“I’m hoping so, because, from what I know of him, I’d think you would have been compatible colleagues.”
“Umm. Someone who used to teach here then?”
Max nodded. “I’m taking a flier on this. Pure instinct and hope.” He knew a psychologist or psychiatrist would love the combination of “motive and emotion.”
“Who is it?”
“Professor Jefferson Mangel.”
“Oh. Jeff. My God, yes. I knew him. A tragic loss. Then it’s not his field, philosophy, but his hobby, the philosophy of magic, you’re writing about?”
Max nodded.
“That wasn’t Jeff’s academic discipline, but it was his passion. He felt it should be taken on a psychological level. Yes, I do … did know Jeff quite well and his theories on the subject. In fact—” He leaned forward to click on a menu on his open laptop. “—Jeff probably has some papers in the university archives on the subject.”
“Not accessible to non-academics, I imagine.”
“I’d be happy to check them out for you, put you on a course of study on the subject of how Jeff’s mind worked. He was quite the, uh, magic trick detective, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised if he advised that fellow who does a Strip hotel show based on revealing the classic illusions’ underpinnings. The Caped Confabulator, or something.”
Max smiled. Performers on the Strip were world-famous. It was humbling and encouraging that some Las Vegas residents had such a casual knowledge of the industry that drove the city, and Nevada.
“Professor Mangel, I understand, had a mystical view of the subject.”
“Yes, yes. He was the true appreciative amateur.”
“Wasn’t his death very ironic?”
“More than ironic. Sinister. Murdered on campus. You can imagine that wasn’t something anyone official anywhere wanted to dwell on.”
“You think the murder was … magical?”
“Of course not. I said sinister. The poor man was stabbed to death among an exhibition of his collection of magic show posters old and new. He was found lying in a grotesque position on the floor, like in that insanely popular thriller novel of a few years ago about the Vatican and Mary Magdalen.”
“The Da Vinci Code,” Max prompted from some reviving memory synapses. “You think there’s a connection?”
“No. Of course not. Jeff didn’t have an enemy in the world. He was single, so there were no, ah, what you call hanky-panky motives.”
“A true mystery,” Max agreed. “Is anything left of the professor’s office or papers on campus?”
“Nothing I know of. That was months ago. He willed his estate to the university, so the small gallery has been named in his honor and his personal magical artifacts added to the poster display, which were a very small percentage of his collection. Jeff was ahead of his time in seeing that history of magic in Las Vegas deserved as much an academic mention as the history of the mob.”
The word “mention” was not lost on Max. “So I can visit the … shrine?”
“Next building, floor three. We have abbreviated hours, since a guard must be on site, ten A.M. to three P.M.”
“I can just make it.” Max half rose before pausing to sit back down. “Wasn’t Professor Mangel young to have made a will?”
“You can do it online now. Jeff was forty-eight, far too young to die.” Gruetzmeyer shook his shaggy head. “I made mine after the calamitous fact of his death.”
“He sounds exceptionally expert on the magic and the mantic arts. Did he advise any other magicians?”
“He had a couple of local pals. Let me see.” Gruetzmeyer squinted his eyes tight on his own command, letting relinquished memories resurface.
Max understood that technique well. He’d done it at home with a glass of Irish whiskey. Some men drink to forget, they said. He drank to loosen up his subconscious, to remember.
The prof’s striking green eyes popped open, brightening as they saw the light. “One was an older fellow. Larry Randolph, or some such.”
Max nodded, holding himself very still.
“Then there was a practicing magician, but at small clubs around Vegas, not a big shot. Still performed in full white tie, tails and top hat. I don’t think he pulled rabbits out of the top hat, though. His name was odd … ‘Topper’?”
“Topper?” Max asked. “That could refer to the top hat.”
“And Còsimo, like Còsimo di Mèdici, the Renaissance prince.”
“Cosmo.” Max muttered the word that leaped into his arbitrary brain before tying ‘Cosmo Topper’ to a character in an old TV show.
“No. Còsimo. That name is known in Europe. Còsimo and … something to do with fire.”
“Cosimo Sparks?”
“That’s it!”
“And you just recalled it now?” Max asked.
“Yes, thanks to your inquiries. Why, should it be familiar?”
“No. He was pretty much retired, as far as I can find out.”
Max was sure some mention of the man’s recent death had been in the newspaper or on TV, but Gruetzmeyer seemed the kind of old-fashioned intellectual who relied on books, not electronic media. Max recalled Temple bemoaning the ill luck of having media on hand to film the dead body as it was being discovered—her bright idea gone wrong—since she wasn’t expecting a corpse to show up for her ceremonial opening of an old underground safe.
And Cosimo Sparks, also stabbed like Jefferson Mangel, had also been found with his red-satin-lined cloak arranged in a tortured shape.
He decided not to ask Professor Gruetzmeyer if he’d heard of Ophiuchus. The big question was whether Revienne had.
Chapter 43
Alien Eyes
Poor Jeff Mangel. His honorary gallery was in an eight-foot-high space whose ceiling Max could dust with his upstretched hand, a bland former classroom sporting sound-deadening ceiling tiles spotted with tiny black holes.
The floor was covered by equally uninspiring vinyl tile in a pastel, smashed-worms-on-sidewalk pattern.
Flashback.
Max had gone to high school in exactly the same bland spaces. If he hadn’t made himself a stranger to his family in his teens, as Gandolph told him, he would know where to go to confirm these unsettling slide shows in his brain. Wisconsin, Gandolph said. Max didn’t feel like a Wisconsin sort of person … fresh air, bracing winters. More like an escapee from a Florida swamp filled with gators and snapping turtles and black mambas on the brain—oh, my.
He strolled around the perimeter to study the three-dimensional items under Plexiglas boxes.
Decks of gorgeously illustrated antique tarot cards; wood and metal coin boxes, the Okito, Boston and slot varieties; wands of all types …
He stopped and moved back to the coin boxes. One was made of beautifully grained cocobolo wood, as wands often were. Not a seam showed in its curved dimensions, but a ring of ivory inset on the top was carved in the shape of a worm Ouroboros, the snake biting its tail and a symbol of eternity that matched the ring Kathleen O’Connor had forced Matt Devine to wear for a time.
The image was commonly known to people with a mystical bent. This could be meaningless, but it had belonged to Jefferson Mangel, who perhaps had been a man who knew too much.
The Plexiglas cover wasn’t locked. It had an “invisible” sliding seam on one side. Max had the cocobolo wood box in his hands in an instant, and the other four coin boxes in that section respaced to hide its absence. He could return the piece as easily.
The wood warmed in his hands. His fingertips felt no opening, but there had to be one. Time to play with it later. It slipped into his pants pocket.
Could there be something interesting in the ranks of posters displayed carpet-sample fashion? Max flipped through the giant aluminum frames like pages in a book, viewing show placards that pictured magicians from the Frenchman Robert-Houdin, to the Austrian he’d inspired, Houdini, to Blackstone to David Copperfield and to … the Mystifying Max. He started slightly as he came face-to-fa
ce with himself.
All magicians, except the Cloaked Conjuror, aspired to that Bela Lugosi as Dracula hypnotic stare, but Max was surprised in ambush by the dramatically intent expression. His green-eyed black-panther stare would do Midnight Louie proud.
Flashback.
He is standing, seeing his blue eyes in the mirror and then, blink, the green contact lenses glide into place on his vitreous humour, the glistening fluid of his eyes. He becomes the Mystifying Max … and also a few degrees closer to a disguise that will keep Max Kinsella a wholly separate entity, at least in international intrigue circles.
His own gall surprises him. By doing a show in Las Vegas in any guise he’d been taking a hell of a risk.
Why had he done the Vegas bit? Garry had retired here, of course. He must have gotten an offer he couldn’t refuse from the Goliath. Only for a year, but it must have been renewable. And … as his memory clicked into operation, the eyes on his poster shifted from feline green to a tantalizing blue gray, not quite either. Temple Barr’s eyes.
Max shut his eyelids as memory replayed himself talking, selling, cajoling. She’d come here to Vegas because of his upcoming gig. Because of him. Leaving her home city, her career. That was a major commitment. Had he ever experienced anything but specific traumas of the distant past? Was he as brave as Temple Barr? Or just obsessed?
Max paged past his own frozen image. The Mystifying Max was history. Even if he remembered all his old stage moves and illusions, his compromised physique would probably be unable to duplicate them.
The next poster had him staring into Harry Houdini’s truly mesmerizing vividly black gaze. That man had enough visceral charisma and drive to power a planet. The storied “escapologist” was pictured nearly naked, hunched over like an ape-man, metal cuffs and chains hanging from every muscle and sinew. He’d accomplished incredible feats of working in freezing water to free himself, of hanging upside down like a bat. The illusions may all have stemmed from the same secret magical routines of his predecessors, but the marketing chutzpah and electrifying stage presence were individual.
Max searched himself and found no remembered driving motive. Revenge for Gandolph’s death? That tragic recent incident in Belfast had been a last impotent cannon shot in a cause long left behind by a more tortured contemporary history. It wouldn’t have happened if Garry hadn’t been so loyal in tracking down Max’s obsession with a past he didn’t even have the good grace to remember.
Maybe it was good to have no one to hate, but it was more than bad to have no one to love.
Max flipped back to his false-eyed image.
He did not know the man.
Chapter 44
Midnight at the Oasis
“You may wonder,” Miss Midnight Louise says, sashaying back and forth in front of the Dumpster behind the police substation, “why I have called you all together this afternoon.”
There is indeed a convocation of cats crowded around the closed Dumpster, domestic shorthairs and longhairs, big, small, chubby, lean, striped, spotted, calicos, tabbies, tortoiseshells, black-and-white tuxedos, solid whites, and, naturally, the royal color, solid black.
Of course, cats do not come with birth certificates unless they are purebreds, so you could say three generations of the Midnight clan are present, if you believe Miss Midnight Louise’s claim that I am her long-lost daddy.
“Why indeed has your caterwauling awakened us?” Ma Barker grumbles under her Happy Meal breath as her forepaws box the sleep from her eyes. “This is the hottest part of the day and I need my afternoon beauty sleep.”
I try not to choke audibly on that last statement. Ma Barker, as leader of the clan of Las Vegas cats called a clowder, bears many honorable scars from fierce territorial battles, but she is no beauty and proud of it.
She and I have the family eyes, hers more at half-mast, but both green. Miss Louise, however, sports eyes of old gold, and her hair is not thick and full for battle in the wrestling ring, but long and fluffy. If she is a descendant of mine, I believe one of my showgirl flings is responsible.
Miss Midnight Louise is, however, quite a tenacious little dame, like my Miss Temple, and there is no underestimating her.
“Listen up,” she is saying now, passing among the troops with razor-sharp nails cocked as she gives some of the nodding-off nap crowd NCIS back-of-the neck slaps.
“I have been on solo stakeout,” she continues, giving me the cold gold stare she wields so well, so you feel like you have been whipped with a guilt stick. “I have covered not only a major undercover mover in Las Vegas, Mr. Max Kinsella, whom some of those among us do not feel is a worthy subject of interest—”
“I get it, Louise,” I howl. “Forget all this pointing paws stuff. I did underestimate what was going on when Mr. Max disappeared at the Neon Nightmare a couple months ago, but he is back and getting his black on, and that is old news now.”
She leaps to confront me with a bound, growling in my face. “He is back and about to make major fresh news.” Louise turns to rouse her minions. “And this emergency intervention involves another location I have been surveying on my own, the Oasis Hotel and its Lusty Ladies and Laddies sea battle attraction.”
A hiss stirs the assembly. Louise has made a tactical error. We of the feline family do not, as a rule, like water.
I spot my opening and seize it, stepping in front of her. “Excuse me. The junior partner of the firm has done some fine legwork—and you gentlemen will all agree she has the legs for it.…” I am not surprised to raise a hiss from among the clowder females. “Just pulling your legs, ladies, to get your attention.
“Obviously,” I go on, “we need a special ops team on this matter Miss Louise has brought to our attention. Midnight Investigations, Inc., offers services in all areas of crime prevention and detection, but we are a two, er, individual operation. Occasionally, we need to expand our arena of operations into a major public presence.
“So.” I look around at every yellow, green, yellow green, and even blue eye. “I am calling the Cat Pack back into action.”
The Cat Pack is the elite fighting cadre I put together for protecting my Miss Temple in matters involving major weapons, like a loaded handgun … in her purse. Not good. We all wear ninja black.
Ma Barker lurches in front of me. “Front and center, you volunteers,” she orders, her slightly skewed gaze raking every black-haired dude or doll in the clan.
“What about Three O’Clock at Gangsters?” Ma grumbles to me under her breath. “We need a geezer?”
Since she is probably older than my esteemed sire, Three O’Clock Louie, gourmand and restaurant mascot, that was a low blow.
“No time to fetch him.” Miss Louise blows past me to address the clan. One swipe of the fluffy train on that youngster’s skirt puts enough fine hairs and dander into my eyes and nose to shut down sight and speech for half a minute.
“We could use a special team of the tuxedos,” she adds.
A smaller but equally triumphal roar goes up. I have to admit these guys and gals look pretty sharp with their spanking white bibs and faces, white gloves and sox and formal black topcoats everywhere else.
Sadly, those snappy white areas also make it easier for predators to spy them in the dark. You cannot beat nose-to-tail black for camouflage.
Once I can sneeze out her loose hairs, I go abreast of Louise and whisper in her little perked ear. “Those tuxedos are a mixed bag when it comes to nocturnal operations,” I warn her. “Ma Barker will shorten our tails in tandem if we lose any of her gang.”
“Relax, Daddy-O. I have this upcoming clash of Titans thoroughly scoped out. All we have to do is throw a big monkey wrench in the unfolding events, and our guys at the Oasis will come out up on top.”
“We do not have any guys at the Oasis.”
By now the grateful tuxedos are making like a Broadway chorus line in front of Louise, they are so delighted to be asked to dance at our party.
Miss Midnight Louise, I
am thinking, is biting off more than I can chew.
Chapter 45
Million-Dollar Collar
“It’s either you or Molina,” the semi-familiar voice on Temple’s smartphone intoned with resignation when she answered. “I much prefer you, Zoe Chloe.”
“Um … is this Rafi Nadir?”
“My job’s at stake. My access to my daughter’s at stake. The Amy Winehouse of Las Vegas Boulevard is MIA. I need an insty, gutsy MC by eight tonight to replace the celebrity hostess that nobody knows. I figured you could do the job in a pinch.”
“Who gets pinched?”
“Hopefully no one. It’s for the prize drawing on the million-dollar see-through treasure chest at the Oasis. You have heard of that?”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to resurrect Zoe Chloe. You just need someone to announce?”
“Like that creep Buchanan did on the body-in-the-safe event. You were there. You could probably do his job, right?”
“Yes. Is this dangerous?”
“I will personally keep a bead on your ass.”
“That is not encouraging.”
Rafi chuckled. “I have a feeling you are just what the situation needs. In case things get crazy.”
Temple had a feeling too, a feeling that Rafi wasn’t telling her everything he knew, or suspected. “The hotel honestly, truly had a semi-celebrity cancel?”
“Yeah. This ditzy dame named—”
Temple had a metaphysical moment. “—Savannah Ashleigh.”
“Exactly right.”
“And I just have to—”
“Hold a mic. Welcome suckers … I mean, eligible gaming card holders in the audience. Announce the winning card number after the executive manager spins the barrel and draws a winner. Then let the winner gush and the executive preen.”
Temple ran through her short-notice wardrobe possibilities for something that went with a million dollars. Thanks to Bahama Mama resale, it was a go.
So she told Rafi.
* * *
The gig would keep her mind off Matt, so suddenly out of town on mysterious business. Temple could handle an audience, but nowadays she was used to being an anonymous PR person standing on the sidelines like a referee, yelling out encouragement and cringing at errors.
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