Cat in a White Tie and Tails Read online

  “Yeah. I was undercover, working ‘security’ there. Even I didn’t know what was what when the EMTs carted you away. I was starting to feel sorry for Temple Barr, she’s such an okay gal. Then my cell phone rang and I heard Garry giving me my ‘story’ while that ambulance siren was still screaming in the background. He musta got you out of the country stat. What was he? CIA?”

  “Confounding International Agent, yes.” Max smiled again.

  “He must have been ready for anything. Damn, he was good. I wish I’d known him longer.”

  Max bestirred his cranky frame to lean forward and click glass rims with Rafi. “To Garry Randolph, my friend and yours.”

  The expensive crystal rang, an exquisite death knell. Max was sure Garry would have approved the impulse, the toast, and the ingredients, including him and Rafi, resurrected victim and unseen guardian angel.

  Enough Irish mist and sentiment. Max sat back. “I have a posthumous assignment from Garry too. He wanted to figure out who’s been dogging my existence here in Vegas.”

  “Yeah. I know you’re working with Molina on something.”

  “For Molina, which means I’m working for myself first and foremost.” The two men exchanged a tight smile. “So you’ve kept that close an eye on me.”

  “Not you, repo-memory man. Molina. That’s all I’m after, shared child custody. And I can prove cause to get it if she doesn’t give me some rope soon.”

  “From the perspective of one with impaired memory, she strikes me as the devoted mother type, and her rendezvousing occasionally with me is not exactly juicy, career-breaking news. Hell, I could be dating her.”

  “But you’re not,” Rafi said. “And she’s still vulnerable if she’s using you like she did Dirty Larry to cover up her illegal B-and-E at this very house and do some personal Peeping Tom work.”

  “Have you tried negotiating with her on the child custody?”

  Nadir took another healthy slug and let it burn down fast. “A little. She knows what I want, says she’s not ‘ready.’ Mariah, my kid, is thirteen. I don’t have months, even weeks and days, to lose.”

  “Yeah, she’ll be a rebellious teen with no time for parents in the wink of Pussycat Doll eye.”

  “Don’t remind me.” Nadir lowered his drink to the table and his head to bury his hands in his thick dark hair.

  “Push it, then.”

  “You’ve seen Molina more recently than I have. She seem any mellower now that the Barbie Doll Killer case is solved and she isn’t playing cat and mouse with that undercover narc?”

  “Nope.” Max stretched out his legs. “I don’t remember her from before my near-death experience, but I can tell you that woman is not going to soften one tiny bit … unless you push it.”

  “She must be still bending the rules if she’s hiring you for something. And now there’s another guy found conked out in the Goliath mechanical systems.”

  “He made it out. Don’t let the blood fool you. I cut off his air temporarily and used a sharp head blow. A quick out cold, but not forever. And don’t think you can turn my exploits on Molina’s behalf into blackmail. What’ll impress a fiercely protective, seriously paranoid single mother like her will be how upstanding you are. And you are now, aren’t you?”

  Nadir rubbed his furrowed temples but still didn’t raise his head. “I guess so. Your friend Garry got me a chance at the Oasis. I’m in line for the security chief job, but I’m not the dead cop hero Carmen made out I was to the kid.”

  “Carmen. I bet C. R. Molina despises that girly name.”

  “She always did.”

  “Whoa.” Max poured a bit more whiskey into Nadir’s glass. “Wait a minute. I was wrong. You can blackmail her. Don’t you get it? You don’t have to live up to her lie, but she has to live down lying to the kid.” Rafi nodded, seeing the light. “That’s something kids don’t understand and forgive. She needs you to cooperate and help her explain away that unforgivable breach of trust. No wonder she’s been such a mama grizzly. Hell, if that were a qualification, she could run for president on that platform. If I were you, I’d make nice and then nail her.”

  “Are you suggesting I date her?”

  “No, of course not. I’m telling you to. And getting her into bed would seal the deal.” Max laughed at the sight of Nadir’s struck-dumb expression. “You’ve said you get along with the kid—”

  “Mariah.”

  “—with Mariah already, since she and the always entertaining Miss Barr were competing in that teen talent reality show.”

  “Yeah. It cuts like a knife to hear Mariah wants that media-perfect ex-priest to take her to the junior high Daughter–Dad dance. What’s he got that I haven’t got, besides looks and money?”

  “I could say the same thing, since he cut me out with Temple.”

  “You’ve got looks and money,” Rafi growled.

  “Had,” Max said. “Had it all, and a live Garry Randolph.”

  Rafi slanted a suspicious glance his way. “Kinsella, are you getting drunk?”

  “Maybe so.” Max eyed the low level of Irish whiskey in his glittering glass and fixed that. “Not to go all metrosexual on you, but you’re a buff, decent-looking guy. You turned your life around. You really care about being in that young girl’s life. I say, use it. You and Molina had something going once.”

  “You must be drunk.” Rafi sat staring into his glass, then grabbed the Jameson for a refill.

  Yeah, Max thought. First had come the recent rerun of the Goliath episode he still didn’t remember. Now Rafi’s account of his almost-fatal Neon Nightmare plunge was bringing back haunting glimpses. Both incidents merited a good dose of anesthetic.

  And … where would Max with a Memory be now, instead of drinking with Rafi Nadir? Maybe at the Circle Ritz, sleeping with Temple Barr. The idea seemed ridiculous at first, but she sure had known how to reintroduce a morose amnesiac to his own life.

  “Come home, Max.”

  Her parting words, sounding shell-shocked but game, would never leave his rebooted memory going forward. She had guts and grace, that little woman. And if Vegas still didn’t feel like “home,” nowhere did. Maybe the Circle Ritz could have. Maybe being with her again would bring everything flooding back.…

  Max ended the maybes. That was the liquor nattering on.

  He didn’t need to star in a romantic melodrama. He needed to find out who was out to kill him, and why so many innocents were being drawn into that murderous endgame.

  For now, if he could sic Rafi on Molina, distract her from the remaining unsolved criminal matters that she obsessed about, he’d have a much clearer field of operations for his own investigations.

  Once he was totally sober again, that is.

  Chapter 14

  Gossip Guys: Doing One’s Nails

  Well, trim my toe hairs with a hedge shears!

  Or just step on a crack and break my mother’s back, why not? She will make you pay, believe it. One does not mess with Ma Barker, and you do not tug on Superman’s cloak or Midnight Louie’s tail.

  Here I have been trekked to Chitown in a designer carrier that gets me taken for a purse pooch and kidnapped, but I am still about to perish of boredom. Then I keep my ears perked and a nice, plump juicy family scandal plus a deranged stalker case gets tossed into my furry lap like a grenade.

  Some would scramble to dodge falling family standards and potential bodies. Not Midnight Louie. I will be on the lookout for any malfeasance, not to mention bad actors.

  Speaking of bad actors, my Miss Temple and Mr. Matt and Miss Matt Mama all do a lousy job of concealing the verbal bombshell Miss Mira has just let loose regarding her late demented hubby.

  Cliff Effinger was the worst lowlife to hit Vegas and did not do a decent thing in his life, except draw Mr. Matt to my hometown to track him down.

  I know the whole sordid story. It is as common in my world as in soap operas. In other words, it actually happens in real life but sounds too bad to be true. Seem
s Mr. Matt is the “product of sin.” Yeah, we hip cats on the street do not get those ugly labels. We are all just called superfluous.

  He was actually the product of this sloppy Romeo and Juliet scenario humans like to sniffle over when they are not busy casting stones. My kind has often been the object of such schizo reactions too. As I understand it, She Who Is to Become Matt’s Naïve Young Mother is visiting St. Stanislaus Catholic Church near Christmastime to light a candle to the Virgin Mary. Watch out for that Virgin Mary! She is just a statue and may sometimes be asleep at the switch, as the Great Goddess Bast has been known to do for a century or two through her many millennia of worship.

  Anyway, this young soldier going off to whatever war is the flavor of the moment is there to light a candle for his safe return, and zowie, powie. Human hormones strike, aka love at first sight. Believe me, I sympathize with the biological imperative. I have been blindsided by its pull a few dozen times myself.

  It is the same old story as in my world. He is off about his business protecting territory for the feline race and she is left with a six-pack of kits … or just one if the leavee happens to be human.

  You can imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the church choirs come the ensuing months. Jeez, you would think they could leave a lone cub in peace to be born, but Mr. Matt comes into this world everything a human kit should not be. Father unknown, mother shamed, and a family secret forever.

  Follows the dumb, desperate marriage to whatever lowlife will take a fallen woman to wife. Enter the lazy, worthless, haranguing Cliff Effinger. At least Miss Matt Mama gives poor Mr. Matt a false surname, her one act of defiance, changing that into something new, not the old Polish “maiden” name, not Effinger’s, but something unique and Devine. Mr. Matt grows up with such lousy father figures except for the parish priest that he becomes one. Maybe his interior kit thinks he can redeem his mother’s “mistake.”

  Me, I find life tough enough as a former homeless street dude. I cannot see adding on all this additional angst, but humans have over the centuries invented whole systems designed to make most things miserable.

  Mr. Matt is a good priest; he has to be a perfect “father,” after all, but he finally wakes up and smells the candles and realizes he cannot make up for anyone else’s past. So he gets himself cashiered out as a civilian, but tells no one he wants to track down the Evil Effinger, who has long since left his mother for the dubious attractions of the criminal life in Las Vegas.

  It could be Mr. Matt is primed to leave a lot of Mr. Cliff Effinger’s skin on the asphalt. Whatever, he has an epiphany and puts the brakes on his revenge, but some other dudes take out the miserable cur. Murder, they wrote. The rest is a long slow dance to reconnect with his mother and encourage her to bury the past and grow strong in the new soil that has accrued over it during all these years.

  Which is working great until Mr. Matt once again uses his tracking skills to find out his real father is not dead on foreign soil, as his mother was told by the guy’s family lawyers long ago, but alive and well and rich and unhappily married in his old hometown, Chicago.

  I guess this is a “what if Romeo and Juliet had lived” story, and it looks like acts four and five are still coming. With my Miss Temple in the midst of all this, I cannot let her do it alone, but perhaps I must let her do a teeny tiny bit of it solo.

  Although the family dinner tomorrow is sure to be a slaughter of more than the main course—I am violently against any but vegetarian fare for humans, given they have the unfair double advantage of opposable thumbs and automatic weapons—I decide that while our current crew is out for Sunday dinner I will find reason to hang out at Mr. Matt Mother’s homestead and see if I can catch whoever is spiking the place with billets-doux of a threatening nature.

  Chapter 15

  Prodigal Cat

  “This city is way too tall,” Temple observed as Matt drove their rented Camry sedan to the apartment late Sunday morning to pick up his mother and Krys. “And this car is way too conservative for people in their early thirties like us.”

  “You’re not even thirty-one yet.”

  “I will be in a couple of months. I’m told that’s the beginning of the end.”

  “That birthday was more like the end of the misguided beginning for me,” Matt mused, referring to when he’d left his vocation. “And the older Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs are hardly high-rise.” He eyed Temple uneasily. “I have to warn you. Carl Sandberg the poet was right: Chicago was always a brawling, sprawling city. The immigrant ethnics fiercely battled each other. No Irish priest would serve a Polish or German community church. There’s still surviving prejudice.”

  “Good thing I’m a mutt,” Temple said. “Anybody who calls me Irish because of my red hair will have to have his or her mitts up.”

  From the backseat, Louie seconded her assertion with a long, low growl.

  “I just don’t know how Louie would adjust to being an indoor cat,” Temple said. “The sheer size of this city is stunning. Manhattan feels intimate in comparison, and Minneapolis is a shrimp. Now I see Vegas is really just a small town with a Disney World downtown blossoming atop the stem of a rhinestone Las Vegas Strip. The rest of it is low-rise and residential and alley cat friendly.”

  “Not by law.” Matt’s eyebrows had lifted over the top rims of his sunglasses as he made his point.

  “Louie writes his own laws,” she reminded him.

  “Las Vegas is no longer in the lawless West, Temple. You know he should be confined to quarters at all times.”

  She sighed. “He’d break out. I don’t worry about him there. Too much. Here, I would.”

  “This would be a definite reverse in lifestyle. I like the idea of having our nights together. Maybe you and Louie could get a Zoe Chloe Ozone and cat act going in some medium.”

  Another low growl from the backseat punctuated that comment.

  “Sweet idea, but not likely,” Temple said. “I’m glad your mother phoned this morning. She sounded more upbeat.”

  “Confession is good for the soul.”

  “Who invented that quote?”

  “You don’t ‘invent’ quotes, Temple, and you know it. I know you love a mystery, but Mom clearly wants us to set aside the ugly stalking situation for the moment, partly because the family sand trap is even more delicate to navigate. We can’t do anything serious about it on Sunday anyway. Let’s just try to get along.”

  “And worry about things tomorrow. Okay. New conversation. I’m glad I’ll be arriving at your uncle’s house with your mother and cousin. I won’t stand out as an outlander too much.”

  Matt’s laugh rang off the moonroof’s tinted glass. “Oh, you will, don’t worry. Low-profile and quiet don’t work in my family anyway.”

  The Camry turned into the dark of the apartment building’s underground garage. Street parking spots were precious in Chicago neighborhoods. Matt glided the car into a “visitor” slot and collected Louie in his leopard-print carrier.

  “He could lose a little weight.” Matt hooked the broad strap over one shoulder as he stood and locked the car.

  This time Louie didn’t even bother commenting.

  * * *

  “Uncle Stach is such a hoot! He still won’t drink any German beer.” Krys shook her particolor, multilength-cut head. “Party” was Krys’s main mode. Zoe Chloe could take styling lessons from that girl.

  Matt’s mother had unearthed a family album for Temple to scan, with appropriate commentary from Krys, Matt, and Mira herself.

  Temple’s job right now was to share the long couch with the two women and look and listen as they flipped pages through Mira’s album—“There’s Matt at seven, in his white First Communion suit,” Mama said proudly.

  “Even then he looked divine,” Krys kidded.

  Temple thought he looked solemn and adorable, like a miniature really young Brad Pitt.

  Krys was holding up her cell phone to run a more contemporary strip of shots. “This
was Matt’s third-to-last trip back.” She thumbed the tiny button through photos she’d taken of them together by holding the phone camera at arm’s length. “Matt had been AWOL for a long time before then.”

  Temple could believe that. The men looked boisterous, the women were always shown slaving happily in the kitchen, and the wall art was all religious. The entire scene would be a silent rebuke for anyone who’d left the priesthood. To the older generation, his act would be like leaving the U.S. Army to enlist in Al Qaeda. Unthinkable.

  Krys, however, had no such scruples. She’d obviously ached to get her hot little hormone-charged teen hands on Matt and now was flashing this fact in Temple’s face.

  As the only girl in her family of five kids, Temple didn’t get excited about female competition. There was at least one part of the Catholic religion she found sympatico and that was the concept of free will. If Matt found another woman (even if she was just an immature, overgrown girl like Krys) more interesting and attractive than he found Temple, he was welcome to walk.

  Well, maybe Temple had just a tiny competition bone in her compact body. She did find Krys immature and note that her parade of photos was making Matt squirm in that well-concealed way he had of doing.

  “Thank you so much,” Temple told Mira. “It’s so thoughtful of you to preview such a large, extended family to the new kid on the block.” Followed by a flick of the eyes to Krys. “Even though I work in a ‘people’ profession, it’s always nice to know the lay of the land.” Another swift glance at Krys and her string of “she smiled, he smiled” photos. What else could the poor guy do?

  Matt was trying not to smile now and his dear mother remained oblivious.

  Temple already felt her native, ex-reporter indignation rising in Mira’s behalf. It must have been a nightmare for the sensitive girl she’d been to “disgrace” her own family. She’d obviously not been given Instruction One about protecting herself from an early age, the way girls today were.