No sign of Miss Hyacinth, but a lot of foot-stomping is going on. In fact, I am being subjected to such a fever of Saturday night feet, even in the relatively static arena of the bar area, that I finally loft back atop the mirrored black surface, which reflects the constellations of panicked neon mares in the heights above us all.
Now I understand what I am experiencing: a kind of psychic stampede. To my keyed-up senses, it is as if these humans are a cat colony in communal heat. Thanks to the efforts of the Ladies of Spaying, among my kind that sort of thing is dying out, but here it is in full, rampant bloom.
I strut along the bar in a direction opposite to my first fling up here, finding dudes wearing backward baseball caps (loathsome fashion!) and the fedora as occasional as the shaved head, knocking back obscure beers, high-octane lemonades, and trendy coolers.
Not many dames line up at the bar on this side, as it seems to be a dudely kind of place, what with a TV perched above the liquor-bottle wallpaper blaring out some sports contest, but one lady does attract my notice.
She is sitting artistically behind a martini glass, that sublime inverted pyramid shape that spells sophistication and a nodding acquaintance with my ancestors’ favored sepulcher.
I ankle over, rubbing against a half-dozen sweaty long-necks on the way.
What attracts me is the luminous color that fills her classic martini glass. Ah! I cannot rhapsodize enough. It is the liquid, lurid green of the Queen of Cat’s eyes, Bastet herself. It is the Green Fairy of absinthe gone nouveau noir. It is as modern as the blinkers on a well-bred Chartreuse cat.
The lady in question, and in a place like this, the “lady” is always in question, attracts my attention next.
Other than Miss Temple, a feisty ginger-bit of a Tortie to me, I am not much impressed by human pulchritude.
But this lady is well-matched to her sour green-apple martini. Her hair is as black as the sheen in my coat at its most well-licked. Her eyes are the blue-green of the Divine Yvette, my absent ladylove, at her most imperious Persian princesshood. Her lips on the short straw stuck in the opaque drink like a tap into a poisoned apple skin, are, well, to coin a phrase, grapefruit ruby-red. Her skin is the dead-white of an albino and hairless Sphinx cat.
All in all, she is a Technicolor treat.
I boldly stop before her and yawn, so she can observe my glossy black coat, so like her hair…my blood-red tongue, so like her lips…my lettuce-green eyes, so like her poison of choice…my shark-white teeth so like her pale, satin skin.
I am eye-to-eye…indeed, eyetooth to eyetooth with, of course…the living inspiration for the sketch of Kathleen O’Connor, aka Kitty the Cutter. (My thankfully absent roommate does have such a way with words!)
They say a cat may look at a queen. They also call unfixed female cats queens. They also call jealous and vicious women “cats.” I think I have Miss Kitty’s number.
I stare into Miss Kathleen O’Connor’s aquamarine eyes.
“What have we here?” she asks loudly enough that only I may hear. “A tomcat on the town? Would you like a drink?”
I do not respond, but she raises a pale finger topped by a scarlet nail, and in two shakes of an innocent’s lamb’s tail, the bartender presents me with a saucer of the same vile green liquid she imbibes.
I deign to run a paw across it, sniff the result, then shake the excess onto the black-glass bar.
Miss Kitty laughs. She has claimed even my kind’s name, as if evil had an inbred feline bent. I owe her for that one too.
“You Las Vegas boys,” she says soft and low, “are all alike. Thinking you know something, but too…discriminating…for the real world.”
If I know who she is, does she know who I am? How could she? I am an undercover operative. I am as discreet as a poodle in Paris. What could she know about me?
She leans close, sips from her straw, blows the words at me as if she expects me to understand. And I do.
“Tell your friends—and I know you have some, big boy—I have some myself. Tell your friends that I said ‘Hello.’ I don’t know quite how you will go about telling them that. Perhaps it is just as well. Anyway, kiss them good-bye for me.”
I have a thousand questions, most of them starting with, “Are you really leaving my associates alone?”
I do not admit to human “friends.” (Miss Temple, of course, is different. She is much more than a friend. She is my tender little filet of solemate.) And I certainly do not “talk” to humans, friend or foe. I stand alone among my kind in knowing more of humanity than I would want to. This particular piece of it I would like to toss into the pool in front of the Mirage’s volcano attraction during mid-explosion, but even though she is a petite little doll she is too big to throw for a loop here or anywhere else.
So I content myself with hissing in her voodoo martini and stalking off without a word.
Sometimes it is better to leave to fight another day.
Chapter 32
…Wizard!
Another whip-crack sound of an unseen door opening. Night air and parking lot lights slapped Max’s senses silly.
He felt like a tomb robber slipping out of Cheops’ pyramid at Giza. A dark figure urged him forward, and soon both were ensconced in…an aged Volkswagen Beetle.
Shades of Tomb Raider? Hardly.
Yet, behind them, shadows of the Synth were pouring from the black pyramid of Neon Nightmare while the titular horse was screaming in neon rainbows above it all.
His guide revved the VW and putt-putted them into a dark corner of the lot, where they parked between the looming screens of a Ford Exasperator and a Lincoln Aggravator.
Great. If he’d wanted a getaway driver in a midget clown car he could have called on Temple and her new Miata.
Or maybe not.
He eyed the driver, a hunched figure in black rather like Sister Wendy, the Episcopal nun-cum-art-expert on public TV.
Max was getting very tired of mysteries inside of enigmas inside of puzzles.
“I don’t need a chauffeur,” Max said finally. Grumpily.
“You need a friend.” The simple answer paraphrased the old Carole King song.
“No.” Max was certain. “Friends are excess baggage.”
“So I taught you,” the raspy voice answered. “But I was wrong. Terribly wrong. I’m sorry.”
Not many people had ever said “I’m sorry” to Max Kinsella.
There was only one person, maybe two, he needed to say “I’m sorry” to. One was Sean, his dead cousin. The other one was dead too.
Or was he?
Max turned to eye the obscure figure.
Magicians were good at obscuring things, even and especially themselves.
“You saved me back there,” Max said.
“You needed saving,” was the answer.
“We all do, but I especially needed it half a lifetime ago, in Ireland. Only one person applied for the job.”
“He must have been a masochist.”
“He was a genius.”
“Thank you.” Said modestly.
Max twisted in the cramped seat to see better, as if a change in position could penetrate the veil of mystery.
“Garry?” he asked. “Gandolph? It’s you? You’re alive?”
“My greatest and most cowardly illusion. I’m sorry. I never meant to deceive you.”
“The hell you didn’t!” Max pushed open the car door, stepped out at full length, and still didn’t top the Lincoln SUV at his back. The parking lot was quiet now, pursuers faded back into their bizarre building. “You old fraud! You…faked your own death. What are you, a Houdini for the New Age set? Did you plan on reappearing and snagging a major hotel gig, or what?”
The lumpy form struggled out of the driver’s seat to confront his pupil.
“It wasn’t planned. At least not my death. You fret over a death in a foreign land long ago. I now know your pain, pardon the cliché. Can’t you guess what happened?”
“Wait.” Max
ground his bicuspids and his brain cells at the same time. If Gandolph was alive, and he definitely was, then…
“You were dedicated to unmasking false mediums,” he said. “That required a false persona. You were always good at disguises. But you needed to be better. So…you did what a lot of magicians have done for stage work. You hired…a double.”
Gandolph’s head nodded in the dark.
“A double,” Max repeated. “And your double died at the haunted house seance. You didn’t expect that.”
“Never. I never would have allowed another person to risk life or even limb on my behalf. I merely wanted to lurk behind the scenes, as you yourself did that night. Quite a brilliant impersonation of Houdini, by the way. You are nothing like him, in physique or in magical style.”
“Thank you. But I also have you to thank for thinking you were dead all these months. You didn’t warn me.”
“How could I? I expected my double to survive the séance. I would never have hired a stand-in for my own murder! I never dreamed the Synth would be so irritated by my existence.”
“So it was the Synth!”
“The Synth has a thousand heads, and they are all Magic.”
“Magic is an illusion.”
“So is death.” The figure so short and squat stepped forward to doff its hood.
Max looked down into the grandfatherly face of the late Garry Randolph, now come back to life, wondering if he should pinch himself, or his mentor. Was Garry really alive and back? Yes!
It had been almost two decades since he’d read The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s epic fantasy. If he remembered correctly, Gandalf the Gray, whose name Garry Randolph had folded into his stage persona almost forty years ago, had been lost in a deep cavern and presumed dead.
Only he had returned.
Now Garry had pulled that same mind-boggling trick and Max was as bedazzled as any wannabe magician.
Not until now, seeing Gandolph alive again, had he understood, or admitted, how much the older magician had meant to him, alive and dead. He had an ally again, a mentor. Someone who talked his language, the bilingual tongue of magic and counterespionage.
Like the company of the Ring, he felt energized again by the notion of a stout companion. Garry was more than that, though, he was all Max had left of family. And he was alive!
There’d be plenty of time now to figure out who had wanted Gandolph dead, to unravel the Synth and all its works, to track down Kathleen O’Connor—Garry had known her, seen her, as a girl. She wouldn’t intimidate him, as she had Matt Devine and Temple and even Molina, long-distance.
He realized he had felt the same sense of betrayal at Garry’s presumed death and resurrection as Temple had felt at Max’s own disappearance and return. You can’t condemn a man for avoiding you because he was a walking death trap, not even Matt Devine.
Max smiled broadly and held out his cloaked arms. “Welcome home, maestro.”
The old man embraced him with true feeling. “Welcome to the endgame, rather. My home is your home now, I’ve learned that, and it was what I intended. Yet I dare not appear as myself until all my enemies are unmasked.”
“They’re my enemies too.”
“Then we have even more in common. Come on, let’s go chew over our pasts and our futures until our damn jaws ache and we know we’re alive because it hurts. Let’s go…home?”
For once Max found himself stunned into silence. He had never dreamed that a live Garry Randolph would return to the house he himself had occupied alone for many months, a recluse and a hermit and a hunted man, brooding on ghosts.
He had never dreamed another human being would urge a retreat to any place they could both call “home.”
It felt incredibly good.
He was so…unusually jubilant that he almost forgot where he was.
Something skittered past his ankles: large, dark, ratlike.
Or was it a shadow that fell between the bolts of flashing neon from the neon mare high atop the building’s distant peak?
Whatever it had been, it recalled Max to himself, to here and now, and to danger. He stood there in the guise of the Phantom Mage. Now he should make like his name and vanish.
“We should leave separately, and ensure that no one follows us. Let’s meet at the house.”
“Delighted to, my boy!” Gandolph hustled back into his low-profile car and started the engine.
Amazing, Max thought.
Garry Randolph alive. Investigating the same shadowy entity that he was. Now they’d get somewhere!
Time for him to make the first step. Swirling his theatrical cape around him, Max stalked away like Dracula repelled by the whiff of garlic toast.
He could hardly wait to lose this persona and this place and rejoin forces with Gandolph.
Yes!
Chapter 33
…Torn Between Two Tails
Some shamuses have all the luck.
Not Midnight Louie.
Here I am, as undercover as a dude can be at the Neon Nightmare. I have just made contact with the Woman in the Case.
I have previously seen Mr. Max Kinsella slinking around the joint, although he has been as invisible as a flea on a tweed suit for the past hour or so.
I am frantic to keep these two natural enemies apart, though they have not seen hide nor hair of each other in years, and I am mad to trail both of them as they separately (I devoutly hope) leave this place.
There is only one entrance and exit that I know of, the velvet cordoned-off door guarded by the goons up front.
That does not mean there are not other doors, used for service purposes.
Miss Kitty is still holding down the bar like a forties film fatale.
Mr. Max is still AWOL.
I pace beside the bar, blending beautifully with the black high-gloss floor that reflects the clientele and offers me further cover. Who would notice me when you can eyeball Victoria’s Secret thongs on half the babes in the room?
The noise that passes for music nowadays is louder than a chorus of queens in heat, and the smoke and mirrors and neon of the dance floor is interfering with my night vision.
I decide to slip out the front door for a bit of fresh air while I figure out what to do.
And then whilst I am in the act of successfully slipping and the clamor and commotion inside is fading into a bad dream… I happen to notice the two muscle men I am ankling behind.
There has been a changing of the guard since I came in, and one of them is now Rafi Nadir, the indomitable Miss Lieutenant Molina’s ex-squeeze and no friend of Mr. Max, although he has a soft spot in my heart for coming to the aid of my Miss Temple recently.
That does not mean that I cut him any slack in the hired hood line.
But I am really perplexed now.
I slip along the building’s foundation and the row of trendy metal and neon cutouts of Las Vegas’s favorite flora, palm trees and cacti.
They are spatters of Technicolor chalk and I am the soft unseen canvas of a velvet painting behind them.
Apparently I am not soft and unseen enough, however, for I hear a hissing sound.
I pause, ready to leap left, right, or up. Snakes do not faze me but I cannot stand these timer-operated sprinkler systems they have around here that can drench a guy to his toe-hairs.
Before I can execute a Kitty Kong move I am tapped on the shoulder by a set of delicate feminine shivs. That is to say that they dig in like a hellion with hangnails.
“Say, Pop. Chill out. It is Number One Daughter.”
“No Charlie Chan-speak from you, Miss Louise. And you presume.”
“Of course I do. I am a professional investigator now, non?” She sits down beside me and directs a narrow glance to the guys at the door. “Who is that dude you gave the evil eye to on the way out?”
I guess a partner should know the cast du jour.
“That, my inquisitive sneak, is one Rafi Nadir, aka Raf. He is a shady character around town, but I have it on ey
ewitness testimony—mine—that he helped my Miss Temple collar a crook who was threatening to close down her windpipe not two nights ago.”
“So he is a bad guy with one gold star to his credit, but only from you and your girl-tortie roommate.”
“Right.”
“Okay, he is not the reason you are dithering around here outside Neon Nightmare. What gives?”
“What gives is why you are dithering around here outside Neon Nightmare. I at least have been inside.”
“This rave and mosh scene is not for me. Hard on the eardrums. Truth is, I came across Mr. Max Kinsella a couple hours ago and decided to tail his Hush Puppies until they cried Uncle.”
“He wears Hush Puppies? Mr. Max?”
“Do not sound so wounded. No, he remains the sartorial fashion plate you know and loathe. His shoes are Bruno Maglis, which, as you know, have served many a celebrity, but they are as silent-soled as plain old sneakers. One whiff of his footwear and I knew he was someone to watch.”
“ ‘Sartorial,’ Louise! That is a big word for a street kit.”
“Listen, I can sling around anything you can, including vocabulary.”
“Whatever. I have determined that Mr. Max is indeed inside. Somewhere. I also have a dame I wish to tail. I was just wondering how to go in two directions at once, or serially, but perhaps you can solve my dilemma.”
“Of course I can solve your dilemma, and any other cold cases you have hanging around. We are not Midnight, Inc. for nothing. Speaking of vocabulary, that was actually a rather clever idea of yours, Pop.”
“Thank you, Louise. Now—”
I gaze aghast at the open door to Neon Nightmare.
She is limned against the interior neon like a silhouette of evil incarnate. Miss Kitty O’Connor.
“Something got your tongue, and eyeballs? Ah.” Miss Louise perks up her ears and the hair on her hackles. “Some hussy, I see.”
“If you see her, can you tail her?”
“Like her thong bikini.”
“She will have transportation.”
“So do I.” Louise snaps out her shivs. I hear them bite sandy Las Vegas dirt.
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