Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Chapter 41

Sob Sisters

Newsrooms nowadays were quiet and orderly compared to when they filmed All the President’s Men about the Watergate political scandal. Temple sat in the one chair pulled up beside Louise Dietz’s tiny cubicle and scanned the newsroom’s mixture of empty and occupied matching cubicles. No-drama Cinerama. Columnists and feature reporters worked from home nowadays.

Louise Dietz was a poised forty-something blond woman secure enough to let a few silver hairs show through.

“So you’re the PR rep for the Crystal Phoenix Hotel, but you have a tip on the latest CCF profile?” the reporter asked, pulling out a manila file and a narrow reporter’s notebook.

“I used to be a TV reporter,” Temple said, knowing “public relations” people were suspect to print journalists.

“Me, too.” Louise smiled wryly. “Obviously long before your day. I got a bit ripe for on-camera, so I moved into print media just before newspapers started sinking into the Great Recession.”

“Bad timing,” Temple said sympathetically.

“It’s been grim, but I have this job now, and here you are to help me do it. What’s your tip?”

Temple knew you had to give to get, in all areas of life and work. “A weird message showed up on Miss Fuentes’s corpse in the morgue. It never got reported.”

“Really?” Louise was staring down through her reading glasses, pencil poised for a note.

Temple smiled, so glad to see that long-honored notebook and pencil instead of a tablet computer. Since she loved vintage everything, beyond mere clothes, she lamented that everybody was stuck in the same computerized mass-market mode these days. Not that she’d want to break her fingernails on stiff manual typewriter keys.

“You laugh at my ‘stone tablet and chisel.’” Louise noted. “You get to my age, you’ll see your brain works best on what it learned young. I need that hand motion to get my little gray cells churning in think-and-remember mode.”

Remember mode. Maybe handwriting would help Max.… He could transcribe his adventures from the time he came out of his coma in the Swiss clinic. She’d suggest that ASAP. And she’d be first in line to read them.

“You’re smiling,” Louise said. “Is my method so laughable?”

“No, not at all. I’m smiling because I like that idea. I’m not laughing.”

“So how does a PR gal know this inside morgue information?”

“It’s because I’m in PR. There have been … deaths on my watch at events I’m responsible for. Think about it. Almost forty million people a year hit Vegas, or did before the economic downturn. Many of them attend conventions where you can have twenty to eighty thousand people milling around. What are the odds of … unexpected death, given the heat, the excitement, the long hours, the fevered hype, and after-hours overindulgence in food, gambling—”

“And sex,” Louise added. “So you see your job as supervising this giant aquarium of predators and prey.”

“That’s a bit colorful. Let’s say I run into the occasional great white. Mention my name to Coroner Bahr. B-a-h-r. No relation.”

“Makes me reevaluate the nickname ‘flack’ we journalists give those in your profession.” Louise smiled at Temple like a colleague. “So Grizzly Bahr is on your speed-dial too? He’ll just swear me to secrecy on this postmortem message. It’s the only way the cops have a prayer of solving the Fuentes murder.”

“Maybe there are other unsolved, and related, Vegas crimes you could look into.”

“Maybe you could suggest some.” Louise Dietz’s pencil was poised.

“First, I could use more information on Gloria Fuentes’s personal history.”

“Deal,” Louise said. “Not much there. She’d retired from being a magician’s assistant a few years earlier when her longtime boss took his last bow onstage.” Louise flipped through her notebook. “The guy worked as ‘Gandolph the Great.’ I can’t find what became of him.”

Temple glossed past that. “Do you think Gloria wanted to retire or…?”

“Yes. Like me,” Louise said, “she was probably considered too old for a ‘visible’ job. And she didn’t just need her face on camera, she needed her whole bod in condition for fishnet hose and Playboy Bunny thong leotard. She’d gotten away with the Vanna White look for the old-timers’ shows.”

Louise tossed a promotional eight-by-ten-inch color photo on her desk from a drawer folder.

“Gandolph worked in white tie and tails!”

“What did you expect of a traditional magician?”

“I don’t know. Given his wizardly name, maybe a velvet robe with long, flowing sleeves. Gloria was lovely. And her floor-length gown is strapless.”

“Leggy is where it’s at in Vegas today. You know that.”

“Yeah. Where’d you get this photo? I know a fan of Gandolph’s act who’d love a copy if I could scan it.”

“Really?”

“A sick friend,” Temple said.

“I found this in a Vegas antique shop, actually, so you have to promise to return it unclutched.”

“I will. You’re right. This paper ephemera could be worth something someday.”

“Anything for my pensionless old age. Or do I mean penniless?”

“You’re not that old.”

“No, but I’m on my own.” Louise glanced ruefully at Gloria’s photograph. “Like she was. Gloria had a lost personal history and a lost career behind her. She ended up working as a cashier at one of the Circus Circus restaurants.”

“That’s a big family venue. The restaurant must have been lively, with lots of kids coming and going.”

“Lots of families reminding her that she didn’t have any.” Louise sighed. “I try not to identity with these cold case victims, but sometimes it’s hard not to. You married?”

“Not yet, but it’s a near thing.” Temple lifted her left hand from her lap to flash significant bling.

“Ooh. He sure likes a-you. You’re young. No, don’t argue. If you have something going, hang on to it, kiddo.”

“I plan to.” Temple smiled. “So … what was with the church parking lot attack? Was the killer a repeat act?”

“Not that anyone found out. Gloria was active in her church, St. Jude’s. I interviewed the old priest. They all seem to be very old these days. The young ones left.”

“I suppose so,” Temple said, trying not to look guilty.

“He indicated that she might have worked for a short while for another of those top hat and cloak magicians. I couldn’t trace him. Parks? Anyway, Father Delahunt said she was very faithful, very ‘old school,’ he called it, and he was older than the Mojave Desert. “Daily early Mass, novenas, stations of the cross, confession. He said it was a wicked world if so much piety hadn’t preserved her from the death that was visited upon her.”

“Piety.” Matt went to Mass, she knew, and prayed, although not with her, maybe for her, fallen-away UU that she was. Temple was feeling guiltier and guiltier.

“Father Delahunt said something strange,” Louise went on, leaning inward for emphasis. “He said Gloria was overscrupulous and vulnerable to the ‘other side’ of religion. What do you suppose he meant by that?”

“I have no idea, but that’s an interesting comment. It might tie in to the ‘she left’ on the body in the morgue.”

Temple didn’t mention she wondered if the Synth, or even that ever-lurking font of all evil, Kathleen O’Connor, was behind Gloria’s murder. Gloria had “left” a magic career because age had forced her to. Maybe that was the wrong aspect of her life to focus on. Had Gloria also “left” the Church, just before she was killed or in a more permanent way. Like Matt had “left” the priesthood. So maybe she was a victim of Kitty the Cutter’s vendetta against Catholics.

But Kitty should have applauded Gloria leaving the Church.

In fact, Temple had known, and could not share, that Gloria died right about the time a woman’s dead body was found by Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s old Volvo car in the Blue Dahlia parking lot. Molina had come out late after the usual impromptu gig as jazz singer Carmen and found the body, along with the SHE LEFT message fingered onto the dust on her vehicle’s side.

The victim in the Blue Dahlia lot had turned out to be … an ex-nun.

Wow. Times were harsh for ex-religious and ex-magicians, and Temple had a big stake in both those categories.

“So what can you do for me?” Louise was asking as if they were in an echo chamber. “Temple? Are you still with me?”

“Yeah. Sure. Okay. Have you heard of a University of Nevada at Las Vegas professor named Jefferson Mangel who was killed on campus last March?”

“No.” Louise’s pencil was making cryptic marks only she could read. Temple wondered if they spelled “Ophiuchus.” “Tell me more.”

“He was murdered on campus in a classroom converted into an exhibition of magic show placards from pre-Houdini days to Siegfried and Roy and the Mystifying Max.”

Temple watched for Louise’s reaction to the last magician’s name, but she was only dutifully scrawling it down, as Temple would have.

“A professor.” Louise screwed her lips into a moue and nodded. “That’s a change of profession for Las Vegas. I’ll look into it.”

“Meanwhile, I can scan and return your photo of Gloria and Gandolph?”

“Sure. You think it would help solve the case?”

“I think it might make my sick friend happy.” Or not. She had no idea what would break through Max’s memory loss, or what would set him back.

Temple rose and tucked the photo carefully into a hard-sided folder in her tote bag. “Thanks, Louise. You’ve been a great help.”

“Ditto.” Louise stood to shake hands with her.

Temple trotted out to the clickety-chuckle of computer keyboards, hoping they weren’t laughing at her for pursuing such a long shot.