Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

Temple and her bosses returned to the executive office suite. Nicky planned to show Temple more plans for a revamped Gangsters. Van, looking pale and wan and dubious, opted out.

“Come on down,” Nicky urged Temple, as their private elevator sped straight to the main floor.

“The hotel has a Door Number Three?”

“Kinda,” he said. “We blocked off the Jackson Action Attraction a while back, when ‘family theme park’ wasn’t working in Vegas.”

“Everything is a work in progress in this town,” Temple agreed.

“Except your love life, which has finally settled down, I hope.”

When Temple started at the reference, Nicky winked.

“Come on, PR lady. I saw you and Matt Devine at Aldo and Kit’s wedding. Looks like you two are planning to go forth and do likewise pretty soon.” He shook her arm slightly. “Congratulations, right? I’m glad Aldo’s going over to the matrimonial side is shaking loose other confirmed bachelors from their routines.”

“Confirmed bachelor” was as good a description of an ex-priest as any, Temple decided. Matt certainly had been confirmed.

“We’re not announcing anything official yet,” she said.

“ ’Course not. I just can’t help noticing stuff. After the wedding, your aunt hiked her bouquet straight to your hot little hand.”

“That Kit. Quite the athlete.”

“And I noticed something big and hopefully not hot on it.”

“You mean this glitzy number?” Temple waved the vintage ruby-and-diamond ring on her left hand. Being bicolored, it didn’t scream “engagement” ring. “Matt and I were engaged then, but we didn’t want to steal any of Kit and Aldo’s spotlight.”

“That’s a one-of-a-kind stunner,” Nicky said.

“Thanks.” Temple waggled her ring finger again so he could admire it.

“I meant you both,” Nicky added with Fontana gallantry.

She blushed, as meant to.

“You want to watch that nobody steals it,” he warned.

Even as she nodded, Temple recalled the unique “unofficial” engagement ring from Max she’d worn for such a short time before it had been stolen, and found, and then confiscated. Now the man who’d given it to her was unofficially missing in action. Maybe he’d been confiscated too. Enough bittersweet moment and looking backward!

“Anyway,” she said, back to business, “how long have you had this mob theme in mind, Nicky?”

“Longer than I’d care to admit,” he said, casting a gaze upward at his wife’s office. “Van was the only child of a widowed German hotel hotshot. She grew up in a rotating roster of posh hotel suites and doesn’t get the Italian big-family feeling.”

“Especially when that big Family has a history with a capital F in it.”

“Well, yeah.”

Temple laughed. “You don’t do ‘sheepish’ well, even though you’re the Fontana family’s self-described ‘white sheep.’ You can confess to me, Nicky. You are thrilled as hell to get your entrepreneurial teeth into a mob-themed upgrade of Gangsters before the city powers-that-be even get off their conservative duffs.”

“They’ve committed twelve mill to it, but they’re waffling all over the Strip and the media. Now it’s a ‘law enforcement’ museum, so no official toes get stomped on. The public doesn’t want political correctness in Vegas. They want a free-for-all. You have a taste for the jugular too. Admit it, Barr. You live to scoop the competition.”

“I do have TV reporter roots, from back in the day when news had to be vetted and reliable and wasn’t just an Internet streaming-of-consciousness.”

“So. We’re both on the side of old-fashioned values,” he said with a conspiratorial grin. “Family on my end, and a publicity-snagging public-relations coup on yours.”

“Legitimately publicity snagging.”

“Right,” Nicky said. “Legit. That word is engraved on the Fontana family escutcheon.”

“Uh-huh. Like the Fontanas have a stone shield somewhere that’s engraved with the family coat of arms. That’s for European aristocracy dating back to the Middle Ages.”

“I know what the word escutcheon means. Jeez. Give me some credit. We have lots of Fontanas beyond the middle-aged, some in the Old Country still. I guess you could say our coat of arms is etched on our epidermis. Me and my brothers all get the family tattoo when we turn twenty-one. Wanna see?”

“I can wait,” Temple said, although wildly curious about the exact location and design of the tattoo on all ten Fontana brothers. She would think they’d have individual druthers.

She imagined that her aunt Kit, latest Fontana family in-law with her recent marriage to Aldo, knew more than she ever would on the subject. And would never tell … without the investment of a whole bottle of wine. Which might be fun.

“Say,” Temple said, “where are you steering me? We’re not going underground to the former Jackson Action ride site?”

“Nope. Not yet. We’re hitting the hotel bar. I have some folks I want to take a meet with.”

“You are beginning to sound more and more like an escapee from The Sopranos.”