Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

“Nicky said the exhibit made the ‘biggest impression’ on me, not that it scared me.”

“No?” Macho Mario managed to sound both condescending and dubious.

“No,” Van said. “Something floated in the liquid, which was evidently a preservative: a severed human arm. Cut off here.” The edge of Van’s pale hand gave a light karate chop to her own upper arm. “Severed across the humerus bone. It had been floating there, flesh and fingers and all, for decades.”

“Ew,” somebody said, behind the inner circle gazing at the impaled bones.

Temple turned, surprised to find the speaker had been Spuds Lonnigan, the Three O’Clock Louie’s cook.

“I’ll never be able to boil another soup bone in my kitchen life,” he went on. “Why would the Brit cops have a severed arm on display?”

Van smiled. “They had crime scene fingerprints that they thought would match a German perpetrator. So they wired the Berlin police to send them the man’s fingerprints.”

“The man in question,” Nicky said, “happened to have been killed in a police shoot-out, so the German police cut off his right arm, packed it in dry ice, and shipped it to Scotland Yard.”

“But—” Macho Mario was almost speechless with confusion. “Why the whole arm? Why not just the hand, which would be, uh, cheaper to ship?”

“Teutonic efficiency,” Nicky explained, straight-faced. “The Black Museum guide explained the matter that way. Why skimp on body parts when you could as easily ship an arm as a hand. You’ll understand why I don’t cross my wife, Uncle Mario.”

“I guess not!” He wiped his palms nervously on his pant seams.

“A gruesome little trophy, this,” Temple agreed, gazing upon their own similar artifact, “and it has a genuine Las Vegas connection, likely mob. Until someone knows who and why that guy’s feet were encased in cement and dropped like an anchor in Lake Mead, though, it doesn’t command a lot of media interest. And that’s what you need to launch the announcement of a redone hotel.”

“You’re a snoop sister,” Macho Mario told Temple, with narrowed eyes. “You figure all that out.”

Eightball O’Rourke stepped up beside Temple. “I heard some long-gone mobsters favored the ‘Lake Mead footbath’ as a way to dump rivals or turncoat associates. That was in the forties, before the place became a tourist draw. So anything in the way of evidence on this guy’s bones was probably eaten away decades ago.”

“On the other hand,” Temple said, “solved cold cases are a hot ticket in both fact and fiction now. I’ll check with the coroner’s office. Forensics is much more sophisticated, and ID-ing a long-dead body would make a bigger tourist draw.”

Nicky surveyed the surrounding vintage cars and blown-up photographs.

“Great stories make museums, not exhibits,” he said. “We need to bring everything alive.”

At that moment, a figure in a huge photograph stepped away from the wall and sprayed the onlookers with … the neck of an electric guitar, as a sound track played screaming riffs, and the static photographs started streaming past as if everyone present was riding a carousel.

Which they were.

Even Van lost her composure enough to reach for Nicky’s support, at the same instant chrome stripper poles shot up from the floor, ready to be grabbed for balance. Nightclub booths also levitated around the moving circle’s edge. The Fontana brothers gestured the others into seats, then swung round the poles and seated themselves.

Santiago in his white pseudo zoot suit with his hopefully unloaded vintage tommy gun leaped between the rotating booths into the carousel’s center like a ringmaster.

“Sound,” he shouted into the din. “Motion. Surprise. This must look like a traditional museum but become an ‘amuseum.’ An amusement park that does not ‘park’ itself but takes you, the viewer—the ‘amusee’—places.”

Temple grabbed hold of a cocktail-table edge. The entire exhibit area was slowly screwing itself down to a lower level, the surrounding walls changing into black-and-white movie scenes, with Edward G. Robinson barking threats at the circling party as anonymous punks in trench coats and fedoras sprayed crescendos of gunfire into their midst.

There was only the slightest jerk as the elevator floor reached the lower level and stopped turning.

Leggy cocktail waitresses with aprons as small as their bar trays scissored their fishnet-hose-clad gams to the tables, setting down drinks in vintage lowball and small martini glasses.

Temple tried to name the drinks. The first to come to mind was … an old-fashioned. She thought she recognized some gin rickeys and Singapore Slings.

A flat-screen TV menu materialized from the middle of each booth’s table, flashing movie scenes of the available drinks clutched in some long-gone movie star’s black-and-white hand.

“Disneyland for adults,” Van declared, sipping her—Temple checked the flashing “pages” of filmed drinks—Tom Collins. “Everything’s animated.” Van eyed the six frozen-faced beauty-queen waitresses floating drinks down to tables occupied by the men in the party, while Santiago explained their video menus to them. “Except for the eye candy.”

“Gangsters gotta have that,” Nicky said.

“Vegas too.” Van glanced at Temple and sighed. “What do you think?”

“This is just the first stage Santiago proposed,” Nicky said. “It can always be redacted.”

Using that ridiculous word made Temple and Van laugh in tandem.

“We can always ‘redact’ Santiago,” Van added.

“Meanwhile,” Temple suggested, “let’s see what other media magic tricks he has to show us. I do like the sinking cocktail bar. Very post-Titanic.”

“Uncle Mario wanted a bank of Marriott-style bullet-shaped glass elevator cars with tufted white satin-lined doors to reach the underground level,” Nicky admitted to the women’s groans, “so I vote for the cocktail carousel myself.”

By then Santiago had reached their booth and swung into his sales routine.

“This is only a crude approximation yet. The Speakeasy bar and restaurant will be under the area of the hotel we just left. That offers necessary ventilation and crowd-control possibilities in case of disaster. This descending carousel is the cocktail area, of course, and beyond us, in the dark, Gangsters limos on rails will await passengers desiring an exciting trip to the Crystal Phoenix.

“These elderly gentlemen are becoming quite animated about the menu possibilities. Apparently, they have actually drunk some of these amusing old cocktails.”

The Glory Hole Gang members were indeed hashing over future entrée names on menus, and Temple was dreaming up a theme of bullet-hole-riddled online pages, with sound effects and videos, and Van’s face was still paler than her hair.

“Trends change constantly in the hospitality industry,” Van said at last. “What’s new quickly becomes ‘old hat,’ and what was forgotten becomes the new favorite. For a while.”

“Why, Miss von Rhine, could you possibly be talking about Santiago’s multimedia inventions?” the man himself asked.

“Eventually,” Van said, with a softening smile. “Everything moves so fast these days.”

“One would hope values would not,” Santiago said.

The word seemed odd coming from such a flamboyantly shallow persona, Temple thought.

Still, every artist in every media had to be a one-man or one-woman show these days, on the Internet, on Facebook, on Twitter—“on” all the time, everywhere. She’d even heard Matt complaining that the radio station wanted to move him “onto YouTube and beyond” their Web site.

“Let me show you,” Santiago suggested, “the darker possibilities ahead.”