Unknown: Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

She might not be able to draw a decent stick figure in a game of Hangman, but she could trace straight lines to infinity.

Temple swooped the page around in a forty-five-degree turn and began drawing another series of lines crossways to the first.

“This is a table, Louie,” she explained as the cat continued giving encouraging pats — or playful bats (with Louie it was so hard to tell when he was just being a cat, or was being just a cat) — as he supervised her progress down the page.

“There!” Temple spun the page around again. “I am going to list every mysterious death that I know of for the past year. Seeing it laid out in black and white ought to make something clear.”

Temple leaned back to study her handiwork. It seemed that the last year had not showered pennies from heaven on Las Vegas casinos, but dead bodies. Parking lots came in second as a hot crime scene. Magic was a thread linking four of the victims, including the last three.

Louie lashed out a paw and, with what passed for retractable thumb tacks on his forefoot, drew the drawing closer to him. He actually appeared to study the layout for a moment with the usual feline solemnity, but immediately after rolled over on the paper and wiggled luxuriously, creasing wrinkles into Temple’s crisp recto-linear design.

“Off, off, damn…Spot!”

Temple’s expletives often displayed her years doing PR for the Tyrone Guthrie repertory theater in Minneapolis.

Louie did not heed Shakespearian admonitions. He didn’t heed admonitions, period. He rolled onto his back, putting his curled limbs into what Temple called the Dead Bug position (well, Louie was jet black), the one that cats everywhere from Peekaboo the comic strip cat to Leo the Lion considered the safe-at-home, leave-me-alone position: Home Alone, for short. In other words, meddle with the cat sprawled helplessly on its back at your own peril.

Temple decided she was in no hurry to reclaim her paper and reached instead for the cell phone headset on her desk. The headset left her hands free to take notes while on the phone, which she had to do frequently, and also preserved her from possible cancer of the ear, eye, nose, throat, and, most creepily, brain.

She punched the autodial number for Max’s cell phone.

Meanwhile, Louie twisted his torso in two different directions at once and took total possession of the papers on her desk.

“What’s up?” Max’s voice answered.

“Louie’s legs. In the air. All four.”

“That doesn’t sound like a phenomenon worth reporting.”

“It’s the paper he’s lying on that’s interesting.”

“The Sunday paper?”

“No. The list I just made of all the unsolved murders hanging over us…some of them quite literally. It’s rather interesting when you spell it out in black and white. Thought you might want to see it. I also have an enlarged version of that crude symbol painted around poor Jeff’s body.”

Temple’s glance fell on the small, crumpled, pale green receipt on which she had first drawn the palm-sized version of the symbol.

“Max,” she went on suddenly, “isn’t there some tradition relating to a five-sided figure, a pentagram, as a sign of evil?”

“If you’re talking Universal Pictures from the forties, then yeah.”

“I thought so! But I can’t remember what. It isn’t Dracula —”

“No way would he dirty his palms with pentagrams. Can’t you remember?”

“No! That’s why I’m asking you.”

“A werewolf.”

“Right!”

“So you think a werewolf is involved?”

“No, but somebody might want us to think so.”

“So we’d look even more ridiculous to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department?”

“A lot of the victims are people involved professionally in magic.”

“That doesn’t make them consorters with werewolves, Temple, m’dear. In fact, just the opposite. The magic professional despises any intimations of the weird or paranormal surrounding the art. We are illusionists. We create mysteries for others. We don’t cherish any illusions ourselves.”

“Hah! Shows what you know about your own self, Mr. Mystifying Max. Don’t worry. I’d never suspect you of being a werewolf. No, you’ve got to be a vampire: shuttered windows, night person, wears black.”

“Just to prove you wrong I’ll pick up a pizza with garlic on the way over.”

“Done!”

After she disconnected the phone, Temple wondered how to kill time. Max wouldn’t take long to get there. Las Vegas boasted almost as many great pizza places as it did wedding chapels.

Midnight Louie had abandoned his tummy-up position and hit the hardwood floor with a thump. He stalked over to the French doors and gazed out on Temple’s second-floor patio. Most people would assume the big black cat was watching for birds, but Temple understood that he was watching for Max.

Somehow Louie always knew when his predecessor in the role of roommate was coming over. Temple had never owned a cat before she had found Louie running loose in the exhibition hall of the convention center a year ago, and also had stumbled over, literally, her first murder victim. She hadn’t realized yet that the verb “owning” was wishful thinking when it came to cats.

If anything, Louie owned her, and often acted like it.

Now that he was absorbed with guard duty, Temple pulled the papers back toward her, smoothing any wrinkles Louie had pressed into them.

She paused, realizing that Louie’s maneuvers had left the strange figure upside down. And it looked weirdly familiar in that position. Not like something you saw every day, certainly, but like something. Some similar conjunction of crude lines she had seen. Somewhere.

Great! She would be the Queen of Vague when she trotted this sketch around desperately seeking a definition for it.

Movement in the sun-dappled room suddenly caught her eye: Louie trotting swiftly into the main room.

He seldom troubled to move faster than necessary, so Temple jumped up to follow the cat.

She hadn’t heard a thing, but Max had materialized in the living room like the imposing magician he was, six-feet-four, lean and all in black from hair to toe except for the white-and-red cardboard pizza box he held before him like a tray.

“Not climbing the balcony today?” she asked, referring to his usual second-story-man approach.

“Didn’t want the pepperoni to slide off the mozzarella. Vertical ascensions don’t suit pizzas.”

Temple was already rooting in the hip-pocket kitchen’s cupboards and drawers for plates, knives, and napkins. Fingers would do for the rest.

“Are you still worried about being seen here?”

“Now more than ever,” he answered fervently.

She saw that he was serious. “Why?”

“The forces of evil seem to be gathering.”

“Of evil? Or crime?”

“I think it’s just outright evil, but crime trails after evil like a kid brother trying to keep up.”

“Evil. The Synth?”

Max pulled a triangular piece from the precut slab of crust, cholesterol, and tomato sauce as red as blood.

Eating it allowed him to mull his answer. “I started thinking about who would be in the Synth. I know or know of most of the professional magicians around. I can’t see any of them being seriously irritated by the Cloaked Conjurer. At that level, they’re institutions. Everybody knows they’re trickmeisters, and their level of trick is not what CC is exposing. He blows the whistle on dated stuff; illusions we’ve all had to reinvent or forget. So the Synth —”

“Has to be ‘nothing but a bunch of bloody amateurs!’” Temple declaimed in a thundering British accent.

“‘Bloody’ may be eerily appropriate. Where’d you come up with that quote?”