Cat In A Neon Nightmare

Previously in

Midnight Louie’s

Lives and Times . .

Heavens to Mehitabel, folks! After the turn of events last time out, so many of my human associates have their fat in the fire that I am not sure even an ace feline PI is chef enough to extract all their skins from the conflagration in one piece.

As a serial killer–finder in a multivolume mystery series (not to mention a primo mouthpiece), it behooves me 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 fifteen books now. When I call myself an “alpha-cat,” some think I am merely asserting my natural feline male dominance, but no. I merely reference the fact that since I debuted in Catnap and Pussyfoot, I then commenced to a title sequence that is as sweet and simple as B to Z.

That is 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 Neon Nightmare.

Since I associate with a multifarious and nefarious crew of human beings, and since Las Vegas is littered with guide books as well as bodies, I wish to provide a rundown of the local landmarks on my particular map of the world. A cast of characters, so to speak: To wit, my lovely roommate and high-heel devotee, 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: after his cousin SEAN died in a bomb attack during a post-high-school jaunt to Ireland, he went into undercover counterterrorism work with his mentor, GANDOLPH THE GREAT, but Gandolph was murdered the previous Halloween while unmasking phony psychics at a séance.

Meanwhile Mr. Max is sought by another dame, Las Vegas homicide LIEUTENANT C. R. MOLINA, mother of preteen MARIAN … 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 has tracked down his abusive stepfather, MR. CLIFF EFFINGER… .

Speaking of unhappy 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 soon found him joining Mr. Rafi Nadir on Molina’s prime suspect list, although both are off the hook now, on that case at least.

In the meantime, quite literally, Mr. Matt has drawn a stalker, the local girl that young Max and his cousin Sean boyishly competed for in that long-ago Ireland .. .

… one MISS KATHLEEN O’CONNOR, for years an IRA operative who seduced rich men for guns and roses for the cause. She is deservedly christened by Miss Temple as Kitty the Cutter … and—finding Mr. Max impossible to trace—has settled for harassing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine .. .

… while he tries to recover from the crush he developed on Miss Temple, his neighbor at the Circle Ritz condominiums, while Mr. Max was missing in action, by not very boldly seeking new women, all of whom are now in danger from said Kitty the Cutter.

In fact, on the advice of counsel, i.e., AMBROSIA, Mr. Matt’s talk-show producer, and none other then the aforesaid Lt. Molina, he has tried to disarm Miss Kitty’s pathological interest in his sexual state by losing his virginity with a call girl least likely to be the object of K the Cutter’s retaliation. Except that hours after their assignation at the Goliath Hotel, said call girl turns up deader than an ice-cold deck of Bicycle playing cards.

All this human sex and violence makes me glad I have a simpler social life, revolving around a quest for union with ..

.. THE DIVINE Yvette, a shaded silver Persian beauty I filmed some cat food commercials with before being wrongfully named in a paternity suit by her air-head actress mistress, MISS SAVANNAH ASHLEIGH… .

And just trying to get along with my unacknowledged daughter …

… MISS MIDNIGHT LOUISE, who has insinuated herself into my cases until I was forced to set up a shop with her as Midnight, Inc. Investigations, and who has also nosed herself into my long-running duel with .. .

… the evil Siamese assassin HYACINTH, first met as the onstage assistant to the mysterious lady magician .. .

.. SHANGRI-LA, who made off with Miss Temple’s semi-engagement 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 GG’s former lady assistant, Miss GLORIA FUENTES, as well as the more recent death of the CLOAKED CONJUROR’S assistant, not to mention a professor of the metaphysical killed in cultlike surroundings among such strange and forgotten zodiac symbols as Ophiuchus, PROF. 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?

Chapter 1

Fallen Woman

She looked like a fashion model photographed by Helmut Newton for some slick, slightly sick ad in a fashion magazine.

Or like a butterfly pinned on a mosaic of fire opal.

Or like just another dead woman in the City that Never Sleeps—West Coast edition.

Lieutenant C. R. Molina gazed down at the gossamer straps attached to the extreme curve of a high-heeled, paper-thin sole dangling from the dead woman’s bare big toe on one foot. Gucci or St. Laurent, probably. Talk about an upscale toe-tag. Grizzly Bahr would get a kick out of hearing that when he got the body.

Medical examiners got a kick out of things most people would consider grotesque.

“How are we gonna get the body off that?” came a disgusted male voice from behind her.

Alfonso had joined her in gazing at a victim ten feet below who was seemingly suspended on the intricate galaxy of neon that formed a ceiling for the hotel’s vast gaming area.

The chatter, chimes, and clinks of Las Vegas games of chance drifted upward in the vast central atrium above the false neon ceiling, like sound effects from a faceless computer universe.

“There must be a clear Lexan ceiling above the neon,” Molina guessed. “That’s the only thing strong enough to resist extreme impact. Otherwise she’d have crashed right through the neon tubing down to the casino floor.”

“Bullet-proof plastic. That’s a security application.”

“That’s what the hotel needed. One kid on an upper floor dropping a BB could fatally bean a customer.”

“Makes sense,” Alfonso conceded. “I’ll check to make sure.”

“Any idea how far she fell, or how long she’s been there?”

Alfonso shook his head like a doleful basset hound. He was one of those sloppy cops: fifty or sixty pounds overweight, baggy suit, mussed hair, puffy face, sleepy eyes set in a bezel of perpetually bruised skin. The package made him a very successful homicide detective. As with Peter Falk’s Colombo, everybody always underestimated Alfonso.

Not Molina, who devoutly wished that someone other than the crack team of Alfonso and Barrett had been “up” for this case. Abie, they were called, as in Abie’s Irish Rose. A.B.

“We’ll have to treat it like a wilderness retrieval,” she said. “Lower some techs down to record the scene, then bring the body up in a litter and go over it on solid ground.”

Alfonso nodded and winced at the same time. “Depending on how far she fell, that could be like loading liquid shit into a beach pail.”

Molina only winced internally. Cops and coroners had dirty jobs and found harsh words to describe them. Normally, the distancing techniques of pros at scenes of crimeand dissolution didn’t bother her, but normally she didn’ feel personally responsible for the dead body under dis cussion.

What was the subject’s name? Probably a lavish phony but they’d soon pry the Plain Jane moniker from beneath the façade. They almost always did, and the corpse almos always proved to be someone’s not-so-darling little girl al grown up wrong. This one looked like a solid-gold sue cess, even after the rough hands of death. She had been ; Vanity Fair woman: long, elegant, impossibly thin and im possibly busty—Molina would bet on implants—dressed to kill. Or to be killed.

“The staff know her?” she asked Alfonso, although she suspected the answer.

“Too well,” he said, acting the usual morose when he wasn’t being downright lugubrious. “One of the hotel’s top call girls. High-rollers all the way. Or at least fat money rolls.”

Molina looked up, past the building’s gaudy neon rimmed ribs to the soaring true ceiling maybe twenty floor, above. “So she was a penthouse suite sweetie.”

He nodded. “I hate these cases: JFP. Jumped, fell, o: pushed. Damn hard to prove, any which way but dead.”

“Yeah.” Molina’s nerves unclenched a little. Bad as the situation was, Alfonso was right: damn hard to prove wha she privately called an ASH: accident, suicide, or homi cide. “So you haven’t pinned her to a room number yet?’ she asked.

“Barrett’s still on it, questioning staff. Trouble is, the lady was such a regular that they didn’t even bother to notice which rooms, which night.”

“She looks like she could have made money enough doing something legit,” Molina mused. She was no fashion maven, but she recognized the expensive flair that clothe( the twisted body. Why not model? Or act? Why hook?

Who could answer why women who could ride in limos on their looks so often ankled over to the shady side o the street? They might have thought the money was better but breaking out in legitimate modeling paid off massively for the few dozen who made it. Maybe an underlying self-hatred? Lately Molina was getting a bit too comfy with that feeling, but she wasn’t about to turn tricks to deal with it.

Alfonso nodded, still gazing soulfully above them with his hound-dog eyes. “That Barrett! You’d think he was in the cast of Rescue 51.”

Just then, as if summoned, Alfonso’s partner, thin and bony, leaned over the sixth-floor balustrade, directing a tech team that was descending from a wire stretched across the atrium’s architectural chasm.

“Randolph Mantooth, where are you?” Molina muttered, watching their herky-jerky progress.

“Your kid watch those old reruns too?” Alfonso asked. “Religiously.”

“Kids today! Growing up on yesterday.”

She nodded, too intent on observing the shaky operation to comment. She had no time to watch TV, or reruns of long-cold TV shows. Being twelve-year-old Mariah’s mother kept her current, but not much.

“Just how old is the Goliath?” she asked suddenly. “You’d think they’d know not to design interior atriums in a town where people lose their shirts and their self-respect every day and night. This is no place for Hyatt-style hotels enamored of atriums.”

Alfonso nodded, smiling fondly. He was a native. He loved every manifestation of the city’s phenomenal entertainment explosion along the Strip, like a research scientist enamored of cancer growth.

“Yeah,” he said, “they didn’t worry as much about divers in the old days. Maybe what, gosh, twenty years ago? The exterior balcony doors at this hotel didn’t used to be sealed shut, but they are now.”

“So this was the only way to fall,” Molina said. “Inside straight, so to speak. Over the internal atrium edge. Or to be pushed. Who spotted her?”

“Some ma and pa tourist couple on fourteen, waiting foran elevator and ambling to the edge to be brave and look over. Took her for part of the design at first.”

Molina had to agree. Well-dressed supine women always looked decorative, or sexy, or decadent. Or dead. The functions seemed interchangeable. She’d seen a lot of dead and never had found it decorative or sexy or even glamourously decadent. So shoot her.

They were shooting the woman below now. From every angle, videotape and still camera. She was a featured player on Dead TV and soon she’d be a star on Grizzly Bahr’s stainless-steel autopsy table while he droned the dreary statistics of her internal organs and external injuries into a microphone for an audience of one. Himself.

“Mine eyes dazzle,” Alfonso murmured, his hangdog countenance even droopier as they both blinked at the flashes illuminating the dead woman like heat lightning.

“Huh?” Molina stared at him as if he were a stranger.

He jerked her a weak grin. ” ‘She died young.’ That’s the rest of the line. Webster. Elizabethan playwright. Grim guy.”

“Webster? I thought he was the dictionary guy. Elizabethan? You?”

“You can’t help what sticks in your head in this job,” he said, shrugging. “There are a lot of pretty women in Las Vegas who die, and we gotta be there. ‘Pretty Woman.’ Roy Orbison. Greatest singer since Elvis.”

Elvis.

That was another subject Molina couldn’t stand, not since becoming involved with the Circle Ritz gang.

Who would think that ditsy, sixty-plus landlady Electra Lark could have assembled so many usual suspects under the fifties-vintage roof of the round condo-cum-apartment building she called the Circle Ritz? Not only former resident magician Max Kinsella, Mr. Now-you-see-him, Nowyou-don’t, was possibly involved in a murder, or three, but now, as of last night, so was Matt Devine, Mr. Altar-Boy Straight Arrow. Not to mention the object of their joint affections, Miss Temple Barr, who confused being a public relations freelancer with imitations of Nancy Drew! Molina just wished TEMPLE BARB, P.R., as her business card read, would decide which of the two apparently shady Circle Ritz men was on her personal Most Wanted list.

And now Molina herself was involved with the whole crew both professionally, and, on unhappy occasion, personally.

Involved. The word chilled her as many much harsher ones couldn’t. Speaking of which, there was a nasty task she couldn’t put off any longer.

She took a last long look at the dead woman. This was as good as this Jane Doe would ever look before she was dissected like a frog princess, unless someone sprung for a casket funeral and they sutured and shined her up to surface beauty again, but Molina doubted anyone would bother.

Molina’s eyes dazzled all right, but in Las Vegas that was just part of the eternal illusion for suckers to sop up and she wasn’t buying anything on face value.

The woman lying on the neon net below, though, had indeed died young, and Molina was horribly, terribly afraid that it was her fault.

Chapter 2

Adam’s Apple

Matt Devine dreamed of falling.

It wasn’t pleasant.

He woke up with a jerk, already sitting up. He was groggy, sandy-mouthed from rich food and too much wine and talk, and had to wonder where he’d been for the first time in his life.

Remembering made him cradle his aching head in his hands.

Vassar. An Eastern Protestant madonna. A call girl. Did that mean she was like a dog? You called and she came? Yes. That’s how demeaning the whole thing was. Buzz for a body. Pay for a person.

He wondered if he was still a little drunk.

Not that he’d been drunk last night … just high? High on anxiety.

He’d tried to forestall one woman with another and had ended up feeling both had cheated him somehow.

Trying to embrace the occasion of sin had become not … sin, just self-disgust.

The phone rang.

It was an hour of the morning when he was used to sleeping deep and hard, thanks to his night job. But he’d had the previous night off, so to speak, and had only hit head to pillow in the early morning hours. What time was it? Who could be calling him now? Didn’t matter. Drift away. Forget the night. Forget yesterday.

The ringing drilled into his consciousness. Wouldn’t stop.

He fumbled for the phone on his makeshift nightstand, giving his sluggish self mental marching orders. Lift the receiver, substitute a nagging human voice for the intermittent ring of the phone.

Wait. Wake up, even if you don’t want to. If that’s not the phone, then it’s the … doorbell?

Now he distinguished the mellow notes of the Circle Ritz’s fifties doorbell.

Someone is at his door.

No. Go away.

Come again another day.

That’s the rain. Right? The rain is ringing his chimes? He’s so tired. Tired of himself and his problems. As if he were the only one in the world….

Ring. Ring. Go away. Come again another day. It won’t.

He rolled off the narrow bed, surprised to find himself still clothed.

The door was many stumbling steps away. He was drunk on too little sleep, that’s all.

Finally. He opened the door.

Rain, rain, go away. Especially if your name is Molina. Carmen Molina. Lieutenant Molina. Mother Molina, pray for us now and at the hour of our death. Amen. “You look like hell,” she said.

She didn’t capitalize it. He could always tell when people were referring to hell versus Hell. Not going there, just referring.

“Look,” he said. “I normally sleep until at least noon.Night hours, if you recall? Whatever it is, I’m in no condition to talk to you right now.”

“Tough.”

She brushed past him like a Las Vegas Strip Rollerblader. Rude.

Matt turned to find almost six feet of female homicide lieutenant adding no ambiance at all to his cozy fifties-vintage entry hall and adjoining kitchen. She wasn’t about to move any more than his heavy metal refrigerator was.

“I’ll put some coffee on,” he said.

“Good idea.” She had wandered into the living/dining room and was peeking into the bedroom.

He was surprised to find her being so obviously nosy, so unmannerly, but police people must come to think the world owes them a peep. Still, she’d always treated him more like a human being and less like some seedy suspect before.

He put a saucepan to boil on the stove top and pulled two mugs out of the cupboard, checking to see if dust or anything mobile had collected in them. Didn’t often have company for breakfast, like never.

“Hot water and instant coffee? You’re still living like a transient,” her voice came from behind him. “Planning to leave town?”

“The world is way too full of costly, trendy, one-task gadgets.”

“You’ve still got Rectory-itis. Father Frugal. First you reject labor-saving domestic devices as effete, then you get devout Catholic grandmothers to come in and do it all for you free.”

“You make frugal sound corrupt.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m a cop and tend to think everything’s corrupt.”

He turned. He’d never seen Molina with this particular edge and it wasn’t nice. “This isn’t a social call.”

“We’ve got to talk, and you’re lucky I can’t afford to do it at headquarters.”

“You can’t afford to do it here.” He glanced at the unit’s various walls and tugged at an earlobe.

She got the message instantly, having forgotten that Matt was possibly or even probably being bugged by his stalker, Kathleen O’Connor.

“Oh, shit!”

Matt stared. Molina had always been a lady, for a cop.

She motioned him into the hall with one finger, turning off the heat under the saucepan with the other. It was fascinating to watch a cop play hausfrau.

“You go get that book you loaned me from the car,” she told him. “I’ll watch the boiling water.”

Her gestures shooed him out into the hall. Through the ajar door he glimpsed her conducting a rapid search of his rooms. Max Kinsella had been the last person to hunt for bugging devices. Matt found it interesting that Molina followed virtually the same path: under furniture, inside tabletop items like the phone, up in lighting fixtures, and down in wall outlets.

After about fifteen minutes she circled back to the dc )r, did a double take, and zeroed in on something on his entry hall wall. The plastic-covered box for the door chimes.

Last was lucky. She pulled out a tiny object that instantly explained the name “bug.” In another moment she had put it in one empty mug and drowned it in tepid water from the saucepan.

Matt felt as invaded as if he accidentally swallowed a dead fly from his coffee cup. It’s hard to define the sense of revulsion you get from knowing that someone’s been listening to you every moment. And what was to hear? He lived alone, didn’t talk to himself, had only the occasional phone call or visitor. Sick.

Molina nodded him inside again and rechecked a couple sites, as if finding the one bug implied an infestation.

They mutually rejected the coffee without consulting. She walked into the living room, stood before the red sofa that was its biggest piece of furniture, and regarded it with her back to him, as if it suddenly was significant.“Did Kinsella check the doorbell unit?”

“No,” he said.

He could sense her smile even from behind. “But I didn’t see everywhere he went and everything he did,” he added.

“Isn’t that always the case with Mr. Kinsella?” She turned, and her face was as expressionless as he’d ever seen it. “For once I’m not interested in that slimeball. He’s not a suspect. You are.”

“Me? What could I have done?”

“That’s a very good question. You might as well sit down.” She gestured to his own sofa as if she was the hostess and he was a guest, an unwanted one.

Matt sat.

Molina didn’t. She began pacing back and forth the length of the long red sofa. She reminded him of a big cat in a cage. She was a tall woman, and she wasn’t slight. Not fat, just there. She was wearing one of the dark pantsuits she favored, even in summer, a look-alike for a man’s business suit. She never carried a purse, as if that sniffed of patent leather Mary Janes and other girly images. He knew there was at least one firearm on her plain-Jane person, and probably latex gloves, maybe a ChapStick, a nail file, and some keys, but that was about it, except for a shield and an ID tag.

Her dark hair was thick, straight, and cut chin-length, a non-style designed to affront any professional stylist. Maybe she wore some lip gloss. Maybe. Matt smothered a smile. She reminded him of a lot of nuns who’d had to give up wearing the habit and had settled on a “uniform” quite like this. It was a way of dampening sexuality, and Matt could see that a female homicide lieutenant would want to do that. It certainly made her look like she meant business, every day, every hour, in every way.

Only now it was 8 A.M. in his living room and he was apparently her business.

“What’s this about, Carmen?” he asked. They knew each other’s history. Didn’t much talk about it, but they had a few things in common: growing up Catholic, serving as role models, working in “helping” professions that encouraged or enforced a code of behavior.

“Lieutenant.” She articulated the word like a machine gun shooting staples.

Okay. This was official. Then he didn’t have to go out of his way to be a friendly neighborhood snitch. “Is this about Kinsella?”

“Screw Kinsella!” She didn’t shout. She spoke in a low, intense tone that was much worse. Carmen, using casual language? The never-part-time mother who didn’t want her preteen daughter growing up anything but a good girl? “I don’t give a flying … fig … for that lowlife at the moment, count my blessings.”

She had pronounced “fig” with such intense articulation that Matt thought the obscenity it stood in for at the last moment would have been less harsh.

“I’m sorry,” he said, spreading his hands, the classic gesture of the poor soul who was without a clue. “Something very bad has obviously happened—”

“Where were you last night?”

“Ah, not at work. I had the night off.”

“So where were you?”

So this was about him, not Max Kinsella. Matt tried to shift his mind and emotions 180 degrees.

“Don’t rehearse an answer,” she pushed. “Just tell me.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because I’m the police!”

“If this is an official interrogation, then there might be reasons why I shouldn’t ‘just tell you.’ Do I need a lawyer?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out. This is off the record. You could tell me you offed Jimmy Hoffa and I wouldn’t have a shred of evidence.”

“Unless you were wired.” Matt eyed her encompassing outfit with a certain wariness.

She paced again for a few seconds, then stopped front and center. “Look. I’m trying to help you. I tried to helpyou before, remember? I don’t need evasions now. I need the absolute truth. Where were you last night?”

“Truth is never absolute,” he began.

“Enough with the hair-splitting. You want to search me?” She stopped again, spread her arms.

“Good Lord, no.” The idea was completely alarming. “I just don’t understand … I’m still half asleep. You’ve completely changed. I don’t get it.”

“I’m not wired. Just being here is putting my career on the line. I’m trying to help you … yes, and me too. I need the truth. I need to know. Where were you last night?”

“Doing what you told me to do.”

“Oh, God.” She put a hand to her mouth. “Where were you doing it?”

“At the Goliath Hotel.”

Her breath came out in a huff. And then all her tensile energy sifted away like flour into a bowl. She sat on one of his gray cube tables. “Take me through it, step by step.”

“It’s kind of personal.”

“No, Matt. It isn’t.”

She nailed him with her police look, with the one personal attribute that was utterly riveting, her Blue-Hawaiiintense eyes. How did a Latina woman come by that Anglo-Saxon imprimatur? He guessed he’d never know.

“I did exactly as you said,” he began, fascinated that the statement made her wince. “I burned and dodged all up and down the Strip to lose any tail. To lose Kathleen O’Connor, the bane of my existence, the woman who wants my supposed virtue.”

“What do you mean ‘supposed’?”

“Only that chastity isn’t a much-valued commodity anywhere but in the Church, and even there nowadays it’s proved to be a pretty tawdry concept, sometimes a matter more of hypocrisy than dogma.”

“So you shouldn’t feel so bad about having to ‘lose’ it to save everybody you know from a vengeful stalker.”

“I shouldn’t, but I do. Think Mariah.”

She looked away, as if her hard-nosed act had cracked a little, maybe a lot.

“Believe me,” she said, “I don’t want to eavesdrop on your psycho-social-sexual-spiritual struggles. I just need to know where you went, and what you did. And when.”

“I got to the Goliath about … before seven. It was still light. I didn’t check the time. I had the night off, didn’t I?”

“Boys night out,” she murmured.

“I did everything you said. Took a room with cash. Changed at the last minute as if I were a superstitious gambler worried about the number. Tipped the bellman a hundred bucks for my lowly single bag.” Matt decided not to mention splurging on expensive new clothes for the occasion; it made him sound like a total hick. “Asked if he knew some entertaining young ladies.”

“And—?”

“Worked like a charm, Lieutenant. You sure know Las Vegas. Within ninety minutes there was this vision in my doorway. She was everything you said. Beautiful. Sophisticated. Smart. Dressed like a movie star at the Oscars. Downtrodden? Hardly. She was willing to hit the tables, but settled for dinner in the room. She ordered, knowing the hotel menu, and it was as expensive as she was.”

“Good dinner?”

“Best I ever had.”

The interrogation had become a bitter point/counterpoint, each side elaborately not quite acknowledging a certain collaboration.

They were in this together, Matt thought with a queasy feeling, as much as he and Vassar had ever been. A tacit accommodation.

“And—?”

“We talked.”

“Oh, come on.”

“We did. You were right. She was a total professional. Proud of her role in the sex industry. No way was I goingto ‘exploit’ her. Why do you need to know all this? You want to arrest the poor woman?”

“If only I could.”

“Well, I’m glad she’s out of your jurisdiction, then. She really was terribly bright. I’m politically incorrect enough to feel she could have had a better job, didn’t have to be doing what she was doing, but she was having none of that. I was insulting her to question her profession. And myself.”

“Did you explain your particular situation?”

“Yeah. She was fascinated. Liked the idea of being the one to ‘minister’ to such a newbie. Acted like a shrink. Freaked me out.”

“So—?”

“Isn’t there a name for this, Lieutenant? Prying into other people’s intimate affairs?”

“Yeah. It’s called ‘need to know.’ Trust me. I don’t like this any better than you do. Cut to the chase. You ate, you talked, you took care of business, and then what?”

“I left. Left fifteen hundred-dollar bills on the marble shelf in the bathroom, fifteen feet long. The shelf, not the fifteen hundred-dollar bills. I was worried about underpaying, so I probably went overboard. Could have saved four or five hundred maybe. What do you think?”

“Don’t sound so bitter. It doesn’t become you. What time was it?”

“Too late? Oops. Bitter again. I don’t know. I deliberately didn’t wear a watch. Didn’t want to know what time the cock crowed. I went out through the casino to the Strip. It was still dark, but a stiletto of light outlined the mountains in the east. It made me think of those thin tall heels she wore, and the snakeskin thongs that held them on.”

“Snakeskin stilettos. Tools of the trade.”

“Yeah. She was a lovely girl. Bright. Beautiful. Vassar-educated. Cultured. Victim of date rape. You see, Lieutenant, dig deep enough, even with a seasoned, fully cognizant pro, and you find a wound, maybe even if you just made it yourself.”

“Was?” Molina asked.

The way she said it, the accusing, probing way she said it, made Matt catch his breath.

For the first time, he feared for something more concrete than his soul.

Chapter 3

Cat Haven

I am lying on my back with my pins reaching for the sky, or ceiling. I am not surrendering, but airing out my underside.

I have commandeered the bottom half of the bed on a forty-five degree angle. This way I am able to stretch out to my full three feet toe-to-tail without touching a hair to anything solid except the zebra-striped comforter I recline upon.

There is no more blissful position in this world, especially when it is accompanied by the knowledge that my resident human, Miss Temple Barr, is curled up like a snail in what is left of her portion of the bed. She is so cute when she is sleeping in such a way as to accommodate yours truly. That is when I realize why I have deigned to share my life, my fortune, and my sacred self-sufficiency with her.

Poor little thing! She has had quite a stressful time lately, almost being strangled by the Stripper Killer, and her not meaning to play a decoy.

Luckily, I had realized her tonsils were imperiled and mustered a rescue party. I also managed to rescue—in the same night, mind you—my upstart supposed daughter (all the supposing is on her part), Midnight Louise, from durance vile in the Cloaked Conjuror’s hidden estate behind a faux cemetery.

Is this Las Vegas, or what? You gotta love it.

While I am basking in my achievements of the damsel-saving sort I pause to wrinkle my brow. It is true that my upstart maybe-offspring took on the evil Siamese feline fatale Hyacinth all by her lonesome, thereby usurping my customary role of muscle man.

(However, since my long-term plans for the aforesaid Hyacinth may include an alliance of a romantic nature, perhaps it was best to let the little spitfire do the dirty work.) Speaking of dirty work, I lather my chest hair into a damp curly tangle that the dames love to run their nails through.

Apparently my washing motions shake the bed, for my Miss Temple uncurls, sits up, squints at me as she does when her contact lenses are out, and says like this: “Louie! Are you getting your nice smooth ruff all messed up again? Enough already with the compulsive grooming! I know that you were at Baby Doll’s and wailed `Sweet Tail-o’-Mine’ or whatever along with your Pet Shop Quartet of alley-cat buddies to alert me to the lurking presence of the Stripper Killer. Thanks, but settle down now. I need my beauty sleep.”

At that she turns over and ignores me. So much for my irresistible chest hair. Sometimes dames can be unpredictable, but what the heck, that is why we love them.

So I sit upright, pounce down to the floor, and swagger into the main room, ruffled but unreformed.

Barely do I hit the living room than I am aware of a soft scritching sound on the French doors to our unique triangular patio.

There is nothing unique about that sound: a feline footpad is out and about and I think I know who.

I amble over to the glass framed between these frilled wooden rectangles. In the lowest one on the left of this particular door is featured the jet-black kisser of my erstwhiledaughter and new partner-in-crime-solving, Miss Midnight Louise.

Woe is me. I take her into the family enterprise last night and here she is at the crack of dawn making like an alarm clock. First rule of the experienced shamus: do not rise until 10 A.M. Noon is even better, but I do not want my moniker to be High Noon Louie, so I settle for ten o’clock, as in scholar. A self-employed dude cannot be too erudite in this town.

I jump up to unlatch the door and watch Miss Louise swish in. For an offspring of mine she is long in the fur, but I must say that it looks good on the female of the species. Any species. I do wish Miss Temple would let her curly red locks grow, but that does not seem to be her style.

“I am surprised you are up and about,” Miss Louise notes, passing me with a half-hearted brush of greeting.

We may be partners in Midnight, Inc. Investigations, but she is as antsy about the alliance as I am.

“I am surprised that you are up already,” I return politely, “given the hair-pulling match you got into with Miss Hyacinth last night.”

“That! That just smoothed the rough edges off my nails,” she says, sitting down to manicure the razor-sharp appendages in question.

“No curare, huh?”

“I am walking, am I not? You must not believe every public line a deadly dame will throw a private dick, Daddykins. Curare on her nails? More like Cutex. Get real.”

“Cutex” means nothing to me, but I suppose it is some beauty product the ladies use on their nails. I try not to know too much about their little deceptions in the looks department. I like to be surprised.

“So why are you here?” I ask.

“Why not? We are partners now, n’est pas?”

I cringe. Louise is alley born and bred. She has no right to assume the adorable foreign habits of the Divine Yvette, mon amour.

“C’est yeah,” I reply loftily, “but that does not mean you can take liberties and muscle in on my relationship with Miss Temple.”

“Muscling in? Who sez I am muscling in? If I were, you would know it, Daddy-o.” Miss Louise narrows her golden eyes. “I thought you might be interested to know the fuzz is in the building.”

“The fuzz? You mean those martial arts ninjas from the Cloaked Conjuror’s place? Havana Browns and Burmese, by their body types and buzz cuts. Ugly customers.”

“Not that kind of fuzz! The human sort. Lieutenant Molina is chitchatting with Matt Devine one story up.”

“So? It is his place. He can entertain whom he likes. And frankly, my dear, I am pleased that he is out of my Miss Temple’s hair. I detest romantic triangles.”

“Dream on. Your human ginger cat is a meal ticket, and that is all. Besides, she has a human panther for a partner.”

I wrinkle my nose at mention of the Mystifying Max Kinsella, ex-magician but unfortunately not ex-significant other in my Miss Temple’s life. He is not good enough for her, but neither is Mr. Matt. I would be, if I were about six-three and 180, instead of being a thirty-six long stretched out and eighteen going on twenty … pounds.

“Miss Lt. C. R. Molina is hardly going to mess with us,” I point out. “She does not speak our language.”

“Apparently she does not speak Matt Devine’s either, from what I saw through the patio window. He looked like a grilled catfish fillet.”

“You spied on them?”

“We are an investigative unit. Undercover surveillance is what we do best. Speaking of what we do, why are we so interested in the Cloaked Conjuror’s hidden digs?”

“Because Mr. Max is, and I always find that trailing him leads to crime. Who do you think has been sneaking around that place as much as you and me these days?”

“It is not hard to figure,” she says, sitting down to slick back her whiskers. “Mr. Max is a retired magician. He would have much in common with the Cloaked Conjuror.”

“Not so!” I protest. “Mr. Max has done the Cloaked Conjuror a good turn or two only because CC is a target of those disgruntled magicians, the Synth, that Mr. Max wants to smoke out. CC is so presona non grata among the magic-making set that someone has sent death threats his way faster than a vanishing dove. That is why CC always wears a full-face mask, and his assistant may have been killed at TitaniCon because he was dressed up like CC. Mr. Max is interested in the villains CC attracts, not the man himself. He has no more time than the Synth for a so-called magician whose act betrays the secrets of magical illusions in his show nightly.”

“Why would Mr. Max care? He is not a practicing magician anymore. No, I saw him lurking about after the excitement last night, visiting our pals the Big Cats.”

“Osiris the leopard and Mr. Lucky the black panther? I guess that figures. Mr. Max helped us rescue them from certain death during my last big case.”

“Previous case, Pop. ‘Last’ always sounds too final in the PI game.” Miss Louise eyes me slyly through the mitt that is doing a mop-up operation on her shiny little nose. “Or . . Mr. Max may be interested in that Lady Mandarin magician who also hides out at CC’s Los Muertos spread.”

“No way! Mr. Max is utterly bewitched by my Miss Temple.”

“Are you sure? I watched the two of them have a little heart-to-heart out by the Big Cat compound last night. I admit that they did not seem on lovey-dovey terms, but among humans you know how the mating dance can start with a preliminary spat.”

“Among us felines too, if you ever had a chance to experience such a fandango before you got the politically correct surgery.”

“Who needs to know the steps to recognize the dance? This Shangri-La magician dame was giving off plenty of pheromones during their tete-a-tete.”

“Love and hate are not as easy to read among humans as among our superior species. I cannot believe that Mr. Max would be seriously untrue to our Miss Temple.”

“Who is to know what the male of any species may be up to?”

“And that is the way it should be. How else can we keep you nosy females guessing? So that is your report? Fuzz a floor up, more nocturnal slinking at Los Muertos. None of that is worth writing Holmes about.”

Louise stops her eternal grooming—dames!—to cock an ear at the door. “Oh, good. I was hoping to observe a police interrogation firsthand and I believe I am going to get my wish.”

Before I can express surprise or doubt or disdain, the doorbell rings.

At the Circle Ritz, doorbells do not just ring. They chime. In a related series of notes. Like a song. In other words, they make a production number out of it.

But like most production numbers, it does raise an audience: in this case, my Miss Temple from the depths of sleep, who robot-walks from the bedroom to the front door in her Hard Rock Café T-shirt and (cringe) Christmas bunny slippers from her mother.

“Fasten your seatbelt,” Miss Louise advises me out of the side of her mouth that is not busy licking whiskers into submission. “It is going to be a bumpy ride.”

Now I know what human dame she reminds me of!

Chapter 4

Fallen Angel

Temple shoved her glasses back up on the bridge of her nose before reaching for the doorknob.

She hated being seen in glasses now that she wore contact lenses, but no way was she going to find anyone still at the door if she paused to insert the contacts.

She hesitated before turning the knob. Maybe she didn’t want to see anyone. Talk about a hard day’s night. It wasn’t every morning she woke up with a stiff neck from being half strangled and runny eyes from being half basted with her own pepper spray. But this might be Electra, the landlady, who had heard about the showdown at Baby Doll’s and was worried about her.

So she edged the door open enough to know she should never have left the soft, warm solace of her bed. Molina! At nine o’clock low in the morning … Temple’s own personal nine o’clock low, when she needed to sleep in after getting home assaulted but safe. Thank God Max was gone already. She blinked. Max was gone, wasn’t he? Oh, God, there’d be hell to pay if he wasn’t.

“You can unchain the door, Miss Barr. I am the police,” Molina pointed out.

“I’m not sure I want to see the police.”

“Too bad. I want to see you. Open wide.”

“I had a rough night,” Temple complained on a half yawn, fumbling with the chain mechanism. “Can’t this wait until later? I’ll come to headquarters and make a statement or whatever.”

Molina marched in the instant the chain released. “I don’t want you at headquarters. I don’t want a statement. The officers at the scene wrote up a pretty lurid report as it was.”

“Lurid? About me?” -

“No, about ‘Tess the Thong Girl.’ “

Temple cringed, but had to hustle to follow Molina into her living room.

The Looming Lieutenant—Temple, at five-feet-flat in bunny slippers couldn’t help regarding the almost-six-foot tall homicide officer as akin to the Great Wall of China—stopped so suddenly that Temple almost rear-ended her. What a revolting thought that was!

“He replicates?” Molina demanded.

Temple peered past Molina’s navy-blue personal uniform. Louie. And Louie? Omigod, she was seeing double. Maybe Molina’d make her do a drunk test. Touch her nose in a straight line, or walk on her toes, or whatever.

Trying to focus, Temple immediately noticed certain inalienable differences in the two black cat images confronting them.

“That’s Louie on the left,” she explained, “and the other one is smaller, longer-haired, and female, as even a blind man could see. That’s Midnight Louise, from the Crystal Phoenix hotel.”

“I must say the fine points of feline anatomy are lost on me,” Molina answered. “They look like clones to me. I’d hate to think there was anything in any way resembling Midnight Louie in greater Las Vegas or Clark County.”

“Louie is an original,” Temple asserted huffily. “Butthen Nicky and Van from the Crystal Phoenix hotel renamed little Caviar Midnight Louise. Don’t you remember, Lieutenant? It was during the champagne celebration in the Ghost Suite after the Gridiron show. You were there.”

“I must have been there earlier. No champagne for working cops.”

“Oops. Maybe you weren’t there right then. It seems like you always are, though.”

Molina’s smile was tight-lipped. “No, I missed the feline renaming ceremony.” She eyed the two cats sitting side by side near the living room’s single sofa. “I suppose I should take a quick look around.”

Before Temple could say yea or nay—or what the heck for?—Molina was bowing and stretching all over the place while doing an intimate search of the furnishings and accessories.

After ten minutes she returned to the living room. “I figured the place would be clean, but better safe than bugged.”

“I am bugged, Lieutenant. I am bugged that you’re here, this early, upsetting my domestic routine. And my … cats.”

Molina eyed the duo, who were returning from accompanying her every move. They settled in tandem in the exact same spot she had first seen them. Obviously she was not used to cats that behaved like paired Dobermans.

“These animals are acting like police escorts and I don’t like it.”

“So sit down, chill out, and don’t move. I’m sure they’ll stay put then. Can I get you some coffee?”

“ ‘May I,’ ” Molina corrected automatically, and then had the grace to look embarrassed.

Temple guessed that she was getting the grammatical correction reserved for the lieutenant’s daughter, poor little Mariah. Well, the twelve-year-old wasn’t so little anymore, she was taller than Temple! But she was still “poor” for having Molina for a mother.

Temple forgot the coffee and sat. “Is this going to be a maternal lecture or a police warning?”

“With you wearing those slippers—?” Molina’s dark caterpillar eyebrows lifted as she stared at the paired bunny faces on Temple’s toes.

“My mother gave these to me for Christmas, so what’s it to you?”

Molina lifted her hands in tandem, presenting the palms of peace, and forestalling further banter.

“Far be it from me,” she said, “to critique a mother’s abysmal choice in Christmas presents. I’ve inadvertently committed a few of those myself. I can see that anthropomorphic slippers are off my list forever. For that I thank you. The lecture part is this: you are a civilian. You have no business playing undercover investigator at striptease clubs. You have no right to risk Midnight Louie’s happy home life by risking your own life in a dark parking lot. I don’t care that it came out all right and the perpetrator was captured. You could have gotten killed, and, believe it or not, Miss Barr, I would be very unhappy about that. But you know all this and will take me about as seriously as you would someone who would give you bunny slippers for Christmas.”

“I am wearing them,” Temple said uneasily.

“That’s the lecture part,” Molina went on. “The police part is this: you may think I’m off base keeping an eye on you and your associates, but as of last night you are now involved with not one, but two murder suspects. Some people might consider that a coincidence. I am a law enforcement professional and I consider it a weakness.”

“Two? What’s wrong? Is persecuting Max not enough for you now? That’s why I went to Baby Doll’s, you know, because you were so bound and determined to nail him as the Stripper Killer. Were you off base!”

“In this case. That doesn’t change the fact that he was all over the scenes of the crimes in various guises.”

“As were you!”

“Me? What gives you that idea?”

“Max. Max saw you more than you saw him. He is a magician, after all. You want to talk about me taking risks! What about a homicide lieutenant who’s secretly undercover investigating her own ex … whatever as a murder suspect and trying to pin the rap on my current … whatever.”

Molina’s nostrils flared. Temple shut up. She’d been goaded into committing truth, but realized that the truth always came with a sting in the tail: the other person’s particular truth. Molina would lash back.

“This is not about Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella,” Molina said shortly.

Sails collapsed, Temple could only wait for Molina to paddle on. Meanwhile, she bailed brains to figure out what Molina’s point really was.

“This is about Matthias Anthony Devine.”

“So you’ve looked up everybody’s birth certificates. What’s my middle name?”

Temple had asked for it, and she got it.

“Ursula,” Molina intoned promptly with a smirk. “I believe that’s a saint who founded an order of nuns.”

“I’m not Catholic. I’m Unitarian. Ursula is a nonsectarian name in my case. I don’t know why it’s in the family. An aunt got saddled with it too. So, what about Matt? You’re going to accuse an ex-priest of murder?”

“It’s not that unthinkable. Non-ex-priests have been accused of a lot of felonies lately.”

“Right. Matt. You have really flipped.”

Even as Molina sat back on the sofa, a black cat jumped up on either arm, as if to say: I’m all ears.

Feline muscle, or eavesdropping, did not dissuade her.

“All I can say,” Molina went on with a relish Temple would have to describe as personal, “is that you sure know how to pick ‘em. So I can’t prove Kinsella was involved in the matter of the dead man in the Goliath Hotel ceiling over a year ago, so I couldn’t prove he was the Stripper Killer, but he’s guilty of something, and proving it is only a matter of time.

“Then there’s nice Matt Devine. I must admit that I was rooting for you to ditch Kinsella for Matt. What’s not to like? Sincere, ethical, untouched, good looking, apparently honest—”

“What do you mean, apparently?”

Molina shrugged, shifting the polyester-blend navy-blue jacket on her shoulders.

Polyester-blend, navy-blue. Ick, Temple thought, trying to distract herself from the ugly news that was coming. Who could believe anything that came from the lips of a P-B, N-B-wearing person? The unlipsticked lips of such a person? Whose eyebrows needed a serious shrubbery trimming.

But no matter how much she denigrated Molina’s persona, Temple couldn’t banish the chill, sick feeling in her stomach. Molina wouldn’t be here unless she had some serious stuff on Matt. Molina wouldn’t be here unless she thought she could use Temple to turn Max—or now even Matt—against his own best interests. Temple curled her toes in the bunny slippers until they dug into the walnut parquet floor and braced herself. With a cat it would be called digging in; with a short woman, it would be called maximum resistance.

“Who, where, when, or why could Matt ever be a suspect of murder?” Temple asked. Give me your best shot.

“A call girl, at the Goliath Hotel—your favorite and Kinsella’s too for mayhem—last night, because he freaked at the idea of sexual intercourse, or he had sexual intercourse and freaked afterward. Take your pick.”

Whew. Temple’s toes did not uncurl, nor did her hidden fists unfurl, nor did her breath stop being held.

“That’s your idea,” she finally said, “of who, where, when, why. I still don’t get the why. Why on earth would Matt be there with that kind of woman to do that? Never in a million years. I don’t believe it.”

“One answer, three little words, your own, and quite brilliant in their way. I can see why you’re a public relations ace: Kitty the Cutter.”

“Kitty O’Connor? The poison ivy of Ireland? Oh. She assaulted Matt once, but that was a long time ago.”

“It didn’t end there. She’s been stalking him.”

Temple said nothing. She couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe that Kitty’s attacks had continued, and especially couldn’t believe that Matt hadn’t told her.

“My own daughter was involved.”

“Mariah? That’s crazy. What would she have to do with Kathleen O’Connor?”

“TitaniCon?” Molina asked, invoking the recent science fiction convention at the New Millennium hotel. “The car that chased you from the parking ramp over the pedestrian bridge and crashed into the hotel’s glass doors while your party escaped down the escalator? You, Matt Divine, and my own daughter. Oh, yes, I heard about it. Matt said that every female in his company was in danger at that event, including Mariah. Kitty had claimed him for her own; either he’d cooperate, or she’d take heads.”

“He didn’t say anything to me.”

“Amazing. Can it be that anyone in Las Vegas fails to confide in Temple Barr, amateur sleuth?”

“Sarcasm does not become you, Lieutenant. I like it better when you’re just plain mean.”

“I am not mean,” Molina answered rather astoundingly. “I am trying to save lives, including my own daughter’s. The fact is that Kathleen O’Connor elected Matt the most dangerous man in Las Vegas to know. Her price was his virtue, and he’s probably the only man in Las Vegas who still has … had … any.”

Temple was on a dizzying mental merry-go-round fixated on tense: has … had. She had no idea she cared that much. Or did she?

“So … to save all the women he knew, he had to find a woman he didn’t know and … render himself undesirable to Kitty the Cutter?”

Molina nodded.

“Hence the call girl. Last night? But—?”

“But what?”

“I mean, we were all so busy last night, you and Max and I, chasing each other and trying to catch the Stripper Killer all at the same time, Matt was … oh, poor Matt. How’d he ever find a call girl?”

She looked to Molina for an answer, admitting her superiority in this one, sleazy instance, and met an evasive gaze, a slightly flushing face, a guilty expression.

“You? You turned him on to a call girl? And you’re really Catholic!”

“This not about religion. This is about abusive stalking.”

“Which is not the stalkee’s fault.”

“It is if he snaps under the pressure and kills the very woman who is the source of his salvation. You probably know Matt better than anyone. Could he snap? Get violent?”

“No!” Temple spoke from gut defense, before she remembered how Matt had torn his own apartment apart once, almost a year ago, when she’d first met him, when he’d been hunting his abusive stepfather. “No,” she repeated more softly, more sanely. Matt had acknowledged the rage within himself. Didn’t that banish it? Unless he had been forced into a corner so against his every instinct. “No.” This last one sounded pretty unconvincing.

“You defended Kinsella, and look where he stands. Are you simply a sucker for flawed men? There are plenty of women like that. I see them every day.”

“You work on the dark side,” Temple answered. “The rest of us live in the light. Mostly. Or maybe we just like to think so. But thinking so can make it so. I will never believe the worst of my friends. I won’t. You’ll have to prove it to me.”

“No, I won’t. You don’t fit at all into this equation. I have to prove it to a prosecutor.”

Molina stood up.

Temple stood, too, although in her case it wasn’t very impressive. “Are you saying something happened to the call girl Matt was with last night?”

“It’s more something that didn’t happen,” Molina said.“She didn’t wake up to have a morning after.”

On that information she turned on her pathetically low heels and left.

Temple was too shocked to move to show the woman out, which allowed Molina to pause and call through the ajar door, “Fasten your chain-lock. There may be a murderer in the building.”

Temple still didn’t move. For one thing, she didn’t believe for a moment that Matt had murdered somebody. But then she’d have never believed he’d patronize a Las Vegas call girl. And what was this about Kitty the Cutter stalking him? How long had that been going on? And why did Molina really call on Temple with all this bad, if vague, news, other than to lecture and to taunt?

She must have wanted exactly what was just about to happen. Too bad. It was going to happen anyway.

Temple rushed to the kitchen door to grab the keys to her apartment, then her glance fell on her bunny-slippered feet.

“Watch the door,” she instructed Louie as she skied over the slick wooden floors to her bedroom to change into proper interrogation garb. “Don’t let in any sex killers,” ‘she mumbled as she fled.

Midnight Louie eyed Midnight Louise. An observer, of which there was no longer one, could well imagine the two consulting each other: Did she say “sex killers” or “sex kittens”?

Chapter 5

Flaming Sword

Midnight Louie did not watch her half-open door while Temple changed into a capri-pants-and-top set with so many chicly beaded hems at the extremities that she felt (and rattled) like a Victorian lamp shade… .

He and Louise had absconded the premises by the time she came charging back from the bedroom, her feet attired in black patent leather mules instead of the soft and soulful bunny faces.

Temple’s outfit had all the bells and whistles that passed for current fad except a pocket, so she dangled her unit key ring from a handy thumb and ran, not walked, up the service stairs to the floor above.

She knocked on Matt’s door, rapped really, and was ready to start scratching like a rodent when the door didn’t instantly fly open.

“Who is it?” he asked from inside finally, as he had never done.

“It’s me!”

The announcement brought silence.

Temple’s courage faded at this unhappy omen. Matt was always glad to see her. Well, almost always. Except lately he had seemed … distant. How could she have missed it? Dummy! He was trying to avoid the targets of Kathleen O’Connor’s hate campaign.

Temple rapped again. “Compared to the women you’ve been hanging out with lately, I’m pretty harmless, really.”

The door jerked open. Matt’s face was about as stiff as the mahogany the door was made of.

“What do you know about the women I’ve been hanging out with lately?” he asked.

“That they’re dangerous. Kitty the Cutter. Lieutenant Molina. Your friendly neighborhood call girl.”

“How do you know any of that?”

“Molina told me.”

“Molina?”

He had spit out the name in a way Temple found totally satisfactory. At last someone else beside her was regarding the homicide lieutenant as the Great Satan, the Enemy, She Who Is Not to Be Obeyed!

“Why in God’s name,” he went on, mostly asking himself, not her, “would Molina run right off to you and spill her guts and mine?”

“I think she’s trying to do with you what she did with Max: use me to pressure you. But I didn’t fall for that the first time and I’m hardly about to do it the second.”

“Temple, just your being here is pressure.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe I can help.”

“Nobody can help, least of all you.”

“What did I ever do to deserve that ‘least’?”

His expression softened into resignation. Not acceptance, just resignation. He stood aside to let her enter. “Nothing.”

Temple decided brisk professionalism was the best approach. She looked around. “I imagine Molina did a bug-search of your place too?”

“She find anything in your rooms?” Matt was suddenly alert and interested.

Temple shook her head. “Yours?”

He walked into the adjoining kitchen and handed her a mug.

“I’m not thirsty.”

Matt just nodded to the cup in her hand.

It was a cream-colored pottery mug, bereft of motto or design. A standard-issue drinking vessel available in any discount store.

“Euw!” Temple had detected the dark bristly form submerged in the clear water. “Is that the kind of bug I think it is?”

“Yep. Molina found it in my doorbell chime unit.”

“Most ingeniously … revolting.” Temple peered at the high-tech pest. “It looks creepy-crawly even if it’s just wires and circuits. So Kitty the Cutter really was stalking you, all this time?”

“You mean since I first … met her and she razored me?”

Temple nodded and put the mug down on the counter.

“No, actually.” Matt’s voice made a more optimistic lilt as he realized that Temple had asked a key question. “Actually … she left me alone after that. It’s only been lately.”

“Maybe after your stepfather’s death early this year?”

“Well, there was that fourth nun attending his fake funeral we never found another trace of … yeah. You’re right. Since about then.”

Temple moved into the living room, sat dead center on the vintage red suede couch she had helped Matt buy from the Goodwill a few months before. She was deliberately reminding him of a time before Kitty had become a secret fixture in his life, when they had been able to go out and hang out and he didn’t have to worry about someone watching.

“I can’t figure out why a redhead looks so good on that scarlet sofa,” he said. It wasn’t a line, just a comment.

“It’s got to make me look good.” She grinned. “I brought it home from the pound.”

His smile was almost transparent, but it was there. “You’re always trying to save something.”

“Yes,” she said, and didn’t add anything else, not easy for an energetic redhead.

He sobered again. “I’m beyond saving.”

“You can’t believe that. You’re an ex-priest. Priests are born to save.”

“Are they? Not to read the newspapers lately.”

“That’s not bothering you, the church scandal?”

“Of course it does, but it’s strangely … remote. That’s what these last weeks have done to me. Made me a zombie, mired me in my own stupid troubles, made me no good to anybody else.”

Temple shrugged and clasped her hands over her crossed knees. “Sometimes it’s more than enough just to be good to ourselves. What is Molina trying to lay on you, Matt? What’s she really trying to get out of you? Why doesn’t she simply send a team of detectives to arrest you if she thinks you’ve done something?”

“Because she wants to peel my head like an orange just to see what’s in it, mainly to protect her own career.”

“Did you really have an … appointment with a call girl last night?”

“I think the word is assignation. Or … deal. Yeah. I was desperate. Everybody told me that was what I should do. It began to make sense, under the circumstances.”

“Everybody?”

“Ambrosia … her off-air name is Leticia, my boss at work. Molina.”

“You told them, and not me?”

“I would have told anybody, except you.”

Temple must have looked like a kicked rat, because he suddenly leaned against the „grass cloth covering the living room wall as if facing a firing squad with Ronald Colman’s classic-film resignation and weary gallantry.

“But Molina’s undone all that. Everything I wanted to preserve at any cost. Between her and Kathleen O’Connor, they’ve left me nothing to protect, not even myself.”

“What was seeing a call girl going to preserve and protect?”

“Not her. She’s dead.” Matt stared at the same parquet squares that tiled Temple’s floor, as if he saw a corpse there. “Molina made that plain, although she wouldn’t tell me where, when, or how just wanted to know every move I made last night. I wouldn’t tell her.”

“Aha! That’s why she came to rattle my cage. She knew I can’t resist … a mystery. Listen.” Temple sat forward. “If Molina thinks she can use me to get to you, just like she wanted to use me to betray Max, you’ve got to see that it doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for more than a year. If we don’t let her divide us, we can survive.”

“No! Vassar is dead. She was killed because she was with me. You’re with me here, now. You could be next.”

“Vassar? That was the girl’s name? Was she really?”

“Really what?”

“A college grad.”

“Probably.”

“You’re saying that Kitty will kill any woman you’re with, for any purpose?”

“Probably. She doesn’t make any exceptions for likelihood or age, young or old. Remember Sheila and Mariah at TitaniCon? The almost-accidental injuries, the car that drove after all of us into the bank of glass doors?”

“That’s right. Mariah Molina was a target at that convention too.”

“So was I. Remember the aspergillum I picked up after we got off the elevator? It’s a sacred object, a holy water sprinkler. Kathleen used it as a goad in my back as we descended, like a gun. Just to remind me she could get that close to me, or to Mariah, or to you.”

“Mariah? That’s why … that’s why you went to Molina about this, not me! You figured she needed to know, and that she could help you.”

“I figured … wrong.”

“So why was a call girl the solution?”

“That’s what Kitty wanted. My innocence.”

“How could she be sure you still had any?”

“Like any personality hooked on controlling others, she knew how to sniff out any vulnerability.”

Temple collapsed against the sofa’s hard upholstery. “So you and your staff advisors figured a call girl would be invulnerable.”

“Yeah. Were we wrong.” Matt sat on the couch, at the other end. He hunched forward, laced his hands, not quite approximating prayer. “The unspoken assumption was that since Kitty coveted something so personal as my virtue, that if I ‘lost’ it, as the expression goes, she’d lose interest. And if the means of my ‘loss,’ was a stranger, a professional, it would be too impersonal to merit Kitty’s rage. Plus, everybody thought, including me, that a call girl counted for so little that Kitty wouldn’t regard her a suitable object of revenge. Looks like everybody was wrong.”

“You can’t know Kitty did it.”

“No. But I did it. Somehow I did it, even if Kitty never came anywhere near Vassar. So Kitty has destroyed my innocence, one way or another. I’m responsible for a woman’s death. Vassar is dead. I left her alive just hours ago, Temple, and now she’s dead. Something I did led to her death. I’ll never forgive myself.”

Temple had heard that phrase a few times in her life. She had muttered it herself. Never with the finality, the seriousness that Matt Devine used.

“I’m sorry. I guess Kitty wins.”

“It’s not a game. It’s a woman’s life. Death. Vassar … she was on a threshold. She wasn’t the stereotype I’d expected. She was a living, bleeding human being. She had a past and future. Now—”

“Matt, I am so sorry. I hate to see Kitty win. She’s bedeviled Max’s life for almost twenty years and I hate, hate, hate to see her mess you up too.”

He nodded. “I’ve seen the guilt he carries for his cousin’s death. He tries to move beyond it, but it seeps out, no matter how sophisticated or cynical he tries to ap-pear.” Matt regarded Temple with a look from the heart. “Molina has always tried to prove that Max isn’t good enough for you, but a man who feels that deep a guilt, that long, has worth that a man—or a woman—who’s never been tested can’t guess at.”

Temple found herself unable to speak for a few seconds. “Thank you. It’s been kind of lonesome defending my druthers this past year.”

“That’s why I never—”

“Never what?” Temple held her breath, knowing that a revelation hovered.

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“Yes, it does! It matters that this one person has blighted Max’s life, and now yours.”

“Temple, I admire your heart in defending Max and would be honored to have it defending me, but I’m … indefensible. We’re talking here and now, and a woman dead within hours. Molina only came to me privately because if I’m identified as a suspect, her role in my actions will have to come out. I told her I wouldn’t say anything—”

“What did she say?”

“She said I damn well wouldn’t say anything unless I was brought in for questioning and then I’d have to tell the truth. I think she’s hoping to avoid an accounting. She wouldn’t tell me much about Vassar’s death, except that it was from a fall, and could be judged an accident. Or”—his expression grew even graver—“a suicide.”

“Then it’s not an obvious murder.”

“Does it matter?”

“It does if there’s no evidence to charge you with a crime.”

“I’m charged already, in my own mind. So it wasn’t Kitty O’Connor, it wasn’t murder. So Vassar jumped to her death somehow? So I drove her to suicide? I was the last person she ever saw. It must have been something I said. Or did. Or didn’t do.”

“And you didn’t tell Molina exactly what that was?”

“No. She wouldn’t tell me the details of the death, and I wouldn’t tell her the details of my … assignation. Just how I followed her directions and got there, I thought, unfollowed. And that I was there.”

Temple couldn’t stifle a smile.

“What?” he asked.

“You and Molina, good Catholics both, tiptoeing around the moment of truth.”

“You Unitarians would face it straight up, huh?”

“Yeah! Better than acting like two parallel lines and driving past each other. It reminds me of some crazy Puritan dance where couples don’t ever touch. Whew. Molina is so not the right person to pursue this case.”

“What case? The woman is dead. I was there. End of story.”

“Matt, there is so much story you haven’t told me.”

“And that would make a difference?”

“I think so. And so would Max.”

“Kinsella?”

“Yes. He’s got to be in on this.”

Matt ducked his head. “Well, he already is, in a way.”

“You told him too! You turned to everyone but me. This … Ambrosia chick, Molina, Max, even Max?”

“Yes, I guess I did.” He examined the parquet floor between his feet.

“Why? Haven’t I proven I have a nose for news, for skullduggery? Didn’t I nail the Stripper Killer? Am I so unsympathetic I don’t listen to my friends’ problems, so stupid that I wouldn’t have a clue to how to deal with a stalker, so selfish that I don’t care what happens to other people, so … useless I can be left out of the real adult talk like a dumb kid—?”

Matt finally looked at her, driven to her defense. “No, Temple. You’re smart and tough and kind and true and nervy and beautiful and—”

Her eyes opened. Literally. There was a kind of wonder in what they saw.

“Matt. The other day. When we had an … encounter in my hallway. You know, with the groceries. You almost-Then you blamed yourself for being ‘selfish.’ Was it because of your situation with Kitty, that you were seeing a way out of it, but just couldn’t do it? That it was … me?”

He shook his head and shut his eyes in denial even as he said, “Yes,” as if confessing a failing.

“Oh.” Temple sat back. She thought for a minute. “I’m flattered. And I’m too smart and tough and nervy to let Kitty the Cutter win. So we are in this together, with whoever we can get on our side, sans Molina. Okay? Okay. This means Max and Midnight Louie, too. Louie saved my hide just last night, so that’s no measly ally.”

Temple had deliberately omitted from her list of admirable attributes the one that had thrilled her the most: beautiful. Really? He thought she was beautiful? Strange how something so shallow could resonate so deep.

Of course she immediately felt guilty for feeling that way.

Max was the one she’d fallen madly, manically, magically in love with, the one she had followed from Minneapolis to Las Vegas, the one she’d lived with at the Circle Ritz. When he had vanished without a word after finishing his magician’s gig at the Goliath Hotel, her world stopped. Then Molina had shown up, pushing Temple for information she didn’t have on Max’s whereabouts, accusing him of a murder discovered at the Goliath the same night he vanished. Temple feared Max was dead too. Molina was sure Max was alive and well somewhere, and a murderer.

Max had come back months later as suddenly as he’d disappeared. It was no one’s fault that Matt had come to live at the Ritz in the meantime. That Temple had begun to learn the secrets of Matt’s past, begun to be a part of his present… .

Max was back, and his reason for vanishing was … her safety. Sheer gallantry. He did indeed know about the Goliath’s dead man and was afraid the killers had been after him. He had fled to keep Temple safe. Turns out even Max had secrets in his past.

Max was back. He had been her only live-in lover, her only partner on the tracks of true love leading to Matrimony Junction. You didn’t throw away a mutually monogamous commitment in the Age of AIDS. You hung with the one who brung you. Who stuck with you. Who didn’t deserve to be cut out while he wasn’t looking, only because he cared enough about you to leave you for your own good.

Still, it seemed she had been wrong somehow in becoming Matt’s friend as he was trying to return to a secular, freshly sexual world from the Catholic priesthood. She had somehow been unfaithful to Max and unfair to Matt, without meaning to, without knowing it.

She clutched the one truth in the whole sordid mess that touched her to the quick. Matt had hoped she could be his salvation. Maybe she hadn’t been in a position to help him disarm Miss Kitty before the fact—and she understood that they could never have been intimate without betraying who they were and the very reasons they were tempted to be intimate—but she could sure kick stalker ass now that all had been said and done.

Chapter 6

Body Bag

People who don’t work in a medical examiner’s facility wonder how the staff can do it. How can they take fingerprints from the fire-eaten tips of charred hands? How can they stare headless bodies in the missing face?

Molina inhaled shallowly in the cool corridor, absorbing the sickly scent of decay with its inescapable overlay of orange, the counter-scent deemed most effective. She was reminded not of orange blossoms, the beginning, but the bitter, curled rind. The end.

As a visiting police officer, she had quickly discovered the paradox that perfectly intact bodies are far harder to cope with than the ones bloated or burned beyond recognition.

Vassar’s was one of those disturbingly intact bodies. She lay naked on the stainless steel examining table in the autopsy room. As if she could wait for anything anymore.

Despite the trauma of her fatal fall, her skin was simply bruised, as if she’d been in a minor automobile accident. The color was not as pallid as Shangri-La’s white stage makeup, but almost normal. She was as fresh as they ever came here. Worse, stripped of her high-fashion clothing and jewelry, she resembled an old-fashioned department-store mannequin underneath. Motionless, naked, as angular as an anvil to which exaggerated female secondary characteristics had been added: full lips abutting a cadaverous cheekbone; full breasts, a ripple of ribs.

She looked as if she could rise and leave any minute, as if her vacant, haughty model’s features would animate in an instant. She would yawn or smile. Sit up. Leave. Get on with her life.

Not, Molina thought, once Grizzly Bahr had finished eviscerating her like an Egyptian mummy in the name of forensics.

“This the downed bird?” the ME’s voice boomed from Molina’s rear. As burly as his nickname, he couldn’t avoid brushing against her as he barreled by. He stopped, arrested. “Say, there’s almost an expression on her face. Makes you wonder what her last thoughts were.”

Molina had noticed it too: a not-quite-expression of surprise and even perhaps a hint of distress. Only extreme trauma left post-mortem expressions on the dead, a death resisted. She’d seen that once, in a victim who had choked on a latex glove, an autistic adult. They’d never determined whether the death was accident … or suicide.

“You in for the duration?” Grizzly asked, his virtuoso eyebrows arched to their highest. Either he couldn’t believe she really wanted to do this, or he was relishing another opportunity to gross out the civilians, which in his opinion included police officers.

“She’s a real mystery,” Molina said as she accepted the mouth mask and clear safety goggles he extended. “I want to be the first to know.”

“Hmmm, may not know much even afterward.” He stepped to the corpse’s side as if about to ask her to join him in a macabre dance. “Pretty woman. Too skinny for my taste, but at my age I’m not the target audience anymore. The bruises all look impact-induced. Nothing-in the thigh and genital area. She wasn’t raped.”

“She was a call girl.”

“They can be raped.”

“Not a veteran. Not often.”

“This one irritate a client, you think?”

“I have no idea. Maybe a client irritated her.”

“And it was such a shock she dove to her death?”

“You know what the multiple choice is: accident, suicide, or homicide.”

“Which one would you like it to be?” Bahr’s eyes were slightly blurred through the goggles, but Molina found his expression especially avid.

Grizzly Bahr could smell when a cop really burned to make a case.

“In this instance … accident would be nice.”

Her choice startled him. Homicide lieutenants seldom rooted for an innocent death. Then he shrugged. He was a scientist. Only the evidence would count and that needed to be exhumed from the body before him.

Molina was having an unwished-for epiphany. She had stood through more than a few autopsies, and was used to the ME’s droning voice as he or she confided the long, Latinate medical terminology to the confessional of a tape recorder. She was aware of Bahr’s spare but invasive motions … the long Y incision of the trunk, the grueling revelation of the brain by sawing a literal skullcap off the top of the head.

These actions, this sequence, this ritual and its accompanying inventory of comment were familiar.

Except that now, today, for the first time it reminded her of another ceremony over another table. Altar. The mass. This is my body. This is my blood.

In a way this body and blood were communal property now, and literally community property. Their sacrifice upon the altar of science would free them from the eternal damnation of a known resting place reached by an unknown cause.

Unless of course, the autopsy was completely inconclusive.

Instruments clanged into stainless steel trays. Molina finally heard the inimitable squeaky, sucking sound of latex gloves being stretched and drawn off like alien skin.

Vassar now lay disassembled like the department store mannequin she had evoked earlier.

“No bruises or other marks consistent with the application of force from an outside source,” Grizzly Bahr summed up for her ears only, the tape recorder already turned off. “The presence of semen, but no indication of force. A contraceptive implant was the only anomaly in the body. Nothing remarkable.”

“Semen?” Molina was startled. “Hookers don’t hook without condoms nowadays.” Her second thought was chilling. That might be evidence to hang Matt Devine. Was he dumb enough to forego a condom? And even if he was, which she doubted, Vassar certainly wasn’t. “How are you going to rule it?”

“Death by misadventure?” He pulled off his mask and grinned, widely. “No, that’s only in the murder mysteries, isn’t it? Guess your people will have to work on the definition, Lieutenant.”

“Guess we will.” She didn’t have to add that nobody usually cared much about a call girl but her cell phone service.

Wait a minute! Where was her cell phone?

“Her things are upstairs?” she asked.

“Bagged and tagged. Just like the remains will soon be.”

Molina glanced in passing at the table and its contents as she removed her mask and goggles. Not even a discarded mannequin anymore. Just remains.

“Any next of kin?” Grizzly had paperwork as well as bodies to process.

“Not that we know of. Yet. Maybe the clothes will be more talkative than her body parts.”

“In this case, then, clothes would ‘make’ the woman.”

Molina quirked a weary smile at his joke. She didn’t expect the expensive labels from any of a dozen casino shopping malls to reveal much more than the extent of Vassar’s clothing habit. But a cell phone might be a lot more “talkative.”

7

Beasts of Eden

There was no cell phone.

“Now this doesn’t make sense,” Molina commented aloud.

The technician in charge was a multi-earringed twenty-something whose eyes were still glued with envy on the slinky, shiny clothes Vassar had worn.

“This stuff is to die for.”

Molina avoided the obvious comeback. Most coroner facility mid-level techs were high school grads so ecstatic about the rewarding pay scale that they overcame any nicety about peeling fingerprints off the dead and other unpleasant tasks.

And they lived in a world where black humor was the best defense against depression.

“If any relatives step forward to arrange a funeral,” Molina said, “they’ll have to find something else to bury her in, that’s for sure.”

“Oh, these are too cool to bury.” The gloved technician pushed the soft silken folds back into their paper bags. Paper was more preservative than plastic when it came to fabrics.

Molina frowned at the iridescent snakeskin purse as it disappeared. One of those glitzy toy purses that cost a bundle but were only big enough to hold credit cards, tight curls of cash, and a decorative lipstick case.

No cell phone.

Vassar had to have carried a cell phone, or a pager. Where was it?

Max Kinsella stared at his own words on the computer screen with a sense of disappointment.

Temple made writing, and talking, look so easy. With her it was a flow, a part of her personality. He could sling a bit of patter himself. A professional magician had to be a silver-tongued devil to some extent. But when it came to setting word after word down on a computer screen, he found something lacking.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t had a head start. Gandolph the Great’s memoirs were packed with fascinating stories about debunking phony mediums. Max had taken them up after Gandolph’s death last Halloween to finish what his mentor had started.

He was living in the man’s house, after all, and one bedroom was crammed with the machines of his stage illusions. The ghost of Orson Welles, former owner of the manse, an amateur magician of note and a film genius, hovered over the place as well.

Why couldn’t Max make something of what Gandolph had started?

Maybe he wasn’t a writer.

He was probably too tired to worry about this project now, but he was also too wired to sleep. His face and body ached, not a lot, but enough that three ibuprofens didn’t totally kill the pain.

Last night had been taxing, to say the least. After weeks of undercover work on both their parts, he and Molina had missed out on capturing the Stripper Killer. While they’d been duking it out mano-a-mana in a strip-club parking lot, Temple had been fighting for her life with the killer in another strip-club parking lot.

He’d finally allowed Molina to capture him, knowing no handcuffs would hold him, but the fact left an ugly taste at the back of his throat, like bile.

He’d never gotten into this kind of a macho contest with a woman before and his mid-thirties’ mind was old enough that a touch of chivalry cramped his style with the combative lieutenant.

Then to know that she’d made him too late to save Temple anyway, that it had been her hated ex-lover, Rafi Nadir, who had been there to do it … the only consolation to Max’s ego was that the pepper spray he’d given Temple had helped her hold off the killer until Nadir could come along and deck him.

He was an ex-cop, Nadir, and must still relish a bust, even if his shady present didn’t permit him to hang around to get the credit.

Max grinned at the annoying words on the screen. His words, that wouldn’t obey and look gracious. Molina would split her spleen to know that her loathed ex had chivalrously come to Temple’s rescue.

The Iron Lieutenant had looked pretty spleen-split when he’d left her handcuffed to her own steering wheel. Max chuckled. Never mess with a magician.

Then he frowned. Someone had messed with Gandolph the Great. No one had been charged with his mid-séance murder at the Halloween haunted house attraction. Garry Randolph had been Max’s mentor in magic and the counterterrorism life, his only family for years. Max had done nothing to avenge or solve his death except try to finish his book, and to do a mediocre job at that. Temple could help him fix the book, and she might even help him clear up Garry’s death.

Max tapped his fingers on the keyboard so lightly that no letters appeared on the screen.

Several psychics and mediums had been present for Garry’s death. He had been there in disguise to expose the frauds among them. Garry would say all of them. Someone more open minded, or imaginative, like Temple, would say most of them. She had been impressed by a couple of the psychics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He must find and infiltrate the Synth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he could tell no one.

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

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

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

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

Who would even believe such a medieval entity still existed?

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

He was dead. Gone.

Chapter 8

Hobbits with Claws

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miss Midnight Louise yawns and casts me a bored glance.

I realize that I no longer look good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 9

The Man That

Got Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What, that I was alive?”

“No, that you were alive and the uniform cops had the Stripper Killer in custody.”

“My being alive didn’t tick her off at all? Then what’s the use?”

“She doesn’t want you harmed, Temple, just out of her hair. I, on the other hand, want you in my hair, so let’s stop talking about Molina.”

At this welcome invitation, Temple ran her fingers through the thick dark hair at his … well, temple. Max flinched and she jerked her hand away.

“Guess that’s another spot that kowtowed to parking lot pavement last night,” he admitted.

“That must have been some fight. I wish I’d seen it.”

“No thanks. One car did come by, shining its headlights on us, but otherwise that fiasco was dark-of-night anonymous. It wasn’t a shining moment for either of us.”

“Speaking of shining moments, what’s happening with your new writing career?”

“I was rereading my expansion of Gandolph’s book. I had no idea putting one word down after another could be so frustrating. It’s not saying what I want to say, it’s not saying what Gandolph would want me to say. Trying to finish his book was a nice idea, but I don’t think I’m up to it.”

Temple, busy eating, nodded.

“Exposing fake mediums had become Gandolph’s life work,” Max went on. “Now that he’s dead, I wanted to fashion a worthy memorial for him. But—” He spread his large bony hands that must have overwhelmed a keyboard. “The student is not worthy of his instructor. Maybe I don’t care enough about exposing frauds. Maybe I feel they are us.”

“Well, after this morning, I don’t know that I can disagree with you.”

Max had only played with the omelet of his creation. Temple watched his fork tines draw stucco-like patterns on his plate.

“You’re feeling betrayed,” he said.

“Ye-es! Everybody I know was talking to everybody else, except me. What’s wrong with me that none of you trust me?”

“It’s not that we don’t trust you. We don’t trust ourselves to do right by you.”

“Molina?”

Max smiled, as she had hoped he might. Even when she had a legitimate grievance she couldn’t stand to make someone she cared about glum.

“Not Molina,” he said. “Molina would never insult you by treading around your feelings. It’s not that we don’t care about you, Temple. It’s that we care too much.”

“We, White Man?”

“Me.” Max made a face as he carved bloody inroads ofchipolte sauce into his untouched omelet. “And probably Matt Devine.”

“Great. So being an ignorant idiot becomes me. It’s the way you guys love to see me.”

“Being alive is the way we love to see you.”

“You really think that was at stake?”

“You don’t know Kitty O’Connor like I know Kitty O’Connor. And, I suppose, as Devine does now.”

Temple thought about that. She swigged a bunch of cranberry juice and thought about it.

“Oh, my God.”

She looked into Max’s eyes, mild blue now, unabetted by the magician’s panther-green contact lenses that he had used as a professional adjunct. “It’s a parallel, isn’t it? You, and now Matt. What … seventeen years apart? Did you see it the moment I called?”

“No. I had to brood about it while you were on the way over.”

“Writer’s block will do that to you. Make you brood.”

“So you’re saying, paradoxically, that in writing, a block is a sign of progress?”

“It’s a sign of no progress. But … you have to not get anywhere to get somewhere.”

“So where have you gotten, my darling ignorant idiot?”

“You’re sorry, aren’t you?”

“Yes, especially now that you’ve caught us out protecting you. Mea culpa.”

She had heard the Latin phrase from Matt, the ex-priest, and knew what it meant. My fault.

“Mea maxima culpa,” she retorted, having heard the ritual follow-up, also from Matt.

Max, good Irish-Catholic lad that he had been, only nodded. Mea maxima culpa. My most grievous fault. He got up and poured two cups from the coffeemaker, dosing them with swigs of Bailey’s Irish Cream.

Then he came back and waited for her to piece out the truth that had been kept from her for her own good, the kind of truth that hurts worse than any deliberate attack.

“Matt hit on it, way back when,” she began. “When he said that maybe Kitty had arranged your cousin’s death. There you and Sean were in northern Ireland, back there before any hint of truce between the Protestants and the Catholics. Two naive American teenagers visiting the Auld Sod. And there was Kathleen O’Connor. God, I wish I’d seen her, Max. I know she’s been lurking around now, but she must have been really gorgeous back then, teen angel symbol of the beloved country’s tortuous history and noble fight for freedom from hundreds of years of British domination. And you and your cousin Sean, kicking up your heels from an American high school graduation. Drinking in pubs! Flirting with the colleens. On your own, together. Cousins and Irish-American soul brothers getting your ire up about centuries of injustice in the Auld Country. Away from your parents, the nuns and priests, and so hoping to get laid. Have I got it?”

“Amazingly well for a Protestant and a Scots/English/ French lass and a grown girl.”

“It was spring break, European-style. Irish Spring. And you, Max, you devil, you amateur magician who may have been a twelve-year-old geek but you were growing into your post-adolescent sexy guy, you were dueling Sean for who could drink the most and get the girl. And Kitty let you be the one.”

“Stupid adolescent competition. We were like colts in a field, kicking up our heels, too young to know what any of it meant, the sex or the politics.”

“You won the lady fair. While you were dallying with her, Sean consoled himself with a pint of Guinness. In a Protestant pub that had been targeted for an IRA bomb. So you lost your innocence, in every possible sense of the word. Except you didn’t lose anything, Max. She spoiled it.”

He nodded. “Yes, she did. Forever. You could say I did some good with my years of covert counterterrorism work later. I saved lives. I know I did. But none of them were the one life I wanted, needed, to save. I never loved. Untilyou. And then I couldn’t be there when you needed me because of that past. Then she came again, and, indirectly, she was threatening you.

“If she knew how much Devine cared about you, you would be Sean. Dead. That is the one thing that he and I believe in common.”

“You … believe that he cares that much about me?”

“Who could not?” Max shook his head, as if angered by an invisible gnat that never stopped flitting in front of his eyes. “Temple, I worry that you don’t really know how much I care about you.”

“You’ve got a lot on your mind—”

“No. I’ve always had you on my mind, first and foremost. On how to keep my damnable past from hurting you, our future. Maybe I had no right to contemplate a future.”

“You more than anybody, Max. After that woman tried to taint it forever. We’ve got to be happy, just to piss off Kathleen O’Connor.”

He laughed then. “You always do that. Turn my black Irish depression inside out. I admit I’m jealous of your neighbor. Our neighbor.” He smiled at the surroundings, claiming them again. Claiming her because she’d told him to.

“And now … irony of ironies.” Max sighed theatrically. “We’ve become coconspirators, Devine and I, as Sean and I never had a chance to be. She divides and conquers, Miss Kitty O’Connor, but, like all extremists, she also unites where she doesn’t intend to.”

“Amen!” Temple said. “She’s united us here and now. Max, I hate what she’s done to you, and I hate what’s she’s done to me. We’ve got to stop her.”

They sealed the vow with a cranberry juice toast.

Chapter 10

Peeping Tomcat

I must admit that it sometimes comes in handy to have a minion.

I mean, a minor partner. Junior partner? Maybe Junior Miss partner better describes it.

Whatever you want to call it, Midnight, Inc. makes a most auspicious debut at the Goliath Hotel and Casino, as Miss Midnight Louise and I embark on our first intentional venture as a crime-fighting team.

We enter the premises by my favorite route: the hotel kitchens.

It is not only the plenteous foodstuffs that attract the seasoned senses of Midnight Louie. What pulls my chain is not calories, but confusion.

You see, I have never encountered a commercial kitchen that was not in a constant state of chaos. Where there is chaos, there is opportunity for the canny operative.

When large numbers of people are running around like fish with their heads cut off (in fact, large numbers of fish are lying around here with their heads cut off), it is easierfor those of Louise’s and my stripe (even though we are solid color) to tiptoe unseen through the blizzard of discarded meat wrappers, flying greens, and peevishly hurled chefs’ hats.

I particularly like the chefs’ hats. They are as big and puffy as giant souffles and are just the thing to duck and take cover under. The ritzier the establishment the kitchen serves, the more likelihood of errant chefs’ hats.

In fact, Louise and I are inching along under two of the same when she smothers a squeak of outrage. It seems a runaway lobster has pinched her tail.

We are in a protected corner of the kitchen, crouched between a huge trash can and a stainless steel steam table. I am not averse to a little lobster now and then, but this is not a little lobster and it is in a distressingly lively condition.

It is all I can do to pry its bony claws off my partner’s posterior. I consider asking it a question or two, but after studying those beady little eyes on their creepy stalks I decide that the creature’s brain is as little and creepy as the rest of it, and prod Louise on. Pinching an inch really gets her moving now.

We dash under the steam table and make our way to the constantly swinging door to the dining room. Getting through this aperture is like dashing through the blades of a fan set on high. And then there are the flying feet that dominate the space for the few seconds the door is open.

“Talk about Scylla and Charybdis,” I mutter.

“Friends of yours?” Miss Louise asks.

There is no use explaining a classical education to a classless street cat, so I tell her to follow me when ready and hitch a ride on a pair of thick-soled sneakers. I take it on the chin a few times, but the busy waiter mistakes my hide for some floor flotsam unworthy of glancing at, so I am soon concealed under a tray stand in the restaurant proper.

I watch the swinging door. Nothing but footwear comes through.

Is it possible that Midnight Louise does not have the nerve her old man—I mean, her senior partner—was born with?

While one part of me is feeling smug, the other part is feeling disappointed. I hate to be torn between two emotions. In fact, I hate emotion. It is the enemy of the effective operative.

While I am dueling my own mind, something large falls past my vision to the floor. It is Midnight Louise!

“How did you get out here?” I ask. “I had my eyes on the door the whole time.”

“Maybe so, Pop, but you probably had them glued to the floor. I opted for the over-the-pole route.”

“Huh?”

“Why walk when you can fly? They had some sort of fluffy dessert the size of a Himalayan chocolate-point under this nice shiny stainless steel dome. I ditched the dessert and took its place. Baked Alaska, they called it. Apparently it was rare and expensive, but I cannot see why. It was mostly air. Though it was chilly.”

Miss Midnight Louise gives a theatrical little shudder. “And the waiter did not find you a bit heavy for one of these airy desserts?”

“Of course, and I wanted him to. All I had to do was wiggle a bit after we were safely through the door. He dropped the platter and its dome faster than you can say `Baked Alaska,’ and I was away and out of sight before you could say ‘Bananas Foster.’ “

“I would never say any of those obnoxious phrases. ‘Bananas Foster’ sounds like he should have been in partnership with Bugsy Siegel. Let us leave this high-priced dessert haven and head for the parts of the joint where we can pick up some scuttlebutt.”

Louise pauses only to lick a bit of Alaska snow from her formerly jet-black whiskers. Then she joins me in a game of hide-and-seek through the restaurant and out into the vast noisy area of the Goliath casinos.

Here everybody’s eye is on the cards or the dice or the spinning cherries. As long as we do not work at attractingattention, we can go as unnoticed as a pair of deuces next to the makings of a royal flush.

I sit under an unoccupied slot machine stool to gaze at the ersatz heaven above, a neon night sky that overarches the gaming area like a stained-glass ceiling.

“That is where the little doll landed,” I tell Louise. “It is a false ceiling. We need to get up there and check it out.” Louise makes a face.

“You would look pretty funny if your whiskers froze in that position,” I tell her.

“You mean that we will have to get ‘down’ there, Pop. That means taking an elevator up. We are not exactly routine riders.”

“Tut tut. Nothing is routine in Las Vegas. Follow me.”

I dart and dash my way around the floor until I spy an elevator. This is tough, as it is disguised as a pagan temple door, the Goliath’s decorative theme being biblical. The floor is a piece of cake, though, maybe even Baked Alaska. Las Vegas hotels know better than most that bright, busy carpet designs will hide a lot of spills for a long time. Maybe the killer, if there is one, thought that a lot of neon would hide a high-class call girl’s body.

Anyway, Louise and I blend into the carpet’s black background fronting the Mardi Gras of carnival colors and no one so much as spots us.

I dive behind the convenient cylinder of sand meant for dousing cigarettes. It is right next to the elevator door. Louise has to make do with sheltering under a potted palm.

A few people come and go, taking the elevator. I wait. I want a crowd. Finally a knot of tourists toting Aladdin DESERT PASSAGE shopping bags ankles along and I ankle right after them through the open elevator doors. Those extended claws I hear ripping carpet behind me are Midnight Louise’s dainty little shivs.

She gets with the program faster than she did on her acceleration, though, and hops into a shopping bag. The owner glares at the man beside her, as if he had brushed her precious bag.

I am not exactly shopping bag material, but I snag a bit of ribbon from a package another tourist is toting and push my head through it. The man who was glared at looks down, ready to pass on the courtesy. There I sit as tame as a toy poodle, a collar of fuchsia ribbon adding luster to the muscled dignity of my neck.

His lip pulls back as if to snarl, but he would look silly behaving so doggishly toward a pet pussycat, so he clears his throat instead.

The laden ladies debark on floor six and so do we.

Louise has wriggled out of the bag as the women were fighting their way forward to the doors, so we both dart around the corner to take cover in the refreshment bay next to the elevators, where the ice machine is gurgling as if it was terminally ill. I imagine all ice machines in Vegas must be ready to give up the ghost from overuse.

When the coast is clear (okay, there is no coast anywhere near Las Vegas; this is just an expression we hard-boiled dudes like to use), Louise and I loft to the wooden railing of the balcony overlooking the neon sky now three floors or so below us.

We would gasp if we could. Even from here we can see the CRIME SCENE Do NOT CROSS tape twined above a particularly purple patch of neon below. The lurid yellow with its black lettering does not look in the least like the jewel-tone spirit of neon lighting. No sirree, bobcat!

“Hmmm,” Miss Louise observes, and she is not purring. “I detect a certain reflective quality from below. I say it only looks like a fragile web of neon tubing. I say there’s a solid surface down there. What else would they affix that crime scene tape to?”

With that she flips over the edge, digging her built-in pitons into the wooden rail-cap. Dangling, she winks. “See you down below, Pop.” And the chit lets go.

I nearly swallow my canines.

And then I nearly barf them back up when I see she has made a perfect four-point landing on the wooden railing a floor below.

She repeats the maneuver and is yet another floor below me.

Well! I cannot allow a mere junior partner to out-acrobat me! Even if I outweigh her two times over.

Not for me those agile twists and turns. I shut my eyes and jump. Luckily, I land on the railing below. It is a perfect four-point landing: my set of two front shivs and my two front teeth. I am hanging by a pair of canines, so there is nothing to do but let go and repeat the trick a floor lower.

So we both get to the railing that overlooks the neon ceiling, only my teeth hurt and Louise’s do not. At least I will not have to pay for braces for her. Ouch!

“Pretty awesome with the ivories,” Louise says, sounding sincere.

I grin knowingly, not being able to talk yet.

However, I do see from this nearer perch that something indeed covers the dreadful neon sky below: call it Plexiglas, or Lucite, or just plain plastic, it is tough, so low-profile it is virtually invisible, and highly supportive. Kind of like the way I am with my Miss Temple.

I take one last leap, on faith, and do a belly flop onto a floor of see-through plastic. Louise lands beside me and rolls away from any too-solid impact.

I grit what is left of my teeth.

But she is not concerned with how we got here. She is sniffing around like a prime-time news-show bloodhound. “Mania by Armani,” she diagnoses.

‘What is that? A rock group or a terrorist cadre?”

“Very expensive perfume. Very Rodeo Drive.”

I am not about to descend to a name-dropping contest with the likes of Midnight Louise, who hangs out at the Crystal Phoenix and is up on the latest fashion victim trends, so I rely on my sterling sense of deduction to get back in the game.

“Costly scents only confirm that the call girl was high dollar.”

Louise wrinkles her shiny black nose. She could use some powdering, but far be it from me to tell her. Right now she is wrinkling it as she squints up into the light-spangled actual ceiling high above.

“Star-gazing?” I ask.

“I am wondering who might be accustomed to hanging out up there and have seen something.”

“Nobody who would talk to us,” I point out.

“Maybe not.” She begins to sniff the area inside the crime-scene tape, which I think is a rather silly gesture.

“It must have irritated the cops to have a body found in thin air,” I say. “None of the normal procedure would quite work.”

She is still sniffing and I confess I feel a certain embarrassment, as it is such a doggish occupation. I have always relied on using my noggin, as opposed to my nose. But I cannot deny that an occasional whiff has helped me figure out a modus operandi now and again.

“Leather,” Miss Louise pronounces, lifting her petite nose as if to wrinkle it like an elephant’s gross proboscis. “Shoes, belt, or handbag, no doubt.”

Since she is vacuuming the area I feel obliged to put my face to the transparent floor as well. Well, well. I spot some spider-web shatters in the clear Plexiglas and point them out to Louise.

She gets excited and runs around like the Maltese proboscis, Nose E. the drug-and bomb-sniffing dog I have worked with, reluctantly, before. “Good work! The shattering matches the exact position of the body. The police may not have left any convenient tape to outline the corpse’s location, but we have an impression, no matter how cloudy.”

I take the long view Miss Louise suggests and observe that it indeed etches a ghostlike swastika image of a human form into the transparent surface.

“Wait, Louise! Stop that disgusting sniffing and do not move. This stuff would not shatter. This looks like a glass ceiling, a thick, industrial-strength glass ceiling, but it must be extra-strength plastic. It is inset into panels and with all those flatfoots walking around up here, a weakened framework could give at any moment from a weight as dainty as a butterfly.”

Louise’s eyes grow as big as the twenty-four-karat-gold charger plates they use in the upscale restaurants. “How are we going to get off of here?” she wonders quite logically.

Luckily, I have had a close encounter with a bunch of neon before. These touchy gas-filled tubes need maintenance like flowers need rain. There has got to be an access tunnel somewhere.

Besides. We are in Eye in the Sky territory. Despite the apparent transparency of the neon ceiling, surveillance cameras must be filming away somewhere.

Surveillance cameras! That is who—or what, rather—would talk to us, if we can just find command central. First things first.

“I suggest,” I tell Miss Louise, “that you crawl on your belly like a snake. Fast!”

She melts into the supine position with gratifying speed. I only remember to assume it myself after a few seconds of smirking. The fact is I have already spotted our exit, which is disguised as a mirrored lozenge on the surrounding rim of wall.

So we elbow-crawl like soldiers carrying rifles under an iron curtain to the perimeter. (That is how we talk in the army.) I run my shivs over the mirror frame until it snaps ajar. “Devious,” Louise comments.

I cannot be sure if she is referring to the mechanism or me, but I will take the credit.

I usher her through with a gentlemanly gesture and follow fast upon my own good manners.

We are in a tunnel, but it is of ample size, at least for Miss Louise, who slithers through to the other side like a black feather boa animated by a Slinky. I have to do a little more grunt work to maneuver my masculine frame through, but we both tumble out into another world.

“Awesome!” Louise comments in the patois of her unimaginative generation.

I have seen it all before. The high-tech hardware, the Mondrian wallpaper of small TV screens showing bird’s-eye views of the gaming tables below. There is a guy in a dark uniform seated before this banquet of visual eye-dropping, his head jerking slightly from scanning screen after screen so he resembles a robot.

“Ingenious,” I whisper in her pink-lined little ear. “The surveillance is done from a circular perimeter, in the round, so to speak.”

“Then it should have captured the woman falling from above.”

“Yes. But the police have taken those tapes by now. I believe they are recorded over every-so-many hours.”

“Phooey,” says Louise. “You are probably right, for once in your life.”

“Apparently I was right twice, or you would not be here,” I point out.

It takes her a minute to realize that this is probably a compliment and maybe even a concession, although nothing one could take to the People’s Court.

“There has got be someone else who saw something from one of the higher floors,” she hisses at me, “even if the police have hogged the surveillance tapes.”

“I would not call it ‘hogging.’ It is their job, after all.”

“Listen,” Miss Louise snarls as if I am the enemy when I am only an innocent, helpful dude who does not deserve snarls. “Mr. Matt was nice to me when I was new in town, as he was. He let me crash at his pad for a while. I am not about to let him swing for what has to be a frame-up.”

“Uh, they do not hang people nowadays.”

“Whatever! We need to figure out what floor the lady took a dive from, and find a witness who saw her go over.”

I shrug. I am sure the police have moved heaven and earth and a bunch of neon to figure out the same thing. We might be better off eavesdropping on the conversations of our nearest and dearest, except that I doubt that Lieutenant Molina will ever again obligingly stomp into the Circle Ritz and reveal much about the case, now that she has got Miss Temple’s wind up.

It is no big trick for us to reach the regular-size door, tease it open, and duck out. We are the same color as most of the decor in the surveillance chamber.

After we dart down a nondescript hall or two and through a door, we are back in the hotel’s public areas, no one the wiser, including us.

As we pause to catch up to our breaths, I note the obvious. “From the shape shattered into the glass, the victim did fall facedown onto the surface. That bespeaks a suicide as much as a homicide.”

“You are saying that after a dalliance with Mr. Matt the lady in question would rather dive than live?”

I regard Louise’s incredulous expression and realize that she is another female who has fallen under the influence of Miss Temple’s favorite path not taken.

“He could have pushed her.”

“Why?”

“Maybe he did not want any witnesses to his fall from grace.”

“He was not the one who fell!”

“Not literally. I am merely thinking like a human. So sue me.”

“I never want to see your sorry hide on the People’s Court again.”

“We did win, after all.”

“After a lot of embarrassing revelations.”

“I do not know what is embarrassing about being abducted by a Hollywood has-been starlet who sends me for unnecessary surgery because she erroneously believes I got her precious Persian princess, the Divine Yvette, in the family way.”

“The name of the game nowadays is ‘blame the victim.’ Besides, it seems to me that you go out of your way even when not in court to deny paternity. Methinks thou dost protest too much.”

“Do not quote Shakespeare at me, Louise. What does he know about it? He never had any kits, and may not have had any plays, to hear the scholars debate the, er, issue.”

But Miss Louise is busy eyeing the elevators, already dismissing my notorious day in court. “There must be someone with an open eye on the upper levels. I am going up and will scout around.”

Of course I am obligated to accompany her. And of course my superior height and strength are called upon to summon the elevator.

I bound up to press the call button, then groom the hairs between my toes, which are a continuing problem for an older guy. They grow like weeds, or Andy Rooney’s eyebrows!

Luckily the car that whisks to answer our summons is empty. The hour is before dinner and after cocktails, so the people are either ensconced in the lounges or up in their rooms debating how to dine.

We get off, arbitrarily (that is to say at Miss Louise’s suggestion) on floor twenty.

It is a nice round number and I waft up to the railing to gaze down on the killing field below. Oops! It is a lot harder balancing like a window-washer on the twentieth floor railing than the fifth. Given my druthers, I would take the fifth.

I feel a jerk on my extremity. Louise has taken a tiger by the tail under the guise of preventing a domestic accident. A domestic feline accident.

“Do not be dumb, Popster! At your age you could lose your balance and fall.”

I am not interested in demeaning speculations on the part of my upstart partner. I have spotted a witness, dead ahead about 350 feet, its claws clutching the opposite railing about as desperately as mine own. And this bird speaks!

I jump down, nearly flattening my solicitous partner, and race around the soft angles that make up this central atrium.

“What?” she cries. “Have you gone nuts? What?”

I have no time to answer foolish questions; my quarrymight fly the coop, which it shows evidence of having done already.

In about four minutes of mad rush, I reach the opposite position and—Oh say can you see!—find my witness still there.

It is not quite a flag of red, white, and blue, but it is white and blue, with a touch of orange.

“Pretty boy,” it greets me warmly.

“You getting inappropriately personal, or referring to your self, I hope?” I ask.

“Pretty boy,” it repeats.

Louise eyes the stripes of black and blue on my discovery’s back. “Daddy Dimmest, this is a jailbird. You cannot trust a word he croaks out.”

“Pretty boy,” my new friend produces promptly after eye. ing Louise.

Obviously, he has indeed been in stir too long.

Still, I am encouraged by the encounter. He is a small chap, more white than blue and easily overlooked in the Goliath’s gaudy multistory atrium, which is crammed with luxurious greenery on the upper floors.

One cannot blame the fellow for thinking the place was freewheeling.

He is so naive it has not yet occurred to him that, were Louise and I not trained investigators, we would as soon eat him as listen to him.

“So how long have you been on the lam?” I inquire casually.

He tilts his head and gazes far below. “The night sky below has dimmed and blazed six times.”

I nod significantly at Louise. ‘Three moons ago.”

“Moons? You mean suns. ‘Days’ would make it even clearer, Hiawatha.”

“What are you doing up here all alone, son?” I say. Midnight Louise tries not to gag when she hears my avuncular “son.”

The little fellow tries to tuck his head under his wing. “Lost,” he mutters in a muffled but shrill tone.

“Aw, what shame. My partner and I specialize in missing persons.”

“I just wanted a glide around the Big Space.”

“Who can blame you? I myself have a yen for the open road.”

“What is a road?”

“A . . Big Space, only low, flat and narrow.”

“That does not make sense.” He wrinkles the down on his pale forehead.

I notice he has a yap on him that is horny and curved like a lobster claw. One would not wish to be this guy’s chew toy. And the claws on his unnatural two feet look pretty ragged too. Though he is small, he is no pushover.

“What is your name?” Louise is asking, grimacing to show her sharp front teeth.

He hides his head under his navy-blue vest again. “Blues Brother, tweetheart, and I do not want to hear any titters about that. My owner is a big film fan.”

“So how did you get out here in the Big Space, BB?” she asks.

“Broke out. Thought I’d tool around the neighborhood. Only it is bigger than I thought, and I can’t find a thing to eat except some crumbs the people leave. Also it is hard ducking below that bright, glowing ceiling.”

“So how did you end up on an upper floor of the Goliath in the first place?” I ask. The seasoned operative likes to start at the beginning.

“I was imported.”

“Obviously,” Miss Louise notes. “Your kind of bird is not native to the US. You are an exotic pet.”

BB fluffs his feathers modestly. “I like to think so too. It is the usual story: raised in captivity, sold to the first bidder, caged and asked to do stupid pet tricks, not even on Letterman, which might be worth it.”

“No mystery why you flew the coop, but I still would like to know why the Goliath? Why not take a spin around the home neighborhood?”

“And why this floor,” Louise puts in, getting my drift at last.

He cocks his small, cagy head. For such a little thing he is a pretty good stool pigeon. “I thought everybody knew. Floor twenty is reserved for pet owners, and therefore pets. The place is crawling with cats, dogs, iguanas, and exotic birds.”

“So how long have you been freewheeling?” I ask casually.

“Couple of days, as far as I can tell by the unnatural light in this place. I haven’t seen an outside window since I took off.”

Louise and I exchange glances that play the same unspoken melody, “Blue Bird of Happiness.”

“Where were you when the dame took a dive?”

“Minding my own business,” BB says indignantly. “Sleeping on the twenty-fourth-floor railing.”

“So you did not see a thing,” Louise finishes sourly. “I did not say that. I heard something.”

My ears perk up. This is the perfect witness of the animal sort. It can hear and talk. If Dr. Dolittle talked to the animals, _this bird listens to the humans.

Miss Louise cannot wait to finesse a confession from the blue bird. “What did you hear?”

“Someone chattering away near the circular perch.”

“You mean this railing we are all hanging onto with our best shivs?”

He gives me the half-shut eye. “I can sleep up here. What is your problem?”

I try not to teeter, but it is difficult. “What floor were they on?”

“The free air has no number.”

Oh, Mother Macaw! The fellow has a New Age streak.

“The ascending cages have numbers written above them on every level,” I point out. “Surely you can read numbers. Or maybe you cannot.”

“Hey! I know my numbers. My ABCs too.” By now his tiny wings are flapping and rustling up quite the breeze. “It was floor twenty and four.”

I swallow a grin. Some types would send their own mothers up the Amazon to cages in Kalamazoo just to prove they knew what they were talking about.

“Which door?” I press.

“They are all alike.”

“No, they are not. They have numbers too, but no doubt your eyes are not good enough to read them at such a distance.”

“My eyes are as good as my ABCs.” Feathers much ruffled, he takes off from the “perch,” leaving Louise and me clinging for dear life with no witness to interrogate.

“You did it,” she charges with a snarl. “You annoyed one of the few species of talking birds into shutting up. This must be a record even for you.”

Before I can talk myself into defending myself, I note that our source has landed.

On the “perch” in front of the door to room 2488.

Louise and I bound down to the carpeted hall in sync and hasten around the endless circling hall to the elevators. Once again I bound up to call an “Up” car. (You notice that it is the senior partner of the firm who has to do all the repetitive bounding to call an elevator.) It is empty and we dash in before the doors decide to do any truncating of our fifth (in my case, sixth) member.

Again I leap up, even higher this time, almost elbow-height on the Mystifying Max by my reckoning, to punch the button to the twenty-fourth floor. At least the buttons respond to punching which does not require that pesky opposable thumb common to monkeys and other higher forms of lowlife to operate.

Finally we race down the hall to vault up beside Blues Brother, who has puffed up his chest feathers in a futile attempt at approximating pecs and hair.

Down we look … 0000h, a long, long way. We spot the tiny yellow-and-black signage of crime-scene tape, sittinglike a bee on the huge, elaborate flower of pulsing neon below.

“Think the cops have figured this out yet?” Miss Louise asks me.

I shrug, a mistake. I almost lose it. My balance. I decide to fall backward onto the hall carpet and throw another question up at Blues Brother.

“You said you heard something before you saw the dame fall. What was it you heard?”

“Something odd.”

“Which was?”

“Pretty bird.”

“Will you cut out the chorus? You must hear that tired old line as often as I am forced to listen to renditions of ‘Here, kitty, kitty’ from every street corner, but that is no excuse for resorting to it every time you cannot think of anything new and interesting to say.”

“You do not understand,” BB chirps.

Miss Midnight Louise gives a Cheshire cheesy smile you find in illustrated books by Englishmen. She loves to think that I do not understand anything.

“She did not see me, the woman who flew,” BB goes on. “She was speaking to the air, and then the next thing I saw she was fluttering down, down, down, like she thought she was me. Like she thought she was a bird.” One onyx-shiny dark eye quirks at the pulsing neon ocean below. “She did not land like a pretty bird, though. Pretty bird,” he finishes up on a wistful note. “I wish I could go home where it is safe.”

Well, call me the Wizard of Oz, but I have an idea on that score and it is not a big balloon or some shiny red pumps like my nonfur person Miss Temple would lust after.

So I nod him down to perch on my shoulder—Miss Louise is shocked to see me playing the diplomat between the species—and whisper a few sweet nothings in his feathered skullcap.

He nods and takes off.

“We might want to ask some follow-up questions,” she complains as his feathers disappear over the railing into the Great Beyond.

“Do not worry. I got his room number. And he is not about to fly this berg, as his owner is in residence.”

“So what do you make of it? A bird did it? A pretty bird?”

“Well, a few other twentieth-floor pets than Blues Brother might take an illegal romp. What if a bigger Blues Brother, say a parrot, got loose? Say it landed on our victim’s shoulder, or even the railing nearby. Scared her right off her feet.”

“You would call an Amazon parrot a ‘pretty bird’?”

“I would call a vulture a pretty bird if it was big enough, and close enough. That is just a theory, given we know that Mr. Matt did not lay a hand on that lady’s, er, feathers.”

“Get real, Gramps. I am convinced he could never kill her, or anyone, but I am not about to take odds that he did not give her feathers a real good ruffling earlier. I mean, the idea of the get-together was to get together.”

“Gramps? Are you trying to tell me something, Louise?”

“Nothing either of us would want to hear. So what have we got?”

“A little bird who heard the dead woman talking to someone just before her fatal flight.”

“‘Fatal flight.’ You should write for the tabloids, Pop. Who do you think we have here, Amelia Earheart?”

“We have a room number where Mr. Matt met the call girl. We have a death the cops can’t get a handle on, because it took place in flight. We have a witness who could not stand up in a court of law. And we may have a few more witnesses among the errant pet population of the twentieth floor. I propose we stake out this most interesting level and see what, or who, we turn up.”

“A zoo!” Miss Louise responds with a delicate feline snort. But she does not offer any better ideas.

Chapter 11

Call Her Madam

Alfonso and Barrett sat on Molina’s visitors’ chairs like the mountain and Mohammed finally come together in defiance of all laws of nature.

The mountainously overweight Alfonso overhung his chair in a pyramid of sagging Big and Tall seersucker suit. He could have been suspended in air for all one could see/ guess of a supporting underpinning.

Barrett, on the other hand, was so leanly ascetic that he seemed to float above the steel-legged chair he perched on, angular elbows braced on angular knees, his putty-colored jeans and sport coat blending into the bland plastic shell that supported him.

“We know whose stable she was in,” Alfonso announced as direly as a funeral director.

“Not a ‘stable.’ ” Barrett’s pleasant tenor reminded one of “Mother MacCree” crooned in Irish pubs. “Too much like the fourth at Santa Anita. The deceased was working under Judith Rothenberg’s, er, sponsorship.”

“Judith Rothenberg,” Molina repeated to buy time to hide her dismay. “She’ll want to make a federal case of it.”

“She does run to the dailies at every opportunity,” Alfonso noted sorrowfully.

“ ‘Vassar.’ ” Molina noted the dead woman’s pretentious working name. “I should have realized. Rothenberg still keep an office out on Charleston?”

“Nope.” Barrett rustled through the pages in his card-crammed reporter’s notebook. “She’s in a strip shopping center now, rather appropriately. Near that new club, Neon Nightmare.”

“Low profile, as usual.” Molina was being as humorous as she ever got at work. “Okay. I’ll handle this. Anything new?”

“A bellman has narrowed the floors Vassar worked that night down to twenty through twenty-four, north side of the atrium.”

“Figures,” said Molina. “Her head was facing the south side of the building. And how many hookers rotate through there a night that the bellman has caught such a solid case of Vague? Neon Nightmare, huh? Haven’t heard about it. Any connection with Vassar landing on a neon ceiling?”

“It’s a semiprivate club,” Barrett said. “Part museum, part dance hall, and part theater.”

“Isn’t ‘Nightmare’ a negative name for a business?”

“Nothing attracts the Goth crowd of hip youngsters these days like ‘negative.’ They offer a multimedia experience,” Alfonso put in. “Kind of like Cirque du Soleil shows, only built around neon and hip hop and acrobatics and magic and music. Small-scale stuff compared to the major hotel shows, but it’s got a market niche.”

“ ‘A market niche.’ ” Molina couldn’t resist mocking the eternal sell that drove Las Vegas. “So does death. Okay. I’ll handle Rothenberg myself.”

“Think she’ll raise a stink?” Barrett wanted to know.

“Doesn’t she always? I’d rather have heard our dead girl worked for Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter than Judith Rothenberg.”

“I hear you, Lieutenant,” Barrett said, snapping his notebook shut as if he wished it were crushing a bug. “Good luck.”

Molina didn’t believe in luck: good, bad, or middling.

Not even now that the one call girl in Las Vegas that ‘ Matt Devine happened to draw had turned up dead in a lethal endgame of stud poker.

She found the bland off-Strip intersection where Neon Nightmare squatted unimpressively. The building was blacked out for the daylight hours: it looked like a huge version of the Mirage Hotel’s volcano surmounted by an elaborate neon image of a galloping horse, mane flying, that would blaze against the night sky when lit.

Neon was odd stuff. The tubes that housed the magical, mystery gas were the lackluster dead-white of tapeworms until electricity charged through them like stampeding elephants. Then the colorless gases inside glowed against the dark like lurid chalk marks on the velvet painting of a Las Vegas night.

Neon was mostly a historical display now, not part of the New Las Vegas, which was more about squeezing money out of tourists for theme park attractions rather than gambling. Fifteen bucks to ride an elevator fifty stories up in a half-size ersatz Eiffel Tower. Twelve bucks to ride a phony Venetian gondola through a hotel lobby. Fifteen bucks to view an art display you could see for eight bucks at an established museum.

Such high-ticket prices were paying down the development costs of the multibillion-dollar new hotels that ped-dled culture instead of the crasser side of Las Vegas nowadays. It was still all about money, and so was a call girl operation, no matter what veneer of political correctness you slapped over it.

Like the mob that had ruled Vegas once, vice had gone corporate. Judith Rothenberg had an “office” as well as an agenda.

Molina was not impressed, but this time she was backed into a corner of her own making. If Matt Devine got painted into it by any unhappy conjunction of events, her career was history, like neon. And maybe in as blazing an inferno as the Mirage volcano.

NEW WOMAN, was the name above the door and window. Molina snorted. There was nothing new about the world’s oldest profession but PR spin.

She gritted her teeth and went in, prepared to play the politician she loved to hate on most working days.

A young, anxious receptionist took her name. Molina did not give rank.

“It’s been kinda … rough around here lately,” the girl confessed. A phone line on her machine blinked. “New Woman. Miss Rothenberg’s not in. I’m sure she’d be happy to speak to you. May I take a message?”

She grimaced at Molina as she hung up, apologizing to a witness of an obvious lie, “You’re here about—?”

“The death.”

“Oh. From the media. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for Miss Rothenberg to get back to you—”

“From the Metropolitan Las Vegas Police,” Molina was forced to admit. She had wanted to stay as low-profile as Rothenberg went for the high-profile.

“Oh! I’d better … talk to her on this one. Just a minute.”

She leaped up, revealing a skirt that suffered from an awesome fabric shortage, and skittered behind the bland door that led to an inner office.

A minute passed, then two. When the girl emerged, she assumed an air of authority that went badly with her beringed facial features and deep teal metallic fingernail polish. In Molina’s observation, the more piercings, the lower the self-esteem.

She thought of her daughter Mariah’s pierced ears and hoped it would stop there, but there was no guarantee of restraint for the twelve-year-old aching to go on thirty-two, and physical puberty hadn’t even hit yet.

“She’ll see you now.”

Molina forbore comment and went into the office.

Madams certainly weren’t what they used to be.

Judith Rothenberg looked more like a New Age guru, with her mane of coarse, grayed long hair, makeup-free skin, frank sun-wrinkles, and Southwestern-style turquoise jewelry.

Molina showed her shield.

“A lieutenant. I’m impressed. I expected the usual tag team of male detectives. They always love to visit my shop.”

Molina was well aware of the male fascination with ladies of the evening, which was why she’d come here instead. That, and the terrible fix she was in over Matt Devine.

“This a priority case,” Molina said, not underestimating the habitual expression of skepticism Rothenberg employed with police officers of any rank or gender.

“One dead sex-industry worker? Who would care? I’m grateful for the pull of your corporate masters, the hotels.”

“You should be. You and your girls make a hell of a lot of money off the hotel trade.”

“We call them women.”

“Whatever you call them, they’re call girls. I am not working vice here. I am not interested in your cynicism. I am not interested in the shining career path of the victim. I’m interested in her death, and how it happened. Any insight?”

“Vassar wasn’t accident-prone, or suicidal.”

“How do you know?”

“I know my employees. That’s the point of them working for me instead of a pimp.”

“So what was Vassar’s personal background?”

“It was all in her working handle. She was a Vassar graduate who decided to freelance instead of struggling up a ladder with a glass ceiling in some corporation run by greedy white men.”

“Hooking was an improvement?”

“When you work for me it is.”

“What about her family? Where was she born?”

“I don’t know any of that, and I don’t keep records on my employees. It only provides ammunition for the police and the moral vigilantes.”

“And you say you ‘know’ your employees?”

“Enough to do business. Their pasts are their property. I know their present state of mind. That’s enough. I don’t take on women with abuse or control issues.”

“Aren’t those the women who could most use a compassionate pimp?”

“I am not a pimp. I’m an office manager. My point is that ordinary, well-balanced, well-educated women should be free to pursue whatever line of work they find most rewarding. That corporate ladder-climber often finds she has to sleep her way up a rung anyway. For nothing.”

“Somehow I thought you operated more like a dorm mother.”

“No. We are all involved in a business enterprise. A business that should be legitimatized.”

“Never happen in Las Vegas and the rest of the real world. A few Nevada counties that okay operating `chicken ranches’ don’t make a trend.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t keep working at it. My employees are never coerced, they are drug-and diseasefree—that I make sure of—and they’re not alcoholics. They are working women in the sex industry. I pay them well, and it would be even more if I didn’t have to maintain a legal fund to defend them from harassment by the puritanical authorities. Are you puritanical, Lieutenant?”

“Probably. By your standards.” Molina couldn’t help smiling. “You enjoy cop-baiting, don’t you?”

“I enjoy harassing back a society that harasses women from the git-go, yes.”

“I’ve read the print interviews with you. I know your position. Prostitution should be legal, regulated, and an upstanding profession. Prostitutes should either be free agents, or represented by a ‘manager’ like yourself, who provides a ‘support system.’ How you are not a parasite like any street pimp, I don’t know.”

“First, I’m the same gender as my workers. There’s no male domination involved. Second, I do pay and protect my employees. To the wall.”

“I know you’ve done jail time in support of your ‘principles.’ “

“Principles with quotes around them, Lieutenant? Your bias is showing.”

“Not as much as your receptionist’s thong.”

“You are a puritan.”

“No, I’m a working woman too, and women who flash their sexuality make it harder for all of us.” Molina waved her hand. “Your receptionist is a billboard for your business, I understand that. But you’ll never convince me that anyone using their sexuality for gain, money, or advancement isn’t acting out personal issues.”

“What issues is someone like me acting out?”

“Well-meant late sixties liberalism. You know, I rather agree with you. If there’s going to be a sex industry, and there always has been, better it be under the control of the workers, not the middlemen. But you are one.”

“I’m not exploitive.”

“Maybe not, but that’s an individual thing. Who’s to say your successor wouldn’t be? Wherever money exchanges hands for things people are forbidden to do, by civil law or social mores, corruption, brutality, and exploitation creep in.”

“So you give up individual freedom to avoid the misuse of it? We’re all screwed then.”

Molina shrugged. “Life’s a struggle. So tell me about Vassar.”

“Tell me how you found out her name.”

“Easy. The hotel staff. She wasn’t exactly a stranger at the Goliath. Did she really attend Vassar College?”

“Attend? She graduated. Sex-industry workers aren’t the dumb bunnies they’re stigmatized as.”

“So why did she come West and start hooking?”

Rothenberg leaned back in her chair, the usual low-backed clerk’s model that gave her office a proletariat air. “I don’t cross-examine my employees. I would guess that she was sufficiently good-looking that she was going to enter some field where her looks would be an advantage. Maybe she wasn’t thin enough for modeling, or talented enough to dance or act. That’s how I get a lot of my employees.”

“She seemed plenty thin to me, except it looked like she’d had silicone and collagen enhancements. Before or after she worked for you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t subject these women to physical examinations.”

“But their looks play a big factor in whether you . represent them, or not.”

Rothenberg shook her head and smiled. “The employee suits the venue. For the big hotels, yes; looks are paramount. But I have employees in less elevated outlets. Some are successful, if not as highly paid as the five-star hotel workers, because they’re kind and sympathetic. Many of my employees function as much as counselors as sex partners. Wealthy men, for obvious reasons, require less shoring up of their egos.”

“Counselors? Please!”

“It’s true. A lot of people are very screwed up about sex.”

“I see the results of that every day. The lethal results. Back to Vassar. How’d she become your employee?”

“Heard about me. I’ve become a little notorious.”

Molina grimaced at the understatement. Through the years Judith Rothenberg had tormented the law enforcement personnel and governing bodies of three cities, even enduring long jail terms on behalf of her “principles,” but she was always set free by some judge. Police had learned to lay off her. She had a doctoral degree and excellent lawyers and wasn’t about to be pushed around as easily as street-side madams.

And, too, the police recognized that Rothenberg hookers were less likely to be drawn into the violent eddy of street crime. The woman did protect her own, and her business did operate more as a legitimate enterprise. Which drove the Moral Majority crowd nuts, because it did seem to prove that prostitution could be a “clean” business.

“She could have fallen,” Rothenberg said out of the blue. “I don’t see Vassar getting into any tacky situation. She was extremely savvy. She would ‘phone home’ instantly if anything seedy seemed to be happening.”

“Phone home. That’s just it. We didn’t find a beeper or cell phone anywhere near the body.”

Rothenberg leaned forward, her modest chair squeaking in protest. “No phone? All our workers have phones, and every one of them has an emergency number programmed in. All they have to do is press a button, and we know who and where, if not why.”

“And then the Hooker Police go rushing to the rescue.”

“Something like that. I do have my own security.”

Molina had seen the bodyguards accompanying Rothenberg to court on the TV news. She favored high-profile muscle, like retired wrestlers. She knew how to direct a media circus.

“So Vassar didn’t sound any alarms that night.” At Rothenberg’s shaking head, she went on. “Maybe the phone is still lost in that neon jungle at the Goliath. One of her shoes almost came off in the fall.”

Rothenberg nodded.

Molina suddenly realized that her fears were not valid. Rothenberg would not cry murder, because everything was invested in her belief that sex for sale could be safe and civilized.

“Frankly,” Molina went on, “the evidence is pretty overwhelming that no foul play was involved. There isn’t an inappropriate mark on the body that couldn’t be explained by a fall. The Goliath is the only Vegas hotel that has that dangerous central atrium design. She would have had to be leaning over the edge, but that neon ceiling is pretty fascinating from above. Still, I find it hard to believe that the woman was simply admiring the view and plunged to her death.”

“We’ve never had an untoward incident at the Goliath,” Rothenberg said. “Admit it, Lieutenant. Accidents can happen. Even to sex companions.”

Molina allowed the sick, troubled feeling that had taken up residence on her insides to show on the outside. Judith Rothenberg took it for officialdom hating to admit that Vassar’s chosen line of work was healthy, safe, and subject to ordinary worker accidents now and again.

“I won’t let you sensationalize Vassar’s death to make a moral point,” Rothenberg added more sternly. “I won’t let you use her to undermine everything she believed in, including herself.”

So now the police were the stigmatizing villains, Molina thought.

Amazing how circumstances and everyone she talked to were making it so easy for her to hide the embarrassing truth and save her own and Matt Devine’s skin.

As a mother and the woman who had advised Devine to take the course that had ended in Vassar’s death, she knew massive relief. He would be safe. She would be safe. Mariah’s future would be safe.

As a cop, she was seriously unhappy. It had been too easy to bury this fatal “mistake” to be honest or true or decent.

Her job was to do something about that, even if it hurt.

Chapter 12

All in a Night’s Work:

The Midnight Hour .. .

Only one other person besides Molina knew the why and wherefore of Matt’s desperate rendezvous with a call girl, and she was on the air solid from 7:00 to 11:58 P.M.

Matt called her at four in the afternoon, and they agreed to meet at the black bar named Buff Daddy’s, one place Kathleen O’Connor couldn’t slip into without standing out like a hitchhiking Caucasian thumb.

Matt, being anxious, got there first. The repainted Probe was the only white car in the parking lot, he noted, anticipating his entry into the club.

There were many ways one could feel an outsider. Being a priest had been one. Being an ex-priest had, surprisingly, been another. Being the only one of your race in a particular place was more external, even more obvious and alienating.

Matt just strolled in, checked to see that Ambrosia’s far table was empty, and made for it without much looking around.

He sensed no hostility, just curiosity. Curiosity only killed cats, and the last time Matt had looked he’d had no fur or a tail.

He sat down and, when the dreadlocked bar girl came by about seven minutes later, ordered a beer and a Bloody Mary for Ambrosia.

The drinks arrived much faster than the server had, and the regally red Bloody Mary seemed to make a good standin for Ambrosia. The chatter and buzz in the place returned to its customary pitch, while Matt waited for the absent queen of the airwaves.

Ambrosia rolled in like coastal fog fifteen minutes later, swift and casting a giant shadow.

Matt watched her approach, never having seen her at a distance before, but only in the claustrophobic halls and cubby-hole offices and studios of the radio station where they worked.

She walked with the little cat feet of Carl Sandburg’s metaphoric fog, lithe and sure despite her three hundred pounds. Her bright knit tunic and pants rippled like tribal ceremonial robes. She was a lot younger and heavier and darker, but reminded him of the late sculptor Louise Nevelson, who had dressed like a living totem to some indeterminately ancient ethnic culture and who thereby went beyond that to utter individuality.

For the first time since he had awakened that morning, Matt felt a thread of hope pulling his leaden spirit upward.

Leticia Brown, aka Ambrosia on the radio, spied the Bloody Mary before she did him, and beamed.

“Is that stalk of vodka-soaked celery for me, or are you just happy to see me?” she quipped in Mae West’s deep breathy tones.

“All yours.”

She eyed the long-neck in front of him as she sat. “Men and beer. It’s some tribal thing.”

“It says we’re hoping to stay sober, for the air in my case.”

“Son, you got miles to go before Mr. Mike makes you sit up and pay attention.”

“I know. I thought I’d tag along for your stint.”

“I enjoy a live audience as much as the next radio voice, but Matt, honey, you got five hours to kill after we get there.”

“I know. I’d like to kill a lot more hours.” When she only sipped her drink in answer, he added. “I’d like to kill all of last night, rewind it, and erase it, only that last verb is grimly apt.”

“Last night! That’s right! Did you do the dirty deed?”

Ambrosia sipped the Bloody Mary through a straw, her perfectly made-up face puckered into the innocent insouciance of a fifties teen at a soda fountain.

“Did I do the dirty deed? Lieutenant Molina seems to think I did.”

“Lieutenant? We talking poe-lice here?”

Matt nodded. “Everything went horribly wrong.”

“When doesn’t it, baby?”

He could only huff out a half-laugh and sip his beer. It tasted flat already, but he guessed that everything would for a long time.

“Let’s go back to square one,” Ambrosia declared. She was definite about everything, and that was what Matt needed now.

He nodded permission for her to direct this off-mike session of theirs. She wiggled a little as she settled into the wooden captain’s chair.

“So you did what we decided was the only way out. If a stalker wants your cherry, you give him—her, in your case—used goods. Used goods. Virginity. That whole notion is such retro-think! You read about that poor girl in Pakistan, where her eleven-year-old brother violated some tribal rule by walking with a girl from another neighborhood, and the dudes in the tribunal decided the only way to make it right was to gang-rape the little boy’s teenage sister, and they did it personally while hundreds of villagers stood outside and laughed? That is so not-human. I do not want to share the planet with such scum. Bunch of dirty old men panting after some young girl and coming up with fairy tales about ‘honor’ to make it happen. Sometimes I hate men. Just the gender. Every last one. I do. Tell me why I shouldn’t.”

“It’s a woman who’s hounding me.”

“Un-natch-u-ral woman. That’s who she is. Acting like a man. Like she needs to own people. I’m sorry, Matt. Sometimes I get so mad. You’re not like that scum.”

“I suppose any of us could be like them. If we didn’t have the capacity for evil, being and doing good wouldn’t be worth as much.”

“Don’t give me that theology. I don’t want to see any evil in the world. No devils. And that witchy woman stalking you is a devil. Riding in on her motorcycle, snatching the necklace right off my neck and waving it around like a scalp before she roared off … one unnatural woman. And she don’t even come from some crazy primitive land, you say.”

“Only Ireland, and that is a crazy, primitive land in its own way.”

Ambrosia nodded, and directed the last part of it at the waiter. Her Bloody Mary was a thin, watery pink in the bottom of the tall glass.

She sighed. “Ireland and Israel. Strange, besieged lands. You’d like to like those feisty people, much sinned against, but sometimes they’re so stubborn you could strangle them. We were sinned against,” she added contemplatively, the first time Matt had ever heard her refer to her race, “but we danced and sang and marched our way out of it, as much as we ever could.”

“I can’t know about that, not really.”

“N000, you can’t. And I can’t really know about that poor Pakistani girl, much as I came close to her experience.”

Matt nodded, acknowledging what she had confided to him during a previous session at Buff Daddy’s, her childhood sexual abuse.

There she was on the radio, a disembodied voice that was mother confessor to anybody who chanced to call in.

In person she still hid behind a wall of flesh, flaunting what was pretty about herself, but keeping it to herself.

“So what happened last night that was so bad?” she was asking softly now, the pacifier of a fresh Bloody Mary sitting before her again. “Just losing it? The virginity thing? I’d like to know, since I’ve never misplaced mine yet.”

“Me neither,” Matt admitted, as he had not yet told anyone else.

The perfectly plucked and groomed eyebrows lifted without wrinkling her smooth, brown forehead. “You neither? How’s that possible?”

“I got to talking to her. The call girl. I’d been assured she was a perfect pro, that there was no way I could take advantage of her. Turns out, she couldn’t take advantage of me either.”

“She wouldn’t play?”

“Not so much that. It’s when we got talking … you know what happens with that. You connect, whether it’s over the airwaves or face-to-face. She wasn’t as ‘professional’ as advertised. She had, as they say, issues. I had issues. So … nothing happened.”

“All that angst and nothing happened? I am disappointed, my boy. I may be sympathetic, but I like a good gossip as much as the next person. So that leaves you witch-bait. Still. I say you should have checked your conscience at the front desk and gone for it.”

“Maybe. But then I’d have a better motive for her death. Maybe.”

“Death? Whose death? I hope that motorcycle mama.”

Matt shook his head. “She was there only in spirit. Everything was between me and this woman, Vassar. I left thinking it was all right. I left her the money. She understood why I couldn’t sleep with her. Weird expression. It’s about anything but sleep, as far as I can tell. Anyway, she didn’t take my walking out on her as personal. In fact, I think she was beginning to examine some personal issues. I considered that a positive step. Maybe I was wrong.”

“You jilted a ho’ and hoped that she was reconsidering her lifestyle? I have heard of unreformed do-gooders, but that beats all.”

“Yeah, I’m a compulsive do-gooder, all right. Anyway, sometime after I left at three in the morning, I don’t know when, Vassar slipped, jumped, fell, or was pushed off the twenty-fourth-floor tier of the Goliath Hotel and fell all the way to the third-floor neon ceiling. The impact killed her.”

“Holy smoke, child. You saying you’re not only still a virgin, but you’re a murder suspect too? That witch-woman on the bike is a double whammy, that’s for sure. I’d like to send her over to Pakistan.”

For a split second he actually relished considering it. “No. We don’t want to do that.”

“Speak for yourself, John, such as you are.”

Chapter 13

… Maxed Out

It turns out that we turn up a not very interesting menagerie of bored and thus talkative pets on the twentieth floor of the Goliath Hotel. You would think it was the Noah Hotel and we were the head-counters for the Ark.

I make it one snapping turtle, two trilling lovebirds, three twitching bunnies, four porky pigs, and a python in an air duct, five gnawing ferrets, six yapping lapdogs, seven afghan hounds, eight cooing cockatiels, nine hamsters running, ten gerbils a-gyrating, eleven iguanas leaping, and twelve pampered pussums.

Unfortunately, none of them have anything significant to say, so Louise and I pad out through the kitchen again, snagging an errant shrimp and a fallen-by-the-wayside gourmet turkey burger on the way out.

We pause for a snack behind the hotel’s rear Dumpster, which is camouflaged as a mini-ark in keeping with the Goliath’s biblical theme.

“I must compliment you on your restraint today, Miss Louise,” I say after disposing of the shrimp. I have a weakness for seafood, so I leave the turkey burger, unnatural hybrid that it is, to her. She can take it. She is a modern girl.

“How so?” she asks, patting daintily at her whiskers.

‘We encountered a lot of tasty tidbits on the hoof, paw, and belly up there. I imagine during your life on the open road you must have had to dine on their cousins frequently.”

‘What I dine on when or where is none of your business. Certainly now that I have a personal chef I do not need to rustle up my own foodstuffs.”

“So Chef Song at the Crystal Phoenix hotel is still laying down the rice bowls for you in return for his precious koi going unmolested in the hotel pond, is he?”

“Why should you care? I have never cared for carp. By any other name, and price, koi are still carp. And it is obvious that you have converted completely to health food. I saw the bowlful of Free-to-be-Feline on Miss Temple’s kitchen floor myself. It is amazing that you do not lose weight on such a macrobiotic diet, but perhaps your metabolism has slowed down with age.”

I am speechless. The little twit can load a couple sentences with more insults than Don Rickles can pack into a Milton Berle roast.

“Then you had better hasten back to your gourmet Asian cuisine at the Phoenix,” I say finally. “I need to check on Miss Temple.”

We agree to part ways and I hoof it back home, meditating on that full bowl of Free-to-be-Feline Miss Louise spotted. It is always full because I do not eat that disgusting health food, which is probably composed of compressed seaweed and sawdust. Certainly the army-green color would not appeal to anything other than a buck private and I have never considered military life.

Back at the Circle Ritz, I let myself in through the trusty French doors on the patio, having vented my temper with Miss Louise, tooth and nail, in climbing the palm tree that so conveniently shades the building.

My dear roommate is in residence at the moment, and greets me with happy little cries. I respond with unhappybig cries, and am rewarded when she opens a can of baby oysters and shuffles them over the Free-to-be-Feline in a succulent chorus line as an encouragement.

I wolf them down. Several hours in Miss Louise’s company is very draining.

“Now do not eat just the oysters, Louie,” Miss Temple advises me fondly. “The part that is really good for you is underneath.”

That is always what they tell you and you cannot believe a word of it, whoever they are or however well-meaning they are! I am a great believer that the “good stuff” is usually right on top and easy as pie to reach for those who would take it. Observe the case of Adam and Eve, though that turned out badly, but that is only because it was an object lesson. The lesson is that you must be surreptitious in pursuing the objects of your desire. Do not just reach for them and grab them right out of the Crystal Phoenix koi pond in broad daylight.

So I manage to move a few unappetizing pellets around with my nose in such a manner that my movements could be mistaken for actually eating the things. I see that I must export a few to the wastebasket by dark of night. If I do not disturb the underlayment in my bowl, Miss Temple can on occasion get as stubborn as a Yorkshire terrier and hold back on the toppings.

After my bit of domestic undercover work, I hop up on the sofa arm to smooth my whiskers and bib.

A rat-a-tat of fingernails on the glass panes inset into the French doors alerts both me and my lovely roomie. I manage an under-my-breath growl as Miss Temple rushes to admit Mr. Max Kinsella.

When it comes to Mr. Max Kinsella, there are times when I regret that we are rivals for my Miss Temple’s affections. He has much to recommend him.

I heartily approve of Mr. Max’s second-story skills, his surreptitious ways, his magical arts, his limber physical condition, his penchant for wearing black and only black, his skill at keeping his lips zipped, and his impeccably effective way around the female of his species. In fact, he is a lot like me in many ways, as anyone could plainly see.

That may be why my hackles rise when he enters the picture and my Miss Temple’s domicile, even though he once shared her Circle Ritz unit as an official resident.

Things change, and I am official resident now; he is visitor.

“Missed dinner, huh?” he comments, observing my grooming ritual.

“Baby oysters over dry cat food,” my personal chef says. “Scrumptious,” Mr. Max comments acidly.

I flash him an agreeing glance, but not an agreeable one. “May I sit on your tuffet, Miss Muffet, or is the House Cat going to draw claws on me?”

“Louie is just a big lovable lug,” Miss Temple says, speaking from her experience.

The Mystifying Max honors me with a fleeting glance. He does not believe that for an instant, and I must say I like him the better for it.

“So what brings you out in the light of day?” she asks.

‘What else? Seeing you. How’s the working world going?”

Miss Temple sits down on the sofa, much closer to Mr. Max than to me. In fact, she is close enough to lick his whiskers for him, if he had any.

“Good. That Crystal Phoenix job may have been all-consuming, but now that the revamped attractions are up and running, I’m getting calls to handle public relations for big events all over town.”

Mr. Max runs a few pads down Miss Temple’s arm. “Are you not going to miss Elvis? I hear he haunts the Haunted Mine Ride at the Phoenix.”

“Where does Elvis not haunt in Las Vegas? It used to be his town, so why not? I’ve got a big gig this weekend. Not your style, or Louie’s, but I will have fun. It is the Woman’s World expo at the civic center. Miles of stuff that bores men but enthralls women. I wonder why we’re so different? Do you ever?”

“Never.” Mr. Max does what I cannot, no matter how hard I try. He smiles.

“So what are you working on nowadays, besides writer’s block?”

“Writer’s block. I love it. It sounds so intellectual. There’s never such a thing as ‘magician’s block.’ “

“Actors ‘blank’ onstage sometimes.”

“That is momentary amnesia. Writer’s block is long-term, from what I can tell. I went online and you should see the sites that spring up from those two little words. I have never had a trendy malady before. I enjoy it.”

“You would. You still have not told me what you are up to.”

“I am following your clues, Miss Drew, and looking further into the Synth.”

“Progress? You are making progress?”

He is by now nibbling on her neck, so I suppose he is making progress indeed.

“Some,” he finally says, a weasel word that does not describe the thorough inroads upon her person he has just engineered. “Have you heard of a new club in town called ‘Neon Nightmare’?”

“Sure,” says my Miss Temple, retreating from the abandoned purr-in with visible effort. “PR people know all, like fortune-tellers. A strange outfit is running the place. It is part disco, performance hall, magic club, bar. If you want my professional opinion, the owners have diversified their image too much. Neon Nightmare is a cool name, though.”

“Hmmm.” Mr. Max is miles away from Neon Nightmare.

I am contemplating a fast, full-bore, four-limb leap upon his unprotected spine, but he suddenly leans back against the sofa, foiling my purpose.

“I suspect the place has links to the Synth,” he tells Miss Temple.

“Really? You really think the Synth is concrete enough to have a clubhouse?”

“Why not? An extravagant attraction is the best disguise in Las Vegas, anything extravagant is.”

“What about Matt?” she asks.

Mr. Max fulfills my dearest wish and pulls far away from Miss Temple. “What about him?”

“He needs our help.”

“Let him help himself. It will be good for him.”

“Max! You have a compassionate side, I know you do.”

“But does he have a passionate side? That is something you should think about, Temple.”

“Why?” She is sifting up like a redhead someone has just called a mere strawberry blonde.

“If you want to be someone’s champion, you need to know what he is capable of.”

“Apparently a lot more than I would have thought!”

“Ah. Women always resent the professionals.”

“No, I do not! I did not resent that poor Cher Smith, even though you were feeling so sorry for a stripper you’d never met before that you nearly got arrested for murder.”

Mr. Max sighs, the gesture for which I most envy men and dogs, and I make it a point to never envy men and dogs.

“Cher was not a professional. That was her problem, and ultimately her death warrant. But you are right, Temple. We all have our knee-jerk soft spots. I am just warning you that you have no idea what Matt Devine is capable of; or me, for that matter; or Carmen Molina; or even yourself. Or, to be ridiculous, even Midnight Louie. We all harbor surprises deep within. Sometimes they are well-kept secrets from ourselves.”

“I thought we were all in this together, and going to ‘get together, people and love one another.’ Right now. Are you trying to tell me that Matt might have murdered that call girl?”

“I am trying to tell you that he might not have. It is a fifty-fifty chance for any one of us to committing it—murder—if we are pushed hard enough, and something, or someone, important enough is at stake. And those are pretty good odds for Las Vegas. I could have snapped Molina’s neck the other night when I realized you were in danger and shehad to delay me by going mano-a-mana in the parking lot.”

“But you did not. You let her beat you up!”

“I do not want to fight real murder charges as well as the phony ones, and my object was to get into a car and get to you. A cop car did as well as any.”

“Especially since you can crack any handcuffs on the planet. Still, it must have bruised your pride to let her subdue you.”

“Bruised pride heals. Dead amateur detectives do not.”

“I was all right. I had your darned pepper spray. Not to mention Rafi Nadir.”

“You are lucky he fled the scene. He might have been more lethal than the Stripper Killer, who was merely a sick puppy. Nadir is dangerous.”

“And he once was Supercop Molina’s significant other. Oh, God, this whole town is … a neon nightmare.”

“Exactly. Just like life.”

Mister Max pecks her on the cheek, a chaste gesture even a possessive guy like me cannot resent, and gets up to leave by the same circuitous route he arrived.

Sometimes you just gotta love the guy.

And sometimes you do not.

Chapter 14

… The Shadow Knows

The Strip couldn’t extend to the distant mountains surrounding Las Vegas, so someone had come up with the bright idea of bringing the mountain to the Strip: the club named Neon Nightmare.

From the exterior the new enterprise was a bold slash of neon and a galloping horse graphic atop a man-made peak that reminded Max Kinsella of the ersatz landmarks at Disney attractions.

He squinted at the towering façade by leaning far over the Maxima’s steering wheel to peer through the windshield.

That windshield was the last protective barrier between himself and what he proposed to do.

He was planning to venture back into the world of the professional magician, planning to expose his carefully secured flanks and underbelly … for what?

Not for Matt Devine. He wouldn’t lift a magic wand to save Matt Devine, would he? The ex-priest was grudgingly likeable, and he was a true innocent, but Max owed himnothing. No. And not for Molina. She had twisted her professional and personal life into a barbed-wire spiral of ethics and self-interest like the briar and the rose in an old English ballad. Sweet and sour turned mostly sour. He would do it for Temple, but she was on the fringe of this. No. He did this for himself, for the nagging certainty that everything bad that had happened in this town in the past year affecting the other three had something to do with him.

Call it instinct, call it ego. It was time to face the music and dance.

Trouble was, the Man of a Thousand Faces had problems coming up with a credible new identity. Elvis was too obvious to fly here. The Cloaked Conjuror’s masked costume had come in handy a couple of times, but at a magician’s club would only get Max stoned by flying doves if not more lethal missiles. He’d considered a mime’s disguise: leotards and white-face, but the costume would only emphasize his trademark lanky muscularity, and he couldn’t picture himself, even in deep disguise, with painted teardrops and a bowstring mouth.

So … Max sighed at his newest persona, one he would have never seriously presented to an audience. So unoriginal, but apt and useful here and now. He came to this new costume party as a glitzy Phantom of the Opera, black sequins turning the cape into a distracting, glittering carapace, the porcelain half-mask sporting an Austrian crystal jet-black bat as a tattoo over right temple and cheekbone.

With the cape he could crouch a little to hide his sixfoot-four frame, another trademark he didn’t want ringing a bell of memory.

No one would have heard of the Phantom Mage, but the costume was flashy enough to banish thoughts of the recently vanished Mystifying Max, who had always been both bare-faced and discreet and who religiously wore matte-black.

Max studied the building’s sloped exterior, planning his entrance. It should be noticeable, but not too spectacular.

He wanted to move among colleagues, not rivals. This was a fine line: he must impress, but not over-dazzle.

For some reason he thought of Midnight Louie, a master of surreptitious dazzle if he ever saw one. Always turning up where he was least expected, and always looking like a long-lost alley cat who had happened to get lucky.

Max didn’t believe in happening to get lucky. Neither, he suspected, did Midnight Louie.

He was equipped with all the bells and whistles seen on screen and stage. He could fly like Peter Pan, he could rappel down a skyscraper like Spider Man. Thing was, what to do where, and when.

The dark of night was an ally, for the building kept the neon fireworks at its pinnacle. He finally scaled the rear of the volcano’s rough red stucco surface like an upright Dracula and ducked under the massive neon signage crowning the structure.

Neon required maintenance. Maintenance required a service hatch.

He found the two-foot-square camouflaged flap under the mare’s running right hoof and eeled inside, pulling his cape after him like a train. Or a tail.

Immediately he was surrounded by pulsing wood and glass, the man inside an MTV video. Music, music, music. The building was constructed like a bullhorn. He was at the narrow tip, and all the bass beat came throbbing up at him like a bad dinner. Neon Nightmare was a dance club first, a magic showplace second.

Wishing for earplugs, Max let his feet find the service ladder in the dark and started down. Hmmm. The Phantom/ Dracula would enjoy a swooping appearance. He touched the dark belt at his waist, equipped with a stuntman’s gadgetry, and snapped the steel fastener over a ladder rung.

Below him the bad vibes ratcheted up to a piercing, wounded falsetto howl.

“The music of the night,” as the Master had said.

Max swung out and down, into the pulse of a strobe light above a floor of writhing forms.

They looked like imps in hell, but were mostly teenagers and wished-they-were-still teenagers.

Max landed as light as a thistle-down in a swath of magenta spotlight.

He released two dozen bat-shaped balloons that sped to the building’s peak, farting air unheard in the uproar. They seemed to vanish even as they fell like used condoms, unnoticed, to the floor below, to be trod underfoot.

The Prince of Darkness had arrived.

He was cheered by the drunken crowds for this tawdry, second-rate illusion, and then the dance went on. He unfastened his belt line and left it dangling invisibly for retrieval later.

By strobe light he moved from the floor to the entry area, and there he was, thank God, intercepted.

“Lounge act, or magician?” he was asked.

“A little of both. It’s a cross-media world.”

“Indeed,” said the black-tails-attired round little man who had accosted him. “I applaud your entrance, but we are a private club. Can you pass muster?”

“I don’t know the qualifications, but the place, like the music, hath its charms.” Max loathed the frenetic blend of hip hop and jazz. He favored Respighi, Rimsky-Korsakov, Vangelis, and the lugubrious poetic charms of Leonard Cohen.

“Hmmm. May I escort you to our clubrooms? We are always interested in new would-be members.”

Max recognized that the exact opposite was true, but he was here to overturn custom.

“Please do. I am not often a member of anything, but I do like your ambiance.”

“Ambiance is our specialty. This way.”

Max found the dance music muting as he followed the man up a spiral that reminded him of the interior of a giant conch shell. The spiraling upward path both confused and enthralled, like a fun house attraction.

The trick was the same as in a maze. The route bore only in one direction, no matter how many times it seemed to twist in another. This was a left-handed maze, perhaps in tribute to the left-handed art. Magic. And sometimes, the occult.

Max arrived at as commonplace a destination as any club might boast: a wood-paneled, four-square room at the heart of spiraling darkness.

One wall was solid glass, and it overlooked the madly lit dance floor below.

As he stepped nearer to analyze the view, he noticed other faintly lit windows onto the chaos positioned at irregular intervals in the upper darkness.

A soft whirr made him check the room behind him in the black mirror of the glass wall. A desk was rotating into view.

By the time he turned, it was in place and occupied.

A man in a business suit sat behind it in a silver mesh chair. Its spare, ultramodern shape and bristling levers reminded Max of an aluminum praying mantis. Or preying mantis? Ordinary man. Extraordinary chair. Max began to feel less melodramatic in his Phantom getup.

“New to Vegas?” the man asked.

Max nodded.

“New to magic?”

“Not quite.”

“Not new to the spotlight.”

“I did circus work for a while.”

“Trapeze?”

“Some.”

“High-wire act?”

“Always.”

“This is a private club.”

Max turned his head over his shoulder to regard the masses gyrating to the music unheard up here.

“That’s the paying public,” the man said. “They take us for a New Age disco. We are much more.”

“I’d heard.”

“Are you much more than you appear to be?”

“I hope so.”

The man leaned back in his airy chair, steepling manicured fingers, the epitome of a businessman: overstuffed, well-suited, conservatively groomed, losing a little hair. Ultimately nondescript.

Such men never projected personalities strong enough to seem capable of running anything. Such men were always dangerous to underestimate.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“You mean the Phantom Mage doesn’t do it for you?”

“Not bad. I like the Mage part. It’s different. Implies real magic. You know anything about real magic?”

“I take my magic seriously, if that’s what you mean. I’ve worked hard to make my move into the profession. I have some illusions that no one else does. I was thinking, if there’s a magician’s club starting up in Vegas, like the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, I’d like to be in on the ground floor.”

At this the businessman laughed. “You can’t. Our magician’s club is as old as time, or at least as the Dark Ages.”

Max tried not to over-or underreact. This is what he had been hunting. He must have managed to remain encouragingly still, neither overwhelmed or underwhelmed, because the man went on speaking.

“Alchemy, religion, philosophy, superstition. All played their parts in developing magic over the centuries until it reached our rational age.”

“Not so rational that there still isn’t room for wonder.”

“True. And I wonder who you are and why you’re here. You haven’t given me a street name.”

“I don’t like mine. Why else would I reinvent myself?” No answer. “It’s John. John Dee. As in Sandra, if you remember back that far.”

“Ever been in the military?”

“No.”

“Done time?”

Max paused for effect, and to hint at a slightly shady past. “No.”

“You must have studied magic in its older forms to have taken the nom de illusion of ‘Dee.’ “

Max could have both kicked and kissed himself.

The bland inquisitor was right; Max’s subconscious had dredged up the name of the most notorious alchemist of the Middle Ages and claimed it for his own: Dr. John Dee.

Actually, if he examined his unconscious, when he had said “John D.” He’d been thinking of Rockefeller. Or MacDonald. The titan or the ‘tec writer.

“I am intrigued,” Max admitted, “by magic’s ancient theosophical roots.”

“They were also political,” the man corrected, “and we modern-day offspring do not forget that.”

“I am, at heart,” Max said with perfect truth, “a very political animal.”

“Then we may get along well together. In the meantime, allow us to consider your membership.”

John Dee, aka the Phantom Mage, bowed profoundly in agreement.

The Mystifying Max recognized a kiss-off when he heard or saw one. They would try to investigate “his” background. Good luck.