“Even the Olympic athlete deserves dessert once in a while. It is so good to be back in this kitchen.”
“It’s good to have you back. Your supposed ‘death’ fooled me completely. I thought your new career of exposing fraudulent mediums had finally pushed you over to the Other Side.”
“No, no, no, Max. I genuinely hate phony mediums, of course.”
“It was nice to know that you’d retired to such a benign pursuit.”
“So that you could too, with your little redheaded girl?”
“That was the general idea. Once, a year or so ago, before the past caught up with me.”
“I saw the notices of your ‘abrupt departure’ from Vegas. What happened?”
Max took another bite of the apple and chewed over his thoughts before speaking again.
“I was finishing up a run at the Goliath. I never told anybody this, but the Crystal Phoenix was offering me an even bigger bundle and a multiyear contract to develop a new act for them, a boutique magic show, small and stunning, a one-man Cirque du Soleil. Anything I wanted to work up.” Max found a rueful smile on his face. “I never told Temple. She’s got an in at the Phoenix. We almost would have been working together.”
“And—? Because none of this happened, did it?”
“The past showed up. Two IRA hit men.”
“Took ’em long enough to finally catch you. What? Sixteen years?”
Max picked another apple from the basket. And one more. He began juggling all three.
“It turned out they wanted money first, then murder.”
The aromas of butter and brandy on the crepes almost made Max miss an apple. But he didn’t.
“I used my magical arts, under duress, to get them into the crawl space under the Eye in the Sky setups over the Goliath casino floor.”
“And then?”
“Why do you think there’s an ‘and then’?”
“Max, my boy, you are never less than four-dimensional.”
“I led them over a high-dollar craps table where they could observe the money-changing-out routine. Only it’s always easier to enter air-conditioning ducts than to get out again, unless you’re double-jointed. I left. They didn’t. But that turned out not to be such a clever act, after all.”
Garry turned from the stove to slip two pairs of fruit-filled crepes onto two crystal dessert plates. “Yes?”
“They tried to shoot me.”
“In an air-conditioning duct? What idiots.”
Max caught one spinning apple and held it between his thumb and little finger while keeping the other two apples bouncing between his hands and the ceiling.
“One shot the other, which should have gotten both of them off my back, except the deadweight of the victim fell through the flimsy ceiling panels right smack onto the middle of the hot craps table.” He caught the second apple, and held it.
“Not discreet.”
“Not discreet. I got out of there, but I couldn’t go home again.”
The last apple came to rest in the palm of his free hand. Max heard his own voice, hard and ironic. He’d been an exile for seventeen years, and still found new places, and people, to be exiled from.
“So you left the little redheaded girl and fled . . . where?”
“Canada.”
“Refuge for many a conscientious objector.”
“The only thing I was objecting to was false imprisonment. I worked as an itinerant corporate magician/comic and didn’t dare contact Temple for almost a year.”
“So you lost her?”
“No.”
“No? She waited for you, despite hearing nary a word?”
“Redheads are stubborn. And Temple is tougher than she looks.” Max took the extended plate artfully drizzled with raspberry sauce and melted dark chocolate. “Let’s just say she took exception to a certain relentless homicide lieutenant who thought I’d done the dirty deed and that Temple had to know why and where I’d gone to. Ah. You haven’t lost your gourmet skills.”
“Very satisfying work concocting a difficult dish. I could be content to remain . . . er, dead, and allowed to indulge my palate, here in this house that my fellow gourmand Orson Welles once owned. I feel quite willing to let my legend rest in peace.”
“I can’t understand how you managed to quit the counterterrorist game, Garry. God knows I’d do it if I could.”
“Being presumed dead helps, Max. But I haven’t quit. Not at all.”
Max stopped enjoying the seduction of tender, sweet, warm crepes on the tongue.
“Damn it, Garry. You had retired. That’s why you gave me the use of this house that time forgot, and luckily everybody else. You were off to see the wizard, unmasking phony mediums.”
“Tut. Just a cover, my boy. I’m glad even you accepted it. I’ve never retired.”
“But your book.” Max was standing now, angry as much as surprised. “Your book on fraudulent mediums. I was finishing it in your honor. In memoriam.”
“Such a nice thought, my boy. I’m quite touched.”
“I’ve been banging away at that computer keyboard like a cow in boxing gloves. I’m no typist, no writer. It’s the toughest thing I’ve ever tackled.”
Garry chuckled through the forkful of crepe he’d hoisted into his mouth like a prize. “Very flattering, Max. In every way. If we both survive the next, critical few months, I’ll certainly share a byline with you on it.”
“I don’t want a byline, I want a life!”
“I’m afraid, my lad, that the only way you’ll get it is by courting Lady Death one more time.”
Max frowned as he nodded in concession. It was Temple he should be courting now, before it was too late. From what Gandolph said, though, this one last assignment would make him a free man, And, ultimately, that would make Temple a happy woman.
Clean Sweep
Midnight Louise and I pussyfoot through the empty lot that is dead center across from Maylords.
“Coyote,” she declares after a long sniff of the ground.
“So what else is new? That Wild Bunch runs this town after dark.”
“Might be a witness.”
“You that eager to see a coyote after one almost made you the main course?”
“A witness is a witness,” she says. “Besides, that other one would never have come within shiv range had I not been thrown from the motorcycle saddlebag and knocked out.”
“Well, you were, and it is lucky that I was around to face off Fangpuss.”
“Good job, Popster! His two front teeth must have been older than your latest whisker growth, though.”
“That was a primo coyote and you would have been Instant Appetizer, had I not been there. Next time you may not be so quick to secretly tail a bad actor. That motorcycle joyride into the desert dark could have fricasseed your fantail. If I had not been tailing your tail they would not have been able to peel you off the asphalt in the morning.”
“Yadda, yadda,” she says. This younger generation has no respect for anything but MTV. “Nose to the groundstone, Daddy-o. Everybody and his brother and sister and second cousin have been marking territory on this lot. Not much vacant land left in Vegas.”
The chit is correct on both counts: bare desert scrub is a rarity inside the city limits. Where it exists, every life form except alien invaders tries to establish a beachhead. I sniff coyote, all right, and domestic dog. Ugh! And rat and mouse, and several of the lizard variety, even tortoise.
What I am looking for, though, is Man. Not woman. I am not about to cross woman off my suspect list, but high-powered rifle attacks usually indicate the male of the human species. Unless we are talking somebody aberrant, like Miss Kathleen O’Connor, whom I have seen dead with my own eyes, after my associate Miss Louise offed her on a desert road.
Of course, I do not tell Miss Louise that she offed her. I encourage the fiction that it was an accident. I like my little dolls feisty, which means that I do not want them feeling guilty about their lethal
tendencies.
“We can clearly see here,” I note, “the shell casings where the dastard crouched to take aim. I am sure that this once-vacant lot will soon be crawling, quite literally, with crime-scene investigators.”
“We should brush out our tracks.” Louise sits and twitches her long, bushy extremity over a swath of dirt, sand, and gravel.
Showoff! She is more than somewhat vain about her long hair. She makes it clear that my buzz-cut one is not a very efficient broom. Just as well. I do not do women’s work.
I am forced to stand back from the mini-dust storm her cleanliness fetish is stirring up.
While doing so I detect something interesting: pads other than ours have been all over this lot for a long time. My practiced sniffer gets into the act. After several impassioned sneezes and a long walk around the perimeter I return to Miss Louise and her obsessive-compulsive cleaning motions.
“Forget the yard work,” I tell her.
“Why? You want the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to come calling at the Circle Ritz and the Crystal Phoenix with plaster casts of our feet?”
“Forensics is not into pad-prints. Besides, this place is loaded with them, not just ours. Nice, fresh ones. I think we have a few dozen witnesses to track down. From the way they scattered in all directions, they must have been on the premises when the first shots were fired.”
“A colony?” she asks.
“Not exactly,” I answer.
“Then what?”
“A gang.”
“Oh, great. Gangsters will not unbutton their lips for us.”
“This gang will. I know the top cat. One Ma Barker.”
“Ma Barker! What a name for a self-respecting feline! She must be one low-down excuse for female empowerment.”
“I cannot say,” I answer mildly. “All I know is that she could be your grandmother.”
Miss Louise’s big gold eyes widen like headlights on high power.
I cannot wait to bring her home to mother.
Hot Car
Temple and her Miata returned Matt to the Maylords parking lot at a time of morning much brighter and earlier than a night-shift man was used to.
When she mentioned this, he smiled ruefully. “Maybe I need to shake up what I’m used to. Having had a stalker decree your every move, your every moment, makes you question yourself on a pretty deep level about what’s important.”
“Like having the world’s most demanding home-room teacher.”
He laughed. “We all kinda freeze in the high school hierarchy somehow, don’t we? Getting it in our heads what we are and what other people think of what we are way too early.”
“It’s the first serious institution we tangle with. But you’re right; a lot of people are still trying to ditch their high school preconceptions in midlife crisis.”
“Maybe I should thank Kitty O’Connor, if I could.”
“Thank her? Why on earth?”
“She really knew how to play me, play my conscience. Made me see I needed to reexamine my . . . I won’t say that old cliché ‘priorities,’ but maybe my premises. I’m feeling strangely freer.”
“You are. Free of that harpy! Freer is good.” Temple smiled and looked up to the open sky as the warm breeze riffled their hair. It was like getting a scalp massage by the wind.
This was another cloudless Las Vegas morning, except for the straight chalk marks of jet vapor trails from Nellis Air Base. The day’s heat was still set low on simmer, and the sky was so blue it looked like a cool pool to jump up into.
Ahead of them the facade of Maylords’s one-story beige stucco building glittered like a high-end junkyard, though. Its glassless windows with their jagged-edge frames seemed almost deliberately arty. Helmut Newton territory.
In fact, a photographer was busily shooting away at the shot-out windows, either recording damage or creating a postmodern catalogue for the store.
When a security guy swaggered around the building’s corner, overbuilt legs and arms as stiff as a puppet’s, the whole area just looked like a crime-scene wannabe.
Temple was so busy eyeing the damage and estimating the time and cost needed to repair it that she was startled when Matt tapped her on the shoulder.
“Stop over there.”
“Where? This lot is deserted. I don’t see—”
She scanned a line of mature pine trees that bordered the lot on the east.
Something hunkered in the early morning shade, something streamlined and silver. Matt had taken the Hesketh Vampire to the opening? The vintage motorcycle, formerly Max’s and famous for its screaming engine whine at high speeds, was a spectacular ride, but it was hardly a Datemobile.
Temple had gone for a spin on it once, long ago, with Max, but she couldn’t picture tall, dignified Janice Flanders riding pillion with Matt . . . maybe she just couldn’t picture Janice Flanders with Matt, or didn’t want to.
No mystery was too small for Temple’s busy brain to ponder.
How had Matt gotten Janice home? Her car? Then how had he gotten back here for the Vampire? And why would he leave such a valuable bike in an unprotected parking lot? Forget hands! Idle questions are the devil’s workshop.
Even as Temple’s mind worried the question, one part of her cerebellum spun the Miata’s small steering wheel right. The car glided into the shade.
There Temple’s vision acclimated enough to reveal her mistake.
This was no Hesketh Vampire before her eyes. This was a candy-coated, supercool, streamlined silver, automotive baby the likes of which she had never seen.
“Matt? What is this thing?”
“A Crossfire.”
“Yeah. We did have a lot of that here last night. Bang, you’re toast . . . or tawny, or beige. Galloping gasoline prices, did this thing sit on the lot the whole time? During all that destructive snap, crackle, and pop?”
“Yeah. It’s fine. I checked it out last night before I collected you for the ride home. Lucky I parked it in the most protected and low-profile area of the lot.”
Temple followed him out of the Miata to circle the stranded car. It struck her as low and sleek enough for Las Vegas’s famous Fontana brothers (who favored Dodge Vipers) to lust after in triplicate. The two-seater had that squinty-eyed rear window all the newest speedsters sported.
“I see you have a vestigial backseat too,” Temple noted, trying shamelessly to attach herself and her new Miata to the Crossfire’s chrome dual exhaust pipes.
“It does look kinda impractical.” Matt’s sheepish frown only underlined his good looks. “But I don’t need a big vehicle shuttling back and forth from WCOO.”
“You could have made do with a golf cart. So what’s with the eye-candy car?”
Matt shrugged. “Maybe I’m tired of certain people complaining about my modest tastes. I don’t know, Temple. I guess I got carried away. I could, so I did. I’m feeling a lot that way lately. Big mistake, huh?”
“Not if you take me for a ride in this baby. What’ll it do?”
“I’m not sure. One-forty? Kind of pointless.”
“The most fun things in life are kind of pointless, or hadn’t you noticed?” Temple circled the Crossfire. “It makes my Miata look like a Tinker Toy.”
“I don’t think this is a contest.”
“Cars are always a contest.” Temple didn’t ask what she figured the Crossfire cost: around thirty-five grand.
Hmmm. Matt was still resisting buying a microwave and a cell phone, but he sprang for this?
“When’d you get it? I mean, this is a major decision. I just bought a car. I would have been glad to help.”
“It was either a Prius or this. This gets okay gas mileage. And I did all the Internet research, so I didn’t need much help.”
Temple shook her head. News flash: Matt was one severely conflicted ex-priest. This glitzy Crossfire road burner was like the evil twin to an eco-friendly, gas-saving Prius.
“Canned heat on wheels,” Temple diagnosed. “I
think it’s great you got it, after running around in—”
And then Temple got it. Of course! This was his bustin’-free-of-his-stalker car. No more slinking around in Electra Lark’s old pink Probe painted white to blend into a landscape where boring bathtub white cars repelled the desert sun.
That reminded Temple of Max and his all-black cars and all-black wardrobe in the nation’s hottest city. What did that say about contrariness? Always living on the edge of invisibility. When was the last time she had seen him in the light of day?
She returned to admiring Matt’s new car. “Crossfire. Cool. It must have set you back a bundle.”
“Certain people,” he said, through slightly gritted teeth, “have been urging me to become a conspicuous consumer.”
Oh. That might have been her. She? Whatever!
“It rocks!” she said. “You’ll have to give me a ride sometime.”
“I’d like to.”
Hmmm. The expression in his café noir brown eyes might even mean it literally.
Or Temple was fantasizing again, an unwelcome new development. She had to be responding to something new in Matt, something edgy and even a little hot. No! Matt was still too innocent to make sexy double entendres. Wasn’t he? Who knew what he had learned from a couple hours with a high-end Vegas call girl? Anyway, Temple was too committed to Max, even with their current enforced semiseparation, to think about other men’s meanings. Wasn’t she? She gritted her mental teeth. She must be the only woman in the world dithering about an ex-priest on one hand, and an ex-magician on the other. The only thing they had in common was in being uncommonly attractive. And her, of course. Youch!
“I’m glad you got it,” she said of the car.
“If you’re glad, I’m glad.”
“So glad we agree. Well, I’ve got to buzz over to the Bellagio for a meeting of Wong Inc.”
“Now who’s upscale?”
“It’s not me. It’s my client’s star guest, of whom I’ve seen zilch since last night. Amelia Wong is also the likeliest target of the shooting spree, if anyone specific was. It’s time I made up for that oversight. Wish me luck.”
“I probably should wish you good chi.”
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