Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

Gandolph laughed. “Damn cute. What a disappointment, Max! You’re making the same first-glance mistake most people do about her.”

“I don’t think I ever did ‘cute,’ even in my right mind.”

Gandolph turned the laptop to eye the image. “Then your right mind is an ass. I never worried about you sleeping with her. That Continental blonde … pretty poison maybe.”

Max spun the laptop to face himself again. “Pretty cute,” he said on second look. “Nice hair. She looks … petite.”

“Natural redhead, but she’s toned it down since I last saw her. Or you did. Five feet zero. You can see the high heels.”

Max hit Alt + to focus close-up and personal.

“Great ankles, not to mention arches curved enough to turn foot fetishist for.”

“Max!”

“Just saying I do find her attractive in some ways.”

“You’re not a foot fetishist.”

“Could have fooled me.” He worked his way up the close-up image like a street-corner Romeo. “Sweet figure, if you like miniatures.” While Gandolph cradled his unbelieving head with closed eyes in his hand, Max finally focused on the face and smiled. “You give up too soon on people also, Garry. I see it now. Smart. Feisty. Tenacious.”

Gandolph glanced over.

“She’s a pistol, isn’t she?” Max suggested.

“You haven’t completely lost your mind.”

Max nodded. “Not yet.” He hit the Alt – until Temple Barr became fairy-tiny on the sterile, hard-surfaced, long-shot background of McCarran Airport. “She’s far away and long ago, Garry.” He sighed. “I feel nothing earthshaking. I feel nothing. ‘It was in another country. And besides, the wretch is dead.’ ” He paraphrased a famous line from the Elizabethan play The Jew of Malta.

“I won’t allow you to become so cynical, Max. I know you’re directing that quote back on yourself. The original line was, ‘the wench is dead.’ So you’re really talking about the late Kathleen O’Connor, once aka Rebecca. I assure you that Temple Barr is far from dead and far too many aeons away from being a mere ‘wench’ to be forgotten so easily. I’d bet she’s not given you up for dead, either.”

“You mentioned I had a rival there anyway.”

Garry took back the laptop grimly and typed a few short letters into the search engine. He turned the resulting Web page and image back to Max, who rolled his eyes.

“Pretty too,” he said acerbically, eyeing Matt Devine’s professionally taken head shot on the WCOO-FM radio Web site. “They make a photogenic match. Miss Temple is way better off without me and my bum legs and blasted mind. Shut this damn thing down, and let’s get deeper into the new, PR-polished Belfast you’ve been bragging about.”

Gandolph held the laptop open despite Max’s thrust to close it.

“ ‘Pretty too.’ Can’t disagree. Handsome and a really nice guy, from what I’ve learned. Matt Devine, radio advice personality. Maybe you’re doing the noble thing by leaving them to their own ignorant devices… .”

Max snorted with disdain.

“Ex-priest …”

Max’s eyes narrowed with disbelief. “This smoothy media personality?”

“And relatively recent knifing victim of Kathleen O’Connor, henceforth christened Kitty the Cutter by your ex, the ‘cute’ redhead.”

“Kathleen was in Las Vegas?”

“Looking for you. She never succeeded. You found her, dead, first.”

Max said nothing. Until …

“‘Kitty the Cutter’? The redhead’s got a quick mouth and mind on her. The ex-priest didn’t kill easy?”

Gandolph shook his head. “Glancing wound. Kitty was looking for you and found you too elusive. So she found him.”

“So. My mea culpa. Again. He bled for my sins. He should thank me. A scar makes him much more interesting. ‘Kitty,’” he repeated, finally laughing. “‘Kitty the Cutter.’ I like that little redheaded girl.”

“You always did.”

“And she liked me?”

“She did. Maybe still does, although you appeared to run out on her for an inexcusable second time.” Gandolph glanced at the screen. “He was a good priest, from what I learned. Left formally, and celibate.”

“In his … what, early thirties? Isn’t that too Sleeping Beauty to believe?”

“Believe it. I’m guessing he loved Temple from the moment he met her. It was first love on his part, but you were in the way.”

Silence. Then …

“I’m not now, Gandolph. I’m here in bloody Belfast, which I’m willing to bet hasn’t forgotten me, although I’ve forgotten it. Blood feuds die slowly. Someone, some entity, just tried to kill me and failed. Several times. If I don’t find the hit man or woman, or them, I might as well be buried at the nearest graveyard to Temple Bar in Dublin, and you can write Sean’s name on my tomb to put a just and bitter end to our ‘graduation’ trip to Ireland. Ire means ‘rage,’ doesn’t it? A fitting English name for a blasted country.”

He glanced at the laptop, which his mentor had finally shut off and closed.

“Why show me these losses of the recent past when I’m knee-deep in the bloodier past?”

“A reason to live?”

Max let his jaw drop. “My supposed girl is seeing, maybe even planning to marry, a man, a freaking ex-priest, who took the heat for my sins like bloody Jesus Christ, and you think that will inspire me with a reason to live?”