Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

“You did not see this coming,” Hal points out.

“Please,” Czarina urges, “we do not need to quarrel; we need to solve Cosimo’s murder so we can get the foreign investors off our backs.”

“What about the Phantom Mage’s ‘accident’?” Carmen asks. “Or was it murder?”

“Did any of us do it? What about Cosimo?” Hal continues the questions.

“You mean we might have a serial killing going on?” Carmen demands.

“He wasn’t one of us,” Hal notes dismissively. “Just a hokey half-acrobatic magic act that gave a few thrills to the drunken postmidnight crowd. He did no real magic.”

“As if ‘real magic’ is on any of our résumés,” Czarina finally jibes back. “You and Cosimo and the other old-timers, like that Professor Mangel, might have wanted to diddle around tracing magical, mystical schools of history, but we were always a cadre of dreamers and schemers. I happen to think the schemers had the right idea all along. Looks as if Cosimo was more on the schemer side than anyone thought, and maybe the Phantom Mage was too.”

“You are not going back to that old notion that he was Max Kinsella?” Carmen asks.

“Kinsella vanished about the time the Mage crashed, did he not?”

“Yeah, but that was a pattern with him,” Herald points out. “Nothing new.”

“Maybe the reason was new, Hal.”

“That is crazy, Czarina. The Mystifying Max lost his Goliath gig. He may have pretended his contract just expired, but so have all our contracts expired as our venues dried up here in Vegas. Siegfried and Roy were retired by tragedy. Cirque du Soleil kicked the pants out of magic acts, face it. Dumb as the Phantom Mage’s act was, at least he was in the bungee-jumping, costume-wearing vanguard. We’re—” he snaps a flat disk on the mantel into the magnificence of a classic magician’s “topper”—“old hat.”

It is enough to pull a tear out of an aged duct. Not mine, mind you.

“Lance Burton just resigned for several more years at the Monte Carlo,” Hal notes.

“But not thee and me,” Carmen says. “Oh, poor Cosimo. Who’d want the old man dead? And why?”

“We are a threat,” Czarina intones in a dire alto voice almost as spooky as the strangers’ masks.

“So we had hoped,” Hal replies. “I think the Synth was just another Vegas scam. Something to keep us busy and hoping for a second coming, like the millennium nuts. Only we’re magic nuts.”

“You believe the Synth’s House of Ophiuchus was a delusion? It has killed four people so far,” Carmen points out, “maybe five now, including our colleague. The cloak beneath his dead body was spread in the celestial shape.”

“Ophiuchus is a forgotten constellation, Carmen,” Czarina says. “I do not think I can believe in the stars any longer. Unless it was a meteor like the Phantom Mage. He certainly put stars in your eyes.”

“A pose,” Carmen says haughtily. “I am not so easily impressed.”

“There was that intimate parting note from Max Kinsella,” Herald smirks, “before the Phantom Mage fell to his death. Maybe he was leaving you in both personas and you cut his bungee cord. A woman scorned …”

“Silly accusations!” Carmen objects to Herald’s jibes with a shrug and a dramatic spin to the hidden door. “This has not been a productive assembly, except for those foreign Synth members showing up. I wonder what they really want from us. We would be better off going to ground separately, or assuredly we will be pestered whenever we meet here until those interlopers leave Las Vegas. I am not going to accept any masked individual who knows how to breach our club rooms as a Synth member.”

“You did accept Max Kinsella and the Phantom Mage as just that,” Czarina singsongs to Carmen’s departing back.

I leap aside as the woman’s knee nudges the door’s pressure device and she vanishes into the dark beyond.

So I am left with two grumbling Synthettes and Midnight Louise.

Wait! Where is Midnight Louise?

The room is dim, and our kind is adept at the magic of blending into the background so we are not noticed, but even I have not noticed Louise for too long. You would think I would relish a vacation from her constant demands, and of course I do … but not when I do not know her whereabouts after we have dropped in on a sinister cabal of magicians.

Has she been kitnapped to play some moth-eaten top hat’s up-popping bunny rabbit? What a comedown for a born predator.

While I worry, I stir like a vagrant draft along the floor, brushing pant legs and robe hems of the remaining two Synth members. Miss Midnight Louise is not hiding out under anything human or inanimate in the room.

What a puzzle. What a worry.

Did not master magician Mr. Max Kinsella disappear from this very place only a couple months ago? Are not Miss Louise and myself the only investigators who have kept a weather eye on these shady characters? Should I stay to investigate this obvious hotbed of past and future villainy, or rush off and return to the Crystal Phoenix to assist my Miss Temple, who has her hands full with an awkward murder related to this very place and present company and does not even know either one exists?

And what of my missing … uh, partner? Surely, the scrappy little thing can take care of herself for once without me. To hear her tell it: Surely, Daddy-o dude. Chill.

Still, having the whole long-lost family now reunited on the streets of Las Vegas puts me in a pickle. I am only one individual. I cannot protect everybody at once!

Everybody at once … That reminds me of an old Las Vegas legend needing resurrection. One for all and all for one. The Rat Pack is dead; long live its successor—the Cat Pack.

A Ghost of a Clue

Temple sat in her Miata outside the coroner’s facility, inhaling the smell of sun-warmed leather to erase any rubbery, plastic, formaldehyde or decaying odors that might have clung to her clothes. She still didn’t understand how the significant others of morgue workers ever got used to what had to come home with the job.

One odor she couldn’t escape: this case reeked of Jersey Joe Jackson and his silver-dollar hoards hidden in the desert around the Joshua Tree Hotel he founded, which desert had become a sprawling city. From the macabre skeletal remnants exposed on the bottom of Lake Mead to the chubby, sad, clownlike, overdressed corpse inside the abandoned underground vault, it all came down to a Las Vegas legend of crime—Jersey Joe Jackson and his silver empire.

Temple decided that communing with a ghost was impractical. What she needed was witnesses.

She revved the Miata and squirted out of the morgue’s parking lot onto Pinto Lane and then Charleston Avenue, buzzing by vintage-clothing stores as if they were in the city dump. The Blue Mermaid motel whizzed by on her left. Down the street stood its inspiration, the Blue Angel. Temple had heard that the graceful female neon figures atop their respective motels were inspired by Disney’s Blue Fairy from the classic animated feature Pinocchio. And she knew that a woman designed the Blue Angel, Betty Willis, who also came up with the iconic and still-standing “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign that “said” Las Vegas all over the world. Go, Betty!

Temple never saw the “Virgin Mary blue”–attired mermaid or angel figure without thinking of Matt. He’d first sensitized her to the religious significance of that particular hue of blue, which Temple realized echoed the shade of a Tiffany’s jewelry box, of all things. Temple had a sudden inspiration. Her wedding attendants would wear VM blue! That ought to please Matt’s Chicago Polish-Catholic relatives. Her Unitarian and Lutheran relatives would never guess a thing.

Wait! Who would be her attendants? Matron of Honor, Aunt Kit Carlson Fontana, of course. Bridesmaids? She didn’t have a sister or many female friends close enough to pay for a VM-blue gown and an airfare to Chicago or Minneapolis.