Cat in an Alien X_Ray

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  The policewoman needed to access her inner Carmen again. Temple guessed the in-home stalker messing with her performance clothes, and her close encounter with a wardrobe slasher when she was snooping in Max’s house, had soured her on what she already regarded as frivolous: being a girl.

  Temple was happy to plead to that charge. It was the little touches—a bright color, a new bangle or bag—that perked up everyday life. It had nothing to do with youth or gender but joie de vivre. She knew she’d feel the same way when she was eighty.

  She hummed as she looked up the mall on her smartphone. The Metro Police campus was in a traffic tangle north of Charleston and west of downtown, where Martin Luther King Boulevard ran parallel to Highway 93 before it split off before heading for Death Valley and Utah.

  She checked her wristwatch. She was hooked on that second hand. Smartphone time readouts reminded her of looking at an alarm clock at 6 A.M. She checked the condo. Louie was out and about and could return via the small high open window in the second bathroom. She had no idea why he’d gotten macho and broken into the French doors, but the claw marks were inescapable.

  Landlady Electra Lark had chained the doors shut until a locksmith could repair the middle latch’s damage. Matt had promised to fill in the scratches and touch up the paint afterwards. Imagine, all that and handy too.

  In three minutes Temple’s Miata was tooling up the highway, she wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a built-in scarf tied under her chin to protect her hairdo from the wind and her skin from the sunlight. Convertibles made hats obligatory for a natural redhead, but were still fun. She felt very Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief. Too bad her Cary Grant was off on errands today.

  In no time the mall’s low adobe-style shops were in view, painted the earth tones of a desert sunset. A Miata could breeze into a small space near the elevators, so Temple was soon through the Mountain, Tree, and Earth Courts and seated in the bustling food court. The echoing voices would make hearing—and overhearing—hard, but it was always a kick to see Molina out of her well-traveled road of home, office, and crime scene.

  Temple started musing about Cary—Matt—wondering what he was up to today. And lately. He seemed distracted and yet amazingly unruffled by the lack of news from Chicago about his dream job as a network talk show host.

  “Cat got your attention?”

  Molina had sneaked up on her, hard for an almost-six-foot-tall woman in a khaki pantsuit. The ambient noise had muffled her clodhopper footsteps. Ugh. The usual unadorned brown loafers. Temple knew guys who’d buy better-looking shoes.

  Molina nodded at the surrounding food stands. “Time to do our hunter-gathering thing?”

  Temple, perhaps inspired by Silas T. Farnum’s lunch order, got the Little Philly Sliders, in a “six-pack” with chicken instead of steak. Molina went for the Chicagoland Cheesesteak with white American cheese. Both went for dark drinks. Temple’s was Dr Pepper, and Molina’s was iced tea.

  “Chicagoland,” Temple noted of Molina’s sandwich as she paid the tab. “Isn’t that mob-appropriate, although the gourmet American cheese is a classy touch.”

  “Class is not on my wish list,” Molina answered.

  Temple disagreed. Those vintage ’30s velvet gowns Carmen wore while performing were class personified, but it seemed C. R. Molina had stuffed Carmen permanently back in the literal closet. Naturally, a blues-singing female homicide lieutenant didn’t want the guys at work to know she did occasional gigs at the Blue Dahlia supper club.

  After they sat down at their little plastic table for four, Molina hefted the sub-style bun before taking a bite. “Isn’t Chicago becoming Matt Devine’s second home these days?”

  “It was his first home,” Temple said. “And not a happy one.”

  “Our first homes often aren’t. That’s why so many people end up in a pseudo-city like Las Vegas.”

  “That’s only the Strip and all its works. Beyond that it’s a pretty normal community.”

  “If you say so.”

  “And even crazy Vegas has its plus side. Matt’s mother and her new beau just whisked in and out of town to be married here.”

  “Were you flower girl?”

  “Maid of honor. Louie was ring bearer, though.”

  Molina rolled her eyes as she chewed. “Sometimes I think that cat has dog genes. What self-respecting feline would sit still for a bit part in a wedding ceremony?”

  “Midnight Louie, as you know, has the self-respect and chutzpah to use this whole town for a litter box.”

  “His free-wheeling ways wouldn’t go over in Chicago.”

  “Au contraire.” Temple sipped the tangy Dr Pepper before adding, “He was kidnapped by the mob and got two made men arrested.”

  “Kidnapped by the mob? Grant you, the only places the mob still parties hard now are in the Northeast and Chicago. But people are too ready to attribute purpose to what pets do, and turn coincidence into beyond-natural motives and acts.”

  “What about your domestic pets, Lieutenant?”

  “You’ve seen them. Two tabby cats of perfectly ordinary intelligence and instinct. They sleep a lot and always hear the can opener. So?”

  “You’ve seen Louie inexplicably present on a few crime scenes.”

  “He follows you around like a dog. I don’t suppose that’s beyond the capacity of cats, though it’s unusual. It may be some scent you wear.”

  “Like tuna toilet water?”

  “Not an appetizing image right now, Miss Barr.”

  “We’re sounding like we’re at a tea party,” Temple complained. “That’s not necessary with cheese dribbling down our chins.”

  “I agree. I can call you Red.”

  “As in ‘better dead than’?”

  “You can call me—”

  Temple waited breathlessly.

  Molina shook her head ruefully. “Wait. You don’t need to call me anything.”

  “I was waiting for Blue. You do sing them.”

  “The blues? Not so much lately. Now. What do you know about the body on the construction site?”

  “It’s more a matter of what I want to know.”

  “Me first. Just who is this Silas T. Farnum guy?”

  “An out-of-state investor. Company name, Deja View Associates. I checked it out on the Internet and it looks legit.”

  “Ah, the Internet. That’ll soon replace police departments and newspapers as ‘impeccable’ sources.”

  “I don’t take everything at face value,” Temple said, adding a tinge of indignity to her tone.

  “Only Irishmen,” Molina commented.

  “I think I could come up with something to call you now, but it’s not suitable for public consumption.”

  Molina laughed. “That was catty of me. I wasn’t even catty in grade school. You’re a bad influence.”

  “I hope so, because Chico’s is just down the Sun Court.”

  Molina sipped iced tea with a grimace. “Everybody wants to remake me.”

  “Really. How ‘everybody’?” To Temple’s amazement, Molina answered.

  “Teen singing phenom Mariah.”

  “Daughters always do that.”

  “You just brushed that off. Why?”

  “Because I went through that creepy kid stage. The day you notice that Moth-er is Dow-dy. So embarrassing. Someone might notice you’re Not Cool Too.”

  “You’ve got that stage down,” Molina agreed. “Why do we always end up discussing trivial things?”

  “Because you don’t have any girlfriends?”

  “Why would I want any?”

  “I rest my case.”

  “Who have you got?”

  “Well, Mariah, for one.” When Molina winced, Temple went on. “I’m getting to be gal pals with Matt’s mother. Not so much his lovesick younger cousin. Electra is a girlfriend. And a couple media women in town. And, oh, I mustn’t forget my aunt Kit, who’s hardly like a relative at all. And now that she’s married Aldo Fontana, I’m some kinda cra
zy in-laws to the ten brothers.”

  “Aldo Fontana is married? To your aunt? You’re right. That is vaguely … incestuous. And you’re asking me about mobsters?”

  “You know the Fontanas are … vestigial mobsters. Mock mobsters.”

  “And that truly is all that’s left of the mob in Vegas. The Metro Police and the FBI cleaned up the town in the ’80s. Our big problem now is ethnic gangs.”

  “Couldn’t there be a few vestigial made men hanging around town? That body dump on Paradise is very Jimmy Hoffa.”

  “What makes Hoffa a mystery is that his body was never found. This Paradise guy was old, though.”

  “Like the Glory Hole Gang? Those eighty-something rascals who heisted silver dollars in their youth and run a restaurant at Gangsters?”

  “About that age. We don’t see too many elderly murder victims.”

  “I suppose age takes people to a point where the usual motives—lust, envy, and vengeance—don’t matter much anymore. Except for greed. That seems ageless.”

  “True. The Glory Hole Gang were holdup artists, not mob.”

  “Whoever killed Cliff Effinger was probably mob,” Temple said. “Effinger was in on something. He knew something that got him killed. When Matt and I visited Chicago, someone was shaking down his mother for some old personal items Effinger had left behind.”

  “Really? What kind of items?”

  Temple was not going to reveal the strange history of the constellation Ophiuchus and secret magicians’ circle called the Synth. If Molina found the names of the outlet mall’s various areas “New Age,” she’d find all the Synth mumbo-jumbo, with bodies arranged in a constellation shape, too outré for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

  “We don’t know,” Temple said, guilty about lying. “Just that there was a fireproof locked file box full of memorabilia, and somebody wanted it enough to threaten and stalk Matt’s mother—”

  “Another stalking situation?” Molina’s squinting eyes reduced her electric blue irises to high-intensity narrow beams. “That’s … a coincidence too many.”

  “Her apartment was broken into and Midnight Louie taken to force her to surrender the box and its contents. The Chicago police went to the warehouse Louie had escaped from and found two ‘minor crime figures’ with Italian surnames in somewhat shaky condition.”

  “That’s ethnic profiling, Red.” Molina was sensitive about her half-Hispanic origins.

  “Go to the mob museum if you want to see ethnic profiling spelled M-a-f-i-a.”

  Molina leaned back in the plastic chair, her meal and beverage dispensed with. And probably her patience. “I’ll look into the Farnum character’s company, but as far as we yet know, that dumped body was a murder in search of an unrelated site to be found in. The only prints around the location indicate the presence of rats. And cats,” she added with a forbidding frown.

  Temple knew when to pull back. “You can’t have one without the other or else you get bubonic plague,” she pointed out.

  “The victim hasn’t been identified, but I’d doubt he’d have mob connections. His hands were callused from heavy labor. I’d suspect the building trades.”

  “Shovels. Pickaxes. Maybe he knew where other bodies were buried.”

  “Will you get off this Jimmy Hoffa theme?” Molina was annoyed enough to make a speech. “With all the undreamed-of construction on the Strip in the past twenty years, any hidden bodies would have come to light. This is not a Big Crime case. It could be someone who welched on a bet at an illegal street gambling site. It could be someone who was bribed to use substandard building materials and was going to ‘squeal’ in the language of the gangster movies you favor.” Molina rose, ready to go.

  Temple would love to know what the woman kept in her pockets; she never carried a purse. “I agree that this was man-on-man violence, not some old lady going crazy with the family revolver after fifty years of unhappy wedlock.” Temple gathered up her tote bag and stood as well.

  “Stay put,” Molina ordered. “I’ll find my own way out. Maybe you should forget crime-solving, after all, and stick to what you know best. Shopping.”

  Molina had gone too far too fast for Temple to think of a snappy comeback. While she picked up the lunch remnants and consigned them to the trash barrel, she considered that she’d at least learned the official police position on the dead body on Paradise.

  And that Molina was behind the times. A woman could work both sides of the street these days: career seriousness and self-expression.

  Just to prove it, Temple would not stop in at the Juicy Couture 80 percent off sale on the way out.

  Chapter 19

  Honeymooners

  “You and Matt make such an adorable couple!” Aunt Kit pronounced that evening.

  She linked Temple’s arm through hers and led her on a stroll through the lavish indoor tropical gardens and water features of the Crystal Court cocktail lounge. Although this was a private reception in honor of Kit and Aldo Fontana’s return from a Lake Como honeymoon in Italy, a big and festive crowd thronged the Crystal Phoenix Hotel’s bar area. The soaring spotlighted entry wall was frosted-crystal sheened by a thin veil of falling water. Very bridal.

  A life-size wedding cake topper couple posed in the center of the space. “Living” statues as pure white as Carrara marble had been introduced at the Venetian Hotel. The specialty mimes looked frozen in place, but moved infinitesimally, disconcerting the unwary in a whimsical, charming way.

  “Adorable couple, me and Matt,” Temple repeated her aunt’s comment. “Them too.” She nodded at the statues. “And … I could say the same about you and Aldo.”

  Kit smiled like the Persian who’d lapped up the ice cream. “We Carlson girls are just the bee’s knees. Luckily the genes weren’t weakened by your father, Mr. Barr.”

  “Leave my poor father out of it, Kit. I hear you ‘Carlson girls’ have been chatting about me behind my back. Have you even told Mom you’re married now?”

  “Hell no. She’d make such a fuss. Have you told her you’re engaged?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Temple said with a virtuous air she could seldom assume, “yes.”

  Kit grabbed her hand and sat them down on a white patent leather tufted bench with Lucite legs. It felt more like floating than sitting. “How’d she take it?”

  “She was dubious until she learned the happy fiancé wasn’t Max.”

  “Your mother recognizes a dangerous man when she sees him.”

  “Wait’ll she sees Aldo.”

  “I hope to postpone that day until Aldo condescends to grow a respectable gray hair or two. These Italians are slow to turn distinguished.”

  “I hope ‘that day’ is at my wedding.”

  “Then you’re going to do the deed in Minnesota?”

  Temple sighed. “Maybe. Or Chicago. Or maybe there’s someplace ecumenical in between.”

  “Iowa?”

  Temple laughed. “Why not Wyoming, while you’re at it?”

  “Wherever it is,” Kit said with a hug, “you’ll make a beautiful bride.”

  That made Temple tear up a tad. “I’d better not desert my bridegroom-to-be. It’s really great to dress up and go out in Vegas together at an event that’s not so late he’ll have to rush off to the radio station.”

  Temple jumped up and fluffed the full skirt of her ’50s vintage dress, now so “in” again. She and Kit strolled back to the main mingling area.

  “Ah, bella.” Tall, dark, and handsome Aldo Fontana intercepted them and so equally offered his glance that it was impossible to tell which woman he’d called beautiful, presumably both.

  That was the Fontana touch, diplomatic to the bone. Imagine the movie Godfather having ten nephews who were maître d’s at a five-star restaurant.

  All the Fontana brothers were clichés: ridiculously tall, dark, and handsome. There were an incredible ten of them, here now mingling in suave social patterns to make guests feel welcome, whether it wa
s steering a couple to the bar or kissing the ladies’ hands.

  Matt, bearing a tall frosted glass, joined them. “A mini family reunion?” he asked, smiling at Kit.

  “Don’t you look handsome,” Kit said, embracing him and brushing his cheek with a kiss. “Family privilege, right, Aldo?”

  Aldo responded by kissing Temple’s left hand and winking at the engagement ring on it. “Family privilege, Matt.”

  “You’ll all be pleased to know,” Temple said, “that Kit has informed my worried mother in Minnesota that I’m under the wing of a large Italian family while in Las Vegas. She was much relieved.”

  “Then,” said Aldo with a brush of his palms that ended with a gentle clap, “my function in life has been more than met. May I sweep you away,” he asked Kit, “for a private family stroll among the camellias? I do have a lot of brothers.”

  “Your mother and mine,” Matt told Temple after they moved on, “would have a lot in common. Worrying. How do we stop them?”

  “We get married and convince them we’re grown-ups. If my mom knew that Uncle ‘Macho’ Mario’s roots are as firmly planted as a corpse in Vegas’s mob history, she’d be down here with the state police to pry me out of Vegas. Come to think of it, Chicago’s a more notorious mob town. She’ll pout when we settle down so close, but far, to her.”

  Matt’s arm around her waist had tensed during her happy babble. Maybe she shouldn’t have had that champagne cocktail when they arrived.

  “Don’t count your Chicagos,” he said, “before they put out a contract on me. Media kingpins are fickle.”

  “It’s not like we didn’t totally blow the network bigwigs away. They were even talking about ‘doing something’ with me. We could be the hot new media couple of Michigan Avenue.”

  “It could all fall through.”

  “Anything could, I guess, Matt.”

  He remained silent, a shadow in his eyes. Then he deliberately shook off the mood, like Louie unseating an invisible flea. “Here I am, neglecting Number One fiancée. I think I’ll switch to champagne. It’s certainly given you a bubbly glow.”