Carole Douglas - Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

Wetherly chuckled. “That’ll make your eyes cross. Don’t look left. We got a customer.”

Customer. As in the expression “bad customer”. The guy who was swaggering over to their table was tame enough to have only a couple visible tattoos on his biceps and wrist. He also looked to be about sixty. The late Effinger’s generation.

The guy screeched a heavy wooden captain’s chair over to their booth. “Woody, my man,” he greeted Matt’s escort. “You got a long-lost grandson?”

Wetherly’s wheezing laugh turned into a cough, but on a grizzled veteran it didn’t sound weak.

“Naw. This here’s Matthew from Chicago.” Wetherly spoke slowly, as if spelling unsaid things out…not to Matt, but to his pal.

Matt was beginning to feel like a marked man, or a shill. Why had he trusted the retired cop? Because Molina knew of him? She was relatively new in town. “Woody” could have been as crooked as a scarecrow in his day. Matt sipped the beer and studied the bar, repelled by tattoo-clothed muscleman arms and a greasy ponytail snaking down a jeans jacket back. Narrow-eyed glances eeled over leather jacket shoulders toward the banquette and away so fast you’d wonder if you’d imaged the attention. This place was one step lower than a biker bar. Beyond the bar, Matt could only glimpse a supernaturally high-kicking chorus-girl leg over the crowded circles of hooting men. Nudie pole dancing.

Wetherly leaned forward over the huge table, and lowered his voice. “You know, Ox, I got some kin up there and said I’d help him out.”

“With what?”

“Post-mortem report on a former brother of the coast.”

Matt recognized the phrase “brother of the coast”. That was old-time talk for pirates. Anybody who’d seen Johnny Depp Jack Sparrow movies knew that.

Not everybody knew Cliff Effinger had died tied to the figurehead of the pirate ship attraction far up the Strip from this place. Had died tied. Tie-dyed in water. A horrible death Matt wouldn’t wish on his worst nightmare, which Effinger had been when he was a kid.

The newcomer named “Ox” laughed. “You old buccaneer. I think I see where you’re sailing. What’s to ask about that? Old business.” He suddenly eyed Matt with suspicion. “You the law? Why no mustache?”

Matt was flummoxed. Then he recalled all the bicycle cops around town—tanned, fit, hair bleached blond from the sun, and their mustaches too. “I’m a—”

Wetherly took control. “Crime buff broadcaster.”

“Well, he’s buff enough,” Ox said sourly. “We’ll never be that again.”

“Too true. You know how that mob museum craze Downtown and on the Strip stirred up the media and the tourists. Our checkered pasts here in Vegas are a big-time money machine nowadays for everybody but the mob, which was always a myth anyway.”

“Yeah, a myth. Mythconception.” Ox eyed Matt. “I can see this guy on TV. So what’d we owe him a story for?”

“I told you. He hails from Chicago, ain’t that right, Matthew?”

He hated being called “Matthew” when his baptismal name was Matthias, after a Disciple, but Matt knew he should keep quiet, and had to anyway. He’d been sipping the beer to quell the hard liquor hit to his stomach and was unable to answer right away. If Wetherly’s elbow jabbed him in the bullet wound once more, he wouldn’t answer for his reaction. This charade was useless. He could never swim with the barracudas.

Matt nodded like a Howdy Doody puppet.

Wetherly lowered his voice even more. “Freaking Effinger.”

The other guy regarded Matt with awe. “How’d someone like you ever know anyone like freaking Effinger?”

“My mother’s cousin married him.”

“Oh, gawd. Was she institutionalized at the time? Oh, hey. Kid. Just…like, uh, kidding.” He’d noticed Matt’s hands fisting on the table and probably felt the whiskey fire in his eyes.

Wetherly put an apparently restraining hand on Matt’s well-muscled forearm. “I’d be obliged, Ox, if you would put my young friend’s questions to rest as to the fate of said Effinger. If some bad actor we are all very grateful to hadn’t of offed him, my boy here might be facing thirty years to life on a homicide charge. He’s going back to Chicago soon, and would like to have some peace of mind about the guy.”

“Yeah. I can see he’s touchier than he looks. You really going back to Chicago?”

Matt nodded. He was going to Minneapolis, for sure, and maybe not to Chicago if the talk-show gig didn’t come through, but he figured nodding was not really a lie…and that whiskey shot had hit him harder than he’d like if he was doing this confession dance in his head, worrying about lying to someone who was the scum of the earth, although it was wrong to judge…

“Okay, Matthew…whatcha need to know for your peace of mind’s sake?”

Matt knew he needed to do this just right. St. Jude, the saint of the Impossible came to his rescue with the words that came out of his mouth, just the right thing to elicit what he wanted/needed to know.

Matt leaned over the table like his mentor, and lowered his voice. “You see, I’m afraid the bastard isn’t really dead.”

“Oh, man.” Ox looked from Matt to Wetherly. “Isn’t really dead? I tell you. We—um, he…the police (poe-lease , he said ), they found him wrapped up like a mummy, you know about that?”

Matt nodded quickly to keep Ox’s words and shock flowing.

“Well, only not dry as a mummy from some pyramid like at the Luxor but wet, drowned, and not in any good shape when he hit the water. You cannot get more dead than Cliffie Effinger in this city. At least, not since the Chicago outfit got pushed out by the FBI in the eighties. You, ah, have connections in Chicago?”

“Sure thing, but my generation is bit behind on current protocol in Vegas.”

“Current protocol?”

“Yeah, uh, they sent me to college. When I was back in Chicago recently, a couple of made men searched his widow’s apartment, not on any orders we knew about. Maybe these freelancers were Effinger’s ex-associates and were looking for something valuable he might have left there a long time ago. What bothers me, see, is the way Effinger was offed, seemed kinda…I’m not being critical here…but kinda an old-fashioned hit. If you know what I mean.”

Wetherly intervened. “A message was being sent. My question is, was it the right message?”

Both men stared at Matt, who explained, “Here’s the thing. Before Effinger sailed off into the sunset, I learned a body with his ID on it, get this, fell to a craps tabletop at the Crystal Phoenix and was taken for, uh, Cliffie, by the poe- lease.”

Matt glanced at Wetherly, and lifted his beer glass. “Any more of these? Ox might need a hit.”

Three fingers shot up.

Ox commandeered what was left of Matt’s beer and downed it. “I don’t know nothin’ about that. That was…nobody I know is doing Strip hotel whack jobs. I don’t know any hit man could pass going into the Crystal Phoenix’s front lobby, or back stairwell, not with that wall-to-wall Fontana muscle all over the place. It’s also like they’ve got some secret robot surveillance unit on duty there. Why, some grifters with a sweet party pickpocket game got IDed there by a freaking black cat. Who needs K-9 mastiffs when you have undercover vermin? Whoever dumped a body in the Eye-in-the-Sky system at the Phoenix has balls.”

“Robot surveillance.” Matt, who’d been present at that very pickpocket targeted event, had to tap his lips with his fist to hide a smile. Luckily, that gesture read like impatience. And by then the returning round brown tray had been emptied of three beer pints and accompanying shot glasses.