Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  The problem was solved in an instant. Ralph bent and lifted Temple up, his hands fixed at her waist.

  So. This is what it felt like to be tall. She gazed into the elephant-ear plants, read the hidden neon messages that flashed off and on like shy Rorschach blots. Domingo had said. He had promised to acknowledge Matt with this exhibit. How? Where?

  It was a mystery.

  A challenge.

  Something necessary to solve.

  “There!”

  Ralph carried her where she pointed.

  No one gawked. This was Las Vegas. One expected the unexpected.

  He set her gently down by a lurid gaggle of overgrown neon kiwi birds.

  “How did Domingo know?” Temple muttered.

  When a world-famous conceptual artist decides to do something in Las Vegas, there are no holds barred. The entire project, a coup for the Crystal Phoenix, was courtesy of Domingo’s high regard for Matt Devine. Temple might have cleared him of murder, but Matt in his role of hotline-counselor had cured him of a mid-life sexual addiction that was threatening to ruin his professional and personal future.

  Behind the kiwis (so prominent in a more recent murder environment) stood the sinister figure of the Wicked Witch of the West holding a flamingo pink neon sign.

  “Surrender Dorothy” it read in cursive script, with an added line beneath: “to Mr. Midnight.”

  Signed: “Domingo.”

  Really, Temple thought. Most…ambiguous.

  And her without a pair of ruby red slippers to her name.

  Temple pulled into the Circle Ritz parking lot, feeling in the mood for a brass band, but no such luck. It was deserted except for the landlady’s inherited silver VW Bug, millennium model.

  Temple pulled in right next to it. Take that, Elvismobile!

  For a moment she wondered again why Matt Devine had traded this sleek if funky little car upholstered in blue-suede-shoe cloth for Electra’s groady old pink Probe. Which he’d immediately painted an uninspiring shade of white. Of course, all shades of white were uninspiring on any car but a Stutz-Bearcat convertible to Temple.

  She sat there in her snazzy red convertible, contemplating Matt’s depressingly modest outlook on life. If it was quiet, unassuming, and dull, he was all for it. Perhaps that was why he’d never really fallen for her.

  It had been a close call, though, interrupted by Max’s sudden return from the missing-in-action lists just when she was beginning to accept that her live-in lover was gone for good. What if Max hadn’t come back? Would she and Matt be sharing the whitewashed Probe now? Or a red Miata? At five-ten, Matt would probably fit in the Miata like Goldilocks in baby bear’s bed: just right.

  Temple glanced at the empty passenger seat beside her. Ghosts always rode with a single woman. Maybe some women wouldn’t have taken Max back after he’d vanished for almost a year with no notice. But he was a magician. Vanishing was a professional hazard. And he had left to save her from drawing the attention of the bad guys on his trail. A noble act, really. Besides, they had been monogamous long enough and enough in love to flirt with a real commitment: marriage someday. You had to remain true to your school, and Temple’s alma mater was monogamy in a bed-hopping age. Max had remained true the whole time he was gone, too. Mutual fidelity wasn’t something you threw away.

  Temple fluffed her road-whipped hair into a semblance of order in the rearview mirror, which reflected a lot empty of all the working tenants’ cars, including her reliable old Storm.

  Too bad you couldn’t keep old cars like you did old pets: till death did you part, and a little box of rust at the end for yourétagère. Then she thought of Max and his rotating stable of “cold” cars, courtesy of his international-operative friends. Temple didn’t know what he’d be driving from one day to the next, and they were all perfectly serviceable, perfectly forgettable vehicles. That was the point.

  Temple patted the leather passenger seat beside her, hot in the sun. Maybe that’s why she had made such an extravagant statement with this car. Maybe she wanted to shout that she didn’t need to live the kind of self-denying life Matt seemed married to, or have to follow the kind of enforced low-profile pattern that Max’s undercover work had made his lifestyle if he wanted to keep having a life.

  Something tweedled, and Temple jumped. Every new car had its own literal bells and whistles that told you to take the key out of the ignition, or put your seat belt on, or to turn off your headlights.

  But this signal was just from the cell phone in the tote bag on the passenger seat. She patted it down expertly, looking for concealed communications devices, and finally came up with her phone.

  “Yes?” she asked after the fourth ring, basking in the open air, staring up at clear blue sky of spring.

  “I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time,” the voice said.

  “Only on a most unusual day,” Temple caroled back. She was in a good mood and would not be denied.

  “This is Molina and all my days are unusual, so don’t flatter yourself. I need to talk to you.”

  “You are.”

  “In person, where I can see you and you don’t sound half-looped.”

  “I am not looped. I am happy. It is a natural human state in parts of Las Vegas you seldom see, Lieutenant.”

  “That’s good to know. Can you come see my side of town?”

  “Yeah. Now?”

  “As good a time as any.”

  “For you, maybe.” Then Temple pictured zipping up to the police department building in this jaunty set of wheels. What’d Molina drive, an ancient Volvo? “Okay, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Thanks,” Molina’s brusque voice said before the connection died.

  Temple stared at her cell phone as if it had grown Dumbo ears. Molina gave thanks? To her?

  Must be a trap.

  Temple resolved to be on her guard despite a New Car High and welcomed piloting her new baby on a mission to Homicide Central. Might as well break it in early.

  C. R. Molina’s office was depressingly functional, but Temple had been here before. She sat on the molded plastic visitor’s chair, her feet barely grazing the floor despite platform wedgies that added four inches to her five-feet-zero.

  Across from her, Molina was the same stark, brunette figure that sometimes stalked Temple’s nightmares: Mother Superior incarnate, a female authority figure who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  Instead of feeling chirpy about her flashy new car, Temple suddenly felt like a kid with a new red fire engine that all the adults were too busy with Real Life to look at.

  This insight reminded Temple that she had often been too busy lately to look at Real Life, which was the only kind of life — and death — Molina dealt with daily.

  Molina was shunting some paperwork aside. The statistics of death in Las Vegas. She reminded Temple of a school principal calling a student to her office. Except school principals were seldom nervous, and today the Rock of Gibraltar of the LVMPD was. Slightly.

  She sat back, a nunlike figure in her dark navy blazer and denim shirt. “This is off the record.”

  “Which way? I’m not supposed to tell anyone, or you won’t tell anyone?”

  “You’ve never listened to me before, but I wish you’d prick up one tiny Toto ear and listen now.”

  Temple flushed at being compared to a dog. A small dog. A small cute film dog. “Which Wicked Witch are you warning me about now?”

  “It’s Wicked Wizard.”

  “Max? Don’t you know by now that I don’t listen to propaganda?”

  “I do. Which is why I’m pretty stupid for even trying to open your eyes about him. You should know that he is suspected of some pretty serious stuff. That there’s good reason to think he’s committed a felony.”

  Temple’s sun-warmed skin felt the sudden frost of an inner chill. “Felony.”

  “Grand theft, burglary, robbery, kidnapping,” Molina noted tone lessly. “And murder.”

  “You’re not
back on that old sweet song again? Max is not a murderer. If he’d done anything even remotely wrong since he came back last fall, you’d have had him arrested by now.”

  “Easier said than done with the Mystifying Max. Magicians have a criminal edge second to none.”

  “Ex-magician.”

  “Too bad he’s not an ex-boyfriend.”

  “Maybe he is. You don’t know anything about us, really.”

  “I know more than you do about Max Kinsella.”

  “Now, really, that’d be going some.”

  “You’re blinded by your relationship to the man. You so resented the implication when you were assaulted in the parking garage that the emergency room staff assumed you were a battered woman. But what does sleeping with the stripper strangler make you?”

  “Max? Killed that poor girl? Cher Smith?”

  “For starters.”

  “You think I wouldn’t know if he were capable of that?”

  Molina nodded. “Most of the worst serial rapists had nice little wives at home who were totally ignorant of their real natures. And some didn’t. Some had willing partners in their crimes; women who preferred to see it done to other women than to suffer it themselves. Abused to the point of becoming accomplices.”

  “You have no idea of who Max is,” Temple said, stunned at the darkness of the crimes under discussion, but unshaken. “I wish I could tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Who’s more liable to be deceived here: the girlfriend, or the police professional?”

  Temple just shook her head.

  “Remember that I warned you. He could go down for something seriously criminal, and then you really will be an accomplice, as well as a witness for the prosecution.”

  “Why do you need to prove Max guilty of something so badly?”

  “Because it’s my job to find and arrest the guilty. He may be guilty of more than you can imagine.”

  Temple had a Cecil B. DeMille imagination, so this was a real threat. If Molina was even more convinced now than a year ago that Max was guilty of something heinous, the situation was as serious as she said.

  Temple answered seriously. “I know it looked suspicious when Max disappeared right after that dead man was found in the spy network cubbyhole over the Goliath Casino, but he had just finished his performance contract there. If — and I say if — he knew about the death, he might have gone underground because he was afraid of whoever did it, or of being arrested for it. Maybe he was set up —”

  “You’re telling me you lived with the man and he never explained his vanishing act to you?”

  “Max keeps his own counsel. He said it was for my own protection.”

  “He’s not doing a very good job of protecting you, or what’s yours.”

  Molina finally lowered her laser blue eyes — so like that beautiful blue light of the glaucoma test machine at the eye doctor’s that you’re supposed to hold absolutely still for while staring right into it without blinking as it pushes closer and closer…and even though you can’t feel it you know that gas-blue flame is drilling right into your cornea — ick! Temple blinked from just thinking about the eye test.

  Maybe it had made her nervous (that epic imagination at work again), because she jumped when Molina tossed something across the desk that hit the papers with a thunk.

  This was the usual police evidence baggie that you thought should be holding somebody’s leftover tuna-fish sandwich, which usually turned to be something sad, like one earring, or grisly, like somebody’s leftover bloodstained wallet….

  The object inside the bag was small and lumpy with a glint of gold.

  Temple’s ghoulish imagination conjured a flashy molar pulled out by the roots….

  “Oh.”

  She reflexively reached for the object. It was hers, after all.

  It weighed heavily in her palm as her memory assayed it. She’d forgotten how utterly beautiful it was, the opals, the diamonds, the gold setting.

  It had been hers for only a few days.

  “Where? When?”

  Molina was happy to dispatch the dispassionate facts. “In a parking lot. A church parking lot. Several weeks ago. Near another parking lot body. It was identified, but the perp remains at large. A female victim, of course.”

  “My ring was by the body?”

  “By the edge of the parking lot, actually. A bright young uniform found it. The body was thirty yards away.”

  “I don’t understand.” This time Temple could meet the laser eyes: she stood on firm ground. “You know this ring was on my hand the night we all attended the Opium Den to see that woman magician’s act. Shangri-La called me onstage as the willing audience schmoo, took my ring, and then vanished with her whole retinue.”

  “You vanished too, and that black alley cat of yours, who gets around like a case of the clap.”

  “But Max found me, and Louie too.”

  “I found you. Max was along for the ride.”

  “He found us. You were along for the ride. Maybe that’s why you hate him.” Temple found a lump as big as the ring blocking her throat. Holding the ring brought back her Manhattan “honeymoon” with Max last Christmas, reminded her of his hopes, promises, that he’d be able to duck out of the undercover life, live a normal existence someday with her.

  “Max had nothing to do with this ring!” Temple said, her wits gathering. “It was stolen from me by a woman no one has been able to trace. She must have been involved with that drug-smuggling ring you busted that night. Somebody must have pawned the ring and it ended up in that parking lot. Why would this be evidence incriminating Max, except that he gave it to me? Is giving me rings a crime?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Unless it was stolen.”

  Temple stared at the object in its sheath of cheap plastic, aghast.

  “It wasn’t,” Molina admitted. “Purchased in New York, at Tiffany’s. For cash.”

  “Really? Tiffany’s?”

  “He didn’t brag?”

  “Quality doesn’t brag. So how does this being on the scene of a murder implicate Max? You admit the ring was his to give. You know that it was taken from my possession in front of a theater full of witnesses, including you. You know that the entire magic act was a cover for criminal activities. Why drag Max into it?”

  “You haven’t mentioned the murder victim. Of course you wouldn’t have noticed or known about her death. It got a three-inch mention in the local news section roundup column. Still, she was just as dead, brutally strangled. Not a young woman: sixty-two. Gloria Fuentes would not ring a bell with you or most people who read the paper that day.”

  Molina was wrong. The name Gloria Fuentes almost made Temple drop the evidence bag, but she clutched it tight instead.

  “And the connection to Max Kinsella,” Molina went on. “She was a former magician’s assistant, long since retired. Still, magic is the link, isn’t it? Between Shangri-La, the vanishing magician, between the late Gloria Fuentes, and between Max Kinsella, formerly the Mystifying Max and lately your non-live-in lover. I’ll take that bauble back now. It’s police evidence.”

  No! Temple wanted to shout. It’s mine! It’s precious. Valuable. Mine.

  How cruel Molina was to flaunt her possession of Temple’s only engagement ring. Temple felt a wash of anger, but it was rinsed away by fear. What if Molina knew what Temple knew: that Gloria Fuentes had been the longtime assistant to Max’s mentor in magic, Gandolph the Great? She would really be able to add several rows of bricks to her wall of circumstantial evidence closing him off from the normal life he hoped for.

  Temple held the baggie out to Molina. “Handle it carefully. Opal is delicate and the ring is valuable. You probably know just how valuable more than I do. If it’s damaged in your custody, I’ll sue.”

  While Temple met Molina’s hard gaze with her own steel blue fury, the desk phone rang.

  “Molina,” she answered.

  Then she was quiet. “I’m in the middle of somethi
ng,” she said finally, sounding much friendlier than she had to Temple. “I’ll call you later. Yes. As soon as I can.”

  The call didn’t sound totally professional, Temple diagnosed expertly. A public relations professional knows a lot about phone voice language. So if this was a semipersonal call, who was it from? Not Molina’s preteen daughter, Mariah. There had been none of that annoying Mother Superior-knows-better tone that Temple got by default.

  A man. It was a man who Molina didn’t need to intimidate, but liked. Since a female police supervisor needed to intimidate men all around her into giving her an even break, Temple deduced that the man on the line was not a colleague, but a…friend? When did Molina relax enough to have friends, of any gender?

  “Where were we?” the lieutenant asked.

  Temple raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t like Molina to lose track of anything, especially something so potentially lethal. “I was requesting that you take good care of my ring, and you were talking about how I was married to the Mob.”

  “That would be better than the state you’re in,” Molina retorted. “This is a friendly warning. Kinsella is trouble and he’ll take you down with him, no matter how many pretty rings he tosses your way. If you see him do anything that makes you think twice, let me know.”

  “If I do, I will, but I haven’t yet.” Temple itched to reveal Max’s secret good-guy past, but secrets were supposed to stay that way and Molina would only call it defensiveness anyway. “Are you through with me?”

  “For now.” Molina eyed Temple as she stood up, barely looming over the seated police officer even when standing. “You see much of Matt Devine nowadays?”

  “Around the Circle Ritz. But he’s been…busy lately. Out of town on speaking engagements.”

  “I hear he has other engagements on his calendar, too.”

  “Oh?” Temple recognized a leading dig when she heard it. She braced herself again.

  “Only that he’s been working himself back into the social mainstream.”

  “Dating, you mean.”

  “I guess I do.”

  Temple gritted her teeth. She would not ask who. “That’s good. Single guys should date.” She narrowed her eyes like daggers at Molina. “Single gals, too.”