Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

Before I can do a karate chop to the neck, the rat’s racing claws kick something big and dusty out of its hole right into our faces.

We sneeze in tandem, our claws relaxing in one uncontrollable reflex moment.

Rats! Exhibit A is history. We step back, boxing our nostrils and vibrissae free of some pretty well-aged dirt and sand.

My Miss Temple approaches on her hind claws, aka spike heels, and bends to pick up the trash. Humans, even the best of them, are hard to figure sometimes.

It is obvious that Louise and I deserve to be picked up and made much of for our valiant effort to seek, find, and agitate vermin. Not that we would accept such namby-pamby fondling even when well deserved. We are professionals. Just buy us a steak and salmon dinner and call it quits.

Miss Temple unfolds the wad of paper.

“This looks like … a stock certificate.”

“Yeah?” Nicky asks. “That’s worth about a penny these days.”

Miss Van von Rhine stretches out a hand. “Let me see.”

The light is dim, but long, tall Pitchblende O’Hara steps up and produces a tiny high-intensity flashlight.

“This and a Swiss Army knife are always in my jeans,” he explains.

Miss Van von Rhine quirks a smile at her confident spouse.

“You’d be wrong, Nicky. This isn’t as old as it looks, and it looks less like a stock certificate and more like a bearer bond.”

“Bearer bond?” Miss Temple asks. “Is that worth anything?”

“Ten thou,” Mr. Nicky says, taking it to stretch the crumpled paper smooth, “to anyone who holds it in his hand.”

“Or hers,” Van says, taking custody.

Girls can be so possessive.

Love Connection

It was early evening by the time Temple returned to her Circle Ritz condo. She was still a having a brain attack that made her stomach turn cartwheels. What an amazing turn of events! What a PR break, if she handled it right.

She had to slow down and think. She had to call Matt.

First, though, she had to take a shower and blast the plaster and limestone dust off her epidermis and out of her hair. The showerhead installed over the vintage bathtub was a fancy chrome “waterfall” type, expensive and European-made. Its warm, tingling downpour rinsed her right off. Yup. She was enjoying one of Max’s upgrades of the premises. She so did want to wash that man’s memory out of her hair.

Perhaps only leaving the condo that had initially been “theirs” would end the unwanted memory reruns. Matt’s unit was too small for two, though. Unless Electra would let them remodel two units into one, they might have to move out. Darn. Rip Midnight Louie from his charming Circle Ritz home? Unthinkable!

Temple, now double-wrapped in a huge Crystal Phoenix bath towel (perk of the job), padded barefoot and dripping into the main room. She threw herself down on the living room couch and picked up her iPhone to dial Matt’s cell phone. No answer.

He often turned it off when traveling, perhaps the only annoying habit he had. When Matt was on camera on a major TV talk show, he sure didn’t want a ring tone broadcasting over the air, even though Temple had installed Leonard Cohen’s awesome “Hallelujah” and it was pretty playable.

She left a message, part love note and part incoherent job report, disappointed. Matt always had long business dinners at fancy places when he was in Chicago, so they often didn’t connect until midnight or later.

Temple couldn’t wait that long. She was bubbling over with ideas and anxieties (wasn’t that always the way?) and needed to run them by someone she could trust. What she was planning was risky to the point of being a hokey failure, but her job depended on selling her bosses and the public on her thinking. A consultant always needed someone close to consult.

Matt’s room phone rang and rang.

She tried the cell phone again. If the dinner ran late and the wine had been primo, she knew Matt would call her on the room phone from bed. He knew she liked to wake up to his voice, and while it wasn’t totally phone sex, it was sweet-little-nothing sex that left them glowing and intimately connected, long-distance.

Matt’s experience hosting The Midnight Hour radio call-in program had made him a sex symbol to thousands of women, and Temple had that smooth baritone on personal speed-dial. She indulged in a little shiver that cooled down her overactive brain.

Temple kept her old-fashioned line phones because they were cozier to cuddle up to and she used a headset on her cells for business calls. She didn’t want to get brain cancer from long cell phone calls. Well, it could happen! Besides, her longtime bedroom phone was shaped like a red spike-heeled shoe and she’d never give it up.

Temple jumped up and went to her tiny black-and-white kitchen that would wake up a narcoleptic. She opened the refrigerator and stared inside, then did the same with all her cupboards. She hadn’t eaten dinner but she was too jumpy to find anything appetizing … except her absent fiancé.

Back to the living room to scan the day’s newspaper.

She jumped up again in five minutes and did an all-room under, inside, and above search for Midnight Louie. At least she could tell him her plans. He listened with remarkable attentiveness and intelligence and only yawned occasionally during her monologues.

But the only black body hairs and rare white whisker she could find were throwaways. Who knew where he’d gone after the hubbub in the Chunnel of Crime-to-be?

Back to the kitchen. Caramel corn. No! Blueberry yogurt. No. Try the phones again. No answer.

She finally went to bed without supper, all alone without her iPhone. She found a terrible sixties movie on a bottom-feeder cable channel and watched it until her eyes crossed and her nerves flatlined and … she went to sleep.

The old-fashioned ring from the bedside phone gave her the expected but still pleasant little shock.

“Oooh, is this my secret midnight caller?” she cooed into the shoe phone’s toe, only then realizing something might have gone wrong at the Phoenix and midnight was prime time there.

Matt’s laugh was low. “Hi, Lolita. This is Lonesome calling. You sound all sleepy and warm.”

“And I’m only wearing a towel.”

“You just showered?”

“No, hours ago, but I went to bed early just so you could wake me up.”

“I could wake you up a lot more if I were there.”

“I know. So it was a late dinner? I left messages on all your phones.”

“The cell’s on off in my jacket pocket, but I saw your red light blinking on the hotel phone the second I got in. You must be ready for business.”

“For you, always.” Temple let her voice exit intimate mode. “But I really do have business to talk over with you.”

“So you’ve been so frantic to reach me just for … business?”

She started to explain, but he interrupted.

“Actually, Temple, I might have some work stuff to discuss with you before this trip ends. So what’s up besides me?”

“Oh, really? You just made me forget what I was going to say.”

“Small chance. I can hear your PR vibes revving up even now. Spill.”

“Okay. I’ve got this really wild idea for promoting Nicky Fontana’s mob-style update of the Phoenix ex-underground attraction and Gangsters Hotel and Casino. Guess what we found in the under-construction tunnel connecting the two properties today?”

He knew better than to guess and she rattled on.

“It’s so incredible. Midnight Louie and Louise found it, chasing a rat into a hole and digging out an old bearer bond for ten thousand dollars!”

“Louie stuck in a paw and pulled out a plum?”

“Financially speaking. Van said bearer bonds never lose their value. Whoever holds ’em can cash ’em.”

“I imagine Louie and Louise were relieved of their find?”

“They may be smart, but they don’t have bank accounts. Van has the bond now, but one of the Glory Hole Gang thought the side wall was hollow in one spot, and the workmen went at it with pneumatic drills and the Glory Hole Gang grabbed pick axes and the noise and dirt were atrocious, but they uncovered a buried vault door right in the middle of the tunnel! I mean a bank-style, heavy-metal vault door. Locked. Can you imagine if the vault is stuffed with bearer bonds and silver dollars?”

“Big news,” Matt agreed. “What are you going to do with it, Ace?”

“The workmen chipped away all the concealing construction and I got this idea.”

“Obviously.”

“Given the legends about the Phoenix’s own Jersey Joe Jackson hiding stashes of cash and silver dollars in and around Vegas, I want the workmen to open the vault in full media presence. The public loves the idea of buried treasure, so the ‘opening’ should bring out all the syndicated media from Los Angeles as well as all the usual suspects in Vegas. Nicky could not buy better exposure. But I need to get the whole setup together really fast. What do you think?”

“I think you’re brilliant. If anyone can pull this off, you can.”

“It might be a real tangle who gets the money, but that’s up to the powers-that-be to decide.”

“True, but I think you should get a bonus.”

“Bonuses are good. That would help with the bridesmaids’ costs for the wedding.”

“Bridesmaids, plural? You are planning on a big production.”

“I always plan on a big production, keep that in mind.”

“I do, I do.”

“And that’s what you’ll be repeating at the altar. Gee, I hope I’m not biting off more than I can chew here.”

“You’re talking about the unveiling of the vault again, I hope.”

“Yeah.” Temple suddenly felt a nasty, aching gnaw in her stomach. Cold feet?

“What’s the worst that could happen?” she asked him.

She answered her own question before he could.

“The worst that could happen is that vault could be absolutely empty.”

“I’ll say a prayer that it isn’t,” Matt promised.

“Thank you, Matt!”

The Deity having been invoked, they wound up the conversation with a few innocent but extended good-byes, and Temple hung up.

The gnawing feeling in her stomach wasn’t cold feet about anything. Apparently her nervous fit was over. She knew her course.

She jumped out of bed, heading for the main room and the kitchen.

She was starved! Starved for … blueberry yogurt with a crisp topping of … caramel corn.

Whose Vault Is It?

Temple found it impossibly nerve-racking to have all of Fontana, Inc. peering over her shoulder, including Van von Rhine.

Not that Temple’s shoulders were broad or high enough to keep a grasshopper from kibitzing over them.

“You’re sure we went with the right announcer?” Van asked.

Underground, in the hard-surfaced tunnel, her hushed whisper carried as if she were yelling through a megaphone.

Not to worry. The announcer was absorbed in fussing with the tiny earphone in one ear and eyeing himself in a mirror the prop girl was holding up.

“Is this all the camera-power opening Bugsy Siegel’s vault could pull?” Macho Mario Fontana demanded from behind Temple’s other shoulder.

“It’s all the major stations as far as L.A. and several national news feature shows, including Excess Hollywood,” Temple assured every Fontana ear within hearing, which included Nicky and eight of his brothers, who formed an impressive crowd on their own. “Everybody’s pooling camera teams now. Recession.”

“Recession!” Macho Mario ridiculed. “In my day we had goddamn real Depressions, not these pansy recessions.”

“Watch the political correctness,” Nicky growled.

“Now I can’t even say the word Depression?”

“It’s the flower thing, Zio Mario,” Julio put in as the second-oldest and therefore bravest nephew on site.

“I will call a g-d daffodil a daffodil. And who is this limp-wrist holding the microphone? I wanted someone with authority, like Robert Stack or Charlton Heston.”

“They’re dead.” Julio broke the news.

“No kidding? And they didn’t even announce it on TV? The world is going to the bloodhounds.”

Temple didn’t want to admit she shared the paterfamilias’s anxiety.

She’d wanted Geraldo Rivera, but he’d been booked.

At least she’d found someone who remembered who Geraldo Rivera was.

Basically, this job required a huckster who deeply believed in his own seriousness.

Meanwhile, the pneumatic hammers drilled into the rock surrounding the massive metal door of the vaunted “vault.”

Rock shards littering the packed dirt floor and the support structure’s wooden ribs made this section of tunnel feel like the belly of a petrified whale. The vault had been sited halfway between Gangsters’ and the Crystal Phoenix’s stoutly supported tunnel of faux-rock mine walls bolted into strong concrete beneath.

Everybody present wore hard hats, including the videographers toting large cameras on their shoulders, giving them Alien monster silhouettes.

The Phoenix’s section had built-in temperature controls, but this new area was the last freshly excavated bit from the Gangsters side and oddly combined hot and cold spots. It felt dank, but also steamy.

Temple figured a little sweat added to the ambience, and it certainly made the drill operators’ tan, muscled, bare arms look wrestling-ring ready. Two of the four videographers were female and were not missing panning the local color.

Somehow Crawford Buchanan, self-proclaimed local “personality,” radio vagabond, and perpetrator of cheesy events usually involving underage females, was the exact right figure to ballyhoo the forthcoming mystery revelation. His short stature, black suit, and gel-slathered, black-streaked white pompadour made him an “anti”-Santiago. It also brought a funereal gravity to an operation that threatened to reveal … “Bugsy Siegel’s vault, folks. This massive rusted steel door has been dated to be at least forty years old,” he shouted into the mike over the racket of spitting faux rock and concrete.

“You know the story of Al Capone’s Chicago vault, found decades after his death and famously broken into on live television with Geraldo Rivera at the microphone in nineteen eighty-six. No? Forgotten about that? Let me fill you in.”

Buchanan began pacing in front of the looming steel vault door.

“Capone took over the Chicago Outfit in nineteen twenty-five, before Vegas was a glimmer in the mob’s eye. He was a primo mob boss. He planned the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre and ran the operation from a suite in the Lexington Hotel until he was arrested for income-tax evasion in nineteen thirty-one. Capone was kaput.”

Temple was wishing by now that Crawford was kaput. Every bit of this exposition could be cut, and probably would be.

“So, folks,” Buchanan continued, “the old Lexington Hotel was long overdue for renovation by the eighties. When a surveying crew comes in, what do they find? A series of secret tunnels. Yes, folks, tunnels just like this one linking Gangsters with the far older former Joshua Tree Hotel-Casino, where Jersey Joe Jackson holed up until his death. And in those Chicago tunnels, they found escape routes to local taverns and brothels. They even found a shooting range! And rumors of a secret vault beneath the hotel.” His radio baritone deepened into a thrilling basso: “Just. Like. This. One.”

Crawford straightened his slight frame even as his voice grew deeper and more powerful.

“By then, Geraldo Rivera himself was kaput. He’d been fired by ABC, but he cooked up a comeback broadcast, a two-hour live special program of opening that vault. Thirty million people and standing-by IRS agents and a medical examiner watched, breathless to find Capone’s buried riches or bodies.

“Inside the finally-opened vault? Nothing. It was empty, but Rivera’s career was revived.

“And, don’t forget. This is Vegas, babies! We’ve already had a notorious vault excavated and found it stuffed with treasure, if not bodies. Vegas’s shady founding father, Benny Binion, had a son named Ted, probably killed because of a massive vault buried in the desert, which authorities opened on his death in nineteen ninety-eight. The vault was … crammed with six tons of silver bullion. Six tons! Not to mention scads of chips and paper currency and piles of uncirculated mint Carson City silver dollars, more than a hundred thousand, worth millions. And that was only a decade or so ago.”

This recital was actually causing some onlooker jaws to drop, including Temple’s. She glanced around. Even Santiago’s eyes were glinting with speculation. This tunnel was his playground at the moment… . Might he find more vaults?

Maybe there was something fabulous inside this vault.

“Remember,” Buchanan egged on his now-actually-spellbound audience, “for the last century, Vegas remained a playground for outlaws, from train robbers to mobsters to corporate shysters.”

Buchanan was in full flight of fancy, covering all bases.

“This is not Al Capone’s vault and maybe not even Bugsy’s vault, but it may be Jersey Joe Jackson’s. He died supposedly broke, atop this very ‘hunka hunka burnin’ hidden treasure. Remember? One of Jackson’s reputed stashes of mint silver dollars worth millions was discovered a few years ago deep in the desert. Imagine what the cagey old fart would have buried in his own backyard!

“We’re talking fast-buck operators from the Vegas founding era, when Bugsy and his Jersey-Joey-come-lately desert empire-builder pal, Jackson, were putting up the Flamingo and the Joshua Tree Hotels,” Buchanan went on. “We know Bugsy was shot dead in his girlfriend’s Beverly Hills living room, but Jersey Joe literally faded away in Vegas, just a few hundred feet from and above this very spot. He died in a modest suite in his abandoned Joshua Tree Hotel—”

Temple considered it a Howard Hughes story gone very wrong, much sooner.

“—a hotel now risen from the ashes as the glamorous Crystal Phoenix.”

Temple also considered that finding that desert cache unfortunately unmasked Jackson as a cheating member of the Glory Hole Gang of prospectors.

The surviving gang members were all on site now, grizzled and creaky but still possessing camera-ready grins. Their colorful, Old Vegas presence had really helped roust the media for this admittedly hoary and hokey stunt à la Geraldo’s highly hyped The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault.

Sensationalism was the name of the media game in print or on film these days, and retro was popular … again.

Macho Mario had made it plain to all comers that he was personally hoping that the opened vault would reveal a scantily clad pinup-girl poster on the inside of the door, number one. Then a fortune of some kind.

The surprise existence of the vault was genuine. It predated the Crystal Phoenix excavation and was located beyond the area the hotel had cleared. Although a rat hole circled it, the vault door was sealed tight as a submarine’s engine room.

Temple would forgo pinup girls, but some souvenirs from the Titanic, say, would be most welcome. Even some more vintage silver dollars. Jersey Joe was rumored to have had more than one stashing spot, and the area above them had been raw desert back in the fifties.

The shrill drone of the drills slipped into another range of shriek.

With a crack, the locking mechanism gave way. The metal door’s huge hinges slipped, sending up clouds of stone and metal powder from the surrounding structure.

Fontana brothers frantically clapped the dust from their immaculate silk-blend dark suits, now the same pale color as the powder.

“Pay dirt!” Crawford Buchanan bellowed, pushing Pitchblende O’Hara and Wild Blue Pike aside to jerk on the gleaming brass spoked wheel that would open the door.

Nothing happened. He jumped up and down on the spokes like a monkey on a stick.

Nothing moved.

“Now, there,” said Macho Mario, his stocky figure in Fontana signature threads pushing to the fore, “I’m head of the family. I’ll do the honors.”

He grabbed the huge loosened wheel and tugged. Then he grunted and twisted. Finally, he fell back, panting.

“I thought you cut through the lock,” he yelled at the sweat-streaming workmen who had dutifully ebbed aside to let the big shots claim the glory.

Everyone stared, stymied, at the metal powder-dusted door.

Then, while no one was trying, it slowly edged ajar four inches.

“Jersey Joe’s ghost!” Crawford shouted. “Human hands were not touching the handle just now. I was watching and swear it.”

Absolutely true. The hovering videographers focused for a close-up of the waist-high mechanism.

Temple’s brow crimped with consternation. This was a great effect, but someone must have engineered it. There would be hell to pay when the media realized that. Being short, she looked down, wondering if a concealed chain of some sort had been attached to the door base.

A motion at the door’s very bottom caught her eye. A black cat muzzle retreated from the opening.

No, Temple thought. Impossible. Midnight Louie had “nosed” the metal door open? From the inside?

She watched his black form slip out and vanish unnoted among the videographers’ jean-clad legs as they jockeyed to film the ajar door, not the exiting cat.

Nicky took matters into his hotel owner’s hands and stepped up to jerk on the immobile metal spokes with both fists. That old Fontana-brother magic still worked. The bank-vault-thick door groaned open with a clank befitting Marley’s ghost … and out came … walked … another black cat, to Temple, anyway, the first giant step for catkind to all the other witnesses.

Midnight Louise sat in the opening and yawned.

“Someone’s already breached the vault,” Eightball O’Rourke accused. “This isn’t any debut opening. It’s a setup job.” He glared at Crawford Buchanan.

Temple pushed to the forefront, even though she might accidentally and unprofessionally appear on camera.

“This vault was not accessible beforehand,” she insisted. “We checked it last night and again this morning.”

“Stop the fussing and see what’s inside,” Eightball O’Rourke urged. “You folks call yourself media, but you don’t have the curiosity of that little cat there. Now that’s better, but don’t trample her. That’s the Crystal Phoenix mascot.”

“Midnight Louise?” Van von Rhine’s soprano suddenly cried into the milling people and rising dust. “Don’t hurt her!”

Temple herself was pushed aside by Crawford Buchanan as he elbowed through the narrow opening. She didn’t see Louise underfoot anywhere.

“I got it!” Buchanan crowed, his voice echoing off metal. “I’m inside. Whoo! What a rank whiff. I sure hope paper money doesn’t mildew. Get me some light here.”

In seconds, the press of light-bearing workmen and videographers had pushed the heavy door open wide and rinsed the dazzling silver metal interior with light.

It illuminated a room-sized empty safe, all right, except it wasn’t empty.

Gasps echoed in the sodden air.

“Let me out!” Buchanan ground the Cuban heels of his pimp shoes into Temple’s tender instep as he stampeded past. “It smells like a cat box in there.”

By now everyone had stopped crowding and yelling in the opening.

By now every eye, human or mechanical or digital, had fixed on the rotund corpse of a man in white tie and tails who lay oddly but stiffly splayed on the red satin lining of his evening cloak on the safe’s steel-gray metal floor.

His white gloves, cane, and a top hat that lay on its glossy black side were arrayed near his pale, bloated features.

“What a rip-off!” someone yelled. “It’s a wax dummy.”

That certain “someone” had been Crawford Buchanan.

As usual, he was terribly wrong.

Someone else had to do something. Temple guessed it was up to her.

She stepped forward, ripped the mike from Crawford’s clammy yet clutching grip, and considered bending down to press her fingers against the formal gentleman’s carotid artery just above the high starched collar.

Overkill, so to speak, she decided.

Obviously, the man was as cold and unmoving as a still photo, yet definitely not made of wax. He was dead. Morally, ethically, spiritually and physically, positively and absolutely, undeniably and reliably and most sincerely … dead.

Shock had turned everyone present into stone. Then the videographers all rushed forward, grunting to seize the best camera angle.

A wall of expensive dark tailoring materialized in front of them, blocking Temple from being overrun. A six-foot wall of gangster-suited muscle between her and a media feeding frenzy was even more welcome than silver dollars.

When she spoke she knew she was heard but not seen, and that was fine with her too.

“I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen of the media. We need to clear the scene and call the police. No more filming.”

Like a row of ultradressy football linemen, the brothers Fontana swayed en masse this way and that to block all camcorders and cell-phone cameras.

One cell phone bobbing up and down was clutched in Buchanan’s pasty hand.

He, unfortunately, was definitely and indubitably not dead.

Road to Ruin

“This whole blasted island is only the size of Wisconsin.”

“Indiana, actually,” Gandolph corrected.

Max knew he’d sounded cranky just then and had deserved correction for that, if not his geography. His whole body ached from a mere three-hour flight and now this drive across half of Ireland. If he took a wrong turn and needed to reverse direction, his shoulders ached so much he had to turn the car around in several moves on the narrow road. So much for the aftermath of grand gestures. He found it easier to admit to being a mental grouch than a physical one. Call it the House syndrome. Wait! That was a television show popping up in his memory. Old or new?

Gandolph must have put up with a lot from him, because he continued speaking in a calm, professorial way. “Ireland is a small nation; always was, Max, but it always loomed large in your personal history.”

“Where am I actually ‘from,’ Garry?”

The older man sighed. Older people often did that. Trouble was, Max was so inclined himself these days.

“Your birth family was … is … in Wisconsin.”

“ ‘Birth’ family? I’m adopted?”

“No, not at all. After Sean’s loss, you adopted a number of foreign lands, a different future, and a different family, which you constructed piece by piece. It was all your choice. Forced upon you, but a choice, nevertheless. A hard choice. Especially for a boy, not a man.”

Max stomped on the brakes so the modest family car, the Mondeo, did a dramatic TV-chase U-y. Only when they were facing the opposite direction on the deserted country two-lane did Max realize his immature gesture might have strained an older man’s neck. Good thing they’d left the major highway, the “colorfully” (not) named M1, to find a quaint place (or a good bush) for a rest stop.

“Sorry,” Max said. “I’m acting like an ass.”

Garry blinked, then chuckled. “So what’s new? Glad to see the old form is still there.”

The man Max still often thought of as Gandolph the Great massaged his nape. He wore a soft wool scarf over his suit jacket. Garry Randolph, past seventy, had far more reason to ache than Max did, or at least to complain about it.

“Why,” Max asked softly, “do I get the idea you know me way too well?”

“Somebody has to, Max. You’ve always been Mr. Mystery to everybody who cared to know you.”

“ ‘Cared to know’ me. Am I that bad?”

“That … demanding. Never more of anyone than of yourself.”

Gandolph—and Max now focused on the older man as a magician in the classical sense of a mage, like the wizard Gandalf his stage name played upon—shook his head.

“You’re a hard case, Max Kinsella, but hard times made you so. Why do you think we’re following the sad trail of Kathleen O’Connor?”

“She’s an irresistible siren, that girl renamed Rebecca. I remember the movie.”

“Just the movie? There were several TV versions as well.”

“Rebecca was a beauty, but she was an evil woman, a manipulator, a man-eater,” Max said.

“Granted. Notorious women leave longer legends than noble ones.”

“And dead before the novel began, yet she had more vitality even when dead than the novel’s pallid nameless heroine.”

“That was the point, my boy. Evil can be not only attractive but vital. Some women are poison.”

Max glanced at his mentor as the accelerating Mondeo clung to a curve. “You have Revienne in mind?”

“Don’t you? Oh, what a lovely candidate for a femme fatale. Blonde. Beautiful. French, but don’t forget she’s half German. Easy for her to be at war with herself. I know nothing about this woman, Max, except her impressive résumé as a psychiatrist. When I discovered she was associated with the sanitarium I whisked you to in desperation, I seized upon her services. I knew every step of the way it could all have been set up by whoever attempted to kill you back at the Neon Nightmare club in Vegas. Or not. It’s hard to believe any man would encounter two she-devils before he was thirty-five.”

“And Kathleen O’Connor was indeed demonic?”

“After our visit to the Convent of the Little Flower near Dublin and a glimpse into its presumed impious prisoners, wouldn’t you have been?”

“Unbelievable how past wrongs keep raising their monstrous heads. I remember reading about the Irish institutional abuses a decade ago, and here they are making headlines again.”

“Victims never forget. And … it’s easier to track records, and people, now.”

Max glanced at the open netbook on Gandolph’s lap. “You find anything online on Kathleen as opposed to the downtrodden Rebecca?”

“Kathleen O’Connors are as common as grains of sand on a beach, in Ireland or out. We’ll have to rely on personal interviews with old enemies. Next stop, Belfast and any ex-IRA men we can turn up.”

“You’re sure they’re ‘ex’? I do remember headlines about pub bombings and outrages against innocents in my vague ‘way back when’ youth.”

“You don’t remember family? Where you lived? Wisconsin? A street? The house?”

“Pieces. As if Picasso had played Guernica with images of my past. A long empty echoing hall, in a school or possibly a church. Snow covering a looming pair of fir trees in a front yard. Concrete stairs and a metal railing to a white-painted door. Midwestern, it looked. I felt more at home on the Alpine meadows, come to think of it.”

“You were on the run. That’s been half your life, the most recent life. No faces from your past haunt you?”

“No faces. It’s as if someone had erased the most intimate parts of my memories.”

“You’re sure Revienne didn’t drug you? Hypnotize you?”

“No. How could I be sure she didn’t? I stayed off the pain pills and injections in the Swiss clinic as soon as I was conscious, but anything could have been pumped into my mind or veins before that. My apparent memory loss could be totally induced.”

“That’s the Max I remember. Always suspicious.”

“Not a fun guy.”

“Not now. You used to be amusing company.”

“I don’t know whether to be relieved or insulted. When did we stop keeping company?”

“Just over two years ago. We split up when you got the Vegas hotel job. You’d met Temple Barr in Minneapolis, and it was love at first sight.”

“Wasn’t I … more careful then?’

“Not about her. You whisked her away from her native city and family to live in sin with you in Vegas while you headlined a magic show at the Goliath. I, and our employers, understood you deserved a life. Hiding behind the magician persona had always been a natural cover for you. I was relieved we both seemed to have ‘retired’ due to true love, and I resumed my long-ago hobby of unmasking fraudulent psychics.”

“A contradiction in terms, isn’t that last?”

“So I’ve always found, but I have hopes. Anyway, your redheaded girlfriend got involved promoting a hokey Vegas Halloween séance in which I was playing the undercover patsy … and you came along eventually to safeguard her, so I had to fake my own death.”

“A true Gandalf.”

“I’ve always been Gandolph. What do you mean by true?”

“The book! Even I remember The Lord of the Rings. You took your stage name from the wizard Gandalf the Grey, right? He appeared to die in the novels and then came back.”

“Really? Sounds more like your role in Las Vegas, if you ever revisit the place. That ‘revival’ thing is just a bizarre coincidence. I didn’t actually read the books. Do you know how long each of the three is? I plucked the Gandalf mojo out of the popular-culture air ages ago. My last name was Randolph. I needed a ‘magical’ moniker. ‘Gandolph.’” Garry chuckled and patted the hair at his temples. “Time did make me ‘Gandolph the Grey,’ though.”

Max chuckled too.

Chuckled. His mood was improving. No wonder he’d partnered with this guy.

“This route doesn’t seem familiar,” Max complained ten minutes later. “Sean and I had to have taken the M1 heading north before.”

“It shouldn’t,” Gandolph said. “Times have changed. I’m tracking our route on a Yahoo! map on my computer. The M1 wasn’t much of anything when you and your cousin made your way north. How? Hitchhiking, perhaps? Once you had ID’d and targeted the three IRA members who’d blown up O’Toole’s Pub and killed Sean, among six other victims, my job was to recruit you and get you off the island and onto the Continent for concealment and training. You were on the IRA’s most-wanted list for years.”

“When did that change?”

“Officially? Ages ago, as international grudges go. Since the Good Friday Agreement was signed by the British and Irish governments in nineteen ninety-eight, most of the politically motivated violence tapered off. International repugnance for the horror of nine/eleven finished off the ‘Troubles’ the way hundreds of years of relentless hatred and undying hope could not. The IRA has evaporated except for last-gasp ‘alternate’ groups. Recently, Belfast was named the safest city in the UK.”

Max snorted. “My memory is dysfunctional, not my nose for political hatred. The English have tried to destroy the Irish for almost five hundred years. And vice versa. Enmity is in the blood.”

“Quite true, Max, but it can’t compete with fundamental Islam’s jihad against Christian nations, for longevity. Give the Irish credit for knowing when they’re outgunned. At any rate, Belfast is the new tourist hot spot.”

“That bridge toll I paid near Drogheda?”

Gandolph nodded. “That was for crossing the Bridge of Peace. Less than two euros a car. You didn’t even notice.”

“It was a bloody highway toll. They’re as common as grass.”

“Exactly. We’ve crossed the border. You didn’t notice the changes in signage.”

Max looked around wildly. “It can’t be that simple. I may not remember much, but even my aching bones know that.”

“It won’t be simple,” Gandolph said, “but it at least will be possible now.”

Max spotted a pub sign. The place was stage-Irish rustic and called Durty Mulligan’s.

“That looks like a fine place to get stewed,” Max quipped.

Gandolph ran a vein-knotted hand through his pepper-dusted white hair. “Ah, it’s like old times again, without the imminent danger.”

“Are you sure?”

Gandolph shrugged. “No one’s had time to fix on us and figure out our mission. For now, we can eat, drink, and be merry, eh?” He eyed the attractive pub that had probably been put up five years ago.

“And you can catch me up even more on my forgotten past,” Max said.

“I said ‘be merry.’ Time enough for business when we’re back on the road.”

Once they were seated over a pint in the Belfast pub, though, Gandolph revved up his computer.

“We should have been doing this in the Temple Bar area of Dublin,” he said wryly.

“When I didn’t even know who she was and that we’d had a … serious connection? Even smacking me in the face with her name in foot-high gold letters didn’t trip my memory trigger. You’d think if our love affair was that intense, I’d remember it.

“And why do all these things come wireless nowadays?” Max asked, unable to keep an irritable edge out of his voice. He felt both antsy and reluctant. “It’s intrusive, and we could be tracked.”

Did he want to see the Web site of this “Temple Barr” in Dublin’s fair city or Belfast or anywhere on the globe? If she was his “lost love,” he had forgotten that fast enough to sleep with a sleek, mysterious blonde of the possibly traitorous sort, who could have seduced an alpine walking stick.

So all he’d get out of perusing his past now was looking at a woman betrayed, thanks to His Truly. Or Untruly, rather.

Garry … Gandolph, starting to look familiar and trustworthy, was as eager as a boy, though, bringing up the “Web page” as if unveiling a magical feat. Even Max knew the old guy was behind the times, more at sea at these tech things than how Max himself would be with an intact memory. His rush of affection made plain that he needed to keep that superior knowledge from his mentor.

Temple Barr, a memorable name for a PR woman, had chosen to use a Web site photo of herself taken against the huge stone creature statues on the floor of Vegas’s McCarran Airport. Max was shocked to instantly identify the place, but not the person. What kind of a cad was he?

“She’s … cute,” he couldn’t keep from commenting in his dazed monotone.

Gandolph laughed. “Damn cute. What a disappointment, Max! You’re making the same first-glance mistake most people do about her.”

“I don’t think I ever did ‘cute,’ even in my right mind.”

Gandolph turned the laptop to eye the image. “Then your right mind is an ass. I never worried about you sleeping with her. That Continental blonde … pretty poison maybe.”

Max spun the laptop to face himself again. “Pretty cute,” he said on second look. “Nice hair. She looks … petite.”

“Natural redhead, but she’s toned it down since I last saw her. Or you did. Five feet zero. You can see the high heels.”

Max hit Alt + to focus close-up and personal.

“Great ankles, not to mention arches curved enough to turn foot fetishist for.”

“Max!”

“Just saying I do find her attractive in some ways.”

“You’re not a foot fetishist.”

“Could have fooled me.” He worked his way up the close-up image like a street-corner Romeo. “Sweet figure, if you like miniatures.” While Gandolph cradled his unbelieving head with closed eyes in his hand, Max finally focused on the face and smiled. “You give up too soon on people also, Garry. I see it now. Smart. Feisty. Tenacious.”

Gandolph glanced over.

“She’s a pistol, isn’t she?” Max suggested.

“You haven’t completely lost your mind.”

Max nodded. “Not yet.” He hit the Alt – until Temple Barr became fairy-tiny on the sterile, hard-surfaced, long-shot background of McCarran Airport. “She’s far away and long ago, Garry.” He sighed. “I feel nothing earthshaking. I feel nothing. ‘It was in another country. And besides, the wretch is dead.’ ” He paraphrased a famous line from the Elizabethan play The Jew of Malta.

“I won’t allow you to become so cynical, Max. I know you’re directing that quote back on yourself. The original line was, ‘the wench is dead.’ So you’re really talking about the late Kathleen O’Connor, once aka Rebecca. I assure you that Temple Barr is far from dead and far too many aeons away from being a mere ‘wench’ to be forgotten so easily. I’d bet she’s not given you up for dead, either.”

“You mentioned I had a rival there anyway.”

Garry took back the laptop grimly and typed a few short letters into the search engine. He turned the resulting Web page and image back to Max, who rolled his eyes.

“Pretty too,” he said acerbically, eyeing Matt Devine’s professionally taken head shot on the WCOO-FM radio Web site. “They make a photogenic match. Miss Temple is way better off without me and my bum legs and blasted mind. Shut this damn thing down, and let’s get deeper into the new, PR-polished Belfast you’ve been bragging about.”

Gandolph held the laptop open despite Max’s thrust to close it.

“ ‘Pretty too.’ Can’t disagree. Handsome and a really nice guy, from what I’ve learned. Matt Devine, radio advice personality. Maybe you’re doing the noble thing by leaving them to their own ignorant devices… .”

Max snorted with disdain.

“Ex-priest …”

Max’s eyes narrowed with disbelief. “This smoothy media personality?”

“And relatively recent knifing victim of Kathleen O’Connor, henceforth christened Kitty the Cutter by your ex, the ‘cute’ redhead.”

“Kathleen was in Las Vegas?”

“Looking for you. She never succeeded. You found her, dead, first.”

Max said nothing. Until …

“‘Kitty the Cutter’? The redhead’s got a quick mouth and mind on her. The ex-priest didn’t kill easy?”

Gandolph shook his head. “Glancing wound. Kitty was looking for you and found you too elusive. So she found him.”

“So. My mea culpa. Again. He bled for my sins. He should thank me. A scar makes him much more interesting. ‘Kitty,’” he repeated, finally laughing. “‘Kitty the Cutter.’ I like that little redheaded girl.”

“You always did.”

“And she liked me?”

“She did. Maybe still does, although you appeared to run out on her for an inexcusable second time.” Gandolph glanced at the screen. “He was a good priest, from what I learned. Left formally, and celibate.”

“In his … what, early thirties? Isn’t that too Sleeping Beauty to believe?”

“Believe it. I’m guessing he loved Temple from the moment he met her. It was first love on his part, but you were in the way.”

Silence. Then …

“I’m not now, Gandolph. I’m here in bloody Belfast, which I’m willing to bet hasn’t forgotten me, although I’ve forgotten it. Blood feuds die slowly. Someone, some entity, just tried to kill me and failed. Several times. If I don’t find the hit man or woman, or them, I might as well be buried at the nearest graveyard to Temple Bar in Dublin, and you can write Sean’s name on my tomb to put a just and bitter end to our ‘graduation’ trip to Ireland. Ire means ‘rage,’ doesn’t it? A fitting English name for a blasted country.”

He glanced at the laptop, which his mentor had finally shut off and closed.

“Why show me these losses of the recent past when I’m knee-deep in the bloodier past?”

“A reason to live?”

Max let his jaw drop. “My supposed girl is seeing, maybe even planning to marry, a man, a freaking ex-priest, who took the heat for my sins like bloody Jesus Christ, and you think that will inspire me with a reason to live?”

“A reason to revenge, then, maybe.”

“We’re in the right bloody country for it.” Max stood. “Can we go on to the hotel now?” He glanced at their semiempty plates and the last strands of beer foam webbing the bottom of their pint glasses. “I’ve had all that I can stomach.”

Gandolph nodded, took up his laptop computer, and walked.

Hoopla and Homicide

“And the point of this so-called media gathering was purely publicity?”

Detective Ferraro was “middle” everything: height, weight, age.

Now he was putting on a show of being middling patient with the situation, but just barely.

He’d ordered everyone present in the tunnel at the time the body was discovered into separate rooms at Gangsters, since it was the closest premises to the “crime scene.”

As far as Temple could calculate, that was a cast of nine indignant Fontana brothers plus their uncle, Macho Mario; a death-pale Van von Rhine; four panting media videographers; three gawking workmen; a happily flushed Crawford Buchanan, sure to appear on evening news hours nationwide, not to mention YouTube. And her. The cats—and rat—appeared to have been overlooked, as usual.

“Did you recognize the deceased?” Ferraro asked now.

“No,” Temple said, “but I didn’t get a good long look at him. Also, he was lying on his back, so the body and face were foreshortened.”

Detective Ferraro’s basset-hound dark eyes looked up from his lined notebook pages. “Would you like to see a photograph? One should be posted at the morgue shortly. I can e-mail you the photo number.”

“No. Really. I’m pretty sure I don’t know any portly men who wear white tie and tails, nor of any Vegas act using them, although I’m not up on every last Cirque du Soleil production, particularly the sex one, Zumanity.”

“Too much information, Miss Barr.” Ferraro’s mustache quirked with distaste. “I wasn’t really asking your preferences. I was being polite. What is your e-mail address? Please examine the features of the deceased when they arrive and let me know.”

She accepted his card. Technology was getting creepy. First it had been regarding the corpse through a small window with draperies, then it was looking at a photo, then the photo was e-mailed fresh from the morgue to your queue for the final indignity of sitting cheek-by-dead-jowl with Nigerian solicitations, fake PayPal fraud warnings, and chain letters that would consign you to hell if you failed to pass on a soppy hard-luck story to ten of your closest friends. Who had time for that number of intimates these days? Temple didn’t even know a fat man in evening dress found dead in her very own stunt safe.

“You are the person primarily responsible for everyone else being there?” Ferraro asked.

“Uh … yes, I suppose you could say so.”

“And you’re responsible for the presence of mob and muscle.”

“Mob and muscle?”

The mustache quirked again. Maybe a sense of humor hid behind Ferraro’s clenched, refreshingly unbleached, beige front teeth. “The Fontana family and that highly photogenic drill team. You pick those particular construction crew members?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, but it was purely random.”

“The random factor being … ?”

“Uh, they were working on the actual project.”

“And?”

“Good tans, skimpy T-shirts, impressive, uh, tool belts.”

“Thought so. You manipulated this event and staged the scene. Why wouldn’t you have also arranged to have an overdressed corpse appear inside this empty, useless safe?”

She was speechless. She was so used to dealing with Molina and the homicide lieutenant’s favorite detective team of Su and Alch, she wasn’t accustomed to being considered a serious suspect.

“What are you implying?” she asked, wondering if she should shut up and get a lawyer.

“That you hired the corpse for this gig.”

“Hired a corpse? That’s not possible.”

“It is if he was alive and you had him slip into the safe before lights, action, and camera time.”

“But the door had to be drilled open.”

“Maybe. Maybe it was all a media setup gone wrong.”

“Not ‘maybe.’ It is! This kind of publicity is not helpful, believe me, detective. And if you don’t believe me, which I see you have no reason to, ask Dr. Bahr, the coroner, when the deceased died. The smell was ripe enough to indicate it was at least overnight. No sane patsy would sleep overnight locked in that rank, dark safe, even if there was some way to open and close it before today. Which there wasn’t.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Of course we tried to get into it before we arranged for a formal ‘opening ceremony,’ so to speak.”

“So you were willing to risk revealing whatever was in there?”

“Whatever wasn’t, detective. I knew, we all knew, it was probably just an empty safe someone had installed for who-knows-what reason. Making a big deal of it à la Al Capone’s vault was a joke. A harmless media ‘event’ in a city known for being over the top.”

“You consider murder a joke, ma’am?”

“No! A body was the last thing anybody expected to be in that safe!”

“Was there anything you thought might be in it?”

“Maybe … It was a long shot. Maybe some old silver dollars.”

“The Jersey Joe Jackson part of the ‘joke.’ ”

“He was real, and he did bury a lot of stolen silver dollars around town and in the desert years ago, some of which were found and turned in. That’s one Las Vegas legend that’s true.”

“It would take a lot of nerve to ask the media out for a safe opening that might or might not contain some silver dollars.”

“Yes. That’s my job.”

“To have a lot of nerve?”

Oh, how she wanted to snap back: “Yes.” That was not smart. “To ask the media out.”

Actually, they’d gotten a sensational story out of it. Temple’s stock would be high with them.

With the Las Vegas law … not.

“Don’t you have friends at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department?” Van von Rhine asked, pacing her pristine office.

Nicky was still at Gangsters, waiting with his uncle and brothers during their separate interrogations by Detective Ferraro’s partner.

“Ah … acquaintances,” Temple told Van. “I can call … one … to check on the progress of the case. He’s a great guy, but when it comes to department policy, I can’t guarantee Detective Alch will tell me the weather.”

Van was not appeased. “I knew flaunting the family’s … Italian … connections would go terribly wrong. What was Nicky thinking?”

“How to cheaply enhance a venue during an economic meltdown by appealing to public curiosity. Gangsters eternally fascinate the public. Rap culture was built on reinventing it.”

“We don’t need our own Ocean’s Eleven through Thirteen happening right here beneath the Crystal Phoenix.”

“That is kinda cool,” Temple remarked. “It hadn’t occurred to any of us.”

“What?” Van paused. She moved like a harried executive, but her face and mind were cool and collected.

“The Ocean’s Eleven parallel. The ten brothers and their uncle. What happened to their father, by the way?”

Van’s delicately glossed lips vanished into a straight, stressed line. “Shot down when Nicky was still a preadolescent. The ‘last hit’ in Vegas. His grandmother had made a legitimate fortune on a pasta factory. She underwrote the Crystal Phoenix. Now all of it’s endangered, thanks to this angel-hair-pasta-brained publicity scheme of his.”

“Maybe not.”

“A body in a hidden vault beneath the juncture where the Crystal Phoenix and Gangsters property lines meet? An underhanded criminal alliance implied between the two hotels? A secret vault? Only a few silver dollars may have been found under the body, but they raise the shady ghost of Jersey Joe Jackson, a founding spirit of the Crystal Phoenix. We are ruined, Temple. It’s just a matter of time.”

“What if the body could be tied to another gang, something very far from gangsters?”

“What do you mean? How? You’re a wizard at manipulating events, but I don’t think a dead guy who could sing Italian opera can be wished away.”

“Something about the body, the way it was … arranged, rang a bell with me.”

“Publicity at any cost?”

“No, I’m thinking of a secret society.”

“Oh, great. Like the Mafia?”

“No, a mystical secret society called the Synth. I’m serious, Van. The way the body was laid out was ritualistic.”

“Well,” Van said bitterly, sitting on her immaculate white leather chair, “I guess you know more about crime and bodies than the average hotel executive does.”

Temple understood her frustration. She was worried sick about Nicky and his brothers and had no way to help them.

Temple sat and leaned forward over the glass-topped desk. “It was more the way the red lining of the cloak was arranged. You noticed that the body’s flung-out arms and legs made something of a star shape?”

“No. I wasn’t close enough to see, but now I will imagine that, which is worse.”

“The police are going to zero in on the contortions, but that wasn’t the bizarre part.”

“If you say so, Temple.”

“It was the cloak lining. I knew it reminded me of something, some weird shape I’d seen before. Then I realized I was remembering an outline, not a piece of flagrant cloth, and I’d seen it at the site of an unsolved murder, of a professor at the university campus.”

She quickly sketched the configuration of a forgotten constellation’s major stars on Van’s pristine notepad.

“Our dead body is part of a serial killing?” Van demanded.

“More like a sequential killing, I think. Anyway, once I get a chance to check my records, I can tell you whether the poor guy’s cloak is a dead match to Ophiuchus.”

“Off-ee-YOO-cuss? I have some background in the classics, but … is this name of a lost Greek play?Off-ee-YOO-cuss Rex?”

Van had wanted Temple to smile after all these grim events, so she did.

“No, Van. It’s the thirteenth sign of the zodiac.”

“I’m a little superstitious, so I know there are only twelve signs of the zodiac. I’m a Virgo.”

“And I’m a Gemini. Traditionally. Yet, in December, the sun passes through the constellation of a man twined by a serpent. But this interesting pairing doesn’t name a sun sign like the constellations of Libra and Virgo and Gemini do. As far as I and some interested parties were able to determine concerning the death of the professor, the star positions of Ophiuchus resemble a distorted pentagram and are a mystical symbol of the mysterious Synth.”

“That sounds … truly ominous, Temple.”

“Actually, it gives me a good angle on current events and a possibility of diverting police and media interest to individuals and enterprises far removed from Fontana family affairs.”

“That,” said Van, “would encourage me to regard this Ophiuchus entity as a friend of the family and make sure Nicky gives you a raise.”

When a Body Meets a Body

I have not had occasion to explore the bowels of the Crystal Phoenix since the Jersey Joe Jackson Action Attraction ceased to be attractive. My solo return to the scene of the crime puts me in a reminiscing mood.

It seems like only yesterday that the “new” Vegas promoting “family values and entertainment” fizzled like a glass of lukewarm iced tea at a stripper joint. Vegas hastily returned to soap-opera status: The Luxe and the Lustful.

I found it rather poignant when the underground mine-ride cars vanished, leaving only unused tracks in their wake. This area was now a dead-end destination, no longer a rowdy, raucous place a guy would expect to encounter fun and profit.

This subterranean sweatbox had a lot of history before it was resold as an entertainment venue. A gang of would-be heisters had used the tunnel for a robbery scheme but was undone by my able sleuthing work, thanks to aid from the world of Elvisimitators, now called “Elvis tribute performers.”

The actual King and I crossed paths here a few times, his path and presence being totally ectoplasmic. I find it interesting that the only individual in my circle of acquaintances, human and otherwise, who has also apparently had an encounter with the ghost of Elvis is Mr. Matt Devine, the former priest.

I believe my species has a special connection to the spiritual, hence our gift of nine lives. Or so. I am now working on the “or so” portion, which is why I sincerely hope my assumptions are true.

Mr. Matt never claimed to see Elvis’s ghost. There was merely an anonymous caller to his radio advice program who seemed to sound exactly like Elvis. This fact was vetted by Mr. Matt’s ex–seminary mentor now in the FBI, namely Mr. Frank Bucek. These “mentors” are apparently important folk in younger lives. (I would not know, given my mama was forced to train all of us kits on the street and move us on ASAP.)

Anyway, the world is full of would-be Elvii. Las Vegas particularly attracts the breed, and tourists have been married by “Elvis” almost since the King’s death more than thirty years ago.

Maybe that is what Elvis and Mr. Matt have common. They both performed marriage ceremonies, one more religiously than the other. Now Mr. Matt is eager to move on to taking vows instead of administering them. I must admit he and my Miss Temple make a photogenic couple, but I and my Miss Temple also look good in pictures, together or apart.

I have no intention of letting my significant other of the human sort leap into matrimony without me as a codicil.

As I understand it, a codicil is not anything fishy, but an add-on to legal matters, marriage being one of them. I plan to be the codicil on bedroom protocol. That is, I will retain my bed-snoozing rights so long as I can stand what else may go on there. I was not born yesterday or even a couple leap years ago.

I have a lot to muse on these days, what with the wholesale way my Miss Temple has swapped suitors without even consulting me. That has made me reconsider our relationship. I am thinking that I need a pre-nup for myself, and fast.

While I am so doing, ambling along the abandoned mine-ride tracks by the dim illumination of work lights, I run into an immovable object.

A moment later I am whisker-dancing in the dark with a stranger.

This is nothing new for a dude about major resort destination, even in these depressingly financially flat days.

Visions of Satin from the Sapphire Slipper chicken ranch in the next county, or Topaz from the Oasis Hotel setup down the Strip, dance a heady tango in my noggin.

Alas, my impediment, like the sleek Topaz, is black-furred and female, yet, by the twitching of my nostrils, I can tell it is only my partner in crime solving, Miss Midnight Louise.

“What are you doing down here again?” we croon in simultaneous challenge.

“The Crystal Phoenix is my turf now,” Miss Louise growls.

“This is my crime scene. I was here first, and my resident human has a big new project going here for the owners. That trumps your paltry claim of possession of the premises. Millions are at stake.”

“Millions of fleas, if your unsanitary hide is involved,” she sniffs. “You have been hanging out more with the feral gang than I have.”

I did say she sniffed, and you can take that literally.

“I receive an herbal repellent from my mistress in my daily food to handle that sort of infestation,” I say.

“But you rarely eat the Free-to-Be-Feline she uses as a staple because you are politically incorrect in your most primitive appetites. Thus, you are unprotected.”

“Not true! I am the most protected tomcat in town! Unlike most cowardly human males, I have chosen to have ‘the surgery.’ ”

“While knocked unconscious,” she jeers. “You were kidnapped by that airhead actress Savannah Ashleigh and returned to your mistress in a satin pillowcase bearing her initials. I am amazed her plastic surgeon only did a vasectomy and a tummy tuck. He could have done a sex-change operation.”

I had never considered that possibility and feel slightly faint from the thin air in this deserted section beneath the hotel grounds.

“At least I am not an ‘it,’ ” I lob back. My powerful serve of sarcasm silences my mouthy self-described “daughter.” Youngsters. No respect for their elders, even when they are trying to label them as delinquent dads.

Now that the formalities of our unexpected encounter have been observed, we sit and get down to business.

“I agree that you must solve this case to protect your mistress’s financial interests,” she concedes. “Just get straight that your land is now my land and I have the Fontanas to protect, so I will be a participating party in any investigative shenanigans you and/or she might get up to, high or low, at the Crystal Phoenix and its environs to the property lines, above-and belowground.”

“Jeez, Louise. Have you been consulting a lawyer?”

“I thought you tacked an ‘Esquire’ onto your name on occasion.”

“My degree is in street smarts.”

“Mine as well, and far more recently than yours. What do you think of this scheme to link the Crystal Phoenix with Gangsters?”

“Not much. The CP has a solid-silver rep as classy. This mob stuff could tarnish what Miss Van von Rhine and Mr. Nicky Fontana have so carefully built.”

Louise is not buying my dire scenario.

“The Fontana brothers, sans Nicky, have built the exotic Gangsters Limo Service into a popular Vegas brand, though,” she ripostes. Ow! Her ripostes end with pretty sharp punctuation marks. “Even the mayor wants to loosen up the Code of Silence on the city’s mob roots. I thought you would approve of your human associates getting the jump on the city-hall bunch.”

“When those guys are nervous, there might be reason. First they called it a mob museum. Then they called it a law-enforcement museum. They are fudging the facts so much they would look good accessorized with nuts and marshmallows.”

“Are you always thinking of your next meal, Daddy-o? You could stand to lose a few fat rolls.”

“Bulging muscles, my girl. Now that your ‘furomones’ have been ‘fixed’ you simply cannot tell the difference between a male at the peak of his powers and some fuddy-duddy fixee.”

She shakes her head. “I am done trying to urge you to a healthier lifestyle. I do have news that tops your latest Elvis sighting.”

“That was some time ago. The Memphis Cat has not deigned to show himself this trip through the belly of the beast, so I am most interested in what your insights are.”

“I paid a recent visit to the Crystal Phoenix’s so-called Ghost Suite.”

“Ah, old seven-thirteen. A most provocative number for a hotel room. And who did you find there? Or should I say, what?”

“Miss Temple Barr, for one.”

“Really? I thought she was on the scoffer side of matters paranormal.”

“She was using the peace and quiet to muse.”

I nod sagely. The presence of Miss Midnight Louise, my possible number-one daughter, brings out the Charlie Chan in me.

“She also was using it to mourn, I believe,” Miss Midnight Louise adds. “I do not think that is healthy.”

“Hmm. You mean she was contemplating the absence and likely death of Mr. Max Kinsella. You were there when he hit the Neon Nightmare wall on that sabotaged bungee cord. A savage end to a most civilized magician.”

“You believe you can see Elvis and yet you think a seasoned performer like Mr. Max would use equipment he had not checked for flaws?”

“Perhaps someone compromised the cord after he had launched. That Neon Nightmare club is a maze of secret passages and rooms. The cord required an anchor at the top. I recall shenanigans of a similar sort at the New Millennium Hotel and Casino, which shortly after put an end to that treacherous lady magician Shangri-La.”

“Does that not make your nether appendage twitch just the slightest bit? These two acrobatic acts afflicted with lethal malfunctions?”

“Which ‘nether appendage’ do you refer to?” I ask, deadpan.

“The one that is long and useful for balance,” she snaps.

Yup. Literally snaps. I avoid her daughterly snit and let her fangs close on a whisper of my retracting whiskers.

I am still quick on the draw both fore and aft.

We hunker down to resume civil discourse.

“You have made a decent point, Louise. There has been a lot of lethal aerobatic hanky-panky at major hotels lately. Reminds me of the dead dudes found in the spy spaces above the Goliath and New Millennium gaming tables a year or two ago.”

“Phhhtttt!” she says. “Those were not spectacular deaths of professional performers. The victims there were small-time lawbreakers.”

“Does that not sniff more of ‘mob’ activity than the Cases of the Plunging Performers?

“Please, Perry Mason,” she says, “let us not get illiterate about it.”

“Perry Mason novels are very literate,” I protest.

“I was referring to the Case of the Repeating Initial Title Consonants. I believe you are guilty of that very thing sometimes. Now I know where you get it. Perry Mason, indeed. I am no Della Street.”

“No, you are not. You are more what they call ‘proactive.’ ”

“Thanks, Pop. It makes me sound like a variety of yogurt, but I realize that you meant to be complimentary.”

Guess Who’s Come to Dinner?

Temple was surprised to have been invited to Van von Rhine’s office for a one-on-one.

Van without Nicky was like latte without coffee. Puzzled, Temple hoped the couple’s differences in enthusiasm for the Gangsters redo hadn’t gotten serious.

She settled into a chair facing the desk. Van didn’t look ruffled.

“How is everything going?” the boss lady inquired, sticking a Montblanc pen into her blonde French twist.

The effect reminded Temple of a geisha girl, although Van was anything but.

“Frankly,” she answered, “we’ve got a bit of a mess. The police are pretty annoyed by the drama of a mysterious, anonymous man in formal dress dying in a hidden vault in an uncharted tunnel beneath major Vegas Strip attractions. The civic mob-museum committee has been threatening to ‘commandeer’ the entire vault for the city’s ‘vintage law-enforcement’ exhibition.”

“Amusing,” Van said, sounding anything but amused. “Obviously, that death scene is the last thing the police want. They’re clearly out of their depth, excuse the expression. Everything the Phoenix had planned has ground to a costly halt. We need that murder solved.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Temple said.

Van sighed and retrieved the pen from her coiffure.

At that geisha moment, her Asian personal assistant knocked on the door, then entered.

Tommy Foy had seen Temple in. He knew the women were simply noodling around on Crystal Phoenix matters and therefore interruptible.

“Miss von Rhine,” he said, “you wanted to know the moment your foreign visitor checked in. Her luggage has been taken to the Crystal Cascade Suite, and she is here.”

“Wonderful,” Van said, standing. “Show her in.” She smiled at Temple. “This is a friend from my European upbringing, visiting Vegas out of the blue. I’d love you to meet her.”

Van was literally bubbling over. It reminded Temple that career women like them didn’t have much time to nourish female friendships. Associations, yes. Temple, the only girl in a family of boys, felt a pang that she had no best gal friend in Vegas. Van was an employer, after all, and Electra Lark, a landlady. And, gosh, who next came to mind? Her nemesis, homicide lieutenant C. R., aka Carmen, Molina. Was that pathetic!

Temple turned to greet the newcomer with a warm smile.

Oh, wow. Supermodel tall, slim and sleek. Blonde like Van, only not like Van. Zorchy, used to be the word. Cool, blonde, and hot, the type that always made Temple feel like she was on loan from the Girl Scouts to the local high school. Or college. Or TV station job.

“Revi!” Van exclaimed, coming around her desk to grasp expensively suited arms and to brush cheeks. “So amazing to see you again.”

“And I, you. I see so few from Saint Moritz these days.”

“A girls academy in Switzerland we both attended,” Van, always the perfect hostess, explained to Temple. “And, Revi, this is the hotel’s ace public-relations expert, Temple Barr. My school friend, Revienne … Schneider, is it still?”

“Yes, of course,” the blonde said, with the faintest of accents. “You also work under your maiden name?”

“Of course,” Van said.

Well, Temple thought, ‘Revi’ had neatly dodged the issue of her marital status. Bet she knows Van’s married surname to an F, as in “Fontana family.”

“Revienne is such a lovely name,” Temple noted. “I’ve never heard it before.”

“Yes,” Van agreed. “It’s French, but totally unique. It comes from the word return, and here she’s returned to my life. I wish I had such an evocative name.”

“Now, Van,” Revienne said, “I’ve always found your full name enchanting. I do understand why you dislike it, though.” The woman sat in the chair next to Temple and arranged her long legs into a paired, high-fashion-model side slant. “I use mine in full form now.”

No more girlish “Revi,” she was saying.

In fact, Temple had a rough time envisioning the newcomer as ever having been an awkward adolescent. Revienne wore a mossy green silk suit that had to have been purchased in a major Europe an capital and which fell into expensive, unwrinkled folds fresh from the transatlantic flight.

“No time to psychoanalyze me at the office, Revienne,” Van said, donning her impassive executive mask for a moment, in fun. “We’ll dine after you’ve rested. What brought you to Las Vegas so suddenly?”

“I’d been promising to do some lectures for a friend from Lyon. He’s had a visiting professorship at your branch of the University of Nevada here. Hugo Gruetzmeyer. He thought a local case might intrigue me. But, Van, I caught some disturbing buzz on the Internet after the flight.”

“You’re talking about the Crystal Phoenix,” Van said, her blue eyes sharpening. “So, this is a business, not a pleasure trip. What is your business then?”

Temple would not have wanted to be under Van’s suddenly suspicious gaze. Her hotel and her husband’s family were the center of a sensational murder case. Even old school friends needed to prove themselves for suddenly showing up.

Revienne shrugged her wide, expensively clad shoulders. Her quick gray-eyed glance summed up Temple’s position and temperament as if taking a psychic temperature.

Temple felt as cautious as Van did. This woman was as quick and subtle as she was smart, in both meanings of the word.

Revienne spread her long, graceful fingers palms up, in a gesture of charming surrender. Temple noticed she wore no rings, not from a man and not from Revienne to Revienne. Temple instantly remembered Matt’s glamorous engagement ring on her third finger. She’d certainly come to take it for granted and sometimes wondered if it was too much bling for a petite woman. Now it felt like a glitzy weapon blinking out a Morse-code message: Don’t tread on me. I have backup, lady.

It was weird this woman got her and Van’s hackles up so fast. They were equally protective of the Crystal Phoenix, perhaps, and even more protective of the Fontana family males, as well. Temple did have some best pals in Vegas, she realized. They just weren’t girls, but an updated rat pack of cool guys and one big beautiful black cat named Midnight Louie.

Revienne gave a single breathy laugh, part apology, part peace gesture. “I realize, Van, and Miss Barr, you need to be sensitive about negative publicity right now. That’s why I’m here. To help. Professor Gruetzmeyer called on me because certain aspects of the tunnel vault death might relate to my experience. I know you have the legendary CSI filmed here in Las Vegas, but that is television-show razzle-dazzle, as you say in this country. I am a respected psychologist on the Continent, and beyond—England, the Mideast …”

“Not in the U.S.?” Temple asked.

“Not … yet. Though I very recently worked with a most challenging and unforthcoming American. You are a wary people, I must say.”

“These are wary times,” Van said.

“Exactly. I do have experience in cases involving terrorism.”

“Perpetrators or victims?” Temple asked.

“Both,” Revienne said.

“This has nothing to do with terrorism,” Van said. “We have one unidentified man, in formal costume yet, dead and likely murdered in an abandoned part of the hotel property. If we hadn’t been, er, excavating for a new attraction, no one would have known.”

Revienne gave Temple an amused (possibly condescending) glance. “I take it your publicity efforts devised the live taping of the old vault being opened. I never heard on any news source that anything besides the dead man was found inside.”

Temple tapped the sole of her high-heeled Nina sandal on Van’s cushy carpeting. “No news is bad news when it comes to publicity. The Crystal Phoenix is getting as much buzz as the Wynn or the Venetian now. If you manage to solve the death, it’ll make a super exhibit in the new Mob Museum at our affiliated facility, Gangsters.”

“Spin,” Revienne mocked. “You Americans are experts at it until you become entangled in unexpected outcomes.”

“You French, on the other hand, are experts at food, wine, and tomfoolery.”

“Tom whom?”

Van laughed. “L’amour, illicit love affairs, Temple means.”

“Ah,” Revienne said, nodding her perfectly windblown, shoulder-length Bed Head. “Is love ever truly illicit?” She nodded at Temple’s ring finger. “You are tying yourself to one man—always risky. An impossible dream, perhaps?”

“Not really,” Van said briskly. “You’ll meet my husband at dinner, if you can rest sufficiently to be up and about then.”

“Oh, I slept on the plane. Like a baby.” She stood, all five-nine of her on four inches of Christian Louboutin spike-heeled leather.

“Barbie goes supermodel,” Temple muttered under her breath, as Van ushered her friend to the office door.

“What was that, Temple?” Van asked, coming back.

“Your friend could be a supermodel.”

“Not really. They’re even taller and thinner.” She sat in her chair and swayed it from side to side. “I suppose we could use the help of an internationally known psychologist, but Revienne has become rather tiresomely perfect.”

“She wasn’t always like this?”

Van shook her head in its polished blonde-satin helmet of elegant hairdo.

“Those exclusive girls schools in Switzerland? We were all offspring in the way of our wealthy parents, parked there to learn how to look and act healthy, wealthy, and wise. We were mental messes, Temple, and Revi—Revienne—was just as fragile and confused as the worst-off of us. My father was a widowed hotel executive who changed temporary residences and lovers almost as frequently as the maids changed sheets. He had a semilegitimate reason for dumping me. Revi’s parents had a stable luxury flat in Paris. They dumped her because she witnessed her younger sister’s suicide.”

“Oh, my gosh. That slick woman?”

“That woman.” Van nodded grimly. “We were all isolated, ignored, and mad as hell. Revienne may look smooth and successful, but that’s what we were trained to do. A renowned psychologist? Yes. But we all learned to put on a good front at school, and unless something dramatic happened to shatter that psychological shellac, which we all hid behind, she’s not the paragon she seems.”

“What ‘shattered’ your ‘shellac’?”

Van looked startled. “You think mine did?”

Temple nodded. “You kept the hairdo and the manner, but you snagged the first Fontana brother to break the family front and marry. I’m happy to say my aunt was the second. How’d that happen?”

Van smiled and spun her fancy executive chair all the way around, like a kid on a ride. “Nicky. He broke through. Never underestimate the persuasive power of a Fontana.”

“I wouldn’t,” Temple swore, standing. “If your old school friend and her professor friend want to investigate the death, we can’t stop them. I have some suspicions of my own and will follow them, solo, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

Temple opened the door to leave.

“But,” said Van, “don’t hesitate to call on all the resources of the Crystal Phoenix, which are mostly Fontana brothers.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am.” Temple grinned as she shut the door on Van.

She’d like to see Revienne up against a Fontana brother.

Not literally, however.

Bahr Bones

Temple wasn’t a habitué of the local morgue, but her size-fives had visited the low-profile building a time or two.

“Dr. Bahr is expecting you, Miss Barr,” the receptionist reported in a happy chirp.

Temple knew she was a nice break in routine, being alive and not being a grieving relative or in a helping profession.

“Thank you, Yolanda,” she said. A savvy PR person always reads name tags and uses first names to establish rapport.

The door to the morgue’s inner sanctum—and here that cliché phrase really resonated—opened, crammed full with burly Dr. Bahr in his white lab coat.

His surname, tall bulk, and untamed, curly, reddish gray hair had earned him the “Grizzly” nickname. Also, like most medical examiners, he dealt with death and the dead in a matter-of-fact, sometimes wickedly humorous way.

“Come in, come in,” he greeted her, the soul of professional conviviality. “You are looking very lively,” he confided as he showed her into an empty conference room.

The vanilla-bland Formica tabletop and surrounding black chairs could have been in any business office.

“Let’s see today’s shoes,” he suggested before they sat at a pair of meeting corner seats. “Oh, the dead will like that open-toed look, especially the bloodred toenail polish. Tagless toes are a big turn-on here.”

“High praise,” Temple said, putting her perpetual tote bag, this one red patent leather, on the empty chair seat next to her.

“You could almost smuggle out a body in that giant bag, Miss Temple.”

“I’m here on behalf of Gangsters renovated mob museum, but I am not their ‘bag’ lady.”

“You are nobody’s bag lady,” he said gallantly. “What exactly can I do for you?”

“Did you ID the vault victim?”

“Ex–Vegas magician named Cosimo Sparks. Bizarre death.”

“How did he die? I found the body. He was in formal dress, and I didn’t see a mark on him but the studs on his shirt front.”

“Sure one of them wasn’t a stab wound?”

“That would take a pretty ‘anorexic’ weapon.”

Bahr nodded. “Like a supermodel in spikes. I can’t leak any more confidential info, except to say there were odd hesitation marks. Usually stabbers overdo it, over and over again. Sparks’ wounds were an odd combo: A half dozen trial cuts—hesitations—then a bold killing stroke, one clean, deep drive to the heart. An angry, powerful, but initially timid murderer.”

“Glad he or she was long gone before I got there,” Temple said, with a mock shiver. “Okay, I could also use any details on the Lake Mead … find. That would be super helpful.”

“Ah, yes, a cold case. I can spill my guts on that one. Just a figure of speech. So you are intrigued by our old pal ‘Boots.’ Too bad he’s too dead to enjoy having a lovely young lady like you on his case.”

“You have a name for him already?”

“We always nickname our corpses for in-house reference. Numbers are so impersonal.”

“ ‘Old pal’ is not a total figure of speech?”

Grizzly pouted his lips and shook his head. “Those leg bones are eligible for AARP, at least.”

It took thirtyish Temple longer than usual to get his meaning. “Oh, fifty years old or more.”

“That’s going by what’s left of the leg bones. The only parts of the feet and boots that didn’t decay, dissolve, or were eaten are some scraps of the soles. Cowboy boots.”

“I suppose many men wore cowboy boots out here in the forties and fifties.”

For answer, Grizzly shifted in his chair and stuck out a foot.

Temple glimpsed a stitched, pointed black toe.

“Not necessarily just them,” Grizzly said, stating the obvious.

How could she have omitted checking out footwear just because it was on a man, and a respected professional man, an older man!

“My bad,” Temple admitted. “Those are mighty good-looking boots.”

Grizzly shrugged. “The higher heels and steel arches support your feet when you’re standing over a cold body all day. You gals aren’t the only fashion victims. Besides, height is a psychological advantage.”

“Don’t I know it,” Temple said glumly, thinking of the perfect Revienne Schneider.

On the other hand, Kitty the Cutter wasn’t more than five-three, to hear Matt tell it. He was the only man to have seen her alive and in person, and then again, among the naked and the dead, here, where she had finally been both.

Wow, Temple realized, Max and Matt are the only men who’ve seen both Kathleen O’Connor and me naked. Not a happy thought! Thank goodness women today didn’t have to marry any man who’d seen them naked.

This place made her mind run in wild, morbid veins. Veins! Oh, no. No wonder Grizzly and his staff practiced black humor. The mind loved to play gruesome tricks on itself. Maybe it was the notion of all the naked corpses concealed here in windowless rooms and on sheeted gurneys.

“Would you like to see him?” Grizzly asked.

“Him?”

“What’s left of Boots.”

“Ah, sure.” She could check that the wax replica—taken from a photograph someone had obtained illegally at the morgue, probably a Fontana brother, and she did not want to know which one, ever—was accurate. “If it’s all right for a member of the public to view the body.”

“Sure. I have lady ‘cozy’ crime writers in here every month. They are much cooler with it than some of those male slice-and-dice thriller authors. I do have to make the ladies promise not to eat and drink during the autopsy, though.”

“Not a problem with me,” Temple said as she rose to walk in his boot tracks back into the hall and then into an area of shining stainless-steel walls, gurneys, tables, sinks, and instruments. All that wall-to-wall steel reminded her of the fatal vault.

At the door Temple donned latex gloves and a Plexiglas face shield with the coroner.

Everything smelled fine, but on every inhalation she expected a hint of decay. The suspense was really hard on one’s breathing rate.

Coroner Bahr didn’t notice. This was his daily arena, and he was busy commanding it.

“I had the remains brought out for you. The TV stations were satisfied with the discovery footage. You can’t beat the human interest of those cats sniffing around old Boots here. I knew you’d want to see the real thing, sans snacking pussycats.”

Temple’s stomach finally reacted and skydived. She wasn’t going to admit she knew those “cannibal” cats, especially that she often shared a bed with one. TMI.

Bahr’s large, latexed fingers pulled a sheet back from a beach-ball-size lump that looked a lot larger than the “appetizer with toothpicks” Louie had uncovered.

That was because a “doily” of caked lake bottom had also been excavated with the concrete and leg bones in place.

Grizzly smiled fondly at the mess. “Makes me feel like an archaeologist for a change. Ah, the good old days of crime, not drugs and bodies in the street, but bullet-riddled bodies dumped in strange and secret ways.”

He picked up a surgeon’s scalpel and used it as a pointer. “I decided to chip my way in from the rear. If there were any footwear remnants, the heels would be the easiest to uncover and offer the most information. As it happened, I struck pay dirt.”

“Literally.”

Humming relevant bits of the old song Temple recognized with a sinking heart as “Clementine,” as in “… was a miner, forty-niner,” Bahr produced a steel tray that clanked with the moving metal on it.

Temple peeked. It wasn’t a rolling bullet, but something both bulkier and thinner.

“Silver?” she asked. “You hit silver?”

“Yup.”

“That’s a mighty big tooth cap, Dr. Bahr. Boots must have been a giant.”

His laughter rang off all the surrounding stainless steel. “Most amusing. And apt. I hadn’t thought of it that way. No, Miss Barr, since we are being formal, it is not a tooth cap for a giant. It is a cap of sorts, and it is—ta-da!—signed.”

“Dentists do that, don’t they, with fillings?”

“True, but let’s drop the orthodontic comparison, unless you wish to posit that the victim had a set of choppers in his heels.”

Temple bent to study the find close up. “Oh. There are two! Nested together.”

“Simply a convenient storage option. Let me … unnest these lovely twins… .”

“I’m stumped,” Temple admitted, after he had done so, looking at the odd silver shapes.

“ ‘Stumped,’ ” Grizzly echoed, eyeing the truncated leg bones. “You will force me to hire you just for the very punny commentary. Quite unconscious, of course.”

Temple rolled her eyes. “Do you have any idea who this guy was? Besides a marked man?”

“He certainly was a heel,” Grizzly mused.

Temple stared, still stumped, at the silver shells. They still reminded her of dental caps. She mulled the coroner’s broad hints.

“I’m shocked,” he prodded. “It’s right up your alley.”

Temple knew that shocking and awing civilians was Grizzly Bahr’s favorite pastime. No one would have dared to nickname him if he didn’t relish word games. He was right. That was right up her alley, along with “spin.”

Spin. Wait! She took the odd artifacts from his hands into hers and … spun them.

“Caps, or taps! Taps come on shoes. But this guy is getting called Boots. Aw, cowboy boot heels, high, wide, and handsome! These are sterling silver boot-heel caps.

“Hi-ho, Silver,” Temple finished up by quoting the Lone Ranger. “Away!”

“Very good. Care to examine them further?”

“It won’t hurt the evidence?”

“We’ve already tested and photographed them for the Hall of Exotic Evidence Fame.”

Temple let her curiosity loose.

“These marks aren’t concrete damage or sand crust. They’re … engraved.”

“Engraved,” he repeated, going off in wheezing laughter.

“A stylized leaf motif. Looks Mexican.”

“Very fancy.”

Temple knew enough to look for marks on silver, at least a “925” for sterling silver content.

She turned the heel caps around, wondering what kind of guy was secure enough to flaunt these things, besides a Fontana brother. Aha! On the inside of the heel cover just under the sole. Very discreet, but a complete artist’s stamp. Who and where. Not Taxco, the sterling silver Mexican stamp of the mid-nineteenth century, but … Hollywood. Of course. Singing movie cowboys were peaking then—Gene Autry, Roy Rogers. Outfits were extravagant.

And …

“IOHLANDMADE … CALIF … HOLLYWOOD … STERLING,” Temple read.

“Whew. This is real signed silver,” she added. “And collectible. And it might even be traceable, if you find an expert on cowboy boots of the period.”

“Just what I thought,” Grizzly said, beaming. “The faded first letter of the name is B, as in Bohlin. And I’m counting on you to find that expert, Miss Vintage Rag Wearer.”

“I’ve been a little busy for vintage collecting lately,” Temple said, frowning.

Literally “losing” one boyfriend and getting engaged to another didn’t leave a girl a lot of shopping time, unless it was for a shrink.

“But you know the vintage scene,” he said.

Temple nodded. “I know the scene.” Even better, the Internet probably knew it too. She could hardly wait to track down this late, great Hollywood artisan.

“Hold your horses,” Dr. Bahr said as she turned to leave, lifting a gloved palm.

She’d forgotten to lose her accessories.

Temple was into vintage, but latex gloves and a plastic visor weren’t her idea of going-to-tea wear, and she was happy to leave them. They made her sweat. She wasn’t eager to linger, but Grizzly Bahr held up another steel dish, and these contents did roll around.

Temple peered inside. “Silver dollars! You have no idea how these might connect—”

“I have plenty of idea. These were evidently once bolted onto the rotted away boot sides. Too bad they aren’t nineteen-thirty-four San Francisco mint dollars, worth a bundle today. Still, Boots appeared to be a silver-lovin’ dude.”

“Did they call guys ‘dudes’ back then?”

“Sure did. There have always been dudes. Do silver dollars mean something to you more than a gleam in your eye? They were once more common than fleas here in Vegas and were melted out of existence by the thousands every time silver prices went up.”

“I know,” Temple said. “The last big silver-dollar roundup and meltdown was in the seventies, when the Texas millionaire H. L. Hunt cornered the silver market and drove the price so high my spinster great-aunt sold the family silverware. Hence I inherited stainless steel.”

“Minting of silver dollars stopped in nineteen thirty-five,” Bahr said, “so this guy could have snagged these from then until the seventies. His bones say he was last running around about nineteen fifty, give or take a few years.”

“But his footwear says there may be a motive for his murder some folks still alive may know about.”

“It’s always better to consult the living,” Grizzly Bahr agreed. “Better hurry, because this guy’s peers would be getting so up there in age, St. Peter might be already reaching down for them.”

Synth You’ve Been Gone

I decide I must take the lead with Miss Midnight Louise as decisively belowground as above it.

“I must admit that this space just cried for something dramatic to happen in it,” I tell her. “I had a tad of trouble finding a way into the underground tunnel from Gangsters, which is a chichi little venue that could use a dash of Fontana make over magic, so I went back to the Phoenix, and underground there. Worked like a charm, so, all in all, I would be able to give my blessing to this Chunnel of Crime notion. Linking two enterprises in these days when people want more for their money is a good idea,” I pronounce.

“Three,” she says.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Three.”

“Three what?”

“Three venues.”

While I am still blinking like a blind bat at what she is implying, the little minx adds the codicil.

“I did not ‘amble over’ from the Crystal Phoenix,” Midnight Louise explains, with a quick smoothing of what bristles pass for her eyebrows. “I walked, all right, and the route was subterranean and a bit tight at times, but I came from the underbelly of the Neon Nightmare.”

The Neon Nightmare club? Where the cabal of disgruntled magicians known as the Synth keep secret meeting rooms? Where Mr. Max just tragically crashed and maybe died not two months ago?

You could knock me over with a magic wand.

Luckily, Miss Midnight Louise is not packing any, but she cannot smother a huge smirk as she starts grooming spidery cobwebs off of her whiskers.

While I have resigned myself to letting Miss Midnight Louise lead when it comes to exploring the third and most secret underground tunnel in this below-street-level maze, I had not counted on the pathway being so paltry.

“Hurry up, Pops,” Miss Louise is nagging from ahead of me, like Charlie Chan’s number-one son.

Fact is, I cannot!

The passable concrete area around the vault is a glorified rat maze, and the human-fist-size rift at one dark corner of the vault opened up by a small earthquake or construction vibrations is mouse-size to me.

In fact, delicious as my surprise exit from the opening vault door was, I was so low to the ground, the cameras overlooked me and Louise entirely, and I nearly lost my midsection coat from my innards being squeezed through the raw-metal-edged hole.

Now we must retrace our path around the vault exterior. It has been jolted into rubble by the recent tawdry pneumatic drilling on the front door, so it is an even tighter squeeze for any creature other than a snake.

Fine for a sylph like Miss Midnight Louise to wriggle through when she is all of nine pounds soaking wet.

I am a feline of size. I do not “wriggle” like an earthworm; I “bull” my way, like a dozer. (Not the kind that sleeps, I hasten to add.)

So there I am having clods of stone and sand kicked up into my face as I follow the narrow path she has forged.

Ah! At last! We get into man-high territory, if the man were on his knees. It strikes me that this tunnel is a recent and inexpert excavation.

Sneezing out a cloud of stone powder, after much circuitous footwork, I finally follow Miss Louise into a large and thankfully finished piece of manmade construction, what is certainly a rarity in Las Vegas, which is built on concrete foundations—a basement.

While I enjoy a coughing break, the kit is pacing ahead of me, twitching her front and rear extremities. By extremities, I am being literal: not legs, but vibrissae and tail. Yes, the rear member whips up more dust for my sensitive sinuses.

Only a few dim work lights, aka classic bare lightbulbs, illuminate our way into what turns out to be a vast space.

Before long we encounter the massive figure of a martini glass. By then I could use one. Miss Louise has leaped atop the toe of a high-heeled sandal that would really ring my Miss Temple’s chimes.

All of these items are made from a giant fretwork of wood and steel or aluminum supporting milky glass tubes in Rube Goldberg–style rat-maze arrangements, i.e., like a really complicated maze for giant rats.

Manx! I would not want to meet the rat large enough to run this junkyard maze, but …

“Hey, Louise! Any one of these big retired neon signs would make a great jungle gym for Ma Barker’s gang behind the police substation. They are just wasted down here.”

“At least they are not fading in the acid rain and sunlight UVs at the neon graveyard topside,” she replies. “But I like your idea. Maybe you can manipulate your red-and-cream roommate to claim one of these mementos when we bring the Neon Nightmare crowd down.”

“Uh, we are bringing a nightclub crowd down?”

“Of course. Not the customers, but the Synth set. No human would find or follow that rat tunnel around the vault to trace the passage from the Crystal Phoenix underground to here.”

Now she tells me! So I have started this crawl by personally enlarging with my body a tunnel made by and for desert rats. Think about it! I look around for some rat on whom to take out my angst, but I find the place as quiet and still as, well, a graveyard.

Meanwhile, Miss Louise has sashayed into the pale spotlight of a work light.

“Remember when Mr. Max as the Phantom Mage hit the nightclub wall upstairs and was carted out of here as DOA?”

“Um, I would hardly forget such a disaster.”

“Remember that I promised to kick major butt around here?”

“Yes, but that is your general modus operandi anyway.”

“General Modus Operandi is about to breach enemy headquarters. Want to tag along, Daddy-o?”

I slink along after my number-one (and only, that I know of) daughter.

In my heart of hearts, I realize that my devotion to my Miss Temple and her affairs (I am not just speaking of Mr. Matt here, but her life-threatening murder investigations) has made me a trifle derelict in pursuing the trail of Mr. Max Kinsella.

This might have been a wee tactical error. He is the primo international undercover cat in our circle of human acquaintances, and it is never wise to underestimate what he might be up to and who might not like it.

Oh, rats!

Thus I find myself tailing a girl to the scene of the crime! I mean, a girl other than my Miss Temple, who is always sensitive to my contributions and appreciative and a pleasure to tail.

The Neon Nightmare, as Miss Louise and I—and Mr. Max before us—have discovered, is designed like a pyramid-shaped wedge of Swiss cheese. It has more hidey-holes than Cab Calloway did. Okay, that is an abstruse reference. I am an abstruse kind of guy. Mr. Cab Calloway, being a musical black cat of the human persuasion back in the Jazz Baby age, was noted for his vocal chorus of “Hi-de-hi, hi-de-ho.” Hidey-hole. Get it?

So “Hi-de-hi, hi-de-ho” is all I can mutter to myself in consolation, as I follow Miss Midnight Louise through a long and winding upward path of hidden hallways and cubbyholes toward the lofty peak of the pyramid, where the conspirators who call themselves the Synth maintain a private club so tony that Sherlock Holmes’s older smarter brother, Mycroft, might feel at home there, save that there are at least two women members we spotted on an earlier occasion.

Every door looks like a jet black wall in this magical maze, and every opening is operated by pressure hinges. Push and release; the hidden latch pops the door ajar.

Those of my breed have no trouble being pushy, and I, at least, being exceptionally big and strong, can leap high enough to select floor designation buttons on even the highest hotel-tower elevators.

On the other hand, such gymnastics need to be accomplished on the sly, without human witnesses. They could cause comment and sudden attempts to capture a trick cat like myself with a camera, if not a strangling grip around the throat.

Luckily, the designers of Synth headquarters played it cute and placed many of their pressure points below the usual human hand level. Of course both Miss Midnight Louise and I remember this ploy. There is a bit of kerfuffle as we nudge shoulders to each command the active role here.

My longer reach wins out but at the cost of a nick in my sensitive sniffer.

“Sorry, Pops,” she hisses. “I did not see your prominent nose in the dark.”

The door has opened without a sound after the initial click, so I stand back to let her enter first.

She gives a surprised purr under her breath, mistaking my holding back for courtesy. Hah! It is only seasoned breakin strategy.

She, being practically anorexic from scarfing up Chef Song’s low-fat, low-cal Asian delicacies at the Crystal Phoenix koi pond, requires a less-ajar door to enter. I, being majestic in size, push in after her, thrusting the door open farther. I immediately whirl to nudge it shut, but delicately, though there is little light to admit from the dark passage.

There! We are once again closeted with the same cast of characters, plus a couple more, whom we had intruded on before Mr. Max’s tragic accident-cum-assassination attempt.

They are not acting the usual calm and smug, though, but riled up like a school of flesh-eating piranhas feasting in a diet spa’s hot tub.

“You incompetents,” a voice with a stagy echoing tone admonishes so passionately, the hair on both Miss Midnight Louise’s and my backs rises as if we had been attacked.

It is the same eerily altered human voice I have heard through the Cloaked Conjuror’s whole-head mask and used by protected witnesses on TV true-crime shows.

“Sparks is dead, and you have no idea how, who, or why,” the man goes on.

“And,” the second newcomer adds in an echoing, possibly female voice, “you have no idea where our ‘investment’ has gone.”

I am not being specific about the description of these Jill-and-Johnny-come-latelies because they wear long, concealing cloaks and, of all things, full-face Darth Vader–type masks!

I nudge Miss Louise in the shoulder, but she is gone. Even with my superior vision, I cannot see her. I give the kit credit for stealth. She has probably established a listening post under somebody’s floor-length dark robe, a delicate operation for one with her longer coat’s tendency to tickle human skin.

“Listen,” the dark lady known as Carmen says.

I have eavesdropped on this dame at Synth Central before, but every time I hear or see this Carmen chick, I get a jolt. That is the same first name the C in C. R. Molina conceals. The unsmiling homicide lieutenant only goes by that moniker when she is undercover, kicking back as the Blue Dahlia nightclub’s blues singer. Not that she has had any time free from kicking ass, including her own, lately.

Or course, there are other Carmens in the world, just as there are other Louies. We are just the most important ones in Vegas. But I digress. The wrong Carmen is still yammering.

“We are not responsible for Cosimo’s wandering or death,” she argues. “Why would any one of us trail him to that vault and draw every eye to all of us? It is bad enough that the two hotel excavations met in the middle at our ground zero. You would think they knew what they were doing.”

“Exactly,” says Vader One, pacing like a caged member of my actual breed. “Things could not have gone worse for us. Using that aged vault was folly.”

“Benny Binion’s son Ted had a treasure vault buried in the desert,” says a tall, unmasked man who must be in the Synth.

“This part of Las Vegas is not desert and has not been since a few years after that vault was built,” Vader Two points out, “probably by the colorfully named Jersey Joe Jackson.”

His spooky, gender-altered tones drip sarcasm like rattlesnake venom.

“First the Phantom Mage dies,” Vader One ticks off on a forefinger, which makes me suspect she is female. We guys do not “tick off,” unless it is making someone else mad. “Why?”

The lady known as Carmen stirs uneasily on Cosimo Sparks’s vacant easy chair, which she has apparently claimed since his death. The slinky Carmen stirring is quite a show, but neither Darths, nor Miss Midnight Louise, I am sure, is properly impressed.

“You do not know for sure, do you?” Vader One demands. “This is not a game of make-believe for magicians. Your creation of the Synth was a brilliant ploy, but you magicians tend to be all show and no go, as they say. You were always the facade for the real operation, and you would have been rewarded by having your revenge on the hotels and venues that ousted your tired acts years ago.”

A buzz of protests has as much effect on the two interlopers as if the resident threesome had been flies.

“Spare us,” Vader Two says. “We want to hear your theories, not excuses. There is too much at stake.”

“Well,” says the heretofore-silent, turbaned medium, whom I remember has taken the show-cat moniker of Czarina Catherina, “lords and masters—or lady and master—we have been holding the fort here at the Neon Nightmare waiting for you to give the word for the moment we would astound Las Vegas and the nation … and you have been as quiet as mice.”

What an insult to those who would masquerade as the mighty feline hunter species! Of course, humans are not built for imitating us. They have lost the ability to kill for their supper and also to tease adoration from those who are willing to serve them.

“Where is the money?” Vader Two demands.

“We do not know!” Carmen says hotly. (There is no other way this femme fatale could possibly speak.) “We do know when the economic crash made the mortgage on the Neon Nightmare unfeasible. We were all dipping into our own reserves to pay the monthly fees, even as our club’s bar tab plummeted and the loss of the Phantom Mage as a draw also killed our bottom line.”

“Ah.” Vader Two purrs almost as convincingly as Miss Midnight Louise. “Now we hear a motive for why Cosimo Sparks, your senior Synth member, could have gone rogue. You cabal of failures could not pay the rent.”

“Mortgage,” Czarina spits back. “We were buying the building. It is not our fault. Our combined assets now couldn’t get enough credit to buy a busted magic wand. The entire country was caught napping. And the world.”

“Stop whining,” Vader Two says. “We have always operated as a shadow group, with our own shadow economy. Your end of the deal was to hunker down at the Vegas base, guard our tangible assets, and prepare to unleash your illusionary skills when called upon.”

“So,” Vader One adds, “our amassed-over-the-years assets are either gone or are on the verge of being discovered by the authorities, and your leader is not only dead, but attracting the exact kind of attention that none of us can afford.”

“All heart, right?” the medium asks.

“Even worse,” Vader One goes on, “news of this long-secret operation in the making is now running like wildfire through the Continent, stirring up old enemies the Synth was created to confound.”

“We are here,” Vader Two adds, “to untangle your mess and find out why Cosimo Sparks was killed, not because we care, but because the secret stash is gone. We are here to follow and find the money, the bearer bonds, the cash, and the guns.”

Guns?

Oh, my. We are not in the audience at Amateur Night anymore.

“Obviously,” Vader Two continues, “you have a spy in your ranks. Or did.”

Czarina sits up straight. “You are accusing Cosimo of being a traitor? Now that he is dead and cannot defend himself?”

“He has no need to defend himself, because he is dead,” Vader Two observes coldly. “And we thought you had dealt with any traitors in your midst when the Phantom Mage hit bottom. Nice spectacular end, by the way. Should have discouraged other weak links, but apparently Sparks—”

“You have no idea whether Cosimo was a traitor or a victim,” the Synth man declares.

“Do you?” is the icy retort.

A silence holds during which you could hear a cat scratching at a flea.

Luckily, Miss Midnight Louise’s constant fishy breath from her high-end Asian cuisine, and my own personal magnetism that repels all vermin as if by magic, have kept us from any such rude personal grooming impulses at the moment.

Obviously, none of the Las Vegas branch of the Synth had considered that Cosimo Sparks could have died a traitor.

“While you lot are examining your consciences,” Vader One says, “and hunting traces of your brains, we will be watching all of you and the case with keen interest.”

“We have kept our eyes too closely on the international situation,” Vader Two further notes, “and left you to your own sorry devices, relying on your self-interest to keep you out of trouble.”

“Alas,” Vader Two purrs again, overdoing it this time in a poor imitation of the real thing, “that approach has not worked. You can count on being the objects of concentrated but hidden observation from now forward.”

“What can we do?” Czarina wails. “Cosimo is dead, and the rest of us might swiftly follow.”

“Consult your crystal ball,” Vader One snarls, sweeping the long cloak back as if brushing them aside so swiftly that the heavy faille material hisses. “Perhaps it has more intelligence than your conjoined brains.”

I am only able to avoid their dramatic exit and accompanying foot stomps by sucking in my stomach and flattening against the black wall.

Another long silence commences, which is unfortunate because I cannot let my breath out until they start yammering again, and the longer they do not, the more certain my breath is to release in an audible windstorm whoosh!

Perishing from self-strangulation is considered pretty kinky these days, and I have no wish to succumb to something the tabloids would have a field day with.

“What nerve!” Carmen finally says, standing up to pace, whipping her own silken cloak around as stylishly as the recently departed Darth Vaders. “They play the long-distance puppet masters for several years, holding us back from our big, uh, reveal, as they say on the extreme-makeover shows, and then dare to blame us for Cosimo’s death.”

“Ah, those extreme make over shows have moved from facial reconstruction to major house renovation,” the Synth man points out.

“I do not care about any of those stupid shows, Hal Herald! Apparently you have no better things to do than watch them. I am thinking about the magic show of the century we were planning for Las Vegas.”

“Last century or this?” Czarina asks dispiritedly, which is a rather sad condition for a medium. “We have been involved with these mysterious money backers almost that long.”

“You did not see this coming,” Hal points out.

“Please,” Czarina urges, “we do not need to quarrel; we need to solve Cosimo’s murder so we can get the foreign investors off our backs.”

“What about the Phantom Mage’s ‘accident’?” Carmen asks. “Or was it murder?”

“Did any of us do it? What about Cosimo?” Hal continues the questions.

“You mean we might have a serial killing going on?” Carmen demands.

“He wasn’t one of us,” Hal notes dismissively. “Just a hokey half-acrobatic magic act that gave a few thrills to the drunken postmidnight crowd. He did no real magic.”

“As if ‘real magic’ is on any of our résumés,” Czarina finally jibes back. “You and Cosimo and the other old-timers, like that Professor Mangel, might have wanted to diddle around tracing magical, mystical schools of history, but we were always a cadre of dreamers and schemers. I happen to think the schemers had the right idea all along. Looks as if Cosimo was more on the schemer side than anyone thought, and maybe the Phantom Mage was too.”

“You are not going back to that old notion that he was Max Kinsella?” Carmen asks.

“Kinsella vanished about the time the Mage crashed, did he not?”

“Yeah, but that was a pattern with him,” Herald points out. “Nothing new.”

“Maybe the reason was new, Hal.”

“That is crazy, Czarina. The Mystifying Max lost his Goliath gig. He may have pretended his contract just expired, but so have all our contracts expired as our venues dried up here in Vegas. Siegfried and Roy were retired by tragedy. Cirque du Soleil kicked the pants out of magic acts, face it. Dumb as the Phantom Mage’s act was, at least he was in the bungee-jumping, costume-wearing vanguard. We’re—” he snaps a flat disk on the mantel into the magnificence of a classic magician’s “topper”—“old hat.”

It is enough to pull a tear out of an aged duct. Not mine, mind you.

“Lance Burton just resigned for several more years at the Monte Carlo,” Hal notes.

“But not thee and me,” Carmen says. “Oh, poor Cosimo. Who’d want the old man dead? And why?”

“We are a threat,” Czarina intones in a dire alto voice almost as spooky as the strangers’ masks.

“So we had hoped,” Hal replies. “I think the Synth was just another Vegas scam. Something to keep us busy and hoping for a second coming, like the millennium nuts. Only we’re magic nuts.”

“You believe the Synth’s House of Ophiuchus was a delusion? It has killed four people so far,” Carmen points out, “maybe five now, including our colleague. The cloak beneath his dead body was spread in the celestial shape.”

“Ophiuchus is a forgotten constellation, Carmen,” Czarina says. “I do not think I can believe in the stars any longer. Unless it was a meteor like the Phantom Mage. He certainly put stars in your eyes.”

“A pose,” Carmen says haughtily. “I am not so easily impressed.”

“There was that intimate parting note from Max Kinsella,” Herald smirks, “before the Phantom Mage fell to his death. Maybe he was leaving you in both personas and you cut his bungee cord. A woman scorned …”

“Silly accusations!” Carmen objects to Herald’s jibes with a shrug and a dramatic spin to the hidden door. “This has not been a productive assembly, except for those foreign Synth members showing up. I wonder what they really want from us. We would be better off going to ground separately, or assuredly we will be pestered whenever we meet here until those interlopers leave Las Vegas. I am not going to accept any masked individual who knows how to breach our club rooms as a Synth member.”

“You did accept Max Kinsella and the Phantom Mage as just that,” Czarina singsongs to Carmen’s departing back.

I leap aside as the woman’s knee nudges the door’s pressure device and she vanishes into the dark beyond.

So I am left with two grumbling Synthettes and Midnight Louise.

Wait! Where is Midnight Louise?

The room is dim, and our kind is adept at the magic of blending into the background so we are not noticed, but even I have not noticed Louise for too long. You would think I would relish a vacation from her constant demands, and of course I do … but not when I do not know her whereabouts after we have dropped in on a sinister cabal of magicians.

Has she been kitnapped to play some moth-eaten top hat’s up-popping bunny rabbit? What a comedown for a born predator.

While I worry, I stir like a vagrant draft along the floor, brushing pant legs and robe hems of the remaining two Synth members. Miss Midnight Louise is not hiding out under anything human or inanimate in the room.

What a puzzle. What a worry.

Did not master magician Mr. Max Kinsella disappear from this very place only a couple months ago? Are not Miss Louise and myself the only investigators who have kept a weather eye on these shady characters? Should I stay to investigate this obvious hotbed of past and future villainy, or rush off and return to the Crystal Phoenix to assist my Miss Temple, who has her hands full with an awkward murder related to this very place and present company and does not even know either one exists?

And what of my missing … uh, partner? Surely, the scrappy little thing can take care of herself for once without me. To hear her tell it: Surely, Daddy-o dude. Chill.

Still, having the whole long-lost family now reunited on the streets of Las Vegas puts me in a pickle. I am only one individual. I cannot protect everybody at once!

Everybody at once … That reminds me of an old Las Vegas legend needing resurrection. One for all and all for one. The Rat Pack is dead; long live its successor—the Cat Pack.

A Ghost of a Clue

Temple sat in her Miata outside the coroner’s facility, inhaling the smell of sun-warmed leather to erase any rubbery, plastic, formaldehyde or decaying odors that might have clung to her clothes. She still didn’t understand how the significant others of morgue workers ever got used to what had to come home with the job.

One odor she couldn’t escape: this case reeked of Jersey Joe Jackson and his silver-dollar hoards hidden in the desert around the Joshua Tree Hotel he founded, which desert had become a sprawling city. From the macabre skeletal remnants exposed on the bottom of Lake Mead to the chubby, sad, clownlike, overdressed corpse inside the abandoned underground vault, it all came down to a Las Vegas legend of crime—Jersey Joe Jackson and his silver empire.

Temple decided that communing with a ghost was impractical. What she needed was witnesses.

She revved the Miata and squirted out of the morgue’s parking lot onto Pinto Lane and then Charleston Avenue, buzzing by vintage-clothing stores as if they were in the city dump. The Blue Mermaid motel whizzed by on her left. Down the street stood its inspiration, the Blue Angel. Temple had heard that the graceful female neon figures atop their respective motels were inspired by Disney’s Blue Fairy from the classic animated feature Pinocchio. And she knew that a woman designed the Blue Angel, Betty Willis, who also came up with the iconic and still-standing “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign that “said” Las Vegas all over the world. Go, Betty!

Temple never saw the “Virgin Mary blue”–attired mermaid or angel figure without thinking of Matt. He’d first sensitized her to the religious significance of that particular hue of blue, which Temple realized echoed the shade of a Tiffany’s jewelry box, of all things. Temple had a sudden inspiration. Her wedding attendants would wear VM blue! That ought to please Matt’s Chicago Polish-Catholic relatives. Her Unitarian and Lutheran relatives would never guess a thing.

Wait! Who would be her attendants? Matron of Honor, Aunt Kit Carlson Fontana, of course. Bridesmaids? She didn’t have a sister or many female friends close enough to pay for a VM-blue gown and an airfare to Chicago or Minneapolis.

Aha! Matt had a young Chicago cousin, Krys. And there was Temple’s oldest brother’s daughter, Tabitha. What about Mariah Molina, if her mother would let her? Heh-heh. That would so get her mother’s goat and also help Mariah’s self-esteem. She was getting taller and leaner and needed to get over her teen crush on Matt. Watching him get married ought to do it. On the other hand, Matt in a tux was not a discouraging sight… .

Three bridesmaids seemed plenty, but Temple could picture all eight eligible Fontana brothers as groomsmen in pale formal attire, morning coats out of an Oscar Wilde play—to die for! Obviously a … summer wedding. So she needed five bridesmaids more by then. Her mother would be over the moon. Only one daughter, one mother-of-the-bride dress. Temple would manage it, the whole schmear.

Okay. Matt’s best man? He was short of relatives too. Maybe his birth father? Yes. Full circle.

Wait another minute! Temple was blue-skying the future when the present was a tangle of Las Vegas’s perpetual reinvention woes and bizarre deaths and buried secrets. Didn’t the past just always have to keep cropping up that destructive way?

She directed the Miata down the Strip and then off it, to Gangsters.

A parking valet in a Bonnie Parker beret offered to care for her car in the most personal way, with assurances it wouldn’t get hit with any nasty G-men bullet holes.

A Fontana brother had been alerted to escort her inside.

Temple shifted through her brain cells to identify the brother. The feature-shading fedora didn’t help. The Fontana did, though.

“Call me Ralphie the Wrench. We’ve all got new mob handles. Nicky’s idea.”

“Sure thing, Ralphie. I need to consult with the Glory Hole Gang. Where are they hanging out now?”

“The executive chef’s suite. It’s got a whole new test kitchen, but it’s also a bunkhouse. Nicky calls it that so they don’t feel it’s charity. The fellas are too old to be off on their own, except for Eightball, who is not about to give up his little house from the old days and his PI license.”

By then they had passed through the ka-ching chatter of the casino area to the elevators.

Ralphie the Wrench continued to play tour guide en route to the tenth floor. “Work on the Speakeasy’s bar and restaurant layout and the Chunnel of Crime is pretty intense, so the GH guys are mostly in the suite these days, menu planning.”

Ralphie pulled the latest fancy phone from his pinstriped breast pocket and rang up ahead of them, explaining afterward to Temple, “Even really old bachelor guys are not tidy enough for lady visitors without warning.”

Always the gentleman mobster, Ralphie the Wrench knocked for Temple, escorted her inside the suite, checked that the residence was fit for the presence of a lady, and then left her to her mission.

Pitchblende O’Hara was lounging on the huge upholstered conversation pit, wearing a flour-dusted apron and drinking a Red Bull. He jumped up at Temple’s arrival.

“I’m the designated welcoming committee, Miss Temple. Gollee, you look fresher than one of Spud’s French pastries right from the oven. We are gonna call them Bonnie’s Bits.”

“Well, maybe I just look flaky by now,” Temple said, waving good-bye to Ralphie as the door closed on his pinstriped back. “I need to talk to all of you. Can the kitchen crew put the experiments on heat-lamp warming and come out for a few minutes?”

Pitchblende rose and beat it back to the kitchen, drawing Temple’s attention to his size-thirteen feet in battered Roper boots. Serviceable, not fancy, and probably resoled and resewn a number of times.

Their well-worn clothes told the tale of the Glory Hole Gang’s obscure, last-but-not-best decades living in a ghost town until drawn into Vegas by another, earlier search for Jersey Joe Jackson’s silver hoards.

The first Glory Hole Gang member out of the kitchen wasn’t one.

Santiago bustled through.

He looked flustered to see her, but no more than she to see him.

“Ah, Miss Barr,” he said. “You have caught me. The sublime scents of the test kitchen penetrate to my suite next door, and I cannot control myself. Thanks to my neighbors, I’m indulging a fascination with genuine western barbecue.” He lifted a blue-and-white-checkered linen towel that added a smoky, spicy tang to the air, which had Temple’s stomach ready to growl. “Not my usual fare. They are going to call it Smokin’ Smothered Sirloin on the menu. Gentlemen, as usual, my gratitude and compliments to the chefs. Miss Barr.”

With a bow, he was out the door. He must be a barbecue fanatic to eat it in that white suit. Temple smirked to have seen a smudge of deep burgundy sauce on the edge of his pristine white sleeve cuff. Simply Santiago was simply … a freeloader.

“He’s been in and out like a boarder with a tapeworm,” Pitchblende complained, “slinging those fancy compliments like they were hash. I think he was afraid our fixin’s for the new restaurant would not be tony enough for his high-tech ‘installation.’ But we use the best aged beef, and those South Americans know prime steak when they taste it.”

“Howdy, Miss Temple!” The next kitchen émigré was Wild Blue Pike. The old man had the face of an aging angel, amazingly unwrinkled and pale. Maybe he was into Oil of Olay. He would have looked innocent in any lineup, with his lush white hair and distance-focused blue eyes.

Spuds Lonnigan came clunking out, wiping his wet hands on another checkered linen towel. Cranky Ferguson was munching on one of those flaky French pastries too delicate to put down, but he carried a saucer under it to catch crumbs.

Eightball O’Rourke exited the kitchen last. Whoops! He was not the last. A large black cat, not Midnight Louie, ambled out, tongue working some dropped morsel out of his long white whiskers.

“Three O’Clock has moved in?” Temple asked, pleased. “I thought he wouldn’t let you guys near him when you left the restaurant at Temple Bar.”

“Ah, he jest visits for the chow train,” Cranky said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “He’s like your house cat, a will-o’-the-wisp.”

“Not in girth,” Temple said.

“None of us are wispy these days,” Spuds said, “ ’cept Wild Blue and Eightball.”

“And our Miss Temple,” Eightball loyally pointed out. “I noticed,” he added, “you been admiring our footwear. There a reason you want our feet all in a campfire circle?”

Eightball was not a man to be fooled.

“Absolutely,” Temple said. “I confess. I was sizing up your feet.”

“And … ?”

“You’ve always worn cowboy boots?”

“Hell, yes,” said Wild Blue, “even in my flying days.”

“We don’t say ‘hell’ in front of ladies,” Cranky warned him.

“It’s okay now,” Temple countered. “I’m here to examine your boots, which is not a very ladylike pursuit.”

“Phew,” Pitchblende said. “You shore don’t want us to take ’em off before suppertime.”

“Sit down and make yourself at home,” Eightball urged. “You can eyeball our foot-leather better close-up.”

Temple smiled and pulled a folder out of her ever-present tote bag.

“I’m trying to solve the identity of the Three O’Clock Louie’s once-submerged corpse.”

Wild Blue winced. “Poor guy who was et away almost down to his anklebones? Those Lake Mean carp were hungry suckers, even when our restaurant was still going. Hate to think what they did before there were piles of tourists to feed ’em.”

“More like piranha,” Spuds agreed. “Say, we could serve catfish and call it something like Cannibal Catfish.”

“So you saw that TV news piece. How about Capone’s Catch of the Day?” Temple suggested.

“More refined and Frenchlike,” Eightball agreed. “But how come our boots are suspects? Forgive me, Miss Temple, but even we can’t string out a pair of boots for more ’n twenty years’ wear. That Lake Mead dead guy musta passed back in the glory days of the forties and fifties, because as Las Vegas heated up as a tourist destination, you did not wanta pollute the wonders of nature they could be bussed out to, or have an indiscretion caught on a boat anchor and causing consternation.”

“Gotta give whoever dumped that body in concrete booties credit,” Cranky added morosely. “Didn’t get found until Mother Nature sucked all that H-two-oh outta the lake.”

“You guys go back that far, along with Jersey Joe?”

“Yes, ma’am, ’cept we are all still alive. Living out in the desert keeps all that carbon monoxide from the Strip out of a man’s lungs,” Pitchblende said.

“Did Jersey Joe get too big for his boots when he stole all those silver dollars you all found? Did he dress like a dude?”

“ ’Course he did.” Eightball snorted.

“You woulda thought he was the second coming of Roy Rogers,” Spuds said. “Bolo ties with western suit coats. Boots pointed enough to make a horse run away from him.”

“So he went ‘Hollywood,’ like the movie Melody Ranch’s singing cowboys?” Temple asked, to make sure they were talking the same language and style.

“Oh, yeah. Got way above us and hisself.” Wild Blue said. “Dollar cigars. We didn’t figure it out at first, where he got the money. Thought he won it gambling, or one mob or the other was backing him. He always had big plans.”

“We had Jilly to raise, number one,” Eightball said gruffly. “That changed our dreams of hitting a strike at an old mine. We only did that train robbery to get a fund for our girl, and when we found all the silver dollars gone from our mine tunnel, we figured at first other prospectors took ’em, not one of our own gang.”

“JJ was a disappointment,” Cranky said. “But he was long dead and gone, and the Joshua Tree Hotel and Casino was a wreck no one wanted to take on, by the time Solitaire Smith and that tourist gal stumbled on one of JJ’s new hiding places for the silver-dollar hoard.”

“We’d been hiding out all those years from that robbery, and turns out it wasn’t necessary. The dollars were only worth anything to those ‘numisintist’ people.”

Temple couldn’t help smiling at Spud’s mangled version of the word.

The Glory Hole Gang had all been roped into being stepfathers for Eightball’s orphaned granddaughter, and dreams of riches and glory had faded with their quirky responsibility for a young girl. Jill grew up looking out for her gang of uncles. Now she was Mrs. Johnny Diamond and lived on a lavish ranch that the Crystal Phoenix’s never-fading ballad singer kept as a retreat after his nightly shows.

The whole Crystal Phoenix family, Temple knew, would be devastated if any of these old guys had anything to do with killing the sunken soul Midnight Louie and his daddy had found on the bottom of Lake Mead.

“So,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Did you know anyone else in the old days who could have afforded a custom pair of silver heel-capped cowboy boots signed by a master silversmith out of Hollywood named Bohlin?”

She tossed the close-up photo of the maker’s stamp onto the coffee table that centered the sprawling conversation-pit sofas.

And all conversation stopped.

Every last man stared at the black-and-white photo as if it were an eight-foot-long rattlesnake sunning on a hot rock six inches from their cowboy-booted ankles.

They should have been safe from any poison, but just seeing the possibilities made their blood run cold.

“Oh, man,” Pitchblende wailed. “I saw those things fresh outta the box. Real fine box, with all this girly tissue-stuff wrapped around them for shipping.”

“Darn and definitely darn,” Wild Blue pitched in. “He did leave town without notice.”

“Forever,” Cranky intoned.

“I thought it was another fast deal down Arizona-way,” Eightball said.

“He never did like water,” Spuds mourned. “Only in his whiskey.”

Temple sat still and silent, realizing she had kicked off a wake.

For Jersey Joe Jackson? Didn’t seem quite right.

Motorpsycho Nightmare

Max dreams and knows it.

He’s riding a sleek silver motorcycle.

Through the Alps.

Revienne Schneider is riding pillion behind him, clinging. She is not the clingy type.

It this weren’t a dream, she’d be hurling Freudian interpretations his way.

Motorcycle, symbol of freedom. Alps, symbol of hubris and danger. She would yank him off his electro-glide high horse, bring him down to Earth.

So he knows dreamland is not throwing the sexy, brainy shrink at him, but someone else, the visceral, gut-wrenching shrew who is riding behind him in Revienne’s intellectual sheepskin clothing. Riding him.

Rebecca was a spoiled, conniving bitch in the famous novel of that name. And dead.

Now he sees the woman passenger’s long black entangling hair whipping around his face like a mesh mask. The burr on his back is Black Irish, just as he is. Thorny. Dogged. Just as he is. Deceptive. As he can be if he has to. Hate filled, as he never was, unless it was at himself.

Maybe that is the key to Rebecca. Her hatred was always self-directed, and turned outward.

Whatever the truth, he knows what she is. A revenant, a haunting dream. A nightmare is always a dark female ride for him.

He dares to pity her. And feels steel spurs in his side.

The tarot card reads Strength. Who is compassion and light.

He is the Magician. Who is action and power.

His dark rider is … Death. Who is dark and sometimes welcome, which is light.

Rebecca. Kathleen. Kathleen O’Connor. Kitty the Cutter.

The odd card in the deck, the Hierophant, with the stage name of Gandolph, rises with a staff, barring the middle of the steep, dark road. A ring glints into the air, all gold and twisted like the worm Ouroboros, the serpent swallowing its own tail, that ancient symbol of eternity. Its eye is shimmering like an Australian fire opal, which is a symbol of hope and purity.

A lost engagement ring. “Engagement” being action and power, as well as passion and commitment.

He wants to ditch this monkey on his back, this entire magical, mystical motorcycle ride.

And he does. The motorcycle lies on its side, smoking tires spinning. He bends over to brush a long, lusterless lock of hair back from the pale face on the ground … and recoils.

The face is a map of decaying fungus, iridescent with rot.

He is up and running. Down a dark, deserted road, naturally.

Not so naturally. He’s running toward something, a black pyramid topped by a rearing stallion etched in flaring neon light.

It’s her! The real nightmare. The steed the fairy-tale knight urged up the glass mountain again and again, as he failed to surmount it again and again. To win the princess.

He understands that dreams are often the outpourings of subconscious punsters, like the literal nightmare. He’s got a split mind, both creator and hapless creature of himself, of his banged-up mind.

Then he’s running through a place he knows, the neon-sign graveyard in Las Vegas, faded in the sterile sunlight, larger than life, clownish. All bones and no flesh … flash.

As if turning on his dismissal, the world goes from sun soaked to black velvet painting. There is noise, music, as loud and raucous as the blazing neon images clashing all around him.

He is plunging down a dark rabbit hole, swinging out over an abyss. Instead of crashing down into the blur of life and motion and light below, he swings into an angular zigzag of a tunnel, running again, bouncing off the reflective black walls.

Then … it all opens up again into light, the warm glow of lamps against the darkness, and the whole cast is onstage, in costume, posed for a vignette fit for an Addams family portrait.

He can finally stop running, trying to escape, because he knows and can name each face.

This is where he was led and to where he has to return.

He assumes a confident persona, donning his own costume.

Flames flicker against the soot-blackened walls of a fireplace, but their red and yellow tongues are too regular to be real, and they flash a spark of gas-fed electric blue. Yet their false heat warms the room’s cherrywood paneling and highlights tufted leather couches and Empire satin-and-gilt chairs.

“Czarina Catherina predicted you’d never come back to us, but Carmen always knew you would,” a portly man in white tie and tails says as pompously as the White Rabbit, speaking from his position of power standing alongside the fireplace.

From his tone, Carmen is the handsome Spanish woman in her thirties lounging on one of the black horsehair-upholstered chairs. Her clothes and coloring are a study in black, white, and crimson. The name pricks Max.

Max bows to her acknowledgment, then turns to the other woman present.

This is the usual “medium,” a woman in her fifties or sixties, blowsy and exotic in her own commanding way, wearing a gold lamé turban and caftan, with a name as fussy as she is. Czarina Catherina.

She speaks in a surprisingly deep yet quivery voice. “Carmen said you weren’t dead.”

“You commune with the spirit world,” he answers. “What do they say?”

“Imposter,” Czarina Catherina charges, her voice thick with accusation. “Max Kinsella fled the Neon Nightmare the night the Phantom Mage fell to his death at that very club. Why would a murderer return to the scene of the crime?”

Before he can answer, she adds, “Besides, you don’t at all resemble the Mystifying Max.”

He turns to where she is staring and finds his entry door has become a floor-length mirror.

Dreams will do that: go out of their way to seal off any logical means of escape.

He sees four people behind him, the two women and the formally attired man he suddenly knows for a stage magician who’d worked years ago as Cosimo Sparks. The second man is tall and dark-haired and so familiar-looking. It is Max Kinsella, looking as intense and secretive as the poster for his stage show. His long-retired stage show.

So who is the star of this dream, the man facing him in the mirror?

Max feels a strangling spasm of disbelief.

Sean stands there instead … as he’d never lived to be: tall, broad, and husky, the curly red hair now auburn and spiky with some trendy gel, grinning like a death’s head come back to life.

While Max stands gaping, Carmen slinks up behind him to curl crimson-taloned hands over his shoulders.

“Don’t go so soon,” she croons in an Irish accent. “We’re just starting. Do you like my engagement ring, darling?”

He stares at the huge fiery opal framed in diamonds. He’d given someone a ring like that, but it had been smaller, finer, more tasteful. Exquisite.

“It’s synthetic!” he protests. “It’s not real.”

Next his dream self would be shouting, You’re nothing but a pack of cards!

With that thought, he meets Sean’s hazel eyes in the mirror and watches them darken into expanding pupils, a pair of emotional black holes to suck his sadly split selves into their own heart of darkness.

Silent Partner

“Not Jersey Joe,” Eightball O’Rourke quickly assured Temple. “He could wear a suit and would go so far as to don a black leather bolo tie when business called for it. We found it pretty fancy, but he was all for building something that would last, like Bugsy.”

“Not his goldurn wardrobe,” Wild Blue agreed, picking up the photo of the silver boot-heel stamp.

“Aw, it destroys your faith in humanity all over again,” Pitchblende said mournfully. “Our old pal Boots Benson musta been in on sneakin’ off our illegally obtained lucre and squirreling it away for Jersey Joe. Just another dirty rotten desert rat.”

“Now, maybe not,” Eightball opined, sitting forward on the oversized yardage of couch. “Maybe our restaurant out at Temple Bar was settin’ atop the answer to our busted lives of crime all the time, buried under fathoms of silent Lake Mead water.”

“Our mascot, Three O’Clock, has snagged carp out there,” Spuds Lonnigan said, with a shudder. “That could be the seventieth generation of fish that nibbled on Boots’s bones. How long do carp live, anyway?”

“Longer than we’d think,” Cranky Ferguson answered. “I’m guessing twenty-five to fifty years in places where there ain’t predators, and carp is not a prized game fish unless it’s a real huge one.”

Temple had sat openmouthed during this conversation, but she shut it fast when she realized all her companions were versed in the sport of fishing.

“No,” Eightball agreed, “it’s your largemouth and striped bass, channel catfish, crappie, and bluegill you want at our southern end of Lake Mead. Tourists have fed the shoreline carp to overstuffing for decades. So I agree, several of those suckers could have nibbled on Boots’s sunken chest. Yo, ho, ho.”

“That is so gruesome,” Temple said. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t like sportfishing.”

“Boots is gone,” Eightball told her. “Weren’t pretty, but now we know where, thanks to you.”

“I need to know why,” Temple said.

Eightball shook his head and regarded his pals. “Just like my granddaughter, Jilly, at age six. Why, why, why.” He turned to Temple again. “You and I have done some private-eye work, and we know murder always boils down to motive and method.”

“The method in this case illuminated the motive,” Temple said.

“How so?” Cranky asked.

“It’s such a classic mob ploy,” she explained, “encasing a man’s feet in concrete and throwing him off a pier.”

“Yup.” Wild Blue jumped into the discussion. “That was a big city mob method. They had a lot more water at hand—New York Harbor or Lake Michigan in Chicago.”

“That’s right,” Temple said, getting into the ghoulish groove. “A lake for body dumping was a novelty in the desert. Lake Mead’s artificial. When did it—?”

“Oh, young lady,” Pitchblende said, “the big Depression, of course. Hoover Dam was one of the few things that damn-fool president did to help folks get work. His first reaction was to laugh the whole thing off as poor folks not wanting to work enough. Building that dam backed up the Colorado River, and then you got the lake.”

“Nobody much cared about that big old watering hole in those days,” Spuds said. “Nobody much cared about any of this until Bugsy Siegel tried to sell the area as a resort to Hollywood folk.”

“What I’m getting at,” Temple said, “is that Boots Benson went missing because he’d been murdered in this spectacular, brutal, big-time mob way. I’m thinking his death was mostly meant to be a message.”

“Yeah, but if nobody knew he’d been killed, much less that way, what was the point?” Wild Blue asked.

Temple glanced at the photo of the maker marks on what was left of Boots’s footwear. “Maybe someone got all modern and took photos of Boots’s going-away launch. Maybe someone else was told and shown what happened to Boots.”

“That’s it!” Cranky Ferguson slapped his tobacco pouch down on the coffee table, making them all jump. “That’s why Jersey Joe got so quiet and dodgy with us all about where the train-robbery silver dollars were hidden and what was going on in town and when we could expect to get some of our cut.”

“He kept stalling us,” Spuds put in, “and stalling us, saying it was needed to put up the Joshua Tree Hotel and Casino.”

“And that put you all off?” Temple asked.

“Sure,” Wild Blue Pike said. “We expected to wait to get something back on our investment. The Joshua Tree was the whole purpose of the stickup. Train robbery was pretty rare by then. We had it all figured out how to separate the silver cars and shuffle ’em off on a side rail and keep movin’ them along from spur to spur track. We didn’t wear bandanas on our faces and pull guns or nothing. I kept track of everything from the air, before and during and after, from my biplane.”

“Why’d you think the Crystal Phoenix put the Haunted Mine Ride in the Jersey Joe Jackson attraction, girl?” Spuds asked. “During those early construction days, rails ran right nearby. We were miners, for mercy’s sake! We just excavated ourselves under the hotel-to-be property and scooted those silver-dollar-loaded cars down there and covered up the shaft.”

Temple’s mouth was open again.

“Only we ended up getting the shaft,” Wild Blue complained. “Nothin’ we could do about it. Jersey Joe seemed to have spread the wealth from there, to hiding places in the distant desert and right under our feet, and nothing we could do about it but stew.”

“Then the lost vault was real?” Temple asked.

“Sure.” Eightball shook his head at that latest travesty. “It was real hard to keep our composures, watching that sucker getting opened in front of God and TV cameras and that weasely Crawford Buchanan and fancy man from down Rio way.”

“Looks like that dead magician fellow inside got the same shaft we did,” Pitchblende said, puffing on his now-smoking pipe.

“What if the vault had been loaded to the gills with silver dollars from that robbery?” Temple wondered.

Eightball chuckled. “That’s been dead to us for decades. Those ill-gotten gains are too infamous to do anybody any good now. ’Cept gettin’ new greedy fools killed. Poor Boots started the chain letter of deceit from hell, and Jersey Joe was the next recipient.”

“So you’re thinking Jersey Joe never gave the mob the money, but he never had a worry-free day in his life from then on,” Temple said.

“Yup.” Cranky had returned from the test kitchen with an opened longneck. “That’s why he never faced us guys again.”

“Maybe he thought you’d get the ‘concrete bathtub’ treatment like Boots if you were linked to the robbery,” Temple suggested.

The stunned silence showed they’d never thought of that.

“Jersey Joe was cheatin’ us because he was protectin’ us?” Pitchblende asked in slow, four-four time.

“He didn’t live much of the high life after the Joshua Tree went up,” Temple pointed out. “After all, he’s famous for what he hid and didn’t use. And, Eightball, didn’t your granddaughter, Jill, find some of the stash?”

“Yeah, that was a fluke,” Eightball said, “and by then any money we couldn’t give Jilly for college and such was moot. She was already grown.”

“But she’s played the World Championship Poker game,” Wild Bill pointed out, “and is the top-ranking female. Wouldn’t have happened it she hadn’t grown up playing Gin Rummy and Old Maid and poker with us old coots when we were all hidin’ out for years in that ghost town.”

“I guess,” Eightball said, beaming even as he shrugged at their ward’s accomplishments.

“And now,” Temple pointed out, “the very drying up of Lake Mead that revealed the resting place of your old associate, Boots, is putting the light of day on the puzzling actions and motivations of another old associate who may have betrayed you all for your own good.”

Eightball considered, nodded his head, then glared at her.

“You are an inveterate and unreformed Little Mary Sunshine, did you know that, Miss Temple Barr?”

“Not really.” She cringed a bit inside. These guys had endured forty years of deprivation, loneliness, and justifiable anger. Who was she to put a better spin on it?

“Get a whole round of those beers, Cranky,” Eightball ordered. “We need to drink a long-delayed toast to Boots Benson and Jersey Joe Jackson, may they finally rest in peace, boots and bolo tie together, and to Miss Temple Barr: may forever she wave, at Lake Mead or elsewhere, wherever it’s needed.”

An Inspector Calls

When Temple told Van she’d work on the death in the vault solo, she’d hadn’t realized how really solo she was these days.

She was used to a sounding board, but Max was as gone as a Las Vegas tourist on a three-night jag. Now Matt was in Chicago, doing a daily live Amanda Show gig and having serial dinners with his relatives, especially his wary mother and his newly discovered birth father.

“I’ll do some groundwork for you flying up with me on a later visit,” he’d told Temple on the long-distance phone call when she checked in from her car. “I understand you’d want to have a formal wedding in Minneapolis or Chicago for both families, but mine is a mess right now. I don’t want their ancient issues clouding the biggest day of our lives. Believe me, I’ve seen how a couple of feuding family members can make a wedding into a battleground no one will ever forget, including the happy couple.”

Temple had nodded, though he couldn’t see. She’d witnessed that too, had attended wedding receptions where pregnant brides’ bitter fathers had too much champagne and blabbed their daughters’ condition to all and sundry, or where best men had needed to confess during the wedding toast that they’d known the bride “in the biblical fashion.” Or worse.

When Temple returned to her Circle Ritz condo, it was quiet and empty, and she realized that would drive her nuts. She went to the spare bedroom to use the desktop computer and did a search on Revienne Schneider and Professor Hugo Gruetzmeyer. She no longer Googled. She used Bing.com because that encouraged her to shout aloud, “Bingo!” when she hit pay dirt and found something.

Pay dirt, she mused. That was a gold miners’ expression, and if anyone should take it seriously, it was the old guys who made up the Glory Hole Gang.

Hmph. Maybe she wasn’t solo on this investigation. They had a lot at stake in settling matters and getting their restaurant underway at Gangsters. Their brainstorming session today had put a new light on some very dark issues in their lives and given her a lot more to think about regarding current deaths and disappointments.

Why hadn’t she thought of them sooner, instead of moping around feeling that forties song staple, lonely and blue?

Cheered, Temple dove into the many sites mentioning Revienne Schneider. She found nothing about her family, but plenty on that Swiss private school. Then the Sorbonne in Paris, then a gap, then graduation from Sigmund Freud University of Vienna and Paris, and an impressive portfolio building to a crescendo of 165,000 Web mentions.

Apparently, Revienne Schneider had been a girl wonder right out of PhD school, working with damaged young women all over the Continent and Ireland.

Mention of that island nation always chilled Temple’s blood. It had spawned Kathleen O’Connor, she who’d ruined the lives of Max and his terrorism-slain cousin, Sean, and who’d seduced Max into a future of regret and undercover counterterrorism.

Now Temple was chilled to the bone to read of the awful Magdalen institutions, where young women were given a life sentence of drudgery and incarceration. Verbal, physical, and sexual abuse thrived among such an isolated and helpless population, as it can in private families as well. In comparison, having four slightly bullying, obnoxiously superior older brothers didn’t seem like much of a problem at all.

The former reporter in Temple was working up a righteous rage, but the Magdalen atrocities had long been revealed, though the hidden sins of the Roman Catholic Church in that regard persisted the way Wall Street CEOs’ unbelievable millions in “bonuses” persisted after the entire country’s economy crashed in 2008.

You had to admire Revienne for wading into that cesspool of damage with her fresh shrink credentials and, well, media-ready personal attributes. This woman definitely looked “Illegally Blonde.”

Jeesh, thought Temple, staring at another image of Revienne, designer-suited up and sleek, what is it with these European femme fatales? Thirty-seven, single, dedicated to her work. It didn’t seem … natural for a woman this attractive to have no marriage history or romantic links, but she was a Frenchwoman. She’d have no trouble connecting with men wherever she went.

Temple wondered why this perfect, and even selfless, career woman gave her the creeps. A big black bar flashed across the screen and slapped Revienne Schneider right in the elegantly aloof blonde kisser. It was a furry tail.

“Louie! You scared me. When’d you get home? And from where? And why are you playing computer-screen smackdown with the beautiful blonde stranger in town?”

He hunkered low on the desktop, covering Temple’s notepapers and pen and a quarter of the computer keyboard. He began grooming his slap-happy paw and purring loud enough to imitate a queen bee hive.

“Apparently,” Temple said, “you don’t like gorgeous blonde interlopers on our crime scene, either.”

Louie just yawned to show his carnivore-red mouth and flash his white baby-shark’s teeth.

Temple was still mooning at this image of tall blonde perfection when her old-fashioned doorbell rang. Avon calling? Maybe.

Right now she was about convinced that finding the right facial foundation might make her look taller. She padded barefoot to the entry hall, and voilà …

“You!” Temple was sorry she’d answered her doorbell, though it was too nice of a one to ignore. Now she wished she’d just stood behind the closed door, enjoying a long, sonorous melody of bells until her visitor had given up and gone away.

Unfortunately, her visitor was not the type to give up and go away. Ever.

“I thought my life had been too blessed to be true lately,” Temple grumbled as she stepped aside for Amazonian homicide officer C. R. Molina, in the extenuated flesh. And wearing flats! “And here I thought we were drinking buddies,” Lieutenant C. R. Molina said, crossing onto Temple’s black-and-white-tiled entry-hall floor with her giant Big and Tall Women low-heeled loafers.

Flatfoot was right!

Even without high heels, the homicide officer still towered over her. Well, why not? Temple not only went mostly barefoot at home, she knew she looked particularly shrimpy at the moment, wearing her longest T-shirt belted as a short knit dress.

Molina was eyeing Temple’s bare pink toes with their scarlet nail polish looking like blood drops on the black-and-white checkerboard of cool marble.

“So that’s your secret to stomping around on spikes all over the Strip. At home you’re a closet toe nudist. Even Mariah had more ‘toe’ at age nine.”

“My toes are off-limits. How is Mariah?”

“She’s fine. I understand from Van von Rhine that you’ve recently met an old school friend of hers, Revienne Schneider.”

“Just in passing in Van’s office. Why on Earth would you be interested in Van’s European school friends?”

“So you’d never heard of or met this woman before?” Molina asked.

“Nope. Why’d you ask about her?”

“After the body in the vault—oh, Lord, that sounds so Agatha Christie!—everyone new at the Crystal Phoenix is a person of interest to the police. Detective Ferraro has his hands full with the cast of dozens on the scene. I decided to consult your friends and business associates in the Fontana crime family. They were quite forthcoming about such exotic recent imports as Mr. Tomás Santiago and Miss Revienne Schneider.”

“Santiago was Nicky’s find,” Temple said, taking the chance to defend herself while she had it. “The body in the vault was a freak accident, I swear. I didn’t do it to drum up publicity for the hotel, and I don’t think Crawford Buchanan did it, even though he deserves a murder rap, and I am totally cooperating with Detective Ferraro and any minions he may have, because the Crystal Phoenix really needs to shut this incident down.”

“Not a stupendous opening stunt for a mob museum,” Molina agreed, eyeing the pale living-room sofa for big black blots with claws in residence.

“Santiago is, unfortunately, all for real,” she went on. “His avant-garde architectural work is well known and respected internationally. Revienne Schneider shows up as a world-renowned expert in her field. Her only flaw—Well, I looked as hard for some as you probably did, but I found only two things awry.”

“Two things! What a relief.” Temple sighed.

“One would think an international expert doing a workshop at a local university would be a much ballyhooed event on the Web site, at least, if not in a course catalog. Not so with Dr. Schneider.”

“Van seemed to be hosting her at the eleventh hour too,” Temple noted.

“She’d come here directly from Zurich, which is not her home or office base.”

“But she and Van attended a Swiss prep school. They would have Swiss friends in common.”

“Being a proud graduate of Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy in East L.A.,” Molina said, “I wouldn’t know about Swiss prep-school friends. Interpol tells me there was some sort of recent upset at an Alpine Swiss clinic. Dr. Schneider left abruptly and notified the clinic later from Zurich that she wouldn’t be returning.”

“Maybe the visiting professor here needed her to bail him out.”

“So you don’t find her presence just before the murder was discovered to be suspicious?”

Now was the time for Temple to blab or babble about the Synth and the forgotten thirteenth sign of the zodiac and the suspicious shape of the victim’s red cloak lining.

Yeah, Molina would really crack the whip and have Ferraro follow those lines of inquiry.

“This is clearly a local affair,” Temple said. “Weird but all too local. That’s Vegas.”

Molina eyed Temple hard, then nodded her satisfaction.

“Good,” she said, plopping down on the cushions like she owned the place. “I’ll take something cool and slightly alcoholic. Don’t fuss. Whatever’s handy.”

She smiled and lifted the strong, dark eyebrows Temple had always thought were in desperate need of plucking. On the other hand, the Brooke Shields look had worked for her for years. So … Molina was working her, Temple?

Think again. She banged around the tiny kitchen that suited her just fine and returned with two tall, festive glasses filled with something the color of watermelon juice.

“Pretty pale sangria,” Molina commented, taking a sip.

Temple sat on a chair at the end of the glass-topped coffee table, checking to see that her no-sweat, absorbent stone coasters were out. As usual, what was left of daily newspapers these days littered the coffee-table top. No PHOENIX REVIVAL ACT FOR BIZARRE BODY IN HIDDEN HOTEL VAULT was the gripping three-line head over the one-column front-page teaser story for a more-detailed inside report.

“Front page,” Molina commented. “A publicist’s dream. Unless the topic is antiproductive. What is this stuff?”

“Newsprint? How soon they forget. Oh, you mean the drink. It’s not like I keep a fully stocked bar.”

“What is it?” Like all homicide detectives, even off-duty Molina wanted answers, pronto.

“Crystal Light cherry pomegranate with vodka.”

“Not bad.” Molina nudged the paper away to uncover a coaster, as if delicately unveiling a dead body … or a cockroach. She put the glass down.

Temple took a big farewell gulp of hers and did likewise.

“Relax,” Molina said. “I’m not here about your current problem. I’m not even surreptitiously examining the premises for symptoms of Max Kinsella.”

“ ‘Symptoms’? Like he’s a disease?”

“Not still contagious by now, I hope. No,” Molina mused, “I’m convinced I no longer need to worry about him, and you certainly don’t, not with another man’s engagement ring on your left hand.”

No … not until Molina bopped over and got overly cozy with Temple’s spiked Crystal Light and seemed about ready to drop a bombshell.

“By the way …” Molina shifted on the sofa.

Was she going to draw a gun?

Temple’s paired bare knees pressed together until the bones ached. What was going on here? Really?

Molina thrust a hand into her khaki blazer pocket and pulled out a …

Plum?

No, a plastic sandwich baggie wearing a narrow white label.

Temple eyed it as if a tarantula crouched inside.

“You’ll recognize this,” Molina said, tossing the baggie onto the bed of newspapers on the coffee table.

Temple reached to take another sip of her cherry-pomegranate vodka cocktail. Did the baggie contain drugs? Was she being set up? Was she paranoid? Yes! She picked up the plastic baggie.

Something heavy sagged down in one corner.

Too heavy to be a tarantula.

But not too heavy to be a shock.

Temple heard her own voice echo as if she were speaking in the Chunnel of Crime. “It’s the ring. My ring.”

“Right. Kinsella’s ring, which the late magician Shangri-La conned you out of during her magic act way back when.”

“You … said it was police evidence, that you had to keep it.”

Molina shrugged. “I suppose it still might be police evidence, but you’re engaged to Matt Devine now. And Max Kinsella is … apparently long gone. Shangri-La’s dead. So it’s my call.”

Temple tangled her bare ankles together. Her toes barely touched the long white fur of her fake-goat-hair area rug under the coffee table. She was just too damn short.

Since her clamped knees made her skirt into a secure little hammock between her thighs, she peeled open the bag’s zip-strip and worked the ring into her palm. She remembered telling Max that opals were unlucky, but he had laughed at the idea.

Oh. Seeing it again was like viewing a full moon for the first time. This was a particularly vivid, fire-laden stone, the whole sky’s worth of aurora borealis captured in a knuckle-sized square. Wasn’t that just like Max? The diamonds framing the opal twinkled in obeisance to the central stone. This ring wasn’t as antique or expensive as the ruby-and-diamond Art Deco showpiece she now wore and adored, but it was unique and exquisite.

It brought back the magic of Max, and the knowledge that he was utterly gone, even as far as his archenemy Molina was concerned. Temple was surprised Molina hadn’t croaked, “Come … bite,” in a hag’s voice just now as she offered the ring to Temple.

Temple gazed up into the homicide lieutenant’s eyes. They were as vividly blue as the Morning Glory Pool in Yellowstone Park—which was brimming with poisonous sulfur.

Molina’s expression remained the usual law-enforcement-personnel noncommittal blank.

Temple was equally determined not to give an inch, or even a centimeter of opal.

“If you can give this ring back to me now,” she said, “you didn’t need to keep it as ‘evidence’ all this time.”

“No. No, I didn’t.”

“Then that was mean.”

The schoolyard epithet sank deep between them like the opal ring had weighed in Temple’s lap. Impossible to ignore.

“Yes,” Molina said, her hands jamming her blazer pockets, her front teeth biting her barely lip-glossed bottom lip. “That was mean. I have been a mean girl.”

“And you’re giving it back now because … you think Max is dead!”

“Maybe,” said Molina. “You know Max is dead!”

“I don’t, and I’m not sure I’d believe it if I did hear it. Max Kinsella, dead or alive, has nothing to do with my bringing that here.”

“Why, then?”

“Shangri-La is dead. The case is closed, and the wench is dead.” Molina shrugged. “No reason to keep it.”

“I can’t wear it!”

“It’s a keepsake, then. I certainly don’t need it cluttering an evidence locker.”

“This little thing?”

“Any little thing,” Molina said, smiling wryly.

Temple inhaled but didn’t say anything, after all.

Molina sipped her drink. “This is pretty good, amazingly. You have a gift for the impromptu.”

“So do you!” Temple charged back, eyes flashing. “You just show up, brandishing my engagement ring?”

“Hardly an engagement ring now,” Molina said.

“Why now?” Temple demanded.

“It was an excuse to talk to you.”

“You’ve never needed an excuse before.”

“I’ve never needed your ‘expertise’ before.”

“Which is?”

“You … appear to be something of a better judge of men than I am. Except for Matt. He’s golden, as we both know.”

“Mostly. He’s human too.”

“Apparently, I am not.”

What a confession! Temple felt they really ought to be seated in a bare little room with a two-way mirror somewhere. Molina wanted something from her. Molina was flashing something that looked a lot like … humility? Vulnerability? Oh, happy day!

Temple took up the gauntlet and sipped deliberately. Damn good cherry-pomegranate-vodka cocktail. If aspartame is your aperitif of choice.

“What are you not being human about?” Temple inquired.

“Our main topic. Men.”

Did Temple ever dream she would see the day she and Molina snuggled down with booze to discuss men? No.

“Which men?” Temple asked. “If you’re going to grill me about Max again …”

“No. Max Kinsella is a dead issue.”

Temple cringed. “An official declaration?”

“Totally personal. Or don’t you think I have a personal view?”

“I think it’s all been personal about Max.”

Molina actually winced. “He’s such a natural-born suspect, even you have to admit that. If he was always the counterterrorist operative you claim, that would draw official suspicion, even subconsciously.”

“Maybe,” Temple admitted. “So it’s Max you want me to dissect.”

“Actually, no. I say he was a likely suspect. You say I was persecuting him. He disappeared, probably happy to not be a bone of contention any longer. No, let Max enjoy his anonymity. I’m more interested in knowing what you think about Dirty Larry.”

“Huh?”

“Dirty Larry Podesta. You’ve seen him around crime scenes. The recovering undercover guy.”

“You mean ‘Dirty Blond’ Dirty Larry.”

“If you say so. So you think blond means ‘dumb’? You’re marrying a blond.”

“Do I have to call him Dirty Larry? It’s so seventies.”

Molina cracked a smile. Vodka will do that to even the most poker-faced person. “Yes, he does seem out of some Steve McQueen time zone, doesn’t he?”

“I thought you liked him.”

“I have associated with him. Or, rather, he has associated with me. What do you think?”

“He’s not your type.”

“Do we know what is my type?”

“I guess not,” Temple admitted. “You are an enigma wrapped in a torch singer hiding behind a madonna.”

“We ought to tip a glass more often.” Molina tipped hers, but Temple noticed her vivid blue eyes were completely focused.

That was the problem with striking eyes. Temple’s were a changeable blue-gray, which allowed her to play vague or steel-sharp.

“Dirty Larry.” Temple savored the theatricality of the nickname. “Did he decide to leave the undercover detail, or was he shuffled out?”

“The records on that are vague.”

“Suspicious in itself. Your impression?”

“He showed up suddenly. I could have been flattered. Or I could have decided I got a rash of unknown origin.”

“So you never trusted him.”

“I never trust anyone.”

“That is sad, Carmen.”

“Did I say we were on first-name basis, Temple?”

“You gave me a ring, Carmen.”

The lieutenant burst out laughing. “I would hate to play poker with you, I’ll give you that. Look. My personal and professional life is a mess at the moment, admitted. I bet you’d be busy loving that, except you can’t admit how worried you are about your missing ex, even with the upscale brass ring from another man on your third finger, left hand. I can’t admit how wrong I probably was about your ex, which makes him the elephant in the room. But we aren’t the type to go around blindfolded discussing elephants when we can be doing something productive, are we? Is Dirty Larry dirty or not?”

“He could be. You don’t invite hangers-on, and he’s sure stubborn about that.”

“Exactly,” Molina said. “I’ve watched him as much as I can with a mystery stalker intruding now and then into my house, and my teenage daughter acting out, and me trying to push an invisible man into a corner, where I’ll probably end up getting myself trapped.”

“I’d lose him,” Temple said. “Personally. Watch your back, but lose him.”

Molina nodded and lifted her glass. “Any more where this came from?”

“If you want Crystal Light and no-name vodka, you have hit the mother lode.”

Temple bustled off to refill their glasses. She made Molina’s heavy on the vodka, hers on the Crystal Light. Did she think she could outdrink the Iron Maiden of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, or Carmen the bar singer, or whatever role Molina was going to whip out of her blazer today? Not without playing a bit dirty. Dirty. The word of the hour. Maybe.

“So,” said Molina, when Temple had returned with the drinks reloaded. “You’ve disposed of Dirty Larry as a bad idea whose time has not come. What about … Detective Alch?”

“Really? We’re supposed to discuss him, as what? A detective? Or a favorite uncle?”

“Your opinion, your choice.”

“He’s kind of like me,” Temple said thoughtfully.

Molina almost spit out her drink in surprise. “How in the world?”

“Fiercer than you’d think.”

Molina thought about it for a long while, then nodded grudgingly. “My best man.”

“Are we still speaking professionally?”

“Your choice.”

“Solid-gold veteran,” Temple declared. “And … a bonus: he gets girls.”

“How do you mean ‘girls’?”

“All ages, all stages.”

“He has an only daughter, grown,” Molina confirmed. “Ah! And a wife?”

“Ex-wife.”

“Somehow I don’t get someone leaving him.”

“It was the other way around, but it wasn’t his fault.”

“No. It wouldn’t be,” Temple said.

“Does Alch know you’re such a fan?”

“Probably, but he wouldn’t think much about it. Does he know you’re such a fan?”

“Did I say that?”

“He’s your right-hand man. I say that.”

Molina nodded and sipped. “And Rafi Nadir.”

She didn’t phrase it as a question, but Temple realized it was the one “burning” question Molina actually wanted someone else’s opinion on.

Wow. Had Rafi supplanted Max as the object of Molina’s obsession? Was this progress or regression or just plain human?

Temple went for shock value. “Max didn’t think much of him.”

“Kinsella knew him?”

As if there were another Max in this town for either of them. Temple noticed Molina was back to last names, a way of dehumanizing people.

“Max ran into Rafi when your ex first came to Vegas,” she explained, “and was working temporary security jobs around town.”

Molina raised her eyebrows expectantly, but no way was Temple going to turn this into a discussion of Max’s various efforts to protect Temple and investigate traces of the bizarre cabal of magicians known as the Synth.

“He found Rafi bitter and biased and just plain bad news.” Temple spotted the slightest hint of a wince in Molina’s features, which she hid behind another sip of sweet-and-sour vodka pop.

Molina was forced to interrogate further. “Later you, as Zoe Chloe Ozone, were so warned off the guy that when you teamed up with my daughter at the Teen Idol reality-TV house, you both got crazy cozy with Rafi Nadir, of all security personnel to turn to with a murderer on the premises.”

“Sounds nuts, doesn’t it?” Temple said with a sober sip and a smile. “Zoe and Mariah were just crazy mixed-up teen kids, right? Actually, Rafi proved pretty perceptive in that house of pop-culture horror and murder. He looked out for us both.”

“And got close to my daughter under false pretenses.”

“Did he even know he had a daughter then? I don’t think so. They just naturally clicked.”

“Oh, my God! You’ve been encouraging their unlikely relationship just to bug me.”

“It’s never been about you, Carmen Molina. That’s like saying you were chasing Max’s shadow all over Vegas for a murder rap just to annoy me. Other people are living their lives naturally, without it being a conspiracy you need to bust.”

Temple sat back. “Yes, I’ve decided that Rafi isn’t so bad. You’re just mad because you’ve come to the same conclusion after Mariah and I did. And ditto for Max. You’re fresh out of personal villains, unless Dirty Larry cooperates and turns out to be a pimp or something.”

Temple wasn’t sure whether Molina was going to explode, stomp out of there, arrest her, or … laugh.

“You are fiercer than you look,” Molina said, shaking her head. “Good thing you plied me with vodka doubles so I’m in a good mood. No. I don’t need any personal villains. Or heroes. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t getting back at me for pursuing your apparently heroic ex-boyfriend by foisting the villainous Rafi on me.”

“It does seem you underestimated each other back when you were young and foolish. Rafi does seem to have reformed enough to earn a shot at fatherhood, and Mariah deserves to know who he is. She likes him, you know.”

“Yes, I know.” Molina put down her glass. “There are right psychological moments, though, and legalities to consider.”

“If you managed to work those out by the junior-high father-daughter dance this fall, that would be nice. Matt is dying not to have anyone depend on him to be an official ‘father’ anymore.”

“He’s not around right now?” Molina looked up at the ceiling that was the floor to Matt’s upstairs unit.

“In Chicago on a working vacation, actually. He has family there.”

“Really? Oh. Of course. That pond-slime stepfather he tracked here had to have left other disenchanted souls behind in Chi-Town. Now that Matt’s past family issues are resolved, I’m sure he’d make a great real father. Mariah likes him too.”

“Not that way, mama. And you’re prying… . We haven’t even set a date and place for the wedding.”

Molina stood. “So it’s anti–Dirty Larry and pro–Rafi Nadir. Pro–Max Kinsella, as always, and pro–Morrie Alch. Interesting. I wonder which of us has been taken in the most? By whom?”

“Ourselves?” Temple offered, standing too. She was determined to reduce the tall police lieutenant’s degree of “loom.”

Molina didn’t answer but pulled a cell phone from her blazer side pocket.

“You’re calling in reinforcements?”

“I’m calling a squad car to drop off a driver for my vehicle. I’m not getting behind the wheel after drinking those ‘Vodka Surprises’ of yours. Nice try. We’ll have to do this again some time. Enjoy the old bling. I’ll see myself out,” Molina said. “Thanks for the drinks.”

Temple blinked and took a deep breath after her front door closed on Molina. She had a valuable Tiffany ring to return to a plastic baggie.

She would not try on Max’s ring to see if it still fit. It would. She would not try the ring on to see if it threw bolts of reflection around the room like it used to. It would. She would not play with the ring, admire the ring, or touch the ring to see if she still felt regrets for Max Kinsella.

Ringing Issues

So my Miss Temple just sits there on our living-room sofa, as if lost in a dream, turning the plastic baggie and Mr. Max’s opal ring around and around in her hand.

She does not even move when we hear her front door open and close.

Ooooh, that Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina has been a mean girl. Humans! They claim not to use tooth and claw as we four-feet do, but even a so-called “nice” gesture can come with a fierce bite, a “kick” like the firing of a gun.

I can see that my Miss Temple has no idea where she should put this ring. It would look tacky on her third finger, right hand, although the jewelry biz is busy marketing a “right hand” diamond ring as every woman’s necessity, to up sales.

Even I know that two major pieces of bling on the same person’s petite ten fingers is tasteless. I know my Miss Temple’s scarf drawer is not lucky for ring storage, not after Mr. Matt found Kitty the Cutter’s worm Ouroboros ring inside, and no one can figure out how it got there. The evil K the C had stolen the tail-sucking snake back from Mr. Matt after forcing him to wear it as a sign of her murderous power over everyone he knew.

“Wait a minute!” Miss Temple shouts.

I jump slightly at the racket, but at last my roommate has leaped into action. She has stood to yell after the long-gone Molina.

“You must be off duty if you’re drinking, even if you can get a driver home. Giving this ring back is not an official act.”

Nice point, but the door is shut and Molina is out of hearing range. Only I am here to get the message.

Miss Temple sits again to squirm on her uncomfortable side chair, and so I come out of hiding to loft onto the empty sofa she is leaving vacant for me.

I can read her mind like it was pile of tea leaves.

She eyes the anemic pink liquid and melted ice cubes in her glass, obviously wondering if maybe she had imbibed more hard liquor than she realized. She looks puzzled and a little sad.

At last she looks up and spots me. Now is the time for some distracting action on my part!

But which part?

I leap onto the sofa arm so I have an artistic pedestal and begin sucking my rear-toe hairs. This is quite the athletic feat. I know I look a little silly and that therefore Miss Temple will find me talented and endearing and forget her woes. As they sing: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag.”

I am certainly an old kit.

“Oh, Louie,” she says, totally won over by my native charm and cute little nibbling acts. “You must have been hiding in the spare bedroom until the fuzz was gone, or until your toe fuzz needed a grooming. Now, do not fall off the sofa and hurt yourself.”

As if I couldn’t do a double axel on the way down and land with all four sets of shivs stapled to the wood parquet floor!

Of course I do nothing of the kind to damage the décor, but I give my Miss Temple one of my best world-weary, totally superior glances. She had never heard me come in, has no idea that I have seen and heard the entire scene. I can go barefoot around this place too, so she will never hear me sneaking up on her.

She smiles gratefully at my presence.

“Louie,” she says, “you are the only male in my life I have no worries or doubts about whatsoever. Unless you fall off the sofa arm.”

Oh, please. The one to worry about is she herself.

After all, I had returned to my center of operations and paused to check in on my Miss Temple, only to find her entertaining the enemy. Cordially. With powdered drink mix and hard liquor.

I suppose my antipathy to Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina is nothing personal.

She has her job to do, and I have mine. We both nail crooks, and her way is a lot less personal than mine usually, because she has underlings.

Yes, yes, you could argue that because I am a prominent member of the Feline Nation, the entire population of humans become my automatic underlings.

But there is a communication disconnect, so I am forced to exert precious time and energy in leading these self-involved and inarticulate creatures down the most logical garden path. Certainly they chatter a great deal, but much of it is meaningless.

At any rate, Molina, as my roommate and her intimates so abruptly call her, has not been on any personal crime-solving trail, nose to the groundstone, until she recently got too nosy about where Mr. Max Kinsella kept a safe house in Vegas and she broke the law by breaking and entering.

Miss Midnight Louise witnessed the whole episode, so we had plenteous blackmail material to hold over Molina the next time she came around bullying my Miss Temple about the whereabouts of Mr. Max Kinsella. Of course, it would be troublesome to manipulate what we know into public awareness, and now here is the dreaded Molina sharing alcohol content with my Miss Temple.

One never knows when or by whom the sanctity of one’s home will be violated. Mr. Max had a way of breaking and entering as an expected unexpected guest. That method had much in common with my comings and goings, plus it gave my Miss Temple the frisson of unpredictability. We suave dudes know how to keep a dame interested.

Big Mama Molina apparently just rang the doorbell and walked right in. So crude and rude!

I eye the abject form of a plastic baggie on the sofa. A lowly commercial object representative of our plastic culture nowadays, which I might sometimes allow to entertain me for a few moments while my shivs staple holes into it until its ziplock closure begs for mercy.

Now it is weighted with a small object that would make it quite bat-worthy, even for a dude of my serious size and dignity. Unfortunately, I recognize a precious object and know better. I edge near to examine this item, once stolen and held for ransom, to refresh my sometimes delinquent memory.

It is a subtle, fiery gemstone set into a white-gold circumference small enough for my Miss Temple’s size-five feet and fingers. She wears the same size in shoes and rings, which is handy for dudes who wish to shower her in Jimmy Choos and Fred Leightons. (She has, however only one each of these two gentlemen’s high-end foot and finger fripperies, and many of her shoes nowadays are from resale shops.)

Again seeing my Miss Temple’s long-withheld keepsake of Mr. Max and what harassment she must put up with in his absence only makes me more determined to settle the hash of these Neon Nightmare Synth people and solve the tri-venue tunnel murder all to my mistress’s greater glory and ability to further lord it over the official fuzz, like Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina.

Miss Temple has always been right. The Molina eyebrows are way too furry for a lady.

Breakfast of Champions

“I’ve had a breakthrough,” Max told Garry Randolph at breakfast in the hotel the next morning.

“What?” Gandolph, startled, sprayed the word into his cup of morning hot chocolate.

Watching him mop up the ring around the cup, Max felt the painful nostalgia of finally surprising the man who, he guessed, had always surprised him, at least during his vulnerable younger years after O’Toole’s Pub.

“Freud was right,” Max opined. “Dreams are the key. At least mine were. I’ve recovered some pretty vivid memories from before my engineered fall at the Neon Nightmare. I dreamed a whole cast of characters. Old-school magicians or charlatans … Cosimo Sparks?”

“ ‘Old-school’ is right. Cosimo was strictly minor, even in his heyday. Retired to Vegas from better days in the Midwest. Did social-club benefits and auctions. Thought when they said how the mighty have fallen they meant him. A stumble maybe, but his career successes were mostly in his own ego.”

“Carmen?”

“Ah. Your type, right? Femme fatale. Poisonous young thing, once. When I was still working, which is several years ago, as you know, she tried to seduce me into replacing Gloria Fuentes as my assistant. Indeed! Give up a trained veteran who still looked PDG.”

“PDG?”

“Pretty damned good. At my age, you appreciate women who manage that, and some do into their nineties now. It’s in the head,” he said, tapping his right temple. Max winced, sensitized to the word temple now. “Anyway, I don’t dump a loyal partner for a few crow’s-feet when I’m all over sags and bags.”

“That’s so encouraging,” Max said.

“You just twinkled, wicked boy! Making fun of your old partner in a double-edged way. Go to it! That’s the spirit. ‘Curse, if you must, this old gray head… .’ ”

“Enough, ‘Barbara Frietchie.’ I had that poem in grade school too. From what you tell me, we both honored our ‘country’s flag,’ as in that old poem, more than the average.”

“Charmin’ Carmen.” Gandolph mused. “That moniker came later when she conned the guy who made a mint becoming the Cloaked Conjuror into taking her on. Ramona Zamora was her real name. Oh, she was tasty, though. Nineteen and hungry. But what was really in it for me to dump Gloria for a young thing but a few blow jobs and a kiss-off?”

“Garry! Have I ever heard you talk that way before?”

He had the grace to look apologetic. “No.” He rubbed a hand over his weary features, giving them a passing face-lift. “I used to respect women more, and the world.”

“Didn’t Gloria die?”

“Hardly. She was killed last year. Only fifty-eight. Police couldn’t find her murderer right away and probably retired the case. Woman accosted and killed in a parking lot. It’s the major unsolved cliché crime of our time.”

“Helluva time,” Max muttered.

“Don’t let me hang up your dream memories. I can’t believe your subconscious has dredged up those familiar names from my days of yore. I helped you set up the Phantom Mage persona and act at the Neon Nightmare. We knew the Synth members met there, or even owned the place, but you never reported names back to me. Just questions about the Synth, which I’d never heard of before. Who else has your memory conjured?”

“Czarina Catherina, the usual fake medium in a fake turban.”

“Oh, I’d exposed her years ago in Cleveland.”

“More details about your unsuspected sex life, Gandolph? Really, I’m still too young for such confessions.”

“I exposed her as a fake, bilking people out of money for ‘messages’ from dead loved ones.”

“You don’t think one can get messages from dead loved ones?”

Gandolph glanced at him with worried eyes. “Occasionally, there are cases and mediums that seem … actual. What do you think you saw in your dreams last night, Max?”

“I think one of the four Synth members present is still a mystery to me, because I saw myself in a mirror, and I was Sean.”

“You recognized him, and them. A giant step forward, Max.”

“Really? I saw Sean as the full-grown man he’d never lived to be.”

“You think he’s ‘haunting’ you?”

“I think he’s always haunted me, but we don’t know for sure, do we?”

“I do know you were that rarity in Irish-American family life—an only child.”

“So Sean and I must have been more like brothers than cousins. The same age. What do you know of our families?”

“The cold facts. Nothing personal. Sean was part of the usual large brood. He was a gregarious, charming boy, from what I gathered, but immature. Unlike you.”

Max laughed. “ ‘Gregarious.’ Why do I know that’s not me?”

“You were always the ‘run silent, run deep’ sort, Max. Charming too, when you found it useful. And cursed with maturity.”

“Even about girls, women? Even about revenge?”

“Why do you think you ended up with the enchanting Kathleen O’Connor, who was an ‘older woman.’ Technically?”

“I don’t know. I saw her dead in my dreams, just a swatch of her face on the dark ground, no features. She’d have been in her early twenties when we met, and she already had been through hell.”

“Twenty-three to your seventeen. A huge gulf at those ages.”

“Gandolph!”

“Yes, Max?”

“Her mother was condemned to a Magdalen house, and she in her turn. She was an unwed mother by her late teens. What happened to her infant?”

“Adopted out? Could have died during childbirth. Teenage mothers—”

“God! Don’t tell me we need to look for another lost soul!”

“I don’t know, Max. It doesn’t concern us now. If getting pieces of your memory back means you’re going to obsess about Kathleen O’Connor again, all right. I can live with that, as I did before. But we don’t have time to hunt younger generations of old losses. The burying of the terrorism hatchet so long impaled in this island seems to have released some collateral mischief. That’s why our old enemies are talking to us. They want what we know.”

“What I know is cobwebs and night frights.”

“Perhaps more than that, behind the veil?”

“I saw a ring,” Max remembered. “An unlucky opal ring. The seductress in the dream, your real-life Carmen, produced it for me, but I declared it synthetic. Like dreams, like my not-quite-teen angel, Kitty the Cutter, like God knows what else is synthetic.”

“ ‘Synthetic,’ Max? An odd word for a dream.”

“What? Dreams don’t come in three syllable words? Mine do.”

“Listen, Max. We’re playing a cat-and-mouse game with these ‘retired’ Irish operatives. They want to know something from us or they’d never cooperate. We desperately need to know what, and what not, to tell them during these upcoming negotiations.”

“I get it.”

“No, you don’t. Even your dreams are trying to tell you. We’ve been tracing the vague trail of a conspiracy, or cabal of individuals, many of them magicians or former magicians, and unsolved murders in Las Vegas.”

“And we’re now in Northern Ireland, because … ?”

“Because it may have started but not ended here. You dreamed up the word synthetic, clearly referring to what these magicians call themselves—the Synth.”

“Sounds like they suffer from a lisp.”

“This is not funny, Max!” Gandolph’s fist hit the hardwood arm of his chair. “This is not a holiday jaunt.” He rubbed his banged fist with the other hand, brows forming an anxious knot above the bridge of his nose. “It’s obvious your subconscious is trying to break out of your amnesia. Going back to the scenes of your youth might leapfrog a lot of time and pain. So might this.”

Gandolph spun his laptop so Max could see the drawing of a city map split by mostly red and green blocks of color covering innumerable neighborhood names.

“The Orange and the Green sides,” Max guessed. “Orange, east; Green, west. When’s the Broadway musical coming?”

“This ‘tune’ is too bitter to play in America. To this day,” Gandolph said, “this is a land packed with atrocities vividly remembered on both sides of Belfast and both sides—south and north—of the island itself.”

“And you hope my and the nation’s toxic history might stir my memory in a way happier places wouldn’t?”

“Something is stirring.” Gandolph shut the laptop, locking away the hundreds of lethal neighboring borders invisibly marked on half a million Belfast minds.

Max shook his head. “Sean and I came wandering north into Protestant Ulster during the thick of the ‘Troubles,’ didn’t we? American-Catholic lambs to the slaughterhouse. That was stupid.”

“Yes, it was. That’s the first thing you admitted, after the pub bombing.”

“You’re not going to fill in the blanks for me, are you?” Max asked.

“No, Max,” Gandolph assured him. “Your memory will either kick-start itself here in this traumatic place, or it won’t. Best to know as soon as possible which is the case. The city has changed, and you need to.”

“How has it changed, other than being a tourist and travel hot spot?”

“Oh, can’t you sense the raw energy of a bad place turning better? The locals boast that tourists want to come here. Peace and prosperity are their Horsemen of the Post-Apocalypse. What’s more, they’ve made a point of saying that a visit to Belfast will reveal far more about the British and Irish psyche than visiting Dublin or London will. We’re staying in the gentrified city centre, in a decent hotel chain.

“Even better for our purposes, the peace has made access to information on past skirmishes and fighters on both sides of the conflict easier. The government offices we need to visit are nearby, and so are the … unofficial sources I’ve contacted. My recent quest to investigate Kathleen O’Connor and her involvement in the ‘Troubles’ back then and her whereabouts now has attracted serious interest.”

“Dangerous interest?”

“We won’t know until we go through the motions, right?”

Max finished his coffee, stood, and stretched without comment. “A middling hotel, huh? These beds are going to be murder on my legs and mobility.”

“If that’s the only variety of murder we encounter here, I’ll be happy.”

The morning was late enough that Gandolph rushed them off to an appointment he’d managed before leaving Zurich. Belfast’s city centre was obviously a work in progress, Max noted. Grand piles of Victorian architecture jostled glitzy new development. A border of frayed older structures betrayed the ongoing “urban renewal” process of a downtown business district anywhere in the U.S.

They were headed to a Victorian pile. No elevators to mar the vintage grandeur. Max had to suffer managing a long, stone, internal staircase worn swaybacked in the middle, and a long, echoing hall before arriving at an office higher than it was wide or broad. For all the exterior stateliness, this grandly high-ceilinged room broadcast an air of desertion, except for the two London Fog–coated middle-aged men awaiting them across a hard-used wooden table.

A dark, noisy, smoky pub would have been a far better setting for this meeting of obvious law-enforcement types, whether they were still undercover operatives or not. The guidebooks said the pubs weren’t uneasy ground in Ulster now. No one wanted to remind the tourists that now packed them of frequent pub bombings in the pre-peace days.

Inside the huge building, the temperature seemed lower than the brisk, fifty-degree air outside. Max’s legs and hips ached as if they’d been encased in ice water for hours. Maybe he’d grown too used to Las Vegas heat. He’d bet that little redhead would have warmed him up; “cute” didn’t rule out hot.

The two waiting men unconsciously rubbed their bare hands together for warmth, then exacted army-green file folders from their cheap, scuffed briefcases. Gandolph had brought a well-used black case of his own.

Max decided to cast the men opposite as familiar actors to tell them apart: an innocently nondescript Kevin Spacey and a young Brian Aherne, burly and buzz-cut.

“This is the O’Toole’s Pub survivor, Mr. Randolph?” the Kevin clone asked, nodding at Max without greeting him, as if he were still a minor who didn’t require being consulted. Insulted, yes.

“Not a survivor,” Max corrected. “I was nowhere near when the bomb exploded. I’m a surviving relative of a victim.”

“A fine point,” Brian noted. “Are you always so scrupulously accurate, Mr. Kinsella?”

There was no point denying who he was here. For all he knew, he “owned” one of those inch-thick file folders of hidden history.