Cat In A Crimson Haze

Chapter 15

Oddball Witness

"You witnessed the victim's plunge onto the table, too, Ma'am?"

Temple looked up at the homicide lieutenant, dazed.

Not Molina. He was not Molina. She couldn't believe her luck. Too bad she didn't care for gambling. Today would be her lucky one.

Lieutenant Hector Ferraro not only was not as tall as Molina, he was also balding--definitely not Molina's personal grooming problem. Ferraro's coloring was as dark as hers, however, and his attitude as unforthcoming. Must be something in the water coolers at Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department headquarters. Temple thought.

"Yes, Lieutenant," she made herself answer, after realizing she had been thinking too much and saying too little. ''We all saw him fall."

"You and the. . . um, brothers Fontana?" The officer's stubby pencil tip jerked toward an urbane clot of custom tailoring a few feet away. The Fontana Brothers smiled as smoothly as a juggling act. Emilio even waved.

"That's right."

"They say you're a freelance public relations person." Lieutenant Ferraro sounded as if he didn't quite believe that, but not believing people and things was part of his job. "What were you doing with the brothers?" The way he posed the question, he could have been asking Temple why she had been caught cold in the company of a cadre of cockroaches.

"They were instructing me on the fine points of craps."

"Learn anything?" he quirked out of the side of his mouth,

"Zilch. That poor man came crashing down before I could figure odds from evens. How did he . . . die?"

"Not from the fall, that's for sure. You know what's up there?"

"Eye in the Sky," Temple replied promptly, eager to show her mastery of some Las Vegas facts of life, if not of gambling. Realizing she sounded like her former TV newswoman incarnation, she modified her statement. "Not a traffic helicopter, but the surveillance equipment every casino stashes above its gaming areas." She leaned around the lieutenant's awesome stomach paunch--as taut as a wind-filled sail in its pristine white broadcloth--to eye the evidence. "Isn't that a . . . hole in the victim's temple?"

"No doubt you're an expert on temples," he responded deadpan.

Glancing up, she decided that he was kidding her, maybe even flirting.

"Sure. I've seen a dead body before. A murdered dead body."

"Where and when?"

"As a TV news reporter in Minnesota a few years ago. And ... I was doing PR for the stripper's competition a few weeks back."

"Oh, you're the one." Lieutenant Ferraro spoke with unnerving emphasis.

"I can't help being observant."

''Neither can I, or I get canned. Now. Give me your address and phone number, and I can get on with being observant myself."

Temple hesitated just long enough for his pathetic pencil to lift from the notebook page and point at her. ''It's required information, Ma'am."

She provided her vital statistics, still trying to glimpse the crime scene crew as it fussed around the craps table.

A ring of eyewitnesses was forced to watch the police go about their business, but the area was otherwise private.

That was because the floor pit boss and the Fontana boys had moved like red-hot lava--

deliberate but inexorably effective--to stop the action, calm and corral witnesses, then banish any curiosity-seekers.

By then, Temple had thought to suggest that they ring the area with portable curtains from the exhibition area. It had been accomplished before the police even arrived, thanks to the security personnel's quick work.

Beyond the burgundy linen circle. Van von Rhine and her husband Nicky waited impatiently for news. Temple knew. Figuring--hoping--that she had been dismissed. Temple slipped through a slit in the curtains. She was back amid the noisy bustle she had heard even within the charmed circle of death and detection-in-progress. Back with the quick and the curious.

"What's happening?" Nicky asked staccato-fast.

Van shot him a warning look. "Temple might like to sit down for a moment and rest. It must have been a terrible shock."

"I'm fine," Temple insisted, veteran of sudden death that she had become. Funny that her knees knocked a bit. "The police are awfully interested in your brothers," she told Nicky.

"The police are always interested in my brothers. They can handle it. So. Is the dead guy some sort of delusional diver, or did someone push him?"

"I think someone centered a bullet on his left temple, unless he was born with a large and unsightly mole he never had removed. The police didn't allow me near enough to check it out."

"Really!" Van said, "You two talk as if murder is a daily event in Las Vegas. At least these curtains are in place. I'd never have thought the police would be so sensible."

''They weren't," Temple said. ''I asked for the curtains, and the staff set them up in triple time."

Van nodded, pleased. ''The sooner this . . . mess ... is cleared away, the better. Death is always an unwanted guest at a hotel, particularly violent death." She winced. "That poor man. A Cliff Effinger. He's not registered at the hotel. That's the first thing the police asked. But who would have shot him in the ceiling? It must be suicide."

"There's plenty of room up there," Nicky said. "Not over the entire area, but there's the command post, and various service accesses to the cameras. Nobody messes with them that often. The guy could have been shot a week ago, and not be detected until next Easter. We're lucky the ceiling panels gave way."

"Please." Van was beginning to look in need of a seat herself. "My expertise is hotel management, not such sleazy matters as spying on our customers and employees. I do hope that man hasn't been dead for as long as Nicky thinks."

"No way," said Temple, not mentioning the slight, sweet-and-sour odor she had detected.

Death was a fast mover, but the man's ghoulish pallor indicated an earlier date with death than the moment of his fall. "And why would the ceiling give way?" she wondered aloud. "A man doesn't weigh any more dead than alive. Maybe someone pushed him, all right, but after he was dead."

"Why?" Nicky was skeptical. "That means risk of exposure. The pusher would have to get out of there fast."

"Everyone was too distracted by his spectacular descent to react quickly enough to catch anyone. Security sent some guys, but they didn't find anybody. You can bet the police won't."

"They may find how the ceiling was rigged to fall," Van von Rhine put in. Her china-blue eyes narrowed. "I supervised every stage of this hotels renovation. I can testify to the impossibility of a ceiling giving way like that, particularly one in the security area." Temple's thoughtful scowl matched Van's frown. ''You know, this kind of death is not without precedent in Las Vegas."

''What do you mean?" Nicky asked.

Temple shrugged. "A man was found dead some months ago in the security area over the Goliath Hotel casino."

" 'In?' " Nicky questioned.

Temple nodded soberly. "He didn't fall on any gaming tables, but he was just as mysteriously dead as this guy. Murdered."

"Anybody know why?" Van sounded aghast.

"The case is still open, as far as I know," Temple said. And, she added to herself. Max Kinsella is still a prime suspect.

Even as she worried at the knots of her particular past, the curtains behind them parted to a stream of exiting police technicians. Lieutenant Ferraro, uniformed officers and, finally, the dark plastic length of a body bag.

"This way." Van intercepted Lieutenant Ferraro to conduct the mob to the shortest, if not the sweetest way out, Nicky close behind her.

Even then the procession had to pass before quite a crowd. Gape-mouthed gamesters focused bleary eyes on the pre-funeral cortege before turning back to their diversion of choice.

After a hesitation in the spinning, chiming and clatter of the slot machines, the hubbub resumed its tempo and traditional volume.

Temple, forgotten but not gone, shook her head and retreated down an aisle of nickel slot machines. She could see the hotel's security staff dismantling the curtains that surrounded the fatal craps table.

While she watched, an unholy cataract of coins slammed into a stainless steel sill behind her. As seldom as Temple gambled, she couldn't resist the sound of pay dirt being struck.

She turned to the still-clucking slot machine to see a sheepish figure hunched on the stool before it. He held his hat, a Frank Sinatra-style straw fedora, under the blizzard of coins as they overflowed the till and streamed onto the floor.

Temple squatted quickly to scrape up the overflow before someone else did. She rose to drop two fistfuls into the hat.

''Looks like you hit it rich, Eightball."

The old guy rubbed his mostly hairless head with one hand and wrinkled his nose at the loot.

''I ducked down this aisle so the cops wouldn't spot me. Then I threw a few nickels in the slot for cover, and now I'm the center of attention.''

Temple studied the wide-eyed players gathered around to watch Eightball stuffing nickels into stacks of paper cups.

''Jeez," he complained, "If my pals hear I hit a big payoff on the nickel slots my name'll be mudslide in this town. Nickel slots are for tourists and cheapskates."

"Then why'd you put a nickel in?" Temple asked, her mind adding the rest of the old lyric, in the nick-le-lod-e-on; all I want is you and mu-sic, mu-sic, mu-sic.

Eightball's answer surprised her.

"I needed to duck the cops."

"Why? You're an honest private investigator, aren't you?"

"Reasonably so," he said sourly. His money transferred to a formation of paper cups, he clapped his trademark straw fedora back on his head. "That dead guy there?" He jerked his head toward the fatal craps table.

"Yeah?"

"I think he's someone I been looking for."

"Who?"

"Just a guy someone wanted to find."

"What someone?"

"You know better than to ask that. A client."

"I'm glad to see that you abide by client confidentiality rules."

Eightball's crooked smile showed crooked teeth. "Yup, little lady, sometimes I abide by the rules, even when I'm itching not to."

He stood up. "Better cash out before anyone who knows me sees me with all these damn nickels."

"I'll help you carry them to the cashier," Temple volunteered.

"You're a real lady," Eightball said with a half-courtly tow.

"Whoopee," came a gleeful cackle from the slot machines opposite.

A white-haired woman wearing a mint-green knit pantsuit over a wildly overgrown blouse of violets turned to grin at them, her finger never leaving the button that rotated a greengrocer's rogues' gallery of renegade fruits. "Just imagine. Eight-ball O'Rourke busted down to playing the nickel slots. Wait'll I tell the Glory Hole Gang."

''Hester Polyester," he retorted with gusto, "if you squeeze out a peep about my activities today, I'll get a knitting needle and sew your lips shut so tight that you'll never shout 'Bingo!'

again."

The woman recycled some dead nickels from her till back into the machine's pitiless maw, never losing her rhythm: feed/ feed/feed . . . push . . . scrape/scrape/scrape . . . push.

"So you claim you're too hoity-toity for the nickel slots, are you? Guess you got a secret vice, O'Rourke. As for sewing up anybody's lips, you're so crooked you couldn't stitch a straight seam up a highway center line."

Hester Polyester was still cackling and cranking away as Temple and Eightball elbowed through the crowds to dump their booty of nickels at the marble-silled cashier's booth. Its brass grillwork made it look like a cross between a downtown bank's teller station and St. Peter's toll booth at the Pearly Gates. In a couple of minutes, Eightball was pocketing forty-three dollars in crisp bills.

They turned as one back to the casino floor. The craps table that had been the center of attention was indiscernible from the other tables in play, unless you knew exactly which one it was. And you could only tell that by looking up at the ceiling where a piece of bland cardboard filled in a jagged hole.

The Crystal Phoenix had little to worry about. Most gamblers never looked up, not even the ones who knew--or cared--about the Eye in the Sky.

Eightball shrugged without saying anything.

Carole Nelson Douglas

"I wish I knew who your client was." Temple said with a sigh. "I bet the police would love to know too."

"A client," Eightball said, with a particularly piercing look as if toothpicks in his eyeballs wouldn't get any more details out of him. "A client who's gonna be mighty disappointed to know his search has hit a dead end."

"He?"

"You're fast. Missy, but so are chuckwalla lizards. I don't tell them the time of day, neither."

His horny fingertips touched his fedora brim before he left, both a poorer and a richer man.

"Cliff Effinger." Temple breathed out the syllables with which Van had labeled the dead man, lost in a fog of speculation.

It was a nondescript name, which matched the unimposing corpse she had glimpsed. She reviewed her mental picture of the man: a loser in a short-sleeved shirt and corny polyester tie; middle-aged, slack-stomached, thin-haired. A time-tuckered face loosened by booze and late hours, maybe even by a recent fist fight. Some petty crook. Temple guessed. Possibly a smalltime loser who had lost too much. Who at the Circle Ritz was hunting such a man?

She was suddenly intensely curious about the identity of the man found dead above the Goliath casino floor. No one had ever breathed a name or an occupation to her. Drat. She almost wished Molina had this case so she could ask her, although Molina probably wouldn't reveal anything. Not until Temple had fed Molina some tidbit about Max, and Temple: was running on empty when it came to Max.

Temple stared at the craps table. People, mostly men, again leaned low over its depressed surface. They pleaded and cajoled the dice that rolled over the navy Ultrasuede cryptically marked in red. They begged for naturals and cursed "snake eyes."

Temple had viewed another kind of "snake eye" on that soft, seductive gaming surface. A bullet hole. She wondered if it had exited the other side, or lay imbedded in the dead tissue of a formerly live human brain.

Maybe the tacky man had possessed a good heart. Maybe he had a mother who had adored his every baby step; a toddler who had once called him ''Daddy;'' or just a dog who had come when called. Maybe he had once been a dapper, upright member of society who had lost it all long ago in Las Vegas.

Maybe.

Maybe Cliff Effinger was somebody someone would miss.

Maybe even Eightball's client.

Temple recalled her instant image of the man, and rather seriously doubted it. Fairy tales don't come true, and--if they do--they don't happen to you. Or to men who look like that.