has a long reach and an even longer memory.

“And it can crush a Big Cat with its front toenail.”

…The Sting

“This music could drive a person crazy,” Molina shouted to Morris Alch.

She was hoping he had attained an age group where he’d agree with her right off.

Instead, he just smiled.

“Sorry, can’t hear you over this racket, Lieutenant.” His forefinger patted his earlobe. “Hard of hearing. What a blessing sometimes.”

He gazed around like a kid who’d run away to see a traveling carnival.

This was a side show, all right, with the hoochie-coochie girls front and center. Morrie gazed up at their undulating everythings with innocent amazement. He was working, after all, even though it was past midnight when he met her here.

Molina wasn’t sure she was ready to watch another man fall for the obvious.

“I should have brought Su,” she shouted. “She’d keep her eye on the prize.”

Alch screwed a finger in one ear as if to twirl out wax. “Can’t hear,” he shouted happily.

Maybe, Molina thought, the awful, knee-knockingly loud music was part of the attraction. Some men seemed to crave not having to talk, or think.

The music made her teeth grind. It was what she thought of as jackhammer rock: screeched lyrics you couldn’t understand, screaming guitar, a dominant, body-vibrating bass deep enough to stop pacemakers for three blocks around.

She glanced at the small, glassed-in booth where the teenage troll responsible for this hellish hullabaloo was nodding his scraggly head to the beat like a palsied muppet.

They were here on official business, waiting for a brief break in the festivities.

Morrie stared up at the stage, where the only view was of Frederick’s of Hollywood thongs being put to very skimpy use.

You’d think Alch had never been to a strip club before, she thought, and then Molina considered the likely fact that he probably hadn’t, not often. He didn’t strike her as the type to rowdy out with the boys. Maybe that was why she’d always liked him, as much as an impartial superior officer could like an underling. Not playing favorites was the key to effective management, but she realized that she trusted Morrie more than most.

Which meant that she was relying on him to trust her enough to be useful and not ask too many questions. In other words, enough to use.

She let a few dead strippers romp through her memory to remind herself why this case had her covering up for her enemies and keeping her colleagues in the dark.

If progress was made tonight, if they could get closer to a chargeable suspect on the Cher Smith murder, the pressure would ease. The charade could stop, and she could go after the quarry she really wanted with brass knuckles: Max Kinsella, signed, sealed, and delivered for assorted felonies. Or Murder One would do. Maybe solving this case would take care of that matter for her at one and the same time.

The idea was so satisfying that she smiled.

The music stopped. Silence was more shocking than sound.

“Quick,” Molina said under her breath to Alch.

He heard her. The barefoot boy with mouth agape was gone, replaced by a canny investigator. Their quarry was momentarily accessible.

Together they burst like gangbusters through the small wooden door with its upper half all window.

“Police,” Molina said before the kid in the hot seat could do more than squirm.

He half stood, gulping like a guppy, trapped in his fishbowl of a booth, a place so transparent that almost nobody ever noticed it. She had.

“Police,” she repeated, aware of their plainclothes.

“Take it easy, son. This is just a routine inquiry.”

This was why she’d brought Morrie along. There was hardly a savage soul to be found in Las Vegas that his easygoing manner couldn’t soothe: antsy, acne-ridden, teenage DJs among them.

“This is Lieutenant Molina,” Morrie was saying. “My name is Alch. I know, it sounds like I’m burping. Just think of mulch or gultch. But you don’t have to think of anything but what you might have seen. Answer a couple questions and you’ll never see me — us — again.”

“Questions? I only get a five-minute break.”

“That might be against labor laws,” Molina said.

“So what?” the boy demanded. “You think I’d give up this cool job just for a longer break?”

“What’s so cool about it?” Morrie asked. “Besides the scenery?” His suited shoulder shrugged toward the empty stages.

“The music, man. I get to do it all. Next step is my own radio show.”

Molina nodded, leaning against the closed door. “Who picks the music?”

“The girls mostly. They have their routines worked out. Sometimes I get to suggest numbers, though. Depends on the girl.”

“Okay, son…say, what’s your name?”

A silence held that matched the unnatural sound of silence in the larger room beyond.

“First name,” Alch settled for.

“Tyler.”

“So, Tyler, what’s the attraction with this here job, other than cutting a career path to the top ten radio stations. Hours sort of stink. Nobody notices you much.”

“Are you kidding, man? The girls notice me plenty. They’d be lost without me. I miss a cue, they look stupid. Like I say, I help a lot of them with their routines. All the guys in my class would kill to have this job.”

“Just what class are you in?” Molina’s tone implied “underage.”

“Senior,” he said. Sneered. Didn’t like teacher types asking him to account for himself, big man like him. “I’m okay to work here, nights or whenever.”

“I wish I’d had a job like this at your age,” Alch put in, pulling the kid’s attention away from Molina. Teenage boys didn’t like female authority figures. It takes a few decades to get used to it. Did for Morrie anyway. Maybe kids today were faster studies. He doubted it.

He glanced at Molina, broadcasting his thinking.

She subsided, amused.

He didn’t often get a chance to take the lead with her. He was surprised that she didn’t care, but she didn’t. He realized that this was why she’d ordered him along. Male bonding. Sort of.

“I gotta admit,” Morrie went on, doing his Columbo imitation, “it’s pretty hard to hear the music out there. It’s all boom box, you know?”

“Yeah. It’s a generation thing. The point is the beat, the bass. That’s all there is. You’re not supposed to notice the lyrics or anything. We’re selling beat, bump, oomph.”

“Well,” Molina said, “we’re not selling anything, but we’d sure buy an ID if you can make one. We figure from your booth here you get a good view of the whole place, including the regular customers.”

“Yeah.” The kid nodded, glancing at the stage where a purple spotlight glared on empty wood flooring. He twisted a dial up, then down, but the sound system remained mute.

“See, Tyler,” Morrie said, “we’re counting on you having sharp eyes, even if you’re half-deaf from this music.”

“I hear fine.”

“I don’t. My little middle-aged joke. Don’t get like me.”

“Deaf?”

“Middle-aged.”

Tyler looked truly appalled at the thought. From zits to zip, not a happy notion.

“So,” said Morrie, “we brought some pictures. Could you eyeball them and tell me if you recognize anyone?”

“It’s about that stripper that was killed a while back, isn’t it?”

“Maybe. We’re not allowed to say exactly.” Morrie glanced at Molina like she was the one who had made the rules.

“Yeah. I’ll look. But make it quick. I gotta rev up these girls pretty quick for the next set.”

“Sure.” Alch produced the first of the papers Molina had given him: a full frontal photo of a powerfully handsome guy with that soft rot of something wrong in the character working its way out, the way Qaddafi had looked once, or the self-declared Reverend Jim Jones before he had served deadly Kool-Aid to the whole damn cult at Jonestown back before this kid was born.

This kid was nodding, as if in time to some music only he heard. “This guy’s Rafi, sure.”

“Rafi?”

“Not much weirder than ‘Alch’.”

“Got me there, Tyler. Kind of a bouncer, isn’t he, around the strip clubs?”

“Yeah. He got around. Worked ’em all: Kitty City, Baby Doll’s, Les Girls. Haven’t seen him lately, though.”

“Not lately,” Molina stressed, wanting to be sure.

“No.” Tyler shrugged. “Used to be around all the time.”

“When did he drop out?” Morrie asked.

“Don’t know. Haven’t thought about it. A couple weeks ago? Hey.”

“Hey what, Tyler.”

“After Cher Smith was killed, I guess. That’s all.”

“That’s all,” Alch repeated, pulling away the photo.

He traded it for a piece of heavy, nubbly paper.

“This a police sketch?” Tyler asked, impressed.

“Naw. The person who drew it did police sketches in the old days, but we use computers now.”

“Yeah. I use computerized equipment too. It’s all digital, man.”

“We’re not digital yet. Funny, that used to mean doing it by hand. Anyway, this guy’s face ring a bell?”

Tyler frowned, squinted, visibly thought.

Molina said not a word.

“He could have been wearing something different, could have looked different,” Morrie put in so smoothly no one would ever know he’d been coached. Maybe not even Morris Alch. “Tall guy, I hear, way over six feet.”

“Now that’s something that’d stand out around here.” Tyler’s sneer was back. “Most guys who come in are on the short side.”

“Really? I’ve never heard that observation before.”

“Like you said, I get to eyeball the whole place. I’m here mostly for the music, but I notice things. Tall guy would stand out.”

“You look like you’re not missing any inches, so you mean most of the customers are like me.”

“Yeah.” Tyler stood up to stretch, showing off. Five nine maybe. “Not shrimps exactly, but no, uh, Schwarzeneggers.”

“You think Arnold’s that tall, really? Or just overbuilt?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not as tall as he looks in his movies. This guy, though? I haven’t seen him. He must be a bad dude, he gets his own police sketch. Computer too good for him?”

“We like to try different methods.” Molina pulled the image off the small table crowded with buttons and dials where Tyler had dropped it when he couldn’t make the subject. “People react to different things.”

“Yeah, and I gotta make sure this crowd reacts right to that little honey about to strut her stuff onstage. Sorry.”

Tyler sat down and started playing the tabletop dials and buttons like the Phantom of the Opera pulling out all the stops on the organ.

Molina eased the door open, admitting a blast of earsplitting sound.

She and Alch slipped outside, sealing Tyler into his cocoon of equipment and the sound of silence.

“Get me chapter and verse on the kid,” she told Alch. “School, parents, age, everything.” Molina shouted into Morrie’s better ear as they wove their way through the cheesy tables to the door and the parking lot.

“You get what you wanted, Lieutenant?” he asked when they stood at last on the pulsing asphalt, the building behind them thumping like a herd of buffalo but thankfully muffled.

“No, Morrie. You did.”

Tempted

If the nights were no longer his own, belonging to WCOO and, more recently, Kitty the Cutter, the days were Matt’s to do with what he would.

The Circle Ritz parking lot, he was relieved to see the next mid-morning, was bare of a red Miata.

He got into the sun-warmed, whitewashed Probe that had been his landlady Electra’s once-pink signature car and drove onto streets thronged with white vans, pickups, and sedans designed to repel the relentless sunlight.

He didn’t know where he was going, just somewhere else. To think. Ethel M’s cactus garden crossed his mind. So did the shore of Lake Mead.

Instead, he found himself heading into Molina territory — not on her account, but because the stucco spire of Our Lady of Guadalupe beckoned him like a parental finger.

The church was in its midday lull, between services, empty.

Matt dipped his fingers in the stainless-steel-lined holy water font — no longer bracketing bowls at either side of the entrance arch, but now a footed and carved stone structure upheld by angels.

That’s what he loved about Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was always in retrograde, like a planet frozen in its eternal orbit. The more modernity shouldered into Catholic churches, the more Our Lady of Guadalupe became a quaint, intractable anachronism. In an ecumenical world, OLG remained staunchly Catholic with a capital C. Matt genuflected before entering an empty pew, noticing that his knees were beginning to begrudge going through the familiar motion.

The vigil light signifying the presence of the Eucharist burned true-blue blood red above the elaborate altarpiece. The altar itself had long ago been turned to face the pews, one glaring concession to change. Matt remembered masses said with the priest’s back to the congregation, so he faced only the crucifix and the presence of God. That made the ritual more solemn somehow, when the congregation eavesdropped over the priest’s shoulder. Secrecy always conferred solemnity, or else why whisper during confession in those dark, private booths in the old days?

Matt’s eyes inventoried the familiar artifacts: the embroidered altar cloth, the flowers provided by the Ladies’ Altar Society, the simple pulpit awaiting a preacher the way a clay pot does its plant. The Stations of the Cross marched down the side aisle walls, the bas-relief wood carvings resembling petrified flesh. Everything was as soothing and familiar as it had been when he had come to church as a child, sitting silent beside his mother (nobody in the congregation spoke responses then, but were seen and not heard like good children of God). He realized the peace he had felt in church was literal. It was the only place he and his mother had escaped the bitter harangues of Clifford Effinger.

No wonder he had hoped to make the church his permanent home.

A door cracked open behind the altar.

Matt smiled at the familiar, secret sound, betraying the rich liturgical life that was always being led behind the scenes in a church. Every day had its meaning, its patron saint or significance in Church history. The Church calendar was a phantom image of the secular calendar, with its major “feast days” only reflected in a few secular holidays. The word “holiday” was itself an evolution of “Holy Day.” And the secular calendar was Gregorian, after all, determined by a Pope hundreds of years ago.

Father Raphael Hernandez crossed from the sacristy door to genuflect painfully on the red carpeting in front of the altar.

He wore the long cassock abandoned by most modern priests but its solid black dignity suited his angular Iberian features. He was the model of the reserved, dedicated priests Matt had known as a child. The father figure he had aspired to become.

The vigil light glinted off the small round black buttons closing Father Rafe’s cassock from neck to hem. Matt found himself remembering Temple wearing a soft black knit dress that buttoned up the front, and him undoing some of them.

The vigil light’s red heat seemed to flood his face. He wanted to censor the thought, then resisted. Too much had been censored. Self-censored and confessed. What he had felt and done had been natural, honest. That part of himself was as worthy of embracing as the urge for commitment and service that had brought him to the priesthood.

Father Rafe spotted him, started a bit theatrically, and then came striding forward.

“Matt. Nice to see you here. I’ve missed you at a few masses.”

Matt rose, shook the thin hand. “I like to visit other parishes. Different decor, different music.”

“I wasn’t implying you had missed a Sunday —”

“I know. I wasn’t implying that your sermons were anything but inspirational. I did that even when I was…a priest. Visited other congregations.”

Father Rafe sighed. “I’m so involved with my little world here. That’s what got me into trouble.” He frowned and looked hard at Matt. “Are you troubled?”

Matt nodded, relieved.

“You need the sacrament of reconciliation?”

“Not…yet, Father. Just to talk. To discuss ethics. Right and wrong.”

“If it’s something involving the female sex, I admit I’m not your man.”

“Nothing like that. At least not directly. It’s about the nature of evil.”

“Evil?” Father Rafe frowned again. “You mean that literally.”

“Yes.”

“Sit down.” He gestured to the polished oak pew as if it were an easy chair.

Matt knew that there were no easy chairs in church. He sat, though, jamming his feet under the descended kneeler.

“I know a homicide lieutenant,” Matt began.

Father Rafe nodded, understanding that this was prologue.

“She deals with the results of evil, day in, day out. I honestly don’t know how she does it, faces so many dead souls, knowing they were killed by malice. I admire her.”

“It is a debilitating job. I have such a one in my congregation.”

Matt didn’t acknowledge the relationship. OLG was Carmen Molina’s parish, this was a story. No names would be given, to protect the innocent as well as the guilty.

“Like you, Father,” Matt went on, “I’ve heard confessions…administered the sacrament of reconciliation as we say now. I like the old, plain title better. Confession. I liked absolving people of their sins, which they themselves had named. You and I know that as we priests became aware of the true wrongs in society we had to read between the formulas to find the violent spouses, the child abusers, and persuade them to seek help beyond mere forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness is never ‘mere.’ It is the greatest of the divine gifts.”

“Yes, I know that. Especially since I’ve been led to forgive beyond reason, beyond right myself.”

“Forgiveness heals the wronged as much as the one who wrongs.”

“I know that too. I’ve seen evil in human form, and have seen that the origin of that evil is all too human. But.”

The priest’s dark, peaked eyebrows lifted and held the position.

“What if, Father, you encountered truly irredeemable evil? Someone who would slaughter innocents, persecute children, spit in the face of God only because it was there?”

He thought about it, the implications. “You are discussing demonic evil.”

Matt nodded.

“Inhuman evil.”

“It would seem so.”

Father Rafe considered it. He had a face that could have sat judge for Torquemada. Of all the priests in Las Vegas, he was the only one that Matt could imagine conducting an exorcism.

“I believe in pure evil,” the older man said, speaking slowly. “I believe in the Devil. I believe the Devil can make use of humans who let him.” He tented his fingers, considering every implication of Matt’s question. “I believe in you, Matthias, named after the disciple who replaced Judas. But I do not believe that any human being is so unremittingly evil that he would be on an equal footing with the Unholy One.”

Matt absorbed this. “Then anything once human keeps some lost core of humanity, no matter how debased?”

“I believe so.” Father Rafe grimaced. “It is an act of faith, my belief in ultimate good. It is an act of reason to admit the existence of pure evil.”

“Is it a sin to do what is necessary to save someone else from pure evil?”

Again the eyebrows raised. “I’m just a parish priest, not a theologian.”

“That’s why I’m asking you. You see people at their best and worst every day. Theologians do so only on Sunday.”

Father Rafe chuckled. “Theologians are theorists. Very necessary, but sometimes annoying. So are parish priests. We don’t say what you want to hear.”

Matt shrugged. “As long as you tell us what we say we want to hear.”

“I’m sorry you’ve encountered such evil. Your stepfather —?”

“Was a piker. I’ve learned to…forget him.”

“Forgive him?”

“I suppose so.”

“And this other evil?”

“I’ve truly never encountered anyone so devoted to destruction for its own sake. My conundrum is how to stop it.”

“No.”

“No? Innocent lives may be lost, ruined.”

“No. Your conundrum is how to heal it.”

“Heal evil? This evil demands my soul.”

Father Hernandez was silent, then crossed himself, his lips moving in prayer. “I don’t doubt that you are tried. Remember Our Lord, taken by the Devil to the top of the Temple and offered every worldly thing.”

“Mere materialism. He was not offered the chance to save the lives of his disciples, to do good by doing wrong.”

“One can never do good by doing wrong.”

“If a kidnapper holds a child with a gun to its head and won’t surrender, isn’t it right that a police sniper shoot him?”

“That’s between the police sniper and his conscience. But suppose the kidnapper’s gun is defective and can’t fire?”

“The only way to find out is to risk the child. Sacrifice the child.”

“Or to negotiate.”

“And while you negotiate, the kidnapper panics and shoots.”

“You are not a hostage negotiator, Matt.”

“Yes, I am. If you only knew how much I am.”

“And the item under negotiation? It can’t be a child.”

“It’s my soul.”

“Your soul. You and I know what that means. Your soul is immortal, as you are not. You must not sacrifice it.”

“But what is sacrifice, and what is self-defense?”

“I don’t know enough about the specific situation to say. Surely the Devil has not appeared before you to tempt you.”

“He has,” Matt said gravely.

Father crossed himself again.

Seeing the ancient gesture invoked was strangely comforting.

“I’ll pray for you,” Father Raphael said. “Every day at mass.”

Some would have said that was no solution. Matt respected the power of prayer, even if prayer might not solve his problem.

“Thank you, Father.”

The man’s hand leaned on his wrist as he pushed himself to his feet. It was a gesture acknowledging Matt’s comparative youth and strength. “I can’t tell you how to defeat this devil of yours. I was not very good at defeating my own devil.”

“But you did.”

The older man smiled, an expression that turned his stark, ascetic face handsome. “Yes, I did. With your help. I am sure that you will find a way to outsmart your own devil, which is not of your making, is it?”

Matt shook his head.

“You are fortunate to share with Our Lord the role of an innocent tried. I hope you find an easier path to redemption.”

Matt did too. Perhaps the answer was to renounce all hope of his own salvation.

He let his knees sink into the padded kneeler, remembering the oak-hard kneelers of his childhood. Even here things had become easier, less deliberately harsh. It made for less agonizing decisions.

Kitty the Cutter had placed him back on the cutting edge of ethics. That’s what she really wanted — not his body, but his divisive soul. Should he be the Lamb of God and go peacefully to the Cross to save the world? Or should he be the Soldier of the Lord, ready to smite Satan in all His forms?

He remembered the sadistic charade of the Blue Dahlia parking lot.

With Temple he had glimpsed his passionate, loving, sensual self.

With Kathleen O’Connor, and with Cliff Effinger before her, he had glimpsed his passionate, hating, homicidal self.

Which was the best/worst way to save his soul? A sin of the flesh, or the sin of murder? Cain had been the Judeo-Christian culture’s first murderer but before that his parents, Adam and Eve, had lost paradise through a sin of intellectual superiority, though succeeding generations had chosen to convert hubris into a sin of the flesh.

Europeans, for centuries less puritanical than their American brethren, had long ago learned to rank sexual sins low on the totem pole. Americans called them cynical; they called themselves realists. Americans still flourished the scarlet letter: better death than disgrace. That presumed the death of the innocent. What about the death of the guilty at the hands of the innocent?

American society still had, today, a legitimate role for the executioner as well as the executed.

Matt let his mind and his emotions dance an interlacing pavane of imagined action and reaction.

He recognized that he could kill Kitty O’Connor. He knew the martial arts moves that would do it. Everything would stop there. Certainly his brave new secular life. He’d be lucky to get life imprisonment but what was he facing now?

He knew a hatred of what she was doing that shook him, made him think the once unthinkable.

She had revived his rage against Cliff Effinger, that childish fury of knowing the whole world was turning a blind eye to a terrible wrong, and the urge to right it by the most violent means, by yourself.

Weighed against the dark balance of his thoughts now, murder, a spiritual and social violation, a sexual act seemed trivial. He began to see the European point of view, and it wasn’t cynical, it was practical.

So. He would sleep with someone not of his choice, of his free will.

Would letting it be Kitty spend her poison and save others at the sacrifice of his self-respect? Or would cheating her of her prey make her deadlier than ever?

There was only one way to find out. He must act and find out before her game became lethal to some innocent bystander. When she’d found out what he’d done, maybe she’d kill him.

He stood, still not sure what he’d do, directing a prayer to the altar: that God would give him the wisdom to sin in the manner least hurtful to the most people.

He genuflected on the way out, and touched the water from the font to his forehead, chest, and shoulders. Head, heart, and arms to act with.

Charming Fellow

I am pretty excited when I hit the home place again.

I know I am hot on the trail.

My Miss Temple has been playing with a sketch of the very charm I have seen dangling on Miss Hyacinth’s neck.

Only this interesting item is no longer dangling from that stringy and fuzzy throat. It has been nicked. It is caught close in the second shiv on my right mitt. And let me tell you hiking home the whole long way with one foot cramped to hang on to my prize has not been easy.

Several Good Samaritans have spotted my limping form and given chase, trying to save me by condemning me to the city pound.

The dedicated operative lets no discomfort dissuade him from the necessary heroics. My Miss Temple is interested in this bauble, so like any swain I have snagged it for her. Too bad it was at the sacrifice of playing the cringing toady with Miss Hyacinth. I could retch at my masquerade, except I am picturing my Miss Temple putting two and two together, and not having any notion of how to make it four.

Perhaps if she discusses it with Mr. Max they will finally make some progress.

Not that I wish to encourage her discussing anything with Mr. Max. He is much too big to share our bed.

So I claw my way, three-handed, so to speak, up the slick black marble face of the Circle Ritz to our patio and cast myself panting on the cool slate stones shadowed by the sole palm tree honoring our exterior.

It is not unusual for me to arrive at Chez Ritz by the dawn’s early light, so I pop the easiest French door and finally stagger onto the parquet tiles of home. My mitt is numb from holding onto my prize. I can barely loosen my grip to release the item onto the floor.

I collapse, knowing nothing but Free-to-be-Feline lies in my bowl as goad and reward. I might as well have headed straight for the Crystal Phoenix koi pond, where there is some real eating adventure.

After recovering from my night of long treks, I amble into the bedroom, relieved to spy a familiar lump under the comforter. Like many a tea drinker, I like only one lump, not two, of sugar…so I am even more relieved to see that this is the case, although how Mr. Max Kinsella could have beaten me back here even with the assistance of wheels I cannot imagine.

I leap upon the bed, ignoring my sore pads, and excavate the edge of the comforter most likely to cover the end where intelligence resides in my Miss Temple.

“Luffffuhhh,” she finally murmurs affectionately. Well, she murmurs. It might be more of an annoyed murmur.

I spot a stray red curl escaping the zebra stripes that cover her and snag it affectionately. Well, it might be with more of an intention to annoy.

With roommates of such long duration as Miss Temple and I, the line between affection and annoyance is always whisker-thin.

“Owww, lufffuhhh!” she complains, her endearing murmur having escalated into a less endearing mewl.

Aha, I am making progress.

I pat at her nose, just visible now.

“Owww!” She sits up, fully aroused. “Louie! Did you just knife my nose with your claws?”

It is so hard to be misunderstood.

I reach out a mitt again, and massage her nose.

“Louie! That hurts. What is the matter with you? You do not often put your claws out, not at home, at least.”

Could I sigh, I would. But that is another rare thing that dogs are better at than my breed. I lift the paw again and dangle my prize from it, hoping that her eyes are open enough to see that my shivs remain in a gentlemanly closed position. It is the trinket I have snatched from Hyacinth that has scratched her.

“What is that? Have you got some tinsel caught in your paw? Did you walk on a open can while you were out!” She is sitting up now, all attention, torn between concern and annoyance, like a fond parent. “Let me see, you poor baby. Hold still!”

I sigh metaphorically and let my grasp relax, so that the item drops to the comforter.

“Where are my glasses?”

As if I would know. In fact, I do, and I paw them off the night-stand, also onto the comforter.

She claws at the black-and-white pattern until her one of her pathetic fingernails clicks against the red metallic glasses frames and she installs them on the same nose I was forced to abuse.

“I swear I saw your paw pierced by a piece of tin can…. Is there blood on the coverlet?”

Please. If I were bleeding, I would be licking it.

She feels the comforter surface again and finally, finally pulls up a plum: my offering, fresh from the sinister collar of the treacherous Hyacinth, who after a stint on cable TV has been reunited with the same evil mistress who stole Miss Temple’s semiengagement ring only weeks ago.

Of course I cannot tell Miss Temple all this. I have to leave something for her to figure out on her own.

“Louie…” She leans over to snap on the bedside light. We both blink in the flood of artificial sunlight. “This isn’t a piece of tin. It’s gold. Real…eighteen-karat-marked gold. And I’ve seen it before. At the Rancho Exotica. And now I know what it is. Ophiuchus!”

Miss Temple practically stands up in bed, she is so excited.

“This is it! The charm I spotted on that woman at the Ranch. The larger-than-life symbol that was used to contain the dead body of poor Professor Mangel! The thirteenth sign of the zodiac! The sign of the Serpent. The calling card of the Synth. Louie!”

She comes back down to terra cognita again and hunkers down beside me, kisser to kisser.

“Where on earth did you get it?”

And she waits.

Like I could tell her.

Like I would.

A Place of Concealment

“Aren’t you afraid,” Molina asked when Matt called, “that your girlfriend might be tapping your line?” She sounded weary and annoyed. Annoyed with him.

“That’s why I got a cell phone. I’m calling from the Circle Ritz parking lot.”

“Don’t mention parking lots. Too many bad things have happened in them lately.”

“How is Vicki?”

“Fine. Except for being scared to death. The scariest part is that I can’t do anything to protect her. You’ve got to get me some solid information on this madwoman of yours, or she’ll really do some damage.”

“She’s not my madwoman!”

“Anger is a deadly sin. You sound tired too.”

“Yeah, well, I imagine we’re both pretty much at the ends of our ropes. I’m sorry, Carmen. It’s my fault that the Blue Dahlia parking lot has another bad memory for you.”

“Bad memory? Not this time. This time I’m just…aggravated. Who the heck does that woman think she is, playing mind games on my territory? Was she alone?”

“She always has been when she’s encountered me…or when she sees fit to confront me. You mean did she have an accomplice last night, with Vicki?”

“Yeah. It took planning. That outdoor sound setup was installed around ten yesterday morning. A couple of BD employees saw someone in white coveralls and a painter’s cap on a ladder messing with the roofline but it was near the neon sign and they thought it was maintenance.”

“Man or woman?”

“Couldn’t exactly tell, even when pressed. Workmen and mail carriers are the world’s most invisible occupations.”

“So what happened to Vicki?”

“Took her statement, gave her a card for a good trauma counselor, suggested she stay off the call-in lines of The Midnight Hour and away from you and WCOO. She didn’t see who nabbed her. The car had a dark-tinted glass privacy panel between the back and the driver’s compartment like a limo. Some of the car services around town do that. She saw and heard mostly you when she was on the pavement. She thinks you’re God’s gift to damsels in distress, though, despite not knowing what was going on, and is grateful you ‘saved’ her. I am not hopeful that she’ll have the smarts to avoid calling your radio show. Girls today are way too boy crazy way too young. It’s a shame that Mariah can’t skip adolescence like you did and go directly into the convent instead of junior high, but I guess nunneries are a dying institution.”

“I can see why parents get into that kind of repressive thinking.”

“This Kitty scenario doesn’t make sense. Sure, women can become obsessed, they can stalk, but, as usual, they tend to hurt themselves, not others. They get arrested, ridiculed, mentioned on the nightly news, put into mental hospitals. They don’t turn dangerous like this.”

“I don’t think Kathleen O’Connor ‘turned’ dangerous. I think she always was.”

“Then you do know something of her history.”

He did, and he teetered on the brink of telling Molina on a need-to-know basis. Something stopped him. Keeping other people’s secrets was too ingrained from his life as a priest. Maybe he could persuade Kinsella to come clean about this himself. Yes. This latest incident would persuade him if nothing would. Kinsella couldn’t stand innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire. It was the one trait he shared with Matt, that old Catholic guilt syndrome. No one must pay for my actions, my sins, but me.

“Well?” Molina was demanding.

“I’m thinking.” True. So true. “I guess if we haven’t lived in a politically and religiously segregated society like northern Ireland it’s hard to understand how deep the hatred goes. That’s what she’s acting out: that bred-in-the-bone hatred where rage becomes your life’s blood, your air.”

“Unemployed terrorist is your explanation? Downsized into State-side harassment of ex-priests? There’s some more primal motivation, some ritual, just like there is with serial killers, that I know.”

“You think she’s really a killer?”

“I think she likes to put chaos in motion and sit back and watch the carnage. As you said, and Mr. Oscar Wilde before you: ‘Each man kills the thing he loves. The coward with a kiss, the brave man with a sword.’”

Matt nodded to himself. The most virulent hatred is rooted in love betrayed. His own hatred of his abusive stepfather was his reaction to a father figure who was anything but. You are supposed to love and protect me, the abused child cries. And no anger, no fury is stronger than the final, unavoidable realization that the protector has betrayed his role and is really the destroyer. But it takes a while to find out that the unthinkable is not the status quo, and that your daily “normal” is very abnormal to a larger world.

“So.” Molina was interrupting his silence again. “What can you give me? Something solid, other than this crackpot IRA theory. I don’t know where you got that anyway. I called Frank Bucek and he didn’t remember finding anything like that about Kathleen O’Connor, although he did remember you asking him to do a search and retrieve on her.”

“I don’t know. She may have mentioned something herself. She’s said a lot of wild things to me.”

“I still don’t get how she found you, why she targeted you.”

“It was when I was trying to track down my stepfather. She noticed I was on his trail. She mistook me for a hit man, I think. When she found out I wasn’t one, she got angry, as if I had disappointed her.”

“You’re just too good to be true, that’s your problem. It’s very annoying, take my word for it.”

“I guess women like the bad boys. Russell Crowe. Puff Daddy.”

“Some who need their heads examined do.” There was an odd silence on the line. “The bad boys have a way of introducing themselves as Mr. Right. But Miss Kitty seems to have a thing for good boys. I suppose she’s no different from overcontrolling men who pick on naive girls.”

“I may be innocent, but I’m not naive.”

“So there’s nothing you can give me, nothing concrete on tracking Miss Kitty?”

He thought, remembered, decided to lie. One small sin down the slippery slope.

“No.”

As soon as he had hung up on Molina, Matt punched in another number.

Kinsella answered. They were now both plugged into cell phones. Matt pictured the whole world with a hand and phone clamped to one ear, mouths moving like cud-chewing cows, eyes gazing vacantly into the sky or the ceiling.

“Devine here,” Matt said, brusquely.

“Gad, you sound like you’ve taken lessons in phone etiquette from Molina.”

“Maybe I have. I’ve just gotten off the line with her.”

“My condolences.”

“Your Irish friend has crossed the line. I need to give Molina a real lead on her. All I can think of is that sketch.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“It’s been our little secret, we three.”

“Secrets are made to be shared.”

“That’s not the way you act.”

“I’m a mass of walking contradictions.”

“I know, and that makes you not as unique as you think.”

“What do you want?”

“Your permission to bring Molina in on the Kitty O’Connor loop.”

“My permission?”

“She is your demon.”

“It is your sketch. You commissioned it. Why an ex-priest would want a pinup picture of a demon, I don’t know.”

“This is not just an amusing game of harass-the-clergy anymore. A girl was involved in the latest incident. And Molina was there.”

For once something Matt said stopped Kinsella the Kool cold.

“Okay. Where can we meet?” he said. “When?”

“I don’t know if we can. That woman is watching my every move. It’s not just my apartment or my job anymore. It’s me, twenty-four/seven.”

“Go to the Oasis Hotel back parking lot. Park in the exact middle, as far as you can tell. What are you using for wheels now?”

“A white ’93 Probe.”

“Gack.”

“So I hoped.”

Kinsella laughed. “Your boring taste is impeccable. I congratulate you. Good work. Park the Ignoro-car and walk on a zigzag course toward the lamppost with the Sphinx on it. Drop to the ground and get under the car parked nearest to the lamppost. Did I mention you should wear Rough Gear clothes? I’ll come by in a black Maxima.”

“A black Maxima? Isn’t that a little iconic?”

“Only you would ask if something was iconic. Yes. Just get into the backseat when I pause, and stay down until I say. It may be a while.”

“Have you always lived like this, like James Bond or Howard Hughes or somebody?”

“Longer than you’d care to think about.”

“I still don’t trust you.”

“Funny. I’ve always known I could trust you. It’s what I’ve disliked about you most. Later.”

Matt lay on the shaded asphalt, road grit prickling through his clothes.

He felt like a fool. Then he remembered how Vicki Jansen must have felt lying on the Blue Dahlia parking lot, bound and gagged.

He was here of his own free will, if against his better judgment.

He was doing what Max Kinsella had told him to do, and it was darn undignified.

He supposed Kinsella got a kick out of that.

But he was the undercover expert, and their enemy was now mutual.

Funny, a woman had made them rivals and another woman was making them allies.

Matt guessed that was life in the noncelibate world. He began to understand the deep fears of the Church fathers who had called woman the Devil’s tool.

It wasn’t demons they had feared, but their own impulses, both noble and base.

Groveling in the gravel did lend itself to philosophical and theological contemplation. It recalled his ordination, the long minutes of lying prone before the altar.

For I am a worm and no man.

Was that truly the thought of Jesus as he made the Way of the Cross? Was self-abnegation the only gateway to Godhood, or to any kind of religious transcendence?

Waiting obediently for Max Kinsella to show up was giving Matt all kinds of second thoughts.

He heard and saw some tires seize to a stop in front of him.

What he could see of the vehicle’s rocker panels was black.

He scrabbled out from his ignominious shelter, scraping his palms on sand and glass, and hurtled through the open rear door, crouching to pull it closed.

Maybe he’d hitched a ride with a lady blackjack player with a broken rear door latch. Maybe Kitty the Cutter was at the wheel, having eavesdropped on him with some demonic high-tech device.

Whoever was driving turned up the CD in the player as they lurched away.

Oh, my sweet Lord…

Only Max Kinsella, always the impresario for his own one-man show.

Matt pulled the black blanket on the backseat over himself and tuned out.

Many, many gratuitous bumps later — Matt suspected that Kinsella enjoyed every pothole — the car came to a gravelly stop. He heard the tires slow as if stuck to adhesive.

More likely desert sand. The CD player stopped.

“All right if I do a gopher and peek out?” Matt asked.

“You can jump on the hood and tap-dance if you want.”

Matt, blinking in the flat, bright light, glanced at endless scrub through car windows. “Where are we?”

“Where only the nuts and the G-men will find us.”

Matt dusted off his khakis, staring into distant nothingness.

“We’re on the fringes of Area fifty-one,” Kinsella added. “We go any farther in, we attract unwanted federal attention. I figure even Kathleen O’Connor doesn’t want federal attention.”

“Really. This zone is that touchy?”

“Area fifty-one is the Holy Grail of conspiracy nuts. It’s also real.”

“Can I get out, get in the passenger seat?”

“Why? Don’t fancy feeling like a mob abductee? It’s better than being an alien abductee.”

“I don’t ‘fancy’ being anybody’s abductee, including hers.”

“Sorry. Sometimes I slip into a European expression. It’s habit, not pretension.”

Matt got out of the car without comment, paused to be ironed by the searing desert heat, then slammed the back door shut. He opened the front door and entered the idling car. A blast of air conditioning ruffled his hair and soothed his indignation.

“Is all this drama necessary?”

“You said she was on you twenty-four/seven.”

“Seems like it.”

“Tell me.”

The trouble was that Kinsella looked and acted so bloody competent compared to the rest of the world. Matt knew most of it was stage presence. A magician is the ultimate controller, next to God Himself. A magician’s biggest and best illusion is the myth of his own omniscience.

Matt had been trained to honor omniscient figures, but now he resented it. So he laid out the details of Kitty the Cutter’s terrifying omniscience. Maybe it took one to outwit one.

Kinsella listened, his hands still clamping the steering wheel, unwilling to relinquish control.

Matt described the attack on him and his producer as they left the radio station. The ghastly setup in the Blue Dahlia parking lot, with the enthusiastic fan as an abducted witness.

“Why were you at the Blue Dahlia?” Kinsella asked.

“I wanted Molina’s advice on this. I figured it was a safe place to meet her.”

“Apparently safe places are no longer on your route now.”

Matt glanced through the car’s rear window.

“This is safe, for a while. Now you understand how terrorists work. They never rest. They’re always scheming. It’s not that they’re everywhere. They can’t be. But their victims are everywhere, and when they strike, it looks as if no one is safe. They have generated terror.”

“She’s one woman.”

“Is she?”

“That’s what Molina asked me, if she worked alone. Yes, until last night. Last night I couldn’t be sure. She could have had a driver. Witnesses saw a workman, or woman, putting up the sound equipment earlier in the day.”

“That’s the terrible beauty of being a terrorist. You put all your time into plotting, and it looks superhuman. Invincible. Not unlike a magical illusion.”

“It feels invincible too.”

“I know.” Max Kinsella lifted something off the seat between them, thrust it at Matt.

The morning paper. He read the second headline, not the one across the top, but three thick lines above the fold on the right.

IRA OFFERS TO DESTROY ITS ARMS

“So? They’ve been dancing the peace shuffle in Northern Ireland for three years. It’s been one step forward and two steps back every bit of the way.”

“So. This is how Kathleen discharged her anger for almost two decades: selling herself to buy arms. She’s not going to take this well. Peace is a threat to someone like her. It undoes all her life’s work. She’s more liable than ever to lash out at innocent bystanders.”

“She already has.” Matt gave him the short and sweet version of Kitty’s treatment of the girl.

“And this girl she kidnapped was just a groupie at WCOO?”

“I don’t like the term ‘groupie’.”

“Swell rock star you’d make. How’d Kathleen pick her out of the crowd?”

“Judas kiss.”

“Ah, Kathleen’s obsession has gotten seriously possessive. So this poor girl assaulted you with a postshow smooch and within twenty-four hours she’s the main course at Kathleen’s not-so-impromptu picnic at the Blue Dahlia parking lot?”

“How could Kitty know I was going there?”

“Had you ever been there before?”

“A couple, three times.”

“Molina does trill a good torch song.”

“So how, on the basis of my going there a few times, does Kitty know?”

“How many other spots around town do you patronize?”

“Uh, none. Not since I stopped hitting the joints looking for my stepfather.”

“She’s just covering all the bases, like a good terrorist. But you’re right. She’s tailing you twenty-four/seven. Or someone is.”

“That’s why I’m sneaking around to see Molina.”

“Strictly business, huh?”

Matt remembered the subject of his last discussion with her and felt a reddening surge of guilty fluster.

“Sorry. None of my business.” Kinsella’s smooth smile annoyed the heck out of Matt.

“Just business,” Matt managed to say, “sordid as it is when that O’Connor woman’s involved. You know she’s only tormenting me because she can’t find you.”

“I don’t know that. Why would she think you had anything to do with me?”

“We’re not complete strangers. She devotes all her time to it. She’s superhumanly omniscient, remember?”

“So she is.”

Matt couldn’t resist an urge to flash some omniscience himself after contemplating the varieties displayed by these two mortal enemies.

“Temple knows where her ring is now. Your ring.”

“Ring?”

It was Matt’s turn to look smug. How could Kinsella have forgotten Temple’s almost-engagement ring? “How many have you given Temple? The one the magician swiped. Sha-nah-nah or whatever.”

Max reclaimed the newspaper section and folded it into crisp thirds as if trying to bury something inside it. “The ring? Where is it? Who found it? When?”

“I don’t know when. I guess we could figure it out if we tried.”

“Why should we?”

“Because Molina has it. In a plastic evidence baggie. She’s had it for some time but just showed it to Temple a couple of days ago, along with a warning that it tied you to yet another murder and that Temple had better ditch you fast.”

“Another murder? How?”

“I’m not too sure, but Temple sure didn’t like the connection.”

“Where did Molina find it?”

“It’s evidence from the case of that woman killed in a church parking lot about the same time as Molina found the other poor woman’s body in the Blue Dahlia parking lot. I’m not sure why Molina’s so convinced the ring’s being found there links you to the murder. We all saw the ring taken by a third party.”

“Seeing things with her own eyes wouldn’t change Molina’s mind about me,” Kinsella said absently. “She’s like Kathleen, absolutely blinded by her wacked sense of political correctness. That dead woman in the church parking lot had been a magician’s assistant years ago. That’s the connection Molina sees. And she probably believes I got that ring back the night it disappeared because I got Temple and Midnight Louie back. She probably figures I palmed it and then dropped it while strangling Gloria Fuentes. That was the dead woman’s name. She used to be quite well known in magical circles in this town.”

“I’m sorry.” Matt Kinsella’s bleakness when speaking of the dead woman made it seem as if he had known her. Not good if he had. It only bolstered Molina’s theory.

“Magic is dead,” Kinsella pronounced with finality, the way Matt had heard some people chant “God is dead” twenty years ago. “There’s more profit in debunking it.”

“You could say the same thing about religion.”

“So you could. We invested in the wrong careers for the times, didn’t we? But you’re still trying to save souls on the radio and I’m still trying to save lives with magic tricks.”

“At least we’re trying.”

“Very trying.” Kinsella grinned, unfolding the newspaper into a tattered patchwork that Matt took dazed custody of when Max put the car into gear. “Especially you. You must drive Kathleen nuts, as if she needed any help in that direction. Want to hop in the back again?”

“Not really.” Max opened the passenger door to admit a wave of pure dry heat. It felt clean. “What are you going to do?”

“What I’ve always done: my Invisible Man act, try to control everything and be seen nowhere. As for your question, sure, give Molina the portrait of Kathleen. I’d appreciate it if she’d get off on persecuting someone else for a while.”

“Can anyone actually persecute a psychopath, even if they’re the police?”

“I could. If I could find her.”

“Looks like you and Kathleen are at an impasse.”

“I think we have been for almost twenty years. So don’t sweat Miss Kitty. I outrank you.”

Matt dropped the magically savaged newspaper on the passenger seat as he moved to his place of concealment in the back.

Men in Motion

Matt rang the Circle Ritz penthouse doorbell, feeling oddly nervous.

He hadn’t seen his landlady, Electra Lark, in so long that he felt like a fraud to be calling on her for a favor. A menial favor at that.

And he still hadn’t thought up a good excuse for asking her to do it. Kitty O’Connor had driven him to the point that the truth was only a method of last resort.

The door swung open.

“Matt! I was just thinking about you.”

“Why?”

“I get these sort of premonitions.” She dimpled like a teenager. Not bad for a sixty-something. Electra and her apparel, the usual blooming Hawaiian muumuu that more often seemed to wear her, stepped back to admit him into the tiny octagonal entry hall that was covered in vertical Mylar-faced blinds.

It was like walking inside one of those spinning mirrored balls that hover like UFOs over scenes of mass ballroom dancing.

“Gracious, you haven’t taken up wallpaper sales on the side, have you, dear?”

Matt lofted the cardboard tube he held like a clumsy sword. “No, this is why I came up. I was wondering if you could mail it for me. It’s awkward for me to do it myself, I can’t quite explain why —”

“If you were going to be late with your rent I’d need an explanation. If you need a favor, I’m not about to demand one.”

Being a good guilt-ridden Catholic, Matt gave her one anyway. “It’s a poster.” A Wanted poster, in its fashion. “I taped an envelope to the top; what’s inside should cover the postage.”

Electra waggled plump fingers of dismissal at his scrupulous accounting. “Listen, Matt, I’m so pleased to have a media celebrity residing at my modest little residence I’d probably send a hundred-pound box of Ethel M for you gratis.”

“A hundred pounds of Ethel M candy? That would be overkill.”

She took the cardboard tube and leaned it against the doorjamb. “This is a featherweight. I’ll mail it this afternoon. Can you come in for a minute?”

“Sure.” Matt didn’t like to beg and run. Besides, he was curious to see the penthouse.

“I keep things rather dim up here,” Electra warned, preceding him through a split in the mirroring blinds.

The large room beyond was indeed bathed in eternal dusk, thanks to more vertical blinds, although these were a lot less flashy.

“I grew up with furniture like this.” Matt eyed the sprawling, overupholstered forms that grazed on the dark wood floor like baby elephants.

“It that a complaint or a compliment?”

“I don’t complain. It becomes chronic.”

“That’s for sure. Especially in my age group. If it isn’t ‘my aching angina’ or ‘my inflamed tendon’ or my ‘inverted intestine’ or whatever, it’s a marathon discussion of doctors and HMOs and prepaid burial plans. No thanks!”

Electra plopped down on a long, dark sofa shaped like a ’40s Ford. Matt tried a ’50s sling chair.

“So why did you paint my Probe white?” she asked. “It looks like a bathtub on wheels. I know the pink was a little sun-faded, but you could have gone for something zippier.”

“White is the most practical color in this climate; reflects sunlight, keeps the interior cooler. And its high visibility makes it the safest color to drive. You’re less likely to blend into anything and get hit.”

“Oh, don’t sound like a spokesman for the automotive council. I know all that, but a car isn’t just a safety cradle. It should be fun.”

“I have the Hesketh Vampire for that,” Matt said.

“Which you hardly use. If it weren’t for my Elvismobile and that new red Miata I’ve spotted in the parking lot just recently, the Circle Ritz would have to be renamed the Circle Ho-hum.”

“The Miata is Temple’s,” Matt said, happy to divert Electra’s wide-ranging curiosity from his choice of vehicle color, which was a defensive move, not an option.

“Well, at least you know what she’s up to these days. Where on earth is Max?”

Matt was tempted to answer, “Out at Area fifty-one,” but refrained from paraphrasing Bob Dylan’s early landmark line “out on Highway 61.” Temple had assured him Highway 61 actually had been a major Minnesota highway to Dylan’s Iron Range hometown of Hibbing back in the ’60s. Like a lot of major fabled highways, including the iconic Highway 66, 61 was mostly history now.

And now was Matt’s turn to pump Electra. “You mean you haven’t seen Max around here? I’ve been so busy working nights and giving out-of-town talks that I didn’t realize he was doing another disappearing act.”

“I worry about Temple. She waited around months for him to show up once, and now she’s waiting around again.”

“Oh, Temple’s pretty resilient. I wouldn’t worry about her.”

Electra patted her short white hair, which was au naturelle today instead of being sprayed to match her floral-print muumuu. “Maybe you wouldn’t, but I would. It’s no fun waiting to see when a significant other is going to bow back into your life. That’s why I had to lose number three.”

“Husband number three?”

“Well, I’m not talking about gerbils.”

Matt blinked, because just then he had seen paired pinpoints of red flashing between Electra’s well-planted ankles. Did she have…rodents in the place?

“Do you keep gerbils?” he asked.

“No! And I didn’t keep husband number three either. Those kids were such a happy couple when they moved in here. I just hate to see that go the way of all relationships.”

“If all relationships deteriorate, Electra, it was just a matter of time.”

“Maybe, but I marry ’em in the Love Knot chapel downstairs and I like to think some of them do better than I did. You aren’t going to be in the market for a JP anytime soon, are you?”

“Me? No. I don’t exactly have a social life with my work hours.”

“Then get a different job.”

“I don’t see myself doing this radio shrink work forever, but —”

Electra leaned forward, hands fisted on her flowered knees, pewter eyes sharper than honed steel. “You never know, Matt. You never know when something will take life away just like that. Like a bolt of lightning. You don’t want to be so absorbed in making a living that you don’t live.”

Between her slightly swollen ankles, the baleful red eyes regarded him as intently as she did.

“What makes you think I’m in danger of losing anything?”

“We always do, as life goes on. And I hate to see you young people so absorbed in running to this obligation here and galloping to that event there. You’re just rushing your lives away.”

Matt relaxed into the canvas sling. Electra was only bemoaning the up-tempo pace of modern cell-phone, belt-beeper, jet-speed, overbooked life. She didn’t have any special insight into any of their lives, only that they seemed more isolated than her generation had.

And of course she had no idea of the secret waltz they were all doing to survive the fixed attention of one elusive psychopath.

He was glad that Electra was safe, then wondered if she was.

“I’ve still got time to worry about dating later,” he said, hoping that Kitty had bugged the penthouse too, and her jealous spleen had heard his landlady bemoaning his lack of social life.

Maybe it was Kitty’s eyes glowing ember-red beneath the sofa. Like a rat, she could probably gnaw her way in anywhere.

He excused himself, fought his way out of the chair, and left with one last glance at the innocuous cardboard tube in Electra’s entry hall.

He hoped Molina could get further with that sketch than they had.

Max called Temple at four in the afternoon, when her shoes were off, her bare feet were tucked under her on the office chair, and her computer screen was blank because she had run out of words. Or thoughts. Or energy.

“What’s up?” she asked, trying to sound upbeat.

“Short notice.”

“Is that some kind of sneaky personal slur?”

“Never. I was hoping you could dine with me tonight at the Crystal Phoenix.”

“The Phoenix, why?”

“Because all your grand remodeling plans are now open to the public.”

“How nice of you to remember.”

“It wasn’t hard. They made all the papers.”

“Well, six.”

“Including USA Today and the Washington Post.”

“They both happened to be planning a Vegas update travel story. The timing was right. How did you know about the Post?”

“Web search. ‘Crystal Phoenix. Fabulous show. Brilliant PR woman.’ Just type in the right key words and the Web will take you anywhere.”

“Just murmur the right words and I’ll go anywhere. How dressy?”

“Very.”

“Hmmm. We must be going to Nicky’s place at the top.”

“It’s a surprise.”

“It always is when you feel you can afford to appear in public.”

“Apparently my star has faded. I’m not in the world-wide demand I used to be.”

“That would be wonderful!”

“Wouldn’t it? Seven P.M. I’ll meet you in the lobby. Please don’t mistake a Fontana brother for me.”

“Max, I never thought of the resemblance before, but darned if you don’t make a natural — what would it be, thirteenth?”

“Unlucky number for dinner, so forget that.”

Temple did as she got ready for her evening out, trying to forget the depression that had dogged her since a certain lieutenant had slapped a certain plastic evidence bag onto her desktop.

She took a long, neck-high bubble bath.

She did her nails.

She threw shoes around on her closet floor, finally sitting down and trying them on one by one.

The new Crystal Phoenix attractions were a rousing success. She thought, What next? She had a kicky new car. She thought, Why care? Matt Devine had gotten both too close and too far in the last forty-eight hours. She thought, Who cares? A ring that had once been lost, now was found. She thought, What next? Why care?

“This girl has a depression,” she told a pair of purple leather high heels she had rejected and tossed back into the closet. Her whole life was like dressing for dinner: she didn’t know what she wanted, what would make her happy, or if anything would.

Once just knowing that Max dared to take her someplace public was a triumph. Once glimpsing that Matt wanted her was a thrill. Once worrying about where she lived, what she could afford to drive, who would pay her for freelance work was a concern, a worry, a set of circumstances to overcome.

Now she thought, Is that all there is? And could hear Peggy Lee’s world-weary voice sighing the same question to music.

Missing Link

After a nice long nap preceded by a concerted pedicure, I wake up with all my ruffled edges soothed, particularly my journey-roughened cuticles.

The place reeks with that absolute quiet that means you are the only living thing on the premises (except for assorted illegal aliens of the vermin variety).

Last I remember my Miss Temple was a tad out of sorts because I had presented her with an object that was both a prize and a conundrum.

Sorry, that is the way I operate. Look, I could be one of those uncouth dudes who think bringing home a limp lizard is enough to thrill the lady of the house. At least I brought her something with some high-carat value, not to mention tantalizing links to crimes past and future.

What more could a high-heeled gumshoe of a little doll want? A grasshopper?

That reminds me of my mama’s long-forgotten nickname for me. How embarrassing!

I am glad there were no witnesses who knew me to this humiliating incident. This thought leads me to Miss Midnight Louise. I shudder to think the variations of demeaning nomenclature she could work on the nickname “Grasshopper.”

I have naturally been absorbed by the females at opposite ends of the spectrum in my life: Miss Temple, my sponsor and ward, and her utter antithesis, the evil Hyacinth. Now I decide I should look up Miss Louise, admonish her for leaving the scene of the crime solo, and flaunt my trophy from the expedition.

I immediately trot into the office and hop up on the desk to collect the prize.

It is gone!

I check the French doors. Night has already drawn its shades on the day. I see my own green peepers reflected back at me, thanks to the desktop lamp Miss Temple has left on in her haste to gather up drawings and Exhibit A and go.

I have no idea where she has gone, except that it requires the wearing of A-list shoes. But I know where I must go. To the Crystal Phoenix to roust my defecting (I could say defective, but that would be too catty) partner and give her a piece of my mind.

Partners indeed! She has not the first notion of the word.

Moonlighting

“What’s the opposite of a harvest moon?” Temple wondered aloud.

“A sowing moon?” Max asked.

Their window table allowed a panoramic view of the glittering icons of rival hotels and casinos, an entire constellation of mythical beasts like the Sphinx and a giant gilded lion, and flocks of neon flamingos.

“I’ve never heard of a sowing moon. I can actually see the real thing over your shoulder.”

Max swiveled in his captain’s chair to look. The moon was low yet, just above the bristling skyline of the Strip establishments. It paled in comparison to the acres of manmade illumination. Still, it was big and solid and warm, like a sun fashioned from a wheel of cheddar cheese.

“Is the moon over my shoulder a lucky sign?” Max asked, swiveling back.

“You never used to mention luck.”

“I never used to need it.”

Temple sipped from her exotic martini, the latest fad in cocktails. Every fad came to Las Vegas first, and left it last.

“What is the occasion?” she asked.

Max reached into his side coat pocket like an ordinary man and pulled out a small, perfectly square box.

He placed it by her knife tip.

Temple hesitated. She was beginning to regard certain items of jewelry as akin to striking snakes.

“It’s not what you think,” he said.

“How do you know what I think?”

“It’s fun to pretend. You might be thinking I’ve had a duplicate ring made up of the one that was lost.”

“You could, and you would.”

“And you wouldn’t like that. Some things are irreplaceable.”

Temple nodded.

“You could assume that this is the bauble from Fred Leighton you wore as a ‘disguise,’ shall we say, at Rancho Exotica.”

“That would be incredibly extravagant.”

“I agree. So. Open the box. It won’t bite.”

Temple did, gazing at the ring inside by the flickering light of their table candles.

The stone was small, green, solitaire.

She looked at him, questioning but mute.

“I thought at this point you’d trust modest more than anything else. That’s all I can offer. Modest guarantees.”

Temple nodded again. Max making the modest gesture was somehow heartbreaking.

“It was mean, what she did,” he added.

“Molina?”

“I won’t forgive her for it.”

“How did you know —? Not Matt?”

“He was furious with himself for keeping Molina’s confidence. We agree completely. She never should have ambushed you like this. It goes beyond police work. I warned you. She’s desperate.”

“To accuse you?”

“No. I’m just a means. To clear herself.”

“Clear herself?” Temple absorbed the implication. It wasn’t the first Max had made.

She took the ring out of the box, held the slender band between her fingers. Such an innocuous ring, neither engagement ring nor wedding band. Something simple you might give to a child on her confirmation.

“It’s an emerald,” he said. “Not a bad one, but small. Sincere.”

“A piece of the Emerald Isle.” A piece of his heart and soul.

He shrugged. “I don’t know what I can promise you any more, Temple. I’ve always been a master of the impossible. Now even the possible seems out of reach.” He moved his silverware, inward, outward, both futile gestures, one negating the other, marking time, wasting energy.

“You and Matt, conferring? About me. And Molina?”

“Strange times make for strange alliances.” Max straightened in the chair, spun to look at the gibbous moon, spun back. “I’d even say he was your best bet, better than I, except he’s even more dangerous for you now than I am. And that’s going some.”

“Max, I am not contemplating a change of allegiance.”

He didn’t seem to believe her, or, if he did, it didn’t seem to make much difference.

“I’ve got to go underground again.”

“Canada?”

“I can’t say. I won’t be around to protect myself.”

“And me?”

“I hope I’ll be protecting you. That’s my priority.”

“You’ve always tried to protect people. I hope you include yourself in that.”

“I have to, don’t I? First piece of business.”

“Speaking of business…” Temple pulled a small box of her own from her slightly larger evening purse.

“For me? I hope it’s not cuff links,” Max said. Max the chronic wearer of turtleneck sweaters.

While he opened her box, Temple slipped on the slim ring. It fit best on her third finger, left hand. Max knew her ring finger size. He had left her no choice but an ambiguous one.

“This was the charm that Courtney the secretary wore at the canned-hunt ranch.” Max turned the slender charm in his fingers so it caught the candlelight. “She vanished after the arrest. Where on earth did you get it?”

“Master Midnight Louie. He came limping in this morning and threw this down on the bed. Do you think he knew what he was doing?”

“Impossible. He was out at the ranch. He must have found this in the area where everyone was milling around — man, woman, and beast. He’s an alley cat. They’re used to biting their way into garbage bags, through plastic and tin foil and into tin cans. He must have snagged it then.”

“And kept it and waited until I had a drawing of this very image on my desk and then plopped it down on my bed, just by…alley catness?”

“Yes. Because if you’re trying to make me believe that Midnight Louie pulled a Lieutenant Molina and tried to ambush you with a lost piece of evidence…then he should be climbing the career ladder at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Although I would enjoy seeing Molina outmaneuvered by a cat.”

“Max, what’s really going on?”

Their dinner orders had been taken so not a soul was hovering around to interrupt them. Max rested his elbows on the table anyway, to better to lean forward, lower his voice, and still be heard.

“I just finished giving you a speech a few days ago about how someone in my profession has to keep confidences. Somehow, I feel no obligation to keep this one now.”

His caustic glance ricocheted off the ring on her finger. His anger had nothing to do with her or the ring, Temple realized, but everything to do with the Tiffany ring kept in a sandwich baggie at the LVMPD, as everybody now knew.

“You know how I encountered that sad young stripper, Cher Smith, the night before she was murdered. Strangled in a parking lot at another strip club, Baby Doll’s, the ‘new’ venue I’d advised her to find?”

Temple nodded. “Another Sean to avenge.”

Max ignored her parallel. He would neither deny nor defend his obsessions. Being a magician from an early age had sealed that fate.

“Molina put me there. In that strip club, on a collision course with Cher Smith. That one move also made me the last person known to have seen Cher Smith alive.”

“Molina? How?”

“I was working for her.”

“No way!”

“Yes. She had a personal problem. Wanted me to check out a certain guy. Can you guess who?”

It didn’t take Temple long to remember the uncharacteristic fear in Max’s eyes at the Rancho Exotica, his strange insistence that the ranch guard leave the scene of attempted murder before Molina and the police arrived.

“Rafi Nadir,” she guessed. “That creep who just had to lift me out of the Jeep as if I were a southern belle. I thought you’d strangle him. And then, later, you protected him, I never did understand why.”

“Understand now.” Max’s voice grew so deep and intense Temple had to lean inward to hear it. “I wasn’t protecting Nadir. I was protecting Molina. And I hated every second of it.”

“You? Protecting Molina?”

“She wanted me to keep an eye on this Nadir guy. That’s what got me into the strip clubs, where he worked as a bouncer. That’s how I met Cher Smith. He was hassling her in the parking lot and I stopped him.

“You know the rest. I took her home. Tried to tell her how to get away from Nadir at least, from stripping too. The next night she died in Baby Doll’s parking lot. Strangled.”

“Nadir, you think?”

He shrugged. “He’s a bully, likes to throw his weight around on women. He’s always on the strip club scene like an arsonist at a five-alarm fire. Trouble is, strip clubs were his scene.”

“Apparently hunt clubs are too.”

Max reached out to touch the small thin gold charm, a mere outline really. “Not so much hunt clubs, I think, as the Synth.”

“The Synth? He’s connected to the Synth?”

“He’s working as a bodyguard at a site I think the Synth is targeting.”

“What has all this to do with Molina, other than her asking you to keep tabs on a creepy guy?”

“The ‘creepy guy’ is the father of her child, and doesn’t know it.”

Temple opened her mouth. Closed it. Closed her eyes. Tried to picture this. Failed. Opened her eyes.

Max was regarding her with the ironic gaze he was famous for.

“And I thought my life is complicated,” she said, taking a swan dive into her martini.

An hour later the moon had vanished, but the carnival panorama of Las Vegas after dark more than made up for it.

Max had suggested they top off their excellent dinners with Bailey’s Irish Cream liqueur instead of dessert.

Temple never disagreed with Max when his impulses matched her own.

During dinner they had discussed nothing more innocuous than the old days before chaos and crime has disrupted their Las Vegas unwed honeymoon. The change of subject had given Temple time to digest the new information on Molina and Nadir along with her sea bass.

“So why’d Molina ask you to track Nadir?” she said after savoring the first sip of Bailey’s, now braced to return to ugly realities.

“Two reasons: One, no one in the police department knows about him and she wants to keep it that way. Number two: he doesn’t know about Mariah, and she wants to keep it that way.”

“Why she’d have to do anything about him in the first place?”

“His description had been noted on routine police reports, I guess. It, uh, rang a a very big bell. Remember that time I took off for Los Angeles without much explanation?”

“Yes! You did.”

“I was checking out Nadir for Molina. To see if he was still in California. He was a former LAPD officer gone bad. And he wasn’t still in LA.”

“I don’t get it. She called on you for help. She’s your worst enemy. Well, maybe not your worst enemy, but your closest and most official. Why’d you do it?”

“Any opportunity to learn more about an enemy’s secrets and vulnerabilities is rarer than rubies. Her theory was that I was sneaky and crooked enough to scent out her sneaky, crooked ex–significant other. She was right.”

“Molina and Nadir? That’s like…Queen Victoria and Yasser Arafat.”

Max chuckled. “Thanks for painting another indelible picture. I thought so, too, but not nearly as imaginatively. I really don’t get it, but I’m convinced Molina is telling the truth this far: Nadir is Mariah’s father and she’d move all the neon in Las Vegas to keep either one of them from finding out.”

“So you helped her out. Why wouldn’t she ease up on you, then? Has the woman no gratitude?”

“None. And that’s a key element of human nature, Temple. If you learn somebody’s deepest, darkest secret, even at her own invitation, she eventually comes to fear and loathe you for having that edge, for having had to give it to you. Especially a hardnose like Molina, who thinks she can do it all alone.”

“Max, how did a veteran like you get caught in the middle like this?”

“I know. I should have rocketed like the Roadrunner away from all this. But after Cher Smith was killed, I couldn’t.”