Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

“Not Jersey Joe,” Eightball O’Rourke quickly assured Temple. “He could wear a suit and would go so far as to don a black leather bolo tie when business called for it. We found it pretty fancy, but he was all for building something that would last, like Bugsy.”

“Not his goldurn wardrobe,” Wild Blue agreed, picking up the photo of the silver boot-heel stamp.

“Aw, it destroys your faith in humanity all over again,” Pitchblende said mournfully. “Our old pal Boots Benson musta been in on sneakin’ off our illegally obtained lucre and squirreling it away for Jersey Joe. Just another dirty rotten desert rat.”

“Now, maybe not,” Eightball opined, sitting forward on the oversized yardage of couch. “Maybe our restaurant out at Temple Bar was settin’ atop the answer to our busted lives of crime all the time, buried under fathoms of silent Lake Mead water.”

“Our mascot, Three O’Clock, has snagged carp out there,” Spuds Lonnigan said, with a shudder. “That could be the seventieth generation of fish that nibbled on Boots’s bones. How long do carp live, anyway?”

“Longer than we’d think,” Cranky Ferguson answered. “I’m guessing twenty-five to fifty years in places where there ain’t predators, and carp is not a prized game fish unless it’s a real huge one.”

Temple had sat openmouthed during this conversation, but she shut it fast when she realized all her companions were versed in the sport of fishing.

“No,” Eightball agreed, “it’s your largemouth and striped bass, channel catfish, crappie, and bluegill you want at our southern end of Lake Mead. Tourists have fed the shoreline carp to overstuffing for decades. So I agree, several of those suckers could have nibbled on Boots’s sunken chest. Yo, ho, ho.”

“That is so gruesome,” Temple said. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t like sportfishing.”

“Boots is gone,” Eightball told her. “Weren’t pretty, but now we know where, thanks to you.”

“I need to know why,” Temple said.

Eightball shook his head and regarded his pals. “Just like my granddaughter, Jilly, at age six. Why, why, why.” He turned to Temple again. “You and I have done some private-eye work, and we know murder always boils down to motive and method.”

“The method in this case illuminated the motive,” Temple said.

“How so?” Cranky asked.

“It’s such a classic mob ploy,” she explained, “encasing a man’s feet in concrete and throwing him off a pier.”

“Yup.” Wild Blue jumped into the discussion. “That was a big city mob method. They had a lot more water at hand—New York Harbor or Lake Michigan in Chicago.”

“That’s right,” Temple said, getting into the ghoulish groove. “A lake for body dumping was a novelty in the desert. Lake Mead’s artificial. When did it—?”

“Oh, young lady,” Pitchblende said, “the big Depression, of course. Hoover Dam was one of the few things that damn-fool president did to help folks get work. His first reaction was to laugh the whole thing off as poor folks not wanting to work enough. Building that dam backed up the Colorado River, and then you got the lake.”

“Nobody much cared about that big old watering hole in those days,” Spuds said. “Nobody much cared about any of this until Bugsy Siegel tried to sell the area as a resort to Hollywood folk.”

“What I’m getting at,” Temple said, “is that Boots Benson went missing because he’d been murdered in this spectacular, brutal, big-time mob way. I’m thinking his death was mostly meant to be a message.”

“Yeah, but if nobody knew he’d been killed, much less that way, what was the point?” Wild Blue asked.

Temple glanced at the photo of the maker marks on what was left of Boots’s footwear. “Maybe someone got all modern and took photos of Boots’s going-away launch. Maybe someone else was told and shown what happened to Boots.”

“That’s it!” Cranky Ferguson slapped his tobacco pouch down on the coffee table, making them all jump. “That’s why Jersey Joe got so quiet and dodgy with us all about where the train-robbery silver dollars were hidden and what was going on in town and when we could expect to get some of our cut.”

“He kept stalling us,” Spuds put in, “and stalling us, saying it was needed to put up the Joshua Tree Hotel and Casino.”

“And that put you all off?” Temple asked.

“Sure,” Wild Blue Pike said. “We expected to wait to get something back on our investment. The Joshua Tree was the whole purpose of the stickup. Train robbery was pretty rare by then. We had it all figured out how to separate the silver cars and shuffle ’em off on a side rail and keep movin’ them along from spur to spur track. We didn’t wear bandanas on our faces and pull guns or nothing. I kept track of everything from the air, before and during and after, from my biplane.”