“A sixth sense?” he suggested finally. “It was so black over there and I had a lot to think about, all simultaneously.”
“It’s a wonder you managed to save CC. He must be almost twice your weight.”
“And don’t it make my biceps blue? He okay?”
“Fine. Shaken up about losing his partner, of course.”
“Yeah. I know the feeling.”
“What?” Temple sensed sudden alarm bells in the pit of her stomach.
Max regarded her with far too limpidly innocent eyes. “Gandolph, I meant. What other partner would I have lost? I suppose my cousin Sean was a sort of partner for the summer.”
Max reminding her of his losses made Temple want to swear, “Not me. I’m not the next one you’ll lose.”
But she couldn’t say a word. Not if it meant repudiating Matt. She was already half lost, which made her feel all the more adamant about defending Max. Supporting Max. Paying Max back for her wayward heart.
“It’s best you stay as far from me as possible,” Max was saying, urging. “Not that I don’t appreciate first-aid. Or your opinions.”
“Right.” She sipped a little more whiskey, then stood.
He was telling her to go. Pushing her away for her own sake. Pushing her toward Matt, when she’d already leaned way too far in that direction for her conscience’s sake.
What should she do? What could she do? Max wouldn’t fight to keep her. Didn’t he see? Or did he, as usual, see all too well? Damn you, Max!
He’d never tell.
She had to drive home. She had to pull herself together. She had to picture Max colored more than the usual invisible, but absent. But she didn’t have to stop believing in him, his innocence, even if hers was compromised.
“I’ll stick to my job at the New Millennium,” she told him. “And I’ll find out who really did this, because that’s my job and because there was another man killed earlier on that same scene, and I think that there’s a criminal operating there who’s closer at hand than the Synth.”
“You may be right and if anyone can prove it, you can. That’ll keep Molina on her toes.” Max rose to escort her out. “Molina in toe shoes, now there’s an image to stop the heart.”
“Don’t underestimate her. She’s aching to stomp on someone who’s gotten away with something for far too long, and it’s a dead heat between you and Rafi Nadir who’d make the best fall guy.”
“Nadir had nothing to with this.”
“No,” Temple admitted, “but if I could make Molina think he did, she might blink and you’d be able to eel out of her sights.”
Max drew her close to him at the door and kissed the top of her head. Her artificially blond head.
“Always a superb strategician.” He pulled her closer, hugged her almost to death. “I’m sorry, Temple. More sorry than I can ever say and you can ever know. There are some things I only realize now that I just can’t control.”
Temple couldn’t decide whether to take that as a confession, a farewell, or a prediction.
Triple Threat
Nobody much notices what us cats get up to.
That is why we make such good detectives and sneak thieves. There is not that much difference between either role.
Anyway, there is nothing I can do for Mr. Max eeling away like the snake that dropped the apple at Eve’s tootsie tips and then remembered a pressing appointment elsewhere. Nor can I help my Miss Temple in performing whatever acts of Public Relations legerdemain that she finds necessary with the press and the forthcoming police.
Nor can I do much with the Big Cats, who have been sealed up in their portable tin cans and carted away. So much for brawn when the chips are down.
So.
There is only Squeaker and me gazing down on the aftermath of one nasty bit of carnage. And contemplating the ignored but wriggling form of Hyacinth clinging to the unseen back of a dangling platform twenty feet below.
“They assumed she fell,” I note.
“Erroneously,” Squeaker notes in turn.
“She was a witch bat out of hell.”
“Is,” Squeaker says, quite accurately, “and I do not like her either. She could be very sharp with me.”
I examine the tiny blood-red scabs visible around her throat and neck. “She no doubt did not like competition.”
“I was just an anonymous body double. I offered her no challenge.”
“That is challenge enough for one like Hyacinth. Oh, well. Hide-ho. I suppose we might as well consider how to rescue her.”
“You are a noble breed, Louie.”
“Naw. I just do not like to leave one of my own kind on the ropes. I do not know how we will manage it, though.”
This last statement wins the applause of a feline hiss. I gaze at the empty carrel of the two black leopards and find a pair of old gold eyes with green backlights gazing back.
“Louise!”
“Moonlighting again,” she says, “without a net. When will you wake up to reality, Pops? Who is the caramel-cream popcorn?”
“Ah, Squeaker, this is my partner in crime solving, Miss Midnight Louise.”
“Oh, I see the family resemblance. You must be Mr. Midnight’s sister.”
What a ditz! I hear Miss Louise purring while I smother a growl of protest.
“I had heard,” Louise goes on, “that my pals Lucky and Kahlúa were performing marvels of levitation at the New Millennium, so I decided to drop in on the proceedings. Little did I know that others of my acquaintance would have the same idea.”
Miss Midnight Louise, of course, is quite familiar with the onstage shenanigans of Mr. Max Kinsella. At all costs, she must not mention this to Squeaker because the fewer beings, four- or two-footed, who know about his brief but spectacular presence here, the better.
“We have a more immediate problem, Louise,” I say.
“Yes, I see my former sparring partner is hanging by a hair, what little of it she has.”
The antipathy between the longhairs and the shorthairs of the cat kingdom rivals that between the Gelphs and Merovingians. I do not quite know who these funny-named dudes were, but I have heard their names mentioned on PBS, along with other individuals of supposedly liberal biases, so maybe they are libertarians or librarians or something.
“We cannot leave one of our kind just hanging,” I venture.
“Speak for yourself, Johnny Snappleseed,” Louise retorts. “I cannot wait to watch the scrawny little witch drop. Considering her attempts to end your life, liberty, and pursuit of haplessness, I would think you would be counting down the seconds too.”
“Oooh!” Squeaker’s eyes could not be rounder. “Your sister is most outspoken.”
“She is not my sister, and she is right in that Hyacinth has been a bad girl.”
I look down at the cat in question’s long dangling gams in their plush gray stockings. Bad girls are minor failings of mine. Those long, painted showgirl nails won’t stick to hardwood for long.
“So,” says Louise from her higher perch, “it is decided. We all have suffered at the claws of Hyacinth and hate her arrogant, destructive guts. Who wants to go down and peel her treacherous claws off the board, and who wants to stay up here and make sure we all get back up safely?”
“I will go down,” Squeaker says promptly. “I am her body double and have been rehearsing acrobatics on these fallen pedestals.”
“And we are the lightest,” Louise concurs, joining the rescue party.
“What is left for me to do?” I ask.
“We need a reliable counterweight, Daddy-o, to pull us all up. Now, I will hop onto this snarl of cable that the Mysti . . . that the mysterious stranger in black used to disable and save the Cloaked Conjuror earlier. We should go down like an elevator. You hop on as I pass your perch, Miss Caramel Cream. And you, Big Boy, grab on to the trailing rope as we swing low enough to reach that piece of traitorous feline fur.”