Cat in a Neon Nightmare Read online

  Cat in a Neon Nightmare

  By Carole Nelson Douglas from Tom Doherty Associates

  MYSTERY

  MIDNIGHT LOUIE MYSTERIES

  Catnap

  Pussyfoot

  Cat on a Blue Monday

  Cat in a Crimson Haze

  Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

  Cat with an Emerald Eye

  Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

  Cat in a Golden Garland

  Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

  Cat in an Indigo Mood

  Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit

  Cat in a Kiwi Con

  Cat in a Leopard Spot

  Cat in a Midnight Choir

  Cat in a Neon Nightmare

  Midnight Louie’s Pet Detectives

  (editor of anthology)

  Marilyn: Shades of Blonde

  (editor of anthology)

  IRENE ADLER ADVENTURES

  Good Night, Mr. Holmes

  The Adventuress

  (Good Morning, Irene)†

  A Soul of Steel (Irene at Large)†

  Another Scandal in Bohemia

  (Irene’s Last Waltz)†

  Chapel Noir

  Castle Rouge

  HISTORICAL ROMANCE

  Amberleigh*

  Lady Rogue*

  Fair Wind, Fiery Star

  SCIENCE FICTION

  Probe*

  Counterprobe*

  FANTASY

  TALISWOMAN

  Cup of Clay

  Seed upon the Wind

  SWORD AND CIRCLET

  Keepers of Edanvant

  Heir of Rengarth

  Seven of Swords

  * also mystery

  † reissue

  Cat in a Neon Nightmare

  A MIDNIGHT LOUIE MYSTERY

  Carole Nelson Douglas

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For Panache and Longfellow, our first alley boys, and for the original and real Midnight Louie, stray cat extraordinaire, nine lives were not enough

  Contents

  Previously in Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times…

  Chapter 1: Fallen Woman

  Chapter 2: Adam’s Apple

  Chapter 3: Cat Haven

  Chapter 4: Fallen Angel

  Chapter 5: Flaming Sword

  Chapter 6: Body Bag

  Chapter 7: Beasts of Eden

  Chapter 8: Hobbits with Claws

  Chapter 9: The Man That Got Away

  Chapter 10: Peeping Tomcat

  Chapter 11: Call Her Madam

  Chapter 12: All in a Night’s Work: The Midnight Hour…

  Chapter 13: …Maxed Out

  Chapter 14: …The Shadow Knows

  Chapter 15: …Play “Misty” for Me

  Chapter 16: …Men in Black Too

  Chapter 17: …Unfixed Females

  Chapter 18: …Play Mystery for Me

  Chapter 19: …Max Outed

  Chapter 20: …Synth Lynx

  Chapter 21: …Magic Fingers

  Chapter 22: …Playback

  Chapter 23: The Morning After: Fast Backward

  Chapter 24: …Gone for Good

  Chapter 25: …Jailhouse Hard Rock

  Chapter 26: …Sudden Death Overtime

  Chapter 27: …Homicide Alone

  Chapter 28: …A League of Her Own

  Chapter 29: …Glory Days

  Chapter 30: All in Another Night’s Work: Split Personality

  Chapter 31: …Neon Babes

  Chapter 32: …Wizard!

  Chapter 33: …Torn Between Two Tails

  Chapter 34: …Going to the Devil

  Chapter 35: …Roadrunner

  Chapter 36: …Neo-Neon Nightmare

  Chapter 37: …Death Trip

  Chapter 38: …Ghosts

  Chapter 39: The Morning After: Foxy Proxy

  Chapter 40: Dead Certain

  Chapter 41: Sweat Shop

  Chapter 42: Wake-up Call

  Chapter 43: Crime Seen

  Chapter 44: Wake

  Chapter 45: Cherchez La Femme

  Chapter 46: Callback

  Chapter 47: Suitable for Mourning

  Chapter 48: Night Music

  Chapter 49: Melting

  Tailpiece: Midnight Louie Picks a Bone

  Carole Nelson Douglas Explains

  Cat in a Neon Nightmare

  Previously in Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times…

  Heavens to Mehitabel, folks! After the turn of events last time out, so many of my human associates have their fat in the fire that I am not sure even an ace feline PI is chef enough to extract all their skins from the conflagration in one piece.

  As a serial killer-finder in a multivolume mystery series (not to mention a primo mouthpiece), it behooves me to update my readers old and new on past crimes and present tensions.

  None can deny that the Las Vegas crime scene is a pretty busy place, and I have been treading these mean neon streets for fifteen books now. When I call myself an “alphacat,” some think I am merely asserting my natural feline male dominance, but no. I merely reference the fact that since I debuted in Catnap and Pussyfoot, I then commenced to a title sequence that is as sweet and simple as B to Z.

  That is when I begin my alphabet, with the B in Cat on a Blue Monday. From then on, the color word in the title is in alphabetical order up to the current volume, Cat in a Neon Nightmare.

  Since I associate with a multifarious and nefarious crew of human beings, and since Las Vegas is littered with guide books as well as bodies, I wish to provide a rundown of the local landmarks on my particular map of the world. A cast of characters, so to speak:

  To wit, my lovely roommate and high-heel devotee, freelance PR ace MISS TEMPLE BARR, who has reunited with her only love…

  …the once missing-in-action magician MR. MAX KINSELLA, who has good reason for invisibility: after his cousin SEAN died in a bomb attack during a post-high-school jaunt to Ireland, he went into undercover counterterrorism work with his mentor, GANDOLPH THE GREAT, but Gandolph was murdered the previous Halloween while unmasking phony psychics at a séance.

  Meanwhile Mr. Max is sought by another dame, Las Vegas homicide LIEUTENANT C. R. MOLINA, mother of preteen MARIAH…

  …and the good friend of Miss Temple’s recent good friend, MR. MATT DEVINE, a radio talk-show shrink who not long ago was a Roman Catholic priest and has tracked down his abusive stepfather, MR. CLIFF EFFINGER….

  Speaking of unhappy pasts, Lieutenant Carmen Molina is not thrilled that her former flame, MR. RAFI NADIR, the unsuspecting father of Mariah, is in Las Vegas taking on shady muscle jobs after blowing his career on the LAPD…

  …or that Mr. Max Kinsella is hunting Rafi himself because the lieutenant blackmailed him into tailing her ex. While so engaged, Mr. Max’s attempted rescue of a pathetic young stripper soon found him joining Mr. Rafi Nadir on Molina’s prime suspect list, although both are off the hook now, on that case at least.

  In the meantime, quite literally, Mr. Matt has drawn a stalker, the local girl that young Max and his cousin Sean boyishly competed for in that long-ago Ireland…

&nb
sp; …one MISS KATHLEEN O’CONNOR, for years an IRA operative who seduced rich men for guns and roses for the cause. She is deservedly christened by Miss Temple as Kitty the Cutter…and—finding Mr. Max impossible to trace—has settled for harassing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine…

  …while he tries to recover from the crush he developed on Miss Temple, his neighbor at the Circle Ritz condominiums, while Mr. Max was missing in action, by not very boldly seeking new women, all of whom are now in danger from said Kitty the Cutter.

  In fact, on the advice of counsel, i.e., AMBROSIA, Mr. Matt’s talk-show producer, and none other then the aforesaid Lt. Molina, he has tried to disarm Miss Kitty’s pathological interest in his sexual state by losing his virginity with a call girl least likely to be the object of K the Cutter’s retaliation. Except that hours after their assignation at the Goliath Hotel, said call girl turns up deader than an ice-cold deck of Bicycle playing cards.

  All this human sex and violence makes me glad I have a simpler social life, revolving around a quest for union with…

  …THE DIVINE YVETTE, a shaded silver Persian beauty I filmed some cat food commercials with before being wrongfully named in a paternity suit by her air-head actress mistress, MISS SAVANNAH ASHLEIGH….

  And just trying to get along with my unacknowledged daughter…

  …MISS MIDNIGHT LOUISE, who has insinuated herself into my cases until I was forced to set up a shop with her as Midnight, Inc. Investigations, and who has also nosed herself into my long-running duel with…

  …the evil Siamese assassin HYACINTH, first met as the onstage assistant to the mysterious lady magician…

  …SHANGRI-LA, who made off with Miss Temple’s semi-engagement ring from Mr. Max during an onstage trick and who has not been seen since except in sinister glimpses…

  …just like THE SYNTH, an ancient cabal of magicians that may take contemporary credit for the ambiguous death of Mr. Max’s mentor in magic, Gandolph the Great, and GG’s former lady assistant, MISS GLORIA FUENTES, as well as the more recent death of the CLOAKED CONJUROR’S assistant, not to mention a professor of the metaphysical killed in cultlike surroundings among such strange and forgotten zodiac symbols as Ophiuchus, PROF. JEFFERSON MANGEL.

  Well, there you have it, the usual human stew, all mixed up and at odds with each other and within themselves. Obviously, it is up to me to solve all their mysteries and nail a few crooks along the way. Like Las Vegas, the City that Never Sleeps, Midnight Louie, private eye, also has a sobriquet: the Kitty that Never Sleeps.

  With this crew, who could?

  Chapter 1

  Fallen Woman

  She looked like a fashion model photographed by Helmut Newton for some slick, slightly sick ad in a fashion magazine.

  Or like a butterfly pinned on a mosaic of fire opal.

  Or like just another dead woman in the City that Never Sleeps—West Coast edition.

  Lieutenant C. R. Molina gazed down at the gossamer straps attached to the extreme curve of a high-heeled, paper-thin sole dangling from the dead woman’s bare big toe on one foot. Gucci or St. Laurent, probably. Talk about an upscale toe-tag. Grizzly Bahr would get a kick out of hearing that when he got the body.

  Medical examiners got a kick out of things most people would consider grotesque.

  “How are we gonna get the body off that?” came a disgusted male voice from behind her.

  Alfonso had joined her in gazing at a victim ten feet below who was seemingly suspended on the intricate galaxy of neon that formed a ceiling for the hotel’s vast gaming area.

  The chatter, chimes, and clinks of Las Vegas games of chance drifted upward in the vast central atrium above the false neon ceiling, like sound effects from a faceless computer universe.

  “There must be a clear Lexan ceiling above the neon,” Molina guessed. “That’s the only thing strong enough to resist extreme impact. Otherwise she’d have crashed right through the neon tubing down to the casino floor.”

  “Bullet-proof plastic. That’s a security application.”

  “That’s what the hotel needed. One kid on an upper floor dropping a BB could fatally bean a customer.”

  “Makes sense,” Alfonso conceded. “I’ll check to make sure.”

  “Any idea how far she fell, or how long she’s been there?”

  Alfonso shook his head like a doleful basset hound. He was one of those sloppy cops: fifty or sixty pounds overweight, baggy suit, mussed hair, puffy face, sleepy eyes set in a bezel of perpetually bruised skin. The package made him a very successful homicide detective. As with Peter Falk’s Colombo, everybody always underestimated Alfonso.

  Not Molina, who devoutly wished that someone other than the crack team of Alfonso and Barrett had been “up” for this case. Abie, they were called, as in Abie’s Irish Rose. A.B.

  “We’ll have to treat it like a wilderness retrieval,” she said. “Lower some techs down to record the scene, then bring the body up in a litter and go over it on solid ground.”

  Alfonso nodded and winced at the same time. “Depending on how far she fell, that could be like loading liquid shit into a beach pail.”

  Molina only winced internally. Cops and coroners had dirty jobs and found harsh words to describe them. Normally, the distancing techniques of pros at scenes of crime and dissolution didn’t bother her, but normally she didn’t feel personally responsible for the dead body under discussion.

  What was the subject’s name? Probably a lavish phony, but they’d soon pry the Plain Jane moniker from beneath the façade. They almost always did, and the corpse almost always proved to be someone’s not-so-darling little girl all grown up wrong. This one looked like a solid-gold success, even after the rough hands of death. She had been a Vanity Fair woman: long, elegant, impossibly thin and impossibly busty—Molina would bet on implants—dressed to kill. Or to be killed.

  “The staff know her?” she asked Alfonso, although she suspected the answer.

  “Too well,” he said, acting the usual morose when he wasn’t being downright lugubrious. “One of the hotel’s top call girls. High-rollers all the way. Or at least fat money rolls.”

  Molina looked up, past the building’s gaudy neon-rimmed ribs to the soaring true ceiling maybe twenty floors above. “So she was a penthouse suite sweetie.”

  He nodded. “I hate these cases: JFP. Jumped, fell, or pushed. Damn hard to prove, any which way but dead.”

  “Yeah.” Molina’s nerves unclenched a little. Bad as the situation was, Alfonso was right: damn hard to prove what she privately called an ASH: accident, suicide, or homicide. “So you haven’t pinned her to a room number yet?” she asked.

  “Barrett’s still on it, questioning staff. Trouble is, the lady was such a regular that they didn’t even bother to notice which rooms, which night.”

  “She looks like she could have made money enough doing something legit,” Molina mused. She was no fashion maven, but she recognized the expensive flair that clothed the twisted body. Why not model? Or act? Why hook?

  Who could answer why women who could ride in limos on their looks so often ankled over to the shady side of the street? They might have thought the money was better, but breaking out in legitimate modeling paid off massively for the few dozen who made it. Maybe an underlying self-hatred? Lately Molina was getting a bit too comfy with that feeling, but she wasn’t about to turn tricks to deal with it.

  Alfonso nodded, still gazing soulfully above them with his hound-dog eyes. “That Barrett! You’d think he was in the cast of Rescue 51.”

  Just then, as if summoned, Alfonso’s partner, thin and bony, leaned over the sixth-floor balustrade, directing a tech team that was descending from a wire stretched across the atrium’s architectural chasm.

  “Randolph Mantooth, where are you?” Molina muttered, watching their herky-jerky progress.

  “Your kid watch those old reruns too?” Alfonso asked.

  “Religiously.”

  “Kids t
oday! Growing up on yesterday.”

  She nodded, too intent on observing the shaky operation to comment. She had no time to watch TV, or reruns of long-cold TV shows. Being twelve-year-old Mariah’s mother kept her current, but not much.

  “Just how old is the Goliath?” she asked suddenly. “You’d think they’d know not to design interior atriums in a town where people lose their shirts and their self-respect every day and night. This is no place for Hyatt-style hotels enamored of atriums.”

  Alfonso nodded, smiling fondly. He was a native. He loved every manifestation of the city’s phenomenal entertainment explosion along the Strip, like a research scientist enamored of cancer growth.

  “Yeah,” he said, “they didn’t worry as much about divers in the old days. Maybe what, gosh, twenty years ago? The exterior balcony doors at this hotel didn’t used to be sealed shut, but they are now.”

  “So this was the only way to fall,” Molina said. “Inside straight, so to speak. Over the internal atrium edge. Or to be pushed. Who spotted her?”

  “Some ma and pa tourist couple on fourteen, waiting for an elevator and ambling to the edge to be brave and look over. Took her for part of the design at first.”

  Molina had to agree. Well-dressed supine women always looked decorative, or sexy, or decadent. Or dead. The functions seemed interchangeable. She’d seen a lot of dead and never had found it decorative or sexy or even glamourously decadent. So shoot her.