Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “The crew built the set and can rebuild it. The question is, why did it fail?”

  “The question,” Temple said, “is who rigged it to fail?”

  “If that was the case, ‘who’ is obvious. That man who came plunging down from nowhere. Obviously, another thief. First Andrei, now this. The scepter must be recovered. Nothing can replace it. The exhibition is lost.”

  A murmur of deep men’s voices escalated into muted squeaks of despair. The scepter was the drawing card for the entire exhibition.

  “This has been a pretty obvious heist,” Randy pointed out in his patented Sominex tones. “Maybe there are also some pretty obvious clues to who’s behind it. Once the authorities give us leave to go, we can adjourn to the conference room to plan the next steps. It looks like this death was accidental. Even if someone rigged the machinery to fail, that’s going to take at least a day to determine. All of us down here saw the same thing.”

  “The security cameras,” Temple added, “are the witnesses the police will want most.”

  “Security cameras,” Madame Kirkov said sharply. “Up there, too?”

  “I’m sure of it. They’d provide a constant overview of the exhibition, and the hotel would recognize the performance tunnels as a risk. Unless,” she added, thinking of someone who was supernaturally security wise, “they’d been disabled too.”

  * * *

  The police took names and phone numbers and made cursory inquiries, but clearly didn’t think a shocked crowd made for very reliable witnesses.

  Temple left them interviewing the Fontana brothers, whom they thought would make reliable witnesses for some reason, or perhaps reliable suspects.

  Temple had informed the sergeant in charge that the Fontanas were special security hired by the hotel, which had made him snort and say, “We’ll see how special they are.”

  Temple couldn’t afford to worry about the flock of Fontanas, or even Aunt Kit’s Aldo, whichever one he was. She had to hustle off with Randy for a late-night emergency session with the people bankrolling this event.

  And then . . . then she had to break her string of bad luck in communicating with Max to find out where and how he was before Molina got on the warpath again.

  Because everything about that chaos in the upper air had the mark of a Mystifying Max operation, except for the death.

  My Baby Tonight

  Max wasn’t answering his cell phone. Temple hoped it hadn’t fallen during the struggle above the exhibition. Talk about leaving a telltale clue behind. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t weigh himself down with anything unnecessary during whatever he was attempting, but it was hard to be absolutely sure about anything involving Max lately.

  The thing was, she’d always assumed that Max had an unseen motive for everything he did, because of his long-time role as an undercover operative, a counterterrorism agent long before the world had felt the true potential of terrorism. She’d aided him now and again in that noble pursuit, and now the furies of lawful and unlawful pursuit were harder on his trail than ever.

  She drove to his house in the aging development that had been new when Orson Welles lived out his last years there.

  There were protocols for approaching Max’s house, most recently inherited from Garry Randolph, Max’s magic and counterterrorism mentor, known as Gandolph the Great before his retirement years ago.

  Protocol one: Temple parked the Miata four houses away. She moved quietly to the home’s front door. Protocol two: she rang the bell twice. Protocol three: she waited.

  She waited for so long she almost slunk away into the three A.M. darkness, recalling that Matt would be just home and unwinding from delivering two hours of instant empathy to all comers. She felt a strange pit-of-the-stomach craving for Matt that it was better not to examine right now.

  Only streetlights and house security lights lit up this residential part of the city. It could have been Anywhere, U.S.A. Except it was Anywhere But Here. And if Max was home, he might very well be unwinding from botching a high-end heist and failing to save the life of a woman they both distrusted but neither knew. Poor Max! He hated failure, even in an iffy cause.

  Finally, the door cracked open.

  “You’re crazy; get out of here,” Max whispered through the crack.

  “I’m crazy? I’ve got to talk to you, and not just about tonight.”

  The door opened a begrudging foot. Temple eeled through anyway. Max sealed it behind her with the sophisticated security system that made this mild-looking house into a fortress.

  There was enough light, barely, in the hall to follow him, and then only because he was shirtless and his bare, muscular back reflected a bit of light. His bare and cross-hatched back.

  “Max!”

  He turned as they reached the living room, which was lit by pools of lamplight like spotlights in the dark.

  She stopped him to examine the long, jagged claw marks festering on his pale skin. “Those’ll put you at the scene for sure.”

  “If anyone can find me to see this. Besides you.”

  “You’ve got to get them treated. Even so, the marks will be visible for weeks.”

  “Fine. I don’t intend to be.”

  “You’re not really magic, you know. You can’t actually disappear, like the Cheshire Cat, until only your scratch scars are visible.”

  “I’ll have to. Drink?”

  A bottle of Bushmill’s Irish whiskey sat on a wooden end table beside a juice glass filled either with cider or whiskey neat.

  “Didn’t feel like breaking out the best crystal,” Max said, noticing her surprised look. “Nothing to celebrate. I’ll get another glass.”

  “I’ll get some rubbing alcohol, antibiotic cream, gauze, tape . . . from the bathroom. Cat scratches can be virulent. You never know where those claws have been. Especially Shangri-La’s cat’s claws.”

  “These claws already have been virulent,” he said from the kitchen. “They made me drop her and they sting like they had chili peppers on them.”

  By the time Temple had assembled the first aid materials, Max had poured her a fruit juice glass of straight whiskey. No coasters. He was really rattled when he skipped the small civilizing touches. Details were his livelihood and his safety line and his passion.

  Temple sat down and had a good belt, then made him sit forward in his chair and tended his back by lamplight, feeling like Florence Nightingale.

  “You saw, I suppose?” he asked.

  “What there was to be seen. I don’t know why you were there, or what you thought you were doing, or how those set pieces collapsed like that.”

  “Why, what, how are the mystery. We know when and where. Answer the first three and the five key questions of a journalist are covered.”

  “Max! I’m not asking this as a journalist. I’m not even asking this as someone who’s responsible for the exhibition going smoothly and has had her ground cut out from under her by her own boyfriend. I’m asking this as someone who cares about you. And your bloody back.”

  Max bolted more whiskey but never quivered a muscle as she flooded his back with raw alcohol, then patted it down with a towel.

  “A Max Kinsella Production gone very wrong,” he said at last. “Some other unexpected stage manager had gotten there before me and booby-trapped the entire set. Everything alive up there was meant to plunge to the floor below.”

  “Including you, the mystery guest?”

  “I’m beginning to think so. Maybe me most of all, and the others were just a cover.”

  “Why?”

  “Sabotage on that scale usually has more than mere greed behind it. Maybe a geopolitical motive.”

  “Russian stuff?”

  He eyed her. “More likely the Synth.”

  “They’re a logical suspect for a plot to destroy the Cloaked Conjuror who’s been betraying their trade secrets nightly, but why would renegade magicians have a geopolitical motive?”

  Max shrugged, then winced at the pain the auto
matic gesture caused. “For years, Gandolph and I found the role of magician handy for international tours in the service of counterterrorism work. Why wouldn’t the opposition discover the same thing?”

  “Magicians are entertainers, not political fanatics.”

  “Fooling all the people almost all the time can get to be a power trip. Maybe the profession is uniquely vulnerable to political recruitment. I was.”

  “You’d lost a close friend and relative to terrorism. Why did your mentor Gandolph become involved in counterterrorism?”

  “He’d become disillusioned with hucksters who used their talents to delude and defraud gullible people, false mediums and the like. When he was approached to use that gift to foil spies and bombers, he was ready for a more meaningful role.”

  “Could you go back to it full-time, just being a magician? Just being entertaining?”

  “Maybe. I won’t know until I infiltrate the Synth and break it, or vindicate it.”

  “Why were you there? Did you have some idea that the cast would be targeted?”

  “No. No heroics. I was there on behalf of the Synth. A sort of initiation ritual.”

  “Some kind of frat boy stunt? Intrude yourself into the aerial show and upset everything and vanish? No harm done?”

  “Right. No harm done. That was not on the menu. Not mine, anyway. Now I’m wondering if they haven’t seen through my deception and if my so-called ‘assignment’ wasn’t an attempt to off me. My ‘entry fee’ for the Synth was stealing the Czar Alexander scepter. They wanted me out on a limb; they wanted to have something on me before they would accept me.”

  “A very sick initiation ritual.” Temple resumed her seat, dismayed.

  She’d suspected the Synth had become Max’s mission, that the Synth had put their relationship on the back burner. That situation was even less likely to change now and it had impacted her work.

  “And you couldn’t argue, of course,” she told him, “when their target turned out to involve my job and my reputation. You’re clever, Max. Couldn’t you have talked them into ripping off some other hotel that hadn’t given me the best PR contract of my life?”

  “I’m clever, but they made it clear that it was this or nothing. Of course, I didn’t know then that you’d been hired for this exhibition. When I found out, it was too late to pitch another treasure. It would have looked suspicious, and they already have their suspicions about me.”

  “Just asking you to do this pretty much blew your cover. Who else besides you could have engineered that death-defying aerial ballet of thievery, rescue, and tragic death?”

  “God!” He drank half the fruit juice glass in one gulp. “I could not hold on to that lightweight woman one more second. Her cat landing on my back, all four feet splayed out, and scratching me to ribbons was the last claw.”

  “Everyone could see that you—Zorro, the masked man, the superhero—saved the Cloaked Conjuror and almost saved Shangri-La. And still snagged the scepter. Maybe saved it too. Frankly, I’m toying with spinning it for the press as a Robin Hood sort of feat. The earlier death proved someone was interested in robbing the exhibition and the booby-trapped platforms tonight show that some kind of plot was still live and lethal.”

  “The masked man stole the scepter to save it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re the clever one, Temple.” His expression, bleak until now, softened into a smile. It quickly vanished. “Watching those white robes flutter like a leaf to vanish into the matching marble floor below were the longest moments of my life. I wished—I really, really wished—that I was a real magician, that I could have waved a hand and kept that from happening.”

  Temple kept silent. A death not prevented was a life lost forever, for no reason. She tried a different tack.

  “Maybe she was always the target of the falling set pieces. Shangri-La did work the shady side. She must have at least been complicit in the kidnapping of me and Louie and the truckload of designer drugs we were spirited away in. Who knows who put her up to that and maybe wanted to punish her for failing?”

  “She still didn’t deserve a fatal fall to a cold stone floor. She was no friend to either of us, but at least we know she wasn’t in on this caper or she’d have saved herself.”

  “She was working with the Cloaked Conjuror. The Synth would have considered her a traitor.”

  Max nodded and sipped again. “Maybe they meant to off all three of us in one blow. I’m still not sure that my ‘test’ wasn’t a way to get rid of me.”

  “What’ll they do now?”

  “What can they do? Welcome me into their ranks as promised. I did steal the scepter, whatever the cost. From their viewpoint, Shangri-La is no loss and rescuing the Cloaked Conjuror is no feather in my cap to them. . . . I’ll say I needed him out of my way to complete the job of stealing the scepter, so I was ‘forced’ to save him.”

  Temple shivered a little at the idea of justifying saving someone. “If it was obvious to me that it was you up there, you know that Molina will be right on that and go after you for this.”

  “She’d be going after me for something else anyway.”

  “No. I negotiated a deal with her during that Teen Idol charade where I was locked up in a mansion with a TV crew and her daughter and twenty-eight rival unnatural blondes. If I watch-dogged her daughter Mariah, she promised she’d lay off you.” She squirmed, knowing that the deal was off because Molina now suspected Max of being her stalker, but she figured that Max had enough on his plate at the moment. He was surely wary and wily enough to elude the Blue Ice Queen.

  Max’s own blue eyes paled in the lamplight as he studied her. “I didn’t hear much about that caper. Sorry I couldn’t be there.”

  “It worked out. But Molina can’t ignore that there are very few people at large in Las Vegas who could stage that surprise guest appearance at a floating magic show. This is the second death at the White Russian exhibition. Major Las Vegas mojo will come down on the police to solve them both. You are the prime suspect.”

  “Good. I’d hate to give up my crown as the town’s perennial Number One Suspect.”

  Max leaned forward, took one of Temple’s hands. “Whatever the Synth is, they’re formidable. Forget you ever heard of them, Temple, as you ought to forget me. I’ve got to get out of sight again.”

  “I won’t say anything about you. You know you can count on me. Ducking out of sight for a while is wise. But . . . for how long?”

  “Maybe . . . forever.”

  “Max! What are you saying—?”

  “A woman is dead, Temple, one I never meant to hurt.”

  “It was obvious to anyone who saw that you were trying to save her!”

  “Or trying to kill her? Both actions resemble each other. Don’t they?”

  “You threw a safety net around the Cloaked Conjuror and saved his life.”

  “Or a snare that only by chance, or mischance, kept him from falling.”

  “You risked your life to catch Shangri-La and would have saved her if her cat hadn’t attacked you.”

  “Or I always intended to drop her, and the cat merely got in the way. Besides, how many people saw way up there as clearly as you, my dear defense attorney? I disabled the cameras. There’s no record. I sealed my fate, or my reputation, at least.”

  Temple was silent.

  “Every eyewitness sees what he or she is bred to expect, or want.”

  “What saved the big cats from going out on those booby-trapped platforms?”

  Max bit his lip instead of shrugging and swigged more whiskey. He was a fast adapter.

  “A sixth sense?” he suggested finally. “It was so black over there and I had a lot to think about, all simultaneously.”

  “It’s a wonder you managed to save CC. He must be almost twice your weight.”

  “And don’t it make my biceps blue? He okay?”

  “Fine. Shaken up about losing his partner, of course.”

  “Yea
h. I know the feeling.”

  “What?” Temple sensed sudden alarm bells in the pit of her stomach.

  Max regarded her with far too limpidly innocent eyes. “Gandolph, I meant. What other partner would I have lost? I suppose my cousin Sean was a sort of partner for the summer.”

  Max reminding her of his losses made Temple want to swear, “Not me. I’m not the next one you’ll lose.”

  But she couldn’t say a word. Not if it meant repudiating Matt. She was already half lost, which made her feel all the more adamant about defending Max. Supporting Max. Paying Max back for her wayward heart.

  “It’s best you stay as far from me as possible,” Max was saying, urging. “Not that I don’t appreciate first-aid. Or your opinions.”

  “Right.” She sipped a little more whiskey, then stood.

  He was telling her to go. Pushing her away for her own sake. Pushing her toward Matt, when she’d already leaned way too far in that direction for her conscience’s sake.

  What should she do? What could she do? Max wouldn’t fight to keep her. Didn’t he see? Or did he, as usual, see all too well? Damn you, Max!

  He’d never tell.

  She had to drive home. She had to pull herself together. She had to picture Max colored more than the usual invisible, but absent. But she didn’t have to stop believing in him, his innocence, even if hers was compromised.

  “I’ll stick to my job at the New Millennium,” she told him. “And I’ll find out who really did this, because that’s my job and because there was another man killed earlier on that same scene, and I think that there’s a criminal operating there who’s closer at hand than the Synth.”

  “You may be right and if anyone can prove it, you can. That’ll keep Molina on her toes.” Max rose to escort her out. “Molina in toe shoes, now there’s an image to stop the heart.”

  “Don’t underestimate her. She’s aching to stomp on someone who’s gotten away with something for far too long, and it’s a dead heat between you and Rafi Nadir who’d make the best fall guy.”