“I didn’t know about your double life, Max, but I’ve always felt a kinship with you, probably because I sensed you had your own secrets. You understood my isolation and loneliness, and I sensed that in you.”
“Soul brothers.” Max leaned forward to butt glass rims. “But you’re not at the top of my save list. My ex-girl is, for instance.”
“You do pretty well for a multi-client guardian agent. I get that totally.” CC sighed, then took a three-swallow hit of straight vodka. “I had a girl. Why is your ex an ‘ex’?”
“I don’t quite remember, mercifully.” Max eyed the uneasy mix of liquor and water in his glass, not a shaken or stirred cocktail but two elements in opposition. “I think I felt she was safer without me.”
CC stared past him to the metal door and nodded. “Yeah. We’re both targets. Our survival can come at the risk of collateral damage.”
“Yet you’re out in plain clothes prowling the Strip after your act.”
“Damn it, Max! I’m cooped in this heavy, hot, itchy false skin five nights a week, three to five hours depending on the day of the week. I need to get out to breathe.”
“You have that big estate out on Sunset Road.”
“Big for a prison yard.” He shifted his sturdy frame, and his mood changed. “So what’s new?”
“What’s new is that I think we’re in the same boat on significant others too, and I hadn’t realized until last night that you were in a position to do something about it … in fact, anything you damn well please.” Las Vegas was a place where no one knew his face.
“Am I?” The man’s laugh was bitter. “Can I bring back the dead? Is that a trick I can work into my act? Maybe you can do that, Max Kinsella, Mr. Mystifying Max, magician and IRA target and counter-spy. You can’t bring back Gandolph.”
Max saw the Cloaked Conjuror was doffing his masks, getting down to a face-peel of the soul. He shut his eyes, accessing his own. “I saw him die.”
“I saw her die.”
Max took a deep breath. This was probably the most important interview of his life, and he didn’t know where it was going except it was someplace he damn well didn’t want to be.
“Look,” Max said. “I don’t know your name—and I’ve tried to find it. With that greasepaint mask you lard on beneath the headpiece—black, white, red, it’d be like trying to ID a clown from his makeup. I don’t really know what you look like, not enough to give the police for a BOLO. In fact, the police find me a highly suspicious character. What I also don’t know is if we’re in this together, because the woman you followed the other night is the devil in snakeskin who indirectly killed my cousin Sean, and maybe Gandolph directly. What have you got against her?”
“Devil is right.” CC turned to the mirror and began swiping cold cream over his face with a tissue, wiping off sweat and greasepaint in such hard repetitive strokes that Max winced for his skin. The man of masks was scraping himself raw.
Max knew that feeling. He’d been doing that himself since the age of seventeen when Sean was killed. He let CC talk. It was a monologue to the real man in his mirror anyway, to the meaty, middle-aged face in his mirror. Ordinary was a good disguise too.
“She seemed like a rich amateur, Max. A hanger-on. A groupie. We magicians don’t get many of those besides wannabe adolescent boys. Maybe we’re supposed to be satisfied by the hot babes in our acts.” He glanced at Max. “I know, you didn’t have any assistants, except feathered. But she brought me Shang.” CC’s smile was rueful. “And Shang brought me her furred Siamese cat, Hyacinth. Damn thing ran away, after her death.”
“Wait. The woman I’m after, who’s after me, wasn’t Shangri-La?”
“Sometimes she got herself up as Shang. They had similar body types, but Shang was fine-boned, more graceful, a true tiger lily of a girl. She worshipped this woman, this Rebecca.”
Max recognized Kathleen O’Connor’s latter-day persona, based on the amoral and manipulative psychopath in the novel of the same name. Rebecca.
He couldn’t restrain a shocked move.
“You hate her too.” CC’s voice contained wonder, and hope.
“Hate isn’t the word. I know her for an enemy. Once we were lovers, for a day.”
CC blinked, his eyelashes oily with cold cream. “That witch?”
“I was seventeen, and no judge. I’ve long suspected she knew my cousin was in harm’s way, and seduced me to safety … and a lifetime of guilt. That’s her modus operandi, to ‘take away’ love and life.”
CC set his glass down so hard on the dressing table, the fine crystal cracked. “She did that with me, dear God. Her games left Shang dangling by a thread during our act. I know you were there, guardian angel. I know you did everything to save Shang from the fatal cut bungee cord, but even you couldn’t do it. At least you tried.”
“I didn’t know then there were … two. I thought I was saving Kathleen. Ironic. I questioned trying to save this woman, but my reflexes betrayed me.” Max shut his eyes. “And so another of her victims perished. Shang had been set up as a body double. We often use them. I’m still not sure if yours, Barry, fell or was pushed from the top of your set. This woman has used body doubles before to deceive the living and cheat death. Shang’s not the only one who’s died in that woman’s demented script of vengeance.”
“Vengeance? Hers? That’s crazy. We need to avenge ourselves on her.”
Max recalled the horrific childhood abuse he and Garry had discovered she’d survived in Ireland. “She was sinned against early and often.”
“Shang was the only woman I ever loved.” CC pounded his padded chest in emphasis. “I’ve used eight private detectives to find this vicious woman from her looks alone. She shows up on film of my show that was done for TV spots.” He leaned back, spent. “Now you’ve found both her, Max, and my recent secret outings. She made a mistake creating a pattern at the Goliath. One of my hired guys spotted her. I’ve been following her, but I’ve never found where she goes to ground. I should have gone to you in the first place.” CC gazed into the pool of priceless vodka in his glass.
Max decided to wait until he knew more before asking his friend and colleague in magic and vengeance the question he most wanted answered at the moment. He stood, and set his unsatisfying drink on the dressing table. “I’m following her now,” Max said. “Stay out of it. I’ll let you have the leavings.”
He left before CC could answer, as unsatisfied with the situation as with the drink. The guards gave him dirty looks, but he noted them only in passing. He was thinking hard.
O’Connor and Santiago MacCarthy were old allies and likely after the hidden money they raised for the IRA that the Synth had protected. That’s what really had brought Santiago to Las Vegas. If Santiago was in town, Kathleen would have seen him.
And so could CC have when he was following her.
Kitty was good at finally slipping away from the amateur-detective magician whose antisocial lifestyle made him less agile on the street, but maybe Santiago hadn’t been. Max could imagine CC recognizing Santiago as someone he could trap, following him somewhere deserted like Farnum’s building, and trying to throttle Kathleen’s whereabouts out of the man.
Yet … Max couldn’t imagine a scenario that put both Santiago and CC on the top floor of the mysterious building on Paradise Road.
Max needed to figure out not only motivation, but opportunity. Motivation was all too plain. He wondered how sane a man could be who’d lived hidden behind a literal false front to the world for years, once he lost the one woman he’d loved.
Chapter 47
Falling for You
Why did he feel more guilty, Matt wondered, the longer he let himself be forced into nightly meetings with Kathleen O’Connor?