Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

“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?”

“Spoken by the late great Tyrone Guthrie, the British director who founded a repertory company in the American Midwest, my alma mater in Minneapolis, after trying to coax a professional performance of Oedipus Rex out of some college-level theater students as a demonstration. He burst out with that sentence. It became a catch phrase around his namesake theater forever.”

“I’m afraid we’re ‘a bunch of bloody amateurs’ in the face of what’s really going on here. Which is why I brought this.”

Max reached into his pocket to pull out an object.

Temple was so stunned at the directness of the gesture — usually an ex-magician like Max couldn’t resist producing physical objects out of thin air — that she stared at him instead of it for a moment.

The overhead kitchen fluorescent light cast an admittedly harsh shadow, but Max’s lean face looked hollow instead of sleek. Temple saw strain in the taut tilt of his eyes, and he looked tired. No, dispirited.

“We never had time to go to the firing range,” he was saying, regretfully.

“Ah, you did notice my extremely awkward relationship with firearms out at the Rancho Exotica? I’m better off unarmed.”

“I don’t like guns either. This is just pepper spray. You have to snap the cover open and move the spray head out of the guarded position. Then press away.”

Temple curled her fingers around the molded edge of the leatherette carrying case, unsnapped the flap, and rotated the little white plastic nozzle into the armed position. It looked like a key chain giveaway, or something kids in a kinder, gentler time used to send for through the mail from ads at the back of comic books.

“You sure it doesn’t double as a decoder ring?” she quipped.

“No, it just sprays very hot pepper. Be careful not to let any get in your eyes if you have to use it. Works against mad dogs, and Englishmen too.”

She glanced at Midnight Louie, looking natty as a rug on the black-and-white-tiled floor. He was dispatching a pepperoni circle that Max had slipped to him.

“Who am I supposed to be using it against?” Temple asked. “Besides mad dogs and Englishmen?”

“Whoever chased you with the car at TitaniCon. Whoever was getting pushy with your entire party at the convention. I don’t know who, but you will if he/she/it/they ever have you cornered.”

“Yeah.” Temple kept silent to chew on pizza and a scene from the past: a parking garage, two strange men, blows, pain, humiliation, fear. She glanced at the petite pepper spray. Would that have helped her then? Only if she carried it where it was instantly accessible.

“And,” Max said, not quite meeting her eyes, “it wouldn’t hurt to put Matt Devine on your distant acquaintance list, since he seemed to be the main target at TitaniCon.”

“Yeah, well…” Temple swallowed too much pizza too fast and almost choked. “The way he’s been acting lately, that won’t be a problem. Is something going on I should know about?”

“Nothing concrete.” Max expelled a huff of frustrated breath. He got busy inhaling more pizza. “Never hurts to be cautious,” he said finally.

That also held true for interpersonal relationships. Temple bit back a lot more questions. They sounded more like an interrogation in her mind.

Besides, it was time to put the leftover pizza in the refrigerator and show Max her handy-dandy list of murderous events.

She hopped off the stool, avoiding Louie who was still cleaning up undevoured pepperoni while a full, fresh bowl of Free-To-Be-Feline lay untouched not three feet away.

“You’re spoiling him,” she warned Max.

“Consider it a bribe.” He glanced back with a grin, satisfied that the cat was remaining behind to finish dinner. “I always feel I have a Victorian father scowling at me whenever that cat’s around the place.”

“A Victorian father? Louie?” Temple laughed. “No, I picture him more as a Mob enforcer. You know, Louie the Shiv from Cicero.”

“How about Louie the Lip from Jersey?”

They were laughing as they entered the office. The sun had moved to the other side of the building, so Temple switched on the student lamp on her desk. Its warm yellow light hit the enlarged drawing she’d made like a spotlight.

“All wrong.” Max had stopped just inside the door to regard it from a distance.

“How?”

“Not your sketch. The original. It’s too crude. Why go to the trouble of stabbing the professor with a custom knife with a hokey Satanist handle, why import all the S and M paraphernalia, and then surround the man’s body with such a plain-Jane arcane symbol? I’ve seen ritual markings. They’re elaborate and based on something…alchemy or horoscope symbols, alien hieroglyphs. This giant ‘house’ is too bland for that kind of mind-set.”

Temple took a deep breath. “Then it must really mean something, and all the other props are distraction.” She waggled her left-hand fingers.

“And meanwhile the right hand is scrawling these five pathetic lines on the floor? It think it’s all a distraction. Let’s see your list.”

Temple pulled it from under the drawing.

In the bright artificial light of early evening, with someone else looking on, her brave new approach looked as childish as the drawing.

“It’s just a list,” she said before he could point out the obvious.

Max had come close to read it, and stood with folded elbows staring down at the names, and especially the blank places.

“Why’d you include the dead men in the casino ceilings?”

“Nobody’s really been charged with their murders, although Molina’s pretty sure you had something to do with the Goliath one.”

“Why is Effinger listed?”

“Molina turned those two thugs over to the DEA. Wasn’t it assumed they’d killed Effinger, though proving it would be hard?”

“If Effinger was tied into anything, it was those two casino deaths, especially since the second guy looked like him. I happen to think that sequence has nothing to with the later murders.”

“But…you call it a sequence.”

Max just nodded. Then his long forefinger stabbed a blank slot under the “Suspect” heading. “You can put a name in here: Rafi Nadir.”