Cat In A Zebra Zoot Suit

27

Send Off

Temple was madly typing away at her laptop the next morning when the doorbell rang. She jumped up and Louie, startled, skittered off her desk, sending printouts flying.

“Louie!”

Her complaint was wasted. He was already at the door when she got there.

She loved that each unit at the Circle Ritz had a real, live nineteen-fifties doorbell. Temple was not the domestic type—in fact she happily bordered on incompetent—but answering a doorbell made her think she was the perfect, efficient fifties hausfrau in full skirts, high heels, and pearl necklace, as portrayed on TV series then.

“Electra,” she greeted the landlady. “Come on in. I’ve got Crystal Lite and Pecan Sandies and have been jotting down ideas for a charmingly kick-ass urban village. That’ll take your mind off current events of the criminal kind.”

“I’m afraid not, dear.”

Temple noticed then that only one tame swatch of yellow decorated Electra’s hair, and it disappeared after two inches, like a fading sunbeam. Electra with almost all-white hair seemed older, frailer, and several gallons low on her natural zest.

“Come sit down. Something’s happened. The police—?”

“Not them. Yet.” Electra arranged the folds of her pale blue muumuu, which seemed to reflect her mood. Blue. “I wonder if you can go to a funeral with me today.”

“The funeral? That’s fast. Who would arrange to bury Jay Edgar here in Vegas? Wait. Are you doing it? At the wedding chapel?”

“Heavens, no!”

“Then who would, um, sponsor it? I don’t think you mentioned having kids with him. And he hadn’t been back in town for years.”

“He had no kids by anybody. His other ex-wife, Diane, keeps in touch with me. The police contacted her by phone in Dayton. She gave them Jay’s lawyer’s name in Dayton. And she was invited to the funeral too.”

“By whom?”

“A woman named Cathy Zevon. She claims to have been his fiancée.”

“And she’s here, in Vegas?”

“I guess so. She’s using my friend Sam’s funeral home, and I checked. She’s paying for it. In cash.”

“Curiouser and curiouser. Jay Edgar didn’t mention anything about having a fiancée along or in town, when you gave him what-for at the motel?”

“You can get anything you want in terms of companionship in Vegas,” Electra said with a sad smile, “including, I guess, a convenient fiancée.”

“This is so fishy.”

Louie, who’d been rubbing on their ankles during the conversation, paused and interjected a strong merow of agreement. Temple had observed that cats expressed emphasis in a progression from mew to meow to merooow.

“Of course I’ll go with you,” Temple told Electra. “For one thing, the police will probably have someone there watching who attends and I might be able to spot the observer.”

“The police will be watching me?”

Temple nodded. “And Diane. She didn’t know about a fiancée?”

“They both still lived in Dayton, Ohio, so she’s pretty sure he didn’t have one.”

“What terms were Jay and Diane on?”

“Not close, but in touch now and again. She gave the police his lawyer’s name. I guess they needed to know if Jay had a will.”

“What do you think?”

“Sure. He was a businessman, even if his recliner store recently went belly-up. The Great Recession did a job on a lot of people. He’d have all the paperwork. Jay’s the one who brought me to Las Vegas, like your Max, to get married.”

“Uh, not like Max. We didn’t come here specifically to get married.”

“But Max left and you stayed. That’s what happened with Jay and me. That’s why I trusted him to honor our agreement that I’d have first dibs on his land adjacent to the Circle Ritz. That’s what we did when we came to Vegas to get married. We were both starting over and investing our life savings in real estate. We weren’t kids, so we kept our investments separate.”

“What broke up the marriage?”

Electra made a face. “His gambling. You heard what he did here just now, got deeper in debt. It was criminal to get him comped at a casino.”

“The people who wanted that building site knew how to play him. I bet they didn’t know about you or your claims on the property.”

“Which are nil. A promise is worth nothing when the promiser is dead. My ‘claim’ was paper-thin when he was alive.” She sighed. “I guess worrying over the Circle Ritz and Lovers’ Knot is pointless when I’m a suspect for murder.”

“That is so lame, Electra. The murder hasn’t even made the paper.”

“They just don’t want the way they found him to get out.”

“Shot dead is big-time headline news?”

Electra bit her lip and shook her head. “Your Lieutenant Molina was more than stern about me not telling anybody this, especially you.”

“She’s not ‘my’ anything but a pain, and she specifically mentioned me?”

“They had to ask me specific questions.” Electra’s voice started to break. “So I know Jay was found hanging from that giant chandelier in the future Lust ‘n’ Lace building. It’s not a way I’d want to see him go.”

“Oh, my God. Why suspect you, then? It could have been suicide. Anyway, you couldn’t haul a man up a ladder and hang him.”

“They think I could have made him hang himself at gunpoint. They think I was mad enough to kill him. And I sorta was.”

“Still bizarre.”

“There’s some evidence more than one person was involved.”

“I see. You’d need a man to help you hang him. Who’d you get to do that? Matt? Or, holy moly Molina! She might be thinking Max would help you. She wouldn’t know he’s left Vegas. If he has. I hope so. You know what this murder method reminds me of?”

“Nothing good, I’m sure. What?”

The death of Matt’s wicked stepfather, Clifford Effinger.”

“Euww, that ship thing.”

“Another elaborate killing. It’s like someone is sending someone else a message.”

Louie leaped up beside Temple on the couch and rubbed his chin against hers. “Louie! Your whiskers tickle.”

She pulled her face away, still thinking despite the distraction. “It’s like that darn building is attracting a nexus of evil.” Louie began kneading his paws on her lap. “Ouch, Louie. That pricks.” She tried to push him away. “I swear. You could almost film a horror movie there.”

“Temple, it’s creepy enough now as a murder site. You’re right, though, a lot of ghosts of previous business incarnations haunt that place. I wonder if anyone associated with it lived at the Circle Ritz?”

“Maybe there is a connection. I’m going to investigate the place’s history. It might have more than face value,” Temple decided.

Louie stopped needling her lap and leaned up to nudge his furry face against her forehead and began purring up a storm.

“He’s certainly gotten awfully affectionate all of a sudden,” she told Electra.

“You can see from my marital history that a good man is hard to find,” Electra said, stroking Louie’s long black tail, “but a great cat will never let you down.”