Cat in a Topaz Tango: A Midnight Louie Mystery (Midnight Louie Mysteries) Read online

  Cat in a

  Topaz Tango

  By Carole Nelson Douglas from Tom Doherty Associates

  MYSTERY

  MIDNIGHT LOUIE MYSTERIES

  Catnap

  Cat in a Leopard Spot

  Pussyfoot

  Cat in a Midnight Choir

  Cat on a Blue Monday

  Cat in a Neon Nightmare

  Cat in a Crimson Haze

  Cat in an Orange Twist

  Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

  Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit

  Cat with an Emerald Eye

  Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

  Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

  Cat in a Red Hot Rage

  Cat in a Golden Garland

  Cat in a Sapphire Slipper

  Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

  Cat in a Topaz Tango

  Cat in an Indigo Mood

  Midnight Louie’s Pet Detectives

  Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit

  (anthology)

  Cat in a Kiwi Con

  IRENE ADLER ADVENTURES

  Good Night, Mr. Holmes

  The Adventuress*(Good Morning, Irene)

  A Soul of Steel* (Irene at Large)

  Another Scandal in Bohemia* (Irene’s Last Waltz)

  Chapel Noir

  Castle Rouge

  Femme Fatale

  Spider Dance

  Marilyn: Shades of Blonde (anthology)

  HISTORICAL

  ROMANCE

  Amberleigh†

  Lady Rogue†

  Fair Wind, Fiery Star

  SCIENCE

  FICTION

  Probe†

  Counterprobe†

  FANTASY

  TALISWOMAN

  Cup of Clay

  Seed upon the Wind

  SWORD AND CIRCLET

  Six of Swords

  Exiles of the Rynth

  Keepers of Edanvant

  Heir of Rengarth

  Seven of Swords

  *These are the reissued editions.

  †Also mystery

  Cat in a

  Topaz Tango

  A MIDNIGHT LOUIE MYSTERY

  Carole Nelson Douglas

  A Tom Doherty Associates

  Book New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  CAT IN A TOPAZ TANGO

  Copyright © 2009 by Carole Nelson Douglas

  All rights reserved.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Douglas, Carole Nelson.

  Cat in a topaz tango : a midnight Louie mystery / Carole Nelson Douglas.—1st hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1862-6

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-1862-8

  1. Midnight Louie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Barr, Temple (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Women cat owners—Fiction. 4. Cats—Fiction. 5. Las Vegas (Nev.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.o8237c27698 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2009012866

  First Edition: August 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For the late Mary Katherine Marion, a friend

  who was fun, fearless, and fashionable,

  clever, creative, and supportive,

  and for all the great times we had together

  Contents

  Previously in Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times . . .

  Chapter 1: Nervous Nuptials

  Chapter 2: Louie Left Out

  Chapter 3: House of Max

  Chapter 4: Alpine Do-si-do

  Chapter 5: Missing in Action

  Chapter 6: Lost in Cyberspace

  Chapter 7: Duty Call

  Chapter 8: Police Premises

  Chapter 9: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

  Chapter 10: Grilled Crawfish

  Chapter 11: Wolverine Dreams

  Chapter 12: Shotgun Reunion

  Chapter 13: Car Chase

  Chapter 14: Road Scholars

  Chapter 15: Emerald City Express

  Chapter 16: Text for Two

  Chapter 17: Leaving Laughlin

  Chapter 18: The Bus Fume Boogie Blues

  Chapter 19: Unhappy Hoofer

  Chapter 20: Dancing with Danger

  Chapter 21: Celebrity Is the Cat’s Pajamas

  Chapter 22: Pool Shark

  Chapter 23: Shaken, Not Stirred

  Chapter 24: En Sweet

  Chapter 25: Everybody Undercover, Quick!

  Chapter 26: Insecure Security

  Chapter 27: Reinvention Waltz

  Chapter 28: Precious Topaz

  Chapter 29: Brothers, Where Art Thou?

  Chapter 30: Undressed Rehearsal

  Chapter 31: Hot Stuff

  Chapter 32: Wardrobe Malfunction II

  Chapter 33: Hotfooting It

  Chapter 34: Mama’s Girls

  Chapter 35: Purse Pussycat Prowl

  Chapter 36: Red Hot Chili Peppers

  Chapter 37: The Shoe Must Go On

  Chapter 38: Mercedes Pasodoble

  Chapter 39: Chef du Jour

  Chapter 40: Rapid Recovery

  Chapter 41: Too Dead to Dance?

  Chapter 42: Pasodoble Double Cross

  Chapter 43: Stomp ’Em If You Got ’Em

  Chapter 44: Too Hot to Handle

  Chapter 45: Postmortem on a Pasodoble

  Chapter 46: A Perfect Barbie Doll

  Chapter 47: Madness in His Method Dancing

  Chapter 48: Paso de Deux

  Chapter 49: Another Opening, Another Blow

  Chapter 50: One-armed Bandit

  Chapter 51: Crime Seen

  Chapter 52: Rehearsed to Death

  Chapter 53: Fighting Form

  Chapter 54: Rest and Recreation

  Chapter 55: Last Tango in Zurich

  Chapter 56: On the Topaz Trail

  Chapter 57: An Open and Shut Case

  Chapter 58: Fenced In

  Chapter 59: Terminal Tango

  Chapter 60: Curtain Calls

  Chapter 61: Dial M for Motive

  Chapter 62: Topaz Tango

  Chapter 63: Ciao Ciao Ciao

  Chapter 64: For Her Eyes Only

  Chapter 65: Cane Dance

  Chapter 66: Dancing in the Dark

  Chapter 67: No Good Dude Goes Unpunished

  Tailpiece: Midnight Louie Mulls Many Matters

  Carole Nelson Douglas Plays the Dance Card

  Cat in a

  Topaz Tango

  Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times . . .

  There are a lot of fat cats in Las Vegas.

  These glitzy media-blitzed streets host almost forty million tourists each year and a ton of camera crews. If cameras are not recording background shots for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, they are capturing thousands of personal videos. People think they know this town—from film if not firsthand experience—know it from the flashy hotels to the seamy side of the Strip.

  And a good number of them know one particular Las Vegas institution.

  That would be me.

  Oh, I keep a low profile. You do not hear about me on the nightly news. That is the way I like it. That is the way any primo PI would like it. The name is Louie, Midnight Louie. I am a noir kind of guy, inside and out. I like my nightlife shaken, not stirred.

  I am not your usual gumshoe, in that my feet do not wear shoes of any stripe, but shivs. Being short, dark, and handsome . . . really short . . . gets me overlooked and underestimated, which is what the savvy operative wants anyway. I am your perfect undercover guy. I also like to hunker down under the covers with my little doll.

  Miss Temple Barr and I are perfect roomies. She tolerates my wandering ways. I look after her without letting her know about it. Call me Muscle in Midnight Black. We share a well-honed sense of justice and long, sharp fingernails and have cracked some cases too tough for the local fuzz. She is, after all, a freelance public relations specialist, and Las Vegas is full of public relations of all stripes and legalities.

  None can deny that the Las Vegas crime scene is big time, and I have been treading these mean neon streets for twenty-one books now. When I call myself an “alphacat,” some think I am merely asserting my natural male and feline dominance, but no. I simply reference the fact that since I debuted in Catnap and Pussyfoot, I then commenced to a title sequence that is as sweet and simple as B to Z.

  That is where I began my alphabet, with the B in Cat on a Blue Monday. From then on, the color word in the title is in alphabetical order up to the current volume, Cat in a Topaz Tango.

  Since Las Vegas is littered with guidebooks as well as bodies, I wish to provide a rundown of the local landmarks on my particular map of the world. A cast of characters, so to speak:

  To wit, my lovely roommate and high-heel devotee, Miss Nancy Drew on killer spikes, freelance PR ace Mi
ss Temple Barr, who had reunited with her elusive love . . .

  . . . the once again missing-in-action magician Mr. Max Kinsella, who has good reason for invisibility. After his cousin Sean died in a bomb attack during a post-high-school jaunt to Ireland, he went into undercover counterterrorism work with his mentor, Gandolph the Great.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Max is sought by another dame, Las Vegas homicide detective Lieutenant C. R. Molina, mother of teenage Mariah . . .

  . . . and the good friend of Miss Temple’s recent fiancé, Mr. Matt Devine, a radio talk-show shrink and former Roman Catholic priest who came to Vegas to track down his abusive stepfather, Cliff Effinger.

  Speaking of unhappy pasts, Miss Lieutenant Carmen Regina Molina is not thrilled that her former flame, Mr. Rafi Nadir, the unsuspecting father of Mariah, is in Las Vegas after blowing his career at the LAPD. . . .

  Meanwhile, Mr. Matt drew a stalker, the local lass that young Max and his cousin Sean boyishly competed for in that long-ago Ireland . . .

  . . . one Miss Kathleen O’Connor, deservedly christened Kitty the Cutter by Miss Temple. Finding Mr. Max impossible to trace, Kitty the C settled for harassing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine . . .

  . . . who tried to recover from the crush he developed on Miss Temple, his neighbor at the Circle Ritz condominiums. He did that by not very boldly seeking new women, all of whom were in danger from said Kitty the Cutter.

  Now that Miss Kathleen O’Connor has self-destructed and is dead and buried, things are shaking up at the Circle Ritz. Mr. Max Kinsella is again apparently lost in action. In fact, I saw him hit the wall of the Neon Nightmare club while in the guise of bungee-jumping magician, the Phantom Mage, and neither I nor Las Vegas has seen him since.

  That this possible tragedy coincides with my ever-lovin’ roommate going over to the Light Side (our handsome blond neighbor and former priest, Mr. Matt Devine) in her romantic life only adds to the confusion.

  However, things are not always what they seem. A magician can have as many lives as a cat, in my humble estimation, and events would seem to bear me out. Meanwhile, I am spending more time tracking the doings of Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina these days, whose various domestic issues past and present are on a collision course. Since she has always considered the Mystifying Max a murder suspect and my beloved roomie his too-loyal accomplice, she may have to eat some humble pie as well as deal with two circling men of her own, Rafi Nadir and Dirty Larry Podesta, an undercover narc who is mysteriously interested in her personal and professional crusades. . . .

  I am not surprised by these surprising developments. Everything is always up for grabs in Las Vegas 24/7: guilt, innocence, money, power, love, loss, death, and significant others.

  All this human sex and violence makes me glad that I have a simpler social life, such as just trying to get along with my unacknowledged daughter . . .

  . . . Miss Midnight Louise, who insinuated herself into my cases until I was forced to set up shop with her as Midnight Inc. Investigations and who, along with her many admirers, will be as mad as hell at her not making an appearance in this adventure, Girrrls always stick together . . .

  . . . and still needing to unearth more about the Synth, an ancient cabal of magicians that may be responsible for a lot of cold cases in town and which is of international interest now.

  Well, there you have it, the usual human stew, all mixed-up and at odds with one another and within themselves. Obviously, it is up to me to solve all their mysteries and nail a few crooks along the way. Like Las Vegas, the City That Never Sleeps, Midnight Louie, private eye, also has a sobriquet: the Kitty That Never Sleeps.

  With this crew, who could?

  Nervous Nuptials

  “You’re the ex-priest,” Temple pointed out. “You must know how we can avoid the wedding from Hell?”

  “All weddings, or the preparations at least, are from Hell,” Matt said.

  He went on, chapter and verse. “I’ve officiated at enough of them to know that by now. The wedding ‘party’ always bristles with conflicting, intergenerational agendas. I doubt they’re all as highly dramatic as Aldo Fontana’s and your aunt Kit’s, though.”

  Temple sighed and stirred on her living-room sofa in the Circle Ritz condominiums and apartment building, where she and Matt had units atop each other on the second and third floors. As, in fact, they were even more closely on top of each other now.

  The five-story, round fifties-era building was a whimsical little place even for the city of Las Vegas, which only did whimsical large and on the Strip, but theirs was a whimsical little engagement.

  Their lives were Euphemism Central these days. Being “engaged” made “sleeping together” expected, but they were still “living in sin” in the eyes of Matt’s Catholic church. In the eyes of Temple’s church, Universal Unitarian, she was just a modern woman ready for marital commitment and smart enough to want to know what she was getting into.

  At least now that they were “engaged,” Temple didn’t have to “keep her feet on the floor” when she and Matt shared a sofa. Her feet were on his lap, and he was playing with the ankle ties on the resale-shop designer spike heels she’d worn previously as Kit’s maid of honor at the elegant hotel wedding ceremony a couple of days earlier.

  Aldo, the groom, had nine brothers, one of whom owned the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino. Hotelier Nicky had been the best man, which left eight brothers to escort Kit’s eight bridesmaids. (How a Manhattan resident came up with eight Las Vegas bridesmaids is another story.)

  “Only a best man and matron or maid of honor for our wedding, I think,” Temple said. “How can we get into trouble with that?”

  “You still want the small civil ceremony here at Electra’s wedding chapel first?”

  “I don’t know. We did meet here. Electra’s our landlady and would love to marry us in the Circle Ritz’s attached chapel. We’d be legal but we’d still be sinful in the eyes of your church. Would legal make you feel any better?”

  “The only thing that makes me feel any better is you,” he said, his golden-brown eyes darkening.

  Temple hiked a shapely but short leg onto his shoulder. “Untie my shoe straps and then we can discuss more important things.”

  “I don’t know how you walk in these things,” Matt said, complying.

  “Years of being a shrimp and suffering.”

  He smiled and moved her other foot from his lap to his shoulder. “For a shrimp you have some provocative moves.”

  “For an ex-priest, you catch on fast.”

  They grinned at each other. Then yawned.

  “That was a rough twenty-four hours in the desert,” Matt commented, “then the big wedding ceremony came right after it.”

  “You were the kidnapping victim,” she pointed out. “I was only a member of the rescue party.”

  “I wasn’t the target. I was just along for the ride.”

  “And what a ride! Murder in a Nevada cathouse. It may not have been in Vegas proper, but it would sure make a great movie. Eight vengeful women, eight captive groomsmen, assorted associates, almost all of the last identifiable mob “family” in Clark County. Uzis, limos, hookers.”

  “Not likely for my bachelor party,” Matt said, laughing. “I hardly know anybody here.”

  “You’d be surprised, buddy. I think the Fontana boys plan on doing just that when we finally do get hitched.”

  “No, a fate worse than a Vegas wedding with Elvis,” Matt said, still laughing, and then tickling the bare soles of Temple’s feet to make her join in.

  She was easy and giggled away on cue. “Stop that! I’m really ticklish!”

  He was no fun. He stopped, then frowned. “I really don’t know about committing to that charity fund-raiser for all of next week.”

  “You wouldn’t bow out?”

  “Ballroom dancing isn’t exactly in my résumé.”

  “Just why you need to brush up before we do the wedding waltz at our reception. Not to mention you’re committed to taking Mariah Molina to her freshman father-daughter dance in high school this fall.”