Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

Faster the cars went, twining and soaring in the tunnel, passing scenes of glittering festivity, until finally there was only the intimate glimpse of a private suite, the decor harking back to the 1940s, a silver-haired ghost of a dirt-poor miner moving through the scene like a holographic host at a Halloween party.

Jersey Joe Jackson’s faint image went to the prow of the train of cars, Tinker Bell as figurehead, leading them into the darkness and the future like a headlight.

Walls flashed by, dark and stony, lit by veins of unimagined richness. Subterranean minerals gleamed like phosphorescent fish schooling in some dry sea bed long deserted by a polar wave of warming.

Temple blinked. For an instant Jersey Joe’s ghostly figure took on iconic form, white and gleaming…Elvis!

No, another illusion. Another dip into the collective unconscious. They were hurtling toward the light at the end of the tunnel, and it was solid, warm, and bright.

Daylight.

The cars rocked to a standstill. They had stopped in the Crystal Palace, a glass-domed tropical garden flooded with brightness. Fluorescent flamingos moved among the green leaves. Huge tropical flower faces sang in holographic harmony, inviting the admiration of an invisible Alice. A massive neon caterpillar rippled with rainbow segments.

Everyone struggled out of their seat belts and the cars, blinking, the scenes viewed in the darkened tunnels still imprinting their retinas.

Ralph smoothed out his suit coat, pleasantly surprised. “It was not as tumultuous as I had thought.”

“But it was fun?” Temple was anxious to be reassured.

“An experience,” he said, patting his inside coat pockets delicately until reassured as to the integrity of the contents of both pockets.

Temple tried to imagine hunting for a wayward Beretta in those dark tunnels and was glad this was just a fictional scenario.

People, buzzing as contentedly as honey-fed bees, fanned into the artificial garden the performance artist Domingo had wrought.

It was a garden of sound as well as sight, hushed songs from vintage radios, hushed soothing voices.

Temple ignored all the fascinating constructions, moving, blinking, changing color, changing voices, looking for one specific landmark.

“What are you hunting for?” Ralph asked.

“I don’t know. A plaque, I suppose.”

“Like on a public fountain?”

“Right,” she said. “Some acknowledgment…He’d probably build it into the overall theme. Nothing obvious.”

“Nothing obvious is ever worth hunting,” Ralph noted with lofty Fontana-brother certainty.

Temple stopped dead. “That’s rather profound.”

“I’m sorry. The ride upset my stomach.”

“Maybe I’m too short to see it. That’s always a problem.”

The problem was solved in an instant. Ralph bent and lifted Temple up, his hands fixed at her waist.

So. This is what it felt like to be tall. She gazed into the elephant-ear plants, read the hidden neon messages that flashed off and on like shy Rorschach blots. Domingo had said. He had promised to acknowledge Matt with this exhibit. How? Where?

It was a mystery.

A challenge.

Something necessary to solve.

“There!”

Ralph carried her where she pointed.

No one gawked. This was Las Vegas. One expected the unexpected.

He set her gently down by a lurid gaggle of overgrown neon kiwi birds.

“How did Domingo know?” Temple muttered.

When a world-famous conceptual artist decides to do something in Las Vegas, there are no holds barred. The entire project, a coup for the Crystal Phoenix, was courtesy of Domingo’s high regard for Matt Devine. Temple might have cleared him of murder, but Matt in his role of hotline-counselor had cured him of a midlife sexual addiction that was threatening to ruin his professional and personal future.

Behind the kiwis (so prominent in a more recent murder environment) stood the sinister figure of the Wicked Witch of the West holding a flamingo pink neon sign.

“Surrender Dorothy” it read in cursive script, with an added line beneath: “to Mr. Midnight.”

Signed: “Domingo.”

Really, Temple thought. Most…ambiguous.

And her without a pair of ruby red slippers to her name.

Temple pulled into the Circle Ritz parking lot, feeling in the mood for a brass band, but no such luck. It was deserted except for the landlady’s inherited silver VW Bug, millennium model.

Temple pulled in right next to it. Take that, Elvismobile!

For a moment she wondered again why Matt Devine had traded this sleek if funky little car upholstered in blue-suede-shoe cloth for Electra’s groady old pink Probe. Which he’d immediately painted an uninspiring shade of white. Of course, all shades of white were uninspiring on any car but a Stutz-Bearcat convertible to Temple.

She sat there in her snazzy red convertible, contemplating Matt’s depressingly modest outlook on life. If it was quiet, unassuming, and dull, he was all for it. Perhaps that was why he’d never really fallen for her.

It had been a close call, though, interrupted by Max’s sudden return from the missing-in-action lists just when she was beginning to accept that her live-in lover was gone for good. What if Max hadn’t come back? Would she and Matt be sharing the whitewashed Probe now? Or a red Miata? At five-ten, Matt would probably fit in the Miata like Goldilocks in baby bear’s bed: just right.

Temple glanced at the empty passenger seat beside her. Ghosts always rode with a single woman. Maybe some women wouldn’t have taken Max back after he’d vanished for almost a year with no notice. But he was a magician. Vanishing was a professional hazard. And he had left to save her from drawing the attention of the bad guys on his trail. A noble act, really. Besides, they had been monogamous long enough and enough in love to flirt with a real commitment: marriage someday. You had to remain true to your school, and Temple’s alma mater was monogamy in a bed-hopping age. Max had remained true the whole time he was gone, too. Mutual fidelity wasn’t something you threw away.

Temple fluffed her road-whipped hair into a semblance of order in the rearview mirror, which reflected a lot empty of all the working tenants’ cars, including her reliable old Storm.

Too bad you couldn’t keep old cars like you did old pets: till death did you part, and a little box of rust at the end for yourétagère. Then she thought of Max and his rotating stable of “cold” cars, courtesy of his international-operative friends. Temple didn’t know what he’d be driving from one day to the next, and they were all perfectly serviceable, perfectly forgettable vehicles. That was the point.

Temple patted the leather passenger seat beside her, hot in the sun. Maybe that’s why she had made such an extravagant statement with this car. Maybe she wanted to shout that she didn’t need to live the kind of self-denying life Matt seemed married to, or have to follow the kind of enforced low-profile pattern that Max’s undercover work had made his lifestyle if he wanted to keep having a life.

Something tweedled, and Temple jumped. Every new car had its own literal bells and whistles that told you to take the key out of the ignition, or put your seat belt on, or to turn off your headlights.

But this signal was just from the cell phone in the tote bag on the passenger seat. She patted it down expertly, looking for concealed communications devices, and finally came up with her phone.

“Yes?” she asked after the fourth ring, basking in the open air, staring up at clear blue sky of spring.

“I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time,” the voice said.

“Only on a most unusual day,” Temple caroled back. She was in a good mood and would not be denied.