“I hope you enjoyed your Columbo moment, Mr. Fontana,” Ferraro began.
“Of course,” Macho Mario beamed. “It was a pleasure to nail that phony.”
“I meant Mr. Nick Fontana,” Ferraro said. “That was a risky stunt, but it was worth shaking that cool customer up for interrogation. I had no idea Miss Barr would be on board for it.”
“She pushed her way into the car. What could I do?” Nicky asked innocently.
“You couldn’t overpower her?”
“You don’t know women, detective. The smaller they are, the more tenacious. They don’t call those stiletto heels for nothing.”
The detective eyed Temple’s spike heels. “I guess those are oddly fitting today.”
She immediately got the allusion. “Because Cosimo Sparks was murdered with a very thin dagger, like a stiletto?”
“And how do you know that?”
“Just … guessing from the context.” She’d never squeal on Coroner Bahr. She wasn’t a dirty rat.
“Pretty clever,” Ferraro said, turning to Nicky. “You got the evidence?”
Nicky reached into his breast coat pocket and pulled out a tiny tape recorder, not a firearm. “He didn’t actually confess, but he was pretty rattled by the dead man’s rerun appearance in his own media show. Broke the car window.”
“Glad the blood on his hands is his own doing,” Ferraro noted, pocketing the tape.
“Well said,” Nicky answered. “I’m just glad the Glory Hole Gang is cleared.”
“What?” Temple demanded. “Have I been totally out of this loop? They were suspects?”
“You should be ‘out of the loop,’ ” Ferraro said, his lean face stern. “I’ve heard a bit about your civilian snooping. Not to be encouraged. Yeah,” he finally admitted, “they were mixed up with Jersey Joe Jackson and his stolen silver dollars and rumored hidden stashes of other assets through the years since the late forties. We couldn’t come up with a motive for Sparks’s murder other than attempted robbery.”
“Not Sparks’s attempted robbery?”
“Could be, and Santiago could have come on him cracking the safe while inspecting the tunnel before the vault was opened, but why would a rich guy—and he is—kill someone for an empty vault? It looked more like money from the past was involved, with those few silver dollars found in the vault. When we searched the old boys’ suite …”
Temple’s jaw dropped and she stared at Nicky.
He nodded confirmation. “The police asked, so we got them all out of there on a pretext.”
“How could anyone think the Glory Hole guys … ? They’re in their eighties.”
“Greed never dies, Miss Barr, you should know that.” Ferraro’s lip quirk could have been the start of a smile. “Anyway, we found an ice pick among their test-kitchen supplies. It looked as clean as a whistle and new as a store-bought razor blade, but forensics found Santiago’s DNA on it, which was easily obtained from all over the media wizard’s Fontana Suite.”
“Why would Santiago kill Sparks?” Temple asked. “Greed is a pretty broad category.”
“For some reason, Santiago could have been looking for Jersey Joe’s treasure, now that he was in the vicinity.”
That just lay there, as linguistically lame as it was as a motive for murder.
“What about the hesitation marks on Cosimo’s body?” Temple asked.
Ferraro frowned at her as fiercely as he had at Midnight Louie. “You have some inside access to the forensics report, Miss Barr? I thought Lieutenant Molina had enough of your fringe investigations.”
“I was a reporter, Detective Ferraro. I hear things.”
Midnight Louie chose that moment to take a long stretch up the detective’s pant leg. His full-length reach was awesome, almost crotch-high.
Ferraro stiffened like a frozen haddock, winced, and gazed down into Louie’s big green eyes. Louie’s big black claws had probably pricked through his lightweight slacks fabric into his skin, but very delicately.
“I hate cats,” Ferraro said, “almost as bad as amateur dicks. Get this one off me, and I’ll overlook your possession of police information,” he told Temple, never breaking Louie’s stare.
“Louie! Down!” Temple ordered, as if he were a dog. She wasn’t sure how he’d react to that indignity.
Louie held his pose and Ferraro’s gaze for a long, deep moment of mutual standoff, then dropped back on all fours.
“We won’t keep you, Detective,” Nicky said. “We’ll, uh, read all about it in the Review-Journal.”
Ferraro turned to go.
Temple spoke. “What if those ‘hesitation marks’ on the body were prod marks?”
Ferraro turned back, looked at her, at Louie, and then nodded. He knew a bit about prod marks personally now.
“Good point. Sparks failed to find the loot, and once Santiago saw the empty safe, he thought he’d been deliberately led astray and tried to ‘prick’ Sparks to give out the ‘real’ location of the Jackson treasure. For some reason, Sparks couldn’t, or wouldn’t, then Santiago lost it, like he did in your car,” Ferraro said, nodding at Nicky.
“Frankly, despite his DNA on the ice pick, the motive is all iffy and airy-fairy, and I doubt we’ll convict. Where did Santiago run into this slightly eccentric retired magician? Why would a sophisticate like him buy this bizarre Jersey Joe Jackson hidden-money rumor, and then kill over it? Right at the site of his brand-new toy about to debut. He would have had to have had a lot more visceral motive than a rich man’s unending greed to go through all that.”
“I don’t know,” Temple said, who thought she did, “but he was in and out of the Glory Hole Gang’s suite and test kitchen next door to his like a neighbor with a borrowing fetish. I saw that while I was visiting the old boys briefly.”
“At least,” Ferraro said, “your ultrasenior-citizen friends are in the clear. If I were you, I’d leave it at that and be happy.”
Temple nodded quickly. “You’re right, detective. All’s well that ends well.”
He actually grinned, but it looked forced. “We’re in agreement on that.”
She turned to Nicky when it was just her, him, Macho Mario, and Midnight Louie again.
“I can’t believe you engineered that stickler detective into letting you take Santiago for a ‘ride’ to his arrest.”
“It was a hard sell,” Nicky admitted.
“And you didn’t even tell me? I’m your PR person, Nicky. That was … cold.”
“I only told Uncle Mario, and I had to do it that way.”
“Well, letting Santiago luxuriate in his own setup and then slipping in a whole new scenario—how’d you do that, anyway?”
“Please. Vegas is teeming with special-effects people. You got the dough, they got the go. But the police demanded secrecy.”
“I get that, but why the big production?”
Nicky waggled his handsome head from side to side and shrugged with his hands in his pockets like a misbehaving twelve-year-old.
“The police came to me with their evidence and suspicions. It was all as thin as an ice pick, but I knew a high-profile arrest couldn’t go down at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel itself. People sleep there. You can’t have them thinking murderers are floating around. Van would kill me!”
Macho Mario nodded soberly. “Definitely.”
“So …,” Nicky said, “down here it fits. It’s all part of the ambience, right?”
“I suppose there’s a certain poetic justice to Santiago riding the rails to his own arrest.”
“You can work with that? I mean publicity-wise?”
“I can work with that. Publicity-wise,” Temple said. “You know, I’d just like to sit down here in the car seat and collect my thoughts.”