Carole Douglas - Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

“I wish you weren’t leaving right now.” Electra sounded truly forlorn.

Temple realized her landlady’s upbeat, funky image and personality obscured the fact that she was an aging woman alone in a rapidly changing world. And her livelihood might become a casualty any minute.

Temple tightened her grip on Electra’s arm with an encouraging squeeze. “Matt and I will only be gone one night and two days, Electra.”

“I wish Max still lived at the Circle Ritz.”

Temple felt stunned. Surely Electra knew the place couldn’t hold both of Temple’s…well, lovers, at once.

“You have the Fontana Brothers to keep watch over you,” Temple said, only then realizing they had recently “adopted” the Circle Ritz as a hangout. Because…they saw what Temple hadn’t realized until today.

“I’ve let Nicky and Van know we’ll be gone for a short while,” Temple said. And maybe forever if Matt’s Chicago job came through. “This trip is only two days, Electra. A lightning raid on the relatives. What can go wrong in forty-eight hours?”

10

Off-Strip Joint

“I gotta talk to some people,” Woodrow Wetherly had said that morning. “You better come to my place around nine thirty tonight and drive with me. That fancy car of yours can go in my garage instead of my beater. It just screams Steal Me . What were you thinking?”

“It was a gift.”

“From who? Your worst enemy?”

Woody huffed and puffed to open the rickety garage door with a hand-hold at the bottom. Matt rushed to take over the job, overwhelmed by the scent of gas and oil. Wetherly’s place didn’t say much for the retirement pensions in law enforcement. Matt wondered what Molina would get.

Apparently the aging Dodge’s air-conditioning didn’t work, because Woody lowered the windows. As darkness crept over the western Spring Mountains, Woody steered them through the tangle of settled Las Vegas valley real estate where Interstate highway 93-95 intersected Highway 15, called the Spaghetti Bowl. These were tangled, dimming streets far from the bright lights and glitter of the Strip’s artificial neon sunburst.

Just as the Manhattan theater scene supported Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway venues, Las Vegas had its Off-Strip and Off-Off Strip drinking establishments.

By the time you got to Off-Off, the bars would be more accurately described as dives.

Matt had explored these places when he’d first come to Vegas searching for his no-good stepfather, Cliff Effinger. This time he was looking for old cops and old crooks who might belly up to the same bars together even though they were presumably out of the game. This time, he’d come prepared to fade into the foreground.

He’d visited one of Temple’s beloved vintage shops to nab banged-up jeans, scuffed motorcycle boots, and a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt topped with a plaid long-sleeved work shirt. He even messed up his altar-boy smooth blond hair with some drugstore gel goop, teased into a point at the top. The effect was still too tidy, but would have to do.

Tired swirls of neon lettering indicated the bars among the lingerie, tattoo, head shops and Vegas T-shirt emporiums in these shabby, one-story strip shopping areas.

Tired girls and women anchored darker street corners, one leg cocked to rest a hooker high-heel against the wall. Matt saw the sheen of their neon-tinted eye-whites as their gazes followed him. Some shifted their weight onto two feet, ready to approach him through the open car window, but he didn’t look, didn’t stare, just gazed listlessly ahead like a hopeless drunk out of beer money.

LUCKY STARS the nearest neon sign announced in a meteor shower of gold, green and blue stars. Cars and motorcycles kept lurching company in the front parking strip, but Woody found an empty, if tight, slot for his ponderous old Dodge sedan.

“Here we are, Mr. Midnight. Slots and jukebox in the front, pool table and hookers in the back. Tabletop nudie entertainment, everywhere.”

Woody nudged Matt through the door first. Matt’s pushing palm encountered a stickiness that could be any unclean bodily fluid he’d care to imagine. He wiped his hand on the jeans. They’d be in the Circle Ritz Dumpster tomorrow.

Smoke haze was even thicker here than in the Strip casinos. Wetherly bulled through broad-shouldered guys wearing biker leather and jeans jackets to a large, empty corner booth. The old man sat with a fervent oomph, then pushed himself grunting along the curved vinyl seat until he sat in the center, back to the wall.

A jerk of his head had Matt sliding in beside him.

The cigarette smoke and pot fumes made Matt’s vision blur, but he could see both sides of the oval bar and most of the room on either side.

“You have an in with the maître d’?” he asked Woody.

An elbow jabbed Matt’s side, the one with the bullet wound, and Woody wheezed out a pained breath. “That’s a good one. Yeah, Mr. Midnight, I have an in with the maître d’. Been coming here fifty-five years. You could say I’m married to the joint.”

“Have you ever been?” Matt asked.

“I’ve been a lot of things. What?”

“Married, I mean.”

“Oh, hell. I don’t remember. I do remember some wedding chapel, so I was either a justice of the peace, a bridegroom, or Elvis assisting at a ceremony. You never been married.” He leaned forward with a piercing look.

“Not yet,” Matt said.

“Bet you got a girlfriend who would be shocked, shocked, if she knew you were here.”

“I won’t take that bet.” Matt glanced at surrounding bar tops to glimpse a lot of luridly lit topless and maybe bottomless flesh, but the array of lights, particularly black light that turned skin an eerie spoiled skim milk purple-white, was so exotic it dampened the impression of wall-to-wall nudity. Oddly, half of the customers were favoring drinks over ogling.

“Boilermakers.”

“Huh?” Matt said, startled, but as he looked back, he saw Wetherly was addressing a waitress, topless, who’d appeared at their table, and whose mascara looked older than she was.

“How many, sir?” she asked, holding up her pad with newbie importance and obscuring her personal scenery.

“Two.” Wetherly raised stubby fingers.

Matt tried not to react. Topless waitresses and boilermakers were not his socializing style. And mixing beer and booze seemed redundant.

Wetherly waggled the fingers. “Each.”

Matt tried not to choke. He needed a clear head, so he had to be either a slow or sloppy drinker tonight.

“This is how you do it.” The old guy leaned close, the stale cigar breath coming through teeth riper than a rotten fish head. “Bull your way in. Establish a presence. Then wait.”

“For what?”

“You look like you came right off the set of The Bachelor. I will stop calling you ‘kid’, but guys in here won’t. Clean-cut, that’s a gutsy thing to be in this part of town. They’ll want to settle their curiosity, but then maybe we can satisfy some of yours about Cliffie Effinger. You gotta give a little to get something.”

“I have a feeling I’m like…bait.”

Wetherly grinned and slapped Matt on the back. “That’s the spirit.”

When the boilermakers arrived, crowding the round brown tray no gin joint in all of the world was ever without, Matt decided that was just what he needed.

Wetherly dropped the shot glass of whiskey down inside his pint glass of beer, but Matt already distrusted the cleanliness in this place. So he downed the whiskey in one go, like in the movies, and hoped the high-octane bolt wouldn’t make him cough. That would be way too clean-cut for this place.