Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“Yeah.”

The glasses were tiny and exquisite. The sherry was the color of watered-down blood. Temple killed hers with one swallow.

Sue chuckled again. “At least you’re trying to figure this out. Listen. This man, the ex-priest, I don’t think he’s fooling himself. No, this civil marriage plan is not a way out for him . It is for you , if you don’t mind having a Reno divorce on your record. His church would never recognize the validity of a civil marriage. He’d have sinned. But both you and he could start over again, fresh. You’d be a Reno divorcee, not odd at your age. And he would have sinned but he wouldn’t have committed himself to a real marriage, the only kind his faith recognizes, a Catholic one.”

“All this for a free sample?”

“That was you, not him.”

“Oh, God. Oh.”

Sue shook her head and refilled Temple’s glass.

“You two. You’re like a pair of blind people trying to meet in some nonexistent middle.” She leaned forward. “You don’t have Doubt One about your sexual compatibility with this man. You have doubts about your religious compatibility.”

“It’s strange. I don’t want to think about some of these things in advance. I’m okay with sex, marriage, and what next? Who knows what I’ll want in three years? But my not wanting kids right away, or ever, would be a big religious no-no for him and his church. Yet he’s the one with a legitimate reason to worry about that.”

“There are options. Natural family planning, for instance, is accepted by his church. You know, it means abstinence on presumed ‘infertile’ days. It works a lot better these days than when it was take-your-temperature-and-hope forty years ago.”

“I don’t want to think about that. It sounds so . . . clinical. I want to think about who I love and could spend the rest of my life with.”

“What about who loves you?”

Temple smiled, shakily. “I’m lucky. I know two guys do. And I guess I . . . love them both. Is that possible?”

“Maybe, but it doesn’t work very well. I can see you’ll be conflicted no matter which way you go.”

“That sucks! Excuse me, Reverend.”

“The truth often does.”

“He said . . . my ex-priest friend, that he never wanted to confess anything that happened between us.”

“Nor should any seriously sincere person, no matter his religion. I’m afraid, Miss Temple Barr, that you also are a seriously sincere person. It doesn’t make life easy. But it will make it rewarding. Eventually. That doesn’t help, I suppose.”

“You’ve confirmed what I was afraid of. Ma—The ex-priest was thinking of me, not himself, when he came up with that civil marriage stunt. He’d still be in trouble with his faith.”

“You gotta love a guy like that.” Sue smiled.

“Yeah. But the other man has always looked out for me too, even risked his neck. It’s just that he’s been so . . . absent lately. I know he has good, even noble reasons.”

“Sounds like you can’t live with one man’s religious values and the other’s man’s job.”

“I can’t live with liking, needing, wanting, loving two men at the same time!”

“A lot of women claim they can’t find one good guy nowadays. You have two. Can you spare one? I’m single.”

Temple, on the verge of tears, found herself laughing instead.

“Yeah,” Sue said. “I’m a fine one to give advice. Love isn’t for sissies. I think something will happen to push you one way or the other. It’ll just happen, and you’ll know what’s right.”

Temple nodded and got up to leave.

She had no doubt that Max was another one of Sue Hathaway’s “seriously sincere” persons too. Maybe the answer was not what she couldn’t live with—subdivided loyalties, conflicting love and lust—but what, or who, she couldn’t live without .

And maybe she’d recognize that when she saw it.

Police Work

Now that Temple was a bottle blonde, Morrie Alch was salt-and-pepper putty in her petite little hands.

She would bet that his only child, a grown daughter, had been a taffy-haired honey of twenty-two months at one time.

“Thanks, Detective Alch, for handling this so discreetly.”

He gazed up at the empty area above the peak of the exhibition ramp, where men in coveralls sat on boards suspended on paint-spattered ropes.

“Thank the New Millennium,” he said. “They have clout in this town. We poor flatfoots do our job and bow out.”

“You’re not a flatfoot; you’re a detective. You don’t fool me. That poor dead man. I’m still trying to find out if he could possibly have been hired by the hotel.”

“Waste of time. All that fuss about him maybe being a Chechen rebel. He has a Slavic look, but ‘Art’ was a petty crook. A hotel hanger-on, all right, but more used to hanging paper around town than hanging dead over the site-to-be of a priceless artifact. It takes a superior criminal mentality to engineer a major art heist.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Temple tried not to think of the superior criminal mentality she knew intimately. “We’ve tripled security.”

“That ought to make somebody very unhappy.”

“You think the exhibition is still endangered?”

Alch shook his grizzled head. “Security is out of our hands. Homicide’s the name of our game. The LVMPD will offer some officers to watch things around here, but it’s up to hotel security now. That’s the way they want it.”

Temple checked her watch. It was one of those easy-read dials big enough to cover her wrist. Nothing Paris Hilton would wear, but it kept her on time in a field where split seconds could make all the difference in the world.

Randy Wordsworth had arranged for her to interview the Cloaked Conjuror in his dressing room.

This was a biggie. The New Millennium kept the name of their headlining masked magician a state secret and his safety Job One. When you live and work in a magical kingdom where illusion adds up to a billion-dollar-a-month industry, your hide can become wall worthy when your whole shtick is outing the opposition. Death threats combined with the masked mystique to keep CC pretty much out of reach of the media, except for a few controlled appearances outside the New Millennium, like judging the TitaniCon science fiction costume contest at the Hilton Hotel a few months before, where Temple had first encountered him.

One of his body doubles had fallen to a suspicious death from the flies there, so CC’s security had tightened even more after that. But since Temple’s job here was partly spin control, management was letting her play sleuth in hopes she could head off more disastrous events spelling bad publicity. Temple was pleased to think that she was gaining a reputation for PI as well as PR work in Las Vegas. They made a useful combination.

She wasn’t surprised she had to sign in with a guard at the entrance to the backstage area. And to show her special New Millennium ID card. God, she hoped she could keep it when this job was through. Between her new blond bling look and the softening Glamour Shots effect of teeny tiny security card photos, she looked hardly as old as teen queen Hillary Duff. And thirty was already beginning to feel over the hill.

“You the one going to be working with CC?” the guard asked a bit shyly. He was the usual sedentary Social Security geezer who was content to watch the world go by, especially if it had good legs.

“Gosh, no!” Had he really mistaken her for Shangri-La, the lethal mistress of Asian illusions? Not so strange. “Shang” almost always wore makeup, so who knew what the woman really looked like? A handy asset. “I work PR for the hotel.”

He waved her onward, down some bare concrete steps into the significant bowels of the backstage area.