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

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Sorry, Louie, nothing you can drink,” he added. “Liquor keeps, dairy products don’t.”

  Temple couldn’t help smiling. Males get so possessive at times.

  Louie responded by jumping atop the bar and sitting on the papers.

  “Louie!” It was a battle Temple had fought many times. Work in anything but a paperless industry and your cherished feline companion will be on every possible pile, all over them, digging down under them. Sigh!

  “Wait a minute,” Max said. “He’s placed the dead-center of his, um, posterior on the ‘house’ image of the major stars in Ophiuchus.”

  “What? Divining by cat rear? The spirit of the Synth magicians survives. Look, Max. Cats are attracted by the scent of ink or toner. That’s all.”

  “But that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about. You were saying you’d come to a new conclusion on the Ophiuchus constellation’s major star outline.”

  “Only that we’ve been calculating it as referring to an area along the Strip. Look.” Temple took the transparent tracing paper of the house image and spun it as if transfixed by a pin.

  “It matches all of Las Vegas inside the five major highways,” Max said. “That’s a bigger canvas than we’ve been considering, not a smaller one.”

  “Well, maybe we’ve been looking small, rather than big.”

  “Or…maybe the opposite. Sorry, Louie.” The cat grumbled with a smothered growl as Max pulled the “house’ version of the Ophiuchus constellation drawing out from under him.

  “This would be highway 159 or 589 just below it on the north,” Temple said. “and that connects with Interstate 515 going southeast to Henderson. And you can get on Interstate 215 going directly west, for the bottom of the house, and 215 swings up north again to connect with 15 going parallel to the Las Vegas Strip to cross state routes 589/Sahara and 159/W. Charleston Avenue just south of downtown east and west. And there you have your rough ‘house’ shape in the stars.”

  “Very true.” Max looked up and then down. Louie mimicked his motion.

  “We’re inside it,” Temple realized. “We’re east of the Strip toward the junction of state 589/Sahara with 515. Right where a major star in the Ophiuchus constellation is located.”

  “Rather, Temple, the Neon Nightmare is. Magicians are drawn to astrology too. Ophiuchus proved to be an unlucky star to the Synth members when they got greedy and schemed to get the IRA loot. Kathleen and Santiago wanted them to provide the cover of a magical diversion for a major last Vegas heist for the Irish cause. Only Santiago had gone rogue and Kathleen didn’t know it.”

  “Everybody was duping everybody,” Temple summed up.

  Max looked up. “And the stars weren’t aligned to let anyone profit. The Synth leader was murdered and cabal members scattered. Santiago was murdered. Kathleen returned to Ireland empty-handed, the reputed guns and loot lost.”

  Max smiled. “Maybe that’s why it was a tough venue to make profitable. And cheap to buy.”

  “Cheap?” Temple was skeptical.

  “Cheaper,” Max said with a smile. “Remember Star Trek?” he asked Temple.

  “The new movies?”

  “No, Star Trek Classic from the sixties.”

  “Please. The women’s costumes were so sexist, boldly going into Playboy territory. Not my kind of vintage.”

  Max smiled. “Always the consistent crusader. You’ve lived to see Playboy so over. Anyway, I wasn’t thinking of the 3-D girls, but the 3-D chess game.”

  “I remember a still photo of that on a vintage nostalgia auction site.”

  “You’re moving from vintage shops to online?”

  “Most worthwhile vintage clothing is online now. I had a bid number registered for Debbie Reynolds’ fabulous Hollywood costume auction a few years ago, and watched every second. The bidding for one of Judy Garland’s simple Dorothy dresses going up and up to almost a million dollars was breathless. You wished she could have lived to see what an iconic character she created.

  “But even trinkets I bid on went up into the hundreds…a swooping hat, some gloves, and so much of our cinematic history went to Asia. Call me xenophobic, but that kind of rankles. Debbie saved Old Hollywood by buying out MGM’s entire stock before anyone valued it. She was the only woman star with the guts to try to float a Vegas venue based around her career and costume collection, and it failed. She finally couldn’t afford to maintain the collection.”

  “She made millions on the sale, didn’t she?”

  “That’s for her heirs, and she knows she saved those things for posterity, but it hurt to let her lifelong passion go. I know.”

  “Temple. That must have been when I went ‘missing’. Had I been there I’d have bought you a fabulous hat if I’d known. And one for Debbie to keep too.”

  “Which is why you will find the perfect woman for you, and I warn you, I’ve started shopping right now.”

  He laughed again. “Right now we need to decipher what Louie is sitting on.”

  Temple sighed. “If it’s on a small scale, what is shaped like the child’s drawing of a ‘house’?”

  Max spread his long fingers and twisted the traced image over the blow-up of central Las Vegas.

  “Most shows on the Strip are mostly two-dimensional. We see that on TV, in films, we learn to think that way. When I appeared to be walking on air in my act, with all the doves landing on and flying around me, I was actually, thanks to fast-winking strobe lights, walking back and forth between the foreground and the background, like a zigzag sewing machine, although I appeared to be going on a straight, linear line.”

  “The depth was the distraction.”

  “Everything in magic, and too much in life, is a distraction, Temple.”

  “Too much math for me.”

  Midnight Louie looked up, intently and made those jaw-tremoring chee-chee-chee chirps cat make when spotting prey.

  Max picked up a black remote control Temple hadn’t noticed and aimed it at the interior apex of the Neon Nightmare.

  Louie leaped to the lowest liquor shelf, then up to the top one, chirruping steadily.

  “This place is a huge cat toy, isn’t it?” Max said. “All those dancing shifting lights. Care to accompany me to the top?”

  Temple took a deep, shaky breath. “No.”

  “The hidden scaffolding that continues up and behind the Synth’s third-floor clubroom bird’s-nest on the opposite wall, it’s quite safe. You’d have to leave your heels behind, though.”

  “I hate heights.”

  “You wear high heels every day.”

  “That’s on a small scale.”

  “Look at Louie.”

  His round, intent eyes moved with the circling images. The traditional signs of the Zodiac, crab, goat, scorpion, lion, along with the disputed thirteenth sign.

  Max whispered, “A still central core is generating the illusion of movement and depth. Ophiuchus circles his attacking serpent continually. It’s like a clockwork construction, and, like clockwork, has many parts. Game?”

  Temple kicked off her heels, which hit the bar side and fell to the floor. “If you can replay your almost fatal fall, I can climb some pathetic…hidden, dark, secret scaffolding.”

  Oh yeah. Maybe.

  Max was as sure as a mountain goat and he easily wafted Temple from level to level by a firm hand grip. Since his remote control handled the working lights, the backstage structure was well-lit and simple. And the scaffolding was three feet wide and solid, she was relieved to find.

  At the building’s pointed apex, a nest of spotlights dueled, creating crossing beams of colorful shimmer. That was when Temple began to lose confidence.

  Max left her clinging to two cross bars and climbed higher. His black clothing was soon invisible against the dark, mirrored surfaces and dueling lights. She envisioned the four floors of empty space below, equally dark, and also reflecting crossed sabers of colored lights.

  “Max,” she whispered, ashamed of her cold
feet.

  Something warm and furry brushed her calves.

  “Louie,” she whispered again, reassured.

  Then Louie’s silhouette vaulted up past her, backlit by the light show. For a moment he seemed as huge as a leaping black panther.

  The opposite wall flared with a yellow-lit image of the wrestling man and giant serpent.

  Then the circling light show paused. Had Max made the apex of the pyramid go dark for an instant? And stop?

  Another click. Only the yellow work lights were on and Temple had to squeeze her eyes shut against the sudden illumination.

  She heard and felt Max and Louie leap down onto the lower scaffold, one large thump that vibrated the boards, followed by a smaller one. Temple teetered, spreading her bare toes for balance and looking down from a sideways squint. Up here the scaffolding was ten feet wide.

  It could have accommodated a van.

  Somehow, that didn’t make her feel better. There was always getting down.

  “Max Kinsella, why I let you talk me into climbing the inside of this magic mountain I will never know, but I am so over you.”

  He leapt down beside her. “I wanted you to be the first—and last in this country to see. Look.”

  Max’s hands opened the magician’s typical black silken square that produced white rabbits and doves.

  Nothing white appeared. His cupped hands held a mini-universe of captive, eye-dazzling red, green, blue, and white…the colors of what she’d taken for gel-tinted theatrical spotlights, now boiled down into large, faceted gemstones.

  Louie stretched himself three feet long along her leg, and Max did a knee-dip so he could see too.

  Louie’s paw automatically tensed to touch.

  “Oh, no, boy,” Max said, “this is a very different kind of kibble than you eat.”

  “He doesn’t,” said Temple. “Eat kibble. He just pretends to. He’s in it for the toppings I ladle on it to get him to eat the healthful Free-to-Be-Feline. Which he doesn’t.”

  “What a con that cat has going.” Max laughed as the silk square shrunk in his hands and disappeared.

  Temple looked around. “This entire building’s lighting system is a spinning gigantic kaleidoscope in the sky,” she realized. “Made from the IRA money Cosimo Sparks found, converted into jewels, and then secretly kept. He was the worst crook and hypocrite ever. He murdered people to maintain a phony scam about Strip-rejected magicians finding Kathleen O’Connor’s stockpile of undelivered IRA support funds, and all along he’d found and converted them to diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds to dazzle night-clubbing tourists right in front of his duped co-conspirators’ eyes. Why?”

  “It was a magician-conning-magician scheme, all right,” Max said.

  Temple looked down. Plain yellow-white spotlights raked the black mirror walls. The neon glamour was gone. The Plexiglas looked scratched and dull under the unrelenting light.

  “How are we going to get back do-o-o-o-own?

  “No! No, Max, no-o-o-o!”

  Not a bungee cord!

  She was not suicidal.

  Temple felt the air rush up and her stomach swoop down and then bounce back a tad as she gasped to a stop, hanging a couple inches above the black glass floor and her abandoned shoes.

  “Exactly heel height, I believe, Madam.”

  Temple pushed her feet into the only kind of height she craved, her high-heeled shoes.

  Stable again, she released her death grip on Max’s arms. “Anyone who ever offers me a ride on the Rio’s zip line is going to die the death of a thousand nail file jabs,” she told him.

  Turning and looking up to the dizzying apex, she saw Midnight Louie flitting down the scaffolding to the stairs with fluid skill.

  She turned back to Max. “And what are you going to do with the jewels?”

  He hefted the black silk scarf, now knotted into a jewelry bag. “Return it to those who suffered from not having it.”

  “The IRA widows and orphans fund.”

  Max’s smile was somehow secret. “Yes, and for other devastated Irish lives.”

  “So it’s Ireland again for you. And what will you do with this place afterward?”

  He looked up. “The technical apex would make a fine penthouse. I could live here. Redeem the place. Redeem myself. Or—”

  “Or?”

  “Find another place, over the rainbow.”

  “You’re holding a rainbow in your hands,” she pointed out, “only you know you can’t live there.”

  “And don’t we all do that sometimes?” He bowed. To her and to the cat sitting beside her. “I give you the Irish wish that you live for your rainbows, not for the rain.”

  She did tear up a bit, for all the people she’d met who couldn’t do that, and Irish wishes were always so…infectious.

  Louie rubbed on her ankles and she looked down, imagining she was wearing the ruby-red slippers and she’d instantly be back at the Circle Ritz with Matt.

  Of course Max was gone. She didn’t have to look up and around to know that, and hoped he got to live his own wish. A trio of jewels—ruby, emerald and sapphire—remained on the black glass. A wedding present, she guessed.

  She wondered if the Midnight Louie shoes would do anything other than shed Austrian crystals if she tried to knock the heels together three times.

  She looked down at Louie and to the door.

  On the dark floor on which they stood, the stilled, naked, no longer jewel-toned lights cast a path like a yellow brick road.

  36

  Command Performance

  Molina felt like a green rookie on a stakeout.

  She had plenty of reasons to be nervous.

  She’d agreed to this “meet” without knowing the purpose.

  She’d known the venue was fairly formal, so she’d worn the long black microfiber skirt with a discreet knee-length slit Mariah had whined for her to get for the Barr-Devine wedding reception.

  In an act of rebellion against her fashion-obsessed daughter, she wore a bronze forties jacket with padded shoulders and black sequin cuffs and pointed collar. And her magenta suede platform forties shoes for when she moonlighted as the torch singer “Carmen”.

  Mariah had tagged it a “Goddess” look and approved, although disappointed that it wasn’t Rafi she was dining with at the Paris Hotel Eiffel Tower restaurant. When she’d lied and said it was FBI agent Frank Bucek, Mariah made her “Oh, Mother” face. Frank was married. The man she was meeting was not.

  Now Molina was shuffling forward toward the closed elevator door, as obviously unescorted as an inchworm on a maple leaf.

  He appeared beside her just as she reached the brass pole end of the velvet rope and no one remained between her and the closed elevator door to the Paris Eiffel Tower restaurant and the valet who would usher her in. Her turn.

  Suddenly “their” turn.

  “Timing is everything,” Max Kinsella commented.

  Sure was. He’d let her feel the embarrassment of an imminent “left at the altar” position. What a manipulator.

  No one behind them grumbled about the last minute line-hopper. It was as if Kinsella had been invisible. Hardly. She flashed on his black shirt, black tuxedo jacket. More Oscar Red Carpet than stage magician garb.

  “You look very ‘Midnight Louie’,” she said, as they turned together in the elevator to face the doors for an eleven-story ride to the elegant French restaurant.

  “The highest of praise. I even filed my nails and washed behind my ears.”

  “I’m not checking,” she said.

  “Looks like you’ve done me one better; I’ve not glossed my lips. You’ve not been here before?”

  “No. Tourist attraction. High-priced tourist attraction. Over high-priced tourist attraction.”

  Max shrugged. “And on me tonight. I can understand your viewpoint. It’s hardly worth the cost unless you snag the one table at the very—point—the prow where the glass walls meet in a Vee.” His long tented
fingers demonstrated. “Each person at that table for two gets an exclusive view of the Bellagio Fountains when they come on at eight and nine p.m. Sad. The fountain show and music used to play every half hour from dusk until midnight.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said, “cost and conservation, I assume.” Someone had indeed buffed his nails, even more discreetly than Julio’s. To outdo a Fontana brother at being a Fontana brother was no small achievement.

  He, meanwhile, was running his glance up from her shoes to her shoulders, where a large brandy-colored rhinestone pin perched on the shoulder pad of her vintage “Joan Crawford-style” power suit-jacket. It was the antithesis of anything Temple Barr could ever wear. Or maybe anyone other than Anjelica Huston or a cross-dressing football linebacker.

  “Really high heels,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes. “I like.”

  “I don’t need to be unintimidating to you. You’re already cowed.”

  He laughed, and she heard a new freedom in it. “Is that what they call it? I know a leader of men can’t ever be too much of an Amazon.”

  “Not with some of the Neanderthals still on the force. The meteor has struck and they’re fading away, and still don’t know it. But let’s not talk work.”

  “What else would we talk about, Lieutenant?”

  “What you really want tonight.”

  “I’m not that kind, I assure you,” he answered.

  She laughed, skeptically. The hostess was heading their way. Molina had been scanning the room while they waited and chatted. “The corner table is taken,” she noted, raising an eyebrow. “I thought for sure you’d swing it.”

  “Look again.”

  She jerked her head around so fast her short bob whipped cheekbone on one side.

  Empty. Reset. The previous couple abducted into the Twilight Zone somewhere. He’d invited her to look without doing that himself, as if prescient. The magician always had to surprise, not that she showed she knew it. Molina had needed to develop a shell beyond showing surprise, facing the dirty, tragic details of an endless parade of crime scenes.