Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (16 page)

“Temple.” Max turned her to look at him. “This is the first major purchase you’ve made since we’ve been together without asking me about it.”

“Well, yeah. I suppose so.”

“I really can’t fit into a Miata.”

“You can’t? Oh. I didn’t think of that.”

“Oh.”

“But…we always drive places in your car. Or cars. Or whatever They leave for you.”

“It won’t always be like that. Haven’t you been listening to me?”

“Yes, but the Storm was worn out and I finally had some real income from my semipermanent floating PR work for the Crystal Phoenix and the Jersey Joe Jackson attraction is done and open and a big success and I thought I deserved something…and this seemed like fun at the moment.”

“You used to think that what we did was fun at the moment. You used to consult me about big decisions.”

“It’s a…little car.”

“It’s a big issue. I don’t fit in it. Are you sending me a message?”

“Max, no! Don’t be paranoid. I wasn’t even thinking about you.”

The words hung there, an intended reassurance hoisted on its own petard.

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” Temple said.

“No one ever does,” Max said, and shut the door on any further discussion.

Temple felt awful. She wanted to blame Molina for it, but that was too simple.

The car looked like a toy as she approached it. Silly. Too small for anyone but a shrunken Alice in Wonderland.
Eat me
. Humble pie, that’s what she should eat. She felt about two inches tall, and short stature was such an issue with her that feeling small meant she felt really, really guilty. Because she was.

She’d only been thinking of herself when she’d bought the Miata, and maybe not very maturely at that.

Despite the sun-warmed sidewalk, her feet in their Mootsie’s Tootsies high-rise slides felt ice cold. This was a lot of money to spend on a whim. An impractical whim. A whim that hurt a significant other’s feelings. Max always acted so strong she sometimes forgot that he had feelings to hurt.

She got in, arranged herself and her tote bag, glanced at Max’s stoic house facade. Here she sat, in a brand-new car, with a brand-new clue in her tote bag, and she felt horrible.

The only thing to do when troubled was to get on with the routine of life. She started the car and headed back toward the Circle Ritz. She needed to stop at the Lucky’s store first. Buy groceries. Her least favorite chore. She saw a lot more chocolate in her future than was healthy for her figure.

Forty-five minutes later Temple stood on a sun-baked asphalt parking lot, her arms cradling brown paper bags, bulging plastic bags dangling from both wrists, wondering where to put her groceries.

One brown bag could share the passenger seat with her tote bag if she squeezed them together and belted them in. The second brown bag and a couple plastic bags could crowd into the well behind the seats. The other two plastic bags full of bottled water could go in the trunk, such as it was.

Now. What would hold the groceries down while she whizzed along the street? Time to put up the top, roll up the windows, and turn on the AC. This would be one buttoned-down convertible for the trip home.

Misgivings nagged her the whole way. How could she have bought a car that Max didn’t fit in, much less a few bags of groceries? She had bought in to a sales pitch without considering the practicalities. She had been suckered.

Her back straightened against the seat back as the AC wafted the curls off her face.

Maybe the car wasn’t the bill of goods she’d been sold.

Maybe it was Molina who was the slippery saleswoman. Maybe her whole mood had shifted at the woman’s dire predictions about Max, and her cruel revelation of the whereabouts of the ring. Come on, the Storm hadn’t been just Max’s size, either, although she had bought that car before she knew him.

No, the question was
why
Molina was bearing down so hard on Max right now. Why was she warning Temple? To get her to do something. What? Question Max. Break up with him. Throw him off balance. Distract him from Molina’s moves against him.

Max had warned her. Had said Molina could have motives Temple might not even guess at.

That he wouldn’t say more only meant that Temple had many more puzzles than Ophiuchus to solve.

Smoke Signals

Hoping this was the about-to-be-perfect end of a perfectly dreadful day, Temple zoomed into the Circle Ritz lot. She parked the Miata as close to the door as she could while still sheltering it under the big old palm tree’s erratic shade.

As she stood beside the car extracting her groceries from various nooks and crannies, she heard another engine pull into the lot: Electra’s old pink Probe, now Matt’s, and now painted the color of a white sepulcher.

Temple brightened as she balanced the two brown bags, her tote bag’s considerable weight swinging from the crook of her right elbow. Her key ring was in her right fist.

Great. Matt was here just in time to help her with the bags.

He exited the Probe, locked it, and thrust his keys into the pocket of his khaki pants. Looking neither right nor left, but at the ground, he rapidly crossed the asphalt to the building’s side door.

Temple opened her mouth to hail him, except that his haste, his almost deliberate avoidance of looking anywhere near her direction made her freeze in chill indecision.

In those moments of hesitancy, Matt was through the door and gone.

Talk about being the Invisible Woman! How could he have missed the sight of a strange red Miata in the almost-empty lot?

Fact was, he couldn’t have. He must have spotted it as he turned in, and he could hardly miss her.

But he had.

Temple trudged toward the building’s glass door, the darkness inside allowing the glass to reflect her overburdened figure.

She looked like Little Orphan Annie disguised as a bag lady. Or maybe Typhoid Mary. Matt had seemed distracted lately, and he did work late hours and travel out of state for speaking engagements. He was semifamous now. Guess Mr. Midnight no longer had time to hobnob with the locals.

She shifted the bags to one side as she prepared to grab the door handle and shoulder her way into the cool darkness beyond.

It opened of its own invisible accord, like the eerie door at Max’s house. Temple dodged inside before her bags slipped and she found them lifting out of her arms.

“Sorry,” Matt said, scanning the parking lot behind her as the door swung shut. “I was busy thinking about tonight’s show and I didn’t notice you out there. Is that a new car or something?”

“Ye-es! Thanks. You like the car?”

“Fine,” he said, juggling grocery bags. Not the kind of tribute that the new owner of a racy red convertible expected. Matt still seemed in a hurry. “Can you press the elevator button? Thanks.”

“Well,” Temple commented, “everyone around here was switching cars — Electra with your Elvismobile and you with her Probe, so I thought I’d trade the Storm for a Miata.”

He nodded, looking over her shoulder, then at the bronze pointer above the door that showed what floor the elevator was on.

Forget about Matt not paying proper attention to her new car, Temple thought. He wasn’t paying
any
attention to
her
!

What was she today, a poor cousin of Typhoid Mary, Miss Poison Ivy?

Before she could say anything, the elevator door ground open and Matt leaped aboard. “Hit the floor button, would you?” he instructed.

No, she was Miss Elevator Operator.

They both seemed stunned into silence on the brief ride up one floor.

But once the elevator doors parted, Matt was again peering up and down the hall like a wary Doberman.

It was like he was afraid to be seen with her.

Surely he didn’t think that her resumed relationship with Max meant she couldn’t have male friends? That was the problem. She didn’t have a clue as to what was going on with Matt these days. Something had come between them, and she didn’t know what or why, only that she felt horribly left out on all fronts: with Lieutenant C. R. Molina, the Mystifying Max Kinsella, and now Mr. Midnight Matt Devine.

Temple was the youngest of a family of five brothers and the only girl. She ought to be used to feeling left out by now, but in fact the older she got the worse she felt about it. Would she never count? Was she always “too little” to tell, to take along, to trust, to treat like a mature adult?

“Temple?”

Matt was looking down at her, peering into her face as if reading some of her distress. Professional PR lady couldn’t allow that!

“Yeah, what?”

“Uh, could you take your keys and open the door before I drop these jam-packed bags.”

“Oh. I guess I overdid it at the store. I was…distracted.”

“You? Buy groceries when you’re distracted?”

“Well, you’ve been pretty distracted yourself lately.”

“Busy,” he said quickly.

“Right. Me too.”

She still didn’t move toward the door, but he started to brush past her as if expecting it to open on its own.
Open sesame
, wasn’t that the formula? But Temple didn’t think any magic phrases would work anymore, certainly not on her door, and maybe not on her, ever again.

j

The grocery bags ended up crushed between them so they actually had to look each other in the eye — eyes, which were so evasive and edgy and anxious that Matt took a giant step backward against the opposite wall and stood there like the boy with his finger in the dyke keeping out all the floodwaters of the North Sea, except he looked more like a carry out boy from Lucky’s.

“Put…the…bags…down,” she paraphrased Gene Wilder from
Young Frankenstein
.

Matt just looked bewildered. It was a vintage movie and Temple imagined one didn’t see many movies in a Roman Catholic seminary unless they were about Lourdes or Joan of Arc.

But he put the bags down on the floor, propped up by the wall, and he put his hands in his pants pockets. And stood there, looking Brad Pitt-adorable if Brad Pitt had been really, really good-looking.

Temple leaned against her opposite wall and looked away. “It’s been a bad day.”

“I got that.”

“First I had to listen to Molina tell me the sky was falling and then my new car decided it wouldn’t even hold my groceries.”

“Groceries? There won’t be that many groceries if you return to your usual ways. You’re not exactly Wolfgang Puck, you know.”

“You mean Martha Stewart.”

“If I was referring to your whole domestic mise-en-scène, yes, I would have meant that.”

“‘Mise-en-scène’? That is giving my life way too high a profile. How about misery-en-scène?”

“Temple, what’s wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing. Max is in trouble so deep he won’t talk to me about it, though Molina will, but nothing’s wrong. You’re running around with a sketch artist and won’t talk to me, or even look at me, but nothing’s wrong. Molina’s gloating like a vampire at a blood bank and
she
won’t tell me anything except that I’m moving in all the wrong directions, but nothing’s wrong.

“There.” Temple folded her arms and stared sullenly at her grocery bags slumping against the opposite wall next to Matt’s khaki-clad legs. “Nothing’s wrong.”

He was silent for so long she was almost tempted to look up at him, but resisted. She felt very rebellious all of a sudden.

“I can see,” he said finally, “why you’d think I was avoiding you, but it’s just that late-night schedule of mine and the travel.”

“That’s a lie, Matt. You don’t lie well. You want to avoid me.”

“I don’t
want
to —”

“Listen, you’re free to do whatever you need to. I just thought that we were friends —”

“No.”

She paused, startled into looking up.

“We might have been friends once, we might be friends once again. But now. Friends. We are not friends.”

The wave of disbelief, of unallayed hurt that struck like the opposite wall moving and smashing her between it and the plaster at her back, was a tsunami.

Nothing, she saw, was what she had thought it was.

Lives were being lived apart from her, separate from her, and they were not what she assumed them to be.

Molina was right. She knew nothing.