“Speaking engagement.” The word “engagement” suddenly took on a sinister new resonance. “Temple. Call him right away.”
“You got it.” She hesitated, didn’t want to say good-bye, wanted to ask a few questions. He didn’t want to answer any.
“Thanks,” he said quickly. “ ’Bye.”
It was ironic that he was rushing to hang up on Temple. Usually it was the other way around. A nasty thought had surfaced. Maybe his phone was tapped. He should have called Temple and made his unprecedented request from somewhere else.
Kitty O’Connor was the last person in the world he wanted to know that he was calling in Max Kinsella.
Matt tried to watch TV, then to listen to his new stereo. He went to the bedroom and looked for a book he hadn’t read before, or one he had and that he could count on to distract him.
Nothing worked.
The gold snake ring lay coiled on the otherwise empty gray cube table. All he needed was an apple to make an apropos still life. And maybe a naked woman. God knew there were a few in Las Vegas.
Probably his mother had been right. It was a godless town.
It takes a thief to catch a thief. To catch a stalker, did it take…Max Kinsella?
No. To catch a stalker, stalk the stalker’s past.
He ought to know that by now.
At 8:10 P.M., his doorbell rang.
Matt approached the coffered door with uncustomary caution.
When he opened it, Max Kinsella was leaning against the opposite wall, the illumination from Matt’s doorbell-level lamp uplighting his face into a Boris Karloff mask.
“I thought you’d call first.” Matt almost stuttered.
Max Kinsella, tall, dark, and all in black, including a long Western duster, on your doorstep was not a reassuring sight. Especially in eerie lamplight.
“I’m not a vampire.” His mocking, deep voice sounded very much like Bela Lugosi without the accent. “You don’t have to invite me in. But it would be nice.”
Matt stepped out into the small hall separating his unit from the building’s circling arterial hallway. He left the apartment door ajar.
“Maybe it’s better you turned up out here,” Matt said. “The place may be bugged. I thought of that after I called Temple.”
“Calling Temple seems to be a knee-jerk reaction with you.”
“It was the only way I knew to reach you.”
“Bugged. Curiouser and curiouser.” Kinsella pushed himself away from the wall in a motion as fluid as India ink. “Say nothing until I’m done.”
Matt let Kinsella precede him into the apartment, then sat on the red Kagan sofa that Temple had spied at a thrift shop and insisted he buy.
Spotting it stopped Kinsella cold, but then he moved to the bedroom, not making a sound.
Gumshoe, Matt thought, noticing his leather-soled shoes that resembled costly Italian loafers, but were probably a knockoff chosen for their quiet, downscale soles.
Kinsella was back in the main room like an apparition, passing through en route to the spare bedroom that Matt kept practically nothing in. Matt glimpsed an ebony ghost standing on a chair seat to check the ceiling light fixture.
Then Kinsella visited the kitchen and inspected all of the cupboards as well as the lighting fixtures. The living room, under and over everything, including behind light switch and electric plug outlet covers. The phone, of course, and all the electronic equipment Matt had so reluctantly purchased in the last couple of months.
Then the French doors to the patio, the patio, and back to the living room and bedroom for a second check.
It took thirty-five minutes.
When Kinsella came to sit on the Kagan sofa, he spoke at ordinary volume.
“A good thing you have such a spare design for living. Hard to bug. And no one has. Yet, I take it. You should check the phones, though, like I did, after I go, and every day. If you know what’s supposed to be in there, you recognize what isn’t. So what’s going on?”
“I wouldn’t have bothered you—”
“You have never bothered me.” Kinsella’s smile was so slight it was anorexic.
His face was angular and arresting, rather than handsome, but Matt guessed that women didn’t notice the difference.
“You wouldn’t call on me unless something was drastically wrong,” Kinsella went on. “What?”
Matt pointed to the snake ring.
Kinsella’s long, spidery fingers plucked it like a grape, then held it up to the light as if his fingertips were a bezel for a jewel.
“Good quality. Craftsman made. Perhaps not in this country. Not very valuable. A few hundred dollars maybe. The worm Ouroboros, of course. It symbolizes eternity.”
“Is that all?”
“Probably not. More would take research.” He held the ring toward Matt.
Matt couldn’t help it; he drew back as from a live snake.
“Speak,” said Kinsella, as if addressing a trained dog.
“I thought it came in the mail when I got back from out of town. But I dumped all the mail on that table.” He pointed to the matching cube still covered in unopened letters. “I now think this was ‘delivered’ earlier. When I was gone.”
“Someone surreptitiously entered your unit, that’s why you suspected bugging. But who? Who’d want to bug you?”
“An acquaintance of yours.”
Max’s gaze shifted to Matt’s midriff. “Kitty the Cutter. Temple does have a way with words, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, she does, and this Kitty woman is your auld acquaintance not-to-be-forgot, not mine. She’s…attached herself to me, I don’t know why, but she’s getting dangerous.”
“Not ‘getting,’ my lad. She always was.”
“Drop that phony brogue. This is not Ireland, north or south. This is not twenty years ago, and this is not my problem.”
“Why would Kitty O’Connor send you a worm Ouroboros?”
Matt picked up the Post-it note and handed it to Kinsella.
“Don’t you have tweezers?”
“No.”
“Pliers?”
“No.”
“Sugar tongs?”
“For the love of God, no! What has that to do with anything?”
“Only that we shouldn’t be handling these artifacts. Pieces of physical evidence, in fact. In case we need the police to take fingerprints.”
“I don’t have any pincerlike devices. You saw the place.”
“Then get on the phone, call Temple, and ask her to bring up some tweezers.”
“Do we have to involve Temple?”
“You called her in the first place.”
“I don’t want her to know about this.”
“All right. Go down, come up with whatever story it takes to get them, and borrow some tweezers.”
Matt rose, left the apartment door open, took the stairs beside the elevator a floor down, then headed for the small private hallway to Temple’s apartment.
Before he rang the bell, he put his palm on the door, like a medium reading the scene of a haunting. This was the scene of a haunting, all right, his own haunting.
He rang the bell, waiting on pins and needles for her to answer.
“I need a pair of tweezers,” he blurted out on sight.
Temple blinked, signifying polite mystification that he should be eager to dispel. She knew something was up. He didn’t dispel anything. She was more suspicious than ever.
“Tweezers? Has Max—?
“I’ve got a…domestic emergency. Have you got some tweezers or not? Quick!”
Still blinking, Temple disappeared. She reappeared a moment later with tweezers rampant in a raised, closed right hand. A fist, as it were.
“Will these work?”
“Thanks.” Matt snatched them before he had to look into her soft steel blue eyes too long. He was bound to start saying more than he should. “I’ll bring ’em back…tomorrow or sometime.”
He raced down the little hall,
around the big circular hall, and up the stairs again.
In his apartment, Kinsella was bending over the cube table staring at the Post-it note.
He looked up to say, “Plastic baggie?”
“That I’ve got.” Matt went to the kitchen to fetch a big one.
Taking Temple’s tweezers, Kinsella placed the manila envelop and the Post-it note in the baggie. “A present for Molina. She’ll do anything for you, right? It would be best not to mention the suspected source. Tell her a demented female fan is stalking you.”
“It’s the truth.”
Kinsella cocked his head. “Sit down and tell me about it.”
Matt sat, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak for a moment. He still felt like a body double for the real actor in this instance.
“I don’t get it,” he exploded finally to Kinsella. “She’s a demon from your past. What’s she doing in my present?”
“Bad luck, I guess. What does this phrase mean, ‘Wear me’?”
“I think the snake is a ring. She’s approached me a couple of times again recently.”
“To maim again?”
“No. She knows I’d never let her get that close again.” Matt felt his hand go to his scarred side, despite himself. “This TitaniCon I took Mariah Molina to—”
“And how did that happen, I wonder?”
“That has nothing to do with this. Temple showed up there, and a woman I used to work with at the volunteer hotline, ConTact. And all three…females were somehow attacked during the convention, including Mariah.”
Kinsella became very intent. “I didn’t know that.”
“You don’t know everything, after all, I guess.”
He smiled. “No, I just act like I do. Part of the magician’s code of behavior. I know you hate coming to me with this, but it’s better than Temple, isn’t it? Why?”
“Because this Kathleen threatened Temple. And Sheila, the ConTact employee, and Mariah, and even poor Janice.”
“Janice?”
“You don’t know her. I hope. She’s an artist, does sketches for the police sometimes.”
“Hmmm. The talented portraitist of Miss Kitty. I did see that piece of work.”
“The fact is, this woman has threatened everybody. And now she sends me this…token. Like she’s daring me to not do as she says, or she’ll take it out on the people around me.”
“Why you?”
“Because you’re not available, right? You’re Mr. Invisible. You’re her real target, you have to be. But you’re holing up somewhere no one can find you, except Temple probably, so the rest of us have been turned into targets. She is your old girlfriend, after all.”
“Besides my professional services, what do you want?”
“I want you to tell me everything about her and your relationship with her.”
“Sorry, Father, I’m not about to confess my youthful sins to you.”
“I’m not a priest anymore, and you’re not a kid anymore. Whatever happened in Northern Ireland twenty years ago triggered what’s happening here and now. I’ve got to figure out what’s driving her. Don’t you understand? Temple is in danger. We’re all in danger. Except you.”
Kinsella smiled and turned the Ouroboros ring in his fingers.
“No, I’m in danger too. It’s just not obvious yet.” He glanced at Matt. “I suppose she’s targeting you because you’re the equivalent of the seventeen-year-old boy I was all those years ago. You’re a virgin, right? Don’t bother denying or claiming it. I don’t care about your sex life, or lack of it, as long as Temple isn’t involved. You’re me seventeen years ago. An overeager innocent trying to right global wrongs in a single summer. You don’t come across greenhorns like that every day, or at least Miss Kitty doesn’t, not with the role she’s played for the IRA all these years, seducing rich old men for gun money. Guns and roses, that’s been her specialty. Fortunately, she’s spent most of her time in Central and South America. Until now.
“But I doubt the rich old guys have done anything for her ego. It’s poor young men she really likes to prey on. I don’t doubt that she’s been trying to track me down, and she wouldn’t have if I hadn’t settled with Temple here in Vegas for a few months. So you’re right; it’s my fault she found us all.
“That’s all I can tell you. She seems to want to replay that deadly summer in Londonderry, when my cousin Sean was blown up in a pub bombing by the IRA. I lived to tell the tale only because I was losing my innocence to Kathleen O’Connor at the very moment he died.”
“You realize,” Matt said, “that if she’s repeating a pattern, and if I’m right in suspecting that she sent your cousin into that pub bombing deliberately, that she’ll need to kill one of us…again?”
“Will she? What does she want now? Right now? From you. Best guess.”
“To torment me.” Matt thought that was obvious. “To force me to do what she says by threatening the people around me.”
“But not me.”
“She’s never mentioned you to me.”
“Hmmm.”
Matt hesitated. He couldn’t tell Kinsella Kitty’s stated price: Matt’s body and soul, i.e., his body would do because the soul went with it. Kinsella would probably laugh, and say, “Screw her, then, and save us all.” Kinsella would probably just laugh.
He wouldn’t understand the price Matt had paid, that his soul did ride on his priestly purity, even now that he was no longer a priest.
Especially, he couldn’t tell Kinsella that emotionally, spiritually, he was utterly married to Temple. That she was the only woman he could see sharing his first sexual moments with, that in his heart, reality aside, he was still saving himself for Temple.
He remembered teaching virginity to preteens, using Saint Maria Goretti, the forgiving rape victim, as a model. That was going too far; that was woman as eternal victim. But the violation of rape or molestation was real, for a child, and for an adult. For a woman, and for a man.
Matt still had innocence to lose, long beyond the age most people are permitted to be innocent.
If Kitty O’Connor coerced that hope and dream from him, she had done something worse to him than Cliff Effinger had managed in years of daily domestic tyranny. He couldn’t let her do it and still be whole.
And, of course, she knew that.
Max Kinsella could never understand that. Except possibly Matt’s hopeless devotion to Temple. That he would understand only too well, and too personally.
Where could Matt go, who could help him, who would understand what he was up against?
Which was a devil in human guise.
He looked at the serpentine ring.
Beware of beautiful women bearing gifts.
And old grudges.
And golden chains.
Chapter 29
Damage Control
As soon as Max left Devine’s apartment he ducked into another unit’s cul-de-sac hallway and pulled a small folding cell phone from his jacket pocket.
The unit was small enough to be overlooked in a cursory search, and certainly small enough to cause no unseemly lumps in his Italian tailoring.
Before he did anything else, though, he slumped against the wall and closed his eyes. He felt as drained as if he had just done his second two-hour show of the night at the Goliath.
“Master of Mystery” had been one of his billing sobriquets, but the Mystifying Max had never believed his own hype. The mysteries of life mastered us, we the people, the eternal actors and audience at one and the same time.
Right now he felt the exhaustion of a spy who had been in the camp of the enemy for too long.
The word “enemy” made his lips spasm in the impulse of a smile. Matt Devine would be astounded that anyone might regard him that way, but it wasn’t personal, at least not between Max and Devine.
It was just that Max knew quite well that whatever had happened between Temple and Devine during Max’s enforced absence—or whatever had almost happened—had not been triv
ial. Even a master of illusion couldn’t compete with substance.
And not that his and Temple’s relationship didn’t have substance, but circumstances kept forcing it to indulge the surfaces rather than get lost in the depths below.
So Max, who had lived and worked all over Europe in his twenties and knew the attractions and evils (and that sometimes they were the same) of many worlds, found himself momentarily Koed by his recent tour of one ex-priest’s apartment. Mentally knocked off his own self-certain foundation.
Maybe it was just the intimate glimpse into someone he had to regard as a rival.
As residences went, the place was pathetic: more unfurnished than not, with an air of undergraduate impermanence. Except for the slashing grin of the red suede couch in the living room—it reminded Max of some surreal Marilyn-mouth of a loveseat designed by some artist or other whose name he couldn’t remember—everything was strictly brick-and-board and borrowed looking.
The bedroom especially, with its tiny TV on a cheesy cart, the kind of setup you’d find in a low-rent nursing home, with the childish island of a single bed, a fact Max found sad and a woman like Temple would probably find in need of fixing, with that shelf of paperback heavy reading, philosophy and sociology in broken-spine and dog-eared array…and then between Thomas Merton and Thomas Mann, the oddity of a single bestseller here and there. He found the presence of The Joy of Sex sinister. And only one popular fiction work…Surrender by Sulah Savage…Now, what was that about?
Max suddenly recalled that Temple’s engaging aunt in Manhattan, the one who owned that terrific Village condo, wrote historical romances. Maybe Surrender was one of hers. Temple had given it to Devine for some reason, and he had felt obligated to set it out. It hadn’t been read, certainly.
Manhattan. A flood of familiar emotions replaced the uneasy feelings Max was indulging now. Finally, finally, he had overcome the deep breach he had driven between himself and Temple by vanishing without word for almost a year. Even though she understood better than anybody his urge to protect her from the deadly forces on his trail, the wound of abandonment within was raw and oozing.
It was only on the alien ground of Manhattan and during the magic of the Christmas holiday, the little-kid-wanting-the-impossible time, that Max had been able to break through her hurt to the trust of a physical relationship again. It had taken every bit of the considerable charisma he possessed, and the accommodating aunt. He never made the mistake of taking Temple for granted, nor of assuming their current situation would satisfy her forever.
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