Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

“A reason to revenge, then, maybe.”

“We’re in the right bloody country for it.” Max stood. “Can we go on to the hotel now?” He glanced at their semiempty plates and the last strands of beer foam webbing the bottom of their pint glasses. “I’ve had all that I can stomach.”

Gandolph nodded, took up his laptop computer, and walked.

Hoopla and Homicide

“And the point of this so-called media gathering was purely publicity?”

Detective Ferraro was “middle” everything: height, weight, age.

Now he was putting on a show of being middling patient with the situation, but just barely.

He’d ordered everyone present in the tunnel at the time the body was discovered into separate rooms at Gangsters, since it was the closest premises to the “crime scene.”

As far as Temple could calculate, that was a cast of nine indignant Fontana brothers plus their uncle, Macho Mario; a death-pale Van von Rhine; four panting media videographers; three gawking workmen; a happily flushed Crawford Buchanan, sure to appear on evening news hours nationwide, not to mention YouTube. And her. The cats—and rat—appeared to have been overlooked, as usual.

“Did you recognize the deceased?” Ferraro asked now.

“No,” Temple said, “but I didn’t get a good long look at him. Also, he was lying on his back, so the body and face were foreshortened.”

Detective Ferraro’s basset-hound dark eyes looked up from his lined notebook pages. “Would you like to see a photograph? One should be posted at the morgue shortly. I can e-mail you the photo number.”

“No. Really. I’m pretty sure I don’t know any portly men who wear white tie and tails, nor of any Vegas act using them, although I’m not up on every last Cirque du Soleil production, particularly the sex one, Zumanity.”

“Too much information, Miss Barr.” Ferraro’s mustache quirked with distaste. “I wasn’t really asking your preferences. I was being polite. What is your e-mail address? Please examine the features of the deceased when they arrive and let me know.”

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.”