“This is way too deep for cat food commercials,” Matt said.
“Maybe not,” Temple said. “The zoot suit rebellion has been declawed by a lot of decades of social progress. The next step after belated acceptance is celebration.”
“So you’re saying cat food commercials can be relevant social commentary?” Matt sounded and looked dubious.
Temple shrugged. “I’m saying people just want to have fun. Don’t overthink it and maybe they’ll accidentally learn something. That top-notch director they want?” Temple asked Tony. “Danny Dove right here in town would be great at that.”
Tony was surprised. “The choreographer?”
“Set designer too. Catch the Black & White rock-group show with French Vanilla at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel. Danny designed both the fixed and moving stage settings. WOW,” Temple said. “Maybe the ads can start out in noir black-and-white, and then, POW, go to Technicolor, like The Wizard of Oz movie.”
“That’s a hot ticket,” Tony agreed. “She’s quite the idea girl,” he told Matt before turning back to Temple. “It was your Zoe Chloe Ozone persona that inspired the network.”
“That old blog and podcast stuff from the teen reality show?” Temple shook her head and sighed. “It’s dead in the water and has been for months. Fads fade at warp speed in today’s media world.”
“And a good thing,” Matt put in. He eyed Tony. “She went undercover with that persona and nearly got killed.”
“As she said, nothing dies on the Internet. Matt. Zoe Chloe is still out there. There could be a TV tour in this and you’re perfect for that,” he told Temple.
“Would Louie have to travel?” Temple wondered.
“Perhaps. Is that a problem?”
“Nooo,” Temple said. “He’s got a brand-new zebra-print carrier for the job. He’d look fab in a zebra-print fedora. Or zoot suit.”
“Whoa, Temple,” Matt said. “He would not love wearing the suit, I bet, and do you really want to tote a twenty-pound cat on and off a plane? Airlines don’t even provide room for under-seat shaving kits or feet these days.”
“First class,” Tony said, “would be in the contract. And media escorts. Don’t worry, Matt. I’d see your fiancée is treated like a queen, or at least a bestselling author.”
“Say,” Temple sat up taller. “I could write a book about Louie!”
Tony made a note on his leather-bound legal notepad.
Matt groaned. “Tony, Temple and I need to think and we need to talk this over. It could be hell moving to Chicago with Temple starting such multi-pronged media project.”
“Of course.” Tony eased back in his chair. “I see this as complex, yes, but fortuitous.”
“The network hasn’t been pestering me,” Matt said, “or you, about my possible national TV talk show gig. Meanwhile, every celebrity and his and her siblings are starting new shows.”
Tony grew serious. “True. You’ve played pretty hard to get.”
“I’m not playing anything, Tony. My mother just remarried and Temple and I are thinking about scheduling a wedding. I don’t want us to be rushed into something so demanding it’ll ruin our private lives.”
“Very sensible,” he said, standing to end the visit. “Keep this top secret. Buzz blows deals as often as it hypes them. If you have any questions, let me know. This is only in the development stages. It’s good to know about, because you both can still have a lot of input now.”
Matt shook, and then Temple shook, Tony’s soft manicured hand.
At the door Temple turned. “And I do have to ask Louie if he wants to do this.”
“How would you know?” Tony asked.
“Oh, Louie knows how to make his druthers known, don’t worry.”
26
The Minstrel Boy
Max’s heart was pounding. He felt he’d been making a pilgrimage commemorating the Stations of the Cross over all of Ireland, south and north, with Kathleen. The fourteen harsh images often hung on Catholic church walls, memorializing Jesus’s suffering, crucifixion, and death…and, sometimes a last image, a happy ending, the resurrection.
Sometimes Max thought the Church fixated on darkness. Yet now, so did Max. This journey, he hoped, would end at the grave of the best man he’d ever known, but first he must deal with the unsuspected living. He hoped he was on the brink of witnessing a rising from the dead.
Kathleen, practicing the controlling cruelty that had dominated her childhood, had told Max nothing, nothing about his cousin. Only that Sean was alive. That Sean was alive and now they were here, in County Tyrone of Northern Ireland, where he and Sean had gone astray on a quest for their roots and “adventure” tourism.
He stood with Kathleen before a quaint white-washed cottage. Ireland was breathtakingly picturesque, but traditionally the land and people were poor, with a harsh and tragic history. The only thing the modern Emerald Isle had to sell was charm until the “Celtic Tiger” awakened in the ’80s with a burst of high-tech businesses. Then a second Irish “famine” came with the global recession.
Max took in every feature of the simple building—the gravel driveway with a green iron gate. The house, clad in white stone, was shaped like an arc or a simple church, a long main floor with an A-shaped second story. The windows weren’t in even rows. Simple narrow wood frames painted bright green dappled the white stone canvas here and there. Green window boxes on shallow stone sills spilled over with fuchsia, purple and white petunias, blooming as madly as any second-story pub window box in the British Isles.
This modest traditional home could be a whited sepulcher, hiding a blasted life behind its green-framed Irish charm.
Sean Kelly, Wisconsin boy by birth. Mourned and missed for almost twenty years. Max thought his thoughts sounded like an obituary. But, unless Kathleen had played the sadist again, Sean was somewhere behind that bright green-painted wooden door, breathing the same clean, earthy Irish air that had Max close to hyperventilating. He hoped Sean wasn’t under a gravestone in the back garden. He wouldn’t put it past Kathleen to “mirror” his past to match the tragedy of hers.
Max’s training as a magician had made him seem eternally cool and collected and had served well onstage and under cover. And now…now he was a bipolar boy again, one moment agonizingly unsure and an instant later filled with a cocky conviction he would soon be master of his own life and druthers, he would know the truth fully and master his fears and guilt.
Maybe, Max thought, this was his moment for finally growing up.
Kathleen sighed, ruefully. “Ah, so green it is, so white the stone, so black the hearts. So charming the accents, so savage the hypocrisy.”
“You’re regaining your lost native Irish lilt,” Max told her.
“I spoke mostly Spanish when I worked South America for the Cause. Sure, and I can sound as Irish as the cleaning lady when I want to. That encouraged Irish-Americans to donate to the IRA.”
“You have a gift for languages, then.”
“Gift? Perhaps. Why would you be interested in my ‘gifts’?”
“No reason.” He studied the house again. “The architecture is so pure and simple, timeless. You don’t realize at first how big and well-situated the structure is. The roof has some skylights. That’s not authentic ‘Irish cottage’.”
“So we’re doing a review for Architectural Digest?” Kathleen’s tart tone was at least an improvement on downright angry.
Max gazed out over a bright green rolling quilt of landscape, seamed by darker green hedgerows and brown stone walls. “Peaceful too,” he added.
“Things may seem so long-distance lovely,” Kathleen said, “but there’s always dirt beneath the grass and shamrocks, soil beneath the soul.”
Max eyed the worn stone sill underlining the aggressively green front door.
“Is he…are they, even home?” he asked, walking to the gate to view a parked car on the paved area behind the house and inhale the drift of roses from the charming garden.
&nbs
p; Charm. That word again. Lucky charm. Max had always cultivated both luck and charm, but he had a feeling they had run out on him now.
Kathleen would never bring him to a picture-postcard ending. He again inhaled the scent of dozens of roses, amused by the intricate white wrought-iron garden table and chairs glaring against the everlasting green, and speculated about the owner of the parked Opel Zafira car.
He circled back to Kathleen. Her jade-green pantsuit and plain black pumps blended with the scenery. A designer scarf swathed her throat and shoulders, as vividly floral as the flower boxes and distracted attention from her facial scars. She had white skin, like the stone-clad cottage, black hair, like the dark and bloody history of the land beneath it, and…something very wrong about the eyes. He’d been avoiding direct glances, partly to quell his accelerating emotions as he neared a reunion with Sean. Hope. Fear. Guilt. Anger.
It took him a second to figure out what was wrong…different. She wasn’t wearing her exotic aquamarine-tinted contact lenses. He was seeing the clear blue eyes of young Kathleen O’Connor, twenty-three and the prettiest girl in Northern Ireland, at least to two teenage American boys from Racine, Wisconsin.
Max knew then there was no way to escape this time machine, or the revelations and shock Kitty the Cutter was about to inflict on her two long-ago admirers.
27
Send Off
Temple was madly typing away at her laptop the next morning when the doorbell rang. She jumped up and Louie, startled, skittered off her desk, sending printouts flying.
“Louie!”
Her complaint was wasted. He was already at the door when she got there.
She loved that each unit at the Circle Ritz had a real, live nineteen-fifties doorbell. Temple was not the domestic type—in fact she happily bordered on incompetent—but answering a doorbell made her think she was the perfect, efficient fifties hausfrau in full skirts, high heels, and pearl necklace, as portrayed on TV series then.
“Electra,” she greeted the landlady. “Come on in. I’ve got Crystal Lite and Pecan Sandies and have been jotting down ideas for a charmingly kick-ass urban village. That’ll take your mind off current events of the criminal kind.”
“I’m afraid not, dear.”
Temple noticed then that only one tame swatch of yellow decorated Electra’s hair, and it disappeared after two inches, like a fading sunbeam. Electra with almost all-white hair seemed older, frailer, and several gallons low on her natural zest.
“Come sit down. Something’s happened. The police—?”
“Not them. Yet.” Electra arranged the folds of her pale blue muumuu, which seemed to reflect her mood. Blue. “I wonder if you can go to a funeral with me today.”
“The funeral? That’s fast. Who would arrange to bury Jay Edgar here in Vegas? Wait. Are you doing it? At the wedding chapel?”
“Heavens, no!”
“Then who would, um, sponsor it? I don’t think you mentioned having kids with him. And he hadn’t been back in town for years.”
“He had no kids by anybody. His other ex-wife, Diane, keeps in touch with me. The police contacted her by phone in Dayton. She gave them Jay’s lawyer’s name in Dayton. And she was invited to the funeral too.”
“By whom?”
“A woman named Cathy Zevon. She claims to have been his fiancée.”
“And she’s here, in Vegas?”
“I guess so. She’s using my friend Sam’s funeral home, and I checked. She’s paying for it. In cash.”
“Curiouser and curiouser. Jay Edgar didn’t mention anything about having a fiancée along or in town, when you gave him what-for at the motel?”
“You can get anything you want in terms of companionship in Vegas,” Electra said with a sad smile, “including, I guess, a convenient fiancée.”
“This is so fishy.”
Louie, who’d been rubbing on their ankles during the conversation, paused and interjected a strong merow of agreement. Temple had observed that cats expressed emphasis in a progression from mew to meow to merooow.
“Of course I’ll go with you,” Temple told Electra. “For one thing, the police will probably have someone there watching who attends and I might be able to spot the observer.”
“The police will be watching me?”
Temple nodded. “And Diane. She didn’t know about a fiancée?”
“They both still lived in Dayton, Ohio, so she’s pretty sure he didn’t have one.”
“What terms were Jay and Diane on?”
“Not close, but in touch now and again. She gave the police his lawyer’s name. I guess they needed to know if Jay had a will.”
“What do you think?”
“Sure. He was a businessman, even if his recliner store recently went belly-up. The Great Recession did a job on a lot of people. He’d have all the paperwork. Jay’s the one who brought me to Las Vegas, like your Max, to get married.”
“Uh, not like Max. We didn’t come here specifically to get married.”
“But Max left and you stayed. That’s what happened with Jay and me. That’s why I trusted him to honor our agreement that I’d have first dibs on his land adjacent to the Circle Ritz. That’s what we did when we came to Vegas to get married. We were both starting over and investing our life savings in real estate. We weren’t kids, so we kept our investments separate.”
“What broke up the marriage?”
Electra made a face. “His gambling. You heard what he did here just now, got deeper in debt. It was criminal to get him comped at a casino.”
“The people who wanted that building site knew how to play him. I bet they didn’t know about you or your claims on the property.”
“Which are nil. A promise is worth nothing when the promiser is dead. My ‘claim’ was paper-thin when he was alive.” She sighed. “I guess worrying over the Circle Ritz and Lovers’ Knot is pointless when I’m a suspect for murder.”
“That is so lame, Electra. The murder hasn’t even made the paper.”
“They just don’t want the way they found him to get out.”
“Shot dead is big-time headline news?”
Electra bit her lip and shook her head. “Your Lieutenant Molina was more than stern about me not telling anybody this, especially you.”
“She’s not ‘my’ anything but a pain, and she specifically mentioned me?”
“They had to ask me specific questions.” Electra’s voice started to break. “So I know Jay was found hanging from that giant chandelier in the future Lust ‘n’ Lace building. It’s not a way I’d want to see him go.”
“Oh, my God. Why suspect you, then? It could have been suicide. Anyway, you couldn’t haul a man up a ladder and hang him.”
“They think I could have made him hang himself at gunpoint. They think I was mad enough to kill him. And I sorta was.”
“Still bizarre.”
“There’s some evidence more than one person was involved.”
“I see. You’d need a man to help you hang him. Who’d you get to do that? Matt? Or, holy moly Molina! She might be thinking Max would help you. She wouldn’t know he’s left Vegas. If he has. I hope so. You know what this murder method reminds me of?”
“Nothing good, I’m sure. What?”
The death of Matt’s wicked stepfather, Clifford Effinger.”
“Euww, that ship thing.”
“Another elaborate killing. It’s like someone is sending someone else a message.”
Louie leaped up beside Temple on the couch and rubbed his chin against hers. “Louie! Your whiskers tickle.”
She pulled her face away, still thinking despite the distraction. “It’s like that darn building is attracting a nexus of evil.” Louie began kneading his paws on her lap. “Ouch, Louie. That pricks.” She tried to push him away. “I swear. You could almost film a horror movie there.”
“Temple, it’s creepy enough now as a murder site. You’re right, though, a lot of ghosts of previous business incarnations haunt t
hat place. I wonder if anyone associated with it lived at the Circle Ritz?”
“Maybe there is a connection. I’m going to investigate the place’s history. It might have more than face value,” Temple decided.
Louie stopped needling her lap and leaned up to nudge his furry face against her forehead and began purring up a storm.
“He’s certainly gotten awfully affectionate all of a sudden,” she told Electra.
“You can see from my marital history that a good man is hard to find,” Electra said, stroking Louie’s long black tail, “but a great cat will never let you down.”
28
Laid Off
Appropriately for a man hung from a giant dusty crystal chandelier, Jay Edgar Dyson’s funeral parlor reception room boasted a much more tasteful and petite and sparkling chandelier.
Ironically, the mysterious fiancée had chosen Sam’s Funeral Parlor, with its white-pillared Tara façade, where Matt’s stepfather had been “laid out”. She had also sprung for a funeral announcement in the paper.
Temple studied the sparse group of people who’d signed the book and entered. Most were male senior citizens with bald or very low thread-count heads. Not likely mob-related. Gambling buddies, probably.
In fact, a short spry guy with black still streaking his gray hair approached her. She was mystified until she realized he always wore a snappy fedora around town, but had doffed it in respect for the place and occasion.
“Nostradamus,” she greeted him. “Did you know Mr. Dyson?”
“Only to see and nod in passing. Or spend some time just gassing.”
Yup, it was the rhyming bookie, all right.
“Is his death a surprise to you?”
“Rumor is it wasn’t quite kosher. Me…” He shrugged. “I know better than to look for closure. There still are elements in this town that would bring an okay guy down.”
Temple nodded. “Thanks.”
Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit Page 18
