Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  He hoped Temple would stress how important this was, how fast the contact needed to be made, before Molina got her “evidence” back, before Temple heard about this from the police. Before Max would be a seriously wanted man.

  But the afternoon dragged on as he clung to his apartment at the Circle Ritz. The shadow of the lone palm tree in the parking lot elongated like a dark tightrope strung across the asphalt.

  And nothing. Neither phone rang.

  He heard the throaty little engine of Temple’s Miata over the air-conditioning. Rushing to the spare bedroom window that overlooked the lot, he was just in time to spy a woman with strawberry-blond hair running out on high heels to get in the passenger side. The Miata spurted out of the lot, off for the evening, Matt sensed. Girls’ night out. He grabbed his cell phone to call Temple, but . . . Max might call. He might miss it.

  Matt tried to watch the TV news, some silly network programming. More news. The phone never rang.

  The Miata wasn’t back by eleven thirty P.M. when he had to leave for WCOO. Listen, he told himself. One more day won’t make that much of a difference.

  It was just the secret burning a hole in his pocket. He wanted to warn Max so Temple wouldn’t be hurt. He wanted to confront Max, so he could find out if the man had done something to hurt Temple, something beyond forgiving, that would make her forever give up on him.

  His noble and ignoble motives rubbed together like two worn coins in his pocket. Sometimes he felt one under his fingertips, sometimes the other.

  For Temple’s sake, he hoped Max had an answer, an alibi. For his own, and maybe Temple’s in the long run, he half hoped Max didn’t have an answer, an excuse. For once.

  “Ooh, Mr. Moody Blue,” his boss and sister DJ Ambrosia crooned when he walked into the broadcast booth. “You look just like Leo or Brad or Jude getting a pout on when you don’t walk in smilin’.”

  The commercial breaks between her show of schmaltzy oldies and his “Midnight Hour” of schmaltzy talk radio were running. He seldom cut his arrival that close. But he had thought Max might call.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m expecting an urgent call. You want to stick around and answer my cell phone off mike?”

  Ambrosia’s brown velvet face managed an expression that was both surprised and agreeable.

  “I do love to hear you work that mike magic on those call-ins. Sure, I’ll hang with you, bro.”

  Matt sighed relief. “Sorry I was almost late. Thanks, Leticia.”

  That was her real name, not her radio handle. Ambrosia was the scatwoman of the spoken word, soothing the airwaves with her voice and her songs for every emotion. Now she leaned into the foam-fat microphone to play one last number, her voice a low mesmerizing purr.

  “I’m gonna leave you all to one last request, for a special colleague of mine. Don’t let it put you to sleep, babies, ‘cuz Mr. Midnight himself is right here, blinking his baby browns and getting ready to take over the seat I’ve kept warm for him all this time.

  “Here it comes, ‘Sentimental Journey.’ Let me tell you, you will never go wrong taking a sentimental journey with Mr. Midnight.”

  She slid out of the upholstered rolling chair that her three-hundred pounds of leopard-spot caftan had literally made into a hot seat and patted the fabric with a coquettish look.

  Matt couldn’t help laughing.

  “What do I do if your cell phone rings and a man answers?” she asked.

  “Keep him on the line until the next break. I have to talk to him as soon as possible.”

  She cradled his cell phone against her Mother Earth bosom. “Trust me,” she whispered before leaving the booth. “This will not be ‘The Man That Got Away.’ ”

  Matt sat on the prewarmed chair, rolled it closer to the table, donned the headset, wiped his wet palms on his khaki-clad thighs.

  He had to let his anxiety go. It would show in his voice, the tightness in his throat, and he was here to ease anxiety, not spread it. Mr. Midnight, the radio persona, settled on him like a gossamer cloak. His body slipped into a posture both relaxed and alert. He kept a notepad and pen at his right to jot down the callers’ names, issues, key words. That cool fat pen barrel between his fingers felt like an alabaster cigar. He doodled some loops. Temple’s first name. That was the usual. He kept and destroyed the sheets each night. If they married and she took his last name, she’d sound like a place of worship. Temple Devine. That didn’t strike him as out of place.

  If they married . . . if Max had waltzed himself totally out of the picture with this last escapade—who was he kidding? Himself, of course. He wanted to talk to Max so badly because he needed to find out the man had done Temple wrong. Temple Kinsella just did not have the same ring as Temple Devine. Not that she’d take anybody’s name but her own. Still. He wrote the new combo. He was literally loopy over her, had been for months, but hadn’t felt free to feel it.

  And so Matt did what he did with the disembodied voices who called five nights a week to ask him for instant on-air advice and comfort. He imagined how sad Temple would feel if she thought every loyal bone in her body had been devoted for two years to a creepy secret stalker.

  And, loopy or not, Matt did not, deep in his way-too-honest soul, want Max Kinsella to be a guilty man.

  Riding Shotgun

  “Hide-ho, honey!” Ambrosia greeted Matt as he stepped out of the glass booth at two A.M. She was lofting his cell phone like Perry Mason revealing Exhibit A. “This mockin’ bird don’t sing. Not one little ringy-dingy outa this cell phone. Daddy is not gonna get either one of us a diamond ring. No, sir. Is that bad?”

  Matt reclaimed his cell phone with a sigh. “I’m probably taking this way too seriously.”

  “You do have that tendency, sweet cheeks. Hey. Ambrosia’ll buy you a drink to wind down with.”

  “Thanks. Another time. I’m sorry I kept you up so late. I need to, ah, gather my notes. I’ll leave in a bit.”

  “You vant to be alone,” she accused in a dead-on Garbo voice. “Sure thing. Curtis here is putting ole WCOO on digital autopilot until morning. Don’t linger too long brooding, my man. It’s bad for the face. Trust me.”

  Matt stood dreaming on the other side of the door to the waiting room long after Ambrosia had sailed out like Cleopatra’s Barge heading over to anchorage as a famous restaurant at Caesar’s Palace.

  Talking to the people out there in Radioland had given him a sense of perspective. They were all trying so hard. Trying to stay afloat in this down-sizing economy. Trying to keep love in their lives. Trying to make sure their children didn’t feel the losses they had, although that was always impossible. No matter how much a parent tried to “make up,” there was always some new psycho-social stress to make kids’ lives hard. Tragically, it was often caused by the parents’ own anxiety.

  Matt breathed deeply, and allowed as he didn’t control a single thing in his life and the larger world beyond it. Just let go of trying to insist that God—or the Fates if you were a secular person—would ensure that things would go your way.

  By the time he stepped out into the tepid Las Vegas night air, he was at semi-peace with himself.

  His fancy new silver car shone like a slick magazine ad under one of the parking lot lamps. All alone. It had the same sleek mechanical beauty of the Hesketh Vampire motorcycle that had originally belonged to Max Kinsella, but Matt would have pushed his new car off a cliff if he thought it would make Temple feel one sixteenth of a scintilla better about the ugliness Carmen Molina was about to drop on her.

  Turned out he didn’t have to sacrifice his car.

  A low, throaty growl drew his attention to something glinting outside the wash of parking lot lights. A motorcycle. Not the Vampire. Flashier but oh-so-familiar.

  Matt edged over warily, like a kid to a high-end bike on Christmas morning. He knew that bike, that figure in glitzy leathers, that shining black helmet as round as a pumpkin on Halloween.

  The rider revved the engine as his leath
er-gloved hands wrung the bike’s handlebars. Matt approached. The rider tossed him a helmet that had been tethered to the back.

  “Rock or roll?” he asked with something of a Southern accent.

  Matt shook his head, not sure if he needed to clear it or to derail a rueful laugh. This was the motorcycle that had shadowed him during those dark nights when someone sinister had seemed to be on his tail light, his motorcycle’s tail lights. When he’d ridden the Vampire he’d gotten from Electra after Max Kinsella had let her have it.

  He’d had a shadow rider then. Two. One lethal, another riding ghost shotgun for him. That guy had looked and acted a lot like Elvis, who’d apparently called in to the Mr. Midnight show for a while there. An Elvis so real you thought you’d had breakfast with him one time that you couldn’t quite remember: a pound of bacon and a dozen eggs. Elvis had been Atkins before Atkins was Atkins.

  One mystery was solved. A persistent mystery of streets and night and pursuit. The voice over the air waves was a different matter entirely. Much harder to impersonate.

  Matt donned the safety helmet and gazed at the night and its lights through the veil of its smoke-Plexiglas visor, darkly. He mounted the elongated seat behind the rider, curled his hands around the chrome rods beneath the seat, pushed his heels onto the chrome rods over the rear wheels.

  The cycle charged into the night, leaning, roaring, shooting like a star.

  Being a passenger on a meteor’s tail took guts. Matt realized for the first time that he really, really wanted to be in control, not eddied along by his history, his inheritance, his losses.

  The biker took the bike to a high point overlooking Vegas before his boot-heels dropped to asphalt and he let the machine tilt to a stop. All that massive weight, held up by a bike stand.

  Matt hopped off, doffed the damn helmet. Waited.

  The motorcycle man dismounted like a cowboy who loved his mount, fluid and easy. He took off the helmet.

  “You were my guardian biker,” Matt said. Accused. Thanked. “My ersatz Elvis.”

  “Maybe.” Max Kinsella hung his helmet from the handlebar. The full moon reflected in its dark side, kind embracing kind. “Sometimes. Maybe sometimes it was Elvis. Dude had an aura, you know. You don’t kill that.”

  “I know. Still, masquerading as a motorcycle cop that time—”

  “Me? Impersonate a cop? Don’t have that costume on tap. ‘Fraid not.”

  Matt felt a chill trickle down his spine. That had been the guy who’d advised him to let the bike fly. If not Max, then who? Elvis for real?

  “What did you need to talk to me about?” Max asked.

  “You took me seriously.”

  “I take Temple seriously.”

  The words hung in the air, in their multiplicity of meanings. “Me too,” Matt said. “What about Molina?”

  “What about . . . her?”

  “She’s bound to get you for something.”

  Max shrugged. “Let her try.”

  “Fine for you, Mr. Invisible. Tough on Temple.”

  “Temple’s tough. So, what’s Molina up to now?”

  “It’s who’s up to what against Molina.”

  Max walked to the overlook, trying to untangle that sentence. Las Vegas lay like a tea tray of white-silver glitz on the vast dark desert floor.

  They were halfway up the Spring Mountains. Matt would have a long, exhausting walk back to civilization if he had to make it on foot power. How competitive was Max Kinsella, anyway? Very.

  “You don’t like me. You really, really don’t like me.” Max surveyed the distant glitter of the city where he had once been an A-list star, a magician to reckon with. “You particularly don’t like me in Temple’s life. Or bed. Still. You want to warn me. Why?”

  “Because I don’t like you in Temple’s life.” Matt made himself ignore the bed part. He felt guilty about being the other man. Given recent events, he was now supersensitive about beds and what did, or did not happen in them.

  “That’s why when you call, I listen. But I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “You don’t know how true that is.”

  “Tell me.”

  Max Kinsella never waffled around. Never shillied nor shallied. Matt admired that. He’d been reared to question everything, most of all himself and his motives. His motives here were pure, even selfless. Mostly.

  “Carmen Molina’s had a stalker for several weeks.”

  “Stalkers must be hard up.”

  “Not funny. I had one, one handed down from you.”

  “Stalkers must be hard up,” Max repeated with sardonic humor. He turned back to face Matt. “Molina’s a cop. Stalkers come with the territory. With her, I wouldn’t doubt that it would come more often.”

  “She’s got a right to be angry. The stalker has been breaking into her house. She has a young child there.”

  Max chuckled. “From what I heard went down at the Teen Idol reality TV show, that kid is hitting puberty big time. Maybe it’ll keep Mama off my tail.”

  “I don’t think so. This latest visit, the stalker left a trail of rose petals to Mariah’s bedroom as well as hers.”

  “That’s really sick! No wonder she’s unhinged.”

  “And she’s convinced you’re the stalker.”

  For once, Matt had rendered Max Kinsella speechless.

  “Me?” Kinsella said. Then frowned. “That’s crazy.”

  “That’s what I thought. At first.”

  “I don’t care what you think. What has this got to do with Temple? That’s all I care about.”

  Matt kept himself from saying “Me too.”

  Max was still on a tear. “Let Molina rant and roar and chase a phantom. She can’t touch me.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe this time . . . yeah, maybe. But she’s already touched Temple.”

  Kinsella’s motorcycle boots crunched desert shale as he stalked back over to Matt, looming at six four with two added inches of boot heel.

  Matt felt enough bottled fury, and a nasty edge of guilt, to take him on and take him out if he said anything dismissive about the threat to Temple.

  But Kinsella never satisfied in that way. He cared about her as much, maybe, as Matt did. That knowledge was as bitter as an arsenic pill in his throat, but it was also why Kinsella was the first, and last, person he’d gone to about this.

  “What did Molina do?” Max asked.

  “Barged into Temple’s place at the Circle Ritz”—Max didn’t correct him on that. A magician was, above all, a realist, but it had once been theirs, that place, his and Temple’s. “Took something likely to have your fingerprints still on it.”

  “Took? Without a warrant? Why didn’t Temple—? Never mind. It was a lightning raid, wasn’t it? What did Molina take?”

  “A CD.”

  “Damn. Temple never did share my tastes, or like to run the VCR or even the multiple-CD player. So. Molina is now the only cop in the Western World with possible fingerprints on me. So what? She has nothing to compare them too.”

  “That makes anything she finds on that CD all the more likely to be yours. She already printed Temple way back when.”

  “I’m going to swear, Devine. You can put your fingers in your ears if you want.”

  “Go right ahead. On that I’m with you.”

  Max sighed, not a weak sigh, more like the hissing sound a weight lifter makes during ultra-heavy reps. “That damn . . . woman . . . will not leave well enough alone. If she had a decent sex life, she wouldn’t have to mess with mine so much.”

  Matt shut his eyes. He didn’t want to hear about this. Think about this. “That’s what she said you told her in the parking lot of Secret’s. That’s why she thinks you’re obsessed with her.”

  “Me. Her? Obsessed? Get a life! That’s what I told her in that damn parking lot, while she was trying with all her might to keep me from going where Temple was in fatal danger. How has she explained her stupidity in fixating on hogtying me when a major capture of the Stripper
Killer was going down with Temple playing the next victim?”

  Max had grabbed his sleeves, was shaking Matt in agitation.

  “Hey!” Matt slapped Kinsella on the leather lapels, forcing him to back off. “That wasn’t me standing in your way then, pal. Molina did give you a chance to fight her for your freedom from what she said.”

  “Couldn’t shoot me cold. I wasn’t carrying. Yeah, she had the guts to go hand-to-hand with me, risky considering how frantic I was about Temple. Guts were never her problem. She’s not a lightweight. She’s been trained. I finally had to play possum; live to fight another day, and get her in a situation where I could win without wasting time: handcuffed in her car. You know about magicians and handcuffs. Anyway, I let her grind my face into the asphalt, cuff me, and lead me away like Mary’s little lamb. What more does the woman want?”

  “That’s all it was? Her not daring to shoot you dead? You two mixing it up? You letting her ‘win’ so you could escape faster to race to Temple’s defense? Her hung up on catching you and losing you?”

  “That was it. She’d got me cuffed and in her Crown Vic. I was already working on the handcuff’s release mechanism when the call came over the radio that the cops had nailed the Stripper Killer while he was attacking a certain Miss Barr masquerading as a club costume seller. The minute I heard Temple was safe, Molina was wearing her own cuffs attached to the steering wheel and I was outa there.”

  “Interesting,” Matt said.

  “This stuff we’re talking about is way more important than ‘interesting’.”

  “I’m just replaying it. You’re Molina’s prisoner, then she’s a police professional handcuffed to her own steering wheel, and not only that, wrong about you being the Stripper Killer.”

  “It might freak her out,” Max said, a smile in his voice.

  “It might freak her so far out that she’d violate Temple’s space and her trust to take you to the cleaners.”

  “You know what I think?” Max’s voice had lowered. It sounded dangerous in the dark. “You and Molina are a pair. You’ve got that blind Catholic standard that makes everyone else substandard.”