Cat in a White Tie and Tails Read online

  “Funny. Nobody mentioned you were a sadist.”

  “If you made it across Western Europe dodging assassins, I think you can navigate the Goliath Hotel. Consider it a challenge grant.”

  “The pay is lousy.”

  “And so is the food. Welcome to a menu of plain, old-fashioned law enforcement, Mr. Kinsella.”

  He chewed on her assignment and the rest of the dinner, including the plain, old-fashioned tapioca pudding she insisted on ordering for him, saying it might spark memories of his childhood—she was indeed a sadist.

  She also gave a dry, even skimpy, summation of the Goliath murder case files, which were basically the method of murder—knifed above a casino table, interesting—name of victim, and time of death and discovery.

  This was a cold case and most likely a criminal hit, not a juicy crime of personal motive. It was the deep-freeze of cold cases and the most personally challenging crime she could ask him to investigate.

  Game on.

  Chapter 7

  Suite Deal

  Temple had finished her tour of the suite, cooing over all the posh designer touches.

  She returned to Matt in the living room, where he’d slipped off his shoes and was checking out the six-foot HDTV offerings. Just like a guy.

  Normally Temple never let bare foot touch hotel carpeting, but this stuff was so soft and expensive, it felt like walking through velvety grass on a golf course only billionaires played.

  Louie reclined near Matt in his “King of Sheba” position, glossy black front paws straight out like the Sphinx’s, head high, ears forward, and tail arranged into a graceful S behind him.

  In this very pose he had made his rival TV commercial cat, the unlamented Maurice, look like yellow tabby hash at a greasy spoon diner.

  “The producers called,” Matt said over his shoulder, clicking past the Home Shopping Network and QVC while Temple quashed a knee-jerk reaction to cry, Wait. Accessory Alert!

  “Dinner Sunday okay?” he asked.

  “That’s family dinner day.”

  “The family get-together will be over by six P.M. Every Sunday dinner is Thanksgiving-size in my family. Given the beer, they’ll be ready for naps. And the producers dine downtown, close by. That’ll work.”

  “Do I have to meet the family all in a bunch?”

  Matt shrugged, still channel surfing. “Not my choice, but we’re the guests.” He paused the screen to turn to her. “I tried to get Mom to meet us first, but Saturday nights are busy at the restaurant and I guess she couldn’t get off.”

  “That big tourist draw must have two hostesses.” Temple sniffed avoidance and Matt nodded agreement, about to say more. Although what can you say about a family so uneager to meet someone who is marrying into it?

  “She’s—,” Matt began, sounding apologetic all over again.

  The room phone rang, echoed by all the other phones dotting the suite. It made the place sound like an office … or a command post.

  Matt leaned over to the sofa table to take the call, then stood and turned to face Temple so she’d get the drift.

  “Yes?” he said. And then, “Sure, Mom. Yes, the flight was fine. Except for an incident at the airport. Someone tried to snag Temple’s carrier with her cat in it.” Matt laughed. “He’s a pretty big cat to snatch without pulling a muscle, so we got him right back.”

  “Tell them they thought my cat carrier held the crown jewels,” Temple said.

  Matt did, and added, “No, no diamonds. Only on her finger.”

  He listened, then smiled. “Sure. We’d love to have dinner at your apartment.” His eyes questioned Temple, who nodded extreme agreement. “We’ll cab it. And I guess we can bring the ‘famous’ cat.”

  Temple looked at Louie, who was lounging on the sofa like a sultan, one leg now draped over the pillow edge. Despite the playboy pose, he was a rough-and-tumble street cat adept at opening the French doors in her Vegas condominium. One shuddered to think what he might try at thirty-some stories if he decided he didn’t like being left home alone in a hotel suite.

  “That’s good, excellent,” Matt told Temple after he’d turned off the portable phone. “Looks like Mom got her courage up despite the situation that’s got the whole family in an uproar.”

  “Will she discuss it in front of me?”

  “Remains to be seen.”

  “And you said she shares an apartment with your young cousin Krys?”

  “Yeah. Krystyna, all y’s, is doing performance art in her spare time. I can imagine.… She hates the Polish spelling of her name. Too Old World. She is a radical chick, a rebel as much as you can be one in my family. Mom was … pretty shut down for a lot of years. Moving in with Krys got her out of her shell, enough to meet this guy who wants to marry her.”

  “That was at the restaurant where she hostesses?”

  “Right. It’s a classy but down-home place. Polandia. Ethnic food.”

  “I can’t believe he’s the brother of your real father.”

  Matt nodded, with resignation. “Chicago is a huge city, but sometimes coincidence beats the odds.”

  “Maybe it’s not just coincidence. Are you seeing your dad this trip?”

  “Lunch Monday. He wants to meet you.”

  “You didn’t tell me any of these plans beyond the Sunday dinner.”

  “And you didn’t ask, wise woman that you are.” Matt came around the couch to fold her into his arms. “I didn’t know how it was going to work out. I’ll probably be playing therapist all four days. You’re just the gorgeous, charming distraction I need to keep me sane, and keep my crazy family on their company toes so a total meltdown doesn’t occur.”

  “Funny, I’m just in this trip for the sex.”

  “And you’ll get it,” he promised, moving his lips to her ear. “After you see the way my family has messed up, you’ll know we can’t help but get everything right.”

  The moment was interrupted by a harsh, sawing sound. Oh-oh. Louie had abandoned his catbird seat on the couch. It sounded like he was making retching noises behind it. By the time Temple got there to tend him, he’d turned away and was vigorously scraping his nails all the way down to the tough jute backing of the costly carpet.

  Obviously, Louie was sharpening his utensils in preparation for Sunday dinner, which was held, as it always was in the Midwest, in the middle of the day, after church.

  The only more intimidating scene for their first social appearance as an engaged couple Temple could imagine was at the Barr family home in Minneapolis.

  Chapter 8

  Doves vs. Pigeons

  To enter the Goliath Hotel, one had to walk or drive under the three-stories-high statue of a straddling man, the said Goliath, although his kilt looked more like a sumo wrestler’s diaper.

  “Older” in Vegas meant cornier. Passing through the showy mirrored copper entrance onto a carpet bearing woven-in camel figures, Max wended around a twelve-foot-wide meandering lobby waterway called “the Love Moat,” where tourists lounged in automated red-velvet-lined gondolas.

  Finally he made it through the noisy, crowded casino to where red velvet ropes blocked off an attraction that went “dark” during the daytime.

  Max stood staring at a placard mounted behind glass at the Goliath Hotel Sultan’s Palace Theatre.

  SOPHISTA, MISTRESS OF MAGIC OF THE 21ST CENTURY.

  It didn’t surprise him that he’d been replaced.… His run had ended almost two years ago.

  It didn’t surprise him that he’d been replaced by a woman. The magic field had been a male domain for too long.

  What shocked him was that he’d been replaced by an utterly new name in the magic-show firmament.

  Not that anybody would recognize him now.

  He’d worn his usual self-effacing casual black but had sacrificed his thick black locks to a messy postmodern crew cut. Now he looked like any gel-laden spiky-topped hipster out there, vaguely gangsta but also slickly Hollywood. Pretty soon he’d be grow
ing a soul patch … and goatee. Zeus forbid!

  Given the new hollows on his already angular face, the look was hip and sinister enough to blend in like a lot of other Vegas wiseguys on the make.

  “Hot, ain’t she?”

  Max corrected his line of vision from the magic show headline to the magician’s Victoria’s Secret pumped-up bustline. “But can she make rabbits leap out of hats?” he asked.

  “Man, I would leap out of hats for that babe.” The guy was a Chris Rock wannabe, too genial to be quite as hard-edged as he hoped for. He glanced up at Max. “You a fan of magicians, or those major perky rabbits?”

  “I’m a fan of illusion.”

  “Wow, dude, you should have seen the magician they used to have here. The guy walked on air in a snowfall of pigeons.”

  “Doves.”

  “Oh, yeah, doves. Wonder what happened to him? Wonder what happened to all that bird shit?”

  Max laughed. “No wonder he walked on air.”

  “Right. Right!” The guy shot his trigger finger at him. “Good one.”

  After the man moved on, Max remained staring at the glossy babe who’d replaced him without seeing anything but the makeup and costume. They might remember his act, but not his working name, or him. Good to know the new look was working.

  He turned to wander back through the casino area listening to the chortles and screams and clucks of the push-button slot machines that silently swallowed five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills. “One-armed bandits” was a vintage expression now. Only the die-hard slot addicts could find a machine with a physical lever to pull.

  And if they did, the hotel would know. Sensors populated casinos like popcorn multiplied in movie theater aisles and seats. They resided on every slot machine, every ATM, every computerized door lock system. Computersville. Max refrained from gazing above the gambling tables and apparatuses. A casino this size might install three thousand eye-in-the-sky cameras but had only fifty monitors watched by six or so people. Casino surveillance was geared to archives, not live issues.

  That meant a dead man among the camera-servicing pathways might lie undiscovered there for a while, given all the remote recording methods nowadays. Max needed to get up in the ceiling service areas to explore.

  Some casinos also had catwalks in the ceiling above the casino floor, catwalks that allowed surveillance personnel to look directly down, through one-way glass, on the activities at the tables and/or slot machines. On him.

  Luckily, casinos still lavished mirror on many surfaces. Max studied the camera placements in eye-level reflections.

  All the casinos also relied on the old mechanical “eye in the sky,” hyped up for the new century. Max checked his watch, knowing a PTZ, the devilishly versatile Pan Tilt Zoom security camera, could read the time and count the hairs on his wrist. The catch was, what was happening above the PTZ went unrecorded, and undetected … unless a tattletale body crashed through the fancy ceiling tiles.

  Not his, he devotedly hoped.

  Chapter 9

  Tunnel Vision

  Max had finally found a service entrance and was elbow-crawling through the ceiling access tunnels above the Goliath casino area. The aging hotel’s multimillion-dollar face-lifts over the years had left much of the interior infrastructure in place.

  Sure, the cameras and remote-viewing equipment were state of the art. Yet the light maintenance modern cameras required meant that outmoded and bypassed air-conditioning ductwork that was as forgotten, narrow, and tortuous as secret passages in the Great Pyramid at Giza could be used. At least access to the murder scene hadn’t altered since then.

  Ga-cheez. Max sneezed at the dust. He was proceeding not by memory, but by what he could find about the hotel’s layout on the Internet. What a pathetic amateur memory loss had made of him.

  After scouting the building’s well-disguised functional areas, he’d found the battered gray-painted metal door that led to this area. Service stairwells sported so many of these doors that the thrum of recognition in his mind at seeing it could have been déjà vu instead of resurrecting memory.

  All he knew from Temple Barr, his lost love, and Molina, his unremembered enemy, was that a body had been found in the above-casino area of the Goliath. Molina, at least, had given him the vic’s name. Max lifted an elbow to claw farther forward and banged his funny bone on a metal strut.

  Not funny, he thought with gritted teeth, biting back monumental curses. The drilling pain made him wonder why torture by funny bone had never been popular. What had Temple said? The man had been stabbed. That method of murder made sense in these cramped labyrinths, but one sure couldn’t lift an arm far to get in a decent killing blow.

  According to Review-Journal archives the victim, Anthony Hedberg, had been the Goliath’s assistant security chief. Had Tony happened on a crime in the making, say abetting big-time cheating on the gaming tables below, or blackmailing the cheaters, or even a heist? Or was Hedberg a good guy gone bad? Was he setting the stage for any or all of the above?

  Like many multiple-choice questions, those speculations weren’t solid enough to bet on.

  Moving along mentally and physically in the dark, Max crawled right off the edge of a drop. Adrenaline peaked as he fell.

  His latex-gloved fingers clawed upward to grab for struts, but his body swagged into a shallow depression, not a void. He tried to avoid scrabbling for stability and sounding like squirrels in the attic. The casino floor below chimed with choruses of cheery computerized sound from the slot machines, but the general racket would be more muted if he happened to be above a blackjack or craps table.

  Exploring the miniature sinkhole, he concluded it was the equivalent of a duck blind in the sky. Back out a couple of bolts and you could shift the camera to look down on a Twenty-one table next to the cash-out area. A crook or a cop in this overlooking cradle could go country or pop: exploit the position for cheating at cards or know when the loaded cash cart was leaving for the vault.

  So why kill the guy in the sweet spot? Maybe someone was trying a takeover bid. Or … Hedberg had spotted signs of a heist and was hoping to play the hero and expose the scheme at the last minute.

  It had been his last minute, all right.

  Max used his tiny high-intensity flashlight to inspect the overlooking post. Somebody with a sizable investment of time and stealth had prepared it. The area either suffered from black mold or the fingerprint dust from the police investigation two years ago remained undisturbed.

  Max used the peephole station to jackknife his long legs around so he could retrace his path face-first. The classic “stiff upper lip,” gained by biting his lower lip with his upper teeth, kept the painful process quiet.

  An echoing scuffle above the venting shadowed his withdrawal. It could be the hotel had installed a more modern catwalk above the old camera access route, with one-way glass to survey the casino.

  Or … it could be his incursion had loosed a hound. The answer would soon be obvious as he approached the light leaking through the venting grille at the beginning of the air-duct tunnel, and now the end, for his retreat.

  Chapter 10

  Family … Matters

  Facing the blankness of the apartment door, Matt had no illusions about this apparently impulsive Saturday-night dinner for four. He was bringing Temple into something far trickier than your average possibly awkward family get-together.

  He shifted the strap of Midnight Louie’s carrier on his shoulder, marveling at her fortitude in carting around the hefty tomcat.

  “What are you smiling about?” she asked, glancing nervously at the blank apartment door in front of them.

  “Your secret strength.”

  “Right, midget Supergirl. Calves of steel on spikes of iron.” She hefted one foot cradled in those shoes that were only thin leather straps on a platform high heel of pewter-colored metal.

  She’d changed from hotel-room sweats back into the red leather suit that even Matt could tell meant business
.

  “You look very Waterplace Tower,” he told her, “but I’m guessing you’ll need those roach-stompers here in Chicago.” He wasn’t totally kidding as he knocked on wood for luck, and the usual reason. Admittance.

  The door opened instantly to his rapping. Matt’s younger cousin, Krystyna, filled the space like the real Supergirl. Her naturally blond hair was chopped into intersecting sprayed angles of magenta and black, the black matching her exotic eye makeup. Matt could hardly take in what she wore at one glance, except it was black and white and Lady Gaga.

  “You must be Temple,” Krys said, looking down on her older, smaller rival.

  “Right.” Temple was unintimidated by the Amazonian Alternative Lifestyle model looming in front of her. “I have an alter ego that would lurve your look, sister. Krys with a Y, is it, or are you going by a performance name now? Chris Angel is taken.”

  Krys blinked. She hadn’t expected the conventionally but modishly dressed fiancée to understand her visual statement.

  Matt escorted Temple inside while the doorwoman remained gawking. It had been evident on his last trip to Chicago. His fifteen-years-younger cousin was still “crushing” on him, as Temple’s teen persona, Zoe Chloe Ozone, would put it. If it came to a smackdown between the two, Matt’s money was on Temple and her secret weapon, Zoe Chloe. Plus, Temple had faced down a serial killer in her latest avocational stab at playing private detective.

  His mom was hovering in the archway to the next room, letting her taller, broader niece and roommate be the front woman.

  Matt hated to see his mother retreating again in that effacing way, as she had during his latest visit only a couple weeks ago. She was the real reason he’d come back. Mira had been blossoming lately, but had suddenly shut down. Matt reached to draw her forward even as he pulled Temple to his side.

  “Mom, meet Temple. Temple meet Mira.”

  “Now I see where Matt gets his telegenic looks.” Temple extended her right, ring-bare hand. Mira took it with a shy smile as the contact became more of a clasp than a shake.