“I was rereading my expansion of Gandolph’s book. I had no idea putting one word down after another could be so frustrating. It’s not saying what I want to say, it’s not saying what Gandolph would want me to say. Trying to finish his book was a nice idea, but I don’t think I’m up to it.”
Temple, busy eating, nodded.
“Exposing fake mediums had become Gandolph’s life work,” Max went on. “Now that he’s dead, I wanted to fashion a worthy memorial for him. But—” He spread his large bony hands that must have overwhelmed a keyboard. “The student is not worthy of his instructor. Maybe I don’t care enough about exposing frauds. Maybe I feel they are us.”
“Well, after this morning, I don’t know that I can disagree with you.”
Max had only played with the omelet of his creation. Temple watched his fork tines draw stucco-like patterns on his plate.
“You’re feeling betrayed,” he said.
“Ye-es! Everybody I know was talking to everybody else, except me. What’s wrong with me that none of you trust me?”
“It’s not that we don’t trust you. We don’t trust ourselves to do right by you.”
“Molina?”
Max smiled, as she had hoped he might. Even when she had a legitimate grievance she couldn’t stand to make someone she cared about glum.
“Not Molina,” he said. “Molina would never insult you by treading around your feelings. It’s not that we don’t care about you, Temple. It’s that we care too much.”
“We, White Man?”
“Me.” Max made a face as he carved bloody inroads ofchipolte sauce into his untouched omelet. “And probably Matt Devine.”
“Great. So being an ignorant idiot becomes me. It’s the way you guys love to see me.”
“Being alive is the way we love to see you.”
“You really think that was at stake?”
“You don’t know Kitty O’Connor like I know Kitty O’Connor. And, I suppose, as Devine does now.”
Temple thought about that. She swigged a bunch of cranberry juice and thought about it.
“Oh, my God.”
She looked into Max’s eyes, mild blue now, unabetted by the magician’s panther-green contact lenses that he had used as a professional adjunct. “It’s a parallel, isn’t it? You, and now Matt. What … seventeen years apart? Did you see it the moment I called?”
“No. I had to brood about it while you were on the way over.”
“Writer’s block will do that to you. Make you brood.”
“So you’re saying, paradoxically, that in writing, a block is a sign of progress?”
“It’s a sign of no progress. But … you have to not get anywhere to get somewhere.”
“So where have you gotten, my darling ignorant idiot?”
“You’re sorry, aren’t you?”
“Yes, especially now that you’ve caught us out protecting you. Mea culpa.”
She had heard the Latin phrase from Matt, the ex-priest, and knew what it meant. My fault.
“Mea maxima culpa,” she retorted, having heard the ritual follow-up, also from Matt.
Max, good Irish-Catholic lad that he had been, only nodded. Mea maxima culpa. My most grievous fault. He got up and poured two cups from the coffeemaker, dosing them with swigs of Bailey’s Irish Cream.
Then he came back and waited for her to piece out the truth that had been kept from her for her own good, the kind of truth that hurts worse than any deliberate attack.
“Matt hit on it, way back when,” she began. “When he said that maybe Kitty had arranged your cousin’s death. There you and Sean were in northern Ireland, back there before any hint of truce between the Protestants and the Catholics. Two naive American teenagers visiting the Auld Sod. And there was Kathleen O’Connor. God, I wish I’d seen her, Max. I know she’s been lurking around now, but she must have been really gorgeous back then, teen angel symbol of the beloved country’s tortuous history and noble fight for freedom from hundreds of years of British domination. And you and your cousin Sean, kicking up your heels from an American high school graduation. Drinking in pubs! Flirting with the colleens. On your own, together. Cousins and Irish-American soul brothers getting your ire up about centuries of injustice in the Auld Country. Away from your parents, the nuns and priests, and so hoping to get laid. Have I got it?”
“Amazingly well for a Protestant and a Scots/English/ French lass and a grown girl.”
“It was spring break, European-style. Irish Spring. And you, Max, you devil, you amateur magician who may have been a twelve-year-old geek but you were growing into your post-adolescent sexy guy, you were dueling Sean for who could drink the most and get the girl. And Kitty let you be the one.”
“Stupid adolescent competition. We were like colts in a field, kicking up our heels, too young to know what any of it meant, the sex or the politics.”
“You won the lady fair. While you were dallying with her, Sean consoled himself with a pint of Guinness. In a Protestant pub that had been targeted for an IRA bomb. So you lost your innocence, in every possible sense of the word. Except you didn’t lose anything, Max. She spoiled it.”
He nodded. “Yes, she did. Forever. You could say I did some good with my years of covert counterterrorism work later. I saved lives. I know I did. But none of them were the one life I wanted, needed, to save. I never loved. Untilyou. And then I couldn’t be there when you needed me because of that past. Then she came again, and, indirectly, she was threatening you.
“If she knew how much Devine cared about you, you would be Sean. Dead. That is the one thing that he and I believe in common.”
“You … believe that he cares that much about me?”
“Who could not?” Max shook his head, as if angered by an invisible gnat that never stopped flitting in front of his eyes. “Temple, I worry that you don’t really know how much I care about you.”
“You’ve got a lot on your mind—”
“No. I’ve always had you on my mind, first and foremost. On how to keep my damnable past from hurting you, our future. Maybe I had no right to contemplate a future.”
“You more than anybody, Max. After that woman tried to taint it forever. We’ve got to be happy, just to piss off Kathleen O’Connor.”
He laughed then. “You always do that. Turn my black Irish depression inside out. I admit I’m jealous of your neighbor. Our neighbor.” He smiled at the surroundings, claiming them again. Claiming her because she’d told him to.
“And now … irony of ironies.” Max sighed theatrically. “We’ve become coconspirators, Devine and I, as Sean and I never had a chance to be. She divides and conquers, Miss Kitty O’Connor, but, like all extremists, she also unites where she doesn’t intend to.”
“Amen!” Temple said. “She’s united us here and now. Max, I hate what she’s done to you, and I hate what’s she’s done to me. We’ve got to stop her.”
They sealed the vow with a cranberry juice toast.
Chapter 10
Peeping Tomcat
I must admit that it sometimes comes in handy to have a minion.
I mean, a minor partner. Junior partner? Maybe Junior Miss partner better describes it.
Whatever you want to call it, Midnight, Inc. makes a most auspicious debut at the Goliath Hotel and Casino, as Miss Midnight Louise and I embark on our first intentional venture as a crime-fighting team.
We enter the premises by my favorite route: the hotel kitchens.
It is not only the plenteous foodstuffs that attract the seasoned senses of Midnight Louie. What pulls my chain is not calories, but confusion.
You see, I have never encountered a commercial kitchen that was not in a constant state of chaos. Where there is chaos, there is opportunity for the canny operative.
When large numbers of people are running around like fish with their heads cut off (in fact, large numbers of fish are lying around here with their heads cut off), it is easierfor those of Louise’s and my stripe (even though we are solid color) to tiptoe unseen through the blizzard of discarded meat wrappers, flying greens, and peevishly hurled chefs’ hats.