Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

Temple wove on her feet, which were attired in bunny slippers, a little. “There’s always the office,” she noted with the strange dignity of a drunk or a person drawn out of deep sleep. She nodded to her right, and Matt gratefully followed her in there. He had no desire to view the California king-size bed Electra said Max Kinsella had required.

  Temple shut the door behind them.

  They stood and stared at each other for a few moments.

  “You must have come from the radio station,” Temple said, waking up enough to get self-conscious. “And I must look a mess.”

  “Love the bunny slippers. The robe’s a wash but it makes me wonder what’s under it.”

  “Then it’s a successful robe,” Temple said, running the end of a pink satin tie through her hand.

  Conversation stopped. He found himself content, as he often was nowadays, just to stand and look at her. Her sleek new blond hair was uncombed, but even he knew from TV commercials that was a greatly desired look. He took a mental snapshot of her appearing sleepy enough to pick up and take somewhere like a child who’s been up way too late. Somewhere not childish at all. It was a shame to spoil that tousled innocence with other people’s wrangles.

  “Matt? What is it? Why are you here so late?”

  “It’s all bad,” he said. “I’ve talked to Molina and just now to Max.”

  “You saw Max? Must have needed an appointment with his secretary.”

  “He found me. Things are . . . a mess. A duel of the Titans is coming and you’re going to be squashed between them.”

  “What do you mean?” Temple yawned as she settled into her computer desk chair, letting the slippers fall off and tucking her bare feet under her on the seat.

  Matt paced away, not wanting to say what he had to say. “I can’t stop ‘em. Molina is going after Max for sexual harassment and stalking. Max . . . you know him. He has too many irons in the fire bigger than his own self-defense.”

  “Max? Stalking?” She was sitting up, feet on the floor again. “Who? Shangri-La?”

  “Molina herself.” Matt stopped to take in Temple’s reaction, which was incredulous and heated.

  “Max stalking her? I thought Molina was wired lately, but is she completely crazy?”

  “I can’t make him take this charge seriously.”

  “Maybe because he’s seriously innocent.”

  Matt nodded. “Carmen has a hope chest of evidence for the stalking charge, but only one piece of it damning—”

  “Damn her, then!”

  “I can’t. She believes it.”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t think she’s crazy,” he said.

  Temple snorted indignantly.

  Matt knelt beside the chair. “No, I don’t think Max is her stalker. That makes what I think completely contradictory. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  Temple leaned back in her chair, away from him. “You’re neutral, then?”

  “I suppose so . . . if you can believe that two people telling the truth adds up to somebody else’s lie? Temple, the only thing I know is that I don’t want you to be hurt.”

  “The only thing I know is that you can’t ever stop anyone else from being hurt.”

  “Okay. I’ll take a position.”

  “Which is?”

  “For Max. Can you believe it?”

  She smiled at him, leaned nearer, put her palm on his cheek.

  “Yeah. You always give everyone but yourself the benefit of the doubt. If you do think Max is innocent, it means a lot. Are you sure you’re not doing this just for me?”

  “I’d do almost anything ‘just for you.’ But . . . I’ve got that Catholic conscience. No. It’s not for you, or me, but for what I believe. God help me, in this case, I believe in Max Kinsella.”

  “So do I. So did I, well past the point when I looked like a stupid woman.”

  “Not stupid. Loyal. But now that he’s in Molina’s sights again—”

  “What?”

  “It’s going to bother you.”

  “What?”

  “Us.” He’d said it, put his selfish insecurities out on the table for Temple to see.

  Her gray-blue eyes stared into his for a long moment. Then she stroked her forefinger across his lips, a tender gesture recalling their recent intimacies. Was it hello, or good-bye?

  “Max will always be in trouble with someone,” she said finally. She produced a wry, sad smile. “Maybe me this time, if he’s been playing head games with Molina.” She frowned. “I may be conceited, but I just can’t see him stalking her under any circumstances.”

  “She wouldn’t be convinced he was, though, without some grounds.”

  “So. You understand what he’s up against.”

  “I understand what he’s always been up against.” And that’s why you loved him, Matt thought. Love him.

  It’s hard to compete with a martyr. To win Temple, Matt figured, he couldn’t do it over Max’s dead body, over his disgrace and fall. Somehow, he’d have to absolve Max and disprove Molina’s deepest convictions.

  Or this ugly suspicion about Max, so wounding to a loyalist like Temple, would always lie between them.

  Miracle Worker

  “Is it all right if Aldo picks me up here?” Kit asked Temple at about six P.M. the next evening.

  Her aunt was shifting her weight from foot to foot in her zebrawood-soled brocaded stiletto sandals like an antsy twelve-year-old.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Well, you’re used to thinking of the Fontanas as a flock. Seeing just one at a time might be . . . overwhelming and confusing.”

  “I’m not the one who has to be very sure about not confusing Fontanas,” Temple pointed out. Pointedly. “Where are you going tonight?”

  “The Bellagio.”

  “For dinner? That’ll cost Aldo a well-tailored Zegna arm, and probably a leg.”

  “I’m worth it,” said Kit, ducking back into Temple’s office and its attached bathroom to finish her makeup.

  Temple hoped that she would be that self-confident when she was sixty . . . in thirty years. Right now, the outlook was glum on all fronts.

  The idea of Max was bitter in her mind. At best, he was brushing her out of his life. At worst, he was coming on to her, their relentless enemy. Maybe there was some ulterior reason for the good of mankind behind it. Even that idea left a sour taste in her mouth. She wished she’d kissed Matt last night. He’d looked so torn and worried and his mouth was always as clean and bracing as springwater to her.

  At work, everyone connected with the White Russian exhibition was being regarded as an apparent thief-in-training. Temple’s guilty knowledge that innocents were suspected when she knew Max was the culprit was twisting her usually wrought-iron stomach into queasy knots. The media was all over the hotel and her and Randy. In fact, to avoid them snooping into their PR plans to accentuate the positive, Randy had ordered Temple to work from her home computer for a while.

  Now, she’d barely settled in to craft totally unworkable press releases—how do you defuse a fatal fall and a stolen artifact in 150 words or less?—and Kit was preparing to exit, way too excited about her fling with Aldo to even notice that Temple was running on emotional empty, six quarts shy of hope.

  Temple forced her depleted energy up forty revolutions per minute when the doorbell rang.

  “Would you get that, hon?” Kit yelled from the bathroom. “I haven’t finished unpacking the bags under my eyes.”

  “Hi!” Temple greeted Aldo, checking out his smooth, swarthy Italian hide for forty-something wrinkles. He didn’t look a day over thirty-two, but Mediterranean types aged well. “Kit’ll be right out.”

  God! She felt like her own mother. She was the young chick here; Kit was, well, not acting her age.

  “How is the family?” Temple inquired as she led tall, dark, and Fontana into the living room. The cappuccino color of his suit matched her sofa exactly, although the material was far better.

  “Uh
, do you mean the family, or the Family, Miss Temple?”

  She felt like she’d never been trapped into making small talk with a single Fontana for so long before.

  “I mean your terrific brothers. And I haven’t even been to the Crystal Phoenix in ages to see Nicky and Van.”

  “Me, neither,” Aldo said, making ready to sit on her sofa.

  “Wait!”

  “What?” He slapped a hand to his inside breast pocket. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing . . . worth, ah, a sidearm extraction. It’s just that you’ll get black Midnight Louie hairs all over that pale linen suit.”

  “Whoa! You mean I am trespassing on the Top Cat’s territory here?”

  “Sort of.”

  Temple decided not to mention that Kit had been sleeping there lately . . . when she was home before four in the morning. Temple never thought she’d be the one to uphold the Barr family standards for discreet behavior.

  Aldo, perhaps as uneasy as she was, began pacing. Although he wasn’t as tall as Max, he was still way too tall to pace in a room this size.

  He stopped by the French doors to eye the petite balcony. “Cute place.”

  “Thanks.” Temple felt like a Lilliputian being visited by a rod-packing Gulliver.

  “Sorry!” Kit clattered out over the hardwood floors, looking as breathless and perky as a sixteen-year-old. “I’m ready now.”

  “Bella!” Aldo gathered her into his long-armed escort and steered her to the door.

  “We’ll be back—” Kit began. “When will we be back?”

  “When the night has had enough of us,” Aldo said dramatically.

  Kit shrugged. “Oh, well . . . ”

  Temple could have sworn she winked at her before Aldo drew the big coffered door shut on them.

  Well, this was a fine how-do-you-do! Kit out on the town, Fontana style. Louie out on the town, prowling style. Matt gunning for Max and not telling her a thing about it until after the fact. Max the usual Invisible Man he’d been for the past few months.

  Temple threw herself down on the sofa, unmindful of Louie hairs, put up her feet, and debated calling Matt, calling out for a pizza, calling the Mounties, or the remaining Fontana brothers.

  Instead, she did what a future sixty-year-old should do. She fell asleep, feeling rather sorry for herself but too tired to do anything to take her mind off that spineless condition.

  When she woke up, the room was dark. Totally dark. Not a lamp lit.

  The time on the VCR read 12:00. Midnight! She jolted upright. Wait. She had never reset the VCR time after it went out during one of the few summer electrical storms in Las Vegas. With an annual rainfall of four inches, they were rarer than ace-high flushes. She couldn’t have fixed it anyway, because only Max knew how to do it.

  Her eyes felt grainy from sleeping with her contact lenses in, even though they were the soft variety.

  The peace and quiet was nice, though, after frenetic, long hours on the hotel’s marble floors. It was too late to relieve Randy, but she’d be there first thing in the morning and start pulling her weight again. Surely nothing terrible had happened in just these few hours.

  Then she saw the red light blinking on her answering machine through the open door to her office. Oh, no. Someone had called.

  Temple sat up, fast, and tried to stand, but she ran into a solid piece of darkness that caught hold of her arms and held her back. Before she could scream, she recognized the silky texture of Max’s trademark black turtleneck sweater.

  “If you won’t scream, I’ll promise not to fall asleep,” he said.

  Temple wiggled up high enough in the sofa seat to switch on the floor lamp next to it. Max had been sitting at the sofa’s far end with her feet on his lap, waiting for her to wake up.

  “You do look tired enough to fall asleep right now,” she told him, as the light searched the deep lines and sharp angles of his features. “What’s been going on, Max? I swear I can’t take it anymore.”

  He just nodded. “I’ve come here on orders.”

  “Who orders you around?”

  “Apparently, your upstairs neighbor.”

  “Matt? You’d never take orders from Matt. What’s going on? He was all rabid to find you, talk to you. Maybe I shouldn’t have passed his message on to you.”

  “He was and I found him. We had a heart-to-heart.”

  “I heard and I don’t like the sound of that. It’s much too civilized.”

  “Just civil. He agreed that I should talk to you.”

  “Agreed?”

  “He insisted. I agreed.”

  “This is crazy. I don’t need Matt as a go-between.”

  “Maybe you do. He was warning me.”

  “About what?”

  “That fingerprint Molina bullied you out of.”

  “That was the piece of damning evidence Matt said she had? Then there was a fingerprint on that CD?”

  “So Molina told Matt.”

  “Why would she tell Matt about that?”

  Max shrugged, a gesture so small she hardly detected it. “It appears she finally has the evidence to draw the net closed on me.”

  “Oh, God, Max! She just charged in here. I didn’t even think until later that I could have stopped her.”

  “I don’t think you could have. She’s been pushing the line on what’s legal lately, not to mention ethical. I do take a certain pride in driving her to such measures. It will be some consolation when I’m led off in chains.”

  “She’d have to find and catch you first.”

  “Yes, well, that may not be necessary. No matter how long I can avoid capture, all she really has to do to ruin me is come here and tell you what she thinks she’s got me on.”

  “Not murder?”

  “That too, but nothing she can prove.”

  “What can she prove, then?”

  “Can we take a high-end whiskey break? Still got some?”

  “Of course. You don’t think I just pass your Millennium bottle out to strangers?”

  “Or to neighbors?”

  Temple felt her cheeks heat up, probably not visibly, though. “Or aunts,” she said, dodging the implication. Had she offered Matt some? Once? Maybe.

  Either way, she was glad for an excuse to hustle into the kitchen and slam cupboard doors and fill glasses with a dark potent inch of the pricey Bushmill’s Millennium Irish whiskey with which Max had celebrated, and mourned, the passing of his worst enemy, Kathleen O’Connor, who’d taken with her the golden days of his youth and left behind eternally unresolvable guilt. No enemy could do worse.

  Temple wondered what Max was mourning now.

  She brought him the crystal glass and sipped from hers as she sat down again. “I can’t imagine what Molina’s done now that you need to fortify yourself against it.”

  “The whiskey isn’t for me. It’s for you.”

  “Me?”

  “Molina couldn’t find any evidence on the two or three counts of murder she wanted to lay at my door, which she can’t find anyway.”

  “Then what was the whole bit about gleaning a fingerprint off a CD from here about?”

  “She apparently now does have evidence on a nasty lesser charge, enough to bring me in, if she can find me, and prosecute. Even if she can’t find me, she can just run tattling to you and damage me enough to give her immense satisfaction.”

  “What is it?”

  Max composed his features as if he were on stage. Calm, authoritative, unreadable. “Sexual stalking.”

  “Of who? Me? She has flipped. We are totally consensual.”

  Max laughed. “You are a past master of spin. No. Of her.”

  “Of her?”

  Tilt! Max was right: Temple needed a belt, even though she’d heard this first from Matt, especially since she didn’t want to admit to Max just how . . . in touch she and Matt had been lately. She assuaged her own guilt by unleashing her spleen on Molina. “That woman! What gall! What . . . conceit. You’d never
—”

  “Thank you.”

  “What’s given her this idea? Stalking how?” Still playing dumb.

  “Sneaking into her house and leaving items. A blue vintage velvet dress in her closet.”

  “Hey! Wanta moonlight here? I could use a stalker like that!”

  “Not so nice, a Gameboy in Mariah’s room once, before she evolved into such a game girl, thanks to you. But mostly stuff in Molina’s bedroom, including, the latest indignity, according to Devine, a racy teddy. I suspect he didn’t know what that was until Molina explained it to him. Imagine, she has two adolescents to rear. I suppose we should pity the woman.”

  Temple waved away his attempt at humor, as disturbing as it was to picture Matt and Molina discussing racy teddies. “And she found a fingerprint matching the one on my CD to one found in her house?”

  “One is the operative number. None of the objects had fingerprints but one, and that had only one print. It matches one of mine from the CD.”

  Temple swilled Millennium whiskey way too thoughtlessly. “She planted it! Aren’t there ways?”

  “Nice thought.” Max shook his head. “Molina is too proud to cheat. It was there, all right.”

  “You’re too proud to make a mistake like that.”

  “Thanks for your total trust in my hubris. Won’t mean much coming from a character witness on the stand, though.”

  “How can she think you’d do such a thing?”

  “She hates me? No, I suppose she figured I’d upped the cat-and-mouse game we’ve been playing all over Vegas long before this.” His expression grew bitter. “According to your new friendly neighborhood go-between, the last stalker invasion was particularly nasty. In that sense, I don’t blame her for going ballistic. A trail of rose petals all through the house, into Mariah’s bedroom as well as her own. I think the threat to Mariah sent her over the edge.”

  “That’s proof of your innocence. You’d never include a kid in anything, not even a cat-and-mouse game.”

  “Again, character witnesses aren’t going to save me, as sterling as you are and as sure as you are to be a knockout on the witness stand. The jury would fall for you like babies for saltwater taffy.”

  His palm stroked her straight blond hair. Temple forgot how different she looked these days, how different she was beginning to feel.