"So does yours."
They regarded each other sadly. Telling the truth, yet saying nothing.
Temple moved back to her side of the sofa; actually Louie's, but even he had walked out on this painful impasse. From the kitchen she heard the astounding sound of Free-to-be-Feline pellets being crunched. Either nothing else was set out to eat, or he was making an unprecedented statement.
"It's not Matt," she said finally, not expecting Max to believe her. "It's the mystery. We all have a right to our own mysteries, but yours are too deep. I have to wonder now if I've been misled. Taken.
Used."
Three little words, and she could see him conceal an internal wince at each one. He lashed out in turn, but not at her.
"Then it's that damnable police lieutenant Molina, planting poisonous seeds, but doing what?
Arresting me? No, not even if I walked up and held my wrists out for the cuffs. Because I'm not... guilty of anything arrest able. You're going to let some pathologically suspicious detective come between us?"
"Frank is coming between us--"
"Frank? That's his name?"
Temple smiled at his latest erroneous conclusion. "Frank Ness, maybe a relative of Elliot, do you think? Molina's just a messenger, Max. An unwelcome one, but a bit player, believe me. You've got to accept responsibility. You said earlier that maybe you shouldn't have let' us happen, that you had no right."
"But I had an inclination, a need."
"What I need to know, what I have a right to know, is what you can't tell me about yourself, bad or good or indifferent. That's the sad thing, if you'd just trust me--"
"There's no trust in what began in Ireland all those innocent years ago, Temple, only serial suspicion.
It's not that I don't trust you, or myself, it's the whole mean and uncouth world out there. I suppose I should be grateful you have someone around to look after you," he added in a bitter mumble, as if accusing himself of dereliction of duty.
"Yeah," Temple said assertively. "Me."
"Temple, I have always respected your independence."
"Good, because I've had to develop a bit more of it lately."
"Good."
"Fine. Then everybody's happy. Max, if you really knew what kind of danger I've faced and survived lately, you'd stop acting like a knight errant and offer me a job as a bodyguard."
"If I knew, I'd probably ship you back to your family in Minneapolis."
Temple shook her head. "Too late. Can't go back, and I'm glad. I thank you for that. Can't go back to being a professional innocent, either."
"Too bad. Absence is overrated; it doesn't make the heart grow fonder."
Resignation had settled on his expressive form like an invisible cloak. He was a mime at heart; despite his phenomenal emotional and facial control, his body language always gave him away, at least to her.
Temple felt her uncertainty and resolve melting into compassion, anguish, the vague grip of chronic misery.
"Max, you idiot, this wouldn't be so bloody bewildering if I didn't want to just jump right back to where we were! Maybe with some time, some talk--"
"I haven't got time! And talk is academic." He sat forward on the couch, staring at the bare glass top of her coffee table as if studying his faint reflection. "Temple, your suspicions are absolutely right, in a way. That ancient Interpol card marked the beginning of the whole mess. It began with a death. There have been more, and will be more. So maybe that means that I don't deserve a life. But you ... I won't risk you, even if that means I must risk losing you."
"Will you stay in Las Vegas?"
His fingers entwined tightly, making his two hands into one bare-knuckled, white-capped mountain range, like some Oriental form of isometric exercise symboling intense inner conflict. "I can't say."
"Will you come up and see me sometime?" A suggestion of Mae West in the delivery barely disguised her underlying seriousness.
He glanced up from contemplating some dark well in his past and future, truly startled. Temple just smiled. One didn't often shock the Mystifying Max.
She managed to keep the smile light and bright. "I didn't say it was hopeless, Max. Just use the door now and again. And knock first."
Chapter 4
Yvette to Be Alone
Humans are a curious species. I mean that in both senses of the word: they are odd in their own practices, and nosy about the habits of others.
So they are always writing books about my kind purporting to explain our comings and goings and endearing little domestic quirks. They are especially obsessed by our bathroom routines for some reason, although we have bent over backwards to use their indoor facilities and I have not observed them making any reciprocal effort to adapt our outdoor etiquette in these matters.
When they are not speculating about our potty practices, they are puzzling over our enduring attraction to paper goods. Be it newsprint, tax forms or the pages of an open book, we can always be found on it (or, on occasion, under it). Why?
The answer is apparently too obvious to arrive at. Where do they suppose we get our legendary savoir faire, our wise demeanor and sage expressions? We are absorbing the contents of the printed matter in our own cryptic, inimitable way. I do not propose that we actually read line by line, but proximity is enough. Perhaps you have heard certain veterinarians seriously advising humans to shred newspapers as substitute litter box material for felines who have had that sometimes necessary procedure that I call a "claw draw."
How idiotic! What do they take us for? Such humans will tell you that their discriminating domestic partners usually refuse to use these substitute box fillers. And why? Not because of the caustic perfume of printer's ink, but because all of those tumbled and shredded bits of words and phrases confuse our sense of order. Although we often may be inclined to demonstrate our opinion of much of human literature with a well-deserved scratch and deposit, we do not wish to deface potential reading matter.
However, I am not here to discuss human behavior, however disgusting.
I merely cite these facts of feline behavior to explain how it is that when Miss Temple Barr returns from seeing Mr. Max Kinsella to the door, she finds me rising and stretching atop the brochures and flyers on the kitchen countertop.
"Oh, Louie, shoo!" she greets me in her usual melodious tones of affection. "Have you wrinkled all of Electra's information?"
Wrinkled it? I have conquered it. As I rise I know several key facts: one is the imminent arrival of hundreds of romance-lovers. This is no news. Las Vegas is full of romance-lovers, else it would not have so many wedding chapels.
What has set my synapses singing is the news that the female hostess of the main event at this amorous gathering is none other than Miss Savannah Ashleigh, the so-called film star. And where Miss Savannah Ashleigh goeth, her little lamb is sure to goeth also. I refer to none other than the Divine Yvette, mon amour of fur, the pinnacle of Persian pussy-hood, the shaded silver sultana of Rodeo Drive.
"Louie! Don't drool on the convention brochure." Miss Temple is now berating me. "Surely, you are not one of these cover model maniacs?"
Please. Naked muscle does not do a thing for me. The usually percipacious Miss Barr has evidently missed the key image: a small head shot of Miss Savannah Ashleigh, her waves of platinum hair bleached to match the natural silver of my beloved's soft locks.
"Ooooh," says Miss Temple, her piquant little features wrinkling. "Savannah Ashleigh is hosting the cover model pageant. That has-been could not get work as Heather Locklear's stand-in. Am I glad I am not handling PR for this do--temperamental cover hunks would be bad enough. Savannah Ashleigh would be too much. Louie--! Give that back!"
Even as my little doll battles me for possession of the convention brochure, I keep my claws in and my lip zipped. She suddenly freezes in mid-fight and opens those baby blue-grays as wide as all outdoors.
"Why, Louie, that Ashleigh woman has a cat you're sweet on ... what is its name? Iva ... Ivory ...
Minuet... Minaret?"
The Divine Yvette is not an "It," but I will not deign to tell Miss Temple so. I do not speak to humans, on principal, because some of them are so unspeakable to my kind.
Miss Temple does not expect an answer from me anyway. "Even cats get the long-gone, lonesome blues, I guess," she goes on. "I am sure that Savannah Ashleigh drags the poor thing everywhere she goes. So, feel free, Louie, to mosey on over to the Phoenix to visit Electra and me during the G.R.O.W.L.
convention. You can even say hello to your lost inamorata."
In amor what? Poor Miss Temple. Her mind is more than somewhat muddled from her recent encounter with the Mystifying Max. No doubt she has already forgotten that there is good reason I would not be eager to race over to the Crystal Phoenix to mix whiskers with the Divine Yvette.
I cannot touch tootsie to premises without risking an encounter with my own unwelcome offspring, the exceedingly un-divine Midnight Louise. No matter that the Divine Yvette waits and wonders in her lonely canvas carrier.
A romance conference may be convening at the Crystal Phoenix, but love is not in the cards for two lonely persons from the opposite side of the tracks. The Divine Yvette is forever Pretty Paws, and I am plain dirt.
Chapter 5
A Really Big Shoe-down
"It's no use, Louie," Temple announced at 10:30 p.m., slapping back the covers so quickly that the cat was forced to edge aside.
Midnight Louie, rearranged in the Sphinx/Leo position so prominent in Las Vegas nowadays, regarded her sitting form with polite yet bored amazement. Cats were as good as concealing their thoughts as . . .
well, the Sphinx.
"I just can't sleep," she went on aloud despite Louie's obvious disinterest, "and I won't spend any more time tossing and twitching over men whose names begin with the letter M. There is more to life than angst in the first degree. I'm outta here."
She picked up the red shoe phone and sparred a round of numbers into it, by heart. It wasn't answered until the fourth ring, but Temple felt no guilt whatsoever. She'd had it with guilt.
"Did I wake you? Sorry. I won't take more than a minute. Electra, get me out of here! It's a go on your GROWLers. Whisk me away to Wishful Thinking Land. Reality . . . mucks. Eight tomorrow morning? No problem."
She set the phone down on its high red heel and disconnecting black sole, then regarded Midnight Louie in her turn. "There's only one place a girl can go when everything has gone wrong in her life, and I'm on my way."
Temple jumped up, tore off her Garfield T-shirt, no doubt to Louie's supreme relief, and sprinted over to her fifties dresser with the foot-deep drawers.
Pantyhose hurled left and right until she found a pair that lacked runs, snags and holes in the toes.
Her flurry of action had lured Louie from the bed to the floor, where he was playing footsie with the rejected pantyhose.
"Eat 'em if you want to," Temple advised him in atypical abandon. "Why keep defective hose around that I'll never wear?" That line might also apply to certain human beings whose first names began with the letter M, but, like Scarlett, Temple wasn't going to think about that until tomorrow.
She donned a linen culottes and top in such a cheery shade of butter-substitute yellow that it would make teeth grit for miles around, snarled a brush through her bed-tousled curls and left the bedroom.
In five minutes flat she had her red patent leather tote bag on the passenger seat and was weaving the aqua Geo Storm in and out of the Las Vegas Strip's twenty-four-hour traffic jam.
Caesars Palace was lit up like a wedding cake, all illuminated white columns. The image did nothing for Temple's mood, but she parked the Storm in the lot and hoofed her way into the churning crowds.
The dark casino with its thousand pinpoints of low intensity light was a blurred, sound-barrier-breaking, warp-speed passage to her.
Seconds later she broke into the tasteful beige ambiance of the hotel's marble-lined Forum shopping area. Here she finally paused, although it was a detour on her ultimate route. Despite the hour and the hot action in the casino, crowds still jostled through the tangled byways of shopfronts. Temple hitched the tote bag straps higher on her shoulder. Don't mess with me, purse*snatchers!
She was coming up fast on the pale Cararra-marble backside of Michelangelo's David, a replica that loomed eighteen virtually nude feet into the mall's airy classical vault. The surrounding rotunda was painted bawdy-house red with oodles of white plaster-work, creating an intimate bedroom ambiance for David's marbled muscles. Another slick imposter, Temple thought darkly. A costly imitation of the real thing. Just like certain relationships !
She cast David's insouciantly bare, ultra-masculine form a glance. His name decidedly did not begin with an M. Soon she would be seeing similar territoriality in the flesh at Electra's G.R.O.W.L. conference.
Growl! So what!
Like Caesar, she stood at a personal Rubicon: between two vastly different paths. Hah! Did her subconscious think it was referring to matters metaphysical? No. This choice was far more crucial than a mere fork in the rocky road of her lovelife.
Should she go east, or should she go west? East lay the more familiar turf of the Appian Way, a well-heeled shopper's paradise of vamp and sole, most of them not manmade, but the real thing.
West lay the Place-She-Dare-Not-Contemplate and remain sane, the Place-She-Had-Been-Ignoring, the guaranteed site of temptation beyond budget. Temple had never laid eyes on the exact location, though she had known of its existence for months. To plunge into such a dangerous region in her state of emotional chaos was folly, but there are times when only exquisite excess will soothe the savage soul.
Sole.
Even now she thought she could hear the siren song of high heels tapping, could see the sad, stirring vision of rows of unoccupied shoes lined up like doggies in a window, hoping for a possessor. ... Pick me.
Pick mel Pick me!
She turned right, west, and marched to her doom and to her delight. Odd how often those opposite concepts went together!
First, she decided on a frontal attack, which was the long way around, but a brisk walk does wonders to soothe the savage heart. She retraced her way through the casino and out the sweeping front entrance flanked by more reproductions of classic statues. Given the mating habits of the Roman gods they represented, reproductions were oddly apt. Temple followed the curving walk from pool to pool of dramatic lighting, pausing only under the huge rotating Planet Hollywood sign at the midway point.
By the time she reached the Strip, she was braced for the background clatter of cars and foot traffic, and bathed in millions of kilowatts of a neon symphony. Caesars's warm white incandescence glowed on her left; the Mirage's sophisticated coppery cliff-side shone amid tropical splendor. The Mirage volcano emitted a cigarette cough as it prepared to whoop and roar with artificial fireworks, the Strip's only chain smoker.
But Temple was pointed between these titans of the Las Vegas Strip, toward her own temple, a rotunda bristling with gilded horses flaunting their twenty-four-carat hooves. A hop on the moving sidewalk and she was wafted, alongside a stream of tourists, up a gentle incline toward The Forum Shops at Caesars Palace. (Omit the apostrophe in Caesars, she mentally reminded herself, like a good PR
girl who knows all the local quirks, and even some national ones: the Dr in Dr Pepper never has a period, nor does the S in Harry S Truman, nor does Caesars Palace sport an apostrophe.) Like Jean Paul Sartre's Hell, the novice found No Exit from The Forum Shops except through Caesars'
casino. Las Vegas architecture was as canny as a maze. Despite all the bells and whistles, the object was to maroon visitors right where the management wanted them: dead center in a casino.
No such illusions would do for Temple tonight. This was a serious pilgrimage. So she brushed by aimless tourists with single-minded skill. Many people had slowed to gawk at the eternally blue trompel'oeil sky, where wispy clouds shimmered in a shifting bath of sunset haze. She dodg
ed around the massive marble obstacle of the first indoor fountain. A ring of people was awaiting the hourly animation of Bacchus, Plautus, Apollo and Venus, but Temple rushed through, unimpressed by the dome's laser-lashed storming sky, or the emerald constellations of stars that twinkled through.
She streaked past Planet Hollywood like a copper-topped comet, did not pause to watch its indoor world-shaped sign turn above the neon-framed cave of the trendy restaurant. She de-toured around the gigantic sculpted fountain in the ersatz street's center, not even glancing at the honored Italian names under the surrounding Greek pediments surmounted by statuary: Versace, Gucci, Escada, Armani. Once again it was Romans over the Greeks, and everybody else, by a designer logo.
She knew most of the stores here, but kept an eye out for the newest one. By now the black yawning maw of Caesars, glinting with the gold teeth of casino lighting, loomed beyond the Forum Shops's eternal twilight glow like a monster mouth.
Where was it? Had she overshot her goal? No! Her feet were tiring. Even the businesslike clicks of She squinted at the shop signs above the doors, deliberately underplayed to showcase the brilliantly lit shop windows below. Temple's heart began beating faster as she recognized part of a name. Surely that first word .. . S-t-u? Yes! She had never seen it before, but she would have known it anywhere. Her feet moved faster.
She crossed lanes in the stream of shoppers like the Storm darting through traffic, her chin lifted so she could see above the madding (and Texas-tall) crowd to the object of her outing.
Was that woman in the high-tech rubber jumpsuit going to dash in the door before her? Not on her life!
Temple's feet barely touched ground as she scuttled through the moving mob, slipping through the open door a step before the Rubber Jumpsuit.
Ah. Ahhhh.
Here all was not only classical, but class. The understated gleam of travertine walls, warm backlighting that showcased (shoe-cased?) glass shelves artfully lined with goods. She was aware of miniature dressmaking forms attired in gold brocade, of purses and the odd accessory scattered artfully hither and yon. But they were not the Main Event.
Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle Page 4
