Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Perennial Partner

Matt was trying to be a good go-along guy.

Mob scenes, figurative or literal, weren’t his thing.

Stag entertainment wasn’t on his horizon or in his history.

An ex-priest had a hard time regarding women as sex objects.

Large amounts of bare female skin still made him uneasy.

Intimately, it was a turn-on. Publicly, it was . . . gross, crude, blatant. Exploitive of both gawker and gawkee.

And, of course, all en route to this bachelor blowout, he wondered, not what Jesus would do—He’d probably be okay with it; witness the woman at the well and the wedding at Cana; Jesus had been the Prince of Peace and the Soul of Mercy and Tolerance—but what Temple would think.

Of him.

This did not promise to be an easygoing evening.

So when he saw the peep show backlit at the entrance to wherever they had been driven, he thought, Holy mackerel!

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid could not have been greeted by a perkier array of corseted, feather boa-strewn, high heel-booted saloon girls in their heyday.

He’d expected to suffer through this supposed festivity. He hadn’t expected to be as badly ribbed as the guest of honor, bridegroom-to-be Aldo Fontana.

“Pretty good goods,” a Fontana brother commented, jabbing his ribs.

“You get what you pay for,” Matt answered, meaning every shade of the words.

They bounced off Fontana brother bonhomie.

“Right. This is way spicier than I expected, now that Aldo is giving up his wild, womanizing ways. We’re gonna actually have fun. I can tell. Let the partee begin!”

Matt and, of all not-people, Midnight Louie were the last to move into the dazzling light. The cat had been first, but now hesitated on the threshold.

Temple’s black cat, a last-minute hitchhiker, finally trod in delicately, forefoot by forefoot. Matt could have sworn the cat was as much taken aback by this Wild West saloon scenario as he was.

“We’ll both have to keep a sober eye on the proceedings,” Matt told Louie under his breath.

It disturbed him immensely that the big black cat winked at him.

Okay. One eye closed momentarily. Maybe he had a hair caught in it.

Twelve men and cat had entered a Wild Wild West fantasy of a Victorian brothel. The flocked floral wallpaper wasn’t scarlet woman crimson-colored, but it was velvet-flocked: deep blue against a silver foil background.

The carpeting was a field of Victorian, full-blown roses (so appropriate to the feminine residents). The shades were blue and green with touches of gold.

Beyond the foyer in the parlor, on various blue velvet love seats and settees in the Victorian style, lounged, lay, and reclined about a dozen women attired in bits and pieces of corsets and lingerie, all in shades of blue.

If there were eight groomsmen in the party, there was a shade of blue for each one: baby blue, aqua, sky blue, periwinkle . . . lavender-blue, Dilly, Dilly . . . teal, ice blue, royal blue, sapphire blue, and even navy blue, in the form of a sailor suit with a bikini bottom and a skimpy sea-shrunken top.

While the groomsmen leapt to the task of inspection, Matt was interested to see that Aldo and Nicky were loitering in the foyer with frowns on their faces.

One was almost wed, one married, so Matt approved of them showing at least some discretion. Uncle Macho Mario Fontana was accepting a cigar the size of a submarine sandwich from the madam of the place, the only woman fully clothed. She wore some Mae West blue-sequined gown rimmed in pale blue feathers at the shoulders.

Matt edged over to the frowners because they most closely reflected his own confusion.

“We were supposed to go to the G-String Club on the Strip,” Nicky was saying under his breath, “with the nude harpists. I mean, fun’s fun, but this place is obviously—” He shut up as he noticed Matt approaching.

Aldo’s back was to Matt and he kept talking. “Kit will have my nose hairs in a vise and our Miss Temple will have all our heads on pikes outside the Crystal Phoenix if she finds out about this. The guys said they’d arranged a first-class venue with one discreet, cake-popper-out-of stripper. The usual harmless prank.”

“This,” Matt said, “doesn’t look ‘usual’ to me, and I’ve never been to one of these before.”

Nicky’s upper lip was actually dewed with tiny dots of sweat. He had his cell phone to his ear.

“Sorry, Father,” he murmured absently. “Damn!” he spat at Aldo. “I’m not getting a signal. We are screwed. What’s going on here? That drive was way too long.”

Aldo was chewing his lower lip. “I thought we were deliberately being driven around town so we’d have time to do our duty by the champagne.”

The eldest and youngest Fontana brothers were clearly dealing with an unexpected situation.

“Why don’t we ask the driver?” Matt suggested.

Nicky and Aldo exchanged a long stare.

“Good idea!” Aldo strode toward the door, Nicky and Matt behind him.

Aldo opened it on someone on the other side. Someone in a nifty black chauffeur’s cap and jacket, and nothing else but fishnet stockings, four-inch black heels, and an Uzi cradled in her uniformed elbow.

“Holy shi—shazam!” Nicky breathed, glancing at Matt midway through his expletive.

“No need to get huffed,” the caramel-skinned chauffeurette said, caressing the Uzi’s trigger with her forefinger. Her nails were long and lacquered crimson. “You all look so cute standing out here with your mouths hanging open, but you’d better get back inside before this big mean gun gets too heavy for little me to hold and I grab onto the wrong part.”

Nicky and Aldo backed up quickly. Maybe it was her remark about the wrong part. Matt stayed put.

“You drove us out here?” he asked. “Why?”

She looked him over, mostly his face and blond hair. “You may be an innocent bystander, mister, but an Uzi isn’t very discriminating.”

“Jesus!” Aldo breathed behind him. “I for one don’t underestimate the ‘weaker’ sex. This is as serious as that chest-stapler she’s holding. What the hell—?”

“Get back inside,” Nicky ordered. When Matt didn’t move, he shouted at the girl, “You’d off a priest?”

“Ex,” Matt tossed over his shoulder without taking his eyes from the woman. He was used to talking to suicidal and sometimes homicidal people on his call-in radio advice show. This girl didn’t strike him as either.

But her next words and tone changed his mind. “A priest,” she purred. “Now isn’t that interesting. Maybe we can use you for some ceremonial necessities later.”

“They don’t do extreme unction anymore,” Aldo said, jerking Matt back inside the foyer by the jacket sleeve. “Hold your trigger finger, lady. We’re all inside.”

Matt shook himself loose as soon as the door slammed shut. “She’s not for real.”

“That Uzi sure is,” Nicky said. “Never argue with a fully automatic gun that can kill your whole damn family in one strafe.” He redialed his cell phone. “Nothing. You take this,” he said to Matt, slipping it into his jacket pocket. “It’s an auto-dial to Van. I have a feeling this is a Fontana affair.” His face and voice were grim.

“Some gangsta hoods have heisted us,” Aldo said. “Don’t let the James Bond girl in fishnet hose fool you, padre. This is a sharp operation. They’ve got Fontana Inc. in the palms of their machine pistols. The whole enchilada. Shit!”

“Yup. The whole Mama Fontana pasta factory.” Nicky turned to Matt. “Play along. Don’t make any fuss. We’re the target, obviously. They may overlook you.”

“They?”

But the two brothers were separating at the double doors to the parlor, drawing Berettas and waiting like cops about to storm a crime in progress.

“Mr. Fontana and . . . Mr. Fontana?” came the madam’s once-booming voice, sounding quivery. “Please come in.”

“And drop your weapons before you do,” a second voice commanded.

Consulting each other with a glance, Nicky and Aldo lowered their guns to the floor and kicked them inside onto the field of blue flowers that carpeted the place.

Matt stood, shocked, in the foyer as the two men vanished into the Victorian sitting room at some unseen gunpoint.

This must be act one in a Vegas mob war.

From Temple’s talk of the Fontana brothers, he’d considered them hunky comic relief on the Las Vegas scene. Apparently it was a lot more serious than that. Thank God Temple was safe at home at the Circle Ritz. Sweet Jesus. Louie! Her precious alley cat was here, in danger of getting caught in the crossfire. Anything happened to him, it’d be worse than the current anxiety she was feeling about Max. She tried to downplay it, but he knew.

Nicky was right. Nobody had mentioned him. He glanced to his left and the floral-carpeted staircase leading into shadows above. Thank God! Midnight Louie stood five steps up, waiting for him. Looking like the cat was concerned about him, rather than vice versa. That was a cat for you.

But Louie was right. Matt got it. In this crowd of large, dark-haired men barging into that crowded and armed and dangerous brothel sitting room, an effacing blond guy might get lost. He had been. Along with an alley cat. The driver-gangster girl wouldn’t forget him, but she was pulling guard duty outside, perhaps for the duration.

He moved swiftly to the stairs and cautiously up the treads. The place may have looked like it dated from the last days of the frontier, but the steps were solid and creakless. All the better for serial hanky-panky in the night. Not that sex was on anybody’s mind anymore. Just its perennial partner. Death.

Only when he reached the dark at the top of the stairs did Matt notice that Midnight Louie was no longer anywhere to be seen.