Faster than you can hitch a ride on a roller coaster, I am inside the New Millennium and rousting the resident Big Cats in their cages.
They blink and growl and hiss loud enough to fill the sails of a nice little ketch. Where, they ask, is Miss Louise?
While I am tongue-tied—for Louise is holding down the fort at the Crystal Phoenix—I feel an airy feminine presence brush by my side. Feline, of course.
The Big Boys growl in tandem, which—let me tell you—is ear inspiring. Also deafening.
“This is not the valiant daughter of Louie the First,” they thunder.
I see Squeaker’s narrow tall tremble slightly.
“You are that sssspolled houssssecat, Hyasssscinth,” they add hiss to growl.
Well, I am about to be outa there, seeing as one of their mitts would make a giant Freddy Kreuger–like razor-nailed glove, AWOL from Elm Street and in my own back yard. But Squeaker weaves back and forth, tail high and tickling their baseball-mitt-size noses.
“You big dummies,” she begins.
I cringe.
“You cannot tell a lilac-point Siamese from a chocolate-point one! Have you ever heard of Siamese fighting fish? You cannot keep two in a bowl, for one will eat the other.”
“Eat?” Lucky asks. “I am not into rampant indiscriminate carnivorosity. I am on a strict health regime. I do not eat what I do not know.”
“How unfortunate,” Squeaker says, “for your social circle.”
Kahlúa tries to clear things up. “We do not eat our trainers.”
As with dames of all species, explanation is a fatal move. I feel forced to put my body between hers and the Big Cats.
“Give the little lady a break, boys,” I urge. “She is new not only to show biz, but the crime beat. Have you two seen anything suspicious?”
“Everything is suspicious to us,” Lucky says. “We work for a masked man, and we see workmen crawling around up here where only bats and tree frogs should hang out.”
“And then there is the woman,” Kahlúa said.
“Shangri-La?”
“Shangri-La-ti-dah,” Lucky growls. “She has no time for leopards, but dotes on that skinny, snooty housecat of hers. No offense,” he adds in a polite aside to Squeaker.
“At least she is small, as humans go,” Kahlúa adds. “Our master has no business risking his neck up here, as he is so large and slow, like a lion.”
“And his mask emulating the look of our kind impairs his vision,” says Lucky.
“Which is weak and human to begin with.” Kahlúa looks out toward the performance area, his vertical pupils instantly adjusting to the change of focus and light, making his point. “One wrong step on those suspended platforms out there and any one of us could come crashing down.”
I sense their sincere worry for their master. Now that I hear them discuss it, I realize how dangerous a show this is for the Cloaked Conjuror and his Big Cats. What it offers is a showcase for the lithe Shangri-La and Hyacinth. And the lithe Shangri-La has been involved in criminal shenanigans before this. I wonder how she talked her new partner, CC, into doing this stunt. The New Millennium sure wouldn’t want their major attraction executing a swan dive from sixty feet up.
Could the Cloaked Conjuror be blinded by love, or lust?
“She is always telling him what to do,” Kahlúa says with disdain. “We are a better-known attraction in Vegas, and Lucky and I do not do more than demur with a friendly growl now and then.”
“Really? Shangri-La rules this roost then.”
Lucky sniffs and lifts his upper lip to bare truly awesome fangs. It is an expression of total disgust among our kind.
“I could not sleep the other night and I heard them arguing. Well, I heard her arguing, her voice is high and harsh. Our master’s voice rumbles deep like a purr. He never says boo back to her.”
“The other night?” My ears perk up. “When was it?”
Lucky rubs his huge black nose with an even huger black mitt. These guys are big. “Three, four nights ago?”
“The night before the police came?”
“Yeah. Maybe so, now that I think of it.” Lucky yawns. “I have a bit of insomnia.”
“After what they tried to do to you, I can bet you do,” says Kahlúa. “If Miss Louise had not taken things in hand you would not be here and your new name would not be ‘Lucky’.”
“Hey,” I say, “that was my case, fellas. I had something to do with Lucky’s rescue too.”
Lucky was purring, so loudly the boys apparently did not hear me. “That Louise, she is a plucky little thing for someone who could be an appetizer for us.”
“We would not snack on one of our own species,” Kahlúa says quickly.
“Unless we were starving,” Lucky agrees.
I back away, just in case the meat truck has been a little slow today.
They have forgotten me anyway. Apparently, they only have eyes for Louise.
I am chewing over what I have learned, anyway, and find it pretty disturbing stuff.
There is a very good chance that Shangri-La was the last person to see the late Art Deckle alive, that she wasn’t arguing with CC but with Deckle, and that she helped him dive off the platform to his death.
Accursed
“Well, don’t you look like something the wet cat dragged in?”
Randy Wordsworth did a double-take to examine Temple’s expression. “Don’t tell me there’s more bad news about this accursed exhibition.”
“Don’t call it that. ‘Accursed’ is the kind of word that takes on a life of its own if the media get ahold of it.”
“Maybe you will call it that too when I tell you what the higher-ups learned from the police and told me, confidentially.”
“And you’ll tell me?”
“They don’t know what to do with it and I have a feeling you might.”
While Temple mulled that over, she studied the assembling skeleton of the exhibition spaces. Worker ants in white coveralls climbed an elliptical yet narrowing structure, reminding her of slaves laboring on Cheop’s Great Pyramid in Egypt.
The pinnacle was the clear Lexan plastic onion-shaped dome. Lexan was Lucite on steroids: impact proof. When the Czar Alexander scepter was suspended above its stone base and a bright pinpoint spot was aimed at all that high-carat jewel fire, the effect would be spectacular.
Already the exhibition’s lower levels glittered with period gowns and high-polished furniture, interspersed with islands of imperial silver and gold and more gemstones.
“This should be a knockout, Randy.”
“This information should knock you out more.”
Temple gave him an inquiring look. Her usual slightly sandpapered voice was raw gravel this morning, thanks to serial sobbing into her pillow. Even Visine had only softened the bloody tinge of her eye whites. Having an emotional meltdown as a blonde was way too risky. Normally, her natural red hair would have deflected interest from her eyes.
“Tell me,” she said. Even bad news would take her mind off . . . things.
“The dead guy may have been a petty con man, but he had experience topside in this kind of show. He was, get this, Madame Olga Kirkov’s brother. Got his start performing in her traveling ballet company, then came here and got an American citizenship years ago.”
Temple allowed herself to look shocked. “Art Deckle had been a Russian ballet dancer?”
“Andrei Dechynevski. He made the leap thirty years ago. Did you know Madame Olga herself had defected from Russia twenty years ago? Back when you couldn’t leave the Soviet Union without an escape pod and help from the CIA or an underground group?”
“So, this White Russian exhibition in the white-hot center of American tourism would mean a lot to her. Could she and her brother have been in it together? Why would a respected elder stateswoman of the ballet world want to steal the Czar Alexander scepter?”