Cat in a Leopard Spot

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Even if they think you’re still crazy for sticking with an invisible man.”

  “You manage to show up when it matters. So. Have you figured out why you really came back?”

  “I always knew, Temple. I love you.”

  “That simple?”

  “That complicated.”

  She put her hands around his, smiled. “I always knew that you love me and I love you. And at least we’re together again, in a way. Barr and Kinsella, undercover detectives. I think we make a good team, even if it’s not onstage.”

  He finally smiled back. “I admit I underestimated your capacity for the lurid and the offbeat during our Minneapolis honeymoon.”

  “See. That’s what was wrong. Most people honeymoon in Las Vegas. We came to Las Vegas, and suddenly the honeymoon was over.”

  “Not completely over.”

  “No,” she admitted, looking down at their empty plates. “I wish you still lived here with me.”

  “I can’t, Temple. It would blow my cover and make you a target.”

  She looked up. “At least you ask me to help out now and then.”

  “Like I said, I underestimated you. Doing PR for a regional repertory theater looked like such a respectable position. Maybe it was your previous life as a TV news reporter, but you really have a heck of a need to know. Tell you that you can’t go somewhere, and you’ll scratch, kick, and burrow—or con—your way in. And look as innocent as Shirley Temple all the while. No wonder you drive Molina nuts.”

  Temple basked in Max’s regard. She had developed her serious snooping instincts during the long year he’d been missing in action, and was glad to hear the professional spook admit that the amateur sleuth was effective, even useful. In limited ways, at least. It was more than Molina would ever do.

  “So what’s the story on the big cat?” she asked, using a caffeine chaser to wash down starches and sugars.

  “I don’t know yet. The Cloaked Conjuror’s leopard has been kidnapped. It could be by a ring of illegal animal dealers. It could be by some disgruntled local magicians who don’t like him squealing on how stage illusions are done. It could be—”

  “The Synth.”

  Max nodded, staring into the dark depths of his coffee as if expecting an image to appear there. “CC has heard from them. It. Supposedly. The note could have been a misleading hoax.”

  “Cee-cee?”

  “I can’t keep repeating that corny title. The Cloaked Conjuror. Ye gods, what the public will buy.”

  Temple squinted at her kitchen wall clock, a rhinestoned Felix the Cat model with twitching tail for a pendulum that Electra had given her after her most recent brush with death.

  “The CC seemed nervous at the TitaniCon judges’ table even before all hell broke loose. Once the action started, he and his bodyguards got out of there fast.”

  “He’s a nervous man. The media aren’t kidding about death threats. He makes enough money to live behind the security measures of a drug lord, but I don’t think that would help him against a cabal of rogue magicians.”

  “They make bad enemies?”

  “The worst.” Max was dead serious. Then he lightened up. “But I don’t know that this leopard snatching has anything to do with the Synth, if there is such an entity. No ransom demand has turned up yet, which is a little disturbing. So I’m going on the first premise: the cat was taken by someone who wanted a ‘tame’ wild animal to peddle for big dough to a drug lord or a vanity collector.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to abduct a leopard?”

  “Osiris’s front nails were clipped, and he was probably shot with a tranquilizer gun.”

  Temple looked at Louie and winced. “Please, no gory details in front of the c-a-t. Louie’s ears are flat back; it’s like he knows you’re discussing an attack on a cat.”

  “He knows he’s not going to get any leftovers,” Max said. “That’s his problem.”

  “But he’s scowling. Can’t you see the little vertical wrinkles in his forehead fur?”

  “Yes, and they’re always there. With all the bad actors I have on my tail, I refuse to get worried about being eavesdropped on by a cat.”

  Temple exchanged a glance with Louie. He blinked in what she could choose to regard as complicity, or as the usual feline boredom with messy human affairs.

  “So you need me to pose as a woman desperately seeking a leopard for…oh, I get it! For the new Crystal Phoenix animal attraction. But we have a consultant doing that. I have nothing to do with it.”

  “You don’t have to tell anyone that.”

  “Of course not. When do you want to do this?”

  “Starting today? Osiris is a pampered performing animal. I’d like to get him back home with as little trauma as possible.”

  “Then you think the snatchers, and the sellers, are around here?”

  “No sense transporting an animal when there are plenty of buyers in Las Vegas. This town attracts people who like to live big and break rules.”

  “You don’t think they’d hurt the leopard?”

  “Not intentionally, I hope, but for all the animal compounds around Vegas, the biggest being Siegfried and Roy’s, there are also some sleazy, questionable operations.”

  Temple, who longed to visit Siegfried and Roy’s white stucco wonderland especially designed for their rare white tigers and other big cats, recalled the sleek black panther that Max had borrowed for his unsettling Houdini “haunting” illusion at the Halloween haunted house attraction the previous fall.

  “I’d hate to think of Kahlúa in bad hands,” she said.

  “A lot of love and training go into a performing animal,” Max agreed. “They’re a special breed. Every animal is a partner in the act. Stealing one is more than nipping an investment.”

  “You never worked with big cats.”

  Max glanced to the countertop. “Maybe that’s why Louie and I have never gotten along.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say you two don’t get along. It’s just that you’re both too overprotective of the same person.”

  “Yeah, you can take care of yourself,” he mocked. “Seriously, you’ve got the gumption of a pit bull when someone is trying to keep you from knowing what you think you should. Where did that come from? Besides the news biz.”

  “I suppose that didn’t hurt.” Temple hadn’t thought about it much. “Maybe mostly from being the youngest and littlest and femalest in the family. Everybody was always beating me up by sheltering me from something. It got tiresome. The more they whispered or concealed, wouldn’t show me or tell me, or wouldn’t let me tag along, the more I wanted and needed to know, to hear, to go there. That’s all.”

  “Picked on with love,” Max said, almost nostalgically.

  “Picked on is picked on, whatever the motive.” She pulled her own coffee mug near, nursed it between her slightly cool fingertips. “So what did your birth order do for you? You’ve mentioned your cousin, but even I don’t know about your immediate family. I never thought to ask, because you always seemed so…solo.”

  “That was my act. The Mystifying Max. I deliberately avoided using the usual assistants. No nubile girls. Just me.”

  “Even Zorro had a henchman.”

  “Only on TV. But in the family, I was the oldest, with younger sisters and one very little brother. That’s why my cousin Sean and I bonded. Brothers more than buddies. A guy your own age to do everything with, with none of the little everyday family tensions to drive us apart, or make us fight over stupid things. Until Ireland.”

  Temple nodded, not mentioning the disastrous fight over a woman in the end. “A soulmate. I grew up alone in a large family.”

  “So did I,” Max said.

  “We’re absolutely unique, and two of a kind.”

  “Yup. Now, will you be my shill?”

  It wasn’t a proposal of marriage, but when he put it that way, how could she refuse?

  Max was still driving the Maxima dropped off for him a couple weeks before
by some anonymous contact. Such edgy manipulations were the only proof Temple had that Max led an undercover life for a shadowy international antiterrorism organization.

  He seemed to relish the black car’s nondescript profile, and its play upon his name. It was as if his life always had to be so anonymous that brand names became extensions of his personality.

  Today he drove the Maxima out Highway 95 into the desert that surrounded Las Vegas like a white paper doily surrounds a glazed fruit tart, Las Vegas being the tart, of course, and a gaudy little number she was, too.

  Temple adored going places with Max and doing things together again, even if they were clandestine. Their “honeymoon” period was symbolic; intimations of marriage had been scuttled by the realities of Max’s antiterrorist past when it rose up like a deep-sea monster.

  Today, there were no monsters, and there never would be any sea here, just desert. The blue sky was cloudless, yet grew misty at the horizon where the distant mountains shimmered like the mauve and lavender glints in an opal.

  Much as Temple loved to drive herself, a bit faster than the law allowed, she loved letting Max drive her somewhere, somewhere surprising. He was a magician by profession, after all, even if he was now forcibly retired.

  When the car finally turned onto a rutted sandy road, it drove into the encroaching desert for a quarter mile. Then she saw a big wooden sign with white-painted lettering carved into its wind-weathered surface.

  “‘Animal Oasis,’” she declaimed and asked at the same time.

  “No shills needed here,” Max reassured. “This is where we’ll research your upcoming role. Ever wonder where I got that cloud of cockatoos for the finale of my act?”

  “You kept them in that wonderful mesh aviary at the Goliath theater. They looked so gorgeous flitting around that tropical greenery. I’d never seen plants backstage before, unless it was for a production of Little Shop of Horrors.”

  “Audrey Junior was hardly a plant,” Max objected, referring to the domineering carnivorous growth that had starred in the cult film and the later musical play and film. He was as much a theater and film buff as Temple was, another reason they had clicked like the opening tumblers of a bank safe.

  “I’m just in a gruesome mood,” Temple admitted. “Did you know your cockatoo retreat inspired my idea for an elegant petting zoo at the Crystal Phoenix?”

  “That Goliath setup was only for the length of my contract. The birds came from here. And they came back here when I went.”

  “Do you miss them? I mean, did you like working with animals?”

  “Sometimes better than with people. Well-trained birds are easy to work with. Except for the occasional dropping. A real drawback when wearing black is your trademark.”

  “Kind of like really large, gooey dandruff.”

  Max grimaced at her comparison. “Luckily, the distance between stage and audience hides a multitude of flaws.”

  Temple didn’t mention that sometimes the distance between magician and mate could also hide a multitude of flaws.

  She thrust aside past issues, leaning forward to see their destination, intrigued to encounter a place that housed performing animals. Animal Oasis. It sounded like a shelter, but was there really any true shelter for creatures that could be bought and sold like household plants?

  They parked behind a low beige-stucco building set into the brown bezel of the usual desert scrub. Beyond it, Temple glimpsed higher stucco walls fringed by exotic greenery. As they left the car, she could hear water trickling in the distance. A lush, damp smell tinged the dry wind that riffled across the sand.

  “It does look like an oasis in there,” she told Max, pushing up on her toes to see over the wall. “No! I know. It looks like the wall that kept in King Kong on Skull Island.”

  Max laughed so hard that the man coming out of the building to greet them froze in his tracks and looked back to see if a clown car was following him.

  “You’re not a bloodhound on the track of crime,” Max told her, “you’re an unlicensed imagination in search of a Stephen King storyline.”

  They approached the bewildered man, a typical outdoors guy for these arid parts. Time and the desert had impressed a road map of wrinkles onto his features like a tooling die biting into leather. His teeth gleamed bone white in his weathered face, and his eyes were Lake Mead blue.

  “Max Kinsella,” he was saying, with wonder. And warmth. He strode forward to grab Max’s right hand and wring it as much as shake it. “I thought you’d left us for good. Damn, but you look fine.”

  Then he turned the weathered charm on Temple, grinning expectantly.

  “Temple Barr, PR.” She extended a hand before Max had a chance to explain her. “I’m helping Max out on a project.”

  “Kirby Grange.” He didn’t offend her by shaking hands any more delicately, but the grip wasn’t punishing, just firm and brief. “This here’s my outfit.”

  “Any great apes in there, Kirb?” Max asked, removing his sunglasses, and glancing at Temple.

  “Only some of my crew. But come in outa the sun, folks. It’s already fixin’ to turn into summer on us.” Kirby turned to Temple with a grin. “Not that I haven’t housed an ape or two. Terrific fellas and gals.”

  Inside, the building was functional with a capital S as in Spare: Concrete floor, discount office furniture, battered file cabinets and a lot of metal folding chairs sitting around.

  Temple got the impression that not a lot of sitting around was done at the Animal Oasis.

  “Have a seat.”

  They took the only ones available, two folding chairs raked into a rough conversational angle. Kirby Grange leaned against a desk edge. Beer belly, jeans, and rolled-up faded denim shirtsleeves made him look like a ranch hand, and Temple supposed that was what he did.

  “Why’d you rush off like that, Max? Not a word. And not that you weren’t paid up, but the birds just left downstairs at the Goliath.”

  Max did something Temple had never seen him do before. He fidgeted with guilt.

  “I had to leave town fast, Kirby. Personal matter.”

  Kirby nodded, craggy face impassive but his blue eyes sparkling with speculation. “It was all right. Got a crew to disassemble the aviary and we moved the whole shooting match out here. You need the birds again?”

  “No.” Max took a deep breath. “I’m out of the magic game.”

  “Glad to hear it, because I’m out of the performing parrot game too.”

  “They were cockatoos, and they didn’t really have to perform that much.”

  For a moment tension hung between the two men like an invisible curtain, like the heat giving the desert air a permanent wave right before your eyes.

  “For now,” Max went on, “I’m helping out a friend. Not her,” he added as Kirby automatically glanced at Temple.

  “No.” Kirby grinned. “You don’t look like jest a friend, miss. Leastways I wouldn’t want it that way if I was twenty years younger.”

  It was the kind of gallantry older men felt entitled to make to much younger women. Temple ignored it because it was so harmless in this instance, and because Max might need reminding.

  He looked on benignly, as avuncular as Kirby now, as if he had somehow taken on the older man’s coloring like a chameleon.

  Temple was shocked to realize that this was what Max did: he presented himself to people and fell into their patterns so completely and naturally that he could blend into any environment, any situation, any persona.

  “What can I do for you?” Kirby asked, pleasantries over and business beginning.

  “I’m looking into something for a magician friend,” Max said smoothly, seriously.

  He was only half lying, Temple noted. The Cloaked Conjuror wasn’t a friend.

  “His big cat’s gone missing. We’re thinking it might have been taken by someone who deals in illegal wildlife sales.”

  Kirby’s friendly face hardened. “Got a few of those around. Worse varmints than any
thing on four feet or no feet. How can I help you?”

  “First, let me take a stroll through your records. I know you keep tabs on some of the shady operations for the authorities. Then show my friend—” Max grinned and corrected himself. “My not-friend around your compound. And tell her how to spot a big cat that’s not at home.”

  Kirby’s eyes played ping-pong between Max and Temple, their expression bouncing from surprise to worry before he fixed his attention on Temple. “Well, now, miss, showing you the Oasis would be a fine break for me.”

  He went over to a file cabinet, jerked open a drawer, and eyed Max with much less pleasure. “You’ll find what you want under V. As in ‘vermin.’”

  His boot heels clacked the concrete as he came to Temple. “Follow me. I hope you got shoes that can stand a cleaning. These animals don’t always use the bidet.”

  She laughed and accompanied him out into the searing sunlight.

  Behind them, Max was already shuffling papers. She saw him pull a small object from his jacket pocket and lift it to a page. Too big to be his mascara-size camera. What?

  But Kirby Granger was drawling out a guidebook spiel to his animal kingdom. Temple trotted alongside him to the inner gates, to the animal Shangri-la beyond: big, looming wooden stockade gates, now that they had penetrated the electrified cyclone fence that defined the fringes.

  Uh-oh. Maybe King Kong was on the menu after all. Or she was.

  Chapter 8

  Portrait

  Molina thought Janice Flanders sounded oddly flustered on the phone.

  “You have a job for me?”

  “I know. The computer has made you obsolete,” Molina said, “but not in this case. I don’t trust eyewitness descriptions, particularly when they come from a bartender. I’m betting your fine Italian hand will get a better translation. Besides, he’s not exactly Mr. Cooperative.”

  “A challenge?” Janice’s voice had perked up.

  “And he works nights, and the only place he’ll consent to be debriefed is on the job.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Secrets strip club, on Paradise.”