“Look,” Matt said. “I’m the prime suspect here, just because I tried to breathe some life back into Madonnah. It’s obvious she had something to hide.” Matt glanced at Temple. “She knows what it is, but she hasn’t told even me yet. And we’re engaged to be married. Whatever this information in your safe is, it could help find Madonnah’s killer.”
Miss Kitty’s barely there eyebrows lifted. “Engaged to be married? Would you hold your bachelor party here too?” Apparently the group take was hefty.
Matt glanced at Temple again. “Uh . . . not really.”
Temple shrugged and appealed to Miss Kitty. “He cannot tell a lie. That’s why the police would make garlic mashed potatoes of him.”
“Where did you find such a rare specimen of the gender?” Miss Kitty asked.
“Formerly in the priesthood.”
“Oh. Really?” Miss Kitty gave Matt an accessing glance that only a madam could. “What a waste.”
“Not now,” Temple said. “But we can’t let the poor lamb be led to the slaughter for doing a good deed.”
“I suppose not.” Miss Kitty’s sigh again inflated her decol-letage. Then she went to the closet door and fiddled inside until there was a metallic clank. The standing safe door yawned open while she retrieved a small metal box.
She brought it to the desktop, then reached to pull a key to its lock from between her bosoms.
“This is Madonnah’s life. It’s all in here. I was her keeper, I guess you could say.”
“Why?” Temple asked.
“Everybody has to trust somebody,” Miss Kitty said gruffly.
“The police won’t want us handling the contents,” Matt said. “Why don’t you just tell us what it is. Temple already suspects.”
“Knows,” Temple told Miss Kitty gently. “I called the phone number Matt found in her room.”
Miss Kitty’s plump hand rested on the unlocked but unopened box. “It’s not much. Her real driver’s license and Social Security number. Birth and high school graduation certificates. A license tag for her dog, Clancy.” Miss Kitty’s lips curled with bitterness. “He died protecting her, little pound mutt. He was the only person who cared about her.”
Silence held. Matt segued into his radio voice: soft, even, inviting confidences. “It was that bad?”
“Worse.” Another deep sigh. “A lot of these girls are just party animals. A lot of them were introduced to sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll too soon, or too roughly. But victims? Not the way they tell it. They’re having fun being sex queens, making two hundred bucks an hour, traveling around, building up nest eggs until they retire at forty.
“A couple are ‘ordinary’ wives and mothers who take an annual ‘vacation.’ Me, I don’t judge. I took my own path to here and now. I know the girls here are clean and doing what they do from free will, as much as any of us have it. Right, Father?”
Matt look disconcerted. “I’m not clergy anymore.”
“This is so not your scene, though, right?”
“Right. I don’t judge either.”
“Did you, when you found her, did you—?”
“She was still warm. I tired to revive her. Then, yes, I said the prayers for the dying.”
Miss Kitty’s lavender-blue-white head nodded. “My job is simple: keep order, keep the money, pay the girls, make it fun for the client. With Nonah, I let it get personal. I tried to keep her safe. That’s not in my job description. That’s not my business. But I tried.”
Temple leaned forward on the hard chair. She wondered why the office furniture was so ungiving, when everything else in the place, except the Victorian sofa, was overupholstered, cushy.
“That’s why she got to preview the night’s clientele by the surveillance system,” Temple said. “Why she made a shtick out of using the name Madonnah and changing her hair and makeup and looks so often. Why she locked up the remnants of her real life in your safe.”
Miss Kitty nodded. “Somebody had to know. Somebody had to keep her secret, otherwise, the loneliness would have destroyed her.”
Matt was growing more puzzled by the minute. “Now that the secret’s out and she’s dead, let me in on it. I don’t get it. I get that she led a tragic life, and that you were her only friend,” he told Miss Kitty. “But I still don’t see how that got her killed.”
This time Temple sighed. “She was in the Witness Protection Program, Matt. She had to ditch her real identity and life. Choosing to be a traveling prostitute was clever. She could tart herself up until unrecognizable, change her location frequently, do anything but have friends, be truly intimate with anyone. Why’d she pick this life?”
Miss Kitty was answering all questions now. “She didn’t want any connections with anyone. No long-term coworkers, no hope of friendship or romance that would have to be broken off anyway. She’d had a rough time as a kid and ended up as the mistress of a drug dealer. She witnessed a triple murder, and testitled. There’s a chain of dealers all over this country, and it would enhance their reps if she was caught and punished. She said she liked it here. She was in control. The men were grateful. Pets aren’t allowed. Abuse isn’t allowed.”
“Someone found her,” Matt said.
Miss Kitty nodded. “Someone found her and managed to get in and kill her. You bachelor party guys, and gals, were just innocent bystanders.”
“Or cover,” Temple said, catching Matt’s eye.
“Funny,” he said. “I don’t feel very innocent, or very much like a bystander anymore, or like I’d settle now for being ‘cover’ for anybody.”
Mincemeat
Okay.
I got a party of one picnicking on smuggled-in rare roast beef in the outbuilding.
Inside the Sapphire Slipper, it is not a picnic, as several of my favorite humans and a whole passel of other Homo sapiens are twitching to the ends of their opposable thumbs about what the oncoming authorities will make of them when the murder at the Sapphire Slipper is everybody’s business, and especially the cops’.
I need to get Mr. Rare Roast Beef wrapped up in a nice exportable package before the county sheriff, the real-life Vegas CSI techs, and the law personnel who don’t know any of us from a Geico caveman (or those who do know my nearest and dearest all too well) get here to really mess up the crime scene.
All this guy out here needs to do when reinforcements arrive is retreat to the cover of the tumbling tumbleweed that surrounds this bit of salacious enterprise in the desert and he will be home Scottsdale-free. Heck, he may shortly be in Scottsdale if I do not stop him.
I could persuade my human cohorts to lean on the ambiguous Ms. Phyllis Shoofly and make he or she confess to aiding and abetting a murderer. But how?
I could betray the guy’s presence without allowing him to run. But how?
Everybody has focused on the brothel, on keeping the suspects in the brothel along with the body and crime scene.
Nobody has considered that the crime had an inside and outside man.
Maybe that is because of the intimate setting of the murder on a mass scale. Maybe that is because there are so many likely suspects inside, no one has seen the bigger picture. They cannot all be detecting geniuses like me.
Monkey Business
“Sorry to report this just now,” Morrie said, eyeing Molina for more than physical stress. He’d charged into her office as soon as she’d returned from Rafi’s. She hadn’t even had time to process her talk with her ex.
“I bet. What is it?” She sat gingerly on her desk edge.
“It’s out of our jurisdiction, is what it is.” The detective sat her usual mug of coffee on the oddly empty desktop. “But the, er, visiting personnel are persons of interest.”
“Jurisdiction?”
“Nye County. Near Beatty.”
“That isn’t even on the same planet as Vegas, really. Chicken ranch land.”
“Right. That’s the point.”
“The county sheriff can handle it. That’s what they’re for
.”
“Murder.”
“Hmm. Intriguing. But if some wayward Vegas boys got themselves into trouble way out in Nye County, it’s none of our affair. Literally. Why are they bothering us with this at all?”
“Most of the persons of interest in the murder are well-known Vegas habitués.”
“Lots of the horny gamblers who fly in here motor out to a chicken ranch. What’s new about that?”
“These aren’t tourists. They’re residents.”
“Residents? What residents?”
“They would be the Fontana boys.”
“Fontana! What were those city slickers doing out in the boonies?”
“Uh, bachelor party. Hijacked bachelor party, they claim.”
“One of the litter was murdered, hopefully?”
“Now, Carmen, don’t wish for something you wouldn’t like to live with. You know they add a lot of ambience to the town.”
“Ambience that Vegas tried to dump in the nineties. Who was getting married, anyway?”
“The state police didn’t fax wedding party assignments.” Morrie kept his eyes on the sheet. “Matt Devine is there, though, and Macho Mario Fontana.”
“Matt? In with that crowd?”
“It was a bachelor party.”
“He’s getting married?”
“I don’t know about that. He may be, given his new closeness to Temple Barr, but I’d guess this bachelor is known to us.”
“Known to us? Do not play games with me, Morrie. I’m a little on edge right now, as you well know.”
“I thought you’d remember.”
“Remember? Why shouldn’t I remember? I was stabbed, not robbed of brain cells. Fontanas. Bachelor party. I missed attending because of eighty-six fresh stitches, not that I would have gone anyway. Oh, that’s right!” She slapped her forehead. “My own unauthorized adventures made me temporarily forget that saccharine public announcement you reported on at the Crystal Phoenix six weeks ago. Aldo Fontana is engaged to Temple Barr’s aunt. Kathy . . . Harrleson, isn’t it?”
“Kit Carlson,” Morrie corrected in a discreet murmur.
“That’s it. The Pony Express rider once removed.” Molina frowned. “Aldo must be several years her junior. Must be the chlorine in the water those Minnesotans drink. My question remains. What does this have to do with Matt Devine?”
“Apparently he’s the number one suspect. Found the body.”
“And the body is—?”
“Someone called Madonnah. One of the girls at the Sapphire Slipper. Tried CPR on her, so Devine’s DNA—”
“That’s what happens when idiot ex-priests visit brothels with the Fontana brothers. This sounds more like a Marx Brothers movie, if it weren’t for the dead body. I suppose your favorite redhead is accounted for and present too?”
“Now she is. Seems a female rescue party motored up after the murder. So we’ve also got, on the premises, Nicky Fontana and Van von Rhine, the eight Fontana girlfriends who hijacked the bachelor party, Macho Mario himself, Electra Lark, the bride-to-be aunt, a dozen or so bordello girls, and assorted staff. And, uh, three extra black cats.”
“You can have ‘extra’ black cats on a crime scene?”
“One of the black cats is a resident. The other three are visiting from Vegas.”
“And we know this how?”
“They’ve been identified as Temple Barr’s cat, Midnight Louie, and the Crystal Phoenix mascot, Midnight Louise, plus an unnamed old alley cat, also black. The resident cat is called Baby Blue.”
“I suppose their paws are all over the crime scene too.”
“It’s possible. That’s why our crime scene technicians need to go over the place before the body and any suspects are removed.”
Molina just shook her head. “You know I don’t need another Temple Barr Flying Circus of Crime and Cats just now, Morrie.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Stop addressing me like a military woman. You’ve seen my midriff bare. You can call me Carmen.”
He straightened uneasily. No one on the force was allowed to use her first name. “You want me out there wrangling this, don’t you? Is that the reward I get—?”
She leaned close, over her desktop, eyes like indigo ice.
“That’s the reward you get for being the bearer of this bloody awful news. Don’t worry. I’ll have to go too. God, jolting over those desert roads! How does Barr know just when to turn up bodies to inconvenience me the most?”
“Talent?” he asked.
“That was a rhetorical question, Alch. Saddle up the Crown Vic. I’ll call Grizzly Bahr. I’m sure he’ll want to eyeball this one himself.”
“Because of the complication of postmortem CPR administered by one of the suspects?”
“Because of all the seminaked ladies on the premises.” Molina managed a grin. “He does like to get out of the autopsy room sometimes to view some live bodies instead of dead ones. Especially if they’re comely.
“Come to think of it, this crazy quilt of a case might get my mind off grimmer matters.”
“What’s scratching your ass today is more than your stitches,” Alch said.
She nodded, the phone already auto-dialing the coroner’s office. “I just saw the father of my child. Tried to set up a civil ‘arrangement.’”
“Good for you—”
She waved him silent. “Dr. Bahr. Got a case that might need your personal touch.” She listened as he spoke. “One corpse, female.” Another pause. “I know that’s nothing new in Vegas, but this one isn’t in Vegas. It’s out at the Sapphire Slipper. Yes, that place is still out there, and going great guns, apparently. Our involvement? The joint is crammed with Vegas persons of interest, including all of the male members of the Fontana family. Yes, mentioning ‘male members’ is ironic under the circumstances. Oh, you’ve been pining for some fieldwork, have you? Alch and I will drive over and your van can follow us out there.”
Alch was astounded. “Grizzly Bahr is leaving his den of death and disintegration?”
“A dozen or so live shady ladies will motivate and move even the most morgue-entrenched coroner.”
“Does he know you nicknamed him ‘Grizzly’?”
“I doubt it, Alch, and you aren’t going to tell him. I’ll inform the captain. He will just love this! And me deserting my newly neat desk I’ve maintained for more than a month after you cleaned it up during my week off. You get the CV from the garage. Matt Devine!” She snorted. “In a hooker hotel. This I gotta see with my own eyes.”
“And supervise?”
“That’ll be the best part.”
She was feeling a lot better.
Louie Puts Up
a Red Flag
Can you believe that I, Midnight Louie, must come up with a scheme to draw attention to myself?
Me, who is usually bigger than life and as hard to disguise as the MGM lion?
Having assistants at hand during this case has permitted me to hang back above the battle and remain out of sight while I deploy my operatives. It has permitted my three female operatives to assume at various times the identity of Satin, the house cat, and be taken for granted and totally ignored while collecting information like a trio of furry, black, mobile, eavesdropping “bugs.”
Now I need to step up to the plate my own self and lead the many befuddled humans in the house to the lurking perp at the perimeter. I return to the back screen door of the kitchen and proceed to sharpen my shivs on the mesh, making a nerve-wracking rending sound.
But the kitchen radio is playing and the assembled bridesmaids are doing their nails in the courtesans’ bizarre and glittery colors.
I yowl.
Finally, one yawns and shivers. “Listen to the coyotes.”
“It sounds like it is right on top of us,” another comments.
They never even glance toward the back door, not even Ms. Shoofly who is not only a guilty party, but presiding over a huge, noisy fry pan of sizzling bacon and scrambled egg
s at the stovetop.
Not one of my ninja trio is in the kitchen at the moment.
I want to scream like a catamount. This case is next to closed, and I am shut out and ignored.
In desperation, I amble outside to prowl the bordello’s perimeter, finding a way up to the first-story roof via the courtesans’ bedroom annex. I am forced to blunt my shivs on stucco before I manage to scramble onto the roof’s asphalt shingles.
Panting, I approach the dormers for the guest bedrooms. All are draped, or shaded, or blacked out. I finally am able to claw a ripped screen open. The broken edges currycomb my sides as I eel through, cutting a pad on a loose nail.
By now I am panting, bleeding, and furious.
I must head-butt a heavy Roman shade aside until it slips its bottom moorings. I plummet to the wooden floor inside, not landing on my abused feet. I do not know which is worse: more foot trauma or knocking my teeth on some thick circle of leather embedded with spikes.
Eek! My own black facial leather has touched a recreational dog collar! Spitting out the awful taste, I box my way out of the room in the darkness into the hall.
Luckily, it is lined with night-lights even during the daytime, a touch I am sure the Sapphire Slipper clientele much appreciate both coming and going.
I find my way into another room, this one decorated more like a bedchamber than a doggy discipline school. I jump back when I glimpse a black cat in the mirror.
Oops. That is me, but my hair is a mess. I look almost as ragged as Ma Barker.
Now. I gaze around as my eyes adapt to the dim light.
I need a signal. Something like a white flag of surrender. Something that will draw every human eye to my form and will sufficiently intrigue someone in this mob of guys and gals and my usual associates to follow me to where the criminal is hiding out.
It certainly will not be a canine collar!
Something bright catches my eye. It is light, small, but memorable.
Just the thing!
Cat in a Sapphire Slipper Page 25
