Cat In A White Tie And Tails

The minute Hal Herald vanished into the crowds on the dance floor, Max turned to the guys on either side of his and Hal’s empty seat. He slapped a hundred-dollar bill in front of both men. “Hold my places for five minutes and you’ll own these pretty pieces of paper permanently when I come back.”

“That’s an ex-shpensive leak, buddy,” one said in serious slur mode.

But when Max slid off his perch, both men were hooking an ankle on the footrests of the empty barstools. Besides, the unfinished drinks were a claim too.

Max threaded through the crowds like a whip snake, elbowing and shouldering a path with just enough force to make people shift without getting territorial.

The men’s room was darker than an Egyptian tomb, all black reflective surfaces, even the urinals. He ducked into a cubicle, lucky the busy clientele had their backs to him and no mirrors on that wall.

Max cruised the Internet on his cell phone and had Hal Herald’s Wikipedia bio in hand. Pushing Medicare. Had a pretty good engagement for a lot of years at the Frontier in the old days. One of his ex-wives had been a successful medium, got some cred from “finding” a dead body for the police, late did an act as Czarina Catherina. Wait! Had shared bills with Gandolph the Great and—bulletin Miss Temple Barr would die for—the recently late Cosimo Sparks.

Herald’s busy biography until the late 1980s confirmed what he saw as “the death of magic.” What else was obvious now, twenty-some years later, was the death of magicians and people associated with them.

Max returned to the “reserved” barstools in plenty of time to convey the two Ben Franklins to the bracketing drinkers, who grabbed them and probably exited to hit the casinos.

Only a couple minutes later, Hal Herald reappeared. He didn’t claim his expensive barstool. “Say, we don’t have to sit here with the going-deaf-slowly crowd. I happen to be one of the owners. We have a private suite upstairs. We make a point of keeping it on the QT. Game?”

About time. Max followed Herald up the same subtle staircase to the same pressure-operated door Temple Barr had described. Oddly, he remembered the next part from his recent dream of being closeted in secret rooms with the Synth. Probably that had been the Phantom Mage’s dream, but that persona was truly dead and gone.

And he needed to convince the people here of that, because this would be Max Kinsella’s big play. Only a real commitment would win him entrée to the circle of vengeful entertainers or clever criminals or just plain crazies who called themselves the Synth.

Chapter 37

The Shadow Nose

My feet and heart are both primed to hop, skip, and jump over to the Oasis Hotel and Casino in the dark of my namesake hour.

Great Bast’s Ghost! When is a dude to get some downtime on his own in this world? When I was not in the bosom of my Miss Temple and Mr. Matt and his family members during the weekend Chicago jaunt, I was in the clutches of the low-end mob boyos and TSA security checkers coming and going.

These are not happy travel memories and involve many personal indignities too indelicate to describe, including derogatory comments about my carriers, especially Miss Krys’s homemade one, which occasioned open hoots of laughter. If I do return to Chicago, I will have to have a nose-to-nose with her.

Then, I come home on Tuesday and Miss Midnight Louise is always hovering somewhere, needing to unburden herself of endless “reports.”

Now, at last, my role as CEO of Midnight Investigations, Inc., and my need for a roam of my own have met. Something fishy is going on at the Oasis, at least in the Lusty Ladies and Laddies ship attraction.