Cat in a Neon Nightmare

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “No,” Matt said. “Nothing much beautiful in the way of death happens out here in No Man’s Land at all.”

  “Extreme Unction we used to call it. I loved that phrase. It put Death in a caliph’s tent with serving men and girls. Extreme. Unction. The Final Anointing. Extreme Unction. Now it’s called Last Rites. Loses in the translation, doesn’t it?”

  “The church has lost a lot in the translation lately, including respect and dignity. Do you…let on what you used to be?”

  “Not recently. Everyone’s eyebrows lift. ‘One of those.’ We were blind. I’m glad I left, and I’m glad you finally left, Matt. That you’re out of all that scandal.”

  “Not quite,” he said ruefully. At the shocked silence on the phone line, he added, quickly, “Now I’m only suspected of adult heterosexual misconduct. What a relief. It’s all right, Frank. I’ll survive.”

  “Better than Kathleen O’Connor.”

  “So there was no report of her operating in the U.S.”

  “She disappeared on them, after all these years. And, frankly, they were just as happy to have such a loose cannon out of the way. I’ll report her death, and your confirmation of it. She left no fingerprints anywhere, was just a rural County Clare girl who went north to Londonderry and found a cause. What made her so lethal, we’ll never know.”

  “No.”

  Matt hung up, thinking that Kitty the Cutter was still pretty lethal to his circle of acquaintances.

  An image of her body on the autopsy table flashed into his mind, including the spidery tattoo on her naked hip. No final anointing for her, except with the medical examiner’s scalpel, and he probably used much more brutal instruments.

  For a moment the official description of the sacrament of Extreme Unction flashed before Matt’s eyes too; he’d looked it up again only recently: the anointing with oil specially blessed by the bishop of the organs of the five external senses (eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands), of the feet, and, for men, of the loins or reins; while saying “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by sight, by hearing, smell, taste, touch, walking, carnal delectation.” Carnal delectation. The phrase had always stuck with him, even though anointing the loins is generally omitted in English-speaking countries. He never forgot the section ending: “and it is of course everywhere forbidden in the case of women.”

  Apparently anointing female loins was itself an occasion of sin. Now he would forever associate a tattoo of the worm Ouroboros with “carnal delectation.” He wondered if attending a woman’s autopsy was a confessable sin.

  Having delved his own possible weaknesses, he returned to the living room to minister to Max Kinsella, possible self-confessed murderer, but the sofa was empty…

  …except for Midnight Louie, who had taken Kinsella’s place.

  Matt stared at the big black cat and the big black cat stared right back at him.

  Was Kinsella a shape-shifter?

  Or was it Midnight Louie who pulled all their strings?

  The tomcat yawned, showing pearly whites.

  Oh, the shark, dear, waits closer than you think.

  Chapter 47

  Suitable for Mourning

  Max so seldom called ahead to advertise one of his patented surprise appearances that Temple couldn’t help feeling a frisson of dread when she picked up the phone and it was not only Max speaking, but he was asking if he could come over.

  Max? Asking? After all, he had once called the Circle Ritz and this apartment home. Temple really didn’t mind him popping in unannounced. Unpredictability was one of Max’s many charms, at least to her.

  “I’ve been out carousing,” he warned her.

  “Carousing?” Another surprise. Max drank only with meals, and only with happy meals, like with her.

  “With Matt Devine.”

  Surprise number three was a throat-choker.

  Max. And Matt. Together. Over a friendly glass of…something? What could they possibly have in common to talk about? Besides her.

  “You’re not coming over,” she asked, “with news I’m not going to like, are you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, that Molina has eloped with Russell Crowe, or that Rafi Nadir is an undercover agent for the IRS, or that you’re going into the priesthood.”

  “Would Molina eloping with Russell Crowe be good news or bad news, in your opinion?”

  “Half and half. He is a major movie star, but he’s also spoiled and cranky and immature. Actually, it would be a heck of an entertaining match: Gladiator vs. Xena the Barbarian Princess Cop.”

  “Sounds like a play card for the World Wrestling Federation. No, nothing that worthy of Access Hollywood. And why would I enter the priesthood at this scandal-ridden time?”

  “For the surprise factor?”

  “I’ve got enough surprises right now that I don’t need to go looking for trouble. And I’ve got a bottle of very good Irish whiskey, mostly full.”

  “Max! You’re not driving with an open bottle! If the police—”

  “Relax. My car is right in your very own parking lot and nudging up next to an extremely curvaceous little red Miata with its top disappointingly up.”

  Temple ambled to her French doors and slipped out onto the patio, from where she could see her parked car, which was why she tried to park it there. A prized new possession needed to be always within easy view.

  She glimpsed a new black car beside it, wondering how long it had been there. A while, if he had been visiting Matt. Why go back to the parked car to call her? she also wondered.

  Max was in his favorite element now, the dark, and leaving other people in the dark too.

  “Are you going to come up in the elevator like a Real Boy?” she asked.

  “Of course. I’ll even knock.”

  “No, ring the doorbell. It’s a lovely chime. I don’t hear it enough.”

  “You might want to put some Leonard Cohen on.”

  Uh-oh. That was Max’s brooding black Irish music.

  They closed the conversation quickly. When Temple went back into her living room, Midnight Louie had pulled a Max and sat still as a statue in the middle of her coffee table, looking as if he had been there for generations.

  She smoothed his black-satin head as she went to the kitchen and rooted out the heavy Baccarat crystal glasses suitable for premium Scotch, Irish whiskey, and terminally spicy Blood Mary mixes, yum-yum. Max didn’t call her his Paprika Girl for hair-color reasons only.

  The doorbell rang through its leisurely melody. Like the era of the building, the fifties, it had time to slow dance through even a practical purpose. That was an era when women in high heels waltzed through domestic chores with vacuum cleaners and single strings of pearls around their necks.

  Domestic chores didn’t have that quaint glamour anymore, but Temple swept open the door with the panache of that decade’s leading ladies, Loretta Young or Donna Reed.

  Max leaned against the doorjamb. Like many really tall men, he favored the disarming slump. Tonight, though, he just looked tired, not insouciant.

  “I’ve got the best glasses down,” she told him.

  He swung through the door, planting the whiskey bottle on a nearby countertop. “We don’t have to drink this.”

  She eyed the four inches ebbed in the bottle. “You and Matt did that much damage? I guess I deserve an equal crack at it. You wouldn’t have brought the medicinal stuff if you didn’t think I’d need it.”

  “I need it,” he said shortly.

  “You don’t ‘need’ anything addictive. Never have.”

  “Never have been where I’m standing now.”

  “Then sit down. I’ll pour. Neat, I presume, the way the bloody British take it.”

  He nodded as he passed her the bottle and she uncapped it, pouring the ruddy-amber whiskey three fingers deep in each elaborately etched glass. It glistened like amber, and Temple supposed that many once-liv
ing things had been entombed in more than one glass of hard liquor. Entombed and resurrected.

  “How can I sit down?” Max demanded.

  She came bearing a glass in each hand, and peered past his indignation-stiffened form to Midnight Louie sprawled like the world’s biggest Rorschach inkblot on her pale sofa.

  “We move the cat. He was sitting on the coffee table just a minute ago.”

  “He must have known I was coming,” Max complained, taking the glasses as Temple bent to lift Louie in her arms and return him to his tabletop post. “I don’t know if I much like him listening in.”

  “It’s not like he cares what we say, Max. He’s a remarkably sensitive animal, but I doubt that English is his second language.”

  Max stared silently at Louie in answer. His stare was returned in kind: intense, challenging, immobile.

  Temple had the oddest feeling that man and cat could talk to one another, but that the relationship was decidedly wary.

  The staring match ended when Louie rose, jumped to the floor, and stalked off into the office.

  “He knows when he’s not wanted.” Temple went to the portable stereo to let Leonard Cohen’s monotone bass throb through the room. She shook her head. “If your stare didn’t do it, that music would have. Not exactly anything to cuddle up to.”

  Max sat dead center in the sofa and claimed one glass for a hasty sip.

  “So how,” Temple asked, sitting beside him, “was Matt? Is he getting over that poor woman’s death at all?”

  “He’s got other things to think about now. So do I.”

  “The bad news you said was only half bad.”

  “It depends on how happy you are to hear someone is dead.”

  “Someone…I know?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Not just Vassar.”

  Max shook his head. His hand didn’t shake as he lifted the glass to his lips again, but Temple sensed that it might have if he had allowed such a thing.

  “Who? Max, tell me now. I can’t stand this waffling around. It’s so unlike you.”

  “She’s gone. Kathleen O’Connor. Dead.”

  “Kitty the Cutter dead? Not possible!”

  “Believe it. Devine ID’ed her for Molina this morning, and besides, I was there when it happened. She’s in cold storage at the medical examiner’s facility, waiting for next of kin to claim her. There won’t be any. Only enemies.”

  “Dead? After making all our lives so miserable? People like that don’t just…die.”

  “Effinger did.”

  “Yes, but you’re sure it’s her? Both you and Matt? And Molina buys it?”

  “The medical examiner buys it. It’s undeniable. Even your Midnight Louie witnessed the accident.”

  “Louie! He was out earlier, but…when?”

  Max shook his head. “Not today. Two nights ago.”

  “And no one told me?”

  “Not our fault, Temple.”

  “You speaking for Matt now, too? Mr. Zipped Lips?”

  “Not our fault,” he repeated. “We had a lot to do. I had to call emergency personnel from a phone that couldn’t be traced to me, dump the Maxima, and stay low. Devine had to answer Molina’s summons and go stare at the dead body. We haven’t much felt like talking to anyone human in forty-eight hours, or like explaining ourselves.”

  “Or how you feel about this,” Temple added shrewdly. “Dead. For you guys it must be like…the twin towers falling. No. More like the upside-down world turned right-side up again, like gravity has reversed itself.”

  “Yeah,” Max held the whiskey glass in both hands before his face, as if it were a fire capable of casting warmth and light. “Her evil pull was like some counterforce I was so used to fighting that I’ve lost all energy to stand on my own. She was out there somewhere. I’d sensed her hatred for so long, it almost seems unnatural to live without it in the world.”

  “Kind of how Matt felt about his abusive stepfather.”

  Max nodded. “Given a nemesis like either one of them, you start to wonder if you don’t deserve it somehow.” Max looked at Temple for the first time, straight on. “He must have thought about killing her, you know. Before he tried Vassar. He knew he could. He had enough martial arts training to do it. And she…was a small woman. Perfectly killable, except you’d become her and then she’d go on anyway, wouldn’t she?”

  “Matt? It crossed his mind to kill? How can you be so sure?”

  “She threatened everyone he knew and cared about. It crossed his mind. Mine too.”

  Temple took a deep breath. “So that’s what you two talked about, your homicidal impulses?”

  “We also talked about our mutual guilt.”

  “For thinking that way, and then getting your wish?”

  “For being that desperate. And then, Fate steps in and kills her for us. And now we’re feeling guilty because Fate had the guts to do what we didn’t.”

  “Max, start from the beginning. How did she die, and when, and how on earth was Louie present?”

  “It began Sunday night, at Neon Nightmare. I have no idea how or why your cat was there, but he ended up in my car.”

  “Your car?”

  “Yeah. The backseat. Must have eeled in when I left the club. Anyway, I was being my usual paranoid self, checking for any car that might be following and…thinking of other things, I admit, when that wildcat of yours comes clawing over the leather seat back into the front passenger seat, yowling and generally ripping cowhide.”

  “Ooh, your car,” Temple sympathized as only the owner of a new vehicle with a costly leather interior could. Of course hers had just a little leather because it was just a little car. Call it a Baby Bear car. “Louie knows not to scratch the furniture. I can’t imagine what got into him.”

  “It didn’t take imagination. It took glancing into my rearview mirror, which I’d ignored after a few cursory checks because I was busy thinking about something else. There was a motorcycle on my tail.”

  “A motorcycle? Wow. A motorcycle? It was Kitty?”

  “Apparently. It was dark, the street was ill-lit. She was riding a black Kawasaki Ninja and she wore black leather and a helmet.”

  “Then it didn’t have to be her.”

  “No, but it made a lot of sense that it was her. I think she made me at Neon Nightmare. I’ve been going there, hanging out.”

  “Why? It’s a hot new club, but—”

  “It’s where the Synth meets.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Sure? I’ve joined them. They welcomed a passé magician like myself into the fold. They assume I’m not working because I can’t, that I despise the likes of the Cloaked Conjuror, who gives away trade secrets. That I’m bitter and washed up by the newest trends in mega-magic, i.e., raise the Titanic on national TV and then make it disappear again, all in an hour minus forty minutes of ads. They may be right.”

  “So now you’re mourning your career as well as the death of an enemy.”

  He quirked her a smile. “I’m mourning change, Temple, the first sign of dawning middle age.”

  “What is Matt mourning?”

  “A good question. A lot more than I am. His duel with Kathleen was fresh; mine is decades old. He followed Molina’s sage but cynical advice right into a death trap…he’d almost feel better if it had been his death rather than Vassar’s. I brought that over to cheer him up, but even the whiskey of kings couldn’t lift his depression.”

  “So you dove right in with him.”

  “Momentarily.” Max’s smile grew as slender as he was. “There is some good news. Think about how Kathleen died.”

  “In a motorcycle accident?”

  “Doesn’t that answer some dangling questions?”

  “She had an Easy Rider hang-up? Wait! Way back when…when you got back from California looking up Rafi Nadir for Molina, someone on a motorcycle took a shot at you while you were driving in that convertible you had then. It was her?”

&n
bsp; “Seems logical. I suspect she’d been looking for me since she hit town. Luckily for me, she only caught that one glimpse of me, and took advantage of the opportunity.”

  “Luckily for you, she only grazed your scalp.”

  “Rush hour on the Strip is not the ideal venue for target practice. But it wasn’t me she only had eyes and wheels for. In his cups, Devine confessed that he’s been…haunted for weeks by a motorcycle-riding phantom. It was definitely Kathleen, he said, when she attacked his female producer at the radio station, but at other times he swears it was—are you ready? An Elvis impersonator. He doesn’t believe in Elvis or his ghost, of course, so he’s convinced these manifestations were just darn good imitations.”

  Max grinned again, so crookedly that Temple suspected he wasn’t telling her everything. She returned to the slow process of getting things as straight as she could.

  “So Kitty didn’t see you again after that sniping incident on the Strip until she spotted you Sunday night at Neon Nightmare. You’ve been going out in public too much again, and several times with me. It’s my fault.”

  “Don’t go all Devine-ish on me, Temple. Taking the blame for other people’s actions can get to be a bad habit.”

  “You feel it too, don’t you, Max? That someone died because of you, even if she was out to get you. Lord, Matt has his soiled madonna on his conscience, and you have your Irish Fury. You Catholic boys are a mess.”

  “I’m not going to weep for Kathleen O’Connor. She had a lot of years to get into something better than using a passionate cause as cover for her own twisted hatreds. And I guess I’d rather she crashed and burned chasing me than Devine. I can handle it better. His plate of guilt already runneth over.”

  “Tough guy,” Temple teased, realizing as she said it that he’d always had to be that to survive. Tough enough as a mere teenager to seriously annoy the IRA. Toughness wasn’t muscle, or age, or any gender. It was something in your soul.

  “So you’re sure she’s dead?”

  “Why even ask?”

  “You hadn’t been able to lose her in seventeen years. She had grabbed onto Matt like a vampire bat and wasn’t about to let go. Who’d expect somebody that…tough…to let go of anything, most of all her life?”