Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (2 page)

the Divine Yvette, a shaded silver Persian beauty I filmed some catfood commercials with before being wrongfully named in a paternity suit by her air-head film-star mistress Miss Savannah Ashleigh…

and a quest for peace from my unacknowledged daughter, Miss Midnight Louise, who has been insinuating herself into my cases, along with the professional drug-and bomb-sniffing Maltese dog, Mr. Nose E….

and a running battle of wits with the evil Siamese Hyacinth, first met as the onstage assistant to the mysterious lady magician…

Shangri-La, who made off with Miss Temple’s semiengagement ring from Mr. Max during an onstage trick and who has not been seen since except in sinister glimpses…

just like the Synth, an ancient cabal of magicians that may take contemporary credit for the ambiguous death of Mr. Max’s mentor in magic, Gandolph the Great, and that of GG’s former lady assistant as well as the Cloaked Conjuror’s assistant’s more recent demise at TitaniCon science fiction convention, not to mention a professor of the metaphysical found dead among strange symbols, Mr. Jefferson Mangel.

Well, there you have it. The usual human stew, all mixed up and at odds with each other and within themselves. Obviously, it is up to me to solve all their mysteries and nail a few crooks along the way. Like Las Vegas, the City That Never Sleeps, Midnight Louie, private eye, also has a sobriquet: the Kitty That Never Sleeps.

With this crew, who could?

Serial Sunday

The drawing seemed like child’s play.

Done by a preschool child.

A preschool child lacking any art talent.

Temple frowned at her own handiwork.

She had never had much drawing skill, but one would think a grown woman could do better than this.

One would think, for that matter, that a participant in an alleged ritual murder could do better than this.

The thought unleashed a montage of memory-pictures. Actual crime-scene photos flared in her mind’s eye again like psychic flashcards wielded by a female homicide lieutenant who went by the name of C. R. Molina. All homicide lieutenants needed a sadistic streak, Temple mused. You didn’t provoke betraying reactions by walking softly and carrying a sharp nail file. Not that Molina had fingernails long enough to file.

Temple shut her eyes against the vivid memories of a death scene and pictured the site when she had last seen Jeff Mangel alive in it: a bland classroom in a bland, boxy University of Nevada at Las Vegas building. Jeff had converted the uninspiring space into a small exhibition, mostly of posters framed in freestanding ranks like pages in a gigantic book.

With the painted paper eyes of Houdini, Blackstone, Copperfield, and Gandolph the Great looking on, the professor enchanted by magic had met a brutal death amid the paraphernalia of kinky sex. The weapon had been a custom-designed ritual blade.

Underneath it all lay the five crude lines drawn in blood on the floor, that had boxed in Jeff’s body like a symbolic fence.

Those bloody lines had to mean something, perhaps both more and less than the crude attempts to invoke cults and sexual extremes had.

Temple had started this Sunday afternoon homework project because she’d promised Max that she’d try to find out what the strange shape represented, if anything. Thanks to her exposure to a cadre of mediums and psychics the previous Halloween, he now considered her an expert on the mantic arts.

Public relations people had to be quick studies, and since Temple had moved from TV journalism to fine arts public relations to the far less fine art of freelance PR in Las Vegas, she had become even better at being a jill of all trades. But an artist she was not.

She stared at the five rough lines linked into the askew shape of a house drawn by a three-year-old. Or…a rather clumsy bell.

Her sketch had been jotted down on the back of a flimsy restaurant receipt she’d found in her tote bag when Max had broken into the crime scene to show her the bizarre props littering it. The sketch would have fit on the palm of her hand.

In reality, in life, in death…it had been drawn on a vinyl tile floor in great sweeping strokes, large enough to encompass a dead body.

Had it been drawn before, or after, Jefferson Mangel had bled and breathed his last on the floor of his small exhibit room of magic show posters and paraphernalia?

Temple shivered a little, though it was a lovely spring afternoon. Las Vegas springs and falls could be numbered by days. This day was one where the bountiful sunlight poured through the French doors into her home office until the room seemed made of bottled radiance. Even shadows were lazy, innocent sketches on the warm, inadvertent canvas of her wood parquet floor. The room contained nothing sinister, except her thoughts…

…and the drawing from a killing ground…

…and something sinuous and black that brushed the sun-drenched floor as if keeping slow-motion time.

“Louie?” She stood and leaned over the width of the desktop, an oak slab with a tight grain streaked like honey blond hair.

Only by leaning to the point of teetering could a woman as short as Temple see the owner of the serpentine tail, a huge black cat sunning himself in the hottest, purest pool of sunlight in the room.

“I’ll thank you not to waggle that tail around. It looks too much like a desert snake that crawled in.”

The cat’s green eyes, slitted almost shut, angled open while its ears flattened. Midnight Louie did not take kindly to criticism. At twenty-plus pounds of muscular alley cat, he didn’t have to.

His balefully still image sank like a black sun behind the desk’s horizon line as Temple sat down again. She could hear the grumpy metronome of an insulted tail thumping the parquet.

“This
is
a
work
room,” she pointed out to no one in particular.

And maybe she was a little grumpy herself this morning, because her only roommate was a cat.

She pulled the gigantic mug that held hazelnut-flavored nonfat creamer diluted with gourmet coffee close enough to lift and sipped, slitting her eyes at the drawing again.

It had to mean something.

She needed to enlarge it, think in bigger terms.

Temple picked up the ruler and pencil and duplicated the figure at several times its original size on an eleven-by-seventeen sheet of blank paper.

The peaked “roof” was obviously the top, but why was the bottom foundation line slightly angled? An accident of freehand drawing, or intentional? And none of the four paired lines exactly matched, which was what gave the image its childishly askew look.

“It doesn’t have to be a house,” she muttered as she set down her implements and took up her coffee mug again. She would never admit that she was talking to Louie. “It could be a window. A Gothic window with a peaked arch. Like a church!”

Now that image was interesting. It brought to mind another murder of another person connected to the world of magic and magicians, as Professor Mangel had been: Gloria Fuentes, the late Great Gandolph’s now late ex-magician’s assistant.

“
Arghgghgh!
” Temple ran her red-enameled fingernails into her naturally wavy, coppery hair.

The source of her frustration wasn’t just Professor Mangel’s death, circumscribed by a crude outline, it was a lot of unsolved murders over the past year or more, all tangential to her life and the lives of those she knew.

She pulled a fresh sheet of large paper over the puzzling image and grabbed the ruler as if she intended to admonish someone with it: herself.

But her cri de coeur had disturbed the native.

Midnight Louie leaped with surprising grace atop the desk. He sniffed the contents of her mug until his dashing white whiskers twitched, then lay down on the edges of all her papers and began bathing his right forefoot.

“There have been too many unsolved deaths in this town for too long,” she told him.

Louie took this declaration stoically, and switched to licking his other forefoot.

He may have been thinking, but Temple thought not.
She
did not tend to lick her toes when thinking, although she had been known to wet her lips.

At least she was drawing straight lines now. The ruler moved down the page inch by inch as she underlined it with pencil, dark and emphatic.

Louie stretched out a damp paw to follow her progress. Temple wasn’t sure whether he was playing or putting his own stamp of approval on the form taking shape on the paper.

She might not be able to draw a decent stick figure in a game of Hangman, but she could trace straight lines to infinity.

Temple swooped the page around in a forty-five-degree turn and began drawing another series of lines crossways to the first.

“This is a table, Louie,” she explained as the cat continued giving encouraging pats — or playful bats (with Louie it was so hard to tell when he was just being a cat, or was being just a cat) — as he supervised her progress down the page.

“There!” Temple spun the page around again. “I am going to list every mysterious death that I know of for the past year. Seeing it laid out in black and white ought to make something clear.”

Temple leaned back to study her handiwork. It seemed that the last year had not showered pennies from heaven on Las Vegas casinos, but dead bodies. Parking lots came in second as a hot crime scene. Magic was a thread linking four of the victims, including the last three.

Louie lashed out a paw and, with what passed for retractable thumb tacks on his forefoot, drew the drawing closer to him. He actually appeared to study the layout for a moment with the usual feline solemnity, but immediately after rolled over on the paper and wiggled luxuriously, creasing wrinkles into Temple’s crisp recto-linear design.

“Off, off, damn…
Spot!
”

Temple’s expletives often displayed her years doing PR for the Tyrone Guthrie repertory theater in Minneapolis.

Louie did not heed Shakespearian admonitions. He didn’t heed admonitions, period. He rolled onto his back, putting his curled limbs into what Temple called the Dead Bug position (well, Louie
was
jet black), the one that cats everywhere from Peekaboo the comic strip cat to Leo the Lion considered the safe-at-home, leave-me-alone position: Home Alone, for short. In other words, meddle with the cat sprawled helplessly on its back at your own peril.