He didn’t say or ask any more, just held her.
“And I’m not even cutting any onions yet,” she finally said. Thickly. Much later.
“I don’t like onions anyway. Skip them. And maybe you better put the knife down. It’s sticking into my ribs.” “Oh!”
Max removed the long sharp knife from her fingers and took over slicing the bread.
“There’s an open bottle of wine in the chill compartment,” he said. “Very red, very dry, and very expensive. French, of course. You pour the wine, and I’ll cut the cheese.”
She laughed, shakily, at the allusion to her reckless knife wielding, and did as he suggested.
French wine always made her lips pucker, but sipping it felt virtuous. Maybe it was like communion wine. Too austere to
be a sin, not at all silky and sensual, like a white zinfandel or a merlot.
Max lifted her up onto the kitchen stool, reminding her of another man and another lift. Not good.
Then he smiled and linked arms and glasses with her and they drank that hokey old-movie way, together. Good. “Tell me
about it,” he said.
“Simon Foster is Danny Dove’s significant other. Was.” She sipped again, on her own. “I’d just met him at the Maylords opening.”
“Maylords is your account?”
“Right. Amelia Wong et al. is their guest guru for the opening week’s events.”
“And the Murano?”
“A door prize for the opening. It was orange.”
Max winced. Like Louie, he personified the sophistication of black, pure black.
Temple felt obliged to defend her client’s color scheme. “The whole week’s theme was … is orange. It’s the hot new merchandising color this year.”
“Louie must love that.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Black cat. Orange. Halloween.”
“I guess.” Temple felt misery descend on her like parachute silk, soft but engulfing and blinding, doing nothing to cushion the impact of landing on her own inadequate feet.
“So whose was the second body?”
Max knew how to pull her out of an emotional tailspin. Engage her puzzle-solving mind.
“I found her. Personally. Alone. Swinging from picture-hanging wire in Simon’s brilliant Art Deco interior vignette, with a
letter opener stuck in her chest.”
“Temple! That’s ghastly.”
“Not as bad as finding Simon. He had been stabbed too, and then put in the Murano. But he was just plain nice. Beth Blanchard was a witch. Bitch. There. I said it, even if it speaks badly of the dead. I saw her in action and she was incredible.
Every clich� you ever heard about a bitch on wheels. Still, it was awful to see her dead.”
Max nodded. “I know what you mean. Much as Kathleen O’Connor wronged me and mine for twenty years, and as much as I would have cheerfully and personally have wrung her neck, I’m glad Devine had to ID the body, not me.”
“You mean that?”
“Which? The neck wringing or ID-ing the body?”
“Both, I guess.”
“Yes.”
“So you don’t hate Matt.”
Max pushed her always unruly hair behind one ear. “Wish I could.”
“But you don’t.”
“Don’t tell anyone.”
“Only you.”
He caught her in a bone-crushing embrace then, and she watered his velour again, not sure if it was for Simon or Danny,
or Matt, or Max, or herself.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Not once, but twice or more.
He never did say why, and she didn’t think to wonder about that until much later.
They pulled apart and ate the sandwiches, not with relish but with a mutual pretense of appetite.
They drank the wine.
Max asked her all the right questions, and soon he was painlessly caught up on all the painful things that had happened to her. She didn’t mention collaborating with Rafi Nadir. That was even worse than mentioning Matt.
Max just shook his head at Danny’s loss, frowned at her description of the Maylords house politics, and laughed at the extra-virgin oil incident. Not even Max could take a gay biker gang that seriously. Maybe that was a mistake.
As comforting as it was to be consulting with Max again, he never offered to see her back to the Circle Ritz.
He held her in the entryway, and kissed her six ways from Sunday.
But he never asked her to stay.
Temple left in a slight wine glow that was rapidly waning as the hearty sandwich absorbed it. Talk about an anticlimax!
She’d writhed with guilt over smooching Matt in the hall, tossed and turned herself out of the bed in the middle of the night. Rushed over to Max’s place to confirm their scintillating couplehood, only to find Max acting like he was the ex-priest, not Matt!
Oh, he had sympathized, encouraged, theorized, but he had never volunteered to barge back into her life, protect her honor, and solve the crimes.
He had pled the exhaustion of the book, of his recent workout. He had not taken advantage of the visit to make love to her. He had never, for a moment, acted like the old Max. At all. She had left the house wined and dined, and somewhat pet-ted, but suspiciously unfulfilled.
This was a first. And not a good one.
But maybe she had learned what she had cow here to find out, after all.
Chapter 48
Dry Red Wine
Max leaned his weight against the shut front door, both ensuring its security and regretting the fact that it was shut more
than anything in his life since Ireland. “Lad?”
The voice behind him was tentative, almost cajoling. He sighed and turned to face Gandolph.
The old man’s smooth fleshy face was riddled with wrinkles of anxiety.
“I apologize, Max. I’d no right to bring my sorry dead skin back into your life, to interfere with … the young and the living.”
“Save it, Garry.” Max pushed himself off the closed door, off the recent, regrettable past. “That sounds like the title of a
TV soap opera: The Young and the Living. What does that make us? The Old and the Dead?”
“In my case, yes.”
“Well, you’re not dead yet.”
Gandolph chuckled. “Your position on my age is noted. Seriously, Max, she’s a lovely, lovely girl, inside and out. She’d have to be to win you from your self-imposed emotional exile. I would have found a discreet way to exit the house, believe me. There was no need to turn the lady out. Our cause may be noble, but it doesn’t require martyrdom of such a personal nature.”
“It’s not only your being here, and the need to keep your survival secret from the Synth. All that damn, difficult physical catching up on my acrobatic and magical skills. I don’t think I could do her justice tonight, and if Temple deserves anything of me, it’s justice.”
“Nonsense. You young men are so self-exacting. Women rarely demand as much as we believe they ought to. And you love her. That’s why you’re too proud to let her see any hint of weakness on your part. Pride, not weakness. And yet, pride is weakness.”
“Oh, shut up, Garry. You’re a great magician, but a lousy Ann Landers.”
“I believe she also is dead.”
“Does it matter? Her work, her column, goes on. And so does yours.”
“I hate having to stay undercover, letting you take all the risks.”
“If I bust the Synth, neither of us will have to worry about staying undercover again. Ever.”
“You’re now that convinced that they’re the key to the past, and our future?”
Max nodded. “Want a sandwich? There are plenty of fixings in the kitchen.”
“Sandwich?” Garry sniffed. Derisively. “Your young lady is a sweet little thing, but she has no culinary skills whatsoever.”
Max laughed. “You know what? Frankly, my dear Gandolph, I don’t give a damn.”
They retreated to the kitchen anyway, where Max chatted with his mentor while Garry whipped up an exotic hot dish that soothed his own soul and that Max had no appetite to taste.
Instead, Max drank way too much of costly dry, red wine.