Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alien X-Ray

“He’s your rival,” she said.

Matt shook his head. “He’s harmless.”

She almost spit at him, but glanced at the chasm below and reconsidered.

“He’s forgotten most of his past, you know. That’s right. You wouldn’t know. He’s forgotten you, thanks to that bungee cord act of sabotage at the late, great Neon Nightmare club. Was that you? No, you like live victims. But you knew about that so-called accident. It’s your business to know everything about all of us.”

“Us?”

“Anyone close to Max Kinsella. As I said, he’s lost and misplaced most of what made Max Kinsella before he was the Mystifying Max. His mentor’s death in Northern Ireland probably blasted the rest out of him. Do you know anything about that, Kathleen? The old IRA and the recalcitrant ‘New’ IRA are still fightin’ and fussin’ some, and Max and Garry Randolph got caught in the crossfire. Do you know anything about who betrayed them? Speechless? Thinking hard? Never mind.

“Max is back in Vegas putting pieces together. He remembers the past few weeks since he recovered from his coma, of course. He remembers his travels with his mentor to Belfast. I’m not sure he remembers you, Kathleen. Except for what his mentor learned about your mother and your birth and your own motherhood and passed on.”

By now her glare had frozen as if this Medusa had finally glimpsed herself in a mirror. Her breathing was hardly detectable, but her pulse was galloping in her wrists.

“He has odd flashes of memory, you understand? And he’s a very bright man. Brilliant. I’m counseling him too. Helping him to rebuild his life. To remember. But it’s often just the offbeat emotional flash. Something simmers, then he blurts it out.

“During one of those moments, when we were talking about you … you can imagine how much we talk about you lately. Max said, regarding those crazy teenage times in the Auld Sod when he and his cousin Sean went waltzing up to Londonderry into the teeth of the Troubles. He said, and we can’t put much stock into what a man in his condition, not to mention recovering from the violent loss of his mentor, thanks to some unknown assailants, says. But he said, with amazing and sudden certainty, that he’d been in love with you.

“It’s ironic that you’d hate forever the only man who ever really loved you.”

He pushed her away and left, knowing he was done with this charade and that, if she did go over the railing, she would never scream on the way down.

* * *

At least he’d learned something major, if he was inclined to believe anything Kathleen O’Connor would say, but he did believe she was lurking there that night. Vassar hadn’t killed herself. She’d fallen, grabbing for her cell phone while gazing out at the pseudo-tropical foliage, inhabited by birds no less, twenty stories up.

Had she been calling the advice hotline he’d suggested? Had he turned her despair around, just a little? Or was Kitty the Cutter just toying with him again? Hope was an antidote to guilt, and she knew how to work that combination lock to the emotions very, very well.

Chapter 48

After the Fall

So there I am at the Goliath, on tailing duty, having shadowed Mr. Matt Devine into the hotel and up in the elevator when I overhear that interesting interlude.

Las Vegas hotel elevators are the easiest to slip into and out of, like loafers. Folks are always counting their chips or their money, and chatting or planning their forays around the Strip. Many are rotund enough that they cannot even see where their toes are, much less me and mine.

And the management prefers dark-floored elevators to resist stains.

I was even able to follow him to the door of room 2032. I cozied up to it in hopes of hearing something useful, but the door was too well built to hear through, especially with the air-conditioning running.

The recent balcony scene outside the door was no Romeo and Juliet rerun and I heard every word. At last Mr. Matt knows from someone on two legs who was there that Vassar’s death was accidental and his counseling had encouraged her to call for more help while Miss K the C spied on her from down the hall.

I knew that all along after coming here and interviewing the wildlife on the scene. I learned that Miss Vassar had come out to gaze on the flora and fauna and make a call on her cell phone after Mr. Matt left. She reached down as the phone slipped from her hand and, sadly, fell.

There was no way for me to bring the eyewitness evidence I obtained from a macaw and cockatoos to human attention, so Mr. Matt has labored under a bit of suspicion and his own sense of guilt ever since. Now he has stepped up and found the truth.

I cannot rejoice overmuch at the moment, though, because when the pair left the hotel room, I had flung myself down under the railing to cling to a thick but thorny length of exotic flowering vine and am now desperately fighting two fatal impulses: To sneeze or to fall, that is the question. Or do both.

Hopefully, neither of the above.

Unfortunately, Miss Kitty the Cutter is alone now and wringing the brass top rail with her razorless hands and cussing out Mr. Matt, Mr. Max, and Miss Temple something awful.

I dare not climb up to resume tailing Mr. Matt because the awkward positions required to achieve solid ground again would leave me at the mercy of Miss Kitty and either a swift kick to the gut and the curb twenty stories below or a lusty neck-wringing.

Inquiring members of feather nation gather around me, chirping and calling and clicking their beaks in admonition, drawing unwelcome attention to my secret presence and generally twittering it all over the atrium.

Fortunately, I am recognized.

“Oh, not a predator,” comes the sweet tweet of a gray parrot I recognize from my last assignment here.

“Begone, begone, begone,” tweet a flock of cockatiels, and I would be obliged if Miss Kitty would depart.

“I need a diversion,” I tell the gray parrot, who is amazingly verbal and intelligent for a featherhead.

“Troops,” the gray orders, “Disneyize that woman at the railing.”

Well, you have never seen a more colorful array of sweet little feathered nothings twining in and around Miss Kathleen O’Connor’s form, swooping into her black locks and lifting edges of her filmy clothing in their little yellow beaks and chirping oh-so-sunnily.

It is as if one of the Ugly Stepsisters became the object of a Cinderella makeover. Miss Kitty is soon batting and turning and making like Miss Tippi Hedren in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

I undulate up the sinuous branch, never looking down to twenty stories below, and scramble over the edge onto the balcony.

The last I see of Miss Kitty the Cutter, she is batting off birds and much resembling the Wicked Witch of the West surrounded by her flying monkeys.

I race to the elevators, heading for the main floor and the parking lot, determined to get to Mr. Matt’s silver Jaguar before the big automotive cat takes off without me.

That would not be a brotherly act from a fellow feline. I need to keep my tail.

I can only hope the rest of the Cat Pack is pursuing their assignments with equal savvy and vigor.

And less dependence on our feathered friends.

Chapter 49

Left Behind