Cat In An Alien X-Ray

Chapter 24

Law and Order: Truce or Consequences

“I thought,” Max said, “I was to be allowed a long leash.”

He was still gobsmacked that Molina had invited him onto her home turf for a conversation, instead of to the usual scuzzy confidential-informant meeting place.

The unexpected civility put him off his game. He actually was sounding apologetic. “I’ve barely had time to survey Goliath and the Oasis Hotels for any lingering taint from the time dead bodies occupied the casino ceiling and were shanghaied onto sinking-ship attractions.”

“Circumstances change,” Molina answered.

They sure had; she’d gone from hunting him as a murderer to accepting his secret counter-terrorism past and finding him a useful covert investigator.

“Your bias against all things ‘me’ certainly has,” he agreed. “You’re asking to see me so often, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m a candidate to take Mariah to the Dad–Daughter dance next fall.”

“You know about my daughter’s school events? How?”

The truce was still iffy. Max laughed. “Scrub that Mama Grizzly look off your face and relax. Since the leading favorite for that honor, Matt Devine, is making visits to Chicago with Temple and cat in tow, he may not even be in Vegas by then. I smell a job opportunity for our golden boy.”

“Really? Apparently you still keep in touch with old acquaintances, even if you don’t remember much of them?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Devine has always visited Chicago regularly for TV talk show gigs. Your rival is a media darling.”

“Ex-rival. I’ve conceded. This most recent Windy City visit by the happy couple is enough to plant suspicions. Your daughter would be crushed to lose her Prince Charming.”

“Maybe not so much now.” Molina sat back on her slouchy family couch. “Mariah is all about becoming a YouTube sensation these days. Why do you think I can even consider … entertaining you at home?”

“She’s off with her girlfriends,” Max speculated, “singing into home karaoke machines and trying out new Girly Gaga looks.”

“Something like that.” Molina’s smile was nostalgic.

“I can see that’s in the genes. How did your secret singing career get started?”

“Church choir.”

Max nodded. “Makes sense. Singing alto on ‘Little Drummer Boy’ is perfect training for crooning torch songs at a neighborhood club.”

Molina wouldn’t be baited. “Your sarcasm,” she said, “is not going to make me ‘sing’ about how my undercover hobby got started. One good thing about today’s teen mania for fame and fortune and American Idol: It keeps them off the streets at night.”

Max smiled to hear that. He knew Rafi was getting what he wanted, quality time with his kid. And, because of that smart parental compromise, Max was getting a mellowed-out Molina. She’d actually given him a beer when he arrived.

“So what can a man with no memory tell a homicide lieutenant?” he asked, back to business.

“What are you getting from those two cold case deaths? Casino robbery interrupted?”

“Probably.”

“Does it seem … like the mob?”

“The mob?” Max repeated. “Vegas mobsters are only in museums now, aren’t they?”

“Are they?”

“You’re the one who’s supposed to know, Lieutenant.”

“Call me Molina.”

Max donned an impressed expression. “Sure thing. I could even shorten it to ‘Mole.’”

She did not look amused. “Maybe,” she said, “someone is trying to fake a fresh mob presence on the Strip. We did have one nasty murder that recalled the old-time mob methods of threats, torture, and death.”

“Anybody I know the victim?” Max asked carefully.

“You know about him. That scumbag named Clifford Effinger. He was bound to the prow of the sinking Treasure Island boat attraction and drowned.”

Max found his most disinterested look. “Yes, but it sounds a little too bloodless and histrionic for the mob.”

“Agreed. But it was a message to somebody.”

“Why do you say ‘fake’ mob presence?” Max asked.

“This department and the FBI cleared the mob off the Strip and out of town in the early ’80s.”

“For real?”

“For real. Listen. You should contact Frank Bucek.”

“Frank Bucek?”

“Yeah, the ex-priest FBI guy.” When Max’s face remained blank, she realized she’d entered a memory-free zone and explained further. “He was an instructor at Matt’s seminary. He comes to town now and again.”

“Ex-priests seem to find interesting new occupations.”

“They have a lot to offer—intelligence, diligence, discipline, knowledge of human psychology.”

“From what I remember of grade school, the parish priests and nuns were pretty good cops, now that you mention it.”

“You remember that far back still?” she wondered.

“The oldest memories are the last to go.”

Max let his mind drift back to summer twilights in a grassy climate and ball games in the street, then snow and cold and hockey, the prick of ice skate blades slung over his shoulder through his down-quilted jacket. Sean’s ears scarlet under his stocking cap. They’d reddened when he was in Northern Ireland, drinking beer with him at pubs, two underage young guys behaving foolishly but harmlessly. Sean waving him off. Max felt the small soft hand in his, the girl bewitching and ripe and as easy to acquire as that illegal-in-the-U.S. Brit version of beer. Smiling, flirting, pulling him away from Sean, the beer, the pub to slake other thirsts at a private place she knew, for him to become a man in Ireland.…

Then the memory exploded.

“Whoa.” Molina caught the beer bottle before it crashed from his numb fingers to the coffee table top in front of them. “Brain crash?”

“Memory flash.”

“Not a good one.”

He nodded. “Mixed reviews, good and bad.” He placed the one-third-full bottle as carefully on the tabletop as he would if it were made of blown glass. “I just remembered I don’t drink beer if I can help it. Your hospitality has overwhelmed me, Lieutenant.”

“Me Molina. You Kinsella.” She picked up the bottle and left the room.

Max threaded his fingers, suddenly icy, together. This was a hell of a place to have a guilt attack, right in front of a homicide lieutenant.

A lowball glass with an inch and a half of amber liquid descended to the coffee table in front of him.

“It’s not the prime brand you keep at home,” she warned him, “but you need it.”

He did. He took a stinging gulp. “My legs are almost normal.”

“But not your head, yet.”

“Head and heart.”

“Regrets?”

He looked up. Her eyes were nonaccusing, and as blue as the Morning Glory Pool at Yellowstone. Memory, he thought, might hide in the depths of such eyes, eyes so like Kathleen O’Connor’s.

“Regrets? Do you mean about a certain engaged couple? No. Only that I’m the cause of a lot of the grief that people I’ve known have faced.”

“I hate to puncture your cozy, self-hating cocoon of ego and guilt, but you are not the cause. You are the mere pretext. The cause is this highly damaged and damaging psychopath you and your cousin had the bad luck to encounter.”

“So I’ll chase another will-o’-the-wisp. If I have a surviving psychopath, maybe Las Vegas is still haunted by vestiges of the mob, some greedy and retired old don who still wants to squeeze filthy lucre out of the trillion-dollar city.”

Molina sighed and sipped. “Vegas has indeed had an explosion of entrepreneurial interest in the mob,” she said. “There’s the forty-two million dollars of official civic museum in the same civil courts building that held Senate hearings to bust the mob in the ’50s. Now the Mob Attraction Las Vegas at the Tropicana is vying with the underground Chunnel of Crime that links the separate venues of the Crystal Phoenix and Gangsters.”

“What is this fever for interactive attractions?” Max asked rhetorically. “It used to be that a magician inviting an audience member onstage to assist in an illusion was a biggie. Now people are expecting to see whole buildings disappear before their eyes.”

“Or elephants,” Molina said with a toasting gesture of her beer bottle.

“Ahh, you’re talking about the elephant, the girl sitting on the elephant trunk, and the disappearing trunkful of prize money last week. I assume you got a report on that incident at the Oasis.”

“I got film, Kinsella. Not all of the street hucksters milling around that million-dollar giveaway were street hucksters.” She eyed him hard. “And you of all people know that from firsthand experience.”

Max took the fifth by not responding.

“The only thing I’m wondering,” Molina went on, “is if you and the Cloaked Conjuror switched places. You have the height to do it, and I imagine the Cloaked Conjuror might have enjoyed a few minutes performing out of his disguising carapace.”

“Carapace. Interesting word for a full head mask and a bulletproof padded costume that weighs sixty pounds. CC leads an insanely constricted life. I suspect someday he’ll take the money and run, never to be seen in Vegas again.”

“I’m guessing Matt Devine has the same hopes for you.”

Max shook his head. “I’m no threat. I’m not only crippled in mind and body, but I’ve got a brand-new girlfriend.”

“Lay off the ‘poor me’ stuff,” she was already saying, then exhibited the same indignant reaction as Matt Devine. “Wait a couple months or three. You’re performing in disguise as the Phantom Mage—the Cloaked Conjuror should sue you for that—when you get your bungee cord sabotaged and crash spectacularly. You’re spirited away to two months of coma and leg casts in a fancy Swiss clinic, end up on the run across Europe and Ireland, and come back here alive, crippled, and memory impaired. Yet you’ve replaced Temple Barr in your affections, presto change-o?”

“Yes,” Max said simply. “Want to see a photo?”

Before Molina could open her lips or shake her head to indicate “no,” he had his phone screen in front of her face. The first photo showed Revienne showing a lot of leg on a slot machine stool at the Paris. That was his favorite. He clicked through a couple of smashing portraits of her full face and in profile against the Paris’s beautifully lit balloon.

Molina sat speechless, a state that Max enjoyed more than he would ever let her see.

“That woman’s … a stunner,” she finally got out, “but I don’t see—”

“And überbright. Don’t let the façade make you underestimate the foundations. She’s a noted psychologist in Europe and here, works gratis on teenage eating disorders. Gutsy too. Went on the lam across the Alps in a Saint Laurent Paris suit and Charles Jourdan pumps. Hacked my casts off and begged food from Swiss farmers and other … necessary things for us.

“By the way,” he added, suddenly serious. “This is just a hunch from an accidental half-wit, but from what I’ve seen, no one could replace Temple Barr.” Max leaned back on the sofa, took a long satisfactory draft of whiskey, eyed Molina, and tapped the phone photo of Revienne. “I want you to run her through Interpol.”

“Okay. You have my jaw dropping. You must be very proud of yourself. And, meanwhile, you’re sleeping with this wonder woman?”

Max gave an affable shrug. “Or she’s sleeping with me. There’s a difference.” He turned the phone image to face him. “I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t believe in convenient escapes with bright, beautiful strangers. Remember The X-Files catch phrase: ‘Trust no one.’”

Molina stirred uneasily on the couch. “What makes you bring up that old cult TV show?”

“Not old, classic,” Max corrected her. “Like us. And the songs you sing.” He grinned before going on. “Now, what did you want to see me for? I’m at your service for anything not horizontal. I do have some standards.”

* * *

It took a couple of minutes for Molina to exhaust such nouns and adjectives as “gall,” “arrogance,” “amoral,” and “treacherous.”

All he said at the end of it was, “I’ve e-mailed you her photos. Her name is Revienne Schneider, and it’s real. Dig deep. This could involve your career.”

“As if you care about my career.”

“Deeply,” he said. “I need solid contacts.”

“Look here, Kinsella, I am using you, not the opposite.”

“Let’s compromise. We’re using each other, in a purely platonic way, of course. There’s one big nasty conspiracy underlying the sometimes silly excesses of Vegas. You might look into the movements of Cosimo Sparks for the past couple of years.”

“He’s a victim of an unsolved murder.”

“No reason he couldn’t also have been a perp beforehand.”

“You give me a headache.”

“Great. Then we can never have sex.”

“As if I would—”

He cut her off, as fun as it was to smash into the iron wall of her professionalism. “I know. You’re all business and no personal life. So…”

“Anybody else you want me to investigate for you?” She’d reverted to sarcasm.

“Well, in the larger picture, why Las Vegas is going prerecorded and interactive. Artifacts from real life and movie crime on display, guests interacting with 3-D holograms of movie mobsters and live actor guides, deciding if they want to become part of the ‘Family’ or else—”

“An ‘immersive experience,’ they call it,” Molina said. “Ask your ex-fiancée. She was up to her pert little nose in using that Chunnel of Crime ride to freak out a possible murderer.”

“Cosimo Sparks’s murderer,” Max said.

“He was a magician, not a mobster.” Molina’s tone tightened. “Or was he both?”

“I hear the suspect for his death is some notoriously flamboyant international architect. Not your usual slasher.”

“He had his suspicious hands on the murder weapon—an ice pick—but I’m not convinced he used it lethally. Sparks was known to you?”

“Most likely not. Different generation. Different level of professionalism.”

“By that, I’m to gather that he was a penny-ante has-been?”

“You seem to be admitting that I’m a high-dollar up-and-comer.”

“You were. Once. Do you even remember your signature illusions?”

“You ever see me perform?”

“Not on my wish list.”

“Too bad. You’d know that magic is as much in the fingers as in the frontal lobes. The hands remember.” Max waggled his particularly long and strong hands.

“Really, how viable is your memory nowadays?”

“Going forward, it’s wizard.”

“And backwards?”

“Dicey. Arbitrary. I don’t seem to remember intense emotions.”

“Lucky for the happy couple at the Circle Ritz.”

“I wish them eternal bliss,” he said seriously. “But most of all, I wish them safety, and that won’t be possible until I solve what will stop this nemesis on my tail from endangering anybody else.”

“I solve that.” Molina said, “It’s my turf, my city, my job.”

Max raised his bottle. “And you do it superbly. Las Vegas is lucky.”

Her olive skin flushed again, barely detectable. Not from anger, but from pride. That was a step forward. “So who is our common enemy?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“It’s obvious,” she said.

He nodded. “Okay. I had a stalker in my house when I was gone, as you know, since it was you.”

“Good thing I stopped by. Someone wanted to cut you to shreds.”

“Instead my wardrobe—and you—got shredded, I hear. So you were stalking me,” Max asked, “because you thought I was stalking you?”

“Someone was. You were the only suspect I was after who had the obvious … skills … and gall to do such a subtle and thorough job in my own house.”

“More kudos. I may take up my abandoned onstage career yet.” Max grinned.

“You still want to remain a mystery man for some reason. Until it suits you.”

“We’ve both had ‘closet’ issues.”

She didn’t quite get the connection at first. Then she tumbled. “You think my stalker was your stalker?”

He nodded. “My closet’s contents were obliterated. Yours apparently acquired alien articles of clothing.”

“Why me and mine?”

“She wanted to make you more suspicious of me, angry enough to hunt and hassle me even more.”

“She? I hadn’t figured on a woman stalking a woman. Why would it be your nemesis? You’re just habitually cynical about women.”

“I wasn’t always. Not until her.”

“Weren’t you very young then?”

“Seventeen.”

“Only … three years older than Mariah.” Molina seemed stunned by the comparison.

“Kids were more naïve back then.”

“Your same-age cousin died in a pub bombing at the same time.”

Obviously Temple had thoroughly briefed Molina on Max’s history with the IRA, probably to defend him.

“More like a brother,” Max said brusquely. “So how were you stalked in this house? That takes a lot of nerve, going after a police detective.”

Molina hesitated, reluctant to change the subject, then moved on. “It could have been someone I closed a case on. What happened … ended. It was a warped, sick scenario. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Temple Barr knows.”

“Yes,” she admitted. She stood, walked around the sofa behind him, leaned her hands on either side of his shoulders, and asked, “Matt Devine knows?”

He paused to decide what to say, what to admit. “Yes.”

Molina took an audible deep breath. She leaned in, so the meter of her words huffed across his skin. “That’s too many already.”

“Why can’t I know?” Max asked.

“Why do you have to know?”

“It might affect your detecting ability. I want your objectivity working for me.”

“You think I could be objective about you?” Molina asked.

“Yes, I do.”

She came around to the front of the couch, looming as only a five-foot-ten woman could. “The stalker tried to manipulate me. I’m willing to concede now that wasn’t you. Probably. But even I don’t claim I’m objective about you.”

“Everything and everyone needs to be questioned now—motives, goals, what strings are being pulled by whom. We all do the best we can to pull back the curtain, don’t we? While still keeping a veil over our deepest fears and oldest sins.”

“Heavy.” Molina let herself sink back onto the couch. “This time you fetch me a beer from the fridge.”

* * *

The second soldier was empty on the snack bar between the kitchen and the living room, and Max was crawling around in the bottom of Molina’s closet. “A shrink would have a lot of fun with your shoe collection.”

“More so with Temple Barr’s, I’m thinking.”

“It’s all about height, or the lack of it, with women. She overcompensates for short physical stature, you temper your ability to intimidate male coworkers with an array of low-heeled loafers for work. Even at home you wear moccasins.”

“I see your association with Miss Barr has made you a sidewalk connoisseur of shoes and psyches.”

“And sometimes you just want to break out of the career closet. What’s this?” Max looked up, one forefinger dangling the ankle strap of a pale nile green satin sandal with a half-inch platform on the sole. “Lady Gaga boots it isn’t. Don’t tell me you share a vintage clothing jones with Temple Barr.”

Molina snatched the slipper up, up, and away.

“And Cinderella you’re not,” he commented. “Also not a size five, looked like—”

“None of your business.”

“Wrong. It’s my business. Any of your shoes or mates go missing during the stalking incidents?”

“No. I told you. The stalker added to my wardrobe.”

Max let his fingers page through the soft five-inch swatch of floor-length hanging gowns in deep jewel-toned silk velvet. “These are Carmen’s, your warbling alter ego’s. Which one didn’t you buy?”

She reached out to one. “The blue. At least I didn’t remember it.”

“It looks a lot like the others.”

“Gowns of that 1930s’ vintage are very similar and there isn’t much good light in the closets of these old houses.”

“So you can’t be sure.” Max leaned back to study the gowns. “They’re all the same length.”

She nodded. “That’s what made this first discovery creepy. I sensed it didn’t belong, but it looked like it should.”

“What was the next leaving?”

“Nasty. Obvious. Meant to chill.”

He waited and she averted her eyes.

She answered in a monotone, turning away. “It was a gift-wrapped slim little box on my bedspread, looked like candy. I couldn’t conceive that Mariah would do that, although teen girls often do owe their mothers an apology. But I opened it.”

“Not a letter bomb,” he said to diffuse the tension.

Her laugh was short. “A filmy piece of cheap lingerie, with a note: ‘You dress like a nun.’”

“And of course, that sealed the deal that it was me.”

She turned on him, blue eyes blazing like midnight specials. “You always like to … taunt me.”

“I honestly can’t remember.”

“You were doing it just now.”

He thought. “Yeah, I was—”

“You think I’m too buttoned-down and uptight.”

“I am getting a bit of that vibe, but it’s hitting me more like … that’s there because you’d be a lot hotter if it wasn’t.”

“That comment is sexist, not sexy. Like that invasive ‘gift’ was stalking, not … not courting behavior.”

“But you know now that it wasn’t me.”

“Mostly.” She sounded almost as sullen as a teenager fessing up. Learned that from Mariah, likely.

“Look. I’m sorry. I don’t think I’d do that. A magician gets used to manipulating people, to getting a reaction from an audience. It’s nothing personal.”

She shrugged, her anger and embarrassment spent.

“Um, I have to ask. Was the article of lingerie black?”

Oops. She was annoyed again.

“‘Articles’ like that usually are.”

“Then, Lieutenant. Molina. I think there’s a clue you’ve missed because you couldn’t possibly know it. That ‘gift’ wasn’t a sexual come-on. Not at all.”

“What?”

“You went to school with Catholic nuns.”

“I’m half Hispanic. Of course.”

“And the habits they used to wear were—?”

“Black.”

“You don’t wear black. Navy maybe, but not much in this broiler climate. I think that gown was left by a woman.”

She looked doubtful.

“Who was out to get me.”

“It’s always all about you.”

“In this case, it really is.”

“And the next time, when I came home to find the radio on and a trail of rose petals down the hall to Mariah’s bedroom?”

Max sighed. Kathleen O’Connor had done a job on Molina. No wonder she’d risked her career to break into Max’s house to prove he was the stalker, and then had the bad luck to run straight into Kitty the Cutter.

“She likes to play with her prey, but she is armed and dangerous. She slashed Matt Devine trying to get at me.”

Molina let herself sink down upon the bed, in a way reclaiming it from being a scene of a crime. Max didn’t want to loom, so he sat beside her, with no protestations.

“This monster was in my house? How do you know all this with a flawed memory?”

“My mentor, my foster father really, was the one who spirited me away from the Neon Nightmare. He filled in my history from the age of seventeen. And I have … flashes of recovering memory.”

“This woman, you think she has something against Catholic nuns?”

“And priests.”

“Hence Devine.” Molina nodded. “So it’s a vast anti-Catholic, anti-Max conspiracy?”

“Anti-me mostly.”

“Why?”

“I saw through her early. That made me the enemy. I’ve only just learned, in Northern Ireland, what a hellish history she had. People have died because of that.” Max bestirred himself to leave his recent, all-too-vivid memories. “I’ll tell you a story, all I was told and remember, about a girl named Kathleen O’Connor, who became a murderous, mad, vengeful force aptly renamed ‘Kitty the Cutter.’

“I think she’s safely out of your private life, Molina, but not your professional one. I once loved her, then hated her, and now I hunt her. As she hunts me and mine … and even my ‘frenemies’ … is that the word for us now?”

Molina nodded solemnly.

“I need your help, Carmen Regina, Lieutenant, sir.” He mustered a crooked smile. “And we none of us will sleep well until she’s cornered and confined.”