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

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Only the dead neon remains, stocked in the Neon Graveyard museum, a past art fondly remembered, but too passé to revive on a large scale. I and my compadres often stroll there, and I nap under the giant Silver Slipper shoe in honor of Miss Temple. Passed down from generation to generation of my lineage have been the sumptuous seafood entrees at, say, the Dunes amid Art Deco grandeur. All gone, gone utterly, along with plenteous inexpensive buffets. Now tourists desiring seafood at a hotel buffet must have the tops of their hands stamped like at a cheap nightclub to be scanned to give them entry if they have paid for that option.

  Yet desert flowers can lay dormant and then bloom spectacularly, even if only once in a blue-suede moon. And the media always loves a spectacular failure. And resurrection.

  Like Elvis, who was the quintessential Vegas entertainer, larger than life, flawed and beloved for it, immortal for his sad mortality.

  That is why Graceland in Memphis has created its first permanent outpost at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort and Casino.

  I find that news very exciting. Fact is, Elvis and I share a certain simpatico spirit. I have seen his ghost out and about in Las Vegas and am expecting even more encounters now that so many of his beloved objects have landed here.

  Some may pooh-pooh my “Elvis sightings”. True, a lot of nut jobs have claimed that honor. But none of them can also claim a historically established heritage of nine lives. That is how I believe I can see Elvis. I can slip in and out of my past and present lives if I am in the right meditative mood. It is nothing like the psychic powers Miss Electra’s overbearing companion, Karma, claims.

  These are dude-to-dude moments when our psyches intersect. They did not call Elvis “the Memphis Cat” for nothing. In fact, he and I cleared up the cold case about who killed Jumpin’ Jack Robinson at the Zoot Suit Choo-Choo to get the land it sat on, which still has a valuable, but lost, gambling license. He went there in person as a young first-time Vegas act and I went there in spirit, diving deep into my hep cat catalog of lives.

  So I listen when Miss Temple is muttering to me while sopping up Internet trivia on Elvis’s latest incarnation at a big off-Strip venue.

  “Wow, Louie,” she says, staring too long at the screen. “Elvis has finally, really never ‘left the building’.”

  That is the announcement made after his concerts, when fans were hopping and shouting for encores, but the concert was over. “Elvis has left the building.”

  “Elvis is back almost where he began here,” she says. “The attraction building is the real deal, not some ersatz pretender. Before it was the LVH-Las Vegas, then the Las Vegas Hilton. It was originally the International Hotel, where Elvis performed more than six hundred sold-out shows between his 1968 ‘comeback’ and 1976 death.”

  I press nearer. Elvis’s comeback had only lasted a short cat’s life. Eight years. How old am I? It is none of your business, I would trumpet to anyone crass enough to ask.

  “Hmm.” Miss Temple is sliding onto her spine on the chair. “When Priscilla Presley opened ‘Graceland Presents ELVIS: The Exhibition-The Show-The Experience’ last year on April 23rd (Shakespeare’s birthday, Miss Temple and I know, but so few follow the Bard these days), she looked as gorgeous and young as only a seventy-year-old Hollywood celebrity can. Imagine going from child bride-in-waiting to ex-wife to savvy businesswoman and mother guarding the major legacy of Graceland.”

  That is very hard for me to imagine, especially the child bride-in-waiting part. I do not wait well.

  I see the screen morph into Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding photo.

  Miss Temple frowns. “Not an inspiring wedding gown, Louie. One of those sixties waistless long sheaths. She does have a small train, though. Oh, well. Back to business.”

  Miss Temple is devouring the new attraction’s details because she might use them in related press releases.

  She often talks to herself by pretending to talk to me, and, face it, I am a world-class listener because I have chosen not to talk back. She has no idea that I, too, have a deep, abiding interest in my buddy, the King.

  “The redone old International showroom opened on the 59th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s first, ill-attended Las Vegas performance at the Venus Room of the New Frontier Hotel. Now the renamed ‘Elvis Presley Theater’, it has been restored to ‘vintage perfection’. I gotta see that vintage perfection, Louie. Think Matt would go with me?”

  I would, but I do not need a ticket to sneak into any show in town.

  “And,” she exclaims, “Some PR genius even dug up, excuse the expression, an aged cocktail waitress who had worked at the International then and remembered Elvis.”

  Miss Temple laughed uproariously at the computer when she read that.

  “What a PR coup,” she said. “Imagine a Vegas hotel keeping a cocktail waitress employed into her eighties. I suppose Elvis was her claim to continuing employment. Good for her!”

  One forgot how young Elvis had been when he had died. Forty-two. When his life spirit has intersected occasionally with one of my lost early lives, he is in his mid-thirties prime, like the black leather he wore in his comeback TV show, sleek and dangerously sexy. Also like me when Miss Midnight Louise is not around to rain on my parade.

  And like Miss Temple, I love every facet and era and trace of the 24/7 carnival fantasy show Vegas always has been and always will be. And I know Miss Temple and I both will always mourn a classic attraction gone dark.

  35

  An Attraction Gone Dark

  The sun also fades fast in Las Vegas.

  As she drove up to the Neon Nightmare, Temple could barely make out the support structure for the galloping neon horse that had given the nightclub its name. Neon Nightmare, the horse being the “mare” part. It had reminded her of Dallas’s famous red neon flying “Pegasus”, restored in both its nineteen-thirties original and a new version commissioned before the first horse had been miraculously found disassembled in a box and restored.

  The parking lot lights were dark too, so Temple drove her red Miata with the convertible top down, as if that provided any security, right up to the main entry door.

  The building was a black glass-clad pyramid, inside and out, a nightclub owned and also used as a private clubhouse by a cabal of magicians delighting in all the secret mystifying stage scenery, effects and props of their profession.

  “Boo.” Max’s face appeared at her lowered driver’s side window.

  Temple started. With his black hair and trademark black turtleneck sweater and slacks, she hadn’t noticed him leaning against the building. Magicians before and since before Houdini had used Men in Black against a black curtain onstage to create their illusions.

  “Sorry,” Max said when she blinked. “I forgot how spooky this place was.” He opened the door and Temple handed him her tote bag while she locked the car.

  “The place is closed,” she said. “How do we get in?”

  “No worries. I already ‘cracked’ it. I did perform here as the Phantom Mage for a while.”

  Temple took in the faint reflection of them as a couple in the dark door, cast by a distant street light, a dark attraction that had gone darker.

  “You almost died here, Max. How can you stand seeing it again?”

  “You’re right. Standing is taxing. We should go in and sit down.”

  He produced a small but powerful flashlight and tapped the seamless black façade. A wide door clicked ajar. Faint light shone behind it.

  “Temple, we have nothing to fear from the things that almost got us. It’s the new ones that might.”

  “And your greatest enemy is out of the country for good? In Ireland. She’ll stay put?”

  “She’s very not at liberty.”

  Temple ventured inside reluctantly. She was dying to ask more about Kathleen O’Connor, but Max had walked to the long black-glass bar and put her tote bag on it.

  Where it went, she went, and vice versa. Temple followed him to determine the light source that lit
up a wall of liquor bottles still in place.

  “Hurricane lamps?” She laughed. “Your idea of housekeeping?”

  Temple studied the empty space. The black glass floor effect was always edgy. When the dance floor and the black mirrored walls of the pyramid pulsed to piped-in music with neon colors and shapes zapping into the air above, and the dancers gyrated and the drinkers at their tables shouted at each other it had that Vegas Hell vibe, like the crazy-popular deejay-driven electronic music nightclubs mesmerizing young Vegas visitors nowadays and putting zillions into the Strip venues.

  Temple looked up to the peak high above where a swirling universe of lighted constellations rotated. She looked down fast, dizzy.

  Max took her elbow.

  Temple shook her head. “How could you leap down from there on a bungee cord every night? I get chills thinking about the High Roller ride at LINQ entertainment center.”

  “You’ve always yearned to be taller.”

  “Not that way.” She shuddered to think about that giant Ferris wheel of swaying cable cars.

  “Let’s sit at the bar and examine your Ophiuchus file.”

  Temple started laughing. “That’s the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard.”

  With that, Max picked her up and perched her on a high barstool.

  “I need to get rid of these dangerously tippy things,” Max said as he leaned easily into sitting on the adjoining stool. Nobody should have to hop up to a seat in a bar.”

  “The world should be more considerate of short people, but I don’t think you can change that all on your own.”

  “No, but here I can.”

  “What? You’re staking out an abandoned building like a homeless person? Which you are after that witch burned you out of house and home.”

  “Not exactly.” He spun to lean back against the bar, spread out his long arms and surveyed the vast black satin space. “I own it.”

  “It almost killed you and you bought it? That is so…contrary and unpredictable. And yet ‘Max’,” she said. “When did you buy it?”

  “After it failed. I felt it had potential.”

  “Potential to be a rogue building and kill.”

  “I do need a home.”

  “So you’ve been living here. In all this gleaming, mocking, deceptive blackness?”

  “No.” He nodded at the opposite wall where a rail-less stairway and the balcony above it were barely discernible.

  “You’re living in the cozy, English-y clubrooms of those crazy magicians who called themselves the “Synth”! I spent one of the most heart-pounding moments of my life stumbling across that place and those people. Aren’t they all dead now?”

  “Ghosts won’t hurt you, Temple, unless they’re in your head. The only dead Synth member is the leader, Cosimo Sparks, knifed in underground tunnels connecting the Crystal Phoenix, Gangsters, and our old familiar venue here, the Neon Nightmare.”

  Temple hooked her high heels over the stool’s lower rung, as she always had to in bars. She frowned, for a long time, as Max went back behind the bar to pour Bombay Sapphire into two crystal lowball glasses and place them before Temple.

  He came around to reclaim his seat and one glass and stare into it as the hurricane lamps flickered, broadcasting a searing kerosene scent that unnerved Temple, but not Max, who was waxing contemplative without even a sip of liquor.

  “I look at Sean and Deidre, and realize he recovered from that bomb and its scars long before I could. I had no right in Minneapolis to sweep you into my ungoverned, unsafe world, Temple.”

  “Then why did you?”

  “I think I thought that you could save my soul. And you did.” Max smiled. “It was selfish and self-pitying. I regret being an aggravating hiccup in your life.”

  “Oh, you Irish. Always the martyrs. I needed to be jerked loose from my lovingly smothering family and get a little excitement in my life.”

  Max lifted his glass. “A toast. To our separate but exciting futures.”

  The crystal was Baccarat and rang like a heavenly chime from above in this hellish place.

  “And so,” Temple said, “to work.” She pulled her tote bag flat on the bar to shuffle a deck of white papers onto the black onyx glass.

  “We’ve always thought the drawn representation of the Ophiuchus constellation, the naked hero twined by and fighting a giant serpent, was a representation of what the ancient Greeks or other cultures saw in the stars. And we were half right. Matt recently learned that image had grabbed his stepfather’s pre-teen mind like a leech. He drew it constantly in class. The son he abandoned kept one drawing attached to his uncle’s refrigerator with a magnet. He had only that one keepsake image and memory of its significance to his father, and he inked it on his arm when he came of age.

  “After my fake wedding, when a long-ago renovation was used to conceal the lost Binion stash of millions in gold under the Our Lady of Guadalupe altar, Matt recognized the altar’s central decoration, a turquoise carving of serial ‘Ms’ like the Loch Ness monster humps, with serpent heads at each end.”

  “Surely not Ophiuchus.”

  “No, but close. And not Ouroboros, the ancient eternity image of a serpent or dragon biting its own tail. After all the excitement, I looked it up. It represents the Central American god, Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent, often depicted with a semi-naked human avatar standing beside the giant snake. Christian conquerors would integrate native symbols into the ‘new religion’ they forced upon the native people. The original builders of Our Lady of Guadalupe were part of that tradition, almost subconsciously by now.”

  “So,” Max said, “the altar bore another representation of Cliff Effinger’s man-snake fetish, which is very Freudian, by the way—”

  “I get it,” Temple said. “And Cliff Effinger used it like a signature he put on all his mob jobs, including one more than twenty years ago to hide the Binion stash in the renovated church basement. Using the altar as a cover, which would have tickled a perverse sadist like Giacco Petrocelli.”

  “But Binion had no idea that the altar itself was marked by a maker during the construction?” Max asked.

  “No,” Temple said. “He was a rather dumb guy, to give the location of his hoarded millions to the man who built the concrete safe in the desert for him and who was, um, intimate with his wife.”

  Max laughed and sang, “I am I, Dumb Coyote—” It echoed many times against the glass walls. “Man of La Mancha,” he explained.

  “Oh, yeah, the old Broadway musical about Don Quixote. Come to think of it, ‘Don Qui-ho-te’ always did sound like “dumb coyote” when sung. I didn’t know you could sing, and on key.”

  “No need for it,” Max said.

  “Well, I can’t.”

  “You’ve got to give poor Carmen Molina some advantage over you.”

  “No, I don’t,” Temple said. “She persecuted you, and me, like Javert after poor Jean Valjean in Les Misèrables, another Broadway musical. Say, they were depressing for a while, weren’t they?” Temple was adamant on that. “Anyway, it was that odious Woodrow Wetherly Molina sent Matt to for information who was the dyed-in-the-woolly-white balaclava mask villain.”

  “The man fooled people for decades, it seems,” Max said.

  “He was clever. A mobster who killed and took the place of the cop trailing him decades ago, who kept running crooked schemes into his eighties. Giacco Petrocelli. Jack the Hammer and his bloody jackhammer.”

  Max’s eyes narrowed. “A monster as well as a mobster.”

  “Exactly.” Temple’s ire would not die. “That man was willing to kill people, not only to ruin my wedding, if I were prone to get in a huff. He needed a guaranteed congregation with a small guest list and specific times so he could round up and neutralize everyone in the nave of the church while his gang uncovered and plundered the basement stash.”

  “‘Neutralize.’ Don’t we sound like a task force?”

  “We were. Electra even announced the phony wed
ding rehearsal at OLG by emailing a photo of Midnight Louie in his white bow-tie as Ring Bearer to Crawford Buchanan’s fleazy gossip column. Louie went viral and it was an invitation the criminals couldn’t refuse.”

  “Fleazy?” Max asked.

  “It’s my new word for unutterably low.”

  Max shook his head. “I’ve created mini-me monsters. Going undercover, tailing criminals, planting traps.”

  “Are you continuing that spy stuff, Max? You said Kathleen was no longer a threat.”

  “Not to us.”

  “Matt and I have our talk show and Midnight Louie and I have our national commercial gig, but what are you going to do?”

  Max pulled the papers closer. “Solve where the IRA contributions have been hidden right now. If the mob can’t fool Matt and Fontana Inc., can a cabal of rogue magicians and retired Irish rebels fool you and me?”

  A thump atop the neighboring barstool made Temple jump. Max leapt up and clutched his shoulder like a Fontana brother who had misplaced his best friend. And he obviously wasn’t even armed.

  “Louie,” Temple said. “What brought him here tonight? How’d he get in?”

  “The building has been neglected and isn’t as secure as it will be,” Max said. “Apparently, just mentioning his name summons the demon.”

  Midnight Louie didn’t seem to like Max’s explanation for his coming when “called”. He lashed his tail furiously against the stool seat. The big black cat’s chin barely cleared the bar’s lip, but he stuck it out. Pugnaciously.

  Then he tilted his head as flirtaceously as a kitten’s toward Temple.

  She could hear him saying, if he would deign to talk to her, “Somebody mention my name? At last!”

  “My apologies. Pull up a stool, Louie,” Max said, drawing Louie’s stool closer. “First you are sleeping in my California king-size bed at the Circle Ritz with my ex-girlfriend and now you are cadging a drink at my bar.