Obviously, Louie had not been in, or he had left in disgust.
Temple went back to kneel by her new acquisition. Caviar tilted her sleek head so Temple's long nails could scratch her chin. She purred, stretched and displayed a long, lithe torso, quite different from Louie's well-upholstered midsection.
Then the tender interlude was over. Duty called. Or rather, Temple must call to do her duty.
She looked up the Las Vegas police number, dialed it and waited through the super-smooth and polite, Star Ship Enterprise female computer voice, expecting it to purr "Captain Kirk" at any minute. After rejecting pressing a series of numbers that would connect her to a dozen unneeded departments, Temple stayed on the line and asked meekly for "Lieutenant Molina, please."
She got her on the first throw.
'This is Temple Barr. I--"
"Fine. Are you at home?"
"Er, yes."
"Good. I'll be by in twenty minutes. Think you can stay put?"
"Yes, Lieutenant."
"I've got something I want you to see."
"Er, don't you want to know what I called about?"
"No. Be there."
Another gracious conversation with the Amy Vanderbilt of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Temple hung up with a sigh. She wasn't any good at interfacing with police personnel. Why did she have to keep doing it?
She changed her clothes and ditched the pantyhose, but she kept the businesslike pumps on, with footlets, just because. She wasn't about to sit back and let Molina catch her napping at five-foot-zero.
She dangled her key chain in front of Caviar and was rewarded with several spirited boxing motions. "That's it, girl, you show that Midnight Louie what a tough cookie you are!"
She paced to the window and looked at the empty pool. No Matt waiting by his namesake mats, no Louie glaring resentfully up at her. She was glad not to confront Louie's reaction to her impulse purchase, but what if he had already come, seen and decamped?
Her doorbell rang, a lovely ding-dong sound straight out of the fifties and "Father Knows Best."
She skittered to the door and opened it to face Lieutenant Molina, looking her most official and towering.
Temple ebbed before the law, into her living room. "Is it about Miss Tyler's . . . death? Has the cause been determined?"
"No--and no."
Surprised to hear it put so plainly, and so cavalierly, Temple sat down on her shapeless sofa.
Molina stood there, glancing at Caviar. "Shrunk your cat?"
"This is Caviar. She was going to be sent back to the Humane Society."
"Your Midnight Louie may shrink her head--and then send her back to the Humane Society, from what I've seen of that black devil. You do rush in--"
"If you're not here about the Tyler case--"
"Why would I bother you about the Tyler case?"
"I was ... a witness."
"Not to the murder. But you may have been a witness to this."
Molina flashed a card from the depths of one of her ever useful jacket pockets. A flash card, Temple thought, like I'm in school and I have to get some equation right.
Molina's eyes shone with brilliant blue triumph as she slapped the card faceup on the sofa's broad, canvas arm.
Also face up was Max Kinsella, in profile and full-front views, looking about--oh, eighteen, his Adam's apple prominent in the profile shot. A lot of type supported the double images, and some bigger type ran across the top, Letters. Initials. I-n-t-e-r-p-o-1.
M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-u-s-e.
And Molina was the cat who had caught the canary.
"Interpol--?" Temple queried.
"That's why I couldn't find anything on him," Molina announced with the glee of Lieutenant Gerard pouncing on Dr. Richard Kimball. "Look at the name. Look at it."
"Michael," Temple repeated dully. "Michael. Aloysius. Xavier."
"Kinsella!" Molina finished. "Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella. That's why I couldn't trace him
"Max," Temple pronounced slowly. "He didn't lie. What's this about the IRA?"
Molina began to pace. "He was suspected of being a member. Of course it was a while back. According to that card, he was sixteen. Still . . . that's an international terrorist organization. I knew he had a record somewhere!" She paused, as if her euphoria had let her down with a bang.
"This doesn't explain the dead man at the Goliath, or his supposed career as a magician, but I knew he was more than he appeared to be."
"I always knew that, Lieutenant," Temple said quietly.
"Not this!"
Temple looked at the card again. She had never pictured Max that young, that raw, that unfinished, but even here she saw the magician half-hidden behind the flat, unflattering black and white. Michael. Mike--? No, Max.
"Look at the description," Molina prodded.
Temple knew Max's statistics by heart, and the damning card confirmed them, only the height off. Height: six feet (and three inches yet to come). Hair: black; eyes: blue. . . .
She gaped up into the icy aquamarine of Molina's waiting eyes, which glittered with true-blue triumph.
"Max's eyes aren't blue!" Temple said. "They got that wrong." Maybe they got everything else wrong too. . . .
"Did they? I always wondered why a man with green eyes--a performer used to projecting a well-groomed stage image--kept a beige-and-blue sweater. I assume you're as sentimental as ever and it still hangs in your closet."
Temple flushed to remember an intent Molina taking Max's sweater to the French doors a few weeks before. "I'm just lazy, not sentimental, Lieutenant; no time to house clean.
And I never saw Max wear that sweater."
"Exactly. Why did he have it?"
"Most men are careless about color-coordinated clothes."
"He wouldn't be." Molina almost sounded as if she spoke from intimate knowledge. "Don't you get it? Contact lenses.
We know he was a wanted man at least once in his life. Who knows what he's been up to since he was sixteen?"
"I do!" Temple stood up, her voice and hand shaking, the Interpol card quivering. "I never saw any contact lens equipment; I never saw Max take them in or out, and I lived with him."
"Long-wear lenses. And he was a magician, after all. You only saw what he wanted you to."
That allegation hurt worse than anything Interpol might have had on Max. Temple lowered her eyes to the familiar stranger captured in cold type. "What did they say he did wrong?"
"Not enough," Molina admitted. "Enough to be suspected, to sit on some search roster for a while and be forgotten. The IRA is dirty, brutal business. I wouldn't get my hopes up, if he started there that young."
Temple rubbed her nose, which itched and maybe wanted to do something else undignified, like sniffle. "It's politics," she said. "Politics is always dirty if you're the underdog."
"I imagine he was, Mr. Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella."
"If you're the underdog, you're used to surviving."
"What would you know about it?" The question was personal.
"I knew Max, and you didn't."
The lieutenant reared back, then blew out a breath like a winded horse. "You didn't know enough."
"Neither," Temple said evenly, "do you."
"It's my job to find out."
"Thanks for the tip."
"You're not disillusioned, are you?"
"It's hard to disillusion a magician's assistant."
"You were more than that."
"Was I? I wonder. What are you going to do about the cats?"
"Cats?"
Temple told her about the will and the forthcoming article and the furor likely to arise over their collective welfare.
"Oh, rats," said Molina, her good mood ruined by the coming storm. "All I need is a raft of animal extremists all over the scene of the crime."
She snatched up her card like it was the ace of hearts.
"You do admit that this is the same man?"
"This is the man," Temple said, echoing Miss Tyler, who had echoed a classic scene of betrayal with a kiss in the Garden where Peter had betrayed yet again--and had been betrayed. Temple betrayed nothing but the facts, Ma'am, just the facts.
Molina read that in her eyes and had another reason to lower her triumph a notch.