Carole Douglas - Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

“You’re regaining your lost native Irish lilt,” Max told her.

“I spoke mostly Spanish when I worked South America for the Cause. Sure, and I can sound as Irish as the cleaning lady when I want to. That encouraged Irish-Americans to donate to the IRA.”

“You have a gift for languages, then.”

“Gift? Perhaps. Why would you be interested in my ‘gifts’?”

“No reason.” He studied the house again. “The architecture is so pure and simple, timeless. You don’t realize at first how big and well-situated the structure is. The roof has some skylights. That’s not authentic ‘Irish cottage’.”

“So we’re doing a review for Architectural Digest ?” Kathleen’s tart tone was at least an improvement on downright angry.

Max gazed out over a bright green rolling quilt of landscape, seamed by darker green hedgerows and brown stone walls. “Peaceful too,” he added.

“Things may seem so long-distance lovely,” Kathleen said, “but there’s always dirt beneath the grass and shamrocks, soil beneath the soul.”

Max eyed the worn stone sill underlining the aggressively green front door.

“Is he…are they, even home?” he asked, walking to the gate to view a parked car on the paved area behind the house and inhale the drift of roses from the charming garden.

Charm. That word again. Lucky charm. Max had always cultivated both luck and charm, but he had a feeling they had run out on him now.

Kathleen would never bring him to a picture-postcard ending. He again inhaled the scent of dozens of roses, amused by the intricate white wrought-iron garden table and chairs glaring against the everlasting green, and speculated about the owner of the parked Opel Zafira car.

He circled back to Kathleen. Her jade-green pantsuit and plain black pumps blended with the scenery. A designer scarf swathed her throat and shoulders, as vividly floral as the flower boxes and distracted attention from her facial scars. She had white skin, like the stone-clad cottage, black hair, like the dark and bloody history of the land beneath it, and…something very wrong about the eyes. He’d been avoiding direct glances, partly to quell his accelerating emotions as he neared a reunion with Sean. Hope. Fear. Guilt. Anger.

It took him a second to figure out what was wrong…different. She wasn’t wearing her exotic aquamarine-tinted contact lenses. He was seeing the clear blue eyes of young Kathleen O’Connor, twenty-three and the prettiest girl in Northern Ireland, at least to two teenage American boys from Racine, Wisconsin.

Max knew then there was no way to escape this time machine, or the revelations and shock Kitty the Cutter was about to inflict on her two long-ago admirers.

27

Send Off

Temple was madly typing away at her laptop the next morning when the doorbell rang. She jumped up and Louie, startled, skittered off her desk, sending printouts flying.

“Louie!”

Her complaint was wasted. He was already at the door when she got there.

She loved that each unit at the Circle Ritz had a real, live nineteen-fifties doorbell. Temple was not the domestic type—in fact she happily bordered on incompetent—but answering a doorbell made her think she was the perfect, efficient fifties hausfrau in full skirts, high heels, and pearl necklace, as portrayed on TV series then.

“Electra,” she greeted the landlady. “Come on in. I’ve got Crystal Lite and Pecan Sandies and have been jotting down ideas for a charmingly kick-ass urban village. That’ll take your mind off current events of the criminal kind.”

“I’m afraid not, dear.”

Temple noticed then that only one tame swatch of yellow decorated Electra’s hair, and it disappeared after two inches, like a fading sunbeam. Electra with almost all-white hair seemed older, frailer, and several gallons low on her natural zest.

“Come sit down. Something’s happened. The police—?”

“Not them. Yet.” Electra arranged the folds of her pale blue muumuu, which seemed to reflect her mood. Blue. “I wonder if you can go to a funeral with me today.”

“ The funeral? That’s fast. Who would arrange to bury Jay Edgar here in Vegas? Wait. Are you doing it? At the wedding chapel?”

“Heavens, no!”

“Then who would, um, sponsor it? I don’t think you mentioned having kids with him. And he hadn’t been back in town for years.”

“He had no kids by anybody. His other ex-wife, Diane, keeps in touch with me. The police contacted her by phone in Dayton. She gave them Jay’s lawyer’s name in Dayton. And she was invited to the funeral too.”

“By whom?”

“A woman named Cathy Zevon. She claims to have been his fiancée.”

“And she’s here, in Vegas?”

“I guess so. She’s using my friend Sam’s funeral home, and I checked. She’s paying for it. In cash.”

“Curiouser and curiouser. Jay Edgar didn’t mention anything about having a fiancée along or in town, when you gave him what-for at the motel?”

“You can get anything you want in terms of companionship in Vegas,” Electra said with a sad smile, “including, I guess, a convenient fiancée.”

“This is so fishy.”

Louie, who’d been rubbing on their ankles during the conversation, paused and interjected a strong merow of agreement. Temple had observed that cats expressed emphasis in a progression from mew to meow to merooow .

“Of course I’ll go with you,” Temple told Electra. “For one thing, the police will probably have someone there watching who attends and I might be able to spot the observer.”

“The police will be watching me?”

Temple nodded. “And Diane. She didn’t know about a fiancée?”

“They both still lived in Dayton, Ohio, so she’s pretty sure he didn’t have one.”

“What terms were Jay and Diane on?”

“Not close, but in touch now and again. She gave the police his lawyer’s name. I guess they needed to know if Jay had a will.”

“What do you think?”

“Sure. He was a businessman, even if his recliner store recently went belly-up. The Great Recession did a job on a lot of people. He’d have all the paperwork. Jay’s the one who brought me to Las Vegas, like your Max, to get married.”

“Uh, not like Max. We didn’t come here specifically to get married.”

“But Max left and you stayed. That’s what happened with Jay and me. That’s why I trusted him to honor our agreement that I’d have first dibs on his land adjacent to the Circle Ritz. That’s what we did when we came to Vegas to get married. We were both starting over and investing our life savings in real estate. We weren’t kids, so we kept our investments separate.”

“What broke up the marriage?”

Electra made a face. “His gambling. You heard what he did here just now, got deeper in debt. It was criminal to get him comped at a casino.”

“The people who wanted that building site knew how to play him. I bet they didn’t know about you or your claims on the property.”

“Which are nil. A promise is worth nothing when the promiser is dead. My ‘claim’ was paper-thin when he was alive.” She sighed. “I guess worrying over the Circle Ritz and Lovers’ Knot is pointless when I’m a suspect for murder.”

“That is so lame, Electra. The murder hasn’t even made the paper.”

“They just don’t want the way they found him to get out.”

“Shot dead is big-time headline news?”

Electra bit her lip and shook her head. “Your Lieutenant Molina was more than stern about me not telling anybody this, especially you.”