“Maybe you could suggest some.” Louise Dietz’s pencil was poised.
“First, I could use more information on Gloria Fuentes’s personal history.”
“Deal,” Louise said. “Not much there. She’d retired from being a magician’s assistant a few years earlier when her longtime boss took his last bow onstage.” Louise flipped through her notebook. “The guy worked as ‘Gandolph the Great.’ I can’t find what became of him.”
Temple glossed past that. “Do you think Gloria wanted to retire or…?”
“Yes. Like me,” Louise said, “she was probably considered too old for a ‘visible’ job. And she didn’t just need her face on camera, she needed her whole bod in condition for fishnet hose and Playboy Bunny thong leotard. She’d gotten away with the Vanna White look for the old-timers’ shows.”
Louise tossed a promotional eight-by-ten-inch color photo on her desk from a drawer folder.
“Gandolph worked in white tie and tails!”
“What did you expect of a traditional magician?”
“I don’t know. Given his wizardly name, maybe a velvet robe with long, flowing sleeves. Gloria was lovely. And her floor-length gown is strapless.”
“Leggy is where it’s at in Vegas today. You know that.”
“Yeah. Where’d you get this photo? I know a fan of Gandolph’s act who’d love a copy if I could scan it.”
“Really?”
“A sick friend,” Temple said.
“I found this in a Vegas antique shop, actually, so you have to promise to return it unclutched.”
“I will. You’re right. This paper ephemera could be worth something someday.”
“Anything for my pensionless old age. Or do I mean penniless?”
“You’re not that old.”
“No, but I’m on my own.” Louise glanced ruefully at Gloria’s photograph. “Like she was. Gloria had a lost personal history and a lost career behind her. She ended up working as a cashier at one of the Circus Circus restaurants.”
“That’s a big family venue. The restaurant must have been lively, with lots of kids coming and going.”
“Lots of families reminding her that she didn’t have any.” Louise sighed. “I try not to identity with these cold case victims, but sometimes it’s hard not to. You married?”
“Not yet, but it’s a near thing.” Temple lifted her left hand from her lap to flash significant bling.
“Ooh. He sure likes a-you. You’re young. No, don’t argue. If you have something going, hang on to it, kiddo.”
“I plan to.” Temple smiled. “So … what was with the church parking lot attack? Was the killer a repeat act?”
“Not that anyone found out. Gloria was active in her church, St. Jude’s. I interviewed the old priest. They all seem to be very old these days. The young ones left.”
“I suppose so,” Temple said, trying not to look guilty.
“He indicated that she might have worked for a short while for another of those top hat and cloak magicians. I couldn’t trace him. Parks? Anyway, Father Delahunt said she was very faithful, very ‘old school,’ he called it, and he was older than the Mojave Desert. “Daily early Mass, novenas, stations of the cross, confession. He said it was a wicked world if so much piety hadn’t preserved her from the death that was visited upon her.”
“Piety.” Matt went to Mass, she knew, and prayed, although not with her, maybe for her, fallen-away UU that she was. Temple was feeling guiltier and guiltier.
“Father Delahunt said something strange,” Louise went on, leaning inward for emphasis. “He said Gloria was overscrupulous and vulnerable to the ‘other side’ of religion. What do you suppose he meant by that?”
“I have no idea, but that’s an interesting comment. It might tie in to the ‘she left’ on the body in the morgue.”
Temple didn’t mention she wondered if the Synth, or even that ever-lurking font of all evil, Kathleen O’Connor, was behind Gloria’s murder. Gloria had “left” a magic career because age had forced her to. Maybe that was the wrong aspect of her life to focus on. Had Gloria also “left” the Church, just before she was killed or in a more permanent way. Like Matt had “left” the priesthood. So maybe she was a victim of Kitty the Cutter’s vendetta against Catholics.
But Kitty should have applauded Gloria leaving the Church.
In fact, Temple had known, and could not share, that Gloria died right about the time a woman’s dead body was found by Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s old Volvo car in the Blue Dahlia parking lot. Molina had come out late after the usual impromptu gig as jazz singer Carmen and found the body, along with the SHE LEFT message fingered onto the dust on her vehicle’s side.
The victim in the Blue Dahlia lot had turned out to be … an ex-nun.
Wow. Times were harsh for ex-religious and ex-magicians, and Temple had a big stake in both those categories.
“So what can you do for me?” Louise was asking as if they were in an echo chamber. “Temple? Are you still with me?”
“Yeah. Sure. Okay. Have you heard of a University of Nevada at Las Vegas professor named Jefferson Mangel who was killed on campus last March?”
“No.” Louise’s pencil was making cryptic marks only she could read. Temple wondered if they spelled “Ophiuchus.” “Tell me more.”
“He was murdered on campus in a classroom converted into an exhibition of magic show placards from pre-Houdini days to Siegfried and Roy and the Mystifying Max.”
Temple watched for Louise’s reaction to the last magician’s name, but she was only dutifully scrawling it down, as Temple would have.
“A professor.” Louise screwed her lips into a moue and nodded. “That’s a change of profession for Las Vegas. I’ll look into it.”
“Meanwhile, I can scan and return your photo of Gloria and Gandolph?”
“Sure. You think it would help solve the case?”
“I think it might make my sick friend happy.” Or not. She had no idea what would break through Max’s memory loss, or what would set him back.
Temple rose and tucked the photo carefully into a hard-sided folder in her tote bag. “Thanks, Louise. You’ve been a great help.”
“Ditto.” Louise stood to shake hands with her.
Temple trotted out to the clickety-chuckle of computer keyboards, hoping they weren’t laughing at her for pursuing such a long shot.
Chapter 42
Back to School
Max strolled through the shady thronging university campus. It was almost as incredibly lush and green as Ireland. Acacia, sycamore, and oak trees thrived among the cacti and majestic desert willows. Discreet signs advised that the landscaping was desert-appropriate and water-saving. Max tried to let natural beauty and memory wash wavelike over him under the blazing blue sky, though he doubted he’d had many reasons to visit the site when he’d lived here earlier.
Students rolled past him in waves, energetic and vital, chirping like grasshoppers. They made him smile. Why did he feel so old?
“Mr. Randolph,” a female voice hailed him, stunned him.
It was throaty and mature.
He turned. She was blond, she was confidently striding toward him, and she was the only woman he remembered ever sleeping with.
“Miss Schneider.” Revienne. Her lovely first name, the word in French for “return.” And here she was again, a beautiful but bad penny turning up?
Her smile remained dazzling yet mysterious. “So whom do I discover on this amazing campus in the entertainment capital of the world but my very recent … shall we say, exchange student from abroad?”
He stared at her, suspicious yet enthralled.
“And you’re walking well. Very well,” she added encouragingly. Like a teacher.
Normally, people would say, “You’re looking well.” No. This was a renowned psychiatrist, and a clever one. With one phrase she revived every moment of their recent escape/escapade through Switzerland. You’re walking well.
“Thanks,”
he said. “Care to stroll, then?”
She hoisted a gold-metallic leather bag large enough to hold papers to her shoulder. A Prada silk scarf was loosely knotted around one strap. The gesture released a whisper of perfume into the dry desert air.
“This entire campus is designated as an arboretum,” she commented, adopting the role of tour guide. “Isn’t it lovely? I have no pressing engagements so I took a walk.”
“That’s lovely too.”
“What about you? What are you doing here, Mr. Randolph?”
“Not skiing in St. Moritz,” he said, reviving the fiction that he’d been injured in a skiing accident and had naturally ended up at a Swiss clinic. The four-week coma had not been so natural. And he’d let her think Garry’s surname was his. That was how he had been registered at the clinic.
“And your memory, it is returning?” she asked.
“In bits and pieces. Enough to make things … interesting.”
They ambled together, staid adults among hurrying students on foot and riding bikes.
“What an astounding coincidence,” she said in her perfect but charmingly inflected accent, an icing of German, a tantalizing trace of French, to match her genes.
“Astounding,” he agreed. Affably.
“I had no idea you had links to this area, this city.”
“I didn’t either.”
“How are you really doing?”
The question was hardly casual. “Fine, as you see. And you? What brings you here?”
“Business, although an old school friend lives here and we enjoyed a reunion visit. I’d committed to assisting a former mentor from Lyon in a study of his, and am enjoying a visiting professorship on this beautiful campus.”
“In what subject, may I ask?”
“You may ask anything.” Her smile was more Da Vinci Code than Mona Lisa. “Psychology, of course. Herr Doktor Hugo Gruetzmeyer has a guest professorship here.” She stopped walking, not because he needed to. “Why are you here?”
Of course, he was currently pondering the existential meaning of that common query, but he couldn’t afford to seem needy with her, especially of information.
“An excellent place to recuperate. Lots of walking required.”
“On campus, or on the Strip?”
“Both,” he said.
“You seem … more stressed than when you left Zurich.”
“American life. We’re more stressed by nature than Europeans. The ‘save the world’ complex,’ I suppose you’d call it.”
She looked around so he had a chance to sum her up on his supposed turf. Cool, controlled, blond. The Hitchcock thriller movie femme fatale who seemed unapproachable, but who’d unravel at first contact with a stressed Hitchcock everyman who knew too much, or not enough.
She dressed, he realized in this American setting, like so many of the politically ultraconservative women pundits, high heels, short skirts, long blond hair. Barbie for the Tea Party set. This short-skirted suit was ivory linen over a familiar olive green silk camisole.
“You’re wearing part of the ensemble I bought you in Zurich,” Max noted, sounding pleased.
“Yes, thank you. You noticed.”
One thing not politically useful he’d learned in Zurich was that Revienne Schneider wore scraps of silk and lace, not bras. Very French.
“But,” she continued, “I found a fabulous new perfume at the Bellagio shops. Like it?” She brushed cheeks, leaving a comet trail of hair caressing his skin in her wake and a scent like walking into a wall of exquisite perfume flowers blooming in the south of France. This was a blend of jasmine and mimosa.
“I’d have to be a block of stone not to,” he answered.
He and Garry had endlessly discussed on their trek from Zurich to Belfast whether Revienne Schneider, his assigned shrink at the Alpine clinic, was friend or foe. Max still didn’t know. He did know Garry’s reaction to Max sleeping with Revienne while they were on the run. It unreeled in his brain like a film clip.
“You have no idea who Ms. Schneider really is or what her agenda was, or still might be. You were foolish, Max. That kind of sexual bravura got you and Sean tangled up with the IRA all those years ago when you were green and seventeen. You don’t need to act impulsively anymore.”
“Why are you on campus?” Revienne asked him, now confronting the apparent coincidence. “It’s insane we should run into one another a world away, like this.”
“Kismet, maybe?” He chose flirting over frankness.
She wet her already glossed lips. “I never expected to see you again.”
“Me neither.”
“That’s an odd expression.”
“Colloquial English, although you do that well, as you do everything well. I meant I didn’t expect to see you again either. What are we going to do about it?”
“You could enroll in my class.”
“Yes? What is it?”
“Identity and the Troubled Soul in the Modern Zeitgeist.”
“Sounds … mesmerizing. My legs don’t care to sit for long stretches in Spartan classroom accommodations, though.”
“A nice cushy leather banquette for dinner then,” she said.
“Delicious.”
“When?” she asked.
“This is Thursday. Saturday? Unless you’re otherwise engaged.”
“Not. And you?” she asked.
He did have a rather important engagement Friday night, but not Saturday. “Not.”
“Where shall I meet you?” she asked.
“I can’t pick you up?” He was surprised.
“You already have,” she said.
He shrugged. “The Eiffel Tower restaurant at the Paris Hotel.”
“What a very American place.”
“I am American.”
“And I am not.”
“Vive la différence.”
“It’s rather dangerous to take a Paris resident to an ersatz version of the city,” she pointed out.
“You already know I like danger. The view of the Bellagio fountains is particularly spectacular, and American.”
“The Bellagio.” She laughed merrily, something he’d never heard on their arduous escape from the Swiss clinic that perhaps was intended to imprison him.
“Yes,” he said. “Americans spring from all nationalities, and you can sample the best of each here in Las Vegas. I know Continental dining is late, but the earliest seating works best at the Paris. You can watch the sun set on the Strip from the corner table overlooking the fountains.”
“Very romantic, Mr. Randolph.” She was flirting back, but then an undercover agent would.
“I’m sure it’ll be a … memorable occasion. I’ll meet you at the private elevator in the Paris lobby at … six, say?”
She agreed and moved on through the hot, dappled shade created by the many trees. He watched her like a lovesick swain until she was out of sight, then quickly ducked into the nearest building to study the rosters of classes and instructors and the campus map on his cell phone. Amazing, what was on the Internet these days.
Revienne had just left that dreary seminar on existential angst. If he hurried, he could catch her partner in academic crime at his office, finishing up student appointments.
Max was “walking well.” And his vague excuse for being in Las Vegas and on this campus, walk therapy, was proving genuine. Max bolted up the stairs to the third-floor office, not knowing if the class called Motivation and Emotion could explain his momentary burst of energy. Obviously, Revienne’s incredibly uncoincidental presence in Las Vegas either meant he was on the brink of a bracing duel of wits, or a love affair. Why not? He was fancy-free.
And so was Professor Gruetzmeyer free, at least after a lanky kid with a backpack slouched out of the professor’s office door and down the hall.
Max knocked on the ajar doorframe.
“You’re very late,” the man’s voice boomed from within.
When Max appeared around the door, he looked abashed
to see a stranger. Excellent. It put the guy off balance.
“Professor Gruetzmeyer. How lucky to have found you in. I was on campus merely to explore the layout and ring up for an appointment.”
“At least you look ahead, young man.”
Since Professor Gruetzmeyer was only about fifteen years older than Max, he must be used to addressing younger students. He was a fit and youthful fifty, curly haired and missing the Freudian beard and mustache. He wore a dress shirt rolled up at the elbows and reading glasses perched on his strong nose, underlining his green eyes. Impressionable twenty-somethings might crush on him but he didn’t seem Revienne’s type.
“You’re late for enrolling in the summer program,” he was telling Max. “Are you returning for credits toward a degree?”
“Not at all, Professor. I’m a writer.” The moment he said it, Max knew in some deep well of experience that this was true. Or was it Gandolph who was the writer? “My name is Matt Butler.” Always pick a false first name that’s close enough to yours. You won’t jump if you hear someone call you by it. However, what had popped out was some Freudian port in a storm. Matt?
“Fiction you write?” Gruetzmeyer had a slight German accent and he’d used the Yoda-like word reversal of foreign-born English speakers.
“Nonfiction. Do you mind if I come in for a few minutes? I’m not sure you’re the resource I need.”
“Step in. Sit down. How can I help you?”
Max smiled his thanks and obeyed. Psychology was a “helping profession.” Suggest that someone of that temperament couldn’t be of help and they’d be eager to prove the opposite. Max didn’t have a degree (that he remembered) in anything, but his instincts hadn’t gone missing with his shorter-term memory.
He sat in the chair opposite an impressively laden but neat desk. “I am writing,” he explained, “a book on the mystique of what some people consider a profession, others an art form, and still others an elegant con game.”
“Tasty.” The professor settled back. “Far more interesting than these earnest, labored class papers. Why come to me?”
“Because I’ve discovered that my prime source is, to put it right out there, dead.”
He pondered that. “Did I know him? Or her?”
Cat in a White Tie and Tails Page 24
