Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A White Tie And Tails

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In Carole Nelson Douglas' Cat in a White Tie and Tails, Midnight Louie goes along as chaperone when PR whiz Temple Barr and her fiance, rising media star Matt Devine, head to Chicago so she can meet his family. Matt's mother has a tragic past primed to rise and bite anybody in reach, even the ex-alley cat sleuth. When Louie is snatched, the catnapping's surprising motive loops back to Vegas and a string of unsolved murders connected to magic…and ex-magician Max Kinsella, Temple's former significant other.
Skeptical homicide lieutenant C. R. Molina has commissioned Max to investigate the cold case murder she suspects he committed two years earlier. With traumatic amnesia from a recent attempt on his life, the once infallible Max is more sitting duck than predator. It will take an alliance of frenemies to solve the serial deaths before one of them joins the fatality list.

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“Baggage.”

Not true. There was the unsinkable Temple Barr. Obviously, she and Matt Devine were forthright, delightful people. Obviously, they made a forthright, delightful couple. All tucked away for the night and life ever after.

The fact was, he and Revienne had confided in each other. They shared a devastating teenage sense of failure and loss. The question was, Did you do that with mere strangers because there was no risk, or because it was all risk in lives so carefully lived ever after?

Max’s instincts were out to lunch. The adage about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer rang true, but he couldn’t define his motives when it came to Revienne.

“In your position,” she said, sipping from the demitasse of coffee and the tiny liqueur glass and sampling the plate of miniature sweets, including a white chocolate Eiffel Tower, “you are having a total eclipse of the mind and emotions. That’s my professional opinion. Anything you might think or do now is extremely unreliable. You shouldn’t trust yourself and you shouldn’t trust me.”

“An excellent diagnosis. When do you leave Las Vegas?”

He pulled her toy purse over to his side of the small table, opened it, and inspected its contents. The twenty-dollar bill he’d contributed, the lip gloss compact, a European brand he’d never known or couldn’t remember. The case had no hidden sections. The gambling card and the room card.

“When my work is done,” she said, unperturbed.

“Your classes in existential angst?”

“It’s a more common problem than you’d think.”

“Your ‘baggage’ is annoyingly innocent.”

“Thank you.” She reclaimed the compact and reglossed her lips as he put the credit card that read GARRY RANDOLPH with his green-eyed photo in the bill packet. Nothing he or Garry did had ever been innocent.

“Look,” Revienne said, “our last chance to see the Bellagio fountains dancing.”

He turned in his chair, watching the silent waltz of water and lights and music. The fountains were diminishing into sprinkler height as he escorted Revienne out of the restaurant.

She wanted to pause at her previous spot to put his twenty bucks in the slot machine.

He took the bill, studied the scene, then moved it and them to the end of another row. “This one.”

A skeptical blond eyebrow almost distracted him from the white skirt stretched tight as she sat on the stool and slid the bill into the waiting slot.

The moving icons chirruped and blinged and binged. Coins plinked into the stainless steel apron under the computerized slot machine. Revienne scooped them with her white-tipped French manicured nails into the paper cup Max held. Again she pushed the button. And again.

In a few minutes she’d won a hundred and fifty dollars. And she laughed like a kid while doing it.

“That is magic,” she said.

He shook his head modestly. “They position sucker slots to let someone win for a while and lure others to lose.”

“It’s all programmed?”

He nodded as she set her full cup on the shelf.

“It was fun, winning, but I don’t need the money. It’s not worth the fuss converting all these coins to cash.” She rose. “Let someone else find it, and think they got lucky too.”

Max laughed. And escorted her to the drive up.

“We can hear the fountains’ music from here?” Revienne asked.

“With a short stroll.”

“After dinner, a stroll is always good. Very Parisian.”

Max led her near Las Vegas Boulevard. As they arrived, the fountains paused for a moment to take a deep breath and then gushed up like geysers to the accompaniment of symphonic music paced by the lights and water. Behind the dancing shafts of water the Bellagio façade was lit with its own symphony of light.

“You know,” Revienne said, turning to view the spotlit Eiffel Tower behind them and the Paris’s festive neon balloon, “this almost reminds me of Paris, out of the corner of my eye, anyway.”

Max looked at the Vegas he remembered in bits and pieces, compared it to crisp images of bustling Zurich and the mist-blurred landscapes of sweet, savage Ireland and Belfast. This was new territory to his unraveled memory, and he stood isolated, having no remaining remembered intimate connection, except one.

The evening wind blew a wet mist from the fountains across the Strip. Revienne recoiled and then laughed, welcoming the cooling shower.

Max’s hand had automatically gone between her shoulder blades for support and she relaxed into his shoulder.

The Bellagio fountains continued their assault on hot Las Vegas with waves of cool Irish mist.

“My clothes, hair, everything, will be wet, ruined,” Revienne said, laughing. “It’s wonderful!”

He remembered the hardships of their on-foot escape in the Alps.

She turned her face into his shoulder and lifted it, eyes closed to the tiny wet crystals of water dewing her eyelashes, lips, and all that everything that was getting wet.

He wondered if they would get to first names this time. She thought his was Michael, and Garry had told him it actually was, once upon a time.

“You want a return engagement?” Max asked. “Why?”

“Because this is somewhere very special and free, and your strength of will is phenomenal.”

“I’d be much better now.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling even more. “That too.”

Chapter 54

Meddling Belles

“Tell me about the wedding,” Miss Midnight Louise demands. “I understand you wore a sissy white bow tie.”

Louise has buttonholed me while I dallied in the Circle Ritz parking lot, after the wedding party saw the happy couple off to their Crystal Phoenix digs.

I do not mean my business partner literally buttonholed me, but she did stick a tiny but sharp shiv in my black velvet shoulder that gives me pause.

Girls just like to hear about weddings, even if they are fixed.

“Who has ratted on me?” I ask.

“I heard your very own roommate ooh ing and aah ing to Miss Van Von Rhine in this very parking lot about how adorable you looked in white tie and black tail. They were giggling about you revisiting this role again soon.”

Gag me with a can of politically correct, dolphin-safe tuna. I put in my vote for all species forgetting the folderol and eloping … me with Miss Topaz from the Oasis. Now that I am playing Gossip Guy, I will confess that I am so over lion-cut shaved Persians.

“Well.” Miss Louise nudges me. “I want a complete report, down to the wearing apparel, besides yours.”

It is to yawn, but there is only one way I will be left to my own devices.

“The bride was totally drool-worthy. She wore a silky soft, tiered lace-and-ruffle dress that flared below the knee into a mermaid skirt. It was a pale peach mauve color like really diluted blood.

“The bodice featured an oversized soft chiffon bow in back, with the tails reaching all the way to her hips. A pity it will hang in her Chicago closet from now on.”

Louise is as close to swooning as I have ever seen her. “Ummm,” she purrs. “Totally climbable and clawable. A ten on the Shred Scale. What about your roommate?”

“Even better. As maid of honor she wore pale saffron—”

“Saffron?”

“We fashonistos don’t say ‘yellow.’ It was a saffron full-pleated skirt, ’50s length.”

Oooh, the hem at calf-level, so accessible and a potential carousel of swing.”

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