Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

She accepted his card. Technology was getting creepy. First it had been regarding the corpse through a small window with draperies, then it was looking at a photo, then the photo was e-mailed fresh from the morgue to your queue for the final indignity of sitting cheek-by-dead-jowl with Nigerian solicitations, fake PayPal fraud warnings, and chain letters that would consign you to hell if you failed to pass on a soppy hard-luck story to ten of your closest friends. Who had time for that number of intimates these days? Temple didn’t even know a fat man in evening dress found dead in her very own stunt safe.

“You are the person primarily responsible for everyone else being there?” Ferraro asked.

“Uh … yes, I suppose you could say so.”

“And you’re responsible for the presence of mob and muscle.”

“Mob and muscle?”

The mustache quirked again. Maybe a sense of humor hid behind Ferraro’s clenched, refreshingly unbleached, beige front teeth. “The Fontana family and that highly photogenic drill team. You pick those particular construction crew members?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, but it was purely random.”

“The random factor being … ?”

“Uh, they were working on the actual project.”

“And?”

“Good tans, skimpy T-shirts, impressive, uh, tool belts.”

“Thought so. You manipulated this event and staged the scene. Why wouldn’t you have also arranged to have an overdressed corpse appear inside this empty, useless safe?”

She was speechless. She was so used to dealing with Molina and the homicide lieutenant’s favorite detective team of Su and Alch, she wasn’t accustomed to being considered a serious suspect.

“What are you implying?” she asked, wondering if she should shut up and get a lawyer.

“That you hired the corpse for this gig.”

“Hired a corpse? That’s not possible.”

“It is if he was alive and you had him slip into the safe before lights, action, and camera time.”

“But the door had to be drilled open.”

“Maybe. Maybe it was all a media setup gone wrong.”

“Not ‘maybe.’ It is! This kind of publicity is not helpful, believe me, detective. And if you don’t believe me, which I see you have no reason to, ask Dr. Bahr, the coroner, when the deceased died. The smell was ripe enough to indicate it was at least overnight. No sane patsy would sleep overnight locked in that rank, dark safe, even if there was some way to open and close it before today. Which there wasn’t.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Of course we tried to get into it before we arranged for a formal ‘opening ceremony,’ so to speak.”

“So you were willing to risk revealing whatever was in there?”

“Whatever wasn’t, detective. I knew, we all knew, it was probably just an empty safe someone had installed for who-knows-what reason. Making a big deal of it à la Al Capone’s vault was a joke. A harmless media ‘event’ in a city known for being over the top.”

“You consider murder a joke, ma’am?”

“No! A body was the last thing anybody expected to be in that safe!”

“Was there anything you thought might be in it?”

“Maybe … It was a long shot. Maybe some old silver dollars.”

“The Jersey Joe Jackson part of the ‘joke.’ ”

“He was real, and he did bury a lot of stolen silver dollars around town and in the desert years ago, some of which were found and turned in. That’s one Las Vegas legend that’s true.”

“It would take a lot of nerve to ask the media out for a safe opening that might or might not contain some silver dollars.”

“Yes. That’s my job.”

“To have a lot of nerve?”

Oh, how she wanted to snap back: “Yes.” That was not smart. “To ask the media out.”

Actually, they’d gotten a sensational story out of it. Temple’s stock would be high with them.

With the Las Vegas law … not.

“Don’t you have friends at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department?” Van von Rhine asked, pacing her pristine office.

Nicky was still at Gangsters, waiting with his uncle and brothers during their separate interrogations by Detective Ferraro’s partner.

“Ah … acquaintances,” Temple told Van. “I can call … one … to check on the progress of the case. He’s a great guy, but when it comes to department policy, I can’t guarantee Detective Alch will tell me the weather.”

Van was not appeased. “I knew flaunting the family’s … Italian … connections would go terribly wrong. What was Nicky thinking?”

“How to cheaply enhance a venue during an economic meltdown by appealing to public curiosity. Gangsters eternally fascinate the public. Rap culture was built on reinventing it.”

“We don’t need our own Ocean’s Eleven through Thirteen happening right here beneath the Crystal Phoenix.”

“That is kinda cool,” Temple remarked. “It hadn’t occurred to any of us.”

“What?” Van paused. She moved like a harried executive, but her face and mind were cool and collected.

“The Ocean’s Eleven parallel. The ten brothers and their uncle. What happened to their father, by the way?”

Van’s delicately glossed lips vanished into a straight, stressed line. “Shot down when Nicky was still a preadolescent. The ‘last hit’ in Vegas. His grandmother had made a legitimate fortune on a pasta factory. She underwrote the Crystal Phoenix. Now all of it’s endangered, thanks to this angel-hair-pasta-brained publicity scheme of his.”

“Maybe not.”

“A body in a hidden vault beneath the juncture where the Crystal Phoenix and Gangsters property lines meet? An underhanded criminal alliance implied between the two hotels? A secret vault? Only a few silver dollars may have been found under the body, but they raise the shady ghost of Jersey Joe Jackson, a founding spirit of the Crystal Phoenix. We are ruined, Temple. It’s just a matter of time.”

“What if the body could be tied to another gang, something very far from gangsters?”

“What do you mean? How? You’re a wizard at manipulating events, but I don’t think a dead guy who could sing Italian opera can be wished away.”

“Something about the body, the way it was … arranged, rang a bell with me.”

“Publicity at any cost?”

“No, I’m thinking of a secret society.”

“Oh, great. Like the Mafia?”

“No, a mystical secret society called the Synth. I’m serious, Van. The way the body was laid out was ritualistic.”

“Well,” Van said bitterly, sitting on her immaculate white leather chair, “I guess you know more about crime and bodies than the average hotel executive does.”

Temple understood her frustration. She was worried sick about Nicky and his brothers and had no way to help them.

Temple sat and leaned forward over the glass-topped desk. “It was more the way the red lining of the cloak was arranged. You noticed that the body’s flung-out arms and legs made something of a star shape?”

“No. I wasn’t close enough to see, but now I will imagine that, which is worse.”

“The police are going to zero in on the contortions, but that wasn’t the bizarre part.”

“If you say so, Temple.”

“It was the cloak lining. I knew it reminded me of something, some weird shape I’d seen before. Then I realized I was remembering an outline, not a piece of flagrant cloth, and I’d seen it at the site of an unsolved murder, of a professor at the university campus.”

She quickly sketched the configuration of a forgotten constellation’s major stars on Van’s pristine notepad.

“Our dead body is part of a serial killing?” Van demanded.

“More like a sequential killing, I think. Anyway, once I get a chance to check my records, I can tell you whether the poor guy’s cloak is a dead match to Ophiuchus.”