Part 28 (1/2)
The Maxima would not attract attention. It would purr back to town and move quietly into its preordained stall, like a docile horse. It would move to its imminent destruction, unnoticed, and shrink to a cube of crushed metal and gla.s.s and bits of cat-cut leather. It would have no history, leave no trace.
It was not interesting anymore.
When the lights of the Strip made a luminous dome on the black horizon, Max hit the number programmed into his cell phone and designated the drop point, the parking ramp of a major Strip hotel, in the slot marked for hotel executives only. It was always empty and no one questioned that.
Max walked out through the ramp, pa.s.sing the occasional couple heading for their cars, too self-involved to notice him.
Sometimes it seemed too easy.
He walked the endless way to the Strip, amounting to maybe four city blocks in a town that didn't sport billion-dollar hotels as big as airports. He caught a cab to within two miles of his house, then walked home like a sneak thief casing the neighborhood, avoiding lights, 'jumping privacy walls, cutting through unlit backyards, until the last unlit backyard was his own. He entered the house with a key through a hidden door.
Safe at home. Just like a baseball player who's. .h.i.t the ball out of the park.
He moved through the large utility room, past the unoccupied maid's room and bath, into the black-as-pitch kitchen.
Someone turned on the overhead fluorescent lights, a dimmer switch that made no sound and spun up to maximum brightness in one smooth flash.
Max spun around to maximum alertness, never taking a visitor for granted. Who knows. It could have been a ghost. He got one.
”I know I should have waited for you to arrive,” Gandolph said. ”I shouldn't have let myself in either. You might have changed the security measures.”
”I thought I had.”
Gandolph smiled, waggishly. ”I managed not to trip any of them. I haven't lost all my marbles during my ... exile. You look terrible, Max. Is this a bad moment for a reunion? What took you so long? Where have you been?”
”Back in Ireland.” Max opened the huge Zero-king stainless steel refrigerator and pulled out a beer. A Harp beer. ”Want one?”
”Beer is not my druthers, dear boy. Why do you think I bought Orson Welles's former house? Like him, I am a gourmand. Wine, brandy, perhaps the not-too-trendy liqueur when I'm in a mellow mood. No beer, ale, or stout of any sort.”
Max twisted off the cap, drank deep. ”All that is still here. Help yourself.”
The older man disappeared into the adjacent wine cellar and came out reverently bearing a bottle.
Max took and uncorked it for him.
”My arthritis thanks you.” Gandolph lifted the ruddy winegla.s.s to the light to savor it visually before he tasted it.
Max reflected on arthritis, the unspoken reason why Gandolph had given up the practice of magic to concentrate on unmasking false mediums. When had it hit Gandolph, the stiffening of fingers once so nimble? Somewhere in his early fifties. Max might be heading in the same direction. Who knew? He'd been out of contact with his family for so long, for their own protection, he didn't even know what maladies ran in their genes, what he might expect. He was as good as an orphan.
”Max, lad,” came Gandolph's cajoling voice, warmed by his first savored sip of the Chardonnay. ”You're brooding. That's a genetic predisposition of the Irish more ingrained than a love of liquor and even more dangerous. Don't think. Talk. What's happened?”
”There's bad news and worse news. Which do you want first?”
”Bad before worse.”
”Actually, I think my bad is your worse, and my worse is your bad. Did you know Gloria Fuentes was dead?”
”Gloria! No.” Gandolph sat on a kitchen stool. ”I haven't seen her in years, of course. Odd how you can work together so closely with someone, and once the act is retired, lose touch. And I was das.h.i.+ng about the country looking for mediums. When was it?”
”A few months ago.”
”Only a few months?” Gandolph shook his head. ”And me back in town just in time to miss seeing her alive. Poor Gloria. She wasn't that old. I hope it wasn't cancer.”
”It was faster. Gandolph, somebody strangled her in a church parking lot. Do you know what she'd be doing there?”
”Oh my G.o.d, what a tragedy! Why was she there? Going to church, I a.s.sume. Just because she worked onstage in fishnet tights didn't make her a showgirl. She loved her work, but when it was over, she was out of the spotlight. Had a gaggle of nieces and nephews she doted on. She'd been retired for years. They did catch the killer?”
”No. Do you think her death could be related to the attempt on your life?”
”I don't see why. Once I retired, we lost touch. I was like you, pursuing the trail of ghosts that were hard to find, and I was darn hard to find myself. If this is the bad news, what is worse?”
”Worse for me than for you, I think.” Max sat on a kitchen stool and told him about Kathleen O'Connor's terrible accident and probable death, as if he were at the village pub chatting up the friendly barman.
”The emergency crew was working on her, of course,” Max finished up. ”But it looked like frantic revival efforts in the face of inevitability. I'm convinced she's gone.”
Gandolph's round face grew long and he shook his balding head several times.
Baldness. That was another thing Max didn't know would come to him soon or later or never. He was beginning to feel age hovering behind him like Elvis's ghost, closing down his future.
”Terrible,” Gandolph was muttering. ”A terrible . . . accident? I can't quite call it that. She was still pursuing you, after all these years?”
”Me. And others in my place. Innocents, as usual. She liked to torment innocents.”
”I remember her. Prettiest la.s.s in Londonderry. It couldn't last as I remember it, of course, that beauty.”
”It did,” Max said shortly. It had been too dark in the desert to see Kathleen's face as other than a light-andshadow-kissed mystery, and now he would never see it again. ”Others saw her more recently. A sketch had been done from memory. Her beauty had matured, that's all. Grown, not faded.”
”Hearsay, though.”
”I believe the source, an impeccably honest source.” Max smiled to recall just how hopelessly honest Matt Devine still was. Momentarily, he envied him. ”I'm glad I never saw her again, Garry. I can't think of that lovely young girl without seeing a death's head superimposed on those treacherous features. Sean's skull, sans crossbones.”
”You didn't see her at the accident scene.”
”Too dark.”
”But you're sure it was her, sure she's dead.”
”What other woman would pursue me on a motorcycle? Someone else had seen her riding one earlier.”
”She rode a bicycle in Londonderry, like a country la.s.s.”
”She was a country la.s.s then. She had moved up in the world. You don't know. . . . You remember Sean and me trying to trip each other up while we both played court to Kathleen. You know what happened.”
”A sad, sad thing, Max. You can't blame yourself for winning the la.s.s over your cousin, or for him being alone that night in a Protestant pub that was bombed by the IRA.”
”No, but I can blame Kathleen O'Connor. I've since met someone she was plaguing, stalking really, here. And when he heard of how I knew her, and where, and what happened, he had an interesting diagnosis for it all. He thinks she knew the pub would be hit and that Sean would be there. He thinks she enjoyed dallying with me while my cousin was being murdered, that she relished the guilt I would bear for the rest of my life.”