Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Louie's obvious umbrage at Max's impinging on territory the black cat regarded as his own was just the final fillip to the situation.

  "Louie has been hard to reach lately. I've seen him at Matt's--"

  "Have you?" Max asked with bland interest.

  "Just in passing," she answered. "And I know Louie's dropped by here from time to time, but he's mostly been out and about. A pity you let him scare you off so fast; apparently he has better things to do than hang around here."

  Max had wandered over to the bookcase, selected a volume and was smiling at the pages.

  "What have you found?" Temple asked.

  "Nothing mysterious. Just my favorite collection of Isak Dine-son. I thought you might throw me out when I came back, but I knew you'd never get rid of my books."

  "You did not think I'd throw you out. You thought I'd be waiting here like an unplayed CD or an unread book, frozen in time until you came back to remind yourself of what I was like."

  "Maybe I used to be just a little overconfident. But I got over it, didn't I? Now I'm just as insecure as your average guy. Suspicious, paranoid, jealous. Happy?"

  Temple rolled her eyes and replaced the book. Show time was looming.

  But Max exchanged the book for her left hand. "You're wearing my ring tonight."

  "My ring." Temple flared her fingers to admire the opal. "I put it on after Molina left."

  "Molina was here?"

  "Oh, yeah. She just comes to call on her favorite all-around suspect any old time. After she left, it suddenly dawned on me that I was letting what I was afraid other people would think run my life. I never used to do that. I've caught your habit of concealment, and I don't like it.

  Besides, how many million years will it be before I run into Molina again?"

  "Obviously you're a dead end for her on this case."

  "This case--" Temple picked up her small evening bag; only bag ladies kept tote bags on their laps in theater seats. "--is a bust. If the only clue to who killed Effinger, and why, is the word 'hyacinth,' it's a lost cause."

  "Then you don't think Shangri-La and her performing cat Hyacinth at the Opium Den are our last, best hope for resolution?"

  "No! Do you?"

  Max hesitated, then sleeked the hair back at his temples and laced his fingers contemplatively behind his head.

  He gazed at the ever-fascinating arched ceiling that acted as a movie screen for the play of evening shadows.

  "I've tried to trace the act," he said, "having never heard of it here or abroad. I can't."

  You said this Opium Den was a low-end venue."

  "But even second-rate acts have a history. And then there's the magician's name."

  "Shangri-La? Kind of Eastern mystical. Not bad for a lady magician."

  "Shan-gri-La," Max repeated so slowly that she could have read his lips.

  "Shang-ri-La. Kind of like frangi-pangi, I guess. I think of Lost Horizon . . . Shanghai. . .

  shantung. Chinese stuff mostly." Then she got Max's meaning. Shan! The directory name for the files involving mysterious brotherhood on the parchments."

  Max smiled, as if a slow student had finally managed to withdraw an elephant from a top hat. "It struck me as interesting. I have a vivid imagination."

  "Max, Effinger isn't worth all this mumbo jumbo."

  "Maybe it isn't about Effinger at all. Maybe it's about someone else."

  "Who?"

  He shrugged. "Let's go see a magic show."

  Temple snaked her beringed hand through his right arm (his sport coat was baby-soft black cashmere), caught her knit jacket collar together against the evening chill, and they left the unit, as they had so many times before in less uncertain days.

  "My God, wait!" Max ordered in the cul-de-sac.

  "What's wrong?"

  He clapped a hand to his forehead. "How could I have forgotten? I have been a selfish beast.

  I didn't check out the shoes."

  ****************

  Temple spun to exit the Taurus, admiring her strappy magenta suede Via Spiga pumps with the radical heel to which Max had given his highest seal of approval in the hallway. Shoes were wearable sculpture; they satisfied something in her sole . . . probably the endless kid years when she'd been too little to be seen, heard or even blinked at. Not until she'd acquired literal stature with her grown-up lady shoes. Somehow, one could face anything in the properly spirited shoes.

  The entrance to the Opium Den required facing. Max dropped the car keys into the valet's waiting hand with a stern expression that somehow conveyed, "Park it six blocks away at a respectable establishment. And don't strip the gears."

  Despite the valet parking, necessary because of virtually no on-street parking and no adjacent lot, the Opium Den's entrance canopy smacked of third-string Mann's Chinese Theater.

  The sidewalk outside was gritty with refuse, including crushed private-dancer flyers picturing scores of vacuous pouts. In the en-trance facade, missing neon bulbs lent a gap-toothed grin to the garish dragon hanging over all who entered.

  Yet tourists poured in, the ladies clad in spike heels and glitter-threaded sweaters with faux mink collars, the men in sports coats over knit golfing shirts. Going out to a show was Las Vegas's most gala event, even if the show wasn't a top ticket like Siegfried and Roy, Cirque du Soleil or Lance Burton.

  "Why do the women magicians get the short end of the wand?" Temple wanted to know.

  "It's a cruel sexist world," Max answered lightly. "I admit that I'm curious to see her act."

  He was gazing at a poster of a woman with a ghostly white face and the dramatic, drawn-on features of Asian drama, strands of flat-black hair whipping around her like a cat-o'-ninetails.

  Her quasi-Oriental robe was slashed at implausible points to reveal sinuous white arms and legs up to the firm white thigh muscles.

  "Dragon Lady," Temple murmured. "With kick."

  Max laughed as they entered the lobby and that's how they came face-to-face with Matt Devine and Carmen Molina.

  Stupefaction would not have been a strong enough word to describe the general reaction, which was no reaction, because everybody froze as if suddenly playing the children's game

  "Statue." That was where one was spun around by the hand and suddenly released with instructions to freeze in whatever position one could stop in.

  Temple was caught stepping forward on her right foot with her left hand reaching up to brush the hair from her face, a pose which highlighted her ring like a de Beers diamond ad.

  Max had been guiding her ahead of him so the crowd wouldn't smash into her, as it was wont to do with one of her short stature.

  Matt had been checking his watch, left wrist raised and twisted, a comment on his lips iced into a sudden silence.

  Carmen Molina had been turning her head to scan the crowd, and had spotted them both in one eagle-eyed sweep, had eagles ever been blessed with morning-glory blue eyes.

  Like a camera, Temple took in the entirety of the pair before her. Matt's bronze velvet jacket (how could he? So soon. With another woman. Well, sort of woman). Molina's totally uninspired boxy navy suit, just the formal side of career dressing for an accountant's office (so tacky, but then it was probably boxy to hide an arsenal).

  Matt was staring at her hand as if she had just punched him with it.

  Molina was staring at Max as if she'd like to tackle him.

  Max was staring at them both as if they were Martians.

  But he spoke first

  "Is this a . . . date? Are congratulations in order?" Sometimes Max was the reincarnation of Cary Grant in a James Bond movie.

  "Work," Molina barked.

  "Command performance," Matt said. "What's your excuse?" But he was looking at Temple.

  She didn't have to answer. Lieutenant Molina was taking command.

  "This isn't my bust, or I'd take you right now," she told Max. "But I'm not supposed to make a scene. So consider yourself lucky."

  "I don't k
now--" Shock had ebbed and he was starting to enjoy himself. Max thrived on other people's tension. "I don't expect much from the show. We could probably have put on a much better one out here."

  Molina's strong features hardened, but she resisted a reply.

  "We'd better find our seats," Matt the peacemaker suggested. But the look he shot Temple was far from meek.

  "What if we're seated near them?" Temple whispered hoarsely to Max as they moved away through the crowd.

  "We'll find other seats."

  "But they may all be taken."

  "We'll find other seats," he reassured her so firmly that she didn't want to know how he'd accomplish it.

  But fate was merciful. Temple could see Matt's blond head veering right through the crowd.

  Max, tickets in hand, steered them left.

  "This will be odd," Max noted as if just thinking of it. "To be in the audience for a change."

  "Max ... we keep going forward. We're not in the really close-in seats?"

  "Of course, we're in the critic's circle. I definitely intend to criticize the show. If you're lucky, it won't be aloud."

  "How did you get such close seats?"

  Temple jerked her head around. Matt and Molina were set-tling into a banquette on the upper tier.

  "Seats are sold by computer. I'm learning. Besides, I want to be close enough to seethe smoke, mirrors and wires. Also, I want to see this Hyacinth fur-person close up. A Siamese cat is pretty small from the back row."

  Temple knew this was not the time and place to object to Max's manipulative seating skills.

  She would bet that Molina was really steamed that they were so close and she and Matt were so far away.

  "Why on earth are they here?" Max asked, mirroring her thoughts in the eerie way he had used to be quite good at.

  "I don't know! Probably to bug us."

  "Don't be paranoid. There's a reason, and I take it unlikely romance is not it."

  "Absolutely not," Temple said emphatically.

  "Then calm down, quit covering your ring hand and figure out what it is. You're closer to the couple in question than I am."

  "Separately, or together?"

  "Either way, I assume. The stage is my job; the gate-crashers have now become yours."

  "I'm sure they have tickets."

  "I'm sure the tickets were obtained by the police about as highhandedly as ours were by me.

  The key is why Devine is here. What does he know, who does he know, that would make him useful as a witness?"

  "Effinger."

  "But he's dead." Max suddenly settled back in his seat, arms folded across his chest. "Now that might be interesting. A resurrection. I don't believe a stage magician has tried it in forty years."

  "If you sit this close up front, you don't get roomy banquette seats around nice tables, but have to put your drink in this dinky hollow attached to the seat arm."

  "Aren't we cranky, all of a sudden? Just how many drinks are you planning on having."

  "Plenty," Temple threatened.

  She hadn't mentioned her real source of irritation: the fact that the pair in the back had a perfect view of them all evening but they could hardly return the favor without looking like rubber-neckers. Rubbernecks! Not neckers. Oh, shoot.

  Max was chuckling. "What a farce. I bet Molina's got a bad case of itchy holster. She can't really arrest me, you know. Not enough evidence for probable cause."

  "Maybe she's got evidence you don't know about."

  "I doubt it. Now, here's the nice lady with the notepad. What will you have?"

  Temple was tempted to ask if they served hemlock, but settled for two scotch and sodas instead. One had to order in bulk, because once the house lights dimmed and the show began, the only interruptions for two hours would be the waiters circulating silently with drink orders.

  Max chose white wine, one abstemious glass. Temple wondered what Molina and Devine were knocking back: nothing for Molina if she were working, and who-knows-what for Matt, whose habits of any type were no longer any of her business.

  But what was he doing with Molina?

  She wasn't aware that she was twisting the ring around her finger until Max took her hand to stop her. "Chill out," he whispered in her ear. "Some questions are better answered later than sooner."

  Temple sighed. She remembered them sitting like this at theaters around Minneapolis. How fun it was to settle into their seats, alone together but not alone, whispering back and forth.

  Max nuzzled her earlobe, his hand moving from her shoulder to her neck.

  "Do you suppose this Shangri-La will change the Siamese cat into twins?" he asked. "Why a domestic cat? It's so small for a stage act."

  "As big as a rabbit, and bigger than doves."

  "I'm glad I never worked with animals." His caressing fingers paused on her neck. "What's this? A souvenir of Effinger?"

  Temple froze at his touch, but not from excitement. Confession trembled on the tip of her tongue, but it managed to twist into denial. "No. Louie must have done it."

  "A cat gave you a hickey?"

  "You know cats." Temple's shrug interrupted his caress. "They'll hook you with a claw here, a fang there and you never even notice it."

  "Tooth and nail, huh? Law of the jungle." Max did not sound convinced.

  Temple welcomed the nick-of-time arrival of their drinks, and toyed with the evening's program until the waiter left.

  "This is clever. Like a Chinese menu."

  "With a little Japanese thrown in for good measure. I have a feeling this will be a multicultural evening."

  Temple fanned herself with the slick cardboard. It seemed hot in here. She wriggled out of her jacket, Max holding it so she could work her arms out. "Excuse me. Sorry," she murmured as her thrashing impinged on the woman on her right.

  "Better?" Max asked as she settled down.

  Before she could nod, the Musak that had been barely noticeable swelled into a distinctly Oriental sound, full of crystalline pings and high, yodeling instruments.

  "Sounds like the overture to 'Flower Drum Song,' " Max whispered in what was not meant as a compliment.

  At once baby-stepping Chinese maidens tripped onto the stage as the opening curtain parted to reveal a set of piled pagodas and distant mountains. A glittering covered rickshaw was being drawn across the stage by a twenty-sandal team of coolies in satin pajamas, pigtails and straw hats.

  Temple was about to comment on the politically incorrect cliches when the music grew even higher and shriller. A cloud

  CAT ON A HYACINTH HUNT * 297

  of shadows crossed the stage, dispersing the coolies and attacking and dissembling the rickshaw with predatory swiftness. Within was a woman in exquisite Chinese robes, which the black-clad attackers rent from her body with flourishes of unraveling fabric.

  So many thin, veiled layers flew up into the stage flies that it seemed nothing would be left of the woman, but she suddenly burst upward like the clothes, swinging out of the shadow figures' earthbound grasps on an invisible wire, a tattered kite of a figure, her bare legs and arms flashing through the provocative tatters of her robes.

  "Hmm," Max commented, aiming a Clint Eastwood-squint at the stage.

  But he was watching the wings, not the central figure of the woman careening above the stage.

  The dark cloud was dispersing to the stage's far reaches, separating into a swarm of furies, into black-Spandex-clad ninjas.

  "Aren't ninjas Japanese?" Temple whispered to Max.

  He nodded, still watching the stage. "This setup blends everything exotic and Eastern into a kind of chow mein. Purist it ain't, but it's perfect for Las Vegas."

  By now Shangri-La had come to rest atop a huge elephant figure that had materialized from behind a sheer length of chiffon that the Chinese maidens had lifted from a trembling "river" on the stage floor into a wavering wall of color and softness.

  As the show progressed, Shangri-La, while her henchmen the ninja and the maid
ens disappeared and reappeared, wore less and less and played peekaboo with the almost-living lengths of exotic fabrics that made the stage a fluid space, a kind of cloud kingdom.

  Temple was struck by the arch peep-show nature of Las Vegas magic shows. For this later

  "adult" show, bare breasts were obligatory, though Shangri-La, being the magician star, only revealed glimpses of her acrobatic body.

  Her agile movements were even more impressive because of the six-inch platform shoes she wore, which changed in elaboration and grew taller with each of her reappearances in yet another delicately glittering robe. And as the act progressed, Shangri-La's robes intensified in color from the palest pastels to the more lurid and inflamed shades.

  "What's the grade?" Temple asked, leaning over to whisper to Max, whose intense surveillance of the onstage and offstage action had turned him into a virtual statue.

  "Execution is excellent; originality is pathetic. A very odd combo of strength and weakness.

  Disturbing. It's almost as if--," but Max's sentence trailed off, lost in the multitude of interior paths his quick mind was following on a journey of its own.

  Still, a magic show is a magic show. Impossibly large objects are made to appear or disappear; people come and go in exotic cabinets like Clark Kent dashing into a phone booth and flying out as Superman.

  Temple watched, always tricked, like the rest of the audience, despite her best efforts to see the smoke and mirrors, to watch the hand that wasn't waving the red flag of distraction.

  And eventually came another patented magic-show moment.

  The enchantress, in her tatter-edged robes of black-and-orange chiffon imprinted with silver chrysanthemums, glided across the stage apron on her incredibly high Chinese platform soles.

  Temple squinted to better see a silver-leafed landscape carved into the six-inch-high platforms.

  She had never before seen a woman as vertically ambitious.