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

22

There Goes the Groom

The “real” cast of Wedding Rehearsal, the Continuing Serial, packed the choir loft, laughing and hugging and milling.

Midnight Louie, back in his carrier and sporting a hang-dog look, had the organ bench for a pedestal. Fontana brothers were slipping him fishy-scented treats the agent assigned to bring him had purchased to lure him into the carrier, which had proved unnecessary.

“At least,” Temple said, clinging to Matt, “we got a feel of how a real rehearsal would have gone. We’ll have to do it cold tomorrow for the real thing.”

“Naw.” Danny Dove waved a phone over his angelic blond curls as if tipping a top hat in a some jazzy tap dance. “Got it all recorded on my cell phone. Plus the choir loft was already wired and set up for filming weddings, so the police will have more than one bird’s-eye view to study. Their evidence team will be up all night emptying the hidden vault, but that altar should slip back into place with no problem.”

“And, Danny,” Electra added, “some of your chorus line dancers need to waltz my thirty soft-sculpture ‘guests’ back to their places in my wedding chapel.”

“Enchanted,” he said, with a bow. “We have the LeBron James edition extra-stretch limo for that.”

“Electra,” Matt asked, “will you be a real doll—” he winked and everyone laughed, “—and give Temple a ride back to the Circle Ritz? The groom-to-be must do a trifling but vital errand.”

He answered Temple’s inquiring look with a raised hand. “Top secret. Not for the bride-to-be’s ears, eyes, or marvelously nosy nose.”

Temple pulled him aside. “Now I understand what you’ve been secretly working on. Our wedding as a thief trap. I can’t believe everyone was in on this, even Frank Bucek.”

“Everyone except Louie.”

“Apparently, he had a scheme of his own, but no, how could he have done anything? He was at home unaware an officer of the law would be coming to fetch him here to play his usual walk-on part.”

“What about the cat oratorio?” Matt wondered.

“I’ve heard somewhere about that phenomenon. The area must be crawling with cats because many of the late Blandina Tyler’s hoarded cats found new neighborhood homes. The church is always open, and the area behind the red velvet curtains must be a favorite hidden snoozing spot when the church isn’t in use.”

“It sure was this evening.”

“You heard Louie yowl when the ‘supposed me’ was whisked away into thin air. That must have roused the sleeping cats. Homeless and feral cats are way more bonded than most people know.”

Father Hernandez put a hand on each of their shoulders to join their tête-à-tête. “We have not one mouse or rat in the church or schools, thanks to Peter and Paul and the neighborhood cats. And you must remember, Miss Barr, that you brought your black cat to the Blessing of the Animals I performed. I must be a very effective priest.”

“So you are,” Matt said. “There might be some reclamation money due the church for the Binion stash.”

“And that notorious, long-dead gangster is the source of the gold bullion I glimpsed?”

Matt nodded. “It should be the last of the millions he hid around Las Vegas. About four were missing.”

“We remodeled the lower church in the mid-eighties,” Father Hernandez said, “when the gangsters were supposed to have been banished. It’s amazing some have remained to this day.”

“Binion was still alive then,” Matt pointed out.

“We created meeting rooms and a small chapel to St. Jude in the lower church, just below the main altar here.”

“The Saint of the Impossible,” Matt explained to Temple. “St. Jude sure came through for you, Father, and us today.”

“The drive had raised extra funds, amazing for a poor parish, to commission a grand stone altar with the symbolic turquoise central image of Quetzalcoatl from the ancient Aztec tradition and the carnelian insets of the fish from the ancient Christian community on either side.”

“The turquoise serpent portrays the endless coils of eternity,” Temple said, “and the carnelian fish the enduring faith of the present worshipers.”

“Not a bad interpretation for a UU,” Matt said.

Once Father Hernandez had laughed, patted their shoulders, and advised rest until the “real” ceremony twenty-four hours hence, Temple returned to her cross-examination of Matt.

“One last thing you have to tell me right now. You okayed Max’s special appearance?”

“Reluctantly, believe me. I didn’t know he was going to say anything. Bucek and Molina needed something to distract the intruders’ attention upwards and away from the bridal party hostages on the ground as their peripheral armed forces slipped in through the side aisles to get behind the action. The Graduate film’s iconic wedding crasher scene with Dustin Hoffman running off with the bride came to mind.”

“Max is hardly Dustin Hoffman, and he’s communing with Molina these days?”

“Who doesn’t?” he said good-naturedly. “It was all I could do to get Molina to let you and me and a few others into the choir loft behind police bodyguards.”

“I nearly had a heart attack. Detective Su could have been killed.”

“Or Max,” Matt said. “It’s not every bride who gets another marriage proposal at the altar,” he noted shrewdly. “How does that feel? Do you think that it’s true?”

“What?”

“That Max has regained his memories.”

“I hope so,” Temple said, “but I have more to make, with you. Golly, this was close. You’re going to have a lot more to explain to me.”

“I do, I do,” he promised. “But my work here is not done. My last task won’t take long. And then you’ll know all.”

Matt galloped down the loft steps.

He clicked off the alarm on the Jag at a run. Nobody was going to do an “intervention” on him this time.

The main parking lot held cop cars and evidence vans, but the bush-shrouded side parking area that concealed the wedding participants’ and stagers’ vehicles had been church-lot peaceful until his “blip” disturbed the evening air. Taking his low-profile old car from the Circle Ritz would be better for where he was going, but Matt didn’t want to lose time.

As he’d expected, when all those creepy white balaclavas were stripped off, the heads beneath them were white, gray or bald. The masks were camouflage, not a quaint bow to the wedding rehearsal the wearers disrupted.

Matt was missing the only two persons he’d expected to be among the treasure-hunting thugs from the long-dead past, and one he’d be deeply glad to see among the guilty.

The Jag made the trip smooth and fast. Matt parked three houses down from his target. A low-rider with throbbing exhaust pipes gargled its way past as Matt got out and thumbed on the alarm, the driver rubber-necking backward. If it weren’t not quite dark yet…

But it was, though Matt didn’t have time for worrying about his wheels’ security.

He loped down the uneven sidewalk toward the familiar sagging front porch, passing a curbside mattress wearing a map of tears and blood that sagged even more than the porch, waiting for a garbage pick up or a passing dog to piss it deader.

No car was parked in front of Woodrow Wetherly’s house or in its crumbling driveway.

Matt eyed the front door. Closed like an indifferent eye.

He peered down the cluttered five feet holding litter and one ancient lawn mower between the house and the freestanding garage, unusual in Vegas, where carports had been king until the housing booms, and busts, of recent decades.

He bent to grab the garage door’s hot metal handle, jerking upward fast and hard, so he could pull back before his palm burned.

The rattling mechanism could have been announcing a train outward bound at high speed.

In the quiet, derelict neighborhood, it was as loud as a five-alarm alert.

Yet nothing happened, nobody reacted.

Matt felt the heat wetting the underarms of his borrowed blazer, suitable for church, for a wedding rehearsal.

He should have borrowed a Beretta from a passing Fontana brother, maybe Julio, back at the church instead of a jacket. Not even Molina would have called them on their firearms there and then. Maybe especially not Molina. The brothers were the only civilians who had risked their skins to be on call during that charade. Temple’s aunt had married one of them. Matt smiled. Maybe the “Iron Maiden of the Metro Police” would be the next to do so.

The whisper of that smile lasted until Matt jimmied the feeble wire fastening on the old Chevy’s trunk open for the second time. Empty except for an oil-stained piece of canvas and several dented and spent Dos Equis cans.

Matt walked around the car and found a side door garage entrance. A skinny door on painted-out hinges. He pushed it ajar, saw some broken-down steps and a side door to the house. Tight. Getting between the garage and the house felt like squeezing through a mystery pipe. You didn’t know where it began, or ended. He heard the faint whine of a power tool.

Far away, or nearer than you think?

He retraced his steps sideways, alongside the behemoth of a car, its raw ruined body paint scraping on his clothes. What did this proudly junker car say about its driver? Driven? Perverse? Hiding behind ordinary poverty and powerlessness?

Hey, midnight shrink, your instincts had better be as good as advertised now. You’re going to be bawled out by law and order, and mostly your nearest and dearest, of whom you have way more than you deserve, for this solo jaunt into the heart of darkness.

Matt reached down, into his deepest dark place, the moment he had Cliff Effinger in his bare hands and could have killed him. And didn’t. Did the God of the universe give credit for paths not taken as much as those embraced? What was a person’s best weapon, justice or mercy? Paraphrasing Ecclesiastes…

There is a time for every season. A time to be foolish, a time to be wise.

A time to confront, a time to evade. A time to stand, and a time to fall fallow.

Like Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” song, thirty years in the making, the verses could go on forever. So the maker must cut to the exultant chorus at exactly the right time. And then stop the music.

Matt was now up the rickety porch stairs, quiet as a TV-show shamus.

The screen door was too conveniently agape, the wooden side door too artistically cracked.

He felt like the protagonist in a Twilight Zone rerun, wondering and then losing all certainty and hope of where or when he was, and knowing the outcome would always be dire.

There is a time to risk it all, and a time to run the table.

Tell me where is justice bred, in the heart or in the head?

In an old garage, he thought. Not the ordinary Las Vegas construction. In the hidden vault carved from under a church renovation. Not the usual Las Vegas method. Vaults. Underneath. Benny Binion buying so much property. The building near the Circle Ritz, used by the Zoot Suit Choo-Choo Club. In a basement. Not the ordinary Las Vegas venue. And its founder, Jumpin’ Jack Robinson, hanged there on a zoot suit cat chain. Likely another Binion casualty.

Did someone harbor an obsession with underneath, the desert, the city, with vaults, not basements. Not middle-western basements for canned beets and fruits, but for illegal things, like alcohol, drugs, guns, skimmed money. The underworld, the Chicago Outfit, so powerful.

Underneath the Irish rebellion. The millions. Under a church basement, for Christ’s sake. And the old building Matt had stormed with Electra’s Probe car. Its basement was pockmarked with holes in the concrete, keeping the desert sandstone out. Desert storm.

Matt heard the whine of power tools, shaking the scarred and lusterless wood floor beneath his feet.

He charged the swinging door to the kitchen, onto a floor covered with a splotchy sixties-pattern of blemished linoleum.

Woody had lived here for a long time because its covered garage and the oddity of a basement suited him. And his work.

He’d lived here for decades.

But maybe not much longer.

Matt had always hated basements. His mother’s two-flat in Chicago had one. Dank, dark, damp. Out of a serial killer movie. She soon married Cliff Effinger in hopes of giving Matt a “normal” childhood. From the first, Matt had hated Cliff Effinger, who soon became lazy and sour and abusive for reasons of his own and maybe a little because Matt despised him.

Matt began to see Effinger’s point of view, as unjustified as it was. After Effinger was dead and gone, murdered horribly, and as much as Matt had relished his absence, he saw they had, and he may still have, common enemies.

And only by going down the basement stairs, where in his childhood a hidden monster pursued him up the stairs every time he ventured down there, would he stop the fear.

Bob Dylan sang that dreams were only in your head. Classic understatement of all time. No wonder Matt had wanted to march down the aisle to the guy’s words and melody. He was an anti-social genius who named and banished lies.

Now, if Matt was going to do that, he would have to confront, and conquer, his dreams and nightmares.

The worst part of the basement steps was that they were usually freestanding, each step open to anything. Anything or anyone could be lurking down below to snake a fist or tentacles through a riser space and catch your ankle from behind. Any black-and-white movie monster.

And yet a kid could be sent down there time and time again to fetch a jar of pickled onions.

Do parents ever remember those horrors? See “AB Normal” brains floating in a jar labeled “Cauliflowers”, a.k.a. Frankenstein’s Monster in the making?

No. They had forgotten their own childhood fears.

Matt stepped sideways down the basement stairs, hearing voices from dozens of scary movies in his head. And maybe from down here.

“All right. Rat-a-tat, you rat.”

A machine whined, drilled, shut out sound, made vibration torture.

“You’re crazy, kid.”

Matt, on solid if lumpy ground at last, stepped into the cool fetid air. “He’s not the only crazy one,” he said.

The strobe light flash of black-and-white in his mind illuminated Woody Wetherly gagged with T-shirt material and bound by clothesline to a three-generations-back recliner chair covered in cracked turquoise vinyl upholstery.

A jackhammer bit was poised between his legs like a ballerina’s toe shoe en pointe.

Chunks of concrete lay piled around the bit. Woody’s bunion-distorted toes strained against their worn Reebok uppers.

“Matt, my man,” Chuck hailed him. What had he done? “Aren’t you always where you shouldn’t be? You should be in church, man. Having a life. A Life with Father. Old-time family sitcom. Get it? Don’t say I can’t be funny.”

“I think you’re a scream.” Matt eyed Woody, struggling to free his hands and whimpering through his saliva-wet gag.

“This Devine guy is not what he says he is,” Woody managed to mumble.

Chuck nodded. Slowly. “You shouldn’t have come, Chicago boy. I hate your guts too.”

“But I didn’t know anything,” Matt said. “Woody did.”

Chuck was rocking back and forth slightly, the jackhammer handle swaying with him. His face was bruised and cut, but his arms were raw, red, the tattoos sanded halfway off. Matt winced for his pain, both outer and inner.

“My dad,” Chuck said, shaking his head. “Maybe he was just a dream, but he was mine. I didn’t need being farmed out to my Uncle Joe. Dad knew too much and they hounded him out of Vegas to live all those years in Chicago, to keep an eye on him. He knew he knew too much of what-was-what back here. He knew he’d been sold out.”

“Banished,” Matt suggested.

Chuck eyed him with an appreciative glint. “Yeah. Big word. Banished. Gotten rid of while this piece of crapola was hunting the big payoff. Benny Binion’s Last Las Vegas Big Cash Dump.”

“And you’ve been sold out, in turn,” Matt said. “What did he do to you?”

“He’s got a sixth sense, Woody. Always has. He knew I knew something that might lead to the Binion money and went about getting it out of me and my past, my ink, my skin. Now I’m getting it back out of him.”

Chuck pressed down. The jackhammer whined and then machine-gunned into the concrete floor, spattering Woody’s legs, arms, and face with freckles of blood from impacting concrete spray. He screamed into the gag.

“Chuck.”

“Yeah, perfect little Matt, what?” Chuck wouldn’t take his eyes from Woody’s bizarre figure.

“You had to get real close to that altar to see your father’s mark, to know he’d worked there. Why? You didn’t have to follow me inside.”

Chuck wouldn’t look at him. “I don’t believe in that holy stuff.”

Matt kept quiet.

“I got to wondering, that’s all.”

“Wondering what?”

Chuck’s eyes—Matt noticed that they were a pale hazel in a pale, freckled-by-nature face—finally met his.

“I got to wondering why I wasn’t you. So I went in and saw the altar.”

He tore his gaze away to Woody. “Did he get it? Did Woody’s years of favors and confidential informants pay off? He get his payoff over at the church?”

“No. The cops got it. And the FBI. And they’re coming to get him pretty soon.”

“Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, old man!” Chuck eyed Matt again after taunting Woody. “Bet that feels good to you.”

“Yes, it does.”

“You’re supposed to be super-holy and forgiving.”

“Well, I’m not. But…you, you could be smart and on the move and read all about it in the newspapers. You could vanish and I could call Metro Police to pick up Woody, in one piece mostly, and, presto, you could be a vanished mystery man.”

“You came here. From there. The money was at the church, under the altar?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“This piece of scum had me follow you. After we, um, met, you could say. I was curious too.”

“I led you to Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

“Led me there, but I stayed to go in.”

“Why?”

“Used to. Once. Go to church. Back when they made you go.”

“You saw the altar. You had to get up close. You had to care about something you can’t see, or steal, or hate, or beat.”

“My dad.” Chuck flexed his abused left arm. “This tattoo. Man fighting snake. Here’s the real snake in front of us. All along.”

“The constellation Ophiuchus.”

“Huh. No. Not that crazy mouthful in the sky. This is. This guy. Ole Woody Wetherly, retired cop. My dad did mention Lucky Stars, like the nudie bar, if that’s the stars you’re referring to. This second tat I got is Quetzalcóatl. The plumed serpent the ancient Indians worshiped. My dad liked that image too. But this was his favorite.” He traced the faint tattoo of a mighty serpent entwined with a mighty muscled man on the other arm. “My dad lived by that ink.”

Matt looked at the jackhammer still balanced on its bit, ready to bite into Woody’s feet and ankles, legs, flesh and bone, and spew blood on them all.

“Chuck. You’ve already got your revenge, from the evidence of Woody’s pissed pants. He’s old. He’s done. I can speed dial the cops and FBI to come get this guy and that damning weapon ten minutes after you and your scabrous junker are gone.”

“What’s scabrous? Nothing good, I bet. Hey, that’s a seventy-seven Chrysler. It’s got a lot of fond memories and a lot of buried glory and mileage on that six-figure odometer.”

“Haven’t we all?” Matt said.

“You’d let me go? Just like that.”

“Hey, I’d give you credit, but it’s best to skip that. We all saw what greed and cunning did for the Binions, father and son.” Matt nodded at Woody. “I now see your dad was harsh at my house because he’d been kicked out of his—what’d you say, clan?—that this crooked cop put together and ran like a mob while playing the harmless old gent. So, Woody will get nothing but the justice your father would have wanted, and you’ll get a free run on that amazing odometer.”

Chuck’s smoldering look lifted upwards and became cagey. “I heard that Jag motor coming, vibrating these rotten floor posts.”

Matt nodded. “Not the best surveillance vehicle, even I know that.”

“You didn’t waste any time racing over to save this sorry piece of naugahyde.”

“Nope. Needed to nail a master criminal.”

“Say I swap you out the junker for the Jag,” Chuck proposed.

Matt sighed. “Just go far, far away, change the license plates, trash the VIN number, and get yourself a better grade of jacket on the way. As far as I’m concerned, you weren’t here.”

Chuck hesitated, gazing longingly at the jackhammer.

“Here. You’ll match the car better.” Matt shrugged out of his Fontana suit jacket, and paused when Chuck’s weight on the jackhammer pressed down to produce a spray of concrete gravel. Matt turned his face away from the blow-back. Wetherly wriggled and whimpered.

Holding both hands up, Matt hooked the jacket on one forefinger and dangled it in view of Chuck Effinger.

Without a word, Chuck cut the air supply from the compressor and lowered the top of the jackhammer to the floor. Matt pitched the jacket to him, and it was over.

“Hey.” Chuck paused three steps up the basement stairs, as his forefinger massaged his sorry soul patch. “Have a nice wedding for real, step-bro.”

“Thanks. I will.”

Chuck’s work boots banged up the rickety stairs, then stomped through the house above. He let the front door bang on the way out.

Wetherly mouthed something through the greasy rag.

“Yes, you’re right, Mr. Wetherly. I don’t look like the type to torture you with a jackhammer.” Matt used another dirty rag to wipe the jackhammer free of prints. “I’m glad he’s gone. This is an old model and I don’t think he used the proper safety precautions. Of course, Chuck is a ‘known associate’, I think they call it in law enforcement circles. His prints would be expected around your place, as anyone at the Lucky Stars could testify, not that they’d be that believable.

“How I got here is this. I’ll say that I suddenly realized that some information you had given me was important. Say how I was referred to you for my radio show by a local homicide lieutenant. Yup, that’s true. That’s your despised, relocated LAPD woman cop. Anyway, the cops knew I was interviewing you about cold cases. So I realized something was relevant and rushed to confront you, only to interrupt some of your other big bad buddies intent on nabbing the hidden stash from your henchmen when they came back. I had to grab the jackhammer out of one’s hands, my own prints blurring whatever was left of his fingerprints.”

Matt folded his hands around the handles. “I didn’t know who they were and I didn’t want to disturb ‘the crime scene’, being an amateur. So I just phoned the police and asked them to please take you off my hands. Who are they going to believe, me or you?

“No, don’t say anything. I need no thanks for saving you from a fate worse than death.

“Hammer toes.”