Cat In A Zebra Zoot Suit

3

Off the Map

Midnight Investigations, Inc., is having a meeting of the board, and all I can conclude is that we are both bored by a—heh-heh…pawcity—of evidence. (I do know how to spell “paucity” but cannot resist an occasional pun for fun.) What we are dealing with is not fun.

The two principle partners, Miss Midnight Louise and I, have finished scouring the Strip from the Downtown Experience to the Excalibur Hotel and the lower Strip luxury hotels like the Luxor and the Mandalay Bay.

We have then zigzagged our paws east and west of the Strip like berserk sewing machines.

Three days, and not a trace.

Mr. Max Kinsella and Miss Kathleen O’Connor have left not a trace or track of themselves in this whole town that is not seventy-two hours old.

Even Miss Louise’s fluffier-than-mine tail is dragging. She curls it around her sharply manicured toes and gives the terminal hairs a listless lick.

My own agile, whip-thin appendage just lies there like a dead snake. Well, maybe a sleeping Black Mambo, because I am always armed and dangerous, even when I am discouraged.

Discouraged! That word is banned from Midnight Louie’s vocabulary.

“They are gone,” Miss Midnight Louise says. “Really and most clearly gone.”

“Most clearly and most sincerely gone,” I agree. “Even Nose E, the drug and bomb sniffing Maltese dog, could not inhale one recently shed skin cell from either of them.”

“At least it was not a violent departure,” she says. “We could not find a blood trail either.”

“That is even worse. Now we are not only totally in the dark as to whether the departure was forced or voluntary, but whether they went off separately, or”—here I shudder—“together, Bast forbid.”

Miss Louise’s head seems to nod morosely as she tongue-lashes her long black bib. “It is like sitting through the endless battles of the first two Lord of the Rings movies and never seeing that miserable ring go over the cliff into the fire in the third one. Who knows what epic battle of good and evil between Mr. Max and Miss Kathleen is even now occurring offstage?”

“And we shall never know what disposition has been made of our own local favorite magician, Gandolph the Gray,” I add, “or in what forgotten plot of the Old Sod his body may lie.”

“Oh, quit wailing like a Dublin pub band,” she snaps. I mean literally snaps.

I back off, pretty literally too.

“And,” she adds, “Garry Randolph’s stage name was Gandolph the Great, not Gray. You are confusing him with the fictional inspiration for his performance persona.”

“Same difference. Dead and gone is dead and gone.”

“Gandalf the Gray came back from the dead to Middle Earth,” she points out. “But no one is likely to fight to return to this glittering bit of High-end Earth. Listen to me, Da.”

I roll my eyes at her using the Irish version of “Dad”.

“We can be sure,” she goes on, “Mr. Max Kinsella is capable of charming news of his late mentor’s final resting place out of a four-leaf clover, but perhaps not if Miss Kitty the Cutter has lit out after him, as it seems.”

“He wants to lead that Hibernian headcase a merry chase away from our favorite people,” I say. “And the scene here is much more serene without him here, the awkward ‘X’ as in X-Acto knife, not to mention being a leftover leg of a romantic triangle.”

Miss Louise growls.

“Oh, I forgot, Louise. Your favorite person is Mr. Max, and now he has left you lovelorn and forlorn in dull olde Las Vegas while he engages in a deadly game with Miss Kitty in Ireland.”

“And that is yet another thing. Your Miss Temple was clever to nickname her ‘Kitty the Cutter’ for her lethal ways with a straight razor, but I am beginning to resent a pet name for our breed being constantly associated with a psychopath.”

“This is old business, Louise, and we avoid the main issue here. If Miss Kathleen O’Connor is gone, who has perpetrated the latest outrage on my Miss Temple? I was indeed farsighted to have the Cat Pack move a sizeable presence from the police substation to the Circle Ritz grounds.”

“You? It was I who convinced Ma Barker she needed to expand her territory.”

“Me, you. Schmee, schmoo. What are we going to do about it?”

“Obviously your duty lies with Miss Temple. The Cat pack got a generous sampling of the intruder’s DNA, but we do not have an inside operative at the crime lab to process it.”

“Much less a CSI with the skill and stones to remove the evidence from the claws of a pack of ferals. Besides, I think the last thing this poor excuse for a housebreaker wanted was an encounter with Miss Temple.”

“Why?”

“She leaves a night-light on in the second bathroom to facilitate my coming and going through the open narrow ‘eyebrow’ window. This is an example of her tender regard, for we know I do not need any night vision amplification. The intruder could have thought the resident was sleeping on the other side of the unit.”

“Seeing you eel your expanding midsection through an eyebrow window sounds like an entertainment I could sell tickets to. What was he after, then?”

“She has a bad habit of sticking genuine and costume jewelry in her bedroom scarf drawer. I have fished out an amusing string of freshwater pearls for my own entertainment a time or two.”

“Hmpfft. Besides the flash on her ring finger that Mr. Matt gave her, she has not much in the way of fine jewelry to interest a thief.”

“Or…” Here I pause, to build suspense. It does not work.

Louise merely rolls her eyes and yawns. “Senior moment, Daddy dude?”

“No! Or…someone is after the secret map of Vegas Miss Temple put together for where Miss Kitty’s secret stash of big-time money and guns for the IRA might be hidden in town, or hunting remnants of the Synth conspiracy to continue their aim to stage the Vegas heist of heists.”

Miss Midnight Louise is still yawning. “Those scheming magicians are dead or scattered. Nobody who ever looked for that ‘buried treasure’ saw more trace of it than a rat-chewed, crumpled bearer bond. The underground tunnels between the Crystal Phoenix, Neon Nightmare nightclub, and the Fontana brothers’ Gangsters hotel have now been remodeled into entertainment entities so popular and crowded you could not hide a mouse whisker in there.”

“Still, there is the Ophiuchus connection between several of the deaths our associates have investigated.”

“Ophiuchus is a constellation of a man battling an improbably big serpent. The ancient myth-tellers and modern comics purveyors are fond of that notion. I know this ‘forgotten thirteenth sign of the Zodiac’ appeals to conspiracy nuts, like those UFO freaks that recently descended on the city. I would hope that superior and sensible species like ours are not so gullible as the human one. If one cannot see, hear, or eat it, it is likely to be a hallucination.”

Well, I have been told off! I guess I will not remind Louise that a drawing of Ophiuchus was found only a couple of weeks ago in an old lockbox the late Mr. Clifford Effinger left with Mr. Matt’s mother in Chicago. Vegas is as full of lost treasure tales as Oak Island is on cable TV. At least Vegas has had seventy years of mob shenanigans to make it a more likely spot for harboring such mythical things.

“Very well, Louise,” I say. “I will keep an eye and ear on Miss Temple. You will have to tail Mr. Matt.”

She sighs. “The hours are lousy and it is a long midnight trek back and forth from his radio station, but the Jaguar has a splendid sound system, at least. I will have to monitor his show. His call-ins do nothing but caterwaul about their personal woes. And then I must put in a full day as Crystal Phoenix house detective. It will be a taxing, boring assignment, but someone must do it, and you cannot be in two places at one time.”

“Yet,” I say. “You are whining like a Weimaraner dog. Except for the occasional intruder, I predict it will be a snoozer around the Circle Ritz too. I must agree that Mr. Max and Miss Kitty enlivened the neighborhood a good deal.”