Cat In A Midnight Choir

Cat in a

Midnight

Choir

By Carole Nelson Douglas from Tom Doherty Associates

MYSTERY

MIDNIGHT LOUIE MYSTERIES

Catnap

Pussyfoot

Cat on a Blue Monday

Cat in a Crimson Haze

Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

Cat with an Emerald Eye

Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

Cat in a Golden Garland

Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

Cat in an Indigo Mood

Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit

Cat in a Kiwi Con

Cat in a Leopard Spot

Cat in a Midnight Choir

Midnight Louie’s Pet Detectives

(anthology)

IRENE ADLER ADVENTURES

Good Night, Mr. Holmes

Good Morning, Irene

Irene at Large

Irene’s Last Waltz

Chapel Noir

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

Keepers of Edanvant

Heir of Rengarth

Seven of Swords

*also mystery

Cat in a

Midnight

Choir

A MIDNIGHT LOUIE MYSTERY

Carole Nelson Douglas

A Tom Doherty Associates Book

New York

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

CAT IN A MIDNIGHT CHOIR

Copyright © 2002 by Carole Nelson Douglas

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Edited by Claire Eddy

A Forge Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Douglas, Carole Nelson.

Cat in a midnight choir / Carole Nelson Douglas. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-70619-7

1. Midnight Louie (Fictitious character) — Ficion. 2. Barr, Temple (Fictitious character) — Fiction. 3. Stripteasers — Crimes against — Fiction. 4. Public relations consultants — Fiction. 5. Women cat owners — Fiction. 6. Las Vegas (Nev.) — Fiction. 7. Cats — Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.O8237 C2767 2002

813’.54 — dc21

2001058281

For the original and real Midnight Louie, stray cat extraordinaire, nine lives were not enough

Table of Contents

Previously in

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Tailpiece

Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times…

As a serial killer-finder in a multivolume mystery series (not to mention a primo mouthpiece), I want to update my readers old and new on past crimes and present tensions.

None can deny that the Las Vegas crime scene is a pretty busy place, and I have been treading these mean neon streets for fourteen books now. When I call myself an “alphacat,” some think I am merely asserting my natural feline male dominance. But no, I refer to 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 when I begin 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 Midnight Choir.

Since I associate with a multifarious and nefarious crew of human beings, and since Las Vegas is littered with guidebooks as well as bodies, I wish to provide a guide to the local landmarks on my particular map of the world. A cast of characters, so to speak:

To wit, my lovely redheaded roommate and high-heel devotee, freelance PR ace Miss Temple Barr, who has reunited with her only love…

the once missing-in-action magician Mr. Max Kinsella, who has good reason for invisibility: years of international counterterrorism work after his cousin Sean died in a bomb attack in Ireland during a post–high school jaunt to the Old Sod…

but Mr. Max is sought by another dame, homicide lieutenant C. R. Molina, who is the mother of preteen Mariah…

and the good friend of Miss Temple’s recent good friend, Mr. Matt Devine, a radio talk-show shrink who not long ago was a Roman Catholic priest and who came to Las Vegas to track down his abusive stepfather, Mr. Cliff Effinger.

Speaking of inconvenient pasts, Lieutenant Carmen Molina is not thrilled that her former flame, Mr. Rafi Nadir, the unsuspecting father of Mariah, is in Las Vegas taking on shady muscle jobs after blowing his career on the LAPD…

or that Mr. Max Kinsella is hunting Rafi himself because the lieutenant blackmailed him into tailing her ex. While so engaged, Mr. Max’s attempted rescue of a pathetic young stripper, Cher Smith, soon found her dead…

and Mr. Rafi Nadir looks like the prime suspect.

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

…one Kathleen O’Connor, for years an IRA operative who seduced rich men for guns and roses for the cause, deservedly rechristened by Miss Temple as Kitty the Cutter.

Miss Kitty, finding the Mystifying Max impossible to trace, has settled for harassing with tooth and nail the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine…

while he tries to recover from the crush he developed on his Circle Ritz condominium neighbor, Miss Temple, by not very boldly seeking new women, all of whom are now in danger from said Kitty the Cutter.

This human stuff is all very complex, but luckily my life is much simpler, revolving around a quest for union with…

the Divine Yvette, a shaded silver Persian beauty I filmed some catfood commercials with before being wrongfully named in a paternity suit by her air-head film-star mistress Miss Savannah Ashleigh…

and a quest for peace from my unacknowledged daughter, Miss Midnight Louise, who has been insinuating herself into my cases, along with the professional drug-and bomb-sniffing Maltese dog, Mr. Nose E….

and a running battle of wits with the evil Siamese Hyacinth, first met as the onstage assistant to the mysterious lady magician…

Shangri-La, who made off with Miss Temple’s semiengagement ring from Mr. Max during an onstage trick and who has not been seen since except in sinister glimpses…

just like the Synth, an ancient cabal of magicians that may take contemporary credit for the ambiguous death of Mr. Max’s mentor in magic, Gandolph the Great, and that of GG’s former lady assistant as well as the Cloaked Conjuror’s assistant’s more recent demise at TitaniCon science fiction convention, not to mention a professor of the metaphysical found dead among strange symbols, Mr. Jefferson Mangel.

Well, there you have it. The usual human stew, all mixed up and at odds with each other 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?

Serial Sunday

The drawing seemed like child’s play.

Done by a preschool child.

A preschool child lacking any art talent.

Temple frowned at her own handiwork.

She had never had much drawing skill, but one would think a grown woman could do better than this.

One would think, for that matter, that a participant in an alleged ritual murder could do better than this.

The thought unleashed a montage of memory-pictures. Actual crime-scene photos flared in her mind’s eye again like psychic flashcards wielded by a female homicide lieutenant who went by the name of C. R. Molina. All homicide lieutenants needed a sadistic streak, Temple mused. You didn’t provoke betraying reactions by walking softly and carrying a sharp nail file. Not that Molina had fingernails long enough to file.

Temple shut her eyes against the vivid memories of a death scene and pictured the site when she had last seen Jeff Mangel alive in it: a bland classroom in a bland, boxy University of Nevada at Las Vegas building. Jeff had converted the uninspiring space into a small exhibition, mostly of posters framed in freestanding ranks like pages in a gigantic book.

With the painted paper eyes of Houdini, Blackstone, Copperfield, and Gandolph the Great looking on, the professor enchanted by magic had met a brutal death amid the paraphernalia of kinky sex. The weapon had been a custom-designed ritual blade.

Underneath it all lay the five crude lines drawn in blood on the floor, that had boxed in Jeff’s body like a symbolic fence.

Those bloody lines had to mean something, perhaps both more and less than the crude attempts to invoke cults and sexual extremes had.

Temple had started this Sunday afternoon homework project because she’d promised Max that she’d try to find out what the strange shape represented, if anything. Thanks to her exposure to a cadre of mediums and psychics the previous Halloween, he now considered her an expert on the mantic arts.

Public relations people had to be quick studies, and since Temple had moved from TV journalism to fine arts public relations to the far less fine art of freelance PR in Las Vegas, she had become even better at being a jill of all trades. But an artist she was not.

She stared at the five rough lines linked into the askew shape of a house drawn by a three-year-old. Or…a rather clumsy bell.

Her sketch had been jotted down on the back of a flimsy restaurant receipt she’d found in her tote bag when Max had broken into the crime scene to show her the bizarre props littering it. The sketch would have fit on the palm of her hand.

In reality, in life, in death…it had been drawn on a vinyl tile floor in great sweeping strokes, large enough to encompass a dead body.

Had it been drawn before, or after, Jefferson Mangel had bled and breathed his last on the floor of his small exhibit room of magic show posters and paraphernalia?

Temple shivered a little, though it was a lovely spring afternoon. Las Vegas springs and falls could be numbered by days. This day was one where the bountiful sunlight poured through the French doors into her home office until the room seemed made of bottled radiance. Even shadows were lazy, innocent sketches on the warm, inadvertent canvas of her wood parquet floor. The room contained nothing sinister, except her thoughts…

…and the drawing from a killing ground…

…and something sinuous and black that brushed the sun-drenched floor as if keeping slow-motion time.

“Louie?” She stood and leaned over the width of the desktop, an oak slab with a tight grain streaked like honey blond hair.

Only by leaning to the point of teetering could a woman as short as Temple see the owner of the serpentine tail, a huge black cat sunning himself in the hottest, purest pool of sunlight in the room.

“I’ll thank you not to waggle that tail around. It looks too much like a desert snake that crawled in.”

The cat’s green eyes, slitted almost shut, angled open while its ears flattened. Midnight Louie did not take kindly to criticism. At twenty-plus pounds of muscular alley cat, he didn’t have to.

His balefully still image sank like a black sun behind the desk’s horizon line as Temple sat down again. She could hear the grumpy metronome of an insulted tail thumping the parquet.

“This is a workroom,” she pointed out to no one in particular.

And maybe she was a little grumpy herself this morning, because her only roommate was a cat.

She pulled the gigantic mug that held hazelnut-flavored nonfat creamer diluted with gourmet coffee close enough to lift and sipped, slitting her eyes at the drawing again.

It had to mean something.

She needed to enlarge it, think in bigger terms.

Temple picked up the ruler and pencil and duplicated the figure at several times its original size on an eleven-by-seventeen sheet of blank paper.

The peaked “roof” was obviously the top, but why was the bottom foundation line slightly angled? An accident of freehand drawing, or intentional? And none of the four paired lines exactly matched, which was what gave the image its childishly askew look.

“It doesn’t have to be a house,” she muttered as she set down her implements and took up her coffee mug again. She would never admit that she was talking to Louie. “It could be a window. A Gothic window with a peaked arch. Like a church!”

Now that image was interesting. It brought to mind another murder of another person connected to the world of magic and magicians, as Professor Mangel had been: Gloria Fuentes, the late Great Gandolph’s now late ex-magician’s assistant.

“Arghgghgh!” Temple ran her red-enameled fingernails into her naturally wavy, coppery hair.

The source of her frustration wasn’t just Professor Mangel’s death, circumscribed by a crude outline, it was a lot of unsolved murders over the past year or more, all tangential to her life and the lives of those she knew.

She pulled a fresh sheet of large paper over the puzzling image and grabbed the ruler as if she intended to admonish someone with it: herself.

But her cri de coeur had disturbed the native.

Midnight Louie leaped with surprising grace atop the desk. He sniffed the contents of her mug until his dashing white whiskers twitched, then lay down on the edges of all her papers and began bathing his right forefoot.

“There have been too many unsolved deaths in this town for too long,” she told him.

Louie took this declaration stoically, and switched to licking his other forefoot.

He may have been thinking, but Temple thought not. She did not tend to lick her toes when thinking, although she had been known to wet her lips.

At least she was drawing straight lines now. The ruler moved down the page inch by inch as she underlined it with pencil, dark and emphatic.

Louie stretched out a damp paw to follow her progress. Temple wasn’t sure whether he was playing or putting his own stamp of approval on the form taking shape on the paper.

She might not be able to draw a decent stick figure in a game of Hangman, but she could trace straight lines to infinity.

Temple swooped the page around in a forty-five-degree turn and began drawing another series of lines crossways to the first.

“This is a table, Louie,” she explained as the cat continued giving encouraging pats — or playful bats (with Louie it was so hard to tell when he was just being a cat, or was being just a cat) — as he supervised her progress down the page.

“There!” Temple spun the page around again. “I am going to list every mysterious death that I know of for the past year. Seeing it laid out in black and white ought to make something clear.”

Temple leaned back to study her handiwork. It seemed that the last year had not showered pennies from heaven on Las Vegas casinos, but dead bodies. Parking lots came in second as a hot crime scene. Magic was a thread linking four of the victims, including the last three.

Louie lashed out a paw and, with what passed for retractable thumb tacks on his forefoot, drew the drawing closer to him. He actually appeared to study the layout for a moment with the usual feline solemnity, but immediately after rolled over on the paper and wiggled luxuriously, creasing wrinkles into Temple’s crisp recto-linear design.

“Off, off, damn…Spot!”

Temple’s expletives often displayed her years doing PR for the Tyrone Guthrie repertory theater in Minneapolis.

Louie did not heed Shakespearian admonitions. He didn’t heed admonitions, period. He rolled onto his back, putting his curled limbs into what Temple called the Dead Bug position (well, Louie was jet black), the one that cats everywhere from Peekaboo the comic strip cat to Leo the Lion considered the safe-at-home, leave-me-alone position: Home Alone, for short. In other words, meddle with the cat sprawled helplessly on its back at your own peril.

Temple decided she was in no hurry to reclaim her paper and reached instead for the cell phone headset on her desk. The headset left her hands free to take notes while on the phone, which she had to do frequently, and also preserved her from possible cancer of the ear, eye, nose, throat, and, most creepily, brain.

She punched the autodial number for Max’s cell phone.

Meanwhile, Louie twisted his torso in two different directions at once and took total possession of the papers on her desk.

“What’s up?” Max’s voice answered.

“Louie’s legs. In the air. All four.”

“That doesn’t sound like a phenomenon worth reporting.”

“It’s the paper he’s lying on that’s interesting.”

“The Sunday paper?”

“No. The list I just made of all the unsolved murders hanging over us…some of them quite literally. It’s rather interesting when you spell it out in black and white. Thought you might want to see it. I also have an enlarged version of that crude symbol painted around poor Jeff’s body.”

Temple’s glance fell on the small, crumpled, pale green receipt on which she had first drawn the palm-sized version of the symbol.

“Max,” she went on suddenly, “isn’t there some tradition relating to a five-sided figure, a pentagram, as a sign of evil?”

“If you’re talking Universal Pictures from the forties, then yeah.”

“I thought so! But I can’t remember what. It isn’t Dracula —”

“No way would he dirty his palms with pentagrams. Can’t you remember?”

“No! That’s why I’m asking you.”

“A werewolf.”

“Right!”

“So you think a werewolf is involved?”

“No, but somebody might want us to think so.”

“So we’d look even more ridiculous to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department?”

“A lot of the victims are people involved professionally in magic.”

“That doesn’t make them consorters with werewolves, Temple, m’dear. In fact, just the opposite. The magic professional despises any intimations of the weird or paranormal surrounding the art. We are illusionists. We create mysteries for others. We don’t cherish any illusions ourselves.”

“Hah! Shows what you know about your own self, Mr. Mystifying Max. Don’t worry. I’d never suspect you of being a werewolf. No, you’ve got to be a vampire: shuttered windows, night person, wears black.”

“Just to prove you wrong I’ll pick up a pizza with garlic on the way over.”

“Done!”

After she disconnected the phone, Temple wondered how to kill time. Max wouldn’t take long to get there. Las Vegas boasted almost as many great pizza places as it did wedding chapels.

Midnight Louie had abandoned his tummy-up position and hit the hardwood floor with a thump. He stalked over to the French doors and gazed out on Temple’s second-floor patio. Most people would assume the big black cat was watching for birds, but Temple understood that he was watching for Max.

Somehow Louie always knew when his predecessor in the role of roommate was coming over. Temple had never owned a cat before she had found Louie running loose in the exhibition hall of the convention center a year ago, and also had stumbled over, literally, her first murder victim. She hadn’t realized yet that the verb “owning” was wishful thinking when it came to cats.

If anything, Louie owned her, and often acted like it.

Now that he was absorbed with guard duty, Temple pulled the papers back toward her, smoothing any wrinkles Louie had pressed into them.

She paused, realizing that Louie’s maneuvers had left the strange figure upside down. And it looked weirdly familiar in that position. Not like something you saw every day, certainly, but like something. Some similar conjunction of crude lines she had seen. Somewhere.

Great! She would be the Queen of Vague when she trotted this sketch around desperately seeking a definition for it.

Movement in the sun-dappled room suddenly caught her eye: Louie trotting swiftly into the main room.

He seldom troubled to move faster than necessary, so Temple jumped up to follow the cat.

She hadn’t heard a thing, but Max had materialized in the living room like the imposing magician he was, six-feet-four, lean and all in black from hair to toe except for the white-and-red cardboard pizza box he held before him like a tray.

“Not climbing the balcony today?” she asked, referring to his usual second-story-man approach.

“Didn’t want the pepperoni to slide off the mozzarella. Vertical ascensions don’t suit pizzas.”

Temple was already rooting in the hip-pocket kitchen’s cupboards and drawers for plates, knives, and napkins. Fingers would do for the rest.

“Are you still worried about being seen here?”

“Now more than ever,” he answered fervently.

She saw that he was serious. “Why?”

“The forces of evil seem to be gathering.”

“Of evil? Or crime?”

“I think it’s just outright evil, but crime trails after evil like a kid brother trying to keep up.”

“Evil. The Synth?”

Max pulled a triangular piece from the precut slab of crust, cholesterol, and tomato sauce as red as blood.

Eating it allowed him to mull his answer. “I started thinking about who would be in the Synth. I know or know of most of the professional magicians around. I can’t see any of them being seriously irritated by the Cloaked Conjurer. At that level, they’re institutions. Everybody knows they’re trickmeisters, and their level of trick is not what CC is exposing. He blows the whistle on dated stuff; illusions we’ve all had to reinvent or forget. So the Synth —”

“Has to be ‘nothing but a bunch of bloody amateurs!’” Temple declaimed in a thundering British accent.

“‘Bloody’ may be eerily appropriate. Where’d you come up with that quote?”

“Spoken by the late great Tyrone Guthrie, the British director who founded a repertory company in the American Midwest, my alma mater in Minneapolis, after trying to coax a professional performance of Oedipus Rex out of some college-level theater students as a demonstration. He burst out with that sentence. It became a catch phrase around his namesake theater forever.”

“I’m afraid we’re ‘a bunch of bloody amateurs’ in the face of what’s really going on here. Which is why I brought this.”

Max reached into his pocket to pull out an object.

Temple was so stunned at the directness of the gesture — usually an ex-magician like Max couldn’t resist producing physical objects out of thin air — that she stared at him instead of it for a moment.

The overhead kitchen fluorescent light cast an admittedly harsh shadow, but Max’s lean face looked hollow instead of sleek. Temple saw strain in the taut tilt of his eyes, and he looked tired. No, dispirited.

“We never had time to go to the firing range,” he was saying, regretfully.

“Ah, you did notice my extremely awkward relationship with firearms out at the Rancho Exotica? I’m better off unarmed.”

“I don’t like guns either. This is just pepper spray. You have to snap the cover open and move the spray head out of the guarded position. Then press away.”

Temple curled her fingers around the molded edge of the leatherette carrying case, unsnapped the flap, and rotated the little white plastic nozzle into the armed position. It looked like a key chain giveaway, or something kids in a kinder, gentler time used to send for through the mail from ads at the back of comic books.

“You sure it doesn’t double as a decoder ring?” she quipped.

“No, it just sprays very hot pepper. Be careful not to let any get in your eyes if you have to use it. Works against mad dogs, and Englishmen too.”

She glanced at Midnight Louie, looking natty as a rug on the black-and-white-tiled floor. He was dispatching a pepperoni circle that Max had slipped to him.

“Who am I supposed to be using it against?” Temple asked. “Besides mad dogs and Englishmen?”

“Whoever chased you with the car at TitaniCon. Whoever was getting pushy with your entire party at the convention. I don’t know who, but you will if he/she/it/they ever have you cornered.”

“Yeah.” Temple kept silent to chew on pizza and a scene from the past: a parking garage, two strange men, blows, pain, humiliation, fear. She glanced at the petite pepper spray. Would that have helped her then? Only if she carried it where it was instantly accessible.

“And,” Max said, not quite meeting her eyes, “it wouldn’t hurt to put Matt Devine on your distant acquaintance list, since he seemed to be the main target at TitaniCon.”

“Yeah, well…” Temple swallowed too much pizza too fast and almost choked. “The way he’s been acting lately, that won’t be a problem. Is something going on I should know about?”

“Nothing concrete.” Max expelled a huff of frustrated breath. He got busy inhaling more pizza. “Never hurts to be cautious,” he said finally.

That also held true for interpersonal relationships. Temple bit back a lot more questions. They sounded more like an interrogation in her mind.

Besides, it was time to put the leftover pizza in the refrigerator and show Max her handy-dandy list of murderous events.

She hopped off the stool, avoiding Louie who was still cleaning up undevoured pepperoni while a full, fresh bowl of Free-To-Be-Feline lay untouched not three feet away.

“You’re spoiling him,” she warned Max.

“Consider it a bribe.” He glanced back with a grin, satisfied that the cat was remaining behind to finish dinner. “I always feel I have a Victorian father scowling at me whenever that cat’s around the place.”

“A Victorian father? Louie?” Temple laughed. “No, I picture him more as a Mob enforcer. You know, Louie the Shiv from Cicero.”

“How about Louie the Lip from Jersey?”

They were laughing as they entered the office. The sun had moved to the other side of the building, so Temple switched on the student lamp on her desk. Its warm yellow light hit the enlarged drawing she’d made like a spotlight.

“All wrong.” Max had stopped just inside the door to regard it from a distance.

“How?”

“Not your sketch. The original. It’s too crude. Why go to the trouble of stabbing the professor with a custom knife with a hokey Satanist handle, why import all the S and M paraphernalia, and then surround the man’s body with such a plain-Jane arcane symbol? I’ve seen ritual markings. They’re elaborate and based on something…alchemy or horoscope symbols, alien hieroglyphs. This giant ‘house’ is too bland for that kind of mind-set.”

Temple took a deep breath. “Then it must really mean something, and all the other props are distraction.” She waggled her left-hand fingers.

“And meanwhile the right hand is scrawling these five pathetic lines on the floor? It think it’s all a distraction. Let’s see your list.”

Temple pulled it from under the drawing.

In the bright artificial light of early evening, with someone else looking on, her brave new approach looked as childish as the drawing.

“It’s just a list,” she said before he could point out the obvious.

Max had come close to read it, and stood with folded elbows staring down at the names, and especially the blank places.

“Why’d you include the dead men in the casino ceilings?”

“Nobody’s really been charged with their murders, although Molina’s pretty sure you had something to do with the Goliath one.”

“Why is Effinger listed?”

“Molina turned those two thugs over to the DEA. Wasn’t it assumed they’d killed Effinger, though proving it would be hard?”

“If Effinger was tied into anything, it was those two casino deaths, especially since the second guy looked like him. I happen to think that sequence has nothing to with the later murders.”

“But…you call it a sequence.”

Max just nodded. Then his long forefinger stabbed a blank slot under the “Suspect” heading. “You can put a name in here: Rafi Nadir.”

“Rafi Nadir…what kind of name is that?”

“Lebanese, maybe Lebanese-American. I don’t know.”

“For Cher Smith’s murder? Who is this Rafi guy?”

“You’ve met him.”

“No way!”

“I wish you hadn’t, but you did.”

“How do you know —? Max, you were there when I met him!”

“Elementary, my dear Temple.”

“Don’t tell me,” she ordered. She was already irritated that he knew something he hadn’t told her. Now she would have to figure out on her own who this Rafi Nadir was and when she had “met” him.

Max wished she hadn’t met him. It must have been recently, because they’d been hanging out together more. That creepy guy in the desert, the knife and chain-mail bikini maker. Mace was his name, though maybe it was a nickname.

She glanced at Max. He was smiling, watching her mental wheels turn, spin, and dig themselves deeper into a rut.

Somebody at the science fiction convention? But everybody there wore some stupid costume, and they certainly didn’t use names unless they were Spock or Data.

Max wished she hadn’t met him. A moment flashed into her mind. Looking over her shoulder at Max and seeing a deep flicker of fear beneath the surface anger. And looking forward from that moment, she was staring into the face of the Rancho Exotica guard who had made a point of lifting her down from the Jeep, an act she could have managed all by herself.

“The macho guy at the ranch. The guy you later told me had to get out of there at the end before the police came. I could tell you hated to see him leave the scene of the crime as much as you hated to leave it yourself. But Molina was coming…so who is Rafi Nadir, Max?”

He nodded in tribute to her impeccable deductions. “Ex-L.A. cop. Went rogue. Does shady muscle jobs, like at the ranch. Which was why I was furious when he laid hands on you.”

Furious, Temple remembered. And frightened. She had never seen Max frightened before.

“He also does bouncer work at the strip clubs,” Max added grimly.

“That’s how you decided he was a suspect?”

Max stared at her hand-drawn table as if an invisible rattlesnake lay coiled upon it. “Yeah. I saw him in the clubs. He liked to throw his weight around, particularly at a-hundred-and-ten-pound strippers. Someone…drew my attention to him.”

Temple remained silent, studying her table, studying Max. He seemed to be talking and thinking on autopilot. Too little on his mind, or, more likely, too much.

Whichever it was, he was not about to share his deepest inner concerns with her.

Max mysterious was one thing: this was a given with a man who had made his living as a magician for so long. Max unable, or unwilling, to be forthcoming with her was something else. Someone else.

“Anything more I should know?” she asked suddenly.

He started slightly. That was also so unlike Max, showing surprise. “Know?” He was confused, playing for time while the cobwebs cleared.

“Any more suspects I haven’t listed here, like this Nadir guy?”

“Oh. No. Except for the amorphous Synth.”

“Rafi doesn’t sound too sinister,” she said, lettering it in.

“He goes by Raf.”

“As in raffish?”

“As in you wouldn’t want to win this bozo in a raffle. If you cross his path, stay away from him, Temple. He’s major breaking news in the local disaster department, especially for women.”

“Yet you let him get away from the scene of the last crime before the police got there.”

Max’s face froze as if she had said something astounding.

“Scene of the crime? How did you —?”

“I was there, remember? At Rancho Exotica.”

“Oh, right, at Rancho Exotica.”

That’s when Temple realized that there had to have been another scene of the crime where both Max and Rafi were present, but she hadn’t been.

“Apparently he’s as eager to dodge Molina as you are,” she said, probing now.

Again Max tensed, right on the name, which Temple had dropped the same way some people would toss a grenade into a garden party: casually, but with oh-so-lethal intent. The bombshell was the name Molina. Homicide Lieutenant C. R. Molina, lady cop, lady blood-hound when it came to Max and his vague past and all-too-often suspect present.

“Let’s face it,” Max said, deciding to hide behind humor, “what red-blooded man wouldn’t want to dodge Molina? Except maybe Matt Devine.”

Now Max was dropping his own grenades. Temple tried not to feel the spray of psychic shrapnel. When had their consultation become a chess game?

When the name Rafi Nadir had come up.

The one man Temple had ever seen who frightened Max. Excepting Matt, and that was a very different kind of fear.

Why? Who was Rafi Nadir, really?

And why wouldn’t Max tell her a damn thing about him?

Feral Foul

As everybody knows, the world-weary private eye must sometimes tread on the dark side of danger.

Mean Streets R Us.

By us I mean the old-time guys: Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Travis McGee. We are a breed apart. We are not afraid to get our digits dirty, our eyes blackened, our whiskers wet, or our ears wiped.

You can knock us down, but not out.

Okay, sometimes you can knock us out.

But not off.

Anyway, having observed my Miss Temple struggling to make sense of the string of murderous events that have dogged her teeny-tiny high-heeled footsteps since we met, I decide to take action.

It was nice of her to share her deductive reasoning with me. I truly enjoyed our consultation over Sunday morning coffee. We make a good team. She is the cream in my coffee, and I am the caffeine in her cream. She is sugar. I am spice. But she can be feisty, and I can be nice when it suits me.

However, when it comes to ferreting out information from the lower elements, there is no way that I will allow my Miss Temple to dirty her tootsies with a walk on the wild side. I will go this part of the case alone.

I am not even taking my usual “muscle,” the spitting-mad Miss Midnight Louise, who is my would-be daughter. I say that there are a lot of black cats in this hip old world (despite wholesale attempts to eliminate our kind since the Dark Ages, no doubt why they call it that), and we cannot all be related. Though even a macho dude like myself must admit that there are times when you cannot beat a seriously enraged dame for effective backup.

The successful operative will stick at nothing to get results.

Still, sometimes it is best not to show up in the company of a girl. She might be mistaken for your mother.

So it nears my namesake hour when I slink solo into a neighborhood where even the pit bulls and housing developers do not go.

This is the north side of town where the abandoned houses and cars are all older than the Nixon administration. “Run-down” would be a high compliment in this area, and run down is what careless intruders usually get.

I pass a few rats the size of Midnight Louise scurrying in the opposite direction.

One stops to hiss in amazement at my presence, and at the fact that I am heading in the direction that he and his cohorts are fleeing like the, er, plague.

I hiss back. His claws scrape the cracked asphalt like dry leaves as he skitters out of sight.

I shrug my coat collar up around my neck to keep the wind from picking all my pockets. It also looks as if I am making a fashion statement instead of just having the hair on the back of my neck at permanent attention.

The effective operative does not wish to look scared into a new hairdo.

Either somebody is fitfully beating on a hollow tin drum…or the trash cans are rocking in the wind. Or somebody is trying to stuff a body in ’em. Or, more likely, pull one out for supper.

I did mention that this was a rough crowd. Of course now you cannot see a soul, not even a rat.

That is how I know I am just where I want to be.

I sit down to survey the place, casually clipping my toenails in the light of the only working streetlight within six blocks.

While sharpening my shivs, I regard a street in ill repair that cuts like a rusty knife through what amounts to one big empty lot.

Islands of trash thrust up from the flat desert landscape here and there. I recognize articles of furniture missing stuffing and upholstery, and large black-green garbage bags big enough and lumpy enough to hold sufficient dead bodies to populate a zombie movie, and maybe a sequel or two. Broken amber-colored empty bottles exhale the sour stench of beer so flat it is looking for a singing teacher.

However, my connoisseur’s sniffer notices something else among the odors of decay: the whiff of fish. Oh, it is not the delicate, scaly scent of freshly caught fish, such as you find at the edge of a koi pond, but the odor of the canned stuff they sell in the stores. Being that my old man was once the mascot on a Pacific Northwest salmon boat, I prefer to catch my own, but it is clear that the pre-caught kind of fish is here to catch something else.

I rise and swagger over to the nearest hummock of trash.

It is not long before I am close enough to notice something familiar jammed in among what is left of somebody’s Tia Evita floral reclining chair. I spot the familiar crosshatching of thin gray metal wires.

Normally such sights give me a chill of apprehension, but tonight I emit a soft purr of satisfaction instead. Everything is as bad as I had hoped it would be.

In not too long a time, I shall be at the mercy of the most fearsome street gang this old town has ever seen.

What I do to keep my Miss Temple out of danger and in arch supports.

Midnight Consultation

Max stretched, pushed Temple’s compilation of dead people aside, and consulted the watch on his right wrist as his long arms folded around her.

“Almost the witching hour. We could tune in Mr. Midnight for a bedtime treat.”

“Listening to a bunch of strangers whine about the personal lives they don’t have? Not me.”

“You’re not a fan?”

Temple yawned pointedly. “Who can stay up that late anymore?”

“You’re right. I should let you get your beauty sleep.”

“Since when have you ever done anything you ‘should’ do? Max, what’s the matter?”

“What isn’t the matter? Listen, Temple. You stood by me like, I don’t know, like the brave little drummer girl, when everyone thought I was a cad and coward and a murderer.”

“Everyone?”

“Well, mostly Molina, but she carries a lot of weight. It’s not fair for me to ask this, but you might have to do it again.”

“Stand up to Molina?”

“Always. I mean, stand by me.”

“What’s happening?”

“I can’t quite tell. Can’t quite say. I don’t know what to think. I know.” He laughed ruefully. “That’s not like me. This is getting too much like Northern Ireland. Foes and friends mixed together in one bloody stew. You start to question friends, you start to sympathize with foes, and the upshot is almost always betrayal and death.”

“Max! You’ve never talked this way before.”

“I’ve never been here, in this precise position before.” His hands touched her shoulders, then his thumbs reached up to caress her cheeks. “You’re sharp. You’re nobody’s fool. You might hear some things about me. Don’t believe them. No matter who they come from. I know. You’ve done it before, but it’ll be worse now. What I’ve found is worse.”

“The Synth?”

“No, nothing that exotic! Something down-home and downtown. Just remember, if I’m suspect, it might be because other people are more suspect.”

“People? Or person? Is it this Nadir guy?”

Temple watched her stab in the dark ricochet off the wary expression in Max’s blue eyes, like a stone skipping across one of her native state’s vaunted ten thousand lakes, never quite connecting with anything, defying gravity, just defying. Everything.

She was close, but still too far away.

“Does it have something to do with Molina?”

“It always has something to do with Molina,” he answered, laughing bitterly. “Try to keep it between us, Temple. Can you?”

“I always have,” she said, no longer certain she could.

DOD: Domesticated or Dead

No sooner I have applied myself to sniffing around the silver mesh than I sense a change in the air.

I do not hear a thing, mind you. Yet the empty space surrounding me has suddenly become not so empty. It cannot be rats. Rats cannot retract their shivs, so they always announce themselves, like Miss Temple in her high heels. Also, rats cannot refrain from chittering when excited, and the gang I expect knows how to keep its lips zipped tighter than a leather bustier on Pamela Anderson.

I flick a nail at the pungent glop of fish before me, then say right out loud, “Sucker bait. One bite and boom! You are in stir.”

I turn to regard my audience. Gack. Imagine a ragtag road show of CATS! with the entire cast recruited from a feline West Side Story.

These dudes are lean, edgy, and ravenous. Their shivs nervously scrape the cracked asphalt. Their whiskers are broken and twitching. I spot one poor sod who was in a rumble with a car. His untended broken leg sticks out at such a bizarre angle he can only walk on his knee. I notice a duke’s mixture of ragged ears — some neatly notched — and crooked tails, not to mention fresh and festering wounds. As for coats, this crowd looks like it has just come from the Ragpickers’ Ball. Exiting through a shredder.

There must be a dozen of them. Three or four start circling me so somebody is always at my back no matter which way I turn.

This is when prior planning pays off. I retreat until I am pressing the nap of my coat flat against one wall of the wire grille. After this gig I will look like I am wearing monotone plaid from the back, but sartorial concerns are the last thing on my mind.

These are not just tough and desperate dudes; this is the original Wild Bunch.

A big tiger-stripe pushes forward until his fangs are in my face. “You got a lot of nerve coming onto our turf, a downtown dude like you.”

This I already know, so I say nothing.

A marmalade tom with a broken front fang pushes so close I can inhale the Whiskas-lickings on his breath. “Fee, fie, foe, fumbug! I smell human on your lapels. You are a housebroken cat.”

“Not true,” I hiss back. “I do happen to occupy a co-op off the Strip, but I come and go as I please and when and where I please.”

“Where is your collar, dude?” taunts a once-white semi-long-hair I hesitate to describe as a lady. “No vet tags, Prince Chauncey?”

“Yeah,” the tiger-stripe adds. “We need an address for where to send the body.”

“At least I do not live in a road-kill academy.” I glance at the street. “I bet they drag race their lowriders so regular along there that a lot of you end up as poster boys and girls: flat as a face card in a fixed deck.”

I have hit a nerve, for several sets of green and gold eyes narrow to angry slivers.

“It is the rugrats like Gimpy,” says Snow Off-white, with a shrug of her razor-sharp shoulder blades, “who get creamed.”

I glance at the kit with the right-angle leg, and conceal a shudder. Poor sod would be better off with that seriously bum limb amputated.

“It is not so bad,” the dingy yearling pipes up. “The winos and bums feel sorry for me because I cannot forage and see that I get McDonald’s leavings.”

Jeez, this lot is so low that the homeless humans show them charity. Chalk one up on the pearly gates for the homeless humans. I have always found that the have-nots are better at sharing than the have-it-alls who got plenty to share.

“What about this day-old fish market behind the grille here?” I say.

“We stay away,” says Tiger, with a growl. “We think it is a trap. People come and take away the dumb ones that venture inside and cannot get out.”

“And you never see them again?”

“We do,” Snow Off-white says, eager to explain. I can always get through to the babes, which may be why Tiger and Tom are breathing down my epiglottis. “But…they are different.”

“They are…drones,” Tom snarls. “All the fight is out of them. They come back with their ears…and everythng notched and have zero interest in dames and just want to lay around and wait for free food and get fat like you.”

“I am not fat. I am well built. If your lot was not half-starved, you would see that you are all way too skinny.”

“That is better than the alternative,” Gimpy bursts out in his high adolescent voice.

“And what is the alternative?” I ask.

“Death or domestication.”

I digest this for a few seconds. It is no use to preach the joys of the domestic lifestyle to those to whom just living for the next day is a real achievement. They regard every human with fear and suspicion, and in almost all cases around here, rightly so.

Except, that is, for those beneficent bums and bumettes, and the feline birth control brigade responsible for the satellite clinics that litter this junkyard, one of them right at my back.

I realize, of course, that if this gang gets too rough I can always leap through the open door, grab the glop, and trigger the automatic closing mechanism. I will be caught like a rat in a trap, but I will also be safe from the Wild Bunch.

Ole Tiger seems to be reading my mind, because his yellow teeth show a Cheshire cheese grin. “Guess you would not mind a ride in a cage, being the domestic sort to start with. You would come back minus your cojones, though.”

“You do not understand. I have already been rendered free of unpopular potential, such as progeny.”

Gimpy has been slinking around the side. “He has still got them, boss. He is lying. He is still armed and dangerous to dames.”

I sigh. “It is too difficult to explain to street types. I have had a fancy operation by a plastic surgeon called a vasectomy, and —”

“We are not interested in your medical history, you pampered sellout!” Tom spits. “Whatever you have had, what you will not have when you come back from the twenty-four-hour abduction is your hairballs.”

I gulp. This mission is more dangerous than I thought. If I happen to fall into the hands of these do-gooders, they will have me sliced and diced for real in no time, because a vasectomy is invisible. I will be summarily cut off from my former self just as if I were a homeless, irresponsible, kitty-littering street dude.

“So,” says Tom with an evil grin, digging his shivs into my shoulder like staples. “Why is a domestic dude like you risking life, limb, and liberty to come hassle us on our territory?”

“I am an investigator,” I begin.

“Narc!” screams Snow Off-white, arching her bony back. “We hardly ever get any nip, just that awful weed that people are always selling on corners around here. We better take care of the narc personally.”

They crowd closer, ugly mugs full of fangs and uglier expressions. I can handle myself in a brawl, but they have me pinned and my only escape is into the clutches of the North Las Vegas Neutering Society.

Shivs as edged as sharks’ teeth are pricking my undercoat in warning. With this crew, one puncture wound, one whiff of blood, and they will go into a fighting frenzy.

I let them push me closer to the open door to eunuchhood. I’d rather take my chances hornswaggling a bunch of humanitarians than beating off a gang of wildcats any day. Where is that twerp Midnight Louise when you need her?

“Wait a minute,” yowls a rough female voice.

A cat who is black like me shoulders through the mob to thrust her jaw in my face like a knuckle sandwich. Midnight Louise this is not.

This is a big-boned, rangy lady with a hacksaw voice. The white scar tracks crisscrossing her mug are not tokens of the plastic surgeon.

“I have been taken away by the aliens with the silver ships,” she says, “and it is not so bad. I was tired of trying to eat for five or six every few months anyway. So if I were you, dude, I’d take the escape hatch. This gang is out for blood. Just being brave enough, and stupid enough, to come here will not save you.”

I stare into her hard and weary green eyes. She stares into my hard and wary green eyes. Suddenly, I feel an embarrassing purr bubbling in my throat. I growl to conceal it, but it is too late.

She lunges at my throat, then twists her head and takes the nape of my neck in her teeth and shakes me until my fangs chatter. A big black mitt boxes my cheek.

“Is that you, Grasshopper?”

“Yeah,” I admit sheepishly. I cannot stand being publicly mauled by overenthusiastic females who are not babes. “Ma. But they call me Louie now. Midnight Louie.”

Well, there is only one thing that cuts it with a gang as down and out as this one: family. They are all so related to each other that if they were people they would be put in jail. In fact, I think a lot of them are a few whiskers shy of a full muzzle, but nobody cares about the family trees of our kind. Our mating tendencies go back to our godlike Egyptian origins. The Egyptians were not too nice to resort to marital alliances with brothers and sisters to keep the royal line going. I believe the term is inbred.

Anyway, by virtue of my long-lost mama being among them and being something of a top cat at that, my bacon is not chopped liver. In fact, they are all my kissing cousins now.

She has taken me aside for a family reunion.

“How did you remember me?” I ask as we settle down on a Naugahyde ottoman that has lost its stuffing until it is shaped like an inner tube. Actually, it is quite comfy. “It is not like you did not have dozens just like me.”

“Oh, Grasshopper, there were none just like you. Naughty from the moment you lost your milk teeth. You were after those poor grasshoppers before your eyes were open. So. You are in business. Did I hear you bragging about a co-op apartment? Not smart with this gang.” She boxes my ear again, as if dislodging mites.

“Actually, it is a ‘cooperative’ living arrangement I have with this babe who flacks for the Crystal Phoenix.”

“It is a mixed marriage?”

I blink.

“She is human?”

“Um, pretty much so, but she has long red nails. I really love the way they sink into my…ah, we are just roommates, Ma. Purely platonic. My real ladylove is this shaded silver Persian —”

“A foreigner? And what is this ‘shaded silver’ stuff? You mean the chit is gray.”

I roll my eyes. I am not about to explain the sublime and subtle mix of black, white, and gray hairs on the aristocratic form of the Divine Yvette.

“So tell me about your business.”

“It is a one-dude operation. Private-eye stuff. That is why I am here. I am looking into a case involving some Big Cats.”

“You know some Big Cats?” She actually sounds impressed. I am impressed.

“Some.”

“Then why did you not bring one along for backup?”

“These big guys do not just meander out on the streets. There are laws.”

“Well, boy, you are lucky I am part of this colony because your meatballs would have been chili powder in another couple of seconds, and I am getting too old to rumba without activating my rheumatism. So I suggest we go over and ask the boys what you want to know and then you skedaddle.”

“Yes, Ma.” There was never any point in arguing with her. She was the Sultana of Swat when it came to keeping her litters in line. “Uh,” I add as we amble over to the others. “What is your name besides Ma?”

“That is it. Ma. Ma Barker.”

“You are not a dog!”

“No, but I bite like one. Just remember that.”

In a moment I am huddling with the Wild Bunch.

“I am looking for a man,” I begin.

“Why come to us? We have nothing to do with that species if we can help it.”

“I cannot argue with your good taste, but this man has a place where he keeps Big Cats. It is a hideout, see. No human knows where it is. I figure you guys” — Snow Off-white bristles and hisses — “and dolls might have an idea where it is. I know you get around and I figure you have your ears to the ground better than anybody.”

“Hmm,” says Tom. “We do not roam as much as we used to now that our numbers are being whisked away and returned all meek and meatball-less. But I wonder if you could be talking about the Dead Place?” He glances at the others.

Oh, great. Like I need to visit another Dead Place. “What is this joint?” I ask.

“I have smelled Big Cat there,” Snow Off-white mews. She rolls her yellow eyes. “Very Big Cat.”

“But nobody human goes there much,” Tiger adds. “That is why we explore sometimes. It is not far from here and there are trees to climb.”

“It is like a park,” Ma puts in. A lot of these street types do not even know what a park is.

I nod. “It would be a rich man’s estate, but no one would know.”

Whiskers tremble sagely all around. “That is it, then. The Dead Place. People do not like Dead Places. They stay away and then we can come out and play. Not even the aliens with the silver ships who abduct us go there.”

“I have been thinking of moving the colony there,” Tom admits, “but we grow weak and fewer, and many like the free food too much. We have gone soft.”

“Not very. Trust me,” I reassure them.

So I get the general location of the Dead Place, which I am happy to learn is in Las Vegas proper, if there is any district in Las Vegas you could call “proper.” I had enough treks into the desert during my last case to leave permanent sand calluses between my toes.

Then I bid the gang adieu. Ma escorts me to the edge of their territory.

“Imagine,” she muses with a trace of fondness, but very little. “The Grasshopper hangs with Big Cats.”

“You could come back with me. I am sure I can get you a cushy position at my pad, the Circle Ritz.”

For a moment her eyes soften.

I press on. “Air-conditioning. Sunspots. Security. Down comforters.”

She shakes her head. “They need me here. We are dying out, of course. That is the plan.”

I try one last ploy. “Ah, Dad has retired on Lake Mead. Runs the goldfish concession at this eatery they named after him, Three O’Clock Louie’s.”

“Your father is a restaurateur?”

“Sort of.”

She shakes her grizzled head. “I thought he had to follow the sea.”

“He followed it to a salmon boat in the Pacific Northwest, but he came back here to retire.” I look at her edgeways. “Maybe he wanted to find us.”

“Three O’Clock! He always was a loner, that one. We had some good times, though. Nice to see you, boy.” She cuffs me one more time. “But do not come around again. I may not be here to save your ashcan.”

I gulp. I have not mentioned her maybe-granddaughter, Miss Midnight Louise. The maternal instinct is a hormonal thing with our breed: strong as steel when kits are coming and growing…gone with the wind once they have left the litter.

Still, her eyes are suspiciously shiny as I turn away and begin my long midnight stroll toward the Dead Place.

Dead Air Time

Matt Devine pulled off the huge foam-padded earphones.

This heavy-duty headset always reminded him of the “earmuffs” people wore at target-shooting ranges.

Some nights, wearing them, he felt like the target.

“Rough shift?” a woman’s voice asked.

For a moment he was disoriented. Without the strange, isolated intensity of a phone-line link to the whole, wide radio-listening world, the nearby unamplified sound of a normal human voice was surprising, even alarming. He’d thought he was alone.

Matt swiveled around on his stool. Had she —?

But it was only Letitia, the host who preceded him on WCOO’s nightly schedule of moody music and listener requests followed by his Mr. Midnight call-in shrink gig.

“Letitia. I didn’t know you’d stayed for my show.”

She lowered herself to the empty stool. This was quite a production, because there was well over three hundred pounds of Letitia to lower.

“I’m your producer, after all.” She folded her arms over her formidable chest and stared at him.

To the world of the airwaves she was her pseudonym, Ambrosia, the warm, maternal voice that teased mention of hurts and shy loves out of anonymous callers and then played the perfect song to celebrate or soothe. “You Light Up My Life,” “The Rose,” (Matt had to admit he liked the clean poetry of that one), that sort of thing. Most of the songs were soothers, and Ambrosia’s hokey therapy worked wonders. Matt, formerly a priest in a fairly formal religion, tended to distrust easily accessed emotions, but he couldn’t deny the magic Letitia/Ambrosia performed each night from seven to midnight.

Even her morbid obesity wasn’t unusual for a radio personality. Radio was the ideal medium for the less-than-medium attractive. Garrison Keillor wasn’t only a self-proclaimed “shy person,” but one of the homeliest men in the public eye since Abraham Lincoln. It had made him a star. On radio, and then in books. Not on TV.

Hefty size aside, Letitia was gorgeous and dressed like an MTV queen. Tonight she wore a pleated tangerine polyester pantsuit draped with a chest plate of African beads. The seriously chubby fingers braced on her knees were choked with high-carat solitaires of semiprecious gemstones. Silky smooth brown skin set off her eyes the way black velvet showcases diamonds, and they were meticulously made up with metallic swaths of shadow. Looking at her was like regarding a bird of paradise.

“You look gorgeous tonight,” Matt couldn’t stop himself from remarking, though he seldom felt comfortable complimenting a woman on looks alone.

“Thanks.” Her self-esteem preened visibly. “You look pretty good yourself.”

“It’s not anything I do,” he said, instantly uncomfortable.

She just shook her head. “I told you when I hired you that you were too pretty to be on radio, but that’s okay. They can hear it in your voice.”

“People can hear how I look?”

“They get an image. If you have a nice voice, it’s a nice image. Radio’s the only place I can be taken for a size six, honey!”

A rich rhumba of laughter emerged from the bright drum of her huge body. She cocked her gorgeous head with its decorated dreadlocks to hear herself. “Then again, maybe not. Too much reverb for an anorexic.”

Matt couldn’t help smiling.

“Now that’s better, Mr. Moody Midnight. You keep smilin’. Remember, they hear it all in your voice. So what’s the matter?”

“You hear something in my voice?”

“I hear everything in your voice, baby. It’s nothing personal. It’s my job. I read voices. Yours has changed.”

“How?” He felt an irrational surge of defiance. If she could hear it, so could…anyone.

“Tighter, more cautious. Strained. If you were a singer I’d be worried. We got to get back that nice, easy open throat you were born with. So tell Ambrosia what’s the matter. Don’t think of me as your producer; think of me as that nice smooth-as-white chocolate voice on the radio.”

She shook with laughter then, picturing herself as white chocolate. In a way she was, thanks to radio. Ultraslim, no-calorie white chocolate.

Matt sighed, relieved to have nothing to hide behind right now. Letitia was indeed his producer. If she detected something strained in his performance, then it was her business. And…half the world confided in Ambrosia and felt better for it. Maybe he could share a bit of that magic too. God knew he had a lot to confide.

“So tell Mama.”

The admonition made Matt superimpose his mother’s image over the gaudy mountain of Letitia. Mira Zabinski was small, pale, constrained, lost like a pastel portrait by Degas against a lush Gauguin oil painting of the islands.

He felt a pang of disloyalty along with relief.

“When did you notice a change?” he asked.

She considered. “Around ’bout that time Elvis started calling you.”

“Letitia, it wasn’t Elvis —”

“Let me think it was Elvis. I’d feel better thinking it was Elvis. A lot of people would. He’s kinda a patron saint for the dysfunctional, you know.”

“I know! I heard that loud and clear from the callers back then. So I started going wrong then?”

“Wrong? Nothing wrong with you, then or now.” She stood up. “Let’s go get some fruity drink some place. I’m buying.”

Matt knew then that it was serious. He was slower to rise. Half of him welcomed a chance to share the trouble he’d doled out piecemeal to the people he knew over the past few weeks, partly to protect them, mostly to protect himself.

Protecting yourself was constant, lonely, back-breaking work, and he was tired of it.

They paused at the door to turn off the lights. Their familiar studio landscape vanished like a stage set. After Matt’s “Midnight Hour” program, the station went to satellite feed until regular programming resumed in the early morning. Only a lone technician kept the sound of music flowing over the air waves.

The hall was dimly lit and the tiny reception room seemed larger without people in it. Beyond the glass door, the almost empty parking lot looked like a staging ground for a UFO movie.

It was one-thirty in the morning, but in Las Vegas the bars were open twenty-four/seven.

Matt opened the door for Letitia, then followed her into the lukewarm night.

They’d dawdled inside long enough that the small gaggle of fans who usually waited for Matt after his show had given up and gone home.

“No groupies,” Letitia commented.

“No groupies.” Matt sounded relieved even to himself.

“You don’t worry that your ratings might be slipping?”

“No, because if they were, I’d do what I did before I had ratings to slip.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t know. Whatever I have to do to pay the rent.”

A form came barreling toward them from Matt’s left side, from the shadow the building cast along its sides.

Matt barely had time to put his hands up before something as big as a German shepherd lunged at him. Hairy, too. Red hair.

While he was thinking Irish setter, the apparition’s weight pushed him slightly backward and swiped his mouth off-center with a sloppy kiss.

It was five-feet-something of overenthusiastic girl and only the red hair kept him from pushing her away like an encroaching poodle.

“I love your show! I can’t believe I did this! ’Bye.”

And she dashed off around the building, giggling.

Letitia nodded. “Kiss-and-run groupie. Not bad.”

Matt backhanded his mouth. “Where are their parents, anyway?”

“At home, wondering where their kids are, as usual.” She chuckled, a sound as rich as water in a mountain stream plunking notes from a scale of river rocks. “Lighten, man. You’ve got fans and they’re in the desired demographic. I don’t know why you gotta see life in shades of gray when it can be a Technicolor paradise like the merry old land of Oz.”

“You forget the wicked witch.”

“Don’t look at me. I’m not playing no ugly old thing with striped socks unless I get to keep the jazzy red shoes, bro. That’s what it’s all about. Life does not have to be a black-and-white film these days.”

Letitia stopped to stare at a vehicle under the greenish glare of a security light. “There. See what I mean? Where’s that kick-ass motorcycle of yours? Or that sweet shiny silver Volkswagen Bug that Elvis left for you? That just makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time, Elvis givin’ people VW Bugs, even if they have been redesigned. Poor Elvis never got a chance for a redesign. I know what you’re gonna say: ‘it wasn’t Elvis.’” She sing-songed along with Matt, nodding at his programed response. “But why you driving that white chocolate old Probe now? It isn’t even white chocolate. It’s just plain white, honey, and that ain’t you. Trust me.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be me.”

“Yeah, that’s soooo tough. Easy job, good money. Raking it in on the traveling chitchat circuit. I don’t get those gilt-edged national speaking invitations. Not yet. And I was here first. So what is it? Girl trouble?”

That question was so wildly off and so right on that Matt felt like Letitia did about Elvis’s postmortem taste in giveaway cars: he didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

“Boy trouble?” she asked when he remained silent.

He saw that he’d at least have to commit to declaring a sexual preference. Before he could, his feet felt a faint, almost spectral thrum. They knew that subliminal vibration but his mind couldn’t name it.

“Damn it, Matt, my car’s in the garage, so we’re going to get in that Vanilla Ice car of yours and go someplace for a Bloody Mary and then you’re gonna drop me home —”

He was frowning into the distance, black and empty. “Yeah. Let’s get to the car.” He took her elbow, or what he figured to be her elbow, and tried to hurry her across the black asphalt sea of the parking lot.

That was like a fishing boat trying to tug the Queen Elizabeth into port in double time.

“What burr got up your nose?”

Not only his feet felt it. Now his knees were humming with it, all his joints, and he could finally hear that distant waspish drone, sweet and scary.

“Come on, Letitia!”

They didn’t make the car, of course.

Some things just overtake you, like hurricanes and tornados and very fast motorcycles.

It came spurting and bucking into the lot, as black and anonymous as the leather jumpsuited and helmeted figure that rode it. Zorro on wheels.

It came roaring toward them on a curving scythe like Death’s particular sheep’s crook, the dark side of the Good Shepherd. Matt cast a quick prayer at the nearest streetlight, a vigil light for the whole firmament and what might lie behind it.

He stopped moving and Letitia mirrored him.

“What’s going on? Who’s that speed demon?” she demanded. For the first time her deep, dark voice trembled like her flesh.

“That’s my problem.”

“Drugs? Somebody’s after you?”

“No drugs. Just after me.”

The black motorcycle, a Kawasaki model aptly called the Ninja, swung in a circle and tilted closer and closer until it ringed Matt and Letitia into an invisible circle of containment.

“It sure does stir up a lot of hot air,” Letitia complained as her tangerine outfit expanded to blowfish proportions.

The Ninja revved and came whooshing by, forcing them to back step.

Matt circled Letitia, keeping between the motorcycle and her.

“Hey, man,” she objected, “don’t play the hero. I can take that thing. Who’d you think’d be left standing after a head-to-headlight?”

Matt laughed, his tension easing. “You’re addicted to counseling, you know that?”

“It’s cheaper than a lot of things. Oh, that machine is snortin’ now. Here comes El Toro.”

The dark motorcycle charged, cutting it even closer than before.

Matt tensed to pounce as it passed. Motorcycles were powerful, fast, and maneuverable, but they rode a very fine line of balance. If he could tip that balance he might be dragged over the asphalt, but the bike might skid, tip.

He lunged as the heat and sound roared at them like a dragon’s breath. Grabbing at the handlebar jerked him off his feet, sent him rolling on the asphalt without the protection of biker leathers.

Khakis and a linen blazer kept the asphalt from breaking through and he was up as fast as he was down, but fifteen feet away from Letitia.

The Ninja cut a close, wobbly circle; its rider was forced to throttle down and drag a booted foot on the ground to stabilize the bike.

Then it revved again and drove straight ahead, between Matt and Letitia.

He tried to lunge and grab once more, but only ended up smacking the red taillight good-bye. Letitia huffed out a protest.

He glanced at her. Still upright. Still all right.

The vanishing bike’s driver lifted a right hand off the handlebars and flourished something long and dangling like a trophy, or a scalp.

Matt ran toward Letitia.

“My beads!” she was bellowing. “That bastard ripped off my tribal beads.”

“Are you all right? Your neck?”

“The world’s worst Indian burn.” Letitia removed her palm from her nape and examined it in the glare of the streetlight. No blood. “Now I really need that bleeding Bloody Mary. And you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

The place was called Buff Daddy’s and the clientele was all black.

Rap and hip-hop twitched off the sound system, the rapid-fire rhythms and lyrics as relentless as musical machine-gun fire.

Matt made his Polish-blond way in Letitia’s wake to the corner table she commandeered like a petty dictator. The speakers were far enough away that you could hear someone talk if the language was English.

A tall, pipe-cleaner-skinny waitress with an awesome arrangement of interwoven dreadlocks took their orders. Matt joined Letitia in a Bloody Mary, suddenly reminded of another wise woman of color and size, this one from the musical South Pacific.

Her tangerine false fingernails curled around the tall thick glass of tomato juice and vodka as soon as it arrived.

“This is a three B. M. night,” she announced. “Glad you’re driving me home.”

Matt noticed that her chocolate complexion had grayed to the color of cold cocoa. “Then one’s my limit,” he said.

“Didn’t plan on getting you drunk and compliant anyway,” she chuckled, drinking from a straw that rode alongside the usual celery stalk. She twiddled the celery like a swizzle stick and winked. “Good drink for dieters.”

Matt just shook his head.

“No use playing innocent. What you got after you? The mob? Some crazed Elvis nut?”

“Elvis. That’s what I thought the motorcyclist was at first. And a motorcycle did follow me one night…a motorcycle cop — maybe.” He shook his head again, wanting to clear away the biker roar he still heard, still felt. “After tonight, I have no doubts. It’s my stalker.”

Letitia made a face, shook her celery playfully. “Not this kind of stalk, I guess. Stalker. What gender we talking about here, Matt?”

This time he laughed as he shook his head. “I didn’t think anybody could get me to see the bright side of this…Female.”

“Ooh, well, then.”

“If you say ‘relax and enjoy it,’ I’ll steal your celery.”

“Nobody steals one more thing off me tonight.” Her mock defense softened into a radio cajole. “Tell me about this Leather Lady on wheels, Matt.”

“First off, I didn’t know she had wheels. I’d seen a motorcyclist following me, but like you I’d assumed it was male.”

“You thought it was really Elvis! Admit it!”

“Well, it did occur to me. He was a speed freak. Things had been pretty weird, especially at the Elvis impersonator competition.” Matt actually nibbled his celery stick.

He wanted to remain sober, after all. No, he didn’t. For the first time in his life he didn’t, and he couldn’t get drunk. He had to drive. The story of his life.

“So how’d you pick this freako up? Through the show?”

“No. She came first.”

“Now, no dirty talk. I might get outa control.”

“Dirty talk?”

“How long were you a priest? Never mind. Where’d she come from?”

“Out of the blue. Looking for another man. She thought she’d use me to lead her to him. She seems to have gotten stuck on me.”

“Like an old LP that gets in one groove and won’t jump out of it.” Letitia had drunk half her Bloody Mary and was working on the celery stick. “That pepper vodka really gives this bite!” She waved at the waitress for a follow up. “So. She’s not the usual groupie.”

“Definitely not. The second time I ‘met’ her, she cut me.”

“You’re not talking high school snub here?”

“Razor. Superficial, but a lot of blood loss.”

“Jesus!”

He kept silent, listening to the piped-in rapper excoriate “ho’s” and “hot mamas.” Why’d anybody want this as aural wallpaper? It was like listening to Hitler. Except nobody here was really listening, which made it even worse. Cultural nihilism was easy to ignore until it got into the communal bloodstream and then it lashed out and bit.

“Jesus,” Letitia whispered this time. “Where’d she cut you?”

Matt put a hand to his right side. Didn’t mention it was where the spear had pierced the God-man she’d just invoked without much thinking about it.

Catholic kink might be a little out of Letitia’s line, as much as she knew about human nature when it came softly over an anonymous radio line.

“Poor baby!” She was now halfway through the second Bloody Mary and growing a little unfocused.

That was all right with Matt. If he was finally going to confide the whole story to someone, he’d prefer a slightly tiddly confessor.

Her sympathy, her distance from the whole conundrum that was Kitty/Max/Temple made Letitia the perfect big sister. He could even picture her in a habit, with rosary beads instead of the African trade variety. Now, that would really horrify her.

“Say, Matt, you’re doing okay here.” She looked around the funky bar.

“What you do mean?”

“For a sheltered white boy.”

He didn’t bother to tell her that he’d haunted black Baptist churches for the music for years. If he hadn’t become color-blind, he’d become color-immune.

“You’re so strange. Way ahead of the rest in some ways, way retarded in others. Must be the priest thing. Anyway, what does this witch-woman want?”

“I think she really wants to destroy the man she was looking for and can’t find. So she’ll settle for me.”

“She’ll kill you?”

“No. Not physically. That would be too kind.”

“Gee, Matt. You gotta remember you’re dealing with Bloody Mary here. I am feeling no pain from my necklace rip-off, okay? But I am also feeling no pain, so ’splain it to me in teeny-tiny syllables of one word. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah. Okay. She wants my history. My past. Everything that was sacred in it. She wants my priesthood.”

“I don’t get it.”

“What if somebody came to you and demanded that you do the one thing that most undid whatever you were, or everybody at the radio station would be killed? And that person could do it.”

“Wait. I’m trying to think what would take that much away from me. Being made to do something would.” Letitia’s face suddenly sobered, grew ashen. “I wish you hadn’t asked me that, Matt.”

“I’m sorry. You wanted to know. I —”

Her extravagantly manicured hands cupped her exquisite face, which wore a mask of slack horror. “I hadn’t thought of that for thirty years.” Her eyes interrogated him. “How’d you know, Matt. How’d you know?”

“I don’t. I don’t know anything.”

“Someone comes and stirs up the worst hurt, the worst hate in your whole life.” Her hands entwined, twisted, the nails clawing into the dark backs until dead white moons appeared there. “The ones who call at night. Call us. They all have hurts like that. We make them feel better for a while, but we don’t really cure anything for good. Only until tomorrow…when we talk to a whole new set who are all the same, really. God, if Someone came for me, she’d bring memories of Him back.”

“God?”

“No! The devil. My own particular devil, whom I will now drown in a third Bloody Mary.” She lifted a dagger-nailed forefinger, signaled the waitress. “Tell me about your devil.”

For some reason, Matt felt obliged to distract Letitia from the monster in her past that his trouble had raised from the dead. He was a good counselor. He would sacrifice himself to prevent anyone around him from suffering. Just open a vein and he would bleed tomato juice and pepper vodka.

He understood how utterly Kitty O’Connor had trapped him.

“She wants my vows,” he said. “My virtue, I guess. She wants me to sleep with her.”

Letitia blinked. “I heard a hundred sob stories from girls up against it, but I never heard a guy complain.”

“I’m not a guy. I’m an ex-priest. I made promises of chastity.”

“Ex, baby. That’s all history.”

“No, it’s my choice now. It’s a sin outside of marriage.”

Letitia snorted.

“In my religion it is. Especially for me, who was holier than holy.”

“Listen, plenty of priests have made the news —”

“They are not me and I am not them. I was a faithful servant, okay? Think of me as a monogamous married man. I love my wife. I’ve been faithful to her. And some woman comes along and insists that betraying my wife is the only way for my wife, and me, to live.”

“That’s sorta like the reverse of that movie a few years back, where the rich dude offers a couple a million if the wife will sleep with him. People sleep with the wrong people every day. What’s the big deal, really?”

“When it’s wrong.”

Letitia was suddenly silent. Her hands twisted. “Yeah. Sometimes it’s wrong, no question.” Sweat jeweled her forehead like a diadem.

“Letitia. You asked. If it’s too…”

“Too what, Matt? Too big of a problem for Ambrosia? Too hard for a black Baptist to understand a white priest?”

“Letitia. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have tried to unload this on you. I was weak.”

“You? Weak? You don’t have a headlock on weak.” She wiped a hand over her mouth, painted the color of a hot pink camellia. The lipstick washed off onto her palm, like a stigma. “It’s abuse, that’s what it is. Plain and simple. Doesn’t matter how old you are, who’s doing it, why. Forcing is abuse. You gotta resist. I didn’t, but you gotta resist.”

“Letitia.”

“That’s me. The lusty virgin. Pretending I’m gonna get you drunk? Who am I kidding. I couldn’t ever get myself drunk enough for it. Not after…that. Oprah’s not the only one, just the most, what, public, successful? Does she ever still get the night sweats, I wonder. Is that why her weight never stays off? Yeah, we’re worldly. We know the score. We are too hip to hurt. Too old. Too successful. Huh!” She swiped the sweat on her face away with the back of her hand, streaking the exquisite glittering makeup, the mask.

Matt leaned his chin on his balled fists, watched her intently across the table. The music hummed like a buzz saw, a hive of venomous hornets. The music threatened, abused, and everybody ate it up like it was normal. No, just common. Not normal.

“That’s why you can really help me,” Matt said. “What can I do? You saw how she threatened you for just walking out of the radio station with me.”

“Was that it? The bitch was jealous of me?” Letitia started laughing. “If she only knew —” Tears replaced the sweat beads on her cheeks. “Oh, Matt. You are my project, boy. I am not going to let anybody take away from you what they took from me when I was just a kid. Just a kid. I guess you’re just a kid, too, in some ways.”

“If I give in, everybody around me’s safe. I know she’ll keep her word, because she knows that their safety will sear me as much as their danger if the price is right. Or wrong.”

“She’s mean. She’s bad. She might do anything, right?”

He nodded.

“Then you have to be ready to give in.”

He drew away, sheer repugnance pushing him back like a fist.

“No. But on your terms. Your innocence is her price, right?”

He nodded.

“Then you have to lose your innocence. Even if she holds a gun to your mother’s head, then you can give in and she hasn’t won what she really wanted. She’s not the first one! That’s what they want, to get to you before you can say yes or no, to make you a fool forever, hopeless, weak, stupid!”

“But it would be a sin.”

“So sin! That’s better than being a victim. A martyr. Sin and get what — confessed, and it’s all gone. Don’t you believe that? Isn’t that what Catholics believe?”

“Yes, but —”

“Yes, but. I didn’t have any ‘yes, but’ when I was seven years old. I just did the best I could and it wasn’t good enough. You’re older. You’re smarter. You outsmart that wicked woman. You put yourself in a condition that whatever she gets from you, it isn’t what she wants. And don’t you dare get so damned nice that you fail to protect yourself. You owe it to every kid who never had a chance to do better than that. You take away what she wants before she has a chance to get it. Get it?”

Matt nodded numbly. Letitia was right. If someone holds a weapon at your head, disarm the weapon. Especially when the weapon is yourself, your better instincts, your conscience, your integrity.

“I get it, Letitia. Thanks.”

“Okay.” She sat back, gathered the externals that were Letitia and Ambrosia and his producer together. “You want my extra celery stick?”

“Thanks.”

“I’d help you out myself, you understand, but it’s better for our professional relationship —”

“You’re absolutely right.”

“You have any…candidates?”

“A few. Maybe.”

“Honey, just look at the nightly groupies.”

He frowned.

“I know the Elvis shtick isn’t for you. But there must be a nice girl somewhere —”

“It’d have to be absolutely secret. To protect…her.”

“That’s done all the time, particularly in Las Vegas. This ho ain’t God. She ain’t everywhere all the time.”

“No.” But sometimes it felt like that. The obsessed could be pretty pervasive.

“You can lose her and lose your virginity at the same time. I know you can.”

Matt eyed her soberly. One Bloody Mary-soaked celery stick wasn’t going to undo the condition. “Am I some sort of surrogate for you here?”

“You bet your sweet ass you are. Just let me know when the deed is done. Ambrosia’ll play something real special for you on the rah-di-o.”

DAD: Desiccated and Dead

I am happy to hotfoot it out of the feral territory. I am even happier to hop onto the back bumper of a bus downtown and get a ride almost all the way to my destination.

In another city, buses and traffic would be scarce as hens’ hangnails in the middle of the night. Here in Vegas, things are always jumping, from dice to bailees.

I have to catch a cross-town bus and there it gets tough. Beyond the Strip schedules slow down appreciably.

Still, the moon has barely bar-crawled past the top of the sky when I trot the last few blocks. I had never noticed this before in my travels about the old town, but I find myself suddenly beyond the three-story apartment complexes and one-story strip shopping centers that fan out from the famous Strip in all directions.

Instead I confront a ten-foot-tall wall of shrubbery, like oleander but bigger, thicker, and taller. The sort of testosterone-overdosed vegetation you expect to find comatose princesses behind. When I reach a cross street it is unmarked. It too is lined by an endless length of stone and iron fence, diminishing like train tracks in the distance.

Now this is definitely not the Las Vegas I know and love, and sometimes loathe. All the streets around here are the usual suburban sprawl, and Las Vegas has sprawled more than most urban areas, being that the landscape here is flatter than a tapped-out tortilla, so there is nowhere to go but up and out.

So I start ambling down the lane. The night is dark, but the moon is yellow and the leaves come tumbling down. Still, my builtin night vision is in fine shape. I notice that a lot of long green has gone into furnishing the grounds beyond the fence…not only the cash kind, as in long, green paper money, but long green grass. The upkeep on what the English call sward costs a bundle in this desert burg.

I know this is the right place because it is littered with small stone slabs, the upright kind that usually mark where a person is buried.

Strange that I have never before noticed an in-town plant-a-tarium, so to speak. That may be because my kind is so seldom interred. In fact, as I move down the road, I spot a pair of iron gates with the heavenly host on guard duty in the form of plaster statuary. On one of the big stone pillars is a brass plaque, and inscribed on the plaque in raised letters are the words “Los Muertos.”

Now, when you live in a city called Las Vegas, and there is another burg of the same moniker in New Mexico, which also has a town called Las Cruces; when, in fact, Los Angeles is just three hundred miles west of where I now stand, you tend to get used to Hispanic place names and do not think twice about what the words mean, although there is often a religious connotation. Las Cruces means “the crossroads” and Los Angeles means “the angels.” Even the early Spanish monks must have known Las Vegas was never going to live up to any Biblical ideal, except maybe Sodom and Gomorrah, because its name just means “the meadows” and there is nothing holy about that.

But Los Muertos…a few hours ago and in broad daylight I would have strolled by without a second thought. Now, though, I think. And it comes to me that muertos must have something to do with death, or the dead.

So I am in the right place, the Dead Place. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get into where nobody ever gets out.

I sit down under an overarching oleander bush and am rewarded by the hiss and sting of a venomous serpent on my rear end.

I bristle and leap around to face the attacker, which is a little too little too late, apparently. Ask not for whom Los Muertos is named: it is named for me. A sinking feeling in the pit of my pith tells me I may be done for. There is no antidote for snakebite way out here, alone, in the dark.

Unfortunately, I am not alone in the dark. I gaze into the chilling sight of a dark open maw with two world-class Dracula fangs bared for a second, totally unnecessary, lethal strike.

“You are sitting on my train, Pops,” the snake hisses. “Move or I will staple you to the nearest prickly pear.”

“Midnight Louise! What are you doing here?”

“None of your business,” hisses my darling daughter-not, closing her maw to reveal her piquant little black face, which is purely feline.

“It is my business if you nearly give me a cardiac arrest. I thought I had been hit by a rattlesnake with a contract to kill.”

“No one would sic a rattlesnake on you, Dads. You have not aggravated any feuding Mormons lately. Besides, you are a polygamist by nature. You would be kissing cousins with the early Mormon patriarchs.”

“Leave the Mormons out of this. I want to know what you are doing out here alone at this late hour.”

“Since when do you play the stern parent, Daddy Densest? The real question is what brought you here.”

“Business, which is none of yours.”

“So I guess we are even. This is what they call a Mexican stand-off. Unless you want a way in, which I can provide for a price.”

“And the price?”

“We are partners.”

The nauseous feeling in the pit of my pith lurches into a vomitous feeling. I sense the Mother of All Hairballs coming on.

“Throw up anything gross and you are on your own.”

“I am merely…gagging. So show me the way to San Jose.”

“Odd you should mention that. There is a handsome statue of St. Joseph just inside the gates, along with a raft of plaster-winged angels. And farther in, a quite nice grotto to Bastet.”

“Bastet! She does not get any respect here in Vegas!”

“Perhaps you underestimate our esteemed Egyptian goddess. Like me, she gets around.”

“The females of the species always do,” I grumble. “That is what is wrong with the species.”

“What? I did not hear you, Daddio Dearest.”

She has turned her back on me and is wiggling through the oleander thicket and toward a stone wall.

There is nothing like a dame for pointing out that she is younger, sleeker, and more limber than you, particularly if she is claiming to be your offspring.

I belly down and crawl right after the minx. Midnight Louie can do night recon with the best of them. Black berets are built in with us.

The oleander stalks prick like barbed wire and my dress blacks will be sadly disheveled, but I manage to push myself through the tunnel of missing stones to the other side.

I allow my innards to expand, shake out my outer coat, and gaze upon the moonlight grazing among the short grasses and tall monuments.

“This is a cemetery,” I complain. (I am too young to be in such a place.)

“Hmmm,” Miss Midnight Louise says thoughtfully, rubbing against my side.

Kissing up will not cut any crypts with this dude.

“So why are you here?” she asks.

That was my question, but it has been forgotten. “I am hunting Big Game.”

“You are always doing that, to hear you talk. I suppose you want a tender reunion with Butch and Osiris.”

“Tender I will leave to you. Reunion, yeah.”

“Follow me.”

This is not what I had in mind, but I have almost no choice. I am still trying to figure out what Miss Midnight Louise is doing on the premises when I find myself past all the monuments and tomb-stones and crypts and other gruesome but ornate set dressings.

I hear the tinkle of…a waterfall, I hope. Either that or the MGM Grand’s giant Leo the Lion statue is taking another untimely, three-story leak.

There are walkways of flat stones, bowers of exotic plants, patches of clipped thick Bermuda grass, sandy pits…this is either a really nice golf course, or it is —

A growl that sounds like marbles the size of basketballs being shaken together makes the ground vibrate.

I freeze.

“Do not worry,” Miss Louise purrs in that superior tone that makes me want to slap her whiskers off. “It is a friend of ours. Of mine, I should say.”

“You have earth tremors for friends?”

“Just Lucky, I guess,” she answers with a grin that would make the Cheshire Cat frrrrrow up.

We round an outcropping of canna lily leaves and come face to face with this large black dude with a mug the size of a beach ball.

Black panther, no doubt about it. Lean, mean, and counterculture, if domestication is the name of your game.

A huge black paw lifts and hangs over Miss Midnight Louise.

I gulp, then leap forward to knock her to safety.

The looming paw does not descend, but Miss Louise swipes me again on the rear.

“Ow! What was that for!”

“Conduct becoming a male chauvinist porcine. I do not need protection from Mr. Lucky. Do you not recognize Butch from the Rancho Exotica? He is the one who shared his dinner with poor Osiris, thanks to me.”

“Oh. Sorry, Mr. Butch. I mean, Mr. Lucky.”

The paw lowers and tickles my ears, and my back and my everything.

“Is this your poor old dad?” the black panther’s voice growls like thunder above me. “He was most valiant in your defense, although sadly ineffective.”

“That is my dad. He wants to see you for some reason. I am sure he will update me shortly.”

Well, what is a practical private eye to do? I am where I want to be, about to interview who I want to see. The only fly in the ointment is the odious Miss Louise, and telling her so would be highly self-destructive in present company.

So I do the right thing, ignore the chit, and get down to the chitchat with the Big Boys.

Saturday Night Stayin’ Alive

Women in strip clubs that catered to men either had business in being there, or no business at all in being there. Women with no business at all being there attracted attention, all of it either bigoted (“dyke!”) or unflattering (“frigid freak”).

Molina couldn’t afford attention and she couldn’t admit to her real business in being here at Saturday Night Fever — police business — so tonight she was a location scout for C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation.

It gave her a professional payback to name-drop the hit forensic science TV show that uses Las Vegas as a backdrop for its high-tech and personal look at maggots, body parts, and implausible police procedure.

Tonight, Molina was here on official business, and she was not alone.

Visibly alone, yes. Actually, no.

She glanced in the mirror behind the bar at Sergeant Barry Reichert, who usually did undercover drug detail. His dirt-biker ensemble and party-animal attitude fit right in at Saturday Night Fever.

At the moment he was stuffing ten-dollar bills in about six G-strings at a prodigious rate, all the time getting paid back in information that was worth hundreds.

Molina sipped her watered-down no-name whiskey and kicked back, despite the relentless overamped beat of music to strip by: loud, all bass, and brutally rhythmic.

She could relax and (almost) be herself because tonight she knew where Rafi Nadir was: being tailed by a plainclothes officer who had reported him across town at another strip club. Purely a customer now, not a bouncer.

She glimpsed her curdled expression in the mirror, as if she was drinking a whiskey sour.

Didn’t want to think about why a man she had used to know hung out at strip clubs. Know? “A fellow officer” was the now-inoperative phrase. Another phrase followed, one even more painful to roll around in her head like ice in an empty lowball glass: an ex-significant other.

Barry unglued himself and his wad from the bevy of off-duty strippers and lurched to Molina’s station at the bar.

“Hey, casting director lady!” he greeted her with feigned quasi-drunken camaraderie.

“Location scout,” she corrected him for whatever public they played to during even the most private conversation.

“Whatever, babe.” He grinned. Barry Reichert enjoyed getting into a persona where he could play fast and loose with a ranking female homicide officer. That was almost living as dangerously as risking his sanity and life among the crystal meth set.

Barry was an unstriking brown/brown: hazel-eyed, dishwater brown-haired, middle-American guy with scraggly coif, a five o’clock shadow aiming for midnight blue and missing by several shades, and scruffy casual clothes.

Like all undercover officers, he absorbed his role. He was “in character” night and day, even when a slice of reality stabbed through on the knife of a cutting remark.

Despite his apparent shaggy geniality, Barry reminded her of that walking immaculate deception, Max Kinsella.

Molina tried not to let her distaste show. She was playing at undercover work now herself, and it was entirely different from anything she had done in police work before except for a brief, early stint as john-bait in East L.A.

“Come on,” Reichert was cajoling, maybe only half kidding in his womanizing role, “you could use a guy like me, admit it.”

“Using is one thing; liking it is another.”

“Ooooouch!” He shook a mock burned hand. “I’d be great on camera.”

By now everyone at the bar had lost interest in their interchange.

Barry leaned so close she could smell his motor-oil cologne. “You getting any info?”

“A little. And you?”

He lifted her almost empty glass and sucked the remaining water and the ice filling it. “The girls are spooked.” He spoke so softly that he might have been whistling Dixie through his teeth. “These parking lot attacks are getting to them.”

Molina nodded. Strippers weren’t dumb. They saw the axe from the first. “You see that man I mentioned?”

Reichert’s shaggy yeti-like head shook. “No really tall guy like that here. You ever notice that guys who patronize strip clubs tend to be short? No? True. Must be compensation. For the height of what, I won’t say.” Grin. “As far as tall guys go, not even an Elvis in disguise either. Were you serious about that?”

“I’m always serious, Reichert.”

He grinned as if she had issued him a challenge. “So I heard. The Iron Maiden Lady of Homicide.”

She didn’t react. Stoicism was the best defense. “Believe it. I don’t care how much you’re enjoying a break from the speed freaks, Reichert, I’m after a killer here, maybe a serial killer. He won’t play the part, like you do, but he’ll mean business. So you keep at it. I’m sure those bills are burning a hole in your…pocket. Enjoy.”

She pushed off the bar and headed for the door. Halfway there a drunken topless stripper collided with her.

“Hey, who was that lady! Whatcha doin’ here?”

“I’m a location scout.”

“Location scout?”

“For a TV show.”

“Oh, a TV show. C’mon, you gotta be in the picture.”

“No.” Molina pulled her arm away.

“We’re all having our picture taken. It’s Wendy’s birthday. C’mon.”

Molina didn’t have to “c’mon.” A bunch of strippers surrounded her, hanging off her shoulders and making her part of a topless chorus line.

“That’s it, ladies,” a guy shouted over the noise,“get closer now. Smile.” The photographer backed up to include the whole impromptu row, the camera’s long telephoto lens obscenely erect given the atmosphere.

Molina ducked her head, let the false hair fall forward over her face just as the camera flashed.

“Sorry, ladies, I’m outa here.” She pulled away, the drunken one clinging.

“It’s my birthday,” she slurred,“you gotta say ‘Happy Birthday’.”

“Happy Birthday Suit,” Molina muttered, making for the door.

She wasn’t happy about being in a photo. These pro-am shutter bugs always haunted strip clubs, selling prints to regulars and the girls themselves, cataloguing offstage life and likely illegal activities.

The whole scene had a stench that was almost smothering. She crashed through the door to the outside, suddenly understanding what prisoners must feel on release.

Air. Black night. Bright constellations falling to the ground, like angels, and becoming neon signs. Another night on Paradise. On Paradise Avenue in Las Vegas, a long, straight row of strip clubs magnified to infinity.

When you thought about the endless numbers of women who found a tawdry glamour and even self-esteem in flashing nudity at men, and the families they came from that made this strip-club life seem a far, far better thing than they had ever done…. Molina shook her head, though no one was there to see it.

In another moment she herself didn’t see the gaudy neon tracks of signs narrowing into the distance like lonesome train rails. Her mind was back in the Valley Hospital room, watching a girl who called herself Gayla lying pale and lost in some monotone film nightmare produced by that low-budget pair of mind-numbers: pain and pain killers.

The injuries from the attack Molina had almost witnessed in the Kitty City strip club parking lot were minor, but Gayla’s voice rasped from a near-throttling. Her knees had been skinned, her wrist sprained. All minor injuries in a major-trauma world.

“Did you see or hear anything? Anyone?” Molina had asked.

Gayla’s red-blond frizz of a hairdo had thrashed back and forth on the pillow.

“No, ma’am,” she said, either reared in a household that taught children respect for their elders and authority figures…or that beat the hell out of them until everyone they met was a force to be reckoned with and kowtowed to.

“No, ma’am. If I’da seen something I’da screamed. You know? I just sort of slipped and my throat was all tight, and my elbows and knees burned and someone was leaning over me.”

“Someone. Tall, dark?”

Gayla frowned. Every night she saw faces on the other side of the spotlights, all blurred and all Someones. “Dark. The hair. Maybe.”

Maybe. Maybe Kinsella. Maybe…Nadir.

“Were the eyes dark, or light?”

“It was night.” Gayla finally sounded indignant enough to speak up for herself, for everything she missed really seeing as it was because life was nicer that way. “I couldn’t see eyes. I didn’t see face. Just something…dark coming at me and knocking everything out from under me. And breath. It was hot on my cheek.”

“Breath. Did you smell anything on it?”

“Wow. You know, when I was feeling sick there on the ground, it did seem my sense of smell kicked up. Like when you —”

“When you what?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t. When?”

“During…it.”

“Oh. That.” Molina sighed. “So what was the smell in the parking lot?”

“What? I wasn’t doing…it.”

“The attacker’s breath. What did it smell like?”

Gayla’s faced screwed into such exaggerated concentration that she winced when her muscles hurt from it. “Gum, I guess.”

“Gum?”

“Gum.”

Molina chewed on that. Neither suspect was what she’d call a gum-chewing man. Unless he’d drunk something that often flavored gum.

“The scent. Was it cinnamon? Spearmint? Fruity?”

“I don’t know. For just a second I thought…maybe spicy, I don’t know.”

Spicy. Did they put cinnamon sticks in anything besides hot Christmas punch? Or maybe it was breath mints! Any scents similar? Check it out. Check out every damn breath mint on the market.

“But you didn’t see anything?” Molina pressed.

“I told you, no!”

“Did you sense how tall the man might be? He was behind you. He choked you, forced you down. Did he feel like a shadow of yourself? Not much taller, but stronger? Or did he come from above, like a tree, bearing down?”

“Gee. I don’t know.” Her vacant, pale eyes, no color to speak of, like her opinions, her testimony, blinked rapidly. “I can’t say. It was like a…spike, driving me down. I just gave, without thinking about it. It was so sudden, I didn’t know anything else to do.”

Molina looked at this frail young woman. She was a willow, this girl. She would bend to any will stronger than hers, and every will was stronger than hers. That was why the attacker had picked her. He knew a beaten-down soul when he saw it. It was so unfair! Those whom life had already battered gave like reeds and took more battering.

Molina reached to cover Gayla’s hand on the thin hospital blanket. “I’m sorry. We’re going to find the man who did this. Stop him.”

Gayla nodded, looked like she believed her. Smiled a little. Sadly.

“There’s always another, though,” she said. For the first time during the interview, she sounded very, very certain about something.

Molina’s flashback faded, leaving her back in the Las Vegas night, standing alone on Paradise, not certain about anything except that she had to catch an elusive killer.

Too bad that arresting either of the two leading candidates for the honor would be disastrous for either her career or her personal life. Or both.

Asian Persuasion

It turns out that I need an interpreter with the Big Boys. By allowing Miss Louise to check out their circumstances at the canned hunt club first, I have encouraged them to bond with her, not me.

You would think that male solidarity would overcome a little exercise in charity like visiting the imprisoned, but no such luck. Mr. Lucky, the black panther, and Osiris, the leopard, now think that Miss Midnight Louie is the cat’s meow, and I am merely a tolerated hanger-on.

At least I am allowed to eavesdrop.

“So how plush a pad is this?” she asks.

“Like the cemeteryscape up front,” Mr. Lucky says,“this is a fine and private place.”

I do not think that he means to paraphrase a poet, especially a Cavalier poet, but he does. I refrain from pointing it out. This is not a poetry crowd.

“You will get used to the funereal facade,” Osiris assures his new roommate. “It is a security dodge that protects all our hides, including that of our esteemed sponsor, the Cloaked Conjuror.”

“An artful dodge,” I put in with admiration. “Hiding behind a cemetery is what you might call ironic, as his life is always in danger because his act reveals the ploys behind some of the most famous magical illusions of all time. That is why the Cloaked Conjuror must disguise his face and voice even on stage. Of course he makes enough moolah at it to challenge that casino known as The Mint for the title.”

“I do not know about him,” Mr. Lucky replies with a hackle twitch. “That creepy leopard-spotted mask is insulting to the real thing, and his voice sounds like he is gargling rattlesnakes. I liked the Man in Black who stole us back from the ranch better.”

“Mr. Max,” Mr. Lucky purrs in basso agreement. “I have heard of him often on the Big Cat circuit. It is a shame that he has retired from the magician trade nowadays. He was the best. We guys in black are pretty hard to beat.”

“Hear, hear!” I put in, but am ignored, except by Miss Louise, who corrects me. “Gals in black, too.”

“Speaking of gals in black,” I put in, hoping to be heeded for once,“I hear you two big guys are going to be working with a new female magician. How is that going?”

“How does a pipsqueak like you know about our secret sessions?” Osiris growls.

“I hear things others do not. It is my job. I am a private investigator.”

“She does not wear black,” Osiris says,“this new lady. At least not all the time, although I commend the truly long fingernails she wears. As long as some human females’ high heels. Four inches, I would say.”

“Awesome,” purrs Mr. Lucky, cleaning between his own four inch shivs.

I try not to shudder, knowing that the evil Shangri-La and her light-fingered mandarin stage-shivs stole my Miss Temple’s ring as part of her so-called act three months ago. Besides, it is more important to know what Shangri-La is up to now.

“So Miss Shangri-La is indeed joining the Cloaked Conjuror’s act?” I say idly.

“And that kitten of hers.” Mr. Lucky lifts a paw the size of a catcher’s mitt and licks it cleaner than home plate.

“You mean” — my breath catches in my lungs like a two-pound koi in the throat — “a piece of fluff about the size and weight of Miss Midnight Louise here, only pale of coat?”

“She is a funny-looking feline,” Mr. Lucky says,“not a symphony in monotone like Miss Midnight Louise. Her eyes are an unnatural blue shade, her body is the pale liverish color of the pablum I am given when I am sick and off my feed —”

“Baby food,” Osiris sneers. “They give you human baby food, buckets of it.”

Mr. Lucky ignores the attempted ignominy, as I would do in his position. “And her extremities appear to have been dipped in some sort of mud. They are all dirty brown.”

I chortle to hear the hated Hyacinth cut down to size by the Big Cats. My every encounter with her so far has ended with me caged or drugged, not a sterling record for a street-smart shamus. But even she would not dare to challenge these big dudes.

Midnight Louise is not amused. She never is.

“I have seen the cat in question. She is a lilac-point Siamese and is supposed to look like that, including the blue eyes, which are highly prized by humans. The only thing unnatural about her is the colored enamel on her claws, and that is perpetrated by her mistress, who presents a rather gaudy stage presence herself.”

I cannot believe that Miss Louise has beaten me here to lay eyes on my bête not-noir in her new lair before I have! To lay eyes on both of them, in fact, Shangri-La and her hairy familiar.

“I need to check these babes out,” I say.

“I bet you do,” Mr. Lucky says with a wink. “I must say you get around for a little guy.”

I fluff my ruff, but Midnight Louise is not impressed. “I have got the whole layout down cold. Come on along and I will show you.’Bye, boys.”

There is little left for me to do but to sashay after Louise like she is cheese and I am a rat. When I catch up with her, I decide to assert my age and experience.

And then I get a brilliant idea. These dames are big on family trees, and have I got a claw off the old cactus for her!

“Say, Louise.”

“Miss Louise to you, since we are not related, as you keep reminding me.”

“It is funny you should mention that. Before I came here I ran into a rather large piece of auld lang syne.”

“Huh?” She stops and twitches her tail. “I am a Scottish fold, ye dinna hae ta speak Scots to me.”

“I mean I encountered a figure from my past. My earliest years. It was quite a shock.”

“I am surprised you remember anything that far back.”

“Ungrateful kit! I am not about to forget my own mother.”

“Mother?” She actually stops and sits, squashing that metronome tall of hers. “How can you be sure? You must not have seen her since you were six weeks old. I certainly did not see mine after that, though whether it was because she was dead or domesticated I cannot say.”

“Well, my ma is neither dead nor domesticated. She runs a feral gang on Twenty-fourth Street, a pretty raw neighborhood. She has survived being kidnapped by the Fixers and is doing just fine. I would say she said hello if there was any chance that you two were related, but it does not look like there is.”

“Liar!” she spits. “So my grandmother is alive.”

I do not say anything to dissuade her. Dames love to imagine long lines of interelated individuals, whether they be human or feline. Perhaps that is why the human ones watch soap operas.

“Do you think she would know anything about my mother?” Louise asks.

“Could be.”

“I suppose you did not ask, you irresponsible lug!”

“There was not time. I was about to be jumped by the Wild Bunch or whisked away for an unnecessary globe-otomy by the Fixers.”

For some reason Miss Louise finds this amusing. Her shiny black lips curl like whiskers with a permanent wave. “Yeah. I suppose in your condition you could be mistaken for an unneutered male. Who would dream an alley cat like you had benefitted from a human-style vasectomy?”

“Not the Fixers,” I admit with a shudder. “Now, where are these dames of Asian persuasion? I have reasons for tracking down Shangri-La and her evil sidekick Hyacinth.”

Midnight Louise sits down in the middle of a flagstone walk between a luxurious growth of giant-leaved plants imported to give the Big Cats a touch of jungle clime.

I can tell right off that she is about to be obstinate.

“We need to make a deal,” she says.

“About what?”

“Our relationship.”

Dames!“We do not have one.”

“I wonder if the delightful lady gangster you met on the north side would agree if she laid eyes on me.”

“A mother may recognize a grown kit, especially when the kit in question was such a remarkably smart and personable little nipper, but no grandmother is going to recognize an offspring once removed. Let us face up to the common prejudice: we black cats all look alike.”

“Actually, I was not interested in any personal relationship,” she says silkily. “I was speaking purely of business.”

“Oh. Right. You work for me. Sometimes.”

“I have worked with you, sometimes, when it suited me. I believe it is time for a more formal arrangement.”

“What? I should pay you?”

“We should be partners.”

“Partners! I do not need a dame for a partner any more than I need a dustball dog for a sniffing substitute.”

“Yet you have employed both on several of your latest cases.”

“Aha! You admit that I do have ‘cases.’”

“I will…if you admit that we are probably blood related.”

“Hell, an average cat couple can create over four hundred thousand offspring in seven years, which I admit is a long run for your average street cat. All cats are probably related.”

“Do not swear, Daddikins,” she purrs in an odiously sweet manner. “It is a bad example for the boys.”

I turn to find black and spotted muzzles parting the glossy leaves. “Ah…nothing to worry about. Just a little family discussion.”

The leaves close like emerald curtains and we are alone once more.

“See,” says Louise. “That was not so bad. We can consider this a family business. No one will think anything of it.”

I think something of it, and it is not good! But I have not lasted in a cruel world so long without being a smidgeon adaptable, so I lick my lips and weigh how badly I want to track down the rotten Hyacinth against how much I hate conceding anything to Midnight Louise.

“All right,” I say. “You are in the firm: Midnight Louie and Son.”

“And son!”

“That is what they usually name two-generation businesses.”

“I am not a male!”

“Yeah, well, one could not tell by looking at you. You could be one of these poor souls the Fixers got. A business has to have a name the public will have confidence in: Midnight Louie and Son. What’s not to love, like, and lap right up?”

“How about Midnight Louie and Daughter?”

I try not to snerk up my plush leather glove. The kit is so busy defending her gender she has neglected to note that I remain the first and foremost element in the billing.

“Who ever heard of a PI firm with ‘and Daughter’ in the name? Not that I concede that you are, of course. My daughter, that is.”

“I do not care what you concede. I am not moving a foot on the way into that Fort Knox of a house until you come up with something reasonable.”

When a dame uses the word “reasonable” she means her way, period.

I shift my weight from forefoot to forefoot. I must admit that Midnight Louise has certain talents she may have gotten from a brilliant second-story dude like myself. She does have potential, and I could use a schnook now and then. But I cannot stomach, in this life or any other of my remaining eight,“Midnight Louie and Daughter.”

If ever I was called upon to be brilliant and devious, it is now.

I clear my throat. I hum a few bars of “Melancholy Baby.” I rid myself of an irksome nail sheath.

“Quit stalling, Mein Papa. You are cornered and you know it.”

I am at my most inventive when cornered, so…invent!

“All right,” I say portentously. “We will be partners in a firm. We will have a sexy, Richard Diamond kind of aura.”

“Richard who?”

“TV PI, had a secretary with a world-class pair of gams.” (Which were provided by Miss Mary Tyler Moore, who went on to become even more famous for tossing a hat into the air at the opening of a TV show.)

Midnight Louise blinks. I do not think that she knows a “gam” from a “gat” or she would be all over me for that sexist remark. I swallow my smirk.

“We will have a name that says it all,” I go on, caught up in my own scenario.

“We will be equal,” she warns, flattening her ears and fluffing her fur.

I am not afraid of a family spat with Midnight Louise, but I am well aware that her lurking backup outweighs me twenty to one, and there are two of them.

I straighten, shake out my coat until it is in gleaming order, and pronounce: “Midnight Inc. What could be better?”

I catch her flat-footed and wimp-whiskered. “You mean like in India ink?” she asks, confused.

“No. As in Murder Inc. Capisce?”

“It does sound dangerous,” she concedes.

“It is compact.”

“It does include both our names.”

“Indeed.”

“It is gender neutral.”

“Of course,” I growl. I hate gender neutral.

“It will do.”

With that she turns on her tail and struts forward, assuming that I will follow.

Having dodged “Midnight Louie and Daughter,” I do. For now.

I do. The expression smacks indecently of wedding vows.

Well, there is always divorce and, in business unions, dissolution. And finally, in Midnight Inc.’s line of work,’til death do us part.

Sunset Boulevard

I stare at the pool behind the house.

It is big and old-fashioned, just a huge, deep rectangle of blue mosaic tiles seen through a glassy viewfinder of chlorinated water, darkly. Some jungle leaves the size of elephant ears float like lily pads, lending an air of disuse or of the macabre, I cannot decide which.

I almost expect to see William Holden floating facedown in the limpid water as I look beyond to the stucco mansion looming beyond the pool like the white cliffs of Dover.

“What a spread,” I say.

“It belonged to Carissa Caine, a mistress of Jersey Joe Jackson before he lost his stash. That man had more mistresses than Howard Hughes had phobias.”

Louise sits to tick off her research on her toes. Or perhaps she is licking off her research from her toes. Now that she is my partner, I will be darned if I will call her “Miss” anymore. Business is business. “That is why a spread of this size still exists inside Las Vegas,” she goes on. “It was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Jersey Joe went crazy and while the tabloids were busy reporting his slow self-destruct, Carissa faded away, as untouched as this mansion. She was a little touched in the mad sense of the word, because she didn’t want to be alone after she died, so she turned the streetside acres into a cemetery. Everybody forgot about the house and grounds behind it.”

“Only in Las Vegas can the façade become the reality,” I note. “So the Cloaked Conjuror grabbed up this cold property when he started getting death threats for exposing the secrets behind magical illusions in his act.”

“He wanted to be near the Strip, but needed to be discreet. Los Muertos was perfect.”

“‘Lost’ Muertos is more like it. And the Big Cats up front make dandy bodyguards.”

“Oh, the Cloaked Conjuror has every security device in the firmament. Even the Mystifying Max would have trouble breaking into this joint.”

“But you cracked it.”

“I am small and subtle,” she says demurely.

“Small, yes. So Hyacinth and her mistress now inhabit the house with the Cloaked Conjuror?”

“His friends call him CC. It saves one’s breath.”

“Yeah, one would worry about saving one’s breath around this creepy place.” My ears prick up, and then my nostrils flare. “Dogs?”

“Not just dogs. Rottweilers.”

“Oh, weinerschnitzel! How do we get around them?”

For answer she leaps into one of Sleeping Beauty’s thorny vines and starts climbing.

She may be small and subtle, but I am larger than life. I follow in her footsteps, but not without collecting as many snags as a cheap pair of nylons. All right, pantyhose. A guy must move with the times, although even my Miss Temple, the high-heel queen, hates pantyhose. I do not want to mention how many times she goes barefooted and high-heeled, but I understand that this is all the fashion now among the starlet set.

I manage to muffle any cries of protest as I am raked right and left on the way up.

I suppose my reward is the sight of two Rottweilers, heads bowed and nostrils sucking sand, snuffling and whimpering at the foot of the vine that has been our high road to heaven.

Louise is already intently pawing a mullioned window.

I join her on the wide sill to lick down my worst wounds and cowlicks.

“Forget the grooming fetish,” she advises. “No one will see us to care how smooth your coat is. I hope.”

“So this Shangri-La is crashing with CC.”

“Speak sense, Poppy.”

“She is residing at the house. Do you suspect some hankypanky?”

“Really! I choose not to dwell upon the disgusting mating habits of humans, which never cease. I suspect that since CC must remain in constant hiding, anyone who joins the act is forced to stay here so they can practice.”

“Practice! Mr. Max Kinsella has never been seen to practice.”

“No doubt he has his own hideaway for the purpose, unless you believe that magicians can really work magic?”

“Of course not. But what has brought you to trespassing on such sinister grounds?”

Midnight Louise shrugs the silver-tipped ruff that nestles around her shoulders like an open bear trap with a fun-fur cover. “I wanted to check up on the boys, make sure that they were being treated right here.”

“Like you would be able to do something about it if they were not,” I jeer.

She ignores me, which is very hard on a jeerer. “Everything was on the up-and-up on the outside, where the Big Cats are kept. It was what was going on in the inside that kept me sniffing around.”

“How did you manage to breeze in through a window if the joint is so protected by security?” I ask, eyeing the cushy chamber beyond the mullioned window. A guy could film Rebecca here, the place looks so old-Hollywood-style lush, and creepy in that inimitable blend that only black-and-white movies can convey.

“I did not. Every aperture is wired for sound and fury, including the chimneys.”

“Then how do we —?”

For an answer she flips her busy tail in my face and ankles off along the ledge.

I cast one last hungry look at the Leave Her to Heaven bedroom, all chiffon and brocade and oil portraits of to-die-for dames and tall glass perfume bottles that resemble a cityscape of mid town Manhattan.

Instead of busting into Manderlay I am taking the high road to agoraphobia.

At least Louise is doing point.

Way up here the oleander bush tops scratch on the brickwork and it is a hard twenty-foot fall to the foundation landscaping, which looks to be a variety of thorny hedge.

At last Louise pauses at a porthole the size of a salad plate and sits down with unpardonable pride.

“This is a peephole?” I suggest.

“This is the only unwired entry in the place.”

I peer through the aluminum-lined opening. “I can see why. A snake would have trouble breaking and entering here.”

“Luckily, the snakes stick to the ground cover.”

I peer below, picturing serpents writhing among the thorns. No way do I want to go down.

“This is a perfect entrance,” Louise goes on. And on.

It seems she has stumbled across a former clothes dryer vent pipe in a closet that everyone has forgotten was once an ultra-modern second-floor laundry room, only now it is filled with racks of costumes and stage props. The pipe, she says, exits into the back of a red-satin-lined cape, sort of like the escape chute on an airliner.

A moment later, the tip of her tail is vanishing into the pipe. She has not even paused to consider that I might be a rather tight fit. Young kits nowadays!

Normally the Rule of Entry and Exit is: if the head will fit, you must commit.

However, this helpful motto does not allow for individuals whose proportions tend more toward those of Nero Wolfe than the Thin Man.

I must admit to wolfing down my food more often than not of late, especially when I get out and have a chance at something other than that arid mound of Free-to-be-Feline Miss Temple keeps endlessly replenished at the Circle Ritz. Luckily, Las Vegas is as much a town to eat out in as to lose your lunch (and bargain buffet breakfast) in.

However, I cannot have Miss Louise saying I am the slowpoke of the outfit, so I nose my way into the pipe.

It is dark and cold as only bare metal can be in this climate. I can already feel my innards shrinking from the chilly contact, which will only do me good in slithering through this foul worm-hole.

Still, it is quite a job to wriggle through, requiring all my superior muscular strength. I recall an anaconda from a previous case and pretend that I can propel myself by rippling muscle tone alone, as Trojan did.

Finally my head pokes through into free space. I feel like I can breathe again, and grunt and huff as I pull my body through the eye of the needle that Miss Louise’s wonderful, handy, forgotten entryway has proven to be.

I plop with a thump onto the advertised red satin lining of the cape, which is so slippery I can barely get the traction to push myself upright without flailing my battle-shivs through it until it is shredded wheat.

Altogether a most undignified illegal entrance. The only thing missing from this comedy of erroneous entry is the usual dead body I have a knack for stumbling over, especially in strange places, in the dark.

I attain my balance and swagger forward. Fortunately, this closet is so dark that the hypercritical Louise has not witnessed my struggles.

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 inside 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.”

The problem was solved in an instant. Ralph bent and lifted Temple up, his hands fixed at her waist.

So. This is what it felt like to be tall. She gazed into the elephant-ear plants, read the hidden neon messages that flashed off and on like shy Rorschach blots. Domingo had said. He had promised to acknowledge Matt with this exhibit. How? Where?

It was a mystery.

A challenge.

Something necessary to solve.

“There!”

Ralph carried her where she pointed.

No one gawked. This was Las Vegas. One expected the unexpected.

He set her gently down by a lurid gaggle of overgrown neon kiwi birds.

“How did Domingo know?” Temple muttered.

When a world-famous conceptual artist decides to do something in Las Vegas, there are no holds barred. The entire project, a coup for the Crystal Phoenix, was courtesy of Domingo’s high regard for Matt Devine. Temple might have cleared him of murder, but Matt in his role of hotline-counselor had cured him of a midlife sexual addiction that was threatening to ruin his professional and personal future.

Behind the kiwis (so prominent in a more recent murder environment) stood the sinister figure of the Wicked Witch of the West holding a flamingo pink neon sign.

“Surrender Dorothy” it read in cursive script, with an added line beneath: “to Mr. Midnight.”

Signed: “Domingo.”

Really, Temple thought. Most…ambiguous.

And her without a pair of ruby red slippers to her name.

Temple pulled into the Circle Ritz parking lot, feeling in the mood for a brass band, but no such luck. It was deserted except for the landlady’s inherited silver VW Bug, millennium model.

Temple pulled in right next to it. Take that, Elvismobile!

For a moment she wondered again why Matt Devine had traded this sleek if funky little car upholstered in blue-suede-shoe cloth for Electra’s groady old pink Probe. Which he’d immediately painted an uninspiring shade of white. Of course, all shades of white were uninspiring on any car but a Stutz-Bearcat convertible to Temple.

She sat there in her snazzy red convertible, contemplating Matt’s depressingly modest outlook on life. If it was quiet, unassuming, and dull, he was all for it. Perhaps that was why he’d never really fallen for her.

It had been a close call, though, interrupted by Max’s sudden return from the missing-in-action lists just when she was beginning to accept that her live-in lover was gone for good. What if Max hadn’t come back? Would she and Matt be sharing the whitewashed Probe now? Or a red Miata? At five-ten, Matt would probably fit in the Miata like Goldilocks in baby bear’s bed: just right.

Temple glanced at the empty passenger seat beside her. Ghosts always rode with a single woman. Maybe some women wouldn’t have taken Max back after he’d vanished for almost a year with no notice. But he was a magician. Vanishing was a professional hazard. And he had left to save her from drawing the attention of the bad guys on his trail. A noble act, really. Besides, they had been monogamous long enough and enough in love to flirt with a real commitment: marriage someday. You had to remain true to your school, and Temple’s alma mater was monogamy in a bed-hopping age. Max had remained true the whole time he was gone, too. Mutual fidelity wasn’t something you threw away.

Temple fluffed her road-whipped hair into a semblance of order in the rearview mirror, which reflected a lot empty of all the working tenants’ cars, including her reliable old Storm.

Too bad you couldn’t keep old cars like you did old pets: till death did you part, and a little box of rust at the end for yourétagère. Then she thought of Max and his rotating stable of “cold” cars, courtesy of his international-operative friends. Temple didn’t know what he’d be driving from one day to the next, and they were all perfectly serviceable, perfectly forgettable vehicles. That was the point.

Temple patted the leather passenger seat beside her, hot in the sun. Maybe that’s why she had made such an extravagant statement with this car. Maybe she wanted to shout that she didn’t need to live the kind of self-denying life Matt seemed married to, or have to follow the kind of enforced low-profile pattern that Max’s undercover work had made his lifestyle if he wanted to keep having a life.

Something tweedled, and Temple jumped. Every new car had its own literal bells and whistles that told you to take the key out of the ignition, or put your seat belt on, or to turn off your headlights.

But this signal was just from the cell phone in the tote bag on the passenger seat. She patted it down expertly, looking for concealed communications devices, and finally came up with her phone.

“Yes?” she asked after the fourth ring, basking in the open air, staring up at clear blue sky of spring.

“I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time,” the voice said.

“Only on a most unusual day,” Temple caroled back. She was in a good mood and would not be denied.

“This is Molina and all my days are unusual, so don’t flatter yourself. I need to talk to you.”

“You are.”

“In person, where I can see you and you don’t sound half-looped.”

“I am not looped. I am happy. It is a natural human state in parts of Las Vegas you seldom see, Lieutenant.”

“That’s good to know. Can you come see my side of town?”

“Yeah. Now?”

“As good a time as any.”

“For you, maybe.” Then Temple pictured zipping up to the police department building in this jaunty set of wheels. What’d Molina drive, an ancient Volvo? “Okay, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Thanks,” Molina’s brusque voice said before the connection died.

Temple stared at her cell phone as if it had grown Dumbo ears. Molina gave thanks? To her?

Must be a trap.

Temple resolved to be on her guard despite a New Car High and welcomed piloting her new baby on a mission to Homicide Central. Might as well break it in early.

C. R. Molina’s office was depressingly functional, but Temple had been here before. She sat on the molded plastic visitor’s chair, her feet barely grazing the floor despite platform wedgies that added four inches to her five-feet-zero.

Across from her, Molina was the same stark, brunette figure that sometimes stalked Temple’s nightmares: Mother Superior incarnate, a female authority figure who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Instead of feeling chirpy about her flashy new car, Temple suddenly felt like a kid with a new red fire engine that all the adults were too busy with Real Life to look at.

This insight reminded Temple that she had often been too busy lately to look at Real Life, which was the only kind of life — and death — Molina dealt with daily.

Molina was shunting some paperwork aside. The statistics of death in Las Vegas. She reminded Temple of a school principal calling a student to her office. Except school principals were seldom nervous, and today the Rock of Gibraltar of the LVMPD was. Slightly.

She sat back, a nunlike figure in her dark navy blazer and denim shirt. “This is off the record.”

“Which way? I’m not supposed to tell anyone, or you won’t tell anyone?”

“You’ve never listened to me before, but I wish you’d prick up one tiny Toto ear and listen now.”

Temple flushed at being compared to a dog. A small dog. A small cute film dog. “Which Wicked Witch are you warning me about now?”

“It’s Wicked Wizard.”

“Max? Don’t you know by now that I don’t listen to propaganda?”

“I do. Which is why I’m pretty stupid for even trying to open your eyes about him. You should know that he is suspected of some pretty serious stuff. That there’s good reason to think he’s committed a felony.”

Temple’s sun-warmed skin felt the sudden frost of an inner chill. “Felony.”

“Grand theft, burglary, robbery, kidnapping,” Molina noted tone lessly. “And murder.”

“You’re not back on that old sweet song again? Max is not a murderer. If he’d done anything even remotely wrong since he came back last fall, you’d have had him arrested by now.”

“Easier said than done with the Mystifying Max. Magicians have a criminal edge second to none.”

“Ex-magician.”

“Too bad he’s not an ex-boyfriend.”

“Maybe he is. You don’t know anything about us, really.”

“I know more than you do about Max Kinsella.”

“Now, really, that’d be going some.”

“You’re blinded by your relationship to the man. You so resented the implication when you were assaulted in the parking garage that the emergency room staff assumed you were a battered woman. But what does sleeping with the stripper strangler make you?”

“Max? Killed that poor girl? Cher Smith?”

“For starters.”

“You think I wouldn’t know if he were capable of that?”

Molina nodded. “Most of the worst serial rapists had nice little wives at home who were totally ignorant of their real natures. And some didn’t. Some had willing partners in their crimes; women who preferred to see it done to other women than to suffer it themselves. Abused to the point of becoming accomplices.”

“You have no idea of who Max is,” Temple said, stunned at the darkness of the crimes under discussion, but unshaken. “I wish I could tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Who’s more liable to be deceived here: the girlfriend, or the police professional?”

Temple just shook her head.

“Remember that I warned you. He could go down for something seriously criminal, and then you really will be an accomplice, as well as a witness for the prosecution.”

“Why do you need to prove Max guilty of something so badly?”

“Because it’s my job to find and arrest the guilty. He may be guilty of more than you can imagine.”

Temple had a Cecil B. DeMille imagination, so this was a real threat. If Molina was even more convinced now than a year ago that Max was guilty of something heinous, the situation was as serious as she said.

Temple answered seriously. “I know it looked suspicious when Max disappeared right after that dead man was found in the spy network cubbyhole over the Goliath Casino, but he had just finished his performance contract there. If — and I say if — he knew about the death, he might have gone underground because he was afraid of whoever did it, or of being arrested for it. Maybe he was set up —”

“You’re telling me you lived with the man and he never explained his vanishing act to you?”

“Max keeps his own counsel. He said it was for my own protection.”

“He’s not doing a very good job of protecting you, or what’s yours.”

Molina finally lowered her laser blue eyes — so like that beautiful blue light of the glaucoma test machine at the eye doctor’s that you’re supposed to hold absolutely still for while staring right into it without blinking as it pushes closer and closer…and even though you can’t feel it you know that gas-blue flame is drilling right into your cornea — ick! Temple blinked from just thinking about the eye test.

Maybe it had made her nervous (that epic imagination at work again), because she jumped when Molina tossed something across the desk that hit the papers with a thunk.

This was the usual police evidence baggie that you thought should be holding somebody’s leftover tuna-fish sandwich, which usually turned to be something sad, like one earring, or grisly, like somebody’s leftover bloodstained wallet….

The object inside the bag was small and lumpy with a glint of gold.

Temple’s ghoulish imagination conjured a flashy molar pulled out by the roots….

“Oh.”

She reflexively reached for the object. It was hers, after all.

It weighed heavily in her palm as her memory assayed it. She’d forgotten how utterly beautiful it was, the opals, the diamonds, the gold setting.

It had been hers for only a few days.

“Where? When?”

Molina was happy to dispatch the dispassionate facts. “In a parking lot. A church parking lot. Several weeks ago. Near another parking lot body. It was identified, but the perp remains at large. A female victim, of course.”

“My ring was by the body?”

“By the edge of the parking lot, actually. A bright young uniform found it. The body was thirty yards away.”

“I don’t understand.” This time Temple could meet the laser eyes: she stood on firm ground. “You know this ring was on my hand the night we all attended the Opium Den to see that woman magician’s act. Shangri-La called me onstage as the willing audience schmoo, took my ring, and then vanished with her whole retinue.”

“You vanished too, and that black alley cat of yours, who gets around like a case of the clap.”

“But Max found me, and Louie too.”

“I found you. Max was along for the ride.”

“He found us. You were along for the ride. Maybe that’s why you hate him.” Temple found a lump as big as the ring blocking her throat. Holding the ring brought back her Manhattan “honeymoon” with Max last Christmas, reminded her of his hopes, promises, that he’d be able to duck out of the undercover life, live a normal existence someday with her.

“Max had nothing to do with this ring!” Temple said, her wits gathering. “It was stolen from me by a woman no one has been able to trace. She must have been involved with that drug-smuggling ring you busted that night. Somebody must have pawned the ring and it ended up in that parking lot. Why would this be evidence incriminating Max, except that he gave it to me? Is giving me rings a crime?”

“Not to my knowledge. Unless it was stolen.”

Temple stared at the object in its sheath of cheap plastic, aghast.

“It wasn’t,” Molina admitted. “Purchased in New York, at Tiffany’s. For cash.”

“Really? Tiffany’s?”

“He didn’t brag?”

“Quality doesn’t brag. So how does this being on the scene of a murder implicate Max? You admit the ring was his to give. You know that it was taken from my possession in front of a theater full of witnesses, including you. You know that the entire magic act was a cover for criminal activities. Why drag Max into it?”

“You haven’t mentioned the murder victim. Of course you wouldn’t have noticed or known about her death. It got a three-inch mention in the local news section roundup column. Still, she was just as dead, brutally strangled. Not a young woman: sixty-two. Gloria Fuentes would not ring a bell with you or most people who read the paper that day.”

Molina was wrong. The name Gloria Fuentes almost made Temple drop the evidence bag, but she clutched it tight instead.

“And the connection to Max Kinsella,” Molina went on. “She was a former magician’s assistant, long since retired. Still, magic is the link, isn’t it? Between Shangri-La, the vanishing magician, between the late Gloria Fuentes, and between Max Kinsella, formerly the Mystifying Max and lately your non-live-in lover. I’ll take that bauble back now. It’s police evidence.”

No! Temple wanted to shout. It’s mine! It’s precious. Valuable. Mine.

How cruel Molina was to flaunt her possession of Temple’s only engagement ring. Temple felt a wash of anger, but it was rinsed away by fear. What if Molina knew what Temple knew: that Gloria Fuentes had been the longtime assistant to Max’s mentor in magic, Gandolph the Great? She would really be able to add several rows of bricks to her wall of circumstantial evidence closing him off from the normal life he hoped for.

Temple held the baggie out to Molina. “Handle it carefully. Opal is delicate and the ring is valuable. You probably know just how valuable more than I do. If it’s damaged in your custody, I’ll sue.”

While Temple met Molina’s hard gaze with her own steel blue fury, the desk phone rang.

“Molina,” she answered.

Then she was quiet. “I’m in the middle of something,” she said finally, sounding much friendlier than she had to Temple. “I’ll call you later. Yes. As soon as I can.”

The call didn’t sound totally professional, Temple diagnosed expertly. A public relations professional knows a lot about phone voice language. So if this was a semipersonal call, who was it from? Not Molina’s preteen daughter, Mariah. There had been none of that annoying Mother Superior-knows-better tone that Temple got by default.

A man. It was a man who Molina didn’t need to intimidate, but liked. Since a female police supervisor needed to intimidate men all around her into giving her an even break, Temple deduced that the man on the line was not a colleague, but a…friend? When did Molina relax enough to have friends, of any gender?

“Where were we?” the lieutenant asked.

Temple raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t like Molina to lose track of anything, especially something so potentially lethal. “I was requesting that you take good care of my ring, and you were talking about how I was married to the Mob.”

“That would be better than the state you’re in,” Molina retorted. “This is a friendly warning. Kinsella is trouble and he’ll take you down with him, no matter how many pretty rings he tosses your way. If you see him do anything that makes you think twice, let me know.”

“If I do, I will, but I haven’t yet.” Temple itched to reveal Max’s secret good-guy past, but secrets were supposed to stay that way and Molina would only call it defensiveness anyway. “Are you through with me?”

“For now.” Molina eyed Temple as she stood up, barely looming over the seated police officer even when standing. “You see much of Matt Devine nowadays?”

“Around the Circle Ritz. But he’s been…busy lately. Out of town on speaking engagements.”

“I hear he has other engagements on his calendar, too.”

“Oh?” Temple recognized a leading dig when she heard it. She braced herself again.

“Only that he’s been working himself back into the social mainstream.”

“Dating, you mean.”

“I guess I do.”

Temple gritted her teeth. She would not ask who. “That’s good. Single guys should date.” She narrowed her eyes like daggers at Molina. “Single gals, too.”

Molina shrugged. “A lot of single gals Matt’s age are single parents, though.”

Temple resisted catching a gasping breath. Molina had that daughter, Mariah. Was this her way of announcing that she was dating Matt?

“I’m a single gal with a dependent myself,” Temple said breezily, “only he’s a cat.”

“Doesn’t count as a dependent, especially given Midnight Louie’s untrammeled ways. I’m surprised you haven’t figured out who Matt’s new interest is. I thought you fancied yourself an amateur detective.”

“In criminal matters. There’s no crime in Matt’s having a social life.”

“There’s a crime in that it took him so long to get around to getting one.” Molina let her pencil rap back and forth on a manila folder, but kept silent.

Guess you could call this, Temple thought, a second “Manila Thrillah” only instead of Frazier and Ali going another brutal round, it was her and Molina. A Manila Molina, maybe? She be darned if she went down first.

Molina finally straightened, her mouth making a moué Temple couldn’t interpret as approval or not. “Janice Flanders. He’s been seeing Janice. I think they’re well matched.”

Temple had seen the sketch artist’s portrait work, but never hide nor hair of her in the flesh. Curiosity was killing her.

“She’s a wonderful artist,” Temple said smoothly. “She must share Matt’s insight into people and their problems.”

Molina paused on the brink of saying something, then seemed to remember her own secret. “That midnight radio job keeps him off the streets during prime time. Not too conducive to a social life. Probably for the best. Funny, there was a time when I thought you’d go with him over Kinsella.”

Temple was so flummoxed she couldn’t say anything for a moment. “I don’t think personal relationships are your long suit,” she said finally. “Obviously, you were wrong.”

“Oh, the show isn’t over yet.” Molina’s Midnight Margarita-blue eyes narrowed speculatively at Temple, like she was an undercover operative Molina was unleashing on the world at large. An unwilling, ignorant undercover operative. “Just watch yourself. It’s dangerous out there,” she added, turning back to her papers, dismissive.

Temple tottered out of the office to the elevator, weak-kneed for a moment. The last admonition had sounded reluctantly sincere enough to be real. And it wasn’t just Max that the woman was warning her about, Temple sensed.

Given how deeply Molina loathed and distrusted Max, it gave Temple chilling pause to wonder what else threatening Molina saw looming in Temple’s own present and future.

The Sign of the Serpent

If Lieutenant C. R. Molina had meant to destroy Temple’s zip-a-deedoo-dah mood, she couldn’t have done better had she gone to graduate school in Killjoy 101.

Temple put the Miata’s top down again, fussing aloud about the process and herself.

“There’s no sense in taking anything that woman says seriously. She’s prejudiced against Max and probably thinks Miatas are the Devil’s workshop, too. What a puritan! She probably has the sex life of a cantaloupe. She certainly has the hide of one.

“I’d hate to be her daughter! Poor Mariah! It would take more than a Xena the Warrior Princess outfit to make that woman halfway human.”

Still, Temple stopped and grinned to picture the towering, no-nonsense detective done up as a credible Xena in leather bustier, studded boots, and kilt. And she already had the Lucy Lawless Olympus-blue eyes down cold. The masquerade had been a ruse to catch a killer at a science fiction convention where Xena clones were about as unique as Bozos at a clown convention. Temple was surprised the buttoned-down Molina would go undercover in such an over-the-top feminine guise, but her daughter had been in danger and mother love is a desperate motive. Actually, Molina’d looked pretty hot for a homicide lieutenant in that get-up. Temple’s grin faded.

Then she broke a fingernail on the convertible-top latch.

“Holy Aeolus! It’s the curse of the Chakram Chick.”

She got in the car and drove away, worrying more about what Molina might know about Max (that Temple didn’t) than was good for her sanity.

She hardly noticed where she was driving, she was so upset. Seeing the ring Max had given her treated like a Cracker Jack token made her stomach churn. Contemplating how Molina might use it to tie Max into yet another murder made the churn start whipping out butterflies. She was hardly Max’s keeper, she told herself. He’d been taking care of himself since high school and then some. Taking care of her, too. Loyalty and faith were hard emotions to defend; they were so totally in the mind and heart of the holder.

Had her supply of both run out on Max? He was mysterious, yes, but that had been a professional qualification for a magician, a charming quirk at first. Later…

She was driving east of town on Charleston. On her left the Blue Mermaid suddenly surfaced from a tangle of junky roofs and signs, her slowly turning serene plaster image a kind of Virgin Mary for the down-at-the-heels set.

And of course the Virgin Mary (which she was decidedly not) reminded her of Matt (which he decidedly was). Virgin, that is. Holy mackeral! What had she been thinking? How could she, a fallen away Universalist Unitarian, deal with an earnest ex-Catholic priest determined to re-enter the single lifestyle with eyes wide shut; to play by the religious rules even some Catholics had found unworkable? Talk about sexual responsibility. Before Max had reappeared, she might have and he couldn’t. After Max had returned, he might have and she wouldn’t. A tragicomedy of timing. Something to film for a joint HBO and Pax TV project: Sex in the Psyche.

The white-painted motel named in the mermaid’s honor bore a huge new sign of its own, a temporary banner stretched over the portico:

PSYCHIC FAIR

Temple’s foot hesitated over the brake for a heartbeat. She’d attended a psychic fair once. Even knew a few psychics. Maybe one of them would have a clue about the strange five-sided figure that had scribed professor Jefferson Mangel into a circle of death only a couple weeks before.

She was sure that the figure meant something arcane. Who better to ask than a psychic? It was doubly a pity that poor Jeff was dead. He was the one objective expert on the mantic arts she’d trust to have a scholar’s dispassion on the subject. But she couldn’t consult him anymore….

Or could she? What had Max said? He’d borrowed some Ph.D. theses that mentioned the mysterious entity known in some magic circles as the Synth.

She twisted the small steering wheel right to shoot down a side street, rather dingy in this near-downtown neighborhood. Max would have wanted her convertible top up, pronto, if he were along. But he wasn’t, and she quickly turned around in a deserted gas station lot and got back on Charleston heading west.

She hoped Max was at home and feeling like company. Maybe she could also find out what he had done lately to put Molina in her rabid-rottweiler mood.

The house was a picture of housing development serenity, like its neighbors. In the nearby houses, though, people were really away at work and school. Behind this house’s hooded windows, Max probably spun plots like a spider in a suburban web.

Temple parked the Miata three houses down and hefted a businesslike folder from her tote bag. Maybe she’d be mistaken for an Avon lady if anyone was watching.

If anyone was watching. At the very least Max was. Like a spider, he was supersensitive to any stirrings on the fringes of his gossamer empire.

Why was she creating such unattractive metaphors for Max’s perpetual state of siege today? Had Molina really gotten to her this time?

Temple paused in the sheltered entryway. Ringing the doorbell was a last resort. If Max was inside, he would materialize at the heavy wooden door and draw her within before anybody on the street noticed her.

When she came here Temple always felt like a magician’s assistant being shuttled quickly into the next disappearing lady trick, as if the whole house were only an illusion, one big revolving door into a maze fashioned of hidden compartments and deceptive mirrors and sliding false walls.

Temple stood in the shade of the portico, designed as shelter against the daily Las Vegas Heat and Light Show. The door did not so much open as dissolve into deeper darkness.

A hand, pale as a formal glove, reached out to draw her inside.

Her eyes blinked, unable to adjust to the interior shadow.

Max’s hand, conversely as warm as it looked pallid and cold, pulled her through the entry hall and into the well-lit rooms beyond.

Her eyes, still blinded, rebelled at the rapid-fire change in light.

“What brought you here without phoning first?” he asked.

“An interview with the vampire.”

“Vampire? Before lunch? Let’s go into the kitchen for a little healthy fluorescent light.”

Temple laughed. Max always managed to banish his own most powerful illusions. It was just a darkened house, after all, kept shuttered against the heat, but mostly so he could see out without anyone seeing in. That’s what a man on the run for eighteen years needed.

The kitchen was its usual gleaming, efficient self, the stainless steel appliance fronts reflecting and distorting their entering figures into gray alien forms.

“You didn’t say why you dropped by.” Max never forgot an unanswered question.

“I…I was happy.”

“Was?” He never missed an implication either.

She studied him as he leaned against the walk-in refrigerator front like an extremely suave corpse propped against his coffin. Or a space vampire against a high-tech crypt door.

His trademark black clothing underlined the image, but Molina had carefully planted the sinister side of Max in Temple’s brain. The policewoman had been working on that for a year, always questioning Max’s whereabouts, his history, his sudden disappearance and reappearance in Temple’s life. Maybe it was beginning to work.

Max turned away to pull open the stainless steel door, and spun back to face her, something in his hand. “Dreamsicle?” he asked

Molina’s evil spell of doubt was broken.

“Dreamsicle?” Temple slung her tote bag and folder atop the huge kitchen island. “Where you’d get that? I haven’t had one of those since I had scabby knees.”

“You never had scabby knees.”

“Yes, I did, and I sold lemonade at a stand, too.”

“Shocking.” Max handed her an orange-vanilla ice cream treat on a stick and unwrapped the thin white paper from his own. The label read Creamsicle now but they both knew these were Dreamsicles of old, of their youths. “And you worry about my past.”

Uncanny how he could always target the unspoken issue.

“I don’t worry about it as much as Molina does.”

“She doesn’t worry about, she just worries at it, like a demented Scottish terrier, only she would be an Iberian terrier.”

“Not necessarily. She got those blue eyes from somewhere. Why not a Scot?”

“Bagpipes in the blood? I don’t think so, Temple.”

“I just saw her.”

“Why am I not surprised.”

“She warned me about you.”

“I repeat: Why am I not surprised? That’s nothing new.”

“She warned me really, really hard about you. And she showed me something.”

Max managed to tense without visibly moving a muscle. Temple only noticed it because she knew him so well. He had that perfect concentrated stillness that the stage required, the sense of something tensile ready to spring, like a big cat.

He didn’t ask what.

“The ring,” Temple finally said.

“The ring?” Max unfolded his arms. “How the hell did she get the ring?”

“Found it.”

Max’s face broadcast consternation. “Found it? Where?”

“Actually a street cop found it. And where is the problem. At the scene of another murder.”

“A new murder? And the ring was by the body?”

“Not so old a murder, but not so new either. Gloria Fuentes. Remember? She was found strangled in the church parking lot.”

“I remember,” Max said grimly. “Another of your magic-linked murders.”

“Not mine. I just noticed the connections.”

“And the ring was there? But that was before —”

“Before what?”

Max relaxed enough to smile. “I’m trying too hard to anticipate you. Magician’s bad habit. You tell your story at the right pace.”

“It wasn’t very near the body, at least. Maybe ninety feet away at the edge of the bushes. In the dirt. My ring! In the dirt.”

“Your ring?”

“Well, it was originally your ring, until you gave it to me. I think that’s how Molina thinks of it too. As your ring. As a nasty talisman associated with the demon Max. As more evidence to hang you with.”

“That ring,” he said faintly, blinking once. He leaned against the wall again. “That ring. So it’s found. Has been for a few weeks.”

“Isn’t that just the meanest thing ever, Max? Molina had it, knew she had it, and never told me?”

Max smiled again. “It’s mean, but that’s police work. It was a wildly out-of-place piece of evidence. Of course she’d save it for a rainy day. Apparently she decided on today to rain on your parade.”

“Well, it worked. It was horrible to see it in that tacky plastic bag, pulled out of a tacky desk drawer in a mean little office.”

“I’m sorry, Temple.” Max came to put his arms around her, creating a living ring. “I don’t much like Molina having custody of that ring either. But it was lost weeks ago. We have to give it up.”

“It’s so beautiful, and it was from Tiffany’s.”

Max embrace hardened. “How did you know that?”

“Molina found out.”

“She is starting to really irritate me.”

“It’s mutual, and don’t you forget it. I reminded her that the ring was taken by that Shangri-La onstage at the Opium Den, in front of all of us, you, Matt, me, Molina. How can she suspect you of getting it back and then being stupid enough to drop it on a murder scene?”

“I got you and Louie back from the abductors, didn’t I?” Max pulled away and retreated to the buttress of the refrigerator door, this time as if he needed the support. “Maybe Molina figured I found the ring during my search of the magical chambers, and palmed it. Then I decided it wasn’t safe to give it back to you, so I took it along on one of my stalking expeditions and left it as a tip for a beat cop.”

“Max, don’t joke. She’s dead serious. And it does look like some body wants to implicate you in these murders. Maybe it’s the Synth. Maybe that book you’re writing on Gandolph is making them nervous. Whoever, it doesn’t matter. Molina thinks she’s got a hold of another coffin nail for you.”

“Why’d she show it to you now?”

“Because she’s convinced, she wants to convince me, that you’re a monstrous criminal I should turn in to my nearest precinct house. She said you could be going down for something big, and that I could be a witness, or an accessory.”

“What did you say?”

Temple had to work on finishing her Dreamsicle, which had melted like syrupy emotions while she’d been talking. It was hard to discuss serious issues with ice cream in your mouth. Disposing of the treat gave her time to notice that Max’s insouciant attitude, both physical and mental, overlaid an uncharacteristic edginess.

He showed the strain, a magician’s worst enemy.

“Is there something I should know?” she asked.

“There are a lot of things you should know, that I can’t tell you.” He pushed off from the refrigerator door’s icy steel support, looking gaunt and haunted under the unforgiving overhead fluorescent light.

“Undercover work,” he said, “which I did a lot of for a long time in a good cause, mostly requires keeping an ungodly amount of balls in the air. You deceive by telling the truth, or by telling slices of the truth to a lot of people, like doling out a piece of pie that’s too rich for human consumption.”

“I guess the food analogy fits a kitchen,” she noted.

“Spy work is all oblique, all analogies. Yet there is a simple straight-forward rule underlying the cut corners and endless angles. You must always respect your sources and their confidences, or the whole thing falls apart. That means you know pieces of everybody else’s truth, but can never tell the whole truth. You tell lies — not to deceive, but to protect the truth that some people have the courage to tell. You must know more than any one of them. You must see the big picture, and prevent them from seeing it, or they will fall into it and die. And it will be your fault.”

“You’re saying you have to lie to protect people.”

Max nodded. “From others. From themselves.”

“But —”

Max leaned forward to collect the empty wooden stick from her and throw it in the trash can hidden behind an island cupboard. He waited for her to finish her thought.

“But…you’re talking about professional espionage. Telling lies not to deceive but to protect people: isn’t that where people go wrong in their personal lives?”

“Not so much committing untruth, but neglecting to mention truth, I think.”

“You know what I think?”

He smiled. “No. That’s what I like about you. I get to find out.”

“I think you and Molina both know something that you don’t dare tell anybody else, but that makes you mortal enemies.”

Max folded his arms. “That’s possible.”

“Sure, play Mr. Stone Face. She does the same thing. Just glowers and intones warnings like a witch from Macbeth, but she won’t come out and say diddly!”

Max was laughing. “A witch from Macbeth. I like that.”

“Good, because you’re Macbeth, trying to decide which way to jump.”

“I’m not contemplating killing anyone.”

“No, you want to stop the killing. That’s always been your problem. Most people are happy to get a good job and retire with a gold watch, although yours probably would be a Patek Philippe. You want to end the Irish Troubles and put your dead cousin to rest.”

“Sean will never rest.”

“He will, but you won’t. Max, being secretive about what you really do, your past, is hurting you with Molina. This could get serious. She could arrest you, or worse, shoot you. If you would only tell her a little —”

“She wouldn’t believe it. She’s made a hobby out of not believing me, and telling her a little could hurt a lot of people.”

“She’s in law enforcement, I can’t believe she’d be so blind —”

“Believe it!”

Temple stiffened to encounter the stainless steel in Max’s voice, an ungiving intensity she’d never heard before.

“Do you realize what you’re doing, Temple? You’re taking Molina at face value. Because she’s a woman, a policewoman, because she has a career in law enforcement, you assume she’s straight. You assume she doesn’t have a personal agenda. You assume she’s honest.”

“Well, she acts annoyingly self-righteous. Are you saying Molina might be crooked?”

“She might have agendas that have nothing to do with the law or her job. I’m saying she might be human, and if she’s human, she might go very wrong.”

Temple leaned against the island’s hard granite edge, feeling it dig into her back. It was straighter than a stone ruler, and could not lie.

People were another matter.

“You’re right, Max. Ever since Molina came charging at me after you vanished, nagging, worrying, digging, like an annoying dog after a bone — you’re right, I assumed that all she wanted was justice. She might be misinformed, or, in your case, underinformed, but she really just wanted to catch criminals. You’re saying she has a special interest in pinning these vague crimes on you. It isn’t just dogged police work, it’s…obsession? Self-protection?”

“I’m saying if someone is persistently wearing blinders, maybe he, or she, has something to hide from herself. And people with something to hide from themselves are very dangerous.”

Temple tried to rearrange the chessboard in her mind. Molina, the Red Queen, say. Not just legal authority but a human being with human failings. Blind to any but one view of Max, because that supported an illusion she needed to maintain, no matter what.

“I wish I could, Temple,” Max said softly, watching her think, watching her rearrange her assumptions. His voice was sad and tender.

“Could what?”

“Could tell you the whole truth. But I love you too much to risk it. I’ll have to risk you finding out half-truths from everybody else and turning against me. It’s just the way it is.

“I can tell you this. I spent more than ten years of my life worrying about danger that might befall strangers. Now, since I came to Vegas with you, it’s become personal. I don’t worry about strangers anymore. I’m cured of that delusion. Now I’m like everybody else who can’t do anything at all about fate, and life, and death. Now I worry about the people I know.”

“People?”

He inclined his head in tribute to her instincts. “People.”

“Anybody I know?”

“Everybody you know.”

Temple considered this unwelcome news. Max would always tell her the truth, as far as he could.

She nodded, and picked up her folder.

“Max, what happened to Professor Mangel’s magical poster collection once the room was no longer a crime scene? Did anyone at the university care to keep the exhibition going?”

“No.”

“No? What a shame! Even though the posters of you were missing after the murder, the rest of the material must have been invaluable.”

“I’m glad you thought the collection diminished by my absence, but now it’s enhanced by my presence.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Come with me.” He beckoned her toward the hallway.

“I haven’t time for dalliance, Mr. Valentino. Or do we say Pitt nowadays?”

“I hope not. But dalliance is not on my mind.” Max led her down the dark hallway to the large, unoccupied bedroom where he stored all of his and the late Gandolph’s magical paraphernalia.

“I’ve seen this act before,” Temple objected.

“I’ve got a new illusion.” Max opened the door and switched on the light: no magic, just Thomas Edison and Hoover Dam in tandem.

Temple gasped anyway. Against one wall stood ranks of aluminum poster stands framing the mostly yellow, black, and red vintage placards announcing the great magic acts of the past century and a half.

“Now this is a magic trick. How, Max?”

“The magic of money. An anonymous donor offered the university a good price for the entire collection.”

“How wonderful!” Temple flung her arms around Max’s neck, dangling from his height. “What a wonderful thing to do. I’m so glad.”

“Well, Mangel really and truly loved my act. He loved the acts of every magician whose posters he collected. Now they’re in a private museum with the leftovers of Gandolph’s magical career. In a way Gandolph and Jeff Mangel, and Gloria Fuentes, Gandolph’s murdered former assistant, are all interred here, locked away from life.”

Max’s eyes grew distant as he gazed at the collection of magic acts in their most physical form. Temple had the oddest sensation of being in an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb, of seeing the things the ruler intended to surround himself with in the afterlife, even of witnessing the final enshrinement of the Mystifying Max and his career in magic.

The notion was so sad she let her arms fall slack and stepped away from him. She could say nothing. It was like being tongue-tied at a funeral because the corpse had sat up politely to listen.

“Okay,” she said finally, trying to sound businesslike, and succeeding. “I’m here to do some research. I’ve got a murder to solve, or maybe six. Show me the books you took from Professor Mangel’s office just before he was killed.”

Max rubbed her shoulders, his fingers digging into the tense muscles ridging the nape of her neck. He put a fresh mug of coffee with Bailey’s Irish Cream for flavoring next to her on the desk.

“Ye gods,” Temple complained. “Haven’t these aspiring Ph.D.s ever heard of a declarative sentence? This last one was two hundred and fifty words, all passive voice.”

“I’m no writer. Sounds okay to me.”

“I hope your book on Gandolph isn’t written like this. What’s happening with that anyway?”

“I’ve, ah, kind of dropped it. Got a little busy.”

“You can’t stop writing if you want to finish something.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Temple frowned at the narrow pages bound in soft rag-paper covers. “What do they use for type size? Agate italic? Never mind what I’m referring to, it’s a print-media phrase for very tiny type.” She sighed and sipped.

“They’re quoting medieval alchemists and Edgar Cayce and Gypsy tarot readers. Especially something called the Tarot of the Bohemians.”

“These are probably academic cranks, Temple. Let’s face it, magic is not the usual postgraduate discipline.”

“No, but poor Jeff Mangel took it seriously as an art form, and apparently got killed for his pains. Listen to this: ‘The key to ancient science of Egypt and India is synthesis, which condenses all acquired knowledge into a few simple laws. To save the laws of synthesis from oblivion, secret societies were established. In the West, they were the Gnostic sects, the Arabs, Alchemists, Templars, Rosicrucians, and lastly the Freemasons.”

“The Synth. But tarot, alchemy, knights Templar, Freemasons…that’s rank superstition, Temple.”

“Superstition is one way of fooling yourself, and you just said a couple hours ago that self-deception was a dangerous state.”

Temple turned a page and blinked.

“Another blasted star chart. These things make my head hurt. Sidereal time and minutes and planetary positions. I like to read my horoscope in the morning paper, but please!”

Max read over her shoulder. “This section seems to cover astrology. What that has to do with magic I shudder to imagine. Skip it.”

Temple started to turn several pages at once, but two stuck together. She pried them apart. “Yuck, red sauce. Somebody was eating pizza over this tome.”

“That’s not red sauce, Temple. That’s…blood.”

“Double yuck!”

She stared at the pages sealed with a blot of blood as they parted under the pry bar of her fingernail.

“Max! That’s it! Look. That’s the symbol on the professor’s floor!”

He leaned close to peer at the small drawing. Dots connected by lines. Stars linked in arbitrary patterns so that humans could put a name and shape to their geometry and call it a…

“A constellation,” Temple said. “The figure is a constellation. What a weird word they call it: Ophiuchus. You ever heard of that before?”

“O-fee-yuch-uss? Hmmmm. Have you?”

“Or O-fie-a-cuss. Never.”

They exchanged a glance.

“Web search.” Temple hit the boot-up button on the dead computer sharing the desk with the books from Professor Mangel’s shelf.

In moments a list of entries with the word Ophiuchus unrolled like a carpet containing a hidden Cleopatra announcing herself to Caesar.

Max and Temple studied the entries together, heads touching as they stared at on-line “pages” that showed the very drawing that had contained Jeff Mangel’s dead body.

“Ophiuchus,” Temple repeated almost reverently. “I’ve played around a little with horoscopes…when I was a kid, Max. I used to know the symbols for the planets even. But I never ran into a thirteenth sign of the zodiac. And this is it. Ophiuchus, the Serpent Beaver.”

“Thirteen is not a lucky number.”

“Don’t give me the willies! I know that. Black cats and thirteen are unlucky.”

“So far we’re batting a thousand.”

“Leave Louie out of this. He’s just an innocent stray.”

“And so am I?” Max raised a Mr. Spock eyebrow.

Temple elbowed him in the ribs, not hard enough to notice.

“Cut it out. Seriously,” Max said, “this constellation has as long a history as any other recognized sign of the zodiac. No wonder some ancient zodiac systems included a thirteenth sign. It’s probably as old as Eden. The serpent. Ophiuchus.”

“Serpent. Sneaky, convoluted, quiet. Hidden. Poisonous. Enduring since the Fall.”