Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

35

An Attraction Gone Dark

The sun also fades fast in Las Vegas.

As she drove up to the Neon Nightmare, Temple could barely make out the support structure for the galloping neon horse that had given the nightclub its name. Neon Nightmare, the horse being the “mare” part. It had reminded her of Dallas’s famous red neon flying “Pegasus”, restored in both its nineteen-thirties original and a new version commissioned before the first horse had been miraculously found disassembled in a box and restored.

The parking lot lights were dark too, so Temple drove her red Miata with the convertible top down, as if that provided any security, right up to the main entry door.

The building was a black glass-clad pyramid, inside and out, a nightclub owned and also used as a private clubhouse by a cabal of magicians delighting in all the secret mystifying stage scenery, effects and props of their profession.

“Boo.” Max’s face appeared at her lowered driver’s side window.

Temple started. With his black hair and trademark black turtleneck sweater and slacks, she hadn’t noticed him leaning against the building. Magicians before and since before Houdini had used Men in Black against a black curtain onstage to create their illusions.

“Sorry,” Max said when she blinked. “I forgot how spooky this place was.” He opened the door and Temple handed him her tote bag while she locked the car.

“The place is closed,” she said. “How do we get in?”

“No worries. I already ‘cracked’ it. I did perform here as the Phantom Mage for a while.”

Temple took in the faint reflection of them as a couple in the dark door, cast by a distant street light, a dark attraction that had gone darker.

“You almost died here, Max. How can you stand seeing it again?”

“You’re right. Standing is taxing. We should go in and sit down.”

He produced a small but powerful flashlight and tapped the seamless black façade. A wide door clicked ajar. Faint light shone behind it.

“Temple, we have nothing to fear from the things that almost got us. It’s the new ones that might.”

“And your greatest enemy is out of the country for good? In Ireland. She’ll stay put?”

“She’s very not at liberty.”

Temple ventured inside reluctantly. She was dying to ask more about Kathleen O’Connor, but Max had walked to the long black-glass bar and put her tote bag on it.

Where it went, she went, and vice versa. Temple followed him to determine the light source that lit up a wall of liquor bottles still in place.

“Hurricane lamps?” She laughed. “Your idea of housekeeping?”

Temple studied the empty space. The black glass floor effect was always edgy. When the dance floor and the black mirrored walls of the pyramid pulsed to piped-in music with neon colors and shapes zapping into the air above, and the dancers gyrated and the drinkers at their tables shouted at each other it had that Vegas Hell vibe, like the crazy-popular deejay-driven electronic music nightclubs mesmerizing young Vegas visitors nowadays and putting zillions into the Strip venues.

Temple looked up to the peak high above where a swirling universe of lighted constellations rotated. She looked down fast, dizzy.

Max took her elbow.

Temple shook her head. “How could you leap down from there on a bungee cord every night? I get chills thinking about the High Roller ride at LINQ entertainment center.”

“You’ve always yearned to be taller.”

“Not that way.” She shuddered to think about that giant Ferris wheel of swaying cable cars.

“Let’s sit at the bar and examine your Ophiuchus file.”

Temple started laughing. “That’s the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard.”

With that, Max picked her up and perched her on a high barstool.

“I need to get rid of these dangerously tippy things,” Max said as he leaned easily into sitting on the adjoining stool. Nobody should have to hop up to a seat in a bar.”

“The world should be more considerate of short people, but I don’t think you can change that all on your own.”

“No, but here I can.”

“What? You’re staking out an abandoned building like a homeless person? Which you are after that witch burned you out of house and home.”

“Not exactly.” He spun to lean back against the bar, spread out his long arms and surveyed the vast black satin space. “I own it.”

“It almost killed you and you bought it? That is so…contrary and unpredictable. And yet ‘Max’,” she said. “When did you buy it?”

“After it failed. I felt it had potential.”

“Potential to be a rogue building and kill.”

“I do need a home.”

“So you’ve been living here. In all this gleaming, mocking, deceptive blackness?”

“No.” He nodded at the opposite wall where a rail-less stairway and the balcony above it were barely discernible.

“You’re living in the cozy, English-y clubrooms of those crazy magicians who called themselves the “Synth”! I spent one of the most heart-pounding moments of my life stumbling across that place and those people. Aren’t they all dead now?”

“Ghosts won’t hurt you, Temple, unless they’re in your head. The only dead Synth member is the leader, Cosimo Sparks, knifed in underground tunnels connecting the Crystal Phoenix, Gangsters, and our old familiar venue here, the Neon Nightmare.”

Temple hooked her high heels over the stool’s lower rung, as she always had to in bars. She frowned, for a long time, as Max went back behind the bar to pour Bombay Sapphire into two crystal lowball glasses and place them before Temple.

He came around to reclaim his seat and one glass and stare into it as the hurricane lamps flickered, broadcasting a searing kerosene scent that unnerved Temple, but not Max, who was waxing contemplative without even a sip of liquor.

“I look at Sean and Deidre, and realize he recovered from that bomb and its scars long before I could. I had no right in Minneapolis to sweep you into my ungoverned, unsafe world, Temple.”

“Then why did you?”

“I think I thought that you could save my soul. And you did.” Max smiled. “It was selfish and self-pitying. I regret being an aggravating hiccup in your life.”

“Oh, you Irish. Always the martyrs. I needed to be jerked loose from my lovingly smothering family and get a little excitement in my life.”

Max lifted his glass. “A toast. To our separate but exciting futures.”

The crystal was Baccarat and rang like a heavenly chime from above in this hellish place.

“And so,” Temple said, “to work.” She pulled her tote bag flat on the bar to shuffle a deck of white papers onto the black onyx glass.

“We’ve always thought the drawn representation of the Ophiuchus constellation, the naked hero twined by and fighting a giant serpent, was a representation of what the ancient Greeks or other cultures saw in the stars. And we were half right. Matt recently learned that image had grabbed his stepfather’s pre-teen mind like a leech. He drew it constantly in class. The son he abandoned kept one drawing attached to his uncle’s refrigerator with a magnet. He had only that one keepsake image and memory of its significance to his father, and he inked it on his arm when he came of age.

“After my fake wedding, when a long-ago renovation was used to conceal the lost Binion stash of millions in gold under the Our Lady of Guadalupe altar, Matt recognized the altar’s central decoration, a turquoise carving of serial ‘Ms’ like the Loch Ness monster humps, with serpent heads at each end.”

“Surely not Ophiuchus.”

“No, but close. And not Ouroboros, the ancient eternity image of a serpent or dragon biting its own tail. After all the excitement, I looked it up. It represents the Central American god, Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent, often depicted with a semi-naked human avatar standing beside the giant snake. Christian conquerors would integrate native symbols into the ‘new religion’ they forced upon the native people. The original builders of Our Lady of Guadalupe were part of that tradition, almost subconsciously by now.”

“So,” Max said, “the altar bore another representation of Cliff Effinger’s man-snake fetish, which is very Freudian, by the way—”

“I get it,” Temple said. “And Cliff Effinger used it like a signature he put on all his mob jobs, including one more than twenty years ago to hide the Binion stash in the renovated church basement. Using the altar as a cover, which would have tickled a perverse sadist like Giacco Petrocelli.”

“But Binion had no idea that the altar itself was marked by a maker during the construction?” Max asked.

“No,” Temple said. “He was a rather dumb guy, to give the location of his hoarded millions to the man who built the concrete safe in the desert for him and who was, um, intimate with his wife.”

Max laughed and sang, “I am I, Dumb Coyote—” It echoed many times against the glass walls. “Man of La Mancha,” he explained.

“Oh, yeah, the old Broadway musical about Don Quixote. Come to think of it, ‘Don Qui-ho-te’ always did sound like “dumb coyote” when sung. I didn’t know you could sing, and on key.”

“No need for it,” Max said.

“Well, I can’t.”

“You’ve got to give poor Carmen Molina some advantage over you.”

“No, I don’t,” Temple said. “She persecuted you, and me, like Javert after poor Jean Valjean in Les Misèrables, another Broadway musical. Say, they were depressing for a while, weren’t they?” Temple was adamant on that. “Anyway, it was that odious Woodrow Wetherly Molina sent Matt to for information who was the dyed-in-the-woolly-white balaclava mask villain.”

“The man fooled people for decades, it seems,” Max said.

“He was clever. A mobster who killed and took the place of the cop trailing him decades ago, who kept running crooked schemes into his eighties. Giacco Petrocelli. Jack the Hammer and his bloody jackhammer.”

Max’s eyes narrowed. “A monster as well as a mobster.”

“Exactly.” Temple’s ire would not die. “That man was willing to kill people, not only to ruin my wedding, if I were prone to get in a huff. He needed a guaranteed congregation with a small guest list and specific times so he could round up and neutralize everyone in the nave of the church while his gang uncovered and plundered the basement stash.”

“‘Neutralize.’ Don’t we sound like a task force?”

“We were. Electra even announced the phony wedding rehearsal at OLG by emailing a photo of Midnight Louie in his white bow-tie as Ring Bearer to Crawford Buchanan’s fleazy gossip column. Louie went viral and it was an invitation the criminals couldn’t refuse.”

“Fleazy?” Max asked.

“It’s my new word for unutterably low.”

Max shook his head. “I’ve created mini-me monsters. Going undercover, tailing criminals, planting traps.”

“Are you continuing that spy stuff, Max? You said Kathleen was no longer a threat.”

“Not to us.”

“Matt and I have our talk show and Midnight Louie and I have our national commercial gig, but what are you going to do?”

Max pulled the papers closer. “Solve where the IRA contributions have been hidden right now. If the mob can’t fool Matt and Fontana Inc., can a cabal of rogue magicians and retired Irish rebels fool you and me?”

A thump atop the neighboring barstool made Temple jump. Max leapt up and clutched his shoulder like a Fontana brother who had misplaced his best friend. And he obviously wasn’t even armed.

“Louie,” Temple said. “What brought him here tonight? How’d he get in?”

“The building has been neglected and isn’t as secure as it will be,” Max said. “Apparently, just mentioning his name summons the demon.”

Midnight Louie didn’t seem to like Max’s explanation for his coming when “called”. He lashed his tail furiously against the stool seat. The big black cat’s chin barely cleared the bar’s lip, but he stuck it out. Pugnaciously.

Then he tilted his head as flirtaceously as a kitten’s toward Temple.

She could hear him saying, if he would deign to talk to her, “Somebody mention my name? At last!”

“My apologies. Pull up a stool, Louie,” Max said, drawing Louie’s stool closer. “First you are sleeping in my California king-size bed at the Circle Ritz with my ex-girlfriend and now you are cadging a drink at my bar.

“Sorry, Louie, nothing you can drink,” he added. “Liquor keeps, dairy products don’t.”

Temple couldn’t help smiling. Males get so possessive at times.

Louie responded by jumping atop the bar and sitting on the papers.

“Louie!” It was a battle Temple had fought many times. Work in anything but a paperless industry and your cherished feline companion will be on every possible pile, all over them, digging down under them. Sigh!

“Wait a minute,” Max said. “He’s placed the dead-center of his, um, posterior on the ‘house’ image of the major stars in Ophiuchus.”

“What? Divining by cat rear? The spirit of the Synth magicians survives. Look, Max. Cats are attracted by the scent of ink or toner. That’s all.”

“But that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about. You were saying you’d come to a new conclusion on the Ophiuchus constellation’s major star outline.”

“Only that we’ve been calculating it as referring to an area along the Strip. Look.” Temple took the transparent tracing paper of the house image and spun it as if transfixed by a pin.

“It matches all of Las Vegas inside the five major highways,” Max said. “That’s a bigger canvas than we’ve been considering, not a smaller one.”

“Well, maybe we’ve been looking small, rather than big.”

“Or…maybe the opposite. Sorry, Louie.” The cat grumbled with a smothered growl as Max pulled the “house’ version of the Ophiuchus constellation drawing out from under him.

“This would be highway 159 or 589 just below it on the north,” Temple said. “and that connects with Interstate 515 going southeast to Henderson. And you can get on Interstate 215 going directly west, for the bottom of the house, and 215 swings up north again to connect with 15 going parallel to the Las Vegas Strip to cross state routes 589/Sahara and 159/W. Charleston Avenue just south of downtown east and west. And there you have your rough ‘house’ shape in the stars.”

“Very true.” Max looked up and then down. Louie mimicked his motion.

“We’re inside it,” Temple realized. “We’re east of the Strip toward the junction of state 589/Sahara with 515. Right where a major star in the Ophiuchus constellation is located.”

“Rather, Temple, the Neon Nightmare is. Magicians are drawn to astrology too. Ophiuchus proved to be an unlucky star to the Synth members when they got greedy and schemed to get the IRA loot. Kathleen and Santiago wanted them to provide the cover of a magical diversion for a major last Vegas heist for the Irish cause. Only Santiago had gone rogue and Kathleen didn’t know it.”

“Everybody was duping everybody,” Temple summed up.

Max looked up. “And the stars weren’t aligned to let anyone profit. The Synth leader was murdered and cabal members scattered. Santiago was murdered. Kathleen returned to Ireland empty-handed, the reputed guns and loot lost.”

Max smiled. “Maybe that’s why it was a tough venue to make profitable. And cheap to buy.”

“Cheap?” Temple was skeptical.

“Cheaper,” Max said with a smile. “Remember Star Trek?” he asked Temple.

“The new movies?”

“No, Star Trek Classic from the sixties.”

“Please. The women’s costumes were so sexist, boldly going into Playboy territory. Not my kind of vintage.”

Max smiled. “Always the consistent crusader. You’ve lived to see Playboy so over. Anyway, I wasn’t thinking of the 3-D girls, but the 3-D chess game.”

“I remember a still photo of that on a vintage nostalgia auction site.”

“You’re moving from vintage shops to online?”

“Most worthwhile vintage clothing is online now. I had a bid number registered for Debbie Reynolds’ fabulous Hollywood costume auction a few years ago, and watched every second. The bidding for one of Judy Garland’s simple Dorothy dresses going up and up to almost a million dollars was breathless. You wished she could have lived to see what an iconic character she created.

“But even trinkets I bid on went up into the hundreds…a swooping hat, some gloves, and so much of our cinematic history went to Asia. Call me xenophobic, but that kind of rankles. Debbie saved Old Hollywood by buying out MGM’s entire stock before anyone valued it. She was the only woman star with the guts to try to float a Vegas venue based around her career and costume collection, and it failed. She finally couldn’t afford to maintain the collection.”

“She made millions on the sale, didn’t she?”

“That’s for her heirs, and she knows she saved those things for posterity, but it hurt to let her lifelong passion go. I know.”

“Temple. That must have been when I went ‘missing’. Had I been there I’d have bought you a fabulous hat if I’d known. And one for Debbie to keep too.”

“Which is why you will find the perfect woman for you, and I warn you, I’ve started shopping right now.”

He laughed again. “Right now we need to decipher what Louie is sitting on.”

Temple sighed. “If it’s on a small scale, what is shaped like the child’s drawing of a ‘house’?”

Max spread his long fingers and twisted the traced image over the blow-up of central Las Vegas.

“Most shows on the Strip are mostly two-dimensional. We see that on TV, in films, we learn to think that way. When I appeared to be walking on air in my act, with all the doves landing on and flying around me, I was actually, thanks to fast-winking strobe lights, walking back and forth between the foreground and the background, like a zigzag sewing machine, although I appeared to be going on a straight, linear line.”

“The depth was the distraction.”

“Everything in magic, and too much in life, is a distraction, Temple.”

“Too much math for me.”

Midnight Louie looked up, intently and made those jaw-tremoring chee-chee-chee chirps cat make when spotting prey.

Max picked up a black remote control Temple hadn’t noticed and aimed it at the interior apex of the Neon Nightmare.

Louie leaped to the lowest liquor shelf, then up to the top one, chirruping steadily.

“This place is a huge cat toy, isn’t it?” Max said. “All those dancing shifting lights. Care to accompany me to the top?”

Temple took a deep, shaky breath. “No.”

“The hidden scaffolding that continues up and behind the Synth’s third-floor clubroom bird’s-nest on the opposite wall, it’s quite safe. You’d have to leave your heels behind, though.”

“I hate heights.”

“You wear high heels every day.”

“That’s on a small scale.”

“Look at Louie.”

His round, intent eyes moved with the circling images. The traditional signs of the Zodiac, crab, goat, scorpion, lion, along with the disputed thirteenth sign.

Max whispered, “A still central core is generating the illusion of movement and depth. Ophiuchus circles his attacking serpent continually. It’s like a clockwork construction, and, like clockwork, has many parts. Game?”

Temple kicked off her heels, which hit the bar side and fell to the floor. “If you can replay your almost fatal fall, I can climb some pathetic…hidden, dark, secret scaffolding.”

Oh yeah. Maybe.

Max was as sure as a mountain goat and he easily wafted Temple from level to level by a firm hand grip. Since his remote control handled the working lights, the backstage structure was well-lit and simple. And the scaffolding was three feet wide and solid, she was relieved to find.

At the building’s pointed apex, a nest of spotlights dueled, creating crossing beams of colorful shimmer. That was when Temple began to lose confidence.

Max left her clinging to two cross bars and climbed higher. His black clothing was soon invisible against the dark, mirrored surfaces and dueling lights. She envisioned the four floors of empty space below, equally dark, and also reflecting crossed sabers of colored lights.

“Max,” she whispered, ashamed of her cold feet.

Something warm and furry brushed her calves.

“Louie,” she whispered again, reassured.

Then Louie’s silhouette vaulted up past her, backlit by the light show. For a moment he seemed as huge as a leaping black panther.

The opposite wall flared with a yellow-lit image of the wrestling man and giant serpent.

Then the circling light show paused. Had Max made the apex of the pyramid go dark for an instant? And stop?

Another click. Only the yellow work lights were on and Temple had to squeeze her eyes shut against the sudden illumination.

She heard and felt Max and Louie leap down onto the lower scaffold, one large thump that vibrated the boards, followed by a smaller one. Temple teetered, spreading her bare toes for balance and looking down from a sideways squint. Up here the scaffolding was ten feet wide.

It could have accommodated a van.

Somehow, that didn’t make her feel better. There was always getting down.

“Max Kinsella, why I let you talk me into climbing the inside of this magic mountain I will never know, but I am so over you.”

He leapt down beside her. “I wanted you to be the first—and last in this country to see. Look.”

Max’s hands opened the magician’s typical black silken square that produced white rabbits and doves.

Nothing white appeared. His cupped hands held a mini-universe of captive, eye-dazzling red, green, blue, and white…the colors of what she’d taken for gel-tinted theatrical spotlights, now boiled down into large, faceted gemstones.

Louie stretched himself three feet long along her leg, and Max did a knee-dip so he could see too.

Louie’s paw automatically tensed to touch.

“Oh, no, boy,” Max said, “this is a very different kind of kibble than you eat.”

“He doesn’t,” said Temple. “Eat kibble. He just pretends to. He’s in it for the toppings I ladle on it to get him to eat the healthful Free-to-Be-Feline. Which he doesn’t.”

“What a con that cat has going.” Max laughed as the silk square shrunk in his hands and disappeared.

Temple looked around. “This entire building’s lighting system is a spinning gigantic kaleidoscope in the sky,” she realized. “Made from the IRA money Cosimo Sparks found, converted into jewels, and then secretly kept. He was the worst crook and hypocrite ever. He murdered people to maintain a phony scam about Strip-rejected magicians finding Kathleen O’Connor’s stockpile of undelivered IRA support funds, and all along he’d found and converted them to diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds to dazzle night-clubbing tourists right in front of his duped co-conspirators’ eyes. Why?”

“It was a magician-conning-magician scheme, all right,” Max said.

Temple looked down. Plain yellow-white spotlights raked the black mirror walls. The neon glamour was gone. The Plexiglas looked scratched and dull under the unrelenting light.

“How are we going to get back do-o-o-o-own?

“No! No, Max, no-o-o-o!”

Not a bungee cord!

She was not suicidal.

Temple felt the air rush up and her stomach swoop down and then bounce back a tad as she gasped to a stop, hanging a couple inches above the black glass floor and her abandoned shoes.

“Exactly heel height, I believe, Madam.”

Temple pushed her feet into the only kind of height she craved, her high-heeled shoes.

Stable again, she released her death grip on Max’s arms. “Anyone who ever offers me a ride on the Rio’s zip line is going to die the death of a thousand nail file jabs,” she told him.

Turning and looking up to the dizzying apex, she saw Midnight Louie flitting down the scaffolding to the stairs with fluid skill.

She turned back to Max. “And what are you going to do with the jewels?”

He hefted the black silk scarf, now knotted into a jewelry bag. “Return it to those who suffered from not having it.”

“The IRA widows and orphans fund.”

Max’s smile was somehow secret. “Yes, and for other devastated Irish lives.”

“So it’s Ireland again for you. And what will you do with this place afterward?”

He looked up. “The technical apex would make a fine penthouse. I could live here. Redeem the place. Redeem myself. Or—”

“Or?”

“Find another place, over the rainbow.”

“You’re holding a rainbow in your hands,” she pointed out, “only you know you can’t live there.”

“And don’t we all do that sometimes?” He bowed. To her and to the cat sitting beside her. “I give you the Irish wish that you live for your rainbows, not for the rain.”

She did tear up a bit, for all the people she’d met who couldn’t do that, and Irish wishes were always so…infectious.

Louie rubbed on her ankles and she looked down, imagining she was wearing the ruby-red slippers and she’d instantly be back at the Circle Ritz with Matt.

Of course Max was gone. She didn’t have to look up and around to know that, and hoped he got to live his own wish. A trio of jewels—ruby, emerald and sapphire—remained on the black glass. A wedding present, she guessed.

She wondered if the Midnight Louie shoes would do anything other than shed Austrian crystals if she tried to knock the heels together three times.

She looked down at Louie and to the door.

On the dark floor on which they stood, the stilled, naked, no longer jewel-toned lights cast a path like a yellow brick road.