Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Molina shrugged. “A lot of single gals Matt’s age are single parents, though.”

  Temple resisted catching a gasping breath. Molina had that daughter, Mariah. Was this her way of announcing that she was dating Matt?

  “I’m a single gal with a dependent myself,” Temple said breezily, “only he’s a cat.”

  “Doesn’t count as a dependent, especially given Midnight Louie’s untrammeled ways. I’m surprised you haven’t figured out who Matt’s new interest is. I thought you fancied yourself an amateur detective.”

  “In criminal matters. There’s no crime in Matt’s having a social life.”

  “There’s a crime in that it took him so long to get around to getting one.” Molina let her pencil rap back and forth on a manila folder, but kept silent.

  Guess you could call this, Temple thought, a second “Manila Thrillah” only instead of Frazier and Ali going another brutal round, it was her and Molina. A Manila Molina, maybe? She be darned if she went down first.

  Molina finally straightened, her mouth making a moué Temple couldn’t interpret as approval or not. “Janice Flanders. He’s been seeing Janice. I think they’re well matched.”

  Temple had seen the sketch artist’s portrait work, but never hide nor hair of her in the flesh. Curiosity was killing her.

  “She’s a wonderful artist,” Temple said smoothly. “She must share Matt’s insight into people and their problems.”

  Molina paused on the brink of saying something, then seemed to remember her own secret. “That midnight radio job keeps him off the streets during prime time. Not too conducive to a social life. Probably for the best. Funny, there was a time when I thought you’d go with him over Kinsella.”

  Temple was so flummoxed she couldn’t say anything for a moment. “I don’t think personal relationships are your long suit,” she said finally. “Obviously, you were wrong.”

  “Oh, the show isn’t over yet.” Molina’s Midnight Margarita-blue eyes narrowed speculatively at Temple, like she was an undercover operative Molina was unleashing on the world at large. An unwilling, ignorant undercover operative. “Just watch yourself. It’s dangerous out there,” she added, turning back to her papers, dismissive.

  Temple tottered out of the office to the elevator, weak-kneed for a moment. The last admonition had sounded reluctantly sincere enough to be real. And it wasn’t just Max that the woman was warning her about, Temple sensed.

  Given how deeply Molina loathed and distrusted Max, it gave Temple chilling pause to wonder what else threatening Molina saw looming in Temple’s own present and future.

  The Sign of the Serpent

  If Lieutenant C. R. Molina had meant to destroy Temple’s zip-a-deedoo-dah mood, she couldn’t have done better had she gone to graduate school in Killjoy 101.

  Temple put the Miata’s top down again, fussing aloud about the process and herself.

  “There’s no sense in taking anything that woman says seriously. She’s prejudiced against Max and probably thinks Miatas are the Devil’s workshop, too. What a puritan! She probably has the sex life of a cantaloupe. She certainly has the hide of one.

  “I’d hate to be her daughter! Poor Mariah! It would take more than a Xena the Warrior Princess outfit to make that woman halfway human.”

  Still, Temple stopped and grinned to picture the towering, no-nonsense detective done up as a credible Xena in leather bustier, studded boots, and kilt. And she already had the Lucy Lawless Olympus-blue eyes down cold. The masquerade had been a ruse to catch a killer at a science fiction convention where Xena clones were about as unique as Bozos at a clown convention. Temple was surprised the buttoned-down Molina would go undercover in such an over-the-top feminine guise, but her daughter had been in danger and mother love is a desperate motive. Actually, Molina’d looked pretty hot for a homicide lieutenant in that get-up. Temple’s grin faded.

  Then she broke a fingernail on the convertible-top latch.

  “Holy Aeolus! It’s the curse of the Chakram Chick.”

  She got in the car and drove away, worrying more about what Molina might know about Max (that Temple didn’t) than was good for her sanity.

  She hardly noticed where she was driving, she was so upset. Seeing the ring Max had given her treated like a Cracker Jack token made her stomach churn. Contemplating how Molina might use it to tie Max into yet another murder made the churn start whipping out butterflies. She was hardly Max’s keeper, she told herself. He’d been taking care of himself since high school and then some. Taking care of her, too. Loyalty and faith were hard emotions to defend; they were so totally in the mind and heart of the holder.

  Had her supply of both run out on Max? He was mysterious, yes, but that had been a professional qualification for a magician, a charming quirk at first. Later…

  She was driving east of town on Charleston. On her left the Blue Mermaid suddenly surfaced from a tangle of junky roofs and signs, her slowly turning serene plaster image a kind of Virgin Mary for the down-at-the-heels set.

  And of course the Virgin Mary (which she was decidedly not) reminded her of Matt (which he decidedly was). Virgin, that is. Holy mackeral! What had she been thinking? How could she, a fallen away Universalist Unitarian, deal with an earnest ex-Catholic priest determined to re-enter the single lifestyle with eyes wide shut; to play by the religious rules even some Catholics had found unworkable? Talk about sexual responsibility. Before Max had reappeared, she might have and he couldn’t. After Max had returned, he might have and she wouldn’t. A tragicomedy of timing. Something to film for a joint HBO and Pax TV project: Sex in the Psyche.

  The white-painted motel named in the mermaid’s honor bore a huge new sign of its own, a temporary banner stretched over the portico:

  PSYCHIC FAIR

  Temple’s foot hesitated over the brake for a heartbeat. She’d attended a psychic fair once. Even knew a few psychics. Maybe one of them would have a clue about the strange five-sided figure that had scribed professor Jefferson Mangel into a circle of death only a couple weeks before.

  She was sure that the figure meant something arcane. Who better to ask than a psychic? It was doubly a pity that poor Jeff was dead. He was the one objective expert on the mantic arts she’d trust to have a scholar’s dispassion on the subject. But she couldn’t consult him anymore….

  Or could she? What had Max said? He’d borrowed some Ph.D. theses that mentioned the mysterious entity known in some magic circles as the Synth.

  She twisted the small steering wheel right to shoot down a side street, rather dingy in this near-downtown neighborhood. Max would have wanted her convertible top up, pronto, if he were along. But he wasn’t, and she quickly turned around in a deserted gas station lot and got back on Charleston heading west.

  She hoped Max was at home and feeling like company. Maybe she could also find out what he had done lately to put Molina in her rabid-rottweiler mood.

  The house was a picture of housing development serenity, like its neighbors. In the nearby houses, though, people were really away at work and school. Behind this house’s hooded windows, Max probably spun plots like a spider in a suburban web.

  Temple parked the Miata three houses down and hefted a businesslike folder from her tote bag. Maybe she’d be mistaken for an Avon lady if anyone was watching.

  If anyone was watching. At the very least Max was. Like a spider, he was supersensitive to any stirrings on the fringes of his gossamer empire.

  Why was she creating such unattractive metaphors for Max’s perpetual state of siege today? Had Molina really gotten to her this time?

  Temple paused in the sheltered entryway. Ringing the doorbell was a last resort. If Max was inside, he would materialize at the heavy wooden door and draw her within before anybody on the street noticed her.

  When she came here Temple always felt like a magician’s assistant being shuttled quickly into the next disappearing lady trick, as if the whole house were only an illusion, one big revolving door into a m
aze fashioned of hidden compartments and deceptive mirrors and sliding false walls.

  Temple stood in the shade of the portico, designed as shelter against the daily Las Vegas Heat and Light Show. The door did not so much open as dissolve into deeper darkness.

  A hand, pale as a formal glove, reached out to draw her inside.

  Her eyes blinked, unable to adjust to the interior shadow.

  Max’s hand, conversely as warm as it looked pallid and cold, pulled her through the entry hall and into the well-lit rooms beyond.

  Her eyes, still blinded, rebelled at the rapid-fire change in light.

  “What brought you here without phoning first?” he asked.

  “An interview with the vampire.”

  “Vampire? Before lunch? Let’s go into the kitchen for a little healthy fluorescent light.”

  Temple laughed. Max always managed to banish his own most powerful illusions. It was just a darkened house, after all, kept shuttered against the heat, but mostly so he could see out without anyone seeing in. That’s what a man on the run for eighteen years needed.

  The kitchen was its usual gleaming, efficient self, the stainless steel appliance fronts reflecting and distorting their entering figures into gray alien forms.

  “You didn’t say why you dropped by.” Max never forgot an unanswered question.

  “I…I was happy.”

  “Was?” He never missed an implication either.

  She studied him as he leaned against the walk-in refrigerator front like an extremely suave corpse propped against his coffin. Or a space vampire against a high-tech crypt door.

  His trademark black clothing underlined the image, but Molina had carefully planted the sinister side of Max in Temple’s brain. The policewoman had been working on that for a year, always questioning Max’s whereabouts, his history, his sudden disappearance and reappearance in Temple’s life. Maybe it was beginning to work.

  Max turned away to pull open the stainless steel door, and spun back to face her, something in his hand. “Dreamsicle?” he asked

  Molina’s evil spell of doubt was broken.

  “Dreamsicle?” Temple slung her tote bag and folder atop the huge kitchen island. “Where you’d get that? I haven’t had one of those since I had scabby knees.”

  “You never had scabby knees.”

  “Yes, I did, and I sold lemonade at a stand, too.”

  “Shocking.” Max handed her an orange-vanilla ice cream treat on a stick and unwrapped the thin white paper from his own. The label read Creamsicle now but they both knew these were Dreamsicles of old, of their youths. “And you worry about my past.”

  Uncanny how he could always target the unspoken issue.

  “I don’t worry about it as much as Molina does.”

  “She doesn’t worry about, she just worries at it, like a demented Scottish terrier, only she would be an Iberian terrier.”

  “Not necessarily. She got those blue eyes from somewhere. Why not a Scot?”

  “Bagpipes in the blood? I don’t think so, Temple.”

  “I just saw her.”

  “Why am I not surprised.”

  “She warned me about you.”

  “I repeat: Why am I not surprised? That’s nothing new.”

  “She warned me really, really hard about you. And she showed me something.”

  Max managed to tense without visibly moving a muscle. Temple only noticed it because she knew him so well. He had that perfect concentrated stillness that the stage required, the sense of something tensile ready to spring, like a big cat.

  He didn’t ask what.

  “The ring,” Temple finally said.

  “The ring?” Max unfolded his arms. “How the hell did she get the ring?”

  “Found it.”

  Max’s face broadcast consternation. “Found it? Where?”

  “Actually a street cop found it. And where is the problem. At the scene of another murder.”

  “A new murder? And the ring was by the body?”

  “Not so old a murder, but not so new either. Gloria Fuentes. Remember? She was found strangled in the church parking lot.”

  “I remember,” Max said grimly. “Another of your magic-linked murders.”

  “Not mine. I just noticed the connections.”

  “And the ring was there? But that was before —”

  “Before what?”

  Max relaxed enough to smile. “I’m trying too hard to anticipate you. Magician’s bad habit. You tell your story at the right pace.”

  “It wasn’t very near the body, at least. Maybe ninety feet away at the edge of the bushes. In the dirt. My ring! In the dirt.”

  “Your ring?”

  “Well, it was originally your ring, until you gave it to me. I think that’s how Molina thinks of it too. As your ring. As a nasty talisman associated with the demon Max. As more evidence to hang you with.”

  “That ring,” he said faintly, blinking once. He leaned against the wall again. “That ring. So it’s found. Has been for a few weeks.”

  “Isn’t that just the meanest thing ever, Max? Molina had it, knew she had it, and never told me?”

  Max smiled again. “It’s mean, but that’s police work. It was a wildly out-of-place piece of evidence. Of course she’d save it for a rainy day. Apparently she decided on today to rain on your parade.”

  “Well, it worked. It was horrible to see it in that tacky plastic bag, pulled out of a tacky desk drawer in a mean little office.”

  “I’m sorry, Temple.” Max came to put his arms around her, creating a living ring. “I don’t much like Molina having custody of that ring either. But it was lost weeks ago. We have to give it up.”

  “It’s so beautiful, and it was from Tiffany’s.”

  Max embrace hardened. “How did you know that?”

  “Molina found out.”

  “She is starting to really irritate me.”

  “It’s mutual, and don’t you forget it. I reminded her that the ring was taken by that Shangri-La onstage at the Opium Den, in front of all of us, you, Matt, me, Molina. How can she suspect you of getting it back and then being stupid enough to drop it on a murder scene?”

  “I got you and Louie back from the abductors, didn’t I?” Max pulled away and retreated to the buttress of the refrigerator door, this time as if he needed the support. “Maybe Molina figured I found the ring during my search of the magical chambers, and palmed it. Then I decided it wasn’t safe to give it back to you, so I took it along on one of my stalking expeditions and left it as a tip for a beat cop.”

  “Max, don’t joke. She’s dead serious. And it does look like some body wants to implicate you in these murders. Maybe it’s the Synth. Maybe that book you’re writing on Gandolph is making them nervous. Whoever, it doesn’t matter. Molina thinks she’s got a hold of another coffin nail for you.”

  “Why’d she show it to you now?”

  “Because she’s convinced, she wants to convince me, that you’re a monstrous criminal I should turn in to my nearest precinct house. She said you could be going down for something big, and that I could be a witness, or an accessory.”

  “What did you say?”

  Temple had to work on finishing her Dreamsicle, which had melted like syrupy emotions while she’d been talking. It was hard to discuss serious issues with ice cream in your mouth. Disposing of the treat gave her time to notice that Max’s insouciant attitude, both physical and mental, overlaid an uncharacteristic edginess.

  He showed the strain, a magician’s worst enemy.

  “Is there something I should know?” she asked.

  “There are a lot of things you should know, that I can’t tell you.” He pushed off from the refrigerator door’s icy steel support, looking gaunt and haunted under the unforgiving overhead fluorescent light.

  “Undercover work,” he said, “which I did a lot of for a long time in a good cause, mostly requires keeping an ungodly amount of balls in the air. You deceive by telling the truth,
or by telling slices of the truth to a lot of people, like doling out a piece of pie that’s too rich for human consumption.”

  “I guess the food analogy fits a kitchen,” she noted.

  “Spy work is all oblique, all analogies. Yet there is a simple straight-forward rule underlying the cut corners and endless angles. You must always respect your sources and their confidences, or the whole thing falls apart. That means you know pieces of everybody else’s truth, but can never tell the whole truth. You tell lies — not to deceive, but to protect the truth that some people have the courage to tell. You must know more than any one of them. You must see the big picture, and prevent them from seeing it, or they will fall into it and die. And it will be your fault.”

  “You’re saying you have to lie to protect people.”

  Max nodded. “From others. From themselves.”

  “But —”

  Max leaned forward to collect the empty wooden stick from her and throw it in the trash can hidden behind an island cupboard. He waited for her to finish her thought.

  “But…you’re talking about professional espionage. Telling lies not to deceive but to protect people: isn’t that where people go wrong in their personal lives?”

  “Not so much committing untruth, but neglecting to mention truth, I think.”

  “You know what I think?”

  He smiled. “No. That’s what I like about you. I get to find out.”

  “I think you and Molina both know something that you don’t dare tell anybody else, but that makes you mortal enemies.”

  Max folded his arms. “That’s possible.”

  “Sure, play Mr. Stone Face. She does the same thing. Just glowers and intones warnings like a witch from Macbeth, but she won’t come out and say diddly!”

  Max was laughing. “A witch from Macbeth. I like that.”

  “Good, because you’re Macbeth, trying to decide which way to jump.”

  “I’m not contemplating killing anyone.”

  “No, you want to stop the killing. That’s always been your problem. Most people are happy to get a good job and retire with a gold watch, although yours probably would be a Patek Philippe. You want to end the Irish Troubles and put your dead cousin to rest.”