Cat in an Alien X_Ray

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Some days it is. That’s where you ID’d your dead stepfather after someone sank him at the sinking-ship attraction. Is that what’s got this new ‘mob’ fixation going?”

  Matt sighed loudly enough so she’d hear him over the phone, then waited.

  “All right. I agree that ugly incident had the whiff of an old-time whack job. Fifty minutes. My place. Just follow your fiancée’s ruby red slippers to South Martin Luther King Boulevard. I’ll have a visitor’s ID ready for you.”

  * * *

  The new headquarters, almost 400,000 square feet, had recently united departments housed in various leased facilities around town in two five-story blocks of dark gray stone with regimental square windows. It had reminded Matt of the supposedly impregnable Bastille stormed during the French Revolution.

  Yet the soaring glass central structure had a slightly curved and raised roof that also reminded Matt of folded angel wings as he drove up to the main doors.

  Tender little trees edging the parking lot resembled architect’s 3-D miniatures so prissily placed on model building sites. The mirrored central window-wall reflected the cloudless blue sky common to Vegas. That made the solid structure look like it was only a hollow gridwork on a Hollywood backlot, one you could see right through. Matt supposed that architectural “trick of light” was appropriate to a city built on illusion.

  Matt parked the Jaguar near an oval of concrete holding the skimpy trees. He scanned the central glittering plinth for the entry doors, watching the sky reflection vanish as he got closer, until he met his reflection at a door, then pushed through … and straight into a waiting Molina.

  She was, as always, tall and plainly dressed and sardonic. “Fancy car,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to valet-park it?” she joked.

  “It’s not mine—”

  “This a confession?”

  “It’s a gift I’m not sure I’ll keep.”

  She shook her head, causing her shiny brunet bob to shimmer. Was Molina doing a Hillary Clinton and letting her businesslike chop cut grow out?

  “Relax,” she told him. “I know you’re a syndicated radio personality and all things pretty and perklike flow your way.”

  “You think the car is pretty?”

  “Gorgeous, but my Prius is greener. Mariah would swoon over your Jaguar, though.”

  “Do teenage girls still swoon?”

  “No, they text—dear Lord, how they text.”

  She started walking and he fell into step beside her through a big modern space sprouting rows of sleek and skinny gray-upholstered visitors’ chairs. As they neared the office area, there was chaos, there was crowding, there was heat generated by computers and noisy phone calls, like in a newsroom.

  Molina shut a door on them both. They were boxed into a small but slick private office.

  “You’ve got something new, too, don’t you?” Matt asked. “Fancy private office instead of a cubbyhole.”

  “You betcha.”

  She sat in the desk chair, spun a quarter turn, and gestured at an angular guest chair. “Have a seat.”

  “This is big,” he said, eyeing the horizontal file cabinets, a sideboard with a single-shot coffeemaker, a photo of Mariah in the uninspiring annual-school-photo style.

  “Comparatively small, but mine own. It’s new. It’ll get that used look fast.” Molina nodded at her computer, all screen and no visible tower. “So what do you want to know about mob remnants in Vegas?”

  Matt started to answer, but she interrupted him.

  “I should say, first, why do you want to know?”

  “That’s the key question. Why would some aging mobsters out of a Danny DeVito movie stalk my mom in Chicago? They ended up kidnapping and holding Temple’s cat for ransom while we were in town last week.”

  Molina had leaned forward during his recital, resting her elbows on her desk and her chin on her fists. Matt doubted she’d fall into such an informal pose with anyone else, but it gave him a chance to suffer the concentrated effect of her truly electric blue eyes. Like his Jaguar, they were gorgeous. No wonder she was a mesmerizing cabaret singer on the side. He blinked and she drew back, either satisfied or, like him, surprised.

  “Miss Barr mentioned that,” she said. “You tell me more. Midnight Louie’s fate was in question?” She’d resumed sardonic cop mode. “Should I send flowers?”

  “Only catnip. The nappers, Benny ‘the Viper’ Bennedetto and Waldo ‘the Weasel’ Walker, were caught.”

  “You’re describing a movie script, right? So what’s with the cat?”

  “He escaped the warehouse where they were holding him. The hoods apparently had a falling out and beat each other senseless. The only sign that Louie had been there was the empty leopard-print carrier Temple had bought him.”

  “So we have Midnight Louie now at large in Chicago and living large? Is that hoping too much?”

  “He, uh, made his way back to my mother’s apartment.”

  “Chicago is a big city.”

  “Louie’s a big cat.” Matt shifted in the chair. Visitors weren’t expected to stay long anywhere here, and the Spartan seating assured that. “Look, Lieutenant. The thugs were mobsters on their last legs and pretty lame, but what they did to my mother was extreme. They followed her to her workplace and left threatening notes among her papers. They broke into her apartment and left notes on her pillow. She rooms with my college-age cousin, Krys, and was scared stiff her niece was in danger too.

  “But the notes insisted she’d regret going to the police.”

  Now Molina had leaned far back in her chair, her eyes narrowed, a pen she’d picked up beating hushed time on her desktop. “What did they want?”

  “A lockbox my late stepfather, Cliff Effinger, had left behind in Mom’s old Chicago-style two-flat place.”

  “And somebody had killed Effinger here in a particularly torturous and grisly way. He must have mentioned the lockbox was with his ex-wife before he died.”

  “You’d think they could have let him live.”

  “You might. Not me. I’d think they’d consider him a loose end that they would see tied tight and sunk publicly enough to scare off anyone else interested in the contents of Effinger’s lockbox.”

  “And my mother wasn’t his ex-wife. They’d never divorced.”

  Molina put a finger to her lip. “Keep those personal facts to yourself. My first thought is that maybe you’d want to off Effinger to free your mother from a rotten marriage.”

  “Effinger had moved on to Vegas years before I came here. Besides, it took more than one person to do him in that way.”

  “True. Not that you don’t have loyal groupies here in Vegas now. What was in the lockbox the Chicago hoods didn’t get?”

  “That’s just it. Nothing much. Tax returns, probably doctored. An old high school yearbook, some school stuff a mother would have saved.”

  “Speaking of mothers, why did yours get mixed up with a rotter like Cliff Effinger?”

  “He came from the same neighborhood. I was heading off to preschool and you couldn’t have single mothers in my Polish Catholic neighborhood then unless they were widows.”

  “Oh.” Molina sat back. She was a single mother too.

  “That wasn’t a problem, with you?” Matt asked. “You and Mariah, I mean? You grew up in L.A.”

  “Yeah. Latino Catholic community.” When Matt tilted his head, wanting more, she delivered. “My mother was like your mother. Unwed. I always fantasized my father was Paul Newman.”

  “The blue eyes.”

  “He sure wasn’t Latino. When she married, she made sure my stepdaddy was.”

  Matt pulled out his cell phone and held up a photo. “Mom just got married again. Here in Vegas last weekend.”

  Molina took the phone. “That’s a very familiar-looking wedding party … you, Temple Barr, Electra Lark as justice of the peace. Even Midnight Louie present and accounted for. The groom looks like a nice guy, but if the blond woman in the
middle is your mom, she looks like your slightly older sister.”

  Matt took the phone back to survey the shot. “Louie was ring-bearer. Mom was very young when she had me. ‘And naïve’ is the expression.”

  “Not my problem,” Molina said. “I was old enough to know better and protect myself, but it didn’t work.” She sat back again. “Easy for me, I just got the hell out of Dodge and changed jobs and locations. Lots of cops get divorced.”

  “Being a single mother can’t ever be easy.”

  “Easy in that I was too old to be shamed with the ‘unwed mother’ label, and I was pretty distant from my family by then anyway.”

  “Yeah. Mom and me were the odd ones out too.”

  “Thing is, I was just old enough that I got to babysit all six of my younger stepsisters and brothers from the time I was practically a toddler myself.”

  “I would have loved to be ‘lost’ among a family of other children.”

  “Try it before you convert.” Molina tapped a folder on her desk. “Back to the undying rumors of the mob. So you and Temple Barr are now the chaperones of this interesting treasure chest of Effinger’s?”

  Matt hesitated, not sure how much he wanted to reveal. Certainly, talk of the Synth and Ophiuchus would get him laughed out of Molina’s spanking new office and destroy this new personal rapport over their lives as bastard kids, an echo of his recent sessions at the Goliath.

  Molina wasn’t lingering on personal revelations anyway. “Aren’t you two setting yourselves up to get the unfriendly attention Effinger and your mom got?”

  “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “If there is anything suspicious going on in your family link to Effinger, it always defaults back to Vegas, where you and Temple Barr and even that annoying cat live. That should have been the first thing on your mind.”

  It would have been, Matt thought, if he hadn’t been distracted by becoming the sole target, he hoped, for the unfriendly attentions of Kathleen O’Connor.

  Could the mob or any undying remnant really be any worse?

  Chapter 35

  Black Ops

  If anybody had told me I would be playing the role of co–cat burglar with my maybe-baby Miss Midnight Louise in order to break into the Metro morgue … well, I would have taken them off at the anklebones, or hocks, depending on the species.

  We have interrupted our tour of the outer limits of a low municipal building on the southern fringe of Downtown, where the nightly light show is bright. Here are silence and shadow.

  Morgues tend to be sedate sites, and the residents even more so.

  Still, this is a morgue in a city teeming with celebrities and paparazzi. Every window is shuttered and locked tight, and the entry door requires checking in and ID. The only “ID” me and Miss Louise could ever have is that brand name of medically approved canned pet food only the terminally ill would deign to touch with a pooper scooper.

  The warm Las Vegas night seems to have been put to bed early around this place. I led the perimeter search and now we are sitting by the parking lot door planning our next move.

  At least this is one occasion on which the know-it-all Miss Louise has not a clue.

  “You admit,” she tells me, “you have never been inside the morgue.”

  “But I have often been on very close terms with individuals destined for the morgue.”

  She sniffs. “I was closer than you to the current victim under discussion.”

  “My dear girl, the dead man—or whatever species, domestic or feral alien—and I fell ten stories together. That betokens a closeness a mere postmortem sniff cannot match.”

  “Boots on the ground count more than aerial displays, Daddy-O. I was first to reach the body and the first to detect those ‘unusual cryptic marks’ all the tabloids are making a front-page fuss about. Laughable. Even bad journalism has slipped to the level of fish wrappings.”

  “You simply recognized the Cat Pack’s handiwork. That was no leap of brain power. Some commentators have come closer to the truth.”

  “Chupacabra tracks!” Louise’s longish jet-black best coat is having an electric static hair attack, she is so outraged. “These dumbskulls are too blind to see the obvious.”

  “Look at it their way, Louise. They have already been conditioned to think that the dead guy fell out of the sky or at least a revolving high-rise restaurant-to-be. Who would suspect that an avenging pack of domestic cats would have scratched him up one side and down the other, and his partner-in-crime too, and disarmed them both?”

  “The Cat Pack is not composed of domestic cats,” she growls. “We are all feral and semiferal, except for the one indoor lounge lizard of our acquaintance, you. And you are not the boss of us. Ma Barker is.”

  “And you are a floating member, as am I. You do your lounge lizarding under a tanning bed by the Crystal Phoenix pool, so that exempts you from true feral status. Whatever the fine points, you all need a link to the ruling human class, and I am the expert at that.”

  “You mean the dominant race. Cats rule—dogs just wish they did, and people are fooling themselves.”

  “Now is no time to talk politics. I am thinking up a plan to storm this jail of the dead and get a good look at the ancient alien.”

  “My testimony is not good enough?”

  “I see the big picture, Louise. That is my job. Now, here is the plan. We need to stake out the back entrance and make like we rode in on a Black Maria.”

  “A black Maria? What kind of jimsonweed have you been masticating now? You always were of the slacker generation.”

  “That is what meat wagons were called back in the day when the classic detectives walked the mean streets.”

  “As I recall, we hitched a ride on a meat wagon a while back during one of your so-called self-assigned cases.”

  “That was a genuine meat wagon, and that is one place where the mob still operates in Vegas, selling illegal meat.”

  “That is not very glamorous. I do not see a revival of the Godfather movies on that subject forthcoming soon.”

  “You gotta admit there is a gore quotient.”

  “So is there inside. This expedition is not a crabcake walk.”

  “It will be.” I say “All we have to do is slip under the next incoming deceased’s gurney and keep pace with it. Morgue attendants have a lot to do at above-the-waist level, which is always a boon to us.”

  “But we need to see a body already in the morgue. It will be in a freezer. Those have one-way doors.”

  “A trifling detail, Louise. That is why there are two of us. One to dare the frigid freezer and one to keep watch outside, ready to release the other.”

  “Who does what?”

  “We will see when we get in.”

  At that moment, we hear the low peeling sound of a Band-Aid being ripped off. Tires turning onto sandy asphalt. We duck behind the nearest thicket of pampas grass.

  Sure enough, a big black van, all its windows blacked out, is grinding our way, its headlights poking nova-sized holes in the night. I feel my eyes switch to built-in infrared night vision mode. No bulky headgear for yours truly.

  Las Vegas is one of the few metropolitan areas where we still have a “coroner” as opposed to a “medical examiner.” As far as I can see, dead is dead and one title will do as well as the other to deal with it.

  Out of the now-stopped vehicle comes the clatter of a collapsed-for-travel gurney being uncollapsed.

  It is a chilling sound. This process smacks of a ritual, and humans and dogs are big on those. Our kind is so much more independent, which implies we need no care, and are likely to retreat on our own to some elephant graveyard to fade away never to be found. Of course, if we are lucky enough to have a human base, we too will benefit from last rites and memorializing.

  I am sure my Miss Temple would provide some suitable stately urn if—Bast forbid!—I should ever lick my last flake of koi. Perhaps something classic in lapis lazuli stone, or no—malachite. That
is green to match my eyes.

  “Old dude!” Louise whacks my whiskers. “It is time to do the limbo under the dead departed’s skateboard. Hustle.”

  “That is ‘dear’ departed, Louise.” I manage to get in one last jab, verbal and physical, before we whisk into place and atune our slowest trot to the pace of the gurney. These workers are wasting no time and muffling no noise. I guess their passengers cannot complain of a bumpy ride. I could complain of a distinct odor of decay, but it is not my place.

  Momentarily blinded once we hit the fluorescent lights of the receiving area, we are happy to stop with the gurney.

  It is hard to describe the condition of the air inside a morgue. Of course, Louise and I are more fitted to detecting undertones and overtones, to analyzing stages of decay, than your usual human.

  But there is the dominant whiff of Febreze to overcome. Which, I find, tends to make me want to … sneeze!

  Catastrophe!

  I feel Louise holding her breath next to me to resist the same overpowering instinct. At least the people are talking.

  “Log in and then store it in the decaying-body room. Metro says this guy was not found for a while.”

  Louise is shaking her head at me. We both realize the decaying-body room is likely to be colder, less often visited, and a really bad place to get locked in. I mean, our deepest instincts are to prefer fresh kill. Not that we exercise them much these days, each having our own private chef.

  I must admit that Louise benefits from the personal attentions of Chef Song and his palette of Asian-infusion menu items at the Crystal Phoenix (the little suck-up) and my Miss Temple, being a working woman, can be a bit cavalier about her menu planning.

  We trot under the belly of the beast as its wheels start spinning and peel off when we spot a large stainless steel trash can. Not ideal cover, because it reflects us, but black is a very fine color because it shows up in almost any room you can think of.

  We immediately eel around the round trash can into a room of tables surrounded by four lightweight chairs. Hmm. Is this place a morgue or a bridge club?