Cat in a Neon Nightmare Read online

  “Yeah. She was a lovely girl. Bright. Beautiful. Vassar-educated. Cultured. Victim of date rape. You see, Lieutenant, dig deep enough, even with a seasoned, fully cognizant pro, and you find a wound, maybe even if you just made it yourself.”

  “Was?” Molina asked.

  The way she said it, the accusing, probing way she said it, made Matt catch his breath.

  For the first time, he feared for something more concrete than his soul.

  Chapter 3

  Cat Haven

  I am lying on my back with my pins reaching for the sky, or ceiling. I am not surrendering, but airing out my underside.

  I have commandeered the bottom half of the bed on a forty-five degree angle. This way I am able to stretch out to my full three feet toe-to-tail without touching a hair to anything solid except the zebra-striped comforter I recline upon.

  There is no more blissful position in this world, especially when it is accompanied by the knowledge that my resident human, Miss Temple Barr, is curled up like a snail in what is left of her portion of the bed. She is so cute when she is sleeping in such a way as to accommodate yours truly. That is when I realize why I have deigned to share my life, my fortune, and my sacred self-sufficiency with her.

  Poor little thing! She has had quite a stressful time lately, almost being strangled by the Stripper Killer, and her not meaning to play a decoy.

  Luckily, I had realized her tonsils were imperiled and mustered a rescue party. I also managed to rescue—in the same night, mind you—my upstart supposed daughter (all the supposing is on her part), Midnight Louise, from durance vile in the Cloaked Conjuror’s hidden estate behind a faux cemetery.

  Is this Las Vegas, or what? You gotta love it.

  While I am basking in my achievements of the damsel-saving sort I pause to wrinkle my brow. It is true that my upstart maybe-offspring took on the evil Siamese feline fatale Hyacinth all by her lonesome, thereby usurping my customary role of muscle man.

  (However, since my long-term plans for the aforesaid Hyacinth may include an alliance of a romantic nature, perhaps it was best to let the little spitfire do the dirty work.)

  Speaking of dirty work, I lather my chest hair into a damp curly tangle that the dames love to run their nails through.

  Apparently my washing motions shake the bed, for my Miss Temple uncurls, sits up, squints at me as she does when her contact lenses are out, and says like this: “Louie! Are you getting your nice smooth ruff all messed up again? Enough already with the compulsive grooming! I know that you were at Baby Doll’s and wailed ‘Sweet Tail-o’-Mine’ or whatever along with your Pet Shop Quartet of alley-cat buddies to alert me to the lurking presence of the Stripper Killer. Thanks, but settle down now. I need my beauty sleep.”

  At that she turns over and ignores me.

  So much for my irresistible chest hair. Sometimes dames can be unpredictable, but what the heck, that is why we love them.

  So I sit upright, pounce down to the floor, and swagger into the main room, ruffled but unreformed.

  Barely do I hit the living room than I am aware of a soft scritching sound on the French doors to our unique triangular patio.

  There is nothing unique about that sound: a feline footpad is out and about and I think I know who.

  I amble over to the glass framed between these frilled wooden rectangles. In the lowest one on the left of this particular door is featured the jet-black kisser of my erstwhile daughter and new partner-in-crime-solving, Miss Midnight Louise.

  Woe is me. I take her into the family enterprise last night and here she is at the crack of dawn making like an alarm clock. First rule of the experienced shamus: do not rise until 10 A.M. Noon is even better, but I do not want my moniker to be High Noon Louie, so I settle for ten o’clock, as in scholar. A self-employed dude cannot be too erudite in this town.

  I jump up to unlatch the door and watch Miss Louise swish in. For an offspring of mine she is long in the fur, but I must say that it looks good on the female of the species. Any species. I do wish Miss Temple would let her curly red locks grow, but that does not seem to be her style.

  “I am surprised you are up and about,” Miss Louise notes, passing me with a half-hearted brush of greeting.

  We may be partners in Midnight, Inc. Investigations, but she is as antsy about the alliance as I am.

  “I am surprised that you are up already,” I return politely, “given the hair-pulling match you got into with Miss Hyacinth last night.”

  “That! That just smoothed the rough edges off my nails,” she says, sitting down to manicure the razor-sharp appendages in question.

  “No curare, huh?”

  “I am walking, am I not? You must not believe every public line a deadly dame will throw a private dick, Daddykins. Curare on her nails? More like Cutex. Get real.”

  “Cutex” means nothing to me, but I suppose it is some beauty product the ladies use on their nails. I try not to know too much about their little deceptions in the looks department. I like to be surprised.

  “So why are you here?” I ask.

  “Why not? We are partners now, n’est pas?”

  I cringe. Louise is alley born and bred. She has no right to assume the adorable foreign habits of the Divine Yvette, mon amour.

  “C’est yeah,” I reply loftily, “but that does not mean you can take liberties and muscle in on my relationship with Miss Temple.”

  “Muscling in? Who sez I am muscling in? If I were, you would know it, Daddy-o.” Miss Louise narrows her golden eyes. “I thought you might be interested to know the fuzz is in the building.”

  “The fuzz? You mean those martial arts ninjas from the Cloaked Conjuror’s place? Havana Browns and Burmese, by their body types and buzz cuts. Ugly customers.”

  “Not that kind of fuzz! The human sort. Lieutenant Molina is chitchatting with Matt Devine one story up.”

  “So? It is his place. He can entertain whom he likes. And frankly, my dear, I am pleased that he is out of my Miss Temple’s hair. I detest romantic triangles.”

  “Dream on. Your human ginger cat is a meal ticket, and that is all. Besides, she has a human panther for a partner.”

  I wrinkle my nose at mention of the Mystifying Max Kinsella, ex-magician but unfortunately not ex-significant other in my Miss Temple’s life. He is not good enough for her, but neither is Mr. Matt. I would be, if I were about six-three and 180, instead of being a thirty-six long stretched out and eighteen going on twenty…pounds.

  “Miss Lt. C. R. Molina is hardly going to mess with us,” I point out. “She does not speak our language.”

  “Apparently she does not speak Matt Devine’s either, from what I saw through the patio window. He looked like a grilled catfish fillet.”

  “You spied on them?”

  “We are an investigative unit. Undercover surveillance is what we do best. Speaking of what we do, why are we so interested in the Cloaked Conjuror’s hidden digs?”

  “Because Mr. Max is, and I always find that trailing him leads to crime. Who do you think has been sneaking around that place as much as you and me these days?”

  “It is not hard to figure,” she says, sitting down to slick back her whiskers. “Mr. Max is a retired magician. He would have much in common with the Cloaked Conjuror.”

  “Not so!” I protest. “Mr. Max has done the Cloaked Conjuror a good turn or two only because CC is a target of those disgruntled magicians, the Synth, that Mr. Max wants to smoke out. CC is so presona non grata among the magic-making set that someone has sent death threats his way faster than a vanishing dove. That is why CC always wears a full-face mask, and his assistant may have been killed at TitaniCon because he was dressed up like CC. Mr. Max is interested in the villains CC attracts, not the man himself. He has no more time than the Synth for a so-called magician whose act betrays the secrets of magical illusions in his show nightly.”

  “Why would Mr. Max care? He is not a practicing magician anymore. No, I saw him lurking about afte
r the excitement last night, visiting our pals the Big Cats.”

  “Osiris the leopard and Mr. Lucky the black panther? I guess that figures. Mr. Max helped us rescue them from certain death during my last big case.”

  “Previous case, Pop. ‘Last’ always sounds too final in the PI game.” Miss Louise eyes me slyly through the mitt that is doing a mop-up operation on her shiny little nose. “Or…Mr. Max may be interested in that Lady Mandarin magician who also hides out at CC’s Los Muertos spread.”

  “No way! Mr. Max is utterly bewitched by my Miss Temple.”

  “Are you sure? I watched the two of them have a little heart-to-heart out by the Big Cat compound last night. I admit that they did not seem on lovey-dovey terms, but among humans you know how the mating dance can start with a preliminary spat.”

  “Among us felines too, if you ever had a chance to experience such a fandango before you got the politically correct surgery.”

  “Who needs to know the steps to recognize the dance? This Shangri-La magician dame was giving off plenty of pheromones during their tête-a-tête.”

  “Love and hate are not as easy to read among humans as among our superior species. I cannot believe that Mr. Max would be seriously untrue to our Miss Temple.”

  “Who is to know what the male of any species may be up to?”

  “And that is the way it should be. How else can we keep you nosy females guessing? So that is your report? Fuzz a floor up, more nocturnal slinking at Los Muertos. None of that is worth writing Holmes about.”

  Louise stops her eternal grooming—dames!—to cock an ear at the door. “Oh, good. I was hoping to observe a police interrogation firsthand and I believe I am going to get my wish.”

  Before I can express surprise or doubt or disdain, the doorbell rings.

  At the Circle Ritz, doorbells do not just ring. They chime. In a related series of notes. Like a song. In other words, they make a production number out of it.

  But like most production numbers, it does raise an audience: in this case, my Miss Temple from the depths of sleep, who robot-walks from the bedroom to the front door in her Hard Rock Café T-shirt and (cringe) Christmas bunny slippers from her mother.

  “Fasten your seatbelt,” Miss Louise advises me out of the side of her mouth that is not busy licking whiskers into submission. “It is going to be a bumpy ride.”

  Now I know what human dame she reminds me of!

  Chapter 4

  Fallen Angel

  Temple shoved her glasses back up on the bridge of her nose before reaching for the doorknob.

  She hated being seen in glasses now that she wore contact lenses, but no way was she going to find anyone still at the door if she paused to insert the contacts.

  She hesitated before turning the knob. Maybe she didn’t want to see anyone. Talk about a hard day’s night. It wasn’t every morning she woke up with a stiff neck from being half strangled and runny eyes from being half basted with her own pepper spray. But this might be Electra, the landlady, who had heard about the showdown at Baby Doll’s and was worried about her.

  So she edged the door open enough to know she should never have left the soft, warm solace of her bed. Molina! At nine o’clock low in the morning…Temple’s own personal nine o’clock low, when she needed to sleep in after getting home assaulted but safe. Thank God Max was gone already. She blinked. Max was gone, wasn’t he? Oh, God, there’d be hell to pay if he wasn’t.

  “You can unchain the door, Miss Barr. I am the police,” Molina pointed out.

  “I’m not sure I want to see the police.”

  “Too bad. I want to see you. Open wide.”

  “I had a rough night,” Temple complained on a half yawn, fumbling with the chain mechanism. “Can’t this wait until later? I’ll come to headquarters and make a statement or whatever.”

  Molina marched in the instant the chain released. “I don’t want you at headquarters. I don’t want a statement. The officers at the scene wrote up a pretty lurid report as it was.”

  “Lurid? About me?”

  “No, about ‘Tess the Thong Girl.’ ”

  Temple cringed, but had to hustle to follow Molina into her living room.

  The Looming Lieutenant—Temple, at five-feet-flat in bunny slippers couldn’t help regarding the almost-six-foot tall homicide officer as akin to the Great Wall of China—stopped so suddenly that Temple almost rear-ended her. What a revolting thought that was!

  “He replicates?” Molina demanded.

  Temple peered past Molina’s navy-blue personal uniform. Louie. And Louie? Omigod, she was seeing double. Maybe Molina’d make her do a drunk test. Touch her nose in a straight line, or walk on her toes, or whatever.

  Trying to focus, Temple immediately noticed certain inalienable differences in the two black cat images confronting them.

  “That’s Louie on the left,” she explained, “and the other one is smaller, longer-haired, and female, as even a blind man could see. That’s Midnight Louise, from the Crystal Phoenix hotel.”

  “I must say the fine points of feline anatomy are lost on me,” Molina answered. “They look like clones to me. I’d hate to think there was anything in any way resembling Midnight Louie in greater Las Vegas or Clark County.”

  “Louie is an original,” Temple asserted huffily. “But then Nicky and Van from the Crystal Phoenix hotel renamed little Caviar Midnight Louise. Don’t you remember, Lieutenant? It was during the champagne celebration in the Ghost Suite after the Gridiron show. You were there.”

  “I must have been there earlier. No champagne for working cops.”

  “Oops. Maybe you weren’t there right then. It seems like you always are, though.”

  Molina’s smile was tight-lipped. “No, I missed the feline renaming ceremony.” She eyed the two cats sitting side by side near the living room’s single sofa. “I suppose I should take a quick look around.”

  Before Temple could say yea or nay—or what the heck for?—Molina was bowing and stretching all over the place while doing an intimate search of the furnishings and accessories.

  After ten minutes she returned to the living room. “I figured the place would be clean, but better safe than bugged.”

  “I am bugged, Lieutenant. I am bugged that you’re here, this early, upsetting my domestic routine. And my…cats.”

  Molina eyed the duo, who were returning from accompanying her every move. They settled in tandem in the exact same spot she had first seen them. Obviously she was not used to cats that behaved like paired Dobermans.

  “These animals are acting like police escorts and I don’t like it.”

  “So sit down, chill out, and don’t move. I’m sure they’ll stay put then. Can I get you some coffee?”

  “ ‘May I,’ ” Molina corrected automatically, and then had the grace to look embarrassed.

  Temple guessed that she was getting the grammatical correction reserved for the lieutenant’s daughter, poor little Mariah. Well, the twelve-year-old wasn’t so little anymore, she was taller than Temple! But she was still “poor” for having Molina for a mother.

  Temple forgot the coffee and sat. “Is this going to be a maternal lecture or a police warning?”

  “With you wearing those slippers—?” Molina’s dark caterpillar eyebrows lifted as she stared at the paired bunny faces on Temple’s toes.

  “My mother gave these to me for Christmas, so what’s it to you?”

  Molina lifted her hands in tandem, presenting the palms of peace, and forestalling further banter.

  “Far be it from me,” she said, “to critique a mother’s abysmal choice in Christmas presents. I’ve inadvertently committed a few of those myself. I can see that anthropomorphic slippers are off my list forever. For that I thank you. The lecture part is this: you are a civilian. You have no business playing undercover investigator at striptease clubs. You have no right to risk Midnight Louie’s happy home life by risking your own life in a dark parking lot. I don’t care that it came out
all right and the perpetrator was captured. You could have gotten killed, and, believe it or not, Miss Barr, I would be very unhappy about that. But you know all this and will take me about as seriously as you would someone who would give you bunny slippers for Christmas.”

  “I am wearing them,” Temple said uneasily.

  “That’s the lecture part,” Molina went on. “The police part is this: you may think I’m off base keeping an eye on you and your associates, but as of last night you are now involved with not one, but two murder suspects. Some people might consider that a coincidence. I am a law enforcement professional and I consider it a weakness.”

  “Two? What’s wrong? Is persecuting Max not enough for you now? That’s why I went to Baby Doll’s, you know, because you were so bound and determined to nail him as the Stripper Killer. Were you off base!”

  “In this case. That doesn’t change the fact that he was all over the scenes of the crimes in various guises.”

  “As were you!”

  “Me? What gives you that idea?”

  “Max. Max saw you more than you saw him. He is a magician, after all. You want to talk about me taking risks! What about a homicide lieutenant who’s secretly undercover investigating her own ex…whatever as a murder suspect and trying to pin the rap on my current…whatever.”

  Molina’s nostrils flared. Temple shut up. She’d been goaded into committing truth, but realized that the truth always came with a sting in the tail: the other person’s particular truth. Molina would lash back.

  “This is not about Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella,” Molina said shortly.

  Sails collapsed, Temple could only wait for Molina to paddle on. Meanwhile, she bailed brains to figure out what Molina’s point really was.

  “This is about Matthias Devine.”

  “So you’ve looked up everybody’s birth certificates. What’s my middle name?”

  Temple had asked for it, and she got it.

  “Ursula,” Molina intoned promptly with a smirk. “I believe that’s a saint who founded an order of nuns.”