Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

Then … it all opens up again into light, the warm glow of lamps against the darkness, and the whole cast is onstage, in costume, posed for a vignette fit for an Addams family portrait.

He can finally stop running, trying to escape, because he knows and can name each face.

This is where he was led and to where he has to return.

He assumes a confident persona, donning his own costume.

Flames flicker against the soot-blackened walls of a fireplace, but their red and yellow tongues are too regular to be real, and they flash a spark of gas-fed electric blue. Yet their false heat warms the room’s cherrywood paneling and highlights tufted leather couches and Empire satin-and-gilt chairs.

“Czarina Catherina predicted you’d never come back to us, but Carmen always knew you would,” a portly man in white tie and tails says as pompously as the White Rabbit, speaking from his position of power standing alongside the fireplace.

From his tone, Carmen is the handsome Spanish woman in her thirties lounging on one of the black horsehair-upholstered chairs. Her clothes and coloring are a study in black, white, and crimson. The name pricks Max.

Max bows to her acknowledgment, then turns to the other woman present.

This is the usual “medium,” a woman in her fifties or sixties, blowsy and exotic in her own commanding way, wearing a gold lamé turban and caftan, with a name as fussy as she is. Czarina Catherina.

She speaks in a surprisingly deep yet quivery voice. “Carmen said you weren’t dead.”

“You commune with the spirit world,” he answers. “What do they say?”

“Imposter,” Czarina Catherina charges, her voice thick with accusation. “Max Kinsella fled the Neon Nightmare the night the Phantom Mage fell to his death at that very club. Why would a murderer return to the scene of the crime?”

Before he can answer, she adds, “Besides, you don’t at all resemble the Mystifying Max.”

He turns to where she is staring and finds his entry door has become a floor-length mirror.

Dreams will do that: go out of their way to seal off any logical means of escape.

He sees four people behind him, the two women and the formally attired man he suddenly knows for a stage magician who’d worked years ago as Cosimo Sparks. The second man is tall and dark-haired and so familiar-looking. It is Max Kinsella, looking as intense and secretive as the poster for his stage show. His long-retired stage show.

So who is the star of this dream, the man facing him in the mirror?

Max feels a strangling spasm of disbelief.

Sean stands there instead … as he’d never lived to be: tall, broad, and husky, the curly red hair now auburn and spiky with some trendy gel, grinning like a death’s head come back to life.

While Max stands gaping, Carmen slinks up behind him to curl crimson-taloned hands over his shoulders.

“Don’t go so soon,” she croons in an Irish accent. “We’re just starting. Do you like my engagement ring, darling?”

He stares at the huge fiery opal framed in diamonds. He’d given someone a ring like that, but it had been smaller, finer, more tasteful. Exquisite.

“It’s synthetic!” he protests. “It’s not real.”

Next his dream self would be shouting, You’re nothing but a pack of cards!

With that thought, he meets Sean’s hazel eyes in the mirror and watches them darken into expanding pupils, a pair of emotional black holes to suck his sadly split selves into their own heart of darkness.

Silent Partner

“Not Jersey Joe,” Eightball O’Rourke quickly assured Temple. “He could wear a suit and would go so far as to don a black leather bolo tie when business called for it. We found it pretty fancy, but he was all for building something that would last, like Bugsy.”

“Not his goldurn wardrobe,” Wild Blue agreed, picking up the photo of the silver boot-heel stamp.

“Aw, it destroys your faith in humanity all over again,” Pitchblende said mournfully. “Our old pal Boots Benson musta been in on sneakin’ off our illegally obtained lucre and squirreling it away for Jersey Joe. Just another dirty rotten desert rat.”

“Now, maybe not,” Eightball opined, sitting forward on the oversized yardage of couch. “Maybe our restaurant out at Temple Bar was settin’ atop the answer to our busted lives of crime all the time, buried under fathoms of silent Lake Mead water.”

“Our mascot, Three O’Clock, has snagged carp out there,” Spuds Lonnigan said, with a shudder. “That could be the seventieth generation of fish that nibbled on Boots’s bones. How long do carp live, anyway?”

“Longer than we’d think,” Cranky Ferguson answered. “I’m guessing twenty-five to fifty years in places where there ain’t predators, and carp is not a prized game fish unless it’s a real huge one.”

Temple had sat openmouthed during this conversation, but she shut it fast when she realized all her companions were versed in the sport of fishing.

“No,” Eightball agreed, “it’s your largemouth and striped bass, channel catfish, crappie, and bluegill you want at our southern end of Lake Mead. Tourists have fed the shoreline carp to overstuffing for decades. So I agree, several of those suckers could have nibbled on Boots’s sunken chest. Yo, ho, ho.”

“That is so gruesome,” Temple said. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t like sportfishing.”

“Boots is gone,” Eightball told her. “Weren’t pretty, but now we know where, thanks to you.”

“I need to know why,” Temple said.

Eightball shook his head and regarded his pals. “Just like my granddaughter, Jilly, at age six. Why, why, why.” He turned to Temple again. “You and I have done some private-eye work, and we know murder always boils down to motive and method.”

“The method in this case illuminated the motive,” Temple said.

“How so?” Cranky asked.

“It’s such a classic mob ploy,” she explained, “encasing a man’s feet in concrete and throwing him off a pier.”

“Yup.” Wild Blue jumped into the discussion. “That was a big city mob method. They had a lot more water at hand—New York Harbor or Lake Michigan in Chicago.”

“That’s right,” Temple said, getting into the ghoulish groove. “A lake for body dumping was a novelty in the desert. Lake Mead’s artificial. When did it—?”

“Oh, young lady,” Pitchblende said, “the big Depression, of course. Hoover Dam was one of the few things that damn-fool president did to help folks get work. His first reaction was to laugh the whole thing off as poor folks not wanting to work enough. Building that dam backed up the Colorado River, and then you got the lake.”

“Nobody much cared about that big old watering hole in those days,” Spuds said. “Nobody much cared about any of this until Bugsy Siegel tried to sell the area as a resort to Hollywood folk.”

“What I’m getting at,” Temple said, “is that Boots Benson went missing because he’d been murdered in this spectacular, brutal, big-time mob way. I’m thinking his death was mostly meant to be a message.”

“Yeah, but if nobody knew he’d been killed, much less that way, what was the point?” Wild Blue asked.

Temple glanced at the photo of the maker marks on what was left of Boots’s footwear. “Maybe someone got all modern and took photos of Boots’s going-away launch. Maybe someone else was told and shown what happened to Boots.”

“That’s it!” Cranky Ferguson slapped his tobacco pouch down on the coffee table, making them all jump. “That’s why Jersey Joe got so quiet and dodgy with us all about where the train-robbery silver dollars were hidden and what was going on in town and when we could expect to get some of our cut.”