Cat In An Alien X-Ray

Chapter 34

Law and Order: LVMPD

“What is the Circle Ritz these days?” Molina asked him the moment Matt identified himself on the phone. “The new home of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang?”

He was confused, maybe because he’d been mentally planning an approach to his problem.

Molina relieved him of answering that seemingly irrelevant question as her voice on the phone answered for him. “Your inventive fiancée has been showing up at bizarre sites all over town, messing up crime scenes.”

“Temple?”

“You think I’m talking about Lydia, the Tattooed Lady?”

“I’ve never met that entertaining individual, and don’t hope to,” Matt said, more confused than ever. He’d been too distracted to hear about any other crimes than the ones committed by Kathleen O’Connor.

Also, he was uneasy anyway about trying to pump Molina for information when he was secretly playing psycho cat-and-mouse with the most wanted suspect on her—and everybody’s—unofficial Wanted Lists.

“Temple’s trespassing on crime scenes? News to me.”

“The significant other is always the last to know.” Molina sounded dire. “A client of hers happens to own the crime scene property.”

Matt obviously needed to be brought up to date on his fiancée’s current events, but he wasn’t going to let a homicide lieutenant give him the first spin on what was going on.

“I just called to see if I could make an appointment to talk to you about—”

“Don’t tell me.”

Had she somehow found out about his nightly 3 A.M. “sessions” at the Goliath Hotel?

“UFOs,” her firm contralto boomed in his ear.

Curiouser and curiouser. “UFOs? No, I’m interested in another mythical Las Vegas apparition. Mobsters.”

“Hie yourself over to the three new mob museums or, better yet, to the Crystal Phoenix or Gangsters Hotels and convene a flock of Fontanas.”

“I’m not talking about the Beretta of brothers in the Fontana clan. They’re as much for show as those mob museums popping up all over. But … I wondered how seriously mob their uncle, Macho Mario Fontana, was? Is.”

“Before my day. Remember, I moved here from L.A. Are you serious?”

“I did say so. Aren’t there a few leftover elements from the bad old days still bouncing around town?”

Molina’s laugh was wary. “They’re all over at the Museum for Law Enforcement downtown, signing autographs.”

“I am very serious.” Matt was aggravated enough to sound like it. Serious and steamed. “Can we talk or not?”

“Sheesh. You Circle Ritz residents act like you have a private line to the police. If you’re that serious, visit me at the office. You know where Metro headquarters is located now?”

“Sure, it’s Temple’s second-favorite Las Vegas site to point out on jaunts around the Strip.”

“What’s our girl’s very favorite?”

“Grizzly Bahr’s morgue on Pinto Lane. That innocuous street address just cracks her up. Says it sounds like a pony ride.”

“Some days it is. That’s where you ID’d your dead stepfather after someone sank him at the sinking-ship attraction. Is that what’s got this new ‘mob’ fixation going?”

Matt sighed loudly enough so she’d hear him over the phone, then waited.

“All right. I agree that ugly incident had the whiff of an old-time whack job. Fifty minutes. My place. Just follow your fiancée’s ruby red slippers to South Martin Luther King Boulevard. I’ll have a visitor’s ID ready for you.”

* * *

The new headquarters, almost 400,000 square feet, had recently united departments housed in various leased facilities around town in two five-story blocks of dark gray stone with regimental square windows. It had reminded Matt of the supposedly impregnable Bastille stormed during the French Revolution.

Yet the soaring glass central structure had a slightly curved and raised roof that also reminded Matt of folded angel wings as he drove up to the main doors.

Tender little trees edging the parking lot resembled architect’s 3-D miniatures so prissily placed on model building sites. The mirrored central window-wall reflected the cloudless blue sky common to Vegas. That made the solid structure look like it was only a hollow gridwork on a Hollywood backlot, one you could see right through. Matt supposed that architectural “trick of light” was appropriate to a city built on illusion.

Matt parked the Jaguar near an oval of concrete holding the skimpy trees. He scanned the central glittering plinth for the entry doors, watching the sky reflection vanish as he got closer, until he met his reflection at a door, then pushed through … and straight into a waiting Molina.

She was, as always, tall and plainly dressed and sardonic. “Fancy car,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to valet-park it?” she joked.

“It’s not mine—”

“This a confession?”

“It’s a gift I’m not sure I’ll keep.”

She shook her head, causing her shiny brunet bob to shimmer. Was Molina doing a Hillary Clinton and letting her businesslike chop cut grow out?

“Relax,” she told him. “I know you’re a syndicated radio personality and all things pretty and perklike flow your way.”

“You think the car is pretty?”

“Gorgeous, but my Prius is greener. Mariah would swoon over your Jaguar, though.”

“Do teenage girls still swoon?”

“No, they text—dear Lord, how they text.”

She started walking and he fell into step beside her through a big modern space sprouting rows of sleek and skinny gray-upholstered visitors’ chairs. As they neared the office area, there was chaos, there was crowding, there was heat generated by computers and noisy phone calls, like in a newsroom.

Molina shut a door on them both. They were boxed into a small but slick private office.

“You’ve got something new, too, don’t you?” Matt asked. “Fancy private office instead of a cubbyhole.”

“You betcha.”

She sat in the desk chair, spun a quarter turn, and gestured at an angular guest chair. “Have a seat.”

“This is big,” he said, eyeing the horizontal file cabinets, a sideboard with a single-shot coffeemaker, a photo of Mariah in the uninspiring annual-school-photo style.

“Comparatively small, but mine own. It’s new. It’ll get that used look fast.” Molina nodded at her computer, all screen and no visible tower. “So what do you want to know about mob remnants in Vegas?”

Matt started to answer, but she interrupted him.

“I should say, first, why do you want to know?”

“That’s the key question. Why would some aging mobsters out of a Danny DeVito movie stalk my mom in Chicago? They ended up kidnapping and holding Temple’s cat for ransom while we were in town last week.”

Molina had leaned forward during his recital, resting her elbows on her desk and her chin on her fists. Matt doubted she’d fall into such an informal pose with anyone else, but it gave him a chance to suffer the concentrated effect of her truly electric blue eyes. Like his Jaguar, they were gorgeous. No wonder she was a mesmerizing cabaret singer on the side. He blinked and she drew back, either satisfied or, like him, surprised.

“Miss Barr mentioned that,” she said. “You tell me more. Midnight Louie’s fate was in question?” She’d resumed sardonic cop mode. “Should I send flowers?”

“Only catnip. The nappers, Benny ‘the Viper’ Bennedetto and Waldo ‘the Weasel’ Walker, were caught.”

“You’re describing a movie script, right? So what’s with the cat?”

“He escaped the warehouse where they were holding him. The hoods apparently had a falling out and beat each other senseless. The only sign that Louie had been there was the empty leopard-print carrier Temple had bought him.”

“So we have Midnight Louie now at large in Chicago and living large? Is that hoping too much?”

“He, uh, made his way back to my mother’s apartment.”

“Chicago is a big city.”

“Louie’s a big cat.” Matt shifted in the chair. Visitors weren’t expected to stay long anywhere here, and the Spartan seating assured that. “Look, Lieutenant. The thugs were mobsters on their last legs and pretty lame, but what they did to my mother was extreme. They followed her to her workplace and left threatening notes among her papers. They broke into her apartment and left notes on her pillow. She rooms with my college-age cousin, Krys, and was scared stiff her niece was in danger too.

“But the notes insisted she’d regret going to the police.”

Now Molina had leaned far back in her chair, her eyes narrowed, a pen she’d picked up beating hushed time on her desktop. “What did they want?”

“A lockbox my late stepfather, Cliff Effinger, had left behind in Mom’s old Chicago-style two-flat place.”

“And somebody had killed Effinger here in a particularly torturous and grisly way. He must have mentioned the lockbox was with his ex-wife before he died.”

“You’d think they could have let him live.”

“You might. Not me. I’d think they’d consider him a loose end that they would see tied tight and sunk publicly enough to scare off anyone else interested in the contents of Effinger’s lockbox.”

“And my mother wasn’t his ex-wife. They’d never divorced.”

Molina put a finger to her lip. “Keep those personal facts to yourself. My first thought is that maybe you’d want to off Effinger to free your mother from a rotten marriage.”

“Effinger had moved on to Vegas years before I came here. Besides, it took more than one person to do him in that way.”

“True. Not that you don’t have loyal groupies here in Vegas now. What was in the lockbox the Chicago hoods didn’t get?”

“That’s just it. Nothing much. Tax returns, probably doctored. An old high school yearbook, some school stuff a mother would have saved.”

“Speaking of mothers, why did yours get mixed up with a rotter like Cliff Effinger?”

“He came from the same neighborhood. I was heading off to preschool and you couldn’t have single mothers in my Polish Catholic neighborhood then unless they were widows.”

“Oh.” Molina sat back. She was a single mother too.

“That wasn’t a problem, with you?” Matt asked. “You and Mariah, I mean? You grew up in L.A.”

“Yeah. Latino Catholic community.” When Matt tilted his head, wanting more, she delivered. “My mother was like your mother. Unwed. I always fantasized my father was Paul Newman.”

“The blue eyes.”

“He sure wasn’t Latino. When she married, she made sure my stepdaddy was.”

Matt pulled out his cell phone and held up a photo. “Mom just got married again. Here in Vegas last weekend.”

Molina took the phone. “That’s a very familiar-looking wedding party … you, Temple Barr, Electra Lark as justice of the peace. Even Midnight Louie present and accounted for. The groom looks like a nice guy, but if the blond woman in the middle is your mom, she looks like your slightly older sister.”

Matt took the phone back to survey the shot. “Louie was ring-bearer. Mom was very young when she had me. ‘And naïve’ is the expression.”

“Not my problem,” Molina said. “I was old enough to know better and protect myself, but it didn’t work.” She sat back again. “Easy for me, I just got the hell out of Dodge and changed jobs and locations. Lots of cops get divorced.”

“Being a single mother can’t ever be easy.”

“Easy in that I was too old to be shamed with the ‘unwed mother’ label, and I was pretty distant from my family by then anyway.”

“Yeah. Mom and me were the odd ones out too.”

“Thing is, I was just old enough that I got to babysit all six of my younger stepsisters and brothers from the time I was practically a toddler myself.”

“I would have loved to be ‘lost’ among a family of other children.”

“Try it before you convert.” Molina tapped a folder on her desk. “Back to the undying rumors of the mob. So you and Temple Barr are now the chaperones of this interesting treasure chest of Effinger’s?”

Matt hesitated, not sure how much he wanted to reveal. Certainly, talk of the Synth and Ophiuchus would get him laughed out of Molina’s spanking new office and destroy this new personal rapport over their lives as bastard kids, an echo of his recent sessions at the Goliath.

Molina wasn’t lingering on personal revelations anyway. “Aren’t you two setting yourselves up to get the unfriendly attention Effinger and your mom got?”

“That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“If there is anything suspicious going on in your family link to Effinger, it always defaults back to Vegas, where you and Temple Barr and even that annoying cat live. That should have been the first thing on your mind.”

It would have been, Matt thought, if he hadn’t been distracted by becoming the sole target, he hoped, for the unfriendly attentions of Kathleen O’Connor.

Could the mob or any undying remnant really be any worse?