Cat in an Alphabet Endgame: A Midnight Louie Mystery (The Midnight Louie Mysteries Book 28) Read online

  MA BARKER

  My long-lost mama who gave me a last tummy-lick and prodded my rear out of our humble abode next to the Bellagio Dumpsters. (Even high-end hotels need down-to-earth garbage control.) I elected to continue on my own, though Ma now runs the toughest feline street gang in Vegas. She is not pretty, but she is pretty effective. I have never quite banished a quiver at the memory of a four shiv-tip disciplinary slap-down from Mommy Dearest.

  So that is how things stand today, even more full of danger, angst, and criminal pursuits. However, things are seldom what they seem, and almost never that way in Las Vegas. So any surprising developments do not surprise me. Everything in Sin City is always up for grabs 24/7—guilt, innocence, money, power, love, loss, death, and significant others.

  I comfort myself that my ordeals may soon end and I can pull the covers up over my thick blanket of pages and catch some beauty sleep for a decade or two. But wait…

  Like Las Vegas, the City That Never Sleeps, Midnight Louie, private eye, also has a sobriquet: the Kitty That Never Sleeps.

  With this crew, who could?

  1

  Five-Alarm Fire Power

  The onrushing yodel of a police car siren cut through Temple’s dreams like a hot knife through custard pudding. Instead of fading, like a nightmare, the nagging alternating yowls frayed and snapped her nerves.

  She was on her feet by the bed, hands to ears, watching her peaceful arched white ceiling become rinsed by lurid forms of red and blue as if as awash in patriotic stingrays.

  The red LED lights on her bedside clock read 1:09 a.m. Matt wouldn’t be off the air until 2 a.m. She was on her own. At least no intruder had broken into her unit, not the case ten days ago.

  Her sleep T-shirt was short, her feet were bare and she needed to get outside to see what was happening.

  Even as another siren came bowling toward the usually grave-silent Circle Ritz apartment and condominium building, she saw Midnight Louie’s black silhouette stretching up to reach and pull down the French doors’ levered handles to the small balcony outside.

  “So that’s how you make your escape,” she muttered, burrowing into the “winter” side of her closet for a velvety micro-fleece jogging suit she slept in on cold desert nights. She’d have awakened an icicle wearing them in her native Minnesota, but in a Las Vegas July they were more of a sweat suit.

  Temple didn’t own a flip-flop—cursed backdrop for hammertoes and other unlovely foot maladies—but she did have a pair of fuzzy skunk slippers, child size. She stuffed her size-five feet in them and opened a door to follow the big black cat, now balancing on the railing, out into warm, noisy night. Below, other owners and tenants were milling, half dressed, around the slice of parking lot and pool visible from her second-floor perch.

  She craned her neck to the balcony above, Matt’s place, but it wasn’t an object of police interest either.

  Time to go down and see what the neighbors knew. Louie had opted to go up, his sharp nails snagging the bark of the single venerable palm tree that overarched the five-story building.

  Skunk slippers don’t climb well, so Temple grabbed her cell phone and unit key and headed for the seventy-year-old elevator. Since the fifties-era Circle Ritz was actually round, she had to trot halfway around the central mechanical core to wait for the car.

  The small lobby was abuzz with people as hastily (if not as absurdly) attired as she. Outside, more of the same awaited her.

  Some words from the murmuring neighbors hung like audible billboards far above the rest. “Burglar… Shot… Three squad cars… Ambulance… Taken away.”

  Obviously the stir centered around the farther part of the building, which overlooked the pool house pavilion. Temple edged through the neighbors, nodding at some she knew. Then she heard someone behind her say, “No, not Max Kinsella. He moved out a couple years ago, but, yeah, he used to be a famous magician…”

  This bit of discussion coincided with her sighting a tall, dark man talking with a police officer who was shaking his head “No”, even as he took notes.

  Yes, it was “No”. Mr. Tall, Dark and Confident was not Temple’s former significant other. The Milan-styled beige summer suit he wore, now also wearing the strafes of red and blue lights that bathed everybody out here, was one of an uncommon but plural Vegas Genus of Gentleman Gangster, a Fontana brother.

  How somebody as squat and chubby as Macho Maria Fontana had ten nephews as sleek and politely formidable as the Berettas they carried under their thirteen-hundred-dollar suit coats, Temple would never know. And only two of them married yet, the youngest and the eldest.

  If she ever had time to write a blockbuster novel, the lives, loves, and deeds of Clan Fontana was a natural subject.

  Identifying individual Fontana brothers was an art form, even for Temple, who worked for the white sheep of the family. Married Nicky Fontana owned the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino and carried an impeccably honest reputation. Of the current bachelor Fontana crew, one wore a Roman glass ring. One an earring.

  “Officer,” probably Ernesto was saying, “it is obviously an instance of self-defense.”

  “Well, Mr. Fontana, then you can obviously hire a lawyer to prove that.”

  Ernesto was under arrest? Perish the thought that the gelato-pale, Italian summer-weight wool suit should pass a night in the slammer.

  “Maybe, Officer…” Temple butted in. Being young and petite, no one listened to her unless she took action. “You might want to notify Lieutenant Molina about this incident.”

  The uniformed policeman wasn’t Fontana-tall, but he could certainly look down on her. “Who voted you old enough to vote?”

  “My driver’s license.” She was going to tell him right out that homicide Lt. C.R. Molina was currently seeing Julio Fontana. Or so it seemed. It was hard to tell what was what with the deadpan lady lieutenant.

  “The lieutenant is off this shift,” the officer said. “Besides, it’s all over. The vic is in an ambulance heading to the ER and the shooter is going in for questioning.” He nodded to the squad car and someone with red-white-and-blue hair in rollers was peering out the backseat window.

  “That’s our landlady!” Temple said. “Our elderly landlady.”

  “So they tell me.” The officer nodded at the crowd of tenants who’d followed her to the scene.

  “What is she charged with?”

  “None of your business, Miss. Read about it in the paper tomorrow. Or you can inquire at headquarters in the morning. Or wake up Lieutenant Molina if you want to risk losing an inch or two of height, which it doesn’t look like you can spare. Hey, Dan, let’s get rolling.”

  As he hopped into the squad car’s passenger seat the headache band lights went off. Electra Lark was a passing flash of plain white hair and a paper-white face in the back window as the vehicle slowly pulled away from the frowning crowd. Murmurs of dismay ebbed into departing shuffles.

  “Don’t worry,” Ernesto told Temple. “I passed her some legal advice before they swept her away.”

  “Legal advice?”

  “Say nothing until the Fontana Family lawyer gets her out in the morning. She’s only being held for questioning. So far.”

  “Questioning for what?”

  Ernesto shrugged a well-padded shoulder. Whether it was the fine tailoring or a gun holster or just awesome muscle, Temple didn’t know. Now that she was an official fiancée she chose not to speculate further.

  “My dear lady,” Ernesto said. “The dude trundled away in the ambulance was a common burglar. Miss Electra found him in her penthouse quarters. What would you do? She approached the alarming sounds with her trusty semiautomatic and took a shot in the dark. Well, several. He fell out of the French doors to the balcony and had the ill luck to fall even farther over the railing to the ground.”

  Ernesto led her to a crushed landscape of Hedgehog, Prickly Pear and hooked spine Cat Claw cactus.

  “Ouch. No bed of roses. Five stories, and he’s alive?
”

  “So far.”

  “I can’t believe Electra shot at him more than once,” Temple said.

  “You are not an older lady who lives alone.”

  “I’m thinking any jury, including grand ones, would be sympathetic to that factor.”

  “Sympathetic, yes indeed. However.” Ernesto folded his slender hands prayerfully. “In Miss Electra’s case she has already been that targeted ‘person of interest’ in a previous death. A very recent and intimate previous death. Police procedure is not always precise, but they can hardly fail to notice that. Once may be understandable. Twice might look excessive.”

  “So, what really happened here?”

  “I’m inclined to believe that even the police don’t know yet. That’s when they get their most official and clam up.”

  Temple nodded glumly.

  “I’m also inclined to believe that this was no ordinary second-story man, given your own recent home invasion also. If you want my opinion, you had better assemble what allies of whatever ilk you have to stop more ‘senseless’ assaults that may in reality be quite specific.”

  Temple narrowed her eyes. How much did Fontana, Inc. know about the amassed IRA donations gathered for years internationally, that were rumored to be so valuable and hidden somewhere in Vegas?

  “Rest assured, Miss Temple,” Ernesto said. “We at Gangsters hotel-casino and vehicle rental service will always be available to help in any small, or large, amusing way.”

  “Thank you, Ernesto,” she answered as formally. “Rest assured, we appreciate your skill and finesse in certain areas and will always be grateful.”

  A rustle in the palm fronds high above shook the papery spikes like a small tornado.

  Ernesto looked up. “All your allies of whatever ilk.”

  “I totally agree.”

  2

  Three-Cat Night

  From the faint, first siren call of the police cruisers, I knew that my role was not to remain on the ground among the powerless gawkers. I eyed the limp victim being lifted onto a gurney for a rough ride in an ambulance that may finish him off for good and immediately hit the Palm Tree Trail up to the penthouse balcony from whence he had come.

  I regret to say my Miss Temple is as bloodthirsty as any one of these eight-to-eighty-year-old onlookers treated to a crime scene in their midst. Besides, she has the able support of a Fontana brother who is far too fastidious to allow any random blood drop to decorate his lapel. He will restrain her from giving too many pieces of her mind to the local police, given her worry about Miss Electra Lark’s brush with a soon-to-be-dead guy.

  I am not a sentimentalist, though, and wonder if our free-spirited landlady has flipped her lid. Not that she wears hats. She prefers to use her snow-white hair as a canvas for bright temporary colors. I fear that I have seen a few white Persian cats and poodle dogs so styled, and it is the height of silliness, but at least Miss Electra has free will in the matter.

  Now she has no freedom at all. I did not exert all my efforts to save her so recently to give up now. Even if I must encounter her “psychic” Birman cat, Karma, here in the penthouse. Karma is by nature reclusive and I expect she is hiding by the back wall under the couch after the hullabaloo of a burglar turned falling missive.

  I complete a leap from a limber palm frond onto the balcony without the sound of even a pad landing. (I am the strong, silent type.)

  A flurry of feline boxing punches, shivs out, and a panther-level battle cry from another cat greet my subtle approach.

  Meeowwwgrlllphtttt!

  Could my would-be daughter, Miss Midnight Louise, be up here, cussing me out? She can be snarky, and considers me a deadbeat dad, but I have allowed her to help out in my Midnight Investigations, Inc. business. Also, I outweigh her by twelve pounds so it is impossible that she could give me a shellacking.

  Backackackdowwwn-invading-vermin is spat at me in fluent alley cat. Louise may be a lot of things, but she rarely swears.

  “Karma,” I plead, while blocking a continuous sharp-clawed pummeling with my front mitts. “Tell me you are not channeling a performing Big Cat black leopard from a Strip magic show.”

  I am convinced my foe cannot be the wimpy Karma, a fluffy buff-colored lady with pretensions to calm Eastern mysticism, unless she has shape-shifted. We contenders here are both a part of the night’s darkness, black of coat and born to be bad to the bone if we have to.

  The frequent blows pause. “Grasshopper?” a raw voice questions.

  I am too aghast to answer, but back off, dodging a finishing swat.

  “Ma?” My voice trembles, but not from emotion. I am still mad about those double-paw smackdowns she gave us kits when we did not obey, even if she was right.

  “You are already short of wind,” Ma is muttering, as I see her pink tongue in the moonlight, wiping off a bloody claw. “Too many gourmet meals from a can.”

  “What is with the head wounds?” I counter. “I could have been an innocent bystander.”

  “A crime has been committed here. There are no innocent bystanders.”

  I search for a comeback while licking my own wound. Single. She got me only once.

  Another voice interrupts. “I am the innocent bystander.”

  We both turn to the open balcony door. Framed by moon-silvered white-painted wood, Karma sits as calm as a show cat on a photographer’s background. Her Serene Highness has tucked her white-gloved paws under her soft, long coat like a monk’s hands into his sleeves. Not a hair on her pale head is mussed, and by night her heavenly blue eyes are mere sapphire rings around her enlarged black pupils.

  I am struck dumb.

  But, then, Karma would say I had been born that way.

  The Sacred Cat of Burma seems to radiate light, and in that glow I see Ma Barker clearly, her scruffy, raccoon-ravaged, rusty-black best coat, her half-mast left eye and moth-eaten ear edges, her scarred muzzle.

  That is what one gets for nine years of running the biggest, toughest feral cat clowder in Vegas. She is one awesome dame.

  “Sorry, Ma,” I mutter under my tongue as I smooth a ruffled jet-black front spat. “I did not expect to see you here. Must be major clowder business to bring you from the police substation.”

  Karma emits an almost inaudible spurt of purring, always happy to hear me eat crow. Or that abominable health food, Free-to-Be Feline, Miss Temple lavishes on me. Luckily, the clowder loves the stuff and I see they get all they can eat. I am quite the philanthropist when it suits me.

  “This is most convenient, Louie,” Ma says, settling into her bony haunches like a granny into a rocking chair.

  I am sure that she would like grandkits from my superior line of her younger genes, but Miss Midnight Louise, if she is my daughter, is “fixed” and proud of it. And I suffered a certain neutering procedure, not usual, that disabled my ability to reproduce, but left all my working parts intact, known among people as a vasectomy. (For graphic details on how I managed to get what I call “a license to thrill” for life, you will have to consult an earlier volume of my adventures, Cat in a Flamingo Fedora. Yes, there was a flamingo-pink fedora involved that I momentarily was forced to wear. Every freedom has its price.)

  “So why are you here at the Circle Ritz penthouse, Ma?” I inquire casually, working a torn sheath off a rear toenail.

  “Karma called.”

  “She has a cell phone? You do too?”

  “Do not be silly. You know she is the best psychic hotline in Las Vegas.”

  I turn a suspicious green peeper on Miss Serenity. “So what is the message, sweetheart?” I ask in my best Bogart.

  “It is all too intuitive and revolving around celestial spheres for the likes of you, Louie,” Karma says. “That is why I called on your more sensitive mother.”

  Ma Barker? Sensitive? She would have half of my second-most valuable member if I called her that.

  Ma modestly tucks her chin into her ratty neck ruff. “I do think I am sensitive to certain vibe
s, such as danger and evil-doing.”

  Well, sure, that is her job. One does not need an advanced degree in Psych 101 to know that.

  She leaps to the balcony rail and down the palm tree to the parking lot with practiced ease as I follow.

  I escort Ma to the oleander bushes that ring the Circle Ritz parking lot. “I agree that something wicked this way comes.”

  “What is ‘this way comes’? Did I not teach you proper grammar? It is ‘comes this way’.”

  “Seriously, Ma. What brings you away from the clowder? Do you want to extend your territory, is that it?”

  She sits and massages her muzzle with a forepaw. “My territory has been enlarged, Louie. I now see the big picture.”

  “How big.”

  Her head gestures up to the starry Nevada night sky, which is not very starry because all the lights on the Strip outshine real star power.

  “I have been…up there. Higher than high. Higher than a security fence.”

  “Up…to the top of the Stratosphere Hotel?”

  I did introduce Ma to stairs recently when I had to smuggle her into the rooftop suite of the Crystal Phoenix to consult on a case. That was only twelve stories but one humungous giant step for her.

  Think about it. She has been a feral urban cat all her life in a desert city. Why would she have to climb service stairs in a hotel, or even four or five steps, when all those acres had been spreading outward since before Howard Hughes bought them? And she would avoid the hurly burly of the Strip except for ground-level Dumpsters for quick raids.

  “So, Ma. You dreamed you went to the stars.” She is getting loopy in her old age.

  “Not the stars, son! I would never breathe a word to the gang, but the aliens got me. Their hovering craft landed and sat there camouflaged until I was enticed inside by Free-to-be Feline over Sardines Almandine, and I was whisked up into their alien mother ship.”

  “No!” I say, quite sincerely.

  “I am sorry, son, but it was your introducing us to that succulent Free-to-Be-Feline that enslaved us.”