Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Molina stood, snapping her notebook shut as if it had jaws. "We'll get the bitch."

  He blinked, and she laughed. "I can do squad-room rap as well as the next cop. I've just got an impressionable preteen daughter to think about. Look at it this way. You did not suffer in vain. We can swear out an assault complaint on . . . the little darling."

  "An assault complaint? A woman against a man? I don't think--"

  "Now we get to the manhood part, right?"

  "Not exactly. I just don't think it sounds credible. This is a woman I've never met before except in answer to a missing-person quest of mine. It doesn't make sense."

  "It's a crime. It doesn't have to make sense. Listen, Devine, don't go wishy-washy on me.

  Effinger's dead. You're a prime suspect in any cop's rule book. This lethal lady and her razor could get the heat off you. Don't let her get away with hit-and-run."

  "You're really ticked off about this."

  "You bet I am. She's a sicko, at the very least. And she smells of out-of-town interests."

  "You think she's a hit woman?"

  "Don't sound so incredulous. Women can do everything nowadays, you know, hunt as well as be hunted. But, no. You'd be dead if she was, which was one of the messages she was sending. She kiss as good as she cut?"

  He shook his head. "It was symbolic, like the razor."

  Molina nodded. "A sicko. Although how you would know the difference, I'd like to know."

  Sardonic was her hard-bitten style of humor. Interrogation over.

  "Think about swearing out a complaint. You have a name, for what it's worth, and a description," she added. "You might find it to your advantage. Statute of limitations doesn't run out for some time, and you'll be scarred for life."

  "So what's new?"

  She shrugged. She was done probing his wounds. Like a deliberately lousy surgeon, she had left a scalpel sewn in to irritate the site until he came back for corrective surgery. Maybe.

  Matt wondered if he should have revealed the sketch of Kitty O'Connor and let Molina really go to work. He wondered if he should have repeated, and recorded the final humiliation, the words the woman had breathed at him as she departed, when he first felt the liquid warmth oozing onto his fingers and hadn't yet grasped what it was.

  Remember me, you bastard.

  Was that a symbolic attack too? Or worse?

  Because, as few people outside a very small neighborhood in Chicago--and the late Effinger--knew, he was indeed a bastard.

  Quite literally.

  Chapter 33

  Forbidden Planet

  "Yo, Sherlock!"

  "Temple?"

  Max sounded surprised by her gung-ho tone.

  "I've read your manuscript and I've spent far too many hours at the library looking up forms of hyacinth. Does Gandolph have any books there that might pertain to hyacinths?"

  "Nothing flowery. But what about the manuscript?"

  "What about it?"

  "Can it be saved?"

  "Modest Max. Perhaps. What are you going to give me for dinner?"

  "What can you bring?"

  "Boston Market?"

  A pause. "Home cooking isn't my style, but beggars can't be choosers. Just don't spill anything on the manuscript."

  "You can always print out another one."

  "I know, but it doesn't feel that duplicatable."

  Temple smiled. Max was used to making magic out of transient impressions and other people's blind spots. The concrete power of words awed him. Maybe he understood her bailiwick better now.

  "Be over in half an hour."

  Temple packed her tote bag and took an uneasy tour of the apartment. Louie was certainly making himself scarce lately. She wondered if he were trying to send a message.

  But she had another message to decipher. Hyacinth.

  She tucked a couple of flower books from the library into her tote along with Max's manuscript, checked to make sure one last time that Louie's bathroom window was ajar, and then locked the condominium on the way out.

  She had to admit to a snare-drum rattle of excitement. Going over to Max's place felt like Minneapolis all over again. Just meeting Max, going out. Okay, not exactly going out. The only times recently she had gone out with Max it had been a major undercover operation, or a breaking and entering.

  Still, they were working on things together. They were working on being together. Temple's red two-inch Cuban heels did a Castanet click over the Circle Ritz marble lobby floor. The ghosts of Fred and Ginger and that happy, chattering rhythm followed her to the parking lot.

  Even cocking the pepper spray on her key ring as she neared her car couldn't dampen her spirits.

  Her long red corduroy skirt refused to dampen its folds to fit into the Storm on the first try.

  So she collapsed it like a recalcitrant umbrella and then locked herself in, after checking the back seat. Then she sighed. Twilight time. A beautiful January night, with the sun hanging over the western mountains like a bloodshot moon.

  It was dusk by the time she pulled into Boston Market's car-jammed lot and inched through the crowded line, buying everything hot and homey, so it would drive Max bananas: corn and meatloaf and mashed potatoes and all that midwinter, Midwestern comfort food.

  Loaded with one brown bag, and sure this time that no bogeyman would be lurking by her car, unless he was an escapee from Night of the Living Dead, gruesome thought, Temple clicked out to the car, stowed her goods and revved the Storm away from the sun sweltering into a burnt-orange puddle behind the mountains.

  The sky was still the faint, pale blue of the Madonna's cloak when Temple carefully parked on the border of Max's lot line and carried her burdens to the house.

  This time the door was infinitesimally ajar and she glided through without having to shift her packages.

  "What?" she asked the darkness inside. "Am I Midnight Louie, with an automatic entrance/exit?"

  Max shut the door behind her, and closed her mouth with a kiss as he off-loaded the food bags.

  "Editors can be snakes, I understand," he said. "So I left the door open just wide enough to accommodate one."

  "Not all editors," Temple protested. "Just a few bad ones. I thought my literary skills were going to be respected around here now that you're an aspiring author."

  "I don't know what you think of my opus; until then, I'm prepared to consider you the enemy."

  "Ridiculous." Temple followed him into the awesome kitchen. There was something charming about eating fast food in such an intimidating atmosphere of haute cuisine. "You want my opinion, then you shrink from getting it. Listen, if the manuscript stank, I'd return it in a plain manila envelope marked 'Illiterate, irrelevant and immaterial,' so all the neighbors would know."

  "Sensitive soul, aren't you?"

  Max was pulling out Styrofoam containers and frowning at the contents. "This is like Sunday dinner on the farm, Grant Wood edition."

  "Isn't it fun?" Temple didn't wait for an answer, but pulled plates and silverware from drawers and cupboards she had checked out on previous visits.

  The baronial breakfast table was of burnt oak, with captain's chairs burly enough for Bluto.

  Max was laughing by the time he brought the food to the table, along with a thin elegant bottle of wine from the walk-in wine cellar.

  "The sublime and the ridiculous," he announced, setting the bottle on the table with a marked emphasis.

  "Who's the sublime and who's the ridiculous."

  "We both are both."

  The cork teased out of the wine bottle, releasing a dry pungent scent. Temple guessed that this one bottle would have paid for a month's worth of fast-food dinners, but she didn't know, and didn't care.

  She searched for her tote bag and found it by the side of her chair.

  "Thanks. I suppose you can't wait for this fine cuisine to digest before I get to the manuscript."

  Max was staring at the meatloaf as if wondering what to put on it. Perhaps a wig.
/>
  "Here's the sauce. It's good, really! Pretend you're having a nice hot meal at home, and dig in."

  "That's what this is about, hmm? My missing family dinners. You don't exactly go in for them yourself nowadays."

  "No. But I had deli with my aunt in New York. Besides, my taste buds are on Minnesota wintertime, no matter the climate. I've got that squirrel-it-away-for-the -winter mentality."

  Max dished up servings from the various steaming boxes.

  "All right. I'll load up on starches while you critique the starch out of my manuscript."

  "Gee, I wish I had my glasses. I have an absolute craving for frames balancing on my nose as I make my pronouncement."

  "I prefer to see your unadorned eyes, all true blue and absolutely honest."

  Temple sampled the meatloaf, corn and potatoes before pulling the stack of white pages to her side.

  "Well, it's pretty seamless where Gandolph's part ends and yours begins. I like your history of magic and psychic phenomena intro. You need more contemporary examples. And why don't you exploit the Houdini seance?"

  "That's . . . still under investigation. I prefer not to give anything away."

  "Don't hold back. Put in what you have now. You can always update it later. Houdini is your thread. He should bracket the entire book: the mystery of his magic tricks, the mystery of contacting the dead. He's still the most famous magician of all time, and he ended up fascinated by the hope of contacting the dead, then disgusted by the fraud that passed for psychic power then . .. and now? What would Houdini think of the Russian ESP experiments? Et cetera, et cetera."

  "I'd have to . . . rebuild the whole book."

  "You've sawed half-naked ladies in two and put them back together again."

  "Not since I was seventeen. That's much too obvious to be real magic."

  "So's the book as it stands now. It needs more personalization. Maybe you could parallel Houdini's development as an escapologist with your own development as a magician."

  "But Temple, a good magician is always both front man and unseen operator. What you're talking about would expose my life, and you know how dangerous that would be."

  "Didn't you say the best disguise in Las Vegas is loud? Maybe in magic, it's naked. And you said that revealing yourself as 'just' a magician might disarm all those nasty terrorists out there that don't want to believe you're not an active counter-terrorist."

  "It's true. The more I put myself into this book, the more I blow my cover, the less useful I am to anybody."

  "Besides, any book is written on water. It can always be changed. Until you sell it, of course."

  Max was cutting the meatloaf Continental-style--with his fork in his left hand, his knife in his right--into neat cubes as if it were the finest steak. He didn't seem to be aware that this was no way to treat a nice, mushy, down-home meatloaf.

  "And," Temple added, not hampered by having to excessively chew anything on her plate,

  "it would be really nice to add Orson Welles and this house as a bracketing element too."

  "That would really blow my cover!"

  "Maybe, by then, you wouldn't need it anymore."

  "By . . . when?"

  "Oh, the three to four years you'll need to finish the book and find someone to publish it."

  "Three to four years?"

  "Didn't you say a good illusion takes years to develop?"

  Max gave up on the dinner and devoted himself to the wine. "I had no idea you would be such a stern taskmaster when it came to the book."

  "You could always publish it yourself, of course."

  "I could?"

  "All it takes is a little money, and then you wouldn't have to worry about it blowing your cover. It would probably print about twenty-five hundred copies to be sold to a very exclusive readership."

  "That's not what I wanted for Gandolph's book."

  "Then you must make it yours and Gandolph's book."

  "I'll have to think it over."

  "Of course. I wouldn't expect to sit down to dinner with you on virtually no notice, throw a major, life-altering proposal your way, and have you fall for it hook, line and signet ring right there and then."

  Max winced. "I get it. You accepted my proposal in a spirit of game impulsiveness. I can do no less. Now. What is this about hyacinth?"

  "That, you'll be happy to hear, I'm at a loss on."

  Max lifted his wine glass so she could mirror his gesture of conciliation.

  "Sometimes ignorant women can be very reassuring."

  Temple chimed rims with him, watching the opal ring on her finger glitter under the overhead sparkler of light. Everybody had a bailiwick.

  *****************

  First they attacked Gandolph's computer.

  "I seem to remember encountering the word 'hyacinth' somewhere in this house when I first came back here," Max said. "Since I've been messing so much with Gandolph's files, I'm wondering if I didn't see it in here."

  But a search turned up nothing but a spell-check definition: "any of various bulbous herbs."

  "Hyacinth is an herb?" Temple was amazed. "That's news to me."

  "What's so special about an herb?"

  "Nothing, except that herbs usually have a long history as folk remedies, and I've never heard of hyacinth in that context."

  "I've got a dictionary of toxins on hard disc. I'll check that."

  "A dictionary of toxins, Max, why?"

  "For emergencies?"

  He grinned as the file came up and the search program box obscured the regular screen. He stopped grinning when an entry came up.

  "Digitalis. It's a potent toxin, our friend the hyacinth plant, though probably in unwieldy amounts if it's to be fatal."

  "Max! You're putting down the poor hyacinth because it would take too much of it to kill someone?"

  "Efficacious poisons require minute amounts for morbidity, and, of course, the most useful ones are also the least detectable. And perhaps the least well known."

  "Like hyacinth, in that regard?"

  "Like hyacinth."

  "What now?"

  Max looked up at her, his narrow face uplit by the computer screen and looking utterly sinister. "Now we consult the magi-cian's grimoires."

  "Grimoires," Temple said on the way to Gandolph's storage room, her heel taps far too gay on the hardwood hall floors for this grim errand. "Such a nice, nasty word. What does it mean?"

  "A book of spells, of herbal knowledge, of incantations. It sounds better than it is. Any grimoires I've seen were either obvious frauds or benign and boring compendiums of dubious home remedies."

  "Did Gandolph really have any?"

  "No, but he has 'many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.' "

  "Poe man."

  "I assume you have suddenly developed a Southern accent."

  "Assume your worst. I assume these three open bookcases are it."

  "Indeed. I'll skim the top shelves; you do the lower ones."

  "Thanks. My knees needed that."

  Max suddenly sank to the floor beside her, his joints collapsing like hinges. "We'll start at the bottom and work up, sharing all the way."

  "Why does that sound like an indecent proposal?"

  "Because it is," he whispered, opening the first book and setting it on her lap. "I suggest we check the indices under H."

  "Elementary, my dear Datsun."

  Gandolph's books were indeed a fascinating stew of offbeat and even eerie subjects.

  Rasputin. Judge Crater. Alistair Crowley. Numerology. ESR Psychics. Freak shows. Graphology.

  Spirit knockings.

  Temple and Max sped-read indexes by the dozen. "Hy" words were at a premium.

  "Hypatia," Temple caroled out once.

  "Early Christian woman mathematician and martyr," Max mumbled back, absorbed in his own search.

  "I wish all mathematicians would be martyred," Temple muttered.

  "Then who would do your taxes?"

  "Jimmy t
he Greek?"

  "I think he died."

  "Doesn't matter, according to this book on revenants. He could come back, better than ever."

  "I think he died politically incorrect."

  "Oh. Then he's beyond any human help."

  "Hyperbole," Max suggested hopefully.

  "A literary term. It means exaggerated overstatement."

  "Like 'you are absolutely too delicious to resist with meatloaf on your breath.' "

  "Oh, ick, Max! That sounds like one of those awful mispronounced foreign language sentences that's supposed to say, 'Where is the meat market, onion breath?' "

  They laughed so hard that the third shelf of books fell into their laps.

  "Oh, this is interesting."

  "What?" Max asked.

  "Just a book of gemstone lore. I'll look up opal."

  "Don't. I can tell you that they're considered unlucky."

  "And that's the ring you gave me?"

  "I'm not superstitious."

  "But I might be! Especially after I read this book."

  Max's big, bony hand covered the open pages like a shroud over the face of the dead. "Then don't look."

  "Call me Pandora. I have an aggravating need to know."

  Temple bent her head over the small-print index entries. A check of the copyright page revealed the book to be a 1913 first edition.

  She found a string of entries under "Opal," and flipped to the major section.

  "Maybe that's why I can finally wear contact lenses," she announced after a couple minutes of silent reading.

  Max looked up from his reference book.

  "Your opal ring," she explained, waggling the finger it decorated. "According to this book, in the middle ages wearing an opal was regarded as beneficial to the sight. Some even said wearing opals conferred invisibility."

  "I could use that."

  "Maybe that's why it's the patron stone of thieves."

  Temple nodded, already paging through the old volume. She was a sucker for any book title that began Curious Lore of . .. and this one, with its frequent footnotes, engraved illustrations and lists of gemstone attributes was a particularly addictive example.