Father Flynn would have been happy to hear that from him at last.
30
Paid Off
Breedlove, Conway and Gallagher, attorneys at law, weren’t far from Sam Funeral Home’s, so Temple and Electra shared Temple’s two-seat red Miata while Diane drove her rental car to meet them there.
Temple had to wait in the expected mahogany and leather outer office while Electra and Diane, apparently the only heirs, went into the attorney’s inner office. She tapped her toe impatiently on the forest-green plush carpeting while paging through Newsweek magazine. Thank God some magazines were still in print.
She wanted to be there, an eyewitness at this oft-filmed cinematic cliché, the second she’d viewed today, The Reading of the Will. The first had been the Black Widow from Central Casting.
Of course, with one lawyer who knew no one involved, including the deceased, and two fairly friendly ex-wives, the event was not likely to be drenched in drama.
Which was why Temple leaped out of her seat when a soprano “No!” boomed from behind the closed door to the inner office.
The outburst was followed by a bass male murmur and rapid breathless soprano arpeggios.
Temple paced the waiting room.
She neared the door, stopped, and listened with all her attention. She could hear nothing clearly, except the counterpoint of agitated high and low calming tones.
Then all sound stopped.
Temple waited and wondered, and was caught flat-footed in the figurative sense when the door burst open, emitting a dazed-looking Electra and Diane.
Ethan Gallagher, a thin man in a stuffy, dark three-piece suit that looked horribly hot for Vegas, followed them out, frowning at Temple’s proximity. “Remember, ladies, you don’t have to reveal the terms of the will to anyone except the police.”
He glared at Temple. She glared back and followed the women into the hall. “Well, Mr. Gallagher’s parting words were on the rude side,” she said. “Unless you want to keep the terms private from snoops like me.”
Diane hesitated, but Electra didn’t. “I need a drink. I need to sit down. Ditto for Diane. Take us somewhere, Temple. We are too gobsmacked to think.”
A PR person’s main meeting places are in the community she covers, its restaurants and watering holes. In Las Vegas, there were enough of those to trip over every fifty feet, even at 10:00 a.m. in the morning. After giving Diane directions, in fifteen minutes she had them all installed at the Stratosphere’s 108th-floor Air Bar, with Electra and Diane ordering four-dollar strawberry-lime frozen margaritas, set down on paper napkins that read: AFRAID OF HEIGHTS.
Temple’s stomach quavered at so much alcoholic sweetness, especially at extreme heights, so she stuck to ice water. She was driving, after all.
The cool green neon interior was fairly deserted and the 360-degree view of Las Vegas looked dusty and distant, like any southwest desertscape.
“So what’s the news?” Temple asked.
Diane and Electra noisily sucked up flavored crushed ice. Diane spoke first. “I got the house in Dayton, Ohio.”
“Is that a good thing?” Temple asked.
“At my age, any house is an asset,” Diane said. “I didn’t expect him to leave me anything.”
“And Electra?”
Electra was staring out at the drab landscape, slowly slurping the lurid drink in its lowly plastic glass in front of her. “I can’t believe it.”
“What you got in the will?”
Temple glanced at Diane, who nodded solemnly. “I can’t believe it either. But the lawyer said the house is free and clear, no liens or anything. And Electra—”
“Jay had it in his will.” Electra’s eyes shone with tears. “He left me all his Vegas land and the buildings on it. So I’ve got your baby urban village going, Temple. And to think I cussed him out just before he died.”
Temple couldn’t reveal at this maudlin moment that she had a hugely hot idea for said urban village. Instead, she offered consolation.
“Jay made the bequest long before you yelled at him,” Temple said with a smile. “That’s fabulous. I wonder why he didn’t tell you that?” She jumped down from her skimpy bar-height chair, her heels hitting the smooth floor with a clap like hands. “Let’s find a window that overlooks your new empire.”
She rushed to the slanted glass windows with DO NOT LEAN ON signs posted at regular intervals. Outside, clothed body parts and screaming faces flashed by as the Stratosphere’s extreme thrill rides plunged willing riders up and down and around at fearsome heights and speed.
“We’re right near the Pawn Stars village,” Temple said.
“That looks like an ant hill,” Diane exclaimed.
“Four thousand people a day,” Electra quoted Temple.
But Temple’s high heels were almost striking sparks off the shiny floor as she raced to another window view.
“Come on. This is the window we want. Look. Down there.” Temple pointed. “There’s the police substation roof and your penthouse atop the Circle Ritz and a little bit over and down, your new, big empty building and lot.”
“Oh, my,” Electra said. “It’s more land than just that. I need to get home and look up my plat maps. I think I remember where Jay’s parts began and ended, but we could probably get them from the city too.” Her excitement ebbed. “I’ll always remember that building as where Jay died, where he was killed.”
“He wanted you to have it,” Diane said quietly, slipping her arm through Electra’s. “He provided for us both. That’s an amazing thing for a divorced man to do. If he hadn’t been addicted to gambling—”
“There you go,” Electra said. “A phrase that could go on many a Vegas headstone.”
Temple put an arm through Electra’s free one and pulled both women back to the bar. “Let’s finish our drinks with a toast to Jay Edgar and then go get our feet on the ground. Your new ground, Electra.”
What she didn’t say, and wasn’t about to over the older women’s strawberry-lime frozen margaritas, was that she hoped J. Edgar Dyson hadn’t signed any irrevocable documents with the interested parties who’d seemed determined to fleece him, and maybe even had killed him after he’d signed on the dotted line. The bizarre manner of death and location sure wouldn’t help authorities look farther than Electra or her friends.
Nor did Temple point out that Molina and company would consider Electra being Dyson’s most significant heir made her an even more likely suspect for engineering his macabre murder.
31
Sleepless After Sunset
Mea culpa, mea culpa. My fault, my fault, I am not worthy.
Even with Sean and Deirdre looking on, Max thought a man who had come all this way with a woman to a remote Irish cottage ought do more than feel regret and move on.
“If I ran away after that intimate moment, Kathleen,” he confessed, “I wasn’t ready for the responsibility of such a pure and needful love. It was the worst mistake of my life. I’ve paid for it every day, and you’ve seen that I’ve paid for it every hour.”
He laughed a little. “I wish there was something that would redeem the moment for you.”
She shook her head. “You’ve won. You’ve forgotten, and I can’t.”
Before Max could answer, Deirdre spoke behind him. “See the glorious sunset you’ve brought with you, Michael Kinsella.”
He and Kathleen automatically looked away from each other to the picture window again, where the sky was bleeding all the colors of a watercolor box into undiluted strands of peach and aqua and magenta and orange and purple and scarlet and iridescent mother-of-pearl blue.
“Mother of God,” Deirdre’s soft croon sounded like a lullaby, “’tis the loveliest spot on earth.”
Max waited for Kathleen’s raw outburst, but she remained silent.
Deirdre said briskly, “Sean has things under control at the stove. We’ll sit outside. Will ye take out the settings?”
“Of course,” Max said, collecting Kathleen’s glass with
his—broken glass was a weapon—and heading for the kitchen to deposit them on the table. Sean wasn’t there.
Deidre indicated a cupboard with tableware in ceramic pots and the dinner plates on a high shelf. Deidre must stand five-eight, Max thought, almost Molina tall.
He smiled to think of no-nonsense, emotions-stowed Molina peeking in on the dramatis personae in this domestic scene with utter shock.
Max reached for the plates and turned, almost bumping into Kathleen collecting knives and spoons and forks. He could feel her entire body tense to have someone standing this close, especially him.
He looked down on her shining black hair, wearing no black velvet band, and stroked his palm over it.
She remained frozen, staring down at the silverware in her hands, minutely trembling, fighting the instinct to lash out.
He stepped away without incident, and saw Deirdre watching.
“Michael, be a love, and take the butter dish out as well? Ah! Max, I mean.”
Hands full, luckily, Max and Kathleen elbowed themselves out the pantry door to be ambushed by a Cinemascope version of the sunset that suffused the entire sky.
While their eyes feasted, their nostrils inhaled the smoky aroma of grilled steak. Sean stood at a portable stainless steel barbecue setup against the cottage’s textured stone wall.
“A high-end barbecue?” Max asked. “Not a common item of Irish charm.”
“It charms the tourists,” Sean said. “The brews are on ice in the washtub, if that’s charmin’ enough for an Ugly American like you. And the ladies might need shawls against the goin’ of the light. Deirdre’ll give you a couple inside.” Sean stepped forward to pull the heavy wrought-iron chair out for Kathleen, who stared at the thing as if it’d bite her.
Max darted inside to take two big serving dishes from Deirdre and ask for the shawls.
Forty-five minutes later, the food was gone and the lingering sunset was nearly gone. Two lanterns moved from the side table now flickered on all their faces, almost like flames.
Sean had fetched a wine bottle for the women. Max had tired of the strong Irish ale and itched for three fingers of Jameson’s, but drank what his host did, eager not to challenge the habits of the house in this peaceful place.
“Have you thought of adding a fire pit, Sean?” Max asked. “It’d take away the chill.”
“Too American, Max. The tourists like their comforts, but also like a bit of the primitive. Except for the stainless steel barbie, a must for the Aussies.”
“You’re right. You don’t want to make this into a suburban backyard in Racine.” Max looked around. “St. Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland, it’s said, but I believe he exiled the mosquitoes too.”
“Aye, I don’t miss the mosquitoes in Wisconsin, as big as butterflies,” Sean told Deirdre.
“And now carrying exotic and lethal diseases,” Max said.
“But you don’t have mosquito problems in Las Vegas.”
“No, drought though.”
“I can’t stand it!” Kathleen’s voice shattered the peace. “Look at you. Two self-satisfied retiree ex-patriots reminiscing over your pints.”
“We are ex-pats of a sort,” Max told Sean, ignoring her outburst.
“I don’t mean from America, you dunces!” Kathleen had stood, her cheeks ruddy with wine and fury, her shawl clutched around her. “From the Cause. Even Michael here once gave a tinker’s damn about undermining the resistance’s bombing plots, and you, Sean, you were taken in by the IRA and ended up at a negotiation table. All that I did for years to raise money for guns and gold is fading like the setting sun into futility.”
“Because we’ve won the peace,” Deirdre said quietly.
“It will never last. The Orangemen still march in Belfast.”
“And,” Max said, “there’s still a price on my head, or else I wouldn’t be going to Belfast to find where Garry Randolph’s body has been buried.”
“Once again,” Kathleen said, “you set yourself on a quest for a dead man. I suppose the living aren’t good enough for you. I can arrange more such quests.”
“Sit down, Kathleen,” Deirdre said.
“Why should I sit at table with you lot of traitors?”
“This is my table and you will sit down, Kathleen.”
To Max’s amazement, she obeyed. Deirdre’s intense command must have echoed a nun’s from the Magdalene asylum. A stern parental “No!” can sometimes make an attacker pause. Max had used that trick, but Deirdre had not shouted.
“Body?” Sean asked Max. “Buried? Who is Garry Randolph?”
“The counterterrorism mentor I told you about,” Max said, “who performed as the magician Gandolph the Great. My bungee-based magic act was sabotaged in Vegas and I fell, broke both my legs and a good bit of my brain, the part that remembers. Garry took me to Europe to escape, heal and revisit my past. We were on the run and got tangled up with some IRA remnants in Belfast. Trying to outdrive a shooting spree, I…Garry got hit. I…do you have any whiskey?”
Sean nodded at Deirdre.
“I’ll have some too,” Kathleen said. Sullenly.
Deirdre paused beside her, and put a light hand on her shoulder. “I’ll bring the whiskey and then later you and I will have our say.”
The bottle wasn’t Jameson’s but a good brand, nevertheless. Deirdre brought Waterford lowball glasses and the lantern light made the whiskey into liquid orange sunsets in the bottom of their glasses.
So it came to this, Max thought, night coming on and the four of them all still alive and older and drinking together in Ireland. He wondered if he should check under the table for a bomb.
He told Sean how Garry had put him in a private Swiss sanitarium to recover, how assassins may have found him, and Max had to escape into the Alps with casts on both legs. He told how he survived to reach Zurich and contract Garry, omitting mention of the woman psychiatrist from the clinic who was his doctor and/or hostage or assigned assassin.
Reminding Kathleen of the dangerously bright and beautiful Revienne Schneider might trigger another jealous jihad. Seeing Revienne leave his Las Vegas house probably had spurred Kathleen to burn down the place with him in it. She’d certainly seemed surprised to see him when he’d hijacked her on this flight to the Old Sod.
“So,” Max concluded, “when I finally connected with Garry, we flew to Ireland. He hoped retracing the path you and I made many years ago, Sean, from Ireland to Northern Ireland, would help my memory. We interviewed all shades of former IRA members in Belfast, and irritated someone enough to try to kill me. Us.”
Max glanced at Kathleen, her shoulders hunched in the softly woven shawl, her hands cupped around the glass, warming the crystal as the liquor warmed her.
“What did you do with Garry’s body?” Sean asked.
Max shut his eyes. “I had to leave it with our abandoned car in Belfast, hoping that his friends among the old IRA people who made the peace would claim it for a decent burial.”
“And so do I,” Sean said, leaning forward to put his good right hand on Max’s wrist. “I’ll help you find your friend if you reach an impasse.”
Max was too stressed to do more than nod.
“Did the that trip, and this, help your memory?” Deirdre asked.
Max sighed. “Somewhat.”
Even with them there, he couldn’t afford to let down his guard in front of Kathleen. She’d palmed a steak knife when the meal was cleared. He’d disarm her before beddy-bye time. She might have slipped her straight razor through airport security too.
He laughed to himself, thinking of Matt Devine trying to glimpse if she had any cat-scratch scars on her back and the back of her legs during one of their 3:00 a.m. hotel rendezvous. He would bet the ex-priest had sweated that assignment.
Come to think of it, he was glad that job was done and he didn’t have to worry about it. Kathleen had definitely not been one of the two Darth Vader-masked figures who’d tried to threaten the cabal of magicians
turned would-be heist operators, all in a search for Kathleen’s collected but now lost hoard of money and guns for the IRA.
Even as Max savored the straight whiskey and the cool darkness, he realized this family-like atmosphere was priming Kathleen nerves.
“Cheers,” Kathleen said, lifting her glass. “What was it we were to settle, Deirdre? Why are you so eager to embrace the man who left your husband there in the pub to be blown up, and you along with him?”
“Boys. They were boys, Kathleen.”
“Ireland makes boys men at fourteen.”
“Only because of the Troubles. And who was it hangin’ around the IRA men like a rock star groupie, jumpin’ on any fresh outsider comin’ in?”
“They were foolish not to use women in the Cause, except to breed more of them and nurse them when they were hurt or dyin’.”
“Sure, and you wanted to fight like a man, Kathleen, only you used woman’s wiles. You weren’t a patriot. You thrived on the anger and hatred for the British Protestants and army, well deserved, but you needed the high emotions and the dance of betrayal for your own selfish reasons. You lived to turn one against the other, and so you did. Oh, you knew how to flirt and tease and you ached to destroy. You craved the attention, but despised the men who gave it to you.”
“Deirdre,” Sean began.
“Stay out of it. This is woman’s work.” She turned to Kathleen again. “I saw you playing one American lad against the other. They were innocents wantin’ a bit of sin. They knew nothing of the grinding oppression we Catholics felt. Sure, they feared most the confessional back home once they’d stepped over the so-sweet forbidden fruit line thousands of miles away, not the tinderbox that was Northern Ireland. You were three-and-twenty. They were randy virgins of seventeen, well reined in by the Church. Our home-grown boys and men knew to dodge your temptations. They feared the confessional too. Or, if hardened, were willing to engage with you in a contest of who was using whom. But these two, their rivalry was trivial. Neither would have long resented the other for ‘winning the beauteous colleen’. And the winner would have felt duly guilty afterwards.”
Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit Page 21
