“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.”
10
The Tony Awards
“Matt,” said the man on the phone. “I have serious news for you.”
He flashed back to his conversations with Frank Bucek and Chuck Effinger earlier that day. So what new crime figure was haunting him, because the caller sure wasn’t Woody Wetherly. Yet the voice was vaguely familiar….
Then Matt recognized the caller, and wondered, What next today?
Caught by his personal appearance agent, Tony Valentine, a great guy he’d been avoiding, he turned to face Temple’s balcony.
With his amateur sleuthing turning up deadly suspicions, his supposed career jump to going live on air in Chicago was a distracting issue he wished would go away. He’d have to be honest with Tony, but not just yet.
“‘Serious’ news,” Matt repeated. “Usually, agents only have good or bad news.”
Darn. By now the sound of his voice had drawn Temple from the kitchen, where she’d been tossing one of her “everything” salads.
“Matt,” Tony was going on, gently but firmly. “We must talk. You and I know you haven’t been acting wildly enthusiastic about this opportunity for some time.”
“I’m sorry, Tony. With the wedding in the offing and…some personal matters involving relatives—”
“No serious family illness, I hope? I can certainly explain that.”
“No. Complications, but not that.”
“Then I hope you and the ‘little woman’ can still come by my office today.” Tony was chuckling. “I’d like to see Temple reacting to my using that descriptive phrase.”
Matt looked over his shoulder at Temple, who’d lurked there since he used the words “serious” and “Tony”, trying to interpret the trend of the conversation.
“Couldn’t resist,” Tony said. “She’s so earnest when she’s angry.”
“Ah, you want us to come in today?”
Temple was nodding vigorously.
“I think that would be best.”
“Of course,” he told Tony. “We’re daytime people. About 4 p.m.?”
“Very good. See you then.”
Temple was jumping up and down, her shoulder-length fiery waves bouncing, looking like a twelve-year-old who’d just gotten tickets to the rock band of the day. Her mind wasn’t dwelling on the possible resurrection of the long-dead Jackhammer Killer. Or at least his jackhammer.
“Tony!” she screamed after the phone went off. “Needs to see us? Finally!”
“But for ‘serious’ news. I don’t think it’s good, Temple. He mentioned my putting Chicago off for so long. First, I’ll need to give the Jaguar back, which is fine.” In fact, Matt wanted the whole deal and every trace of it to disappear.