Cat in a Neon Nightmare Read online

  “Some,” he finally says, a weasel word that does not describe the thorough inroads upon her person he has just engineered. “Have you heard of a new club in town called ‘Neon Nightmare’?”

  “Sure,” says my Miss Temple, retreating from the abandoned purr-in with visible effort. “PR people know all, like fortune-tellers. A strange outfit is running the place. It is part disco, performance hall, magic club, bar. If you want my professional opinion, the owners have diversified their image too much. Neon Nightmare is a cool name, though.”

  “Hmmm.” Mr. Max is miles away from Neon Nightmare.

  I am contemplating a fast, full-bore, four-limb leap upon his unprotected spine, but he suddenly leans back against the sofa, foiling my purpose.

  “I suspect the place has links to the Synth,” he tells Miss Temple.

  “Really? You really think the Synth is concrete enough to have a clubhouse?”

  “Why not? An extravagant attraction is the best disguise in Las Vegas, anything extravagant is.”

  “What about Matt?” she asks.

  Mr. Max fulfills my dearest wish and pulls far away from Miss Temple. “What about him?”

  “He needs our help.”

  “Let him help himself. It will be good for him.”

  “Max! You have a compassionate side, I know you do.”

  “But does he have a passionate side? That is something you should think about, Temple.”

  “Why?” She is sitting up like a redhead someone has just called a mere strawberry blonde.

  “If you want to be someone’s champion, you need to know what he is capable of.”

  “Apparently a lot more than I would have thought!”

  “Ah. Women always resent the professionals.”

  “No, I do not! I did not resent that poor Cher Smith, even though you were feeling so sorry for a stripper you’d never met before that you nearly got arrested for murder.”

  Mr. Max sighs, the gesture for which I most envy men and dogs, and I make it a point to never envy men and dogs.

  “Cher was not a professional. That was her problem, and ultimately her death warrant. But you are right, Temple. We all have our knee-jerk soft spots. I am just warning you that you have no idea what Matt Devine is capable of; or me, for that matter; or Carmen Molina; or even yourself. Or, to be ridiculous, even Midnight Louie. We all harbor surprises deep within. Sometimes they are well-kept secrets from ourselves.”

  “I thought we were all in this together, and going to ‘get together, people and love one another.’ Right now. Are you trying to tell me that Matt might have murdered that call girl?”

  “I am trying to tell you that he might not have. It is a fifty-fifty chance for any one of us to committing it—murder—if we are pushed hard enough, and something, or someone, important enough is at stake. And those are pretty good odds for Las Vegas. I could have snapped Molina’s neck the other night when I realized you were in danger and she had to delay me by going mano-a-mana in the parking lot.”

  “But you did not. You let her beat you up!”

  “I do not want to fight real murder charges as well as the phony ones, and my object was to get into a car and get to you. A cop car did as well as any.”

  “Especially since you can crack any handcuffs on the planet. Still, it must have bruised your pride to let her subdue you.”

  “Bruised pride heals. Dead amateur detectives do not.”

  “I was all right. I had your darned pepper spray. Not to mention Rafi Nadir.”

  “You are lucky he fled the scene. He might have been more lethal than the Stripper Killer, who was merely a sick puppy. Nadir is dangerous.”

  “And he once was Supercop Molina’s significant other. Oh, God, this whole town is…a neon nightmare.”

  “Exactly. Just like life.”

  Mister Max pecks her on the cheek, a chaste gesture even a possessive guy like me cannot resent, and gets up to leave by the same circuitous route he arrived.

  Sometimes you just gotta love the guy.

  And sometimes you do not.

  Chapter 14

  …The Shadow Knows

  The Strip couldn’t extend to the distant mountains surrounding Las Vegas, so someone had come up with the bright idea of bringing the mountain to the Strip: the club named Neon Nightmare.

  From the exterior the new enterprise was a bold slash of neon and a galloping horse graphic atop a man-made peak that reminded Max Kinsella of the ersatz landmarks at Disney attractions.

  He squinted at the towering façade by leaning far over the Maxima’s steering wheel to peer through the windshield.

  That windshield was the last protective barrier between himself and what he proposed to do.

  He was planning to venture back into the world of the professional magician, planning to expose his carefully secured flanks and underbelly…for what?

  Not for Matt Devine. He wouldn’t lift a magic wand to save Matt Devine, would he? The ex-priest was grudgingly likeable, and he was a true innocent, but Max owed him nothing. No. And not for Molina. She had twisted her professional and personal life into a barbed-wire spiral of ethics and self-interest like the briar and the rose in an old English ballad. Sweet and sour turned mostly sour. He would do it for Temple, but she was on the fringe of this. No. He did this for himself, for the nagging certainty that everything bad that had happened in this town in the past year affecting the other three had something to do with him.

  Call it instinct, call it ego. It was time to face the music and dance.

  Trouble was, the Man of a Thousand Faces had problems coming up with a credible new identity. Elvis was too obvious to fly here. The Cloaked Conjuror’s masked costume had come in handy a couple of times, but at a magician’s club would only get Max stoned by flying doves if not more lethal missiles. He’d considered a mime’s disguise: leotards and white-face, but the costume would only emphasize his trademark lanky muscularity, and he couldn’t picture himself, even in deep disguise, with painted teardrops and a bowstring mouth.

  So…Max sighed at his newest persona, one he would have never seriously presented to an audience. So unoriginal, but apt and useful here and now. He came to this new costume party as a glitzy Phantom of the Opera, black sequins turning the cape into a distracting, glittering carapace, the porcelain half-mask sporting an Austrian crystal jet-black bat as a tattoo over right temple and cheekbone.

  With the cape he could crouch a little to hide his six-foot-four frame, another trademark he didn’t want ringing a bell of memory.

  No one would have heard of the Phantom Mage, but the costume was flashy enough to banish thoughts of the recently vanished Mystifying Max, who had always been both bare-faced and discreet and who religiously wore matte-black.

  Max studied the building’s sloped exterior, planning his entrance. It should be noticeable, but not too spectacular. He wanted to move among colleagues, not rivals. This was a fine line: he must impress, but not over-dazzle.

  For some reason he thought of Midnight Louie, a master of surreptitious dazzle if he ever saw one. Always turning up where he was least expected, and always looking like a long-lost alley cat who had happened to get lucky.

  Max didn’t believe in happening to get lucky. Neither, he suspected, did Midnight Louie.

  He was equipped with all the bells and whistles seen on screen and stage. He could fly like Peter Pan, he could rappel down a skyscraper like Spider Man. Thing was, what to do where, and when.

  The dark of night was an ally, for the building kept the neon fireworks at its pinnacle. He finally scaled the rear of the volcano’s rough red stucco surface like an upright Dracula and ducked under the massive neon signage crowning the structure.

  Neon required maintenance. Maintenance required a service hatch.

  He found the two-foot-square camouflaged flap under the mare’s running right hoof and eeled inside, pulling his cape after him like a train. Or a tail.

  Immediately he was surrounded by pulsing
wood and glass, the man inside an MTV video. Music, music, music. The building was constructed like a bullhorn. He was at the narrow tip, and all the bass beat came throbbing up at him like a bad dinner. Neon Nightmare was a dance club first, a magic showplace second.

  Wishing for earplugs, Max let his feet find the service ladder in the dark and started down. Hmmm. The Phantom/Dracula would enjoy a swooping appearance. He touched the dark belt at his waist, equipped with a stuntman’s gadgetry, and snapped the steel fastener over a ladder rung.

  Below him the bad vibes ratcheted up to a piercing, wounded falsetto howl.

  “The music of the night,” as the Master had said.

  Max swung out and down, into the pulse of a strobe light above a floor of writhing forms.

  They looked like imps in hell, but were mostly teenagers and wished-they-were-still teenagers.

  Max landed as light as a thistle-down in a swath of magenta spotlight.

  He released two dozen bat-shaped balloons that sped to the building’s peak, farting air unheard in the uproar. They seemed to vanish even as they fell like used condoms, unnoticed, to the floor below, to be trod underfoot.

  The Prince of Darkness had arrived.

  He was cheered by the drunken crowds for this tawdry, second-rate illusion, and then the dance went on. He unfastened his belt line and left it dangling invisibly for retrieval later.

  By strobe light he moved from the floor to the entry area, and there he was, thank God, intercepted.

  “Lounge act, or magician?” he was asked.

  “A little of both. It’s a cross-media world.”

  “Indeed,” said the black-tails-attired round little man who had accosted him. “I applaud your entrance, but we are a private club. Can you pass muster?”

  “I don’t know the qualifications, but the place, like the music, hath its charms.” Max loathed the frenetic blend of hip hop and jazz. He favored Respighi, Rimsky-Korsakov, Vangelis, and the lugubrious poetic charms of Leonard Cohen.

  “Hmmm. May I escort you to our clubrooms? We are always interested in new would-be members.”

  Max recognized that the exact opposite was true, but he was here to overturn custom.

  “Please do. I am not often a member of anything, but I do like your ambiance.”

  “Ambiance is our specialty. This way.”

  Max found the dance music muting as he followed the man up a spiral that reminded him of the interior of a giant conch shell. The spiraling upward path both confused and enthralled, like a fun house attraction.

  The trick was the same as in a maze. The route bore only in one direction, no matter how many times it seemed to twist in another. This was a left-handed maze, perhaps in tribute to the left-handed art. Magic. And sometimes, the occult.

  Max arrived at as commonplace a destination as any club might boast: a wood-paneled, four-square room at the heart of spiraling darkness.

  One wall was solid glass, and it overlooked the madly lit dance floor below.

  As he stepped nearer to analyze the view, he noticed other faintly lit windows onto the chaos positioned at irregular intervals in the upper darkness.

  A soft whirr made him check the room behind him in the black mirror of the glass wall. A desk was rotating into view.

  By the time he turned, it was in place and occupied.

  A man in a business suit sat behind it in a silver mesh chair. Its spare, ultramodern shape and bristling levers reminded Max of an aluminum praying mantis. Or preying mantis? Ordinary man. Extraordinary chair. Max began to feel less melodramatic in his Phantom getup.

  “New to Vegas?” the man asked.

  Max nodded.

  “New to magic?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Not new to the spotlight.”

  “I did circus work for a while.”

  “Trapeze?”

  “Some.”

  “High-wire act?”

  “Always.”

  “This is a private club.”

  Max turned his head over his shoulder to regard the masses gyrating to the music unheard up here.

  “That’s the paying public,” the man said. “They take us for a New Age disco. We are much more.”

  “I’d heard.”

  “Are you much more than you appear to be?”

  “I hope so.”

  The man leaned back in his airy chair, steepling manicured fingers, the epitome of a businessman: overstuffed, well-suited, conservatively groomed, losing a little hair. Ultimately nondescript.

  Such men never projected personalities strong enough to seem capable of running anything. Such men were always dangerous to underestimate.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  “You mean the Phantom Mage doesn’t do it for you?”

  “Not bad. I like the Mage part. It’s different. Implies real magic. You know anything about real magic?”

  “I take my magic seriously, if that’s what you mean. I’ve worked hard to make my move into the profession. I have some illusions that no one else does. I was thinking, if there’s a magician’s club starting up in Vegas, like the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, I’d like to be in on the ground floor.”

  At this the businessman laughed. “You can’t. Our magician’s club is as old as time, or at least as the Dark Ages.”

  Max tried not to over- or underreact. This is what he had been hunting. He must have managed to remain encouragingly still, neither overwhelmed or underwhelmed, because the man went on speaking.

  “Alchemy, religion, philosophy, superstition. All played their parts in developing magic over the centuries until it reached our rational age.”

  “Not so rational that there still isn’t room for wonder.”

  “True. And I wonder who you are and why you’re here. You haven’t given me a street name.”

  “I don’t like mine. Why else would I reinvent myself?” No answer. “It’s John. John Dee. As in Sandra, if you remember back that far.”

  “Ever been in the military?”

  “No.”

  “Done time?”

  Max paused for effect, and to hint at a slightly shady past. “No.”

  “You must have studied magic in its older forms to have taken the nom de illusion of ‘Dee.’ ”

  Max could have both kicked and kissed himself.

  The bland inquisitor was right; Max’s subconscious had dredged up the name of the most notorious alchemist of the Middle Ages and claimed it for his own: Dr. John Dee.

  Actually, if he examined his unconscious, when he had said “John D.” He’d been thinking of Rockefeller. Or MacDonald. The titan or the ’tec writer.

  “I am intrigued,” Max admitted, “by magic’s ancient theosophical roots.”

  “They were also political,” the man corrected, “and we modern-day offspring do not forget that.”

  “I am, at heart,” Max said with perfect truth, “a very political animal.”

  “Then we may get along well together. In the meantime, allow us to consider your membership.”

  John Dee, aka the Phantom Mage, bowed profoundly in agreement.

  The Mystifying Max recognized a kiss-off when he heard or saw one. They would try to investigate “his” background. Good luck.

  He left the chamber, already planning further investigations right here at Neon Nightmare, more convinced than ever that something sinister was going on.

  Chapter 15

  …Play “Misty” for Me

  Even after three Bloody Marys, Leticia Brown, aka Ambrosia, Sibyl of on-air Sympathy, was as smooth and cool as chocolate-mint ice cream.

  Matt watched her field call-ins and select the just-right song to soothe the savage breast. Her motions on the console were as liquid as her voice. It was a ballet in the dark, lit only by the various red, blue, and green lights sparkling like Technicolor stars in the studio’s half-light.

  Matt sat in with her, knowing to keep quiet. Their reflections in the big glass window were ghostly. Nightly
voices in the dark were half ghosts to begin with, phantoms of the air waves. The host’s voice was like a baton, urging on the shy triangle section, coaxing the violins to soar, toning the brasses down.

  The words, the moves, the songs she chose to play for each caller were a ritual that calmed Matt, both unexpected and comfortingly predictable.

  In the secular world, it was a bit like saying the mass. Ritual mystery and revelation at the same paradoxical moment.

  He listened to the sad souls calling in. None had a possible death on their conscience, but the anguish of their lost loves, or broken romances and marriages, their ill children and parents, wove a quilt of guilt and suffering that seemed to blanket the entire country slumbering in the dark of night across the miles.

  A radio show was at once as intimate as a confessional and as public as the stocks in a Puritan village.

  Matt couldn’t believe he did this, six nights out of seven, for his daily bread.

  The Midnight Hour remained the name of his show, even though its popularity had extended it to two hours. Beyond that it would not go. Matt sensed you needed to ration the music of night, the whispers of the soul, even when they were interspersed by tasteful, wry ads for biofeedback devices and magic crystals.

  He was beginning to see the program as a sort of midnight mass offered to an invisible congregation.

  Once a priest, always a priest. Ambrosia had no such formal calling. Yet there she sat, as sacred as a mountain, as certain and immovable, touching buttons, touching hearts, reaching out electronically as she never could personally, or physically.

  Watching her, Matt mourned his missed opportunity with Temple. Opportunities, plural. He had glimpsed a truly personal, consuming connection, and had retreated. To what? An impersonal encounter with a call girl. A call girl. Not a person. A role. It hadn’t worked either. Neither of them could be as impersonal as their ritual roles demanded. Me Tarzan, you Jane. Me pay, you dance. Me lost, you lose.

  He regretted “Vassar’s” death. Mostly he regretted her short life. He had to wonder what he had contributed to that. A shot of curiosity? A condescending pity?