Vegas Centennial:An Olivia Wright Mystery

By Lynnette Baughman

The wealthy McNamara clan -- plus a few angry ex-wives -- gather on the eve of the city's centennial. When writer Olivia Wright tries to add flesh and blood to the memoirs of the family matriarch, she finds more blood than she bargained for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: May 1, 2004
• ISBN: 9781590883525

Book preview

One

Monday, December 6 , 2004

Las Vegas, Nevada

She’s got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, Andréa Cousteau said as she popped open her compact and checked her teeth for arugula and spinach residue. And I’m not getting any younger either. I need the complete manuscript yesterday.

Satisfied with her teeth, my editor applied a dash of lipstick the color of brackish water to her full lips. Andréa’s name was French, but her accent was Brooklyn all the way.

Yesterday! she said again, punctuating the proclamation with a loud snap of the compact.

She had flown to Las Vegas from the city so nice they named it twice and my literary agent, Coco Jones, had flown in from the Left Coast to, as they put it, work with me.

This was in the same spirit that Ice-pick Louie and Nasty-man Knuckles might fly in from Moline to work with a gambler behind on his debt payments. We’s got a layaway plan youse might like to know about. Get it? Lay away?

We were sitting in an ersatz outdoor café in Caesar’s Forum. The faux Mediterranean sky never changed, and the noise level never dropped. From far down the promenade I could hear the boom of Neptune’s voice as he rose on cue in his magical fountain.

Coco took off her rose-tinted sunglasses so I could feel the full wattage of her black-eyed stare. She spoke to Andréa, but her eyes were locked on mine. I’m sure Olivia is nearly finished.

There followed a pregnant pause that I was supposed to fill with something about Fed Ex-ing copies of the manuscript to both of them in some single-digit number of days, but I just nodded and said, Nearly. I was nearly finished with the book on Clara McNamara Kellem in the same way a twenty-foot rope ladder off the top of a fifty-foot building nearly reaches the ground.

I knew Coco wanted to practice her martial arts on me right about then, but since she was technically working for me, she leaned back and smiled at Andréa.

What about Eileen McNamara? Andréa persisted. Her story’s got to be included and you haven’t even talked to her yet. As far as I can tell, Eileen getting away with murder is the high point, publicity-wise, of the McNamara family saga.

Andréa the Astute had landed with both feet right on the weakest part of my story. I was getting apprehensive on the subject of Eileen McNamara, who hadn’t returned any of my calls. I’d first gone to her house in Beverly Hills and on to her house in the Mission District of San Francisco, only to find she’d flown back to Beverly Hills then driven to Las Vegas. I’d flown back to Vegas myself that morning, barely in time for my brunch meeting with Andréa and Coco.

I had reason to be encouraged on the Eileen McNamara front, however. Her agent swore to me that Ms. McNamara would call me that evening or first thing in the morning. And this time she’d given me Eileen’s cell phone number instead of the brushoff.

I’m going to see Eileen tomorrow, I said with more certainty than I felt. And don’t worry about Clara’s age. Lots of people are living to one hundred these days.

Not any editors, Andréa snapped. Our lives are shortened by worry.

Well, the sooner I get back to work, the sooner you can ease your worried mind. Both of you. All three of us.

Coco tucked her chin-length hair behind her ear and nodded as if I’d said something profound, but Andréa stuck to her guns.

"I have to take something back with me. If I don’t give the art department some meat, they’re going to put tits and ass on the cover and call it Vegas Secrets. Deadline for the catalog is now. She stretched out now" like a cow mooing.

I lifted a five by seven envelope from my purse and saw I had Andréa’s rapt attention. These are pictures of Clara in 1923 when she came out in San Francisco society, and in 1924 when she married for the first time. And this is Michael T. McNamara, Clara’s father, in 1905 or possibly 1906.

Love her, hate him. Andréa almost fondled Clara’s debutante photo. This will make a great cover. I can hear the art department sigh in relief already. We’ll put old muttonchops inside where he won’t scare away the buyers.

I wanted to feed her jocundity with more good news, such as I’ll be writing the final chapter this week, but it’s better not to tempt fate with rash statements. Or outright lies.

Andréa signed the charge slip and dropped her platinum card in her pocket. You’ll e-mail a thumbnail for the catalog this afternoon?

By close of business New York time. To the art director.

Andréa repeated the e-mail address and we all air kissed good-bye. I strode out at a brisk pace, knowing Coco wanted to stroll out with Andréa and pitch a novel by a new client, a coming-of-age-with-fear-and-loathing opus.

While I waited for the valet to retrieve my baby blue Lexus, I checked my cell phone for messages. You have no new messages and one old message, the electronic woman intoned. I tried Eileen McNamara’s cell phone number again, left another message.

I knew what the old message was. My main (and only) squeeze, Mace Emerick, had called from Virginia while I was on the plane, saying he’d call when he got another break from class.

There’s a chance I’ll get back to Vegas sooner than I expected. When will you get back from California? That was a real good news/bad news message in light of the horrendous amount of work I had to do on the book. Clara’s book. I headed south on the Las Vegas Strip, east on Harmon, then south again, winding my way to the Wickworth Tower. Clara’s place.

Clara McNamara Kellem ruled one of the four penthouse suites on the thirty-fifth floor. She appeared to have the constitution of a woman pushing eighty instead of someone soon to leave one hundred candles smoking. She was fond of stating her age and weight in tandem, Ninety-nine, that’s the answer to both questions! Ninety-nine, soaking wet.

Clara would share her next birthday with the centennial celebration of the city of Las Vegas on May 15, 2005. And she’d be damned (her words) if her memoir wasn’t published by then.

Her memoir. That’s where I got sucked into Clara’s always-swirling drain. Having plenty of experience at writing, under my name and as a ghostwriter for others, and being a really fast transcription typist, I was a natural. As fate would have it, I even lived in Clara’s apartment building. Excuse me—Clara’s luxury condominium complex. Technically, that made her my landlady, but a raft of lawyers and business managers served as buffers.

My daughter Candace, co-owner of a very successful catering company and the only one of my kids who lived in Las Vegas, wanted to know why I took the job of listening to and transcribing the disjointed recollections of Clara Kellem. If it had been strictly a work-for-hire writing job—as I’d done before to make a living—I would have said no. I’m not a robot.

And a robot is exactly what Clara wanted when she began the project. Consequently, I did say no when first approached six months earlier. So Clara hired a sycophant, an advertising copywriter used to making stomach gas remedies sound better than sex, and together they wasted four months. Now, four months might not sound like much time to waste, but when you’re ten...nine...eight...seven months shy of your one hundredth birthday and counting—well, as the song says, The days grow short. I got another call from Clara.

I drove a hard bargain: my name under hers on the cover, joint ownership of the copyright, and fifty percent of the royalties as well as fifty percent of any subsidiary rights we could hold out of the clutch of the publisher. I still might have said no, but Mace Emerick needed to spend six weeks in Quantico, Virginia, adding some special FBI training to his already considerable portfolio of crime fighting. With Chief Detective Emerick scheduled to leave in early November, I would have time to kill. So I said yes, with two additional provisos. One, that I do research to place her story in context against the history of Las Vegas. Two, that I interview as many of her family members as possible to give the story flesh and blood. She agreed in late October and we got started November first.

As it turned out, the story had a lot more blood than I’d counted on.

Two

Ipulled into the entrance to the Wickworth Tower’s underground garage and held my plastic card out to the laser reader. I parked, locked the car with a button on my key ring, and yanked up the handle on my carry-on suitcase.

After an annoyingly long wait for the elevator, I stepped in and pressed twenty-nine. The doors closed with a gentle whoosh and a barely perceptible change in air pressure. I glanced at my image in the bronzed wall on my right and looked back at the doors, aware that any primping, even a judicious tug on my pantyhose, might be observed on a monitor by one or more of the building’s security guys. Security is a good thing, but so is privacy.

The company that won the security contract for the Wickworth had years of experience in casino surveillance. There are, I am sure, American embassies in war zones with fewer cameras watching the portals. So, do I feel safe in my apartment on the twenty-ninth floor?

No, not really. What is building security, when you come right down to it, except a form of fashion police? They allow no one to pass who doesn’t look rich. Of course they say with the swagger of authority that they only let people known to live in the building and invited guests past the lobby.

They don’t mention the policy of implied invitation that covers discreet call girls and anybody with skill at passing cash. Oh, then there’s the service entrance. I’ve read enough crime reports to know that when the carpet cleaning company claims it’s bonded, it means about half the employees are out on bail.

And there’s the fact that most murders occur at the hands of domestic partners or some such relation. At least I’m not afraid of that. I have no domestic partner, and my grown children are non-violent. Two out of three of them I actually like quite a lot. And the other one I never see.

I have plenty of money, only twenty-eight percent body fat, and at fifty-one, I look about forty. Okay, forty-one. Anyway, life is good. So why do I feel a sort of gnawing anxiety?

The slow elevator coughed to a stop on the tenth floor, the doors opened, and a thin man in his mid-thirties materialized in the frame as if he’d been conjured by my uneasy mind. Our eyes met, and I didn’t have time to slap on a happy face.

Olivia! You’re back early. There was a chiding tone to Lyle Kellem’s statement and I knew he wondered if I’d been fibbing when I told him I wouldn’t be back from California until December ninth. He was dressed in tight ivory bell-bottom slacks and a purple silk shirt. He had a combination of gold and silver studs in his ears, three on one side and four on the other. His blond hair had been permed recently, but his roots needed a retouch, in my old-fashioned opinion.

I finished my business and got lucky at the airport, I blurted.

He pressed the button for the thirty-fifth floor and the doors closed in slow motion. He cleared his throat. So, did you have a good trip?

Very good, I lied, looking up as if intrigued by the numbers above the door.

Actually, it wasn’t Lyle I was avoiding. It was his paternal grandmother. Clara McNamara Kellem was enjoying her trip down memory lane, and waved off my looming deadline for a finished manuscript like a pesky gnat. It made me think of Penelope, slyly taking out stitches from her tapestry, playing for time against the prospect of declaring her certain widowhood and choosing a second husband.

Grand-Mom is in a grand mood today, Lyle said, sounding pretty jovial himself. Why don’t you join us for lunch? One o’clock. I’m cooking. And there’s a surprise guest. Someone I know you want to meet.

I was ready to say, Thanks, no, sorry—I’ve got so much to do after my trip, but wily Lyle had uttered the word I love: surprise. So I walked right into his friendly trap.

Who? My first thought was Eileen McNamara, but I eliminated that instantly. She was persona non grata in the McNamara family, having shot one of them fatally.

As the doors opened on my floor, he waggled his finger to show I was a naughty girl to ask. You won’t know unless you come. All I will say is, he or she can fill in some large gaps in Grand-Mom’s life story.

I stepped off and Lyle held the door open. Before I could say no, he issued the coup de grace: I’m making Carrot Ginger Soup.

Words leaped unbidden to my mouth from my stomach. One o’clock? I’ll be there.

In my apartment I kicked off my pumps and tossed my purse on the couch. Crossing the thick mauve carpet, I opened the drapes to let in the low winter sun. My view was to the south, toward McCarran International Airport and away from the Las Vegas Strip. I surveyed the room, totally dissatisfied with the chrome and glass dining room table and coffee table, and the mauve and pale green drapes, couch, and carpet. It looked like the lobby of an overpriced hairdresser. It didn’t reflect anything about me: Olivia Wright, a woman with both good taste and money.

I hadn’t had the money for long, having earned it with my best-selling book, an insider’s biography of a murdered movie star. Margot Farr had employed me as her ghostwriter about thirty minutes before she became a ghost. My adventures and misadventures trapping the murderers led to a lucrative book contract. I’d invested the money and rented the larger-than-necessary apartment in Wickworth Tower. I was still toying with the idea of buying the apartment as a condominium, but didn’t feel sure I would stay in the Wickworth, or anywhere in Las Vegas for that matter. And until I felt rooted, I didn’t want to undertake a massive interior-decorating project.

I hadn’t had my good taste for long, either, as evidenced by my three poor choices in husbands.

At one o’clock I took the lumbering elevator to the top floor of the building, wondering what oddity Clara had in store for me. I don’t have anything against eccentric old ladies. In fact, I hope to be one myself, someday. But Clara Kellem would try the patience of a saint.

Concurrent with her decision to write, or, more accurately, dictate, her life story was her secret oath to clean it up, to improve on history. Had there been no public records to the contrary, I think she would have claimed she invented the electric light bulb, served as governor of Nevada, and married only once, for love.

I might have believed the first two.

Lyle answered the door at his grandmother’s suite, wearing an apron that looked like the front of a tuxedo. I gladly took the glass of sherry he’d brought to the door. One o’clock is a little early to drink, but dealing with Clara calls for liberal interpretation of such rules. Either that or Prozac.

Is that Olivia? Clara called in her high, reedy voice. Tell her to come in.

All right, Lyle, I said quietly, who else is here? Who is the surprise you teased me with?

I expect him any minute. Come in and see Grand-Mom.

If my apartment needed an interior designer, Clara’s needed a good old-fashioned yard sale followed by a wash with a fire hose, then an interior designer. Everywhere my gaze fell there was too much color and bric-a-brac. I’d known people before who couldn’t part with objects, but I’d never known anyone who lived to ninety-nine and a half without setting anything by a curb. The only culling was done by clumsy maids.

Clara had always been inordinately fond of vases. Not flowers, which she considered a wasteful extravagance, but vases. They were everywhere. Everywhere, that is, not occupied by scrapbooks. She’d dragged more scrapbooks out since last time I was there. She said the old photos, show tickets, and newspaper clippings jogged her memory.

Built-in bookshelves bowed with the weight of books, including encyclopedias that listed only forty states in the Union. Three couches and seven chairs of varying sizes and periods formed a conversation grouping so tight that people had to come and go one at a time. I counted four different designs of slipcovers that probably represented the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties. A massive coffee table was useless for setting down so much as a demitasse, its surface devoted instead to vases and bird figurines. I wedged myself between a couch and chair to get close enough to give Clara an air kiss.

Sit down, Olivia. Right here. She gestured toward a chair on her right. I removed the scrapbook from the seat, shoved it under the coffee table, and sat.

Clara’s lawyer, or rather one of her lawyers, the one who handled her end of our book contract, came in from the other hallway. Rossi Mitchell was about seventy, semi-retired, and hard of hearing, but too vain to do anything about it.

Rossi, Lyle called loudly, here’s Olivia Wright. You two have met before. Now, excuse me, please. I’ve got to check on the veal.

Rossi took a seat across from me in the conversation circle and we made nice, commenting in turn about how delicious the lunch smelled, how mild the winter was so far.

Wild? he barked. Wild?

No, I said ‘mild,’ it’s a mild winter.

He said, Umm, but still regarded me with a suspicious air.

I pointed to the fireplace and said in a loud voice that I admired the arrangement of family photos Clara had placed on the mantel and walls. Three of them I’d borrowed and had professionally copied for Andréa to give to her art director. I was glad to see the originals were safely back in their frames. The hand-tinted photo of Clara as a debutante in 1923 proved that the only daughter of real estate baron Michael T. McNamara of Los Angeles had been a great beauty in her day—beautiful and rich enough to come out in society in San Francisco. There she was, frozen in time, black hair piled on top of her head, a white formal dress, white gloves above the elbow, and a large white feather, probably ostrich, held like a fan.

I walked over to the mantel to straighten that photo and the one beside it, of Michael T. McNamara in 1905, old muttonchops, so they could catch the light.

On the other end of the mantel, in a frame with a black velvet band across the upper right corner, was a portrait of Clara’s only nephew. The late Michael T. McNamara III, called Trey, had enlisted in the Navy as soon as he turned eighteen, in 1943, and shipped out to the South Pacific. He looked too young in that picture to be in anything but a Boy Scout uniform. Trey had survived the war, returned to carry on the family tradition of turning money into more money, and married twice.

It was a search for Trey’s notorious second wife that led to my California trip. Eileen was still best known for the shooting death of Trey, her ex-husband, in 1972. The scandal had absorbed the attention of the country, especially of California, until the Patty Hearst kidnapping knocked Eileen’s second trial off the front page. After her acquittal, Eileen had an enviable career as an actress and later as a model and spokesperson for a fashion and cosmetics company. Her permanent home was in Los Angeles and her second home was in San Francisco, but she traveled most of the time.

I simply have to pin her down while she’s here in Las Vegas, I exhorted myself. Today if possible, tomorrow at the latest.

I straightened the velvet band on Trey’s photo and examined a picture of Lyle and his twin sister, Layla, in jester costumes in front of what might be a Mardi Gras float.

Clara’s African-American maid, an old woman with the unfortunate name of Pug, shuffled from the hall into the circle of couches with a black lacquer tray and six mugs. I took two, trying not to unbalance the tray.

Is that my eggnog? Clara asked Pug.

Yes, ma’am. Pug moved behind the couch and Rossi slid a mug off. Pug looked around for a place to set the tray, shook her head, and turned back toward the kitchen, having downloaded just half her cargo. I held one mug steady until Clara had a good grip on the handle with her arthritic hands, then sat down with my drink.

Lyle met Pug midway and took another mug. The other two guests will be here any minute, Pug. I’ll come get their eggnog when it’s time.

He perched on a high stool outside the conversation circle and looked down on Rossi’s shiny bald spot, miming a check of his own hair in the mirrored surface. I hid my grin with my cup.

Ah, saved by the bell, Lyle hooted when the doorbell chimed, and hopped off the stool. He always seemed to be auditioning for a Noel Coward comedy. He particularly enjoyed introducing his twin sister, Layla, as his identical twin, leaving one to wonder, did she or didn’t she? Or he?

Rossi, who hadn’t heard the doorbell, looked up, puzzled by Lyle’s sudden sweep from the room. I corkscrewed in my seat to see who entered. A woman’s voice and Lyle’s laugh echoed from the entryway.

There’s someone here who’s been wanting to meet you, he said. Reentering the living room, he announced the guest with a flourish, Olivia, here is my Great-Aunt Zinnia, Grand-Mom’s eldest daughter.

I rose and walked behind the couch. What a pleasure, I said, extending my hand to a plump woman in an electric cart. Not a conventional wheelchair, it was more like a motorized scooter with a seat and a basket. In the basket rode a brown toy poodle, or maybe a very dirty white toy poodle that growled at me and showed its sulfur-colored teeth.

Now ZsaZsa, be nice, Zinnia admonished. She pinched something at the side of her glasses and the dark half circles flipped up to a horizontal position over her clear lenses like awnings.

I had committed a family tree to memory and knew Zinnia’s father was Ralph Cassini, Clara’s first husband. Zinnia was their only child, born in late1924, which made her eighty on her last birthday. Clara had married Cassini—an EYE-tal-i-an!—against her father’s wishes. She went on to divorce him in Reno in 1928, again defying her father. The very Catholic Michael McNamara hated Italians and never said Cassini’s name without spitting, but he hated divorce even more.

Clara had a gift for goading her father. He’d scarcely unclenched his jaw over One, the Italian, and Two, the Divorce, when she did it all again with Nick Bartok—a Polack! Clara told me with relish that her father had brayed like a mule through the halls of his Los Angeles mansion, What’s next? A forkin’ Chinaman?

Zinnia sniffed suspiciously at the eggnog Lyle offered, took a sip, and held the mug where ZsaZsa could dangle her tongue into the milky drink. The poodle showed more enthusiasm for eggnog than anyone else in the room did. Actually, I had liked it at first, but seeing the yellow muck on ZsaZsa’s whiskers kind of put me off my feed.

Lyle fretted about the unnamed guest without divulging a name. Zinnia cooed to ZsaZsa, sounding like a raven clucking over a bag of ripe garbage, and Clara sniped at Zinnia for her late arrival.

The doorbell sounded again and Lyle waltzed to the door. Olivia! he called as he reentered the room. Here’s my cousin, Mickey McNamara.

Lyle had been on target when he said the guest was someone I wanted to meet. I knew only that the fourth Michael T. McNamara lived in Florida, was a recluse, and supposedly hated women. That he’d married five times indicated that his misogyny was sporadic. Or maybe that it was progressive, each wife worse, in his eyes at least, than the one before.

Mickey glanced at me without interest as Lyle shepherded him into the living room, then turned stiffly to face Clara Kellem as if called before the queen. A man of average height, he wore an all-white suit, the lapels of his shirt and the large knot of his snowy tie a bright contrast to his brown face and neck. He had the kind of overdone tan that looks sexy and rugged for a few years, then suddenly turns to old cowhide. I knew from his date of birth that he was about a year younger than me, but the years had not been kind.

Kind or not, they had certainly been busy. When I drew the family tree, I had to write small and sideways to fit in his four wives, one of whom he’d married twice. After Cherry came Peaches, extending the motif of fruit with pits, then Kate, then Peaches again, and Suzi. He was presumably still married to Suzi, who was only twenty-two or twenty-three and (if pictures could be trusted) not as fine a dish as Peaches in her prime. His first three/four wives had produced no heirs, but Suzi had a lot of good years left in her.

I waited outside the couches for Mickey to finish greeting his great-aunt Clara. Then Lyle presented me to his second cousin with extravagant enthusiasm.

I sat down again and acted interested in my mug of yellow fluid. Over the rim of the cup I watched Mickey take a seat on the other side of Clara and