Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “A whole week gig? Not just the occasional hour like you’ve been doing? And you leave your major-media promotion break to an afterthought? The Amanda Show is second only to Oprah.”

  “Oprah has a huge lead . . . on everything. My relatives do get a huge kick out of me being on TV in their own backyards. I figure that will help them adjust to a soon-to-be married ex-priest in the family.”

  “Good,” said Temple. “I’ll try not to solve any murders without you.”

  Matt checked his watch. “I hate to kick my fiancée out of a warm bed, but the movie’s over and I have to get ready for heading over to the radio station.”

  Temple yawned. “Do what you have to. I’m starting to feel like a lovesick teenager with a curfew,” she grumbled. “Home by eleven. Yes, folks.”

  “I’m sure your parents would be very proud,” Matt said as he bent to kiss her good night again, and vanished into the bathroom.

  Temple retrieved her clothes and shoes from the bedside and gave a fond farewell look at the fifty-two-inch flat-screen television. She only had a thirty-seven-inch in her condo.

  Of course, she also had Midnight Louie, when he deigned to sleep in nights, and he was an extra-large model cat.

  Fifteen minutes later she was snuggled down in her own bed, Midnight Louie blissfully on his back on the other side, all four feet splayed in ludicrous disarray. Temple was sure he only unfurled his long, furry, soft underbelly here at home.

  The Circle Ritz, like all fifties-vintage construction, was cramped by modern room-size standards, especially in the tiny, tile-lined bathrooms, only a bathtub wide, both of them. Still, Temple loved her petite living quarters. It was like living in a luxurious dollhouse surviving past its time. The thought of forsaking it for another place, for a freestanding house, made her a little sad.

  But then, Max had rolled around alone in a big house when he returned to Vegas from his first disappearing act. Maybe it was more grown-up to live in a house rather than an apartment or condominium.

  Maybe Temple was finally growing up, not just getting older and wiser.

  She scratched Louie’s tummy until he yawned to display his vast pink maw lined with white teeth and started purring like a Volkswagen motor.

  Nobody who knew her would reject her.

  Apparently Max had, despite himself, twice. Somehow Max was still showing up unexpectedly at the most awkward moments. In her mind.

  Her heart told her she’d loved Max, but it had always been “despite” circumstances that never stopped keeping them apart. Her heart told her she’d remained faithful to their passionate past for so long, she’d almost missed falling in love with a uniquely wonderful guy who loved her to death. Or rather, until death did them part, and meant it.

  That same heart told her that Max would have let her know if he was alive, somehow, if he was alive.

  And, if not, he was a master magician. You’d think even then he’d have the chops and decency to let her know for sure that he was dead.

  How Green Was My Valley

  “Smog?” Max asked, staring out the Cessna’s porthole window as the small twin-engine prop airplane approached Dublin.

  “Ireland has smog now? Is that what the Celtic Tiger is thrashing its technological tail about? Is pollution what Ireland’s acclaimed economic revival achieved?”

  “Hmm. The fabled Irish landscape is awakening your memories.” Garry Randolph leaned forward from his window seat behind Max. “I’m afraid poor old Ireland is the technological Celtic Pussycat since the recession. And, my boy, don’t go all dismal and depressive. Can’t you see that blur of green meeting the pale blue and pink horizon is nothing so rank and modern as smog, but the legendary Irish mist?”

  “ ‘Irish mist,’ ” Max mocked. “You’re resorting to a stage brogue too? I can see why. Green fields and hedges . . . silver ponds and rivers. The landscape below us is incredibly beautiful, an emerald harp strung with silver strings.”

  “I knew the Auld Sod would bring out the poet in you, Max.”

  Max snorted in reply. “Bring out the memoryless lunatic, more likely,” he added after a moment.

  Both men had to raise their voices over the drone of the Cessna’s nearby engines, while the cottages and farmhouses—white with dark thatched roofs, like a patch of mushrooms—grew large.

  No one could overhear them. The pilot was muttering little nothings about landing to the Dublin Airport control tower, where a man answered in the universal English of pilots, but with an Irish accent.

  Max leaned nearer the tiny curtained window to view a lit Christmas tree–shaped grid of landing lights on the ground, pointing arrowlike to the runway. As the plane flew lower, the lights winked red and then green. Intimations of Christmas, Max thought, in an ancient druidic land seen through the mist. . . .

  The pastel dawn seemed a distant dream he and Garry were rushing headlong into. Maybe it was a metaphor for his lost memory, a pale purple haze of terror and delight awaiting him in this beautiful, so-long-troubled landscape.

  In moments, runway lights were blinking past the Cessna’s miniature window. A smooth landing led to a smoother taxi to a small hangar.

  Max sensed that his six-foot-four frame always hungered to unkink from the plane seat and deplane. Here he had to duck considerably to exit, and navigate his injury-stiff legs down a steep, narrow, drop-down stairway.

  He groaned at the bottom, waiting for his older, stouter friend.

  “Tell me you didn’t hire a Morris Mini,” Max pleaded, wincing for his recently healed broken legs.

  Garry slapped him on the arm. “Am I a secret sadist? Your lovely blonde shrink at the Swiss clinic is, perhaps. Gandolph the Great—never!”

  “You were a magician,” Max repeated. “They are basically tricksters. And someone presumed dead longer than I have been,” he reminded him.

  “We were magicians. Are still. Aaah.” Garry inhaled the crisp morning air. “How do you feel about a Ford Mondeo?”

  “A Ford Mon Dieu? I’ve never heard of it. So much forgotten.”

  “Getting frisky and funny and slightly profane now that you’re on native soil, are we? My good lord, Max, you’re back. A Mondeo is the across-the-pond version of the Ford Contour or the Mercury Mystique; the latter name I think better befits our mission. And you as well.”

  Max spotted the shiny black sedan and nodded glumly. “Serviceable and dull family four-door. Just what old undercover, presumed-dead magicians like us need. Plenty of game-leg room up front, I see.”

  “Ah, that’s the old Max, yearning to go fast and furious. This is a journey into the past. Yours and Ireland’s—and Northern Ireland’s itself.”

  “And you naturally thought such a sentimental journey required a car of a funereal color?”

  Max was surprised to see the upbeat old man’s face grow sober.

  “Max, you’ve just weathered a terrible physical ordeal, one that might have killed another man. And it’s an immense psychological trauma to wake up an amnesiac. Yet a worse psychological trial awaits you. Take it one step at a time. You can’t make a rabbit jump out of a top hat unless you first figure out how it got in.”

  “Did I really do that?”

  “What?”

  “That corny rabbit trick?”

  “No, my lad. You used doves. A cornucopia of doves.”

  Obviously Garry thrived on being mysterious.

  Max sighed. “You keep hinting that this land is my land, but I’m obviously as American as hell.” Max frowned. “Despite having a knack for vaudeville Irish accents. What kind of an Irish name is Max, anyway? It might be of German derivation, like the non-French part of the lovely Revienne Schneider.”

  Garry pursed his lips. “German? No. Never. You’re American Irish through and through. We keep this secret also: how you became ‘Max.’ Your given birth names were Michael Aloysius Xavier.”

  “Quite a triad of antique saints and one major archangel. That’s why you registered me as ‘Mi
chael Randolph’ at the Swiss clinic! You thought I’d unconsciously respond more naturally to the name Michael. How long have I been ‘Max’ ?”

  “Since you were seventeen.”

  “And how did that come about?”

  “I rechristened you to save your life.”

  “What the hell? Why does a seventeen-year-old need his life saved?”

  “Because you were a hell of a seventeen-year-old and you got three men killed. They deserved it, and you did it.”

  Max didn’t answer that one. What an appalling past. Garry was right. TMI—too much information. Obviously, he needed to be spoon-fed the ugly truths. He strolled toward the Ford car, limping more than he liked after the flight and landing in the chilly Irish dawn. So an Irishman hankered for sunshine and heat? He seemed to. Or his legs did.

  Max eyed the sedan from hood to taillights. “You expect me to drive this thing?”

  “Yes, and on the left. It is at least an automatic.”

  “Even worse!”

  “How do you know that?”

  Food for thought. “That I prefer to drive stick shift? I don’t know; isn’t that my key problem? I know the general past. I know what I like. And don’t like. I just don’t know my own damn past. I can’t recall what I did and where I was and with whom. Or whom I hated and whom I loved.”

  “We know you had a good high-school English teacher.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Whom was the proper construction there, and you used it like some men swear. Frequently and fervently, without thinking about it. Relax, Max. Go through the motions and let your old self shine through bit by bit. I’m here. I’m your safety net.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re partners. Or were, for your formative young-adult years. I was all the family you had, for a long time.”

  “After I killed three men. Justly.”

  “After three men died. Justly.”

  “I remember a popular song. ‘At Seventeen.’ It was about an unhappy, awkward girl. What kind of song is there for a guy ‘at seventeen’?”

  “An Irish ballad. Which is why we’re here.”

  “All the Irish ballads I recall were bloody and sad.”

  “Exactly. But you’re here, mostly in one piece, and too puzzled to be sad. Things could be worse.”

  Max opened the right driver’s door to the Ford Mondeo and eyed the seating and dashboard layout with resignation.

  “I drive, old man. On the left, with automatic. You think that will help my memory return?”

  “That depends upon where we drive and what we learn when we get there.”

  “Why the hell don’t you just tell me?”

  “You’re a dubious man, Max. You only believe what you see.”

  “You mean I’m a magician.”

  Garry nodded.

  “I believe that now. I suppose it’s a start.”

  “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single—”

  “Boring rent-a-car.” Max ended the truism. “Hop in and put on your seat belt. I have a feeling this is going to be a bumpy ride.”

  Broke New World

  Temple pulled her red Miata convertible under the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino’s shaded entry.

  The relentless Las Vegas sun was hard on leather seats and even harder on slightly freckled natural redheads. That was why Temple wore sunscreen daily. Today, she’d added a straw visor with a built-in white cotton headscarf, circa the mid-1940s, tied under her chin.

  When vintage-clothing-store-shopper Temple married fiancé Matt Devine, finding “something old” would be a snap.

  “Going to be long, Miss Barr?” a parking valet attired in a snazzy bellboy uniform asked.

  “Conference with Mr. and Mrs. Big,” she said. “Let the Miata cool its wheels in the ramp for a couple of hours, Dave.”

  “Right,” he said, seeing her out of the car and himself in, and enjoying it. “Cool hot wheels.”

  Temple was the hotel’s sole public-relations rep. That got her a permanent parking space and speedy ins and outs. As a freelance publicist, she was always dashing from one client to another, especially if something went wrong, which could be as minor as a short order of folding chairs, or even occasionally something major in the homicide line.

  PR was getting tough now. Newspapers were sinking like the real London Bridge in the Arizona desert. Web sites weren’t taking up the slack. Vegas’s last best bet on megamillion new construction projects was still mostly stalled in midair. Tourism was down, along with optimism. Temple was very curious to see what had amped up the ambitions of Nicky Fontana, Crystal Phoenix owner, and his manager-wife, Van von Rhine.

  In minutes she was sitting in the Strip-overlooking executive suite, being told.

  “The past,” Nicky said, pacing around his wife’s ultramodern office.

  Like all Fontana brothers—and he had a slew of them—he was tall, dark, and handsome, but Nicky was fierier than his laid-back bros. “The future is dim, the present is grim. Everybody’s talking Depression, although it’s only a recession. Why not cash in on what made Vegas in the first place? Our notorious past.”

  “Retro is Metro?” Temple ventured, eyeing the cool blonde who was his wife.

  As usual, Van had a crisp summary of her husband’s overheated rhetoric. “Nicky rebuilt this hotel, Las Vegas’s first boutique hostelry, from the still-standing corpse of the old Joshua Tree Hotel, Jersey Joe Jackson’s rival to Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo. When he talks, I listen. It’s the least you can do too.”

  Nicky paused behind his wife’s white leather desk chair, put his palm prints on her glass desktop, and nibbled a strand loose from her perfectly smooth French twist.

  “You didn’t always believe in my founder dreams, Vanilla baby.”

  She remained unruffled, even by the use of the first name she hated. Fire and ice worked well for them, Temple had always noted.

  “You see,” Van told Temple, confirming her observation, “Nicky can sell ice to Eskimos and even get away with mussing my coiffure. Can you sell his hairbrained concept? Granted, his hair is very good. Still.”

  Temple tried not to giggle. Sometimes spending time with the pair was like babysitting Grace Kelly and Tony Curtis in some never-made sixties romantic comedy.

  All ten Fontana brothers were noted for good hair. Only Nicky, the youngest, and now Aldo, the oldest, had married. The other eight remained Vegas’s most eligible bachelors, en masse. Even Macho Mario Fontana, the family patriarch, had great hair, high-end, store-bought, and solid silver, the color of the old dollar coins used for some Vegas slot machines until the seventies.

  Silver dollars were now history here. And so seemed to be the endless building boom that had produced profitable minarets of condo towers before the current financial unpleasantness. The Crystal Phoenix always moved conservatively and stayed small, so it had deeper pockets than some far-more-famous Strip names.

  “So tell me how I’m supposed to make the city’s criminal past sexy,” Temple told Nicky.

  “You don’t have to. That’s the beauty of my concept.” He spread his Italian-suit-tailored arms. “Me.”

  At the uninterrupted silence, he eyed his wife and hastily corrected course. “Us. I’m remembering what the Crystal Phoenix was almost named if you hadn’t had a better idea, Van.”

  “Way back when we decided against calling the hotel the Fontana?” Van asked, still unsure what her volatile spouse was getting at.

  “But the Fontanas are still here in Vegas, and better than ever,” Nicky answered.

  Temple stayed out of it. This was sounding too marital for her input.

  Faint worry lines schussed across Van von Rhine’s pale brow like tiny ski tracks. “ ‘Fontanas’ as in your family?”

  “Family—that’s it! She is sharp, isn’t she?” Nicky asked Temple.

  “Like a Jimmy Choo stiletto,” Temple agreed. “I must admit that I’m still just a blunt Cuban heel. I don’t get where you’re going,
Nicky.”

  “At least you’re not a yes-woman.” He turned the wattage of his smile on her as he sat in the neighboring chair. “The Jersey Joe Jackson Action Attraction under the hotel grounds has been idle since Vegas decided to forget going ‘family attraction’ years ago as a bad bet. I say we go Family with a capital F, as in Fontana.”

  “Nicky,” Van said, “that city mob-museum project goes off and on faster than the semaphores on the Vegas Strip. It got caught in the last election’s rebellion against ‘pork’ and is seriously compromised.”

  “True. And they started out so coy, calling it the ‘redacted’ museum. Redacted,” Nicky jeered. “What kind of word is that? What tourist knows that word? Only English majors. Vegas is not an English-major kind of town.”

  “You know it.” Van called him on it.

  He shrugged. “I needed to know it to figure out what the heck the mayor was thinking.”

  “That’s a good point,” Temple said, watching Van’s arched foot in its white patent-leather peep-toe Ferragamo pump tapping the carpet. Her own silver Stuart Weitzman T-strap sandal offered plenty of “peep toe.”

  She herself and the mostly torrid Vegas climate favored high-heeled sandals and open-toed shoes. Women liked to go bare-legged and show off colorfully painted toes. Or maybe the nail-polished toes announced they were going bare-legged. Temple could remember, as a child, when clingy, bothersome pantyhose was required. Most women had tossed away that fashion “rule” along with strictly prescribed skirt lengths.

  Some fashion mavens sneered at white patent leather, but it was hard to come by in shoes and Temple adored it for surviving all extremes of the elements, from heatstroke to flash flood, both possible in Vegas.

  Considering extremes, Temple also thought now was the time to pour the oil of PR on the marital CEO waters.

  “You’re right, Nicky,” she told him. “The Vegas powers-that-be have spent almost fifty years soft-pedaling the city’s colorful mob roots. The idea of creating a major mob museum here has been floating around for years, but everyone’s afraid of that three-letter word.”

  “When you’re afraid of something, you need to face it and flaunt it,” he answered.