Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “I can do that, guys,” Matt was saying to no avail.

  Ernesto leaned down to murmur in Temple’s ear, broadcasting a faint scent of male cologne she had never been able to detect in any samples in dozens of Vanity Fair magazines. So post-Ralph Lauren.

  “Miss Electra is, um, tied up right now,” he whispered.

  “Why do I think you mean that literally?”

  He shrugged, which adjusted the fall of his designer suit jacket, then shot the sleeves to reveal rose-gold cufflinks. “She is being entertained at Metro Police headquarters.”

  “Entertained? You mean detained, don’t you?”

  “Some might put it that way.”

  “Enough with the evasive charm. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Not to worry. The Fontana family lawyer is right beside her.”

  “My God! Where?”

  “Possibly still in an interrogation room, I believe. Shoddy places, even in the magnificent new building. I only presume. I have not yet been honored to be a guest there.”

  “Interrogated? By whom? For what?”

  “By our friendly neighborhood chanteuse and cop, Lieutenant Molina.”

  “She’s a homicide cop.”

  “This seems to be a case of homicide.”

  “And Electra is a suspect?”

  “Many are called in these cases, but few are nailed.”

  “The victim isn’t—?”

  “An ex-husband of our dear landlady? I fear he is an ‘ex’ in the most, er, permanent fashion.”

  “Not…Jay Edgar Dyson?”

  “Not anymore.”

  Temple’s jaw and shoulders slumped with shock. Her tote bag handles started slipping through her nerveless fingers, but Ernesto caught the bag and ushered Temple into the limo’s cavernous white leather interior.

  He leaned in after her, a living example of Scent Surround. “You also are on the interrogation list, dear lady.”

  “Me?”

  “Not to worry. Gangsters is providing complementary limo service for all involved. And a getaway car, if needed.”

  Matt had overheard the news and invited Ernesto to join them in the horseshoe of luxuriously padded seats.

  “Normally I ride shotgun.” Ernesto patted the subtly padded shoulder of his Emanogildo Zegna suit coat. The firearm in the hidden holster was a Beretta, of course. The Fontanas patronized all things Italian. Ernesto ducked to take a seat opposite them and turned to the glittering façade of the bar.

  “Better not,” Matt said. “We’re going straight to police headquarters and I don’t want high-end booze on our breaths. When did this happen?”

  “Yesterday. Miss Electra was invited to headquarters for an interrogation today. I happened to be dropping by the Circle Ritz to give her a saltimbocca recipe and was able to offer her the same, calming white-glove Gangsters transportation service you experience now.”

  “Couldn’t someone have called us in Minnesota?” Temple asked.

  “Miss Electra wouldn’t hear of interrupting your family reunion, Miss Temple. We promised to drive you direct from the airport to the interrogation room.” Ernesto made a sour face. “The lady lieutenant was most unbecomingly fierce about that. Not even Julio could dissuade her to wait until you’d settled back home at the Circle Ritz.”

  “What awful news,” Matt said. “It’s crazy that Electra Lark would need to be anywhere near a police headquarters, but what can Temple know about this? Molina has a lot of nerve issuing a command appearance. We’ve been traveling all day. Temple is tired. Are they interviewing all Circle Ritz residents? If so, I can do it today and give Temple a break.”

  “You are not on the list,” Ernesto said.

  “That’s even crazier. What could Temple know about some crime that happened while we were out of town?” Matt looked at her, with a firm nod. And then frowned.

  Temple knew she looked guilty.

  “Wait a minute.” Matt eyed Ernesto. “Temple asked if the victim was—then broke the sentence off…and you mentioned this Jay Edgar guy.” He turned to Temple. “You can’t have known him, an ex-husband of Electra?”

  “Not known him, no.” Temple made an apologetic shrug. “But I could have met him.”

  “Where? Not at the Circle Ritz, surely?”

  “No. Not there.”

  “Then where?”

  “At the Araby Motel.”

  “The—” Matt was speechless.

  “I think,” Ernesto said, leaning forward to look them each in the eye, “that the gentleman, since he’s not called upon to answer questions, should have a nice stiff Scotch. And the lady should sit back in silence and compose her thoughts for the forthcoming chat with the police. At least she is known to them as a solid citizen.”

  “So is Electra,” Temple complained. “All of this is just plain bogus. And since when does Gangsters chauffeur people to police headquarters instead of to the nearest underground nightclub?”

  Ernesto could only shrug his impeccably Emanogildo Zegna-tailored shoulders. Some mysteries even Fontana brothers forebear to question. Temple wondered if Julio’s recent attentions to Molina had made things better, or worse.

  Matt had insisted on accompanying Temple into the Crimes Against Persons offices, although Ernesto also insisted he alone was needed as escort.

  Temple was further unnerved when she learned that Electra had been interrogated and released, and likely she would be too. She was relieved Electra hadn’t been arrested after seeing the police, but wondered if her account, coming after Electra’s, could inadvertently make things worse, not better.

  Even with Matt and Ernesto as escorts, Temple would have felt a lot calmer with Midnight Louie by her side.

  21

  Vegas Blues

  When Matt and Temple heard Lieutenant Molina paged, she appeared so fast that both Matt and Temple started…guiltily, some might say. Especially Temple.

  “Wait here,” the tall police officer told Matt, indicating a spare modern chair among a long row of mostly empty ones. “With that.”

  He took custody of Temple’s tote bag, as instructed, and sat.

  “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” Ernesto said with a rueful smile, “before you rush off, you should know that Miss Barr has legal representation.”

  Temple was shocked, but Molina coolly cocked a strongly dubious eyebrow.

  “The Fontana family law firm is getting a workout recently.” Molina sighed and stepped away to confer with a colleague.

  “I have a lawyer?” Temple leaned up to whisper Ernesto. “I don’t have, like, a lawyer that I know of.”

  “No problem.” Ernesto patted the top of her forearm. “We always keep several at hand.” He turned to a person sitting farther down the line of chairs, whom Temple had taken for a bookie about town, like Nostradamus, the rhyming odds maker.

  At Ernesto’s nod, a roly-poly balding man with tortoiseshell-framed glasses and a lot of white shirt frontage showing beneath a snugly rumpled suit coat hastened their way.

  Temple was even more shocked. How could the fashionably slick Fontana males employ a lawyer who looked like a dropout from mail-order law degree school? And his equally shoddy and bulging briefcase was festooned with untidy paper corners sticking out every which way.

  “Lester Savoy,” Ernesto introduced him to Temple. “Our longtime legal eagle.”

  He looked more like an adult ugly duckling. He didn’t quack like a duck, though, and rolled out a short introduction-instruction spiel.

  “Miss Barr, I’ve also been honored to represent Mrs. Lark and am acquainted with the facts of this situation. Just relax in the interrogation room, but convey the least information possible to answer any questions. I’ll be the Invisible Man unless you are asked a question it would be in our better interests to let go unanswered.”

  Invisible? No one was going to miss that Hawaiian-themed tie, which barely reached the fourth button on his wrinkled shirt. An aroma of cigar—not a pleasant vanilla-scented one, but th
e burned alfalfa-fertilizer kind—screamed “shyster”.

  Matt was looking appalled, but Ernesto quickly shepherded this new odd couple of Barr and Savoy into Molina’s custody. “All bright and shining and ready for you, Lieutenant.”

  Molina’s eyelids shuddered shut for half a second.

  Waving a hand holding a slim file, she gestured Temple and Savoy to precede her farther into the bowels of the building, Actually, everything here was too new and modern to qualify as the usual seedy bowels of a police station. Temple knew that from having witnessed an interrogation here during the recent Black & White rock band murder case.

  Now, out of the blue rather than the black-and-white, Temple was going to be facing the other side of the one-way mirror. The wrong side. As the interviewee.

  Even an interrogation room that smells as pristine as a new car can’t disguise its unpleasant purpose. Molina gestured her inside to a seat at the familiar bare table.

  Somewhere during their progress to the room, Detective Alch had turned into a tail and brought up the rear. The veteran detective, with his salt-and-pepper shock of hair and laid-back manner, reminded her of TV’s Lt. Columbo, Peter Falk. He spun to shut the door behind him while Lester Savoy pulled out the chair next to his and…left Temple to seat herself.

  As Savoy sat, he slapped the briefcase to the tabletop, a small mountain of scuffed calf-excrement-color brown leather. It stank of cigars too.

  Molina recited the date and names of all present for the recording device. Her voice was as flat and factual as her wardrobe of solid-color pant suits were monotone and her working shoes were loafers to spare the egos of shorter male colleagues or superiors.

  Temple wondered how Electra had fared when she had sat in this same room earlier today? Temple wished she’d been able to consult with Electra beforehand. No chance when she’d been whisked from airport to police headquarters, and the Fontana brothers had played accessories before the fact.

  Temple also wondered if Molina’s new rapport with Julio Fontana was a cynical plan to use them to her advantage…or the start of a real romance for the relationship-averse single mother pushing forty.

  Right now, Molina was all cop and started the session. “To begin, Miss Barr, you’ve just arrived back in Las Vegas after a two-day trip to Minnesota?”

  “Yes.”

  “The purpose?”

  “To see family.”

  “Did Mrs. Lark call you or communicate with you in any way during that time?”

  “No.”

  “Were you aware that she had been questioned in connection with a murder?”

  “No.”

  “Did you communicate or try to communicate with her when you landed in Las Vegas?”

  “No. I hadn’t heard anything—” Temple glanced at the warm hand with hairy knuckles resting on her forearm and stopped her answer with a simple, “No.”

  “Before you left town, you accompanied Electra Lark to the Araby Motel last Friday night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s in a bad neighborhood. Safer for two.”

  “So you knowingly went into a ‘bad neighborhood’ in the middle of the night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Again why?”

  “Electra needed to go there.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “To see a man about a property sale.”

  “This man was known to Mrs. Lark?”

  “He…she said he was her ex-husband.”

  “Did Mrs. Lark give you a name?”

  “She called him Jay, and later, Jay Edgar.”

  Molina rolled her eyes at the name. “Was she afraid of him?”

  Temple wanted to squirm for the first time. She was starting to wonder what kind of case the police were building against Electra. And what she might say that would seem harmless and could be damning instead. How could Molina ever believe Electra capable of murder, a nice elderly lady like Electra—with a kooky youthful spirit, granted. Darn.

  “More afraid of the neighborhood he was in,” she said.

  “What property was involved?”

  “Some land near Electra’s residential building.”

  Molina consulted the contents of the file. “Property that Jay—not an initial, J-a-y—Edgar Dyson had promised to offer to Mrs. Lark before he sold it to anyone else?”

  “Yes. That’s what she said.” Temple winced to hear Molina being as precise as a coroner like Grizzly Bahr doing an autopsy in recording information for the casebook. This was super serious.

  “But he had sold it to someone else?” Molina asked.

  “It looked like that, but he was vague about how far the deal had progressed.”

  “He said that in his motel room?”

  Temple nodded.

  “Respond vocally please,” Molina instructed.

  “Yes.”

  “What was the tone of the discussion between them?”

  “Tone? Um, mixed.”

  “Mixed?”

  Temple eyed Savoy, who’d been scribbling illegible notes on a yellow legal pad with an edge soaked in brown liquid, either coffee or tobacco spit. He didn’t look up, so she committed truth.

  “Electra wanted him to live up to his promise—”

  “So she was angry.”

  “More…adamant.”

  “And Dyson?”

  “He was apologetic. He complained that the people interested in the land had flown him into town, put him up at hotel, and then, when he lost at the gaming tables, started pressuring him to sign over the property to cover his losses.”

  “His tone as he revealed this?”

  “Whiney,” Temple answered promptly. She saw Alch stifle a smile.

  “And Mrs. Lark’s reaction?”

  “She was…upset.”

  “Angry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She threatened him?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “How inexactly was it?”

  Temple sighed. “It was sort of a political correctness thing.”

  “Political correctness?”

  “She implied he was taking up too much space on the planet.”

  “Well, it’s worse now.”

  “How?” Temple asked, startled.

  “The space Mr. Dyson’s taking up now is horizontal, not vertical.”

  “Oh.” Temple imagined Jay Edgar laid out on Grizzly Bahr’s autopsy table and shuddered. A much too ugly mental visual.

  Molina turned over some papers. “You left the victim’s room at the Araby Motel at…?”

  “Two twenty a.m.”

  “How did you know the time?”

  Temple thrust her left wrist forward to display her unusually large analog watch. “My job depends on good timing. No LEDs for me. I keep my eye and trust on the big hand and the little hand at all times, and I was eager to get home. Back to the Circle Ritz.”

  “Because?”

  “It was late, the area was shaky…and my fiancé was due home from work at a night job.”

  “So you told him—it is a him? One never knows these days.”

  “That you very well know, Lieutenant.”

  “So you told him about your offbeat expedition.”

  “No.” Temple shut her mouth, irritated. Molina’s ridiculous last comment had been calculated to needle her into giving a knee-jerk answer. And she had. The truth.

  Temple glanced at Savoy. He held a shading hand over his eyes, and she couldn’t read his expression.

  Molina had tuned out his presence. “So you didn’t mention this midnight outing to anyone.”

  “No.”

  “Not your fiancé, and not even when you and he flew off the very next day for Minnesota?”

  “No.”

  “Not even when you spent five hours captive in airplane seats with plenty of time to converse.”

  “No.”

  “What did you talk about during the flight?”

  Temple sighed. �
��I don’t know. The latest national news. Who was going to drive the rental car. My various relatives’ names and ages.”

  Molina leaned forward, narrowed her eyes. “Who did drive the rental car?”

  “I did,” Temple snapped. “I knew the area. I didn’t need a GPS.”

  “And you’re sure Mrs. Lark never said anything that threatened Jay Dyson?”

  “I, ah, didn’t say that.”

  “Oh, she did?”

  “He was reneging on a deal made when they were divorced. She wanted him to know she expected him to keep his word.”

  “Someone’s word is not legally binding.”

  Temple turned to the Fontana family lawyer, who’d been irritatingly silent. “I don’t know. We have a lawyer in the room. Is it legally binding, Mr. Savoy?”

  “Depends,” he said.

  “And I should probably put you in some of them for all the good you’re doing here,” Temple answered, immediately realizing Molina had pushed her into making an irritated response again.

  The lieutenant smiled like a shark. “Never mind, Miss Barr. We have witnesses who heard Mrs. Lark being very specific in her plans for Mr. Dyson if he didn’t do as she wanted.”

  “Witnesses?” Temple remembered the hookers. How much had they seen or heard that was damaging?

  “I also understand that you claimed to be a member of the Sisterhood of the Streets, that you and Mrs. Lark were a ‘sister act’. Is that something Vice might be interested in? Or perhaps your evidently long-suffering, kept-in-the-dark fiancé?”

  “You know that was a joke.”

  “Maybe, but you’d gone way out of your normal fields of operation to tell it, and this follow-up situation is definitely not a joke. Even if it’s because you gave me a rare opportunity to use a classic line.

  “Don’t leave town again, Miss Barr.”

  22

  Off Duty

  Ernesto, the expert chauffeur-psychiatrist by virtue of his job shepherding limo-loads of tourists around Las Vegas, reversed his recommendations on the next leg of the long, long trip from the airport in a long, long custom car.