She nodded sympathetically.
“And then I’ll deal with the ‘Days in the Lives of Michael-slash-Max Kinsella’.”
“That’s wonderful! And I’ve made a decision too.”
He waited. Afraid.
“I know where we should be married.”
“Let me see. It’s either religious or civil, either there or here. The Polish cathedral in Chicago where my family are, and you can have a Princess Diana-long train on your wedding dress, or the Crystal Phoenix wedding chapel here in Las Vegas, where you can have a Princess Diana-long train on your wedding dress.”
“You!” She slapped his shoulder in play. “You so understand my need for stature. Close, but wrong! It’s at Our Lady of Guadalupe here in Las Vegas where I can have a Princess-Diana-long train and wear the Midnight Louie Austrian crystal shoes without worrying about them being ripped off during travel.”
“Here? At OLG? A small Catholic Church. You don’t have to.”
“I want to. I think it would make Father Hernandez very happy. And more importantly, I think it would make you very happy.”
“It’s crazy, but genius,” Matt said.
And it was. Both families on uncommon ground, the formal Catholic ceremony satisfying his mother’s conventional dreams, and Temple’s more liberal family loving the sweet ethnic simplicity. OLG, as the church was so inelegantly initialized. Where Temple had accompanied him to her first Mass.
“I hate to crush your diplomatic-level wedding ceremony dreams,” he said, “but you do remember that’s Lieutenant Molina’s parish?”
“So? Let her help with the Flower Committee. I might even let her whistle a happy tune.”
Matt laughed. “That’s an image to bring nightmares.”
“Here we are, talking and making compromises like an old married couple,” she said happily.
“Uh, yeaaah,” he drawled, “I was beginning to think the same thing.” He pulled the slipping nightgown spaghetti strap off her shoulder. “We need to do a lot more living in sin fast if the wedding is looking so logical and so soon.”
So they did something about that.
“You’re a hell of a negotiator, you know that,” Matt said when all had been said and done. “All I have to do to win the princess is to storm black-ice mountain of Max Kinsella’s family past.”
“I’m a public relations expert. Why wouldn’t I be great at private relations too.”
“Oh, you are, baby doll. You really are.”
Reassured, Temple fell asleep with her small but firm fist curled in his, pressed against the middle of his chest above his heart.
Max bloody Kinsella was the least of Matt’s problems. The faces of Effinger, Woody, the soul-patch man with the jackhammer in the junker trunk, Rafi, and even Molina, floated past his closed eyelids like a montage from an old black-and-white film.
Some would take what had happened at the Circle Ritz tonight as another colorful episode in its seventy years of solid Las Vegas history.
He was wondering if it would solve everyone’s problems but his own.
Woody Wetherly and his veiled threats hung over him like the ghost of Cliff Effinger getting his own twisted revenge on him and Temple from beyond the grave.
5
The Wrong Arm of the Law
“So you think you can breeze into headquarters like Miss Temple Barr, P.R., on a tear and get a warm welcome from a homicide lieutenant?”
Matt found his welcome with local law enforcement much cooler and more skeptical than Temple had envisioned.
Lieutenant C. R. Molina was wearing one of her high-summer khaki pantsuits which were the same wrinkle-resistant fabric as her winter navy-blue and black twill pantsuits. Her office at the new headquarters building had fancier modern chairs and computers, but was still the same narrow dimensions.
She leaned her impressive height against the front of her desk, arms folded over her plain blazer and her mannish black loafers on full view. You would never imagine her in blood-scarlet nineteen-forties silk velvet crooning torch songs at the Blue Dahlia nightclub, and, sadly, she hadn’t been taking that Carmen persona out for a bluesy walk for some time.
Matt shrugged mentally.
He wasn’t going to remind the all-business homicide lieutenant of her kinder, gentler side. Seeing Molina about this matter might lead to awkward questions, but Temple felt he was more likely to find out why the Circle Ritz landlady was in custody. She was clearly the homeowner. She’d shot at an intruder already in her fifth-floor penthouse. At night. Alone in her residence. He didn’t see why she’d been taken away for questioning.
Unless they had evidence of a relationship between Electra and the intruder, which was ridiculous.
“All we Circle Ritz residents are understandably worried about last night’s intrusion”, he began.
“I imagine that ‘we’ is principally your fiancée, Miss Temple Barr.”
Matt smiled. “She thought she’d spare you the sight of her inquisitive face.”
“Detectives are surveying residents even now. So, no worry. Her doorbell will soon be ringing and she’ll be able to give her no doubt breathless account quite soon. I thought I would spare her the sight of my inquisitive face.
“And where were you at one a.m. this morning?” Molina pulled her cell phone out of her side pocket and started tapping.
“You know I’m covered, Lieutenant. On the air at WCOO-AM radio, doing my call-in counseling show, The Midnight Hour.”
“And it doesn’t bother you that The Midnight Hour is now actually two hours?”
“When the show became popular they upped the hours, but the title was unique, and syndicated.”
“Hmm,” she muttered at her cell phone, tapping away so fast she might have been Fred Astaire. “I assume the engineer can attest to your presence.”
“Yes, he was there. It’s a live show. Somebody has to program the canned music until six a.m. after I leave at two a.m.”
“And by two thirty you weren’t home yet? The resident Circle Ritz amateur detective didn’t call you the minute the shots were fired?”
Matt hesitated. “Midnight Louie is good, but his claws are murder on cell phone screens.”
“Oh, you kidder,” Molina said in a flat tone. “That was an evasion. Why?”
“Temple did call, but I had my cell phone off.”
“Is that usual?”
“It has to be off during broadcast, of course.”
“But leaving and driving home?”
“I work nights, Lieutenant. Temple doesn’t.”
“The drive would take, what? Almost half an hour. No two twenty-five in the morning ‘welcome home’ surprises? You’re only a floor apart.”
“Are you trying to prove we’re co-habiting, Lieutenant?”
“She’s the nosy one. I’m trying to determine if you have an alibi for the Circle Ritz death.”
“Death? The man has died? Me? Why would I be a suspect?”
“Not so far-fetched. After all, I hear you tossed a man off your fiancée’s balcony recently.”
“He was attacking Temple in her bedroom and she yelled ‘Fire!’”
“Smart of her.”
“By then he’d retreated to the balcony. I jumped down atop him from my balcony. It was a fierce, quick struggle. No one could see well in the dark bedroom or the dark night beyond. He broke my hold and scrambled or fell over the railing. I didn’t ‘toss’ anyone. We reported the incident to the police.”
“Did they find a prowler?”
“I don’t know. Last we saw, and heard, he staggered away to the fringes of the parking lot and encountered the neighborhood feral cat pack. They seemed to do more damage than I did. How does anybody know what happened to him?”
“Your starry-eyed bride-to-be described the scene and your role as a WWF smack-down hero to Mrs. Lark when she arrived to help.”
“You can see why Electra might overreact to another home invasion.”
“Hmm.
The same M.O. at the same place begins to sound like an appointment rather than serial mayhem.”
“Oh, my God. You think I could practically kill someone and deny it?”
“We certainly know you are fit enough, not only to fight, but to climb those balconies like a Malayan flying lemur.”
“What on earth is that?”
“A kind of pre-primate. On the brink of extinction, of course.”
“Do I get the idea I’m on the brink too?”
“You came here, so you saved Detective Alch a trip. This will be an exchange of prisoners.”
“Bail, you mean. So Electra’s homeward bound?” Matt asked. “If it has to be that formal.”
Molina straightened. “It has to be that formal. We are talking D.B., approximately five-nine, two-hundred and forty pounds.”
“Dead body built like a bowling ball. Not the man I encountered on Temple’s balcony.”
“Say you. It makes a colorful comparison. Stuck by a bullet in the shoulder and falling forty feet backwards, four stories, with impact on the back of the skull. Head trauma likely killed him. He died in the ambulance, so until the coroner rules whether the bullet or the fall killed him, we have to treat your landlady as a suspect.”
“So only one of Electra’s shots hit him?”
“One could be enough. Same gun she kept in her place the last time she was under suspicion of murder.”
“This must be different. The victim isn’t another of her ex-husbands, is he?” Matt thought for a moment. “She’s had several.”
Molina turned to pick up a file folder from her desk. “Not unless an ex-husband of hers spent two-to-six for felony assault in High Desert State Prison.”
“A burglar, obviously.”
“Obviously, but was he known to someone else who resided at the Circle Ritz?”
Matt didn’t like the sound of that. “Temple says most of the residents came down to ground level as soon as shots were heard.”
“Since our Miss Temple had an intruder in her second-floor unit two weeks ago, I’m not surprised she was among the first on the scene.”
“But this was farther at the back of the property.”
“Can a round building be said to have a back?”
“Of course. Where the ground-level deck connects to the pool and pool house.”
“All right. I must admit the dead man does not seem to have any obvious connection to the Circle Ritz.”
“Not a hiree, not a pool or yard man?”
“At that hour? No. The dead man was burly, but not HDTV-inclined.”
Matt was getting a bad feeling. Molina sardonic was a Molina to beware of.
“And Electra had to be taken away in handcuffs?”
“Charges aren’t likely, but her story has to be taken down and investigated fully.”
“‘Story’?”
“And yours, considering you recently confronted an intruder at the same address that resulted in the man falling.”
“I was driving home from WCOO when the man fell.”
“Cell phone off. Seems odd. That’s when you’d most get messages after being unavailable on the air.”
“Not all of us are attached to AT&T or Verizon at the hip.”
Molina smiled. “Got a little behind on social media in the priesthood, did we?”
“Got a little behind on a lot,” Matt said.
Molina leaned forward so the full effect of her electric-blue eyes filled his range of vision. There was no quarter in them. “Even you would not dreamily drive home from a middle-of-the-night job without checking your phone after almost three hours of literal ‘radio silence’, ex-Father Matt. Or did she call in?”
“No!” He did not want to bring up Elvis.
“Touchy. Are you trying to be noble and hide the fact that you’re now sleeping with Miss Barr in her own rooms? Trust me, it would be more suspicious if you weren’t.”
“Do I owe your certainty to a gossiping Fontana brother, ex-torch singer Carmen? Like Julio. Would you stoop that low, romancing one of Las Vegas’s finest bachelor brothers to get eyes inside the Circle Ritz and our lives? You have a pattern of recruiting male civilians as your private confidential informants. Since you’re married to the Metro PD force, maybe they’re your surrogate boys club.”
She recoiled as if he had snapped a whip. “You are definitely past the ‘too good to be true’ stage.”
Matt was horrified by what she’d pushed him to say. There was much truth that the act of recruiting or coercing men to be her secret agents could substitute for a real relationship, leaving her single working mother status unthreatened. Max had been such a one, certainly. Dirty Larry, long gone and almost forgotten. Rafi. Now Julio Fontana?
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You goaded me.”
“That’s my job. Never apologize. It’s never good for an officer of the law to cross lines and have personal links, no matter how feeble, to a confidential informant or anyone.”
“Do you hear yourself?”
“Do you hear yourself? You probably don’t use your phone’s GPS, Mr. High-tech Dinosaur. That buys you a precious forty minutes when you could have arrived at the Circle Ritz. Heard the shots. Climbed the balconies that form a step pyramid, and ‘tossed’ the guy off the balcony to his death.”
“No. I was not there. Residents were gathered around the crime scene when I arrived and they told me what had happened.”
“There’s something you’re hiding about your cell phone being off when you left work. Don’t snow me. Maybe you can psychoanalyze me, but I can read a suspect. And there’s something you don’t want anyone to know.”
Matt let his shoulders relax, willing anxiety and anger away. “You’re right.” About a lot of somethings he concealed. He’d throw her a small one. “Okay.”
She hissed out a long-held breath.
“It will sound stupid, but it’s given me the willies, the heebie-jeebies, a nasty vague sense of danger.”
“Oh, God. New Age angst. Next you’ll tell you’re channeling Midnight Louie.”
“Don’t I wish,” Matt said. “The Once and Forever King is back.”
“Arthur?”
“Elvis.”
After five beats of silence, she burst into deep contralto laughter.
Matt shrugged. “He’s calling in on The Midnight Hour again. The listeners and other callers went crazy to recognize his voice. Our mutual friend in the FBI had the voice recordings analyzed the last—first time. They couldn’t explain it. It was Elvis’s voice.”
“And they brought back the The X-Files for a limited run on TV too.” Molina leaned in again, all vivid blue skepticism. “Look here, Mulder. There are no reruns in real life.”
“Look here, Skully. There’s Frank Bucek and the FBI. Send him the audiotape of my show tonight.”
“What does this have to do with your alibi?”
“What can I say? The vocal reappearance of Elvis Presley got me all shook up. The show ran overtime. The last time this happened it presaged some very strange events at the Crystal Phoenix. I didn’t want to go through anything weird again.”
Molina sat back again. “Well, think of this, Marty McFly. The deceased shows signs of physical assault not attributable to gunshots or a fall. He’s a low-level thug from an old Vegas family of muscle-headed muscle. Word is he was involved in an altercation a couple of nights ago at a nudie bar. You weren’t on the air at that time. I don’t think an imminent bridegroom went rogue to visit a nudie bar, not even Fontana brothers, but who knows what passes for a bachelor party today? That D.B. at the Circle Ritz was sure there. There’s a hidden planet behind this sudden crime wave at the Ritz.”
Matt felt, had to think the cliché was dead-on true, because his blood ran cold. His hands grew instantly icy. His heart pounded, pumping all his energy into physical defense. Yet he had to sit there and appear calm and certainly not somebody who had started the brawl at Lucky Stars nudie bar before he had to be at The Midnight Hou
r.
“Speaking of old mobsters possibly associated with Effinger,” Molina said, innocently this time. “Are you getting anything useful out of that retired cop I sent you to, Wetherly?”
“Uh. Rapid change of topic.”
“I’m through scaring you straight for now. That Elvis thing is too weird to be invented. Well?”
“I think old Woodrow is looking for someone to tell his stories to. He takes The Midnight Hour for one of those true-crime shows.”
Molina laughed. She finally shifted her hip off the desk edge and moved from being in his face to a less confrontational stance.
“Watch yourself,” she told him. “I’m beginning to think there’s something serious to your quest to solve the sleazy doings and strange death of the late Clifford Effinger.”
Matt stepped out of the towering new police headquarters building, gazing back at its central swooping T-shape of glass.
It reminded him of the illuminated red, purple, and blue neon-lit fifty-story “winged” shapes on the side or the Rio Hotel, which in turn echoed the immense concrete-and-stone statue of the white-robed Christ of the Andes near Rio de Janeiro, with arms and sleeves stretched as wide as the crossbar on the Cross.
Three similar images and architectural mimics, he mused, one holy, one secular and one legal. The Brazilian landmark represented God, the Vegas Rio represented Mammon and here, the sweep of a robe represented judges and justice.
Matt turned away to see Electra waiting by the parked cars, looking like a tourist in her brightly colored muumuu and flip-flop slippers. Two pink foam curlers still clung to her snow-white hair and the tall Fontana brother standing beside her for once wore an expensive suit coat that looked wrinkled and hung slightly askew.
It was a shock to see a Fontana either disheveled or less than smiling and gracious. Then he wondered what he looked like after sweating through his interrogation with Molina.
“Is it, um—” Matt said as he held his hand out.
“Armando.” The man offered a firm, fast handshake. “We were told you had an appointment, so waited around.”
Matt looked around for what fantastic custom limo Armando had found appropriate for a drive to the clinker. He knew he visibly started to spot Electra’s blue Elvis-edition VW Beetle, a car Matt had won and given to Electra to replace her old Probe, the car he had recently wrecked beyond repair driving up two sets of stairs and through strong double doors to save Electra and her kidnapped cat, Karma, from imminent harm. Score: Probe Dead. Elvis Undead, and back in vocal and automotive forms.
Cat in an Alphabet Endgame: A Midnight Louie Mystery (The Midnight Louie Mysteries Book 28) Page 6