"And me more motive."
"And Matt even more motive than you."
"All right! We're all motivated to death! What about the note mentioning you?"
"She wouldn't say exactly how I was mentioned, but admitted to 'hyacinth.' And she did tell me how Effinger died."
"Forgot to mention that too?"
"I was coming to see you."
"Awwwww. Couldn't think of anything else, poor baby. So . . . how did he die?"
"Via barge. Only he was 'affixed' to the boat and sank with it during the programmed descent."
" Affixed?' That was Molina's word for it?"
Temple nodded glumly. "Would I forget a weird description like that? Plus, Louie and his little friend from the Crystal Phoenix were at the scene of the crime."
"Louie? And . . . who?"
"This black female cat that showed up at the Phoenix after he moved on. I didn't think they got along."
"They're both cats; of course they get along. But why at the Oasis, on the very scene of Effinger's dramatic demise?"
"I don't know. Molina seemed a little spooked by it, though."
"Molina? Spooked?" Max snorted.
"I know it's hard to believe. Maybe she has personal pressures. Or maybe she's tired of Louie and me showing up in every case she supervises. . . and you never showing up at all."
Max's smile was surprisingly mellow. "Not always 'never.' I want to see the autopsy report. I can try breaking into the computers for it, or I can have some real fun and ask Molina for it."
"Max, no! You can't! If she got a hold of you, she'd never let you go."
"We could negotiate."
"How?"
"By phone. By computer."
"Those are traceable."
"For a while."
"You like darting into the lion's mouth."
"I'm used to it."
"I'm not."
"Oh yes, you are. And speaking of that, when are you going to tell Devine?"
Temple squirmed until her unstable chair tilted.
"I can understand you didn't want to ruin his grand night of reporting the triumph of nailing Effinger," Max went on. "Hey, I'm glad he did it. Otherwise, I would have had to. More power to him. He's got a G-man cereal-box badge in my book. So he's a big boy now. He deserves to know, Temple."
Yes, but. She couldn't tell Max about Matt's newest secret: Kitty's bizarre and disturbing attack. Temple sincerely wished she could. Kitty was a wild card. Max would understand wild cards as no one else would.
They were an eternally stymied trio right out of Jean Paul Sartre's play about Hell, No Exit.
Only instead of being held in stasis by conflicting sexual preferences, they each held different pieces of a jigsaw puzzle long in the making. And the game board upon which the disparate parts were coming together was called "Effinger." If only they would compare enigmas. Or the two men would allow her to move between them without each demanding her utter confidence and loyalty.
But no. Each tolerated the other's existence, at a distance, only so far. And the battleground became, not Effinger, their common enemy, but Temple, their common friend. And in one case, lover. Past. Present.
"When the time's right," she finally said.
Max said no more. The time was right for him now.
*****************
They adjourned to the kitchen for a final glass of wine.
Hyacinth, they agreed, was presenting as much of a stalemate as the issue of Matt.
"Maybe it was meant to be a distraction," Max suggested. "Maybe Effinger wanted to pick out a roll of toilet paper with that brand name. I think it's a dead end."
"It was for Effinger," Temple said.
Max was determined to pursue what he called "official sources" on Effinger's death, but they also were in accord that Effinger's passing should not go unnoted.
They plotted his funeral. Temple agreed to walk Matt through it, and Max made no unseemly comments about their continuing partnership in death. Max needed to stay out of plain sight; as much as Max wanted Matt out of Temple's life, he needed him.
Stalemate.
Max leaned across the kitchen table to jiggle Temple's wrist.
"You're looking tired."
"Sweet-talker."
"Let's go to bed. No?"
"Why can't this house have one regular bedroom?"
"You don't like the opium bed?"
"Oh, it's great for lounging around in when you're feeling decadent. Fine for foreplay. But...
when I was little--no wise cracks; I mean when I was really little, a tiny kid--my doting grandmother got me one of those stupid Colonial beds with a white eyelet canopy. And pink satin ribbon twining through the eyelets.
"I was only five or six. I hated having to climb up into that bed using a stool, like I was a baby. I hated the pink satin ribbons, and I hated that canopy that hung over me every night like an eyelet spider web. I kept thinking about all the creepy things that might be hiding up there.
Spiders and bats and snakes, all waiting for me to go to sleep so they could fall down on me."
"You're afraid of enclosed beds. But the opium bed doesn't have any concealing curtains.
The frame is pierced."
"But all those carvings. Those hidden faces in the shadows, watching."
"Now the bed's a voyeur! Your romantic imagination always takes a Gothic twist. All right.
We'll sleep in 'my' bedroom, on the futon. Should be good for our backs."
"Yes, therapeutic."
But when they got to the room Temple had glimpsed only once, she was struck by its stark opposition to the excesses of the opium bed.
"Now here I could be agoraphobic instead of claustrophobic! This looks like a monk's cell."
She eyed the low black-lacquered tables, the huge red ceramic vase sporting one stalk of driftwood, the black-and-white fabric on the futon. "I wish we could live at the Circle Ritz like we used to."
Max adjusted a panel installed on the wall and low music infiltrated the simple "cell."
Vangelis, like the dusty CDs in Temple's bedroom.
"Magicians are addicted to extremes," Max said with a smile. "We love the elaborate for the illusion it offers, but the underlying tricks are all deceptively simple."
"So the opium bed is the set dressing--"
"The futon is the basic necessity. I suppose I could be really simple and revert to the floor."
"Or the cave floor."
Max shrugged, dimming the lights. "You're hopelessly domestic."
"Domestically hopeless," she said, laughing. "But I guess it doesn't matter where, or when, or on what. Only with whom."
"As long as," he added, "there are no hidden spiders, snakes and Chinese bats."
Temple eyed the room's pristine white ceiling from the starched comfort of the futon a few minutes later. She would never tell Max, but too much blank simplicity overhead turned into an empty movie screen for the horror show of her anxieties and worries.
Excess or simplicity. Neither distracted her from the ever-present, encroaching Gothic all around, twining toward the unwary like kudzu. Danger and death and things that go bump in the night, like conscience. And secrets.
Chapter 34
Siamese Twins
I am most sorry to leave the backstage scene of the Opium Den and the presence of the lively Hyacinth, but I have a mission to accomplish.
So I make a lightning run back to the Circle Ritz. This is some trek to undertake in a hurry. If I am not careful, I will be in need of an undertaker, all right. So I try to hitch a few rides, but the Strip does not usually offer the sort of working vehicle that is best for clandestine hitchhiking.
The delivery vans and panel trucks usually take Highway 15 to avoid the crush and the hordes of tourists on foot crossing every intersection.
I must admit that I am spotted now and then, and my obvious sense of purpose is duly noted.