Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

Could Temple be gazing not on beauty bare, but on the bare face of that almost mythic, duplicitous illusionist and ring thief and CC’s new partner in magic, Shangri-La? Yes.

  Temple thought her heart had stopped and restarted about three times, but it might have been four. Or five. This was the mysterious enemy to all things Temple: Max, Louie, Tiffany opal-and-diamond engagement rings. Ring, solo.

  “Temple Barr,” CC was saying by way of introduction. “She’s doing PR for the hotel on our new show. This is my petite performing partner, Shangri-La, less formally known as Shang.”

  Temple nodded to acknowledge the introduction. Shang nodded with almost deliberately clichéd Asian inscrutability.

  What an actress! Temple thought. Could the woman have failed to recognize her? Shangri-La had stood next to Temple onstage, then had conjured the ring off her finger, pushed her into an onstage box and down a dark rabbit hole into a coffinlike box ready for transport and who knew what else?

  Surely she didn’t forget a victim.

  Oh, wait! Temple was still a flagrant bottle blonde from her last assignment, not a natural redhead. It threw off her most intimate friends, particularly the male ones. Why not a woman?

  “Nice to meet you,” Temple said, happy that the woman was disinclined to thrust a saber-nailed hand at her for shaking. “You’re quite right that this poor man couldn’t hurt anyone now, if he had ever wanted to. But he can hurt the public profile of this exhibition.”

  “Bad publicity is the best kind nowadays,” Shang said, eyeing the hanged man.

  They all stood around staring, like crowds come to see an execution in the bad old days of public hangings.

  “We must embrace such facts,” Shang added, looking up into CC’s stoic mask. “And you and I must triple check our equipment once the authorities have freed the scene.”

  “Any notion of who he might be?” Temple asked, knowing the answer but wondering if they did.

  “Nobody,” Shang said coolly. “Nobody having anything to do with our performance. Just a supernumerary. An extra.”

  Temple quelled another shiver.

  CC moved off in the custody of his much smaller partner, like a mastiff dominated by a terrier.

  Temple had to admit that it had occurred to her more than once that Shangri-La, that down-scale lady magician in extravagant Asian theatrical face paint and razor-slashed hair and kimonos, might have been a secondary persona of Kitty the Cutter.

  Having met the lady wearing what was as close as she might ever get to civvies, no way was she a Black Irish super-patriot and stalker. That woman was well and truly dead, and no one mourned her. Except maybe Max, in the temple of his heated adolescent memory and forgiving Catholic soul.

  Temple. She’d thought she was that for a while, with him. A permanent refuge from the international war of terror and counterterror going way back before 9-11.

  “Get these civilians out of here,” a new voice ordered.

  Temple shivered again.

  Just who spoke this time, she didn’t have to guess.

  Temple turned. It was her red-letter day for unhappy encounters.

  “Ah, Miss Temple Barr,” the voice continued. “I took you for a chorus bimbo from the back.”

  “They’re usually your height, not mine, human giraffes almost six feet tall.”

  “True.” Lieutenant C. R. Molina was tall, dark, and semi-female. She was also not a friend, although sometimes an associate. “I see you’re keeping Zoe Chloe alive.”

  “Do you have any idea how hard a bleach job is to undo?”

  “No, and I never intend to. Now shoo. This is a crime scene and snoops aren’t needed here.”

  “I’m doing PR for the exhibition. Naturally, I was informed.”

  “The New Millennium doesn’t float its own flock of flacks?”

  “Not with a fine arts background,” Temple said as snootily as she could. She hated snooty people and hoped Molina did too.

  “You?”

  “Guthrie Repertory Theatre in Minneapolis. You know, Shakespeare and Congreve and Oscar Wilde.”

  Molina sighed. “You never cease to amaze. Now . . . back.”

  She could have been a lion tamer and Temple a housecat.

  “Let my people work in peace.”

  Molina turned vivid blue eyes up at the blacked-out exhibition ceiling above the acres of off-white walls. Temple suspected she didn’t realize that she had sighed.

  “You understand,” Molina asked, “that there is one and only one likely suspect for aerial deaths in this town?”

  “You said you’d give Max a free pass if I masqueraded as a teenybopper on that reality TV show to protect your daughter. I kept my part of the bargain. Just look at my hair!”

  “I don’t have to.” Molina kept her eye on the slightly twirling corpse not-so-high above. The crime scene technicians had reached it and were carefully freeing the lines from which it was suspended. “All of the men in this room are doing it for me. Men can be so shallow, as we know, and your girlish, gilded head is a distraction, so . . . out.”

  “Why would Max have anything to do with this dead body?”

  “Because it’s there?”

  “That’s not fair. You promised.”

  Molina smiled. Like a shark.

  Temple froze again, this time to hear herself sounding just like the lieutenant’s whining teenage daughter, Mariah.

  “Mother” Molina had one last bombshell to lay down. She wasn’t smiling now.

  “I promised that I’d lay off going after your elusive significant other if he didn’t flip a smoking gun in my face. I think he just may have. All bets are off. This is Las Vegas, after all, and the odds on anything can turn in the wink of an eye.”

  It was some comfort to Temple that Randy insisted she be present when Molina held an informal convocation with the New Millennium management an hour and a half later.

  By then, the body had been removed. The police presence had retreated to a pair of buff young uniformed officers guarding the entrance to the exhibition. In their khaki shorts they looked rather like Boy Scout docents. Temple was thinking that she and the hotel could live with that if they were stationed there throughout the exhibition.

  Besides, they were eyeing her with great interest. Apparently, she now could wrap men around her finger as easily as she could curl a strand of her blatantly faux blond hair around it.

  This realization was sobering. Jessica Simpson knew something, although it wasn’t Chicken of the Sea tuna fish. Even Midnight Louie would never get confused about whether fish were chicken. In fact, he probably had a higher IQ than Jessica Simpson, but alas, he wasn’t blond.

  Temple realized that she was going beyond the bend, but Molina and hotel executives negotiating when and how a crime scene could become a public attraction again were too bloody boring to bear.

  Siamese If You Don’t

  Please

  Unfortunately, they rush the body out before I can do some shamus-class sniffing around on the scene.

  I do not dare show myself anyway, but lurk up in the blacked-out flies. This is a sky-high hodgepodge of catwalks and ledges trimmed with deceptive mirrors and electrical wires and bungee cords, where all the magic show equipment lies in wait for the unwary. Or the gullible observer below.

  Speaking of below, far down and away I spot the bright blond blot that is now my Miss Temple. It is sad how they tart up these showgirls for the ring nowadays. Yet I understand that she underwent this transformation for the Greater Good and the high purpose of rooting out a killer. Too bad she will have red roots for a number of months now.

  I also watch Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina prowl the scene like a big black leopard with bright blue eyes. She is a manhunter, that one. Not for her personal use, of course, but in the name of crime and punishment, which would be admirable if she were not hassling my Miss Temple at the moment.

  I must lay low (in this case, high) and take it without defending MMT, but I growl out a low gr
umble of frustration.

  It is answered by a bewitching merrrrow? of respectful interrogation.

  I turn to find that a parchment-pale frail has pussyfooted out onto the long lean line of ledge on which I perch. Precariously.

  Every muscle in my body tenses! Yes, every one. I have not glimpsed hide nor hair nor polished nail of the feline fatale attached to the magician known as Shangri-La for some weeks, even months.

  Yet I know that hip-swinging long lean stride, so like a highfashion model on a catwalk. I know those blazing blue eyes. Rather like Miss Lieutenant Molina’s human version (only with a feline pupil as impetuously vertical as an exclamation mark). I know that gray mask and gloves and hose. And tail.

  She is pretty poison, Miss Shangri-La’s performing partner from the storied land of Siam, now Thailand, who goes by the name of Hyacinth. Yet I am glad to see her again. Curare-painted nails and all. She stops to sit about two feet away, then curls her sinewy train around her gray-booted tootsies. I love boots on ladies!

  You would never guess we were both balancing on a high-wire line sixty feet above a floor thronged with cops and major hotel executives.

  She purrs. “They have taken our twirly toy away. I see you miss it.”

  That is my Hyacinth. Heart of steel.

  “I miss getting a good look and sniff around,” I say.

  “You do not like to play with your food?”

  “I am all work and no play, missy. I am a professional.”

  “Performer?”

  “Detective. You do remember me?”

  “Oh! A shamus. You do not look Irish.”

  “I am not! I am all-American, unlike you, lady. And we have met before.”

  “Not to my knowledge. And I may be happy about that, if you are going to be so rude.”

  “Look here, Hyacinth—”

  “I am not Hyacinth. My name is . . .” Here she sighs. Pauses. Paws the adjacent ledge as if burying something stinky. “Squeaker.”

  I am knocked speechless. Not only is this dame a double for the deliciously evil Hyacinth, down to her undercoat, but she has a moniker I would expect to find on a cat toy at Petco.

  “Squeaker?” I repeat.

  “I am told by my trainer that I was adopted from the shelter because I was a dead ringer for the commercially viable Hyacinth. But I was named because I had a”—another sigh—“ ‘screen door’ mew.”

  “Screen door? What is that?”

  “I do not know. Only that it has scarred me for life. At least my shelter name was feminine, Fontana.”

  I do a drop back and ticker-clutch pose to convey my shock. I know ten cool cats named Fontana, and not one is a feline. But the little doll is still airing her grievances in the human nomenclature game, and I cannot blame her.

  “Do I look like a ‘Squeaker’ to you?” she is demanding.

  I do some heavy little-doll-aimed back-peddling. “Nope. You could be a . . . Cleo, or a . . . Sirena . . . or even a Britney, but not a Squeaker. No way.”

  She sniffs. Mollified. Maybe she is Irish. “And you are—?”

  “Midnight Louie. Dude about town. Private investigator. At your service.”

  “Well, you go get that twirly toy back. I am so bored up here.”

  “Not possible. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police have taken it home to take apart. They are very possessive, trust me. So, why are you up here?”

  “I am to become part of the act, but only as a body double for my adopted sister Hyacinth. I did not want to do it but you know Hyacinth.”

  “Not as well as I would like to. Sorry, Squeaker, but Hyacinth is hot.”

  “And I am not? We are identical twins. What is the difference?”

  What can I say? Squeaker seems the nice, shy, domesticated sort.

  Her stepsister Hyacinth would carve your heart out with a toxic toenail and eat it. She is irresistible. The male of the species is pretty stupid. Of any species. But somehow we survive.

  “So what is your part in the upcoming show?” I ask.

  And she tells me, sweet trusting soul that she is.

  I am getting a sense of the high jinks that are going to unwind up here. The dude on the yo-yo string is just the beginning. An unscheduled beginning. But I love getting in on the ground floor. So to speak. Or to Squeak. So I ankle over to my new partner in high crime and we talk further. Among other things.

  A Heist Hoisted

  “Déjà Vu,” Max said. Glumly.

  “Double-jointed assistant at the Treasure Island,” Gandolph said, nodding, “worked under that name in the nineties I remember her well. Indian. Eastern, not Western. Best little sawed-in-half lady in the business. Great stage name: Déjà Vu. Those were the days.”

  “Never knew her. I was speaking generally.”

  They sat cloistered in the daylight darkness of Gandolph’s former home, now Max’s digs. The darkness came from metal security shutters at each window and door. The place was a fortress.

  “Max. I know it’s a pain to be upstaged by a corpse.”

  “It’s not a pain. In my case, it’s a habit.”

  “We just have to wait until things settle down again.”

  “Which will be in what century?”

  “Sooner than you think and sooner than the media and the police will like. This Russian show is way bigger than a worker’s unfortunate . . . accident.”

  “You think?”

  “Or suicide.”

  “Or murder.”

  “See. So many to choose from. It’ll confuse the authorities.”

  “You never used to be callous.”

  Gandolph sighed. “I never used to be so close to mortality myself. You understand it’s crucial that you steal the Alexander Scepter. This is one lost life. What you can do inside the Synth could save dozens.”

  “Somehow quantifying tragedy doesn’t do it for me anymore, Garry. At least the IRA has officially pulled its own teeth, though it can’t guarantee the shadow factions. But the rest of the world is running willy-nilly toward the same ugly, blind, political stewpot of tit for tat at any price. And who pays? Not the old, cold warriors. It’s the troops and the civilians. The casualties. The numbers, not the names.”

  “You want to bow out?”

  Max twirled a tall glass of tomato juice on the kitchen island’s stainless-steel top. It resembled a bloody carousel.

  “I want to see some good results. We’re chasing phantoms here in hopes of catching a vague mastermind, or the money behind the madness.”

  Gandolph pulled a computer printout from his always-concealed pockets. This unassuming man in black had always seemed made of hidden resources.

  “Your ladyfriend is thorough, I’ll say that for her. I like her Table of Unresolved Events.”

  “Did she call it that? Really?” Max tried to see, having forgotten the details.

  Gandolph wrested the paper away. Teasing. Tempting.

  “Yes, she did. It’s all laid out right here. The sad history of unsolved murders and related conundrums in Las Vegas since you and she hit town a couple years ago.” Gandolph’s plump middle-aged face wrinkled with mock consternation. “You two have not been lucky charms for this old town.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know! ‘This old town’ hasn’t exactly showered us with roses and rice.”

  “Tsk. I see my cover as a corpse is not blown.” Gandolph put the paper down so Max could read it, which he eagerly did, although he’d seen it before. Still, a refresher course was always welcome in Life 912B.

  “ ‘Roses and rice,’ ” Gandolph echoed his worlds. “Max, you’re thinking of the normal life you could have had, if you hadn’t been what you were forced to be, and if we hadn’t done what we did, and had the times not called for us to do it again.”

  “Damn it, Garry. You’re the closest thing to a father I’ve had since high school. You know I want to get out. You know I need to give Temple something better to do than make tables of unsolved deaths and lists of my possible pr
osecutable delinquencies.”

  “Just this one last game.”

  “ ‘Last’ is the operative word.” Max crumpled the paper. “I’m losing her.”

  He was this close to saying no more games, no matter how noble the objective. This close to saying, “I deserve a life, and so does Temple.” Hadn’t she adapted to every suicide curve on his undercover trajectory? Wasn’t she as true blue as her eyes? What did he think he was saving, the whole world? And losing the most important person, to him, in it?

  Garry nodded, poured himself a bit more of a superior Beaujolais. Filled Max’s glass, which was only down a sip or two.

  “I have no family,” Garry said. “No lost lovers. Just you, my boy. I truly do think that if we expose this Las Vegas connection to international terrorism and thievery, we will disarm a significant force in today’s miserable world.”

  Max sighed. Sipped. Raised his eyebrows in tribute to the vintage. “So now we have to get back inside the New Millennium with half the LVMPD homicide department crawling all over the site.”

  “You mean . . . with the lady lieutenant alerted to the signature of a Max Kinsella Production.”

  “Woman. She’s no lady. And politically correct on top of it. Molina is not to be underestimated. At this point, the burr under her saddle to get me will warp even her professional judgment.”

  “Warped professional judgment might work very well for us.”

  “For you.” Max pursed his lips.

  He had certain advantages. The Cloaked Conjuror relied on him. Shangri-La hated him and was looking for his signature on the scene. Expectations were more often blinding than forewarning.

  Same with Molina.

  Only thing, it might best suit their plans to make him look damn guilty, even to Temple. He hated the idea of deceiving her. When he had been forced out of town by the hitmen at the Goliath two years earlier, he’d deceived her by omission because he didn’t dare contact her until his trail was months cold and no one could follow it back to her and the Circle Ritz. But this time, the deception would be deliberate. How many times could Temple’s loyalty defy the odds of how things looked on his behalf?