Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Max stomped on the brakes so the modest family car, the Mondeo, did a dramatic TV-chase U-y. Only when they were facing the opposite direction on the deserted country two-lane did Max realize his immature gesture might have strained an older man’s neck. Good thing they’d left the major highway, the “colorfully” (not) named M1, to find a quaint place (or a good bush) for a rest stop.

  “Sorry,” Max said. “I’m acting like an ass.”

  Garry blinked, then chuckled. “So what’s new? Glad to see the old form is still there.”

  The man Max still often thought of as Gandolph the Great massaged his nape. He wore a soft wool scarf over his suit jacket. Garry Randolph, past seventy, had far more reason to ache than Max did, or at least to complain about it.

  “Why,” Max asked softly, “do I get the idea you know me way too well?”

  “Somebody has to, Max. You’ve always been Mr. Mystery to everybody who cared to know you.”

  “ ‘Cared to know’ me. Am I that bad?”

  “That . . . demanding. Never more of anyone than of yourself.”

  Gandolph—and Max now focused on the older man as a magician in the classical sense of a mage, like the wizard Gandalf his stage name played upon—shook his head.

  “You’re a hard case, Max Kinsella, but hard times made you so. Why do you think we’re following the sad trail of Kathleen O’Connor?”

  “She’s an irresistible siren, that girl renamed Rebecca. I remember the movie.”

  “Just the movie? There were several TV versions as well.”

  “Rebecca was a beauty, but she was an evil woman, a manipulator, a man-eater,” Max said.

  “Granted. Notorious women leave longer legends than noble ones.”

  “And dead before the novel began, yet she had more vitality even when dead than the novel’s pallid nameless heroine.”

  “That was the point, my boy. Evil can be not only attractive but vital. Some women are poison.”

  Max glanced at his mentor as the accelerating Mondeo clung to a curve. “You have Revienne in mind?”

  “Don’t you? Oh, what a lovely candidate for a femme fatale. Blonde. Beautiful. French, but don’t forget she’s half German. Easy for her to be at war with herself. I know nothing about this woman, Max, except her impressive résumé as a psychiatrist. When I discovered she was associated with the sanitarium I whisked you to in desperation, I seized upon her services. I knew every step of the way it could all have been set up by whoever attempted to kill you back at the Neon Nightmare club in Vegas. Or not. It’s hard to believe any man would encounter two she-devils before he was thirty-five.”

  “And Kathleen O’Connor was indeed demonic?”

  “After our visit to the Convent of the Little Flower near Dublin and a glimpse into its presumed impious prisoners, wouldn’t you have been?”

  “Unbelievable how past wrongs keep raising their monstrous heads. I remember reading about the Irish institutional abuses a decade ago, and here they are making headlines again.”

  “Victims never forget. And . . . it’s easier to track records, and people, now.”

  Max glanced at the open netbook on Gandolph’s lap. “You find anything online on Kathleen as opposed to the downtrodden Rebecca?”

  “Kathleen O’Connors are as common as grains of sand on a beach, in Ireland or out. We’ll have to rely on personal interviews with old enemies. Next stop, Belfast and any ex-IRA men we can turn up.”

  “You’re sure they’re ‘ex’? I do remember headlines about pub bombings and outrages against innocents in my vague ‘way back when’ youth.”

  “You don’t remember family? Where you lived? Wisconsin? A street? The house?”

  “Pieces. As if Picasso had played Guernica with images of my past. A long empty echoing hall, in a school or possibly a church. Snow covering a looming pair of fir trees in a front yard. Concrete stairs and a metal railing to a white-painted door. Midwestern, it looked. I felt more at home on the Alpine meadows, come to think of it.”

  “You were on the run. That’s been half your life, the most recent life. No faces from your past haunt you?”

  “No faces. It’s as if someone had erased the most intimate parts of my memories.”

  “You’re sure Revienne didn’t drug you? Hypnotize you?”

  “No. How could I be sure she didn’t? I stayed off the pain pills and injections in the Swiss clinic as soon as I was conscious, but anything could have been pumped into my mind or veins before that. My apparent memory loss could be totally induced.”

  “That’s the Max I remember. Always suspicious.”

  “Not a fun guy.”

  “Not now. You used to be amusing company.”

  “I don’t know whether to be relieved or insulted. When did we stop keeping company?”

  “Just over two years ago. We split up when you got the Vegas hotel job. You’d met Temple Barr in Minneapolis, and it was love at first sight.”

  “Wasn’t I . . . more careful then?’

  “Not about her. You whisked her away from her native city and family to live in sin with you in Vegas while you headlined a magic show at the Goliath. I, and our employers, understood you deserved a life. Hiding behind the magician persona had always been a natural cover for you. I was relieved we both seemed to have ‘retired’ due to true love, and I resumed my long-ago hobby of unmasking fraudulent psychics.”

  “A contradiction in terms, isn’t that last?”

  “So I’ve always found, but I have hopes. Anyway, your redheaded girlfriend got involved promoting a hokey Vegas Halloween séance in which I was playing the undercover patsy . . . and you came along eventually to safeguard her, so I had to fake my own death.”

  “A true Gandalf.”

  “I’ve always been Gandolph. What do you mean by true?”

  “The book! Even I remember The Lord of the Rings. You took your stage name from the wizard Gandalf the Grey, right? He appeared to die in the novels and then came back.”

  “Really? Sounds more like your role in Las Vegas, if you ever revisit the place. That ‘revival’ thing is just a bizarre coincidence. I didn’t actually read the books. Do you know how long each of the three is? I plucked the Gandalf mojo out of the popular-culture air ages ago. My last name was Randolph. I needed a ‘magical’ moniker. ‘Gandolph.’” Garry chuckled and patted the hair at his temples. “Time did make me ‘Gandolph the Grey,’ though.”

  Max chuckled too.

  Chuckled. His mood was improving. No wonder he’d partnered with this guy.

  “This route doesn’t seem familiar,” Max complained ten minutes later. “Sean and I had to have taken the M1 heading north before.”

  “It shouldn’t,” Gandolph said. “Times have changed. I’m tracking our route on a Yahoo! map on my computer. The M1 wasn’t much of anything when you and your cousin made your way north. How? Hitchhiking, perhaps? Once you had ID’d and targeted the three IRA members who’d blown up O’Toole’s Pub and killed Sean, among six other victims, my job was to recruit you and get you off the island and onto the Continent for concealment and training. You were on the IRA’s most-wanted list for years.”

  “When did that change?”

  “Officially? Ages ago, as international grudges go. Since the Good Friday Agreement was signed by the British and Irish governments in nineteen ninety-eight, most of the politically motivated violence tapered off. International repugnance for the horror of nine/eleven finished off the ‘Troubles’ the way hundreds of years of relentless hatred and undying hope could not. The IRA has evaporated except for last-gasp ‘alternate’ groups. Recently, Belfast was named the safest city in the UK.”

  Max snorted. “My memory is dysfunctional, not my nose for political hatred. The English have tried to destroy the Irish for almost five hundred years. And vice versa. Enmity is in the blood.”

  “Quite true, Max, but it can’t compete with fundamental Islam’s jihad against Christian nations, for longevity. Give the Irish cr
edit for knowing when they’re outgunned. At any rate, Belfast is the new tourist hot spot.”

  “That bridge toll I paid near Drogheda?”

  Gandolph nodded. “That was for crossing the Bridge of Peace. Less than two euros a car. You didn’t even notice.”

  “It was a bloody highway toll. They’re as common as grass.”

  “Exactly. We’ve crossed the border. You didn’t notice the changes in signage.”

  Max looked around wildly. “It can’t be that simple. I may not remember much, but even my aching bones know that.”

  “It won’t be simple,” Gandolph said, “but it at least will be possible now.”

  Max spotted a pub sign. The place was stage-Irish rustic and called Durty Mulligan’s.

  “That looks like a fine place to get stewed,” Max quipped.

  Gandolph ran a vein-knotted hand through his pepper-dusted white hair. “Ah, it’s like old times again, without the imminent danger.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Gandolph shrugged. “No one’s had time to fix on us and figure out our mission. For now, we can eat, drink, and be merry, eh?” He eyed the attractive pub that had probably been put up five years ago.

  “And you can catch me up even more on my forgotten past,” Max said.

  “I said ‘be merry.’ Time enough for business when we’re back on the road.”

  Once they were seated over a pint in the Belfast pub, though, Gandolph revved up his computer.

  “We should have been doing this in the Temple Bar area of Dublin,” he said wryly.

  “When I didn’t even know who she was and that we’d had a . . . serious connection? Even smacking me in the face with her name in foot-high gold letters didn’t trip my memory trigger. You’d think if our love affair was that intense, I’d remember it.

  “And why do all these things come wireless nowadays?” Max asked, unable to keep an irritable edge out of his voice. He felt both antsy and reluctant. “It’s intrusive, and we could be tracked.”

  Did he want to see the Web site of this “Temple Barr” in Dublin’s fair city or Belfast or anywhere on the globe? If she was his “lost love,” he had forgotten that fast enough to sleep with a sleek, mysterious blonde of the possibly traitorous sort, who could have seduced an alpine walking stick.

  So all he’d get out of perusing his past now was looking at a woman betrayed, thanks to His Truly. Or Untruly, rather.

  Garry . . . Gandolph, starting to look familiar and trustworthy, was as eager as a boy, though, bringing up the “Web page” as if unveiling a magical feat. Even Max knew the old guy was behind the times, more at sea at these tech things than how Max himself would be with an intact memory. His rush of affection made plain that he needed to keep that superior knowledge from his mentor.

  Temple Barr, a memorable name for a PR woman, had chosen to use a Web site photo of herself taken against the huge stone creature statues on the floor of Vegas’s McCarran Airport. Max was shocked to instantly identify the place, but not the person. What kind of a cad was he?

  “She’s . . . cute,” he couldn’t keep from commenting in his dazed monotone.

  Gandolph laughed. “Damn cute. What a disappointment, Max! You’re making the same first-glance mistake most people do about her.”

  “I don’t think I ever did ‘cute,’ even in my right mind.”

  Gandolph turned the laptop to eye the image. “Then your right mind is an ass. I never worried about you sleeping with her. That Continental blonde . . . pretty poison maybe.”

  Max spun the laptop to face himself again. “Pretty cute,” he said on second look. “Nice hair. She looks . . . petite.”

  “Natural redhead, but she’s toned it down since I last saw her. Or you did. Five feet zero. You can see the high heels.”

  Max hit Alt + to focus close-up and personal.

  “Great ankles, not to mention arches curved enough to turn foot fetishist for.”

  “Max!”

  “Just saying I do find her attractive in some ways.”

  “You’re not a foot fetishist.”

  “Could have fooled me.” He worked his way up the close-up image like a street-corner Romeo. “Sweet figure, if you like miniatures.” While Gandolph cradled his unbelieving head with closed eyes in his hand, Max finally focused on the face and smiled. “You give up too soon on people also, Garry. I see it now. Smart. Feisty. Tenacious.”

  Gandolph glanced over.

  “She’s a pistol, isn’t she?” Max suggested.

  “You haven’t completely lost your mind.”

  Max nodded. “Not yet.” He hit the Alt – until Temple Barr became fairy-tiny on the sterile, hard-surfaced, long-shot background of McCarran Airport. “She’s far away and long ago, Garry.” He sighed. “I feel nothing earthshaking. I feel nothing. ‘It was in another country. And besides, the wretch is dead.’ ” He paraphrased a famous line from the Elizabethan play The Jew of Malta.

  “I won’t allow you to become so cynical, Max. I know you’re directing that quote back on yourself. The original line was, ‘the wench is dead.’ So you’re really talking about the late Kathleen O’Connor, once aka Rebecca. I assure you that Temple Barr is far from dead and far too many aeons away from being a mere ‘wench’ to be forgotten so easily. I’d bet she’s not given you up for dead, either.”

  “You mentioned I had a rival there anyway.”

  Garry took back the laptop grimly and typed a few short letters into the search engine. He turned the resulting Web page and image back to Max, who rolled his eyes.

  “Pretty too,” he said acerbically, eyeing Matt Devine’s professionally taken head shot on the WCOO-FM radio Web site. “They make a photogenic match. Miss Temple is way better off without me and my bum legs and blasted mind. Shut this damn thing down, and let’s get deeper into the new, PR-polished Belfast you’ve been bragging about.”

  Gandolph held the laptop open despite Max’s thrust to close it.

  “ ‘Pretty too.’ Can’t disagree. Handsome and a really nice guy, from what I’ve learned. Matt Devine, radio advice personality. Maybe you’re doing the noble thing by leaving them to their own ignorant devices. . . .”

  Max snorted with disdain.

  “Ex-priest . . .”

  Max’s eyes narrowed with disbelief. “This smoothy media personality?”

  “And relatively recent knifing victim of Kathleen O’Connor, henceforth christened Kitty the Cutter by your ex, the ‘cute’ redhead.”

  “Kathleen was in Las Vegas?”

  “Looking for you. She never succeeded. You found her, dead, first.”

  Max said nothing. Until . . .

  “‘Kitty the Cutter’? The redhead’s got a quick mouth and mind on her. The ex-priest didn’t kill easy?”

  Gandolph shook his head. “Glancing wound. Kitty was looking for you and found you too elusive. So she found him.”

  “So. My mea culpa. Again. He bled for my sins. He should thank me. A scar makes him much more interesting. ‘Kitty,’” he repeated, finally laughing. “‘Kitty the Cutter.’ I like that little redheaded girl.”

  “You always did.”

  “And she liked me?”

  “She did. Maybe still does, although you appeared to run out on her for an inexcusable second time.” Gandolph glanced at the screen. “He was a good priest, from what I learned. Left formally, and celibate.”

  “In his . . . what, early thirties? Isn’t that too Sleeping Beauty to believe?”

  “Believe it. I’m guessing he loved Temple from the moment he met her. It was first love on his part, but you were in the way.”

  Silence. Then . . .

  “I’m not now, Gandolph. I’m here in bloody Belfast, which I’m willing to bet hasn’t forgotten me, although I’ve forgotten it. Blood feuds die slowly. Someone, some entity, just tried to kill me and failed. Several times. If I don’t find the hit man or woman, or them, I might as well be buried at the nearest graveyard to Temple Bar in Dublin, and you
can write Sean’s name on my tomb to put a just and bitter end to our ‘graduation’ trip to Ireland. Ire means ‘rage,’ doesn’t it? A fitting English name for a blasted country.”

  He glanced at the laptop, which his mentor had finally shut off and closed.

  “Why show me these losses of the recent past when I’m knee-deep in the bloodier past?”

  “A reason to live?”

  Max let his jaw drop. “My supposed girl is seeing, maybe even planning to marry, a man, a freaking ex-priest, who took the heat for my sins like bloody Jesus Christ, and you think that will inspire me with a reason to live?”

  “A reason to revenge, then, maybe.”

  “We’re in the right bloody country for it.” Max stood. “Can we go on to the hotel now?” He glanced at their semiempty plates and the last strands of beer foam webbing the bottom of their pint glasses. “I’ve had all that I can stomach.”

  Gandolph nodded, took up his laptop computer, and walked.

  Hoopla and Homicide

  “And the point of this so-called media gathering was purely publicity?”

  Detective Ferraro was “middle” everything: height, weight, age.

  Now he was putting on a show of being middling patient with the situation, but just barely.

  He’d ordered everyone present in the tunnel at the time the body was discovered into separate rooms at Gangsters, since it was the closest premises to the “crime scene.”

  As far as Temple could calculate, that was a cast of nine indignant Fontana brothers plus their uncle, Macho Mario; a death-pale Van von Rhine; four panting media videographers; three gawking workmen; a happily flushed Crawford Buchanan, sure to appear on evening news hours nationwide, not to mention YouTube. And her. The cats—and rat—appeared to have been overlooked, as usual.

  “Did you recognize the deceased?” Ferraro asked now.

  “No,” Temple said, “but I didn’t get a good long look at him. Also, he was lying on his back, so the body and face were foreshortened.”