Cat in a White Tie and Tails Read online

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  For Midnight Louie Jr. and Xanadu, simply the best ever

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Previously in Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times …

  Chapter 1:

  Underwater

  Chapter 2:

  Let the Mind Games Begin

  Chapter 3:

  Las Vegas Leavings

  Chapter 4:

  Louie on the Fly

  Chapter 5:

  Second City Kitty

  Chapter 6:

  Fast Food 4 Thought

  Chapter 7:

  Suite Deal

  Chapter 8:

  Doves vs. Pigeons

  Chapter 9:

  Tunnel Vision

  Chapter 10:

  Family … Matters

  Chapter 11:

  Collared

  Chapter 12:

  Prawn Patrol

  Chapter 13:

  Surprise Party

  Chapter 14:

  Gossip Guys: Doing One’s Nails

  Chapter 15:

  Prodigal Cat

  Chapter 16:

  Search and Unexpected Seizure

  Chapter 17:

  Subterranean Sunday Blues

  Chapter 18:

  Trapped, Stacked, and Zapped

  Chapter 19:

  Tail End

  Chapter 20:

  Lefty Behind

  Chapter 21:

  Past Tax Due

  Chapter 22:

  We Call the Wind Mariah

  Chapter 23:

  The Second Coming

  Chapter 24:

  A Tale Untold

  Chapter 25:

  Angst à la Carte

  Chapter 26:

  Lurking Lusty Laddies

  Chapter 27:

  Brothers, Where Art Thou?

  Chapter 28:

  The Post-Midnight Hour

  Chapter 29:

  Bye-Bye Windy Kitty

  Chapter 30:

  Surprise Park

  Chapter 31:

  Missing Links

  Chapter 32:

  Bad Mews

  Chapter 33:

  Temple’s Table of Crime Elements

  Chapter 34:

  Fur Flies

  Chapter 35:

  Double Down

  Chapter 36:

  I’ll Have a Double … Agent

  Chapter 37:

  The Shadow Nose

  Chapter 38:

  Game for Adventure

  Chapter 39:

  Cold Case Contact

  Chapter 40:

  Brassy and Breezy

  Chapter 41:

  Sob Sisters

  Chapter 42:

  Back to School

  Chapter 43:

  Alien Eyes

  Chapter 44:

  Midnight at the Oasis

  Chapter 45:

  Million-Dollar Collar

  Chapter 46:

  Monkey-Suit Business

  Chapter 47:

  After-Hours Nightmare

  Chapter 48:

  Bringing Down the House

  Chapter 49:

  Max’s Last Act

  Chapter 50:

  A Very Vegas Affair

  Chapter 51:

  Makeover of Honor

  Chapter 52:

  Here Comes the Bride

  Chapter 53:

  Evening in Paris

  Chapter 54:

  Meddling Belles

  Chapter 55:

  Twisted Tight

  Chapter 56:

  Rematch

  Chapter 57:

  Invitation to a Duel

  Chapter 58:

  Domesticated Species

  Chapter 59:

  Motorcycle Melodrama

  Tailpiece:

  Midnight Louie Has Mixed Feelings

  Tailpiece:

  Carole Nelson Douglas on Other Matters

  By Carole Nelson Douglas from Tom Doherty Associates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Previously in

  Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times …

  Las Vegas is my beat.

  I love this rambling, gambling entertainment capital with a supersized dose of lights, action, and camera—security or otherwise.

  The lights … the security and tourist cameras … and the action remain as bright and frenetic as always. Our landmark hotel-casinos and allied institutions are still puttin’ on the glitz.

  Me, although a Las Vegas institution, I have always kept a low profile.

  You do not hear about me on the nightly news. That is how I like it. That is the way any primo PI would like it. The name is Louie, Midnight Louie. I am a noir kind of guy, inside and out. I like my nightlife shaken, not stirred.

  Being short, dark, and handsome … really short … gets me overlooked and underestimated, which is what the savvy operative wants anyway. I am your perfect undercover guy. I also like to hunker down under the covers with my little doll. So would some other guys, but they do not have my lush hirsute advantages.

  Miss Temple Barr and I make perfect roomies. She tolerates my wandering ways. I look after her without getting in her way. Call me Muscle in Midnight Black. We share a well-honed sense of justice and long, sharp fingernails, and have cracked some cases too tough for the local fuzz. She is, after all, a freelance public relations specialist, and Las Vegas is full of public and private relations of all stripes and legalities.

  I must admit that our most recent crime-busting adventure took us a step beyond the beyond to a conspiracy of magicians and a collision with the mean streets of international terrorism and counterterrorism that left us both breathless.

  Let me just say that everything it seemed you could bet on is now up for grabs and my Miss Temple may be in the lose–lose situation of her life and times.

  Here is the current status of where we are all at:

  None can deny that the Las Vegas crime scene is big time, and I have been treading these mean neon streets for twenty-three books now. I am an “alpha cat.” Since I debuted in Catnap and Pussyfoot, I commenced to a title sequence that is as sweet and simple as B to Z.

  My alphabet begins with the B in Cat on a Blue Monday. After that, the title’s color word is in alphabetical order up to the, ahem, current volume, Cat in a White Tie and Tails. (Oh, yeah? I would like to see what three gorillas are going to stuff me into any such monkey suit. Watch this space.)

  Since Las Vegas is littered with guidebooks as well as bodies, I will 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, Miss Nancy Drew on killer spikes, freelance PR ace Miss Temple Barr, who had reunited with her elusive love …

  … the once and future missing-in-action magician Mr. Max Kinsella, who has good reason for invisibility. After his cousin Sean died in an Irish Republican Army bomb attack during a post–high school jaunt to Ireland, Mr. Max joined the man who became his mentor, Garry Randolph, aka Gandolph
the Great, in undercover counterterrorism work.

  The elusive Mr. Max has also been sought—on suspicion of murder—by another dame, Las Vegas homicide detective Lieutenant C. R. Molina, single mother of teenage Mariah.…

  Mama Molina is also the good friend of Miss Temple’s freshly minted fiancé, Mr. Matt Devine, aka Mr. Midnight, a radio talk show shrink on the “Midnight Hour” and former Roman Catholic priest who came to Vegas to track down his abusive stepfather and ended up becoming a syndicated radio celebrity.

  Speaking of unhappy pasts, Miss Lieutenant Carmen Regina Molina is not thrilled that her former flame, Mr. Rafi Nadir, working in Las Vegas after blowing his career at the LAPD, and for years the unsuspecting father of Mariah, now knows what is what and who is whose.…

  Meanwhile, Mr. Matt drew a stalker, the local lass that Max and his cousin Sean boyishly competed for in that long-ago Ireland …

  … one Miss Kathleen O’Connor, deservedly christened Kitty the Cutter by Miss Temple. Finding Mr. Max as impossible to trace as Lieutenant Molina did, Kitty the C settled for harassing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine.…

  Now that Miss Kathleen O’Connor’s sad and later sadistic history indicates she might not be dead and buried like all rotten elements, things are shaking up again for we who reside at a vintage round apartment building called the Circle Ritz. Ex-resident Mr. Max Kinsella is no longer MIA, although I saw him hit the wall of the Neon Nightmare club with lethal impact while in the guise of a bungee-jumping magician, the Phantom Mage.

  That Mr. Max’s miraculous resurrection coincides with my ever-lovin’ roommate going over to the Light Side in her romantic life (our handsome blond upstairs neighbor, Mr. Matt Devine) only adds to the angst and confusion.

  However, things are seldom what they seem, and almost never that in Las Vegas. A magician may have as many lives as a cat, in my humble estimation, and events now bear me out.

  Meanwhile, any surprising developments do not surprise me. Everything is always up for grabs in Las Vegas 24/7: guilt, innocence, money, power, love, loss, death, and significant others.

  All this human sex and violence make me glad that I have a simpler social life, such as just trying to get along with my unacknowledged daughter …

  … Miss Midnight Louise, who insinuated herself into my cases until I was forced to set up shop with her as Midnight Investigations, Inc.…

  … and needing to unearth more about the Synth, a cabal of magicians that may be responsible for a lot of murderous cold cases in town, and are now the objects of growing international interest, but as MIA as Mr. Max has been lately.

  So, there you have it, the usual human stew—folks good, bad, and hardly indifferent—totally mixed up and at odds with one another and within themselves. Obviously, it is left to me to solve all their mysteries and nail some 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

  Underwater

  She was in the water, drowning.

  Her hands pressed against her constricted chest, thumped it as if she could force the liquid from her lungs. She couldn’t … breathe. Move.

  She’d fallen from the top deck of a ship, a huge ship like the Titanic. Another ship was heading toward her, not like the Titanic, more like the Black Pearl pirate ship.

  She knew she was dreaming then, knew she had to struggle to wake up because a nightmare had her by the throat. She knew someone was by her side to do it, if she could only move her paralyzed lips or body before the dark water sucked her under.

  She could see the oncoming ship’s billowing black sails scudding like storm clouds above her. It was as colorful and clear as a movie scene. She should remember this and write it down.…

  Oh, God! The ship’s bowsprit was a solid metal lance twenty feet long, and the ship was wallowing deep in the waves to strike her right in the heart. The figurehead poised below that lethal weapon … was no naked mermaid.

  It was a blindfolded and blinded man with blood trickling from his eyes, his battered body bound to the ship’s bow, his mouth distorted around a dirty rag of a gag that bottled up his silent scream.

  He was a dead man sinking.

  And she knew just who he was and how long he’d been dead.

  “Temple. Temple.” Someone was shaking her awake. Her hero.

  She looked into Matt’s dark eyes blinking in the bedside table light. As she blinked herself, he crushed her into his arms. Hmm. Strong arms, warm bare chest … Her heart was considering a different reason to race.

  “You’re here, Temple. You’re with me. You’re safe.”

  “Yeah. Yeah! Oh, my God, it was an awful dream.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, high seas, and falling into the ocean to drown, and a ghastly, ghostly pirate ship and a handsome buccaneer to rescue me.” She felt like Dorothy Gale explaining a Darkside Oz.

  Matt laughed, relieved to hear her making sense. “You’ve never had a nightmare with me here. They common?”

  “No, Matt.” She sighed.

  “We’re going up in an ‘airship’ of sorts tomorrow morning. Maybe you’re nervous about the flight.” When she hesitated, he added, “About meeting my family?”

  “Or maybe it’s Chinese takeout for dinner?”

  He laughed again and rolled her over atop him as he turned out the light. “Fiancées the world over go out of town to meet the future in-laws every hour. Granted, my family’s a bit messier than most, but they don’t bite.”

  She nodded and murmured as he rubbed her back and let him think what he wanted, needed to.

  When she shut her eyes she could still see the grotesque dead man racing toward her. She’d never seen him dead until now, just knew about it. Knew his name. He’d roughed her up once. Clifford Effinger. Sleazeball, petty crook, family abuser, deadbeat, Matt’s detested stepfather, and victim of an unnamed killer or killers, slain just the way she’d dreamed him, on the Oasis Hotel’s famous sinking sailing ship attraction months earlier. This could not be a good omen.

  Chapter 2

  Let the Mind Games Begin

  A man without a memory’s greatest enemy wasn’t vulnerability. It was boredom.

  That’s what Max Kinsella was discovering. Here he sat in a parked car in Las Vegas, unemployed magician and ex-counterterrorist, staking out the Circle Ritz condo and apartment building.

  After spending several days driving on the left side of the road, he had more memories of doing it in Ireland and Northern Ireland than in the U.S. So a car with the driver seated on the left side felt “wrong.”

  His recent visual memories still featured his slain mentor sitting in the place Max occupied now, as if Max were occupying the lap of a ghost.

  Pathetic. Almost as pathetic was spying on a couple he didn’t remember and hadn’t “known” in his current state of amnesia until last week. He watched them walk out the Circle Ritz’s rear door, luggaged up for a trip out of town. And he wondered like crazy where and why.

  Blond Matt Devine wore his usual impeccable yet casual beiges. Temple Barr was dressed to impress in a shiny red pencil-skirted suit that looked like leather. Her dark strawberry blond hair glowed redder in the naked sunlight. A leopard-pattern tote bag and matching high heels spiced up the look.

  A white-haired older woman in a hot pink muumuu and orange flip-flops shepherded them into boarding order as a Yellow Cab pulled up.

  Used to the soothing grey greens of the Irish countryside, Max’s eyes almost winced shut at all the bright colors glaring in the sunlight. Despite his ultra-dark sunglasses, it was like watching a Technicolor silent film. Matt Devine gestured to instruct the cabdriver on the proper order in loading the three bags. Temple hefted her bulky tote to the floor of the SUV’s second passenger row behind the driver, and then hugged the landlady, Electra Lark.


  How odd to observe people he had known and who knew him as if they were pantomiming strangers.

  Temple turned to see how the luggage-stowing was going, waiting for an assist up the SUV’s first big step. At her height in those heels and that tight skirt, she needed it. At around a hundred pounds, she would get it.

  Not a casual girl, in any respect. Max could give her a lift in a second, even with his recovering broken legs, and spin her around. For an instant, his mind flashed inside the building to an earlier time. He saw himself doing just that, and Temple laughing.

  His hands tightened on the Volkswagen’s steering wheel. When Matt Devine came to the vehicle’s side to do the escort honors, Max looked away, up the lone palm tree trunk toward the Circle Ritz’s triangular corner balconies. One of those had been his—theirs—once.

  A suspicious stirring among the tall oleander bushes edging the parking lot caught his eye. The cause of the suspect motion was a pair of stray cats, one black, one striped.

  Neither was Temple’s oddly inseparable guard cat, Midnight Louie. Ah. The oversize carrier was for one oversize black cat.

  Max shook his head as the rear of the yellow taxi disappeared from view.

  He badly needed to find a hobby.