Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

by Carole Nelson Douglas

"No, that would be too ridiculous. In fact, lately, Midnight Louie has been showing a marked dislike for his old haunts."

  "Has he indeed? Could this be a cat with taste? With deep and eerie instincts? What do you think?"

  Before Matt could answer Molina's sarcasm, Max Kinsella appeared from behind a mummy case.

  "Might these be what the chaps in the moon-invasion outfits want?" His palm flowered open to reveal a cluster of capsules, half-clear, half-purple.

  The drug team gathered around like hash-sniffing hounds.

  "Where'd you find those?"

  "Baggies of them. Under the celestial robes of the automated Fortune-telling Mama from Yokohama."

  "All right!"

  Combat boots beat a tattoo on the trailer's metal floor as the men raided the premises.

  Max leaned against the trailer's side. "Now that the smuggled drugs are confiscated, I suppose I'm to be allowed a little peace and quiet to search the rest of the props?"

  "Hyacinth!" a muffled masculine voice called from inside the truck. "Bingo."

  "That's the name of the narcotic?" Matt asked, incredulous. "Hyacinth? That's what the note in Effinger's pocket referred to?"

  Molina smiled and braced a hand on the truck level. In an instant she had pulled herself up to the trailer floor level. Kinsella applauded her feat, not easy in a skirt. Then Matt jumped up.

  "Hyasynth," Molina repeated. "S-y-n-t-h. A designer drug fresh from Hong Kong. They needed to get it out before the Communists took over and quashed all sorts of dubious private-enterprise factories. One component is a digitalis replica taken from hyacinths as a base to produce the usual high."

  "I don't get it." Matt was honestly confused. "Why Las Vegas?"

  "Because it wasn't Hong Kong." Max pushed his long frame off the trailer opening. "Perfect cover. A magician's props. Are these clodhoppers going to get out of my way soon, Lieutenant?

  I've got a Very Important Person to find."

  "Got your evidence?" Molina shouted into the trailer's long metal cavern. "Get 'em into the van. We've got missing persons to find."

  "Missing persons?" Matt asked.

  She shrugged. "Kinsella did hear a mewing sound."

  The men, carrying garbage bags full of gently clicking capsules bounded off the trailer end in formation, the vehicle shaking as each man leaped to the ground.

  The moment the drug-hounds had deserted the trailer, Max began moving his fingers over the nearest cabinet as if searching for Braille.

  Matt's alarm grew as he watched the magician's swift and serious search.

  Before this, everyone had seemed so laid-back, as if there were no hurry. Now, it was all hurry.

  "I've been hearing a faint cry," Kinsella said, finding a hidden spring and clicking open a sword-swallowing taboret.

  The cinnabar-red painted interior was empty.

  Matt moved among the magical furniture, listening for clues.

  A banshee's cry came from far within the trailer.

  "Eeeeeeroooooooow. "

  Kinsella bounded in that direction, still using the flashlight Molina had commandeered.

  "That doesn't sound like anything human," Molina pointed out.

  "You wouldn't sound very human if you'd been locked in a virtual coffin decorated by mandarin-fingernail painting," Matt said, as Kinsella wrestled another tall case away from the side wall. His long fingers made spider-light tracks across the front surface.

  When Matt joined him, he tilted the unit forward just in time for Matt to catch the brunt of its weight, then did the same thorough finger-walking over its lowered top and revealed bottom.

  At last a secret lower drawer clicked out and jammed into the trailer floor.

  Kinsella rooted through a tangle of rainbow-colored scarves, then rose and pushed the cabinet upright.

  Some pieces were covered in tarps. Kinsella began ripping them off. His early handling technique had been cautious, even respect-fill. Now he was indifferent to the magical cabinet-maker's art.

  Matt heard a squeak, or a cry. "There!" He pointed to a low shrouded oblong.

  The elasticized ropes binding the piece snapped like suspenders in Kinsella's eager fingers.

  He knelt before the revealed object.

  It reminded Matt of an altar from a Black Mass. Chains and locks crisscrossed its sinister battered leather surface, which was scribed with arcane signs scrawled in the deep burgundy-brown color of old blood.

  Kinsella rubbed his hands together, as if stimulating circulation. He tapped on the trunk in various places, tested the chain links, rattled the locks.

  "If Temple were confined in something like that," Matt demanded, exasperated, "wouldn't she have run out of air by now?"

  Kinsella shook his head. "These props are all made of wood. Wood breathes. It never joins as tightly as it should. These may be built to look as solid as a steel safe, but in magic everything is the opposite of what it appears to be."

  "In life, too, I'm beginning to think."

  The man grinned up at him in the harsh glare of the flashlight. "Sounds like you're learning."

  "If we don't have keys, we need .. . picks, hatchets."

  "Violent, aren't we?"

  Kinsella's hands roamed the heavy metal keys like a pianists. He unthreaded a length of chain then jerked. Two loops fell free.

  "I suppose," he told Matt in a confidential us-guys tone, "that if I asked Molina for a nail file, and she did have one, she would stab me with it."

  Matt dug in his pockets. "I've got a nail clipper, one of those deals with a short pull-out file.

  "Good work, Scout Devine! I'll take it."

  Kinsella fanned out his bare hand like a surgeon anticipating the slap of a scalpel on his palm.

  Matt complied, a little harder than he had to.

  "Male nurses can be so violent," Kinsella said, chuckling and handing Matt the flashlight.

  Kinsella flipped out the two-inch ribbed-metal file--utterly useless for smoothing off hangnails, Matt had always found--and began probing the keyholes as if they were open wounds in need of cleaning out.

  Matt aimed the light at whatever lock Kinsella explored.

  Sometimes he gave up and moved on. At other times, a lock conceded with a click that sounded like applause to Matt's blood-pulsing ears. Then Kinsella would draw another long length of chain free and into a puddle on the floor.

  Ten minutes became fifteen by the watch Matt's mother had given him, that he wore only on occasions "out."

  "You believe she can breathe, if she's here somewhere?" he asked at last.

  "These devices aren't made for smothering someone, merely containing them, concealing them, letting them escape. It's too bad I never taught Temple some tricks of the trade. . .. ah!"

  Another lock sprung open. More chain pulled through Kinsella's agile hands to coil on the metal floor.

  An almost unheard whine hailed the fall of the last length of chain.

  Kinsella shook his hands, spread his arms, fanned his fingers over the trunk's front corners, and lifted.

  The metal-banded maw cracked, then split, then elevated upward.

  Matt felt his blood slow in his veins. The trunk was big enough to hold Temple, especially if her body were curled up. And why would it be curled up? Because someone had forced her into that position to fit into the trunk? Because she had assumed it herself? The ever-comforting fetal position? Or because she had curled up and died. That expression didn't exist for nothing.

  The flashlight he held glared like a nova sun into the darkness inside the trunk. Anyone alive in there would have reacted to the bright light, would have stirred or protested.

  But all Matt saw were the trunk's dark corners outside the overheated circle of the flashlight beam. No one was inside.

  Relief felt like the flu, his arms and legs aching as if all the blood in his body was draining.

  The next thought was: if not this casket, what about the next? And the next. And the next.

  T
his was like playing hide-and-seek in a funeral-parlor coffin-display room and he had very recent reason to be familiar with that grimly hushed arena.

  And then the darkness moved, leaped up at him and the flashlight, struck the portable lamp from his hand.

  "What the devil--?" Kinsella was caught off guard too.

  Matt jumped back to retrieve the light where it lay rocking on the floor.

  Something brushed his leg as he did so, and he couldn't restrain a shudder.

  He swept the light across the floor, until its beam nailed the perpetrator. Matt saw flattened ears, frown-ruffled forehead blinking eyes with the pupils narrowed to a vertical slit the width of a straight pin. A tail lashed the trunk's outside corner.

  "Louie?"

  "Oh, no," came Molina's groan from outside the truck. "Keep searching."

  Kinsella bent to pick up the cat.

  Louie's feet flailed against the magician's chest, and from the expression on his face, a few claws connected.

  "Who wants this fireball?"

  "Put him down," Matt suggested. "Maybe he knows where Temple is."

  "This is a wild goose chase," Molina said from her distance. "We should go back to the theater and conduct a more thorough search there."

  Kinsella was quick to answer. "We haven't conducted a thorough search here yet."

  Matt heard the mockery as Kinsella repeated her official phrase: conduct a thorough search.

  He could afford to mock the routine, the methodical means of the law. He was an outlaw.

  Before Matt could decide which side to join--stay with Kinsella until every box had been broken down or rush back with Molina to strip-search the theater topside and below--Kinsella spun violently forward and tore the tarp from a concealed shape.

  What he revealed made even Matt catch his breath.

  "It's the cabinet Temple disappeared from! But how can that be? Did they break down the stage props that fast?"

  "Or a duplicate," Kinsella suggested.

  He grabbed the pulls centered on the pierced Oriental brass circles. Both doors swept open.

  Matt glimpsed a figure inside: shadowy, still. Like a statue.

  Kinsella mimicked its frozen attitude. Only his lips moved.

  "Lieutenant, you better split your skirt seams again and get up here."

  He stood as still as a man face-to-face with a striking snake, his tone severe. Matt turned with a swoop of the flashlight beam and ran to the truck apron to help Molina make the giant step up.

  Her hand was already reaching up when he got there. Between his alarmed pull and her push she was up beside him as lightly as an acrobat.

  Their feat surprised them almost as much as Kinsella's alarm.

  They rushed to the rear of the trailer.

  Kinsella still stood before the open doors he had forced into revealing their contents.

  Matt's flashlight beam probed the open space beyond him. The demonic figure inside wore a familiar face indeed: Max Kinsella's.

  The box's back wall was a mirror.

  "You need to see this, Lieutenant," Kinsella said tightly, like a man afraid to move even his lips, as if something transient and shocking might melt away at too much attention.

  Molina stepped past Matt to stand behind Kinsella, so close that she finally saw what he saw.

  Matt watched her shoulders stiffen.

  He edged next to her place, straining to see the devilishly reflected light, the mirror-refracted light.

  He saw Kinsella's facade, as through a glass darkly. Saw the glass that reflected it. Saw . . .

  scratches upon the glass. Sand-painting. Scrawls.

  The letters were printed in a shade the flashlight illuminated as ox-blood red.

  Big letters, lavishly covering on the glass. At a slight angle, up to the right.

  R-e-m-e-m-b-e-r m-e

  y-o-u b-a-s-t-a-r-d!

  Chapter 45

  Shoe Time

  Matt felt a phantom cut.

  This time he knew it for what it was, if not why it was.

  Like all bad things that happen to supposedly good people it was swift, savage and puzzling.

  Kinsella finally spoke. "Someone knew. Someone knew that I would be here to open this device."

  Matt stood in the background, faintly reflected beyond the mirrored Max. Matt stood silent, knowing the words had a special, searing meaning for him. And him alone. Didn't they?

  Molina's voice was clinical. Calm. "This does seem personal.

  Anyone here care to confess?"

  After the dead silence, Kinsella laughed.

  "Confession requires specifics, Lieutenant. This is far too vague. But you're right. It is personal. With me, from now on."

  An angry howl from the floor caught their attention.

  Louie was pacing back and forth, his tail lashing against the tarps, thumping like a snare drum keeping background rhythm.

  His next vocalization was a yowl.

  He snaked back and forth against a box shrouded by tarpaulin, rubbed his nose on its corner, first left then right, like a chef honing a knife-edge.

  *********************

  No one wanted to articulate the message they each were getting loud and clear: Midnight Louie wanted them to open this box.

  "Must be something fishy," Max said finally.

  Kinsella, Matt reminded himself. The man was only a last name and an occupation: magician. He was not a person. He was not Temple's . . . sole savior.

  "I don't know about you two, but I'm about ready for ouija boards," Molina said. "Open this thing."

  Matt bent to strip off the tarp, anticipating Kinsella.

  What they unveiled was another oblong box. Odd how every magic-show container was so coffin like, Matt thought. How the tricks all involved confinement and escape. Maybe he was missing some subtle erotic content; he wouldn't doubt it. But he was struck by the defiance of death that ran through the art: rising from the dead. No more, no less. Easter Sunday for the unthinking masses. Rolling away the stone.

  "Another sword-trick box." Kinsella's voice had lightened for the first time.

  They stared at him, shocked by the lilt in his tone.

  "Don't you get it? There are already holes slit through, for the blades. Breathing slits."

  Molina's glance crossed Matt's, like dueling foils. They were wondering where the swords were, and what they might have already done. Here, among the props of his trade, the magician was an optimist, the master of illusion.

  Matt and Molina had no such expectations of defeating the obvious. They pictured the unthinkable. He, from his anxious heart. She, from her professional pessimism.

  Max . . . Kinsella . . . bent over the box, checking top and bottom.

  "The head and foot slides are shut. Sealed with ... duct tape!" He laughed. "We've got it! The one. That damn cat must have smelled something, or he saw her put into it." He rapped on the lid. "Temple, we're coming."

  Who could demur in the face of such theatrical confidence. Matt found his eyes anchored on Molina's when they weren't darting nervously to Kinsella's delicate maneuvers to crack open the box.

  If Temple wasn't here, where was she?

  The top of the box lifted off in hinged sections.

  They glimpsed a painted interior, something colorful in the bottom. They smelled a potent floral not quite like perfume.

  Midnight Louie suddenly leaped atop the closed bottom portion.

  The box was like a coffin: top ajar, bottom covered.

  Fragile red silk lined the interior. In the open upper portion, next to a satin cat toy in the shape of a gaudy ice-cream cone, lay several blood-red commas, fifteen or sixteen scattered like rose petals.

  They were the nail guards one might glue onto a cat's claws.

  Kinsella shoved the box hard against the truck side, so the impact rang with a dull, bell-like thrum.

  "The dressing room at the Opium Den," Molina said. "All that was left of Shangri-La were a few makeup tins, and the
mandarin nail shells."

  To Matt was left the logical pronouncement. "The cat Hyacinth was here. That's what Louie smelled."

  Louie paced, and rubbed his nose against the corner of the box, like a chef honing a knife.

  Max Kinsella began breaking down every cabinet left untouched in the trailer.

  Matt and Molina watched as if caught on the sidelines during a sudden-death overtime.

  "If she's not here," Matt said, "she must still be there. And the issue of air--"

  "He's damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't. Either way we go, we risk everything."

  Molina leaned against the truck side, looking weary. "I could phone in a search, but they wouldn't be able to open most of the remaining cabinets. And the company probably left behind what they did for good reason. Kinsella's got to eliminate the odds somewhere. We're here. It's most economical timewise to stay."

  "That's what it comes down to? The least waste of time?"

  Molina nodded solemnly. "We've committed. We've got to see it through here before we waste time going somewhere else."

  "I'm glad I'm not a cop. Or a magician."

  Midnight Louie, as agitated as they were, lurched back and forth from Max Kinsella to the two of them, meowing and pacing, only stopping to sniff at the uncovered cabinets.

  "I had no idea," Matt said, "that so much could fit into the back of a semitrailer."

  "Great smuggling device." She watched Kinsella shove a rejected cabinet aside.

  "We can't help him?" Matt asked.

  She shook her head. "Oh, we could shuffle furniture around, try to feel useful. But we'd just obstruct him in an attempt to soothe our own feelings. He's our drug-sniffing dog; let him work."

  "Temple isn't 'drugs.' "

  "She is if she's hidden in a magician's maze."

  "Why can't we hear something, if she's here?"

  "She could be gagged. Drugged."

  "Or dead."

  "Or dead."

  Matt found himself looking at Molina as if she were the God of Death itself. But she was only the messenger.