Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Of course, I do not mention that the house mascot at the Oasis is the lovely and lithe Topaz, she of the black velvet gloves and golden eyes. She has already clued me in that the mob is a clear and present danger, not a bunch of rogue magicians. Some might point out that Midnight Louise herself benefits from that sublime coloring, but since she claims to be kin, she is off my wish list for good.

Her loss.

Chapter 41

Sob Sisters

Newsrooms nowadays were quiet and orderly compared to when they filmed All the President’s Men about the Watergate political scandal. Temple sat in the one chair pulled up beside Louise Dietz’s tiny cubicle and scanned the newsroom’s mixture of empty and occupied matching cubicles. No-drama Cinerama. Columnists and feature reporters worked from home nowadays.

Louise Dietz was a poised forty-something blond woman secure enough to let a few silver hairs show through.

“So you’re the PR rep for the Crystal Phoenix Hotel, but you have a tip on the latest CCF profile?” the reporter asked, pulling out a manila file and a narrow reporter’s notebook.

“I used to be a TV reporter,” Temple said, knowing “public relations” people were suspect to print journalists.

“Me, too.” Louise smiled wryly. “Obviously long before your day. I got a bit ripe for on-camera, so I moved into print media just before newspapers started sinking into the Great Recession.”

“Bad timing,” Temple said sympathetically.

“It’s been grim, but I have this job now, and here you are to help me do it. What’s your tip?”

Temple knew you had to give to get, in all areas of life and work. “A weird message showed up on Miss Fuentes’s corpse in the morgue. It never got reported.”

“Really?” Louise was staring down through her reading glasses, pencil poised for a note.

Temple smiled, so glad to see that long-honored notebook and pencil instead of a tablet computer. Since she loved vintage everything, beyond mere clothes, she lamented that everybody was stuck in the same computerized mass-market mode these days. Not that she’d want to break her fingernails on stiff manual typewriter keys.

“You laugh at my ‘stone tablet and chisel.’” Louise noted. “You get to my age, you’ll see your brain works best on what it learned young. I need that hand motion to get my little gray cells churning in think-and-remember mode.”

Remember mode. Maybe handwriting would help Max.… He could transcribe his adventures from the time he came out of his coma in the Swiss clinic. She’d suggest that ASAP. And she’d be first in line to read them.

“You’re smiling,” Louise said. “Is my method so laughable?”

“No, not at all. I’m smiling because I like that idea. I’m not laughing.”

“So how does a PR gal know this inside morgue information?”

“It’s because I’m in PR. There have been … deaths on my watch at events I’m responsible for. Think about it. Almost forty million people a year hit Vegas, or did before the economic downturn. Many of them attend conventions where you can have twenty to eighty thousand people milling around. What are the odds of … unexpected death, given the heat, the excitement, the long hours, the fevered hype, and after-hours overindulgence in food, gambling—”

“And sex,” Louise added. “So you see your job as supervising this giant aquarium of predators and prey.”

“That’s a bit colorful. Let’s say I run into the occasional great white. Mention my name to Coroner Bahr. B-a-h-r. No relation.”

“Makes me reevaluate the nickname ‘flack’ we journalists give those in your profession.” Louise smiled at Temple like a colleague. “So Grizzly Bahr is on your speed-dial too? He’ll just swear me to secrecy on this postmortem message. It’s the only way the cops have a prayer of solving the Fuentes murder.”

“Maybe there are other unsolved, and related, Vegas crimes you could look into.”

“Maybe you could suggest some.” Louise Dietz’s pencil was poised.

“First, I could use more information on Gloria Fuentes’s personal history.”

“Deal,” Louise said. “Not much there. She’d retired from being a magician’s assistant a few years earlier when her longtime boss took his last bow onstage.” Louise flipped through her notebook. “The guy worked as ‘Gandolph the Great.’ I can’t find what became of him.”

Temple glossed past that. “Do you think Gloria wanted to retire or…?”