Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Police Work

Now that Temple was a bottle blonde, Morrie Alch was salt-and-pepper putty in her petite little hands.

She would bet that his only child, a grown daughter, had been a taffy-haired honey of twenty-two months at one time.

“Thanks, Detective Alch, for handling this so discreetly.”

He gazed up at the empty area above the peak of the exhibition ramp, where men in coveralls sat on boards suspended on paint-spattered ropes.

“Thank the New Millennium,” he said. “They have clout in this town. We poor flatfoots do our job and bow out.”

“You’re not a flatfoot; you’re a detective. You don’t fool me. That poor dead man. I’m still trying to find out if he could possibly have been hired by the hotel.”

“Waste of time. All that fuss about him maybe being a Chechen rebel. He has a Slavic look, but ‘Art’ was a petty crook. A hotel hanger-on, all right, but more used to hanging paper around town than hanging dead over the site-to-be of a priceless artifact. It takes a superior criminal mentality to engineer a major art heist.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Temple tried not to think of the superior criminal mentality she knew intimately. “We’ve tripled security.”

“That ought to make somebody very unhappy.”

“You think the exhibition is still endangered?”

Alch shook his grizzled head. “Security is out of our hands. Homicide’s the name of our game. The LVMPD will offer some officers to watch things around here, but it’s up to hotel security now. That’s the way they want it.”

Temple checked her watch. It was one of those easy-read dials big enough to cover her wrist. Nothing Paris Hilton would wear, but it kept her on time in a field where split seconds could make all the difference in the world.

Randy Wordsworth had arranged for her to interview the Cloaked Conjuror in his dressing room.

This was a biggie. The New Millennium kept the name of their headlining masked magician a state secret and his safety Job One. When you live and work in a magical kingdom where illusion adds up to a billion-dollar-a-month industry, your hide can become wall worthy when your whole shtick is outing the opposition. Death threats combined with the masked mystique to keep CC pretty much out of reach of the media, except for a few controlled appearances outside the New Millennium, like judging the TitaniCon science fiction costume contest at the Hilton Hotel a few months before, where Temple had first encountered him.

One of his body doubles had fallen to a suspicious death from the flies there, so CC’s security had tightened even more after that. But since Temple’s job here was partly spin control, management was letting her play sleuth in hopes she could head off more disastrous events spelling bad publicity. Temple was pleased to think that she was gaining a reputation for PI as well as PR work in Las Vegas. They made a useful combination.

She wasn’t surprised she had to sign in with a guard at the entrance to the backstage area. And to show her special New Millennium ID card. God, she hoped she could keep it when this job was through. Between her new blond bling look and the softening Glamour Shots effect of teeny tiny security card photos, she looked hardly as old as teen queen Hillary Duff. And thirty was already beginning to feel over the hill.

“You the one going to be working with CC?” the guard asked a bit shyly. He was the usual sedentary Social Security geezer who was content to watch the world go by, especially if it had good legs.

“Gosh, no!” Had he really mistaken her for Shangri-La, the lethal mistress of Asian illusions? Not so strange. “Shang” almost always wore makeup, so who knew what the woman really looked like? A handy asset. “I work PR for the hotel.”

He waved her onward, down some bare concrete steps into the significant bowels of the backstage area.

If Las Vegas shows were overly glitzy behemoths featuring casts of dozens and stage effects that mimicked natural catastrophes almost as well as a Spielberg flick, the underbelly that supported such overweight extravaganzas ran even deeper, wider, longer.

That meant a creepy underworld of dim-lit halls lined with fluttering ghosts of a zillion costume changes. Of crowded chorus dressing rooms haunted by disembodied heads in Marie Antoinette–high wigs and moving bits of glitter everywhere, even when the rooms were empty. Of high heels hitting jackhammer hard on concrete and echoing into eternity, as Temple’s were now.

This was no brightly lit yellow brick road, but she did have her Toto on board. A small black form was trotting ahead of her. Not fluffy, but sleek. Not canine, but feline.

She ought to have known.

“Louie!”

For a moment, she wondered if Max could shape shift. Because Louie had certainly been dogging her footsteps lately, as if subbing for her missing significant other.

Temple winced mentally. Did a woman who smooched a close neighbor still have the right to a significant other?

Another guard could be seen on duty a long way down the hall. Standing at attention, his beer gut leading the way. Louie was not to be seen, but the hems of some gowns on a nearby rack were fluttering suspiciously.

Temple reported to Guard Two.

“Need to see your driver’s license too.”

“My driver’s license?”

“Rules.”

Temple sighed and dug it out of her tote bag. Finally. The guard then rifled through the bag while she worked to pry the license from behind a permanently sticky clear plastic window with her still too-long pageant fingernails.

“Sharp,” he commented.

“A fingernail file.”

“Have to hold it.”

“I’d get through the Cloaked Conjurer’s crocodile-tough costume with a fingernail file?”

“Orders.”

“Why don’t I just go to McCarren and go through airport security there, then come back here?”

He sniffed. Allergies. “Patience, little girl.”

That was better than the usual “little lady”?

“What’s this?” He held up her little motorized instant flosser.

“A birth control device.” She was kidding.

He dropped it back in the bag like a hot potato. “So, okay. You can go in now. You can collect the nail file on the way out.”

At that moment Temple felt the softest tease of motion at her ankles. She resolved not to look down.

“Thanks, Sir.”

And she turned toward the next tunnel of gray hallway, nothing visible ahead but various closed doors and the convenient ranks of costume racks.

The greasepaint in her blood made her inhale deeply. No matter how fancy the theater or amphitheater, below stage it was the same bare, functional, fascinating, weirdly enchanting wonderland.

She was off to see the Conjuror.

His dressing room soon became obvious. The single star had a peephole in the middle. Talk about paranoia!

Temple knocked, realizing that both peephole and star were positioned for a man who wore elevated platform boots and reached close to seven awesome feet onstage. He’d probably be unable to see her.

Apparently, the guard had called ahead for a deep voice asked, “Miss Barr?”

“Here!” Temple piped up, waving her fingers before the peephole.

The door opened a crack, while she was inspected. Then it widened just enough to admit her.

On the other side stood not the Cloaked Conjuror, but a man who embodied the description “bruiser.” All this for little her. Imagine if somebody suspicious had come calling unannounced. . . .

A figure bigger and broader than the silent doorman was sitting on a squarish couch at one side of the room. The dressing table and mirror, directly across from the door, were not only unoccupied but looked oddly vacant.

Then Temple realized what she was missing: the clutter of tins of greasepaint and powder, of tubes of makeup. Because CC wore a voice-altering masking headpiece, he didn’t need to touch up a thing. The mirror was useless, except for reflecting the beefy bodyguard now backed up against the door as if holding off a horde of Huns.

“Sit down,” CC’s weirdly altered voice, rather like Darth Vader on cough drops, said. “Randy Wordsworth said you needed to interview me for PR reasons.”

Temple did as invited, feeling like a bug on a log alongside a large, leathery, tiger-faced toad.

“We need to defuse the publicity on the . . . unfortunate death,” she began. “If the exhibition got the reputation of being jinxed—”

“It’d bring the crowds out in droves.”

“Maybe, but the art museum is already nervous about the risks of showing such rare works in a Las Vegas hotel. Showing them over some poor man’s dead body is even worse.”

“You think I don’t care? I do. Believe me. Few know this, but I lost a crewman during TitaniCon. Up on the catwalk. Fell to the floor sixty feet below. Dead. Wearing a costume much like mine. You think the museum is spooked? You haven’t walked in my shoes, Miss Barr.”

Temple eyed the footwear in question. Possibly a size thirteen, built up like a Klingon’s seven-league futuristic boots.

“I don’t think walking in your shoes would be possible for me,” she said. “Sleeping in them, maybe.”

The large head with its narrow eye slits had to move far to eyeball Temple’s size five Via Spigas. CC laughed, an operatic sound that combined both basso and tenor.

“Sleep indeed. Let’s just say I don’t like the coincidence of two men working the flies on an act of mine dying for it.”

“When do you actually go up there?”

“Later in the act. My female assistant goes on first. She’s a midget like you, no bigger than a mayfly, and she does this ballet-acrobatic routine, like a silvery cocoon spinning and lifting and lowering. Very classy. Then she bursts out of her chrysalis waving filmy wings of fabric.”

“I know. I saw the tape. Her act reminds me of Loïe Fuller.”

“Louie who?”

Temple smiled. “A pioneering modern dancer at the end of the nineteenth century who wielded incredible lengths of white silky wings.”

“Everything recycles.”

Temple was thinking that Beauty and the Beast was one of the more enduring fables to recycle, from French seventeenth-century fabulist Charles Perrault to Walt Disney. And that’s what an act comprising the Cloaked Conjuror and Shangri-La would be. Beauty and Beast. How clever. How marketable.

She recalled, with a pang, that once Max had kidded her about joining his act. She was no acrobat or illusionist, but she understood the innate showmanship of it, petite little her, supernaturally strong and elegant him: fairy girl and superhero.

“And then, of course,” CC added in his commanding faux voice, “there are the cats. Now that Siegfried and Roy are tragically removed from the scene, mine is the last act to feature big cats, and one very small one.”

So, the amazingly agile performing Siamese that Shangri-La had worked with at the Opium Den would be appearing here as well! How had these two far-removed performers ever hooked up?

Temple asked CC that question in much more elegant terms.

“She hit on me, in the professional sense. Showed up at my . . . home with an offer I couldn’t refuse. Amazing woman. I notice small-statured women are particularly insistent. And Shang had her Asian background to both overcome and assert.”

Temple flashed for a second on half of Molina’s prize homicide team of Alch and Su: detective Merry Su. Teeny, wiry, implacable. Given the historic low regard for women in her culture, from exposing girl babies to the lethal elements in the bad old days to aborting them in the bad new days, those Chinese women who went West and thrived were veritable Dragon Ladies.

Normally, Temple admired women of steel. In Shangri-La’s case, she made a significant exception. The woman was associated with an incident involving a semi-load of stolen designer drugs. People often forgot that Las Vegas catered heavily to the Pacific Trade. Asians were fevered gamblers, and had become treasured high-roller clients of every major hotel-casino along the Strip.

With that came the Asian mafia, the drug trade, and every evil flower of crosscultural international corporate/gangster contamination. So, what was Shangri-La’s game here? Besides spinning like an entombed butterfly above a fabulous treasure trove of Russian artwork? She couldn’t ask the Cloaked Conjuror such blunt questions, but she could skirt around them.

“Your solo act was a huge hit, exposing magician’s tricks. Why add an element?”

Even through the cumbersome mask, CC’s laugh was rueful.

“My shtick is great. I’m big, I’m anonymous, I’m half man, half mystery. Even the death threats work into my mystique. And the big cats. Audiences are all unconsciously waiting for that Roy Horn–Manticore moment, though they’d never admit it. Ask NASCAR drivers. But look at me. All this disguise paraphernalia weighs me down. My act needed a certain lightness of being. Shangri-La and Hyacinth provide that.”

Temple was surprised to hear CC use a literary phrase, but she nodded. “Yin and yang. Always appealing, always commercial.”

“And this blend of fine art and illusion is another yin-yang combo. Very potent. Very exploitable.”

“Very volatile maybe.”

“For that dangling dead man, yeah. I earn millions per year, Miss Barr. I pay my crew a rock star’s ransom. The hotel has millions sunk into my act. But there’s a person in here behind all this theatrical bluster. I don’t want anyone else to die on my set. Ever.”

“You think the death of your TitaniCon crewman and this unidentified stranger are connected.” Temple did not put a question into her voice.

“I do.”

“Part of the magicians’ vendetta against you?”

“Maybe. But I suspect it’s even more than that.”

“Why?”

“Instinct? In this getup, that’s what I rely on, more than my senses.”

“It must be hell, being a literal prisoner of your success.”

The huge head was eerily still for several long moments.

“I didn’t understand,” the mask said in its altered voice, “when I got into this thing.” CC’s gauntleted hands struck his Batman-molded chest. “It seemed like a straight drive to success after years of fringe action. So what? James Earl Jones’s voice got fab reviews for Star Wars. Let me tell you, Darth Vader is not a cushy part.”

“Surely at home you can ditch the equipment.”

“And wouldn’t everybody think that way, and go after me there? Tabloid photographers. Blackmailers. Hired killers.”

“Maybe. You really think that if they solve the murder of this poor guy they might close that TitaniCon case?”

“Probably. But I’m not sure ‘they’ will have anything to do with it.”

“Who, then?”

CC couldn’t smile, grin, grimace, or change his expression a scintilla in the lordly leonine mask with its tiger stripes. Temple had heard of lion-tiger crosses: tigons and ligers. The Cloaked Conjuror was his own rare breed.

His leather-gloved forefinger tapped her on the breastbone, his intended gentle tap nearly pushing her over.

“Why not you? You’re enterprising, small, mobile, curious, just the kind of cat who could sniff out this murderer.”

His suggestion was interesting but not alarming. Enterprising, small, mobile, curious. He could have been describing Temple’s sometime secret shadow on the scene of a crime, Midnight Louie.

Still, she was highly flattered to hear this huge, menacing man express such confidence in little her. Max had, but he wasn’t around much anymore for ego boosting.

“Maybe I’ll do just that then,” she said, sounding impish but feeling dead serious.

It was her job as well as CC’s to run a steady ship on this show and she disliked lost lives as much as he did. Besides, Temple was more than ready to wade hip-deep into anything that might unmask Shangri-La and any ulterior motives that mysterious creature might have.