“How did a rabid cat get in here?” The flour-decked groom’s makeup is cracking. “We will sue.”
“I am so sorry,” Miss Van von Rhine is saying, wringing her hands.
“Oh, Louie,” my Miss Temple is whispering. “He must have had some fright,” she says in a louder tone.
Me? Subject to a “fright”?
I can spot Miss Midnight Louise’s narrow gams through the forest of lower limbs. She is putting in an appearance to make sure that there can be no question that I am the culprit. Talk about family solidarity, not that we are family.
People are cooing over the disheveled bride, and they include some of the Fontana brothers. Is there no loyalty?
My name is indeed black. My reputation is in as many tatters as the gown wilting on this so-called statue of a bride.
The murmurs are getting ugly and I am hearing words like “cage” and “tetanus shots” and “isolation.”
My Miss Temple is pleading for my life and freedom. I am thinking Marty Scorsese is the director for the biopic. He can move beyond fiction. He did a great documentary on Bob Dylan.
While they are all so exercised, plotting evil retribution for my apparent sins, I sneak out a long limb and stretch my shivs to the max. I am nearing the bride’s stiffly starched skirt.
I put in a paw and pull out a plum … the sparkly bit I saw her bridal slipper toe sneaking under the giant white umbrella of her skirt.
I pull it across the smooth marble and into the custody of my folded forelimbs.
“What have you got there?” Trust my Miss Temple to keep a steady eye on me and my well-being in the midst of this mob. She bends to retrieve what I have captured. “Anybody in this crowd missing a screw-back ruby earring?” she asks loudly.
A muted shriek comes from the rim of the mob.
No guillotine for Midnight Louie today.
* * *
In another hour, hotel security and the Metro Police have hauled away the larcenous lovebirds in powdered sugar white. Only the inner circle remains, which does not include the Mystifying Max and Miss Dr. Revienne Schneider.
I am sitting atop one of those high chairs that surround tiny tall cocktail tables, lapping up an all-fat cream used for cocktails from a bell-shaped champagne glass that better suits my drinking method than those tall narrow flutes.
Miss Midnight Louise has done a disappearing act, so I get all the credit.
“Imagine the nerve,” Miss Van von Rhine is telling the gathered Fontana brothers, including her husband. “I cannot believe all you crime experts had no idea a pair of pocket-pickers were working our party.”
“Well, uh.” Mr. Nicky Fontana eyes his sheepish bros. I have never before seen a Fontana brother looking sheepish. “Obviously we needed an undercover operative on the right level.”
“It was a sweet setup,” Aldo says despite his sister-in-law’s small frown at that description. “You won’t even feel a good pickpocket taking the gold fillings from your molars, much less anything dangling out there on your limbs or lobes.”
“I could not believe,” Miss Temple says, “how much jewelry they had slipped into the bags beneath the bride’s skirts. A Rolex, even.”
Miss Van von Rhine winces.
“Two things going on there to make this crooked gig work,” Nicky said. “People will forget about living statues once they figure out what they are. Or, they come close and try to make them break character in front of them. Either way, they are distracted, and a small move from, say, the groom will not be obvious while you are trying to stare down the bride through her veil.”
“I am sure,” Miss Temple says, “the police will discover this pair, or even the booking agency, has been ripping off clients and their guests for quite a while. I knew Midnight Louie had not lost his marbles.”
She strokes me fondly on the head. Nice, but not while I am drinking.
I look up, glad to see everyone now smiling down at me like I was the genius crime-fighter I know myself to be.
It is a bit disappointing that my swift action did not unmask a psycho bride, but you cannot have everything.
Chapter 22
A Fine and Secret Show
“The police anticipate murderers coming back to the scene of the crime,” Temple told Silas T. Farnum as she looked from the deep, dark starless Las Vegas night to the lukewarm security lights dotting his shrouded building in a pattern resembling the Big Dipper.
“Is that why you’re whispering in this huge deserted lot at midnight?” he asked. He was now accoutered with a handsome silver-headed cane, like a circus ringmaster.
Why had she come running back to the Paradise site at his excited call? Maybe she needed her mind taken off her personal woes.
She and Matt had so little time together lately, and after what should have been a romantic evening out too. When they’d gotten back to the Circle Ritz, she used the elevator ride to woo him from his mysterious overtime sessions at the radio station with the promise of a steamy rendezvous at the usual 3 A.M. He’d gotten off on her floor, but put her off with excuses again. When she persisted, he’d suggested that maybe she should call on Max for that, since she was so eager to rescue him from a Kathleen O’Connor who wasn’t even in the room, and rushed up the stairs to his unit.
Talk about feeling drop-kicked all the way to Santa Monica! She wanted to be mad, but just felt sad. So, when Silas T.’s unfailingly cheerful voice chirped from her cell phone, she came running.
She gazed around the construction site, which reminded her of the remnants of the Forum in Rome, more in a state of fallen down than going up. Farnum at the Forum. It was not an enticing bill to envision on a marquee.
“Don’t worry,” Silas T. said, having read her mind. “I’ve had very discreet security … forces on duty here all along. The cops didn’t detect them when they were swarming all over the place around the dead body, and they won’t detect them now.”
“Security forces? That sounds sinister, Mr. Farnum.”
“If you have a secret site, you need to safeguard it, Miss Barr.”
It was eerie how unpopulated this street was, how dark Las Vegas could be at night without its constant halo of neon and spotlights. She’d allowed Farnum to get her here so late because the Vegas Strip was pretty safe when it came to street crime and because she couldn’t sleep and Matt sure wasn’t going to show up at the Circle Ritz until the dawn patrol and she wasn’t sure she wanted to see him if he did. And because even Midnight Louie had gone out after she’d put a favorite but frenetic movie musical, Moulin Rouge, on the TV before Farnum had called her.
“You don’t want to daydream past the big reveal, Miss Barr,” Silas T. urged, tapping her on the shoulder and pointing up with his cane.
Her gaze lifted beyond the unpromising construction to the aurora borealis of the Strip peeking like the earthrise shot from 2001 over the familiar silhouettes of its landmarks.
As she watched, some of the eye-blinking points of light flared even brighter. They separated from the huge nebula of neon and started moving slowly, moving together into a vee formation like migratory birds, only their size increased with motion and also the detail. Nine sleek silver UFOs bearing all the glimpsed futuristic bells and whistles Hollywood could invent swooped and spun over the Strip.
Even here, Temple could hear a rise and fall of excited screams, as if New York–New York’s tower-circling roller coaster had broken—or been torn—free of its tracks and its passengers were howling for their lives.