Cat in a Neon Nightmare Read online

  But Garry, he hadn’t performed for years. His mission the last years of his life had been revealing the tricks behind the illusions. Unlike the Cloaked Conjuror, he hadn’t built a mega-million Las Vegas headlining act out of it. Now the Cloaked Conjuror was facing death threats, and Max had to wonder if Garry’s death had been the first act of a plot to kill renegade magicians who gave away trade secrets.

  Which brought up the mysterious Synth, supposedly a band of magicians who punished magicians who told. Even Garry’s former assistant, Gloria Fuentes, had been found dead a couple months ago in a church parking lot, one of a series of strangled women whose deaths might, or might not, be related.

  And now CC had partnered with the strange female magician Shangri-La.

  Max ran last night through his head again, but it didn’t come out any less cluttered. First there was the realization that Temple was a target for the Stripper Killer, then his own compelling need to reach and protect her. Yes, he was protective of Temple, call it what you would. He was bigger, sadder, wiser. She was the last, best hope the limited life his work as a counterterrorism agent had allowed since his late teens. While he had roamed the world working onstage illusions, he had foiled offstage attempts to kill innocent civilians. It was a career choice he hadn’t chosen and no one retired from.

  Max was trying to be the first. Gandolph had preceded him in that attempt and Gandolph was dead.

  Max wasn’t dead yet. He grinned again at the screen. And he sure wasn’t a writer. Where there’s imperfection, there’s hope.

  Back to last night. He had tried not to damage Molina to the point where she could press charges, which meant he’d had to take a few blows, yet appear subdued. That was the hardest part. Max had built a life on refusing to be subdued.

  When the news of the attack at Baby Doll’s had come over Molina’s radio, he had raced there to collect Temple after the crime scene officers let her go and whisk her home to the Circle Ritz and the frantic comfort of a man with nothing good in his life but her. Then, restless in the wee hours, he had stolen away from a sleeping Temple to seek out his own kind, the caged Big Cats, trained to perform, who had been saved from fates worse than death to join the Cloaked Conjuror’s menagerie. It was the best situation for them, but they were as trapped, in a way, as he was, by what they were and what they could do. Dangerous beasts.

  And then she had appeared: the most dangerous game of all. Shangri-La, whose likeness and act were a combination of Japanese Kabuki theater and Kung Fu. He could still see her flying though the air above the stage at the Opium Den like an ax, sharp and lethal, all tattered robes and tongues of sable hair, crimson nails as long as a switch blade, face hidden by dead-white makeup with a scarlet mask defining the cheekbones and eyes. And lips.

  She had confronted him on his visit to the big cats, broadcasting contempt and threat. A small woman with major mojo.

  He didn’t know who she was or where she came from, but he recognized personal threat when he felt it.

  The Synth. She had to be an agent, or perhaps a director, of this mysterious alliance of magicians that had its roots as deeply in the past as the arcane ceremonies of the Masons.

  He must find and infiltrate the Synth.

  It would be the most dangerous assignment of his career, if he had already been targeted by the shadowy organization. If it existed.

  Max read the section he had rewritten on Gandolph:

  Garry Randolph reinvented himself twice. He led three lives. The first was as the curious and clever adolescent, enchanted by the idea that he could instill wonder in watching eyes. That was the emerging magician, the teenage prestidigitator, renamed as an inverse of an old Western film star, Scott Randolph. (He had always hated the common name, Garry, with its oddball spelling. Hadn’t Garrison Keillor been a plain Gary once, and gotten famous by Easternizing his name on NPR?) Garry Randolph figured that two R’s didn’t have much mystique.

  Then he progressed from a good amateur magician to a gifted professional. Somewhere in the process he began to believe in his own magic and took on a stage name that reflected that journey: Gandolph the Great. It was an ingenious reference to that most benign of fictional magicians, and a bow to Garry’s sixties youth: Gandalf the Gray from The Lord of the Rings fantasy trilogy, the one man of power strong enough to leave its use to less lethal beings than man or magician, like the hairy-footed, pint-size simple folk called hobbits.

  In an odd way Garry’s life mirrored that fictional character.

  At the height of his fame and career, he began undercutting his own stage illusions by debunking false mediums, and ultimately, the trickery practiced by magicians.

  He ended as he had begun, better known as Garry Randolph than by any stage name. And so he had died. While disguised as a heavily veiled woman medium, in fact, at a phony séance, perhaps murdered by some charlatan’s hand.

  In death, as in life, his passing through was a mystery. No one has yet been charged in his death, although several persons present had motives. Was he a victim of the ancient Synth? Had he trespassed against the timeless brotherhood of magicians?

  Or is this sense of conspiracy only another stage illusion, created to dazzle the ignorant and the suggestible?

  There the narrative ended. Perhaps because Max had only questions and no answers. Actually, it read a lot better than he had thought it would while he was writing. But now his thoughts had ricocheted from the unsuspected difficulties of the writing game to the hidden side of the magic world.

  If there was a Synth, he had to find it. Then he had to penetrate it, expose it, survive it.

  And he could tell no one.

  Especially not Temple. He had to do this solo, much as she wanted, needed to help him in his quest. She was grittier than he had imagined. Max’s lone-wolf life had precluded real intimacy until he had met Temple at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and broken all his own rules.

  She was smart, creative, and otherwise adorable. He’d always understood that he needed to protect her from the dangers of his counterterrorism past. When it came to international politics, good guys made bad enemies.

  He hadn’t understood, until he was forced into a corner, that she was ready, willing, and able to protect him. She’d stone-walled Molina for months while he was gone. She deserved to know, but she didn’t have what the espionage industry called “a need to know.”

  The Synth was too much an unknown, too risky, to allow Temple to know too much.

  Who would even believe such a medieval entity still existed?

  Only Garry Randolph, perhaps, and one fact about him was certain.

  He was dead. Gone.

  Chapter 8

  Hobbits with Claws

  “All things come to he who waits,” I tell Miss Midnight Louise.

  “I am tired of trite and gender-limiting clichés,” she tells me right back.

  “The truth is often uncomfortable, but I do not intend to be.” I settle back into the soft spot I have dented into the sofa cushion through long custom.

  Miss Louise is still sitting upright on the opposite arm, twitching her tail, and she does have a long supple one to twitch.

  “We should be ratcheting up the side of this crazy building right now,” she tells me. “I know we could eavesdrop an earful on Mr. Matt Devine’s patio.”

  “Eavesdropping through solid glass and wood is a taxing affair.”

  “Maybe for the senior set,” she shoots right back.

  “And it would be hard to conceal our presence. The undercover operative is most effective when he—or she—is unseen. Around Miss Temple’s digs, a cat, or two, is ho-hum. Although I must admit that our double presence did cause the intimidating lieutenant a certain unease.”

  “It was my unexpected presence that unnerved her. That, and the thought that you might be multiple. What did you do to scar the poor woman’s psyche?”

  “That lieutenant is no ‘poor woman.’ Save your sympathy for someone more deserving,
like the great white shark in Jaws.”

  “You are referencing stuff way too old for my generation, Pops. Since when did playing the couch potato pass for head’s-up investigation?”

  At this juncture I hear the key turn in our door. “Since now. Listen and learn, kit.”

  Sure enough, Miss Temple bustles in and throws her key on a kitchen countertop. Then she snags the portable phone on the coffee table en route to casting herself down right alongside me on the couch Miss Louise finds so hospitable to potatoes.

  She hits one digit that I know leads right to a certain cell phone.

  On her perch, Miss Louise lifts an airy set of eyebrow hairs.

  “Come on,” Miss Temple urges the phone, jiggling the sofa cushion unnecessarily as she idly caresses my ears. “Answer!”

  Well, who would dare disobey my Miss Temple when she is in crisis mode? Not the phone system.

  “Max!” She always sounds so glad to hear his voice. I admit to being a wee bit jealous, and stretch out so that my toes are tickling her thighs.

  She returns the favor to my tummy while Louise makes audible growling noises of disgust.

  Despise my methods if you must, but they are effective. I am now poised to pick up every nuance of the ensuing conversation and am getting a professional-level massage at the same time. Try that, Mike Hammer! I have never gone in for the hard-knocks school of private investigation. If it is that private, it should at least be pleasant.

  “You will never guess who was just here,” Miss Temple is continuing. “Molina!” she tells him right out before he can exercise his guesser even a little.

  Miss Temple is to information dispersal what Exxon is to an oil spill.

  “No, it wasn’t about your set-to last night. Not at all. It seems she thinks I know another filthy rotten murderer. In fact, she’s so hot on this new suspect she has forgotten all about little you.”

  Mr. Max does not cotton to rivals in any area, even bad ones. I can hear his basso grumble over my low-level purr.

  “No, this time she is after Matt. Yeah, Matt. For murder. You know that little enterprise that apparently half of Las Vegas was aiding and abetting him in? Operation Call Girl? Well, the call girl had a big fall and now Molina’s trying to figure out a way to keep Matt from being accused of her murder, as he looks like the last person to see her alive.

  “No, I do not think he did it! But neither is he helping out Molina with lots of alibis and denials. And none of you—none!—told me about Kitty the Cutter’s turning stalker and forcing Matt into a corner. We need to find and expose that psycho before she gets more people killed. Why ‘we’? Because she hates you most of all and if she can do this to Matt, who she never even knew from Adam until a few months ago, think what she could cook up for you. Or me.”

  Then Miss Temple does something uncharacteristic. She leans back into the sofa and listens. And listens.

  I can learn nothing from good listeners, only world-class talkers.

  Miss Midnight Louise yawns and casts me a bored glance.

  I realize that I no longer look good.

  Miss Temple rises, phone still clapped to ear. She heads for her bedroom. “I will get over there as soon as I can,” she is saying.

  I know she will change clothes first. She has not exactly had time to concoct a wardrobe today.

  Miss Louise gives her ruff a lick and a promise and leaps down to the floor. She is even hotter to trot than my Miss Temple.

  I give up my Nero Wolfe spot and reluctantly push myself upright. “It looks like we need to do some fieldwork,” I admit. “My usual sources will be going in for recriminations before they get down to business.”

  “So we head for—?” Miss Louise is already at the French doors, gazing over her fluffed shoulder at me. She would be as cute as a cricket were it not for the expression of hunt-lust on her piquant face.

  “The Goliath Hotel. We need to do some firsthand scouting on the scene of the crime.”

  I leap up and loosen the latch with one practiced blow from my mighty paw. The door bounces ajar and Miss Louise noses through it without mewing so much as a thank-you for my doorman service.

  That is what a dude gets for being a gentleman toward the weaker sex.

  Chapter 9

  The Man That Got Away

  Temple gathered several admiring, and a few envious, looks as she spurted her new red Miata through the clogged Strip traffic, the wind currying her hair. All she needed was a long white scarf and she would be the Isadora Duncan of the twenty-first century, prima donna dancer and unintentional suicide.

  The thought slowed her down to a decorous forty miles an hour even though her mind was still supercharged.

  Little did they know that her apparently carefree spin to Max’s house was a matter of life and death.

  She hadn’t had a minute to calm down and consider things. First she got a case of pre-breakfast bad-news indigestion from Molina, who she knew was an enemy, followed by multiple doses of kept-in-the-dark-itis from everyone she thought was a friend.

  Even with her thoughts in chaos, she could see that the tenuous relationships of a number of people, all of whom she knew and some of whom she loved or liked, were teetering on the brink of a disaster engineered by a common but elusive enemy.

  On the drive she had a chance for the first time to think about the victim. “A call girl.” It conjured images from B movies of faceless women with cynical smiles as shallow as their cleavage was deep. Bit-part players who were there only as a fleeting sex/love interest/motivator for the weary PI or cop, for a bit of smacking around by the mob boss, for dying hard and too soon to earn little more than minimum pay until the next film.

  She just couldn’t picture Matt in that scene. That desperate.

  But then she hadn’t really seen or been told what was going on for some time.

  But a call girl? Paid-for sex with a sleazy stranger? If that wasn’t a mortal sin in his church, what was? It made no sense. Or…maybe it did. A call girl was already damned, according to strict religions. Was sex with a sinner less damning than sex with a—?

  Temple decided not to mull that question while she was driving when she almost wandered into the same lane that had been staked out by a Humvee. Oops!

  Sex and Matt Devine didn’t make any sense, period. She’d never seen anyone who took it as seriously as he did. Kitty O’Connor had to have gotten under his skin with a lot more than a razor blade.

  She squealed onto Max’s street, then braked fast to avoid attracting, er, attention.

  She parked four houses away, looked around, then hiked to his door, nervous and impatient and not feeling at all inconspicuous.

  Max was there waiting to open it. He admitted her into the high-security inner sanctum that this former home of Orson Welles and Gandolph the Great had become.

  Its interior shadows felt like an oasis from the relentless Las Vegas sunshine and blazing cynicism.

  Temple leaned against the closed door behind her and breathed deep sighs of relief. Max took her hands. Their warmth made her realize how cold her fingers were.

  “You’ve had a rough morning,” he said.

  “It was a rough night, then…Molina first thing.”

  “I can’t imagine anything worse than waking up to Molina. I should have stayed.”

  “No.” Temple pushed her sinking spine off the temporary brace of Max’s solid-steel front door. “She would have found you. She walked right into my bedroom.”

  “I bet. Nosy Parker.” He noticed her confusion and laughed. “British expression for a snoop. Come on. Let’s try breakfast sans Molina. I haven’t had much sleep since I left you either. I’m having a case of what I think is called writer’s block.”

  Temple followed him down the house’s dark halls to the kitchen. The place was a quintessential magician’s residence: a maze of dim passages that opened onto strange, large, enthralling rooms.

  The kitchen was one of them. State-of-the-art, filled with stainless s
teel food machines with a canopy of contrasting copper-pan warmth above. Like a sunset-metal sky.

  Max whisked up a giant omelet in one of the copper pans and iced it with hot raspberry chipolte sauce. Goblets of cranberry juice shone like jewels as they settled on stools at the huge island unit to eat.

  Temple hooked her heels over the highest rung of her stool and ingested a tricolor of pepper strips, bland eggs, and mushrooms, all heated up by the sweet-spicy sauce.

  For a moment everything ugly drew back, like reality does when you feel about to faint, or to go down the biggest dip on a roller-coaster.

  “So…writer’s block? You?” she asked. Maybe jeered a little. It wasn’t often she was expert at something and he was the amateur.

  Max scratched his cheekbone where the asphalt burns from last night were hardening into scabs. Chalk up another nasty surprise to Molina.

  “Molina can really get that mean?” She nodded at his face.

  “Cops who don’t make collars fast and hard risk losing their weapons, and their suspect.” Max shrugged. “I have no complaints. I asked for it, and she did it by the book. Well, maybe she enjoyed it a bit too much, but I suspect she enjoys so little of anything that I don’t mind giving her a thrill.”

  “Oooh. Odious idea. She seems to despise you even more now than before. Just because you got away?”

  Max’s shrug was slightly uneasy the second time. Temple had the oddest notion that he wasn’t telling her something.

  “I threw every trick in the book at her to get away in time to race to your rescue.” He shook his head at the memory. “That probably didn’t sit too well. She just thought I wasn’t fighting fair, and anyway, she didn’t believe me that you were in danger…until the news came over her car radio.” Max chuckled. “She was not happy with it.”