On his order, the bar produced two princely looking, and costing, martinis embellished with gourmet onions, and more of Max’s big bills went to the cause.
“What flavor martinis are those?” the cocktail waitress asked.
“They’re called Open Sesames.”
“That’s a new one,” she commented, shrugging.
“Now, head backstage,” he told her.
She raised both eyebrows. “We only go there on orders.”
“These are my orders, and we’ll be as welcome as whales … once we get in.”
Max followed her through the casino, donning the white Star Wars helmet with black eye visor he’d also bought from the bartender.
Now they were a cocktail waitress and her personal Star trooper guard en route to a Very Important Prestidigitator Max wanted to surprise.
The girl glided past the hotel’s huge theater and down a low-lit side ramp most people would overlook. She paused at a heavy steel door, with a keypad entry showing both letters and numbers.
Max thought he knew his man, but he thought some more. His fingertips tapped a rhythm on eight buttons. Nothing happened. The girl sighed heavily behind him. He tried three more combinations. The fifth unlocked the door, which he pulled open to admit her before him. Always the gentleman, but this was the riskiest part of the plan.
Two heavyset men who probably held black belts in several varieties of exotic martial arts and also held high-caliber automatic weapons bracketed the door.
They didn’t have a silver-metal almost naked girl, though, and from the looks on their stolid faces, this was the best part of their day.
Knowing her power, the waitress approached without hesitation. From the next look on their faces, she had smiled at them.
“Legacy liquor-crafted cocktails from Mr. Akihiro on a radiant performance,” Max intoned in an insufferably snobby English accent. The major Vegas hotels could charge thousands for drinks made from obscenely aged liquors.
Max knew their voices would be piped into the next room. So did the cocktail waitress, who probably believed this entire farce was the gesture of an immensely rich “whale.”
The interior keypad allowed the door to be cracked enough for Max to again usher his glamorous guide right through.
And like that, he was in the fortress of the Cloaked Conjuror’s dressing room.
As the door shut automatically behind them, Max took the cocktail tray and placed it on the dressing table. The next moment, he wrenched off the helmet and made a deep bow with it playing the part of a cavalier’s hat.
“Yo, Max Kinsella!” The man in the massive easy chair rose slightly. “Testing my security again and finding it lacking. I’ll have to put you on retainer.”
Max gave another courtly bow. “I live to serve.”
“What did you use to take out my doormen, a Vulcan neck pinch? A bit physical for you, isn’t that?”
“Nothing crude and violent. My intercepting you coming offstage last time made that route null and void, so I improvised with a lovely distraction, the trick of our common trade.”
“Jolly good.”
The waitress flashed Max an approving look and offered another to the Cloaked Conjuror, who’d retained his helmetlike but animalistic head mask after leaving the stage for the night.
“Have a seat, and your gorgeous cocktail waitress friend can fetch you any drink you desire.”
“Sparkling water,” Max ordered. “In fact, I see some on ice on your dressing table. That’ll do,” he told the waitress.
He fancied he would have seen CC’s eyebrows rising if the magician hadn’t been wearing the head-encompassing mask.
“You a teetotaler suddenly?” CC asked, incredulous. Max was probably the only drinking buddy he had.
“Just for the moment.” Max accepted the Baccarat crystal goblet showcasing totally unalcoholic bubbles fizzing like mad.
When the heavy door shut behind the departing cocktail waitress, Max set down the glass and leaned toward CC. “I followed you following her last night.”
“Me? Out following someone?” The mask’s voice-altering mechanism made CC’s laugh sound like a pack of Santa Clauses on a toot. “Max, you’re good, but you’re not so good you can follow a figment of your imagination.”
“The figment of my imagination was my first thought about the identity of the portly guy who trekked from the Goliath to the Treasure Island to the abandoned Neon Nightmare to the New Millennium here. I actually thought at first it might be Gandolph.”
“And why wouldn’t it be? He’s a foxy fellow and could have led you a merry chase.”
“He was shot and killed in Belfast a few weeks ago.”
“God, no.” CC slumped back in his chair, the sagging of his costumed shoulders conveying sorrow, but in an exaggerated way, like a forlorn clown. “I’m sorry, Max. I know how much he meant to you.”
“Then take off that mask and talk to me face-to-face.”
The Cloaked Conjuror put his bare hands to the striped sides of his leonine face mask. Then they paused. “You broke in here, but you’re also going to have to break out, if I say you can’t go.”
“I’m aware of that.” Max finally drank some water, never taking his eyes off CC and the mask at his graceful fingertips. Magicians were used to making flourishes.
“Risk.” CC pulled off the headpiece. “Always your long suit, Max. I envied you that. My risks are well cloaked, and I don’t have any sense of personal credit when I win.”
“I’m not after credit. I’m after justice and truth.” Max heard himself and laughed. “And the American way.”
“You’d make a good Superman, but I don’t think red and blue are your colors.” CC chuckled, setting his iconic headpiece on the dressing table.
Black greasepaint circled his eyes and nose so they’d blend with the mask, and red surrounded his mouth, which made him look like a part-time member of Kiss. Sweat shone in his hairline. Max doubted it was fresh.
“Cheers,” said CC, leaning forward to click his drink glass with Max’s. He sat back. “So how did Garry Randolph come to be shot in Northern Ireland?”
“We weren’t just magicians when we toured the Continent years ago.”
“That was such a lucky gig for a young pup like you. I was doing birthday parties and nursing homes. Then, years later, you came back and hit Vegas like a storm with that strobe light and walking-on-air act of yours. Why’d you vanish after your first year? You must have had offers bigger than the Goliath by then?”
“I did.” Max sipped fizz water, feeling his throat tighten. To get info, you had to give info. First rule of manipulation. “Also several firm offers to leave the planet. Garry and I were undercover counterterrorists during our tour of Europe. I’d run afoul of the IRA when my cousin was blown up in a pub bombing, and they’ve been after me ever since.”
“No shit.” CC was shocked to the soles of his five-inch platform shoes.
“So now you know why I slink around Las Vegas like a cartoon spy character. I have a lot at stake. Now I want to know why you slink around like a bad cartoon spy character and how long this has been going on.”
“What? You’re hallucinating, Max. You don’t know what I look like out of mask and makeup and this costume, not to mention the padded body armor because of all the threats on my life. You thought you were seeing Gandolph, Garry Randolph. That shows you’re a bit off your rocker, and I don’t blame you.”
Max got up, got an empty glass, and poured the Grey Goose vodka on a side table into it straight.
CC tensed as Max moved, yet kept very still.
Then Max poured the vodka into his sparkling water. “Not exactly a James Bond–approved martini, but it’ll do. Yes, I am a bit off my rocker. Someone tried to kill me and racked up my legs and memory.”
“You … walk just fine.” CC frowned his puzzlement at where this was going. “And you remember me.”
“I remember bits and pieces of back then and back now
, and bits and pieces of people. Confession time. I always admired your guts in making an act out of exposing other magicians’ tricks.” Max settled in the chair as if for a long winter’s nap, stretching out his legs. “Those ticked-off magicians are short-sighted. They’ll still get audiences trying to see them do what you show they do, and the audiences still won’t see through everything.”
“I never exposed one of your specialties.”
“I appreciated that. That’s why I’ve been acting as your guardian angel.”
“I didn’t know about your double life, Max, but I’ve always felt a kinship with you, probably because I sensed you had your own secrets. You understood my isolation and loneliness, and I sensed that in you.”
“Soul brothers.” Max leaned forward to butt glass rims. “But you’re not at the top of my save list. My ex-girl is, for instance.”
“You do pretty well for a multi-client guardian agent. I get that totally.” CC sighed, then took a three-swallow hit of straight vodka. “I had a girl. Why is your ex an ‘ex’?”
“I don’t quite remember, mercifully.” Max eyed the uneasy mix of liquor and water in his glass, not a shaken or stirred cocktail but two elements in opposition. “I think I felt she was safer without me.”
CC stared past him to the metal door and nodded. “Yeah. We’re both targets. Our survival can come at the risk of collateral damage.”
“Yet you’re out in plain clothes prowling the Strip after your act.”
“Damn it, Max! I’m cooped in this heavy, hot, itchy false skin five nights a week, three to five hours depending on the day of the week. I need to get out to breathe.”
“You have that big estate out on Sunset Road.”
“Big for a prison yard.” He shifted his sturdy frame, and his mood changed. “So what’s new?”
“What’s new is that I think we’re in the same boat on significant others too, and I hadn’t realized until last night that you were in a position to do something about it … in fact, anything you damn well please.” Las Vegas was a place where no one knew his face.
“Am I?” The man’s laugh was bitter. “Can I bring back the dead? Is that a trick I can work into my act? Maybe you can do that, Max Kinsella, Mr. Mystifying Max, magician and IRA target and counter-spy. You can’t bring back Gandolph.”
Max saw the Cloaked Conjuror was doffing his masks, getting down to a face-peel of the soul. He shut his eyes, accessing his own. “I saw him die.”
“I saw her die.”
Max took a deep breath. This was probably the most important interview of his life, and he didn’t know where it was going except it was someplace he damn well didn’t want to be.
“Look,” Max said. “I don’t know your name—and I’ve tried to find it. With that greasepaint mask you lard on beneath the headpiece—black, white, red, it’d be like trying to ID a clown from his makeup. I don’t really know what you look like, not enough to give the police for a BOLO. In fact, the police find me a highly suspicious character. What I also don’t know is if we’re in this together, because the woman you followed the other night is the devil in snakeskin who indirectly killed my cousin Sean, and maybe Gandolph directly. What have you got against her?”
“Devil is right.” CC turned to the mirror and began swiping cold cream over his face with a tissue, wiping off sweat and greasepaint in such hard repetitive strokes that Max winced for his skin. The man of masks was scraping himself raw.
Max knew that feeling. He’d been doing that himself since the age of seventeen when Sean was killed. He let CC talk. It was a monologue to the real man in his mirror anyway, to the meaty, middle-aged face in his mirror. Ordinary was a good disguise too.
“She seemed like a rich amateur, Max. A hanger-on. A groupie. We magicians don’t get many of those besides wannabe adolescent boys. Maybe we’re supposed to be satisfied by the hot babes in our acts.” He glanced at Max. “I know, you didn’t have any assistants, except feathered. But she brought me Shang.” CC’s smile was rueful. “And Shang brought me her furred Siamese cat, Hyacinth. Damn thing ran away, after her death.”
“Wait. The woman I’m after, who’s after me, wasn’t Shangri-La?”
“Sometimes she got herself up as Shang. They had similar body types, but Shang was fine-boned, more graceful, a true tiger lily of a girl. She worshipped this woman, this Rebecca.”
Max recognized Kathleen O’Connor’s latter-day persona, based on the amoral and manipulative psychopath in the novel of the same name. Rebecca.
He couldn’t restrain a shocked move.
“You hate her too.” CC’s voice contained wonder, and hope.
“Hate isn’t the word. I know her for an enemy. Once we were lovers, for a day.”
CC blinked, his eyelashes oily with cold cream. “That witch?”
“I was seventeen, and no judge. I’ve long suspected she knew my cousin was in harm’s way, and seduced me to safety … and a lifetime of guilt. That’s her modus operandi, to ‘take away’ love and life.”
CC set his glass down so hard on the dressing table, the fine crystal cracked. “She did that with me, dear God. Her games left Shang dangling by a thread during our act. I know you were there, guardian angel. I know you did everything to save Shang from the fatal cut bungee cord, but even you couldn’t do it. At least you tried.”
“I didn’t know then there were … two. I thought I was saving Kathleen. Ironic. I questioned trying to save this woman, but my reflexes betrayed me.” Max shut his eyes. “And so another of her victims perished. Shang had been set up as a body double. We often use them. I’m still not sure if yours, Barry, fell or was pushed from the top of your set. This woman has used body doubles before to deceive the living and cheat death. Shang’s not the only one who’s died in that woman’s demented script of vengeance.”
“Vengeance? Hers? That’s crazy. We need to avenge ourselves on her.”
Max recalled the horrific childhood abuse he and Garry had discovered she’d survived in Ireland. “She was sinned against early and often.”
“Shang was the only woman I ever loved.” CC pounded his padded chest in emphasis. “I’ve used eight private detectives to find this vicious woman from her looks alone. She shows up on film of my show that was done for TV spots.” He leaned back, spent. “Now you’ve found both her, Max, and my recent secret outings. She made a mistake creating a pattern at the Goliath. One of my hired guys spotted her. I’ve been following her, but I’ve never found where she goes to ground. I should have gone to you in the first place.” CC gazed into the pool of priceless vodka in his glass.
Max decided to wait until he knew more before asking his friend and colleague in magic and vengeance the question he most wanted answered at the moment. He stood, and set his unsatisfying drink on the dressing table. “I’m following her now,” Max said. “Stay out of it. I’ll let you have the leavings.”
He left before CC could answer, as unsatisfied with the situation as with the drink. The guards gave him dirty looks, but he noted them only in passing. He was thinking hard.
O’Connor and Santiago MacCarthy were old allies and likely after the hidden money they raised for the IRA that the Synth had protected. That’s what really had brought Santiago to Las Vegas. If Santiago was in town, Kathleen would have seen him.
And so could CC have when he was following her.
Kitty was good at finally slipping away from the amateur-detective magician whose antisocial lifestyle made him less agile on the street, but maybe Santiago hadn’t been. Max could imagine CC recognizing Santiago as someone he could trap, following him somewhere deserted like Farnum’s building, and trying to throttle Kathleen’s whereabouts out of the man.
Yet … Max couldn’t imagine a scenario that put both Santiago and CC on the top floor of the mysterious building on Paradise Road.
Max needed to figure out not only motivation, but opportunity. Motivation was all too plain. He wondered how sane a man could be who’d lived hidden beh
ind a literal false front to the world for years, once he lost the one woman he’d loved.
Chapter 47
Falling for You
Why did he feel more guilty, Matt wondered, the longer he let himself be forced into nightly meetings with Kathleen O’Connor?
Maybe that was because he was getting somewhere with her, which meant she was getting somewhere with him. The last thing he needed was for her to transfer her love–hate fixation on Max Kinsella to him. The fact was, Temple was still in danger from the woman either way, because she’d been loved by both men.
At Temple’s Table of Crime Elements meeting today, with the exciting revelation that Jeff Mangel had secreted a Synth map in his exhibition of magic and Max had found it, Matt had wanted to shout, “Hey, I found out that Kathleen O’Connor isn’t the second Darth Vader who intimidated the Synth members. She is cat-scratch free.”
Yeah, explain how he knew that to Temple with Max Kinsella looking on.
Speaking of Kinsella, he’d broadcast the same air of stress and guilt Matt felt. And Temple had obviously picked up their unease.
Last time Kitty the Cutter had cut herself. He’d tended the wound and left her the razor. She’d seemed much more docile tonight, even subdued. They’d discussed her abuse, his abusive stepfather, Cliff Effinger.
She’d first approached—and cut him—because she’d believed his following Effinger made him a rival for her interests. That alone tied the IRA hoard to minor mob errand boys, at least.
It was almost a normal counseling session.
That made Matt nervous. Normality made Kathleen O’Connor even more nervous.
The session was breaking up early tonight.
* * *
“Do you see her after every time you come here?” she asked as they’d left the room together, like a fornicating couple leaving an assignation.
At least that’s the look they got from a late-returning gambler shambling down the hall toward them, his short-sleeved shirt darkened by damp rings around the armpits. His build was as baggy as his eyes, but he spared each of them a knowing leer that said “hooker and john” before passing by.
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