Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Miracle Worker

“Is it all right if Aldo picks me up here?” Kit asked Temple at about six P.M. the next evening.

Her aunt was shifting her weight from foot to foot in her zebrawood-soled brocaded stiletto sandals like an antsy twelve-year-old.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well, you’re used to thinking of the Fontanas as a flock. Seeing just one at a time might be . . . overwhelming and confusing.”

“I’m not the one who has to be very sure about not confusing Fontanas,” Temple pointed out. Pointedly. “Where are you going tonight?”

“The Bellagio.”

“For dinner? That’ll cost Aldo a well-tailored Zegna arm, and probably a leg.”

“I’m worth it,” said Kit, ducking back into Temple’s office and its attached bathroom to finish her makeup.

Temple hoped that she would be that self-confident when she was sixty . . . in thirty years. Right now, the outlook was glum on all fronts.

The idea of Max was bitter in her mind. At best, he was brushing her out of his life. At worst, he was coming on to her, their relentless enemy. Maybe there was some ulterior reason for the good of mankind behind it. Even that idea left a sour taste in her mouth. She wished she’d kissed Matt last night. He’d looked so torn and worried and his mouth was always as clean and bracing as springwater to her.

At work, everyone connected with the White Russian exhibition was being regarded as an apparent thief-in-training. Temple’s guilty knowledge that innocents were suspected when she knew Max was the culprit was twisting her usually wrought-iron stomach into queasy knots. The media was all over the hotel and her and Randy. In fact, to avoid them snooping into their PR plans to accentuate the positive, Randy had ordered Temple to work from her home computer for a while.

Now, she’d barely settled in to craft totally unworkable press releases—how do you defuse a fatal fall and a stolen artifact in 150 words or less?—and Kit was preparing to exit, way too excited about her fling with Aldo to even notice that Temple was running on emotional empty, six quarts shy of hope.

Temple forced her depleted energy up forty revolutions per minute when the doorbell rang.

“Would you get that, hon?” Kit yelled from the bathroom. “I haven’t finished unpacking the bags under my eyes.”

“Hi!” Temple greeted Aldo, checking out his smooth, swarthy Italian hide for forty-something wrinkles. He didn’t look a day over thirty-two, but Mediterranean types aged well. “Kit’ll be right out.”

God! She felt like her own mother. She was the young chick here; Kit was, well, not acting her age.

“How is the family?” Temple inquired as she led tall, dark, and Fontana into the living room. The cappuccino color of his suit matched her sofa exactly, although the material was far better.

“Uh, do you mean the family, or the Family, Miss Temple?”

She felt like she’d never been trapped into making small talk with a single Fontana for so long before.

“I mean your terrific brothers. And I haven’t even been to the Crystal Phoenix in ages to see Nicky and Van.”

“Me, neither,” Aldo said, making ready to sit on her sofa.

“Wait!”

“What?” He slapped a hand to his inside breast pocket. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing . . . worth, ah, a sidearm extraction. It’s just that you’ll get black Midnight Louie hairs all over that pale linen suit.”

“Whoa! You mean I am trespassing on the Top Cat’s territory here?”

“Sort of.”

Temple decided not to mention that Kit had been sleeping there lately . . . when she was home before four in the morning. Temple never thought she’d be the one to uphold the Barr family standards for discreet behavior.

Aldo, perhaps as uneasy as she was, began pacing. Although he wasn’t as tall as Max, he was still way too tall to pace in a room this size.

He stopped by the French doors to eye the petite balcony. “Cute place.”

“Thanks.” Temple felt like a Lilliputian being visited by a rod-packing Gulliver.

“Sorry!” Kit clattered out over the hardwood floors, looking as breathless and perky as a sixteen-year-old. “I’m ready now.”

“Bella!” Aldo gathered her into his long-armed escort and steered her to the door.

“We’ll be back—” Kit began. “When will we be back?”

“When the night has had enough of us,” Aldo said dramatically.

Kit shrugged. “Oh, well . . . ”

Temple could have sworn she winked at her before Aldo drew the big coffered door shut on them.

Well, this was a fine how-do-you-do! Kit out on the town, Fontana style. Louie out on the town, prowling style. Matt gunning for Max and not telling her a thing about it until after the fact. Max the usual Invisible Man he’d been for the past few months.

Temple threw herself down on the sofa, unmindful of Louie hairs, put up her feet, and debated calling Matt, calling out for a pizza, calling the Mounties, or the remaining Fontana brothers.

Instead, she did what a future sixty-year-old should do. She fell asleep, feeling rather sorry for herself but too tired to do anything to take her mind off that spineless condition.

When she woke up, the room was dark. Totally dark. Not a lamp lit.

The time on the VCR read 12:00. Midnight! She jolted upright. Wait. She had never reset the VCR time after it went out during one of the few summer electrical storms in Las Vegas. With an annual rainfall of four inches, they were rarer than ace-high flushes. She couldn’t have fixed it anyway, because only Max knew how to do it.

Her eyes felt grainy from sleeping with her contact lenses in, even though they were the soft variety.

The peace and quiet was nice, though, after frenetic, long hours on the hotel’s marble floors. It was too late to relieve Randy, but she’d be there first thing in the morning and start pulling her weight again. Surely nothing terrible had happened in just these few hours.

Then she saw the red light blinking on her answering machine through the open door to her office. Oh, no. Someone had called.

Temple sat up, fast, and tried to stand, but she ran into a solid piece of darkness that caught hold of her arms and held her back. Before she could scream, she recognized the silky texture of Max’s trademark black turtleneck sweater.

“If you won’t scream, I’ll promise not to fall asleep,” he said.

Temple wiggled up high enough in the sofa seat to switch on the floor lamp next to it. Max had been sitting at the sofa’s far end with her feet on his lap, waiting for her to wake up.

“You do look tired enough to fall asleep right now,” she told him, as the light searched the deep lines and sharp angles of his features. “What’s been going on, Max? I swear I can’t take it anymore.”

He just nodded. “I’ve come here on orders.”

“Who orders you around?”

“Apparently, your upstairs neighbor.”

“Matt? You’d never take orders from Matt. What’s going on? He was all rabid to find you, talk to you. Maybe I shouldn’t have passed his message on to you.”

“He was and I found him. We had a heart-to-heart.”

“I heard and I don’t like the sound of that. It’s much too civilized.”

“Just civil. He agreed that I should talk to you.”

“Agreed?”

“He insisted. I agreed.”

“This is crazy. I don’t need Matt as a go-between.”

“Maybe you do. He was warning me.”

“About what?”

“That fingerprint Molina bullied you out of.”

“That was the piece of damning evidence Matt said she had? Then there was a fingerprint on that CD?”

“So Molina told Matt.”

“Why would she tell Matt about that?”

Max shrugged, a gesture so small she hardly detected it. “It appears she finally has the evidence to draw the net closed on me.”

“Oh, God, Max! She just charged in here. I didn’t even think until later that I could have stopped her.”

“I don’t think you could have. She’s been pushing the line on what’s legal lately, not to mention ethical. I do take a certain pride in driving her to such measures. It will be some consolation when I’m led off in chains.”

“She’d have to find and catch you first.”

“Yes, well, that may not be necessary. No matter how long I can avoid capture, all she really has to do to ruin me is come here and tell you what she thinks she’s got me on.”

“Not murder?”

“That too, but nothing she can prove.”

“What can she prove, then?”

“Can we take a high-end whiskey break? Still got some?”

“Of course. You don’t think I just pass your Millennium bottle out to strangers?”

“Or to neighbors?”

Temple felt her cheeks heat up, probably not visibly, though. “Or aunts,” she said, dodging the implication. Had she offered Matt some? Once? Maybe.

Either way, she was glad for an excuse to hustle into the kitchen and slam cupboard doors and fill glasses with a dark potent inch of the pricey Bushmill’s Millennium Irish whiskey with which Max had celebrated, and mourned, the passing of his worst enemy, Kathleen O’Connor, who’d taken with her the golden days of his youth and left behind eternally unresolvable guilt. No enemy could do worse.

Temple wondered what Max was mourning now.

She brought him the crystal glass and sipped from hers as she sat down again. “I can’t imagine what Molina’s done now that you need to fortify yourself against it.”

“The whiskey isn’t for me. It’s for you.”

“Me?”

“Molina couldn’t find any evidence on the two or three counts of murder she wanted to lay at my door, which she can’t find anyway.”

“Then what was the whole bit about gleaning a fingerprint off a CD from here about?”

“She apparently now does have evidence on a nasty lesser charge, enough to bring me in, if she can find me, and prosecute. Even if she can’t find me, she can just run tattling to you and damage me enough to give her immense satisfaction.”

“What is it?”

Max composed his features as if he were on stage. Calm, authoritative, unreadable. “Sexual stalking.”

“Of who? Me? She has flipped. We are totally consensual.”

Max laughed. “You are a past master of spin. No. Of her.”

“Of her?”

Tilt! Max was right: Temple needed a belt, even though she’d heard this first from Matt, especially since she didn’t want to admit to Max just how . . . in touch she and Matt had been lately. She assuaged her own guilt by unleashing her spleen on Molina. “That woman! What gall! What . . . conceit. You’d never—”

“Thank you.”

“What’s given her this idea? Stalking how?” Still playing dumb.

“Sneaking into her house and leaving items. A blue vintage velvet dress in her closet.”

“Hey! Wanta moonlight here? I could use a stalker like that!”

“Not so nice, a Gameboy in Mariah’s room once, before she evolved into such a game girl, thanks to you. But mostly stuff in Molina’s bedroom, including, the latest indignity, according to Devine, a racy teddy. I suspect he didn’t know what that was until Molina explained it to him. Imagine, she has two adolescents to rear. I suppose we should pity the woman.”

Temple waved away his attempt at humor, as disturbing as it was to picture Matt and Molina discussing racy teddies. “And she found a fingerprint matching the one on my CD to one found in her house?”

“One is the operative number. None of the objects had fingerprints but one, and that had only one print. It matches one of mine from the CD.”

Temple swilled Millennium whiskey way too thoughtlessly. “She planted it! Aren’t there ways?”

“Nice thought.” Max shook his head. “Molina is too proud to cheat. It was there, all right.”

“You’re too proud to make a mistake like that.”

“Thanks for your total trust in my hubris. Won’t mean much coming from a character witness on the stand, though.”

“How can she think you’d do such a thing?”

“She hates me? No, I suppose she figured I’d upped the cat-and-mouse game we’ve been playing all over Vegas long before this.” His expression grew bitter. “According to your new friendly neighborhood go-between, the last stalker invasion was particularly nasty. In that sense, I don’t blame her for going ballistic. A trail of rose petals all through the house, into Mariah’s bedroom as well as her own. I think the threat to Mariah sent her over the edge.”

“That’s proof of your innocence. You’d never include a kid in anything, not even a cat-and-mouse game.”

“Again, character witnesses aren’t going to save me, as sterling as you are and as sure as you are to be a knockout on the witness stand. The jury would fall for you like babies for saltwater taffy.”

His palm stroked her straight blond hair. Temple forgot how different she looked these days, how different she was beginning to feel.

“I’ve always wanted to be all fifties’ overdressed and stalk into a witness box on black spike heels,” she said. “And to attend a funeral wearing a big black hat with a veil. But I don’t have the height to carry any of it off.”

“Not my funeral, I hope.”

“She’ll never catch you. She can’t touch you.”

“Probably not. But she can touch you.”

“How?”

He sat back, sipped the whiskey. “That’s what Devine sent me to tell you. The one . . . minor reason Molina might not be completely unjustified in suspecting me of this slimy crime.”

“Matt sent you? Again? Since when do you take directions from him?”

“Since he’s right. Molina will tell you. I’d rather be first.”

“I can’t imagine anything serious enough involving me for you and Matt to collaborate on.”

“We have your best interests at heart.”

Temple’s heart almost stopped to hear that. Max and Matt conspiring to . . . what? Spare her? This must be major.

“Remember,” Max said, swirling the dark honey liquor in his Baccarat glass so it oiled the sides, “when you were doing that sopho-moronic ‘Tess the Thong Girl’ undercover routine in the strip clubs, trying to prove that I wasn’t the Stripper Killer? I could have throttled you myself for taking such a risk when I found out what you’d been doing.”

“Molina’s always been too ready to accuse you of sleazy crimes. It’s been a slap in the face to me too; that’s why I had to do something about it. But, hey, we got the creep.”

“We?”

“I never told anybody this, but although the pepper spray you gave me stopped the real Stripper Killer in that parking lot, it was Rafi Nadir coming along and decking him that put him out cold until the police came. Rafi didn’t want the credit for some reason, so he vanished, and I got the, ah, capture.”

“Nadir!” Max slapped his forehead. “What irony! Molina’s hated ex-squeeze saved you from the Stripper Killer and cut out, leaving you sole credit.” His chuckle escalated into a laugh as he pulled Temple against him. “I love it.”

“You hate Molina almost as much as she hates you, don’t you?”

“I’m getting there,” he said, grim again. He kept his arm around her, holding on tight. “That wasn’t my greatest hour, either, that night. She backed me into this corner I didn’t want to be in. She caught up with me in the other strip club parking lot, the wrong one, where the Stripper Killer wasn’t planning to strike again. That’s when I put it all together, where he’d really be, and that you were there, alone.”

“Heck, no, Max. I had Rafi Nadir, remember. And even Midnight Louie showed up with a yowling Greek chorus of feral cats, no less.”

“Where is Louie, by the way?”

“Out. Like my aunt Kit. She’s dating a Fontana, can you believe it?”

“Knowing your aunt Kit, yes. Knowing the Fontanas, no.”

Temple smiled, the tension between them dissipating with their separate visions of a Fontana brother-Aunt Kit tryst.

Max sighed and reached for his glass again, but he didn’t let go of her.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I knew I had to get to you and Baby Doll’s. Molina knew she had me in her sights and she wasn’t going to let me go anywhere. I’d been in the same spot with her before and got away, but not this time.”

“Sights? She’d pulled a gun on you?”

“Right. I convinced her I wasn’t carrying and that I’d go anyway and she could justify the shooting however she liked.”

“Max! You shouldn’t bluff an angry, prejudiced person with a gun.”

“Wasn’t bluffing.”

“Max!”

He shrugged. “She’s not a killer, just a damn determined woman. I knew she wouldn’t shoot, and she knew I knew that. So . . . that woman has balls, I’ll give her that. She slams her semiautomatic on the hood of the nearest Ford 350 and decides to keep me from leaving using hand-to-hand combat.”

“She’s really crazy. You’re strong from all that stage work.”

“Used to be. Molina’s no lightweight, plus she’s trained. And, I didn’t want to hurt her.”

“You’re a gentleman.”

“Maybe. Mostly because an assaulting-an-officer charge is hard to defend against if she did manage to haul me in. The point, Temple, is she was costing me time. She was keeping me from getting to where I knew you were exposed to the real Stripper Killer. I tried to overpower her, but she wasn’t having any of it. We were too evenly matched, given my overriding concern to get away and get to you. I couldn’t clobber her outright. And I couldn’t gain enough advantage to get away fast enough and far enough. It was a stalemate. I had her pinned to a van, but the instant I let go, my advantage was gone. I had to get her off-guard, really shock the shield off of her.”

By now, Temple was listening like a kid at a campfire ghost-story telling. What would Max do? What clever magician’s trick?

“You remember my face after that night?”

“It was scraped.” Temple was jolted by the change of topic in the story.

“That’s because I let her take me down and cuff me. That finally became the only way I could get out of that damn parking lot and into her car where I could pick the handcuffs and unite her and her steering wheel with them until death did them part, then get out and get to Baby Doll’s to, I thought, save you. Except you and Rafi Nadir had already turned the trick.”

“And Midnight Louie. He alerted me to someone stalking me.”

Max put his head in his hands. “Don’t mention stalkers. I never want to hear that word again. Temple, when I had that woman up against that van, all I could think of was how to throw her off-guard. What would distract her the most so I could get away without hurting her or myself. What would shock her. So . . . you had to have been there . . . I sort of came onto her. Loathing me as she does, it was the only trick I had left up my sleeve. And it did freeze her into next week. I almost got away before she recovered and I had to play ‘possom. That’s really why she ground my face in the asphalt and why she might think I’m her stalker.”

“Oh, wow.” Temple put her own head in her hands. “Like what did you do, say?”

“It was the heat of the moment. I don’t even remember.”

“She sure does.”

Max cleared his throat. “I might have implied she was . . . frigid. That she was putting all that energy into chasing me because—”

“—she really wanted you.”

He shrugged.

“That is so sexist, Max Kinsella! And so is thinking that I always need to be rescued.”

“There’s the one common denominator in my sins: thinking of you, caring about you, wanting to protect you.”

“You have to leave me with no word for a year to protect me? You have to hit on another woman to protect me? I think I’d rather not be protected.”

“That’s what Devine said. That I had to come clean with you now, before Molina embarrasses you later.”

“Embarrass nothing! Humiliate is more like it. And then the fact that you’re involved in the Czar Alexander scepter going missing. . . . Creating the worst publicity fallout in my career is not ‘protecting’ me. I’d be much better off without you doing that.”

“Or without me?”

“I don’t know! Everything’s crazy. I don’t know what I think anymore, except that you and I are just not working out. We’ve tried, God knows, but as long as you have to play peek-a-boo with the law,

I’m never going to know where you and I really stand, and I can’t . . . stand . . . that anymore. I want stability. I want openness. I want—”

“Someone else,” he said shrewdly.

“I was going to say ‘Molina off my case.’ ”

“I’ll be the first to admit that my secret status quo has changed, and I can’t tell you one word about it. But something’s changed for you too, and I don’t think it has to be secret. You just want it that way.”

Temple calmed down and thought. She supposed a parking lot faux-seduction was maybe no worse than some desert dirty dancing.

“Thanks for telling me about Molina. I will be happy to break it to her that you didn’t mean anything by whatever you said or did. Unfortunately, I can’t report a meaningless . . . crisis in my own life. While we’re being so honest, I have something to confess. Matt has proposed.”

“To you?”

“Well, not to Molina!”

“Marriage?” Max seemed dazed.

“Yup, the usual.”

“He can’t.”

“He can.”

Max finally let her go. There seemed more space between them than one small sofa could produce. He thought it over.

“His stalker is dead, unlike my current bête noir, Molina. He’s safe at last, a free soul. He loves you. I’ve known that for way too long. Makes a decent wage. Has a night job, but you got used to that with me. You could do worse.”

“Max! You sound like my mother!”

“I’m just weighing the competition. He’s good looking, but too moral to succumb to bold hussies. He’s got an edge he tries to hide, so he could protect you the next time you need to masquerade as a murder victim. Outside of Midnight Louie, I can’t think of anybody better for you.”

“Max, don’t you care?”

“I’ve always cared too much, Temple. My problem, not yours. I thought, swore, when we connected again in New York that I could elude my past and become what I’d masqueraded as for so long: just your average headlining Las Vegas magician.”

He grinned at the immodesty of that description. The grin vanished as fast as a Cheshire cat. “But things have . . . changed. My shadow life is looming larger than ever these days, and a lot more than the Czar Alexander scepter depends on it. I can’t guarantee to be there for you. I can’t guarantee not to muck up your job site for hidden, but we hope, higher, purposes. I can’t guarantee that I won’t have to drop out of sight again. I can’t guarantee to keep all the flying axes in the air anymore.

“It’s time for you to get a life of your own. I can’t be a dog in the manger anymore.” Max stood. “Molina isn’t imagining things, but I never meant anything but a ploy by it, and she almost fell for it. You remember that when she comes calling. Make Matt’s day, or night, when the time comes for it. Remember me, now and then.”

Temple stood too.

The magician was heading toward her entry hall. He was going to walk out her front door like a mortal man. It was wrong, no argument, no sudden paper flowers, just leaving, it sounded like . . . forever.

“Max—!”

But the door had closed, and when she ran to open it, he was gone.

Temple hung on the door, swung a little with it, so dazed that the insistent sound inside her unit didn’t register until it had been so insistent that she feared it would escape her.

She ran back in to pick up the phone a split second before her answering machine kicked in.

“Temple?”

She couldn’t speak, but the caller rushed on.

“It’s Randy. It’s the hugest frigging wonder of the world. The Czar Alexander scepter is back! Sitting under its Lexan onion dome as big as life and eight times more glitzy. This will be huge! The publicity will be the best thing the hotel has ever had. ‘Now you see it, now you don’t! Come view the New Millennium’s vanishing scepter while you still can . . .’ Are you there? We are no longer in deep doo-doo. We are saved!”

“Great,” Temple managed to say. Randy was too excited to hear the strain in her voice. “I’ll be in first thing tomorrow to plan . . . to plan—”

“We’ll need a whole new campaign to announce its reappearance. ‘The Magic and Mystery of Vegas Strikes Again. Maximum glitz, minimum fuss.’ Kiddo, I am so glad to be working with you on this. We can really milk this thing. We’ll be the talk of the town, and our careers will be caramel, yours especially, as you’re a freelancer and can really capitalize on it. But I’ll expect a big raise, let me tell you.”

“Great.”

“Okay. Get some sleep. You’ll need it.”

“Will do.”

She sat holding the receiver, lulled by the dial tone for a long time. And then the tears came: relief, regret, regret, relief. Regret.