Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme Read online

“I like that,” Van said, as if relieved to voice a first positive reaction.

  “Yeah,” Nicky told Santiago. “Temple’s a genius at ‘spin.’ You build it and she’ll call it something no one can resist, and they will come.”

  “Oh,” Santiago said, reassessing Temple. “She is a very powerful woman, then. The smaller the explosive device the more concentrated the effect, I have always believed.”

  “We’re not going to have ‘explosions’ in this . . . attraction,” Van said.

  “Of course not.” Santiago was definite. “Sounds—yes. Action, motion—yes. Speed—yes. Thrills—of course. But it is all merely show, as you say.”

  He pointed a sleek silver remote at the hi-def TV. The dark screen jumped into life, a continual sweeping pan of what Temple would call an existential gangster movie—part comic superhero movie, part black-and-white vintage hits and chases, the Fast & Furious of mob nostalgia, accented by metallic, symbolic splashes of red, all to a frenetic Carnaval musical beat.

  All three stood mesmerized and shell-shocked. Temple was aware of a layer of immense stage-set detail behind the hurtling cars and street scenes and running, shooting figures. There was a 3-D feel, although none of them wore assisting glasses.

  “This would require an age limit,” Van said.

  Santiago shrugged. “The family approach was tried in Las Vegas and failed. As well as impose a dress code on Carnaval in Rio. I would say, what you call PG-13. But no need to worry: this is not a ride for infants in strollers.”

  “Nor all women tourists,” Temple pointed out.

  “Women shop and eat in Vegas. Men gamble and seek excitement. Many women too, no?”

  His intriguing-colored eyes bored into hers. It was either a challenge or a come-on or an intimation that he knew she was not a stranger to the aftermath of violence, at least.

  Oh, yes. Tomás Santiago needed a lot more looking into, a lot more serious looking into. Maybe Detective Alch could be persuaded to do that. Or Frank Bucek in the FBI’s L.A. office, Matt’s former seminary teacher.

  Temple smelled something highly fishy about this artsy entrepreneur from the tropics. She knew that many South American cities were rife with crime and corruption. The white suit could almost be a disguise.

  “That, my friends,” Santiago declared inaccurately, as far as Temple was concerned, “is just the suggested canvas of our new Las Vegas sensation.”

  She and Van were not “sold,” although Nicky was still pop-eyed enamored of the sample show. It had all the action, all the motion of the Dire Straits song “Walk of Life.” Temple recalled a line about “Down in the tunnels, trying to make it pay.”

  Wasn’t that the “Talk of Life, and Death,” here? Violence and double-talk? Turning the day time into the night? Peddling mayhem, not history.

  Temple didn’t think shopping and eating would shut up her objections.

  “Of course,” Santiago said, clicking to another program, “you can’t appreciate the three-D of those scenes if you’re not riding in the magic limos.”

  “Magic limos,” Nicky repeated. “I like that phrase.”

  Santiago gave him the exotic-elixir-salesman wink and hit another button on the remote control.

  The screen became a black slate of sliding, continuous motion, like the tinted windows of a limo.

  “A blank window?” Van objected.

  “Ah, yes, dear lady, but it is far from blank. It is a porthole on the past, a magic slate for the future. Behold.”

  “Behold” the hokey, Temple thought, but even her eyes were glued to Santiago’s TV screen.

  For a moment the dim windows looked as if raindrops were sliding across their surface at seventy miles per hour.

  Then . . . the drops resolved into a human face, a human face under a fedora brim, shaping itself from the curved window into a three-dimensional presence, a recognizable, talking, three-dimensional presence that seemed to leap out of the TV screen into the room with them, the same size as any human present.

  Nicky sounded both awed and leery. “Okay, Santiago, I know you’re a media wizard, but how’d you get Frank Sinatra to do a personal appearance on your mini movie screen?”

  “God,” Frank was saying, “where the hell is my regular ride? Look,” Ol’ Blue Eyes said, staring straight into every eye present. “I appreciate you giving me a lift in your subterranean U-boat here, folks. The Sands goofed on priming my limo, and I gotta get to the Crystal Phoenix for Deano’s solo show. Shirley and Marilyn will be there, and we’re all gonna have a time of it, right?”

  The voice was that resonant speaking baritone heard round the world.

  “How did you reconstruct the Chairman of the Board?” Nicky asked.

  “Why?” Van asked.

  “The mob controlled and socialized with a lot of Italian singers and celebrities in the forties to the sixties because they owned the nightclubs and theaters,” Temple answered. Las Vegas history was her business. “Sinatra and Dean Martin outlived the mob-boss era. Remember, JFK was sleeping with Chicago’s Sam Giancana’s mistress.”

  “ ‘Camelot’ corrupted. I don’t want to remember that,” Van said.

  “We’ll keep the Kennedys out of your zipped-up club-car tour of the ‘Chunnel of Crime,’ right?” Nicky asked Santiago.

  “Of course.” Santiago reassured him. “We’ll only revive the infamous dead who are well known for their Las Vegas associations.”

  “What about Jersey Joe Jackson?” Van asked.

  “Jersey Joe . . . who?”

  “A minor figure,” Temple told him, “affiliated with the Crystal Phoenix when it was the Joshua Tree Hotel back in the day.”

  “What is this ‘Joshua Tree’?”

  “A big, tree-like desert cactus,” she explained. “About as uninteresting as Jersey Joe Jackson.”

  The first underground attraction had borne his name and gone belly up. Temple didn’t want to jinx this new project that Nicky had his heart set upon.

  Lake Mean

  It is about an hour’s drive from Vegas to Temple Bar, which is actually in—shhh!—Arizona.

  State lines are iffy around the meandering shoreline of Lake Mead and the soaring bulk of Hoover Dam. They are easier to find on a map or as the crow flies.

  Imagine how thrilled I am to see roadside signs advertising Temple Bar Days, apparently a new annual April shindig. They spelled my roommate’s name wrong, though, using only one r in Barr.

  They are always doing that to me as well.

  Louis! I see my name written that way again and again.

  What do they think I am? A foppish French monarch with a tail of Roman numerals attached to his first name like fleas? I am all-American and the One and Only moi, thank you. Merci. Arrive-derci, Roman.

  Lou-ee. That is my name. Plain and fancy. Capital L, small o-u-i-e. Such a meaning-laden name. Except for an a, it is a compact and elegant assembly of all the vowels in the English language. A portmanteau name, as the French might put it. Okay. No a. But I have always been a the, rather than a mere a.

  The feline PI in Vegas, as opposed to a feline PI in Vegas.

  I suppose Miss Midnight Louise would take exception to my claim, but she is a rank upstart. I was in this town first and foremost. In fact, the way she tells it, she would not be here were it not for me and my unsanctioned love life.

  Anyway, all my observations of the physical sort on this road trip are confined to craning my neck at banners visible in the upper area of the windshield. I am a stowaway, riding behind the gearbox amid the perfume of oily rags, dusty boots, and Red Man chewing tobacco.

  The radio blares out “Redneck Woman” to match, while I picture what my Miss Temple would think of my current . . . er, ambience. Thus amused, I wait for the driver to gather up his invoices before dismounting. I have about half a second to tumble outside on his work-boot heels before the heavy truck door will bisect me like a bug.

  I hover behind his sweat-stained seat, lunging and retreating twice
as he remembers another piece of paperwork and turns back to claw it into his grubby mitt.

  Although it is only April, every little reek is magnified by the sun’s heat beating down on hot metal like it was my personal toaster oven.

  At last we both set foot on the desert floor and go our separate ways. He stomps over to a mobile-home office, where the cement mixer disgorges Butch, who immediately trots off on his rounds. I scuttle into the gravel truck’s shade to inhale a few deep breaths of the sage and creosote bushes.

  The Mojave Desert is not my favorite perfumery, not like a New York New York Hotel delicatessen, say. But I will take Ma Nature over man-made smells any day.

  When I edge into the open to explore, I quickly discover that Temple Bar is not the place I used to know.

  Oh, the marina and café are still there, and so are the rambling wooden verandas of Three O’Clock Louie’s restaurant and bar. But the shoreline boats are bobbing a couple football-field lengths from where they did when last I saw them, and there is a long rambling bridge from the highway to Three O’Clock Louie’s. Over dry desert!

  What the hell—? Oh. Three O’Clock’s does not even look operational. Good news for the café next door scarfing up all the business. Bad news for my esteemed sire of the same name. Butch claimed my dear old dad had sent for me, but maybe his license has expired by now too. Sudden accidental death is not unknown to our kind.

  With these dire thoughts, I start padding over the wooden bridge toward the deserted restaurant. I suppose in these hard times many eating establishments have faded away like old soldiers, but I am getting worried about the old dudes who founded and ran this place. Collectively, they were once known as the Glory Hole Gang, and they had “retired” to one of Nevada’s innumerable ghost towns before being persuaded back into what passes for civilized society these days.

  Come to think of it, I have not heard any fresh reports of Jersey Joe Jackson’s ectoplasm showing up in the Crystal Phoenix Ghost Suite either. I will have to get Midnight Louise on that as soon as I get back.

  Meanwhile, I have arrived at the restaurant proper, once on the lapping waters of Lake Mead and now as high and dry as an old hippie on weed. The building is shuttered and obviously empty.

  So who was around to feed Three O’Clock enough to keep fur and claw together, so he could survive to send Butch for me? Certainly not Eightball O’Rourke, sometimes Vegas PI. Nor his old-time cohorts, Wild Blue Pike, Pitchblende O’Hara, Cranky Ferguson, and Spuds Lonnigan.

  I cannot believe all these old guys have just vanished, but they would be living on cactus-spine toothpicks (ouch!) and sand had they remained here. I gaze with damp eyes under the veranda tables where I once was wont to lounge, snagging fallen slivers of chicken. Crab. Lobster.

  Alas, poor Arthropod, I knew him, shook pincers with him once. Or her. It is hard to discern the fine points with critters that low on the evolutionary scale. You could say we had only a passing acquaintance, but you are what you eat.

  I wander to the end of the line, the deck-cum-pier where boats used to anchor and gilt-scaled carp practically walked on water to cadge bread crumbs and popcorn from tourists.

  What a fishing hole this was! I imagine how Three O’Clock would hang over the deck rim, batting at a flashing fin. Of course, the old boy was too aged and well fed to hook anything.

  If I bend over the wooden edge now and let my imagination out to play, fill the sere sand with sparkling blue water, I can even see Three O’Clock’s white-whiskered black face, the mirror image of mine, reflected back.

  How could no one have notified me the old fishing hole was gone? And now maybe my old man has vanished for good.

  Then my imagined reflection smacks me one in the kisser.

  “Do not gawk, boy!” an irascible voice orders. “You will give away my position. I did not get you all the way out here to find myself scooped up by do-gooders hustling me off to the Big House.”

  Ah . . . “Three O’Clock? Is it really you? This place is a ghost town.”

  “It is your daddy, all right, lad,” he says, digging in his brittle claws and scrabbling up over the decking to join me on the dried wooden slats. “If you had shown one whisker of concern for your forebear, you would have known the lakeside food and drink biz was taking a dive with the Lake Mead water level. You would have come out here to do an elder check.”

  “Speaking of ‘elder,’ where are the old dudes who ran the place?”

  “Skedaddled, with the carp and tourists. Even a lot of those boats next door have been foreclosed on.”

  “The Glory Hole Gang did not take you along when they left?”

  “I elected to hide out and keep my hard-won territory, such as it no longer is.”

  “The Strip is not exactly jumping with joy juice anymore, either,” I point out, “but it is better pickings than a marooned empty restaurant. I am sure I could fix you up with one of the Circle Ritz residents.”

  I frown in deep thought. I do not want the old man on top of me and my doings, and the only sucker-inhabited cat-free unit I can think of on the spot is Mr. Matt’s. Given the impending human cohabitation, I do not want a resident parent at my age and state of independence.

  “No, no, no!” Three O’Clock is hissing mad. “I am not ready to steal some gullible human’s rocking chair and place in the sun. I hear you have expanded your operation.”

  “My oper—Oh, you mean Midnight Investigations, Inc.”

  “You can always use an extra quartet of paws and pair of ears, I am sure, son.”

  “Look, Three O’Clock, as it happens, ‘family’ business is a lot on my mind right now, but I already have a junior partner. I am not looking for a senior partner.”

  “Well, I am not looking for a dead body, but I happen to have found one. I would not expect charity or for you to take on an aging relative out of the supposed kindness of your heart. I have brought my own case with me, and it is Murder One.”

  “Murder One?”

  “And a dandy,” he says, running a tattered claw through his snow-white whiskers. “Reeks with possibilities.”

  “Where?”

  “Here, of course.”

  “Here?” I look around. “Deadwood does not count, Dad.”

  He snorts.

  “And those tourists next door look about as lively as any tourists do lately.”

  His eyes are not the vivid emerald green I possess, but a watered-down version. Still, they flash in the sunlight.

  “Care to trot those pampered Vegas Strip tootsies of yours over the dead lake bed? Your old man still can show you a thing or two.”

  I feel a frisson of interest. It is true that the retreating lake waters might have revealed a sunken treasure. Heck, a fully intact B-29 bomber has rested at the bottom of Lake Mead since an early scientific flight measuring sunspots dropped it there in 1948.

  I doubt the lowered water level has given up the ghost that much, but who knows what baubles may have fallen overboard from the thousands of boating expeditions the lake has hosted? Rich dames? Big-time winners wearing gold baubles and bling?

  Finders keepers has always been a favorite modus operandi of me and mine.

  I shake the dust off my back and follow the old guy’s scrawny tail into the pebble-strewn desert that ruled the roost around here until Hoover Dam made the mighty Colorado River into an artificial lake.

  Now the water has dried up like the worldwide credit system, a matter of ecology mirroring economy.

  I do not know what I expected to see. Maybe carp corpses glittering with solid gold scales. A few diamond rings that slipped from careless hands into the deep blue waters would be rewarding, but it looks as if the metal detectors have already scoured the surface, given the sand is burnished in circles as if a wax buffer had been over it.

  So all I see is cracked yellow sand harder than stone and the same old, same old that spells M-o-j-a-v-e Desert. This once-submerged dirt is decorated by patches of burnt brown grass and a few scuz
zy green areas, maybe moss where some moisture might have gathered. Beyond it the ringing low hills show a wide beige watermark I’ve heard called the lake’s “bathtub ring.” Mostly, the dry land is parched, marked only by the island of an abandoned rowboat trailing a desiccated fuse of rope and some small rocklike hummocks.

  Manx, if I had wanted to walk on the moon, I would have applied to NASA!

  And if I had wanted to chap my pads, I could have walked the Strip from one end to the other and at least had a few morsels of fast food out of it, either boxed or bagged on the hoof. Or a Paw and Claw dinner of mouse and lizard, not that I eat much that has not been fully prepared and is fit for human consumption these days.

  The overhead sun beats down on our black coats. I pause to look back. The ersatz, ramshackle bulk of the restaurant seems far away. Even farther is the sparkle of blue shore and the bob of white boats next door. Add a bit of carp gold, and I would be a happy hiker.

  As it is . . .

  “Look here, Three O’Clock,” I say. “I have developed pretty good distance eyesight from many long nights spent ogling the neon on the Strip. I can see a bright band of blue water that marks the lake’s new water’s edge. I can see enough sand and abandoned anchors and driftwood and plain old junk to background a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. But no hide nor hair of a dead body do I see. So you have no case.”

  “No?” Three O’Clock does the senior scamper and cackle to a spot ten yards farther on.

  I slog over to examine an odd and unpromising “find” about the size of a picnic hamper for munchkins, except it is in no way appetizing.

  “Daddy-o,” I say, once again adopting Miss Midnight Louise’s casual manner of addressing me, “what is this? Some carnival stilt-walker dumped his huge clown shoes and sticks cut off at the calf overboard. Maybe he was giving up the circus and made the grand gesture on Lake Mead. Maybe he was impressing a girl. Humans will do that.”

  By now Three O’Clock is having a senior tantrum, hissing and spitting.

  “Did I sire something with kitty litter for brains? With the eyesight of a bat? The mental acuity of a hedgehog? The arrogance of a hedge-fund manager? Great Bast, help me, boy. You are a detective like I am a Fig Newton! Open your eyes and your mind.”