Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

Meanwhile, she had a souvenir of the evening: the memory of how he’d ducked those handcuffs and left her chained to her own steering wheel. Of course she’d whomped him good first, but she had an ugly feeling he’d let her because it would be easier to escape her in a moving car than in a parking lot. He’d been right in insisting that Temple Barr needed help, but he wasn’t the one who should have been giving it.

She mused for an another really ugly moment on where they’d both be now if Temple Barr had not fought free of Tyler Dain to use her pepper spray but had been found dead the next morning.

Hell. In hell. And hating each other even more, if that was possible. It reminded her of the infernal, eternal triangle in Jean-Paul Sartre’s hell-set play, No Exit .

Things, Molina decided, could not possibly get any worse.

At least that was one ray of hope in a dirty world getting grimier every day.

She hoped to hell that Kinsella had as hard a time getting some shut-eye tonight as she did.

Max left Temple at 3:20 A.M., sleeping like the dead, which she almost had been.

Magicians can do that, slip away and not be noticed. He intended only to be gone for a couple of Temple’s deepest sleep-drenched hours.

Midnight Louie apparently never slept. The black cat watched Max go through slitted green eyes. He wasn’t about to squeal on a fellow creature of the night, but he just might judge him.

The early-morning air kissed Max a cool fifty-five degree hello as opened the French door to the patio and then worked his way down the Circle Ritz’s conveniently stepped exterior. Art Deco had a lot to recommend it. To a second-story man, its step pyramid tendencies were the most pleasing.

The Maxima purred like a panther as he started it. He idled silently past Temple’s new red Miata and the silver blob of Electra’s Elvis-edition VW bug, glided beyond the white Probe Matt Devine used now. They were all in transition, he realized, changing emotional models and personal identities like cars.

The Hesketh Vampire, chained in the shed like a lone wolf, called to him with a howl higher than human sound as he exited the parking lot.

In mere minutes he was parked outside the bone-white walls of Los Muertos.

The presumed dead remained still beneath their ersatz tomb-stones. This was Disneyland Macabre, this phony cemetery designed to hide the residence of a magician whose career was built on mocking other magicians. Max would defend the Cloaked Conjuror’s life to the death, but he didn’t have to like the way he made his living, on the harvest of an honorable land of dead magicians and their once-spectacular illusions.

Magicians were like spiders: you had to keep spinning or the web would fracture and fall. And you with it.

He climbed and leaped down from the wall, thankful for a cushion of expensive sod. He noted the absence of the guardian Rottweilers he’d been prepared to deal with.

Odd, but now he could cross the grounds like a shadow, on foot.

Soon the plink of water on carefully arranged stones told him he was where he wanted to be.

With the big cats.

Mr. Lucky came forward first, rubbing and purring like a housecat, his muscular black-panther side hard enough to knock over an unprepared man. Max was never unprepared among the big cats.

Osiris the leopard kept a wary distance at first, then he too swaggered closer, making a soundless snarl that Max understood was not a threat but a greeting.

Max crouched like the big cats and they rubbed closer, leaving their scents on his shoulders and face. The dogs, if they were loose, would stay away from him now.

The big cats were show-biz veterans and magicians’ familiars, used to the spotlights and the long, deep well of darkness before and after. They understood Max as he understood them. Domesticated and wild. Social and asocial. Caged and free. Life was a compromise. So was death.

They permitted him to stroke their furred sides as they paced back and forth, wrapping him in acceptance as if he were a domestic cat, welcoming him to the litter, the cage, the spotlight.

He stood, caressing their wide-cheeked faces, lulled by their high-volume purring, more a rumble. He had come only to see that they were well housed, happy, living as they wanted to live after their various captivities, both benign and malign. That they were themselves, that he had been right to choose the Cloaked Conjuror as their best hope for long, content lives.

Their rhythmic greeting dance paused.

They lifted throats and eyes to the edge of the rock garden that was their home.

A small cat stood there, under the glare of a security light.

Max stared, expecting it to be Midnight Louie, though how he would have gotten here…

But this cat’s coat was pale, as were the eyes that shone sky-blue in the spill of sodium iodide rays from above.

The darkness beyond the shower of light, behind the cat, turned into a figure as Max’s vision adjusted. The form was curlicued like a silhouette portrait cut with manicure scissors from stiff black construction paper. This thing was more solid, more like paper-thin wrought-iron, a creature of razor-sharp extremities…gown, nails, the curled ends of hip-length tresses as dark as night would be without security lights.

Shangri-La.

Max templed his fingers, drew himself into one long line of watching black, an impassive vertical of stasis and potential.

Behind him, leopard and panther pushed against his legs, their massive throats growling gently.

He was taken aback that his presence had the capacity to surprise her, but she clearly was shocked. Perhaps she overestimated the estate’s security measures.

“You violate this place,” she said at last. Her husky soprano trembled slightly with some strong but undecipherable emotion.

Shangri-La was nothing if not feminine, but like many Asians, had a throaty intonation. It reminded him of Temple’s voice, so charmingly rough for such a small, smooth package.

“This place is inviolate,” he answered. “At least to the cats, and I am their guest.”

She stood unmoved, her fluttering pennants of garb frozen as still as the carved draperies on a black jade statue of Quan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion and mercy.

Shangri-La, he was sure, neither possessed nor desired either virtue.

“Guest?” she repeated, outraged by the term.

He offered the truth as a pretext. “I procured them for the Cloaked Conjuror. I wanted to see how they were doing.” He’d also wanted silent but amenable company after the night’s extreme stresses: almost losing Temple, almost losing to Molina.

“The cats will not always come when you call,” she warned him.

But they would. That was his gift.

The small Siamese in the spotlight hissed at him and retreated to her side, to the dark side. Its blue eyes flashed stoplight-red from the night.

Max studied Shangri-La. She reminded him of something. Something lethal.

Medusa.

That’s what her spiky, trailing tendrils of hair and gown recalled. Medusa, the snaked-haired Gorgon whose very glance was fatal poison.

Perseus had needed a mirror to defeat Medusa; he had needed to slay the image to destroy the monster. To see her face was to glimpse your own death, even as she in turn saw your future.

They stared at each other through the dark. Max wondered why this alien magician had allied herself with the Cloaked Conjuror and against him…against Temple, for Shangri-La had stolen the ring he gave to Temple and she must have allowed the ring to find its way, for some reason, to Lieutenant Molina.

Was she a professional rival of his in her own mind? Perhaps the intervention was even personal. Perhaps Shangri-La had left Temple’s ring…his ring…on the scene of Gloria Fuentes’ murder. But how could this woman know who had given Temple the ring, know of their connection?