Cat On A Hyacinth Hunt

Chapter 33

Forbidden Planet

"Yo, Sherlock!"

"Temple?"

Max sounded surprised by her gung-ho tone.

"I've read your manuscript and I've spent far too many hours at the library looking up forms of hyacinth. Does Gandolph have any books there that might pertain to hyacinths?"

"Nothing flowery. But what about the manuscript?"

"What about it?"

"Can it be saved?"

"Modest Max. Perhaps. What are you going to give me for dinner?"

"What can you bring?"

"Boston Market?"

A pause. "Home cooking isn't my style, but beggars can't be choosers. Just don't spill anything on the manuscript."

"You can always print out another one."

"I know, but it doesn't feel that duplicatable."

Temple smiled. Max was used to making magic out of transient impressions and other people's blind spots. The concrete power of words awed him. Maybe he understood her bailiwick better now.

"Be over in half an hour."

Temple packed her tote bag and took an uneasy tour of the apartment. Louie was certainly making himself scarce lately. She wondered if he were trying to send a message.

But she had another message to decipher. Hyacinth.

She tucked a couple of flower books from the library into her tote along with Max's manuscript, checked to make sure one last time that Louie's bathroom window was ajar, and then locked the condominium on the way out.

She had to admit to a snare-drum rattle of excitement. Going over to Max's place felt like Minneapolis all over again. Just meeting Max, going out. Okay, not exactly going out. The only times recently she had gone out with Max it had been a major undercover operation, or a breaking and entering.

Still, they were working on things together. They were working on being together. Temple's red two-inch Cuban heels did a Castanet click over the Circle Ritz marble lobby floor. The ghosts of Fred and Ginger and that happy, chattering rhythm followed her to the parking lot.

Even cocking the pepper spray on her key ring as she neared her car couldn't dampen her spirits.

Her long red corduroy skirt refused to dampen its folds to fit into the Storm on the first try.

So she collapsed it like a recalcitrant umbrella and then locked herself in, after checking the back seat. Then she sighed. Twilight time. A beautiful January night, with the sun hanging over the western mountains like a bloodshot moon.

It was dusk by the time she pulled into Boston Market's car-jammed lot and inched through the crowded line, buying everything hot and homey, so it would drive Max bananas: corn and meatloaf and mashed potatoes and all that midwinter, Midwestern comfort food.

Loaded with one brown bag, and sure this time that no bogeyman would be lurking by her car, unless he was an escapee from Night of the Living Dead, gruesome thought, Temple clicked out to the car, stowed her goods and revved the Storm away from the sun sweltering into a burnt-orange puddle behind the mountains.

The sky was still the faint, pale blue of the Madonna's cloak when Temple carefully parked on the border of Max's lot line and carried her burdens to the house.

This time the door was infinitesimally ajar and she glided through without having to shift her packages.

"What?" she asked the darkness inside. "Am I Midnight Louie, with an automatic entrance/exit?"

Max shut the door behind her, and closed her mouth with a kiss as he off-loaded the food bags.

"Editors can be snakes, I understand," he said. "So I left the door open just wide enough to accommodate one."

"Not all editors," Temple protested. "Just a few bad ones. I thought my literary skills were going to be respected around here now that you're an aspiring author."

"I don't know what you think of my opus; until then, I'm prepared to consider you the enemy."

"Ridiculous." Temple followed him into the awesome kitchen. There was something charming about eating fast food in such an intimidating atmosphere of haute cuisine. "You want my opinion, then you shrink from getting it. Listen, if the manuscript stank, I'd return it in a plain manila envelope marked 'Illiterate, irrelevant and immaterial,' so all the neighbors would know."

"Sensitive soul, aren't you?"

Max was pulling out Styrofoam containers and frowning at the contents. "This is like Sunday dinner on the farm, Grant Wood edition."

"Isn't it fun?" Temple didn't wait for an answer, but pulled plates and silverware from drawers and cupboards she had checked out on previous visits.

The baronial breakfast table was of burnt oak, with captain's chairs burly enough for Bluto.

Max was laughing by the time he brought the food to the table, along with a thin elegant bottle of wine from the walk-in wine cellar.

"The sublime and the ridiculous," he announced, setting the bottle on the table with a marked emphasis.

"Who's the sublime and who's the ridiculous."

"We both are both."

The cork teased out of the wine bottle, releasing a dry pungent scent. Temple guessed that this one bottle would have paid for a month's worth of fast-food dinners, but she didn't know, and didn't care.

She searched for her tote bag and found it by the side of her chair.

"Thanks. I suppose you can't wait for this fine cuisine to digest before I get to the manuscript."

Max was staring at the meatloaf as if wondering what to put on it. Perhaps a wig.

"Here's the sauce. It's good, really! Pretend you're having a nice hot meal at home, and dig in."

"That's what this is about, hmm? My missing family dinners. You don't exactly go in for them yourself nowadays."

"No. But I had deli with my aunt in New York. Besides, my taste buds are on Minnesota wintertime, no matter the climate. I've got that squirrel-it-away-for-the -winter mentality."

Max dished up servings from the various steaming boxes.

"All right. I'll load up on starches while you critique the starch out of my manuscript."

"Gee, I wish I had my glasses. I have an absolute craving for frames balancing on my nose as I make my pronouncement."

"I prefer to see your unadorned eyes, all true blue and absolutely honest."

Temple sampled the meatloaf, corn and potatoes before pulling the stack of white pages to her side.

"Well, it's pretty seamless where Gandolph's part ends and yours begins. I like your history of magic and psychic phenomena intro. You need more contemporary examples. And why don't you exploit the Houdini seance?"

"That's . . . still under investigation. I prefer not to give anything away."

"Don't hold back. Put in what you have now. You can always update it later. Houdini is your thread. He should bracket the entire book: the mystery of his magic tricks, the mystery of contacting the dead. He's still the most famous magician of all time, and he ended up fascinated by the hope of contacting the dead, then disgusted by the fraud that passed for psychic power then . .. and now? What would Houdini think of the Russian ESP experiments? Et cetera, et cetera."

"I'd have to . . . rebuild the whole book."

"You've sawed half-naked ladies in two and put them back together again."

"Not since I was seventeen. That's much too obvious to be real magic."

"So's the book as it stands now. It needs more personalization. Maybe you could parallel Houdini's development as an escapologist with your own development as a magician."

"But Temple, a good magician is always both front man and unseen operator. What you're talking about would expose my life, and you know how dangerous that would be."

"Didn't you say the best disguise in Las Vegas is loud? Maybe in magic, it's naked. And you said that revealing yourself as 'just' a magician might disarm all those nasty terrorists out there that don't want to believe you're not an active counter-terrorist."

"It's true. The more I put myself into this book, the more I blow my cover, the less useful I am to anybody."

"Besides, any book is written on water. It can always be changed. Until you sell it, of course."

Max was cutting the meatloaf Continental-style--with his fork in his left hand, his knife in his right--into neat cubes as if it were the finest steak. He didn't seem to be aware that this was no way to treat a nice, mushy, down-home meatloaf.

"And," Temple added, not hampered by having to excessively chew anything on her plate,

"it would be really nice to add Orson Welles and this house as a bracketing element too."

"That would really blow my cover!"

"Maybe, by then, you wouldn't need it anymore."

"By . . . when?"

"Oh, the three to four years you'll need to finish the book and find someone to publish it."

"Three to four years?"

"Didn't you say a good illusion takes years to develop?"

Max gave up on the dinner and devoted himself to the wine. "I had no idea you would be such a stern taskmaster when it came to the book."

"You could always publish it yourself, of course."

"I could?"

"All it takes is a little money, and then you wouldn't have to worry about it blowing your cover. It would probably print about twenty-five hundred copies to be sold to a very exclusive readership."

"That's not what I wanted for Gandolph's book."

"Then you must make it yours and Gandolph's book."

"I'll have to think it over."

"Of course. I wouldn't expect to sit down to dinner with you on virtually no notice, throw a major, life-altering proposal your way, and have you fall for it hook, line and signet ring right there and then."

Max winced. "I get it. You accepted my proposal in a spirit of game impulsiveness. I can do no less. Now. What is this about hyacinth?"

"That, you'll be happy to hear, I'm at a loss on."

Max lifted his wine glass so she could mirror his gesture of conciliation.

"Sometimes ignorant women can be very reassuring."

Temple chimed rims with him, watching the opal ring on her finger glitter under the overhead sparkler of light. Everybody had a bailiwick.

*****************

First they attacked Gandolph's computer.

"I seem to remember encountering the word 'hyacinth' somewhere in this house when I first came back here," Max said. "Since I've been messing so much with Gandolph's files, I'm wondering if I didn't see it in here."

But a search turned up nothing but a spell-check definition: "any of various bulbous herbs."

"Hyacinth is an herb?" Temple was amazed. "That's news to me."

"What's so special about an herb?"

"Nothing, except that herbs usually have a long history as folk remedies, and I've never heard of hyacinth in that context."

"I've got a dictionary of toxins on hard disc. I'll check that."

"A dictionary of toxins, Max, why?"

"For emergencies?"

He grinned as the file came up and the search program box obscured the regular screen. He stopped grinning when an entry came up.

"Digitalis. It's a potent toxin, our friend the hyacinth plant, though probably in unwieldy amounts if it's to be fatal."

"Max! You're putting down the poor hyacinth because it would take too much of it to kill someone?"

"Efficacious poisons require minute amounts for morbidity, and, of course, the most useful ones are also the least detectable. And perhaps the least well known."

"Like hyacinth, in that regard?"

"Like hyacinth."

"What now?"

Max looked up at her, his narrow face uplit by the computer screen and looking utterly sinister. "Now we consult the magi-cian's grimoires."

"Grimoires," Temple said on the way to Gandolph's storage room, her heel taps far too gay on the hardwood hall floors for this grim errand. "Such a nice, nasty word. What does it mean?"

"A book of spells, of herbal knowledge, of incantations. It sounds better than it is. Any grimoires I've seen were either obvious frauds or benign and boring compendiums of dubious home remedies."

"Did Gandolph really have any?"

"No, but he has 'many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.' "

"Poe man."

"I assume you have suddenly developed a Southern accent."

"Assume your worst. I assume these three open bookcases are it."

"Indeed. I'll skim the top shelves; you do the lower ones."

"Thanks. My knees needed that."

Max suddenly sank to the floor beside her, his joints collapsing like hinges. "We'll start at the bottom and work up, sharing all the way."

"Why does that sound like an indecent proposal?"

"Because it is," he whispered, opening the first book and setting it on her lap. "I suggest we check the indices under H."

"Elementary, my dear Datsun."

Gandolph's books were indeed a fascinating stew of offbeat and even eerie subjects.

Rasputin. Judge Crater. Alistair Crowley. Numerology. ESR Psychics. Freak shows. Graphology.

Spirit knockings.

Temple and Max sped-read indexes by the dozen. "Hy" words were at a premium.

"Hypatia," Temple caroled out once.

"Early Christian woman mathematician and martyr," Max mumbled back, absorbed in his own search.

"I wish all mathematicians would be martyred," Temple muttered.

"Then who would do your taxes?"

"Jimmy the Greek?"

"I think he died."

"Doesn't matter, according to this book on revenants. He could come back, better than ever."

"I think he died politically incorrect."

"Oh. Then he's beyond any human help."

"Hyperbole," Max suggested hopefully.

"A literary term. It means exaggerated overstatement."

"Like 'you are absolutely too delicious to resist with meatloaf on your breath.' "

"Oh, ick, Max! That sounds like one of those awful mispronounced foreign language sentences that's supposed to say, 'Where is the meat market, onion breath?' "

They laughed so hard that the third shelf of books fell into their laps.

"Oh, this is interesting."

"What?" Max asked.

"Just a book of gemstone lore. I'll look up opal."

"Don't. I can tell you that they're considered unlucky."

"And that's the ring you gave me?"

"I'm not superstitious."

"But I might be! Especially after I read this book."

Max's big, bony hand covered the open pages like a shroud over the face of the dead. "Then don't look."

"Call me Pandora. I have an aggravating need to know."

Temple bent her head over the small-print index entries. A check of the copyright page revealed the book to be a 1913 first edition.

She found a string of entries under "Opal," and flipped to the major section.

"Maybe that's why I can finally wear contact lenses," she announced after a couple minutes of silent reading.

Max looked up from his reference book.

"Your opal ring," she explained, waggling the finger it decorated. "According to this book, in the middle ages wearing an opal was regarded as beneficial to the sight. Some even said wearing opals conferred invisibility."

"I could use that."

"Maybe that's why it's the patron stone of thieves."

Temple nodded, already paging through the old volume. She was a sucker for any book title that began Curious Lore of . .. and this one, with its frequent footnotes, engraved illustrations and lists of gemstone attributes was a particularly addictive example.

Under "Planetary and Astral Influences" she stumbled across (appropriately) acrostics formed with stones. Acrostics were linked concepts whose first letters spelled out a meaning.

Thus,

Feldspar Amethyst Idocrase (Huh?) Topaz Heliotrope

. . . spelled out F-AT-T-H with their first letters. Eighteenth-century French and English women would wear rings, bracelets and brooches set with these gems in order to give the secret message. However, change one gem and you had quite a different saying. Temple's larcenous mind invented a new quintet:

Topaz

Heliotrope

Idocrase

Emerald

Feldspar

Thief. Or a slightly twisted Feith.

Hope looked a little harder to come by than Faith. She smiled at the obscure or antique-named gems listed:

Hematite Olivine Pyrope Essonite

Luckily, more common alternate gems were given for each motto: Hyacinth Opal Pearl Emerald

Hyacinth was a gemstone? Be still her beating .. .

Hyacinth

Emerald

Amethyst

Ruby

Topaz!

. . . HEART!

Max looked up from the massive tome table topping his knees. "Something you ate?"

"Heartburn. You're right. Did you know there was a gemstone called hyacinth?"

"Never in a million years."

Temple was fumbling through the index for citations on the gem called "hyacinth."

Max watched her with amusement. "You'll excuse me if I rather doubt that Effinger was carrying the name of a rare precious stone in his pocket."

But Temple was immersed in the long description of jewels in the High Priest's breastplate from the book of Exodus.

There it was, hyacinthus, listed among the twelve foundation stones of the New Jerusalem in Revelations as well as on the High Priest's ritual body armor. Granted, various translations from the Hebrew, Greek and Latin through the centuries varied on just what the stones were: sapphire seemed a popular substitute for the more obscure hyacinth or its apparent twin, jacinth.

And lists of birthstones for the various months included hyacinth as a second choice on more than one month.

And in the Sanskrit of India, the hyacinth was a jewel dedicated to a mysterious "dragon,"

the cause of the periodic eclipses of sun and moon. As such--the embodiment of the evil genius of a great, unseen power--it was a potent talisman against misfortune.

Temple devoured these arcane info-bits and finally spat them out undigested to Max.

"Fascinating," he said in his best Mr. Spock manner. "But I just can't see any of this falderal having anything to do with that animated piece of pond scum called Cliff Effinger."

"No, I can't either. Yet. I'm just happy to find out that the word has some other history than as the name of a boring and innocuous flower."

Max had neglected to drop his eyes to the book he was studying. Instead he was staring into the distance as if much enamored of it.

"On the other hand," he murmured.

Then he was up, so smooth and fast that the abandoned book eased itself shut with a whisper of slick pages.

"What?" Temple sprang up like a raspberry-topped Pop-Tart.

"On the other hand," Max repeated in a more energetic tone, taking hers, "maybe that's where I ran across the word on Gan-dolph's files. Not in the general folders, but in the directory he labeled " 'Shan.' "

"Na-na?"

He dragged her back to the computer room, scooted a wheeled steno chair under her, then sat down in the computer chair to play the keyboard like piano.

"I didn't think to check the files involving that magician league hocus-pocus."

Temple refrained from offering Matt's definition of the origin of the phrase "hocus-pocus"

from the Latin of the Roman Catholic mass: body and blood.

Some info-bits were unwelcome, even in an information age.

"Hmmph." Max sounded grouchy.

"Couldn't and it?"

"Oh, it's here all right. But as vaguely mentioned as the mysterious 'Synth.' "

"What's really bothering you?"

"Heartburn?" he asked wryly. "Meatloaf? Really, Temple."

She shrugged.

Max shook his head, his dark hair as sleek and glossy as Midnight Louie's--Max's long, back-gathered hair serving as the tail to finish off the comparison.

Won't you come home, Midnight Louie? Temple sang inside her head. She already did the cooking, such as it was, and she paid the rent.

"I don't like it." Max pushed back, making the chair squeak for mercy. "What does this mumbo jumbo of Gandolph's have to do with what lowlife Cliff Effinger was carrying around in a note in his pocket?"

"I was also mentioned in that note, somehow."

"How do you know?"

"I forgot to mention it. Molina paid me a surprise interrogation today. Unfortunately, Electra thought she was there to follow up on Effinger's assault on me, so Molina now knows that I have plenty of motive to wish him ill."

"And me more motive."

"And Matt even more motive than you."

"All right! We're all motivated to death! What about the note mentioning you?"

"She wouldn't say exactly how I was mentioned, but admitted to 'hyacinth.' And she did tell me how Effinger died."

"Forgot to mention that too?"

"I was coming to see you."

"Awwwww. Couldn't think of anything else, poor baby. So . . . how did he die?"

"Via barge. Only he was 'affixed' to the boat and sank with it during the programmed descent."

" Affixed?' That was Molina's word for it?"

Temple nodded glumly. "Would I forget a weird description like that? Plus, Louie and his little friend from the Crystal Phoenix were at the scene of the crime."

"Louie? And . . . who?"

"This black female cat that showed up at the Phoenix after he moved on. I didn't think they got along."

"They're both cats; of course they get along. But why at the Oasis, on the very scene of Effinger's dramatic demise?"

"I don't know. Molina seemed a little spooked by it, though."

"Molina? Spooked?" Max snorted.

"I know it's hard to believe. Maybe she has personal pressures. Or maybe she's tired of Louie and me showing up in every case she supervises. . . and you never showing up at all."

Max's smile was surprisingly mellow. "Not always 'never.' I want to see the autopsy report. I can try breaking into the computers for it, or I can have some real fun and ask Molina for it."

"Max, no! You can't! If she got a hold of you, she'd never let you go."

"We could negotiate."

"How?"

"By phone. By computer."

"Those are traceable."

"For a while."

"You like darting into the lion's mouth."

"I'm used to it."

"I'm not."

"Oh yes, you are. And speaking of that, when are you going to tell Devine?"

Temple squirmed until her unstable chair tilted.

"I can understand you didn't want to ruin his grand night of reporting the triumph of nailing Effinger," Max went on. "Hey, I'm glad he did it. Otherwise, I would have had to. More power to him. He's got a G-man cereal-box badge in my book. So he's a big boy now. He deserves to know, Temple."

Yes, but. She couldn't tell Max about Matt's newest secret: Kitty's bizarre and disturbing attack. Temple sincerely wished she could. Kitty was a wild card. Max would understand wild cards as no one else would.

They were an eternally stymied trio right out of Jean Paul Sartre's play about Hell, No Exit.

Only instead of being held in stasis by conflicting sexual preferences, they each held different pieces of a jigsaw puzzle long in the making. And the game board upon which the disparate parts were coming together was called "Effinger." If only they would compare enigmas. Or the two men would allow her to move between them without each demanding her utter confidence and loyalty.

But no. Each tolerated the other's existence, at a distance, only so far. And the battleground became, not Effinger, their common enemy, but Temple, their common friend. And in one case, lover. Past. Present.

"When the time's right," she finally said.

Max said no more. The time was right for him now.

*****************

They adjourned to the kitchen for a final glass of wine.

Hyacinth, they agreed, was presenting as much of a stalemate as the issue of Matt.

"Maybe it was meant to be a distraction," Max suggested. "Maybe Effinger wanted to pick out a roll of toilet paper with that brand name. I think it's a dead end."

"It was for Effinger," Temple said.

Max was determined to pursue what he called "official sources" on Effinger's death, but they also were in accord that Effinger's passing should not go unnoted.

They plotted his funeral. Temple agreed to walk Matt through it, and Max made no unseemly comments about their continuing partnership in death. Max needed to stay out of plain sight; as much as Max wanted Matt out of Temple's life, he needed him.

Stalemate.

Max leaned across the kitchen table to jiggle Temple's wrist.

"You're looking tired."

"Sweet-talker."

"Let's go to bed. No?"

"Why can't this house have one regular bedroom?"

"You don't like the opium bed?"

"Oh, it's great for lounging around in when you're feeling decadent. Fine for foreplay. But...

when I was little--no wise cracks; I mean when I was really little, a tiny kid--my doting grandmother got me one of those stupid Colonial beds with a white eyelet canopy. And pink satin ribbon twining through the eyelets.

"I was only five or six. I hated having to climb up into that bed using a stool, like I was a baby. I hated the pink satin ribbons, and I hated that canopy that hung over me every night like an eyelet spider web. I kept thinking about all the creepy things that might be hiding up there.

Spiders and bats and snakes, all waiting for me to go to sleep so they could fall down on me."

"You're afraid of enclosed beds. But the opium bed doesn't have any concealing curtains.

The frame is pierced."

"But all those carvings. Those hidden faces in the shadows, watching."

"Now the bed's a voyeur! Your romantic imagination always takes a Gothic twist. All right.

We'll sleep in 'my' bedroom, on the futon. Should be good for our backs."

"Yes, therapeutic."

But when they got to the room Temple had glimpsed only once, she was struck by its stark opposition to the excesses of the opium bed.

"Now here I could be agoraphobic instead of claustrophobic! This looks like a monk's cell."

She eyed the low black-lacquered tables, the huge red ceramic vase sporting one stalk of driftwood, the black-and-white fabric on the futon. "I wish we could live at the Circle Ritz like we used to."

Max adjusted a panel installed on the wall and low music infiltrated the simple "cell."

Vangelis, like the dusty CDs in Temple's bedroom.

"Magicians are addicted to extremes," Max said with a smile. "We love the elaborate for the illusion it offers, but the underlying tricks are all deceptively simple."

"So the opium bed is the set dressing--"

"The futon is the basic necessity. I suppose I could be really simple and revert to the floor."

"Or the cave floor."

Max shrugged, dimming the lights. "You're hopelessly domestic."

"Domestically hopeless," she said, laughing. "But I guess it doesn't matter where, or when, or on what. Only with whom."

"As long as," he added, "there are no hidden spiders, snakes and Chinese bats."

Temple eyed the room's pristine white ceiling from the starched comfort of the futon a few minutes later. She would never tell Max, but too much blank simplicity overhead turned into an empty movie screen for the horror show of her anxieties and worries.

Excess or simplicity. Neither distracted her from the ever-present, encroaching Gothic all around, twining toward the unwary like kudzu. Danger and death and things that go bump in the night, like conscience. And secrets.