Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“You’ve seen him already? While I was gone? And isn’t that Gandolph guy dead?”

“His real name was Garry Randolph. He and his magician persona were presumed dead after that séance at the haunted house last Halloween, but he wasn’t. He was shot dead in Northern Ireland about a week ago days ago. In a car. With Max at the wheel.”

Matt shook his head and worked on the Silver Zombie. “And you say Kitty the Cutter may still be knocking around somewhere, too? Everybody we presumed dead … isn’t. Except for poor Gandolph?”

“That’s about it.”

“Chicago’s looking better every second.” Matt buried his face and expression behind the tall padded menu.

“Matt,” Temple said.

“We’d better eat to offset the drinks. And think.” Matt clapped the menu shut so definitely, Temple jumped.

He sighed and shook his head. “That’s why I love you. Wounded birds will not be left flapping on your doorstep, even when they’re hawks. But I am not deliriously happy.”

The waiter edged toward them. Matt ordered New York steak, medium. Temple wanted to order crow, but settled on flounder.

Matt picked up the “discussion.”

“I see why you wanted to lay this on me in public.”

“No. I wanted you to be relaxed from the flight and the hullabaloo in Chicago and whatever your family’s been up to.”

“You are a born referee, Temple. You want everyone to get a fair chance before they tear each other part. Where’s the resurrected Wonder Boy now?”

“I left him at the house he inherited from Garry Randolph, where he’d lived in hiding after his, um, first return to Las Vegas.”

“After his first abrupt, unexplained disappearance,” Matt said.

“I haven’t seen him since.”

“And that’s been?”

“For two days.”

“And you couldn’t have called me? Warned me?”

“You’d want this over the phone? Look, Matt, you’re not really jealous, are you?”

He thought about it. “No. The counselor in me realizes you’re better off knowing what happened to him. You need the closure, but me, I just want a past that’s laid to rest.”

“As with your stepfather.” Temple nodded, remembering Matt’s tenacity in tracking down the louse. That’s what had brought him to Las Vegas and the Circle Ritz and her. “Laying a past to rest can’t always be literal,” she argued. “Your stepfather is truly and sincerely dead, and he was also pretty harmless by then. If Kathleen O’Connor is still out there … not the case. She seemed to have it in for you as well as for Max. He and Garry found out all about her in Ireland.”

“I wish they all had stayed there,” Matt said as their salads arrived.

The pair of Caesar salads were too lavish to be ignored. They came with a Crystal Phoenix twist: capers instead of anchovies in the dressing. Temple didn’t remember ordering salad. She guessed they both had mechanically OK’d the first item on every course the waiter had thrown at them.

“So,” Matt said, picking at the greens, “Kinsella knows nothing of his past except a lot of juicy stuff about Kathleen O’Connor that he and the late Garry Randolph uncovered in the last week or so?”

Temple nodded. “I didn’t press him for details. He’s … not the same. Both his legs were broken as well as his head in that arranged Neon Nightmare accident. I thought the new revelations were something we should discuss together.”

“You and me.”

She nodded.

“And Max Kinsella?”

She nodded.

“Because…”

“I don’t think any of us will be safe until we lay the mystery of Max’s past with Kathleen O’Connor—or Kathleen O’Connor herself—to rest.”

Matt literally chewed it over.

“You’re the girl gumshoe,” he said. “Look. Here comes our second round and we’ve just killed our first Silver Zombies. Too bad ghosts of the past aren’t that easy to get rid of.”

Chapter 21

The Cactus Garden Cha-Cha

It is a sad day—I should say night, in this instance—when the senior partner of a firm is forced to follow the druthers of the junior partner.

That is exactly how I find myself on the hard concrete of a flash-floodwater-control channel, sneaking up on a tangle of ungoverned desert scrub with Miss Midnight Louise leading the slo-mo “charge,” so to speak.

I voice my objections again.

“We will have more stickers in our soft underbellies than a porcupine’s back has spines if we crawl over all that unfriendly terrain to the house.”

“Obviously, your night-assault skills have suffered sadly from La Vida Lazy at the Circle Ritz condo of your currently conflicted roommate,” Louise says. “I know when to zig and zag to find the soft sandy aisles between this Inquisition of cactus plants.”

“Cleverly put, my would-be flake off the paternal monument, but you forget—yowl!—one thing.”

“Keep down the noise! And what is that one thing?”

“Mine! My underbelly is a lot more complicated than yours, and I am a tad broader of beam. If I had wanted to be curry-combed I would have come back as a horse.”

“That is you, all right, the old gray nag,” she hisses over her shoulder. “There may be persons of evil intent lurking about, so keep the objections to yourself.”

Just then I spy an incandescent glow to my left, behind a tall scrawny mesquite tree. Enough with being a lowly grunt! I spring toward the slender trunk and ratchet up it with my built-in pitons.

Mesquite trees may make twenty or thirty feet in height. They are more an ambitious shrub than a real tree and thus not built for taking much weight. You do not want to mess with the young shoots, not only because of the weight problem. New growth has nasty protection—three-inch thorns that could deflate the tire on an SUV.

So I am up the tree, out on a limb, and leaping toward the light like a would-be saved soul before you can sneeze “Midnight Louise.” As I suspected, I spy a window and am soon perching claws-out on a sill.

These old adobe-style houses have thick walls and wide sills. I can relax and stare right into the living room. I love being on a high perch in a power position.

I know as I contemplate my next move that nothing bad is going down in my little corner of Vegas now that I am on the job.

As for the rest of the city, that is up to the two-foots on the official force.

The smart money is on me.

Chapter 22

All Dolled Up

The victim’s body was laid out like a corpse on an autopsy table, stiff-armed and -legged, a horrible life-size doll.

Homicide Lieutenant C. R. Molina stalked around the corpse lying on the pavement. The night was warm and dark, the shopping-mall parking lot empty except for the circle of police vehicles.

Forensics had done its grisly duty. Every iota of evidence had been photographed and collected. The meat wagon was waiting, along with Coroner Grizzly Bahr at the end of the ride. Then would come the Y-cut of the torso, the circular saw through the skull-top, and the corpse wouldn’t resemble a molded plastic doll anymore.

Molina could already hear the saw’s whine, scent the Febreze-laden, icy air of the city morgue. She was not quite ready to release this corpse from its state of suspended wholeness.

There was not a mark on the girl’s form. She was twenty or so, high-fashion-model thin, with her hipbones as prominent as an undressed department-store mannequin’s through her thin summer skirt, her small breasts supernaturally firm under the lacy top.

Her open-eyed face, though, was a mask of distortion and anguish. Most corpses, even victims of terrible accidents, even horribly damaged ones, were blessedly expressionless.