Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Temple’s pen hit paper, making a period on the notebook sheet.

  She was inclined to object that simply being a Chechen made anyone a “known” criminal, but there was no doubt that Chechen rebels had been making it as hot for the Russian government as unknown anarchists had for the czars in the bad old days a hundred and more years ago.

  A possible dead Chechen swinging from a bungee cord in the New Millennium wouldn’t be just a would-be jewel thief but a possible political gauntlet slapped across everybody’s face. And as a PR problem, he would be a top-drawer nightmare. It would take a pile of artful public relations to salvage a situation like that. No wonder she often ended up solving crimes as well as creating press releases. It was the only way to protect her clients from the law’s delay. She had to do it herself.

  Well. A big cold, slimy salty mouthful of dead fish eggs might be just the thing to snap Temple out of the serious PR funk Monsieur Volpe had just put her in.

  Maximum Insurance

  Temple kept her own counsel until she got home to the Circle Ritz.

  Who would have ever thought that a PR person for a major exhibition would have ever welcomed the idea of plain and simple out-and-out jewel thieves?

  Especially since the only model that came to mind was Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. Who wouldn’t want Cary Grant on one’s case? Speaking of art thieves, there was always Pierce Brosnan in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. Not too shabby either. Every female PR freelancer should be so lucky!

  Except. Here. Now. A Russian exhibit blending Czarist and post-Soviet politics with Las Vegas capitalist commercial sizzle. A marriage made in hell, for sure. And if a Chechen rebel in black spandex accessorized with bungee cord turns up dead on the scene?

  Oh, hell indeed!

  Temple speed-dialed Max on her cell phone. It was the relatively early hour (for a magician) of 1:00 P.M., but she hoped he was out there. Somewhere.

  An answer!

  “Well. Hello, Miss Teen Hottie. You still a bad, bad bottle blonde?”

  “Yup. Sorry I was so out of it when you paid your respects the other night.”

  “I hate to disillusion you, but those weren’t respects.”

  “Hmmm,” she responded.

  Max was doing his best to sound Max-errific, but Temple could tell that he was . . . simply . . . tired. Just awakened. Getting his bearings. Pretending to be perfectly alert, perfectly all right.

  Just as she was. Pretending, that is. Rats!

  “Listen, Max, I have that New Millennium Russian exhibition PR job and I need your input.”

  “The Millennium? You’re doing the public relations for it?”

  “Yes, duh. That’s what I do for a living. This is my biggest commission yet and it’s already going south.”

  She outlined the exhibition and her role in it, surprised he didn’t already know. Max’s job was being preternaturally informed and his avocation was keeping an eye on her, wasn’t it?

  “So, how can I help you?” he said.

  “So . . . if it turns out that this death means that terrorists are stalking the exhibition, what’s a savvy PR person to do to prevent more mayhem, murder, and, worst of all, bad publicity?”

  “Watch her back?”

  “That’s all?”

  “And front.” Max chuckled. “Now that you’re a platinum blonde, everybody else will be. It’s a knee-jerk response.”

  “And unwanted, but I can’t just wash that dye job out of my hair.”

  “Nor me either.”

  Temple warmed to the conviction in his voice. “Max, this is way out of my league. I’m supposed to be getting goodie-goodie artsy coverage, but all the media will want is gory details.”

  “That’s all the media ever wants these days.”

  “True, it’s all sunk to National Enquirer level. Maybe I should become a . . . I don’t know, an etiquette columnist. Miss Manners is looking rather wrinkly these days.”

  Max laughed until he sounded like his old self. “You as an etiquette dominatrix? Brave New World. Don’t worry about the New Millennium job. I’ve got a feeling it’ll work itself out.”

  “Max, I know I wasn’t at my best the other night. But I did tell you that she’s there, yes? On the scene.”

  “She?”

  “That treacherous bitch.” The phrase even surprised the usually ladylike Temple. “That awful female magician who napped your ring right off my hand on stage. Shangri-La.”

  A long silence, then Max said, “The ring that Molina found near the murder site of Gandolph’s former assistant, you mean.”

  “Right. That one. I swear, Molina would never be girly enough to have a hope chest, but her custody of that ring of yours, of ours, is as close as she’ll ever come to one. It’s evidence of something, though I don’t have any idea of what. Do you?”

  Max was silent again.

  “Shangri-La is Asian, supposedly,” he finally said. “This exhibition is pre- and post-Soviet Russian. She may be involved merely as the Cloaked Conjuror’s co-performer. Even treacherous bitches have to work.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know what his real game is either. He’s masked, isn’t he? A conundrum. And so is she.”

  “Masked magicians are an ancient tradition.”

  “You always performed bare faced.”

  “Maybe I was just a good liar.”

  The last word hung suspended in the ether that connected their voices, but not their faces.

  “I’m not a good liar, Max,” Temple said.

  “That’s why I love you.”

  Oh. He still did. And she still did. And that combo still made her heart sing. But. She knew she’d been treading toward lies of omission with her new, closer relationship with Matt. If only Max would sweep her off her feet again into surety, security.

  Give me a rope, Max! You who are so good at spinning over the abyss. Give me something to hang on to besides faith and fairy tales. Be my prince, not my pauper.

  “I don’t know where you are,” she said in a little lost voice.

  “Neither do I.”

  Temple recognized truth even when it came wrapped in three little words over a cell phone line. She sighed. “We need to really talk, Max. Face to face. Soon.”

  “We need to do much more than that. Agreed.” Pause. “I can’t now. Later, though.”

  “Later,” she agreed.

  “Don’t worry.” His voice was already fading.

  She thought he’d added, “I’m on it.” But it could have been anything murmured in passing, some good-bye formula that meant nothing.

  She snapped the cell phone shut, torn between taking comfort from Max’s certainty that everything would work out all right, and an odd worry about why he should be so certain. She had the unpleasant feeling of having been sweet talked. Max knew better than to offer her Splenda instead of simple, high-calorie sincerity. Didn’t he? Didn’t Max, more than anyone? That was her mantra, her faith, her story.

  Maybe she’d been reading herself into the wrong book.

  These new divided loyalties were tearing her in two. Why was she still putting her heart and soul into a relationship that had been perfect at first but had become more and more tenuous? Even Matt, Mr. Patient, thought Max had deserted her. He wouldn’t be tempting her with romantic gestures and the sweet, crazy idea of an opt-out trial civil marriage if he thought her relationship with Max was the done deal it once was.

  Temple took guilty refuge from her quandary over Max by mentally replaying her most recent intimate moments with Matt. He had sure found his inner Casanova. That combined intensity of tenderness and sheer engulfing sexual hunger loose for the first time was pretty overwhelming. So. Overwhelm her. That would surely erase this miserable sense of loss and increasing distance every time she saw or talked to Max now.

  She shook herself out of her sad, sexy reveries and examined her familiar homescape.

  Midnight Louie was lounging on her living room sofa, one long foreleg sticki
ng out over the edge as stiff as a shotgun barrel, yet oddly graceful.

  It was the pose of a bored, indolent cat, but Temple didn’t believe it for a second. Any more than she’d believed Max’s offhand, indolent reassurances.

  “A Chechen rebel,” she told the cat, only because Max had signed off and wasn’t there to hear, and regard, her. “That’s crazy. What would they gain from disrupting a pretentious Las Vegas circus-act-cum-art-exhibition?”

  Would Louie shrug her off, like Max? No. Cats didn’t shrug. They just yawned, and blinked, and fanned their toes.

  As Louie was doing right now.

  Men! They were all alike.

  Even when they were wearing fur.

  Playing Chechen

  Max came out of the back patio’s scorching sunlight into the house’s cool dark shadows.

  Garry, aka Gandolph, was in the kitchen, literally whipping up lunch. Max sat on a stool to watch his mentor in magic and counterterrorism whisk egg whites into a bowl-topping foam. The process was tricky, so he nibbled on some red grapes and kept quiet.

  Gandolph finally looked up from under his salt-and-pepper eyebrows, now shaggy and quizzical when in his youth they had been devilishly peaked and cynical.

  “Working two nighttime undercover jobs is putting maroon circles under those baby blues of yours, my lad.”

  “Working two nighttime jobs up in the rigging, period, is putting circles under my eyes. One blink too many and it’s splat.”

  “You are fanatically precise about the care and feeding of your equipment.”

  Max grunted. “There’s been an ugly turn in the New Millennium situation.”

  “The dangling dead man wasn’t enough?”

  Gandolph turned to put the dish into the preheated oven. Cooking was his form of meditation, and he was damn good at it.

  “Now they’re speculating the victim could be a Chechen rebel, or at least someone tied to them.”

  Gandolph’s pudgy form (with time and retirement from the stage, the gourmet cooking had won the battle for Gandolph’s physique) whirled around to face Max.

  “And you know this from—”

  “A little bird.”

  “Ah, your little bird, the redheaded PR chick.”

  “Blond, temporarily, as you recall. She couldn’t know that I knew she was working on this PR assignment so I had to act, surprised. Damn! Why did she have to get hired on a project that I’m being forced to muck up? She is very proud of this New Millennium exhibition, thinks this could be the plum PR assignment of her career, and is afraid that things might turn really ugly and political.”

  “And she went right to you for advice. Good thing for us!”

  “Possibly.”

  “What’s not to like about a tip-off?”

  “One ugly fact. Not only has the murder drawn higher hotel security and the LVMPD’s attention to our little heist site, it implies that we’ve got a lot more to worry about than some greedy low-end would-be jewel thief. This might mean that if some terrorists plan to use this exhibition for a political statement, we’ll have the FBI all over the place as well. I’m supposed to nip a large and valuable cultural artifact from under the noses of hotel security, the Vegas cops, hidden anarchists, the FBI, and God knows who else?”

  Gandolph set the oven timer and hopped up on another stool like a chubby adolescent bellying up to a soda fountain. He grinned.

  “We always did our best work against impossible odds. You love ’em.”

  Max grinned and ate another grape.

  The grin faded fast as he considered how much this last, demanding, double-edged masquerade to infiltrate and topple the Synth was imperiling his long-held and deep love for Temple.

  Maybe, he thought, it was high time to love impossible odds less and to spend his energy loving Temple more. Only a month more, surely. Once he was an inside man. Which he wouldn’t be without stealing the scepter. Which would damage Temple’s job performance.

  Damn, sometimes there wasn’t any which way to go, including loose.

  Better Bred Than Red

  Hot news is hot news even when it is hot mews.

  I allow my Miss Temple to mistake me for a stuffed pillow (a role I had more than enough of during one of our previous adventures), but the moment she leaves the condo, I bestir myself. I also desert the Circle Ritz, my home away from homicide, for the New Millennium, my homicide away from home.

  I cannot tell you how all my hunting instincts sit up and take note when I hear that the dead man in the exhibition area may be from Chechnya (or could be connected to some rebel cause there?). I have relatives in Chechnya. (In fact, I have relatives all over the globe. Those of us who do not cling to limited pedigrees are truly universal. Some call us “mongrel” but it might as well be “Mongol” as not.)

  Global politics is not normally my bailiwick. (Bailiwick is a good old-fashioned word for “arena of operation.”) My arena of operation for the nonce (another good old-fashioned word) is the New Millennium and the White Russian exhibition. By now, I have found a handy ground-floor entrance: the back area where they download the Big Cats every day for rehearsal.

  I merely hop through the bars of their cages—all right, I have to shimmy-shimmy my midlife male middle through the iron uprights—then I can hunker down between their extended forelegs and pass as a shadow. We are all big black dudes, after all.

  Kalúha is cool, but I have to watch Lucky, as he is new to the act and at times does not realize his own strength. Sometimes when he yawns, his lower jaw knocks my skull sideways. But a few blows to the cerebellum does not stop the streetwise shamus, as all the noir detective novels point out ad nauseam.

  By the time the boys are transferred to their holding cages up top I am freewheeling and hard on the trail of crime and punishment. First, I need to know if the Big Cats have any insight on Russian politics.

  Zip. Nil. Nada. These guys are huge and brawny and cooperative, but not much in the little gray cell department.

  So I slink about the upper area, blending into the matte black paint job as long as I keep my eyes slitted almost closed, looking for some high witness I have missed interviewing. See, the guy was found dangling just above the apex of the exhibition area. That was sixty feet below the magic show staging zone. I figure somebody up there was not only watching, but pulling the strings.

  CC and Miss Shangri-La are not on the scene yet, so I edge to the rim of a ledge to gaze down at the busy work below. It is way higher than an elephant’s eye up here and is in no way a beautiful morning, so I am not surprised when a cold bolt of fur and claws bowls me over and has me hanging by my flimsiest nail sheaths from the wooden platform.

  I gaze up into celestial blue eyes rimmed in predator red. Before I can blow my cover and whimper “Squeaker,” I watch those Babyface Nelson–blue eyes blink.

  “You!” Miss Hyacinth hisses. “I would help you up but my curare claws might bring you even farther down. Now we will see what upper foreleg strength will do for a common street fighter.”

  She steps back out of sight, leaving me to heave myself up on semi-solid ground sheath by sloughed sheath. I hear their tiny clicks hitting hard surfaces below like invisible hail.

  Panting, I have regained my footing and stare my sudden tormentor down. That is just an expression. She remains with me up here, on this pseudo–crow’s nest perch. I wish one of those bigbeaked black birds were up here. They would teach Miss Hyacinth a thing or two.

  While I catch my breath, she eyes me up and down, no doubt regretting that my “down” was not fatal. That is always the thing with these feline fatale types: they have to establish their street cred.

  “Midnight Louie,” she acknowledges. “I thought you had taken a few days off to bury your impertinent daughter after our encounter at CC’s estate.”

  “Hmph,” I say, “more like her burying me. I see you survived her onslaught.”

  “Easily.”

  I look into those crystal blues and know she is
lying. Her set-to with Miss Louise is why a body double is in this new show. And . . . she might have enjoyed the superiority of helping me back up on the platform, except I can sense a certain delicacy in the joints on her part.

  For a moment a soupçon of sympathy vibrates through my vibrissae (that is whiskers to you!). A domestic-size cat is always at a disadvantage on stage. Hyacinth is struggling to keep up with the Big Boys despite suffering a world-class catfight a few weeks back against my purported daughter, Miss Midnight Louise. I would have to say Louise may indeed be my spawn, for she won that one, pads down.

  So, Hyacinth had thrown her weight around on me because it is her best weapon at the moment, curare-painted nails or not. Besides, she probably has a soft spot for me, anyway. Who would want to off the only reproductively harmless macho housecat in Las Vegas? The Big Boys would have her for lunch, or elevenses, if it were left to them.

  “I did not know you were interested in high-wire acts,” she says from her usual defensive crouch, which emphasizes the sharklike sharpness of her shoulder blades. Her coat is the same pale cream shade but her dove-gray trim shows slight scars.

  “Me? An aerial act? Bast forbid.”

  “You do look a little bottom heavy.”

  “Physique has nothing to do with it. I am an earth sign.”

  “Oh, really? Which one?”

  “Well, I do not believe in that astronomy stuff so I cannot say. Maybe, uh, Taurus.”

  “Ah. The bull. As in slinging lots of it. Why are you here? This is my mistress and my new gig. Intruders are not welcome.”

  “I am not an intruder.”

  “Then what are you?”

  For one thing, fast on my feet with a good story. “Ah, I represent the boys.”

  “Boys?”

  “Yeah. The Big Boys. I am their agent.”

  “I do not have an agent.”

  “That is because you have a verbal contract with your mistress. Never a good idea. You need someone between her interests and your interests.”