“So only one of Electra’s shots hit him?”
“One could be enough. Same gun she kept in her place the last time she was under suspicion of murder.”
“This must be different. The victim isn’t another of her ex-husbands, is he?” Matt thought for a moment. “She’s had several.”
Molina turned to pick up a file folder from her desk. “Not unless an ex-husband of hers spent two-to-six for felony assault in High Desert State Prison.”
“A burglar, obviously.”
“Obviously, but was he known to someone else who resided at the Circle Ritz?”
Matt didn’t like the sound of that. “Temple says most of the residents came down to ground level as soon as shots were heard.”
“Since our Miss Temple had an intruder in her second-floor unit two weeks ago, I’m not surprised she was among the first on the scene.”
“But this was farther at the back of the property.”
“Can a round building be said to have a back?”
“Of course. Where the ground-level deck connects to the pool and pool house.”
“All right. I must admit the dead man does not seem to have any obvious connection to the Circle Ritz.”
“Not a hiree, not a pool or yard man?”
“At that hour? No. The dead man was burly, but not HDTV-inclined.”
Matt was getting a bad feeling. Molina sardonic was a Molina to beware of.
“And Electra had to be taken away in handcuffs?”
“Charges aren’t likely, but her story has to be taken down and investigated fully.”
“‘Story’?”
“And yours, considering you recently confronted an intruder at the same address that resulted in the man falling.”
“I was driving home from WCOO when the man fell.”
“Cell phone off. Seems odd. That’s when you’d most get messages after being unavailable on the air.”
“Not all of us are attached to AT&T or Verizon at the hip.”
Molina smiled. “Got a little behind on social media in the priesthood, did we?”
“Got a little behind on a lot,” Matt said.
Molina leaned forward so the full effect of her electric-blue eyes filled his range of vision. There was no quarter in them. “Even you would not dreamily drive home from a middle-of-the-night job without checking your phone after almost three hours of literal ‘radio silence’, ex-Father Matt. Or did she call in?”
“No!” He did not want to bring up Elvis.
“Touchy. Are you trying to be noble and hide the fact that you’re now sleeping with Miss Barr in her own rooms? Trust me, it would be more suspicious if you weren’t.”
“Do I owe your certainty to a gossiping Fontana brother, ex-torch singer Carmen? Like Julio. Would you stoop that low, romancing one of Las Vegas’s finest bachelor brothers to get eyes inside the Circle Ritz and our lives? You have a pattern of recruiting male civilians as your private confidential informants. Since you’re married to the Metro PD force, maybe they’re your surrogate boys club.”
She recoiled as if he had snapped a whip. “You are definitely past the ‘too good to be true’ stage.”
Matt was horrified by what she’d pushed him to say. There was much truth that the act of recruiting or coercing men to be her secret agents could substitute for a real relationship, leaving her single working mother status unthreatened. Max had been such a one, certainly. Dirty Larry, long gone and almost forgotten. Rafi. Now Julio Fontana?
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You goaded me.”
“That’s my job. Never apologize. It’s never good for an officer of the law to cross lines and have personal links, no matter how feeble, to a confidential informant or anyone.”
“Do you hear yourself?”
“Do you hear yourself? You probably don’t use your phone’s GPS, Mr. High-tech Dinosaur. That buys you a precious forty minutes when you could have arrived at the Circle Ritz. Heard the shots. Climbed the balconies that form a step pyramid, and ‘tossed’ the guy off the balcony to his death.”
“No. I was not there. Residents were gathered around the crime scene when I arrived and they told me what had happened.”
“There’s something you’re hiding about your cell phone being off when you left work. Don’t snow me. Maybe you can psychoanalyze me, but I can read a suspect. And there’s something you don’t want anyone to know.”
Matt let his shoulders relax, willing anxiety and anger away. “You’re right.” About a lot of somethings he concealed. He’d throw her a small one. “Okay.”
She hissed out a long-held breath.
“It will sound stupid, but it’s given me the willies, the heebie-jeebies, a nasty vague sense of danger.”
“Oh, God. New Age angst. Next you’ll tell you’re channeling Midnight Louie.”
“Don’t I wish,” Matt said. “The Once and Forever King is back.”
“Arthur?”
“Elvis.”
After five beats of silence, she burst into deep contralto laughter.
Matt shrugged. “He’s calling in on The Midnight Hour again. The listeners and other callers went crazy to recognize his voice. Our mutual friend in the FBI had the voice recordings analyzed the last—first time. They couldn’t explain it. It was Elvis’s voice.”
“And they brought back the The X-Files for a limited run on TV too.” Molina leaned in again, all vivid blue skepticism. “Look here, Mulder. There are no reruns in real life.”
“Look here, Skully. There’s Frank Bucek and the FBI. Send him the audiotape of my show tonight.”
“What does this have to do with your alibi?”
“What can I say? The vocal reappearance of Elvis Presley got me all shook up. The show ran overtime. The last time this happened it presaged some very strange events at the Crystal Phoenix. I didn’t want to go through anything weird again.”
Molina sat back again. “Well, think of this, Marty McFly. The deceased shows signs of physical assault not attributable to gunshots or a fall. He’s a low-level thug from an old Vegas family of muscle-headed muscle. Word is he was involved in an altercation a couple of nights ago at a nudie bar. You weren’t on the air at that time. I don’t think an imminent bridegroom went rogue to visit a nudie bar, not even Fontana brothers, but who knows what passes for a bachelor party today? That D.B. at the Circle Ritz was sure there. There’s a hidden planet behind this sudden crime wave at the Ritz.”
Matt felt, had to think the cliché was dead-on true, because his blood ran cold. His hands grew instantly icy. His heart pounded, pumping all his energy into physical defense. Yet he had to sit there and appear calm and certainly not somebody who had started the brawl at Lucky Stars nudie bar before he had to be at The Midnight Hour.
“Speaking of old mobsters possibly associated with Effinger,” Molina said, innocently this time. “Are you getting anything useful out of that retired cop I sent you to, Wetherly?”
“Uh. Rapid change of topic.”
“I’m through scaring you straight for now. That Elvis thing is too weird to be invented. Well?”
“I think old Woodrow is looking for someone to tell his stories to. He takes The Midnight Hour for one of those true-crime shows.”
Molina laughed. She finally shifted her hip off the desk edge and moved from being in his face to a less confrontational stance.
“Watch yourself,” she told him. “I’m beginning to think there’s something serious to your quest to solve the sleazy doings and strange death of the late Clifford Effinger.”
Matt stepped out of the towering new police headquarters building, gazing back at its central swooping T-shape of glass.