Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

Temple pushed to the forefront, even though she might accidentally and unprofessionally appear on camera.

“This vault was not accessible beforehand,” she insisted. “We checked it last night and again this morning.”

“Stop the fussing and see what’s inside,” Eightball O’Rourke urged. “You folks call yourself media, but you don’t have the curiosity of that little cat there. Now that’s better, but don’t trample her. That’s the Crystal Phoenix mascot.”

“Midnight Louise?” Van von Rhine’s soprano suddenly cried into the milling people and rising dust. “Don’t hurt her!”

Temple herself was pushed aside by Crawford Buchanan as he elbowed through the narrow opening. She didn’t see Louise underfoot anywhere.

“I got it!” Buchanan crowed, his voice echoing off metal. “I’m inside. Whoo! What a rank whiff. I sure hope paper money doesn’t mildew. Get me some light here.”

In seconds, the press of light-bearing workmen and videographers had pushed the heavy door open wide and rinsed the dazzling silver metal interior with light.

It illuminated a room-sized empty safe, all right, except it wasn’t empty.

Gasps echoed in the sodden air.

“Let me out!” Buchanan ground the Cuban heels of his pimp shoes into Temple’s tender instep as he stampeded past. “It smells like a cat box in there.”

By now everyone had stopped crowding and yelling in the opening.

By now every eye, human or mechanical or digital, had fixed on the rotund corpse of a man in white tie and tails who lay oddly but stiffly splayed on the red satin lining of his evening cloak on the safe’s steel-gray metal floor.

His white gloves, cane, and a top hat that lay on its glossy black side were arrayed near his pale, bloated features.

“What a rip-off!” someone yelled. “It’s a wax dummy.”

That certain “someone” had been Crawford Buchanan.

As usual, he was terribly wrong.

Someone else had to do something. Temple guessed it was up to her.

She stepped forward, ripped the mike from Crawford’s clammy yet clutching grip, and considered bending down to press her fingers against the formal gentleman’s carotid artery just above the high starched collar.

Overkill, so to speak, she decided.

Obviously, the man was as cold and unmoving as a still photo, yet definitely not made of wax. He was dead. Morally, ethically, spiritually and physically, positively and absolutely, undeniably and reliably and most sincerely … dead.

Shock had turned everyone present into stone. Then the videographers all rushed forward, grunting to seize the best camera angle.

A wall of expensive dark tailoring materialized in front of them, blocking Temple from being overrun. A six-foot wall of gangster-suited muscle between her and a media feeding frenzy was even more welcome than silver dollars.

When she spoke she knew she was heard but not seen, and that was fine with her too.

“I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen of the media. We need to clear the scene and call the police. No more filming.”

Like a row of ultradressy football linemen, the brothers Fontana swayed en masse this way and that to block all camcorders and cell-phone cameras.

One cell phone bobbing up and down was clutched in Buchanan’s pasty hand.

He, unfortunately, was definitely and indubitably not dead.

Road to Ruin

“This whole blasted island is only the size of Wisconsin.”

“Indiana, actually,” Gandolph corrected.

Max knew he’d sounded cranky just then and had deserved correction for that, if not his geography. His whole body ached from a mere three-hour flight and now this drive across half of Ireland. If he took a wrong turn and needed to reverse direction, his shoulders ached so much he had to turn the car around in several moves on the narrow road. So much for the aftermath of grand gestures. He found it easier to admit to being a mental grouch than a physical one. Call it the House syndrome. Wait! That was a television show popping up in his memory. Old or new?

Gandolph must have put up with a lot from him, because he continued speaking in a calm, professorial way. “Ireland is a small nation; always was, Max, but it always loomed large in your personal history.”

“Where am I actually ‘from,’ Garry?”

The older man sighed. Older people often did that. Trouble was, Max was so inclined himself these days.

“Your birth family was … is … in Wisconsin.”

“ ‘Birth’ family? I’m adopted?”

“No, not at all. After Sean’s loss, you adopted a number of foreign lands, a different future, and a different family, which you constructed piece by piece. It was all your choice. Forced upon you, but a choice, nevertheless. A hard choice. Especially for a boy, not a man.”

Max stomped on the brakes so the modest family car, the Mondeo, did a dramatic TV-chase U-y. Only when they were facing the opposite direction on the deserted country two-lane did Max realize his immature gesture might have strained an older man’s neck. Good thing they’d left the major highway, the “colorfully” (not) named M1, to find a quaint place (or a good bush) for a rest stop.

“Sorry,” Max said. “I’m acting like an ass.”

Garry blinked, then chuckled. “So what’s new? Glad to see the old form is still there.”

The man Max still often thought of as Gandolph the Great massaged his nape. He wore a soft wool scarf over his suit jacket. Garry Randolph, past seventy, had far more reason to ache than Max did, or at least to complain about it.

“Why,” Max asked softly, “do I get the idea you know me way too well?”

“Somebody has to, Max. You’ve always been Mr. Mystery to everybody who cared to know you.”

“ ‘Cared to know’ me. Am I that bad?”

“That … demanding. Never more of anyone than of yourself.”

Gandolph—and Max now focused on the older man as a magician in the classical sense of a mage, like the wizard Gandalf his stage name played upon—shook his head.

“You’re a hard case, Max Kinsella, but hard times made you so. Why do you think we’re following the sad trail of Kathleen O’Connor?”

“She’s an irresistible siren, that girl renamed Rebecca. I remember the movie.”

“Just the movie? There were several TV versions as well.”

“Rebecca was a beauty, but she was an evil woman, a manipulator, a man-eater,” Max said.

“Granted. Notorious women leave longer legends than noble ones.”

“And dead before the novel began, yet she had more vitality even when dead than the novel’s pallid nameless heroine.”

“That was the point, my boy. Evil can be not only attractive but vital. Some women are poison.”

Max glanced at his mentor as the accelerating Mondeo clung to a curve. “You have Revienne in mind?”

“Don’t you? Oh, what a lovely candidate for a femme fatale. Blonde. Beautiful. French, but don’t forget she’s half German. Easy for her to be at war with herself. I know nothing about this woman, Max, except her impressive résumé as a psychiatrist. When I discovered she was associated with the sanitarium I whisked you to in desperation, I seized upon her services. I knew every step of the way it could all have been set up by whoever attempted to kill you back at the Neon Nightmare club in Vegas. Or not. It’s hard to believe any man would encounter two she-devils before he was thirty-five.”

“And Kathleen O’Connor was indeed demonic?”

“After our visit to the Convent of the Little Flower near Dublin and a glimpse into its presumed impious prisoners, wouldn’t you have been?”

“Unbelievable how past wrongs keep raising their monstrous heads. I remember reading about the Irish institutional abuses a decade ago, and here they are making headlines again.”