Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

Once more Midwestern naïveté had reared its innocent head. Instead, the restaurant walls showcased plenty of naked female flanks, loins, and ribs.

“Oops,” Temple said. “I’ve never been here before. The Web site didn’t show all the wall cheesecake, just the dessert on the menu.”

“That’s okay,” Max said, “I’m sitting with my back to the wall, so I’ll have to leer long-distance, anyway. Your fiancé would frown on the decor?”

“How do you know so much—?”

“Garry was trying to give me a trip down memory lane via his laptop computer in between following the trail of Kathleen O’Connor back to her beginnings.”

“Kathleen O’Connor? Beginnings?” Before Temple could catch her breath and ask for more, the waiter came to take their drink orders.

“Double single-malt whisky. No ice,” Max said.

Temple had planned to skip another drink but changed her mind. She wasn’t going to let Max out of this place until he’d revealed every shock in the Book of Life.

“I’ll have a”—What was a long-sipping drink?—“house Margarita, no ice, no salt.”

By then the busboy was bringing goblets and bottled water, so the barriers to instantly shaking the news about Kathleen O’Connor out of Max remained.

“‘Kitty the Cutter,’” he said when they were alone again. “You’d be interested to know that nickname may have been appropriate even in her early teens.”

“Why on earth? Where on earth?”

He immediately understood what she was asking. “Apparently, I’d instructed Gandolph to, ah, track down her background, if he could, if he survived me. He considered my almost fatal brush with mortality enough reason to do just that. Where is that drink?”

She’d never heard Max impatient before. She’d never seen him visibly hurting both physically and psychically before.

The waiter skated back with a tray and set down the drinks. Max’s was low and deep amber colored, Temple’s was high, wide, and the color of diluted snot, if you thought about it.

“That cocktail is bigger than you are,” he noted.

She shrugged and stirred it with her straw. “Do you mean that Kathleen may have been a cutter as a teen? Self-abuse? Or assault even then? She had a police record?”

“She had a history that might have started her off mutilating herself rather than other people. Look, Temple, it’s not a pretty story.”

“What have you got to tell me that is?”

“Good point.” He took what detective novels call a “slug” of the expensive whisky.

Her credit card company might be calling to check up on a sudden increase in her spending. No problem.

“Tell me a little about me,” he said, “before I go into my dark-and-stormy-night-of-the-soul routine.”

“I’m sorry, Max.”

“I know. That’s why you let me come back. I don’t quite remember all of that call.”

She did.

Yes, I’ve been drinking; that’s what we Irish do at wakes, even private ones.

“Gandolph must have told you,” she said after a halfhearted sip of her Margarita, “about your long and unhappy relationship with Ireland and the IRA, about your counterterrorism work with him.”

“Yes.”

“How much,” she asked, “did he know about what Kitty the Cutter did here?”

“More than he should have, come to think of it. He was always a master spy as well as a spymaster. I don’t suppose too many people know that she slashed … your current fiancé,” Max said.

“No! I would have said three, four people, tops, including you. That’s impossible.”

“Nothing was impossible with Garry.” Max said with a sigh. “Except a surprise resurrection, like in the book.”

“The book? Oh, you mean the books. The Lord of the Rings trilogy. That’s right, Gandalf the wizard plunged to his apparent death in the Moria abyss, fighting the Balrog, but then came back.”

“Garry isn’t coming back.” Max sipped his drink and paused to master his grief before speaking again. “Maybe taking the stage name of Gandolph the Great wasn’t just chutzpah. He could be a wizard. He spent all that time under cover here in Vegas—from his purported death at the Halloween séance to two months ago when he spirited me from the Neon Nightmare to a Swiss clinic in the Alps—looking into the Synth and, in the past two months, Kathleen O’Connor abroad.”

“She was a broad, all right,” Temple said, surprised to hear a bitter note in her voice. “After you, trying to track you down, maybe for the same obsessive reason you wanted to uncover her past, even after your own ‘death.’”

“I’m not leaving this planet without knowing why she manipulated a couple Irish-American teenaged boys to betray each other over her.”

“And did you find out?”

“Gandolph … Garry … did. Maybe. But we’re back to the insoluble, inhuman tragedy. What about the immediate present? What was I like when I lived here? Was I happy?”

“Were we happy? Yes.”

“Why’d I blow it?”

“Someone was always on your trail. Kinda hard to keep up a normal life.” Temple sipped just as the waiter returned with padded leather menus big enough to give her carpal tunnel syndrome.

Max reached across the table to take and shut hers. “Let me order for you. Keep talking.”

It was good he kept his eyes on the menu while she recited the highs and lows of their interrupted two-year relationship.

“You swept me off my feet, literally, at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and distressed my over-fond family of pushy brothers and protective parents by whisking me away to your year-long gig at the Goliath Hotel here in Vegas. Then you disappeared on the closing night of your magic show, the very night a dead man was found in the spy area above the gaming tables. A local homicide detective was on your trail for that, but I knew nothing and said nothing. A year later you came back, but you didn’t dare occupy the condo we’d bought together at the Circle Ritz building, so you lived in a house that I now realize had been Gandolph’s. You and I were trying to trace a weird magical cult called the Synth for masterminding several unsolved Vegas murders. Then you must have gone undercover at the Neon Nightmare, which has now been revealed to me as the Synth headquarters. You fell or were sabotaged and disappeared once more. And, voila! Here you are again.”

So was the waiter. Max ordered quickly to regain their privacy.

“All right?” he asked of his double order as the waiter vanished.

“It has to be. It’s a Max Kinsella Production.”

“So,” he said, nodding at the ring on her finger, “where did the fiancé come in?”

“His name is Matt. You can say it.”

“I know.… I was shown that online.”

“Just that radio station Web site?”

He nodded.

“It’s all hype.”

“Of course.”

“His name is Matt Devine, as you know. You may not know he and you actually kinda got along. When Lieutenant Molina would go into her usual rants about you, Matt defended you. Even to me.”

“Lieutenant Molina?”

“Homicide. She was sure you’d offed the guy in the Goliath ceiling.”

“So this hard-case lieutenant gave you a rough time about me and my whereabouts?”

“Of course.”

“And you didn’t crack?”

“Of course not.”

“Did we always talk like a Humphrey Bogart movie?”

“No. Just when we were trying to pretend everything was okay, like now.”

Their salads arrived, forcing them to lean back and away from their opposite sides of the table. Max ordered another double. Temple had barely lowered her drink below the unsalted rim level. She was driving. He wasn’t.

“Thank you,” Max said in the pause after the food had arrived and the waiter had left.