“Uh,” Temple said, “before we leave the topic of my incisive mental powers, I have to mention that I’ve had a close encounter recently at the Neon Nightmare’s secret Synth clubrooms.”
“And you didn’t mention it to me?” Matt was shocked.
Temple grimaced. Time to confess her sins to Matt. “When I went to Neon Nightmare—which every guy I know wants to lecture me for doing, including Nicky Fontana, my boss at the Crystal Phoenix, where I do PR—”
“I know this,” Max said.
“Uh. Okay. It was a very tacky and woo-woo experience, lacking only Rod Serling as narrator intoning, ‘Welcome to the Twilight Zone.’”
“Extreme stage effects,” Max said, “often are used to divert an audience from what’s really going on. Cirque du Soleil is masterful at that.”
“Also the Mystifying Max,” Temple said with a smile.
“So,” Matt challenged. “You were an audience of one subjected to delusional magic tricks, Temple?”
“Maybe,” she told Matt. “It involves ninja cats and double Darth Vaders.”
“Oh.” Matt sat back.
“Oh.” Temple shrugged. “I had been exposed previously to inferior cocktails, would-be wild and sexy single guys, and the screamingly loud, shrill, and robotic noise that passes for dance music these days, not to mention circling neon laser lights that cast the spinning zodiac signs, including Ophiucus, on the black glass dance floor and walls.”
“Takes me right back to my near-death experience,” Max murmured.
“I figured out, though, that all those lightworks hide entrances to the interior pyramid-shape of the nightclub. I found a narrow upward ramp that has spring-loaded doors into the walls.”
“Temple!” Matt was horrified. “Why would you go there? That sounds like a drug trip.”
“Just think of the doors on fancy home theater equipment storage units. They’re always black lacquered and you just touch a corner and they spring open. That’s how I got into a maze of rooms behind the walls, and the Synth clubrooms, which overlook the dance floor with a one-way wall of black glass.”
“Sounds like a private high roller club,” Max said, “at some of the upscale hotel-casinos where a lot goes on that isn’t legal. So? If a group of fantasizing fakes want to pretend they’re magicians with an agenda…”
“We know from the empty safe built between the underground tunnels where the Crystal Phoenix and Gangsters hotels meet with one from the Neon Nightmare that your old IRA enemies had been amassing money and guns in Vegas for a couple decades.”
“What kind of safe?” Max asked.
“A giant walk-in one. That’s where Synth member Cosimo Sparks’s body was found, wearing white gloves, top hat, and tails.… Well, the top hat didn’t stay on when he was stabbed to death. A couple silver dollars were found on the floor, along with a bearer bond for twenty thousand dollars a rat dug up from the adjacent hidden tunnel to … the Neon Nightmare.”
“Rightly named,” Matt said. “You never told me you’d broken into the Synth’s lair at that nightclub.”
“Well, that’s because what I saw there wasn’t exactly believable.”
“In what way?” Max wanted to know.
“It wouldn’t pass the C. R. Molina test.”
“In what way?” Matt now wanted to know.
Temple kept jerking her head from one interrogator to another. “It does sound a bit too much Mad Tea Party.”
Into the continued silence she had to commit truth. “The club room held a middle-aged woman who looked like a medium, or Gandolph in the guise of a female medium at that Halloween séance. The other woman looked like Morticia, the slinky Goth wife from The Addams Family. And there was a pretty ordinary guy there. They were upset about Cosimo Sparks’s death, and then another spring-loaded door opened and these two … figures … showed up.”
“Figures?” Matt questioned.
Temple decided then and there to leave out the pack of black cats that closed down the private party minutes later, but she was now committed to describing the figures.
“They were disguised. In black. Head to toe.”
“Head to toe?” Max snorted. “Were they wearing blackface?”
“Gloves and long cloaks with hoods.”
“Old magicians’ tricks to blend in with the background,” Max said. “Houdini used it.”
“That’s not all. Full head masks. I thought of them as the Darth Vaders.”
“Now, that’s an elaborate getup,” Matt said. “Hokey, though. Are you sure that’s what you saw, Temple?”
“It was dark, but I’d entered through a sheltered niche between bookcases and it was like being an audience at a peepshow.” She took measure of the two men’s dubious expressions. “Not that kind of peepshow. Let’s just say it was a gathering of dramatic personalities. The Darth Vaders were clearly the stars. They had guns and they wanted money.”
“Temple!” Matt was shocked. “You put yourself at risk in the middle of some kind of heist? People who rip off casinos go for the extreme disguises, don’t they, Kinsella?”
Max looked quizzical. “You’re relying on my memory? Fortunately, it’s the personal history that’s mostly gone missing. Yeah. Because of the intense visual security and scrutiny in casinos, people who knock over cash transfers at money cages wear masks at least. They’re safe physically.”
Temple wasn’t so sure. “They always get caught.”
“But they are never interfered with as long as they’re armed and dangerous and out on the casino floor among hundreds of clients and players,” Max said. “Hotel security and police want zero collateral damage.”
“So,” Temple said, “you can get out with the money, but your chances of keeping it are—”
“Zero,” Max said.
“What about the plans I overheard, for the Synth magicians to create a multi-Strip free-for-all distraction of illusions to cover a major heist?”
“Again,” Max said. “Great idea. Would work for getting the money. As in every robbery from a modest ATM stick-up to a major planned assault on a Strip casino or Fort Knox, for that matter, the real trick is the disappearing act afterwards.”
Temple nodded. “That’s why the Glory Hole Gang hid out for decades when Jersey Joe Jackson absconded with the train robbery money.”
“Jersey Joe,” Matt reminded her, “got away with the money and cheating his buddies, but he had to hide the ill-gotten goods for so long, he died bankrupt and alone.”
“So this IRA money raised over a couple decades could simply be left hidden forever?” Temple asked.
Max sighed. “The Synth members are pawns. From what you said, they were in it for the revenge and the prestige, in the sense of the payoff in a magical illusionary statement, when jaws drop. So how did you and they escape being mowed down by two Darth Vaders?”
“Jesus,” Matt said prayerfully.
Temple shrugged. “I … just bowed out. They sorta noticed me finally—”
“‘Sorta’?” Matt sounded pre-cardiac.
“And I just said I was looking for a ladies’ room and they were really hard to find here and I wouldn’t be back. Stephanie Plum always gets out of pickles with girly candor.”
“Stephanie who?” Matt demanded, exasperated.
“The book series,” Temple said. “Chick lit mystery.”
Max chuckled. “She must mean Nancy Drew rebooted. You do know who that was?”
Matt shook his head, mystified.
“How do you know about Nancy Drew?” Temple asked Max.
“I don’t know.” He blinked. “I had a younger girl cousin, I guess, in Wisconsin.” His contribution ended in one of his memory-exploring silences.
“I know all about ‘younger girl cousins,’” Temple said, eyeing Matt.