Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

10

Off-Strip Joint

“I gotta talk to some people,” Woodrow Wetherly had said that morning. “You better come to my place around nine thirty tonight and drive with me. That fancy car of yours can go in my garage instead of my beater. It just screams Steal Me. What were you thinking?”

“It was a gift.”

“From who? Your worst enemy?”

Woody huffed and puffed to open the rickety garage door with a hand-hold at the bottom. Matt rushed to take over the job, overwhelmed by the scent of gas and oil. Wetherly’s place didn’t say much for the retirement pensions in law enforcement. Matt wondered what Molina would get.

Apparently the aging Dodge’s air-conditioning didn’t work, because Woody lowered the windows. As darkness crept over the western Spring Mountains, Woody steered them through the tangle of settled Las Vegas valley real estate where Interstate highway 93-95 intersected Highway 15, called the Spaghetti Bowl. These were tangled, dimming streets far from the bright lights and glitter of the Strip’s artificial neon sunburst.

Just as the Manhattan theater scene supported Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway venues, Las Vegas had its Off-Strip and Off-Off Strip drinking establishments.

By the time you got to Off-Off, the bars would be more accurately described as dives.

Matt had explored these places when he’d first come to Vegas searching for his no-good stepfather, Cliff Effinger. This time he was looking for old cops and old crooks who might belly up to the same bars together even though they were presumably out of the game. This time, he’d come prepared to fade into the foreground.

He’d visited one of Temple’s beloved vintage shops to nab banged-up jeans, scuffed motorcycle boots, and a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt topped with a plaid long-sleeved work shirt. He even messed up his altar-boy smooth blond hair with some drugstore gel goop, teased into a point at the top. The effect was still too tidy, but would have to do.

Tired swirls of neon lettering indicated the bars among the lingerie, tattoo, head shops and Vegas T-shirt emporiums in these shabby, one-story strip shopping areas.

Tired girls and women anchored darker street corners, one leg cocked to rest a hooker high-heel against the wall. Matt saw the sheen of their neon-tinted eye-whites as their gazes followed him. Some shifted their weight onto two feet, ready to approach him through the open car window, but he didn’t look, didn’t stare, just gazed listlessly ahead like a hopeless drunk out of beer money.

LUCKY STARS the nearest neon sign announced in a meteor shower of gold, green and blue stars. Cars and motorcycles kept lurching company in the front parking strip, but Woody found an empty, if tight, slot for his ponderous old Dodge sedan.

“Here we are, Mr. Midnight. Slots and jukebox in the front, pool table and hookers in the back. Tabletop nudie entertainment, everywhere.”

Woody nudged Matt through the door first. Matt’s pushing palm encountered a stickiness that could be any unclean bodily fluid he’d care to imagine. He wiped his hand on the jeans. They’d be in the Circle Ritz Dumpster tomorrow.

Smoke haze was even thicker here than in the Strip casinos. Wetherly bulled through broad-shouldered guys wearing biker leather and jeans jackets to a large, empty corner booth. The old man sat with a fervent oomph, then pushed himself grunting along the curved vinyl seat until he sat in the center, back to the wall.

A jerk of his head had Matt sliding in beside him.

The cigarette smoke and pot fumes made Matt’s vision blur, but he could see both sides of the oval bar and most of the room on either side.

“You have an in with the maître d’?” he asked Woody.

An elbow jabbed Matt’s side, the one with the bullet wound, and Woody wheezed out a pained breath. “That’s a good one. Yeah, Mr. Midnight, I have an in with the maître d’. Been coming here fifty-five years. You could say I’m married to the joint.”

“Have you ever been?” Matt asked.

“I’ve been a lot of things. What?”

“Married, I mean.”

“Oh, hell. I don’t remember. I do remember some wedding chapel, so I was either a justice of the peace, a bridegroom, or Elvis assisting at a ceremony. You never been married.” He leaned forward with a piercing look.

“Not yet,” Matt said.

“Bet you got a girlfriend who would be shocked, shocked, if she knew you were here.”

“I won’t take that bet.” Matt glanced at surrounding bar tops to glimpse a lot of luridly lit topless and maybe bottomless flesh, but the array of lights, particularly black light that turned skin an eerie spoiled skim milk purple-white, was so exotic it dampened the impression of wall-to-wall nudity. Oddly, half of the customers were favoring drinks over ogling.

“Boilermakers.”

“Huh?” Matt said, startled, but as he looked back, he saw Wetherly was addressing a waitress, topless, who’d appeared at their table, and whose mascara looked older than she was.

“How many, sir?” she asked, holding up her pad with newbie importance and obscuring her personal scenery.

“Two.” Wetherly raised stubby fingers.

Matt tried not to react. Topless waitresses and boilermakers were not his socializing style. And mixing beer and booze seemed redundant.

Wetherly waggled the fingers. “Each.”

Matt tried not to choke. He needed a clear head, so he had to be either a slow or sloppy drinker tonight.

“This is how you do it.” The old guy leaned close, the stale cigar breath coming through teeth riper than a rotten fish head. “Bull your way in. Establish a presence. Then wait.”

“For what?”

“You look like you came right off the set of The Bachelor. I will stop calling you ‘kid’, but guys in here won’t. Clean-cut, that’s a gutsy thing to be in this part of town. They’ll want to settle their curiosity, but then maybe we can satisfy some of yours about Cliffie Effinger. You gotta give a little to get something.”

“I have a feeling I’m like…bait.”

Wetherly grinned and slapped Matt on the back. “That’s the spirit.”

When the boilermakers arrived, crowding the round brown tray no gin joint in all of the world was ever without, Matt decided that was just what he needed.

Wetherly dropped the shot glass of whiskey down inside his pint glass of beer, but Matt already distrusted the cleanliness in this place. So he downed the whiskey in one go, like in the movies, and hoped the high-octane bolt wouldn’t make him cough. That would be way too clean-cut for this place.

Wetherly chuckled. “That’ll make your eyes cross. Don’t look left. We got a customer.”

Customer. As in the expression “bad customer”. The guy who was swaggering over to their table was tame enough to have only a couple visible tattoos on his biceps and wrist. He also looked to be about sixty. The late Effinger’s generation.

The guy screeched a heavy wooden captain’s chair over to their booth. “Woody, my man,” he greeted Matt’s escort. “You got a long-lost grandson?”

Wetherly’s wheezing laugh turned into a cough, but on a grizzled veteran it didn’t sound weak.

“Naw. This here’s Matthew from Chicago.” Wetherly spoke slowly, as if spelling unsaid things out…not to Matt, but to his pal.

Matt was beginning to feel like a marked man, or a shill. Why had he trusted the retired cop? Because Molina knew of him? She was relatively new in town. “Woody” could have been as crooked as a scarecrow in his day. Matt sipped the beer and studied the bar, repelled by tattoo-clothed muscleman arms and a greasy ponytail snaking down a jeans jacket back. Narrow-eyed glances eeled over leather jacket shoulders toward the banquette and away so fast you’d wonder if you’d imaged the attention. This place was one step lower than a biker bar. Beyond the bar, Matt could only glimpse a supernaturally high-kicking chorus-girl leg over the crowded circles of hooting men. Nudie pole dancing.

Wetherly leaned forward over the huge table, and lowered his voice. “You know, Ox, I got some kin up there and said I’d help him out.”

“With what?”

“Post-mortem report on a former brother of the coast.”

Matt recognized the phrase “brother of the coast”. That was old-time talk for pirates. Anybody who’d seen Johnny Depp Jack Sparrow movies knew that.

Not everybody knew Cliff Effinger had died tied to the figurehead of the pirate ship attraction far up the Strip from this place. Had died tied. Tie-dyed in water. A horrible death Matt wouldn’t wish on his worst nightmare, which Effinger had been when he was a kid.

The newcomer named “Ox” laughed. “You old buccaneer. I think I see where you’re sailing. What’s to ask about that? Old business.” He suddenly eyed Matt with suspicion. “You the law? Why no mustache?”

Matt was flummoxed. Then he recalled all the bicycle cops around town—tanned, fit, hair bleached blond from the sun, and their mustaches too. “I’m a—”

Wetherly took control. “Crime buff broadcaster.”

“Well, he’s buff enough,” Ox said sourly. “We’ll never be that again.”

“Too true. You know how that mob museum craze Downtown and on the Strip stirred up the media and the tourists. Our checkered pasts here in Vegas are a big-time money machine nowadays for everybody but the mob, which was always a myth anyway.”

“Yeah, a myth. Mythconception.” Ox eyed Matt. “I can see this guy on TV. So what’d we owe him a story for?”

“I told you. He hails from Chicago, ain’t that right, Matthew?”

He hated being called “Matthew” when his baptismal name was Matthias, after a Disciple, but Matt knew he should keep quiet, and had to anyway. He’d been sipping the beer to quell the hard liquor hit to his stomach and was unable to answer right away. If Wetherly’s elbow jabbed him in the bullet wound once more, he wouldn’t answer for his reaction. This charade was useless. He could never swim with the barracudas.

Matt nodded like a Howdy Doody puppet.

Wetherly lowered his voice even more. “Freaking Effinger.”

The other guy regarded Matt with awe. “How’d someone like you ever know anyone like freaking Effinger?”

“My mother’s cousin married him.”

“Oh, gawd. Was she institutionalized at the time? Oh, hey. Kid. Just…like, uh, kidding.” He’d noticed Matt’s hands fisting on the table and probably felt the whiskey fire in his eyes.

Wetherly put an apparently restraining hand on Matt’s well-muscled forearm. “I’d be obliged, Ox, if you would put my young friend’s questions to rest as to the fate of said Effinger. If some bad actor we are all very grateful to hadn’t of offed him, my boy here might be facing thirty years to life on a homicide charge. He’s going back to Chicago soon, and would like to have some peace of mind about the guy.”

“Yeah. I can see he’s touchier than he looks. You really going back to Chicago?”

Matt nodded. He was going to Minneapolis, for sure, and maybe not to Chicago if the talk-show gig didn’t come through, but he figured nodding was not really a lie…and that whiskey shot had hit him harder than he’d like if he was doing this confession dance in his head, worrying about lying to someone who was the scum of the earth, although it was wrong to judge…

“Okay, Matthew…whatcha need to know for your peace of mind’s sake?”

Matt knew he needed to do this just right. St. Jude, the saint of the Impossible came to his rescue with the words that came out of his mouth, just the right thing to elicit what he wanted/needed to know.

Matt leaned over the table like his mentor, and lowered his voice. “You see, I’m afraid the bastard isn’t really dead.”

“Oh, man.” Ox looked from Matt to Wetherly. “Isn’t really dead? I tell you. We—um, he…the police (poe-lease, he said), they found him wrapped up like a mummy, you know about that?”

Matt nodded quickly to keep Ox’s words and shock flowing.

“Well, only not dry as a mummy from some pyramid like at the Luxor but wet, drowned, and not in any good shape when he hit the water. You cannot get more dead than Cliffie Effinger in this city. At least, not since the Chicago outfit got pushed out by the FBI in the eighties. You, ah, have connections in Chicago?”

“Sure thing, but my generation is bit behind on current protocol in Vegas.”

“Current protocol?”

“Yeah, uh, they sent me to college. When I was back in Chicago recently, a couple of made men searched his widow’s apartment, not on any orders we knew about. Maybe these freelancers were Effinger’s ex-associates and were looking for something valuable he might have left there a long time ago. What bothers me, see, is the way Effinger was offed, seemed kinda…I’m not being critical here…but kinda an old-fashioned hit. If you know what I mean.”

Wetherly intervened. “A message was being sent. My question is, was it the right message?”

Both men stared at Matt, who explained, “Here’s the thing. Before Effinger sailed off into the sunset, I learned a body with his ID on it, get this, fell to a craps tabletop at the Crystal Phoenix and was taken for, uh, Cliffie, by the poe-lease.”

Matt glanced at Wetherly, and lifted his beer glass. “Any more of these? Ox might need a hit.”

Three fingers shot up.

Ox commandeered what was left of Matt’s beer and downed it. “I don’t know nothin’ about that. That was…nobody I know is doing Strip hotel whack jobs. I don’t know any hit man could pass going into the Crystal Phoenix’s front lobby, or back stairwell, not with that wall-to-wall Fontana muscle all over the place. It’s also like they’ve got some secret robot surveillance unit on duty there. Why, some grifters with a sweet party pickpocket game got IDed there by a freaking black cat. Who needs K-9 mastiffs when you have undercover vermin? Whoever dumped a body in the Eye-in-the-Sky system at the Phoenix has balls.”

“Robot surveillance.” Matt, who’d been present at that very pickpocket targeted event, had to tap his lips with his fist to hide a smile. Luckily, that gesture read like impatience. And by then the returning round brown tray had been emptied of three beer pints and accompanying shot glasses.

This time Matt poured the shot glass contents into the beer. “That’s interesting. Could Effinger himself do that? Dump his double’s remains in the Phoenix spy areas?”

“I said ‘balls’. Does that word mean something else these post-college days in Chicago?”

Matt made an apologetic face. “I haven’t been quite honest, guys,” he said.

“Oh?” the word, spoken in tandem, sounded ominous.

“I need to know who offed both guys, Effinger and Effinger clone. Chicago doesn’t like muddy waters, even in the pirate ship attraction. Chicago wants to know what Effinger knew that a minor rat fink like him killed someone else to cover his tracks, or who did it for him. Chicago wants to know what results any enhanced interrogations on Effinger himself produced. It’s like before with Bugsy Siegel. Chicago wants to know. And what Chicago wants to know, Chicago gets. It’s a toddlin’ town, not a coddlin’ town. Capiche?”

Meanwhile half the bar had gathered around, drawn by the words “Chicago” and “Effinger”. Matt sensed a noose pulling tight around the circular booth.

“Hey,” Wetherly shouted, because Ox was up on his feet along with six other heavy-muscled guys who moved when he did.

“So ‘Chicago’ is critical of hits on our turf?” Ox demanded. “And sends an errand boy to slap our wrists? We had our reasons and we’re not done with what got Effinger killed—the bastard never squeaked—and we don’t like accountants from Chicago coming around to crunch our numbers ’cuz we’ll crunch his nuts first.”

The Vegas nutcrackers leaned in, fists looking as big as boxing gloves moving toward Matt.

Uh-oh, he figured, go big or go home. He stood, overturning the huge round table, then crouched behind it, using it as a giant shield. Glass shattered, waitresses screamed, men cursed. Woody had dived to the floor off to the side.

Matt spun the bulky table onto its edge.

Matt half-stood to see the six guys grabbing for the table. He stood all the way up, pushing the heavy table’s single stainless steel support pillar into their midsections. They were the bowling pins and he was the ball. They clutched their guts in a chorus of grunts. Onlookers showed jaw-dropping disbelief as Matt rushed for the door, the six guys from behind recovering enough to lunge for him, tightening like a noose.

“Watch out, kid!” Wetherly shouted from somewhere faint and far away.

He busted through the exit door after smashing a waitress’s tray to the floor, now wet and paved with glass shards. More curses and thumps and chaos behind him.

Barely through the door, he hesitated to gulp in the hot, stale air.

“And away we go,” said someone outside, someone much too close, who grabbed the back of Matt’s plaid shirt and slung him out down along the sidewalk like sack of garbage. Gasping, Matt felt himself flung around a corner out of sight, against a dark wall by tall guy with a lot of moxie, muscle, and hair darker than the night around them. A half block away, the roar the Strip was again dominant.

Matt hauled back an arm and fist that meant business. “Dammit, Kinsella, if you really aren’t out of the country, I’ll knock you right over the border into Mexico myself.”

But the dark-haired man wasn’t tall enough to be Max Kinsella.

It couldn’t be… “Frank”?

“Adios, amigo,” the man said, and slammed him hard in the jaw.