Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Chapter 57

Invitation to a Duel

From an early evening wedding to a worknight. Matt usually came in a half hour early for his Midnight Hour talk show, which ran two hours, thanks to popular demand.

Hosting a live radio talk show five nights a week was a responsibility. He’d been used to relentless timetables when he was a parish priest, so he always allowed for small, unexpected delays. Oooph, those 6 A.M. Masses. Now he was a night owl.

And he’d much rather be at the Circle Ritz having another honeymoon night with Temple. She’d made his mother shine and he wanted to return the favor.

He filled two tall cardboard glasses with chilled Dr Pepper and headed from the station kitchen to the control room, where he lifted them to greet his boss, Letitia.

She was nearing the end of her nightly gig as “Ambrosia,” the black-velvet voice of consolation and Top Fifty songs from recent decades fit to soothe the savage soul.

Ambrosia cooed soft encouragement to her latest caller and started Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” to put that stressed caller to bed.

“Matt,” she mouthed through glass, waving him closer with a flounce of one long, knuckle-brushing orange chiffon sleeve. She dressed like Joan Rivers for the red carpet, if Joan had been black, thirty years younger, and weighed two hundred pounds more.

But hyper and abrasive were the opposite of Ambrosia’s style, on or off mic.

“Toodle your globe-trotting tuckus over here for a hug.”

He set down the soft drinks before obeying. In a moment, he was encompassed by a warm, spice-scented cloud of affection the color of a desert sunset.

Ambrosia had taught him that if you didn’t feel good about yourself, you couldn’t make other people feel good about themselves. Her listeners pictured a seductively sympathetic siren reclining on a chaise longue while extending a languid hand to press a button and surround them with healing song and, well, schmaltz.

Darned if they weren’t right.

“So how was that ‘toddling town’?” she asked about his trip home and indirectly about the job opportunity.

“Interesting,” was all Matt was going to say. Moving to the network and Chicago was history now.

“You’re early.” Ambrosia checked the glitzy Home Shopping Network watch on her wrist. A long lacquered false fingernail colored dead-on orange to match her caftan tapped him on the hand.

“I have a special request tonight,” he said.

“Anything for you … insane, illegal, whatever. Unless it’s fattening.”

“Calorie-free,” he promised. “The one thing you won’t like is I don’t want any questions or second guesses.”

“That’s tough. Second-guessing is my favorite hobby. Okay. You’re the guy on the way up. What is it?”

Commercials were still blaring. He’d developed her instinct for knowing how much time off the air they still had.

“I brought a golden oldie you can slip in that I want you to play at the end of your set as a segue into mine.” He handed her the DVD.

She glanced at the label. “John McCormack? Not on my playlist.”

“Great but long-dead Irish tenor. Just say it’s ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,’ from Mr. Midnight for ‘she knows who she is.’ Then you finish your show with a second song, requested by Anonymous. ‘I Know You’re Out There Somewhere.’”

“Matt, honey, what a great idea! Vintage schmaltz. I betcha this DVD is some ancient Irish crooner with crackle in the vinyl recording and all. Is this for your mama in Chicago, you favorite son, you? You do realize every Kathleen, Kathy, Katy, Kat in the world will think she’s Mr. Midnight Hour’s ‘she’?”

“Just play it. I’ll worry about the reaction.”

“Hmm. That Moody Blues oldie is so fine, like a moose call on a hunting trip, only to an old flame. ‘I Know You’re Out There Somewhere.’ Everybody has somebody they think of that way. You too, honey?”

“Oh, yeah.”

* * *

An hour and forty minutes later, Matt was winding up a call from a grandmother worried that her granddaughter had taken Lady Gaga for a role model, at least in her wardrobe.

“Kids all go through trying to look different from the crowd,” he consoled her. “I doubt meat dresses will catch on. They’re too expensive, require a freezer for a closet, and attract flies as well as paparazzi.”

Leticia had left, chortling over Matt the mama’s boy and his old-fashioned “tribute” to his visit home to Mom.

If only.

Why was he doing this, trying to draw Kathleen O’Connor out? Couple obvious reasons: He felt guilty—always a personal failing with him—that he hadn’t told his cohorts in private detection that he suspected Kitty the Cutter was stalking him again.

And, in his judgment, better she should tangle with him than with her long-sought love–hate object, Max Kinsella. He’d lately been unable to dodge the feeling that Kinsella was his resented, older, sexier, savvier brother. With his memory in meltdown, all the fabled Kinsella advantages boiled down to making him a sitting duck. And Matt did not need a dead martyr for a romantic rival.

He eyed the LED clock that counted down seconds as well as hours and minutes. Luke in the control room was signaling “end” with the hand karate chop gesture Elvis had loved to use in his stage shows.

Matt removed his padded headset and pushed the big wheeled chair back from the now-dead mic. Luke was making his final bows to the equipment boards, setting up programmed music for the rest of the night.

WCOO-AM wasn’t the biggest little radio station in the West, but it had two syndicated shows between Ambrosia and him. She’d been so supportive when his initially local hour show had gone to two hours and national. Matt smiled as he exited into the night air, the usual Las Vegas warm soup.

His silver Jaguar sat alone in the parking lot. That gift from the Chicago producers was an albatross. Maybe expensive wheels were okay if you went from costly city apartment to major office building, both with locked and guarded garages, but Matt’s pattern was from modest and quirky little apartment building to remote radio station to the grocery store and gas station.

Unless he and Temple moved to Chicago and a life of parking valets.

He approached the Jag, already beeping it open. Then he remembered to check for tire slashing. A tour around the gleaming streamline body revealed … no tampering.

Gosh, Matt thought as he allowed the front seat leather to wrap around him, and the engine to clear its expensive throat, he couldn’t even match Max Kinsella at attracting psychos. He’d always been a substitute for the real object of Kathleen’s warped affections and now he felt as impelled to protect the newly vulnerable Max from Kitty the Cutter as to save Temple.…

Still, he scanned his surroundings, checking the rearview and side mirrors until the red blinking light atop the WCOO tower was zooming away behind him like a suddenly shy retreating UFO.

Matt saw nothing in the rearview mirror. At 2 A.M. this was a deserted stretch. The person who’d followed him several times by motorcycle months ago along here knew that.

Out of nowhere, the rearview mirror showed what Matt hoped was a car with a burned-out headlight. Spotting those had been the object of a classic car-traveling game called padiddle.

“Padiddle,” Matt said to the road-level Cyclops. Nobody else was riding along to give him points for spotting it, and, frankly, newer cars didn’t seem to burn out their perpetually “on” running lights. Only the old junkers.

Wait. Some crook in a junker could be interested in carjacking the Jag.

Matt sped up, but the light behind matched him. The radio station was situated in a semi-industrial area pretty dead at night. He’d noticed that more when he rode the Vampire motorcycle for a time.

Back when the phantom motorcycle had shadowed him.

Had that rider been pursuer, or protector? Those episodes had ended. Matt had never known whether he was haunted by the ghost of Elvis, who’d been “calling” in to his show at the time, or whether he was escorted by Max Kinsella. And, if so, whether Kinsella had been guarding Matt’s skin or the prized Hesketh Vampire motorcycle’s sheen.

And, of course, it could always have been Kathleen O’Connor.

Or … considering how Max Kinsella swore she’d died, in a motorcycle pursuit of his car, Miss Kitty’s ghost. Both Max and he later swore they’d seen her dead, but they both had been wrong.

Or … a cop. His reverie had upped his speed well beyond the limit—easy to do without noticing when driving a car designed to slip through wind resistance like an eel—and he could have run afoul of a speed trap.

Any possibility he considered was a trap of some kind he wouldn’t like.

So he pulled over under the nearest streetlight to stop. And wait.