Kit winced and drank wine. “I can’t deny it. So. You wanna get married?”
“Actually, no. I mean, I would, but mainly I want a guy who loves me and vice versa, who I can trust and try to get through this mess called Life together with. That’s awful sentence construction, isn’t it?”
“Horrid. But the sentiments are pretty universal. I did like Max.”
“So did I.”
“Did?”
“I thought he was Mr. Right, like there is any such mythical beast, but . . . it’s not that he doesn’t want to commit, he can’t. Not with his job history.”
“And Matt can.”
Temple nodded. “Now. Except that he comes with all these religious strictures that aren’t mine.”
“You’ve always liked him.”
Temple rolled her eyes, Mariah style, left over from the Teen Idol competition. “Ye-es”
“Maybe some of those strictures have something to do with that.”
Temple nodded. “He’s so honest you sometimes want to kick him in the shins. He really does care about what I think and feel. He’s willing to sell himself down the river if I’ll give him a shot, though he didn’t tell me that part. I figured it out. And he’s really hot for me, but he’s aggravatingly able to control it.”
“Grrrrowl. Take it from Auntie, that is not a problem when it comes to female satisfaction. Would that they taught that in high school instead of abstinence and friends with benefits.”
“What are friends with benefits?”
“Are you out of the talk show circuit! Girls are preserving their virginity, all right, but by giving out oral sex to boys as a substitute. Can we say ‘not a fair trade-off’?”
Temple couldn’t say a thing. Girls always lost something, somehow, in the dating game, and she was very glad not to be the mother of one. Yet. Maybe she could become a Red State conservative and marry Matt yet. She and Kit finished their wine and conversation, yawned, and hugged each other good night.
Temple’s mind and emotions were in turmoil despite several glasses of wine. A woman’s future options were much rockier than she’d suspected. Her own immediate options made her stomach churn with an unhealthy surfeit of emotion and indecision. Max. Matt. Matt. Max. It was coming down to a duel in the sun. Her heart and libido were giving her emotional whiplash. She took a Tylenol PM to help her to sleep, and so to bed.
It was past two in the morning, so Max did the Midnight Louie trick. Push, bounce, click and the left French door from the balcony let him into Temple’s living room with barely a sound.
Unlike the White Rabbit, who was too late to say hello/good-bye, Max was the black cat burglar. He knew it would soon be too late to say hello/good-bye/good night, so he wanted to explain himself to Temple before he became entangled in the inexplicable again. Perhaps for a good long time.
The parking lot lights cast shadows over the living room’s familiar topography: potted Norfolk pine in corner, pale sofa grazing like a White Buffalo in the middle, and various tricky tables and lamps to tiptoe around.
Max was almost around the sofa when it sat up and took notice.
“Ahhh!” it said, switching on the floor lamp at its right end.
There was Max, in the spotlight again.
He blinked to see a pale imitation of Temple: small, indignant, red hair faded to strawberry-blond in the bright light pouring down on it. What was she doing sleeping in their living room? Temple’s living room?
When the glasses appeared and pasted themselves to the bridge of her nose, he realized that this was not Temple. She wore contact lenses now.
“Max!” Not-Temple exclaimed in a hushed, hoarse voice.
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing here?” they each intoned like a chorus of two.
“You remember me,” the woman said. “Aunt. New York. I’m the one who stuffed my sexiest nightgown into Temple’s overnight bag for your Manhattan reunion. Like it?”
“It didn’t survive the reunion. That nightgown was yours?”
“I’m flattered, however vicariously. I haven’t lost lingerie to an encounter in twenty years. Remember, it comes with full visitation rights.”
“Never forgot that for a moment. So is Temple here?”
“Inner sanctum. Midnight Louie’s out and prowling. Your path is unobstructed.”
“Except for you.”
“Oh, don’t let me stop you. Not that I think I could. Or would. I’m an ex-actor. We all shared close quarters in my heyday. Want me to yell hey when the day is dawning?”
“You are an unnerving woman.”
“Thanks! Now I need my beauty sleep, which you won’t notice the results of unless we meet in daylight. Ta-ta.”
The woman stretched out an arm to turn off the lamp and roll herself into the sheets. Max was now night-blind. Again. He felt his way to the bedroom door, which was indeed shut, and eeled inside.
Temple was asleep. His frazzled nerves suddenly smoothed out. She always loved being awakened in his own special way.
He slipped into the sheets beside her, managing not to awake her. His fingers barely touched the familiar contours of her face. It turned toward him, in her sleep, the way a sunflower follows the sun that names it.
She was rousing now. In the sense of awakening.
“Max,” she muttered.
“Yes,” he said. “Shhh”
“I had a dream. You were falling!”
“Falling here. Into your arms.”
“No! A long, long way. Max!”
She was way too lost in some nightmare. He pulled her into his arms, but she was still falling, her arms and legs jerking and flailing.
“We’ll crash,” she cried. Under his fingers, her face was a spasm of furrows.
He couldn’t erase them. Eradicate the dream. Overcome her fears with the mere nearness of his presence. Not anymore. His fingers felt her eyelashes batting like bird wings.
She struggled up in the bedclothes, sitting.
“Max? You’re really here?”
She still sounded drugged with sleep.
“Really.”
“There’s something I’ve got to tell you. What? Oh. Yeah. That white witch is at the New Millennium.”
“White witch?”
But he knew whom she was referring to, and he had known for some time that Shangri-La had hooked up with the Cloaked Conjuror, although their professional alliance hadn’t gone public.
Temple just didn’t know that Max knew so much more than she did about Shangri-La. Another thing he knew: Shangri-La hated him for some unknown reason. A lot of women seemed to. The late Kathleen O’Conner, Molina. Thank God for Temple.
“CC calls her ‘Shang.’ ” Temple yawned. “Thought you’d want to know. I can’t seem to reach you anymore.”
He leaned back with her, against the pillows, uneasy about carrying a concealed load of knowledge and keeping it from her. “It’s okay. I know now.”
She was still murmuring sleepily. “Shoulda grabbed her by those horsey locks and demanded my ring back.”
“She can’t give it back. Molina has it now, remember?”
“Right, Molina. Another wicked witch. Don’t let the wicked witches get you, Max.”
“Speaking of locks, aren’t yours a whiter shade of pale?”
“The teen reality TV show mavens made me dye it platinum. What started as an undercover job stuck me with a dye job.”
He chuckled as she nuzzled into the pillow of his chest, drifting off again.
“I want a different dream, Max. No falling . . .”
So did he.
Temple tossed and turned onto her side. Away from him. Still stressed in her sleep. Dreaming disaster. Hurting.
Max felt his jaw clench. Pushing anything physical now wouldn’t be sexy, but intrusive. When she’d needed him lately, he’d been committed to his various secret lives. Now that he was here and ready, she’d obviously been up late drinking wine with her aunt. Maybe talking about him. C
omplaining. One sure thing was that he’d lost his last magic midnight touch. He didn’t want to be her bogeyman. And he sure as hell didn’t want to be her sleeping pill!
Max slipped away, like the dead part of night. He even made it past her guard dog of an aunt undetected this time.
He still had his skills, if not his will for using them.
He’d gone over to the Dark Side. For the time being. Best to leave the creatures of light and hope to themselves.
He’d phone Temple tomorrow. In daylight. Maybe. If he had time. Meanwhile he had other promises to keep. Bad ones to dark forces. All in the name of ultimate light.
Spider Men
An hour and a half later, Max was literally out on a limb.
He was garbed in magician’s black: spandex tights, turtleneck, black gloves, black-masked spandex face to match his black hair and bleak expectations.
He was suspended high over the New Millennium exhibition area, a spider on an invisible web, clinging to the network of rosin-treated cables that formed a high-tech web over the entire space.
He felt like a cyberspace creature, some gaming entity loose on a hidden grid.
He’d entered this bizarre, deserted world by the lighting service tunnel. Painted matte black, light hoods studded the ceiling like black holes. They were cobras, poised to strike with shafts of illumination when turned on, ready to run through their preprogrammed schedule once the show began.
The Cloaked Conjuror wasn’t here now, nor the pupae of his spinning web diva, Shangri-La. Spiders had thousands of spawn. Max pictured Shangri-La as a sort of White Widow Spider hanging from an invisible tensile line, spinning her web, changing shapes as she changed venues.
She knew him. Knew he was in Las Vegas, in the equation. She hated him. He didn’t know why. Didn’t care. E equals mc squared. Enemy equals mega-competition squared.
This was Shangri-La’s territory. He was intruding. He moved along the taut wires, slid his gloved fingertips along the bungee cords ready to cut loose and plummet down almost to the top of the mock-onion dome far below that would soon encase the Czar’s scepter.
Guards would soon blanket this exhibition from ground zero to pinnacle. But the high-flying performers would be the last to be suspected: the Cloaked Conjurer, whom Max both trusted and dismissed; Shangri-La, for whom he made neither assumption.
Assumption.
That was what this White Russian act was all about. It took place in the flies, to use a theatrical phrase. In the heavens. Above the crowd, as in the circus. The Greatest Show on Earth. The greatest shell game.
Max felt his way, fingers and feet leading, along the hidden web, tensile rope by tensile rope. A low hissing sound intruded on his concentration, but he ignored it. This unsensed network had been strung up here to create an illusion.
From an illusion, it morphed into an intrusion.
Max stared down, almost seeing the glittering Czar Alexander scepter in place. Twenty-seven-inches long. Diameter: two inches along the shaft. The orb at the top that held the fabulous jewel? Four inches. A phallic sort of thing, suitable for giants, easily concealed upon the persons of mortal men.
Or women.
Max, hanging by his long, flexible limbs, calculated the possibilities. Capture before transfer from the bank vault to the exhibition. Substitution during installation. Virtual removal shortly after with all the eyes-in-the-sky cameras confounded. Abstraction during exhibition hours in front of dazzled tourist gazes.
How do I steal thee? Let me count the ways.
Everything below was empty now. Of treasure. Of people. It was all possibility and, for now, very little risk.
As Max meditated on this, the line of his supporting web vibrated with sudden shock. Glancing upward, he thought he saw one of the black-painted service hatches concealed in the ceiling shutting.
Max scrambled spider swift to spring onto another support rope, to cling at his concealing height. He froze while the scanning cameras cruised past him. Surely that betraying tremor, whatever it had been, had subsided enough to keep his figure safely in the dark.
Apparently it had for no alarm sounded.
For the moment.
And in that moment, Max noticed what had brushed by his supportive wire network. He stared down on a black-clad figure beneath him, dangling by one extremity. In this case a crucial extremity. The neck.
The figure spun on its only support line, a noose, invoking the reverse image of the slender white filament that had been the rehearsing pale silhouette of Shangri-La.
This figure was no artful flutter of tattered robes, but the double of Max himself: black-clad, male, athletic, and dead.
Just as the audible alarms blared their shrill mechanical warning, Max swung from unweighted line to line, back to the claustrophobic shelter of the lighting conduits.
One line was like the deadly third rail on a subway system, one line he didn’t dare touch. That was the tense vee of wire dipping down to the glistening empty onion dome, bearing the pendant of a dead man like a human jewel. His limp black feet almost touched the tip of the scepter’s soon-to-be housing.
Was this some gruesome obstacle the Synth had set up to make Max’s test all the harder? A warning that he had better succeed?
Maybe.
Or maybe more than one cabal of thieves had its eye on the scepter.
Who Do You Trust?
Lieutenant Molina was good to go: she wore her spring khaki pantsuit and her Glock 9 millimeter in a paddle holster at her right rear hip. Her feet were pushed into tan suede loafers that didn’t make any insecure male officers or detectives suspect she might be taller than them by more than a smidge.
She carried several pair of latex gloves and one colorless lip gloss in one side jacket pocket, her shield and sunglasses in the other.
And she was sitting on the arm of the living room couch, tapping her loafer sole on the carpet because America’s almost ’Tween Idol, Miss Mariah Molina—just thirteen and out to prove that age was justifiably unlucky for parents everywhere—was still lost in the jungle of electric cords and tubes, jars and bottles the bathroom countertop had become.
“Hurry it up, chica!” Carmen called, checking her leather-banded wristwatch. “We’ll both be late.”
“Just a minute! I only have to do one more thing.”
Carmen shook her head. From tomboy to teen in one crazy dangerous stint of reality TV. Mariah appeared in the living room archway, flushed and still chasing her sequined flipflops down the hall to push her feet fully into them.
The Teen Idol hairdresser had chopped Mariah’s dark basic bob into a ragged, flipped-up look that was surprisingly appealing except for chunks of highlighted blond here and there.
Try to keep a Latina from going blond nowadays! Even African-American women had jumped on the blond bandwagon. Asians too. Soon the only natural brunet left on the planet would be Midnight Louie, Temple Barr’s pesky black tomcat.
“Look okay?” Mariah ran to the small oval living room mirror for further verification. She eyed only her lightly made-up face (that battle was a goner), not the blue-and-green plaid of her Our Lady of Guadalupe uniform.
Manly men could be a pain, but girly girls were catching up to them fast.
“Terrific,” Carmen said, standing. “Now, let’s roll.”
Mariah grabbed her fully loaded backpack. At least her grades were pretty good. But Carmen missed the long, glossy brunet braid down her back, so ready to be tweaked on their way out to school and work in the mornings.
Tweaks were as out of date in maturing modern mother-daughter relationships as braids. Shoot.
Molina hit her office in the Crimes Against Persons unit feeling more naked that morning than packing a Glock should permit.
She’d come out of the closet a couple weeks back at the Blue Dahlia restaurant and cabaret. Mariah, Temple Barr, and one of Carmen’s colleagues from work had met her occasional alter ego for the first time: torch singer Carmen, a continuing attra
ction in her vintage velvet gowns that matched her vintage velvet contralto voice.
“Morning, Lieutenant,” a colleague greeted her.
No worry. It was just Detective Morrie Alch. He didn’t know she had a closet to come out of. His genially furrowed face under its black and silver spray of thick hair reminded her of a faithful old Scottish terrier.
“Morning. What we got?”
“Trouble at the New Millennium.”
“Who died?”
“We don’t know yet, but he was found twisting in the air-conditioning above the fancy installation stuff they were putting in for that upcoming Russian exhibit. Kinda like a caterpillar in a cocoon. Hanging from a couple of bungee cords. Cirque du Soleil gone homicidal.”
“Murder, then? Or accident?”
“Hard to tell. Was wearing this black spandex cat suit, but his face, get this, was painted white.”
“Classic clown stuff. Accident, murder, or suicide?”
“Triple play. You got it, Lieutenant. Place is a mess. Workmen and hotel execs all over it. Not to mention T. B. and shady security. Su and I are up for it. Are we a go?”
“Sure. If it’s odd, you’re the perfect odd couple to handle it.”
Morrie made a face not unlike Mariah’s when reacting to a really stupid, horribly embarrassing suggestion from her moth-er.
Detective Merry Su was a pit bull-shih tzu cross. Tiny and ultra competent. Relentlessly cute and just plain relentless. A smaller, Asian edition of Temple Barr, PR woman to clients with a bent for providing the scene of the crime for murder.
Speaking of which . . . T. B. “Temple Barr—?”
“She sure looked different, but real cute, at that Teen Idol gig.” Alch’s chuckle was both paternal and, to Molina, annoying. “She’s just like my daughter used to be . . . before she grew up and found out she’d become a wife and mother: you’d never know what they’d be up to.”
“I’m not looking for domestic reminiscences, Morrie.”
He shrugged. “Dispatcher gave me her name. Seems she’s handling PR for this Russian thing at the New Millennium.”
He actually sounded happy about that.
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