Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Just doing my job. Public relations is a very demanding profession. If you do it right.”

  “So, how’s Matt?”

  “Great. He’s becoming a major media . . . icon. Gosh. Speaking all over the country. His syndicated radio show. You’re an ex-priest too, aren’t you?”

  She glanced at the plain gold band on his left ring finger. “Married?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you, like, ever talk to your wife?”

  He cracked a smile, reluctantly. “Yup.”

  “What do you say?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Well, it kinda is. Matt’s asked me to marry him.”

  “That happens. What’s the problem?”

  Temple had been through a very stressful few hours. She searched for something decently vague to say, then couldn’t help what came out: “I don’t want to have thirteen kids, like more than Mama Fontana,” she blurted, “considering how old I am now and how fertile I could be and no birth control and, oh shit.”

  Frank Bucek shut his eyes, gathering himself. “Only the Pope would have thirteen kids now, and he’s exempt. I’ll talk to Matt, okay?”

  “That’s just it. I think he’s afraid to have any, and I don’t know what I want. Yet.”

  “I’ll talk to Matt.”

  “What about me?”

  He smiled. “You need talking to, but by a superior officer. Thank God it’s not me. Leave the Russian mob to the pros and go home and have a good belt.”

  Mad Matt

  “Ma! He’s going to go to the Father-Daughter Dance next fall with me! It’ll be so sweet to see the other girls’ faces. I mean, Mr. Midnight. In person. With me!”

  Carmen came up short on her daughter’s teen exuberance.

  Mariah had grabbed her in the kitchen as she entered from the attached garage and hugged her. Hugged her? Mean Bad No-no Mama?

  No mother of a teenager expects anything but angst during that dreaded three-year transition period.

  “Whoa! Chica! Who are we talking about?”

  She’d had a big, bad day. FBI. Russian mob. Temple Barr.

  That’s when Carmen looked past the kitchen into the den. Matt Devine was standing there, hands in chino pants pockets, looking slightly embarrassed. As well he should be!

  And looking like . . . definite girl bait. Blond, diffident, and coolly hot: a total hottie according to teen parlance. Molina had seen the teen mags.

  “I don’t know much about it,” Matt was saying.

  Obviously, Matt had come to call for some reason and Mariah had seen, jumped, snagged, and overwhelmed. Girls today were so much more aggressive with boys than in her day.

  So Mama was forced to give out the details. “Junior High formal dance. First one. Next fall. Mariah’s way ahead of the gun—”

  “Really?” Matt eyed her chubby-turning-tall daughter. “First dance? I’m flattered. But I’m not a great dancer, Mariah.”

  “You will be. We can practice ahead of time, right?”

  “Ah, right.”

  Carmen smiled to watch Matt watch Mariah bounce down the hall to her bedroom, her inner sanctum of clutter and boy-band posters. He hadn’t counted on rehearsals.

  He eyed the mother in the case. “This meet with your approval?”

  Molina sighed. “She doesn’t have a father. A presentable father,” she added at Matt’s straight-shooter look. “You’re a local celebrity. It’d make her day. Night.”

  “Done deal.” He came closer.

  Matt was attractive in the extreme. He was single. He was an ex-priest, which a Latina like her could certainly understand. She would trust him with her daughter, but not with his own personal instincts.

  “Why are you here? I know Mariah snagged you for escort duty when you showed up, but that’s just you being nice. Why are you really here?”

  “Because I don’t feel like being nice.”

  “Ah. Dos Equis?”

  “Yeah. With lime.”

  “You feeling south of the border tonight?”

  He watched her dive into the fridge. She knew the interior light uplit her face like a lineup photo. Not flattering.

  He took the amber beer bottle she offered. “I’m feeling disappointed tonight,” he said. It was a Catholic school line.

  “With me? Sorry, Father. I don’t go to confession anymore.”

  “You should. What you did to Temple was inexcusable.”

  “What? I did my job. I interrogated her. Finish.”

  “You bullied her.”

  “You can bully a redhead?”

  “She’s a blonde for the moment, and you could bully a shark. Listen, Carmen. I understand the limits and frustration of your job. I hear some of those same sad, self-hating voices over the radio waves five nights a week. That’s who we deal with day after day, night after night. People who are losing, or have lost, hope. We’re alike. The court of last resort for the self-esteem deprived. Excuses. Lies. And so human. So weak. That’s not Temple. Why’d you have to treat her like that?”

  “Because she knows what I need to know to close a case.”

  “A case? Or your own pre-conception of a case?”

  “Kinsella is your rival. He’s screwed the woman you love. Why defend him?”

  Matt froze for a moment at the ugly truth coming from her mouth. She felt a little guilty. He remained a relative innocent in the world of he-she relationships. Love was still sacred to him. Screwing was still a word that twisted both ways: street vulgarity or mystical spiral of DNA, life, and love.

  She felt way guilty. Damn priests! Guilt. That was their Job One, even when they’d left it far behind.

  “He loved her,” Matt said. “Still does. He’s not my enemy but he is yours. Why?”

  “He cuts corners, he hides out. He manipulates this town and this police force for his own reasons. He’s gotta fall. He’s gotta go down.”

  “For his sins? Or yours?”

  “You’re defending him?”

  Matt nodded. Smiled. “Yeah. If he’s innocent. What are you after him for now? Temple said you two had declared a truce.”

  “She’s told you about the dangling dead at the New Millennium?”

  “She’s mentioned it in passing.” He smiled privately as he sipped the beer.

  Molina’s nerves twanged. Something had changed there. What?

  “Let’s sit,” she said, setting an example. It forced him into the role of a guest in her house, on her sofa.

  “I admit,” she said, “that dead bodies raining from the ceiling look like Kinsella’s MO.”

  “Come on. Just one, isn’t it? There was one at the Goliath the night his performance run ended more than two years ago. The only thing to tie him to that was that he vanished for a year. Why’d he come back if he was a murderer?”

  “Sheer gall. That man stops at nothing.”

  “Probably true, but that’s not a jailable offense. Neither does Lance Armstrong.”

  “Except Kinsella didn’t beat cancer. He is cancer.”

  Matt pulled back, surprised. “I can’t believe how much you really hate him. Personally, I mean. Why? I’m the one you think is entitled to despise him.”

  “See this house you’re sitting in? See my teenage daughter run outside, fancy free? That man has been in here. When we haven’t been. Prowling. Playing games with my wardrobe. My mind. The last time was really sick, but he got too cocky. His taunting little note mentioned something only he and I could know about.”

  “Carmen?” Matt had tabled the beer. The slice of lime lay on its pottery dish like a sick green grin. “You’re being stalked? For how long?”

  “A few weeks.”

  “And you’re sure it’s . . . Max?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Sickness. It’s sexually . . . taunting. Items left in my closet, on my bed. Now a trail of rose petals to my bedroom, and Mariah’s! Radios playing. The last ‘gift’ was a slea
zy teddy.”

  While Matt looked blank, Carmen found herself laughing, giddy at leavening her tension with some unexpected comic relief.

  “God, I sure know it’s not you! Not a stuffed bear, like you’re thinking! A teddy is a sex-shop staple, a see-through . . . uh, bathing suit. Red, black, lace.”

  Matt frowned. “Sounds like a sort of valentine.”

  “A sick, threatening valentine only a stalker would slink into a woman’s house to leave.”

  “Thanks for the tip.” Matt was trying to lighten the mood, but his warm brown eyes were deeply concerned now.

  She relaxed a little.

  “So,” Matt said, “you’ve been dealing with this on your own for how long now?”

  “A few weeks.”

  “Can’t you of all people sic the law on this?”

  “No.”

  “You won’t lose face by admitting to your peers that you have a stalker. I’ve seen those two, Alch and Su. They’d go to the wall for you.”

  She blinked back unlieutenant-like tears. So good to hear an outsider confirm her unit’s loyalty. But police work was not like anything else. Loyalty would never overlook irregularity. And Carmen had done some damn irregular things lately while trying to keep her daughter safe and the creep at bay.

  “I couldn’t go to the wall for me in their places, Matt,” she admitted.

  He blew out a breath that indicated he understood the extent of what she was confessing. He was a hell of a counselor, quick to get it, slow to judge. Why hadn’t she confided in him before? Too close to the woman in the case, Temple Barr. Just how close these days, anyway? He radiated a certain secret serenity she hadn’t noticed before. She was pretty quick to understand too.

  Had the scales in the eternal triangle tipped Matt’s way in, say, the last few weeks? Had that made Kinsella go over the edge, and for Molina instead?

  “You’ve always had your suspicions about Max,” Matt said.

  Suddenly, he was referring to a man he’d always called by his last name by his first. What was this?

  “Surely,” Matt went on, “your staff knows that, could make discreet inquiries.”

  “There is nothing discreet to be done when it comes to Max Kinsella,” she said, her voice as tough as Kevlar. She sighed, grabbed her beer and took a long, long swallow to rinse the recent words out of her mouth.

  He raised sun-bleached eyebrows but said nothing.

  “I can’t call on anyone in the department because the note that nails him as my stalker refers to an . . . incident I’m not crazy to open up to anyone official. In fact, I must be crazy trusting you. You swear on the seal of the confessional—?”

  “I’m not really a priest anymore, Carmen.”

  “But you’d hate yourself if you betrayed a confidence. Maybe there is still a little corner of Hell for someone like that, someone who’d betray a serious confidence?”

  “A large corner. Unless someone else’s life was at stake, or something.”

  “I suppose you think I’m just a neurotic woman, after all—”

  “No. I think you’re a rock, too much so. But I’ve noticed that something has been seriously bothering you. I thought it might be, you know, your ex.”

  “Him! Rafi. Some secret. Even you’ve met him. Sure, he’d be a likely suspect, but now his reappearance on the scene looks like child’s play compared to someone stalking me and Mariah. And that someone can only be Max Kinsella.”

  “Why?”

  “Because at the time that your adored Temple, crazy mixed-up kid that she is, went undercover to trail the Stripper Killer, I had Max Kinsella in my sights at Secrets’s strip-joint parking lot. He was all hot to trot, saying that Temple’s life was in danger at Baby Doll’s. He wasn’t going to assume the position and cuffs, no way. Much as I wanted him to give me a reason to shoot, he wasn’t doing that either. He was unarmed.”

  “A stand-off.”

  “Right. What to do? I had to subdue him or lose Mr. Slippery again. And all I had was ‘suspicion’ of being the Stripper killer. But it was good enough to take him in for, with him right there on the site of a previous crime, and having been seen there earlier.”

  “So you radioed for backup.”

  “He was going to walk, daring me to shoot him.”

  “So—?” Matt was really curious now, sitting forward on the sofa, a terrific audience for her defining, and dumbest, moment.

  “So, I slapped my weapon down on the nearest pickup hood and we went hand-to-hand.”

  “Carmen!”

  “I’ve been trained. The sexist watch commanders in L.A. set little old rookie me taking down three-hundred-pound brothers and drug dealers with Uzis in Watts. Loved that Latino-black rivalry. Adding a woman to the mix was even more amusing.”

  “Yeah, but . . . Max is a world-class strong man.”

  “He’s not that tough. I did cuff him.”

  “Maybe he let you. So that’s the problem? You cuffed him and what? Um, I know. He uncuffed himself.”

  “And me to the steering wheel of my car! Never arrest a magician. By then, the radio was announcing the takedown of the Stripper Killer, thanks to your pal Temple’s meddling. I would have had to let him go anyway.”

  “But he would have escaped before then. What’s so irregular about that scenario? You found and captured a reasonable suspect then freed him when fast-moving events proved him innocent.”

  “Don’t ever apply the word ‘innocent’ to that man. Yes, he got away. Yes, no one knows about our parking-lot round but he and I. And that’s how I know—I know now!—that he’s my stalker.”

  “How?”

  She took a deep breath. “When we were fighting, he thought he had the upper hand at one point. He came on to me. Seriously. Your lovely little Miss Temple was off the radar. He had turned my pursuit of justice into some sick psycho-sexual game between us. It was real, believe me. If she had seen it, she would have dumped him like that. I’m protecting her, in a way, from having her illusions sent to Sing-Sing for life.”

  “What did he do, say?”

  “I’m too embarrassed to tell an ex-priest.”

  “Try me.”

  “Just that our cat-and-mouse game was substitute for what I really wanted and needed, a good screwing.”

  Matt winced. As much as he was adjusting to secular society and its rough edges, crudity still impacted his priestly sensibility. Suddenly, he looked at Carmen from under those baby-blond eyebrows, his penetrating brown eyes so unusual in one of his Polish coloring.

  “Intense feelings can flip either way, love or hate.”

  “Don’t say love.”

  “Passion or hate, okay?”

  “You ever feel either one?”

  “More than you can imagine, Carmen.”

  For a few fixed instants, she believed him. “Right. You hated your stepfather. I assume that’s resolved now that he’s dead.”

  Matt shrugged. “Nothing’s ever resolved. It just evolves, or we do. I see your confidentiality problem. I see why you think what you do. What I don’t see is Max Kinsella as a stalker. He’s like Lucifer. He’s got too much pride. So do you.”

  “I am the law!”

  “No. You’re a representative of the law. You may not realize this, and I can’t say more because I do honor confidences, but Max is a representative of another kind of law.”

  “Another kind?”

  “He’s a seeker of justice.”

  “And I’m not?”

  “He’s an émigré from an abused minority.”

  “And I’m not?”

  “So. You have a lot in common.”

  “No way! Matt, you’ve gone over the edge here. Stay out of it.”

  “May I still take Mariah to her father-daughter dance?”

  “Yes.” Said begrudgingly. For her daughter’s sake.

  “Sure. I will. But, you know, as long as we’re being bottom-line frank here, I think her real father should do the honors.”

&
nbsp; He had gotten up and was halfway to the door.

  “Are you crazy? Do you know what her father is?”

  “I know who he is, but, no, I don’t know what he is. Do you?”

  And the bastard walked out of her house unscathed, as Max Kinsella himself had done not a day before having left his sleazy rose-scented threat behind.

  Molina fumed, her teeth taking her frustration out on her lower lip, raking it with fury. It was a bad day when a former priest and a former magician could make her own home taste like bitter ashes in her mouth.

  Mum

  Matt speed-dialed Temple on his cell phone before his Crossfire had left Molina’s curb.

  She answered after five rings. Sounds of frantic activity buzzed behind her cheerful hello.

  “I need to see Max as soon as possible.”

  “Matt? Hello to you too. He’s not very accessible these days.”

  “Just get to him and tell him to get to me, fast.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Him and me talking.”

  “About what?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You can’t say? Now you’re sounding like Max.”

  “Maybe. Just get me through to him somehow.”

  “And you won’t say why?”

  “I can’t say why.”

  “It’s a secret?”

  “Not mine.”

  “Max’s?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Who else’s then?”

  “I can’t say.”

  After a silence, she said “Oh, that secrecy of the confessional thing?”

  “Call it that. Call it ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ I really, really need to see Max, Temple. You’ve trusted him through a whole heaping helping of thick and thin. I’m asking you to trust me just this once.”

  “You know I’ll die of curiosity.”

  “That might be better than the consequences if I don’t speak to Max, fast.”

  More silence.

  Then, “I’ll call him. Leave a message and your phone numbers. Your local answering service signing off.” The natural bounce had left her voice, and she hadn’t said good-bye.

  Matt’s hold on the cell phone turned homicidal, then he realized he’d better not disable one of two thin threads of communication that linked him and Max Kinsella.