Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “The Joshua Tree couldn’t keep up with the times,” Nicky added. “Jersey Joe ended up being the last resident and dying in the abandoned hotel. You guys later helped find one of his silver-dollar stashes in the desert and turned them in.”

  “It’s a great story,” Temple decreed. “The whole Glory Hole Gang saga. Rags to riches to rags. From ghost towns to gangsters to tourist mecca. Nicky and I just need to lay it out new, polish it up, and the publicity will come rolling in.”

  She glanced at him. When Nicky nodded, she stood.

  “Is the Ghost Suite on seven still unlocked?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Every time we try to lock it we find it open again. No sense messing with a ghost.”

  “I’d like to go up there and give a ghost lockjaw,” Cranky Ferguson muttered, making a fist and punching the air.

  “It’s no ghost,” Wild Blue scoffed, “jest broken tumblers. I can take a look at the lock mechanism.”

  “No,” Temple said. “Midnight Louie and I have no trouble coming and going up there. Maybe we can re create the suite in Gangsters Hotel. In fact,” she asked Nicky, “don’t the two hotels’ back property lines abut?”

  Nicky looked abashed. “Uh, yeah. I believe they might.”

  “No wonder you can do an underground linkup, for the . . . Chunnel of Crime,” Temple said.

  “Chunnel of Crime! Yeah,” Pitchblende O’Hara said, gulping the rest of his black and tan. “Love that. We were miners. And the old-time speakeasies favored basement and even cavern locations. When might you get working on it?”

  Nicky shrugged. “Already cleaning up the area and installing a few surprises. Depends on when the boss lady okays the link from the Crystal Phoenix end.”

  “So you old-timers also think it’s time to ‘come clean’ about the city’s mob past?” Temple asked.

  “Nicky did when he reinvented the abandoned Joshua Tree Hotel Jersey Joe built before he went bust. He was a new generation pioneer,” Spuds Lonnigan said. “He did everything on the up-and-up, but on a manageable scale, and look how well the Crystal Phoenix is doing. Now that Vegas construction is in the doldrums, labor and materials are cheaper. Time for reinvesting in the future.”

  “By harking back to the past,” Temple repeated.

  “You can’t move forward if you don’t look back and put the past to rest,” Eightball O’Rourke said.

  Temple felt another little Ghost Suite shiver.

  How could she put her past to rest if she never found out what had happened to Max?

  “We’ll talk more about it,” Nicky said, rising to see Temple off. “You and me,” he added with emphasis.

  Temple wondered why the Ghost Suite mention had made him uneasy. In fact, something about this meeting struck her as slightly “off.” Maybe that was her. They’d talk later, as Nicky had said. Meanwhile, she needed to refamiliarize herself with the Crystal Phoenix’s most unsung tourist attraction, a famous ghost in supposed residence.

  A shiver waltzed down her spine again. Gee, the air-conditioning was frigid in these Strip hotels, even during a recession.

  She wasn’t afraid of ghosts. Was she?

  Spooky Suite

  What had passed for a Las Vegas suite in the 1950s was not square footage in the thousands, as in high-roller-suites today.

  Still, the brass numbers on the door reading 713 were shined to a spit polish, and Temple knew she’d find the interior dusted and tidy. She doubted Jersey Joe Jackson had done household chores. A Crystal Phoenix maid must pay a daily visit.

  She turned the doorknob and pushed.

  Yup. Walk right in. Sit right down. Wait for an apparition.

  The room didn’t smell stuffy and closed, either, although the wooden-slatted blinds were drawn almost shut against the exterior glare. She walked to the elaborate gray satin drapes that framed the double window. Her fingertips found not a fleck of dust in their sculpted folds.

  Her spike heels left faint pockmarks on the flat, tightly woven floral carpeting, marks that disappeared even as she watched. That was the most ghostly effect in the suite she remembered from a couple of social visits.

  Midnight Louie had been the Phoenix’s “house” cat even before he had crossed Temple’s path at the Las Vegas convention center and they had ended up finding a corpse together. If there was any “ghost” of a past occupant here, it was the big black cat’s. Nicky and Van said he’d loved to sleep in the dim, undisturbed vintage elegance of the Ghost Suite.

  She couldn’t find a trace of him anywhere. So much for the Phoenix’s self-appointed “watchcat.”

  Temple smiled as she sat gingerly on a chartreuse satin upholstered chair. As usual, her feet just grazed the floor. She frowned to notice a short black hair on the arm. According to legend, Jersey Joe Jackson’s ghost had silver hair to go with a faint, silvery outline.

  If Gangsters Hotel-Casino was going to have a Jersey Joe Jackson memorial suite, it would have to up the square footage and all the forties bells and whistles. Sheer size was a Vegas landmark now.

  She shut her eyes, envisioning elements. Maybe a silver-dollar theme. The gambling chips should mimic them. And the underground tunnel between the two hotels, Gangsters and the Crystal Phoenix, had a Prohibition-era feel. Santiago wasn’t proposing a ride, really, but an experience.

  Why had the mention of physically linking the two back-to-back properties aboveground made Nicky nervous? True, the rears of Vegas’s major hotels housed a lot of mundane service areas, but it was wasted space, above-and belowground. Temple had a feeling the Fontana family was finally making a more public move with its Las Vegas interests, and Nicky was uneasy because Van wouldn’t care for that. Temple thought of the Fontanas more as local color these days than ghosts of a mobster past. After a certain length of time, notoriety became nostalgia.

  She liked bouncing ideas around up here. The old-fashioned suite’s stillness worked on her like the cool-down ritual after a yoga-Pilates session, lying on a floor mat with a scented cloth over her face and the instructor intoning a relaxation ritual.

  Why not a . . . Ghost Suite Spa at Gangsters Hotel? Ultra–New Age, right? Up to the minute with a vintage forties ambience. What scents would evoke the 1940s? Something exotic and South American, maybe, like the Big Band music of the era. And the decor then had thronged with large, exotic, fleshy blossoms, like Peruvian daffodils and giant orchids and calla lilies.

  Oops, that made her think of the Blue Dahlia supper club and Lieutenant C. R. Molina as Carmen, crooning out an alto version of “Begin the Beguine.” Oh, they had to use that song on the Gangsters Casino playlist. She adored the lushly Latin song of frustrated passion, so complex and compelling no musician could play it from memory, without sheet music, not even Cole Porter himself. He’d composed the song at the Ritz Hotel bar in Paris, the same one Princess Diana had left before her fatal crash. Wow. Come to think of it, Carmen Molina could kill that song.

  Lieutenant Molina was not a relaxing thought for Temple, not even distanced by her torch-singer persona. Nor was Diana’s crash. Temple always found her mind segueing from high style to extreme mayhem.

  Think spa. A deluxe, woman-only spa, she told herself. Female guests loved pampering. Temple pictured attendants in pale, draped pseudo-Greek gowns. That was a forties look. Ooh. Better idea: male attendants in short, draped Greek-god togas in the outer areas. The outer areas of the spa, not the outer areas of the attendants, she was thinking.

  Caesars Palace had cornered the market on the splendors of antiquity on the Strip and Flamingo intersection for decades, but it was solidly Roman. A touch of Greek would be refreshing. Cultural. Hot.

  Then there was the tunnel. Always an attraction. People subconsciously adore that rebirth effect. An old-fashioned “ride” wouldn’t have worked. Too many average Joes and Jills nowadays felt they’d been “taken for a ride” by their mortgage companies, bankers, stockbrokers, employer 401K plans, greedy CEOs, and even Uncle Sam.

  But when a
ride was not just a ride, but a “ride . . .”

  According to the preliminary figures Nicky had flashed along with the architectural plats for the two properties, Gangsters Limo Service was one of Vegas’s top off-Strip attractions. The concept was raking it in like the 11:00–2:00 A.M. wait line at the Flamingo’s Margaritaville. Had Bugsy Siegel only known that a beachy Cajun-croon guy could be a meal ticket in Vegas, he would have wasted away in Jimmy Buffetland with a margarita headache rather than end up wasted in L.A. with two bullets zapped through his skull. There she was, back to gangland violence again.

  Okay. How would she sell Nicky’s new idea?

  You go to Gangsters or the Crystal Phoenix hotels and you get a real “ride,” speeding limos trekking tourists back and forth through the underground tunnel past Pirates of the Caribbean–like vignettes of mobsters at play and pay from B to C, Bugsy to Al Capone. Anything mob would flash past your tinted glass “mobmobile” . . . Chi-Town, the Big Apple, the Big V in the Mojave. Inside you’d be sipping champagne and gulping Glenfiddich. Outside you’d become a spirited-away witness to the bloodiest crimes of the mob era, a CSI tech on speed. Hot cars, hot crimes, hot times.

  Did she have a commercially twisted mind, or what?

  What would Matt think?

  Nowadays? He would totally get it.

  And Max?

  He would think she was unsafe at any speed, as usual.

  But surely not as much as he would be, if he was still alive.

  Again with the macabre thoughts!

  A ghostly waft on her calf made Temple jump and look down.

  A black cat was waiting to cross her path. Not Louie. Midnight Louise was standing at her feet, swishing her plumy black tail. Midnight Louise’s coat was far too long to have left the skimpy black hair on the chartreuse chair, though. That was a souvenir of Mr. Midnight himself.

  Temple had to wonder if he still visited here, and visited Midnight Louise, here. The female cat had not been in sight when Temple entered. She’d looked the place over.

  Temple studied the closed door to the hallway. It didn’t look completely closed, but she had drawn it fully shut.

  Someone had let the cat in after she arrived.

  Midnight Louise was the house cat now; maybe she’d made a deal with the house ghost. The suite was always on the chilly side, and now was no exception. Goosebumps stippled Temple’s arms.

  She picked up her tote bag and walked out the slightly open door into the hall. She turned back to see Midnight Louise curled up on the (warmed-up) chair seat she’d left. The blinds seemed slanted at a more-open angle to allow light to stripe Louise’s languid form. The gray satin drapes on the left where the blind cords would be were stirring, almost taking shape as if someone was hiding behind them. . . .

  Temple pushed the suite door almost shut, just enough for a cat to paw ajar and get out.

  Five steps down the hall, she heard the gentle click of it closing.

  Not her business.

  Merciless Tenders

  “Woo,” Max mocked as he stretched to full length outside the Mondeo’s driver’s side door and took a long look around. “ ‘I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ ”

  He smiled at Gandolph, who got the Daphne du Maurier reference right off.

  “So you remember the creepy manor house in that forties suspense movie? When I see iron gates and red brick grandeur, I always wonder, mansion or prison?”

  Max studied the place.

  “The Convent of the Little Flower looks more forbidding than one would think from the quaint name. Good thing we stopped for lunch and a chance to fill our bladders with ale and empty them. I bet the nuns inside could make a hardened felon piss his pants, if I recall my fleeting memories of the good sisters in grade school.”

  “You once told me the grade-school nuns were Old World, even in Wisconsin. And that the Christian Brothers ran a tight ship in your high school too.”

  “Apparently they did, if Sean and I graduated as virgins. He died one too. Poor bastard.” Max sighed. “That was the purpose of Catholic same-sex education. Worked for quite some time, until the free workforce dried up.”

  Max momentarily shut his eyes. Behind his studied cynicism, an image was assembling in pieces like a torn photograph. Gaptoothed twelve-year-old grin, a freckled face growing angular with hints of a man’s strength. Sean. As redheaded Irish as a leprechaun. Max was Black Irish. Dark hair, no freckles sprouting in sunshine as freely as mushrooms do in the shade for him. Always a flat-black dark seriousness beneath any age-appropriate banter. Temper. An icy vengeful temper that gives nothing away, and no quarter. And never forgets, without the intervention of amnesia . . . even now.

  That surge of teenage memory and emotion shook him. If he was getting pieces of himself back, he couldn’t control them as he’d probably learned to by age thirty-four, the hard way. He’d have to recall and reclaim every stupid, vain, idiotic, maybe crazy puzzle piece and subdue it again. Apparently Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella had been that obsessed. Apparently Garry Randolph, Gandolph the Great, cared enough to do his very best to fulfill that man’s crazy boyish bequest.

  Max clapped the old man on the back. “You’ve teased your audience-of-one’s attention to the breath-stopping point, Gandolph. Show me the payoff behind the facade.”

  Sister Mary Robert Emmet was older than God, who was older than Earth.

  She wore a long black gown, and fanciful arrangements of starched white linen surrounded her face and shoulders, but the “penguin” look framed features worn with incalculable worry.

  “Perhaps Mr. Randolph told you, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Kinsella.”

  A slash of sunshine flickered on the shadowed terrain, a smile.

  “Irish, then. But American too, by your accent. I am something of a museum curator here at the convent. I am the ‘media liaison,’ God help me. I don’t even know what media is—are?—these days. Mr. Randolph swore to me on the tenets of his Lutheran faith, sadly disused, that what I have to impart is key to the salvation of your soul.”

  Max wanted to blush. This situation was quite impossible. Damn Gandolph and his sometimes almost-Irish way with words. Max wasn’t sure he had a soul, or that it could be saved. This ancient nun, for all her weary sorrow, had a tried sort of innocence he found impossible to dismiss with mockery.

  “I’d be honored if you’d suspend your rules for my benefit,” he said with a courtly bow. He was tall enough to pull off a bow even nowadays. And magician enough. “I can’t guarantee a saved soul, but perhaps a soothed one.”

  “Very wise, young man. Salvation is not up to us. Only the effort. Well, what I am going to show and tell you was mostly before my time and place, thank God, and there is much denial even to this day. No institution—political, military, or religious—seems free of the cardinal sin of pride.”

  Max was glad she wasn’t a priest, because he’d have to confess that he was jogging partners with that particular sin. He’d detected it in himself several dozen times in the week or so he remembered in detail. It had tempted him to sleep with a woman, fornicate, they’d call it here. Pride had helped him survive, though, and now it urged him to control his remaining slight limp as their footsteps echoed down a long wood-floored hall.

  Sister Mary Robert Emmet, named for the Virgin and a long-ago “martyred” Irish patriot hung for his freedom fighting, led them down halls paneled in coffered, worm-eaten wood, then over tiled floors, through echoing rooms barren as very old buildings are, so that even antique luxury seems penitential.

  Max felt panic rising, as if he were tunneling into a burrow of old-fashioned confession boxes or torture chambers. Even without much of a memory, he’d considered himself a modern man, a strong and clever man, a man who could cope. All that bracing outer ego was melting away. He was a kid again, facing the clawed fingers skittering from under the bed, the darkness in the corners of the closet, the King Kong in the basement, the mouse gnawing at his brain while he
dreamed. . . .

  Sister Mary Robert Emmet led them to a walled exterior garden, devoid of everything but the green moss that cloaks every stone in Ireland.

  “This is where they found the bodies,” she said in her lilting Irish croon, as if reciting playwright Sean O’Casey at a wake. “Almost a hundred and fifty in unmarked graves. All women and girls. Ireland has long been a killing ground, and this is one of our hidden holocaust sites. The other wing of the . . . house . . . was the orphanage.

  “Who knows where those unwanted babes went, into what situations, good or bad? Here the unwed mothers and the girls who were thought to be ungovernable were buried alive for years and then buried in unmarked graves when their eternal sentence to Mother Church was done. They were considered sinners or bound to be such. Their names were changed; they were lost to kith and kin, and they served God as scullions and laundresses, paid almost nothing and punished for merely being, while the convents thrived on the labor of their salvations, until these lost ones died, unrecognized even then.

  “These grounds, of which there were many in Ireland and all over Europe, were called Magdalen asylums or houses or laundries, and they persisted until the current century, Mr. Kinsella. Until past the millennium. Certainly until you, Mr. Randolph says, came here as a boy in search of the troubled but colorful legendry of the Auld Sod.”

  “Oh, my God,” Max said.

  Sister bowed her head. “Mr. Randolph said you are afflicted with memory loss, that you have forgotten much of your personal past and even some of the world’s. I pray you may forget or at least forgive this piece of our common world.”

  “Is that all you can do, pray for forgiveness?”

  “I’m stationed here to pray daily for the dead, not for myself.”

  Max could only look to his current guide, his past mentor.

  “And Kathleen O’Connor?” he asked, afraid.

  Gandolph must have primed the place’s sister-keeper well. She continued without question of hesitation.