Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “It’s strange,” Electra said, her fond glance on the organ too. “Strange that we never suspected the new tenant, who could play a wedding march from memory and was so at home at a chapel organ keyboard, was a former clergyman.”

  “‘Love Minus Zero—No Limit’,” Temple said, smiling.

  “What?”

  “That’s the title of the song he played that day.”

  “What on earth does it mean?”

  “Unconditional love, I think. Look up the lyrics online. They’re another side of Bob Dylan. A classic love song.”

  “That’s more my generation than yours, dear. I hope Matt will find someone else to play it when you two get married here.”

  Temple opened her mouth, but Electra forestalled her. “I know, I know. You both have families likely to pressure you about where you should get married, but I hope I’m family enough to be in the running.”

  “You sure are.” Temple gave her another hug. She was beginning to realize she’d found a mother figure in her home away from home. “I may be in desperate need of neutral ground on that issue.” She rolled her eyes. “Maybe the decision will be clearer after my trip north.”

  “But you and Matt are definitely getting married?”

  “Definitely, finally, and sincerely getting married.” Temple felt a familiar velvet brush on her bare calves and looked down.

  Mr. Slugabed had roused himself to join them.

  “Where’d Louie come from?” Temple said, laughing.

  “Oh, he’s a fast one, getting down here ahead of us. He often sleeps in the pews,” Electra said. “Usually in Elvis’s lap. He likes to commune with the King.”

  “Maybe, but he probably showed up now because he’s angling for a replay of his earlier starring role here. Ring bearer for Matt’s mother’s wedding.”

  “He was so cute in his white bow tie,” Electra reminisced, “with the ring box dangling from it.”

  Temple had noticed that the word “cute” was as annoying to Louie as to her. Being little didn’t mean one couldn’t be smart and, when occasion called, fierce.

  Louie was not shy of the spotlight. All cats gravitated to basking in natural or artificial rays. But now he gave a restless merow and moved away.

  “So,” Temple asked her landlady, “everything looks great here. What’s the vandalism?”

  “Just you wait.”

  Electra led Temple, again joined by Louie, where Temple at least had never gone before. They walked through the chapel and out to the exterior entrance, which featured a drive-by window for the “marry in haste” crowd and parking for those who opted for more ceremony inside.

  “How gorgeous. I’ve never driven around to this side,” Temple said. “I love the twin shirred chiffon awnings for both the drive-up and walk-in areas. Flamingo instead of pale pink. Classy and kicky at the same time. You’re a savvy marketer, Electra.”

  “And the awnings are made of microfiber fabric, so they’re easy to clean.” Her tone flattened. “Not so much now.”

  Temple looked closer, then walked under an arched awning. Black spray-painted graffiti of crude, even x-rated, language covered the interior.

  “How horrible! Luckily,” Temple added, looking for an upside and finding a literal one, “people in love tend to gaze at each other, instead of up at the undersides of awnings.”

  “Still, Miss Optimist, this will take a cleaning service to eradicate,” Electra said. “I used the garden hose to lighten the stuff on the walls.”

  Louie had leaped atop a long, low concrete planter box, his head bowed to sniff the dirt. The lumpy, empty dirt. Temple looked at Electra.

  She nodded. “Yup. The flowering plants were ripped out. And someone’s taken a hammer to the decorative friezes.”

  Now that Temple looked more intently, she spotted scattered stone chips, evidence that Electra had cleared out a big mess. “Who would do this and why?”

  Electra sighed and nodded to the street. “If you take a drive about a hundred yards down, you’ll find a big empty building with a sign almost as big. A new business is going in.”

  “Huh.” Temple was surprised. “This is an old strip shopping neighborhood, pretty isolated, but the Strip is always reaching out tendrils to new land like an octopus. Maybe some Strip enterprises got the zoning changed for future expansion. That can’t be all bad.”

  “Your optimism is no help to the Lovers’ Knot. The news is all bad.”

  “And—?”

  “It’s an offshoot business of Pornucopia, an Adult Wearhouse,” Electra intoned.

  “A porn shop?”

  “A porn department store with a movie balcony. Yes. So I naturally looked up a what new business they were spinning off in the neighborhood. And now I’m considering a neighborhood protest. Whoever owns that operation does not play nice.”

  “And you think scaring your residents, like me, is part of a campaign to shut you up?”

  “And shut me down.”

  Temple considered what she’d heard. “Max and I invested in the Circle Ritz condo because it was so near the Strip without being part of it. We didn’t realize that cheesy adult businesses could ever fill the holes in-between the two locations, though.”

  “Me neither, kiddo.” Electra’s gray eyes broadcast steely determination. “Vegas got hard hit during the Great Recession. A lot of the innocuous surrounding businesses like dry cleaners and sandwich shops that CR residents found convenient have closed, with nothing to take their places.”

  “Except the demand for ever-expanding sleaze. I don’t suppose there’s a school nearby,” Temple asked hopefully.

  “No. My first thought. That would drive out any porn.”

  “Too bad.”

  Electra’s eyes suddenly widened. “For sure…if Pornucopia’s spin-off gets going strong, it’ll attract more associated businesses.”

  “And your investment in the Circle Ritz goes up in smoke. I’m so sorry, Electra. Maybe you can move the building to someplace better.”

  “Howard Hughes could have afforded to do that. Can’t you see him towing it away with the Spruce Goose? You want to walk along with me to the building site?” She glanced down at Temple’s red suede pumps with gray steel spike heels. “Or do you need to change into flats?”

  “Me, in flats? Only when I want to be completely invisible and have everyone looking over my head. My high heels are my edge, Electra. I wouldn’t leave home without them, any more than Dorothy would have left the ruby slippers behind in Oz.”

  “Gee, what did Dorothy do with her ruby slippers after she got back to the farm in Kansas anyway?”

  “Put ’em away for a rainy day. Let’s hoof it to this new atrocity on the block.”

  5

  Off-Beat

  Temple attacked in her bed at the Circle Ritz.

  Matt woke up late the next morning, that thought circling in his brain like the nightly intro music to his midnight radio show. Both were nagging noises he would never escape. Oh, sure, he was free for the day until showtime called him to WCOO a half hour before the magic moment of going live on talk radio with The Midnight Hour.

  Now he was at loose ends, with Temple packing for their weekend trip north, always a mini-production of a road show. He was pre-packed from his quick trips to Chicago to guest on The Amanda Show, and guys with their small color range—khaki, black, and blue—pack light anyway. No matching shoes involved. He needed to do something…something useful, with all this daylight free time. Max was gone, as Matt had wished for months, leaving Vegas as a moving target with Kitty the Cutter hot on his trail to Ireland.

  Now Matt would wish Max straight back if it would help find out why Temple and her Circle Ritz condo had been some intruder’s target. Matt wasn’t an undercover agent. He was an ex-priest turned radio shrink turned fiancé.

  The attack. Coincidence? Maybe.

  Lieutenant Molina had referred him to Woodrow Wetherly, a retired cop in his weathered eighties, echoing his surname. The
man knew Las Vegas crime history like his long lifeline, going back to the founding mobs. Maybe Woody could clue him in why his nasty stepfather, Cliff Effinger, seemed to haunt Matt’s own history in both Chicago, where he grew up, and here in Vegas, where Matt had moved for the exclusive reason of tracking down Effinger. When he was still alive.

  So he called the old guy on the phone, cell to landline, and requested an audience. Woodrow was a character. Crude, gruff, and savvy in a pre-Netflix way you couldn’t find or buy nowadays.

  Matt ended up back in the fifties-vintage house by noon, regarding Woody ensconced in his worn recliner. Who had something not nice to say.

  “Huh. You don’t look like a liar. But it seems you weren’t straight with me first time we talked, kid.”

  “Not straight? About what, Mr. Wetherly?”

  “Your radio show. The Midnight Hour. It’s not a crime show at all. It’s the midnight soap opera.” Wetherly’s tone was scoffing.

  “Okay, the title may sound hokey, but it is my show. That’s true.”

  “Yeah, but you made it sound like one of those hard crime reality shows, like John Walsh with the dead kid does. Instead, it’s people cryin’ in their banana daiquiris or some chi-chi cocktail about their personal problems.”

  Matt opened his mouth to answer that charge as Wetherly waved him silent. “I know whinin’ in public is what entertainment comes down to these days. You have a nice-sounding voice and, uh, bedside manner, but doesn’t it drive you nuts to be talking to all these losers?”

  Matt opened his mouth again. The old man waited this time. “I’m thinking of moving on from the show.”

  “Aha! So you’re like some headline-happy reporter. You want a big juicy story to break.” He nodded sagely. Ambition he understood.

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s gonna be your ticket out of Sobsville?”

  “This unsolved murder. Grisly murder.”

  “The best kind.”

  “Not in John Walsh’s league, but nasty. Guy was apparently tortured and tied to the sinking pirate ship bowsprit like a mummified figurehead to drown one night.”

  Woodrow Wetherly grinned, showing his yellowed teeth. A certain generation hadn’t heard about bleaching white strips and didn’t care. “Yeah. That was a corker. Retired badge like me noticed the Metro cops went mum real quick on that case.”

  “That’s why I was asking about mob activity in Vegas nowadays. That sounds like something Bugsy Siegel would have done.”

  “Bugsy? Naw. Bugsy got done to at the end, although he did a lot of doing in. He wanted to be a celebrity impresario, and forgot the bottom line is the bottom line.”

  “Or this Italian ‘Jack the Hammer’ guy you told me about. Giaccomo Petrocelli.”

  Woodrow’s gnarled, sun-spotted knuckles made a leprous fist in front of Matt’s chin while the retired cop considered it. “That ship killing was a retro-style hit, wasn’t it, kid? And what passes for police now got quiet fast about that death too. That’s what they do when there’s no leads. Or. When there’s leads they don’t want to follow.”

  His hands parted to slap his palms against his knees. “But you want to follow up on who would do such a thing? Maybe you got some spine, after all. I might be interested myself in just what Creepy Cliffie Effinger was up to that merited an old-style slo-mo capping.”

  Matt tried to rustle up a grateful look, but failed.

  “What makes you think there’s any story left?” the old man asked in his raspy voice. “That these old-school mobsters didn’t get what they wanted outa him and that’s that?”

  “For one thing, a lookalike corpse with Effinger’s ID on him had fallen onto a craps table at the Crystal Phoenix before Effinger was actually killed. It’s like someone wanted people to think he was dead before he really was.”

  Wetherly roared with laughter until it died off in coughing and wheezes. “That’s a good one. Classy place like the Phoenix gets a low-end corpse stowed in its Eye-in-the Sky crawl space? No wonder that was hushed up.”

  “I guess it was ‘hushed up’. It’s still unsolved.” Matt leaned forward. “And Effinger had a Chicago background.”

  “Everybody from Chitown isn’t connected with what’s left of the Chicago Outfit.”

  “But a couple local mob guys were, ah, looking into Effinger’s connections there just recently. After he was dead.”

  “That’s right. The bastard had some sweet set-up in Chicago, I heard. Good-looking wife, a two-flat bringing in rental money. Only the wife’s brat soured the deal.”

  Matt had been that “brat” and his mother the woman Effinger had used and abused. The anger surge almost choked him, but rage would ruin his plan to investigate and overheat his cool.

  “Chicago can’t have anything to do with Effinger’s death here,” Woody declared.

  Matt kept his voice even. “It would if Effinger had kept some…evidence there about things going on here.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “I don’t know. A map, maybe.”

  “A treasure map?” Woody wheezed with laughter. “There’s been rumors about buried treasure around Vegas since the railroad came through. Only treasure is in the casino money carts and they’re better guarded than Fort Knox.”

  “Effinger must have been into something that involved a huge payoff, to get killed in a gruesome way like that. That was warning someone off.”

  “That’s just supposition, isn’t it? If it was real, the cops would be all over it.”

  Matt was getting sick of the old man shooting down his ideas, yet he’d said as much as he’d dared about Effinger “having something” others might want. This old guy would never imagine Matt was seeking clues to a missing IRA hoard. That was such a Max quest. WWMD right now? What Would Max Do? Keep extracting information from the retired cop.

  Wetherly was frowning now. “How do you know this stuff about what Cliff Effinger did or did not do in Chicago before his death?”

  “I, ah, interviewed a local detective about the case.”

  “Private or police?”

  “Police.”

  “Which asshole is that?”

  Matt quelled a defensive retort. “Molina.”

  “Hmph. Lieutenant. Woman. That ain’t gonna do you no good.”

  “She’s extremely competent.”

  “If you say so, but she’s from L.A. Whadda she know about Vegas mob history, the stuff that’s not in all the new mob ‘museums’ around town? That stuff is all for show. For Chrissake, they’re now doing weddings at the downtown mob ‘attraction’. And the Fontana brothers are keeping their pretty suits pressed more than they’re tending to their Gangsters limo service or Gangsters hotel.”

  “I guess I’ve come to the right person here, then,” Matt said.

  “That’s damn right, sonny.”

  “And you can stop calling me ‘kid’ and ‘sonny’. I answer to Matt, or Mr. Devine if you want to keep it formal, Mr. Wetherly.”

  “Speaking up, are we? I told you last time to call me Woody. And, Matt, do you answer to Father Devine too?”

  Matt reared back as if punched.

  “You find out about Chicago,” Woodrow said. “I find out about you. You’re not pulling the smooth cashmere sports coat over these old eyes. I wanta know who I’m dealing with. So you’re right. You’ve come to the right person, Mr. Matt. You can call me a no bullshitter.”

  He braced his misshapen hands on the recliner arms and pushed himself up with a grunt. Matt rushed to support a forearm until the old man seemed balanced.

  “Yup, young Matt. Ignore appearances, I am just the man for your job. We’re gonna go where what’s left of mob operators meet now.”

  “When?” Matt asked, alarmed. His hours weren’t his own.

  “Tonight. Don’t worry. We start at ten and you’ll be at the radio station soothing losers by midnight, Cinderfella. Get it?”

  “Mobsters don’t meet on the Strip?”

  “We
ll, in a way they do.” Woody chuckled and winked. “We’re goin’ to one of them nudie bars.”

  “Nudie,” Matt repeated warily.

  “That’s right.” Woody leaned near to impart a confidentially. “May be something new—get it? ‘Nudie’ may be new—to you, but old to me. I advise you to look like you like it so you ain’t mistaken for a pansy. In fact, I advise you to look all your fill, ’cuz I’m bettin’ you never imagined these places existed.”

  Matt imagined he was right.

  6

  Off-Campus

  I, of course, escort the ladies. Unlike Miss Temple, I savor my short stature and being overlooked. The canny investigator does his best work under those circumstances.

  As I take up my discreet rear guard position to watch the Circle Ritz ladies wonder and wander, I muse on the fact that my Miss Temple needs a foot system like mine, whereby I can retract my hidden shivs in a nanosecond. I would look ridiculous if I tottered along on extended tippy-claws. I am not sure why my Miss Temple does not when she is doing so, but if her fancy shoes had retractable heels, she could have it both ways, as I do.

  Like Miss Temple, I am used to entering and exiting the Circle Ritz by the parking lot. I had never strolled around to the building’s side entrance to view all that wedding chapel traffic. Now I notice the block of shops opposite the wedding chapel entrance. Many are empty, rental signs in their blank glass windows, but others cater to the marriage enterprise. The window of Making Marry showcases wedding cakes and champagne glasses, fresh floral bouquets and “instant engraved” napkins.

  “Oh, look,” commands my Miss Temple as we pass another going establishment.

  So I do, then nearly bite off my tongue in shock.

  “I did not know,” Miss Temple is telling Miss Electra, “a bookshop was so nearby.”

  Neither did I.