Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  A Fontana brother had been alerted to escort her inside.

  Temple shifted through her brain cells to identify the brother. The feature-shading fedora didn’t help. The Fontana did, though.

  “Call me Ralphie the Wrench. We’ve all got new mob handles. Nicky’s idea.”

  “Sure thing, Ralphie. I need to consult with the Glory Hole Gang. Where are they hanging out now?”

  “The executive chef’s suite. It’s got a whole new test kitchen, but it’s also a bunkhouse. Nicky calls it that so they don’t feel it’s charity. The fellas are too old to be off on their own, except for Eightball, who is not about to give up his little house from the old days and his PI license.”

  By then they had passed through the ka-ching chatter of the casino area to the elevators.

  Ralphie the Wrench continued to play tour guide en route to the tenth floor. “Work on the Speakeasy’s bar and restaurant layout and the Chunnel of Crime is pretty intense, so the GH guys are mostly in the suite these days, menu planning.”

  Ralphie pulled the latest fancy phone from his pin-striped breast pocket and rang up ahead of them, explaining afterward to Temple, “Even really old bachelor guys are not tidy enough for lady visitors without warning.”

  Always the gentleman mobster, Ralphie the Wrench knocked for Temple, escorted her inside the suite, checked that the residence was fit for the presence of a lady, and then left her to her mission.

  Pitchblende O’Hara was lounging on the huge upholstered conversation pit, wearing a flour-dusted apron and drinking a Red Bull. He jumped up at Temple’s arrival.

  “I’m the designated welcoming committee, Miss Temple. Gollee, you look fresher than one of Spud’s French pastries right from the oven. We are gonna call them Bonnie’s Bits.”

  “Well, maybe I just look flaky by now,” Temple said, waving good-bye to Ralphie as the door closed on his pin-striped back. “I need to talk to all of you. Can the kitchen crew put the experiments on heat-lamp warming and come out for a few minutes?”

  Pitchblende rose and beat it back to the kitchen, drawing Temple’s attention to his size-thirteen feet in battered Roper boots. Serviceable, not fancy, and probably resoled and resewn a number of times.

  Their well-worn clothes told the tale of the Glory Hole Gang’s obscure, last-but-not-best decades living in a ghost town until drawn into Vegas by another, earlier search for Jersey Joe Jackson’s silver hoards.

  The first Glory Hole Gang member out of the kitchen wasn’t one.

  Santiago bustled through.

  He looked flustered to see her, but no more than she to see him.

  “Ah, Miss Barr,” he said. “You have caught me. The sublime scents of the test kitchen penetrate to my suite next door, and I cannot control myself. Thanks to my neighbors, I’m indulging a fascination with genuine western barbecue.” He lifted a blue-and-white-checkered linen towel that added a smoky, spicy tang to the air, which had Temple’s stomach ready to growl. “Not my usual fare. They are going to call it Smokin’ Smothered Sirloin on the menu. Gentlemen, as usual, my gratitude and compliments to the chefs. Miss Barr.”

  With a bow, he was out the door. He must be a barbecue fanatic to eat it in that white suit. Temple smirked to have seen a smudge of deep burgundy sauce on the edge of his pristine white sleeve cuff. Simply Santiago was simply . . . a freeloader.

  “He’s been in and out like a boarder with a tapeworm,” Pitchblende complained, “slinging those fancy compliments like they were hash. I think he was afraid our fixin’s for the new restaurant would not be tony enough for his high-tech ‘installation.’ But we use the best aged beef, and those South Americans know prime steak when they taste it.”

  “Howdy, Miss Temple!” The next kitchen émigré was Wild Blue Pike. The old man had the face of an aging angel, amazingly unwrinkled and pale. Maybe he was into Oil of Olay. He would have looked innocent in any lineup, with his lush white hair and distance-focused blue eyes.

  Spuds Lonnigan came clunking out, wiping his wet hands on another checkered linen towel. Cranky Ferguson was munching on one of those flaky French pastries too delicate to put down, but he carried a saucer under it to catch crumbs.

  Eightball O’Rourke exited the kitchen last. Whoops! He was not the last. A large black cat, not Midnight Louie, ambled out, tongue working some dropped morsel out of his long white whiskers.

  “Three O’Clock has moved in?” Temple asked, pleased. “I thought he wouldn’t let you guys near him when you left the restaurant at Temple Bar.”

  “Ah, he jest visits for the chow train,” Cranky said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “He’s like your house cat, a will-o’-the-wisp.”

  “Not in girth,” Temple said.

  “None of us are wispy these days,” Spuds said, “ ’cept Wild Blue and Eightball.”

  “And our Miss Temple,” Eightball loyally pointed out. “I noticed,” he added, “you been admiring our footwear. There a reason you want our feet all in a campfire circle?”

  Eightball was not a man to be fooled.

  “Absolutely,” Temple said. “I confess. I was sizing up your feet.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “You’ve always worn cowboy boots?”

  “Hell, yes,” said Wild Blue, “even in my flying days.”

  “We don’t say ‘hell’ in front of ladies,” Cranky warned him.

  “It’s okay now,” Temple countered. “I’m here to examine your boots, which is not a very ladylike pursuit.”

  “Phew,” Pitchblende said. “You shore don’t want us to take ’em off before suppertime.”

  “Sit down and make yourself at home,” Eightball urged. “You can eyeball our foot-leather better close-up.”

  Temple smiled and pulled a folder out of her ever-present tote bag.

  “I’m trying to solve the identity of the Three O’Clock Louie’s once-submerged corpse.”

  Wild Blue winced. “Poor guy who was et away almost down to his anklebones? Those Lake Mean carp were hungry suckers, even when our restaurant was still going. Hate to think what they did before there were piles of tourists to feed ’em.”

  “More like piranha,” Spuds agreed. “Say, we could serve catfish and call it something like Cannibal Catfish.”

  “So you saw that TV news piece. How about Capone’s Catch of the Day?” Temple suggested.

  “More refined and Frenchlike,” Eightball agreed. “But how come our boots are suspects? Forgive me, Miss Temple, but even we can’t string out a pair of boots for more ’n twenty years’ wear. That Lake Mead dead guy musta passed back in the glory days of the forties and fifties, because as Las Vegas heated up as a tourist destination, you did not wanta pollute the wonders of nature they could be bussed out to, or have an indiscretion caught on a boat anchor and causing consternation.”

  “Gotta give whoever dumped that body in concrete booties credit,” Cranky added morosely. “Didn’t get found until Mother Nature sucked all that H-two-oh outta the lake.”

  “You guys go back that far, along with Jersey Joe?”

  “Yes, ma’am, ’cept we are all still alive. Living out in the desert keeps all that carbon monoxide from the Strip out of a man’s lungs,” Pitchblende said.

  “Did Jersey Joe get too big for his boots when he stole all those silver dollars you all found? Did he dress like a dude?”

  “ ’Course he did.” Eightball snorted.

  “You woulda thought he was the second coming of Roy Rogers,” Spuds said. “Bolo ties with western suit coats. Boots pointed enough to make a horse run away from him.”

  “So he went ‘Hollywood,’ like the movie Melody Ranch’s singing cowboys?” Temple asked, to make sure they were talking the same language and style.

  “Oh, yeah. Got way above us and hisself.” Wild Blue said. “Dollar cigars. We didn’t figure it out at first, where he got the money. Thought he won it gambling, or one mob or the other was backing him. He always had big plans.”

  “We had Jilly to
raise, number one,” Eightball said gruffly. “That changed our dreams of hitting a strike at an old mine. We only did that train robbery to get a fund for our girl, and when we found all the silver dollars gone from our mine tunnel, we figured at first other prospectors took ’em, not one of our own gang.”

  “JJ was a disappointment,” Cranky said. “But he was long dead and gone, and the Joshua Tree Hotel and Casino was a wreck no one wanted to take on, by the time Solitaire Smith and that tourist gal stumbled on one of JJ’s new hiding places for the silver-dollar hoard.”

  “We’d been hiding out all those years from that robbery, and turns out it wasn’t necessary. The dollars were only worth anything to those ‘numisintist’ people.”

  Temple couldn’t help smiling at Spud’s mangled version of the word.

  The Glory Hole Gang had all been roped into being stepfathers for Eightball’s orphaned granddaughter, and dreams of riches and glory had faded with their quirky responsibility for a young girl. Jill grew up looking out for her gang of uncles. Now she was Mrs. Johnny Diamond and lived on a lavish ranch that the Crystal Phoenix’s never-fading ballad singer kept as a retreat after his nightly shows.

  The whole Crystal Phoenix family, Temple knew, would be devastated if any of these old guys had anything to do with killing the sunken soul Midnight Louie and his daddy had found on the bottom of Lake Mead.

  “So,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Did you know anyone else in the old days who could have afforded a custom pair of silver heel-capped cowboy boots signed by a master silversmith out of Hollywood named Bohlin?”

  She tossed the close-up photo of the maker’s stamp onto the coffee table that centered the sprawling conversation-pit sofas.

  And all conversation stopped.

  Every last man stared at the black-and-white photo as if it were an eight-foot-long rattlesnake sunning on a hot rock six inches from their cowboy-booted ankles.

  They should have been safe from any poison, but just seeing the possibilities made their blood run cold.

  “Oh, man,” Pitchblende wailed. “I saw those things fresh outta the box. Real fine box, with all this girly tissue-stuff wrapped around them for shipping.”

  “Darn and definitely darn,” Wild Blue pitched in. “He did leave town without notice.”

  “Forever,” Cranky intoned.

  “I thought it was another fast deal down Arizona-way,” Eightball said.

  “He never did like water,” Spuds mourned. “Only in his whiskey.”

  Temple sat still and silent, realizing she had kicked off a wake.

  For Jersey Joe Jackson? Didn’t seem quite right.

  Motorpsycho Nightmare

  Max dreams and knows it.

  He’s riding a sleek silver motorcycle.

  Through the Alps.

  Revienne Schneider is riding pillion behind him, clinging. She is not the clingy type.

  It this weren’t a dream, she’d be hurling Freudian interpretations his way.

  Motorcycle, symbol of freedom. Alps, symbol of hubris and danger. She would yank him off his electro-glide high horse, bring him down to Earth.

  So he knows dreamland is not throwing the sexy, brainy shrink at him, but someone else, the visceral, gut-wrenching shrew who is riding behind him in Revienne’s intellectual sheepskin clothing. Riding him.

  Rebecca was a spoiled, conniving bitch in the famous novel of that name. And dead.

  Now he sees the woman passenger’s long black entangling hair whipping around his face like a mesh mask. The burr on his back is Black Irish, just as he is. Thorny. Dogged. Just as he is. Deceptive. As he can be if he has to. Hate filled, as he never was, unless it was at himself.

  Maybe that is the key to Rebecca. Her hatred was always self-directed, and turned outward.

  Whatever the truth, he knows what she is. A revenant, a haunting dream. A nightmare is always a dark female ride for him.

  He dares to pity her. And feels steel spurs in his side.

  The tarot card reads Strength. Who is compassion and light.

  He is the Magician. Who is action and power.

  His dark rider is . . . Death. Who is dark and sometimes welcome, which is light.

  Rebecca. Kathleen. Kathleen O’Connor. Kitty the Cutter.

  The odd card in the deck, the Hierophant, with the stage name of Gandolph, rises with a staff, barring the middle of the steep, dark road. A ring glints into the air, all gold and twisted like the worm Ouroboros, the serpent swallowing its own tail, that ancient symbol of eternity. Its eye is shimmering like an Australian fire opal, which is a symbol of hope and purity.

  A lost engagement ring. “Engagement” being action and power, as well as passion and commitment.

  He wants to ditch this monkey on his back, this entire magical, mystical motorcycle ride.

  And he does. The motorcycle lies on its side, smoking tires spinning. He bends over to brush a long, lusterless lock of hair back from the pale face on the ground . . . and recoils.

  The face is a map of decaying fungus, iridescent with rot.

  He is up and running. Down a dark, deserted road, naturally.

  Not so naturally. He’s running toward something, a black pyramid topped by a rearing stallion etched in flaring neon light.

  It’s her! The real nightmare. The steed the fairy-tale knight urged up the glass mountain again and again, as he failed to surmount it again and again. To win the princess.

  He understands that dreams are often the outpourings of subconscious punsters, like the literal nightmare. He’s got a split mind, both creator and hapless creature of himself, of his banged-up mind.

  Then he’s running through a place he knows, the neon-sign graveyard in Las Vegas, faded in the sterile sunlight, larger than life, clownish. All bones and no flesh . . . flash.

  As if turning on his dismissal, the world goes from sun soaked to black velvet painting. There is noise, music, as loud and raucous as the blazing neon images clashing all around him.

  He is plunging down a dark rabbit hole, swinging out over an abyss. Instead of crashing down into the blur of life and motion and light below, he swings into an angular zigzag of a tunnel, running again, bouncing off the reflective black walls.

  Then . . . it all opens up again into light, the warm glow of lamps against the darkness, and the whole cast is onstage, in costume, posed for a vignette fit for an Addams family portrait.

  He can finally stop running, trying to escape, because he knows and can name each face.

  This is where he was led and to where he has to return.

  He assumes a confident persona, donning his own costume.

  Flames flicker against the soot-blackened walls of a fireplace, but their red and yellow tongues are too regular to be real, and they flash a spark of gas-fed electric blue. Yet their false heat warms the room’s cherrywood paneling and highlights tufted leather couches and Empire satin-and-gilt chairs.

  “Czarina Catherina predicted you’d never come back to us, but Carmen always knew you would,” a portly man in white tie and tails says as pompously as the White Rabbit, speaking from his position of power standing alongside the fireplace.

  From his tone, Carmen is the handsome Spanish woman in her thirties lounging on one of the black horsehair-upholstered chairs. Her clothes and coloring are a study in black, white, and crimson. The name pricks Max.

  Max bows to her acknowledgment, then turns to the other woman present.

  This is the usual “medium,” a woman in her fifties or sixties, blowsy and exotic in her own commanding way, wearing a gold lamé turban and caftan, with a name as fussy as she is. Czarina Catherina.

  She speaks in a surprisingly deep yet quivery voice. “Carmen said you weren’t dead.”

  “You commune with the spirit world,” he answers. “What do they say?”

  “Imposter,” Czarina Catherina charges, her voice thick with accusation. “Max Kinsella fled the Neon Nightmare the night the Phantom Mage fell to his death at that v
ery club. Why would a murderer return to the scene of the crime?”

  Before he can answer, she adds, “Besides, you don’t at all resemble the Mystifying Max.”

  He turns to where she is staring and finds his entry door has become a floor-length mirror.

  Dreams will do that: go out of their way to seal off any logical means of escape.

  He sees four people behind him, the two women and the formally attired man he suddenly knows for a stage magician who’d worked years ago as Cosimo Sparks. The second man is tall and dark-haired and so familiar-looking. It is Max Kinsella, looking as intense and secretive as the poster for his stage show. His long-retired stage show.

  So who is the star of this dream, the man facing him in the mirror?

  Max feels a strangling spasm of disbelief.

  Sean stands there instead . . . as he’d never lived to be: tall, broad, and husky, the curly red hair now auburn and spiky with some trendy gel, grinning like a death’s head come back to life.

  While Max stands gaping, Carmen slinks up behind him to curl crimson-taloned hands over his shoulders.

  “Don’t go so soon,” she croons in an Irish accent. “We’re just starting. Do you like my engagement ring, darling?”

  He stares at the huge fiery opal framed in diamonds. He’d given someone a ring like that, but it had been smaller, finer, more tasteful. Exquisite.

  “It’s synthetic!” he protests. “It’s not real.”

  Next his dream self would be shouting, You’re nothing but a pack of cards!

  With that thought, he meets Sean’s hazel eyes in the mirror and watches them darken into expanding pupils, a pair of emotional black holes to suck his sadly split selves into their own heart of darkness.

  Silent Partner

  “Not Jersey Joe,” Eightball O’Rourke quickly assured Temple. “He could wear a suit and would go so far as to don a black leather bolo tie when business called for it. We found it pretty fancy, but he was all for building something that would last, like Bugsy.”