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  Still, no one has better scouting instincts than Ma Barker. We follow her somewhat bent tail. Ma has paced far down the long corridor between the first floor stalls. The place is reminiscent, if not redolent, of a horse stable.

  At last we reach a point where the floor grunge has changed from a patina of dust into a carpet of actual refuse and dirt.

  “Hmm,” Ma opines. “Some homeless humans had a clambake here.” She sniffs the area, between sneezes. “Only the usual street filth ground into shoe soles. Unfortunately, humans do not lick those clean.”

  “Meeuw,” Louise comments in disgust. She follows the disturbed filth to the edge.

  I have an idea inspired by my out-of-body mind experience here. “These marks in the grit. Reminds me of old-time ballrooms, when humans shuffled around on soap powder they dribbled on the floor.”

  “You are an old-style gigolo, all right,” she accuses me. “You know what I mean.”

  “This could just be the usual CSI: Las Vegas shuffle, Louise, but what puzzles me is that I detect no smell of blood.”

  “But why is the floor disturbed here in the middle of things?” Louise has moved to the first step of the central staircase. She gazes farther up. “Was the victim pushed down these stairs, and therefore the fatal injuries were internal?”

  “This mountain is made of steps.” Ma Barker sounds puzzled.

  I have forgotten the only Vegas structure Ma has ever entered was when I recently smuggled her into the Crystal Phoenix. As a life-long feral, she has encountered curbs, and even perhaps a back step or two, but an entire one-story flight is utterly foreign.

  “You want to watch yourself, Ma,” I warn. “Those boards may be shaky.”

  “Hah. I have excavated Dumpsters the size of boxcars in my day, sonny.”

  I still worry, because she is creeping up the outer edges of the steps, quite a balancing act for one of her years.

  “Louise,” I hiss under my breath. “Go up and shadow the old dame so she does not fall.”

  “Fall?” Louise’s burning look singes me. “She is preserving the crime scene evidence. Even from here I can see that many footsteps have been dancing up and down those stairs.”

  I take another squint and am shocked. My standing as primo private eye is about to be eradicated by dames of two different generations. How could I miss the faint disturbances on the steps? Rats! I mean, I took them for rat and mouse scratchings.

  After giving a backwards sneer, Louise has obeyed me and is following Ma’s trail. I take the other far side of the stairs and shoot up it like a rocket, arriving up top first, at least.

  Looking down, I notice ladders leaning against some deserted cubicle walls. S-shaped trails through the dust show they have been moved and replaced.

  Meanwhile, Ma and Louise contemplate the ragged ski slide to death from their perches atop the stairs.

  “My Bast-blessed side whiskers,” Ma mutters under her breath, “this manufactured mountain deathtrap has my head whirling worse than playing on the giant Jungle Jim at the Neon Graveyard museum. No wonder this Jay Edgar person with his pathetic, useless, slippery soles skidded right into the Clark County Morgue. I could strike the killing blow myself with one good leap at the back of his knees with all claws out.”

  “He must have been inspecting the property,” I muse as I circle the disturbed dust at the top of the stairs. A jerking plunge to one’s death should produce some blood, though, even if it is only the artistic dribble out the side of mouth TV crime shows excel at creating. And I smell no blood at all, which means I smell a rat.

  I must admit that my girl assistants have treaded carefully around any human traces, leaving plain imprints of their neat little feet.

  Then I spy a strange symmetry in the stair-top markings. Parallel lines here and there, some brushed across, others clear as ice skate blades. Skates up here? Was some daredevil human so stupid as to attempt to skateboard down the staircase of an abandoned building?

  I leap atop the newel post at the top of the stairs, confident I am disturbing no evidence.

  “Louie!” two yowls reprimand me.

  It does not matter. From my higher perch I have spied evidence for my unique and undoubtedly correct theory.

  Poor Ma. Poor Louise. Their vision is limited by their born-feral perspectives.

  Mr. Jay Edgar Dyson did not fall to his death.

  He was not pushed to his death.

  I nod my head at the dull, dust-coated glass chandelier hanging above us and disappearing into the high cathedral ceiling above. Random glints on one of the chandelier’s giant, strong, curved branching arms indicate where a rope or heavy drapery cord rubbed the glass clean.

  Mr. Jay Edgar was hung. Hanged? Whatever. He was strangled, ergo no blood. And ergo the several straight marks of a ladder’s feet, made by the killer to string him up…and made by the authorities to bring him down.

  “Our guy,” I tell the ladies, “was turned into a human chandelier pendant.”

  “Then your keeper’s clowder chief cannot have done it,” Ma says.

  “For once and for all, Ma, get it right. My roommate, Miss Temple Barr, is a client of my detective business. Miss Electra Lark is a landlady for the Circle Ritz residents. I deign to live there and also to provide personal protection for Miss Temple. For the last time, I am not a kept cat. I rule my own roost. And I am an independent private investigator. I will not compromise any investigation. As for Miss Electra, I must consider she could have done this killing if she had a coconspirator.”

  “She could have made someone do it if she had a gun,” Louise says. “And by the way, Ma, I am a full partner in Midnight Investigations, Inc.”

  “Junior partner,” I say.

  She huffs and puffs. “A female cannot be a ‘Jr.’, although you certainly are a senior citizen.”

  “No quite yet, you little ingrate.”

  “How I put up with your senile maunderings, I do not know.”

  She waps me across the nose. I wap her across the nose.

  Wait. That nose-wapping was not us. It was Ma Barker doing a one-two rowdy-kitten slap-down. I have not felt the like in years.

  “Sit down and shut up,” Ma growls in a disciplinary basso that lives up to her canine name. “If this is the way you two run your business, you will soon be pulling guard duty for those pesky alien abductors. I suggest if these so-called abettors to a hanging are a real possibility, you start looking for, and finding them.”

  I fear that Ma Barker is right. With Miss Temple’s private life all in a lovers’ knot wad lately, I fear she has forgotten me and my crime-solving prowess. Hopefully, her affairs will get much simpler post haste and finding the murderer will be number one on the menu.

  24

  Counting Sheep

  “I’ve been in a bar, now I want to go into the convent.” Kathleen announced as Max steered the Honda out of Dublin on the busy M1. “Is that what you’re hoping, Michael? That I’ll finally ‘find religion’, as you put it in the States?”

  “No, but you badly need to find a new mania, a new cause,” he said.

  “Do I? I don’t need to find anything you might think I would.” She sure knew how to pout, looking kittenish with her chin pointed down and her unearthly aqua eyes gazing up at him. The fading pink scar tracks looked like she’d run a pale lipstick tip over her cheek for some punk-style look. “I know about That Damn Movie.”

  “‘That Damn Movie’ doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Phil-o-meen-a.” Her bitter, twisted lips mocked the title and herself.

  Max nodded. “The Little Indie Film That Could. Dame Judi Dench playing the title character got the film a lot of notice for a biopic. Oscar nominations.”

  “I’m amazed you and the Circle Ritz crowd are so au courant about films. Particularly that one. Always thinking of me and my sad orphaned history.”

  Max shrugged. “And it’s a great detective story.”

  “Not solved by Philomena. That woman was
a sheep. Her toddler was taken from her, sold to American adoptive parents for two grand, and the Magdalene ‘asylum’ for fallen women would never tell her where he was sent. She only found where he was after he was middle-aged and dead, and after he’d had himself buried at that damnable place in case his birth mother ever came looking for him. The nuns knew they were searching for each other and kept them apart. Philomena did nothing but accept that she deserved the disdain and pain the Church handed out to her and her despised unwed mother cellmates. Sheep. Meek sheep.”

  “I see Philomena’s quest as one of being reconciled with the past,” Max said. “A horrible past, but she accepted that she couldn’t have changed it.”

  “She could have taken the baby and run.”

  “You did that, Kathleen. You owe your plucky past self more than rage and bitterness in the present.”

  “And what about your past? You clutch your guilt like a talisman. It’s a way to ward off people from getting close, isn’t it? Father Matt would say that. Poor Michael. You can’t leave your young self behind either.”

  “Don’t call me Michael.”

  “I’ll call you what I want to call you. Is Michael the Martyr any better or saner than Kitty the Cutter?”

  “No,” he said. “The punishing world you fled now has been exposed and has changed, but women and children are still being treated as badly, or worse, in much of the world elsewhere today.”

  “Screw foreign atrocities. I only care about my world. My IRA work helped end the daily brutal rule of the English over the Irish in Northern Ireland.”

  “And it was for the Irish Catholics you fought.”

  “Sheep, but now that they’re not distracted by centuries of ethnic discrimination, perhaps they’ll become more critical of their goddam religion.”

  “Or, their religion will become more critical of itself.”

  “Religion causes strife and suffering because it encourages people to despise those not of the ‘true’ faith. Look at the Mideast.”

  “Not my field of operation.”

  “What is, now?” she asked.

  “I’m retired, although some folks won’t accept that.”

  “And your last mission is to find dear lost—but alive if I’m not lying—Cousin Sean.”

  “Not quite my last mission.”

  “Right. You want to find the grave of your partner in undercover work.”

  He nodded.

  “And you wanted to introduce me to my now-grown surrendered daughter, whereupon I would supposedly melt into a bloody, woolly, ill-smelling, bleating sheep of sweetness and light upon a first glimpse of her.”

  “Never expected that.”

  “So. We have a rental car. You are licensed and able to drive on the left side of the road. Where do we go next?”

  “To church, I think.”

  “I won’t cover my head. I won’t kneel. And I may spit in the baptismal fount.”

  Max laughed. “You’re finding your inner brat. I’m glad you’re making up for lost time.”

  And he was.

  “This is the place where I was kept,” Kathleen said as Max pulled the Honda up to the convent church. He’d made sure to rent a car model different from the one he’d shared with Garry a mere two months ago. Yet, every time he glanced left at Kathleen in the passenger seat, he saw a gray ghost with a slack neck and bloody temple in the curve of closed window glass behind her.

  “It’s also the place I visited on my last trip.” Max closed that conversation by going around to open her door.

  She swung her narrow legs to the ground, looking up at him in that same disturbing way he only indentified now: like the preternaturally knowing evil child in a horror movie. He pulled her up by the icy hand. She seemed to take perverse satisfaction in his courtesy.

  The old brown brick building with red-brick bordered windows looked as ancient and abandoned as before when he’d visited with Garry. Against troubled gray clouds a crucifix stood in relief atop the rambling building’s only peaked roof.

  As before, when they walked around the church to enter the rectory door, an old nun met them there. Even though her inexpensive gray-and-black clothing weren’t part of a habit, a simple headdress and lace-up black oxford shoes all screamed “nun”.

  Max braced himself for fits from Kathleen, but she merely looked the woman up and down. “Not from my day.”

  “You were here?” the nun asked. “What’s your name?”

  “O’Connor,” Kathleen said almost passively, as if used to answering on command.

  “Sinéad O’Connor?” The nun named a famously troubled Irish singer.

  “She was in one of these places?” Kathleen’s laugh was corrosive. “I should have recognized her as a soul sister. Should I shave my head like Sinéad in penance for that sin of omission, Mother? Is my black hair still too long, too thick, too inciting?” She thrust her hands roughly through it, like a madwoman.

  The old nun just shook her oddly clad head. “We are not what we were.”

  “Too bad. I am.” Kathleen pushed past her, but she didn’t head for the church out front, or the brick two-story building behind it. She went around to the back, her stylish suede pumps following a broken path of grown-over inlaid stones that made her lurch from time to time like one drunk or drugged.

  “You can’t—” the nun began.

  “Wait here. I’ll accompany her.” Max followed, avoiding the path for the thick, more even grass.

  Despite her gait, he saw Kathleen was purposefully trodding only on the old and rough stones. He remembered a child’s game from snow-bound Wisconsin. Pie. One kid pushed booted feet along to plow a circle in the deep, untouched snow, and divided it into slices. Every kid who came after had to follow his or her footsteps without falling into the unmarked portions of snow.

  Max slowed, not wanting to overtake Kathleen. She was the trailblazer on old ground, plowing back in time in her own wayward fashion.

  He followed her into an overgrown garden, fenced by a stone wall that tumbled down to the earth in places. On the distant rolling green hills, sheep grazed. Kathleen, looking that way, gave one disgusted bark of laughter.

  Then she began lurching among the wildflowers. “I’m walking on the dead,” she said over her shoulder, not looking back to acknowledge him.

  Max looked down. The inset stones were random now, inscribed with words and dates. Some were only first names. The dates all spanned young lives, as young as fourteen. Some had an inscription. Lamb of God.

  Lamb to the slaughter, more like, Max thought, infected by Kathleen’s fury. A million Irish had died in the Great Famine of the 1840s. A million emigrated. Almost 5.000 had died in the Troubles between British overlords and Irish underlings since. And Irish families and authorities had disowned, shamed and condemned to hard labor in both birth and work 30,000 of their daughters, some of whom lay at last among the wildflowers, able to feel exile and pain no more.

  “If I had all that IRA money you think I have,” Kathleen said. “I would buy this place. I would turn this church into the brothel it was and let the sheep in to graze on these graves. Well?” She turned to fix him with a fiery defiance.

  “Your cause is just,” he said. “Your solution is a revenge fantasy. You and the world deserve more than fantasy.”

  She looked away, over the fields of green. “It’s beautiful here. All this greenery is a whited sepulcher, as is the grass beneath our feet. The Church still won’t admit it was as much about money as morality. And what is the ‘morality’ of a church shaming and punishing the girls they kept ignorant of the facts of life in convent schools? Philomena was eighteen when she got out and didn’t know where babies came from. Of course they got pregnant, and then parents sent them to the nuns, who were paid by the state for each mother and child, as well as the labor the mothers had to do six days a week for pay they never got. Our names were changed, toddlers were ripped away without notice. They robbed of us of our children and we had to bow and
scrape and call our brutal childless captors ‘Mother’.”

  “Inhuman,” Max murmured. “So you do know something of the book or film Philomena.”

  “You really can’t stay here,” came a voice. The old nun had followed them.

  Kathleen’s laughter was maniacal. She took a step toward the nun, who stepped back.

  “‘I can’t stay here.’ Here, where I was imprisoned from birth with my imprisoned mother.”

  Another step. “‘I can’t stay here.’ Here, where I was never adopted out because I had become the good Father’s ‘favorite’.”

  Another step. “‘I can’t stay here.’ Here, where he began ‘interfering’ with me at the age of four and every nun looked away, or her eyes narrowed as she berated me for having such lavish hair, for being too pretty, like my mother before me, dead and buried beneath our feet by then.”

  Another step. The elderly nun was stumbling backward. Max didn’t interfere.

  “‘I can’t stay here.’ But I had to, didn’t I, when I was pregnant at fourteen? Many of the other girls had been impregnated by their fathers or brothers or cousins, but I was like Mary, my most un-immaculate conception was courtesy of the head guy. And he would soon have another pretty little bastard of his own. That’s the only time I talked to God. I told Him to damn you all to Hell, and escaped with my infant daughter.”

  “I wasn’t here then,” the nun said. “I was raised in a later generation. The institutions are gone. We’re more aware.”

  “So you would have been a kinder, gentler keeper, then.” Kathleen stopped her advance and looked the woman up and down with contempt. “You still wear the uniform, as did the guards at Auschwitz.”

  “Oh, that awful movie, Philomena,” the nun cried out. “Everyone knows it’s full of lies, inaccuracies and exaggerations.”