Osiris frowns, an expression that lends a leonine dignity to his already formidable presence.
“I am not sure. I remember rushing outside somehow. Butch was awake and pacing in his cage. Our eyes met. Then…I cannot remember.”
“Someone must have caged you again, so the animal control people could handle you.”
“I am not difficult to handle,” Osiris says a bit huffily. “I am trained.”
“Exactly my point. And perhaps you were being trained for the role of murderer.”
“What do you mean?”
The Big Cats may be bigger but they are not always brighter.
“I mean that you were not fed for a reason. And your claws were allowed to grow for the same reason. Had not one of my ilk illegally obtained a forbidden snack for you from one of the other cages, and you had been released in the house ravenous and reverted to your savage state, you might well have mauled Cyrus Van Burkleo beyond all recognition—and destroyed the evidence of human battering, instead of merely puncturing him a bit.”
“They were ‘training’ me to kill him?”
“They were training you to look like you had killed him, only it backfired.”
“This is terrible! My professional reputation would have been ruined. My reliability is all I have.”
“Your professional reliability would have been moot. If you had been found with bloody claws over a mutilated human body, you would be dead by now. As it is, you rest under a cloud.”
“You mean I am still suspected of being a rogue animal?”
“And the people who set this up might want you permanently off the planet.”
Osiris’s yellow eyes gleam with the light of recognizing danger. His claws flex. “Who must I watch out for?”
“It could be anyone, and the best service you can do yourself is forget that I told you someone might want to kill you. If you jump the gun and attack an innocent Oasis worker, your career and your life are down the drain.”
“So I must wait to be attacked?”
“I am afraid so. Frankly, my dear Osiris, it is nothing different from what would have happened to you at Rancho Exotica if they had sold your hide to one of their weekend hunters.”
Chapter 36
Synth You Went Away…
Temple tried to imagine Midnight Louie covered in spots, leopard spots.
Then she looked again at the real leopard.
No, a domestic cat was not just a big cat. The leopard’s head was smaller in proportion to its long, lithe body. (Long was a suitable adjective for Louie, but lithe was not.)
Its ears were smaller and rounder than a house cat’s.
And its face was heavier and blunter.
It so much reminded her of Leonora Van Burkleo’s surgically altered features that Temple would never be able to look at another big cat without thinking of that strange woman.
The leopard was contentedly gnawing a piece of raw meat, which Temple chose to regard as a vague blur of some unknown species.
“He was hungry,” Kirby Grange commented. “Those damn people didn’t feed him properly.”
Max nodded, staring at the leopard as he had stared at the panther.
It finally rose, stretched, and came toward the fencing to view its three visitors.
No cages at the Animal Oasis, but outdoor areas set up for each animal.
Max put his hand to the fence. The leopard came over. Max unfolded his fingers, as if producing an invisible illusion. The leopard nudged its huge blunt nose into his palm.
Temple winced.
“He’s been trained,” Max said.
Grange shrugged and folded hairy forearms over his formidable beer belly. “A lot of the big cats that damned ranch gets are ex-roadside attractions, ex—circus animals, ex-zoo exhibitions, ex-pets. I knew what they were up to, but I didn’t figure on ’em abusing the animals before they sent them out to be killed.”
“Would hungry animals show more spirit during the hunt?” Temple wondered.
Grange’s sharp look softened with pity for her amazing ignorance as he considered her question. “They don’t need the animals to show what you call ‘spirit.’ The poor-spirited trophy collectors who come out to shoot them don’t need any illusions. Just herd ’em out there where they can’t hurt the shooter, but close enough to take a few bullets or arrows in the body and die sooner or later. More often later. Then hand the proud hunters the head and hide in a salt-packed box and ship ’em to wherever for immortality on the home or office wall. If every person in America who saw a mounted animal head in someone’s place said, “Oh, are you one of those yellow-bellied canned hunters?” it might take the fun out of it and they wouldn’t come back for more and drop their ten or thirty grand for one less of an endangered species. ’Course, I don’t hold with shooting unendangered species like that either.”
“There are,” Max said contemplatively, still engaged in his odd eye contact with the leopard, “legitimate hunters.”
“No, Max, there are not.” Granger’s voice was as firm as three-day-old concrete. “There are hunters who get licenses and hunt in season and who follow strict codes of ethics, like not endangering other hunters and fair chase and all that. And I still have no time for them. Nature’s hard enough on wildlife as it is, why does humanity have to persecute it with all our high technology, especially now when we don’t need that to survive?”
“Bow hunters aren’t high tech,” Max pointed out.
“No. And they’re the worst of all, because they can maul and wound worse than any rifleman. Caveman mentality.” He spat into the dust five feet away, startling a dirt-colored lizard into running to escape the acid rain.
“So,” said Temple, “if you know about the ranch and what goes on there, why can’t it be stopped?”
“Proof. Pull. Nobody wanting to stir up controversy.”
“At least we got this guy out,” she said, nodding at the leopard.
“At least he laid a claw on that Van Burkleo guy, but I don’t believe he did more than paw at the body. I doubt I could keep myself from stopping there, and I’m a civilized human.” Granger laughed bitterly. “As long as he’s kept secure here, and they can’t blame him directly for the death, they can’t order him killed.”
“They’d execute a leopard?”
“Yes, Miss Barr. When a wild animal we higher beings have under lock and key acts like it’s supposed to, we kill it because we say it’s become ‘unreliable.’ Even if it’s just suspected of harming a human.”
“Some people will never change their spots, Kirby,” Max said wryly. “You know anything about those protesters that were out on the ranch land before Van Burkleo died?”
Granger shifted from booted foot to foot. “Might,” he said.
“They were after more than disrupting a hunt or two, weren’t they? Photos?”
“Yeah, maybe. But Van Burkleo had a big enough security force to keep anyone too far away to get evidence. You’d think the place was Area Fifty-one.”
“You could have asked me,” Max said. “I would have been able to get some photographic evidence.”
“You’re a magician, Max. Or were. When are you going to amaze the town again, anyway?”
Max waved his hands, dismissing the question of his future.
The leopard’s muzzle and ears lifted at the gesture. It stalked over to the fence edge to confront Max again.
Temple was startled to hear the sound of a faint but large lawn-mower.
The leopard was purring. He liked Max.
Midnight Louie he was not.
But then again, Max wasn’t sleeping in the leopard’s bed.
Max stroked the huge head as it rubbed by.
Granger opened his mouth in warning, but said nothing.
“I can get photos,” Max said. “Just let me know when a hunt’s planned.”
“I don’t know that stuff. I jest hear about it from the animal-rights folks after it’s over. ’Sides, where can a fellah reach the M
agnifying Max these days anyway?”
Max smiled. “The Mystifying Max. That is a problem. Temple can give you her card.”
Granger suddenly relaxed into his usual good-ole-boy charm. “You sure you want to take that risk, partner? I might be tempted to call her number jest to hear that nice growly little voice of hers. Sounds like a tiger cub.”
Temple cleared her throat and presented a card.
“Acts like it sometimes too,” Max said. “So I wouldn’t bother her unnecessarily.”
“You’re jest like that leopard there, Max. Territorial.”
Max shrugged this time. “Only way to be, in this wicked world.”
“Well, this here’s my territory.” Granger squinted into the monotonous distance. “And no animal that gets here gets hurt. Unless it’s a man with a gun.”
As they drove away, Temple shook her feet out of the sandals and planted her bare soles on the car’s cool carpeting.
“Ummm. I’ve inhaled enough dust today to pass for an air cleaner. What is it with you and that panther and leopard? This is the man Midnight Louie won’t honor with a passing glance, and you practically have leopards and panthers eating out of your bare hand. What are you, Dr. Dolittle?”
“No trick. They’ve both been trained to work with humans.”
“Both?
Max glanced at her just before he was occupied with turning onto the highway and merging with traffic.
“Both. That’s what I found so interesting.
“Wait a minute! This is the Cloaked Conjuror’s leopard, but you said the Synth may have kidnapped it.”
“May have.”
“And then…sold it to the hunting ranch? Why?”
“The Synth is angry with the Cloaked Conjuror. I wondered why he hadn’t gotten a ransom demand. Obviously, the leopard was worth a lot to him, professionally. And you don’t work with an animal without getting attached to it. I wonder if, after it had been killed, he would have been sent the head.”
Temple made a noise of revulsion. “Why didn’t you just tell Mr. Granger who the leopard belongs to and get him home?”
“For one thing, I don’t want to alert whoever abducted the leopard that anyone knows where it is. That might be dangerous for the leopard. For another, Kirby has become less liberal since the days when he provided my cockatoos. He no longer approves of performing animals, no matter how well they’re cared for.”
“What about Siegfried and Roy and their breeding program for rare white tigers?”
“I don’t know. Kirby’s more of a hard-liner now than when I worked with him before.”
“Maybe having a canned-hunt club for a neighbor has something to do with it.”
Max nodded, looking abstracted.
Temple amused herself by trying to dust off her diamonds using the soft inside of her knit top.
“You can take custody of this,” she said after a minute.
“You don’t like masquerading as the rich and famous?”
“And as the mugged? I don’t think so. Did you see how Leonora couldn’t take her eyes off of it? And that Rafi guy, when he first spotted it, the look he had.”
“What?”
“Angry. And hungry.”
“Interesting. What did you think of him?”
“I already told you.”
“As a woman.”
“As a woman. You mean if I met him in a singles club, which I wouldn’t because I don’t go there.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Temple thought back. “He must be forty…”
“Age is the first thing you notice about a man?”
“That’s the problem. I really wouldn’t have noticed him if you weren’t asking me to make observations. He’s one of those older guys—”
“Older? At forty. Remind me to not have any birthdays for the next few years.”
“He seems more like fifty, really. I get a sense he’s been through the mill, that he’s down and out and has been for a long time, but he used to be something once. There’s an air of authority. Granted, it comes out as arrogance, but there’s something unconscious about it. Oh, and my opinion as a woman, by which I assume you mean how sexy I find him: I don’t, because I’m not looking for sexy, at least not outside the neighborhood, but he has a certain appeal in a noir kind of way. He’s pretty good-looking, or would be if he didn’t look so dissolute. You think he and Leonora have a thing going?”
“Now, that’s an idea. Husband dies, he shows up.”
“Now I get to ask you what you thought of Leonora.”
“Why? Tit for tat?”
“I’ve seen her before and you haven’t.”
“Something to see, all right. What would possess a normal woman to systemically rearrange her face into something out of Cats!?”
“Fashion, I suppose. And a weird kind of tribute to her husband’s business? But what did you think of her, as a man?”
“She comes across as sexually predatory, but I sense no heart in it. It’s automatic. If anything, I’d suspect she’s frigid.”
“That eliminates a hot affair with Rafi.”
“She might be able to fake it to get what she wants.”
“Which is…was…hubby dead?”
“I charged in there like the Ugly American in Tunisia, ready to buy the place up from the get-go. And she was perfectly willing to entertain my offer. He’s dead. She sells, takes the money, and runs before the authorities close the whole shebang down.”
After a pause, Max glanced at Temple. “How do you read the perfect secretary?”
“Courtney? Oddly like Leonora. I mean, wearing all that gold big-game jewelry—They could be clones.”
“All big-game hunters’ women wear that stuff. You see it at big-game conventions. The men buy traps and guns, the women gold trophies in jewelry.”
“You’ve been at a big-game hunter’s convention?”
Max shrugged modestly. “In the performance of my duty. That’s why I recognize the charm bracelets.”
“Clones. But not in the face.” A rough patch of terrain jolted some new ideas into her head.
“You think in the bedroom?” Max sometimes read her mind.
“Well…Courtney did strike me as the mistress type. But I sense that she’s out in the cold, so what would she gain from killing Cyrus? Nothing, except a loss of position.”
“If that’s her only position.”
“There’s more than horizontal for mistresses?”
“There is if she’s got another agenda.”
“What? Max! Don’t gloat. What did I miss?”
“I don’t think you missed it, I just think you didn’t draw the proper conclusion.”
“Oooh! It’s the jewelry, right?”
He nodded.
“So what’s so special about ostentatious”—here she waggled her ring finger at him—“expensive baubles? Theirs are all animal-based designs. Heavy. Obviously eighteen-karat gold. Crude trophies when you think of the creatures that are killed by the men in their lives.” Temple thought and jolted and stared at Sahara-style sand.
“Wait. Courtney wore one piece that wasn’t clunky and ostentatious and representative of big game. That wiry pendant, really thin. Delicate.”
Max’s profile was grinning.
“That’s why you did that salaam over her hand with your nose in her cleavage!”
“She doesn’t have any cleavage. Believe me, I know.”
“Neither do I, but I don’t get those big-time bows. You were checking out the pendant.”
“And—?”
“And it didn’t look like anything, just some lines joined together.” Temple pictured the oddly subtle charm in question. Her mind suddenly inflated it from two inches square to two feet square.
“Max! It’s the…thingie drawn on the floor where Professor Jeff was killed. At the University of Nevada campus. The out-of-skew house shape a kid would draw. Courtney is with the Synth?”
“The Synth is apparently beh
ind the CC’s leopard being kidnapped. Maybe she’s the reason it ended up at the Rancho Exotica.”
“And who is the reason the leopard ended up alone together with a dead Cyrus Van Burkleo?”
Max lifted his profile to the horizon, dreaming as he drove. Why not, there was nothing out here but rattlesnakes and cactus and ruts?
“Cyrus. It almost sounds like Osiris.”
“If a leopard could be Irish.”
Max winced. “Don’t remind me of that. The Synth seems fond of the arcane. Maybe there’s a cosmic balance in a leopard named Osiris being on the death scene of a man named Cyrus. A balance, do you think?”
“The Synth is against trophy hunting?”
“The Synth may do its own form of trophy hunting, but I suspect—what would you call a gang of rogue prestidigitators…a sleight of magicians?—would be protective of the big cats they have traditionally worked with. Maybe the Synth was killing two birds with one stone: stopping Van Burkleo, and inconveniencing the Cloaked Conjuror.”
“Then the Synth never meant to harm the leopard.”
“No. I think the Synth is strictly interested in interspecies mayhem. Interprofession actually.”
“It’s much more likely that the women in his life killed Van Burkleo. He wasn’t a rogue magician. He was just a greedy egoist.”
“Then whatever the Synth’s peripheral games, we’re back to the women in the case.”
They rode in silence for a while. Cyrus Van Burkleo, the big-game hunter, seemed to have met his match and ended up dead. Leopard Lady and Synth Woman.
“I can’t really understand the woman,” Max said.
“Leonora?”
“Yes. Unless I learn why she had turned herself into a plastic surgeon’s playground. Could a smooth PR woman weasel her surgeon’s name out of her?”
“Maybe. But it could be somebody out of the country. I wonder how many U.S. surgeons would be willing to do that to a human face?”
“With enough money,” Max said, “you’d be surprised.”
* * *
“Was it a good Agatha Christie foreplay?” Max asked with a grin as he dropped Temple off in the Circle Ritz parking lot.
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