Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A White Tie And Tails

“I have Gandolph’s laptop computer from our last recent dash across the Continent and the British Isles. And now I have access to some ambiguous files on his home computer. He wasn’t one to commit the obvious, or the devious, to any lasting form, but he had to pay Rafi and those records are intact.”

“Why are you and Rafi the new Starsky and Hutch?” Temple wanted to know.

“I told you. I inherited Rafi Nadir from Gandolph. He owed Garry a lot, including the recommendation for the Oasis security position. That was a prime job for an ex-cop who’d flunked out after Las Vegas’s current finest homicide lieutenant left him without notice when she got with child. Anybody know why she ran? Was he abusive?”

“Suspicious mind,” Temple said promptly. “She believed Rafi had sabotaged her birth control to get her off a career track at LAPD. They were both ‘minorities’ at the time and competition for the few token slots was harsh.”

“So they both ended up losing out in L.A.” Max smiled at the irony.

Matt entered the exchange. “Classic case of ‘a failure to communicate.’ Forgive the cliché.”

“So why were you and Rafi snooping around the Oasis pirate ship in the wee hours?” Temple asked Max. “That’s the kind of stunt I’d pull.”

“Molina is out of unofficial legmen,” Max said. “She hired me to investigate the crime she fingered me for as likely suspect. She has a sense of irony, I’ll say that for her.”

“But that was the dead guy in the eye-in-the-sky service area above the Goliath casino area.”

“Right. Rafi followed me there in his role of posthumous Max guardian on Garry’s payroll, and I encountered a fly on the wall of the service ducts, armed and dangerous only to himself.”

“So,” Matt said, leaning forward, “you team up with Rafi and on your next stop at the Oasis, you both get waylaid and some anonymous attacker ends up drowned. Why were you nosing around the scene where my stepfather died months ago?”

Max produced a quizzical look. “And you swore you weren’t the possessive sort.”

“You don’t know me well enough to know what ‘sort’ I am, Kinsella. So why?”

Max shrugged. “Gandolph had stored a lot of references to Las Vegas crimes in his computers. Don’t forget that he faked his own death at the Halloween séance to bring back the ghost of Harry Houdini. You can get a lot done when people think you’re dead.”

Temple produced an unladylike snort. “So that ’s your excuse for your AWOL episodes. What about this? Maybe Effinger isn’t dead.”

She’d been exaggerating to make a point, but both men stared at her, the shocking suggestion shaking their separate assumptions.

Matt spoke first. “Temple, we need to tell him about Chicago and Louie and Effinger and Ophiucus.”

She kept silent. Did they really want to let Max in on all of Matt’s family issues. Did she?

“Chicago my long-term memory has down cold,” Max told them, sensing they needed reassurance. “Midnight Louie I’ve met and concede is a formidable cat. Garry’s computer notes make Effinger’s relationship and character clear as the battery acid he was spawned in. But … Ophiuchus? I probably knew what it was just a couple months ago, but it’s not downloading from the backup drive. Is it an ancient Greek curse?”

“Not a bad guess.” Matt smiled to recall his genteel mother’s similar reaction to the word. “It means ‘serpent-bearer.’”

“It’s the ‘lost’ thirteenth sign of the zodiac,” Temple added. “Astrologers are trying to resurrect it right now because they say the sky or whatever has shifted since the traditional signs of the zodiac were designated centuries ago and all the autumn babies are not the same scales, scorpions, and archers they thought they were.”

“Whoa.” Max put his hand to his forehead. “I don’t remember much, but I can sense that science was never your strong suit, Temple.”

“So maybe the sky didn’t shift. Exactly,” she said. “What is making our specific spot of earth move is that Ophiuchus is the chosen symbol for the cabal of disgruntled traditional magicians that have been operating in Vegas, and out of the Neon Nightmare nightclub for years.

“And,” she added, “the Synth may have had ties to guns and money for the Irish Republican Army both before and since the peace was made. That’s why you were there posing as the Phantom Mage, to investigate it.”

“That I buy,” Max said. “Gandolph briefed me on the Synth during our European travels and it’s been in his computer for ages. He liked them as a serious set of miscreants, but they strike me as rather pathetically mumbo jumbo. Or as a toothless front group.”

“Maybe,” Temple said, “but at least two of the unsolved deaths floating around this town in recent years involved magic or magicians and a corpse displayed in the form of the major stars in Ophiucus, which form what a kindergarten child would draw as the shape of a house.”

“The houses of the zodiac,” Max said.

“Nobody’s put it quite that way,” Matt admitted. “Anything zodiac seems too out there to take seriously.”

“Says you!” Temple was indignant. “I read mine in the newspaper every day and sometimes it’s eerily accurate.”

Max smiled at her. Tolerantly. “Accidental affinities are the long-mined territory of mediums, mind-readers, and scam artists.”

“Is it an accident,” Temple asked, “that Midnight Louie was just catnapped in Chicago to force Matt’s mother to turn over items left behind in a fireproof box by the late Effinger? An accident that the only possible thing relevant we found is what may be a biker tattoo in the form of a drawing of Ophiucus?”

“Ophiucus?” Max was no longer complacent. “Connected to Effinger?”

“And then,” Matt said, lighting fire, “there were the ‘she left’ murders, one at the Blue Dahlia where Molina sings sometimes and one … Temple, you wrote all this down in a table, didn’t you?”

She regarded Max with super-sleuth intensity. “Call me unscientific, will you? I’ve compiled all those eerie details into a Table of … Crime Elements, Ophiuchus and all.”

“Then show me, by all means.” He leaned back and spread his empty hands. “Dazzle me with your superior organizational logic.”

Temple left the sofa to dredge her tote bag from behind it. It sported a leopard pattern bought to match the late, lamented Midnight Louie travel carrier.

First she flourished the drawing of Ophiuchus at Max. “Zodiac signs may be junk science and superstition, but this ‘lost’ one is leaving star tracks all over Las Vegas.”

Max took the drawing to study. “It would make a terrific tattoo.”

Temple shuddered delicately. “It’s called the serpent-bearer, but the muscle man looks more like he’s fighting for his life than giving the snake a lift.”

“Effinger had some tattoos,” Matt said, “crude homemade ones, so this design may only have been a tattoo dream for him.”

“I’m not enamored of making skin into maps,” Temple said, pulling out her netbook.

Its hot pink cover clashed with the red sofa when she sat back down to bring up a file.

She handed the computer to Matt while Max sprang up to lean down over the sofa back between them to see. He was indeed moving like the Max of old.

They all stared at the screen.

“That is worthy of Dame Agatha Christie,” Max said, giving a long, low whistle after studying it.

Temple shrugged modestly. “I have read a Poirot and Marple or two.”

Max’s forefinger speared the table. “I’m right there as a suspect for Murder Number One at the Goliath. And, Devine, you’re down as a suspect for the murder of a call girl named Vassar at the same hotel. My, my. No wonder the closemouthed and manipulative Molina is on all of our cases.” Max eyed Temple. “You’re amazingly unbiased in your suspect list, but I don’t see you on it anywhere.”