Cat in an Alien X_Ray

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  A lowball glass with an inch and a half of amber liquid descended to the coffee table in front of him.

  “It’s not the prime brand you keep at home,” she warned him, “but you need it.”

  He did. He took a stinging gulp. “My legs are almost normal.”

  “But not your head, yet.”

  “Head and heart.”

  “Regrets?”

  He looked up. Her eyes were nonaccusing, and as blue as the Morning Glory Pool at Yellowstone. Memory, he thought, might hide in the depths of such eyes, eyes so like Kathleen O’Connor’s.

  “Regrets? Do you mean about a certain engaged couple? No. Only that I’m the cause of a lot of the grief that people I’ve known have faced.”

  “I hate to puncture your cozy, self-hating cocoon of ego and guilt, but you are not the cause. You are the mere pretext. The cause is this highly damaged and damaging psychopath you and your cousin had the bad luck to encounter.”

  “So I’ll chase another will-o’-the-wisp. If I have a surviving psychopath, maybe Las Vegas is still haunted by vestiges of the mob, some greedy and retired old don who still wants to squeeze filthy lucre out of the trillion-dollar city.”

  Molina sighed and sipped. “Vegas has indeed had an explosion of entrepreneurial interest in the mob,” she said. “There’s the forty-two million dollars of official civic museum in the same civil courts building that held Senate hearings to bust the mob in the ’50s. Now the Mob Attraction Las Vegas at the Tropicana is vying with the underground Chunnel of Crime that links the separate venues of the Crystal Phoenix and Gangsters.”

  “What is this fever for interactive attractions?” Max asked rhetorically. “It used to be that a magician inviting an audience member onstage to assist in an illusion was a biggie. Now people are expecting to see whole buildings disappear before their eyes.”

  “Or elephants,” Molina said with a toasting gesture of her beer bottle.

  “Ahh, you’re talking about the elephant, the girl sitting on the elephant trunk, and the disappearing trunkful of prize money last week. I assume you got a report on that incident at the Oasis.”

  “I got film, Kinsella. Not all of the street hucksters milling around that million-dollar giveaway were street hucksters.” She eyed him hard. “And you of all people know that from firsthand experience.”

  Max took the fifth by not responding.

  “The only thing I’m wondering,” Molina went on, “is if you and the Cloaked Conjuror switched places. You have the height to do it, and I imagine the Cloaked Conjuror might have enjoyed a few minutes performing out of his disguising carapace.”

  “Carapace. Interesting word for a full head mask and a bulletproof padded costume that weighs sixty pounds. CC leads an insanely constricted life. I suspect someday he’ll take the money and run, never to be seen in Vegas again.”

  “I’m guessing Matt Devine has the same hopes for you.”

  Max shook his head. “I’m no threat. I’m not only crippled in mind and body, but I’ve got a brand-new girlfriend.”

  “Lay off the ‘poor me’ stuff,” she was already saying, then exhibited the same indignant reaction as Matt Devine. “Wait a couple months or three. You’re performing in disguise as the Phantom Mage—the Cloaked Conjuror should sue you for that—when you get your bungee cord sabotaged and crash spectacularly. You’re spirited away to two months of coma and leg casts in a fancy Swiss clinic, end up on the run across Europe and Ireland, and come back here alive, crippled, and memory impaired. Yet you’ve replaced Temple Barr in your affections, presto change-o?”

  “Yes,” Max said simply. “Want to see a photo?”

  Before Molina could open her lips or shake her head to indicate “no,” he had his phone screen in front of her face. The first photo showed Revienne showing a lot of leg on a slot machine stool at the Paris. That was his favorite. He clicked through a couple of smashing portraits of her full face and in profile against the Paris’s beautifully lit balloon.

  Molina sat speechless, a state that Max enjoyed more than he would ever let her see.

  “That woman’s … a stunner,” she finally got out, “but I don’t see—”

  “And überbright. Don’t let the façade make you underestimate the foundations. She’s a noted psychologist in Europe and here, works gratis on teenage eating disorders. Gutsy too. Went on the lam across the Alps in a Saint Laurent Paris suit and Charles Jourdan pumps. Hacked my casts off and begged food from Swiss farmers and other … necessary things for us.

  “By the way,” he added, suddenly serious. “This is just a hunch from an accidental half-wit, but from what I’ve seen, no one could replace Temple Barr.” Max leaned back on the sofa, took a long satisfactory draft of whiskey, eyed Molina, and tapped the phone photo of Revienne. “I want you to run her through Interpol.”

  “Okay. You have my jaw dropping. You must be very proud of yourself. And, meanwhile, you’re sleeping with this wonder woman?”

  Max gave an affable shrug. “Or she’s sleeping with me. There’s a difference.” He turned the phone image to face him. “I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t believe in convenient escapes with bright, beautiful strangers. Remember The X-Files catch phrase: ‘Trust no one.’”

  Molina stirred uneasily on the couch. “What makes you bring up that old cult TV show?”

  “Not old, classic,” Max corrected her. “Like us. And the songs you sing.” He grinned before going on. “Now, what did you want to see me for? I’m at your service for anything not horizontal. I do have some standards.”

  * * *

  It took a couple of minutes for Molina to exhaust such nouns and adjectives as “gall,” “arrogance,” “amoral,” and “treacherous.”

  All he said at the end of it was, “I’ve e-mailed you her photos. Her name is Revienne Schneider, and it’s real. Dig deep. This could involve your career.”

  “As if you care about my career.”

  “Deeply,” he said. “I need solid contacts.”

  “Look here, Kinsella, I am using you, not the opposite.”

  “Let’s compromise. We’re using each other, in a purely platonic way, of course. There’s one big nasty conspiracy underlying the sometimes silly excesses of Vegas. You might look into the movements of Cosimo Sparks for the past couple of years.”

  “He’s a victim of an unsolved murder.”

  “No reason he couldn’t also have been a perp beforehand.”

  “You give me a headache.”

  “Great. Then we can never have sex.”

  “As if I would—”

  He cut her off, as fun as it was to smash into the iron wall of her professionalism. “I know. You’re all business and no personal life. So…”

  “Anybody else you want me to investigate for you?” She’d reverted to sarcasm.

  “Well, in the larger picture, why Las Vegas is going prerecorded and interactive. Artifacts from real life and movie crime on display, guests interacting with 3-D holograms of movie mobsters and live actor guides, deciding if they want to become part of the ‘Family’ or else—”

  “An ‘immersive experience,’ they call it,” Molina said. “Ask your ex-fiancée. She was up to her pert little nose in using that Chunnel of Crime ride to freak out a possible murderer.”

  “Cosimo Sparks’s murderer,” Max said.

  “He was a magician, not a mobster.” Molina’s tone tightened. “Or was he both?”

  “I hear the suspect for his death is some notoriously flamboyant international architect. Not your usual slasher.”

  “He had his suspicious hands on the murder weapon—an ice pick—but I’m not convinced he used it lethally. Sparks was known to you?”

  “Most likely not. Different generation. Different level of professionalism.”

  “By that, I’m to gather that he was a penny-ante has-been?”

  “You seem to be admitting that I’m a high-dollar up-and-comer.”

  “You were. Once. Do you even remember
your signature illusions?”

  “You ever see me perform?”

  “Not on my wish list.”

  “Too bad. You’d know that magic is as much in the fingers as in the frontal lobes. The hands remember.” Max waggled his particularly long and strong hands.

  “Really, how viable is your memory nowadays?”

  “Going forward, it’s wizard.”

  “And backwards?”

  “Dicey. Arbitrary. I don’t seem to remember intense emotions.”

  “Lucky for the happy couple at the Circle Ritz.”

  “I wish them eternal bliss,” he said seriously. “But most of all, I wish them safety, and that won’t be possible until I solve what will stop this nemesis on my tail from endangering anybody else.”

  “I solve that.” Molina said, “It’s my turf, my city, my job.”

  Max raised his bottle. “And you do it superbly. Las Vegas is lucky.”

  Her olive skin flushed again, barely detectable. Not from anger, but from pride. That was a step forward. “So who is our common enemy?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “It’s obvious,” she said.

  He nodded. “Okay. I had a stalker in my house when I was gone, as you know, since it was you.”

  “Good thing I stopped by. Someone wanted to cut you to shreds.”

  “Instead my wardrobe—and you—got shredded, I hear. So you were stalking me,” Max asked, “because you thought I was stalking you?”

  “Someone was. You were the only suspect I was after who had the obvious … skills … and gall to do such a subtle and thorough job in my own house.”

  “More kudos. I may take up my abandoned onstage career yet.” Max grinned.

  “You still want to remain a mystery man for some reason. Until it suits you.”

  “We’ve both had ‘closet’ issues.”

  She didn’t quite get the connection at first. Then she tumbled. “You think my stalker was your stalker?”

  He nodded. “My closet’s contents were obliterated. Yours apparently acquired alien articles of clothing.”

  “Why me and mine?”

  “She wanted to make you more suspicious of me, angry enough to hunt and hassle me even more.”

  “She? I hadn’t figured on a woman stalking a woman. Why would it be your nemesis? You’re just habitually cynical about women.”

  “I wasn’t always. Not until her.”

  “Weren’t you very young then?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Only … three years older than Mariah.” Molina seemed stunned by the comparison.

  “Kids were more naïve back then.”

  “Your same-age cousin died in a pub bombing at the same time.”

  Obviously Temple had thoroughly briefed Molina on Max’s history with the IRA, probably to defend him.

  “More like a brother,” Max said brusquely. “So how were you stalked in this house? That takes a lot of nerve, going after a police detective.”

  Molina hesitated, reluctant to change the subject, then moved on. “It could have been someone I closed a case on. What happened … ended. It was a warped, sick scenario. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Temple Barr knows.”

  “Yes,” she admitted. She stood, walked around the sofa behind him, leaned her hands on either side of his shoulders, and asked, “Matt Devine knows?”

  He paused to decide what to say, what to admit. “Yes.”

  Molina took an audible deep breath. She leaned in, so the meter of her words huffed across his skin. “That’s too many already.”

  “Why can’t I know?” Max asked.

  “Why do you have to know?”

  “It might affect your detecting ability. I want your objectivity working for me.”

  “You think I could be objective about you?” Molina asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  She came around to the front of the couch, looming as only a five-foot-ten woman could. “The stalker tried to manipulate me. I’m willing to concede now that wasn’t you. Probably. But even I don’t claim I’m objective about you.”

  “Everything and everyone needs to be questioned now—motives, goals, what strings are being pulled by whom. We all do the best we can to pull back the curtain, don’t we? While still keeping a veil over our deepest fears and oldest sins.”

  “Heavy.” Molina let herself sink back onto the couch. “This time you fetch me a beer from the fridge.”

  * * *

  The second soldier was empty on the snack bar between the kitchen and the living room, and Max was crawling around in the bottom of Molina’s closet. “A shrink would have a lot of fun with your shoe collection.”

  “More so with Temple Barr’s, I’m thinking.”

  “It’s all about height, or the lack of it, with women. She overcompensates for short physical stature, you temper your ability to intimidate male coworkers with an array of low-heeled loafers for work. Even at home you wear moccasins.”

  “I see your association with Miss Barr has made you a sidewalk connoisseur of shoes and psyches.”

  “And sometimes you just want to break out of the career closet. What’s this?” Max looked up, one forefinger dangling the ankle strap of a pale nile green satin sandal with a half-inch platform on the sole. “Lady Gaga boots it isn’t. Don’t tell me you share a vintage clothing jones with Temple Barr.”

  Molina snatched the slipper up, up, and away.

  “And Cinderella you’re not,” he commented. “Also not a size five, looked like—”

  “None of your business.”

  “Wrong. It’s my business. Any of your shoes or mates go missing during the stalking incidents?”

  “No. I told you. The stalker added to my wardrobe.”

  Max let his fingers page through the soft five-inch swatch of floor-length hanging gowns in deep jewel-toned silk velvet. “These are Carmen’s, your warbling alter ego’s. Which one didn’t you buy?”

  She reached out to one. “The blue. At least I didn’t remember it.”

  “It looks a lot like the others.”

  “Gowns of that 1930s’ vintage are very similar and there isn’t much good light in the closets of these old houses.”

  “So you can’t be sure.” Max leaned back to study the gowns. “They’re all the same length.”

  She nodded. “That’s what made this first discovery creepy. I sensed it didn’t belong, but it looked like it should.”

  “What was the next leaving?”

  “Nasty. Obvious. Meant to chill.”

  He waited and she averted her eyes.

  She answered in a monotone, turning away. “It was a gift-wrapped slim little box on my bedspread, looked like candy. I couldn’t conceive that Mariah would do that, although teen girls often do owe their mothers an apology. But I opened it.”

  “Not a letter bomb,” he said to diffuse the tension.

  Her laugh was short. “A filmy piece of cheap lingerie, with a note: ‘You dress like a nun.’”

  “And of course, that sealed the deal that it was me.”

  She turned on him, blue eyes blazing like midnight specials. “You always like to … taunt me.”

  “I honestly can’t remember.”

  “You were doing it just now.”

  He thought. “Yeah, I was—”

  “You think I’m too buttoned-down and uptight.”

  “I am getting a bit of that vibe, but it’s hitting me more like … that’s there because you’d be a lot hotter if it wasn’t.”

  “That comment is sexist, not sexy. Like that invasive ‘gift’ was stalking, not … not courting behavior.”

  “But you know now that it wasn’t me.”

  “Mostly.” She sounded almost as sullen as a teenager fessing up. Learned that from Mariah, likely.

  “Look. I’m sorry. I don’t think I’d do that. A magician gets used to manipulating people, to getting a reaction from an audience. It’s nothing personal.”
/>   She shrugged, her anger and embarrassment spent.

  “Um, I have to ask. Was the article of lingerie black?”

  Oops. She was annoyed again.

  “‘Articles’ like that usually are.”

  “Then, Lieutenant. Molina. I think there’s a clue you’ve missed because you couldn’t possibly know it. That ‘gift’ wasn’t a sexual come-on. Not at all.”

  “What?”

  “You went to school with Catholic nuns.”

  “I’m half Hispanic. Of course.”

  “And the habits they used to wear were—?”

  “Black.”

  “You don’t wear black. Navy maybe, but not much in this broiler climate. I think that gown was left by a woman.”

  She looked doubtful.

  “Who was out to get me.”

  “It’s always all about you.”

  “In this case, it really is.”

  “And the next time, when I came home to find the radio on and a trail of rose petals down the hall to Mariah’s bedroom?”

  Max sighed. Kathleen O’Connor had done a job on Molina. No wonder she’d risked her career to break into Max’s house to prove he was the stalker, and then had the bad luck to run straight into Kitty the Cutter.

  “She likes to play with her prey, but she is armed and dangerous. She slashed Matt Devine trying to get at me.”

  Molina let herself sink down upon the bed, in a way reclaiming it from being a scene of a crime. Max didn’t want to loom, so he sat beside her, with no protestations.

  “This monster was in my house? How do you know all this with a flawed memory?”

  “My mentor, my foster father really, was the one who spirited me away from the Neon Nightmare. He filled in my history from the age of seventeen. And I have … flashes of recovering memory.”

  “This woman, you think she has something against Catholic nuns?”

  “And priests.”

  “Hence Devine.” Molina nodded. “So it’s a vast anti-Catholic, anti-Max conspiracy?”

  “Anti-me mostly.”

  “Why?”

  “I saw through her early. That made me the enemy. I’ve only just learned, in Northern Ireland, what a hellish history she had. People have died because of that.” Max bestirred himself to leave his recent, all-too-vivid memories. “I’ll tell you a story, all I was told and remember, about a girl named Kathleen O’Connor, who became a murderous, mad, vengeful force aptly renamed ‘Kitty the Cutter.’