Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Not his goldurn wardrobe,” Wild Blue agreed, picking up the photo of the silver boot-heel stamp.

  “Aw, it destroys your faith in humanity all over again,” Pitchblende said mournfully. “Our old pal Boots Benson musta been in on sneakin’ off our illegally obtained lucre and squirreling it away for Jersey Joe. Just another dirty rotten desert rat.”

  “Now, maybe not,” Eightball opined, sitting forward on the oversized yardage of couch. “Maybe our restaurant out at Temple Bar was settin’ atop the answer to our busted lives of crime all the time, buried under fathoms of silent Lake Mead water.”

  “Our mascot, Three O’Clock, has snagged carp out there,” Spuds Lonnigan said, with a shudder. “That could be the seventieth generation of fish that nibbled on Boots’s bones. How long do carp live, anyway?”

  “Longer than we’d think,” Cranky Ferguson answered. “I’m guessing twenty-five to fifty years in places where there ain’t predators, and carp is not a prized game fish unless it’s a real huge one.”

  Temple had sat openmouthed during this conversation, but she shut it fast when she realized all her companions were versed in the sport of fishing.

  “No,” Eightball agreed, “it’s your largemouth and striped bass, channel catfish, crappie, and bluegill you want at our southern end of Lake Mead. Tourists have fed the shoreline carp to overstuffing for decades. So I agree, several of those suckers could have nibbled on Boots’s sunken chest. Yo, ho, ho.”

  “That is so gruesome,” Temple said. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t like sportfishing.”

  “Boots is gone,” Eightball told her. “Weren’t pretty, but now we know where, thanks to you.”

  “I need to know why,” Temple said.

  Eightball shook his head and regarded his pals. “Just like my granddaughter, Jilly, at age six. Why, why, why.” He turned to Temple again. “You and I have done some private-eye work, and we know murder always boils down to motive and method.”

  “The method in this case illuminated the motive,” Temple said.

  “How so?” Cranky asked.

  “It’s such a classic mob ploy,” she explained, “encasing a man’s feet in concrete and throwing him off a pier.”

  “Yup.” Wild Blue jumped into the discussion. “That was a big city mob method. They had a lot more water at hand—New York Harbor or Lake Michigan in Chicago.”

  “That’s right,” Temple said, getting into the ghoulish groove. “A lake for body dumping was a novelty in the desert. Lake Mead’s artificial. When did it—?”

  “Oh, young lady,” Pitchblende said, “the big Depression, of course. Hoover Dam was one of the few things that damn-fool president did to help folks get work. His first reaction was to laugh the whole thing off as poor folks not wanting to work enough. Building that dam backed up the Colorado River, and then you got the lake.”

  “Nobody much cared about that big old watering hole in those days,” Spuds said. “Nobody much cared about any of this until Bugsy Siegel tried to sell the area as a resort to Hollywood folk.”

  “What I’m getting at,” Temple said, “is that Boots Benson went missing because he’d been murdered in this spectacular, brutal, big-time mob way. I’m thinking his death was mostly meant to be a message.”

  “Yeah, but if nobody knew he’d been killed, much less that way, what was the point?” Wild Blue asked.

  Temple glanced at the photo of the maker marks on what was left of Boots’s footwear. “Maybe someone got all modern and took photos of Boots’s going-away launch. Maybe someone else was told and shown what happened to Boots.”

  “That’s it!” Cranky Ferguson slapped his tobacco pouch down on the coffee table, making them all jump. “That’s why Jersey Joe got so quiet and dodgy with us all about where the train-robbery silver dollars were hidden and what was going on in town and when we could expect to get some of our cut.”

  “He kept stalling us,” Spuds put in, “and stalling us, saying it was needed to put up the Joshua Tree Hotel and Casino.”

  “And that put you all off?” Temple asked.

  “Sure,” Wild Blue Pike said. “We expected to wait to get something back on our investment. The Joshua Tree was the whole purpose of the stickup. Train robbery was pretty rare by then. We had it all figured out how to separate the silver cars and shuffle ’em off on a side rail and keep movin’ them along from spur to spur track. We didn’t wear bandanas on our faces and pull guns or nothing. I kept track of everything from the air, before and during and after, from my biplane.”

  “Why’d you think the Crystal Phoenix put the Haunted Mine Ride in the Jersey Joe Jackson attraction, girl?” Spuds asked. “During those early construction days, rails ran right nearby. We were miners, for mercy’s sake! We just excavated ourselves under the hotel-to-be property and scooted those silver-dollar-loaded cars down there and covered up the shaft.”

  Temple’s mouth was open again.

  “Only we ended up getting the shaft,” Wild Blue complained. “Nothin’ we could do about it. Jersey Joe seemed to have spread the wealth from there, to hiding places in the distant desert and right under our feet, and nothing we could do about it but stew.”

  “Then the lost vault was real?” Temple asked.

  “Sure.” Eightball shook his head at that latest travesty. “It was real hard to keep our composures, watching that sucker getting opened in front of God and TV cameras and that weasely Crawford Buchanan and fancy man from down Rio way.”

  “Looks like that dead magician fellow inside got the same shaft we did,” Pitchblende said, puffing on his now-smoking pipe.

  “What if the vault had been loaded to the gills with silver dollars from that robbery?” Temple wondered.

  Eightball chuckled. “That’s been dead to us for decades. Those ill-gotten gains are too infamous to do anybody any good now. ’Cept gettin’ new greedy fools killed. Poor Boots started the chain letter of deceit from hell, and Jersey Joe was the next recipient.”

  “So you’re thinking Jersey Joe never gave the mob the money, but he never had a worry-free day in his life from then on,” Temple said.

  “Yup.” Cranky had returned from the test kitchen with an opened longneck. “That’s why he never faced us guys again.”

  “Maybe he thought you’d get the ‘concrete bathtub’ treatment like Boots if you were linked to the robbery,” Temple suggested.

  The stunned silence showed they’d never thought of that.

  “Jersey Joe was cheatin’ us because he was protectin’ us?” Pitchblende asked in slow, four-four time.

  “He didn’t live much of the high life after the Joshua Tree went up,” Temple pointed out. “After all, he’s famous for what he hid and didn’t use. And, Eightball, didn’t your granddaughter, Jill, find some of the stash?”

  “Yeah, that was a fluke,” Eightball said, “and by then any money we couldn’t give Jilly for college and such was moot. She was already grown.”

  “But she’s played the World Championship Poker game,” Wild Bill pointed out, “and is the top-ranking female. Wouldn’t have happened it she hadn’t grown up playing Gin Rummy and Old Maid and poker with us old coots when we were all hidin’ out for years in that ghost town.”

  “I guess,” Eightball said, beaming even as he shrugged at their ward’s accomplishments.

  “And now,” Temple pointed out, “the very drying up of Lake Mead that revealed the resting place of your old associate, Boots, is putting the light of day on the puzzling actions and motivations of another old associate who may have betrayed you all for your own good.”

  Eightball considered, nodded his head, then glared at her.

  “You are an inveterate and unreformed Little Mary Sunshine, did you know that, Miss Temple Barr?”

  “Not really.” She cringed a bit inside. These guys had endured forty years of deprivation, loneliness, and justifiable anger. Who was she to put a better spin on it?

  “Get a whole round of those beers, Crank
y,” Eightball ordered. “We need to drink a long-delayed toast to Boots Benson and Jersey Joe Jackson, may they finally rest in peace, boots and bolo tie together, and to Miss Temple Barr: may forever she wave, at Lake Mead or elsewhere, wherever it’s needed.”

  An Inspector Calls

  When Temple told Van she’d work on the death in the vault solo, she’d hadn’t realized how really solo she was these days.

  She was used to a sounding board, but Max was as gone as a Las Vegas tourist on a three-night jag. Now Matt was in Chicago, doing a daily live Amanda Show gig and having serial dinners with his relatives, especially his wary mother and his newly discovered birth father.

  “I’ll do some groundwork for you flying up with me on a later visit,” he’d told Temple on the long-distance phone call when she checked in from her car. “I understand you’d want to have a formal wedding in Minneapolis or Chicago for both families, but mine is a mess right now. I don’t want their ancient issues clouding the biggest day of our lives. Believe me, I’ve seen how a couple of feuding family members can make a wedding into a battleground no one will ever forget, including the happy couple.”

  Temple had nodded, though he couldn’t see. She’d witnessed that too, had attended wedding receptions where pregnant brides’ bitter fathers had too much champagne and blabbed their daughters’ condition to all and sundry, or where best men had needed to confess during the wedding toast that they’d known the bride “in the biblical fashion.” Or worse.

  When Temple returned to her Circle Ritz condo, it was quiet and empty, and she realized that would drive her nuts. She went to the spare bedroom to use the desktop computer and did a search on Revienne Schneider and Professor Hugo Gruetzmeyer. She no longer Googled. She used Bing.com because that encouraged her to shout aloud, “Bingo!” when she hit pay dirt and found something.

  Pay dirt, she mused. That was a gold miners’ expression, and if anyone should take it seriously, it was the old guys who made up the Glory Hole Gang.

  Hmph. Maybe she wasn’t solo on this investigation. They had a lot at stake in settling matters and getting their restaurant underway at Gangsters. Their brainstorming session today had put a new light on some very dark issues in their lives and given her a lot more to think about regarding current deaths and disappointments.

  Why hadn’t she thought of them sooner, instead of moping around feeling that forties song staple, lonely and blue?

  Cheered, Temple dove into the many sites mentioning Revienne Schneider. She found nothing about her family, but plenty on that Swiss private school. Then the Sorbonne in Paris, then a gap, then graduation from Sigmund Freud University of Vienna and Paris, and an impressive portfolio building to a crescendo of 165,000 Web mentions.

  Apparently, Revienne Schneider had been a girl wonder right out of PhD school, working with damaged young women all over the Continent and Ireland.

  Mention of that island nation always chilled Temple’s blood. It had spawned Kathleen O’Connor, she who’d ruined the lives of Max and his terrorism-slain cousin, Sean, and who’d seduced Max into a future of regret and undercover counterterrorism.

  Now Temple was chilled to the bone to read of the awful Magdalen institutions, where young women were given a life sentence of drudgery and incarceration. Verbal, physical, and sexual abuse thrived among such an isolated and helpless population, as it can in private families as well. In comparison, having four slightly bullying, obnoxiously superior older brothers didn’t seem like much of a problem at all.

  The former reporter in Temple was working up a righteous rage, but the Magdalen atrocities had long been revealed, though the hidden sins of the Roman Catholic Church in that regard persisted the way Wall Street CEOs’ unbelievable millions in “bonuses” persisted after the entire country’s economy crashed in 2008.

  You had to admire Revienne for wading into that cesspool of damage with her fresh shrink credentials and, well, media-ready personal attributes. This woman definitely looked “Illegally Blonde.”

  Jeesh, thought Temple, staring at another image of Revienne, designer-suited up and sleek, what is it with these European femme fatales? Thirty-seven, single, dedicated to her work. It didn’t seem . . . natural for a woman this attractive to have no marriage history or romantic links, but she was a Frenchwoman. She’d have no trouble connecting with men wherever she went.

  Temple wondered why this perfect, and even selfless, career woman gave her the creeps. A big black bar flashed across the screen and slapped Revienne Schneider right in the elegantly aloof blonde kisser. It was a furry tail.

  “Louie! You scared me. When’d you get home? And from where? And why are you playing computer-screen smackdown with the beautiful blonde stranger in town?”

  He hunkered low on the desktop, covering Temple’s notepapers and pen and a quarter of the computer keyboard. He began grooming his slap-happy paw and purring loud enough to imitate a queen bee hive.

  “Apparently,” Temple said, “you don’t like gorgeous blonde interlopers on our crime scene, either.”

  Louie just yawned to show his carnivore-red mouth and flash his white baby-shark’s teeth.

  Temple was still mooning at this image of tall blonde perfection when her old-fashioned doorbell rang. Avon calling? Maybe.

  Right now she was about convinced that finding the right facial foundation might make her look taller. She padded barefoot to the entry hall, and voilà . . .

  “You!” Temple was sorry she’d answered her doorbell, though it was too nice of a one to ignore. Now she wished she’d just stood behind the closed door, enjoying a long, sonorous melody of bells until her visitor had given up and gone away.

  Unfortunately, her visitor was not the type to give up and go away. Ever.

  “I thought my life had been too blessed to be true lately,” Temple grumbled as she stepped aside for Amazonian homicide officer C. R. Molina, in the extenuated flesh. And wearing flats! “And here I thought we were drinking buddies,” Lieutenant C. R. Molina said, crossing onto Temple’s black-and-white-tiled entry-hall floor with her giant Big and Tall Women low-heeled loafers.

  Flatfoot was right!

  Even without high heels, the homicide officer still towered over her. Well, why not? Temple not only went mostly barefoot at home, she knew she looked particularly shrimpy at the moment, wearing her longest T-shirt belted as a short knit dress.

  Molina was eyeing Temple’s bare pink toes with their scarlet nail polish looking like blood drops on the black-and-white checkerboard of cool marble.

  “So that’s your secret to stomping around on spikes all over the Strip. At home you’re a closet toe nudist. Even Mariah had more ‘toe’ at age nine.”

  “My toes are off-limits. How is Mariah?”

  “She’s fine. I understand from Van von Rhine that you’ve recently met an old school friend of hers, Revienne Schneider.”

  “Just in passing in Van’s office. Why on Earth would you be interested in Van’s European school friends?”

  “So you’d never heard of or met this woman before?” Molina asked.

  “Nope. Why’d you ask about her?”

  “After the body in the vault—oh, Lord, that sounds so Agatha Christie!—everyone new at the Crystal Phoenix is a person of interest to the police. Detective Ferraro has his hands full with the cast of dozens on the scene. I decided to consult your friends and business associates in the Fontana crime family. They were quite forthcoming about such exotic recent imports as Mr. Tomás Santiago and Miss Revienne Schneider.”

  “Santiago was Nicky’s find,” Temple said, taking the chance to defend herself while she had it. “The body in the vault was a freak accident, I swear. I didn’t do it to drum up publicity for the hotel, and I don’t think Crawford Buchanan did it, even though he deserves a murder rap, and I am totally cooperating with Detective Ferraro and any minions he may have, because the Crystal Phoenix really needs to shut this incident down.”

  “Not a stupendous opening stunt for
a mob museum,” Molina agreed, eyeing the pale living-room sofa for big black blots with claws in residence.

  “Santiago is, unfortunately, all for real,” she went on. “His avant-garde architectural work is well known and respected internationally. Revienne Schneider shows up as a world-renowned expert in her field. Her only flaw—Well, I looked as hard for some as you probably did, but I found only two things awry.”

  “Two things! What a relief.” Temple sighed.

  “One would think an international expert doing a workshop at a local university would be a much ballyhooed event on the Web site, at least, if not in a course catalog. Not so with Dr. Schneider.”

  “Van seemed to be hosting her at the eleventh hour too,” Temple noted.

  “She’d come here directly from Zurich, which is not her home or office base.”

  “But she and Van attended a Swiss prep school. They would have Swiss friends in common.”

  “Being a proud graduate of Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy in East L.A.,” Molina said, “I wouldn’t know about Swiss prep-school friends. Interpol tells me there was some sort of recent upset at an Alpine Swiss clinic. Dr. Schneider left abruptly and notified the clinic later from Zurich that she wouldn’t be returning.”

  “Maybe the visiting professor here needed her to bail him out.”

  “So you don’t find her presence just before the murder was discovered to be suspicious?”

  Now was the time for Temple to blab or babble about the Synth and the forgotten thirteenth sign of the zodiac and the suspicious shape of the victim’s red cloak lining.

  Yeah, Molina would really crack the whip and have Ferraro follow those lines of inquiry.

  “This is clearly a local affair,” Temple said. “Weird but all too local. That’s Vegas.”

  Molina eyed Temple hard, then nodded her satisfaction.

  “Good,” she said, plopping down on the cushions like she owned the place. “I’ll take something cool and slightly alcoholic. Don’t fuss. Whatever’s handy.”

  She smiled and lifted the strong, dark eyebrows Temple had always thought were in desperate need of plucking. On the other hand, the Brooke Shields look had worked for her for years. So . . . Molina was working her, Temple?