Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“Sneaking into her house and leaving items. A blue vintage velvet dress in her closet.”

“Hey! Wanta moonlight here? I could use a stalker like that!”

“Not so nice, a Gameboy in Mariah’s room once, before she evolved into such a game girl, thanks to you. But mostly stuff in Molina’s bedroom, including, the latest indignity, according to Devine, a racy teddy. I suspect he didn’t know what that was until Molina explained it to him. Imagine, she has two adolescents to rear. I suppose we should pity the woman.”

Temple waved away his attempt at humor, as disturbing as it was to picture Matt and Molina discussing racy teddies. “And she found a fingerprint matching the one on my CD to one found in her house?”

“One is the operative number. None of the objects had fingerprints but one, and that had only one print. It matches one of mine from the CD.”

Temple swilled Millennium whiskey way too thoughtlessly. “She planted it! Aren’t there ways?”

“Nice thought.” Max shook his head. “Molina is too proud to cheat. It was there, all right.”

“You’re too proud to make a mistake like that.”

“Thanks for your total trust in my hubris. Won’t mean much coming from a character witness on the stand, though.”

“How can she think you’d do such a thing?”

“She hates me? No, I suppose she figured I’d upped the cat-and-mouse game we’ve been playing all over Vegas long before this.” His expression grew bitter. “According to your new friendly neighborhood go-between, the last stalker invasion was particularly nasty. In that sense, I don’t blame her for going ballistic. A trail of rose petals all through the house, into Mariah’s bedroom as well as her own. I think the threat to Mariah sent her over the edge.”

“That’s proof of your innocence. You’d never include a kid in anything, not even a cat-and-mouse game.”

“Again, character witnesses aren’t going to save me, as sterling as you are and as sure as you are to be a knockout on the witness stand. The jury would fall for you like babies for saltwater taffy.”

His palm stroked her straight blond hair. Temple forgot how different she looked these days, how different she was beginning to feel.

“I’ve always wanted to be all fifties’ overdressed and stalk into a witness box on black spike heels,” she said. “And to attend a funeral wearing a big black hat with a veil. But I don’t have the height to carry any of it off.”

“Not my funeral, I hope.”

“She’ll never catch you. She can’t touch you.”

“Probably not. But she can touch you.”

“How?”

He sat back, sipped the whiskey. “That’s what Devine sent me to tell you. The one . . . minor reason Molina might not be completely unjustified in suspecting me of this slimy crime.”

“Matt sent you? Again? Since when do you take directions from him?”

“Since he’s right. Molina will tell you. I’d rather be first.”

“I can’t imagine anything serious enough involving me for you and Matt to collaborate on.”

“We have your best interests at heart.”

Temple’s heart almost stopped to hear that. Max and Matt conspiring to . . . what? Spare her? This must be major.

“Remember,” Max said, swirling the dark honey liquor in his Baccarat glass so it oiled the sides, “when you were doing that sopho-moronic ‘Tess the Thong Girl’ undercover routine in the strip clubs, trying to prove that I wasn’t the Stripper Killer? I could have throttled you myself for taking such a risk when I found out what you’d been doing.”

“Molina’s always been too ready to accuse you of sleazy crimes. It’s been a slap in the face to me too; that’s why I had to do something about it. But, hey, we got the creep.”

“We?”

“I never told anybody this, but although the pepper spray you gave me stopped the real Stripper Killer in that parking lot, it was Rafi Nadir coming along and decking him that put him out cold until the police came. Rafi didn’t want the credit for some reason, so he vanished, and I got the, ah, capture.”

“Nadir!” Max slapped his forehead. “What irony! Molina’s hated ex-squeeze saved you from the Stripper Killer and cut out, leaving you sole credit.” His chuckle escalated into a laugh as he pulled Temple against him. “I love it.”

“You hate Molina almost as much as she hates you, don’t you?”

“I’m getting there,” he said, grim again. He kept his arm around her, holding on tight. “That wasn’t my greatest hour, either, that night. She backed me into this corner I didn’t want to be in. She caught up with me in the other strip club parking lot, the wrong one, where the Stripper Killer wasn’t planning to strike again. That’s when I put it all together, where he’d really be, and that you were there, alone.”

“Heck, no, Max. I had Rafi Nadir, remember. And even Midnight Louie showed up with a yowling Greek chorus of feral cats, no less.”

“Where is Louie, by the way?”

“Out. Like my aunt Kit. She’s dating a Fontana, can you believe it?”

“Knowing your aunt Kit, yes. Knowing the Fontanas, no.”

Temple smiled, the tension between them dissipating with their separate visions of a Fontana brother-Aunt Kit tryst.

Max sighed and reached for his glass again, but he didn’t let go of her.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I knew I had to get to you and Baby Doll’s. Molina knew she had me in her sights and she wasn’t going to let me go anywhere. I’d been in the same spot with her before and got away, but not this time.”

“Sights? She’d pulled a gun on you?”

“Right. I convinced her I wasn’t carrying and that I’d go anyway and she could justify the shooting however she liked.”

“Max! You shouldn’t bluff an angry, prejudiced person with a gun.”

“Wasn’t bluffing.”

“Max!”

He shrugged. “She’s not a killer, just a damn determined woman. I knew she wouldn’t shoot, and she knew I knew that. So . . . that woman has balls, I’ll give her that. She slams her semiautomatic on the hood of the nearest Ford 350 and decides to keep me from leaving using hand-to-hand combat.”

“She’s really crazy. You’re strong from all that stage work.”

“Used to be. Molina’s no lightweight, plus she’s trained. And, I didn’t want to hurt her.”

“You’re a gentleman.”

“Maybe. Mostly because an assaulting-an-officer charge is hard to defend against if she did manage to haul me in. The point, Temple, is she was costing me time. She was keeping me from getting to where I knew you were exposed to the real Stripper Killer. I tried to overpower her, but she wasn’t having any of it. We were too evenly matched, given my overriding concern to get away and get to you. I couldn’t clobber her outright. And I couldn’t gain enough advantage to get away fast enough and far enough. It was a stalemate. I had her pinned to a van, but the instant I let go, my advantage was gone. I had to get her off-guard, really shock the shield off of her.”

By now, Temple was listening like a kid at a campfire ghost-story telling. What would Max do? What clever magician’s trick?

“You remember my face after that night?”

“It was scraped.” Temple was jolted by the change of topic in the story.

“That’s because I let her take me down and cuff me. That finally became the only way I could get out of that damn parking lot and into her car where I could pick the handcuffs and unite her and her steering wheel with them until death did them part, then get out and get to Baby Doll’s to, I thought, save you. Except you and Rafi Nadir had already turned the trick.”

“And Midnight Louie. He alerted me to someone stalking me.”