Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  She punched the autodial number for Max’s cell phone.

  Meanwhile, Louie twisted his torso in two different directions at once and took total possession of the papers on her desk.

  “What’s up?” Max’s voice answered.

  “Louie’s legs. In the air. All four.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a phenomenon worth reporting.”

  “It’s the paper he’s lying on that’s interesting.”

  “The Sunday paper?”

  “No. The list I just made of all the unsolved murders hanging over us…some of them quite literally. It’s rather interesting when you spell it out in black and white. Thought you might want to see it. I also have an enlarged version of that crude symbol painted around poor Jeff’s body.”

  Temple’s glance fell on the small, crumpled, pale green receipt on which she had first drawn the palm-sized version of the symbol.

  “Max,” she went on suddenly, “isn’t there some tradition relating to a five-sided figure, a pentagram, as a sign of evil?”

  “If you’re talking Universal Pictures from the forties, then yeah.”

  “I thought so! But I can’t remember what. It isn’t Dracula —”

  “No way would he dirty his palms with pentagrams. Can’t you remember?”

  “No! That’s why I’m asking you.”

  “A werewolf.”

  “Right!”

  “So you think a werewolf is involved?”

  “No, but somebody might want us to think so.”

  “So we’d look even more ridiculous to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department?”

  “A lot of the victims are people involved professionally in magic.”

  “That doesn’t make them consorters with werewolves, Temple, m’dear. In fact, just the opposite. The magic professional despises any intimations of the weird or paranormal surrounding the art. We are illusionists. We create mysteries for others. We don’t cherish any illusions ourselves.”

  “Hah! Shows what you know about your own self, Mr. Mystifying Max. Don’t worry. I’d never suspect you of being a werewolf. No, you’ve got to be a vampire: shuttered windows, night person, wears black.”

  “Just to prove you wrong I’ll pick up a pizza with garlic on the way over.”

  “Done!”

  After she disconnected the phone, Temple wondered how to kill time. Max wouldn’t take long to get there. Las Vegas boasted almost as many great pizza places as it did wedding chapels.

  Midnight Louie had abandoned his tummy-up position and hit the hardwood floor with a thump. He stalked over to the French doors and gazed out on Temple’s second-floor patio. Most people would assume the big black cat was watching for birds, but Temple understood that he was watching for Max.

  Somehow Louie always knew when his predecessor in the role of roommate was coming over. Temple had never owned a cat before she had found Louie running loose in the exhibition hall of the convention center a year ago, and also had stumbled over, literally, her first murder victim. She hadn’t realized yet that the verb “owning” was wishful thinking when it came to cats.

  If anything, Louie owned her, and often acted like it.

  Now that he was absorbed with guard duty, Temple pulled the papers back toward her, smoothing any wrinkles Louie had pressed into them.

  She paused, realizing that Louie’s maneuvers had left the strange figure upside down. And it looked weirdly familiar in that position. Not like something you saw every day, certainly, but like something. Some similar conjunction of crude lines she had seen. Somewhere.

  Great! She would be the Queen of Vague when she trotted this sketch around desperately seeking a definition for it.

  Movement in the sun-dappled room suddenly caught her eye: Louie trotting swiftly into the main room.

  He seldom troubled to move faster than necessary, so Temple jumped up to follow the cat.

  She hadn’t heard a thing, but Max had materialized in the living room like the imposing magician he was, six-feet-four, lean and all in black from hair to toe except for the white-and-red cardboard pizza box he held before him like a tray.

  “Not climbing the balcony today?” she asked, referring to his usual second-story-man approach.

  “Didn’t want the pepperoni to slide off the mozzarella. Vertical ascensions don’t suit pizzas.”

  Temple was already rooting in the hip-pocket kitchen’s cupboards and drawers for plates, knives, and napkins. Fingers would do for the rest.

  “Are you still worried about being seen here?”

  “Now more than ever,” he answered fervently.

  She saw that he was serious. “Why?”

  “The forces of evil seem to be gathering.”

  “Of evil? Or crime?”

  “I think it’s just outright evil, but crime trails after evil like a kid brother trying to keep up.”

  “Evil. The Synth?”

  Max pulled a triangular piece from the precut slab of crust, cholesterol, and tomato sauce as red as blood.

  Eating it allowed him to mull his answer. “I started thinking about who would be in the Synth. I know or know of most of the professional magicians around. I can’t see any of them being seriously irritated by the Cloaked Conjurer. At that level, they’re institutions. Everybody knows they’re trickmeisters, and their level of trick is not what CC is exposing. He blows the whistle on dated stuff; illusions we’ve all had to reinvent or forget. So the Synth —”

  “Has to be ‘nothing but a bunch of bloody amateurs!’” Temple declaimed in a thundering British accent.

  “‘Bloody’ may be eerily appropriate. Where’d you come up with that quote?”

  “Spoken by the late great Tyrone Guthrie, the British director who founded a repertory company in the American Midwest, my alma mater in Minneapolis, after trying to coax a professional performance of Oedipus Rex out of some college-level theater students as a demonstration. He burst out with that sentence. It became a catch phrase around his namesake theater forever.”

  “I’m afraid we’re ‘a bunch of bloody amateurs’ in the face of what’s really going on here. Which is why I brought this.”

  Max reached into his pocket to pull out an object.

  Temple was so stunned at the directness of the gesture — usually an ex-magician like Max couldn’t resist producing physical objects out of thin air — that she stared at him instead of it for a moment.

  The overhead kitchen fluorescent light cast an admittedly harsh shadow, but Max’s lean face looked hollow instead of sleek. Temple saw strain in the taut tilt of his eyes, and he looked tired. No, dispirited.

  “We never had time to go to the firing range,” he was saying, regretfully.

  “Ah, you did notice my extremely awkward relationship with firearms out at the Rancho Exotica? I’m better off unarmed.”

  “I don’t like guns either. This is just pepper spray. You have to snap the cover open and move the spray head out of the guarded position. Then press away.”

  Temple curled her fingers around the molded edge of the leatherette carrying case, unsnapped the flap, and rotated the little white plastic nozzle into the armed position. It looked like a key chain giveaway, or something kids in a kinder, gentler time used to send for through the mail from ads at the back of comic books.

  “You sure it doesn’t double as a decoder ring?” she quipped.

  “No, it just sprays very hot pepper. Be careful not to let any get in your eyes if you have to use it. Works against mad dogs, and Englishmen too.”

  She glanced at Midnight Louie, looking natty as a rug on the black-and-white-tiled floor. He was dispatching a pepperoni circle that Max had slipped to him.

  “Who am I supposed to be using it against?” Temple asked. “Besides mad dogs and Englishmen?”

  “Whoever chased you with the car at TitaniCon. Whoever was getting pushy with your entire party at the convention. I don’t know who, but you will if he/she/it/they ever have you cornered.”

>   “Yeah.” Temple kept silent to chew on pizza and a scene from the past: a parking garage, two strange men, blows, pain, humiliation, fear. She glanced at the petite pepper spray. Would that have helped her then? Only if she carried it where it was instantly accessible.

  “And,” Max said, not quite meeting her eyes, “it wouldn’t hurt to put Matt Devine on your distant acquaintance list, since he seemed to be the main target at TitaniCon.”

  “Yeah, well…” Temple swallowed too much pizza too fast and almost choked. “The way he’s been acting lately, that won’t be a problem. Is something going on I should know about?”

  “Nothing concrete.” Max expelled a huff of frustrated breath. He got busy inhaling more pizza. “Never hurts to be cautious,” he said finally.

  That also held true for interpersonal relationships. Temple bit back a lot more questions. They sounded more like an interrogation in her mind.

  Besides, it was time to put the leftover pizza in the refrigerator and show Max her handy-dandy list of murderous events.

  She hopped off the stool, avoiding Louie who was still cleaning up undevoured pepperoni while a full, fresh bowl of Free-To-Be-Feline lay untouched not three feet away.

  “You’re spoiling him,” she warned Max.

  “Consider it a bribe.” He glanced back with a grin, satisfied that the cat was remaining behind to finish dinner. “I always feel I have a Victorian father scowling at me whenever that cat’s around the place.”

  “A Victorian father? Louie?” Temple laughed. “No, I picture him more as a Mob enforcer. You know, Louie the Shiv from Cicero.”

  “How about Louie the Lip from Jersey?”

  They were laughing as they entered the office. The sun had moved to the other side of the building, so Temple switched on the student lamp on her desk. Its warm yellow light hit the enlarged drawing she’d made like a spotlight.

  “All wrong.” Max had stopped just inside the door to regard it from a distance.

  “How?”

  “Not your sketch. The original. It’s too crude. Why go to the trouble of stabbing the professor with a custom knife with a hokey Satanist handle, why import all the S and M paraphernalia, and then surround the man’s body with such a plain-Jane arcane symbol? I’ve seen ritual markings. They’re elaborate and based on something…alchemy or horoscope symbols, alien hieroglyphs. This giant ‘house’ is too bland for that kind of mind-set.”

  Temple took a deep breath. “Then it must really mean something, and all the other props are distraction.” She waggled her left-hand fingers.

  “And meanwhile the right hand is scrawling these five pathetic lines on the floor? It think it’s all a distraction. Let’s see your list.”

  Temple pulled it from under the drawing.

  In the bright artificial light of early evening, with someone else looking on, her brave new approach looked as childish as the drawing.

  “It’s just a list,” she said before he could point out the obvious.

  Max had come close to read it, and stood with folded elbows staring down at the names, and especially the blank places.

  “Why’d you include the dead men in the casino ceilings?”

  “Nobody’s really been charged with their murders, although Molina’s pretty sure you had something to do with the Goliath one.”

  “Why is Effinger listed?”

  “Molina turned those two thugs over to the DEA. Wasn’t it assumed they’d killed Effinger, though proving it would be hard?”

  “If Effinger was tied into anything, it was those two casino deaths, especially since the second guy looked like him. I happen to think that sequence has nothing to with the later murders.”

  “But…you call it a sequence.”

  Max just nodded. Then his long forefinger stabbed a blank slot under the “Suspect” heading. “You can put a name in here: Rafi Nadir.”

  “Rafi Nadir…what kind of name is that?”

  “Lebanese, maybe Lebanese-American. I don’t know.”

  “For Cher Smith’s murder? Who is this Rafi guy?”

  “You’ve met him.”

  “No way!”

  “I wish you hadn’t, but you did.”

  “How do you know —? Max, you were there when I met him!”

  “Elementary, my dear Temple.”

  “Don’t tell me,” she ordered. She was already irritated that he knew something he hadn’t told her. Now she would have to figure out on her own who this Rafi Nadir was and when she had “met” him.

  Max wished she hadn’t met him. It must have been recently, because they’d been hanging out together more. That creepy guy in the desert, the knife and chain-mail bikini maker. Mace was his name, though maybe it was a nickname.

  She glanced at Max. He was smiling, watching her mental wheels turn, spin, and dig themselves deeper into a rut.

  Somebody at the science fiction convention? But everybody there wore some stupid costume, and they certainly didn’t use names unless they were Spock or Data.

  Max wished she hadn’t met him. A moment flashed into her mind. Looking over her shoulder at Max and seeing a deep flicker of fear beneath the surface anger. And looking forward from that moment, she was staring into the face of the Rancho Exotica guard who had made a point of lifting her down from the Jeep, an act she could have managed all by herself.

  “The macho guy at the ranch. The guy you later told me had to get out of there at the end before the police came. I could tell you hated to see him leave the scene of the crime as much as you hated to leave it yourself. But Molina was coming…so who is Rafi Nadir, Max?”

  He nodded in tribute to her impeccable deductions. “Ex-L.A. cop. Went rogue. Does shady muscle jobs, like at the ranch. Which was why I was furious when he laid hands on you.”

  Furious, Temple remembered. And frightened. She had never seen Max frightened before.

  “He also does bouncer work at the strip clubs,” Max added grimly.

  “That’s how you decided he was a suspect?”

  Max stared at her hand-drawn table as if an invisible rattlesnake lay coiled upon it. “Yeah. I saw him in the clubs. He liked to throw his weight around, particularly at a-hundred-and-ten-pound strippers. Someone…drew my attention to him.”

  Temple remained silent, studying her table, studying Max. He seemed to be talking and thinking on autopilot. Too little on his mind, or, more likely, too much.

  Whichever it was, he was not about to share his deepest inner concerns with her.

  Max mysterious was one thing: this was a given with a man who had made his living as a magician for so long. Max unable, or unwilling, to be forthcoming with her was something else. Someone else.

  “Anything more I should know?” she asked suddenly.

  He started slightly. That was also so unlike Max, showing surprise. “Know?” He was confused, playing for time while the cobwebs cleared.

  “Any more suspects I haven’t listed here, like this Nadir guy?”

  “Oh. No. Except for the amorphous Synth.”

  “Rafi doesn’t sound too sinister,” she said, lettering it in.

  “He goes by Raf.”

  “As in raffish?”

  “As in you wouldn’t want to win this bozo in a raffle. If you cross his path, stay away from him, Temple. He’s major breaking news in the local disaster department, especially for women.”

  “Yet you let him get away from the scene of the last crime before the police got there.”

  Max’s face froze as if she had said something astounding.

  “Scene of the crime? How did you —?”

  “I was there, remember? At Rancho Exotica.”

  “Oh, right, at Rancho Exotica.”

  That’s when Temple realized that there had to have been another scene of the crime where both Max and Rafi were present, but she hadn’t been.

  “Apparently he’s as eager to dodge Molina as you are,” she said, probing now.

  Again Max tensed, right on the name,
which Temple had dropped the same way some people would toss a grenade into a garden party: casually, but with oh-so-lethal intent. The bombshell was the name Molina. Homicide Lieutenant C. R. Molina, lady cop, lady blood-hound when it came to Max and his vague past and all-too-often suspect present.

  “Let’s face it,” Max said, deciding to hide behind humor, “what red-blooded man wouldn’t want to dodge Molina? Except maybe Matt Devine.”

  Now Max was dropping his own grenades. Temple tried not to feel the spray of psychic shrapnel. When had their consultation become a chess game?

  When the name Rafi Nadir had come up.

  The one man Temple had ever seen who frightened Max. Excepting Matt, and that was a very different kind of fear.

  Why? Who was Rafi Nadir, really?

  And why wouldn’t Max tell her a damn thing about him?

  Feral Foul

  As everybody knows, the world-weary private eye must sometimes tread on the dark side of danger.

  Mean Streets R Us.

  By us I mean the old-time guys: Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Travis McGee. We are a breed apart. We are not afraid to get our digits dirty, our eyes blackened, our whiskers wet, or our ears wiped.

  You can knock us down, but not out.

  Okay, sometimes you can knock us out.

  But not off.

  Anyway, having observed my Miss Temple struggling to make sense of the string of murderous events that have dogged her teeny-tiny high-heeled footsteps since we met, I decide to take action.

  It was nice of her to share her deductive reasoning with me. I truly enjoyed our consultation over Sunday morning coffee. We make a good team. She is the cream in my coffee, and I am the caffeine in her cream. She is sugar. I am spice. But she can be feisty, and I can be nice when it suits me.

  However, when it comes to ferreting out information from the lower elements, there is no way that I will allow my Miss Temple to dirty her tootsies with a walk on the wild side. I will go this part of the case alone.