Cat In A Neon Nightmare

The only conclusion is that the night gust that ran off with the tumbleweed also whisked away the earthly remains of Miss Midnight Louise.

She was only a slip of a girl, like my Miss Temple, I think maudlinly.

Nothing much holding her to earth but her determined shivs, and my poor Miss Temple only has them on two, not four feet, and only through artificial implementation.

I am getting quite choked up, what with the sand and dust and unhappy thoughts of my two female associates.

I have saved Miss Temple’s skin more than a few times, but in this case I have sent Miss Louise to certain death, as it turned out.

Whoa is me.

I stagger back to the human crime scene, my perked ears hearing no sirens yet, hearing nothing but the vast, empty desert and the vast, empty echo of my guilt.

The motorcycle and rider remain a macabre still life on the wild desert floor, flesh and machine separated by death but complicit in death.

Finally my vision has cleared except for an odd blurring. Poor Miss Louise. She only did what I had told her to do. Why did I not choose to tail Kitty the Cutter? I am always one for the dames anyway.

Why was it not me whose fresh furry corpse was jostling even now through Joshua trees and saguaros and cat-claw patches?

Well, I might not be jostling, being somewhat too heavy even for a Kansas-strength tornado to sweep up. Face it, Toto was a wimp as well as a dog. Midnight Louie would not go gently onto the Yellow Brick Road, let me tell you!

So if I had gone with Kitty the Cutter, I would be alive and kicking, as I have so recently proven, and Miss Louise would be in the safe custody of Mr. Max, who was wise enough to keep clean away from this messy accident/death scene.

Poor Louise! She was not so bad, even if she was not likely any relation. I bow and shake my head at the vagaries of life, and death.

A sudden cough to my rear interrupts my sober vigil. “Do you mind?” a raspy, faint voice asks.

I glance first to the still form of Kitty the Cutter. She is not moving.

I glance second all around me in a 360-degree circle. And I see that the puddle has been wafted near the downed motorcycle.

I approach with caution. As well I should.

The puddle lifts a spiky head and then lifts a lip to bare sharp, white fangs.

“First,” it says, croaking, “you send me on a death trip. Then you try to plant a tree on my spine. Then you let a dust devil have its way with me.”

I race to the talking carp pool as if it were a mirage of the Crystal Phoenix. It must be Louise! A live Louise! Well, it is a head lifting from the desert floor, and not by much.

I am a one-cat emergency technician team. Quickly, I assess the situation with a realistic professional eye. One kit down, pretty flattened. Just a few centimeters off from road kill.

Her eyes are glued shut from sand-dust. Her once coal-black coat is as mouse-colored as a computer accessory. She looks like a radiator brush that has been sent through a corkscrew backward.

Obviously, some good nursing care is needed, but theonly good nurse I know is my Miss Temple and she is miles away.

Looks like it is up to me. We dudes are not good at this TLC stuff.

I grit my teeth, bend down, and begin licking the dust off her eyes and face. Arrphg. Tastes like a gravel pie.

However, I come equipped with a tongue that is the equivalent of number 80 sandpaper. Do not call me Easy Rider, call me Rough Rider.

It is tough going. It strikes me that my task is not unlike licking afterbirth off a newborn kit. That is women’s work!

However, the hardened operative must be prepared to save lives, however necessary, as well as to kick posterior.

Speaking of kicking posterior, at length it becomes necessary for me to lick posterior … it is bad enough when I must do this chore on my own self.

However, in time I have Miss Midnight Louise shining like a new pair of patent leather Mary Jane shoes. Now if she can only make like a pair of shoes and get up and walk. Miracles of that nature not even a professional tongue can achieve.

At least her peepers are open and she is looking around. “What happened?” she asks, like they do on the TV shows.

“Well,” says I, sitting down and aware that my much-tried tongue would rather keep silent. “It looks like Miss Kathleen O’Connor ran off the road and took you with her. Apparently you were in the left saddlebag, which is under the fallen motorbike, so it is a wonder that you survived.”

“Your deductions are accurate only so far,” she retorts. Yes, even half dead, Miss Midnight Louise can dredge up a retort.

“I was in the left saddlebag, as you speculate, but when I sensed some trouble and peeped out, I saw Miss Kathleen ready to take a run at Mr. Max and his vehicle, and the semiautomatic she pulled out from her black leather motorcycle jacket. I decided desperate measures were called for.

So I scrambled out of the saddlebag onto the back of her seat—”

“You rode pillion on a speeding motorcycle?” I demand incredulously.

“I do not know what pillows have to do with it. It was as rough as a roller-coaster ride out on the seat at eighty miles an hour. But I managed to climb her back and rake her neck, thereby disrupting her aim and unfortunately her driving sense, sending her and the motorcycle and myself into an off-the-road soar that ended as you see it.”

I am speechless.

I sit down and manage to dig up enough spit to wet a mitt and sweep it over my worry-wrinkled brow.

I cannot believe it.

According to her testimony, Miss Midnight Louise has single-mittedly brought down Kitty the Cutter.

“Louise,” I say, when I think I can speak. “You are telling me that you stopped Kitty the Cutter from shooting Mr. Max?”

“That was the general idea.”

“Then you … you killed her.”

“No,” she says faintly. “I have never brought down prey that big. Maybe a bulldog or two—”

“I tell you, the dame is dead. Iced. Offed. I had to keep a coyote from eating the remains.”

“The same coyote you did your Karate Kid act on?”

“You saw that?

“Heard it. Thanks for the eyewash, by the way.” In the distance, I hear a car motor approaching. “We have to get you out of here.”

“ ‘We’ is not an operable option.”

“It will have to be.” I regretfully examine my rescue handiwork. “If you cannot walk, I will have to do the sled-dog routine. Too bad I rousted that coyote. He could be useful now.”

“I would never accept assistance from a yellow-bellied dog.”

“Dogs are not so bad once you teach them a few man ners.”

“Going soft in your old age, Daddy-o?”

“Quite the contrary. I am about to give you the rough ride of your life. Now keep still and think of England.”

“Huh? Why would I think of England?”

“I hear it is the thing to do in unthinkable circumstances.” With that I bend down and take the loose skin at the nape of her neck in my strong teeth.

There is only one way to get her off the scene of the crime that will soon be crawling with curious humans. I must make like a mama-cat and move my litter of one.

Chapter 38

… Ghosts

Max watched the ambulance attendants finally bully the loaded stretcher up the incline and toward the waiting open mouth of the vehicle’s rear. Its occupant was slid in as unceremoniously as a corpse slammed into a metal drawer at the local morgue.

In the momentarily lit ambulance interior, Max could see people bending over Kathleen, fussing, hooking, injecting, intent on coaxing life back until all options had been exhausted.

He had once bent over Kathleen. Only once, long ago. The memory seared like acid. What had been a moment of deliriously innocent guilty pleasure had become years of intense regret.

Would that regret finally die with her?

Max hoped so. He’d advised Devine to “get over it,” knowing that it had been impossible for himself. Maybe he could finally take his own advice.

Or find someone to make him take it.

The ambulance raced away screaming, the squad car ahead of it.

The fallen Ninja gleamed in the soft moonlight, elegant as a polished onyx tombstone.

Motorcycles were dangerous toys. Ask the man who had owned one. Helmets or not, admit you rode a motorcycle and your health insurance rates would soar. But Max wished he owned the Hesketh Vampire now, a fast, screaming motorcycle that would take him back to town as if he were mounted on a banshee, able to hear not one thought thanks to the distinctive high-velocity howl that gave the bike its macabre name.

The Maxima would not attract attention. It would purr back to town and move quietly into its preordained stall, like a docile horse. It would move to its imminent destruction, unnoticed, and shrink to a cube of crushed metal and glass and bits of cat-cut leather. It would have no history, leave no trace.

It was not interesting anymore.

When the lights of the Strip made a luminous dome on the black horizon, Max hit the number programmed into his cell phone and designated the drop point, the parking ramp of a major Strip hotel, in the slot marked for hotel executives only. It was always empty and no one questioned that.

Max walked out through the ramp, passing the occasional couple heading for their cars, too self-involved to notice him.

Sometimes it seemed too easy.

He walked the endless way to the Strip, amounting to maybe four city blocks in a town that didn’t sport billion-dollar hotels as big as airports. He caught a cab to within two miles of his house, then walked home like a sneak thief casing the neighborhood, avoiding lights, ‘jumping privacy walls, cutting through unlit backyards, until the last unlit backyard was his own. He entered the house with a key through a hidden door.

Safe at home. Just like a baseball player who’s hit the ball out of the park.

He moved through the large utility room, past the unoccupied maid’s room and bath, into the black-as-pitch kitchen.

Someone turned on the overhead fluorescent lights, a dimmer switch that made no sound and spun up to maximum brightness in one smooth flash.

Max spun around to maximum alertness, never taking a visitor for granted. Who knows. It could have been a ghost. He got one.

“I know I should have waited for you to arrive,” Gandolph said. “I shouldn’t have let myself in either. You might have changed the security measures.”

“I thought I had.”

Gandolph smiled, waggishly. “I managed not to trip any of them. I haven’t lost all my marbles during my … exile. You look terrible, Max. Is this a bad moment for a reunion? What took you so long? Where have you been?”

“Back in Ireland.” Max opened the huge Zero-king stainless steel refrigerator and pulled out a beer. A Harp beer. “Want one?”

“Beer is not my druthers, dear boy. Why do you think I bought Orson Welles’s former house? Like him, I am a gourmand. Wine, brandy, perhaps the not-too-trendy liqueur when I’m in a mellow mood. No beer, ale, or stout of any sort.”

Max twisted off the cap, drank deep. “All that is still here. Help yourself.”

The older man disappeared into the adjacent wine cellar and came out reverently bearing a bottle.

Max took and uncorked it for him.

“My arthritis thanks you.” Gandolph lifted the ruddy wineglass to the light to savor it visually before he tasted it.

Max reflected on arthritis, the unspoken reason why Gandolph had given up the practice of magic to concentrate on unmasking false mediums. When had it hit Gandolph, the stiffening of fingers once so nimble? Somewhere in his early fifties. Max might be heading in the same direction. Who knew? He’d been out of contact with his family for so long, for their own protection, he didn’t even know what maladies ran in their genes, what he might expect. He was as good as an orphan.

“Max, lad,” came Gandolph’s cajoling voice, warmed by his first savored sip of the Chardonnay. “You’re brooding. That’s a genetic predisposition of the Irish more ingrained than a love of liquor and even more dangerous. Don’t think. Talk. What’s happened?”

“There’s bad news and worse news. Which do you want first?”

“Bad before worse.”

“Actually, I think my bad is your worse, and my worse is your bad. Did you know Gloria Fuentes was dead?”

“Gloria! No.” Gandolph sat on a kitchen stool. “I haven’t seen her in years, of course. Odd how you can work together so closely with someone, and once the act is retired, lose touch. And I was dashing about the country looking for mediums. When was it?”

“A few months ago.”

“Only a few months?” Gandolph shook his head. “And me back in town just in time to miss seeing her alive. Poor Gloria. She wasn’t that old. I hope it wasn’t cancer.”

“It was faster. Gandolph, somebody strangled her in a church parking lot. Do you know what she’d be doing there?”

“Oh my God, what a tragedy! Why was she there? Going to church, I assume. Just because she worked onstage in fishnet tights didn’t make her a showgirl. She loved her work, but when it was over, she was out of the spotlight. Had a gaggle of nieces and nephews she doted on. She’d been retired for years. They did catch the killer?”

“No. Do you think her death could be related to the attempt on your life?”

“I don’t see why. Once I retired, we lost touch. I was like you, pursuing the trail of ghosts that were hard to find, and I was darn hard to find myself. If this is the bad news, what is worse?”

“Worse for me than for you, I think.” Max sat on a kitchen stool and told him about Kathleen O’Connor’s terrible accident and probable death, as if he were at the village pub chatting up the friendly barman.

“The emergency crew was working on her, of course,” Max finished up. “But it looked like frantic revival efforts in the face of inevitability. I’m convinced she’s gone.”

Gandolph’s round face grew long and he shook his balding head several times.

Baldness. That was another thing Max didn’t know would come to him soon or later or never. He was beginning to feel age hovering behind him like Elvis’s ghost, closing down his future.

“Terrible,” Gandolph was muttering. “A terrible … accident? I can’t quite call it that. She was still pursuing you, after all these years?”

“Me. And others in my place. Innocents, as usual. She liked to torment innocents.”

“I remember her. Prettiest lass in Londonderry. It couldn’t last as I remember it, of course, that beauty.”

“It did,” Max said shortly. It had been too dark in the desert to see Kathleen’s face as other than a light-andshadow-kissed mystery, and now he would never see it again. “Others saw her more recently. A sketch had been done from memory. Her beauty had matured, that’s all. Grown, not faded.”

“Hearsay, though.”

“I believe the source, an impeccably honest source.” Max smiled to recall just how hopelessly honest Matt Devine still was. Momentarily, he envied him. “I’m glad I never saw her again, Garry. I can’t think of that lovely young girl without seeing a death’s head superimposed on those treacherous features. Sean’s skull, sans crossbones.”

“You didn’t see her at the accident scene.”

“Too dark.”

“But you’re sure it was her, sure she’s dead.”

“What other woman would pursue me on a motorcycle? Someone else had seen her riding one earlier.”

“She rode a bicycle in Londonderry, like a country lass.”

“She was a country lass then. She had moved up in the world. You don’t know… . You remember Sean and me trying to trip each other up while we both played court to Kathleen. You know what happened.”

“A sad, sad thing, Max. You can’t blame yourself for winning the lass over your cousin, or for him being alone that night in a Protestant pub that was bombed by the IRA.”

“No, but I can blame Kathleen O’Connor. I’ve since met someone she was plaguing, stalking really, here. And when he heard of how I knew her, and where, and what happened, he had an interesting diagnosis for it all. He thinks she knew the pub would be hit and that Sean would be there. He thinks she enjoyed dallying with me while my cousin was being murdered, that she relished the guilt I would bear for the rest of my life.”

“That would be unthinkably evil, to plan that sort of thing, and she was just a young girl. Who is this ‘someone’ who thinks such terrible things?”

“My impeccably honest man, an ex-priest that she targeted as a victim when she couldn’t find me.”

“An ex-priest? No wonder. I couldn’t believe you’d tell just anyone your sad history, especially the undercover implications.”

Max laughed, not happily. He drank some more beer. “Oh, Gandolph. Oh, Garry. You and I exited Ireland together all those years ago, and mostly worked together until you retired a few years ago. You were a stepfather to me, in magic and in espionage, but you can’t know what’s happened in Las Vegas in just the past year. This man, this ex-priest, is my new Sean, my cousin and my rival, and my fellow victim of a fatal woman. If he weren’t so honest I’d feel free to hate him, but I can’t.”

“He rivaled you for Kathleen?”

“In terms of competing for her deepest hatred, yes. It was shocking to see her find another to bedevil, to be almost unfaithful in her hatred. But … there’s another woman too. I had to leave Las Vegas for almost a year to keep some hounds on my trail away from her. She met him in the meantime.”

“Ah. So they are now a pair.”

“No. She took me back, but it’s different, isn’t it? If I hadn’t been able to come back—”

“They would have been a new couple?”

“Maybe. I can’t be certain. I don’t think they can be either.”

“Just as none of us can be certain why Kathleen played the game she did, right up to the end. It went way beyond aiding the cause of Irish freedom. That was only a pretext for her.”

“Agreed. But since her reappearance—and she left me alone for all those years—I’ve had to wonder what triggered her return. And return she had.”

“She Who Must Be Reckoned With,” Garry mused. “Ghosts are like that. Supposed ghosts, I should say. They have unfinished business and cannot rest, so say the mediums. There’s a certain psychological attraction to the notion that the dead wait around for justice to be served.”

“Kathleen served up injustice.”

“Perhaps not in her own mind. What a puzzle and homicidal round we began in Northern Ireland.”

“I began.”

“No. You were in the middle, that’s all. As all innocents are, caught in the middle. You were just a boy.”

“Are any of us ‘just’ anything? I was … programmed to hate the ‘other,’ the ‘wrong’ side, as in all sectarian wars. I found my soul mate in Kathleen O’Connor. We were made for each other, drawn to our most opposite extremes. Now she’s dead, and I don’t know what to make of myself anymore.”

“Dead? Kathleen? No, lad. Such ideas never die. They infect. For a time she revitalized the movement, single-handedly, with her hatred and her … well, whatever she had in full measure.”

“But you are alive. I never expected that.”

“To my discredit. I would rather be dead in my own place than alive in another’s.”

Max thought. “I can’t say that of myself. Yet.”

“Then you have a future.”

He studied Gandolph. Once he had believed the older man could never be wrong.

Now he knew that anyone could be.

Even, for a split second of inattention or blind fury, Kitty the Cutter.

Chapter 39

The Morning After:

Foxy Proxy

Temple stood stock-still in the middle of the crowded convention aisle, people brushing against her every five seconds, their excited hubbub echoing to the top of the cavernous space.

This hubbub had a definite soprano tinge. One might even call it shrill. If one were sexist. Luckily, there weren’t any of those sort around here. It wouldn’t pay.

Temple inhaled the very mixed bag that scented the air-conditioned environment. There was a smorgasbord of odors from the food booths and latte bars, from exotic or even erotic massage oils and hair spray. She hadn’t done PR for a major civic-center event in a few months. Her feet, once hardened to miles of concrete underfoot, now throbbed beneath her despite the concession of thick-soled and cushy clogs.

She had finally found time to venture out from the press room. The media had come, saw, and conquered, shooting miles of film that would show up on local and regional TV, and as far away as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Chicago.

Temple’s résumé was rosy with new praise from the organizers, but she wasn’t one to blush at getting quote-worthy recommendations. A freelancer lived or died by word of mouth.

And the subject of her reentry into major convention business was so up her alley. It was the annual Nevada women’s show, a combination sales exhibition and pajama party, crammed with booths on time-saving gadgets, amazing beautification products, clothes, jewelry, and legerdemain: false nails, false hair, false push-up boobs, false teeth … ah, no, not that quite yet, but falsely whitened teeth.

This was an unabashedly girly event and Temple was an unabashedly girly girl. If it was good enough for a buff but disarmingly petite little number like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it was good enough for her. So she’d had no trouble revving up the media on all that was new and exciting in a Woman’s World.

Working this convention was the equivalent of a Mental Health Day off from work, times seven.

Now, on Sunday, the last day, she ambled among the exhibits, even paused to decide if a lifetime of never being able to tie a decent-looking knot could indeed be redeemed by a handy-dandy gadget called “Scarf-It-Up!” Exclamation free of charge.

For her, even exclamation marks couldn’t redeem butterfingers.

She moved on, fascinated by a display of glittering minerals in small plastic towers, fairy dust for female faces. The women who manned the booths (paradox intentional) spotted her staff badge and immediately offered elaborate demonstrations and yummy freebies, which she took. For journalists that was a no-no, but PR people needed to know how the items they promoted worked. It was on-the-job research. Right, she thought, tucking a clever zebra-fabric mini-tote with miniature samples of lip gloss, eye cream, and nail enamel into her usual Goliath-size tote bag. She loved being back in business.

But this was the exhibition’s last hours on the last day. When the Sunday sun went down, the magic booth-city of ideas and products would vanish like the dropped flyers littering the aisles.

Tempting words blared from the papers ground underfoot along with the rainbow wink of glitter: Renew. Glamourous. Recharge. Easy. Cheap. Miraculous. Magic.

Temple found her wandering eye snagged by a glittering tray of rings. Inexpensive costume rings, but, hey, a girl could always use a cocktail ring. So she often thought in department store aisles, but she had never ever bought one.

These were cubic zirconia, she guessed, set in gilded sterling silver. “Vermeil” was the formal name for literally gilding the costume jewelry lily. A girly girl could always scope out rings, just because.

One. This one. It reminded her—sharply—of the ring Max had given her last Christmas, which already seemed half a lifetime ago.

She paused to stare at it. Amid gaudy “diamond” solitaires too big to be real, this was the only classy design, the setting angular and intriguing. One large stone, a moonstone maybe—it couldn’t be a real opal—was offset and set off by twinkling diamonds. Cubic zirconia, or name-brand substitute.

Temple felt a compulsion to buy the thing. Was it merely because it looked like the ring she had lost so soon, surrendered to an onstage magician who had vanished with it never to reappear … until the ring had turned up weeks later at a murder scene. Apparently it had gone from Temple’s hand, to the mandarin-nailed claw of Shangri-La the magician, to the plastic evidence baggie of Lieutenant C. R. (Cruella de Rottweiler) Molina.

Temple’s fingers hovered over the ring.

“Don’t be shy. Try it on,” a hyper-happy (harpy?) female voice urged.

Temple, bewitched by the ring, didn’t even answer, but did as suggested.

The ring glided over her knuckle (third finger left hand) as though made for it. It settled into the groove between her middle and little fingers like a baby into a cradle.

“How much?” she asked.

“Ummm. Thirty-eight ninety-five.”

Gee, $38.95 to reclaim a dream, a memory, a moment. Not a bad bargain. But it wasn’t really like her ring. Her memory must have already decayed a little. She knew she couldn’t be sure. Still …

“Thirty-two. It’s the last day of the expo.”

Thirty-two! Well. Temple stared at the ring on her finger. It seemed to belong there. Her other hand dug in her tote bag for her wallet. At thirty-two cash would be okay, and the exhibitor probably would be spared a percentage to the credit card company.

“It’s lovely,” the woman said, sealing the bargain. “Made for you.”

The real ring, the original, had been lovely, and the way it had been presented had been even lovelier, that Temple remembered exactly. Poor Max. His best intentions of six months ago had turned into hash again, like all best intentions. Not his fault. Not hers. Just … life and all its accidents.

Temple stuffed her change, five bucks plus some coins once tax had been added, into her tote bag and turned away.

“Wait!” the saleswoman urged. Her beautifully manicured hand reached out to push a small hot-pink moiré box into Temple’s tote bag. “The box is free; might as well take it.”

“Thanks!” That’s what Temple loved about girly events; they were brimming over with bonuses and free gifts and little touches you didn’t expect.

She glanced again at her hand, fanned her fingers, enjoyed the ring resting there like it belonged, like it had always been there.

She didn’t dare tell/show Max. He would recognize it for the cheap imitation it was. He would remember the ring he had given her in every detail. She just remembered it in her emotions, and that seemed close enough. Better than nothing. It was her secret, this ring. Her secret and her souvenir.

The next morning was Monday. Temple awoke with Midnight Louie sprawling across her stomach. He felt like a very bad hangover.

“Louie!”

One lazy green eye slitted open. He deigned to regard her, then shut the eye again.

“Louie! You are an avalanche and I am an innocent Swiss village. Move! Off!”

He responded as all cats do to vocal commands. He didn’t even bat an eyelash. And he had them. A lush line of jet-black a Supermodel would give her cheekbones for.

Not even a wink.

“Louie! I had a very big weekend. I don’t have to go to work today, it’s true, but I have a lot to catch up on.”

Louie yawned and allowed himself to roll over. In so doing, he rolled right off the minor hump Temple’s body made in the covers and onto unoccupied comforter.

She polished his head with her palm. “Sony, boy. I overslept. I need to be up and doing!”

He yawned his response to that declaration and shut his eyes again.

Temple twisted herself into a pretzel trying to exit the bed without disturbing a hair on Louie’s Olympic-broadjump-length body.

“Ow!” Temple complained when she had kinked her feet onto the floor in a position preparatory to rising and shining.

She really didn’t want to get up any more than Louie did, but … she had people to rouse and perpetrators to pursue.

The ring winked at the morning, catching her eye. She’d have to be careful to wear it for herself alone. In the daylight it looked so … tawdry. Maybe dreams deferred were tawdry.

Her tote bag sagged against the wall by the bedroom door. She remembered the cute little box the saleswoman had given her for the ring. Time to put the things of a child away. She’d inter the ring in the box and bury it at the back of a dresser drawer, where all tarnished memories dwell.

Temple dredged her tote bag and all its ill-gotten gains from the floor and probed its chaos with her right hand. Her fingers finally curled around a tubular object. Either a freebie lipstick or the box in question.

Tiffany it wasn’t. Temple stuck in her thumb and pulled out a plum-blossom special, a lurid taffeta-wrapped box looking super-tawdry in broad daylight.

She opened it to reveal a cheap foam pillow pierced by a horizontal slit.

Only this hole-in-one was already occupied. By a ring. An ersatz gold ring, very large and very plain, of a snake … or a worm, or an eel, or something else icky … biting its own tail.

Was there a message there? Hmmph. Free box and free ring. Bingo. Goodie.

The new ring was way too big to fit even Temple’s thumb—she tried—and it didn’t sport the slightest dusting of rhinestones to give it star quality.

For a moment she wondered if the saleswoman had lost a valuable item. Naw. Like the ring Temple had bought on a whim and a prayer, this ring was also, utterly … worthless.

She set both rings away in the bottom dresser drawer, under the scarves she had bought and been given over the years—and had kept because it seemed rude and even cruel not to—and had never used.

Because she never had, and never would, learn to tie a knot worth letting anyone actually see.

Chapter 40

Dead Certain

“You’ve never been in an autopsy room before?”

Matt stared at Molina. “You mean when I was a priest? No. Nothing happened in my parish that called for that.”

“Yeah, visiting the morgue is pretty uncalled for, isn’t it?”

She flashed him a wry smile, as if they were in this together.

And they were, in a sense.

“Now,” Molina said, holding the steel-and-glass entry door open for him, like a good hostess. “It looks pretty regular up front. Reception desk, chairs, etcetera etcetera. Just brace yourself. Every step farther in gets more like a new TV show hybrid: ER blended with The Twilight Zone, if you remember that golden oldie.”

“Reruns,” Matt pointed out. “Who could forget Rod Serling and his spooky series?”

“This place isn’t exactly ‘spooky,’ ” Molina paused to tell him. “It’s way too clinical. That’s what’ll get to you. The utter ordinariness of dead and dismembered bodies.

Not like a crime scene, which is a sort of origami nightmare you have to figure out. Here, it’s all clear. Dead and about to be buried. Think you can handle it?”

“I’ve done funerals in my time, Lieutenant.”

She regarded him with a gaze as icy as a vodka gimlet. “You identified your stepfather’s body here. I remember that. No gentle remote viewing booth for this one. You’ll see her on cold stainless steel and she won’t be prettied up.”

“Why? Why did Effinger get the opening-night curtain presentation and why does Kathleen O’Connor get none of the frills?”

“Body’s too fresh. No time. Besides, we know there are no relatives to find. When I asked, not even your friend Bucek could come up with anything on her through the FBI. Don’t let Grizzly Bahr ghoul you out. He’s just a sawbones. Literally.”

Matt then followed her to the reception window, where a perky young thing with highlighted hair shaven to look as if crop circles had set up permanent residence on her scalp handed them clip-on VISITORS tags.

Matt pinched a bit of cotton knit with the alligator clip, also stainless steel. He hated to tell Molina, but he was ready to see Kitty O’Connor, mistress of the edged razor blade, laid out on another metal surface.

Mercy?

He only had to think of Vassar, and he felt none. He was as cold as dry ice.

They went through doors and down hallways. They passed people in lab coats with matching tags, only these bore names.

“I nicknamed him ‘Grizzly,’ ” Molina said abruptly, “because it fit his last name and his attitude. All MEs are weird. Death is their daily bread. Maybe they’re reincarnated hyenas, but they laugh about it a lot. Don’t be put off. Bahr knows his stiffs.”

“Why are you worrying about me?”

She stopped. Fixed him with a Blue Dahlia gaze only she could level. “Sometimes you wish someone dead. Usually you have reason. Sometimes you get your wish. Don’t freak on me.”

“I never wished Kitty O’Connor dead.”

She resumed walking through the bland, confusing halls.

He could pick it up now, the faint … unpleasant . smell. Death with an orange twist. Vaguely kitchen, vaguely crematorium.

“I didn’t,” Matt said, his stride lengthening to keep up with the tall lieutenant. “I wanted to talk to her more than anyone, I think.”

Molina turned, vertical forefinger pressed warningly against her lips. “The Iceman cometh.”

Matt stopped to look around.

A pair of double doors burst apart to birth a form as forceful and burly as John Madden commenting on a football game. The vaunted “Grizzly” he presumed.

Grizzled was right. Bristling gray eyebrows, piercing gray eyes driving a physique once powerful and now larded with midlife excess.

The old lion. Still clawed. Not sleeping tonight, not an instant.

“Who’s Dr. Kildare, the intern?” he growled at Molina. “He may be able to identify the body.”

“Will he pass out?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Shall we find out?”

“Let’s.” He lifted a clipboard and ran his restless gaze down it. “This is the easy rider organ donor, right? Unusual it’s a woman. Motorcycles! Might as well take arsenic as an appetizer. If I had a thousand dollars for every dead Marlon Brando–wannabe that came through here, I’d be retired in Tahiti.”

“Brando made it there,” Matt put in.

Bahr stopped, turned on him, quieted like a rearing black bear in a Grizzly Adams movie.

“I don’t want to be where Brando is. It’s a saturated-fat paradise. Me, I’m all muscle. Come along, son, and see the bifurcated lady. She’s a sight. Must have been onewhile alive, but now she’s autopsy Annie. Follow me.”

He blasted through another pair of double doors, and by now Matt couldn’t escape the pervasive odor of the working environment: decay.

He tried not to breathe too deeply, but even shallow breaths brought the heavy bouquet of rotting flesh.

The room was like a lab: big, inhabited by stainless steel tables, sinks, and equipment. People seemed superfluous in here. Matt accepted the clear safety goggles and latex gloves Molina also donned like a seasoned astronaut used to looking like a parody of a person.

Matt ran a prayer through his overactive mind. For the dead. For Kathleen O’Connor, who had been somebody’s precious baby once.

She lay on a stainless steel bier, naked.

Matt realized that he had never seen a naked woman before.

But she wasn’t a woman now. Death made her unreal, a department-store mannequin glimpsed in an unfinished window-dressing set.

He kept his eyes on what he was here to see: her face. Was this truly her? Was she truly dead? And gone.

She looked tiny, fragile on that large steel bed.

Odd that she had hurt him with a small steel blade.

Now the blades had been at her. Her torso was seamed like a Raggedy Ann’s body. Her stuffing seemed to have been removed, and returned, like Scarecrow’s after the Flying Monkeys had dispersed him.

Her face, though, was whole, such as it was. He couldn’t say the same for her head, and avoided looking above her eyebrows. Raven eyebrows. Her eyelids were shut and her cheekbones and chin bruised and scraped. Somebody’s child had taken a great fall.

“Motorcycles,” Bahr snorted. “Hate ‘em. Make hash out of my bodies. She wore leathers, so the limbs are pretty solid, what’s not broken. But the face … restructuring by Gravel, Inc.”

Matt sighed, then was sorry he’d exhaled. He’d have to inhale sooner, and ingest the air of decay.

“Is it her?” Molina asked.

He’d forgotten about her in the presence of Milady Death.

Was it?

Kitty had been vital and certain, threatening and powerful. This … corpse was none of that. It wore a skullcap where the surgeon’s saw had sliced through her cranium. She was like an Egyptian prince, her vital organs removed and weighed and stored elsewhere.

Still, beneath the matted raven-black hair, behind the abraded facial skin, Matt saw flesh as white as snow, lips as red as blood, eyes as liquid as Caribbean waters .

“Her eyes,” he said aloud.

Molina held up a plastic baggie. It contained, not the furtive glimmer of Temple’s opal-and-diamond ring from Max Kinsella this time, but two pale, flat gemstones, aquamarines when he bent closer to look.

“Colored contact lenses,” Molina said. “She wore them. Like her archenemy, the Mystifying Max, Miss Kitty altered her eyes. Their natural shade was gray-green, if you believe romantic coroners like Grizzly here.”

Bahr hawked out a laugh as another man might expel phlegm.

“The eyes have it,” Molina went on. “Contact lenses. Vivid blue-green. Looks like the lady couldn’t make up her mind. Was she blue, or was she green?”

“Green,” Matt said. “She worked for the IRA.”

“Or maybe Ralph Nader,” Bahr put in. “You do know her, then?”

Matt wasn’t sure that his relationship with Kitty O’Connor could be described as “knowing.”

He tried for the objective eye. Saw long, narrow neck. Pale skin paler now in death. Small determined chin. Slightly upturned nose. A pretty girl without the hatred that made every feature sharp and feral. She should behanding out appointment cards in an office somewhere, a dentist’s or a chiropractor’s.

All the anger that had propelled her, made her vivid, living, had left her.

She’s gone. She left.

“Is it Kitty O’Connor?” Molina asked, unconsciously shifting into the neutral reference that remains demanded. It. The remains.

He glanced over the entire figure again, this time seeing something like a spider on one of her prominent hipbones. Even as he thought somebody should brush away the trespassing insect, he caught his breath as he realized the black blot was a tattoo. Of a serpent swallowing its own tale, just as Kitty’s lifelong flirtation with death had finally been consummated. The worm Ouroboros celebrated in the unwanted ring she had given him, and taken away.

Only she would bear such a mark.

“Yes,” Matt said.

“You’re sure?”

“I was sure when I walked in. But I needed to make double-sure. It just seems … impossible.”

“She was mean, but she was mortal.”

He nodded. That terse epitaph fit his stepfather too. But Cliff Effinger plainly had been murdered.

Kitty had not died so obviously. Could mere accident have claimed her when bitter opposition could make no dents on her stainless steel soul? Anything was possible.

Including the fact that his worst enemy was dead, that he was free.

Free to live out the legacy she had left him: a lot of atypical acts, enough guilt to ensure Purgatory for eternity, eternal regret for another life lost.

He heard Molina and Bahr conferring, as if Kathleen O’Connor’s dead body were just another conference table to gather around.

“A couple of odd abrasions on the nape of the neck, almost cuts,” Bahr was saying.

“Hmmm. Know what I’m thinking?” Molina asked.

“Women can get those from abrasive labels at the back of the neck. I’ll check out her clothing.”

“—the only anomaly, and it’s a minor one for a spinout into a dry wash like this,” Bahr’s voice was grumbling.

A spinout in a dry wash. It sounded like an epitaph for a frustrated and wasted life, Matt thought.

A hand closed on his ann.

Molina’ s.

“We can leave now,” she said.

Matt wasn’t so sure you ever left Grizzly Bahr’s realm, not once you had seen it.

“Good job,” the man himself said, grinning. “You didn’t upchuck once. Disappoint an old man, will you? Out of here, then. You’ve graduated Ghoul School with honors.”

Chapter 41

Sweat Shop

“What’s the story on the man with the golden arm?” Molina asked Alfonso later that morning. He stood before her desk with a manila folder in his hand and a Cheshire-cat smile on his well-used face.

“How’d you guess?”

“I assigned my detectives to sweat a possible witness who’s clammed up. First you’d do a thorough background, which I assume is what fattens that manila folder in your hand. Next, I told you to let me know when you had him ready for the ropes. And here you are bright and early Monday morning.”

“Awesome, Lieutenant. You’re wasted behind that desk.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Yup. You got it. Guy’s name is Herb Wolverton. Energetic, strong for his size. Was in the merchant marine years ago. Can lift hefty luggage as easily as he can pocket hundred-dollar bills. ‘Retired’ to Vegas from Biloxi, where he had accumulated quite a rap sheet, all petty stuff but as long as an octopus’s arm. Drunken brawling, gambling … and it used to be illegal there unless you were on a licensed riverboat. Nothing felonious, just cantankerous. Had a chip on his shoulder, old Herb did, and it turned into a brick when he drank.

“Anyway, vice was no stranger and when he hit Vegas eight years ago he settled down to work his way up as a bellman. Since he’d been used to greasing his palms in Creole town, he fit right in. Real accommodating to anyone with green palms.”

“What have we got on him that we can use?” Molina rose and headed into the corridor for the interrogation rooms.

Alfonso’s grimace exaggerated his hangdog features as he caught up with her, huffing slightly. “Not much. He’s threatening to call a lawyer, but we keep telling him we’re just interested in his testimony as a witness. I have a feeling this guy is real scared, but I can’t tell of who.”

Molina quashed an urge to correct him. Whom, it was whom. She’d told Mariah that at least a couple hundred times.

“Alch and Su in?” she asked instead.

“Yeah, but Barrett and …”—maybe he had read her mind—“and I brought him in.”

“Still, I’d like you and Su to do the interrogation. Alch and Barrett and I can watch.”

“Me and Su? We’re not partners. We don’t know each other’s moves.”

“Exactly. I want to shake this clam up until he burps up a pearl or two. An edgier interrogation just might do it. And we’re investigating the death of a woman. Su might make him feel guilty, subconsciously at least.”

“Psychology, Lieutenant? Guys like this only know fists or rolls of cash.”

“Humor me,” she advised, not remotely sounding like anyone who knew a thing about humor.

Alfonso got the idea and shut up.

Barrett was holding up the wall outside one of thecramped interrogation rooms when they arrived. Molina sent him to round up Alch and Su while she and Alfonso slipped into the adjoining room with the two-way glass every suspect knew was there. It still came in handy. Observers could spot things interrogators might miss in the heat of the Q & A, and the sense of unseen hovering watchers unnerved all but the most hardened criminals.

When the three detectives arrived, Molina had to explain her thinking again. What she didn’t tell them was that detective teams could get like old married couples, if there was any such thing nowadays: so used to each other’s ways life was a sleepwalk. Complacent. Much as they all grumbled about the unusual pairing, Molina noticed Alfonso and Su sizing each other up as they went next door to meet Herbie Wolverton, boy bellman.

They made a Mutt and Jeff combo, no doubt, with gender and racial differences accenting the unlikely pairing. Wolverton would be distracted by the odd couple. A distracted witness was an unintentionally frank witness.

“You don’t make this guy for a killer?” Alch asked, turning a chair around and straddling it, his chin balanced on the plastic-shell back.

She understood his paternally protective attitude toward Su (much resented by Su but good for sharpening her edge). Differences, not similarities, made a detective team cook, Molina had discovered. And maybe marriages. You can’t learn anything from a clone of yourself.

She settled into her own uncomfortable chair, intrigued by the show she had set in motion. She realized that Herb could reveal facts that would lead to Matt Devine and ultimately to her. So be it. She wondered what would persuade a bellman to shut up so completely when all he had to do was describe the usual comings and goings on an ordinary bought-and-paid-for night shift in Las Vegas.

It was all up to Alfonso and Su, unlikely partners: unearth information, and maybe bury their lieutenant.

Herb Wolverton was already unhappy, an excellent sign.

He fidgeted on his own plastic hot seat, sitting at the plain table with the tape recorder its only accouterment.

Molina could have studied the rap sheet in the manila folder Barrett had given her, but she preferred to write her own scenario, then do a reality check.

He was around thirty-five, a well-used thirty-five. Over-muscled the way some short men will get, but still a boyish and jaunty carriage. Aye, aye, sir. Yes, ma’am. His freckled face was surfer tanned. Although not stupid, he had allowed youthful potential to decay into mere canniness.

His blue eyes darted doglike to Alfonso and Su, Su and Alfonso. The big sloppy man unnerved him. That kind of St. Bernard confidence had always escaped him. He’d had to be wiry and shipshape to get some respect. Su … oh, he’d seen a foreign port or two and he liked those delicate Asian ladies. Just his size. He could be a courtly fellow if he wasn’t feeling threatened.

“Ma’am,” was his first word, with a nod to Su. He almost rose from his chair, but Alfonso gestured him down. Down, boy.

The tension was already riveting. Herb ached to charm and disarm Su, the appealing toy Pekinese. He knew Alfonso could crush him if he wanted to, hardly knowing it. He didn’t know Su could too. But she would know it.

Fox terrier, yes. Aggressive but eager to please. Already conflicted and now … scared.

Molina could smell his fear through the two-way glass. Alch leaned forward. “Someone’s got to him good.”

“But who? This guy is combative, a scrapper.”

“Small potatoes,” Alch noted.

“Right,” Molina agreed. “He’s not used to a town like Las Vegas, running on major juice. You think a former client of Vassar’s, some big mojo guy, resented her profession? Tried to claim her?”

“Anything’s possible,” Alch said, “when you’re dealing with Sex in the City, especially this city. Mr. Big, is what you’re suggesting. Vassar was a prime piece of real estate. Wonder if Rothenberg has dealt with that before, having girls so classy the clients get possessive?”

“We’ll have to ask her,” Molina said, “but first our team needs to have a go at Herbie.”

Beat policemen often referred to suspects by childhood diminutives and Molina had adopted the habit. Infantalizing suspected perps reinforced their own shaky sense of control. Made the Bogey Man into Little Mikey. It was a self-deluding ploy, but must have served a purpose. The police were so often impotent when it came to the courts and defense attorneys. Only place to show muscle was on the streets.

“Mr. Wolverton.” Su sounded as demure as she looked. “I’ve gone over your rap sheet. It’s pretty minor. I’m guessing that you’d want to cooperate with the police in a capital murder case.”

“Capital murder?”

“Well, it’s possible that the victim was held against her will in the hotel room. That would be kidnapping.”

Wolverton’s frown aged him a decade. “I don’t think … Vassar, she was always a pretty savvy lady.”

“You knew the victim then?” Su inquired as if making chitchat at a garden party.

“Yeah, sure. She was a regular. Came and went all the time. Classy act from entrance to exit. But not my type,” he added, as if fearing admiration might be mistaken for obsession. “Too big.”

Alfonso weighed in lazily. “It wouldn’t take much strength to push a tall woman over that chickenshit balcony. Those stiletto heels she had on? Would have made her unstable. Tippy.”

“Look.” Wolverton licked his lips and eyed Su. “My job is to see people up to their rooms, drag in their luggage, turn on the air conditioner, get ice if they want it, show ‘em which way the faucets turn. Then I’m outta there.”

“Didn’t you forget something?” Su asked gently. Too gently.

“What? What’d I forget? It’s my job, for chrissakes, not yours. I know my job.”

“The tip.” Su brushed her middle finger over one of her exotically plucked brows. “You got good tips, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Great tips. Everybody was happy with me. Why not? I am a happy guy.”

“Most Happy Fella,” Alfonso put in a like a genial un-cle. A little too like a genial uncle. Like a godfather.

Herbie jerked his head, loosening taut neck muscles. “It’s a pretty good job. I meet some very interesting people.”

“But you really get tipped for what you don’t do,” Alfonso insinuated. By now he was smirking like a fellow transgressor.

Wolverton glanced at Su. “I don’t get it … ‘what I don’t do.’ “

Alfonso rested his forearms on the table and leaned inward, taking up more than half the surface, edging into Wolverton’s space.

“A happy fellow, a good citizen, would report solicitation instead of profiting from it. Las Vegas ain’t no chicken ranch down the highway. That stuff is illegal here.”

“Everybody does it. Why are you on me about it?”

“Because you’re lying,” Su finally interjected. “What red-blooded male could forget what room Vassar went into and who was in it? The tip for placing her with a customer must have been big.”

“Su,” Alfonso remonstrated, “you’re forgetting one thing. Maybe Herbie here isn’t a red-blooded male.”

“Hey, I’m as red-blooded as any hunk of meat out there. But it’s a business, see. Faces come and go in Las Vegas like everybody’s on a merry-go-round. There’s no point in remembering something you’ll never see again. Besides, I dig girls, not guys. Why would I take inventory of just another john?”

Alfonso leaned closer. “Haven’t you had any famous checkins?”

“Yeah. Ah, Mel Gibson one time. And Rod Steiger before he died. But they didn’t want call girls, I remember that. Most other people are pretty anonymous.”

“Why do you use Judith Rothenberg?” Su asked out of the blue.

“Why not? Her girls are clean and classy. You never have trouble with a Rothenberg girl.”

“Until now,” Sue pointed out. “Is that it? Are you paid to keep quiet if anything goes wrong? Is Rothenberg taping your mouth and your memory shut?”

“Naw, she wouldn’t have enough pull to make me risk my skin.”

“Who would?” Alfonso asked.

“Nobody. Nobody’s bribing me, I swear it. I got a good deal here. I make enough to get along, and if you don’t like how I get my biggest tips, face it; it’s just business in L.V. Even you guys have to hype yourself up to make a periodic hooker roundup, and then you go for the street types.”

“We don’t do that,” Alfonso said softly. “We don’t mess with any of that. We are homicide detectives, Herbie. I don’t think you get how big this case is.”

Sweat was glistening on his forehead now, Molina noticed, but the boyish blue eyes remained bulging and defiant.

It wasn’t treats that made this dog go; it was threats. Someone had scared the shinola out of him.

Su’s narrowed eyes announced the same conclusion.

“She’s got it,” Alch murmured with satisfaction.

“Got what?” Barrett asked, annoyed. “This guy responds to force. Look at how Alfonso’s got him crowded half off his own chair. As nice a job of creeping intimidation as I’ve seen in a while.”

“Exactly,” Molina said. “So what force is big enough to shut him up even when facing that kind of intimidation?”

“Money,” Alch said. “A lot of money.”

“Someone with more force,” Barrett said.

“Right, Barrett.” Molina threw Alch an also-ran smile. “This guy has seen Godzilla. Otherwise he’d be squealing like Randy the Rat. Money wouldn’t keep him mum on a murder case, if we’ve got one.”

“And he’s scared enough to make me think we do,” Barrett said.

Now Su was leaning into the table, but only slightly, her shoulders tilted, her air just a trifle big sister. “You were the only one, Herb. The only one to peek into the room where Vassar’s assailant waited. I know a big tip wouldn’t keep you from making the guy. I know you called Vassar to that room, that you take your job seriously and you wouldn’t want anyone messing with some classy lady you had sent up to her death.”

“Shuddup!” Wolverton clapped his hands over his ears. “I didn’t see no monster lurking behind that door. Nothing to remember. An ordinary guy, all right! I forget faces like that eight days a week. One ride up and down in the elevator and I couldn’t remember my own mother’s mug. You don’t know what it’s like. Faces, faces, hands, hands, bags, bags. Even hundred-dollar bills get to look like ones. I’m telling you the truth. Nothing registers.”

“Except johns who want high-dollar suites,” Alfonso pounced, “so they can abuse high-dollar call girls.”

“Maybe, but I read the paper too. You guys didn’t find any marks of violence on the body. Maybe the woman fell, huh? Maybe she just fell.”

“Or jumped,” Su put in.

Herb Wolverton jumped at the suggestion. “Yeah. Who knows how these broads really feel about what they do? I mean, sometimes I gotta tote and haul for some arrogant prick that makes me feel two inches tall. It goes with the territory, but the turf can be pretty mean. I shrug it off, but someone like Vassar, whose services are more … personal. It might get sick, you know what I mean? She might … get driven into something she hates herself for. So, yeah. She could have jumped. But I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

“And you don’t know where you weren’t, because you can’t remember the room number she went into on her last visit, or a thing about the looks of the guy who opened the door.” Alfonso’s tone was scathing.

“No. I can’t.” Wolverton was not caving into anything, intimidation or angst.

“The mob, do you think?” Barrett asked Molina on the other side of the window glass. “Vassar could have been some godfather’s favorite, and it could have gotten ugly, like Wolverton says. He doesn’t look like a guy who’d cross organized crime.”

“Organized crime is so corporate in this town nowadays,” Molina objected. “And if he’d had the bad luck to really tread on some old-time neanderthal toes, he’d be buried in the Mojave by now.”

“Yeah.” Alch stood and turned his chair back to face the two-way mirror. “It doesn’t make sense: Wolverton `forgetting’ every detail and still being here to not tell the tale. Something scared him, and it wasn’t mob, or muscle. It was worse.”

“I agree,” Molina said, standing too. She caught both their glances and didn’t let go. “Your partners did a great interrogation job, but they’re up against something that’s got this guy whammied. We’ll watch his bank account for a bribe, see if he does anything unusual. Or if … he really does have a lousy memory.”

The men filed out, discouraged, meeting their partners in the hall for mutual head-shaking.

Molina went next door, shut it, and confronted Herb Wolverton.

“My name is Molina. Lieutenant. You know something we should. So whatever you’re afraid of, be more afraid. We’ll be on your case too. You owe money, you’re afraid of goons. Be more afraid of us. You owe Mr. Big a favor, you’re afraid of a grave in the sand. Be more afraid of us. There’s something else out there that gives you the heebie-jeebies. It’s not anything to worry about. Worry about us.

“That’s it. You can go now. Back to the Goliath and the happy fellah job. If you really want to.”

Wolverton took a few moments to think over standing up. When he did, his eyes took in her Amazonian measure. He edged to the door, and Molina opened it.

He looked up, and up, at her.

And then he made his last stand.

“Vassar was about your size, Lieutenant. And she’s dead.”

He scurried into the hall. Molina stepped out to watch him run the gauntlet of her unhappy homicide detectives.

He avoided eye contact and hastened to push the elevator button, visibly fidgeting while it creaked its way to their floor.

Something, or somebody, really bad had scared him.

That was her first thought. Her second was that it had scared him enough to “forget” a face as movie-star memorable as Matt Devine’s. Good luck for Carmen Molina. A puzzle for Lieutenant C. R. Molina. It would be intriguing to see whether self-interest or professional curiosity won this game of cat and rat.

Chapter 42

Wake-up Call

“Okay, honey,” Ambrosia was crooning into the mike as if the gray foam sound-muffler was toasted meringue ready to be eaten, “here’s a little something to cheer you up.”

The upbeat anthem of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” percolated over the radio speaker as Matt stepped into the studio and closed the door.

Right now he was trying to converse with Leticia Brown between the raindrops … during the three dead-mike minutes that a song or commercial break would take before she had to get back on the air as Ambrosia and talk to the people.

“I can’t believe it,” she repeated as she stared at him. This had been her mantra during their tête-à-tête through the previous song too. “That she-witch is really dead? Like melted? Tall pointy hat and all?”

“Melted away. Out of my life anyway, and anybody else’s. Forever.”

“You almost sound disappointed.”

“Sorry, you mean.”

“No, I say what I mean. I’m not like those poor uncertain souls who call you and me. You sound dis-ap-pointed.”

“Why would I be disappointed?”

“A body can get used to being persecuted, you know. That’s not uncommon. At least someone’s paying you attention. That’s better than being invisible. If you know what I mean.”

“I do. It’s called ‘playing the victim,’ and it’s common to oppressed people. You believe I was doing that?”

“I don’t know. All I know is you’re entitled to a little meanness after all the spite and spit that was aimed at you. Celebrate your freedom, boy! Wiggle you ass like the football players do in the end zone. Spike a football. Stomp an ant. Be not nice.”

Leticia shook her shoulders in what Matt had seen described as a “Watusi” dance move. Given her three-hundred Spandex-draped pounds and the fact that she always wore heavy shoulder pads no matter the outfit, she did look a bit like a linebacker for the Amazon Large League.

“Any man’s death diminishes me,” he quoted John Dunne.

“That was no man, honey. That was an e-vil wo-man. I never play anything that downer for my dear little lambs, but there is a song about women like that. That is the worst species of demon on earth.”

“No mercy?”

“No mercy. Be a little human for once. Gloat like the rest of us.”

She suddenly leaned into the mike and cooed to it as if to a baby. “Now isn’t that better, sweetie? Sadness should run away to the corners of your vision like raindrops on a windshield. Is it all better now?”

“Better,” the listener repeated.

Who dared argue with Leticia/Ambrosia? Darn few. Her smile was a union of Cheshire cat and Crest White-strip as Matt backed silently out of her domain. It would be his cocoon and his hot seat soon enough. He glanced at the schoolhouse clock on the wall: time writ big and simple, boiled down to Big Hands and Small Hands and the slender, restless Second Hand.

He wondered if you had a secondhand conscience when you were supposed to take pleasure, or relief at least, in another person’s passing.

The listener’s voice coming over the speaker was a woman’s now. Women always sounded a little breathless and young on speaker systems. The microphone exaggerated higher vocal tones, and had since the talkies had come in and made a falsetto of matinee idol John Gilbert. Remember him? Not much.

This woman caller also sounded hesitant, unused to dialing radio programs.

“I guess I can ask for a song dedicated to someone,” she said.

“Ded-i-cated to the one you love.” Ambrosia quoted the old song, talking the melody in perfect rhythm. Rappin’. “It’s for someone named … Vassar.”

Matt’s heart stopped for one too many times in the past few days.

“Vassar,” Ambrosia echoed. “A classy lady, I take it.”

“Very classy.”

“School friend?”

“You could say that. She’s … dead now.”

“Aw, sorry, honey child. Well, I think I can find a song that’ll talk to the both of you, even now.”

Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” came over the speaker, but Matt barely heard it after automatically identifying the tune and the lyric.

He was busy doing a mental post-mortem on the voice of the woman who had requested a song in Vassar’s name. Was there anything of Kitty O’Connor in it? No. It was a softened American accent, friendly but monotone, with still a sobered bounce beneath the syllables. Someone really in mourning. For someone named “Vassar.”

Mau headed posthaste for Mike’s tech booth.

“Who is that? Where’d the call come from?” he asked.

Mike eyed the rectangular gray screen on the telephone and shook his ear-muffed head. “Cell phone or pay phone, no caller I.D. on this one. Or maybe he knew the code to turn off the originating number. Oops, gotta fade and then it’s your two hours on the air, dude.”

Matt backed out of the booth, silently shutting the door.

Somehow he had known that this call would be haphazard, untraceable. At least the request hadn’t been phoned in by Elvis from who-knows-where. Two stars to the right and straight on to morning. Elvis had always been a Lost Boy, if not Peter Pan himself.

Leticia was already standing, pushing back the studio chair, making way for him.

“I like that,” she said. “Ending my show on a sad note but with an upbeat tune. Paradox is what they call it. Makes for good tension on radio and in the thee-ay-ter. Miss Carole King. What an album Tapestry was. We are Woman, hear us roar. At least now and then. Here. I kept it warm for you.”

She wasn’t kidding. Leticia pushed the leatherette-upholstered chair his way. He knew the surface would be obscenely hot from her overflowing bulk.

Cocoon or womb? Sometimes Matt wondered which better described his show and his nightly workplace.

He donned his headphones and sank onto the chair, spun it to face the mike. No music. His show had no music to face, only faceless voices, the music of the night. Lone wolves howling in the dark.

Oh, wait. He had theme music. He waited for it to fade, and then only his voice conducted the orchestra of regret and fear and pain and hope that came cascading over the airwaves every night but Monday. The Midnight Hour. His. Two hours actually, it had become so popular. Would someone crash his party tonight now that the name of Vassar had been invoked? But Kitty O’Connor, the only one with nerve enough to masquerade on live radio, was dead meat now. Wasn’t she?

* With Kitty officially dead, Leticia didn’t linger after her show to protect him.

She headed home.

Matt fielded calls and touchy ethical questions and borderline schmaltz, his mind only half on his job. No one claiming to be Vassar phoned in. Not even anyone pretending to be someone else who could easily be Kitty O’Connor. Not even a bad Elvis impersonator. For a moment he wondered if Elvis was a rock-‘n’-roll Gospel guardian angel who had vanished once Matt’s personal demon was dead.

Whoa! Such speculation was not solid theology. And Elvis had faced plenty of his own demons, especially one falsely-named Colonel Tom Parker who had outlived him as obscenely long as he had plundered Elvis’s earnings and his artistic soul.

Kitty O’Connor as an Irish Colonel Parker, now that was a thought!

Meanwhile Matt had tired, sad, earnest voices to answer. He did the best he could while still caught in his own tired, sad, earnest confusion.

At last the two hours were finally over.

He could go home knowing that Kitty O’Connor would never trouble his life, work, or mind again. At least not in person.

The parking lot was deserted except for Mike’s souped-up Honda Civic and his own bland white Probe. Lights shone unwaveringly. No distant motorcycle throb threatened the night.

She’s gone.

Ambrosia played that song often for left-behind lovers. I have to learn how to take it.

Matt had never comprehended that one could miss an enemy, or miss watching for an enemy, rather. He was like a soldier in No Man’s Land. Armed but not dangerous to anyone, because nobody was there. Trudging through mist that looked haunted, but was disconcertingly unoccupied.

Except that he was used to bogeymen, and women, leaping out of the dark in the radio station’s deserted parking lot. Now they might be all ghosts: Clifford Effinger… Kathleen O’Connor … Elvis. Vassar? You’ve Got a Friend. Really?

A woman was waiting by the one lit parking light. Matt felt his heart stop again, although his feet kept on trudging.

There was no running away from ghosts, he’d learned that much in Las Vegas.

This one stepped forward in female form, hair black as tar, skin pale, lips rosy, eyes unreadable in this bogus light. “Hi,” she said, shy and not shy. “You’re Mr. Midnight, aren’t you?”

He nodded, not bothering to deny the hokey handle. A “handle” was an air name, he had learned since working at WCOO. We Care Only for Others. Yeah, right. And ad revenue.

She offered the night a breathy laugh as an apology. “I’m sorry for botherin’ you, but I didn’t know how else to reach you.”

“Knowing how to ‘reach’ people is always a problem,” he said.

“I know. I do … outreach work myself. Kind of what you do, but face-to-face. Sorry.” She stepped forward, thrust out a hand. “My name is Deborah Walker. Deborah Ann Tucker Walker, to be specific.”

He looked at her outstretched hand, heard her stretched-out name, and couldn’t help smiling, especially at the soft, Southern grit in her voice. Deborah Ann Tucker Walker could not be put off, not politely, anyway.

“Mr. Midnight,” he said, shaking hands. Her palm was soft as dough, but his own palm detected the small calluses of the dedicated housewife or craftswoman.

“You don’t have to give your real name,” she assured him. “I give mine only because I have so dang many of them. Not to my credit or shame. Just fact. Married twice,once too long. I got past that, and then I tried to help other women who couldn’t. Not too different from what you do.”

“Not different at all. What do you need?”

“Your time. And I think you might need me, rather than vice versa.” She smiled, widely. “I’m not used to dealing with celebrities. Not too many of them came through Al-abama, exceptin’ Jimmy Buffet.”

“What are you doing here? I mean, in Las Vegas?”

“My second husband moved here to follow his job.

`Whither thou goest’ and all. I was a Quaker for quite a while, but I do believe in my Scriptures.”

“A Quaker? For a while?” Matt couldn’t help sounding intrigued.

She grinned. “I’d like to talk to you about a mutual friend. If I tell you about being a Quaker, would you tell me about being a Roman Catholic priest?”

He paused. The station sometimes broadcast his past as a program hook, usually in press releases, but not on the air. Not every night for the world to tune in on. They liked Mr. Midnight to be a nondenominational man of mystery.

A mini-me for the masses.

“Only thing open is fast-food joints,” he warned. “Shoot. I like slow food. But I can adapt to anything.”

“I bet you can. Where’s your car? You can follow me to Tinker Bell or Ronald Colman Donald or Warren Bur-ger King.”

“Tinker Bell would be good. I always liked to eat fairy mushrooms.”

“Right.”

He got into the Probe, keyed up the motor, and waited for her car, a Honda Civic he had mistaken for Mike’s of all things, to pull in behind him.

What was it about the WCOO parking lot? Central Casting Central? A séance site for the Las Vegas universe? An alternate Elvis nexus? Did everyone show up here, at least once? For their fifteen minutes of fame? Too bad his had lasted so long.

*

“Thing is,” she said, sucking on the straw in her chocolate malted milk, “it was the best success I’d ever had, and the worst.”

“Vassar,” he repeated, to make certain.

“Right. Vassar.”

“You called in the song for her on Ambrosia’s show! How did you know her?”

Deborah frowned. “Do you ever really know someone like Vassar?”

“I didn’t,” Matt confessed. Confessed. He knew what that word really meant. Sacramentally. He didn’t fool around with it. He didn’t expect a former Quaker to get it.

But she did.

“Well, I didn’t really know her either, even though we talked a lot. Who could?”

“I only saw her the once.”

“I saw her several times, but I wasn’t gettin’ anywhere.”

“Anywhere … where?”

“Well, I was like the AA buddy you don’t want.”

She tilted her head as if posing for a Glamour Shot mall picture. Matt had to remind himself that Southern courtesy was real, even if it had been parodied so much that it looked phony.

“Vassar didn’t want you in her life,” he said.

“No, sir. Not at all. Oh, she did … and sometimes she didn’t. I just tried to be there for her, all the time.”

“Some people are fragile,” he agreed. Wrong again.

“No, Vassar wasn’t fragile, exactly. She was … spooked? That the word? So tough, some ways. I envied her. I really did. But we Southern women are like willows. We bend. Too much, too long. I don’t much know how to deal with Blue Northers, I admit it. You know what a Blue Norther is?”

“No—”

“Well, it’s a storm, you see. Comes out of nowhere, but usually the North. It’s blue like a Yankee uniform. Dark, sudden, sweeps everythin’ away before it. Don’t look so worried. I’m not a reactionary. I’m a modern woman. I’ve been up, and down, and up again. Anyway, it’s unpredictable, but you know when it’s there, a Blue Norther.”

Maybe that Norther had swept Kathleen O’Connor away before it, Matt thought. She was from Northern Ireland, a Norther kind of woman, icy, sudden, unpredictable. Dead.

“Anyway,” Deborah Ann said, that being a favorite in troductory word, “I’ve been volunteerin’ for an outreach program for fallen women. Only we don’t call them that to their faces. For vertically challenged women, if you get my drift. Oh, you’re finally smiling, Mr. Sober Face. I don’t blame you. Listenin’ to Other People’s Troubles is the opposite to usin’ Other People’s Money. No fun.”

“So you made contact with Vassar. Knew her.”

“Contact! That’s somethin’ that electrical outlets do. People get to know each other. Vassar wasn’t easy, but she was … innerestin’.”

“A hard case.”

Deborah laughed, softly, like she did everything but think. “You could put it that way. Not easy to reach. Defensive, the shrinks would say.”

“What would you say?”

“Hurt some. Not about to be disappointed again. Like you? Like me? I reckon we all have been hurt some.”

“Did you know what hurt Vassar, why she’d do what she did for a living?”

“No. I’ve learned what it must have been like. She’d tell me about her clients sometimes. They didn’t sound much different from the guys you could end up marrying. Some guys were sweet and lonely, she said. Some thought they could own you. A lot just wanted nostrings stimulation and release, one step up from a blow-up doll.”

“Blow-up doll?”

“You don’t know what that is?”

“Would I ask otherwise?”

“Don’t get testy! And if you don’t know, I’m not gonna tell you. I can see why Vassar liked you.”

“If you won’t tell me about a blow-up doll, why are you telling me about her?”

“Because you knew her.”

“Not much. Not for long.”

“Doesn’t matter. How long. How much. What matters is, how … real. Anyway, I was tryin’ to be her phone buddy. I’d get her on the line—she always called me, and hung up on me too, when she was done for the time bein’. She’d get me on the line and dribble out the teeniest bit of a question. Need. Want. Aggressive, she was. About what she was doin’. But not really.”

“Do you know what I was seeing her for?”

“No, sir. I imagine you were a client, is all.”

Is all. A client. Of a call girl. Matt tried not to hear himself described in the terms that applied.

“Anyway—”

Matt thought that he would strangle the next person to use that opening expression.

“I was gettin’ nowhere with Vassar. I mean, what do I know about fancy northeastern schools? She’d been there. Hadn’t been happy there, but she’d been there. Had a chance to be everythin’ upscale: northern, snooty, ed-ucat-ed”—just there she’d sounded like Leticia—“sophisti-cat-ed. A natural woman. Only it didn’t really feel natural, and Monday night she called me. She phoned home, bless her, my little ET. I can’t tell you how happy I was to see her need me for the first time. Call it an addiction, but it’s my kind of happy. I like to be of service, is that so wrong? I like to help people rather than harm them. Now that is not cool in an MTV world. That seems to be … embarrassin’, in some way, don’t you think? No, you don’t, you like to do the same thing, don’t you?”

“No,” Matt said automatically, embarrassed. Then he listened for the cock to crow. “Yes.”

“Yes. Of course. Here’s the thing. She called me from some fancy hotel. What hotel in this town isn’t fancy, right? It was … oh, the wee hours of Tuesday.”

“Early Tuesday? What time?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Her call woke me up. Whatever you might be thinkin’, I’m a decent woman and in bed before midnight.”

“Then you don’t listen to my show. Program.”

She looked really embarrassed. Almost blushed. “No, sir. I’d never heard of you or your … program, until Vassar mentioned it during that call.”

“She knew who I was?”

“She was a fan! Before and … um, after the fact.” Matt winced to consider what the “fact” Deborah Ann referred to so blithely might be.

“Anyway … that’s when she told me all about you. She was so excited.”

“She was?”

“Oh, yes. You were a celebrity, but, best of all, you listened to her. I’d never gotten to Page One with her, but you put her on Page Eighteen. She couldn’t wait to see me the next day. She’d made up her mind. She’d start raging in the middle of being ecstatic. Said her last client before you was a prick. A real pig. But you weren’t. That showed her something. You showed her something. She was going to do something with her life. She wasn’t sure just what, but somethin’. She was going to leave.”

“Leave? Las Vegas?”

“No! The Life. You know. Hookin’. She was lookin’ at it in a whole new way. Something you said. Lotta somethin’s you said. I couldn’t get everythin’ she was sayin’. She talked so fast. My, but she was hyped. I’d never heard her so excited.”

“Happy? Are you saying she was happy?”

Deborah Ann sat back to consider, then sipped on her straw. “Don’t know any other way to describe it.”

“She wasn’t in despair?”

Deborah stared at him. ” ‘Despair’? Honey, that girl was so high she must have been wearin’ platform mattress springs. I’d never been able to get beyond that worldly wise attitude of hers. So teenage, really. Anyway—”

“Yes, anyway?” Matt was getting impatient. Blue Norther impatient.

Deborah Ann leaned into the table, closer, so only he could hear her, as if anyone would eavesdrop on them at a Taco Bell.

“It doesn’t make sense. No, sir. The woman I talked to was a happy camper. I don’t see her … killing herself, that’s all.”

“And then what happened?”

“Well, we were cut off.”

“Cut off?”

“Right. Or cut out. Cell phones will do that to you, you know. You have a cell phone?”

“No. I probably should have.”

“You should. A very handy sort of thing.”

“But you had one, and Vassar had one, and the line was cut.”

“It’s not a line, I don’t think. More like … air. There was a lot of echo while we talked, and then … She was gone, that’s all.”

“Never said good-bye?”

“No.”

“Never said anything more?”

“No.”

“Did you hear anything more?”

“No. Just an open line. And … a kind of cackling, cracking on it.”

“Like a person?”

“No!”

“Like what?”

“Like nothing, that’s all. We were cut off.”

“That’s what you came to tell me? She didn’t hang up. You were cut off?”

“No. I came to tell you that you converted Vassar. Sorry, I have a Southern Baptist mentality when I’m not reverting to my Quaker sojourn. She was out of that life. Born again. She was going to talk to me some more. You did it. That’s what I came to tell you. I didn’t know who or what youwere, or why you bothered to talk to her, given the situation, but she said enough that I knew I ought to tell you. It’s not every day a person does a good deed. I’d been trying to good-deed that woman into her senses, and somehow you just cruised along like any ole customer and did it, all by your lonesome. I thought you’d like to know, ought to know, that she’d been a new woman when she died. ‘Cuz she must have died not long after that, accordin’ to the newspaper, if you can believe the newspaper.”

He nodded. Vassar must have been standing in the hall, near the railing. He remembered leaving her there, insisting she didn’t want to go down in the elevator. She wanted to think.

So instead she’d gone down on an invisible downdraft of air.

Apparently.

Converted, she had floated like a butterfly, an angel, to her death twenty-one stories below. Called her counselor and then dived.

It didn’t make sense.

Deborah Walker had come forward because she wanted to make sense of it all.

But everything was only more confused. Nothing was clear.

Except …

Vassar had left him happy. In a good mood. Not suicidal.

And she had been cut off.

Not only in her life, but on a cell phone.

Something had happened.

What?

Or had … someone … happened?

Kitty. Kathleen O’Connor.

Did she watch? See Matt leave, an undefeated Matt? See Vassar euphoric, dialing what passed for a girlfriend, crowing about what had not happened?

Had Kitty then pushed Vassar over the literal edge?

Happiness would madden a killjoy personality like hers. Anyone’s happiness.

So Matt had managed to kill Vassar with kindness. One way or the other.

Chapter 43

Crime Seen

We have returned to the twentieth floor.

Miss Midnight Louise and myself, that is. (She insisted, though she still limps, and I objected.) But we have returned.

Midnight, Inc.

Tonight, call us Murder, Inc., for we are determined to lay all questions to rest, and any spare call girls too. “I am convinced,” Miss Louise says, “that we have missed a key point in this case.”

“We?”

“Well, I do not know where your brain has been on leave, but mine has been very unhappy with our conclusions thus far. Are you not concerned about the testimony of the parakeet?”

“Parakeets are not exactly Supreme Court judges.”

“But they talk, and they listen. Consider the last words heard by the bird on the scene addressed to the victim. `Pretty bird.’ “

“So? That may say something else to me than it does to thee. You, that is. I mean, that ‘keet had a bird brain. It was used to hearing certain phrases. Nothing more natural that it should eavesdrop on humans and hear its own lingo.”

“Or a human lingo as characteristic as its own.”

“Like, for instance?”

“Like, for instance, ‘Pretty bird.’ I recall that ‘bird’ is a pet name for a nubile human female in the British Isles.”

“We are not in the British Isles here, in case you did not notice!”

“But someone else, the perpetrator, might be from the British Isles. After all, what are the British Isles but England and—?”

Miss Louise nods encouragingly at me, as if I am a dull student in need of encouragement. I know my geography, and take pleasure in reciting it for the uppity chit.

“And Scotland, where they favor sheep in plaid clothing,” I grudgingly admit.

“And—?”

“And Wales, which they let maritally unfaithful princes take their lad-in-waiting names from.”

“And—?”

I hate the unremitting logic of the female inquisitor. Thank Bast the Inquisition was more prone to interrogating rogue females than incorporating them. Imagine Joan of Arc as a prosecuting attorney! Miss Louise does a pretty good imitation, and she is only a feline and not at all saintly, not to mention singed around the edges.

“And … northern Ireland,” I concede.

“Exactly! And where does Kitty O’Connor hail from?”

“Northern Ireland. But you cannot believe—”

“I can believe whatever I discern. Who else would be standing here at the balcony edge but Kitty O’Connor, crooning ‘Pretty bird’ to the lovely American call girl whot ‘ad just made Mr. Matt ‘istory for the foiled purpose of said Kitty the Cutter.”

“Whew. You females play hardball. Which is what I gratefully still have, thank Bast!”

“I am not interested in the intactness of your anatomy,old dude. I am making a point that if Miss Kitty was around and about that night, and annoyed that Mr. Matt was stealing a march on her plot to disgrace him by disgracing himself first, she might take it out on the poor call girl he called upon: the ‘Pretty bird’ she hated more than even herself, or she would have never fixated on undoing a mere male, who are undone by the very nature of their gender to begin with.”

Well, these are fighting words, but I do not know where to begin. So I decide to build my case. It does not take much, simply calling a few witnesses who are already hanging about the place.

I could say I just put my lips together and whistled, but the fact is we hep cats are never much good at the wolf whistle game. It takes a certain canine swagger to pull off.

So instead I merow to the ether and hope that a thing with feathers will answer my call.

I am answered in spades: one turtledove, two French hens, three Budgerigars, four calling birds, five cockatiels, etcetera, ad nauseam. You would not think so many feathered friends inhabited the twentieth floor of the Goliath Hotel, but then you would not think, would you? Best to leave that to experts, like myself.

I call my first witness. Literally.

“Did you see a tall young lady on stilted heels pausing by the balcony?” I inquire.

“Tweet.”

“Please repeat that response in English for the jury.”

My jury is a twelve-part-harmony team of various feathered friends.

“Yes. Pretty bird,” says Blues Brother on cue.

I flash a triumphant glance at Miss Midnight Louise.

“So the phrase, ‘Pretty bird,’ is pretty common to the avian world,” I follow up like the sharp legal wit I am.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Bird-biter,” the little ‘keet answers.

I pace impressively before it. “So it was indeed a bird that called Miss Vassar to her death?”

“No, sir,” says the ‘keet.

“What do you mean, ‘No, sir’?”

He fluffs his feathers and bites his toenails and works on various unmentionable portions of his underlayment, and then he sings again.

“It was a cat, sir. A feline person of the pet persuasion. I saw it.”

“A cat, sir?”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Would you repeat that for the jury?”

“Indeed, sir, repeating is my business, my only business.”

By now I have gone farther than any defense attorney would, save for 0. J. Simpson. If only there were a dog in the case to lay all the blame upon. Kato, my Akita friend, wherefore art thou?

“What cat?” I demand.

“Pale-colored, with a little dark feathering. Very attractive for a fur-body. Seated. Upon the balcony. The human lady in question was on her cell phone, but then she noticed the balancing act occurring not five feet away from her. She was most distressed.”

“How distressed?”

“She abruptly terminated her conversation, ‘Pretty bird,’ and reached out to extract the cat from the railing. Well, you sir, being a cat, can understand how unfortunate that misguided good Samaritan gesture was.”

I say nothing, for to do so is to incriminate my breed and my brethren of the court. And mostly myself.

“Pretty bird,” mourns Blues Brother. “She reached so far and then farther. The fickle feline jumped down to the floor. The poor human female leaned over the railing and fell down to the glass ceiling far below. Pretty bird. Bye-bye.”

I stand astounded. And corrected. No one killed the little doll known as Vassar except her own soft heart.

She died trying to rescue one of my kind, albeit a pampered, perfumed kind.

Joan of Arc indeed. The name Hyacinth comes to mind. At least Mr. Matt is set free by my kind’s obligation. This was an accidental death. The only Kitty involved was the unknown feline fatale balanced on the balcony. Ah, my anonymous Juliet, how fatal thou art.

Chapter 44

Wake

Matt thought he must be dreaming, but he had thought that a lot lately.

There came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping .. . not on his or Poe’s chamber door, but on the glass of the French doors to Matt’s patio.

He ignored it as an audible hallucination.

He was two stories up. His patio was a pathetic thing compared to the other units’ outdoor areas. It remained as he had found it: furnished by one dusty white plastic lawn chair. Temple’s patio was a whimsical mini-Disneyland of potted plants and creative seating. His was a wasteland. His private garden was miles away at the Ethel M chocolate factory, filled with sere, thorny cacti.

Tap, tap, tap.

There wasn’t even a tall tree nearby to scratch a branch over his door glass. The venerable palm in the parking lot ended by just tickling the underside of his balcony.

He supposed Midnight Louie could have leaped up to his balcony from the palm tree, but Midnight Louie would never knock, or scratch, or mew for entry. Matt didn’t know much about cats, but that much he knew about Midnight Louie.

So … nothing was there. Nobody was there.

There was barely anybody here, Matt thought, still reeling from the past few days’ events.

Rap, rap, rap.

Matt rose from his red-suede vintage sofa and moved to the balcony patio. The absence of curtains made his figure the well-lit star on an obscure stage, he knew, while the anonymous tapper on the patio remained in the dark, invisible.

He wasn’t afraid of the invisible, so he jerked one of his French doors wide open, daring cutthroats, sneak thieves, and random murderers to have at him.

In the soft Mercurochrome glow from the parking-lot lamp, he spied a black form balanced impeccably on the narrow wrought-iron railing … not Midnight Louie, but Midnight Max.

Matt regarded his visitor, reflecting for the first time that Max reminded him of Flambeau, the master thief in a Father Brown story, those genteel literary exercises in crime, punishment, and Roman Catholic theology by G. K. Chesterton.

Balanced like a mime-acrobat on the railing, Kinsella waved his current calling card: the tall black-labeled bottle of amber liquid with which he had apparently leaned forward to rap on the glass.

Despite the skill of such a trick, Matt recognized that the bottle was whiskey and that Kinsella had already been drinking from it.

“Top of the evening to ye,” Kinsella greeted him in a stage brogue. “Mind if I come in?”

Matt did mind, but he was too curious to refuse. Before he could nod, the magician had untangled himself from the iron railing and vaulted into the living room in one liquid motion.

“To what do I owe—?” Matt asked, omitting the phrasethat usually followed those words: the pleasure of your company.

Max Kinsella evoked many feelings in Matt, but companionability was not one of them.

Kinsella didn’t answer directly. Did he ever? Matt wondered.

Instead he held the bottle up to the central ceiling fixture. The glass was such a dark brown that almost no light penetrated it.

“This,” Kinsella announced, “is the finest Irish whiskey in the world, Bushmill’s Millennium at a hundred dollars a bottle, and the Irish distill the finest whiskeys in the world. The word ‘whiskey’ is Gaelic in origin, did you know that?”

“Yes. It means ‘water of life.’ The Irish also have the finest addiction to alcohol in the world.”

“Ah. Not a tad of the Auld Sod in your soul.”

“Polish-American.”

“So you’re a beer man.”

“I don’t drink much of anything.”

Kinsella shrugged, quirked an eyebrow, and flourished the bottle in one fluid gesture.

He set the bottle down firmly on one of Matt’s discount-store cube tables. “I suggest you owe yourself a sip of Heaven now.”

“Heaven isn’t to be found in a bottle; more often Hell is.”

“True, and I’m generally abstemious. A man in my line of work can’t afford smudged senses.”

“Are you referring to magic or spying?”

“Either. Both. However, this is an occasion, and I suggest you join me in an uncharacteristic elbow-bend. Where are your glasses?”

“Kitchen,” Matt said, bemused.

Kinsella was not drunk, as he had feared, but he was in a strange, forced, bitter mood.

He was now peering into Matt’s cupboards and apparently displeased by what he saw.

“Not a lead crystal glass in the place. You can’t set up housekeeping without a pair of glasses worthy of the occasional drink of kings. Well, these gas-station jelly jars will have to do.”

“I don’t have any such thing.” Matt moved to defend his possessions.

Max had whisked two short thick glasses from the cupboard to the counter. Now he was rattling in the refrigerator in search of ice.

“Not a sliver, not a cube. ‘Tis more fitting that we take it neat, anyway.”

“Why should I drink with you?”

“It’s better than drinking alone?” Kinsella paused to reflect. “You can’t have me doing that, can you? Besides, we have something to celebrate.”

“You don’t seem in a very celebratory mood to me.”

“We Irish are deceptive. We laugh when you think we should weep, and weep when you think we should laugh.”

Matt took the glass Kinsella handed him, holding two inches of amber liquid as richly colored as precious topaz, the expensive, genuine article, not the cheap yellow citrine or smoky quartz that was passed off for it. He could already inhale the rich, sharp scent of aged whiskey.

Suddenly, he did wish for crystal glasses. Life needed its rituals and its ritual vessels.

By now Matt was ready for a drink. He lifted the glass and took a swallow: hot, burning in his throat like bile, yet strangely soothing.

“Is anybody ever allowed to sit on this?” Kinsella was still holding his glass, saving it, and staring at the long red sofa.

“It’s a Vladimir Kagan.”

“Here’s to Vladimir.” Kinsella lifted the lowly glass and drank.

“You can sit on it,” Matt said. “I sit on it all the time.”

“Designer sofa, rare whiskey, barware by Martha Steward,” Max enumerated.

Matt sat in front of the cube table Kinsella had notclaimed, realizing that the magician had purposefully mispronounced Martha’s last name, not liquorfully.

The play on words reminded Matt of Martha from the New Testament: that bustling, somehow frantic female fussing so compulsive that even Christ had urged her to slow down and smell the roses. Comparing domestic diva Martha Stewart to her New Testament namesake made for an interesting take on America’s Queen of Clean and Possibly Mean. Were successful women always assumed to be shrews? Or did success make shrews of us all? Matt wouldn’t know. He sipped more whiskey. It tasted stronger than swallowed perfume would smell, and he didn’t much like either.

Kinsella was lounging in a corner of the Kagan as no one else who had ever sat on it had dared to do, including himself. For all its provenance and rarity, it was a demanding, stylish seating piece and wasn’t the least bit comfortable. Like Kinsella himself.

“You look to the Kagan born,” Matt admitted.

Kinsella chuckled. “We’re both magicians, in our way. Our game is not to make you feel comfortable, but challenged, uneasy. Do I make you feel uneasy?”

“Sometimes.”

“Not all the time? Shame on me.”

“To what do I owe the honor of this visitation?”

“It’s not an honor. It’s a … bloody wake.”

“I still don’t get why you’re here.”

“This is a wake, after all,” Kinsella noted. “For that you need a priest.”

“So you think an ex-priest will do in a pinch.”

“Why not? An ex-Irishman will do.”

“So whose wake is it?” Matt was half afraid his bitter visitor would produce Vassar’s name.

“All of ours?” Kinsella sat forward, cradling the whiskey glass in his hands. “She’s … gone. Dead. Our Martha Stewart of the soul, giving us no rest, rearranging our priorities, redecorating our psychoscapes. To Kathleen.” He raised his glass. “To Kitty the Cutter. To our survival on the occasion of her death. I often thought she would kill me, but I never dreamed … she would die.”

, “An eternal enemy offers a certain stability,” Matt said, slowly, amazed by how true his words were only as he articulated them. “Why else is there the Devil?”

“You should know. You’re thinking of Cliff Effinger.”

“No. I didn’t cause his death. At least I hope not. I mean, not specifically, but by looking for him, I might have attracted the wrong sort of attention to him.”

“Devine! Effinger attracted the wrong sort of attention to himself. He was a royal loser. A royal pain in the ass to everyone who encountered him. You were his stepson. You had certainly felt the back of his hand. Don’t go all goody-goody on me and tell me you regret his death.”

“I do. You know what he said to me once, here, in Las Vegas, when we met again as adults? He said his abusive ways in my childhood home had done me a favor. He claimed he had taught me what the world was really like. I think it was like that for him, as a child, and he really did believe that was the way to rear a kid, to know how hard and cold the world can be.”

“So did you learn anything?”

“From coldness and hardness, no. But maybe from him, finally. Not what he wanted me to know. I found that inside he was small and afraid still, trying to be the big, rough person he thought it took to survive in this world.”

“He was a loser.”

“So was Jesus Christ.”

“Spare me! Next you’ll be asking mercy for Kathleen 0’ Connor.”

“Someone has to.”

“You won’t admit you’re relieved she’s dead?”

“Yeah, sure. Who wouldn’t be? But you won’t admit you’re sorry she’s dead. That’s what this is all about.”

“Me? Sorry?”

“She’s been in your life longer than any person you know. Longer than your dead cousin. Longer than Temple.”

“What do you know of me and who’s been in my life?”

“Only bits and pieces. But Kathleen, Kitty, was your demon longer than she was mine. Granted, she dug in her heels and really hounded me, but it was all misplaced obsession. I was a substitute for you, for the young you she had known years ago in northern Ireland.”

“I’m glad she’s dead.” Kinsella lifted both his glass and his eyes in a defiant toast.

“It’s your right. I can’t argue with it.”

“You’re not glad.”

Matt considered. In his worst moments he had imagined killing her to save others, but that was fantasy. The reality was that he felt relieved that Kitty wasn’t here to drive him to the end of his wits and his integrity. But anyone’s death as the price of his deliverance? No.

“Christ died to save our souls,” Kinsella said. “Would you wish that death undone?”

“That was different, preordained.”

“And wasn’t her death preordained? She must have harbored a secret death wish, pushing people to their limits, maybe hoping someone, sometime, would have the guts to kill her for it.”

“You didn’t.”

“No.”

“I didn’t either.”

“So God did it for us.”

“It’s too easy to attribute things to God, miracles or revenge.”

“Still…. A toast to God, for justice literally above and beyond the call of duty.”

“I don’t think God requires toasts.”

“Don’t underestimate Him. He gets them in mass every day.”

“That’s blasphemy.”

“That’s what they said of Jesus. ‘He blasphemes.’ “

“Irreverence then. And comparing yourself to Our Lord is more of it. Don’t argue the Testament with me.”

“Why not? What would we argue about? Temple?”

“You’re trying to pick a fight with me. Why?”

“I’m not.” Kinsella put his glass down next to the bottle. “I’m trying to talk to you instead of tap-dancing out an unwanted conversation, which is our usual routine. We have a lot in common. Too much probably, but the one thing we really have in common from this moment on is Kathleen O’Connor’s death. I’m not as happy about it as I should be, and you’re not as relieved as you should be. Aren’t you drinking?”

“Sure. We Poles are as prone to depression as the Irish anyday. Our homeland has been trampled under by centuries of invaders, we’ve been forced into exile and immigration, and beyond that, we’re the butt of Pollack jokes. At least Irish humor is always warm beneath the barbs.”

“I’ll give you that.” Kinsella touched glass rims with Matt. “Pollack jokes are meaner than Irish jokes. It’s damned unfair.”

Matt let the whiskey that was likely older than himself trickle down his throat. He was surprised that Kinsella would concede anything to him, even something as trivial as the denigrating ethnic humor sweepstakes, when Kinsella surprised him even more.

“Speaking of which, I don’t usually revert to ethnic stereotype,” he said, eyeing the bottle.

“And you don’t usually come looking me up.”

“No. This case seems to call for it. I have, after all, a confession to make. I think I killed Kathleen.”

Chapter 45

Cherchez La Femme

So I hear this tapping as of someone gently rapping on my … chamber pot, not my chamber door!

I open my snoozing eyes. I am resting in Miss Temple’s office, where I can get some peace and quiet of a night instead of enduring constant tossing and turning in the bed, my dear roommate’s specialty of late.

My litter box is only a few feet away, and someone is clawing the heck out of it.

No one is privileged to use Midnight Louie’s privy but Midnight Louie!

I am up and hissing like a radiator in an instant.

“Mine!” I yowl, advancing on the equally instant high heels of my fighting shivs.

“Relax,” comes an all-too-familiar drawl. “It is a long walk over from the Crystal Phoenix and I needed a pit stop. It is all in the family, right?”

“If you are speaking of a professional family—”

“Any other relationship involving you would be unspeakable,” Miss Midnight Louise responds.

“Our spats aside, what are you doing up and about after your recent six rounds with the Mojave Desert? Do you forget the extreme difficulty I had dragging you to the highway, then hitching a ride back to town in the back of a squad car, no less? Talk about a risky undercover assignment, that was my top job, mitts down.”

“I am as stiff as Miss Kitty the Cutter at the moment,” she admits, “but pampering will only delay my recovery. If I had been hit by a car near Twenty-fourth Street where the wild things hang out, no one would have stirred a whisker for me. Up there in Feral Country it is move or die.”

“I got you safely back to the Crystal Phoenix, did I not? And speaking of ‘knot,’ that is what all my muscles were in after squiring your semiconscious form around half of Clark County.”

She pussyfoots over and sits beside me. “You are the usual unsung hero, Pops, but that is the lot of an undercover operative. Speaking of which, I have been thinking.”

“Apparently this is such a rare occasion that you must get up in the middle of the night and hotfoot it over here without even remembering to use your own facilities.”

“Everything is such a territory issue with dudes. If you all could get over it we would have world peace.”

“Then what would there be to do? Sit on our assets and clip coupons?”

“Whatever.” She yawns.

I stifle a comment that such a young thing should be in bed by now. It sounds too solicitous and I would never like to be mistaken for solicitous. It ruins my image.

“So what is so earth-shaking that you need to ankle over here and play Oriental sand painting in my executive bathroom?”

“Something in Blues Brother’s testimony has been bothering me. I think we should visit the twentieth floor of the Goliath Hotel.”

“And risk all those bird droppings again?! They fly around unfettered up there, you know. I personally do not think your looks would be flattered by a bird poop chapeau.”

“Please, Pops! No need to get vulgar. We have dodged the airborne missives so far. There is something I really think you should know. Unless, you believe the savvy operator prefers to remain in the dark about some things.”

“Of course not. I am only in the dark if I know it.” Wait! That did not make sense. Oh well, no need to tip off the kit. “So you want me to hike back to the Goliath on a whim of yours?”

“Who knows?” she asks coyly, buffing her fingernails with her tongue. “You might thank me for it.”

Well, that does it. The chit is insinuating that she knows more than I do. I will not sleep the rest of the night worrying about that possibility anyway.

So it is that Midnight, Inc. Investigations creeps out of the well-lit comforts of the Circle Ritz, down a callused palm tree trunk, and out into the warm and well-populated Las Vegas streets.

By now we have made breaking into the Goliath and its bank of elevators an art form, if I do say so myself.

Miss Louise snags a fallen gaming chip in the casino and carries it by mouth to the elevator area.

I lurk behind the ever-popular ashtray, here an embellished column mimicking beaten copper.

“Look at that!” cries the obligatory tourist. “A cat with a chip in its mouth.”

Better than a cat with a chip on its shoulder, lady. Those are called lions and tigers and leopards.

So little Miss Louise trots into the elevator car, the object of all wonder and admiration, and I slip in after her and cringe in a dark corner where even the security camera can’t see.

“And what floor do you want, little lady?” the man tourist asks Louise with a wink at his wife.

She sits solemnly and stares straight ahead, but I realize that she is meditating deeply, mentally intoning the desired floor number like any superstitious gambler silently pleading for a roulette number to come up. With us cats, it works.

The man winks again at his wife while his forefinger taps

“Yvette!” I cry, stunned by her beauty and presence yet again.

She weaves herself around me, her black-tipped silver fur coat and mascara’ed aquamarine eyes weaving me into their spell. Hyacinth who?

“What have you been up to?” I ask, thinking of her pet food commercial contract.

A sardonic voice interrupts my idyll. Miss Midnight Louise.

“Up on the railing, I think? So, Miss Yvette, did the pretty lady try to pet you, did she try to lift you down and fall over the edge herself?”

“Pretty lady?” Yvette fluffs her ruff, which surrounds her piquant little face like an Elizabethan lace collar. “I do not know what you mean. I have been out of the room when my mistress is sleeping or gone. She often forgets to lock the deadbolt, ugly name! She leaves the bigger brass prong set inside the door to keep it ajar when she goes down the hall for ice, which is frequently. Thus I am free to slip out and take the air.”

“Did you ‘take the air’ on the railing a week ago?” Louise demands in her usual surly tones.

The Divine Yvette answers with her usual sublime patience. “I may have. I like to watch the sushi on the wing. This is not the People’s Court, miss, I am not obligated to answer. Is that not right, Louie, mon amour?”

Well, what can I say to that? “Enough of this grilling, Louise. Miss Yvette is not a suspect in anything.”

“If enticing a human to her death is not a crime, then I suppose she is not.”

“Yvette?” I growl. “Not Yvette.”

“A ‘pale cat with attractive dark feathering’ on the railing. Sounds like a shaded silver Persian. You heard the bird. Eyewitness testimony and he even talks so humans can understand him.”

“Yvette, did you see the pretty lady seven nights ago?” I ask in my turn.

“What is time to me? I did take the moving box four floors up, where someone did pick me up and got their naked oilyhands all over my recently laved fur. I was able to leap away, like mist. These humans are so clumsy. I remember that mindless mimic of the air, that morsel on wings, crying “Pretty bird!” As if I were chopped liver! I escaped back into my room to restore my garb to proper order. What wrong is there in that?”

I cannot speak.

The Divine Yvette is the feline femme fatale who apparently lured the ill-fated Vassar into her penultimate act of mercy that became an inadvertent dive.

It was an utter accident, of course. On both their parts. But I cannot deny that Vassar acted from the nobler intent, my admired Yvette from the baser one.

Still, one can understand that an oft-pawed beauty might naturally rebuff even an attempted rescue.

I glance at Miss Louise, who is sitting by offering the sour demeanor of Judge Judy to the proceedings.

“The human female only tried to rescue you,” I tell her. But the Divine Yvette is as blind in her fashion as her self-absorbed mistress.

“I did not need it,” the Divine One says pointedly. She flounces back to her door, where she begins to paw with her declawed right mitt, making a nerve-grinding shwshshs shwshshs shwshshs sound.

I sit bemused. Then I hear a thump behind me.

Miss Midnight Louise is now balanced on the railing board, looking down.

“Off!” I order.

“There it is.”

“What?”

“Miss Vassar’s cell phone. It had to have fallen with her, but it caught in the fork of that potted Norfolk pine tree on the level below.”

I jump up beside her. Two can play at this game, which some would call “chicken.”

Sure enough, I spot a small oblong of dull silver metal, a cell phone in a pine tree. If that cell phone could talk …

but of course it cannot. And of course the police will never discover it up here.

“Get down from there, Louise. We have seen our job and done it.”

She obeys me, leaving me momentarily speechless. Behind me I hear Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s door open. “You naughty kitten!” she admonishes the Divine One.

“How did you slip out?”

The door closes, and I realize I have neglected to turn to capture a last glimpse of that vanishing plume of fur, of summer and smoke.

Miss Midnight Louise is shaking her head as if a flea, or two, were cohabitating in her ear. Perhaps witnessing the Divine One’s sublime indifference to her own role in a recent death has shaken my partner, for she says to me out of the blue, “I did not mean to kill her, Pop. Just to distract her from taking out Mr. Max.”

“You are discussing a woman nicknamed Kitty the Cutter. Not only that, in this instance she was a rogue driver. Innocents could have been killed. And do you think she would have hesitated to run you over if you had gotten between her and Mr. Max’s car? You were the backseat driver on that ‘cycle. She was out of control. You did what you had to do.”

“Still … I have never killed anything that big before. And humans are supposed to be the superior breed.”

“Every breed is superior in its own mind. There are inferior humans just as there are inferior cats, hard as that is to believe. But none of that matters when it comes down to an issue of life and death. Mr. Max”—here I swallow my territorial pride for the first time in my nine lives—“is a dear friend of my Miss Temple, and I should hate to have my roommate in mourning for the next millennium if anything untoward should happen to him. You did the right thing. You did what I would have done.”

“Gee, thanks.” She gives me the skeptical green-eyed slit. “I have never before considered ‘what you would have done,’ to be any standard worth aspiring to.”

Before the terrible import of those convictions quite clear the hurdle of my overworked brain, Miss Louise gives me a quick lick on the chops.

“But I may have to reconsider my standards,” she says. “Such is life and death, I see, on the mean streets of Las Vegas. Thanks for the buggy ride, Daddy-o Dearest.”

I shudder to think what Miss Louise’s memoirs will have to say about me. I had better get started on my own, pronto.

Chapter 46

Callback

The phone rang. His phone rang.

Matt stared at Kinsella. Max had killed Kitty? Was it possible?

Yes. They were old enemies.

“Better answer,” Kinsella suggested, seizing the Bushmill’s bottle by the neck for a refill.

As if Matt, a Polish beer man according to Kinsella, would hog Irish whiskey.

He got up and went to the bedroom phone, the only one he owned. Yet. He could smell a cell phone in his future, but at least now he still had a very unportable model and could use it as an excuse to escape the unthinkable. Was he entertaining a confessed murderer in his living room? Wouldn’t Carmen Molina be enchanted to know that?

“Hello.”

“Matt. Am I calling too early for out there?” asked Frank Bucek’s vibrant ex-teacher voice.

“No. We’re awake and at ‘em out here.”

“That three-hour time difference is annoying. I have toremember not to call at the crack of dawn when it’s midmorning here in Virginia.”

Not just Virginia. Quantico. FBI headquarters. Matt wondered what the place had got its name from. “I have something,” Frank announced.

He’d always boomed out sermons and homilies in the priesthood, hadn’t allowed any mumbling among the altar boys. Nothing retiring about Father Frankenfurter.

“On … the woman.”

“On your persecutor. Kathleen O’Connor. No ‘Kathy,’ for her, at least not with the IRA.”

“I asked you to look into her months ago, and you didn’t find anything.”

“Ah, Matt, me boyo. That was before nine-eleven and the IRA began playing ball-o with the English and American authorities. Can you believe it? The enormity of the World Trade Center attack gave the IRA pause. They’d been in peace negotiations anyway, then said publicly that the scale of the attack on the U.S. was so extreme that they would never bomb Britain again.”

“They’re terrorists.”

“Yes. Who believed them? And of course they have their hard-nosed elements who will never give in or never give up mayhem. But, by and large, begorra, they’ve been as sincere as you can expect of reformed terrorists. And … they’re cooperating with the authorities, so this time I finally got some information on the bane of your block, Kathleen O’Connor.”

“She’s dead.”

“What?”

“I just identified the body. A motorcycle accident.”

“And it was her, for certain?”

“I saw her face. It was scraped and bruised, but hers, no mistake. I identified her on the coroner’s examining table.”

“Ouch. I don’t like those places. They make you not quite believe in immortal souls, seeing all those mortal remains so still and shattered and such dead meat. So you’re sure.”

“Yes, but I’d still like to know more about her.”

“I don’t know much more. They admitted to knowing of her, but said that she had long ago become a rogue agent.”

“How do you become a rogue IRA terrorist?”

“You don’t take orders, for one. The biggest no-no. That’s true of any para-governmental agency.”

“ ‘Para-governmental agency’? We’ve got them too?”

“We’ve got everything we need in a modern, dangerous world. And sometimes it isn’t enough. Anyway, Kathleen went off on her own years ago. Would send money home. They tagged her as working South America, the Irish-Latino community there, which is almost as big as the German-Latino community, aka the Hitler has-beens. She sent them money periodically. They didn’t ask where it came from or where she was.”

“So she supported them, and followed her own agenda, unsupervised.”

“They didn’t want to supervise her. Found her way too unstable for terrorism. A kind of Fury. Who’s the mythological creature with the serpents for hair—? God, my memory. Methuselah doesn’t sound right. Too Biblical.”

“Medusa. That’s Greek.”

“Right. Miss O’Connor was a human Medusa to them. Every lock of her raven-black hair was sheer poison to touch. Apparently some of them tried.”

“Raven-black?”

“Yes. They say she was a beauty the way an honorable death is beautiful. A terrible beauty, to quote the poet. Were they right?”

“Maybe. Her eyes were plastic and her face was … eroded … at the end. It wasn’t a beautiful death.”

“Yes, we did use to say that in the church, didn’t we? `A beautiful death.’ I don’t see much of those in the FBI. I suppose one thinks of a very old person, fading away without pain and faithfully shriven. Does that much happen in our Alzheimer’s, post-HMO world anymore, do you think?”

“No,” Matt said. “Nothing much beautiful in the way of death happens out here in No Man’s Land at all.”

“Extreme Unction we used to call it. I loved that phrase. It put Death in a caliph’s tent with serving men and girls. Extreme. Unction. The Final Anointing. Extreme Unction. Now it’s called Last Rites. Loses in the translation, doesn’t it?”

“The church has lost a lot in the translation lately, including respect and dignity. Do you … let on what you used to be?”

“Not recently. Everyone’s eyebrows lift. ‘One of those.’ We were blind. I’m glad I left, and I’m glad you finally left, Matt. That you’re out of all that scandal.”

“Not quite,” he said ruefully. At the shocked silence on the phone line, he added, quickly, “Now I’m only suspected of adult heterosexual misconduct. What a relief. It’s all right, Frank. I’ll survive.”

“Better than Kathleen O’Connor.”

“So there was no report of her operating in the U.S.”

“She disappeared on them, after all these years. And, frankly, they were just as happy to have such a loose cannon out of the way. I’ll report her death, and your confirmation of it. She left no fingerprints anywhere, was just a rural County Clare girl who went north to Londonderry and found a cause. What made her so lethal, we’ll never know.”

“No.”

Matt hung up, thinking that Kitty the Cutter was still pretty lethal to his circle of acquaintances.

An image of her body on the autopsy table flashed into his mind, including the spidery tattoo on her naked hip. No final anointing for her, except with the medical examiner’s scalpel, and he probably used much more brutal instruments.

For a moment the official description of the sacrament of Extreme Unction flashed before Matt’s eyes too; he’d looked it up again only recently: the anointing with oil specially blessed by the bishop of the organs of the five external senses (eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands), of the feet, and, for men, of the loins or reins; while saying “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by sight, by hearing, smell, taste, touch, walking, carnal delectation.” Carnal delectation. The phrase had always stuck with him, even though anointing the loins is generally omitted in English-speaking countries. He never forgot the section ending: “and it is of course everywhere forbidden in the case of women.”

Apparently anointing female loins was itself an occasion of sin. Now he would forever associate a tattoo of the worm Ouroboros with “carnal delectation.” He wondered if attending a woman’s autopsy was a confessable sin.

Having delved his own possible weaknesses, he returned to the living room to minister to Max Kinsella, possible self-confessed murderer, but the sofa was empty …

… except for Midnight Louie, who had taken Kinsella’s place.

Matt stared at the big black cat and the big black cat stared right back at him.

Was Kinsella a shape-shifter?

Or was it Midnight Louie who pulled all their strings? The tomcat yawned, showing pearly whites.

Oh, the shark, dear, waits closer than you think.

Chapter 47

Suitable for Mourning

Max so seldom called ahead to advertise one of his patented surprise appearances that Temple couldn’t help feeling a frisson of dread when she picked up the phone and it was not only Max speaking, but he was asking if he could come over.

Max? Asking? After all, he had once called the Circle Ritz and this apartment home. Temple really didn’t mind him popping in unannounced. Unpredictability was one of Max’s many charms, at least to her.

“I’ve been out carousing,” he warned her. “Carousing?” Another surprise. Max drank only with meals, and only with happy meals, like with her. “With Matt Devine.”

Surprise number three was a throat-choker.

Max. And Matt. Together. Over a friendly glass of … something? What could they possibly have in common to talk about? Besides her.

“You’re not coming over,” she asked, “with news I’m not going to like, are you?”

“Like what?”

“Oh, that Molina has eloped with Russell Crowe, or that Rafi Nadir is an undercover agent for the IRS, or that you’re going into the priesthood.”

“Would Molina eloping with Russell Crowe be good news or bad news, in your opinion?”

“Half and half. He is a major movie star, but he’s also spoiled and cranky and immature. Actually, it would be a heck of an entertaining match: Gladiator vs. Xena the Barbarian Princess Cop.”

“Sounds like a play card for the World Wrestling Federation. No, nothing that worthy of Access Hollywood. And why would I enter the priesthood at this scandal-ridden time?”

“For the surprise factor?”

“I’ve got enough surprises right now that I don’t need to go looking for trouble. And I’ve got a bottle of very good Irish whiskey, mostly full.”

“Max! You’re not driving with an open bottle! If the police—”

“Relax. My car is right in your very own parking lot and nudging up next to an extremely curvaceous little red Miata with its top disappointingly up.”

Temple ambled to her French doors and slipped out onto the patio, from where she could see her parked car, which was why she tried to park it there. A prized new possession needed to be always within easy view.

She glimpsed a new black car beside it, wondering how long it had been there. A while, if he had been visiting Matt. Why go back to the parked car to call her? she also wondered.

Max was in his favorite element now, the dark, and leaving other people in the dark too.

“Are you going to come up in the elevator like a Real Boy?” she asked.

“Of course. I’ll even knock.”

“No, ring the doorbell. It’s a lovely chime. I don’t hear it enough.”

“You might want to put some Leonard Cohen on.” Uh-oh. That was Max’s brooding black Irish music. They closed the conversation quickly. When Temple went back into her living room, Midnight Louie had pulled a Max and sat still as a statue in the middle of her coffee table, looking as if he had been there for generations.

She smoothed his black-satin head as she went to the kitchen and rooted out the heavy Baccarat crystal glasses suitable for premium Scotch, Irish whiskey, and terminally spicy Blood Mary mixes, yum-yum. Max didn’t call her his Paprika Girl for haircolor reasons only.

The doorbell rang through its leisurely melody. Like the era of the building, the fifties, it had time to slow dance through even a practical purpose. That was an era when women in high heels waltzed through domestic chores with vacuum cleaners and single strings of pearls around their necks.

Domestic chores didn’t have that quaint glamour anymore, but Temple swept open the door with the panache of that decade’s leading ladies, Loretta Young or Donna Reed.

Max leaned against the doorjamb. Like many really tall men, he favored the disarming slump. Tonight, though, he just looked tired, not insouciant.

“I’ve got the best glasses down,” she told him.

He swung through the door, planting the whiskey bottle on a nearby countertop. “We don’t have to drink this.”

She eyed the four inches ebbed in the bottle. “You and Matt did that much damage? I guess I deserve an equal crack at it. You wouldn’t have brought the medicinal stuff if you didn’t think I’d need it.”

“I need it,” he said shortly.

“You don’t ‘need’ anything addictive. Never have.”

“Never have been where I’m standing now.”

“Then sit down. I’ll pour. Neat, I presume, the way the bloody British take it.”

He nodded as he passed her the bottle and she uncapped it, pouring the ruddy-amber whiskey three fingers deep in each elaborately etched glass. It glistened like amber, and Temple supposed that many once-living things had been entombed in more than one glass of hard liquor. Entombed and resurrected.

“How can I sit down?” Max demanded.

She came bearing a glass in each hand, and peered past his indignation-stiffened form to Midnight Louie sprawled like the world’s biggest Rorschach inkblot on her pale sofa.

“We move the cat. He was sitting on the coffee table just a minute ago.”

“He must have known I was coming,” Max complained, taking the glasses as Temple bent to lift Louie in her arms and return him to his tabletop post. “I don’t know if I much like him listening in.”

“It’s not like he cares what we say, Max. He’s a remarkably sensitive animal, but I doubt that English is his second language.”

Max stared silently at Louie in answer. His stare was returned in kind: intense, challenging, immobile.

Temple had the oddest feeling that man and cat could talk to one another, but that the relationship was decidedly wary.

The staring match ended when Louie rose, jumped to the floor, and stalked off into the office.

“He knows when he’s not wanted.” Temple went to the portable stereo to let Leonard Cohen’s monotone bass throb through the room. She shook her head. “If your stare didn’t do it, that music would have. Not exactly anything to cuddle up to.”

Max sat dead center in the sofa and claimed one glass for a hasty sip.

“So how,” Temple asked, sitting beside him, “was Matt?

Is he getting over that poor woman’s death at all?”

“He’s got other things to think about now. So do I.”

“The bad news you said was only half bad.”

“It depends on how happy you are to hear someone is dead.”

“Someone … I know?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Not just Vassar.”

Max shook his head. His hand didn’t shake as he lifted the glass to his lips again, but Temple sensed that it might have if he had allowed such a thing.

“Who? Max, tell me now. I can’t stand this waffling around. It’s so unlike you.”

“She’s gone. Kathleen O’Connor. Dead.”

“Kitty the Cutter dead? Not possible!”

“Believe it. Devine ID’ed her for Molina this morning, and besides, I was there when it happened. She’s in cold storage at the medical examiner’s facility, waiting for next of kin to claim her. There won’t be any. Only enemies.”

“Dead? After making all our lives so miserable? People like that don’t just … die.”

“Effinger did.”

“Yes, but you’re sure it’s her? Both you and Matt? And Molina buys it?”

“The medical examiner buys it. It’s undeniable. Even your Midnight Louie witnessed the accident.”

“Louie! He was out earlier, but … when?”

Max shook his head. “Not today. Two nights ago.”

“And no one told me?”

“Not our fault, Temple.”

“You speaking for Matt now, too? Mr. Zipped Lips?”

“Not our fault,” he repeated. “We had a lot to do. I had to call emergency personnel from a phone that couldn’t be traced to me, dump the Maxima, and stay low. Devine had to answer Molina’ s summons and go stare at the dead body. We haven’t much felt like talking to anyone human in forty-eight hours, or like explaining ourselves.”

“Or how you feel about this,” Temple added shrewdly. “Dead. For you guys it must be like … the twin towers falling. No. More like the upside-down world turned right-side up again, like gravity has reversed itself.”

“Yeah,” Max held the whiskey glass in both hands before his face, as if it were a fire capable of casting warmth and light. “Her evil pull was like some counterforce I was so used to fighting that I’ve lost all energy to stand on my own. She was out there somewhere. I’d sensed her hatred for so long, it almost seems unnatural to live without it in the world.”

“Kind of how Matt felt about his abusive stepfather.”

Max nodded. “Given a nemesis like either one of them, you start to wonder if you don’t deserve it somehow.” Max looked at Temple for the first time, straight on. “He must have thought about killing her, you know. Before he tried Vassar. He knew he could. He had enough martial arts training to do it. And she … was a small woman. Perfectly killable, except you’d become her and then she’d go on anyway, wouldn’t she?”

“Matt? It crossed his mind to kill? How can you be so sure?”

“She threatened everyone he knew and cared about. It crossed his mind. Mine too.”

Temple took a deep breath. “So that’s what you two talked about, your homicidal impulses?”

“We also talked about our mutual guilt.”

“For thinking that way, and then getting your wish?”

“For being that desperate. And then, Fate steps in and kills her for us. And now we’re feeling guilty because Fate had the guts to do what we didn’t.”

“Max, start from the beginning. How did she die, and when, and how on earth was Louie present?”

“It began Sunday night, at Neon Nightmare. I have no idea how or why your cat was there, but he ended up in my car.”

“Your car?”

“Yeah. The backseat. Must have eeled in when I left the club. Anyway, I was being my usual paranoid self, checking for any car that might be following and … thinking of other things, I admit, when that wildcat of yours comes clawing over the leather seat back into the front passenger seat, yowling and generally ripping cowhide.”

“Ooh, your car,” Temple sympathized as only the ownerof a new vehicle with a costly leather interior could. Of course hers had just a little leather because it was just a little car. Call it a Baby Bear car. “Louie knows not to scratch the furniture. I can’t imagine what got into him.”

“It didn’t take imagination. It took glancing into my rearview mirror, which I’d ignored after a few cursory checks because I was busy thinking about something else. There was a motorcycle on my tail.”

“A motorcycle? Wow. A motorcycle? It was Kitty?”

“Apparently. It was dark, the street was She was riding a black Kawasaki Ninja and she wore black leather and a helmet.”

“Then it didn’t have to be her.”

“No, but it made a lot of sense that it was her. I think she made me at Neon Nightmare. I’ve been going there, hanging out.”

“Why? It’s a hot new club, but—”

“It’s where the Synth meets.”

“You’re sure.”

“Sure? I’ve joined them. They welcomed a passé magician like myself into the fold. They assume I’m not working because I can’t, that I despise the likes of the Cloaked Conjuror, who gives away trade secrets. That I’m bitter and washed up by the newest trends in mega-magic, i.e., raise the Titanic on national TV and then make it disappear again, all in an hour minus forty minutes of ads. They may be right.”

“So now you’re mourning your career as well as the death of an enemy.”

He quirked her a smile. “I’m mourning change, Temple, the first sign of dawning middle age.”

“What is Matt mourning?”

“A good question. A lot more than I am. His duel with Kathleen was fresh; mine is decades old. He followed Molina’s sage but cynical advice right into a death trap . he’d almost feel better if it had been his death rather than Vassar’s. I brought that over to cheer him up, but even the whiskey of kings couldn’t lift his depression.”

“So you dove right in with him.”

“Momentarily.” Max’s smile grew as slender as he was. “There is some good news. Think about how Kathleen died.”

“In a motorcycle accident?”

“Doesn’t that answer some dangling questions?”

“She had an Easy Rider hang-up? Wait! Way back when … when you got back from California looking up Rafi Nadir for Molina, someone on a motorcycle took a shot at you while you were driving in that convertible you had then. It was her?”

“Seems logical. I suspect she’d been looking for me since she hit town. Luckily for me, she only caught that one glimpse of me, and took advantage of the opportunity.”

“Luckily for you, she only grazed your scalp.”

“Rush hour on the Strip is not the ideal venue for target practice. But it wasn’t me she only had eyes and wheels for. In his cups, Devine confessed that he’s been … haunted for weeks by a motorcycle-riding phantom. It was definitely Kathleen, he said, when she attacked his female producer at the radio station, but at other times he swears it was—are you ready? An Elvis impersonator. He doesn’t believe in Elvis or his ghost, of course, so he’s convinced these manifestations were just darn good imitations.”

Max grinned again, so crookedly that Temple suspected he wasn’t telling her everything. She returned to the slow process of getting things as straight as she could.

“So Kitty didn’t see you again after that sniping incident on the Strip until she spotted you Sunday night at Neon Nightmare. You’ve been going out in public too much again, and several times with me. It’s my fault.”

“Don’t go all Devine-ish on me, Temple. Taking the blame for other people’s actions can get to be a bad habit.”

“You feel it too, don’t you, Max? That someone died because of you, even if she was out to get you. Lord, Matt has his soiled madonna on his conscience, and you have your Irish Fury. You Catholic boys are a mess.”

“I’m not going to weep for Kathleen O’Connor. She had a lot of years to get into something better than using a passionate cause as cover for her own twisted hatreds. And I guess I’d rather she crashed and burned chasing me than Devine. I can handle it better. His plate of guilt already runneth over.”

“Tough guy,” Temple teased, realizing as she said it that he’d always had to be that to survive. Tough enough as a mere teenager to seriously annoy the IRA. Toughness wasn’t muscle, or age, or any gender. It was something in your soul.

“So you’re sure she’s dead?”

“Why even ask?”

“You hadn’t been able to lose her in seventeen years. She had grabbed onto Matt like a vampire bat and wasn’t about to let go. Who’d expect somebody that … tough . to let go of anything, most of all her life?”

“If she knew about Devine’s appointment with a call girl, she may have been furious that he had eluded her. Then she had the good luck to spot me at Neon Nightmare. On that lonely desert road, one thing was certain: she wasn’t going to let me escape with a grazing this time. She was literally hell-bent for leather to catch me from behind. If your nosy cat hadn’t been in my car, and hadn’t been determined to shred my leather seats, I might not have noticed her until she’d gotten close enough to shoot something … the tires, the window glass, me.”

“But instead—”

“Instead, thanks to Midnight Louie, I saw, did an immediate one-eighty-turn so my headlights were blaring straight at her. I’d hit the high-beams while the Maxima was skating around. You know how things slow down in a car accident, even one you avoid? How it is absolute slow-motion, with these snapshots of images as sharp and large as if they were on a movie screen?”

Temple nodded, remembering. “I’ve had the occasional close call. Once I almost hit a squirrel that had decided to run across a street in front of me. I hit the brakes, but I can still see the little critter in every detail, stopping crouched on his delicate hind feet, trying to decide whether to run forward or back.”

“What did he do?”

“Ran back.”

“That’s a squirrel for you, dithering and then retreating. That’s why so many get run over.”

“Not this one. I slowed the Storm enough to miss him, and the oncoming cars saw me braking and slowed down themselves, so he was sitting safe on the curb by the time I looked again.”

“It was like that, except Kathleen didn’t retreat. I saw her in my headlights. That ‘cycle looked like one shiny big black bug bristling with armor. RoboRoach. Her own single headlamp almost blinded me. She swerved at the last moment to avoid a head-on collision, not because she cared about damaging any car or motorcycle, but because I’d survive it and she wouldn’t.

“We were already out of town near the Great Nothing of Darkness. She went careening off into it, then I saw her red taillight bobble like a UFO headed for Venus. It arced upward. The front wheel must have hit a pretty big impediment. The little red light sailed up and then fell down so far it disappeared. That’s when I knew that she had landed in a dry wash.”

“Was it very deep?”

“Ten, twelve feet probably. Not so deep unless you’re diving helmet first into the hard sand at seventy miles an hour.”

“You’re sure she’s dead.”

“I’m not, personally. Logically, she had to be. The person pulled out of that gully was sirened away by the EMTs, but they always have to try. Devine saw the body, and swears it was hers.”

“How close did he see it? In a viewing room like where he ID’ed his stepfather?”

“Naked on an autopsy table. It doesn’t come any more revealing than that. They’d even taken out her contactlenses. Blue-green. That was the wrinkle she developed after Ireland. Her eyes were hazel-green.”

“She meant something to you. A lot.”

He didn’t quite look at her. “Kathleen was sweet, charming. So … unspoiled compared to the Material Girls at home. So dedicated to a cause. Sean and I had to pretend it was a contest between us, winning her. But it was first love, for both of us.”

Temple kept silent, knowing from her older brothers how early boys learn to disguise softer feelings beneath a kind of brusque, rude energy.

Max went on without prompting, as if her comment had released the floodgates of the past instead of tears. “After Sean’s death, when I turned on the IRA to punish his killers, I always thought Kathleen’s apparent love had turned to hatred because I’d betrayed her cause. I always felt guilty about that, regretful that my thirst for justice, or vengeance, had come between us, that it was my fault.

“Only when Matt Devine came along recently, the ‘innocent’ ex-priest, and blithely suggested that Kathleen had set up Sean’s death did I understand that he was right, that hatred underlay everything about Kathleen, that she had charmed us into infatuation and goaded us into competition. Do you know the story of Maud Gonne?”

Temple shook her head.

“I was into everything Irish then. Maud Gonne was a beautiful nineteenth-century Irish actress, but first and always she was a relentless patriot. William Butler Yeats, the poet, fell madly in love with her, wrote plays and poems for her, said her beauty ‘belonged to poetry, to some legendary past.’ She refused all his many marriage proposals. He wasn’t as fiercely committed to the Irish cause as she required. His last poems memorialized the fruitless beauty of a bitter, angry woman.”

“When did you first start calling yourself ‘Max,’ after your string of given names?” Temple asked carefully.

His glance was tender, grateful, recognizing the intuition that had guided the seemingly irrelevant question.

“Michael Aloysius Xaviar. After … Kitty and Sean’s death and my blowing the whistle on the IRA, I needed a new identity. Max it was.”

“So you haven’t been called ‘Michael’ since.” Temple didn’t indicate “since” when.

“Not since then. Her. Until now.” He looked at her again, smiling. “It’s time to put away the things of a child, including delusions. We have more modern mysteries to solve.”

Temple decided it was also high time to let Max escape back into present conundrums. “Like why both you and she had a knack for high-tech disguise.”

“Hardly disguise, Temple. Merely effect. I guess she and I liked to stage-manage our own images. Maybe that’s what drew her to me.”

“What drew her was that you had a conscience. That’s the one thing you and Matt have in common.”

“Me, the seasoned man of magic, illusion, counterespionage? You think I have a conscience?” He spoke lightly, self-disparagingly.

“Second only to Matt’s, which is way overdeveloped. That’s why you were both her victims.”

He leaned forward to finally pick up the glass and take a long swallow. “You may be right. We’ll never know, will we?”

“Probably not. Who’s going to bury her?”

She didn’t often startle Max, but this time she had. “Hell, Devine can bury his wicked stepfather, I can do as much for Kitty the Cutter. I’ll do it.”

“How? You don’t exist.”

“It will be a challenge. And it will be a good Catholic interment, priest and all.” He savored the idea like aged whiskey. “Perhaps I can find her something white and bridal to wear, like a Communion dress. She would have loathed it. Thank you, Temple, for suggesting a ritual of closure for her, and for me.”

“Are you going to invite Matt?”

“The less he dwells on her, alive or dead, the better. Ihate to say this, but be gentle with him, Temple.” She eyed him incredulously.

Max shrugged. “He was naive and he got nothing but well-intentioned bad advice. I didn’t help him as much as I could have and I can pity anyone who’s been the object of Kathleen’s distilled ill will. It’s an inbred poison, like any venomous serpent’s. He wouldn’t let me say I’m glad she’s dead, but I am relieved she is. A lot of lives will go easier now, and who knows who would have attracted her lethal attention in the future.”

“I’ll let you say you’re glad she’s dead. Some people are destroyers. They’re just evil, like serial killers. And a lot of them are running around loose in society like ordinary people, poisoning reputations and spreading gossip and lies. I guess we can’t kill all the liars and sociopaths, but we don’t have to pretend they add anything to the world but unnecessary pain.”

“Granted. Kathleen was a disease, and she’s been cured. She must have been scaldingly unhappy to have caused so much hurt. That’s why I can be glad she’s dead. She’s better off that way, I’m sure.”

“Someone too ill to live, I’m not sure Matt would ever accept that.”

“He has to, because she is dead now. She’s gone, Temple. I can feel it, as I’ve never sensed it before. That era is over.”

“And so, where does that leave you?”

“Personally, I’m not sure yet. Professionally, as a provisionary member of the Synth.”

“You mean you can concentrate on finding out what role they’ve played in the column of murders on my table? Max, they could be as dangerous as Kitty.”

“Of course, but they’ll never have the ancient hold on me that she did. Sean is finally at rest. His murderer lies in the same dark, cold ground, the universal ground of planet earth. We are left to walk upon it until our turns come. I plan to make the most of mine.”

* Louie only ventured out from the office when Max had left, leaving the whiskey bottle for long-term interment in Temple’s liquor cupboard, which boasted one half-empty bottle of Old Crow, a vastly inferior brand.

It was like the old English ballad of the briar and the rose, Temple thought, setting the new bottle next to the resident one. Two opposites united. Like Max’s macabre and touching image of his young cousin Sean sharing Mother Earth with his conniving murderer by proxy, the youthful Kathleen O’Connor.

Speaking of thorny relationships, they were all surrounded with briar and rose combinations: Matt and Molina; Temple and Molina; Matt and Max; Temple and Matt … more than one modern woman could contemplate at a single sitting.

“So,” Temple told Louie, standing up.

The Leonard Cohen CD had long since played through and she had switched to the local golden oldies radio station, avoiding any temptation to dial in WCOO. It was only 11 P.M. anyway.

“You ruined Max’s interior upholstery,” she told Louie. “I thought you knew better than to sharpen your claws on furniture. You’ve left mine alone with not even an admonition.”

Louie shook his head and then licked busily at the hair just beneath his chin, a sure sign he was annoyed with her. Usually this gesture was only evoked by a fresh influx of Free-to-be-Feline in his bowl.

“I suppose your actions drew Max’s attention to his pursuer, but how and why on earth did you get into his car in the first place, and why were you at Neon Nightmare in the first first place?”

One of Louie’s ears flattened, and he sparred at it with a well-licked paw, as if to say, Can I really be hearing these inane questions?

Temple examined him a little more closely. His fur hadbeen licked up into cowlicks all over and the hairs stuck together in a punk rocker’s spiky look.

Louie had been off doing a major cleanup, which made her wonder what kind of mess he had gotten into. Could it be any worse than what Matt or Max had managed in the past few days?

Naw.…

Chapter 48

Night Music

“Sure. I’ll come early and catch your act. I do think you have something to croon about tonight, Carmen.”

“I hope so, Devine. You owe me that at least for my sterling dating advice.” Said sardonically.

Matt smiled after she hung up. For once he would be the bearer of good tidings.

“I’ve got,” Matt said into the phone, “a witness to Vassar’s death. Where do you want to hear about it?”

The line went dead for about half a minute. Then came a deep sigh. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“I can go anywhere now, see anyone. She’s gone. She left the planet.”

“Do not use that stinking ‘she left’ phrase. It’s connected to too many murders for my peace of mind.”

“This one wasn’t a murder.”

“Say you and your murky witness.”

“My murky witness will be your solid witness. Trust me. I’m no more in the mood for fairy tales at this point than you are.”

“A solid witness, you say.”

“We’re both off the hook.”

“Then ‘It’s a Grand Night for Singing.’ That’s a song title, by the way. Oldie but goofy. Come to the Blue Dahlia at ten-thirty. Think a half hour should get you to the radio station on time?”

Matt always found it amazing what people did to distract themselves from tension. He prayed. Temple bought wildly impractical shoes. Max Kinsella performed magic tricks. Lieutenant C. R. Molina sang.

And she did it very well.

Tonight she wore blue velvet, forties style. Her voice was blue velvet whatever she wore, dark, midnight deep, and plush.

The voice was a gift. Matt’s vocation as a priest had forced him to sing the mass, to intone responses. He had managed to execute that narrow-range singsong respectably, but that was all.

Secretly, he had visited Baptist congregations, wowed by the vigor, faith, and musical pyrotechnics of their choirs. Plain song would always hold a pure, medieval attraction, but the passionate musical joy of the black congregations struck a chord in him that maybe only Elvis would understand, now that Matt had been forced to understand Elvis.

Most torch singers caught the reflected sensual glow of the flames their lyrics celebrated. Molina was a cerebral singer. Her voice was something apart from Carmen the Performer. You couldn’t get a crush on her even while she crooned Gershwin’s “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” That made her an even more fascinating performer. The audience sensed something held back from them. Matt had heard that the secret of great acting was to always hold something back, leave the audience craving more. Something more to come, if only you can wait long enough, hold the applause, and … wait for the fireworks.

But even Molina’s vintage performing wardrobe was somehow didactic. This forties gown, that silk blue Dahlia above one ear perched on an out-of-period Dutch cut that was vaguely twenties decadent at the same time it was schoolgirl fifties. Her only makeup was dark lipstick, Bette Davis style. And Davis had been many things on the screen, all of them magnificent; sometimes the neurotic, but never the Vamp.

Matt ordered a deep-fried appetizer and a drink and gave himself the luxury that Molina never had given herself: thinking about her as a person, rather than a profession.

The trio behind her had suddenly become instrumental only.

Matt realized his dining-out Scotch was a drizzle of memory over ice cubes and Carmen was offstage. Time for him to “strike up the music and dance.” To her tune, of course.

Even at the Blue Dahlia, Molina was somehow in uniform.

Matt left a nice tip on the table and got up. He headed for the hallway and the second door on the right, straight on till morning, where her tiny dressing room was.

He knocked, and was invited in.

It was here she … they … had hatched the scheme of sending him to a professional call girl to lose the virtue that Kathleen O’Connor had wanted to capture for herself. As if one could acquire another’s virtue. As if virginity was a condition rather than a state of grace.

“Here we are again.” Molina acknowledged their mutual complicity in the call-girl scheme, gesturing to the round-seated wooden chair he had used before.

He watched her expression in the round mirror of the vintage dressing table. She hadn’t turned to welcome him, and he understood that. Guilt between even casual coconspirators was as much a barrier as the one between performer and audience. Every stage comes equipped with an invisible “fourth wall,” a division that is only in the mind of both performer and audience. A barrier.

“What do you have for me?” Molina had finally turned around, her workaday tone neutralizing the persona of Carmen.

“A way out. For both of us. Vassar accidentally fell to her death.”

“Says who?”

“Says the woman who was on the cell phone with her at the time, the woman she called after I left the Goliath suite.”

“Woman?”

“A volunteer counselor. I have her name, address, rank, cell phone number. She’s real, Carmen. She has a convincing explanation for Vassar’s death, and it wasn’t either of our faults.”

“Some woman? How did you find her?”

“She found me.”

“The radio station. Your show. That attracts nuts, don’t you know that by now?”

“So does your profession.”

“So be mad. I was only trying to help you.”

“Your advice was impeccably hard-headed. It was just wrong for me. And for Vassar, as it turned out.”

“What do you know about a call girl? There was semen in the body. If not yours, whose? Hookers, and especially high-end call girls, won’t lick a stamp without a condom these days. It does make one wonder about her previous stand. If things had gotten tight and you’d hadn’t been contacted by your convenient phone witness, I’d have had to ask you for a sample. Where does that fall on the spectrum of sin? Probably venial, compared to actual copulation. You didn’t even screw her, which was the whole point. Did you?”

“No. I didn’t even screw her. And that was the whole point. I was the first person who didn’t even screw her. Can you understand what that might mean to someone like her?”

“Maybe.” Said sourly. Molina was clinging tight to her professional distance. Compassion was an enemy to a cop.

“So what’s the latest story on Vassar’s last gasp?”

“You and that coroner. Always cynical. Always laughing at Death in fear of Death laughing at you. I’ve got good news. At least to me and my conscience. Vassar was happy, okay? She didn’t regard me as a flop. We made talk, not love, and sometimes talk is better than sex. I felt better for talking to her. Apparently she felt better for talking to me. She called this counselor she’d been avoiding right away. Deborah Ann Walker. She came to WCOO to find me and tell me that. Nice lady. Like Vassar. They were both classy ladies. The hooker and the reformer. Not so different, after all. Maybe the lady lieutenant figures in there somehow. Carmen, I know you tried to help me. I tried to do what you said. I failed. I chickened out. And that seems to have made all the difference. To Vassar anyway. And to me. I didn’t need to ‘lose’ anything about myself. I needed to give something more to someone else.”

A knock on the door. The barman with a tray. Two Scotches on the rocks.

Molina waved him in and him out again. She drank from her glass before resuming the conversation.

“This Walker woman was on the phone with Vassar after you left her at the Goliath?”

“She was on the phone with her just before Vassar fell.”

“Then where’s the frigging phone?”

Matt outstared her sudden fury. “That’s your job, to find it. My job is to tell you the truth you don’t want to hear. You didn’t do me any favors with your advice. But it worked out in a strange way, after all. I’d give right now what I was so desperately trying to keep Kathleen O’Connor from getting to get Vassar back, but I can’t be sorry I met her. I can’t be sorry I … failed to be a good customer. I’m glad I was a better friend.”

Molina pushed a hand through her unmussable hair. “You and Vassar, making fools of us all. Kathleen O’Connor and me. You’re right. I was fighting O’Connor through you and Vassar. I had convinced myself that this would heal everybody’s ills, you and the call girl. I wasacting like a goddamn social worker instead of a cop. Here’s the hardened call girl. I send her an ethical man. Here’s the beset ex-priest who actually cares. I send him to a woman who regards sex as richly rewarded therapy. A marriage made in Heaven, right? Except I no longer believe any marriage is made in Heaven.”

“That’s where you went wrong.”

Carmen/Molina glared at him, saying and singing nothing.

“You were right. Vassar and I were very good for each other. That’s what Deborah’s testimony tells me. We were both better off for meeting each other.”

“Deborah.” Molina pulled the fake blue Dahlia from her hair, tossed it onto the dressing table. “That’s the name of a judge in the Old Testament, isn’t it?”

Matt nodded.

“And she’s your witness to Vassar’s last words?” Matt nodded again.

Molina sighed, rested her head on her hand, which was braced on the dressing table pillar. “Don’t you see why I interfered? Kathleen O’Connor was every sexual predator I never caught. You were my … Mariah. My innocent daughter who’s growing into the real world that hides scum like that, whatever the gender. I wanted to see you safely through adolescence, Matt. Maybe the means were cynical, but the intent was … honest.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“Sure. You and me, we’re dinosaurs. True. Our work, our vocations, require us to live up to public images, rigorously honest, severe, sexless, perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect. Recognize the dogma? Except we’re human. We want to preserve what’s innocent in us, but we can’t afford to live by it in the real, ugly world.

“So I know where you’re coming from, Carmen. Strict Hispanic Catholic family. Or Polish Catholic family. High standards. Impossible standards. Still, if you don’t go for the top, you’ll settle for the bottom. That’s the problem with religious absolutism: there’s either bad or good. Perfect or imperfect. You either sin or you don’t. No middle ground. No gray. That’s not what Jesus preached in the New Testament. His bottom line was compassion, which abolishes the black and white and leaves only the gray and the benefit of the doubt. That’s why they killed him.”

“Abolish black and white from the law enforcement profession and anarchy would reign.”

“Maybe so. Maybe not. I’m just saying we can both be thankful that nobody killed Vassar, not even us. It was a stupid accident. I left her standing by the railing overlooking the atrium. Deborah heard her cry out and then the cell phone clattered and buzzed, but it didn’t shut off.”

“Someone still could have come up behind her and pushed her.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so. Deborah says she was exhilarated, hyper. She more likely … turned around to lean against the railing, lost her balance on those high-rise heels.”

“You realize what you’re telling me? That a call girl was deliriously happy because you didn’t sleep with her. Not much of a personal advertisement.”

“Do I care? I’m deliriously happy I didn’t have to act against my conscience myself. Can’t you accept the gift of a free conscience? That doesn’t come along every day.”

“No.” Molina turned to the mirror to wipe off Carmen’s camellia mouth with a tissue. She turned back to lift her glass toward him. They tapped rims and sipped.

“I have to play Devil’s advocate so I don’t buy every fairy tale I might want to believe. I’ll have that atrium scoured for the cell phone. Of course someone could have spotted and taken it by now. Still, if this Walker woman’s testimony holds up then we’re both in the clear. My career and your freedom. We were gambling for pretty high stakes.”

Matt nodded and sipped again, feeling relief tingle all the way to his fingertips.

“Only two things bother me,” she added.“Two things?”

“Rafi Nadir and Max Kinsella.”

“Kinsella and Nadir? Who’s Nadir?”

“Ah—” Molina waved a dismissive hand. “A pickpocket around town. Different case. Anyway, I personally checked the Goliath videotapes. They show you checking in. And they show Kinsella hanging around the registration area about the same time.”

Matt knew his face showed utter, unfeigned shock. What was Max doing there? Right then?

He was so shocked that he only vaguely understood that Molina the cop always had to have the last suspicious word.

He was very glad that he had not mentioned Kinsella’s presence on the even more recent death scene of Kathleen O’Connor, which had not yet entered Molina’s official radar.

But it could, if anyone had seen both Kinsella and O’Connor at Neon Nightmare.

Chapter 49

Melting

Temple was curled up on her couch with Midnight Louie, watching a really bad Boris Karloff movie. Karloff, of course, was never bad, but some of his later films were.

She couldn’t sleep.

Hi-ho the witch is dead, the wicked witch is dead.

She had actually broken out the Midnight Louie shoes, which really didn’t go well with her Garfield T-shirtcum-nightgown.

Glittering white crystal high heels with the image of a black cat on the heels were not the done thing to wear with cotton knit, although almost anything went in Las Vegas.

She gazed down at her bare insteps surrounded by the elegant dazzle of Stuart Weitzman custom pavé shoes. Elegant, gorgeous, even improbable shoes invariably made her feel better.

High heels were a little girl’s stepping stones to adulthood. Maybe adulthood was something as simple as losing a shoe and gaining a prince, or accidentally killing a witchand gaining a magical pair of red sequin pumps. Then killing one on purpose later.

Temple had to admit that she had a prince, or two, in her life, and a witch or two, as well. She also had to admit to herself that she hadn’t wanted Kitty dead, not really, although maybe the woman was dead because two men were determined that Temple wouldn’t be hurt by her. In olden days, women were thrilled to have men fighting for their honor and their lives. Temple wasn’t thrilled with the uneasy guilt she felt now. She was particularly queasy about Matt’s unspoken willingness to sacrifice his most personal well-being for her. Oh, he was concerned about a host of other women in his life, but they were all incidental, weren’t they? And she wasn’t. Had Max guessed that? Of course. He wasn’t a jealous man, but he had always been worried about Matt since he had returned to find a new neighbor in Temple’s building and life. She couldn’t complain about either man’s sincerity in thinking of her safety, but she wished she weren’t so darned guilty about, and impressed by, both of them.

Nowhere in the book of fairy tales did it mention two Prince Charmings. Come to think of it, both Max and Matt had been involved in the retrieval of the glass slipper, aka the Midnight Louie shoes. Modern life, not dreams, was what fractured fairy tales are made of, Mr. Ariel.

So now, fairy tale-wise, one witch was dead. An evil witch who had looked as glamorous as Glinda the Good Witch of the North in the Judy Garland movie, all Southern-belle skirts and glitter and magic wand.

The evil witch was a bony hag in a pointed hat with grossly striped stockings and granny lace-ups in villainous black. Why, then, had she wanted the ruby red slippers? For the power they conferred, of course, but maybe somewhere in her evil black cinder of a heart she had simply coveted something beautiful for its own sake.

Temple had to wonder if Kathleen O’Connor had coveted innocence that way, Max’s teenage chastity, Matt’s post-priesthood delayed-adolescent possession of the same. Kathleen had wanted to destroy both boys. Men. And maybe she yearned for the very innocence she sought to destroy. Maybe it was her own.

Two women dead only a couple of days apart. The mysterious call girl (to Temple anyone who followed that line of work would always be mysterious) and the mysterious stalker-girl.

And here she was, trying to avoid either extreme, trying to be a real girl the way Pinocchio ached to be a real boy.

Three clicks of her heels and maybe she could be back home in Minnesota, where call girls were few and under wraps and wicked witches froze their long noses and toes and peaked hat tips off.

But, no, she couldn’t leave the Emerald City of Las Vegas yet. There was still too much to solve about herself and everyone around her.

She was too melancholy to move on. She glanced at the sparkling shoes on her feet. Her high-heel addiction had always been the bravado of a short girl, a small woman. I am walking on hot spikes, hear me roar. Except I’d rather whimper sometimes.

But didn’t everybody?

Even Vassar. Even Kitty the Cutter.

That’s what got to Temple. Between them, these women so different from her had forced two men she cared about to the bitter edge, making them commit to unwanted sex in one instance, and unwanted death in another. You couldn’t ask for any more dire consequences.

Was her gender really so destructive? Or so frustrated?

And then there was Molina, gloating over it all like a legal vulture bent on picking away at everybody’s bones and insecurities.

Temple watched Karloff’s cadaverous features in his black-and-white world. Films were better before color. So was newspaper photography. Color cluttered up the scenery, distracted the eye, made everything a moral morass, shades of the rainbow.

Midnight Louie stirred against her hip, uttered a cross between a meow and a purr.

“You’re right, boy. I’m in a very bad mood tonight. I guess cats don’t have moods. Just territorial disputes.”

He seemed to nod as he licked away at one forepaw, head bobbing up and down.

It was pretty bad when she was discussing her emotional state with a cat. A large, intelligent, amazingly handsome cat, but a cat nonetheless.

A knock came on Temple’s door. Her eyes streaked to the clock on the portable stereo. Eleven-fifteen. Who on earth … Max had already been by.

She rose and clicked over to the door, peering through the tiny peephole.

The hall was dark and the sidelight only distorted the view.

She opened the door but kept her chain lock fastened. “Matt!”

The mechanism resisted her fingers for a moment, but then her door was wide and he was hesitating on her threshold like a Fuller Brush salesman, if there still were Fuller Brush salesmen.

“What is it?”

“I’ve got to get to work,” he said, “but do you have a minute?”

“Sure. Come in. What’s going on?”

“I had to tell you some good news.”

He was checking out her apartment, spotting Louie still on the sofa—looking most annoyed at losing his lap pillow—hunting for signs of Max, she supposed.

“Are you alone?” he asked.

“No. Louie and you are here. That’s all.”

He paced a little in the entry hall. “I just wanted to let you know, so you wouldn’t worry.”

“What, me worry?”

“You’ve been doing it. I can tell. I’ve just seen Molina.”

“This should stop me worrying?”

“At the Blue Dahlia.”

“Worse and worse.”

“And I told her that I heard from a counselor of Vassar’s, who was on the phone with her and probably heard her fall. After I left. It was an accident, Temple. Molina knows that now.”

“An accident. How … great. I mean, not great that she fell, but … for you.”

“Yeah. For me. For Molina.”

He stopped, ran a hand through his blond hair, turning into a punk bedhead. Looked at her.

“Vassar … died … planning to reinvent her life. Oh, God.”

“A happy death,” Temple said, remembering the phrase from somewhere.

“A happy death,” he repeated. “I’ve got to get to work. I can’t be late … what am I now, some kind of White Rabbit? Oh, Temple.”

“Aren’t you glad? If I understand all this, no one’s to blame for Vassar’s death and even she was upbeat at the time. That’s the way I’d like to go, that everyone would, fast and happy.”

“Fast and happy. Better than slow and sad, that’s right. Temple.”

“Thanks for telling me, Matt. I won’t worry now. Not much.” She didn’t lie well.

He glanced down, and frowned. “Why are you wearing those shoes now? It’s almost midnight.”

“Maybe I was expecting Prince Charming.” She didn’t know why she’d said that, except that she was mistress of the flip quip and she was feeling a very confusing need to be inappropriately flip at the moment, her and her tiny feet and big mouth …

Matt put a palm to his forehead as if he was trying to play mind-reader, or hold his thoughts in. But it didn’t work, because his next words came out of left field, the left field of his inner anxieties.

“I didn’t sleep with her.”

“You don’t have to tell me this. I mean, it’s none of mybusiness. Except … maybe it’s relevant to the case.”

“What case?”

“Well, all of them. The unsolved cases. The things that are none of our business. Except Molina’s. So … who?” Temple wanted to be very precise on this fact.

“Who what?” Matt was looking more confused now than she was.

“Who didn’t you sleep with? Besides anybody in the past seventeen years.”

“Seventeen? How do you get seventeen?”

“Well, from since you went from high school to the seminary.”

“You’ve been keeping track of my non-sleeping-with timeline?”

“Well, I just have a mind for these details. So you were going to tell me. Who.”

Matt shook his head, sufficiently distracted that the information no longer felt so horribly personal. It was about a “case,” after all.

“Vassar. It didn’t work. Molina’s plan. Not for me. Not .for Vassar.”

“Oh. But she didn’t kill herself.”

“No. Not that. Not because of me. Someone still could have … but it’s not likely. It was all an accident. An accident, Temple. All of it.”

She nodded, continually. “I understand. You’d better go now. The show.”

“The show.” He joined her in nodding and stepped into the hall.

“Drive carefully,” Temple caroled after him like her irritating Aunt Marge, whose cautionary tones she had not heard in twelve years, thank God.

“I can’t believe I said that,” she muttered to Louie, who had risen and was now rubbing his black satin legs against the rough Austrian crystal sides of her shoes.

Temple had never wanted to know, and not know, something so much in her life. Now that she knew, she didn’t know what to make of it, what to make of Matt thinking it was important to tell her what had happened, and not happened between him and Vassar. As a friend, she was glad he hadn’t been forced to go against his conscience. As a neighbor, she was glad he felt free to confide in her, although he had seemed somewhat constrained to talk just now.

As … whatever, she was relieved. And scared.

She leaned over and gazed hard into the Emerald-citygleam of Midnight Louie’s eyes.

“And have you anything momentous to confess concerning your sex life, or lack of it, and any recent involvement in violent death you might have had?”

The cat gazed solemnly back, and kept the usual mum.

Tailpiece

Midnight Louie

Picks a Bone

I am flabbergasted.

Appalled.

Outraged.

Imagine my very own collaborator springing such a surprise on me.

I refer, of course, to the untimely death of Kathleen O’Connor.

I grant you that Miss Carole let me be first on the death scene, but I am not that crazy about inspecting the corpus delicti, especially if it is nothing I can eat.

Ultimately, not even a coyote was willing to pick Miss Kitty’s bones, which I suppose is something of an epitaph. Too bad nobody will write it on her tombstone, though I doubt she will have one.

A mystery woman to the end. And that is another good epitaph gone to waste.

I am really coming up with them.

At least I do not have to compose any final words for my partner, Miss Midnight Louise. It would really shrivel her whiskers to know I had the last word.

I must say that the kit has benefitted from her association with an older, wiser mentor, as no doubt Mr. Max will from the return of Gandolph the Great. She is a little distraught about causing a human death, though who is to say that a minor cat scratch really tipped the balance. I have had to explain to her that we are predators by nature, despite living on the handouts of human cuisine, in these, our latter decadent, domesticated days.

Still, she shows an oddly unspecieslike regret about her role in Kitty the Cutter’s demise. Perhaps she has caught something from Mr. Matt, with whom she briefly resided when she first showed up on the scene.

My one regret is my longtime resolution never to speak to humans. It kills me to know how Vassar died and not to be able to set assorted consciences at rest. But it is too late for me to lower myself at this late date. And, in fact, I do not know if I could talk to them anyway. I have never tried and have always found other means of communicating my druthers.

Sometimes, I believe, it is good for humans to not know the answer to every question. Life, and often death, as I tell Louise, is like that.

Very best fishes, She is not impressed.

Louise is like that too.

Midnight Louie, Esq.