“Wait. The least you can do is tell me what crazy tangent you are chasing now.”
“It involves murder, of course, and strange, exotic human rituals that would make a cat laugh, were evil not involved.”
“‘Evil’, you say. Evil under the Las Vegas sun?”
Now Ingram is paraphrasing an Agatha Christie title. He does not realize I know this and know it shows his weakness for a mystery.
“Yes, but extending back decades. Too old to be found.”
“Historical, you say?”
“And far too obscure to convey, even with the photographic memory and wide resources you possess.”
“Try me.”
“And the time factor is…hopeless.”
“Try me.” He is almost begging now.
“If you insist. I hate to set you up to fail, and Miss Temple and Miss Electra will be taking Miss Maeveleen to lunch in less than twenty minutes.”
“Tell me!” Ingram is now almost grinding his fangs.
I shrug and give my thick ruff an absent lick. “I need to find a book with a particular reference. The phrase in question is ‘Zoot Suit Choo-Choo’.”
“I thought-we had discussed that thoroughly. Oh. I suppose you are trying to relive your triumphs in the À la Cat commercials. The Fontana brothers ‘made’ that production number. They wore the zoot suits and you stumbled and tumbled down the stairs.”
“I was tripped by my evil rival, the spokescat Maurice.”
“If you say so. However, the zoot suit, unlike you, has an interesting history and may be represented in books in inventory. Let me think.”
Ingram closes his eyes and rapidly drones, “Zoot Suit. Referencing the Zoot Suit Riots of the nineteen-forties. Not in Las Vegas, though. L.A. So. Nothing in Historical Las Vegas section. Two in Entertainment section. Not in Fiction. Three books in Fashion. Four in Sociology. One in Cat, the Forties. Three in World War Two. Nothing in Trains, History. And certainly nothing under ‘Choo-Choo’ but The Little Engine That Could, Children’s Fiction.”
He opens his eyes and blinks. “Anything sound useful?”
“I know most of that,” I mutter. “I thought Miss Maeveleen Pearl ran a mystery bookstore. Her inventory is long on miscellanea and short on murder.”
“An independent bookstore owner today has to be resourceful. We are hanging on by my dewclaws. You already know about the Zoot Suit and the riots, why come to me again?” Ingram asks.
“Because I need to get the Circle Ritz ladies to trip over something concrete that will get them thinking about the Zoot Suit Choo-Choo club that existed in that abandoned building back in the fifties. I am sure there are clues there to a contemporary crime.”
“And how do you know this?”
“Uh, certain connections.”
“What connections?”
“Okay, it is a hunch.”
Ingram glares at me.
“I had a…dream.”
Ingram shakes his head slowly.
“Call it Karma.”
“That flake! I am talking documented history here, not woo-woo speculation. There is nothing concrete about that site down the block except it will be the end of all small businesses in the neighborhood.”
Ingram is, sadly, correct. I cogitate. When I look up at Ingram again to declare defeat, I am mesmerized by his…feet. His right shivs are tapping his folded forelimbs in agitation.
“I am forgetting a prime sales category at the Thrill ‘n’ Quill, so to speak, Louie.”
“Am I suppose to wax hopeful over the word ‘prime’ or ‘category’?” I ask sourly.
“Both, my good sleuth. Miss Maeveleen has descended, er, expanded, into selling used videos.”
“So? I can see all that on retro TV. Miss Temple does provide me with best in cable and recorded entertainment.”
Ingram lifts an admonitory claw. On him it is not a weapon of mass deconstruction. “Tut, tut. You say the Circle Ritz headwoman and your paramour are arriving here soon?”
I do not quibble about his demeaning descriptions. He would not fare well by me either. “Yes. It is our last best chance to clue them in on the nefarious doings at the future Lust ‘n’ Lace strip club site.”
Ingram shudders in distaste. “Ghastly name. Let them come, and I will build it. A stunning big ‘reveal’, as we say in reality TV, only this will be live and in furperson. just get them to follow me when they arrive.”
Am I to pin all my hopes on Ingram as Pied Piper? I must say he is the brainy type. And, when it come to push versus shove, when it comes to Ingram versus my Miss Temple’s keen investigative instincts, I must put my money on her making the giant leapt for human kind.
It has been a twenty-minute wait and I am nibbling on my toenails.
The clever gong of funeral bells reverberates when Miss Electra and Miss Temple enter the mystery bookstore. I was too intent to notice that small touch on my earlier visit.
The three women confer, tsking over the challenging economic climate for the small entrepreneur, the crassness of the Vegas Strip mentality, and the superiority of cats over men as boon companions. Sadly, my Miss Temple is silent on this key issue, but she always is the diplomat.
Then Ingram goes to work as an ankle massager of world-class moves. I am shocked, but have agreed to give him the lead role.
Within two minutes he has the trio cooing over the rack of plastic-covered recorded items. Within thirty seconds he has pried one loose. It tumbles to the floor.
“Oh, look,” says Miss Electra Lark, “the clever boy has selected our latest home entertainment. What a fun fat cat on the cover.”
I manage to catch a glimpse of Ingram’s selection and am left speechless and barely able to wiggle a whisker, or whisk past a female ankle.
“Zoot Cat” is pictured on the cover. It is that loathsome Tom from the Tom and Jerry cartoons where the Jerry-mouse gets Tom-cat’s goat every episode. These are artifacts from a politically incorrect age and I am shocked that they are still available in their old, unadulterated form.
“Maeveleen,” Miss Temple says, fishing the odious portrayal up off the floor. “So you have a DVD player for this vintage cartoon?”
No, no! It is denigrating to cats everywhere. We are long past these dated depictions as dumb and gullible and manipulated by mice. We are the smooth operators these days.
I cringe as Miss Maeveleen produces a laptop computer and the tinny period music unfolds and we all see the dated cat action in cartoon view.
“Yoo-hoo! Hey, Toots!” yells Tom at the door of a lady-cat. “What’s cookin’, Toots?”
Tom peeks through the window and sees Toots listening to a radio while painting her claws. The radio airs a commercial for a zoot suit. Tom decides to make his own zoot suit from an orange-and-green hammock.
Tom cat goes awry right there with that awful color combination, I think with a shudder.
Toots loves the suit Tom models for her…the coat hanger that widens the jacket shoulders and the long pocket chain, which is actually a bathtub plug.
“Now you collar my jive,” Toots says. “You are on the right side, you alligator.”
They jive dance, but Jerry clips the hanger in Tom’s jacket to a window shade, then kicks Tom. As Tom pursues the fleeing mouse, the shade unravels and rebounds, rolling up Tom and tossing him into a fishbowl, where his wet zoot suit slowly shrinks. It pops off his body and drifts to the floor. Jerry jumps into the shrunken suit, now a perfect fit and dances away.
Everybody laughs.
“You know,” Miss Maeveleen says, “this reminds me of a fifties-era nightclub near here called Zoot Suit Choo-Choo. Isn’t that funny?”
Very unfunny. This is a cartoon entertainment, but they have always been about violence.
Maybe even murder.
35
A Pool of Suspects
It is not usual police procedure to convene a meeting on a murder case poolside in Las Vegas, but this was decidedly not a police operation.
The pool area was the only space at the Circle Ritz that could hold all the friends and neighbors of Electra Lark. And all of these people present were concerned about her being a person of interest in a spectacular murder case with overtones of an elaborate mob hit.
“A ‘mob’ of Fontana brothers, all ten, were an awesome presence on their own, especially accessorizing their pastel-cool summer suits with hot, black-framed sunglasses that would put them at home with George Clooney (the new Cary Grant) in a new Ocean’s Las Vegas heist film.
In tune with its vintage perfection, the Circle Ritz had a quaint little pool house with a striped awning to provide deep shade for Electra, flanked by Temple and Matt.
The Fontana boys had arrived with a large portable screen and small laptop computer. They proclaimed they had a “most intriguing” Powerpoint presentation based into their research into the scene of the crime.
“Not to worry, Miss Electra,” Aldo Fontana told the guest of honor, bowing like a prosecuting attorney about to put on trial the real “person or persons unknown” they were searching for. “If your custom falls off because of this cloud of unjustified suspicion, I assure you we Fontanas shall purchase and occupy any lost tenants’ residences.”
Temple sat boggled by the implications. Under Aldo’s plan, the Circle Ritz could become the coolest Fontana Brothers upscale frat house in Vegas. Hip people would kill to rent or own there. And the security would be Fort Knox-class.
“Wouldn’t it,” Matt asked, “be simpler to finger the fraudsters and the murderer or murderers without a mass move-in?”
“Of course,” Nicky said. “My bros don’t need cribs and could always take over a floor at the Crystal Phoenix, if they want.”
Temple was very glad Nicky’s wife and the hotel manager, Van von Rhine, wasn’t here to learn of her husband’s grandiose hospitality. But then, every Fontana brother was grandiose, and that would be criminal to stamp out.
Ernesto presented Electra with a suspiciously rum-colored giant cocktail glass accessorized with paper umbrellas and drew up a bamboo ottoman.
“Now you just rest your feet and sit back, Miss Electra. Let us boys figure out who mighta done it—even better, who we’d all like to nail for doing it—and who our concerned close friends, Mr. Matt Devine and Miss Temple Barr, need more information about once we have laid out criminally suspect persons in this local cast of Clue.”
Electra wiggled her toes in their carnival-colored cork sandals—once Ernesto had swept the ottoman under them—and sipped on the long, long straw in her umbrella drink. “I’m most intrigued to see your presentation, fellas.”
Temple smiled at Electra’s joie de vivre. Now that luxury brand Céline had made an octogenarian Joan Didion their ad icon and Yves Saint Laurent had done the same with septuagenarian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (who’d written a song on the Magdalene asylums), Temple could revel in the idea of someday being a hip little old lady. She hoped to live long enough to be seriously removed forever from the “small and cute” and young category, like a lapdog.
Darn those Fontana brothers, their antique gallantry somehow got women feeling empowered! Of course the entire family fortune was based on Grandmama Fontana’s Italian sauce empire. Sauce equals sauciness.
“Now.” Aldo was evidently the chief prosecutor. “We have consulted family archives back to a time in which the Fontana escutcheon was slightly tainted in the public knowledge by the aura of Family connections not quite within the strict confines of The Law.” He turned, his double back-vented jacket swaying as gracefully as if on a Milano runway. “As some would say, not ‘legit’.”
Temple could hardly stop from laughing. Any minute now, she expected the assembled Fontana Brothers to form a Broadway musical chorus and break out singing the “Sit down, sit down, you’re rockin’ the boat” chorus from Guys and Dolls.
She conjured a paraphrased second line, tailor-made for Fontana, Inc.
“And the Devil will drag you under by sharp lapels of your Emanogildo Zegna coat. Stand up, stand up, you’re shakin’ the boat.”
Meanwhile, Ralph Fontana, his single diamond ear stud twinkling like a wink, hurried around the roomy patio to ensure the laptop computer projected the right image, a photo of the forlorn empty building.
“First,” Aldo said, “I wish to notify those not acquainted with police photos of crime scenes and the like, that some images may be hard to take. Happily, we start with an architectural long shot of the building in which the gruesome discovery, Mr. Jay Edgar Dyson’s dead body, was found.
“We Fontanas have been asked to research some of the possible perpetrators who might have what is called ‘mob’ corrections. Of course, we all know—” he pushed his impossibly stylish Italian sunglasses atop his head so his face was an open book, “—the FBI drove out all mob factions from Las Vegas by the end of the nineteen-eighties.”
Nicky Fontana cleared his throat. Loudly.
Temple knew mob activity remained alive and well in offbeat areas like controlling meat sales rather than the more glamorous gambling violations.
“Anyway,” Aldo went on, “we have learned that Mr. Dyson owned, as did his ex-wife, Miss Electra Lark, quite a bit of land surrounding this, what I can only call an abandoned hulk, on a nameless side street. Mr. Dyson, we learn, was lured to Vegas to discuss selling this vintage edifice, most recently a purveyor…” Here images passed in succession. “…of wigged-out old dolls (nothing personal to the older lady among us), chipped metal-painted toys and Depression glass, which I believe is called that because it is so depressing to look at, being all moss green and yellow colors, and often chipped besides.”
Temple cringed as the dolls with their balding wigs and cracked China faces passed by, looking like escapees from old horror movies.
“And,” Aldo added, “several hundred amps of rhinestone jewelry that Miss Temple Barr no doubt would covet.”
Since all the illustrated pieces were either G-strings or showgirl bras, Temple doubted that, particularly since she was a 32 AN. All Natural. Still, she was flattered Aldo thought she might be interested in something other than crime scenes.
“This building looks innocent of everything but urban blight,” he said. “Now we will segue to the Unusual Suspects.”
Aldo flipped the screen image to images from old photos to present film clip as easily as his suit jacket vents fluttered in a Vegas breeze.
“First, the understudies.” He clicked to a jail intake photo of a tough-looking guy. “In these shots, the suspects’ ‘performance’ names are noted,” Aldo explained. “Punch Sullivan did just that—punch and get punched—until taking too many ‘dives’ in fixed fights ruined his profile. Kat with a K was ‘Cathy’ with a C when she was assisting Vegas’s lowest-level con men and street magicians off the Strip, and hooking on the side. Naturally, they were soon ready for bigger money-making ventures. After they got together and shifted their focus, they became a Team around Town. We are looking at a pair of known adult entertainment figures, two of dozens in Las Vegas. You gonna open a strip club, you need sexperienced overseers to keep strippers and patrons in order.”
“Those two sound like something out of pulp novel,” Matt whispered to Temple. “You actually met this odious pair?”
“Sort of.”
Aldo went on. “In the Most Interesting Personality Involved category…” he said, bringing up a mug-shot photo. “The one, the only Leon Nemo,” he finished with a flourish.
“My money is on that guy.” Electra sat up and dumped her soggy paper umbrellas on a side table. “He’s a bad ’un. He could railroad a weakling like Jay Edgar. I’d bet my instincts about my last, and late, husband on that.”
Ernesto grabbed some copies of Nemo’s photo and marched around the assemblage to pass them out. The letters and numbers under Nemo’s photo were impressive, too, especially since they were in black and white.
“This jailhouse portrait was taken before nineteen sixty,” Temple said.
“Nemo is old enough to have been active in the heydays of the Vegas mobs.”
Aldo’s long, buffed forefinger nail pointed to Temple. “A dollar to the little lady on the money! His dyed black hair aside, Nemo is as old as the dessert dirt that hid Ten Binion’s multimillion-dollar buried safe. He knows where the bodies as well as the booty in Vegas are buried, and if he’s involved in the Lust ‘n’ Lace takeover, it ain’t for the G-string dollar bills.”
Temple smiled modestly as he confirmed her suspicions. “Then what?” she asked.
Fontana brother padded shoulders lifted in unison. “To be determined later.”
“Having hit an impasse with the cast of crooks,” Nicky said. “I suggested we look into the strange scene of the crime.”
“And the bizarre manner of death, I hope,” Temple said.
“Our sources on the Vegas scene are impeccable,” Ralph stepped up to say. “For one thing, we have a bit of living history in our Uncle Macho Mario.”
“A bit? He is the entire Old Testament,” Julio said. “Problem is, he is a bit reluctant to testify against his old acquaintances. A matter of honor.”
“Surely,” Matt said, “such upstanding nephews can persuade an uncle to clear his conscience? If not, I could step in as a confessor. I still have the purple stole.”
“My blushes,” Aldo said. “We cannot have you assuming the mantel of a man of the cloth when you are so close to committing marriage. And also, by my admittedly old-fashioned uncle’s lights, if you would hear his confession, you would need to be committed to eternal silence, or death.”
Matt sighed. “Those are both pretty eternal. Temple might have objections.”
“I would,” she said. “If the dramatis personae are missing links on some fronts, what about the building in question? It’s as old as Las Vegas, apparently, and had a racy history before ending up as an antique mall.”
Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit Page 24
