Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (17 page)

Signals Received

Matt watched Temple’s usual wall of blithe good cheer crumble into a shimmer of plaster dust around her.

He suddenly realized that of all of them, she knew nothing of the pervasive threats of Kitty the Cutter. He had confided in Molina. He had confided in Max Kinsella, of all penances the most painful. He had not breathed a word to Temple.

It was in the name of her own protection, but it had isolated her, infantalized her. His enemies and acquaintances he could tell. Temple, whom he most feared and most feared for, he had kept in the dark. And she knew it, sensed it, felt it.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’ll open the door. I can get the groceries in myself.”

“We are not friends —”

She looked away again, in that heartbreakingly unfocused way too proud to show distress.

“— because we are too close to being something else. You know that. It’s always been true.”

Now she didn’t dare look at him, and he found his hopeful, craven brain thinking, thinking…here, this tiny hallway. Not even
she
would,
could
have it bugged. Here. Now. Up against the wall. It would solve every dilemma but sin, and sin seemed such a small fault when hearts and souls were at stake.

“Not friends,” she was saying faintly. “Oh, that’s part of it, you know.”

“I do know. Know more than I ever did before. And now I know that friends is not enough.”

She stared at him, against her better judgment.

He understood he had the power. Just had to use it. He stepped forward, brought himself close to her. She didn’t blink, didn’t flinch, couldn’t.

She’d always known, but had hoped he wouldn’t, because then there’d be no one to say stop. No. The known norm is better than the imagined nirvana.

She knew more than he about what could be. He felt it, though, as he never had before, and his own self-interest was so strong, both subjugated to her and dominant over her, it was like sensing a hurricane in his heart.

His fingertips touched her shoulders.

Just that.

It seemed they stood in some still center while an electric dervish whirled around them.

Impulse mattered, not thought. Feeling, not fear.

He bent his head to hers.

She turned away.

He turned away.

They were closer than ever.

He turned.

She turned.

They couldn’t avoid each other.

Always, always, turning, turning until they came round right.

Temple closed her eyes.

Anything, anything could happen. He could make it happen.

Suddenly the magnetism reversed itself. Or he did. He could make anything happen now, and he chose reversal.

They drew apart, leaned against their separate walls, said nothing.

“I don’t understand,” Temple said, her always dusky voice hoarse now. “But I will someday, won’t I?”

“I hope so.”

“Will I —” She hesitated, almost braced herself for something. “Will I ever understand why you knew that Molina had found my lost ring at a crime scene, and she told you and not me? And why you never told me that she had it?”

If she had wanted to throttle a moment and its aftermath, she had committed bloody murder right now.

“Ring?” he repeated, suddenly remembering the loathed object on his key ring: his own crime-scene memento. Only that crime scene had been his apartment.

“
My
ring. You know, the gorgeous opal-and-diamond-studded band Max got me in New York, that you both saw me wearing when you went together to the Opium Den to see Shangri-La perform.”

“That ring.”

“You make it sound so…common.”

“I don’t mean to. It was police business. Molina told me in confidence. She wanted me to distrust Kinsella more than I did already, maybe use it against him. I wouldn’t be manipulated to hurt you. And then, the circumstances…it was a professional confidence. I didn’t feel I could pass it on.”

“The privilege of the confessional! Great. You were already with Molina that evening. Hand in glove. Why should I ever think you owed anything to me, even honesty?”

“She browbeat me into going with her that night. You know how she’s always dogged both of us about Kinsella, trying to get us to crack, betray him. It was all part of her game plan.”

“That Dragon Lady magician calling me up on stage and then making my ring disappear wasn’t part of Molina’s game plan.”

“No, neither was your complete disappearance from the onstage chamber right after that.”

“The one time I get to be part of audience participation at something,” Temple went on bitterly, “and it turns out to be a kidnap attempt.”

“Maybe worse,” Matt said, his voice darkening. “Nothing we’re talking about is anything to underestimate. You were abducted and that magician and her whole crew vanished. Then your ring was found later near where a woman had been strangled, an ex-magician’s assistant, no less. Molina’s games are not for the heck of it. She’s trying to close down a lot of unsolved cases, and, like it or not, Max Kinsella seems to be at the heart of most of them.”

“So. You’re so busy now, with your own life and times, you should care about any of this, about me?”

“I care more than I can —”

“Wait. Let me finish. Or you do care, hallelujah, you care so much you’d like to see Max slapped in irons and taken away to death row, because then he’d be out of your way.”

“No, Temple. What I care about or don’t care about doesn’t matter. It’s what I’d do. I’d never hurt anyone for my own gain. But I can’t betray a confidence either. Molina told me a piece of police business. I didn’t want to know it. I understood that she was using me, that she was hoping I’d tell you and undermine your confidence in Max, don’t you see? But I didn’t do that. I honored her confidence and by doing that, I avoided being manipulated by her.”

“You didn’t avoid betraying
me
!” Temple’s eyes burned with anger. “If we really were
friends
, you wouldn’t try to protect me by concealing things from me. Maybe Molina was trying to drive you and me apart. Telling one person a secret that leaves another person out is a pretty time-tested way to do that.”

“Molina has no personal interest in all this.”

“Are you sure?”

“Molina? She’s the Great Stone Mountain of the Metropolitan Police Department.”

“Are you sure?”

Matt let his mind pull back, start wondering.

“Why is she so down on Max? Why does she never let up? Does she need a fall guy? Why does she try to use you to split Max and me apart? Does she really want Max? You? You’ve been thinking of her as a job, a function, a career, not as a human being. As a woman. Maybe she has agendas you haven’t even imagined.”

“And if she does, what was her agenda in showing you the ring? Now?”

They both paused, breathless, to consider their own charges.

“‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’” Temple quoted Sir Walter Scott.

“‘When first we practice to deceive’? That’s not what we have here. I don’t think anyone wants to deceive,” Matt said. “But to protect.”

“Protecting means you put yourself above the protected. You know better.”

“It’s a parental role, yes.”

“Or a priest’s?”

“Or an undercover operative’s?”

“Or a policewoman’s?” Temple, laughed, not happily. “I guess lowly PR flacks are stuck being the protectees. Nothing noble and elevating about my job.”

“Temple.”

“I am tired of being protected by people meddling in my life for my own good. It’s my life. I’m allowed to mess it up all by myself.”

“But not to lose it.”

“That’s what you’re really worried about?”

He nodded, unable to speak, to voice the anxiety.

She relaxed a little.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, too. Just like Max and the lieutenant. Join the club. I hate what people do to you for your own good. I hated it when I was five years old and I hate it worse now.”

“It’s worse when they think about doing something to you for their own good, and not yours.”

Her eyes grew suddenly shrewd. “That’s what almost happened a little while ago with you, didn’t it?”

He nodded miserably.

That seemed to cheer her up considerably. “You were being selfish, really?”

“Irresponsible,” he admitted. Almost lethally irresponsible.

“So it wasn’t my own good you were thinking of?”

“For a few, unforgivable seconds, no.”

Temple let out a huge breath. “Well. At last! Somebody who’s acting like a human being around me. What a relief!” Her voice grew mischievous, if not quite flirtatious. “We’ll have to try it again sometime.”

Matt bent to pick up her groceries.

“I’ll take the stuff in. Just go while you’re ahead. That’s what they say at the craps tables.”

He did.

He had never been so close to the perfect end of the fairy tale, but he realized that the witch would have been waiting to extract her price anyway. Temple wasn’t his way out, no matter that she was the most tempting way out. He’d have to find another one.

That’s when he knew that there were no perfect endings, just endless wishes that there were.

Disappearance Inc.

I have spent the night not panicking.

This is hard to do when you are locked in a closet in a strange house that is hidden behind a forgotten cemetery. Especially when sharing said closet with you is a bunch of spooky magician’s gear and a stiff stretched out on the floor like a rug du jour.

I mean this guy — and I have pussyfooted enough over the
corpus delicti
in the dark to know that it is a guy — is harder than the concrete they wrapped around Ugly Hugo Manicotti’s tootsies before taking him to diving school in Lake Mead back in ’59.

Eventually I settle down to the head’s-up detecting I am noted for and realize that my closet corpse is so wooden for a reason: he is a giant-size Pinocchio, a mere dummy probably used in some body-switching illusion or another.

This is what comes of taking a supposed relative for a partner: the usually canny operative loses all sense of proportion when the partner in question goes missing.

I revise my previous conclusions. If Miss Louise had figured out the dead guy is really just deadwood, she would have had no compunction about moving on from our point of entry to other, more interesting, and thus more perilous, places. We two need to have a serious talk about not pressing forward on our own, leaving the senior partner in the dark quite literally.

I tromp over Dead Fred’s nose, which is not prevaricatingly long (although the dummy maker must have had a sick sense of humor as something else on this anatomically correct stiff is), and nose the door open a smidge with my own admirably proportioned schnoz.

That it obliges my nudge tells me Miss Louise has gone this way. I slip out into the semidark and pull the door almost shut again.

Of course I am at a loss, while Miss Louise has obviously scouted this terrain previously.

I am really going to bawl her out for numerous acts unbecoming to a partner when I find her. I eye the room. It is vast, shadowy, and smells of mothballs and dustballs. I am guessing it is a mostly unused storeroom. The Cloaked Conjuror had hit Las Vegas like a leopard-spotted tornado only months ago. I imagine clandestinely finding and purchasing this hideout was a difficult job, and did not leave much time for dusting every nook and cranny.

Housekeeping is such a bore anyway, which is why it is better done by the female of the species. I note with disgust that my particular female of the species has carefully used her fluffy rear member to blur her distinctive footprints across the wood-plank flooring.

I must follow in her footsteps, but more slowly, lacking the builtin feather duster, as my aft member is long, strong, and buzz-cut. See what I mean about females being suited for domestic tasks?

After backing to the door and doctoring my trail with dust-busting swipes from my front mitts, I am able to nose another door open and survey a long hallway with the kind of railing that nasty Damien kid from the
Omen
films would love to push an unwary relative over.

I am nobody’s unwary relative, not even Miss Louise’s, so I look sharp both ways before pulling the door almost shut behind me — I believe in rapid retreats — and tiptoeing down the long, thread-bare carpet that looks like something Queen Elizabeth tossed out at Windsor Castle. After the fire.

Wherever my wandering waif has gone, it is somewhere in a decaying mansion filled with the ancient traces of — I sniff the air — rats, bats, and…cats!

Somehow I do not believe that Miss Midnight Louise all by her lovely self in a few hours has accounted for the distinct attar of cats I sense in the air. Nor is that a lingering scent of days gone by, as is the essence of rat and bat.

These are contemporary cats. Alarmingly current cats, and of a strange, potent, malodorous breed I have not encountered before, not even in my wide and long travels.

That darn brat! She has rushed in where her elders would hesitate to tread, and now I have to get her out of trouble before anything drastic happens. I sniff again, though I am sadly lacking the specialized skills of even the smallest breed of dog. Ah! A waft of willfulness. An odor of the nunnery. A scent of superiority. Midnight Louie has his quarry and he will hunt her down.