“Exactly.” Temple’s ire would not die. “That man was willing to kill people, not only to ruin my wedding, if I were prone to get in a huff. He needed a guaranteed congregation with a small guest list and specific times so he could round up and neutralize everyone in the nave of the church while his gang uncovered and plundered the basement stash.”
“‘Neutralize.’ Don’t we sound like a task force?”
“We were. Electra even announced the phony wedding rehearsal at OLG by emailing a photo of Midnight Louie in his white bow-tie as Ring Bearer to Crawford Buchanan’s fleazy gossip column. Louie went viral and it was an invitation the criminals couldn’t refuse.”
“Fleazy?” Max asked.
“It’s my new word for unutterably low.”
Max shook his head. “I’ve created mini-me monsters. Going undercover, tailing criminals, planting traps.”
“Are you continuing that spy stuff, Max? You said Kathleen was no longer a threat.”
“Not to us.”
“Matt and I have our talk show and Midnight Louie and I have our national commercial gig, but what are you going to do?”
Max pulled the papers closer. “Solve where the IRA contributions have been hidden right now. If the mob can’t fool Matt and Fontana Inc., can a cabal of rogue magicians and retired Irish rebels fool you and me?”
A thump atop the neighboring barstool made Temple jump. Max leapt up and clutched his shoulder like a Fontana brother who had misplaced his best friend. And he obviously wasn’t even armed.
“Louie,” Temple said. “What brought him here tonight? How’d he get in?”
“The building has been neglected and isn’t as secure as it will be,” Max said. “Apparently, just mentioning his name summons the demon.”
Midnight Louie didn’t seem to like Max’s explanation for his coming when “called”. He lashed his tail furiously against the stool seat. The big black cat’s chin barely cleared the bar’s lip, but he stuck it out. Pugnaciously.
Then he tilted his head as flirtaceously as a kitten’s toward Temple.
She could hear him saying, if he would deign to talk to her, “Somebody mention my name? At last!”
“My apologies. Pull up a stool, Louie,” Max said, drawing Louie’s stool closer. “First you are sleeping in my California king-size bed at the Circle Ritz with my ex-girlfriend and now you are cadging a drink at my bar.
“Sorry, Louie, nothing you can drink,” he added. “Liquor keeps, dairy products don’t.”
Temple couldn’t help smiling. Males get so possessive at times.
Louie responded by jumping atop the bar and sitting on the papers.
“Louie!” It was a battle Temple had fought many times. Work in anything but a paperless industry and your cherished feline companion will be on every possible pile, all over them, digging down under them. Sigh!
“Wait a minute,” Max said. “He’s placed the dead-center of his, um, posterior on the ‘house’ image of the major stars in Ophiuchus.”
“What? Divining by cat rear? The spirit of the Synth magicians survives. Look, Max. Cats are attracted by the scent of ink or toner. That’s all.”
“But that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about. You were saying you’d come to a new conclusion on the Ophiuchus constellation’s major star outline.”
“Only that we’ve been calculating it as referring to an area along the Strip. Look.” Temple took the transparent tracing paper of the house image and spun it as if transfixed by a pin.
“It matches all of Las Vegas inside the five major highways,” Max said. “That’s a bigger canvas than we’ve been considering, not a smaller one.”
“Well, maybe we’ve been looking small, rather than big.”
“Or…maybe the opposite. Sorry, Louie.” The cat grumbled with a smothered growl as Max pulled the “house’ version of the Ophiuchus constellation drawing out from under him.
“This would be highway 159 or 589 just below it on the north,” Temple said. “and that connects with Interstate 515 going southeast to Henderson. And you can get on Interstate 215 going directly west, for the bottom of the house, and 215 swings up north again to connect with 15 going parallel to the Las Vegas Strip to cross state routes 589/Sahara and 159/W. Charleston Avenue just south of downtown east and west. And there you have your rough ‘house’ shape in the stars.”
“Very true.” Max looked up and then down. Louie mimicked his motion.
“We’re inside it,” Temple realized. “We’re east of the Strip toward the junction of state 589/Sahara with 515. Right where a major star in the Ophiuchus constellation is located.”
“Rather, Temple, the Neon Nightmare is. Magicians are drawn to astrology too. Ophiuchus proved to be an unlucky star to the Synth members when they got greedy and schemed to get the IRA loot. Kathleen and Santiago wanted them to provide the cover of a magical diversion for a major last Vegas heist for the Irish cause. Only Santiago had gone rogue and Kathleen didn’t know it.”
“Everybody was duping everybody,” Temple summed up.
Max looked up. “And the stars weren’t aligned to let anyone profit. The Synth leader was murdered and cabal members scattered. Santiago was murdered. Kathleen returned to Ireland empty-handed, the reputed guns and loot lost.”
Max smiled. “Maybe that’s why it was a tough venue to make profitable. And cheap to buy.”
“Cheap?” Temple was skeptical.
“Cheaper,” Max said with a smile. “Remember Star Trek?” he asked Temple.
“The new movies?”
“No, Star Trek Classic from the sixties.”
“Please. The women’s costumes were so sexist, boldly going into Playboy territory. Not my kind of vintage.”
Max smiled. “Always the consistent crusader. You’ve lived to see Playboy so over. Anyway, I wasn’t thinking of the 3-D girls, but the 3-D chess game.”
“I remember a still photo of that on a vintage nostalgia auction site.”
“You’re moving from vintage shops to online?”
“Most worthwhile vintage clothing is online now. I had a bid number registered for Debbie Reynolds’ fabulous Hollywood costume auction a few years ago, and watched every second. The bidding for one of Judy Garland’s simple Dorothy dresses going up and up to almost a million dollars was breathless. You wished she could have lived to see what an iconic character she created.
“But even trinkets I bid on went up into the hundreds…a swooping hat, some gloves, and so much of our cinematic history went to Asia. Call me xenophobic, but that kind of rankles. Debbie saved Old Hollywood by buying out MGM’s entire stock before anyone valued it. She was the only woman star with the guts to try to float a Vegas venue based around her career and costume collection, and it failed. She finally couldn’t afford to maintain the collection.”
“She made millions on the sale, didn’t she?”
“That’s for her heirs, and she knows she saved those things for posterity, but it hurt to let her lifelong passion go. I know.”
“Temple. That must have been when I went ‘missing’. Had I been there I’d have bought you a fabulous hat if I’d known. And one for Debbie to keep too.”
“Which is why you will find the perfect woman for you, and I warn you, I’ve started shopping right now.”
He laughed again. “Right now we need to decipher what Louie is sitting on.”
Temple sighed. “If it’s on a small scale, what is shaped like the child’s drawing of a ‘house’?”
Max spread his long fingers and twisted the traced image over the blow-up of central Las Vegas.
“Most shows on the Strip are mostly two-dimensional. We see that on TV, in films, we learn to think that way. When I appeared to be walking on air in my act, with all the doves landing on and flying around me, I was actually, thanks to fast-winking strobe lights, walking back and forth between the foreground and the background, like a zigzag sewing machine, although I appeared to be going on a straight, linear line.”