Cat in an Alphabet Endgame: A Midnight Louie Mystery (The Midnight Louie Mysteries Book 28)

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “You think?”

  “Everyone your age does, you just get distracted from showing it. What have you got to lose? A rejection? But you will have been considered, and you can try it again.”

  “It could backfire on me.”

  “It could. That’s why your parents have to read it. Where do you want to make an impact? In high school? Or in the future?”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, gravely.

  She thought about something else during ten beats of radio silence.

  “Gosh, Mr. Midnight, you’re way better than sexy.”

  Matt smiled. “Thank you, Jessica. Thank you very much.”

  The next voice was a world away from soft teenage girl doubt. It was deep, hoarse, male, and there was no doubt about it.

  “Hi, there, Mr. Midnight. I’ve been around the block. I’m usually giving advice, not asking for it.”

  Matt felt his throat tighten. No doubt, this was Woodrow Wetherly, the Molina-referred retired cop now turned creepy.

  “And I’m usually not up this late, Mr. Midnight. Gotta admit I’d never tuned in your show until lately. My, those sweet little female fans you draw…nice work if you can get it.”

  “You say you’re asking for advice—?” Matt waited for the name.

  “Call me Old Bill. Old Bill come due. Heh-heh-heh-heh.” That long wheezing high-pitched laugh was more sinister than the man’s usual low rumbling voice.

  “Bill will do,” Matt said. “We don’t need to age ourselves before our time.”

  “You may not, but I am just darn old. You don’t sound that way. You sound young, sonny. Too young to be handing out advice.”

  “You don’t have to take it. In fact, we’ve got a line-up of calls waiting, if you don’t—”

  “Oh, no. No kiss-off. You gave that pretty little thing plenty of time. Just because I ain’t a fan is no reason to cut me off.”

  “You need to state your problem, sir, or the moving finger of fate moves on in talk radio.”

  “All right, all right. Keep your pants on. Or I guess you don’t have to since you’re on the radio.” Another wheezing laugh.

  Dave was about to cut Woody off, when Matt shook his head “No” and the old man complied simultaneously.

  “My problem is a lie, Mr. Midnight. Call me old-fashioned, and I already told you to call me Old Bill. What happens when someone you don’t know from Adam introduces himself nice and proper, comes with recommendations even, and you find out he’s a liar, and he’s got a whole lot more in mind than you know.”

  “Are you talking about someone out to defraud you, sell you an insurance plan you don’t need? I can direct you to the Better Business Bureau or the Senior Services division of your local government…”

  “Darn it! I want to know what you would say. If you were in my shoes.”

  “I’d want to be sure he’d told me a lie. And then I’d ask him why.”

  “Yeah, I could do that. But I only have his work number and I’m old-school, as I said. It’s not right to call someone up at his work number and hassle him. And if I found his home number and called him there, it might upset the family. Maybe they don’t know what he’s gotten himself into.”

  “Bill—”

  “No, wait. I got it now. Thanks. I’ll find another way to send him a message.”

  “Old Bill come due” hung up and a woman’s voice wafted into Matt’s ears.

  “Oh, Mr. Midnight, I’m so glad I got through…”

  Matt looked at his watch. Like Temple, he liked the assurance of the time right there with second hands, but the multi-device wrist was here.

  Stuck here for an hour and a half more, Woody’s threats running like rats on the treadmill of his mind. Stuck here trying to catch the caller’s problem. He pulled out his cell phone to dial Temple. It went to message. She always had her phone on. She was always in the condo at this hour. Had there been another intruder? Should he cut and run? Or had he let Woodrow Wetherly spook him?

  “Yes,” he heard himself encouraging the caller to talk herself out while he figured what to do. What he could do.

  Luckily, it was the usual lonely hearts call, and Matt could advise her by rote. He hated his own glibness, but she ate up every self-help cliché and hung up gushing thanks.

  Dave’s bushy eyebrows raised along with his right forefinger. Signals that meant, Wow. A hot one incoming.

  Matt sat up straighter, more than ready to hear the next caller. The show was dying.

  It was another male caller, with a pleasant, deep, drawling voice.

  “Mr. Midnight, I like what you said to that little girl. She needs to know she counts. She needs to know she’s treasured. I grew up with that, and it made all the difference. You are our Las Vegas midnight hero, local boy gone syndicated. Your voice has the right pitch to make the mic go and fall right in love with it.”

  Matt felt a chill up the back of his head. “Did you grow up in Vegas, sir?”

  “‘Sir.’ I like that. Real polite. You can never be too polite. Did I grow up in Vegas?” A deep rolling chuckle let the mic have its way with it. “You could say that, though I’ve been away for forty years. Hardly seems it. Forty years. On the other hand, you could say I did not grow up at all in my early Vegas moments, if you know what I mean.”

  Dave signaled Matt frantically through the studio glass window, circling his forefingers to “keep going”. Matt got it. FBI guy and ex-priest Frank Bucek would signal the same thing if he were here. And Matt’s former seminary mentor just might be somewhere in Vegas. Matt had thought he’d glimpsed him once. Not in a good place. Outside the nudie bar where Wetherly had taken him in the name of research into Cliff Effinger.

  Dave was tapping on the studio glass, frowning and waving.

  Matt shook off that memory and saw all the phone lines were lit up.

  “You ‘didn’t grow up in Vegas’?” He fought for time to adjust to a voice that seemed so familiar…to everyone. “What do you mean?”

  “Aw, I was so young, wanted every toy I’d never gotten, every girl. So I did what they wanted and let ’em ‘market me’.” He dropped into an eerily spot-on Marlon Brando voice saying an iconic line. “I coulda been a contender. Done real movies instead of sappy stuff. I had every line in every part of my first movie memorized when I got to Hollywood. Man, if I hadn’t have let Colonel Parker demand first billing over Barbra Streisand on that A Star is Born remake… She had a heck of a voice and was a producer to boot. That would have been an A-1 acting job. I shoulda taken some heavy non-singing roles, like Frank.”

  “Frank?” The name of Matt’s mentor-turned agent from seminary again. “Oh, you mean Frank Sinatra.”

  “Yeah. The Frank. He owned Vegas, but I overtook him, after all.”

  “You could have overruled Colonel Parker on the Streisand film. He was just your manager.”

  “Oh, no, sir. He did so much for me, and my mama was gone and there was only him to guide me.”

  “He became notorious for mismanaging you and your money.”

  The drawn-out sigh could have auditioned to be an aria. “I won’t say folks didn’t lead me astray. Things look different from a different place, a different time. But I can’t leave Vegas. This is where I laid it all down, every night. For my fans, my audience. Anyway, I have some tips for you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. The billboards show you’re a blond guy. I hear you’re going TV.”

  Matt cringed to hear that going out over the radio. The opportunity was hush-hush and very uncertain. Only four people in Vegas knew that. How—?

  “Anyway, why I’m calling is I have some career advice. I was born blond. A natural blond. Not good. I noticed when I was real young dark-haired guys did better on the screen. Tony Curtis. Robert Taylor. I decided right then I needed to be dark-haired onstage…only those film actors didn’t have to sweat the rock and roll until the hair dye ran down into their eyes. And I did. That stung, and worse.

&nbs
p; “But I don’t see your new talk gig involving a lot of sweat. So ditch the blond hair.”

  “Thanks. I’ll consider it. Anyway, it’s good to hear from you. Again.”

  “I’m a performer. Gotta stay up to wind down after my shows.”

  “And you’re back at the International causing a sensation,” Matt pointed out.

  “So they say.” The voice turned wistful, younger. “I’d like to try something new, but everyone wants the same old, same old. I finally was jus’ about to die of boredom, you know what I mean?”

  “Well, hey, you gotta love your new Vegas digs. It’s a shrine, really.”

  “Yeah. Classy. Everything I loved once is there now as well as in Graceland. My wheels, my wardrobe. Even Priscilla sometimes. Big change from my first gig in Vegas, that they said the usual gray-hairs in the audience didn’t get and wasn’t successful. It was, my man. They just didn’t know how. How I got some new tricks off the stage.”

  “You know how back as a kid in Tupelo, Mississippi, I’d go to black clubs to hear the blues, and anywhere I’d go to black churches to listen to Gospel?”

  “I know you loved blues and Gospel,” Matt said with a smile in his voice. “I do too. Especially Gospel. I went to black churches to hear it myself.” Matt didn’t mention he’d been a Catholic priest at the time.

  Dave was smiling on the other side of the glass and every phone line had gone dead. People were just listening to that slow, musing voice.

  Whether this was one of hundreds of Elvis tribute performers and wanna-bes, an obsessed fan, a deranged actor, a ghost, or a mass hallucination, it was ratings gold. And, Matt believed, the King might be feeling lonely tonight, but he had a message for Matt.

  “You have a good show there, Mr. Midnight. Cool handle. You offer good advice, like to that little girl who doesn’t quite know where she’s going, or can go. I seen lots of little girls like that.”

  “Thank you.” Matt quashed an impulse to add: “Thank you very much.”

  “Nice and polite, but nobody’s fool. Now that ‘old Bill’ guy who called in. I don’t have a good feeling about him. There is something ‘off’ there. Reminds me a bit of the Colonel. Yeah, I know now he was bad for me in the end, but he tried real hard at the beginning, and I don’t have to see or hear or think about him anymore. We aren’t in the same place now, if you get what I mean?”

  “I do”, Matt said. “And am glad to hear that.”

  “I don’t wish anybody ill. We all are just all doin’ the best that we can, from where we come from and where we’re going.”

  “You know, maybe I should turn this show over to you.”

  The laugh was long and musical. “No, but you should get that black dye job.” The voice grew fainter and reminiscent.

  “Jumpin’ Jack Robinson. Black cat. Wore a black-and-white, pin-striped zoot suit. He was like a fistful of jumpin’ jacks, all right. Man, he could make those zoot suit pantaloons and that long, long steel cat chain at the side shake, rattle and roll. Proud that chain came off a toilet. Makin’ do and makin’ do well enough to own his own club. Down some rickety stairs to a basement like in speakeasy days. Way off from where the New Frontier was on highway US-91.

  “When I got married at the Aladdin in sixty-seven, Howard Hughes was buying the New Frontier and some guy named Steve Wynn had a small interest in it. I remember seein’ that in the paper and remembering my first Vegas gig. The New Frontier had a big cut-out image of me at the curb, grinnin’ with my guitar like I was a ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign. The city was not very welcomin’ that first time, until the Colonel got some teenagers in on the weekend.

  “Anyway, after our performances, me and my three band boys didn’t go for gamblin’ casinos. We visited other acts. They were all white in those days, but we heard about this weird little place.”

  Matt’s heart almost stopped. He knew what was coming.

  “The Zoot Suit Choo-Choo Club. Learned some moves off that cat I never did in Memphis. Killed, though. He was hung by that make-shift cat chain. Not long after I left town.

  “Nobody much noticed me, until I had my TV comeback Special and came back to Vegas in sixty-nine. Whole different Vegas then. The Rat Pack with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Two crooners, an actor-in-law to President Kennedy, a comic and a singin’, dancin’ dude like two Jumpin’ Jack Robinsons, all on the main stage of the big hotel-casinos. Like I was. The Zoot Suit Choo-Choo Club wasn’t even history. No surprise. I was almost history before my comeback. Then the Rat Pack soon became history and Vegas was mine. For a time, Mr. Midnight. I think you know that. For a time. A time is all anybody gets and we need to make the most of it.”

  Matt’s feelings and intellect suspended. Elvis at eighty, had he lived, back on the radio? Might as well be with half of Graceland a Vegas attraction now. A smart business decision. The “Memphis cat” and his heartland house and legend needed more tourist exposure.

  What next? A Disney cruise? Elvis would love his Vegas shrine. He could relive his earliest days, when he used to sneak nights into the Zoot Suit Choo-Choo Club along with other performers around the dark side of the Strip.

  “You still with me?” Elvis’s voice took Matt’s mind off of Jumping Jack Robinson’s murder, not suicide.

  “So, Mr. Midnight. You should live up to your name. You wanna do some ebony black hair, so dark it gets blue highlightenin’. Blue Lightning. And don’t knock sweat. I don’t think a talker like you will sweat enough. A rocker will. That’s what they loved me for. I sweated my heart out for them. Once they don’t see you sweat, they don’t love you anymore. You’ve got to let it pour out.”

  Dave was signaling something as the caller’s voice faded and stopped.

  Pore out, Matt thought. Right. It’s all right, Mama. No, it wasn’t. Not after Mama died. What do you do when you’ve got everything in the world except the one who loves you?

  Dave had queued up his closing song. “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

  Matt sat in the WCOO parking lot, his silver Jaguar from the Chicago producers the last car left, sitting under a glaring light, for security against theft. Two thirty a.m. and even the engineer had left. WCOO would broadcast canned music until dawn. It was a small station, lucky to have two syndicated shows.

  The greenish lamp above highlighted his white-knuckled grip on the leather steering wheel. Visibility was now not a haven, but a liability. He finally started the car and moved it, purring contentedly, to the darkest side of the lot, overshadowed by a high wall of Photinia bushes. Cars were made to run, but maybe ex-priest amateur detectives should consider it too.

  Maybe he and the car they gave him should run right to the network TV executives who’d offered him a juicy talk show gig in Chicago, with Temple riding shotgun, literally. The Bonnie and Clyde of the Circle Ritz.

  Matt laughed aloud, softly, at his self-mocking scenario. That was something Temple would dream up.

  He eyed the dashboard clock. He couldn’t sit and think long now that he and Temple were sleeping at her place. That made his clandestine investigations harder to conceal. The whole point of sleeping together had been to avoid hypocrisy before they married…well, other benefits were the real draw.

  He knew a threat when he heard one. Now that Woodrow Weatherly was joining Elvis in stalking him on The Midnight Hour, his quest to unravel his stepfather’s grisly murder was even more dangerous. Trouble was, something just as sinister seemed to haunt the Circle Ritz vicinity, or inhabitants.

  He let the idling car off its leash and headed onto the randomly lit two-lane road that led through a flatland of deserted industrial park buildings. Radio stations were built on urban fringes. The Strip’s ever more towering Babel of new hotel-condominiums around the iconic brands of the Caesars Entertainment and MGM Mirage consortiums made the distant horizon glare look like a sunrise was imminent.

  Not for him.

  He couldn’t feed his need-to-brood mood any lon
ger.

  A bright yellow headlight appeared behind him, far and small, but incoming.

  The mysterious motorcyclist who had followed him months ago was back. Along with Elvis. Or…Elvis himself?

  Matt blinked and saw the oncoming light glaring on his inner eyelids.

  The usual suspects burned a similar single-minded path through his brain.

  Vengeful psychopath Kathleen O’Connor had left the country for Ireland. Probably traveling with Max Kinsella, the chief object of her homicidal obsession, who was drawing her away from Temple and himself. Also a motorcycle lover.

  That left, most whimsically, the King. Elvis, obsessed with anything that had an engine. Cars. Big buses he personally drove to Las Vegas. A private jet. And motorcycles.

  And Matt himself, who’d used Max’s ’cycle for a time and had probably drawn an even uglier antagonist down on them all.

  Matt glanced at the single headlight.

  “Padiddle,” he said under his breath. It was a road game. Call out that word when you spot a car with a single headlight or remove on article of clothing if you don’t.

  But this was not a car and he wasn’t into strip poker of any type. So, like Elvis, he needed to discover what kind of engine it had. Had to know if it was Max’s vintage Hesketh Vampire Brit motorcycle he’d left stored in Circle Ritz landlady Electra Lark’s shed.

  Only one way to find out. The Hesketh earned its name from the otherworldly scream the motor let out at high speeds.

  He had a straightaway to the main highway and a car that did zero to sixty miles an hour in four seconds. He’d never stretched it much over the legal limit. He did now, even though he was doing forty. With spine-numbing speed, he was slammed back in the seat. The Jag leaped ahead, smooth as a steel arrow, a racehorse from the gate, like the famous leaping chrome jaguar hood ornament, already charging.

  Matt was surprised by an adrenaline kick of pure escapist joy followed by a grim satisfaction that nothing could catch him unless he wanted it to.