Cat In A Topaz Tango

Madness in His

Method Dancing

Twenty minutes later, Temple returned to the empty greenroom and picked up her tote bag, digging out her cell phone and dialing. Where was Louie, anyway? Not playing a purse pussy anymore, that’s for sure.

“Yes?” Molina barked into her ear.

“Ah, Zoe here.”

“If you’ve quieted the natives, get up here. Your M&Ms are missing you.”

Click. Gone.

She hefted the tote bag over her shoulder. It suddenly felt very heavy, even without Louie, and she headed, not for the high-roller suite, but into the deserted rehearsal areas. The backstage dressing and rehearsal rooms were eerily empty, but muffled voices had her heading for the men’s dressing room.

Sure enough, some light spilled into the dim hall and a group of men sat hovering around a camcorder, looking and listening.

She recognized Rafi Nadir and one of his uniformed security lieutenants, Hank Buck. Dirty Larry held the camcorder while Matt told him when to pause. A couple more security guys stood by, arms folded.

“She seemed fine here,” Matt was saying. “Only at the end did she falter, and then it was like she went out cold in two seconds. I was already holding her up for the leg slide, still trying to save the routine, not realizing anything more than a misstep was wrong.”

He’d swept off the head scarf and false black lovelocks. With his highlighted blond hair showing against the intensified spray tan, he now resembled a surfer dude instead of a matador. Not a bad look, either.

“Are they going to alert you on her condition soon?” Matt asked.

“Soon,” Rafi said, “but the EMTs reported from the ambulance that it looks like a common sedative OD. Could be something she took for nerves.”

“A pro wrestler at a dance contest?” Matt asked incredulously.

“Not likely,” Rafi admitted with a smile. “Police procedure avoids jumping to any conclusions. Given the other incidents on stage here, it’d be safe to guess it’s not voluntary. You all drink water?”

Matt looked around at the empty plastic water and energy drink bottles on the long makeup dresser tops. “Constantly. Even the makeup lights are hot, and we rehearse until we sweat like overhydrated pigs. Then there’s the stress of waiting for your performance results.”

“The police will test all the empties they find. Okay,” Rafi said, glancing at Temple in the mirror. “That crazy mixed-up kid you want to marry has come calling. I think you two can have some face-to-face time in the hall.”

Matt’s warm brown eyes seemed black in this artificial light as they met hers. He stood, knocking his chair back a little. After all the complicated dance-floor moves, he suddenly seemed awkward.

Having your partner pass out in your arms on live TV might be a bit disorienting, Temple thought, not to mention the uncertainty about Wandawoman’s condition.

They went down the hall far enough so they couldn’t hear the murmur of investigators, and the investigators probably couldn’t hear them.

“You all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine, and you heard Nadir say Wandawoman will be too. This competition is looking more ‘killer’ by the moment. What did you get me into?” he added mock ruefully.

“This major sexy costume,” she said, pasting herself against it and running her fingers down the deep front V of the transparent mesh shirt. “Pardon my pawing, but I’m standing in for all the women in the audience.”

“Yeah?” He smiled down at her. “You’re the only one I care about.”

“And aren’t I lucky? Matt, how did you manage that amazing transformation? Danny said you outmachoed José. It can’t be just Tatyana’s whip hand.”

“You know, this ‘acting’ stuff that you talk about, and that Tatyana is trying to drag out of me by hook or by crook, has given me some new insights. Is it supposed to work like that?”

“Ye-es. Acting forces you to inhabit other people’s skins and that’s very enlightening. Sooo?”

Their embrace stayed close as he combined almost kissing her with a dutiful recital of his recent epiphany.

“I knew I had to commit totally to this competition, even the parts of it that made me uncomfortable. Tatyana loved my swimming physique, but, unlike fencing, it’s not a very passionate or romanticized sport and you don’t learn drama doing it. So I thought about the dance, the pasodoble. The love-hate aspects. Didn’t help me much. I’d been working on the ‘love thy fellow human’ part for years and even purged my hatred of my rotten stepfather once I found him here and saw what a pathetic weasel the bane of my childhood was.”

Temple cuddled closer, needing a romantic interlude after the anxiety and hurly-burly all around them.

“You’re gonna laugh,” he warned. “I knew I had to take charge and sling Wandawoman around like a seventeen-pound matador’s cape, all the while feigning passion. So . . . I imagined I was dancing with Kitty the Cutter.”

“What brilliant Method acting, Matt! No wonder you were so relentless, so powerful, so passionate. You were dancing with the Dev il. The classic attraction-rejection dance with evil incarnate. Kathleen O’Connor was a perfect embodiment of that.”

“When I let out my anger at Kathleen O’Connor for cutting me, in a way I became her. I felt the pent-up rage that makes a person so destructive. And, thinking about her attack, I realized for the first time, maybe because I’m different from then, because of, you know, us.”

Temple nodded. “Us” was a first and only sexual commitment for Matt, and it had been hard-won.

“This may sound sick.”

“The truth often can.”

“I sensed for the first time, thinking back as I had to, something sexual about her rage and her attack. I don’t think of women as sexual predators, but I believe she was.”

Temple nodded again, solemnly. “You were fresh out of the priesthood when you encountered her, so you didn’t get her underlying motives. I think you’re right. You remember the story of Max and his cousin Sean visiting Ireland as a high school graduation present?

“Yeah. Sad story. Could make a modern opera out of it. I get Max’s guilt. I’ve always understood that about him, even when he was being his most caustic. It must have been hard on you.”

“Only when he was in those Irish melancholy moods, and that was seldom. Max helped nail the bombers. He got revenge, for what it was worth, and went on to prevent a lot of awful acts of terrorism from happening. Sean’s loss was there, but it was old news. But I don’t think you understand just how innocent they were, those boys.”

“Catholic high schoolers? Back then? Sure. Trust me.”

“And eager. This was their first time unsupervised, in a foreign country during perilous times, and yet it all looked so cheery and all pub songs and ale and no one carding them. Kathleen O’Conner was older, in her early twenties. She was a woman, and the game the boys played competing for her was semiserious. They were virgins and here was a free woman who seemed to want to change that, and they’d be scot-free, never likely to see her again. No risk, all gain.

Max won, he thought. He didn’t have to be embarrassed about being a seventeen-year-old virgin ever again and his cousin Sean wouldn’t hold it against him that he’d gotten there first. That apparently literal roll in the hay saved Max’s life but cost him his peace of mind.”

“I know he came to believe that Kathleen was allied with the IRA and knew the pub would be bombed. What a sad, sick woman,” Matt said.

“He also came to believe that Kathleen knew Max would meet his cousin at that pub, afterwards. To brag a little, and celebrate. He believed that she picked him, and so picked him to live, so that his first act of love turned an act of trifling boyish betrayal into a mortal personal loss. That’s why I call her ‘Kitty the Cutter.’ She existed to mess up other people’s lives with whatever it took on her part, sex or violence.”

“You’re describing a psychopath.”

Temple nodded. “She tainted the lives of the only men I’ve ever loved.”

Matt was silent, accepting the simple truth of Temple’s love for both of them.

Then he sighed. “My God, I never thought I’d be glad someone was dead. Or that someone deserved to die, or to be stopped, anyway. Max was there? He was sure?”

“She was still chasing him, chasing his car on that demon’s motorcycle of hers. After all these years, she was furious that he was alive and happy and free of her. It was a single-vehicle accident. She gunned that motorcycle off the road into a fiery crash. He stayed around long enough to search for a pulse in her broken neck. There was none.”

They kept silent, their close embrace and mutual mood completely turned from triumph to a sober clinging.

Matt pulled Temple away to see her face finally, looking roguish, deliberately lightening the mood.

“Tragic story. Like I said. I got off lucky,” he commented.

“You mean the wound she gave you was only physical?” she asked.

“I mean I got away from that homicidal man-eater still a virgin.”

Temple laughed through the unacknowledged sheen of sorrow in her eyes.

She let herself be swept back into the arms of the sexiest pasodoble dude on the planet. Well, in Las Vegas, anyway.