Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Nicky is really jazzed on this Gangsters redo,” Temple started, stating the obvious.

  “And it is Nicky, solo,” Van replied. “I had no idea. Obviously the brothers had been cooking this up since their custom limo service became such a famous local attraction. I am worried that the accentuated “mob” theme is going to focus too much attention on Nicky’s Family connections.”

  “The consensus,” Temple pointed out, “is that the mob ‘went corporate’ in the seventies, and any remaining shenanigans are shadows of their former selves.”

  “I know. But the Fontana name carries overtones of the old days.”

  Meanwhile, Temple had been taking in the usual casino trappings. “This place always came across as old-fashioned and intimate and has a ready-made vintage gangster ambience. Oh, look! I love that the shopping marquee reads the ‘Moll Mall.’ Don’t you?”

  “I don’t quite get it,” Van said, trailing Temple to the brightly lit tunnels of shop windows sparkling with feminine glitz.

  “You grew up in Europe, so you wouldn’t know the reference, but Americans would. A ‘gun moll’ was a gangster’s girlfriend. Usually her clothes were brighter than her I.Q.”

  “Wasn’t there some civil unrest in Africa decades ago, before the Tutsi and the Hutu? A bloody uprising of natives who were called the Mau Mau?” Van asked.

  “Exactly. Almost everybody younger than a stereo system has forgotten that, but ‘Moll Mall’ has that same ring of madness, only it’s all us riled-up female shoppers.”

  “I’m not much of a shopper,” Van noted.

  She doesn’t have to be, Temple thought. The more money a woman has, the less she likes to join the shopping scrum to hunt for bargains and “perfect little” thises and thats. Temple could see that women and shopping are like men and sports: both are self-expressive, energetic youthful hobbies that become sporadic spectator sports as one gets older and tired and more responsible.

  Of course, Temple herself was aeons away from any of those last three things.

  A sharp whistle—not a wolf whistle—turned Temple from her chance to educate Van on conspicuous consumption that was more conspicuous than costly. Most of the biggest and choicest Strip hotels sold only luxury goods in eerily quiet, elegant shops far from the madding crowd.

  Gangsters was clearly not that kind of place. Nicky’s urgent whistle alone showed that.

  Van turned slowly, like the Queen Mary, annoyed by the streetwise hailing.

  “The Mob Museum,” Uncle Macho Mario Fontana mouthed reverently from the bottom of an escalator flanked by neon cityscapes of Chicago.

  “Not likely to be on the level of the Guggenheim at the Venetian,” Van suggested under her breath as she and Temple hustled through the milling gamblers. “This is going to be a bigger disaster than the revamped Aladdin was, but I suppose Nicky wants gainful employment for his playboy brothers.”

  “They have made a lucrative go of the limo service,” Temple said.

  “What have we made quite a go of?” the nearest brother asked.

  It could have been Armando. Or Ralph. Their white straw summer fedoras made the look-alike clan even harder to distinguish from one another. What part of tall, dark, and handsome is a hallmark?

  “The museum is up here,” Macho Mario gestured from twelve smooth-gliding steps above them. “Watch yer high heels, ladies. We don’t want any unfortunate accidents at Gangsters.”

  Nicky had waited to swing onto the moving stairs behind Temple and Van. “Don’t worry,” he advised, “I’ve got your backsides.”

  Van visibly bit her tongue, while Temple was tempted to turn around and stick hers out. Nicky was in an ideal position to be cheeky and knew it.

  At the escalator’s top, Temple wasn’t surprised to spot a lavish 1930s-style movie theater blinking its neon-bulbed marquee at them like a flirtatious chorus girl’s false eyelashes.

  The name between the blinking lights read The Roxie.

  “Oh,” Van said, impressed for the first time, “an American movie palace.”

  The graduated triangle of Art Deco columns thrust up in step-pyramid glory. Its towering central spire was silhouetted against a twilight-azure sky darkening to a navy blue dusted with golden stars, a sickle moon serving as the dot on the spire’s exclamation point.

  They followed the red carpet through the lobby populated with black-and-white human-sized cutouts of the great gangster noir movie actors . . . James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino, Robert Mitchum and Barbara Stanwyck.

  Beyond the double doors with the porthole windows, tommy guns rat-a-tatted and car brakes screeched as men groaned and women screamed. It sounded as much like a shooting gallery as the Santiago-occupied suite at the Crystal Phoenix had, but when two Fontana brothers swept the doors open, the movie “screen” before their eyes was a cutout set that they could walk right through.

  Then they were strolling ill-lit alleyways littered by fallen bodies, with wax figures in trench coats huddled over submachine guns and a sound track blaring out threats and counterthreats and lines of immortal gangster-film dialogue, like “You dirty rat.”

  “Dis is where the latest find will be,” Macho Mario said, adopting Chicago-style mobster diction like a theatrical pro.

  “Latest find?” Van asked.

  “Yeah. The body part that just surfaced from Lake Mead, now that the dried-up fringes uncovered some dirty work.”

  “Surely,” Temple said, “the police wouldn’t release—”

  “Vegas is not just some one-Bugsy burg,” Macho Mario said. “We have a Madam Tussauds wax museum in town. There are these mortuary artists or whatever from the morgue to the Madam’s working here. Macho Mario does not wait for things to become public domain. My domain is public. Voilà!”

  Well, Temple thought, according to legend, the old-time gangsters did carry submachine guns in violin cases. She supposed that implied some “culture.”

  Macho Mario whisked a black trench coat from what seemed a nearby hunched figure to reveal a display pedestal surmounted by a Plexiglas box. Through the clear plastic, one could view a glob of coagulated concrete from which two splintered shin bones stood up like giant toothpicks in an aspic of solid cement oatmeal.

  “Oh, my God,” Van muttered, “shades of the Black Museum.”

  “Black Museum?” Macho Mario was gratified by the reaction to his prize. “I like that title. This is just a mock-up of the latest body parts found in Lake Mead, but it will be in Gangsters upgraded Black Museum. Oh, wait! We gotta make clear we’re not celebrating black gangsta rappers. Boys, isn’t that going to be confusing?”

  Yes, Temple thought, as the Fontana brothers rolled their eyes in unison.

  “The Black Museum I was referring to,” Van explained, “is a very old, private, and venerable museum kept at Scotland Yard in London.”

  “‘Venerable’?” Macho Mario rolled the word on his tongue like Mama Fontana’s world-famous pasta sauce. “That means fancy, right? Scotland Yard? That’s Sherlock Holmes stuff, right?”

  Van absorbed Macho Mario’s further questions with inarticulate disbelief, while her husband placed a quieting palm on his uncle’s well-padded suit shoulder.

  “Yeah,” Nicky said. “Pardon my wife’s shock. She’s a tender blossom, reared in Continental girls academies. The Black Museum hit her at quite an impressionable age. The museum is this ‘little shop of horrors,’ you could say, at Scotland Yard headquarters. Few outside the constabulary get in to see it, but her daddy was a major hotel manager—”

  “Like you.” Macho Mario nodded seriously.

  “Like me and Van. Only in London. Her father got them an ‘in,’ because this place is famously hard to get into.”

  Macho Mario’s manicured hand lifted like an upscale traffic cop’s. “Say no more. That happens with them fancy French restaurants in Paris. You gotta reserve months in advance by letter. Now that is class. The Eiffel Tower joint at the Paris Hotel on the S
trip is classy, but a letter in advance is real class.”

  “Real class,” Nicky repeated. “And e-mail may do it nowadays. You must remember that Van’s father was German.”

  “Sorry,” Macho Mario commiserated with Van, who was now biting her lip from either fury or laughter. “Italian is much better.”

  Nicky soldiered on. “So Van was just twelve when they had the tour, and there was a pedestal like this one, with a clear cube atop it, only it was actually really thick glass.”

  “This Plexiglas here is better than glass.” Macho Mario rapped thick knuckles on the surface, making an interior liquid quiver creepily. “It’s lighter. More modern. More expensive. Not breakable.”

  “Absolutely, Uncle Mario.”

  “I buy the best.”

  “Of course, but back to the Black Museum,” Nicky said.

  “Did it have all these lights and sound effects, eh? Like a gangster movie?”

  “No,” Van finally said, speaking for herself, “it was just a series of offices then, really, with some framed Jack the Ripper notes on the wall, an acid murderer’s claw-footed bathtub, and tables of confiscated homemade weapons, including Freddy Krueger’s clawed gloves from the American horror film series, with human blood on the razor-blade nails.”

  “Yeah? I’m impressed. That Freddy the Ripper! What a hit man! Dressed up like a movie creep and doing the serial-cutter crawl through London.”

  “That’s not what made the biggest impression on Van,” Nicky said.

  “Nor the Victorian Inquisition–like S-and-M machinery,” Van muttered under her breath to Temple, whose eyes widened.

  “What in that office suite of horrors did impress you so much, little lady?” Macho Mario inquired delicately. “A knitting-needle murder weapon?”

  “No, Uncle Mario,” Van answered as coolly as only Van could. “It was the glass display cube so like this one, also filled with some liquid or other.”

  Macho Mario glanced at the concrete-booted shinbones. “Death by water would have kinda terrified this guy before his end came,” he said. “I can see how it scared a little girl like you.”

  “Nicky said the exhibit made the ‘biggest impression’ on me, not that it scared me.”

  “No?” Macho Mario managed to sound both condescending and dubious.

  “No,” Van said. “Something floated in the liquid, which was evidently a preservative: a severed human arm. Cut off here.” The edge of Van’s pale hand gave a light karate chop to her own upper arm. “Severed across the humerus bone. It had been floating there, flesh and fingers and all, for decades.”

  “Ew,” somebody said, behind the inner circle gazing at the impaled bones.

  Temple turned, surprised to find the speaker had been Spuds Lonnigan, the Three O’Clock Louie’s cook.

  “I’ll never be able to boil another soup bone in my kitchen life,” he went on. “Why would the Brit cops have a severed arm on display?”

  Van smiled. “They had crime scene fingerprints that they thought would match a German perpetrator. So they wired the Berlin police to send them the man’s fingerprints.”

  “The man in question,” Nicky said, “happened to have been killed in a police shoot-out, so the German police cut off his right arm, packed it in dry ice, and shipped it to Scotland Yard.”

  “But—” Macho Mario was almost speechless with confusion. “Why the whole arm? Why not just the hand, which would be, uh, cheaper to ship?”

  “Teutonic efficiency,” Nicky explained, straight-faced. “The Black Museum guide explained the matter that way. Why skimp on body parts when you could as easily ship an arm as a hand. You’ll understand why I don’t cross my wife, Uncle Mario.”

  “I guess not!” He wiped his palms nervously on his pant seams.

  “A gruesome little trophy, this,” Temple agreed, gazing upon their own similar artifact, “and it has a genuine Las Vegas connection, likely mob. Until someone knows who and why that guy’s feet were encased in cement and dropped like an anchor in Lake Mead, though, it doesn’t command a lot of media interest. And that’s what you need to launch the announcement of a redone hotel.”

  “You’re a snoop sister,” Macho Mario told Temple, with narrowed eyes. “You figure all that out.”

  Eightball O’Rourke stepped up beside Temple. “I heard some long-gone mobsters favored the ‘Lake Mead footbath’ as a way to dump rivals or turncoat associates. That was in the forties, before the place became a tourist draw. So anything in the way of evidence on this guy’s bones was probably eaten away decades ago.”

  “On the other hand,” Temple said, “solved cold cases are a hot ticket in both fact and fiction now. I’ll check with the coroner’s office. Forensics is much more sophisticated, and ID-ing a long-dead body would make a bigger tourist draw.”

  Nicky surveyed the surrounding vintage cars and blown-up photographs.

  “Great stories make museums, not exhibits,” he said. “We need to bring everything alive.”

  At that moment, a figure in a huge photograph stepped away from the wall and sprayed the onlookers with . . . the neck of an electric guitar, as a sound track played screaming riffs, and the static photographs started streaming past as if everyone present was riding a carousel.

  Which they were.

  Even Van lost her composure enough to reach for Nicky’s support, at the same instant chrome stripper poles shot up from the floor, ready to be grabbed for balance. Nightclub booths also levitated around the moving circle’s edge. The Fontana brothers gestured the others into seats, then swung round the poles and seated themselves.

  Santiago in his white pseudo zoot suit with his hopefully unloaded vintage tommy gun leaped between the rotating booths into the carousel’s center like a ringmaster.

  “Sound,” he shouted into the din. “Motion. Surprise. This must look like a traditional museum but become an ‘amuseum.’ An amusement park that does not ‘park’ itself but takes you, the viewer—the ‘amusee’—places.”

  Temple grabbed hold of a cocktail-table edge. The entire exhibit area was slowly screwing itself down to a lower level, the surrounding walls changing into black-and-white movie scenes, with Edward G. Robinson barking threats at the circling party as anonymous punks in trench coats and fedoras sprayed crescendos of gunfire into their midst.

  There was only the slightest jerk as the elevator floor reached the lower level and stopped turning.

  Leggy cocktail waitresses with aprons as small as their bar trays scissored their fishnet-hose-clad gams to the tables, setting down drinks in vintage lowball and small martini glasses.

  Temple tried to name the drinks. The first to come to mind was . . . an old-fashioned. She thought she recognized some gin rickeys and Singapore Slings.

  A flat-screen TV menu materialized from the middle of each booth’s table, flashing movie scenes of the available drinks clutched in some long-gone movie star’s black-and-white hand.

  “Disneyland for adults,” Van declared, sipping her—Temple checked the flashing “pages” of filmed drinks—Tom Collins. “Everything’s animated.” Van eyed the six frozen-faced beauty-queen waitresses floating drinks down to tables occupied by the men in the party, while Santiago explained their video menus to them. “Except for the eye candy.”

  “Gangsters gotta have that,” Nicky said.

  “Vegas too.” Van glanced at Temple and sighed. “What do you think?”

  “This is just the first stage Santiago proposed,” Nicky said. “It can always be redacted.”

  Using that ridiculous word made Temple and Van laugh in tandem.

  “We can always ‘redact’ Santiago,” Van added.

  “Meanwhile,” Temple suggested, “let’s see what other media magic tricks he has to show us. I do like the sinking cocktail bar. Very post-Titanic.”

  “Uncle Mario wanted a bank of Marriott-style bullet-shaped glass elevator cars with tufted white satin-lined doors to reach the underground level,” Nicky admitted to the women
’s groans, “so I vote for the cocktail carousel myself.”

  By then Santiago had reached their booth and swung into his sales routine.

  “This is only a crude approximation yet. The Speakeasy bar and restaurant will be under the area of the hotel we just left. That offers necessary ventilation and crowd-control possibilities in case of disaster. This descending carousel is the cocktail area, of course, and beyond us, in the dark, Gangsters limos on rails will await passengers desiring an exciting trip to the Crystal Phoenix.

  “These elderly gentlemen are becoming quite animated about the menu possibilities. Apparently, they have actually drunk some of these amusing old cocktails.”

  The Glory Hole Gang members were indeed hashing over future entrée names on menus, and Temple was dreaming up a theme of bullet-hole-riddled online pages, with sound effects and videos, and Van’s face was still paler than her hair.

  “Trends change constantly in the hospitality industry,” Van said at last. “What’s new quickly becomes ‘old hat,’ and what was forgotten becomes the new favorite. For a while.”

  “Why, Miss von Rhine, could you possibly be talking about Santiago’s multimedia inventions?” the man himself asked.

  “Eventually,” Van said, with a softening smile. “Everything moves so fast these days.”

  “One would hope values would not,” Santiago said.

  The word seemed odd coming from such a flamboyantly shallow persona, Temple thought.

  Still, every artist in every media had to be a one-man or one-woman show these days, on the Internet, on Facebook, on Twitter—“on” all the time, everywhere. She’d even heard Matt complaining that the radio station wanted to move him “onto YouTube and beyond” their Web site.

  “Let me show you,” Santiago suggested, “the darker possibilities ahead.”