Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (46 page)

“Relax,” says Miss Louise. “She did not lay a lavender-point glove on me. Besides, you are old enough to know that you cannot believe everything that a feline fatale says.”

She looks up from her grooming at the Big Cats. “Thanks, boys, but I had her on the run even before she saw you.”

Not one mention of my contemplated desperate dash to sacrifice myself! Talk about ingratitude.

Ma Barker stalks forward. “Very impressive, young lady, but you could interrupt your bath to give your elders a nod of thanks.”

“Are you claiming to be an elder?” she asks.

“Only if you are claiming to be a descendant of my son.”

Here they both glance at me.

“I do not know about that,” Miss Midnight Louise says with a hard look at me, “but I do have a partner who had the smarts to break me out of prison so I had a chance to whip the vibrissae off that witch, so I will say thank you very much to all concerned. Now I really must wash that purported curare out of my hair. Although, according to my connoisseur’s tongue from a life of attending Dumpster sales, it is no more toxic than Revlon’s Mean Green Glitter nail enamel that is available at Wal-Mart.”

While my jaw drops, everybody does not quite laugh, but would have, had they been human enough to indulge in such bizarre expressions of amazement.

The Morning After

Max awoke, still dressed at three
A.M.
, in Temple’s bed, with Midnight Louie.

He felt stiff all over, in all the wrong places.

The night lights plugged into outlets on all four walls for Master Midnight’s nocturnal convenience cast a moonlit glow on the room.

Midnight Louie blinked reflective amber irises at him — proceed with caution — then the black cat assumed one of those show-offy, impossibly limber cat positions — hindquarters stretching in one direction, extended forelegs reaching in the other, torso torqued in between like a twisted rope.

The black cat yawned, wide and long, flashing white fangs and crimson mouth. He almost seemed to be sticking out a tongue at his crippled human littermate.

Max refused to rise to the bait.

He had earned his strains and bruises, and Temple had tended his scraped face last night with wincing care while they exchanged war stories.

“So my pepper spray was ready for the rescue?” Max asked, glad he had been there to defend her in absentia, somehow. “And Nadir finished that guy off? I would have been there to do it if not for that damn Molina.”

“Rafi was a real little gentleman about the whole thing…other than decking the Tyler kid. What would make a teenager into a crazed killer?”

“Rafi?”

“Whatever.”

“I’m sure that the newspapers will dig up the usual background predictors, as the sociologists say. Abusive family situation. Antisocial history. Assumption that women are there to be used and knocked around.
Rafi
!”

“He actually was kind of okay to me…or Tess the Thong Girl, even before the parking lot incident.”

Max just shook his head. Which hurt. So he stopped. “Crime and punishment make for strange bedfellows.”

“Speaking of which, I can’t believe you and Molina duked it out. I mean, she’s a cop, but she’s a woman.”

“Barely. She is a pretty good sparring partner, though.”

“It must have killed you to let her handcuff you.”

“Being handcuffed is second nature to me. Letting her do it…yeah, that stung. But I couldn’t have put her away without getting pretty rough, and I knew you were in trouble and it’d be easier to get out of the handcuffs and custody than a felonious assault charge on a cop, so….”

“Poor Max! Sacrificing your pride for nothing, when you heard over the radio that ‘Pepper Tess’ had bagged the baddie. I’d give anything to see Molina’s face when she heard that the stripper killer had been stopped by yours truly.”

“The incoming news bulletin certainly made my rapid exit from the handcuffs and the car easy.”

“That must have fried her fajitas! I not only get the killer, but you get away. She was left with nothing.
Nada
!”

“It’s not becoming to gloat, Temple.”

“Since when?”

“You’re right. It’s most becoming. I’m glad one of the three of us is in a position to gloat, and that it’s you, and that you’re all right. And when I’m feeling better — ow! That stings!”

“It’s hydrogen peroxide. It’s supposed to sting. Things that heal you are supposed to sting.”

Max didn’t say anything more about what he’d do when he felt better, lecture her or love her. He just took her hand and kissed it.

“Truer words were never spoken.”

Lieutenant C. R. Molina tossed and turned in her old double bed at home. Three o’clock in the morning and she couldn’t sleep.

She had worked late enough to know that the gathering reports on Tyler Dain did not give her the sense of closure she had hoped for in finding the Stripper Killer. A kid had done it? He was old enough to try as an adult, but that never quieted the unease a young perpetrator brought to the surface in society, all the way through the police and courts structure, like an ugly undertow in the ocean showing its hidden power. He had confessed to the strip club attacks, including the Cher Smith murder. He was cocky, proud of it.

That still left Gloria Fuentes’s parking-lot killing unsolved, and a lot of other questions unanswered, most of them pertaining to magic. Fuentes had been a magician’s assistant years ago. Magic also clung to the apparent ritual murder of Jefferson Mangel, the university professor killed among his collection of great magician posters. Missing from the collection? Any trace of the Mystifying Max’s admittedly spectacular career. Max Kinsella was the missing link, all right, behind a lot of unsolved crimes in Las Vegas over the past year, and who knew where else, when?

Magic was a boyhood hobby that offered the illusion of power and secret knowledge. Some boys never grew up. Kinsella was one, always hinting that his mysterious past had some clandestine purpose.

Boys could be so dangerous when they reached that cusp between adolescence and adulthood cherishing a secret sense of power. Like Tyler Dain in his sound-proof Peeping Tom booth, who played the music the strippers danced to and came to consider them puppets who should dance to the needs of his immature lust. Girls that age also were walking time bombs, but usually because they often harbored a secret sense of helplessness.

She pictured Mariah, asleep with the tiger-striped cats in her bedroom and surrounded by Technicolor stuffed animals, visions of boy bands dancing in her head. Almost twelve and already hormones were erupting like invisible pimples. A sudden yen for pierced ears. Belly button next? Sass and backtalk becoming common household static. Sending her to Catholic school retarded the inevitable, but didn’t stop it.

What would it do to Mariah if she discovered the father her mother had always said was dead was alive and was a loser like Rafi Nadir? What would it do to Mariah’s
mother
, she thought wryly, if she had to ’fess up herself for a change? To admit to lying to her daughter. No. Why couldn’t Rafi have crashed and burned completely? Died or stayed in L.A.? She had never pegged him as a killer, just as a controller. She would never have tried to keep him out of the stripper cases otherwise. So she wasn’t surprised that Tyler Dain and not Rafi Nadir had killed Cher Smith. No, Rafi was only a danger to her. And Mariah. And he didn’t have to raise a fist or lift a little finger to be a threat. Just existing did the job nicely.

Molina pictured having to face him again after all these years. The thought made her insides writhe, her hands into fists. Just thinking about him brought back a younger, dumber, weaker version of herself. She didn’t fear facing Rafi so much as reverting to a state of vulnerability she’d struggled to escape for many years.

And if they ever met face-to-face, she would indeed be weak: a police officer who’d cut all the corners off procedure to bury a link to a personal issue. Rafi Nadir could ruin her, as he’d tried to do thirteen years ago, and failed. Now, after what she’d done to ensure he stayed out of her and Mariah’s lives, he could ruin her utterly.

She spent a few minutes savoring the bitter fact that she’d have been better off confronting the problem directly.

She turned over in bed again, her mind moving with her body into yet another uncomfortable position.

Her encounter with Max Kinsella had been a complete failure too, a humiliating downer.

Everything the man said and did was calculated, like that attempt to eroticize their conflict. What an amoral human chameleon! He had to be guilty of something, and she would find out what and then she would nail him for good.

Meanwhile, she had a souvenir of the evening: the memory of how he’d ducked those handcuffs and left her chained to her own steering wheel. Of course she’d whomped him good first, but she had an ugly feeling he’d let her because it would be easier to escape her in a moving car than in a parking lot. He’d been right in insisting that Temple Barr needed help, but he wasn’t the one who should have been giving it.

She mused for an another really ugly moment on where they’d both be now if Temple Barr had not fought free of Tyler Dain to use her pepper spray but had been found dead the next morning.

Hell. In hell. And hating each other even more, if that was possible. It reminded her of the infernal, eternal triangle in Jean-Paul Sartre’s hell-set play,
No Exit
.

Things, Molina decided, could not possibly get any worse.

At least that was one ray of hope in a dirty world getting grimier every day.

She hoped to hell that Kinsella had as hard a time getting some shut-eye tonight as she did.

Max left Temple at 3:20
A.M.
, sleeping like the dead, which she almost had been.

Magicians can do that, slip away and not be noticed. He intended only to be gone for a couple of Temple’s deepest sleep-drenched hours.

Midnight Louie apparently never slept. The black cat watched Max go through slitted green eyes. He wasn’t about to squeal on a fellow creature of the night, but he just might judge him.

The early-morning air kissed Max a cool fifty-five degree hello as opened the French door to the patio and then worked his way down the Circle Ritz’s conveniently stepped exterior. Art Deco had a lot to recommend it. To a second-story man, its step pyramid tendencies were the most pleasing.

The Maxima purred like a panther as he started it. He idled silently past Temple’s new red Miata and the silver blob of Electra’s Elvis-edition VW bug, glided beyond the white Probe Matt Devine used now. They were all in transition, he realized, changing emotional models and personal identities like cars.

The Hesketh Vampire, chained in the shed like a lone wolf, called to him with a howl higher than human sound as he exited the parking lot.

In mere minutes he was parked outside the bone-white walls of Los Muertos.

The presumed dead remained still beneath their ersatz tomb-stones. This was Disneyland Macabre, this phony cemetery designed to hide the residence of a magician whose career was built on mocking other magicians. Max would defend the Cloaked Conjuror’s life to the death, but he didn’t have to like the way he made his living, on the harvest of an honorable land of dead magicians and their once-spectacular illusions.

Magicians were like spiders: you had to keep spinning or the web would fracture and fall. And you with it.

He climbed and leaped down from the wall, thankful for a cushion of expensive sod. He noted the absence of the guardian Rottweilers he’d been prepared to deal with.

Odd, but now he could cross the grounds like a shadow, on foot.

Soon the plink of water on carefully arranged stones told him he was where he wanted to be.

With the big cats.

Mr. Lucky came forward first, rubbing and purring like a housecat, his muscular black-panther side hard enough to knock over an unprepared man. Max was never unprepared among the big cats.

Osiris the leopard kept a wary distance at first, then he too swaggered closer, making a soundless snarl that Max understood was not a threat but a greeting.

Max crouched like the big cats and they rubbed closer, leaving their scents on his shoulders and face. The dogs, if they were loose, would stay away from him now.

The big cats were show-biz veterans and magicians’ familiars, used to the spotlights and the long, deep well of darkness before and after. They understood Max as he understood them. Domesticated and wild. Social and asocial. Caged and free. Life was a compromise. So was death.

They permitted him to stroke their furred sides as they paced back and forth, wrapping him in acceptance as if he were a domestic cat, welcoming him to the litter, the cage, the spotlight.

He stood, caressing their wide-cheeked faces, lulled by their high-volume purring, more a rumble. He had come only to see that they were well housed, happy, living as they wanted to live after their various captivities, both benign and malign. That they were themselves, that he had been right to choose the Cloaked Conjuror as their best hope for long, content lives.