“You mean in the Biblical sense, I assume,” Matt added. Temple chalked up one point for the mild-mannered ex-altar boy.
“In every sense,” Max said, not sparing Temple the truth.
His glower did not diminish. His arms remained crossed on his chest, a classic posture of self-containment. Max hated being here with her and Matt, Temple knew, and with Midnight Louie. He hated group anything, which at least made him a very unlikely candidate for an orgy. He was the original lone wolf and had gotten too used to it, certainly for their communal needs now, and maybe for his own good.
“You’re not the issue here,” Temple said, catching Max’s eye. “Matt is.”
“Only because Kathleen can’t find me.”
“Is that ego, or analysis?”
“Analysis.” Max glanced at Matt, not unsympathetically. “Look. She’s following a classic pattern. It’s older than Devine here, and it’s older than me.” He uncrossed his arms to prop them on his knees and lean forward, speaking only to Temple, as if he had to justify himself and the past only to her.
“Here’s how it goes down with the likes of Kathleen O’Connor, even when you’re both seventeen. You meet her. You think it’s chance, and later you see that she put herself in your path. With you,” he added as an aside to Matt, “the introduction was shocking, but she’s older now, and hasn’t time to waste. So you got the razor to the gut, a flesh wound, so you’d know she could inflict any kind of wound she wants, when she wants, on whom she wants.”
Temple frowned now. “So she was always a psychopath?”
“A shrink would probably argue that label,” Max said. “More like a sociopath with a heavy case of narcissism.”
“What’s the difference?” Temple wanted to know.
Matt answered. “Both a psychopath and a sociopath lack a conscience. They don’t feel hurt, so they hurt, just to see what happens to people who do feel. A narcissist is always trying to prove the world stupider than she is. In a way, a narcissistic sociopath is worse than the average psychopath. She can pass in normal society.”
“Where’d you learn that?” Max asked, sounding impressed.
“Confession,” Matt said shortly. “They’re expert manipulators, and they love to manipulate all that’s solid and sacred.”
“ ‘Solid and sacred,’ ” Max mocked. “Wouldn’t go over in a personals ad.”
“Cut it out, guys!” Temple said. “This woman has ruined both your lives. You want to snipe at each other, or get her?”
“Get her,” Max said without hesitation.
Matt temporized. ” ‘Get,’ sounds so hostile. She needs help.”
“You need help, can’t you see that?” Temple exploded. “That’s what she’s done to you. She’s made you into a murder suspect, and you’re worried about her, for heaven’s sake.”
Max’s frown was back. “Temple’s right. It’s the same pattern. Half a lifetime ago, while I was dallying with Kathleen on the riverbank, my cousin Sean was walking into an IRA death trap. And you, ex-Father Devine, once suggested that might have been deliberate manipulation on Kathleen’s part: seducing me and killing Sean at one and the same time, killing one man … boy, really… . and condemning the other to permanent Purgatory because of it.”
“Purgatory?” Temple asked.
The two men were staring at each other, ignoring her, speaking the same language for once. Catholic. Guilt. Only for one it was the Irish and the Troubles and for the other it was the Polish and the family dysfunction.
“It must have been hell for you,” Matt said, “given how I feel about Vassar’s death, and she wasn’t a relative, an innocent, or anyone I even knew.”
“Still is.”
Matt’s mouth tightened. “Then Temple’s right. We have to find this woman, stop her.”
“All we know about her today,” Temple put in, “is that she ran across Matt several months ago somehow and can’t let go. How? And why?”
“Simple,” he said. “Talk about poetic justice. My hunt for my stepfather drew her attention. I distributed these photos of him with my contact information. That’s when she showed up here at the Circle Ritz, by the pool when I was working out. She thought I was a contract killer looking for him.”
“What does that tell us about her?” Max asked.
“That she expects the worst of everybody,” Matt answered. “If we knew why, we might know how to get to her.”
“No,” Temple said. “It tells us that she wouldn’t have found you, Matt, if you hadn’t been looking for Cliff Effinger. It had nothing to do with you, Max, not then. Sorry.”
He shrugged. “My own sociopathic narcissistic streak is shattered.”
“Effinger’s the key?” Matt said doubtfully. “He’s dead.”
“But he wasn’t then, Temple said. And why is he dead now? He was killed. By someone. Molina nabbed a couple of thugs who for the rap, the guys driving that semi when the drug bust was made, but even the police didn’t have enough evidence to charge them with Effinger’s murder.”
“And that bust was tied to your and Louie’s kidnapping,” Max said, “from the Opium Den stage.”
“When,” Matt put in, “that lady magician Shangri-La used Temple’s ring in a disappearing act and it vanished.” He didn’t quite look at her. “Until it turned up on a murder scene Molina was covering.”
“I love the way everybody knew about my ring being found, except me.” Max’s frown escalated into a glower.
Temple took a deep breath. “I didn’t know this until just recently.”
Max glanced at Matt, immediately realizing what she meant. Matt knew about the ring being found long before either of them. He could only have been told by Molina, and he had kept that from the two people who had a right to know what had happened to the ring, the man who gave it and the woman who accepted it.
“The point is,” Temple said to break the awkward silence, “that the ring was found near the dead magician’s assistant, who was killed at the same time as that other body was dumped at the Blue Dahlia. Her name was Gloria. Gloria Fuentes. Gandolph’s retired assistant.”
“Who’s Gandolph?” Matt asked.
Neither Temple nor Max answered him. They were staring at each other, lost in the implications.
“The question is,” Max told Temple, “was the ring left there to implicate you, or me?”
“Temple, obviously.” Matt ran a hand through his blond hair as if unconsciously pushing away an encroaching headache. “Even Molina’s not so obsessed with arresting the great Max Kinsella that she’d blame you for the death of anyone simply connected with magic.”
A silence. They were three, but there were islands of knowledge between them shared by only two, and perhaps in some case by only one. Time to build bridges over troubled water.
Temple focused on Matt. “Gloria Fuentes has a more direct connection to Max than mere magic. She was the longtime assistant to Max’s mentor, Gandolph the Great.”
The news jolted Matt. “Wasn’t that the fellow killed at last Halloween’s Houdini séance? And now you tell me this guy’s retired ex-assistant was killed only a few months later?”
“Yes.” Max was terse. “You see what Molina could do with those facts, given her hard-on for charging me with some crime or other.”
“So—” Matt was perking up from the funk he’d been in since hearing the shocking news of Vassar’s death. “That ring being at Gloria Fuentes’s death scene was a double whammy for Max, only Molina didn’t know it. Doesn’t know it?”
“No, thank God.” Temple grimaced. “And don’t you tell her. That’s why I didn’t invite her to our heart-to-heart. Even though she’s up to her shield in your recent foray into the local sex industry, she has no idea of how badly someone is out to get Max. It has to be Kathleen 0’ Connor.”
“Why?” Matt demanded.
“She doesn’t let go,” Max put in. “I also reacted to Sean’s death differently than she expected. Guilt, she got that, an endless peat bog’s worth to wallow in. But I went undercover in the IRA, found out who bombed that pub, and turned them in, remember.”