Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

MISS KATHLEEN O’CONNOR

Deservedly nicknamed “Kitty the Cutter” by my Miss Temple, she is the local lass that Max and his cousin Sean boyishly competed for in long-ago Northern Ireland, who turned embittered stalker. Finding Mr. Max as impossible to trace as Lieutenant Molina has, Kitty the C settled for harassing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, primarily Mr. Matt Devine.

Miss Kathleen O’Connor’s popping up again like Jill the Ripper has been raising hell for we who reside at a vintage round apartment building called the Circle Ritz, owned by seventy-something free spirit, Miss Electra Lark.

Now reunited with her long-ago IRA associates, Miss Kathleen knows a life is at stake unless the man she has tormented for the past two years betrays an associate of his she stalked.

Someone (Miss Kathleen?) arranged for Mr. Max Kinsella to hit the wall of the Neon Nightmare club with lethal impact while undercover. His enduring traumatic memory loss means he knows he and my roommate were once a committed couple, but he recalls none of the emotional and, ahem, spicy details. So far. And now he returns as a secret agent again.

All this human conniving and canoodling and 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

This streetwise minx insinuated herself into my cases until I was forced to set up shop with her as Midnight Investigations, Inc. She alleges that I am her deadbeat dad, but I will never cop to that charge.

MA BARKER

My long-lost mama who gave me a last tummy-lick and prodded my rear out of our humble abode next to the Bellagio Dumpsters. (Even high-end hotels need down-to-earth garbage control.) I elected to continue on my own, though Ma now runs the toughest feline street gang in Vegas. She is not pretty, but she is pretty effective. I have never quite banished a quiver at the memory of a four shiv-tip disciplinary slap-down from Mommy Dearest.

So that is how things stand today, even more full of danger, angst, and criminal pursuits. However, things are seldom what they seem, and almost never that way in Las Vegas. So any surprising developments do not surprise me. Everything in Sin City is always up for grabs 24/7—guilt, innocence, money, power, love, loss, death, and significant others.

I comfort myself that my ordeals may soon end and I can pull the covers up over my thick blanket of pages and catch some beauty sleep for a decade or two. But wait…

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?

1

Five-Alarm Fire Power

The onrushing yodel of a police car siren cut through Temple’s dreams like a hot knife through custard pudding. Instead of fading, like a nightmare, the nagging alternating yowls frayed and snapped her nerves.

She was on her feet by the bed, hands to ears, watching her peaceful arched white ceiling become rinsed by lurid forms of red and blue as if as awash in patriotic stingrays.

The red LED lights on her bedside clock read 1:09 a.m. Matt wouldn’t be off the air until 2 a.m. She was on her own. At least no intruder had broken into her unit, not the case ten days ago.

Her sleep T-shirt was short, her feet were bare and she needed to get outside to see what was happening.

Even as another siren came bowling toward the usually grave-silent Circle Ritz apartment and condominium building, she saw Midnight Louie’s black silhouette stretching up to reach and pull down the French doors’ levered handles to the small balcony outside.

“So that’s how you make your escape,” she muttered, burrowing into the “winter” side of her closet for a velvety micro-fleece jogging suit she slept in on cold desert nights. She’d have awakened an icicle wearing them in her native Minnesota, but in a Las Vegas July they were more of a sweat suit.

Temple didn’t own a flip-flop—cursed backdrop for hammertoes and other unlovely foot maladies—but she did have a pair of fuzzy skunk slippers, child size. She stuffed her size-five feet in them and opened a door to follow the big black cat, now balancing on the railing, out into warm, noisy night. Below, other owners and tenants were milling, half dressed, around the slice of parking lot and pool visible from her second-floor perch.

She craned her neck to the balcony above, Matt’s place, but it wasn’t an object of police interest either.

Time to go down and see what the neighbors knew. Louie had opted to go up, his sharp nails snagging the bark of the single venerable palm tree that overarched the five-story building.

Skunk slippers don’t climb well, so Temple grabbed her cell phone and unit key and headed for the seventy-year-old elevator. Since the fifties-era Circle Ritz was actually round, she had to trot halfway around the central mechanical core to wait for the car.

The small lobby was abuzz with people as hastily (if not as absurdly) attired as she. Outside, more of the same awaited her.

Some words from the murmuring neighbors hung like audible billboards far above the rest. “Burglar… Shot… Three squad cars… Ambulance… Taken away.”

Obviously the stir centered around the farther part of the building, which overlooked the pool house pavilion. Temple edged through the neighbors, nodding at some she knew. Then she heard someone behind her say, “No, not Max Kinsella. He moved out a couple years ago, but, yeah, he used to be a famous magician…”

This bit of discussion coincided with her sighting a tall, dark man talking with a police officer who was shaking his head “No”, even as he took notes.

Yes, it was “No”. Mr. Tall, Dark and Confident was not Temple’s former significant other. The Milan-styled beige summer suit he wore, now also wearing the strafes of red and blue lights that bathed everybody out here, was one of an uncommon but plural Vegas Genus of Gentleman Gangster, a Fontana brother.

How somebody as squat and chubby as Macho Maria Fontana had ten nephews as sleek and politely formidable as the Berettas they carried under their thirteen-hundred-dollar suit coats, Temple would never know. And only two of them married yet, the youngest and the eldest.

If she ever had time to write a blockbuster novel, the lives, loves, and deeds of Clan Fontana was a natural subject.

Identifying individual Fontana brothers was an art form, even for Temple, who worked for the white sheep of the family. Married Nicky Fontana owned the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino and carried an impeccably honest reputation. Of the current bachelor Fontana crew, one wore a Roman glass ring. One an earring.

“Officer,” probably Ernesto was saying, “it is obviously an instance of self-defense.”

“Well, Mr. Fontana, then you can obviously hire a lawyer to prove that.”

Ernesto was under arrest? Perish the thought that the gelato-pale, Italian summer-weight wool suit should pass a night in the slammer.

“Maybe, Officer…” Temple butted in. Being young and petite, no one listened to her unless she took action. “You might want to notify Lieutenant Molina about this incident.”

The uniformed policeman wasn’t Fontana-tall, but he could certainly look down on her. “Who voted you old enough to vote?”

“My driver’s license.” She was going to tell him right out that homicide Lt. C.R. Molina was currently seeing Julio Fontana. Or so it seemed. It was hard to tell what was what with the deadpan lady lieutenant.