Rose petals. Crushed to release scent. Each a separate blot on the carpet, like gouts of blood.
Sweet. Sick.
She followed the trail, knowing this was intended, her stomach twisted with anxiety. Mariah’s room on the right. Was that where the muffled music was coming from?
Call in? Call backup? Call Morrie? Call Larry?
Someone had been playing games with her for weeks. Leaving things in the house, announcing a bold come-and-go presence. At first, she’d doubted her own senses.
Not anymore.
Oh, God! And if Mariah wasn’t out as announced? Wasn’t doing teenage overtime on the social circuit? If she was still here, in that room where the rose petals led and the music was just a shadow of itself . . .
She came almost abreast of the door. Ajar. And the radio sound. Louder. And the rose petals, crossing the threshold.
The door banged against the wall, askew on its hinges. Her semiautomatic’s sleek, sweeping muzzle had the whole room covered.
A life-size poster of Johnny Depp as a pirate had nearly bought it until she recognized another familiar media face in the male photograph on the opposite wall. Had looked like a long-haired druggie at first flash. That beard sure begged for a 9-millimeter shave.
She had to wade through teenage effluvia, kicking away several stuffed animals, to reach the closet and rip that door open.
Just more girly clutter on the floor and unmoving ranks of clothes old and new. She used the gun muzzle to sweep the hangers back, her bare foot to feel and kick the clutter off the floor.
Nothing there. No one.
Back to the wall, backed up by Johnny “Pirates of the Caribbean” Depp. Big help. She needed to re-enter the hall, but someone might have followed her down, or preceded her down. Be waiting for her now. Or have been waiting for her all along.
The bathroom. Shower curtain. Oh, great, Janet Leigh at the Bates Motel time. But too small to conceal much. Then, her own bedroom.
In the hall, she pointed the Glock left, then right. Someone might have been lurking in her bedroom and returned to the living room while she investigated Mariah’s room. The rose petal trail smelled like a trap. There were still rose petals at her feet and they led into her bedroom.
If she goes on toward it, she bottles herself up in an architectural cul-de-sac. Just how well does Whoever know her house? Very well indeed. The music must be coming from the radio alarm clock in her bedroom.
No wonder it sounds so tinny. They never put decent sound systems into those cheap dual-function things.
At least Mariah is out, and safe at . . . someone’s house. Try to keep track of a kid nowadays. Try to remember the kind of September— this is May! Concentrate.
Carmen eyes the hall back where she came from. The perp could be out there, escaping. Or poised to bottle her in. Or . . . not.
She edges along, back to the wall, ready to move, or fire, in either direction.
What if this is just the misguided prank of some besmitten teenage boy, trying to get Mariah’s attention? Carmen overreacts, and disaster.
But she’s the one who’s had strange vintage velvet gowns showing up in her closet. Alien gift boxes left on her bed. She’s the one being stalked.
Carmen nears the door to her own bedroom. That door is ajar.
It always is. This is a two-female, two-cat household. The cats bounce between her bedroom and Mariah’s every night. Several times every night. And their litter box is in the bathroom under the sink with its four chrome legs circa the fifties.
Normal is open doors.
Abnormal is someone lurking behind them. Someone more solid than a poster. No posters in her bedroom. She spots a male figure . . . it’s surrender or shoot.
Her own house has come to this. Ticks her off. She adjusts her hands on the metal grip, the trigger guard. She’s got her forefinger resting on the guard, not the trigger. She moves it slowly and carefully to the trigger itself. Her palms are damp. They just stick to the warming metal better.
Her grip is sure.
She kicks her own bedroom door open and backs into it fast, so the door can’t rebound, hiding half the room.
Everything is so damn familiar. So damn static. But this room has a closet. And a gun safe in that closet.
There are a couple more guns in there. The standard issue .38 she got on her first patrol job in L.A. Another .38 she accidentally took during her flight from L.A. when she was pregnant with Mariah. Rafi Nadir’s, with his fingerprints all over it, like they were all over her past. How do you return an accidentally abstracted police department issue gun to an ex-lover you never want to see again? You don’t.
He’d never see the daughter he’d tricked her into bearing, he’d never see his gun again. Bastard.
She’s mad now. A match for anything.
She takes down the room foot by foot, piece by piece. Her own sanctuary, a crime scene.
After twenty sweaty minutes, she has nothing.
The gun safe is secure. Locked. The alien blue velvet dress still hangs among the other vintage velvet gowns for her secret off-duty role as Carmen, just Carmen, the blues singer.
She sits on the bed, her bed, holding the gun, her gun.
No one is here. She’d barged back out into the main rooms, shocked the cats, looked behind and under and over and into every nook and cranny. Nothing.
The bedside alarm clock radio drones on.
She can’t be sure she forgot to turn it off this morning.
There’ve been a lot of mornings like that lately, tainted by serial worry. About her job, her daughter, her stalker.
Then the alarm goes off—buzzing, buzzing—on her bedside table.
She slams the button down. And listens.
The radio, the damn radio is still playing.
From under her pillow.
She tosses the pillow aside like a lightweight Hollywood rock.
Something remains.
A vintage transistor radio.
A flat box, like nylon stockings used to come in. With a note.
After she dons latex gloves, she teases the box open with the muzzle of the gun at arm’s length. As if that would do any good against an explosive device. Just red tissue paper. She doesn’t really expect a literal explosive device. Her stalker is too subtle for that.
She expects an explosive message.
She gets it when she eases the enclosed gift card out of its Barbie-size white envelope. The note reads, “This is what you should have been wearing for a midnight rendezvous in the Secrets’ parking lot.”
The box holds one of those sleazy sub-Frederick’s of Hollywood outfits: black garters and red satin and white lace and underwire bra and filmy chiffon.
Only one person knows about Secrets’ parking lot. She puts the safety on the Glock but not her emotion, which is sheer fury. Max Kinsella with his sick cat-and-mouse games has invaded her home, her privacy, and threatened her child.
This is war.
Home Invasion
Temple heard the knock on her door. Too demanding for Matt Devine, the only one diffident enough to ever knock. And maybe that would stop now.
Max just broke in, born second-story man that he was. As long as it was her second story. Temple used to think that was cool. She was starting to resent what she had loved before.
She opened up.
Whoa. Lieutenant Molina, looking navy blue official, like a nun or a military man. Was there a difference? Wasn’t your guilt and anxiety always to their advantage?
“Excuse me,” Temple said, trying to stretch to at least five four on her three-inch heels.
“I’m here to gather evidence,” said six-foot-something C. R. Molina. “I don’t have a court order. You can kick me out. But then I’d have to put it all on the record. If you want that, fine.”
What a witch! Temple so resented this woman breaking into her life, her condo, her sense of privacy and security.
“What do you want here?”
“Not much, and everything. Something he has touched. Besides you.”
Temple had already been backed up until she dug her heels into the faux goatskin rug under her coffee table. Make that cocktail table, because she could use about three right now. Plus her aunt Kit.
“You have no idea,” Temple said.
“You have a crime scene bonanza,” Molina contradicted Temple. “You believe in Max Kinsella. Okay. Just let me gather my evidence.”
“What evidence?”
“What would still have his fingerprints? Hmmm?” Molina produced a latex glove and snapped it on.
Euww! So like a gynecologist. Temple’s home was a laboratory? Like she had a yeast infection named Max?
“You—” Temple began.
“You give me what I want, I’m outa here. Scared?”
“Of you, no. Of your unadmitted obsessions? Yes.”
Molina marched on. Later, Temple would wonder why Molina did this take-down solo, with no paperwork. But Temple had been caught head-on, like deer being shined. No time to think.
“You live in Las Vegas,” Molina said. “You bet on this town for your livelihood. For your luck. Just something. One thing he has touched. An innocent man leaves no trail but trust. Yes? One little thing.”
They were in the bedroom by then, Temple quavering, thinking madly but not well. She didn’t want this woman in here, tainting the truth of her past and possibly even the present.
Temple’s eyes gave her away. They flashed on the second stereo system. Small but mighty. The rack of CDs. Vangelis, of course, a magician’s musician. Soaring. Dazzling. Mystifying.
“You gaze longingly at the sound system. Music is the food of love. And delusion.” Molina’s latexed fingers snared one CD. Old. Not played recently. Cosmos. Not dusted. Not wiped free of fingerprints, just Max all over it. The music, the mood, the intimate moments.
Molina read Temple’s unreeling memories and anxieties in one glance. The CD was sealed in plastic, ready to be raped of all its secrets.
Temple took that image, that notion, way too personally.
Temple sat sweating in her air-conditioning after the homicide lieutenant left.
She was dazed. Molina had only recently promised to leave Max and her alone. Now she was muscling into their intimate lives, sneering at the implicit details of their love life. Making it criminal to care. To defend and protect.
Or, was she just too tired to be Max’s personal pit bull anymore? Was she weakening because she was distracted by Matt and his needs, his attractions? Was it getting easy to give up the ghost? Max, her maybe lover?
Temple knew she should have done more to resist Molina, but she also knew that this humiliating breaking and entering wouldn’t have been necessary if Max had done less. If he’d been here rather than anywhere else. And the fact that he needed to do what he did didn’t make it one damned bit easier. For him.
Or for her.
High Anxiety
Max’s stint as the Phantom Mage at Neon Nightmare was the ideal training ground for this job at the New Millennium.
“Job”in the sense of pulling a heist.
In the deepest dark of night, against the ceiling of the black-painted area above the exhibition, he’d installed his own web of deception.
He and Gandolph had spent many wee morning hours after Max’s Neon Nightmare shows tunneling a secret entrance above the suspended platforms and electronically operated mirrors and the web of bungee cords the Cloaked Conjuror and Shangri-La had rigged for themselves, the two black panthers, and her acrobatic Siamese cat.
The tangled nest of electric cords and circus gadgetry had evolved into two levels of treachery. The machinery of illusion could always be dangerous. Two hidden hands, two different purposes made it doubly treacherous. As was Shangri-La herself.
Max had erected a secret shadow rigging above the original installation.
He planned to tangle CC in a falling net of cables, then swing down in his stead, wearing a duplicate costume. In front of a transfixed audience (the way he always liked ‘em), he would use the heavy boots to kick away the Lexan pyramid-cum-onion dome protecting the scepter, which he and Gandolph had rigged to give. Then he’d swing up into the black nowhere, prize attached to utility belt.
No matter that the alarm system screeched its worst.
The guards would believe their eyes and waste time lumbering upward to corral a sputtering and stunned Cloaked Conjuror.
Max by then would be shimmying through eighty feet of narrow aluminum tubing installed like a long, long, skylight tunnel. CC’s mask and heavy shoes and cloak would remain behind, as deflated as the hat and robe of the melting Wicked Witch of the West.
What a world, what a world!
The Synth would have proof of his loyalty and daring and would at last admit him to their inner sanctum of secrets. Gandolph, presumed dead and therefore not suspect, would keep the scepter for producing later, when the Synth and all its murky works would be known to Max and the world and be broken.
Max would gladly retire his growing poker hand of identities. Maybe he could break the Synth in a couple of months, then come back as his original performing persona, the Mystifying Max. He was in superb physical condition again. Maybe the Crystal Phoenix would renew its offer, particularly with Temple as his . . . agent. They could stop playing hide and seek. Get married. Buy a house of their own.
But all that was later. This was now. The biggest problem for his successful escape was Shangri-La. He carried a lariat of steel cord. If he could encoil her on the way down, her long tatters of costume would become her prison.
Now, he hung under the ceiling like a big black spider, feet and hands in the holds he and Gandolph had screwed into the unseen joists. He breathed deeply, trying to relax in the trying position.
The music was revving up to introduce the Cloaked Conjuror and Shangri-La. Across the chasm below, he could see into the staging area hidden from the audience. The low-level spotlights that dotted the black ceiling gleamed on the steel bars caging in the big cats across from him. Their eyes gleamed in the dark as they growled softly with anticipation. They saw him and spotted prey, but no one would heed them. That would be invisible to the audience looking up from the pool of brightly lit white exhibition cubicles and pedestals far below.
They sat in a semicircle of sleek white stands on the museum’s far walls, chattering with opening night excitement. Buzz. Temple would be happy. Even though the press wouldn’t be allowed into the exhibit until the following week, he knew that she would be down there, making sure all the VIPs were at ease and ready for the big preview night. But he didn’t dare shake his concentration to look for her.
He hated to ruin an event she had worked on, but she was endlessly clever at turning bad publicity into good.
Max eyed the equipment installed for the true performers. They had tested it many times for stability and strength, as he had his own gear. This mock-robbery stunt was nothing more, or less, than Cirque du Soleil had so elegantly reinvented for Vegas, a spectacular, arty circus act.
Max inhaled long and slow. Launch time was only a few minutes. He would swoop down, looking like part of the act. He would leave the real CC and Shangri-La hanging uneasily, shocked.
He would take the prize and retract his presence as swiftly as a spider reeling in web silk. And he, like Robert the Bruce, had studied their swift and efficient ways on the back patio of Gandolph’s house, now his. Not his and Temple’s. Someplace new for them. Fresh. Free.
No. Think the job. Only the job. Not the rewards.
The music swelled into the introduction segment, forcing the upward-staring faces below to turn down as they settled into their seats.
Like a bird of prey, he swiftly eyed all the platforms: CC’s, Shangri-La’s, the big cats’, even the tiny one reserved for the Siamese cat named Hyacinth.
She was really too small for an aerial show. She wouldn’t be very visible. But Max understood Shangri-La’s loyalty to an an
imal partner. He’d worked with some himself and knew that they came to love and crave the spotlight. Praise and adulation and applause could seduce any species, a sad commentary on how often it was missing in young human and animal lives.
Max blinked. He wasn’t wearing his colored contact lenses tonight: not the Mystifying Max’s feline-green ones, not the Phantom Mage’s brown ones. His eyes were their natural hue, blue, rather like the Siamese cat’s.
But he wasn’t seeing a Siamese cat on the small, half-hidden perch reserved for it.
He was seeing a small glimmer of ultra-feline green, as vivid as his own false lenses. He didn’t see much else there, just disembodied eyes, like the isolated toothy smile of the Cheshire Cat from Wonderland, implying a total cat, but winking out.
This was a kink in the perfect plan. Hyacinth hadn’t suddenly made her blue eyes green. With a shudder of premonition, Max looked harder. A dark feline form was moving onto the platform poised like a diver’s board on the edge of nothing.
It was, of course, Temple’s eternally meddling tomcat, Midnight Louie. While he posed there, invisible to everyone near and far but Max, he glanced up. Directly. At Max.
Great. Outed by an alley cat.
Then Louie pounced farther out onto his podium, as if chasing phantom prey.
Max’s mouth opened to shout a warning no cat would heed. Stop!
But Midnight Louie had already leapt back into the shadow of what passed for wings up here, besides bungee cords.
And the entire platform buckled and fell vertical to its support members. It dangled there as if held by an invisible thread of remaining support.
Sometimes seconds can take minutes. It required enormous muscular strength for Max to cling to the ceiling. His body craved the release of a bungee freefall, of stretching long to fly and then liberate the prize, seize it, rebound upward toward ungiving ceiling, then cling and skitter out the escape route.
That release was gone, Max realized. While he and Gandolph had been rigging their secret web above it all, someone else had sabotaged the actual performance platforms, and probably the bungee cord anchors too. Everything was too weak to hold . . . even an alley cat.
Cat in a Quicksilver Caper Page 20