“No. Maybe when I was a kid under Effinger’s heavy fist I might have. Real adults don’t need revenge. So. I’m not still under suspicion?”
“Real cops don’t need far-fetched suspects. Whoever gagged and tied your stepfather to the sinking ship attraction is a practiced killer, a pro who likes to sign his work with a sadistic flourish.”
“I’m amazed you’d let an amateur like me look into that.”
“Your recent drive to the rescue at Electra Lark’s abandoned warehouse was pretty spectacular. Besides, you knew the victim. I want that creepy cold case solved myself and can’t afford to put shoe leather on it. It’s admirable you’re keeping your better half out of your hunt for step-daddy’s killer or killers. Has Woodrow been a help? The oldest uniforms still here said Detective Wetherly had confidential informants in the mob as far back as the seventies.”
Matt hesitated. Was this his chance to call in reinforcements? Molina seemed a bit distracted, maybe not yet. “Yeah, Woody’s stories from the old days would grow hair on a cantaloupe. I hope The Mob Museum founders interviewed him.”
“Maybe not,” Molina said. “Mobsters go viral and virtual, but retired cops fade away. Old-fashioned footwork is now lost behind a mountain of modern forensics and keyboard magic.”
By then Matt had followed her into the comfortable living room, with the curled-up cat dents in the sofa pillows and unopened junk mail still tossed on the coffee table.
Molina swept the mail aside in a messy pile, perhaps expressing the level of her regard for Vegas’s infatuation with The Mob Museum.
“Take a seat.” She gestured to two roomy upholstered chairs opposite the couch. “Can I get you some lemonade? A cold beer?”
“I have a feeling this is a sober occasion. Coffee, if you’ve got it. Black.”
“Does the Pope have encyclicals?”
Matt watched her disappear around the other side of the breakfast bar. Her kitchen rattlings sounded like the backbeat of percussion instruments against the steady hum of the air-conditioner.
He sat back to take stock, brushing a tuft of silken cat undercoat off his bare forearm.
Midafternoon on a hot summer Saturday. Molina at her least lethal, wearing boot-cut jeans, not tight, a loose black gauze top, and moccasins. And that universally familiar class ring no one ever wore unless it advertised an elite Eastern school. It stood out when she wasn’t wearing matching blazers and trousers and packing a badge and gun on her belt.
Matt tried to read the ring’s engraved design as she returned to set his mug down on a woven coaster on the coffee table.
“Drinking coffee in the summer,” she commented, setting her tall glass of lemonade on a matching coaster. “That’s what the night shift will do to you. And that slightly tense look around your eyes. That daytime TV job in Chicago ever coming through?”
Matt almost choked on his first swallow of high-octane caffeine. “That’s supposed to be hush-hush. How do you—?”
“I have my sources.”
“Yeah. Usually one of us civilians.”
She squinted her spectacularly blue eyes as she probed his mood. “Or am I seeing fatigue from playing Dale Earnhardt and revving Electra Lark’s old white Probe up the stairs of an abandoned building? Usually a white knight uses a horse instead of horsepower. How did you know there was any urgency to interrupt the doings inside that place?”
“Neither Temple nor Electra were where they were supposed to be. Vandals had been defacing Electra’s wedding chapel and threatening her Circle Ritz residents.” Matt took another swallow of coffee, smaller this time. “The place had recently been a murder scene, and…lights were on inside.”
“Yup. Any passing citizen would have driven somebody else’s car right up the exterior concrete steps and through the double doors and halfway up the stairway to the second floor. And why were you driving her car anyway? You have a sweet ride of your own. Although I’d never use a Jaguar as a battering ram, but maybe you have money to burn in your future.”
“This invitation to drop by is beginning to sound like entrapment, Lieutenant.”
“What?” She spread her arms in an innocent gesture. “I’m unarmed and unbadged, Matt. It’s just that the Circle Ritz crowd always seems to spawn a miasma of questionable activity around it. You’d better marry Miss Temple and get her out of there before Max Kinsella shows up again and does it himself.”
“No comment,” he said.
Nor was he about to confess to acquiring an older cheap car for tailing possible mob killers, or mentioning that Rafi Nadir had already helped him buy that replacement for the Probe. Rafi was acting like Matt’s bodyguard. Had Molina given her old flame the assignment. Still…why let Matt blunder around in very old and dirty mob business if he needed a keeper?
The coffee was cooling along with his patience, so Matt got to the point. “What is this meeting about besides pumping me on my laughable amateur Effinger investigation?”
Was Molina stalling for time? She seemed nervous, one foot tapping the area rug under the furniture. Something was up.
She shrugged. “Maybe you should forget it. Like God, the mob is dead and now enshrined in what passes for places of worship in Vegas, the new mob and old neon museums.”
“You directed me to a source.”
“An aging gossip, apparently.”
“Woody Wetherly is older than Spanish Moss, all right, and about as attractive. Almost makes me appreciate Temple’s harping on my wearing sunscreen.”
“Don’t be manly and forego it,” she said. “Vegas sun is not kind to redheads and blonds. Think of the children.”
Matt quashed a flush, finished his coffee and put the mug down on its coaster. “If that’s the message of this meeting. Dump Woody Weatherly and use sunscreen? Consider me warned.”
“Wait.” She put out a spread-fingered hand. “You’re right. I’ve been backpedaling on getting to the real issue.”
Matt leaned into his cushy chair as Molina unconsciously took a singer’s deep breath and said, “It’s about Mariah.”
“Anything wrong? Temple said she had an amazing chance to sing onstage weekends.”
“Yes. That’s going fine. In fact, she’s working with her coach right now.”
Matt chuckled. “Kids today. All junior high school Miley Cyruses and would-be viral Justin Biebers, hankering for instant YouTube fame and maybe fortunes.”
“Yes, Mariah is about to enter the dreaded junior high school. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Matt put on his best puzzled face. He thought she’d be fuming about her daughter being in the running for Twisted Teen of the Year. Not that Mariah would…would she?
Molina twisted her class ring with both fingers. “It’s about the Dad-Daughter Dance coming up in a few weeks.”
Molina? Not only finger-twisting, but tongue-tied? All’s wrong with the world, but how? Why?
Matt sat there blinking.
He usually morphed into the position of advisor and confident as easily as any ex-priest who’d heard thousands of what was now called the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
If this supremely self-possessed policewoman was this rattled, he didn’t want to speculate what her—upcoming confession, put it in plain language—would be.
12
Strapless in Sin City
“Oh my favorite Cinderella slippers,” Temple’s aunt Kit Carlson Fontana said over the phone when she heard Temple’s shocking proposal. “We need to go to a very cool cocktail lounge, my dear. My nerves are not what they were.”
“I would think that being married to Aldo Fontana would do a lot for your nerves, Auntie,” Temple said.