“Maybe not,” Molina said. “Mobsters go viral and virtual, but retired cops fade away. Old-fashioned footwork is now lost behind a mountain of modern forensics and keyboard magic.”
By then Matt had followed her into the comfortable living room, with the curled-up cat dents in the sofa pillows and unopened junk mail still tossed on the coffee table.
Molina swept the mail aside in a messy pile, perhaps expressing the level of her regard for Vegas’s infatuation with The Mob Museum.
“Take a seat.” She gestured to two roomy upholstered chairs opposite the couch. “Can I get you some lemonade? A cold beer?”
“I have a feeling this is a sober occasion. Coffee, if you’ve got it. Black.”
“Does the Pope have encyclicals?”
Matt watched her disappear around the other side of the breakfast bar. Her kitchen rattlings sounded like the backbeat of percussion instruments against the steady hum of the air-conditioner.
He sat back to take stock, brushing a tuft of silken cat undercoat off his bare forearm.
Midafternoon on a hot summer Saturday. Molina at her least lethal, wearing boot-cut jeans, not tight, a loose black gauze top, and moccasins. And that universally familiar class ring no one ever wore unless it advertised an elite Eastern school. It stood out when she wasn’t wearing matching blazers and trousers and packing a badge and gun on her belt.
Matt tried to read the ring’s engraved design as she returned to set his mug down on a woven coaster on the coffee table.
“Drinking coffee in the summer,” she commented, setting her tall glass of lemonade on a matching coaster. “That’s what the night shift will do to you. And that slightly tense look around your eyes. That daytime TV job in Chicago ever coming through?”
Matt almost choked on his first swallow of high-octane caffeine. “That’s supposed to be hush-hush. How do you—?”
“I have my sources.”
“Yeah. Usually one of us civilians.”
She squinted her spectacularly blue eyes as she probed his mood. “Or am I seeing fatigue from playing Dale Earnhardt and revving Electra Lark’s old white Probe up the stairs of an abandoned building? Usually a white knight uses a horse instead of horsepower. How did you know there was any urgency to interrupt the doings inside that place?”
“Neither Temple nor Electra were where they were supposed to be. Vandals had been defacing Electra’s wedding chapel and threatening her Circle Ritz residents.” Matt took another swallow of coffee, smaller this time. “The place had recently been a murder scene, and…lights were on inside.”
“Yup. Any passing citizen would have driven somebody else’s car right up the exterior concrete steps and through the double doors and halfway up the stairway to the second floor. And why were you driving her car anyway? You have a sweet ride of your own. Although I’d never use a Jaguar as a battering ram, but maybe you have money to burn in your future.”
“This invitation to drop by is beginning to sound like entrapment, Lieutenant.”
“What?” She spread her arms in an innocent gesture. “I’m unarmed and unbadged, Matt. It’s just that the Circle Ritz crowd always seems to spawn a miasma of questionable activity around it. You’d better marry Miss Temple and get her out of there before Max Kinsella shows up again and does it himself.”
“No comment,” he said.
Nor was he about to confess to acquiring an older cheap car for tailing possible mob killers, or mentioning that Rafi Nadir had already helped him buy that replacement for the Probe. Rafi was acting like Matt’s bodyguard. Had Molina given her old flame the assignment. Still…why let Matt blunder around in very old and dirty mob business if he needed a keeper?
The coffee was cooling along with his patience, so Matt got to the point. “What is this meeting about besides pumping me on my laughable amateur Effinger investigation?”
Was Molina stalling for time? She seemed nervous, one foot tapping the area rug under the furniture. Something was up.
She shrugged. “Maybe you should forget it. Like God, the mob is dead and now enshrined in what passes for places of worship in Vegas, the new mob and old neon museums.”
“You directed me to a source.”
“An aging gossip, apparently.”
“Woody Wetherly is older than Spanish Moss, all right, and about as attractive. Almost makes me appreciate Temple’s harping on my wearing sunscreen.”
“Don’t be manly and forego it,” she said. “Vegas sun is not kind to redheads and blonds. Think of the children.”
Matt quashed a flush, finished his coffee and put the mug down on its coaster. “If that’s the message of this meeting. Dump Woody Weatherly and use sunscreen? Consider me warned.”
“Wait.” She put out a spread-fingered hand. “You’re right. I’ve been backpedaling on getting to the real issue.”
Matt leaned into his cushy chair as Molina unconsciously took a singer’s deep breath and said, “It’s about Mariah.”
“Anything wrong? Temple said she had an amazing chance to sing onstage weekends.”
“Yes. That’s going fine. In fact, she’s working with her coach right now.”
Matt chuckled. “Kids today. All junior high school Miley Cyruses and would-be viral Justin Biebers, hankering for instant YouTube fame and maybe fortunes.”
“Yes, Mariah is about to enter the dreaded junior high school. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Matt put on his best puzzled face. He thought she’d be fuming about her daughter being in the running for Twisted Teen of the Year. Not that Mariah would…would she?
Molina twisted her class ring with both fingers. “It’s about the Dad-Daughter Dance coming up in a few weeks.”
Molina? Not only finger-twisting, but tongue-tied? All’s wrong with the world, but how? Why?
Matt sat there blinking.
He usually morphed into the position of advisor and confident as easily as any ex-priest who’d heard thousands of what was now called the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
If this supremely self-possessed policewoman was this rattled, he didn’t want to speculate what her—upcoming confession, put it in plain language—would be.
12
Strapless in Sin City
“Oh my favorite Cinderella slippers,” Temple’s aunt Kit Carlson Fontana said over the phone when she heard Temple’s shocking proposal. “We need to go to a very cool cocktail lounge, my dear. My nerves are not what they were.”
“I would think that being married to Aldo Fontana would do a lot for your nerves, Auntie,” Temple said.
“Him I can handle. Your impetuous lives and times I cannot.”
Smoke and mirrors. Las Vegas was the home of the absurdly glittering cocktail lounge and Temple loved every overblown one of them, although none was a smoke-free zone. For the short time she visited, she chose to think of the airborne eddies as produced by dry ice from a misty horror movie.
In the reflections all around them, providing film-splice glimpses of their images, Temple saw she and her aunt could be taken for mother and daughter, perhaps more than her own mother. Kit was a sophisticate who’d lived most of her life single in Manhattan. Her sister Karen had reared four strapping sons and one petite girl in suburban Minneapolis.
Once each had been served with the elaborate cocktail of her choice in a stemmed glass, Kit lifted her glass for a toast. “I congratulate you on not waiting as long as I did to tie the knot. A bride at sixty-something.” Kit rolled her eyes. Her hair was a softer, faded peachy red than Temple’s vivid red-gold, but they were both five-foot-zero.
“You were a gorgeous bride,” Temple assured Kit. “And irresistible. Think about it. Aldo stayed single for almost fifty years.”
“Well, I assume we can count from when he attained the age of majority at twenty-one, so he only had to deny himself matrimony for twenty-five years. Your mother in Minnesota would strangle me if she knew I was the first to hear details of your wedding.”
> Temple lifted and sipped in time with her aunt. “That’s just it,” she said after savoring. “Everything must be hush-hush. Just between us. I need the preliminaries in place.”
“When is the big date?”
“Ah, not sure yet.”
“So, niece. I am to stage-manage a formal wedding with out-of-town guests in four-four time. Sometime. Soon?”
“Not alone. Danny Dove will help.”
Kit fanned her face with the table’s specialty cocktails menu. “Oh, my further shattering nerves. I am to assist the foremost and fussiest producer-director in Las Vegas.”
“Quite the contrary. He has promised to assist you,” Temple said. Then she frowned. “Although the Ladies Altar and Flower Society at Our Lady of Guadalupe might be a challenge. I gather they’re rather proprietary.”
“You’re not planning on a Crystal Phoenix wedding, like Aldo and I had? The Phoenix would roll out the red carpet for you. You’re living in ‘Vegas, Baby’ and getting married in a parish church?”
“Las Vegas has long been noted for its variety and abundances of churches, Aunt,” Temple said demurely. Cocktails tended to make her demure, which was why she didn’t drink too many of them.
“Las Vegas is also noted for its variety and abundance of amazing, fantastic, sumptuous, luxurious wedding chapels too,” Kit said. “Not to mention your landlady’s uniquely charming Lover’s Knot chapel where Matt’s mother remarried for a first shot at real happiness.”
“Oh, I know there are so many people who’d like a say in the ceremony, so many people to please.”
Kit’s warm hand clenched Temple’s cold one. “When it involves your wedding, the only person to please is the bride. Truly. Otherwise you’ll be honeymooning in a nuthouse.”
“Thank you, Kit. That’s the kind of advice I asked you here to provide.”
“I’ll do anything I can, whenever it happens, but why so vague?”
“Matt’s agent’s negotiations with the network producers on that talk show job are ongoing. We don’t want to tip anything off. You know media people, Kit. You were an actress and then a novelist in New York City. These negotiations are delicate.”
And, Temple didn’t add, although she was dying to tell Kit all the fabulous news from Tony, we can’t marry until Max and I find the hidden IRA hoard of money and guns, and I find out what Matt’s secretly involved in with Molina, who, if she’s nice to me, can sing at my Our Lady of Guadalupe wedding with her daughter. If she is messing with Matt’s head, she won’t be allowed to sweep out the confessionals.
“I do understand media nosiness,” Kit said. “My lips are sealed with long-lasting ‘Scarlet O’Hara Woman’ ravishing red gloss. What do you need from me now?”
“Say yes to the dress.”
“Shopping? For your bridal gown? First, curtains are out, despite my lip color. Oh, what fun!! You’re so young. You can do anything. Princess Diana with clouds of skirts and shoulder ruffles. Not Kate Middleton, that was lovely, but a bit too demure, Kim Kardashian…”
“Nothing Kim Kardashian. I only require a train exactly my height, but I do require a train. One of La Kardashian’s gowns had a train long enough to wrap the groom several times around, like a mummy.”
“I’m sure her husbands felt like flies in a spider’s cocoon. She seems to regard weddings as investment growth operations.”
Temple was thinking. “I’ve wanted to wear a dress with a train since I realized I was never going to grow any taller than I was in junior high.”
“Poor traumatized child.” Kit patted her hand. “You do realize that sad lack of stature automatically enrolls us in the EHHCC.
“EHHCC?”
“The Endless High Heel Collection Club.”
“And that’s another thing. The front hem must be high enough to show the Midnight Louie shoes.”
“This is beginning to sound like a custom tailoring job.”
“No time for that. Off the rack is fine with me. Oh, and nothing strapless.”
“Oh, my Great Granny’s Garters! Not strapless. That makes it an impossible quest. Every bride today goes for a strapless wedding dress.”
“You and Matt’s mother didn’t.”
“We were mature brides,” Kit said with pursed lips.
“I think following the crowd is immature.” Temple finished her cocktail. “Come on, take up your tote bag and walk to the parking garage and my car. I’ve found a bridal shop on Rainbow Boulevard that sounds promising.”
“Probably why it’s located there. Good marketing.”
“Since marketing’s my game, I figure they might have good taste too.”
And tons and tons of lace, satin, and beaded chiffon white strapless wedding gowns.
“Oh,” Temple said when she and Kit walked in the door and then stopped.
Two towering mannequins wearing strapless gowns greeted them, along with a bridesmaid and flower girl. And so did a tall brunette Temple’s age who might bring to mind Lieutenant C.R. Molina if she’d ever wear leggings and kitten heels and a smart cold-shoulder top. Dream on.
Temple’s heart sank. She and Kit suddenly seemed like Munchkins overwhelmed by a wedding party of six-foot-tall mannequins.
“Mother and daughter?” their greeter chirped, the chickadee voice odd coming from such a rangy woman.
They nodded mutely. It was better than explaining their relationship at length, which was the one thing they could both do, explain at length. Best not to start.
“Please sit.” The woman gestured to a pair of expensive tufted leather boudoir chairs. “I’m Courtney.”
“Temple Barr.”
“I’m Kit. Kit Carlson Fontana.”
A ghost of recognition materialized between Courtney’s beautifully plucked eyebrows and floated away. Kit Carson had been an Old West pony express rider and Fontana was an old but ambiguously law-abiding Vegas name. Or maybe long, tall Courtney had dated one of the boys.
The clients’ difference in surnames wasn’t an issue. So many women kept maiden names or remarried like a Kardashian these days, all to the good of bridal shops’ bottom line,
Behind the wedding consultant stretched rows and rows of bridal gowns shrouded in plastic like captive clouds. Or ghosts, all about seven feet tall. Temple glanced at Kit, intimidated for the first time in a long while.
Courtney’s eye glanced, and then stayed glued on Temple’s ruby-and-diamond vintage engagement ring from Matt…and The Bellagio Hotel’s fabulous vintage jeweler shop, Fred Leighton, which accessorized Red Carpet women. It was not only gorgeous and Temple knew she’d faint if she knew what it cost, but she could endlessly daydream about the tragic life of some nineteen-thirties woman forced to give up the ring decades ago because of the Depression and her husband had jumped off a building. Or perhaps it had been a heroic gesture during the second World War to help family members escape Hitler…
Reality intruded.
“Something from Vera would suit a petite bride well,” Courtney suggested, upping her estimation of Temple’s means.
Something from the phenomenal designer suited Temple very well when it was Simply Vera from Kohl’s department store. In the bridal department, they were talking thousands of dollars. Of course, there was that TV ad work for Louie and her coming up. Nothing signed yet, alas. She was sure Louie would kick in his advance share for a wonderful wedding dress, especially if he could have the wedding veil afterward as a very large tulle toy.
Courtney took a new tack. “Why don’t we see what we can rule out.”
She turned and led them between the intimidating rows. Given the voluminous skirts and trailing trains, the hangers hung on a six-foot-high rod. No wonder it took a giraffe like Courtney to sweep these heavy protective bags out of the row so she and Kit could stare through the plastic at a dazzling blizzard of billowing satin and lace and tulle Temple would look like a pygmy wearing. Besides, Temple was sure she’d soon go snow-blind.
“Is that a mermaid skirt” sh
e asked about one candidate.
“Don’t you like mermaid skirts?”
“I adore mermaid skirts, but wearing a tight sheath to mid-thigh and then having a ballerina tutu billowing out to the floor is death to a short woman. Not to mention impossible to sit in.”
“The bride doesn’t sit much at a wedding reception,” Courtney pointed out.
“No, I don’t suppose so.” Temple hadn’t thought beyond the church ceremony. “Anyway, strong horizontals must be avoided or I’ll look like an albino mushroom.”
“Don’t tell me that rules out a strapless gown?” Courtney looked ready to burst into sobs.
“Well, yeah.”
“Everyone wants a strapless gown, except—” Courtney caught herself before she said something uncomplimentary.
Temple had even seen a Catholic bride in a strapless gown illustrating the Pre-Cana website Matt had directed her to view after she decided on Our Lady of Guadalupe for the wedding site. Temple found she had some differences with dogma, but if the Catholics—stern advocates of the two-inch-wide “spaghetti” strap, according to hearsay—were finally okay with strapless, why wasn’t she?
She told Courtney, never having deceived herself about her literal shortcomings.
“Flat-chested women. Short women. We need a strong central vertical, not to be chopped up with horizontal lines at the bust and thighs.”
“We have some gowns with sleeves, but sleeves are so…”
“Matronly,” Kit said brightly, with a brittle smile that no one in her right mind would challenge.
Courtney had a comeback. “Many brides do work out for several months before the wedding to correct that universal flabby little upper arm problem we women have…”
“That’s like cutting the corpse to fit the coffin,” Temple objected.
There was a pause.
“Off the shoulder,” Courtney suggested. “Very sexy. You have good shoulders and no upper arm issue.”
“Are you kidding?” Temple was indignant. “Another strong horizontal, right above where I am not so sufficient and do not want to try to hold up a strapless gown.”
Cat in an Alphabet Endgame: A Midnight Louie Mystery (The Midnight Louie Mysteries Book 28) Page 10