Cat In A Red Hot Rage

Previously in

Midnight Louie’s Lives and Times .. .

Crime, chicanery, and chicks are my beat.

I am a noir kind of guy, inside and out.

I admit it. I am a shameless admirer of the female of the species. Any species. Of course, not all females are dames. Some are little dolls, like my petite roommate, MissTemple Barr.

The difference between dames and little dolls? Dames can take care of themselves, period. Little dolls can take care of themselves also but they are not averse to letting the male of the species think that they have an occasional role in the Master Plan too.

That is why my MissTemple and I are perfect roomies. She tolerates my wandering ways. I make myself useful looking after her without letting her know about it. Call me Muscle in Midnight Black. In our time we have cracked a few cases too tough for the local fuzz of the human persuasion, law enforcement division. That does not always win either of us popularity contests, but we would rather be right there than on the side-lines when something crooked is going down. We share a well-honed sense of justice and long, sharp fingernails.

So when I hear that any major new attraction is coming to Las Vegas, I figure that one way or another my lively little roommate, the petite and toothsome, will be spike heel–high in the planning and execution. She is, after all, a freelance public relations specialist, and Las Vegas is full of public relations of all stripes and legalities. In this case, though, I did not figure just how personally she would be involved in murder with hattitude.

I should introduce myself: Midnight Louie, Pl. I am not your usual gumshoe, in that my feet do not wear shoes of any stripe, but shivs. I have certain attributes, such as being short, dark, and handsome … really short. That gets me overlooked and underestimated, which is what the savvy operative wants anyway. I am your perfect undercover guy. I also like to hunker down under the covers with my little doll. My adventures would fill a book, and in fact I have several out. My life is one ongoing TV series in which I as hero extract my hapless human friends from fixes of their own making and literally nail crooks.

After the recent dramatic turn of events, most of my human associates are pretty shell-shocked. Not even an ace feline PI may be able to solve their various predicaments in the areas , of crime and punishment … and PR, as in Personal Relationships.

As a serial killer finder in a multivolume mystery series (not to mention a primo mouthpiece), it behooves me to update my readers old and new on past crimes and present tensions.

None can deny that the Las Vegas crime scene is a pretty busy place, and I have been treading these mean neon streets for nineteen books now. When I call myself an “alphacat,” some think I am merely asserting my natural male and feline dominance, but no. I merely reference the fact that since I debuted in Catnap and Pussyfoot, I then commenced to a title sequence that is as sweet and simple as B to Z.

That is where I began my alphabet, with the B in Cat on a Blue Monday. From then on, the color word in the title is in alphabetical order up to the current volume, Cat in a Red Hot Rage.

Since I associate with a multifarious and nefarious crew of iuman beings, and since Las Vegas is littered with guideDooks as well as bodies, I wish to provide a rundown of the ocal landmarks on my particular map of the world. A cast of characters, so to speak: To wit, my lovely roommate and high-heel devotee, Miss Nancy Drew on killer spikes, freelance PR ace MISS TEMPLE BARR, who had reunited with her elusive love …

… the once missing-in-action magician MR. MAX KINSELLA, who has good reason for invisibility. After his cousin SEAN died in a bomb attack during a post–high school jaunt to Ireland, he went into undercover counterterrorism work with his mentor, GANDOLPH THE GREAT, whose unsolved murder while unmasking phony psychics at a Halloween séance is still on the books….

Meanwhile, Mr. Max is sought by another dame, Las Vegas homicide detective LIEUTENANT C. R. MOLINA, mother of teenage MARIAH … and the good friend of MissTemple’s recent good friend, MR. MATT DEVINE, a radio talk-show shrink and former Roman Catholic priest who came to Las Vegas to track down his abusive stepfather, now dead and buried. By whose hand no one is quite sure.

Speaking of unhappy pasts, Miss Lieutenant Carmen Regina Molina is not thrilled that her former flame, MR. RAFI NADIR, the unsuspecting father of Mariah, is in Las Vegas taking on shady muscle jobs after blowing his career at the LAPD … or that Mr. Max Kinsella is aware of Rafi and his past relationship to hers truly.

In the meantime, Mr. Matt drew a stalker, the local lass that young Max and his cousin Sean boyishly competed for in that long-ago Ireland …

… one MISS KATHLEEN O’CONNOR, deservedly christened by Miss Temple as Kitty the Cutter. Finding Mr. Max impossible to trace, she settled for harassing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine …. who is still trying to recover from the crush he developed on MissTemple, his neighbor at the Circle Ritz condominiums, while Mr. Max was missing in action. He did that by not very boldly seeking new women, all of whom were in danger from said Kitty the Cutter.

In fact, on the advice of counsel, i.e., AMBROSIA, Mr. Matt’s talk-show producer, and none other than the aforesaid Lieutenant Molina, he had attempted to disarm Miss Kitty’s pathological interest in his sexual state by supposedly losing his virginity with a call girl least likely to be the object of K. the Cutter’s retaliation. Did he or didn’t he? One thing is certain: hours after their iffy assignation at the Goliath Hotel, said call girl turned up deader than an ice-cold deck of Bicycle playing cards. But there are almost forty million potential victims in this old town, if you include the constant come and go of tourists, and everything is up for grabs in Las Vegas 24/7: guilt, innocence, money, power, love, loss, death, and significant others.

All this human sex and violence makes me glad that I have a simpler social life, such as just trying to get along with my unacknowledged daughter …

… miss MIDNIGHT LOUISE, who insinuated herself into my cases until I was forced to set up shop with her as Midnight Inc. Investigations, and who has also nosed herself into my long-running duel with …

… the evil Siamese assassin HYACINTH, first met as the onstage assistant to the mysterious lady magician …

… SHANGRI-LA, who made off with MissTemple’s semiengagement ring from Mr. Max during an onstage trick and has been seen since only in sinister glimpses …

… just like THE SYNTH, an ancient cabal of magicians that may deserve contemporary credit for the ambiguous death of Mr. Max’s mentor in magic, Gandolph the Great, not to mention Gandolph’s former onstage assistant as well as a professor of magic at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

Well, there you have it, the usual human stew, all mixed up and at odds with one another and within themselves. Obviously, it is up to me to solve all their mysteries and nail a few crooks along the way. Like Las Vegas, the City That Never Sleeps, Midnight Louie, private eye, also has a sobriquet: the Kitty That Never Sleeps.

With this crew, who could?

Chapter 1

Last Seen Dead

It is enough to break a guy’s heart …

. if a macho dude like me could ever admit to having one.

I sit, apparently calm and dignified, on the off-white sofa in the living room of what you could call my digs, my crib, my flat … okay, “our” condominium unit at Las Vegas’s only round five-story 1950s landmark, the Circle Ritz.

The round part you probably get. The Ritz part is a word that was chichi way-back-when in the mid-twentieth century and sounds more like a cracker nowadays. Although that cracker is indeed round.

But crackers can be easily crushed, and that is exactly what my esteemed roommate, Miss Temple Barr, would be if she knew what I knew: that her longtime squeeze, Mr. Max Kinsella,is pretty thoroughly crushed himself these days. In fact, I and my partner in crime solving saw him plunge five stories into a solid black wall thirty-six hours ago at the nightclub called Neon Nightmare. Talk about an apt name.

Miss Midnight Louise is my partner (and a would-be descendant in her own mind if only I would admit to being a deadbeat dad). She suspects that someone sinister had arranged Mr. Max’s unscheduled landing, from which he was taken away by ambulance.

Granted that performing bungee-cord acrobatics and illusions over a nightclub floor is a pretty dangerous pastime, but Mr. Max Kinsella had formerly been a top Vegas magic act under the name of The Mystifying Max.

What is so mystifying is why he was performing masked under the moniker of the Phantom Mage at Neon Nightmare. Not even his girlfriend–and mine–MissTemple Barr, knew about it.

The lady in question ambles into the living room even as I muse about her. She is talking on one of those obnoxious cell phones that I wish had been drowned at invention in an acid bath. As if the world needed more distracted people wandering around forcing everyone to overhear the details of their professional and personal lives.

Overhearing all that stuff is my job!

However, it is sometimes handy to eavesdrop on one’s nearest and dearest, though in this instance it is more than somewhat heartbreaking.

“Max!” my MissTemple admonishes the tiny instrument pressed to her ear. “Answer! Pick up the phone. You have got to be home sometime during one of my hundred and one calls. I’ve got to talk to you. Soon!”

She folds the already mouse-size phone in half and tosses it onto the sofa seat in disgust. Then she spots me and does her Cary Grant imitation: “Lou-ie, Lou-ie, Lou-ie.”

I do not know what ancient film that is from, but I never object to being associated with a leading man like Mr. Cary Grant, the twentieth-century equivalent of Mr. George Clooney in the suave department.

Miss Temple picks up the phone and sits beside me, glum as the holiday-hijacking Grinch.

“Louie, what am I to do with a man who won’t ever answer the phone, even when I’m going to dump him?”

Well…. For the first time in my long career as a primo PI, all-around hip cat, and career-girl companion, I wish I had not taken a vow of silence when it comes to conversing with humans.

I long to offer my MissTemple some trenchant “Dear Tabby” advice. I wish I at least had the option of warning her that her not-so-beloved-lately was in the hands of the paramedics and the city hospital system, if not the county coroner.

Usually I like knowing what other folks do not: that is a crack Pl’s job.

Now I just feel as low-down and guilty as any back-alley goldfish-gulper caught raiding the koi pond at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino.

“I am so glad I have you to talk to when I am upset,” she continues, twisting the knife.

Who knew a conscience could be so painful? Not moi. I am glad that I do not have a soul, at least, although some on the ailurophile fringe might debate that.

I understand her problem, of course. She has gone forth and consummated her long-simmering attraction to our upstairs neighbor, Mr. Matt Devine, ex-priest now in need of a nice dark confessional, if the church authorities had not scotched these handy dramatic devices of film and story long ago.

I saw that coming from almost a year ago, not that anybody would listen to me. And not that I would want them to. I do not talk to people, and thus save myself from a lot of drivel.

Mr. Max is a swell fellow, but enmeshed in intrigue local and international. Such an agenda does not allow a man to keep the home fires burning as hotly as they should. It is the old story: a romantic triangle turned tragic, only nobody knows it but me.

I will have to see what I can do to change that.

Chapter 2

Limp Biscuit

Temple hiked herself onto one of the two breakfast stools in her tiny black-and-white kitchen. Then she ravaged the upper cupboard for something salty, crunchy, and frustration-reducing.

All she found was a long-opened box of Ritz crackers, half full of soggy imposters of crunch. She tossed the box toward the Albertson’s paper bag that served as a temporary trash receptacle.

Okay. She’d finally made the most momentous decision of her life. She’d picked which of two totally wonderful guys she wanted to spend that life with. She took a deep breath. Matt was so sweet. So totally amazing. So hot!

He had been, like, worried about seventeen priestly years of celibacy cramping his style?

Not!

Oh! She was sounding so teenager-y-in-love.

Temple sobered. She’d felt that much in love with Max once, almost three years ago. A year in love here in Las Vegas after instant-everything in Minneapolis. A year of Max gone. Not even a full year of Max back.

Temple went for her refrigerator, hunting something, something … crisp and sour. No pickles. Okay. Sweet. What? Was she pregnant? Or just having a change of hormones. Of heart? Or a heart still torn two ways?

A knock on her doorbell put her into cardiac arrest. On her door! Not doorbell, dumbbell! She had to cut herself some slack. After all, she was just a teenager in love.

Matt always knocked.

She opened the door, hungry and anxious and edgy. And it was all, well, all right.

“I’m not bothering you?” Matt asked in his polite Midwestern way.

She pulled him inside, slammed the door shut, and pushed him up against the entry-hall wall.

“Yes, you are. What are you going to do about it?”

He didn’t hesitate, just drew her into a mind-blowing soul kiss and during it turned her into the wall herself, so she was pressed hard against, well, everything.

Several minutes later, they ambled into the living room to admire Midnight Louie on the couch.

“Have you reached him?” Matt asked warily.

Temple knew he didn’t mean Midnight Louie. She eyed his ruffled blond hair, his warm brown eyes hotter than black coffee from their make-out session in the hall, his expression of uneasy concern.

He realized their new intimate relationship would never feel entirely real until Temple formally broke it off with Max. Although neither one would say this or even mention Max’s name at the moment.

That was Max. Mystique to the end. Temple swallowed a sob.Matt was there, holding her. “It’s all right.”

“What’s all right?”

“However you feel.”

“I feel horrible. I feel like a rat. I’ve got to reach him. It’s not like he didn’t know this was coming.”

“He knew?” Matt held her away, staring hard into her eyes, seeing the troubled emotions she hadn’t wanted him to notice. “He’s Max. Of course he knew.”

Matt’s lips tightened.

“He gave me permission, for God’s sake.”

“Permission?”

“His blessing?” Temple added with a sob she had to cup with a hand to her mouth to stop.

For some strange reason, Matt smiled. “Yeah. I kinda got that from him too. I don’t think your faith in him was ever misplaced.”

“But he is! Max is. I can’t find him. I can’t get him to call me back so I can say, ‘Hi. ‘Bye.’ I need to be up front with him about this. That’s all. Let him know. For sure. Nothing about us is a problem, Matt. But I warned you, saying good-bye to someone is hell.”

“What about the ring?”

“What about it?”

“Where are you keeping it, since you don’t wear it? Yet.”

Temple breathed deep. “In my scarf drawer,” she said in a small, wee voice.

“Scarf drawer?”

“It’s where I keep everything I don’t know what to do with safe.”

“Temple, that ring is worth, well, way more than it should be.”

“I know, Matt. Fred Leighton. I was hoping I could put it openly on my finger soon. Like … today. Then it would take a mugger cutting my finger off to get it.”

“Temple!” Matt was half laughing, half shaking his head. “Look. Danny built a floor safe into my bedroom redo. I’ll just keep it there for the time being. Your scarf drawer doesn’t sound terribly secure, unless you also keep boa constrictors in there to fend off burglars.”

“You’re right. The ring needs to be worn or kept someplace secure. Come into my boudoir and we will unearth it from a pile of lovely but annoyingly unmanageable scarves. Frenchwomen really know how to accessorize with those things, but I am about as French as Midnight Louie.”

She took his hand to lead him away, thinking maybe it was time her Circle Ritz bedroom had a new sensuous adventure to record.

Matt hesitated at the threshold. Temple knew what he was thinking: this had been Max’s and her bedroom for more than a year. The bed was California king-length, for six-foot-four Max, and Matt sure didn’t need that.

She stepped close. “It’s all right. You know I’m all yours, anytime, anyplace. Ring or no ring.”

So they ended up ruffling the zebra-stripe coverlet, both of them the better for it.

“Where’s this fabled scarf drawer?” Matt asked finally. Temple guessed he’d never consummate anything with her in that bed.

“Over here, sir.” She got up and opened the top drawer of the small chest against the wall. “Every scarf I was ever given as a gift, and that I wronged with an inept knot, a careless twist, a hopeless loop, lies interred here, along with other odds and ends. It is yours to riffle as you please. As am I.” She finished with a curtsy.

Matt grinned at her presentation. “No one can oversell like you.”

“Thanks for the professional compliment.”

He began sifting through the frothy rainbow of scarves. “This should be good practice for violating your lingerie drawer in future. Aha! The significant clue. A ring box.”

He pulled out a plain white box and opened it to reveal something Temple didn’t recognize at first. When she did, her cheeks flushed.

“That’s not it. That’s just a tawdry cubic zirconia ring I bought somewhere.”

It was also oddly similar to the Tiffany opal-and-diamond ring Max had given her in New York City Christmas last, when she and he had thought his dangerous past was history and their glowing future was now.

She’d bought this cheap reminder of that lost ring for less than forty dollars in a weak moment, for which she’d been noted recently.

Matt tossed the box on the bed.

“Okay,” he said. “More scarves. Am I supposed to deduce something from this mass of scarves?”

He held up two, stretched out. Gave her all sorts of ideas. “Danny did give your bedroom a four-poster bed,” she said. Danny Dove was Temple’s dear friend and a noted Vegas choreographer. Nothing better than a gay choreographer for masterminding a straight guy’s bedroom decor.

There was a moment of prolonged silence. Matt had read his Joy of Sex book religiously. But at least now he’d forgotten the ersatz opal-diamond ring. Mission accomplished.

He lifted another cheap ring box with a quizzical look.

“Something I picked up somewhere, sometime. Don’t ask me what that is.”

Matt opened it. Stared. Looked up at her with real worry. “I do, Temple.”

“What?” The wedding vow answer had both startled and encouraged her.

“I know what this is, and it’s not good. This is the ring Kathleen O’Connor mailed to me.”

“No! What was that about? It’s a nasty snaky thing, no wonder it came from that vixen.”

“Not a snake.” Matt held up the sinuous gold circle between his thumb and forefinger, like a dissection specimen. “It’s a dragon, really, swallowing its own tail; an ancient symbol of eternity called the worm Ouroboros.”

“Ouroboro-what? Kitty the Cutter sent you a ring? I didn’t know about that.”

“I didn’t want you to. It was another of her sick stalking games. She said I had to wear it or she’d hurt someone near me. So I carried it in my pocket when I was out and left it on my living room side table when I was in. I never put it on my finger. Where did you get it?”

Temple thought. “I don’t know. I put everything I don’t know what to do with in that drawer.”

“Including this?” Matt lifted the gray velvet box containing his … her … ring.

“Yes, but only for safekeeping. Until I can, you know, reach Max.”

“What if you never reach him? Are we on hold until then?”

“No! I just want to do the right thing.”

“Temple.” Matt came to sit beside her on the bed. “I’ve spent all my life trying to do exactly the right thing and I’ve learned that can be paralyzing. Look. I’ll take this ring up to my safe for now. But I need you to think about when, and where, you got Kitty the Cutter’s ring, the one she made me carry as a sign of her power over me.”

“Good Lord! What an awful talisman! How did you lose it?”

“She loved to show that she could come and go in my place as she pleased. It disappeared one day. After … Vassar died. That’s all. I figured that meant she was finally disappointed in me. It disappeared. Just like she ultimately did.”

“Yeah, she died. Gee, Matt, I just can’t remember where I got that thing right now. But I did get it. It’s ended up here. You don’t think Kitty—?”

“I hope not, but she is dead now, at least.”

“Somehow I came across it, but where or when—?” Temple pushed her hands into the blond hair at her temples, warding off the headache that was sure to come.

Matt caught and removed her hands. “Take it easy, Goldilocks. You’ll never remember something trying that hard. Just let the question bounce around in your brain for a while.”

“What brain? I’m a blonde, haven’t you noticed?”

“Only temporarily, and I don’t mind. I’m a blond too, so dumb blond jokes are personal.” He leaned in and kissed her hair. “Besides, I think that’s what did it.”

“What did what?”

“Your bottle-blonde undercover makeover job. It made you look just different enough to make me think that I might have a chance with a BraveNewTemple.”

Of course he had to kiss her surprise away. Too bad she wasn’t brave, or very new. Just the same old bundle of chutzpah, humor, and hope a single girl had to be nowadays.

Not quite single.

“Matt, I’m sorry to be so neurotic about Max. It’s just that I’ve been worrying about him for so long.”

“I wouldn’t love you if you didn’t. What can I do?”

“Love me when I’m being a ditz.”

“Easy.”

“Safeguard our ring.” She closed her hands over his holding the box. “I’ll try to zen my way into remembering Kitty’s ugly offering. In fact, take that ugly ring thing up to your safe too. There might be fingerprints on it.”

“What good will that do us?” he asked.

“Molina can get it analyzed, if we figure out a good excuse.”

“I’m not sure she would—”

“I am. All we have to do is have you ask her.”

“I don’t have any pull with Molina.”

“Hmmm. We’ll see.”

Chapter 3

Riders of the Purple Rage

Matt had only been gone a few minutes when the phone rang.

Temple shook herself out of her meditation session on the sofa and dove for the receiver. It might be Max at last.

So far, she hadn’t a clue about when she could have gotten the wormy gold ring Matt was so concerned about. Maybe this was it: the first senior moment, a tendril of looming peri-menopause striking out at her fifteen years too soon. She was only almost thirty-one, God!

“Temple, dear,” said a well-known voice. “I’m in such a pickle and I really need your help.”

“Electra?” Temple sat up straight, jolted out of her meditations. Trouble would take her mind off a lot of personal issues. “I can run right up to the penthouse.““Don’t, dear. I’m not there.”

The landlady of the Circle Ritz was always somewhere about the place. When not in her fifth-floor penthouse digs she was running the Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel with Drive-by Window—Photo Shoots free—at the side of the condominium-cum-apartment building. Everything here did double duty, including the angst.

“Electra! Where are you? What’s going on?”

“I’m at the Crystal Phoenix.”

“You have good taste.”

“Not really, dear. I have never been guilty of that. But I’m afraid I may be found guilty of something else.”

“Guilty? Of what?”

“I volunteered for security for this damn convention, Temple, dear. I thought I had picked up a thing or two from you and Max. Alas, apparently not. They’re planning on taking me in.”

“In where?”

“To stir, as we say in the security trade. Somewhere downtown, as they always say on TV. Can you come bail me out?”

“Yes! But, Electra, why?”

“They say I knocked off a Pink Lady.”

“I’ve been known to knock back a Pink Lady or two in my day too.”

“Not the drink, dear. A live one. Now dead. Please come! This Detective Su is very small, smart, and stem, and my using your name is having no effect whatsoever.”

The call ended on that alarming note.

Temple grabbed her cell phone and auto-dialed Max’s number one more time, just in case. No answer. “I’m leaving the Circle Ritz and heading for the Crystal Phoenix,” she told the messaging function. “You can catch up with me there. Electra’s in big trouble.”

Maybe that cryptic message would draw Max out of his disappearing act.

She threw the cell phone in her tote bag, pushed her bare feet into the Steve Madden slides under the coffee table, blew Louie a good-bye kiss, and skidded out the door.

Electra? In trouble with the law? Impossible!

Chapter 4

Mr. Know-It-All

Once my framed roomie has done her little-doll skidoo, I gaze sadly at the morning paper, which she has neglected to read, given the enthralling appearance of Mr. Matt Devine on her doorstep … and in her scarf drawer.

A dude of my age, position, and gravitas is above peeking in on bedroom antics, but I did hear mention of their late archenemy, and therefore mine, Miss Kathleen O’Connor. I could tell MissTemple exactly when and where she acquired the sinister ring Mr. Matt took away, quite rightly.

It is not that I could talk, if I wanted to, though I like to think I can do anything. But it is also against my principles to talk to humans. Besides, that would be spoiling my MissTemple’s fun. She does love a mystery.

So do I.

I am eager to follow her over to the Crystal Phoenix and find out what our beloved landlady is up to.

But first I ponder the newspaper. Those of my ilk are hopelessly drawn to paper products. Maybe it is the heady aroma of fresh ink. Maybe it is because we are smarter than we let on, and can read quite well if we apply ourselves and the seats of our pants to it. Pantaloons, I should say, in our case. We have bibs, we have ruffs, we have pantaloons and feathering. You would think we were cavalier poets.

Maybe it is because we are like those men I’ve heard talk of, who feel most wanted when they interrupt their women at some absorbing minor task and sweep them away to the bedroom, or the living room carpet.

The French do not worry about these things, but simply say, “Je ne sais quoi.” I know not what. Those French! Quite the cards.

Me, I worry about the bigger picture.

Sometimes I am the only one who sees it, and that is when I worry most.

I lean forward to regard the small news story below the fold on that morning’s front page.

NEON NIGHTMAREMAGICIAN-ACROBATFALLS TO DEATH, it reads.

The “jump” is on page 4. Ouch! Most unfortunate terminology in this case. “Terminology.” Ouch!

Now only I know why Mr. Max Kinsella is not answering his cell phone or his home phone or any phone on earth of late. “Of late.” Ouch!

I think I have had enough of phones and “jumps” lately myself.

So that emergency ambulance run from the Neon Nightmare was for naught. My poor MissTemple! Just when she had intended to tell Mr. Max “good-bye,” he has gone to the Great Good-bye in the Sky.

My whiskers droop. He died young. I can understand Miss Midnight Louise’s fury at the accident. It had looked rigged to me too. Mr. Max was too expert to take a fall without sabotage in the picture. I admit that I will miss my human rival and look-alike.

My MissTemple will be beside herself when she finds out. For now, I must forsake the trail of Mr. Max’s fatal fall and go whither she goeth, to be there when the roof caves in. And it will.

Chapter 5

Twist and Shout

Temple pulled her red Miata into the Crystal Phoenix’s entry area to shouts and applause.

She jumped out as the parking valet took it, realizing she was wearing her hot pink Steve Madden slides. Maybe that was what was getting all the twisting of necks and shouting.

“Amore,” the Italian word for love, was supposed to hit your eye like a “big pizza pie,” according to the old song, but Temple was being whomped in the iris by a wave of purple and red clothing.

People clothed in both colors were streaming through the glass doors into the Crystal Phoenix lobby like so many bicolor birds of paradise.

People. Check that: women. Women wearing T-shirts and feather boas and high heels and wide-brimmed hats, dragging wheeled purple leopard-pattern luggage, wearing red lipstick and purple eye shadow, women of size, women of no size, like her. Wait! Older women. Well, “seasoned” women, as Gail Sheehy had put it so profitably in her latest life-state book.

The lobby was teaming with red and purple. Temple felt positively dowdy in pink. Then she spotted a pink hat here and there amid the flock and felt better.

Until she remembered that a woman in pink had been killed. She had no idea where Electra might be, so she dialed her landlady’s cell phone.

“Yes?”

The voice was brisk, female, and not Electra’s.

Temple couldn’t have misdialed; Electra’s cell phone number was in her directory.

She muttered something about misdialing anyway. “You were calling Mrs. Lark?”

“Yes.”

“Who is this?”

“Who is this?”

“The police. Who are you and why are you calling?”

“I’m a friend of Mrs. Lark’s and I heard that something had gone wrong at the hotel.”

At that momentTemple became aware of a tall pale figure behind her, and turned. It wasn’t a ghost, it was a Fontanabrother in an expensive Italian ice-cream suit, accompanied by her errant aunt Kit, who had not come home to the Circle Ritz the night before and was looking not the least worse for wear.

Temple’s mother’s sister, a New York City actress turned romance novelist, had come to stay with Temple for a few days. She had surprised the heck out of Temple by ending up having more than a few dates with the eldest of Vegas’s Most Eligible Bachelor frat pack, the nine single Fontana brothers. Their uncle, Macho Mario Fontana, was the last of the mob bosses. The brothers were presumed to be elegant quasi-muscle around town. They owned, among other things, Gangsters’ vintage limousine service. The youngest, and number ten, was married and owned this hotel.

Aldo Fontana—tall, dark, and dangerous—took the phone from a frazzled Temple’s hand. “This is Crystal Phoenix security,” his majestic baritone mentioned, almost threatened in a silky, seductive way. Kit rolled her eyes behind his looming back and pantomimed fanning herself and swooning.

“May I help you?” Aldo held the phone away from his ear so that Temple could hear the raging soprano aria on the other end. Temple guessed who it was; a female seriously disinclined to swooning: Detective Su.

Meanwhile, her aunt Kit, a thirty-year-older petite version of herself, cozied up to her side.

“Sorry I didn’t call to announce a change of venue last night, but it was awfully late.”

Temple could easily imagine a woman forgetting the time in Aldo’s company, and shrugged. “I know a New Yorker like you can take care of yourself, Aunt, and anything that might come up.”

“Speaking of that, what’s going on? Why are you here apparently being berated by a cell phone?”

“Electra called me at the Circle Ritz. There’s a death connected to this convention and the authorities are holding her for questioning. That was one of the detectives in charge of the case.”

Meanwhile, Aldo had snapped her cell phone shut and returned it with a flourish.

“The Lalique Suite. The police have set up shop there.”

Temple raised an eyebrow. She’d been the hotel’s PR person for a year now. The Crystal Suites were pretty fancy for police use.

“ ‘This convention’?” Kit looked around, as if seeing all the purple and red for the first time, and indeed, she probably was. A swarthy Italian hunk in expensive clothes as pale and soft as creamery butter would be hard to see past.

Temple took her aunt’s arm as they followed Aldo to the private elevators. “‘Big Wheel in Las Vegas’ convention for the Red Hat Sisterhood,” she explained, having gleaned all that from attendees on the way in. “It’s for older women with style, joy, and pizzazz. Like you.”

“Oh. Except that I’m with Aldo and they’re not.”

Temple eyed the many women around them who had stopped short, riveted by his tall, smooth passage through them.

“I wouldn’t bet on that if you were so foolish as to unhand his arm and let him loose. They’d be on him like an expensive suit.”

“But I’m not going to unhand him,” Kit said. “I’m sure Aldo can convince the police that Electra Lark is not a crook.”

“It’s ridiculous,” Temple agreed when the three of them were alone in the stainless-steel elevator, wafting upward, “for anyone to think my landlady would kill someone.”

Aldo waved his manicured fingers. One would never guess they were rattlesnake-fast to draw a Beretta.

“The police always make snap judgments,” he said, suiting gesture to words. “It saves them thinking. I’ve paged Nicky. He’ll put a stop to this police nonsense.”

“Nicky?” Kit asked.

Aldo smiled tenderly down at her and even Temple felt the heat. “My youngest brother. He owns the hotel.”

“Wow. And what do you own, big boy, besides a Viper and an expensive collection of aged scotch?”

“For one thing, my luscious linguini, a race horse.”

Kit was truly shocked, and Temple too. She’d never known what supported the litter of Fontana brothers, excepting Nicky, the white sheep of the family, and some iffy side businesses.

Kit leaned into Temple to whisper an explanation for the pet name. “He thinks I’m really rather … supple for my age. All those cheerleader splits didn’t hurt.”

“Aunt! I don’t need to know these things,” Temple hissed back. “What’s your horse’s name?” she asked Aldo to get the discussion onto a higher plane.

“Midnight Louie,” he answered. “Black as coal, fast as greased stainless steel, took second in his last race. A real comer on the inside.”

“But—”

“I figure your cat has been lucky for you and has at least nineteen lives, from what I’ve seen. What can it hurt?”

Louie with a thoroughbred namesake! Temple doubted that he cared much about such connections, but she was impressed.

The elevator doors spit them out onto an aubergine-carpeted hallway, deep purple to the common folk. Temple had never seen the Crystal Suites, nor had much needed to. Now she did.

The soft-lit sconces along the silver suede-covered halls were priceless vintage Lalique frosted glass.

The suite itself had huge Lalique door handles of facing phoenixes, commissioned for the hotel.

Another Fontana brother opened it before they could ring the bell, but it was not a usual member of the “frat pack.”

“Nicky!” Temple cried, embracing her boss (as near as a freelancer can have a boss) and biggest client and remembering to add, “It’s me, Temple, passing as a blonde.”

“Good thing it’s you:’ he said. “Van doesn’t like me canoodling with any blondes but her.”

Van had just arrived to peek over his shoulder.

“Temple, I see you’ve come over to the light side,” she said, smiling at the blond dye job.

Nicky’s wife was an Alfred Hitchcock blonde, smooth, cool, and dignified, like the stars of his best films: Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, and animal rescuer Tippi Hedron. One of her films, a rare lesser Hitchcock effort named Marnie, had featured a young pre-Bond Sean Connery! Yum. Temple may be engaged now, but age did not wither nor custom stale the Scottish actor’s sex appeal.

Van von Rhine was Nicky’s wife and the hotel manager. Where he was all macho charm, like any Fontana brother, she was cool Anglo efficiency and smoldering drive. If they were both on this scene, the situation was serious.

Nicky high-fived Aldo, then the couple settled in to hear Kit introduced, managing not to appear surprised that Aldo’s latest squeeze was also Temple’s visiting maternal aunt.

“Listen,” Nicky said, his low tone pulling everybody conspiratorially close.

“Van and I got this TV cop show off the main floor. We do have a murder on the premises, and your friend Electra was there for the denouement:’ he told Temple. “I don’t know how even a sharp PR diva like you is gonna keep both the hotel and your friend out of the headlines.”

“Electra’s my landlady and I doubt she’d kill a gnat. Can I talk to her?”

Van spoke for the first time. “It’s a he-she detective team. She spits nails; he slings mashed potatoes. Do love your hair.”

“Su and Alch,” Temple diagnosed. “I know them. He’s tougher than he acts, but she isn’t. She’s the real deal, a mini-Molina. Lieutenant Molina is my bane on the LVMPD. Born to be bad, particularly to me. Thanks for the vote for the hair color. It’s temporary, though.”

“Bleach never is, baby,” Nicky put in.

“Eventually,” Temple said, finished with coiffure matters. “Keep Aldo and Kit on the fringes with your camp. I’ll wade in and see if they’ll let me talk privately to Electra.”

“You a lawyer now?” Aldo asked incredulously.

“No,” Kit answered, “but she is a Carlson on the distaff side and we are nothing to mess with. Viking stock, you know.”

Aldo blinked at the image of petite, low-rise Kit, or Temple, as Valkyries.

What did he know? Columbus had been preceded to North America by the Vikings. Everyone north of the forty-fifth parallel knew that!

Temple went inside first. The room was expensively pale in decor and furnishings, except for a big bright blob of red and purple in the seating area near the floor-to-ceiling windows.

As she approached, Temple saw the canny detectives had placed Electra facing the windows so her features were in blinding daylight while they were silhouettes to her aging eyes.

Bullies!

But it worked.

Electra was in her sixties, which Temple now regarded with shock and awe after a heart-to-heart with her aunt about what aging women could expect. She was almost thirty-one, unmarried (although with strong prospects), and suddenly very sympathetic to the problems of aging women in a culture that worshiped young and thin and shallow.

She appreciated Electra’s free spirit even more after a few heart-to-hearts with her aunt.

She appreciated the landlady’s tropical muumuus color-coordinated to the temporary dyes she sprayed onto her halo of springy white hair. The wedding chapel business she ran out of the Circle Ritz. Being game to hop on a motorcycle at her age, wearing a helmet that proclaimed “Speed Queen.” Her warm and lively interest in all her tenants, including Matt’s emergence from ex-priest to buff boy about town. All were part of the Circle Ritz mystique, and Electra Lark was its resident fairy godmother.

No way would this lady off somebody. Of course, such a conviction would never stand up in court, so Temple would have to see that it never got that far.

As she came even with the silhouettes of Alch and Su, she noticed with astonishment that Electra’s hair was all-over purple. An ex-undercover girl in honey-bunnie blond shade number 43 was hardly one to criticize.

“Electra!” Temple said, to let her know she had backup.

The face that turned to her, usually haloed with good cheer and motherly encouragement, suddenly looked pale, aged, drained.

“Temple! Thank God you’ve come.”

“Just what do you think she can do for you?” Su asked.

Su was a tiny Asian-American woman not much older than Temple who managed to convey Green Giant–size competency. Temple supposed that was from being a little woman in a big man’s profession.

“Can we talk?” Temple asked the detectives, moving away from the windows.

They followed her out of Electra’s hearing range.

“I know this woman,” Temple said. “She’s not a killer.”

“Neither are most of us,” Su pointed out, “until something pushes us over the edge.”

Morrie Alch, a teddy bear of a homicide detective with nicely polished claws, was staying out of it. Women’s business.

“At least you can tell me why Electra’s being questioned,” Temple said.

“We don’t have to tell you anything,” Su said, close to a sneer. It must have chapped Su’s chopsticks that her boss, Lieutenant C. R. Molina, had sent Temple undercover as a teenager at the recent Teen Queen Idol reality TV show set, instead of her.

Competing guys were standard police issue, but dueling gals could be meaner.

“Okay, ladies.” Alch puckered his lips judiciously. “Miss Barr might get something we can’t out of the … suspect. The lieutenant would like that.”

“And then,” Temple said, “I’d like you to let Electra go about her business.”

“Not!” Su.

Alch frowned.

“I bet you couldn’t pry her away from this convention:’ Temple argued. “She’s volunteered to set things up. And she wouldn’t leave Las Vegas. She runs two local businesses. She has local people like me to look out for her. Simply being found near a dead body would have had me in lockup numerous times.”

“Should have,” Su said.

“Lighten up, ladies,” Alch said. While they were both scowling at him for that method of address, his palms lifted in a peace gesture.

“We have grounds for holding Mrs. Lark:’ he told Temple, dead serious. “But not enough. I’ve checked with Molina. She’s not ready to bring Mrs. Lark in for questioning on the evidence so far. So, you can take her outta here when you go, or put her back with the other birds of a feather.”

Su glared at him with soundless fury, but Alch gave her A Look. He gave Temple another one. “I’m going to let you take her out of here, but that’s not an irreversible option. And anything of interest she tells you, you tell us. Right?”

“Absolutely, Detective Alch.”

Su snorted.

Molina had okayed Temple’s custody of Electra? What was the Iron Maiden of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department up to?

That’s what Nicky and Van and Aldo and Kit wanted to know as Temple retreated to their position by the long Italian leather sofa against the wall.

“What’s the deal?” Nicky asked in a whisper.

“I get to talk to Electra, and take her out of here if she doesn’t do something foolish and confess.”

“Great, but why?” Aldo wanted to know. “The cops never back off unless they have to.”

“Not enough evidence to hold her,” Temple said. “I think. Maybe they’re just giving her enough rope.”

“We don’t want this case dragging on any more than they do:’ Van said.

Nicky winked at Temple. “She’s saying you better solve this one for the cops. Get them out of our hair. Out of her vanilla-smooth French twist.” Nicky ran teasing fingers into it, making Van’s eyes glare steel-blue. She shook him loose.

Not many people knew “Van” was short for “Vanilla.” Temple did.

Van smoothed her hair back into place. “Do whatever you can, Temple, to cool down this situation.”

“Right.” First, she had to find out from Electra what was really going on.

“I’m lucky I got them to cut you loose:’ Temple whispered as she settled beside Electra on the cushy leather sofa. Electra clasped her hand with matronly zest.

“So nice to see you here, dear. Who gave you permission? Was it that nice Detective Alch?” Electra whispered, glancing coyly at the fiftyish detective.

“Yeah. Luckily, Morrie likes to pull Su’s chain.”

“Morrie. Such a cute name. Do you think he’s married?”

“I think he’s fifteen years younger than you are, Electra.”

“Just right. Boy-toy age for me.”

Temple sighed. “Electra, why are they holding you for questioning? Who died here?”

“It’s so silly, Temple. You know me. Always eager to help. I volunteered to set things up before the convention—”

“You mean that wave of purple and red in the lobby is just the advance troops?”

“Heavens, yes! We’ll soon have five thousand Red Hatters in town, splitting up between the Crystal Phoenix and the Goliath.

We have several hundred here now to help with setup. My Red-Hatted League is one of the local chapters.”

“So that’s why you’re here. And you are being questioned by the police because—?”

“There was this Pink Lady—”

“Not a drink.”

“No! Girly cocktails are so passé now. They really knock back those martinis on Sex in the City.”

“That’s Sex and the City and it’s in reruns now, Electra. Not hot. Speaking of hot, just how many Red Hat Sisterhood members live in Vegas?”

“I don’t know. The Las Vegas area has more than one hundred chapters with up to forty-some members, and that’s who’s here setting up.”

“Yowie. That alone almost makes five thousand! How did a local PR ace like me miss knowing about all of them?”

“Not everyone is helping with setup. And you’re too young to be a Red Hatter, which is age fifty and over, just like AARP. Although you could be a Pink Lady, dear.”

“Since they appear to have a short life span, maybe not. And a Pink Lady is—”

“A memberin-waiting to turn the golden age of fifty and be eligible for the Red Hat, kind of like a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, don’t you know? They never let anybody too young into the full sisterhood; it might upset the applecart.”

“Or lead to murder?”

“No, it’s just that the Red Hat Sisterhood is one of the few things in life that older ladies can call their very own. Whatever. I was just trying to help out that helpless Pink Lady. She’d fallen facedown, I’d thought. I didn’t know she’d been strangled. A lot of us wear scarves and boas to hide the jowls, you know.” Electra patted at the scarlet feathers making her face into an island without a telltale neck.

“Okay. Which Pink Lady?”

Electra’s voice and expression hardened. Temple was glad Su and Alch were out of earshot. “Just some bimbo, dearie, who maybe wished she was old enough to be a real Red Hat Sister.”

“And why is this anonymous ‘some bimbo’ attached to your movements and motivations?”

“Um, there’s an awkward connection the police found out about.”

“What awkward connection?”

“The good detectives—”

“There are not good detectives in a case like this, just suspicious and determined and not on your side.”

“Whatever. Anyway, I’d been seen earlier at the preregistration desk, showing newbies how to tie their scarves.”

“Around their throats to hide awkward wrinkles and sags, I presume.”

“Exactly, dear. Hides the turkey wattle and all those nasty sagging horizontal lines. What more could a woman do for her sisters?”

“And?”

“When they found the Pink Lady dead a few hours later, strangled by a scarf, naturally I came to mind.”

“Because—?” Electra was being way too evasive.

“I did use her earlier to demonstrate properly tying a scarf to the other ladies.”

“Not good, but not damning. So—?”

Electra looked down and wrung her hands. She even wore red and purple rings and some looked like real rubies and amethysts.

“Electra?”

“This convention meant so much to me. I wanted our chapter to shine, Temple. I wanted the Red Hat Sisterhood to have a stellar time in our uniquely glitzy city. I just wanted to help.”

“So what was the problem with that particular Pink Lady?”

“She was from Hollywood.”

Temple waited.

“Florida.”

“So?”

“So was my third husband.”

“But that must have been long ago. You’ve ditched several more husbands since then.”

“Oh, yes. We split almost thirty years ago. I’d thoroughly washed my hands of the cad after I found out he was stepping out on me, and this was back when I still looked like someone who shouldn’t be stepped out on.”

“You still do,” Temple said, putting a firm hand on Electra’s nervous ones.

Tears filled Electra’s gray eyes. “It was the name tags. So cute. Our chapter designed them. A chorus line of high-kicking red EiffelTowers on a lavender border. The EiffelTower in Pariswas originally painted red, you know.”

Temple shook her head. She didn’t know, and she didn’t know what that had to do with anything. Electra probably didn’t either at this point.

“Everything was perfect,” Electra went on, “was going to be perfect, until she came along.”

“The name tags. The Pink Lady’s name—?”

“Was Lark, just like mine. I hadn’t noticed it during the scarf-tying demonstration.”

“I had no idea you knew your way around scarves and knots, because I certainly could use tutoring in that knack.”

“Call on me anytime, dear, if I’m not in jail.”

“And you didn’t know you were advising an ex-rival?”

“Honey chile, she’d changed as much as I had. And my attention was on her neck, not her name tag. But when I saw it, after I’d done the scarf demonstration, I knew she was the formerly teenaged bimbo who’d lured Elmore Lark away from me. It wouldn’t have mattered, except I’d kept his last name because it turned out to be the only thing I liked about him.”

“So … Lark met Lark.”

“Then she got insulting. Said she’d never have recognized me and I said the same, because, believe me, those husband-stealing teen tootsies who shine at that age lose it faster than Bruce Willis loses hair.”

“Apparently you discussed your mutual revelations and revilements in front of God and everybody.”

“No. If God had been there, He would have struck her dead for illegal parking with my then-legal husband.”

Temple winced. “And within hours, she was really dead.”

“I didn’t do that. I respect a Red Hat Sisterhood scarf toomuch to wring that witch’s neck with it. Even with a lesser Pink Lady version. It is a sacred trust.”

“So is a marriage,” Temple said, who’d had reason to think about that very thing long and hard lately. “You know that. You operate a wedding chapel, after all.”

“Yes.” Electra sniffled. “That is my expression of optimism in a pessimistic world and time. I may have wanted to wring Oleta’s cheating neck, Temple, but I never would have killed her. And that’s why I was so surprised to find the fallen woman, excuse the expression, that I tried to help was her. Again.”

Electra’s purple-mascara-loaded lashes beat hard to drive back the tears.

Temple believed her. Wanting to wring someone’s neck was a common urge and almost never acted upon.

But maybe someone who’d had it in for this particular Pink Lady had witnessed Electra’s shock and fury and had decided to ride on it… .

An opportunist among a … brimful … a feather … a hat pin … of innocuous Red Hat Sisterhood ladies.

Or maybe not innocuous. Not all of them.

Chapter 6

Louie Among the Sisterhood

It is not a cakewalk to ease unseen into a suite at the Crystal Phoenix, much harder than fronting on down a yellow brick road out in Las Vegas proper, and there are plenty of yellow brick roads in this town, only they all are covered in green felt.

Thankfully, I know these Crystal Phoenix grounds and buildings well from my stint as an unofficial house detective here. Those room-service carts always hide the tableware and such under a thick white linen cloth. And I was always to the fine linen born.

So today I have gotten the lay of the land and the dramatis personae through a tablecloth, darkly. Thank heaven and Bast for these sharp black ears of mine.

I manage to sneak a peek or two when nobody is looking. Since I am always at ankle level, nobody is looking most of the time.

First of all, I cannot believe that Miss Electra Lark, major dame-o of the Circle Ritz, has sprayed her hair completely purple! It was one thing when she went multicolored. I know a lot of cats with coats like that. But I have never seen a purple cat. And Miss Electra does not even have the excuse of St. Paddy’s Day and green. Does she not realize that white-haired ladies tinting their hair blue is a cliché? That purple is just one half step up from that? That Blond is the New Blue for the post-sixty set?

Of course, I also cannot believe that Miss Electra Lark (even if she is a reformed “Mrs..”) would off some so-called Pink Lady just for the act of lassoing her man some decades before. If he was so lasso-able, he was lose-able in my estimation.

We all have our issues, and hopefully outgrow them. Like I have forgotten and forgiven Miss Midnight Louise for taking over my primo PI position here at the Phoenix.

Not!

Okay. I am a cool dude. I go where I am needed, I do what I must, and I always keep my whiskers dry.

I know my MissTemple will not sit still for our beloved landlady being railroaded for murder one, so we both are here for the duration.

I also know that if Miss Electra Lark is not returned soon to the Circle Ritz, someone will have to assume the duties of feeding and watering her reclusive Birman cat, Karma. And that will not be me! Every time I am around that mystical feline dame I get the heebie-jeebies. I do not know what the “heebie-jeebies” are (maybe a relative of cooties), but they are not conducive to the hair lying flat along my spine. Unless I wish to be known as the feline Rod Stewart, I will keep myself away from Karma and any hair-raising encounters.

In a way, though, I am glad this has happened. It will keep my MissTemple’s mind off her romantic dilemma. That is the trouble with romance, in my view; it always leads to dilemmas.

I advocate the way cats of my kind do it: wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, and off to one’s dudely pursuits until the next free-for-all called “heat” comes along.

Humans are so primitive in certain matters.

Chapter 7

Fatal Flair

Nicky Fontana himself escorted Temple to the scene of the crime after she’d left Electra at the registration desk doing volunteer work.

This was a relatively quiet corner of the ballroom holding dozens of Red Hat Sisterhood shopping booths and ringed by stages featuring products of allied interest.

It was all a girly shopper’s paradise, but with racks of clothing and feathers on three sides, the booth in question formed a perfect cul-de-sac for murder, now sheltered from the public gaze by freestanding screens. Inside them, yellow crime scene tape looked like a garish and tacky ribbon garlanding all the flower-shop reds, purples, lavenders, and pinks.

You’d have thought they were filming Crime Scene Investigation on-site. Worker bees were teeming over the body and its surrounding area. None of them were Attractive Babes Showing Lots of Cleavage on the job. None of them were Nerdy Young Brainy Guys with Possibilities.

They were just average working people, squinting through spectacles, wearing wrinkle-free khakis, and free of nipple-showing T-shirts and blouses. Their salaries were likely lower than hers, and she was a risk-laden freelancer.

Temple compared their ordinariness to their TV alter egos to avoid staring rudely at the corpse. But now she did.

Oleta Lark’s face was turned Temple’s way. She looked like a fallen department store mannequin lying there. Several were already on display in the ballroom, some of them decked out in unabashedly girly doses of pink and lavender. Oleta’s own skin color was still normal, lifelike, but her eyes were open and glassy, sightless, so unnervingly still. Her pink hat had fallen aside to reveal hair so highlighted that any base color was lost in the red-gold-brown blur.

Though the pink hat proclaimed her as under fifty, it wasn’t by much. The dead flesh was pasty and slack and her body had a sacklike look that an upright position and animation might have made hard to notice.

The Lolita of yesterday who’d stolen Electra’s husband had been history long before someone had wrapped the purple scarf dotted with red flowers around her neck and pulled until dead.

“The detectives okay this?” a CSI woman asked Temple, rising from the floor next to the corpse. She didn’t have chiseled features and a hot haircut. In fact, she had a double chin and a couple of not-telegenic zits.

“Detective Alch did,” Nicky said, turning on a hundred-watt smile. “I’m Nicky Fontana. This is my hotel, and this is my PR representative, Miss Barr. I want her to be able to give an accurate account of where we’re all not at on this.”

Nicky being modest and genuine was pretty irresistible. He may have been married, but he still had that Fontana brother charisma down pat.

The woman smiled.

“We’re just working the scene. Detective Alch will make what he sees fit available to the hotel and the press. If it’s okay with him that you gawk for a while, gawk. Even we won’t know a thing until the lab processes everything. It ain’t as fast as on TV.”

“Understood,” Nicky murmured.

Temple took that invitation at face value and gawked to take in more detail.

She’d seen a few dead bodies in her time and on her sensitive job of making Las Vegas safe for good news, not bad. She’d never seen a strangling victim before.

She’d been relieved that Oleta Lark’s tongue wasn’t extended and black in a pallid post-death face. The scarf wound around her neck did not cut into flaccid flesh like a piece of barbed wire. It looked like an accessory. There was a “Got Milk” ad slash of foam on her bright pink lipstick and her open blue eyes were bloodshot.

Still, if ever a wronged wife had wanted to see a rival brought down, this postmortem image would do it. Temple couldn’t have wished anything more demeaning on Kitty the Cutter, and God knew she had her reasons, number one being Max, number two being Matt.

Electra hadn’t done this. It would take not only strength but deep, long-simmering hatred to pull tighter and tighter until a body’s breath was just a memory. Temple couldn’t believe Electra would ever succumb to such a rage.

Temple liked to think no woman could or would do this, and most strangulation murderers were indeed men, something sexual about the process. Often they were sons of smothering mothers. But Temple had learned to know her own gender in all its proud and petty glory, and didn’t underestimate the female of the species.

Anyone would have the strength to do this, if determined: man or woman. And, face it; this was a convention of women drawn from all over the country. Grudges recognized no borders. Women were more than their ages, despite social assumptions that cast them as either pursuable young bunnies or uninteresting maternal mama rabbits.

Oleta had started out to be someone’s bunny and had ended up a helpless rabbit choked to death. But why?

For what she knew? For what she was?

Or for what she was not?

Chapter 8

Honorary Older Women

“Okay,” Temple told Electra when they were safely back in the bosom of the Red Hat Sisterhood thronging the hotel’s main floor. “You haven’t been arrested. Yet. Su would love to; Alch is Mr. Wait-and-See. I need to be on the scene.”

“But here you are! And you work for the hotel.”

“No. I need better credentials. A reason to be able to enter all the convention event rooms. And,” she added, spotting Kit’s hand waving above the milling hats as her aunt spied them and darted forward, “it wouldn’t hurt to have Aunt Kit on our side.”

“Easy,” Electra said. “We get you both registered for the convention. We could say she’s a Red Hat hottie from Manhattan. I’ve been handling registration among some other things. That’s it! We have the Sinsinatti Reds chapter. Why not the Ragin’ Red Manhattan Hatties? And you? You’re such a baby. You have to be a Pink Hat.”

“So think Pink.”

Electra cupped her double chin in her hand and thought. She straightened, grinning. “I know! You solve crimes, right?”

“Sometimes.”

“The Hot Pink Panthers chapter!”

“Seems to me a lot of the Red Hat Sisterhood chapter names use the word ‘hot.’ Is there a hidden statement in that?”

“Hat. Hot. They’re so close. I guess we think women who wear hats are hot.”

Kit joined them. “Make mine pink.”

“That’s cheating,” Temple said.

“What’s cheating?” a passing Red Hat woman stopped to ask with the speed of an ice skater turning on the toe of a blade. All three were struck dumb with guilt.

“It’s great to see new members enlisting at the convention,” she went on. “Are you from Las Vegas?”

“I’m from Las Vegas,” Electra said quickly. “The Red-Hatted League chapter.”

“I’m a Vegasite too,” Temple admitted.

“Manhattan:’ Kit said.

“Wonderful! I’m Jeanne Johnson.”

The name struck Temple as familiar. Maybe because it was a good Nordic Minnesota name and Jeanne Johnson had that natural blond, semiathletic look about her. Like she could ski down an Alp on tennis racquets if she had to, enjoying the below-zero windchill. In other words, one cheerfully determined woman.

Then Temple got it, encouraged by Electra’s elbow digging into her side. She’d seen the name in the Red Hat Sisterhood program book she’d been studying.

“Oh! You’re the founder.”

Jeanne released a six-hundred-watt grin.

“My official title is ‘Her Royal Hatness.’ Who would have believed that we supposedly over-the-hill dames can all don tiaras and be queens of our own inclusive kingdom? Who would have believed in a few short years we’d be a national phenomenonwith hundreds of thousands of members? It’s all based on a poem, you know. Not many organizations are.”

“A poem:’ Kit asked. “That’s pretty amazing. Something from Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale?”

“No, it’s by Jenny Joseph, about a woman musing that when she’s older she’ll indulge herself by wearing purple, and a red hat that doesn’t go with it by conventional standards.”

“Free spirit:’ Kit summed up.

“Exactly. Women of a certain age often find themselves with empty nests, or divorced or widowed, with no intense job commitments and falling faces and fannies. The Red Hat Sisterhood encourages them to band together. Sure, we have crazy, mixed-up fun, but we have a thirst for moving in new directions and mutual support too. And even spreading good cheer among the less fortunate than we.”

“I can’t wait until I’m a full Red Hatter,” Temple said, catching Red Hat fever.

Her Royal Hatness assumed a sober expression. “We’d love to have you then, but don’t wish your youth away. Too many women do. Now, what can I do for you? You looked at a loss standing here.”

So Temple explained the difficulty straight out.

“Oh.” Jeanne’s natural buoyancy flattened. “That killing was awful. The hotel was wonderful about sparing the poor woman public display, and the police have been cooperative too.”

“That’s important in Las Vegas,” Temple said.

“That’s why they and the hotel want Temple keeping an eye on things,” Electra said proudly. “She’s got a knack for spotting killers.”

“Only I don’t want any killers spotting me:’ Temple said, “so we were trying to figure out how I could go undercover as a member. You hide a leaf in a forest, and here you’d hide your presence in a hat.”

“I’d certainly like this matter settled as soon as possible,” Jeanne said. “I’m Queen. I’ll name you an honorary member, Temple.”

“And my aunt too? I could use a partner.”

“And Miss—”

“Carlson,” Kit said.

“Ah. And Miss Carlson too.” She ushered them to one of the registration stations and whispered her instructions to the wearer of the red hat there.

“This would be wonderful,” Jeanne Johnson said as she turned back to them, “if a woman and an honorary Red Hat Sisterhood member found whoever killed Oleta Lark.”

She glanced at Electra’s name tag with sudden concern. “A relative?”

“Once removed.” By a murderer.

“No wonder you want your crime-solving friends present and accounted for, Electra! Carry on, Hatters, and do us proud.”

The royal audience ended with Jeanne Johnson grinning as she produced two enameled pink-hat brooches with the Red Hat Sisterhood logo. She dropped them into Kit’s and Temple’s purple canvas convention bags filled with informational sheets, convention programs, and favors from bars of soap to decks of playing cards.

“Good luck on your serious quest, but remember to have fun!”

“That’s an order everyone would like to take,” Temple commented, but Kit looked a bit chagrined.

As they left Electra at the registration desk with her Red Hat friends, Kit caught Temple’s elbow in a death grip to steer her out of hearing range.

“Aldo must never hear of this,” she said, pulling Temple aside from the crowded registration lines. “That I’m really qualified to be a Red Hat.”

“Yes. I mean, no! Never. But he knows that you’re my aunt. I don’t buy the dumb hunk thing. Can’t he do simple arithmetic?”

“Aldo is an emperor of enterprise. He just thinks you’re as old as you look, sixteen, and that I was your mother’s youngest, hippest, most not-Midwestern sister.”

“This whole Red Hat Sisterhood movement wants women to be proud of their lives and ages and futures.”

“Right. Meanwhile, I got myself listed in Actors Equity as ten years younger ages ago and I’m not going to lose that edgenow. Not even for you, niece, would I go undercover as an over-fifty. You or your landlady, the old darling.”

“You and Electra are probably about the same age, Kit, although you don’t look it.”

Kit sighed her deep relief. “There is some advantage in short stature and a slight frame. You are going to inherit it, dear niece, so honor my position now because someday you’ll be here.”

“I hope so, because you’re a pretty cool lady. If you want to think Aldo digs you for the age on your Actors’ Equity card, fine.”

Temple was a legitimate Pink Lady, but not the youngest. She spied a few twenty-something daughters accompanying their mothers. For her trouble, she’d scored a truly darling name tag: a hot pink miniature straw hat with feathers framing her name on the front: Temple.

Kit’s shorter name fit her miniature pink hat much better, but she was cheating. In every respect.

“So we are both Pink Ladies,” Kit noted, “for the record. Lord, every time I hear that phrase I could use a drink. How do we do this undercover sleuth stuff?”

“We’re registered, but first we must find the proper hats to disguise us and announce our status.”

Luckily, the convention store, called the Hatorium Emporium, was mostly set up. Temple and Kit trolled the aisles, trying on hats and giggling like five-year-olds until both had suitable chapeaux, wide-brimmed for purposes of disguise.

“Short women aren’t supposed to wear wide-brimmed hats,” Temple told Kit.

“Pink Hat women don’t worry about silly fashion rules.”

“Is mine too … bridesmaid-y?”

Kit stepped back to assess. The hat was pink with a lavender touch, both colors permitted the under-fifty Pink Lady member. Temple had figured she might actually wear the hot pink straw hat later, after removing the pale pink cloud of marabou feathers and cluster of silk lavender flowers around the crown.

“It’s utterly charming, Temple,” Kit said. “You look like an angel. And I’d say it was more bridal than ‘bridesmaid-y.’ “

Temple felt her cheeks pink to match the marabou. She hadn’t announced her marital potential to anyone yet.

“Well, yours is a showstopper,” Temple told Kit in turn.

The front of Kit’s wide-brimmed pink straw was a huge, rhinestone-dotted organdy bow anchored with pink satin roses and wisps of ostrich feathers.

“The hat! The hat,” Kit intoned in a Broadway musical style as she spun to display the back. “The hat is nothing ratty. The hat! The hat! Is that which makes us all look batty!”

“Batty is beautiful,” Temple interrupted. “Golly, I’m glad I’m still a temporary blond. Pink would do nothing for my natural red hair color, and vice versa.”

“Speaking of blond and unnatural,” Kit said, stopping in midstep. “What or who is that?”

“Oh, Lord. I hope it’s not another of Electra’s husband’s ex-wives. That would be too much of a coincidence to bear.”

“The whole entourage is too much to bear,” Kit murmured, pulling Temple aside so the oncoming parade could pass.

It was led by a woman on hot-pink stilettos, crowned by a hot pink hat with a brim so wide it would suffice to shade an elephant. Even so, it barely shaded the cleavage on her Pamela Anderson–size enhanced Hollywood breasts. The woman was pulled along by two tiny pink-dyed Chihuahuas on rhinestone-studded leashes.

She was trailed by an assistant attired in pink checks who toted two pink canvas pet carriers and was followed by a large brass luggage trolley that had been mugged by a pink polka-dot matched set of baggage.

Temple let her jaw drop in horror.

Kit eyed her sagely. “You know her.”

“To my everlasting regret. Surely a former actress like you has heard of Savannah Ashleigh.”

Kit pulled her red-framed reading glasses off her nose to stare at the entourage in naked disbelief.

“She makes Pamela Anderson look like Oscar material. And all that pink. She’s no more under fifty than I am! Oh!” Kit cupped her mouth and looked around, but no Fontana brothers were lurking to overhear her confession.

“That woman,” Temple said, “has made this town headquarters for the rotten actress retirement home. She’s the one who wanted to slice the balls off Midnight Louie.”

“No! Well, those pink Chihuahuas looked pretty neutered.”

“I’ve got to find out what Savannah Ashleigh is doing here. Could you amble over and grill her, Auntie? She kinda really hates me since I took her to People’s Court and won.”

“This will be like grilling an unzipped banana,” Kit promised. “I’ll smash her.”

She skittered over on her low-heeled slides to stand in the registration line behind the lady in question.

Not that Savannah was content to wait in line. Oh, no. Apparently Temple hadn’t needed an undercover agent aunt. Savannah was broadcasting live from the Crystal Phoenix lobby.

“I do not do lines, unless they’re waiting for my autographs. I am the celebrity emcee of this shebang and should have a prestige suite waiting for me, and mine.” She beamed upon the yappy pink Chihuahuas. “Taco! Belle! Hush, babies.”

Taco and Bell? Temple thought, cattily. Are we angling to be a fast-food commercial huckster as well as an over-the-hill Paris Hilton wannabe?

Kit came skittering back. “What a bad name that woman gives airhead starlets. You heard, I presume. Her voice has the projection quality of a buzz saw.”

Since both Kit and Temple had been blessed with arresting, slightly raspy voices to counterbalance their petite size, that was saying something.

“Hey, Kit. I just realized that I’m a dumb blonde now, just like Savannah. At least she might not recognize me.”

A shriek erupted at the front desk area. Savannah was prettily perched atop her hot pink luggage trolley as if she’d seen a mouse.

Actually, Temple saw, she’d just glimpsed Midnight Louie sniffing around the pink canvas pet carriers, which must contain Savannah’s Persian cats, Yvette and Solange. The Crystal Phoenix was a favorite hangout of his.

“That cat is a criminal!” Savannah shrieked. “Arrest him. He wants to rape my babies.”

Bellmen came running over, but Louie had dashed under the cart. He wasn’t there when the bellmen went on their knees to look (and possibly to look up Savannah’s miniskirt). He’d pulled a disappearing act under everybody’s noses. That made Temple think of Max. She began patting down her tote bag for the lump of her cell phone.

Meanwhile, Savannah opened the fancy pet carriers with maternal panic. Out pussyfooted the shaded golden Persian, Solange, wearing a red hat with purple flowers, and the shaded silver Persian, Yvette, with a red marabou boa around her neck and edging her purple cape and a red pillbox hat tied to her silver-platinum head.

Camera lights sparked as Red Hat Sisterhood ladies circled around, taking dozens of photos of Savannah and her red hat cats and pink-dyed pooches, who also wore pink hats, one a fedora (must be the boy, Taco) and one a beret (the putative girl, Bell). Or Belle, rather. Bellwhether? Temple stood unmoving, dazed by the possibilities.

But never underestimate an alley cat born and bred. Into the sea of red and purple dashed a flash of solid black. When it disappeared, Taco was whimpering and sitting on his tail, hatless as well as hairless.

Temple let her mouth drop open.

“Who was that masked cat?” Kit asked.

“All I can say is that Louie was forced to wear a flamingo-pink fedora in a cat food commercial when we were in New York last Christmas. I think Taco’s semi-sombrero is dog meat.”

“What a nuthouse. No wonder the second Mrs. Lark was killed with no one caught red-handed at the scene. With everybody wearing a red or pink hat, who’s to say who did what to whom? It’s like costuming; if it works, nobody can see past it.”

“You’re absolutely right, Kit. It’s even possible the wrong victim died.”

“Now that’s a thought. That would clear Electra lickety-split.”

“Nothing about crime solving is lickety-split.”

Even as they spoke a wave of cool neutral colors washedinto the tide of red and purple. Nicky’s brothers, calming and charming the troubled waters.

Emilio bent and came up holding Taco and Belle, while Armando captured Yvette and Solange. Julio escorted Savannahto the elevators, color-coordinated pets in tow. Giuseppe and the second youngest, Ralph, were doing duty as community photographers. Their impeccable Italian tailored suit coats hung with a half-dozen instant cameras as they obligingly photographed groups of Red Hat ladies posing naughtily for the camera, knees cocked and hands on generous hips. In Italy, women of substance were considered sexy, so Red Hat lady and Fontana brother had met their match.

“Ridiculous,” Kit sniffed, no doubt worrying about Aldo amid all these happy hussies. “Women my age and older preening like fading chorus girls in front of the entire world.”

A solo Fontana brother waltzed up to Temple; no lavish, wide-brimmed hat could fool a fine Italian eye. Besides, he’d inadvertently spent some recent time around her, so she recognized him immediately.

“Our difficult guest,” Aldo told her, “is assured that Midnight Louise will no longer trouble her purse pooches. Any ideas how I can indeed ensure that?”

“Of course!” Temple said. “The Crystal Phoenix is Midnight Louise’s beat now, not Louie’s. Funny, even I took that black speedball for Louie. He was framed!”

Mixing up the two black cats also underlined Kit’s point that everybody in the Red Hat Sisterhood was inadvertently in disguise.

Aldo had other things on his mind than cats and hats.

“Where, my lovely MissTemple, is your delightful aunt? I seem to have lost her in this parade of feminine fripperies. Never have I seen so many bright, and large, hats.”

Kit, hidden by her huge pink brim, turned sheepishly to lift her face and also admit her membership in the silly sisterhood.

“Bellissima! Is this you under that charming chapeau? Such a blazing pink is certainly your color.”

“Hot pink,” Temple corrected him.

Aldo’s dark eyes grew mock-rebuking. “I did not wish to compromise your adorable relative’s reputation in a public place, but it is indeed a very … hot … pink.” On the last word he touched his forefinger to Kit’s lips.

Well, Temple thought, she’d swoon right there and toodignified-to-preen Kit was blushing the same color as her hat. It was nice to know the older woman was still capable of blushing, although a dreadful facial flush called rosacea was another thing Kit had mentioned the aging belle had to fight.

“Go and have a Pink Lady with Aldo, Kit, in the Crystal Bar. I’ll snoop around here and head back to the Circle Ritz once I can pry Electra from her volunteer post.”

Actually, Kit looked terribly smart in her hat as she ambled away. She didn’t walk off “into the sunset” with Aldo, because, thanks to the hat, she was the sunset.

Temple spared a couple minutes to take in the scene.

It looked as if the giant blown-glass blossoms from the huge Chihuly chandelier at the Bellagio had drifted down to cover every female head in sight.

If the advance guard of six hundred Red Hat Sisterhood members could command such a presence in a Las Vegas hotel lobby, then the incoming five thousand should really take over the old town. The press was sure to giggle at this overblown convention of aging women refusing to be invisible, but Temple felt a sinister chill.

It reminded her of the Father Brown mysteries (which she’d quietly started reading a year or so ago in honor of meeting an ex-Catholic priest). Luckily, the modest, often-overlooked British priest-detective (no Red Hat candidate in any context, he) bore not the slightest resemblance to a certain modem American ex-priest, Matt. Her Matt. That thought felt so right.

But the Father Brown stories were philosophical, even metaphysical and often metaphorical. She remembered one about “where would you hide a leaf?” The answer was “in a forest,” only, in the story, the leaf was a murdered body and the forest was a battlefield.

The Crystal Phoenix was a different kind of battlefield now, against aging, not death itself. But the issues and motives could be as desperate. Every woman attending the convention hadlived long enough to have a story, to be the heroine or villain of one. Maybe it was all jovial girly celebration, but loss and heartbreak had to be lurking in the background.

And Temple was one who didn’t believe that murder had a gender, despite all the dead lovelies on the crime-show autopsy tables.

Women could kill as well as die, and she knew her bubbly landlady had firmly landed in the unpleasant police category labeled “under suspicion.”

Chapter 9

No Kitting

I have decided to take a small detour from the lobby, since my natural territorial urges have caused a stir.

No dog crosses Midnight Louie’s path unpunished, even if it is the size of an English muffin and dyed pink.

My step is firm and my heart is high, for I have seen the Ashleigh sisters all togged out in felt and feathers and buttons and bows and know that I can pursue both this case and my personal interests.

Right now these interests are invested in the Delightful Solange, she of the honey-blond hair. Since her sister, formerly the Divine Yvette, now busted down–in my book–to the Supine Yvette, snubbed me for being common and possibly having an alley cat for an ancestor and a daughter, I have reconsideredmy preference for the shaded silver over the shaded golden Persian.

Solange is sweet and affable where Yvette is sour and demanding.

I will always choose sweet over sour.

I am making my way to my former office, the canna lily stand by the koi pond, when a bolt of cold black lightning knocks me over near the hotel service entrance.

Bolt lightning may be cold, but this particular edition is hot, and bothered.

“Traitor!” it says, hissing and spitting and thoroughly dampening my impeccable shirtfront. “Lazy, self-serving, koi-sucking, no-good, overweight layabout, poor excuse for a partner, tail-chasing son of a–”

This is getting serious and I raise my dukes. Also my mitts. And my tail.

“Nobody disses my esteemed dam, Ma Barker.”

“I was about to say ‘lazy, self-serving, koi-sucking, no-good son of an overweight layabout’ at Lake Mead.”

I let my guard down. “When did you hear about my old man, Three O’clock Louie?”

“When I had a little heart-to-heart with your old lady, Ma Barker.”

I sit down and restore an eyebrow to its usual pasted-down suave state. “Louise, Louise, Louise. You have got to do something about that hot temper of yours.”

“I am hot? When you’re easing on through to take over my spot at the rear of the Crystal Phoenix? I am the house muscle here now.”

“Your spot was my spot once. I am merely taking the opportunity to survey my old stomping grounds.”

“Well, prepare to get stomped. I thought you were going to help me nail whoever engineered Mr. Max’s fatal fall at the Neon Nightmare. I guess you do not care that your so-called MissTemple is missing one major boyfriend in action.”

“My MissTemple has plenty of action to handle these days. Our esteemed landlady, Miss Electra Lark, is suspected of murder one in this very hotel on this very day.”

This news forces Miss Midnight Louise to sit on her highly haired tail to think things over for a change.

“So that is why you are here. Hmm, two disasters in two days, both connected to the Circle Ritz. You might want to think about relocating, Pop.”

“Just when I have gotten Ma Barker and her street gang moved to the CR for some TLC of a human sort? No way.”

“Speaking of ‘CR,’ is Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina on this new murder case? And what is with all the dames in purple wall-to-wallow T-shirts and scarlet wide-brims. You would think this was a vintage car convention.”

“It is a vintage person convention,” I tell Louise, “and there has already been a murder. I did intend to concentrate on Mr. Max’s sudden fail from grace, quite literally, but I have had my mitts full on this end.”

Oddly enough, Miss Midnight Louise does not jump down my throat for once.

“I have been over the Neon Nightmare for the past day and a half like a spider on a web, and that turns out to be an apt figure of speech. The place is riddled with secret rooms and passages.”

“I am not surprised, Louise, having already explored that territory. The building is designed as a pyramid and you know what mazes of treasures and dead bodies lay hidden inside those for centuries.”

“That is exactly it, Daddikins.”

I cringe at her latest sarcastic endearment for me, but I listen to her report.

“Mr. Max’s gear and illusions are housed up under the pointed inner roof, but the angled walls have all sorts of rooms, visited by all sorts of persons.”

“Such as?” I have some insight into the inner workings of the Neon Nightmare but want to see what the chit has discovered on her own.

She leans close and whispers in my ear. Too bad she is not an Ashleigh sister. “Other magicians. Some of them had seen him fall and they are not alarmed.”

“How so?““They think it was a ruse, that he is not dead.”

“Glory, hallelujah. The newspaper item reported he had died, but perhaps the press rushed to judgment. You cannot believe everything you read in the press. Sometimes you cannot believe anything?”

“If the Synth is right. They also think Mr. Max was the Phantom Mage. That he robbed the exhibition of the Czar’s Scepter, and then vanished to avoid the pursuit of the law.”

“Makes sense in the usual devious Mr. Max manner.”

“They think he will return in time, to join them in their aims.”

“Which are?”

“Do not ask me. They were not about to lay them out for whoever might be eavesdropping. There are aims, and these people have them. Mr. Max was supposed to be part of all this and they still hope that he is merely a clever criminal who will return to their treacherous bosoms.”

“And you think, Louise? That he is still alive and will return?”

“I think the jury is out on that one, but if he is dead and anyone is to blame, it is one or more of those so-called magicians who own, operate, and haunt Neon Nightmare and may have secret plans of their very own.”

Chapter 10

Mad Hattery

Temple was still super pleased with herself for having aced Electra out of the Lalique Suite without any charges being levied.

When they rendezvoused again by the registration area, Electra cooed over the dainty charms of Temple’s new pink hat.

“Enough girly noises,” Temple said. “We’ve got to sit down and hammer out this murder situation. The police may be playing hands-off at the moment, but you’re still their most viable suspect. The woman was your long-ago rival, after all.”

Electra grimaced. “As I said, I didn’t know who she was until I saw the name tag and then I did feel like decking her. You notice that I said ‘decked,’ not ‘killed.’ “

“How reassuring.““Are you mad at me, Temple?”

“No. I’m mad at the cops. I thought Alch knew better. Su is always ready to roll at any hint of guilt, but I always thought of Morrie Alch as a favorite uncle—”

“I am not interested in your favorite uncle, dear girl! I need an alibi. I need a sharp defense lawyer.” Electra took a deep breath. “Sorry, I’m frazzled down to my purple roots. What now, Pink Pussycat?” she asked.

“We go home and you tell me even more about your third husband and his second wife. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt if you told me about all your husbands and any other wives in common you might have out there.

“Then we discuss every second of your involvement in this convention and the Red Hat Sisterhood.”

“Oh, my, just those two subjects are a book and a half.”

“Then we need to figure out how the cops found out the victim was your ex’s wife so fast.”

“Oh! That’s right. Someone must have squealed on me.”

“We say ‘prejudiced the authorities against you.’ `Squealed’ went out with Edward J. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney.”

“Well, those boys may be dead, but I’m not. We dames outlive ‘em.”

“Sad but true,” Temple said, “and very interesting.”

“How so?”

“Maybe your ex died and something’s at stake, like his estate?’ “I wouldn’t have any interest in that.”

“No, but maybe your successor did.”

“Oh! Elmore always was a hustler. Maybe he hustled himself into something lucrative and she inherited.”

“Who would stand to gain by her death?”

Electra’s skin took on a lavender hue to match her purple hair. “That would be Elmore’s and my only son, Curtiss.”

“Oh. I guess we’d better look elsewhere then, Electra.”

“Yes. He’s a good kid, Temple. Well, good young man.”

“And where does he live now?”

“Tucson, last I knew.”

“And Elmore?”

“Reno.”

“I thought you met and married him in Florida. He moved to Nevada, really?”

“Last I heard from Curtiss. We usually only talk by phone on holidays and birthdays.”

Temple nodded sympathetically. Families were far-flung nowadays, although she could wish that young Curtiss was more far-flung from the Las Vegas scene of this crime than Tucson.

She’d have to get Electra home to the Circle Ritz, sit right down, and draw out a family tree. With five ex-spouses and assorted offspring, that would be a big job.

“The way it was,” Electra explained in her cool, shadowed penthouse living room, “is that my dad ran out on the family. I was raised by my mom and a stepdad, and he was funny.”

“Tell me you don’t mean ‘funny’ the way I think you do,” Temple said.

“I do. Only back then nobody admitted it. I ran away from high school before I graduated. First there was Darren. That fizzled mighty quick. I then married Billy on the road to Daytona Beach. We split about six months later. I kept finding guys who were going to take me ‘away from all this,’ except ‘all this’ was myself and my background. Elmore Lark hit me in my early thirties. He was a cardsharp and hustler, but he cleaned up good in those days. By the time I found out he was a two-timer, I was ready to escape with my sanity and his last name.”

“Was he unfaithful to you with this dead woman?”

“Hell yes, the little hussy. And they—or she—had the nerve to send me a wedding notice. That’s what got me into the wedding chapel business when I moved to Las Vegas later, that tacky card from a chapel out on Highway 95. I decided I wanted to give people ceremonies to remember. Maybe it would keep them together longer.”

“You think so?”

“Maybe not, but at least they might have some nice memories. I didn’t have nice memories of most of my marriages, and I finally realized it was because I didn’t have nice memories of my family life.”

“Gosh, Electra. I’ve always seen you as this energetic entrepreneur, not as a desperate housewife racing from marriage to marriage.”

“You mean you always thought I was a free spirit, not a Stepford Wife. Why do you think I evolved into a free spirit?”

“So you knew about her becoming the new Mrs. Elmore Lark?”

“Yeah, as I said, from the cheesy wedding announcement photo she just had to send me almost thirty years ago. But she didn’t look at all like herself in her Pink Lady outfit here and now.”

“Not a great alibi. Okay,” Temple said. “What about the other ex-husbands? Don’t you want to know where they might be?”

“No,” Electra said. “Tasmania or Outer Mongolia would be good.”

“You are not a great advertisement for the Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel attached to this very building.”

“Maybe not, but why are you so interested?”

Temple twisted a pale blond bleached lock around her forefinger. “I might want your services. Sometime.”

“You? Married? When? I thought Max, your main man, had to remain undercover and under the covers.”

“He does. Nothing’s changed there.”

“Oh, then. Oh. My dear!” Electra grabbed Temple’s right hand and crushed it to her large, soft, purple-knit bosom. “It’s that darling boy Matt! At last!”

“Darling, but not a boy, Electra.” Temple extracted her hand. “We really don’t have time to discuss my love life when your formerly wedded life could get you tried on a count of murder one.”

“Irises. No canna lilies. Violets? No, something showy, bird of paradise! Music. He loves Bob Dylan, did you know? Say, there’s that one with a wedding march tempo! The one about his love speaking in silence—”

“I’ve never spoken in silence, Electra.”

“You could start. Certainly you’ll have to be silent for the wedding vows until called upon.” Electra’s blue eyes teared up. “I feel like … a matchmaker.”

Temple was remembering the song Electra had mentioned. “Love Minus Zero/No Limit.” It did have a solemn, ceremonial tempo, and the singer’s “love” was “true” as fire and ice. That line made her squirm instead of smile. She’d warned Matt: breaking up was hell to do.

“Electra! Forget my fantasy wedding. Your ex-love walks in anonymity and where is the dirty dog if his second wife is dead? I’d love to make him suspect number one.”

“Elmore? He wouldn’t hurt a flypaper.”

“Not what we want to hear, or say. I want to know the name of all of your exes, and all post-you liaisons they had, including wives, and any descendants.”

“That’s a lot of family tree to come up with on the fly, my dear.”

“Your family. Your tree. Your job. I’m heading back to the Crystal Phoenix to find out what the gossip is. With that many women flocking around, it’s got to be choice.”

Electra had sat herself down at her forties blond mahogany dining table, lined note sheet and fountain pen in hand.

“You go ahead, dear. I’ll alert my Red Hat Sisterhood chapter to rush to the scene to assist you.”

“Really, Electra, I doubt I need their help when I’ve got the Fontana brothers at my beck and call. And my aunt Kit.”

“But my chapter members will fit in where the Fontana boys won’t.”

Temple sighed and headed back. The last thing she needed was to be drowned in red and purple until death-solved did them part.

Chapter 11

Old Flame-Points

I must admit that middle-aged human dames in extreme colors are not particularly attractive to me, unless they are wearing feathers.

And most of these Red Hat Sisterhood attendees are. Hubba hubba!

There is enough feather flaunting around here to keep me on the prowl and ready to pounce for a month.

I cannot share this personal peccadillo with my partner in crime solving at Midnight Inc. Investigations. Miss Midnight Louise is the straitlaced sort who disapproves of shenanigans. And all these Red Hat Sisterhood ladies have come to Las Vegas to have shenanigans.

Me, I am a shamus and we shamuses like shenanigans.

So I bob and weave through this plethora of feathered feminine pulchritude milling in the Crystal Phoenix lobby and beyond. Alas, my short stature often gets me overlooked. Who made tall dudes king? Besides some Big and Tall Man shop?

Well, that “man” part is a bit of a handicap for me too.

Although my heart goes out to my MissTemple as she struggles to keep this major celebration event happy despite the intervention of ugly human emotions resulting in murder, I have my own fish to fry.

Now that Louise is off following up on her Mr. Max fixation, I make my way over miles of casino floor to the pool out back again, where once I hung up my shingle as house detective, and where under the towering canna lilies, I received clients.

Of course, my old stomping grounds are only a huff and a puff away from the Crystal Phoenix pool area. I cannot admit a partiality to coconut oil. Fish oil is another kettle of … well, you know.

I gaze into the limpid depths of the carp pond. I watch the mermaid seductions of fluid fin and tail. Koi. Each one worth a month or more of my MissTemple’s employ. Once I hunted here, simply hungry, and their worth was the equal of my survival. Now that I am established, I understand that I cannot dine on EpiKorean delicacies unless I pay for them in advance.

Such is the price of success.

Still, I miss the good old days of daring survival. I miss hankering to move above my station in life.

What reminds me of this is the sight of Miss Savannah Ashleigh sunning her silicone and collagen in a string bikini. “String” is the word for MSA. I am more attracted by the two pink canvas carriers under her lounge chair and her coconut-oil dripping body. That woman needs an oil pan change!

I edge over the hot tiles despite my worries.

Two carriers, sizzling hot pink. Two residents, both pink at the ears and nose, or just hot-tempered.

I approach on velvet paws, sniff carefully. I look in one carrier and see my once-smitten now-snooty diva passed out colder than the Crystal Phoenix’s buffet-line salmon.

I butt canvas with the other carrier.

A brick-red purebred nose pushes against its black mesh side.

“Louie?” a low voice whispers on a hint of pure Persian purr. “Solange?”

“Louie!”

“Solange!”

It is your classic noir dialogue. Full of unsaid … little nothings.

“Yvette is in the adjacent carrier,” Solange points out, literally sticking a pale scimitar of nail through the mesh in the right direction.

“I saw. So I should care?”

“She will not waken. She is so high-strung that our mistress gives her Prozac for her nerves.”

“I do not approve of doping animal companions, but in this case it permits us to conduct our affairs in confidence.”

“Oh, Louie.”

“Oh, Solange.”

“I am sorry. I do not want you to see me now. I am forced to wear this pansy hat of red and purple. I do not think it flatters my coloring.”

“Your coloring goes with everything, especially … black.”

“Oh, Louie.”

“Oh, Solange.”

“I cannot … betray my sister.”

“Betray? No. I merely need an on-event guide?”

“First, you must free me I do not have these mini-saber-tooth canines for nothing. I use one to pull down the zipper of her container.

Miss Solange steps out, a muff of glorious golden fur tipped with the divine color, black.

Her petite face is surmounted by a bonnet of purple straw covered with purple pansies and crimson roses. She looks like a Victorian Valentine’s Day postcard.

I tell her so.

“My, you are well traveled, Louie. I do not believe that I have ever seen a Victorian Valentine’s Day postcard.”

“They are all very feminine and elaborate, like you and the Red Hat ladies.”

“My mistress will be distraught about my unauthorized liberty.”

I snort, despite the delicate company. “Your mistress is sucking up to those annoying Mexican hairless dogs, the better to pass as Paris Hilton and her ilk. Taco Belle indeed! Cheesy, cheesy, cheesy!”

“We have felt relegated to second place of late.”

“You and–?”

“My sister Yvette,” she whispers in my ear, so close that her vibrissae exchange feints with my vibrissae. (Whiskers to you human types out there.) This is a very titillating conversation. “Your sister Yvette,” I tell her, “is in my bad books now.”

“You mean for her slurs against your associate who may be a blood relative?”

“Right,” I say, knowing that the only way Miss Midnight Louise will be an admitted blood relative of mine is if we mix it up.

However, since Miss Midnight Louise now has my job of house detective at the Crystal Phoenix, the only way we could come to blows is if she got between me and my koi. And I have swom off the expensive show fish. Too big and chewy for the refined palate of a dude-about-town.

“I find Midnight Louise very pretty and agreeable,” Solange says.

Well, that is Solange’s generous take on a brutal world, and who is to say it is not superior to my own cynical point of view, honed by my sharp incisors?

“If a guy has got to have a partner,” I concede, “she is pretty okay.”

“Louie!” Solange shivers until her thickly furred coat collar tickles my shoulder. Somebody ought to outlaw that move. “You play the tough guy but you are all pussycat underneath.”

Not all, baby. Oh, well. I am supposed to be the gentleman here, not to mention the private dick enlisting a house spy.

“Now, here are the names I need you to recognize, Solange. Just let the ladies pick you up and pet you, and keep those shell-pink little inner ears perked and recording what they say.”

She nods soberly and follows me over the hot tiles to the air-conditioned dim interior of the Crystal Phoenix.

Cacophony and voices echo off all the hard lobby surfaces, marble, wood, granite, glass. Scooters bearing Red Hat ladies dart over the shiny marble floor like water bugs.

We need to be on our toes, making like Mexican jumping beans to avoid getting our nether members run over.

“I see what you mean, Louie. This place is a death-bymisadventure waiting to happen?”

I begin to worry that Solange is too sensitive a soul to do undercover work.

Then a scooter wheels past and she lofts up to the seat like a Hell’s Angel mascot born.

“Oooh!” cries a passing Red Hat lady, gawking at Solange in her flowery and feathery chapeau. “What an adorable cat! And that hat! Where did you get her?”

The rider shrugs purple shoulders. “She just jumped aboard.”

“What a darling! I’ll walk along with you a little so I can pet her.”

“Be my guest.”

“Did you hear what happened off the lobby yesterday?”

“No, I just got in.”

“Someone got killed!”

“No! Not one of us?”

“Yes! And they’re saying another of us did it.”

Off goes the Gossipmobile, Solange installed like a beauty queen on a parade float. A PI never had a sweeter eavesdropping machine!

Chapter 12

Old Acquaintances

If anything, more Red Hat ladies crowded the Crystal Phoenix lobby when Temple returned from the Circle Ritz.

If anything on earth was purple, or red, or purple and red, it was gathered in this lobby. Rolling luggage bags boasted these royal colors, as did clothing, tote bags, purses, scarves, shoes, hose, nail polish (red or purple), and eye shadow (only in purple, thank God).

The gaudiest women, dripping red and purple feather boas and scarlet lace, plume, and rhinestone-swagged Victorian-size hats, posed on a huge photo poster announcing “Candy Crenshaw and the Red Hat Candies,” Candy being the lead singer and “clown princess.”

Pink-hatted ladies, like herself, stood out, but there stillwere a fair number. It occurred to Temple that a mad serial killer of pink-hatted ladies might be at work here. If so, she had firmly put herself among the potential victims.

This was not a new feeling for her, but she had a new significant other now. Matt might not be as easy about that as Max had been, because he was tied to a job and couldn’t watch over her the way Max had.

The feeling of total responsibility for herself was heady. She’d sometimes resented Max’s omniscient ways in regard to her life and how she lived it. And risked it.

Yet she worried that Matt would be a lot less liberal than Max about the times her PR work turned into PI work. Still, he’d recognized her sleuthing tendency almost as soon as they’d met.

So if she was so liberated, why was she standing there dithering about what Matt or Max would think? She needed to know what she thought about the problem at hand.

There were many reasons someone might have killed Oleta Lark, none having anything to do with the Red Hat Sisterhood or Oleta’s skimpy relationship to Electra.

Temple strolled into the ballroom housing all the Red Hat shops. Oleta’s body was gone now, but the murder scene might not have been “released” yet.

As always in Las Vegas, any major Strip crime scene was quickly concealed. A uniformed Crystal Phoenix security guard in a tasteful black-and-tan uniform kept the public from wandering behind the freestanding screens. A pair of Fontana brothers cruised the area, easily drawing away the eyes of arriving Red Hat Sisters.

A third Fontana brother buttonholed Temple, recognizing her despite her new pink hat.

She didn’t think of Nicky Fontana as one of Fontana Inc. He was the youngest, cutest Fontana brother, but cast in the same winning mold of olive skin, black curly hair, deep brown eyes, and supernaturally white teeth that probably had inspired the rush to whiteners in the rest of the population.

He was also married and fixed in position as owner of the Crystal Phoenix, while his brothers still rambled the Strip and painted the town red hot nightly.

“You sure got literally undercover on the scene quick,” Nicky said. “Nice disguise. What was also nice was finally getting to meet your aunt. I can see where you get some of your spunk. But a little birdie rumor has it that that this relative of yours might be breaking up that old, brotherly gang of mine. Any truth to that rumor?”

For a moment, Temple didn’t get it. Then she nodded, forgetting that would set her wide hat brim atremor.

Nicky ducked getting nicked in the chin by the coiled organdy.

“Sorry,” she said. “I should renounce head gestures while wearing this getup. You must be referring to my aunt, Kit Carlson, and your eldest brother, Aldo. I might have introduced them. Sort of.”

“My uncle, Macho Mario, is hearing wedding bells. We haven’t had a wedding in the family since I married Van. I don’t know what got into Aldo, except seeing that red hair that you usually sport on your aunt. I hardly see him anymore.”

“Well, that’ll change, because Kit’s joining me here to infiltrate the Red Hat Sisterhood. It’s likelier that some out-oftowner killed the Pink Lady, don’t you think?”

“Maybe. It would suit us all better if that were the case. Your landlady doesn’t look like a crazed killer.”

“Neither do any of these attendees. That’s why I think someone used the cover of this convention to mask the criminal and the crime.”

“Great. Van will love that angle. Good for the hotel. We frown on homegrown homicidal maniacs. But a tourist … not our fault.”

Temple smiled. Nicky and Van made a great couple and better bosses, which was what Temple cared about. Nicky would always give her a long leash when needed. Van would always make her expectations precise.

“Let’s go see the bossy lady,” Nicky suggested, “and discuss this stuff in private.”

Temple had always liked the easy, affectionate way Nicky deferred to his wife on the job. It was Nicky’s vision but Van’s execution that had made the Crystal Phoenix Las Vegas’s classiesthotel, what would be called a boutique hotel anywhere else, but was just “classy” in Vegas.

But it did make Temple wonder about their sex life: fire and ice sounded good on paper, but in real life … Maybe she was dwelling on their sex life because hers had taken such a sudden, earth-shaking turn.

Back to business, Barr. Matt doesn’t get off of work until 2:00 A.M… . Tomorrow is another day. Oh, yeah.

She and Nicky whisked straight up to the fourteenth floor where Van had her ultra-modern office. She was on the phone when they arrived so they arrayed themselves on the Italian leather chairs in front of Van’s desk and waited for her to get free.

Only Van von Rhine would dare to have a glass desktop. Not a paper or a paper clip was out of place. Her pale straight blond hair was smoothed into a tiny French twist at her neck, but everything else about her was Italian. Furniture, clothes, shoes, purses.

Husband.

Temple didn’t know if Van had developed the design addiction after she’d met Nicky or just had always had good, expensive taste.

She waved a manicured hand at Temple, gave Nicky a cool, inciting glance, and wound up her call in twenty seconds flat.

“Temple, that hat is a bit much, but you’ve always been able to carry off a lot for such a petite woman. Are you going to nail our Pink Lady killer while fending off the press?”

That was Van, multitasking with a vengeance.

“I thought I’d start,” Temple said, “by finding out what the police told you.”

“Nicky, I think the male detective enjoyed interviewing you man to man. I suspect he has too many women on his tail already.”

Temple collapsed into laughter, freeing her impish self. “You must mean Detective Alch. A sweet guy and a good detective, but he does have a hell of a lady lieutenant to answer to.”

“God, she’s good, Nicky,” Van said, eyeing her husband. “That’s the guy. Tell us what we girls weren’t up to knowing.”

“Can I help it if I inspire police confidence?” Nicky said with a shrug, spreading his hands like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. “The victim was Oleta Lark from Reno.”

“A Nevadan?”

“According to her IDs. Forty-eight. Strangled with an official Red Hat Sisterhood scarf.”

“Wait,” Temple said. “The Pink Lady was strangled with a Red Hat scarf? So the killer is fifty or older?”

“That’s the assumption. But anybody can buy those scarves online or at all sorts of shops. That’s my observation, from watching Van’s shopping habits at the Strip malls and on eBay.”

“I do not shop on eBay, Nicky!”

“Just kidding, Duchess. Our credit cards alibi you on that one.”

“What are you going to do to keep the publicity on the upside?” Van asked Temple with a frown.

“Accent the positive. Female empowerment. This is a significant woman’s movement from a generation that was expected to shrivel up and go quietly on a diet of Maalox and calcium tablets. Instead, they are out there, having fun and making great role models for all of the younger women coming up who aren’t going to lose it because they turn thirty or forty or fifty or sixty or seventy or eighty or ninety or a hundred and twenty. There was a time when turning thirty was a day of mourning for women. Now they want to turn a hundred.”

“Most inspiring,” Nicky said, fanning himself at that fiery speech. “Whew. Put keeping us guys around on that to-do list, please.”

“Always,” Temple said. “Las Vegas wouldn’t be Vegas without the Fontana brothers, each and every one.”

“Agreed,” Van said, stroking Nicky’s ankle with the toe of her Jimmy Choo stiletto.

With a glass desk, you can see everything, Temple thought with a smile. That was Van von Rhine. Nothing to hide. She was an unofficial Red Hat lady already.

Chapter 13

The League of Extraordinary Gentlewomen

Temple arrived back on the main floor ready to rumba and roll.

An unknown woman in a purple microfiber knit pants suit and a red pillbox hat covered with matching feathers headed toward her.

“Pink Hat with the pink marabou band?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” She turned and nodded to the massing red-andpurple feathered mob. Several separated from the flock, tossing their red or purple, or red-and-purple, feather boas over their shoulders.

Temple felt like a wimpy, skinny, young pink person surrounded by a queenly moat of P and Rs, as she decided to call the Red Hat Sisterhood colors for short.

“This is super-secret,” said the first woman, a chubby and bespectacled brunet. “I’m Mary Lou. This is Alice, Starla, Judy, and Phyllis, Phyll for short. We’re the Red-Hatted League.”

Temple expected them to burst into the “Lollipop Guild” number from The Wizard of Oz. She was a very puzzled newcomer to this colorful kingdom of exotically attired women: Dorothy, of course. And Louie was the right size and color, if not species and temperament, for Toto. All the scene needed was a witch or two, good and bad. Temple had a feeling they were already milling among the colorful crowd.

“The Red-Hatted League,” Temple repeated. “Electra said that was the name of her Red Hat Sisterhood chapter. Um… wasn’t that a Sherlock Holmes story or something?”

Alice, a tall, angular blonde, tipped her red-and-purple hound’s-tooth-pattern deerstalker hat. “No. That story was ‘The RedHeaded League.’ We’re told that phrase has some special significance for you,” she added.

“Yes.” Temple looked around for eavesdroppers. Only Red Hat Sisterhood members filled the lobby, embracing, comparing clothes and insignia, cooing. Looking harmless.

Don’t believe it! Temple told herself. The whole point of this organization was that midlife and beyond women weren’t inactive, weren’t invisible, and weren’t the harmless biddies some people liked to think and say they were.

“Yes,” Temple repeated. “I used to be a natural redhead, and soon hope to be one again. At least my current blond hair doesn’t clash with the convention reds. How did Electra get the word out to you all so fast?”

Starla, who resembled an aging chorus girl (in other words, she would look sexy at any age), hoisted a—what else?—purple cell phone.

“We’re all wired, inspired, and ready to kick criminal butt. I used to be a bounty hunter in my younger days.”

Phyllis did not look hot, but she did look like the world’s most efficient librarian with her gray hair in a bun under her scarlet marabou-edged bridesmaid hat. She pulled a P and R folder from her P and R tote bag.

“And I was a dispatcher for the police department whilegetting my library degree. I copied the registrants and guest list from the computer at convention central and copied it for everyone. Here also are copies of the various official badges, in case you spot any phonies wandering around. I have everyone’s cell phone number but yours, Miss Barr, including my old pal Morrie Alch’s. If you’ll give us yours now—”

Temple watched five red ballpoint pens topped with long purple ostrich plumes drawn from Red Hat Sisterhood tote bags in unison like Musketeer dueling swords.

She stuttered her phone number and it was duly copied down on the various sheets. Phyllis handed her a set, with her own cell number added.

“Judy and I have already fanned out and gathered info about the vic and her chapter.”

Temple eyed Phyll and Judy, a feminine version of Mutt and Jeff: Judy was a tall, thin woman in drapey red ankle-length gown and vest. Some might call her homely and others dignified; Phyll was gray-haired and brisk. On the other hand, Mary Lou was a rhinestone cowgirl: short, curvy, and all fake fingernails (R and P, of course), tight purple jeans, and red jeans jacket, slathered with appropriately colored rhinestones.

“We’d better talk in private,” Temple decided, hustling them to the first-floor conference room Nicky had assigned to her during the conference.

A Fontana brother, probably … Emilio, stood guard, a single gold ear stud the only visible metal on his person, although the concealed Beretta elsewhere was what would alert a metal detector. There weren’t any of those here … yet.

“Ladies,” he said with an appreciative bow, opening the door to usher them all inside.

And didn’t they love that! As a matter of fact, Temple did too. There was no resisting a Fontana brother with his hot young GQ looks and his elaborate Old World ways.

“Love the hair,” he whispered under Temple’s hat. “And the lid.”

She was last in the room and the women were still cooing over Emilio.

“Do you know him?” Starla asked.

“He’s a brother of the hotel owner. They sometimes work security here.”

“A boyfriend?” buxom Mary Lou asked coyly, all her rhinestones twinkling like a flutter of winks.

“Not mine.” Max flashed through her mind. Not a boyfriend anymore. An ex. Don’t waffle. Move on.

“I’m … I’m engaged.”

She heard her own words with an inner gasp. She was engaged. To a man who would marry her at the drop of a red hat at any Vegas chapel. The thought took her breath away.

Her announcement brought a half-dozen murmurs of congratulations and as many surreptitious glances at her left hand.

“I’m not wearing my ring here. I don’t want to attract any attention.”

“That big a ring, huh?” Starla’s purple-shaded eyelids lifted.

“Not that,” she said, although it was that. Partly. “Nobody knows yet, not even Electra. I wanted to surprise her, now—”

“Now,” said Phyll, sitting at the conference table and whipping out a notebook, “we need to make sure our founder isn’t facing a murder one rap.”

“Electra is your founder?”

“Right,” Judy said, sitting and still looking as tall as a stork. “Electra brought us together for our love of mysteries, but the fact was, we were all retired or semiretired and lacking things to do. Many of us don’t have husbands or adult children in the area. The Red Hat Sisterhood is our support group. Now Electra needs our support and she’s going to get it.”

“Amen,” said Phyll. “You’re the shamus here. Electra’s told us all about your cases, every one. Just tell us what to do.”

In no time, Temple was gazing at a conference table ringed by very silly hats with very serious women under them.

Talk about undercover operatives!

“All right,” she said. “First, I want to know about the, er, vic.” These dames were more up on crime TV slang than she was.

Judy flipped back about twenty notebook pages. The Red-Hatted League had been busy.

“Oleta Lark. Member of the Reno Scarlet Women chapter for six years. Ex-wife of Elmore, ‘the rotten dickhead.’ “

Temple almost choked on the news. Oleta was an ex herself? This put things on a whole new level. Judy was so tall and ethereal-looking to be laying down such blunt terms. “Um, ladies, ah, Judy. Who said that?”

“All her chapter members reported she said that, all the time.”

“Is he living?”

“If you could call a rented room by the week at the Araby Motel living.”

“The Araby Motel? In town here? How’d you find that out?”

“Oleta’s hateful remarks about Elmore got us curious,” Phyll said. “Never get a librarian on your tail. We easily got an address in Reno, but I decided to check every hotel/motel along the Strip, starting at the bottom. Saved me a lot of checking. He’s been in town for a week.”

“So he’s essentially a recent Las Vegas resident?” Darla asked.

“He’s also Electra’s ex-husband,” Temple announced.

“No!” Alice started scribbling furiously in her notebook. “One of us had better check out the Araby Motel and Mr. Double X in person.”

“Two of you,” Temple cautioned. “And take a Fontana brother with you. Pick one you like the looks of and go.”

This caused a ripple of anticipation among the feathered hat brims.

“There are more Fontana brothers?” Starla batted metallic purple false eyelashes.

“Several,” Temple admitted. “Just ask Emilio outside for a name. Tell him where you’re going, and why, and that I said you need an escort. Alice and Mary Lou, you’d better do that.”

There were pouts all around the table, but not on Alice and Mary Lou.

“Meanwhile,” Temple said, “what else do we know about the victim?”

“Well—” Phyll leaned forward. Her tone was the familiar one of a woman letting her hair, or hat, down to give the real story.

“Oleta Lark had written a memoir, her local chapter tells me. About her lousy life, before and after Elmore Lark. A New York publisher was willing to pay big bucks, she said, but it was going to investigate her, now that everybody knows people make up things about their lives, as why wouldn’t we? Given how boring things can be?”

“Any copies of this memoir?” Temple asked.

“Large chunks of it on e-mail, to assorted Red Hat Sisterhood members. Nobody knows who all was on the list, but there were a lot of them.”

“I suppose her friends were encouraging her.”

“Right. And she was leading them on with juicy detail after juicy detail.”

“Like what?” Temple said.

“This isn’t good for Electra.”

“Like what?” Temple said in a sterner tone. “We have to investigate, whoever it hurts. Or seems to. The truth is like the Lone Ranger. It’s always out there, it’s often masked, and it always sets you free.”

“Oh, that’s deep,” Starla breathed.

“Not really,” Temple said modestly. “What was in her memoirs about Electra?”

Judy cleared her throat. “I’ve interviewed several e-mail recipients. Oleta said Electra couldn’t give Elmore the hot sex life he needed. That she cared more about their son and was always after him to father the kid. I guess Elmore was a wild and crazy guy. Party animal.”

“No doubt that’s where he met Oleta.” Starla pronounced “Oh-leeet-ah” in an exaggerated catty tone.

Everybody laughed.

Not Temple. If the dead woman was runnlng Electra down not only in her memoirs, but in leaks to other Red Hat Sisterhood members, that only upped the ante on Electra’s being a credible suspect.

“And then there’s that reference to Oleta having married a bigamist,” Phyll said.“A bigamist? Let me see that e-mail.”

This was bad. Bigamy, and exposing it, was no laughing matter. It affected a lot more people than the victim and perp.

Such as her dear landlady who was soon to find out that her long-gone ex may not be an ex.

Chapter 14

Film Noir

The meeting with the Red-Hatted League had Temple walking on figurative Airsteps instead of Argenti for a change. That was an investigative team!

She merged with all the other hatted women milling in the Lobby, jazzed by their energy and verve.

Kit, a symphony in lavender and pink, came skittering up to Temple like a glamorous water bug.

“Kiddo! I’ve got a hot lead.”

“I’m all hat.”

“There’s a woman here.”

“No kidding.”

“And she’s filming the event.““Filming?”

“Yes. You get it. She might have filmed something suspicious. She might have even filmed the murder.”

“Wouldn’t she know it?”

“That’s just it. She’s running around with this cute little camcorder in front of God and Her Royal High-Hatness and all, but she’s also carrying a tote bag big enough to smuggle in a Spielberg track camera.”

“And you think—?”

“I think the cute kitty-eye on that bag front could go headto-head with your Midnight Louie.”

“Another camera? A hidden camera?”

“You ever see TV news show exposés? Besides, I’ve seen the indie filmmakers use that trick dozens of times, when they want ‘authenticity.’ It’s very easy to record people surreptitiously nowadays.”

“Why would she do this?”

“You’re the shameless shamus, not me. Find out. Anyway, I’m due for a drink with Aldo in the Crystal Court

.”

“How will I recognize her?” Temple asked, eyeing the sea of red hats surrounding them, along with islands of pink.

“She’s wearing the uniform, although her colors are burgundy and eggplant, but her shoes are green snakeskin platform espadrilles. So appropriate, I suspect. You’re the shoe maven. Follow the green snakeskin road.”

Kit dashed away like she had someone tall, dark, and handsome … and Italian to meet.

Temple sighed. She had someone tall, blond, and handsome … and betrothed to meet. When she could get away from this chaos.

So she did what she did best, wandered and looked hard.

Most of the footwear here was low, well padded, and comfortable. Red Hat Sisters had pizzazz, but they weren’t fashion victims.

Temple’s heart thrummed to the thrill of the hunt when she spied a pair of hot pink Ferragamos, but that was just Savannah Ashleigh doing her media thing.

Green. Either Irish or jealous. Or both.

It took a couple of hours of dedicated foot watching for Temple to find the shoes in question.

The woman wearing them was the incarnation of Little Mary Sunshine. Everywhere she went, her cooing voice coaxed celebrating women into standing and delivering a great group shot.

And every group shot was backgrounded by something not so wonderful.

Like HRH getting into a face-to-face with a Vanity Fair magazine interviewer who was obviously gay in the Truman Capote mode. Seeing over-the-top females and flagrantly gay men together made Temple wonder why some gay men identified with often-troubled ultra-female women divas like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. And they all made great drag queens.

Maybe because being “different” was a universal badge. And expressing yourself completely was only human.

Even Electra had been “different” for her time. She’d pulled loose from a bunch of husbands and had ended up running her own unique little world off the Strip here in Las Vegas.

Aha! There were those grass-green snakeskin six-inch-high platform espadrilles again!

Temple dodged out from the mob and turned on the threadbare charm for Snakeskin Stilts.

“Hi, there. I’m a local PR woman. You seem to have a good handle on this event. What’s your secret?”

“Empathy,” said the woman, turning and scanning behind Temple as if expecting a network camera to be focused upon her. “Isn’t empathy always the secret in the media game?”

“Or the scam.”

“Aren’t you the little cynic?”

Temple hated it when taller, older women pointed out her size.

“My name is TempleBarr. I really need to ask you some questions someplace quiet.”

“Around here?”

“How about the Crystal Court

bar? I bet you could stand to get off those high-rise shoes. I know I could use a break from mine.”

The woman eyed Temple’s pink pumps and nodded. Curtly. “Natalie Newman. What’s this about?”

“The murder.”

“Oh.” Natalie was about forty, an angular, skinny woman who adeptly substituted urban chic for natural beauty. “A freelance stringer can always use a lead on murder. Lead me to this island of peace called a bar. It’ll probably be standing room only.”

It was, except Aldo spotted Temple at the entrance instantly. He abandoned Kit to snag a small table tucked under the Hawaiian-lush greenery that surrounded the bar area.

“Who was that dishy maitre d’?” Natalie asked, gluing her eyes to Aldo’s back as he left.

“The owner’s brother. I do the PR here.”

“Why didn’t you mention that before, darling?”

Natalie pulled out a gold cigarette holder and matching lighter, then ignited one of those long, slender “women’s” cigarettes that always reminded Temple of emaciated tampons.

“You mentioned stringing for someone?” Temple prodded.

“I’ve reported for the AP, People, Newsweek, the usual.”

The Associated Press and People magazine were not the usual print media a regional stringer would work for.

“You’re not based in the area?”

“Vegas, are you crazy? No, I’m an East Coast baby. I’m actually a documentary filmmaker, on the side, when I don’t need to eat.”

“I get that,” Temple said as a waiter appeared. She nodded at her guest.

“I’ll have a Cosmopolitan.” Natalie blew smoke past Temple. “So last wave, but I got hooked on them.”

Temple ordered her usual white wine spritzer. It would taste like Chablis-flavored Kool-Aid, but that was the point. PR people really shouldn’t slosh down the liquor, not on the job.

“So some TV folks are interested in this Red Hat Sisterhood convention?” Temple asked.

“Not directly. I’m hoping. You know, freelance.”

Temple nodded sympathetically, but those green snakeskin platform espadrille shoes had her suspicions set on “liar alert.” The shoes, and especially the tote bag Kit had so astutely mentioned. Temple was a tote bag addict herself, but hers was crammed and messy.

Natalie’s seemed heavy to sling around, but betrayed no overflow of tissues, breath mints, morning papers, scarves etc. And that one eye of the cat in the red hat on the front looked pretty glassy. Like a lens. Why would a newsie, freelance or not, video record two versions of a convention? One upfront and obvious, the other concealed?

Their drinks arrived, giving them both sipping time to regroup.

“What do you think of this Red Hat phenomenon?” Temple asked. People always liked to air their own opinions.

“You said it. It’s a phenom. Plus it’s colorful. Look at all the local TV crews around. Great for a minute-ten on the evening news. Women making spectacles of themselves is always good copy in the good old U.S. of A.”

Temple sipped, weighing that comment. It could be worldly. It could be bitter.

“These women seem to be having something we all could use.”

“Cocaine?” Natalie lifted penciled eyebrows.

“I meant fun.”

“Well, aren’t they the same thing? Listen, Temple, you seem like a nice working girl. Wanna bet that you’ll be up to something a bit more serious when you’re their age?”

“Sure, it’s fun and games. And that’s pretty healthy for the aging population. But there’s more. Read the press kit. The chapters also join marathons to raise money for breast cancer and visit nursing homes—”

“Single-handedly save the ancient profession of clown. You’ve obviously gone over to it above your eyebrows.” She nodded at Temple’s beautiful hat.

“This is to blend in, but what’s wrong with it? Men are going to say older women are silly anyway. Why not enjoy the bad rap? Why not reverse it? Embrace it? Disarm the opposition?”

“Now you’re talking old-style civil protest. Face it; in this day and age, the only thing that counts is what gets on the media. And that’s me, baby; that’s me.”

Boy, did this woman make Temple see red without even looking around. Still, she needed to pretend to be a media-savvy peer. To be someone Natalie Newman might be able to use, because that’s what would keep this so-called stringer on a string.

“The Red Hat Sisterhood,” Temple said, “is lucky to have the kind of national attention you can get them.”

“Damn right! And they won’t know how much until this convention is long past.”

A pair of bright red spots on Natalie’s cheeks revealed that the Cosmopolitan was getting to her discretion. Her words implied that she had something very different in mind than what she claimed.

Temple tried to calm her anger. This group meant a lot to Electra, and now she was in serious trouble. Temple had never found Electra clownish because she sprayed her white hair fun colors or wore tropical print muumuus. Las Vegas was a place that allowed for a lot of diversity.

She didn’t mind a bit when Natalie lurched up on her reptilian stilts, grabbed her bigger-than-Temple’s tote bag, and swaggered away.

Chapter 15

No Longer in Service

After Natalie left, Temple stayed at the table and speed-dialed Max’s number again.

She didn’t really expect him to answer, Mr. Invisible now turned Mr. AWOL, but then she heard that wailing banshee yowl over the line. Temple’s stomach plunged into the Pit of Despair. An unreal female voice said that she was sorry, but that this number was no longer in service.

No longer in service?

Temple had been worried about not making contact with Max. Now she was sick-anxious.

She redialed. Listened again to the impossible message. Checked the stupid little LED numbers with slashes throughzeroes that made them look like eights, so maybe somehow the wrong number had been entered on her speed-dial. Right.

No, everything was correct. She knew this number by heart. By heart.

But maybe she didn’t deserve to know it anymore. Maybe that alone was the message. Max had cut her off.

“Temple?”

Kit and Aldo were standing by her table, then Kit saw Tem-ple’s face and took Natalie’s vacant seat, and Temple’s hand. “Temple, honey, what did that tacky woman say to you?”

“Lots of stuff, but that’s not it. Kit, Max’s number is disconnected.”

Kit got it. Her other hand clenched Temple’s arm. “Oh, no!”

“Max,” Aldo asked. “Your Max?”

Not anymore. Temple tried to swallow a sob and ended up hiccuping.

“Don’t say another word,” Kit told Aldo. “Just listen and let me handle this. Honey. Temple. Numbers get changed all the time.”

“But it rang through the whole time. He hasn’t been answering for the past three days!”

“You said yourself he’s been juggling a whole lot of career obligations.”

Like saving her bacon on the last PR job? Temple thought.

Aldo had been listening to all this in affable Fontana brother mode: laid-back, but with a don’t-tread-on-me air, and decorative in the extreme. Now he shot his jacket sleeves in preparation for extreme action.

“Where does he live?” he asked Temple.

“In town, but it’s … a secret.”

“Not if the number is disconnected. I’ll drive you there.”

“In the Viper?”

“It’s my car.”

“It doesn’t have room for three passengers.”

“I’ll drive you to this secret place. Your delicious aunt will wait here to thank me properly when we get back. You can trust my discretion, because I myself have a lot to be discreet about, right?”

“Aldo—” Temple didn’t know what to say. “You are a brick.” The British expression zinged right past him. “No, I’m Italian.”

Kit rolled her eyes as Aldo ordered her a second Pink Lady cocktail, kissed her hand, and murmured indecipherable promises that made the tiny hairs on Temple’s neck perk up with interest, and she was not only firmly unavailable, but under severe emotional distress.

Then Aldo took Temple’s arm and hustled her out the hotel entrance faster than a house detective escorting a lady of the night off the premises.

The parking valet already had the low black sports car growling at the entrance portico, so Temple had the whole ride to berate herself for being a Weepy Worried Wanda.

“You’re the Fontana who owns the Viper,” she finally said to make talk.

“No, this is the, er, Family car.”

“How do you arrange who drives it when’?”

“Not the car, the model.”

“You mean you all drive Vipers?”

“All but Nicky. He’s a family man now. He drives a Land Rover.” Aldo made a face that screamed “canned ravioli.”

“The Fontana brothers run a fleet of Vipers? Isn’t that a bit”—she hated to use this word with a Fontana, just in case it really applied—“overkill?”

“Not at all. It gives us an instantly recognizable presence in the community. Sometimes you want people to see you coming and … sometimes you don’t. Then we drive Saturns.”

Awesome. She’d never thought of the Fontana brothers as “Enforcement R Us.”

“Besides,” Aldo said, the gold hinges of his designer sunglasses glinting as he turned the car onto Max’s street, “the ladies like it. This the place?”

“Almost.”

Temple clutched her tote bag. Max would kill her for leadinga Fontana brother here, leading anyone here. Then again, maybe she’d get him killed by coming here now.

What made her think that, other than insane worry?

Aldo was not impressed by the surroundings. “Jeez-Luisa, this neighborhood doesn’t look like it needs to be kept secret. It looks like an accountant lived here.” He eyed Temple over his glasses frames. “Your accountant. Not our accountant.”

“I don’t have an accountant,” she answered. And maybe she didn’t have an ex-boyfriend either.

Aldo walked around the parked car and bent to spring Templefrom the black leather passenger seat. This was a car that would fry you alive in Las Vegas, but apparently Aldo kept the air-conditioning blasting as much as the multispeaker sound system that had been blaring Italian opera all the way. One more sorrowful aria from Pagliacci or Pavarotti and Temple would strangle the nearest tenor.

Aldo followed her clicking heels up the familiar sidewalk. “No uncollected milk bottles on the doorstep:’ he mentioned. “Nobody delivers milk anymore.”

“That’s my point. So why is that black cat lurking in the Hollywood twist, then?” Aldo, well, pointed.

“Louie!” Temple gasped, glimpsing a dark feline face in the door-side plantings.

Except it wasn’t Louie, but a fluffier, younger version of Louie. The gold eyes gave it away.

“Looks like the black cat that hangs out at the Crystal Phoenix,” Aldo said. “Of course, all black cats look alike.” As if Fontana brothers didn’t?

“Maybe it’s an omen,” Temple said.

“Aw, MissTemple. Tell me you’re not superstitious?”

Aldo escorted her by the elbow up the rest of the walk.

“Watch it!” He seized her to a stop. “There’s a crack. You don’t wanna break your mama’s back. Especially my mama’s back. Any more than you wanna shave her mustache.” He glanced at her dumbstruck face. “Just kidding. Trying to jolly you up. You are getting grimmer than a grandma at a mob funeral these days.”

Lord, she wasn’t even a peri-menopausal woman and here was a man comparing her to his grandma! Kit had been right: all downhill from thirty. Except for the Red Hat ladies and her red hot aunt.

“So,” Aldo asked, standing in front of Max’s ultra-secure door like the pale ghost of Fuller Brush salesman from the days when housewives were at home and hucksters went from door to door instead of unsolicited e-mail to e-mail. “This is where the Mystifying Max hides out. He had the coolest disappearing onstage act in town.”

Temple quailed at that “had,” but rang the doorbell.

Need any red-feather dusters here? Beat-up Purple Hearts still beating? A memory-erasing vacuum that really doesn’t work very well? All returns guaranteed.

But nothing happened, which was a huge relief to Temple. The house was unoccupied. Quiet. Empty. The way Max had designed it to be seen forever. A movie-set facade that only the initiated could see behind.

Temple was sure she wasn’t the initiated anymore. And then the faceless front door opened.

“Yes? You did read the NO SOLICITING sign out front?” Temple was speechless.

Speechless.

“So sorry, miss,” Aldo said in whipped-cream-on-cappuccino tones. “We were seeking the previous resident.”

“I have no idea who that was, handsome. The Realtor found me this perfect place and the price was so very right that I couldn’t refuse.”

Temple had used Aldo’s charm time to survey the apparent new owner: a leggy brunette about six feet tall with a dangerously curved figure that screamed “showgirl.” She was not only stunned, but madly jealous. Go figure.

“Ah,” Temple managed. “So you’ve only been here—”

“A week, sweets. I got this place at a bargain bistro price, and wasn’t gonna waste time taking possession before somebody recovered their sanity.”

“Was the previous owner … was the furniture—?”

“Clean as Whistler’s mother.”

“No … equipment in the extra bedroom?”

“No, I brought my own home gym.”

Temple had been thinking of Gandolph the Great’s and Max’s retired magic props. “No opium bed in the north bedroom?”

“Hey, I don’t do anything heavier than Starbucks, sweetie. You want to come in and sit a bit? You look a lot green around the gills.”

“That would be very nice.” Aldo grabbed Temple’s elbow and swept them both inside, understanding that any peek inside would be insightful. “Miss, uh—?”

“French. Dolly French.”

Oh, please! Temple thought. PseudonymCity in a city made for phony monikers.

The woman batted her double-wide false eyelashes at Aldo. “And you and your lady friend?”

“Aldo Fontana, at your service, Miss French.” He somehow made “French” sound mildly obscene, which of course the rest of the world had been doing for centuries. “Miss Temple Barr is an employee of my”—Aldo cleared his throat like an operatic baritone—“Family.”

“Say, I’ve heard of you Fontana brothers. Want a drink?

Your brother’s employee looks like she could use one.”

“That would be delightful. Would you permit me to mix it?”

“I’d permit you to do a lot of things.”

While this B-movie dialogue was unrolling, Temple’d had time to eye the premises. Oh, man! Oh, Max! Everything was gone. Every bit of furniture or wall decor that she knew. Even the super-security touches, like metal interior shutters, were only a dream in Temple’s head.

She toddled after Aldo into the kitchen, which was the whole point in him playing bartender: seeing more of the house.

The stainless-steel appliances and countertops were the same, but the high stools were a whole different breed and the stone floor now echoed to Dolly French’s stilettos stomping around on them.

“You in the entertainment biz, sweetie?”

“No, public relations.”

Dolly stopped on a dime, holding three footed glasses expertly in one long-clawed hand and a bottle of vodka in the other.

“Not that kind of public relations,” Temple said through her teeth. “I represent the Crystal Phoenix hotel’s publicity and promotional interests.”

It was all some ghastly nightmare. A familiar place taken over by unfamiliar things and people. How could what Orson Welles, Garry Randolph, aka Gandolph the Great, and Max Kinsella had created here become so quickly a staging area for a stereotypical Las Vegas woman of iffy morals?

Aldo, as cool as Italian … gelato, was making some sort of stirred not shaken martini and trying to catch Temple’s eye with sympathy, and caution.

“Did you know,” Temple heard herself saying, “that this house originally belonged to Orson Welles?”

“Orson who?”

“He was a boy genius, a noted gourmand, writer, and film director. But he’s dead now, of course.”

“I thought you said his first name was Orson?” Dolly blinked her fuzzy lashes.

“I did.”

“Now you’re saying it was `Ormand’? Isn’t that French?”

Ormand Welles. Well, it had a Las Vegas ring to it.

Ring. She thought of Max’s little emerald one tucked into her scarf drawer now that she was otherwise “engaged,” and the gorgeous one she’d forced Matt to hide in a floor safe because she wasn’t ready to come out as his fiancé.

Maybe now was the time to “ring” in the new, “ring” out the old. Max was gone. Only her memories of Max in this house remained.

It was as if a brutal hand had erased everything here in the most hurtful, sweeping way to make her face the facts, and the present, not the past.

Nothing here to cling to, but regret. She sipped the drink Aldo had made while he “allowed” Dolly French to take him on a guided tour of the house. Temple kept staring at the Sub-Zero refrigerator like the Abominable Snowman it was: a lurkingvision in a mist, once an old friend, but now mostly an old and fading legend.

“Max, wherefore are thou, Max?”

He had appeared in her life in another place at another time like an answer to a dream. Now the dream had ended, and Max was gone. All trace of him. The perfect exit for a magician.

Maybe she’d better get used to life without everyday magic. Maybe she’d better concentrate on making sure Electra didn’t face a nightmare of her own too real to write off.

Chapter 16

Electra’s Larks

The Circle Ritz penthouse where Electra lived and presided always felt like it was off-limits, even when you were expected.

Temple had only been up here a few times, so she knocked gingerly on the door, then rang the doorbell right after that, convinced that her petite knuckles wouldn’t rouse a flea.

The door jerked open to reveal Electra back to wearing her usual wildly floral muumuu.

“What’s happening at the convention?” she asked.

“Not much:’ Temple said. “There’s more going on in that hot jungle print you’re wearing.”

“I don’t feel up to wearing imperial purple at the moment. But you look pretty in pink. You never used to wear that color.”

“I wasn’t planning on masquerading as a Pink Hatter before, and it never went with my natural red hair color.”

“It goes great with your new blond do. Come in, dear.”

Electra’s entry hall was a hexagonal affair lined in mirrored blinds, so multiple muumuus greeted Temple’s eyes. Also multiples of her still foreign-looking blond self.

Maybe if she dyed her hair back to its natural red shade, she’d find Max. That was superstitious thinking, but desperate people turn to symbolic notions.

Temple passed herself coming and going in the mirrored blind slats. Now that she was clad in Pink Lady hues she looked as nauseatingly sweet as a tropical drink to a beer buff.

Electra’s living room was the usual dim and mysterious, not to mention occupied by hulking pieces of forties-vintage furniture.

Temple loved vintage, but one had to draw the line somewhere, and for her, oversize forties jungle florals in shades of forest-green and chartreuse were it.

She sat gingerly on the only floral-free chair in the room, a plain maroon mohair lounge chair. Mohair was a stiff, buzz-cut wool texture as welcoming to the epidermis as falling into a native stake pit.

Electra sat with a grateful “oof ” on the long lumbering sofa hunched against the wall. Lights were dim here, but a green glint caromed off the huge glass ball sitting atop the vintage blond-wood TV set. A pair of small, eerie red lights blinked like Christmas bulbs at Electra’s ankles.

Since this was firmly spring, as much as Las Vegas ever admitted to such a pleasant, moderate season, Temple assumed the red lights were the reflective eyes of Electra’s psychotically shy cat, Karma, the mystic Birman.

Come to think of it, the atmosphere up here was thick enough to slice with a chain saw. Electra might very well be a Las Vegas strangler with a gender-bending mission … Instead of the literal lady-killer Bluebeard, she could be a blue-haired lady killer of husbands.

“Did you get the family tree written down?”

“I tried, but I just can’t concentrate enough right now. Finding a dead woman, even if she turned out to be someone I had no sympathy for, is very discombobulating.”

Temple picked up the notepad and pen that Electra had only managed to doodle on.

“Okay. We’ll do this as an interview. You said you had five husbands.” Temple asked, pen poised, “Where are they all now?”

“Goodness, dear, I don’t know! What’s the point of leaving them if they’re still on your Christmas card list?”

“You must have known Elmore and Oleta were in Reno, though.”

“Nope.” Electra gazed at the green globe over the dead TV as the red lights danced at her ankle level. “He was easy to forget.”

“I imagine most of them were, from what you said, but I need to know the who, where, and when on all of them.”

“Not the why, though?”

“No. That would be prying,” Temple said demurely, as befitted a Pink Lady.

As soon as she got through with this convention she was going to ditch this ditzy hat for something red, even if it was a wig the color of her real hair.

“I’m glad you’re leaving something for me to have and to hold,” Electra said dryly. “Just how serious do you think this being under suspicion is for me?”

“Very. It turns out your next Mrs. Lark was writing a memoir and mailing bits and pieces all over the Internet.”

“What would Oleta have to write about? Elmore was dull, dull, dull.”

“Not according to one tidbit gleaned from Oleta’s compulsive Internet confessions, or maybe it was just canny book promotion: she said her long ‘marriage’ ended when she was abandoned in a ghost town in Nevada by a bigamist.”

“Bigamist!” Electra jumped up as the little Rudolph-red noses at her ankles vanished under the sofa’s swaying cocoa-colored fringe.

Her shock reassured Temple. She hadn’t heard it from Oleta, then.

Electra was still in angry orbit. “Oleta is saying that bastard didn’t really divorce me? Where is he? I’ll kill him now if she didn’t do the job first before coming here.”

“Am I glad this is just between us and the fire-eyed feline under the couch, because murder suspects must never threaten to slay new victims in public. Unless you’re a third-world dictator. Are you?”

“Of course not? What are you getting at?”

“The fact is, I don’t really know anything about your private life. When a murder happens, no life in the vicinity is private anymore. In this case, especially yours.”

Electra sat again in the dimness. Her sigh almost stirred the dark floral draperies at the doors to her patio.

“Well, darn, Temple. I came here to forget all about my past life. It wasn’t that successful.”

“But you’re an entrepreneur. You own and operate this building and the attached Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel. You’ve got energy, singular style, and tenants who adore you.”

“Really, you guys adore me?”

“What’s not to adore? You’re patient, creative, fun, and always listen. You’re our dorm mother.”

“ ‘Dorm mother.’ I like that.” Electra’s hands curled together on her chest.

Temple realized for the first time that she’d never seen any rings, nary a one, on those busy, plump fingers. And here was Temple with a seriously significant ring she wasn’t quite ready to flash, like a novice stripper with a Gstring and no nerve to wear it. At least Temple had a couple thoroughly painful thong panties in her lingerie drawer.

“You already know Elmore was number three,” Electra was saying in a monotone, subdued voice. “You put that in your notebook. I never bothered to write any of this down—unlike dear, dead Oleta!”

“Whenever you talk to the police again, none of these theatrics. Pretend you’re a Stepford wife. Only say what you have to and without any emotion whatsoever.”

“When, not if?”

“When, not if, Electra. You were too darn convenient to the body. Somebody else probably figured that out too. But don’t worry, the Red-Hatted League is on it.”

“I want to be there with them!”

“We’ll see.” Temple found the pen slipping between her fingers and rolling under the sofa fringe. “Electra, what is that under your couch?”

Electra looked down. “Ali, besides dust bunnies? Maybe my cat, Karma.”

“Is she declawed?”

“Never!”

“Thanks, I guess I won’t risk patting around down there in the dark. I’ll try to remember what you say and write this down later.”

“Try to re-mem-ber,” Electra quavered in a thready soprano. “Husband number one,” Temple demanded.

“I’ve never really counted him.”

“Electra!”

“That’s what we girls did in my day, my dear. We either married any man who ever kissed us, or we never married at all and got known as hippies. Darren and I eloped in senior year of high school, and he then further eloped with a bottle of rye a few weeks later. I’ve never seen or heard from him again, and am the better for it. I don’t think that minister was real, anyway, and I never thought to ask to see the license. Boys would do anything to get into your girdle in those days.”

“Girdle?”

“Tubes or panties with industrial-strength elastic you had to spend ten minutes getting on. They were tight enough to bite like a snapping turtle, believe me, if any roaming fingertips roamed too far. I didn’t lose my virginity until my second husband.”

Temple cleared her throat. “Darren must have really liked that bottle. It’s awfully dark and hot in here. I may swoon.”

“That’s all right. All the floors are covered in Persian carpets; lots of nap.”

“So who was number two?”

“Another elopement. Billy was a filling station attendant with an urge to—”

“Don’t say it!”

—go to refrigeration school. Between his double shifts, I somehow got left out. I divorced him and I moved yet again to forget.”

“And then came Elmore.”

“Not a moment too soon. I actually had delusions about him.”

“You mean ‘illusions.’ “

“No, just delusions. I had so many delusions that Curtiss actually came along a full nine months after them. I really enjoyed being a housewife and mother. Elmore was always on the road, selling insurance policies. Curtiss and I had six happy years together before Elmore came home one day and said he’d found another woman. What he’d meant was that a conniving cheerleader had found him and his house payment and steady job and little family to fling out on the stoop.”

“That was Oleta.”

“Yup. She always was a little—”

“I get the picture,” Temple said quickly, trying to evade hearing another rough word from her landlady’s mouth: slut.

“—snip. That’s why I kept the last name ‘Lark.’ Just to annoy her. And it did.”

“Why? You had moved on to Vegas and the Elmore Larks were in Florida.”

“By then, I was old enough to start getting mad about being betrayed.”

Temple bit her lip and thought about feeling like a betrayer, which she did now. She’d always taken Electra at face value as a free spirit. She’d never guessed how many decades it had taken her to get that way.

“Men and women,” Temple said, “seem to have a hard time getting in sync with each other in any era.”

Electra’s face lost its pained, in-the-past expression and resumed the sweetly sharp look Temple knew so well. And relied upon. She was two thousand miles away from her mother, but they’d never quite evolved into girl talk, anyway. Kit and Electra made excellent standins.

Electra pursed her lips, as if to say: Enough about my little murder rap and me. “You care to discuss what’s happening on the Max-Matt front? I’ve been dying to know. Really. Dying.”

Temple didn’t care to, but she could feel herself blushing, which was a dead giveaway in a modern girl that something was happening.

“How much do you know?”

“I’m a landlady. I always know more than I’m supposed to.” Temple nodded and wished she’d been an old-fashioned girl with a handkerchief to knot.

“I know,” Electra said, “that our darling boy Matt Devine has made major updates to his bedroom decor. About time! And that you’ve been up there admiring the changes.”

“Electra!”

She shrugged. “You’ve always had an interest in interior design. And I know Max hasn’t been around lately. Except for the time he called and you weren’t in, so he took me for a ride on the Vampire.”

Temple was stunned silent. Max had been here, at the Circle Ritz? Recently? When she hadn’t been? And he’d taken Electra for a ride on the vintage motorcycle he had traded to Electra for a down payment on the Circle Ritz unit back when he and Temple had been almost-marrieds?

“The Vampire,” Temple repeated. “Max took you out on the Vampire?”

“You weren’t here at the time, dear,” Electra said gently. “I think … I think it was a farewell spin; that I do. He’s a knight, Max, in shining midnight-black. Can give an old lady a thrill ride as well as a young one. And, I admit, I was thrilled.”

“When? What day?”

“Why, I don’t quite remember. Maybe four or five days ago. It felt like a sentimental journey, and I’m sure he’d have much rather had you riding pillion. But you weren’t here.”

And now Max was not “here” at all.

Temple tried to make sense of the timeline. Did Max have time to squire Electra around on the Vampire and still shut down his house, sell it? Or had all that happened before he came back to the Circle Ritz for one last dashing surprise visit?

Only … Temple hadn’t been there to be surprised, or kissed good-bye, or driven around the block. So Electra got it in her place: the cryptic, fond farewell. All Max, only Max, all the time.

“Temple. Dear. It’s not all tragedy. Haven’t you and Matt been—?”

“Yes. But it’s tragedy if I never see Max again.”

“I’ve never seen most of my husbands again.” Electra leaned back into the sofa. “And you and Matt?”

Temple gave a deep sigh. “We may want a Lovers’ Knot ceremony sometime soon.”

“No! Really? I’m honored.”

“Electra, Max is missing.”

“Wasn’t he always?”

“Not like this. For real! As far as I know, you’re the last person to see him.”

She got it immediately. “Me, not you.”

Temple nodded.

“Then he doesn’t know about you and Matt?”

“He’s Max. He knew about me and Matt before me and Matt knew about us.”

“That makes it worse.”

“Right.” Temple leaned forward and knotted her hands together. “I don’t feel right about this. This is not the way Max would have bowed out, and I think he was probably ready to bow out.”

“He was a little … the last time I saw him,” Electra admitted. “A little what?”

“A little … nostalgic.” Electra leaned forward to take Temple’s hands in hers. “Listen, hon. If Max is as omniscient as you think he is, there’s nothing you could do that surprises him. Maybe this was his graceful exit, like Sherlock Holmes falling into ReichenbachFalls. Maybe he thought people would want to forget about him.”

“Like we could?”

Electra shook Temple’s intertwined fingers. “He knows that. He knows that he’ll be resurrected, that we won’t stand for him being gone. Not even you and Matt. He’ll come to your wedding. Trust me. He could never resist a surprise appearance.”

Temple sighed, shakily. Electra was right. You had to have faith in Max. That was what made him such a peerless magician. Now you see him, now you don’t. But you will.

“Meanwhile,” Temple said, “we’ve got to deal with your crisis.”

“Right. So how is he?”

“Who? Max? I told you, I don’t know and it’s driving me crazy.”

“No. Matt! I don’t know and it’s driving me crazy.”

“He’s fine. He’s still here.”

“No, I meant, how’s he in bed?”

“Electra!”

She shrugged. “It was a natural question, given his priestly history.”

“I’m not asking you how Elmore Lark was in bed. Not that I’d ever want to know.”

“It’s no secret. He wasn’t, so there’s nothing to tell.”

“You must have slept with him to have a son from the marriage.”

Electra pulled a face. “No, I was not a virgin bride in that instance. Curtiss was the only good thing that came out of that marriage. With the next husband, Gerry, I got a herpetologist.”

“As in helping people with herpes?”

“No. As in snakes. I have a daughter with a fascination for reptiles. Now it’s her career. Maybe she was trying to tell me something about my choice of husbands.”

“So there was Darren, Billy, Elmore, Gerry … who else, and any more kids?”

“Weldon the Winn-Dixie manager and Tom, who couldn’t even manage to hold a job. Terra in Indianapolis is a teacher and Rob in St. Louis is a car mechanic. Curtiss sells insurance in Tucson, which is lucrative. Sandy’s the herpetologist in Texas. All grown and good kids and nicely on their own. They can’t believe I married such a string of losers, though.”

“In which case, you could be a suspect in a lot of deaths.”

“No. The only one of my exes I might wish dead is that jerk Elmore. But I suppose I should wish him far away so I’m not tempted to confront the bum.” Temple decided against telling Electra that her supposed almost not ex was here in town. She also was glad that she managed to get Electra’s always-busy mind off of her and Matt’s nocturnal adventures.

Better that she dwell on dead people.

“Can I go back to the convention now, Temple?” Electra inquired in a small wee voice. “I was supposed to be helping with registration.”

“I don’t see why not. Oleta’s dead. How much more trouble could you get into?”

Chapter 17

Sob Sister, Soul Brother

Matt was finishing his afternoon laps in the Circle Ritz pool.

One thing he loved about working nights—and there were a lot of things he didn’t—was having uncrowded daytime access to things that normally would be unpleasantly crowded. There were usually seven or eight after-work visitors to the pool. Now he had it all to himself.

He’d come here late at night too, before or after his “Midnight Hour” stint, which was now two hours and no longer accurately titled. Temple had recently confessed to watching him then, sometimes. That innocent little voyeuristic admission had been wildly … stimulating. But so was everything she said and did these giddy, sexy engagement days and nights.

He was smiling as he swam to the side to pull himself up on the pool’s tile edge when he heard the cell phone “ring.” Templehad helped him program the call signal, a paid-for download of Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young.” He liked the way the song echoed the New Testament Beatitudes. Once a priest, always a sucker for biblical phrasing.

Not a lot of people called him. His agent. His immediate boss at WCOO radio. Temple.

So he raced for the cell phone, dripping on the hot concrete, snatching it up from the towel, and sitting on the lounge chair. “Yes?”

“Matt! I’m so glad I reached you.”

He lay back in the soothing sunlight, letting his skin and the sunscreen protecting it soak up rays. “Me too.”

“I mean now.”

There was more than banter under her words. Matt sat up again. “What’s happened?”

“Everything! I’m at the Crystal Phoenix. They’re holding a huge convention here, and they almost were holding Electra for murder. I just got back from the Circle Ritz talking to her around two. You weren’t there.”

“Just got back now myself, in time to slip in some laps before the five o’clock crowd hits the pool.”

“Oooh, what are you wearing besides a light tan?”

“Light tan swim trunks.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yeah, apparently.”

“Could I get you to take them off?”

“Hardly!”

“Phone sex is something we haven’t tried yet.”

“I can wait.”

“Oh, don’t mind lascivious me. I’m just trying to take my mind off all the really terrible things that have happened already today.”

“Electra, under suspicion of murder? What on earth is that about?”

“It’s too hard to explain over the phone: hundreds of women in red hats, some of them in pink hats. One strangled with a Red Hat lady scarf. Electra found her dead, and the victim happens to be the vixen who stole her third husband thirty years ago.”

“I am not following this.”

“You don’t have to. I’m on it. The Fontana brothers are on it. Our old friends Alch and Su are on it. What’s really wigging me out right now, selfish as it is, isn’t Electra’s and the Crystal Phoenix’s PR troubles. It’s … oh, dammit, Matt. It’s Max.”

He’d really, really hoped to hear as little of that name as possible.

“I needed to talk to somebody about it, and I know you’re the last person I should, but Electra’s in no state to deal with my petty problems—”

“I’m the first person you should come to. Always. About anything.”

“I know. And I love you for it. Here’s the thing. Aldo Fontana, who’s dating my aunt Kit, believe it or not, drove me out to Max’s top-secret house location this morning.”

“I could have done that.”

“It just came up. I haven’t been able to reach Max by phone for three days. I just wanted to say … you know, about us. Sony, good-bye, and good luck. It seemed the decent thing to do.”

“I agree.” Of course he’d hoped she’d never see Max Kinsella again, that she’d never want to, but that was totally unrealistic.

“Matt, the house was gone!”

“Gone?”

“Not physically, just all the furniture, everything that was so `Max’ about it. This floozy named French opened the door.

She’d bought it at a terrific price a few days ago, she said; moved right in. All her ugly condo unit stuff was everywhere.”

“You said he’d been acting … distant lately.”

“And now Electra just told me that he’d visited the Circle h Ritz four or five days ago, but I wasn’t here. And then he, e—” Matt waited for her to battle back tears. His heart was sinking like the Titanic. Damn Max Kinsella! He always managedto draw the spotlight, create a scene, make Temple’s tender heart ache.

“He … took Electra.”

Matt waited.

“For a ride.”

He waited, not guessing the next line.

“On the Vampire. Way out on the highway, really fast. That was supposed to be me, Matt. But Electra got that last ride. It’s as if he was saying good-bye to the Circle Ritz, to the Vampire, to me. And now he’s really, really, missing. Not like before, just for a while. And I missed saying good-bye.”

Matt waited, but Temple didn’t say anything else. Probably couldn’t. Okay, Counselor Guy, what do you say to the woman you love and adore when she’s cracking up over your rival?

You say to yourself: she came to you with this. And that’s a very important thing.

“I’m sorry, Temple. Everything’s crashing down all at once for you. But I’m not. I’m here. I’ll help you. I’ll do whatever it takes to find out what happened to him, if you can’t.”

“I’m sorry for laying this on you. I’ve got to go back out here and play perky PR woman with everything in hand, and get Electra off the hot plate on the side. What do you think, though, Matt? Why is Max doing this to me?”

“I think Max is doing what he has to, for those undercover reasons nobody has a need-to-know about. I do think he’d given up on being able to offer you the open commitment you needed. I picked that up from him, lately, you know, an ebbing away. I think he foresaw that we would happen if he stepped out of the picture. I think he let that happen.

“Temple, if you don’t mind having Max Kinsella for a matchmaker, I sure don’t. Trust the man. You always have.” She laughed, shakily. “Thanks. I told you breaking up was hard to do, I just wish I could do it. Formally. I’ll see you, later?”

“Later.”

“Sorry to be such a weak sister. I’m lucky I didn’t short-circuit this stupid cell phone.”

“You can come home and short-circuit me anytime.”

She laughed. “Thanks for the motivation. Back to the hubbub and the funny, tragic, lethal human circus.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too, Matt,” she whispered back.

It was some comfort that she’d used his name

Chapter 18

Vanishing Powder

“It was bad,” Miss Midnight Louise says, “very bad.”

Well, these girls. Always exaggerating. I cannot believe that Miss Midnight Louise, usually as hard as nails, is even a tad breathless as she reports back to me.

Then again, she has hightailed it from Mr. Max’s home on the city fringes back to the Circle Ritz by means of sneaking into the six inches of space behind the passenger seat in Aldo Fontana’s Viper.

am not sure whether it was the squeeze or the speed that put a kink in Miss Midnight Louise’s tail. I do know that I am not going to yank her chain farther by asking which.

Either way, she has returned to the Crystal Phoenix agitated and expecting me to do something about it. She does not even care that I have been nosing around her turf in a criminal matter.

We have rendezvoused under the tropical greenery edging the lobby bar.

“Listen,” I tell Louise. “The scene of the crime as far as we’re concerned is now here at Crystal Phoenix Central. Midnight Inc. Investigations can no longer afford to have you gallivanting from the Neon Nightmare club to former residences of former MissTemple squeezes when our beloved landlady’s reputation and freedom are at stake.”

“You mean your MissTemple’s and your landlady. I live here at the Phoenix, thank you. So you are willing to give up on investigating Mr. Max’s whereabouts and condition–or lack of living condition–after the terrible impact he made on the Neon Nightmare side wall?”

I am indeed disturbed about that, but I am more concerned right now with restoring the Circle Ritz’s landlady’s reputation. I have just moved Ma Barker and her gang of feral felines to the Circle Ritz. There is not much sustenance around there unless the place’s residents get on with the program. Miss Electra Lark is the best general for the job. Ergo, my task is to get her off the homicide hook.

So I answer Louise in a way to take her mind off the current obsession.

First, I reassure. “Mr. Max knows how to take care of himself and about six others at once, and always has,” I say. “And he is forever doing things that are not what they seem. That is the magician’s credo.” Then I tempt her weakest spot, her curiosity. “Anyway, it does not look like his long frame will be jousting me for comforter space in the future. MissTemple has embraced the light.”

“No! You mean Mr. Matt? He is the best-looking shaded golden human I have ever met, but I think you would dislike seeing a black alpha male unseated from the communal bed, even if you did knock toes and claws sometimes. When did this new set of sleeping arrangements happen?”

“Recently. They conducted their courtship off the premises, but there is a ring with enough carats to keep Bugs Bunny forlife and they almost forgot themselves on the zebra-striped comforter in MissTemple’s boudoir the other day. With me in the next room, mind you.”

“In the daytime! With you present! That is indeed serious,” she agrees. “Mr. Matt is the most diligently serious human being I have ever seen. Does he not require papers and witnesses to take a mate?”

“Oh, they want ‘papers’ for everything these days, including us. Big Brother is watching even the cockroaches now. But I know how romance can turn a dude’s head. And my MissTemple’s head is pretty turned too. Frankly, Mr. Max was not making the scene often enough lately to preserve his territory.”

“I am thankful I have been fixed to prevent such unpredictable periods of insanity,” Louise sniffs.

Although I always aim to use the utmost courtesy with the females of any species, the chit does claim to be a descendant and has recently forced me into making our purely professional association formal. Midnight Inc. Investigations, of course, is mainly me.

I return to our most satisfying bone of contention.

“So you say that my MissTemple and Mr. Aldo Fontana paid a visit to the house formerly known as Mr. Max’s. And so you saw that it was occupied by some foreign dame with a great figure. So what is new in Las Vegas? The city is all about great figures, on the stage and on the list of house gambling rules.”

“That must have been a terrible shock for your roommate. It would be like your returning to the Circle Ritz and finding that no one you knew was there.”

“With Miss Electra Lark suspected of murder, that could happen.”

“Your MissTemple would be missing, her furniture gone.”

“My living room sofa? The zebra-patterned comforter on the bed? My litter box under the sink in the second bathroom? No!”

“You are certainly the self-sacrificing sort, Pops. And you do not even deign to use the litter box in MissTemple’s digs, which is a mighty inaccurate name for her unit, given your habits.”

“Where I go is my business, and my business only.”

“Thank goodness,” she says, swiping a dainty claw over her eyebrow hairs. “Anyway, Mr. Footloose and Fancy Free, I am sure you have seen some pretty swift set changes on a Las Vegas hotel stage.”

“For sure. And the ones at Mr. Max’s magic shows, when he used to perform at the Goliath, were faster than a cardsharp’s deal.”

“Well, that is the way it was at that house of his. After I checked out the Neon Nightmare from top to bottom and learned some very interesting and alarming things, I nipped over to the house you had told me about.”

“Only MissTemple is supposed to know that address.”

“And you? How did you manage that, then?”

“I make it my private business to know where my MissTemple goes.”

“And you dropped mention of it to me.”

“When?”

“Long ago, when you were thinking I was a stupid unrelated female and not listening.”

“I did not do that!”

“What? Think I was a stupid, unrelated female?”

“No. That ‘thinking you were not listening’ part.”

“Trust me, Daddio. If it were not for you dominant males forgetting to remember that we listen, half the stuff in the world would not happen, except thanks to us stupid unrelated females.”

“Louise! I cannot follow your flawed logic, not to mention your Sin Tax.”

“I know that Sin Tax is very big in Las Vegas,” she answers, exposing her fangs in one of those so-called Cheshire Cat grins that toney Brit cats affect.

“Okay, kiddo,” I say, knowing Louise hungers for acknowledgment as a relative of mine. “Tell me what you have learned on your little foray.”

Does she bend my ear! And whiskers.

I must admit that I am impressed. Wait! I do not have to admit it, and I do not. I just simply let her spill her guts, as girls will, and will figure out later if she is just dreaming or is really on to something.

It turns out the other half of Midnight Inc. Investigations is allhot and bothered by a whole lot of things I thought only I had discovered and was not worried about. Like, as we have discussed, the fact that the Neon Nightmare club is built like a pyramid-shaped hunk of Swiss cheese, with more hidden rooms and shafts than a pharaoh’s funeral home in the Egyptian desert.

It makes sense. Las Vegas sits in the middle of the Mojave Desert. A lot of folks died here during the mob wars long ago. Bodies and treasure are buried in these forgotten sands of time.

And … those secret areas were not just so the Phantom Mage could rappel down on bungee cords nightly. There are rooms occupied by a hidden coven of magicians with ambi-tions.

Maybe the kit is right. Maybe Midnight Louie had better take a break from murder one at the Red Hat Sisterhood convention and ankle on over to the Neon Nightmare tonight to see what Mr. Max’s former confreres are up to now that the Phantom Mage is MIA too.

Chapter 19

Ding-Dong Daddy

Temple had convinced herself that letting Electra return to the literal scene of the crime was a good idea. An innocent woman would hold her head and hat up, and carry on.

And Detective Alch was okay with it. Simply finding a body was not a crime.

Of course all traces of the late Oleta Lark were gone, conveyed to the Las Vegas coroner. Still, Temple could tell from the subdued note of the lobby chatter that the news of her death was getting around, and hung like a purple-haze pall over the pre-opening activities.

It was most evident in the sidelong glances Electra attracted, even when surrounded by her welcoming Red-Hatted League chapter members. Noticing Detective Su cruisingnearby, it occurred to Temple that the police had okayed Electra’s return because they wanted to watch her, and the reaction of everyone else to her. If so, she was letting Electra play right into their hands. Great! Temple believed in supporting her local police, but not in railroading her landlady for murder!

“Electra! You look great,” Alice squealed, the first to spot their missing member. “We are on the trail around here like bloodhounds.” Alice brushed back the bill of her purple-andred-checked deerstalker.

That assertion made Electra blink.

“Well,” Phyll added, “bloodhounds are officially red, aren’t they?”

Temple was glad to leave Electra in the friendly custody of her gal pals and be about her PR person’s business, which was to clear the Crystal Phoenix of any taint, as well as firmly affix the murder rap on anyone other than Electra.

She still had to wear the cursed Pink Albatross (its brim span must have been as wide as that doom-bearing seabird’s wingspan) to pass unchallenged in these main hotel areas now declared the Queendom of Hattitude.

As an unofficial “squirt,” Temple felt like a tugboat cruising among a port thronged with ships of the line. Most of the women were taller and broader than she, so Temple sometimes felt like a child lost at a fairgrounds.

The fact that so many women of a certain age had attained a certain comfortable and even powerful size made Temple realize how easy it would be for one to commit a tidy job of strangulation.

Once the victim’s throat was encompassed, it would surely only be a matter of ruthless compression, of indifference on a murderous scale.

People often threatened to “wring” someone’s neck, but how many could follow through on such a vow for the two minutes or so that it took for the action to complete the impulse?

Not her!

She heard a distant mutter like the cooing of pigeons. Standing on tippy toes on her vintage Beverly Feldman spikes, Templespotted a male presence cleaving the crowd of red and purple furbelows.

So far only Aldo Fontana had managed that honor. This guy was as tall, but that was because he wore a hat in the sea of hats. A fawn-colored ten-gallon cowboy hat.

When Temple was able to glimpse the whole man, she saw he was tall but lean in that ready-to-blow-away mode of old cowboys.

His sun-leathered face was cadaverous, with a long, prominent jaw. His jeans were so weather-washed they looked designer-fashionable and his belt buckle was almost as big as his hat.

Of course, Temple was not the only one to have spotted this out-of-place person.

An agitation of red hats surrounded this iconic Western figure.

Then came a shriek.

Weathered Cowboy Guy turned in that direction, then shouted out, “Puddin’ Puss! Is that you?”

Another shriek.

Temple clawed her way through the crowds to the scene of unseemly behavior.

The Red-Hatted League was at the center of it, forming an honor guard around Electra, who had plucked a four-inch-long hat pin out of her double-wide red chapeau and was aiming it at the Stranger in Town.

“Elmore Lark,” she said, “you stay away from me.”

Temple jerked her head back to the guy. This was Electra’s third husband, the bigamist? Well, he was big. Tall, anyway.

“Now, Puddin’ Puss, calm down. I’m jest here to hear what happened to my Pearly Poochie.”

Temple was starting to think Elmore Lark would shortly be found strangled by a pet leash.

“Cain’t we jest talk?” he asked.

“If we had ‘jest talked,’ Elmore Lark,” Electra retorted, sheathing her hat pin in red felt with the panache of a Musketeer, “I would have had a lot happier life.”

“But no darlin’ baby boy Curtiss,” he said with a grin.

Electra grimaced. “And when did you last have contact with your son?”

Elmore shrugged. “A while. Boy needs his mother. A daddy’s jest a ding-dong bother.”

“Well, you were,” Electra said. “You really think I’m gonna sit down meekly and talk to you after all you did, and didn’t do, years ago?”

“Waal, no, Puddin’ Puss. Except I may be the only man in the state of Nevada who jest knows you didn’t do in Miss Pearly Poochie.”

He raised bushy gray eyebrows. “Whatayah say? I came down here to give you an alibi.”

This Temple had to hear. She elbowed her way through a cotton-knit cloud of purple tops to take Electra’s elbow and turn to Elmore Lark.

“The hotel has made an interview room available. Let’s go there. Follow me.”

“Now who are you, Little Lady?” Elmore asked.

“Your worst nightmare or your best chance. Follow me.”

“Yessum. I’d follow your behind anytime anywhere, Little Doggie.”

Electra managed to elbow him, hard, in the bony ribs, while she scampered ahead to catch up with Temple.

“You really want to talk to this scum, Temple dear?” she whispered.

“I’ll talk to anyone who knew the dead woman and might have had a motive to get her that way. He’s the man in the middle, Electra, and they make good witnesses, or suspects. Can you can the vitriol, however deserved, for a while?”

“For you, sure. Besides, I want to watch this worm squirm.”

Hotel conference rooms are depressingly similar: large central wood-grain table surrounded by huge, heavy, impossible-tomove leather chairs. A table along one wall usually holds coffee and hot water urns, foam cups, plastic stirring straws, fake sugar, and fake creamer.

This was the Crystal Phoenix, though, Las Vegas’s classiest hotel long before the Bellagio, Paris, Venetian, and Wynn went arty and upscale.

The central table was a slab of granite topped with inch-thick glass. The sleek Herman Miller office chairs didn’t take a World Wrestling Federation champion to move them.

The thick-piled carpet boasted a Chihuly-like design that would both wear well and perk up spirits.

And the coffee and tea services were sterling silver. The sugar bowls held sugar. An exotic wood box hid packets of exotic teas and Temple’s favorite sugar substitute, Splenda. The matching creamers held—heavens!—real cream and skim milk, the best of both worlds.

That fact may have been why not one, but two black cats had preceded them to the conference room. That Louie! He respected no boundaries, human or feline! She had to wonder if he was after more than filched cream. Everything he did was reasonably catlike, but it often seemed to have a second purpose. He had a definite penchant for death scenes, always someone’s unlucky black cat. Hmm, Midnight Louie as furry albatross …

Seeing the two cats together, Temple could tell that Louise’s furrier frame was much smaller and her tail hair was much fatter than Louie’s muscular buzz cut.

She also had old-gold eyes rather than green ones.

Despite the differences, Temple still wasn’t sure which cat had mixed it up with Savannah Ashleigh’s entourage. She had at first assumed it had been Louie, because he had no liking for the Ashleigh woman. But the Crystal Phoenix was Midnight Louise’s territory now.

“Waal, Puddin’ Puss,” Elmore boomed out. “I see the cats still come to you like rats to cheese.”

The cats eyed him with the same dubious gaze Electra gave him.

“Don’t keep calling me that, Elmore Lark, or I will commit murder.”

“See why I came down, PP? I knew you’d lose your cool. Even if you did knock off Oleta, you’ll need a character witness.”

“You’re only a witness to my bad judgment decades ago.”

“Sit down,” Temple suggested. Ordered. “If you two keep sparring in public it won’t do either one of you any good.”

“That what you brought us in here to say, Little Lady?”

“And you can drop that nickname too. As long as you’re here you can tell me why you didn’t kill Oleta.”

He laughed long and loud about that, then filled up a coffee cup with six teaspoons of sugar before coming to sit at the conference table across from Temple and Electra.

“I’da stood out a little in this Little Red Hen party, don’tcha think? Besides, me and Oleta’s been quit for, oh, three, four years now.”

“Were you officially divorced?”

“As much as God and Reno can make it so.”

“Then why did she describe you as a ‘bigamist’?”

“Haven’t any idea.” He spread his hands wide, his scrawny chest swathed in an innocent checked cowboy shirt with plastic pearl snaps down the front. A plastic cowboy.

Temple turned to Electra. “How did you know for sure you were divorced?”

“I filed the papers before I left. And a couple weeks later I got them, all stamped and signed.”

“By the county, or by Elmore Lark?”

“They looked official, and I was so glad to be quit of him.”

Elmore Lark was tapping his ten-gallon hat on his angular, bejeaned knee. When the women looked at him, he looked away. And whistled.

The sound brought the two black cats lofting onto the tabletop, sighting on him like a pair of hounds from hell, eyes narrowed, hair raised, and hissing.

Temple shook her head. “The divorce never went through. He sent you forged papers.”

Electra was stunned to learn she was still a married woman, and a bigamist herself on top of it.

“Why? Why on earth? He already had hot young Oleta waiting in the other stall?”

Temple narrowed her eyes at the utterly selfish old man. What had he gained by tricking Electra, and Oleta? “You bore his son.”

“And Curtiss turned out fine,” Electra said, “because he was with me only from the age of six on.”

“You weren’t likely to come back.”

“That’s for sure.”

Temple gave her take on the situation. “Elmore wanted Oleta, but not her greedy claws in him. She was entitled to nothing if it came out the marriage was bogus, and it would if he wanted it to. If something happened to him, when the courts asked for documentation, his worldly goods would have still gone to you and Curtiss.”

Elmore had stopped his irritating whistling and hat-tapping. He looked sheepish.

Electra looked like a little purple teapot with a red cover who was about to blow its top.

“Elmore Lark! Why? Do you realize that I’d remarried since then?”

“Several times,” Temple put in with a “so there” emphasis. Electra didn’t even hear that. “Is she right? We’re still … married?”

“That little filly Oleta. She wanted the whole deal. I don’t trust women like that. I trust women like you.”

“Stupid?”

“Trustin’, Puddin’ Puss. That little girl sorta ran me over. I wasn’t thinking, but I knew enough to make it so she couldn’t get ahold of my horse ranch.” He turned the hat in his bony hands. “Curtiss is my only son.”

“For all you’ve ever seen of him.”

“I’m not the raisin’ father type, but I am the leavin’ father type.”

“That’s for sure,” Electra said, standing up. “I could kill you for what you’ve done to me, and especially to Curtiss.”

Some people found women in purple outfits with red hats amusing and a little silly. Electra’s fervent tone would have convinced them otherwise.

Certainly it convinced the people just entering the conference room.

Temple cringed inside as she noticed and identified them: Detectives Su and Alch.

Chapter 20

Truth Has Consequences

Detective Su’s first name was “Merry,” which Temple had always found incongruous: Merry Su, a homophone for Mary Sue.

She understood that second-and third-generation Asian Americans often bore delightfully trendy American first names nowadays. It was a mark of assimilation, while maintaining pride in the family name of origin.

And Detective Su was another petite woman in a man’s world, even more petite than Temple’s five-foot-zero, size three and five in clothing and footwear. Su probably wore 0 and size four shoes.

So Temple totally sympathized with such a small woman making it in such a man’s world as law enforcement.

But .

Sometimes . .

Sometimes Temple thought Su was a mini-Molina, a female bully who liked to throw her badge and her figurative weight around. In C. R. Molina’s case, Temple was talking about an almost-six-foot-tall woman homicide lieutenant with the cojones of a pit bull and the open mind of a shut-tight miniblind.

This was one of those Su-Molina times.

“We don’t often walk in on a confession of murder,” Su said, folding her arms. She wore a black pantsuit over a white shirt. Her expression and mind seemed to be in an equally black and white mode.

Detective Morrie Alch loomed behind her, a symphony in gray, especially his hair and mustache. From him came a vibe of mature sympathy for all involved.

Not from Detective Su.

“What’s this?” she demanded. “An alternative on-site interrogation room? The hotel has asked us to be discreet. It didn’t require that we be co-opted by an amateur detective with two alley cats for backup.”

“Backup” was the word. Louie and acquaintance obliged by humping their spines like Halloween cats at Su’s approach.

Never duel a cat for attitude, Temple thought, watching Detective Su observe the animals’ fierce united feline front and wisely swagger around them to confront Temple.

“You are not Las Vegas’s answer to Veronica Mars,” she told Temple. “You had no business diverting this man, whom I take to be Elmore Lark, from the long arm of the law.”

“Oh, ma’am,” the man in question couldn’t keep from intervening. “She hasn’t been diverting at all. In fact, I am delighted to be released from the presence of my, er, ex-wife and associates, into the custody of such a fine member of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.”

“Shut up,” Su said. “And sit down, hands on the table. Away from the hat.”

Elmore shrugged at Temple and Electra, and the cats, and did as ordered.

Alch came up behind Su on little cat feet. “Let’s take him upstairs for questioning,” he suggested.“I suppose you think this is funny,” Su said, her dark eyes fixed on Temple.

“No,” Alch said, intervening. “I think you’re right. This is po-lice business. We’re the police and we’ve got the right to question Mt Lark. Let’s do it someplace private, is all I’m saying.”

“Yeah.” Su turned away from the table. “Do you want to tell the old broad not to leave town, or should I?”

Alch’s eyes shut for an instant. They opened to regard Electra. “Miss Lark, we’d advise you to stay in town, in case we want to talk to you again. It would be even better if you didn’t abuse your permission to be at the convention by getting into arguments with the victim’s ex-husband. It could look suspicious.”

Electra had really appreciated that “Miss.” Especially now.

She began beaming at the start of Alch’s speech but gradually lost her glow and was fervently glum by the ending word “suspicious.”

“Thank you, Detective. You can count on me concentrating on Red Hat Sisterhood activities that are completely amusing and innocent.”

Su snorted like a horse. Or a Shetland pony, in her instance.

Luckily, she didn’t stamp a petulant hoof.

From the rubber-soled clunky Mary Janes she wore, Templethought the petite thump she could produce would lack a certain heavy-metal pizzazz that horseshoes and tap shoes share.

“Lightweight:’ Temple muttered under her breath as Elmore Lark left the room under the oddball escort of Alch and Su.

Beside her, Electra let out a deep breath and let her head droop to the tabletop. “Holy hypocrite! That bastard lied. About everything. I’m amazed he isn’t the dead body in the morgue.”

“You better hope he’s not, because you have police witnesses to wishing him dead.”

“Not seriously—”

“Everything here is serious now, Electra. Don’t let the happy high of the Red Hat Sisterhood lead you astray. We are hip-deep in trouble.”

It was only then Temple noticed that the black cats had slipped out of the conference room on the heels of Elmore and Merry and Morrie.

Oh, shoot. She and Electra weren’t even serious enough players to keep the attention of a couple of cats!

Louie and Louise, how could you?

Chapter 21

The Third Degree

“That was not very nice,” Louise observed as we shimmied through the air-conditioning vents.