Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Temple recognized her inevitable cue. A dramatic pause she had to fill. Now she really knew more than they did.

“Have you all ever considered … Cosimo Sparks?” she asked.

“Who’s out there? Who is it?”

Three hands saluted the owners’ eyebrows as they glared past the moving lights into the darkness to find her. Ramona let the hand shading her eyes tilt down to cover them. Hal and put his hands at the sides of his face. Czarina gasped and clapped a hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. They resembled the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil monkeys gone catatonic.

Temple stood.

As everyone stared speechlessly during a long, flabbergasted pause, something thumped onto the bar top. One Midnight Louie, taking a stroll through the Stoli and Beefeater and Blue Curaçao bottles.

A second unmistakable thump. Another black cat landed atop the barstool next to Czarina.

Thump. A black cat beside Hal bracketed the trio.

“Don’t freak,” Ramona told her confreres. “It’s just those rabid cats that invaded our clubrooms when the two clowns in Darth Vader masks threatened us. These kitties clawed those invaders to shreds. And the woman lurking in the dark over there is Restroom Girl.”

Czarina lifted glasses on a beaded chain invisible against her patterned caftan to her shocked face. “Yes, it is. She claimed she’d gotten lost on the way to the restrooms.”

Hal pushed off the barstool and limped forward two steps. “What do you mean have we ever considered Cosimo Sparks? He was our natural leader, totally committed to making a statement. He knew we were … caretakers of those mysterious parties’ hidden loot. He wouldn’t have betrayed them, because when they got ready to do their biggest Vegas heist in history, we’d bring off the biggest magical illusion in Vegas history too. In person. Not like David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty vanish on TV, but right in front of people. That’s magic the old-fashioned way.”

“Look,” Temple said. “You all thought each other might have done it. You all deny it rather convincingly. That leaves … Cosimo Sparks as the murderer. These dead people were all ‘recruits’ for your secret Synth-esis of magic and mysticism. All except Gandolph. He wouldn’t ‘recruit.’ They all knew too much once they refused to join.”

“Gloria Fuentes was with us,” Hal said.

“She was also highly religious and her confessor thought she suffered from too many scruples as well as superstitions,” Temple revealed. “Her scruples may have won out in the end. She might have backed out. Such people tend to have loose lips. And Professor Mangel … his enthusiasm for magic would have stopped at anything dicey. He had credibility. If he became alarmed at your backing a dangerous heist that could hurt people, he’d out you live on Channel Five, believe it.”

“I wasn’t so obvious about what the Synth actually was with him.” Ramona’s curled lip distorted her beautiful face. “I know how to be subtle. Jeff would not have been a threat, whether he went along with me … us. Or not.”

“Could Cosimo afford to believe that?” Temple asked.

Ramona frowned. Her prideful expression crumbled. “I did complain to Cosimo about Jeff being ‘too Goody Two-shoes’ for us. Oh, God. If Cosimo killed him because of what I said—”

Hal was adamant. “Cosimo died protecting whatever had been stored in that empty safe!”

“Maybe so,” Temple said, “but he may have done it for his own fanatical purposes.”

She paused, then quoted an unforgettable line from some Synth-related papers Max had found hidden long ago at Garry’s house and she had reviewed lately. “‘The aberrant brother shall be declared anathema. The price upon his head shall be death.’”

The three jerked backwards as if snake-bit.

“How’d you get that?” Hal demanded. “That’s from the sacred illuminated Book of the Synth, from the induction ceremonies. Only sworn members see the liturgy, and only once.”

“That does read like a license to kill,” she said, “and some sects consider all nonmembers are born to damnation, so offing a few who were a threat wouldn’t be a big leap.”

“The Synth had its ancient, revered ceremonies,” Czarina said, “but it was a philosophy, not a religion. Nobody took that ‘aberrant brother’ and ‘price upon his head’ seriously.”

“Maybe Cosimo did,” Temple said, “and then he ran up against some desperadoes who had no compunction against killing to get what they needed for their own ‘sacred’ cause. And if those secret ‘backers’ of the heist-concealing illusion were putting the pincers on you to produce the money they’d stashed in Las Vegas, think what pressure they might have been putting on Cosimo. The coroner found multiple marks from the knife-point before the killing stab was struck. I’m guessing Cosimo, if he’d been willing to kill for his grand plan, would be willing to keep mum and die for it too.”

“You can’t prove this,” Ramona charged.

“No. But you’re all in jeopardy if my theory is true, from the law as accessories and from our mutual acquaintances we call the Vaders.”

“You are just a Restroom Girl.” Ramona advanced on Temple, each step a hammer strike on the hard black Lucite floor. “What makes you think you can stroll into our nightclub, onto our property, and make accusations with what they call impunity?”

“The killer cats?”

By then the number of black cats sitting tall on barstools and the bar had tripled.

The trio turned around to take in that eerie sight. Czarina and Hal froze into position.

The silence was complete again, and eerie, and sad.

An interruption in the rhythmic passage of the rotating zodiac made the drinkers look up. Temple and Louie too.

A tiny flash of white at the interior pyramid’s apex seemed to be growing closer. It grew larger, and then you understood that it was lowering and growing closer. The trio at the bar seemed mesmerized.

Closer, and closer … a figure in white tie and tails, descending on an invisible black thread like a spider, silent and stealthy but relentless.

Temple eyed the three at the bar, prey for the descending black widower. They’d already drunk themselves into near-paralysis.

“Cosimo…” Hal stood, clutching at his bow tie, a melodramatic gesture that would have looked silly had he not been scared stiff. “He’s alive.”

“No. His ghost.” Czarina was staring upward as if transported. “Speak to us, spirit.”

“The only spirits here are in your glasses.” Ramona stood and glared into the lights, hands on hips, defying the oncoming figure. “Enter our nemesis. Max Kinsella. He engineered our floating table trick with the street performers and then turned around and engineered the aerial high jinks and off-and-on chest-vanishing illusion with the Cloaked Conjuror and all his high-tech equipment.”

Something came flying down out of the dark.

A black top hat.

An object as white and weightless as dove plummeted down next, and then another just like it.

A third such fluttering drifted down in the silence as the figure lowered in the same supernaturally smooth fashion. Looking up, into the lights, made him a man of mystery still, even for Temple.

She could see a silver wand tumbling down end over end, and then … it vanished.

On the nightclub’s black Plexiglas floor lay a shiny black top hat, two empty white gloves, and a white bow tie.

Above, was nothing. No motion, no descending body. Nothing.

Chapter 48

Bringing Down the House

As dramatic exits go, that was a pip.

Especially since there was no entrance to start with.