Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “I’ve always wanted to be all fifties’ overdressed and stalk into a witness box on black spike heels,” she said. “And to attend a funeral wearing a big black hat with a veil. But I don’t have the height to carry any of it off.”

  “Not my funeral, I hope.”

  “She’ll never catch you. She can’t touch you.”

  “Probably not. But she can touch you.”

  “How?”

  He sat back, sipped the whiskey. “That’s what Devine sent me to tell you. The one . . . minor reason Molina might not be completely unjustified in suspecting me of this slimy crime.”

  “Matt sent you? Again? Since when do you take directions from him?”

  “Since he’s right. Molina will tell you. I’d rather be first.”

  “I can’t imagine anything serious enough involving me for you and Matt to collaborate on.”

  “We have your best interests at heart.”

  Temple’s heart almost stopped to hear that. Max and Matt conspiring to . . . what? Spare her? This must be major.

  “Remember,” Max said, swirling the dark honey liquor in his Baccarat glass so it oiled the sides, “when you were doing that sopho-moronic ‘Tess the Thong Girl’ undercover routine in the strip clubs, trying to prove that I wasn’t the Stripper Killer? I could have throttled you myself for taking such a risk when I found out what you’d been doing.”

  “Molina’s always been too ready to accuse you of sleazy crimes. It’s been a slap in the face to me too; that’s why I had to do something about it. But, hey, we got the creep.”

  “We?”

  “I never told anybody this, but although the pepper spray you gave me stopped the real Stripper Killer in that parking lot, it was Rafi Nadir coming along and decking him that put him out cold until the police came. Rafi didn’t want the credit for some reason, so he vanished, and I got the, ah, capture.”

  “Nadir!” Max slapped his forehead. “What irony! Molina’s hated ex-squeeze saved you from the Stripper Killer and cut out, leaving you sole credit.” His chuckle escalated into a laugh as he pulled Temple against him. “I love it.”

  “You hate Molina almost as much as she hates you, don’t you?”

  “I’m getting there,” he said, grim again. He kept his arm around her, holding on tight. “That wasn’t my greatest hour, either, that night. She backed me into this corner I didn’t want to be in. She caught up with me in the other strip club parking lot, the wrong one, where the Stripper Killer wasn’t planning to strike again. That’s when I put it all together, where he’d really be, and that you were there, alone.”

  “Heck, no, Max. I had Rafi Nadir, remember. And even Midnight Louie showed up with a yowling Greek chorus of feral cats, no less.”

  “Where is Louie, by the way?”

  “Out. Like my aunt Kit. She’s dating a Fontana, can you believe it?”

  “Knowing your aunt Kit, yes. Knowing the Fontanas, no.”

  Temple smiled, the tension between them dissipating with their separate visions of a Fontana brother-Aunt Kit tryst.

  Max sighed and reached for his glass again, but he didn’t let go of her.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I knew I had to get to you and Baby Doll’s. Molina knew she had me in her sights and she wasn’t going to let me go anywhere. I’d been in the same spot with her before and got away, but not this time.”

  “Sights? She’d pulled a gun on you?”

  “Right. I convinced her I wasn’t carrying and that I’d go anyway and she could justify the shooting however she liked.”

  “Max! You shouldn’t bluff an angry, prejudiced person with a gun.”

  “Wasn’t bluffing.”

  “Max!”

  He shrugged. “She’s not a killer, just a damn determined woman. I knew she wouldn’t shoot, and she knew I knew that. So . . . that woman has balls, I’ll give her that. She slams her semiautomatic on the hood of the nearest Ford 350 and decides to keep me from leaving using hand-to-hand combat.”

  “She’s really crazy. You’re strong from all that stage work.”

  “Used to be. Molina’s no lightweight, plus she’s trained. And, I didn’t want to hurt her.”

  “You’re a gentleman.”

  “Maybe. Mostly because an assaulting-an-officer charge is hard to defend against if she did manage to haul me in. The point, Temple, is she was costing me time. She was keeping me from getting to where I knew you were exposed to the real Stripper Killer. I tried to overpower her, but she wasn’t having any of it. We were too evenly matched, given my overriding concern to get away and get to you. I couldn’t clobber her outright. And I couldn’t gain enough advantage to get away fast enough and far enough. It was a stalemate. I had her pinned to a van, but the instant I let go, my advantage was gone. I had to get her off-guard, really shock the shield off of her.”

  By now, Temple was listening like a kid at a campfire ghost-story telling. What would Max do? What clever magician’s trick?

  “You remember my face after that night?”

  “It was scraped.” Temple was jolted by the change of topic in the story.

  “That’s because I let her take me down and cuff me. That finally became the only way I could get out of that damn parking lot and into her car where I could pick the handcuffs and unite her and her steering wheel with them until death did them part, then get out and get to Baby Doll’s to, I thought, save you. Except you and Rafi Nadir had already turned the trick.”

  “And Midnight Louie. He alerted me to someone stalking me.”

  Max put his head in his hands. “Don’t mention stalkers. I never want to hear that word again. Temple, when I had that woman up against that van, all I could think of was how to throw her off-guard. What would distract her the most so I could get away without hurting her or myself. What would shock her. So . . . you had to have been there . . . I sort of came onto her. Loathing me as she does, it was the only trick I had left up my sleeve. And it did freeze her into next week. I almost got away before she recovered and I had to play ‘possom. That’s really why she ground my face in the asphalt and why she might think I’m her stalker.”

  “Oh, wow.” Temple put her own head in her hands. “Like what did you do, say?”

  “It was the heat of the moment. I don’t even remember.”

  “She sure does.”

  Max cleared his throat. “I might have implied she was . . . frigid. That she was putting all that energy into chasing me because—”

  “—she really wanted you.”

  He shrugged.

  “That is so sexist, Max Kinsella! And so is thinking that I always need to be rescued.”

  “There’s the one common denominator in my sins: thinking of you, caring about you, wanting to protect you.”

  “You have to leave me with no word for a year to protect me? You have to hit on another woman to protect me? I think I’d rather not be protected.”

  “That’s what Devine said. That I had to come clean with you now, before Molina embarrasses you later.”

  “Embarrass nothing! Humiliate is more like it. And then the fact that you’re involved in the Czar Alexander scepter going missing. . . . Creating the worst publicity fallout in my career is not ‘protecting’ me. I’d be much better off without you doing that.”

  “Or without me?”

  “I don’t know! Everything’s crazy. I don’t know what I think anymore, except that you and I are just not working out. We’ve tried, God knows, but as long as you have to play peek-a-boo with the law,

  I’m never going to know where you and I really stand, and I can’t . . . stand . . . that anymore. I want stability. I want openness. I want—”

  “Someone else,” he said shrewdly.

  “I was going to say ‘Molina off my case.’ ”

  “I’ll be the first to admit that my secret status quo has changed, and I can’t tell you one word about it. But something’s changed for you too, and I don’t think it has to be secret. You just want
it that way.”

  Temple calmed down and thought. She supposed a parking lot faux-seduction was maybe no worse than some desert dirty dancing.

  “Thanks for telling me about Molina. I will be happy to break it to her that you didn’t mean anything by whatever you said or did. Unfortunately, I can’t report a meaningless . . . crisis in my own life. While we’re being so honest, I have something to confess. Matt has proposed.”

  “To you?”

  “Well, not to Molina!”

  “Marriage?” Max seemed dazed.

  “Yup, the usual.”

  “He can’t.”

  “He can.”

  Max finally let her go. There seemed more space between them than one small sofa could produce. He thought it over.

  “His stalker is dead, unlike my current bête noir, Molina. He’s safe at last, a free soul. He loves you. I’ve known that for way too long. Makes a decent wage. Has a night job, but you got used to that with me. You could do worse.”

  “Max! You sound like my mother!”

  “I’m just weighing the competition. He’s good looking, but too moral to succumb to bold hussies. He’s got an edge he tries to hide, so he could protect you the next time you need to masquerade as a murder victim. Outside of Midnight Louie, I can’t think of anybody better for you.”

  “Max, don’t you care?”

  “I’ve always cared too much, Temple. My problem, not yours. I thought, swore, when we connected again in New York that I could elude my past and become what I’d masqueraded as for so long: just your average headlining Las Vegas magician.”

  He grinned at the immodesty of that description. The grin vanished as fast as a Cheshire cat. “But things have . . . changed. My shadow life is looming larger than ever these days, and a lot more than the Czar Alexander scepter depends on it. I can’t guarantee to be there for you. I can’t guarantee not to muck up your job site for hidden, but we hope, higher, purposes. I can’t guarantee that I won’t have to drop out of sight again. I can’t guarantee to keep all the flying axes in the air anymore.

  “It’s time for you to get a life of your own. I can’t be a dog in the manger anymore.” Max stood. “Molina isn’t imagining things, but I never meant anything but a ploy by it, and she almost fell for it. You remember that when she comes calling. Make Matt’s day, or night, when the time comes for it. Remember me, now and then.”

  Temple stood too.

  The magician was heading toward her entry hall. He was going to walk out her front door like a mortal man. It was wrong, no argument, no sudden paper flowers, just leaving, it sounded like . . . forever.

  “Max—!”

  But the door had closed, and when she ran to open it, he was gone.

  Temple hung on the door, swung a little with it, so dazed that the insistent sound inside her unit didn’t register until it had been so insistent that she feared it would escape her.

  She ran back in to pick up the phone a split second before her answering machine kicked in.

  “Temple?”

  She couldn’t speak, but the caller rushed on.

  “It’s Randy. It’s the hugest frigging wonder of the world. The Czar Alexander scepter is back! Sitting under its Lexan onion dome as big as life and eight times more glitzy. This will be huge! The publicity will be the best thing the hotel has ever had. ‘Now you see it, now you don’t! Come view the New Millennium’s vanishing scepter while you still can . . .’ Are you there? We are no longer in deep doo-doo. We are saved!”

  “Great,” Temple managed to say. Randy was too excited to hear the strain in her voice. “I’ll be in first thing tomorrow to plan . . . to plan—”

  “We’ll need a whole new campaign to announce its reappearance. ‘The Magic and Mystery of Vegas Strikes Again. Maximum glitz, minimum fuss.’ Kiddo, I am so glad to be working with you on this. We can really milk this thing. We’ll be the talk of the town, and our careers will be caramel, yours especially, as you’re a freelancer and can really capitalize on it. But I’ll expect a big raise, let me tell you.”

  “Great.”

  “Okay. Get some sleep. You’ll need it.”

  “Will do.”

  She sat holding the receiver, lulled by the dial tone for a long time. And then the tears came: relief, regret, regret, relief. Regret.

  Maxamillion

  “I was worried,” Gandolph said when Max came home in the wee hours to find the old man waiting up for him.

  “That’s kind of nice,” Max said. He knew his smile was weary.

  “It took longer than it should have.”

  “I had a detour to make afterward. A personal detour.”

  Garry Randolph, the man who had been the magician Gandolph the Great, let the graven lines of his sixty-something face lift. “That little redheaded girl you love.”

  “She’s a blond these days, and I can’t afford to love anybody while I’m infiltrating the Synth.”

  “They won’t like that you put the scepter back.”

  “The deal was that I steal it and do with it what I please, giving them a cut of any profits. What I please is to restore it.”

  “You’re trying to win them over.”

  “Being a wimp won’t win them over. They’ll be pissed to see all that lovely money gone, but they’ll get that I’m my own man.”

  “You did it for her. It was her show.”

  “Garry, you have me cold. I did it for her. And it was a hell of a challenge to get it back in place again with all the extra security they have lined up now.”

  “Yeah? How’d you manage it?”

  “I could use a stiff drink and then I’ll tell you every little detail.”

  “Not about your detour, though.”

  “No. Not about my detour.”

  Garry frowned at him, as he had years ago when Max—still numbed by the IRA-bomb death of his cousin Sean—had charged into some particularly dangerous situation abroad, He’d been so young—not even nineteen—and wounded, and wild. The perfect counterterrorism agent. He felt that same untamed urgency again, but not the energy. Not any of the energy at all anymore.

  But he had to muster it again for one last personal appearance. Tomorrow.

  Leaving Las Vegas

  Carmen stopped dead in her tracks.

  They hadn’t been very purposeful tracks, just the usual domestic homecoming shuffle at the end of a Friday while she totaled all the minor annoying weekend cleaning chores she had been neglecting.

  She’d been thinking about something as mundane as washing down her kitchen cupboard doors—Mariah should help—when she realized that Max Kinsella had appeared in her living room not six feet away.

  He was all in black—shoes, slacks, trench coat—more like encountering a life-size cutout of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix than a real person. No. Larger than life size. Certainly larger than Keanu Reeves. But he looked gaunt, maybe even worn, desperate.

  It was enough to stop her heart. Did. For a beat or two.

  She’d made a few collars in her day who’d been threatening and creepy. They were always loud and uncontrolled, flailing against their incarceration.

  Kinsella was still free, quiet, and way too calm.

  He watched her pull the Glock from the paddle holster at her rear right hip and aim it. The muzzle wavered between head and heart.

  “I’m not armed, as usual,” he said, shrugging, “but don’t let that stop you. Maybe your ankle gun is a throwaway. You wipe it clean, paste it in my cold dead hand, and internal affairs goes far, far away.”

  He was, what was the word? Disarming. Literally. Silver Irish tongue.

  She wanted to check to see if her ankle holster showed or he had just guessed. She’d taken a wide, shooting stance the instant she saw him. Her pant leg could have outlined the gun’s shape.

  That didn’t matter. She shrugged in turn, the only gesture she could make without losing the total control she had of the semiautomatic, and of the situation.

  “Thanks for la
ying out the options. This is my home. I’m a police officer. You’re a suspect. A stalking suspect. You shouldn’t be here. I don’t need to salt a gun on your corpse. You’re dead either way.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Me? You blame me for the hole you’re in?”

  “Blame is too big a word. You’re a tool.”

  It took a split second for her to hear the word as “tool” instead of “fool.”

  “Oh, everybody’s after you.”

  “Probably.” He smiled so faintly she wasn’t sure she’d seen it.

  “Aren’t you special? Aren’t you important?”

  “Apparently, you think so.”

  “So. Why walk into the muzzle of a Glock?”

  “I’m leaving Las Vegas. One way or the other. On your floor, or on a jet plane.”

  “You leave? Give up the game? I don’t believe you. Why?”

  “The only thing keeping me here has been lying in an evidence baggie in your desk drawer.”

  The ring he’d given Temple Barr, later found at a murder scene. He was right. She regarded it as a personal trophy. And a clue.

  He said, “Thought I’d give a word of warning before I go.”

  “Shoot first?”

  “Maybe. Matt told me about what has been happening to you. I just wanted to say . . .” He let the words hang in the air. “I didn’t do . . . this.” His arms lifted slightly to indicate her violated house.

  Her trigger finger tautened at the motion. “Tell it to a jury.”

  “Sorry. Can’t wait around. Unless it’s a grand jury, investigating my own shooting.”

  “Open and shut. Trust me. I hate to play the gender card, but a male suspect stalking a female cop looks especially bad.”

  “Fine. I didn’t do this.”

  “Who the hell else? Who the hell else knew we’d run into each other in the strip club parking lot and had it out? Who besides you had to get touchy-feely in between the body kicks?”

  Again, he denied the charge with a shrug and a faint smile.

  “I don’t know. I just know that all’s fair in love and war, but home invasion isn’t my style. You’re the detective. Just asking. If it wasn’t me—say someone was speculating on the far fringe edge of an open mind—who else could it have been?”