Cat In A White Tie And Tails

“Hmm,” Hal said. “So our heartless seductress became an acolyte of a mild-mannered professor and our ridiculed medium would never besmirch her afterlife with a destructive act and, frankly, ladies, I’m too old and honest with myself to care to kill anyone. So who did the crimes?”

Temple recognized her inevitable cue. A dramatic pause she had to fill. Now she really knew more than they did.

“Have you all ever considered … Cosimo Sparks?” she asked.

“Who’s out there? Who is it?”

Three hands saluted the owners’ eyebrows as they glared past the moving lights into the darkness to find her. Ramona let the hand shading her eyes tilt down to cover them. Hal and put his hands at the sides of his face. Czarina gasped and clapped a hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. They resembled the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil monkeys gone catatonic.

Temple stood.

As everyone stared speechlessly during a long, flabbergasted pause, something thumped onto the bar top. One Midnight Louie, taking a stroll through the Stoli and Beefeater and Blue Curaçao bottles.

A second unmistakable thump. Another black cat landed atop the barstool next to Czarina.

Thump. A black cat beside Hal bracketed the trio.

“Don’t freak,” Ramona told her confreres. “It’s just those rabid cats that invaded our clubrooms when the two clowns in Darth Vader masks threatened us. These kitties clawed those invaders to shreds. And the woman lurking in the dark over there is Restroom Girl.”

Czarina lifted glasses on a beaded chain invisible against her patterned caftan to her shocked face. “Yes, it is. She claimed she’d gotten lost on the way to the restrooms.”

Hal pushed off the barstool and limped forward two steps. “What do you mean have we ever considered Cosimo Sparks? He was our natural leader, totally committed to making a statement. He knew we were … caretakers of those mysterious parties’ hidden loot. He wouldn’t have betrayed them, because when they got ready to do their biggest Vegas heist in history, we’d bring off the biggest magical illusion in Vegas history too. In person. Not like David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty vanish on TV, but right in front of people. That’s magic the old-fashioned way.”

“Look,” Temple said. “You all thought each other might have done it. You all deny it rather convincingly. That leaves … Cosimo Sparks as the murderer. These dead people were all ‘recruits’ for your secret Synth-esis of magic and mysticism. All except Gandolph. He wouldn’t ‘recruit.’ They all knew too much once they refused to join.”

“Gloria Fuentes was with us,” Hal said.

“She was also highly religious and her confessor thought she suffered from too many scruples as well as superstitions,” Temple revealed. “Her scruples may have won out in the end. She might have backed out. Such people tend to have loose lips. And Professor Mangel … his enthusiasm for magic would have stopped at anything dicey. He had credibility. If he became alarmed at your backing a dangerous heist that could hurt people, he’d out you live on Channel Five, believe it.”

“I wasn’t so obvious about what the Synth actually was with him.” Ramona’s curled lip distorted her beautiful face. “I know how to be subtle. Jeff would not have been a threat, whether he went along with me … us. Or not.”

“Could Cosimo afford to believe that?” Temple asked.

Ramona frowned. Her prideful expression crumbled. “I did complain to Cosimo about Jeff being ‘too Goody Two-shoes’ for us. Oh, God. If Cosimo killed him because of what I said—”

Hal was adamant. “Cosimo died protecting whatever had been stored in that empty safe!”

“Maybe so,” Temple said, “but he may have done it for his own fanatical purposes.”

She paused, then quoted an unforgettable line from some Synth-related papers Max had found hidden long ago at Garry’s house and she had reviewed lately. “‘The aberrant brother shall be declared anathema. The price upon his head shall be death.’”

The three jerked backwards as if snake-bit.

“How’d you get that?” Hal demanded. “That’s from the sacred illuminated Book of the Synth, from the induction ceremonies. Only sworn members see the liturgy, and only once.”

“That does read like a license to kill,” she said, “and some sects consider all nonmembers are born to damnation, so offing a few who were a threat wouldn’t be a big leap.”

“The Synth had its ancient, revered ceremonies,” Czarina said, “but it was a philosophy, not a religion. Nobody took that ‘aberrant brother’ and ‘price upon his head’ seriously.”