Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Max decided to cast the men opposite as familiar actors to tell them apart: an innocently nondescript Kevin Spacey and a young Brian Aherne, burly and buzz-cut.

  “This is the O’Toole’s Pub survivor, Mr. Randolph?” the Kevin clone asked, nodding at Max without greeting him, as if he were still a minor who didn’t require being consulted. Insulted, yes.

  “Not a survivor,” Max corrected. “I was nowhere near when the bomb exploded. I’m a surviving relative of a victim.”

  “A fine point,” Brian noted. “Are you always so scrupulously accurate, Mr. Kinsella?”

  There was no point denying who he was here. For all he knew, he “owned” one of those inch-thick file folders of hidden history.

  “You’d have to ask Mr. Randolph,” Max said. “My condition—”

  “—is damn unfortunate,” Brian erupted. “Not much exchange of anything here. We hold all the ‘cards’ ”—he gestured to their files—“and you lot want all the old information.”

  Gandolph had somehow pulled out his own file folder. Everyone noticed it at the same time, as if it had blossomed on the creased and nicked oak. The retired magician’s sleight of hand had sufficed to startle the two world-weary agents. That was a fine edge of advantage.

  “We discovered,” Gandolph said, “where Kathleen O’Connor came from, which may explain a lot about her.”

  “Kitty,” Max said, before he knew it was coming out. “Kitty the Cutter, we called her in Vegas.”

  The Northern Irishmen couldn’t hide their eyebrow-raising surprise at that declaration.

  “That’s just what we don’t have,” Kevin said. “Where she came from and where she went. The mayhem she wreaked in between, yes. We’re bloody experts on that.”

  “She’s dead,” Max said harshly.

  “You have proof?”

  Max licked his lips and glanced inquisitively at Gandolph. “I don’t even know why I said what she was called just now.”

  “Who was the ‘we’ who called her Kitty the Cutter?”

  “I don’t remember.” Max refused to involve another innocent bystander like the Vegas redhead.

  “What was the reason?”

  “Ditto,” Max said. “I’m like that nowadays. Sorry, gentlemen. I know it’s a bore. It bores the hell out of me too.”

  Another silence. This one lasted.

  “Lad,” Brian, the older man, said softly, “everyone who ever saw Kathleen never forgot her. Everyone mentioned what a beauty she was. Elizabeth Taylor with ultramarine eyes instead of violet. I don’t think even amnesia is an excuse for forgetting that.”

  Beautiful?” Max was apparently the one man who forgot all but an anonymous wedge of the temptress’s face, but he guessed she’d used colored contact lenses to produce those unearthly deep blue-green eyes no one forgot. “She killed my cousin and two fistfuls of innocents along with him.”

  Eyebrows lifted again.

  “How much did you fill him in?” Kevin asked Gandolph.

  “Not that much. You need to understand he was almost killed in Las Vegas less than two months ago and escaped another attempt on his life in the Alps just this last week. He got himself to Zurich with two barely healed broken legs and what wits he has, memory or no memory.”

  “I remember the common things of our lives and times,” Max said. “Just not my own damn history before I awoke from a coma a couple weeks ago.”

  “So you think O’Connor’s dead?” Brian prodded. “We’d have to see for ourselves to believe that. She’s had more lives than a witch’s cat. She seems to thrive on trouble, other people’s, and exploiting it.”

  Max buried his face in one eye-shading hand. They’d take it for stress. He was really trying to block out this torn photograph that had appeared in his dreaming mind’s eye: a pale white cheek on the dark ground, the just-recalled eerie green wink of a nearby cat’s reflective eye, a whole lot of disbelief on his part, and . . . guilt? Regret? Savage satisfaction? The exact emotions were as fugitive as his memory.

  “We now know why this woman was so lethal,” Gandolph said. “I made these notes from our visit to a former Magdalen asylum on our journey from Dublin.”

  He handed over a printed copy. Max thought he must have used the hotel’s business travelers’ setup. Dangerous, even printed direct from his laptop.

  “Magdalen asylum? Sweet Jesus!” swore the younger man, Kevin. “She was kept in one of those places? No wonder.”

  “She’d be young for that,” Brian mentioned, troubled, “even given her thirty-nine years or so.”

  Max sat dazed for a moment, struck by the Irish lilt on the words thahr-ty nigh-en. It was hard not to imitate the tongue-misted accent that was like a lullaby for his troubled mind, maybe because he and Sean grew up in Catholic schools and churches where some of the older nuns and priests still kept a bit o’ the brogue.

  “Forty?” he asked. “Kathleen would be forty now?”

  “About that,” Kevin agreed.

  “And she’s still wanted?”

  “If she was involved in that pub bombing fiasco, yes.” Kevin consulted some pages. “Three loyal IRA men were named, and run down, thanks to an American kid named Michael Kinsella. ‘Cousin of one of the victims.’ You say you can’t remember being that young and fierce?”

  Max shook his head violently to expel the image of a dead woman’s pale cheek. They took it for a simple no.

  “You can’t remember,” Brian said, “but we’ve got many more files on her suspected activities. If anything here helps you recall anything we could use . . .” They passed him a couple of files while pulling Gandolph’s paper pile to their side of the table. It felt like the exchange of human hostages in paper-doll form.

  Max flashed Gandolph a glance. They didn’t know about his Mystifying Max magician persona, then, or of his undercover counterterrorism work. If they still wanted information on Kathleen’s later activities, it might explain why someone still wanted to kill him.

  Was it only about revenge for stalking and finding those IRA pub bombers all those years ago? Vengeance didn’t have a half-life, like nuclear waste did.

  Max nodded agreement and pushed back his chair, liberating his legs from under the cramped table.

  While Gandolph gave thanks, set up another appointment, and made farewell noises, Max tried to avoid hobbling to the door with the old-fashioned transom window above it. His body was dreading the long walk and then the worn, perilous stairs to descend, but his hopes were clutching at the files he’d turned to jam into Gandolph’s case. He’d need both hands free for the stairs, but at last his mind was liberated from day-to-day survival issues and could exercise its memory.

  There had to be something more to the attempts on his life than ancient history, Ireland’s or his. Something as contemporary as last month or week.

  The Vegas Cat Pack!

  A seasoned sleuth senses when too much is going wrong and it is time to call in reinforcements.

  Much as I am concerned about Midnight Louise’s puzzling disappearance from the Neon Nightmare’s secret maze of club rooms, I know I need to put executive decisions in motion before looking into her whereabouts.

  I leave Miss Temple’s quarters and ratchet my way down the claw-marked slide of the Circle Ritz palm tree trunk to hit the hot parking-lot asphalt at a jog. I handled a murder case once, in the desert, for a coyote clan, and learned something from the lesser species: the endurance possibilities of the so-called dogtrot.

  After my recent stint with the dance competition at the Oasis Hotel, I have also mastered the fox-trot. So I am now well seasoned with a new feral canine flavor—carrrumba!—and am perhaps the fastest so-called domestic cat on four feet in Las Vegas.

  A secondary advantage to this pace is that my natural black sole leather is not getting singed as badly as it would on naked paving materials in this climate. Ordinarily, I can travel from scant oasis of shade to oasis of shade, be it of greenery or Detroit origin, but I do not have the time
now to take a zigzag route.

  Who knows what those Synth freaks would do in the Satanist way if they caught an eavesdropping quadruped of midnight hue?

  Speaking of such a dastardly situation, I am now entering the Men in Beige zone and need to tread extra carefully. One does not go rushing into police custody, even if they seem friendly. Often they have extradition agreements with the local Animal House of Blues, aka the city pound.

  This particular police substation near the Circle Ritz seems to have been civilized pretty well. Officers Shrimp Combo and Miss BO, short for Bicycle Officer, are fast-food aficionados. Not the ubiquitous doughnut, mind you, but a heap of protein in a slick waxed wrapper on a bed of mushy white bread that can be torn off and distributed to our feathered friends, who appreciate not being the Catch of the Day at these McDonald’s moments.

  (Normally, I do not resort to brand names other than the occasional Las Vegas landmark, but in this case the fast-food place is a mere two blocks away. Also, I am well aware that chichi modern narratives are now fashionably littered with the best in clothing and cuisine. So far, my works have only contributed my roommate’s shoemeisters to that trend, except for a few painfully fashionable details from Mr. Max’s recent grueling European fling, which is entirely in my collaborator’s materialistic hands. You will note those episodes are decidedly and solely inhabited by bipeds and are the poorer for it.)

  “Mr. Midnight, sir!” My advent through the cloaking oleander bushes is joyfully hailed.

  I brush off my shoulders from young Gimpy’s greeting. He can certainly hurl himself over a lot of ground on those three legs. I straighten him up by the scruff of the neck. He wears a sporty striped suit that serves to downplay his handicap. It is bum luck to be hit by a car when you are a homeless kit and no one is around to get you to the hospital, so you lose your misshapen foreleg in a charity ward months later.

  However, misfortune leads to improvisation, and little Gimpy could eke out enough free food to swamp the whole clowder, like Oliver Twist beseeching “More” from the local church choir instead of a villain of the piece.

  As it happens, I have set up the entire Ma Barker gang pretty sweet here at the police substation, which I am peacefully explaining to Gimpy when a sharp-nailed mitt curls into my thick shoulder pad.

  “The youngster does not need to hear your fairy tales,” Ma Barker spits. “I am the one who copped to this location, and now you have burdened me with my ex.”

  “It is only a temporary thing,” I say quickly. “He has had a retirement gig as a restaurant mascot, but these trying economic and ecological times has erased his last employment situation.”

  “Great Bast, son! You sound like one of those boring talking human heads on the nightly news. Forget the philosophy. When do I lose the loser? I already gave him the first heave-ho ages ago.”

  It is trying to hear one’s sire discussed in such scathing terms. I fluff up my ruff and get to the point.

  “The old guys who ran Three O’Clock Louie’s at Temple Bar on Lake Mead have snagged a hot new venue.”

  “Is a ‘hot new venue’ something edible?”

  “It will be: Three O’Clock Louie’s Speakeasy subterranean bar and restaurant at Gangsters, the underworld departure point for Vegas’s coolest high-speed underground mobster run.”

  “I am confused here. Is this a seafood restaurant? With lobsters?”

  “Naw, Ma. Not lobsters, mobsters that run with gangsters. Kinda like you,” I add slyly. “Gangsters Hotel and Casino is amping up its theme with an expanded mob museum and cosmetic redo.”

  “Oh. Are any female mobsters represented in the Gangsters renovation?”

  “Ah . . . I am sure your namesake, Ma Barker, will be represented, and an immortal gun moll or two.”

  She seems “mollified” by that and adds, “I must confess that the human Ma Barker did precede me on the planet by a few decades. So. Three O’Clock is now again leading the life of Riley at a new human feeding station, and outta my hair. I know he took off for somewhere.”

  “I promise, Ma. Meanwhile, my humans are facing a three-pronged Death Challenge. I need twenty-four-hour, around-the-clock operatives to cover the Crystal Phoenix, Gangsters, and the Neon Nightmare, along with some layabouts in the tunnel that is the immediate scene of the crime. So far.”

  “You have Midnight Louise already at the Phoenix.”

  “Bast be good,” I mutter, disturbed by having found no trace of Louise here at clowder headquarters. I would not expect to her to be slumming, but where can she have gone from the Neon Nightmare, and where might she now be? “I could use a couple more there. It is a big place.”

  Ma cocks her whiskers at a pair of ninja-black shorthairs enjoying a Big Mac for two.

  “These are your half brothers. Having Louise look-alikes on the grounds will be good cover.”

  “Smart thinking, Ma.”

  “I will ‘smart’ your ears if you condescend to me again, boy. I happen to have a lot of ‘midnights’ in my gang, so I can send a couple more to cover the Neon Nightmare. It is a rough place, I hear, and I do not let my people tackle gin joints like that without my personal supervision. Where will the duffer go? You need anyone out at Lake Mead?”

  “Not now.”

  Her yellow eyes bore into my green ones. At least I got my Black Irish coloring of black hair and green eyes from Dad.

  “Might as well assign the Old Man and the Sea to Gangsters, where he belongs now.”

  “The sea?” I ask.

  “Me. Ma Barker. The mother of all mothers. Mother Ocean. Mother Hell-on-Claws. I gotta itch to see this Gangsters operation. See if it gets the Ma Barker seal of approval.” She slashes a foreclaw in the sand. “See what kind of cushy gigolo job your so-called father has got himself now.”

  Three O’Clock and Ma Barker back on the same turf together again, after all these years. It kinda makes even a street-tough dude choke up . . . with horror at the prospect of the two of them mingling with the ex-prospectors of the Glory Hole Gang.

  I fear my esteemed parents will require a referee, not a job assignment.

  Bottoming Out

  “Where can we meet,” the man’s deep voice on the phone asked Temple, “where nobody we know will be there?”

  “‘We’?” Temple asked, still blinking from the recent departure of Rafi Nadir’s long-ago ex-girlfriend.

  “Well, not your alley cat and me.”

  Temple glanced to see if Midnight Louie had sensed himself being dismissed. Yup. He had no doubt left the premises by the open-bathroom-window route she had reinstated. As the sole resident second-story man now, he was a frequent patron of the exterior high road provided by an old, leaning palm tree trunk.

  Her mind snapped back to her caller. “You and me lunching together, alone?”

  “Yeah. I thought you’d decided I don’t bite.”

  “But . . . why? Why the secrecy?”

  “I’m not Mr. Popularity in some quarters. And the why is . . . personal. Do I have to send an engraved invitation?”

  “No. I’m just . . . surprised. Ah, are you off work? How about a picnic in Sunset Park today?”

  “Picnic? Sunset Park? It’s long after lunchtime.”

  “I know, you’re not the picnic type. That’s why it’s an ideal locale. We’ll call it a picnic supper. I can’t imagine anybody we know loitering there after working hours on a weekday. And nobody can eavesdrop on one of those well-spaced picnic tables. How about six P.M. near the parking lot? We can hike to a likely spot from there.”

  “Not if you’re wearing the usual spikes.”

  “You shouldn’t be surprised at what I can do in high heels by now.”

  His laugh sounded relieved. “Naw, I wouldn’t. Ciao.”

  Good golly, Miss Molina, thought Temple as she hung up the phone. Good thing Matt’s out of town. Rafi Nadir was still a slightly sinister presence on the Vegas scene. Then she imagined how Molina would react to Temple having a private pic
nic with her long-ago live-in and giggled all the way to the kitchen to look up man-size-sandwich possibilities.

  She arrived at the parking lot ten minutes early, raised the Miata’s top, and locked the car, then sat on the hood with her insulated lunch and tote bags, swinging her feet, realizing she should have asked the make and color of Rafi’s car.

  What would he drive? Molina had that awful aging Volvo. About as sexy as support hose. Rafi . . . let’s see. He’d been on the skids, working temp security details, until he got that security job at the Oasis.

  He’d quickly become assistant security chief and had seemed so solid-citizen lately that even Molina had thawed toward him. She’d thawed toward Temple too. Toward everybody but her teen daughter, Mariah. There she was Mama Bear in every sense of the word.

  Poor Mariah, having a homicide cop for a mom! Mothers of teenagers had reason to be paranoid to begin with, and the Molina household had been violated by a stalker. At least Mama no longer thought that had been Max. As if he would have to force himself on women and Temple would be going with a guy who did! Molina was right. She was a horrid judge of men.

  “Sensible shoes,” a deep voice said behind her, breaking into her mental tirade.

  Temple looked over her shoulder to see Rafi standing at the Miata’s other front fender.

  “Thanks,” she said, eyeing her broad-based but insanely strappy red wedge sandals. “For me, they are.”

  She was about to hop down when Rafi came around and took her hand, quite the gentleman. He was about six feet, swarthy, around forty, wearing the usual black jeans and boots, not cowboy, and a black T. Just a regular guy. He was also carrying a cooler and incarcerated Temple’s insulated bag of sandwiches in it as soon as she was on level ground.

  “How’d you get here?” she asked.

  “Parked across the road and walked in.”

  Meanwhile they were pacing along the hard-packed red clay hiking path toward the concrete picnic tables. Quacking ducks swam near the small artificial lake at the park’s center, when not beak-diving for snacks or waddling after bread-carrying tourists on the grass.