Cat in an Alphabet Endgame: A Midnight Louie Mystery (The Midnight Louie Mysteries Book 28)

9

Serpentine Schemes

Matt cruised the Circle Ritz neighborhood almost blindly, his mind churning, trapped behind the wrong vehicles, looking ahead through their windshields for a glimpse of that bare-metal green paint finish version of psoriasis. Madly impatient to wait in line for a red light to turn.

Then, looming in Matt’s rearview mirror, fast and furious, like a squad car that had burped its siren and pulled him over, only there had been no sound, was the driver of the junker glaring at him.

Matt had three vehicles ahead of him, including an SUV that blocked the sight of anyone crossing the intersection. The light was changing and the guy behind Matt laid on his horn as if he had died on it.

Matt looked left, right, ahead. Undecided. Traffic was moving. The car behind jerked ahead enough to tap his bumper. That was a common tactic of someone wanting to claim an accident and then bully a driver into paying him off to go away, or, worse, assaulting and robbing the poor soul.

The gap ahead of the old Impala was growing.

Matt wrenched the wheel, screeching, hard right into the side parking lot of a closed-down dry cleaning store, and put the car in Park.

He charged out of the idling car, slamming the door behind him as the other car followed him into the lot and stopped.

“What the Hell are you doing tailgating me?” Matt demanded. “I’m not falling for any scratch-and-dent scam. Get off my tail, buddy.”

The man got out, slowly, not expecting this. “You were following me.”

Matt snorted. “Like I’d want to look up your tailpipe. Your junker is worse than mine.”

“What’s your game, buddy?” He squinted at Matt. “I’ve seen you somewhere. You look familiar. Somewhere poor dead Ox was. Wait! At the Lucky Stars nudie bar. Word is a new guy was with Woody… That was you, all cleaned up. I didn’t think much about it, ’cuz you looked so familiar in a funny way I can’t put my trigger finger on it. Yet.”

Not good. Had the guy spotted him at Woody’s house too? Matt hadn’t expected to encounter his prey face-to-face, standing up.

“Woody? You his errand boy?” Matt asked, aware his khaki slacks and beige leather loafers didn’t match the shabby jacket and cap. He’d have to hope his dishonest face would look different enough under mussy hair to throw the guy off.

The man suddenly leaned against his diseased fender. The arms on his faded denim jacket had been torn off, a tough blue-collar look, and common in the Vegas heat. The arms folded over his chest displayed unimpressive muscle, but a ton of tattoos.

Matt had maybe twenty-five pounds on him, but figured this guy wasn’t anybody’s muscle. He looked and acted like a born sneak who’d be useful for sleazy jobs, like following and threatening women. And…digging up dead bodies…and moving corpses…or even fifty-year-old murder weapons.

The sleeves of ink on both arms crawled to his neck, ending with a fat spider in a web under his left ear.

Why did so many dispossessed people, convicts or depressed teens, wear tattoos as armor nowadays? A sign they could endure some pain? A third finger stuck up at the world? Tattoos were too chic now to be seen as threatening.

This guy’s skin art was a crude and uninspired patchwork—except for his forearms. Snakes seemed a favored subject. The right arm showed the blue waves lapping and a set of serial blue-green humps of the Loch Ness monster in its most famous, and never duplicated, photograph. A small human figure with a headdress stood next to it. A fully seen serpent wound around his left arm in lurid colors, fighting some comic book hero with bulging muscles, ridiculously oversized, but…nude. What comic book superhero wrestled nude?

“You starin’ at something?”

“Uh, yeah. Righteous arm tats.”

“What would a Mr. Clean like you know about it?” The man lifted and turned his left forearm to acknowledge his major and prize tattoo. “Yeah, a beaut. Nothing canned. No one has a tat like this.”

Matt watched the arm rotate as he’d watch a cobra coiling for a strike. Another blood-run-cold moment, not welcome on even a hot day. The naked man entoiled by a large snake seemed to move with the guy’s rotating elbow, the point of having it on the forearm.

Man and serpent entwined, the exact image of the contested thirteenth (unlucky for him) sign of the Zodiac. Located in the constellation named Ophiuchus.

This same image had been discovered in his mother’s Chicago apartment, in a fireproof box along with other memorabilia of Matt’s late, most unlamented abusive stepfather, Clifford Effinger.

“Yeah,” the tattooed man was saying, “my old man traced it out of some book in grade school. It was a kind of banner with him, I guess. Didn’t go to school much past eighth grade. Had to work. But it’s like based on some classic nudie sculpture. Famous.”

Matt knew the sculpture well, the prize of the Vatican museums. “Laocoön and His Sons.” A man and his two sons in mortal agony under attack by venomous biting and constricting sea serpents, probably sent by some miffed Greek god.

Matt felt an empathetic shiver from the ironic fact that Effinger had two sons as well, but the tattoo had been simplified to man and snake only.

The guy was still admiring his arm art. “When I was a kid, it was on the refrigerator door with a magnet, you know? That’s when my uncle promised me I could get it tattooed on when I was eighteen.”

“It was your uncle’s refrigerator?”

The guy shrugged. “Them was still mob days. An Outfit capo needed my dad in Chicago. I never knew why. Anyway, he married some rich woman with a house and a snotty kid there. And bye-bye, Chuckie. So it was always me and my uncle here in Vegas.”

“Your mother?”

“Never knew her. OD’ed on drugs, I guess.” The guy’s Mississippi-mud-colored eyes sharpened. “Why are you asking all these questions?”

“Why are you answering them?”

“That’s because I was trying to figure it out, why you’re passing the time of day admiring my tattoos, and where I remembered you from.”

“That Lucky Stars fracas? I ducked out of there early.”

“So you were the new guy with Woody?”

Matt nodded, hoping the guy remembered his worn jeans, scuffed motorcycle boots, and faded Grateful Dead T-shirt topped with a plaid long-sleeved work shirt. “I have Chicago connections too.”

The guy started laughing, a humorless wheezing sound that ended in a cough. “You’re telling me? I’ve finally remembered what else was under a magnet on that refrigerator door, with a Chicago phone number. A photo of some sad, but not bad-looking woman, and this perfect little blond kid leaning against her.

“My stepmom and stepbrother I never saw, but who kept my dad away from me for over twelve years. That kid didn’t look too happy either, just the way you’re looking now.”

Matt knew he’d been “made”, but he needed to know more, everything.

“Cliff Effinger had a son in Las Vegas? You?”

“And a not-real son in Chicago. Matt, they called him.”

“And Cliff had a brother?”

“Well, he did, but Uncle Joe died too. I should say, was killed too. Nobody copped to either hit.”

Gold mine, Matt thought. Gold mine. How do I win over this guy?

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Chuck.”

“For Charles.”

“Naw, just Chuck. Chuck Effinger.”

“We should go somewhere and talk.”

“And what game are you playing, little Matt, with your fancy shoes and down-low cap? Yeah, I noticed. I’m not as dumb as I look. Lucky Stars okay?”

“No, not anywhere near that crowd, where someone could overhear. I think we’ve both been had.”

The nearest hamburger joint had a dated look involving lots of the color orange, Burgers ‘n’ Beers.

The tabletop juke-box music was loud, but there was an empty corner booth at the back.

“Two things we have to talk about,” Matt said, sliding into the vinyl-covered booth as his pants caught on some taped-over cuts in the upholstery. “The first and the last.”

Over greasy hamburgers and draft beer, Matt and Effinger’s son compared past and present grievances.

First.

“I hated your father for hitting my mother,” Matt said.

“And hitting you too, I bet. He knocked me around some before he left for so long. But he was my dad. And I don’t think he wanted to be in Chicago. He had to go, like someone here was after him, or he was sent away by the mob for knowing too much. Where was your dad?”

“He disappeared, never knew about me.”

Chuck nodded, lighting a cigarette. “At least my dad used to send me stuff. Comic books and toys. Even when I was getting too old for them. He’d come back from Chicago more often later.”

“I wanted to kill your dad.”

“But you didn’t do that drowned-alive operation. That was planned, I think to send a message and shut my uncle up. Someone will pay for offing my dad like that. But it’s hard to find who. Lots of people wanted to kill my dad. It wasn’t just because they didn’t like him or he bounced them around some. That was kinda his job, to do things for the mob.”

“I had a chance to kill him, though.”

“What stopped you?”

“Some parts of your life are just over, and you are what you are because of them. That won’t change, but you can. So you walk away from the bad and move forward into the good.”

“Golly, little Matt. That should be in a book. I won’t walk away until I get my revenge.”

“Let’s call it justice.”

“I’ve got a double dose of it coming, ’cuz they got my Uncle Joe into something bad too, and he ended up dead on a craps table at the Crystal Phoenix.”

Matt’s heart almost stopped. That sentence solved a cold case and maybe a big part of the puzzle that made this chronic loser a key piece. The body had initially been IDed as Cliff, but no records showed and no one had known Clifford Effinger had a brother. Meanwhile, Chuck was droning into his beer.

“Uncle Joe’d never go into a hoighty-toighty place like that, not willingly, and besides, it’s crawling with Fontana Family muscle, who are more deadly than they look.”

“So his death was meant as a distraction, to muddy the waters,” Matt said. “What role would a retired cop like Woody play in this scenario?”

“He’s always got some scheme going on. He’s telling me to do the kind of things my dad did. Handle this schnook, look up that or this made man from the old days, if they’re still alive. I can’t figure what he’s working up to.”

“A cop retired since the nineties hanging out with ex-mob guys and sending people to burglarize the Circle Ritz? That’d be another unlikely place for aging mobsters to show up.”

“Ouch, Poor Ochs,” Chuck said around a ketchup-bloody handful of French fries.

It wasn’t, “Alas, poor Yorick” from Hamlet, Matt thought, but it had a rough-and-ready eloquence.

“He wasn’t a bad egg,.” Chuck mumbled.

“Why’d they call him ‘Ox’, his size?”

“Nah, his size, maybe, but his last name was Ochsenhoffer or something that makes Effinger sound like a cool name. Woody could be putting a burglary ring in operation.”

Matt nodded to encourage Chuck to continue.

“See, Woody is so old he goes back to the time when the mob ran this town in the seventies,” Chuck said. “He was a green young cop, but they back and forthed with the mob then.”

Matt got it. “That’s why it took the FBI to come into Vegas in the eighties to get the mob out.”

“Out, but not down. My dad used to laugh with my uncle about it being the ‘same old, same old’, with one big difference. And then they’d get to laughing so hard. They’d say ‘if the dumb cops then and the dumb cops now only knew…”

“And now both Effinger brothers are dead. Murdered.”

Chuck’s slack features grew taut. “Old Woody Wetherly is the only cop left now who might know what they meant. Anyway, he sure knows who to call on for major dirty work, and for small-timers like me as errand boys.”

“And for something more?”

“I dunno who big-time is left that would engineer a mob-days, right-out-there gig of tying a gagged guy to a sinking ship in a nighttime show and letting him drown with a…what’d you call the bare-breasted ladies they had carved on sailing ship’s fronts?”

“Figurehead.”

“Yeah. Those ship ladies were more boobs than heads, if you ask me. And now the show is closed down and dead in the water too, and you can only see one anchored lit-up ship from the Strip. Did you know they did weddings on that ship for years?”

“No,” Matt said, not liking the topic of weddings coming up with an enemy. But Chuck was still wrapped up in his “Wayback Machine”.

“It’s funny. My dad sent me a kit once. A put-a-ship-together kit. Too many pieces. I threw it away. Who’d ever dream he’d die on one? I’m going to find one of those kits and make whoever did that to him eat it.”

Matt didn’t know what to say. The monster had a kid who loved him, in his way.

“I’m sorry, Chuck.”

“Are you, little-perfect-photograph Matt?”

“For you.”

“What are you going to do with all this info? You’re not the law. You’re just some D.J. I know that.”

Disk Jockey. Matt chuckled. He’d hardly touched his burger, but threw two twenties on the table. To reward the waitress who’d been derelict in coming around, which perfectly suited his mission.

“So?” Chuck pushed away his plate of massacred leavings, dead cow crumbs and cold fries buried in ketchup.

“So, I think the police will finally get a lead on who killed your dad and your uncle, and why. I don’t know who or when, but it will happen. And you’ll have your revenge.”

“You mean ‘justice’,” Chuck mocked. He actually had a sense of humor. “I get the ‘first’ thing and all that stuff, but what’s the ‘last’ thing you were talking about?”

Matt leaned in on Chuck, hands braced on the table rim, eyes and voice on the same jagged edge as broken glass.

“You will forget any instructions from anybody to follow, threaten, or harass with even a glance Miss Temple Barr at the Circle Ritz or anywhere in Vegas or the universe, or I will hunt you down and this time I will kill an Effinger. The last of the Effingers.”