Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Fact was, he couldn’t have. He must have spotted it as he turned in, and he could hardly miss her.

  But he had.

  Temple trudged toward the building’s glass door, the darkness inside allowing the glass to reflect her overburdened figure.

  She looked like Little Orphan Annie disguised as a bag lady. Or maybe Typhoid Mary. Matt had seemed distracted lately, and he did work late hours and travel out of state for speaking engagements. He was semifamous now. Guess Mr. Midnight no longer had time to hobnob with the locals.

  She shifted the bags to one side as she prepared to grab the door handle and shoulder her way into the cool darkness beyond.

  It opened of its own invisible accord, like the eerie door at Max’s house. Temple dodged inside before her bags slipped and she found them lifting out of her arms.

  “Sorry,” Matt said, scanning the parking lot behind her as the door swung shut. “I was busy thinking about tonight’s show and I didn’t notice you out there. Is that a new car or something?”

  “Ye-es! Thanks. You like the car?”

  “Fine,” he said, juggling grocery bags. Not the kind of tribute that the new owner of a racy red convertible expected. Matt still seemed in a hurry. “Can you press the elevator button? Thanks.”

  “Well,” Temple commented, “everyone around here was switching cars — Electra with your Elvismobile and you with her Probe, so I thought I’d trade the Storm for a Miata.”

  He nodded, looking over her shoulder, then at the bronze pointer above the door that showed what floor the elevator was on.

  Forget about Matt not paying proper attention to her new car, Temple thought. He wasn’t paying any attention to her!

  What was she today, a poor cousin of Typhoid Mary, Miss Poison Ivy?

  Before she could say anything, the elevator door ground open and Matt leaped aboard. “Hit the floor button, would you?” he instructed.

  No, she was Miss Elevator Operator.

  They both seemed stunned into silence on the brief ride up one floor.

  But once the elevator doors parted, Matt was again peering up and down the hall like a wary Doberman.

  It was like he was afraid to be seen with her.

  Surely he didn’t think that her resumed relationship with Max meant she couldn’t have male friends? That was the problem. She didn’t have a clue as to what was going on with Matt these days. Something had come between them, and she didn’t know what or why, only that she felt horribly left out on all fronts: with Lieutenant C. R. Molina, the Mystifying Max Kinsella, and now Mr. Midnight Matt Devine.

  Temple was the youngest of a family of five brothers and the only girl. She ought to be used to feeling left out by now, but in fact the older she got the worse she felt about it. Would she never count? Was she always “too little” to tell, to take along, to trust, to treat like a mature adult?

  “Temple?”

  Matt was looking down at her, peering into her face as if reading some of her distress. Professional PR lady couldn’t allow that!

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Uh, could you take your keys and open the door before I drop these jam-packed bags.”

  “Oh. I guess I overdid it at the store. I was…distracted.”

  “You? Buy groceries when you’re distracted?”

  “Well, you’ve been pretty distracted yourself lately.”

  “Busy,” he said quickly.

  “Right. Me too.”

  She still didn’t move toward the door, but he started to brush past her as if expecting it to open on its own. Open sesame, wasn’t that the formula? But Temple didn’t think any magic phrases would work anymore, certainly not on her door, and maybe not on her, ever again.

  j

  The grocery bags ended up crushed between them so they actually had to look each other in the eye — eyes, which were so evasive and edgy and anxious that Matt took a giant step backward against the opposite wall and stood there like the boy with his finger in the dyke keeping out all the floodwaters of the North Sea, except he looked more like a carry out boy from Lucky’s.

  “Put…the…bags…down,” she paraphrased Gene Wilder from Young Frankenstein.

  Matt just looked bewildered. It was a vintage movie and Temple imagined one didn’t see many movies in a Roman Catholic seminary unless they were about Lourdes or Joan of Arc.

  But he put the bags down on the floor, propped up by the wall, and he put his hands in his pants pockets. And stood there, looking Brad Pitt-adorable if Brad Pitt had been really, really good-looking.

  Temple leaned against her opposite wall and looked away. “It’s been a bad day.”

  “I got that.”

  “First I had to listen to Molina tell me the sky was falling and then my new car decided it wouldn’t even hold my groceries.”

  “Groceries? There won’t be that many groceries if you return to your usual ways. You’re not exactly Wolfgang Puck, you know.”

  “You mean Martha Stewart.”

  “If I was referring to your whole domestic mise-en-scène, yes, I would have meant that.”

  “‘Mise-en-scène’? That is giving my life way too high a profile. How about misery-en-scène?”

  “Temple, what’s wrong?”

  “Wrong? Nothing. Max is in trouble so deep he won’t talk to me about it, though Molina will, but nothing’s wrong. You’re running around with a sketch artist and won’t talk to me, or even look at me, but nothing’s wrong. Molina’s gloating like a vampire at a blood bank and she won’t tell me anything except that I’m moving in all the wrong directions, but nothing’s wrong.

  “There.” Temple folded her arms and stared sullenly at her grocery bags slumping against the opposite wall next to Matt’s khaki-clad legs. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  He was silent for so long she was almost tempted to look up at him, but resisted. She felt very rebellious all of a sudden.

  “I can see,” he said finally, “why you’d think I was avoiding you, but it’s just that late-night schedule of mine and the travel.”

  “That’s a lie, Matt. You don’t lie well. You want to avoid me.”

  “I don’t want to —”

  “Listen, you’re free to do whatever you need to. I just thought that we were friends —”

  “No.”

  She paused, startled into looking up.

  “We might have been friends once, we might be friends once again. But now. Friends. We are not friends.”

  The wave of disbelief, of unallayed hurt that struck like the opposite wall moving and smashing her between it and the plaster at her back, was a tsunami.

  Nothing, she saw, was what she had thought it was.

  Lives were being lived apart from her, separate from her, and they were not what she assumed them to be.

  Molina was right. She knew nothing.

  Signals Received

  Matt watched Temple’s usual wall of blithe good cheer crumble into a shimmer of plaster dust around her.

  He suddenly realized that of all of them, she knew nothing of the pervasive threats of Kitty the Cutter. He had confided in Molina. He had confided in Max Kinsella, of all penances the most painful. He had not breathed a word to Temple.

  It was in the name of her own protection, but it had isolated her, infantalized her. His enemies and acquaintances he could tell. Temple, whom he most feared and most feared for, he had kept in the dark. And she knew it, sensed it, felt it.

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’ll open the door. I can get the groceries in myself.”

  “We are not friends —”

  She looked away again, in that heartbreakingly unfocused way too proud to show distress.

  “— because we are too close to being something else. You know that. It’s always been true.”

  Now she didn’t dare look at him, and he found his hopeful, craven brain thinking, thinking…here, this tiny hallway. Not even she would, could have it bugged. Here. Now. Up against the wall. It would solve every
dilemma but sin, and sin seemed such a small fault when hearts and souls were at stake.

  “Not friends,” she was saying faintly. “Oh, that’s part of it, you know.”

  “I do know. Know more than I ever did before. And now I know that friends is not enough.”

  She stared at him, against her better judgment.

  He understood he had the power. Just had to use it. He stepped forward, brought himself close to her. She didn’t blink, didn’t flinch, couldn’t.

  She’d always known, but had hoped he wouldn’t, because then there’d be no one to say stop. No. The known norm is better than the imagined nirvana.

  She knew more than he about what could be. He felt it, though, as he never had before, and his own self-interest was so strong, both subjugated to her and dominant over her, it was like sensing a hurricane in his heart.

  His fingertips touched her shoulders.

  Just that.

  It seemed they stood in some still center while an electric dervish whirled around them.

  Impulse mattered, not thought. Feeling, not fear.

  He bent his head to hers.

  She turned away.

  He turned away.

  They were closer than ever.

  He turned.

  She turned.

  They couldn’t avoid each other.

  Always, always, turning, turning until they came round right.

  Temple closed her eyes.

  Anything, anything could happen. He could make it happen.

  Suddenly the magnetism reversed itself. Or he did. He could make anything happen now, and he chose reversal.

  They drew apart, leaned against their separate walls, said nothing.

  “I don’t understand,” Temple said, her always dusky voice hoarse now. “But I will someday, won’t I?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Will I —” She hesitated, almost braced herself for something. “Will I ever understand why you knew that Molina had found my lost ring at a crime scene, and she told you and not me? And why you never told me that she had it?”

  If she had wanted to throttle a moment and its aftermath, she had committed bloody murder right now.

  “Ring?” he repeated, suddenly remembering the loathed object on his key ring: his own crime-scene memento. Only that crime scene had been his apartment.

  “My ring. You know, the gorgeous opal-and-diamond-studded band Max got me in New York, that you both saw me wearing when you went together to the Opium Den to see Shangri-La perform.”

  “That ring.”

  “You make it sound so…common.”

  “I don’t mean to. It was police business. Molina told me in confidence. She wanted me to distrust Kinsella more than I did already, maybe use it against him. I wouldn’t be manipulated to hurt you. And then, the circumstances…it was a professional confidence. I didn’t feel I could pass it on.”

  “The privilege of the confessional! Great. You were already with Molina that evening. Hand in glove. Why should I ever think you owed anything to me, even honesty?”

  “She browbeat me into going with her that night. You know how she’s always dogged both of us about Kinsella, trying to get us to crack, betray him. It was all part of her game plan.”

  “That Dragon Lady magician calling me up on stage and then making my ring disappear wasn’t part of Molina’s game plan.”

  “No, neither was your complete disappearance from the onstage chamber right after that.”

  “The one time I get to be part of audience participation at something,” Temple went on bitterly, “and it turns out to be a kidnap attempt.”

  “Maybe worse,” Matt said, his voice darkening. “Nothing we’re talking about is anything to underestimate. You were abducted and that magician and her whole crew vanished. Then your ring was found later near where a woman had been strangled, an ex-magician’s assistant, no less. Molina’s games are not for the heck of it. She’s trying to close down a lot of unsolved cases, and, like it or not, Max Kinsella seems to be at the heart of most of them.”

  “So. You’re so busy now, with your own life and times, you should care about any of this, about me?”

  “I care more than I can —”

  “Wait. Let me finish. Or you do care, hallelujah, you care so much you’d like to see Max slapped in irons and taken away to death row, because then he’d be out of your way.”

  “No, Temple. What I care about or don’t care about doesn’t matter. It’s what I’d do. I’d never hurt anyone for my own gain. But I can’t betray a confidence either. Molina told me a piece of police business. I didn’t want to know it. I understood that she was using me, that she was hoping I’d tell you and undermine your confidence in Max, don’t you see? But I didn’t do that. I honored her confidence and by doing that, I avoided being manipulated by her.”

  “You didn’t avoid betraying me!” Temple’s eyes burned with anger. “If we really were friends, you wouldn’t try to protect me by concealing things from me. Maybe Molina was trying to drive you and me apart. Telling one person a secret that leaves another person out is a pretty time-tested way to do that.”

  “Molina has no personal interest in all this.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Molina? She’s the Great Stone Mountain of the Metropolitan Police Department.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Matt let his mind pull back, start wondering.

  “Why is she so down on Max? Why does she never let up? Does she need a fall guy? Why does she try to use you to split Max and me apart? Does she really want Max? You? You’ve been thinking of her as a job, a function, a career, not as a human being. As a woman. Maybe she has agendas you haven’t even imagined.”

  “And if she does, what was her agenda in showing you the ring? Now?”

  They both paused, breathless, to consider their own charges.

  “‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’” Temple quoted Sir Walter Scott.

  “‘When first we practice to deceive’? That’s not what we have here. I don’t think anyone wants to deceive,” Matt said. “But to protect.”

  “Protecting means you put yourself above the protected. You know better.”

  “It’s a parental role, yes.”

  “Or a priest’s?”

  “Or an undercover operative’s?”

  “Or a policewoman’s?” Temple, laughed, not happily. “I guess lowly PR flacks are stuck being the protectees. Nothing noble and elevating about my job.”

  “Temple.”

  “I am tired of being protected by people meddling in my life for my own good. It’s my life. I’m allowed to mess it up all by myself.”

  “But not to lose it.”

  “That’s what you’re really worried about?”

  He nodded, unable to speak, to voice the anxiety.

  She relaxed a little.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me, too. Just like Max and the lieutenant. Join the club. I hate what people do to you for your own good. I hated it when I was five years old and I hate it worse now.”

  “It’s worse when they think about doing something to you for their own good, and not yours.”

  Her eyes grew suddenly shrewd. “That’s what almost happened a little while ago with you, didn’t it?”

  He nodded miserably.

  That seemed to cheer her up considerably. “You were being selfish, really?”

  “Irresponsible,” he admitted. Almost lethally irresponsible.

  “So it wasn’t my own good you were thinking of?”

  “For a few, unforgivable seconds, no.”

  Temple let out a huge breath. “Well. At last! Somebody who’s acting like a human being around me. What a relief!” Her voice grew mischievous, if not quite flirtatious. “We’ll have to try it again sometime.”

  Matt bent to pick up her groceries.

  “I’ll take the stuff in. Just go while you’re ahead. That’s what they say at the craps tables.”

 
He did.

  He had never been so close to the perfect end of the fairy tale, but he realized that the witch would have been waiting to extract her price anyway. Temple wasn’t his way out, no matter that she was the most tempting way out. He’d have to find another one.

  That’s when he knew that there were no perfect endings, just endless wishes that there were.

  Disappearance Inc.

  I have spent the night not panicking.

  This is hard to do when you are locked in a closet in a strange house that is hidden behind a forgotten cemetery. Especially when sharing said closet with you is a bunch of spooky magician’s gear and a stiff stretched out on the floor like a rug du jour.

  I mean this guy — and I have pussyfooted enough over the corpus delicti in the dark to know that it is a guy — is harder than the concrete they wrapped around Ugly Hugo Manicotti’s tootsies before taking him to diving school in Lake Mead back in ’59.

  Eventually I settle down to the head’s-up detecting I am noted for and realize that my closet corpse is so wooden for a reason: he is a giant-size Pinocchio, a mere dummy probably used in some body-switching illusion or another.

  This is what comes of taking a supposed relative for a partner: the usually canny operative loses all sense of proportion when the partner in question goes missing.

  I revise my previous conclusions. If Miss Louise had figured out the dead guy is really just deadwood, she would have had no compunction about moving on from our point of entry to other, more interesting, and thus more perilous, places. We two need to have a serious talk about not pressing forward on our own, leaving the senior partner in the dark quite literally.

  I tromp over Dead Fred’s nose, which is not prevaricatingly long (although the dummy maker must have had a sick sense of humor as something else on this anatomically correct stiff is), and nose the door open a smidge with my own admirably proportioned schnoz.

  That it obliges my nudge tells me Miss Louise has gone this way. I slip out into the semidark and pull the door almost shut again.

  Of course I am at a loss, while Miss Louise has obviously scouted this terrain previously.

  I am really going to bawl her out for numerous acts unbecoming to a partner when I find her. I eye the room. It is vast, shadowy, and smells of mothballs and dustballs. I am guessing it is a mostly unused storeroom. The Cloaked Conjuror had hit Las Vegas like a leopard-spotted tornado only months ago. I imagine clandestinely finding and purchasing this hideout was a difficult job, and did not leave much time for dusting every nook and cranny.