Cat In A Neon Nightmare

He left the chamber, already planning further investigations right here at Neon Nightmare, more convinced than ever that something sinister was going on.

Chapter 15

… Play “Misty”for Me

Even after three Bloody Marys, Leticia Brown, aka Ambrosia, Sibyl of on-air Sympathy, was as smooth and cool as chocolate-mint ice cream.

Matt watched her field callins and select the just-right song to soothe the savage breast. Her motions on the console were as liquid as her voice. It was a ballet in the dark, lit only by the various red, blue, and green lights sparkling like Technicolor stars in the studio’s half-light.

Matt sat in with her, knowing to keep quiet. Their reflections in the big glass window were ghostly. Nightly voices in the dark were half ghosts to begin with, phantoms of the air waves. The host’s voice was like a baton, urging on the shy triangle section, coaxing the violins to soar, toning the brasses down.

The words, the moves, the songs she chose to play for each caller were a ritual that calmed Matt, both unexpected and comfortingly predictable.

In the secular world, it was a bit like saying the mass.

Ritual mystery and revelation at the same paradoxical moment.

He listened to the sad souls calling in. None had a possible death on their conscience, but the anguish of their lost loves, or broken romances and marriages, their ill children and parents, wove a quilt of guilt and suffering that seemed to blanket the entire country slumbering in the dark of night across the miles.

A radio show was at once as intimate as a confessional and as public as the stocks in a Puritan village.

Matt couldn’t believe he did this, six nights out of seven, for his daily bread.

The Midnight Hour remained the name of his show, even though its popularity had extended it to two hours. Beyond that it would not go. Matt sensed you needed to ration the music of night, the whispers of the soul, even when they were interspersed by tasteful, wry ads for biofeedback devices and magic crystals.

He was beginning to see the program as a sort of midnight mass offered to an invisible congregation.

Once a priest, always a priest. Ambrosia had no such formal calling. Yet there she sat, as sacred as a mountain, as certain and immovable, touching buttons, touching hearts, reaching out electronically as she never could personally, or physically.

Watching her, Matt mourned his missed opportunity with Temple. Opportunities, plural. He had glimpsed a truly personal, consuming connection, and had retreated. To what? An impersonal encounter with a call girl. A call girl. Not a person. A role. It hadn’t worked either. Neither of them could be as impersonal as their ritual roles demanded. Me Tarzan, you Jane. Me pay, you dance. Me lost, you lose.

He regretted “Vassar’s” death. Mostly he regretted her short life. He had to wonder what he had contributed to that. A shot of curiosity? A condescending pity?

It was easy to get maudlin at a late-night radio station. Ambrosia, pseudonym for a strong, lost soul, was a fantasy, but it worked for her and for her listeners.

Mr. Midnight was a fantasy too. Matt didn’t know if it would work for him anymore. And in only two hours that simulacrum of himself would be “on.” Could he still do it?

“Yes, honey, I hear you,” Ambrosia crooned in her soft, maternal, omni-ethnic voice like liquid jazz. “Life hurts. All the great artists knew that. That’s why we love them. That’s why they always made it hard for them. Here’s a little Ella for you. Go with the flow. Let go of the ‘no.’ Say, ye-ess to life.”

Jazz. Beethoven gave him a headache. Duke Ellington gave him hope.

Ambrosia looked up at him, and winked.

The control board blinked. A call coming in.

“Miss Ambrosia?”

“That’s my name.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s a pseudonym.”

“As Miss Red Riding Hood said to the wolf, ‘My, what big words your big teeth have got.’ What can I do for you, honey?”

“Play ‘Misty’ for me.”

Ambrosia’s mellow eyes snapped to Matt’s.

They both knew the reference: Clint Eastwood’s direc-torial debut was a film of that very name. Play Misty for Me centered on a male deejay stalked by an obsessively possessive female fan.

“What a golden oldie!” Ambrosia’s voice was still as smooth as whipped cream. “I don’t know if it’s on my play list.”

“Maybe I’ll call back later and ask Mr. Midnight to play it for me.”

“He doesn’t do music, dear. He just talks.”

“Such a shame. I’d think he could play beautiful music if he set his mind to it.”

“I play beautiful music. What do you want to hear besides ‘Misty’?”

“Nothing. I want to hear `Misty’.”

“I’ll find something just right for you, honey.”

Matt waited, wondering what Ambrosia would come up with. She always surprised and always satisfied.

Her long, artificial nails twisted a dial, punched a button. Matt had never paid attention to the mechanical aspects of radio. They pointed at him, he talked. They mimed cutting their throats, he stopped. He watched a clock. He listened, got lost in the river of voices.. He was a dilettante.

In an instant a sinister male voice was intoning, “I’ll be watching you.”

Matt knew the song, loathed it, and so did Leticia. It was an eighties hit by the Police, a stalker’s anthem. The singer promised to observe every move and every breath the victim took, and tacitly threatened to end both.

Anybody who knew anything about domestic abuse recognized the stalker mentality, and the song seemed to glorify the omnipotence of the deranged rather than indict it. It was raw threat, very real. And even more threatening after 9/11.

Ambrosia’s Cleopatra eyes narrowed at Matt. She was aiming a stalker’s attitude right back at the caller. Both of them had instantly recognized Kathleen O’Connor, of course, who had called Matt’s show before to taunt him.

Matt wasn’t sure about fighting fire with fire in this case, but he guessed Kitty the Cutter would get the unspoken message: the police will be watching you.

Ambrosia made an up-yours gesture through the glass, and leaned into the mike, which was off-air now that the song was playing. “Guess your unwanted girlfriend will get the idea,” she cooed into the foam-guarded metal mesh.

Matt managed a pale smile. Ambrosia had encountered Kitty only once. She didn’t know how lethal the woman could be. And he worried. Kitty had already stripped Ambrosia of a necklace. This act of on-air defiance might motivate a more personal attack.

“You okay?” Ambrosia was asking Matt.

“Yeah, sure. I was hoping this would be a therapy session, though.”

“That woman does need therapy. A good rolfing.”

Matt’s smile became a weak chuckle. Rolling had been a trendy form of rough massage for decades. It was supposed to release inner demons. There were a lot of alternative physical and mental health therapies, but none of them addressed dealing with actual, outer demons.

Matt started thinking exorcism.

And then … the show rolled on. Ambrosia’s usual callers lined up to make the usual requests. In their voices, as if in a confessional, Matt heard the quiver of deep emotion expressed in half sentences and long pauses. There was nothing slick about personal pain. About losing a live lover or a dead child. They weren’t clever or glib, just honest. Just hoping a song and prayer would move someone’s heart, maybe even their own. Matt heard the truth beneath the hope: the fatal cancer that wouldn’t recede without more of a miracle than an upbeat song on the radio; the broken relationship that was obviously over with the other party, and obviously not with the caller. There were some happy calls, like McDonald’s Happy Meals: warming fast food for the soul. The thanks given for a relative’s recovery from a terrible car crash, for a child’s progress in physical therapy, for living with/loving/having “the best” man/ woman in the world.

Sophisticates might laugh at the hit parade of songs played to soothe or reflect the feelings on semianonymous display: John in Reno. Mary in St. Helens. Matt supposed people made these universal sentiments popular because they spoke to them as nothing else quite did, words and music in perfect harmony. It was a rite, like much of religion. Soul food.

And … after a few hours of listening, he felt better. Other people had troubles. His might be a bit more extreme, but no different, really. Guilt. Loss. Hope. Fear. Hope was always the leveler for a mountain of helpless feelings. For him, there was another word for hope. Faith.

He wondered how much of it he still had left. Perhaps enough.

Radio stations signed off by playing “The Star-spangled Banner.” Ambrosia signed off her show at midnight by always playing one song. After five hours of mellow, it was an odd choice: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

In the aftermath of 9/11 and, personally, in the aftermath of Matt’s own disaster, it seemed to strike just the right note.

She gave him a fierce thumbs-up through the glass, and then leaned into the mike again.

“The hot seat’s all yours again,” she said. Threatened. Affirmed.

He stood up. You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself about. And that’s what living is all about.

Chapter 16

… Men in Black Too

Max ducked into a narrow hall, and then found a service closet. The place was packed with them. No major soundand-light show operated in an electrical vacuum.

He peeled off the Phantom Mage’s mask and cloak, stripping to his naked face and black-clad form. Then he bundled the items into a ball and left them on the floor behind a pink neon palm tree.

He hoped to retrieve the Phantom Mage before he left. For now he planned to merge with the civilians packing the dance floor and in that innocent guise do some serious snooping.

If he was caught … hey, just a juiced night-dubber wandering into forbidden territory.

There had to be more to the building than the central neon core and the balcony offices.

At the moment, the center was incredibly loud, the crowd action more like a rave than an ordinary dance club. A deep bass beat vibrated every part of the building. Even the neon lights seemed to spit and hiss and tremble.

Then a herd of gigantic horses came galloping down from the pyramid’s peak. Max studied the illusion. Giant TV screens ringed the apex, each broadcasting the image of the single external neon horse to make a herd. A vivid rainbow of colors cascaded in its flying mane and made its eyes into manic flares.

The “nightmare” of the place’s title had come to life. Max had never seen neon so liquid, so mixed, so electric.

The crowd dancing below was the same, except it was also mostly under thirty. His partner of the moment was a sleek, model-tall black woman wearing tattoos and a filmy designer sari. They gyrated apart, nobody seeming to dance with anybody in particular, which suited his purpose. With every step he took, Max was moving to a wall opposite the entrance, his eyes searching through the strobe-light effect.

The control booth was probably on high, like the casinos’ Eye in the Sky snooping parlors, but there had to be ground access to a physical plant, to whatever powered the hyped-up soundand-light show.

The lower walls were covered in classic neon advertising designs. Pink flamingos. Signs announcing BAR. EATS. He stopped cold to recognize the Blue Dahlia’s fabled signage, then realized that it was an outmoded design. All these pieces were vintage neon, throwaways redeemed. Neon had been what made Las Vegas hot for a long time. Now it was not. Perhaps Neon Nightmare would make it cool again. Like going through a light cycle instead of a life cycle.

The major neon companies were still in business, but now they were fabricating computerized digital light shows, like the canopy over Freemont Street downtown. The new culture-driven megahotels spurned the obvious glitz of million-dollar neon light paintings for more subtle, if no less expensive lighting effects.

Max would guess that some of the neon classics before him had been plucked from storage in the Boneyard, a lot behind YESCO, Young Electric Sign Company, one of Las Vegas neon’s founding firms. Max had visited it when scouting props for his magic act. He had found Wonderland in a wasteland, marked by such gigantic landmark icons as Aladdin’s gilt lamp from the original Aladdin hotel and the gigantic Sliver Slipper. Both were studded with the dotted Swiss of lightless neon bulbs, piled together among other defunct signs like old drunks abandoned to the sun and the sand. Civic hopes foresaw a neon museum in the future. In the meantime some of the most unique signs had been dismantled and lost.

Were the Synth magicians feeling as outmoded as neon signs in the new Las Vegas? Was the Synth not some mystical ancient conspiracy but a response to the contemporary downsizing affecting every segment and part of the country?

Max noticed more men not dancing in the room, all as quietly attired as he. House security. They seemed to be looking for something. .. .

About time he quit mooning over old-time neon and found what he was looking for.

Then he spotted it. As always, the obvious was the best disguise. The three rectangular sides of a hot-pink neon doorway framed an actual door painted the same matte black as the walls.

Max leaned back against the space, his hands behind him feeling delicately for an opening mechanism. At last he found it, the kind of magnetic latch that responded to a sharp push by bouncing the door outward.

Clever. One would never suspect a full-size door operating on a principal designed for cheesy audio-video cab-inets.

Max stepped past the neon outline to vanish into a black blob of unadorned wall. He checked out the men in black opposite. They were staring at his former dancing partner, who was doing a vintage Watusi in the center of the floor, all by herself.

All by himself, Max turned sideways and slipped through the ajar door, pushing it only as far open as his slim frame required.

He stepped into utter darkness.

And then he heard a sharp metallic click.

Chapter 17

… Unfixed Females

What a pretentious joint!

I take one gander at the wild, neon-eyed mare galloping over the top of this pyramid-shaped building and then I ogle the black velvet rope keeping the wretched refuse of the Las Vegas Strip from pouring into the place.

Among the guards up front I recognize a figure whose very name is a curse word among my humans, Mr. Rafi Nadir, whom it was my not-so-great pleasure to spy (while he did not see me) at Rancho Exotica a couple of harrowing cases back. Still, he has done my Miss Temple a semi-decent turn a couple of times now and I cannot bring myself to indulge in my most utter loathing.

Hmmm, I wonder in my wicked way … would it not be interesting if his ex-squeeze, the torch singer Carmen, aka Homicide Lieutenant Molina, were to get a yodeling gig at this place. Sigh. (I have to think my sighs.) No such luck. She likes her anonymous moonlight’ g stints at the Blue Dahlia too much to go slumming at the latest hot spot.

Of course no velvet rope intended to keep out the hoi polloi can bar Midnight Louie from going where and when he pleases. I am the koi polloi and invisible until I strike!

So I stroll among the mingled Manolo Blaniks and Nikes entreating entry with low success. I am the same color as most of their pant legs or boots or platform shoes or what have you.

I am soundless midnight fog drifting past their ankles and calves. I manage to almost sideswipe Nadir himself, who is clad in black denim, so tacky for the guardian of a supposedly upscale place .. .

In a minute I exchange the spotlighted, overheated, pushing, whining hubbub of the Uninvited for the morgue-icy, over air-conditioned, strobe-lighted cacophony of the Insiders.

In here it sounds like a herd of wild horses amplified on rock-concert speakers, and indeed a neon wave of such creatures washes continually over the walls. There is no ceiling as such, as the interior narrows to a black vanishing point.

Actually, I am right at home in the pyramid structure. My ancestors were mummified and enshrined in just such triangle-shaped tombs a couple millennia back, and there is some ancient stirring in my blood at the modern, noisome desecration of my ancestral traditions, not to mention my royal roots.

Call this place Luxor West, or maybe Memphis West, as Elvis himselvis would probably groove on it. Meanwhile, I have all I can do to keep my tootsies and penultimate member from being stomped upon by dancing humans. I cannot understand why they consider the equivalent of smashing a cockroach an exercise, entertainment, and art form. And they would not even eat them afterward! Another signpost of the wasteful Ugly American.

However, native customs are not my reason for reconnoitering this venue. Nor am I interested in the menu, at the bar or underfoot. I am interested in what Mr. Max is: any signs of the Synth.

I have heard enough about this mysterious organization to form some notion of its composition. If we are talking hidden, sinister magicians, as opposed to home-grown, known-quantity ones like the Mystifying Max, I can think of no better candidate than the Asian Athena, Shangri-La, who entered our communal consciousness by shanghai-ing Miss Temple and myself, and most successfully making off with Miss Temple’s precious opal ring from Mister Max. I always knew that opals were unlucky, but would anybody listen to me? No.

Now this makeup-masked minx (I understand the creature’s performing face paint is from the Noh drama of Japan) and her familiar, the Siamese siren Hyacinth, have reappeared in Las Vegas on the grounds of the Cloaked Conjuror’s secret estate. I am convinced that the Synth is emerging from the darkness to do evil. What is the point of being a secret, sinister organization if you cannot creep out once in a while and cause chaos?

So let other gentlemen of the night cruise this Neon Nightmare hunting prey of the opposite gender. I am after loftier game in order to save my significant other. If I happen to run across the winsome Miss Hyacinth in less than her usual homicidal mood, I would not object to trying to establish some rapport in whatever way possible, all in the service of the greater good, of course.

Am I glad I ditched that wet blanket Miss Midnight Louise for this assignment!

She sniffs at my People’s Court appearance, but the fact is I came out of the humiliating episode that preceded our call for justice in very good shape. I had the latest in enlightened birth control methods forced upon me against my will.

Luckily, this gives me what James Bond would kill for, excuse the expression, a license to thrill. Like Mr. Bond’s trademark martinis, I was shaken but not stirred. Unlike Mr. Bond, I am shooting blanks.

Despite knowing this, Miss Louise has no tolerance whatsoever for unfixed females, and I am very sure that neither Shangri-La nor her nimble magician’s assistant, Miss Hyacinth, are in any way whatsoever “fixed.”

Chapter 18

… Play Mystery for Me

Matt took a last look at Ambrosia’s beaming face through the studio glass. On the big schoolhouse clock affixed to the wall the seconds were ticking toward zero hour: midnight. That’s when Mr. Midnight began answering call-in questions.

He had some of his own tonight.

Could he really be sitting here at the same table and microphone when only twenty-four hours earlier he’d been in a posh room at the Goliath entertaining the idea of los-ing his innocence with an intimidatingly gorgeous call girl who called herself Vassar?

Could Vassar really be sixteen hours dead?

A trick of reflection momentarily pasted Vassar’s haugh-tily beautiful white features over Ambrosia’s darkly stunning black ones.

He stared at both women, unwilling to give either of them up for dead.

But a radio show was just that: a show that must go on. And, if he had truly listened to his own advice all these months, he would believe that going on was the only reasonable response to loss.

The canned intro resonated in his headphones, introducing “Mr. Midnight,” who brought personal counseling and humane advice to “The Midnight Hour.”

Personally, he didn’t feel very human tonight. Or rather, all too human. Lord, I am not worthy.

“Mr. Midnight?” The voices were always hesitant at first. Calling in was not easy for most, despite the numbers who did it. For people who sought the long-distance anonymity of a phone-in radio program, speaking up at all was not easy.

He had to respect his callers, even if he had trouble respecting himself for conducting business as usual.

“I’m here,” he said, to encourage her to talk, to affirm something to himself.

“I am in such trouble,” the young voice went on. “I don’t know what to do.”

Matt recalled Vassar saying very similar words only twenty-four hours earlier, after they’d gotten past the roles of buyer and seller, predator and prey (which one being which depending how you looked at their unique situation), man and woman.

Matt suddenly knew what to do. “No trouble is so bad it can’t be helped by talking to someone else about it. What kind of bad is it?”

Very bad. She thought she was pregnant. She was in high school. Her boyfriend, forbidden of course, was older and wanted nothing to do with her or her condition. Her parents would never understand. She didn’t dare confide in a girlfriend; she didn’t have many … any … of those.

The classic story had also been classic in the New Testament. The church had resolved it with the concept of the Virgin Mary. Sadly, no other unwed mother since then had received a similar dispensation. In the Holy Land, they were still stoning them to death.

“Just once,” she was saying. “Honest. I never thought … just once.”

If there could be a virgin mother, could there be a sinless sinner? Not in any religion he knew. There could be an innocent sinner. That he had reason to believe.

He coached her into giving birth to some options: a drugstore pregnancy test. Buy it out of the neighborhood, off the Strip. If it came out positive, talk to a school counselor. Her writhing protest was clear even over the phone line. Planned Parenthood, he suggested in desperation, aware that were he still wearing a Roman collar, even figuratively, that would be anathema. But where does a girl desperately seeking impersonality go with this most personal of problems? To people she doesn’t know, since the ones she does have made clear through sixteen callous years that they don’t really care enough about her to inspire any kind of confidence at all. That was the real sin. It starts at home and spreads beyond to school and the larger society. Once the human hen yard decides that you are the chick to be picked out and pecked to death it only gets worse and your predictably nervous behavior only reinforces the bullying.

Matt recalled the awful incident Ambrosia had mentioned of the Pakistani teenager gang-raped by the village elders. If a pregnancy resulted, that fact would only further condemn her, even and especially in the eyes of her own family. She would be doubly dishonored. For this the God of Christians had made himself human and died by torture, to reflect and reject humans’ inhumanity to humans, and two thousand years later it still went on.

His caller was sounding a little more hopeful. Not a lot. A little. She had a plan, a mission. A test to buy. Information. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she’d go to Planned Parenthood.

Maybe, Matt thought, her self-destructive spiral could be halted by contraception. He had mixed feelings about that issue. He knew many “good” Catholic couples who had rationalized using it despite the church’s stand against it. Many others had tried natural family planning methodswith great or not-so-great success. Being orthodox in any religion was always a balancing act.

But given that this girl on the phone, this child, had been conditioned to not care much for herself, preventing her from having another person in her care until she had matured seemed a necessary stopgap.

“Thanks for listening to me, Mr. Midnight,” she was saying, gushing, high on the idea that she had places to go, things to do, that she wasn’t necessarily alone.

“A lot of people would listen to you, if you take a chance. But pick them carefully.”

“I know. Not everyone is mean, is what you’re saying, even if it seems that way. Chuck—” She hadn’t meant to mention his name, not ever and especially not on the radio.

Matt couldn’t help smiling at the notion of all the “Chucks” out there in the listening audience who were doing hasty examinations of conscience.

“I never thought I could get caught. I never thought, I guess. I need to figure out why I did that, and how not to get caught again, right?”

“You need to figure out who you are and what you want and need and care about.”

“Everybody says that: figure out who you are. They never say how.”

“Look at what makes you happy. Look at what makes you hurt. Think about your future, not just now. Think about what you owe to yourself, not anybody else.”

“Isn’t that selfish?”

“No. That’s self-knowledge. We’re all working on it. Every day in every way. We don’t always get it right. Making mistakes is how we learn.”

“Have you made mistakes, Mr. Midnight?”

“Many.”

“But here you are, rich and famous.”

“Not so much of either, but more than I ever thought.”

“ ‘More than I ever thought.’ Maybe that’s it. Being more than you ever thought. Hey, thanks. And say ‘Hi’ to Elvis for me.”

Matt shook his head at her parting shot. A regular listener, there even when “The King” or a darn good imitation had called in a few times. This was Las Vegas. What do you expect if you hang out a counseling shingle on the airwaves? You are going to get what you asked for. The lonely, the lost, the Elvis freaks.

“Only the Lonely.” Was that an Elvis song? Maybe, maybe not, but clearly Elvis had been so lonely he had never been alone until he died that way in his own throne room.

The next caller was a crank, insisting that aliens had taken over the famed Area 51 outside Las Vegas and were all masquerading as Elvis impersonators.

God save him from Elvis freaks.

Another caller was back in the all-too-real world. She was, she said, a devout Catholic widow. But the Social Security system screwed seniors out of their earned benefits, so she was going to live without benefit of matrimony with Stanley, who wasn’t Catholic and had no problem with it, so they’d both collect the SS they needed to underwrite their monthly prescription-medicine bills.

Both of them had distant adult children they would tell they were married. They hated lying to the kids, but wait until the juniors found out what prices the seniors had to put up with.

Matt heartily encouraged her. To live so long and still find the courage to bond and then pay a survival-threatening penalty struck him as the heart of social injustice.

He couldn’t believe how much this job forced him to endorse positions contrary to Catholic doctrine. He was out in the real, secular world now, not within the enchanted circle of a parish. He had faced a true ethical dilemma, and come out of it more uncertain and confused than ever. Was Miss Kitty winning? Or was he coming to terms with things he had been able to avoid in his vocation? He wouldn’t know until, like his first caller, he went through the process, took action, found himself.

The phone line clicked as another caller came on. “Mr. Midnight.”

The clock said eight minutes to go on his expanded two-hour stint.

“I’m here.” It had become a catchphrase for his show.

The station had commissioned new billboards around town with those two words. Mr. Midnight is here for you. (Even if he isn’t here for himself, Matt would add whenever he drove past one of the billboards.) They ran spot ads on radio stations the nation over, wherever his program was syndicated. “I’m here.”

That’s why he had to be here, tonight, the hardest time he’d ever put in. He should have been somewhere with Vassar, even if it was at the city morgue. Ashley Andersen, she had told him, finally, last night. Confessed her true identity. Ashley Andersen from Wisconsin. On scholarship to Vassar and never fitting in. And look at her now. Glamorous. Well-off. Scandalous. Dead.

I’m here. Sometimes. Strictly by schedule.

“Play ‘Misty’ for me.”

Of course she would call back. Especially now. “You’re dialing the wrong show. Ambrosia’s off the air. I don’t do music, just chat.”

Ambrosia was making frantic throat-cutting motions, but he shook his head just as definitely. Vassar’s death had made him angry for her, and ultimately, wonder of wonders, for himself. Let the games begin.

“Just chat.” She repeated, laughing, with a lilt.

Her voice had the loveliest trace of an Irish brogue. Nothing stage-Irish or exaggerated. Just a faint mist of musicality. Hearing her, one could almost love her instead of loathe her.

Matt held to that idea. Had Kitty the Cutter been lovable once? Or never? Was that what had shaped her?

“What’s your trouble?” he asked, emphasizing the word for the Irish political conflict, The Troubles.

“Ah. It’s about a man.”

“Of course.”

“I gave him everything. Or the chance at everything.”

“And he failed you. Just like a man.”

“Well, no. He was a man. He betrayed me.”

“My gender takes a beating on this program.” Matt could never bear to call it a “show,” though sometimes it was. “Another gal done wrong by some heartless cad?”

“Not heartless. Too much heart. No balls.”

He glanced at Ambrosia. Games he could play on his own time. Raunchy language that could lose the station its license was another matter.

She shook her head, disowned any say-so on program content. This was too vital.

Matt had long since disowned the issue of cowardice. Martial arts had built up his self-esteem in that area, if not others. He had abandoned every precept of his youth and vocation to meet Vassar. Even she had understood and respected that. As he had come to respect her. Yes. That was his weapon. His assignation with Vassar had been a meeting of the minds, even the soul. Who would have thought it?

“A coward,” Matt said. “Fickle. Anything else?”

“Only that he went to a common whore, snuck around on me. Thought I’d never know.”

“Maybe he knew you’d know, wanted you to know, wanted you to get the idea, and get lost.”

“Wanted me to know? Snuck around, I said. Danced in and out of casinos all along the Strip so no one could trace his path.”

“Apparently you did.”

“Well, a woman knows.”

“So, forget him. You really want that kind of sneaky rat?”

“Hmmm. I had hopes that he would have some morals. His history certainly indicated that.”

“So what are you going to do? Moon over this no-good guy? Confront him? He’ll Only lie.”

“You’re right. The only thing to do is to wash my handsof him. Wash that man right out of my hair. Wash my hands of him, like Pontius Pilate.”

Matt felt a chill. She knew her Scriptures as well as he did. He was to be crucified, was that it?

“Maybe,” he said, “you should consider yourself lucky. This is Las Vegas. You can get a lucky break here. He obviously wasn’t worth your attention.”

“Obviously. He obviously was a lot more sneaky than I thought. I guess I’ll just leave him alone all by himself to pay the price. There will be one, won’t there?”

“For every action and reaction, there is always a price.”

“Right. So this is my declaration of independence. He’s off my hook. I want nothing more to do with him. Let him stew in his own juices, if he has any. I’m outta here. Will you tell him for me?”

“I think you’ve done it yourself, very well.”

“Thank you. It’s been fun. And, if you really want to do me a favor, play ‘Misty’ for me.”

Matt was surprised to find Ambrosia “breaking” into the studio, shattering the “fourth wall.” That’s what actors called the invisible divide between them and the audience, and it pretty much applied to radio too. Both mediums offered ersatz intimacy.

Before Matt could answer, Ambrosia punched some buttons on the console.

The Midnight Hour closed for the first time with music, not talk: Johnny Mathis crooning “Misty.” His voice was as caressing as ever. Matt couldn’t believe this was the swan song to Kathleen O’Connor’s obsession with him.

Once the words and music were launched and the mike was dead, Ambrosia glared at Matt. Not at him, on his behalf. “Sorry, my man. I really wanted to give that girl what she had coming to her. And that was not a last word from you. She don’t deserve that.” She smiled suddenly. “Oh, that Johnny is one mellow fellow, isn’t he?”

Would that Mr. Midnight were one too.

Chapter 19

… Max Outed

Not many people, especially security, carried firearms that required cocking anymore.

Max decided he had heard his almost-invisible door magnetically shutting again. Or … he was not alone in the pitch dark.

He stood still and listened.

No one can stand still longer than a performance-hardened magician. Perfectly still. Even his breathing slowed. His performance days were a bit too far behind him, but most of his physical disciplines had held up. He worked out daily.

In time all the tiny almost sub-sonic sounds to be heard became clear.

The faint thump of the raucous musical heart of this odd building. The occasional click, almost mechanical, that came not from a pistol-packing phantom, but from somewhere inside this dark and concealed space.

Max began moving on his treadless, rubber-soled shoes designed to leave no trace and make no sound. He felt likea mime against a black velvet curtain, moving, or appearing to move, but hardly perceived.

And then he heard a thin trail of laughter, as distant as a dream.

His hands reached further out, finding a wall.

He moved along it, swift and silent as a spider, halting the instant the wall vanished.

The slight breath of air on his mask-bare face, the touch of his fingers, told him he had reached the intersection with a wider hall.

This he went down, drawn by the sound of men murmuring, the sound increasing, murmurs becoming words. Thurston in twenty-four … on Halloween yet … damned bastard! … the thugi … dead, I suppose… .

A woman’s voice came bright as a bird chirp in that basso chorus. Cloaked Conjuror, she said. Jeered. Laughter, mostly male. Hearty. Mean.

Max stopped moving, listened further.

More murmurs and now the convivial click of crystal. Not glass, but crystal with its higher, bell-like clarity, as seductive as a long fingernail skimming silk.

He had to be there, bare-faced or not.

Max let his fingers do the walking, those combination pads and prints so supersensitive they could feel another’s sticky fingerprints on glass.

They reached out and touched something. Another door into the dark.

Max knew how these doors worked now. He gave this one a karate chop at the doorknob level, where no doorknob, where no light existed.

The barrier snapped open, halfway, truncating Max’s figure into two halves, both dark.

A roomful of people stared at him as if he were an apparition. What an entrance! Now all he had to worry about was an exit.

Chapter 20

… Synth Lynx

It strikes me as very odd that humans have to work so hard at having fun.

What is it all but running around the block until the day of the executioner’s axe? For the mouse it is the toothsome cheese that comes just before the steel trap. For the cat it is the endless naps that come before the Final Nap. For people, it seems to be addictions, group tours, and therapy. ‘ The scene at Neon Nightmare reminds me of a cruise on the good ship LSD. I was not around for the vintage happenings, but it recall what I have learned of the sixties: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Just add neon and you get the general idea.

The light, sound, and action here is so manic that a dude of my persuasion strolling into the open raises no more of an eyebrow than a chain-smoking, hooka-pipe-hooked caterpillar did in Alice in Wonderland.

Speaking of Alice, there are no little girls in ballet slippers and full skirts here. I am seeing lots of skin, much of ittanned (one way or another), tattooed, and pierced. The same goes for the dudes.

When they are not gyrating in the flashing neon strobes on the central floor, they are hunched around too-tiny tables importing illegal smokes, tokes, and cokes of the non-capitalized kind.

I cannot feel too superior. I do like a little nip now and then myself. It has even been known to turn me head over heels, quite literally. But this is a small vice I indulge in the privacy of my own home, provided for me quite legally by my thoughtful roommate, who herself does not indulge in anything illegal other than meddling in police matters. And maybe sporting incendiary hair, an invitation to arson of a temperamental sort.

Although I understand that my Miss Temple has been snooping around such debased environments as strip clubs lately, I am glad that she is not here to see this: Mr. Max slinking along the perimeter to disappear into a door as invisible and matte black as his own attire.

Mr. Max does slink almost as well as I do, for a two-leg. I know he is investigating the premises, but it still saddens me that he must hang out among such dissolute individuals.

I decide to go forth and do likewise, however, for I have this pet theory. Okay, it is very pet and very much theory. I believe that Hyacinth and her evil magician-mistress Shangri-La are links to the Synth.

They have been turning up at the fringes of several cases like a bad dream now for months. In fact, Hyacinth has been turning up in my personal bad dreams like a case of kitty acne. (You know, that nasty black rash that shows up under the chin. No problem in my case, as black is my business, my only business, but it provokes a major depression in my pale-coated kin, believe-you-me!) So I am determined to stick around this joint until I learn more than I should.

Granted, that is a dangerous position to be in, but if you are a solo operative, danger is often the only way to go. I may not get anywhere tonight, but at least I will see Mr. Max safely home after whatever he is up to is over.

My Miss Temple would appreciate my thoughtfulness, and I will know as much as Mr. Max does, which strikes me as a very good thing.

Chapter 21

… Magic Fingers

If the people in the room were surprised to see Max appear in their concealed doorway, he was pretty nonplused himself.

It was like looking into one of those small worlds in a glass globe that could make snowflakes fall when shaken, not stirred.

The room was paneled in cherry wood and glowed like fine claret. Flames flicked against a soot-black chimney. Max noticed that the disembodied fingers of fire fueled gas logs, but otherwise the effect was British Empire clubhouse, and quite inviting.

To add to the ambiance, the men gathered on an array of tufted leather couches and Empire satin-and-gilt chairs were all in their middle years and dressed in black tie.

Only two women were present. One woman was Hispanic, perhaps mid-thirties, sleeker than a polished ebony hair comb, matte black in her own way, with pale skin like a mask, raven eyebrows drawn in perfect arches, and a wide, crimson mouth. Her eyes were as dark as tar. She too wore black tie, with a man’s formal suit.

The other woman matched the age of the men present, her torso relaxed into middle-age spread, wearing a paisley turban and a black caftan. She reminded him a bit of Electra Lark, Temple’s much more colorful landlady at the Circle Ritz. But her hair was concealed by the turban, and it was difficult to assign her an exact age. A middling-preserved sixty, he would think.

“I see I’ve not dressed for the occasion,” Max said, taking the initiative. He stepped inside, bowed, and shrugged.

“You weren’t expected,” the Hispanic woman spoke in a husky tone that outrasped Temple’s slightly foggy voice.

“Nor were you,” he answered with another slight bow. Max immediately, from some impish impulse, decided to nickname her “Carmen.”

They regarded each other, the assembled magicians, for Max recognized faces that went with familiar posters. These were long-established magicians– One could say over the hill. Steady, reasonably well-known professionals who had not, and never would, front a major hotel act in Las Vegas.

The good old boys. The pre-pyrotechnic crowd. Performers who didn’t have a gimmick, as Gypsy Rose Lee and her stripping sisterhood had found essential. His kind of magician, really. His youthful idols.

They were the Synth.

Of course.

He had found them.

Or had they found him?

Old-fashioned though they were, it wouldn’t do to underestimate them.

“How did you get in?” a Colonel Mustard type asked from the fireplace.

“Who are you?” Carmen demanded, her strident voice overriding the duffer’s.

Max answered the old fellow first. “I blundered in. I’m a magician. I find a door with no visible hardware, I play with it, looking for the trick. Magic fingers.” Max liftedand waggled his own particular set of those useful appendages. “Every puzzling thing I see is an illusion I have to figure out. It’s my vocation. That’s all there is to it.” He turned to the Spanish rose with thorns. “I was known, at one time, as the Mystifying Max.”

Of course they all knew that. He was a renegade. A true solo artist. Everyone knew of him, and no one knew him. And he was one of them. A professional magician of the old school.

“You vanished,” Carmen observed with an Elvis-like S-curled lip.

“I gave up the art, for a while.” Max paused. “It’s changed. Now it’s more fashionable to mock magic than to practice it.”

That was the party line, of course. Yet he believed it enough to sound sincere. He had grown up in the old traditions. Even if he hadn’t been forced to flee after the murder at the Goliath over a year ago, he had already begun to wonder if he could move fast enough for the shell game that magic in the media age had become. Or if he even wanted to.

Heads were nodding around the room, grizzled, balding heads. One belonged to the man who had interviewed the Phantom Mage and said, Don’t call us; we’ll call you. Apparently Max had not lost his touch for changing his personality, his stance, his mentality with each new role he played. Max winced internally. Problem was, now in his own persona, he wasn’t playing the role as much as he should be. He hadn’t identified with this generation; he had revered it. Now, he wondered, had he joined it?

The older woman’s turbaned head also nodded, as much in sorrow as in agreement. “Magic isn’t what it used to be,” she added in the fruity, post-menopausal tones of an Ethel Mertz.

Max took a deep but shallow breath, so no one would notice. He would be accepted here. He realized that meant they thought he was passé, that they had no reason to think he might not be as disgruntled as they were.

An upsetting thought. Not that he had finessed them into accepting him under false colors, but that they knew his performing persona and found it quite logical that the Mystifying Max should be part of a retrograde magicians’ coven, driven by dissatisfaction and bile, angry at progress, set on preserving the past at any cost.

Could it be that truth was the best disguise?

“Come to the fire,” Colonel Mustard invited.

The invitation triggered a memory. Sparks, the man’s performing name had been. Cosimo Sparks.

“Have some brandy,” suggested the turbaned woman, lilting her thinning eyebrows and a snifter at the same time.

There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t quite attach it to a time or a place.

“Czarina Catharina,” she introduced herself. “I did a mentalist act.”

He nodded. He had seen the posters in Jeff Mangel’s on-campus art gallery at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and she wasn’t among them, but a mentalist wasn’t quite a magician. The professor had died surrounded by the posters he had preserved, but now Max was surrounded by many of the famous faces immortalized in those very posters, a Who’s Who of … forgotten magicians, bypassed headliners, outmoded prestidigitators.

The potent brandy seared his lips, making him jerk like a false reading on a lie detector test graph.

“Strong stuff,” Carmen noted with a contralto laugh.

“No,” Max muttered. “It’s strong stuff meeting a roster of a World Magicians’ Hall of Fame.” Oddly, he meant it.

His hand shook slightly as he lifted his brandy snifter and inhaled the high-proof perfume of Hennessy XO Special. He had liked to think he had retired, forcibly, from his profession, pushed by an inexplicable murder into flight. He didn’t like to think he had also reached a dead end.

“World Magicians’ Hall of Fame! There’s no such organization.” Sparks barked like a discontented seal. “It’s all commercial tie-ins nowadays. Make a Lear jet disappear on live TV. Make the Seagram Building crumble on cable TV. We might as well be terrorists as illusionists.”

“You were always too subtle,” Czarina noted sadly, “to survive.”

Her words struck a chill like a dagger to Max’s heart. He had consoled himself that he had retired because his primary career, counterterrorism, had finally made his cover profession useless. But the fact was he had been a magician first and foremost, from his preteen years, and now he was among his own kind, who faced his own kind of extinction, and they were his enemies. They were the Synth.

Max couldn’t help it. He took a deep, sighing breath.

Carmen rose and stalked toward him. “You are one of us, aren’t you? However, or why ever you ‘blundered’ in here, it was no accident. You have come home.”

An undercover operative could not have asked for an easier “in.”

A fellow magician could not have imagined a harder task.

He was in like Flynn. Like Errol Flynn, Mr. Swashbuckler, he would have to play many parts, and some of them, he saw now, might break his heart.

Chapter 22

… Playback

Hand it to Leticia, Matt thought. She never fully relinquished the Earth-mother persona of Ambrosia.

She walked Matt out to the parking lot. The 2:00 A.M. sick-green parking-lot lights turned the black asphalt gray and made a knot of female fans waiting for Matt look jaundiced.

“Safety in numbers,” Leticia declared. “Don’t you linger after all the sweet young things get your John Hancock and leave.”

Matt eyed his white Probe, looking pea-green in the lights, and nodded. He could edge over to the car while signing the station photographs and they could all skedaddle without risking a close encounter with Kitty the Cutter.

The slam of Leticia’s car door assured him that she was sealed away from any motorcycle raids. He thanked his gushing fans and signed, moving toward the car.

Sweet young things they were not. More like sweet middle-aged things, women whose faces wore the worry lines of hard work and hard times. People with higher educations and high-paying jobs took their insecurities to psychoanalysts and trendier alternative practitioners. Radio listeners let it all hang out, Matt had discovered, the same phenomenon that drove the tabloid TV show phenomenon and kept Jerry and Ricki and company in clover.

He was just a local phenomenon in a second-tier media. He liked it that way, and hoped that Kathleen’s unfond farewell broadcast on his show meant she was really out of his hair.

He was signing on the Probe’s fender now, straining to keep some light on the photograph so his penmanship was at least recognizable.

There was one last customer, an immensely overweight woman with the optimistic beaming eyes of a child. Seeing such doomed outcasts always made Matt hurt for them. Everybody faces rejection, but not everybody is a walking advertisement for it. She did everything wrong: carried too much weight, wore circus-size polyester, had her brown hair crimped into some shapeless frizz, a bad complexion, thick-lensed glasses in bad frames, and bit her fingernails down to the bloody quick. Did the Almighty have no mercy sometimes? Couldn’t He have given this female equivalent of Red Skelton’s Poor Soul some natural advantage? Just one.

Her smile. She brought the signed photo close to the crooked-framed glasses, read what he’d written, and smiled. Her teeth were perfect: small, even, white as snow.

“Gee, thanks! That’s one thing I’m good at. Devotion. Your ‘devoted listener.’ I just love radio. It lets you imagine anything.”

And off she toddled, happy.

Matt leaned against the car door. There ought to be an Individuals Anonymous group for people who weren’t thin, confident, good-looking, and socially smooth.

They should spend their time reinforcing their self-esteem, instead of pursuing autographs from people like him who looked like they had it all together and certainly didn’t.

He breathed deeply. The air was the exact temperature of his body. Breathing seemed to be swimming in a puddle of warm, unscented night.

Was she really gone, out of his life, Kathleen O’Connor? But before he could breath free, something fell from somewhere, out of the corner of his eye, a piece of air-lifted paper, whatever. It looked like a falling woman, Vassar slipping downward in the hollow core of the Goliath Hotel at an hour when everybody else was wafted upward in the glass cages of hotel elevators.

A pale figure stepped out of the radio station building’s one-story shadow.

Matt straightened, tightening his fingers on the car keys in his pocket.

He’d been dreaming when he should have been following Leticia’s orders and getting himself out of the deserted parking lot.

The figure was slight, light-colored, and coming toward him.

For a moment he fantasized the ghost of Vassar. Then he feared it was Kitty.

Before he could act on any instinct: stand or run, the figure had come too close to avoid.

“Matt? You are Matt Devine?”

He hesitated, unwilling to give anything of himself away again.

The figure stepped closer, into the wedge of green light that shed a lime pall over Matt and his white car. He was relieved to see it was a man.

Most people would fear male muggers. Matt feared a female one.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Don’t you recognize me?”

This invitation to inspection had Matt trying to pin a label on a cipher. The guy was maybe five-five, pale-skinned, no Las Vegasite. Balding hard, but only in his … mid-thirties, maybe? Mild-looking. No mugger. So what was he, then?“It’s Jerome,” he said.

Jerome. Okay. Didn’t ring a bell. Or did it?

“Do I know you from somewhere?”

“St. Vincent’s. And I guess I’ve changed. Used to have a mop of hair. That’s the way it always is with us bald guys; heavy on top at the beginning, cue balls by the time we hit the late twenties. Your hair seems to be hanging on.”

“Yeah. I guess.” Matt didn’t think much about his hair, except when it needed cutting. It had never occurred to him that cutting was a privilege. “St. Vincent Seminary?”

“In Indiana. We were there. Together.”

“Jerome. Jerome! Uh, Johnson, wasn’t it?”

“Still is.”

“Sorry. Las Vegas is so far away from all that.”

“Is it ever.”

“What are you doing here?” •

“Here? Right now? Or here in Las Vegas?”

“Both, I guess.” Matt looked around, realizing their vulnerability. “You have a car. Want to go somewhere?”

“I have a Geo Metro. Sure, but I don’t know the places yet.”

“Why don’t you follow me to the first fast-food joint we hit? They’ll have chairs and coffee.”

“Kinda like an AA meeting.”

“Yeah.” Matt immediately wondered if that was Jerome’s problem. Because he had to have one. People from your past didn’t turn up unless they did. Look at himself, turning up in Cliff Effinger’s present. And now Effinger had no future at all. Ever. Anywhere.

I’m dangerous to know, Matt wanted to tell Jerome Johnson from St. Vincent’s. You don’t want to go anywhere with me.

The man reeked of the Midwest. He could have been an extra in Fargo, but he’d come a long way to be in this parking lot. Matt couldn’t turn him away.

He got into the Probe, started it, watched in the rearview mirror for Jerome’s vehicle to wheel in behind him. It did, a toy car on spindly wheels, looking as insubstantial as the man who drove it.

Why? Matt wondered.

Johnson had obviously come here trying to make a connection. St. Vincent’s was an Ice Age ago to them both. So much water had melted under the church’s medieval bridge since those days. So much had happened to them both. Jerome today had not worn a collar. It didn’t mean he had left the priesthood too. Lots of priests nowadays dispensed with obvious religious labeling. But Matt sensed they had something in common. That was why Jerome had looked him up, had approached him in this disconcerting way. The only way he could have found him was through the radio persona, and even then he would have had to have tried hard.

Matt pulled onto the deserted street, watching for motorcycles, but more worried about the unassuming man in the very unassuming car behind him.

Matt didn’t like surprises from his past any more than he liked surprises from Max Kinsella’s past. In that case, he had ended up stalked by a madwoman. What did this sad little guy want from him? More than Matt could or would want to give, he’d bet.

Lose one crown of thorns, gain another. God help him.

He drove, half an eye ahead on the highway of lit signs fifteen feet above the street level, half an eye in his rearview mirror, not only scanning for the headlights of Jerome’s little car, but for any other following vehicles.

Nothing.

Matt suddenly swung the Probe’s steering wheel up the usual Strip center rise and dip designed to discourage speedsters. A Wendy’s he remembered only when he saw the big lighted sign.

He took a slot between two mammoth SUVs near the front door. Jerome found a place in the street-facing row behind him.

They entered together, suddenly lit by night-bright restaurant fluorescents.

It was awkward standing in line to order, strangers surrounded by strangers, not wanting to make small talk because there was none. Between graduates of the same seminary there was only large talk.

They found a fairly crumb-free table for their plastic trays and sat near the window, where they could watch lights stab the night ad infinitum. It was like a fallen universe, a big city street at night, with galaxies of signs touting 24/7 enterprises and the small satellites of cars cruising by continually.

The black-backed window faintly reflected their faces, neither particularly recognizable.

“So how did you find me?” Matt asked, stripping the flimsy paper jacket off the straw for his Sprite.

“Just … luck. I saw the billboard. Or one of them.”

“Those miserable things! Hype. But the radio industry is a media business, and it’s all hype. What were you doing in Las Vegas?”

“I work here. Live here.”

“Really? You ever go to the ex-priest meetings in Henderson?”

Jerome lowered his eyes to his tissue-wrapped burger. Grease was soaking through like giant raindrops. “No. I … I felt no need.”

“I don’t go myself. I just was surprised that there were enough of us in Las Vegas to get a group together. So you are … ex, then?”

Jerome nodded as if not happy about it. Or about admitting it. Matt said, “There are almost as many `exes’ as `ins,’ these days.”

“I know. I heard about you.”

“What?”

“Nothing bad. Only that you’d gone through the whole laicization process. I didn’t. I just … walked away.”

“I guess that’s the norm.”

“You were never the norm. In seminary, I mean. You were always different.”

“Different? Me? How?”

“You kept to your studies and yourself. Oh, you played sports, did the community thing, but it was like you were never fully there.”

“I felt pretty grounded.”

“You never—” Jerome sucked on his own straw, as if swallowing his next words. He was drinking a cola, and Matt wondered about taking in all that caffeine so late at night … so early in the morning.

“I never what? I’m used to having my failings presented to me. Seminary, you know.”

“You didn’t have any failings. We all figured you were the one who’d never leave. Except I—”

“You what?”

“I never bought that, even though you always seemed like you were really meant to be there. I always felt you were escaping your past, but I had to honor what you were trying to be.”

Trying to be? Matt wondered. Was he still trying to be something unreachably honorable? Not a priest, but a celibate. Would Max Kinsella consider honoring him for his … restraint with Temple? Would he be having this conversation with Kinsella ten years down the pike?

But this was now, and that was then, and it was disturbing news.

“All? You were all talking about me? I didn’t talk about you.”

“Maybe that’s why—You didn’t know what was going on. Did you?”

“I like to think I’m fairly observant.”

“But then.”

“But then … we were kids. We were engaged in a very serious course of self-examination and study.”

“I used to admire you.”

“Used to?”

“I mean, back then, when I was just a kid. I was two years behind. You don’t remember me, do you?”

Matt tried to, and then he tried to think of a way oflying and saying he did without actually lying, but Jerome cut through all that.

“I not only had hair then, but I had glasses.” He looked up from his burger. He had pale blue eyes, rather soulful. “I wear contact lenses now. I don’t much want to be what I was back then.”

“It’s understandable.”

“Is it? How can you say that when you don’t understand?”

Matt felt irritation scratching like his long-lost clerical collar. He’d finished a draining night shift at work; he was at worst a suspect in a murder and at best responsible for a woman’s suicide. And now he was expected to make small talk with someone he didn’t even remember from a time he wanted to forget.

And who expected him to do this? He asked himself. He did. He smiled wryly, at himself.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind, and, no, the brain is not turning back the album pages very efficiently right now. Doing a live radio show is terribly draining. I’m told by those who know that there’s a natural let-down’ afterward. It’s not my best time.”

Jerome swallowed, not any food or drink, just his own very visible Adam’s apple. “Mine neither. I’m not an after-midnight kind of guy.”

“What’s your job?”

“Day shift, obviously. I’m a picture framer.” He shrugged. “Guess it’s an outgrowth of all those Sacred Heart paintings the old folks at home had framed on the walls everywhere. You can’t outrun your own history.”

“No. You can’t.” The words cut Matt like a razor.

His own history was getting pretty lurid. He wondered what Jerome would think if he knew his old seminary schoolmate had been with a high-priced call girl just last night. Matt checked his wristwatch with a spasm of guilt. This time last night he had been talking to Vassar. She had been alive.

“I don’t mean to keep you up.”

“It’s not you,” Matt said hastily. This guy looked like people were always ducking out on him, and Matt didn’t want to add that guilt to the load he already carried. “I was thinking of a … friend.”

“There’s someone—?”

“Someone? Oh. No. I’m single.”

Jerome nodded, looking a little uneasy.

“Something wrong about that?”

“No. Only it’s obvious—”

“What?”

“That you’re committed to marriage, since you equate being single with having no significant other.”

“Yeah, I guess. Listen. We haven’t seen each other in years and we weren’t even in the same class. I don’t get—”

Jerome took a deep breath. “You never knew, did you? I kinda hoped it was that way, that one of us got out unscathed.”

“Knew what?”

“What was really going on in seminary.”

Matt felt the burger bites in his gut congeal with cold, as if slapped with an ice pack. Oh, my God, was this about the nightly news?

“If I was so ignorant, why are you looking me up?” he asked.

“I was hoping to find someone who escaped. Who got clear. If one did, it makes the rest of it, the worst of it, better.”

“One! Are you saying it was that prevalent?”

Jerome shrugged, sucked on his straw even though only a few drops of melted ice water migrated up his straw. “Maybe not. It just Telt like it. To us.”

“Was it peers, or instructors?”

“Both. Kind of like those British public schools used to be, maybe still are. Bullying and boys on boys. I think now it was all about authority, not sex. Sex was just the excuse.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“Why, when telling is the only redemption?”

“Why tell me?”

“I—I always admired you. I hoped you’d escaped what I couldn’t. It’s important to me to know that you did.”

“Yes, I did. At St. Vincent’s. I could swear that on a Bible in a court of law, but, Jerome, I didn’t escape it elsewhere. I was at St. Vincent’s because I was running away from the abuse at home. Not sexual, thank God, but abuse.”

“You were abused?”

“What kid hasn’t been, to some extent, by someone at some time?”

“You believe that?”

“I’ve seen that. No family is perfect. Every generation has its own axe to grind. We all get sandpapered with someone else’s issues. And we go on.”

Jerome nodded, and neatly wrapped most of his burger in the tissue for disposal.

Matt hadn’t managed to eat much either. Not so much because of Jerome Johnson, but because of Ashley Andersen, both Upper Midwest babies in a world far colder than a North Dakota blizzard.

“Maybe that’s why no one messed with you,” Jerome said meditatively. “I remember you working out those marital arts moves, alone. You were like … oh, Luke Sky-walker in the first Star Wars movie, remember? Looking for the Force in yourself. I never thought it might be because … you looked invulnerable. Like nobody should mess with you.”

“They didn’t. So maybe my past made me less likely to be abused. It didn’t feel like it then.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m strong in some ways, and weak in others. Hey, we’re human, yes?”

“I always …”

Jerome no longer seemed capable of finishing a sentence, and Matt, the stressed-out Matt who’d seen a bitter enemy make mincemeat of his life and more importantly of his conscience, was growing impatient with this stumbling loser who had nothing better to do than to look him up. The blind leading the blind was not Matt’s current goal.

“I always … liked you, especially,” Jerome said, finally raising his limpid blue eyes to Matt’s again, brimming with something unfortunately quite readable.

Holy Mother of God. Help me now and at the hour of my death, amen.

Chapter 23

The Morning After: Fast

Backward

“In bright and early, Lieutenant?”

“Always, Chet. So are you.”

“Yeah, but I got a great job. This is better than Eye in the Sky at any Strip hotel. This is Eye in the Sky central for all of Las Vegas.”

“This” was Chet Farmer’s wall-to-wall wired domain, stacks of audio and video equipment, a gray/black wallpaper of knobs and switches and dials.

The high-tech surround would have creeped Molina out, but Chet thrived in it like a spider in an electronic/digital/ computerized web. There was a bit of the arachnid about him anyway: long bony limbs and such poor eyesight that he had to wear half-inch-thick lenses in heavy-framed plastic glasses despite living in the age of thin high-power optical lenses that gave everyone else a cosmetic edge.

There was no way to avoid describing Chet as a nerd, but he was a happy nerd. That was the blessing given to nerds along with extreme myopia and a socially-challenged existence.

“I need to see the Goliath tapes.”

“Sure thing.” He spun in his mesh-seated chair to pull some labeled tapes out. “Must be a sensitive case.”

“Just hard to call. Why do you say ‘sensitive’?”

“Su and Barrett both checked these out. Separately. And now you’re here.”

“Glad to hear they’re on the job. Either one come up with anything?”

“Nope. Just a lot of faces and bodies milling through the casino and lobby area.”

“I’ll take another look. New eye, new ideas. Say from six to eight P.M. You make that look so easy,” Molina said, envying the ease with which Chet played his electronic game board. “I had to let my twelve-year-old daughter take over the VCR at home. She’s teethed on computers since third grade.”

“That’s cool. We can’t afford any more computer-phobic generations. Do you know my folks don’t e-mail?”

Chet was on the cusp of forty, Molina figured, so his parents must be senior citizens baffled by debit cards at the grocery store.

“At least I have a job where I have to keep up on some modern improvements,” Molina said. “Try the hotel registration area first.”

“Okay. There’s the time in the lower right-hand corner.” Molina watched the broken LED numerals flick through their predictable round.

If Su and Barrett had seen nothing, maybe nothing was to be seen. Certainly Vassar hadn’t checked in at the front desk. But Matt Devine had, and she wanted to know if he had been caught on tape. It was possible he hadn’t. The tapes were pervasive but general. It would be easy to miss one person in the constant flood of bodies through a major hotel during the evening hours.

And, of course, Su and Barrett only knew to look for Vassar and anything “unusual.”

She forced herself to focus on the front desk clerks. Mattwould have had to pass through the lines leading to one of them.

That was the one given she knew, that no one else did. Who the man was that Vassar had met.

The tape was black and white; no point wasting color on pure surveillance. It made finding Matt’s very blond head harder. A lot of silver-tops came to Vegas and in black’ and white blond was white.

Something familiar flashed past her eyes. “Stop!” Chet froze the screen instantly.

“Can you go back in slow motion?”

“I can make this thing do everything but cook, Lieutenant.”

“Slow motion is good enough, Flyboy.”

Chet grinned. The images began running backward in a staccato fashion, as jerky as if a strobe light were flashing somewhere above them.

A man who had walked out of the camera’s view back-stepped reluctantly into focus again.

“Stop there.” Molina leaned inward, studied the figure from the same bird’s-eye view as the camera. His face was foreshortened, his shoulders exaggerated. She caught her lower lip in her teeth. Rafi Nadir? She’d only seen him close-up once in recent years, and a lot of Middle-Eastern men came to Las Vegas, enough that the security lines at McCarran Airport snaked through half the terminal nowadays. Was it him, or just your average possible terrorist?

“Want a close-up?”

“Yeah. Lower left-hand quadrant.”

Magically, the screen expanded to a larger blur of bodies.

Rafi? Rafi had been at the Goliath that night? It was possible. He was quite the man about Las Vegas, from what she had gleaned.

“That enough, Lieutenant?”

“Quite enough. Go back to the overview and run the tape forward.”

“Nobody good, huh?”

“Nobody good, right.”

No good, period. Molina brooded. He had gone downhill since L.A. Downhill and edged into quasi-legal territory, at the least. Not all cops stay the course, but they don’t have their futures written on their foreheads either. She had the uneasy feeling that Rafi’s downward slide, if graphed, would exactly parallel her upward climb, in rank at least. It had not started out that way.

All the while her eyes were scanning the images flowing past the registration desk. The time read 6:10, the seconds fleeing like suspects.

Ten minutes, then she sat forward again.

Chet read her body language and immediately stopped the tape, reversed it, froze it.

Molina checked the time, then noted it down in the small notebook she carried in her jacket pocket: 6:23. And Matt Devine waiting at the brass stands that kept people from rushing the desk clerk.

What had nailed him was that he was looking around, constantly. Hunting Kitty the Cutter. If you knew to look for a hunted man, and Barrett and Su had not, it was easy to spot that bobbing head amid the sea of bored, nodding heads.

She nodded at Chet herself, okaying him to continue the tape, and watched Matt approach a desk clerk, chat, flash a roll, wait, study the page her computer spit out, hesitate, chat some more. The woman smiled. He was changing his room number and the woman smiled. What an operator! Mr. Charm. Irritate an overworked functionary and have her eating out of your hand anyway.

He did everything she had suggested.

“Stop.”

Again the taped world obliged thanks to Chet’s quick trigger finger. Molina studied every single soul in the frame, maybe seventy people. Nobody recognizable. No Vassar. No Kitty. No Rafi.

Nobody to see Matt Devine check into the Goliath Hotel for a date with death.

Nobody but the eternal Eye in the Sky and anybody with access to studying the tapes.

“Forward,” Molina finally ordered.

Docilely, everyone on-screen sprang to life again, shuffling forward in line, slapping credit cards to marble, jostling each other, hanging back behind the registration line watching. .

Son of a biretta!

Molina’s hands tightened on the hard plastic arms to keep herself from leaping out of her chair, but the control geek at the monitors sensed her excitement.

“Got it!” Chet caroled.

Even in black and white, there was no mistaking that head. Black as night, towering over the common crowd.

Max Kinsella had been at the Goliath Hotel the evening that Vassar had died, long before she and he had tangled in the Secrets parking lot and before Temple Barr had met the Stripper Killer face-to-face in another parking lot.

The ultramodern letters on the frozen tape read 6:26.

Molina was doing some fast mental math.

Was there any way Kinsella could have escaped her custody and gotten back to the Goliath in time to interfere with Vassar in a fatal way?

Yes. And the bastard would even have had time to visit his heroic ladylove on the way.

If Kinsella could fly as a suspect, Matt was off the hook, and so was she.

But no. She and Matt would still have to reveal their roles in the whole charade, and who would believe the tale of Kitty the Cutter, woman of mystery?

Still. Kinsella had been there. She knew it. She had evidence. It would be worth something. Sometime.

Chapter 24

… Gone for Good

Matt awoke, so early that the light wasn’t sluicing through his bedroom miniblinds, and panicked.

Yesterday had been Sunday and he had missed mass. The instant overpowering, guilty surge was an old altar-boy reflex.

Matt knew it had been Sunday. He knew he had missed mass. He had deliberately missed mass.

After the Saturday night he planned had turned out, he hadn’t figured out how to go back to church. Was he a lamb of God or a leper? Did he need confession, and if so, exactly what sins should he confess? For the first time, Matt understood the constant internal agonies of overscrupulous Catholics caught up in an obsessive-compulsive round of self-doubt.

Father, forgive me, for I may have done something wrong sometime, like maybe now by debating just what is confessable and what is not.

Often Matt had been secretly impatient with their endless, tiny, tedious venial sins, then had joined their self-abasement and assigned himself penance afterward. Now that his mind was splitting hairs, too, he began to see the torturous thumbtacks of self-incrimination that pinned these overanxious souls to a rack of worry and insecurity.

Okay. Yesterday had been Sunday. Today was Monday. A new week. Vassar was two days dead instead of one. Molina was digging into a new week’s worth of investigative work. He was, what, eight hours into being promised release—paroled but not pardoned, if you will—by the call-in lips of Kathleen O’Connor? Could you believe a psychopath? Wasn’t the impulse to want to believe them just another way they wrapped you up tighter in their own sick scenarios?

Nothing was sicker than his feelings about Vassar’s death.

Matt sat up, his bare feet on the wood floor, which felt slick and cool.

Somebody must miss Vassar. She hadn’t lived, or worked, in a vacuum. Maybe he could find out who. Tell them, him or her, about her last hours, which hadn’t been too bad really … or was that hubris?

Matt shook his head, trying to make sense of the crowded hours: Vassar, and then Molina breaking in on him at home with such awful news, and next Temple, asking questions he didn’t want to answer. Then Leticia baby-sitting him through the lonely hours live on radio, and Kathleen calling to say he was free, and finally Jerome, Jerry Johnson from seminary, showing up in the parking lot with fifteen years of baggage invisibly dragging behind him, expecting Matt to help lift the load.

Punishment, he supposed, for trying to turn against years of conditioning.

He got up and trudged to the shower, sloughing his gipajamas. Martial arts-wear as sleepwear. Was there some underlying statement in his habits? Did he need to be on guard even as he slept? Especially as he slept? Yes.

Hot water, then cold may have cleared his head, but not his heart.

Dressed, Matt went into the main room, not surprised that the hour was too early for anything except extra z’s.

Maybe he would drive somewhere, to an all-night fast-food place. Eat breakfast as the sun rose over the mountains at the valley’s eastern edge.

His wallet and keys lay on one of the small cube tables that formed an impromptu coffee table in front of the sofa.

He swept the items up, designated for opposite pants pockets, then stopped to study the key ring.

Something was different. Wrong. Missing.

His heart leaped to the top of the Mount Charleston, seeking the first rays of sun.

It was Monday morning, and Kathleen O’Connor’s worm Ouroboros ring was gone. The bad news was that sometime in the recent past she had been in his rooms, had moved among .his things, perhaps even while he slept, to accomplish the sleight of hand of the missing ring. The good news was that, for the first time, he truly believed that she had given up on him.

Liberation felt uplifting, like a good confession. Like saying the Apostle’s Creed and starting a whole new day, a whole new life.

But one man’s liberation was often another’s loss. The snake had left Eden.

Where was it slithering next?

Chapter 25

… Jailhouse Hard Rock

“Okay,” Molina said, shaking the multivitamin energy drink-to-go on her desk.

Breakfast.

Everyone in the room was eating on the run, or on the meeting break: Alfonso, Barrett, Su, and Alch.

Alfonso had a McDonald’s cholesterol special on his lap, sausage and cheese predominating. Barrett munched a sports nutrition bar. Su had coffee from the Office Urn of All Sediment and an Almond Joy candy bar. Alch, he went for a Weight Watchers bar, munching in time with Barrett.

Molina eyed her troops, aware how their very differences, physical and psychological, made them good partners. Too good for this case that cut so close to her own bones. Yet she had to do her job. Or seem to.

“I saw Rothenberg,” Molina announced. “Vassar was her girl, and Rothenberg believes that her girls are too mentally, physically, and socially healthy to off themselves, or to get offed. She won’t be yelling police incompetence if we just bury this investigation. Case closed?”

“No way,” Su mumbled through three hundred luscious calories that would not put an ounce on her tensile little frame, Molina reflected. “A call girl dies. Chances are ninety-to-one it’s murder.”

“No evidence,” Alfonso countered.

Molina took a deep breath. It was now or never. Do her job or save her rear.

“I don’t like that bellman with Alzheimer’s,” she said. “The kind of tips they get for playing matchmaker, I don’t believe he never noticed a thing.”

“Lots of that sort of traffic at a big place like the Goliath,” Su said. “I doubt those women even remember the faces they saw the night before, and they get paid plenty.”

“What do you suggest?” Alch asked Molina. Morrie always recognized when she was leading a horse to water.

“Bring the bellman in. Sweat him. Let me know when you’re ready.”

Alch nodded.

Barrett spoke up. “Whatever the bellman says, there’s not a mark on her that wasn’t caused by hitting neon at eighty miles an hour. Some bruises, a lot of internal damage. She could have dived. But Rothenberg has a political stake in representing hooking as safe and sane.”

Molina nodded, waiting for their respective partners to bow in.

“It’s not good PR,” Alch offered, trying not to look lustily at Su’s half-eaten candy bar. “A dead call girl when you’re a national spokeswoman for hookers’ rights to choose? Rothenberg might know more. Maybe somebody was moving in on her operation. It’s pretty passkey. The girls are gung-ho about wanting to do what they do. An old-school pimp would be a wolf among sheep.”

“Interesting,” Molina agreed. “Rothenberg’s bled the local media for all the feature stories she can get. She might be ripe for plucking, and her girls too. Vassar might have been approached first to change handlers.”

“What if she went for the idea?” Su asked, sitting forward on a chair she already perched on like a sparrow.“What if she’d been recruited by someone else, and Rothenberg saw her libertarian utopia looking shaky? Would she kill to defend it?”

“Even more interesting,” Molina granted. “And then there’s the string of deaths of near-apparent women of the night. You know which ones I mean?”

“Yeah.” Alch burped. That Weight Watchers bar must have been heavy consumption for him. He shrugged apology, but was too jived on his idea to blush for his social sins. “First there was that woman’s body dumped at the Blue Dahlia parking lot. ‘She left,’ was painted on the neighboring car. Yours, as I recall, Lieutenant.”

“You don’t have to remind me, Morrie.”

“Right. Anyway, Su and I solved that one. Some weirdo had killed her for not being a shady lady, can you believe it?” he asked Alfonso and Barrett.

“And there was that young stripper, Cher Smith,” Su put in. She was competitive with her elder, Alch, even though, or especially because, they were partners. “We lucked out when her killer tried to attack a strip-club costume-seller who was armed with pepper spray.”

“Right,” Molina said too quickly.

The less anyone dwelled on that recent episode the better she’d feel personally. The fact was that a mere civilian had lured and trapped the killer, pathetic as the murderer had turned out to be.

“We’ve still got one outstanding,” Su noted unhappily, folding her candy bar wrapper into very tight, neat origami.

Buddha bless overachieving third-generation Asian-Americans, Molina thought.

“That’s the broad,” Alfonso said, Egg McMuffin sticking to his teeth, “they found in the church parking lot about the same time as the Blue Dahlia dame.”

God bless old-time cops of whatever ethnic heritage who never let go.

“Gloria Fuentes,” Barrett added with narrowed eyes, “was no shady lady. She was a retired magician’s assistant. Sure, they’re all legs and cleavage, but this lady was over the hill, pardon me. She’d been out of the performance game for years. Hell, her main magician, Gandolph the Great, had quit performing to sniff out fake mediums years ago. She was no spring chicken, and she died in a church parking lot, for Gawd’s sake, not in the parking lot of a trendy restaurant-nightclub like the Blue Dahlia, pardon me, Lieutenant, for your patronage.”

“The Blue Dahlia hasn’t had any crime calls except that one,” Molina noted.

“But that was a doozy. Murder One,” Barrett chortled. Yes, chortled. Molina turned to Alch, whose insight she could always depend upon.

“ ‘She left,’ ” he intoned. “That was the phrase painted near the body in the Blue Dahlia parking lot, and that was the phrase that appeared during the autopsy of Gloria Fuentes’s body, like invisible ink finally showing up. I think those murders were connected.”

“We nailed the Blue Dahlia perp,” Su objected, pulling a second Almond Joy from the pocket of her size-zero navy silk jacket.

Alch’s salt-and-pepper head shook doggedly, like a wet Old English sheepdog’s. “I think they were connected, all right, but not necessarily by the same killer.”

All jaws stopped munching.

This was a radical suggestion.

Molina bowed her head, or maybe merely nodded, at Alch.

Encouraged, he went on. “Maybe it was a copycat killing. I mean, there we have it, in the Blue Dahlia lot, the phrase ‘She left.’ How basic can you get? Every woman who’s involved with an abusive man, what is her death all about? She left, he got homicidal. It’s predictable.”

“We’ve never found a suspect for the Fuentes case,” Molina pointed out.

“But,” said Alch, perching on the edge of his chair a lot more uncomfortably but no less eagerly than Su had on hers, “the same words turn up relative to Fuentes after the body’s in our custody. She left. Same old overcontrollingbastard’s complaint, only someone got into our system, into the morgue, mind you, to send that message. What did Gloria Fuentes leave? Anybody know? Anybody look into that?”

“Lived alone, past sixty,” Su said.

“You’re young,” Alch returned. “That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have had a man in her life.”

“Or a child,” Alfonso said. “Sometimes a kid gets threatened and the mother gets drawn into something uglier than she’s ready for.”

Amen, Molina thought.

“Her ‘kids’ would have been out on their own, older than me,” Su said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Alch returned. “Kids are always kids to their parents. But I checked Fuentes out. She was single, had no known boyfriends, no known kids. Once she left the stage, she did a little magic act for civic groups around town, kids’ birthday stuff. She didn’t even have anyone to leave anything to in her will. It all went, what there was of it, to some magician’s retirement home.”

“Funny. She’d been a looker. Somehow she ended up alone,” Alfonso meditated, chewing his high-fat cud.

“And dead,” Barrett said. “If this is a cold case, I say we look deeper. Fuentes may not have been a lady of the night, but you point out yourselves that the woman at the Blue Dahlia led a respectable life, she was just murdered like a stripper or a call girl. Maybe we got a killer who’s not too good at telling the difference.”

“Gloria Fuentes,” Molina said meditatively, as if caressing the idea. Her troops would jump on that train of thought, she knew. “Alch is right. We haven’t dug deep enough into her lifestyle, present and past. The words ‘She left’ showing up on her body smacks of magic tricks.”

Su jumped in with both size-four feet. “And Vassar could have ‘left’ too. We don’t know that she wasn’t dumping Rothenberg and all her principles.”

Molina nodded, though she didn’t believe it. Rothenberg’s girls didn’t leave; they retired.

She quashed a surge of triumph. Nasty as the neon ceiling death was, it was redirecting her detective’s attention to the one definitely magic-related death that had hit the town since Max Kinsella had left a year ago and come back last fall.

If she had to hang out on a limb, that son of a … psychopath should too. And she might finally find a case that tied him to all the mayhem and murder in this town that was still floating loose.

That would be worth her own personal and professional jeopardy, all due to the misguided impulse to help Matt Devine escape from between a rock and a hard place.

Molina frowned, thinking of his particular problem. Kathleen O’Connor. She’d have to pursue that lead herself. None of them would be in this mess without that femme fatale operating just out of sight, sound, and reach of the law’s long arm.

Maybe not even the Mystifying Max Kinsella.

Chapter 26

… Sudden Death Overtime

“You may have wondered,” Temple said, “why I’ve called you all together.”

“Two is ‘all’?” Max asked dubiously.

Matt was too polite to question the obvious, but his expression of stubborn silence agreed with Max’s for once. “Well, Louie is here also,” Temple said.

Everyone glanced at the large black cat that formed the only barrier between Max and Matt as they shared the small living room sofa. Given Louie’s size, it was a considerable separation.

Louie, knowing he was being discussed as all cats do, did a tarantella move and extended his long black furry legs. Then he showed his claws, curved them artistically into the open-weave upholstery, and yawned, as if to say: I could rip this fabric to shreds, but 1 am being the little gentleman and am restraining myself for my Miss Temple’s sake. So you two guys better follow my example and keep away from each other’s throats, tempting as they may be.

Temple eyed her gentlemen callers. She perched on the edge of the chair facing the sofa, her feet not quite touching the floor, as usual. She hadn’t seen these two men juxtaposed often, and here and now it was obvious that they were Night and Day.

Max was Night, long and lean, attired in magician’s black from the hair on his head to raven-glossy black Armani loafers on his feet. Matt was Day, not as tall but more solid, blond from the hair on his head to the suede loafers on his feet. In a fashion parallel of the Civil War ballad of the brothers on opposite sides, one wore black and one wore blond, instead of blue and gray.

Matt was more classicly handsome than Max, but Max had more presence.

Neither one was in the least shabby. Okay, girl. Down. Speak, Lassie, speak! What are you trying to tell us?

“I am not Nancy Drew, Miss Marple, or Jessica Fletcher,” Temple said. She was red, from her hair to her lucite-heeled Stuart Weitzman Dorothy-in-Oz scarlet pumps.

“Great,” Max noted, glancing at Matt. “One’s underage and the other two are definitely overage, if not for you, then for me.”

Temple and Matt blushed in concert.

“Go on,” Matt encouraged her. He was a great facilitator.

“But I am a mean hand with a ruler and a pencil, so I’ve resurrected my table of the unsolved murders I made before the Stripper Killer was caught, and I added Vassar.”

Temple slapped the template in question down on the coffee table.

“And I made copies.” She handed them, after a second’s hesitation, first to Max, then to Matt.

Midnight Louie glared at her.

“Sorry, boy. I do have an extra.”

This she placed on the sofa by Louie’s large black paws. Her human companions shook their heads.

“Hey!” Matt spoke first. “You not only added Vassar to the list of dead people, you put me in the suspect column.”

“Along with Kathleen O’Connor. And Max is first in the list with the death that started it all at the Goliath, so it’s only fitting that you should finish up the list to date with Vassar’s death at … the Goliath. Anybody see a pattern here?”

“Temple,” Max explained, “the karma of heading and finishing up the suspect list is lost on the suspects in question.”

“This suspect list reflects both who we might think is responsible and who the police might, or do.”

“Don’t use a euphemism,” Max growled. “You mean Molina. Say it.”

“I’m also saying that I’m no expert, but given what’s happened, I think we better get our acts together and figure out the who, what, where, when, and why of these deaths and what Kathleen O’Connor is up to before we’re all finessed onto Death Row.”

“She’s my problem,” Max said, glowering. “I knew her first.”

“You mean in the Biblical sense, I assume,” Matt added. Temple chalked up one point for the mild-mannered ex-altar boy.

“In every sense,” Max said, not sparing Temple the truth.

His glower did not diminish. His arms remained crossed on his chest, a classic posture of self-containment. Max hated being here with her and Matt, Temple knew, and with Midnight Louie. He hated group anything, which at least made him a very unlikely candidate for an orgy. He was the original lone wolf and had gotten too used to it, certainly for their communal needs now, and maybe for his own good.

“You’re not the issue here,” Temple said, catching Max’s eye. “Matt is.”

“Only because Kathleen can’t find me.”

“Is that ego, or analysis?”

“Analysis.” Max glanced at Matt, not unsympathetically. “Look. She’s following a classic pattern. It’s older than Devine here, and it’s older than me.” He uncrossed his arms to prop them on his knees and lean forward, speaking only to Temple, as if he had to justify himself and the past only to her.

“Here’s how it goes down with the likes of Kathleen O’Connor, even when you’re both seventeen. You meet her. You think it’s chance, and later you see that she put herself in your path. With you,” he added as an aside to Matt, “the introduction was shocking, but she’s older now, and hasn’t time to waste. So you got the razor to the gut, a flesh wound, so you’d know she could inflict any kind of wound she wants, when she wants, on whom she wants.”

Temple frowned now. “So she was always a psychopath?”

“A shrink would probably argue that label,” Max said. “More like a sociopath with a heavy case of narcissism.”

“What’s the difference?” Temple wanted to know.

Matt answered. “Both a psychopath and a sociopath lack a conscience. They don’t feel hurt, so they hurt, just to see what happens to people who do feel. A narcissist is always trying to prove the world stupider than she is. In a way, a narcissistic sociopath is worse than the average psychopath. She can pass in normal society.”

“Where’d you learn that?” Max asked, sounding impressed.

“Confession,” Matt said shortly. “They’re expert manipulators, and they love to manipulate all that’s solid and sacred.”

“ ‘Solid and sacred,’ ” Max mocked. “Wouldn’t go over in a personals ad.”

“Cut it out, guys!” Temple said. “This woman has ruined both your lives. You want to snipe at each other, or get her?”

“Get her,” Max said without hesitation.

Matt temporized. ” ‘Get,’ sounds so hostile. She needs help.”

“You need help, can’t you see that?” Temple exploded. “That’s what she’s done to you. She’s made you into a murder suspect, and you’re worried about her, for heaven’s sake.”

Max’s frown was back. “Temple’s right. It’s the same pattern. Half a lifetime ago, while I was dallying with Kathleen on the riverbank, my cousin Sean was walking into an IRA death trap. And you, ex-Father Devine, once suggested that might have been deliberate manipulation on Kathleen’s part: seducing me and killing Sean at one and the same time, killing one man … boy, really… . and condemning the other to permanent Purgatory because of it.”

“Purgatory?” Temple asked.

The two men were staring at each other, ignoring her, speaking the same language for once. Catholic. Guilt. Only for one it was the Irish and the Troubles and for the other it was the Polish and the family dysfunction.

“It must have been hell for you,” Matt said, “given how I feel about Vassar’s death, and she wasn’t a relative, an innocent, or anyone I even knew.”

“Still is.”

Matt’s mouth tightened. “Then Temple’s right. We have to find this woman, stop her.”

“All we know about her today,” Temple put in, “is that she ran across Matt several months ago somehow and can’t let go. How? And why?”

“Simple,” he said. “Talk about poetic justice. My hunt for my stepfather drew her attention. I distributed these photos of him with my contact information. That’s when she showed up here at the Circle Ritz, by the pool when I was working out. She thought I was a contract killer looking for him.”

“What does that tell us about her?” Max asked.

“That she expects the worst of everybody,” Matt answered. “If we knew why, we might know how to get to her.”

“No,” Temple said. “It tells us that she wouldn’t have found you, Matt, if you hadn’t been looking for Cliff Effinger. It had nothing to do with you, Max, not then. Sorry.”

He shrugged. “My own sociopathic narcissistic streak is shattered.”

“Effinger’s the key?” Matt said doubtfully. “He’s dead.”

“But he wasn’t then, Temple said. And why is he dead now? He was killed. By someone. Molina nabbed a couple of thugs who for the rap, the guys driving that semi when the drug bust was made, but even the police didn’t have enough evidence to charge them with Effinger’s murder.”

“And that bust was tied to your and Louie’s kidnapping,” Max said, “from the Opium Den stage.”

“When,” Matt put in, “that lady magician Shangri-La used Temple’s ring in a disappearing act and it vanished.” He didn’t quite look at her. “Until it turned up on a murder scene Molina was covering.”

“I love the way everybody knew about my ring being found, except me.” Max’s frown escalated into a glower.

Temple took a deep breath. “I didn’t know this until just recently.”

Max glanced at Matt, immediately realizing what she meant. Matt knew about the ring being found long before either of them. He could only have been told by Molina, and he had kept that from the two people who had a right to know what had happened to the ring, the man who gave it and the woman who accepted it.

“The point is,” Temple said to break the awkward silence, “that the ring was found near the dead magician’s assistant, who was killed at the same time as that other body was dumped at the Blue Dahlia. Her name was Gloria. Gloria Fuentes. Gandolph’s retired assistant.”

“Who’s Gandolph?” Matt asked.

Neither Temple nor Max answered him. They were staring at each other, lost in the implications.

“The question is,” Max told Temple, “was the ring left there to implicate you, or me?”

“Temple, obviously.” Matt ran a hand through his blond hair as if unconsciously pushing away an encroaching headache. “Even Molina’s not so obsessed with arresting the great Max Kinsella that she’d blame you for the death of anyone simply connected with magic.”

A silence. They were three, but there were islands of knowledge between them shared by only two, and perhaps in some case by only one. Time to build bridges over troubled water.

Temple focused on Matt. “Gloria Fuentes has a more direct connection to Max than mere magic. She was the longtime assistant to Max’s mentor, Gandolph the Great.”

The news jolted Matt. “Wasn’t that the fellow killed at last Halloween’s Houdini séance? And now you tell me this guy’s retired ex-assistant was killed only a few months later?”

“Yes.” Max was terse. “You see what Molina could do with those facts, given her hard-on for charging me with some crime or other.”

“So—” Matt was perking up from the funk he’d been in since hearing the shocking news of Vassar’s death. “That ring being at Gloria Fuentes’s death scene was a double whammy for Max, only Molina didn’t know it. Doesn’t know it?”

“No, thank God.” Temple grimaced. “And don’t you tell her. That’s why I didn’t invite her to our heart-to-heart. Even though she’s up to her shield in your recent foray into the local sex industry, she has no idea of how badly someone is out to get Max. It has to be Kathleen 0’ Connor.”

“Why?” Matt demanded.

“She doesn’t let go,” Max put in. “I also reacted to Sean’s death differently than she expected. Guilt, she got that, an endless peat bog’s worth to wallow in. But I went undercover in the IRA, found out who bombed that pub, and turned them in, remember.”

“That’s right. You were reared Catholic yet you betrayed the IRA.”

“I would have betrayed the pope to get the ones who killed Sean.” His eyes narrowed at Matt. “You can probably dig that. You were pretty hot to find your evil stepfather. Didn’t you ever want to wring his neck?”

Matt nodded. “And now I’d like to wring the neck of whoever hurt Vassar.”

“You, ah,” Max said cautiously, “can’t offer any insight on her last hours on earth?”

“Nothing except that she was alive and well when I left her.”

Max refrained from asking how well, for which Temple gave him full credit. The conversation was getting unbearable for all-parties involved.

“I realize,” Matt said, looking steadfastly at the top of the coffee table, which was littered with sections from two days’ worth of newspapers, “that inquiring minds want to know what happened between Vassar and me. Sorry. No comment.”

“What did Molina say to that?” Max asked with his best Mr. Spock raised eyebrow.

“Nothing. She never asked.”

Max suddenly laughed. “I love it! You shut down Molina on a case where her own hide is at stake. I’ve heard of Teflon politicians, but you, Devine, have a Teflon sex life. Nothing sticks but mystery.”

“Yet,” Matt said. “She hasn’t asked me yet.”

“And if she does?”

“I tell her the same thing I tell you: no prurient details. Vassar deserves better than that. She deserves a heck of a lot better than what happened to her, however it happened. I didn’t know her like a cousin, but I did get to know her enough to realize that.”

Another awkward silence.

Temple broke in with her best nonintimidating small wee voice. “Can you tell us, Matt, if you had any reason to think she might commit suicide?”

He stared at the pages of newsprint again, one bearing a small front-page story about a plunge to death at the Goliath. Then his eyes met Temple’s.

“I don’t know. She had … issues. Doesn’t everybody?”

“Amen, brother,” Max agreed. “Okay. If I’m reading this right, you don’t know yourself whether she jumped or was pushed, and you’re the last known person to have seen her.”

“Yes.”

“When exactly was the ‘last time’?” Temple asked, eyeing the newspapers.

“Four A.M.”

“So you spent, what, six hours with her?”

“More like eight. Call it a shift, if you like.”

“I’m not calling it anything,” Temple said carefully. “You must have gotten to know her … talked … in all that time.”

He nodded.

“Tell us about her,” Max said in a surprisingly calm voice. “She’s just a role to most people in a town filled with hookers and call girls and boys and private dancers. Tell us about her, not about what she did for a living.”

Matt nodded, seeming to welcome the chance. He leaned back, clasped his tanned hands around one khaki-clad knee. The casual pose couldn’t disguise the darkness in his voice.

“Molina … misrepresented her to me. Not her fault. She gave me the best advice she could.”

“Humph!” Temple couldn’t resist inserting. “You didn’t hear anything of the kind from me!”

“I heard it from you, though,” he said with a glance at Max. “And Leticia at work. Everybody said this was the best thing to do.”

“Not me,” Temple said.

Matt finally met her glance. “I wish to God now I’d listened to what you didn’t tell me to do. Anyway, Molina swore that this level of call girl would be smart, comfortable with herself and her … job, impersonally personal, the solution I so desperately needed. And I don’t think even you”—he eyed Max—“know what it’s really like to have Kitty O’Connor on your case, day in and night out. She was beginning to seem omniscient.”

“Like God,” Max suggested, “or your own conscience. The Hound of Hell. Impossible to flee.”

“And she’d made enough threatening gestures at females I knew … Mariah, even Electra, that I was pretty paranoid and ripe for her manipulation. And for drastic solutions.” Matt shook his head. “The idea was that she couldn’t track me to a call girl the bellman sent up, and I ran all over Las Vegas to lose her.”

“Not enough,” Max said. “I saw you go into the Goliath that night.”

“You!”

Max managed to shrug indifferently and look sheepish at the same time. “I knew Kathleen was stalking you. I wanted to catch a glimpse of how she looks today. You did a damn fine job of trying to lose a tail. If I hadn’t known you, I might have lost you.”

“Max!” Temple didn’t mean to sound exasperated, but she did. “Are you telling us you were at the Goliath, that you saw Matt going into the hotel?”

“It was earlier in the evening … sixish, wasn’t it? Right. I followed him in, checked the surroundings. Certainly didn’t see Kitty O’Connor, and then I split, because I was worried about you and the Stripper Killer. If I’d been able to stay …” He nodded at Matt. “I might have been curious enough to hang around after you left and seen something. So we get to share the riches of guilt this time, if that makes you feel any better.”

“It doesn’t and I think you know that. Misery loves company is a sop to the poor of heart.”

Another silence.

Temple felt like someone trying to herd a glacier toward the Tropic of Cancer.

“So what did you see, Max?”

“I saw our fair-haired boy check in and go up in the elevator. I saw no one who looked like Kathleen, or Kathleen in disguise, but it’s been almost twenty years, Temple. She could look like your grandmother by now.”

“She doesn’t,” Matt said dryly. “You saw the sketch.”

“Wouldn’t it have been weird,” Temple speculated, “if Vassar had been Kitty the Cutter?”

“You mean,” Max said, getting it at once, “if she had followed our man Flint into the Goliath and arranged to ring his bell, metaphorically speaking, when the bellman ordered a call girl. That would make her dead, and I can’t say I’d be sorry.”

Matt shook his head at their lavish scenarios. “Vassar was a tall woman; Kitty was petite. You can’t fake that.”

“How petite?” Temple asked.

“A bit bigger than you.”

“Oh. I always imagine her as bigger than life. Like Wonder Woman.”

“No,” said Max, “she’s a wee bit of a thing, rather like a plastic explosive.” But he was thinking so hard he was frowning again. “It’s possible Kathleen was there. Certainly she could fool me after all these years. It’s possible she followed you to the room and killed Vassar after you left. Did you notice anything suspicious?”

“Everything felt suspicious, everybody I had contact with was out of a B movie. The accommodating desk clerk, who let me pay cash for a room and then change the number at the last moment, all by the book according to Molina, by the way.”

Max grinned meanly. “She sure knows how to read the wrong side of the law for such an upstanding policewoman.”

Matt went on, as if needing to relive each sleazy step toward disaster. “And there was the lurking bellman, happy to pocket a big tip to provide X-rated entertainment. It was like some hokey formula. I felt unreal.”

“I’ve got a news flash for you, Devine. Hiring a hooker is not a ‘real’ experience.”

“I know that. I can’t believe I listened to everybody, including you, and did this. I thought you worldly sophisticates knew what you were doing.”

“We don’t. And we just look worldly. It’s all an act, Devine. Magic. Don’t believe in magic. It’s not real.”

“Vassar was more real than any of you,” Matt commented bitterly.

That hurt. Temple felt it like a punch to the stomach. She hadn’t led him down this particular garden path … but she could have made the whole charade unnecessary, she knew that now. And that was another punch to the gut.

She got back to business to hide the pain. “So. No sign of Kitty the Cutter knowing where you were and who youwere with. She couldn’t have passed as the bellman. Or was he short?”

“He was,” Matt said with a certain spine-stiffening motion. “But so was the waitress who brought dinner. I never thought of that. She was … petite.”

“Could she—?” Max asked.

“That is such a repellent idea, that woman spying on me even as I’m going to lengths she drove me to .. I suppose she’d like that. What would make a person want to destroy another person?”

“Why did the fundamentalists attack the twin towers?” Max asked. “Envy. They can call it religion or politics, but it’s envy and fear. Kathleen is like that. She hates innocence. She hates freedom. She hates anyone with a zest for life.”

“Why?” Matt asked.

“Why you?” Max retorted. He sighed. “You trigger her most negative emotions. Don’t feel guilty about it. But I did. I was seventeen. You’re … seventeen, too, don’t you see? Kathleen’s getting too old to find true innocents cluttering the landscape. I’m too burned-out for her. You’re fresh meat. She can really do a tap dance on your head. Let her bring you down, and she’s won. Unlike most of Las Vegas and some people of our acquaintance, I don’t care to know what went on between you and the dead woman. That’s irrelevant. It’s what went on between you and the dead woman and Kathleen O’Connor, don’t you see? With her, it’s always a triangle.”

“An unholy trinity,” Matt said slowly, “as it was that night: Vassar, me, and Kitty O’Connor rolling in a room-service tray.”

Temple felt a certain satisfaction. She had brought the two men together to shake loose some facts, ideas, and maybe solutions.

She hadn’t expected it to be pretty, and she hadn’t expected to enjoy it. It hurt to watch Max’s self-protective cynicism and Matt’s injured innocence jousting as if they were each other’s worst enemies when their real antagonist, and the truth, was still out there.

And whatever had happened, or had not happened between Matt and Vassar, the call girl’s sudden death had made her a permanent fixture in his life, and that of anyone who cared about him Which, Temple thought sourly, included her, dammit.

Chapter 27

… Homicide Alone

Molina stood inside and pushed the garage door opener control, waiting until the single wooden door shook, rattled, and rolled all the way shut.

Nobody like a cop to follow home-safety rules. No neighborhood cat would slip under her closing garage door undetected, not to mention the odd, escaped serial rapist.

When she went through the door into the kitchen, locking it behind her, the house felt cool, dim, and suspiciously silent.

Then she remembered. Mariah was at an after-school game followed by a team pizza party. Some lucky parents with regular hours or even an at-home mom would be dropping Mariah off from a minivan around eight P.M.

So not even Dolores, the trusty neighborhood nanny, was here.

Molina wasn’t used to an empty, quiet house.

She draped her jacket over the back of a kitchen chair and pulled the paddle holster from her back waistband, heading for the bedroom to deposit it in her closet gun safe.

Even with Mariah not there, she never left her weapon unattended for a split second.

A sudden thump from the living room halted her instantly.

Only Catarina or Tabitha, thundering over the hardwood floors, slipping and sliding, on almost-year-old paws. The tiger-striped kittens had become cats, but still could revert to an adolescent romp.

“Hi, girls,” Molina greeted them as they charged past, one only two feet behind the other.

No answer. Their bowls were full of dry food and they didn’t need to make up to her for dinner.

Actually, she was glad they were growing up and settling down. Kittens were appealing and fun, but layabout adult cats were better medicine for the frazzled police professional.

Many of Molina’s peers were unwinding in a laid-back cop bar right now. She glanced at her watch. 6:05 P.M. She could have actually stopped by for once. Except that having made a habit of heading home to kid and kittens had made her a stranger in a familiar land. So had her rank. Face it. She was not a party person.

Ah. Mariah was gone. No need to listen to that pulsing, rapping, mewling, screaming rock/rap radio station. Save her from preteens going on thirty!

Molina backtracked to the living room, moved the dial to the easy-listening station she had once kept tuned in, and waited until “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” came drooling over the airwaves like a cool mint julep spilling between the cracks of an overheated wooden porch floor somewhere over the rainbow where bluebirds sang and crickets chirped and sap ran.

Ah. She stepped out of her loafers, worn because their low heels did not intimidate male coworkers shorter than she. She picked them up by the heels and carried both shoes and semiautomatic pistol toward her bedroom.

She paused at the open door to Mariah’s bedroom.

The same bright chaos as always. Textbooks in canted piles under discarded clothing scattered around the room like the Scarecrow after the Flying Monkeys had gotten through with him. Mariah could never decide which look-alike shapeless T-shirt and baggy pants were coolest of them all. Posters everywhere of sinister, pouting males and females masquerading as singers. If she’d seen these punks when she was walking a beat she’d have arrested them on suspicion of juvenile dysfunction. Stuffed toys enough to almost hide the state of the unmade bed.

Nothing straightened up as promised: “Tomorrow, I promise!” And tomorrow and tomorrow.

Molina shook her head and smiled. Better an untidy room than a messy head. And Mariah’s head was still mostly straight on. So far.

She moved the few steps down the hall to her room. So quiet now.

Maybe she would have a drink before dinner. There was a bottle of aged whiskey that had aged even longer in her kitchen cupboard waiting to serve in Christmas egg nogs. Somehow she never had time to have adults over for Christmas.

She paused at her bedroom door, remembering the crowded, noisy Christmases of her childhood in East L.A. The tiny bungalow crammed with tearing kids tearing wrappings off a Technicolor mountain of presents under a skinny balsam Christmas tree draped in miniature piñata figures and huge pinwheel-striped lollipops from the Christ child to every kid under twelve in the house, and there were tons of kids. Her eight half-brothers and -sisters, for instance, all younger. All kids still, and she, Carmen, had been older, an adult early, more their nursemaid than their sister, even when she had been only nine, or seven, or even five.

They danced around her imagination now, her half-brothers and -sisters, black-haired, black-eyed sprites with adorable faces … that needed constant wiping by her of food and tears, depending on the day or the occasion.

She loved them all … and it would be a cold day in hell before she would want to shepherd more than one kid, Mariah, to adulthood again. She’d been a mother most of her life. When she’d become the first in her family to go to college, a two-year college, it was more a betrayal than a cause for celebration.

Molina … Carmen … sat on the bed, gun and shoes sitting beside her, symbols of everything that had gone right and wrong in her life.

She so seldom had time to think. To remember. Now, even shattered images of Rafi Nadir washed over her in the dead quiet.

She couldn’t seem to control the memory flood. Was she drowning? Drowning in guilt? Or just stranded tired and alone for once? Sitting on the dock of the bay, on the tree above the flood, waiting to be rescued.

No. She rescued herself. Always had. She didn’t sit around waiting for anything. For anybody.

She started singing counter to the living room radio, softly, in harmony. It was odd hearing her own voice without accompaniment, without the boys in the band behind her.

She sighed. It had been too long since she’d dropped in at the Blue Dahlia to add the words to their music. Dolores was always available. She should do it again soon.

Sittin’ on the dock of the bay. Something, something away.

She saw Vassar spread-eagled on neon, stripped and dissected on stainless steel, a twelve-hour transformation, from pinned butterfly to laboratory frog.

She shook her head, shook the image away. There was no reason she couldn’t contact her family now, though it had been so long.

Except that Rafi would have known, and he wasn’t about to let her go. And maybe, maybe, she was just as glad he’d forced her to run away, start a new life alone. With Mariah when she arrived.

She had been mired in her own unhappy history. Always the half-breed. Her mother’s one unforgivable mistake, that she’d tried to undo eight times until she had died of it.

By then Carmen had been in place, knowing she was a mistake, apologetic enough to make up for it, tending her mother’s whole-breed brood, loving them, hating herself.

She shook her head. That was so long ago. Why was she thinking of it now?

Of course. Rafi. He was like the recurrent nightmare in a slasher movie, Michael or Jason, never quite dying, always popping up to revive the terror. A franchise attraction.

Molina stood up. She was a big girl now, in every respect.

If Matt Devine had anything to do with Vassar’s death, she would find out and arrest him. If Rafi found her and Mariah, he would be sorry. If Max Kinsella crossed her path again, in the wrong place at the wrong time, she’d stop him no matter what it took. If Temple Barr was in mourning for the two men in her life, let her weep and wail.

If she, Carmen … no, Molina, had to destroy her career to bring down a murderer, so be it.

She went to her closet, opened the door, dropped her shoes on the floor, moved to turn the tumblers on the safe. Something elusive and soft brushed her wrist. She started to push it aside.

It was velvet. Midnight blue velvet, a limp, 1930s evening gown, Depression era; sleazy and soft and irresistible.

Molina frowned at the Blue Dahlia side of her closet with its meager column of vintage gowns. Carmen wasn’t here anymore, but her wardrobe was.

Blue velvet? God, she was losing it. She’d forgotten buying that one.

Or did she just want to forget? Not only the ancient past, but the recent one, all the way up to encouraging Matt Devine to make a date with destiny.

CHAPTER 28

… A League of Her Own

Matt had spent his working life on a phone for over a year now: first at the hot line and now at WCOO radio.

He was used to calls being urgent, to surprises, to communicating well despite the distance and the lack of face-to-face contact.

Now he was hanging on hold, waiting for the phone to be picked up again after a long, frustrating attempt to make contact.

He supposed calling the FBI might be like that. “Matt!” boomed a confident and somewhat superficial voice.

“Frank,” Matt echoed, determined to control this conversation.

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m afraid I still need information on that woman terrorist, Kathleen O’Connor, only this time it might involve murder.”

“I came up dry last time.”

“I know. I believe in try, try again.”

“What’s the murder case?”

“Mine.”

“What?”

“Well, it cuts two ways, if you recall how Miss Kitty introduced herself to me a few months ago.”

“Humor does help, Matt. Yes, I remember. She cut you. Razor, wasn’t it? Odd weapon for a woman.”

“She’s an odd woman. She’s been stalking me.”

“Why?”

“Because I was there? All I can glean from what she’s said, which I don’t entirely believe, is that she has a grudge against priests.”

“You’re an ex-priest.”

“So I told her. It doesn’t seem to matter to her.”

“I know she’s been a thorn in your side for some time. What’s happened to escalate matters?”

“First, she started physically threatening my friends and acquaintances. Women, girls, old women, it didn’t seem to matter as long as they were female.”

“You are talking major-league obsessive.”

“Yes.” And Matt hated doing this sort of talking on the telephone. Despite a bug-free apartment, he still had the slimy sensation that someone was listening. It could be a hangover from his radio talk-show history, or just knowing that the FBI probably recorded everything.

“I wish we could talk in person.”

“Can you come out here?”

“Not right now.”

“Then shoot. If it’s not a matter of national security, this is a safe line.”

Matt grimaced. That wasn’t much of a guarantee, but he needed solid answers, not speculation. Besides, he had confessed so often to Father Frank Bucek when they were both in seminary, Frank as instructor, Matt as acolyte, that pulling back now seemed foolish.

“Okay. This woman made it plain: my virtue, or their lives.”

“Nasty. I assume you took measures.”

“I tried to. I got as much advice as I could—”

“From whom? You didn’t ask me.”

“I’m … sorry, Frank. Guess I was embarrassed.”

“What? That some woman was so infatuated she’d blackmail you into submission? You and Brad Pitt. Don’t be an ass, Matt. It’s like that out here in the real world. There are guys who would envy you.”

“That’s like telling an eighty-year-old woman she’s lucky to be raped.”

Silence on the line. Long silence. “You’re right. I was being cynical. It gets that way, if you see enough. Sorry. It works both ways. Stalking is stalking. So what advice did you get?”

“It was clear she wanted to destroy what I had taken out of the priesthood, my celibacy.”

“Odd fixation. Odd woman.”

“I know. So, my … friends … all urged me to lose my virtue and thereby my value to her.”

“It makes sense, but this is a senseless woman.”

Matt nodded, even though Frank couldn’t see the gesture. “The solution they came up with was that I take advantage of Las Vegas’s reputation as ‘Sin City.’ I was to take a circuitous route along the Strip, get a room for cash and then change the number, at an upscale hotel, and hire a high-class call girl to do the job, make me unfit for my stalker.”

Frank chuckled. “Surely an expensive way to go. Did it work?”

“Yes … and no.”

“I’m on tenterhooks.”

“I bet you are, you old married man. I bet you love hearing my odyssey of unwanted sex.”

“Maybe. It’s an interesting theological question: for love of your fellow man, should you submit to carnal knowledge, once against your vocation, and now against your free will and inclination only? If you were a woman, say St. Maria Gorretti: virgin, rape victim, and martyr, the answer would be a resounding yes. But the Church is a bit more ticklish about male self-sacrifice.”

“Apparently not in seminaries.”

“Whoa! Where did that come from?”

“A former St. Vincent’s alumn who approached me. That’s not what I meant to call about, but he says there was a lot of abuse back when we were there. Was there, Frank?”

Another silence. “God, I hope not.”

“You don’t know? You were an instructor, a confessor, a mentor.”

Silence. “I … honestly don’t know. Did you see it?”

“Maybe. But I didn’t know enough to recognize it.”

“You never—?”

“No. I’m told I was fairly unapproachable by then.”

“Ah, yes. Mr. Angel-face iron man. Not unapproachable, really, just closed like a work-in-progress freeway. I knew you were chewing on family issues. I respected that. Leaving you alone to do it seemed the best course. That work out?”

“Eventually.”

“Good enough. So you came through unscathed.”

“I thought so, but if others didn’t, then there’s no honor in that, is there?”

“No. It’s hard enough to outgrow your childhood and your past, then you learn that it was all corrupt. I wasn’t, Matt. I was as shit-faced innocent as you were then. That’s no excuse.”

“Yes, innocence never feels like enough of an excuse. She’s dead, Frank.”

“Whoa again. We’re out of the seminary here. Who?”

“My … salvation. The invulnerable Las Vegas call girl.

She fell to her death in the hotel atrium after I left.”

“Fell.”

“Archangels fall. She could have been pushed.”

“And you take the fall. Well, my money is on your stalker. She would be the kind of jealous bitch to teach you both a lesson for trying to get around her.”

“That’s why I need you to dig deeper, Frank. I know this woman was an IRA operative. She may have been very clever, very undercover, but she was loose in northern Ireland as Kathleen O’Connor about seventeen years ago. She had a second career squeezing money out of very wealthy Irish-Hispanic men in South America after that. She must have left some kind of trail. With the emphasis on foreign infiltrators now, surely you can find something on her. She isn’t a ghost.”

“No. I remember running a search already. Are the police on your tail for this call girl death?”

“Yes … and no, I think. Remember Molina?”

“Sure. Good cop.”

“Well, she was one of those who advised me to take the call-girl route.”

“No kidding. She must be sweating it now.”

“She won’t let me get away with murder if she thinks I did it, no matter what.”

“I know. Good cop. Got a few hang-ups too, but, hey, it’s what makes us all interesting. So … you join the mile-high club with that call girl?”

“Mile-high—?”

“Those Las Vegas megahotels are said to be halfway to heaven.”

“Frank.”

“I know. None of my business. You do see, though, don’t you? If you hadn’t made a fetish out of chastity, if you’d failed like a billion men and a few thousand priests before you, you wouldn’t be in this mess. You wouldn’t have had anything to lose.”

“You really believe that now?”

“Yeah. For women and for men. It’s a form of control, don’t you see, Matt? And no one can control you if you can control yourself.”

The paradox had Matt’s head spinning.

It was trying to control himself that had gotten him into this out-of-control situation, after all.

“You’re reasoning like a Jesuit,” he complained.

“Come to think of it, being an FBI agent is a little like that. Anything else I can help with?”

Matt shook his head, then realized he was on the phone and needed to say something.

“No. Not for now. Just find out something—anythingon Kathleen O’Connor.”

Chapter 29

… Glory Days

The glossy photo Alfonso slapped down on Molina’s desk made her blink for a moment.

What did she want with a vintage photo of Dolores Del Rio?

“Fuentes,” Alfonso explained without being asked. “About forty years ago. A looker.” He pushed the highly colored portrait aside to reveal a full-length black-andwhite cheesecake shot beneath it. “Her calling card was her legs, though, not that face. She did a lot of product posing in L.A. before she ended up in Gandolph the Great’s magic act.” Another photo: gorgeous Gloria with an ordinary-looking youngish guy who was already showing a little too much chub for the camera.

“Were they friends, lovers?” Molina asked.

“Coworkers. Barrett dug up a bunch of old-time magicians. They’ve got this old folks club going at the local barbecue now. Meet every Tuesday, only we got a membership list and made some rounds. Everybody said Gandolph—real name Garry, two R’s, Randolph as in Churchill—”

“Again your easy erudition amazes me, Alfonso.”

He shrugged modestly. “I try to know things that might come in handy, and you never know what might come in handy in our line of work. Anyway, they were colleagues. Buddies. That’s all.”

“She didn’t outlive him by much,” Molina commented, moving the glamour photo front and center. The body on the autopsy table with the words “she left” scripted under her rib cage hadn’t even hinted at such past glory as this. Dish to dust.

“Now that might be funny,” Alfonso said. “Old Gandolph dead under uncertain circumstances on Halloween, his former assistant strangled to death only months later in the parking lot of a church. Odd part is, she wasn’t churchgoing, the ex-neighbors in the apartment building were sure of that. It was kind of an unofficial retirement home for ex-performers, that place: cheap, a little rundown like they were, kind of a community, though, and they kept an eye on each other.”

“Is this stuff in the original reports?”

“Some. Some Barrett and me made up.” He grinned. Molina knew he was referring to the Abies’ mysterious ways of squeezing new facts out of old cases.

If they could wring some fresh suspects from the Fuentes case files, it would create enough of a flutter in the department and the media to let Vassar die a natural death in the news.

“So how did she get to a church parking lot?” Molina asked.

“Someone was trying to look her up a few days before she died. A mysterious stranger.”

Alfonso enunciated the final phrase with relish as he sat on the plastic shell chair in front of Molina’s desk. Plastic wasn’t supposed to groan like wood under massive weight, but this chair managed at least a squawk. Maybe the steel bolts were giving.

“Any description of this mysterious stranger? Was he tall?”

“Got someone like Barrett in mind, Lieutenant?” Alfonso flipped pages and shook his head. ” ‘Fraid not. Middling kind of guy: middle-aged, middle-height, middle-weight, but dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and loose running pants, light gray, like he had come from the gym. Kept his hood on too, so he could be bald as an eagle or as hairy as Elvis on top. Wore sunglasses, so his eye color is a mystery too.”

“Just asking for her?”

“She had an unpublished number, so her address wasn’t in the phone book. He was asking for her apartment, but nobody would tell him. They look out for each other at the Iverton Arms.”

“The place sounds like a time warp.”

Alfonso nodded. “Retired performers live in the past. You should have seen the old ladies fawning over me, inviting me in for pastry and a photo-album session of their clippings from the days when they were cuties instead of Medicare patients. Not so many old guys in residence. Guess my gender isn’t in it for the long run.”

“Maybe too many cigarettes and pastries,” Molina suggested.

“Always the diplomat, Lieutenant,” Alfonso said blithely.

Three ex-wives and a series of police doctors hadn’t gotten him to change his habits or his profile in thirty years. One remark from her wasn’t going to do it now.

“That’s more than we got on Fuentes the first time around,” she noted approvingly. “You and Barrett keep on it.”

“And what about that call girl, Vassar?”

“Alch and Su are backgrounding her. It’s a little tougher. Rothenberg’s employees don’t offer the police pastry and photo albums, more like zipped lips and the bum’s rush.”

“I thought you softened her up yourself.”

“The city attorneys haven’t softened her up in fourteen-years. What makes you think I could do it?”

“I thought maybe woman to woman—”

“Sisterhood means zilch when you’re on opposite sides of the long lean line of the law, Alfonso. I just wanted to know what she thought about the death.”

“And?”

“Oddly complacent. More concerned about making a point that it was unlikely for a seasoned call girl to get hurt, or underestimate a john with designs on throwing her off an atrium railing. She’s all politics.”

“Want Barrett and me to do some digging there?”

“Higher placed minions of the law than you and me have done that for years and came up with harassment suits and ACLU press conferences. Besides, the Goliath death is iffy, at best.”

Alfonso stood, taking a stab at pulling his belt up over his ballooning belly. “If the words ‘she left’ show up on this Vassar’s corpse, though, let me know.”

“You and half the force.”

Chapter 30

All in Another Night’s

Work: Split Personality

Max was finding his new double identity, established on an impulse, quite handy.

He was back at Neon Nightmare on a crowded Friday night in his Phantom Mage persona.

Given the circus of acrobats, dancers, and magicians who performed nightly at the place’s pinnacle and then came down to earth when their gigs were over to mingle with the audience, the Phantom and his hokey half-mask fit right in.

Max knew he was like a moth drawn to flit around the fatal flame the Synth threw off, but the building was itself a maze that demanded further exploration before he could hope to penetrate to the heart of the labyrinth, the Synth and all its works, and its workers.

What he didn’t learn now by clandestine explorations, his own self could return later to learn by subterfuge.

So he began at the bar, buying a drink and moving along it to entertain its patrons with a card illusion, an instant manifestation of a filled glass, a silk-flower bouquet, whatever cheap tricks would make him a familiar and accepted figure in their midst.

He gyrated out onto the dance floor a time or two, thankful that the music’s volume made conversation impossible. The place was a mime’s paradise, actually, a high-volume meat market for the young and the restless, transient singles in search of momentary connection.

After ninety minutes another breath-defying bungeetrapeze act was flashing through the neon stampede high above. Drums beat like pounding horse hooves, so loud they made the floor shake and teeth ache and almost impinged on sanity.

During this perfect distraction, Max turned the white side of his mask to the wall and slunk along it in search of a door to an area he had not yet investigated.

The place was as riddled with hidden chambers as a Swiss cheese. He still hadn’t erected a mental map of the place, unusual for his swift and certain skill at 3-D visualization.

And the doors were the same seamless built-ins that could only be cracked like a safe in the pitch dark: with the help of sensitive fingertips in finding the fulcrum that controlled the swing mechanism.

A piece of wall became a door under the pressure of his fingers. Once cracked, it remained only ajar. Max tried to listen for any sound beyond it, but the chaos of the nightclub concealed it and also filtered through now that it was open. Best he dart within before the sound leak betrayed his snooping, and explain himself to anyone inside later.

Not only doors opened at his fingertips, but a cover story was always a moment’s inspiration away.

But the area beyond the door was empty and dark, and when Max pushed the door’s opposite point, it swung smoothly shut.

He moved quickly, feeling the limits of his particular box of darkness with his hands and feet. As long as he expected anything—unseen stairs leading up or down, sud-den openings, a demanding resident or guard—he would be surprised by nothing.

Voices murmured faintly ahead to his left. Probably the club room of the Veteran Magician’s Society. The Phantom Mage was an upstart to them, and would not be as welcome as an established act like the Mystifying Max.

He almost chuckled aloud at how easily he could approach the Synth from two different personas, now that he had found their hideout.

But that was just it. Had he truly found the Synth? No one had mentioned the name during his introductory interview three nights ago. Max guessed that they were a front organization, and that not all the members even knew about the Synth.

Still, Rafi Nadir’s presence outside the club Wednesday night was a bad omen. First he shows up in Las Vegas and gets his ex-girlfriend Molina’s paddle holster in a snarl. Then he shows up at the TitaniCon science fiction convention as a hired guard in alien guise. Then he’s out at Rancho Exotica in another semiofficial role. Next he’s in a strip-club parking lot just in time to see Temple attacked by a serial killer. Then he’s hired as security at the Cloaked Conjuror’s secret estate. Now, here he is at Neon Nightmare. True, men who take muscle jobs move around like pawns on a chessboard, busy as beavers while the more powerful people behind them move glacially slow, preferring to sacrifice the front men rather than their own safety.

But Nadir was turning up like funny money in a Monopoly game.

Max’s fingers, which had never left the smooth sheet-rocked walls and had felt every taped seam, again encountered one of the featureless doors. The pressure points changed from door to door, never turning up in the same predictable position, as a doorknob would. He stretched high and low and finally found the right spot.

Low-level light outlined the rectangle of a slightly open door.

Max eeled inside, finding himself in another comfortably clubbish room, but this one offering a wall of Eye-inthe-Sky television screens reporting from various spy points throughout the building.

The seat before the console was a burgundy leather wing chair. Max sensed this was a recreational watching post for the most part. He sensed the mind of a nonsexual voyeur. A dilettante of surveillance, who enjoyed the power of looking out over this dark and neon-lit realm. Not that the board couldn’t be manned by a serious surveillance team if necessary.

He quickly checked all the camera locations so he would know what to avoid on his next visit.

A half glass of wine sat on the cherry wood console. He came near, sniffed like a dog. A dessert wine, sweet and expensive.

He could picture some enormous Nero Wolfe of magical misdeeds sitting here overseeing his hidden realm.

Enough theorizing! Time to leave before the oeneophile returned.

Once again in the dark beyond a closed door, Max waited and listened, then moved farther into the building.

Suddenly, a grid of hot pink glowed ahead of him.

Moving along the wall he almost felt a part of, Max discovered the passage widened. A giant blocked his path.

Elvis, maybe nine feet high.

His white suit glowed, accented with garish magenta and indigo lightning bolts and the famous Taking Care of Business initials: TCB. Indigo streaked his hair and his hot-pink guitar had strings of poison green.

He was executed all in neon, of course.

Max moved out of the dark and into a neon Wonderland. Behind Elvis lurked a red neon shoe big enough for a potion-expanded Alice, dotted with patriot-blue stars. A neon lion boasted a mane that lit up in alternating strands of orange and hot pink.

The place was a hidden museum of neon. Max moved among the gigantic figures, noting that most of the styles seemed to date from the advertising art’s heyday, say the fifties and sixties.

After the concentrated darkness behind the scenes, Max felt he now inhabited some Technicolor dreamscape. A galaxy of neon icons loomed over him, reminding him of fabulous dreams he had as a child, when illuminated pinwheels of planets and galaxies in the night sky spun just above him and he could only gaze in wonder. He’d never forgotten those dreams, and had never had them since. Sometimes he wondered why, wondered what he had lost, what all children lost.

Yet here this universe of forgotten neon silently winked on and off, lighting up a space as vast and dark as a jumbo-jet hangar. Who would imagine Neon Nightmare harboring such a huge hunk of neon paradise?

Max rarely played the tourist.

He never blinked at the neon icons on the Strip, although he admired their gorgeous chutzpah. Those signs, the Flamingo Hilton’s chorus line of hot-pink feathers, the Four Queens’s glittering card faces downtown, were the showgirls of the Strip, bejeweled, beplumed, bedazzling. Living in Vegas, you quickly came to take them for granted. Maybe you even wanted to apologize sometimes for their blatant appeal.

And then you saw the gathered impact of outmoded neon signage and suddenly realized what the Strip had lost when it went upscale during the Steve Wynn years. Sheer visceral fantasy.

It surprised and bewitched Max, and for too long.

He heard more than the low sizzle of neon tubes, but a distinctive shuffle. Not Elvis shuffling his neon blue suede shoes, but smaller men moving on soles as soft as his own, like cats in Hush Puppies.

Max spun, looking for a black wall he could blend into despite the neon turning night to day all around him.

He glimpsed the figures then. All in black from sleek hooded masks to gloved hands, to slippered feet. Ninjasfrom a hokey martial arts movie, small, wiry men as agile as grasshoppers.

Hokey didn’t matter. Intention did. And this crew was out to nail him.

Max darted into the neon jungle all around him, behind Elvis, around the lion that roared in all the colors of the rainbow.

There were four, maybe five of them, separating instantly to pursue and trap him.

The Phantom Mage wanted to remain precisely that at this point. It was one thing if this false persona had been caught snooping at Neon Nightmare. It was another thing if he were to be caught and unmasked as Max Kinsella. With one blow, both of Max’s options for infiltrating the Synth would die. And he might too.

So he played tag with these anonymous denizens of the neon night until he could double back, slide through Elvis’s wide-spread legs with a patented knee dip, and scrabble into the black, unlit corridors that had led to this carnival of nervous light and ambushing darkness.

Max ran from a Neon Nightmare into a maze, a labyrinth. The labyrinth. The Minotaur was his shadow, but it had fractured into mini-Minotaurs in pursuit.

The bull-beast thundered behind him. Its name was Uncertainty. History. Myth. Loss. Treachery.

The dark was his brother. The dark was Sean, lost in time and treading the endless moibus strip of Death, always turning back upon itself until it almost became Rebirth. The worm Ouroboros.

Who would have thought this place was so big and intricate? A kind of Hell, learned only by running the length and width and breadth of it.

Which, of course, was endless. Hell is other people, Jean Paul Sartre had said. But what did he know? The French found Hell in endless politics. The Russians in endless bureaucracy. The English in endless colonialism. The Americans in endless self-analysis. The Jews in endless longing. And the Irish? In endless self-destruction.

He was Irish and expected to impale himself upon his own image, except the dark offered no reflections. If they caught him they would kill him.

It was the ultimate race. Not against time, or history, but against enemies.

He had once welcomed enemies, when the thought of them made him one with his dead cousin. You killed my cousin, my brother. Come, kill me if you can.

They could. Max was old enough now to no longer consider himself immortal.

And he had a life now, or a half-life, like all radioactive matter. Temple was most of that half. He thought of her learning that he had been caught and killed … and decided that he could not be caught and killed. Maybe they’d just catch him. Maybe the chase was enough. So far it hadn’t been for Kathleen, but for these unknown men so far away in time and space … Maybe.

He couldn’t rely on it, so he dodged the dark’s sharp unseen corners, raced past easy exits never knowing of their existence, drove himself deeper into darkness, like a screw into hardwood.

He ran by instinct, no longer knowing anything.

His wind was going, and his resilience. He was blind, out of control, everything that he had fought so long from becoming … from going back to.

Someone panted in the dark. Himself.

And the unseen pursuers.

He paused to find a wall and flatten himself against it. This labyrinth was their construction. It was meant to trap intruders like midnight flypaper. They were the spiders; he was the fly.

Finally he would hit a dead end, and they would have him.

He moved forward. Backward? He heard their rustling clothes, the secret almost-silent slide of hidden doors, the thud of feet and heartbeats, his own.

He was running wild, irrational. Lost. Everything thatcould, would fail him. How to capture control again, which he had mastered for so long?

No time.

No time.

Keep running, thinking, losing.

Animals who allowed themselves to be herded, died. He was being herded and he knew it.

Then fresh air assaulted him like the soundless crack of a whip. The crack of a door, rather.

He saw a scimitar of light, felt claws clutch his forearm. He was being drawn in, into light or further dark. A force slammed him against a wall and the door behind him clicked shut.

The light was an illusion, a hissing, dying thread of false fire. A magician’s trick.

“Follow me,” a whisper rasped, as a hand pulled him forward into more dark.

It could have been anyone’s hand, or whisper. Kathleen O’Connor. The Cloaked Conjuror. The ghost of Harry Houdini, or Elvis, for that matter. What an act that would be! Unbidden thoughts of a really wild comeback stage show jousted in his brain. What if he based an act on bringing back ghosts? He could do Elvis … Houdini had been a much smaller, more muscular man, but he’d done a damn good imitation of him at the haunted house … No! This was not about his performing future. This was about escaping his consuming past.

In the dark.

This was about escaping Neon Nightmare before the Synth found him and put a name to their nemesis.

Chapter 31

… Neon Babes

Naturally, I am the Ninth Ninja in this low-budget stalk-athon at Neon Nightmare.

Finally! Tailing Mr. Max has paid off.

I knew something sinister was going on at Neon Nightmare, and tiptoeing through the tulips of neon blossoming in the secret warehouse has not only introduced me to a set of human ninjas, but reacquainted me with the nightmare ninjas from my own dreams.

The place is not only crawling with human agents of the amorphous Synth, but with Miss Hyacinth’s own nonet of Havana-brown hit men.

So while Mr. Max is eluding the human variety, I am sidestepping the determined pursuit of the feline assassin, times nine.

It is not the first, nor, I imagine, the last time.

Even as Mr. Max is whisked away by a strange dude in a hooded robe, rather like a monk, I am dashing back into Disco Central to vanish among the crowd.

Interested as I am to encounter the ninja brigade again,I really crave to cross whiskers—vibrissae is the technical term—with that Siamese siren Hyacinth.

Miss Midnight Louise, being caught up in a post-hormonal hurricane, kicked her can during our previous case, but I am sure that I can get much farther with her by less violent means. In any case, I would rather make love than war.

I decide to hang out by the bar, as that is where the single babes congregate.

I must admit I create quite a sensation.

An unescorted dude of my ilk is the cause for much comment in such a place, and the chicks really like to pat me on the back.

So I strut back and forth on the black glass bar top, accepting tribute and admiration. They are particularly fond of stroking my tail to the very end.

“I’ll buy the dude a saucer of White Russian,” one lonely lady yells over the chaos at the barkeep. Her would-be escort snarls into his frozen margarita, but what is a mere guy compared to a well-furred Casanova?

Anyway, there I am, lounging on the bar, licking up a luscious concoction of cream and KahlOa, thinking of my friend of the same name, a performing panther of great elegance, when I hear a hiss at my rear.

Either I have a personal problem, or there is a snake or flat tire on the premises. I opt for the snake.

When I turn my head and look down at the floor behind the bar, I am confronting a pair of gleaming, red predatory eyes.

Not even a Sears catalogue could have delivered so fortuitously, back in the days when Sears had catalogues, which only goes to show how many lives I have enjoyed.

“Missster Midnight Louie,” the apparition breathes. “Misss Hyasssscinth,” I respond in kind.

My human hostess withdraws, fearing a hissing and spitting match.

Often an irresistible attraction looks like that at the onset. “Fancy meeting you here,” she says.

“Nothing fancy about it. I came because I thought this was the kind of flashy joint you would be hanging about.”

“So you think I am ‘flashy.’ “

“Not at all. I think you are a show biz kind of girl.”

“Really?”

“Indeed. Your career is on the upswing. Not only a cable sci-fi show, but some possibility of a product endorsement. Obviously, you have your paw on the pulse of the modern entertainment media.”

“And you want to resume your role as a cat food spokesman?”

“I would not be averse to it.”

“So you had nothing to do with that spitfire who invaded the Cloaked Conjuror’s headquarters and dared to cross claws with me?”

‘That chit? Obviously a low-class upstart. I did try to prevent that grudge match, you recall.”

“I recall that you offered to go some rounds with me yourself.”

“Can you blame me?” I ask, flexing my brow whiskers like Tom Selleck. We both are luxuriously haired, you know.

“Are you saying your offer was a gallantry, rather than a challenge?”

“Gallantry is always a challenge,” I respond.

“So you have no ulterior motive in making my acquaintance.”

I allow my ears to flatten and my expression to become downcast. “Alas, I do have an ulterior motive. I cannot resist a foxy female.”

“Then come down here and we will do a little line dancing.”

Of course I cannot resist an invitation, or a challenge, from an unrelated female.

I leap down, only to find that Miss Hyacinth has pulled a disappearing act. Not so strange for a feline doll who assists in a magic show. I decide to play her game of hide-and-seek, so I ankle out from behind the bar, where I am at the mercy of the gyrating feet on the dance floor.

No sign of Miss Hyacinth, but a lot of foot-stomping isgoing on. In fact, I am being subjected to such a fever of Saturday night feet, even in the relatively static arena of the bar area, that I finally loft back atop the mirrored black surface, which reflects the constellations of panicked neon mares in the heights above us all.

Now I understand what I am experiencing: a kind of psychic stampede. To my keyed-up senses, it is as if these humans are a cat colony in communal heat. Thanks to the efforts of the Ladies of Spaying, among my kind that sort of thing is dying out, but here it is in full, rampant bloom.

I strut along the bar in a direction opposite to my first fling up here, finding dudes wearing backward baseball caps (loathsome fashion!) and the fedora as occasional as the shaved head, knocking back obscure beers, high-octane lemonades, and trendy coolers.

Not many dames line up at the bar on this side, as it seems to be a dudely kind of place, what with a TV perched above the liquor-bottle wallpaper blaring out some sports contest, but one lady does attract my notice.

She is sitting artistically behind a martini glass, that sublime inverted pyramid shape that spells sophistication and a nodding acquaintance with my ancestors’ favored sepulcher.

I ankle over, rubbing against a half-dozen sweaty long-necks on the way.

What attracts me is the luminous color that fills her classic martini glass. Ah! I cannot rhapsodize enough. It is the liquid, lurid green of the Queen of Cat’s eyes, Bastet herself. It is the Green Fairy of absinthe gone nouveau noir. It is as modern as the blinkers on a well-bred Chartreuse cat.

The lady in question, and in a place like this, the “lady” is always in question, attracts my attention next.

Other than Miss Temple, a feisty ginger-bit of a Tortie to me, I am not much impressed by human pulchritude.

But this lady is well-matched to her sour green-apple martini. Her hair is as black as the sheen in my coat at its most well-licked. Her eyes are the blue-green of the Divine Yvette, my absent ladylove, at her most imperious Persian princesshood. Her lips on the short straw stuck in the opaque drink like a tap into a poisoned apple skin, are, well, to coin a phrase, grapefruit ruby-red. Her skin is the dead-white of an albino and hairless Sphinx cat.

All in all, she is a Technicolor treat.

I boldly stop before her and yawn, so she can observe my glossy black coat, so like her hair … my blood-red tongue, so like her lips … my lettuce-green eyes, so like her poison of choice … my shark-white teeth so like her pale, satin skin.

I am eye-to-eye … indeed, eyetooth to eyetooth with, of course … the living inspiration for the sketch of Kathleen O’Connor, aka Kitty the Cutter. (My thankfully absent roommate does have such a way with words!) They say a cat may look at a queen. They also call unfixed female cats queens. They also call jealous and vicious women “cats.” I think I have Miss Kitty’s number.

I stare into Miss Kathleen O’Connor’s aquamarine eyes.

“What have we here?” she asks loudly enough that only I may hear. “A tomcat on the town? Would you like a drink?”

I do not respond, but she raises a pale finger topped by a scarlet nail, and in two shakes of an innocent’s lamb’s tail, the bartender presents me with a saucer of the same vile green liquid she imbibes.

I deign to run a paw across it, sniff the result, then shake the excess onto the black-glass bar.

Miss Kitty laughs. She has claimed even my kind’s name, as if evil had an inbred feline bent. I owe her for that one too.

“You Las Vegas boys,” she says soft and low, “are all alike. Thinking you know something, but too … discriminating … for the real world.”

If I know who she is, does she know who I am? How could she? I am an undercover operative. I am as discreet as a poodle in Paris. What could she know about me?

She leans close, sips from her straw, blows the words at me as if she expects me to understand. And I do.

“Tell your friends—and I know you have some, big boy—Ihave some myself. Tell your friends that I said ‘Hello.’ I don’t know quite how you will go about telling them that. Perhaps it is just as well. Anyway, kiss them good-bye for me.”

I have a thousand questions, most of them starting with, “Are you really leaving my associates alone?”

I do not admit to human “friends.” (Miss Temple, of course, is different. She is much more than a friend. She is my tender little filet of solemate.) And I certainly do not “talk” to humans, friend or foe. I stand alone among my kind in knowing more of humanity than I would want to. This particular piece of it I would like to toss into the pool in front of the Mirage’s volcano attraction during mid-explosion, but even though she is a petite little doll she is too big to throw for a loop here or anywhere else.

So I content myself with hissing in her voodoo martini and stalking off without a word.

Sometimes it is better to leave to fight another day.

Chapter 32

… Wizard!

Another whip-crack sound of an unseen door opening. Night air and parking lot lights slapped Max’s senses silly.

He felt like a tomb robber slipping out of Cheops’ pyramid at Giza. A dark figure urged him forward, and soon both were ensconced in … an aged Volkswagen Beetle.

Shades of Tomb Raider? Hardly.

Yet, behind them, shadows of the Synth were pouring from the black pyramid of Neon Nightmare while the titular horse was screaming in neon rainbows above it all.

His guide revved the VW and putt-putted them into a dark corner of the lot, where they parked between the looming screens of a Ford Exasperator and a Lincoln Aggravator.

Great. If he’d wanted a getaway driver in a midget clown car he could have called on Temple and her new Miata.

Or maybe not.

He eyed the driver, a hunched figure in black rather likeSister Wendy, the Episcopal nun-cum-art-expert on public TV.

Max was getting very tired of mysteries inside of enigmas inside of puzzles.

“I don’t need a chauffeur,” Max said finally. Grumpily. “You need a friend.” The simple answer paraphrased the old Carole King song.

“No.” Max was certain. “Friends are excess baggage.”

“So I taught you,” the raspy voice answered. “But I was wrong. Terribly wrong. I’m sorry.”

Not many people had ever said “I’m sorry” to Max Kinsella.

There was only one person, maybe two, he needed to say “I’m sorry” to. One was Sean, his dead cousin. The other one was dead too.

Or was he?

Max turned to eye the obscure figure.

Magicians were good at obscuring things, even and especially themselves.

“You saved me back there,” Max said.

“You needed saving,” was the answer.

“We all do, but I especially needed it half a lifetime ago, in Ireland. Only one person applied for the job.”

“He must have been a masochist.”

“He was a genius.”

“Thank you.” Said modestly.

Max twisted in the cramped seat to see better, as if a change in position could penetrate the veil of mystery. “Garry?” he asked. “Gandolph? It’s you? You’re alive?”

“My greatest and most cowardly illusion. I’m sorry. I never meant to deceive you.”

“The hell you didn’t!” Max pushed open the car door, stepped out at full length, and still didn’t top the Lincoln SUV at his back. The parking lot was quiet now, pursuers faded back into their bizarre building. “You old fraud! You . faked your own death. What are you, a Houdini for the New Age set? Did you plan on reappearing and snagging a major hotel gig, or what?”

The lumpy form struggled out of the driver’s seat to confront his pupil.

“It wasn’t planned. At least not my death. You fret over a death in a foreign land long ago. I now know your pain, pardon the cliché. Can’t you guess what happened?”

“Wait.” Max ground his bicuspids and his brain cells at the same time. If Gandolph was alive, and he definitely was, then …

“You were dedicated to unmasking false mediums,” he said. “That required a false persona. You were always good at disguises. But you needed to be better. So … you did what a lot of magicians have done for stage work. You hired … a double.”

Gandolph’s head nodded in the dark.

“A double,” Max repeated. “And your double died at the haunted house séance. You didn’t expect that.”

“Never. I never would have allowed another person to risk life or even limb on my behalf. I merely wanted to lurk behind the scenes, as you yourself did that night. Quite a brilliant impersonation of Houdini, by the way. You are nothing like him, in physique or in magical style.”

“Thank you. But I also have you to thank for thinking you were dead all these months. You didn’t warn me.”

“How could I? I expected my double to survive the séance. I would never have hired a standin for my own murder! I never dreamed the Synth would be so irritated by my existence.”

“So it was the Synth!”

“The Synth has a thousand heads, and they are all Magic.”

“Magic is an illusion.”

“So is death.” The figure so short and squat stepped forward to doff its hood.

Max looked down into the grandfatherly face of the late Garry Randolph, now come back to life, wondering if heshould pinch himself, or his mentor. Was Garry really alive and back? Yes!

It had been almost two decades since he’d read The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s epic fantasy. If he remembered correctly, Gandalf the Gray, whose name Garry Randolph had folded into his stage persona almost forty years ago, had been lost in a deep cavern and presumed dead.

Only he had returned.

Now Garry had pulled that same mind-boggling trick and Max was as bedazzled as any wannabe magician.

Not until now, seeing Gandolph alive again, had he understood, or admitted, how much the older magician had meant to him, alive and dead. He had an ally again, a mentor. Someone who talked his language, the bilingual tongue of magic and counterespionage.

Like the company of the Ring, he felt energized again by the notion of a stout companion. Garry was more than that, though, he was all Max had left of family. And he was alive!

There’d be plenty of time now to figure out who had wanted Gandolph dead, to unravel the Synth and all its works, to track down Kathleen O’Connor—Garry had known her, seen her, as a girl. She wouldn’t intimidate him, as she had Matt Devine and Temple and even Molina, long-distance.

He realized he had felt the same sense of betrayal at Garry’s presumed death and resurrection as Temple had felt at Max’s own disappearance and return. You can’t condemn a man for avoiding you because he was a walking death trap, not even Matt Devine.

Max smiled broadly and held out his cloaked arms. “Welcome home, maestro.”

The old man embraced him with true feeling. “Welcome to the endgame, rather. My home is your home now, I’ve learned that, and it was what I intended. Yet I dare not appear as myself until all my enemies are unmasked.”

“They’re my enemies too.”

“Then we have even more in common. Come on, let’s go chew over our pasts and our futures until our damn jaws ache and we know we’re alive because it hurts. Let’s go … home?”

For once Max found himself stunned into silence. He had never dreamed that a live Garry Randolph would return to the house he himself had occupied alone for many months, a recluse and a hermit and a hunted man, brooding on ghosts.

He had never dreamed another human being would urge a retreat to any place they could both call “home.” It felt incredibly good.

He was so … unusually jubilant that he almost forgot where he was.

Something skittered past his ankles: large, dark, ratlike.

Or was it a shadow that fell between the bolts of flashing neon from the neon mare high atop the building’s distant peak?

Whatever it had been, it recalled Max to himself, to here and now, and to danger. He stood there in the guise of the Phantom Mage. Now he should make like his name and vanish.

“We should leave separately, and ensure that no one follows us. Let’s meet at the house.”

“Delighted to, my boy!” Gandolph hustled back into his low-profile car and started the engine.

Amazing, Max thought.

Garry Randolph alive. Investigating the same shadowy entity that he was. Now they’d get somewhere!

Time for him to make the first step. Swirling his theatrical cape around him, Max stalked away like Dracula repelled by the whiff of garlic toast.

He could hardly wait to lose this persona and this place and rejoin forces with Gandolph.

Yes!

Chapter 33

… Torn Between

Two Tails

Some shamuses have all the luck.

Not Midnight Louie.

Here I am, as undercover as a dude can be at the Neon Nightmare. I have just made contact with the Woman in the Case.

I have previously seen Mr. Max Kinsella slinking around the joint, although he has been as invisible as a flea on a tweed suit for the past hour or so.

I am frantic to keep these two natural enemies apart, though they have not seen hide nor hair of each other in years, and I am mad to trail both of them as they separately (I devoutly hope) leave this place.

There is only one entrance and exit that I know of, the velvet cordoned-off door guarded by the goons up front.

That does not mean there are not other doors, used for service purposes.

Miss Kitty is still holding down the bar like a forties film fatale.

Mr. Max is still AWOL.

I pace beside the bar, blending beautifully with the black high-gloss floor that reflects the clientele and offers me further cover. Who would notice me when you can eyeball Victoria’s Secret thongs on half the babes in the room?

The noise that passes for music nowadays is louder than a chorus of queens in heat, and the smoke and mirrors and neon of the dance floor is interfering with my night vision.

I decide to slip out the front door for a bit of fresh air while I figure out what to do.

And then whilst I am in the act of successfully slipping and the clamor and commotion inside is fading into a bad dream.. I happen to notice the two muscle men I am ankling behind.

There has been a changing of the guard since I came in, and one of them is now Rafi Nadir, the indomitable Miss Lieutenant Molina’s ex-squeeze and no friend of Mr. Max, although he has a soft spot in my heart for coming to the aid of my Miss Temple recently.

That does not mean that I cut him any slack in the hired hood line.

But I am really perplexed now.

I slip along the building’s foundation and the row of trendy metal and neon cutouts of Las Vegas’s favorite flora, palm trees and cacti.

They are spatters of Technicolor chalk and I am the soft unseen canvas of a velvet painting behind them. Apparently I am not soft and unseen enough, however, for I hear a hissing sound.

I pause, ready to leap left, right, or up. Snakes do not faze me but I cannot stand these timer-operated sprinkler systems they have around here that can drench a guy to his toe-hairs.

Before I can execute a Kitty Kong move I am tapped on the shoulder by a set of delicate feminine shivs. That is to say that they dig in like a hellion with hangnails.

“Say, Pop. Chill out. It is Number One Daughter.”

“No Charlie Chan–speak from you, Miss Louise. And you presume.”

“Of course I do. I am a professional investigator now, non?” She sits down beside me and directs a narrow glance to the guys at the door. “Who is that dude you gave the evil eye to on the way out?”

I guess a partner should know the cast du jour.

“That, my inquisitive sneak, is one Rafi Nadir, aka Raf. He is a shady character around town, but I have it on eyewitness testimony—mine—that he helped my Miss Temple collar a crook who was threatening to close down her windpipe not two nights ago.”

“So he is a bad guy with one gold star to his credit, but only from you and your girl-tortie roommate.”

“Right.”

“Okay, he is not the reason you are dithering around here outside Neon Nightmare. What gives?”

“What gives is why you are dithering around here outside Neon Nightmare. I at least have been inside.”

“This rave and mosh scene is not for me. Hard on the eardrums. Truth is, I came across Mr. Max Kinsella a couple hours ago and decided to tail his Hush Puppies until they cried Uncle.”

“He wears Hush Puppies? Mr. Max?”

“Do not sound so wounded. No, he remains the sartorial fashion plate you know and loathe. His shoes are Bruno Maglis, which, as you know, have served many a celebrity, but they are as silent-soled as plain old sneakers. One whiff of his footwear and I knew he was someone to watch.”

“‘Sartorial,’ Louise! That is a big word for a street kit.”

“Listen, I can sling around anything you can, including vocabulary.”

“Whatever. I have determined that Mr. Max is indeed inside. Somewhere. I also have a dame I wish to tail. I was just wondering how to go in two directions at once, or serially, but perhaps you can solve my dilemma.”

“Of course I can solve your dilemma, and any other cold cases you have hanging around. We are not Midnight, Inc. for nothing. Speaking of vocabulary, that was actually a rather clever idea of yours, Pop.”

“Thank you, Louise. Now—”

I gaze aghast at the open door to Neon Nightmare.

She is limned against the interior neon like a silhouette of evil incarnate. Miss Kitty O’Connor.

“Something got your tongue, and eyeballs? Ah.” Miss Louise perks up her ears and the hair on her hackles. “Some hussy, I see.”

“If you see her, can you tail her?”

“Like her thong bikini.”

“She will have transportation.”

“So do I.” Louise snaps out her shivs. I hear them bite sandy Las Vegas dirt.

“Go, girl,” I order in the day’s vernacular.

I hardly see her blend into the dark, but one of my problems is now Miss Kitty O’Connor’s problem. She has set all my human friends atremble, but I send her my heartfelt sympathy. Miss Midnight Louise is one fierce tiger to have on your tail, and I ought to know.

All right. I decide on a stroll around the foundation of Neon Nightmare. Above me the mare in question ripples with a blaze of neon … magenta, indigo blue, yellow, red, and purple.

I detect no obvious exits and end up near the main entrance again … just in time to see the figure reminiscent of the Cloaked Conjuror appear in the parking lot with a swirl of cape and a glimpse of white-face.

That hokey Phantom of the Opera getup has never fooled Midnight Louie. I hotfoot it along behind Mr. Max’s striding feet. Rats! Miss Louise is correct. He wears sound-softening shoes with the exquisite redolence only found in Italian leather goods. From Caesar’s sandals to Gucci loafers. So far has Rome fallen. And its vaunted arches.

As I expect, we soon pussyfoot up to a black car parked on a side street.

As Mr. Max swirls aside his theatrical black cloak to enter the driver’s side, I dive into the entrance to the backseat. Thank heaven for black car interiors.

Instantly the engine throbs slightly under my feet. I extendmy shivs into carpeting as I prepare for takeoff. I do not expect Mr. Max to linger.

He does not disappoint me. I am hurled forward, then back as the car accelerates smartly, before settling down to cruising speed.

So black is the night, and the car, that I risk peering over the backseat.

Mr. Max is pulling off the mask and loosening his hair with his fingers. He has no more idea that I am hitching a ride on his wagon than that his most bitter enemy had been indulging in Martian-green martinis at the Neon Nightmare bar.

I wonder where he was during that interlude. Wherever it was, he is now in a more distracted mood than I have ever seen him indulge before.

Streetlights cast bright prison bars over our moving vehicle. He drives fast, smooth and sure. I find a thrill catching in my throat, for I am certain that this time I will know what my Miss Temple knows and has not seen fit to share with me: where the Mystifying Max goes to ground. His home turf. The hideaway that even Lieutenant Molina has not been able to find.

What a night!

I am so jubilant I brace my shivs on the backseat’s upright portions to glimpse the streetlights shining above.

I see one particular light pierce the rear window and then slide across the car’s ceiling like a luminous serpent.

I frown. Streetlights flash by at a downward angle.

This was an upward light.

Risking discovery, I ratchet up the backseat upholstery until my ear-flattened head can see out the rear window.

The moon has fallen from the sky, or maybe the horse from Neon Nightmare is on our trail.

A single wild bright eye follows the car.

The Neon Nightmare is a cyclops?

I blink as the expanding ball of light rakes my delicate irises, turning my pupils into spikes.

We are being tailed by a one-eyed monster.

Luckily, considering my kind and my color, I am not superstitious.

I immediately realize our peril.

It is a motorcycle that follows us, and Mr. Max is obviously thinking of other things. In fact, I hear him chuckle to himself. He is daydreaming when a nightmare is on our tail. Tails!

I am along for the ride, after all.

The lone light winks shut.

I cannot see it, but I hear the faint vibration of a growling motor gaining on us.

Our vehicle suddenly slows, then turns. And turns again. Mr. Max is heading home.

He must head elsewhere.

I leap atop the passenger seat back, howling my warning.

The car swerves as Mr. Max glances in his rear-and side-view mirrors. I see his eyes focused like black laser lights.

The car swerves again, executing a neat 180-degree turn so we are facing in the opposite direction.

Actually, I am facing the rear of the car, for I have been unceremoniously hurled into the foot well of the passenger seat, my shivs stapling nylon carpeting to keep myself from bouncing around a lowly space spiked with odd bits of gravel and scented with asphalt and used gum.

When the car stabilizes, I claw my way to the top of the passenger seat to see. There is nothing behind us but blackness.

I glance into the driver’s seat.

Mr. Max glances at me, but does not seem to really see me.

And then we barrel down the side streets in a zigzag pattern that would make a sidewinder snake dizzy, and suddenly we are shooting onto an entrance ramp to a freeway. Our speed matches the flow of traffic and then increases. And increases.

We weave in and out of lanes, passing every vehicle except, thank Bast, a highway patrol car. I see the single glareof the motorcycle headlight illuminating the car ceiling. Still we speed on. Soon we have slipped the surly bonds of the Nevada posted speed limits and left city and traffic far behind. And still we dodge the single light that clings like static electricity to every move we make.

Finally we screech into another 180-degree turn and immediately Mr. Max hits the gas so we are racing back in the direction from which we just fled, right into the light that has never failed to follow our every maneuver.

There is only one outcome for this showdown. High impact.

I no longer fear our one-eyed pursuer, but I think Mr. Max is trying to lurch me loose from my death grip on his interior upholstery, which is one of my favorite aromatic materials, leather.

Good luck.

It will give before I do.

Chapter 34

… Going to the Devil

Max hit the brakes until they screamed in the desert night like a puma. He turned around in a wide U on the deserted highway and retraced his path.

It had been the ultimate game of “Chicken.”

Maxima and Ninja at full throttle into each other.

Max had never wavered, but he was armored by a car.

Now he brought that car to a full stop and jerked the gears into Park. He hurtled out the passenger door, not bothering to shut it or think about anything but who and why.

Las Vegas was flatter than the proverbial pancake, but the car-motorcycle chase had driven deep into the desert where dry washes veined the landscape like seams in a golfer’s face.

The motorcycle, maneuvering to both dodge and confront a car that had just executed a sudden 180-degree turn, had spun out on the gravel, skittering over the concrete in the restless desert wind.

Max ran to the edge of the arroyo fifty feet from thehighway—that’s how far the motorcycle had sailed through the air—and looked down into the darkness.

Nothing to see now, but if the gas tank blew … he pulled out his cell phone, then realized it would leave a trail and snapped it shut again. Better find a pay phone at the nearest gas station, which might be miles away.

He slammed himself into the front seat and drew the door shut like a bank vault behind him.

He had forgotten what, or who, he had glimpsed in the car during the last, few, desperate seconds of maneuvering. The car seemed empty as he raced alone over unlit asphalt, eyes on the faint dotted line of the two-lane highway. The creature, black as a skunk, was gone now. Midnight Louie, believe it or not. Or not. Or had it been a racoon? Something black and masked about the face. He had only glimpsed it as a scrabbling form in the dark.

On the other hand, he had no doubt about the motorcycle rider, who had reacted a split second too slowly to his latest evasive maneuvers. That was the way of war and races: move fast or spin out permanently. He couldn’t be dead sure of that person’s identity, but he had a gut feeling exactly who it was: the elusive easy rider who had creased his scalp with a bullet weeks ago, who had been dogging Matt Devine at the radio station, who had sailed into an unexpected off-road experience.

He doubted that any emergency vehicle he could call to this site could save anything, not even a guilty conscience. Still, he memorized the first highway marker he came to, and pushed the pedal to the floor. The Maxima leaped like a jackrabbit to the charge as he aimed for a faint line of gas-station neon maybe five miles away.

Chapter 35

… Roadrunner

Ouch! There is nothing out here but cat-claw cactus and it is digging directly between my toes on every step.

It was no big decision what to do when Mr. Max played spin-the-bottle with the motorcycle and won, brakes down.

As he bailed out of the car to check on the damage, I bailed out right behind him.

I stare down at the dried-out wash, gazing at one red taillight.

It is not the motorcyclist I fret about. I knew who it was and I am not sorry to see Mr. Max decide to leave, and no doubt find an anonymous phone upon which to report this fatal accident so long overdue. I know how this dude thinks: like I do, were anyone human ever to realize that I do think.

Right now I am thinking that if Miss Kitty O’Connor has truly clawed her last, I am not about to let any tears soak into my best black lace jabot. She was not exactly a friend to me and mine.

However, I have one nagging worry. Let us just say that I have a nagging nagger nowadays. The last thing I did indelegating power this evening was to tell my junior partner to tail Miss Kitty O’Connor. I do not doubt my order was heeded.

Ergo, Miss Midnight Louise was likely on the motorcycle when it made its Evel Knievel leap to fame and future forensics examination.

Well, one cannot have an associate gasping out her last on the sere desert sands. Since nothing I would or could manage to do with a cell phone can offer an iota of good at the accident scene, I hurl myself down the crotchety incline, avoiding cacti all the way.

Such a path is hard on the unprotected pads, let me tell you. I had never expected to be an upside-down pincushion, but it is in that condition in which I finally catapult to the bottom.

My nose tells me my first worry is well placed. Raw gasoline is one of the strongest odors on the planet, and it hangs in a nasal miasma over the crash scene.

One spark and everything in the vicinity is instant barbecue.

So I pause before approaching nearer to observe the scene.

The motorcycle is on its side, a spray of broken-off accessories pluming over the sand. Broken glass sparkles from the moon-glow high above.

The rider lies fifteen feet away, limbs turned at angles even the most agile alley cat could not manage while in a living, breathing condition. The helmet has rolled like an obsidian pumpkin to the foot of a huge Joshua tree cactus a couple yards away.

“Louise,” I call plaintively.

Something in the distance answers me with an arpeggio of yips ending in a howl. Coyotes. I wonder if Mr. Max will return to the accident scene, or if he will only lurk at a distance, as I would, to see the ambulance come and go.

Probably. I pause by the fallen figure’s head. The skin looks dead in the moonlight and snaky threads of black hair cross the forehead and cheek. Some of them, I sniff on closer examination, are tendrils of blood.

I paw delicately at the motionless mouth, my shortest hairs unstirred by any breath or breeze.

It is a still night in the desert, in more ways than one. I do not hear any feline complaints either.

Nervous as I am, I must approach the fallen vehicle. If Louise had hitchhiked a ride with Kitty the Cutter, she would have needed to do what I have done before: ride in a saddlebag.

One of these handy black-leather pockets faces up at the star-pocked night sky. I examine it with mitt and nose and even tongue. Its exterior buckles are closed. I doubt the dead woman would have overlooked Miss Midnight Louise inside and buckled her in.

Next I bend down and explore the side of the bike crushed against the ground. The scent of oozing cactus juice is even stronger than spilled gasoline at this level.

I find another saddlebag, a twin to the first, crushed flat under the motorcycle’s metal side. I sniff for blood, but can’t overcome the gasoline reek. It is like trying to smell lilies of the valley when gardenias bloom next door.

There is a sudden scrape behind me and the sand shifts under my feet as I leap two feet into the air, execute a 180-turn like Mr. Max’s car, and face the wilderness.

I make out a silhouette cresting the dry wash.

Oh, Great-grandmother Graymalkin! It is a lone coyote.

Now, eating nightly is a serious matter to this breed, which has been hunted to hoped-for extinction by humans and yet still manages to scrounge a living from the few uncivilized acres of desert left to its kind.

Actually, my money is on the coyote in this primal battle, but in these circumstances I cannot afford to let my finer feelings stand in the way of my survival skills.

And a coyote is at least twice my size with teeth at least six times the size of mine.

I know from many street brawls that it is not size but attitude that determines who comes out on top. However,an opponent who is perpetually starving to death and who can only look on one as fresh meat is an extreme case it would be better to avoid than get physical with.

So I prance sideways, my back up and fur fluffed to porcupine fullness.

The coyote tilts his feral head in the universal canine gesture of puzzlement. I am sure that the hint of quills is not welcome to a desert-living breed who must grow up on regular snoutfuls of cactus spines.

Either cowed or simply shocked by my performance, he edges down into the wash a good ten yards away from me and soon is nosing at the recumbent form of the former Kathleen O’Connor.

Much as I would like to tell Miss Temple (could I tell Miss Temple anything) that I had witnessed Kitty the Cutter being eaten by coyotes for the sin of persecuting Mr. Matt and Mr. Max, I cannot allow the death scene and the corpus delecti to be tampered with before the ambulance comes.

“Ah, Mr. Coyote, that is not prey for you. The body is several rungs up the evolutionary ladder from you. It is always bad policy to eat your betters. They tend to retaliate. Not that I speak from personal experience, mind you.”

He does not even lift his head at my whimpered protests, but paws at Miss Kitty’s dead hand. There is no doubt that it is dead, for if it were not, no way would it sit still for playing patty-cakes with a coyote.

Mr. Coyote snuffles disgustingly at the corpse, then lifts his head to sniff the scents emanating from me.

There is no way to turn off my natural perfume, any more than I could deactivate the hypersensitive nostrils on a canine creature.

So it is time to let this bozo get a big whiff of my attitude.

“You do not want to mix it up with me,” I warn him in a low growl. “I am not your usual lost domestic feline. I am big-time muscle in Las Vegas, and I am out here on a case. Mess with me and you will lose a major sense.”

His hackles bristle in response and there we are facing off.

It is in the silence that holds while we bluff each other with our badness that a thin, watery wail pierces the darkness like a cactus needle.

First I think siren, but this time the dog is ahead of me. Its ears prick, its head lifts and off it goes bounding along the meandering trail of the dry wash.

I bound after. Ouch! The ground is littered with Christmas tree needles if a Christmas tree was ever a saguaro cactus. Some are the length of knitting needles!

I limp after, Mr. Coyote being a speedball who can use years of canny desert experience to avoid the prickliest pear plants.

I arrive to see him rubbing his nose in the sand and pawing at it with both front feet.

There is a puddle of shadow on the ground that the moonbeams do not deign to illuminate and every raised hair on my shoulder blades tells me that it is Miss Midnight Louise and that she is dazed or injured, or else she would be standing upright and spitting like a kettle at 4:00 P.M. high tea.

Chapter 36

… Neo-Neon Nightmare

A high, thin keening ripped through the darkness.

Max had run the car off the road, turned off the lights and the engine, and waited.

The siren grew louder and shriller until it sounded like an alley cat in heat. The flashing red and blue lights of the squad car leading the ambulance slowed at a distant mile marker, then spurted ahead.

Max grew impatient when the squad car stopped, a pale blot gleaming like a beached whale carcass on the desert darkness.

“There, you idiots,” he whispered. Trained by both his apparent and his secret vocations to precise observation, his eye had already detected and pinpointed the darker patterns at the bottom of the wash that were a motorcycle and a body.

Soon, though, the officers and ambulance attendants were stumbling alongside the rim of the dry riverbed, their high-power flashlights illuminating mesquite bushes and prickly pears.

Finally the lights danced over the high-gloss sheen of a motorcycle flank. They converged in a clot, one man going back along the highway to direct the ambulance driver forward … for more efficient pickup of the victim, the body.

Everyone was scrambling down the incline now. One of the cops held them back while a pair of EMTs rushed to the blot that was Kathleen’s body. They bent over her, applying tests and remedies. The gurney was half carried, half rolled over the rugged terrain.

Max grunted soft appraisal. The major activity on the scene would obscure any traces he might have left, and with his unmarked soles they would be few.

The tire tracks his car laid on the asphalt as he had spun around wouldn’t erase. Come daylight, when an accident investigation team hit the scene, they’d implicate a car and driver in the outcome. His Maxima was history. He’d leave it at one of the designated drop sites, and walk away. One call, and it would be picked up minutes after he left it. Within hours, it would be in another part of the country getting crushed in an auto graveyard.

Max ran a hand over the passenger’s seat. He’d had this car longer than any for a long while. Temple had ridden in it several times. He’d miss it. Then his palm stroked several superficial slashes in the leather. On the other hand, the hitchhiking critter … Midnight Louie, maybe? … had scarred the upholstery beyond repair anyway.

Chapter 37

… Death Trip

“Get away!” I howl at the coyote.

He interrupts his pawing at the shadow of Midnight Louise to gaze at me, puzzled. Puzzlement is a canine characteristic we felines never descend to.

“This is not human carrion,” he half whimpers, half growls, “as you warned me away from before. This was a four-foot.”

I do not know if the word “carrion” or the verb “was” irritates me in Big Cat proportions.

Either way, I go screeching sideways at him, bouncing on my toes like Bruce Lee on hot coals, my coat hairs all at attention.

That is enough to back him off two steps. “Take it easy, little guy.”

And that is another incentive. I leap straight up, shivs out, and come down at an angle, extremities thrashing. I nick the nose.

“Hey!” The bozo buries his injured snout in the sand, his forefeet pawing at the sting.

While he is on his knees, I rocket past and kick sand in his eyes.

“No fair!” he whines.

While he is still on his knees and now blind, I leap again and land on his back, taking a good toothy grip on his hackles.

Now he springs straight up.

“Ow-ow-wow-wow-ow,” he cries.

He tries to buck me off like he was a bronco and I was an old cowhand, but this galoot has spurs on every limb and I use ‘em, digging in. I am going for a very big silver belt buckle here.

He is turning in tight rabid circles now, and I must admit my own head is getting quite a workout, but I hang on for dear life.

Suddenly Mr. Coyote comes panting to a dead stop.

His head hangs so low I am in danger of using it for a ski slope were I not hanging on tooth and nail, literally. “If you let go,” he offers. “I will.”

`There is nothing you have ahold of, except stupidity.”

“I will go off, leaving you and this cursed spot alone,” he growls between gritted teeth.

“Sounds like a good idea. If you try to pull anything silly while retreating, I will really get nasty.”

“Wolf’s honor,” he says, invoking his bigger, stronger brother in absentia.

“Lion’s honor,” I say, loosening first one shiv, then another.

Finally I drop off, still on all fours and ready to rumble.

Mr. Coyote’s appetite has lost its edge, even if my shivs have not. (Nothing better for sharpening than a little raking and clawing.) He is backing away, head and tail lowered. “What did you say your name was?” he asks just before he turns tall and runs.

“Louie,” I answer. “Midnight Louie. And I like my opponents shaken, not stirred.”

With those words the coyote turns so fast it could eat itstail like a certain worm Ouroboros I have heard discussed around the Circle Ritz .. . and disappears.

I do not take long to stand there and congratulate myself.

An unpleasant task awaits at my unguarded rear: somehow I must conceal Miss Midnight Louise from the oncoming human retrieval team so that she can be interred later among her own kind, with appropriate honors.

Had I not assigned her instead of me to tail Kitty the Cutter, I would be lying there dead in the dust … sand, rather.

I begin to understand Mr. Max’s long-held regrets, and even Mr. Matt’s more recent ongoing angst about the lady known as Vassar. We guys have it tough. Because the world relies on us to be in charge (except for some female exceptions, who are in the minority of exceptional females), when something goes wrong we tend to take it too personally. Guyness is a heavy load to carry, but I have just acquitted myself at the peak of it in facing off the coyote.

Miss Louise would be proud of me, were she still here.

With this thought I steel myself to turn and face something even worse than a ravenous coyote: my dead partner.

Before I can add action to thought, I hear a rasp behind me, then another.

No! More desert scavengers! What are they? Whiptail lizards? Kangaroo rats? Rattlesnakes? I will take them all!

I whirl around, prepared to battle a legion of creepy crawlies, but find the night still and dark behind me.

The puddle of shadow is all that remains of Midnight Louise—rather like the dark puddle the Wicked Witch of the West came to in The Wizard of Oz, but the parallel is purely visual. I make no comment on the personality of the late Miss Midnight Louise vis-à-vis the WW of the West—the puddle is still as motionless as an oil slick.

I approach. A guy has to do something when his partner is killed, but what? I have hounded off the desert dog. I guess I need camouflage first. I spot a lacy tumbleweed blown up against a prickly pear. That is it! It will be light to drag over and will hide ML’s resting place from the prying humans about to descend on this site of tragedy and death.

At least my former partner took Kitty the Cutter down with her! I grasp the tumbleweed by the thick stem and drag it over. It catches on every cactus needle betwixt its lodging and Miss Louise, I swear.

At last I lay it carefully across her.

The desert wind starts to lift it up, up, and away. I cast myself on it to hold it down … ouch!

Again I hear the furtive rasping noise. but there I am spread-eagled on a tumbleweed, trying to keep it from escaping its duty as a makeshift headstone.

Rasp, rasp. Enough with this rasping! My nerves are irritated already. One more rasp, whatever you are, and I will eat you!

I have in mind, of course, a desert mouse. I would not eat a desert rat. You never know where they have been. And then the earth moves.

Or, rather, the tumbleweed does.

Who could imagine it? Midnight Louie thrown by a mere tumbleweed?

But tossed aside I am, like balsa wood.

I come up sucking sand and squeezing my eyes shut against a sleet of grit.

If that coyote is back, I am kitty litter!

Blind as a kitten I struggle to my feet, game for Round Two.

The rasping noise I have been hearing has escalated into a spitting sound.

There are lizards who attack that way, I have heard. Euw! Talk about not fighting fair.

I bat my eyelashes as if I were the Divine Yvette at home plate (bizarre as that image may be), but still I cannot see past the dark and grit and the, ugh, spit that have sewn my lids shut as if I were on some embalming table.

Finally, though, I see the tumbleweed heading into the dim distance like the bouncing ball on a set of on-screen lyrics.

I gaze down at what I presume to be ground and thedenuded dead body of my former partner, not to mention my questionable next of kin.

It is gone!

Well, it depends if you believe in the dead walking. Me, I do not.

On the other hand, I have seen Elvis, and more to the point, Elvis has seen me and been very cordial.

I feel and pat my way around the crime scene and find nothing but cactus quills for my pains. And I do mean pains!