Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “The workmen chipped away all the concealing construction and I got this idea.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Given the legends about the Phoenix’s own Jersey Joe Jackson hiding stashes of cash and silver dollars in and around Vegas, I want the workmen to open the vault in full media presence. The public loves the idea of buried treasure, so the ‘opening’ should bring out all the syndicated media from Los Angeles as well as all the usual suspects in Vegas. Nicky could not buy better exposure. But I need to get the whole setup together really fast. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re brilliant. If anyone can pull this off, you can.”

  “It might be a real tangle who gets the money, but that’s up to the powers-that-be to decide.”

  “True, but I think you should get a bonus.”

  “Bonuses are good. That would help with the bridesmaids’ costs for the wedding.”

  “Bridesmaids, plural? You are planning on a big production.”

  “I always plan on a big production, keep that in mind.”

  “I do, I do.”

  “And that’s what you’ll be repeating at the altar. Gee, I hope I’m not biting off more than I can chew here.”

  “You’re talking about the unveiling of the vault again, I hope.”

  “Yeah.” Temple suddenly felt a nasty, aching gnaw in her stomach. Cold feet?

  “What’s the worst that could happen?” she asked him.

  She answered her own question before he could.

  “The worst that could happen is that vault could be absolutely empty.”

  “I’ll say a prayer that it isn’t,” Matt promised.

  “Thank you, Matt!”

  The Deity having been invoked, they wound up the conversation with a few innocent but extended good-byes, and Temple hung up.

  The gnawing feeling in her stomach wasn’t cold feet about anything. Apparently her nervous fit was over. She knew her course.

  She jumped out of bed, heading for the main room and the kitchen.

  She was starved! Starved for . . . blueberry yogurt with a crisp topping of . . . caramel corn.

  Whose Vault Is It?

  Temple found it impossibly nerve-racking to have all of Fontana, Inc. peering over her shoulder, including Van von Rhine.

  Not that Temple’s shoulders were broad or high enough to keep a grasshopper from kibitzing over them.

  “You’re sure we went with the right announcer?” Van asked.

  Underground, in the hard-surfaced tunnel, her hushed whisper carried as if she were yelling through a megaphone.

  Not to worry. The announcer was absorbed in fussing with the tiny earphone in one ear and eyeing himself in a mirror the prop girl was holding up.

  “Is this all the camera-power opening Bugsy Siegel’s vault could pull?” Macho Mario Fontana demanded from behind Temple’s other shoulder.

  “It’s all the major stations as far as L.A. and several national news feature shows, including Excess Hollywood,” Temple assured every Fontana ear within hearing, which included Nicky and eight of his brothers, who formed an impressive crowd on their own. “Everybody’s pooling camera teams now. Recession.”

  “Recession!” Macho Mario ridiculed. “In my day we had goddamn real Depressions, not these pansy recessions.”

  “Watch the political correctness,” Nicky growled.

  “Now I can’t even say the word Depression?”

  “It’s the flower thing, Zio Mario,” Julio put in as the second-oldest and therefore bravest nephew on site.

  “I will call a g-d daffodil a daffodil. And who is this limp-wrist holding the microphone? I wanted someone with authority, like Robert Stack or Charlton Heston.”

  “They’re dead.” Julio broke the news.

  “No kidding? And they didn’t even announce it on TV? The world is going to the bloodhounds.”

  Temple didn’t want to admit she shared the paterfamilias’s anxiety.

  She’d wanted Geraldo Rivera, but he’d been booked.

  At least she’d found someone who remembered who Geraldo Rivera was.

  Basically, this job required a huckster who deeply believed in his own seriousness.

  Meanwhile, the pneumatic hammers drilled into the rock surrounding the massive metal door of the vaunted “vault.”

  Rock shards littering the packed dirt floor and the support structure’s wooden ribs made this section of tunnel feel like the belly of a petrified whale. The vault had been sited halfway between Gangsters’ and the Crystal Phoenix’s stoutly supported tunnel of faux-rock mine walls bolted into strong concrete beneath.

  Everybody present wore hard hats, including the videographers toting large cameras on their shoulders, giving them Alien monster silhouettes.

  The Phoenix’s section had built-in temperature controls, but this new area was the last freshly excavated bit from the Gangsters side and oddly combined hot and cold spots. It felt dank, but also steamy.

  Temple figured a little sweat added to the ambience, and it certainly made the drill operators’ tan, muscled, bare arms look wrestling-ring ready. Two of the four videographers were female and were not missing panning the local color.

  Somehow Crawford Buchanan, self-proclaimed local “personality,” radio vagabond, and perpetrator of cheesy events usually involving underage females, was the exact right figure to ballyhoo the forthcoming mystery revelation. His short stature, black suit, and gel-slathered, black-streaked white pompadour made him an “anti”-Santiago. It also brought a funereal gravity to an operation that threatened to reveal . . . “Bugsy Siegel’s vault, folks. This massive rusted steel door has been dated to be at least forty years old,” he shouted into the mike over the racket of spitting faux rock and concrete.

  “You know the story of Al Capone’s Chicago vault, found decades after his death and famously broken into on live television with Geraldo Rivera at the microphone in nineteen eighty-six. No? Forgotten about that? Let me fill you in.”

  Buchanan began pacing in front of the looming steel vault door.

  “Capone took over the Chicago Outfit in nineteen twenty-five, before Vegas was a glimmer in the mob’s eye. He was a primo mob boss. He planned the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre and ran the operation from a suite in the Lexington Hotel until he was arrested for income-tax evasion in nineteen thirty-one. Capone was kaput.”

  Temple was wishing by now that Crawford was kaput. Every bit of this exposition could be cut, and probably would be.

  “So, folks,” Buchanan continued, “the old Lexington Hotel was long overdue for renovation by the eighties. When a surveying crew comes in, what do they find? A series of secret tunnels. Yes, folks, tunnels just like this one linking Gangsters with the far older former Joshua Tree Hotel-Casino, where Jersey Joe Jackson holed up until his death. And in those Chicago tunnels, they found escape routes to local taverns and brothels. They even found a shooting range! And rumors of a secret vault beneath the hotel.” His radio baritone deepened into a thrilling basso: “Just. Like. This. One.”

  Crawford straightened his slight frame even as his voice grew deeper and more powerful.

  “By then, Geraldo Rivera himself was kaput. He’d been fired by ABC, but he cooked up a comeback broadcast, a two-hour live special program of opening that vault. Thirty million people and standing-by IRS agents and a medical examiner watched, breathless to find Capone’s buried riches or bodies.

  “Inside the finally-opened vault? Nothing. It was empty, but Rivera’s career was revived.

  “And, don’t forget. This is Vegas, babies! We’ve already had a notorious vault excavated and found it stuffed with treasure, if not bodies. Vegas’s shady founding father, Benny Binion, had a son named Ted, probably killed because of a massive vault buried in the desert, which authorities opened on his death in nineteen ninety-eight. The vault was . . . crammed with six tons of silver bullion. Six tons! Not to mention scads of chips and paper currency and piles of uncirculated mint Carson City silver
dollars, more than a hundred thousand, worth millions. And that was only a decade or so ago.”

  This recital was actually causing some onlooker jaws to drop, including Temple’s. She glanced around. Even Santiago’s eyes were glinting with speculation. This tunnel was his playground at the moment. . . . Might he find more vaults?

  Maybe there was something fabulous inside this vault.

  “Remember,” Buchanan egged on his now-actually-spellbound audience, “for the last century, Vegas remained a playground for outlaws, from train robbers to mobsters to corporate shysters.”

  Buchanan was in full flight of fancy, covering all bases.

  “This is not Al Capone’s vault and maybe not even Bugsy’s vault, but it may be Jersey Joe Jackson’s. He died supposedly broke, atop this very ‘hunka hunka burnin’ hidden treasure. Remember? One of Jackson’s reputed stashes of mint silver dollars worth millions was discovered a few years ago deep in the desert. Imagine what the cagey old fart would have buried in his own backyard!

  “We’re talking fast-buck operators from the Vegas founding era, when Bugsy and his Jersey-Joey-come-lately desert empire-builder pal, Jackson, were putting up the Flamingo and the Joshua Tree Hotels,” Buchanan went on. “We know Bugsy was shot dead in his girlfriend’s Beverly Hills living room, but Jersey Joe literally faded away in Vegas, just a few hundred feet from and above this very spot. He died in a modest suite in his abandoned Joshua Tree Hotel—”

  Temple considered it a Howard Hughes story gone very wrong, much sooner.

  “—a hotel now risen from the ashes as the glamorous Crystal Phoenix.”

  Temple also considered that finding that desert cache unfortunately unmasked Jackson as a cheating member of the Glory Hole Gang of prospectors.

  The surviving gang members were all on site now, grizzled and creaky but still possessing camera-ready grins. Their colorful, Old Vegas presence had really helped roust the media for this admittedly hoary and hokey stunt à la Geraldo’s highly hyped The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault.

  Sensationalism was the name of the media game in print or on film these days, and retro was popular . . . again.

  Macho Mario had made it plain to all comers that he was personally hoping that the opened vault would reveal a scantily clad pinup-girl poster on the inside of the door, number one. Then a fortune of some kind.

  The surprise existence of the vault was genuine. It predated the Crystal Phoenix excavation and was located beyond the area the hotel had cleared. Although a rat hole circled it, the vault door was sealed tight as a submarine’s engine room.

  Temple would forgo pinup girls, but some souvenirs from the Titanic, say, would be most welcome. Even some more vintage silver dollars. Jersey Joe was rumored to have had more than one stashing spot, and the area above them had been raw desert back in the fifties.

  The shrill drone of the drills slipped into another range of shriek.

  With a crack, the locking mechanism gave way. The metal door’s huge hinges slipped, sending up clouds of stone and metal powder from the surrounding structure.

  Fontana brothers frantically clapped the dust from their immaculate silk-blend dark suits, now the same pale color as the powder.

  “Pay dirt!” Crawford Buchanan bellowed, pushing Pitchblende O’Hara and Wild Blue Pike aside to jerk on the gleaming brass spoked wheel that would open the door.

  Nothing happened. He jumped up and down on the spokes like a monkey on a stick.

  Nothing moved.

  “Now, there,” said Macho Mario, his stocky figure in Fontana signature threads pushing to the fore, “I’m head of the family. I’ll do the honors.”

  He grabbed the huge loosened wheel and tugged. Then he grunted and twisted. Finally, he fell back, panting.

  “I thought you cut through the lock,” he yelled at the sweat-streaming workmen who had dutifully ebbed aside to let the big shots claim the glory.

  Everyone stared, stymied, at the metal powder-dusted door.

  Then, while no one was trying, it slowly edged ajar four inches.

  “Jersey Joe’s ghost!” Crawford shouted. “Human hands were not touching the handle just now. I was watching and swear it.”

  Absolutely true. The hovering videographers focused for a close-up of the waist-high mechanism.

  Temple’s brow crimped with consternation. This was a great effect, but someone must have engineered it. There would be hell to pay when the media realized that. Being short, she looked down, wondering if a concealed chain of some sort had been attached to the door base.

  A motion at the door’s very bottom caught her eye. A black cat muzzle retreated from the opening.

  No, Temple thought. Impossible. Midnight Louie had “nosed” the metal door open? From the inside?

  She watched his black form slip out and vanish unnoted among the videographers’ jean-clad legs as they jockeyed to film the ajar door, not the exiting cat.

  Nicky took matters into his hotel owner’s hands and stepped up to jerk on the immobile metal spokes with both fists. That old Fontana-brother magic still worked. The bank-vault-thick door groaned open with a clank befitting Marley’s ghost . . . and out came . . . walked . . . another black cat, to Temple, anyway, the first giant step for catkind to all the other witnesses.

  Midnight Louise sat in the opening and yawned.

  “Someone’s already breached the vault,” Eightball O’Rourke accused. “This isn’t any debut opening. It’s a setup job.” He glared at Crawford Buchanan.

  Temple pushed to the forefront, even though she might accidentally and unprofessionally appear on camera.

  “This vault was not accessible beforehand,” she insisted. “We checked it last night and again this morning.”

  “Stop the fussing and see what’s inside,” Eightball O’Rourke urged. “You folks call yourself media, but you don’t have the curiosity of that little cat there. Now that’s better, but don’t trample her. That’s the Crystal Phoenix mascot.”

  “Midnight Louise?” Van von Rhine’s soprano suddenly cried into the milling people and rising dust. “Don’t hurt her!”

  Temple herself was pushed aside by Crawford Buchanan as he elbowed through the narrow opening. She didn’t see Louise underfoot anywhere.

  “I got it!” Buchanan crowed, his voice echoing off metal. “I’m inside. Whoo! What a rank whiff. I sure hope paper money doesn’t mildew. Get me some light here.”

  In seconds, the press of light-bearing workmen and videographers had pushed the heavy door open wide and rinsed the dazzling silver metal interior with light.

  It illuminated a room-sized empty safe, all right, except it wasn’t empty.

  Gasps echoed in the sodden air.

  “Let me out!” Buchanan ground the Cuban heels of his pimp shoes into Temple’s tender instep as he stampeded past. “It smells like a cat box in there.”

  By now everyone had stopped crowding and yelling in the opening.

  By now every eye, human or mechanical or digital, had fixed on the rotund corpse of a man in white tie and tails who lay oddly but stiffly splayed on the red satin lining of his evening cloak on the safe’s steel-gray metal floor.

  His white gloves, cane, and a top hat that lay on its glossy black side were arrayed near his pale, bloated features.

  “What a rip-off!” someone yelled. “It’s a wax dummy.”

  That certain “someone” had been Crawford Buchanan.

  As usual, he was terribly wrong.

  Someone else had to do something. Temple guessed it was up to her.

  She stepped forward, ripped the mike from Crawford’s clammy yet clutching grip, and considered bending down to press her fingers against the formal gentleman’s carotid artery just above the high starched collar.

  Overkill, so to speak, she decided.

  Obviously, the man was as cold and unmoving as a still photo, yet definitely not made of wax. He was dead. Morally, ethically, spiritually and physically, positively and absolutely, undeniably and
reliably and most sincerely . . . dead.

  Shock had turned everyone present into stone. Then the videographers all rushed forward, grunting to seize the best camera angle.

  A wall of expensive dark tailoring materialized in front of them, blocking Temple from being overrun. A six-foot wall of gangster-suited muscle between her and a media feeding frenzy was even more welcome than silver dollars.

  When she spoke she knew she was heard but not seen, and that was fine with her too.

  “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen of the media. We need to clear the scene and call the police. No more filming.”

  Like a row of ultradressy football linemen, the brothers Fontana swayed en masse this way and that to block all camcorders and cell-phone cameras.

  One cell phone bobbing up and down was clutched in Buchanan’s pasty hand.

  He, unfortunately, was definitely and indubitably not dead.

  Road to Ruin

  “This whole blasted island is only the size of Wisconsin.”

  “Indiana, actually,” Gandolph corrected.

  Max knew he’d sounded cranky just then and had deserved correction for that, if not his geography. His whole body ached from a mere three-hour flight and now this drive across half of Ireland. If he took a wrong turn and needed to reverse direction, his shoulders ached so much he had to turn the car around in several moves on the narrow road. So much for the aftermath of grand gestures. He found it easier to admit to being a mental grouch than a physical one. Call it the House syndrome. Wait! That was a television show popping up in his memory. Old or new?

  Gandolph must have put up with a lot from him, because he continued speaking in a calm, professorial way. “Ireland is a small nation; always was, Max, but it always loomed large in your personal history.”

  “Where am I actually ‘from,’ Garry?”

  The older man sighed. Older people often did that. Trouble was, Max was so inclined himself these days.

  “Your birth family was . . . is . . . in Wisconsin.”

  “ ‘Birth’ family? I’m adopted?”

  “No, not at all. After Sean’s loss, you adopted a number of foreign lands, a different future, and a different family, which you constructed piece by piece. It was all your choice. Forced upon you, but a choice, nevertheless. A hard choice. Especially for a boy, not a man.”