Cat In A Vegas Gold Vendetta

For all the warm-hearted, caring people who take in homeless cats and work tirelessly in animal rescue

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Previously in Midnight Louie’­s Lives and Times ­…­

Chapter 1:­ ­ ­ ­ ­Temple Barr, PI

Chapter 2:­ ­ ­ ­ ­A Very Feral Fellow

Chapter 3:­ ­ ­ ­ ­Violets Are Blue

Chapter 4:­ ­ ­ ­ ­Dead Last

Chapter 5:­ ­ ­ ­ ­House Warming

Chapter 6:­ ­ ­ ­ ­Home, Sweat Home

Chapter 7:­ ­ ­ ­ ­Strangers in the Night

Chapter 8:­ ­ ­ ­ ­Dry-­Gulched

Chapter 9:­ ­ ­ ­ ­What a Lousy Lot

Chapter 10:­ ­ ­Gathering Vultures

Chapter 11:­ ­ ­Crime’­s Her Cup of Tea

Chapter 12:­ ­ ­Return Engagement

Chapter 13:­ ­ ­She Spat, He Spat

Chapter 14:­ ­ ­She Said, He Said

Chapter 15:­ ­ ­The Trojan Men

Chapter 16:­ ­ ­Social Catworking

Chapter 17:­ ­ ­Up for Grabs

Chapter 18:­ ­ ­Unlikely Bedfellows

Chapter 19:­ ­ ­Shock and Awesome

Chapter 20:­ ­ ­Set ’­Em Up, Max

Chapter 21:­ ­ ­The Cactus Garden Cha-­Cha

Chapter 22:­ ­ ­All Dolled Up

Chapter 23:­ ­ ­Break Dancing

Chapter 24:­ ­ ­Maxed to Death

Chapter 25: Wait for The Midnight Hour

Chapter 26:­ ­ ­Yves of Destruction

Chapter 27:­ ­ ­Lies and Alibis

Chapter 28:­ ­ ­Home Invasion

Chapter 29:­ ­ ­Big Pussycats Have Sharp Ears

Chapter 30:­ ­ ­Boys’­ Night Out

Chapter 31:­ ­ ­Every Silver Cloud ­…­

Chapter 32:­ ­ ­The Key to Rebecca

Chapter 33:­ ­ ­In the Hot Sauce

Chapter 34:­ ­ ­Pooling Resources

Chapter 35:­ ­ ­Candle in the Wind

Chapter 36:­ ­ ­The French Resistance

Chapter 37:­ ­ ­Prime-­Time Tail

Chapter 38:­ ­ ­Rafi, with Fries, to Go

Chapter 39:­ ­ ­Living Doll

Chapter 40:­ ­ ­Boxing Day

Chapter 41:­ ­ ­Convoy:­ Beware of Bears

Chapter 42:­ ­ ­Little Girl Lost

Chapter 43:­ ­ ­Goldilocks Boxed

Chapter 44:­ ­ ­Away All Cats!

Chapter 45:­ ­ ­Showdown at the Shrine

Chapter 46:­ ­ ­Burned Out

Chapter 47:­ ­ ­Four-­Posters and Postmortems

Chapter 48:­ ­ ­A Black Mood

Chapter 49:­ ­ ­All’­s Swell That Ends Swell

Chapter 50:­ ­ ­Done and Gone

Chapter 51:­ ­ ­Hanging Out

Tailpiece:­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­Midnight Louie Deplores the State of Things

Tailpiece:­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­Miss Carole Nelson Douglas Sighs Heavily

By Carole Nelson Douglas from Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright

Previously in

Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times …

Las Vegas is my beat.

And take it from me: now that the economy is down, the heat is up. I am not just talking about the Strip when the temperature hits the low hundreds.

Even the biggest names in this rambling, gambling entertainment capital are no longer feeling the love as they used to. Still, visitors can get some great deals in Vegas nowadays, and not just at the casino tables.

The lights, the security and tourist cameras, the action remain as bright and frenetic as always. The landmark hotel-casinos and allied institutions are still puttin’ on the glitz.

Me, I have always kept a low profile for a Las Vegas institution.

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

Being short, dark, and handsome—really short—gets me overlooked and underestimated, which is what the savvy operative wants anyway. I am your perfect undercover guy. I also like to hunker down under the covers with my little doll.

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

I must admit that our last crime-busting outing took us a step beyond the beyond to a conspiracy of magicians and a collision with the mean streets of international terrorism and counterterrorism, which left us both breathless.

Let me just say that everything it seemed you could bet on is now up for grabs, and my Miss Temple may be in the lose-lose situation of her life and times.

So, on the current situation of where we are all at:

None can deny that the Las Vegas crime scene is big-time, and I have been treading these mean neon streets for twenty-three books now. I am an “alphacat.” Since I debuted in Catnap and Pussyfoot, I commenced to a title sequence that is as sweet and simple as B to Z.

My alphabet begins with the B in Cat on a Blue Monday. After that, the title’s most colorful word or phrase is in alphabetical order up to the—ahem—current volume, Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta.

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

To wit, my petite roommate and high-heels devotee, Miss Nancy Drew on killer spikes, freelance PR ace Miss Temple Barr, who had reunited once before—and now reconnected again—with her elusive love …

… the once and future missing-in-action magician Mr. Max Kinsella, who has good reason for invisibility. After his cousin Sean died in a bomb attack during a post–high-school jaunt to Ireland, he joined the man who became his mentor, magician Gandolph the Great, in undercover counterterrorism work.

Meanwhile, Mr. Max has been sought on suspicion of murder by another dame, Las Vegas homicide detective Lieutenant C. R. Molina, single mother of teenage Mariah.

Mama Molina is also the good friend of Miss Temple’s freshly minted fiancé, Mr. Matt Devine, a radio talk-show shrink and former Roman Catholic priest who came to Vegas to track down his abusive stepfather and ended up becoming a syndicated radio celebrity.

Speaking of unhappy pasts, Miss Lieutenant Carmen Regina Molina is not thrilled that her former flame, Mr. Rafi Nadir, now living and working in Las Vegas after blowing his career at the LAPD, and for years the unsuspecting father of Mariah, now knows what is what and who is whose.

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

… one Miss Kathleen O’Connor, deservedly christened Kitty the Cutter by Miss Temple. Finding Mr. Max as impossible to trace as Lieutenant Molina did, Kitty the C settled for harassing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine, and came to a spectacular end in a motorcycle crash.

Now that Miss Kathleen O’Connor’s sad and later sadistic history indicates she might not be dead and buried like all rotten elements, things are shaking up again at the Circle Ritz. Mr. Max Kinsella is no longer MIA and feared dead, though I saw him hit the wall of the Neon Nightmare club with lethal impact while in the guise of a bungee-jumping magician, the Phantom Mage.

That this miraculous resurrection coincided with my ever-lovin’ roommate having gone over to the Light Side (our handsome, blond upstairs neighbor, Mr. Matt Devine) in her romantic life only adds to the angst and confusion.

However, things are seldom what they seem, and almost never that in Las Vegas. A magician can have as many lives as a cat, in my humble estimation, and events now bear me out. Meanwhile, Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s domestic issues past and present are on a collision course as she deals with two circling mystery men of her own—Mr. Rafi Nadir and Mr. Dirty Larry Podesta, an undercover narc who has wormed his way into her personal and professional crusades.

Such surprising developments do not surprise me. Everything is always up for grabs in Las Vegas 24/7—guilt, innocence, money, power, love, loss, death, and significant others.

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

… Miss Midnight Louise, who insinuated herself into my cases until I was forced to set up shop with her as Midnight Investigations, Inc.…

… and needing to unearth more about the Synth, a cabal of magicians that may be responsible for a lot of murderous cold cases in town, now the object of growing international interest, but as MIA as Mr. Max had been lately.

So, there you have it, the usual human stew—folks good, bad, and hardly indifferent—totally mixed up and at odds with one another and within themselves. Obviously, it is up to me to solve all their mysteries and nail some crooks along the way.

Like Las Vegas, the City That Never Sleeps, Midnight Louie, private eye, also has a sobriquet: the Kitty That Never Sleeps.

With this crew, who could?

Chapter 1

Temple Barr, PI

Temple’s fingers were doing the flamenco across her laptop keyboard, writing an e-mail press release, with Midnight Louie, her twenty-pound black cat, playing his usual role of paperweight beside her, when her phone rang.

She jumped.

Midnight Louie growled in alarm and rose up on his forelegs.

Temple wasn’t the skittish type. You had to have nerves of steel to deal with the emergencies and sudden zigs and zags that a freelance public-relations person had to control, particularly in Vegas, and particularly in these Internet character-assassination days.

She had a right to be jumpy after that international phone call twelve hours ago from the late great Max Kinsella, missing magician and ex–significant other, back from the presumed dead. He was even now flying back to Vegas on her say-so, after he’d encountered danger, death, and memory-melting head trauma in Northern Ireland. She was picking him up at the airport later today

So this phone call could be full of woe.

Or, since her new and true love and official fiancé, radio counselor Matt Devine, was on a business trip to Chicago and had family there, he could be calling to report snags, feuds, or winning the Power Ball lottery.

Either way, she was now a nervous Nellie about the simple act of answering the phone.

No caller name popped up on the phone screen. Normally, a blank screen meant new business, but just right now Temple was a little shaky on dealing with voices from the Blank Nowhere.

She picked up the phone and said, “Hello.” Cautiously.

“Temple Barr?”

Relief. A woman was calling. The ghost from her recent past wasn’t calling back. Yet.

“Right,” Temple said.

“Do you mean this is the right Temple Barr?”

“Yes.”

“The Temple Barr?”

“I like to think so.”

By now Louie’s softly growled warnings were a musical accompaniment. He knew when she was tense or worried.

“I didn’t reach that eatery out on Temple Bar at Lake Mead somehow?” the voice persisted. “It sounds like a kid is whining in the background.”

“No, you’ve reached me, the Temple Barr with two rs.”

The voice, both breathy and chesty, was beginning to sound awfully familiar. “Awful” in the deeply serious sense of the word.

“May I ask who’s calling, please?” Temple said. Her normal voice had a slightly hoarse edge. Now it was getting raspy with impatience and … dawning horror.

“This is Savannah Ashleigh.” Pause for effect. “The screen star.”

The second sentence was highly debatable. The first was … all too true.

Temple had crossed paths and spike heels with the ditsy, glitzy C-movie queen several times. The worst was the occasion when Midnight Louie had been cast in cat food commercials with Ashleigh’s Persian beauty, Yvette. When Yvette proved to be with kittens, Savannah had accused Louie of illegal littering and had actually tried to do him bodily harm.

Fortunately, twenty pounds of ex–alley cat Louie can handle any scheming human from murderer to media minx. He came out of the incident proved innocent, in tact, and on top, as usual.

Temple, however, was terminally disgusted with Savannah Ashleigh and all her works.

“What can I do for you, Miss Ashleigh?” Temple asked in a businesslike monotone, polite and oh-so-wishing the connection would break. Cell phone reception was extremely iffy in Las Vegas, especially near the Strip. Connections could be hard to hold. This one wasn’t. Alas.

Temple sat and listened and nodded, not inclined to take the woman seriously. Finally, she got a sentence in.

“Murders happen every day in Las Vegas and surrounding suburbs, Miss Ashleigh.… No, not in your neighborhood, I’m sure.… Oh. Never, you say?”

Temple couldn’t quite believe that any Vegas neighborhood hadn’t hosted murder, old or new.

“Um, you want to hire me to investigate a murder? And where do I see clients?” she echoed her caller.

Temple thought hard. She was now too curious to indulge her dislike. Although she had a knack for solving murders, no one had ever wanted to hire her to do it. And the “case” would take her mind off … impending men.

She did not want the memory of Savannah Ashleigh polluting her living quarters. Not that the woman was bad—besides at acting; she was just a Ditz Queen who usually traveled with a purse pet of some kind. Midnight Louie would never get over his turf being so invaded after what Savannah had done.

She glanced again at Louie, getting an idea. He’d once favored hanging out near a canna-lily stand and koi pond, like Sam Spade keeping office hours behind the …

“Of course,” she told Savannah Ashleigh. “We could meet at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel.”

“Yes,” she repeated her caller’s reaction, “it is ‘always gracious to do business over a good belt.’ I’ll meet you at the Crystal Court Bar. One P.M.”

Temple shut off the connection.

Louie was regarding her, enormous green eyes reducing his pupils to their most condemnatory slits. Temple made excuses, fast.

“It is Savannah Ashleigh, as you heard. Maybe she meant ‘belt’ in the sense of … a solid Austrian crystal Judith Leiber designer belt—yum—or conchos or shells or even a black belt.”

Louie gave his opinion of this meeting by swiping the last printed-out pages off her desk. Now that was a “good belt.”

“You can come along and visit Midnight Louise,” she coaxed him. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Midnight Louise was a black stray who’d taken Louie’s position of house cat at the Phoenix after he’d moved in with Temple at the Circle Ritz condominium and apartment building.

Nice? Louie had no comment but chewing the hairs between his toes.

“Besides,” Temple mused. “I’m wondering why Savannah Ashleigh wants to see me about a murder. Aren’t you even curious?”

That comment propelled him off the desk to the floor.

Temple checked her watch. Eleven A.M. It must be five o’clock somewhere, and she could use a “belt” or two as well. Matt wasn’t coming home from a career-changing personal appearance on The Amanda Show in Chicago for three days, but what was left of Max was flying in from Northern Ireland late this afternoon.

Temple guessed she could use a time-wasting rendezvous with a has-been movie actress to keep her mind off the forthcoming personal apocalypse.

Chapter 2

A Very Feral Fellow

I am not accustomed to rolling up to the Crystal Phoenix’s elegant front entrance in style. Usually, I must slink in the side or back of the fabled Las Vegas hotel-casino like a common stray.

Frankly, I prefer it that way. No PI in the business wants to announce his or her particular sources and haunts.

However, I feel obligated to escort my esteemed roommate on this difficult day. I am doing all I can to distract her from the impending reunion with her former roommate, Mr. Max Kinsella. If I must throw a few papers around, or a tantrum, I will.

I will even show my mug on the front passenger seat of Miss Temple’s red Miata. Usually I hitch a ride on the dark carpeting of backseats, unseen and inhaling a lot of foot odor and the scent of all the ugly things a human shoe can stomp on. Unlike we of the superior breed, humans never clean their soles but reuse them unwashed again and again.

On the bright side, this filthy habit does make the human kind much easier to track.

“Why, Louie,” Miss Temple says as I slip in the open driver’s side door and hop onto the passenger seat. “You want to ride shotgun?”

After an exasperated look and a check of the large dial of her wristwatch, she caves. “If this were an airport run, I’d kick you off the leather seat, but it’s only the Crystal Phoenix, and I suppose you want to arrive at your old place in style. Remember. Velvet paws. No claws on the leather upholstery, not even if I have to brake suddenly. The floor carpeting is all right, though.”

I do like the way my Miss Temple acts as if I am totally conversation-worthy, although I would never deign to talk back to humans.

I blink my agreement to her terms and prepare to enjoy what some of the commonest dogs do—a spin in the car.

Las Vegas is offering a warm spring day, so my Miss Temple has donned lots of lightly scented sunscreen that helps ban any offensive human odors. She is a red-cream kind of kitten with sun-sensitive face and body leather.

Of course, my glistening black coat shines like wet tar in the sunshine and even under the Crystal Phoenix’s front canopy of mirror and tiny crystal lights when we shortly arrive there, sans sudden braking.

I jump out when the doorman opens my side and wait politely for Miss Temple to precede me within while tourists gawk. They do not know my long history here as hotel cat and unofficial house detective before I linked up with Miss Temple and the Circle Ritz bunch.

Before we can enter I am upstaged, however.

Out of the row of brass and glass doors rushes one Fontana brother.

Just one. What a disappointment! There are ten in all, and Nicky, the youngest, owns the Crystal Phoenix. Out comes Aldo, the eldest. The fickle tourist cameras turn toward his five-star looks and high-style, pale-mango Italian suit and the petite redhead on his arm who embraces my Miss Temple and does kissy-cheeks.

Those of my breed do not deign to do kissy-cheeks. It would disarrange our magnificent, delicate vibrissae, aka whiskers. We do sniffy noses. Wait! That is not as off-putting as it sounds.

“Temple,” the former Miss Kit Carlson, her maternal aunt, says. “We are just back from abroad and were heading to the Circle Ritz to see you.”

I stare rebukingly at the new Mrs. Aldo Fontana until the searing burn of my regard forces her to look down.

“To see you and Midnight Louie, of course,” she corrects herself.

By now, Aldo is doing the kissy-cheek thing with Miss Temple. Continental, I am told, but it strikes me as unsanitary.

“How was Italy?” Miss Temple inquires, it being impolite to baldly ask how these post-wedding flings called “honeymoons” went, which is, of course, what everyone really wants to know.

“Divine,” Miss Kit replies.

I do not abide by human conventions. I do not care if Miss Kit Carlson is married; she is still a Miss Kit to me. Missus is such a déclassé word.

“How are things going here with you?” Miss Kit adds with an amiable smile.

“You would not believe,” my Miss Temple answers. “Meanwhile, I’m late; I am late for a very insignificant date. May we catch up later, please?”

“Of course,” Miss Kit says. She is a thirty-year-older version of Miss Temple, and her prime state of preservation for an old dame should cheer up my now-distracted roomie.

I am not about to miss a word that these two exchange about the Current Crises, for they are more gal-pals than aunt and niece. Since Miss Temple has only older brothers in Minnesota, it is fortunate she has a hip, ex-Manhattanite aunt on the scene to help me provide aid and comfort in the coming end of days.

We bustle inside. That is, my Miss Temple bustles, slinging greetings to bellmen and other passing hotel staff. I follow her in slink mode so she will not have to answer awkward questions about my ability to heel like a dog if I so choose.

My breed is not expected to trot docilely along, and Bast forbid that I should let my breed down. Besides, I know that Miss Temple is headed for the Crystal Court, so I race to install myself discreetly before her arrival. She will think that I have headed to the rear pool area to drool over the nearby koi pond.

Soon my baby greens are peering through the indoor greenery to the cocktail table for two where Miss Savannah Ashleigh has arranged herself.

Being five-foot-nothing, Miss Temple favors high heels, but they are usually the classy three-inch designer kind. Miss Savannah goes for what are called “hooker shoes,” high-rises of four or even five inches. She also wears inflated blond hair (extensions) and inflated lip and chest parts (collagen).

I can understand the human urge to supplement their scanty hair, but not to emphasize skin devoid of fur.

I examine the bulky purse thankfully concealing the Ashleigh footwear at the moment. A pair of small shiny black eyes peeks out. Or is that “Pekes” out? I know the fickle actress has forsaken her Persian cat beauties for mere pip-squeak canines these days. Recalling my recent undercover gig as a “purse pussy,” I am in sudden sympathy with the pathetic pooch. The front paws and full head are now visible, and it is too small for even the tiniest Chihuahua.

I pad over to inspect and sniff. Dear Predatory, Bountiful Bast! It is vermin of some kind! Barely have I realized its, ah, composition, than it slithers out of the designer bag, runs out of sight behind me, and hitches a ride on my terminal member.

Spinning, I discover it is clinging there with all four tiny paws, like a quartet of staplers. I cannot whip around fast enough to dislodge the furry little imp, and I am soon dizzy and in danger of making an exhibition of myself, which is the last thing an undercover operative wants to do.

On my final spin I lose the unwanted “tail” and spot its face once again peeking out from the side pocket of the blasted bag. Surely such a savage little thing is not housebroken. The mind boggles at what it must be doing in Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s purse all day.

Behind me I hear the crisp approach of Miss Temple’s Stuart Weitzman petite-platform ankle-strap shoes. Rats! I need to dive back under cover. Rats? Why would Miss Savannah Ashleigh have a pet rat? One that is not even an attractive laboratory-white but plain dumpster-brown?

I had been planning to make a sentimental journey back to my old PI office near the poolside canna lilies out back—back by Chef Song’s koi pond. Now, I must guard Miss Temple’s platform-and-ankle-strap from some street vermin playing footsie with her.

I settle onto my haunches for a long eavesdropping session, when a low hiss at my rear tells me we are not alone.

“I thought I smelled a rat,” says Miss Midnight Louise, all narrowed gold irises and fluffed black fur, nosing her obnoxious way alongside me so close you could not slip a piece of onionskin paper between us, “but it is just you.”

“Most amusing. If you will keep an eye on Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s bag, you will spot a real rat.”

“No! Has purse poochery come down to this? At least, the underground link to Gangsters has been certified rat-free by the health department, and the Neon Nightmare access has been cemented shut.”

“That case and the secret tunnel may be closed, but more crime in the making is brewing somewhere. Just keep watching and listening.”

Something more than mere vermin is afoot, and it has peroxided hair and mighty high arches.

Chapter 3

Violets Are Blue

“I want to hire you,” Savannah Ashleigh told Temple, after their ordered drinks had arrived.

“I’m strictly Las Vegas–based,” Temple said, although that might shortly become Chicago if Matt’s career break materialized. “You … work out of L.A., I would think.”

“You would think wrong. I’ve relocated to Las Vegas because my precious Captain Jack is not allowed to be maintained in the style to which he is accustomed in California.”

“Your ‘precious Coco,’ isn’t it? I saw during the Red Hat Sisterhood convention that you’d retired your Persians, Yvette and Solitaire—”

“Please. Solange.”

“—and Solange, in favor of a small dog.”

“Coco is a papillon, but he too is retired. Too much piddling.”

“So Captain Jack would be—?”

Savannah reached down to probe her designer bag, which carried enough clanking brass straps and buckles to outfit an ancient Roman soldier. She lifted out something lean, long, brown, and crew-cut furry that resembled no minidog or -cat Temple had ever seen.

A small face masked like a raccoon’s peered over Savannah’s thin, veined hands.

Words like weasel, mink, and wolverine—wait! chinchilla or sable—darted through Temple’s mind, but they were hardly domesticated. She decided to find out.

“Well, Captain Jack seems to have the eyeliner concession down for the role. Is that a baby raccoon?”

“Of course not. A raccoon is a wild animal. Captain Jack is just wildly darling.”

Savannah reached a dagger-nailed hand into the side pocket and pulled out a long supple creature that reminded Temple of an animated blond mink from the bad old days when women flounced around with a posse of full animal skins flagellating their shoulders.

Captain Jack ably escaped his mistress’s clutches to circle her neck, run down and along the boosted ledge of her bodice, then cradle himself on her forearm.

Temple studied the close-set, bearlike ears, the ratlike pink nose, and clawed toes. She now saw the rhinestoned harness fastened around the lean and furry body. A pet that some states might allow and others ban would be a …

“He’s a ferret?”

“Not just any ferret,” Savannah cooed. “He is his mumsy’s adorable little mischief maker.”

Watching Savannah’s seriously over-collagened lips making kissy-face with a ferret had to be high on anyone’s Ick List. The actress chattered on.

“Captain Jack is a daring and brilliant rascal. Did you know, Temple, that ferrets are among the most popular pets in the country, and members of the cat family?”

“Nope.” Temple, dumbstruck, doubted Savannah’s extravagant claims but forgot them when she felt a feathery agitation at her bare ankles. She gazed down at a creeping carpet of glossy-leaved indoor groundcover to spot two bewhiskered black furry faces with narrowed eyes of green and gold.

“What are the predators for this sort of creature?” Temple asked, worried.

“Coyotes, great horned owls, golden eagles, prairie falcons, badgers, foxes, and bobcats,” Savannah answered proudly from some guidebook, probably Ferrets for Dummies. “But that’s in the wild. We’re in Las Vegas.”

“I’ve known plenty of coyotes, badgers, foxes, and bobcats in Vegas,” Temple said. “Birds of prey, not so much.”

“Whatever, nobody is going to get Mama’s little oochum-moochum. Really, Temple. May I call you that?” When Temple nodded, she rushed on. “You must consider dumping that misbehaving alley cat of yours for one of these darlings. They can even be vasectomized, as I so kindly—if accidentally—provided that service for your Twilight Toby, or whomever. So they have the cutest fuzzy little—”

“Ouch!” The agitation at Temple’s ankles had developed claw tips.

“Oh, my dear,” Savannah said, “you mustn’t personalize ‘fixing’ our little boys. The surgery really doesn’t hurt. Don’t be so … tenderhearted.”

“I’m more tender-ankled at the moment,” Temple said. “And my cat’s name is Louie, Midnight Louie.”

“Don’t be grumpy either. It can’t be good for your business to contradict clients.”

“You’re not my client yet.”

“I will be.”

Temple sincerely doubted that, but sipped her wine spritzer, giving Savannah time to take a huge gulp of her mint julep before continuing.

“You see, Temple, you do remember Yvette and Solange. Who could forget my silver and golden Persian beauties? My apartment in L.A. was too crowded for them when I got Captain Jack, and I travel so much, so … I left them with my aunt Violet here in Vegas.”

Temple noticed the groundcover at her feet shifting as if a huge, hungry boa constrictor were slithering beneath it. She guessed that Midnight Louise was restraining Midnight Louie from going for Savannah’s ankles for real.

He had performed in TV cat food commercials with Yvette, and Solange was no stranger to him, either. Hearing they’d been dumped for a dog, for a purse pooch at that, and dumped so near to his own doorstep and he’d never known, would not soothe the savage feline soul.

“I don’t understand,” Temple said, glancing at her watch.

The half-wine, half-sparkling-water drink was not settling the butterflies in her stomach, and she had a lot of driving to do this afternoon and tonight. Granted, distances around the Las Vegas Strip were short, but they were traffic jammed too.

“You want me to dream up another commercial gig using the ferret?” Temple asked.

“Captain Jack is not an ordinary ferret, but this isn’t about him or your Midnight Moocher. It’s about my aunt Violet’s yardman being found dead in some kind of … sinkhole at the back of her property. I find the incident most suspicious. Violet lives alone and has collected a lot of nice things. She’s been harassed by phone calls and e-mails. She’s reported some of her suspicions about neighbors to the police, but they brushed her off like a case of dandruff, so Violet doesn’t want to involve the cops any more than they have to be after the death she is certain was meant for her. I need a PI to look into things.”

“Not a PR?” Temple asked, joking. That was on her business card: TEMPLE BARR, PR, with the words PUBLIC-RELATIONS SPECIALIST below.

“Why would I want a Puerto Rican?” Savannah wondered aloud. “My cousin lives near a Mexican neighborhood.”

Temple shook her head, knowing Savannah was too ditsy to grasp the concept of political correctness, much less the name of the cat she had once falsely accused of fathering Yvette’s first and only litter.

On the other hand, Temple was a teensy bit flattered. This was a legitimate offer to investigate.

“Why me?” she asked.

“Oh, you are always around when bad things happen in this town, and I figure you wouldn’t want anything fatal to befall Yvette and Solange, since your Chewie or Chewbacca or whomever is sweet on them. My aunt Violet is a pretty smart ginger cookie, but she does have her little ways. She won’t give me the cats back, and I’m afraid if her yardman was murdered, like I think, the evil will seep into the house pretty soon.”

Temple nodded. “I have some business that will take up the rest of today, but I could look into this tomorrow. Where does your aunt live?”

Savannah passed over a letter the aunt had sent her in L.A. before she’d moved. The return address was one of those small printed rectangles that comes on an adhesive sheet from places where you’ve once donated money; and your name and address aren’t forgotten until the Apocalypse.

VIOLET, was all it read, in capitol letters flanked with violet bouquets, and then the street address. Touches of gold foil decorated the tiny label.

“How long has your aunt lived in Vegas?” Temple asked.

“Oh, years. I take the gigs here that I do so I can look in on her. Not that she doesn’t resent that. She’s quite set in her own way, always was. We haven’t been in touch that much through the years, but now…”

“Now what?”

“She has terminal cancer, and her only daughter died six years ago, so…”

“Violet’s daughter died? How?”

“Drugs,” Savannah intoned dramatically. “It was very sudden and shocking.”

“She must have been … young.”

“A late-in-life only child. Just twenty-something. Violet was shattered.”

“The young woman’s father—?”

“Long gone, along with husbands one through three. Who even knew who the father was?” Savannah rolled her eyes.

“What kind of cancer does Violet have?”

“Something deeply personal people do not discuss.”

That set Temple’s speculations running amok. Enlightened people weren’t reticent talking about even terminal AIDS anymore. But then, they weren’t dealing with Savannah Ashleigh.

“I’m so sorry about Violet’s diagnosis,” Temple said. “And you say she’s at home? Alone, and frightened?”

“She’s had a daily woman come in for years. Doesn’t believe in doctors. Crystals are more her treatment of choice.”

“As her niece, can’t you—?”

“All she wants from me is for someone to look into Pedro’s murder. He’d worked for her for years and was in her will. She’s made it clear that no relative will inherit any of her money or belongings. This might sound strange, Temple, since you seem to be the family-dependent type, and if you don’t have any around you find them, but Violet was my youngest aunt and she ran away from our home and family. I finally did, too, and found her when I came out to L.A. We did … cling together a bit in our younger days for security’s sake, but after Violet had Alexandra, I couldn’t believe how she’d doted on that ugly infant. She left the world of glamour in which I was making my way to have no greater ambition than be a single mother and a successful real estate agent. She once was gorgeous, of course. She could have had it all, too. After Alex died in Tucson, Violet moved her daughter’s cats to her home here and then started taking in more stray cats to dote on. As you can see, I’ve moved on.”

Captain Jack said Aye, aye, by climbing her shoulder, his little clawed “hand” presenting a tiny diamond ear stud he’d found loose in the depths of her bag.

Temple had to admit that the clever ferret and his not-so-clever mistress had certainly distracted her from impending doom, or at least high anxiety. In honor of these unpleasant states, she checked her wristwatch and noted that time had flown.

“Oh! I must be running along. I’ve got an important pickup at the airport.”

They agreed to meet at Violet’s house on Aloe Vera Drive the next day. In the late morning, Savannah stressed. Violet would be feeling better then and Captain Jack would have had his walk and playtime.

Temple skittered through the Crystal Phoenix crowds, Louie’s claws scratching marble underfoot behind her, letting Savannah and her poor aunt fade into the mist of must-dos on her schedule. She could easily get to the airport, but she needed time to dress appropriately to face the most mixed-feeling moment of her life.

Welcoming Max back from the dead.

Chapter 4

Dead Last

Midnight Louie lay curled atop the bedspread like the dark center of a daisy. Making the colorful petals scattered around him were half the items in Temple’s entire wardrobe, it seemed.

He still looked miffed from overhearing Savannah Ashleigh play fast and loose with his unique, entrancing street name. Or maybe, Temple thought, he remained in a state of high dudgeon over the cavalier way Yvette and Solange had been passed from flaky niece to possibly delusional and seriously ill aunt.

Temple drove the afternoon’s distractions from her mind.

Normally, she wasted no angst on what to wear. She enjoyed being a girl, as the petite female usually can. Being a freelance public-relations professional required more business suits and heels than the average Sunbelt wardrobe, but “business” in Vegas could be flashier than the whole navy-blue Elsewhere beyond it.

No, she was agonizing over remembering what Max Kinsella had seen or might remember seeing her wear or not, and whether she should try to jog or confuse his missing memory of her when she picked him up at McCarran Airport in … her wristwatch’s inescapably bold dial told her, seventy-five minutes. A PR person is on perpetual deadline; she can’t always be digging out a cell-phone face for the time.

“Louie,” she exhorted in a blend of aggravation and plea, “must you exercise squatter’s rights on my bed every day? If you’re going to lie there like a lump, pick something for me to meet Max in, then.”

He slit open his blasé green eyes, yawned to show much tongue and teeth, and stretched a lazy foreleg to a chartreuse polished-cotton suit.

“He’ll sure spot me in a crowd if I wear that,” Temple admitted, “and it matches the lighter streaks in your eyes—not that you’re going with me this time.”

With the outfit determined by a clawing instead of drawing lots, Temple next had to confront a deeper problem. To wear her Miracle Bra or not, as she usually did with that figure-flattening suit.

No. She should dress as if retrieving a maiden aunt … although her aunt Kit Carlson, now Mrs. Aldo Fontana, was much too chic for the role. A Miracle Bra would be … calculating … could be misinterpreted. In no way would it be actually inciting, despite her foolish hopes when buying it.

Red patent high-heeled sandals and matching tote bag lifted her spirits if not her bustline. She surveyed herself in the mirror. A petite woman can wear just about everything that is not voluminous or large-patterned. At least her longer, dark strawberry-copper hair color softened the red-and-lime-green, escaped-from-a-jelly-bean-jar look.

Max was not the jelly-bean type. He could spot her easily and then go, Ick, I could never have slept with that woman, even in my right mind. And it was true; they’d made an odd couple—the tall, dark, mysterious master magician and the short, firecracker-red-haired PR hotshot.

You’re supposed to know me.

Those were among the first words she’d heard on her cell phone only moments after she’d finished talking to Matt just last night. She hadn’t instantly recognized the voice, but the call was from Northern Ireland, and the caller admitted he’d been drinking.

Temple was not used to hearing from melancholy, drunk ex-boyfriends. She didn’t have that many, for one thing. For another, Max had been far more than a boyfriend.

She glanced at the glittering Art Deco ring on her left hand. Matt had bought it where the movie stars shopped (and borrowed for the Red Carpet), Fred Leighton’s Vegas vintage-rocks store. Matt had gone from a vow of poverty to making enough money to needing an agent. He’d rather give it away and knew she cherished vintage things, but sometimes she didn’t wear the valuable ring going out alone, for security reasons.

To wear or not to wear. Rubies matched her red shoes and tote bag. Diamonds matched everything. Wear. Max had always been a realist.

So. She’d do her duty, shepherd him back into town, and then get as far away from him as fast as possible … except duty, she knew, had a way of slopping over established borders of behavior. If only Aunt Kit had returned from her honeymoon a day earlier than she had to advise her! She was sure Kit would be there to lap up the gory details afterward, though.

Temple marched out of her condo to follow the circular hallway to the single elevator, not reveling in its touches of burled wood and chrome as she usually did. The fifties-era round building had an eccentric array of differently laid-out units. It was only five stories at the penthouse level, and the small lobby was usually deserted at midday.

“Well, don’t you look spiffy, kiddo!”

Oops. Today of all days, Electra Lark, landlady, would happen to be waiting for the elevator. Or just lurking to make trouble for Temple.

“Um, thanks,” Temple said. “You don’t think this outfit is too … garish?”

“Since when did ‘garish’ bother you or me or Vegas, Temple honey?”

Electra’s halo of white hair was zebra-striped today, with black glitter. Her capacious muumuu was leopard print, and her lipstick was orangutan orange. She was a zoo gone amok.

“Silly of me to worry,” Temple said. “I’ve got to run.”

“Oh?” Nosy landlady was a cliché Electra took pride in living up to.

“I’ve got a quick pickup at McCarran. Kit’s back,” she semi-lied. “Can’t wait. I’m late, I’m late.”

And she clattered out the door, her spike heels echoing in the high, empty space.

The sun-softened parking lot asphalt forced her to dig in those heels at a sober pace and don her sunglasses before she reached her red Miata. She decided to leave the top up. Some vague notion about not messing her hairdo, or maybe about not being seen going to pick up Max.

You’re supposed to know me.

The voice repeated pitch-perfect in her mind. Every word of that one-way conversation was etched on her memory. No amnesia on this end, unfortunately.

You’re supposed to know me.

That works two ways, dude, Temple thought, starting the Miata. If he didn’t recognize her, that might be the best solution.

Forty minutes later she was in Terminal D, wandering among the famous desert-wildlife cast-concrete sculptures crouched on the shiny terrazzo floor. All five sand-colored critters were larger-than-life enough to dwarf kids and most adults. Temple couldn’t decide which one to station herself beside.

The sluggish bulk of the desert tortoise really wasn’t her speed. The black-tailed jackrabbit hunched into his awesomely long rear legs was the only furry one and reminded Temple that she presently felt like Alice plunging down a dark and mysterious hole.

The scorpion’s upraised stone stinger looked too hostile, as did the low, long Mojave rattlesnake.

The horny toad was spined and spiked like a punk rocker, so ugly it was cute, but had an unfortunate name under the circumstances. Luckily, there were no nameplates on the critters, and the horny toad’s foreleg was just the right size for Tiny Alice to sit upon, so Temple did.

Her watch told her she was twenty minutes early for the first passengers exiting Max’s flight to get through the security checkpoints for arrivals from foreign countries. She began scanning the people pouring from the terminals toward the baggage-claim area anyway, mentally phrasing how she’d explain this to Matt, in person, when he arrived on his flight from Chicago in three days.

He was stranded in Ireland without a memory, but with the IRA after him again. Or somebody. His traveling companion was dead. No, I don’t know “Why me?” Someone must have told him about me. I couldn’t just … leave him out there. Christian charity.

“Only redhead sitting on a toadstool. You must be Temple,” said a voice behind her.

She jumped up and spun around at the same time. “How’d you get through so fast, and past me?”

“I’m told I was a magician.”

They stared at each other, strangers.

“You look…” she began.

“Ghastly?”

She almost retorted, Ghostly.

His skin was washed out, not just pale, despite the deliberate smudge of a three-day beard. His expensive wrinkle-shedding clothes weren’t the invariable black, but a designer shade of ultradark moss green. He seemed even taller, maybe because he was even thinner. A huge duffel bag crouched like a giant desert lizard at his feet, and he was leaning on a cane like Dr. House of House, the TV show.

“You look … not like yourself,” Temple finally answered.

“Good,” he said.

Max wore sunglasses, so she couldn’t see his blue eyes, but she sensed him looking her up and down, too. Someone needed to say something next; it might as well be her.

“I, ah, wanted to make sure you couldn’t fail to spot me.”

“Your eye-catching ensemble does remind me of a Christmas ornament that’s gone terribly wrong … but this is the first time I’ve smiled in four days. Your hair color alone would have done the recognition job, Red.”

“You never called me that.”

“What did I call you?”

Your paprika girl.

“Temple. Doesn’t allow for nicknames. And you’ve never seen my hair this color.”

“What color was it?”

“The natural, really red.”

“You needed a new look?”

“I needed a disguise. Long story.”

“At least you have one. What are you going to do with me?”

Good question. Luckily, she had an answer. “I thought you’d want to see if the Strip rang any bells, and at least eat something other than travel food.”

He nodded as they joined the crowds flowing around them. Temple was used to keeping up with taller people, but she found herself slowing her pace.

I’ve got two recently broken legs that will ache in this blasted damp weather for the rest of my life if I stay in the damned country.…

“I’m in the parking lot,” Temple said, “but I drive a … Miata.”

She saw the fine lines at the outer edges of his eyes wince.

“You own a Maxima,” she reassured him.

He winced again. “Am I that egotistical, or do I just have a corny sense of humor?”

“A bit of both.” She smiled. “The car is black, like what you always wear.”

“I had a feeling I was drawn to the color too much for my own safety.”

“I’m … taking you to dinner. An orientation exercise.”

“I suppose I owe you whatever explanation I can remember. Will that restaurant have a bar? This could be a ‘bumpy night.’”

She smiled again, this time at the famous Bette Davis line. He remembered some things just fine.

“You’ve had a long flight,” she said. “I planned on stopping for an early dinner so you can stretch your legs. Or would that be too much right now?”

“I’ve been alone for four days. I could use some apparently familiar company.”

“Aside from the awkwardness,” Temple confessed, “I’m dying of curiosity.”

“Me too,” Max said.

*

“Why are you doing this, curiosity aside?” Max asked ten minutes later. He’d folded himself like an origami napkin into the Miata’s front seat after jamming his crushable duffel bag into what passed as a trunk.

“I’m supposed to know you.” Temple paused in unfastening the convertible top.

He didn’t recognize the near-quote as his. She got out of the car to fold down the top. As she’d anticipated, not enough headroom for Max. He’d never ridden in her Miata, although she’d been a frequent passenger in his cars.

His head turned to follow her around the small car. “You’re ‘supposed to know me,’ but now you don’t, I see. I don’t even know ‘me.’”

“Do you … remember … know … me at all?”

He shook his head. “Oh, wait.”

Temple’s breath caught in her chest as she stood still.

“I know you’re a generous woman to do this,” he said.

Letdown.

“Girl Scout,” she agreed.

They were back to banalities, which was a relief, Temple thought, as she returned to the driver’s seat.

McCarran Airport was on Wayne Newton Boulevard, and you could see the multinational panorama of the major Strip hotels on the flat desert landscape. Temple drove up the Strip, passing the landmarks: the Luxor, the MGM Grand, the Goliath, the Crystal Phoenix, Caesars Palace, the Bellagio, the Paris, the Wynn, and the Venetian. She turned around and cruised down the Strip’s other side. Max’s sunglasses gazed at the exotic views on both sides, but his mind seemed a continent away.

“I made dinner reservations at a steak house,” Temple said at last. “I know it was an ungodly long flight. I can cancel.”

Her words seem to jolt Max out of his spell. “Yes, but no. Long flight, don’t cancel. A prime, rare American steak is just the medicine I need.”

“We’ll be the first seating, so the place will be quiet at this hour. It’s white-tablecloth expensive but four-star. And I reserved a banquette table for four, so you can sit on cushy leather and stretch your legs out under the empty seat kitty-corner.”

“And I let you get away?”

Temple didn’t answer. She couldn’t. He had let her get away, probably for her own safety, judging from what had happened to him.

“That was too … too flip,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Wait’ll you see this place and the menu, then you’ll really be sorry,” Temple said, her usual composure back and sassy. “I need to … orient you to some things. We can answer each other’s burning questions over dinner while you get a break from riding in my pip-squeak car.”

“Thoughtful, but don’t let this cane mislead you. I stopped using one, then I … reinjured myself a little recently, and then came the endless flights. You’re right that explaining myself and your explaining me to me should be on neutral ground.”

“Gosh, you’re way more agreeable than you used to be.”

He grinned for the first time. “I was hoping to learn I was a cantankerous bastard.”

She just smiled and concentrated on her driving.

He read the giant “ph” sign as she turned off the Strip into an entrance driveway. “Isn’t that something to do with skin care?”

“Planet Hollywood.” She nodded at the building’s top that spelled out the words in uncapitalized white neon, understated for Vegas.

“It’s an entire hotel now,” he asked, “not just a restaurant?”

It had been for four years, and Max had only been gone a couple months. She felt a sharp interior wrench to realize how much personal history he’d lost in such a short time.

“Yup,” Temple said. “I find this the classiest interior on the Strip, aside from the Crystal Phoenix. We’re a bit early because you came through faster than I anticipated, so we can have a cocktail at the Living Room bar.”

“Sounds cozy,” Max said, struggling to exit the Miata while the doorman held out a hand for his cane. The parking valet saw Temple out.

“Do you remember any Vegas hotels?” she asked as they entered and were instantly immersed in a gigantic, dim, cool space where even the gaudy slot machines looked primped for a Red Carpet stroll.

“The Crystal Phoenix rang a bell,” Max said. “Lots of high-end crystal.”

“A client of mine,” she said.

“This place too?”

“Not. I’m a one-woman operation. I just like the ambiance here.”

“Aha. That’ll betray a lot about you.”

“Not hard. I’m wearing a fifties-vintage suit and this place is understated Art Deco, unless it’s overstated Art Deco.”

“Vintage is your thing, really?”

He had to study the damn suit, of course. Temple felt an unreasonable pang for her missing Miracle Bra.

“Chartreuse was hot in the nineteen-fifties,” she said, “and classic suits are classic suits.”

“Chartreuse is hot in twenty-somethings, too.”

No comment. Temple bustled across the busy patterned carpeting all casinos demanded for maintenance to a pair of escalators set between towering, color-changing rectangular lights.

“I forgot. Can you do escalators?” she asked, looking back. “Where’s your cane?”

“Sure. Saves steps.” He patted the side pocket of his long, European-styled blazer. “The cane is collapsible.”

They glided up, surveying the subdued casino below, nearing the solid ceiling blocks of marquee-shaped neon lighting that kept shifting colors.

“I commend subtle,” Max said.

“I’m not,” Temple said.

“I like honesty better.”

“You must be drawing on memory to venture opinions.”

“I know what I like,” he said. “I just don’t remember why or who or when or where. Or what.” He slipped his sunglasses into his inside breast pocket.

Even in the muted lighting, she could see his features’ new gauntness and a healing forehead gash the frames had obscured. And a haunted look of loss in his eyes.

Or what with whom. Temple diverted herself back to the tour-guide role. “Come into my fave parlor on the Strip.”

They turned left and they were there. Venetian glass-framed mirrors seemed to float on hanging walls of red velvet curtains. The Living Room was furnished with low bronze leather sofas and tiny bronze metal–sculpted cocktail tables. A spectacularly gilt-rimmed dome hosted a glittering chandelier that reflected in the metal and glass bar.

Thankfully, Max was impressed. She was more Hollywood than he. “Gloriously decadent. Something from an Anne Rice vampire novel.”

Max had read Rice? She’d never known that before.

Only a few customers impeded the view. When the sleek cocktail waitress offered a small padded menu of signature drinks from the polished black altar of the towering bar, something quickly caught Temple’s eye.

“An Albino Vampire?” Max asked, following her gaze. “Like a Chocolatini, the menu says, but with white chocolate and Chambord.”

“White chocolate and raspberry.” Temple needed to loosen her tension, and this sounded like dessert. “What about it, Rice reader?”

“A little girly, but you’re driving, after a long dinner.”

“It’s got surprising kick,” the waitress told Max.

“A Vegas motto,” he said. After she left, he noted, “I hope you can stake me for a couple days.”

“I was planning on it. Do you have access to any operating funds here at all?”

“Since I’m told I was pulled out of some local nightclub dressed as a bungee-jumping maniac advertising himself as the ‘Phantom Mage,’ I had no ID, no credit cards, nothing. But I did have—”

Max stopped. “I need a drink before I go any further. What about you?” He glanced at the vintage ruby-and-diamond ring on her third finger, left hand. “What did you know about my sudden … absence?”

“Next to nothing. You’d been … withdrawing. You’d never told me about your Phantom Mage escapade. There were reports a nameless performer had crashed into the polished black walls of the Neon Nightmare club when a bungee cord broke. Rumors said he’d died and had been taken away by an emergency crew. Yet no one matching those circumstances had ended up at a local hospital. So was it you, or some other masked magician? I didn’t like to think you’d leave without telling me if you could, but you’d been acting strange lately.”

“In what way?”

“In pretty much encouraging me to encourage a friend into turning more than.” She fanned the fingers on her left hand.

“Another magic trick. I was told about Matt Devine, yeah.”

“You remember him?”

“Only from the radio station Web site I saw in Europe. I saw yours, too, so you really didn’t need to don the jelly-bean colors.”

“How? Where?”

“It’s called the World Wide Web for a reason.”

He paused while the martini glasses and their white contents with a setting sun of red in the bottom’s V were set before them. Temple raised a right forefinger for the bill. They had a dinner reservation to get to.

“We’d better sip some booze before I go on,” Max suggested. “It’ll get a little heavy from here on.”

She lifted the glass. “I’m sorry, but ‘Cheers’ anyway.”

“Cheers,” he replied in the hasty, absent, British way.

Their glass rims tinged together. After a couple sips, Max asked, “What’s in these things?”

“Vodka and white Crème de Cacao, besides the other liqueurs.”

“All booze,” he said. “Great. Are we there yet? Because I’m afraid I need to report a resurrection and death.”

Temple was struck by the phrase’s reversal of the religious “death and resurrection.” She was wishing Matt was here; this was starting to sound like a confession.

“Did you know,” Max asked, “a man named Garry Randolph?”

“I’ll do like you and say the name sounds vaguely familiar for some reason, but I can’t attach any memories to it.”

“Maybe because you never knew him, except in disguise.”

She shook her head and sipped her drink. She could feel the tension draining down her neck and arms.

“And shortly after, dead, at that,” Max added.

“Are you talking about the recently dead Synth magician from the Neon Nightmare? I thought his name was known.”

“No. That place is really knocking off magicians, isn’t it?”

“Apparently. Back to Garry Randolph. It’s not an exactly memorable name,” she said.

“Gandolph make it easier?”

“Gandolph!” Temple sat up and put her drink down. “The Great. The magician and your mentor and partner in counterterrorism. He died last Halloween at the crazy Haunted House attraction, where a bunch of psychics were trying to bring back Harry Houdini. He was disguised, and was rather scarily convincing, as a flaky, overripe female psychic.”

Max’s lips quirked on the glass rim as he drank more Albino Vampire.

“Oh, Garry could carry off anything. No, Temple, if I may call you that, he didn’t die. Like a lot of magicians, he was accustomed to using doubles in his act, and did so there, which was a subtle tribute to Houdini, because Harry’d done that too.”

“How did … Garry get away with it?” Temple asked. “He must have put his ID on the dead double and allowed him to be buried in his place.” She glanced hard at Max. “Like you, it was convenient to vanish completely from the hounds of your earlier counterterrorism work on the Continent and in the British Isles.”

“Brava,” Max toasted her, shutting his eyes as he swallowed.

Temple had to continue speculating aloud. “You said … ‘resurrection and death.’ You don’t mean … Gandolph?”

The man who was my only family for half my life is dead, as good as assassinated, and I suppose I’m next on the list.

Temple wanted to be sure she understood. “Garry … Gandolph, your old mentor and former partner in magic and espionage. He’s really dead now?”

“Really dead. Not a double in sight, would God there had been. Irony incarnate. I’d made him fasten his seat belt as we were fleeing both illegal surviving wings of the IRA. Never had time to fasten mine. I was driving.”

“Despite your mending legs and mussed-up mind? Oh, Max! You hit your head on the windshield, didn’t you? And your legs and body must have been brutally jolted.”

“Yeah. Absolutely accurate deductions. You are good. Can you deduce what happened when our car got caught in the crossfire?”

She shook her head.

“I had to brake fast then spurt away to get our pursuers shooting at each other instead of us. Braking so hard thrust me forward just as the bullet meant for my head passed behind me and—”

“—and into Gandolph held upright by his seat belt. Max. That’s beyond awful. I’m … so sorry.”

“Got this gash”—he touched it—“from the windshield, not the bullet. Garry died instantly, but I couldn’t leave him.”

“You had to.”

Max nodded. “That’s what he said.”

Temple didn’t have a reaction to that solemn belief. She didn’t doubt Max had “heard” his mentor’s voice between the daze of his head blow and realizing the older man was dead.

Max set down an empty martini glass with a few watery drops of red at the bottom. Her glass was still half full. Or half empty, like Max’s eyes.

“I couldn’t even make arrangements for the body. I had to drop him and the car off near some of the Irish contacts he’d made. He had colleagues over there from years ago. I trust they had the decency to bury him with some ceremony. He had no … other family.”

The man who was my only family for half my life is dead.…

“Speaking of family,” Temple said, “you must not remember, even know, how to contact your own here in the U.S. now.”

“Apparently we’ve been estranged for almost twenty years, since my cousin Sean died in that IRA bombing in Ulster. I would imagine the Kellys and the Kinsellas had trouble dealing with one son lost, one son saved.”

“That’s true,” Temple said. “You told me that pulling away from both families was your choice. Survivor’s guilt infected your immediate family as well as you.”

Max rubbed the back of his neck as if reliving the fatal impact. “I have a double dose of that now, for sure.”

“So maybe you should just concentrate on the surviving part for a while.”

He looked up at Temple. Her tone had been matter-of-fact.

“I can’t argue.” He sounded surprised.

“And we need to move downstairs for dinner.”

“Garry was right about you.”

“In what way?”

“You’re easy to underestimate, but hard to beat.”

I’ve been told by the only man I ever trusted you’re a pretty smart and gutsy girl … .

Temple handed him her glass. “Finish my Vampire. It was fifteen bucks. Then we’ll go downstairs to get you a decent dinner and you can continue your traveler’s tale.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, draining the glass.

He sat back, then heaved himself up from the low couch without needing Temple’s support, although she’d come around to stand by him.

“If I leaned on you,” he commented, “you’d snap like a toothpick.”

“Try me.”

But he didn’t have to. He moved slowly but certainly out of the Living Room to the escalators. Temple let him lead, watching his steps. Gandolph still alive all those months … Max must have known that. He had been living in “dead” Gandolph’s house, had “inherited” it. Which now was absolute truth.

She would have given them both hell for the secrecy, and Max for leaving her in the dark so long, but who could lay recriminations on an injured, mourning man?

Not Temple.

Not until Max was well and himself and then … she might not be Irish but she had the temperamental fire to match her natural hair color.

Chapter 5

House Warming

Six P.M. was an unfashionably early dining hour in Las Vegas. The mostly empty Strip House restaurant produced the promised red leather banquette and dim lighting, but the crimson walls were lined with black-and-white pinup photos of Hollywood starlets.

Temple had never eaten here before—who could cover every restaurant in Las Vegas?—and had taken the “Strip” in the name as a tribute to its easy access from Las Vegas Boulevard and for, uh, strip steak.

Once more Midwestern naïveté had reared its innocent head. Instead, the restaurant walls showcased plenty of naked female flanks, loins, and ribs.

“Oops,” Temple said. “I’ve never been here before. The Web site didn’t show all the wall cheesecake, just the dessert on the menu.”

“That’s okay,” Max said, “I’m sitting with my back to the wall, so I’ll have to leer long-distance, anyway. Your fiancé would frown on the decor?”

“How do you know so much—?”

“Garry was trying to give me a trip down memory lane via his laptop computer in between following the trail of Kathleen O’Connor back to her beginnings.”

“Kathleen O’Connor? Beginnings?” Before Temple could catch her breath and ask for more, the waiter came to take their drink orders.

“Double single-malt whisky. No ice,” Max said.

Temple had planned to skip another drink but changed her mind. She wasn’t going to let Max out of this place until he’d revealed every shock in the Book of Life.

“I’ll have a”—What was a long-sipping drink?—“house Margarita, no ice, no salt.”

By then the busboy was bringing goblets and bottled water, so the barriers to instantly shaking the news about Kathleen O’Connor out of Max remained.

“‘Kitty the Cutter,’” he said when they were alone again. “You’d be interested to know that nickname may have been appropriate even in her early teens.”

“Why on earth? Where on earth?”

He immediately understood what she was asking. “Apparently, I’d instructed Gandolph to, ah, track down her background, if he could, if he survived me. He considered my almost fatal brush with mortality enough reason to do just that. Where is that drink?”

She’d never heard Max impatient before. She’d never seen him visibly hurting both physically and psychically before.

The waiter skated back with a tray and set down the drinks. Max’s was low and deep amber colored, Temple’s was high, wide, and the color of diluted snot, if you thought about it.

“That cocktail is bigger than you are,” he noted.

She shrugged and stirred it with her straw. “Do you mean that Kathleen may have been a cutter as a teen? Self-abuse? Or assault even then? She had a police record?”

“She had a history that might have started her off mutilating herself rather than other people. Look, Temple, it’s not a pretty story.”

“What have you got to tell me that is?”

“Good point.” He took what detective novels call a “slug” of the expensive whisky.

Her credit card company might be calling to check up on a sudden increase in her spending. No problem.

“Tell me a little about me,” he said, “before I go into my dark-and-stormy-night-of-the-soul routine.”

“I’m sorry, Max.”

“I know. That’s why you let me come back. I don’t quite remember all of that call.”

She did.

Yes, I’ve been drinking; that’s what we Irish do at wakes, even private ones.

“Gandolph must have told you,” she said after a halfhearted sip of her Margarita, “about your long and unhappy relationship with Ireland and the IRA, about your counterterrorism work with him.”

“Yes.”

“How much,” she asked, “did he know about what Kitty the Cutter did here?”

“More than he should have, come to think of it. He was always a master spy as well as a spymaster. I don’t suppose too many people know that she slashed … your current fiancé,” Max said.

“No! I would have said three, four people, tops, including you. That’s impossible.”

“Nothing was impossible with Garry.” Max said with a sigh. “Except a surprise resurrection, like in the book.”

“The book? Oh, you mean the books. The Lord of the Rings trilogy. That’s right, Gandalf the wizard plunged to his apparent death in the Moria abyss, fighting the Balrog, but then came back.”

“Garry isn’t coming back.” Max sipped his drink and paused to master his grief before speaking again. “Maybe taking the stage name of Gandolph the Great wasn’t just chutzpah. He could be a wizard. He spent all that time under cover here in Vegas—from his purported death at the Halloween séance to two months ago when he spirited me from the Neon Nightmare to a Swiss clinic in the Alps—looking into the Synth and, in the past two months, Kathleen O’Connor abroad.”

“She was a broad, all right,” Temple said, surprised to hear a bitter note in her voice. “After you, trying to track you down, maybe for the same obsessive reason you wanted to uncover her past, even after your own ‘death.’”

“I’m not leaving this planet without knowing why she manipulated a couple Irish-American teenaged boys to betray each other over her.”

“And did you find out?”

“Gandolph … Garry … did. Maybe. But we’re back to the insoluble, inhuman tragedy. What about the immediate present? What was I like when I lived here? Was I happy?”

“Were we happy? Yes.”

“Why’d I blow it?”

“Someone was always on your trail. Kinda hard to keep up a normal life.” Temple sipped just as the waiter returned with padded leather menus big enough to give her carpal tunnel syndrome.

Max reached across the table to take and shut hers. “Let me order for you. Keep talking.”

It was good he kept his eyes on the menu while she recited the highs and lows of their interrupted two-year relationship.

“You swept me off my feet, literally, at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and distressed my over-fond family of pushy brothers and protective parents by whisking me away to your year-long gig at the Goliath Hotel here in Vegas. Then you disappeared on the closing night of your magic show, the very night a dead man was found in the spy area above the gaming tables. A local homicide detective was on your trail for that, but I knew nothing and said nothing. A year later you came back, but you didn’t dare occupy the condo we’d bought together at the Circle Ritz building, so you lived in a house that I now realize had been Gandolph’s. You and I were trying to trace a weird magical cult called the Synth for masterminding several unsolved Vegas murders. Then you must have gone undercover at the Neon Nightmare, which has now been revealed to me as the Synth headquarters. You fell or were sabotaged and disappeared once more. And, voila! Here you are again.”

So was the waiter. Max ordered quickly to regain their privacy.

“All right?” he asked of his double order as the waiter vanished.

“It has to be. It’s a Max Kinsella Production.”

“So,” he said, nodding at the ring on her finger, “where did the fiancé come in?”

“His name is Matt. You can say it.”

“I know.… I was shown that online.”

“Just that radio station Web site?”

He nodded.

“It’s all hype.”

“Of course.”

“His name is Matt Devine, as you know. You may not know he and you actually kinda got along. When Lieutenant Molina would go into her usual rants about you, Matt defended you. Even to me.”

“Lieutenant Molina?”

“Homicide. She was sure you’d offed the guy in the Goliath ceiling.”

“So this hard-case lieutenant gave you a rough time about me and my whereabouts?”

“Of course.”

“And you didn’t crack?”

“Of course not.”

“Did we always talk like a Humphrey Bogart movie?”

“No. Just when we were trying to pretend everything was okay, like now.”

Their salads arrived, forcing them to lean back and away from their opposite sides of the table. Max ordered another double. Temple had barely lowered her drink below the unsalted rim level. She was driving. He wasn’t.

“Thank you,” Max said in the pause after the food had arrived and the waiter had left.

She understood why. “You’re welcome.”

Pinning parts of their salads with the fork tines was a good way to not look at each other and carry on an abbreviated conversation.

“Matt sounds like a solid guy,” he said.

“He is.”

“He must have a hell of a backstory.”

“So did you, it turns out,” she said.

“He knows … what … about me?”

“Pretty much everything.”

Silence. “It’s a bit numbing that my replacement knows more about me than I do.”

“Nobody could replace you, Max,” Temple said wryly.

“Now eat your salad and listen,” she continued. “You were gone the first time for almost an entire year with no word. Matt is the most … genuine guy in the world. Way too nice for his own good, but I’ve brought him around to reality some.” She couldn’t help smiling. “You’re a hard act to follow, but he can do it. I love him. We’re working on getting married in a way that will satisfy two geographically and culturally different families. I loved you, but even you finally made me see we couldn’t live with all the kickback from your secret life. I’m not going to let you flail around alone, not knowing anyone now, here or anywhere, who knows anything about you but enemies.”

His fork had been poised over the salad for a long time, and now he put it down for a hit of the second double whisky. She’d quoted his phone-call words almost exactly, but she could see he couldn’t quite place them.

I don’t know anyone now, here or anywhere, who knows anything about me but enemies. They tell me my name is Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella.…

“So, Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella,” she went on, “since you’ve still got enemies and I’ve still got unanswered questions that effect me and mine, including Matt, and there are still unsolved Synth-related deaths out there and signs that some IRA rogues are aiming their sights on Las Vegas, and since Lieutenant C. R. Molina is still suspicious of you and me and the Circle Ritz palm tree, it’s to my advantage to shake the cobwebs out of your head and get you on the road to your real future life, without me.”

He just stared at her for a few moments. “That sounds like it would be a damn shame.”

“And no flirting, no Irish charm, no inveigling, seducing, or magic tricks.”

He shrugged. “I don’t feel in the mood for any of those things. It’s funny. I felt better, more in control, when I was on my own, almost, running for my life, in Europe, anyway. Ireland got … out of control. Yet here in Vegas, where I loved, lived, and almost died, I seem to feel lost, out of steam.”

And Temple could, and would, use that.

I’ve got a case of amnesia where all I’m remembering is a bit about the IRA, a dead woman named Rebecca or a possibly live one named Kathleen.…

“What’s this about a ‘possibly live … Kathleen’?” she asked.

“Did I say that? On the phone?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe something like that.”

“That. Exactly. You think I’m going to forget any words from a ‘possibly dead’ man?”

“You’d given up on me. What a bummer to have me show up again.”

“I was never really sure you were dead, Max. Maybe years from now, I’d believe it. You don’t die easy.” Temple grinned. “Oh, how I wish I could tell Molina.”

“Not good to tell anyone, but I suppose you can’t keep things like me from the fiancé.”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“Out of town for a couple more days.”

“I always have this good timing?”

“Yup. Your timing is annoyingly impeccable. Years of being a magician, I guess.”

The appearance of the attentive waiter struck Temple with a fresh little jolt each time tonight. Overhearing must be avoided. She eyed the surrounding diners and met Max’s eyes returning from the same mission.

Their massive steak platters were still sizzling before them, accompanied by huge-handled steak knives.

“Nice of the staff to arm us,” Max said. “I could have used these last week. If the sight of blood disturbs you, I warn you this will be really rare.”

She thought the sight of blood would disturb him, but Max had obviously put the raw details of the shootout in Ulster behind him. Maybe he felt in limbo because he was busy burying the recent past and trying to grasp the present. As for any future, forget it.

Steak required a lot of attention to eat, and that’s what they did. Temple’s side of black truffle–creamed spinach made the vegetable almost like dessert, and Max had both the Potatoes Romanoff and baked. He’d always been steel-spring lean, but now he ate like a starving vampire drank.

“So,” he asked, after the waiter had removed their empty platters, plates, and drink glasses. “Where are you planning to park me, or should I just get a room at the … Goliath, was it? See if anybody there remembers me?”

“Negative,” Temple answered with emphasis. “Remember, you have a house here. Seeing it might jog your memory. No reason you can’t move right in. I planned to take you on a tour of the place after dinner.”

No reason not to move in, she thought—except it might be haunted … by an unidentified stalker who’d shredded Max’s wardrobe and also speared an illegally present Molina, or maybe by Garry Randolph’s real ghost this time. There was nowhere else to park Max for tonight, though.

“Are we having dessert, or what?” she asked, hoping for more pleasant topics.

“How about Baileys Irish Cream and coffee while I tell you about Kitty the Cutter?”

“My favorite after-dinner combo,” Temple said, with a lemon twist in her voice. “Depressants, stimulants, and psychopaths.”

Max laughed for the first time and signaled the waiter. When they were ensconced behind small crystal liqueur glasses and full cups of coffee, he began.

“The long and short of the matter is that Kathleen was always a rabid IRA agent, even after the peace. She raised gun money from wealthy men who sympathized for the cause from Europe to North and South America.”

“Whoring for the homeland? We’d figured that out before you left.”

“Not why. She’d had a … rough upbringing. Ireland was always poverty-stricken with few natural resources and no competitive living wage until the very recent technological revolution. The wrongs against the Irish are long and many and bitter.”

“Then you and your naive cousin were just practice, early in her career?”

“Something like that.” Max downed the dainty liqueur glass of Baileys in one gulp then concentrated on the coffee.

“What’s this ‘dead woman named Rebecca’ have to do with Kathleen?” Temple said.

“I said that in the phone call? Or, more improbably, you remembered that?”

“I tend to remember every damn word from a ghost. It’s my job to know about everything and remix it into something else. Rebecca?”

“A literary reference.”

“Oh. That Rebecca, the literal femme fatale from the Daphne du Maurier novel of the same name. I devoured that book in eighth grade. I wanted to rekill that lying, manipulative, unfaithful Rebecca and marry Maxim de Winter.”

He stared at her. Maybe it was her rerun of childish but uncharacteristic venom or … oh, right. Wrong! Max de Winter. Temple had just confessed that her preadolescent self wanted to marry a tall, dark, mysterious but tormented man named Max.

“That was just an old, outdated book,” Temple explained in unseemly haste, although she considered Rebecca a timeless classic. “A lot of forties mystery novels featured murderous, manipulative women from hell. Probably a ploy to get women back out of the workforce after World War Two.”

He laughed again and shook his head, hiding his weary eyes behind a forked hand. “Your mind jumps around like a knight on a chess board. So one minute you’re a murderous romantic, and the next you’re a feminist?”

“Makes perfect sense to me. What does the name Rebecca have to do with Kitty the Cutter?”

“It was the name given her at the Irish orphanage where she was … reared. She obviously identified with Du Maurier’s book, too, but in a very different way. She may have been using the name Rebecca as an alias these last several years of détente on the Irish question, which means that the Kitty the Cutter who visited Las Vegas may still be alive and well and elsewhere.”

“You saw her dead,” Temple said. “Then again, I saw Gandolph the Great ‘dead’ at that Halloween séance, and it was just a magician’s trick.”

“It was a master magician’s trick,” Max said, his expression hardening with grief. Then he doffed the mood with a shake of his head. “I’ve … glimpsed that motorcycle accident in recent dreams. I saw myself checking her carotid artery for a pulse. That woman was dead—really dead.”

“You believe in dreams and visions now?”

“That’s where the jigsaw pieces of my memory are reassembling. I’ve got to believe in something.”

Temple didn’t know what to answer; it was so sad to imagine living on shards of yourself.

I have a decision to make as to where I’ll live and die or if there’s any point to the years in between those states.

She thought some more while Max finished his coffee. Sipping the sweet liqueur with the bitterness of all that tragic past lingering in her mouth was like drinking a shot of scouring aquavit.

“Then,” she suggested finally, “maybe the woman who was pursuing your car by motorcycle wasn’t Kitty, aka Rebecca. Maybe the real Kitty has been in hiding here all these months.” Temple finished her Baileys almost as fast as Max had his. “Think about it. Meanwhile, time to visit Gandolph’s former house and your crash pad.”

Temple paused to deal with the waiting credit card and receipt, gathering up her tote bag. “Are you telling me everything, Max? I get a feeling of … missing chapters.”

“I’m telling you everything I can handle at the moment,” he said. “You say I can claim a roof and a bed under it in Las Vegas? Let’s go.”

Some bed, Temple thought, remembering the elaborate opium bed in that house, even if Max didn’t.

Yet.

*

“Timed it right,” Temple said, a half hour later as the Miata pulled up, top raised, to 1200 Mojave Way.

The sun had set behind the western mountains, leaving residential streets dark, dramatically lit, and quiet. Like all Sunbelt homes, this one had few visible windows and a well-shaded front entry, the better to fend off the grueling sunlight.

Max sighed deeply after the car’s engine stopped, then he untangled his legs from the passenger seat to stand and gaze at the question mark of a one-story house.

“Think I can get in?” he asked.

“Lieutenant ‘Nosy’ Molina did. You believe a homicide dick can beat you at breaking and entering into your own place?”

“You’re kidding. A cop did a B and E? That would be—”

“—Against the law and police conduct rules. Yeah, she did. She confessed to me just a couple weeks ago. I told you she was obsessed.”

“What is it about me?” he asked wryly. “Kitty the Cutter, this Molina woman?”

“They just can’t let you get away,” Temple said. “Not my problem, apparently.”

“Smart. I’m obviously trouble.”

The continuing silence indicated he was thinking about Gandolph. Garry Randolph. Clever merging of a pop-culture name with his real one to create a memorable stage name, Temple thought. She knew about Gandolph, although she’d never knowingly met the man himself in his own offstage guise, Garry Randolph. He’d been Max’s father figure from a vulnerable age and time until he’d died several time zones away, either two or three days ago. How do you compute the distance from such a bitter loss?

“Let’s see,” Max said, shambling up the walk, “if the Magic Fingers can still do their thing.”

“Magic Fingers?”

“That’s how I survived on the escape run from the Swiss clinic, which might have been a haven for assassins. I lifted tourist credit cards.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry about those ripped-off tourists losing faith in their fellow man. If they were regular Joes, I used their cards only once before destroying them. If they were rich bastards, I enjoyed myself. No ruined trips of a lifetime for the ordinary blokes.”

“Robin Hood.” Temple gave the name a sarcastic twist.

By then Max was using a Swiss Army knife to jimmy the front door lock. How had he gotten that through security? Scary.

“This place has a Rottweiler of a security system,” he said. “God.” Temple could see him glance to the house’s side. “Six foot fence. Don’t tell me I’ll have to heave myself over it in this condition.”

“The security system is still working?”

“Why not?”

“Molina said it had been breached.”

“You’d think she’d know.”

“Then again,” Temple said, “the house was playing tricks on people, like me, the moment you disappeared.”

“How?”

“Sleight of hand and household goods. I came out here to check after I hadn’t heard from you in a few days, and every stick of your furniture and magic paraphernalia was gone. An aging chorus girl out of Guys and Dolls answered the door.”

Max laughed so hard he fell back against the entry area’s tiled side wall.

“Not funny to me,” Temple said, irritated. “That’s the first moment I knew for sure you were gone.”

“Sorry,” Max huffed as he caught his breath. “That’s the kind of wholesale ‘disappearing’ act only Gandolph—Garry—could pull off.”

“I deserved far more than a wholesale trick.”

“So he told me.” He straightened and grasped her arms. “Temple, you have to understand. I crashed feet first at God knows how many miles per hour when that tampered bungee cord at the Neon Nightmare broke. I was out cold and taken for dead. Gandolph—no, Gandolph is truly dead now—Garry was an old man, but he had to get me out of there and this house and Las Vegas. He had to make me disappear so whoever had attempted to take my life would think they’d succeeded. And the illusion had to be total.”

She wrested away from his grip.

“Temple,” Max said, pleading. “At the Swiss clinic I was accused of being drunk when injured, because only drunks are so limber and relaxed they can survive fatal collisions, when their sober victims can’t. I’d learned that doing ‘death-defying’ acrobatics as a magician: go limp if you fall. That’s what saved me at the Neon Nightmare, if not my legs.”

“I could have been told, Max. I could have been trusted. I’d never said a word about where you might be for almost a year when you were gone the first time, when Molina was harassing me. And that woman knows how to harass. Even hoods couldn’t beat it out of me in a parking garage.”

“Hoods? Beating? Did I know this?”

“No.” Temple simmered down. “Matt did.”

“Ah.”

“It’s not what you think. He caught me sneaking back to the Circle Ritz and insisted I go to an ER, where who happened to be there but Molina, implying I was a domestic abuse victim. Of Matt’s.”

“Sorry.” Max swept Temple into an embrace despite herself. “I should have been there for you. That was humiliating, I know. And you never told the copper what really happened because the creeps were after me. Garry was right. You had to be deceived. You don’t give up.”

“Let me go.”

Max released her to lean against the wall again.

“I’m doing this for—what’s the cliché?—old time’s sake,” Temple said. “So you better figure out a way into the house, because I’m going home unless you need a tour of the premises.”

He didn’t answer, just returned to the security panel and torturing the door lock again, while Temple tormented her do-gooder instincts. That impulsive embrace had shaken her. Max hadn’t been that effusive. This house, the night. Max. Being here was playing with fire. Old flames, to be exact.

“Remember,” he admonished himself after a couple minutes of gashing the metal with the Swiss Army knife. His fingers played tune after tune on the keypad, and … “There!”

He pushed the broad door open.

Chill air wafted against their faces like the house’s exhalation. They stared at each other, although the dark was fast becoming total.

Max cocked his head at the hum of air-conditioning units all over the block.

“This one’s running, too,” he said, pushing inside, the Swiss Army knife still clutched in his hand, now as a weapon.

The hall light rained down incandescence when the wall control was depressed.

“This stuff belong here?” Max asked, waving at a console table and mirror.

“From your time of residence, yes. Molina told me everything had been restored only a few days after I saw it gone. Garry should have waited longer to undo his vanishing act.”

“Who knew a rogue homicide lieutenant would break in?”

“She wasn’t the only one.”

Max had felt his way deeper into the house and was too distracted to hear her. “Wish I had a flashlight.”

“I think everyone who wanted to break in here has come and gone by now,” Temple said.

Max doubled back to shut the front door.

“Let there be light,” he announced, moving forward again to turn on any light fixture he encountered.

How strange, Temple thought—that the security system was on, the air-conditioning was on, the lights working, and the door had been locked. She hadn’t thought to check on the house all these weeks, having been so dramatically turned away from the door and the thought of any future with Max.

That was just what Garry Randolph had wanted. Needed. He was protecting his foster son, she supposed. By cutting off all contact with the woman he loved?

Poor Max. Who would love him now?

An exclamation from down the bedroom wing drew her deeper inside. Had he found the opium bed … or the clothes closet?

*

She walked into the dazzle of the master bedroom, with its cove ceiling lighting and mirrored wall of sliding ceiling-high closet doors. Max stood by an open area, holding up shreds of black material.

“Silk. Cashmere. Featherweight wool. These are leavings fit for a moth’s feast. Looks like a pack of feral cats have been at the contents.”

“Try a butcher knife from the kitchen. Molina was concealed in the house when this slasher party went on. Someone hated you.”

“Nothing new, I gather. I suspected my instinct on the run to avoid black clothing was worth heeding. Was I the depressive sort?”

“Not usually. You always said naked was the best disguise.”

“And black’s the best camouflage … unless it’s your signature.” He let the tatters drop from his hands to the floor. “I was letting myself be predictable. Maybe that’s why Garry died.”

“I don’t think so, Max. You’re a guardian. You don’t slack up. Sometimes fate is bigger than even a magician’s ego.”

“Okay. I won’t self-flagellate in front of you.” Max stared at the huge, glitzy master bedroom. “Where did I sleep? It sure as hell wasn’t in here.”

“This house once belonged to Orson Welles,” Temple explained.

“Ah. So…?”

Feeling mischievous, perhaps because she was now firmly in control here—Max’s “spirit” guide to his own house and past—Temple went down the hall and opened the door on the bedroom holding the opium bed and pretty much that was all.

An opium bed is like an internal gazebo, an exquisite, small room meant to be the central jewel within a larger room, an intricate fretwork frame of ebony and mother-of-pearl. Its silk cushions are miniature embroidered artworks.

Max stepped inside the room, feasted on the art object, and sighed. “‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,’” he quoted Keats, “but I never slept on this magnificent artifact, nor smoked dope on it.”

“No, you didn’t,” Temple said. “And you would never blunt your perceptions with recreational drugs.”

“But I did ‘sleep’ with you on it?”

“Nor would I blunt your perceptions with bawdy speculations.” Temple smiled. “I can show you two more bedrooms in this house. Game?”

“Play on.”

She retraced their steps to another closed door, which opened, and again lights blossomed in a room.

This one was stacked with elaborately painted boxes reflected into invisible mirrors.

“Illusions,” Max said, stepping into their midst like a late arrival at a cocktail party crammed with old friends.

His long supple fingers caressed the smooth wood and cool glass as if they were beloved childhood pets. Temple knew these boxes and mechanisms were the conjoined artistry of Gandolph and the Mystifying Max, years of experimentation and creativity boiled down into the mechanisms of magic.

“Has anything been—?” Temple asked.

“No,” Max said, his eyes and hands still devouring the landscape of escape. “Some things are sacred even to psychopaths.”

Temple remained quiet. She guessed his touch remembered more than his mind at the moment—years of hearing Garry Randolph’s voice on the stage, in this room, or on the run.

Max turned, done with reruns. “I didn’t sleep in here either.”

Without a word, Temple turned and led him to the fourth bedroom, opening the door with a theatrical flourish.

He stepped over the threshold as she depressed the light switch.

Bare walls. Bare wooden floor. A futon on the floor between two metal-shuttered security windows. A celadon vase holding a pussywillow branch and a silk bird of paradise blossom. A low ebony table holding a Japanese blue-ware teacup. And thou.

“It must have seemed boring to a barbarian,” Max mused, stepping inside and breaking the surface of peace that lay like a seal on the room.

“That’s why it was safe. This was where you slept.”

“Not you.”

“I’m a social being, Max. You were always somewhat Zen. That’s how you kept your sanity.”

“I’m a monk?”

“You could be.”

“Was that a problem?”

“Hell, no.”

“You often talk like that?”

“Hell, no.”

He turned with a smile. “I can sleep here safely tonight.”

“Good. I can go.”

“Can I let you?”

“You will.”

They tell me my name is Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella, and I know I need to get the hell somewhere else fast. I guess there’s only one question to ask or answer before I decide where.

He nodded. “Thanks for the tour. I’ll see what my dreams dredge up tonight.”

“Mine, too,” Temple said, mocking herself. “Welcome home.”

Is it possible…? Do you … love me?

Chapter 6

Home, Sweat Home

While my Miss Temple is playing tour guide on Mr. Max’s homecoming trip down No Memory Lane, aka Mojave Way, I need to reconnoiter the exterior of the former Gandolph homestead, and fast, or I may face a long, lonesome hitch or hike back to the Circle Ritz.

Getting myself out of the tiny space between the Miata front seat backs and the door makes my much-put-upon limbs as shaky as Mr. Max’s.

Call it the feline equivalent of a transatlantic flight.

I am really annoyed that my kind is kept out of restaurants. Just think of the wasted food that could be saved if every one came equipped with a “house” homeless feline on the premises.

(I realize that this system would not work for homeless dogs. Even when on their best behavior, they are hopelessly unmannerly. Restaurant patrons would not put up with panting, begging, yapping, drooling, and all the other unattractive canine habits. Nor should they.)

However, I am living proof that the feline moocher is quiet to the point of stealthy and as subtle as a shadow.

So I shake out my cramped legs and gimp around to the house’s shrub-sheltered side. This neighborhood is established to the point of being old, and the owners can pay for watering the greenery, although it is a matter of local ecological debate whether they should.

I make good use of the concealing options of oleander bush and canna lily plantings. I do not much go for the native thorny cactus plants, although I run into one of that ilk not more than ten feet along the house side. So to speak.

It whaps me right on the sensitive black nose leather I aim to maintain unscarred, like Miss Temple’s pristine caramel-colored leather upholstery in the Miata.

Of course, I am related to it.

“Nice of you to finally drop by, Go Daddy-o,” Miss Midnight Louise says, welcoming me to the scene of auld lang syne. “While I had to hop a ride in a Vito’s Vegetarian Pizza delivery car, you were cruising the Strip eavesdropping on Mister Max’s traveler tales and visiting high-end dining venues. I could smell the steak on your breath from the moment you put paw and claw on the desert dirt up front.”

Not one to hold back, our Miss Midnight Louise.

“Nothing rare, medium, or well-done has crossed my lips on this most uncomfortable trip, Louise,” I answer virtuously, although a snicker flirts with my fangs. It is her bad luck to have to ride in a vegetarian pizza-mobile.

“I was forced,” I add in an injured hiss, “to share the meager area behind the Miata’s front seats with Miss Temple’s unfortunately named ‘doggie bag.’ Fortunately, she sets her seat far forward.”

“She has nerves of steel,” Miss Louise says, purring with admiration. “She meets her ex-lover after he has barely escaped death and with his mind a blasted ruin, yet she does not hesitate to bring home tidbits from their first reunion feast together. That girl has her priorities right. Most humans in such a situation would have pled ‘no appetite.’”

“Miss Temple is the pillar of practical,” I say, with a certain pride. “She took him to a costly steak house at Planet Hollywood. Why should she not get all that she paid for?”

“Why indeed.”

“And, my esteemed partner in private investigating, Mister Max’s mind hardly seemed a ‘blasted ruin,’ from what I overheard. I myself would not mind forgetting to remember certain episodes of my past.”

“My existence being one of them.”

“Now, now, my dear Louise. I have grown quite accustomed to your skills as an expert ‘tailer.’ I will be able to rest easy after my cramped travels tonight in the Miata, knowing you will be on patrol here, keeping an eye or two on Mister Max.”

“Nothing will happen here … if your Miss Temple decides to leave. If not, we have front-page news.”

“I know you favor Mister Max Kinsella over Mister Matt Devine, but I see no signs that you are in for a happy ending there.”

“It is not a matter of ‘favoring’ one human male over another. I strongly felt you failed to follow up on Mister Max’s chilling fall at the Neon Nightmare and thereby let the trail of the Synth grow cold while you were swanning after another of your roommate’s causes.”

“It would not be wrong to state that your … doggedness … in considering the Neon Nightmare central to all our long-term concerns was well placed.”

“I should think so.”

“That is why I depend on you to keep an eye on Mister Max now, though the site and situation looks pretty barren from an investigator’s point of view. Most of it is wait-and-watch work, Louise. You know that.”

“I know that you know Miss Temple will give you her doggie-bag steak, cut into bite-size pieces served over your never-eaten eternally full bowl of Free-to-Be-Feline.”

“Perhaps,” I say, trying to avoid visibly salivating.

“And I will have a hot, dark night crouching among the fire ants and lizards while Mister Max goes beddie-bye alone inside.”

“Ah. I heard the front door cracking open. I must be gone, anon.”

“Oh, shut up, Shakespeare, Jr. I know you will have nothing to report in the morning but a full stomach and a long nap.”

A consummation devoutly to be wished, but I do not say so aloud.

Miss Midnight Louise is not in the mood.

Chapter 7

Strangers in the Night

Max was beginning to wish he’d booked a room at Planet Hollywood and had stayed there.

The house was rambling and rang no bells of recognition with him. Instead, it felt creepy.

He wandered from the kitchen, which his memory had populated with a glimpse of Temple Barr sitting on the granite island like a ghost on a marble monument, or a Goth girl perched on her idea of a kinky sex site, to the bedroom closet with its hanging shreds of his knifed former clothes.

Where was Garry Randolph’s presence? If he was going to be haunted by ghosts, Gandolph’s was one he’d welcome.

Max began to realize that from the moment he’d awakened with amnesia in the Swiss clinic, he’d almost never been alone. When Garry hadn’t been shepherding him, he’d been on the run with Revienne Schneider, the Sexy Shrink, from the Alps to Zurich. Then there’d been Temple Barr, Girl Guide, awaiting him at the airport.

This Max Kinsella he didn’t much know had been a lucky guy. For a loner with a double life as stage magician and counterspy, he’d had help from a lot of friends.

He hurled himself away from the symbolic carnage in the closet back to the kitchen. Garry had been something of a gourmet. Jerking open the door to the wine cabinet, he hoped to lay his hand on a bottle significant to his mentor’s memory. But the labels were cuneiform script to him. Presumably he’d shared some of Garry’s tastes, but that was gone, and Garry wasn’t here to aim his hand aright.

Max pulled a dark bottle from the rack, feeling unsettled by the meat-rich dinner. He had to search six drawers to find the corkscrew. Pathetic! He slammed a flat hand down on the granite counter, his palm stinging like hell.

At least he remembered how to use a corkscrew. This had better not be a red wine. He stared down the round lip of the bottle. Bullet-hole entry wounds could look almost this neat and intentional. He’d seen the real and brutal results of Garry’s head wound on the car window to his right, blood spattered like rain in a misty Northern Ireland night.

Max poured the bottle contents into a water glass from the first cupboard he’d opened. He wasn’t going to search every one for a wine glass.

White wine, more like lymph fluid than blood. He gulped some down. Where would he sleep tonight? The futon had been fine for a man without injuries to nurse. Garry’s former bedroom had obviously been turned into the paraphernalia storage room, thank heaven for that. He wanted no dead man’s bed for a resting place. That left the opium bed, more of a stage setting than anything. At least it might spur memories of the nonresident sprite.

He was surprised to find his lips smiling as he thought of Temple. She had a lot of guts to take him on in this condition, with a fresh new fiancé to explain to. Or maybe she didn’t answer to anybody. Maybe she’d bring him sweet dreams in that opium bed. That was one new thing he’d learned since coming back to Las Vegas. She knew his recent past as well as Garry had known his distant past. Max would have to probe her memories to regain his own.

Would the fiancé like that? Matt Devine could go to hell.

Max had finished the wine, drinking it down like the water that normally filled the tall, narrow glass, when a barely detectable sound chilled his veins.

Faint. So faint most people would dismiss it as a distant outdoor noise or the house settling. Faint as a single revolver barrel clicking a bullet into place fifty feet away.

Max set the glass down on a hand towel he’d whipped to the stone counter. He bet he’d used to know how to soundlessly traverse this furniture-scape in the dark. He moved stealthily toward the main room, his stance wide to keep his trouser fabric from hissing against itself, flat-footed to counter any shoe squeaks.

The scraping sound came again, from the front hall. What the hell? A key?

For a heartbeat he hoped that … Gandolph had pulled off another resurrection.

Max plastered himself to the living-room wall. He’d abandoned the shot-up car with the body near the Belfast address of a long-ago counterspy network contact. People didn’t tend to move as frequently in the Old World as in the States. He’d hoped.

Maybe Garry had still been revivable, and found.

The hall was too narrow for an opening door and two people. Max’s blood was pulsing through his carotid arteries, pounding in his eardrums. Maybe Gandolph. Maybe Gandolph.

Whoever … he needed to startle and control the body that came past this break in the house wall.

He heard the door open and shut. The newcomer paused, his or her senses routinely checking the empty house for any change. Max nodded mentally. A pro of some sort. Not the redhead deciding she wanted a return fling in the opium bed. He weighed the slow oncoming footsteps. As precise and cautious as his own.

This was interesting. Who or what would expect this empty house to offer more than vacancy? The white-noise hum of the air conditioner muffled the visitor’s approach. Suddenly a presence blocked the archway, just oncoming bulk and darkness.

Max jumped into the opening, pounding a fist into kidneys, right on target, needing to disable the trunk before the struggle quickly came down to the intruder’s hale legs against his weakened ones. He heard the man’s grunts, but the guy torqued his torso away before Max could get in any more cheap shots. Max pushed his sharp forearm bone across the man’s windpipe and used the opposite wall as his own buttress. Had to exercise some care. He wanted to overcome and question, not kill.

The guy’s elbows were pummeling his ribs. Max slid aside, letting the intruder hit his own crazy bones against the wall. During the expected cascade of curses, he spun the guy against the wall, knee to nuts, and let up on the windpipe.

“Enough already,” the intruder gasped. “You know the turf, and you’re tall enough to be Max Kinsella, in person.”

“And you are—?”

“Your damn house sitter. My contract with Randolph covers my medical costs, so ease off before you run up a bill even you can’t pay.”

Mention of Garry’s name was like saying a password to Max. He lifted his arms and backed away.

“Mind if I turn on the living-room lamp?” he asked the unknown man.

“Hell no! I wanna see how much I can sue for. Freaking idiot. No one called me to say you’d be coming back.”

Max turned and found the lamp he’d noted on his tour of the house, fumbling for what should be a familiar on switch. He let himself sit on the couch arm, relieving his legs but still projecting the impression nothing was visibly wrong with them.

In the weak lamplight, he confronted a sturdy guy, five-ten maybe, 190, and enough five-o’clock shadow for a Latino, with a cop stance, more curious than pissed.

“Man,” he said, “you look like death warmed over and served as sliced jellied aspic. Why’d you attack me?”

“I didn’t know Garry Randolph had contracted for your services, whatever they are. Must be watering the yard and fine-tuning the air-conditioning. Can’t be security.”

“Now that’s where you’re off base. There was nothing to secure here but the house, until you showed up. Where’s Randolph? He e-mailed me saying he’d rendezvoused with you in Switzerland and you were both heading to the British Isles, last I heard.”

Max leaned his head against the wall. “When was that?”

“More than a week ago, U.S. time.”

“Who are you?”

“The guy who helped Randolph get you out of the Neon Nightmare club and then the country.” The man shifted his pummeled body. “I gotta say you recovered pretty damn well from that so-called ‘fatal’ accident in just a little over two months. I figured you’d never walk again, much less threaten the family jewels.” He glanced around. “Where’s Randolph?”

“Who are you?” Max asked again.

“You’d seen me around. Rafi Nadir.”

Max just shook his head.

“My regular job is assistant security chief at the Oasis. Randolph did me a good turn and recommended me for the position, in exchange for maintaining the house so it didn’t deteriorate while he was trying to get you back on your feet again at some fancy Swiss clinic.” He glanced at Max’s legs. “Guess that worked.”

“Somewhat,” Max said. “I’m still compensating. That’s why I hit you like a ton of bricks. I’m still mostly bark and not bite.”

“Pretty nasty bark. But why don’t you know this? Where’s Randolph? Where’s the old guy? He’s some character, but he knows his beans.”

“Dead,” Max said.

Rafi took a deep breath and leaned against the hall wall in his turn. “Shit. I liked that guy. He gave me a second chance.”

“Me too,” Max said. “A couple times.”

“How did he die?”

“Shootout with the ex-IRA and alternate IRA in Belfast. Our car got caught in the crossfire. I lived and Garry didn’t.”

“Shit,” Nadir said. “Nothing personal. I mean the situation. Bad. That old guy moved the world for you.”

Max said nothing. Just took a deep breath.

Nadir said, “Sorry. I’m guessing the admiration was mutual.”

That brought Max’s head up, business on his mind.

“I don’t know what Garry’s arrangement with you was. I don’t know you … who or what you are or how you’re involved. My legs were smashed and my memory is … a vast wasteland. I know what happened after I woke up from a coma at that Swiss clinic, yet almost nothing of my life before, just the … static … of the inane march of pop culture. Nothing important.”

“So you’re a blank slate?” Nadir said. “I know some things. I know someone wants to kill you bad enough to follow you from Vegas to Europe. You say your legs are iffy and your mind is an empty playground? Cheer up, Kinsella. That’s just the bad news. The good news is you have me to depend on.”

The stranger named Rafi Nadir grinned.

“And my ex thinks I’m utterly undependable.”

Chapter 8

Dry-Gulched

Who would have ever guessed that Temple Barr would be grateful to Savannah Ashleigh for anything?

Not Temple Barr.

The annoying has-been actress who’d made Las Vegas her shaky second-career base seemed to embody everything that kept the female persona known as “bimbo” alive way too long into the twenty-first century.

Still, it was good to have a serious errand the morning after picking up what was left of Max.

After a fitful night with Midnight Louie in her California-king-size bed and a nervous morning wondering how Max had fared, Temple was glad to have something on her agenda.

She parked her Miata outside the Aloe Vera Drive address Savannah had given her, although no house was visible. She stared at a tangled web of mesquite trees and spiny desert shrubs and varieties of cacti, a desiccated jungle compared to the scruffy lawns and foundation-planting-bare neighboring house yards.

This was an older area, from the sixties, not maintained with watered Bermuda and landscaped plantings, as Max’s house had been and still was. Another oddity, Temple thought.

En route here she’d driven by really fast to eye Gandolph’s former home in daylight. The groomed yard looked as Twilight Zone–maintained as the interior house systems. No sign of Max, thank God. She would die if she were spotted “hovering.”

Another fading car engine alerted her to the Saturn Sky convertible that had just parked along the crumbling curb. The vehicle’s maker and model had been discontinued by the 2008 Great Recession, but the driver emerged in nineties glitz and glory, tall and thin and extreme, a blond Cher.

“Savannah,” Temple said in a bit of a daze. “That car color almost exactly matches your hair dye … uh, your hair.”

Savannah clicked over on four-inch-heeled mules, her designer jeans torn in all the right places. “Vegas Gold, baby.”

“Vegas Gold what?”

“The custom car color.”

“There’s a color named ‘Vegas Gold’?”

“Absolutely. It’s used to convey the golden glamour of the Strip lights, the glitz, and the gold to be won at the gaming tables. And now it conveys moi.” She turned back to claim the car with a possessive glance, just in case Temple hadn’t gotten the idea.

Temple was, admittedly, a bit gaga at the entire entourage of one, but mostly she was miffed that ditzy Savannah Ashleigh knew something about Las Vegas that she, Temple, the public-relations professional, had never heard of.

Vegas Gold. She wondered if Gangsters car service had a limo of that color.

Meanwhile, Savannah had dressed for her usual riveting entrance. She wore a tiny ruffle-ragged silk top that played peekaboo with sheer transparency, and carried a designer bag the size of an old-fashioned postman’s bag. From its side pouch peeked beady black eyes inset into a brown fur face mask. It would be easy to take Savannah Ashleigh’s current purse pet as a … joey kangaroo. Captain Jack proved that tiny lap dogs were passé, and cats had always had too much dignity to put up with being hauled around everywhere.

“This is your aunt’s residence?” Temple asked, getting out of her car and nodding to the desert scenery. “I don’t see a … house.”

“Oh, yeah. This is the place, Temple. The yard is a mess, but Violet likes it that way. Doesn’t want the neighbors peeping in her windows.”

Judging by the burglar bars on the other houses’ side windows, the feeling was mutual.

“Yvette and Solange live here now?” Temple asked, trying to picture the pampered Persians reclining behind this Sleeping Beauty hedge of thorny bushes and cacti.

“Yes, along with the strays Violet is always collecting. After that cat-food-commercial deal fell through, the Persian Girls just weren’t earning their keep. And those long, thick coats are soooo hard to maintain.”

Temple knew Louie would have a screaming fit if he ever heard the gorgeous shaded-silver and shaded-golden Persian sisters had been handed off so casually. He would give Savannah Ashleigh a brand-new face-lift … or reason for one, anyway.

“Besides,” the actress said, “I’ve had to kick up my heels to earn a living and keep Violet and her Animal Farm going. She’s become something of a recluse; doesn’t have my outgoing personality.”

“Thank goodness,” Temple murmured.

As Savannah’s pseudosympathetic simper turned into a glare, Temple added, “Thank goodness you can help out your aunt. Violet does seem to have some socializing … issues.”

“Our family grew up dirt poor in Alabama,” Savannah answered. “You know what that really means?”

Temple shook her head.

“Dirt was about all we had to eat.”

Temple took in a deep breath, about to say she was sorry, she’d had no idea, but Savannah had always had enough to say, if not to eat at one time, and she kept saying now.

“It did keep my figure scrupulously slender. That’s how Audrey Hepburn did it, you know, kept her slim figure.”

“I didn’t know,” Temple said.

Savannah leaned down to impart girl talk. “Starved in a basement as a child in World War Two Europe. Best thing that can happen to a girl if she wants a film career. You could stand to lose ten pounds, you know.”

Temple was momentarily in an altered state alien to her. She was speechless.

Not so Savannah.

“But you are going to marry that darling radio man, and once you’ve got that wedding ring on your finger, as well as that significant engagement ice, along with the ceremony that goes with it, you can be sure the new mister won’t mind a few extra pounds, or if he does—and they so often do, even when they themselves are as obese as Fatty Arbuckle—will find someone who has the discipline to lose them later.”

Speechless.

“Dis-sa-plin,” Savannah spelled it out. “You’re cute enough to pass now, but what will you be like after forty? Yes, forty! It is death, my dear, but Savannah Ashleigh is a death-defying act.”

She spread her stringy, skinny arms to better frame her foot-wide torso. The creature in her purse climbed to her shoulder, revealing a body as lean and long as its mistress, only furry.

“Is your aunt as fashionably … skeletal as you?”

“Oh, my, no. She’s just my mother’s youngest sister. There always has to be one who’ll let herself go. I don’t blame her. It takes ded-i-ca-tion to be beautiful and successful. Remember that.”

Temple was thinking it seemed to take more like dead-i-ca-tion to the point of anorexia nervosa.

“I’ll never forget it,” Temple swore, as fervently as if a courtroom bible were under her right palm. “You should explain about the dead … employee before I go inside the house, wherever it is, and actually meet … er, Violet.”

“Well, he up and died. Or rather, down and died. There is a concrete-lined ditchy thing behind Violet’s property. He was found at the bottom, dead as a stranded fish in Lake Mead. The empties found him.”

“The … empties?”

“You know, those good-looking young muscle guys who come with ambulances these days.”

“You mean EMTs—the emergency technicians. And some are women.”

“Everything is too, too technical these days, don’t you agree? I mean, they take away the ‘empty’ body in that ‘empty’ ambulance, isn’t that so?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Temple said. “So the only reason you and your aunt think her life is in danger is because her yardman was found dead. How did anyone spot his body?”

Again Savannah leaned in and down, lowering her voice as well as herself to broadcast in Temple’s ear, “Her neighbors all have bi-noc-u-lars, Violet tells me, and watch every little thing that goes on outside and inside her house.”

Which, Temple observed again, was invisible to the naked eye.

“Let’s go inside Violet’s house,” Temple suggested, scratching her neck. If there were this many pests outside, what would the inside be like?

“Don’t be nervous, dear girl.” Savannah also idly scratched her neck, but her fingers were wearing weapons. “You may just be a chubby, short, little overlookable thing, but I’ve heard people say you are a pistol at stumbling over crimes and criminals.”

Still Speechless on Aloe Vera Drive.

Temple followed in Savannah’s footsteps through the winding gravel and twisting carnivorous plantscape.

What do you know? A rounded, earth-toned stucco house lurked at the center of the lot, its style more Santa Fe than Vegas. Meanwhile, the clever masked face clung to the shoulder straps of Savannah’s overweight designer bag and regarded Temple with appallingly intelligent eyes.

“Where did the yardman die?” Temple asked, even more puzzled. There was nothing here that required a yardman to tend it, and no ditchy thing.

“Oh, out back by the control towers and the containment channel and the—what did they call it?—retainer basin.”

“Are you talking about the control channel for the summer flash floods?” Temple asked.

“Something to do with planes or TV stations, I guess. I didn’t know floods flashed,” she added with a calendar girl pose and a wiggle followed by a giggle.

“I didn’t know Las Vegas had ‘retainer basins,’” Temple said dryly.

“That does sound very dentist-office-y.”

“There are fields near control channels called ‘retention basins.’”

“Why don’t you settle all this confusion and hike back and look over the area?” Savannah eyed Temple’s rope-fiber wedgies. “Your casual shoes can take it. I’d sink to my Nicole Miller ankle straps in sand if I left the street or sidewalk.”

Savannah finished presenting her case by cocking a hip and pointing a toe to display a boney ankle and super-high-heeled sandal.

“You might have mentioned,” Temple said, “that the terrain was rough for a city lot.”

Savannah shrugged, her gesture making the head of her purse pet pop up from the outside pocket again like a prairie dog masquerading as a cat burglar.

“I figured a PI could cope.”

“I’m in PR,” Temple said.

“We’ll wait here,” the woman went on, “while you inspect the death scene. Then we can go inside and you can meet Violet. Captain Jack just loves to play with the cats.”

Temple could well imagine. Meanwhile, she followed a slightly worn path of sandy dirt through the aggressively overgrown brush, shorter plants whipping her bare ankles. Who wore hose in Vegas except chorus girls and cocktail waitresses in overly air-conditioned hotel-casinos?

Cowboy boots would have been the proper footwear for this expedition, but Temple’s sole pair was aqua-and-silver flamed leather, and not born to be scuffed.

Temple glimpsed stucco walls as beige as the sandy soil to her right from time to time. Quite a bit of house did indeed lurk in this wilderness. And when she broke through the last, bristly, face-whipping stand of brush, she gazed, like Balboa on the Pacific, on a vast, empty scene, in this case waterless.

A concrete-lined gash in the terrain was Savannah’s “control tower,” otherwise known as a water channel. Next to it lay what most people would take for an empty lot, the retention field used to soak up excess floodwaters.

Anyone who’d lived in Vegas even a very few years, as Temple had, looked on these vast and careful constructions with a small shudder. When the skies clouded over and thronged with storm clouds, their water broke in a cascade so concentrated that desert washes and in-town artificial washes like the control channel filled to their brims then overflowed to swamp roads and even highways, sweeping away vehicles and people in an irresistible eddy of terror and death.

This was the cusp of summer, and the floods came from July to September, but, according to Savannah, a man had died here in the dry belly of the flood-protection system.

It’d be easy to fall into a control channel, hit one’s head fatally hard, and not be found for days. It’d also be easier to push someone into a control channel, counting on no one finding him or her for days. And if the body remained undiscovered long enough, a sudden flood could sweep it away miles down the system.

Temple made her way back to the so-called “front yard,” savvy enough now to avoid the worst tangles, but her lower legs and forearms still looked like she’d been boxing a lynx.

“Tsk,” Savannah said, when Temple finally broke clear into the broken-down front yard. “Those scratches are so unattractive. And your skin, especially that pale kind, tends to never heal deep down. That kind of damage is cumulative, you know, even if you wear sunscreen.”

Temple regarded Savannah’s golden spray-on tan. No doubt the airbrushing had a high SPF rate and protected Her Delicateness from deterioration.

“You could have warned me I’d be roughing it.”

“I didn’t think,” Savannah said. “That’s not my job. That’s your job. What do you think, now that you’ve viewed the scene?”

“You haven’t seen it?”

“Lord, no. I’d never risk my manicure or my skin or my best heels in that wilderness. The police said Pedro had probably been chasing one of Violet’s critters that had gotten loose and fell into the control pit or whatever it is. Violet had reported people lurking around her house at night, but the police discounted that, too. Said it was just all this wild, scratchy stuff brushing on her screens and window glass.”

Temple was starting to itch all over. Maybe it was sand fleas or cat fleas.

This did not seem like an auspicious beginning for a Las Vegas PI.

Where were the night and the neon and the surly pit bosses and sleek and shady casino go-to guys?

Where was her Veronica Lake peekaboo long blond hair and gold lamé trench coat with the impossibly cinched waist and the front hip pocket with the revolver bulge? Where was the glitz and glamour?

Chapter 9

What a Lousy Lot

I pity poor Miss Temple.

I really do.

When she trots gamely off to view the site of the suspicious death, I am finally able to shrug off the black canvas tote bag Miss Temple keeps behind the Miata’s front seats for hauling heavy books in the trunk.

Across the street I can hear Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s steel-tipped stilettos sticking in the sun-warmed asphalt as she paces. They make a monster-movie sucking sound as she pulls them out. Say what you will of Miss Savannah Ashleigh, but that woman has calves of steel.

I poke Miss Midnight Louise, who had caught up with me this morning only as I was hustling my tail section into the Miata to accompany Miss Temple on a very important date: her first assignment as a paid PI.

“Hop in,” I had told the more-than-somewhat-bedraggled and red-eyed Midnight Louise. “We are going to examine a death site.”

“Big deal,” she mutters. “If you are into death sites, there are more surrounding the average Las Vegas household than in any Strip hotel.”

“Vermin and crawling prey do not count,” I say. “Please, do as I say. Hunker down and keep it shut. It is broad daylight now, and our dramatically dark coloring is no longer an advantage.”

Thus it is that we broil together in the Vegas pre-noonday sun, which bakes down through our black canvas cabana roof and onto our solid black coats.

This is why desert-dwelling people wear white.

Cats do not pant often, but we do then, dedicated sleuths that Midnight Investigations, Inc., is. Are? Never mind. Thus, we have not had a chance to confer during the bouncy, “road feel” trip. People have odd tastes, and my Miss Temple likes to rip and roar in her small red car.

Being the larger, manlier member of the firm, I have risen to shrug off our canvas curtain first.

“Vito’s Vegetarian Pizza car was a far smoother and cooler ride,” Louise comments, while unbending her eyebrow hairs with dampened swipes of her mitts. “But I do have news from Chez Max that is as hot as a pizza-box warmer.”

“Amaze me.”

“He had an unexpected visitor soon after Miss Temple left.”

“Not the ghost of Garry Randolph?”

“No. It was someone with a key to the place and the chutzpah to use it.”

“Well?”

Miss Louise pauses to slap back her mangled vibrissae. My “whiskers,” as humans call them, are snowy white, a distinguished and unusual marking for an otherwise solid-black dude. Louise’s are just plain black, but daddy longlegs–fine and out-flung.

“Well?” I demand again. My curiosity is about to give me heatstroke, and she knows it.

“Mister—” she begins.

“A guy. Okay. Then Mister Max did not call the nearest private dancer as soon as he hit town.”

“Rafi Nadir.”

“Whoa. This is the big one, Louise.”

I sit back on my haunches, feeling my heart blip with shock.

How the Hallelujah Chorus would Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s ex-cop ex-cohabitator know of the Randolph-Kinsella house or connection … or any of the many mystery threads involving my Miss Temple that Louise and I have been following these many, many months like bloodhounds? Excuse the expression, but sometimes only a doggy comparison will do the job—speaking of doggy expressions.

“My vibrissae almost went as white as yours overnight,” Louise agrees. “Even worse, Mister Rafi stayed about as long as Miss Temple.”

“Twenty minutes or so you said. So it was … cordial?”

“Who knows? I only know that both visiting humans left the house under their own power. One would think, unlike our kind, they would not hunker down and glare silently at each other for many minutes.”

“You will certainly not question the senior partner’s instincts or orders again,” I say.

“You have that wrong. This just confirms my instincts at the Neon Nightmare more than two months ago that Mister Max is the one to watch.”

“And that is just what you will be doing again tonight.”

Miss Louise’s muzzle makes an annoyed moue, which is a French word for a dainty grimace.

I leap, claws in, to the sun-baked leather seat and then place my front “velvet paws” on the leather upholstery edging the rolled-down window. Bast knows that scratched cowhide would not only give away the presence of feline stowaways but earn Miss Temple’s swift dismay and wrath.

“What is happening?” Louise asks.

“Miss Temple has returned from exploring the back forty looking as if she has spent a month on the African Queen with Humphrey Bogart.

“Oooh! And she is always so smartly turned out. Let me see.”

Midnight Louise has lofted up beside me without a claw prick and is blinking her old-gold-colored eyes in the bright sunlight, taking in my human’s scratched legs and arms and limp curls.

Meanwhile, Miss Savannah Ashleigh has been sitting in the Sky’s driver’s seat with her earbuds inserted and her garish blond head bouncing in tune to some pop-rock drivel.

The world is not a just or kind place.

I stare at the pale adobe walls of a house barely visible through the overgrown scrub surrounding it.

“I am about to reverse myself, Louise,” I say.

“At least you are just a backseat driver.”

“We are coming back here in the dark of night and are going to bust into that illegal cathouse.”

“Oh, you guys love to pile on the sleaze and pose as masters of sex and violence. This is a private residence, not the Sapphire Slipper ranch out in Nye County. I doubt we will find anything illegal inside besides too many cats.”

“Which there can never be too many of,” I get in as a final word.

Chapter 10

Gathering Vultures

On the sun-seared front concrete step spilling unpicked-up daily newspaper rolls, Temple eyed the rusted screen in the battered aluminum outer door and donned a mental suit of armor, not rusted.

She knew hospitals didn’t keep the terminally ill around as long as, say, in her mother’s day. The patient’s home now was a bridge to hospice care at the point of no return. Temple braced herself for the sights and sounds of bedridden illness she had experienced among her extended family now and then as a child.

Savannah showed no such reticence or sensitivity.

Her spike heels kicked away any blocking newspapers as she used a key like a weapon to belabor the big but grungy-looking front-door lock. The wooden door cracked open on darkness and the tepid, wet indoor temperature likely created by an old-style “swamp cooler.”

Temple didn’t have to worry about bracing against the odors of bedpan and medicines. What hit her and Savannah like a tsunami was an invisible wall of litter boxes kept in a musty, closed-windows house.

“You’ll get used to it.” Savannah waved her free hand in front of her face. “My aunt did. It’s worse now, of course, since Pedro Gomez kicked the bucket in the back forty.”

Temple could only nod while holding her breath. Bless Midnight Louie for using the bathroom window to go outside to do his duty most of the time, and not the bathroom litter box.

Now she knew at least two things Pedro had done for Violet. One was to collect and recycle the daily newspaper, a rarity these Internet days. The other was to dig daily shallow graves for the sifted leavings in box after box of used, probably clumping litter.

Finding unsullied new ground to dig must have taken him far from the house and near the retention basin, making Gomez a sitting duck beside a deadly, man-made dry wash.

Temple also realized that Pedro burying cat litter by the light of the moon might have given someone criminal notions of buried treasure. That was another angle.

Why go to such lengths? Because … leaving so much used litter bagged for the city trash haulers would put them in revolt—and, Temple realized, tip off health officials to the fact that Violet was a cat hoarder. And just what was her last name? Surely not Ashleigh, a stage surname if Temple had ever heard one, and she’d heard many.

Meanwhile, Savannah exhaled a shallow breath and stalked on echoing heels into the house, which was floored only with bare concrete and some wood sections. Temple suspected any carpeting had long ago succumbed to litter-box overflow and been ripped out.

The main room was dim, thanks to deep adobe window wells. It was occupied by a bulky island that Temple’s focusing eyes identified as a hospital bed. Around and on it lay a half dozen cats of various sizes and patterns, surrounding the sickly white shadow of a woman.

Temple stared at Savannah’s aunt Violet, thinking of the portrait of Dorian Gray aging in an attic while the real man stayed artificially young in his everyday environment. That was the sort of resemblance Savannah Ashleigh’s aunt bore to her niece.

“My aunt,” Savannah introduced her to Temple, “Violet Weiner. I could attach a few ex-husbands’ names to that, but neither Violet nor I choose to remember those skunks. Now, Violet, this here gal may be young and look a little silly, but she is going to find out what happened to Pedro.”

Temple threw Savannah a warning look as she approached the bed. She didn’t need any extravagant claims wrapped in the disparaging word silly.

Violet lay half-raised on the bulky hospital bed, like a Lazarus in suspended transition between life and death. The old woman’s hair was long, wild, and a dazzling platinum-blond color, but only because it was completely and magnificently white, naturally. Her bone structure was as camera-ready as her niece’s, but the skin had collapsed onto it. Her lips were thin and pale, and her torso was paper-doll flat under the white hospital sheet. No collagen, no breast implants, just her unassisted form.

“Oh, Pedro,” she murmured, her head tossing on the pillows. “He hasn’t come to the house in two days. The cats and I could always depend upon him. I’m so worried. Is he here now? I want to see him. We miss him. It’s terrible to miss someone.”

Her low mourning-dove coos turned harsh with conviction. “He’s dead, they say. I know someone did something to him, like they did to Alexandra. She died, you know. Far away. A terrible accident, they said. Like Pedro. I don’t believe what they say.”

She glared at Savannah, but only because she was known to her, and handy. Violet was an old sick woman. Temple wondered how many years separated Savannah and Violet. How fascinating that Savannah’s stage surname, Ashleigh, was almost an entire alphabet away from their shared maiden name.

Temple would bet Savannah was equally removed from the actress’s christening name. She would love to know what that was, and probably would before this sad story was over.

“My name is Temple Barr.” She put her hand out to the thin one that reached up from the bed linens in an automatic gesture. The wrinkled skin felt dry and hot. “I understand your concerns and must admit that Pedro’s death looks suspicious, Miss Weiner.”

“Call me Violet, dear.” The woman’s voice had an eerily light and girlish lilt, like Savannah’s. Her wrist wore a string of purple beads the same color as the prominent veins in her claw-thin hands. “My name is a good omen,” she added. “Amethysts and emeralds are healing gemstones for my kind of cancer.” She looked to the other side of her bed. “Isn’t that true, Jayden?”

A figure sitting in the shadows beyond the bed stood to capture Temple’s attention as much as the dying woman’s. In the house’s naturally dim lighting, he seemed to rise with the supernatural smoothness of an animated corpse in a horror film.

Savannah’s heels stuttered forward a pace as if she felt compelled to challenge the man.

“Mister Jayden?” Temple went around the foot of the bed to shake hands.

She needed to get a quick fix on this guy, and was instantly assaulted with a theatrical costume, a white muslin Cossack shirt embroidered by way of Sedona, Arizona. He was heavily accessorized for a man, with a thick turquoise bracelet on his left wrist and a chunk of amethyst crystal at his neck.

“Just Jayden,” he corrected her. “Surnames are required by bureaucracies, not our natural impulses. The individual outweighs the tribe. What a potent first name you have, Temple. You need use no more. In fact, your karma would improve if you dropped your surname. Barr is negative, implying barriers. And you don’t like barriers, do you, Temple?”

“Who does?” she said. “Miss Weiner’s employee was found dead in a big concrete gash in the desert—talk about negative barriers. I don’t care to be taken for a place of worship, and I’m not that interested in being omnipotent, so I’ll keep using my last name, thank you anyway, uh, Jayden.”

She wondered if he’d ditched a plain-Jane surname like Johnson. He was too old to have been christened something as currently trendy as Jayden. Under that sun-worshipping natural tan his facial wrinkles were as fine as spiderweb lace. He was pushing fifty, at least. The package had a certain televangelist charisma without the obvious smarm. She found her eyes reluctant to leave his gaze for some reason. And she had two highly charismatic guys preoccupying her mind, heart, and conscience.

“The Earth is our place of worship.” Jayden smiled at Violet as he dropped Temple’s hand to circle around the bed’s foot to Violet’s side, deftly inserting himself between auntie and visitors.

Temple was shocked silent to observe in the better light that Jayden’s left eye was an unearthly turquoise blue and the right was … purple. She’d seen semiprecious stones combine veins of both gems like that, and also color-enhancing contact lenses that were spectacularly unnatural. The teens today were all Lady Gaga about wearing oversize contact lenses that made their eyes look as anime-winsome as the artist Margaret Keane did with cats’ and kids’ eyes fifty years ago.

Jayden bent over Violet like Dracula over a sleeping Victorian lady. “You must rest, dear lady.” He laid his right hand on her forehead, the second finger wearing a silver ring set with an amethyst the size of a teaspoon bowl.

For an instant, Temple feared his nimble golden-brown fingers would retreat down Violet’s pallid features and shut her eyes as a doctor might do for the dead. Instead, his hand lifted to make a dismissive gesture that seemed to start as a sign of the cross, but turned loopy.

Oh. His fingers had sketched out the crosslike form of an Egyptian ankh.

“It’s time for our nap,” Jayden said so softly Temple had to strain her ears. He regarded Savannah as his voice turned from molten to adamant. “You should leave.”

“Hell’s bells,” Savannah said. “We just got here, and I’m kin. Closest kin that she wants to see or hear of, that is. I want to show Temple around. Maybe some of that first-name mojo you rave about might rub off on poor Violet. I’m not leaving unless Violet asks me to, Mister Jayden, and you’ve got her zoned out. What kind of tea have you been pouring into her now?”

“I ease her pain by psychic, not physical means, Sue Anna.”

Sue Anna? Temple swallowed, hard.

“You don’t want to upset her by making a scene,” Jayden added. “From what Violet has told me, you were always good—or should I say bad?—at that.”

Sue Anna Weiner?

Temple was struck silent despite the minor spat brewing beside her.

Savannah Ashleigh was really Sue Anna Weiner? Temple knew that double ns often read like an m. So Savannah could be Sue am-a Weiner.

“You are a bigger phony than I am,” Savannah was telling the equally artificial Jayden now. It takes one to know one. “And a worse actor,” she added. “I am going to have you investigated by my PI.”

“You’ll never get in Violet’s will, Sue Anna. Trust me. I know.”

“Unlike you, I don’t care. I actually care about Violet.”

Temple eyed the sick woman, who lay with her eyes closed, apparently hearing none of this talk. She spied a Garfield mug on the bedside table, but no tea bag tag dangled over its rim. Whatever Jayden was giving Violet was home-brewed.

Her hand tightened on the tote-bag straps over her shoulder. These roomy carriers sure came in handy. The house was a monument to clutter and cats. That Garfield mug was leaving with Temple, and she’d at least give it the sniff test, or, better yet, take it to a tea shop for diagnosis. Many health shops in the suburban strip malls offered exotic tea varieties. Or … maybe the coroner, Grizzly Bahr, would be interested enough to analyze the stuff. Their similar surnames made the pair unlikely soul mates, as did loving the weird little details.

“I’ve brought some treats for the poor cats,” Savannah announced, as importantly as if it were the Second Coming.

She extracted a sealed packet from her bag and rattled something Louie had never seen the likes of, interrupting Temple’s plotting.

“There’s plenty of kibble already set out all over the house,” Jayden said.

“Pedro used to give the cats treats,” Savannah answered. “I’m sure they miss that dreadfully by now. You are obviously not a cat person, which is very odd since you claim to be psychic.”

“I claim to draw on the universal healing calm we all can tap into if we only will.”

“Speaking of wills,” Savannah said, “it’s amazing how the ghouls show up when an old lady who’s determined to cut out any relative is sick. Old Pedro was the only man who ever did look out for Violet, and it’s very convenient for everyone but Violet that’s he’s gone now. I’d think it would be good karma for you to help give out treats to the cats.”

She turned to Temple. “We’re going to the kitchen,” she announced. “You can get acquainted with Violet and bring her mug along later for a fill-up. Then we’ll both leave Jayden to work more of his mental mumbo jumbo on poor, helpless Violet’s psyche.” She looked at the floor. “Watch out for random litter boxes,” she warned Temple over her bare shoulder as they left the room.

Temple saw that aliens had indeed landed: aluminum turkey-roaster pans filled with litter and … leavings … lay like sand traps on the concrete floor. Who was going to deal with the cat boxes now? Jayden was far too elevated for such earthly matters.

“Oh, good. We’re alone.” Violet’s clawlike hand clasped Temple’s forearm with painful desperation. “They never leave me alone.”

“Who?” Temple asked in the same loud whisper Violet used.

In the kitchen, she could hear Jayden and Savannah bickering over a chorus of meowing cats. What a perfect time to interview Violet. Almost as if Savannah had engineered this moment.

“Everyone,” Violet replied. “You’re such a pretty little girl, just like my Alexandra. I can tell you. You wouldn’t believe what’s going on here.”

Temple’s eyes got bigger and she leaned closer, though Violet’s breath was very bad. Illness or Jayden’s brews?

“Every night men climb in and out of my bathroom window.”

“Aren’t your windows locked?”

“They’re very old, like the house. A child could get past them now.”

“What do the men want?”

“My fine china and sterling silver place settings. Will you look in the dining room to see that it’s still there? The burglars do stumble over the cats a lot, but they’re disappearing, too.”

“The cats? How can you tell?”

“How can I tell?” Violet’s grip grew more painful. “Whisper, Alexandra’s white shorthair, never comes to visit my bed anymore. I haven’t seen Frederick, the mackerel tabby, since Pedro deserted me.”

“Pedro didn’t desert you. He had an … accident and fell into the concrete canyon behind your house.”

Violet’s features puckered with puzzlement. “You’re not supposed to swim there.” Then came panic. “Maybe that’s where the cats are going. None of them are supposed to leave the house. That’s where they’re to stay. And where’s Alexandra’s old girl, Little Doll? Where have some of my cats gone?”

“There’re so many,” Temple said, wondering if Violet was imagining things or … right.

“Oh, I know every whisker on every one. I’ve only been bedridden for … for a day or two. Or is it a week or two? Time! It’s hard to keep track of, but I can keep track of my cats and my china.”

“How do you know Jayden?”

“Oh. He has a New Age shop. He knew Alexandra when he lived in Sedona and he met her in Tucson when he toured the southwest. Then he moved here. I went to see his shop, for crystals and magnets. I have magnets on all my cat collars. And under my mattress. They’re from Father Hell.”

“Father Hell?”

“A funny name for a priest, isn’t it? But he was a Jesuit healer. Father Maximilian Hell. He was a friend of the mesmerism man and knew how to restore your magnetic fluid.”

“Is that what you’re drinking, magnetic fluid?” Temple picked up the empty Garfield mug. Violet seemed spacey and erratic, and she was jumbling thoughts together. If her mind was going, were iffy potions helping it depart? “It sounds like something you’d put in an automobile.”

“Hardly,” came Jayden’s jarring voice from behind her. “What has our Miss Violet been saying?”

“Just telling me about mesmerism and magnets,” Temple said, pulling her arm from Violet’s death grip. She turned to him and dropped the Garfield mug into her tote bag in one smooth movement when her body momentarily blocked his vision. “Apparently, you own a shop.”

“I do.” Jayden produced a card from his pale linen pants pocket. A slightly wrinkled card reading, HEALING ARTS, MAGNETIC AIDS.

“Very interesting.” Temple studied the images of faceted gemstones and sunlike rays. “But I’d hate to sleep atop something dreamed up by a guy named ‘Father Hell.’”

“It’s more than merely interesting,” Jayden said. “Magnet therapy goes back to the Egyptians and the Greeks. By the seventeen-seventies, Father Hell could heal people with a steel plate so successfully that Franz Anton Mesmer, the German physician and pioneer in hypnosis, studied Hell’s devices and results and first identified the subtle magnetic fluid flowing through all creation and creatures. The correct placement of magnets on or near the body will restore the disruptions in the field we call poor health.”

“Uh-huh.” Temple had dropped the gaudy card into her tote bag also, where it landed inside the Garfield mug. She pulled the straps tight on her shoulder so no one could see in.

She turned to Violet. “I’ll certainly do everything I can to help care for your cats now that Pedro’s … not here.”

“Do you have any cats?”

“Just one.”

“Only one! So many need homes.”

“He’s a very dominant cat.”

“Oh, you’ll end up with more, my dear. I can tell the lone and wounded just flock to you.”

“You may be right,” Temple said, sweeping her gaze past Jayden’s unnervingly odd-eyed face. In fact, she spotted a white cat with one blue and one gold eye on the bedside chair. “Is this your missing Whisper?” she asked Violet.

“Oh.” She turned her head to view the animal. “No. That’s her sister, Becky Sharpe.”

Temple was startled to hear a cat named for the heroine of an old novel. Then she remembered that Becky Sharpe had been “two-faced.” Violet was, or had been, pretty sharp herself.

“I’m going to help Savannah put out the cat food in the kitchen,” she told Violet in farewell. “It was fascinating meeting you.”

Temple couldn’t help wondering if Jayden’s differently colored contact lenses played on odd-colored eyes sometimes showing up in animals. It would certainly give him an “in” with cat and dog lovers. Did human eyes have that possibility too? Max had worn cat-green contacts when he’d performed as a magician. She wondered if he’d ever gone with one natural blue eye and one artificial green one.

It certainly was a distraction, and magicians are all about distraction. Like right now. Temple was thinking of her returned “lone and wounded” ex, when she should be figuring out what was going on at Violet’s house.

She had to thread her way through milling cat bodies to reach the kitchen and found that the cat treats being distributed had attracted cats like a nucleus gloms on to protons. Or whatever. She was relieved to spot two other Garfield mugs on the counter. The one in her tote bag would not be missed.

“So,” she asked Sue Anna—Savannah—“who will take over Pedro’s litter-sifting and outdoor-burying duties? Surely not the devoted Jayden. And you don’t have the footwear for the job.”

“Oh, Rowdy will do it,” Savannah said, pinching her nostrils shut and waving her free hand under her nose to indicate the distastefulness of the task. “He’s been in town all these years since Alexandra died. Violet could never stand him, but she’s been forced to call on him now and then since she got ill. Not that he’ll get anything out of it but doo-doo.”

“Rowdy?” By now Temple realized her nose was already adjusting to the overpowering odor of many cat boxes in close quarters. She desperately wanted to go outside to talk and breathe.

“As someone with a cat of my own, sort of,” she started to tell Sue Anna … Savannah. She had to forget the woman’s birth names—first, middle, and last—because she would simply giggle at having unmasked the eternal starlet’s unpretentious past, and this was not the place for inappropriate reactions.

“Oh, yes.” Savannah gritted her ultrableached teeth. “I remember that rogue male well! I ended up owing my plastic surgeon a bundle for ‘fixing’ your tomcat with a vasectomy instead of a neutering. He was a very dumb doctor. And he threw in a tummy tuck for your Two-O’Clock Louser, while I certainly didn’t get any freebies. I can’t afford any more surgery with the stupid economy, and I desperately need Botox and collagen. And Violet won’t leave me anything ‘on principle.’”

“Do the cats inherit, is that Violet’s issue?” Temple wondered as she helped Savannah open more of the treat bags the actress had jammed into her oversize Prada bag.

It was a metallic swashbuckler of a purse, buckled to the nines, nothing as old-fashioned and simple as Temple’s ever-present tote bags. Captain Jack must have felt right at home inside all that hardware, but he still scrabbled from his out-of-pocket home to grab an entire bag of treats and rip it open with his tiny paws and claws.

Smelling the fishy-scented plastic packages in the adjacent section and having to be a good boy and cozy up to the mistress must have been torture.

As the packets were ripped open, cats appeared from the vicinity of Violet’s bed and then many more from other house areas. In a minute, a milling, mewing carpet of cats of all shapes and colors swarmed the women’s feet. Cats perched on tables and the wide adobe windowsills, meowing. They lofted atop the countertops, nudging human elbows.

“S-S-Savannah,” Temple said, determined to inter Sue Anna Weiner forever in her consciousness, “is there a definitive count on the cats?”

“I never knew you stuttered. There is help for that, you know.”

“I know! These cats can’t continue to run all over the house. How could the doctors release Violet to her home?”

“It’s obvious you’ve never had a terminal disease, Temple,” Savannah lectured her.

Temple could only blink at the disconnect that sentence implied.

“Am I right?” Savannah obviously had to be.

“Right,” Temple said in exasperation. “What would that have to do with it?”

“Well, the doctors and hospitals are happy to have you coming in and out for daily radiation that’s costing your insurance or Medicare thousands a week, and when they’ve made their bundles and you get so ill from the radiation you can’t get yourself in, they release you to your ‘home and caretakers,’ until you’re sick and out of your mind enough that they can stick you in a hospice for your final day, or days, hopefully just the one if they time it right.

“What is going on, do you think?” Savannah asked. “Violet’s been hallucinating from the pain meds for the last week and a half. Taking these cats away would push her over the edge. Her whole deal was that the cats stay in the house as long as they lived, after her death. The person who will do that for her gets the money, and while the will still isn’t signed, I figure that crystal freak will get it. I’m just trying to keep Violet going as decently as possible until it’s out of all our hands.”

Temple had never heard Savannah Ashleigh speak that many sentences, or sentiments, in a row. She’d obviously seen a tragically similar case to Violet’s. Temple found it touching that the struggling, middle-aged actress would do so much for her difficult aunt, for no personal gain.

“And,” Savannah added, “Violet has promised me I’ll get Yvette and Solange back in the will. When I dropped my babies off with her a few months ago, Violet had far more marbles and many fewer cats.”

“I don’t see Yvette and Solange.” Temple gazed around, counting cats. At least sixteen.

Savannah sniffed. “They would be rushing to Mommy’s arms, but I think Captain Jack’s scent on me is a deterrent. That’s them, on the kitchen table.”

Temple looked over. She couldn’t believe her eyes. It was more than ferret scent that kept Savannah’s formerly favorite pets from approaching her. What about complete betrayal? Could that pair of scruffy gray and yellow cats with knotted coats be the Persian purebreds? No. Yvette was a shaded-silver Persian like the beauty on the Fancy Feast TV ads, and Solange was a richly shaded-golden version of same.

“Don’t look at me like that!” Savannah said as Temple turned to her. Her guilty eyes kept shifting somewhere between the Raggedy Ann cats and Temple. “Violet is holding both of my girls hostage, and I can’t get them to a groomer for a lion cut until she … well, gets to the bottom of her own bowl of not-so-Friskies.”

“Lion cut?” Temple asked, fastening on the most bizarre phrase.

“Of course.” Savannah shrugged. “My Persian babies will have to be shaved to the skin except for their heads and ruffs, the ‘boots’ on their lower legs, and the tufts at the end of their tails. It’s a cool clipping for this climate, rather adorable, and will allow their scrumptious soft, long coats to grow out smooth and knot-free. Until they start tangling again. Hasn’t your Midnight Lounger ever been to a groomer?”

“Nooo. He’d take that personally. I mean, he attends to all his barbering needs himself.”

“I suppose that’s possible. He certainly doesn’t have a show coat.”

By then the treats had been distributed to the small saucers placed everywhere … Royal Doulton, Temple had noticed. Underneath the clutter and the cat hair lurked some wonderful and fragile things.

“So,” she asked, “the will still hasn’t been signed?”

Savannah nodded unhappily. “When Violet first got ill she sounded all certain and organized, but she’s delayed doing anything final, and all the while the vultures have gathered. I’m terribly afraid that crystal-flashing crook will get the whole shebang. I’m no fonder of my aunts and uncles and cousins than Violet is, but her money would be better off with greedy relatives than with an outright con man.”

“What about this ‘Rowdy’ guy?”

“He was Alexandra’s boyfriend at the time of her tragic death. He came to Vegas for the funeral and never left.”

“So Alexandra died far away from her mother. You said drugs?”

“Yeah. In Tucson. Alex was not one of those drug-abusing kids. That’s what was so sad. What got her was one of those awful cases where some creep they never caught was putting bad stuff in pain-reliever bottles on drugstore shelves. Like playing Russian roulette with pill bottles. But Alex was far away from her mother for a reason. They’d had a falling out.”

“And then Alex dies in a freak outbreak of anonymous murder? Poor Violet.”

Savannah nodded. “I didn’t realize at first, but that’s when she started going cat crazy. She can’t let one of them go. It’s like she’s searching for Alex to come back as a cat. Alex was the one who had cats. Violet took her four and the litter of kittens after she died, so I thought she could handle my two. This was before Violet got ill. How was I to know she’d been adding every homeless cat she ran across? She’d always wanted to lunch on the Strip when I was in town, so I never saw the house.”

Temple could understand how Violet’s pet population had multiplied. Most city codes were strict on pet numbers per household. She knew a lot of animal lovers and rescuers exceeded the stingy allowances. Temple had no problems with the codes. Louie would not tolerate even one additional cat on his Circle Ritz premises. Maybe not even a stuffed one. Temple wasn’t about to buy one and find out.

“I need to leave,” Temple told Savannah. “I need to think this over and probably come back and talk to Violet further.”

“Why not? Duh. I come here almost every day now.” Savannah imitated Temple by hoisting her bag straps on her shoulder. “Wait! My bag is too light. It’s not just the treats that are gone, Captain Jack is!”

Temple scanned the cats, looking for a ferret in feline clothing. Most of them were shorthaired, she noticed, and pretty sleek. Her glance fell on the woebegone Persian sisters, looking listless and lost. She tried to approach them, hand out with treat nuggets, but they hissed at her in unison. The poor things seemed half feral now, and forcing these pampered cats to fight for their places in this menagerie was outrageous.

Midnight Louie would bring the house down if he knew his former lady friends were being neglected. Even as she thought of Louie, a lean, wiry form came barreling across the treat-sprinkled countertops—not Louie, for sure.

“Captain Jack!” Savannah welcomed the ferret as it raced up her arm and into the purse’s big outer pocket, its tail vanishing last, just as it did a U-y and the masked little face reappeared over the pocket edge.

Captain Jack seemed very pleased with himself.

Temple and Savannah threaded their way back to the living room, hearing Violet on the cell phone that rested on a small square pillow by her right shoulder.

Jayden bent over the dining-room buffet table, lighting an incense stick that looked and smelled like the cinnamon ones people sometimes put in hot drinks. Temple couldn’t help thinking that even a pot smell would be better than the odor of cat boxes. And she wouldn’t put it past Jayden to give some of that to Violet. That would sure not make for clearheaded will signing. Nevada was not California. Medical marijuana wasn’t legal, but it was easy to import.

“No, Briana.” Violet was on the phone, her light, frail voice strained to sound emphatic. “You can’t have my full-length Russian sable coat no matter how much you whine. What a thing to think of at a time like this—not me, but what I have that you want! That coat is far older than you are, not suitable for a young girl. Besides, I’m still alive. I might wear it in my casket. So there, you greedy little girl. I don’t care that you’re my grandniece. You didn’t care that I was your great-aunt until I got sick. Go away.”

Violet’s thin hand clutched the phone. She seemed unaware that she could click it off. Briana’s whining voice escalated until even Temple could hear it. She walked over and gently slipped the phone from Violet’s fingers, shutting it off.

“She’s gone now,” she told the sick woman.

Violet’s heavy-lidded eyes barely followed Temple’s gestures, instead staring into her face. “You’ve got some red-gold in your hair, like I used to. Would you like my sable coat?”

“What a lovely thought, but you keep it.”

“Can you believe the nerve of my grandniece? She acts as if I was dying.” Her focus became fierce. “I’m going to be fine. Jayden said so. Emeralds and amethysts will see me through.” Her giggle was faint but harsh. “Briana and her parents can go to hell! Father Hell’s magnets all under my mattress will shrink the cancer. Sue Anna…”

Savannah sighed with gusto and clicked over to the bed.

“I did leave you your two precious Persians and a few thousand for pin money,” Violet told Savannah. “Maybe I’ll even give you my sable coat, although it doesn’t go with your bleached-slut hair color.”

“It’s a custom salon tint, Auntie. ‘Vegas Gold.’ Only Rolf at Hair Carousel can do it. It’s the quintessence of all the glitz and lights on the Strip.”

“You are the quintessence of stupidity, niece, with that thin résumé of what you call a ‘career.’ Meanwhile, you keep coming to feed the cats, do you hear me? Jayden has better things to do, and Pedro … Pedro went away.”

Temple was taken aback by Violet’s swift mood changes. She knew the sick can be difficult—heck, give her a stomach flu and watch her moan and whine—but Violet displayed a vengeful, mean streak. Maybe that was why she’d had a rift with her daughter before Alex died so tragically.

Hers not to judge a life she knew so little about. Already she was feeling sorry for Savannah, and that was a major change of heart.

The two visitors walked out of the door, stood in the sunshine, and breathed deeply together, as if sharing the end of an exercise class. The wall of stuffy, fecal odor behind them still wafted past.

“She’s my aunt,” Savannah said with a grimace. “I don’t like her sister and two brothers any more than she does. Luckily, they live in Alaska and are not about to pressure her on the will from more than long-distance calls she can refuse, like her bratty, spoiled grandniece. If they showed up, they’d have to do some things for her, and they’re not the tending type. I guess I’m not either, but I’m here, and I have no stake in any so-called fortune.”

“Do you have any idea what that is?”

“The house is old, but the land is good. She probably has mutual funds, life insurance. With the antiques and household goods, I’m guessing two hundred thousand. Not peanuts, and enough for someone greedy to covet. I can’t say it wouldn’t help me out, but I know the family rifts go back to her and siblings, and she somehow managed to drive Alexandra away, too. I’ve got nothing to gain here but grief, but I am here. What are you gonna do?”

“You’re right. She’s alienated the very people who might have had her good at heart. So she’s been left vulnerable, and the vultures are gathering.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“Investigate Jayden, number one.”

“That’s all?”

“Uh, check with my police contacts on Pedro’s death.”

“Police contacts—wow. You gonna call your blond hottie in on the case?”

“He’s out of town.”

“You get outta town! You wouldn’t let that guy loose on his own in some other city with other women, would you?”

“Other cities are full of other women, and so is Vegas. I trust him implicitly.”

“That a relative of explicitly?”

The wink of Savannah’s false-eyelashed eye indicated she’d understood Temple’s phrase perfectly. Maybe she wasn’t as dumb as she looked and acted. They were almost at the curb, about to split for their respective red and Vegas Gold convertibles (another appalling sign of sisterhood), when a guy in pseudocamos ambled up the walk.

“Miss Ashleigh,” he greeted them, surprised, and giving Temple a bright, alert, Captain Jack look, only with blue eyes. “How’s she doing today?”

“Off and on, as usual, Rowdy,” Savannah answered, relaxing as she hadn’t when Jayden was around. “The guru has got her in his grip.”

Rowdy shook his buzz-cut head. “Losing Alex kinda unbalanced her. It’s not nature, a daughter passing on before a mother, and now Violet’s dyin’ and still denyin’.”

Temple needed to put in a sympathetic word, even though the necessary introduction really killed her.

“Hi, I’m Savannah’s friend, Temple.” Moving on. “Her aunt’s situation is so sad … Rowdy. Oh, that’s right. I remember. Savannah said you were with Alexandra in Tucson six years ago when she died so tragically. And now you’re here?”

He winced. “Came up to Vegas to look after the old lady for Lexi, truth to tell. She and her mother had one of those spats that was hard on both of them. I was lost to have Lexi taken from me like that. She didn’t die right away. They didn’t know what killed her right away. I guess Miss Ashleigh told you.”

“Horrible, horrible thing,” Temple said with full sincerity. “Who would kill people randomly like that? Pointless.”

“Yeah. Even serial killers at least have their crazy logic. I was kinda … at loose ends after Lexi died. I work construction, and until a couple years ago Vegas was booming, so it made sense to move from Arizona up here. I drove the cats up for Violet, but she never warmed to me whether Lexi was alive or dead. I kept an eye on her anyway. Helped Pedro outside. She never tumbled to the fact that I was concerned about her. But I lost my most significant person, too, when Alexandra died.”

Savannah swayed from sole to sole on her painfully high heels while Captain Jack’s little head followed the conversation.

“I know, Rowdy,” Savannah said. “Alexandra was a beautiful girl. To die in her twenties of something so random…”

Temple had been studying the guy. A boyish thirty-eight or so. Short, maybe five-six, but wiry and strong, a wind-tanned face and sun-squinting eyes. A burr of brown hair, intense blue eyes. Not overeducated, but a solid, nice guy.

“Anyway,” he told Savannah, “now that Pedro’s gone, I come over after work every day to bury the litter. It’s been neglected for a few days, and you know that pouf Jayden won’t lift an amethyst pinky-ringed hand to do what really needs to be done around the place.”

Savannah shook her head. “And you know Violet’ll never put you in the will, Rowdy. She hated you when you were Alex’s boyfriend, and she just tolerates you since you came to Vegas because you do things for her.”

“It’s not about the money, trust me,” he said. “I know how she’s always felt about me. No one was good enough for her daughter, especially me.”

Rowdy turned to Temple, pulling a worn wallet out of his pocket-tiered pants. He produced a small portrait photo of a slim, well-groomed blond with hyperthyroid eyes, popping slightly as if she were surprised. She certainly had been, by life. And early death.

He ran a thumb over the matte surface. “That’s Lexi. She and her mom didn’t get along, but no way am I going to let Lexi down and do unto her mom as she did unto me.”

“You dislodge that Jayden creep,” Savannah said, “and I’ll support you.”

“It’s Violet’s house, her stuff. Her life. And death.” He shrugged and moseyed up the walk.

“Violet has more people trying to look out for her than she’ll ever realize,” Savannah said.

“What’s Rowdy’s real first name?” Temple asked.

“Something uncool like Sylvester … no, I guess that turned out to be plenty cool for Stallone. Um, Sylvan Smith. You know how parents with last names that are a dime a dozen always stick an embarrassing, different first name on their kids?”

“That’s a very astute point, Savannah.”

“‘Astute.’ You commenting on my world-class ass? It’s my own redistributed fat.”

Temple refused to be grossed out. “I think you know what I’m commenting on. Your brain that isn’t as disengaged as you pretend.”

Chattering as if joining a Gossip Girl session, Captain Jack peeked out of his personal pocket.

“What’s he got now?” Savannah’s expression turned disgusted. “A hairball from Violet’s house!”

Temple snagged the dry brown object from the ferret’s paws.

“Euww, don’t touch that,” Savannah yelped. “Naughty, naughty Captain Jack!”

“Clever Captain Jack,” Temple said, putting the tea bag into the inside pocket of her tote bag. Come to think of it, she had room for a purse pet herself.

Captain Jack had managed to filch one of Jayden’s custom tea bags from the kitchen. Just what the doctor ordered … for the visiting PI.

“Mind if I keep this?” Temple asked Savannah.

The actress made a very slight dismissive moue, so as not to overstress her facial skin.

“Keep it. It will hardly be in the will.”

Temple had two thoughts as she left Aloe Vero Drive.

It can’t be good for Violet to be living out her last days in this giant cat box.

And: who would try to kill a woman who was already dying?

Chapter 11

Crime’s Her Cup of Tea

Once Temple got back home, she made a tall glass of double Crystal Light cherry pomegranate and loaded it with fresh lime slices.

Mike Hammer may have tossed back double rye whiskeys but she was too petite to handle the calories a hard-drinking male private eye could swallow.

Sitting at her office desk, she stared at the framed black-and-white photo of film noir actress and director Ida Lupino on the bookcase opposite, then looked up the numbers on her cell-phone list and punched one name before she could chicken out.

“Molina,” that deep, dark voice spat out, sounding as if this exact phone call would “make her day” by requiring her to shoot her own phone.

“Ah, Barr here.”

“Bar what? Is this a crank call, kid, because I can have it traced so fast—”

“It’s Temple Barr.”

“Temple Barr?” There was a sudden change of tone Temple didn’t like. She’d describe it as too civil and way too sadistic. “Calling me in the middle of a working day? Lost another ring? Fiancé?”

“This is a business call.”

“And those matters weren’t? Never mind. What do you want?”

“I … need … some information about a man found dead three days ago in the flood channel behind Aloe Vera Drive.”

“Well, that’s so simple, Miss Barr. Just phone your seriously overworked, friendly neighborhood homicide lieutenant and chew the fat—not that we women have any excess of that. Wake up and smell the caffeine! I can’t give you any police information, not even about a dead grackle found in Sunset Park.”

“Well, all the private detectives on TV know somebody on the police force who’ll fill in the technical details.”

“That’s because they only have forty minutes and three ‘acts’ to wind up a totally fictional case. Perhaps the CSI fad has totally corrupted the public mentality on just what boundaries the police really observe, but I thought you might be a tad more sensitive to the inanity of what you’re asking.”

“At least I know this probably isn’t a safe line.”

“Is this your PR person’s way, TB, of forcing me into a P.M. coffee break?”

“Do you really get one?”

“No.” Sigh. Another sigh. “There’s a Sin City Caffeine Cache franchise two blocks from me. Be there in an hour. And what’s the name?”

“Sin City Caffeine Cache.”

“Not that! The DB.”

“Oh, I thought you wanted me to confirm the, ah, assignation spot.”

“Don’t make it sound so romantic.”

“And … DB? Oh. Dead body. Oh, yes. Pedro Gomez.”

“Hmm, that name has a distinctly coffeehouse ring to it.”

“Gomez, not Juan Valdez.”

Molina sighed again. “Or an Addams Family vibe. I can always expect the unusual from you, Miss Barr. Be there.”

Temple clung to the disconnected phone. Molina always made her feel like a breathless junior-high-school newspaper reporter—nervy but eternally hopeful.

Temple supposed being female, tall, and blue-eyed with a Latino last name had been both a curse and a blessing in a high-school life and a police career. Being short and smart and redheaded carried a Little Orphan Annie “vibe” Temple was only now escaping … until she tangled with Molina.

Still … Bingo! The cop was coming across. Temple ramped up her desktop laptop—the new Gateway—to check out the coffeeshop’s address. Poor Starbucks, once king of the coffee-bean hill, now fighting new little independent chains in the Great Recession economy.

Somehow, Temple could identify more with … the SCCC. Sin City Caffeine Cache.

Maybe they served tea, too, and she could run the aroma of Violet’s special “brew” past the expert witnesses there.

*

“First,” Molina said, “tell me why you’re interested in this noncase.”

“A … friend asked me to investigate the circumstances of her rich old aunt. She was concerned that a pack of vultures were gathering around the ill old lady, Violet. Pedro had been Violet’s yardman, but far more. He kept her and the entire establishment going.”

“Driving Miss Daisy,” Molina said. “Shorthand, please. I don’t ordinarily have time to consort with amateurs.”

“You know the man was found dead in the flood channel.”

“He was seventy-eight years old, and it’s hot here. Anything could have caused him to keel over at the back of an extremely rugged property, sustain a concussion, and die.”

“Is that what Grizzly Bahr said?”

“Oh, you know the old goat? I should have guessed. He’s a leg man, even with corpses.”

“Lieutenant!”

“A joke. What’s your footwear of the day?”

“Sensible Easy Spirit pumps.”

“I do put a crimp in your operating system, don’t I?”

“Yes, sir.”

Molina chuckled. “That’s the attitude, Private. Private Investigator, is it now? As it happens, the Gomez death report was buried in File Cabinet Limbo with a lot of other ‘unexplained’ and unglamorous deaths. My ‘Bahr’—I doubt ‘Grizzly’ will ever be a nickname of yours—finds the cause of Mister Gomez’s death ‘vague.’ He could have had a heart attack at the top of the concrete spillway and fell into it. His head could have been bashed in at the top, and then he fell into it, impact masking the initial, deliberate blow. He could have been alive when he was pushed into it and died from the impact.

“This is a case that will only be prosecuted and decided on a reasonable motive for killing an elderly yard worker. A wealthy disabled employer who might name him in a will could very well be one. I can’t tell you not to interfere, except to note that if Gomez was murdered, as you suspect, you should keep yourself miles away from that invalid and that house.”

Molina tapped the manila folder on the tabletop. “Violet Weiner is listed for lots of crackpot calls to the police in the past year, men coming in and out of her bathroom window, Peeping Toms, and suspicious neighbors. That would make her latest fixation on Gomez being killed sound overwrought and like more of the same.”

Molina rose—towered—all almost-six feet of her.

“You know, Miss Temple Barr, PI, sometimes it also depends on a vic’s last name how much attention an unexplained death gets in this town, or any town in the lower forty-eight. I’ll have the case given a new look-see. Good work.”

She left Temple clutching her cup of orange pekoe and blinking with … relief, exhilaration, and pride. Guess she’d finally made the senior-high newspaper staff, after all. So to speak.

*

Such unexpected recognition, the euphoria, and the cold cup of orange pekoe made Temple decide to visit an herbal tea shop familiar with more exotic varieties. She had Captain Jack’s purloined tea bag from Violet’s house in her tote bag, and a wise PI would never look a gift purse pet in the mouth. Especially with sharp little teeth like that.

The Teahouse of the August Moon in bustling Henderson had a quaint, ersatz-Asian exterior, and a man inside named Augie Moon actually ran the place.

“Which came first?” she asked the portly, silver-bearded proprietor after making a deeply scented tour of the shelves. “Did your name or the novel, play, and movie’s title give the shop its theme?”

“Aha. A young lady with some long-range knowledge. However, if you’re as perceptive as I take you to be, you’d know I pre-date the fifties play by about ten years.”

“Really, Mister Moon?” Temple looked mock skeptical.

“Call me Augie. Even more perceptive than I thought. I’m following my life’s obsession, so I’ve certainly shaved at least a decade off my years. Not enough to court you, of course, Miss—?”

“Temple Barr.”

“Now there’s a name that already decorates establishments from the high and mighty and British to the low and Las Vegas.”

She had to chuckle. “You know the territory pretty well yourself. You have a wonderful place here. You wouldn’t be insulted if I told you I was led here by a ferret.”

“A ferret? Great hunters, ferrets. What are you hunting for?”

Temple pulled the Garfield mug from her tote. “The original contents of this cup and this tea bag.”

Augie seized upon the mug with as much relish as Captain Jack had retrieved the tea bag.

“You have to have a nose in this business,” he said, burying his rather large red one in the mug. “I’ll need to consult the shelves on both of these. Please step over to the tea bar and have a savory something on the house, the Teahouse of August Moon. I recommend a cinnamon-chili brew for one of your temperament and hair color.”

“I can change my hair color.”

“But never your temperament. Some paprika might do you very well, too.”

That flustered Temple into blushing.

“Hmph. I see the spice is not new to you.”

“Can tea have such exotic seasonings?”

“Tea can be made of anything.”

“Including narcotics or poisons?”

Augie hoisted the mug and the tea bag in both hands. “As you suspect? Are you a private investigator?”

“Moonlighting as.”

“‘Moon’-lighting. Then you’ve come to the right place. Sit and I’ll search.”

Temple perched herself and her tote bag on the cocktail-height chair while the slightly pierced girl behind the counter showed her a menu and offered a glazed ginger cookie to go with her choice.

Augie Moon was back with her items in a brown paper bag in fifteen minutes. He refused to let her pay and escorted her to front of the shop.

“I should let you pay for one of my greatest challenges?” He shook his head. “The tea bag was the easiest, but it was not what had been brewed in the cup. It’s a soporific. I’m assuming a clever puss like you knows what that means.”

“Inducing sleep.”

“Exactly. Ages-tested ingredients. Chamomile, lavender, valerian, catnip, passion flower, skullcap.”

“You pronounce those last three ingredients with particular zest,” Temple noted.

“Catnip for the Garfield figure on the mug, skullcap because you are investigating naughty doings, and passion flower because you are young enough to find it stimulating rather than soporific.”

“Augie, are you flirting with me?”

“I’m warning you. The tea bag is nothing you wouldn’t find in the most innocuous herbal-goods chain. The cup holds faint traces of less innocent concoctions.”

“Such as?”

“It’s not on my shelves but it is in my impetuous youth. Yes, I had one. Cannabis.”

“For medicinal purposes?”

“So they say now. I detect a slight milk scum. Cannabis in a water-based tea is weak stuff. With milk and its higher fat content, not so weak. In India it’s been referred to as bhang and used for medicinal purposes, despite its name.”

“I thought I smelled marijuana smoke in the house.”

“Not from the tea. What I think has been in this cup—and is very dangerous—is poppy seed.”

“Ooh, that knocked out Dorothy and everybody but the Straw and Tin Men on the way to the Emerald City.”

“Exactly. Poppy pods give us morphine and codeine for the ill as a sedative and painkiller, but it can be overdosed on.”

“So neither item is harmless, and each could be lethal?”

“As with everything, so it is with tea, Miss Temple Barr. A little of it is bliss; excess is dangerous.”

Temple allowed herself to be escorted out, still unsure whether Violet was being dosed for benign or malign reasons.

The custom blends in the bag and in the mug had been passed on, or under, the best “nose” in the house. They were strong combos of blends good at inducing sleep, which is what a sick old lady might crave and need. Nothing at all lethal.

Even the poppy seed was useful in the right dose.

Yet, she thought glumly, between Violet’s own flaky moments and the flakes she was surrounded by, anything evil was still possible.

Chapter 12

Return Engagement?

Morrie Alch pounced the moment his boss returned from her errand and knocked at the hard-won private office door then peeked in.

The room wasn’t much wider than Lieutenant Molina’s desk, yet having a hidey-hole at homicide headquarters had been invaluable when she’d been semiseriously wounded and had to keep it hush-hush.

“Don’t pussyfoot,” she told the veteran detective; “come into my parlor.”

“You must be feeling better.”

“Shut the door.”

He did. Molina had no qualms that office gossip would buzz about her and Morrie, and nowadays she wouldn’t have cared anyway.

“I am feeling better,” she said. “The stitches are finally not pulling and itching with every movement, although my torso looks like an overlaced football. Mariah’s home and behaving, so I don’t have to lie by omission at work anymore. Other than the troubling, unsolved business of the former stalker in my home and the planted trademark of the Barbie Doll Killer inside my teen daughter’s bedroom, all’s right with the world.”

Alch settled himself onto one of her wooden visitor’s chairs. “Feels good to get a weight off my … feet.”

She nodded, puzzled. Morrie had settled into his fifties like a slightly graying Scottish terrier, comfortable but with plenty of chase and growl left in him. He didn’t, uh, “pussyfoot” around like this, even when invited.

“You know those folks you were having me keep a casual eye on?” he said, casually.

She nodded. Two men, one woman.

“My free time for casual eyeing is hit or miss, Lieutenant, you also know that.”

“What I know is I’m lucky to have one last man I can trust on call, Morrie. Whatever you come up with is appreciated.”

“So get this: I was driving up the Strip last night and spotted Our Miss Barr’s red Miata leaving Planet Hollywood.”

“Not her usual venue, like the Crystal Phoenix, but nothing suspicious in that. Girls just want to have fun.”

“Not this one. She drove out to an old address that used to be in the boonies and now, with the years of housing booms, is alarmingly close in, when you think of it.”

“What address?”

“It was already dark. I still kept my distance. She’d already tried to dodge a tail en route. Private house on Mojave Way.”

Molina sighed, audibly.

“Yeah. Guy pried himself from the Miata’s passenger seat.”

“Pried?”

“He was a big guy and that’s a small car.”

Molina shut her eyes.

“I should say he was big by being taller, not so much wide.”

She nodded. “Barr go in?”

“After he apparently jimmied the front door open.”

Molina’s dark eyelashes flicked wide.

“Yeah.” Alch knew he had reached the core of the apple and it was a Golden Delicious. He grinned. “Dude jimmied the lock. He went in. She went in. She stayed … um, barely twenty minutes. I’d have mistaken her for a real estate agent if I didn’t know better. No farewell smooching.”

“Duty, not desire,” Molina pronounced. The missing Max Kinsella was now accounted for.

She had to give Temple Barr credit for character, for not staying to give her returning ex-lover the ugly modern courtesy of a pity screw, but then, if Kinsella had masqueraded as the Phantom Mage, who vanished from the Neon Nightmare after sudden impact with a wall, he must be a shadow of the lady-killer he had been. Whatever the story behind Temple Barr’s stepping out on Matt Devine with her ex, it would be juicy.

“Good girl. Bad boy,” she told Alch. “Interesting from a gossip-mag point of view, but what about our other … serious persons of interest?”

“Good boys both. In the routine groove, work and home, no carousing, no bad habits. Mind you, I’m not on either one enough to swear they’re not busy plotting to knock off the Wynn Casino tomorrow.”

“Okay.” Molina produced a rare smile for their work environment. “Your personnel file is bloated with recent commendations, detective. Better get back to cracking your caseload so that doesn’t look suspicious.”

Alch rose, wincing as his knees creaked. “I don’t suppose you want to know about the black stray cat I spotted in the Mojave Way house vicinity?”

“No, Morrie, no more cat tales around here, if you can contain yourself.”

“And no more shadowing these persons of interest?”

“No. Don’t bother your handsome head about them anymore.”

“But … this new development is a killer.”

“Yet … not illegal. You might still keep that … casual eye on Miss Barr. I worry about that girl as if she was a daughter.”

Alch blinked. “Since when?”

“Oh, Morrie, you’re so behind the times. Since it was we three girls against a berserk but well-hidden killer at the celebrity dance contest—me, Mariah, and Miss Barr’s ever-so-trendy Zoe Chloe Ozone persona. If your name was Charlie, you could call us your angels.”

“Yeah, right. Not a halo in that bunch.” Alch went to crack the door open but turned. “You need anything else, let me know.”

“Always.”

Molina shut down her wide smile the minute the crack in the door went to six inches. The Iron Maiden of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Force had a reputation to keep up. And places to go and people to see.

Person. Singular.

One formerly missing person.

Apparently fate had dropped a shiny new pawn on her board.

Chapter 13

She Spat, He Spat

“This site is dead,” Miss Midnight Louise declares when I come to inspect her work. “All the juice has been squeezed out of it. We should be back on Aloe Vera Drive where the cat action is.”

“I am thinking that it is always good to keep an eye on Mister Max. Were you not hot to do that from the moment the Phantom Mage hit the wall at the Neon Nightmare? I am giving you your dream assignment.”

“That is what will be going on here tonight. Mister Max’s dreams. Now that I know he is all right—or at least alive and back where he belongs—I can concentrate on Miss Temple’s first case along with you.”

Phtchooey, I say.

“Dudes always give dames the ‘scat’ work.”

“What is ‘scat’ work?” I ask, much amazed by the term.

“Where we are forced to hang around and twiddle our dewclaws and are finally shooed away by irritable humans yelling ‘Scat!’”

“I trust you to keep a very low profile, Louise, and the reputation of Midnight Investigations, Inc., discreet.”

“Besides,” she says with a sly sideways look, “you would think the senior citizen of the firm would want the snooze detail.”

Actually, I have been losing some sleep lately over Miss Temple’s suddenly overpopulated private life.

To be honest, I do not have much expectation of anything worth a squib in the Las Vegas Review-Journal happening here, but I am keeping my personal private eye on Miss Violet’s house with all those residents of the female feline sort and do not want a chaperone on my tail.

So I leave Miss Midnight Louise there, on discontented duty, feeling a bit smug in the knowledge that the lovely ladies on Aloe Vera Drive will certainly not be growling “Scat!” at their devoted protector.

What could happen here in one night?

Really.

Chapter 14

She Said, He Said

The last time Molina had stood outside this address in the dark of night, she’d been wearing camouflage black, slinking around to the back of the premises to break in.

The last time she’d been inside the place, an unidentified intruder had paid a simultaneous visit, resulting in an eighty-six-stitch wannabe scar across her left rib cage and hip.

Now she stood at the front door, under the subtle entry light, ringing the doorbell.

*

Max pressed his eye against the peephole, cursing the long Black Irish lashes obscuring his vision, trying to ID the shadowy figure outside, a suited six feet with no other identifying features he could make out in the dim light.

Door-to-door salesmen hardly showed up at 9:00 P.M.

Was he an international counterspy or a mouse? Might as well find out what lamb or lion had called at this house of mourning.

He opened the door, his hand on the SIG Sauer P226 butt now nestled in the small of his back.

It didn’t help that he needed to lean against the wall after all the past four hectic days and nights had done to his recently broken legs.

*

“Mister Max Kinsella,” she told the lurking figure in the dark hallway, rather than asked, when the door opened, “I’m here on unofficial business.”

“I’m here on official home ground,” he answered.

“I know. I’ve checked the ownership of this property. Orson Welles, once upon a time. My, my. Garry Randolph is the resident of record, but the paperwork had always listed you, Max Kinsella, as co-owner. In his absence, I’ll assume you’re the man of the house.”

“I won’t buy anything.”

“I’m not selling anything.”

“You still want to come in?”

“Oh, yes indeed I do, Mister Kinsella.”

*

A woman? he’d wondered at first. If so, she was tall and her vocal range was low. She sounded authoritative and … she didn’t carry a purse. What did she carry? How did she know Garry was “absent”?

“I need some ID,” he said.

“Turn on a light.”

He liked the dark at his back, so he simply turned up the rheostat on the outside entry light as she pulled her blazer aside in a universally familiar gesture. Brass badge and gunmetal black at her hip played well in the improvised spotlight. A command performance, you might say.

“And you are…?” he said, waiting for verbal ID.

She eyed him oddly. “Lieutenant Molina, Metropolitan Police.”

“Come in.” He leaned into the front door to shut it after her. The Temple harasser, in person.

“Head on in,” he said. “The living room’s on the right.”

“I know.”

What the hell? Oh, right. She’d broken in after he’d disappeared. Miss Temple was an informant worth her weight in eighteen-karat gold. And that cost the world these days.

Max managed to touch the walls from stride to stride and so make his way to the living-room arch without his feet making the betraying dragging sound of a limp. He trusted no one interested in crashing Garry’s house party, but Rafi Nadir had certainly been prepped and employed by Gandolph. Was there any way this was another prearranged Vegas contact? No. This is the lady who wanted to hang him for murder.

He leaned inside the living room to turn on the first table lamp within his long reach, but her forearm cut across his gesture to stop it.

“Just getting some light,” he said.

“Are the light-proof shutters drawn?”

“Tight as a … well, it’s not a fit comparison to make in front of a lady.”

“I’m not a lady, and like you’d worry about that.”

She walked into the center of the room as he turned on the overhead central fixture, all Craftsman bronze and creamy milk glass. She wheeled to confront him.

*

Now she believed in ghosts … not the vague, airy-fairy, sheet-draped ones, but the ones fresh from the graveyard after having clawed their way to some gaunt semblance of their former selves.

“You look like hell,” she told him.

“So you’ve … seen me before looking a lot better?”