Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Old Acquaintances

Not Forgot

Back at the scene of the tragedy, an airport metal detector now provided a nice paranoid touch at the entrance to the museum area. A young uniformed guard was manning it.

Sure enough, Temple “tinged” when she walked through. She had to remove her emerald ring from Max and the small studs in her ears and go through again. Ting.

“Sorry, ma’am,” the guard said. “I’ll have to wand you. Maybe it’s something metal in your clothing.” His eyes skimmed and nervously deserted her bust area.

An underwire? He’d thought Temple was wearing an underwire bra? And her a measly 32B since high school? Bless him! The notion was flattering, but Temple couldn’t bask in it for long and still get on with her sad business.

“Are you kidding? You have no future in lingerie sales. Look. It’s probably a steel arch in my shoe.”

Temple went back though, stripped off her Beverly Feldman spikes, and this time waltzed through without producing any rude noises. By then the barely twenty-one-year-old screener was redder than cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving.

“They should have an ID badge ready for you,” he muttered.

But when Temple pawed through the plastic-laminated cards, hers bore the image of her old curly redheaded self, not the straight and sleek-locked blond temptress with the Little Orphan Annie chest measurement the Teen Queen show had recently made of her.

“Old photo.” She sighed, then proved it by flashing her driver’s license. “New look.”

“No problem, ma’am, just step up to that tape mark and I’ll have this new photo ready by the time you leave.”

A computer captured her digitally and the guard nodded to indicate that the shot was taken. “Nice change,” he added, auditioning a shy smile.

Maybe blond hair magically inflated the viewer’s perception of bust measurement. Temple sighed again as she walked into the museum proper and turned about six male heads.

She had to dump this bleach job if she wanted to get any work done! Maybe a temporary rinse close to her natural color; anything that would cover platinum blond.

Crews were still finishing work on the display structures and connecting electrical gizmos for light and security when they weren’t ogling her. Temple eyed them back, which she’d normally never do. Any one of them could be a shill checking out the art installation for future tampering.

Uniformed guards stationed around the perimeter added an air of seriousness to the central chaos. Scaffolds ringed the area too. Temple’s eye was drawn up to the dark dangling V of line still pointing like an arrow to the top of the scepter’s translucent housing.

He’d been turned to show a clown-white-faced man wearing a greasepaint mask, black spandex tights and leotard like an acrobat, apparently strangled by the hammock of bungee cord that spanned one side of the museum ceiling to the other.

“Awful to think about, isn’t it?” an unearthly voice said behind her. Think James Earl Jones as Darth Vader.

Temple spun around, gawked, looked up. And up. And then decided that the men had not been ogling her and her electric blond hair, but the awesome oncoming form that had just now caught up with her.

He was well over Max’s six foot four and robed like a Klingon crossed with an Egyptian lion-faced god.

Towering over her five foot zero in his built-up boots, he was clad in superhero spandex all in black, the better to emphasize healthclub muscles. His head was a mask of two-tone black tiger stripes and a mane of dreadlocks. Add the funereal basso and you had that always anonymous but never shy performer known as the Cloaked Conjuror.

“I almost didn’t recognize you with the hair redo,” he said. “You were the little gal involved in getting that bad guy at TitaniCon a few months back.”

When Temple gaped at him for even remembering her after the chaos of that night, he added, “I never forget a face.”

“Yes, well, your own current face is pretty unforgettable too.”

He didn’t comment but joined her in gazing up at the place where the dead man still hung.

“One of my stunt doubles died high up in the stage flies at TitaniCon,” the Cloak Conjuror’s disguised voice rumbled. “Good man. They never determined if it was an accident. Or murder.”

“This one also iffy?”

“I suppose. Could have been some nutcase working up a publicity stunt. Could have slipped and died with no one around to help. Could have been murdered.”

“Las Vegas leans to aerial murders,” Temple mused, remembering the dead bodies in the ceiling at the Goliath and Crystal Phoenix hotels, both of them connected, perhaps circumstantially, to men she knew and loved.

There! Her subconscious had tricked and kicked her into a reality check. She was a total romantic schizo! Her outer blonde and her inner redhead were of two minds and hearts as well as two Lady Clairol shades.

Temple didn’t think she should be having an emotional epiphany right here amid the rubble of museum construction, but there it was.

“ ‘Aerial murders’?” The Cloaked Conjuror was struck by the phrase. “My guy was killed up on the catwalk up top.” The ponderous head tilted to view the black-painted upper third of the space.

“Is there a catwalk up there too?” Temple asked.

“Of course. To service the lights and the magic act rigging.”

“Which is pretty Cirque du Soleil.”

If a mask could grin, the voice behind this one did.

“Imitation is sincere. No one in this town can put together a new act without taking Cirque into account nowadays.”

That made Temple wonder again what Max was dreaming up in that direction now that he had recommitted to a performing career. She knew the discipline was fierce and all engulfing. Something else occurred to her.

“Are your big cats involved in this museum act too?”

“Of course they make an appearance. I need to limit their time up there. Too risky. Even for magicians.” He chuckled. “But I’ve a got a new catwoman in my act, so that provides the feline presence so effective in magic shows.”

“A catwoman?” Temple feigned ignorance all the better to pump CC on his fishy new partner. “To your Batman/Catman? Interesting. I’m supposed to be skewing publicity toward the high-end art audience, but I could probably get some pop culture media interested in your new partner. Where’d you find her? In one of the Cirque shows?”

“Nope, though she was right here in Vegas. Did a little act at a place called the Opium Den. Shangri-La’s the name, so I guess she’s a Siamese kind of cat herself.”

A thieving kind of she-cat! While Temple was struggling mightily not to go Scarlett enough to outright swoon with fury, he added, “Even has a Siamese cat she used in her old act. Damn agile and clever little thing. Hyacinth. Those two communicate like a witch and familiar. Ought to be a few publicity angles in that.”

Temple could just see the headlines: EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! LAS VEGAS PR WOMAN GOES CODE RED IN CZAR EXHIBIT.

The Cloaked Conjuror was walking away to chat up Randy. Temple guessed that she had held up, as any delicate blossom must when she hears her most fatal female bête noir is on the scene of a very ugly possible crime. She already knew Shangri-La was a thief. She’d taken the diamond and opal ring Max had bought Temple at Tiffany’s.

Temple at Tiffany’s. Hey, that sounded even better than Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

The Opium Den was a third-tier theater off the Strip. She and Max, and Matt and Lieutenant Molina had all gone there for different purposes a few months back. Temple had been asked up on stage; somehow stripped of her ring and lured into a cabinet that deposited her in the building’s basement, from whence she was whisked as a prisoner. Along with Midnight Louie, a cat who had a habit of trailing her like a dog at the most perilous moments. She and Louie had been bound, boxed, and rushed out of town in a semi full of magician’s boxes and designer drugs.

Max had taken the whole cargo apart to find them in the trick cabinets, not too much the worse for wear, except Louie was literally spitting mad. Sometimes having a magician boyfriend was a boon. Sometimes not; say, when he vanishes for a year without a word.

Temple didn’t want to dwell on her worst moments, or months. Max was back and he’d had a damn good reason for ducking out: contract killers on his tail. They still were. And Max was still ducking out, for days rather than months at least. Although Temple was finding that harder and harder to take.

But it was disturbing to think that Shangri-La had shown up again. At best she’d been an accessory to a drug deal. True, no one at the police department had ever been able to connect her to anything. And, believe it, Molina would have tried. Hard. Molina viewed anyone who had anything to do with Temple with suspicion because of Max. Except maybe Matt Devine, who was hard to view with anything but admiration, or . . . lust? Gorgeous ex-priests with an ethically sincere approach to romance were not a dime a dozen even these days, God bless him and his Catholic conscience!

Back to Shangri-La. At worst, she’d wanted to hurt Temple for some reason. Or maybe just use her as a distraction, but how did Shangri-La know who Temple was, or, rather, with whom she associated?

Temple cricked her neck at the pendant dead man, a macabre human chandelier in this vast, airy space.

People wearing latex gloves were laying a plastic drop sheet beneath him. The inevitably paint-spattered step ladders were being brought in, their aluminum feet shod in plastic baggies so as not to contaminate the drop cloth.

Temple couldn’t help shivering in the 72-degree air-conditioning that chills every Las Vegas venue.

“He’s the only one in this room who can’t hurt you. He’s thoroughly dead,” observed a dry, slightly accented voice behind her.

Temple turned, glancing up, as she usually had to. Surprise! The woman was her size, maybe only two or three inches taller. Temple was wearing her three-inch corporate pumps and this woman wore—Temple always checked shoes after faces—snub-toed Mary Jane ultra flats. With a strap across the instep. Not evoking all-American Mary Jane but . . . Detective Merry Su. Yet this wasn’t the same woman.

The face was way more interesting than the footwear.

Pale but unfreckled; unlike Temple’s, the eyes boysenberry dark in a pasty oval cameo of a face—rice powder, maybe? Eyelids and eyebrows tilted up at a sharp angle, with the epicanthic single eyelid of Asian physiognomy. Oh. Temple’s earlier shiver hardened into an overall alert; she froze against allowing all motion. She could guess who this was.

The woman wore a fluttery off-white chiffon top and handkerchief-hemmed skirt, her white tights stark against the black satin Minnie Mouse flats, a disingenuous Alice in Wonderland look. Dull black hair was pulled back hard from her face into a ponytail as coarse and lavish as a show horse’s.

Could Temple be gazing not on beauty bare, but on the bare face of that almost mythic, duplicitous illusionist and ring thief and CC’s new partner in magic, Shangri-La? Yes.

Temple thought her heart had stopped and restarted about three times, but it might have been four. Or five. This was the mysterious enemy to all things Temple: Max, Louie, Tiffany opal-and-diamond engagement rings. Ring, solo.

“Temple Barr,” CC was saying by way of introduction. “She’s doing PR for the hotel on our new show. This is my petite performing partner, Shangri-La, less formally known as Shang.”

Temple nodded to acknowledge the introduction. Shang nodded with almost deliberately clichéd Asian inscrutability.

What an actress! Temple thought. Could the woman have failed to recognize her? Shangri-La had stood next to Temple onstage, then had conjured the ring off her finger, pushed her into an onstage box and down a dark rabbit hole into a coffinlike box ready for transport and who knew what else?

Surely she didn’t forget a victim.

Oh, wait! Temple was still a flagrant bottle blonde from her last assignment, not a natural redhead. It threw off her most intimate friends, particularly the male ones. Why not a woman?

“Nice to meet you,” Temple said, happy that the woman was disinclined to thrust a saber-nailed hand at her for shaking. “You’re quite right that this poor man couldn’t hurt anyone now, if he had ever wanted to. But he can hurt the public profile of this exhibition.”

“Bad publicity is the best kind nowadays,” Shang said, eyeing the hanged man.

They all stood around staring, like crowds come to see an execution in the bad old days of public hangings.

“We must embrace such facts,” Shang added, looking up into CC’s stoic mask. “And you and I must triple check our equipment once the authorities have freed the scene.”

“Any notion of who he might be?” Temple asked, knowing the answer but wondering if they did.

“Nobody,” Shang said coolly. “Nobody having anything to do with our performance. Just a supernumerary. An extra.”

Temple quelled another shiver.

CC moved off in the custody of his much smaller partner, like a mastiff dominated by a terrier.

Temple had to admit that it had occurred to her more than once that Shangri-La, that down-scale lady magician in extravagant Asian theatrical face paint and razor-slashed hair and kimonos, might have been a secondary persona of Kitty the Cutter.

Having met the lady wearing what was as close as she might ever get to civvies, no way was she a Black Irish super-patriot and stalker. That woman was well and truly dead, and no one mourned her. Except maybe Max, in the temple of his heated adolescent memory and forgiving Catholic soul.

Temple. She’d thought she was that for a while, with him. A permanent refuge from the international war of terror and counterterror going way back before 9-11.

“Get these civilians out of here,” a new voice ordered.

Temple shivered again.

Just who spoke this time, she didn’t have to guess.

Temple turned. It was her red-letter day for unhappy encounters.

“Ah, Miss Temple Barr,” the voice continued. “I took you for a chorus bimbo from the back.”

“They’re usually your height, not mine, human giraffes almost six feet tall.”

“True.” Lieutenant C. R. Molina was tall, dark, and semi-female. She was also not a friend, although sometimes an associate. “I see you’re keeping Zoe Chloe alive.”

“Do you have any idea how hard a bleach job is to undo?”

“No, and I never intend to. Now shoo. This is a crime scene and snoops aren’t needed here.”

“I’m doing PR for the exhibition. Naturally, I was informed.”

“The New Millennium doesn’t float its own flock of flacks?”

“Not with a fine arts background,” Temple said as snootily as she could. She hated snooty people and hoped Molina did too.

“You?”

“Guthrie Repertory Theatre in Minneapolis. You know, Shakespeare and Congreve and Oscar Wilde.”

Molina sighed. “You never cease to amaze. Now . . . back.”

She could have been a lion tamer and Temple a housecat.

“Let my people work in peace.”

Molina turned vivid blue eyes up at the blacked-out exhibition ceiling above the acres of off-white walls. Temple suspected she didn’t realize that she had sighed.

“You understand,” Molina asked, “that there is one and only one likely suspect for aerial deaths in this town?”

“You said you’d give Max a free pass if I masqueraded as a teenybopper on that reality TV show to protect your daughter. I kept my part of the bargain. Just look at my hair!”

“I don’t have to.” Molina kept her eye on the slightly twirling corpse not-so-high above. The crime scene technicians had reached it and were carefully freeing the lines from which it was suspended. “All of the men in this room are doing it for me. Men can be so shallow, as we know, and your girlish, gilded head is a distraction, so . . . out.”

“Why would Max have anything to do with this dead body?”

“Because it’s there?”

“That’s not fair. You promised.”

Molina smiled. Like a shark.

Temple froze again, this time to hear herself sounding just like the lieutenant’s whining teenage daughter, Mariah.

“Mother” Molina had one last bombshell to lay down. She wasn’t smiling now.

“I promised that I’d lay off going after your elusive significant other if he didn’t flip a smoking gun in my face. I think he just may have. All bets are off. This is Las Vegas, after all, and the odds on anything can turn in the wink of an eye.”

It was some comfort to Temple that Randy insisted she be present when Molina held an informal convocation with the New Millennium management an hour and a half later.

By then, the body had been removed. The police presence had retreated to a pair of buff young uniformed officers guarding the entrance to the exhibition. In their khaki shorts they looked rather like Boy Scout docents. Temple was thinking that she and the hotel could live with that if they were stationed there throughout the exhibition.

Besides, they were eyeing her with great interest. Apparently, she now could wrap men around her finger as easily as she could curl a strand of her blatantly faux blond hair around it.

This realization was sobering. Jessica Simpson knew something, although it wasn’t Chicken of the Sea tuna fish. Even Midnight Louie would never get confused about whether fish were chicken. In fact, he probably had a higher IQ than Jessica Simpson, but alas, he wasn’t blond.

Temple realized that she was going beyond the bend, but Molina and hotel executives negotiating when and how a crime scene could become a public attraction again were too bloody boring to bear.