“And your investment in the Circle Ritz goes up in smoke. I’m so sorry, Electra. Maybe you can move the building to someplace better.”
“Howard Hughes could have afforded to do that. Can’t you see him towing it away with the Spruce Goose? You want to walk along with me to the building site?” She glanced down at Temple’s red suede pumps with gray steel spike heels. “Or do you need to change into flats?”
“Me, in flats? Only when I want to be completely invisible and have everyone looking over my head. My high heels are my edge, Electra. I wouldn’t leave home without them, any more than Dorothy would have left the ruby slippers behind in Oz.”
“Gee, what did Dorothy do with her ruby slippers after she got back to the farm in Kansas anyway?”
“Put ’em away for a rainy day. Let’s hoof it to this new atrocity on the block.”
5
Off-Beat
Temple attacked in her bed at the Circle Ritz.
Matt woke up late the next morning, that thought circling in his brain like the nightly intro music to his midnight radio show. Both were nagging noises he would never escape. Oh, sure, he was free for the day until showtime called him to WCOO a half hour before the magic moment of going live on talk radio with The Midnight Hour.
Now he was at loose ends, with Temple packing for their weekend trip north, always a mini-production of a road show. He was pre-packed from his quick trips to Chicago to guest on The Amanda Show, and guys with their small color range—khaki, black, and blue—pack light anyway. No matching shoes involved. He needed to do something…something useful, with all this daylight free time. Max was gone, as Matt had wished for months, leaving Vegas as a moving target with Kitty the Cutter hot on his trail to Ireland.
Now Matt would wish Max straight back if it would help find out why Temple and her Circle Ritz condo had been some intruder’s target. Matt wasn’t an undercover agent. He was an ex-priest turned radio shrink turned fiancé.
The attack. Coincidence? Maybe.
Lieutenant Molina had referred him to Woodrow Wetherly, a retired cop in his weathered eighties, echoing his surname. The man knew Las Vegas crime history like his long lifeline, going back to the founding mobs. Maybe Woody could clue him in why his nasty stepfather, Cliff Effinger, seemed to haunt Matt’s own history in both Chicago, where he grew up, and here in Vegas, where Matt had moved for the exclusive reason of tracking down Effinger. When he was still alive.
So he called the old guy on the phone, cell to landline, and requested an audience. Woodrow was a character. Crude, gruff, and savvy in a pre-Netflix way you couldn’t find or buy nowadays.
Matt ended up back in the fifties-vintage house by noon, regarding Woody ensconced in his worn recliner. Who had something not nice to say.
“Huh. You don’t look like a liar. But it seems you weren’t straight with me first time we talked, kid.”
“Not straight? About what, Mr. Wetherly?”
“Your radio show. The Midnight Hour. It’s not a crime show at all. It’s the midnight soap opera.” Wetherly’s tone was scoffing.
“Okay, the title may sound hokey, but it is my show. That’s true.”
“Yeah, but you made it sound like one of those hard crime reality shows, like John Walsh with the dead kid does. Instead, it’s people cryin’ in their banana daiquiris or some chi-chi cocktail about their personal problems.”
Matt opened his mouth to answer that charge as Wetherly waved him silent. “I know whinin’ in public is what entertainment comes down to these days. You have a nice-sounding voice and, uh, bedside manner, but doesn’t it drive you nuts to be talking to all these losers?”
Matt opened his mouth again. The old man waited this time. “I’m thinking of moving on from the show.”
“Aha! So you’re like some headline-happy reporter. You want a big juicy story to break.” He nodded sagely. Ambition he understood.
“Yeah.”
“So what’s gonna be your ticket out of Sobsville?”
“This unsolved murder. Grisly murder.”
“The best kind.”
“Not in John Walsh’s league, but nasty. Guy was apparently tortured and tied to the sinking pirate ship bowsprit like a mummified figurehead to drown one night.”
Woodrow Wetherly grinned, showing his yellowed teeth. A certain generation hadn’t heard about bleaching white strips and didn’t care. “Yeah. That was a corker. Retired badge like me noticed the Metro cops went mum real quick on that case.”
“That’s why I was asking about mob activity in Vegas nowadays. That sounds like something Bugsy Siegel would have done.”
“Bugsy? Naw. Bugsy got done to at the end, although he did a lot of doing in. He wanted to be a celebrity impresario, and forgot the bottom line is the bottom line.”
“Or this Italian ‘Jack the Hammer’ guy you told me about. Giaccomo Petrocelli.”
Woodrow’s gnarled, sun-spotted knuckles made a leprous fist in front of Matt’s chin while the retired cop considered it. “That ship killing was a retro-style hit, wasn’t it, kid? And what passes for police now got quiet fast about that death too. That’s what they do when there’s no leads. Or. When there’s leads they don’t want to follow.”
His hands parted to slap his palms against his knees. “But you want to follow up on who would do such a thing? Maybe you got some spine, after all. I might be interested myself in just what Creepy Cliffie Effinger was up to that merited an old-style slo-mo capping.”
Matt tried to rustle up a grateful look, but failed.
“What makes you think there’s any story left?” the old man asked in his raspy voice. “That these old-school mobsters didn’t get what they wanted outa him and that’s that?”
“For one thing, a lookalike corpse with Effinger’s ID on him had fallen onto a craps table at the Crystal Phoenix before Effinger was actually killed. It’s like someone wanted people to think he was dead before he really was.”
Wetherly roared with laughter until it died off in coughing and wheezes. “That’s a good one. Classy place like the Phoenix gets a low-end corpse stowed in its Eye-in-the Sky crawl space? No wonder that was hushed up.”
“I guess it was ‘hushed up’. It’s still unsolved.” Matt leaned forward. “And Effinger had a Chicago background.”
“Everybody from Chitown isn’t connected with what’s left of the Chicago Outfit.”
“But a couple local mob guys were, ah, looking into Effinger’s connections there just recently. After he was dead.”
“That’s right. The bastard had some sweet set-up in Chicago, I heard. Good-looking wife, a two-flat bringing in rental money. Only the wife’s brat soured the deal.”
Matt had been that “brat” and his mother the woman Effinger had used and abused. The anger surge almost choked him, but rage would ruin his plan to investigate and overheat his cool.
“Chicago can’t have anything to do with Effinger’s death here,” Woody declared.
Matt kept his voice even. “It would if Effinger had kept some…evidence there about things going on here.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“I don’t know. A map, maybe.”
“A treasure map?” Woody wheezed with laughter. “There’s been rumors about buried treasure around Vegas since the railroad came through. Only treasure is in the casino money carts and they’re better guarded than Fort Knox.”
“Effinger must have been into something that involved a huge payoff, to get killed in a gruesome way like that. That was warning someone off.”
“That’s just supposition, isn’t it? If it was real, the cops would be all over it.”
Matt was getting sick of the old man shooting down his ideas, yet he’d said as much as he’d dared about Effinger “having something” others might want. This old guy would never imagine Matt was seeking clues to a missing IRA hoard. That was such a Max quest. WWMD right now? What Would Max Do? Keep extracting information from the retired cop.