Cat In A Red Hot Rage

The Las Vegas summer was firing up for the main event, and I have to admit that my seasoned joints were not doing the horizontal crawl with youthful enthusiasm.

Miss Midnight Louise, of course, was going for a world record in on-land airshaft-swimming.

“What was not nice?”

“Leaving the ladies behind so we could tail the cops. That Detective Su is as mean as a Persian queen in heat”

“She is just annoyed with our MissTemple for beating her out on the undercover job at the Teen Idol competition. They are like feuding sisters and Miss Lieutenant Molina is their mama.”

“Do not let MissTemple hear that idea. She would take you off at the tail.”

“Tut. I know how to handle these human females, unlike most human males. A little purr and rub here, a little manly huff and puff there, and they are all eating out of the palm of my paw.”

“Especially Miss Detective Su.” She is being sarcastic, and I forbear to reply to that comment.

“That is why we are going over ground. Once we reach the vent into the Lalique Suite, we will hear and see all while remaining not seen and not heard.”

“Like very lucky human children.”

“Hush! We are almost, hah! There.”

We hunker down, side to side and face to face, all the better to see and hear through the grille.

“I am jest an innocent bystander,” that heroic lonesome cowboy, Elmore Lark, is whining to the two detectives. “I jest came down from Reno to check on my little fillies.”

Even a good ole boy like me can see that the phrase “little fillies” is not going over with Miss Detective Su. Even Mr. Detective Alch winces at that one.

“Look, Elmore,” Su says. “I can call you ‘Elmore,’ can I not?”

“Sure, lady. Uh, Lieutenant.”

Alch chuckles.

“Detective will do,” Su tells him. “Are you saying that you never divorced Electra, wife number one?”

“No, not exactly.”

“Divorce is a very exact thing, like murder, Elmore. Which is it?”

“The papers were not quite right.”

“And you did this because–”

“Oleta was a hot potato.” He glanced at Alch for backup, but Alch was too savvy to do more than look as stony as a new president on Mount Rushmore.

Elmore shrugged. “Fun, but … touchy. I figured I could always get Electra back–”

Su put a trouser leg up on the chair next to Elmore. It was a fancy Italian leather chair, but she had no shame at resting her mall shoe-shop ersatz leather boot on top of it. (I have learneda few things from my MissTemple and her extensive shoe collection.)

“You are a dirty dog, Elmore. I bet there are a lot of women who would like to see you swing for murder.”

“Ah, they do not hang people anymore.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Ye-ah.”

“And the worst part of your cheesy operation is you set one woman against another and then slip away all innocentlike. You are not innocent, are you?”

“Of murder, yes.”

“So who do you think offed Oleta? Between us.” Su’s boot swiveled like it was about to crush out a cigarette. Elmore’s gentleman’s area was directly across from it on the next chair. I swallowed in fellow sympathy. Even the sinister Hyacinth had never touched claw to my, er, play balls.

“She has got him on the run,” Louise chortled next to me. “Or having the runs,” she adds with that peculiarly feminine zest for certain forms of violence against men who done them wrong. “I do not know what has gotten into the China Doll of the LVMPD,” I say, truly amazed.

And that is when my man, Detective Morrie Alch, rises to the occasion.

“We will need to see your marriage and divorce papers,” he tells Elmore Lark. “To both women, and any others you may have promised to love and obey for all time.”

“I am not the greatest housekeeper,” Lark says. As if one could not tell that from the wrinkles in his checked shirt. “Aren’t there records you people can check in the blink of a computer cursor?”

Su leans closer, all glare. “Sure. But we want to see what you are flashing around, claiming to be genuine.”

“And where were you yesterday morning?” Alch asks.

“At home in Reno. I drove right down when I heard about Oleta on the nightly news.”

“We had not released her name to the press yet.” Su is re-lentless. “Not enough information about next of kin. If you were on any lists in that regard, you sure did not show up.”

“We divorced too. A few years ago.”

“So why are you really in town?” Alch slipped that in with such an easygoing tone that Lark was answering before he thought about it.

“Some old business with Electra.”

“She knew you were coming?”

“Nah. I did not even know all these red-and-purple ladies would be in town.”

“Then how did you end up at the Crystal Phoenix?” Su pounced.

Elmore Lark winced and fingered his cowboy hat on the tabletop. Sometimes even your props will let you down. “Oleta e-mailed me to come. Said she knew something of interest to me. About Electra. And I had other interests in town.”

Su and Alch sat back in their chairs as one.

It looked like the long-ago romantic triangle was still plenty alive and kicking … until someone had throttled Oleta.

At least there is another suspect on the scene besides Miss Electra Lark.

I hiss as much to Louise.

Below us, the humans are leaving the room.

“Why do you always refer to your human lady friends as Miss when some of them are actually Mrs.?” Louise asks in that annoyed tone females and relatives get when they have nothing better to do than pick on some innocent nearby dude.

“It is a courtesy title, Louise. I even use it with you, at times, though Bast knows you have given me little courtesy. All human females were ‘Misses’ at one time and I honor their eternally youthful origins by using that honorific. And, as you have seen and heard, these ‘Mrs.’ titles come and go nowadays.”

“Do you think that your MissTemple, now that she is about to become Mr. Matt’s MissTemple and maybe his Mrs., will soon be a ‘Miss’ again?”

“One never knows in this town,” I answer grimly. If my MissTemple does decide to reside in a state of holy matrimony, I would hope it would be permanent. I do not like to move from pillar to post office. “And you have made my point, Louise. Aman is always a ‘Mr.; no matter his marital status. Ergo, I do not see why a woman should not always remain a ‘Miss:”

“I get that, but who is this ‘Ergo’?”

“Merely an expression referring to some Latin lover type, no doubt. Speaking of which, it might behoove us to look up Mr. Aldo Fontana and his doings with MissTemple’s aunt. They are on the case too, and those Fontana brothers are very well–”

“Built?”

“Connected, I was going to suggest.”

But I admit I am disappointed that even the fiercely independent Miss Midnight Louise can fall prey to a tall, dark guy with a world-class tailor.

Chapter 22

Midnight Madness

Matt Devine sat behind the mike at WCOO-AM, listening to other people’s problems.

His own sounded miniature by comparison: a newfound long-lost father in his hometown of Chicago. A mother who wanted to run from a past too traumatic to remember, including an abusive ex-husband, except that Matt’s real father had been the only good thing in it. And now that Matt had found that man by happenstance and whatever saint presided over happy endings, she wanted to run from him.

Parents. Way overrated once you were past twenty-one.

But he was only four years past thirty, and way too many of those years had been spent as a dedicated Catholic priest. He didn’t regret those years, not even the celibacy. He’d donesome good. But time had made clear that he’d run to the priesthood in search of a more perfect father than his abusive stepfather, Cliff Effinger, even if he had to become that “Father” himself.

He’d come to Las Vegas to track down and confront Effinger, but the man he found was too small to fear or hate, and was dead now, anyway. Meanwhile, Matt had stumbled from hotline counseling into a radio shrink job that made “Mr. Midnight” a hot syndicated property.

He’d also met an empathetic, energetic fireball named Temple Barr who’d made him glad he’d waited seventeen years for her … and her heroic significant other, charismatic ex-magician Max Kinsella. Now the men’s roles had changed.

The Mystifying Max, as his stage name promised, had been in—and out—of Temple’s life for so long that the stifled attraction between her and Matt finally had flared. And how. Matt breathed hard each time he recalled every word, every kiss, every touch, every move. With more to come. He’d been infatuated with Temple since they met, but now the cat was out of the bag and it was ravenous.

And still his happiness didn’t feel guaranteed. Max was a powerful presence even when he went AWOL … and Matt?

It was past midnight in Las Vegas. Matt had a $48,000 vintage engagement ring in his coat pocket because his betrothed didn’t want to wear it “yet” and he couldn’t bear to inter it in the new floor safe in his newly redone bedroom … where he’d done and redone his betrothed even though that was against every rule for an ex-priest maybe on the road to becoming ex-Catholic.

Come to think of it, “Mr. Midnight,” on-air shrink extraordinaire, had plenty problems of his own.

And still freight cars full of free-floating anxiety and angst poured in from the featureless night. From phones in cheap motel rooms and in ticky-tacky box houses, at bars, in dark living rooms, dialed secretly.

“He/she is running around on me.”

“No one can know I’m pregnant.”

“No one can know I had an abortion/adoption/stillbirth.”

“Why does he hit me if he says he loves me?”

“Why doesn’t he boff me if he says he loves me?”

“Why does she run around with every dude on the block?”

“Should I marry him/her even if he/she is physically/sexually/verbally abusive?”

Sometimes, lately, Matt, the most levelheaded of men, wanted to scream, “How should I know?”

But they thought he did, so he tried to give them honest, supportive advice. Sometimes he hung up the oversize foam-padded earphones for the night feeling that he had.

Not tonight. He got into his Crossfire outside the station and drove back to the Circle Ritz on autopilot.

He needed to confront Temple about what wasn’t happening between them. Two-thirty in the morning was a lousy time to do it, but he needed to know.

Besides, he ached to see her again. He’d spent so long subduing all the crazy throbs and fevers of first love, and now it was combined with the wonders and passion of first sex. He was glad they’d been forced to be just friends so long, so they knew each other deep down. Now she’d become a drug he couldn’t get enough of, and that felt so right.

Matt stood in the dim hallway, wondering whether to knock.

He sure wasn’t about to ring the old-fashioned doorbell. That would wake the whole floor.

Max Kinsella, he knew, had made a habit of coming and going unannounced via the patio doors, an unpredictable and dazzling second-story man to the end.

Matt still felt he ought to knock, which was maybe a pretty bad sign. He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Temple’s number, feeling like a fool.

The ringing stopped. She sounded groggy, of course. “Yes?”

“It’s me.” Stupid line.

“Matt? Oh.” He could hear the rustle of sheets as she settled up against her pillows. “It’s been so crazy. I’m so glad to hear your voice.”

He could have admitted he’d been crazy too but that didn’t seem wise at the moment.

“Where are you?” she asked. “Just home?”

“Yeah. Just home.” He leaned against the wall. Her wall. “I’ve been running around all day at the Crystal Phoenix.”

“Still chaos there?”

“A convention of five thousand divided between the Phoenixand the Goliath? Yes. And … well, the usual, at the Phoenix, unfortunately. Listen, if you’re not too tired, and could come down for a while—?”

“I am down.”

“Down?”

“I’m at your door.”

“Oh.” There was a silence. Had he overstepped his bounds? “Oh! Well! Wait just a sec. I need to put something … off.” The cell phone died in his hand, but he’d definitely detected a perk in her interest level.

Two minutes later the door opened. Temple was wearing something long and red and filmy and dotted with rhinestones that was amazingly deficient at covering her breasts.

She couldn’t miss his appraisal. “One great thing about being a blond now is I can wear red. Vintage fifties nightie. We femmes fatales knew how to do it then. Come in, wandering voice of the night. I could use a sympathetic ear.”

“Your aunt isn’t here?”

“Apparently she has found a roost elsewhere for the duration of her visit. Can you spell F-o-n-t-a-n-a?”

Matt raised his eyebrows, but was rather glad to hear Templewas home alone again. They settled at the stools by the kitchen eating counter. Temple’s gaze settled on Matt, and it was unsettlingly fond.

“It’s so good to see a sane face.”

“Um, ‘sane’ isn’t the adjective I was looking for.”

“It’s so good to see your handsome, wise, sexy face. Can a girl these days just say, ‘Kiss me’?”

Matt found his niggling doubts vanishing as he complied. He wondered if a guy could just say, “On the couch, the floor, or the patio under the stars?”

“Hmmm.” Temple smiled at him from six inches away, so her eyes were as adorably crossed as a Siamese cat’s. Speaking of which?

“Louie?” Matt asked.

“Kind of you to inquire, but he’s not in. Not on the couch. Not in my bed. Anywhere else of interest?”

“I was thinking the patio overlooking the pool.”

“You know I loved to watch you swim from there. Lustfully. Maybe there,” Temple said.

“Electra would see.”

Temple sighed. “Not nowadays, lover boy. That’s what I needed to tell you.”

“Something about Electra?” Matt was confused. He still expected every other sentence out of her mouth to be about Max, not a good sign in her or him.

“She was discovered leaning solicitously over a dead body at the Crystal Phoenix yesterday.”

“You mentioned that, but come on, Electra a murderer? She was Just trying to help someone, obviously.”

“The victim turned out to be the woman who took her third husband away from her, so the ‘help’ defense is a bit thin.”

Matt bit his lip. “Not good, but I stand by my first diagnosis. Electra wouldn’t kill a fruit fly.”

“I agree. But that’s something to worry about tomorrow, Rhett.” She leaned forward and took his worried bottom lip in her own. “You tell me: on the plantation porch, by the plantation pond, or in the master bedroom?”

Matt’s heart stopped beating for about twenty seconds. She meant it. Here. Now. Them. The bedroom once co-owned by Max.

He reached in his pocket and pulled out the ring. “You’ve been carrying this around?”

“I couldn’t leave it in a cold metal safe when my whole heart’s in it.”

“Mine too.” Temple beamed and put it on her third finger, left hand, but her eyes never left his.

Matt made his choice. It was late. They were both a littleweary. They deserved a pillow-top mattress. Max was gone.

Louie was out.

Matt led Temple into her very own bedroom to make it into a marriage bed.

At five in the morning they awoke. Temple laid her head on Matt’s shoulder and her left hand on his chest while she got something off hers.

“He’s really gone this time,” she whispered, relating all the details about the complete changing of the guard at Max’s former home. “He’d been hinting that this was it, but with Max you never knew.”

“So you can’t ever tell him it’s over?”

“I think he knew. Maybe he had somewhere urgent to be. Maybe he thought cutting the cord was the kindest thing to do. The thing is, I don’t owe him an apology. I did my best to offer him one, but he’s gone again, and I have a brand-new life to live with someone I’ve always loved very much.”

“Always?”

“From the moment we met. I just didn’t dare know it then.”

“Me neither”

“Now we can dare anything.”

“Except for friends and neighbors and close relatives,” he said with a laugh, lifting her hand to kiss the ring on it. “It’s about time they knew. We’ll get through it.”

She didn’t say the thing she’d decided during the night when Matt had made her bed theirs.

Once Electra was cleared of murder charges, Templewanted a civil wedding ceremony in the Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel downstairs, with all the soft-sculpture people and their Las Vegas friends present, in front of God, state, Elvis, and everybody.

And then they’d decide in which church in which city, and when, they’d do it all over again, to placate the parental demons. And because she really, really wanted to wear her Austrian crystal Stuart Weitzman Midnight Louie spikes with a wedding gown. On the red carpet to the altar. Catholic, Universalist Unitarian, or whatever their relatives would compromise on.

She wanted to meet Matt’s mother. See her parents endorse their youngest child’s adult choice.

Max had been way too big bad wolf, too alpha, for their cautious Midwestern conservatism. Matt still broadcast good boy gone diffidently successful. He would go down much better, if anybody would.

As her family’s youngest child and sole daughter, she could only hope.

Chapter 23

Diamond Razzle Dazzle

The buses, vans, and taxis from McCarran airport rolled up to the red carpet the Crystal Phoenix had laid from lobby to porte cochere. Today, Wednesday, officially began the Red Hat Sisterhood convention, even though a couple thousand early arrivals had been in occupancy for a day.

Temple, irreverent PR flack that she was, wondered two things: if she and Matt should get married here instead, or if the Red HAT Sisterhood had ever considered the acronym, RHATS.

If six hundred Red Hat ladies had seemed overwhelming, five thousand seemed like a revolution, a mass of well-dressed, cheerful lemmings leaping off a cliff into all things Las Vegas.

Temple watched the onslaught with mixed feelings.

Several months before, the performance artist Domingo had arrived in Las Vegas to swath the Strip’s iconic buildings with a million pink plastic lawn flamingos. The hot pink plumage had indeed been spectacular … until the searing Las Vegassun faded them all to pallid pink.

At first the project had seemed over-the-top for an over-thetop entertainment destination. Then the massed flamingos had attained an odd sort of dignity in numbers. Humble but universal. Colorful, eccentric, unashamed … everything Las Vegas. That was Domingo’s point. Life is art. Art is life.

Today the Red Hat Sisterhood swarmed over the largerthan-life artfulness of Las Vegas, and conquered.

Red and purple outshone the Strip’s neon. They were colors of vigor and assertion, yet available to one and all, if they only had the nerve.

Watching the rivers of crimson and purple flow into the Crystal Phoenix on that royal red welcoming carpet, Templedecided that she had lost her own nerve lately, but she was getting it back.

Matt’s gorgeous diamond-and-ruby vintage ring blared from her left hand. She was engaged! With love, with life, with making sure everything in her purview went well. And that included freeing Electra from suspicion by nailing the person who’d strangled Oleta Lark.

Temple, now proud in pink, Joined the Red Hat Sisterhood river flowing into the Phoenix. In the lobby, the Fontana brothers, suited in tones of cappuccino, cream, ivory, bisque, and generally well-tailored, naturally tan Hunk, were out in full force, all nine of ‘em.

They directed the red-and-purple tide to the checkin lines exclusive to their group. They bowed to kiss plump, beringed hands. Their guiding fingers paused ever so briefly but memorably on curvaceous midlife torsos, merely to direct, of course.

“Whew,” someone whispered in Temple’s ear, under her wide hat brim. “If anybody had told me aging gracefully was this much fun I’d have skipped right over menopause to the good stuff.”

Only one person was capable of whispering under Temple’shat brim. Well, two. But she didn’t think petite Detective Merry Su was up to such an incisive summary of this scene, even had she been here.

“Kit. My elusive ex-roommate! Come to think of it, I don’t see Aldo among the Brothers Nine.”

“Brothers Eight. Counting was never your strong suit in kindergarten. And you won’t see Aldo. He’s been forbidden to minister to any midlife needs but mine.”

Temple laughed.

Kit went on. “You’re looking in the pink, girl, even aside from the hat. Any unauthorized hanky-panky happen while I’ve been AWOL that I should know about?”

Temple flashed her left hand, feeling as shallow as a sorority candidate.

“NO!” Kit shrieked like a Teen Queen. “Major commitment. Fabulous taste. I want him. Whoever he is.”

“Et tu, Auntie?”

Kit’s eyes drilled into Temple’s. “He’s not my darling Max?”

“He’s my darling Matt.”

“Oh. Well, he’s the bee’s knees and wings and striped jail-house suit and stinger too.”

Temple felt a laugh gurgle up from between her extravagantly shod toes to her hot pink hat. It was such a relief to know that there was Life Galore After Fifty. Or Sixty. Or Seventy.

Or even Thirty.

“Are these ladies cool, or what?” she asked her aunt.

“The cat’s pajamas,” Kit said. “Speaking of which, I’m see-ing black cats … double.”

“Louie’s here, and he has a little friend.”

“Don’t tell me he’s gone and gotten monogamous. Some things don’t need to change.”

“All I know is that he’s incapable of putting a female in a fix now. I had to go head-to-head with Savannah Ashleigh to clear him of an ‘unwanted littering’ charge.”

“That woman. Somehow I’m going to out her as a Red Hat-ter at this convention.”

“You’re also pretty in pink, but an illegal,” Temple pointed out ungenerously.

“Aldo likes me in pink,” Kit said, “and what Aldo likes, Aldo gets. A lot of. Lately.”

Temple eyed her ring finger. Under these hothouse hotel lobby lights the diamonds shot out serious wattage.

“I’d watch that,” said a male voice that had sidled up.

She turned to find Morrie Alch looking at her with a decidedly paternal twinkle. It was the second-nicest thing that had happened to her in twenty-four hours.

The old folks at home in Minnesota were more likely to narrow their eyes in suspicion at any such maJor alteration on their overprotected only daughter’s anatomy. And its worth would only be another dire danger sign to them.

Alch was chuckling. “Did Molina’s favorite magician finally spring the big question?”

It was a natural question and Temple knew she’d be getting it a lot. She’d better have a pat answer ready.

“Magicians never do the predictable,” she said. Airily. “No. You’ve met him, though.”

Alch was looking abashed for his faux pas.

“Matt,” she said, and watched his paternal beam return to high intensity.

“Good for you! Him, rather. Swell guy. If my own daughter had brought home someone that superfine I’d have done the first Highland fling of my sadly ground-bound life.”

“Thanks.” Temple eyed him slyly. “Is this gonna frost Molina’s cornflakes?”

“Just a teensy bit,” Alch responded. “Don’t you tell her.”

“Staple-gun torture couldn’t squeeze it outta me.” Alch sobered. “But I do need to talk business to you for a moment.”

“Come into my ‘alternate interrogation room,’ aka ‘parlor.’ ” Temple waved good-bye to her aunt as she and Alch headed toward the conference room.

“Sorry about Su. She gets a little gung ho.” He opened the door to let Temple enter first.

Some woman was missing a good bet in Morrie Alch. Temple had a hunch it might be Molina.

Inside the room, Alch sat on the table end while Templetook one of the chairs and twirled around in it just because she could. The diamonds and rubies sparkled like state fair glitz while she did it.

Alch chuckled again. “I hate to rain on your parade, but the police have a problem here.”

Temple stilled herself and listened.

“Elmore Lark is a tin-plated asshole, but he has an iron-clad alibi for the late morning, the time Oleta was killed. Was meeting some buddies who all swear to it. Background checks don’t find anyone else with a motive, except your landlady. The only thing keeping Electra Lark from being taken into custody is Molina.”

“Molina?”

“She’s with you. Thinks the setup is too pat. My hands are tied. I no more think Electra killed Oleta than she ran the half mile in sixty seconds flat. Su is eager to wrap this up. Over-eager. She doesn’t want to give you an inch.”

“Because she thinks she should have gone undercover for Molina last time out.”

“Maybe. She’s a sharp young lady, but she gets all that impressive forward motion from wearing blinders. No side vision. In my experience, crime, and particularly murder, is an oblique sort of thing. It slips in at an angle, does its damage, and slithers away at an angle. Like a sidewinder snake.”

Temple thought about it. Alch was right. Murder was not a straightforward act. It probably sneaked up on the murderer too. A bit of natural fury mixed with what seemed a reasonable sense of loss or betrayal. Human nature operating as usual. And then the same old ingredients that had resulted in a little flurry of aggravation suddenly escalated to an unthinkable act.

“What are you saying?” she asked Alch, right out.

He told her, right out.

“I’m saying our real Las Vegas CSIs didn’t find any DNA evidence on the body but Electra’s.”

“She found Oleta. She tried to undo the scarf.”

“Perfectly natural. Perfectly suitable for framing. No one needs to look further. They had the same husband, for God’s sake. No one else remotely comes to mind for the crime, much less has any evidential link to it.”

“You’re saying that’s all that Las Vegas’s finest can come up with.”

“Yeah. Unless you can provide some evidence that changes our minds.”

“Me? That’s your job.”

“Our job is done, says procedure and history and everything we go by, which is hard evidence.”

“Electra would never—”

“You believe that. I believe that. You prove it.”

Temple took a deep breath. “I’ve just … gotten lucky around some previous crime scenes. I’m not a professional.”

“That’s what Electra Lark needs now. A professional. It ain’t the police.” He took her left hand in his. “Sorry to rain on your parade, Princess.”

“No. Thanks for telling me. Su sure wouldn’t.”

Alch narrowed his eyes. “I like Su and I respect her, but she’s still young and needs a lesson. You give it to her, Red.”

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

Alch shook his head. “A woman can change her hair color like she can her nail polish these days. But not her heart. You’ve always had that redhead rage for truth, justice, and the American way. My money’s on you, kid. Don’t let me down.”

His words made her smile long after he walked away.

Not much was expected of her in her family except staying way too safe.

Maybe that’s why she stuck her nose into crimes on her turf: she had something to prove. Just because her frame was slight, she wasn’t short-sheeted in the brain or heart department.

Even Molina had tacitly admitted she had a gift for detection. That’s why Su was annoyed with her. And why Alch was rooting for her to clear Electra for good and all by finding a better candidate.

And that’s why her parents and older brothers had been a teensy bit right to worry about her.

You want to look for the truth in a case of murder, you’re bound to annoy somebody much more threatening than Detective Su.

Chapter 24

Bad Boy, Bad Boy, Whatcha Gonna Do?

Temple returned to the field of battle, i.e., her most stable job assignment, to find TV vans and crews crowding the Crystal Phoenix Hotel’s porte cochere, filming away like paparazzi at a Paris Hilton or a Tom “Crazy” Cruise sighting.

Neither of those publicity-worthy figures honored Las Ve-gas at the moment. Temple guessed with a sinking feeling in her gut that the Red Hat Sisterhood was somehow in the news again. Another murder? If so, the death of someone unrelated to Electra would be nice… .

Then she saw something poking above the lofted mikes and cameras. A cluster of black hats, not red or purple ones. Hmmm. Natalie Newman! Miss Snaky Shoes was cruising among the local media in the general film-at-six and -ten feeding frenzy.

Sometimes even three-inch-high heels could not make a five-foot-zero woman tall enough to see what she desperately needed to view in the performance of her job.

“Here,” a baritone voice said behind her. Waist-encompassing hands lofted Temple two feet off the ground for the bird’s-eye view available from a ballerina lift.

For a moment, to Temple’s gut and heart it felt like Max was back, taking charge.

Then she glanced over her shoulder and down on a dark-haired male head, and it was all too plain to her.

She patted her dancing partner’s shoulder—nice padding!

Was it muscle or tailoring? Only her auntie knew for sure. Aldo Fontana lowered her back to ground zero again. But she’d seen enough.

The hats that had become the center of attention in a sea of Red Hat Sisterhood ladies were black, masculine, and surmounted by protest signs.

WHAT FILM STARRED PRINCE? PURPLE HAGS! read one. RHS: RAGING HORMONE SISSYHOOD read another. MEN JUST WANTA HAVE FUN. GET THE GUN!

That one was outright threatening.

Temple had been thinking that her pert pink hat was giving her a headache. Her forehead wasn’t used to being bounded by a hatband. Now she knew that those black hats would give her an even bigger headache. As would the lunkheads under them.

“Everything okay?” Aldo asked.

“Nothing’s okay. Can you plow a path through that mob?”

“My dear lady, I am the mob.”

He put his hand into his left front suit coat, like a squat little-Caesar type Corsican named Napoleon, only Aldo was a tall Las Vegan. He then shouldered forward, earning a lot of turned heads, nasty looks, and suddenly pale faces as they spotted his hand on heart (or holster) posture.

Temple trotted in his wake, ducking all the mikes and cameras, until she and Aldo had a front row seat.

If there was an opposite number to a Red Hat Sisterhood woman, several of them were picketing the Crystal Phoenix. The men all wore black and blue: blue jeans and blue work shirts and black cowboy hats, belts, and boots. And huge tin belt buckles bearing the initials BHB.

Their signs announced them as the Black Hat Brotherhood and said they were for men’s rights. Temple the PR maven didn’t think that a black-and-blue color scheme was a really wise choice for men asserting rights over women.

No matter. They were all middle-aged and mostly shy on hair, except the facial sort, and big on beer guts. Or beer-nut guts.

They didn’t offer the glamour of the Red Hat Sisterhood. No dye jobs, tummy tucks, or false eyelashes here. But their cowboy boots had high heels and they broadcast a certain down-to-earth malcontent swagger as they marched back and forth. And they made dynamite copy and great sound bites. Those black cowboy hats made for instant visuals.

Natalie Newman had cornered their apparent leader and was eagerly asking questions. Several TV station videographers were capturing his answers over her shoulder.

From the quality of her questions, she was clearly way more tuned into the Black Hat Brotherhood than the average local reporter.

“Is this your first public protest?” she asked.

“Right. We’re the Men Left Behind. We been run-around-on, run-out-on, and just plain rundown. What’s so special about a bunch of women dressing up like freaks and having a high old time while their husbands and kids are untended at home?”

“You’re not at home,” Temple pointed out, raising her voice to a far higher profile than her frame could ever attain.

The cameras zoomed in on her for an instant, then fixed back on the spokesman.

“Well, now, that’s a good point, little pink lady. We’re just here in Las Vegas to have fun, like those Ragin’ Hormone Sisters. Sounds like some New Age vocal group to me. Anyway, we men are here in Las Vegas to gamble, smoke cigars, and watch naked young women who’re worth the view.”

Boos and hisses from gathering Red Hat Sisterhood women answered that statement.

Natalie Newman raised her voice so the looming multistation mikes could capture it.

“When and why did the Black Hat Brotherhood form?”

“ ‘When’ was at the previous Ragin’ Hormones hooha last year in St. Louis. ‘Why’ was because we men are tired of being used, abused, and put out to pasture when the women get their change of life.”

“Don’t men undergo a change of life?” Temple asked. “Only because the women go crazy then, Hot Pink. You better come on over to our side. We can use a pretty little blond filly like you, instead of these old gray mares most of us are stuck with.” Like all protesters, they meant to inflame.

The Red Hat Sisterhood started up their own chant: “Two, four, six, eight, you old guys discriminate.”

The Black Hat Brotherhood retaliated in kind: “Two, four, six, eight, you old dames are full of hate.”

It was a PR person’s nightmare. The Crystal Phoenix mar-quee would star in the local news on every station tonight. Temple had to do something.

She used her high heels to stomp her way through the crowding media reporters and videographers. With a trail of ows in her wake, she seized the media attention from Natalie Newman by projecting her voice.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” Temple declaimed. “In this corner we have the Black Hat Brotherhood.” She pointed like a carnival barker. “In this corner we have the Red Hat Sisterhood.” She pointed again. “I propose a no-holds-barred debate on these issues tomorrow at 2:00 P.M. right here.”

Her bold proposal had hushed the contending factions. Tern-ple racked her brains. Who would make a media-friendly moderator?

“The debate will be moderated by … Mr. Midnight himself, Matt Devine, syndicated host of Las Vegas’s own WCOO-AM radio’s ‘Midnight Hour.’ “

A series of ooohs among the assembled media and onlookers told Temple she’d hit publicity gold.

She just hoped she didn’t lose a fiancé over it.

Chapter 25

Hot Water and Cool Tequila

Or a major client.

Temple was called onto the carpet in Van von Rhine’s office, only it was all bleached wood floors and no carpet.

Nicky was there, with his brother, Aldo, as a witness.

Van was tapping one sleek Italian designer pump on her high-end wood floor, very audibly. Temple was thinking that Van could wear a bath towel to work if it was Italian-made and be just as happy in it, as she was with her easygoing husband, on whom Temple was banking with every instinct in her.

“Pardon me, Temple:’ Van said, maintaining her natural blond cool. Or ice. “I don’t see how transferring a distasteful media brawl from the Crystal Phoenix’s front porte cochere to our meeting rooms inside is an improvement. But you’re the public relations expert.”

You’re the one whose baby-blond bleached head this is on, was the message.

“The media was eating us up for the five, six, and ten P. M.

news,” Temple said. “I had to do something to stop it for the moment.”

“But they’ll be back tomorrow, hunting for blood. For red ink for the hotel. We’ve worked very hard to establish a reputation as a first-class destination in Las Vegas. Not as the equivalent of World Wrestling Federation contest between middle-aged men and women.”

Nicky lit up. “Hey, maybe we can get all the debaters to wear those Stingy Dingy underwear like they do on the wrestling shows.”

“You mean tighty whities,” Temple said.

“Oh, my God!” Van hid her face in her hands. “There is no way out of this but disgrace.”

“Matt will lend an air of dignity,” Temple suggested.

Van looked up to skewer her with a steel-blue gaze. “Are you sure he’ll be willing to go along with this tasteless stunt?”

Temple stretched out her left hand and wiggled the heavy-duty engagement ring on it.

Van blinked at the high-end glitz. “Congratulations. Okay,”

she conceded. “He’s just a fool in love. I still don’t think he’ll do this, even for you.”

“I would,” Nicky said.

Van lifted a pale eyebrow. “You’d do it for Temple if you were Matt, or just on principle?”

“I’d do it because it makes sense.”

Temple released a hot, long-held breath. Van was the head of this operation, but Nicky was the guts and the heart.

“Look,” he went on. “The damage was done. Our clients were being attacked by a rowdy protester group. Someone sicced the media on that and I’d sure like to know who.”

Nicky eyed Temple, who nodded. She had media contacts all over town and they were going to get roasted on a red-hot grill until she knew who’d masterminded that ugly scene. Shehad her suspicions. She’d get to that just as soon as she got to Matt and did what Van von Rhine rightfully thought was going to be a hard sell.

Three nights tied to his four-poster bed ought to do it for a fiancé. Also for her.

But Matt had scruples, and those were very costly indeed.

Maybe five nights.

“So who do you think did it?” Nicky asked.

“Huh?” Temple pulled her imagination and libido back to the problem at hand. “I have my suspects,” she said mysteriously.

Actually, it was “suspect” singular, but she wasn’t ready to go on record for that.

Temple raced back down to the holding cells.

Wait a minute! She’d been doing too much unofficial police work lately. They weren’t holding cells, just neighboring conference rooms.

A pair of Fontana brothers stood guard outside each set of double doors. Aldo was waiting for her, and he introduced her to his siblings, just so she wouldn’t get embarrassingly confused about names.

“Ernesto and Rico are keeping the Black Hat Brotherhood bottled up with lots of beer,” Aldo said, rolling his eyes. Italians preferred wine to beer and hard liquor.

“Armando and Julio, on the other hand, have been trying to keep the Red Hat Sisterhood from unnecessary stress.” Temple could hear female hooting inside. “What did you have them served? Tea?”

Aldo winced. “Texas Tea, I was told. I was also told it would knock a mule-headed beer-drinking Black Hat Brother back on his ass.”

Texas Tea, Temple thought. Wasn’t that Jack Daniel’s and lemonade? She braced herself to enter the conference room to meet with the Red Hat Sisterhood on ninety proof.

Once inside, the double doors snapped shut, locking her in.

There wasn’t much choice of debaters. Whoever had been in the unruly crowds on both sides had been swept into swift custody by the Fontana brothers at Temple’s instructions.

She was surprised to see two pink hats among the red.

Holy Hattie Carnegie!

One was her aunt Kit, sure to be a strong debater, and one was Savannah Ashleigh. Talk about a loss leader.

Looking around, she was relieved to see that two of Electra’s Red-Hatted League members were among the group, Judy and Phyll, the Mutt and Jeff librarians. And of course she’d had to invite Jeanne Johnson, Her Royal Hatness, the founder and head woman. That pretty much made up a debate team, if she could ditch Savannah.

“Traitor!” the woman in question now spat at Temple. “I beg your pardon?”

“You named a man moderator. Why not me? I’m much better known nationally than some local radio personality.”

“The title is ‘moderator.’ You’re not moderate.”

“I’m as modern as the next Teen Idol.”

“Moderate. Like the weather.”

“Oh.” Savannahtrout-pouted, which collagen treatments to her lips had well qualified her to do. “You mean dull, boring. Bland.”

“Exactly,” Temple said.

“Well, I certainly am not that!”

“I agree,” Temple said with a broad smile.

HRH spoke next. “This could be a good publicity opportunity for our message,” she said, “but I’m worried about lowering ourselves to debate these rowdy protesters. This is our convention. We were violated.”

Temple sighed. “I agree, but protesters have a habit of tak-ing over the news media. At least a debate will even the playing field.”

Temple then set up the debaters: HRH Jeanne Johnson; “clown princess” Candy Crenshaw, recommended by HRH; Kit; and Phyll, one of the two Red-Hatted League librarians. (Never argue with a librarian; they know too much.) She designated Savannah Ashleigh as official emcee and note-taker. The ersatz actress would know how to pose and fidget to draw thecameramen’s attention. It would still effectively gag her. That was fighting dirty, but Temple worked for the Crystal Phoenix, not the Black Hat Brotherhood or Savannah Ashleigh.

Speaking of fighting dirty, Temple next headed to the roundup of Black Hat Brotherhood members.

Armando and Julio Fontana were concerned about allowing her entrance.

“These men have been drinking beer for an hour and a half,” Armando warned.

“I’ve been binge drinking upset-stomach acids,” Templeanswered. “We’re about even.”

She went in, bowled over by a yeasty reek. About fifteen cowpokes glowered at her from under the brims of their black felt hats. Holy Hopalong Cassidy! One was Elmore Lark.

All Temple could think was that this headgear must be mighty hot in a Las Vegas spring. At least the women had been inside and air-conditioned.

Temple introduced herself. “I need four candidates for the debate team, pronto,” she said. “You can draw straws or duke it out.”

The men murmured approvingly at her brisk directions. “I’m the head man,” one said. “The BHB founder.” He stood and nodded at her. “Mike Crenshaw.”

“Oh. That’s the same last name of the lead singer and jokester of that group, Candy Crenshaw and the Red Hat Candies.”

“They call me Cal, and the Big Hat Breaker:’ Crenshaw said with a tight grin.

Temple had lost her smile, suddenly realizing that she had another pair of warring exes on her hands. Crenshaw was a burly man in his sixties. Having plunged into a whirlpool, Templethought it might be interesting to muddy the waters. “And Mr. Lark, I see you’re a member. Want to the join the debate?”

She was thinking he’d never do it, not with bigamy charges against him. In fact, coming down here had put him into the teeth of his two ex-wives and risked bringing up his dicey marital history. Was he really that ticked off at a group that encouraged older women to embrace their ages and not “act” in the ways society expected? Maybe. The Black Hat Brotherhood was a strong reminder that a lot of men of a certain age didn’t like change, especially in their wives.

“Damn right,” he said, tipping his black hat without rising.

She just knew his long legs in cowboy boots were stretched out under the conference table. Temple shrugged her acquiescence. It wasn’t her hide the media would nail to the wall if someone tipped them off about his marital record. She was act-ing as a PR person and a friend now, not a so-called objective reporter.

If these Black Hat Brotherhood guys were too smug and naive to finesse their big media opportunity, tough. Which, of course, was their whole raison d’être. In their minds, Real Men would rather bomb than be caught being reasonable.

“Hey,” Matt said, walking up the short hallway to his door at the Circle Ritz late that afternoon to find Temple holding up the wall with a pitcher of something pale, cold, and alcoholic.

God, he looked good!

Oops. Sorry, God, I know he used to be all yours, but you made him this way.

Since they’d broken the sex barrier something tentative in Matt had vanished, given way to a new ease and confidence that was as sexy as hell. Sorry, God! Again. She supposed releasing his held-back feelings had done that. Now he looked her deep in the eyes, ready to see everything she could show him. A guy couldn’t glow, but he could simmer, and Matt simmering for her was irresistible.

She smiled back at him, and they just stood there basking in each other’s pleasure with the other.

Then he pulled her close for a long, deep kiss. Not a word said. Not a word necessary.

“You’ve been waiting for me?” he asked, sounding a little smug and a lot satisfied. “How long?”

What girl couldn’t play along with a moment like this. “All my life.”

He paused, then laughed. But his brown bedroom eyes were melting like the ice in her pitcher. “And you want—?”

“You. When was it ever different?”

“For a lot of months when you were busy elsewhere, but let’s not count that.”

“I thought so too.” Temple edged away from the door so he could get his key in the lock.

He started to open the door, then paused. Took her and the pitcher into close custody again. “What do you want?”

“Number one or number two?”

Matt’s eyes squeezed shut to consider. “Number two?”

“Shucks. Your help.”

“That’s it? My help? Not my love, my support, my endless passion.”

“You asked for `number two.”

“So I did. Come on down then.” He opened the door to let her eel through.

She put the pitcher on the nearest kitchen counter. Her hand was icy and it was heavy.

“What am I being bribed with?” he asked.

“Margaritas. You brought two to my door when we first met, remember?”

“I remember when we first met, but not the Margaritas.”

“It was after I solved my first case, when you altered my TEMPLE BARR, PR card to read TEMPLE BARR, PI.”

“You’ve got a long memory.”

“You’ve got a long … never mind,” Temple said, getting out a pair of vintage martini glasses she’d given him with frosted Art Deco bubbles etching the clear glass bowls. “I could use a drink:’ he admitted. “It’s hot out there.”

“It could be hotter in here,” she said, pouring.

“Temple, you are gorgeous and I can’t resist you worth a darn, but you’re sometimes as transparent as glass. What do you want?”

“Oh, too bad:’ she purred. “You could have milked this one for at least twenty minutes.”

“I’m guessing neither of us has the time right now.”

She handed him a glass, then lifted her own to chime rims. “Okay. I’m in a really, really tight spot. It could cost me the Crystal Phoenix account.”

Matt stopped sipping, his forehead corrugating with worry. “That’s not possible. They love you. Almost as much as I do.”

“Yeah, but one disastrous round of bad publicity, and love ain’t enough in the PR biz. I am hoping, praying, it is in the Personal Relations biz.”

“ ‘Praying’?” You must need me bad.” He sounded pretty pleased about that.

“Matt, I promise, just this one time!”

“Really bad.”

“I’m on record about it. Sorry! The cameras were rolling, I had to do major spin control. You just popped into my mind. Maybe because you’re always on it.”

“Sure, flatter me. Into what?”

“A great media gig. Really. It’ll be huge for your radio show.”

“My radio show doesn’t need to be huger.”

“You can always use the right good publicity. The crowd just oohed when they heard your name.”

“This crowd heard my name because—?”

“I gave it to them. I needed an instantly recognizable moderator for a live debate tomorrow on the roles of aging men and women in our society.”

“Temple!”

“You’ll be perfect. The media are chomping at the bit. Your radio station will love it. Better phone ‘em to start hyping it now. They’ll probably want to cover it live.”

“Temple.”

“Five nights.”

“What?”

“Tied to your four-poster. You can do anything you want.”

“I’m new at this. I don’t have five nights’ backlog.”

“I’ll help.”

“You don’t have to bribe me. You just have to explain the situation.”

She did, while they sipped the first Margarita.

Matt heard her out. He finally nodded. “I’m thinking a week.”

“Whatever. I’ll pull the whole thing together. Get you a list of possible questions, panelists, everything.”

He glanced at his watch. “In less than twenty-four hours?”

“That’s why I gotta get going. I can count on you, then? Salud! Skoal! Cheers! ‘Bye now. Adios. Au revoir. Ta-ta. Gotta fly .” She pecked him on the lips. He caught her before she could dash away and made a minute of it.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “The Phoenix lobby, I:00 P.M., to get you up to speed. I’ll be the ‘little blond filly’ in the pink hat. Thanks a million!”

She skittered away on her festive slides, heart flying too.

This was the first time that Matt, and not Max, would be assisting her, not only in a skin-saving PR capacity, but maybe in a crime-solving one. Who knew what could come out in a heated debate between these warring men and women?

Temple hit her own place, kicking off her heels and skating barefoot over the slick wood floor to her office, where she riffled through her trusty Rolodex and started making a list and checking it twice. Everything was on computer, but the Rolodex kept her grounded.

Her first calls were to her best sources, so it was easy to slip in a casual question about who alerted them to the protest.

“One of the Red Hat women,” Sunny Cadeaux, a sister PR woman-around-town, said. They hadn’t talked in ages, but it was instant girl chat.

“You’re sure?”

“She didn’t leave a name. Just said they were all meeting there and it was very upsetting.”

The anonymous Red Hat tipster proved to be a universal source, until Temple got tired of hearing it. She punched in a number she usually didn’t have much reason to use.

“Pete,” the woman on the phone yelled to a passing colleague, “how’d we end up sending a videographer to that nothing mini-protest at the Crystal Phoenix?”

Temple held her breath as she heard a muffled answer. “One of our stringers,” the reporter reported, sounding disgusted. “Usually is more reliable.”

“You have a name?”

“You flack the Crystal Phoenix. I don’t want to get an associate in trouble.”

“Actually, I’d like to thank whoever it was. I’ve set up a debate between the Red Hat Sisterhood and the Black Hat Brotherhood moderated by Matt Devine, Mr. Midnight at WCOO-AM.”

“No kidding. Mr. Midnight, hmm. Nobody ever gets to see him in person. When is it?”

Temple told her, listening to the faint scratch of pencil on paper.

“Good thinking,” the reporter said. “People are dying to see what he looks like off the syndicated airwaves, given that dreamy voice. Probably bald and three hundred pounds, like your usual radio personality.”

“Decidedly not,” Temple promised.

“Okay, we’ll send someone. Oh. The tipster was someone who hadn’t worked for us in a long time.”

Temple crossed her fingers.

“Natalie Newman, Mark says. She goes back with us to before she got married and was Natalie Markowitz. She used to be a lot savvier than to call us out on a silly story like this.”

No, Temple thought. She was still savvy. And a lot of other things.

Temple thanked the woman, then cut the connection to listen to the lullaby of the dial tone.

Natalie Newman clearly had a double agenda at the convention. Her two cameras proved that. But maybe she had a triple one, and maybe Oleta Lark’s murder proved that.

Proving that would be a tough assignment for Temple, but she suspected it involved something in the past, something she wasn’t seeing yet. She’d keep her eyes and ears on the alert and on Natalie Newman.

Maybe by the time she was through, the local media would think she was Santa Claus, offering the gift of exposing a murderer.

Chapter 26

Mr. Midnight Sings the Blues

Matt showed up for his usual midnight talk radio gig half an hour early, whistling.

He felt this boundless energy nowadays.

Love was a many-splendored thing and way more than an ex-priest like him was equipped to deal with. He understood that his euphoria and repressed upbringing would soon have to slug it out, but for now, now that he was reassured that all was right with their world in bed and out. It was all gravy with truffles.

“Matt, my man!”

Leticia greeted him during the two precious minutes she was off-mike. “You’re lookin’ fine, honey. Happy and oh-sohot. Tell Auntie Ambrosia all about it.”

She did resemble an aunt: Aunt Jemima crossed with Queen Latifah, both comfy and glamorous. Ambrosia was her on-air name and it fit what she dished out over the late-night airwaves. She did a heartfelt oldies and goodies show, full of the songs that made people forget old wounds and work their way through new ones. She coaxed the callers into expressing deep feelings as they recalled some person lost or found, emotions old or new, painful or joyful. Ambrosia cooed the introductions to the songs she picked, always exactly right whether they targeted angst or euphoria. Matt was the station’s midnight shrink. Ambrosia was its pre-midnight guardian angel.

Now she grinned at him. “Matt, my bro, you are acting way too happy for the Evening Emperor of Angst. Don’t tell me Mr. Midnight is losing his melancholy, baby!”

“Sorry.” Matt smiled and sat on the desk’s edge. “I just won the personal stakes lottery.”

“O-o-o-oh?”

There was nothing about an engagement for a man to flaunt but his happiness. “I asked. She accepted.”

“Why shouldn’t she, honey, whoever she is?”

“I don’t know, because she has free will?”

“Aw, all that Cat-lick stuff. That isn’t exciting, man. That isn’t entertainment.”

“I asked her to marry me.”

“Now, that’s entertainment. And—?”

Matt shrugged. “She accepted the ring.”

“Now, that’s just entrepreneurial. The girl want the ring, or you?”

“Me. I think.”

“Whatcha doin’ thinkin’ at such a time? Hey. Wait. Gotta get back on the air. Here’s a song, just for you, Jude dude.”

The Beatles’ “Hey, Jude” hit the airwaves with the press of Ambrosia’s long, false fingernail painted tangerine.

Matt listened to the classic lyrics, finding them new and, now, personally significant. He was remembering to let her into his heart so he could start to make it better. He wasn’t afraid anymore. He knew he was made to go out and get her under his skin. And she was. And he didn’t have to carry the world on his shoulders alone anymore. Well, not entirely.

“She had a good guy,” he couldn’t help saying as the song ended. “Before.”

“But he wasn’t somebody like you, Mr. Midnight Heartthrob. You think you get all those lovesick females callin’ in ‘cause you talk pretty? Station didn’t put out all those billboards of you lounging on that red suede sofa to bring in the blind, baby.”

Matt still felt squirmy about that ad campaign.

“Her former guy was somebody: rich, good-looking, dazzling performer, smart, and really a decent guy.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t feel free to give away his name.”

“Now let me see, Matthew.”

“Matthias.”

“Whatever. Handsome. Humph. I get that you got that. Rich? I know what your new two-year contract was, honey boy, so don’t jive me there. A dazzling performer. And just what do you think we both do night after night on the airwaves? Smart? Yeah. A decent guy. You are a way more than decent, guy.”

“And he was a lot more experienced than I am.”

Letitia blinked her Oprah-size double set of false eyelashes at him.

“You know what I mean:’ Matt said. She did. He’d confided in her over the months like an emotion-blitzed call-in. “With women.”

“Are you getting better, honey chile?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Hmmm. In that case that new fiancée of yours had better watch out. Ambrosia might be on her tail, or yours.”

Matt knew that Ambrosia’s worldly bluster was another insulator, like the three hundred pounds her body wore, from the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse.

He’d just been celibate by choice, trying to hide unhappiness behind a vocation. She’d been molested.

He lifted her hand and kissed it. “Any gal or guy’d be lucky to call you girlfriend.”

“Well.” She beamed at his tribute. “That’s what I’m here for, baby, to soothe the troubled soul. When’s the wedding?”

“We haven’t decided yet. We don’t know whether to go for a Vegas quickie or drag the relatives up north into it. Or both.”

“Me, I’d want that white dress and long, long train, and everybody lookin’ on.”

“I suppose most women would.”

“Your girl?”

“She’d say no, but probably. Besides, I might like to see her like that myself.”

“Every woman wants to be someone’s angel for a few hours, honey. Hey! Enough jiving. You gotta go on in fifty seconds.”

Letitia scooted out of the literally hot seat to let Matt take her place. He just had time to put on the foam-padded headset, pull his notebook and pen to center spot, and watch the director through the glass window, counting down.

His intro echoed in his ears.

“It’s the Midnight Hour with Las Vegas’s leading man of mellow advice, the divine Mr. D, Matt Devine.”

Chapter 27

The Scene of the Climb

Getting into any nightclub is a snap for those blessed with the ebony coloring and effacing stature of Midnight Louise and myself.

Getting into a nightclub that has reflective black Lucite floors and walls is almost too easy to be ethical.

So the kit and I do the Neon Nightmare Slink and are soon among the merrymakers crowding the bar and the dance floor. If we can avoid some clumsy human foot doing the salsa stomp on our tippy toes or rear members, we will soon melt into these shiny black walls like licorice ghosts.

Well, that comparison leaves something to be desired (mainly that we are not edible like licorice, unless there is a pit bull in the building). Anyway, we do our patented pussyfoot past all the carousing humans to a place that Miss Midnight Louise has earmarked as a “secret entrance.”

“It is probably just a janitors’ closet,” I tell her.

“A tad jealous that / have found my way around this maze when you have not?”

“Nonsense, Louise. I always appreciate the efforts of underlings. Ouch!”

That girl spends hours honing her nails to saber-sharpness, not to mention a spit polish.

In the meantime, she has leaped up to trigger a pressure-opening door, like you see on some TV cabinets. We tumble on through as it bounces shut behind us, leaving us in total darkness.

Darkness is never total for the feline nation.

My trusty, long, supersensitive vibrissae (you thought I was referring to something else?) fan out on either side of my noble nose, feeling the air currents, searching for boundaries. Only Santa has whiskers as famed, and mine are white as snow, just like his.

“Forget the white-cane act,” Louise hisses at me. “I know the way.”

As we mush along my eyes adapt to the almost nonexistent light.

We now spot the whisker-thin vertical and horizontal presence of light leaking from door frames that are not quite tight. I even hear the distant murmur of human voices.

Alas, I do not recognize the deep, dark timbre of Mr. Max’s baritone among them. But I do hear his name mentioned! Both of them.

Louise and I pause outside the pale outline of a door, ears and noses twitching our vibrissae.

We hear the name “Kinsella.” We hear the name “Phantom Mage.” The people within do not appear to think that they are one and the same, at the moment, or in group discussion. We need to get into that room!

But we are stuck on the outside looking in. Okay. That is not quite as accurately stated as the experienced shamus should put it. We are stuck on the secret inside of Neon Nightmarelooking into the even-more-secret inner sanctum of Neon Nightmare. There is obviously no way that a couple of hip black cats are going to bust into a room filled with light and humans and not attract unwelcome attention.

Sure, we will be underestimated, as usual, but we will also be worthy of note, as always.

“I am dying,” Louise says, “to find out what they are saying.” Hey! That might be a way. People do not expect dead cats to eavesdrop.

Uh, no. Ma Barker would not want Miss Midnight Louise to sacrifice herself just so I could get an earful. Ma Barker does not have many known maybe-grandkits.

The narrow beam from one of those tiny, high-intensity toy flashlights comes roaming down the hallway. Louise and I flatten and play dead, or background.

The flashlight does not illuminate much, but it does reflect off the satin folds of a full-length black cloak lining.

Eureka! It is an excellent thing that I have kept my coat licked to shiny perfection. Midnight Inc. Investigations sweeps through the now-open door swathed in cloak folds. We melt separately under the nearest chairs and take a deep breath.

“Cosimo!” our savior is hailed. “We were just talking about our current conundrum.”

“Conundrum” is a funny old-time word that means “puzzle.” If you are talking “conundrum” in this town, you are talking Mr. Max Kinsella, the most enigmatic magician and counterspy guy on the planet. If he still is on the planet, which is what Miss Midnight Louise and I have risked our mutual extremities to find out.

“Where are the odds leaning today?” Cosimo asks, throwing his cloak over his chair back and smacking me in the kisser with several woolen folds sharp enough to eviscerate an eel.

“I think our scintillating Max has offed the Phantom Mage and is lying low until the caper with the Czar’s Scepter is history.” The voice offering this opinion is darkly female, spoken by a real devil-dame from the heyday of Noir.

I must admit that voice makes my most adaptable member sit up and take notice. Hubba Hubba Hussy! Louise’s foreclaws in my shoulder remind me to keep a low profile. Is not that always like a female?

“Why would he kill the Phantom Mage?” another voice asks.

“The guy ripped off his act. Kinsella acted like he was indifferent to that, but he was an alpha magician in this town not too long ago, and we alpha magicians do not forget, or forgive.”

“It would have been a splendid parting gesture,” the woman says. She is a Cleopatra-style temptress lounging into a red leather chair like it used to be the skin of her favorite lover before he disappointed her.

“Maybe you are right, Serena,” says an old dude in plain civvies, “but he also turned the tables on us, my friends, by undoing the criminal act we required him to perform as a membership ritual. I agree that he is a first-rank magician, but he also has a first-rank ego.”

“And you do not?” Serena asks.

“Touché. Still, I find the man too mercurial to be entirely trustworthy. No one knows where he has gone now, for instance. Or why he both did our bidding, rather spectacularly, and undid it. Or if he has indeed murdered this lesser magician-acrobat called the Phantom Mage, or if that demise was an accident. Max Kinsella strikes me as a man ever-ready to take credit for accidents.”

“We thought at one time that he might be the Phantom Mage,” suggested an older, heavier woman than Serena, but one no less dramatic. “Perhaps he is missing because he is dead.”

The first woman stirs on her chair like a cobra easing into a striking posture. “I doubt it, Czarina. He left me a note.”

“A note? What did it say? Let us see it.”

“I am sorry, Czarina.” Serena preens on her sofa like a purebred with a velvet catnip mouse. “It was rather personal.”

“Personal?” The man called Cosimo sounds sharp. “We are all Synth members here, and that dominates such minor matters as concupiscence.““Concupiscence,” Serena derides. “Leave that Latin beatingaround-the-bush word to the bishops. Lust is not alien to our gathering. Max wrote that he finds it useful to drop out of sight–a rather cheeky turn of phrase after recent developments–for a while. But that … the rest is personal.”

It is a gathering of magicians. The white note in her fingers wafts into the man’s hand next to her.

“Hmm.” Cosimo reads the message with rolling diction. “In his self-imposed exile he will fondly recall your satin skin, the … the tattoo of a bat on your–’?”

“Enough, Cosimo.” Serena had risen and struck, snatching the paper from his hands. “You see that he is alive and definitely kicking.”

“I did not know you had found the time to test our new recruit with your charms.”

“It was a hasty but memorable encounter. I can assure you that he was interested. Of course, I didn’t allow him any real liberties. Not until we were certain of him.”

“And now you think we should be.”

“Certainly.” She settles back into her chair, circling the palms of her scarlet-nailed hands on the arms. “Unless he is really dead, which would be a shame now that I am authorized to screw him.”

“He will return, Serena,” Czarina assures her. “He is not a fool and I doubt that Death has claimed him. And any normal heterosexual man would return to do obeisance at your thighs, Goddess of the Nile since days of old.”

Serena purrs like a Persian of my acquaintance in heat. Too bad I have never been around this Persian of my acquaintance when she was in heat.

While I am being enthralled by all this sexy talk, I have let down my guard.

My neck ruff is collared by four shivs.

“This conversation has degenerated,” Miss Midnight Louise hisses in my ear. “We are outta here.”

And, yes, before I can stutter a fond farewell to the magicians of the Synth who are so busy congratulating themselves, I am whisked out into the corridor by Louise, who has taken a dislike to sexy talk on many other occasions.

This is a side effect of the process known as “fixing.” I do not know why it is called that.

But I think that Miss Serena could use a bout of that herself.

Chapter 28

Debate to the Death

Five thousand Red Hat Sisterhood members pouring into the Crystal Phoenix and the Goliath hosting hotels made the Black Hat Brotherhood vastly outmanned for the day’s debate. Luckily, only a few hundred Red Hat women showed up for it.

Even so vastly outnumbered, the fifteen men entered the hotel like a posse surrounding a wrestling favorite. In fact, overnight the golden oldie boys had come up with Americanflag-blue rhinestone hatbands and red-dyed pheasant feathers to stick in those glitzy new bands.

Matt stood beside Temple at the back of the debate room, watching the RedState dudes in Blue and the BlueState dolls in Red file into the hotel’s small-event auditorium. The Red Hat Sisterhood outnumbered the Black Hat Brothers a zillion to one, but on the raised dais, at the neutral white-linen clothed tables featuring a small tabletop podium for Matt, it was four black-and-blues against four red-and-purples.

“I can see why the TV stations sent so many videographers,” Matt murmured to Temple, blinking at the colorful and sparkling gathering. “Makes me happy radio is my medium. Saves me a lot of eye strain and headaches.”

“TV loves people willing to make spectacles of themselves.”

“Which is why you counseled me to wear an ivory shirt and blazer, no tie. Not even a blue and red one.”

“You do get the association?”

“It’s a neutral color scheme for a moderator,” he said, eyeing his bland facade.

Temple raised her eyebrows and said nothing.

“Oh, I get it! Red, white, and blue, reading left to right. That is ‘spin’ with a capital S.”

“Plus,” she said, adjusting the collar of his open-necked shirt, “you look so dreamy in off-white.”

“The PR maven is making decisions based on how ‘dreamy’ the moderator looks?”

“Absolutely. Perk of the job.”

“I just hope I can keep these extreme debaters from each other’s throats. Maybe you really needed Jerry Springer.”

“I do have some Fontana brothers muscle lurking in the wings.” Temple nodded to her own version of bodyguards standing at the extremes of the debating platform.

“Good Lord, I’m dressed like a Fontana brother clone,” Matt realized.

“Northern Italian, where the blonds come from, not southern. Those natives are brunet.”

“You’re also going for a revival meeting look here too, aren’t you?”

“My dear man, I’m trying to touch on numerous subtle cultural nuances.”

“I never knew PR was so manipulative.”

“Or that I was?”

“If I weren’t so nervous about doing this moderator gig, I’d probably have a long answer for that one.““You’ll be great. You improvise six nights a week live on your radio show. How could this be any worse?”

Matt forbore to say anything more.

“Oh,” Temple added. “There is one thing.”

“Yeah?”

“You look somewhat suspicious.”

“It’s that ‘one thing’ element you mentioned.”

Temple grimaced. “We have a prima donna on board.” Matt waited.

“Savannah Ashleigh, fading D-movie actress, is a celebrity emcee for the Red Hat Sisterhood. She’s really hard to hold back. I had to allow her to introduce you.”

“I don’t know her and she doesn’t know me. How can she introduce me?”

“She’s show biz. I gave her a bio. How much damage can she do? It was that, or have a bloodbath offstage, like in Macbeth.” Matt sighed. “I thought one always called it ‘the Scottish play’ or it would be cursed by some new death.”

“This isn’t a play performance,” Temple said. “And it will actually boost your career. You deserve more than radio exposure.”

“I don’t need it.”

“But your panting public does.” Temple went on tiptoe to demonstrate what his panting public needed with a quick but thorough kiss.

Then she backed off.

She felt like a nervous matchmaker, as she always did at a full-press media event. Now she had to sit back and watch all the ingredients blend into some powerhouse super-salad of hype no one could predict, least of all her.

Especially unpredictable was Electra’s red-hatted presence in the audience. Temple was uneasy about that, but maybe seeing Elmore make a public ass out of himself would be cathartic, which was a fancy word for feeling self-justified. Templeunderstood that this was so traumatic for Electra, having her past zooming back at her like a motorcycle out of control.

Temple had been there recently… .

Matt would be the sane, neutral bridge between two volatile substances: manly men and womanly women. Both had enough years on them to add up to media TNT.

Temple prepared to bite her nails as Savannah Ashleigh did a Marilyn Monroe wiggle to the podium to start the show. Even her voice was MM breathy.

“Ladies and gentlemen. I am so proud and happy to introduce your host for this event, the yummy-on-the-tummy and even ears and other areas too—Mr. Midnight! Matt Devine from ‘The Midnight Hour’ on station WCOO, that’s pronounced W- `cooo,’ and we will when we hear him over the microphone. I must say that he looks as yummy as he sounds, so voice isn’t everything.”

Temple felt her eyes crossing, but the TV cameras zoomed in on Savannah’s cleavage and then on Matt’s face as he approached the podium.

Claps and whistles faded.

Matt leaned toward the microphone, looking boyishly mischievous. “I would like to thank the pulchritudinous Miss Ashleigh for her extremely wholesome delivery of the introduction.”

The paraphrase of JFK’s response to Marilyn Monroe’s notoriously inciting “Happy Birthday” serenade spawned another round of hoots, applause, and catcalls.

Temple let out a long-held breath. Matt would do just fine. Now, let the games begin!

“Girls just want to have fun,” Candy Crenshaw was saying into her microphone. “Boys just want to have guns.” The Red Hat Sisterhood’s clown princess was ready to crack wise.

Only four minutes into the debate, tempers were already boiling over.

“Just a minute, Ms. Crenshaw,” Matt said. “Let’s get this straight. “You’re saying that grown men can’t indulge their fantasy personas, but that women can?”

“Women can-can,” Cal Crenshaw shot back, leaning to look around the moderator’s podium to glare at his ex-wife. “I happen to know this woman is sixty-three and a half years old. Why is she got up like a saloon girl from the Old West?”

A titter stirred the audience, for the feather boas did scream

“saloon floozy.”

“Thank you, gentlemen and ladies,” Crenshaw went on with a tip of his Western hat brim.

“Why are you got up as Wyatt Earp?” Kit asked quickly.

“To match you gals,” another BHB panelist said. “Anything you can do we can do better.”

“Can you get five thousand soul brothers to meet in Las Ve-gas?” Candy Crenshaw asked. “How many of you disgruntled dudes are there? Fifteen in all?”

“That’s enough to ruffle your feathers,” Crenshaw bragged.

Matt intervened. “Let’s have a duel of the membership numbers, ladies and gents. Gentlemen?”

“Mmmble-mmmble,” Crenshaw muttered into his mike.

“I didn’t quite hear that,” Matt prodded.

“Forty-five:’ he answered.

“Must be their waist sizes,” Candy Crenshaw quipped.

The audience roared.

“Look who’s talking?” Elmore Lark riposted.

“Enough,” Matt said, “or we’ll all think you’re comparing IQs.”

Laughter came from the audience and both sides of the debating table.

“Look:’ Matt said, “can’t you Black Hat guys admit you get a kick from dressing up in an over-the-top ‘uniform’ and parading around in public?”

“We have points to make,” Mike Crenshaw growled. A little.

“So do the ladies.” Matt was now firmly in the role of peace-maker.

Things were getting so cozy that the water pitcher was crossing the dividing line of the podium and snaking its way from the red-and-purple side to the black-and-blue side.

Temple felt like a diplomat. Both sides were kind of cute, re-ally, the flamboyant middle-aged folks playing dress-up. Even the issues they raised were mostly moot. People their age could hardly care that passionately about the sexual one-upmanship one-upwomanship games anymore, could they?

She eyed Matt with fond pride. He’d been perfect for this delicate assignment. Maybe, when the clips ran on TV, he’d get some master of ceremonies gigs out of it. Not that she wanted him out of town any more than he was …

Even Electra’s ex, Elmore Lark, appeared to be mellowing. He coughed into a Western kerchief, then stood up to wave at the crowd, doffing his hat and putting hand on heart.

That was a bit much. He was an unadmitted bigamist, no matter the excuses he made, not some hokey Buffalo Bill Cody impersonator waving at the audience like a star performer… Oops. He keeled over onto the table.

He must have been drinking, had a concealed pint of something in the back pocket of his jeans.

Oops.

Temple started running to the front of the room, but by now the whole audience was rising and buzzing. TV videographers were crowding like crows with camcorders around that end of the table.

Elmore Lark had been taken ill.

Or … killed. Right in front of God and TV cameras and everyone.

Chapter 29

Lark to Lark?

The sirens wailed away down the Strip.

Elmore Lark lay in the back of an ambulance under the intense care of two emergency technicians.

Temple was about ready to ride along with them as a patient. Her first job after alerting hotel security to call an ambulance was to drag Electra out of the room to the nearest Fontanabrother.

“Home, James,” Temple had said. That smooth, olive-skinned Fontana brow had puckered.

“I’m Armando, MissTemple—”

“She needs to vanish. Fast.”

“Ah. Just the job for a Viper. Madame?” He bowed and offered his arm to Electra, who promptly forgot all about the clear and present danger to her loathed not-really-ex-husband. Temple was left unescorted, and uninspired.

The Crystal Phoenix continued to be the site of homicide most bona fide. The Red Hat Sisterhood’s “Big Wheel in Las Vegas” convention kept coming up corpses. Temple’s best and biggest client kept showing up on the evening news in less than a positive light, and Max was MIA.

Matt, however, was standing by his woman. Right now. And he was way more bracing than even a Fontana brother.

“What a rotten break,” he told Temple, massaging her iron-hard shoulder muscles. “Although the way those panelists were snipping at each other during the debate, it’s a wonder I’m not finely chopped liver.”

“Thank God,” Temple said. “I really don’t know what to do. This convention seems primed for trouble, not to mention murder. Every time I try to turn the thing around, it gets worse.”

“I’ll say,” Matt said, sounding grim.

“What? What don’t I know now?”

“The cops can’t guarantee I can leave in time for my ‘Midnight Hour’ show. Lark’s collapse could be medical, but the EMTs didn’t detect anything obvious. So it could be anything, including murder. So that’s how they’re treating the scene and every ‘actor’ in it. It seems the water pitcher passed through my hands to both sides of the debating table.”

“The water pitcher? They’re thinking poisoned water? Do you know how impossible that would be?”

“Obviously, you do.” Matt waited.

“Water is tasteless as well as clear. It’d be almost impossible to doctor with strong poisons, which smell, taste, and look bad!”

“I doubt I’m a serious candidate. The police just need a candidate and I was up there on the podium with all those unknown quantities.”

Temple wrapped her hand through his arm.

“It’s that pale Fontana Brothers suit. It made you look suspicious.”

“It made you like it, so it’s not all bad.”

She leaned her head against his upper arm. “I am soflummoxed here. It’s bad enough that Electra is a suspect for the first murder. If her bigamist non-ex-husband dies, she’s a shoo-in for the role of serial killer.”

“That marriage, real or not, was ages back in time. People today don’t hold on to the bitterness of a failed marriage as long as they used to.”

“That’s true.” She looked up at him. “But your mother did.”

“They weren’t married.”

“That’s why she’s so bitter.”

“What does my mother have to do with it?”

“It just made me remember that the body may age but the emotions don’t.”

“That true for you and Max?”

She reared back. “He’s out of my life. I just want it to be because I said so, not because something bad happened to him.”

“So now you’re God?”

“You won’t get this, or how your mother feels, unless you become a girl.”

That made him pause. “You’re right. My mom’s furious because my father was finessed out of her life, and mine, by trickery. His relatives just told this pregnant young girl that he’d died `over there,’ and they’d give her a two-flat to live in and rent out the other half to keep her and the baby, and good-bye. When he was just fine! She never had any say in it, and neither did he. Now, when I found him and he wants to talk to her—sincerely, I think—she hates him, not the people who kept them apart. If that’s girl-think, I don’t get it, but I guess it makes sense to her, at least emotionally.”

“Said with the total clarity and sensitivity the adoring public, including me, expects from Mr. Midnight.”

“Temple, I’ve never had a girlfriend before, much less a fiancée. Max must have had several, starting way back with Kathleen O’Connor. You have to cut me a lot of slack.”

“But I don’t want to cut you slack.” She grabbed him by the creamy Fontana Brothers lapels. “Not one bit. I want you on your toes, working to make me a very happy girl.”

“That’s not work.”

“That makes me want to make you a very happy boy.”

“I think we’re in sync on the personal front. What can I do here and now? I have to put in my time with the detectives, but then I’m yours.”

“Report back to me on everything they want to know about. Meanwhile, I’m going to cruise this crazy, mixed-up crowd to see what I can find out.”

When Matt had vanished into the frantic stew of milling redand-purple women, Temple began to circulate. She often did her best work—in PR and as an unofficial PI—while eavesdropping.

Rumor was making the rounds, but benignly. Word was one of the Black Hat Brotherhood guys had suffered a heart attack. Poor fellow, but that Type A behavior no doubt brought it on. Why won’t middle-aged ever men listen and slow down?

The Black Hat Brotherhood was slowing down now, after the shock of Elmore’s collapse. Temple had seen their hats lined up at the Crystal Court

bar, as they knocked back some high-octane liquid tranquilizers. Elmore’s attack had unnerved them as well as the women in the audience.

Many of the women here were widows. A man collapsing at the debate table revived their memories and losses.

Several women were zooming around on motorized scooters, lacking mobility but making up for it by driving as if racing in the Indy 500. Everywhere, she spotted signs of female zest. These seasoned women were not going to let themselves become invisible, just as they weren’t afraid to look bizarre while clinging to the epitome of feminine accessories despite sagging chins and boobs and butts, varicose-veined legs, drawn-on eyebrows, purple and red wigs, every exaggerated feminine grace that age was assumed to strip away. And they reveled in flouting the politically correct act of fading into a corner and dying.

Temple had never seen so many sparkling eyes, whether under white hair or gaudy wig. Every gal here was a one-woman support group for every other gal here. One, in her late eighties, had driven in from California, Red Hat regalia packed in her red convertible.

The red and purple colors everywhere made even the feeblest woman look vibrant. Temple was soaking up energy. Zap! Thatshe had even for a moment thought thirty-one was a significant birthday seemed so incredibly shallow now that she wanted to run around the block thirty-one times in penance, and a Las Vegas Strip block was gigantic!

And penance was a Catholic concept, Matt’s hang-up, not hers.

And yet. She was beginning to see that she’d be as baffled by Max’s instant and unhailed defection in thirty years as now. And that a sixty-something her would still have a thirtyish heart, and memory, as these women did.

So. This killing and perhaps attempted killing weren’t silly senior citizen affairs, but possibly came from the still-living heart of what may have happened decades ago. Our bodies aged, but our deepest, dearest … and darkest … emotions didn’t.

How could a callow, thirty-going-on-thirty-one filly like her solve mysteries of the heart leading to murder at the other end of the age kaleidoscope?

Chapter 30

Mad as a Hatter

“I am so humiliated,” Miss Midnight Louise says.

I am so amazed. I did not think anything could humiliate this feline Gloria Steinem.

Gloria Steinem is a passé name in the media world now. Have you noticed what rare birds major media feminists are nowadays? Myself, I could not be happier about it. After witnessing the brouhaha outside the Crystal Phoenix, I am thinking my sympathies lie with the Black Hat Brotherhood. I do not wear a hat, but I am black.

Miss Midnight Louise is black like me and she does not wear a hat, but I sense that we have our differences, as usual.

“Those Black Hat Brotherhood thugs,” she fusses. “Turning my turf into a circus act.”-You think that the Red Hat ladies were not already doing that?”

“Only in the sense of admirable joie de vivre.”

Okay, my “joie” is about to go DOA. Dead On Arrival. “You have to admit that they are a rather … feathery … lot,” I say. “It is all in the name of fun.”

“The last time I looked, pursuing feathers was in the name of survival for our species.”

“Only in the wild. And in the wild, the male of the species is usually the more colorful and flagrant. That is so unfair. It is only right that these Red Hat Sisterhood ladies opt for a brighter plumage in their mature years.”

“So what can I look forward to you wearing in your mature years, which are admittedly a fair ways off?”

“Not a flamingo fedora:’ she says, referring to my unfortunate brief stint as a cat food commercial huckster wearing that obnoxious article.

Gadzooks, Midnight Louie is cooked! I did not think anyone remembered my ill-fated venture into TV stardom. The greatest and most effective weapon of a female, what makes her indeed deadlier than the male, is a long memory.

“This was a put-up job,” I comment.

“I thought so too. Your MissTemple was caught flat-footed, which is hard to do with a person as prone to wearing stiletto heels as she is.”

“Flat-footed at first. That is permissible. The last I saw, she was flying around like a madwoman trying to put a lid on things.”

“I see we are back to the subject of hats,” she notes.

“Yes. It is odd that no one much wears hats today, and yet they are so central to this case.”

“Central how?”

“A plethora of hats at a convention can hide a lot of things.”

“Identities,” she suggests.

“Yes.”

“Weapons?”

“Could be. The crown of a hat can conceal a lot. Not to mention all the hatboxes being toted into this hotel.”

“Humph. The best concealing headgear so far is the high-crowned ten-gallon hats those would-be cowboys affect.”

“Yup,” I say.

“They are the loose cannons in this convention.”

“But they are not in this convention. They are convention-crashers.”

“I wonder why.”

“They have grievances, or think they do.”

“Still, why make a spectacle of themselves?”

“Their so-called ex-better halves are having all the fun?”

“That is a silly motive. Men are used to going off and drinking beer and shooting things all on their own. Why should they deny the women in their lives the harmless hobbies of shopping, spending money, and looking outrageous?”

“All those things you describe could be addictions to the weak human personality.”

“As if you are not addicted to catnip and female gullibility!”

“Females? Gullible? Louise. Please

“Some are,” she says softly. “And these women with their red chapeaux and Chardonnay and brave spirits are fighting off what could be a lonely old age with others of their kind. Ma Barker is such a one, with no mate, no certain home, and many dependents to look after.”

“She will have a home,” I growl. “At the Circle Ritz. I just have to get my people’s attention off the hullabaloo and homicide here so I can enlighten them on what is needed under their very noses and on their doorstep.”

“That is very noble of you, Dadster.”

I cringe, as usual, at the impudent form of address.

She muses on. “I am not about to let Mr. Max go gently into that dark night. I find the doings at his address most suspicious and intend to stake it out indefinitely. So I guess you will have to spring Miss Electra Lark from suspicion, or Ma Barker and her gang will have traipsed the length of Las Vegas, at your recommendation, from Nowheresville to Nothingsville for naught.”

Sigh. Miss Midnight Louise sure knows how to sand the luster off a guy’s topcoat.

But the kit has it right. If I wish my easily distractible Circle Ritz gang to get on with the program and help my disenfranchised kind, I will have to solve this murder for them. Again.

Amazing. I take on a little job of rehabilitation for the homeless. Then, suddenly, I am whiskers deep in homicide and red hats and it is not even a Vatican conspiracy thriller. Call it my Givenchy Code.

Only in Las Vegas.

Chapter 31

E-mailed to Death

While musing about murder and the middle-aged woman, Temple was almost run over by a red scooter manned … womaned by a P and R lady with a gorgeous golden Persian cat riding shotgun.

Hey ! Wasn’t that one of Savannah Ashleigh’s Persians? Louie had been sweet on the silver one, to the point of earning him a false paternity suit. The golden one had been sweet where her sister and mistress had been sour.

But … would Savannah Ashleigh really allow one of her precious Persians to hot-rod around the convention floor on a hot red scooter? Nah. Not if she knew, and maybe her attention these days was all on Taco and Belle.

Meanwhile, Temple’s hot silver cell phone text messagerevealed a call to order. The Red-Hatted League required a “confab,” having dug up lots of “sensitive info.”

Temple returned to her designated conference room, the door still manned by a Fontana brother, just a different one every time. “The ladies have preceded you into the room,” Eduardo said. “I’ve ordered several light cocktails to hold them. At great personal risk,” he added. “They have a propensity for doing weapons searches.”

“On Fontana brothers, or the general population?”

Eduardo frowned. “Lamentably, they seem inclined to bless us with the most personal attention. ‘Lend a woman a Lexus, and she thinks she owns it. Give a woman a wink, and she thinks she owns you’ These are fun ladies, really. Remind me of my grandma Belladonna.”

“You don’t want to mention that ‘grandma’ part in this crowd. Trust me.”

Eduardo shrugged. “I’m off in two hours. Ralph can watch his own butt.”

Temple sighed. She was sure Eduardo meant that last comment literally. Still, good help was hard to find at a major national convention, and she needed nonpolice sources. Her entrance evoked a round of applause.

“Have we got ‘mail,’ ” Alice said.

“E-mail,” Phyll added. “Yup. That stuff never goes away on the Internet, if you know where to look.”

At the moment, Phyll looked like an extremely smug purple and redheaded nuthatch.

Temple sat down, ready to take copious notes.

“Here’s the deal,” Judy said. ” ‘The Black Hat Brotherhood’ isn’t just some macho group that just sprang up. Two of its founders are disgruntled Red Hat Sisterhood ex-spouses.”

“Elmore?”

Judy nodded.

“So you’re saying that some of the women here might be murderers?”

“You do not get it, Little Pink.”

Temple took umbrage. To them, she was not only small, she was young and green. And pink!

“This stuff is not just sixties’ generation carping,” Phyll added. “It digs down deep. The Red Hat Sisterhood is fairly new on the scene, only a few years old.”

“But the reason for its existence is eternal,” Judy said, portentously.

Always look for a librarian to be portentous. They’d earned it. They knew what everybody else had forgotten. Temple had never thought of librarians as pit bulls with bifocals before.

But the incriminating information Judy and Phyll had dug up in a few short hours was amazing. They’d returned with reams of printouts cradled on the crooks of their arms like freshly printed thousand-dollar bills.

“There’s that much hard info out there on our victims and suspects?” she asked.

“There’s that much information out there on you and me,” Phyll said. “Hey, don’t hyperventilate, Temple. Just kidding. A lot of this stuff is bits and pieces of Oleta’s unpublished memoirs.”

“That looks like more than enough to publish,” Temple observed as the papers hit the conference tabletop. She’d usually only heard papers make such a substantial “smack” when heaving the Sunday New York Times to her coffee table top … when Max had gotten one as preface to a lazy day of reading in bed.

The memory saddened her. An engaged girl with puzzles to solve shouldn’t be sad. Temple picked up the top page and started skimming. It was a digest printout. Oleta’s e-mail address had been steamedfemme4311@hotmail.com. That significant numeral made it scary to contemplate how many mad, mad, mad madwomen were out there.

The weird part was that being a woman scorned had come to Oleta after she had made Electra into one. Didn’t Oleta and women like her understand that you reap what you sow? What goes around comes around? Though men certainly didn’t seem to get that, either.

Temple sat down slowly, reading.

This was disastrous. The current segment described Electra as a vengeful harpy, aching to get into a literal catfight with the tender young innocent that Oleta portrayed herself ashaving been. Her memoirs made a strong case for Elmore needing to use any means to escape the Electra Oleta portrayed, even to marrying another woman without the formality of a divorce.

Women who made a habit of poaching other women’s men often made the cast-off wife the villain. Until it was their turn. “It doesn’t look good for Electra,” Alice agreed, reading silently over Temple’s shoulder. “It’s almost as if Oleta had planted a motive for Electra in these e-mails.”

“ ‘Almost as if,’ heck no! That’s exactly what she did.” Temple stood up, excited. “What if the wrong victim died? What if Oleta had always intended to kill Elmore here, and blame Electra for it? If the widely distributed ‘peeks’ at her memoirs were a setup?”

“That would be pretty fiendish,” Phyll said.

“But perfect. She mentions Elmore as resenting her Red Hat Sisterhood activities and book project. And he must have been a member of the Black Hat Brotherhood for some time. Why? Ironically, maybe he was going to kill her after she left him? Maybe did? She could have known that the Black Hats would be here protesting this convention, and she knew Electra lived in Las Vegas.”

“How’d she know that?” asked Judy.

“Electra runs the Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel. Those chapels are always making the news. Bretangelo, pop stars Bret Aspen and Laura D’Angelo, got married at her chapel just a couple months ago. That generated press all over the country.”

“Isn’t a ‘tangelo’ a hybrid fruit?” Alice wondered.

“There have been rumors about her,” Starla said darkly. “That mango-blond hair job!”

“Aren’t they divorced already?” Judy asked.

“Well, yeah,” Temple said. “Stars marry and adopt and divorce at the drop of a scandal sheet these days. Las Vegas and Reno are conveniently close for both ends of the cycle. I hope those babes keep the third-world kids longer than they keep the Rodeo Drive

husbands.”

Red-hatted heads shook in agreement and sorrow at what the world of international celebrity had come to.

“Elmore Lark was attacked too. But why after Oleta,” Judy objected.

Temple thought. “His illness sure could be an attack. Maybe he was meant to die first? Maybe the method, whatever it was, had been set in motion. Poison, say. It had to be that if he hasn’t just suffered a stroke or heart attack. Poison is a murder method with a very forgiving timeline.”

“How? Oleta couldn’t foresee the debate?”

“Maybe the method that made him collapse had nothing to do with the debate.”

“Or the water pitcher. That would get your significant other off the hook.”

For a second, Temple assumed that Phyll was referring to Max. He sure was habit-forming when it came to scrapes and schemes.

But, no, her SO now was Matt, and she herself had managed to get him involved in a possible attempted murder case.

‘Does this look like a real book?” she asked Judy of the printouts. “Or just random parts?”

“Hard to tell. It does dwell a lot on her meeting Elmore thirty years ago and winning him away from Electra. ‘Weaning’ was the way she put it.”

“Ugh,” Temple said. ” ‘Weaning’ a man off his wife. Makes you wonder why she lasted as long among the living as she did.”

“Anyway, it’s hard to tell whether she was accentuating the negative because she was now bitter and alone, or because she wanted to spill everything and make things hot for Elmore.”

“It’s hard to believe a legitimate publisher would be that interested in a sad old tale like that. Can you find out how real a deal Oleta Lark had for this so-called memoir?”

“Hey,” Phyll said. “If the truth is out there on the Worldwide Web, a librarian can find it.”

“I’m not so sure—” Temple began when Judy jumped in.

“The ordinary author wouldn’t spread all that material free over the Web, you’d think.”

“That’s the smart way to market these days,” Alice objected. “Tease ‘em with a free sample, hopefully scandalous, on the Web. That’s how you build buzz.”

Temple nodded. “And if you were out to slander someone, that’d be the perfect way to start. Oleta seems to have been a pretty vengeful person.”

“She writes a lot,” Starla added, “about finding salvation and self-esteem through the Red Hat Sisterhood. The title is Confessions of a Randy Red Hat Woman.”

Temple the PR maven bristled at that. “That title wasn’t going to sit well with the organization and most members. Talk about a million motives for murder.”

“Maybe she was using us as the first line of assault,” Alicesuggested, “but she seemed sincere. She’d joined three years ago and was hugely gung ho. In fact, she planned to debut her Red Hot Hattery Shop at this convention, then open one in Reno.”

“She set up shop here for the first time.” Temple seized on that. “Just in time for the ‘Big Wheel in Las Vegas’ convention.” Temple considered. “That’s savvy marketing, but does it also disguise a different agenda here? We need to ask the other members of the Reno Scarlet Women what Oleta seemed like. Does the Red Hat Sisterhood Web site list all the different chapters in the country?”

“Sure thing, sugar.” Starla snapped her cinnamon gum, exhaling a spicy scent. “We’re a network. We like to know all about each other. Our Red-Hatted League was even featured in one of the recent magazines.”

“Was Electra mentioned or pictured in the national magazine, say, recently?”

“Of course!” Judy said. “Yes! That’s right. Oleta would have seen that. Mentioned and pictured. She is our Red-Hatted League headwoman, after all.”

“Hmmm.” Temple was thinking that she ought to look up the Sherlock Holmes short story that gave this particular chapter its name. Might be some vague connection to events in the here and now.

Who knows?

And speaking of that, she needed to find out what the police knew by now about the attack on Elmore, if it was attempted murder. Who was prime for squealing?

The ever-sympathetic Morrie Alch, of course.

Chapter 32

Ms. Sherlock Strikes a Holmes Run

It was amazing what you could find on the Internet, Templemused for the millionth time when she hit her home computer that evening.

So, thinking of “headed,” Temple had typed “The RedHeaded League” on a search engine along with the surname “Doyle.” She’d found a version of the story in question as fast as you could say “Sherlock Holmes.”

She’d read all the Holmes stories as a kid, but had forgotten most of them. Luckily, this particular tale had been read by a girl already being teased about her “fire-engine” red hair. Some of her sixth-grade classmates, mostly boys, would wail like sirens whenever she came into view.

Her mother said it was because they liked her, but that had never made sense to Temple. Her older brothers were supposed to like her, and all they could do was ditch her and dis her. Only they didn’t call it dissing then.

So when she read the tale of Mr. Jabez Wilson in far-off, old-fashioned London, who was given a mysterious but well-paying job because of his red hair, young Temple treasured it.

Although the notion of a RedHeaded League seeking out red-haired people for easy work and good pay turned out to be a hoax to cover a bank robbery, Temple had thrilled at the idea that red hair was special and valued and would bring her adventure and rewards.

Her mother had previously tried to console her with that “special” idea, but she believed it more from reading Doyle’s story. She wished she’d had an interesting name to go with her interesting hair, like Mr. Jabez Wilson in the story. It took her a few more years to appreciate being named “Temple” instead of “Ashley.”

For a couple of years, on school documents, she had written her required middle name as “Jazabelle” instead of the hated “Ursula.”

That ended in junior high when the phys. ed. teacher, a sixtyish woman built like coach John Madden but with a plainer face, had called her “Temple Jazabelle Barr” aloud when she flunked out of basketball. (Who would put a four-foot-eleven girl in as a guard anyway?) That whole moniker being repeated twelve times a day by the girls in junior high was worse than the siren shrieks of the boys in grade school. So “Ursula” duly appeared on her school cards again, and thankfully no one ever said that out loud. Even the aunt for whom she was named Ursula went by the nickname of “Kit.” Temple wondered if Aldo knew that.

Still, reading the story again had been fun. Like a lot of the Holmes stories, it showed a naive person being dragooned into a puzzling situation because a hidden schemer had a secret purpose.

It was not unwise for a modern-day Sherlock to keep that classic formula in mind.

Chapter 33

Big Wheels

It was 6:00 P.M. and Matt was wondering where his wandering SO was. So he was surprised to hear an alto female voice when he answered his cell phone.

“I need to talk to you,” C. R. Molina said without any greeting, as usual, the busy, brusque homicide lieutenant personified.

“Your place or mine?” he asked, determined to be playful in the face of such unrelenting social sobriety.

“Neutral ground,” she specified.

“Is there any in Las Vegas?”

“For you or me, probably not. Say, seven?”

“Charley’s Hamburgers?“He was a radio shrink. He could hear the hesitation before she answered. Apparently, for some reason, Charley’s wasn’t neutral ground for her.

“Fine.” The shortness of Molina’s answer showed her annoyance with herself for what she’d felt when she heard that name and location.

Matt would have to try to finesse the reason out of her when they met, simply because it was his job. And it never hurt to know what a homicide lieutenant thought and felt when you’d literally been front and center at a murder scene.

“Seven, then,” he said.

“You still driving that silver flash?”

“Yeah. You want a spin in it?”

“Maybe. Just maybe I do.”

Matt eased the Crossfire into an unpaved parking spot near Charley’s. This was his first real new car, paid for and picked out by him. Being a Catholic priest with a vow of poverty for seventeen years made getting a nice car both a cherished luxury and a venial sin.

He recognized Molina’s personal aging Toyota wagon a few spaces over and ambled over to lean down to the open driver’s window.

Again, she wasted no time on sentimental greetings.

“The blue cheese bacon burger,” she told him. “Hold the ketchup. Mustard, no fries. We eat in my car. When we’re all tidy again we take that spin in yours.”

Matt lifted an eyebrow, but nodded and went to the window. Charley’s was a small, tumbledown shack on a lowly street, no glitz, no glam, just the best darn hamburgers in town. And they were way politically incorrect on the fat and grease meter.

Molina was right. No amount of napkins could save a car from the lethally good grease of a Charley’s burger. He ordered the Philly steakburger for himself, then made his way over the lumpy dirt of the lot to the passenger’s side of her car.

She had the driver’s seat pushed way back to accommodate her almost six-foot frame. Matt scooted the passenger seat, setfull forward for Molina’s teen daughter Mariah, back all the way so they could talk face-to-face.

First they bit into the huge burgers, chewing them down to eatable height.

“What’s new?” she finally asked. “Besides having your fingerprints all over a possibly lethal pitcher of hotel water?”

“That what this is about?”

“Among other things.” Molina bucked in her seat.

Probably the semiautomatic at the small of her back felt bulky against the car seat, Matt thought. Packing iron must get uncomfy in this overheated climate.

Molina was an interesting woman, strong, complex, unpredictable. Temple scoffed at her no-nonsense looks. Matt had seen nuns in civvies who dressed with more style. Her dark blunt-cut hair and strong, unmanicured eyebrows suited her. He liked her a lot, but she was a cop and she never let you forget it. And at the moment he was the dork in the center spotlight with a possibly poisoned man two places to the left and languishing in Never-Never Land at the local hospital.

“Tell me why,” Molina said after eating her burger. She rolled her grease-soaked tissues into a small hard ball inside a fistful of flimsy diner napkins.

He understood instantly what she meant. “Temple—”

“Oh, God.”

“Temple does PR for the Crystal Phoenix. You know that.”

“So she’s ring-mastering those wild and crazy red-andpurple women around the hotel?”

“The Red Hat Sisterhood has its own homegrown PR force, I understand. Temple got involved because of Electra Lark.”

“Alch told me.” Molina gave him another “Oh, God.”

“So you asked me here for spiritual advice?” he said.

She gave him a narrow look. “You should be so lucky. I agree that you and Electra Lark are two of the unlikeliest murder candidates in ClarkCounty, but you do have the Circle Ritz in common, not to mention the ever-dangerous TempleBarr. So how did you get up on that podium between two warring factions in the battle of the sexes?”

“It was … Temple’s idea.”

“Of course. So now she has two Circle Ritz pals in the bull’s-eye for murder.”

“Fiancé,” Matt said, not knowing why he’d spilled the beans. Maybe that word “pal” had done it.

“Fiancé? Who’s the fiancé?”

“Me, I’m told.”

“Temple and you are … engaged?”

He nodded.

It took a lot to shake the stoic expression off Carmen Molina’s face, but that admission had done it. She couldn’t have looked more shocked if he had confessed to killing Elmore Lark, or Abraham Lincoln.

She took a deep breath. “Well, that changes a whole lot of modus operandi around this town.”

He knew she was thinking of Max Kinsella, but Matt didn’t want to go there. He said nothing while she absorbed his new status as if digesting a singularly disagreeable meal.

“I suppose congratulations are in order, but … look at you! Now you’re in the middle of a murder investigation. That’s what squiring Miss Temple Barr around town will get you. I tremble to picture you two as the Nick and Nora of Las Vegas, but this town always did lean to the ridiculous. You done eating here?”

He nodded.

“Good. Take me for a ride in that eye-candy car of yours.”

He shrugged and followed her out of the Toyota, which she locked manually after dumping the hamburger leavings in the nearby trash can. He followed suit, beeping the Crossfire open when they were twenty feet away.

“Show-off.” She smiled finally, though. “Small, isn’t it? Will I fit?”

He nodded, but Molina had to scoot the passenger seat back because it was set all the way forward, for Temple.

“My kid,” she commented, “and your pint-size fiancée. At least my daughter will outgrow the full-frontal seat position in my car.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Ninety-three north. There’s a speed trap six miles south of one-sixty-eight, then it’s clear sailing until Ash Springs.”

“You want me to speed, Lieutenant?”

“I want to blow my mind clear, Devine.”

“About the Crystal Phoenix death and attempted death?”

“About Fontana brothers and Red Hat dames, and cabbages and queens.”

Matt didn’t know how to respond to lines from Alice in Wonderland, so he eased the low-slung car over the pitted dirt lot and onto smooth asphalt.

He kept the windows down, and soon the wind was whipping their hair around.

“You keep a neat car,” she noted.

“Tied down:’ he suggested.

“Now you really are tied down,” Molina commented.

Matt flushed in the dark, remembering Temple’s teasing promises for his cooperation in moderating this fatal debate. Which had now made him an attempted murder suspect.

“How did this all happen?” Molina asked. They had to shout over the wind.

“Temple needed a likely moderator for the Red Hat Sisterhood, Black Hat Brotherhood debate she dreamed up to defuse the shouting match in front of the hotel, so—”

“Not that. The momentous engagement. You cut out the great and powerful Max Kinsella. How’d that happen?”

Matt was feeling really, really modest. He knew that Max Kinsella had cut out Max Kinsella by not being there for Temple. Matt felt like the lucky man by default.

“I finally asked,” he said. “That simple.”

“Knee, ring, and all that?”

“Ring. No knee. Is there a reason you want all the slushy details?”

“Maybe.” She’d leaned her elbow on the open door with the window rolled down and the wind howling past her face. She pulled herself back into the car again. “So. Is Max Kinsella out of town in some romantic funk, or something?”

“Why?”

“No more stalking incidents for a whole six days, that’s why.”

“That’s a record?”

“Lately, yeah.”

Matt mulled the situation.

For several weeks, Molina had discovered, her modest bungalow in Our Lady of Guadalupe parish had been entered by a stalker. Items she hadn’t owned had shown up in her closet, then on her bed, then in her daughter Mariah’s room. The objects had been harmless, but sexually taunting, including a trail of red rose petals through the house to Mariah’s bedroom and then to hers.

She was sure Max Kinsella was behind it. She’d never been able to pin on him a double murder at the Goliath Hotel the night he left Vegas for a year. It was no secret that she had hounded Temple ever since then for information on her missing live-in lover. Even when he came back, Max had resumed a role as Temple’s phantom lover, easily evading Molina, though she knew he was in town. Only Temple and Matt knew that Max’s suspicious actions were related—not to his cover career as a magician—but to his secret role as a counterterrorist.

Molina’s unquenchable suspicion of Max was a problem for Matt. Now that he finally had won Temple to have and to hold, the last thing he wanted was Max and what he was or was not doing at the forefront of his life again.

“He could be out of town,” Matt said shortly. “Temple can’t reach him.”

“Why would she want to?” Molina’s expression of amazement felt complimentary. Pride goeth before a fall, though. “She wanted to say good-bye.”

“Wow. He wouldn’t want to hear that. Sure he isn’t just ducking her?”

“I’m not sure about anything regarding Max Kinsella. Are you?”

She set her lips. She’d eaten off what little lip gloss had ever been on them, but their color was still vivid, maybe her half-Hispanic heritage shining through.

“No,” she finally answered. “Except that he could very well be my stalker.”

“Temple told me about that rap. I don’t think so.““No? I know you don’t. Who made you the expert?”

“He runs on pride. It makes him a loner, but he’s too proud to sink to such sick, puppyish behavior.”

“Lucifer wouldn’t crawl, not even to God.”

“Something like that. You’re a policewoman. I bet you’ve ticked off a lot of bad actors, not to mention people I know.”

She grinned at him, her short chin-brushing hairdo blowing back like a storm of dark, gleeful clouds. Molina should let herself loose more often. He still wondered about Charley’s.

“So why’d you dislike meeting me at Charley’s?”

Her grin faded. “You are such a wet blanket, Devine. I bet you think that was an insightful question. Shrinks suck.”

“Met Max there sometime, huh?”

“You just frigging turn this car around. And drive the speed limit, damn it!”

“No turnoff on this highway for miles,” he reported. Serenely. “Kinda like life. So that’s it. Deep down, you wanted to nail Max as your stalker. A shrink could have a field day with that one.”

“No, I did not. I am not that kind of a victim. Deep down I wanted him to be what your MissTemple always thought he was, worth her time. But now even she’s given up on him. Hallelujah. That man has distorted all our lives. How can you even contemplate him being innocent of anything?”

“I don’t think he’d stalk a woman. A man, maybe. Sure. He was—”

“Two words very important there. ‘Was’ and what you were going to say right after it.”

“He’s out of Temple’s life now. Mine too, because of that fact. And because of what he was, a spy. He was a good guy, Carmen. He had been a counterterrorist in Europe since the age of seventeen. While I was in the seminary climbing the seven-story mountain to the priesthood, Max was out there on the line, trying to save lives.”

“He was wanted by Interpol. There’s a record.”

“He planted that record, him and his mentors. He was a teenage counterterrorist. The magician part was always the cover. That’s why I don’t see him stalking you. Oh, sure, he’d probably enjoy tweaking your whiskers, like he did mine. We’ve both done it by the book, and he hasn’t. And he probably foresaw we’d win in our plodding, methodical ways.”

“This is how you won Temple? Plodding and methodical?”

“Probably.” Matt shook his head, tossing off her rude questions. That was her job. He just didn’t know why she had to do it on his time.

Temple had to deal with it being over with Max. Matt had to deal with there being no Max to act as a counterforce to his own will anymore. He actually missed that.

“He may be dead,” Matt heard himself saying, and the thought disturbed him. Would Max really have faded like this on Temple? If he could help it?

“No! That bastard would never leave us alone, and just die!”

“Carmen …” Matt slowed the car, hit the button that closed the windows so she could hear every word. “He may very well be dead. That’s what Temple’s secretly afraid of. He had enemies from beyond Las Vegas. From far away and way back. And, contrary to appearances, he was not infallible.”

“ Was’ again, Matt?”

He nodded. “I’m very much beginning to be afraid so.”

“You want a live rival?”

“Definitely preferable to a dead one. You know for sure then.”

“A little sin of pride, there?”

“Definitely.”

“And if he’s dead, who done it?”

“That’s your job.”

She nodded. “If my stalker never shows up again, and Max Kinsella never does, then we’ll know the answer to that question.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? That’s proof positive.”

Matt eyed her quickly. “Maybe. Enough proof for you. If we were talking about anybody else but Max. Me, I’d have to see it to believe it.”

Chapter 34

Molina Mia!

Temple had some time to kill the next day before tracking down Detective Alch, so she dropped in on one of the “perkshops.” This one featured the Red Hat Candies Clown Princess vocal group, with Candy Crenshaw performing solo as “Obrah Spinfree.”

Really, Temple just wanted to get a load off her Stuart Weitzmans—she was no Iron-ankled Natalie Newman or Iron Maiden Molina—and to think for a while.

The Crystal Phoenix’s conference theater made a perfect double for a live talk show set.

After the five hugely mugging Red Hat Candies sang a few song parodies, Candy “Obrah” came trudging onstage in a black curly wig and false black eyelashes two inches long. (Oprah had been wearing glam lashes for some time, so Candy was up to snuff on her impression.) She was clad in tight jeans and a rhinestone bra and dragging a little red wagon behind her, heaped, not with pounds of ugly Oprah fat but with piles of red and purple feather boas.

“You see, ladies,” she said, “you can uplift your lives by forgetting about the fat and converting to feathers.”

She flapped her elbows like a bird, releasing a pair of feathered helium balloons that hefted the glitzy cups of her 0-bra.

“Take a load off, ladies. Go, 0-bra. It’s not Oxygen, but Helium that will make us free.”

The act was corny but won lots of giggles and applause. And, in a way, it emphasized that women were always being converted to something: this diet or that guru or this self-help system or that celebrity role model.

At the end Temple checked her watch. Time to find and interrogate a police detective. But he was nowhere to be found.

She finally spotted him near her special conference room! Good. With Su. Bad. And with, amazingly, the interesting combination of Candy Crenshaw and her estranged husband, Cal, of the Black Hat Brotherhood.

Offstage, Candy truly mixed the clown look with her P and R persona. She was an Uma Thurman–skinny gal who accessorized it with extreme fluff. The curly purple fright wig made her head watermelon-big and her face and neck the small stem of it.

Her purple fishnet hose emphasized knobby knees and ankles. A short skimpy red chenille fabric looked more like a bed skirt than a girl skirt. Her elbows were as bony and gawky as her knees, and the huge purple, red, and black eight-foot-long boa constrictor of feathers draped over her shoulders dwarfed her toothpick-thin body. Candy’s limbs looked like they could stab somebody, but her jokes were a lot blunter.

Cal, on the other hand, was a comfortably middle-aged man with billowing belly and double chin.

“You are the cutest little thing,” Candy was cooing atDetective Su despite the glower she was getting in return. “You look like you’d wear a double-zero-size parachute.”

Su was not buying. Or laughing.

Alch swallowed a chuckle in spite of himself, more for seeing Su’s Great Dane–size dignity tweaked than the effectiveness of Candy Crenshaw’s jokes.

“This is not an occasion for levity,” Su told the woman. “It is a murder investigation and our field of suspects is very wide.”

“‘Wide’ is not a word you know the meaning of,” Candy cracked.

“ ‘Suspect’ is not a word you know the meaning of,” Su shot back. “Alch, I want to talk to her in the interrogation room.”

Normally that destination would give Temple an edgy feeling, but here it was just a posh Crystal Phoenix conference room. She was delirious, however, to see slight little Su herding away her giraffe-tall exotic quarry.

“I need a word with you,” Temple told Alch.

“Fine,” he said, jerking his head at Cal Crenshaw. “We’re done for now. No skipping town.”

“The Black Hat Brotherhood is here for the duration, Detective.”

“The investigation might outlast the convention.”

“Great. That’ll give us time to get our guys on some of the local talk shows.”

Temple and Alch watched Crenshaw stomp away on his black cowboy boots, spurs jingling like reindeer harnesses.

“All spur and no spine,” Alch diagnosed. He turned to Temple with a grin. “So what do you want to con out of me now?”

“I think we’ll need to talk privately in my interrogation room.”

“Yours? You mean the conference room where you’ve set up shop to irritate Su?”

“You do read my mind,” she answered.

“That’s only fair. You want to pick my brain.”

Temple produced a guilty look.

“With that pink hat on, you could pick the brain of a slug.”

Temple had the grace to blush. Morrie Alch was such a smart, sweet guy, and was single with a grown daughter, she’d heard. Why didn’t Molina get off her high horse and grab him?

She relied on him at work. Temple supposed a lady lieutenant couldn’t marry down, but someone had to break stupid conventions and rules. Temple also supposed that Lieutenant C. R. Molina would be the last woman on earth to do that.

“So what’s your agenda?” Alch asked as he sat on one end of the long conference table that had recently hosted red-hatted ladies. Temple turned around from shutting the double doors.

Mr. Affable was gone. The arms folded on the detective’s chest indicated that he may be nice, but he wasn’t going to be easy.

“Personally? I’ve got to clear Electra and get Matt out of the suspect picture. Professionally? I need to get the media heat off the Crystal Phoenix. This is their biggest convention ever, and doing it in partnership with the Goliath is a good deal for both hotels, neither of which is exactly the new kid on the block.”

“Your Debate of the Sexes scheme only upped the bad publicity,” he pointed out. “And upped the possible murder raps around here. And Electra Lark remains a prime suspect.”

“I know! And it roped my fiancé into the murderous merriment going around.”

“Fiancé,” Alch teased. “You sure like to sling that word around.”

“Guilty.” Yeah, she did. She’d had too long a run as an almost fiancée with Max. At bottom, she was a middle-of-thecountry girl, a heartland product. And her heart needed to know it had the hope of a permanent home.

“That’s okay,” Alch said softly. “Old-fashioned values go good with that hat of yours.”

“Molina,” she began.

“She’s my boss. Don’t go there.”

Temple reassembled her forces. “I really don’t want to, and I don’t think any sane man would either.” No rise from Alch. “Speaking of insane men, was Elmore Lark really a murder victim?”

Alch nodded. “Only the word is ‘almost.’ He’ll recover. That’s top secret, by the way.”

“Recover? Oh. That’s good news.” That was also theory-busting news. Still, Elmore had been murderously attacked, evenif he hadn’t succumbed. How? “Was it the water pitcher? How could it be? A clear, tasteless substance is a lousy medium for poison. And it had to have been poison, right?”

“I guess you’re moonlighting as a technical consultant for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation these days, huh?”

“No. That’s a bunch of hokum, I know that. But it had to have been poison.”

“Why do you think so?”

“The public collapse, while on camera. If the cause of the attack wasn’t natural, it had to have been induced by a lethal substance. But not in the water.”

Alch nodded.

That was all she was going to get from him, confirmation of her assumptions. That was more than any other detective she knew would give her.

Temple began pacing. “Wait! He had to have carried the poison on him!”

Alch’s expression became even more poker-faced, telling her she was moving in the right direction.

She paced again, then stopped right in front of him, saying, dramatically, “A hip flask full of liquor.”

“Slightly warm,” he said.

“Flasks carry straight liquor. The taste is strong and overbearing. It would mask almost any poison if Elmore had swigged some down in the men’s room before going to the panel and on camera. Even the deadliest poison takes a few minutes to act.”

Alch shrugged and nodded. “I’d put you on CSI.”

“So.” Temple paced some more in her smart hot pink, high-heeled slides.

Her pink hat wasn’t the only thing Morrie Alch liked about her, and friendly paternalism only went so far with even the most decent of men. Maybe he missed his daughter at cajoling sweet sixteen.

Temple had never been a cajoler, but she liked to let her imagination loose.

“Elmore didn’t carry a hip flask,” she both asked and stated outright.

He nodded.

She paced again, recalling the hokey Western outfits he wore. “Something else he carried was tainted, then. In his jeans’ hip pocket.”

Alch’s expression betrayed surprised agreement.

“I feel like I’m on the old Family Feud game show. I have to guess the top five most likely answers. Breath mints or those little strips!”

Alch’s expression grew even more deadpan.

She’d missed. “No, I guess Elmore Lark wouldn’t be as self-conscious as a computer nerd on a date at this stage of the game, would he?”

Alch chuckled.

“Wait. Tobacco! It can be lethal. Poison-spiked cigarettes. A whole pack of them. It would work slowly, then, bingo, the dose would build up and a quick ciggie to ease the tension of the debate could be the Camel that broke the weak straw that was Elmore Lark’s back.”

Alch laughed out loud. “Nice way to put it. Yeah, if you’re talking Fu Manchu or some other pulp villains of the early twentieth century. This is the twenty-first century, kid.”

“But Elmore Lark was a twentieth, even a nineteenth-century kind of guy, especially in regard to women.”

Temple sighed. No poison in the water. Or in any liquor or cigarettes Elmore could have carried on him. Maybe he bit his nails!

She said as much to Alch, who bent over double from laughing. “Creative, but he’d need a daily manicure of poison to do the job.”

“Some seductive Red Hat honey maybe could have talked him into a harmless clear nail polish, then, wham-o!”

“You think you could talk me into some harmless clear nail polish?”

“If I wasn’t engaged, maybe I could.”

“No. Real men don’t do their nails. Elmore’s a real man.”

“Yeah. Lying, lazy, deceptive, womanizing …”

“Agreed. The guy’s a rat. A lot of people like to poison rats. And his kind of rat, the poisoner would likely be a woman. Poison is a woman’s weapon.”

“But Elmore’s a man’s man, in the worst interpretation of that.”

Temple tapped her toe, beating a fast, impatient beat on the stone-cold floor. That’s how cold she felt her guesses were. Alch was still sitting here playing the game only because her earlier guesses had been in the ballpark.

Time to slam something into far left field.

“If it was in his jeans pocket, it had to be as small as a tiny flask or cigarette case. What are both of them? Metal?”

Alch had stopped grinning and was looking ready to be impressed. She couldn’t stop now. Family Feud. She’d always felt sorry for the players who were last to guess after all the most obvious answers had been taken.

Elmore Lark. Aging urban cowboy. High-heeled boots, big-buckled belt, neckerchief, ten-gallon hat. A man’s man while taking women to the cleaners.

“You’re right,” Alch said consolingly, “that it was something that would fit in a jeans pocket.”

“Not cigarettes? Wait. A cigar?”

“Nicotine is somewhat toxic,” he admitted, “but not in this amount, and not instantly. Besides, a smoker would have built up resistance.”

“And he wasn’t a smoker?”

Alch shook his head. “Although nicotine can be lethal in more than cigarettes over years of inhalation, it wasn’t in this case. In this case it was a, er, smoke screen.”

“So something else was lethal to Elmore Lark? He was a drinker. Maybe one of those airplane-sized bottles of scotch was how he concealed it. That would fit in a jeans pocket.”

Alch paused. He didn’t dare speak too loudly, or plainly.

“Let’s just say that Elmore Lark wasn’t toasting his own health.”

Temple felt she had pushed Alch’s envelope to the seam-splitting point. She said her thanks and good-bye, and mulled the detective’s parting words as she left the room for the colorful chaos of the Red Hat Sisterhood–populated lobby.

Elmore Lark “wasn’t toasting his own health.”

A toast had killed him? Alcohol? Sure, you could kill yourself by overusing alcohol, usually over years. But how could someone else kill you with it if not with poison in it? And Alch had implied alcohol wasn’t the medium.

If something at the debate hadn’t poisoned him, the attempt looked much more premeditated and distant. But ifs were all she had. She sure wasn’t going to get any more information about it from the LVMPD.

At least Matt and the water pitcher were off the hook. Except hers.

Chapter 35

Hints and Intimations

Temple eyed the swirl of red and purple pooling around her, the echo of laughing voices exploding from all the shiny hard surfaces that lined Las Vegas hotel-casino’s public areas.

If you could hear yourself think in a Las Vegas hotel-casino, they weren’t doing their job right. The cheerful clatter and clinks of slot machines kept up that subliminal cash-register chatter, while excited human voices competed with them.

And then she realized, what with all her concentration on El-more Lark’s possible habits and many means of poisoning, no one—at least not her—had checked out Oleta Lark’s hat habit. She wove through the crowd, jousting brims with ladies of different colors, red, pink, lavender, until she reached the ballroom that hosted the Red Hat Sisterhood stores, aka the Hatorium Emporium.

Oleta had bought a merchandise booth here, not the one where she was killed. Presumably it had been set up before her death and was still standing. At least Temple would learn something about Oleta’s personal taste, if nothing more.

But the convention “store” was a riot of cheerful disregard of taste, at least in the conservative sense. The atmosphere of women-only shoppers jostling each other at tables filled with frivolous fun products jogged more than her body. It triggered her memory, spurring one of those déjà vu feelings of slipping back in time.

That’s when Temple remembered where she’d bought the costume jewelry ring reminiscent of the one Max had bought her and ShangriLa the magician had stolen onstage.

For some reason Matt came to mind. A flashback slide of him rooting through her scarf drawer. There was something intimate and sexy about that act, that memory. Wow. Her scarf drawer and the rings that resided in it are now a Freudian paradise…

Of recovered memory!

Temple stood shock-still as people and conversation flowed around her. She’d been handling PR for the annual women’s show at the convention center a few months ago. Such shows were orgies of girly self-indulgence, showcasing products that soothed the savaged soul: massage and bath oils, jewelry and clothes.

Just as here and now, there were how-to sessions on using hairpieces and false eyelashes for fun, and for older women who were getting scanty in both outgrowths. Cooking seminars with kitchen gadgets. New cosmetics. That’s where Temple had first seen the Besamé vintage color cosmetics and the mineral-only makeup powders that were now a commercial rage.

And that’s where, on the show’s Sunday sell-off before closing, she’d spotted the ring uncannily like the one she’d lost and had never stopped missing. The woman behind the display discounted it to less than forty bucks (it had real cubic zirconias) and slipped it into a little box and then into a little bigger paper bag.

And … sometimes your subconscious could kick up a long forgotten and buried memory, one not openly noted at the time. And the … the bag had sagged a little on Temple’s arm as she’d turned to leave the booth.

It had almost felt like the lightest touch snagging her bag, providing a second’s worth of drag.

Had that been when the second ring box bearing the worm Ouroboros ring that Kathleen O’Connor had dumped on Matt had found its way into her possession?

Temple was always busy. She’d dumped the paper bag on her dresser top, and later, dumped the ring box in her favorite catch-all spot, the scarf drawer.

Why would anyone lay that sinister ring on her? Who would have had it? Only Kitty the Cutter O’Connor.

People intent on shopping continued bumping into Temple. This was a room of constant movement and female chatter, shopping nirvana. But Temple stood still, frozen in thought, beating the fringes of her memory.

What had she looked and sounded like, that vaguely noticed saleswoman?

Short. Like Temple. Kitty had been maybe three inches taller than she. Still qualified as “short.” A typical saleswoman, all perkiness and persuasion. She had “talked” Temple into the first ring, almost as if she had known it would appeal to her. Because she knew it was similar to the real opal and diamond ring? No. ShangriLa knew that.

Temple was mixing up her villainesses. If Kitty O’Connor had been masquerading as the saleswoman … No, that would have been too difficult to arrange just to taunt Temple with a mock ring. She was a saleswoman on that day, for some reason, and she was a saleswoman who had taken advantage of an amazing opportunity. A second chance to snooker Temple. Except it was ShangriLa who’d relieved Temple of Max’s ring.

Okay, no one had ever figured this out at the time, not even high and mighty Lieutenant C. R. Molina.

Like Sherlock Holmes had said—now that she’d encountered “The Red-Hatted League” she was recalling her childhood acquaintance with the Canon—“Once you eliminate the possible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Or something to that effect.

Ah. Temple ignored a particularly intense bump that almost knocked her off her feet. She was almost knocked out of her shoes.

“My sweet Stuart Weitzmans!” she murmured.

ShangriLa was Kitty O’Connor. Or, rather, Kitty O’Connor was ShangriLa. That could be the only explanation if Matt’s worm Ouroboros ring had gotten into Temple’s possession on the same day a double for Max’s semiengagement ring had. Who else would recognize that the cheap imitation ring bore a striking resemblance to the one from Tiffany’s and Max? It all made terrifying, mind-boggling sense.

Random thoughts, more like twinges, hit Temple then too.

But Kitty O’Connor was dead. Max had seen her die in a solo motorcycle accident out on Highway 61. No, that route was in Minnesota and from an old Bob Dylan song. Kitty must have spun out on Highway 95. Temple had never asked Max where, only accepted the what.

Unless Max had been lying and Kitty hadn’t died. Or he’d been mistaken somehow. No, she was buried.

But ShangriLa wasn’t.

Except she had died recently too, in costume. Or had she? If the two women were the same. They were both dead. Or not.

Temple looked around the room thronging with women squealing and flaunting red or purple feather boas and umbrellas and stockings and satin gloves at each other.

“Look!” they were caroling. “Look. Look at what I found! No, over here! It’s fabulous! It’s too great to be true! Let me see it!”

Temple turned, blindly, and pushed her way out of the room that had just served as her personal time machine.

She needed some peace and quiet. She needed to escape from the red and purple mania. She needed to figure out what had really happened that Sunday, so long ago, and what had really happened to her.

Chapter 36

Loving Dangerously

Temple went home and poured herself a stiff drink from Max’s Millennium scotch. For the first time, she didn’t go into a funk over something related to him. To them. She had big-time conundrums to solve.

She then unearthed every item in her scarf drawer. It gave up no more ring boxes.

Then she sat on her living-room sofa, her bare feet up on the glass coffee table and her heels lying askew on the faux goat-hair rug, and sipped really good scotch very, very slowly.

“Once you eliminate the possible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Round and round her mind went. The thought, the suspicion, the idea, was incredible. She tried out the impossible first: Kathleen O’Connor was ShangriLa. That was impossible because of what had happened at the New Millennium a week ago. ShangriLa had been revealed as an illegal immigrant and an Asian acrobat. However, ignoring that, it was possible because ShangriLa was all costume and mask of makeup. She was also an acrobat, but a lifelong double agent like Kathleen O’Connor would know martial arts and that was only a skip and jump from being an athletic magician.

Max had found the profession of magician to be the perfect cover for his activities. Why wouldn’t Kathleen O’Connor come to the same conclusion, especially since she knew all about him and would have relished using his own methods to track him and bring him down. Maybe ShangriLa wasn’t always the same person. Hai Ling was illegally in this country. Maybe Kitty the Cutter forced her into stepping aside at times when it suited Kitty to masquerade as ShangriLa. For criminal activities! Like that designer drug smuggling operation at the Opium Den!

Everything was amazing … and fit … and, Temple mused, utterly useless. Because Kathleen was dead and buried. Temple’s brilliant insight had come too late. It didn’t matter, except that it proved that Matt was eternally free of Kitty the Cutter’s sick, violent stalking, as was Max.

If she could only find Max to tell him so! He’d be so proud of her reasoning, her revelation. Except he was noncommunicado, as he’d so often been lately. Too absent to even keep her chronic attraction to Matt from finally exploding into consummation. Not that she regretted a moment of that, but Max could have at least tried to prevent it, instead of pushing her into Matt’s bed like some heroic doomed lover passing her onto a new romance and a better life.

So her elated mood at having solved the biggest mystery afflicting them all dropped like a stone. She was still sipping her way through that one expensive glass when she got up to answer the knock on her door, hoping that it wasn’t someone wearing purple and red.

She’d had enough of P and R PR to last a lifetime.

She lucked out in that respect. She faced a wall of plain khaki-colored cotton pantsuit.

Lieutenant C. R. Molina was poised with a fist still raised. That vision shook Temple out of her fog and into combat alert.

“Should I cringe now or later?” she asked.

“I’m greedy:’ Molina said. “I want both.”

“And you still expect me to invite you in?”

“Oh, that would be nice.” Said sarcastically. “Actually, I have some questions that you might really want to know the answers to.”

Temple stepped back from the door, resigned. Molina followed her into the living room, but neither woman sat. Their relationship, always at odds over Max, was too thorny for simple actions like that.

“Have you seen Kinsella lately?” Molina asked, eyeing Temple’s glass of scotch.

Still the same old tune. Only this time, with Max vanishing again, it really stung. Molina was the last personTemple wanted to know that Max had left Las Vegas, maybe. Had left her, certainly.

“Seen Max? Not recently,” Temple said casually. “We’ve never lived in each other’s hip pockets.”

“Heard from him?”

“Not recently.”

Molina nodded. “Were you aware of a magician working at Neon Nightmare?”

“I know the nightclub, but no.”

“He wore a cape and a mask and performed as the Phantom Mage. He bounced around the dark interior walls on bungee cords and did magic effects in literal thin air. I understand he was quite popular.”

“Sounds like a comic book superhero act.”

“Sounded like Max Kinsella to me.”

“He hasn’t performed in almost two years.”

“Exactly why he might want to polish his skills anonymously. What do you think? Even better, what do you know?”

“Nothing about this Phantom Mage. Why ask me? Why not trot over to Neon Nightmare and interview the magician in question? Surely you and your shield can sweet-talk only a mask off a man.”

“I would, except I didn’t learn about him until he stopped performing.”

Temple rolled her eyes. “This is such a non-issue, then. Guess we’ll never know who the Phantom Mage was.”

But she was wondering now if it had been Max. He’d talked about rehearsing again, about putting a new act together. It had been his excuse for remaining distant lately. Maybe that’s why he’d left. To train in Europe or someplace safe. Right, and not tell her he was going?

“Maybe we’ll all soon know who he was,” Molina said, watching her. “Have you seen or spoken to Max Kinsella since last week? Telling me won’t betray him. I know you’ve been in close contact for months.”

Temple had to take a few moments to mentally backtrack. Her mind had been pretty occupied by Matt and his dinner date and engagement ring recently …

“No,” she said finally.

“That’s interesting. You might want to sit down.”

Temple remained standing. Molina sat on the sofa’s broad arm, a position that put their faces on a level.

“The Phantom Mage left a huge puzzle behind him.”

“He’s gone, then? He left?”

Molina shrugged. “Hard to say. Witnesses are divided about whether he died on the scene or not.”

“Died?” Temple spoke quickly to keep from focusing on her stomach doing a swan dive. Died? “What scene? I haven’t read anything in the newspaper about the Neon Nightmare.”

“There was a small notice, but no follow-up. That’s the mysterious part. Witnesses saw him fall. He hit the wall, hard, when his bungee cord failed. An onlooker gave him CPR. Nine-eleven was called, then a pair of EMTs took him away in an ambulance, siren screaming. About four hundred shocked people witnessed it.”

Temple felt her knees turn to Jell-O. Molina must think thiswas Max. And she’d come here, to Temple’s home, to taunt her with the horrifying, gory details to make her give something away.

“You know,” Temple said, her voice shaking, “you’re a heartless bitch.”

“I did suggest you sit down.”

“I won’t suggest what I think you should do.”

“I still think you should sit down.”

“There’s more?”

“The onlookers were pretty shaken up. They started calling the police to inquire about the man’s fate or condition. Of course we had to look into it then.”

“And of course you couldn’t let a magician disappear on you again.”

“Or on you. Again.”

Temple swallowed, hard. That’s just what had happened.

“When we started investigating it,” Molina said, “we found out the magician had really, actually disappeared into thin air. No ambulance had reached any medical facility with an injured or dead man wearing a mask and a cloak. No ambulance service had made a hospital run that night at that time.

“The man who performed CPR never came forward, and never could be found. The only description was medium everything—height, weight, and age—in dark clothes.

“That’s when I became interested in the incident. I sent some detectives to the scene. The fatal bungee cord couldn’t be found. All the bungee cords hanging from the apex of the interior pyramid at the Neon Nightmare club were fine. Whole. Unbroken, and uncut. Everything was normal.

“It must have been an act, my detectives concluded. It must have been the magician’s spectacular exit from a job he’d tired of.

“No unclaimed bodies lie in the morgue. Sometimes, when illegal Mexican workers die, their friends and family stuff the body in a truck or a car trunk and race back into Mexico to bury him. Nobody official in the U.S. knows a thing about it. That could have happened here, except Mexicans are a shortstatured people and everybody at Neon Nightmare agrees that the Phantom Mage was tall and imposing, a thrilling acrobat and illusionist. Really too good for a nightclub act at the Neon Nightmare. The crowd misses him. Maybe you do too.”

That was such a low blow that Temple wanted to shriek at the woman, but she wasn’t giving Molina a shred of information about Max, good, bad, or just damn scary. This might be the last chance she had to shield him from Molina’s obsessive desire to find him guilty of something.

She wouldn’t spill her hard-won speculations about Kathleen O’Connor and ShangriLa, which Molina would never take seriously anyway.

Most of all, she wouldn’t tell Molina about how Max’s very private, hidden house had changed, and changed hands, so supernaturally fast, and so finally.

“I’m not Max’s keeper:’ Temple said. “I never was. Maybe he left town to get away from you. I sure would if I were a man.” There! A low blow in return.

Molina stood. “So you won’t help me. You won’t say if you know where he is. Or even that he is.”

“I never did before.”

“No, you’ve been utterly consistent, if never utterly convincing. I can’t see for the life of me what he ever did to win your loyalty, but it’s first class, if blind.”

Temple didn’t trust herself to speak.

Molina turned and headed for the door.

“What are you going to do?” Temple called after her. “What it takes,” she answered.

Molina was utterly consistent too.

Temple sat only after Molina had left. Sank would better describe the motion.

An elongated chirping sound distracted her, as Midnight Louie jumped up on the sofa beside her. The big black cat paced on the soft seat cushion, leaning into her shoulder to rub back and forth. He pushed his chin against hers and purred.

She wasn’t used to him being so lovey-dovey.

Things must be really bad.

It must be true. But then who had sold Max’s house, if he was dead? He’d always lived alone after he’d returned from his year’s disappearance. They’d never lived together in Las Vegasafter that fabulous first year of loving dangerously at the Circle Ritz.

Max fell and had died, and no one had known?

No. Maybe Max fell. Hundreds saw it. But hundreds and thousands had seen Max fly, onstage. And had believed it.

Temple shook her head, surprised by a blur of blond at the edges of her eyes. That did it. As soon as this mess was over, she was going to get her hair back to its natural red shade. There had to be a hair wizard in Las Vegas that could put her hair back where it had been. Even if no one could put her world back where it had been.

And … Matt had briefly been under suspicion, thanks to her trying to put PR “spin” on a protest. And Electra still was. She had to concentrate on them. On those present. On the provable living.

If there was anything unusual to see in the vicinity of the oleanders, it bypassed her attention.

Chapter 37

Electra Lite

The oleander bushes surrounding the Circle Ritz parking lot were doing a lot of blowing in the wind these days, Temple noticed as she stood on her balcony overlooking the parking lot.

Funny. The breeze wasn’t whipping her longer hair around; it was just stirring the oleander leaves far below.

If she hadn’t had so much on her mind—Max’s whereabouts, the new scenario she’d dreamed up for Kathleen O’Connor and her alter ego, Electra’s pending murder rap, talking marriage with Matt—she might have investigated.

But her mind was on huddling with Electra to get a handle on the two Red Hat Sisterhood convention incidents connected to her complicated past.

The building’s small elevator was a wood-lined bundle of fifties charm the size of a confessional, but it sure could crawl up the wall at a snail’s pace. Make that a slug’s pace.

Temple’s pink low-heeled slides danced an impatient jig on the car’s parquet floor until it creaked to a stop at the penthouse level.

Ringing Electra’s doorbell produced the usual long wait. Temple finally pushed on the door. It wafted slightly open.

Pushing through, she found Electra’s pathologically shy cat, Karma, sitting on the threshold. The mirrored vertical blinds lining the octagonal entry hall reproduced a host of Karmas, cream-colored coat, white-tipped paws, and dark brown mask at her eyes.

“Electra?” Temple called.

Karma remained the usual inscrutable. Temple hated to cross into the cat’s territory without its mistress present. The animal broadcast an air both eerie and intimidating. Its heavenly blue eyes seemed transparent at times. At other times, Temple had seen them gleam red, like a demon’s.

“Electra?”

“Coming,” the landlady’s cheery voice caroled from deep within the shadowed rooms.

Electra kept the light out of her living area because of Karma’s shyness, Temple had been told. Now she wondered if Electra was simply used to living in the shadows of her own hazy past, and husbands.

“What’s happening, dear?”

“Elmore will survive and Matt is no longer a suspect in the attack.”

“That’s wonderful. About Matt, I mean. Who is suspected?”

“You knew him best, they say.”

“Not for years. Sit down. You look stumped.”

“I am. I don’t even know what was used on Elmore. Alch does, but he’ll only give me aggravating hints.”

“Oh, that charming detective. I should think you could coax more than hints out of him.”

“One would hope. But he’s raised a daughter; he’s personally dealt with a teenage girl. He is no longer susceptible to coaxing from females. He did admit that Elmore was poisoned.”

Electra gasped. “Oh! That’s a terrible way to die. Elmore was a lying creep, but he didn’t deserve death by poison. Maybe a jalapeno enema, but not poison.”

“Electra! Talk like that will not get you taken off the suspects list.”

“Why not? I’m not threatening any lethal damage, just a whole lot of pain.”

“The object is to look and sound as innocent as the early morning rain.”

“I am, Temple, that’s why I can afford to tell the truth about the bum. The world wouldn’t have missed him much. I never did. And that’s why I wouldn’t wait all this time and then try to kill the jerk.”

“The question is how the poison was administered. I’ve suggested every method I can think of to Alch. He just beams like Buddha and says I’m not even warm.”

“What did you strike out on?”

“A hip flask. Alcohol is strong enough to disguise a lot of lethal substances.”

“No.” Electra shook her purple-sprayed head. “He liked his liquor well enough but I wouldn’t see him as the hip flask sort.”

“I thought maybe nicotine, but he didn’t smoke.”

“No, never smoked.”

“You’re no help. Alch admitted, implied, that if it was something he carried in his back pocket, it could be metal like a cigarette case.” Temple kept silent for a moment, stumped. “Why would Alch say that Elmore wasn’t toasting his own health? He wouldn’t anyway, because he wasn’t a known drinker.”

“Toast. Now there was an Elmore Lark weakness. The man adored French toast. I had to make it every morning when we were married. Can’t stand it to this day.”

“Food? Food was Elmore’s poison? They must have examined the contents after the hospital pumped his stomach. You can’t stash a piece of French toast in a tight back jeans pocket. He could have had it for breakfast, and someone had doctored it. Maybe one of those middle-aged ladies he preys on now invited him to breakfast and, presto, poison powder sprinkled on his French toast like … powdered sugar! That would work!”

Temple jumped up.

Electra looked around as Temple glimpsed Karma’s fluffy tail vanishing under the sofa fringe.

“That must be it! What Alch meant.”

“Whatever you say, dear. But I left Elmore long ago. I don’t care who sprinkles his toast or anything else with what.”

“Don’t you see? Whoever attempted to kill him knew his habits, and used them. And must have known him after you did.”

“But the police won’t believe that. That’s a ‘someone’ and I’m right here to blame.”

“I’ll just have to find who did know his habits and used them to try to kill him.”

“That’s nice, dear. Now can you sit down and have some Crystal Light so poor Karma will be reassured that no one will be leaping up unseemly and shouting and she can gather her psychic thoughts and come out from under the sofa?”

Subdued, Temple complied, wondering all the while how she could nail a killer with a doctored powdered sugar theory. Maybe “Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down” Mary Pop-pins could, but Temple wasn’t a magical English nanny. She was just a PR woman with a strong sense of protecting her friends.

Chapter 38

A Kick in the Karma

Usually I can count on my MissTemple to lock up a case of murder in four days flat. Double murder, or second attempt. Five days flat.

But my esteemed associate (not Miss Midnight Louise) is not her usual razor-sharp self, partly because our beloved landlady is in the hot seat, but mostly because she herself is trying to be this human insanity called “faithful” to two tomcats. (Not to mention myself, who has always been her steady fella and only real roommate, night-in and night-out. My nights out, that is.) It is so simple in the feline world, as I tell Miss Midnight Louise again and again. One hot young queen. Two potent neighborhood toms. You are talking a litter of adorable goldens and blacks, not a shabby combo for a mama of any species.

But, no. Humans have to make a pair out of a possible full house. Any gambler will tell you this: the more players, the better the odds. And the more fun!

Still, I have cast my lot in life with my MissTemple, and I generally have no complaints. I must admit, now that push has come to shove, that I am already missing the always-impending presence of Mr. Max. That guy knew how to build an audience’s expectations onstage, shatter them, and then show up behind them with an armful of tame doves. Yum-yum. I am talking about the doves, not Mr. Max.

But Mr. Matt is an okay guy. If you want sincerity with a Capital S, not to mention that smoldering sort of sex appeal that comes from a restrictive upbringing, my MissTemple could do no better.

But, see, I have always thought that she could do herself the biggest favor with both. What is so wrong with that? It has been the feline way since before we bit the hands that fed us. Since before there were hands to feed us.

Speaking of which, I am standing in the Circle Ritz parking lot fretting about human behavior, when I am suddenly held up to dry on my own impeccable good intentions and behavior.

“You slug!” I hear hissed from the nearby oleander bushes.

Something snarled and black (and snarling) rushes into my face.

It is my purported mother, Ma Barker. Jeez, I wish she had a couple of consuming tomcats on her mind. But no. She has her whole damn litter of a gang on her mind.

“We are starving. You said down-Strip would be the Promised Land. Free food from gullible humans who would not try to trap us.”

“There are no traps.”

“There is nothing in our traps, either, fool! We have walked off all the spare fat our spare frames could sparer Okay. I could edit that sentence. Eliminate redundant “spares.” Okay. That would not be life affirming in this current situation.

“What about the Free-to-BeFeline piles I have led you and the Chosen Felines to in my own domicile?” I ask.

“That stuff sucks, my son.” Ma Barker responds.

I cannot disagree.

“Okay.” I say. “But that is all I have for now. It will get better later, I promise.”

Ma Barker gets a bit dewy. “You sound just like your father.”

“I mean it! The head lady of this place is too busy to cook for the gang. She does not even know you are here yet. She is facing major murder charges!”

Ma Barker desists her howling and lays back into a purr. “This place is run by a head lady, human style?”

“Right.”

“And she is up on murder charges?”

“False, of course.”

“My kind of human. Except for the false part. So what are you going to do in the meantime, sonny?”

“I will … ah, consult the resident, urn, goddess.”

“It is human or feline?”

“A bit of both, I fear. Just settle down here

“We no longer have the energy to climb that arch of rugged trunk for a few nuggets of dried green rabbit dung.”

“I agree! I will see about getting you something more succulent.”

“Succulents are watery cacti, son. Not nourishing.”

“I meant moist, meaty, thick, tasty.”

“Like lizard tongue.”

“Ah, more like a major cat food brand.”

“I prefer baby food.”

“That too.” I sigh, my work cut out for me.

I take the despised palm tree route to the Circle Ritz’s fourth floor, then claw my way up the exterior to the penthouse.

Panting outside the French doors, I finally see a ray of light. A scimitar of claw has pulled a door ajar.

Now, I suppose, I must do obeisance to the resident goddess, Karma.

I roll into the desirable shade inside, hearing the soothing wheeze of the air-conditioning device. The dimness is also soothing. I could have a nice nap.“Slug!” I hear in dulcet sacred Birman tones.

I bet the Dalai Lamas did not have to put up with this, but they are mostly extinct these days. As I may soon be.

Miss Karma is circling around me on her miraculously white-footed feet.

“Are you responsible for that low-end, homeless riffraff in the parking lot being here?”

“Yes,” I am forced to admit. “They were starving uptown.”

“What makes you think they will not starve downtown?”

“As soon as the human Circle Ritz denizens can get their attention off of your … roommate’s survival, I am sure they will all see the need around them and meet it.”

“Hmph. You are a lowly mixed breed.”

I hold my tongue. And teeth.

“You have served the lowest desires of both kinds.” I hold my tongue, but it is hard.

“You have delusions of being a force-about-town.” I hold my shivs.

“You hold to no guiding principle but self-interest.” I growl.

“And that of a favored few humans of your acquaintance. No mystical human figure has blessed you with its favor.” Well, there was Elvis. Or his ghost.

“No miracle has occurred to paint your outer coat to celebrate your inner courage Okay, so these Birmans got their coloring centuries ago from dying to protect the Dalai Lama of their time. Did not work, did it? And the current Dalai Lama, cool dude as he is, may be the last of his kind, while their kind gets exhibited in fancy cat shows. Huh! They are all just hand-me-downs. I am one-of-a-kind, because I am no kind in particular.

“No miracle occurred for you, Louie?”

“No,” I say. But then, my just being here after having been abandoned in an alley is some kind of miracle to my way of thinking. Which is not divine. Or Birmanish.

“Very well. I will beseech Buddha for loaves and fishes for your wandering kin.”

Uh, that was the other guy.

Karma thrums her shivs on the carpeting. I think I hear a temple bell ring, but then I realize it is a microwave tinging.

“My obedient servant has left a warm meal for me. If your followers can get it, they are welcome to it.”

Hmm. Warm, meaty, fishy, not-Maurice-endorsed product. At least two bowls full.

I bump the patio doors open with my sturdy rear quarters and signal the corps. Ma Barker’s rangy, somewhat raccoon-customized form comes scrabbling up the palm tree trunk, everyone but poor three-legged Gimpy after her.

I look at Karma. “I can work the microwave. You think your Divineship could transport a little grub down to the three-leg waiting below’?”

Those celestial blue eyes blink. In a wink, shy, reclusive Karma has a napkin full of A La Cat’s best between her sharp white teeth, and is sliding down the palm trunk like it is a magic carpet.

The last I see, she is laying it all out for Gimpy, and pitching tasty nuggets into his tuna-hole. Meanwhile, I am the chef du jour, clambering to the countertop, teeth tearing packets open, kicking them into the microwave, then using fifteen-second bursts to release their full, fishy aroma.

Manx! Cooking for a crowd is murder.

Chapter 39

Dangerous Curves

Dirty Larry hunched forward in Molina’s visitor’s chair, his hands loosely clasped.

It was an oddly tense posture for a man with a style cool enough to chill ice. Maybe he sensed that she wanted to know something she didn’t want him to know she wanted.

What a tangled web undercover work involved! If Max Kinsella really was the super-spy Matt claimed he was, he must have been one hell of a multitasker. She knew she was too direct and authoritarian to match wits with a seasoned undercover operative like Larry Paddock. But she needed to do just that.

“My favorite redhead-gone-blond is up to her tiny tush in the murder and attempted murder at the Crystal Phoenix,” she told him. “I dug out the surveillance report you did on her for me a couple weeks back.”

“You want a vintage shop sized-up, she’s your woman.”

“I know her routines look all girly and innocent, but I don’t buy appearances.” Her hard look implied that might apply to him as well.

Larry shrugged. He had that inborn indifference to authority of any kind that made him such an apt candidate for a drug runner or other specialist in the criminal arts. Molina figured it was a native talent, honed through a prefelonious boyhood in some urban slum. Then military, probably special branch, then undercover in L.A. or Las Vegas where crime was as spectacularly intense as the scenery and social ambiance.

“Anything innocuous could be a cover,” she told him. “You didn’t give me the addresses beyond the general locations.”

“You want addresses of local vintage shops?” He grinned crookedly. “I thought Carmen the chanteuse habituated those places.”

“Not for years. Her thirties and forties era is out of fashion in the vintage shops now.”

“Too bad. Them’s ritzy rags.” He gave her a male once-over that stripped away the khaki pantsuit and attired her in dark liquid velvet.

Darned if she didn’t mind that. There was something feral and sexy about Dirty Larry. What used to be called devil-may-care in the torch song era. He’d aimed that at her when no one else dared. She hadn’t made up her mind about who was using who here, or if either of them cared.

She did care about getting a deeper interrogation of him on the matter of TempleBarr’s movements around Las Vegas, without him catching on, which was tricky.

“Mind this store for the moment,” she admonished him, lightly enough that it sounded as much like a come-on as a rebuke. “This is police business.”

“Sure, Lieutenant, you can pull rank on me anytime.” The tone was insolent.

“Like you’d ever take that.”

He shrugged, his smile tight. Then he shifted in the chairand pulled out a small cheap notebook, half the pages pulling out of the spiral binding.

“I took down the addys, just figured you didn’t plan on stopping by these nothing places.”

He started by spitting out the date, then shop names and addresses. Molina could barely jot them down fast enough.

‘That’s the vintage shops, all along or near Charleston, as you know. The residence was 1200 Mohave Way

, kinda like High Noon. The hotels I think you know well enough to dispense with street addresses. And the funky round residence—”

“That one I know all too well,” she said, waving a hand as she finished jotting down the vintage store addresses she didn’t want or need as if they were manna from heaven.

“What’s the deal with this old stuff?”

She looked up to see that the notebook had disappeared. She bet Dirty Larry had a lot of stashing places on his person, almost as many as a magician.

She felt her face flush. Guilt maybe. But Larry was good. He’d read every flicker of her expression, her thoughts.

“You want to search me, Lieutenant?” He spread his arms and hands, inviting.

“Not today.”

“Tonight?”

“Maybe.” Damn it. She needed to distract him. Sexual banter might do that.

His head tilted, like a bird who’d heard a worm wiggling underground.

“I was thinking Carmen needed to put in an appearance at the Blue Dahlia,” she said.

“Tonight?”

Now she would have to. “You’ve been a good boy with your math questions. But I hope you weren’t using a crib notebook.”

He laughed, easy and contented, all male satisfaction. It’d be hard to lose him tonight, but she had to. “Admit it. Those velvet gowns make you hot.”

“And they don’t make you hot?”

He rose, leaned forward, tapped the top of her hand with the pen in it. “I’ll be there.”

Some emergency with Mariah. That would be her out. Dirty Larry paused at the door to her office. Cut her a dirty blond Sting look. Maybe she didn’t want an out.

It was too bad her appearance at the Blue Dahlia was a sham.

The trio was really smoking and her voice had been just unused enough to have a throatier edge that matched them.

Dirty Larry had been lounging at a corner table drinking Madeira on ice like it was cough syrup meant to be taken by teaspoons, sober but undressing her with his eyes.

He was impertinent, unprofessional, arrogant, and oddly attractive. Maybe it would take an outlaw like him to breach her formidable defenses.

But not tonight. She had other business in mind.

She was crooning out the song’s endless last bars when the slimy-looking guy who was as twitchy as a coke addict sidled up to Larry’s table.

Larry frowned, big time. He gestured the lowlife away, brought his eyes back to her so she could breathe the last “you” of “It had to be you” right at him.

His lips pantomimed the word “Shit.” Then he rose and made a royal wave with one hand that meant “and all that stuff we cops do.”

And left.

Thanks to the inside info she had on the drug deal at the Opium Den going down, he was outta here. And so was she.

Molina bowed her head slightly to the enthusiastic applause, winked at the guys in the band, and beat a retreat to her tiny closet of a dressing room.

In front of the big round mirror on the vintage dressing table, she wiped off the dark carmine forties lipstick shade from an online company of vintage cosmetic shades called Besame. Kiss me. Not tonight. She dusted her face with dark brown face powder in a random camouflage pattern. The velvet gown, peacock-green, went on a hanger. She was wearing black yoga pants underneath. The dark green satin platform forties sandalsgave way to black high-top tennis shoes. Black turtleneck. You’d think she was a Max Kinsella fashion clone.

If she was lucky, thanks to that Mojave Way

address from Larry, she’d be invading Max Kinsella territory tonight. The Glock was too heavy for this gig. A small black Beretta nine-shot semiautomatic, perhaps in tribute to the Fontana brothers, was in her black nylon ankle holster.

She glimpsed herself in the round mirror before she ducked out of the dressing room and out the Dahlia’s back door. She looked lean, dark, and dingy.

Maybe this wasn’t Max Kinsella. Maybe this was more Midnight Louie, Allah bless his tribe.

Because she was going to solo as a cat burglar tonight, God willing. Not exactly what Larry’d had in mind, but what she’d planned from the first. Her lips managed a tight feline smile.

Chapter 40

Dead of Night

Molina had to agree with Larry’s reported opinion.

Bland, boring neighborhood. One-story, ranch-style houses. Only the Asian rat-tail sweep up at the roof’s corners gave the place some flare. Not that it didn’t cost three times what her modest bungalow in the Latino area did.

The house was fifties vintage, dark and shrouded like all the firmly middle-class homes in this aging subdivision.

The traffic swish of the Strip was almost audible here, it was so close in compared to more modern suburban developments in Henderson and environs.

No garage out front, but discreetly tucked at the back, as functional things were then.

The shrubbery was low and trimmed, unlike its neighbors.Someone knew the rules for discouraging lurkers. The lights at the corner eaves were motion-triggered.

She’d be better off to climb the cedar-wood six-foot fence at the side and try entering by the back. It had been a long time since she’d scrambled over a wall in pursuit. Desks didn’t require much scrambling.

But she kept her martial arts up and should still be fairly limber … shoot! Literally. She’d almost snagged her ankle holster on one of the pointed boards.

The backyard was lit on the fringes by rows of low lights. Probably solar-powered. She quickly padded out of their glare toward the house and the bulk of a hot tub on a patio.

If this place was what she thought and fervently hoped it was, she could dream up some steamy scenarios for that now-covered aquatic playpen. She had to crouch along the hot tub’s bulk to near the back door without triggering the corner lights.

And then she saw the red gleam near a potted hibiscus plant, matched by one from the opposite pot.

Right. Laser light security. Or guard cats. Given her suspicions, the cats wouldn’t surprise her. But if she wished to surprise anyone still in residence, it was up the fence to the roof, like a cat, and over the tile shingles to the back door, then down. Where she expected to find other barriers.

She did.

Steel shutters. And on the windows too.

She pulled out the small computerized device she’d “borrowed.” Max Kinsella was making her break a lot of rules, not to mention laws.

The device ran through endless codes from the major manufacturers of security barriers. Kinsella might have modified and customized the codes, but this probability device was tireless.

And she knew this was the right place now. The security level screamed that fact. This was the one innocuous residential address at which TempleBarr had stopped the day Molina had asked Larry to tail her.

Her heart was beating with the excitement of a hunter who might suddenly become prey. If Matt was right, Kinsella was an international-level spy. Breaching even a few of his defenses meant only that more awaited her.

This was way out of the range of her normal operations. She’d been a desk jockey for too long. Still, she loved being back in the field, flying on nerve and adrenaline. She loved … breaking the law in the law’s cause. One-upping Kinsella. Proving him guilty of something. Proving him the lying bastard she’d always seen him for. Proving TempleBarr a deluded little girl.

Matt an idealist.

Herself right.

Kinsella wrong. Dead wrong.

The device blipped and then the flashing light stayed red. The back door shutter opened slowly, with a low, grinding sound.

She tested the outer glass door, twin to a million others. It swung ajar.

She stepped into the black empty hole the shutter had left in its stead, into the heart of darkness.

Nothing is as haunting as the landscape of an unlit, presumably empty house.

Every breath you take sounds like the wheeze of an iron lung. Every soft, hesitating step crushes minuscule grains of sand underfoot, as if you were smashing shells in a driveway.

She passed through some utility room or pantry onto a hard-surfaced floor, probably the kitchen. She had a small, high-intensity flashlight in the tiny inner pocket of her supple knit pants, but she left it there.

The house seemed to breathe with her. Someone could be here. He could be here.

She hoped he was.

Step by step, she edged around the altarlike bulk of a kitchen island, her eyes adapting to what little light sifted through the back door into the interior dimness.

Ovals of metal pots glimmered above the island and her head. This was a reflective, metallic chef’s kitchen, so unlike her expectations of Max Kinsella. Crook, yes. Never cook.

Was she wrong? Was this the wrong place? Was it some paranoid citizen’s bunker against imagined assault?

No.

The slim scimitars of light glanced over a butcher block impaled with an expensive array of long, dangerous kitchen knives, something odd about their presence here.

The refrigerator was a matte silver mirror of stainless steel. She glimpsed her own figure as an impossibly narrow fence-post of wrought iron, moving out of range.

From the kitchen she moved into utterly dark inner space, probably a dining room. She edged outward until her hand felt a stucco wall and followed it. A waft of air told her a door or a hall intersected it.

She was moving on primitive instinct now, mostly sightless, her ears straining at every sound she made. It had taken maybe seven minutes to get to this point.

And she sensed a presence. Someone besides her was in this house, in these rooms. Nothing proved it. Nothing could deny it.

She moved even more cautiously. Yes, into a hall. Her long arms could span it, touch each side. The long arms of the law.

You can run, but you can’t hide, Max Kinsella. You are mine! A floorboard creaked ever so slightly.

To her right and behind.

Molina flattened against one wall, felt down it until a doorknob butted against her hip. Had she been moving faster she would have collided with it and huffed out an audible breath of pain.

As it was, she felt the small round disk, the kind you find on louvered wooden doors on closets, and pulled. A panel opened silently. She slipped behind it into folds of clothing. A closet, yes. She pulled the flimsy door shut. It was too light to creak.

Some light sifted through the louvers, striping the darkness with horizontal bars. A jail cell on its side.

Shelter? Or trap?

She heard sounds, motion. The subtle grind of footsteps not hers on the hard-surface floor of the kitchen. A subtle, scraping sound, faintly shrill, reminded her of something she couldn’t name. A faint bellows of someone else moving and breathing now that she was still.

Her heart was thundering in her veins and chest, at her ears and throat. Bending down to draw the Beretta would be damned awkward. She’d butt her head on the louvered door so close. She should have drawn it when she was in the larger hall, damn it!

She heard a door opening, a solid-core door across the hall.

Then a tiny sound, minute but long, like … like something tearing. Again and again. There was a rhythmic, sawing motion to the sound. Across the hall, in another room. Someone breaking into something? A cabinet. A magician’s cabinet?

And breath. Getting louder as the small gnawing sound continued. Heavy. Breathing. Someone else was definitely in here. And not a resident.

Someone secret, like herself.

Who?

The tearing sound stopped. The minuscule grains of outdoor sand crushed again. Breathing, harsh, passed her louvers. She held her own breath until her chest burned and she feared an exhalation would sound like a tsunami.

She clapped her hand to her mouth and used her singer’s strong stomach and chest muscles to expel the air, silent bit by silent bit.

Whoever was in here was dangerous. And it wasn’t Max Kinsella. He wouldn’t move like a thief in his own rooms. No one had sensed her yet. Yet she knew she wasn’t alone.

She felt as if some giant slow-slinking serpent was moving from room to room, about some very vicious business.

And then her mind fixed on the impression of what had been wrong in the kitchen like a grade-school student clinging to a flash card recognized a fraction too late to count.

Metal being honed.

The knife block.

One had been missing in the regular ranks of dark hilts glinting with steel rivets.

A big one.

The biggest one.

The butcher knife.

Holy Saint Ginsu Jesus!

Chapter 41

Transportation

The senior partner of Midnight Inc. Investigations is not the all-knowing oracle he thinks he is.

In fact, there are times when I deeply hope that he is not the dirty dog who sired me and my littermates on my unknown but obviously easily duped mother and took off for other venues.

I admit that I have always had a soft spot for Mr. Matt Devine.

For one thing, he offered me a temporary home for a few days back when I was known as “Caviar,” and had not yet beat all comers to become house detective at the Crystal Phoenix. And I have always felt something in common with the dude, given he was searching for two absent fathers: a mean stepfather and, unknowingly, his birth father. I fear his quests have been as disappointing as mine was.

And Mr. Midnight Louie, dude about Vegas (I would say “dud” about Vegas were he here to hear me), is not the only one wont to drop in on Karma at the Circle Ritz and get up-to-date on the doings of its human occupants.

Anyway, I have a bone to pick with him on what is more important: sheep-dogging his MissTemple through murder among the feather free-for-all at the Crystal Phoenix, or figuring out what is going on with the Mystifying Max.

That dude is sure living up to his performing moniker lately, or maybe not.

So instead of hobnobbing with the chic chapeaux set, I have taken on the thankless job of sitting outside Mr. Max’s residence waiting for something to happen.

Stakeout detail is ungrateful work. You have to sit still until your tail goes numb, both of them in my case. You have to hang out in the shrubbery where the ants crawl in and the ants crawl out and the ants play pinochle on your snout. And these are fire ants!

You have to ignore taunting lizards at your feet and birds chirping and pooping in the bushes above your head. Through heat of day and dark of night, nothing can distract you from your eternal duty.

And, on top of it all, nothing is happening at Chez Max.

I am beginning to think my possibly paternal partner is right. Nothing of interest will happen here and I am wasting my time as another endless day draws to a close and the crickets come out to chatter.

Last night, however, things got interesting for a few hours.

A crew of ninjas pulled up in a train of dark vans about 3:00 A.M., which is when humans are most deeply asleep. Also when my breed is more alert and active, as humans who decide to keep us as indoor domestic pets soon discover.

When I say “ninjas,” I mean ninjas. I have glimpsed those Asian action films. These men were all in black spandex, including hoods and masks. Imagine Spider-Man in mourning. They were nimble, they were strong, and they were fast as a firefly.

Each van was emptied on the lawn, filled with furniture abstracted from the house, and then driven away with suspiciously quiet care. Then the furniture from the lawn was borne silently inside. I watched this surreptitious exchange program go on until the sun was starting to curl its claws into the horizon and pull itself up over the edge of the world.

Not my favorite time.

Twelve vanloads must have been carted out, and in.

Then all was quiet as the sun started getting bold and hot and the lizards stirred and the birds chirped and pooped and nothing happened all day.

No doubt the senior partner would have been off eating and snoozing in his cushy haunts.

I stayed by my post, dining on the occasional grasshopper, until the sun tired of broiling all living things on the surface and slunk behind the Western Mountains to infest the other side of the world.

Except for a few drops sucked off the early morning sprinklers in the neighborhood, my throat was as parched as the sandy dirt surrounding the house, but my curiosity was stronger than my thirst. What would the next night bring? I intend to find out.

So here I am, waiting unseen, when it seems that everybody in the Western world has decided to break into the Kinsella domicile at once. I hunker down, ready to watch and wonder, and draw conclusions. And report back to my partner. If I feel that he deserves to be in the loop.

Chapter 42

Lost in Space

Molina understood that she was no longer the invader.

She was now the resident, and she had been interrupted by one nasty unlawful entrant.

At least that made her home invasion look justifiable.

And made her wonder where the hell Max Kinsella was.

He wouldn’t be slinking through his own quarters.

He wouldn’t tolerate anyone getting this familiar with his territory, or her breaking in. He wouldn’t have left it this easy to get in. Maybe the bastard was dead, as Matt feared.

Matt feared! That man had no normal negative emotions, like jealousy, or wishing a rival dead. Kinsella was no loss. He was her stalker. And now, in a case of poetic justice, he apparently had his own stalker.

Or could he be, God forbid, innocent? Could her stalker and his be the same person? Could she and Max Kinsella both be victims?

Molina rejected that term as violently as she knew Kinsella would. He hadn’t been an innocent since his teens, if Matt’s revelation about the counterterrorist past was true.

So maybe Kinsella was really gone. At least from this house. And maybe someone else had the same hankering as Molina to violate and solve its secrets. Except … Molina was a pro. She was textbook careful, as silent as possible.

The other intruder was breathing hard now, obviously. Angered by something found, or not found, possibly Kinsella himself.

He had left. For real, this time. Molina was suddenly sure about that. The magician had left the building.

Live or dead.

The idea reminded her of the old “she left” case. The killer of the murdered woman found lying with that phrase painted on Molina’s own car at the Blue Dahlia parking lot had been tracked down, tried, and convicted.

But the case of the murdered woman found in the church parking lot about the same time, on whose body the phrase “she left” had appeared at the morgue, that was still open.

Unsolved.

What was the victim’s name? Gloria. Gloria something. Retired showgirl. Or something.

Molina shook her head free of old cold cases. No time to stroll down a murderous memory lane. She had to contend with whoever wanted into the house as badly as she did, and that gave her pause. Okay. She was a trifle obsessed. She was risking her whole career by being here. Right now she couldn’t think of one good reason why if she had to answer to a higher authority.

That man was why! That “demmed illusive Pimpernel,” as the old swashbuckler novel put it. Kinsella drove everybody around him crazy. TempleBarr had apparently shaken loose of that old black magic, but now she, Carmen Regina Molina, had been caught in his abandoned web like a fruit fly on honey.

She pushed the louvered door open. Slowly, cautiously. Bentto touch her ankle. The Beretta rasped as she drew it from the holster. That was the same snakelike, slithering sound the other person in the house had made.

So small.

But all other sound stopped, even the impatient breathing. Molina stepped out into the hall. And saw a descending glint of steel. Where was the shrill music from the infamous shower knife scene in Psycho? She was suddenly Janet Leigh, wasn’t she?

Except she was armed and dangerous, and forearmed too. Molina’s forearm cracked into the descending arm attacking her. Arm bones were the human body’s strongest.

She blocked the blow, which came in lower than she’d thought, but the knife blade burned along her right side, a thin, shallow slice.

It didn’t hurt now, but it would bleed.

Molina’s long leg lashed out, tangling with someone’s ankle. An explosive breath huffed into the dark as a body stumbled and fell. Then stuttering steps pounded in the hall, running by the time they hit the slate floor of the kitchen with muffled thumps.

Sneakers.

Hot blood ran down to her hip as Molina bounded in pursuit. She passed the vague reflective doorway of the stainless-steel refrigerator as she heard the back door bang open and shut. Lights from the left blinded her.

She blinked wildly in that direction, finding the source in an adjoining room, maybe the den. Two table lamps, probably on timers, but controlled by yet a third person in the house.

And she glimpsed the operator.

A man standing by a chair. Wearing pants anyway. A silhouette.

She aimed the Beretta, but didn’t dare shoot a “what if.” What if he was a civilian? A security firm guard? Even a resident, even Max Kinsella? So she’d made herself into a deer in the headlights.

A bleeding deer in the headlights.

Damn, damn, damn.

The man laughed softly.

Chapter 43

Love and Hate: He Said, She Said

“I hate him and he won’t get out of my life!”

“I love her and she won’t let me into her life.”

The phone lines for the “Midnight Hour,” which ran for two hours now, it was so popular, were dishing up double doses of he-she angst tonight.

Matt was riding on the edge of his nerves. The whole male-female apache dance was getting to him.

He couldn’t help personalizing tonight: 1 hate Max Kinsella because he won’t get out of my life. I love Temple and she didn’t let me into her life (check that: bed) for so long.

But those declarations weren’t true in his case. He’d never hated Max; he’d even sympathized with him. He’d always understood why Temple hadn’t seen his fresh young sapling offirst love for the significant redwood forest that was Mighty Max. Matt had been reared to see two sides, even to his own life and loves.

Sometimes lately that felt downright wussy.

He watched the clock. The program’s two hours usually flew by as he probed the callers’ hearts and minds. Now he was impatient, as if something important was going on out there in the night he ought to know about, be in on.

Maybe it was the call that afternoon from his mentor in seminary-turned-FBI agent, Frank Bucek. He was in town to speak at some law enforcement seminar. Wanted to check in with Matt.

“I work really late.”

“You think I’m too old to stay up past midnight? I’ll catch your radio show, then we can hit one of the high-end hotels. Must be bars that serve cocktail menus all night long in this town.”

“Yeah, sure. I guess we can meet at the Venetian,” Matt had said like an old Vegas hand.

The idea of his former religious counselor hearing him on the radio advising the lovelorn and co-dependent unnerved him. Also, uh, his current ecstatic state of living in sin.

Father Frank had been his confessor all through seminary. He’d left the priesthood too, but at a much older age. Matt pictured him as staidly courting an ex-nun and marrying immediately, before any test runs, and having kids right away. Lots of kids that only stopped because the wife was menopausal pretty quick. No birth control, for sure.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. On all counts.

Matt had never regarded his radio gig as a performance, but tonight he did. Afterward, just past 2:00 A.M., he drove the Crossfire to the Venetian, rehearsing what he’d say. If asked.

Frank was at the bar, wearing a good gray suit that the Fontana brothers could probably nail as to designer and price level. Receding hair sharpened his features, and an intelligent, energetic air never failed him, in Roman collar or out of it. Matt realized as he approached that this was the father he’d always wished he’d had. Now that he had an image of his actual father, he still preferred Bucek. The man was brilliant. Why had he left the church after so long? And for the FBI?

Frank stood, holding out a hand with a crippling grip that Matt finally knew how to resist and return.

“Matt! Good work! You always were a remarkable diagnostician of the human soul. No wonder even Elvis called in to your show.”

“That was some pathological impersonator.”

“Not according to Quantico’s top sound analysis people. You could probably exploit those audio recordings.”

“Not my job.”

“No.” Bucek’s quick smile was pleased. “All restless souls deserve privacy, at the end. I ordered you a scotch.”

“Fine. How was the conference?”

“Both boring and exhilarating. The world runs on these things. Half the time I hate them, but half the time I love them.”

“You’re good in front of people.”

“And you’re not?”

“I fake it well.”

“Hmm. You fake the least of anybody I’ve ever known. That’s your problem. So what’s up with you?”

Matt sipped the straight-up scotch. It was almost as good as Max Kinsella’s Millennium brand that he’d shared first with Matt, in a private, bitter wake for Kathleen O’Connor. Almost. Nobody beat Kinsella for taste, especially in women.

“I’m engaged to be married,” Matt said.

“Well! A toast then, to the blushing bride. Who is she?”

“Temple, of course.”

“Not ‘of course.’ Nothing in your life has been ‘of course.’ Hard sometimes, but ultimately rewarding.”

Bucek clinked glass rims. “I must confess that I have mixed feelings about that young woman.”

“How so?” Matt asked cautiously.

“She’s bright, honest, gutsy. I’d be proud to be her father.” So far, so good. Father “Frankenfurter’s” favorable opinion was always hard-won in seminary.