He leaned close and lowered his voice. “If you’re still doing the Nancy Drew act, you’ll need someone to watch your back.”
“I have someone to watch over me.”
“More than one, I bet, at that. Say hello to my pal, the lucky black cat.” Nostradamus winked at her and moved on to gaze into the casket.
Nostradamus knew everybody in town, and apparently, everything. And he suspected murder, even though it hadn’t made the paper.
Temple sighed and looked around again. She hadn’t realized until now that funeral parlors she had visited were so similar to Las Vegas wedding chapels. There was the same, hushed ceremonial air enhanced by thick carpets and banks of flowers. There was the fact of knowing it wasn’t holy ground, yet that an event of great solemnity was underway in this over-luxurious setting.
And it was a setting the late pianist Liberace, the swami of glitter, would have loved. The soft, lavish upholstery of the coffin lid was propped as showily ajar as a Steinway grand piano’s top board…the corpse’s face looked as slightly painted as a stage actor’s…or a mannequin’s.
Seeing Electra here not wearing her Justice of the Peace robes seemed strange. She had added an artificial silver sheen to her white hair and wore dignified navy blue. Standing next to her was a tall, thin blonde woman of sixty-something wearing snazzy red glass frames. Definitely Diane, not the mystery fiancée.
Temple joined them, deciding she didn’t need to gaze upon the not-so-dear departed ever again.
She was not surprised to see Detective Su present. Her usual, darkly sober mini-Molina pantsuit was funeral-appropriate. Temple lifted one eyebrow at Su in greeting, which was not returned.
After Electra introduced Temple to Diane, she murmured, “We were saying that an urn and a photograph would have done for us.”
“At least the surprise fiancée, and not the estate, is paying for this,” Diane said. “I’m here to eyeball the supposed fiancée, frankly.”
“Me, too,” Temple said with feeling. Everything about the murder reeked of a setup. “I bet the police are interested in her too. Is there a reading of the will?”
Electra nodded. “Temple, you can come with us when we leave. The police found the lawyer and he transferred that duty to an attorney here in town.”
“Another waste of estate money.”
“Diane,” Electra warned. “The man was murdered. We don’t want to sound like gold-diggers.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m a retired clerk with a tiny pension. I’m sorry Jay died ahead of his time, but you and I earned some recompense for time put in.”
“At least you were out of town when it happened,” Electra said. “I’m still a ‘person of interest’.”
“Hey. That’s actually a good thing for women our age,” Diane said with a wry smile.
“When did you get to Vegas?” Temple asked.
“Not until this morning, and I have the plane ticket to prove it.” Diane narrowed her eyes. “Electra has mentioned her ‘famous’ tenants in the past, and I know you’re an amateur detective.”
“Well, not really. Not officially.”
“Don’t be modest. I’m sure you won’t get anything on me. Just show me the hussy and the will, and I’m on the next plane home.”
“Hussy at six o’clock high,” Electra trilled under her breath, looking to the gold velvet curtains at the entry archway.
A tall, thin woman in black paused for an entrance moment. She was a walking cliché wearing a close-fitted suit with a pencil skirt, sheer black hose, and a brimmed black hat with a matching veil.
“The Bride Wore Black,” Temple muttered, referencing a title by that very dark noir novelist, Cornell Woolrich. “She’s like out of a really bad Movie of the Week. And I know her!” she added in surprise.
“You do?” Electra was shocked.
“You do, too,” Temple answered.
“No.…”
“Yes. Look at that black dyed hair.”
“What would Lindy Lukas be doing here?”
“Visualize her in tight jeggings and boots,” Temple urged.
“My Lord.”
“Yes,” Temple said, “Diane, meet Cathy Zevon, a.k.a. Katt Zydeco, strip club manager.”
“Actually,” Diane said, “I would like to meet her. Sounds like you and Electra can do the honors.”
“No…” Electra began, but Diane was willful for a willowy blonde and apparently still felt a sense of possession about Jay.
Temple and Electra could only follow Diane as she marched forward to meet and greet the lady in black.
“I’m a former Mrs. Dyson. I understand you were the next Mrs. Dyson-in-training. A little young for a man in his seventies, weren’t you?”
“Jay had a youthful spirit.”
“How’d you meet?”
Temple watched Diane’s interrogation with growing amazement. She’d never have had the nerve to confront a woman who’d paid for the visitation and burial even if she’d come out of the woodwork.
So Temple ventured a question of her own. “You met here in Vegas, didn’t you?”
Cathy Zevon/Katt Zydeco’s eye makeup had been in deep mourning even before Temple had heard of Jay Edgar Dyson or met him. Her “smoky eye” could have survived a five-alarm fire. Her dark pupils were inky black as she fixed Temple with a cold stare.
“You’re the Miss Nosey from the Lust ‘n’ Lace site. It’s none of your business, but we’ve been inseparable since Jaysy came to Vegas.”
“And I’m sure Leon Nemo made the introduction,” Temple said.
“It’s Nemo’s job to make introductions, but it isn’t your job to question our actions.”
“She’s only acting for us,” Diane said. “We widows. You’re not claiming to be another one.”
“Maybe I’m not, and maybe I will turn out to be one. You never know in Vegas, with its instant marriage industry. Now I’m going to pay my respects to the dear departed.”
Every eye upon her, she cat-walked to the casket—one spike-clad foot crossing in front of the other—to place a black-gloved hand on the brass rail and gaze and sigh as if performing in a high school Shakespearian tragedy.
“Oh, Jay,” Diane wailed as the trio walked away and out of the reception room, “did you go off the rails with one bad mama!”
“Maybe not,” Temple said, noticing that Merry Su had snapped some shots of Ms. Zevon/Zydeco with her cell phone. “Maybe one bad mama pushed him off the rails.”
29
To The War Has Gone
The solid green door required a knock. Max’s fist produced three knuckle-tingling blows. Three was a fairytale number. Good things, and bad, came in three.
“A moment,” a voice inside said. Male. Tinged with an Irish accent, so engaging and easy to pick up.
Max stepped back, almost into Kathleen behind him, Kathleen poised to impress this outdated Kodak moment on her vengeful brain.
“I’ll get it,” a woman’s voice trilled, pure Irish to the vocal sway on the word “get”.
The door opened immediately, slamming Max with the vision of a wide smile, a pale but freckled face, hair as crazy red-gold as Temple’s, only curdled with curls haloing her head and shoulders. He couldn’t even register what she wore, just that vivid, welcoming presence.
“May I help you?” she asked. “We’re between engagements, but not for long.”
Between engagements? Was this a show business couple? Here? How?
“I’ve…we’ve come from America,” Max said inanely.
“Don’t you all?” the woman remarked in good humor. “And it’s happy we are to have you here. Come in to see the place.”
Well, yeah. As Max stepped over the threshold, he heard rattling in another room.
“Is it just the two of you, then, sir?” the woman inquired, stretching her neck to see past Max’s six-feet-four to the short woman in his wake. “You and your…lady.”
How adroitly she’d avoided “marrying” them. M
ax was deeply grateful for her tact.
He was still too taken aback to register anything but shards of the room. Wide wood plank flooring, wavy white stone walls and a tall brick chimney with a rough beam mantelpiece. Age-blackened vertical wooden beams here and there.
The woman was perhaps forty, bare of makeup, her pale brows arched and her mouth humorous. Her nose was straight, but meant business. Cheery confidence would describe her. “I’m Deirdre,” she said.
Yes, you are a dear woman, aren’t you? The last thing Max had expected behind the green door was a warm welcome.
“And are you Irish-American, too?” Deirdre asked Kathleen.
Kathleen just nodded. Max chanced a deeper look at her. No, this was not the scene she had planned to stage-manage.
“Well,” Deirdre said, “we can have tea, but as long as you’re standing, would you like to look at the upstairs first?”
“Yes, indeed,” Max said. “I’m Max. The architecture is…charming.” He could sense Kathleen seething with frustrated expectations behind him. Max added to the civil social ritual unfolding. “The cottage looks so traditional, Deirdre, but the skylights are a perfect modern touch for this cloudy climate.”
Deirdre led the way up a narrow set of stairs, a tall woman as solid as the front door. “The place is an old barn we’ve converted to a bed and breakfast. We’ve redone the upstairs to offer a bathroom and four guest bedrooms, one with an en suite, simple but comfortable.”
She opened a door onto a spacious bedroom dominated by a large, elegant iron bedstead against a curtained window, flanked by tables. Above it, a slanted ceiling rose to meet two old beams in a ceiling pierced by a skylight and pocked by modern can lights.
A smaller, much older window on the side wall was flanked by a chair and a huge wall mirror.
“Wonderful,” Max said, knowing the sheer social normality of every word and gesture of his interaction with Deirdre was driving Kathleen crazy. Crazier. “How long have you run the bed and breakfast?”
“Fourteen years. We’d been daft to stay in the city any longer than that, and the Troubles were still bubbling along back then.”
“In Antrim and Down counties?” Max asked.
She nodded. “In Belfast, the worst of it.” Her lips hardened into a taut line. “Now that is mostly under control,” she added briskly, the accommodating hostess again. “You Americans have no idea of the hard-hearted hatred that seared both sides during that time. Belfast requires ‘peace walls’ between sides and still seethes. Yet here we are delighted to provide stress-ridden vacationers with a piece of Irish peace, so to say, not only in the country, but in our rare bit of countryside.”
Max was juggling two scenarios for his cousin. He was Deirdre’s husband and a lucky man. Or, perhaps, a hired man. She’d need someone handy about the place. A head wound, Kathleen had said, if she could be trusted. The fact that Sean, if truly alive, had never gone home could mean severe brain damage, long medical stays, relearning to walk, talk, think.
But if he were here—Max wandered to the window behind the bed and gazed out on the serene countryside all rumpled in shades of green to the horizon. Green, the color of hope. If he was here, Sean had cornered a piece of heaven. Then why hadn’t he ever gone home to his grieving family?
He turned to see Kathleen watching him intently. She knew why.
“The reason,” Deirdre said, perhaps afraid Max was too enchanted by this cozy, modernized cottage, “we’re vacant now is because of a cancellation. I can only offer you the one night.”
“I’d like to go downstairs,” Kathleen said, sharply.
Deirdre looked at Max. He shrugged, ever so slightly, then told her, “The lawn and garden below look stunning. Does it require a lot of upkeep?”
“My Lord, man,” Deirdre said with a laugh. “Try to keep the greenery from growin’ on our famous Emerald Isle. It requires constant ‘groomin’, wouldn’t you know?”
On that they clambered back down the wooden stairs, sounding like a home invasion crew.
“Deirdre,” came a man’s voice with an Irish lilt, “there’s a car in the drive, have you—?”
They collided at the bottom of the stairs, Deirdre still on the first step and taller than the man who looked up at her. Max higher still, looking down on a man’s head of thinning rusted gray hair.
“We have company,” the man told Deirdre. “I didn’t know.” His hand waved a wrench apologetically.
Guests, Max guessed, weren’t to meet the maintenance side of this rural paradise.
The man backed away to let them all descend, Max turned to take Kathleen’s hand for the last steep step. Her fingers were ice cold. Her adrenaline had kicked in at peak performance. Max tried to look the newcomer in the eye, but the guy was looking down, pulling screws from his work belt.
“I’d best be back at it,” he mumbled, moving around the corner to what must be the kitchen.
“Wait,” Kathleen said. “Someone’s here to meet you, Sean.”
Deirdre’s stance immediately stiffened. Max recognized a defender as surely as if she’d been a Doberman. His gut tightened. If this was Sean, he hadn’t escaped the pub bombing without serious damage. Max felt like someone about to walk into a burn ward…bracing himself to face people who’d suffered horrible hurt and disfigurement, but desperately trying to see and show the humanity that could look past that to the person.
“Sean,” he said, far sooner than he’d wanted to.
The man froze, giving Max time to recognize his right profile and rejoice at the slim slice of normality. The receding hairline itself was an amazing alteration. Then he remembered their uncle Dennis. Sean’s appearance had always skewed to the Red Irish side of the family, while Max was a poster boy for the Black Irish model.
So different they had looked, so linked they had been. First cousins, blood brothers, best friends.
“You’re Michael, aren’t you?” Deirdre accused, stepping between Max and Sean. “You turned traitor and disappeared, and now you’re back?”
There Max was, between Kathleen at his back and Sean’s defender at his front. He sensed Kathleen relaxing as the gladiator games between family began.
“Sean,” Max said. “All the evidence and witnesses said you hadn’t survived. That’s what the Ulster government cabled to your parents, our parents. We all believed it and grieved.”
“This is one witness,” Deirdre said, her yellow eyes blazing like topazes on fire, “who didn’t stick around to testify. I’d seen him, an American boyo in the middle of a bloody war zone. He wouldn’t leave,” she told Max. “He wouldn’t leave without you, although you’d had no such qualms. I had to drag him away from the pub bar, and wasn’t fast enough.”
She lifted her left arm and pulled up her cardigan sleeve, exposing burn scar tissue that resembled a Jackson Pollock painting.
“And you!” She turned on Kathleen before Max could react, black pupils overwhelming her pale-ale eyes as she recognized her. “You, acting like a true daughter of Ireland and then flirting like a whore to turn two naive boyhood friends into rivals. You, playing God, and luring one from the bombing site, and not the other, saving one and not the other. Well, I saved Sean, banshee witch! I got him away.
“They say you became a money machine for the IRA, but I always knew your kind. You were just a slut lookin’ to ruin men for your own pride and pleasure. I should take your eyes out.”
And she lunged to do just that.
Max reached out an arm to stop her a second earlier than Sean did the same. Their forearms crossed like swords, straight and tense, and Deirdre rebounded as the men’s eyes met.
Right arm works, thank God, Max tallied. Left side…iffy.
The men stepped back as Deirdre did.
“We should talk,” Max said.
Sean knew whom he was addressing. “Deirdre, watch the woman here in the front lounge. We’ll be in the rear one.”
Sean turned without revealing his full face, or his
left side, and limped around the corner. Max evaluated Deirdre and Kathleen. Deirdre was standing with feet wide and braced, fists on hips. Kathleen had turned sideways to her, watching the woman, as poised to move in any direction as a snake.
Each stood tensed, broadcasting hate, showing the defensive fire of a bear defending her cub. He knew his she-bear wanted the opposite outcome for him. Kathleen wanted Max to be devastated, and welcomed any confessionals between the cousins that would drive the thumbscrews deeper.
Her motives didn’t bother Max at all. The would-be bond-breaker had become an inadvertent matchmaker. It was down to a wrestling match between him and Sean with the angels of their better beings. Between the two careless, impulsive teenagers they had been and the wounded men their separate lives had made them. They needed to know how, and why, and why not.
And the women, however well or ill intentioned, couldn’t affect or change a moment of that.
Sean kept his back turned as Max entered the room. “Close the door,” he said.
His voice was deeper now, a reminder of how young they’d really been that Irish summer of long ago.
As Max complied he heard the two metallic pings in sequence. A paranoid would think of a gun being cocked, but Matt wasn’t surprised to see two open bottles of beer standing on the kitchen counter. An under-counter cap remover explained the pings.
“We drink home-style,” Sean said, holding out a brown bottle.
“Fine by me.” He knew pouring beer into glasses would be clumsy for Sean.
“There.” Sean pointed. “Take that stool. The kitchen’s been redone with all-American bells and whistles, breakfast bar and stools.”
“Impressive. It’s a stunning location,” Max said, leaning his hip on a stool.
“This valley is beyond pleasant, and handy for tourists, being equidistant from Belfast and either coast. How’d you hook up with Kathleen again? In America? How did you find me?” Sean sat on a stool near the kitchen’s farmhouse sink.
“I can’t say I’ve looked for you all this time. Some human remains left were powder and bone. Your DNA was found in the pub wreckage. I accompanied what seemed to be all that was left of you home to Racine for a funeral and burial.”
Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit Page 19
