Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

Max didn’t answer that one. What an appalling past. Garry was right. TMI—too much information. Obviously, he needed to be spoon-fed the ugly truths. He strolled toward the Ford car, limping more than he liked after the flight and landing in the chilly Irish dawn. So an Irishman hankered for sunshine and heat? He seemed to. Or his legs did.

Max eyed the sedan from hood to taillights. “You expect me to drive this thing?”

“Yes, and on the left. It is at least an automatic.”

“Even worse!”

“How do you know that?”

Food for thought. “That I prefer to drive stick shift? I don’t know; isn’t that my key problem? I know the general past. I know what I like. And don’t like. I just don’t know my own damn past. I can’t recall what I did and where I was and with whom. Or whom I hated and whom I loved.”

“We know you had a good high-school English teacher.”

“Yeah?”

“Whom was the proper construction there, and you used it like some men swear. Frequently and fervently, without thinking about it. Relax, Max. Go through the motions and let your old self shine through bit by bit. I’m here. I’m your safety net.”

“Why?”

“We’re partners. Or were, for your formative young-adult years. I was all the family you had, for a long time.”

“After I killed three men. Justly.”

“After three men died. Justly.”

“I remember a popular song. ‘At Seventeen.’ It was about an unhappy, awkward girl. What kind of song is there for a guy ‘at seventeen’?”

“An Irish ballad. Which is why we’re here.”

“All the Irish ballads I recall were bloody and sad.”

“Exactly. But you’re here, mostly in one piece, and too puzzled to be sad. Things could be worse.”

Max opened the right driver’s door to the Ford Mondeo and eyed the seating and dashboard layout with resignation.

“I drive, old man. On the left, with automatic. You think that will help my memory return?”

“That depends upon where we drive and what we learn when we get there.”

“Why the hell don’t you just tell me?”

“You’re a dubious man, Max. You only believe what you see.”

“You mean I’m a magician.”

Garry nodded.

“I believe that now. I suppose it’s a start.”

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single—”

“Boring rent-a-car.” Max ended the truism. “Hop in and put on your seat belt. I have a feeling this is going to be a bumpy ride.”

Broke New World

Temple pulled her red Miata convertible under the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino’s shaded entry.

The relentless Las Vegas sun was hard on leather seats and even harder on slightly freckled natural redheads. That was why Temple wore sunscreen daily. Today, she’d added a straw visor with a built-in white cotton headscarf, circa the mid-1940s, tied under her chin.

When vintage-clothing-store-shopper Temple married fiancé Matt Devine, finding “something old” would be a snap.

“Going to be long, Miss Barr?” a parking valet attired in a snazzy bellboy uniform asked.

“Conference with Mr. and Mrs. Big,” she said. “Let the Miata cool its wheels in the ramp for a couple of hours, Dave.”

“Right,” he said, seeing her out of the car and himself in, and enjoying it. “Cool hot wheels.”

Temple was the hotel’s sole public-relations rep. That got her a permanent parking space and speedy ins and outs. As a freelance publicist, she was always dashing from one client to another, especially if something went wrong, which could be as minor as a short order of folding chairs, or even occasionally something major in the homicide line.

PR was getting tough now. Newspapers were sinking like the real London Bridge in the Arizona desert. Web sites weren’t taking up the slack. Vegas’s last best bet on megamillion new construction projects was still mostly stalled in midair. Tourism was down, along with optimism. Temple was very curious to see what had amped up the ambitions of Nicky Fontana, Crystal Phoenix owner, and his manager-wife, Van von Rhine.

In minutes she was sitting in the Strip-overlooking executive suite, being told.

“The past,” Nicky said, pacing around his wife’s ultramodern office.

Like all Fontana brothers—and he had a slew of them—he was tall, dark, and handsome, but Nicky was fierier than his laid-back bros. “The future is dim, the present is grim. Everybody’s talking Depression, although it’s only a recession. Why not cash in on what made Vegas in the first place? Our notorious past.”

“Retro is Metro?” Temple ventured, eyeing the cool blonde who was his wife.

As usual, Van had a crisp summary of her husband’s overheated rhetoric. “Nicky rebuilt this hotel, Las Vegas’s first boutique hostelry, from the still-standing corpse of the old Joshua Tree Hotel, Jersey Joe Jackson’s rival to Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo. When he talks, I listen. It’s the least you can do too.”

Nicky paused behind his wife’s white leather desk chair, put his palm prints on her glass desktop, and nibbled a strand loose from her perfectly smooth French twist.

“You didn’t always believe in my founder dreams, Vanilla baby.”