Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

“Someone found her,” Matt said.

Miss Kitty nodded. “Someone found her and managed to get in and kill her. You bachelor party guys, and gals, were just innocent bystanders.”

“Or cover,” Temple said, catching Matt’s eye.

“Funny,” he said. “I don’t feel very innocent, or very much like a bystander anymore, or like I’d settle now for being ‘cover’ for anybody.”

Mincemeat

Okay.

I got a party of one picnicking on smuggled-in rare roast beef in the outbuilding.

Inside the Sapphire Slipper, it is not a picnic, as several of my favorite humans and a whole passel of other Homo sapiens are twitching to the ends of their opposable thumbs about what the oncoming authorities will make of them when the murder at the Sapphire Slipper is everybody’s business, and especially the cops’.

I need to get Mr. Rare Roast Beef wrapped up in a nice exportable package before the county sheriff, the real-life Vegas CSI techs, and the law personnel who don’t know any of us from a Geico caveman (or those who do know my nearest and dearest all too well) get here to really mess up the crime scene.

All this guy out here needs to do when reinforcements arrive is retreat to the cover of the tumbling tumbleweed that surrounds this bit of salacious enterprise in the desert and he will be home Scottsdale-free. Heck, he may shortly be in Scottsdale if I do not stop him.

I could persuade my human cohorts to lean on the ambiguous Ms. Phyllis Shoofly and make he or she confess to aiding and abetting a murderer. But how?

I could betray the guy’s presence without allowing him to run. But how?

Everybody has focused on the brothel, on keeping the suspects in the brothel along with the body and crime scene.

Nobody has considered that the crime had an inside and outside man.

Maybe that is because of the intimate setting of the murder on a mass scale. Maybe that is because there are so many likely suspects inside, no one has seen the bigger picture. They cannot all be detecting geniuses like me.

Monkey Business

“Sorry to report this just now,” Morrie said, eyeing Molina for more than physical stress. He’d charged into her office as soon as she’d returned from Rafi’s. She hadn’t even had time to process her talk with her ex.

“I bet. What is it?” She sat gingerly on her desk edge.

“It’s out of our jurisdiction, is what it is.” The detective sat her usual mug of coffee on the oddly empty desktop. “But the, er, visiting personnel are persons of interest.”

“Jurisdiction?”

“Nye County. Near Beatty.”

“That isn’t even on the same planet as Vegas, really. Chicken ranch land.”

“Right. That’s the point.”

“The county sheriff can handle it. That’s what they’re for.”

“Murder.”

“Hmm . Intriguing. But if some wayward Vegas boys got themselves into trouble way out in Nye County, it’s none of our affair. Literally. Why are they bothering us with this at all?”

“Most of the persons of interest in the murder are well-known Vegas habitués.”

“Lots of the horny gamblers who fly in here motor out to a chicken ranch. What’s new about that?”

“These aren’t tourists. They’re residents.”

“Residents? What residents?”

“They would be the Fontana boys.”

“Fontana! What were those city slickers doing out in the boonies?”

“Uh, bachelor party. Hijacked bachelor party, they claim.”

“One of the litter was murdered, hopefully?”

“Now, Carmen, don’t wish for something you wouldn’t like to live with. You know they add a lot of ambience to the town.”

“Ambience that Vegas tried to dump in the nineties. Who was getting married, anyway?”

“The state police didn’t fax wedding party assignments.” Morrie kept his eyes on the sheet. “Matt Devine is there, though, and Macho Mario Fontana.”

“Matt? In with that crowd?”

“It was a bachelor party.”

“He’s getting married?”

“I don’t know about that. He may be, given his new closeness to Temple Barr, but I’d guess this bachelor is known to us.”

“Known to us? Do not play games with me, Morrie. I’m a little on edge right now, as you well know.”

“I thought you’d remember.”

“Remember? Why shouldn’t I remember? I was stabbed, not robbed of brain cells. Fontanas. Bachelor party. I missed attending because of eighty-six fresh stitches, not that I would have gone anyway. Oh, that’s right!” She slapped her forehead. “My own unauthorized adventures made me temporarily forget that saccharine public announcement you reported on at the Crystal Phoenix six weeks ago. Aldo Fontana is engaged to Temple Barr’s aunt. Kathy . . . Harrleson, isn’t it?”

“Kit Carlson,” Morrie corrected in a discreet murmur.

“That’s it. The Pony Express rider once removed.” Molina frowned. “Aldo must be several years her junior. Must be the chlorine in the water those Minnesotans drink. My question remains. What does this have to do with Matt Devine?”

“Apparently he’s the number one suspect. Found the body.”

“And the body is—?”

“Someone called Madonnah. One of the girls at the Sapphire Slipper. Tried CPR on her, so Devine’s DNA—”

“That’s what happens when idiot ex-priests visit brothels with the Fontana brothers. This sounds more like a Marx Brothers movie, if it weren’t for the dead body. I suppose your favorite redhead is accounted for and present too?”

“Now she is. Seems a female rescue party motored up after the murder. So we’ve also got, on the premises, Nicky Fontana and Van von Rhine, the eight Fontana girlfriends who hijacked the bachelor party, Macho Mario himself, Electra Lark, the bride-to-be aunt, a dozen or so bordello girls, and assorted staff. And, uh, three extra black cats.”

“You can have ‘extra’ black cats on a crime scene?”

“One of the black cats is a resident. The other three are visiting from Vegas.”

“And we know this how?”

“They’ve been identified as Temple Barr’s cat, Midnight Louie, and the Crystal Phoenix mascot, Midnight Louise, plus an unnamed old alley cat, also black. The resident cat is called Baby Blue.”

“I suppose their paws are all over the crime scene too.”

“It’s possible. That’s why our crime scene technicians need to go over the place before the body and any suspects are removed.”

Molina just shook her head. “You know I don’t need another Temple Barr Flying Circus of Crime and Cats just now, Morrie.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Stop addressing me like a military woman. You’ve seen my midriff bare. You can call me Carmen.”

He straightened uneasily. No one on the force was allowed to use her first name. “You want me out there wrangling this, don’t you? Is that the reward I get—?”

She leaned close, over her desktop, eyes like indigo ice.

“That’s the reward you get for being the bearer of this bloody awful news. Don’t worry. I’ll have to go too. God, jolting over those desert roads! How does Barr know just when to turn up bodies to inconvenience me the most?”

“Talent?” he asked.

“That was a rhetorical question, Alch. Saddle up the Crown Vic. I’ll call Grizzly Bahr. I’m sure he’ll want to eyeball this one himself.”

“Because of the complication of postmortem CPR administered by one of the suspects?”

“Because of all the seminaked ladies on the premises.” Molina managed a grin. “He does like to get out of the autopsy room sometimes to view some live bodies instead of dead ones. Especially if they’re comely.

“Come to think of it, this crazy quilt of a case might get my mind off grimmer matters.”