Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (12 page)

She and Ralph ended up shuffling into place on a seating bank of four, buckling safety belts across their laps. Ralph frowned to see the fluid drape of his suitcoat puckering like seersucker under the belt’s firm clasp.

Temple’s belt didn’t seem to tighten enough. Maybe she would fly out on the first turn. Eight-year-olds, she told herself. Surely she wasn’t smaller than the average eight-year-old.

The rich, whiskey-and-tobacco-salted voice rolling out from the concealed speakers described Jersey Joe’s colorful Las Vegas history: paydirt-hitting prospector, early Las Vegas developer, founder of the Joshua Tree Hotel from whose ashes the Crystal Phoenix had risen in exquisite glory only years before, busted millionaire living on in a 1940s suite at the abandoned Joshua Tree until life abandoned him and only his ghost remained….

The train of cars jerked into motion, then wrenched their passengers right and left as it careened through the serpentine tunnels under caged bare bulbs of light.

Light. And dark. Swinging, swaying light. And dark.

People shrieked, the uninhibited, pleasurable shrieks of kid-again wonderment, with an edge of adult unease that knew Something Could Go Wrong.

Ralph put an arm around Temple to hold her down. Her small frame was rattling around in her seat despite the belt. She screeched, exhilarated and a little nervous. Having primal fun, but part of the thrill was her reservations. What if she should slip out of her belt…if the ride should run off the rails, if —

Water dripped from jeweled stalactites onto the rising pinnacles of stalagmites as their ore carrier rattled through a wonderland of an underground kingdom seemingly decorated by Jack Frost Inc.

Kids were oohing and aahing between squeals, making Temple grin like a proud department store Christmas window decorator.

The passing stone walls flashed veins of silver and gold and other rich subterranean mineral finds, geodes as lavish as any showgirl’s crystal-and-sequined costume, nature’s naked glittering chorus line, all purveying actual mineral wonders. Genuine silicon silicone, so to speak.

The walls grew gauzy, revealing moving pictures from Jersey Joe’s rise and fall of a life: the Joshua Tree growing out of the desert floor like a manmade geode, all angular stucco and early Southwest style ziggurats. Small planes descending on the spare desert landing strip like tribal thunderbirds, then cars coming, from L.A., many of them Thunderbirds. Then night fell and the lights in the Joshua Tree winked like stars, darkening one by one.

The riders grew hushed. The next scene showed the sun scorching the once-vibrant building, Las Vegas landmarks exploding around it like fireworks, the Joshua Tree a lifeless hulk amidst a neon jungle.

Then…a dark tunnel, like an umbilical passage. The cars sped into more darkness. The moving walls showed the Joshua Tree imploding, exploding, its stucco walls breaking open like the dull surface of a rock containing a geode…and the faceted, glassine elegance of the Crystal Phoenix was revealed at its center like the heart of a chocolate Easter egg’s raspberry-ice nougat.

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 mid-life 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.

“This is Molina and all my days are unusual, so don’t flatter yourself. I need to talk to you.”

“You are.”

“In person, where I can see you and you don’t sound half-looped.”

“I am not looped. I am happy. It is a natural human state in parts of Las Vegas you seldom see, Lieutenant.”

“That’s good to know. Can you come see my side of town?”

“Yeah. Now?”

“As good a time as any.”

“For you, maybe.” Then Temple pictured zipping up to the police department building in this jaunty set of wheels. What’d Molina drive, an ancient Volvo? “Okay, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Thanks,” Molina’s brusque voice said before the connection died.

Temple stared at her cell phone as if it had grown Dumbo ears. Molina gave thanks? To her?

Must be a trap.

Temple resolved to be on her guard despite a New Car High and welcomed piloting her new baby on a mission to Homicide Central. Might as well break it in early.

C. R. Molina’s office was depressingly functional, but Temple had been here before. She sat on the molded plastic visitor’s chair, her feet barely grazing the floor despite platform wedgies that added four inches to her five-feet-zero.

Across from her, Molina was the same stark, brunette figure that sometimes stalked Temple’s nightmares: Mother Superior incarnate, a female authority figure who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Instead of feeling chirpy about her flashy new car, Temple suddenly felt like a kid with a new red fire engine that all the adults were too busy with Real Life to look at.

This insight reminded Temple that she had often been too busy lately to look at Real Life, which was the only kind of life — and death — Molina dealt with daily.

Molina was shunting some paperwork aside. The statistics of death in Las Vegas. She reminded Temple of a school principal calling a student to her office. Except school principals were seldom nervous, and today the Rock of Gibraltar of the LVMPD was. Slightly.

She sat back, a nunlike figure in her dark navy blazer and denim shirt. “This is off the record.”

“Which way?
I’m
not supposed to tell anyone, or you won’t tell anyone?”

“You’ve never listened to me before, but I wish you’d prick up one tiny Toto ear and listen now.”

Temple flushed at being compared to a dog. A small dog. A small cute film dog. “Which Wicked Witch are you warning me about now?”

“It’s Wicked Wizard.”

“Max? Don’t you know by now that I don’t listen to propaganda?”

“I do. Which is why I’m pretty stupid for even trying to open your eyes about him. You should know that he is suspected of some pretty serious stuff. That there’s good reason to think he’s committed a felony.”

Temple’s sun-warmed skin felt the sudden frost of an inner chill. “Felony.”

“Grand theft, burglary, robbery, kidnapping,” Molina noted tone lessly. “And murder.”

“You’re not back on that old sweet song again? Max is not a murderer. If he’d done anything even remotely wrong since he came back last fall, you’d have had him arrested by now.”

“Easier said than done with the Mystifying Max. Magicians have a criminal edge second to none.”

“Ex-magician.”

“Too bad he’s not an ex-boyfriend.”

“Maybe he is. You don’t know anything about us, really.”

“I know more than you do about Max Kinsella.”