“I have a feeling I’m like…bait.”
Wetherly grinned and slapped Matt on the back. “That’s the spirit.”
When the boilermakers arrived, crowding the round brown tray no gin joint in all of the world was ever without, Matt decided that was just what he needed.
Wetherly dropped the shot glass of whiskey down inside his pint glass of beer, but Matt already distrusted the cleanliness in this place. So he downed the whiskey in one go, like in the movies, and hoped the high-octane bolt wouldn’t make him cough. That would be way too clean-cut for this place.
Wetherly chuckled. “That’ll make your eyes cross. Don’t look left. We got a customer.”
Customer. As in the expression “bad customer”. The guy who was swaggering over to their table was tame enough to have only a couple visible tattoos on his biceps and wrist. He also looked to be about sixty. The late Effinger’s generation.
The guy screeched a heavy wooden captain’s chair over to their booth. “Woody, my man,” he greeted Matt’s escort. “You got a long-lost grandson?”
Wetherly’s wheezing laugh turned into a cough, but on a grizzled veteran it didn’t sound weak.
“Naw. This here’s Matthew from Chicago.” Wetherly spoke slowly, as if spelling unsaid things out…not to Matt, but to his pal.
Matt was beginning to feel like a marked man, or a shill. Why had he trusted the retired cop? Because Molina knew of him? She was relatively new in town. “Woody” could have been as crooked as a scarecrow in his day. Matt sipped the beer and studied the bar, repelled by tattoo-clothed muscleman arms and a greasy ponytail snaking down a jeans jacket back. Narrow-eyed glances eeled over leather jacket shoulders toward the banquette and away so fast you’d wonder if you’d imaged the attention. This place was one step lower than a biker bar. Beyond the bar, Matt could only glimpse a supernaturally high-kicking chorus-girl leg over the crowded circles of hooting men. Nudie pole dancing.
Wetherly leaned forward over the huge table, and lowered his voice. “You know, Ox, I got some kin up there and said I’d help him out.”
“With what?”
“Post-mortem report on a former brother of the coast.”
Matt recognized the phrase “brother of the coast”. That was old-time talk for pirates. Anybody who’d seen Johnny Depp Jack Sparrow movies knew that.
Not everybody knew Cliff Effinger had died tied to the figurehead of the pirate ship attraction far up the Strip from this place. Had died tied. Tie-dyed in water. A horrible death Matt wouldn’t wish on his worst nightmare, which Effinger had been when he was a kid.
The newcomer named “Ox” laughed. “You old buccaneer. I think I see where you’re sailing. What’s to ask about that? Old business.” He suddenly eyed Matt with suspicion. “You the law? Why no mustache?”
Matt was flummoxed. Then he recalled all the bicycle cops around town—tanned, fit, hair bleached blond from the sun, and their mustaches too. “I’m a—”
Wetherly took control. “Crime buff broadcaster.”
“Well, he’s buff enough,” Ox said sourly. “We’ll never be that again.”
“Too true. You know how that mob museum craze Downtown and on the Strip stirred up the media and the tourists. Our checkered pasts here in Vegas are a big-time money machine nowadays for everybody but the mob, which was always a myth anyway.”
“Yeah, a myth. Mythconception.” Ox eyed Matt. “I can see this guy on TV. So what’d we owe him a story for?”
“I told you. He hails from Chicago, ain’t that right, Matthew?”
He hated being called “Matthew” when his baptismal name was Matthias, after a Disciple, but Matt knew he should keep quiet, and had to anyway. He’d been sipping the beer to quell the hard liquor hit to his stomach and was unable to answer right away. If Wetherly’s elbow jabbed him in the bullet wound once more, he wouldn’t answer for his reaction. This charade was useless. He could never swim with the barracudas.
Matt nodded like a Howdy Doody puppet.
Wetherly lowered his voice even more. “Freaking Effinger.”
The other guy regarded Matt with awe. “How’d someone like you ever know anyone like freaking Effinger?”
“My mother’s cousin married him.”
“Oh, gawd. Was she institutionalized at the time? Oh, hey. Kid. Just…like, uh, kidding.” He’d noticed Matt’s hands fisting on the table and probably felt the whiskey fire in his eyes.
Wetherly put an apparently restraining hand on Matt’s well-muscled forearm. “I’d be obliged, Ox, if you would put my young friend’s questions to rest as to the fate of said Effinger. If some bad actor we are all very grateful to hadn’t of offed him, my boy here might be facing thirty years to life on a homicide charge. He’s going back to Chicago soon, and would like to have some peace of mind about the guy.”
“Yeah. I can see he’s touchier than he looks. You really going back to Chicago?”
Matt nodded. He was going to Minneapolis, for sure, and maybe not to Chicago if the talk-show gig didn’t come through, but he figured nodding was not really a lie…and that whiskey shot had hit him harder than he’d like if he was doing this confession dance in his head, worrying about lying to someone who was the scum of the earth, although it was wrong to judge…
“Okay, Matthew…whatcha need to know for your peace of mind’s sake?”
Matt knew he needed to do this just right. St. Jude, the saint of the Impossible came to his rescue with the words that came out of his mouth, just the right thing to elicit what he wanted/needed to know.
Matt leaned over the table like his mentor, and lowered his voice. “You see, I’m afraid the bastard isn’t really dead.”
“Oh, man.” Ox looked from Matt to Wetherly. “Isn’t really dead? I tell you. We—um, he…the police (poe-lease, he said), they found him wrapped up like a mummy, you know about that?”
Matt nodded quickly to keep Ox’s words and shock flowing.
“Well, only not dry as a mummy from some pyramid like at the Luxor but wet, drowned, and not in any good shape when he hit the water. You cannot get more dead than Cliffie Effinger in this city. At least, not since the Chicago outfit got pushed out by the FBI in the eighties. You, ah, have connections in Chicago?”
“Sure thing, but my generation is bit behind on current protocol in Vegas.”
“Current protocol?”
“Yeah, uh, they sent me to college. When I was back in Chicago recently, a couple of made men searched his widow’s apartment, not on any orders we knew about. Maybe these freelancers were Effinger’s ex-associates and were looking for something valuable he might have left there a long time ago. What bothers me, see, is the way Effinger was offed, seemed kinda…I’m not being critical here…but kinda an old-fashioned hit. If you know what I mean.”
Wetherly intervened. “A message was being sent. My question is, was it the right message?”
Both men stared at Matt, who explained, “Here’s the thing. Before Effinger sailed off into the sunset, I learned a body with his ID on it, get this, fell to a craps tabletop at the Crystal Phoenix and was taken for, uh, Cliffie, by the poe-lease.”
Matt glanced at Wetherly, and lifted his beer glass. “Any more of these? Ox might need a hit.”
Three fingers shot up.
Ox commandeered what was left of Matt’s beer and downed it. “I don’t know nothin’ about that. That was…nobody I know is doing Strip hotel whack jobs. I don’t know any hit man could pass going into the Crystal Phoenix’s front lobby, or back stairwell, not with that wall-to-wall Fontana muscle all over the place. It’s also like they’ve got some secret robot surveillance unit on duty there. Why, some grifters with a sweet party pickpocket game got IDed there by a freaking black cat. Who needs K-9 mastiffs when you have undercover vermin? Whoever dumped a body in the Eye-in-the-Sky system at the Phoenix has balls.”
“Robot surveillance.” Matt, who’d been present at that very pickpocket targeted event, had to tap his lips with hi
s fist to hide a smile. Luckily, that gesture read like impatience. And by then the returning round brown tray had been emptied of three beer pints and accompanying shot glasses.
This time Matt poured the shot glass contents into the beer. “That’s interesting. Could Effinger himself do that? Dump his double’s remains in the Phoenix spy areas?”
“I said ‘balls’. Does that word mean something else these post-college days in Chicago?”
Matt made an apologetic face. “I haven’t been quite honest, guys,” he said.
“Oh?” the word, spoken in tandem, sounded ominous.
“I need to know who offed both guys, Effinger and Effinger clone. Chicago doesn’t like muddy waters, even in the pirate ship attraction. Chicago wants to know what Effinger knew that a minor rat fink like him killed someone else to cover his tracks, or who did it for him. Chicago wants to know what results any enhanced interrogations on Effinger himself produced. It’s like before with Bugsy Siegel. Chicago wants to know. And what Chicago wants to know, Chicago gets. It’s a toddlin’ town, not a coddlin’ town. Capiche?”
Meanwhile half the bar had gathered around, drawn by the words “Chicago” and “Effinger”. Matt sensed a noose pulling tight around the circular booth.
“Hey,” Wetherly shouted, because Ox was up on his feet along with six other heavy-muscled guys who moved when he did.
“So ‘Chicago’ is critical of hits on our turf?” Ox demanded. “And sends an errand boy to slap our wrists? We had our reasons and we’re not done with what got Effinger killed—the bastard never squeaked—and we don’t like accountants from Chicago coming around to crunch our numbers ’cuz we’ll crunch his nuts first.”
The Vegas nutcrackers leaned in, fists looking as big as boxing gloves moving toward Matt.
Uh-oh, he figured, go big or go home. He stood, overturning the huge round table, then crouched behind it, using it as a giant shield. Glass shattered, waitresses screamed, men cursed. Woody had dived to the floor off to the side.
Matt spun the bulky table onto its edge.
Matt half-stood to see the six guys grabbing for the table. He stood all the way up, pushing the heavy table’s single stainless steel support pillar into their midsections. They were the bowling pins and he was the ball. They clutched their guts in a chorus of grunts. Onlookers showed jaw-dropping disbelief as Matt rushed for the door, the six guys from behind recovering enough to lunge for him, tightening like a noose.
“Watch out, kid!” Wetherly shouted from somewhere faint and far away.
He busted through the exit door after smashing a waitress’s tray to the floor, now wet and paved with glass shards. More curses and thumps and chaos behind him.
Barely through the door, he hesitated to gulp in the hot, stale air.
“And away we go,” said someone outside, someone much too close, who grabbed the back of Matt’s plaid shirt and slung him out down along the sidewalk like sack of garbage. Gasping, Matt felt himself flung around a corner out of sight, against a dark wall by tall guy with a lot of moxie, muscle, and hair darker than the night around them. A half block away, the roar the Strip was again dominant.
Matt hauled back an arm and fist that meant business. “Dammit, Kinsella, if you really aren’t out of the country, I’ll knock you right over the border into Mexico myself.”
But the dark-haired man wasn’t tall enough to be Max Kinsella.
It couldn’t be… “Frank”?
“Adios, amigo,” the man said, and slammed him hard in the jaw.
11
Off Leash
It has been a long night.
Alas, I did not turn tail and publicly snub Punch Sullivan and all his works by stalking off after my Circle Ritz ladies this morning. Frankly, I wanted to explore this unlikely site for serious contemporary reconstruction by myself.
The clod called Punch Adcock took some misplaced comfort in my remaining with him on-site.
“See. This cat knows where the action is going to be,” he tells Miss Katt Zydeco.
She, bearing a feline name, is much more realistic. “Forget it, Punch. It is not our job to deal with that ditsy dame crew or the cat they came in with from up the street. We have more important duties tonight.”
Wonderful. By then I am out of sight underneath the temporary “skirt” of the forty-foot RV. What a perfect eavesdropping site and base of operations.
Perfect, that is, until Miss Midnight Louise slithers in beside me.
“Ideal observation post, Pops. Guess your years as a homeless street person were good training for a useful life, now that you are living La Vida Gigolo at the Circle Ritz.”
Miss Midnight Louise is adept at making statements that one answers at one’s peril, because no way can I come out a winner on that set of implications.
“You can stay,” I announce, magnanimous, because I cannot dislodge her without a lot of sound and fury of the cat kind that will give away our surveillance. “Our role here is to wait and watch. It is like Star Trek. No interference with the alien species and their alien actions.”
“Sure, fine. I see you are still stuck in the milieu of your second-to-last case, where reported UFOs got the Strip in a furor. The aging individual must beware of living in the past.”
“If I were living in the past, I would certainly see that you had remained a mote in Bast’s eye.”
For once a comment of mine has puzzled my alarmingly obstreperous maybe-offspring.
Her furry forehead furrows. “I must confess, although the older generation may be horrified, that I do not believe in Bast.”
“Certainly that is your choice, Louise,” I reply. “Bast has endured for five thousand years, almost as long as our kind. Unfortunately, there is very little else for us to believe in these days. Unless it is Free-to-Be-Feline.”
“That is a scientifically vetted healthful and planet-friendly food source,” she says. “You are short-sighted, but inadvertently generous, to share your bottomless supply with Ma Barker’s clowder.”
I see we are treading delicately around each other so as not to widen the generation gap. It is at times like this I wish I had Karma, Miss Electra’s supposedly psychic Birman cat, to kick around. “If you insist on horning in on my investigation, Louise, I will ask you to remain silent and to follow my instructions. I am expecting mind-blowing revelations later this night.”
Miss Midnight Louise sighs. “You sound like some of my most annoying suitors before I was mercifully made indifferent to the reproductive imperative. However, since you are the best your benighted generation has produced, I will do my best to help you, Daddy-o.”
I am touched. I am also convinced that I will need some decent backup before this night is over. Or, at the least, a witness.
I have lived in Las Vegas since I was spit out onto the street to make my way.
In that respect, I am not unlike the average tourist who visits this town. It is all a matter of luck, good and bad, and luck is a matter of self-esteem.
I have seen many things, good and bad, and have experienced both…the touching charity of a homeless person offering me a pinch of cold, abandoned fast-food burger. The rib-kick of a drunken casino winner, swaggering out of a Strip hotel. The tears on my shoulder-blades from a fifteen-year-old hooker on the notorious Minnesota Strip, who believes for a precious moment that I have it worse than she does.
In all of this, I have grown philosophical. I have also learned a bunch.
So I hunker down, as dudes of my breed, size and color can and have done for many decades and centuries, and wait to see what will transpire. Luckily, I can wait with my eyes closed. I shift into daydreaming mode. And then it is night.
Am I knocked back!
Louise curls sharp shivs into my shoulder. (I prefer tears, no matter how poignant. In that Minnesota Strip instance, I managed to find a nearby undercover policewoman and intrigued her to follow me back to the young girl and get my tearful hookup off the streets, at least for a while.)
/> Anyway, I needed a wake-up pinprick. This deserted lot is suddenly Ringling Brothers Central.
An hour after the sun goes down, an old Volkswagen van covered in wild psychedelic artwork from the sixties lurches into the parking lot and backs up to the rear door. Power to the People is written on its side. The passenger opens the back doors to reveal one big mama of a generator. The driver comes around to Dumpster dive in the metal container next to the door and pulls out a mess of heavy cables he starts laying out in the parking lot.
Then a plain white van pulls up with a flashing neon sign on its side:
POP-UP CASINO
$$ VIDEO POKER $$
DUSK TO DAWN
LAY YOUR BETS AND WALK AWAY
WITH LUCKY LOOT
From our lowly observation positions, Miss Midnight Louise and I keep our peepers set on wide VistaVision focus.
Speechless (our normal condition, actually), we watch men pour out of the van and wheel dollies into the depths of the abandoned building. In minutes, the basement door disgorges crews of the same men wheeling huge video poker machines onto the dirt, crushing the few straggly weeds.
Usually seen in long rows in huge hotel casinos, gaming machines look like the innocuous wall of video games they are. One by one, at night, wheeled out of an abandoned hulk, they resemble invading cyber-aliens.
Soon, a couple dozen slot machines have rolled out from the central building into ragged rows on the sandy lot.
“Some of those machines are antique one-armed bandits,” Louise points out.
Yeah, they are. Folks used to have to pull a lever to make the cherries wheel around or the poker hands show up card by card on an animated, colorful screen. Now, instead of feeding quarters or even nickels into slots, player use five, ten and twenty-dollar bills and push one big square button.
At least a while back you could lose a few calories as well as your paycheck at a casino slot machine. Now you lose “long green” in the time it takes a bill, courtesy of Uncle Sam, to be automatically sucked through a slot. And your forefinger can wrack up losses faster than a thoroughbred springs out of a Kentucky Derby gate.
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