Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

Chapter 38

Tight Places

"Rough day?"

Max swept Temple into the house, haunted by the late Gandolph the Great and Orson Welles.

He gestured to push a stray strand of hair off his face, although his hair was swept back into a sleek ponytail, and nothing about it was stray. Could Max Kinsella be nervous about something?

"Homemade dinner," he said, making a face. "I wish I could take you to restaurants here in Las Vegas."

"You're taking me to a magic show later tomorrow."

"A second-rate one."

"Because the magician is a lady?"

"Because the show is at the Opium Den, a third-rate venue if there ever was one. So tell me about the funeral while I whip up dessert."

Max was good at anything that required assembly, but whipping out the perfect chocolate mousse did require more serious attention.

"Thirty pieces of silver dollars. A trifle obvious," Max pronounced, after he heard the funeral-goer's tale.

"Is that what you're making, a trifle?"

"It's a mousse, and it'll be in your hair if you don't quit harassing the cook."

Max lifted her up to the large kitchen island so she'd be out of his way.

"You know," she said soulfully, "you'd make someone a wonderful wife."

"You know, you've had a little too much before-dinner wine. When did you start today?

Noon?"

"Not till one," Temple said virtuously. "I guess this is really good stuff."

Max eyed the level left in her glass on his next pass through. "Too good to spoil the broth, the salad, the main course and the dessert."

"You've really put yourself out."

"What else can I do, cooped up here?" Max paused before her, grinned. "Actually, I've already traced the flowers by computer."

"Really?"

"Sent from all sorts of places far and near by the dozens. Cost a fortune. The person who ordered them was named Trudy Zelle in every case. The scent of a woman. Does that name ring a bell?"

"Yes, it does. In some foggy, burgundy part of my brain."

Max stopped, clasped her hands. "You're a little reckless tonight. I like it."

He kissed her, and he did it quite well.

"Was the funeral charade too awful?" he asked, still searching for the source of her odd mood. "I suspect that the cashier's check for the whole thing will be signed by this Trudy Zelle.'

Do you suppose her first name is a play on the word, Truly?''

"I'm lost," Temple admitted a little tipsily. "I just came here to eat and be dazzled. Why are there so few women magicians?"

"Male mystique," Max answered promptly. "Magic has been a classic escape route for boys too smart to get stomped in football and too optimistic to give up on girls until they get rid of glasses and zits."

"Do you need a correction, or do you just wear contact lenses to dazzle women?"

"My eyesight is twenty-twenty, Temple darling. And I can see that you're in a very funny mood tonight."

"Do you love me, Max?"

"Of course I do. You're the first person I could afford to love, the first woman I could count on not to be someone or something else than she seemed."

Temple nodded. "Not like this Shangri-La, or Kitty the cutter."

"Are you a little drunk?"

"I should hope so, if I've been working on it since one p.m. in the afternoon. I like to think of myself as a high achiever."

Max tsked like a schoolteacher as he took her empty wine glass away. Probably the T-bird would be next.

"The chef requires a sober palate, Madame. I suppose seeing Effinger laid out was a rather chilling sight, for you as well as for his stepson. How's he holding up?"

Temple giggled. She was more than tipsy.

"Tell me, Temple."

"He's . . . holding up. I'm . . . tired. What do you make of it? Hyacinths and Ladies in Black, nuns even? And then the Cat-woman--"

"That movie has come and gone; Michelle Pfeiffer has unglued her cat ears and peeled off her wetsuit and licked off her whiskers. You'd better have something to eat, and I hope I've made it right."

So Temple sat in one of the huge captain chairs and toyed with sirloin tips on spinach noodles with peppercorn bearnaise sauce. She teethed on tender-crisp asparagus spears and tried not to wash down everything in sight with the dinner wine.

The chocolate mousse was sheer velvet, softer than Midnight Louie's ears, should she care to devour them, and Temple was growing sober despite herself.

She felt full and more peaceful, and guilty as hell. She got up from the kitchen table and wandered into the kitchen proper, with its sleek sacrificial altar masquerading as an island work surface, while Max cleared the plates.

"Should you go out in public?" she asked Max.

"Downtown should be all right. It's still an off-price venue, despite the glamorous new dome that overarches it. I wish I could understand what's bothering you."

"Maybe it's this mystery," Temple said. Not only magicians could use diversion to good effect. "What's the link between Effinger and those two casino deaths? And now his own death, wrapped in the scent of hyacinth and the aura of mysterious Dark Ladies."

"Ladies, plural?"

"You are quick, and too quick for me when I've got molasses in my veins."

"What did you mean, 'ladies.' "

"Oh . . . hyperventilating hyacinths!"

"Temple, you only get inventive in swearing when you're really stressed."

If she couldn't confess the scariest secret of all, maybe she could offer a less vital one.

"It's. . . confidential."

"Everything worth knowing in this town is confidential. Tell me."

Max had followed her into this clinical kitchen so like a surgery of gastronomy. He was doctor; she was patient. She badly needed a nagging thorn to come out. Any thorn.

"There's this woman who's. . . appeared to Matt."

"Virgin Mary, huh?"

"Hardly. Bloody Mary, more likely. I hate telling you this ... but she's the one who told him where Effinger was likely to be found."

"Bloody Judas, maybe?"

Temple nodded. "You don't know how right you are. She appeared to him again after Effinger was murdered. Within a couple of hours, before it was discovered practically."

Max began pacing, listening, absorbing facts into his very bloodstream with a magician's eerie concentration that could hear locked tumblers clicking, audiences holding their breath, and glamorous assistants scratching their high-rise chorus-girl panty lines.

"She attacked him, Max."

Max stopped. Grinned. "He's not that good-looking."

"With a razor."

He sobered so fast the mocking figure of a moment ago seemed like ancient history.

"Sorry. That's serious. That's psychotic. What was her problem?"

"Matt thinks--," Temple felt like a traitor for betraying Matt's confidence, but if she offered Max this truth that he might be able to do something about, perhaps it would atone for withholding the truth that none of them could do anything about.

She was exposing Matt, but not where he was most vulnerable. She hoped. She was using the old magician's trick, creating glittering contrails with one hand, while the real work was being done by the other.

"Yes? You were saying. Matt thinks?"

"It's ridiculous, but Matt thinks this woman thought he was a hit man. That she told him where to find Effinger because she thought he would kill him."

"Interesting. What made her take the ex-priest for a killer?"

"Matt sensed she was one mean mama. He felt he had to take a hard line with her. She asked what he would do with Effinger when he found him and he admitted he didn't know, that he would 'probably kill him.' "

Max nodded. "There are some people I'd 'probably kill' if I found them."

"Some people? Max!"

He shook his head. "We never kill the people we need to. It's something we tell ourselves we could do, but we don't. It's a way of admitting we've known people who deserve killing."

"Never kill them? Even in your line of work? Whatever that is."

Max laughed. "Suspicion becomes you, my lovely sleuth. I'm glad we can talk like this finally.

Frankly. Temple, this can be better than before, because I can be more honest with you."

He stepped closer, and she was comforted. Too bad she had to be less honest than before.

Were relationships always comedies of bad timing? Or tragedies of off-tempo truth?

Temple realized that she had never needed Max's love more than now, when her own feelings were subdivided into searing confusion.

"I know it's hard for you to betray confidences." Max wrapped his endless arms around her.

"But this is for Devine's own good. I'd be willing to bet that the woman who turned over Effinger and accosted Matt later for not killing him is the very same woman who sent the hyacinths and paid for the funeral. I just wish I knew her game. Or her identity." Max tilted up Temple's chin, regarded her with a smile that softened his sharp features. "I give your neighbor credit for his Devine forbearance with Effinger. It's obvious that Effinger was a family abuser who deserved a lot worse than he got from Devine, if not the killer. It takes a lot of moral courage to outgrow the past, even if you were trained as a priest. He's all right. And he'll be all right, Temple. You'd don't have to mother him."

Wonderful. Max the magnanimous. Max the consoler. Max the idiot! Defending the competition because he couldn't imagine any competition worth worrying about. Poor Max!

Max shook her lightly, as if rousing her from a trance. "So let's forget the personal issues and look at the facts, ma'am. Just the facts. Want to hit the computer room? I can show you a graph on the hyacinth orders."

Temple nodded. She could use graphs and cold, hard facts right now. She could use Max's bracing form of self-confidence. She could use distraction.

But the computer revelations were far more interesting than she had thought. She squinted toward the glowing screen.

"The flower orders are amazing. So many little florists, all over the country. One even from Canada. All on telephone credit-card numbers and all shipping every winter-blooming hyacinth they had. It's like a battle plan. Hyacinths in formation. And it must have cost a mint."

"Seventy-six hundred and eighty-nine dollars. And the credit card numbers are all from stolen cards. From all over the country, by the way."

"What? How do you know?"

"I've access to the latest lists of reported lost or stolen cards."

Temple leaned back in the secretarial chair, her accessory to the more substantial throne that Max occupied in front of the computer.

"Sometimes I don't know whether you're Us or Them."

Max grinned again, fondly. "And who are Us or Them?"

"I don't know. Government or insurrectionist. Police or crook. Spy or seditionist. Human or alien."

"You allow for an incredible range of deviation. I admire a lively imagination. But let's stick to the problem at hand. Does this mystery woman have a name?"

"Kitty, according to Matt."

" 'Kitty the cutter,' you called her."

Temple nodded. "If it was the same woman at the funeral home, she called herself Trudy Zelle then."

Max just grinned.

"Why are you laughing at me?"

"Not at you. At her audacity. I just remembered who Gertrud Zelle was."

Temple shook her head. "Yeah, the name does sound vaguely familiar, like I heard it on a PBS station. An opera singer?"

"Only tragic opera, if so. But dance was her ticket to notoriety. Gertrud Zelle was the birth name of the woman who performed as Mata Hari."

"Then this woman is a spy too!"

"Or wants us to think she is. How badly did she slice Devine? I mean, he's still walking among us. Apparently he can still function."

Oh, yes. "A three-inch wound, to the side."

"Interesting. How did she get that close?"

"She intercepted him after work in the parking lot. Obviously, he never expected an assault."

"Why would she do it? Out of pique? This woman is attracting attention to herself. That makes me suspicious. Who or what is she concealing behind the obvious?"

"Efnnger is the key. He's the bridge. Not only to Matt's personal life but to your disappearance and now this whole 'hyacinth' puzzle. The word was on a paper in his pocket, along with some sort of reference to me. Molina won't get any more specific than that." "Not at you. At her audacity. I just remembered who Gertrud Zelle was."

Temple shook her head. "Yeah, the name does sound vaguely familiar, like I heard it on a PBS station. An opera singer?"

"Only tragic opera, if so. But dance was her ticket to notoriety. Gertrud Zelle was the birth name of the woman who performed as Mata Hari."

"Then this woman is a spy too!"

"Or wants us to think she is. How badly did she slice Devine? I mean, he's still walking among us. Apparently he can still function."

Oh, yes. "A three-inch wound, to the side."

"Interesting. How did she get that close?"

"She intercepted him after work in the parking lot. Obviously, he never expected an assault."

"Why would she do it? Out of pique? This woman is attracting attention to herself. That makes me suspicious. Who or what is she concealing behind the obvious?"

"Effinger is the key. He's the bridge. Not only to Matt's personal life but to your disappearance and now this whole 'hyacinth' puzzle. The word was on a paper in his pocket, along with some sort of reference to me. Molina won't get any more specific than that."

Max nodded, absently pulling the discreet ponytail at his nape.

He had never made love to her with his long hair loose.

Temple realized that she wanted him to. That she needed time to fully experience the change in his appearance, to see him as the

CAT ON A HYACINTH HUNT * 271

lover in an erotic Japanese woodcut, flying hair and robes and elegant masculinity that didn't need Western overstatement, suspended in time.

He had changed. So had she. They needed to settle down and explore those differences.

Since their reunion only a week ago they had behaved like all forcibly separated lovers: coming together again at every opportunity to prove that nothing had changed when everything had. Their sexual chemistry had always been satisfying, but it had been tempered by the small realities of daily life that gave its fiery heights a more static, solid base.

Now they seemed characters in a spy-thriller, meeting clandestinely, conspiring, conjoining and slipping away into shadows again. These stolen moments had an exciting, frenetic sensation, but also felt fevered, desperate, disjointed. They needed timeout, leisure, a time to make love and a time not to make love. They needed everything the current situation was least likely to give them.

"Let's adjourn to someplace more comfortable," Max suggested. "You don't like the opium bed, and I doubt the futon is your cat's pajamas ..."

"Is there a living room in this place?"

Max smiled, and pinched her cheek. So they went there, to sit in matching Chinese black-lacquered chairs and talk.

"I like to think these date back to Orson Welles's day here." Max ran his hands over the ebony-smooth armrests. "A man his size would have welcomed the width as well as the elegant understatement. A misunderstood man. Not the overweening genius they made him be, but a titanic talent who spent himself too soon. He fell in love with fame at an early age, and never escaped it. Not even in death."

"What did you fall in love with at an early age, Max?"

"A woman named Kathleen. A land. A heritage. Danger and death. Caring so much that nothing mattered, which is the greatest self-deception of all."

Max looked at her across the formal room's gulf.

"So now you're a counterterrorist," she said. "Who are the head counterterrorists?"

"Shadows, even to me."

"Who do you 'counter?' "

He sipped the wine he had brought with him. Temple had abandoned wine. In vino Veritas.

And she had imbibed too much Veritas for the time being.

"At first I was anti-IRA," he said. "An odd position for an Irish-American. But they had killed Sean. I was off courting a Green colleen when they did it; they weren't Orangemen, but Greens-men, or else there, but for the grace--the gratuitous cruelty--of God, went I."

Guilt, Temple thought. The glue of the human jigsaw puzzle. Guilt made people more than angels, and far less. It made them human. Confession was not always good for the soul.

Concealment was sometimes a mercy, even from oneself.

"Tell me about the dead men in the casino ceilings."

"The Goliath management was worried about their security being breeched. Nothing they could put their finger on, just unease among the staff, as if they glimpsed something wrong out of the corner of their eyes but never could focus on it. I was asked to penetrate their system, if I could.

"I found the secret watching/listening post in the ceiling, cleverly placed just back and below one of their eye-in-the-sky camera installations. Empty, of course.

"It was cramped even for a midget, but it gave an overview of one of the blackjack tables. I reported it and volunteered to inhabit it one night to see what I could see. My profession involves getting myself into spots that are physically impossible for one of my size ... or length, at least. I had to belly-crawl down an air-conditioning vent to get there and when I did, the hidey-hole was occupied. Just my opening the panel to it dislodged what turned out to be the body that fell to the blackjack table. Of course there was no way to turn around without entering the now-exposed hidey-hole. I had to belly-crawl backwards to get out, and when I reached the mechanical annex, three armed men were waiting for me. Not hotel security forces."

"Max!"

"I fought, I hid, I ran. I knew that I was iced either way. Exposed as a spy if I admitted my hotel assignment, and liable to be in the sights of the setup crew for as long as it took to get rid of me. So I ran as far as I could go."

"Where did you go?"

"What's the place so obvious and predictable and taken for granted that no one ever thinks about it?"

When Temple shook her head, Max opened his empty hand as if presenting something magical. "Canada, haven for draft protestors and rogue magicians."

"What did you do there for so long? How did you survive?"

"I became a corporate magician."

"You? A house . . . wand-waver?"

"I kind of liked it actually. My job was to build morale and encourage creative solutions to problems. Production problems, personnel problems. I was a human resources wizard. I was expected to be the odd man out, and was paid for it."

"I bet you were good at it."

"I was. Surprised me. That there was something legitimate I could do in this world. Could bring home a salary like all the other wage slaves. People told me I helped them."

"An entertainer helps people too. Probably more than a publicist."

"What about an amateur sleuth?"

Temple gave one of those sighs that sounded too large for a person of her small size. Sighs, and size. Homonyms. A crucial clue in her first "case."

"It's just congenital meddling."

"Or congenital caring," Max suggested gently.

"Either way it's a female failing, isn't it? It's not macho like going out every day in a uniform with a gun and a billy club, or in civvies with a gun. It's listening to people. It's 'arranging' things.

It's putting the little details together. I let a killer go."

"Whoa!" Max sat up in his handsome chair. "You and Sherlock Holmes. Talk about an

'amateur.' How? And why?"

"The situation was so muddy. The misunderstandings so tragic. The ultimate victims were so very young. I played God. I decided not to judge. But the killer knows I know. I wonder if paranoia will set in, and I'll pay someday."

Max balanced his forearms on the Chinese chair's alien curves.

Not Chippendale, not Duncan Phyfe, not Queen Anne, quite. He seemed like a mystic aiming at elevation, as if he could float off the physical plane. He was just thinking.

She was struck by his grace, which was mental as well as physical. She awaited his verdict.

"Everything is a choice. Good or ill. A choice. Every day brings events, people, that narrow choice. Sends us down a chute like an animal to the slaughter. We twist and we turn. We buck like hell. And we always wonder if we should have broken for freedom sooner, or appeared tamer and less threatening, or been born an amoeba. My choices separated me from you when it was the last thing I wanted to do. I don't know if I'll ever overcome that.

"You let a murderer go. Your choice will make you look over your shoulder for the rest of your life. Not only for the one you think might mull it over and come after you, but for the one you don't realize you let go, and who will never let you go. I know."