Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“Makes perfect sense to me. What does the name Rebecca have to do with Kitty the Cutter?”

“It was the name given her at the Irish orphanage where she was … reared. She obviously identified with Du Maurier’s book, too, but in a very different way. She may have been using the name Rebecca as an alias these last several years of détente on the Irish question, which means that the Kitty the Cutter who visited Las Vegas may still be alive and well and elsewhere.”

“You saw her dead,” Temple said. “Then again, I saw Gandolph the Great ‘dead’ at that Halloween séance, and it was just a magician’s trick.”

“It was a master magician’s trick,” Max said, his expression hardening with grief. Then he doffed the mood with a shake of his head. “I’ve … glimpsed that motorcycle accident in recent dreams. I saw myself checking her carotid artery for a pulse. That woman was dead—really dead.”

“You believe in dreams and visions now?”

“That’s where the jigsaw pieces of my memory are reassembling. I’ve got to believe in something.”

Temple didn’t know what to answer; it was so sad to imagine living on shards of yourself.

I have a decision to make as to where I’ll live and die or if there’s any point to the years in between those states.

She thought some more while Max finished his coffee. Sipping the sweet liqueur with the bitterness of all that tragic past lingering in her mouth was like drinking a shot of scouring aquavit.

“Then,” she suggested finally, “maybe the woman who was pursuing your car by motorcycle wasn’t Kitty, aka Rebecca. Maybe the real Kitty has been in hiding here all these months.” Temple finished her Baileys almost as fast as Max had his. “Think about it. Meanwhile, time to visit Gandolph’s former house and your crash pad.”

Temple paused to deal with the waiting credit card and receipt, gathering up her tote bag. “Are you telling me everything, Max? I get a feeling of … missing chapters.”

“I’m telling you everything I can handle at the moment,” he said. “You say I can claim a roof and a bed under it in Las Vegas? Let’s go.”

Some bed, Temple thought, remembering the elaborate opium bed in that house, even if Max didn’t.

Yet.

*

“Timed it right,” Temple said, a half hour later as the Miata pulled up, top raised, to 1200 Mojave Way.

The sun had set behind the western mountains, leaving residential streets dark, dramatically lit, and quiet. Like all Sunbelt homes, this one had few visible windows and a well-shaded front entry, the better to fend off the grueling sunlight.

Max sighed deeply after the car’s engine stopped, then he untangled his legs from the passenger seat to stand and gaze at the question mark of a one-story house.

“Think I can get in?” he asked.

“Lieutenant ‘Nosy’ Molina did. You believe a homicide dick can beat you at breaking and entering into your own place?”

“You’re kidding. A cop did a B and E? That would be—”

“—Against the law and police conduct rules. Yeah, she did. She confessed to me just a couple weeks ago. I told you she was obsessed.”

“What is it about me?” he asked wryly. “Kitty the Cutter, this Molina woman?”

“They just can’t let you get away,” Temple said. “Not my problem, apparently.”

“Smart. I’m obviously trouble.”

The continuing silence indicated he was thinking about Gandolph. Garry Randolph. Clever merging of a pop-culture name with his real one to create a memorable stage name, Temple thought. She knew about Gandolph, although she’d never knowingly met the man himself in his own offstage guise, Garry Randolph. He’d been Max’s father figure from a vulnerable age and time until he’d died several time zones away, either two or three days ago. How do you compute the distance from such a bitter loss?

“Let’s see,” Max said, shambling up the walk, “if the Magic Fingers can still do their thing.”

“Magic Fingers?”

“That’s how I survived on the escape run from the Swiss clinic, which might have been a haven for assassins. I lifted tourist credit cards.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry about those ripped-off tourists losing faith in their fellow man. If they were regular Joes, I used their cards only once before destroying them. If they were rich bastards, I enjoyed myself. No ruined trips of a lifetime for the ordinary blokes.”

“Robin Hood.” Temple gave the name a sarcastic twist.

By then Max was using a Swiss Army knife to jimmy the front door lock. How had he gotten that through security? Scary.

“This place has a Rottweiler of a security system,” he said. “God.” Temple could see him glance to the house’s side. “Six foot fence. Don’t tell me I’ll have to heave myself over it in this condition.”

“The security system is still working?”

“Why not?”

“Molina said it had been breached.”

“You’d think she’d know.”

“Then again,” Temple said, “the house was playing tricks on people, like me, the moment you disappeared.”

“How?”

“Sleight of hand and household goods. I came out here to check after I hadn’t heard from you in a few days, and every stick of your furniture and magic paraphernalia was gone. An aging chorus girl out of Guys and Dolls answered the door.”

Max laughed so hard he fell back against the entry area’s tiled side wall.

“Not funny to me,” Temple said, irritated. “That’s the first moment I knew for sure you were gone.”

“Sorry,” Max huffed as he caught his breath. “That’s the kind of wholesale ‘disappearing’ act only Gandolph—Garry—could pull off.”

“I deserved far more than a wholesale trick.”

“So he told me.” He straightened and grasped her arms. “Temple, you have to understand. I crashed feet first at God knows how many miles per hour when that tampered bungee cord at the Neon Nightmare broke. I was out cold and taken for dead. Gandolph—no, Gandolph is truly dead now—Garry was an old man, but he had to get me out of there and this house and Las Vegas. He had to make me disappear so whoever had attempted to take my life would think they’d succeeded. And the illusion had to be total.”

She wrested away from his grip.

“Temple,” Max said, pleading. “At the Swiss clinic I was accused of being drunk when injured, because only drunks are so limber and relaxed they can survive fatal collisions, when their sober victims can’t. I’d learned that doing ‘death-defying’ acrobatics as a magician: go limp if you fall. That’s what saved me at the Neon Nightmare, if not my legs.”

“I could have been told, Max. I could have been trusted. I’d never said a word about where you might be for almost a year when you were gone the first time, when Molina was harassing me. And that woman knows how to harass. Even hoods couldn’t beat it out of me in a parking garage.”

“Hoods? Beating? Did I know this?”

“No.” Temple simmered down. “Matt did.”

“Ah.”

“It’s not what you think. He caught me sneaking back to the Circle Ritz and insisted I go to an ER, where who happened to be there but Molina, implying I was a domestic abuse victim. Of Matt’s.”

“Sorry.” Max swept Temple into an embrace despite herself. “I should have been there for you. That was humiliating, I know. And you never told the copper what really happened because the creeps were after me. Garry was right. You had to be deceived. You don’t give up.”

“Let me go.”

Max released her to lean against the wall again.

“I’m doing this for—what’s the cliché?—old time’s sake,” Temple said. “So you better figure out a way into the house, because I’m going home unless you need a tour of the premises.”