Max laughed. “It was a particularly unusual coin box. Call it instinct, call it luck, call it fate. Inside the box, once I figured out how to open it, was this map, for what I don’t know. That’s where you people with a memory of Vegas need to help out.”
“I love puzzles.” Temple snatched the bait with her lilac-enameled fingernails and smoothed out the paper. She reminded him of a terrier playing with a toy hiding treats inside.
Matt balanced his chin on her shoulder to see better. Revienne had been right. They made the coziest couple. Max silently applauded. Apparently he’d been an excellent matchmaker before his memory had gone south.
“It looks like a bare branch with Christmas tree lights on it,” Temple said.
“Or forked summer lightning,” Matt suggested.
“Or fireworks,” Max said. “Yes, there’s something organic about it and artificial at the same time. You’re both right.”
“It could be a night view of an airplane landing field,” Matt said, exercising his left brain.
“Bravo,” said Max.
“Or…” Temple was waxing imaginative. “Or … Area Fifty-one.”
“So you think this is an alien-landing map,” Matt asked, his vocal tone just this far south of ridicule.
“We must think outside the box,” she answered. “What would a cool metaphysical guy like Jeff Mangel have?”
“A string of chemical formulas,” Max said, just to be confounding.
“No.” Temple sounded discouraged. “It’s too skeletal, too sketchy. Unless we had a key to this map, it’ll never mean anything but gibberish. Darn you, Jeff Mangel.”
“You said his philosophical outlook fascinated you,” Matt reminded her. “That’s not science. We need to look for something more symbolic in this … arrangement of dots or points.”
“French pointillist paintings? Sand paintings. Tattoos?” Temple suggested, a bit huffily.
Max sat back, enjoying their … process.
Temple tumbled to his amused voyeurism. “Max. You must have a theory. What? Do these dots repeat the arrangement of doves in your signature illusion, for instance, or the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin or the back of an elephant?”
Her pointed interrogation and references made his smile broaden. “It’s something to do with Jeff Mangel’s obsession with magic. Not angels or elephants, Temple, much as I find that combination stimulating. Maybe for a new act.”
“Oh, that would be so cool, Max!”
Matt frowned at her instant engagement with ideas for Max’s act. “We’re not here to reinvent the Mystifying Max.”
“The Mystifying, Flying Max,” Temple corrected. She thought like P. T. Barnum.
Even Matt was forced to smile and make eye contact with his former rival. “She’s the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t she?”
Max nodded. “I will admit, this pattern leaves me bewitched and bewildered. It looks so deliberate, but must be random.”
Temple leaned in to study it. “I’m no expert at three-dimensional layouts. I mean, before I flew into O’Hare, or even LaGuardia in New York, I printed out the terminal and baggage claim layouts from the Internet.”
“No.” Matt shook his head. “That’s taking organization to insane extremes. There are overhead signs and arrows everywhere.”
“And sometimes they’re ambiguous,” Temple said. “And you’re short and being outpaced by everybody from your flight and dragging and toting bags—and maybe overweight alley cats”—she was offended now, and both men chose to let her rave on uninterrupted—“with no superior upper body strength, I might add. So you want to know where you need to go before you get there. Savvy?”
“Aye, aye,” Matt said, saluting.
Max chuckled, but remained mute.
Temple heaved a five-foot-nine sigh, drew the paper near, and folded her arms on the table to study it some more. After an intense minute or so, she said, “I know what this reminds me of.”
“We’re all ears.” Max fanned his fingers behind said appendages.
Temple mock-frowned. “This is how my dad laid out the Christmas tree light strands before he put them on the actual tree. He didn’t wrap them around the tree, three-dimensionally. He laid them on in a zigzag pattern for each viewable ‘side.’”
“There must have been some crazy overlay.” Max squinted his eyes to visualize the method.
“Not much,” Matt said. “That’s how we did it for the big tree at the church. Wrapping those twelve-foot balsam firs would have required altar boys on skateboards at the bottom.”
Temple giggled at the mental image. “I hope I never see you on a skateboard,” she told Matt.
“I promise,” he said ardently. “Maybe a Segway, but never a skateboard. I see what you’re getting at with this sketch. This might not be a full three-D image, but a skeleton. Like the pine tree and its branches.”
“Which is thinking within the box,” Max added. “I did a lot of that in my career as a magician.”
“Wait a minute.” Temple turned the drawing left and right and then upside down. Then she lifted it up against the ceiling light.
“That would be backwards,” Matt pointed out.
“That would be a mirror image,” Max said. “The basis of numerable illusions.”
“And,” Temple finished, “exactly where the magic-oriented person like Jeff Mangel would turn if seeking to create confusion.” She frowned at the image again. “I know the Strip pretty well. And, gentlemen, I think this is a ‘tree’ of Las Vegas Boulevard and some famous off-Strip attractions, and if you drew an outline around the dots, you’d have the ‘house’ image of the major stars in Ophiuchus.”
Max was so stunned, his forefinger slid the paper to his side of the table. “You mean that it’s a drawing of the inside of the box. Brilliant!”
“I don’t know,” Temple said, “whether to be miffed by your takeover move or flattered.”
“Maybe that was always your problem with Kinsella,” Matt murmured.
“Charity,” Max answered him. “The first of these is charity, Devine. He’s right, Temple. I’m being possessive of this clue. But I wanted to check if there was any invisible writing on it. It looks straightforward.” He lifted it to the ceiling and the light again, like a priest elevating the host, Temple thought, remembering attending Mass with Matt, as she would be again.
“Stop it,” Matt ordered.
Temple wondered if he’d made the same connection and was offended. Max sure was.
“I’m the magician here,” he told Matt. “If there’s anything hinky about this paper and the scrawling on it, I’d be the one to figure it out.”
“No,” Matt ordered. “Put it down. We need to lay it over something before we can see anything in the light.” He turned to Temple. “You took custody of the stuff from Mom’s fireproof file chest in Chicago.”
“Yeah. I have a safe place to store it.”
“You mean your scarf drawer,” Max said sarcastically.
They stared at him.
“You said that like you remembered it.” Matt sounded accusing.
“No, you or Temple mentioned that fascinating depository … or do I remember it?”
“Maybe,” Temple said, “and maybe you’re remembering the safe you had built in the bedroom closet side wall. I have my own fireproof file box in the same closet.”
She turned to Matt. “You should invest in one too. I keep the sketches Janice Flanders, the police artist, made for us there, along with my Table of Crime Elements.”
“Let’s get that file.” Matt stood, heading for the bedroom, and Temple did likewise.
Behind them, Max cleared his throat. “Don’t be too long, kiddies.”
* * *
“We really need tracing paper,” Matt suggested as Temple crouched to dig through the file folders in her closet. “You’re usually uprooting shoes in there.”
She stood, flourishing Effinger’s detailed drawing of the constellation O
phiuchus, man versus giant snake. Those Greeks, so imaginative. Those Synth members, so bewitched by conspiracies and their trappings.
They charged back to the living room and presented the prize to Max. “You can get this closer to the light,” Temple said.
He stood and elevated the two sheets of white paper together, spinning the Ophiuchus drawing around the stripped-down “tree” skeleton from Professor Mangel’s box.
“Hmm.”
Matt gazed up, rapt, and nodded.
“What?” Temple was almost jumping up and down in frustration at being too low to see. She kicked off her shoes and hopped up on her chair seat. “What?”
Matt turned and lifted her up on the table, though she had to squinch down to keep her head from hitting the ceiling.
“It doesn’t jibe,” Max was saying, already lowering the papers.
“No,” Matt said, “flip the snake over. I think there’s some convergence.”
“They’re a different scale,” Temple suggested.
“Scale? Snake?” Max mocked.
“Get me down from here, and I’ll use my copier to enlarge and reduce the map until this Ophiuchus image either matches somehow, or doesn’t.”
This time Max lifted her down. Temple noticed he’d left Matt to do the heavy lifting, probably because he still didn’t have full leg strength.
“Before we all get bent out of shape,” Matt said, “including Ophiuchus, what exactly would explain my no-good late stepfather having custody of any kind of key related to a fringe group of magicians in Las Vegas? The same Synth being apparently abetted by some vague mobster connections and Irish political extremists of either stripe?”
Temple sat at the table again, chin on elbows atop the table. “Looking at my Table of Crime Elements—”
Both guys groaned, realized their mutual agreement, and shut up.
“Effinger died,” Temple went on, “before Gloria Fuentes was found dead and Professor Mangel was, well, as good as slaughtered a month later.” She shut up before she choked up.
She’d had a couple talks with Jeff Mangel, the way a reporter or an investigator would. He was a model of the idealistic, always enthusiastic teacher. She’d liked him instantly. And he’d loved Max’s onstage work. She sensed the guys looking at each other over her head, at a loss.
Because of her emotional upsurge, it was way too awkward for either of them to make a move, like the impasse between the china images of the gingham dog and calico cat on the mantel in an old poem. Because of her, they were frozen into incompatible roles.
Then she’d just have to unfreeze the moment with her incisive logic. Easier said than done.
“Look, guys. It’s pretty clear that Effinger knew or had something that got him killed, likely without talking. We’ve always speculated that the mob and the Synth were after the same prize, and now we know that Cosimo Sparks was the Synth headman.”
“‘Major recruiter’ is probably what you’d call him,” Max put in. “And he wasn’t too persuasive if he left a killing trail of would-be recruits that turned him down.”
“Effinger talked to somebody with mob connections,” Matt said. “The events in Chicago proved that.”
Temple was starting to see the light. “Santiago probably got something out of Sparks. The body had what the coroner calls ‘hesitation marks.’”
“What was the weapon?” Matt wanted to know.
“Ice pick.”
“Cold,” Matt said. “And he hasn’t been indicted?”
“He confessed, but without a lawyer present, so he retracted it.”
“He confessed?” Now Max was incredulous.
Temple grinned. “The Fontana boys took him for a ride from hell, and he wasn’t too rational after that.”
“So now he is in hell,” Matt said, nodding. “According to Dante, there’s a whole circle of hell with murderers being harried in a river of blood.”
“Gosh,” Temple said, “we encountered a few of those killers.”
“Think Kathleen O’Connor will go directly there?” Max asked Matt with gusto.
Matt looked troubled. “I think that’s not up to us. There still may be the soul of a lost child within her.”
Temple hadn’t been following the interchange. She was busy writing Santiago in as the last corpse on her Table of Crime Elements.
“Why was Santiago killed? By whom? And why there?”
Both men opened their mouths to speculate, but Temple suddenly jumped up. “Hold the fort and the mayo. I’ve got an idea.”
She grabbed Professor Mangel’s map and the Ophiuchus map and ran for her office, to rev up the copier. There was some murmured conversation between the guys but the noise from the rackety copier kept Temple from hearing what they were saying.
“I’m back!” she announced breathlessly from the doorway to the main room. “I reduced and enlarged until I went through fifty pages, but I finally herded these two images into cowering submission and they are one. Now I know why Santiago was murdered and why it happened where it did.”
“And who did it?” Matt and Max asked together, in concert for the second time in the history of their sessions.
“Well, no. On that, I haven’t got a clue. Specifically.”
“Specifically is kind of important,” Matt said.
Max nodded.
“So are maps,” Temple said, slapping two pieces of paper to the tabletop. One was copied at a very dark setting.
Both men leaned close to view the usual guidebook map of Las Vegas Boulevard from Downtown to McCarran Airport on the south end, the footprints of all the major hotels and landmarks drawn in and named.
Temple lifted a faint reproduction of the Ophiuchus figure from Effinger’s file box, only a few dark spots inked in: the major stars that formed the crude shape of a kindergartner’s askew house outline.
Matt reared back so abruptly, he almost butted skulls with Max. “It’s the Vegas Strip. The star sites are places that could be hiding the IRA hoard. Why so many, though?”
Max’s forefinger pinioned a dark spot. “The Synth was the keeper of the hoard for outside interests. It’s like Cosimo Sparks kept the map to himself, but some map site points may have been phony to confuse other seekers, perhaps even the intended keepers of the hoard. Or the ‘star spots’ may indicate an order in which the hoard could be moved if in danger.”
“This one,” Temple said, “is right under ‘Area Fifty-four’ Now we know why Santiago was snooping around that site. He’d tormented another copy of the map out of Sparks before the magician died: then he in turn was killed to keep the hoard safe for somebody else.”
“Somebody who may have moved it,” Matt said.
“Doesn’t this feel like an outtake from Treasure Island?” Temple said. “A hidden hoard wanted by many parties, as in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, and, for drama, ‘the Black Spot,’ only several of them.”
“The Black Spot was note delivered to pirates, warning they were marked for death, not geographical markings,” Matt said.
“Death has followed this ‘treasure,’” Temple pointed out. “It we find it, we can end the mayhem being wreaked by the factions fighting over it.”
Max had been silent while Temple and Matt went into their pirate-treasure riff.
“Max?” she asked. “What do you think?”
“More than I’m willing to say yet.” He ran his hands through his hair, looking troubled. “My balky brain isn’t running on high octane, but I do believe I’m … we’re finally on the right trail.”
Max sighed. “And who knows what unlikely suspect we might find at the end of it.”
His intonation hadn’t made that speculation a question, but a statement.
Poor X-man, Temple thought, ex-spy, ex-magician, ex-main man and now operating with an X-factor memory.
Chapter 46
Max’s Midnight Hour
Max wondered what Matt Devine was doing right now. Probably talking down some depressed ex-boyfr
iend on the radio and preparing for another wrongheaded but good-hearted attempt to deal with and deflect Kathleen O’Connor. She’d always found the ex-priest a favorite second-best target.
Max couldn’t worry about that now. Last night he couldn’t believe where the trail of Kathleen’s follower had led. Once again the hulking high skyline of a major strip hotel loomed over him. Max had dodged around Ford 150s and Tacomas and Expeditions in the farthest area of the hotel parking garage to track his prey to an unlighted wall in the structure’s top level.
Max had heard the soft wheeze and snick of an elevator door closing and rushed to find only a concrete block dead end. Several dark gray metal doors promised to lead somewhere, but all were hinged and locked. A very private elevator must lurk behind one of them. They all had security pads, not locks to pick.
Max had pressed like a lover against each in turn, seeking some slight warmth or tremor from the only operative one.
Nothing. The elevator was elaborately camouflaged. Max could, and would, get inside the hotel to find whatever was on the other side of this wall there, but he expected to encounter another dead end.
What that said about the man he’d been following was chilling.
Talk about a cloak of invisibility. Silas T. Farnum’s technologically invisible Area 54 hotel-casino had nothing on this guy.
And here Max himself had made what he needed to do next even harder than it was before.
* * *
“Darlin’ girl,” Max told the stunning New Millennium cocktail waitress wearing a liquid silver catsuit over a silver-paint full body and face job. “I need you to assist me in a street magic illusion. First, who is your favorite president, William McKinley or Grover Cleveland?”
“Grover Cleveland,” she answered promptly, proving she was no babe in the woods.
Max rolled the fingers of his right hand, and a thousand-dollar bill materialized. He’d already expected to dip into his emergency stash. Big bills were easier to conceal.
“All I need is you,” he said, “with a tray of two vodka martinis and a cool head. Follow me and I will follow you later.”
She cocked an inquiring silver eyebrow, but Vegas casino workers were used to eccentric big spenders and often shared in the bounty.
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