Matt had stepped to the brass-and-steel railing, turning his back. He was a radio “personality,” to be heard but not seen … except for the station billboards. MR. MIDNIGHT IN THE WEE HOURS. He didn’t want to read any headlines like MR. MIDNIGHT’S TRYST IN THE WEE HOURS.
Kathleen, of course, had leaned back against the railing as the man had passed, stretching her arms out to display her torso and leering back. “You took the risk in the first place,” she whispered just loud enough for it to be a hiss, “seeing that whore here, for counseling, at night, an upstanding ex-priest like you.”
“That used to be called ‘giving scandal,’” he admitted, relieved that Kathleen had been referring to Vassar, not Temple.
“The Church has a name for every little move a man could make.”
Her answer echoed a song Ambrosia played sometimes, about the usual unfaithful woman. “Sundown.” It was sure place- and person-appropriate now.
He couldn’t help smiling, which infuriated her.
“Smug. You’re so sure, so smug. So ‘right,’ like all the rest of them.”
With the graceful wrist movement of a flamenco dancer poising a castanet for playing, she unfurled the straight razor.
Matt’s small smile didn’t fade. Who did she think she was, a femme fatale or “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” with a razor in his shoe?
Yeah, she’d accosted him on a dark street and cut him once, when he’d been new to Las Vegas and innocent of her existence. He’d had warning now.
He could have done a mind-bending riff on how the razor was an emasculating weapon for a woman, and also an artificial extension that grew longer and a phallic symbol as well. But she wasn’t interested in academic theories now. The leering man had set her off. She was back into terrorizing.
She leaned far out to look down into the tunnel of hanging jungle foliage with colorful birds flitting in and out like escapees from an animated Disney film.
“If you fell from here, like Vassar,” Kathleen speculated in a playful tone. “Just saying. If you fell and were declared a suicide, you’d never be buried in a Catholic cemetery. No St. Peter’s or Paul’s or Stanislaus’s in Chicago for you or your family.”
She spun and put her back to the railing, still flirtatiously threatening.
“And why shouldn’t you fall, with a razor at your throat? Why shouldn’t there be a ‘scandal?’ ‘Ex-Priest Radio Personality Dies on Site of Apparent Tryst.’ Why shouldn’t everyone who knows you weep and wail and say they can’t explain it?… I could leave some indicting trinkets. Hints of a secret love affair gone wrong. Who’d be around to deny it?” She lunged toward him. “Not. You.” The point of her razor pressed against his carotid artery.
He could feel it pulsing, but kept his voice calm. “So this is how you extorted money out of your wealthy IRA ‘donors’? Sex wasn’t always enough, was it, Kathleen?”
“If you don’t care about your postmortem reputation, I’ll remind you that someone’s Circle Ritz balcony is only one story above the parking lot,” she told him. “And it’s a tiny, triangular toy of a space where a woman wearing high heels—like Vassar up here on this very spot—might twist an ankle, or let her cell phone slip away and lean over the railing too far and fall … not far, not twenty stories like Vassar, but … enough.”
He’d warned her about threatening Temple again.
As she leaned close, confident in her faithful cutting edge, Matt caught her left hand in his right as if they were dancing, used his left to exert pressure on her right wrist, twisted, and then pulled her torso against the railing, facing down.
The falling razor flashed as it glinted and sliced through the hanging foliage like a mini machete. Exotic birds, disturbed, rustled up into the air, a fractured rainbow of color. The razor vanished into the long empty distance all the way to the illuminated stained glass ceiling far, far below, where Vassar had been found dead.
“You. Hurt. Me.” Kathleen was aghast. Surprised. Her hands flexed closed and opened, bereft of the weapon that was almost a sentient extension of her hatred and power.
“Sorry.” Matt held her immobile, on the brink of falling herself. “You’ve been hurt plenty before. I could easily toss you over this railing and then all your pain would be gone and you’d be the suicide.”
She shook the strands of black hair out of her eyes and lifted her face. “Deaths like these are always suspicious. Vassar’s was. Twice, Mr. Devine? You’re on the scene when two women go over the railing?” She didn’t notice she’d dropped the taunting “Father” before his name. She was worried.
“I had a chance to off Effinger, you know,” Matt said in a reminiscent tone. He could play the stone-cold killer too. “I could have throttled him. Instead, I left him for your lot to fasten to a sinking ship and slowly drown. My way would have been kinder.”
“You’re not—” She was trying to slide away down the railing, but his grip tightened.
“I’m not playing the usual patsy? That’s thanks to you. I’ve watched your anger and hate strike at everyone around me, and me once. Once is enough with you, Kathleen. You can’t carry around as much hatred as you do and feel entirely justified. Some maybe, but not enough. You are a bad woman, Kathleen. You need to get clear of your past and become a happy person.”
“They don’t serve Kool-Aid in this hotel, but you’ve drunk plenty elsewhere.”
“Right. I’m the demented one. So before we resume our … dialogue, I’ll tell you something you don’t know about Max Kinsella.”
Just mentioning the name tautened every sinew in her frame. Matt felt it all the way through to her slender wrists. Her build was dainty, but she felt like a guitar string that had been tightened to the snapping point.
“He’s your rival,” she said.
Matt shook his head. “He’s harmless.”
She almost spit at him, but glanced at the chasm below and reconsidered.
“He’s forgotten most of his past, you know. That’s right. You wouldn’t know. He’s forgotten you, thanks to that bungee cord act of sabotage at the late, great Neon Nightmare club. Was that you? No, you like live victims. But you knew about that so-called accident. It’s your business to know everything about all of us.”
“Us?”
“Anyone close to Max Kinsella. As I said, he’s lost and misplaced most of what made Max Kinsella before he was the Mystifying Max. His mentor’s death in Northern Ireland probably blasted the rest out of him. Do you know anything about that, Kathleen? The old IRA and the recalcitrant ‘New’ IRA are still fightin’ and fussin’ some, and Max and Garry Randolph got caught in the crossfire. Do you know anything about who betrayed them? Speechless? Thinking hard? Never mind.
“Max is back in Vegas putting pieces together. He remembers the past few weeks since he recovered from his coma, of course. He remembers his travels with his mentor to Belfast. I’m not sure he remembers you, Kathleen. Except for what his mentor learned about your mother and your birth and your own motherhood and passed on.”
By now her glare had frozen as if this Medusa had finally glimpsed herself in a mirror. Her breathing was hardly detectable, but her pulse was galloping in her wrists.
“He has odd flashes of memory, you understand? And he’s a very bright man. Brilliant. I’m counseling him too. Helping him to rebuild his life. To remember. But it’s often just the offbeat emotional flash. Something simmers, then he blurts it out.
“During one of those moments, when we were talking about you … you can imagine how much we talk about you lately. Max said, regarding those crazy teenage times in the Auld Sod when he and his cousin Sean went waltzing up to Londonderry into the teeth of the Troubles. He said, and we can’t put much stock into what a man in his condition, not to mention recovering from the violent loss of his mentor, thanks to some unknown assailants, says. But he said, with amazing and sudden certainty, that he’d been in love with you.
“It’s ironic that you’d hate forever the only man who ever really lov
ed you.”
He pushed her away and left, knowing he was done with this charade and that, if she did go over the railing, she would never scream on the way down.
* * *
At least he’d learned something major, if he was inclined to believe anything Kathleen O’Connor would say, but he did believe she was lurking there that night. Vassar hadn’t killed herself. She’d fallen, grabbing for her cell phone while gazing out at the pseudo-tropical foliage, inhabited by birds no less, twenty stories up.
Had she been calling the advice hotline he’d suggested? Had he turned her despair around, just a little? Or was Kitty the Cutter just toying with him again? Hope was an antidote to guilt, and she knew how to work that combination lock to the emotions very, very well.
Chapter 48
After the Fall
So there I am at the Goliath, on tailing duty, having shadowed Mr. Matt Devine into the hotel and up in the elevator when I overhear that interesting interlude.
Las Vegas hotel elevators are the easiest to slip into and out of, like loafers. Folks are always counting their chips or their money, and chatting or planning their forays around the Strip. Many are rotund enough that they cannot even see where their toes are, much less me and mine.
And the management prefers dark-floored elevators to resist stains.
I was even able to follow him to the door of room 2032. I cozied up to it in hopes of hearing something useful, but the door was too well built to hear through, especially with the air-conditioning running.
The recent balcony scene outside the door was no Romeo and Juliet rerun and I heard every word. At last Mr. Matt knows from someone on two legs who was there that Vassar’s death was accidental and his counseling had encouraged her to call for more help while Miss K the C spied on her from down the hall.
I knew that all along after coming here and interviewing the wildlife on the scene. I learned that Miss Vassar had come out to gaze on the flora and fauna and make a call on her cell phone after Mr. Matt left. She reached down as the phone slipped from her hand and, sadly, fell.
There was no way for me to bring the eyewitness evidence I obtained from a macaw and cockatoos to human attention, so Mr. Matt has labored under a bit of suspicion and his own sense of guilt ever since. Now he has stepped up and found the truth.
I cannot rejoice overmuch at the moment, though, because when the pair left the hotel room, I had flung myself down under the railing to cling to a thick but thorny length of exotic flowering vine and am now desperately fighting two fatal impulses: To sneeze or to fall, that is the question. Or do both.
Hopefully, neither of the above.
Unfortunately, Miss Kitty the Cutter is alone now and wringing the brass top rail with her razorless hands and cussing out Mr. Matt, Mr. Max, and Miss Temple something awful.
I dare not climb up to resume tailing Mr. Matt because the awkward positions required to achieve solid ground again would leave me at the mercy of Miss Kitty and either a swift kick to the gut and the curb twenty stories below or a lusty neck-wringing.
Inquiring members of feather nation gather around me, chirping and calling and clicking their beaks in admonition, drawing unwelcome attention to my secret presence and generally twittering it all over the atrium.
Fortunately, I am recognized.
“Oh, not a predator,” comes the sweet tweet of a gray parrot I recognize from my last assignment here.
“Begone, begone, begone,” tweet a flock of cockatiels, and I would be obliged if Miss Kitty would depart.
“I need a diversion,” I tell the gray parrot, who is amazingly verbal and intelligent for a featherhead.
“Troops,” the gray orders, “Disneyize that woman at the railing.”
Well, you have never seen a more colorful array of sweet little feathered nothings twining in and around Miss Kathleen O’Connor’s form, swooping into her black locks and lifting edges of her filmy clothing in their little yellow beaks and chirping oh-so-sunnily.
It is as if one of the Ugly Stepsisters became the object of a Cinderella makeover. Miss Kitty is soon batting and turning and making like Miss Tippi Hedren in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
I undulate up the sinuous branch, never looking down to twenty stories below, and scramble over the edge onto the balcony.
The last I see of Miss Kitty the Cutter, she is batting off birds and much resembling the Wicked Witch of the West surrounded by her flying monkeys.
I race to the elevators, heading for the main floor and the parking lot, determined to get to Mr. Matt’s silver Jaguar before the big automotive cat takes off without me.
That would not be a brotherly act from a fellow feline. I need to keep my tail.
I can only hope the rest of the Cat Pack is pursuing their assignments with equal savvy and vigor.
And less dependence on our feathered friends.
Chapter 49
Left Behind
Max couldn’t sleep. He often woke up before the dawn, listening. That was said to be a sign of depression, but so was oversleeping.
The house was quiet without Garry there, with no hope of Garry ever being there again. Gandolph the Great had truly died and wouldn’t come back, as Gandalf did in The Lord of the Rings.
Max nursed his whiskey, relaxing in the big lounge chair, feeling his frame settled into the upholstery as all of one piece, not leaning away from a twinge there, an ache here.
Whole.
That was the physical accomplishment. The next step would be mental in two stages: truly accepting Garry’s absence and teasing his own memories into the present. He shut his eyes, wondering what person, what place would undam his barricaded mind.
His thoughts jittered away from anyone he’d been emotionally connected to in the recent past. The issues were too delicate. Molina. Maybe that was his entry point. Their edgy, distant association invigorated him.
Max was disturbed to consider she had become more like a boss, more like a superior, and therefore more like his mentor. Why not? She was a leader of men. Max quirked a smile on the crystal rim of his glass. And she owed him. Falsely accused, poor boy, he was. He sensed something sheepish in her attitude toward him. Now that he’d been chased and half-killed by ex-terrorists, she’d come around to Temple’s view of him.
Stubborn woman.
Not too sure which one he referred to.
Max smiled. That little redhead had faced off the tall police lieutenant and held her ground. It was like a Yorkie and a bloodhound match-up.… No, Molina was more like a Siberian husky with her icy blue eyes and fierce competitive stance. He wished Rafi Nadir good luck with getting any concessions from Big Mama Molina.
Yet, she was vulnerable. Her daughter.
Max was alone now. No one to be vulnerable about. Just as well.
A soft scrape in the entry hall brought his lazy eyelids full open, and his nostrils too.
He sensed a shift in the air-conditioned atmosphere. The big machine cozied up against the house exterior still operated, heaving like an iron lung against the heat.
But something was moving at the edges of the house, the door, a front window, the hallway hatch into the attic.
Max looked up. Squirrels in the attic? Rats? Assassins?
He pulled back a fabric protector over the chair’s broad arm, revealing a control panel.
He’d discovered it when his restless hands had detected a too, too solid bit of piping on the upholstery. His fingers did a light braille dance over the various buttons. Was it like riding a bicycle or playing the piano? Did his fingertips do the walking and rewire his brain?
He hoped so because an enemy was paying him a visit.
And still he spared a smile for Garry Randolph, Gandolph the Late Great. He remembered Garry showing him the security panel embedded in the chair arm. “You’re the captain of the starship Enterprise in this baby. You control the security shutters, the lights, air. You can lock anyone out, or keep anyone in.”
Max nodded and set his wh
iskey glass on the side table. It was time to fly this thing.
First, he turned off the air-conditioning.
The instant silence was deafening. A shuffle down the hall stopped a millisecond too late.
He used the control to lower the lights on rheostats all through the house. Only the highest points of the furnishings, or a face, would be visible now. Anyone moving in this house would be walking on water, an unperceived pool of darkness hiding unanticipated objects.
Max’s fingertips hesitated over the unseen control panel, waiting for an intuitive action.
So far muscle memory had guided him through without a misstep. Not so for the intruder.
A careless limb banged into the living area’s archway.
Max could feel the pain of a hit shin or elbow pulsing mutely in the hall.
He waited about a minute, then shut the interior metal shutters while simultaneously pushing the lights up to maximum.
His eyes were squinted and his nerves tense against the sudden clangs and floodlights, but his visitor was not prepared.
The slight figure in ninja black from head to foot teetered as if on a tightrope.
Max lifted the small Walther PPK from the control compartment. It glinted like black ice on asphalt in his hand.
“You’ve made yourself too easy to find,” she said, her voice not familiar.
“Yes,” he answered with satisfaction. “I wonder who you finally followed to get here. No, don’t tell me.” He put up his free hand. “I love a mystery.”
“I’m not carrying.”
“No, not a gun in all that spandex, but a blade or blades, that’s something else. Please sit down. On that chair by the archway.”
“I’m my own best weapon, don’t you remember that?”
He didn’t answer as she pulled the ski mask off to free her hair. For a moment he flashed back. A dead face on the dark ground beside a totaled motorcycle. Dead white skin, dead black hair. Not really her.
“Your career,” he pointed out, “has been hard on body doubles.”
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