Alone at last.
Everything throbbed when nothing distracted her from the pain. She was supposed to sleep, but she didn’t feel like it.
A soft thump bounded atop the bed.
“Louie! Where did you come from?”
He stalked across the bed linens, wallowing over the swells of sheet and coverlet, and padded along her left side, stopping only when he would have to walk on her shoulder to continue.
Louie’s big, furry feline face extended as he brought his jet black nose to hers, sniffing cautiously.
“You smell hospital.” Or was it blood he noticed?
Louie turned his attention—and his head—to her body and arm, which he also honored with a thorough sniffing. Then he bent to paw the sheets and settled beside her, curling up like a kitten in the vee of her arm and body.
Midnight Louie had never permitted such a cozy position in their association. Temple gingerly patted the glossy back dome of his head, at which he laid his nose on his curled paws, seemed to sigh, and closed his eyes.
Great. Maybe he’d gotten into the potent Tylenol Threes.
Temple awoke in alarm.
She couldn’t quite remember why her arm was propped on tepid plastic baggies, or why she felt like Midnight Louie’s nigh-twenty pounds had been pussyfooting all over her in the night. The cat no longer lay next to her.
Moonlight leached through the fretwork of the French doors, throwing a pale plaid on the parquet tile.
Then it all came back to her. She sat up, panicked, heedless of the pain rapid movement brought. Her blood was battering at all her pulse points as if for exit. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t catch her breath—maybe that’s why her pulse was pounding, she’d been running in her dreams to catch her breath....
A light sweat dappled her entire skin in an instant, chilling her in the relentless spin of the ceiling fan’s Plexiglas blades. Hot flashes at her age? Well, she was pushing thirty, she thought glumly. Combine that with recent shocks and it could happen. Wait. The pills! Strong, Electra had said. Maybe she was having a bad reaction.
Temple forced herself out of bed, hearing herself gasp for air in the tranquil silence.
Her bare feet stuck to the wooden floor as she skated for the door. It opened onto her living room. Moonlight from the bank of the French doors drenched that end of the room and bleached the walnut floor to white pine.
It also silvered the huge, alien form crouching low in front of the doors like an albino tiger. Temple skittered away into the living room proper—and found herself knocking into a larger, whiter unexpected shape.
“Temple?” a man’s voice asked from the dark.
Max!
And then all the alien elements in the room—the two misplaced hunks, the man’s voice—spun a little in her senses as she recognized them for familiar things out of place... her cocktail table turned stumbling block, her sofa turned bed, her neighbor turned watchdog-cum-counselor.
“Yes,” she answered shakily. “I woke up suddenly. I couldn’t remember at first.”
“That was probably the Tylenol wearing off. Time to take another pill.”
“Yes. No! Not just yet. I want to feel like myself for a while.” She sat on the misplaced bed’s foot. “Did you see Louie leave?”
“Was he here?”
She nodded, then remembered that the room was dark and Matt wasn’t used to its nighttime shapes. “Decidedly here, keeping me company in the bedroom. Maybe he went out.”
“How? I never opened the French doors.”
“The spare bathroom window is always cracked open.”
“But that’s two floors!”
“That’s Louie’s private exit and entry. Don’t ask me how. Oh,” Temple said despite herself, still feeling rocky.
“Are you all right?” Matt shifted in the bed.
Temple finally realized why she had such trouble making out his figure in the dim room. He was wearing his martial-arts outfit as pajamas. The pale material blended with the ivory-colored sheets. She had to credit him with coming up with a neat answer to the awkwardness of sleeping over. She wondered what he wore—or didn’t wear—when he didn’t have to be prepared for strange women barging into his sleeping area.
“Are you all right?” he repeated.
“I’m woozy from the pill, I guess.” Matt waited. “And I think I just had a panic attack.”
She could see the moonlight-gilded sheen of his hair nodding.
“That’s why I’m here. Your body knows better than your mind what it’s been through. You’ll be extra jumpy for a while.”
“Maybe I’ll have reason to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just realized something else. I’m afraid I was in mental as well as physical shock last night. I haven’t been honest with you.”
After a silence, Matt said, “How?”
“I didn’t want to make it common knowledge, or maybe I didn’t want to face facts. Those weren’t two strangers that attacked me—I mean, they were strangers, to me. But they weren’t to someone I know. Knew.”
She heard the sheets rustle as Matt sat up and pushed them back. “What are you saying?”
“That it hadn’t occurred to me, but they could come back, could come here. It isn’t fair to let you do guard duty without letting you know that there’s more to be worried about than me just freaking out.”
“Why? Why are they after you?” He came around to sit beside her on the bed’s edge.
“Not me. Max.”
“Hmm.”
“What do you mean, ‘Hmm’?”
“Electra mentioned that you’d had a friend. A stage magician, she said.”
“What else did Electra mention?”
“Only that he’d moved on,”
“She didn’t say how?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Restrained of you. Well, Max overdid the magician bit one day, and vanished. Just like that. Four months ago. Left behind a few of his few favorite things. Me. A motor' cycle I didn’t know about, I’ve since learned. Some clothes and CDs.”
“The men who assaulted you wanted him?”
“They wanted to know where he was.”
“And you couldn’t tell them.”
“No. Wouldn’t, either, if I could help it.”
“Is that why you and the police lieutenant—”
“Why we don’t get along? Sure, along with plain, rock-bottom mutual antipathy.”
“I was going to say—why you know each other?”
“Oh. Well, we don’t get along. God, I hated telling Molina about those creeps being after Max! She’s after him herself, you know. Until tonight she wouldn’t tell me why. Even what she finally told me sounds like only half of it.”
“Why, then?”
She glanced at Matt. The moonlight reached the end of the bed, so she could see his features, and he could read the truth of hers.
“The night Max vanished, he’d finished a run at the Sultan’s Palace in the Goliath. That same night the body of the casino’s security assistant was found in a secret hideaway in the ceiling—not the ordinary surveillance area above the gaining tables, but a hidden, unauthorized observation post.”
“Coincidence,” Matt said, shaking his head.
“Molina doesn’t believe in coincidence. She thinks Max had the expertise to fashion that hidden post, to get in there, and to get someone else in there, maybe to kill that person. ”
“So why is she down on you?”
“Because when she came looking for answers about Max, I didn’t have any.”
“Or were you just not giving out any?”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have talked if I knew, but I didn’t know! And Molina didn’t believe me any more than those men did, although I gotta say her interrogation technique, much as it leaves to be desired, is infinitely preferable to theirs.”
“Poor kid,” Matt said impulsively, his fingers pushing into the curls at the nape of her neck.
<
br /> A kindly gesture, abstracted almost, but Temple felt a silken shiver down her spine that had nothing to do with panic attacks.
That’s when she realized something else had awakened her and driven her out of the bedroom—loneliness under pressure, a need for comfort and care after a terrifying ordeal.
And here they were, all alone together. She wouldn’t even have to worry about violating a bed Max and she had shared. No ghosts but the man dressed only in white martial-arts garb and moonlight.
She held herself still, neutral, and Matt’s hand dropped away.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I stayed because I knew that you wouldn’t feel safe from those men for a long time, especially tonight. If they do come here, I’d be ready for them. I’m the human self-defense machine, remember? If they’re really out to get you specifically, you should do more than contact that self-help group. You should study martial arts yourself.”
“Oh, Matt! Who’d take me seriously? Martial Arts Mouse strikes again. These guys were big.”
“Size has nothing to do with martial arts. They teach little kids.”
“I’m not a jockette. The only muscles I’ve built up are in my feet.”
“That’s why it’s ideal for you. It doesn’t depend on brute strength. There’s a studio only blocks from here. Jack Ree’s a great teacher.”
“Well, the gear is kind of cute”—she tugged on his full-cut sleeve—“but I’d get lost in it. And I bet I couldn’t wear my high heels, right?”
“Not if you want to kick the menace out of anybody. We work barefoot.”
“Never! Not in public.”
“You really have a thing about it, don’t you?”
“Appearing without high heels for me is like appearing nude would be for somebody else,” she said firmly.
Matt leaned over to inspect her feet. “You’re barefoot now.”
“Except at home,” she added with great dignity.
He pondered for a moment. “I can’t stay here every night.”
“Who says?” she couldn’t resist saying. “Oops. Must be the Tylenol talking.”
He was thinking hard and hadn’t heard her, or had and wasn’t going to comment. “I could teach you,” he said. “Here. At home. Then you wouldn’t have an excuse.”
“Here?”
He looked around the room. “Not here. Down by the pool. I could borrow a couple mats from Jack. You don’t
work nine-to-five every day, and I’ve got afternoons off.”
“Would I have to wear the cutesy pajamas?”
“I thought you liked mine.”
“On you. And not even Cuban heels?”
“The only thing you’re going have on your heels will be calluses.”
“Sounds unappetizing.”
“I’m serious, Temple. You might find out you’re not as little as you think you are.”
She shrugged. “You and Molina,” she conceded sourly. “A couple of authoritarian do-gooders. Just for all your meddling, I’m going to find the G-string murderer, and tie him—or her—in knots with my new tai kwan chi.”
“Tai chi or tae kwon do,” Matt said, laughing. “Why should your finding another murderer get my goat?”
“It won’t, but I hope it’ll fry Lieutenant Molina down to her hard-boiled clodhopper sole.”
Talking to someone in the middle of the night was always therapeutic. When Temple returned to her bedroom—unaccompanied, darn!—visions of herself playing Karate Kid danced in her head until the fantasy became a dream and dream, morning.
She slipped into low-heeled slides and a wraparound sundress she didn’t have to dislocate her arms to get into, and entered the sunny front room. Not to worry. No Matt. The sofa was a sofa again, with the bedding folded neatly on one arm. Matt must have learned such disciplined bed-making at boot camp or something.
She shuffled into the kitchen for something hot and bracing. With Matt gone, Temple enjoyed a certain, guilty relief. She could limp around the apartment without putting a brave face on her injuries, and without worrying about what her actual makeup-bare face looked like. She could even cuss under her breath.
And she did. It hurt to open the cupboard door and reach up for the mug, to turn on the faucet and twist open the instant-coffee jar. Running the microwave didn’t hurt, thank goodness.
She turned from the cupboards, looking for some Equal to sweeten the straight black bitterness of coffee, and saw a foreign object poised on the opposite counter. Her shoe. Whole again. Heeled, so to speak. Heel and sole.
Temple smiled as she hobbled over to pick it up. Matt must have gotten up extra early and Super Glued the heel back on. She was standing there with a cup of coffee in one hand and mooning over a shoe in the other when her doorbell rang.
She glanced at the black-cat and pink-neon wall clock. Eight o’clock. Who’d call that early? Unless Lieutenant Molina couldn’t wait until nine for Temple to start her mug-shot search.
She reluctantly set down the shoe and wobbled for the door. She opened it on Electra’s worried face.
“Did you have a good night, dear? I mean, did you sleep well?”
“Mostly,” Temple answered vaguely. “Want some too-black coffee?”
“Never touch the stuff. Here, let me pour a little out, add a bit of water and... voila!”
“Thanks,” Temple said, accepting the diluted, drinkable coffee. “I’m not together yet, and I have to be at police headquarters downtown by nine.”
“That’s what I’m here for. Breakfast while you wait. Assistant dresser, whatever. Do you want me to give you a ride there? The Vampire awaiteth.”
“No, thanks. A bit too much agitation for me. I can get myself around once I get myself going. I wish—”
“Yes, dear—?”
“I wish I had another pair of ears and eyes at the Goliath for the strippers’ competition. I won’t be able to get in until ten or so, and I’ve got a feeling that the show has just begun to get on the road.”
“Can you still do that job under the circumstances?”
“If they lost two PR people in a row, they’d really freak. Besides, it’s too late for anyone else to come in cold.”
“Maybe Mr. Buchanan is feeling better and can spell you.”
“Electra, I’m going to be fine. I’ll be better off with work to take my mind off things. And I wouldn’t wish Crawford Buchanan on anybody.”
Electra was banging through the cupboards in an effort to be helpful. She clattered the dishes, then handed Temple a cereal bowl. “Here’s some milk.”
“Thanks.” Temple set down the coffee mug and took the tablespoon that Electra gave her, and crunched away at a generous spoonful. “Arghgk!” She ran to the sink and spat out her mouthful.
“What is it, dear? Is your stomach too delicate from the attack to—”
“Stomach nothing. It’s my taste buds.” Temple returned to the counter, picked up the so-called cereal container and squinted closely at the fine print. Since she had expected Matt, she had left her glasses on the bedside table.
“Electra, this is Louie’s Free-to-Be-Feline, not cereal! Aiyuch! No wonder he won’t eat it.”
“Oh, sorry! It looked like some trendy new cereal. Something certifiably healthy.”
“It’s supposed to look like that,” Temple commented sourly. “That’s how they sell it to gullible humans. Cats are apparently harder to fool. Would you mind looking in the lower cupboard? I need some protein. I’m sure Louie wouldn’t object to sharing some of the water-packed, dolphin-sparing fancy albacore people-tuna that’s so bad for him with me.”
19
A Kinky Cat-tail
Paging through mug shots was like perusing a yearbook of the terminally tough.
Temple flipped past enough slightly skewed faces, tattoos, scraggly beards, sideburns and mustaches, scars and criminally close eyes to cast the gang members in several road-show companies of West Side Story.
“It’s hard,” she told th
e uniformed female officer who came back to check on her progress. “They were on me so fast, and they didn’t look that unusual.”
Officer Ontiveros, a woman of impressive muscularity, nodded, and offered a slim smile of encouragement. “The subconscious works all the time. Give yours a chance to testify.”
So Temple turned page after page, wondering what Molina expected her to find: petty muggers or big-time muscle? Were her attackers even in this massive book?
At last she indicated three men who might have attacked her. “Obviously, I’m wrong about at least one,” she said.
“That’s okay, miss. It’s a lead. The hard part will come if we dredge up any of these guys and have to go to lineup.”
Molina must have been nearby watching, though that seemed unlikely. She strolled up just as Temple was about to be released from her civic duty, sat on the desk edge—no mercy the morning after—and looked down at Temple thoughtfully.
“Officer Ontiveros tells me you had some luck.”
Temple nodded cautiously. She couldn’t guarantee anything, she’d just done her best.
“I wish I’d had as much luck as you,” Molina added.
“Oh?” Temple knew she was jumping hook, line, sinker and peach snakeskin high heels into something.
Molina rapped the manila file in her hand on the glass-topped desk. Temple didn’t know why they bothered with the glass. The desktop was scarred by ballpoint squiggles, X-Acto knife cuts, and coffee-cup rings.
“I never did unearth a photograph of Max Kinsella,” Molina said. “Not a one. Quite a mystery man to the end.”
Temple tried not to wince at that last phraseology. “The Goliath had tons of publicity shots,” she said. “Head shots and eight-by-tens by the dozen.”
“Not now, they don’t.”
“Oh, come on, Lieutenant. I saw those photos. I had ’em copied and distributed myself. Max didn’t know PR from Puerto Rico. Maybe the publicity department didn’t check the files.”
“They did, and I did. Not a photo.”
“What about the lobby placards?”
“Gone. Vanished.”
“You’re kidding! Those are collectors’ items. This town was plastered with ephemera of Max. He was a big draw. You don’t work the major hotels here unless you are.”
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