Cat in an Alien X_Ray

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “He still in town?” Max asked.

  “I doubt it,” said Temple. “Speaking of ‘mob,’ in a good way, the Fontana brothers put the fear of God into him.” She couldn’t help smiling.

  “What’s to smile about?” Max asked.

  “Oh, I just found out my aunt Kit has been reporting on me to my mom back in Minnesota, who now thinks ‘a nice big Italian family’ is looking out for me here.”

  “They are,” Matt said. “Not to mention the alley cat Mafia.”

  “The Cat Pack,” Temple corrected him. “Louie and the ferals make the human Rat Pack in ’60s Vegas look lame.”

  “Who was that?” Matt asked, speculating. “Singers Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dean Martin, right?”

  “Yes,” said Temple, “and comic Joey Bishop and sometimes actress Shirley MacLaine, Warren Beatty’s older sis.”

  “If you worked in clubs back in the ’50s and ’60s,” Max said, “especially if you were Italian like Sinatra and Dino, you played by mob rules.”

  “Magicians were never under mob influence?” Matt asked.

  “Naw,” Max said. “As you’ve both noticed, we’re too egomaniacal to control. Also, we’re pretty good at defending ourselves. So,” he continued, “did Midnight Louie find what Effinger had hidden away while the three of you were in Chicago?”

  Temple nodded. “We all did, and it’s pretty weird.”

  She lifted the Table of Crime Elements to reveal a crude drawing of a muscleman wrestling a serpent as thick as his gigantic quads.

  “Ah.” Max grinned. “Our old friend Ophiuchus, the lost thirteenth sign of the zodiac and the symbol of the vanquished Synth. I know Professor Mangel’s dead body was found arranged in the houselike shape of the constellation’s major stars. And that the Neon Nightmare zodiac lighting effects included that sign.”

  “So where else did Ophiuchus turn up?” Matt wanted to know. “Obviously I’ve missed a lot by never patronizing this now-closed Neon Nightmare joint.”

  “Cosimo’s red satin cloak lining,” Temple said promptly. “It was arranged in that same houselike shape, with his body in white tie and tails on it.”

  Max gave a small theatrical shudder. “A magician would appreciate that ‘hidden in plain sight’ element of the death scene. Magic is all about loss, death, and restoration. Too bad a surprising resurrection wasn’t in the cards and we could interrogate him.”

  “If Sparks hadn’t been killed,” Temple pointed out, “the Synth members wouldn’t have tried their big plan out on a smaller heist that failed. I think Ophiuchus was just a cover. What the left hand is doing when the right one is robbing the bank.”

  “So his death spooked the Synth conspirators,” Max explained to Matt. “They jumped the gun with the attempted mass illusion.”

  “I thought,” Matt said, “that Oasis Hotel prize presentation Temple emceed was just … a piece of stunt PR.”

  Temple winced. She considered herself more serious than that, but couldn’t deny that had been a larger-than-life event. “It was a heist attempt foiled in a way to look like crazy Strip business as usual.”

  “And the mob,” Matt said. “Just how much mob is really left in Las Vegas?”

  Temple shrugged. “That’s a complicated question. Everybody’s touchy on that subject now, with a forty-two-million-dollar mob museum operating downtown and the Tropicana and Gangsters Hotels adding smaller exhibitions of their own. Many iconic Vegas hotels, long ago imploded into nonexistence, were constructed with mob money. The Mafia skimmed profits from the front men and then invested in nightclubs and in country clubs and shopping centers and housing developments far afield from the Strip. That’s what’s meant by the mob ‘going corporate.’ They disappeared into the larger business climate. I know mob killings persisted into the ’90s, even after the FBI came in and shut down the scene in the ’80s.”

  “And,” Max added, “there’s still illegal activity from meat hijacking to running prostitutes and drugs.”

  “So lingering mobsters could still be active,” Matt said.

  “And, like the displaced traditional magicians of the Synth,” Temple said, “they could still be hankering for that one last big score.”

  Max nodded. “The object of everyone’s greed being the massive stash of money Kathleen O’Connor and her IRA hardliners collected from North and South America over the years and never delivered. Many former IRA malcontents want anything raised for their cause for reparation to the families who lost members in the struggle.” He paused. “Not for collateral damage like my cousin Sean, though.”

  Temple hastened to move past that bitter truth. “We think much of the hoard is in bearer bonds, from what was found in the walk-in safe with Cosimo Sparks’s body. They’re not used much today, but are still valid. So the cache of cash, to put it in homonyms, would not have to be physically huge, although it might include serious weaponry.”

  “Cosimo Sparks. Not a forgettable name. Who killed him?” Matt asked.

  “You’re asking all the right questions,” Temple said. “I’m thinking the mob or ex-IRA members after the stash. It could have been stored in the hidden walk-in safe where Sparks was found. But it’s now gone. Someone could have suspected Sparks of moving it, and he could have. There were ‘prod’ stabs on the body, as if someone wanted to force him to talk.”

  “Like my stepfather, Effinger.” Matt frowned. “Were the marks … slashes?”

  “Ice pick,” Temple said. She noticed Max eyeing Matt narrowly.

  “Any of this theorizing provable?” Matt asked.

  “No, but the other three surviving Synth leaders saw the light at the same time I did. Sparks indeed could have accounted for the magic-related cold cases that have littered Las Vegas lately.”

  “And your only witness to this mass confession is Midnight Louie—?” Matt asked skeptically.

  “Yup. It wasn’t a confession, Matt. More of a clearing the smoke and mirrors from their eyes to see the truth as the scenario came to me.”

  Matt took a long swallow of sangria and sat back. “So tell me the scenario.”

  “If I can stand. I was used to doing ‘stand-up’ on-scene reporting when I was at the Minnesota TV station.” Temple did as requested and “reported” her overhearing the morose Synth survivors commiserating until she realized what the truth could be and stepped out of the dimness to say it.

  “I don’t think the Synth members were killers, and Sparks was probably pretty unhinged by grandiosity and paranoia. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was bipolar.”

  “And you think the lady magician Shangri-La also was approached to join the renegade magicians?” Matt shook his head. “She was already suspected of being a drug smuggler, and now we think she was really Kathleen O’Connor in disguise under all that full-face Asian makeup.”

  “We do know she brought Temple onstage and made her ring disappear and then Temple herself,” Max said. “Louie fast behind Temple, of course, into the understage escape area. The entire sequence was designed to kidnap Temple.”

  “For a ring?” Matt asked, surprised.

  Temple glanced at Max. Kitty had claimed his “promise” ring to Temple.

  “Yes,” Temple told Matt. “A trophy of her power, I suppose.”

  “What happened to it?” Matt asked. He obviously sensed their unspoken thoughts.

  “Molina kept it as evidence,” Temple said.

  “Molina doesn’t strike me as having a leg to stand on in doing that, and she sure isn’t into bling.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Matt. We were having a girly showdown over that, and she finally gave the ring back to me.”

  Max was now staring at Temple with the same puzzlement and a new tinge of shock. “Where is it now?”

  “In my scarf drawer, I guess. It was just something I bought at the women’s exposition when I was handling that.” She said the lie as casually as an amateur college actress could manage.

  “Oh, that fatal bottomless
pit,” Max said, “your scarf drawer.”

  Temple laughed. “I know I’m impossible at managing scarves, but they’re too pretty to throw away. Look. I don’t know where Shangri-La fits in all this,” Temple admitted. “She was sabotaged during her act with the Cloaked Conjuror at the New Millennium and fell to her death. The body was definitely that of an Asian woman. Unless,” she told Max, “the corpse was switched on the way to the morgue and the tender mercies of Grizzly Bahr and his staff. Gandolph managed that for himself and a semi-switch for you when he spirited your unconscious body from the Neon Nightmare to Europe. Why couldn’t the all-powerful Miss Kitty pull off the same kind of illusions?”

  “She could,” said Max. “Although I swore the woman who died pursuing me on a motorcycle was her, from information I got in Ireland, she’s very much alive. Magicians use body doubles. Houdini did. Gandolph and I didn’t. I suppose an international terrorism money-raiser like Kathleen could have insisted the doubles have facial plastic surgery to seem identical to her.”

  “And then she let them die in her place whenever anybody got too close.” Now Temple shook her head. “What a totally irredeemable human being.”

  “Maybe not,” Matt said, staring at the Table of Crime Elements. “The only person Jesus specifically invited to His Father’s kingdom in heaven was the thief being crucified beside him who went from reviling to believing in Him.”

  “Deathbed confessions,” Max said, “are notoriously insincere.”

  “Still.” Matt sat back. “I have to believe every human soul is redeemable.”

  “You don’t have to believe it,” Max said. “You just do. And I guess that’s admirable.”

  He leaned forward, stabbing the Table of Crime Elements with a forefinger. “Here, here, and here. Somewhere in these unsolved crimes are clues that will implicate and lead us to Kitty the Cutter.

  “We’re getting closer than we know. I sense it. This time she won’t die on me to run away and die another day in another guise, and another after that. This time it’ll be a permanent demise. Even knowing what I know now about Kathleen’s beyond-brutal childhood, I won’t find peace until I know that she is off this planet for good, and unable to harm Temple, you, and me.”

  Temple felt a chill run up the back of her neck, sheer anger. What a rabble-rouser Max would have made.

  She eyed Matt, sitting back, his expression both troubled and intense, his arms folded across his chest as if holding something in.

  She wondered what thoughts or emotions held him captive. Something she didn’t know, she sensed, kept him quiet.

  And that couldn’t be good.

  Chapter 4

  Home Alone

  “I thought he’d never leave.”

  Matt shut the door on Max and turned to Temple.

  “Me too,” she said, moving into his arms. “Ever since we came back from Chicago, which was an all-business and too-much-funny-business trip, we’ve been caught up in your mom’s wonderful-but-quickie wedding. You and I haven’t had any real time together, night or day.”

  “I know.” He pulled her into one of those first-time love-declaring, almost desperate embraces with a long kiss that migrated into a breathless series.

  The new-old intensity of it made her knees and pulses quiver like a teenager’s. “What was that for?”

  “For us putting away all the old family business that’s kept us worried and shot down our privacy, including who murdered whom on your darn Table of Crime Elements.”

  “I guess we’d better take a break.”

  His agreement was swift and no less intense, but he broke their kiss with a frown. “The cat’s moved out to the balcony. He just pushed the French door open.”

  “Louie hates human ‘mushy moments.’ Forget him. Now we have the bed all to ourselves.”

  But Matt pulled out of their embrace to inspect the ajar French door and the balcony.

  Temple sighed for full dramatic effect. “Matt. Louie is the original cat burglar. He always uses the French doors.”

  By now Matt was examining the levers and the latches as if they were a more fascinating erotic zone than hers truly’s. Guys! They always had to examine anything mechanical. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn there was a robotic blowup doll.

  She couldn’t help complaining about the French doors getting more attention than her. “You sound just like—” Max.

  He whirled to face her.

  Temple switched grips on the conversational footballs. “—like Lieutenant Molina making a house safety check. We can discuss changing the latches later. Meanwhile, ‘I’m melting, I’m melting,’” she quoted the Wicked Witch of the West, as she had turned into another kind of puddle indeed.

  He looked into her eyes, and seconds later she got a very satisfying bum’s rush into the bedroom, although he shut the door behind them for the first time, as if intent on keeping Louie, or the whole world, out.

  Temple had no complaints about that, or anything.

  * * *

  “You don’t really hate my Table of Crime Elements,” she said later, when they were entwined side by side on the living room sofa, bare feet propped on the newspaper-laden coffee table.

  “It’s brilliant, Temple, like you.” He kissed her … temple, where her hairdo had devolved into damp tendrils. His sigh was deep enough to worry her. “I’m just more aware now of how dangerous this world is, and how much we’re in danger every day.”

  “You mean, because of runaway buses or comets or recession? Or because of whatever your stepfather was mixed up in or—?”

  “Because of all that, up to and including your tendency to solve everyone’s problems, including the police’s. It’s dangerous. This last trip to Chicago, it was almost fatal to Louie.”

  “We can’t sit still and wait for the bad guys and gals to find us.”

  “No,” he agreed, his tight-lipped mouth a grim underline to that reality. “But you can be watchful.” Matt shifted into a less cuddly position. “I’m going to have to be working late for a while.”

  She took that news, turned it over in her mind, and laughed. “You work late already.”

  “Later. A couple of hours later. I won’t be able to see you after the show.”

  “Not until four thirty A.M.? I loved all our wee-hour rendezvous, the off-Strip world so deliciously dark. Why?”

  “Ambrosia and I are running experimental tapes on a new concept. When your boss is the broadcaster ahead of you, that’s the only time available for … experiments. I’m not giving up the earlier evening hours, because that’s the time we can share going out and about like normal people.”

  Temple mock-pouted, though she was curious about the “experimental tapes.”

  “At least that means you’ll be available for the post-honeymoon bash Nicky Fontana and Van are throwing at the Crystal Phoenix Tuesday night for my aunt Kit and his oldest brother Aldo.”

  “Really? There are post-honeymoon bashes? I’d love to have that for us.”

  Temple played coy. “I’m sure if I hint nicely to Van and Nicky. I do handle their PR. But why are you looking into new formats at WCOO? Oh. Does Ambrosia know about your network daytime TV talk show offer?”

  “That’s an exploration, Temple, not an offer yet.”

  “An ‘exploration’ that put a little deal tempter like a Jaguar in your driveway.”

  “In the Circle Ritz parking lot. And that’s a problem because a car like that should be garaged. In fact, fancy cars are more trouble than the head-turning factor is worth. The only head I want to turn is yours.”

  “I’ll never make you into a conspicuous consumer,” Temple said, not complaining.

  “Says the retro fashion recycler.”

  She smiled at his point, but frowned right after. “So did you tell Ambrosia about your career-change possibility?”

  “On the air, ‘Ambrosia’ is all breathy empathy as she plays songs to comfort the troubled. As a businesswoman, Letitia Brown is sharper than
a shark’s tooth.”

  “So she knows you’re in danger of leaving? You’ve caved and are trying out something the two of you can do beyond your Midnight Hour advice show, separately, following her sob story hour?”

  Matt shrugged, looking unhappy. Poor guy, he had way too many scruples for the business world, Temple thought. She didn’t want to add to his pressures.

  “Okay. I’ll give you up for those precious post–Midnight Hour rendezvous, but you’re all mine from noon to eleven P.M.”

  “I’m all yours around the clock, only I’ll have to be absent for my work hours.”

  * * *

  Finally. The men had left. Temple didn’t believe she’d ever feel that way about either one of them. Still fretting over Matt’s strange new indifference to his exciting job opportunities, she unleashed her own anxieties. She hied back to the bedroom and the small chest that housed accessories. The notorious scarf drawer was so full of its airy contents that it jammed a bit on opening.

  She pawed through the contents for the few ring boxes and rings. Not a good hiding place, but she’d felt so safe at the Circle Ritz, when Max lived here with her, with Matt just a floor above.

  Her fingers found the heavy gold of a man’s ring; the worm Ouroboros symbol of eternity, swallowing its own tail; and the box with the cheap cocktail ring she’d wasted her money on at the women’s exhibition, something sparkly and girly that had fit her mood then. She didn’t find the opal and diamond ring in its plastic evidence Baggie from Lieutenant Molina.

  She sat on the bed, her heart pounding, the two rings in her lap. She shut her eyes, remembering the saleswoman behind the ring counter she barely looked at over the array of glittering stones.

  That’s when Matt’s “returned” Ouroboros ring must have been slipped into Temple’s bag and had emigrated with the boxed ring into her drawer unnoticed. When had Max’s ring vanished—again—then? Much more recently.

  Temple looked up, to the rooms beyond the bedroom. Midnight Louie jumped up beside her, nosing the two rings.

  “Oh, Louie,” she said. “Has Kitty the Cutter been breaking in here all along? Collecting ‘trophies?’ And what am I asking you for?”