This place made her mind run in wild, morbid veins. Veins! Oh, no. No wonder Grizzly and his staff practiced black humor. The mind loved to play gruesome tricks on itself. Maybe it was the notion of all the naked corpses concealed here in windowless rooms and on sheeted gurneys.
“Would you like to see him?” Grizzly asked.
“Him?”
“What’s left of Boots.”
“Ah, sure.” She could check that the wax replica—taken from a photograph someone had obtained illegally at the morgue, probably a Fontana brother, and she did not want to know which one, ever—was accurate. “If it’s all right for a member of the public to view the body.”
“Sure. I have lady ‘cozy’ crime writers in here every month. They are much cooler with it than some of those male slice-and-dice thriller authors. I do have to make the ladies promise not to eat and drink during the autopsy, though.”
“Not a problem with me,” Temple said as she rose to walk in his boot tracks back into the hall and then into an area of shining stainless-steel walls, gurneys, tables, sinks, and instruments. All that wall-to-wall steel reminded her of the fatal vault.
At the door Temple donned latex gloves and a Plexiglas face shield with the coroner.
Everything smelled fine, but on every inhalation she expected a hint of decay. The suspense was really hard on one’s breathing rate.
Coroner Bahr didn’t notice. This was his daily arena, and he was busy commanding it.
“I had the remains brought out for you. The TV stations were satisfied with the discovery footage. You can’t beat the human interest of those cats sniffing around old Boots here. I knew you’d want to see the real thing, sans snacking pussycats.”
Temple’s stomach finally reacted and skydived. She wasn’t going to admit she knew those “cannibal” cats, especially that she often shared a bed with one. TMI.
Bahr’s large, latexed fingers pulled a sheet back from a beach-ball-size lump that looked a lot larger than the “appetizer with toothpicks” Louie had uncovered.
That was because a “doily” of caked lake bottom had also been excavated with the concrete and leg bones in place.
Grizzly smiled fondly at the mess. “Makes me feel like an archaeologist for a change. Ah, the good old days of crime, not drugs and bodies in the street, but bullet-riddled bodies dumped in strange and secret ways.”
He picked up a surgeon’s scalpel and used it as a pointer. “I decided to chip my way in from the rear. If there were any footwear remnants, the heels would be the easiest to uncover and offer the most information. As it happened, I struck pay dirt.”
“Literally.”
Humming relevant bits of the old song Temple recognized with a sinking heart as “Clementine,” as in “. . . was a miner, forty-niner,” Bahr produced a steel tray that clanked with the moving metal on it.
Temple peeked. It wasn’t a rolling bullet, but something both bulkier and thinner.
“Silver?” she asked. “You hit silver?”
“Yup.”
“That’s a mighty big tooth cap, Dr. Bahr. Boots must have been a giant.”
His laughter rang off all the surrounding stainless steel. “Most amusing. And apt. I hadn’t thought of it that way. No, Miss Barr, since we are being formal, it is not a tooth cap for a giant. It is a cap of sorts, and it is—ta-da!—signed.”
“Dentists do that, don’t they, with fillings?”
“True, but let’s drop the orthodontic comparison, unless you wish to posit that the victim had a set of choppers in his heels.”
Temple bent to study the find close up. “Oh. There are two! Nested together.”
“Simply a convenient storage option. Let me . . . unnest these lovely twins. . . .”
“I’m stumped,” Temple admitted, after he had done so, looking at the odd silver shapes.
“ ‘Stumped,’ ” Grizzly echoed, eyeing the truncated leg bones. “You will force me to hire you just for the very punny commentary. Quite unconscious, of course.”
Temple rolled her eyes. “Do you have any idea who this guy was? Besides a marked man?”
“He certainly was a heel,” Grizzly mused.
Temple stared, still stumped, at the silver shells. They still reminded her of dental caps. She mulled the coroner’s broad hints.
“I’m shocked,” he prodded. “It’s right up your alley.”
Temple knew that shocking and awing civilians was Grizzly Bahr’s favorite pastime. No one would have dared to nickname him if he didn’t relish word games. He was right. That was right up her alley, along with “spin.”
Spin. Wait! She took the odd artifacts from his hands into hers and . . . spun them.
“Caps, or taps! Taps come on shoes. But this guy is getting called Boots. Aw, cowboy boot heels, high, wide, and handsome! These are sterling silver boot-heel caps.
“Hi-ho, Silver,” Temple finished up by quoting the Lone Ranger. “Away!”
“Very good. Care to examine them further?”
“It won’t hurt the evidence?”
“We’ve already tested and photographed them for the Hall of Exotic Evidence Fame.”
Temple let her curiosity loose.
“These marks aren’t concrete damage or sand crust. They’re . . . engraved.”
“En-graved,” he repeated, going off in wheezing laughter.
“A stylized leaf motif. Looks Mexican.”
“Very fancy.”
Temple knew enough to look for marks on silver, at least a “925” for sterling silver content.
She turned the heel caps around, wondering what kind of guy was secure enough to flaunt these things, besides a Fontana brother. Aha! On the inside of the heel cover just under the sole. Very discreet, but a complete artist’s stamp. Who and where. Not Taxco, the sterling silver Mexican stamp of the mid-nineteenth century, but . . . Hollywood. Of course. Singing movie cowboys were peaking then—Gene Autry, Roy Rogers. Outfits were extravagant.
And . . .
“IOHLANDMADE . . . CALIF . . . HOLLYWOOD . . . STERLING,” Temple read.
“Whew. This is real signed silver,” she added. “And collectible. And it might even be traceable, if you find an expert on cowboy boots of the period.”
“Just what I thought,” Grizzly said, beaming. “The faded first letter of the name is B, as in Bohlin. And I’m counting on you to find that expert, Miss Vintage Rag Wearer.”
“I’ve been a little busy for vintage collecting lately,” Temple said, frowning.
Literally “losing” one boyfriend and getting engaged to another didn’t leave a girl a lot of shopping time, unless it was for a shrink.
“But you know the vintage scene,” he said.
Temple nodded. “I know the scene.” Even better, the Internet probably knew it too. She could hardly wait to track down this late, great Hollywood artisan.
“Hold your horses,” Dr. Bahr said as she turned to leave, lifting a gloved palm.
She’d forgotten to lose her accessories.
Temple was into vintage, but latex gloves and a plastic visor weren’t her idea of going-to-tea wear, and she was happy to leave them. They made her sweat. She wasn’t eager to linger, but Grizzly Bahr held up another steel dish, and these contents did roll around.
Temple peered inside. “Silver dollars! You have no idea how these might connect—”
“I have plenty of idea. These were evidently once bolted onto the rotted away boot sides. Too bad they aren’t nineteen-thirty-four San Francisco mint dollars, worth a bundle today. Still, Boots appeared to be a silver-lovin’ dude.”
“Did they call guys ‘dudes’ back then?”
“Sure did. There have always been dudes. Do silver dollars mean something to you more than a gleam in your eye? They were once more common than fleas here in Vegas and were melted out of existence by the thousands every time silver prices went up.”
“I know,” Temple said. “The last big silver-dollar roundup and meltdown was in the seventi
es, when the Texas millionaire H. L. Hunt cornered the silver market and drove the price so high my spinster great-aunt sold the family silverware. Hence I inherited stainless steel.”
“Minting of silver dollars stopped in nineteen thirty-five,” Bahr said, “so this guy could have snagged these from then until the seventies. His bones say he was last running around about nineteen fifty, give or take a few years.”
“But his footwear says there may be a motive for his murder some folks still alive may know about.”
“It’s always better to consult the living,” Grizzly Bahr agreed. “Better hurry, because this guy’s peers would be getting so up there in age, St. Peter might be already reaching down for them.”
Synth You’ve Been Gone
I decide I must take the lead with Miss Midnight Louise as decisively belowground as above it.
“I must admit that this space just cried for something dramatic to happen in it,” I tell her. “I had a tad of trouble finding a way into the underground tunnel from Gangsters, which is a chichi little venue that could use a dash of Fontana make over magic, so I went back to the Phoenix, and underground there. Worked like a charm, so, all in all, I would be able to give my blessing to this Chunnel of Crime notion. Linking two enterprises in these days when people want more for their money is a good idea,” I pronounce.
“Three,” she says.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Three.”
“Three what?”
“Three venues.”
While I am still blinking like a blind bat at what she is implying, the little minx adds the codicil.
“I did not ‘amble over’ from the Crystal Phoenix,” Midnight Louise explains, with a quick smoothing of what bristles pass for her eyebrows. “I walked, all right, and the route was subterranean and a bit tight at times, but I came from the underbelly of the Neon Nightmare.”
The Neon Nightmare club? Where the cabal of disgruntled magicians known as the Synth keep secret meeting rooms? Where Mr. Max just tragically crashed and maybe died not two months ago?
You could knock me over with a magic wand.
Luckily, Miss Midnight Louise is not packing any, but she cannot smother a huge smirk as she starts grooming spidery cobwebs off of her whiskers.
While I have resigned myself to letting Miss Midnight Louise lead when it comes to exploring the third and most secret underground tunnel in this below-street-level maze, I had not counted on the pathway being so paltry.
“Hurry up, Pops,” Miss Louise is nagging from ahead of me, like Charlie Chan’s number-one son.
Fact is, I cannot!
The passable concrete area around the vault is a glorified rat maze, and the human-fist-size rift at one dark corner of the vault opened up by a small earthquake or construction vibrations is mouse-size to me.
In fact, delicious as my surprise exit from the opening vault door was, I was so low to the ground, the cameras overlooked me and Louise entirely, and I nearly lost my midsection coat from my innards being squeezed through the raw-metal-edged hole.
Now we must retrace our path around the vault exterior. It has been jolted into rubble by the recent tawdry pneumatic drilling on the front door, so it is an even tighter squeeze for any creature other than a snake.
Fine for a sylph like Miss Midnight Louise to wriggle through when she is all of nine pounds soaking wet.
I am a feline of size. I do not “wriggle” like an earthworm; I “bull” my way, like a dozer. (Not the kind that sleeps, I hasten to add.)
So there I am having clods of stone and sand kicked up into my face as I follow the narrow path she has forged.
Ah! At last! We get into man-high territory, if the man were on his knees. It strikes me that this tunnel is a recent and inexpert excavation.
Sneezing out a cloud of stone powder, after much circuitous footwork, I finally follow Miss Louise into a large and thankfully finished piece of manmade construction, what is certainly a rarity in Las Vegas, which is built on concrete foundations—a basement.
While I enjoy a coughing break, the kit is pacing ahead of me, twitching her front and rear extremities. By extremities, I am being literal: not legs, but vibrissae and tail. Yes, the rear member whips up more dust for my sensitive sinuses.
Only a few dim work lights, aka classic bare lightbulbs, illuminate our way into what turns out to be a vast space.
Before long we encounter the massive figure of a martini glass. By then I could use one. Miss Louise has leaped atop the toe of a high-heeled sandal that would really ring my Miss Temple’s chimes.
All of these items are made from a giant fretwork of wood and steel or aluminum supporting milky glass tubes in Rube Goldberg–style rat-maze arrangements, i.e., like a really complicated maze for giant rats.
Manx! I would not want to meet the rat large enough to run this junkyard maze, but . . .
“Hey, Louise! Any one of these big retired neon signs would make a great jungle gym for Ma Barker’s gang behind the police substation. They are just wasted down here.”
“At least they are not fading in the acid rain and sunlight UVs at the neon graveyard topside,” she replies. “But I like your idea. Maybe you can manipulate your red-and-cream roommate to claim one of these mementos when we bring the Neon Nightmare crowd down.”
“Uh, we are bringing a nightclub crowd down?”
“Of course. Not the customers, but the Synth set. No human would find or follow that rat tunnel around the vault to trace the passage from the Crystal Phoenix underground to here.”
Now she tells me! So I have started this crawl by personally enlarging with my body a tunnel made by and for desert rats. Think about it! I look around for some rat on whom to take out my angst, but I find the place as quiet and still as, well, a graveyard.
Meanwhile, Miss Louise has sashayed into the pale spotlight of a work light.
“Remember when Mr. Max as the Phantom Mage hit the nightclub wall upstairs and was carted out of here as DOA?”
“Um, I would hardly forget such a disaster.”
“Remember that I promised to kick major butt around here?”
“Yes, but that is your general modus operandi anyway.”
“General Modus Operandi is about to breach enemy headquarters. Want to tag along, Daddy-o?”
I slink along after my number-one (and only, that I know of) daughter.
In my heart of hearts, I realize that my devotion to my Miss Temple and her affairs (I am not just speaking of Mr. Matt here, but her life-threatening murder investigations) has made me a trifle derelict in pursuing the trail of Mr. Max Kinsella.
This might have been a wee tactical error. He is the primo international undercover cat in our circle of human acquaintances, and it is never wise to underestimate what he might be up to and who might not like it.
Oh, rats!
Thus I find myself tailing a girl to the scene of the crime! I mean, a girl other than my Miss Temple, who is always sensitive to my contributions and appreciative and a pleasure to tail.
The Neon Nightmare, as Miss Louise and I—and Mr. Max before us—have discovered, is designed like a pyramid-shaped wedge of Swiss cheese. It has more hidey-holes than Cab Calloway did. Okay, that is an abstruse reference. I am an abstruse kind of guy. Mr. Cab Calloway, being a musical black cat of the human persuasion back in the Jazz Baby age, was noted for his vocal chorus of “Hi-de-hi, hi-de-ho.” Hidey-hole. Get it?
So “Hi-de-hi, hi-de-ho” is all I can mutter to myself in consolation, as I follow Miss Midnight Louise through a long and winding upward path of hidden hallways and cubbyholes toward the lofty peak of the pyramid, where the conspirators who call themselves the Synth maintain a private club so tony that Sherlock Holmes’s older smarter brother, Mycroft, might feel at home there, save that there are at least two women members we spotted on an earlier occasion.
Every door looks like a jet black wall in this magical maze, and every opening is operated by pressure hinges. Push and re
lease; the hidden latch pops the door ajar.
Those of my breed have no trouble being pushy, and I, at least, being exceptionally big and strong, can leap high enough to select floor designation buttons on even the highest hotel-tower elevators.
On the other hand, such gymnastics need to be accomplished on the sly, without human witnesses. They could cause comment and sudden attempts to capture a trick cat like myself with a camera, if not a strangling grip around the throat.
Luckily, the designers of Synth headquarters played it cute and placed many of their pressure points below the usual human hand level. Of course both Miss Midnight Louise and I remember this ploy. There is a bit of kerfuffle as we nudge shoulders to each command the active role here.
My longer reach wins out but at the cost of a nick in my sensitive sniffer.
“Sorry, Pops,” she hisses. “I did not see your prominent nose in the dark.”
The door has opened without a sound after the initial click, so I stand back to let her enter first.
She gives a surprised purr under her breath, mistaking my holding back for courtesy. Hah! It is only seasoned break-in strategy.
She, being practically anorexic from scarfing up Chef Song’s low-fat, low-cal Asian delicacies at the Crystal Phoenix koi pond, requires a less-ajar door to enter. I, being majestic in size, push in after her, thrusting the door open farther. I immediately whirl to nudge it shut, but delicately, though there is little light to admit from the dark passage.
There! We are once again closeted with the same cast of characters, plus a couple more, whom we had intruded on before Mr. Max’s tragic accident-cum-assassination attempt.
They are not acting the usual calm and smug, though, but riled up like a school of flesh-eating piranhas feasting in a diet spa’s hot tub.
“You incompetents,” a voice with a stagy echoing tone admonishes so passionately, the hair on both Miss Midnight Louise’s and my backs rises as if we had been attacked.
It is the same eerily altered human voice I have heard through the Cloaked Conjuror’s whole-head mask and used by protected witnesses on TV true-crime shows.
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