Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

“Lance Burton just resigned for several more years at the Monte Carlo,” Hal notes.

“But not thee and me,” Carmen says. “Oh, poor Cosimo. Who’d want the old man dead? And why?”

“We are a threat,” Czarina intones in a dire alto voice almost as spooky as the strangers’ masks.

“So we had hoped,” Hal replies. “I think the Synth was just another Vegas scam. Something to keep us busy and hoping for a second coming, like the millennium nuts. Only we’re magic nuts.”

“You believe the Synth’s House of Ophiuchus was a delusion? It has killed four people so far,” Carmen points out, “maybe five now, including our colleague. The cloak beneath his dead body was spread in the celestial shape.”

“Ophiuchus is a forgotten constellation, Carmen,” Czarina says. “I do not think I can believe in the stars any longer. Unless it was a meteor like the Phantom Mage. He certainly put stars in your eyes.”

“A pose,” Carmen says haughtily. “I am not so easily impressed.”

“There was that intimate parting note from Max Kinsella,” Herald smirks, “before the Phantom Mage fell to his death. Maybe he was leaving you in both personas and you cut his bungee cord. A woman scorned …”

“Silly accusations!” Carmen objects to Herald’s jibes with a shrug and a dramatic spin to the hidden door. “This has not been a productive assembly, except for those foreign Synth members showing up. I wonder what they really want from us. We would be better off going to ground separately, or assuredly we will be pestered whenever we meet here until those interlopers leave Las Vegas. I am not going to accept any masked individual who knows how to breach our club rooms as a Synth member.”

“You did accept Max Kinsella and the Phantom Mage as just that,” Czarina singsongs to Carmen’s departing back.

I leap aside as the woman’s knee nudges the door’s pressure device and she vanishes into the dark beyond.

So I am left with two grumbling Synthettes and Midnight Louise.

Wait! Where is Midnight Louise?

The room is dim, and our kind is adept at the magic of blending into the background so we are not noticed, but even I have not noticed Louise for too long. You would think I would relish a vacation from her constant demands, and of course I do … but not when I do not know her whereabouts after we have dropped in on a sinister cabal of magicians.

Has she been kitnapped to play some moth-eaten top hat’s up-popping bunny rabbit? What a comedown for a born predator.

While I worry, I stir like a vagrant draft along the floor, brushing pant legs and robe hems of the remaining two Synth members. Miss Midnight Louise is not hiding out under anything human or inanimate in the room.

What a puzzle. What a worry.

Did not master magician Mr. Max Kinsella disappear from this very place only a couple months ago? Are not Miss Louise and myself the only investigators who have kept a weather eye on these shady characters? Should I stay to investigate this obvious hotbed of past and future villainy, or rush off and return to the Crystal Phoenix to assist my Miss Temple, who has her hands full with an awkward murder related to this very place and present company and does not even know either one exists?

And what of my missing … uh, partner? Surely, the scrappy little thing can take care of herself for once without me. To hear her tell it: Surely, Daddy-o dude. Chill.

Still, having the whole long-lost family now reunited on the streets of Las Vegas puts me in a pickle. I am only one individual. I cannot protect everybody at once!

Everybody at once … That reminds me of an old Las Vegas legend needing resurrection. One for all and all for one. The Rat Pack is dead; long live its successor—the Cat Pack.

A Ghost of a Clue

Temple sat in her Miata outside the coroner’s facility, inhaling the smell of sun-warmed leather to erase any rubbery, plastic, formaldehyde or decaying odors that might have clung to her clothes. She still didn’t understand how the significant others of morgue workers ever got used to what had to come home with the job.

One odor she couldn’t escape: this case reeked of Jersey Joe Jackson and his silver-dollar hoards hidden in the desert around the Joshua Tree Hotel he founded, which desert had become a sprawling city. From the macabre skeletal remnants exposed on the bottom of Lake Mead to the chubby, sad, clownlike, overdressed corpse inside the abandoned underground vault, it all came down to a Las Vegas legend of crime—Jersey Joe Jackson and his silver empire.

Temple decided that communing with a ghost was impractical. What she needed was witnesses.