Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Devine here,” Matt said, brusquely.

  “Gad, you sound like you’ve taken lessons in phone etiquette from Molina.”

  “Maybe I have. I’ve just gotten off the line with her.”

  “My condolences.”

  “Your Irish friend has crossed the line. I need to give Molina a real lead on her. All I can think of is that sketch.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “It’s been our little secret, we three.”

  “Secrets are made to be shared.”

  “That’s not the way you act.”

  “I’m a mass of walking contradictions.”

  “I know, and that makes you not as unique as you think.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Your permission to bring Molina in on the Kitty O’Connor loop.”

  “My permission?”

  “She is your demon.”

  “It is your sketch. You commissioned it. Why an ex-priest would want a pinup picture of a demon, I don’t know.”

  “This is not just an amusing game of harass-the-clergy anymore. A girl was involved in the latest incident. And Molina was there.”

  For once something Matt said stopped Kinsella the Kool cold.

  “Okay. Where can we meet?” he said. “When?”

  “I don’t know if we can. That woman is watching my every move. It’s not just my apartment or my job anymore. It’s me, twenty-four/seven.”

  “Go to the Oasis Hotel back parking lot. Park in the exact middle, as far as you can tell. What are you using for wheels now?”

  “A white ’93 Probe.”

  “Gack.”

  “So I hoped.”

  Kinsella laughed. “Your boring taste is impeccable. I congratulate you. Good work. Park the Ignoro-car and walk on a zigzag course toward the lamppost with the Sphinx on it. Drop to the ground and get under the car parked nearest to the lamppost. Did I mention you should wear Rough Gear clothes? I’ll come by in a black Maxima.”

  “A black Maxima? Isn’t that a little iconic?”

  “Only you would ask if something was iconic. Yes. Just get into the backseat when I pause, and stay down until I say. It may be a while.”

  “Have you always lived like this, like James Bond or Howard Hughes or somebody?”

  “Longer than you’d care to think about.”

  “I still don’t trust you.”

  “Funny. I’ve always known I could trust you. It’s what I’ve disliked about you most. Later.”

  Matt lay on the shaded asphalt, road grit prickling through his clothes.

  He felt like a fool. Then he remembered how Vicki Jansen must have felt lying on the Blue Dahlia parking lot, bound and gagged.

  He was here of his own free will, if against his better judgment.

  He was doing what Max Kinsella had told him to do, and it was darn undignified.

  He supposed Kinsella got a kick out of that.

  But he was the undercover expert, and their enemy was now mutual.

  Funny, a woman had made them rivals and another woman was making them allies.

  Matt guessed that was life in the noncelibate world. He began to understand the deep fears of the Church fathers who had called woman the Devil’s tool.

  It wasn’t demons they had feared, but their own impulses, both noble and base.

  Groveling in the gravel did lend itself to philosophical and theological contemplation. It recalled his ordination, the long minutes of lying prone before the altar.

  For I am a worm and no man.

  Was that truly the thought of Jesus as he made the Way of the Cross? Was self-abnegation the only gateway to Godhood, or to any kind of religious transcendence?

  Waiting obediently for Max Kinsella to show up was giving Matt all kinds of second thoughts.

  He heard and saw some tires seize to a stop in front of him.

  What he could see of the vehicle’s rocker panels was black.

  He scrabbled out from his ignominious shelter, scraping his palms on sand and glass, and hurtled through the open rear door, crouching to pull it closed.

  Maybe he’d hitched a ride with a lady blackjack player with a broken rear door latch. Maybe Kitty the Cutter was at the wheel, having eavesdropped on him with some demonic high-tech device.

  Whoever was driving turned up the CD in the player as they lurched away.

  Oh, my sweet Lord…

  Only Max Kinsella, always the impresario for his own one-man show.

  Matt pulled the black blanket on the backseat over himself and tuned out.

  Many, many gratuitous bumps later — Matt suspected that Kinsella enjoyed every pothole — the car came to a gravelly stop. He heard the tires slow as if stuck to adhesive.

  More likely desert sand. The CD player stopped.

  “All right if I do a gopher and peek out?” Matt asked.

  “You can jump on the hood and tap-dance if you want.”

  Matt, blinking in the flat, bright light, glanced at endless scrub through car windows. “Where are we?”

  “Where only the nuts and the G-men will find us.”

  Matt dusted off his khakis, staring into distant nothingness.

  “We’re on the fringes of Area fifty-one,” Kinsella added. “We go any farther in, we attract unwanted federal attention. I figure even Kathleen O’Connor doesn’t want federal attention.”

  “Really. This zone is that touchy?”

  “Area fifty-one is the Holy Grail of conspiracy nuts. It’s also real.”

  “Can I get out, get in the passenger seat?”

  “Why? Don’t fancy feeling like a mob abductee? It’s better than being an alien abductee.”

  “I don’t ‘fancy’ being anybody’s abductee, including hers.”

  “Sorry. Sometimes I slip into a European expression. It’s habit, not pretension.”

  Matt got out of the car without comment, paused to be ironed by the searing desert heat, then slammed the back door shut. He opened the front door and entered the idling car. A blast of air conditioning ruffled his hair and soothed his indignation.

  “Is all this drama necessary?”

  “You said she was on you twenty-four/seven.”

  “Seems like it.”

  “Tell me.”

  The trouble was that Kinsella looked and acted so bloody competent compared to the rest of the world. Matt knew most of it was stage presence. A magician is the ultimate controller, next to God Himself. A magician’s biggest and best illusion is the myth of his own omniscience.

  Matt had been trained to honor omniscient figures, but now he resented it. So he laid out the details of Kitty the Cutter’s terrifying omniscience. Maybe it took one to outwit one.

  Kinsella listened, his hands still clamping the steering wheel, unwilling to relinquish control.

  Matt described the attack on him and his producer as they left the radio station. The ghastly setup in the Blue Dahlia parking lot, with the enthusiastic fan as an abducted witness.

  “Why were you at the Blue Dahlia?” Kinsella asked.

  “I wanted Molina’s advice on this. I figured it was a safe place to meet her.”

  “Apparently safe places are no longer on your route now.”

  Matt glanced through the car’s rear window.

  “This is safe, for a while. Now you understand how terrorists work. They never rest. They’re always scheming. It’s not that they’re everywhere. They can’t be. But their victims are everywhere, and when they strike, it looks as if no one is safe. They have generated terror.”

  “She’s one woman.”

  “Is she?”

  “That’s what Molina asked me, if she worked alone. Yes, until last night. Last night I couldn’t be sure. She could have had a driver. Witnesses saw a workman, or woman, putting up the sound equipment earlier in the day.”

  “That’s the terrible beauty of being a terrorist. You put all your time into plotting, and it looks superhuman. Invincible. Not unlike a magical illus
ion.”

  “It feels invincible too.”

  “I know.” Max Kinsella lifted something off the seat between them, thrust it at Matt.

  The morning paper. He read the second headline, not the one across the top, but three thick lines above the fold on the right.

  IRA OFFERS TO DESTROY ITS ARMS

  “So? They’ve been dancing the peace shuffle in Northern Ireland for three years. It’s been one step forward and two steps back every bit of the way.”

  “So. This is how Kathleen discharged her anger for almost two decades: selling herself to buy arms. She’s not going to take this well. Peace is a threat to someone like her. It undoes all her life’s work. She’s more liable than ever to lash out at innocent bystanders.”

  “She already has.” Matt gave him the short and sweet version of Kitty’s treatment of the girl.

  “And this girl she kidnapped was just a groupie at WCOO?”

  “I don’t like the term ‘groupie’.”

  “Swell rock star you’d make. How’d Kathleen pick her out of the crowd?”

  “Judas kiss.”

  “Ah, Kathleen’s obsession has gotten seriously possessive. So this poor girl assaulted you with a postshow smooch and within twenty-four hours she’s the main course at Kathleen’s not-so-impromptu picnic at the Blue Dahlia parking lot?”

  “How could Kitty know I was going there?”

  “Had you ever been there before?”

  “A couple, three times.”

  “Molina does trill a good torch song.”

  “So how, on the basis of my going there a few times, does Kitty know?”

  “How many other spots around town do you patronize?”

  “Uh, none. Not since I stopped hitting the joints looking for my stepfather.”

  “She’s just covering all the bases, like a good terrorist. But you’re right. She’s tailing you twenty-four/seven. Or someone is.”

  “That’s why I’m sneaking around to see Molina.”

  “Strictly business, huh?”

  Matt remembered the subject of his last discussion with her and felt a reddening surge of guilty fluster.

  “Sorry. None of my business.” Kinsella’s smooth smile annoyed the heck out of Matt.

  “Just business,” Matt managed to say, “sordid as it is when that O’Connor woman’s involved. You know she’s only tormenting me because she can’t find you.”

  “I don’t know that. Why would she think you had anything to do with me?”

  “We’re not complete strangers. She devotes all her time to it. She’s superhumanly omniscient, remember?”

  “So she is.”

  Matt couldn’t resist an urge to flash some omniscience himself after contemplating the varieties displayed by these two mortal enemies.

  “Temple knows where her ring is now. Your ring.”

  “Ring?”

  It was Matt’s turn to look smug. How could Kinsella have forgotten Temple’s almost-engagement ring? “How many have you given Temple? The one the magician swiped. Sha-nah-nah or whatever.”

  Max reclaimed the newspaper section and folded it into crisp thirds as if trying to bury something inside it. “The ring? Where is it? Who found it? When?”

  “I don’t know when. I guess we could figure it out if we tried.”

  “Why should we?”

  “Because Molina has it. In a plastic evidence baggie. She’s had it for some time but just showed it to Temple a couple of days ago, along with a warning that it tied you to yet another murder and that Temple had better ditch you fast.”

  “Another murder? How?”

  “I’m not too sure, but Temple sure didn’t like the connection.”

  “Where did Molina find it?”

  “It’s evidence from the case of that woman killed in a church parking lot about the same time as Molina found the other poor woman’s body in the Blue Dahlia parking lot. I’m not sure why Molina’s so convinced the ring’s being found there links you to the murder. We all saw the ring taken by a third party.”

  “Seeing things with her own eyes wouldn’t change Molina’s mind about me,” Kinsella said absently. “She’s like Kathleen, absolutely blinded by her wacked sense of political correctness. That dead woman in the church parking lot had been a magician’s assistant years ago. That’s the connection Molina sees. And she probably believes I got that ring back the night it disappeared because I got Temple and Midnight Louie back. She probably figures I palmed it and then dropped it while strangling Gloria Fuentes. That was the dead woman’s name. She used to be quite well known in magical circles in this town.”

  “I’m sorry.” Matt Kinsella’s bleakness when speaking of the dead woman made it seem as if he had known her. Not good if he had. It only bolstered Molina’s theory.

  “Magic is dead,” Kinsella pronounced with finality, the way Matt had heard some people chant “God is dead” twenty years ago. “There’s more profit in debunking it.”

  “You could say the same thing about religion.”

  “So you could. We invested in the wrong careers for the times, didn’t we? But you’re still trying to save souls on the radio and I’m still trying to save lives with magic tricks.”

  “At least we’re trying.”

  “Very trying.” Kinsella grinned, unfolding the newspaper into a tattered patchwork that Matt took dazed custody of when Max put the car into gear. “Especially you. You must drive Kathleen nuts, as if she needed any help in that direction. Want to hop in the back again?”

  “Not really.” Max opened the passenger door to admit a wave of pure dry heat. It felt clean. “What are you going to do?”

  “What I’ve always done: my Invisible Man act, try to control everything and be seen nowhere. As for your question, sure, give Molina the portrait of Kathleen. I’d appreciate it if she’d get off on persecuting someone else for a while.”

  “Can anyone actually persecute a psychopath, even if they’re the police?”

  “I could. If I could find her.”

  “Looks like you and Kathleen are at an impasse.”

  “I think we have been for almost twenty years. So don’t sweat Miss Kitty. I outrank you.”

  Matt dropped the magically savaged newspaper on the passenger seat as he moved to his place of concealment in the back.

  Men in Motion

  Matt rang the Circle Ritz penthouse doorbell, feeling oddly nervous.

  He hadn’t seen his landlady, Electra Lark, in so long that he felt like a fraud to be calling on her for a favor. A menial favor at that.

  And he still hadn’t thought up a good excuse for asking her to do it. Kitty O’Connor had driven him to the point that the truth was only a method of last resort.

  The door swung open.

  “Matt! I was just thinking about you.”

  “Why?”

  “I get these sort of premonitions.” She dimpled like a teenager. Not bad for a sixty-something. Electra and her apparel, the usual blooming Hawaiian muumuu that more often seemed to wear her, stepped back to admit him into the tiny octagonal entry hall that was covered in vertical Mylar-faced blinds.

  It was like walking inside one of those spinning mirrored balls that hover like UFOs over scenes of mass ballroom dancing.

  “Gracious, you haven’t taken up wallpaper sales on the side, have you, dear?”

  Matt lofted the cardboard tube he held like a clumsy sword. “No, this is why I came up. I was wondering if you could mail it for me. It’s awkward for me to do it myself, I can’t quite explain why —”

  “If you were going to be late with your rent I’d need an explanation. If you need a favor, I’m not about to demand one.”

  Being a good guilt-ridden Catholic, Matt gave her one anyway. “It’s a poster.” A Wanted poster, in its fashion. “I taped an envelope to the top; what’s inside should cover the postage.”

  Electra waggled plump fingers of dismissal at his scrupulous accounting. “Listen, Matt, I’m so pleased to ha
ve a media celebrity residing at my modest little residence I’d probably send a hundred-pound box of Ethel M for you gratis.”

  “A hundred pounds of Ethel M candy? That would be overkill.”

  She took the cardboard tube and leaned it against the doorjamb. “This is a featherweight. I’ll mail it this afternoon. Can you come in for a minute?”

  “Sure.” Matt didn’t like to beg and run. Besides, he was curious to see the penthouse.

  “I keep things rather dim up here,” Electra warned, preceding him through a split in the mirroring blinds.

  The large room beyond was indeed bathed in eternal dusk, thanks to more vertical blinds, although these were a lot less flashy.

  “I grew up with furniture like this.” Matt eyed the sprawling, overupholstered forms that grazed on the dark wood floor like baby elephants.

  “It that a complaint or a compliment?”

  “I don’t complain. It becomes chronic.”

  “That’s for sure. Especially in my age group. If it isn’t ‘my aching angina’ or ‘my inflamed tendon’ or my ‘inverted intestine’ or whatever, it’s a marathon discussion of doctors and HMOs and prepaid burial plans. No thanks!”

  Electra plopped down on a long, dark sofa shaped like a ’40s Ford. Matt tried a ’50s sling chair.

  “So why did you paint my Probe white?” she asked. “It looks like a bathtub on wheels. I know the pink was a little sun-faded, but you could have gone for something zippier.”

  “White is the most practical color in this climate; reflects sunlight, keeps the interior cooler. And its high visibility makes it the safest color to drive. You’re less likely to blend into anything and get hit.”

  “Oh, don’t sound like a spokesman for the automotive council. I know all that, but a car isn’t just a safety cradle. It should be fun.”

  “I have the Hesketh Vampire for that,” Matt said.

  “Which you hardly use. If it weren’t for my Elvismobile and that new red Miata I’ve spotted in the parking lot just recently, the Circle Ritz would have to be renamed the Circle Ho-hum.”

  “The Miata is Temple’s,” Matt said, happy to divert Electra’s wide-ranging curiosity from his choice of vehicle color, which was a defensive move, not an option.

  “Well, at least you know what she’s up to these days. Where on earth is Max?”