Cat in a White Tie and Tails

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Not Facebook,” Temple put in. “Too dangerous given the situation. It’s all about connections and Mira is still all about keeping connections apart.”

  Jon sipped his drink. “I’m a married man, whether I still want to be or not. I’m just a hangover from the past, but I don’t see how frankness and ‘being open’ is going to resolve anything.”

  “Did I say it would?” Matt said. “I’m not a miracle worker.”

  “Trouble is,” Jon continued, “any … unfortunate bit of personal history goes viral in this Internet age. If I held out hope that ‘an honest mature discussion’ could do anyone any good, I’d get it out on the table between the three of us. But it wouldn’t stay discreet. You know that, Matt.” Jon’s forehead wrinkled. “This might blow up your career opportunity too.”

  “Just what Temple was saying. That doesn’t worry me. Blowing up people’s lives does.”

  Jon Winslow lifted his glass in Temple’s direction. “Good thinking. You must be wondering what kind of families live in Chicago. Mira thinks her own relatives are demanding and judgmental and my relatives are egocentric and snobbish.”

  “That’s okay,” Temple said with a grin. “Matt and I are the opposite of all that … well, one at a time. I can’t say that I don’t get all crusading and judgmental sometimes, and that Matt doesn’t expect everybody to be the best that they can be.”

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Matt said, “but gossip is the new hard news.”

  “I’m sure your mother would never want anybody—her, me, you, or the pixie PR woman here—to do anything to jeopardize your future. I’m sure everything she did in the god-awful situation I left her in was meant for your betterment.”

  “Yes,” Matt agreed. “It was all meant for me.”

  Temple bit her lip. Parents’ best intentions often go wrong. She was sure her parents didn’t intend their protectiveness toward their only daughter and youngest child to be smothering. Or that Matt’s mother’s cruelly driven quest for respectability would put her and her son in a domestic abuse lockdown. Or that Max’s parents and grieving aunt and uncle ever expected that having one dead and one surviving son would drive an unbridgeable wedge between everyone, forcing the victim, Max, out.

  “My mother and I,” Matt told his father, “are facing some blowback from the past right now. There’s no way she could possibly settle her present dilemma without that being confronted and put to rest. That’s what Temple and I intend to do as soon as we can.”

  Jon looked back and forth between them. “You’re that kind of a team already?”

  They looked at each other and shrugged with a smile.

  “I guess we are,” Temple said.

  “So that’s the way things will have to stay for a while longer,” Matt said. “In suspended animation.”

  “It’s killing my brother.” Jon frowned and then sighed. “He’s coming to me for advice. If we all sat down and you refereed—”

  “No. Not yet.” Matt was firm. “You’re a heck of a nice guy and so, I bet, is your brother, or my mother would never have fallen for the both of you. I’d be proud to have a new father and uncle, but my mother isn’t ready for a ‘one big happy.’ And she’s the one who’s borne the burden of your mutual regard for her. “Don’t you get it?” Matt asked his father. “Thirty-five years is a nanosecond when it comes to the human heartbeat.”

  Temple noticed that Jon had been looking more and more sheepish as Matt spoke, and now made his closing argument.

  “Face it, Jon. She’s scared to death she’ll still feel something for you if you met again, under any circumstances. And I bet you are too.”

  “Do you believe she does?”

  Matt turned to Temple. “What do you think now that you’ve met the birth parents?”

  “I haven’t met Philip,” she said, “so this is a half-boiled opinion.” Temple was not about to mention she was personally quite familiar with romantic tangles, popularly known as “triangles.”

  “Mira needs to see you again,” she told Jon, “to see for herself that the past is buried, even if you aren’t.”

  “Wise advice, Miss Barr,” Matt told her, his penetrating eyes reading hers. “Would you like to appear on my talk show?”

  “Of course.” She smiled. “But I get a lifetime contract.”

  Chapter 26

  Lurking Lusty Laddies

  “I may be off-duty,” Rafi told Max, “but this is my territory.”

  The Oasis was Las Vegas’s answer to the Taj Mahal. In fact, the giant gazebo by the pool out back was a re-creation of the Taj Mahal.

  The Oasis’s fabled towers shimmered like glitter-dusted alabaster in the daylight, and a giant pair of exotically painted elephants stood at attention, glittering palanquins on their distant backs, flashing polyurethane tusks long enough, and strong enough, to seat the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for a photo opportunity. One foot and two faux ivory tusks each were eternally raised in welcome, along with their one-story-long trunks. Those hiked painted toenails, if animated, could have flattened a Humvee.

  The human curbside greeters up front were costumed as Sabu, the elephant boy, with sun-burnished to gleaming cinnamon skin, wearing only brocade turbans and harem pants.

  What snagged Max’s attention though, were the almost seven-foot-tall giant-bellied harem eunuchs holding three-foot-long curved swords and guarding a horizontal freezer-size transparent Plexiglas treasure chest crammed with paper money. Turning his head, Max could inspect thousands of slices of the Great Inventor’s face, aka Benjamin Franklin, gracing hundred-dollar bills.

  “What’s with the cash wishing well?” he asked Rafi.

  “Mucho security headaches until Friday. It’s a prize for the week’s biggest slot machine winner. A million bucks.”

  “The sidewalk and undercarriage are wired, right?”

  “Right. And don’t ask too many questions or I’ll think you’re really here to knock it off. And I’d have to shoot you.”

  Inside, the visitor pushed through crowds milling in an exotic jungle landscape, complete with monkeys and birds, in which the ringing of slot machines chimed like dimly heard temple bells.

  “Impressive,” Max agreed as they passed the elephants. “I’ve always wanted to make an elephant disappear.”

  “Better you make us disappear.” Rafi was terse, and tense. “Remember. If you get into any fisticuffs in the hotel surveillance underbelly, it’s my rear.”

  “There’s only one anatomical site I’m interested in here, and it’s a murder site, past tense.”

  “I was in on the capture of a murderer at the Dancing With the Celebs reality TV show here recently. That was in the theater area.”

  “Good for you.” Max smiled. “Don’t worry. I won’t jinx your career in security. According to maddeningly vague references in Gandolph’s home computer, there’ve been a string of unsolved deaths that have nagging connections to … me.”

  “Oh, great. And here I volunteered to be your backup buddy.”

  “It was a paid position.”

  “Originally. And now?”

  “And now, if Gandolph’s notes and my need to figure out who tried to kill me at the Neon Nightmare club helps solve this string of rather bizarre but possibly related deaths over the past two years, I can see you get cred with Molina for the breakthroughs. That’ll melt the Iron Maiden of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s stony heart into raspberry slush, or at least into giving you visitation rights with your daughter.”

  “You underestimate the calcification of Carmen’s mercy muscle, but I’m working on it,” Rafi said with a grin. “If we go trolling around the Oasis together for too long, though, it’ll look like I’ve got a new boyfriend.”

  “‘Prospective employee,’” Max said. “I just need to see the Oasis’s revamped sexy pirate girl show and inspect the ship that comes round the bend to sink so spectacularly.”

  “Most tourist guys want to inspect the sexy pirate girls.”
r />   “I don’t think they killed anybody, do you?”

  “The tourist guys or the sexy pirate girls?”

  “Either.”

  “It’s a popular attraction, night and day. Who knows what evil lurks in randy tourists.”

  * * *

  Rafi led the way out of the hotel and through the usual milling throngs. The pirate ship show was free, which accounted for the tourist hordes lining the sidewalk outside the hotel. A wooden walk-the-plank bridge connected to a hotel entrance over a broad moat of water.

  The attraction had resembled a set for a pirate film long before Captain Jack Sparrow went viral, so Max knew what to expect. His six-foot-four height made it easier to see over the hundreds of heads, even with many arms extended straight up to record phone videos of the show.

  “Do we start,” Max asked, “by ogling the nearly naked girls in the crow’s nest or the naked female figurehead on the sinking ship’s prow?”

  “We’ll check out the enemy ship that comes around the bend in the landscaping just to sink later. This script is cheesy. ‘Lusty Ladies and Laddies’ at war. The special effects aren’t.”

  Rafi, who’d obviously had a chance to watch the attraction on slimmer attendance days, or nights, pointed out the obvious. “This used to be a rousing, family-friendly all-out action battle between freebooting pirates and the pursuing government ships.”

  “I remember those days.” Max surveyed the bikini-clad “sirens” clambering over the three-masted sailing ship that anchored the show. “Now it’s become an arousing battle between the sexes. The only suspense factor is what will stay put longer, the pirate showgirls’ mic packs or their same-sized bikini pieces.”

  “I sure wouldn’t take my teen daughter here to see good role models.”

  “Parenthood makes new men of us all. These chorines have been trained into pretty solid athletes,” Max said after observing the action. “Those swordfights and fiery dives from the top rigging are tough routines.”

  “Nothing new for you. Didn’t you have the usual magician’s assistants who could go topless for the late show?”

  “No. I preferred to invent less blatant distractions for my audiences. I worked alone. More cerebral.”

  “Art imitates life, huh?”

  Max grinned at Rafi’s comeback, then craned his neck to see the show again. “I think the climax is coming for our hip-slinging crew of seductive beauties on the anchored ship set—I glimpse a ship of lusty male pirates sailing around the bend, to be sunk. Ahoy! The ship is called The Bull. Not too subtle.”

  Max peered through and over the packed tourist crowds. The boys’ ship was basically a large 3-D stage set running on an underwater track. The prow’s figurehead of a large-bosomed naked mermaid personified Las Vegas.

  “Imagine,” he told Rafi, “a man is bound like a mummy against that figurehead.”

  “White wrappings?”

  Max nodded. “Probably. Molina would have access to the details and Grizzly Bahr at the morgue would have the bindings filed away.”

  “Man, that was harsh. The guy was probably conscious, but gagged. Blindfolded too?”

  “Not by sadistic killers like this.”

  “So he saw the whole spectacle. While hundreds cheered the fighting and fireworks up top, making any cries for help, he slowly sank with the ship and drowned on cue. Cold.”

  “It was cold. Happened right at New Year’s.”

  “Holy not-hot water! The temperature in the ‘cove’ gets down to around thirty-eight degrees in the winter. If the water didn’t drown him, hypothermia would have killed him. What got him the royal sinking-barge treatment?”

  “I don’t know. The victim was the scumbag stepfather of my ex-girlfriend’s new fiancé, who’d come to town to look the loser up.”

  “You mean Temple’s significant other, Matt Devine. I’ve met the lovebirds. Man. Your life is even more messed up than mine.”

  “Thanks,” Max said wryly. “It’s good that I excel at something besides amnesia.”

  In fact, he’d forgotten his more recent personal life, yet not Vegas landmarks like this.

  His eyes narrowed at the scene now as perfect as a motion picture still, a snippet from Mutiny on the Bounty, say, with the first ship at anchor in harbor. The serene beauty mocked the grim reality that had brought him here.

  “So,” Rafi resumed, “we’re ruling out Miss Temple’s ex-priest fiancé as the killer? Big of you.”

  “Not really. Only mob muscle would be so vicious,” Max said. “Or ethnic hatred. Obviously, this Effinger guy didn’t give them information they wanted. Didn’t have it, probably, unless he had more guts than the minor-league gofer he was.”

  “When did this happen?” Rafi asked.

  “Before your time. What’s the security around here?”

  “Not much. This area has no overlooking views and is concealed by landscaping. The whole idea is the ship sailing around from behind here is a big surprise out front. Since no one has access except performers and maintenance staff, this is one of Vegas’s few discreet locations.”

  Max nodded. His scan of the building and overhanging palm trees found only camouflaged outdoor fixtures aimed at uplighting the swoop of the hotel’s central structure.

  “Satisfied?” Rafi asked, checking his watch.

  Max nodded. “Like I said. A job for mobsters or terrorists. Nobody much cared about the guy, alive or dead, not even the police. That’s what bothers me. This was a risky, elaborate style of execution and technically tough to pull off, even if the victim was a man who knew too much.”

  “But he was your rival’s evil stepfather.”

  “You can’t have a ‘rival’ if you’re not contending for anything.”

  “So you left the redhead, not vice versa.”

  “I’m assuming I let nature take its course. It’s impossible to sustain a relationship when you’re MIA off and on.”

  “For sure.” Rafi thought for a few seconds. “This crook was the only father Matt Devine knew. Garry Randolph, aka Gandolph, was your father figure. Your real father must have died.”

  “No,” Max said. “I did.”

  “Another of your famous disappearing acts?”

  Max cocked a dark eyebrow “Sort of was, only much longer ago. I walked after high school.”

  “Really? You seem an educated guy.”

  “Roads scholar. Roads in the British Isles, and roads on what used to be called the Continent and is now the European Union. Garry Randolph was my tutor.”

  Rafi opened his mouth to ask another question, but Max cut him off. “Why the interest in my family history? Once I follow the trail Garry was on here to the end, our association is over.”

  “Fine.” Rafi sounded angry. “I’m just trying to figure out how you get to be an okay father. I guess no one much has them anymore.”

  Max relaxed and chuckled to himself. “There are about as many deadbeat dads out there trying to elude their paternity as there are fighting for their custodial rights. You don’t need a role model, you just have to decide if you achieve that best working with Molina, or against her. You’re in a position to go either way.”

  “Which means I have two ways to lose, as much as win.”

  Max nodded. “Life”—he looked at the dead-in-the-water ship—“and death, are like that. Before any early-bird maintenance crew shows up we need to inspect that figurehead and keel until we know how, if not why, it was turned into a killing machine.”

  Rafi checked his watch with a sour expression. “I could lose my job if we’re caught, and I don’t want to dive overboard for a dip in cove. At least it’s bathwater warm this time of year.”

  “If we raise any alarms, we can cast off and catch the ship when it’s next at anchor, me hearty.”

  Chapter 27

  Brothers, Where Art Thou?

  The landmark lunch was over. Matt stepped behind Temple, reaching to pull her chair out when the waiter whisked it away much more authoritative
ly.

  Suddenly standing, Temple jerked around to address the overly solicitous waiter.

  He was a white-haired man with beetling black brows wearing a costly suit with a subtle four-figure sheen.

  “I can’t let you two leave Chicago,” he said, “without laying my cards on the table.”

  “Philip,” Jon said, standing in surprise himself. Obviously, he was the younger brother.

  “I assume this young man is my nephew.”

  By then Matt had Temple’s back and a protective left hand on her shoulder. He extended a right hand past her to the newcomer. “Matt Devine of Las Vegas. This is my fiancée, Temple Barr. I believe we know who you are.”

  The brothers glared at each other briefly across the table.

  Then Philip smiled broadly at Temple and Matt. “I’d like to buy you all a drink in the bar. It’s pretty deserted during the busy lunch hours and I’ll make sure we get a quiet corner.”

  Somehow his light guiding touch on their shoulders had turned Matt and Temple, Philip easing them through the tables like the friendliest of hosts.

  “This must be a whirlwind trip for you two,” Philip said. “I know Matt has a date with syndicated radio five days a week. What about you, Miss Temple?”

  “I’m self-employed, so I don’t answer to anyone for my schedule but me.”

  “Smart woman.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Matt said. “She’s a dynamo and will move the world to make her public relations clients happy.”

  “And you too, I bet.”

  The chitchat covered their relocation to the bar, where a waiting hostess escorted the party to a charming banquette with high, enclosing leather upholstery that ensured privacy. Philip, Temple saw, was a dynamo himself, but a charming one, far more outgoing than his brother. Then again, he hadn’t had a secret love gnawing at him for more than thirty years.

  The brothers bracketed them in the banquette, which was a teensy bit uncomfortable. Matt squeezed Temple’s hand on the seat between them. She saw his eyes sizing up the fact that the brothers faced each other across the white linen, and a faint smile touched his lips.