Cat In An Alien X-Ray

Max smiled to hear that. He knew Rafi was getting what he wanted, quality time with his kid. And, because of that smart parental compromise, Max was getting a mellowed-out Molina. She’d actually given him a beer when he arrived.

“So what can a man with no memory tell a homicide lieutenant?” he asked, back to business.

“What are you getting from those two cold case deaths? Casino robbery interrupted?”

“Probably.”

“Does it seem … like the mob?”

“The mob?” Max repeated. “Vegas mobsters are only in museums now, aren’t they?”

“Are they?”

“You’re the one who’s supposed to know, Lieutenant.”

“Call me Molina.”

Max donned an impressed expression. “Sure thing. I could even shorten it to ‘Mole.’”

She did not look amused. “Maybe,” she said, “someone is trying to fake a fresh mob presence on the Strip. We did have one nasty murder that recalled the old-time mob methods of threats, torture, and death.”

“Anybody I know the victim?” Max asked carefully.

“You know about him. That scumbag named Clifford Effinger. He was bound to the prow of the sinking Treasure Island boat attraction and drowned.”

Max found his most disinterested look. “Yes, but it sounds a little too bloodless and histrionic for the mob.”

“Agreed. But it was a message to somebody.”

“Why do you say ‘fake’ mob presence?” Max asked.

“This department and the FBI cleared the mob off the Strip and out of town in the early ’80s.”

“For real?”

“For real. Listen. You should contact Frank Bucek.”

“Frank Bucek?”

“Yeah, the ex-priest FBI guy.” When Max’s face remained blank, she realized she’d entered a memory-free zone and explained further. “He was an instructor at Matt’s seminary. He comes to town now and again.”

“Ex-priests seem to find interesting new occupations.”

“They have a lot to offer—intelligence, diligence, discipline, knowledge of human psychology.”

“From what I remember of grade school, the parish priests and nuns were pretty good cops, now that you mention it.”

“You remember that far back still?” she wondered.

“The oldest memories are the last to go.”

Max let his mind drift back to summer twilights in a grassy climate and ball games in the street, then snow and cold and hockey, the prick of ice skate blades slung over his shoulder through his down-quilted jacket. Sean’s ears scarlet under his stocking cap. They’d reddened when he was in Northern Ireland, drinking beer with him at pubs, two underage young guys behaving foolishly but harmlessly. Sean waving him off. Max felt the small soft hand in his, the girl bewitching and ripe and as easy to acquire as that illegal-in-the-U.S. Brit version of beer. Smiling, flirting, pulling him away from Sean, the beer, the pub to slake other thirsts at a private place she knew, for him to become a man in Ireland.…

Then the memory exploded.

“Whoa.” Molina caught the beer bottle before it crashed from his numb fingers to the coffee table top in front of them. “Brain crash?”

“Memory flash.”

“Not a good one.”

He nodded. “Mixed reviews, good and bad.” He placed the one-third-full bottle as carefully on the tabletop as he would if it were made of blown glass. “I just remembered I don’t drink beer if I can help it. Your hospitality has overwhelmed me, Lieutenant.”

“Me Molina. You Kinsella.” She picked up the bottle and left the room.

Max threaded his fingers, suddenly icy, together. This was a hell of a place to have a guilt attack, right in front of a homicide lieutenant.

A lowball glass with an inch and a half of amber liquid descended to the coffee table in front of him.

“It’s not the prime brand you keep at home,” she warned him, “but you need it.”

He did. He took a stinging gulp. “My legs are almost normal.”

“But not your head, yet.”

“Head and heart.”

“Regrets?”

He looked up. Her eyes were nonaccusing, and as blue as the Morning Glory Pool at Yellowstone. Memory, he thought, might hide in the depths of such eyes, eyes so like Kathleen O’Connor’s.

“Regrets? Do you mean about a certain engaged couple? No. Only that I’m the cause of a lot of the grief that people I’ve known have faced.”

“I hate to puncture your cozy, self-hating cocoon of ego and guilt, but you are not the cause. You are the mere pretext. The cause is this highly damaged and damaging psychopath you and your cousin had the bad luck to encounter.”

“So I’ll chase another will-o’-the-wisp. If I have a surviving psychopath, maybe Las Vegas is still haunted by vestiges of the mob, some greedy and retired old don who still wants to squeeze filthy lucre out of the trillion-dollar city.”

Molina sighed and sipped. “Vegas has indeed had an explosion of entrepreneurial interest in the mob,” she said. “There’s the forty-two million dollars of official civic museum in the same civil courts building that held Senate hearings to bust the mob in the ’50s. Now the Mob Attraction Las Vegas at the Tropicana is vying with the underground Chunnel of Crime that links the separate venues of the Crystal Phoenix and Gangsters.”