Cat in a Leopard Spot Read online

  Matt’s footsteps ground slightly against the paved walks someone had slipped into his Garden of Woe when he wasn’t looking.

  When he’d first moved to Las Vegas, straight from leaving the priesthood, Matt had come here often, especially in the punishing summer heat. It reminded him of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness before he began his ministry, and struck him as fitting that he should tarry in a cactus garden at the end of his own ministry.

  Tonight, though, Matt found that someone had paved purgatory (if not put up a parking lot, as the song said) since his last visit. Instead of raw sandy footpaths, broad sidewalks meandered among the cactus specimens. He couldn’t read the small identifying markers impaled in the ground by moonlight, but the plants’ bristling forms were somehow even more satisfying half-shrouded, their exact identities hidden.

  A handsome wooden bench was now the centerpiece of an artistic break in the gently hilly layout. Matt sat on it, surrounded by shadow and silence.

  He didn’t know if he sat in a paradise about to be lost forever, or a garden of thorns, of the uncertain angst that precedes the final agony.

  He knew he was at a crossroads. Someone actually wanted his soul besides God. That’s what a religious vocation was, giving your soul to God. What happened when you walked away from that path? Did God return your soul, slightly used? Was it now up for grabs? Not that many people aspired to soul robbing these days.

  That made Kitty O’Connor unique.

  Was she the Devil then? Or just his private edition? He had to take her at her word. She wanted to force him to do the thing he least wanted to do. With her, anyway. Her weapon was to threaten those he cared about, anyone around him, really. Even a mere acquaintance like Sheila had been injured at the New Millennium Hotel only a few days ago. So Temple, Lieutenant Molina’s preteen daughter, Mariah, anyone he associated with, was in danger.

  Therefore…he would associate with no one.

  And she had won.

  Or…he lived his life as before, took his chances. And gambled with the lives of everyone who touched his.

  Temple. Sheila. Mariah. Electra Lark, his motherly landlady at the Circle Ritz. Another name joined the roster. Janice. He’d forgotten about her telephoned invitation to dinner Monday night. Tomorrow.

  Who else would be coming to dinner?

  Sitting there, alone in the dark, he heard the occasional hiss of tires on a nearby thoroughfare. When he’d first come here, the world had seemed so remote. Now it crowded in, smelling and sounding like city.

  Or was he just now hearing the civilization that had always hemmed in his private piece of wilderness?

  The civilization, and the corruption.

  Okay. What did Miss Kitty want? Nothing any teenage boy wouldn’t gladly give in a Las Vegas twenty-four-hour second. His body. His virginity. The unblemished record of his priestly chastity. Since coming to Las Vegas, Matt had actually come to consider his sexual inexperience an encumbrance in dealing with a secular world. Kitty O’Connor wasn’t, as she pointed out, ugly, so why agonize over it? She probably wouldn’t kill him anyway, because once having forced him to do what he didn’t want to do, she’d want him to live with the aftertaste. Why not? The answer in his gut was simple: because it didn’t matter the issue or the history or even whether it was him or some other guy or girl: forcing someone against his will was coercion, and in the sexual arena, it was assault, molestation, rape.

  So was that any worse suffering than the Passion of Christ and Way of the Cross? Identifying with Jesus was hubris, or delusion, but the issue Matt faced was simple self-sacrifice. What made his innocence so precious that one hair on one other person’s head should be harmed by it?

  Kitty the Cutter had sliced right to the heart of the matter: pride. He was proud that he had left the priesthood not a fallen priest but a mistaken one. Why not be proud that he’d honored his promise of chastity, along with obedience and poverty? Maybe because—although any kid knows what being obedient and poor meant, being powerless—Matt had never really understood what chastity meant. Or, rather, what not being chaste promised.

  His Achilles heel. Achilles was another of mythology’s indestructible demigods with one small, nagging vulnerability. No wonder the world had embraced the notion of a destructible God who chose to share human frailty, if not fallibility. Although even Jesus had hesitated in the Garden of Gethsemane. If this cup…

  But…blasphemy! He wasn’t Jesus. He wasn’t here to prove he was either godlike or frail. He was here to…what? Do the best he could. Be the best he could be. Be in the army? Army of God.

  Dying for the Cause was an honored act for both messiahs and martyrs. Living for a cause was sometimes trickier.

  Matt had often thought that the old-time religion had emphasized too much self-abnegation. The Good Friday psalm came to mind, Jesus intoning as he walked meek as a lamb toward the Cross, “for I am a worm and no man.” Such self-abasement would not go over well with the human potential movement today.

  It wasn’t going over with him now that he’d encountered someone who truly wished him ill. Ill in the sense of making him sick to his soul.

  What did he most lose from caving in to Kitty the Cutter’s demands?

  He wouldn’t respect himself in the morning?

  No: the idea of being ignorant and vulnerable in the hands of his worst enemy. Pride again.

  And worse. Since he had started admitting his sexuality, he had discovered it was a headstrong force. Could a man will his body not to respond when stimulated even by someone he hated and feared? Wasn’t that what torture victims attempted so valiantly? Is that why the line between love and abuse was so narrow in certain warped fringes of human behavior, including torture, including, sometimes, intimacy?

  And last, but so very far from least, was something he had pretended was past, and wasn’t. That was his love, passion, hope for Temple. No matter how much he had forced his rational mind to move on, he had never lost hope that she would be his manna in the desert, she would be the one and only to lead him beyond his past and into a fully sexual future. To think of experiencing his first sexual act with someone as much the opposite of her as Kitty the Cutter…that was blasphemy. Better he should have succumbed to the strange, lazy moment on the threshold of Janice’s bedroom the first time he met her. Better some careless, but so very human, hormonal tango than deliberate surrender to a woman who was antilove, antilife, antisex if she used it as a weapon. An anti-Christ, in fact.

  And yet, she could kill. And if she killed anyone because of him, then any innocence he kept was lost beyond redemption.

  A foot scraped the walkway.

  Matt looked up into the dim light of a distant lamp.

  A dog stood there, big and dark. Great Dane maybe.

  He swallowed, aware of how isolated he was, how isolated he had made himself. This could have been Kitty herself.

  Before he could think, the dog turned and trotted off.

  Probably it was as surprised to see him there as he was to see it.

  Anytime. Anywhere. Anything. Anyone.

  That was the lesson of the Garden.

  The Judas kiss was always waiting somewhere.

  Chapter 2

  Bad News Breakfast

  Dreams are only in your head.

  Max woke up slowly, his dead cousin’s face and voice fading too fast.

  Dreams are only in your head.

  His cousin Sean hadn’t said that. Bob Dylan had said that in a long-ago song, using the wrong verb tense, is. Mock ignorant. Mock wise. Mockingly.

  That was the mantra adults crooned at kids with nightmares, dreams are only in your head. True, but a true lie, also. And even scarier when you think about it, because when you grow up you find out that the only reality that matters is what’s in your head. Or what everyone else put there.

  A lot scared Max, who had lived a mostly dreamless life of deception and danger, but Sean in his dreams didn’t scare him. Sean in his dreams was eternall
y seventeen, his features still blurred by baby fat, but the bones starting to push through to make a statement…until they had pushed through on a blast of explosive to make a final statement no one had expected, least of all Sean.

  Sean in his dreams was whole and as precise as a class photo. Senior-high grin, polished mahogany-colored hair and the freckles that went with it. All-American boy via a Celtic pedigree. A middle-class, modern Huck Finn. Or Opie from Mayberry with size twelve feet treading on the brink of manhood. Full of pranks and daring. Class clown. Aching to kiss the girls and make them reveal the sweet mystery of sex. Adolescence personified.

  And still that way in dreams.

  Much as Max blamed himself for Sean’s death, Sean in his dreams never haunted him. Never showed the bombed-out fracture of a face he might have flaunted. Max always awoke in calm nostalgia, almost as if he had received a benediction.

  But then other remnants of his dreams began paying court to his dawning consciousness. A nameless man in a leopard-spotted mask. The Cloaked Conjurer, obviously, seen far more recently than Sean Patrick Donnell Kelly.

  Max found the Cloaked Conjuror’s memory erasing the pleasant tension of his smile as Sean’s never had. In the dream the Cloaked Conjuror had transformed into Gandolph, Max’s dead mentor in the art and illusion of magic. Gandolph had been all the family Max had allowed himself to have. Since Sean. He wished the old man were still here, in this house that Max rattled around in alone like a single die on an empty baize-covered table.

  He wished Temple were here. He never had dreams like this when he slept with Temple.

  But he hadn’t slept with Temple—routinely, all night, with nowhere to go before and/or after—for months. Sean had died too young to understand why “sleeping with” was a euphemism for having sex, for making love. Sleep and the satisfying security that came afterward made having sex into making love.

  Max’s memory jolted him with another unpleasant dream image from the motherland, that long-ago Ireland that he and Sean had visited as naive returning sons.

  A memory of having sex. First sex. With an Irish colleen named Kathleen O’Connor.

  And then, with a dream shift that was only in his head, he finally remembered the dream’s parting illusion. Peace dissolved. He had awakened not seeing Sean but copulating with a corpse.

  Max left the coffeemaker clucking and drooling under the kitchen fluorescent lights and went into the dark yard to retrieve the newspaper.

  Only 4:00 A.M., but the newspaper lay there like a dirty leg bone, a pale oblong encased in clear plastic that reflected the distant streetlight.

  Max never ventured outside without scanning for lurkers. Sometimes he wished he owned a dog that could fetch. Leaving the house in the predawn dark was the most dangerous thing he did all day. A man on his front lawn in the wee hours was like an astronaut on a space walk: isolated, vulnerable, cut off from shelter and safety, so near and yet so far.

  Millions of suburbanites did it every morning, but they didn’t have Max’s past.

  Inside the house, he poured the black coffee into a white mug, then sat on a stool at the huge island counter and spread the paper wide as he skipped the usual front-page headlines—endless foreign talks and sports results—and paged through the rest.

  Las Vegas papers always sizzled with entertainment news. Max found himself perusing small items on openings and closings and newly contracted acts, the longer features on the old standbys, as if he were still an up-and-coming performer with a professional interest in these constant comings and goings. As if he still harbored the unsinkable illusion of a career.

  He missed the intense physical, mental, and social stimulus of doing his magic act, almost as much as he missed sleeping nightly with Temple. For the year they had lived together at the Circle Ritz apartment building while Max performed nightly at the Goliath Hotel, his life had seemed real for the first time since Sean. Imagine…the surreal atmosphere of Las Vegas making him feel so normal.

  The next steps, and he had seen them clearly then, marriage. With children? A house, he could afford a nice one. A long-term contract with one of the spectacular megahotels always rising from the Vegas sands these days like the new Atlantis exchanging a watery mythological grave for a gravy train run on the glittering sandbox of the Strip here and now. What a magic show he could dream up for a place called the Atlantis! More than a magic show, a post—Cirque du Soleil and Eau mélange of sophisticated circus acts with a futuristic accent….

  Max sipped a fragrant distillation of the other, legal, and less lethal export of Colombia: the innocuous bean. His career had always been a cover, not his real job. He was dreaming to think he could resurrect it. Dreams are only in your head. With Sean.

  Still, he felt a bit…wistful? Envious? Professionally curious? He reread a veteran columnist’s spiel about the latest hot Strip magician, who happened to be someone Max had introduced himself to only recently in the line of his other work. And had dreamed about only minutes before. According to Gene Igo, the Cloaked Conjuror’s brand of now-you-see-it, now-you-know-how-it’s-done magic show violated every unspoken tenet of the magician’s code but was packing them in at the New Millennium Hotel and Casino.

  Max read about the multimillion-dollar, multiyear contract, the CC’s desert retreat/fortress and dedication to “unmasking the mystery of magic” in a “thrilling, dramatic fashion.”

  The next paragraph outlined the other magicians’ wrath at the CC flaunting trade secrets for fun and profit.

  And then Max read his own name. The familiar letters exploded in his mind like Fourth of July rockets. The Mystifying Max Kinsella. Stage name and real name in one marquee-spanning phrase.

  The bloody fool! It was true, CC said in Igo’s column, as was now being reported, that the Cloaked Conjuror’s act was literally death-defying, that he’d received many death threats. The columnist suggested that surely these couldn’t be serious.

  “Of course they’re serious,” the CC had “snapped,” wrote the columnist, who had greater latitude in description than a fact-tied, objective-voiced news reporter. “The Mystifying Max Kinsella retired from magic a year ago because of death threats. Just vanished.”

  At this point the magician who appears everywhere in what amounted to almost armor snapped his leather-gloved fingers. “Like that. Gone. No magic involved. The Synth had caught up with him.”

  At first we thought he’d said “the Syndicate,” as in old-time crime organizations, but the CC explained that the word was “Synth,” and even spelled it for us: an ancient secret society of magicians formed to protect trade secrets.

  This is why he uses no name and wears a leopard-spotted mask with a built-in voice modifier that hides his head completely. The gloves he wears constantly prevent leaving even fingerprints as a trail. The effect is a cross between Darth Vader and a protected witness, if you ask us.

  “What about baths?” this reporter joked.

  “I dry-clean,” he said wryly. And seriously.

  The Cloaked Conjuror also said he isn’t married, for which the ladies must be very grateful.

  Max shook his head and rattled the open pages, as if to shake sense into what he was reading. “The fool!”

  Like most fools, the Cloaked Conjuror had managed to pull a boatload of others into the dangerous currents of his folly with this one interview. Not only Max but Temple and God knew who else. Never name an enemy. You warn him. Or her. Or it.

  “‘The Mystifying Max Kinsella.’ Well, well, well.”

  Lieutenant C. R. Molina wasn’t prone to gloating over her high-fiber breakfast cereal. She wasn’t even used, at that early hour, to being anyone more than Carmen Molina, working single mom, until she donned her clip-on leather paddle holster and left the house for police headquarters. But the morning paper had snapped her from domestic to professional mode in the crunch of a bran nugget.

  “Is it a show?” her daughter Mariah asked, eyes still glued to the comics page. “This ‘Max’
thing?”

  “Was a show. Mostly a no-show now.” Molina, muttering, stared at the newsprint until it went out of focus. “Death threats. That’s something Little Miss Red didn’t mention.”

  “Mom! You’re talking to yourself again. I was supposed to remind you not to do that.”

  “Oh. Right. Sorry.” Molina eyed her daughter over the crinkle-cut edge of the newsprint. “Are you supposed to be wearing that to school?”

  “That” was an assembly of beads and fishline that hung over the top of one twelve-year-old ear.

  “I’m giving a report on TitaniCon.”

  “With visual aids?”

  “Yeah.” Mariah liked that idea. “Right.”

  Carmen saw that she had inadvertently given her daughter an excuse instead of an objection, so she just dropped the discussion. “You walking to school with Yolanda?”

  “Like always.”

  “Watch out for bogeymen. There were two cases of guys trying to grab school kids last week.”

  “Those were little kids, Ma. Do I have to hear about every creep on the streets? I know what to do.”

  “So do police officers, and sometimes even they get caught sleeping.”

  “Anyway, I gotta get going if I’m not gonna be late.”

  Carmen nodded, her eyes back on the newsprint. She heard Mariah’s dishes slide into the sink, and tap water rinsing them. Then a hasty “ ’Bye,” and the slam of the front door before her maternal mouth could open to forestall the bang.

  Molina was still shaking her head as the frown she’d kept Mariah from seeing settled into her features like an old friend into a favorite rocking chair.