Cat in a neon Nightmare.

Carole Nelson Douglas.

Previously in Midnight Louie's.

Lives and Times . .

Heavens to Mehitabel, folks! After the turn of events last time out, so many of my human a.s.sociates have their fat in the fire that I am not sure even an ace feline PI is chef enough to extract all their skins from the conflagration in one piece.

As a serial killerfinder in a multivolume mystery series (not to mention a primo mouthpiece), it behooves me to update my readers old and new on past crimes and present tensions.

None can deny that the Las Vegas crime scene is a pretty busy place, and I have been treading these mean neon streets for fifteen books now. When I call myself an "alpha-cat," some think I am merely a.s.serting my natural feline male dominance, but no. I merely reference the fact that since I debuted in Catnap and p.u.s.s.yfoot, I then commenced to a t.i.tle sequence that is as sweet and simple as B to Z.

That is when I begin my alphabet, with the B in Cat on a Blue Monday. From then on, the color word in the t.i.tle is in alphabetical order up to the current volume, Cat in a Neon Nightmare.

Since I a.s.sociate with a multifarious and nefarious crew of human beings, and since Las Vegas is littered with guide books as well as bodies, I wish to provide a rundown of the local landmarks on my particular map of the world. A cast of characters, so to speak: To wit, my lovely roommate and high-heel devotee, freelance PR ace Miss TEMPLE BARR, who has reunited with her only love .. .

... the once missing-in-action magician MR. MAX KINSELLA, who has good reason for invisibility: after his cousin SEAN died in a bomb attack during a post-high-school jaunt to Ireland, he went into undercover counterterrorism work with his mentor, GANDOLPH THE GREAT, but Gandolph was murdered the previous Halloween while unmasking phony psychics at a seance.

Meanwhile Mr. Max is sought by another dame, Las Vegas homicide LIEUTENANT C. R. MOLINA, mother of preteen MARIAN . . . and the good friend of Miss Temple's recent good friend, MR. MATT DEVINE, a radio talk-show shrink who not long ago was a Roman Catholic priest and has tracked down his abusive stepfather, MR. CLIFF EFFINGER. . . .

Speaking of unhappy pasts, Lieutenant Carmen Molina is not thrilled that her former flame, MR. RAFI NADIR, the unsuspecting father of Mariah, is in Las Vegas taking on shady muscle jobs after blowing his career on the LAPD . . .

. . . or that Mr. Max Kinsella is hunting Rafi himself because the lieutenant blackmailed him into tailing her ex. While so engaged, Mr. Max's attempted rescue of a pathetic young stripper soon found him joining Mr. Rafi Nadir on Molina's prime suspect list, although both are off the hook now, on that case at least.

In the meantime, quite literally, Mr. Matt has drawn a stalker, the local girl that young Max and his cousin Sean boyishly competed for in that long-ago Ireland .. .

. . . one MISS KATHLEEN O'CONNOR, for years an IRA operative who seduced rich men for guns and roses for the cause. She is deservedly christened by Miss Temple as Kitty the Cutter . . . and-finding Mr. Max impossible to trace-has settled for hara.s.sing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine .. .

. . . while he tries to recover from the crush he developed on Miss Temple, his neighbor at the Circle Ritz condominiums, while Mr. Max was missing in action, by not very boldly seeking new women, all of whom are now in danger from said Kitty the Cutter.

In fact, on the advice of counsel, i.e., AMBROSIA, Mr. Matt's talk-show producer, and none other then the aforesaid Lt. Molina, he has tried to disarm Miss Kitty's pathological interest in his s.e.xual state by losing his virginity with a call girl least likely to be the object of K the Cutter's retaliation. Except that hours after their a.s.signation at the Goliath Hotel, said call girl turns up deader than an ice-cold deck of Bicycle playing cards.

All this human s.e.x and violence makes me glad I have a simpler social life, revolving around a quest for union with ..

.. THE DIVINE Yvette, a shaded silver Persian beauty I filmed some cat food commercials with before being wrongfully named in a paternity suit by her air-head actress mistress, MISS SAVANNAH ASHLEIGH. . . .

And just trying to get along with my unacknowledged daughter . . .

. . . MISS MIDNIGHT LOUISE, who has insinuated herself into my cases until I was forced to set up a shop with her as Midnight, Inc. Investigations, and who has also nosed herself into my long-running duel with .. .

. . . the evil Siamese a.s.sa.s.sin HYACINTH, first met as the onstage a.s.sistant to the mysterious lady magician .. .

.. SHANGRI-LA, who made off with Miss Temple's semi-engagement ring from Mr. Max during an onstage trick and who has not been seen since except in sinister glimpses .. .

. . . just like THE SYNTH, an ancient cabal of magicians that may take contemporary credit for the ambiguous death of Mr. Max's mentor in magic, Gandolph the Great, and GG's former lady a.s.sistant, Miss GLORIA FUENTES, as well as the more recent death of the CLOAKED CONJUROR'S a.s.sistant, not to mention a professor of the metaphysical killed in cultlike surroundings among such strange and forgotten zodiac symbols as Ophiuchus, PROF. JEFFERSON MANGEL.

Well, there you have it, the usual human stew, all mixed up and at odds with each other and within themselves. Obviously, it is up to me to solve all their mysteries and nail a few crooks along the way. 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?

Chapter 1.

Fallen Woman.

She looked like a fashion model photographed by Helmut Newton for some slick, slightly sick ad in a fashion magazine.

Or like a b.u.t.terfly pinned on a mosaic of fire opal.

Or like just another dead woman in the City that Never Sleeps-West Coast edition.

Lieutenant C. R. Molina gazed down at the gossamer straps attached to the extreme curve of a high-heeled, paper-thin sole dangling from the dead woman's bare big toe on one foot. Gucci or St. Laurent, probably. Talk about an upscale toe-tag. Grizzly Bahr would get a kick out of hearing that when he got the body.

Medical examiners got a kick out of things most people would consider grotesque.

"How are we gonna get the body off that?" came a disgusted male voice from behind her.

Alfonso had joined her in gazing at a victim ten feet below who was seemingly suspended on the intricate galaxy of neon that formed a ceiling for the hotel's vast gaming area.

The chatter, chimes, and clinks of Las Vegas games of chance drifted upward in the vast central atrium above the false neon ceiling, like sound effects from a faceless computer universe.

"There must be a clear Lexan ceiling above the neon," Molina guessed. "That's the only thing strong enough to resist extreme impact. Otherwise she'd have crashed right through the neon tubing down to the casino floor."

"Bullet-proof plastic. That's a security application."

"That's what the hotel needed. One kid on an upper floor dropping a BB could fatally bean a customer."

"Makes sense," Alfonso conceded. "I'll check to make sure."

"Any idea how far she fell, or how long she's been there?"

Alfonso shook his head like a doleful ba.s.set hound. He was one of those sloppy cops: fifty or sixty pounds overweight, baggy suit, mussed hair, puffy face, sleepy eyes set in a bezel of perpetually bruised skin. The package made him a very successful homicide detective. As with Peter Falk's Colombo, everybody always underestimated Alfonso.

Not Molina, who devoutly wished that someone other than the crack team of Alfonso and Barrett had been "up" for this case. Abie, they were called, as in Abie's Irish Rose. A.B.

"We'll have to treat it like a wilderness retrieval," she said. "Lower some techs down to record the scene, then bring the body up in a litter and go over it on solid ground."

Alfonso nodded and winced at the same time. "Depending on how far she fell, that could be like loading liquid s.h.i.t into a beach pail."

Molina only winced internally. Cops and coroners had dirty jobs and found harsh words to describe them. Normally, the distancing techniques of pros at scenes of crimeand dissolution didn't bother her, but normally she didn' feel personally responsible for the dead body under dis cussion.

What was the subject's name? Probably a lavish phony but they'd soon pry the Plain Jane moniker from beneath the facade. They almost always did, and the corpse almos always proved to be someone's not-so-darling little girl al grown up wrong. This one looked like a solid-gold sue cess, even after the rough hands of death. She had been ; Vanity Fair woman: long, elegant, impossibly thin and im possibly busty-Molina would bet on implants-dressed to kill. Or to be killed.

"The staff know her?" she asked Alfonso, although she suspected the answer.

"Too well," he said, acting the usual morose when he wasn't being downright lugubrious. "One of the hotel's top call girls. High-rollers all the way. Or at least fat money rolls."

Molina looked up, past the building's gaudy neon rimmed ribs to the soaring true ceiling maybe twenty floor, above. "So she was a penthouse suite sweetie."

He nodded. "I hate these cases: JFP. Jumped, fell, o: pushed. d.a.m.n hard to prove, any which way but dead."

"Yeah." Molina's nerves unclenched a little. Bad as the situation was, Alfonso was right: d.a.m.n hard to prove wha she privately called an ASH: accident, suicide, or homi cide. "So you haven't pinned her to a room number yet?' she asked.

"Barrett's still on it, questioning staff. Trouble is, the lady was such a regular that they didn't even bother to notice which rooms, which night."

"She looks like she could have made money enough doing something legit," Molina mused. She was no fashion maven, but she recognized the expensive flair that clothe( the twisted body. Why not model? Or act? Why hook?

Who could answer why women who could ride in limos on their looks so often ankled over to the shady side o the street? They might have thought the money was better but breaking out in legitimate modeling paid off ma.s.sively for the few dozen who made it. Maybe an underlying self-hatred? Lately Molina was getting a bit too comfy with that feeling, but she wasn't about to turn tricks to deal with it.

Alfonso nodded, still gazing soulfully above them with his hound-dog eyes. "That Barrett! You'd think he was in the cast of Rescue 51."

Just then, as if summoned, Alfonso's partner, thin and bony, leaned over the sixth-floor bal.u.s.trade, directing a tech team that was descending from a wire stretched across the atrium's architectural chasm.

"Randolph Mantooth, where are you?" Molina muttered, watching their herky-jerky progress.

"Your kid watch those old reruns too?" Alfonso asked. "Religiously."

"Kids today! Growing up on yesterday."

She nodded, too intent on observing the shaky operation to comment. She had no time to watch TV, or reruns of long-cold TV shows. Being twelve-year-old Mariah's mother kept her current, but not much.

"Just how old is the Goliath?" she asked suddenly. "You'd think they'd know not to design interior atriums in a town where people lose their shirts and their self-respect every day and night. This is no place for Hyatt-style hotels enamored of atriums."

Alfonso nodded, smiling fondly. He was a native. He loved every manifestation of the city's phenomenal entertainment explosion along the Strip, like a research scientist enamored of cancer growth.

"Yeah," he said, "they didn't worry as much about divers in the old days. Maybe what, gosh, twenty years ago? The exterior balcony doors at this hotel didn't used to be sealed shut, but they are now."

"So this was the only way to fall," Molina said. "Inside straight, so to speak. Over the internal atrium edge. Or to be pushed. Who spotted her?"

"Some ma and pa tourist couple on fourteen, waiting foran elevator and ambling to the edge to be brave and look over. Took her for part of the design at first."

Molina had to agree. Well-dressed supine women always looked decorative, or s.e.xy, or decadent. Or dead. The functions seemed interchangeable. She'd seen a lot of dead and never had found it decorative or s.e.xy or even glamourously decadent. So shoot her.

They were shooting the woman below now. From every angle, videotape and still camera. She was a featured player on Dead TV and soon she'd be a star on Grizzly Bahr's stainless-steel autopsy table while he droned the dreary statistics of her internal organs and external injuries into a microphone for an audience of one. Himself.

"Mine eyes dazzle," Alfonso murmured, his hangdog countenance even droopier as they both blinked at the flashes illuminating the dead woman like heat lightning.

"Huh?" Molina stared at him as if he were a stranger.

He jerked her a weak grin. " 'She died young.' That's the rest of the line. Webster. Elizabethan playwright. Grim guy."

"Webster? I thought he was the dictionary guy. Elizabethan? You?"

"You can't help what sticks in your head in this job," he said, shrugging. "There are a lot of pretty women in Las Vegas who die, and we gotta be there. 'Pretty Woman.' Roy Orbison. Greatest singer since Elvis."

Elvis.

That was another subject Molina couldn't stand, not since becoming involved with the Circle Ritz gang.

Who would think that ditsy, sixty-plus landlady Electra Lark could have a.s.sembled so many usual suspects under the fifties-vintage roof of the round condo-c.u.m-apartment building she called the Circle Ritz? Not only former resident magician Max Kinsella, Mr. Now-you-see-him, Nowyou-don't, was possibly involved in a murder, or three, but now, as of last night, so was Matt Devine, Mr. Altar-Boy Straight Arrow. Not to mention the object of their joint affections, Miss Temple Barr, who confused being a public relations freelancer with imitations of Nancy Drew! Molina just wished TEMPLE BARB, P.R., as her business card read, would decide which of the two apparently shady Circle Ritz men was on her personal Most Wanted list.

And now Molina herself was involved with the whole crew both professionally, and, on unhappy occasion, personally.

Involved. The word chilled her as many much harsher ones couldn't. Speaking of which, there was a nasty task she couldn't put off any longer.

She took a last long look at the dead woman. This was as good as this Jane Doe would ever look before she was dissected like a frog princess, unless someone sprung for a casket funeral and they sutured and shined her up to surface beauty again, but Molina doubted anyone would bother.

Molina's eyes dazzled all right, but in Las Vegas that was just part of the eternal illusion for suckers to sop up and she wasn't buying anything on face value.

The woman lying on the neon net below, though, had indeed died young, and Molina was horribly, terribly afraid that it was her fault.

Chapter 2.

Adam's Apple Matt Devine dreamed of falling.

It wasn't pleasant.

He woke up with a jerk, already sitting up. He was groggy, sandy-mouthed from rich food and too much wine and talk, and had to wonder where he'd been for the first time in his life.

Remembering made him cradle his aching head in his hands.

Va.s.sar. An Eastern Protestant madonna. A call girl. Did that mean she was like a dog? You called and she came? Yes. That's how demeaning the whole thing was. Buzz for a body. Pay for a person.

He wondered if he was still a little drunk.

Not that he'd been drunk last night ... just high? High on anxiety.

He'd tried to forestall one woman with another and had ended up feeling both had cheated him somehow.

Trying to embrace the occasion of sin had become not ... sin, just self-disgust.

The phone rang.