Matt was the first to answer. “She may be unconsciously searching for someone incorruptible, but she isn’t equipped to recognize such a person even if she found him. Or her. And doing that would so shake her negative world-view—”
“She’d implode,” Max finished. “And the fallout would be lethal.”
Temple tapped her Table of Crime Elements. “When I look at this, I’m struck by how many of these unsolved deaths involve falling. I’m a press release writer, not a logician, but it’s got to mean something. Maybe it’s an unconscious metaphor.”
“Falling from grace,” Matt intoned slowly. “Falling from a ‘state of grace,’ as the Church calls it. Kathleen’s mother was a ‘fallen’ woman. She was expected to live down to that. So she did.”
“Satan,” Max said, “tried to tempt Jesus to step from the top of the temple.”
Matt spun the crime table to face him and scanned the rows. “That could mean Kathleen O’Connor is responsible for almost all these deaths.”
“That would make her a serial killer.” Max said. “And that may not be her only method. Someone tipped the warring IRA remnants off to Garry and my movements in Belfast.”
Temple grabbed back her death list to study it again. “Then we’d better organize and ‘out’ her before she can do us all in.”
Chapter 34
Fur Flies
Miss Midnight Louise and I are enjoying an extended eavesdropping session beyond the flimsy French doors on the corner patio that borders both Mr. Matt’s and Miss Temple’s Circle Ritz digs, a floor apart.
“Well, this is awkward,” I comment.
“Yes, human breeding behavior is prefaced by many long and tortuous episodes and deep and lasting emotions.”
“I mean, Louise, that our human amateur sleuths are divvying up the list of murderous events and victims and locations into three separate investigations, and we are but two.”
I think for a millisecond, and then continue. “Of course, I am up to performing the work of at least two, but I am not able to be in two places at the same time. Yet.”
“Pshaw,” Louise spits, nailing me in the eye. “Who do you think has been Johnny-on-the-spot at Mr. Max’s residence and elsewhere for all these suspicious comings and goings ever since the Neon Nightmare impact?”
“Unfortunately, the investigations from now on focus on multiple major Vegas sites, such as hotel-casinos, the Neon Nightmare nightclub, and even the singular institution of learning in our midst, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Few know that Vegas is a center of learning as well as—”
“Lechery?” Miss Midnight Louise suggests archly. In other words, her whole back makes like a croquet hoop. She is such a felinazi.
I ignore what is patently a personal swipe, and she had the paw to do that with. Oops, now she has me ending my thoughts with prepositions. I am feeling very Mr. Maxlike as my little gray cells go MIA.
Quickly, I point out, “That adds up to at least three, if not seven scenes of the crime or crimes.” I have always been better at math than the female of my species.
“Then,” says Louise, “we must round up seven, or at least three of the Cat Pack to shadow our human friends.”
“Now you make sense. I will take my Miss Temple. She is in need of objective yet steadfast male support now that her two beaux are both back in town.”
“Bow? She has two bows? You make her sound like a Yorkie fresh from the groomers.”
“Obviously, as with the sad case of Miss Kathleen O’Connor, you suffer from a stunted upbringing and have never had reason to learn that language so vital in show circles of our kind, French.”
“Oh, can it, Pop. Preferably with three-day-old tuna fish in a garbage bag. The airs you put on sometimes smell as bad as a card-counting scam at a Laughlin casino. The last time I saw you cozying up to those pampered Persian sisters in thrall to Miss Savannah Ashleigh, they had been assaulted by an electric fur trimmer and looked more like weasels than supermodels.”
“You should know that a deal may be in the works to revive my commercial career with the modishly restyled Divine Yvette and Sublime Solange.”
“Hmph,” Miss Louise sniffs. “I will believe that when I see it.”
“Meanwhile, you can visit Ma Barker at the police substation near the Circle Ritz and see how many likely Cat Pack members she has in her clowder. She always cottons to you better than to me.”
She does not waste time arguing with me, but turns tail and rockets away. I must admit that the kit has a gift for tailing, whether it is Mr. Max or giving me the brush-off.
Chapter 35
Double Down
Dark of night in Las Vegas, and Max was just where he wanted to be, making like Spider-Man in darkness high above the New Millennium Hotel’s massive stage. He was back to his apparently favorite death-defying persona, undercover high-wire artist.
Every few seconds, a shifting stage effect or a neon-bright light from the performance below forced him to skid five feet down a four-story ladder or duck behind the bars of rolled-up scenery scrims.
How do you finagle a private audience with a man advertised as “the world’s most mysterious and reclusive and richest magician”? Max had probably done just that in the recent past. Now … all the shortcuts in his brain were short-circuited. Any magic formulas he’d known had tangled on his tongue. He needed to contact his quarry in the split second between leaving the stage and stepping into the arms of his security forces waiting in the wings just beyond the audience’s line of sight.
Operating under the radar and slipping past security had proved to be one skill still solidly in place. Just the act of scaling the complicated set pieces put his mind and limbs into motions that should shake loose the blocks of memory loss.
The noise bouncing off the hard concrete walls up here made his memory synapses jolt as the pulse-pounding music vibrated the metal framework he perched upon. Gigantic light sabers washed the four-story box’s inner walls in rhythm with the approving roar of the crowd.
Max waited to pounce on his one perfect moment, linked to the height by a thick thread, his favored and always potentially fatal bungee cord. These tensile bundles of elastic nerves made Cirque de Soleil’s many franchised arty acrobat shows—in Vegas and on the road—a billion-dollar business.
The stage floor below was broken into round elevator platforms that lifted magic effects to different levels, and then sank them below view for set changes. And through this magic mushroom stagescape strode the king of the jungle, his dreadlock mane surrounding a tiger-striped face mask, with a muscular-shouldered leather cloak concealing six-inch platform boots off some seventies’ rock album cover.
As applause thundered, Max timed the departing magician’s stride length. He pushed off the high framework to land on point beside the moving man, unfastening the bungee cord at the same time his hand crushed the leather cloak shoulder and his mouth spoke against the cat-head’s broad striped cheek, right on the hearing amplifying device.