Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“I mean your terrific brothers. And I haven’t even been to the Crystal Phoenix in ages to see Nicky and Van.”

“Me, neither,” Aldo said, making ready to sit on her sofa.

“Wait!”

“What?” He slapped a hand to his inside breast pocket. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing . . . worth, ah, a sidearm extraction. It’s just that you’ll get black Midnight Louie hairs all over that pale linen suit.”

“Whoa! You mean I am trespassing on the Top Cat’s territory here?”

“Sort of.”

Temple decided not to mention that Kit had been sleeping there lately . . . when she was home before four in the morning. Temple never thought she’d be the one to uphold the Barr family standards for discreet behavior.

Aldo, perhaps as uneasy as she was, began pacing. Although he wasn’t as tall as Max, he was still way too tall to pace in a room this size.

He stopped by the French doors to eye the petite balcony. “Cute place.”

“Thanks.” Temple felt like a Lilliputian being visited by a rod-packing Gulliver.

“Sorry!” Kit clattered out over the hardwood floors, looking as breathless and perky as a sixteen-year-old. “I’m ready now.”

“Bella!” Aldo gathered her into his long-armed escort and steered her to the door.

“We’ll be back—” Kit began. “When will we be back?”

“When the night has had enough of us,” Aldo said dramatically.

Kit shrugged. “Oh, well . . . ”

Temple could have sworn she winked at her before Aldo drew the big coffered door shut on them.

Well, this was a fine how-do-you-do! Kit out on the town, Fontana style. Louie out on the town, prowling style. Matt gunning for Max and not telling her a thing about it until after the fact. Max the usual Invisible Man he’d been for the past few months.

Temple threw herself down on the sofa, unmindful of Louie hairs, put up her feet, and debated calling Matt, calling out for a pizza, calling the Mounties, or the remaining Fontana brothers.

Instead, she did what a future sixty-year-old should do. She fell asleep, feeling rather sorry for herself but too tired to do anything to take her mind off that spineless condition.

When she woke up, the room was dark. Totally dark. Not a lamp lit.

The time on the VCR read 12:00. Midnight! She jolted upright. Wait. She had never reset the VCR time after it went out during one of the few summer electrical storms in Las Vegas. With an annual rainfall of four inches, they were rarer than ace-high flushes. She couldn’t have fixed it anyway, because only Max knew how to do it.

Her eyes felt grainy from sleeping with her contact lenses in, even though they were the soft variety.

The peace and quiet was nice, though, after frenetic, long hours on the hotel’s marble floors. It was too late to relieve Randy, but she’d be there first thing in the morning and start pulling her weight again. Surely nothing terrible had happened in just these few hours.

Then she saw the red light blinking on her answering machine through the open door to her office. Oh, no. Someone had called.

Temple sat up, fast, and tried to stand, but she ran into a solid piece of darkness that caught hold of her arms and held her back. Before she could scream, she recognized the silky texture of Max’s trademark black turtleneck sweater.

“If you won’t scream, I’ll promise not to fall asleep,” he said.

Temple wiggled up high enough in the sofa seat to switch on the floor lamp next to it. Max had been sitting at the sofa’s far end with her feet on his lap, waiting for her to wake up.

“You do look tired enough to fall asleep right now,” she told him, as the light searched the deep lines and sharp angles of his features. “What’s been going on, Max? I swear I can’t take it anymore.”

He just nodded. “I’ve come here on orders.”

“Who orders you around?”

“Apparently, your upstairs neighbor.”

“Matt? You’d never take orders from Matt. What’s going on? He was all rabid to find you, talk to you. Maybe I shouldn’t have passed his message on to you.”

“He was and I found him. We had a heart-to-heart.”

“I heard and I don’t like the sound of that. It’s much too civilized.”

“Just civil. He agreed that I should talk to you.”

“Agreed?”

“He insisted. I agreed.”

“This is crazy. I don’t need Matt as a go-between.”

“Maybe you do. He was warning me.”

“About what?”

“That fingerprint Molina bullied you out of.”

“That was the piece of damning evidence Matt said she had? Then there was a fingerprint on that CD?”

“So Molina told Matt.”

“Why would she tell Matt about that?”

Max shrugged, a gesture so small she hardly detected it. “It appears she finally has the evidence to draw the net closed on me.”

“Oh, God, Max! She just charged in here. I didn’t even think until later that I could have stopped her.”

“I don’t think you could have. She’s been pushing the line on what’s legal lately, not to mention ethical. I do take a certain pride in driving her to such measures. It will be some consolation when I’m led off in chains.”

“She’d have to find and catch you first.”

“Yes, well, that may not be necessary. No matter how long I can avoid capture, all she really has to do to ruin me is come here and tell you what she thinks she’s got me on.”

“Not murder?”

“That too, but nothing she can prove.”

“What can she prove, then?”

“Can we take a high-end whiskey break? Still got some?”

“Of course. You don’t think I just pass your Millennium bottle out to strangers?”

“Or to neighbors?”

Temple felt her cheeks heat up, probably not visibly, though. “Or aunts,” she said, dodging the implication. Had she offered Matt some? Once? Maybe.

Either way, she was glad for an excuse to hustle into the kitchen and slam cupboard doors and fill glasses with a dark potent inch of the pricey Bushmill’s Millennium Irish whiskey with which Max had celebrated, and mourned, the passing of his worst enemy, Kathleen O’Connor, who’d taken with her the golden days of his youth and left behind eternally unresolvable guilt. No enemy could do worse.

Temple wondered what Max was mourning now.

She brought him the crystal glass and sipped from hers as she sat down again. “I can’t imagine what Molina’s done now that you need to fortify yourself against it.”

“The whiskey isn’t for me. It’s for you.”

“Me?”

“Molina couldn’t find any evidence on the two or three counts of murder she wanted to lay at my door, which she can’t find anyway.”

“Then what was the whole bit about gleaning a fingerprint off a CD from here about?”

“She apparently now does have evidence on a nasty lesser charge, enough to bring me in, if she can find me, and prosecute. Even if she can’t find me, she can just run tattling to you and damage me enough to give her immense satisfaction.”

“What is it?”

Max composed his features as if he were on stage. Calm, authoritative, unreadable. “Sexual stalking.”

“Of who? Me? She has flipped. We are totally consensual.”

Max laughed. “You are a past master of spin. No. Of her.”

“Of her?”

Tilt! Max was right: Temple needed a belt, even though she’d heard this first from Matt, especially since she didn’t want to admit to Max just how . . . in touch she and Matt had been lately. She assuaged her own guilt by unleashing her spleen on Molina. “That woman! What gall! What . . . conceit. You’d never—”

“Thank you.”

“What’s given her this idea? Stalking how?” Still playing dumb.