“You were reared Catholic.”
“I got over it.”
“She said—”
“He said. It’s a draw.”
“Molina said you came on to her. She said you said all she needed was a—I guess you might be kinda conceited—’good screwing.’ ”
Kinsella laughed. “That’s ridiculous. Not that it might not be true. I don’t know what I said, did. I was fighting for my freedom to go and protect Temple. You might know what that feels like, someone you love in mortal danger. You might know what that felt like for me.”
It was Matt’s turn to keep silent. He did, way more now that he and Temple had become . . . closer.
“Carmen distrusts you,” Matt said at last. “I guess she hates you. She might take whatever you said or did to get free of her as the God’s truth. That you would have screwed her to make her let you go. That you thought she would have liked it.”
It was Max’s turn to be silent. “Maybe that’s true,” he said. “Maybe I found her weakness and it was me. Hate is fear, and sexual fear hides unadmitted desire. If that’s what it would have taken. As it happened, I preferred to let her grind my face into the ground and feel she’d beaten me physically. Pride isn’t worth a penny if someone you love is at risk.”
“Nope,” Matt agreed. That’s why he was here, warning Temple’s lover, instead of letting Max go down so he could have Temple all to himself.
“So,” Max said. “Now your face is asphalt dust. Maybe you’ll have to screw Molina to get her off Temple’s case. No sacrifice too harsh.”
“You can laugh. I guess it’s a kind of defiance. But if Temple thinks you’d ever thought of betraying her with Molina—”
“Oh, shit,” Max said. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit.”
“Did you?” Matt asked, because he had to and because he actually enjoyed asking it way too much.
Matt couldn’t believe how much he relished the idea of Max being unfaithful, how down and dirty he could get, for the right wrong reason.
But he had to know.
“Because, if so, I’m going to have to warn Temple, to tell her something. I’d like to include your self-defense.”
“Sanity? Look. Why would I? I don’t need this right now. I have no idea where this nonsense came from. And I don’t need some do-gooder John Alden playing go-between for me and Temple. Even you should know by now you want her.”
Matt felt a flush. Why? It was the truth.
Max threw up his long, bony hands, always clever, always strong. “That was a low blow. Sorry. I suppose you are a professional mediator of sorts. Mediate this.”
“I won’t use this against you with Temple. Or for me.”
“Use it. I won’t surrender Temple to anyone without the balls to take her.”
Matt felt the old blinding rage he thought he’d buried with his stepfather surging into all his muscles. He stepped forward, balanced for martial arts moves. Max was more expert, he knew, but Matt had the fire in the belly in this case. It would be a long, bloody draw probably.
Max stepped back. “Pax, priest. Us tearing at each other will only hurt Temple more. That’s one thing we’re agreed on; the less damage to Temple the better.”
“Is there anything you can say to defend yourself, to counter Molina’s charges?”
Max had nothing printable to answer.
Free to Good Home
I have pretty much figured out this whole murder-theft ring and given my Miss Temple the credit, or the main ideas, at least.
Now would be a good time for resting on my laurels, and this is exactly what I am doing in my crib at the Circle Ritz when I hear the scrabble of pointed nails, i.e., claws, on the French door–opening mechanism.
I am too worn out from my recent intense cerebral labors, not to mention the late hours I have been keeping, to do more than cock one peeper open. Sure enough, a furry snake slides under the crack in the frame. In a moment, the door pops open as sweetly as if my own supple touch had cracked it.
Much to my surprise . . . not! . . . Miss Midnight Louise ankles in.
“Sawing timbers in the Pacific Northwest, I see,” she says.
“Who, me? Not on your life. I am for saving the forests. What I am doing is resting up my muscles after serving as a counterweight to three females of my acquaintance the other night.”
“Big deal, Daddy-o. All you had to do was throw your weight around, which should come naturally. But that is why I am here.”
“Oh, really. It is not because you wish to check up on the health of the senior member of the team?”
“Oh. We are a ‘team’ now?”
“Well, I mean that we are Midnight Inc. Investigations, which is a firm, and since there are only two members of said firm, I suppose in a loose sense we are a . . . team. But nothing personal.”
She sits and tucks her long, luxuriant black train around her dainty forelegs. Show-off!
“Whatever,” she says in the irritating manner of the younger set. “We still have a problem in the flies at the New Millennium.”
I frown. “The show has been closed down for now, and even the police are through dusting the area with a mouse-hair brush and going over it with a flea comb.”
“That is part of the problem.”
“Tell me.”
“I think you should see for yourself”
“Jeez, Louise! That is a long pad across some pretty hot turf, not to mention the climb at the end. I need to preserve my strength.”
“On Miss Temple Barr’s cushy sofa, of course.”
“So. You want one, find your own sugar daddy.”
“I do not need a keeper, but I admit I am an exception.”
“You admit something. Hmmph. All right. I guess I can go and survey the scene of my latest exercise in crime deduction. Miss Temple has seen that the authorities know all about who was in on what and why and how.”
“Exercise is the key word in all that hot air. You need some. Up and at ‘em, Pop, before I sic Ma Barker’s gang on you.”
This opens my other eye and gets me up on my feet and humming “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“The gang is here?”
“Right. And your next trick will be letting the residents of this Building That Time Forgot realize they better put some grub and water out for them.”
“I must see my troops.”
“Forget it. No time to say hello, good-bye, you are needed first and foremost at the New Millennium.”
I suppose it was Miss Louise employing the word “needed.” I respond to necessity. I suppose I caved.
She manages to spur me away from the Circle Ritz without looking around to spot and welcome the feral gang. I mean that “spur” literally. Her foreclaws are as sharp as Ginsu knives on a three A.M. infomercial.
Of course, Las Vegas is the second City That Never Sleeps. We dodge traffic and tourists, but in due time trot our way back to the New Millennium. I am about to show her my secret entryway six floors up on the neon solar system, but she taps me on the shoulder—ouch!—and leads me to the service entrance.
Here we are greeted like old friends, or she is.
“Ah,” says a slim dude of Asian appearance dressed all in white like a bride, or more likely, a cook. “The little lady with the Canton palate. And a gentleman friend. Some wonton soup this evening? Oh, you wish to study the menu?”
He admits us both into the kitchen area as if we were gourmands or something. I nearly swoon. I smell duck. Fish. Eel. Eeew. No eel. I do not eat snakes and lizards and other desert delicacies.
Miss Louise mushes me through the fragrant preparation area ringing with the cymbals of copper lids.
Before I know it, we are dodging the usual footwear bazaar in the main casino and edging around the darkened exhibition area to the access ladders and ramps at the back.
“Up again!” I protest, eyeing the climb. “I thought I had made all this moot.”
“Scoot!” she says, with a prickly encouraging pat.<
br />
“The place is deserted,” I protest, as I climb the long, dark, and winding road built into the access area for the magic show installation far above.
“ ‘Up’ is your motto,” she replies, prodding from the rear.
I must admit it is more than mere weariness that makes me loath to repeat this journey. A man and woman died on these artificial heights. On these man-made mountains, my Miss Temple lost her Mr. Max to obligations she had no power to overcome.
And I nearly strained everything I had to rescue a feline assassin who probably deserved to kiss concrete as much as her human mistress did. There! I do think that there are villains, and villainesses in the world, and that they should meet their just desserts.
On the other hand, my just desserts are lingering in the kitchens we have just forsaken.
“Onward!” Louise matches gesture to vocal command.
Ouch!
We reach the top, and I am immediately struck by the emptiness of the area. The fallen structures still dangle there unanchored. I almost smell the recent death reeking in my sensitive nostrils. I picture the powerful persona that had commanded these black-painted perches on the edge of nowhere: CC, the Cloaked Conjuror, who had lost a performing partner.
The exhibition would continue but the sky-high magic show was suspended, like Siegfried and Roy, maybe forever.
Shangri-La, mystery woman, no friend of my Miss Temple and her Mr. Max, yet a sublime performer and a cat person. Hyacinth, her familiar, the performing partner who had inadvertently sealed her fate and caused her death. Loyalty carried to a lethal degree. How did she deal with dealing her mistress death when she meant only to preserve? I shuddered to think of being in her skin.
Of being in her skin. Right. Where was it? Now. Exactly. I gaze at Midnight Louise. I must admit the kit has climbed every mountain with me.
“Where is she?” she asks now, echoing my thought.
“Hyacinth?”
I do not know. We saved her from dangling death. We risked our own skins—me, Louise, and Hyacinth’s shelter-rescued body double, the delicate and shy Miss Squeaker, aka S. Q.
“Hyacinth is not to be found?” I both ask and declare. She was a magician’s familiar, an apprentice. She would not simply walk away. But she might . . . vanish!
Midnight Louise does not mince words. (When has she ever?) “She has not been seen since S. Q. and I threw ourselves into her rescue.”
“And moi,” I point out. “I was the counterweight.”
“True. We could not have made it without you.”
Yes!
“But I am not concerned about Miss Hyacinth,” Louise says.
Why not? That is truly disturbing. Where can a pampered show cat like her go?
“Squeaker is missing also.”
Oh. My blood runs cold until it chills out my super-overheated tootsies.
I recall the shy shelter cat known first as “Fontana,” and later as “Squeaker.”
No one recalled her when clearing out the paraphernalia of the abandoned magic show. CC had his Big Cats to remove. Who spoke for the late Shangri-La? Who for her performing partner, Hyacinth, and the lowly body double, Squeaker?
“Hyacinth?” I ask.
“She can take care of herself,” Louise says.
That leaves Squeaker.
“She was shy,” I say. “We need to check all the duct work. Especially that engineered by . . . Mr. Max.”
Louise flashes me a twenty-four-carat okay from those orangegold peepers.
About half an hour later, I am beginning to think that Midnight Inc. Investigations should be renamed Mummy Central. These ducts and escape routes are as empty and dry as King Tut’s tomb.
Midnight Louise and I poke our kissers out of equally empty escape routes and compare notes.
“No Hyacinth?” she asks.
“No flowers of any description,” I report.
I must admit that this ceaseless scrambling down narrow, dark ducts is wearing me out. Again. I lay back to pant out my frustration.
And then I hear a sigh.
A shaky sigh.
I push myself as erect as I can manage (my frame, not anything personal) and sniff around for a source. The odor is faintly lavender. As in lavender Siamese.
I edge forward until I spot some ruby irises in the dark. That always gives away a blue-eyed girl. I belly crawl the last five feet and am rewarded by the sight, sound, and sniff of Miss Squeaker.
“What are you doing hidden away down here, girl?” I ask.
“They have forgotten me, Louie. And if they remember me, they will whisk me away to the nearest shelter. I do not ever want to go back to one of those places.”
“I have been there,” I point out carefully. These spooked runaways are touchy. “I do not ever want to go back there either.”
“Oh. I am sorry Hyacinth is gone. When she vanished, the others appeared to forget about me. But there is . . . nothing to eat here.”
“No. As you can see, I do not approve of a state of nothing to eat. If you will inch forward, just a little, I believe that Miss Midnight Louise and I will find you a fine Asian buffet not too far from here.”
“They will know I exist! And destroy me!”
Unfortunately, she is not too far wrong.
“Miss Midnight Louise and I have strings to pull in this town. Often those strings are wrapped around main courses for our kind. Just edge your smooth lavender stockings along this pipe, and you will soon be on your way to a free dinner.”
I ease her out, step by step.
Louise is waiting at the end of the tunnel, all purrs and velvet paws.
Yeah. Like I should get that.
* * *
Later, the guy in the white pipe-stem hat is purring over how hungry Squeaker is for his appetizers.
Louise and I consult in the corner of the busy kitchen, trying to ignore a bunch of lobsters who are held captive for the main course.
“Where can we take her?” I ask.
“She is too sensitive for Ma Barker’s gang.”
“And then some. She is a very timid individual, due to early kit-hood trauma,” I add.
“I had early kithood trauma and you do not weep for me, Argentina.”
“Huh? I have never been to Gaucholand. Or Evitaland. Or Madonnaland. I am just saying that she is not accoutered for survival on the raw edges of anything.”
“It is the raw edges of Ma Barker’s gang, or nothing,” Louise says.
“Maybe not,” I say, looking like my usual inscrutable self.
It takes a lot of paternal persuasion, but Miss Louise and I get a well-fed Miss S. Q. easing on down the road.
I will not describe the rides we have had to hitch, or lies we have had to tell to coax our charge along, but at last we are hotfooting it through a very upscale part of town.
This is where and when it gets tough. We have to prod little Miss S. Q. onto a foreign stoop, and then whip up a helluva faux cat fight right before her eyes.
I take as great a satisfaction in boffing Miss Louise in the nose as she does in giving me a Swedish massage via her toes. We howl and yeowl to beat the band and a few audience members too.
Squeaker cringes against a potted hibiscus on the porch.
Perfect!
At last, the porch lights come on, and Louise and I split for the front hedge.
A human comes out blinking into the dark. When have they ever done differently?
“What is going on out here?”
Louise and I are silent. All one can hear out here is Squeaker’s shoulder blades and teeth clicking together.
“Well.” The human, for once, has heard something more subtle than clashing stray cats.
I hear the slap of bare feet on concrete, and then bushes being brushed aside to reveal Squeaker.
“Oh, my. What have we here? No scaredy-cat, no. A pretty little thing. What blue eyes you have, my dear. No. Do not shake. Why, you are quite a fine little pussums.”
; I hate the expression “pussums,” but Louise whacks me in the shoulder and I shut up. Beggars cannot be choosers, and this is Squeaker’s last chance.
“What a precious puss.” The human has actually lifted her into his arms and she is not doing a thing.
Whoops! Maybe purring.
Yes!
It is a match made in heaven and at Midnight Inc. Investigations.
Danny Dove is now crooning to the little orphan. “Would you like some Bailey’s Irish Cream, hmmm? You need a name. How about . . . I think you are a little girl, right? How about . . . Alexandra?”
Works for me.
Louise smashes me in the whiskers. “Nice going, Pater the Great,” she says.
Well, I guess I would have been a czar in another life, if life were fair.
Telling Temple
It was three-thirty in the morning when Matt knocked on Temple’s door. Loud. He figured he’d better tell her as soon as possible. He was ready to push the doorbell and make a major racket when the door opened.
The Temple of Christmas Future answered, a petite pale redhead in red-and-purple pajamas with goggle-size glasses reflecting himself.
“I want Temple,” Matt said, confused, flustered.
“I’m not a madam, don’t tell me. Tell her. I’m Kit, aunt. You’re Matt, very tasty. I’ll get her if you insist. Although the hour is extremely intemperate. I approve, you mad, impetuous boy, you. No relation to the Fontana Brothers, I presume?”
“Are you kidding? Do I look Italian?”
“Northern Italian, maybe. A girl can dream. I am, however, devastated to inform you that I am no girl. Un momento, favore.’
Matt was left blinking in the tiny entry hall.
Temple toddled out a few minutes later, wearing a robe that reminded him of nun-wear, no glasses. Apparently, he was not to see her without contact lenses.
The thought was both encouraging and heart-breaking.
“I guess you two . . . neighbors had better confer in the bedroom,” Kit said, as delicately as she could probably ever manage. “I’m camping out on the living-room couch so you surely don’t want me eavesdropping.”
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