“As of my return to Vegas, yes. And before.”
“Poor man.” Revienne took his arm. “It must be like walking on ice, living again in a city filled with people you don’t remember. Not knowing who’s a friend, or an enemy.”
“Oh, I think I was used to that,” Max answered, again surveying the people they’d been discussing. But their positions in the room had changed.
As he turned, he almost brushed the extravagant bouffant veil of the living-statue bride.
This concept had been charming when introduced but was getting to be annoying, he thought.
“What the—?” He moved Revienne so quickly aside that the champagne flute in her right hand spilled.
Temple was bearing down on them at a fast, determined clip.
“Oh,” Revienne objected.
“Max, watch out!” Temple shouted.
Chapter 21
Let Them Eat Crow
I have been the perfect party guest. Unseen.
The copious greenery and potted plants make a perfect cover for the jungle-stalking kind, so I have observed this fancy social gavotte at the Crystal Court lounge from the cover of massive canna lily leaves.
My favorite humans are delightfully nimble, if predictable, at the cocktail game. If the soles of their shoes left fluorescent imprints on the pale marble floor, you would have a pattern showing enough to-and-fro traffic to emulate Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
I, however, am not fooled by the usual ins and outs of the usual cocktail party. Like my Miss Temple, I am here to sniff out danger among the daiquiris.
“Hah!” comes an unwelcome greeting from the rear that has my tail hair as stiff and splayed as a radiator brush.
“Hanging about your old haunt, hoping for a job offer?” Miss Midnight Louise speculates. “I could use a pool boy.”
I shudder as my flagship member settles back into its usual sleek condition. “Water is not my medium, Louise, especially chlorinated water. It is hard on the eyes and coat.”
“Just saying. Your old spot by the canna lilies bordering the hotel pool is vacant, and the fishpond is teeming with fat, out-of-condition koi.”
Of course, she knows just how to evoke my sentimental side … schooling fishies glittering in the sun, high-heel-sandaled bathing beauty feet passing to and fro. Bronzed bodies baking in the sun, and scaled golden torsos swaying just below the water level, plump and tasty …
“I no longer crave the swim-spa experience, Louise,” I tell her. “I am on guard duty. If you had your ears perked right, you would know that the most dangerous female in Las Vegas could very well be within eyesight.”
“I spot several suspicious females, including your roommate. She is dangerous to be around. Dead bodies have a habit of suddenly appearing.”
“She is just curious. It is a characteristic of the human breed—only my Miss Temple has a double dose of that personality trait. Which other suspicious female has your hackles twitching?”
“There is that smooth blond foreign number.”
“Are you talking sports cars or human beings? Miss Van von Rhine has not lived abroad since she came to Vegas after her father died and she met and married Nicky Fontana.”
Miss Louise gives my whiskers a slightly exasperated boxing. “I know who the Crystal Phoenix boss lady is. I have been unofficial house detective here longer than you ever were before you decamped with Miss Temple Barr to the Circle Ritz.”
“Oho. We are going into past history and ‘he said/she said,’ are we?”
“We are going into ‘I am the law of the paw around here now.’ And I say Mr. Max Kinsella’s new girlfriend looks like the calico that ate the cream cheese.”
“Mr. Max has not already transferred his affections from my Miss Temple?” I feel indignant hairs stiffening all over my body. “The cad!”
“Or just absentminded,” Louise says. “Like you sometimes.”
Before I can get huffy about that comment, my sharp eyes focus on a movement as minuscule as a mouse might make. Mmm. I have glimpsed a white-slippered toe moving behind a snowy waterfall of bridal skirt.
I could swear I saw that toe pushing something not white out of sight.
“See, Pops. You have totally tuned out,” Louise is whispering in my ear.
“Why should I tune in to nonsense when I have just spotted a major criminal on the scene? If the person under that white makeup and gown is not Miss Kathleen ‘the Cutter’ O’Connor preparing to attack Mr. Max and my Miss Temple and all those near and dear to her, I am the cat that ran away with the spoon.”
“The dish,” Miss Louise says in her best schoolmarm tone. “The dish eloped with the spoon. The cat just fiddled away.”
“This cat is not fiddling around.” I give a fearsome battle cry along the lines of Tarzan of the Apes vocalizations.
Then I leap three feet forward into the open as Miss Midnight Louise cries behind me, “Pop. Stop! What are you doing? Stop! You will humiliate yourself. Stop! You will cost me my job. Stop! This is my turf. Stop! They will think you are me, oh no.”
You would think Miss Louise had gotten a job as a telegraph operator with all those “stop” commands.
I am about to unveil the psychopath among us, and nothing will stop me.
I barrel toward the albino bridal couple at full speed, watching their composure crack as I near and throw myself two-thirds up the bride’s full skirt, clinging like a giant burr until my weight pulls a huge tear in the material.
“Stop!” a male human voice yells.
“Louie,” Miss Temple wails.
“This cat is crazy,” my stauesque victim screeches.
“Louise!” Miss Van von Rhine calls out, having indeed taken me for the house detective.
I leap higher to catch my shivs in the long trailing bridal veil, hoping to bare the black locks of Miss Kathleen O’Connor, human chameleon and Most Dangerous Woman Alive.
I pull down yards and yards of a cloud of tulle, that airy netted stuff, and uncover a … head of pinned-up brown hair.
Brown. That is not the hair color of a femme fatale.
I stand abashed, while human feet and shoes encircle me and human voices drift down in admonishment and anger.
In all the excitement, the living statues broke character and tried to escape my onslaught. Can an individual mount an onslaught? I do not know, but I am pretty impressive in ninja mode, especially against an all-white background.
“How did a rabid cat get in here?” The flour-decked groom’s makeup is cracking. “We will sue.”
“I am so sorry,” Miss Van von Rhine is saying, wringing her hands.
“Oh, Louie,” my Miss Temple is whispering. “He must have had some fright,” she says in a louder tone.
Me? Subject to a “fright”?
I can spot Miss Midnight Louise’s narrow gams through the forest of lower limbs. She is putting in an appearance to make sure that there can be no question that I am the culprit. Talk about family solidarity, not that we are family.
People are cooing over the disheveled bride, and they include some of the Fontana brothers. Is there no loyalty?
My name is indeed black. My reputation is in as many tatters as the gown wilting on this so-called statue of a bride.
The murmurs are getting ugly and I am hearing words like “cage” and “tetanus shots” and “isolation.”
My Miss Temple is pleading for my life and freedom. I am thinking Marty Scorsese is the director for the biopic. He can move beyond fiction. He did a great documentary on Bob Dylan.
While they are all so exercised, plotting evil retribution for my apparent sins, I sneak out a long limb and stretch my shivs to the max. I am nearing the bride’s stiffly starched skirt.
I put in a paw and pull out a plum … the sparkly bit I saw her bridal slipper toe sneaking under the giant white umbrella of her skirt.
I pull it across the smooth marble and into the custody of my folded forelimbs.
“What have you
got there?” Trust my Miss Temple to keep a steady eye on me and my well-being in the midst of this mob. She bends to retrieve what I have captured. “Anybody in this crowd missing a screw-back ruby earring?” she asks loudly.
A muted shriek comes from the rim of the mob.
No guillotine for Midnight Louie today.
* * *
In another hour, hotel security and the Metro Police have hauled away the larcenous lovebirds in powdered sugar white. Only the inner circle remains, which does not include the Mystifying Max and Miss Dr. Revienne Schneider.
I am sitting atop one of those high chairs that surround tiny tall cocktail tables, lapping up an all-fat cream used for cocktails from a bell-shaped champagne glass that better suits my drinking method than those tall narrow flutes.
Miss Midnight Louise has done a disappearing act, so I get all the credit.
“Imagine the nerve,” Miss Van von Rhine is telling the gathered Fontana brothers, including her husband. “I cannot believe all you crime experts had no idea a pair of pocket-pickers were working our party.”
“Well, uh.” Mr. Nicky Fontana eyes his sheepish bros. I have never before seen a Fontana brother looking sheepish. “Obviously we needed an undercover operative on the right level.”
“It was a sweet setup,” Aldo says despite his sister-in-law’s small frown at that description. “You won’t even feel a good pickpocket taking the gold fillings from your molars, much less anything dangling out there on your limbs or lobes.”
“I could not believe,” Miss Temple says, “how much jewelry they had slipped into the bags beneath the bride’s skirts. A Rolex, even.”
Miss Van von Rhine winces.
“Two things going on there to make this crooked gig work,” Nicky said. “People will forget about living statues once they figure out what they are. Or, they come close and try to make them break character in front of them. Either way, they are distracted, and a small move from, say, the groom will not be obvious while you are trying to stare down the bride through her veil.”
“I am sure,” Miss Temple says, “the police will discover this pair, or even the booking agency, has been ripping off clients and their guests for quite a while. I knew Midnight Louie had not lost his marbles.”
She strokes me fondly on the head. Nice, but not while I am drinking.
I look up, glad to see everyone now smiling down at me like I was the genius crime-fighter I know myself to be.
It is a bit disappointing that my swift action did not unmask a psycho bride, but you cannot have everything.
Chapter 22
A Fine and Secret Show
“The police anticipate murderers coming back to the scene of the crime,” Temple told Silas T. Farnum as she looked from the deep, dark starless Las Vegas night to the lukewarm security lights dotting his shrouded building in a pattern resembling the Big Dipper.
“Is that why you’re whispering in this huge deserted lot at midnight?” he asked. He was now accoutered with a handsome silver-headed cane, like a circus ringmaster.
Why had she come running back to the Paradise site at his excited call? Maybe she needed her mind taken off her personal woes.
She and Matt had so little time together lately, and after what should have been a romantic evening out too. When they’d gotten back to the Circle Ritz, she used the elevator ride to woo him from his mysterious overtime sessions at the radio station with the promise of a steamy rendezvous at the usual 3 A.M. He’d gotten off on her floor, but put her off with excuses again. When she persisted, he’d suggested that maybe she should call on Max for that, since she was so eager to rescue him from a Kathleen O’Connor who wasn’t even in the room, and rushed up the stairs to his unit.
Talk about feeling drop-kicked all the way to Santa Monica! She wanted to be mad, but just felt sad. So, when Silas T.’s unfailingly cheerful voice chirped from her cell phone, she came running.
She gazed around the construction site, which reminded her of the remnants of the Forum in Rome, more in a state of fallen down than going up. Farnum at the Forum. It was not an enticing bill to envision on a marquee.
“Don’t worry,” Silas T. said, having read her mind. “I’ve had very discreet security … forces on duty here all along. The cops didn’t detect them when they were swarming all over the place around the dead body, and they won’t detect them now.”
“Security forces? That sounds sinister, Mr. Farnum.”
“If you have a secret site, you need to safeguard it, Miss Barr.”
It was eerie how unpopulated this street was, how dark Las Vegas could be at night without its constant halo of neon and spotlights. She’d allowed Farnum to get her here so late because the Vegas Strip was pretty safe when it came to street crime and because she couldn’t sleep and Matt sure wasn’t going to show up at the Circle Ritz until the dawn patrol and she wasn’t sure she wanted to see him if he did. And because even Midnight Louie had gone out after she’d put a favorite but frenetic movie musical, Moulin Rouge, on the TV before Farnum had called her.
“You don’t want to daydream past the big reveal, Miss Barr,” Silas T. urged, tapping her on the shoulder and pointing up with his cane.
Her gaze lifted beyond the unpromising construction to the aurora borealis of the Strip peeking like the earthrise shot from 2001 over the familiar silhouettes of its landmarks.
As she watched, some of the eye-blinking points of light flared even brighter. They separated from the huge nebula of neon and started moving slowly, moving together into a vee formation like migratory birds, only their size increased with motion and also the detail. Nine sleek silver UFOs bearing all the glimpsed futuristic bells and whistles Hollywood could invent swooped and spun over the Strip.
Even here, Temple could hear a rise and fall of excited screams, as if New York–New York’s tower-circling roller coaster had broken—or been torn—free of its tracks and its passengers were howling for their lives.
Temple’s jaw dropped as she seized Silas T. Farnum by his skinny forearm. “What is that? You must know. You concocted this.”
“That, Miss Barr, is the girl in the fishnet hose and pink satin bustier. What you really want to see is right in front of you. There. Look.”
She forced her focus down from the show in the sky to find one of the damn things had landed, silently, right in front of the new construction. It was gigantic, and hovered above a narrower shaft of swirling color and light, like a pseudopod it had lowered. She thought of a mushroom cloud equipped with a death ray the size of the Superdome tethering it to Earth.
This all being a conventional film version of a flying saucer spewing down alien lights was not reassuring. Her sky was now a huge hunk of alien metal hovering like a sting ray shadow over the entire lot, pulsing with surface tension and emitting the odd watery phosphorescence of exotic undersea creatures.
The saucer’s thick “edge” alone was two or three stories high. Its circumference was … not visible. Temple was aware of shrill ringing in her ears, but that was probably her blood pressure hitting a high C. As far as she knew in her current altered state of stupefaction, this UFO did not sing like the one in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She heard no reassuring, blurted mellow chords that reminded Temple of an engaging—and harmless—kiddie toy.
She barely heard a muted pulsing sound she’d describe as the mating call of a sprinkler system and a legion of seriously leg-chafing crickets. Mechanical yet natural, and even somewhat … calming, like white noise. Her fluttering pulses were evening out. She found herself breathing more slowly and deeply.
The concentrated stalk of light, the softly shifting dark shadows behind the saucer’s beaming edge gave her a sense of quiet and peace, as if she were meditating, chilling out in a rosé wine happy hour all of her own. As if she was being … hypnotized.
And was that so bad? Everything light and bright and … what was that small black dot, that minuscule floater on an eye chart’s lighted scre
en, that tiny, invasive, moment-ruining spot doing? Streaking across the light-bathed ground, shifting shape into an arch of black, and then into a vanishing point, a horizontal line?
Temple blinked. If she hadn’t seen a startled cat streaking away like a superhero …
Her senses reassembled. That pinch on her elbow was Silas T. Farnum’s gnarly age-curled fingers. The ripple pattern under her shoes she’d taken for that last lick of waves on a tropical beach was the gritty, stone-strewn ground. The dazzling gigantic magic mushroom of an unearthly space ship was … once again a roughed-in ten-story building with a few security lights glowing here and there.
Looking toward the Strip, she watched the last of the bouncing balloons vanishing south toward Arizona.
She turned on the only possible target. “Silas T. Farnum, this is a hallucination. Your entire project is a hallucination. And probably the money behind it. Unhand me! You’ve probably been dusting me with psychedelic something.”
He released her and stepped back, leaving Temple to wobble without support, which she much preferred to being suckered.
She ground her soles deeper into the detritus. “I have friends in police places,” she told him. “And here you are violating a crime scene.”
“It’s just dirt, Miss Barr. It’s been released as a crime scene. The police are perfectly satisfied with my credentials and alibi.”
“The police are never satisfied. They just let you think they are. This is Las Vegas. People here enjoy extravagance and make-believe, but they don’t want to be hoodwinked any more than they are at the gaming tables.”
“This is not hoodwinking.” He stood his ground, planting his cane like a claiming flag. “You have just seen an astounding sight, haven’t you? You have just heard the angels of our better beings singing, like the mermaids, for you. You have been transported.”
Temple remained silent. Finally she said, “It was a pretty good illusion.”
“That’s just it. It wasn’t an illusion. It’s real. I needed to prove that. I needed you to see what I have here.”
She glanced over her shoulder to the Strip. “That fleet of UFOs is fake. Radio controlled.”
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