Cat in an Alien X-Ray: A Midnight Louie Mystery (Midnight Louie Mysteries Book 25)

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “There’s no law that I have to!” she shouted as the missing videographer, a tall portly guy, appeared and ushered Buchanan away. “What a putz,” she told Temple.

  “Thanks for getting rid of him. I’m Temple and I’m looking for my cat.”

  “I’m Penny, and I’m looking for my dog. He slipped the collar of his harness.” The woman pulled up her left hand, holding a leash and empty harness.

  Temple had a feeling Midnight Louie had been the harness undoer. “That’s a tiny harness. What kind of dog do you have?”

  The woman chuckled. “He’s a husky Chihuahua.”

  “I’ve seen a few overweight Chihuahuas, but that would be big even on them.”

  “Rens is not overweight, but he does look more like a Siberian husky, only tiny.”

  “Gosh, he could get lost underfoot.” Temple looked around at the carelessly milling crowd taking photos of Area 54.

  “He has a lot of sense, small body, big brain. But I do want to find him.”

  “What brought you and Rens here?”

  “We like to see the passing parade, and this sure is a doozy. I don’t believe in this stuff.”

  Temple nodded.

  “Besides, if aliens did decide to enter our solar system and check Earth out, I believe they’d be galactic conquerors or so different than us, they’d regard stamping us out the way we’d stomp on a scorpion.” Penny’s shoe stamped in demonstration.

  Temple jumped. No scorpions were underfoot, but a cat tail … or a little dog paw could be.

  Then she spotted a familiar street sight. “I’m going over there to look for Rens and Louie.”

  Penny turned her head. “Good thinking. I’ll go the other way.”

  Glad she’d hadn’t had time to don the hat before her impromptu “face time” in front of Awful Crawford’s videographer, Temple tied it on. The wide brim softened the glare and made searching the scene easier, and Buchanan—and Molina—might not recognize her, always a good idea.

  When Temple reached the mobile “pop-up” hot dog stand, a little dog, who did sport the coat color of a husky, was sitting up behind the counter with the operator, getting hot dog bits from time to time. It was amazing. He had the bigger breed’s widow’s peak coloration on his forehead, and carried his feathered tail over his back in a wolf–spitz curl. Yet he was the size of a Chihuahua.

  Temple’s sigh of relief could have launched a model sailing boat. This was definitely Rens.

  Temple eyed the deep black shadow under the truck. She spotted a flash of iridescent green from a cat iris before it winked out.

  She was willing to bet that Midnight Louie would be back at the Circle Ritz before she was.

  Meanwhile, she needed to reunite Rens with his Penny.

  “Hi,” she told the pop-up stand operator, a burly guy who could have played a marine recruiter in a movie.

  “You want a dog, lady?”

  “Yes. That one.” She pointed at Rens.

  “This little fella?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “He just showed up, so how do I know he’s yours?”

  “He’s not, but I’ve just been talking to his owner, who’s pretty distraught.”

  “I don’t know … everybody’s been wanting to claim him.”

  Temple didn’t have time or energy left to trek back and forth in this mob. She set her heels, opened her arms like someone about to burst into song, and called, “Rens!”

  The little dog bounded into her chest like a furry bullet. Temple swayed on her feet, but got heel traction fast and closed her arms around one happy fluffball.

  The burly man looked about to cry. “I guess this little guy knows his name, and you do too. I was thinking we’d make a good team, Big Mike and Shorty. My customers were eating him up.”

  Temple hoped he wasn’t speaking literally.

  “Visit the local shelter,” she suggested over her shoulder as she toted the lightweight dog away. “I bet they have more in need of homes.”

  Shelters were overflowing with Chihuahuas and Chihuahua mixes, she knew, because of the “purse pooch” fad. Rens was sure a lot lighter than Louie.

  She spotted a down-faced Penny gazing back and forth like a scanning camera as she returned to where she’d discovered Rens was missing. Then she saw her dog being toted along at shoulder level.

  “That’s my dog!”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Did you take him?”

  Temple was stunned, and people around them were suddenly paying attention. “No. I found him for you.”

  “How did you even know he was missing? How do I know that you didn’t take him?”

  They were now the center of a circle of animal lovers. Holy jalapeño! Penny was even more suspicious than the hot dog vendor.

  “We—we talked,” Temple said, Temple who never stuttered, who always had even the worst public relations disaster firmly in hand.

  “I don’t know you.”

  Temple felt the crowd pressing closer. Rens whimpered.

  “Do you have any distinguishing characteristics?” Penny demanded.

  “Uh, a few freckles, but I usually use a cover-up.”

  “Besides your face.”

  Temple thought. She looked down, where Rens’s tiny harness still hung empty at the end of the short leash. “My red high heels?”

  “Oh. You’re that lady. Okay. Thanks so much!” She reached to take Rens into full custody as people turned away and moved on.

  “My little Rens, where have you been?” She rubbed noses with the alert mini husky face.

  “He got as far as the hot dog stand. Say, um, Penny, why were you treating me like a petnapper?”

  “Oh, that.” Penny shrugged. “You should have told me you had red hair under that hat you just put on, not that you had freckles.”

  “I guess my red hair is more memorable than my freckles, but I’m more self-conscious of my freckles.” Then Temple had a wild hope. Were her freckles really that minor and she didn’t know it? Could she throw out the vanishing cream?

  “Your freckles don’t register with me.” Penny smiled. “To me your face is a blank space on a map. I have a learning disability that affects only two and a half percent of the population. It’s called prosopagnosia. My brain doesn’t process faces. And it’s hell. The condition has been covered by TV shows like Sixty Minutes.”

  Temple nodded. She’d heard of that problem. She’d also heard that one facility humans had that animals didn’t was … the ability to recognize faces.

  “I’m sorry. That must be … surreal for you,” she told Penny.

  “I’ve learned to focus on pieces of a person. Like hair color, clothing, mannerisms, posture. Freckles! No go. Can’t see ’em. You’re freckle-free with me, kiddo! Just remind me about the red hair and high heels next time we cross paths.”

  Temple doubted their paths would cross again.

  “Do you know what the worst things about this condition are?” Penny asked.

  Temple shook her head. She was almost afraid to hear.

  “One, it makes me brutally honest, so I have a hard time keeping friends. I can’t lie, because I won’t recognize the person I lied to. So I tell the truth at all times. That can get to be a real pain.”

  “So you genuinely forgot Crawford Buchanan,” Temple mused aloud, remembering his confusion.

  “Yes, at first. But then I remembered his oily hair—way too much product, dude! So I played dumb just to tick him off because he was a stuck-up, phony sort of person. I got to snub someone for a change. Everyone always thinks I’m snubbing them in public, like you did here, when they see me in passing on the street and I don’t recognize them.”

  Temple couldn’t begin to contemplate the adjustments such a condition would demand of her and her job, but she had a suggestion for one issue: “Just be a smiley person and nod at anyone you pass who makes eye contact. Strangers will think you’re a bubbly personality, and people who know you will probabl
y stop to chat and you can use your ID system, or get a clue from their conversation.”

  “Hmm. I’m not a bubbly person. I told you, I have to be brutally honest.”

  That was a problem. No wonder Penny was so attached to Rens. His love was unconditional. He’d leap for the sound of his name and know her voice.

  “Can you recognize Rens’s face?”

  “It’s the same, except dogness is easier to isolate.”

  “One other thing I’m curious about,” Temple said.

  “Only one? You’re easy.”

  “With this problem, why come out to join a mob of people like this, all faces you can’t really see? And you are really skeptical of the UFO fever all around here.”

  “Simple. It’s a great laboratory. I practice remembering strangers in the crowd by things beside their faces. Plus, I think they’re all silly for getting caught up in this UFO and ancient-alien stuff. Any aliens who are out there, we definitely don’t want to meet.”

  “Even if you don’t have to see their weird alien faces.”

  “Especially if I have to remember them by other traits. I mean, who’d want to have a memory of tentacles?”

  Chapter 33

  Synth You’ve Been Gone

  Once Rens—that walking contradiction in genetics, the mini husky Chihuahua—was restored to his person, I begin to think I could safely lock myself back in the Miata with my Miss Temple being none the wiser.

  I am about to make myself scarce on the alien flash mob scene, when something familiar flashes across my field of vision and kisser like a chorus girl’s black ostrich fan.

  I sneeze, not the suave reaction I hope for during an encounter with a chorus girl. Once my eyes blink open again, I am disappointed to discover the firm’s junior partner has joined the melee.

  “Off cadging free lunches again, huh, Pops? This time with the local vermin of a canine nature,” Miss Midnight Louise admonishes me.

  If she really were my daughter, as she claims, she would defer to my parental role and let me do the admonishing. Or … maybe not. Miss Midnight Louise does not take correction well at all. She is what they call liberated and I call impertinent to her elders.

  “A guy has got to keep his energy up.”

  “For what? Naps?”

  “Research has shown that the dude who naps lives longer to nap again.” That comment does not quite come out right.

  “You were not napping when you did that swan dive off the top of the so-called parking garage. You are drawing the public’s attention to a lot of bodies of late. You could damage Midnight Investigations, Inc.’s reputation.”

  “You know I did my earlier body-discovery work for Ma Barker’s clowder.”

  “Yes. I am also invited for lunch with them at the police substation from time to time, and get caught up on all the gossip then.”

  “You lunch on Big Macs and Red Lobster?”

  “And Tastee Crème doughnuts,” she adds in a nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah tone.

  “I have never been invited. I am just asked to do the dirty work.”

  “Oh, come on. I have dipped into the trash containers at the Circle Ritz. Your Miss Temple is lavishing oysters and shrimp and sirloin beef tips on your Free-to-Be-Feline bowl.”

  “Yes, but it all has a certain odor of—” I cannot contain a shudder. “—FTBF.”

  “Yeah, there is a definite army green vibe to your roommate’s health food of choice. Have you ever tried putting some of it in her half-used cereal boxes and forcing her to face the stuff first thing in the morning?”

  “I would never subject my Miss Temple to such a dirty trick.

  “Although, Louise … maybe it would banish Free-to-Be-Feline forever. I would have to make it look like Miss Temple had mixed up the bag and the box contents. That could be done if I woke her up earlier than usual in the morning with one of my purr-massage-love-rub sessions.…

  “She would stumble into the kitchen half-asleep and—presto!—Free-to-Be-Feline in her bowl, with low-fat milk.

  “No, I cannot do that to low-fat milk.”

  “Anyway, Pops, I am not here to discuss cuisine.”

  “No kidding. What hair-brained scheme are you laying on me now?”

  “We need to break into the coroner’s office on Pinto Lane.”

  “What!? Are you crazy? Do not answer. That was a rhetorical question. Louise, the facility will be screwed down tighter than a rusty bolt with all these Alien nut jobs in town. Everybody from paparazzi to amateur bloggers wants to break in to eyeball and photograph The Hunk Who Fell to Earth. At the moment, he is more popular than Elvis. And that is going some in Las Vegas.

  “Do they fret about me? Are they worried about my delicate limbs being broken, along with my shivs? Am I on their cell phone and camcorder films? No. I am just a dust mite in a media-mad world, a tiny Cinderfella at the ball. An unsung hero.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Fame is fleeting, also YouTube hits. I am telling you. This is serious. I was there when you fell—”

  “You were? I did not see you rushing up to succor me.”

  “Hah. I was busy rushing up to the falling body once it hit the dirt, before any curious onlookers got a glimpse of it.”

  “So some dead human is more important than your supposed old man. I am really glad we are not related now.”

  “That is your unlikely story.”

  Louise can be merciless, but she is the female of the species. Bloodthirsty. Her mind is back on the corpse. She mews on. “I cannot say for sure—unless I inspect the body in the morgue. But…”

  Females are ferocious hunters and killers, did I mention that? Forget the cliché of them quailing at violence and mayhem.

  “And…,” she says after a final pinprick of her claw into my shoulder just in case I am not paying enough attention. “I think the scars on this guy’s back and sides were put there by the Cat Pack I led to defend the Synth from the two armed individuals in Darth Vader outfits at the Neon Nightmare, now defunct.”

  I catch my breath. What Miss Louise is calling defunct is not the Synth magicians’ club, or the invading Darth Vaders from that recent meeting I was not privileged (or invited, I guess) to participate in. No, it is only the Neon Nightmare nightclub that is closed and defunct.

  Louise does not know I was there much more recently with Miss Temple and Mr. Max, when my roommate’s speculations made it clear that some of the Synth members and wannabes are, um, dead, possibly by the hand of Synth recruiter Cosimo Sparks, himself now slain by person or persons unknown.

  So here I am being asked to consider that one of the two masked leaders and predators who fed on the Synth’s thirst for revenge might now be dead at the morgue, his body bearing identifying marks of the Cat Pack attack on that night when Miss Louise and her minions swarmed to protect Miss Temple and divert attention from her undetected presence.

  Whew. That is a lot of dead people, but then, Miss Temple’s Table of Crime Elements is longer than a grocery list for a reality TV cooking show.

  I sit back on the pillow of my most operative parts, stunned.

  For months and years, I have been protecting my main gal and her associated humans against renegade magicians, IRA terrorists, possible mob remnants, and a psycho serial killer.

  Now, it could be likely the secret malefactors at the top of the pyramid of crime are possibly from out of this world.

  Can it be that I am dealing here with murder most extraterrestrial?

  Chapter 34

  Law and Order: LVMPD

  “What is the Circle Ritz these days?” Molina asked him the moment Matt identified himself on the phone. “The new home of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang?”

  He was confused, maybe because he’d been mentally planning an approach to his problem.

  Molina relieved him of answering that seemingly irrelevant question as her voice on the phone answered for him. “Your inventive fiancée has been showing up at bizarre sites all over town, messing up crime scenes.”

&nbs
p; “Temple?”

  “You think I’m talking about Lydia, the Tattooed Lady?”

  “I’ve never met that entertaining individual, and don’t hope to,” Matt said, more confused than ever. He’d been too distracted to hear about any other crimes than the ones committed by Kathleen O’Connor.

  Also, he was uneasy anyway about trying to pump Molina for information when he was secretly playing psycho cat-and-mouse with the most wanted suspect on her—and everybody’s—unofficial Wanted Lists.

  “Temple’s trespassing on crime scenes? News to me.”

  “The significant other is always the last to know.” Molina sounded dire. “A client of hers happens to own the crime scene property.”

  Matt obviously needed to be brought up to date on his fiancée’s current events, but he wasn’t going to let a homicide lieutenant give him the first spin on what was going on.

  “I just called to see if I could make an appointment to talk to you about—”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  Had she somehow found out about his nightly 3 A.M. “sessions” at the Goliath Hotel?

  “UFOs,” her firm contralto boomed in his ear.

  Curiouser and curiouser. “UFOs? No, I’m interested in another mythical Las Vegas apparition. Mobsters.”

  “Hie yourself over to the three new mob museums or, better yet, to the Crystal Phoenix or Gangsters Hotels and convene a flock of Fontanas.”

  “I’m not talking about the Beretta of brothers in the Fontana clan. They’re as much for show as those mob museums popping up all over. But … I wondered how seriously mob their uncle, Macho Mario Fontana, was? Is.”

  “Before my day. Remember, I moved here from L.A. Are you serious?”

  “I did say so. Aren’t there a few leftover elements from the bad old days still bouncing around town?”

  Molina’s laugh was wary. “They’re all over at the Museum for Law Enforcement downtown, signing autographs.”

  “I am very serious.” Matt was aggravated enough to sound like it. Serious and steamed. “Can we talk or not?”

  “Sheesh. You Circle Ritz residents act like you have a private line to the police. If you’re that serious, visit me at the office. You know where Metro headquarters is located now?”