Cat in a White Tie and Tails

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Hmm,” I say judiciously. Acting judicious gives one time to think. “Are you saying that Midnight Investigations, Inc., might be forced to indulge in some wet work?”

  “I am saying that our job wrangling the private and public part of our human associates’ lives will have to get messy before we can be sure the right people come out of this mess alive.”

  Chapter 33

  Temple’s Table of Crime Elements

  “Nice place,” Max said, prowling around behind Matt’s red suede sofa. “Should I recognize it?”

  “Not at all,” Temple said.

  They’d “convened” at Matt’s apartment. Her suggestion. It held no unsettling memories for Max to unpackage. Matt would be on his own territory. She was the most adaptable person present.

  Max finally settled his long frame on one of the upholstered side chairs, leaving Temple and Matt the sofa.

  “How’d you end up at the Oasis pirate ship attraction?” Matt asked.

  “Gandolph—” Max paused to eye Matt. “You know better than I remember that he was my former stage partner in Europe and mentor at counterterrorism work for half my life. I suppose he was my spiritual father.”

  Max’s blue eyes had become soft-focus as he looked inward, a new habit for the Max Temple had known. “He’s the only person I still feel … felt a real personal link with.”

  Temple couldn’t stop her eyes from flashing to meet Matt’s at the same moment. Max’s insight and declaration, if accurate, cleared away a ton of emotional sand traps looming between Temple’s former and current fiancées.

  Max was still figuring out his reactions. “He’d been born Garry Randolph. I keep calling him by his stage name as a magician and his civilian name interchangeably. Maybe it’s because I’ve lost part of my mind.” He made a humorous grimace. “Or maybe it’s because I can’t separate what he meant to me.”

  “He needs no further introduction here,” Matt said. “I get spiritual fathers. I also get very unspiritual faux fathers, like Cliff Effinger. You know, if that Oasis drowning case ceases being ‘cold,’ this new death there could make me a suspect again in Effinger’s death.”

  Max shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’ve managed to bollix things up so much that right now Rafi Nadir is a likeliest suspect for the latest death at the Oasis. And Molina might be eager to buy that because it takes him out of the running for joint custody for her daughter. Fortunately, the probable victim vanished.”

  “Why is Rafi involved?” Temple asked. “You’ve said he was a good guy. So any personal bones Molina had to pick with him are not relevant?”

  “I say that because Gandolph secretly hired Nadir as our Vegas backup. Even I didn’t know about that. When I crashed, Rafi was on-site at the Neon Nightmare as a security man. He was really there to keep an eye on me. When I went down, he was in instant touch so Gandolph could have me spirited away by fake EMTs, which covered up the murder attempt and made my apparent death convincing.”

  “Gandolph has been way more central to all this than we suspected,” Temple told Matt. “The Synth has been looking like some lame woo-woo group of delusional magicians pretending to be powerful occultists lately, but Gandolph’s ‘retirement’ years were spent unmasking fraudulent mediums. Apparently, he still took the Synth seriously.”

  Max bestirred himself on the upholstered chair, a sign that his battered frame was revitalizing. “Parts of it. The Synth is not a united front.”

  “How do you know?” Temple asked.

  “I have Gandolph’s laptop computer from our last recent dash across the Continent and the British Isles. And now I have access to some ambiguous files on his home computer. He wasn’t one to commit the obvious, or the devious, to any lasting form, but he had to pay Rafi and those records are intact.”

  “Why are you and Rafi the new Starsky and Hutch?” Temple wanted to know.

  “I told you. I inherited Rafi Nadir from Gandolph. He owed Garry a lot, including the recommendation for the Oasis security position. That was a prime job for an ex-cop who’d flunked out after Las Vegas’s current finest homicide lieutenant left him without notice when she got with child. Anybody know why she ran? Was he abusive?”

  “Suspicious mind,” Temple said promptly. “She believed Rafi had sabotaged her birth control to get her off a career track at LAPD. They were both ‘minorities’ at the time and competition for the few token slots was harsh.”

  “So they both ended up losing out in L.A.” Max smiled at the irony.

  Matt entered the exchange. “Classic case of ‘a failure to communicate.’ Forgive the cliché.”

  “So why were you and Rafi snooping around the Oasis pirate ship in the wee hours?” Temple asked Max. “That’s the kind of stunt I’d pull.”

  “Molina is out of unofficial legmen,” Max said. “She hired me to investigate the crime she fingered me for as likely suspect. She has a sense of irony, I’ll say that for her.”

  “But that was the dead guy in the eye-in-the-sky service area above the Goliath casino area.”

  “Right. Rafi followed me there in his role of posthumous Max guardian on Garry’s payroll, and I encountered a fly on the wall of the service ducts, armed and dangerous only to himself.”

  “So,” Matt said, leaning forward, “you team up with Rafi and on your next stop at the Oasis, you both get waylaid and some anonymous attacker ends up drowned. Why were you nosing around the scene where my stepfather died months ago?”

  Max produced a quizzical look. “And you swore you weren’t the possessive sort.”

  “You don’t know me well enough to know what ‘sort’ I am, Kinsella. So why?”

  Max shrugged. “Gandolph had stored a lot of references to Las Vegas crimes in his computers. Don’t forget that he faked his own death at the Halloween séance to bring back the ghost of Harry Houdini. You can get a lot done when people think you’re dead.”

  Temple produced an unladylike snort. “So that’s your excuse for your AWOL episodes. What about this? Maybe Effinger isn’t dead.”

  She’d been exaggerating to make a point, but both men stared at her, the shocking suggestion shaking their separate assumptions.

  Matt spoke first. “Temple, we need to tell him about Chicago and Louie and Effinger and Ophiucus.”

  She kept silent. Did they really want to let Max in on all of Matt’s family issues. Did she?

  “Chicago my long-term memory has down cold,” Max told them, sensing they needed reassurance. “Midnight Louie I’ve met and concede is a formidable cat. Garry’s computer notes make Effinger’s relationship and character clear as the battery acid he was spawned in. But … Ophiuchus? I probably knew what it was just a couple months ago, but it’s not downloading from the backup drive. Is it an ancient Greek curse?”

  “Not a bad guess.” Matt smiled to recall his genteel mother’s similar reaction to the word. “It means ‘serpent-bearer.’”

  “It’s the ‘lost’ thirteenth sign of the zodiac,” Temple added. “Astrologers are trying to resurrect it right now because they say the sky or whatever has shifted since the traditional signs of the zodiac were designated centuries ago and all the autumn babies are not the same scales, scorpions, and archers they thought they were.”

  “Whoa.” Max put his hand to his forehead. “I don’t remember much, but I can sense that science was never your strong suit, Temple.”

  “So maybe the sky didn’t shift. Exactly,” she said. “What is making our specific spot of earth move is that Ophiuchus is the chosen symbol for the cabal of disgruntled traditional magicians that have been operating in Vegas, and out of the Neon Nightmare nightclub for years.

  “And,” she added, “the Synth may have had ties to guns and money for the Irish Republican Army both before and since the peace was made. That’s why you were there posing as the Phantom Mage, to investigate it.”

  “That I buy,” Max said. “Gandolph briefed me on the Synth during our European travels and it’s been in his
computer for ages. He liked them as a serious set of miscreants, but they strike me as rather pathetically mumbo jumbo. Or as a toothless front group.”

  “Maybe,” Temple said, “but at least two of the unsolved deaths floating around this town in recent years involved magic or magicians and a corpse displayed in the form of the major stars in Ophiucus, which form what a kindergarten child would draw as the shape of a house.”

  “The houses of the zodiac,” Max said.

  “Nobody’s put it quite that way,” Matt admitted. “Anything zodiac seems too out there to take seriously.”

  “Says you!” Temple was indignant. “I read mine in the newspaper every day and sometimes it’s eerily accurate.”

  Max smiled at her. Tolerantly. “Accidental affinities are the long-mined territory of mediums, mind-readers, and scam artists.”

  “Is it an accident,” Temple asked, “that Midnight Louie was just catnapped in Chicago to force Matt’s mother to turn over items left behind in a fireproof box by the late Effinger? An accident that the only possible thing relevant we found is what may be a biker tattoo in the form of a drawing of Ophiucus?”

  “Ophiucus?” Max was no longer complacent. “Connected to Effinger?”

  “And then,” Matt said, lighting fire, “there were the ‘she left’ murders, one at the Blue Dahlia where Molina sings sometimes and one … Temple, you wrote all this down in a table, didn’t you?”

  She regarded Max with super-sleuth intensity. “Call me unscientific, will you? I’ve compiled all those eerie details into a Table of … Crime Elements, Ophiuchus and all.”

  “Then show me, by all means.” He leaned back and spread his empty hands. “Dazzle me with your superior organizational logic.”

  Temple left the sofa to dredge her tote bag from behind it. It sported a leopard pattern bought to match the late, lamented Midnight Louie travel carrier.

  First she flourished the drawing of Ophiuchus at Max. “Zodiac signs may be junk science and superstition, but this ‘lost’ one is leaving star tracks all over Las Vegas.”

  Max took the drawing to study. “It would make a terrific tattoo.”

  Temple shuddered delicately. “It’s called the serpent-bearer, but the muscle man looks more like he’s fighting for his life than giving the snake a lift.”

  “Effinger had some tattoos,” Matt said, “crude homemade ones, so this design may only have been a tattoo dream for him.”

  “I’m not enamored of making skin into maps,” Temple said, pulling out her netbook.

  Its hot pink cover clashed with the red sofa when she sat back down to bring up a file.

  She handed the computer to Matt while Max sprang up to lean down over the sofa back between them to see. He was indeed moving like the Max of old.

  They all stared at the screen.

  “That is worthy of Dame Agatha Christie,” Max said, giving a long, low whistle after studying it.

  Temple shrugged modestly. “I have read a Poirot and Marple or two.”

  Max’s forefinger speared the table. “I’m right there as a suspect for Murder Number One at the Goliath. And, Devine, you’re down as a suspect for the murder of a call girl named Vassar at the same hotel. My, my. No wonder the closemouthed and manipulative Molina is on all of our cases.” Max eyed Temple. “You’re amazingly unbiased in your suspect list, but I don’t see you on it anywhere.”

  “I’m innocent of everything,” Temple said blithely. “This table lists suspects the police would find likely for taking the rap. I’m an objective reporter and recorder. I just find some of the suspects likely, period.”

  Her impish grin had both men backing away like nervous tomcats. Max left his casual post at the sofa back that had made them a threesome as Matt frowned at the image on the screen.

  “You’ve added the Cosimo Sparks death,” he noted.

  “If the Synth is a paper tiger,” Temple said, “why was Sparks killed and his scarlet-lined cloak left in the distinctive ‘Ophiuchus house’ shape?”

  “Maybe to misdirect the blame.” Max sat back in the upholstered chair and tented his hands to support his chin. “Most of the cast of characters on your chart, Temple, are mentioned in Gandolph’s computer files. What stands out for me is the murdered professor, Jefferson Mangel That killing was off the Strip and there were no overt links to magic.”

  “There was one,” Temple said.

  “What?”

  “You.”

  “How would Gandolph miss that?”

  “Jeff Mangel was a professor of philosophy, but a magic fan. He was found dead, in that telling Ophiuchus-Synth position, among a classroom exhibition of magic show advertisement posters. People collect that kind of ephemera. And one of your Mystifying Max posters was on display.”

  Max suddenly pounded his temples with his fists. “Damn this MIA memory of mine! I’m useless.”

  Temple’s dismayed look consulted Matt.

  “Not useless enough for someone’s taste,” Matt said with a bit of Max’s own sardonic drawl. “There’ve been two attempts on your life in the time it took us to make a whirlwind trip to Chicago.”

  Max lifted his head, the fury dispersing as fast as it had come. “And on Midnight Louie’s life. Apparently me and the cat have too many of those pesky lives for someone’s security. You’re right, Devine. The more I investigate, the more I’ll flush out the rats. Rat bait is an honorable role.”

  “We all need to investigate.” Temple said, “Why are these cold cases that involve one or more of us suddenly hot again? The trouble is, when you look at my, ahem, brilliant Table of Crime Elements, there are so darn many ways we could go and way too much ground to cover.”

  “Can you get the Fontana brothers as backup?” Matt asked Temple. “We don’t seem to have a choice on staying out of what’s going on, but Rafi’s going to be plenty busy with Kinsella, or Carmen Molina.”

  “I don’t want Nicky getting all über-protective about me,” Temple said.

  “Do all those big boys tell their little brother everything, even though he’s the hotelier?” Matt prodded.

  “Probably not.”

  Max held one hand fanned over his eyes and braced an elbow on a chair arm listening to them, as if the light were too bright.

  Before Temple could make an alarmed murmur in his direction, he spoke. “The Fontana brothers. Is that a juggling act at the Sahara or something?”

  She and Matt exchanged a totally blitzed look. Where to kick-start Max’s memories when he had such serious blanks as already-demolished Strip hotels and Las Vegas legends like the Fontana brothers, high-profile owners of Gangsters custom limo service, not to mention the boutique hotel of the same name?

  Temple should change topics to touch on Max’s more immediate experiences. This would also be an apt time to admit her risky Neon Nightmare adventure and the showdown she’d stumbled onto in the Synth’s secret clubrooms there.

  “I can’t say I’m much impressed by the local Synth crew as capable of murder,” Temple said, “although its symbol flashes itself around murder scenes.”

  “Why not?” Max asked. “I’ve had ‘flashes’ of being at the Neon Nightmare in my Phantom Mage persona and they were certainly planning something. I’m recovering memories in a grid like a Mondrian painting, or pixels when a HDTV picture breaks up … islands of clear images in a sea of nothingness.”

  “Uh,” Temple said, “before we leave the topic of my incisive mental powers, I have to mention that I’ve had a close encounter recently at the Neon Nightmare’s secret Synth clubrooms.”

  “And you didn’t mention it to me?” Matt was shocked.

  Temple grimaced. Time to confess her sins to Matt. “When I went to Neon Nightmare—which every guy I know wants to lecture me for doing, including Nicky Fontana, my boss at the Crystal Phoenix, where I do PR—”

  “I know this,” Max said.

  “Uh. Okay. It was a very tacky and woo-woo experience, lacking only Rod Serling as narrator into
ning, ‘Welcome to the Twilight Zone.’”

  “Extreme stage effects,” Max said, “often are used to divert an audience from what’s really going on. Cirque du Soleil is masterful at that.”

  “Also the Mystifying Max,” Temple said with a smile.

  “So,” Matt challenged. “You were an audience of one subjected to delusional magic tricks, Temple?”

  “Maybe,” she told Matt. “It involves ninja cats and double Darth Vaders.”

  “Oh.” Matt sat back.

  “Oh.” Temple shrugged. “I had been exposed previously to inferior cocktails, would-be wild and sexy single guys, and the screamingly loud, shrill, and robotic noise that passes for dance music these days, not to mention circling neon laser lights that cast the spinning zodiac signs, including Ophiucus, on the black glass dance floor and walls.”

  “Takes me right back to my near-death experience,” Max murmured.

  “I figured out, though, that all those lightworks hide entrances to the interior pyramid-shape of the nightclub. I found a narrow upward ramp that has spring-loaded doors into the walls.”

  “Temple!” Matt was horrified. “Why would you go there? That sounds like a drug trip.”

  “Just think of the doors on fancy home theater equipment storage units. They’re always black lacquered and you just touch a corner and they spring open. That’s how I got into a maze of rooms behind the walls, and the Synth clubrooms, which overlook the dance floor with a one-way wall of black glass.”

  “Sounds like a private high roller club,” Max said, “at some of the upscale hotel-casinos where a lot goes on that isn’t legal. So? If a group of fantasizing fakes want to pretend they’re magicians with an agenda…”