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

by Carole Nelson Douglas

The hostess waited before them, large menus cradled on one arm like a baby, to lead them to the desired corner table.

  Seated, facing a view of the fountains that intersected with his somewhere in the black overlit Vegas Strip night, she wondered what she really wanted from Max Kinsella.

  “Relax,” he said. “I can at last. You should try it.”

  “Really?” She shook out the large white napkin to cover her black lap, to avoid looking him in the eye. They’d been…antagonists for so long. She hated the artificial, the imitation, the slippery.

  She was armed. The dainty pistol at the small of her back. You never knew. Somehow, she still felt naked. Was that “relaxation”?

  “Let’s just have dinner,” he said. “I feel I owe you a grand one, for the headache I’ve been.”

  “I feel you’re right.”

  She decided to go berserk. Appetizer for $28 Warm Lobster, Spring Onion Soubise, Basil Infused Peas.

  “No Fois Gras?”

  “The daughter is a member of PETA, no abused geese.”

  “Don’t tell me! No caviar?”

  She longed to make him pay the $290 price tag for a “Trilogy Osetra Caviar, Golden, Russian, Siberia”, but fish eggs were probably another daughter-forbidden food.

  No one should expect her to avoid magnificent beef. She ordered “The King” filet mignon at $69.

  He raised her to $79 with the Rossini filet mignon Fois Gras with Truffle sauce.

  She frowned. “Don’t you know that ‘fois gras’ are force-fed geese livers. Brutal.”

  “Yet beef is a more politically correct food than some others? All right. Being politically correct costs.” He topped her with $89 for a 22-ounce bone-in rib-eye with bone marrow.

  “It’s hard to renounce being a carnivore,” she agreed, ordering a snappy peppercorn sauce while he stuck to lulling bordelaise. A steal at only 6$ each.

  “Apparently,” he said later over a second glass of the smoothest red wine she’d ever tasted and must be sky-high in cost, “you’re intent on eating and drinking me out of house and home when that’s already been done.”

  “You do owe me. I’ve dismissed all charges against you.”

  “You can’t fool me. You can’t be bought. Not even by this magnificent dinner.” He looked beyond her. “Apparently the Strip is celebrating my innocence. The lighted fountains are flaring to life, right in time for dessert.”

  Once one looked at the glorious golden rise and fall of the Bellagio fountains, which performed on an automated evening schedule, it always made viewers breathless, like viewing Fourth of July fireworks through a precious topaz lens.

  Yet through the glass walls of the restaurant, it was a silent symphony in your head.

  “It always reminds me of Tchaikovsky’s most popular work,” Max said, “used for fireworks displays, the 1812 Overture, celebrating the Russians thrashing Napoleon.”

  “That’s a bit bombastic,” she said. “From the rhythm of the fountain highs and lows, it looks a lot more like popular music in this pantomime we see through the glass.”

  “You would know, of course. Hmm. I’m thinking it might be Frank Sinatra’s ‘Luck Be a Lady Tonight’.”

  “Funny. I ‘see’ Gene Kelly’s ‘Singin’ in the Rain’.”

  “Apt, and you’re the musician. I’m just a magician with a tin ear. Still, those explosive bursts remind me of the Overture’s climactic volley of genuine cannon fire, ringing chimes, and the brass fanfare finale. Explosive, lethal. Defeating Napoleon doesn’t happen every day. Not as smooth as dessert here, say, but most symbolic.”

  Also erotic, Molina thought, as she watched the plumes of gushing water play tag with the pulsing lights.

  The waiter brought two white bags emblazoned with the Eiffel Tower restaurant name…

  “Dessert to go,” Max explained. “The famous Eiffel Tower sculpted in white chocolate.”

  Max held out his paper bag to her. “A souvenir for Mariah. Say it’s from Rafi.”

  She nodded.

  And the waiter left behind the black padded book concealing a bill on the table.

  “Are you sure you can afford me?” she asked.

  “My current magic wand.” Max flipped a tightly rolled bill through his four fingers like a tap-dance cane. When he unfurled the bill, the number one had a train of zeros.

  “My work here is done.” He slipped the bill inside the small black book.

  Mission accomplished; she must be the most expensive “date” ever. Molina concealed a smile as she bowed her head to examine the white chocolate Eiffel tower inside. Two made a mother and daughter pair. Mariah would love it. She looked up to an empty chair opposite her to say thank you.

  Molina screwed herself around in her chair to rubberneck. Max Kinsella’s black back had already passed the hostess station and disappeared into the line waiting for what was now her table and soon to be available again.

  She turned back to the view one last time to imprint the image of the furiously flaring fountains, spotlighted against the Bellagio’s Italian Lake Como façade. Fountains and lights were really soaring now. She recognized an unforgettable rhythm. Wasn’t Whitney Houston’s “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the roster of music? “O’er the rocket’s red glare” maybe…

  “Oh, my God,” she muttered, checking inside the black book holding an over $600 charge and a bill with a one and three zeros on it. One grand. He’d promised her a “grand” dinner.

  Who was the mustached man on its face? Didn’t matter. She grabbed both bags and nodded appreciatively to the waiter aching to pounce on the tray on her way out. Eighteen-twelve overture, her left foot.

  She was reaching for her cell phone. Her vintage suit coat—surprise!—had real pockets.

  “Detective Alch, we have overtime to put in. And ask the Captain to use any pull he has with the Bellagio management from past arrests we’ve made there. Also WET, W-E-T, the design firm that handles the Bellagio fountains and the Mirage flaming volcanoes.

  “I’ve got a notion where the IRA small arms to possible rocket-launcher weapons the Feds want are hidden. Down in the biggest set of plumbing tunnels in town. I think they use frogmen to clean it. Thank God the shows are down to only two an evening. Frank Bucek is going to be ecstatic. Well, maybe a little bit more mellow.”

  Molina eyed a dim reflection of herself in the elevator doors on the way down. Temple Barr had been right about one thing. She could pull together an awesome look if she tried, if she wanted to look chic while being led by the nose to the object of a quirky law enforcement quest.

  37

  Mad Max on the Run

  “Long bumpy flight?” Liam asked. “You look like hell.”

  Max unzipped his black leather bomber jacket to reveal the airplane wear, a bespoke suit jacket underneath it. He had more than one stop this trip and had more than one role to play.

  He examined the familiar IRA clubrooms, a dingy “below-stairs” pub with the street level a precious ten-second dash above them.

  The clientele were the same ex-IRA men. Max was about to take it for a second home, with the remembered scents of yeasty ale and damp wool.

  “How’d Sean take to the US of A?” Liam, the leader and spokesman, asked.

  “It took to him, but he’s back home in County Tyrone. He’ll get a lot more American visitors at the B and B now.”

  “Newfound family. That was well done. Sean is a good man,” Liam agreed, shutting his eyes as he pictured Max’s cousin’s bomb-marred face, Max supposed. “He deserved better than what you and Kathleen left him with.”

  Max shrugged. He couldn’t change what had happened or these men’s opinion of him, or her.

  “You’ve got the ransom.” Liam’s sentence was not a question.

  The boys in the bar had been giving Max’s suit-jacketed form under the loose jacket the hard-eyed once-over since he’d clattered down the several steps from the street in his motorcycle boots.

  He didn’t look like hi
s pockets were stuffed with American dollars or British pounds.

  He’d kept his back to the wall near the stairwell as the men in billed caps sat ringed around their tables and the one long bar. Probably with an Uzi underneath it.

  “I thought,” Max said, “our business was not so crude and criminal as kidnapping and ransom…and revenge.”

  Work boots scraped their readiness for action under the tables and behind the bar.

  “But,” Max went on, “if you insist, I’ll have to see Kathleen before you can see the color of my—excuse me, your—money.”

  Liam nodded to an underling to fetch her from beyond the same door she’d vanished behind, kicking and flailing, a couple weeks ago.

  They dragged her out the same way, hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed now, with the gaunt beauty of a martyr, and slammed her small frame into a chair.

  “How have they treated you?”

  “It’s not been a stay at the Paris Ritz,” she muttered so under her breath he didn’t make out “Paris Ritz” at first.

  “You’ve not been beaten or molested?” he asked.

  “They’ve not gotten that close.” Her voice was a rasp.

  He expected that she’d not made it easy for them to be easy on her. Nothing to be done about that now.

  Max turned again to Liam. “The money your agents long ago collected in the Americas was also long ago converted to a more compact, more easily smuggled form of currency.” He stepped up to the empty table in front of him, reached into a side pocket and paused, smiling, at the scrape of metal on wooden tabletops around the room. Political rebels favored showing weapons that announced their presence, unlike secret agents and hired killers.

  “If I may—?”

  He eased a large jeweler’s pale chamois bag into the light. “Small plastic bags are more usual,” Max said, producing a magician’s square black silk cloth out of thin air. Now there came the restless shuffles of shoes on damp-swollen wood. “This is more impressive.”

  He wafted the cloth. It settled without a wrinkle on the rough wooden tabletop.

  Then he poured out the pouch’s contents. Tiny crystalline clicks announced a tumbling cornucopia of white and rainbow-hued cut gemstones onto the dramatic black background.

  “Holy Mother of God,” Liam breathed.

  Even Kathleen stood, weaving on her feet, forgotten by her guards. “Judas priest,” she whispered, but she wasn’t looking at Max.

  He nodded at her “Yes, Santiago’s work.”

  Liam looked from him to her, fearing a code.

  “Santiago?” he asked.

  “I mentioned him before. He partnered Kathleen in raising IRA funds, but got greedy when it was time to deliver the goods. He converted the North and South American IRA donations to gemstones in Brazil, where the dealing is good, and then concealed them in Las Vegas. I found them.”

  “Where? How?” Kathleen demanded. Max shook his head at her to stay silent as her captors gripped her arms again.

  He spoke only to Liam. “How and where doesn’t matter. I stopped in Antwerp en route here to establish their current value on the international market.”

  Max put a hand to his left breast pocket, eyeing the surrounding intent gazes and palms on pistols. “Pax. Only getting out a signed statement of value.”

  Liam nodded when he raised his eyebrows, so Max moved his hand farther inward to pull out a thick business-size envelope of heavy cream paper.

  “This is a signed and witnessed appraisal on each stone, and estimation of the value, by Poirot Père et Fils of Antwerp, gem dealers since eighteen-eighteen. Cost me a bundle.”

  The men started rising to crowd around.

  “Her by my side first.” Nothing but stage presence and voice supported Max’s command.

  And a man keeping his word.

  Liam nodded.

  Kathleen straightened her shoulders and shrugged off her keepers’ hands. Ten uncertain steps had her within two feet of Max, gazing on the jeweled cache. “Santiago. He was never going to deliver the money,” she muttered.

  “How do I know,” Liam asked Max, gesturing his men to fan out behind him, “if you didn’t take a ‘tip’ from the pouch on the way here? How do I know this isn’t a magician’s illusion, or fakes.”

  “There comes a point,” Max said, “when an Irishman has to take the word of another Irishman or what has all this bloody business been about for centuries and decades? Or the peace, for that matter. I made enough money as a performing magician to want to find this…prize, these funds, given by immigrant Irish folk and their descendants from street sweepers to self-made millionaires, to go to those women and children who suffered generation after generation. I believe that’s what Kathleen wanted it to go for, although her partner was a true Judas and hid these dearly purchased gems from her as well.

  “And, Liam, I trust you to do as you say. If you find me wanting, you know where to find me, or ask Sean, but he’ll tell you go to hell.”

  “We do still have a hostage of sorts,” Liam answered with a crooked smile. “So you swear by Sean’s name and broken body?”

  “I swear. And on the grave of my friend, Garry Randolph.”

  Liam looked away. Overzealous ex-IRA men had shot Garry dead in Max’s passenger seat during a fruitless, damn foolish street chase through Belfast.

  Max sighed, opened the envelope and unfolded the papers to the last page, to point out a karat weight figure to Liam.

  “Holy Mother of God! That many? That much?” His men crowded closer to see.

  Beside him, Max sensed Kathleen cringing at Liam’s repeated ejaculation, for women sworn to the holy mother of God had abused her beyond breaking.

  “You’d better put the jewels all back yourself,” he cautioned Liam, who nodded and started to do so. No suspicion must fester among brethren.

  Max reached without looking for Kathleen’s left arm, a stick of itself, and dragged her almost-limp body up the stairs.

  The night was chill and damp. The scent of rank fish-and-chips oil tainted the air. Only a few stars poked through a tiny skylight of unrelenting black night.

  The air revived Kathleen a bit. Especially when Max slung her over the back of the motorcycle seat and yelled, “Hang on. You know you know how.”

  After twenty seconds, he felt her small hands making fists in the bomber jacket pockets, curling into the lining. He pulled in the clutch and opened the throttle into spurting speed and started the ’cycle waltzing along Belfast’s ancient, war-torn streets.

  “Where are you taking me?” Her voice against his shoulder came and went like a thread on the wind.

  He smiled. Her will to live was not dead. You can’t keep a bred-in-the-bone psychopath down.

  “The Paris Ritz sounds like a good idea,” he shouted back.

  38

  We’ll Always Have Paris

  “What’s happening in Las Vegas?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  Kathleen tilted her head over the lip of the wineglass she held in her saw tooth-nailed almost-to-the-quick grip. No manicurist could restore those cuticles and nails without a two-month grace period, at least. He pictured Kathleen clawing at every exit from her captivity minute after minute, like a wild thing with only raw desperate persistence on its side. It had been cruel to let them imprison her, but he’d had no choice. He’d had to win her ransom and settle affairs at home before going abroad again.

  The candlelight glanced off the epee-thin white cat-claw scars on her left cheek. It was hard for a woman to claim they were four dueling scars contracted at Heidelberg University as a “badge of honor”, as heroes did in operettas.

  “Midnight Louie” was an intriguing name, but it didn’t sound like one that belonged to an unmasked Zorro.

  He was amazed to realize that Kathleen’s eyes were really green, not vividly green, but a sad, fatigued, pale, old-grass green, without the lurid surprise of the blue-green contact lenses she had worn while wreaking chaos on ever
yone he knew in Las Vegas.

  “Temple Barr has married Matt Devine,” he finally told her, “and they’re hosting a locally filmed national TV talk show together,” he said.

  “Married, are they? Happy, are they? Where does that leave you?”

  “Not unhappy.”

  She started laughing low in her throat. The harsh merriment gradually got louder, until people turned around to see what was so horribly funny. “A wishy-washy state for you. Their joint new career sounds as improbable as us doing the same thing. What will you do now?”

  “I don’t know. Not a another show, per se.”

  “You still have the Max Kinsella magic. You took those Irishmen for a ride.”

  “A last gasp. With Garry gone—”

  “Oh, Unholy Mother of God. I burned his…your house down, didn’t I? I was crazy mad, wasn’t I? Don’t take that as an apology.” But she looked uneasy.

  “If you need to know you significantly impacted anyone’s life, you can take credit for me.”

  “And you reward me with a stunning new black dress at the hotel boutique and dinner at the Paris Ritz. You must admit I made your life…interesting.”

  “And what have you made of your life?”

  She lifted her hands as if washing them free of herself. “Revenge has kept me alive since I was a toddler. It’s let me down. You’ve let me down. You won’t be the motive for my manias any longer, you can’t stop me from recognizing that I cannot fix what other people did to me. I thought if I could break you, or yours, it would justify my past, my failures. I just wasted everybody’s time and you all go on, whole, while I continue to break apart. It isn’t fair.”

  “No, it isn’t. You’re right. I was a little in love with you and it could have been a lot, if not for the IRA bomb and my missing cousin. What can you be, Kathleen? Besides what you are? Think about it.”

  He reached into his suit pocket and took out a small, square black-velvet box. He knew she’d conned many men into such a gesture for years since they’d met so long ago, but she’d never conned the boy he had been, or who had tried to be a man then. Like Molina, she was approaching forty, a dangerous age for a woman, a single woman. As a young woman, she’d underestimated her strength and saw only weaknesses. Hers. And his.