Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

Lieutenant Carmen Regina 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 with the LAPD...
    ... or that Mr. Max Kinsella is aware of Rafi and his past relationship to hers truly. She had hoped to nail one man or the other as the Stripper Killer, but Miss Temple prevented that by attracting the attention of the real perp.
    In the meantime, Mr. Matt drew 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, deservedly christened by Miss Temple as Kitty the Cutter. Finding Mr. Max impossible to trace, she settled for harassing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine...
    ... who is still trying to recover from the crush he developed on Miss Temple, his neighbor at the Circle Ritz condominiums, while Mr. Max was missing in action. He did that by not very boldly seeking new women, all of whom were 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 than the aforesaid Lieutenant Molina, he tried to disarm Miss Kitty’s pathological interest in his sexual 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 assignation at the Goliath Hotel, said call girl turned up deader than an ice-cold deck of Bicycle playing cards. But there are thirty-some million potential victims in this old town, if you include the constant come and go of tourists, and everything is up for grabs in Las Vegas 24/7: guilt, innocence, money, power, love, loss, death, and significant others.
    All this human sex and violence makes me glad I have a simpler social life, my prime goal being reunion with...
    ... THE DIVINE YVETTE, the stunning shaded silver Persian belonging to fading B-film star Miss Savannah Ashleigh and once my partner in some cat food commercials, and such a simple hope as trying to get along with my self-appointed daughter...
    ... MISS MIDNIGHT LOUISE, who insinuated herself into my cases until I was forced to set up shop with her as Midnight Inc. Investigations, and who has also nosed herself into my long-running duel with...
    ... the evil Siamese assassin HYACINTH, first met as the onstage assistant to the mysterious lady magician...
    ... SHANGRI-LA, who made off with Miss Temple’s semiengagement ring from Mr. Max during an onstage trick and has not been seen since, except in sinister glimpses...
    ... just like THE SYNTH, an ancient cabal of magicians that may deserve contemporary credit for the ambiguous death of Mr. Max’s mentor in magic, Gan-dolph the Great.
    Well, there you have it, the usual human stew, all mixed up and at odds with one another 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?



Hello Kitty

    Homicide Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s desk hosted two very different images.
    One was a glossy ll-by-17-inch poster of a Barbie-doll-cute teen girl tricked out in industrial-strength am ounts of hot pink.
    The other was the same image, cut into jagged pieces that had been grafted onto photographed body parts of an actual Barbie doll.
    The phrase “Teen Idol” on the first poster had morphed into ‘Twisted Sister,” with a welter of blood-red spatters, on the second one.
    “Sick,” Molina said, unnecessarily.
    They all stood gazing down on the twisted twin posters, neither of which was exactly wholesome. One was merely Extreme Fashion. The other had been refashioned into something freakishly violent.
    “Being the mother of a newly teenaged daughter, finding this stuff strewn around a shopping mall parking lot makes me shudder,” Molina said. “The slashed poster reminds me that some things are scarier than adolescent hormones.”
    “Mariah’s thirteen already?” Detective Morrie Alch asked, surprised. He was comfortably into his mid-fifties and his lone daughter was grown, gone, and a mother herself.
    How Molina envied him.
    “Just turned,” she said. “A month ago. I’m already considering a barbed-wire perimeter around the house. This is so sick.”
    “The Teen Idol concept,” Detective