Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir Read online

  I step over the nearest supine human chest and sniff hopefully for Miss Louise’s unmistakable scent.

  I am sitting, sniffing, on a supine human chest and it is not moving: neither to sit up and unseat me, or to make like it is breathing in and out and going up and down. Come on! Go up and down!

  No. Uh-oh. It is business as usual for Midnight Louie. Most of my horizontal humans are dead, not sleeping, unless I am safe in my bed at home, which is supposedly Miss Temple’s bed, exceptthat all beds are the immemorial and hereditary property in perpetuity of cats. Why else do they call them king and queen-size models?

  I am amazed that Miss Midnight Louise has held her tongue for so long when she has the opportunity to lord it over me and claim the body as her first find.

  That is when I realize that I do not scent so much as a hair from Miss Louise’s body.

  She is not here.

  It is most unlike Miss Midnight Louise to abandon a fresh kill.

  Unless the departure was not voluntary.

  Car Trouble

  Temple cast one fond farewell look over her shoulder at her aqua Storm. Although sun-faded, the car looked remarkably perky for its age. It had served her well but now it was sitting on a used car lot and she was moving on to a hot new property.

  She felt like a traitor. A car took possession of its owner’s history. It was a silent witness to life’s big and small moments. She would be able to date certain occurrences from now on by whether it was before, during, or after she was driving the Storm…or not. Owning a car was almost like going steady.

  The “or not” lay ahead of her in all its new-car glory.

  So Temple let the Storm slip into the rearview mirror of her memory and advanced on the shining form of her new wheels, a Miata.

  She knew every argument on the planet against convertibles: your hair will get scrambled, your eyes will get dried out, and you’ll end up with skin cancer. But hey, the tiny trunk was almost big enough to hold a hat, and the glove compartment could certainly contain a small bottle of sunscreen, which she would apply, along with sunglasses and scarf, with the religious zeal of a redhead.

  She opened the driver’s door and got in.

  The hat she hadn’t bought yet, nor the sunscreen, but she could put on the sunglasses.

  The sun warmed the top of her head. She looked around for someplace to stow her ownership papers so they wouldn’t blow away. The tiny glove compartment.

  She turned the key in the ignition, inhaled the sun-baked scent of new car and resisted looking back one last time at the Storm.

  This was the first car she had bought all by herself. The Storm had been a Barr Family Production, at least all parts of the Barr family that were male, which most of it was, except for her mother and herself.

  Her father and brothers had kicked the tires, negotiated with car dealers, done everything but drive it. This baby was hers alone! She had visited all the web sites, tracked down the MSRP, interrogated the local dealers, and finally decided who she would allow to sell her the car at her price.

  Temple hoped that her price was the rock-bottom one it should have been.

  She sighed deeply and then eased out the brake. Everyone always watched a new owner toodle away as if driving over shattered glass. Hah! She put the car in gear and spurted out onto the freeway access road like a crimson jackrabbit, safe but not sorry.

  In a minute she was on 95, her short curls curried by the desert wind. The car fit her like glove leather, with which it was indeed lined.

  The only negative was that her exit came up too quickly and she was soon trolling mundane city streets again (if city streets could ever be mundane in Las Vegas) at a sedate thirty-five miles an hour.

  Taking a spin in her new car seemed like a good idea, but which direction could she spin it in? All dressed up and no place to go…

  She knew: the Crystal Phoenix. The Grand Opening had been last week, so she wanted to sneak up on the crowds patronizing her various bright ideas there, the Jersey Joe Jackson Action Attraction, the petting zoo, the Domingo performance art garden…. Amid the opening crowds and hoopla, she hadn’t been able to savor every little touch.

  Temple spun the small steering wheel around the next corner, and the next, until she was on the car-crowded Strip, just another gawker in a mechanical bumper-car game of hot metal, lurching her way to Byzantium, or at least the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino.

  She drove up the long, curving drive, thinking everybody was staring at her, which they weren’t. There were far more pricy and exotic cars in the queue.

  She hopped out to let the valet take the precious car instead of parking it in the far back lot and hiking up to the hotel’s rear entrance as usual.

  Sticking the parking chit in her tote bag, where it was promptly lost, Temple strode into the main entrance on her high-rise heels.

  Somebody whistled.

  Obviously not at her.

  She strode ahead as only a determined short woman can.

  Someone whistled again.

  She risked a glance over her shoulder: Armani suit at three o’clock high, bearing down on her in a cotton-candy cloud of unwrinkled wool-silk blend, no easy deed in Las Vegas.

  So here she was: IDed, targeted, and shot down by a Fontana brother in full flight.

  Whether Temple or the Fontana brother was in full flight was a good question.

  She spun and stopped to wait for the inevitable to catch up with her.

  “I am hurt,” he said when within hearing distance. “Miss Temple Barr deigns to visit my brother Nicky’s tacky little establishment and she intends to hit the front door without a suitable escort.”

  He paused to fold his hands in front of him and smile rebukingly down on her.

  “Take off those extreme-price shades so I can see the whites of your fine Italian eyes,” she said,“and can tell who you are. I don’t accept anonymous escorts.”

  He shrugged and peeled off the wraparound Porsches.

  Not Aldo, or Julio, or Rico, or Giuseppe, or Ernesto. Temple put her brain through boot camp. What were the other Fontana names? Not Vito. Or Fabrizio, thank Jove. Wasn’t one named something unlikely? Panache? Pinocchio?

  “Ralph, at your disposal,” he said. “It appears that I am the only member of the family on hand to do the host’s duty. How may I be of service?”

  Temple eschewed the obvious, as was always wise with a Fontana brother. “Well, I could use a good guide.”

  “I am the best. To what?”

  “To the best of the Crystal Phoenix. I’m here to give the new attractions a post-opening test drive, so to speak, as an unsuspecting member of the the public.”

  “Speaking of test drives, I see you have a snappy new car. I can get you a Maserati for a very good price.”

  “I don’t doubt it, Ralph, but the car I drove up in is the best I can afford and I think of it as a Maserati in training.”

  “No doubt you are right.” He offered an arm. “Am I right in assuming that the honor of being your escort on this occasion will mean an expedition on the Jersey Joe Jackson mine ride?”

  “Why, yes. You have any reservations about the JJJ mine ride?”

  “Many, all having to do with digesting a superb lunch of veal Venezia at the Rialto.”

  “Don’t worry. I left special instructions that the mine ride personnel be equipped with, how shall I put it, barf bags?”

  Ralph nodded with monkish resignation most unusual in a Fontana brother, and swept open a glass door by its gilded phoenix handle.

  Temple moved into the chill air inside, onto the soft hush of thick carpeting, secretly hoping that she would soon see a suave and elegant Fontana brother screaming and shaking and losing his lunch.

  Because she had dropped in without making previous arrangements like a proper PR person, Temple and Ralph had to queue up and pay up at the ticket kiosk like any tourists.

  “I could —” Ralph suggested, easing a supple calfskin wallet from his in
side jacket pocket as another, cruder sort of fellow might tease the butt of a Beretta forth from the same site.

  “No tips, please.” Temple frowned, employing her sternest tone. “I want to see how the system works without greasing.”

  “I hope they grease the tracks,” Ralph muttered under his breath.

  Temple noticed that his warm Italian skin now matched the pallor of his fine Italian tailoring.

  The kiosk was manned by a Calamity Jane type. Temple had nixed the first suggestion of a dance hall girl with cleavage.

  Calamity Jane came with side arms instead. “Howdy!” She paused in her spiel to aim her handy pistol at an animated bushwhacker in the faux desert terrain. “Don’t mind him. Jest a claim-jumper. Guess he’s jumped all the way back to St. Louis now. Jest follow the folks up front and keep to four lines and watch out for bushwhackers.”

  “This bushwhacker,” Ralph asked. “Where did the expression come from?”

  PR people are supposed to know everything, so Temple took an uneducated guess. “I suppose from all the missed shots miners fired at each other defending their claims. They probably hit more bushes than people.”

  Ralph nodded, impressed. All that had touched his land of origin in the last century or so had been world wars. “The Wild West.”

  “I hope so.” Temple was buoyed to see that the line was long. They had to baby-step along behind a full complement of riders. Once they had moved into the Old West Saloon the lights grew dim, the piano music came up, and they were passing a laughing crowd of seated patrons watching a burlesque show on the stage.

  Part of the scene were live actors, part animatronic figures, and the line moved just fast enough that you couldn’t be sure which was which.

  People around them laughed at the punchlines or buzzed about some subtle bit of business in one corner or the other. The scene was complex enough that repeated viewings would reveal new details.

  There! Temple noted. In the corner. That byplay between the drunken snake-oil salesman, the temperance lady, and the visiting English duke was hers. She was a playwright!

  She realized that people in line were turning around to eye her and Ralph. Did they know she was the creative genius behind this display?

  Then Temple looked at the people looking at them. Tourists clad in saggy shorts and baggy T-shirts. She in high heels and Ralph in Armani looked out of place in the Wild West ambiance of the Jersey Joe Jackson Action Attraction. Jersey Joe Jackson had probably, and fortunately, never lived long enough to hear the word “ambiance” used.

  Temple cleared her throat and looked down as their path led onto a crude wooden elevator. She catwalked onto the contrivance, setting each foot down so her spindly heels didn’t wedge into the spaces between the rough board floor.

  “Something of an impulsive outing?” Ralph asked.

  There was little chance to answer as the influxing mob crowded them against the wooden struts that formed the elevator’s sides. Otis Packing Crate Company, at your service.

  “This is authentically rickety,” Ralph commented as the mechanism creaked and lurched down a story or two.

  Once they had been jolted to the ground level, they were in the sudden, cool darkness of a mine tunnel. Only the fluorescent lines on the cavern floor, between which they were ordered to queue up, indicated where they were to go next.

  A rocky wall melted away like cheesecloth as lights penetrated it and an overhead voice urged them to move sideways. Temple grabbed Ralph’s creamy sleeve and pulled him beside her.

  “We want to sit together, we line up horizontally,” she whispered up at him.

  “Ah, you may not want to sit together.” Ralph’s suit was delicately yellow, but his face was tinted green. “I don’t like violent amusement park rides.”

  “Nonsense. This ride is certified safe for an eight-year-old.”

  “I didn’t like violent amusement park rides when I was eight years old.”

  Come to think of it, Temple hadn’t at that age either.

  Too late.

  They were in the Disneyland-pioneered pattern: a controlled mob boxed into sequential spaces. Beyond the vanished wall sat a string of mine carts, miniboxcars. Convertible, of course. Open to the dank underground air. She who lives by the convertible will die by the convertible.

  She and Ralph ended up shuffling into place on a seating bank of four, buckling safety belts across their laps. Ralph frowned to see the fluid drape of his suitcoat puckering like seersucker under the belt’s firm clasp.

  Temple’s belt didn’t seem to tighten enough. Maybe she would fly out on the first turn. Eight-year-olds, she told herself. Surely she wasn’t smaller than the average eight-year-old.

  The rich, whiskey-and-tobacco-salted voice rolling out from the concealed speakers described Jersey Joe’s colorful Las Vegas history: paydirt-hitting prospector, early Las Vegas developer, founder of the Joshua Tree Hotel from whose ashes the Crystal Phoenix had risen in exquisite glory only years before, busted millionaire living on in a 1940s suite at the abandoned Joshua Tree until life abandoned him and only his ghost remained….

  The train of cars jerked into motion, then wrenched their passengers right and left as it careened through the serpentine tunnels under caged bare bulbs of light.

  Light. And dark. Swinging, swaying light. And dark.

  People shrieked, the uninhibited, pleasurable shrieks of kid-again wonderment, with an edge of adult unease that knew Something Could Go Wrong.

  Ralph put an arm around Temple to hold her down. Her small frame was rattling around in her seat despite the belt. She screeched, exhilarated and a little nervous. Having primal fun, but part of the thrill was her reservations. What if she should slip out of her belt…if the ride should run off the rails, if —

  Water dripped from jeweled stalactites onto the rising pinnacles of stalagmites as their ore carrier rattled through a wonderland of an underground kingdom seemingly decorated by Jack Frost Inc.

  Kids were oohing and aahing between squeals, making Temple grin like a proud department store Christmas window decorator.

  The passing stone walls flashed veins of silver and gold and other rich subterranean mineral finds, geodes as lavish as any showgirl’s crystal-and-sequined costume, nature’s naked glittering chorus line, all purveying actual mineral wonders. Genuine silicon silicone, so to speak.

  The walls grew gauzy, revealing moving pictures from Jersey Joe’s rise and fall of a life: the Joshua Tree growing out of the desert floor like a manmade geode, all angular stucco and early Southwest style ziggurats. Small planes descending on the spare desert landing strip like tribal thunderbirds, then cars coming, from L.A., many of them Thunderbirds. Then night fell and the lights in the Joshua Tree winked like stars, darkening one by one.

  The riders grew hushed. The next scene showed the sun scorching the once-vibrant building, Las Vegas landmarks exploding around it like fireworks, the Joshua Tree a lifeless hulk amidst a neon jungle.

  Then…a dark tunnel, like an umbilical passage. The cars sped into more darkness. The moving walls showed the Joshua Tree imploding, exploding, its stucco walls breaking open like the dull surface of a rock containing a geode…and the faceted, glassine elegance of the Crystal Phoenix was revealed at its center like the heart of a chocolate Easter egg’s raspberry-ice nougat.

  Faster the cars went, twining and soaring in the tunnel, passing scenes of glittering festivity, until finally there was only the intimate glimpse of a private suite, the decor harking back to the 1940s, a silver-haired ghost of a dirt-poor miner moving through the scene like a holographic host at a Halloween party.

  Jersey Joe Jackson’s faint image went to the prow of the train of cars, Tinker Bell as figurehead, leading them into the darkness and the future like a headlight.

  Walls flashed by, dark and stony, lit by veins of unimagined richness. Subterranean minerals gleamed like phosphorescent fish schooling in some dry sea bed long deserted by a polar wave of warming.


  Temple blinked. For an instant Jersey Joe’s ghostly figure took on iconic form, white and gleaming…Elvis!

  No, another illusion. Another dip into the collective unconscious. They were hurtling toward the light at the end of the tunnel, and it was solid, warm, and bright.

  Daylight.

  The cars rocked to a standstill. They had stopped in the Crystal Palace, a glass-domed tropical garden flooded with brightness. Fluorescent flamingos moved among the green leaves. Huge tropical flower faces sang in holographic harmony, inviting the admiration of an invisible Alice. A massive neon caterpillar rippled with rainbow segments.

  Everyone struggled out of their seat belts and the cars, blinking, the scenes viewed in the darkened tunnels still imprinting their retinas.

  Ralph smoothed out his suit coat, pleasantly surprised. “It was not as tumultuous as I had thought.”

  “But it was fun?” Temple was anxious to be reassured.

  “An experience,” he said, patting his inside coat pockets delicately until reassured as to the integrity of the contents of both pockets.

  Temple tried to imagine hunting for a wayward Beretta in those dark tunnels and was glad this was just a fictional scenario.

  People, buzzing as contentedly as honey-fed bees, fanned into the artificial garden the performance artist Domingo had wrought.

  It was a garden of sound as well as sight, hushed songs from vintage radios, hushed soothing voices.

  Temple ignored all the fascinating constructions, moving, blinking, changing color, changing voices, looking for one specific landmark.

  “What are you hunting for?” Ralph asked.

  “I don’t know. A plaque, I suppose.”

  “Like on a public fountain?”

  “Right,” she said. “Some acknowledgment…He’d probably build it into the overall theme. Nothing obvious.”

  “Nothing obvious is ever worth hunting,” Ralph noted with lofty Fontana-brother certainty.

  Temple stopped dead. “That’s rather profound.”

  “I’m sorry. The ride upset my stomach.”

  “Maybe I’m too short to see it. That’s always a problem.”