Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

Cat in an

Ultramarine

Scheme

By Carole Nelson Douglas from Tom Doherty Associates

MYSTERY

MIDNIGHT LOUIE MYSTERIES

Catnap

Pussyfoot

Cat on a Blue Monday

Cat in a Crimson Haze

Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

Cat with an Emerald Eye

Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

Cat in a Golden Garland

Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

Cat in an Indigo Mood

Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit

Cat in a Kiwi Con

Cat in a Leopard Spot

Cat in a Midnight Choir

Cat in a Neon Nightmare

Cat in an Orange Twist

Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit

Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

Cat in a Red Hot Rage

Cat in a Sapphire Slipper

Cat in a Topaz Tango

Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

Midnight Louie’s Pet Detectives

(anthology)

IRENE ADLER ADVENTURES

Good Night, Mr. Holmes

The Adventuress* (Good Morning, Irene)

A Soul of Steel* (Irene at Large)

Another Scandal in Bohemia* (Irene’s Last Waltz)

Chapel Noir

Castle Rouge

Femme Fatale

Spider Dance

Marilyn: Shades of Blonde (anthology)

HISTORICAL ROMANCE

Amberleigh†

Lady Rogue†

Fair Wind, Fiery Star

SCIENCE FICTION

Probe†

Counterprobe†

FANTASY

TALISWOMAN

Cup of Clay

Seed Upon the Wind

SWORD AND CIRCLET

Six of Swords

Exiles of the Rynth

Keepers of Edanvant

Heir of Rengarth

Seven of Swords

* These are the reissued editions.

† Also mystery

Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

A MIDNIGHT LOUIE MYSTERY

Carole Nelson Douglas

A Tom Doherty Associates Book

New York

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

CAT IN AN ULTRAMARINE SCHEME

Copyright © 2010 by Carole Nelson Douglas

All rights reserved.

A Forge Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-1863-3

First Edition: August 2010

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Janet Berliner,

a magical writer, editor, and friend,

and, most of all, survivor

Contents

Previously in Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times …

Chapter 1: Magic Carpet

Chapter 2: How Green Was My Valley

Chapter 3: Broke New World

Chapter 4: Where Louie Used To …

Chapter 5: Simply … Artisto

Chapter 6: Temptations of Temple Bar

Chapter 7: Lights, Action

Chapter 8: Lake Mean

Chapter 9: Ganged Up

Chapter 10: Spooky Suite

Chapter 11: Merciless Tenders

Chapter 12: Meow Mix

Chapter 13: Dem Old Bones

Chapter 14: Media Draw

Chapter 15: The Guggenheim of Gangsters

Chapter 16: A Rat in Time Saves Nine Lives

Chapter 17: Love Connection

Chapter 18: Whose Vault Is It?

Chapter 19: Road to Ruin

Chapter 20: Hoopla and Homicide

Chapter 21: When a Body Meets a Body

Chapter 22: Guess Who’s Come to Dinner?

Chapter 23: Bahr Bones

Chapter 24: Synth You’ve Been Gone

Chapter 25: A Ghost of a Clue

Chapter 26: Motorpsycho Nightmare

Chapter 27: Silent Partner

Chapter 28: An Inspector Calls

Chapter 29: Ringing Issues

Chapter 30: Breakfast of Champions

Chapter 31: The Vegas Cat Pack!

Chapter 32: Bottoming Out

Chapter 33: Synthesized

Chapter 34: Dalai Lama Eyes

Chapter 35: Room Disservice

Chapter 36: Ladies’ Neon Night Out

Chapter 37: Playing It Koi

Chapter 38: Drinkin’ Bitter Beer

Chapter 39: Guy Wire

Chapter 40: Guns and Gravy

Chapter 41: Getting Their Irish Up

Chapter 42: Armed and Dead

Chapter 43: Murder in 3-D

Chapter 44: On Thin Ice

Chapter 45: Da Denouement, Dudes

Chapter 46: Closing Call

Chapter 47: Moving Issues

Tailpiece: Midnight Louie Decries Sex and Gore

Tailpiece: Carole Nelson Douglas Meditates on Mobs

Cat in an

Ultramarine

Scheme

Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times …

Ah, me. Here I live and work in the world’s biggest and glitziest adult playground, and somebody has gone and turned off the water, lights, and heat.

Well, not literally.

Still, much jazz and razzamatazz has left this jumpin’ joint in the Mojave Desert since the economic angst shut down Las Vegas’s mad, mad, mad building boom. I am not speaking of any of my old joints shutting down, mind you.

Only a couple of years ago the Strip used to be a high-wire act in “construction plaid.” What do I mean by “plaid,” besides that dead men do not wear it?

Picture this. For months the usual burning blue Vegas sky framed tall, thin, vertical condo towers—“every room with a view”—rising thanks to the high, wide, and horizontal lines of construction cranes.

They are both still there, mind you. Just dormant, sort of like me taking an ultralong Sunday nap.

This halted construction “plaid” has ruined the town’s once-so-dramatic helicopter-sweep vista, if you ask me. CSI: Las Vegas shows use old stock film when the scripts call for an aerial pan up Las Vegas Boulevard, aka the famous Strip. And the last venerable hotels that would be imploding to make way for the latest multibillion-dollar construction project are still standing proud and being marketed as bargains now that “exclusive” and “expensive” are looking mighty “expendable” in a lot of folks’ budgets.

You can get some great deals in Vegas nowadays, and not just at the casino tables.

Ah, almost forty million tourists each year and constant camera crews … flashy new hotels rising over the fleshy, seamy side of the Strip. There used to be a lot of fat cats in Vegas.

And one would be 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 the way 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 relations of all stripes and legalities.

None can deny that the Las Vegas crime scene is big-time, and I have been treading these mean neon streets for twenty-two books now. I am an “alphacat.” Since I debuted in Catnap and Pussyfoot, I commenced 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 titles’ “color” words are in alphabetical order up to the, ahem, current volume, Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme.

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 lovely roommate and high-heel devotee, “Miss Nancy Drew” on killer spikes, freelance PR ace Miss Temple Barr, who had reunited with her elusive love …

… The once-again-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 his mentor, 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 local celebrity.

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

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.

Now that Miss Kathleen O’Connor has self-destructed and is dead and buried, things are shaking up at the Circle Ritz. Mr. Max Kinsella is again MIA. In fact, I saw him hit the wall of the Neon Nightmare club while in the guise of a bungee-jumping magician, the Phantom Mage. Neither I nor Las Vegas has seen him since.

That this possible tragedy coincides with my ever-lovin’ roommate going 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 in Las Vegas. A magician can have as many lives as a cat, in my humble estimation, and events seem to 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.

So, there you have it, the usual human stew—folks good, bad, and hardly indifferent—all 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?

Magic Carpet

“Danny Dove really gave you a great view from your bed,” Temple told Matt, snuggling into his shoulder. “I didn’t realize that, seeing this room from the outside in.”

“I’m glad we’re both seeing it from the inside out too,” he answered. “Sorry we have to do the ‘Early Show’ routine, though.”

“With cable and DVDs, what does it matter? Dinner at eight, movie at nine, and you’re on your way to WCOO-FM for your Midnight Hour show at eleven.”

“Leaving you alone to creep downstairs to your unit, and only a cat for company.”

“Don’t let Louie hear you describing him as ‘only a cat’!”

“Somebody needs to trim his overgrown feline ego. I have to admit that his shenanigans have inadvertently helped save your life, for which I’m thankful.”

Matt expressed his gratitude by kissing her thoroughly enough to make her toes curl. “He’s welcome to leave black hairs on Danny’s precious damask coverlet up here anytime.”

“Not necessary,” Temple said. “Louie considers the bed downstairs his.”

“You mean, when we marry, we’ll have to take that California king-size bed along to our new joint residence?”

Temple understood that the bed she’d shared with Louie—and Max Kinsella—might not make a terrific house warming item.

“Maybe I’ll just take the zebra-pattern coverlet Louie loves and looks so good on.”

“I doubt Danny would approve.”

“Danny may have updated your monk’s cell to an Architectural Digest playboy pad, but he’s not going to be sleeping in our future house. Have you thought where you’d like to move? Golf course view?” Matt made a face. “Mountainside or Strip view?” He shook his head. “Water view?”

“Wasteful in this climate.”

“Church view, like Molina’s place?”

“No.” He was laughing. “We need to think of other things than moving first.”

“Like what?”

“For starters, I have some news.”

“News!” Temple muted the movie and sat up in bed.

“Easy, ex-newshound. It’s nothing major. It’s actually a bit annoying for a newly engaged woman. I have a week of vacation coming up—”

“And you didn’t tell me? We could join Kit and Aldo in Italy!”

“I’m not intruding on someone’s honeymoon.”

“I’m sure most of the honeymooning must be done by now. They’re coming home in a week or so.”

“Temple, I can’t go to Italy. I can’t go anywhere with you. This was set up before we were us.”

“Oh? So it involves another woman?”

He grinned sheepishly. “As a matter of fact, it does.”

“Ah!” Temple inhaled in mock indignation.

“Several, in fact.”

“Beast!” She pounded just as mockingly on his shoulder and chest.

“But it might serve our larger purpose very well.”

“Larger purpose?”

“Holy matrimony.”

“Oh, that’s different. Go on. What did you have to keep so secret?”

“It’s not secret; I just forgot about it in the recent excitement.”

“This recent excitement?” Temple prodded.

Matt ran a hand through his tousled hair. “Not that recent. I mean the threats on our lives and our mad, impetuous engagement preceding them.”

“Ha! You’re about as impetuous as a tortoise, so I believe you when you say this me-less vacation was on the books for some time. Where are you going?”

“Chicago.”

“Ah. No doubt you’ll be breaking the news about me to the family?”

“Yes, but that’ll be the least of my worries.”

“ ‘Worries’? Marrying me is a worry?”

“Not you. The idea. My family saw me as a priest for almost half my life. And it’s taken my mother most of my whole life to recover from having me out of wedlock.”

“I would have you out of wedlock anytime,” Temple said soberly.

“You are,” he pointed out. “Am I glad I ran into that ex-priests’ group when I was helping you investigate one of those murders you feel compelled to help solve. They made me see the spirit of the canon law is more important than the letter of it.”

“I keep forgetting I’m a … ‘near occasion of sin’—isn’t that the terminology?”

Matt frowned, sounding stern. “You didn’t get that from me. Who told you that?”

“The Unitarian Universalist minister I consulted,” Temple admitted.

“You saw a minister, about me?”

“No, about me. I needed to know what my being modern about putting the honeymoon before the wedding would do to your conscience. So I’m very happy you’ll be seeing the old folks at home next week and preparing them. You didn’t have to keep that from me, Matt. I’ll understand if they want to reject me.”

“No one who knows you would want to reject you.”

There was a silence. Apparently, Temple thought, Max Kinsella had, or had at least vanished on her for the second time in their mysteriously interrupted three-year love affair.

“Not willingly,” Matt added.

“Remarkably generous concession,” Temple said.

He shrugged, which did great things for his swimmer’s-strength upper torso, upon which Temple snuggled again.

“Okay. You’re out of town for a week,” she concluded. “Fans of The Midnight Hour will be besieging the station phone lines begging for the voice of their favorite radio late-night shrink. Louie will be hogging the entire other half of my condo bed. You’ll be wrestling your large Polish family and pinning them down to offer you independence and support. We’ll cope.”

“I’m sure you will. I’ll also be doing a week of The Amanda Show live.”

“A whole week gig? Not just the occasional hour like you’ve been doing? And you leave your major-media promotion break to an afterthought? The Amanda Show is second only to Oprah.”

“Oprah has a huge lead … on everything. My relatives do get a huge kick out of me being on TV in their own backyards. I figure that will help them adjust to a soon-to-be married ex-priest in the family.”

“Good,” said Temple. “I’ll try not to solve any murders without you.”

Matt checked his watch. “I hate to kick my fiancée out of a warm bed, but the movie’s over and I have to get ready for heading over to the radio station.”

Temple yawned. “Do what you have to. I’m starting to feel like a lovesick teenager with a curfew,” she grumbled. “Home by eleven. Yes, folks.”

“I’m sure your parents would be very proud,” Matt said as he bent to kiss her good night again, and vanished into the bathroom.

Temple retrieved her clothes and shoes from the bedside and gave a fond farewell look at the fifty-two-inch flat-screen television. She only had a thirty-seven-inch in her condo.

Of course, she also had Midnight Louie, when he deigned to sleep in nights, and he was an extra-large model cat.

Fifteen minutes later she was snuggled down in her own bed, Midnight Louie blissfully on his back on the other side, all four feet splayed in ludicrous disarray. Temple was sure he only unfurled his long, furry, soft underbelly here at home.

The Circle Ritz, like all fifties-vintage construction, was cramped by modern room-size standards, especially in the tiny, tile-lined bathrooms, only a bathtub wide, both of them. Still, Temple loved her petite living quarters. It was like living in a luxurious dollhouse surviving past its time. The thought of forsaking it for another place, for a freestanding house, made her a little sad.

But then, Max had rolled around alone in a big house when he returned to Vegas from his first disappearing act. Maybe it was more grown-up to live in a house rather than an apartment or condominium.

Maybe Temple was finally growing up, not just getting older and wiser.

She scratched Louie’s tummy until he yawned to display his vast pink maw lined with white teeth and started purring like a Volkswagen motor.

Nobody who knew her would reject her.

Apparently Max had, despite himself, twice. Somehow Max was still showing up unexpectedly at the most awkward moments. In her mind.

Her heart told her she’d loved Max, but it had always been “despite” circumstances that never stopped keeping them apart. Her heart told her she’d remained faithful to their passionate past for so long, she’d almost missed falling in love with a uniquely wonderful guy who loved her to death. Or rather, until death did them part, and meant it.

That same heart told her that Max would have let her know if he was alive, somehow, if he was alive.

And, if not, he was a master magician. You’d think even then he’d have the chops and decency to let her know for sure that he was dead.

How Green Was My Valley

“Smog?” Max asked, staring out the Cessna’s porthole window as the small twin-engine prop airplane approached Dublin.

“Ireland has smog now? Is that what the Celtic Tiger is thrashing its technological tail about? Is pollution what Ireland’s acclaimed economic revival achieved?”

“Hmm. The fabled Irish landscape is awakening your memories.” Garry Randolph leaned forward from his window seat behind Max. “I’m afraid poor old Ireland is the technological Celtic Pussycat since the recession. And, my boy, don’t go all dismal and depressive. Can’t you see that blur of green meeting the pale blue and pink horizon is nothing so rank and modern as smog, but the legendary Irish mist?”

“ ‘Irish mist,’ ” Max mocked. “You’re resorting to a stage brogue too? I can see why. Green fields and hedges … silver ponds and rivers. The landscape below us is incredibly beautiful, an emerald harp strung with silver strings.”

“I knew the Auld Sod would bring out the poet in you, Max.”

Max snorted in reply. “Bring out the memoryless lunatic, more likely,” he added after a moment.

Both men had to raise their voices over the drone of the Cessna’s nearby engines, while the cottages and farmhouses—white with dark thatched roofs, like a patch of mushrooms—grew large.

No one could overhear them. The pilot was muttering little nothings about landing to the Dublin Airport control tower, where a man answered in the universal English of pilots, but with an Irish accent.

Max leaned nearer the tiny curtained window to view a lit Christmas tree–shaped grid of landing lights on the ground, pointing arrowlike to the runway. As the plane flew lower, the lights winked red and then green. Intimations of Christmas, Max thought, in an ancient druidic land seen through the mist… .

The pastel dawn seemed a distant dream he and Garry were rushing headlong into. Maybe it was a metaphor for his lost memory, a pale purple haze of terror and delight awaiting him in this beautiful, so-long-troubled landscape.

In moments, runway lights were blinking past the Cessna’s miniature window. A smooth landing led to a smoother taxi to a small hangar.

Max sensed that his six-foot-four frame always hungered to unkink from the plane seat and deplane. Here he had to duck considerably to exit, and navigate his injury-stiff legs down a steep, narrow, drop-down stairway.

He groaned at the bottom, waiting for his older, stouter friend.

“Tell me you didn’t hire a Morris Mini,” Max pleaded, wincing for his recently healed broken legs.

Garry slapped him on the arm. “Am I a secret sadist? Your lovely blonde shrink at the Swiss clinic is, perhaps. Gandolph the Great—never!”

“You were a magician,” Max repeated. “They are basically tricksters. And someone presumed dead longer than I have been,” he reminded him.

“We were magicians. Are still. Aaah.” Garry inhaled the crisp morning air. “How do you feel about a Ford Mondeo?”

“A Ford Mon Dieu? I’ve never heard of it. So much forgotten.”

“Getting frisky and funny and slightly profane now that you’re on native soil, are we? My good lord, Max, you’re back. A Mondeo is the across-the-pond version of the Ford Contour or the Mercury Mystique; the latter name I think better befits our mission. And you as well.”

Max spotted the shiny black sedan and nodded glumly. “Serviceable and dull family four-door. Just what old undercover, presumed-dead magicians like us need. Plenty of game-leg room up front, I see.”

“Ah, that’s the old Max, yearning to go fast and furious. This is a journey into the past. Yours and Ireland’s—and Northern Ireland’s itself.”

“And you naturally thought such a sentimental journey required a car of a funereal color?”

Max was surprised to see the upbeat old man’s face grow sober.

“Max, you’ve just weathered a terrible physical ordeal, one that might have killed another man. And it’s an immense psychological trauma to wake up an amnesiac. Yet a worse psychological trial awaits you. Take it one step at a time. You can’t make a rabbit jump out of a top hat unless you first figure out how it got in.”

“Did I really do that?”

“What?”

“That corny rabbit trick?”

“No, my lad. You used doves. A cornucopia of doves.”

Obviously Garry thrived on being mysterious.

Max sighed. “You keep hinting that this land is my land, but I’m obviously as American as hell.” Max frowned. “Despite having a knack for vaudeville Irish accents. What kind of an Irish name is Max, anyway? It might be of German derivation, like the non-French part of the lovely Revienne Schneider.”

Garry pursed his lips. “German? No. Never. You’re American Irish through and through. We keep this secret also: how you became ‘Max.’ Your given birth names were Michael Aloysius Xavier.”

“Quite a triad of antique saints and one major archangel. That’s why you registered me as ‘Michael Randolph’ at the Swiss clinic! You thought I’d unconsciously respond more naturally to the name Michael. How long have I been ‘Max’ ?”

“Since you were seventeen.”

“And how did that come about?”

“I rechristened you to save your life.”

“What the hell? Why does a seventeen-year-old need his life saved?”

“Because you were a hell of a seventeen-year-old and you got three men killed. They deserved it, and you did it.”

Max didn’t answer that one. What an appalling past. Garry was right. TMI—too much information. Obviously, he needed to be spoon-fed the ugly truths. He strolled toward the Ford car, limping more than he liked after the flight and landing in the chilly Irish dawn. So an Irishman hankered for sunshine and heat? He seemed to. Or his legs did.

Max eyed the sedan from hood to taillights. “You expect me to drive this thing?”

“Yes, and on the left. It is at least an automatic.”

“Even worse!”

“How do you know that?”

Food for thought. “That I prefer to drive stick shift? I don’t know; isn’t that my key problem? I know the general past. I know what I like. And don’t like. I just don’t know my own damn past. I can’t recall what I did and where I was and with whom. Or whom I hated and whom I loved.”

“We know you had a good high-school English teacher.”

“Yeah?”

“Whom was the proper construction there, and you used it like some men swear. Frequently and fervently, without thinking about it. Relax, Max. Go through the motions and let your old self shine through bit by bit. I’m here. I’m your safety net.”

“Why?”

“We’re partners. Or were, for your formative young-adult years. I was all the family you had, for a long time.”

“After I killed three men. Justly.”

“After three men died. Justly.”

“I remember a popular song. ‘At Seventeen.’ It was about an unhappy, awkward girl. What kind of song is there for a guy ‘at seventeen’?”

“An Irish ballad. Which is why we’re here.”

“All the Irish ballads I recall were bloody and sad.”

“Exactly. But you’re here, mostly in one piece, and too puzzled to be sad. Things could be worse.”

Max opened the right driver’s door to the Ford Mondeo and eyed the seating and dashboard layout with resignation.

“I drive, old man. On the left, with automatic. You think that will help my memory return?”

“That depends upon where we drive and what we learn when we get there.”

“Why the hell don’t you just tell me?”

“You’re a dubious man, Max. You only believe what you see.”

“You mean I’m a magician.”

Garry nodded.

“I believe that now. I suppose it’s a start.”

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single—”

“Boring rent-a-car.” Max ended the truism. “Hop in and put on your seat belt. I have a feeling this is going to be a bumpy ride.”

Broke New World

Temple pulled her red Miata convertible under the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino’s shaded entry.

The relentless Las Vegas sun was hard on leather seats and even harder on slightly freckled natural redheads. That was why Temple wore sunscreen daily. Today, she’d added a straw visor with a built-in white cotton headscarf, circa the mid-1940s, tied under her chin.

When vintage-clothing-store-shopper Temple married fiancé Matt Devine, finding “something old” would be a snap.

“Going to be long, Miss Barr?” a parking valet attired in a snazzy bellboy uniform asked.

“Conference with Mr. and Mrs. Big,” she said. “Let the Miata cool its wheels in the ramp for a couple of hours, Dave.”

“Right,” he said, seeing her out of the car and himself in, and enjoying it. “Cool hot wheels.”

Temple was the hotel’s sole public-relations rep. That got her a permanent parking space and speedy ins and outs. As a freelance publicist, she was always dashing from one client to another, especially if something went wrong, which could be as minor as a short order of folding chairs, or even occasionally something major in the homicide line.

PR was getting tough now. Newspapers were sinking like the real London Bridge in the Arizona desert. Web sites weren’t taking up the slack. Vegas’s last best bet on megamillion new construction projects was still mostly stalled in midair. Tourism was down, along with optimism. Temple was very curious to see what had amped up the ambitions of Nicky Fontana, Crystal Phoenix owner, and his manager-wife, Van von Rhine.

In minutes she was sitting in the Strip-overlooking executive suite, being told.

“The past,” Nicky said, pacing around his wife’s ultramodern office.

Like all Fontana brothers—and he had a slew of them—he was tall, dark, and handsome, but Nicky was fierier than his laid-back bros. “The future is dim, the present is grim. Everybody’s talking Depression, although it’s only a recession. Why not cash in on what made Vegas in the first place? Our notorious past.”

“Retro is Metro?” Temple ventured, eyeing the cool blonde who was his wife.

As usual, Van had a crisp summary of her husband’s overheated rhetoric. “Nicky rebuilt this hotel, Las Vegas’s first boutique hostelry, from the still-standing corpse of the old Joshua Tree Hotel, Jersey Joe Jackson’s rival to Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo. When he talks, I listen. It’s the least you can do too.”

Nicky paused behind his wife’s white leather desk chair, put his palm prints on her glass desktop, and nibbled a strand loose from her perfectly smooth French twist.

“You didn’t always believe in my founder dreams, Vanilla baby.”

She remained unruffled, even by the use of the first name she hated. Fire and ice worked well for them, Temple had always noted.

“You see,” Van told Temple, confirming her observation, “Nicky can sell ice to Eskimos and even get away with mussing my coiffure. Can you sell his hairbrained concept? Granted, his hair is very good. Still.”

Temple tried not to giggle. Sometimes spending time with the pair was like babysitting Grace Kelly and Tony Curtis in some never-made sixties romantic comedy.

All ten Fontana brothers were noted for good hair. Only Nicky, the youngest, and now Aldo, the oldest, had married. The other eight remained Vegas’s most eligible bachelors, en masse. Even Macho Mario Fontana, the family patriarch, had great hair, high-end, store-bought, and solid silver, the color of the old dollar coins used for some Vegas slot machines until the seventies.

Silver dollars were now history here. And so seemed to be the endless building boom that had produced profitable minarets of condo towers before the current financial unpleasantness. The Crystal Phoenix always moved conservatively and stayed small, so it had deeper pockets than some far-more-famous Strip names.

“So tell me how I’m supposed to make the city’s criminal past sexy,” Temple told Nicky.

“You don’t have to. That’s the beauty of my concept.” He spread his Italian-suit-tailored arms. “Me.”

At the uninterrupted silence, he eyed his wife and hastily corrected course. “Us. I’m remembering what the Crystal Phoenix was almost named if you hadn’t had a better idea, Van.”

“Way back when we decided against calling the hotel the Fontana?” Van asked, still unsure what her volatile spouse was getting at.

“But the Fontanas are still here in Vegas, and better than ever,” Nicky answered.

Temple stayed out of it. This was sounding too marital for her input.

Faint worry lines schussed across Van von Rhine’s pale brow like tiny ski tracks. “ ‘Fontanas’ as in your family?”

“Family—that’s it! She is sharp, isn’t she?” Nicky asked Temple.

“Like a Jimmy Choo stiletto,” Temple agreed. “I must admit that I’m still just a blunt Cuban heel. I don’t get where you’re going, Nicky.”

“At least you’re not a yes-woman.” He turned the wattage of his smile on her as he sat in the neighboring chair. “The Jersey Joe Jackson Action Attraction under the hotel grounds has been idle since Vegas decided to forget going ‘family attraction’ years ago as a bad bet. I say we go Family with a capital F, as in Fontana.”

“Nicky,” Van said, “that city mob-museum project goes off and on faster than the semaphores on the Vegas Strip. It got caught in the last election’s rebellion against ‘pork’ and is seriously compromised.”

“True. And they started out so coy, calling it the ‘redacted’ museum. Redacted,” Nicky jeered. “What kind of word is that? What tourist knows that word? Only English majors. Vegas is not an English-major kind of town.”

“You know it.” Van called him on it.

He shrugged. “I needed to know it to figure out what the heck the mayor was thinking.”

“That’s a good point,” Temple said, watching Van’s arched foot in its white patent-leather peep-toe Ferragamo pump tapping the carpet. Her own silver Stuart Weitzman T-strap sandal offered plenty of “peep toe.”

She herself and the mostly torrid Vegas climate favored high-heeled sandals and open-toed shoes. Women liked to go bare-legged and show off colorfully painted toes. Or maybe the nail-polished toes announced they were going bare-legged. Temple could remember, as a child, when clingy, bothersome pantyhose was required. Most women had tossed away that fashion “rule” along with strictly prescribed skirt lengths.

Some fashion mavens sneered at white patent leather, but it was hard to come by in shoes and Temple adored it for surviving all extremes of the elements, from heatstroke to flash flood, both possible in Vegas.

Considering extremes, Temple also thought now was the time to pour the oil of PR on the marital CEO waters.

“You’re right, Nicky,” she told him. “The Vegas powers-that-be have spent almost fifty years soft-pedaling the city’s colorful mob roots. The idea of creating a major mob museum here has been floating around for years, but everyone’s afraid of that three-letter word.”

“When you’re afraid of something, you need to face it and flaunt it,” he answered.

“Yes, the chamber of commerce types did look silly with that business of blocking out the word mob from the Mob Museum title.”

“I’m no English major,” Van said, “just international business. What does redact mean, anyway?”

“Editing or revising a piece of writing for publication,” Temple explained. “The museum backers actually crossed out the word mob in the title of the Mob Museum. Trying to have it both ways in PR is foolhardy.”

Temple quickly printed out the name with a felt-tip pen on Crystal Phoenix letterhead, then inked out the word mob.

“Why on Earth, or even in Vegas,” Van asked, “create a tourist destination you can’t advertise?”

“Why,” Nicky asked back, “duplicate what’s already there, aching to be expanded and ballyhooed?”

“I agree, but what’s already there?” Van asked.

“The Fontana family’s mob museum,” he answered in triumph.

Silence ensued again. In it, Temple noticed that the hotel cat, Midnight Louise, had either entered on hushed little cat feet or, more likely, arisen from a concealed napping spot in the executive office suite.

She was now sitting demurely at Van’s ankles, licking her clawed front toes one by one, grooming her own brand of “peep” toenails, Temple thought.

Although Midnight Louie, Temple’s … roommate, had inspired this feminine version of his name for this once-stray cat, Louise was smaller than he, with longer black hair. She was just as spit-polished as her larger, buzz-cut, and “butcher” version.

Midnight Louise flicked a paw over one ear, as if cleaning it for better reception. Ears R Us.

Seeing that blot of black on the pale carpet, Temple finally got Nicky’s reference, thinking of another glitzier blot of black on the Vegas scene.

“Nicky. You mean Gangsters!”

He nodded, pleased as a teacher with a prize student. “Like gangbusters! You got it, Miss Temple.”

Van was puzzled. “That’s a small off-Strip hotel-casino setup.”

“I’ve been there,” Temple said. “Lots of ‘local color’ from the delicious bad old days. A string of indecently stretched black limousines always underlines the entry canopy. You’d think it was a funeral fleet. The hotel facade is polished black marble and neon-lit glass blocks. Very Art Deco. The upper stories are capped by a huge neon fedora and gun barrel, both cocked, with veiled red lights visible as squinting eyes in the eaves’ eternal penumbra.

“Customers are escorted inside by broad-shouldered men in sinister fedoras who wear pastel ties against dark shirts and suits. ‘Le Jazz Hot’ and forties swing is on the audio system.

“It’s a modest six-hundred-room hotel, but has the four-star Hush Money steak house, Speakeasy bar and restaurant, and a four-thousand-seat theater and gaming casino that’s ‘raided’ nightly by the fake feds. The Roxie, a vintage movie theater, even plays newsreels—about gangsters, of course.

“They have a small museum with gats and getaway cars from the gangland days of old, and up-to-date shopping in flanking wings: Gents and G-Men on the left, with the Moll Mall on the right.”

“That does sound like a smart concept,” Van conceded, “one that’s been totally overshadowed, Nicky, by your brothers’ allied and adjacent booming exotic limo service of the same name. Bad misfire. A clever concept lost in the execution.”

“Ouch.” Nicky mock-cringed. “Don’t say ‘execution’ in connection with mention of the family business.”

“Hardly a ‘family’ business. You’ve never linked the Crystal Phoenix with your uncle’s or brothers’ Vegas doings. Smart.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m the white sheep of the family. On paper.”

Van placed the flats of both hands on her floating glass desktop and levered herself to her full heeled height.

“Nicky Fontana! You don’t mean to say you’ve been secretly backing your relations’ questionable ventures? That is ‘Death in Vegas.’ ”

“I’m saying I have pull with the Gangsters’ owners, that’s all.”

Temple exchanged a glance with yellow-eyed Midnight Louise, who was frozen in mid-grooming, paw lifted, ear cocked. This was hot news.

“And,” Nicky continued, “I happen to know this brouhaha about a city mob museum has spurred the owners of Gangsters, the best little undermarketed hotel-casino in town, not the limo service of the same name, to launch a redo, taking and running with the mob theme barefaced, instead of resorting to pussyfooting around and ‘redacting’ history.”

“Oh, my God,” said Van, turning as pale as her taffy-colored hair, and sitting.

“Sweet,” said Temple. “That publicity campaign could rock.”

Even Midnight Louise emitted a surprised little squeak, which only Temple heard.

She had an ear for little nothings of the feline sort.

Where Louie Used To …

I am sunning my battered frame by the cool aquamarine length of my private pool on the Circle Ritz grounds when a shadow falls over me.

Shadows in Las Vegas are as rare as mint in a marijuana patch, so I know without opening my eyes that something ugly and unexpected is hovering over me.

I snick out all eight of my front shivs without a sound and open one green peeper.

Hmph. A jowly black face with a five o’clock shadow of dog doo-doo brown dominates my field of vision. Same color spats and gloves. Reddened eye-whites. Big white teeth fresh from the dental tech’s brushing, but no minty afterbreath. Instead, I sniff the reek of raw meat and desiccated pig’s ear, maybe even some pansy kibble product.

Yup. It is a dog. A big ’un. Runs maybe 140, like a middleweight. Makes me want to run, but my ribs are still bruised from the derring-do, save-the-maiden stuff at the end of my previous case, and I do not feel like it.

“Dead dogs wear plaid,” I say, uncrossing my mitts and preparing to carve a red tartan pattern into his ugly mug.

“I heard you were big for your boots,” he growls.

A glob of drool hits my shiny black lapel.

That is it.

I am up on my feet and braced for serious skin surgery. I may be a lightweight compared to this yobbo, but I am faster on my tootsies and have more hidden razors than a pimp with a shaving fetish.

“Hold it, Shorty,” the bruiser harfs. “I would love to staple your pinballs to the teak decking, but I am making like a St. Bernard here.”

“You are carrying hard liquor?”

“Naw, a message. Okay? Jeez, lighten up.”

That is a physical impossibility, both in my coat color and attitude, as both of them are the always-fashionable black. But I sit on my threatened pinballs and wait for this dude to sling some serious trash talk.

“So sing.”

He pants out the message in that annoying, excited whine dogs get, no matter how large or small, nearly knocking me over with concentrated drool-breath.

“I am the construction-site watchdog on some shoring-up work out at Lake Mead, see? So I am patrolling and minding my business, which is being prepared to tear the throat out of any trespassing human, when I am accosted by one of your sort.”

I nod, impressed. It would take a lot for even me to accost a Rottweiler on patrol. Whoever is trying to contact me must have stones. And gravel for brains. Or be desperate.

“Your kind is not in my job description,” the big dog goes on, “so I let him live long enough to sing a song or two. Turns out he has breached my territory deliberately. I gotta admit I am surprised. He appeals to my sense of duty to the human race … the ones who are not violating my masters’ territory, that is. I agree that when I am off duty and driven back to town I will take a stroll to this Circle Ritz residence and lay some info on one Midnight Louie. I figure that is you. Cool joint.”

Well, now we are chatting as guys will do. I retract the shivs and redact the tough talk.

“Mighty cross-species nice of you,” I say. “You ever hear of a dude in your line of work, but a little different? Drug and explosive sniffer. Small fella with a mighty snout. One of those Liz Taylor wrist ornaments. Called Nose E.”

“Oh, him. Maltese. About my paw-print size. Yeah. He does not do legwork. Purse-pooch detail. I know of him. Smarts and nerve, but not my kind of protection-racket guy. Neither are you, no offense.”

“None taken, Mr.?”

“Butch.”

Right. “So, Butch, what is the message, and who had the nerve to walk up to you and ask you to play passenger pigeon?”

“The message is that a human body part has turned up in Lake Mead, and someone has to clue in the local constabulary. Apparently you are good at communicating with humans. Me, I do not find it worth my while. I do my job, keep my nose clean, give out my lumps, and gulp down my steak tartar on the hoof or, off duty, as a postwork treat.”

“Same here,” I growl.

My Miss Temple would be appalled by my demeanor, but guys must intimidate guys.

“I need to investigate this for my own self. Where do I find this snitch of yours?” I ask.

“Hercules Construction project, near Temple Bar, at an eatery called Three O’Clock Louie’s.”

I nearly do a cardiac swan dive. Every word is familiar, from the site on Lake Mead that by odd chance echoes my beloved roommate’s name, to a restaurant that bears a moniker close to my own.

Butch chuckles deep in his massive throat. “I thought I would shock the black kneesocks off you. This has been worth the hike. My ‘snitch’ and your contact is the dude named after the restaurant, Three O’Clock Louie.”

“My good dog,” I say, having recovered. “The reverse is true. The restaurant is named after him.”

“Whaddayou know? I figured you were a hairball off the old hide, but I did not know they are naming restaurants after your kind nowadays. It is not as if your old man is the Taco Bell Chihuahua, may he rest in peace and up to his knickers in puppy biscuits.”

“Neither are you, buddy. Now be a good dog and tell me when your construction crew is making the next run out to Temple Bar on Lake Mead.”

“Temple Bar. Dopey name.”

I hold my temper down and my shivs in.

He harfs on. “I am off duty and actually AWOL right now. Just follow me to the yard, and you can hop the next outgoing cement mixer.”

“Thanks, but I will hop a gravel truck any day. I do not go for rotating rides.”

“Just kidding, pal,” Butch says, slavering himself a river on our landlady Miss Electra Lark’s new cedar decking.

The sun is pretty high and hot for the haired set now.

This is the worst time of day for a long sweltering drive in an un-air-conditioned truck cab, but duty—and Three O’Clock Louie—call.

Who’s your daddy?

I might not have sired Miss Midnight Louise, as much as she would wish to hold that over my head, but there is no doubt I am a nugget off the old noggin of Mr. Three O’Clock Louie, his own self.

Simply … Artisto

“Don’t take my word for the Gangsters’ possibilities,” Nicky said, now that he had a stupefied and silent audience of two. “I consulted an expert. Exhibit A. Be nice, ladies.”

Temple eyed Van. “Did Nicky just tell us to ‘be nice ladies’?”

“If so,” Van answered, “it isn’t going to happen.”

By then Nicky had stepped to the office door and swept it open as if pulling back a curtain.

For another stupefied moment a tall dark-haired man in a white tropical suit stood poised on the threshold, looking, at first blush—a very bold blush—like the eleventh Fontana brother.

“I present,” Nicky said, “our multimedia artiste, Señor Santiago, direct from Rio de Janeiro.”

By then Temple had taken in the glitzy silver stripes in the newcomer’s corona of long, gel-spiked hair and the black silk shirt under the pale suit, accessorized by a flamingo pink tie.

“No ‘Señor,’ ” the vision announced. “I am simply … Santiago.”

“And who exactly is ‘Simply Santiago’?” Van demanded of her exuberant spouse.

Before Nicky could answer, Santiago stepped inside, producing from under his right arm a slim white ostrich-skin portfolio that matched his white ostrich-skin cowboy boots.

“A master of many media and slave of nothing commonplace,” he announced. “My curriculum vitae, madam.”

Temple watched Van nervously, remembering the last one-named “conceptual artist” to hit Las Vegas. The unlamented “Domingo” had smothered the Strip landmarks in pink plastic flamingos. Not the Crystal Phoenix, however.

The first and foremost temporary environmental art creator, internationally famous Christo of the wrapped South Pacific island and planted umbrella park in Japan, had a lot of cheap imitators to answer for. But, frankly, many of Las Vegas’s “new” hotel upgrades and attractions turned out to be temporary, just like the dismantled Jackson Action Attraction several floors below.

Van held up the one slender sheet of paper encased by the luxury portfolio.

“Web site addresses,” Santiago declaimed. He didn’t seem to speak, but to pronounce. “All relevant information today must be seen, not read. Print is kaput.”

“You had to print out this page,” Van pointed out.

“Only to show you, madam, what you have at your fingertips, downloaded to your computer screen.”

Van turned to view her twenty-four-inch flat screen, blossoming with lavish architectural images of futuristic Brasilia, the first Third World city of the future, dwarfed nowadays by the wonders of Dubai and the Far East.

“You’re an architect,” Van said, still trying to file her visitor in a logical category.

“I? Santiago? No! Not simply. Architecture is a plebeian art, easily outmoded, hopelessly physical. I created the image collage in three-D, had you the means to view it.”

Nicky finally contributed an explanation. “Santiago is a multimedia entrepreneur. What he creates is light years beyond even the two-thousand-four-upgraded Freemont Street Experience downtown in Glitter Gulch.”

Van was still clutching the bottom line. “That was a seventeen-million-dollar upgrade, Nicky. We can’t begin to compete with that, and especially not during this economic downturn.”

“That’s just it,” he answered. “We need to create only a limited chunk of light and animation for this hotel. It’ll be perfect for the Chunnel of Crime underground link I’m planning between the spiffed-up Gangsters and the CP.”

“CP?” Santiago inquired politely.

“Where we are now,” Temple put in. “The Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino.”

“Ah. This is reason for the neon Big Bird on the roof,” said Santiago. “I can redesign that funky chicken into a swan, a bird of paradise to outdazzle the huge neighboring hotels, and I do mean neighborrring. Santiago and the Santiago Consortium have come to this amusing oasis of entertainment to make fireworks out of these dated light and liquid-animation shows.”

“Do you do flamingos?”

Temple asked sweetly. “And you are … ?” Santiago asked.

Santiago had not allowed time for introductions, but Nicky recognized sarcasm when he heard it, so he swiftly stepped in as Temple stood to shake hands.

“This is our public-relations whiz, Miss Temple Barr.”

“Miss Barr,” Santiago repeated, with a bow of his zebra-striped mane. He turned to Van, who was no longer stupefied and who had stood to exchange the omitted courtesies. “Señora Fontana.”

“I am Van von Rhine,” Van responded, retrieving her hand.

“Von Rhine. A German name, surely. Spelled as in … rhinestone?” he inquired.

Nicky answered. “Spelled as in b-o-s-s. Jefe in your native tongue.”

“Chieftain,” Santiago said, with a sage nod.

Van just lifted her eyebrows, which were a flaxen blonde, so it was a subtle gesture of polite interest. Boyz might fret about titles; she was interested in authority.

“How did Nicky find you, Mr. Santiago?”

“No, no. Simply Santiago. I am accessible to all at the same level. And so is my work.”

“He found me,” Nicky said bluntly.

“Indeed?”

Van did not like that, Temple knew, even before she saw the faint parallel lines between those almost-as-faint brows. It underlined the perfumed air of “huckster” that oozed from Simply Santiago like … really high-grade motor oil.

“You seem,” Van told Santiago, “to have more of an inside track with my husband than I do.”

“It’s not like that, Van,” Nicky said. “I was kicking the idea around with just family. Um, my family, and Santiago had already contacted Gangsters with some redo ideas.”

“The Gangsters’ contact being … ?” Van asked.

“Not me. Aldo and the boys. Gangsters Limo Service has been doing gangbuster business despite the recession. They were wondering how to let that cachet spill over to the boutique hotel. And maybe even the Phoenix, in the most, ah, delicate of ways. Santiago has some killer concepts and execution.”

“ ‘Killer concepts. Execution.’ ” Van’s tone had gone scorchingly serene. “So appropriate to a mobster-themed limo service, hotel, and now our heretofore ‘classy’ enterprise.”

Nicky was a born enthusiast, shrewd but hooked on new ideas, new plans, new people. Also on selling them all to other people, especially his wife. He was not about to be singed by a dose of in-house skepticism.

“Van, baby, this’ll be great. Santiago has set up an audiovisual display in his suite that will knock your socks off.”

“His suite?”

“In our hotel,” Nicky explained. “You don’t even have to walk outside to get the full picture.”

“The Fontana Suite, I presume,” Van said, naming the hotel’s prime quarters as she stood. She nodded at Temple. “Come along after you finish that proposal.”

Temple watched the trio leave, Nicky holding the door so he could exit last and favor her with a knowing wink.

As soon as the door shut, Temple perched on Van’s yummy white leather executive chair she’d spotted Santiago eyeing, and started a Web search, as Van had meant her to stay and do. There was no “proposal” to finish. The subject of the search, of course, was Santiago.

Temple was surprised to find that he was not a flake at first sight.

Simply Santiago was a larger-than-life self-made South American entrepreneur and inventor, the Richard Branson of the southern hemisphere. Born Tomás Santiago in modest lower-middle-class circumstances in São Paolo, by age twenty he’d founded a Web-design business. Now a youthful-looking fifty, he supported projects from slum clearance to advanced communications and the more spectacular art forms, like emo music, futuristic media, and the flashiness of Rio’s famous Carnavals.

His trademark white suit, his dramatic face and figure were prominent where big money gathered, at yacht and horse races, international soccer matches, and in Brasilia, the country’s ultramodern and also dazzlingly white city. He made the Fontana brothers pale by comparison, and that was going some.

Temple couldn’t imagine a more likely candidate to build on Gangsters Limo Service’s hip and successful reputation, and upgrade that stylish mob pizzazz to the attached hotel and Las Vegas. In fact, her only question was why such an international bigwig would want to work for a modest boutique hotel.

The answer came as she darkened the screen and rose from Van’s desk. Follow the money. That was always the key to motivations everywhere. Vegas’s big spenders were strapped for tourists and cash, sitting atop billions of dollars of idled projects. Santiago could make a splash at Gangsters and remake it as a showroom for his gaudy media expertise as well as a more focused and successful enterprise.

Van had wanted Temple’s assessment of this guy, his flashy ego, and, most important, his business and personal history. Temple would have to dig far deeper, but on first glance he was the Prince Charming of Chutzpah for good reason.

She headed down a floor to the Fontana Suite, happy she could endorse Nicky’s instincts and eager to see what Simply Santiago had to show them.

Temptations of Temple Bar

Max had set the Mondeo’s driver’s seat in a position of slight recline to accommodate his six-foot-four frame … if he hadn’t lost an inch or two in height with his leg injuries. Taking physical stock and measurements could wait until later.

At the moment, he felt invigorated, happy he could stretch his spine and legs and be driving … in control and reasonably secure for the first time since he’d awakened in the Swiss clinic a week ago, not knowing who he was.

They drove through a cobblestoned touristy area of shops and art galleries on Dublin’s southern side while Gandolph consulted maps on his cell phone.

“Lunch?” he asked, looking up.

“You’re not as pretty as my last lunch companion, but why not?”

“You drive, Max. I’ll direct.”

“Got it.”

“You don’t seem to have problems keeping to the left.”

“Probably like riding a bicycle,” Max said. “Once learned, it engraves itself on your brain.”

“Then I’m glad this trip of ours is taking you down an engraved memory lane.”

“I can’t say I remember this part of Dublin at all, but back then, it was probably shabby and in need of restoration, considering how popular and tidy it is now.”

“They say the cobblestones date back to the seventeenth century.”

“Our quest hardly needs to look that far backward,” Max said, driving slowly to avoid pedestrians.

“The next right will bring us to a car park. Can you walk about a bit?”

“Need to,” Max said.

The day sported an encouraging swath of blue sky when they strolled back to the main square. Sunlight gleamed off the paint and chrome of lightweight urban motorcycles herded and chained against a lamppost. It glinted from the clear glasses of passersby. Few wore sunglasses, as Max did. For him, they were an instant disguise and a screen from behind which he could examine the scene and its thronging extras.

“I’d forgotten the first-floor flower boxes,” Max commented. “The beauteous, bounteous hanging flowers draping every pub sign in the British Isles.”

“You do remember that floor levels are counted with ‘one’ starting above street level.”

“Such bizarre small changes of custom,” Max said, “but telling. Oh,” he added, stopping as he saw where Gandolph was heading, “the lady in red. A bit gaudy, but welcome in a land of frequent gray weather.”

The pub ahead occupied a curving corner spot, its sweeping exterior enameled scarlet except for a deep green background at the top, bearing the large gilded letters of its name.

“The Temple Bar,” Max read aloud.

Gandolph was silent.

“Can’t say I’ve ever been here before,” Max went on. “There’s a Temple Bar in London, isn’t there?”

“And in Las Vegas,” Gandolph said in an odd, cautious tone. “Two, you could say.”

“What’s with the same name everywhere?”

“Here,” said Gandolph, “the tourist guides report that a family named Templeton lived in the square in the sixteen hundreds. Temple Bar in London was a gate to the city in earlier centuries, later becoming part of the four Inns of Court, the city’s legal conclave.”

“You are a bundle of trivia today, Garry. And what about Las Vegas, which I should remember something of?”

“Temple Bar is a landing on Lake Mead. In the Arizona section, really, but it attracts Vegas tourists.”

“I doubt this place does,” Max said, after another long gaze at the blazing wall of red.

“Ah,” Gandolph enthused, “but the oysters and Guinness are famous here; the music is traditional and free and has won the Irish pub music crown for years; and the ‘craic’ is unbeatable.”

“Craic?”

“The local gossip and josh and chatter, which any passing patron can join into.”

“I’d prefer to listen, and be drawn into the food and drink.”

By then they’d entered the set-back double red doors and found a tiny free table. Amid the manic music of fiddle and harmonica and drums and the shouted neighboring craic, the pair ordered and ate, imbibing Irish laughter along with the oysters and smoked salmon and Gubbeen cheese and molasses-dark Guinness. They listened rather than talked, for once.

“Was there a reason,” Max asked later, as he threaded the Mondeo back through the Temple Bar area and drove out of the city, “for us to stop there?”

“To fuel up on food and drink and happy music for our journey,” Gandolph said, his shrug saying, “Isn’t it obvious?”

“And to fuel up my memory?” Max asked.

Gandolph looked over with a rueful smile. “I always have hopes on that.”

“So I didn’t pass the Temple Bar test.”

“This journey is not a test, Max. No pass or fail. Just what is.” Silent but somehow content, he and Gandolph continued north into the fringes of County Fingal, forging into less traffic the farther they went. Above them, massed clouds skated across the sky, creating alternating slashes of sunshine and shadow on the sweeping green and gray-stone countryside.

A Chieftains CD on the car player alternated cheery and soulful Irish folk music, jigs segueing into ballads.

“The song selection is setting the stage for my split personalities?” Max asked wryly.

Garry Randolph looked calm and relaxed in the passenger seat. Gandolph the Great’s magician-nimble fingers, though, were tapping the central console in a nervous stutter that didn’t quite keep time with the addictively rhythmic Celtic music.

“I’m looking for signs of the careless, passionate young man you were, yes,” Garry admitted. “Oh, you fell in love with Ireland when you and your cousin, Sean Kelly, drove from County Clare to Dublin, diagonally across the glorious rolling scenery. Seventeen, fresh out of high school, and on your own. Sean was eighteen. Why did you graduate younger?”

“I can’t remember why, or arriving here then, but I must have skipped a year in grade school. Somehow.”

“So, you were mature for your age. Yet a bit raw. Socially awkward.”

“Got me. You’re the historian.”

“You were still a virgin.”

Max laughed. “What an embarrassing thing to bring up now, Garry. I know I’m not anymore, at least, from recent events.”

Max’s impish grin met Garry’s stone face.

“You have no idea who Ms. Schneider really is or what her agenda was, or still might be,” Garry said. “You were foolish, Max. That kind of sexual bravura got you and Sean tangled up with the IRA all those years ago when you were green and seventeen. You don’t need to act impulsively anymore.”

“Maybe I did, just then.” Max’s fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “All right. You’ve briefed me on the short form of my personal and professional history with Ireland. I know you entered the picture after my dalliance with Kathleen O’Connor and after Sean waited out our tryst in a Northern Ireland pub, which an IRA bomb blew up, and with it my cousin, to smithereens of pint-glass shards and bone while he was nursing a lonely Guinness.”

“O’Toole’s.”

Max flashed him a confused look.

“The bombed pub’s name was O’Toole’s. Notorious now. Never rebuilt.”

“Okay. I can believe the Irish colleen we co-courted was a modern-day Mata Hari playing guilt trips with the pair of us, or even that she hated teenage boy virgins or American naïveté or something enough to set one of us up for the kill and the other for a world of survivor’s pain and guilt. I can even believe I tracked the three pub bombers and got them killed in a hail of British troop bullets. Why we’re going back to Northern Ireland at this late date I don’t get. That’s one insane war that’s wound down.”

“I’m following your instructions,” Garry said, “on what to do if anything ever happened to you in the mortal way: find and follow the trail of Kathleen O’Connor, her history and motives. So that’s what we’re doing.”

“The man who wanted that may not be dead now, but he doesn’t remember the why or wherefore of such a request. From what you tell me, I’m the one who’s left the ‘love of my life’ in Vegas thinking I’ve vanished. This … redhead.”

“Her first name is Temple.”

“Even the name is just an improper noun to my blasted memory. Is she Greek or Roman?”

“Neither. One of a kind.”

“Well, then, I should definitely be winging back to the U.S. immediately to explain myself.”

“Right into the hands of your attempted murderers.”

“Not safe there. Not safe here. From what you said I did to enrage the IRA years ago, I shouldn’t be here even now.”

“Probably.” Garry sighed and eased out his seat-belt strap, which cut diagonally and cruelly across a middle-aged girth. “But a promise is a promise.”

Max eyed a glimpse of the Irish Sea on the right, glinting like steel gray glass. “Does she have a Web site?” he asked more quietly.

“Kathleen O’Connor?”

“No. This Temple.”

“Probably. She runs a freelance public-relations business. I hadn’t thought of that. She’d have a Web page. When we get to the hotel we can look it up. No distractions now. We’re on the mission you assigned me, and are perhaps half an hour from the Little Flower Convent of Saint Therese.”

Max rolled his eyes. “A convent? Don’t tell me! The nuns there wear habits to this day, and it’s still as Catholic as the Pope. Predictably Ireland, God bless it.”

Max noticed Garry’s features settling into deep worry lines he guessed were new to those comfortable, intelligent features. Because of him.

“Nothing is predictable in our line of endeavor, Max,” Garry said. “Not the present and not the past. Especially not the past. I’ll thank you not to swear me to fulfill any last requests in future.”

Lights, Action

Temple approached the Fontana Suite’s double doors, treated like the entrance to a mansion, with etched crystal sidelights and brass torchères, wondering whether to ring the old-fashioned doorbell or just walk in.

An ear-piercing burst of automatic weapons fire first made her jump, then storm through the doors. She immediately leaped down and to the side, tumbling to the floor.

The firing stopped so abruptly that the silence hurt her ears in turn. At least she’d brought her iPhone, if not her purse, with the intention of making some quick notes, and could summon help.

A strange slapping sound came next from the other room. Temple rolled onto her bare, bony knees, not appreciating the cold and rough-textured slate entry floor. She rose awkwardly while pulling her skirt down and tried to tiptoe on her T-strap heels into the marble-floored main room.

Van and Nicky were clapping. Santiago stood near a massive steel-topped table, beaming like a São Paulo noonday sun.

A moderately sized flat-screen TV sat on the burnished metal tabletop, which also supported a fifteen-inch-high cityscape of miniature constructions, an elaborate architect’s model.

Temple looked around thoroughly and could see no source for the weapons fire. Apparently a gangland hit was not in progress.

“Won’t the tunnel magnify the sound effects unbearably?” Van was asking.

“Totally programmable,” Nicky reassured her. “Santiago just wanted to get our full attention.”

Temple thought she should declare her arrival.

“He certainly got mine from the hall outside the doors. I thought the Chicago Outfit was back to take over … or else it was the feared first terrorist offensive on Vegas.”

Santiago spread his white-suited arms like the statue of Christ of the Andes overlooking Rio’s harbor. He laughed heartily.

“No, PR lady, it was just me and my media creations. Come closer and see.”

That was rather like an invitation from an albino tarantula, Temple thought, but she walked over the marble flooring to the silken Asian rug to join Van and Nicky at the hypermodern steel-topped table.

She was puzzled that the centerpiece TV screen was only a modest forty-six inches wide. Modest size didn’t seem to match Santiago’s egocentric, open-armed style. As she got closer, Temple spotted a twinkle in his deep hazel-green eyes. He was laughing at her … and at himself and his poses.

He reminded her of Max, wearing his Mystifying Max green contact lenses for disguise and his magic act. Max hadn’t done that for ages, concealed his natural blue eyes since then, not since he quit performing two years ago. Temple wondered why her subconscious had resurrected that outdated image. She’d have to do penance and be sure to phone Matt in Chicago tonight. Or at least watch his taped segment on today’s The Amanda Show at home before bedtime.

“Are you any relation to Flamin—I mean, Domingo?” she asked Santiago.

“That charlatan?” he asked, still laughing. “Only in a gift for thinking big, they tell me. This will be ‘big’ on a small scale, as you are, Miss Temple, and as is the Crystal Phoenix and Gangsters. Here, Santiago is forced to be confined, in his thinking and the space he has to manipulate. That is what so intrigues me about this project. ‘Big is bad’ today. Wasteful. Costly. Santiago will make magic on a small scale. See this.”

He gestured at the miniature mock-up. Everything displayed was fashioned from white matte board, so it was mysterious and sculptural. Temple moved her spike heels delicately over the thick-piled rug so she didn’t turn an ankle. Who could resist 3-D miniatures, so like Christmas dollhouses one had never gotten but had coveted in department-store Christmas windows? A four-boy family wasn’t much into dollhouses when it came to the only girl.

“Oh!” Temple recognized a mock-up of the Crystal Phoenix that resembled the Ice Queen’s palace from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. That construction anchored one end of the slick silver table. At the other stood another fifteen-story hotel, Gangsters, with low additions for the attached limo service’s office and garages. Between them stretched an elongated spiral of white construction paper.

“You must imagine,” Santiago said in a hushed, hypnotic voice. “You must imagine this graceful tunnel as belowground, a swift, silent conduit between Gangsters and the Crystal Phoenix, an underground monorail … no, an American-underworld horizontal time tunnel.”

“A ride?” Van asked, her voice sounding unconvinced.

“No,” Santiago said. “A fast car chase … with intermissions. What is this wonderful American expression from the gangland days—being ‘taken for a ride’? The clients of Gangsters shall have the long-lost experience of that pleasantly helpless, thrilling state so devoutly to be desired.”

While he paused to let that sink in, Temple and Van crossed glances. Was this guy selling his ideas or seduction? If a combo, that was in the Las Vegas tradition, for sure.

“So people will be speeding around in underground limousines?” Nicky asked, immersed in the mechanics of the process more than the sensations.

“It may seem so,” Santiago said. “The ‘limousines’ will look like motorcars, like these ‘stretch’ vehicles, only from the nineteen thirties, forties, fifties, and even sixties. But they will ride like a dream, on rails. On the tunnel walls outside their smoked-glass windows, scenes of iconic American gangster days will unreel before their eyes … the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde and Bugsy Siegel, all the delightfully gory happenings of days of yore. But they will unreel backward. It shall be death and resurrection, a theme the very name of the Crystal Phoenix evokes, yes? It will not be morbid, but the happy ending all Americans crave, for themselves and the world. Yes? All people cannot take their eyes off a disaster. All people then hope to see it reversed. The Chunnel of Crime, as you so colorfully christened it, Mr. Fontana, will be the Ride of Resurrection.”

“We wouldn’t call it by either term,” Temple said. “Box-office poison. Just say it’s ‘Gangsters limos go underground for a thrill ride you can’t refuse.’ ” Or something, she thought.

“I like that,” Van said, as if relieved to voice a first positive reaction.

“Yeah,” Nicky told Santiago. “Temple’s a genius at ‘spin.’ You build it and she’ll call it something no one can resist, and they will come.”

“Oh,” Santiago said, reassessing Temple. “She is a very powerful woman, then. The smaller the explosive device the more concentrated the effect, I have always believed.”

“We’re not going to have ‘explosions’ in this … attraction,” Van said.

“Of course not.” Santiago was definite. “Sounds—yes. Action, motion—yes. Speed—yes. Thrills—of course. But it is all merely show, as you say.”

He pointed a sleek silver remote at the hi-def TV. The dark screen jumped into life, a continual sweeping pan of what Temple would call an existential gangster movie—part comic superhero movie, part black-and-white vintage hits and chases, the Fast & Furious of mob nostalgia, accented by metallic, symbolic splashes of red, all to a frenetic Carnaval musical beat.

All three stood mesmerized and shell-shocked. Temple was aware of a layer of immense stage-set detail behind the hurtling cars and street scenes and running, shooting figures. There was a 3-D feel, although none of them wore assisting glasses.

“This would require an age limit,” Van said.

Santiago shrugged. “The family approach was tried in Las Vegas and failed. As well as impose a dress code on Carnaval in Rio. I would say, what you call PG-13. But no need to worry: this is not a ride for infants in strollers.”

“Nor all women tourists,” Temple pointed out.

“Women shop and eat in Vegas. Men gamble and seek excitement. Many women too, no?”

His intriguing-colored eyes bored into hers. It was either a challenge or a come-on or an intimation that he knew she was not a stranger to the aftermath of violence, at least.

Oh, yes. Tomás Santiago needed a lot more looking into, a lot more serious looking into. Maybe Detective Alch could be persuaded to do that. Or Frank Bucek in the FBI’s L.A. office, Matt’s former seminary teacher.

Temple smelled something highly fishy about this artsy entrepreneur from the tropics. She knew that many South American cities were rife with crime and corruption. The white suit could almost be a disguise.

“That, my friends,” Santiago declared inaccurately, as far as Temple was concerned, “is just the suggested canvas of our new Las Vegas sensation.”

She and Van were not “sold,” although Nicky was still pop-eyed enamored of the sample show. It had all the action, all the motion of the Dire Straits song “Walk of Life.” Temple recalled a line about “Down in the tunnels, trying to make it pay.”

Wasn’t that the “Talk of Life, and Death,” here? Violence and double-talk? Turning the day time into the night? Peddling mayhem, not history.

Temple didn’t think shopping and eating would shut up her objections.

“Of course,” Santiago said, clicking to another program, “you can’t appreciate the three-D of those scenes if you’re not riding in the magic limos.”

“Magic limos,” Nicky repeated. “I like that phrase.”

Santiago gave him the exotic-elixir-salesman wink and hit another button on the remote control.

The screen became a black slate of sliding, continuous motion, like the tinted windows of a limo.

“A blank window?” Van objected.

“Ah, yes, dear lady, but it is far from blank. It is a porthole on the past, a magic slate for the future. Behold.”

“Behold” the hokey, Temple thought, but even her eyes were glued to Santiago’s TV screen.

For a moment the dim windows looked as if raindrops were sliding across their surface at seventy miles per hour.

Then … the drops resolved into a human face, a human face under a fedora brim, shaping itself from the curved window into a three-dimensional presence, a recognizable, talking, three-dimensional presence that seemed to leap out of the TV screen into the room with them, the same size as any human present.

Nicky sounded both awed and leery. “Okay, Santiago, I know you’re a media wizard, but how’d you get Frank Sinatra to do a personal appearance on your mini movie screen?”

“God,” Frank was saying, “where the hell is my regular ride? Look,” Ol’ Blue Eyes said, staring straight into every eye present. “I appreciate you giving me a lift in your subterranean U-boat here, folks. The Sands goofed on priming my limo, and I gotta get to the Crystal Phoenix for Deano’s solo show. Shirley and Marilyn will be there, and we’re all gonna have a time of it, right?”

The voice was that resonant speaking baritone heard round the world.

“How did you reconstruct the Chairman of the Board?” Nicky asked.

“Why?” Van asked.

“The mob controlled and socialized with a lot of Italian singers and celebrities in the forties to the sixties because they owned the nightclubs and theaters,” Temple answered. Las Vegas history was her business. “Sinatra and Dean Martin outlived the mob-boss era. Remember, JFK was sleeping with Chicago’s Sam Giancana’s mistress.”

“ ‘Camelot’ corrupted. I don’t want to remember that,” Van said.

“We’ll keep the Kennedys out of your zipped-up club-car tour of the ‘Chunnel of Crime,’ right?” Nicky asked Santiago.

“Of course.” Santiago reassured him. “We’ll only revive the infamous dead who are well known for their Las Vegas associations.”

“What about Jersey Joe Jackson?” Van asked.

“Jersey Joe … who?”

“A minor figure,” Temple told him, “affiliated with the Crystal Phoenix when it was the Joshua Tree Hotel back in the day.”

“What is this ‘Joshua Tree’?”

“A big, tree-like desert cactus,” she explained. “About as uninteresting as Jersey Joe Jackson.”

The first underground attraction had borne his name and gone belly up. Temple didn’t want to jinx this new project that Nicky had his heart set upon.

Lake Mean

It is about an hour’s drive from Vegas to Temple Bar, which is actually in—shhh!—Arizona.

State lines are iffy around the meandering shoreline of Lake Mead and the soaring bulk of Hoover Dam. They are easier to find on a map or as the crow flies.

Imagine how thrilled I am to see roadside signs advertising Temple Bar Days, apparently a new annual April shindig. They spelled my roommate’s name wrong, though, using only one r in Barr.

They are always doing that to me as well.

Louis! I see my name written that way again and again.

What do they think I am? A foppish French monarch with a tail of Roman numerals attached to his first name like fleas? I am all-American and the One and Only moi, thank you. Merci. Arrive-derci, Roman.

Lou-ee. That is my name. Plain and fancy. Capital L, small o-u-i-e. Such a meaning-laden name. Except for an a, it is a compact and elegant assembly of all the vowels in the English language. A portmanteau name, as the French might put it. Okay. No a. But I have always been a the, rather than a mere a.

The feline PI in Vegas, as opposed to a feline PI in Vegas.

I suppose Miss Midnight Louise would take exception to my claim, but she is a rank upstart. I was in this town first and foremost. In fact, the way she tells it, she would not be here were it not for me and my unsanctioned love life.

Anyway, all my observations of the physical sort on this road trip are confined to craning my neck at banners visible in the upper area of the windshield. I am a stowaway, riding behind the gearbox amid the perfume of oily rags, dusty boots, and Red Man chewing tobacco.

The radio blares out “Redneck Woman” to match, while I picture what my Miss Temple would think of my current … er, ambience. Thus amused, I wait for the driver to gather up his invoices before dismounting. I have about half a second to tumble outside on his work-boot heels before the heavy truck door will bisect me like a bug.

I hover behind his sweat-stained seat, lunging and retreating twice as he remembers another piece of paperwork and turns back to claw it into his grubby mitt.

Although it is only April, every little reek is magnified by the sun’s heat beating down on hot metal like it was my personal toaster oven.

At last we both set foot on the desert floor and go our separate ways. He stomps over to a mobile-home office, where the cement mixer disgorges Butch, who immediately trots off on his rounds. I scuttle into the gravel truck’s shade to inhale a few deep breaths of the sage and creosote bushes.

The Mojave Desert is not my favorite perfumery, not like a New York New York Hotel delicatessen, say. But I will take Ma Nature over manmade smells any day.

When I edge into the open to explore, I quickly discover that Temple Bar is not the place I used to know.

Oh, the marina and café are still there, and so are the rambling wooden verandas of Three O’Clock Louie’s restaurant and bar. But the shoreline boats are bobbing a couple football-field lengths from where they did when last I saw them, and there is a long rambling bridge from the highway to Three O’Clock Louie’s. Over dry desert!

What the hell—? Oh. Three O’Clock’s does not even look operational. Good news for the café next door scarfing up all the business. Bad news for my esteemed sire of the same name. Butch claimed my dear old dad had sent for me, but maybe his license has expired by now too. Sudden accidental death is not unknown to our kind.

With these dire thoughts, I start padding over the wooden bridge toward the deserted restaurant. I suppose in these hard times many eating establishments have faded away like old soldiers, but I am getting worried about the old dudes who founded and ran this place. Collectively, they were once known as the Glory Hole Gang, and they had “retired” to one of Nevada’s innumerable ghost towns before being persuaded back into what passes for civilized society these days.

Come to think of it, I have not heard any fresh reports of Jersey Joe Jackson’s ectoplasm showing up in the Crystal Phoenix Ghost Suite either. I will have to get Midnight Louise on that as soon as I get back.

Meanwhile, I have arrived at the restaurant proper, once on the lapping waters of Lake Mead and now as high and dry as an old hippie on weed. The building is shuttered and obviously empty.

So who was around to feed Three O’Clock enough to keep fur and claw together, so he could survive to send Butch for me? Certainly not Eightball O’Rourke, sometimes Vegas PI. Nor his old-time cohorts, Wild Blue Pike, Pitchblende O’Hara, Cranky Ferguson, and Spuds Lonnigan.

I cannot believe all these old guys have just vanished, but they would be living on cactus-spine toothpicks (ouch!) and sand had they remained here. I gaze with damp eyes under the veranda tables where I once was wont to lounge, snagging fallen slivers of chicken. Crab. Lobster.

Alas, poor Arthropod, I knew him, shook pincers with him once. Or her. It is hard to discern the fine points with critters that low on the evolutionary scale. You could say we had only a passing acquaintance, but you are what you eat.

I wander to the end of the line, the deck-cum-pier where boats used to anchor and gilt-scaled carp practically walked on water to cadge bread crumbs and popcorn from tourists.

What a fishing hole this was! I imagine how Three O’Clock would hang over the deck rim, batting at a flashing fin. Of course, the old boy was too aged and well fed to hook anything.

If I bend over the wooden edge now and let my imagination out to play, fill the sere sand with sparkling blue water, I can even see Three O’Clock’s white-whiskered black face, the mirror image of mine, reflected back.

How could no one have notified me the old fishing hole was gone? And now maybe my old man has vanished for good.

Then my imagined reflection smacks me one in the kisser.

“Do not gawk, boy!” an irascible voice orders. “You will give away my position. I did not get you all the way out here to find myself scooped up by do-gooders hustling me off to the Big House.”

Ah … “Three O’Clock? Is it really you? This place is a ghost town.”

“It is your daddy, all right, lad,” he says, digging in his brittle claws and scrabbling up over the decking to join me on the dried wooden slats. “If you had shown one whisker of concern for your forebear, you would have known the lakeside food and drink biz was taking a dive with the Lake Mead water level. You would have come out here to do an elder check.”

“Speaking of ‘elder,’ where are the old dudes who ran the place?”

“Skedaddled, with the carp and tourists. Even a lot of those boats next door have been foreclosed on.”

“The Glory Hole Gang did not take you along when they left?”

“I elected to hide out and keep my hard-won territory, such as it no longer is.”

“The Strip is not exactly jumping with joy juice anymore, either,” I point out, “but it is better pickings than a marooned empty restaurant. I am sure I could fix you up with one of the Circle Ritz residents.”

I frown in deep thought. I do not want the old man on top of me and my doings, and the only sucker-inhabited cat-free unit I can think of on the spot is Mr. Matt’s. Given the impending human cohabitation, I do not want a resident parent at my age and state of independence.

“No, no, no!” Three O’Clock is hissing mad. “I am not ready to steal some gullible human’s rocking chair and place in the sun. I hear you have expanded your operation.”

“My oper—Oh, you mean Midnight Investigations, Inc.”

“You can always use an extra quartet of paws and pair of ears, I am sure, son.”

“Look, Three O’Clock, as it happens, ‘family’ business is a lot on my mind right now, but I already have a junior partner. I am not looking for a senior partner.”

“Well, I am not looking for a dead body, but I happen to have found one. I would not expect charity or for you to take on an aging relative out of the supposed kindness of your heart. I have brought my own case with me, and it is Murder One.”

“Murder One?”

“And a dandy,” he says, running a tattered claw through his snow-white whiskers. “Reeks with possibilities.”

“Where?”

“Here, of course.”

“Here?” I look around. “Deadwood does not count, Dad.”

He snorts.

“And those tourists next door look about as lively as any tourists do lately.”

His eyes are not the vivid emerald green I possess, but a watered-down version. Still, they flash in the sunlight.

“Care to trot those pampered Vegas Strip tootsies of yours over the dead lake bed? Your old man still can show you a thing or two.”

I feel a frisson of interest. It is true that the retreating lake waters might have revealed a sunken treasure. Heck, a fully intact B-29 bomber has rested at the bottom of Lake Mead since an early scientific flight measuring sunspots dropped it there in 1948.

I doubt the lowered water level has given up the ghost that much, but who knows what baubles may have fallen overboard from the thousands of boating expeditions the lake has hosted? Rich dames? Big-time winners wearing gold baubles and bling?

Finders keepers has always been a favorite modus operandi of me and mine.

I shake the dust off my back and follow the old guy’s scrawny tail into the pebble-strewn desert that ruled the roost around here until Hoover Dam made the mighty Colorado River into an artificial lake.

Now the water has dried up like the worldwide credit system, a matter of ecology mirroring economy.

I do not know what I expected to see. Maybe carp corpses glittering with solid gold scales. A few diamond rings that slipped from careless hands into the deep blue waters would be rewarding, but it looks as if the metal detectors have already scoured the surface, given the sand is burnished in circles as if a wax buffer had been over it.

So all I see is cracked yellow sand harder than stone and the same old, same old that spells M-o-j-a-v-e Desert. This once-submerged dirt is decorated by patches of burnt brown grass and a few scuzzy green areas, maybe moss where some moisture might have gathered. Beyond it the ringing low hills show a wide beige watermark I’ve heard called the lake’s “bathtub ring.” Mostly, the dry land is parched, marked only by the island of an abandoned rowboat trailing a desiccated fuse of rope and some small rocklike hummocks.

Manx, if I had wanted to walk on the moon, I would have applied to NASA!

And if I had wanted to chap my pads, I could have walked the Strip from one end to the other and at least had a few morsels of fast food out of it, either boxed or bagged on the hoof. Or a Paw and Claw dinner of mouse and lizard, not that I eat much that has not been fully prepared and is fit for human consumption these days.

The overhead sun beats down on our black coats. I pause to look back. The ersatz, ramshackle bulk of the restaurant seems far away. Even farther is the sparkle of blue shore and the bob of white boats next door. Add a bit of carp gold, and I would be a happy hiker.

As it is …

“Look here, Three O’Clock,” I say. “I have developed pretty good distance eyesight from many long nights spent ogling the neon on the Strip. I can see a bright band of blue water that marks the lake’s new water’s edge. I can see enough sand and abandoned anchors and driftwood and plain old junk to background a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. But no hide nor hair of a dead body do I see. So you have no case.”

“No?” Three O’Clock does the senior scamper and cackle to a spot ten yards farther on.

I slog over to examine an odd and unpromising “find” about the size of a picnic hamper for munchkins, except it is in no way appetizing.

“Daddy-o,” I say, once again adopting Miss Midnight Louise’s casual manner of addressing me, “what is this? Some carnival stilt-walker dumped his huge clown shoes and sticks cut off at the calf overboard. Maybe he was giving up the circus and made the grand gesture on Lake Mead. Maybe he was impressing a girl. Humans will do that.”

By now Three O’Clock is having a senior tantrum, hissing and spitting.

“Did I sire something with kitty litter for brains? With the eyesight of a bat? The mental acuity of a hedgehog? The arrogance of a hedge-fund manager? Great Bast, help me, boy. You are a detective like I am a Fig Newton! Open your eyes and your mind.”

The elderly require patience. I examine the poor old dude’s precious find again.

Hmm. It is old like him; no wonder he is so attached. My initial description was not without merit. I sniff the upright sticks. There is a pair. Two. They are broken at the ends and tobacco stained. Or that color. They are embedded in a rock of some sort. Actually it is of a smoother surface and consistency than broken-off rock chunks. It is also the wrong color. Around here rocks are reddish.

So we have brown broken sticks in gray stone.

Three O’Clock slaps me on the shoulder blades as if I need a burping. “Well, Sam Spade?”

I nod slowly. You could knock me over with a carp tail.

“You are slamming homers in the right ballpark, Pops.”

Pops? Where did I get that revolting nickname?

“Do not call me that, sonny,” Three O’Clock growls. I do not blame him.

“Sorry, um, sire. You speak true. I mean, you are not telling any fibs. In fact, in this case the fibula and tibia are telling a sordid tale all by themselves. I refer to the thinner and thicker set of human leg bones, which appear to have been booted in concrete, hacked off at the knees, otherwise known as patellae, and dumped in Lake Mead long enough ago to melt all flesh from bone.

“You found the bottom of a body, but there’s no getting to the bottom of this case. A surviving shoe or footprint has long since deserted that concrete casing. This is an empty shell. Even Vegasset TV-show forensics couldn’t come up with anything from this.”

“Too bad,” Three O’Clock growls, “because I can. Obviously, this was murder by the mob, and the mob has officially ebbed in Vegas since the sixties. These are old bones, boy, and the method of murder is some long-gone gangster’s personal fingerprint. Mark my words.”

The old boy is right on this much. I am going to have to drag back to town and work hard to influence my usual humans to get the Law out here to retrieve the remains.

Or … I turn back to shore and sight along the landmarks so I can lead the bloodhounds back. Also, I need to relocate the old man to an assisted-living facility in Vegas without tipping him off to my ploy.

Elder care is such a drag.

Ganged Up

Temple and her bosses returned to the executive office suite. Nicky planned to show Temple more plans for a revamped Gangsters. Van, looking pale and wan and dubious, opted out.

“Come on down,” Nicky urged Temple, as their private elevator sped straight to the main floor.

“The hotel has a Door Number Three?”

“Kinda,” he said. “We blocked off the Jackson Action Attraction a while back, when ‘family theme park’ wasn’t working in Vegas.”

“Everything is a work in progress in this town,” Temple agreed.

“Except your love life, which has finally settled down, I hope.”

When Temple started at the reference, Nicky winked.

“Come on, PR lady. I saw you and Matt Devine at Aldo and Kit’s wedding. Looks like you two are planning to go forth and do likewise pretty soon.” He shook her arm slightly. “Congratulations, right? I’m glad Aldo’s going over to the matrimonial side is shaking loose other confirmed bachelors from their routines.”

“Confirmed bachelor” was as good a description of an ex-priest as any, Temple decided. Matt certainly had been confirmed.

“We’re not announcing anything official yet,” she said.

“ ’Course not. I just can’t help noticing stuff. After the wedding, your aunt hiked her bouquet straight to your hot little hand.”

“That Kit. Quite the athlete.”

“And I noticed something big and hopefully not hot on it.”

“You mean this glitzy number?” Temple waved the vintage ruby-and-diamond ring on her left hand. Being bicolored, it didn’t scream “engagement” ring. “Matt and I were engaged then, but we didn’t want to steal any of Kit and Aldo’s spotlight.”

“That’s a one-of-a-kind stunner,” Nicky said.

“Thanks.” Temple waggled her ring finger again so he could admire it.

“I meant you both,” Nicky added with Fontana gallantry.

She blushed, as meant to.

“You want to watch that nobody steals it,” he warned.

Even as she nodded, Temple recalled the unique “unofficial” engagement ring from Max she’d worn for such a short time before it had been stolen, and found, and then confiscated. Now the man who’d given it to her was unofficially missing in action. Maybe he’d been confiscated too. Enough bittersweet moment and looking backward!

“Anyway,” she said, back to business, “how long have you had this mob theme in mind, Nicky?”

“Longer than I’d care to admit,” he said, casting a gaze upward at his wife’s office. “Van was the only child of a widowed German hotel hotshot. She grew up in a rotating roster of posh hotel suites and doesn’t get the Italian big-family feeling.”

“Especially when that big Family has a history with a capital F in it.”

“Well, yeah.”

Temple laughed. “You don’t do ‘sheepish’ well, even though you’re the Fontana family’s self-described ‘white sheep.’ You can confess to me, Nicky. You are thrilled as hell to get your entrepreneurial teeth into a mob-themed upgrade of Gangsters before the city powers-that-be even get off their conservative duffs.”

“They’ve committed twelve mill to it, but they’re waffling all over the Strip and the media. Now it’s a ‘law enforcement’ museum, so no official toes get stomped on. The public doesn’t want political correctness in Vegas. They want a free-for-all. You have a taste for the jugular too. Admit it, Barr. You live to scoop the competition.”

“I do have TV reporter roots, from back in the day when news had to be vetted and reliable and wasn’t just an Internet streaming-of-consciousness.”

“So. We’re both on the side of old-fashioned values,” he said with a conspiratorial grin. “Family on my end, and a publicity-snagging public-relations coup on yours.”

“Legitimately publicity snagging.”

“Right,” Nicky said. “Legit. That word is engraved on the Fontana family escutcheon.”

“Uh-huh. Like the Fontanas have a stone shield somewhere that’s engraved with the family coat of arms. That’s for European aristocracy dating back to the Middle Ages.”

“I know what the word escutcheon means. Jeez. Give me some credit. We have lots of Fontanas beyond the middle-aged, some in the Old Country still. I guess you could say our coat of arms is etched on our epidermis. Me and my brothers all get the family tattoo when we turn twenty-one. Wanna see?”

“I can wait,” Temple said, although wildly curious about the exact location and design of the tattoo on all ten Fontana brothers. She would think they’d have individual druthers.

She imagined that her aunt Kit, latest Fontana family in-law with her recent marriage to Aldo, knew more than she ever would on the subject. And would never tell … without the investment of a whole bottle of wine. Which might be fun.

“Say,” Temple said, “where are you steering me? We’re not going underground to the former Jackson Action ride site?”

“Nope. Not yet. We’re hitting the hotel bar. I have some folks I want to take a meet with.”

“You are beginning to sound more and more like an escapee from The Sopranos.”

“Gotta get in the mood and the mode,” said Nicky, expertly steering her through the milling crowds, which were milling a bit less these days. “We need some extra oomph and publicity bad. With all this talk about an official mob museum, if we can move fast enough, I figure we can steal the thunder and produce heat lightning of our own.”

They had reached the Crystal Court bar, a tropical paradise of flora and fountains and bright sparkling water and crystal chandeliers.

Nicky’s light touch on Temple’s elbow escorted her through a scattering of chic cocktail table setups to a parlor palm–shadowed corner booth so low-lit she’d need a seeing-eye dog to get back there on her own.

That traitorous thought made her look around guiltily for Midnight Louise, but if the ladylike black cat had followed them to this conspiratorial corner, she’d be invisible.

Temple felt totally undercover. Even the usual tabletop glass candleholder was shrouded by a net of black widow veiling.

“Ah. Mr. Nicky Fontana and Miss Temple Barr bestow their presence. Welcome to our reunion conference.”

A dapper little man stood to greet them. From his white-banded black fedora to the red carnation in the lapel of his pinstriped gray suit, he looked the mobster-movie fashion plate.

“Nostradamus,” Nicky exclaimed, “I didn’t expect you here. I haven’t laid anything resembling a bet since I married Van.”

“Not to worry, Mr. Big Shot. A bookie seeking bets I am not. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the fabled desert gang. Old times pass, but can come back around like a favorite boomerang.”

Temple eyed the five old men seated in the semicircular leather booth. She’d heard lots of stories about them, and now, bad luck had certainly “boomeranged” them back into the bosom of the Crystal Phoenix family. Their quirky faces resembled a line of English Toby mugs, except their heights weren’t uniform like the character barware, but as jagged as the Specter Mountains around Vegas.

“I think you know our history consultants, Miss Barr.” Nicky grinned at the fivesome settled onto the booth’s leather upholstery.

“Gracious,” she said, feeling the need of a genteel expletive, “it’s the Glory Hole Gang, live and in person, every last man.”

The grins spread.

“Miss Barr,” Eightball O’Rourke acknowledged with a nod. “We’re wedged in here too tight to stand like little gentleman, thanks to our larger brethren.”

He remained wiry and cue-ball bald. She had seen the most of Eightball, so she racked her brains for the other guys’ handles, and colorful nicknames they were.

Next to O’Rourke sat another half-pint, Wild Blue Pike, the longtime flyboy. He still flashed sky blue eyes and a shock of snow white hair. Spuds Lonnigan, main cook at Three O’Clock Louie’s restaurant on Lake Mead, remained a generously built man with growing gut and thinning hair, as did Pitchblende O’Hara. Cranky Ferguson, on the other hand, was as lean and lanky as an uncooked spaghetti noodle.

Temple recited each name as it came to her, and she nodded at each man, amazed to recall them rightly. What a PR ace she was! Then she realized the Glory Hole Gang members were just too durn colorful to forget. She had to grin back at them. It was like seeing your favorite grandfather after too much time between family reunions, although it had only been a couple of years. The pace of life in Vegas and the massive number of people who came through the toddlin’ town could still amaze someone used to dealing with conventions of twenty thousand attendees and more.

“Set and chat awhile,” Eightball urged.

Nicky and Temple took the end seats. Nicky ordered beers all around, except for a white-wine spritzer for Temple. The youngest Fontana brother was the perfect host. He’d long ago noted that her “working drink” went light on alcohol.

Temple flashed him a smile of thanks and turned back to the assembled two hundred years of Vegas history seated beside her.

“What are you boys doing here?” she asked, falling into Mae West mode, although she was far from the “Dolly Parton of the Thirties.” Somehow vintage Western dialogue went with the Glory Hole Gang like neckerchiefs and dust, both the desert and gold variety.

“I thought you were running Three O’Clock Louie’s restaurant on Lake Mead,” she added, letting them tell her that it was kaput.

“The water done petered out on the restaurant at Temple Bar, Miss Barr,” Spuds said with a sad shake of his balding head. “We was high and dry as Noah’s Ark aground on global warming.”

“Ah …” Temple had read and heard of Lake Mead’s shrinking shoreline, as drought dried up its waters, but out of sight, out of mind. She’d forgotten about Three O’Clock Louie’s at her namesake Temple Bar, a longtime mark on the map, but not as long as it had been a River Thames landmark near the London Inns of Court.

“Omigosh!” She stared at Nicky as it sunk in that natural ills often caused financial ones. “That’s why the Glory Hole Gang lost the restaurant?”

“Jest our customers, ma’am,” Pitchblende pitched in. “Not much to gaze out on as they et but sand and desolation. We was used to living in ghost towns, but tourists kinda want water features and lots of local color and no two-block walks over sand dunes to get to their eats.”

“Next place over is still afloat,” Cranky Ferguson grumbled. “I think they paid protection to the Guy Upstairs to keep their waterline from wastin’ away.”

“Vagaries of nature,” Nostradamus put in, “are as cruel as odds at the track, but a little birdie—”

“A scavenger crow, no doubt,” Eightball put in.

“—tells me that the Glory Hole Gang is coming back.”

“Right on, Nostradamus!” Nicky’s clap on Cranky Ferguson’s shoulder raised a puff of sand dust. “Three O’Clock Louie’s is coming back, better than ever. What do you guys say to a new location?”

Nostradamus had been standing by, but now he tipped his hat. “I see there’s hefty business on the table, so I must amble on while I am able.”

The Glory Hole Gang nodded the bookie good-bye, then hunkered down for serious talk.

“Thing is,” Nicky said, “I recalled the operation and want to make Three O’Clock’s into a franchise, starting with a flagship restaurant at Gangsters and then going national. After all, the ex–Glory Hole Gang has a colorful early Vegas history, and we can theme the menu to those exciting days of yesteryear.”

“That’s the concept,” Temple asked, “a restaurant?”

“Just one aspect. After all, the Strip Hilton—all that’s left of Bugsy Siegel’s first Flamingo motel-casino—has Margaritaville. Maybe we’ll have Mobsterville. Reposition the name. The old-time ‘Families’ are as much a ‘cultural brand’ as Jimmy Buffet’s Island paradise.”

“That’s ingenious, Nicky,” Temple said, “but I’m not quite sold that it’s genius. ‘Life is a beach’ is a universal longing. ‘Life is a bitch’—maybe not so much.”

“Naw, it’s true. The Wynn Hotel has gone with a Sinatra theme for its priciest restaurant. Think the Ocean’s Eleven film revival. Nowadays it’s George Clooney instead of Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby. Hip, socially concerned, but with a huge wink at our origins. Transparency, right? Today’s political buzzword.”

Temple laughed. “You’re a marketing chameleon, Nicky. Just like the mob.”

“The mob,” Cranky scoffed. “They were a bunch of punks. Overestimated in the Vegas early days, mainly for notoriety.”

“Frankly,” Nicky said, “Bugsy had the vision. The big mob boys didn’t get it. Jersey Joe Jackson followed in Bugsy’s footsteps with his Joshua Tree Hotel-Casino, but they had limited eyesight. They thought motor lodge, not hotel, and would have been astounded by the mega-hotel concept that lines the Las Vegas Strip nowadays. When the mob went corporate, Las Vegas spread its wings. Sure, folks alive today waltzed around the mob fringes, and pockets of the protection racket exist, but now, enterprise has to go mainstream or die. You can’t have ordinary people hurting and be commercial. That’s why this economic tsunami is so disastrous.”

“It sure baked us outta business,” Spuds Lonnigan said. “What’s our comeback restaurant shtick here at Gangsters?”

“Speakeasy’s south. Way south. Underground, in fact, with no pesky problems with Mother Nature,” Nicky assured him. “I’m talking the look of a Prohibition Palace. Knock three times to get in. Bootleg liquor, prime stuff. Guys and dolls. A little gaming. A menu that’s a history of Vegas influences, Spuds, from lowbrow to high-hat. People will be greasin’ palms to get low down with the Glory Hole Gang and its members’ authentic ambience and cuisine celebrating the good ol’ bad days of miners and mobsters. What do you think?”

“Brilliant,” said Temple. “If the Feds don’t raid you, I can sell it until doomsday.”

Hands came up simultaneously to burnish grizzled jaws.

“We’re basically desert rats,” Cranky Ferguson noted, “ ’cept Eightball here got a city PI business going. Sure, we pulled that silver-dollar heist, train robbery stuff from the old days. You think you can sell us as city slicker mobsters?”

“Rat Pack,” Nicky pounced. “Only ahead of your time.”

They squinted dubiously, en masse. That was a lot of experienced doubt.

Temple knew her Vegas history. The famous Vegas Rat Pack had begun around the twin stars of Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra in the fifties. Bogart died that decade, so the sixties became a second-stage Rat Pack heyday, with a nucleus of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford. Marilyn Monroe, Angie Dickinson, Juliet Prowse, and Shirley MacLaine had been “Rat Pack Mascots” at various times.

The men’s solo Vegas acts intermingled improvisationally, and they moved on to costarring in films, most notably the original Ocean’s Eleven. Nobody today could bundle that particular magic act of personalities and talent, so the Rat Pack, which never admitted to or liked that name, were now all dead but immortalized, despite the mob aroma that hallowed the singers. Sinatra had known Giancana too. Vegas tribute Rat Pack groups had abounded in recent years.

“It could work,” Temple told Nicky after long thought, “if we resurrect Jersey Joe Jackson. He was the real deal, a founding figure like Bugsy Siegel, but mostly forgotten. He was also a member of the original Glory Hole Gang, wasn’t he?”

“A rat,” Wild Blue Pike said, spitting into his palm to be polite in front of a lady, i.e., Temple. “He hid the money from our silver-dollar heist for his own self. Left us grubbing a living in ghost towns, hiding from the law for forty years while he built the Joshua Tree Hotel to rival Bugsy’s Flamingo and then presided over its decline.”

“The Joshua Tree couldn’t keep up with the times,” Nicky added. “Jersey Joe ended up being the last resident and dying in the abandoned hotel. You guys later helped find one of his silver-dollar stashes in the desert and turned them in.”

“It’s a great story,” Temple decreed. “The whole Glory Hole Gang saga. Rags to riches to rags. From ghost towns to gangsters to tourist mecca. Nicky and I just need to lay it out new, polish it up, and the publicity will come rolling in.”

She glanced at him. When Nicky nodded, she stood.

“Is the Ghost Suite on seven still unlocked?”

“Sure,” he said. “Every time we try to lock it we find it open again. No sense messing with a ghost.”

“I’d like to go up there and give a ghost lockjaw,” Cranky Ferguson muttered, making a fist and punching the air.

“It’s no ghost,” Wild Blue scoffed, “jest broken tumblers. I can take a look at the lock mechanism.”

“No,” Temple said. “Midnight Louie and I have no trouble coming and going up there. Maybe we can re create the suite in Gangsters Hotel. In fact,” she asked Nicky, “don’t the two hotels’ back property lines abut?”

Nicky looked abashed. “Uh, yeah. I believe they might.”

“No wonder you can do an underground linkup, for the … Chunnel of Crime,” Temple said.

“Chunnel of Crime! Yeah,” Pitchblende O’Hara said, gulping the rest of his black and tan. “Love that. We were miners. And the old-time speakeasies favored basement and even cavern locations. When might you get working on it?”

Nicky shrugged. “Already cleaning up the area and installing a few surprises. Depends on when the boss lady okays the link from the Crystal Phoenix end.”

“So you old-timers also think it’s time to ‘come clean’ about the city’s mob past?” Temple asked.

“Nicky did when he reinvented the abandoned Joshua Tree Hotel Jersey Joe built before he went bust. He was a new generation pioneer,” Spuds Lonnigan said. “He did everything on the up-and-up, but on a manageable scale, and look how well the Crystal Phoenix is doing. Now that Vegas construction is in the doldrums, labor and materials are cheaper. Time for reinvesting in the future.”

“By harking back to the past,” Temple repeated.

“You can’t move forward if you don’t look back and put the past to rest,” Eightball O’Rourke said.

Temple felt another little Ghost Suite shiver.

How could she put her past to rest if she never found out what had happened to Max?

“We’ll talk more about it,” Nicky said, rising to see Temple off. “You and me,” he added with emphasis.

Temple wondered why the Ghost Suite mention had made him uneasy. In fact, something about this meeting struck her as slightly “off.” Maybe that was her. They’d talk later, as Nicky had said. Meanwhile, she needed to refamiliarize herself with the Crystal Phoenix’s most unsung tourist attraction, a famous ghost in supposed residence.

A shiver waltzed down her spine again. Gee, the air-conditioning was frigid in these Strip hotels, even during a recession.

She wasn’t afraid of ghosts. Was she?

Spooky Suite

What had passed for a Las Vegas suite in the 1950s was not square footage in the thousands, as in high-roller-suites today.

Still, the brass numbers on the door reading 713 were shined to a spit polish, and Temple knew she’d find the interior dusted and tidy. She doubted Jersey Joe Jackson had done household chores. A Crystal Phoenix maid must pay a daily visit.

She turned the doorknob and pushed.

Yup. Walk right in. Sit right down. Wait for an apparition.

The room didn’t smell stuffy and closed, either, although the wooden-slatted blinds were drawn almost shut against the exterior glare. She walked to the elaborate gray satin drapes that framed the double window. Her fingertips found not a fleck of dust in their sculpted folds.

Her spike heels left faint pockmarks on the flat, tightly woven floral carpeting, marks that disappeared even as she watched. That was the most ghostly effect in the suite she remembered from a couple of social visits.

Midnight Louie had been the Phoenix’s “house” cat even before he had crossed Temple’s path at the Las Vegas convention center and they had ended up finding a corpse together. If there was any “ghost” of a past occupant here, it was the big black cat’s. Nicky and Van said he’d loved to sleep in the dim, undisturbed vintage elegance of the Ghost Suite.

She couldn’t find a trace of him anywhere. So much for the Phoenix’s self-appointed “watchcat.”

Temple smiled as she sat gingerly on a chartreuse satin upholstered chair. As usual, her feet just grazed the floor. She frowned to notice a short black hair on the arm. According to legend, Jersey Joe Jackson’s ghost had silver hair to go with a faint, silvery outline.

If Gangsters Hotel-Casino was going to have a Jersey Joe Jackson memorial suite, it would have to up the square footage and all the forties bells and whistles. Sheer size was a Vegas landmark now.

She shut her eyes, envisioning elements. Maybe a silver-dollar theme. The gambling chips should mimic them. And the underground tunnel between the two hotels, Gangsters and the Crystal Phoenix, had a Prohibition-era feel. Santiago wasn’t proposing a ride, really, but an experience.

Why had the mention of physically linking the two back-to-back properties aboveground made Nicky nervous? True, the rears of Vegas’s major hotels housed a lot of mundane service areas, but it was wasted space, above-and belowground. Temple had a feeling the Fontana family was finally making a more public move with its Las Vegas interests, and Nicky was uneasy because Van wouldn’t care for that. Temple thought of the Fontanas more as local color these days than ghosts of a mobster past. After a certain length of time, notoriety became nostalgia.

She liked bouncing ideas around up here. The old-fashioned suite’s stillness worked on her like the cool-down ritual after a yoga-Pilates session, lying on a floor mat with a scented cloth over her face and the instructor intoning a relaxation ritual.

Why not a … Ghost Suite Spa at Gangsters Hotel? Ultra–New Age, right? Up to the minute with a vintage forties ambience. What scents would evoke the 1940s? Something exotic and South American, maybe, like the Big Band music of the era. And the decor then had thronged with large, exotic, fleshy blossoms, like Peruvian daffodils and giant orchids and calla lilies.

Oops, that made her think of the Blue Dahlia supper club and Lieutenant C. R. Molina as Carmen, crooning out an alto version of “Begin the Beguine.” Oh, they had to use that song on the Gangsters Casino playlist. She adored the lushly Latin song of frustrated passion, so complex and compelling no musician could play it from memory, without sheet music, not even Cole Porter himself. He’d composed the song at the Ritz Hotel bar in Paris, the same one Princess Diana had left before her fatal crash. Wow. Come to think of it, Carmen Molina could kill that song.

Lieutenant Molina was not a relaxing thought for Temple, not even distanced by her torch-singer persona. Nor was Diana’s crash. Temple always found her mind segueing from high style to extreme mayhem.

Think spa. A deluxe, woman-only spa, she told herself. Female guests loved pampering. Temple pictured attendants in pale, draped pseudo-Greek gowns. That was a forties look. Ooh. Better idea: male attendants in short, draped Greek-god togas in the outer areas. The outer areas of the spa, not the outer areas of the attendants, she was thinking.

Caesars Palace had cornered the market on the splendors of antiquity on the Strip and Flamingo intersection for decades, but it was solidly Roman. A touch of Greek would be refreshing. Cultural. Hot.

Then there was the tunnel. Always an attraction. People subconsciously adore that rebirth effect. An old-fashioned “ride” wouldn’t have worked. Too many average Joes and Jills nowadays felt they’d been “taken for a ride” by their mortgage companies, bankers, stockbrokers, employer 401K plans, greedy CEOs, and even Uncle Sam.

But when a ride was not just a ride, but a “ride …”

According to the preliminary figures Nicky had flashed along with the architectural plats for the two properties, Gangsters Limo Service was one of Vegas’s top off-Strip attractions. The concept was raking it in like the 11:00–2:00 A.M. wait line at the Flamingo’s Margaritaville. Had Bugsy Siegel only known that a beachy Cajun-croon guy could be a meal ticket in Vegas, he would have wasted away in Jimmy Buffetland with a margarita headache rather than end up wasted in L.A. with two bullets zapped through his skull. There she was, back to gangland violence again.

Okay. How would she sell Nicky’s new idea?

You go to Gangsters or the Crystal Phoenix hotels and you get a real “ride,” speeding limos trekking tourists back and forth through the underground tunnel past Pirates of the Caribbean–like vignettes of mobsters at play and pay from B to C, Bugsy to Al Capone. Anything mob would flash past your tinted glass “mobmobile” … Chi-Town, the Big Apple, the Big V in the Mojave. Inside you’d be sipping champagne and gulping Glenfiddich. Outside you’d become a spirited-away witness to the bloodiest crimes of the mob era, a CSI tech on speed. Hot cars, hot crimes, hot times.

Did she have a commercially twisted mind, or what?

What would Matt think?

Nowadays? He would totally get it.

And Max?

He would think she was unsafe at any speed, as usual.

But surely not as much as he would be, if he was still alive.

Again with the macabre thoughts!

A ghostly waft on her calf made Temple jump and look down.

A black cat was waiting to cross her path. Not Louie. Midnight Louise was standing at her feet, swishing her plumy black tail. Midnight Louise’s coat was far too long to have left the skimpy black hair on the chartreuse chair, though. That was a souvenir of Mr. Midnight himself.

Temple had to wonder if he still visited here, and visited Midnight Louise, here. The female cat had not been in sight when Temple entered. She’d looked the place over.

Temple studied the closed door to the hallway. It didn’t look completely closed, but she had drawn it fully shut.

Someone had let the cat in after she arrived.

Midnight Louise was the house cat now; maybe she’d made a deal with the house ghost. The suite was always on the chilly side, and now was no exception. Goosebumps stippled Temple’s arms.

She picked up her tote bag and walked out the slightly open door into the hall. She turned back to see Midnight Louise curled up on the (warmed-up) chair seat she’d left. The blinds seemed slanted at a more-open angle to allow light to stripe Louise’s languid form. The gray satin drapes on the left where the blind cords would be were stirring, almost taking shape as if someone was hiding behind them… .

Temple pushed the suite door almost shut, just enough for a cat to paw ajar and get out.

Five steps down the hall, she heard the gentle click of it closing.

Not her business.

Merciless Tenders

“Woo,” Max mocked as he stretched to full length outside the Mondeo’s driver’s side door and took a long look around. “ ‘I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ ”

He smiled at Gandolph, who got the Daphne du Maurier reference right off.

“So you remember the creepy manor house in that forties suspense movie? When I see iron gates and red brick grandeur, I always wonder, mansion or prison?”

Max studied the place.

“The Convent of the Little Flower looks more forbidding than one would think from the quaint name. Good thing we stopped for lunch and a chance to fill our bladders with ale and empty them. I bet the nuns inside could make a hardened felon piss his pants, if I recall my fleeting memories of the good sisters in grade school.”

“You once told me the grade-school nuns were Old World, even in Wisconsin. And that the Christian Brothers ran a tight ship in your high school too.”

“Apparently they did, if Sean and I graduated as virgins. He died one too. Poor bastard.” Max sighed. “That was the purpose of Catholic same-sex education. Worked for quite some time, until the free workforce dried up.”

Max momentarily shut his eyes. Behind his studied cynicism, an image was assembling in pieces like a torn photograph. Gaptoothed twelve-year-old grin, a freckled face growing angular with hints of a man’s strength. Sean. As redheaded Irish as a leprechaun. Max was Black Irish. Dark hair, no freckles sprouting in sunshine as freely as mushrooms do in the shade for him. Always a flat-black dark seriousness beneath any age-appropriate banter. Temper. An icy vengeful temper that gives nothing away, and no quarter. And never forgets, without the intervention of amnesia … even now.

That surge of teenage memory and emotion shook him. If he was getting pieces of himself back, he couldn’t control them as he’d probably learned to by age thirty-four, the hard way. He’d have to recall and reclaim every stupid, vain, idiotic, maybe crazy puzzle piece and subdue it again. Apparently Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella had been that obsessed. Apparently Garry Randolph, Gandolph the Great, cared enough to do his very best to fulfill that man’s crazy boyish bequest.

Max clapped the old man on the back. “You’ve teased your audience-of-one’s attention to the breath-stopping point, Gandolph. Show me the payoff behind the facade.”

Sister Mary Robert Emmet was older than God, who was older than Earth.

She wore a long black gown, and fanciful arrangements of starched white linen surrounded her face and shoulders, but the “penguin” look framed features worn with incalculable worry.

“Perhaps Mr. Randolph told you, Mr… . ?”

“Kinsella.”

A slash of sunshine flickered on the shadowed terrain, a smile.

“Irish, then. But American too, by your accent. I am something of a museum curator here at the convent. I am the ‘media liaison,’ God help me. I don’t even know what media is—are?—these days. Mr. Randolph swore to me on the tenets of his Lutheran faith, sadly disused, that what I have to impart is key to the salvation of your soul.”

Max wanted to blush. This situation was quite impossible. Damn Gandolph and his sometimes almost-Irish way with words. Max wasn’t sure he had a soul, or that it could be saved. This ancient nun, for all her weary sorrow, had a tried sort of innocence he found impossible to dismiss with mockery.

“I’d be honored if you’d suspend your rules for my benefit,” he said with a courtly bow. He was tall enough to pull off a bow even nowadays. And magician enough. “I can’t guarantee a saved soul, but perhaps a soothed one.”

“Very wise, young man. Salvation is not up to us. Only the effort. Well, what I am going to show and tell you was mostly before my time and place, thank God, and there is much denial even to this day. No institution—political, military, or religious—seems free of the cardinal sin of pride.”

Max was glad she wasn’t a priest, because he’d have to confess that he was jogging partners with that particular sin. He’d detected it in himself several dozen times in the week or so he remembered in detail. It had tempted him to sleep with a woman, fornicate, they’d call it here. Pride had helped him survive, though, and now it urged him to control his remaining slight limp as their footsteps echoed down a long wood-floored hall.

Sister Mary Robert Emmet, named for the Virgin and a long-ago “martyred” Irish patriot hung for his freedom fighting, led them down halls paneled in coffered, worm-eaten wood, then over tiled floors, through echoing rooms barren as very old buildings are, so that even antique luxury seems penitential.

Max felt panic rising, as if he were tunneling into a burrow of old-fashioned confession boxes or torture chambers. Even without much of a memory, he’d considered himself a modern man, a strong and clever man, a man who could cope. All that bracing outer ego was melting away. He was a kid again, facing the clawed fingers skittering from under the bed, the darkness in the corners of the closet, the King Kong in the basement, the mouse gnawing at his brain while he dreamed… .

Sister Mary Robert Emmet led them to a walled exterior garden, devoid of everything but the green moss that cloaks every stone in Ireland.

“This is where they found the bodies,” she said in her lilting Irish croon, as if reciting playwright Sean O’Casey at a wake. “Almost a hundred and fifty in unmarked graves. All women and girls. Ireland has long been a killing ground, and this is one of our hidden holocaust sites. The other wing of the … house … was the orphanage.

“Who knows where those unwanted babes went, into what situations, good or bad? Here the unwed mothers and the girls who were thought to be ungovernable were buried alive for years and then buried in unmarked graves when their eternal sentence to Mother Church was done. They were considered sinners or bound to be such. Their names were changed; they were lost to kith and kin, and they served God as scullions and laundresses, paid almost nothing and punished for merely being, while the convents thrived on the labor of their salvations, until these lost ones died, unrecognized even then.

“These grounds, of which there were many in Ireland and all over Europe, were called Magdalen asylums or houses or laundries, and they persisted until the current century, Mr. Kinsella. Until past the millennium. Certainly until you, Mr. Randolph says, came here as a boy in search of the troubled but colorful legendry of the Auld Sod.”

“Oh, my God,” Max said.

Sister bowed her head. “Mr. Randolph said you are afflicted with memory loss, that you have forgotten much of your personal past and even some of the world’s. I pray you may forget or at least forgive this piece of our common world.”

“Is that all you can do, pray for forgiveness?”

“I’m stationed here to pray daily for the dead, not for myself.”

Max could only look to his current guide, his past mentor.

“And Kathleen O’Connor?” he asked, afraid.

Gandolph must have primed the place’s sister-keeper well. She continued without question of hesitation.

“She was doubly cursed—or blessed—to be here, as they thought at the time. She was both an adopted ‘orphan’ child of a Magdalen laundress and in her turn an ‘incorrigible’ girl resident of this place. The records show they gave her the name Rebecca. She gave up a baby to the orphanage when she was sixteen. How she’d managed such a scandal under lock and key remained a mystery. She ‘escaped’ when she was seventeen.”

Max could understand why.

He wanted to turn and scrabble away screaming at what that short history of one young woman would mean to anyone who encountered her ever after.

Kathleen O’Connor’s body lay buried in a potter’s field in Las Vegas, but surely her unbroken but mangled spirit must haunt this place eternally.

Meow Mix

There is no such thing as an old cat’s home, unless you consider being dropped off at an animal shelter with a murderous overpopulation problem or abandoned on the street to be a nice retirement package.

I am not exactly a kit myself, but Three O’Clock has gotten a lot more creaky about the pins since last I saw him.

“What made you think you could stay at the old restaurant?” I ask him as soon as we are tucked away among the black video-camera cases in the back of the Channel 6 van. “That joint looked closed. Why did the old guys not forcibly take you with them when they decamped?”

“Because I did not want to go and I got ‘lost’ on purpose,” he huffs, trying to get comfy with his chin propped on a case.

We share signature white whiskers, but I notice his black muzzle is surrounded by tiny white hairs. From my own mirror-checks, which I do on the sinktop on my way out the open Circle Ritz bathroom window at every opportunity, I am still matinee-idol black haired from stem to stern, save for the almost undetectable occasional white hair every dude and dame of our color sports.

The old man’s muzzle is starting to look bearded, like Hemingway’s. I only wish he had a superlarge fish to share with a landlubber offspring.

Alas, now Three O’Clock has no sea and no fish to shepherd, with the lake and the lovely golden shoreline carp it used to boast doing a disappearing act.

“Where are you taking me?” he snarls. “I told you I am doing fine on the next-door leavings, and I wanted to watch CSI in action on my turf.”

“Your ‘turf’ is a dried-up wasteland.”

“So is yours.”

“But mine has neon and foot-long submarine sandwiches and Bette Midler.”

A rough stretch has Three O’Clock’s chin seeming to nod agreement. “Bette Midler is all right. You cannot eat neon, and foot-long-anything foodstuffs are more than I care to tangle with at my age.”

This talk of fast food has my mind revving up. What to do with the old folks is the conundrum of the era, especially as the population of old folks is growing by leaps and bounds. Or by creeps and pounds.

I climb a few boxes to curl my shivs around the van’s rear window slit. I see we are getting into serious traffic. Time to bail.

“Come on, Pop,” I urge as I clamber back down. “Time to rock and roll.”

“You young folks still into that racket?”

“You betcha.”

I eye the silver tangle of aluminum tripods stacked behind the driver’s seat. We need to distract our chauffeur just enough to slow down but not enough to crash and burn. It is a delicate operation, and my current partner is none too reliable. Who would think I would actually wish for the presence of Miss Midnight Louise and her nubile climbing skills?

“Okay, Daddy-o. You are going to climb that silver metal tree while I get behind the wheel.”

“There is no way to climb that mess, son. I will just end up in a tangle of clattering pipe.”

“Exactly. Mount Charleston it is not, but you still have built-in pitons and can make quite a mess and commotion of it.”

“I see. You want a distraction.”

“Duh.”

“Why did you not just say so? I was attracting thrown tin cans on the backyard fences while you were just a gleam in my old lady’s eye.”

With that, Three O’Clock rousts his own twenty-pound, leftover-pumped bulk over the camera boxes and leaps like a sumo wrestler for the tripods. Immediately the unseen driver starts muttering and pumping the brakes.

By then I have scaled the vinyl back of his seat and landed in his lap, tail faceup and claws thigh-side down and snapping into place like a staple remover.

The screams are awesome.

I fight to unsnag my valuable shivs as the driver simultaneously slams on the brakes and puts the gear into park, opens the door, and grabs the lapels of my furry ruff.

We hurl outside together into the merciless sunlight as horns bellow and traffic screeches to a stop. The scene causes him to release his grip. I roll under the stopped van, pleased to see Three O’Clock slithering onto the doorjamb edge and then the street.

“Psst!” I say, sticking out a paw to gesture him under the undercarriage.

He slinks into the shadow beside me.

“That guy took some really primo footage of me and thee hamming it up over those Lake Mead bones,” Three O’Clock protests. “Your escape plan has delayed getting our mugs onto the evening news, where they belong.”

“Relax. There will be some exchange of this and that information, then all these hot steel boxes will get rolling again. Meanwhile, you and I can leapfrog from shady spot to shady spot and leave this mess behind.”

“Your ‘shady spots’ could start mowing us down any ‘leap.’ We are not frogs.”

I agree that there is not a lot of “leap” left in Three O’Clock Louie, but I have enough hiss and vinegar for the two of us. I soon prod the old dude out of the street and onto one of my routes to the Circle Ritz.

“This is worse than our recent trek across half of Lake Mead,” he starts complaining. “I did not want to leave my old hangout even when my humans pulled up ‘steaks.’ I hid out until they gave up coming back out and trying to lure me away with the daily special.”

“You are a stubborn old cuss.”

“I am not going to give up my independence. Besides, during the last days they converted to an all free-range, organically grown menu. Those chickens must have had leg muscles the size of ostriches’. And, as far as I know, vegetables are only good for encouraging five-year-old human kits to run away from home. I had never been offered so much dry, twiggy, dirt-dusted chow in my life. Now you are dragging me across a concrete desert. With no food or water in sight. You are a cruel cat, my son.”

I cannot claim that shade and watering holes exactly dot the city landscape if you are not near a major hotel. Sure, I know Three O’Clock has not got much stamina and has already been sore-footedly tried today. For once, I am completely perplexed. Where to park the old man until I can reunite him with his geezer gang?

I need to find someplace soon.

Meanwhile, the Las Vegas sun is boiling high above us in a clear blue sky, soaking into our pure black coats, making our pink tongues roll out like red carpets and our tenderized pads to crack and burn like well-done strip steaks.

Manx! Even my ability to come up with similes has shifted into survival overdrive. I cannot believe that shepherding only one elder could be so taxing.

I am glad that … oh! Of course.

Obviously my brain has been fried on Lake Mead, along with the rest of Three O’Clock Louie’s lost and lamented cuisine.

“Come on, Daddy-o,” I urge with a growl. “I have just the retirement pad for you. Only a few hundred more steps.”

Argh, matey. Yo-ho-ho, and a cache of cement booties.

Frankly, my feet feel like they have been cast in hot concrete and my legs worn down to the bare bones by the time I herd Three O’Clock through a stand of oleander bushes into a de-lovely clearing dominated by my favorite fast-food restaurant, a big brown Dumpster.

“Have you taken me in a circle, Grasshopper?” Three O’Clock asks out of the side of his mouth. Who would have thought the old man had so much sarcasm in him?

“This looks like the abandoned restaurant you just rescued me from. Only I do not get a lake view.”

“Such as it was,” I point out. “I do not believe your vision was keen enough to enjoy the distantly sparkling ripples.”

“My eyes are a durn, er, sight better than yours, lad. Who spotted those pathetic bird bones sticking up out of the lake-bottom sand?”

“Who moved mountains to get them discovered by human movers and shakers?”

“Humans are a cruel breed,” he says, shaking his grizzled head. “They toy with their kill. I have heard that all my life, but until I saw the pathetic pair of leg bones sticking out of the concrete ball like plant supports in an empty flowerpot … The poor victim was poured into his fatal cement footwear while still alive, you know. Vicious breed, humans. And you lead me into the heart of their darkness here in Sin City.”

I sigh. “We are speaking old-time gangsters, or someone modern who was trying to emulate them. I am sure my friend the coroner, Grizzly Bahr, is even now dating and dissecting the whole gruesome mess down to the DNA.”

“They have an ursine coroner here? That is open-minded. I am impressed.”

I sigh again. My old man is not the only one who has chewed through a dictionary or two in his day.

“The name Grizzly is a nickname, Daddy-o. His surname is spelled B-a-h-r. No genuine bears work for the Las Vegas forensics department.”

“Bahr, eh? Related to your cross-species lady friend? The one you sleep with?”

“You have been living with professional bachelors too long out at Lake Mead. You should be so lucky to have a human fan who has a lakeside recreation area named after her, although I think it was just a weird coincidence.”

“I see another weird coincidence,” the old guy says, jabbing me in the ribs with a jovial mitt of half-unfurled claws. “Who is that hot babe I see sniffing along the Dumpster edge?”

Can it be? Has Ma Barker, his old inamorata and my old mama, edged into sight just at this convenient moment? Manx! The sire’s eyes must be broken if he considers her a “hot babe,” although I will take any happenstance luck I can right now.

I look where he is leering.

Horrors! Double horrors.

What is Miss Midnight Louise, my detecting partner and stridently proclaimed daughter—therefore the old guy’s granddaughter, no less—doing here?

I was hoping to arrange a meet between Three O’Clock and Ma Barker and gang. Not between the Senile and the Nubile.

“She is fixed,” I hiss in his somewhat battered ear.

“I do not care who she is fixed up with, I am tossing my whiskers into the ring for that chick.”

What a cluck!

“She is also kin,” I add, emphasizing my point with a cuff of shivs to the jaw.

“These things are hard to trace among a nomadic kind.”

“Make one mew out of line and she will perforate your liver from the outside in. Trust me, I know this kit.”

“So you want to keep her to yourself.”

This is seriously not true. “She is a business partner, and that is it.”

“Oho.”

Before I can argue further, a low and hackle-rising growl from the oleanders behind us delays further discourse. Then comes the reading of the riot act.

“You two roadkill bums can forget drooling over anything you see,” Ma Barker glowls. “This is my gang’s territory, and you are trespassing. I can scar your behinds with my initials and give you a sex-change operation before either one of you drifters can muster a rusty shiv.”

Meanwhile, Miss Midnight Louise has scented our presence and is heading our way at top speed, claws kicking up asphalt like it was unclumpable litter-box sand.

“You take the spitfire up front, and I’ll reverse to face the hellion at our rear,” Three O’Clock says.

What is a parent for but self-sacrifice, right? Except I am the one sacrificing my most vulnerable end. Papa is literally saving his ass.

I comply, knowing Ma Barker will recognize her baby boy from any angle and Miss Louise has already ID’d Three O’Clock as the stranger on the block.

“You are in bad company, son,” Ma Barker growls at my rear. “Who is this aging sack of hairballs you have been foolish enough to bring here?”

Meanwhile Louise continues her liberated she-devil act. “Freeze, stranger! Do not turn around to face me or you will be looking up Eye Patches Are Us on the Internet.”

“He is just a homeless guy I found out at Lake Mead,” I say, not ready to make introductions under the circumstances. Family reunions can be so difficult.

“We are all pretty much homeless, except for you,” Louise notes.

“Have a heart,” I urge. “He is a relative.”

“I object,” Three O’Clock growls. “The one behind me who bedazzled my old eyes with her cute not-interested act is too good-looking to be a relative, and the one in front of me now is too ugly.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, awaiting Three O’Clock’s instant annihilation.

“Say,” hisses Ma Barker, “my raccoon shiner does not permit me the crystal-clear vision of my youth, but I am old enough to know you are not so bad yourself, stranger.”

Huh?

Miss Louise goes whisker-to-whisker with me to whisper, “What can Ma Barker be thinking?”

In a moment we, gasp, then know.

“You remind me,” Ma Barker says, “of a smarmy, swaggering, swell-headed young tom who used to come around when I was more receptive to gentlemen callers.”

“I was all that,” Three O’Clock admits proudly, “except I do not know ‘smarmy’ from blarney.”

“They are the same.”

Ma Barker’s right mitt clips him a smart one in the chops. And possibly the loins. She always excelled at one-two punches.

At any rate, Three O’Clock rolls into a ball, spins a few times, and ends up back on his pins three feet away.

“Can that be you, Pool Hall Polly?” he asks. “I recognize the English.”

Ma Barker bats her eyes like a baby doll, including the one that is still at quarter mast from the raccoon incident.

Louise and I exchange a shocked stare and back off to let this play out unassisted.

“So,” Ma says, “sonny boy managed to catch up with your mangy hide. What are you two bad boys up to now that you have twice the chutzpah and half the brains?”

“We are working the case of the truncated shin bones, doll.”

I wait to see Three O’clock caroming off the back wall of the police substation that is now Ma Barker’s hideout.

Instead, she rubs back and forth on the base of the oleander bush. “So you want in on our boy’s private-eye business?”

“No way,” Miss Midnight Louise snarls.

“Right,” I second. “It is bad enough I got saddled with a girl. I do not need a geezer.”

“Pipe down, junior,” Three O’Clock says, “and let your elders settle this.”

“I am not a ‘junior,’ ” I point out. “And you better act more humble if you want to get bed and board at Ma Barker’s headquarters. She runs this outfit.”

“Really?” Three O’Clock noses toward Ma Barker. “I have been retired from the nautical life in Puget Sound for a couple of years, but if you have need of an enforcer …”

“We are all enforcers here,” Ma snaps back. She eyes me and wrinkles her sparse vibrissae, which are whiskers to veterinarians and others in the know. “So you want to hang around for old times’ sake? I can put you on probation.”

“Probation? I ran a fishing trawler. I was the skipper’s right-hand catch-inspector. Then I retired to Vegas and got a food inspector job with the Glory Hole Gang out at Lake Mead. I should be consigliere here, at least.”

“This is a street gang, Three O’Clock, not some fancy-schmancy operation.”

Ma ambles over to me and Miss Midnight Louise.

“So, Grasshopper. If the old guy stays, I will have to call you disgusting pet names, since the ‘Midnights’ are getting a bit thick around here.”

“I am Louie,” I snarl. “He can be Three O’Clock. Capiche?”

“Whatever, you two can duke it out. Meanwhile, who is going to do the honors?”

“There is any honor around here?”

“I mean introduce your partner to her new grandfather.”

Louise’s baby yellows get moon size. She had not followed the family resemblance to its logical conclusion—her. If she really is my offspring.

Even now she is arching her back and shaking out her shivs to make sure Three O’Clock knows he is not top dog around here.

Dem Old Bones

Temple left the Crystal Phoenix with her head still whirling with empire-building ideas.

Give Nicky Fontana credit: the boy could dream. He was her age, just pushing thirty-one, but CEO of her only permanent contractual client. Van was an amazing executive and executor, but Nicky had the cockeyed vision it took to take Vegas establishments to the next step.

And this time, Temple would be an idea girl from the ground up … or down, if the plans to reimagine the underground spaces were as open-ended as Nicky said.

Underground. Underworld. That was so postmillennial and perfect. Dark, daring, and cooool, man, cooool.

She wanted to tell someone. She wanted to tell Matt. And maybe her Aunt Kit Carson, who—oh, rats—was honeymooning in Europe with her first and post-menopausal husband, Nicky’s eldest brother, Aldo. Sixty is the new forty-five, and so was Aldo. Go, Aunt Kit!

The red Miata wove through the packed Strip traffic like a computerized sewing machine on zigzag. Temple refrained from cell-phoning while driving, but her mind rehearsed what she’d tell Matt when she called him tonight.

Temple’s head was still bursting with wild ideas when she came home to her quiet Circle Ritz condo. She’d been too busy to check with Matt in Chicago earlier. He was used to her calling him because of her erratic freelance schedule.

She plopped down on her soft living-room loveseat, kicked off her Weitzman spikes, and kicked her bare heels into the luxuriant long fibers of her faux-goatskin rug. Then she grabbed the remote just in time to catch the opening of the six o’clock news. Matt was in a two-hour-later time zone, so she had time to chill, shower, and change before calling. More construction defaults and lower tourist numbers still made the news, along with a murder-suicide in Henderson, but the feature story tease was on “cannibal cats.”

Ick!

They even ran a five-second close-up of a poor, starving stray kitty gnawing on some bones.

Temple averted her face, but not before the cat’s color registered.

Black. And big.

The whiskers were an unusual pure white.

As long and straight as kabob skewers. Uh-oh.

Temple programmed her recorder and slipped into the kitchen to pour a glass of red wine. No, white. She might see something startling enough to cause a spill on her off-white couch. Forewarned was forearmed. Or four-armed.

Why would her Midnight Louie be making the evening news munching on bones? He had a perfectly fine full bowl of Free-to-Be-Feline dry, vitamin-packed, politically correct cat food in his kitchen bowl at this very minute. “Full” was the key word.

Oh.

The nightly news had perfected the art of tease. Between every boring roundup they flashed footage of a black feline muzzle and sharp white fangs snapping at the jagged ends of what sure looked like bones. Temple gulped wine.

During commercial breaks, she checked every cat hiding spot in the two-bedroom unit and shouted from the tiny balcony. No Louie anywhere. Had the trespassing cats on the news been taken into custody?

She opened and checked every last kitchen cupboard and refilled her glass with red wine.

The sacred sports and weather sections were coming up. If the cat story didn’t run soon, it would never run. Had she missed it during a commercial break?

An insect brushed her arm. No! Louie’s white whiskers.

He had just lofted over the sofa back to sit beside her. Must have come in the guest-bathroom window she always left ajar.

“Louie! You had me going. Where have you been?”

But his green eyes weren’t turned toward her. They were focused intently on the TV screen. His whiskers twitched as he settled into his haunches.

“Now here’s a gristly tale,” the female half of the anchor team intoned with relish, “better fitting Halloween than spring break. Animal lovers attending the Temple Bar Days annual festival at the Arizona area of Lake Mead called animal control to round up a couple of feral cats scavenging for food dangerously near the lake’s sadly lowered edge and not far from the defunct Three O’Clock Louie’s former lakeside restaurant. The foraging felines eluded capture, but the animal-control people found they had been snacking on a gruesome discovery.”

The camera pulled back to show crime-scene tape circling the littered lake bottom, then zoomed in on an odd formation.

“Yes, witnesses said the object of the cats’ interest appeared to be a pair of snapped off human leg bones mired in rock. Arizona police authorities are mum about the find, but the area is only an hour’s drive from Las Vegas, and the remains have been sent to the city coroner’s facility. Could stray cats have unearthed the remains of some early Vegas crime figure who had been given the concrete booties treatment and dumped in Lake Mead decades ago? Crime historians must be scratching their heads and searching their archives. Meanwhile, the carnivorous kitties made their getaway and are still at large.”

“Carnivorous!” Temple accused her seating partner, then imbibed more wine and reconsidered. “Of course all cats are carnivorous. They said ‘cannibal’ first! That’s all wrong. I am so mortified. I recognized your white whiskers instantly, of course. You are grounded, my lad. No more open window for you.”

Louie yawned.

“I’m going right now to slam it shut. See!”

He rolled over onto his substantial side to flash his fangs as he nibbled at a clawed toe.

Temple did as she had promised and returned triumphant.

“Did you hear that? Shut. Two. Cannibal cats, plural. So who was your accomplice? The other cat?”

Louie remained mum. And way too calm.

Temple sighed. “Three O’Clock Louie. Of course. Why the heck and how did you get way out there? Arizona, for Pete’s sake. I suppose gnawing on human bones can’t be considered cannibal for a cat. Oh.”

She punched the cell phone’s auto-dial to try Matt at his Chicago hotel number. “Our fiancé is going to be so disappointed in you, Louie. Old bones. Criminal bones. Gangster bones. What a news hook. Wonder who it is. Was.

“Bet the Glory Hole guys might have a clue, but who would even remember them to ask? This is a Temple Barr exclusive. Where the heck is Three O’Clock now, huh? You didn’t just leave your compadre to the coyotes and animal control, did you? No, of course not. He’s probably wherever that gang of feral cats that hung around here for a while went. And are you sharing that info with your loyal bed partner? Noooo. Just you wait. You are confined to quarters, mister, but I am going to be out on the town and on this first thing in the morning like a … carnivorous cat.”

And, Temple mumbled to herself, since when had there been an annual festival on Lake Mead with her name on it?

For a PR person to miss her own publicity was really humiliating.

Media Draw

Welcome home to the conquering hero.

I guess not!

Here I have been through a fatiguing trek to Arizona, for Bast’s sake, not to mention my roommate’s namesake place and event on Lake Mead, and I am scolded and locked in like a juvenile delinquent.

It would not sting so much had I not gotten a similar dose of dissing and moaning at my last stop before this.

The locked window does not curl my whiskers.

My Miss Temple flatters herself that I need her arms and two opposable thumbs to fly this coop whenever I please. The living-room row of French doors has horizontal pulls and latches that a kitten could open with its milk teeth.

The lamented, but perhaps not late, Mr. Max Kinsella had often warned Miss Temple about the doors’ flimsy security, but she had relied too much on my crime-fighting presence to take him seriously.

So I can blow this joint anytime I wish. It simply suits me to make like a couch potato and rest my burning pads for a while. Also, to run the watershed events of the past several hours through my weary brain.

Of course it was up to me to mastermind and pull off the “cannibal cats” routine. Three O’Clock had neither the imagination nor inclination to bestir himself, once I’d gotten myself out to Lake Mead and eyeballed his “find,” his “case,” his dubious “murder victim.”

Say it turned out to be Jimmy Hoffa. Now that would make multimedia news.

I have no such expectations, but I know that if I can rouse human interest in this odd piece of found art I can get us air-conditioned transport back to civilization. Obviously, the old dude cannot hoof it, or even move fast enough to hitch it.

My plan is risky, but the best ones always are. I mentally replay my favorite moments.

First, I pick up my sandy toes and trot to the neighboring hash house that is still solvent. The closer I get, the more succulent is the sniff of rare hamburger and well-done anchovies on pizza. My kind of buffet table.

Right now, though, I am only pretending an interest in the quick-fried cuisine. I am trawling for a sucker, preferably a kid or a middle-aged lady. Dudes are useless for my purpose.

I glance back to mark the spot I want to aim at by the black lump of Three O’Clock’s form. The sun is getting hot, and I do not want him to cook more than the ground beef here.

My nimble mitts quickly spar with my cheeks, giving my snappy white whiskers a tangled and bedraggled look, then I roll over in the sand several times before hitting the asphalt surrounding the café. Yowsa! Hot on the bare tootsies.

I suppose I could say I then “hotfoot” into the restaurant “like a scalded cat.”

No. I am too cagey for that. I duck under the nearest vehicle, where the tarmac is shady and cool. By darting from shade to shade, I am able to approach the exterior tables that afford a nice view of the sandy lonesome that used to be lakefront.

Perfect.

I scoot under the first family-of-five table I can spot. Even more perfect! There I peruse four sets of legs and a child’s seat with kicking tiny tennies barely below chair-seat level.

The sweet sound of kiddie fussing whines above my head. Below I see two sets of large ugly tennies and two sets that barely reach the floor, one accessorized with Hello Kitty pink anklets.

I manage not to toss my cookies at the sight of this supercute kitty face swinging in duplicate so close to mine.

I brush my furry puss on the slender bare leg between anklet and shorts.

A small face ducks under the table level, as if searching for something dropped. The mouth makes a silent elongated O.

It disappears, and a French fry plops down beside me. The grease smell almost knocks me over, and the big dollop of attached tomato ketchup could make an Italian greyhound nauseous. I pull back my whiskers and harf and garf the fry down, even though it is death to my cholesterol count.

Another follows. This one I grab and retreat out of reach to eat in patented Hungry Stray Kitty behavior, which says: You feed and I will eat but Touch Not the Cat.

By then the smallest foot set is beating its heels on the chair legs and screaming up a storm. I must say not even a Siamese cat can compete with a human toddler for range and screech effect when howling.

I look up from burping after downing the second fry to see my Hello Kitty friend crouching on the wooden boards, a grease-stained napkin tucked like a hobo’s kerchief into her ketchup-stained little hand. I even sniff hamburger.

Good girl!

No one is watching as I lure her tidbit-by-tidbit down the few steps and onto the parking lot. Now I am simply picking up the latest offering, another fry, and moving away, hunching over it, watching her approach. Just as she gets within reach, I pick up my fry and retreat.

Nothing is as determined as a nine-year-old animal-loving kid attempting to feed a poor, starving stray kitty.

I have her out on the Lake Mead sandlot and halfway to Three O’Clock’s position before the howling heel-kicker can take a breath for another two-minute aria.

Of course every eye in the place has been surreptitiously glued to the screaming Mimi, and the mortified parents are totally concentrated on trying to stifle the sound without doing anything that would bring in the child-protection agencies.

Meanwhile, they fail to notice that Daughter Dearest is decamping on the trail of a no-doubt filthy, diseased, or even rabid stray cat.

I hate to play on my kind’s totally bad rap or the touching humanity of children, but private dicks are always being forced to cross moral lines, if you go by the books and movies.

By the time I hear the hue and cry raised back at the restaurant veranda, Hello Kitty has forgotten feeding me and is busy watching Three O’Clock wash his whiskers beside the bizarre leg-bone setup.

Shortly after a half dozen hysterical people have assembled, my friend Hello Kitty is snatched up, up, and away, and cell phones are put into instant service.

My major hope is that the angered villagers do not get lethal and decide against leaving stray cats and concrete-imbedded leg bones of unknown origin to the authorities.

Thanks to the urgent lobbying of our friend Hello Kitty Anklets, the hysterical adults are persuaded to withdraw and leave bad enough alone.

Luckily, what is left these days of the electronic media arrives first to get the money shot: Three O’Clock and I licking our outstanding whiskers over the macabre mortal remains.

(I had a devil of a time convincing Three O’Clock to smack his whiskers. He said that was rude and the act of a “whippersnapper.”

I said, “No, it was the act of a whiskersnapper.”)

My next challenge was arranging for us to snatch a ride with a TV-station van back to Vegas, undetected, and before the well-meaning animal-rescue folks took us for mere stray cats and tried to “save” us.

Sigh.

Now my Miss Temple has again tried to “save” me from myself by locking me in. She thinks.

I tell you, being a superhero of your species is very frustrating work. Pleased to have finally safely stowed away Three O’Clock—for his sake and that of Greater Las Vegas—I now have a chance to rest my weary feet and mind, eat something that is not greasy, but desert-dry, like Free-to-Be-Feline, and catch a few Zs. As in Zorro! En garde, world!

The Guggenheim of Gangsters

Las Vegas had its “whales”—big spenders who dropped millions on the gaming tables and were treated like sultans for it.

It also had its architectural “whales”—hotel-casinos lined up along the Strip, each one grander and more expensive than the next and inevitably sliding into “old-hat, second tier” as heaver behemoths sprang up along the eternally elastic Strip.

Yet Vegas had always sported the more budget-minded hotel-casinos among the major glamour-pusses, and smaller outfits had also thrived just off-Strip.

Temple was surprised the next day when Nicky collected Van from her literal ivory tower and herded her and Temple and the entire Glory Hole Gang into one of the Crystal Phoenix complimentary airport vans.

First of all, Van didn’t normally “herd.” Secondly, Temple had never ridden in the hotel’s vans and appreciated the navy blue Ultrasuede upholstery and soft piped-in music. The regular airport round-trip was short, but Vegas traffic could be balky.

Even here Van’s white-glove service showed.

As did her impatience as she tapped one Italian designer pump on the immaculate navy blue carpeting.

Temple, meanwhile, was as excited as a kid heading toward Disneyland. You could live in Vegas and never visit the Hard Rock Hotel, for instance, or even Circus Circus on the Strip. She’d only thought of Gangsters as a limo service with a cool office-cum-parking lot with hot-and-cold-running Fontana brothers running it in turn.

Perhaps the Fontana boys and their cool Italian tailoring had distracted her from looking up any farther than six feet something.

For there’d always been “some building” towering behind the enterprise, and she knew Gangsters was a hotel-casino with some intriguing attractions, but Temple had only visited it a couple of times when funnyman Darren Cooke had appeared there with tragic results in her case called “Flamingo Fedora.” So she’d never really checked it out.

Now she was craning her neck so hard as they approached the car services’ headquarters that the seat belt threatened to decapitate her. Short women often felt more threatened than safeguarded by vehicle seat belts. Temple was beginning to think the auto industry had it in for anyone under five feet four.

Gangsters was another relatively “short stack” hotel, like seven-story Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall, once known as the Barbary Coast, nestled on a Strip corner dominated by towering properties. Bally’s and the Flamingo were on its east side, and Caesars Palace and the Bellagio across the Strip.

Gangsters Hotel-Casino had capitalized on a reputation as a well-kept secret. It was only a block off the Strip and eight stories taller than just plain Bill’s.

As Nicky and the whole Glory Hole Gang hustled to help her and Van down from the high-step-up vehicle, Temple glimpsed an edge of unlit neon sign atop the building that looked as high-profile as the Hard Rock Hotel’s iconic guitar and thrusting, neon-fretted neck.

But first Temple needed to get her feet on the ground, and when she looked up to human height again she was greeted by a reception committee of eight Fontana brothers arrayed on either side of a suggestively red carpet, wearing not their usual sherbet-tinted summer suits, but pink pinstriped navy suits with black silk shirts accessorized with Miami Vice neon-colored ties, ranging from peach to turquoise to hot pink to cobalt, melon, and purple.

Van bowed her flaxen-haired head, perhaps the only female on Planet Vegas immune to the conjoined attractions of the brothers Fontana. That was probably from having been married to the youngest, Nicky, and the absence of the eldest, Aldo.

The middle of the pack seemed more like clones, but Temple had always found that the Fontana brothers’ biggest charm, their unanimity. Somehow it made their high spirits and good looks less overwhelming.

As they extended their welcoming, finger-spread “jazz hands” of Broadway dance ensembles to the visitors, the Glory Hole Gangsters do-si-doed down the red carpet in their battered cowboy boots, well-worn jeans, and plastic mother-of-pearl-buttoned plaid shirts.

It was desert western versus Vegas dude.

“Love the suits,” Eightball O’Rourke said. “I can’t give up my jeans, but I’ll do the shirt and jacket with my bolo tie.”

Nicky had escorted Van and Temple by the simple gesture of extending both arms, so the women inspected the honor guard from vastly different points of view. Van was theme-hotel executive, dubious to her pale pink–painted toenails.

Temple was curious down to her “Tara O’Hara Scarlett”–painted toenails just what Gangsters would reveal beyond this production-number greeting. Obviously, some remarketing renovations had already been done.

What the interior revealed was Macho Mario Fontana, the boys’ uncle, who had dyed-in-the-DNA-authenticated mob roots, as a tour guide.

On his pasta-enhanced rotund form, white pinstripes looked like parentheses with a stutter, but they matched the silver streaks in his Men’s Spare Club toupee.

Temple couldn’t help thinking had his suit stripes been horizontal … they’d have resembled vintage prison stripes. Perfect uniforms for the parking valets. No. Bellmen. The valets would be both male and female here, Bonnie and Clyde types.

She knew this was Nicky and Van’s job, dreaming up revamped hotel themes, but she had so many good ideas. This was her best job assignment in aeons.

Their party turned a lot of heads. Nine of the ten Fontana brothers and their Uncle Mario would anytime, even without eight of them attired in Broadway-musical gangster suits. The Glory Hole Gangsters were older and shorter and less natty, but no less interesting. Van and Temple could toddle along ignored, which suited them, because it allowed for a sotto voce tête-à-tête, to combine both Italian and French phrases.

“Nicky is really jazzed on this Gangsters redo,” Temple started, stating the obvious.

“And it is Nicky, solo,” Van replied. “I had no idea. Obviously the brothers had been cooking this up since their custom limo service became such a famous local attraction. I am worried that the accentuated “mob” theme is going to focus too much attention on Nicky’s Family connections.”

“The consensus,” Temple pointed out, “is that the mob ‘went corporate’ in the seventies, and any remaining shenanigans are shadows of their former selves.”

“I know. But the Fontana name carries overtones of the old days.”

Meanwhile, Temple had been taking in the usual casino trappings. “This place always came across as old-fashioned and intimate and has a ready-made vintage gangster ambience. Oh, look! I love that the shopping marquee reads the ‘Moll Mall.’ Don’t you?”

“I don’t quite get it,” Van said, trailing Temple to the brightly lit tunnels of shop windows sparkling with feminine glitz.

“You grew up in Europe, so you wouldn’t know the reference, but Americans would. A ‘gun moll’ was a gangster’s girlfriend. Usually her clothes were brighter than her I.Q.”

“Wasn’t there some civil unrest in Africa decades ago, before the Tutsi and the Hutu? A bloody uprising of natives who were called the Mau Mau?” Van asked.

“Exactly. Almost everybody younger than a stereo system has forgotten that, but ‘Moll Mall’ has that same ring of madness, only it’s all us riled-up female shoppers.”

“I’m not much of a shopper,” Van noted.

She doesn’t have to be, Temple thought. The more money a woman has, the less she likes to join the shopping scrum to hunt for bargains and “perfect little” thises and thats. Temple could see that women and shopping are like men and sports: both are self-expressive, energetic youthful hobbies that become sporadic spectator sports as one gets older and tired and more responsible.

Of course, Temple herself was aeons away from any of those last three things.

A sharp whistle—not a wolf whistle—turned Temple from her chance to educate Van on conspicuous consumption that was more conspicuous than costly. Most of the biggest and choicest Strip hotels sold only luxury goods in eerily quiet, elegant shops far from the madding crowd.

Gangsters was clearly not that kind of place. Nicky’s urgent whistle alone showed that.

Van turned slowly, like the Queen Mary, annoyed by the streetwise hailing.

“The Mob Museum,” Uncle Macho Mario Fontana mouthed reverently from the bottom of an escalator flanked by neon cityscapes of Chicago.

“Not likely to be on the level of the Guggenheim at the Venetian,” Van suggested under her breath as she and Temple hustled through the milling gamblers. “This is going to be a bigger disaster than the revamped Aladdin was, but I suppose Nicky wants gainful employment for his playboy brothers.”

“They have made a lucrative go of the limo service,” Temple said.

“What have we made quite a go of?” the nearest brother asked.

It could have been Armando. Or Ralph. Their white straw summer fedoras made the look-alike clan even harder to distinguish from one another. What part of tall, dark, and handsome is a hallmark?

“The museum is up here,” Macho Mario gestured from twelve smooth-gliding steps above them. “Watch yer high heels, ladies. We don’t want any unfortunate accidents at Gangsters.”

Nicky had waited to swing onto the moving stairs behind Temple and Van. “Don’t worry,” he advised, “I’ve got your backsides.”

Van visibly bit her tongue, while Temple was tempted to turn around and stick hers out. Nicky was in an ideal position to be cheeky and knew it.

At the escalator’s top, Temple wasn’t surprised to spot a lavish 1930s-style movie theater blinking its neon-bulbed marquee at them like a flirtatious chorus girl’s false eyelashes.

The name between the blinking lights read The Roxie.

“Oh,” Van said, impressed for the first time, “an American movie palace.”

The graduated triangle of Art Deco columns thrust up in step-pyramid glory. Its towering central spire was silhouetted against a twilight-azure sky darkening to a navy blue dusted with golden stars, a sickle moon serving as the dot on the spire’s exclamation point.

They followed the red carpet through the lobby populated with black-and-white human-sized cutouts of the great gangster noir movie actors … James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino, Robert Mitchum and Barbara Stanwyck.

Beyond the double doors with the porthole windows, tommy guns rat-a-tatted and car brakes screeched as men groaned and women screamed. It sounded as much like a shooting gallery as the Santiago-occupied suite at the Crystal Phoenix had, but when two Fontana brothers swept the doors open, the movie “screen” before their eyes was a cutout set that they could walk right through.

Then they were strolling ill-lit alleyways littered by fallen bodies, with wax figures in trench coats huddled over submachine guns and a sound track blaring out threats and counterthreats and lines of immortal gangster-film dialogue, like “You dirty rat.”

“Dis is where the latest find will be,” Macho Mario said, adopting Chicago-style mobster diction like a theatrical pro.

“Latest find?” Van asked.

“Yeah. The body part that just surfaced from Lake Mead, now that the dried-up fringes uncovered some dirty work.”

“Surely,” Temple said, “the police wouldn’t release—”

“Vegas is not just some one-Bugsy burg,” Macho Mario said. “We have a Madam Tussauds wax museum in town. There are these mortuary artists or whatever from the morgue to the Madam’s working here. Macho Mario does not wait for things to become public domain. My domain is public. Voilà!”

Well, Temple thought, according to legend, the old-time gangsters did carry submachine guns in violin cases. She supposed that implied some “culture.”

Macho Mario whisked a black trench coat from what seemed a nearby hunched figure to reveal a display pedestal surmounted by a Plexiglas box. Through the clear plastic, one could view a glob of coagulated concrete from which two splintered shin bones stood up like giant toothpicks in an aspic of solid cement oatmeal.

“Oh, my God,” Van muttered, “shades of the Black Museum.”

“Black Museum?” Macho Mario was gratified by the reaction to his prize. “I like that title. This is just a mock-up of the latest body parts found in Lake Mead, but it will be in Gangsters upgraded Black Museum. Oh, wait! We gotta make clear we’re not celebrating black gangsta rappers. Boys, isn’t that going to be confusing?”

Yes, Temple thought, as the Fontana brothers rolled their eyes in unison.

“The Black Museum I was referring to,” Van explained, “is a very old, private, and venerable museum kept at Scotland Yard in London.”

“‘Venerable’?” Macho Mario rolled the word on his tongue like Mama Fontana’s world-famous pasta sauce. “That means fancy, right? Scotland Yard? That’s Sherlock Holmes stuff, right?”

Van absorbed Macho Mario’s further questions with inarticulate disbelief, while her husband placed a quieting palm on his uncle’s well-padded suit shoulder.

“Yeah,” Nicky said. “Pardon my wife’s shock. She’s a tender blossom, reared in Continental girls academies. The Black Museum hit her at quite an impressionable age. The museum is this ‘little shop of horrors,’ you could say, at Scotland Yard headquarters. Few outside the constabulary get in to see it, but her daddy was a major hotel manager—”

“Like you.” Macho Mario nodded seriously.

“Like me and Van. Only in London. Her father got them an ‘in,’ because this place is famously hard to get into.”

Macho Mario’s manicured hand lifted like an upscale traffic cop’s. “Say no more. That happens with them fancy French restaurants in Paris. You gotta reserve months in advance by letter. Now that is class. The Eiffel Tower joint at the Paris Hotel on the Strip is classy, but a letter in advance is real class.”

“Real class,” Nicky repeated. “And e-mail may do it nowadays. You must remember that Van’s father was German.”

“Sorry,” Macho Mario commiserated with Van, who was now biting her lip from either fury or laughter. “Italian is much better.”

Nicky soldiered on. “So Van was just twelve when they had the tour, and there was a pedestal like this one, with a clear cube atop it, only it was actually really thick glass.”

“This Plexiglas here is better than glass.” Macho Mario rapped thick knuckles on the surface, making an interior liquid quiver creepily. “It’s lighter. More modern. More expensive. Not breakable.”

“Absolutely, Uncle Mario.”

“I buy the best.”

“Of course, but back to the Black Museum,” Nicky said.

“Did it have all these lights and sound effects, eh? Like a gangster movie?”

“No,” Van finally said, speaking for herself, “it was just a series of offices then, really, with some framed Jack the Ripper notes on the wall, an acid murderer’s claw-footed bathtub, and tables of confiscated homemade weapons, including Freddy Krueger’s clawed gloves from the American horror film series, with human blood on the razor-blade nails.”

“Yeah? I’m impressed. That Freddy the Ripper! What a hit man! Dressed up like a movie creep and doing the serial-cutter crawl through London.”

“That’s not what made the biggest impression on Van,” Nicky said.

“Nor the Victorian Inquisition–like S-and-M machinery,” Van muttered under her breath to Temple, whose eyes widened.

“What in that office suite of horrors did impress you so much, little lady?” Macho Mario inquired delicately. “A knitting-needle murder weapon?”

“No, Uncle Mario,” Van answered as coolly as only Van could. “It was the glass display cube so like this one, also filled with some liquid or other.”

Macho Mario glanced at the concrete-booted shinbones. “Death by water would have kinda terrified this guy before his end came,” he said. “I can see how it scared a little girl like you.”

“Nicky said the exhibit made the ‘biggest impression’ on me, not that it scared me.”

“No?” Macho Mario managed to sound both condescending and dubious.

“No,” Van said. “Something floated in the liquid, which was evidently a preservative: a severed human arm. Cut off here.” The edge of Van’s pale hand gave a light karate chop to her own upper arm. “Severed across the humerus bone. It had been floating there, flesh and fingers and all, for decades.”

“Ew,” somebody said, behind the inner circle gazing at the impaled bones.

Temple turned, surprised to find the speaker had been Spuds Lonnigan, the Three O’Clock Louie’s cook.

“I’ll never be able to boil another soup bone in my kitchen life,” he went on. “Why would the Brit cops have a severed arm on display?”

Van smiled. “They had crime scene fingerprints that they thought would match a German perpetrator. So they wired the Berlin police to send them the man’s fingerprints.”

“The man in question,” Nicky said, “happened to have been killed in a police shoot-out, so the German police cut off his right arm, packed it in dry ice, and shipped it to Scotland Yard.”

“But—” Macho Mario was almost speechless with confusion. “Why the whole arm? Why not just the hand, which would be, uh, cheaper to ship?”

“Teutonic efficiency,” Nicky explained, straight-faced. “The Black Museum guide explained the matter that way. Why skimp on body parts when you could as easily ship an arm as a hand. You’ll understand why I don’t cross my wife, Uncle Mario.”

“I guess not!” He wiped his palms nervously on his pant seams.

“A gruesome little trophy, this,” Temple agreed, gazing upon their own similar artifact, “and it has a genuine Las Vegas connection, likely mob. Until someone knows who and why that guy’s feet were encased in cement and dropped like an anchor in Lake Mead, though, it doesn’t command a lot of media interest. And that’s what you need to launch the announcement of a redone hotel.”

“You’re a snoop sister,” Macho Mario told Temple, with narrowed eyes. “You figure all that out.”

Eightball O’Rourke stepped up beside Temple. “I heard some long-gone mobsters favored the ‘Lake Mead footbath’ as a way to dump rivals or turncoat associates. That was in the forties, before the place became a tourist draw. So anything in the way of evidence on this guy’s bones was probably eaten away decades ago.”

“On the other hand,” Temple said, “solved cold cases are a hot ticket in both fact and fiction now. I’ll check with the coroner’s office. Forensics is much more sophisticated, and ID-ing a long-dead body would make a bigger tourist draw.”

Nicky surveyed the surrounding vintage cars and blown-up photographs.

“Great stories make museums, not exhibits,” he said. “We need to bring everything alive.”

At that moment, a figure in a huge photograph stepped away from the wall and sprayed the onlookers with … the neck of an electric guitar, as a sound track played screaming riffs, and the static photographs started streaming past as if everyone present was riding a carousel.

Which they were.

Even Van lost her composure enough to reach for Nicky’s support, at the same instant chrome stripper poles shot up from the floor, ready to be grabbed for balance. Nightclub booths also levitated around the moving circle’s edge. The Fontana brothers gestured the others into seats, then swung round the poles and seated themselves.

Santiago in his white pseudo zoot suit with his hopefully unloaded vintage tommy gun leaped between the rotating booths into the carousel’s center like a ringmaster.

“Sound,” he shouted into the din. “Motion. Surprise. This must look like a traditional museum but become an ‘amuseum.’ An amusement park that does not ‘park’ itself but takes you, the viewer—the ‘amusee’—places.”

Temple grabbed hold of a cocktail-table edge. The entire exhibit area was slowly screwing itself down to a lower level, the surrounding walls changing into black-and-white movie scenes, with Edward G. Robinson barking threats at the circling party as anonymous punks in trench coats and fedoras sprayed crescendos of gunfire into their midst.

There was only the slightest jerk as the elevator floor reached the lower level and stopped turning.

Leggy cocktail waitresses with aprons as small as their bar trays scissored their fishnet-hose-clad gams to the tables, setting down drinks in vintage lowball and small martini glasses.

Temple tried to name the drinks. The first to come to mind was … an old-fashioned. She thought she recognized some gin rickeys and Singapore Slings.

A flat-screen TV menu materialized from the middle of each booth’s table, flashing movie scenes of the available drinks clutched in some long-gone movie star’s black-and-white hand.

“Disneyland for adults,” Van declared, sipping her—Temple checked the flashing “pages” of filmed drinks—Tom Collins. “Everything’s animated.” Van eyed the six frozen-faced beauty-queen waitresses floating drinks down to tables occupied by the men in the party, while Santiago explained their video menus to them. “Except for the eye candy.”

“Gangsters gotta have that,” Nicky said.

“Vegas too.” Van glanced at Temple and sighed. “What do you think?”

“This is just the first stage Santiago proposed,” Nicky said. “It can always be redacted.”

Using that ridiculous word made Temple and Van laugh in tandem.

“We can always ‘redact’ Santiago,” Van added.

“Meanwhile,” Temple suggested, “let’s see what other media magic tricks he has to show us. I do like the sinking cocktail bar. Very post-Titanic.”

“Uncle Mario wanted a bank of Marriott-style bullet-shaped glass elevator cars with tufted white satin-lined doors to reach the underground level,” Nicky admitted to the women’s groans, “so I vote for the cocktail carousel myself.”

By then Santiago had reached their booth and swung into his sales routine.

“This is only a crude approximation yet. The Speakeasy bar and restaurant will be under the area of the hotel we just left. That offers necessary ventilation and crowd-control possibilities in case of disaster. This descending carousel is the cocktail area, of course, and beyond us, in the dark, Gangsters limos on rails will await passengers desiring an exciting trip to the Crystal Phoenix.

“These elderly gentlemen are becoming quite animated about the menu possibilities. Apparently, they have actually drunk some of these amusing old cocktails.”

The Glory Hole Gang members were indeed hashing over future entrée names on menus, and Temple was dreaming up a theme of bullet-hole-riddled online pages, with sound effects and videos, and Van’s face was still paler than her hair.

“Trends change constantly in the hospitality industry,” Van said at last. “What’s new quickly becomes ‘old hat,’ and what was forgotten becomes the new favorite. For a while.”

“Why, Miss von Rhine, could you possibly be talking about Santiago’s multimedia inventions?” the man himself asked.

“Eventually,” Van said, with a softening smile. “Everything moves so fast these days.”

“One would hope values would not,” Santiago said.

The word seemed odd coming from such a flamboyantly shallow persona, Temple thought.

Still, every artist in every media had to be a one-man or one-woman show these days, on the Internet, on Facebook, on Twitter—“on” all the time, everywhere. She’d even heard Matt complaining that the radio station wanted to move him “onto YouTube and beyond” their Web site.

“Let me show you,” Santiago suggested, “the darker possibilities ahead.”

His gel-slicked hair reflected the motion in the wall-cast videos as he nodded into the unlit direction of the proposed Chunnel of Crime.

As they walked forward, out of the elevator-cocktail area, work lights hanging above them glowed into life as they passed.

That caught the eyes on the cocktail carousel, where Nicky’s brothers were content to sit and sip and flirt with the waitresses dressed in pointy, short, and skimpy, patented Rat Pack sixties style. The Glory Hole Gang, though, couldn’t resist exploring the unknown dark for possible treasure. They deserted their drinks and came clattering after the disappearing party of four. So far, the lower depths of Gangsters were just that: a crude basement tunnel hacked from limestone.

“Love the ambience,” Nicky said. “Raw, real. We’d want to keep the earthy stone walls, dirt floor, dim lights, the sense of a primitive flouting of the supposed order and law above. Bathtub gin. Sin.”

“Nicky,” Van asked, “have you been tunneling through from the Phoenix already?”

“Ah, call it an investigative sampling,” he answered.

“Call it chutzpah,” Van said tartly. “So …”

She turned to the Glory Hole Gang, who’d regarded her with elaborate and even fearful courtesy since the introductions at the Crystal Phoenix. “… Am I to understand you five would look favorably upon reinventing Lake Mead’s popular Three O’Clock Louie’s restaurant as Three O’Clock’s Speakeasy subterranean bar and restaurant down here?”

“Ah …” Spuds, the short-order cook, rubbed his palms on his jeans’ side seams. “Yes, ma’am. All that deep frying is hard on the epidermis. I would be beholden if I could try a more varied and European, but kitschy, cuisine. I am a big fan of Julia Child and Wolfgang Puck. Something, uh, high-end, I mean. And fun.”

He winked, looking like Long John Silver in chef’s clothing.

Van blinked.

She turned to Temple. “Am I right in believing that your PR genes are eating all this up?”

Temple went with the flow. She rubbed her palms together, flexing her fingers and flashing her long, strong natural fingernails, painted Hyper Hussy Red, which was a bit toned down from her Scarlett-Woman toenail color.

“Yes, ma’am,” she decreed. “I could make this concept pop on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and every surviving newspaper online. Baaad is good. I’m thinking a downloadable temporary-tattoo page.”

Van’s delicate brows frowned ever so slightly. “Why the tunnel and riding the rails?”

Nicky, as usual, had an answer. “The average tourist can’t afford to rent a Gangsters limo for the whole evening. This way they invest in a kicky new-old drink and get a shot of speed and nostalgia in one bolt.”

“What about ventilation? Regulations? You’re talking an underground fast rail operation, no matter how short the distance.”

“We can handle it, Van,” Nicky urged. “We have the underground, Jackson Action Haunted Mine Ride okayed on the Crystal Phoenix end, and the rails are already laid. That’s why I brought in Santiago. He’s first and foremost a renowned and innovative architect. We’re lucky he’s interested in our rather limited project.”

“Nonsense, Nicky,” Santiago objected. “Las Vegas is a petri dish for architects. A playground. Anything goes.”

“Say,” Wild Blue Pike exclaimed as a new work light revealed more tunnel, “this sure reminds me of our mining days working the Silver Spoon out near Rabbit Hole Spring, don’t it, boys? This tunnel safe?”

“Of course.” Santiago was offended. “Everything above us and to the side has been shored up by steel struts. These ‘walls’ you see are concrete and stone aggregate, troweled on like hand-sculpted walls in houses. It only seems to be natural stone.”

“Waal, this don’t seem all that natural,” Cranky said, approaching a section.

He pulled a metal measuring tape off his worn leather belt and rapped it on the ersatz stone.

A small hollow knock sounded.

A Rat in Time Saves Nine Lives

Needless to say, I am always “all ears.”

And I am not alone. At the moment.

Miss Midnight Louise and I have been exploring the tunnel from the Crystal Phoenix side. “Spelunking,” I believe they call it.

I call it “looking for Elvis.”

Of course, I do not tell Missy Louise that. She is most skeptical on the subject of Elvis. She would better believe me if I said that Michael Jackson had appeared to me in the tunnel created a few seasons back. Actually, since that was named the “Jersey Joe Jackson Action Attraction,” I would not be surprised if the King of Pop had popped in to visit the King en route to rock ’n’ roll heaven.

I must say I am glad that a major concert career is not in my past or my future. It seems to be a fatal job choice.

This subterranean rendezvous was Miss Midnight Louise’s idea. She hissed the suggestion in my ear during the brouhaha of the Midnight family reunion at the police substation, whilst my parents (her grandparents) were squaring off.

“I have been eavesdropping in the Crystal Phoenix executive offices,” Louise informs me as we amble along in the almost-dark, following the steel tracks of the defunct Haunted Mine Ride portion of the attraction.

I spot a faint glow far ahead of us, but I do not wish to mention any lights at the ends of tunnels, because (1) it is a cliché, and I am nothing if not original, and (2) that has become a phrase synonymous with moving on to another existential plane, like death, and I do not intend to use my battle-sharp shivs for plucking a harp quite yet.

“Eavesdropping is admirable,” I admit, “and one of our species’ finest skills. The human observer sees us as flicking our ears against the incursions of vermin, when their banal maunderings are the object of our interest.”

“It is not very banal around the Crystal Phoenix of late,” Louise says dryly. “Not with Mr. Nicky and Miss Temple around to cook up new promotional schemes. Miss Van von Rhine and I have our mitts full keeping the lid on.”

“Never fear. I am here to supervise now.”

Miss Midnight Louise favors me with the sight of her tail high-flagging it ahead of me down the Chunnel of Crime-to-Be.

I remind myself that we are possibly—even probably—related and follow her in what you might call a disinterested way and I might call a darn shame.

The overhead work lights remind me of a night game of baseball or some other entertainment where human and feline interests meet. I must say the human recreational propensity for chasing balls of all sizes, from tiny golf ball to big basketball, is one of their most endearing qualities.

Even as I muse, Miss Midnight Louise can be seen to stop suddenly ahead.

She crouches and freezes.

I trot to catch up to her, but just as I arrive she bounds away.

I am too old to fall for this game!

I bound after her to the section of wall where she has landed.

Alas, by the time I hit the wall, she has bounded on, and I bounce off rough concrete like a Ping-Pong ball. Not the kind of sport I had in mind—me being the thing that is smacked, whacked, and dribbled.

(In fact, a bit of unleashed drool from the impact is now meandering down the hairs of my chinny chin chin.)

I pause to hastily tidy my moustache, shocked to see Miss Midnight Louise shooting along the base of the wall some thirty feet away. Luckily, she stops to start digging frantically, so I am able to come abreast of her.

Will I deliver a verbal thrashing!

Before I can get my growl wound up, I hear heavy footsteps approaching.

“Dig, you old fool!” Miss Midnight Louise admonishes me, when the snit should be on the other mitt. “They will never get the idea unless we ham it up like crazy.”

I agree that humans can be unbelievably dense, but am myself a bit puzzled.

“Dig!” she orders. “Unless you want your roommate to walk right past the entrance to the third tunnel.”

Third tunnel? What are number one and number two … ? No, I am not referring to the coy way people describe the major variations of dog doo-doo and dog dewatering.

We have tunnels from Gangsters and the Phoenix meeting in the middle.

Third tunnel?

I see only a crack in the seam where dirt floor meets plastered wall.

Then a small furry head pokes through.

I need no further invitation to scrape away with all shivs going like a circular saw. No dirty rat is going to move in on my territory, which is anywhere I happen to be.

“Louie!” a familiar oncoming female voice calls in shock behind me.

“Louise,” calls an even more shocked male voice.

“Dig until we bare dirt,” Miss Midnight Louise hisses into my ear hairs until they tickle. “They will not get the picture unless we draw out every last detail.”

“Must be mice,” I hear Macho Mario Fontana say, dismissing our prey.

Mice? My well-placed spitball would handle mice. We are talking bigger game here.

“Is the bigger one our Three O’Clock Louie?” I hear chubby Spuds Lonnigan inquire in a slightly breathless wheeze.

He is a fine one to mistake me for my older, fatter father! That is like the potbellied stove calling the cattle black. Or some such phrase.

I hear a sharp squeal from within the wall and see that Louise has pinned a long, hairless tail with her fanned front shivs.

“Rats,” my brilliant Miss Temple points out. “We will have to fumigate. No way Gangsters can run a restaurant down here until the entire rat population is completely eradicated.”

Murderous little thing, is she not?

That’s my roomie!

I lay a big mitt over Louise’s dainty one and pull back with one powerful jerk, revealing the entire rat. Case closed.