“Sparks is dead, and you have no idea how, who, or why,” the man goes on.
“And,” the second newcomer adds in an echoing, possibly female voice, “you have no idea where our ‘investment’ has gone.”
I am not being specific about the description of these Jill-and-Johnny-come-latelies because they wear long, concealing cloaks and, of all things, full-face Darth Vader–type masks!
I nudge Miss Louise in the shoulder, but she is gone. Even with my superior vision, I cannot see her. I give the kit credit for stealth. She has probably established a listening post under somebody’s floor-length dark robe, a delicate operation for one with her longer coat’s tendency to tickle human skin.
“Listen,” the dark lady known as Carmen says.
I have eavesdropped on this dame at Synth Central before, but every time I hear or see this Carmen chick, I get a jolt. That is the same first name the C in C. R. Molina conceals. The unsmiling homicide lieutenant only goes by that moniker when she is undercover, kicking back as the Blue Dahlia nightclub’s blues singer. Not that she has had any time free from kicking ass, including her own, lately.
Or course, there are other Carmens in the world, just as there are other Louies. We are just the most important ones in Vegas. But I digress. The wrong Carmen is still yammering.
“We are not responsible for Cosimo’s wandering or death,” she argues. “Why would any one of us trail him to that vault and draw every eye to all of us? It is bad enough that the two hotel excavations met in the middle at our ground zero. You would think they knew what they were doing.”
“Exactly,” says Vader One, pacing like a caged member of my actual breed. “Things could not have gone worse for us. Using that aged vault was folly.”
“Benny Binion’s son Ted had a treasure vault buried in the desert,” says a tall, unmasked man who must be in the Synth.
“This part of Las Vegas is not desert and has not been since a few years after that vault was built,” Vader Two points out, “probably by the colorfully named Jersey Joe Jackson.”
His spooky, gender-altered tones drip sarcasm like rattlesnake venom.
“First the Phantom Mage dies,” Vader One ticks off on a forefinger, which makes me suspect she is female. We guys do not “tick off,” unless it is making someone else mad. “Why?”
The lady known as Carmen stirs uneasily on Cosimo Sparks’s vacant easy chair, which she has apparently claimed since his death. The slinky Carmen stirring is quite a show, but neither Darths, nor Miss Midnight Louise, I am sure, is properly impressed.
“You do not know for sure, do you?” Vader One demands. “This is not a game of make-believe for magicians. Your creation of the Synth was a brilliant ploy, but you magicians tend to be all show and no go, as they say. You were always the facade for the real operation, and you would have been rewarded by having your revenge on the hotels and venues that ousted your tired acts years ago.”
A buzz of protests has as much effect on the two interlopers as if the resident threesome had been flies.
“Spare us,” Vader Two says. “We want to hear your theories, not excuses. There is too much at stake.”
“Well,” says the heretofore-silent, turbaned medium, whom I remember has taken the show-cat moniker of Czarina Catherina, “lords and masters—or lady and master—we have been holding the fort here at the Neon Nightmare waiting for you to give the word for the moment we would astound Las Vegas and the nation . . . and you have been as quiet as mice.”
What an insult to those who would masquerade as the mighty feline hunter species! Of course, humans are not built for imitating us. They have lost the ability to kill for their supper and also to tease adoration from those who are willing to serve them.
“Where is the money?” Vader Two demands.
“We do not know!” Carmen says hotly. (There is no other way this femme fatale could possibly speak.) “We do know when the economic crash made the mortgage on the Neon Nightmare unfeasible. We were all dipping into our own reserves to pay the monthly fees, even as our club’s bar tab plummeted and the loss of the Phantom Mage as a draw also killed our bottom line.”
“Ah.” Vader Two purrs almost as convincingly as Miss Midnight Louise. “Now we hear a motive for why Cosimo Sparks, your senior Synth member, could have gone rogue. You cabal of failures could not pay the rent.”
“Mortgage,” Czarina spits back. “We were buying the building. It is not our fault. Our combined assets now couldn’t get enough credit to buy a busted magic wand. The entire country was caught napping. And the world.”
“Stop whining,” Vader Two says. “We have always operated as a shadow group, with our own shadow economy. Your end of the deal was to hunker down at the Vegas base, guard our tangible assets, and prepare to unleash your illusionary skills when called upon.”
“So,” Vader One adds, “our amassed-over-the-years assets are either gone or are on the verge of being discovered by the authorities, and your leader is not only dead, but attracting the exact kind of attention that none of us can afford.”
“All heart, right?” the medium asks.
“Even worse,” Vader One goes on, “news of this long-secret operation in the making is now running like wildfire through the Continent, stirring up old enemies the Synth was created to confound.”
“We are here,” Vader Two adds, “to untangle your mess and find out why Cosimo Sparks was killed, not because we care, but because the secret stash is gone. We are here to follow and find the money, the bearer bonds, the cash, and the guns.”
Guns?
Oh, my. We are not in the audience at Amateur Night anymore.
“Obviously,” Vader Two continues, “you have a spy in your ranks. Or did.”
Czarina sits up straight. “You are accusing Cosimo of being a traitor? Now that he is dead and cannot defend himself?”
“He has no need to defend himself, because he is dead,” Vader Two observes coldly. “And we thought you had dealt with any traitors in your midst when the Phantom Mage hit bottom. Nice spectacular end, by the way. Should have discouraged other weak links, but apparently Sparks—”
“You have no idea whether Cosimo was a traitor or a victim,” the Synth man declares.
“Do you?” is the icy retort.
A silence holds during which you could hear a cat scratching at a flea.
Luckily, Miss Midnight Louise’s constant fishy breath from her high-end Asian cuisine, and my own personal magnetism that repels all vermin as if by magic, have kept us from any such rude personal grooming impulses at the moment.
Obviously, none of the Las Vegas branch of the Synth had considered that Cosimo Sparks could have died a traitor.
“While you lot are examining your consciences,” Vader One says, “and hunting traces of your brains, we will be watching all of you and the case with keen interest.”
“We have kept our eyes too closely on the international situation,” Vader Two further notes, “and left you to your own sorry devices, relying on your self-interest to keep you out of trouble.”
“Alas,” Vader Two purrs again, overdoing it this time in a poor imitation of the real thing, “that approach has not worked. You can count on being the objects of concentrated but hidden observation from now forward.”
“What can we do?” Czarina wails. “Cosimo is dead, and the rest of us might swiftly follow.”
“Consult your crystal ball,” Vader One snarls, sweeping the long cloak back as if brushing them aside so swiftly that the heavy faille material hisses. “Perhaps it has more intelligence than your conjoined brains.”
I am only able to avoid their dramatic exit and accompanying foot stomps by sucking in my stomach and flattening against the black wall.
Another long silence commences, which is unfortunate because I cannot let my breath out until they start yammering again, and the longer they do not, the more certain my breath is to release in an audible windstorm whoosh!
Perishing from self-
strangulation is considered pretty kinky these days, and I have no wish to succumb to something the tabloids would have a field day with.
“What nerve!” Carmen finally says, standing up to pace, whipping her own silken cloak around as stylishly as the recently departed Darth Vaders. “They play the long-distance puppet masters for several years, holding us back from our big, uh, reveal, as they say on the extreme-makeover shows, and then dare to blame us for Cosimo’s death.”
“Ah, those extreme make over shows have moved from facial reconstruction to major house renovation,” the Synth man points out.
“I do not care about any of those stupid shows, Hal Herald! Apparently you have no better things to do than watch them. I am thinking about the magic show of the century we were planning for Las Vegas.”
“Last century or this?” Czarina asks dispiritedly, which is a rather sad condition for a medium. “We have been involved with these mysterious money backers almost that long.”
“You did not see this coming,” Hal points out.
“Please,” Czarina urges, “we do not need to quarrel; we need to solve Cosimo’s murder so we can get the foreign investors off our backs.”
“What about the Phantom Mage’s ‘accident’?” Carmen asks. “Or was it murder?”
“Did any of us do it? What about Cosimo?” Hal continues the questions.
“You mean we might have a serial killing going on?” Carmen demands.
“He wasn’t one of us,” Hal notes dismissively. “Just a hokey half-acrobatic magic act that gave a few thrills to the drunken postmidnight crowd. He did no real magic.”
“As if ‘real magic’ is on any of our résumés,” Czarina finally jibes back. “You and Cosimo and the other old-timers, like that Professor Mangel, might have wanted to diddle around tracing magical, mystical schools of history, but we were always a cadre of dreamers and schemers. I happen to think the schemers had the right idea all along. Looks as if Cosimo was more on the schemer side than anyone thought, and maybe the Phantom Mage was too.”
“You are not going back to that old notion that he was Max Kinsella?” Carmen asks.
“Kinsella vanished about the time the Mage crashed, did he not?”
“Yeah, but that was a pattern with him,” Herald points out. “Nothing new.”
“Maybe the reason was new, Hal.”
“That is crazy, Czarina. The Mystifying Max lost his Goliath gig. He may have pretended his contract just expired, but so have all our contracts expired as our venues dried up here in Vegas. Siegfried and Roy were retired by tragedy. Cirque du Soleil kicked the pants out of magic acts, face it. Dumb as the Phantom Mage’s act was, at least he was in the bungee-jumping, costume-wearing vanguard. We’re—” he snaps a flat disk on the mantel into the magnificence of a classic magician’s “topper”—“old hat.”
It is enough to pull a tear out of an aged duct. Not mine, mind you.
“Lance Burton just re-signed for several more years at the Monte Carlo,” Hal notes.
“But not thee and me,” Carmen says. “Oh, poor Cosimo. Who’d want the old man dead? And why?”
“We are a threat,” Czarina intones in a dire alto voice almost as spooky as the strangers’ masks.
“So we had hoped,” Hal replies. “I think the Synth was just another Vegas scam. Something to keep us busy and hoping for a second coming, like the millennium nuts. Only we’re magic nuts.”
“You believe the Synth’s House of Ophiuchus was a delusion? It has killed four people so far,” Carmen points out, “maybe five now, including our colleague. The cloak beneath his dead body was spread in the celestial shape.”
“Ophiuchus is a forgotten constellation, Carmen,” Czarina says. “I do not think I can believe in the stars any longer. Unless it was a meteor like the Phantom Mage. He certainly put stars in your eyes.”
“A pose,” Carmen says haughtily. “I am not so easily impressed.”
“There was that intimate parting note from Max Kinsella,” Herald smirks, “before the Phantom Mage fell to his death. Maybe he was leaving you in both personas and you cut his bungee cord. A woman scorned . . .”
“Silly accusations!” Carmen objects to Herald’s jibes with a shrug and a dramatic spin to the hidden door. “This has not been a productive assembly, except for those foreign Synth members showing up. I wonder what they really want from us. We would be better off going to ground separately, or assuredly we will be pestered whenever we meet here until those interlopers leave Las Vegas. I am not going to accept any masked individual who knows how to breach our club rooms as a Synth member.”
“You did accept Max Kinsella and the Phantom Mage as just that,” Czarina singsongs to Carmen’s departing back.
I leap aside as the woman’s knee nudges the door’s pressure device and she vanishes into the dark beyond.
So I am left with two grumbling Synthettes and Midnight Louise.
Wait! Where is Midnight Louise?
The room is dim, and our kind is adept at the magic of blending into the background so we are not noticed, but even I have not noticed Louise for too long. You would think I would relish a vacation from her constant demands, and of course I do . . . but not when I do not know her whereabouts after we have dropped in on a sinister cabal of magicians.
Has she been kitnapped to play some moth-eaten top hat’s up-popping bunny rabbit? What a comedown for a born predator.
While I worry, I stir like a vagrant draft along the floor, brushing pant legs and robe hems of the remaining two Synth members. Miss Midnight Louise is not hiding out under anything human or inanimate in the room.
What a puzzle. What a worry.
Did not master magician Mr. Max Kinsella disappear from this very place only a couple months ago? Are not Miss Louise and myself the only investigators who have kept a weather eye on these shady characters? Should I stay to investigate this obvious hotbed of past and future villainy, or rush off and return to the Crystal Phoenix to assist my Miss Temple, who has her hands full with an awkward murder related to this very place and present company and does not even know either one exists?
And what of my missing . . . uh, partner? Surely, the scrappy little thing can take care of herself for once without me. To hear her tell it: Surely, Daddy-o dude. Chill.
Still, having the whole long-lost family now reunited on the streets of Las Vegas puts me in a pickle. I am only one individual. I cannot protect everybody at once!
Everybody at once . . . That reminds me of an old Las Vegas legend needing resurrection. One for all and all for one. The Rat Pack is dead; long live its successor—the Cat Pack.
A Ghost of a Clue
Temple sat in her Miata outside the coroner’s facility, inhaling the smell of sun-warmed leather to erase any rubbery, plastic, formaldehyde or decaying odors that might have clung to her clothes. She still didn’t understand how the significant others of morgue workers ever got used to what had to come home with the job.
One odor she couldn’t escape: this case reeked of Jersey Joe Jackson and his silver-dollar hoards hidden in the desert around the Joshua Tree Hotel he founded, which desert had become a sprawling city. From the macabre skeletal remnants exposed on the bottom of Lake Mead to the chubby, sad, clownlike, overdressed corpse inside the abandoned underground vault, it all came down to a Las Vegas legend of crime—Jersey Joe Jackson and his silver empire.
Temple decided that communing with a ghost was impractical. What she needed was witnesses.
She revved the Miata and squirted out of the morgue’s parking lot onto Pinto Lane and then Charleston Avenue, buzzing by vintage-clothing stores as if they were in the city dump. The Blue Mermaid motel whizzed by on her left. Down the street stood its inspiration, the Blue Angel. Temple had heard that the graceful female neon figures atop their respective motels were inspired by Disney’s Blue Fairy from the classic animated feature Pinocchio. And she knew that a woman designed the Blue Angel, Betty Willis, who also came up with the iconic and
still-standing “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign that “said” Las Vegas all over the world. Go, Betty!
Temple never saw the “Virgin Mary blue”–attired mermaid or angel figure without thinking of Matt. He’d first sensitized her to the religious significance of that particular hue of blue, which Temple realized echoed the shade of a Tiffany’s jewelry box, of all things. Temple had a sudden inspiration. Her wedding attendants would wear VM blue! That ought to please Matt’s Chicago Polish-Catholic relatives. Her Unitarian and Lutheran relatives would never guess a thing.
Wait! Who would be her attendants? Matron of Honor, Aunt Kit Carlson Fontana, of course. Bridesmaids? She didn’t have a sister or many female friends close enough to pay for a VM-blue gown and an airfare to Chicago or Minneapolis.
Aha! Matt had a young Chicago cousin, Krys. And there was Temple’s oldest brother’s daughter, Tabitha. What about Mariah Molina, if her mother would let her? Heh-heh. That would so get her mother’s goat and also help Mariah’s self-esteem. She was getting taller and leaner and needed to get over her teen crush on Matt. Watching him get married ought to do it. On the other hand, Matt in a tux was not a discouraging sight. . . .
Three bridesmaids seemed plenty, but Temple could picture all eight eligible Fontana brothers as groomsmen in pale formal attire, morning coats out of an Oscar Wilde play—to die for! Obviously a . . . summer wedding. So she needed five bridesmaids more by then. Her mother would be over the moon. Only one daughter, one mother-of-the-bride dress. Temple would manage it, the whole schmear.
Okay. Matt’s best man? He was short of relatives too. Maybe his birth father? Yes. Full circle.
Wait another minute! Temple was blue-skying the future when the present was a tangle of Las Vegas’s perpetual reinvention woes and bizarre deaths and buried secrets. Didn’t the past just always have to keep cropping up that destructive way?
She directed the Miata down the Strip and then off it, to Gangsters.
A parking valet in a Bonnie Parker beret offered to care for her car in the most personal way, with assurances it wouldn’t get hit with any nasty G-men bullet holes.
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