Chapter 58: Fenced In
Chapter 59: Terminal Tango
Chapter 60: Curtain Calls
Chapter 61: Dial M for Motive
Chapter 62: Topaz Tango
Chapter 63: Ciao Ciao Ciao
Chapter 64: For Her Eyes Only
Chapter 65: Cane Dance
Chapter 66: Dancing in the Dark
Chapter 67: No Good Dude Goes Unpunished
Tailpiece: Midnight Louie Mulls Many Matters
Carole Nelson Douglas Plays the Dance Card
Cat in a
Topaz Tango
Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times . . .
There are a lot of fat cats in Las Vegas.
These glitzy media-blitzed streets host almost forty million tourists each year and a ton of camera crews. If cameras are not recording background shots for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, they are capturing thousands of personal videos. People think they know this town—from film if not firsthand experience—know it from the flashy hotels to the seamy side of the Strip.
And a good number of them know one particular Las Vegas institution.
That would be me.
Oh, I keep a low profile. You do not hear about me on the nightly news. That is the way I like it. That is the way any primo PI would like it. The name is Louie, Midnight Louie. I am a noir kind of guy, inside and out. I like my nightlife shaken, not stirred.
I am not your usual gumshoe, in that my feet do not wear shoes of any stripe, but shivs. Being short, dark, and handsome . . . really short . . . gets me overlooked and underestimated, which is what the savvy operative wants anyway. I am your perfect undercover guy. I also like to hunker down under the covers with my little doll.
Miss Temple Barr and I are perfect roomies. She tolerates my wandering ways. I look after her without letting her know about it. Call me Muscle in Midnight Black. We share a well-honed sense of justice and long, sharp fingernails and have cracked some cases too tough for the local fuzz. She is, after all, a freelance public relations specialist, and Las Vegas is full of public relations of all stripes and legalities.
None can deny that the Las Vegas crime scene is big time, and I have been treading these mean neon streets for twenty-one books now. When I call myself an “alphacat,” some think I am merely asserting my natural male and feline dominance, but no. I simply reference the fact that since I debuted in Catnap and Pussyfoot, I then commenced to a title sequence that is as sweet and simple as B to Z.
That is where I began my alphabet, with the B in Cat on a Blue Monday. From then on, the color word in the title is in alphabetical order up to the current volume, Cat in a Topaz Tango.
Since Las Vegas is littered with guidebooks as well as bodies, I wish to provide a rundown of the local landmarks on my particular map of the world. A cast of characters, so to speak:
To wit, my lovely roommate and high-heel devotee, Miss Nancy Drew on killer spikes, freelance PR ace Miss Temple Barr, who had reunited with her elusive love . . .
. . . the once again missing-in-action magician Mr. Max Kinsella, who has good reason for invisibility. After his cousin Sean died in a bomb attack during a post-high-school jaunt to Ireland, he went into undercover counterterrorism work with his mentor, Gandolph the Great.
Meanwhile, Mr. Max is sought by another dame, Las Vegas homicide detective Lieutenant C. R. Molina, mother of teenage Mariah . . .
. . . and the good friend of Miss Temple’s recent fiancé, Mr. Matt Devine, a radio talk-show shrink and former Roman Catholic priest who came to Vegas to track down his abusive stepfather, Cliff Effinger.
Speaking of unhappy pasts, Miss Lieutenant Carmen Regina Molina is not thrilled that her former flame, Mr. Rafi Nadir, the unsuspecting father of Mariah, is in Las Vegas after blowing his career at the LAPD. . . .
Meanwhile, Mr. Matt drew a stalker, the local lass that young Max and his cousin Sean boyishly competed for in that long-ago Ireland . . .
. . . one Miss Kathleen O’Connor, deservedly christened Kitty the Cutter by Miss Temple. Finding Mr. Max impossible to trace, Kitty the C settled for harassing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine . . .
. . . who tried to recover from the crush he developed on Miss Temple, his neighbor at the Circle Ritz condominiums. He did that by not very boldly seeking new women, all of whom were in danger from said Kitty the Cutter.
Now that Miss Kathleen O’Connor has self-destructed and is dead and buried, things are shaking up at the Circle Ritz. Mr. Max Kinsella is again apparently lost in action. In fact, I saw him hit the wall of the Neon Nightmare club while in the guise of bungee-jumping magician, the Phantom Mage, and neither I nor Las Vegas has seen him since.
That this possible tragedy coincides with my ever-lovin’ roommate going over to the Light Side (our handsome blond neighbor and former priest, Mr. Matt Devine) in her romantic life only adds to the confusion.
However, things are not always what they seem. A magician can have as many lives as a cat, in my humble estimation, and events would seem to bear me out. Meanwhile, I am spending more time tracking the doings of Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina these days, whose various domestic issues past and present are on a collision course. Since she has always considered the Mystifying Max a murder suspect and my beloved roomie his too-loyal accomplice, she may have to eat some humble pie as well as deal with two circling men of her own, Rafi Nadir and Dirty Larry Podesta, an undercover narc who is mysteriously interested in her personal and professional crusades. . . .
I am not surprised by these surprising developments. Everything is always up for grabs in Las Vegas 24/7: guilt, innocence, money, power, love, loss, death, and significant others.
All this human sex and violence makes me glad that I have a simpler social life, such as just trying to get along with my unacknowledged daughter . . .
. . . Miss Midnight Louise, who insinuated herself into my cases until I was forced to set up shop with her as Midnight Inc. Investigations and who, along with her many admirers, will be as mad as hell at her not making an appearance in this adventure, Girrrls always stick together . . .
. . . and still needing to unearth more about the Synth, an ancient cabal of magicians that may be responsible for a lot of cold cases in town and which is of international interest now.
Well, there you have it, the usual human stew, all mixed-up and at odds with one another and within themselves. Obviously, it is up to me to solve all their mysteries and nail a few crooks along the way. Like Las Vegas, the City That Never Sleeps, Midnight Louie, private eye, also has a sobriquet: the Kitty That Never Sleeps.
With this crew, who could?
Nervous Nuptials
“You’re the ex-priest,” Temple pointed out. “You must know how we can avoid the wedding from Hell?”
“All weddings, or the preparations at least, are from Hell,” Matt said.
He went on, chapter and verse. “I’ve officiated at enough of them to know that by now. The wedding ‘party’ always bristles with conflicting, intergenerational agendas. I doubt they’re all as highly dramatic as Aldo Fontana’s and your aunt Kit’s, though.”
Temple sighed and stirred on her living-room sofa in the Circle Ritz condominiums and apartment building, where she and Matt had units atop each other on the second and third floors. As, in fact, they were even more closely on top of each other now.
The five-story, round fifties-era building was a whimsical little place even for the city of Las Vegas, which only did whimsical large and on the Strip, but theirs was a whimsical little engagement.