Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A White Tie And Tails

“Got it,” Max said, “but I don’t play Trivial Pursuit, so don’t need that info. Don’t think you can distract me with minor matters, Temple. I still want to know the dish on where you’re coming from. In Chicago.” His voice had grown speculative. “And why would you lug that overweight cat along?”

“Merely,” Temple said, “to keep the great Mystifying Max guessing and his recovering memory agile.”

Max declaimed, “They drew a circle that shut me out. I drew a circle that took them in.”

“‘Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout,’” Matt quoted, eyeing Max. “That’s the poem’s second line. If the description fits…”

“Heretic, no. Rebel, yes. A thing to flout, lately that seems very appropriate.”

Temple wasn’t getting any of this except the rival guy vibe, so she leaned forward over the seat. “Back to Rafi Nadir. What did you mean by ‘circumstantial’ evidence in a murder?”

“The death occurred at the Oasis Hotel. That’s Rafi’s turf as assistant security chief.”

“And you were there too?” Temple asked. “Why?”

“Doing what you do so well. Sticking our noses into other people’s business. I should mention it was three A.M. and the attraction was shut down.”

“So Rafi wasn’t on duty,” Temple guessed.

“Rafi wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t drawn him into the web of Vegas cold cases I’m investigating on a wing-nut brain and a prayer. The dead man was an anonymous thug and if fighting him off is murder, I probably did the deed and Rafi was a deer caught in the headlights, prepped to take the fall.”

“Why would Rafi Nadir even be there?” Temple wondered.

“He’s a good guy.”

Matt raised his eyebrows to look over his shoulder at Temple.

“And,” Max added, “I’m trying to shut down any lingering poisons from my British Isles adventures way back when and recently. Namely Kathleen O’Connor and anyone responsible for the dead man in the Goliath Hotel surveillance system and a certain unwanted … relative of yours by marriage.” He nodded to Matt. “The late Cliff Effinger.”

In the silence, Max added a chilling coda. “Not what I wanted, to get snarled up in your tragic family history, but Kitty the Cutter certainly involved you in mine.”

A silence inside the idling vehicle reflected everyone’s mutual shock, Temple refected. Max couldn’t know that the Chicago trip had stripped bare a link right back to Las Vegas and possible Synth activity. And Matt had to realize that Max couldn’t resolve his long forced involvement with Irish terrorism and a true femme fatale stalker without treading on part of Matt’s family history Matt wanted no one but Temple to know.

Holy Kowabunga. Temple had a vintage surfer T-shirt to wear around home that paid tribute to that catchword from Chief Thunderthud on the Howdy Doody kiddie TV show in the ’50s. Like slang that kept on reinventing itself for future generations, Kathleen O’Connor and Cliff Effinger were old nightmares that kept recycling again and again, both supposedly dead and both surprisingly potent up to this very minute.

“Call me an obsessive compulsive amnesiac,” said Max, “but I think this all adds up. Somehow.”

“Who’s called you an obsessive compulsive amnesiac?” Matt asked. “That sure sounds like a gripe.”

“Nobody important. Just an amateur psychoanalyzer like you.”

“If you mean I can analyze psychos—”

“You know,” Temple said, “I don’t think I’m comfortable riding here in the backseat like the distant top of a pyramid with you two guys in the front driver’s seat.”

Sometimes Temple didn’t realize the full meaning of things she said until her own voice stopped. Not often. It was not a good habit for a successful PR woman and in the personal arena it was a sound example of clunky, size 5 wedgies firmly inserted in mouth.

Describing a functional triangle at this point was not productive. Something jammed her in the hip. Louie was rocking his carrier over onto its side and into her space.

Oh. Right. They were a dysfunctional quadrangle, not a triangle.

How comforting.

Chapter 32

Bad Mews

Naturally, I have used my incisive incisors to spring the zipper on my new low-end carrier. The less time spent in Miss Krys’s truly ucky idea of a cat carrier from hell, the better.

By the time Mr. Max drives his exceedingly boring rented minivan into the Circle Ritz parking lot, I am free, black, and pushing twenty-one pounds of muscular male physique out of the first opening vehicle door. (My layabout lifestyle in the Windy City has added a tad of avoirdupois around my middle, but that is a French condition and cannot help but be an attractive addition.)

I make a four-point landing on the still-warm asphalt of my native soil: the mean streets of the country’s loudest and liveliest entertainment jungle, and inhale the hot, heavy air.

Aaah. Tar so melt-in-your-mouth sizzling, it could trap a brontosaurus; pad-searing sand; and egg-frying-hot concrete. I am back in civilization! Not for me dank, deserted warehouses down mean streets so dark, not a ray of ultraviolet neon can penetrate those Bastless byways.

Not for me petty thugs who cannot even make an effective and grammatical threatening phone call.

Here in Vegas, style rules. And I am just strutting my stuff toward the parking lot fringes when I come up nose to nose with one of the city’s least famous fixtures.

“Huh,” I say. I do not want to admit that I have hit a wall of pretty impenetrable fur and chutzpah. I am the expert at that. “Louise!” I cry.

I was about to make a pilgrimage to the Crystal Phoenix, but she pops out of the large oleander bushes ringing the Circle Ritz parking lot as though to pounce upon me.

“Where have you been?” I inquire.

“If you wish to sit your unprotected rear down on the sizzling hot asphalt, I can remain in the shade and regale you with a long and winding journey through Vegas hot spots more noted for sin than fever.”

Aaah. I have bounded onto the cooling dirt and sand surrounding the oleanders.

“How was Chicago?” she asks.

“All right. There is a lot less street-level action and entertainment value there. I could get all my exercise jumping up to hit elevator buttons in the high-twenties and up.”

“Home is the hunter, home from the five-star hotels and the lure of hot studio lights,” Miss Midnight Louise observes. “At least you managed to keep your two fragile human charges in one piece.”

“Them? Fragile? Yeah, they were facing family matters more incestuous than Ma Barker’s clan, aka clowder, but, Louise, you have no idea how imperiled I was in life and limb and carrier in Chicago.”

“Where is that leopard-spot carrier fit for a reality TV Chihuahua, by the way?”

“I left it as a headstone for a couple of Chicago gangsters.”

Miss Midnight Louise’s airy whiskers lift above her censorious features. (This censorious features stuff means she has a scowl on her puss that would sour a Green Appletini. Not to mention a decent dude who has only been doing his guard duty out of town.)

“Were they dead or just happy to get you out of their nightmares?”

“Let us simply say that, thanks to me, they knocked themselves out to commit mayhem and got snagged by the cops.”