Cat In A Red Hot Rage

“And I couldn’t help noticing that she is one sweet and delicious girly little number.”

“Am I blushing?” Matt asked.

“Nope. You’re too far gone already.”

“You’re probably right.”

Matt welcomed the combo plate of appetizers Frank had ordered coming down between them, hot and fried and distracting. “So when’s the wedding?” Frank asked after they’d each dipped into the cheese and crab and chicken wings.

“We don’t know. We haven’t met each other’s families yet.”

“You’re from Chicago, right?”

“Right. Temple’s family is in Minneapolis.”

“One quick trip, then, should do it.”

“You don’t know my family, especially since I found my birth father.”

“That’s wonderful, Matt.” Frank clapped him on the arm.

“Not for my mother.”

“Ah.”

“Anyway, you don’t need to hear all that. Did you get married soon after you left St. Vincent’s?”

“Lord, no! I shopped around some first.”

Matt nearly choked on a chicken wing. “Dated, you mean.”

“Sure.” He eyed Matt. “You’ve been hooked on Miss Barr from the git-go, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. Knocked over, but she was taken. I tried to see other women. They were nice, attractive, but—”

“But no fireworks. So you outwaited the competition.”

“We’ve always been friends. I’ve always suspected she sensed we could be more.”

Bucek nodded. “You’d have been an idiot not to have been interested in her. Single gals of her quality aren’t out there at your age, and at mine. So, what is she?”

Matt understood the question instantly. “UU, but she’s not practicing.”

The older man’s sharp guffaw made all heads within twenty feet turn their way.

“Sony, Matt.” Frank was trying to smother his laughter with the linen napkin. “She is independent. Well, UUs are very easy with ecumenical anything. The ceremony shouldn’t be a problem.”

“No.”

“Spit it out.”

Matt glanced at his small plate of wing bones and crumpled batter.

Frank smiled. “I’m not asking about what you’re eating, I’m asking about what’s eating you.”

“That transparent?”

“You’re as edgy as a seminarian with a question about wet dreams.”

Matt looked around, but everyone was chatting and drinking and ignoring them again. He lowered his voice. “I’m living in sin.”

“Do you like it?”

Matt felt Father Frankenfurter had let him down with the blunt, almost jovial question. “Obviously, yes. And no.”

“What’s not to like?”

“I can’t receive communion at mass.”

“So don’t. Everyone will just think you didn’t fast, if they think anything.”

“But we may not get married for months.”

“Didn’t we priests always advise young couples to wait?”

“Frank, you’re supposed to be the voice of authority and wisdom here.”

“Nope. Not my deal anymore. Come on, Matt! You were a parish priest for years. How many beautiful nuptial masses did you officiate at where the lovely young couple moved into separate apartments after months, even years together, just before they showed up in your office to discuss wedding plans?”

“A lot, I suppose. Some wanted advanced degrees before marrying. Many had been ‘dating’ for several years.”

“Sounds sensible to me. Why can’t you do likewise for a few months?”

“I was a priest. I’m supposed to follow the rules more than anyone.”

“You were supposed to be compassionate too. How about having a little compassion for yourself. Look. You are in love with a great young woman. You know she’s had another lover—”

“It wasn’t just that. They’d planned on marrying eventually, except his … job got in the way.”

Frank waved a dissenting hand. “I’m not slamming anyone. I’m saying that people who love each other should express it the best way they know how. There are way too many people in this world expressing hate. They’re in the headlines every day. Jesus associated with the common people who felt love, not the control-freak hypocrites who ran the temple. Oops, your girlfriend has a name made for double entendres in our game. Are you hurting anyone? Then chill.”

“But—”

Frank raised that commanding hand again. “You came here to Las Vegas hunting a man, right?”

“Looking for.”

“Hunting. I know a bit about that. Your abusive ex-stepfather. What drove that?”

“I stood up to him when I was in high school, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to see what had become of him, I wanted to … scare the crap out of him, take out on him what he’d taken out on my mother. Not me, my mother.”

“So you had an agenda of hate.”

“Anger, more.”

“And did you catch up with him?”

Matt nodded, taking a slug of scotch.

“What did you do?”

“Slammed him against a wall. Told him what I thought of him. Tried to beat him up back, but he was such a loser, so truly small after I saw him again. He wasn’t worth my rage.”

“You’re a lucky man.”

Matt gave him a questioning look.

“You had every natural right to hate and harm that guy. And that would have been a mortal sin. You would have been taking on his evil, perpetuating the chain of hurt and retaliation. You stopped. So, forget it. I’m not the one who’s going to call love a sin for you. Yeah, I know the church has confused love with sex, for centuries, but I’m out of it now, and you are too. My advice: Don’t overthink it, kid. Love needs to be embraced with open arms and eyes and no damn guilt, just as we all do, God bless us everyone. So enjoy.”

Temple lay awake in bed, running the events and questions of the day through her head, when she heard the floor above her creaking as Matt came home.

Late. Three-thirty.

She wondered what had kept him out. Whatever it was, he must be wide-awake still, like her.

She’d heard the sounds of his movements above her rooms before. This was an old building; floors creaked, faucets squeaked. Now the sounds of his motions drew her. She’d fought so hard for months to ignore their attraction, to not think about him. Now she didn’t have to. She could lie here getting turned on. She could think about doing something about it.

When she spun her legs out of the bed to the floor, Louie, arrayed by her feet, meowed his protest.

“It’s all yours, fella. Spread out and enjoy.”

She was wearing her favorite sleep T-shirt, which was as unflattering as a Mother Hubbard dress. But she didn’t plan on keeping it on long anyway.

She ran barefoot up the stairs and knocked on his door.

It took a minute or two to open. He must have been in the bedroom already.

No, he still had his open shirt and Jockeys on.

Not for long.

“Hi, I’m your nonaddictive sleeping pill,” she said. “Better get in bed and let me start acting on you.”

“Temple!” He was laughing as she backed him up into the bedroom, onto the bed.

“What? I’m too much for you?”

“Never,” he said fervently. She liked fervent. “It’s just that I never dreamed that you’d come up here like this, to visit me.”

“What did you dream?” Temple asked.

“Oh, God. That you’d suddenly really look at me. See me. Love me. I was needy, I guess.““I don’t think so, Matt. I think you were hot. That’s the way it starts when you love someone. You want them too.”

“One? Them?”

“Making general subjects agree with verbs is the writer’s worst chore. Cut me some slack.”

“I don’t want to cut you some slack,” he quoted her. ” ‘Not one bit. I want you on your toes,’ working your heart and soul off, ‘to make me a very happy’ guy.”

“There’s no way we can be on our toes in this position,” Temple pointed out, wriggling her bare ones.

She knew she shouldn’t tease him. He buried his face between her neck and shoulder. She giggled.

“That tickles!”

“This is bad?”

“This is good.” Temple sighed.

She felt a little guilty. Not about Max, for once, for about luring Matt from the rules of his church.

She felt like an older woman. My God! Her. She, the woman, was the more experienced. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The woman on top. Society said there was something unnatural about this inversion of the “natural order.” Women were supposed to be anxious and ignorant. Innocent, they called it. Duped, others might call it.

But it was her responsibility now. To be gentle with him. To admire and encourage his intensity, his unfurling lust. Whew. She could shatter him with a careless word or gesture. Make him doubt himself, what he felt. It was a tremendous responsibility.

And … wow, really exciting.

He was responding with even more intensity tonight, kissing her, covering her. Matt was tireless, passionate, in love with love.

First love. Could it really be only love? She wished, wished, wished that was so. It would salve his always raw Catholic conscience. God must have wanted this, because it was so exulting, so personal, so ecstatic. God needed sex, or else there’d be no universe, no natural world, no creatures great and small.

And Temple believed that when they were together, as she never had before. She knew love; she knew sex. Max would have been enough, had his world let him be.

She was everything to Matt, as he was to her now. And so far the world was letting them be.

And it was … divine.

Chapter 44

Red Hot Mama

“Step into the light or I’ll shoot,” she barked out, although if he was armed he could have shot her anytime before this. That he hadn’t was promising.

The knife assailant was history, though.

“Now,” she said in the same brusque, mean-business tone. That didn’t mean her heart wasn’t pounding from the attack, the escaped perp, the new mystery.

He obliged.

Oh, my God.

Not Max Kinsella, at least, but the only other man capable of laughing at her when she had a Beretta aimed at his heart. Her eyes began to adjust to the bright headlights of the table lamps. If this man was an enemy, he was one who relished her discomfort more than her death.

“I like you even better in this outfit,” Dirty Larry said from the dark side of the living room. “You are a lady with more secrets than a Swiss bank account. Maybe now is the time to tell me some.”

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, just as brusque, even if a bit relieved.

“When a woman leads me on and then ditches me, I find out why. I’m a cop, Carmen. You can’t play me like a junior-high swain.”

She lowered her gun, and tried to calm her pulse.

The uplighting from the table lamps cast Larry Paddock’s face into a creepy, half-lit mask.

“So you’re really ticked?” she said.

“No.” He sat down in the chair. “I’m turned on. Always love a good chase. And curious.”

She edged nearer, the gun lowered but still clutched in both hands, although the knife wound was starting to throb now. “So you let a perp escape to get one up on me?”

“The fence is a cinch to scale. You know that; I know that. I’d just got in the front when that scuffle broke out in the hall. That was one gone breakin artist. Besides, I was more curious about why you were here than he was.”

Dirty Larry stood and came toward her. “And I was really curious about if you would actually deliver what you were promising tonight if whatever this was hadn’t been on your mind. So I really came here after you.”

His words and tone could have been sinister or sexy. Molina wasn’t sure which motive was scarier. She was sure her heart was still beating like the proverbial trip hammer and it should be slowing down by now.

Was it Dirty Larry or dirty tricks?

The two table lamps were beginning to spin around each other and the gun was sliding from her hands. She managed to push the safety on as the bright lights circled her head. That damn knife wound must have been longer and deeper than she’d thought.“Jesus,” she said, meaning the prayer.

“Christ!” she heard him say, meaning the swear word. And then she went to heaven.

Molina woke up, immediately aware that she’d passed out and not happy about it. If word about the “swooning lieutenant” got around the department it would be way worse than being outed as the “crooning lieutenant,” fourteen years of blood, sweat, and rank were cooked.

She was on her back.

Bad.

On a bed.

Worse.

On a strange bed.

Worst.

Maybe on Max Kinsella’s bed.

Unthinkable.

She focused slowly, ignoring the burning pain in her side and the ugly pull of adhesive tape along her ribs.

The nightstand lamp was blinding her, but she made out that old devil silhouette in a chair by the wall.

Dirty Larry.

He lifted a forefinger to catch her attention. It was hovering over an open cell phone.

“One button punched,” he said, “and the EMTs come to deal with your knife wound. You want?”

“No!”

“Okay, it’s your funeral. I don’t think the wound is that bad, but you should get better medical attention than me.”

Molina patted her side. Her turtleneck sweater was down and her yoga pants were up, holding on a long expanse of gauze and tape, but they certainly hadn’t been while she was out cold.

“You can carry a lot of dead weight,” she told him.

He chuckled. “More like drag, but you didn’t know the difference at the time. Whoever lives here has a hell of a lot of first aid stuff in the bathroom, which looks like the ones at the Luxor.”

“You mean like a fancy, dark tomb fit for a pharaoh?”

“Right.”

“Figures.”

“You know the resident?”

“Maybe ‘knew,’ maybe ‘ex-resident.’ A magician.”

“Yeah, that was a magician’s bathroom. It felt like being pent-up in one of those tricky disappearing boxes. So. How do you feel?”

“Still woozy.”

He lifted a glass of water. “Here’s some Tylenol. Sure don’t want to give you aspirin. Can you sit up to take it?”

“Sure,” she said, then tried. “Oof.”

He came over to pull her upright against the pillows. It hurt. “Sure you don’t want medical help?”

“Would you?”

“No.”

She took the pills and the water glass and choked down the three caplets. Then she swung her legs to the floor.

“You ready already?”

“I’ll have to be by tomorrow morning. Might as well be now.”

“What’s the deal here?” he asked. “This is the house I tailed our little former redhead to. Now I tail you here.”

“I thought the person who lived here might be my stalker. I decided to find out.”

“Who lived here?”

“A missing magician.”

“Isn’t that redundant?”

“Not in this case.”

“So who had broken in before you did?”

“I don’t know.” Molina put down the water glass. She wasn’t sure if her attacker had broken in before, or after, her. “Help me up and let’s go see.”

He came to pull her up. It got as near as close dancing, and he enjoyed that.

“You like having the upper hand, don’t you?” she said. “Always.” He leaned near and whispered in her ear, “I’ve seen London, I’ve seen France, I’ve seen—”

She laughed. “Shut up.” But she thought: Sinister, or sexy?Somehow that question seemed even more appropriate in Max Kinsella’s ex-house.

Because he was gone for good, one way or another; that she knew now, no matter the props still stored here.

Able to lurch around on her own power, she first visited the room across the hall from the closet where she’d hidden.

She paused in the doorway to aim her high-intensity flashlight over the huge piece of furniture looming against one wall, almost a room in itself.

“What the—?”

Larry ambled into the flashlight beam to eye it up close. “Shit! This is right up my alley.”

“What do you mean?” The flashlight illuminated a vivid brocade surface, fret-worked uprights, and a brocade canopy.

“Opium bed.” Her light caught his grin. “Now that’s a crib fit for taking one of your velvet gowns off in, Carmen.”

She ran the light over the massive outlines, grander and larger than a four-poster bed. A small flare in the pit of her stomach said he was right. Madre de Dios! What she didn’t need to deal with right now was a crazy UC guy for a lover. But she sensed something perversely sexy about getting it on with Larry in Max Kinsella’s abandoned digs, and Larry was picking up on that like a good cop should.

In fact, the place reeked of hidden sex. She was sure TempleBarr was a phantom of the erotic opera that had occurred in some of these over-the-top rooms. Now the rooms held a darker ambiance. Whoever had broken in tonight had broadcast a subtle, homicidal presence. And that wasn’t sexy, just sick.

She limped over to the wall of doors and jerked back the first of several mirrored sliding doors.

“Oh, my,” Larry breathed in her ear, having followed her. “Lions and tigers and bears have been busy in here.”

She instantly saw what he meant. The ranks of solid black clothes inside had been shredded into clownish tatters, some dangling from their padded black satin hangers, others fallen to the floor in piles like charred autumn leaves.

Larry bent to run his fingers through the ruins.

“Cashmere. Silk. Italian wool. This guy knew how to dress.”

“Yes.”

“The magician?”

“Yes.”

“And the slasher was—?”

“I don’t know who, but let’s check out the kitchen next.”

When he stepped close and put her good arm around his shoulder, she didn’t object. Her other side was on fire. She needed more than Tylenol, but she wasn’t going to get it just yet. She couldn’t contain a small moan as she felt her lifted arm stretch the wound on the opposite side.

“Scars give a girl that lived-in look,” he said.

“Don’t make me laugh. It hurts too much.”

He ran a finger down her good side. “I think they’re sexy.”

“Everything hurts too much right now for nonsense, Larry.”

But he was right. She’d have a helluva scar from this. That reminded her of the thin straight razor scar Matt Devine’s manly side carried, courtesy of the woman Temple Barr had christened “Kitty the Cutter.”

Payback time. Now Molina had her own Cutter Anonymous. Could the home invader here be her stalker? But what link did she have to Max Kinsella other than an itch to pin some crime or other on him?

When she and Larry shuffled into the kitchen, he turned on the overhead fluorescents. No point in being discreet. That time had passed long before.

He spotted the knife block. “One gone.”

“I sensed that coming in, but didn’t fully register what it meant until I heard those clothes being slashed, although I didn’t realize what that sound was until I saw the evidence.”

“Yeah. Our minds are like cameras. They record everything on a crime scene, but the whole picture doesn’t snap into full focus right away. It’s pretty plain. You were right on his heels. Someone must have a real bad hex on this missing magician.”

“The magician might be more than missing. He might be dead.”

“Really? You don’t know?”

“He probably is dead. He’d never allow his stuff to be trashed like this if he were alive. Let’s look around some more.”

They visited every room. One bedroom was stuffed with stage props and conjuring chests. Larry looked around and sniffed hard in there.

When Molina raised her eyebrows, he shrugged. “Checking to make sure no dead bodies are ripening here. This would be the perfect place to stash a dead magician.”

“Yeah.” She could barely focus even though they had all the lights on. She still wasn’t sure the invader had arrived before her. Surely, she would have sensed movement from the git-go. Larry already had shown up inside. The slasher could have been him. “How’d you get in the front door?”

“Drug lords use this same level of high security. If I didn’t know how to work it, I’d be dead.”

“So this place is high-level secure.”

“Right. Except that you got in the back. I got in the front, which was a lot harder, no offense. And an unknown actor got in somehow just before you did.”

He sure kept stressing that. Police instincts, or planting his own scenario? It was hell to be too jaded to trust anyone. “That was—” she began.

“What?”

“Creepy. Like shadowing a snake.”

“Sick. I agree. And whoever it was had a hankering to slice up a human as well as a high-end wardrobe.”

“The resident vic was pretty hate-worthy.”

“The magician.”

She nodded.

“You?”

She nodded. “Among others.”

“Anybody love him?”

She nodded. “That little blonde you saw at Mariah’s Teen Idol gig, who I had you tail.”

“She was making pretty innocuous rounds, but she led me—and you—here. And the tail was also pretty tasty.”

“That is so sexist.”

“Why? Because it’s not your tail I’ m talking about?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Yeah, you do.” He grinned. “I just peeked.”

With as much blood as she had lost, Molina had enough left to flush. “Not funny.”

“I was being serious.”

That was what she was afraid of. Thing was, Larry knew too much, way too much, about her recent, atypical acts of skirting the law, her own standards, everything.

Thing was, she couldn’t decide whether that was sexy … or sinister.

Chapter 45

Toodle Who?

I must say one thing for my partner’s basic instincts.

She sure does have a female knack for uncovering a crime in progress, even if it is only some poor dude trying to take a catnap.

I feel four shivs in my shoulder and hear a voice hissing, “Wake up, you layabout! I have been noticing some unwarranted activity around Mr. Max’s supposedly sold and occupied house.”

“Are you still playing that sad old tune, Louise?” I ask, unrolling from a warm and comfy ball in my own previously private quarters, i.e., Miss Temple’s bed, sans Mr. Matt for once. “I thought we had decided to permit your Mr. Max to fade into the sunset until my Miss Temple’s current domestic and on-the-job problems were settled.”

“Her worst enemy has been prowling about the premises while I had it under surveillance.”

Well, that made me sit up and take notice. I cannot have mere shirttail relatives (maybe) taking over my primary job of protecting my Miss Temple!

“I wish you would get off this Mr. Max crusade, Louise. Gone is gone. Even Miss Temple has accepted that.”

“Not to mention accepting a shaded golden into her bed where you black-haired boys used to loll at your leisure.”

“I wish you would not refer to Mr. Matt as if he were a certain color of Persian,” I snap. Literally.

“Aha!” She jumps back like a ninja. “Methinks a certain color of female Persian has soured your milk. Your so-called Divine Yvette is a shaded silver.”

“I call her the Supine Yvette now,” I say airily.

“Not for her bedtime manners, I bet:’ she answers.

Little does Miss Midnight Louise know that it is because of her alley cat origins and rumored relationship to me (rumored mostly by herself) that I have been untimely dropped by She Who Was Formerly the Divine Yvette.

She eyes me slyly. “I would bet that there is not much peaceful resting space there for you on Miss Temple’s zebra-striped comforter now. At least Mr. Max had the decency to absent himself frequently on impossibly dangerous secret missions.”

Her words sting like a cat’s-claw cactus.

The fact is my various extremities have been subjected to certain heedless rollings and pinnings, as if I were mere bread dough to be mashed and smashed, on what should be my supreme sprawling space, the California king-size bed. Not to mention all the sweet nothings that I have been forced to overhear, which would be enough to curl the ears on a Swiss chocolate cat who did not even understand English.

So I admit to Miss Louise, “There may be some who enjoy kittenish caperings, not to mention squeals and mews and purrs, and find them amusing and even adorable, but I am not one. Not if it disturbs my sleep.”

“Speaking of disturbed sleep, I have been spending my nights outside Chez Kinsella. I can tell you that what has been going on there lately may not be as titillating as late-night TV in your Circle Ritz boudoir, but it has been fairly puzzling, and … now … mind-blowing.”

“Please, Louise. Do not resort to such uncouth and vulgar modern street expressions as ‘mind-blowing:”

“I believe that is the only way to describe Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina breaking into Mr. Max’s ex-digs with that scruffy cop guy from her daughter’s Teen Idol idyll hot on her heels. And I do mean hot. He is seriously after the crooning cop. And so may be an anonymous perp, who stuck her with a butcher knife before exiting the premises. Or so I learned from eavesdropping in the dark. I am thinking Midnight Inc. Investigations should ramble on over to examine the scene of the crimes.”

Molina. Hot cop guy? Mr. Max’s former premises? Butcher knife? Unapprehended perps?

“What happened to the leggy veteran chorus chick you yourself witnessed in possession of those fabled premises not two days ago?” I ask.

“Good question, Pops. That is the way your Miss Temple escorted by Mr. Aldo Fontana may have been meant to see it. Now it is full of all the old furnishings and as busy with trespassers coming and going as a park marked Do Not Step on the Grass: “

“Aha! That order is usually because there are already snakes installed on the same grass.”

“Apparently one was loose in Mr. Max’s former quarters. His clothes were slashed into fringe, from what I overheard.”

“They did not catch you?”

“No. Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina had been so badly clawed she had to lean on Mr. So-called Dirty Larry, the undercover narc.”

“No! She would not lean on a crutch if both her legs were broken. Where is she now?”

“He said he was driving her to medical care of a top-secret nature

“Then the house is empty.”

“That is why I am here, Rip Van Wrinkle. You want to take a stroll through Mr. Max Kinsella’s formerly secret domicile and figure out how it changes from sold and inhabited to not sold and vacated in forty-eight hours?”

I push my muscular legs into four inches of cotton batting, seeking to gain purchase. It is a cushy venue I am deserting, but something very strange is happening at the house formerly known as Mr. Max’s.

“We will have to hitchhike: Louise warns me as I land with an impressive thump on the wooden bedroom floor.

“Fine. I am sure we can catch a ride on somebody slinging Review Journals to the driveway at this hour.” Louise flicks her tail in annoyance at yet another ride from heck. “Where is your usual resident tonight?”

I jerk my head heavenward.

Miss Midnight Louise gets my drift immediately. “Maybe you can bunk with Ma Barker’s gang if you cannot stand the bedroom antics anymore. Are they getting any free grub here yet?”

“I have told Karma to implant the idea in Miss Electra Lark’s noggin while she is sleeping, but the Sacred Cat of the Dalai Lamas claims our landlady’s head holds too much ‘static’ these days and nights to be influenced subconsciously. I guess you could call that, I suppose, ‘bad Karma:”

“Well, Miss Electra Lark is suspected of murder. That is enough to braise any mere human’s brain. We are going to have to raid a Petco for free food if your humans do not come through.”

“Actually, I have found a temporary solution myself.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“And?”

“I have plenty of Free-to-BeFeline around the place. I have been inviting the gang in via the palm tree trunk to have a nibble of kibble now and then. They may loathe the stuff as much as I do but these beggars aren’t too choosy right now, thank Bast.”

“You are ‘palming’ Free-to-BeFeline off on a gang of starving street cats?”

“It is very nutritious. So say the label and my Miss Temple.” I dampen a mitt and run it over my rakish eyebrow. “And she is absolutely delighted that I am eating the swill down to the crumbs so well these days.”

Chapter 46

Sewed Up

Imagine a barrio doctor having access to dissolving stitches, Molina thought as Larry drove her home from ninety minutes of patching up on the sleazy side of town. And of sheer hell medicated only by some straight shots of cheap tequila.

Her blue eyes had fooled the doctor and ,the various gang types lounging around getting knife cuts sewn up too. They spoke in quick, idiomatic Spanish, and she got every word. Far more than Dirty Larry.

Larry had managed to find her a separate room: the tiny laundry room rather than the kitchen table. For his trouble the doctor assumed Larry had done the deed in a domestic dispute. “This was a nightmare,” she told Larry in her car, which he was driving. “How are you going to get back for your vehicle?”

“ ‘Vehicle,’ ” he mocked. “Six shots of tequila, a knife wound as long as a ruler, and you still use cop talk.”

“Listen. I wouldn’t dis me if I were you. They were spilling their guts both ways in that place, literally and conversationally.” Only she said it “convershashionally.”

“Right. I got some of it. What’d I miss?”

“Big score going down in the Mercado parking lot tomorrow night.”

“Great. Not another wild cocaine chase, I hope. Thanks.” He pulled the car into her driveway. “Mariah?” He’d first met her thirteen-year-old daughter-turning-diva during the dreadful Teen Idol stage, and case.

“On a class trip. End of school year. End of grade school. Junior high, ready or not.”

“Sure. I see you planned for everything but a maniac killer. Can’t blame you for being caught napping.”

“I was not napping. I am not napping now.”

“Sure,” he said, helping her out of the car. “I’ll check the house in case your stalker was busy here while you were busy getting stalked in the magician’s house.”

That hadn’t occurred to her. Between the pain and the liquid painkiller, she could only nod sagely.

Larry used her garage-door opener to enter the house and left her on the living-room sofa while he did a room-by-room and closet-by-closet check. He was fast and thorough.

“Clear,” he reported, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his nylon windbreaker and looking down at her on the couch. “I can get you into the bedroom.”

She regarded the fistful of big white tablets the doctor had given her for pain. Probably Vicodin. She wouldn’t take them. “No.”

“I wasn’t ever going to get you into the bedroom tonight, no way, no how, was I?”

“No. Not tonight. But thanks anyway.”

His eyebrows were so blond they disappeared unless he frowned. He was frowning now. “You didn’t say not ever.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“I guess we should leave it at that.”

“Right.” She waited until he was in the kitchen, behind her back, on the way out.

“Thanks for the backup, though.”

The kitchen door shut. She heard the garage door rattling closed a few seconds later. And then nothing.

She supposed he’d hitch to where he was going, or catch a bus, or call a snitch.

She didn’t worry about it. She worried about getting herself and the house right for Mariah’s return in the morning. And getting herself into work looking unhurt and unfrazzled. She’d need a giant bottle of Tylenol for that, and a really good acting job.

And then she needed to think about Max Kinsella’s house. A shiver snaked down her spine. She’d been there, in that legendary hideout. With someone who apparently disliked him even more than she did. She wouldn’t have slashed all that expensive clothing.

Who would? And if he was being stalked, even after he’d pulled a disappearing act, could it be the same person who was stalking her?

Or was it all a Kinsella sleight-of-hand act to erase her suspicions and put her out of commission and off his case? He was capable of attacking himself to put her off the trail.

Molina put her hand to her head. Her forehead was feverish and damp. Even MIA, Max Kinsella was the biggest headache in her migraine-ridden life lately.

What more could go wrong?

Chapter 47

Mop-up Operation

Were there still milkmen, we would have arrived with them at the humble, or at least low profile, abode formerly known as Mr. Max’s.

As I predicted (call me Mr. Karma!), we hopped a lift in a newspaper delivery van. The night was still dark, but to our feline eyes a faint glow of dawn was creeping over the edge of the world.

I must say having another pair of eyes and feet on the job so Midnight Inc. Investigations can cover two fronts is pretty handy. Uh, pretty mitty.

Miss Midnight Louise leads me around to the back, where the evening’s earlier cat-and-mouse game has resulted in, according to her, multiple home invasion, confrontation, and escape events.

I am beginning to think that Miss Midnight Louise gets all the down-and-dirty action while I dither among the much more civilized Red Hat set.

I recall my Miss Temple remarking in the past that it would take a tank to break into Mr. Max’s house. These super-heavy safeguards seem to be mostly disabled, maybe because the original furnishings had beat a retreat and then been installed again.

Obviously, my Miss Temple was meant to think Mr. Max was long gone. This raises my hopes that the newspaper article was a rush to judgment and that he is not really dead. Or maybe the returned furniture was meant to make someone else think that he was not dead, when he really is.

My Miss Temple’s visit was predictable, but the subsequent visits of various dark-clothed intruders was not. I would love to know who they all were and why they were here.

Despite all the nighttime action, the house smells deserted when the chit and I eel through the broken screen on the outer back door and the slightly ajar solid wood door itself. The inside is dim, but I can scent my Miss Temple’s previous trails through here, and so I tell Louise.

“You are no bloodhound,” she scoffs.

“Nevertheless, I have cohabited with Miss Temple for more than a year now. I know the scent of everything from her hair preparations to her foot powder.”

“Well, I may not know those trivial scents, but I can tell you one thing. There is a trail of fairly fresh blood in the hall and in the adjacent room.”

Blood! I trot along and do indeed find a dried trail in those places. Unfortunately, unlike the ignoble canine, I cannot recognize people by their blood trails. Besides, I would need blood samples to compare this trail with and I am not up to scratching random Las Vegas citizens in search of a similar taste. Yes, different people’s blood tastes different to my tongue. I do not know if all of my kind are similarly sensitive, but it works for me. In fact, if I do encounter someone who strikes me as a suspectfor these breakins, I might just give them a full-frontal, full-shiv whack to check it out.

“You are sure that my Miss Temple was not among the cat burglars?” I ask Louise.

“I do not think so, but I cannot be certain. You know how hard our signature color is to differentiate from the darkness? The other two I saw were large and likely male, like Mr. Mate

“You are not suggesting–?”

“Of course not. I only meant that neither larger figure was as tall as Mr. Max. So we cannot console ourselves that he was sneaking back into his own house. The first one turned tail and ran when the other two came, but those two arrived separately. One of the second two was hurt, and the third escorted that one out. I heard voices then. One was female, the other male

“Maybe these are former associates of Mr. Max. The movers’ ninja costumes you mentioned sound like something from a magic stage show. It is not easy to come up with so many so-called cat suits in a short timer

“They did move as if choreographed,” Louise concedes. “I can see that Mr. Max’s associates would wish to remove his belongings after his demise, but why would they replace them?”

“Demise!” I huff. “That remains to be seen or, rather, the remains remain to be seen, and no one has, have they?” Miss Louise blinks old-gold confusion at my rather convoluted phrasing. “The answer to your question is clear. The house was changed like a stage set for Miss Temple and Miss Temple only, to convince her that seeking Mr. Max here was hopeless. Why would that be necessary unless he was not dead?”

“I do not know. You have pulled a big disappearing act in your life, Pops, on my mama and all us kits. You just wandered off, never to return. You did not need to stage anything.”

“Now, Louise, do not be bitter. We guys all wandered off in those days.”

“Apparently you still are doing so.”

I ignore her, always a good policy, and slip through the empty rooms again. My sniffer is not at the level of a professional like Nose E., the Maltese drug-and bomb-sniffing dog. But I have something better than a canine sniffer. I have experience.

Hence it is that I discover the really shocking piece of physical evidence on the premises.

“Louise! Take a look at this. It is right up our alley.”

She hisses a little, but soon pads into the hall to pause in the doorway of the room I occupy.

“What is it? A garbage can?”

“It is something certainly ready for a garbage can. Get over here and look for yourself.”

She does, her eyes not as adjusted as mine to the light level, and peers through the open closet door.

“It looks like a fine nest for a nap. Count on you to lie down on the job.”

“Look again. Go on, run your shivs through it.”

She ventures into the closet, acting like she thinks I might slam the door shut on her any minute. If my moseying down the road after a short round of hanky-panky with her mother has made her the eternally suspicious little dame that she is, then maybe I have something to answer for, after all.

Her mitts are testing the dark stuff on the floor, then moving it around and sniffing the pieces, her tail slashing back and forth hard enough to swipe the whiskers off my kisser.

I step back. “Well?”

“These are remnants of wool. Wool is subject to the attacks of moths, but these garments have been destroyed by slashes. Maybe Lucky and Kahlua, the Cloaked Conjuror’s black panthers, came by for an exercise bout. The Fontana brothers wear the finest lightweight wool from Italy, so I ought to know. These are from a black sheep, though, whereas they wear only white sheep wool.”

“Black sheep wool. A signature of Mr. Max. The person you saw helped out of here last night was not the only victim of knife work.”

“A human was sharpening his claws on Mr. Max’s clothes?”

“Or hers. Maybe the same person who engineered his fatal fall came here later to gloat.”

“Great. And we have no idea who all these people coming and going here were and where they are now!”

“But we know enough to keep an eye peeled for them infuture. You had better stay here on watch outside. I need to get back to the Crystal Phoenix until that crime scene is resolved.”

“And what will I do for breakfast?”

“I’ll, ah, see what I can pick up in the neighborhood.”

With that I dash away like the busy CEO I am. I sure hope the refuse collectors have not hit the trash cans around here yet.

Chapter 48

Knife Act

“Lieutenant?”

Molina looked up from her desk, trying to keep her face smooth and untroubled. The knife wound felt like a pack of gerbils were gnawing at her side, trying to exit her chest cavity.

“Yeah, Morrie?”

It would have to be Alch, whom she not only owed common courtesy, but who had a way of seeing beneath surfaces.

“It’s not looking good for Mrs. Lark over at the Phoenix. I don’t think she did it, but the local media is all over this Red Hat event and the department is looking bad for not making an arrest.”

“We can’t just arrest the most likely suspect. We have to make it”—the word really stuck in her craw right now—“stick.”

“You’re right. I’m right. I’ll try to hold back Su and the entire West Coast media.”

“The media you can handle. Su, I don’t know.”

“You okay?”

“Why not?”

“Look a little gray around the gills.”

“Mariah. Out all night.”

“No!” Alch, the single father of an only adult daughter, had watched Mariah growing into her teen years with delight and an empathetic pinch of despair.

“A parentally approved sleepover, Morrie. All girls. Only who knows what those girls will get up to today?”

He chuckled. “So you didn’t sleep a wink during Daughter Darling’s sleepover.”

“Not a wink,” she answered with absolute conviction.

“That’s me all over again. Say listen, I’m gonna come down hard on that big convention scene and come up with some other suspects, so help me, Sleeping Beauty.”

“Thanks, Morrie.” Her voice had faded at the end there.

He raised an eyebrow. They didn’t call her the Iron Maiden of the LVMPD for nothing. Her voice never faded.

“Kids,” he said. “You kill ‘em with kindness and they kill you with worry.”

She didn’t try to answer this time, just nodded briskly. That was the Molina they all knew and tolerated while leaving her personal life alone.

She breathed a big sigh of relief when Morrie left … and nearly shrieked at the pulsing, splitting feeling all along her side. Knife wounds hurt like hell until they fought off the infection and started closing. She’d have to move like a real iron maiden around here until the stitches took hold.

The phone rang.

“Yes,” she barked. The pain helped her stay in character better than anything.

It was the desk sergeant. A tipster named Hyde was asking for her, and her alone.

“Freak or geek?” she asked.

“Looks like a fairly solid cit.”

“Send him up.”

Molina wanted to sigh, but she swallowed the gesture. Anything from coughing to hiccuping would be agonizing for a few days, maybe a couple weeks. So much for Dirty Larry’s bedroom fantasies.

Minutes later a shadow loomed in the half-open maple-blond door to her narrow office.

Dark.

And then in walked Rafi Nadir. Just the last person in the whole wide world she’d want to see on her office threshold right now.

“Impersonating a snitch?” she asked. “You used to impersonate an officer.”

They were fighting words, and they shot out of her current pain and wariness, and from some old unhealed wounds as well.

She pulled her forces together: observation, and that old police authoritative attitude that controlled anyone who might resist or bribe or cry wolf at the drop of a shield.

Despite her own problems, she saw that Rafi had a new resoluteness. That’s what had conned the desk sergeant. How? Maybe the black denim jacket paired with black denim jeans and a burgundy T-shirt that read SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. He was thinner, harder, more pulled together. Maybe even confident. For a so-called police confidant. Confidential snitch.

Every muscle in her body tightened at her own assessment. Danger, Wilhelmina Robinson! Rafi was looking in control while she was running on anemia, adrenaline, and nerves.

“Can I sit?” he asked.

“May.”

“Can. I speak real life, not off some blackboard. You always wanted me to pass as something you weren’t.”

She shrugged. Ouch!

“I know why you look like you swallowed a peach pit,” he said, sitting before her desk. “Why?”

“You know why I’m here, admit it, Carmen.”

She had no idea. Her side and head ached abominably andDirty Larry was enough encroaching male to deal with in one week.

“Why?” she asked.

His face puckered in disbelief, maybe disgust. “The kid, of course. Like you didn’t expect this. I can count, Carmen. I know when you left L.A. I know how old the kid is.”

“I didn’t leave L.A. I left you. And she isn’t ‘the kid.’ “

“No. She’s my kid too.”

Odd, how a chair she’d sat in for years could just melt and vanish. How the distance between her desk and the door could suddenly telescope in and out, as if she were being jerked forward and backward in time like a yo-yo.

How her fingers could curl into the papers on her desk and still not find anything solid to dig into.

How her side felt the swift, long score of a sharp knife blade, and also pulled at stitches like a seam splitting, morphing into a splitting headache. A head wound.

“That came after,” she heard her voice say from a long distance away.

“Naw. I don’t think so. I can see myself in her.”

“No.”

“My eyes.”

“No. My mother’s eyes.”

“You got your father’s eyes. Anglo. Northern European blue. Why shouldn’t Mariah have gotten my eyes, Middle Eastern brown? Don’t that fact make your blue eyes bluer?” he paraphrased the old hit song. Bitterly.

“You didn’t want her, Rafi. A daughter. You wanted me tied to her, tied down, off the force.”

“Wait. We talking L.A. here? I didn’t even know you were pregnant. And I didn’t want her?”

“You made sure I was pregnant. Daughters aren’t valued in Muslim society. Remember that suicide? The Anglo girl who got involved with an Arab foreign student and jumped off a bridge because her baby was a girl, and he completely rejected it, and her?”

Rafi was leaning nearer, his almost-black eyes intent, shocked.

“That was a shitty case, but I’m not that foreign student. You wouldn’t even have known what gender the baby was in those days, so can that excuse. I’m a half-breed, sure. Like you. Did I resent it, being Arab-American? Yeah. Every day. It wasn’t a fashionable mix, nobody was fighting to get my kind represented on the force, not like Latinas and black chicks, and that was years before 9/11. Then it really got fun. The looks. The stops. I used to stop people when I was a cop. Now I’m a stopee.”

Molina started to put a hand to her forehead, to block the overhead fluorescent glare that felt like the lights of a third-degree interrogation room in the bad old days, but the hand started up, then stopped. A weak, hesitant gesture. Not a good message in a situation like this.

“I won’t discuss this on the job,” she managed through the throbbing in her head and side.

“Then where? And when?”

“I … don’t know. This is not a good time.”

“It wasn’t a good time fourteen years ago when you walked out on me without a trace. Without a reason.”

“You were a bastard!” Was it her shouting? “That’s all the reason I needed.” Was that her lurching over the desktop and collapsing?

Even Rafi Nadir looked shocked. Concerned. Right.

“Hey.” Morrie Alch was in the doorway. “You’re outta here, fellah.”

Nadir rose, spinning, ready to fight.

“I can call for reinforcements,” Alch said, standing his ground, “but I’d rather beat the crap out of you myself.”

Nadir was ten years younger and a lot taller, but Alch was all infuriated street cop at the moment. Both Nadir and Molina knew better than to tangle with him just then.

“I’m gone,” Rafi said, spreading his empty hands. “Just like she was all those years ago.”

Alch shut the door behind Nadir and came to the desk. “Carmen? What the hell’s wrong? Oh, Jesus.”

She looked down at her desk, where he was staring. Her side was bleeding all over the crumpled paperwork.

Chapter 49

Getaway

Molina was under the glaring fluorescent lights again, feeling a lot weaker and with a lot fewer places to hide this time. This time she sat on a bathroom toilet.

And yet another man was trying to get into her clothes. Dirty Larry, the Dirty Doctor, now Morrie Alch of all people. At least it wasn’t Rafi Nadir.

“Stop fighting me, Carmen:’ he said firmly. “I’ve done more scraped knees than are on an octopus. Jeez, who sewed this up, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, Igor?”

“Barrio doc. Dirty Larry was”—she didn’t want to say “with me,” because it wasn’t precisely accurate and she didn’t want Morrie ragging on her like an overprotective dad about hanging out with a narc. They were known to be wild cards.

“Dirty Larry came along afterward. He realized I couldn’t go to a regular facility without answering questions neither of us wanted to answer.”

“Where’d he take you from?”

Actually, Alch had looked more like the trustworthy family doctor than a cop as he’d gingerly pulled the blood-sopped bandage off the wound. She hoped he’d follow through on that impression.

“From the scene of a B and E.”

“You the breaker and enterer?”

“Yeah. Ouch! You don’t have to pour half a bottle of rubbing alcohol on it.” She hissed in pain again.

“Yeah, I do. Those stitches aren’t pretty. You’re gonna have a really ragged scar, Carmen.”

“Like I care?”

“Wouldn’t want my daughter treated like that. Do a doting father a favor. Before you return from your flu absence, see a plastic surgeon. They don’t have to report anything to the police, and in your case, they’ll just think you got this in the line of duty. Looks like bad ER work.”

“What flu? I’ve never missed work for a cold or flu.”

“Flamingo flu! Bird flu. You know how to pull a con. You’re gonna need at least three days off.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

She glared at him as the alcohol sting ebbed.

“Easy.” Alch was looking as hard as Clint Eastwood in a Dirty Harry movie. Also like the Man Who Knew Too Much. “Yes, Daddy,” she conceded unhappily.

He resumed cutting lengths of white adhesive tape and attaching them to the edge of the bathroom sink.

“You need to be taped all around for a long knife wound like that. That doc was a total quack. Is Mariah able to take care of you if you’re in bed for a couple of days?”

“Don’t know. She’s not exactly at the ‘taking care of stage.”

“I’ll stop in when I can. Change your dressings. You order in. Watch TV. Keep down and as still as you can.”

“I’ll die of boredom.“Morrie pulled a huge roll of gauze out of the medicine cabinet. “You’ll kill your career if you don’t lay low for a while.”

“Oh … shoot.”

“Believe it or not, that would have been worse.”

“You don’t know what, why—”

He gave her a grave smile. “You’ll tell me, though. Eventually.”

“Aiii! ” The gauze was hitting the raw wound.

“Maybe now, huh?” he asked.

Morrie knelt to roll the gauze around and around her bared midriff. She wanted to sigh and protest. But any movement was like red hot lava rolling over her bare skin.

Morrie was, damn him, right. She needed to stay away from work and heal enough to function. She needed help. Someone between Mariah and her and Rafi Nadir. And maybe between her and Dirty Larry. Someone she could trust. Utterly.

“Stay there,” he said when her middle was wrapped like a mummy and starting to feel supported and better.

She buttoned her blouse when he left, feeling unexposed despite everything. The single father of a teenage daughter knew where not to look. She smiled. Morrie was a true sweetie of a guy. Wait! She must be sick. She didn’t think of any men that way.

He returned, bearing gifts. Two lowball glasses, a little smudgy, and a nice tall bottle of Johnnie Walker black.

“Now we use the good alcohol,” he said, sitting on the tub edge and pouring.

“Don’t make me laugh, Morrie. Don’t even make me chuckle. Please.”

“You got it.” He handed her the glass.

“I need to call in.”

“Nope. I called in on the way over here and said you had a real bad case of flu and I was taking you to the doctor.”

“You did! I didn’t hear—”

“You were way out of it, Carmen.”

“Oh. My papers—”

“I stashed ‘em in your desk drawer. I’ll get new forms and refill them out on your computer when I get back.”

She sipped a mouthwash-large bolt of scotch. Ran it over her teeth and gums, then swallowed that bracing fire.

“So.” Morrie sighed and relaxed for her. “Where, when, and why?”

“You don’t often have a chance to get your collars drunk before you interrogate them.”

“Nope.”

“This really isn’t fair, Morrie.”

“Nope.”

“I’m your superior officer.”

“Yup. But us privates sometimes have to look out for the looies for their own good.”

“We’re not in the army, Morrie. Just law enforcement.”

“It’s a war anyway.” He clicked glasses with her. “To iron maidens and good sense.”

“If I’d had good sense I wouldn’t be in this condition.”

“So tell me about it.”

She sipped the drink again, feeling the fire of the wound retreating before the inner fire of the straight scotch. That’s the way the firemen did it: set a fire to stop a fire.

“First, I have to say you have a really cute bathroom, Morrie. I never dreamed.”

He looked around at the seashell-patterned wallpaper, the sage-green and pink guest towels. “My daughter redid it when she was in college. Domestic phase. Then she went and got married and left me with this sea foam dream.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Morrie.”

“Tell me about it, and you won’t laugh.”

“No. I won’t laugh.”

So she told him about her stalker, which made him angry. He’d had a daughter to look after too. She told him about her suspicions about Max Kinsella being her nemesis. And he looked skeptical, as Matt did. Damn! That magician conned everyone around him, even grown men who should know better. Even when it looked like for all intents and purposes that he was dead and gone.

She described the last home invasion the stalker engineered, the trail of rose petals to Mariah’s bedroom, then hers.

Morrie stood up, tried to pace in the tidy little bathroom. “That should have been reported. You can’t do this all on your own.”

“I had no proof … until I got a print from Temple Barr’s place that matched the one print left on all that sick stuff the stalker planted at my place.”

“A print. Just one?”

“One is enough?”

“So Temple Barr’s your stalker?”

“Don’t. Make Me. Laugh.” Confession and scotch were making her edgy, confrontational.

“It wasn’t her fingerprint,” she admitted, “but you know whose prints would be all over her place, especially on those theatrical, egocentric Vangelis CDs in the bedroom.”

“Vangelis, huh?” Morrie chuckled. Was it admiringly? “Guy must have had some stamina.”

Molina felt her face burning almost as much as her side at the implication.

“So,” he said, “you have a set to match your one print with?”

“No. But when I catch him—”

The threat rang hollow even in her own ears. That house had been abandoned, ownerless. Certainly it had held only a shadow of the dark charisma of its likely resident. It was a ruin the snakes had come to take possession of. One particular resident snake with a fang that was eleven inches long.

So she told Morrie of her unauthorized entry. The invader she’d accidentally interrupted. Larry showing up. That part was touchy.

“What was Larry doing there?”

“He was following me.”

“Your stalker, maybe?”

“He’s one of us.”

“No, he’s not. He’s an undercover guy. They’re loners. They get freaky. Sometimes they turn.”

“I’m sure that wasn’t it.”

She eyed Alch. He was looking kinda blurry now, through a glass, smearily. She wasn’t used to anything stronger than a beer and an occasional social cocktail. She wasn’t used to a secret, pulsing pain that never backed off. Never had been plagued with menstrual cramps. Always had been strong. Hardy.

She wasn’t used to a fatherly gaze. Her real father had vanished before she could remember him, a piece of history that labeled her mother’s shame. Pregnant by a blue-eyed Anglo. So she made up for it by marrying José Quintera and bore him seven black-olive-eyed ninos and ninas . Carmen babysat her stepbrothers and sisters all through her school years, and then she shocked everyone by getting a junior college law enforcement degree and turning cop.

And by keeping her mother’s surname. After all that kid sitting, she never intended to have any of her own, church ban on birth control or not. Then Rafi Nadir had pierced that life plan • with a pin though her diaphragm. Or not. Maybe he wasn’t lying. Either way: exit Carmen and, later, enter Mariah. Even her family didn’t know about Mariah. She’d thought it was safer that way. Had she been fleeing a ghost, in L.A., and chasing a ghost here in Vegas?

Her mother had never talked to her about her father. A shame and failure better forgotten. Like Rafi Nadir. Like mother, like daughter.

She’d made sure to spare Mariah the humiliation of a wayward father, or an indifferent stepfather. Matt had suffered from one of those stepfathers, unfortunately not indifferent, just mean and violent.

Molina shuddered and took another slug of scotch. She may have been wrong about Rafi’s motives, but he still wasn’t a candidate for Father of the Year.

The pain inside was getting more insistent than the pain outside.

Morrie put a hand on her shoulder.

“You just rest, kid.” He was only ten or eleven years older than she was. How’d she end up outranking him? He was a good cop, a better detective, and a great human being. Burned past him with ambition, that was how. Had a reverse edge, like Rafi claimed. Women barred for so many years, then suddenly becoming a politically correct carnation in the PD’s buttonhole.

Pain and—Dios!—helplessness made you think and rethink things. People. Events. Your life.

“I’ll handle the Crystal Phoenix case,” Morrie was saying. “I think we’ve got a couple leads to look at if Su doesn’t get too eager and tip our hand.”

Molina nodded.

“I’ll take you home now and get you settled. I’ll be looking in on you, so lay off those unauthorized B and Es and keep Dirty Larry out of your laundry for a while.”

She was nodding, agreeing, nodding off.

Morrie took the glass from her hand because it was weighing her arm down to the floor and dribbling yellow liquid like a two-year-old on the clean white tile bathroom floor. At least she wasn’t dribbling blood anymore.

And thank God Mariah was on a three-day school trip to the Grand Canyon. There was a Grand Canyon in her gut. She’d lied to Morrie. Shouldn’t have. Lying got to be a habit.

And the next thing she knew, she was staring at her bedroom ceiling, gently lit by the time from the bedside clock floating in red numbers on the ceiling.

Twelve-oh-one.

Thing was, was it twelve o’clock high, or twelve o’clock low?

Chapter 50

A Paler Shade of Pink

Temple had decided it was time to take the pink satin gloves off.

First, she’d been diverted in the store area from looking for Oleta’s booth by recovered memories of the whole ShangriLa/Kathleen O’Connor tangle.

She’d come to terms with those speculations. They had nothing to do with this place, this time, and this crime. She could fret over them later when she and Matt could talk long and privately again.

Now, she had to get Electra off the police list of suspects. This convention would be winding down shortly. Everybody would be scattering to the far four corners of the country. It’dbe all too easy for the police, even earnest Detective Alch, to stick the at-hand local with the whole rap.

This time Temple refused to let anything purple or red distract her on the way to Oleta’s booth. She stopped only to ask directions.

“Oh, yes, that poor woman!” said one purveyor at the RedHat-to-Toe booth.

This specialized in head and footwear, including rhinestone-studded reading glasses and red-and-purple anklets and sneakers, not to mention the ankle bracelets and huge hats.

The stork-tall seller herself was festooned in as many of her wares as possible, which made her resemble an overdressed emu, like songstress/clown Candy Crenshaw.

“Poor Oleta’s chapter decided to sell whatever many of her wares they could, and take the rest back to Reno to benefit the chapter.”

“They’re selling her items?”

Temple felt a sudden panic. Something key could have been among that merchandise, maybe hidden among that merchandise. Like Oleta’s tell-all book manuscript. Temple just knew that while Oleta might have spilled some of the juicy beans about her love life on the Internet she would have saved the best for the actual publication of her tell-all.

“Oh, don’t worry, dear,” said Madam Big Bird, “I’m sure it’s not all gone. You can still buy a memento.”

Eek! The stuff was probably selling like red, white, and purple hotcakes because people always like souvenirs from a murder.

It still made Temple shudder that 0. J. Simpson’s two kids by Nicole Brown had opened a lemonade stand to serve the media and crowds besieging the 0. J. estate after their mother’s brutal death. Maybe they were too young to realize that cashing in on their mother’s murder was awful. Or maybe they were just too much 0. J.‘s and not enough Nicole’s children. When a wife is abused in a household, the children can choose the abuser’s side to protect themselves.

So Temple really hated to join the three-deep crowd around the booth clawing for goods. She had to stretch, even on her three-inch pink patent J. Renee heels, to see what everybody was competing for.

Apparently Oleta was serious about being a writer. Her booth was piled with commercial diaries and notepads and stationery slathered with red and purple hats, heels, feathers, and cats dressed in all of the above.

The usual feather boas hung from corner racks, as did red hats by the brimful. No pink and lavender items that would attract Red Hat ladies-in-waiting decorated the booth.

Temple suspected that Oleta Lark, having displaced at least one older woman, didn’t like to cater to the younger women coming up behind her now that she was “an older woman,” and almost a Red Hatter.

Temple, with the tenacity of an entire life spent being too short to see anything, edged around the crowd to the side of the table and then peeked under the floor-length tablecloth. This was where extra items were always stacked.

She dearly wished she’d known enough at the Women’s Exposition to peer under the table skirt of the woman who had possessed among her stockin-trade rings related to the two men most dear to Temple.

Temple felt another chill. She’d spotted something big and bulky under the table. Not a body this time, thank God! Yet it was an item peculiarly appropriate to the convention, and apparently unique at the booth.

Temple wasn’t proud. She got down on her knees and dove for the prize, pulling it toward herself with much effort over a tidal wave of empty boxes.

When she wrestled the huge round hatbox close enough, she lifted it. Cardboard. She shook it. Nothing shifted or rattled. Empty. Drat it!

“Say! What’re you doing down there! Get up this minute.” Temple crawled back out from under the purple table skirt, dragging her prize with her.

“I just saw something perfect for my new pink hat,” she wailed in a Mariah-like tone of aggrieved excuse.

She’d also just patted down the suspect hatbox in secret andnow was mighty interested in conducting a private interrogation off the premises.

Temple rose from the floor, clutching an item that she knew would be the envy of all eyes: a crimson hatbox as big around as the bottom layer of a wedding cake, topped with a high mound of purple net flowers, and circled by a purple silk scarf with a design of red flowers. The exact same scarf design as the one that had wrung Oleta Lark’s neck.

“That’s the scarf!” a nearby woman shrieked. “You said you were all out,” she shrilled at the saleswoman.

That lady glanced from the screamer’s scowling face to Temple’s expression of innocently sincere greed.

“We were out. This young lady has found one we didn’t know about.”

“I’ll pay you fifty bucks for it,” Screaming Woman told Temple.

“I can’t sell it. I don’t own it yet, but I want to. This is for my very first pink hat.” Temple let her voice and chin tremble a little, like a scared Chihuahua’s.

“Shame on you:’ the saleslady told the gathered shoppers. “You’re all a bunch of turkey-necked vultures gobbling up poor dead Oleta’s stock only because she is dead. This young lady is new to our organization and simply needs a hat box.

“That will be twenty-seven-fifty, miss.”

“Oh. Gosh. Thanks. This will look so great in my bedroom. It’s all pink with red and purple accents.”

“Cash. Thanks.”

The member of Oleta’s group leaned near as she handed over the change. “Love your hat.”

“Thank you!”

Temple escaped in girlish triumph, aware that the brouhaha had caught the attention of everyone in the room.

She hurried through the lobby toward the conference room that Nicky and Van had declared hers, shut the double doors, untied the scarf with the dignity the facsimile of a murder weapon deserved, then tore the lavender net roses off the hatbox’s mounded top.

Broken basted-on lavender threads sprouted like blades of grass from Oz on the red velvet top. Temple ripped off the glued-on purple braid around the lid, and lifted the red velvet. Beneath lay a snowy mound of printed paper.

Oleta’s manuscript.

She’d brought a copy with her. To show it, sell it, or use it for blackmail?

Didn’t matter. Temple had the whole story in her hands now and an all-night reading assignment that even Matt couldn’t interrupt.

But that was later. This was now, and she still had a lot of tasks on her to-do list.

Chapter 51

The Flirting Fontanas

“You see the woman in the green shoes?” Temple asked. “Yes,” Emilio said. “She Irish?”

“I rather doubt it,” Temple said. “Those are six-inch platforms and she always wears them.”

He stared. “Isn’t that excessive?”

“Darn right. Especially for covering a convention on these hard floors all day.”

“Agreed. I don’t wear high heels and my feet are killing me from this guard duty. So why would she do that?”

“I thought all Fontana brothers knew all women inside out.” Emilio’s dark eyes grew wary. He knew women well enough to realize that Temple was angling for something. This innocent game of Twenty Fashion Questions was the lead-up to the jaws of the trap crashing shut. On his fine silk-clad Italian calf.

“Like you, Miss Temple, she wishes to be taller and show off her ankles, which are not as world class as yours.”

“Nicely put. What is it with men and ankles anyway? Surely they’re one of the most awkward parts of the human anatomy, along with elbows.”

“It’s always a matter of what you do with them.” His eyes narrowed at Natalie Newman’s high-rise footwear. “Those are much too high for anything other than Milano runways or entering and exiting limousines.”

“I know that six-inch heels are the coming thing in In Style. That’s not real life, though, and Miss Newman is a working journalist and filmmaker, doomed to be on her feet all day. Do you think Michael Moore would wear shoes like that to out a politician?”

Emilio choked discreetly at the idea of Michael Moore’s three hundred pounds on Natalie’s high platform shoes.

“You are leading, Miss Temple, but I’m not following, although this is a most enjoyable ride.”

“That woman is wearing those ridiculous stilts for the same reason that I like my three-inchers. She needs to be taller to see.”

“But she’s already tall for a woman.”

“Exactly. She doesn’t need her eyes to see, but something else.”

Emilio digested that one. “She does lift that handheld camcorder over the crowd frequently. It’s clever, actually, to make herself into a giraffe the better to film the convention.”

“What about the tote bag?”

“Not even a Gucci knockoff,” Emilio noted with a slight sneer. “Otherwise not much different from your ever-present bag of the same sort, sensibly purchased at T. J. Maxx.”

“You do know women inside out,” Temple marveled at his accurate call.

He looked down at her through sexy, half-closed eyes. “I can get you a great deal on the real Gucci if you yearn to go upscale.”

“Sony, Emilio, shoes are my thing, not bags. I’m happy with Target or Steinmart in that regard.”

Emilio winced to hear such anti-Italian talk.

“No,” Temple went on, craning her neck at the Newman woman as she moved through the crowd, “it’s what is in that bag that I want a good look at. That I want copied without her knowing it. Of course not even the fantastic flying Fontana brothers could manage that.”

“Such a thing is impossible. When do you want it?”

“It would have to be done without alerting her, and it would require special equipment.”

“All of us Fontanas have special equipment,” she was told fiercely. “And we all can move like leopards if necessary.”

“I’m happy to hear it for my aunt Kit’s sake:’ Temple continued, unflustered. “Because I know in my bones that there’s a second camcorder in that tote bag and I want the video in it copied and returned to the camera with Natalie Newman completely unaware of that.”

“Hmmm. I’ll have to consult the family. A simple seduction might be the easiest way”—he glanced at Natalie’s severe features—“but, despite the sexy shoes, her ankles predict that she’s a plate of cold spaghetti sans sauce in bed and even Fontana brothers can’t sacrifice themselves to a pleasureless charade. I’m afraid we can’t rely on charm in this instance. Let me get back to you on this.”

“Of course:’ Temple said. “But make it snappy.”

Temple returned to the Crystal Phoenix the next morning to find Red Hat ladies eagerly lining up to the right of the lobby.

She was about to walk around the impediment when a Fontana brother appeared with the smile of the maitre d’ at the Bellagio’s Le Cirque restaurant on his handsome face.

“ ‘Scuse, miss. Hotel security. Due to recent unfortunate events that are the talk of the convention and the town, we are conducting a spot check on items being brought into the hotel. Your most attractive tote bag has been selected for further looking into:’ he murmured in a way that would lead one to offer tote bag, body, and soul to the inspector if she was not careful. “Please join the other ladies awaiting inspection. We promise to be thorough, but, alas, quick.”

“Just like a man,” the Red Hat lady who was last in line chuckled as Temple fell into place, mad with curiosity.

She spotted Natalie Newman’s hatless dark hair eight places ahead and realized the genius of the plan. Another Fontana brother was looming over the reporter despite her extra-high heels and slathering on Fontana brother charm an inch (of Alfredo sauce) thick as he slipped the precious bag from her custody.

“There’s camera equipment in there,” she protested, quite rightly.

“Exactly why my brothers in hotel security will hand-check your bag. We will handle everything with the most delicate of touches, and return it to you in perfect working order.”

An 000h from the entire line of women within earshot made Natalie look like a cur—or worse, a frigid fool—for objecting to anything a Fontana brother might wish to do with her bag.

“Do you think they do pat downs?” the woman in front of Temple giggled.

“Only of bags,” she replied, “and of course you don’t want to be taken for a ‘bag.’ “

Natalie had been plucked from the line to be queried on the exact nature of her job and her work here, as if that were a rare and special activity of tremendous interest to the interrogating Fontana brother.

Her sunken cheeks began to pinken at such intimate and solicitous attention. She didn’t even notice that the other women shuffled past, allowed to proceed far more quickly than she.

Temple was soon the only woman behind her. No others had been recruited after her.

Everything was very airport: the beige wall dividers. The sounds of a big machine churning out of view.

Natalie turned to watch Temple’s tote bag being whisked out of her custody with the same charming patter as her own had been.

“This is ridiculous,” Natalie whispered to her, suddenly a partner in being subjected to bureaucratic idiocy.

“It looks like they’re targeting oversize bags,” Temple whispered back.

“These other silly cows seem to actually like being examined by these greaser gangsters!”

“Well, they’re here to have fun and I suppose this adds a bit of drama.”

“These are the same silly, stupid women who watch soap operas and read romance novels. They’re making idiots of themselves and don’t even know it.”

“Isn’t it hard to record the convention when you despise the attendees?”

Natalie’s pale lips pursed. “I’m not a PR flack like you. I’m a journalist. I can … be objective about anything.”

“Except Purple Cows,” Temple said innocently.

Natalie’s unplucked brows clashed above her nose like broadswords.

“It’s fine for you girly little things to think you can slide through life on your looks without any moral or social conscience. Some of us aspire to more than easy money and the attentions of”—she glared at the Fontana brother handing her tote bag back with a small bow and a big smile—“gigolos!”

Temple and Armando watched her depart, driving those porn-film high soles into the marble floor like flatirons.

“It was a pleasure,” he mused, “to pick the pocketbook of such an unpleasant female undetected. We will have video in fifteen minutes in your conference room. Julio will fetch a chilled bottle of Asti Spumanti for your viewing pleasure.”

“It’s only 10:00 A.M. I don’t need wine.”

“But we do. It really is necessary to rinse the taste of that unhappy woman out of our mouths.”

In the conference room, Temple’s tote bag awaited her atop the long conference table opposite the dead-body-long television that had descended from the ceiling.

A DVD player sat like a centerpiece at the exact middle of the long table. Temple wasn’t even going to ask what it had taken to extract and copy the media in Natalie’s hidden camera, and then replace it as if nothing had transpired, but technical boxes of unknown abilities crouched along the sideboard.

The four Fontanas active in the operation took seats along either side of the conference table, one using a remote to darken the lights and start the player.

Immediately the buzzing chaos of the convention-goers filled the room. Snatches of conversation. Laughter. The footage had a film verite feeling.

The screen was filled with deep purple. Then the camera’s eye zoomed out to reveal the very large purple butt of a woman bending over a wheeled canvas bag.

The camera roved at hip level, zooming in on swollen ankles in laced-edged red anklets, then swooping up to creased and folded middle-age faces wearing blobs of red and purple on lips and eyelids.

“You look darling!” a female voice caroled as the camera closed in on another, decidedly not-darling close-up of an unsuspecting woman.

“Jeesh,” a Fontana murmured, “this is character assassination.”

Temple nodded in the dark. “She’s using a fish-eye lens to distort their faces and bodies. Natalie’s pretty good at operating that tote-bag camera blind. She must have done a lot of this.”

“What’s the point?” Eduardo asked. “She’s getting paid to film the convention.”

“As I suspected, her real agenda is mocking it. Paid to undermine. Nice work if you can get it. I bet she’s done this before. Time to ask the Internet to cough up any references on her.”

“If she’s using her real name.”

Temple glanced at Eduardo. “She’s been a stringer for national news magazines, and I hear that’s her married name. And she doesn’t care how angry the Red Hat Sisterhood is, organizationally or individually, once she’s got what she wants in the can, or on the DVD, rather. Amazing how technology is outdating all our expressions.”

When the recording had run its course, Temple refused a glass of wine, but lifted her water glass in their honor. “To the Fontana brothers. Long may they wave.”

“Cin-cin,” said Armando, pronouncing the Italian toast “Chin-chin.”

“Salud,” said Eduardo in turn, using another romance language, Spanish.

“Prosit,” said Emilio, resorting to German.

“And Skoal,” finished Ralph, going Nordic.

“L’chayim,” Temple finished in Yiddish, saluting life with her water glass, hoping they’d recorded a clue to untimely death with this session.

Temple eyed her co-conspirators for one last toast in English. “To the Red Hat Sisterhood! Your inspection line not only may remove a murderer hiding in their midst, but it was a high point of the day for all the women I overheard raving about their time in the ‘Guy Line.’ “

“Those,” Eduardo said, obviously leaving Natalie Newman out, “were charming ladies. They have a zest for life that is quite Italian.”

“We will have the proper equipment delivered to your Circle Ritz domicile so that you can see both recordings completely.”

“Thanks, but I think I know what’s she up to now. About six-three with those shoes.”

“Those are knockoff Versace,” Eduardo sniffed, opening the double doors to release Temple back into the noisy flood of P and R adherents. “Just as she is a fake.”

Chapter 52

Ms. Apprehension

Temple returned to the lobby to be greeted by a shrill, Hitchcockian film scream. Before she could triangulate on the direction it came from, she saw the flock of Fontana brothers behind her racing past, cell phones glued to their ears.

She spun on a resale Jimmy Choo spike heel and trailed them through a crowd of excited, muttering women that gave way as the Fontanas charged past.

What the women muttered wasn’t encouraging.

“Another murder—!”

“Strangled.”

“Boa?”

“No, scarf.”

“Are those guys hot! D’you think they’re undercover cops?”

By then Temple was weaving in and out of the gathered conventioneers, trying desperately to catch up to the Fontanas.

The crowd around the entrance to the Hatorium Emporium was particularly thick. Temple found herself using elbows and heels to pick her way through, leaving a chorus of ows in her wake.

“It’s another Pink Hat,” someone cried.

Her own pink hat got several tugs.

“Don’t go in there!”

“It’s death to Pink Hatters.”

Someone swiped the hat off her head, but Temple snatched it back and carried it.

No way the police would be on-scene for this latest attack. She and the Fontana brothers were the first responders. Maybe they’d catch the perp.

Suddenly she’d caught up with them, but they were a ring holding everyone back.

“Ernesto!” she asked the first one whose attention she could snag. “What’s happened?”

Their expressions were as grim as death, their locked jaws and forbidding arms braced to hold back the mob.

Even her.

Especially her.

“You don’t wanta rush in,” Ernesto warned. “Aldo’s there.” Aldo? Well, of course, if they were all on red alert. He would be there. He was the eldest. He was .. .

Temple’s heart and jaw dropped in concert.

“A Pink Hatter?”

“She needs air,” Ernesto said gruffly as Temple strained to see past him.

She could hear sirens screaming down the hotel driveway again.

“K-Kit?”

“Coming out,” someone shouted with such authority that the babbling mob fell back.

Ernesto swept Temple out of the way, holding her close to some really great Italian tailoring covering a body of steel. Aldo raced past, carrying Kit swagged in his arms like a doll, her arms swinging with the motion, her soft strawberry-red hair bare.

“You won’t want to be a Pink Lady anymore,” Ernesto muttered.

“She’s—?”

“Alive, but someone sure tried to change that.”

Armando raced past, carrying a pink hat and purple scarf with red flowers on it.

“That scarf design sold out,” Temple told the Fontana brother who was providing her spine at the moment, choking on the words. “They were all gone. I got the last one. I’m storing it in the conference room.”

“We’ll see if you still have it there,” Ernesto suggested ominously. “But first, we’ve got a hospital run to make.”

Temple was swept out of there almost as limply as Kit, thrown into the front seat of a black Viper, just one in a train of the powerful sport cars.

With a roar like an Indy 500 race, a cortege of Vipers shot out from under the Crystal Phoenix porte cochere.

They caught up to the ambulance in no time, but Temple was too woozy and worried to notice how’d they’d managed to weave through the clogged Strip traffic at 4:00 P.M.

All she could think was Kit … Kit … Kit like a pulse pounding in her forehead, interrupted by a my fault … my fault … my fault. For who’d want to kill Kit? But killing a nosy ex-TV-reporter turned PR person was another matter.

The Fontana brother driving—Giuseppe, she thought—had her left hand in tight custody and was rotating the steering wheel one-handed. The brakes pushed them almost into the windshield when the car stopped under another, smaller, plainer porte cochere.

Ernesto opened the passenger door and pulled Temple out. With a conjoined roar, the black Vipers growled away to the parking lot.

Temple’s ankles were wobbling on her Choos, but Ernesto took her arm and rushed her inside. Aldo was slumped in one of the plastic shell waiting-room chairs.

Temple had never seen a Fontana brother slump before.

The pink hat was turning in his flaccid hands, around and around. Ernesto left her standing beside him and rushed to the desk.

“We have a relative here now, yes,” he was saying. “Niece.”

“Aldo,” Temple asked, gasped, “what happened?”

“They won’t let me see her. Not related.”

“What happened at the hotel?”

He still stared into the distance, turning the frivolous hat through his hands.

“I did CPR. Got her breathing again.”

“Again! Who—?”

“Disappeared into that mob. No one realized what had happened at first.” He pulled the scarf from his side coat pocket to show her a tight knot with a slashed end. “No one had a pocketknife to cut the garrote until I got there. I don’t know how long—”

“Oh, God. And that’s the scarf I got with Oleta’s hatbox. Someone snatched it to do this.” Temple wanted to sink down on the chair next to him, but she was afraid to bend her knees for fear she’d never stand up again.

A hand caught her elbow. “You can go in,” Ernesto said. “The doctor will see you.”

Aldo was still brooding over the murder weapon. The attempted murder weapon, God willing. He knew a nonrelative couldn’t see Kit.

Temple put a hand to her mouth to push back any emotions and let Ernesto lead her to a closed door, where a nurse on the other side said, “Come in, miss. It’s only a few steps.”

A few steps were about all she could manage. She was led through another door into an office, and given a clipboard of papers.

“How is she?”

“The doctor will tell you. First, you need to fill these out.”

Temple tried to focus on the questions, half of which she didn’t know answers to. Kit was her New York City aunt she’d only seen again in the last year. She didn’t know her exact street address, so she put in her own at the Circle Ritz. She didn’t know her health history or her doctor. Not even her age! Not exactly.

The nurse came to collect the sheet.

“I don’t know. So much. She’s visiting from out of town.” The nurse’s eyes flicked over all the empty lines. “Doctor will be right in.”

“Doctor” was never right in. It was always an eternity later. Temple jumped at the sound of passing footsteps in the hall, however muffled. Her door remained shut, until she wanted to leap up, open it, and gaze rudely up and down the hall. But her role was to wait until called upon.

And poor Aldo in the waiting room outside had no role at all.

Temple ran her fingers into her hair and let loose a mental scream. What would she tell her mother? What could she tell her mother? Kit was single and lived in the country’s biggest city. She must have dozens of New York friends, and no significant other there. No one but Aldo here, and he was a sudden fling. New, unexpected. Likely not permanent. Temple was the only permanent next of kin available.

The door cracked open so suddenly she twitched. Could a thirty-year-old have a heart attack?

The doctor was an Indian woman. A woman of Indian extraction. She wore glasses and a warm expression.

“This is your aunt?”

“Kit. Yes. Um, Ursula’s her formal first name. Carlson the surname. Kit’s the nickname. Kit Carlson.”

The woman in the white coat smiled and consulted the clipboard she carried.

“We are missing much data, but that is not critical. Nor is your aunt’s condition. She lost her consciousness, but it was restored in time. She will be weak. Her voice will be … rough. She may have forgotten the incident that led to this condition. But she will recover. Would you like to see her?”

“I would. God, yes, I would. And so would the man who gave her CPR.”

“A quick thinker. Certainly. Remember, she will not recall what you think that she should just yet. And I’ll keep her overnight here for observation. Merely a precaution.” Temple could hardly keep from jumping up and down.

“Yes. I understand. Can I get Aldo now?““Aldo?”

“Her … significant other.”

The doctor smiled. “A very good idea at such a time.” She turned to leave, then turned back. “This was an attack. The police have been notified. I don’t know if they will assign her a guard.”

“I can assign her a guard.”

“You?”

“Aldo. If you’ll permit him to stay overnight.”

“He is too involved, perhaps. And someone with law enforcement experience is needed.”

“He has that. He’s a member of the Fontana Family.”

The doctor’s eyebrows lofted high above her upper glasses rims. “Oh. I see. I suppose there is no choice in this matter, then?”

“He would be solo.”

“And you?”

“I’m going to go home and have a nervous breakdown.”

“Excellent idea.” The doctor smiled. “You and Mr. Fontana may join me in Miss Carlson’s room. If I decide your plan is suitable and will not interfere with operations, Mr. Fontana may occupy a chair outside her door for the night.”

Temple didn’t mention that her idea of a nervous breakdown was reviewing all footage taken by both of Natalie Newman’s cameras, then reading Oleta’s memoir and laying out every page of the Red Hat Sisterhood convention material.

Then she would grill her brain for anything she might have done that could have led a murderer to believe that she was almost ready to name a killer.

Chapter 53

Drop-Dead Red

Late that evening at the Circle Ritz, Temple determined to go back to the convention first thing tomorrow, Fontana brothers be darned!

She would, however, ditch wearing the pink hat on advice of counsel. She’d return in a hot red hat from her vintage collection even though that was “illegal.” At least it would help disguise her from the convention strangler. And she wouldn’t leave until she’d fingered a killer and an attempted killer.

In fact, she had a hat-brained plan to smoke out the killer, one that everyone she knew would object to on grounds of insanity, hers. So she wouldn’t tell anyone. Most of what she needed was locked up in the conference room, but it required a slight modification.

Working on a craft project is supposed to be relaxing. As Temple assembled her materials she hummed to herself. Nothing special, just an absorbed, happy sound.

The Fontana brothers’ playful toasts of yesterday echoed in her mind: salud, prosit, skoal. Those guys were true bon vivants, French for high-livers. What would that be in Italian? Toasting with a good drink was a universal trait from sunny Mediterranean climes to the frozen northlands. A Vôtre Sante, toasted the French. To your good health. Most countries’ toast word or phrase was used in other languages as commonly as Joyeux Noel or Feliz Navidad.

Wait! Alch had said Elmore Lark “wasn’t just toasting his health” on the panel when he fell ill. Was the detective implying a foreign substance, or that someone foreign was a suspect? Or was it the toast? What had the Fontana brothers fallen back on after using the Italian variation yesterday? Prosit. Salud. Skoal.

Common variations … “Eureka!” Temple said, nearly slicing off a chunk of her forefinger before she dropped the scissors.

Something small that would slip into a jeans pocket in a bottle or a … tin! Something easily doctored with poison. Something that other people knew about or saw Elmore using.

Temple abandoned her coffee table craft project to take her home office computer for a spin on the Internet. She couldn’t help wondering how Sherlock Holmes would have ever impressed anybody with his instant store of vast but specialized knowledge if he’d had to compete with Google.

She typed in the suspect word and came up with usual 3,869-plus sites.

The top entries were most enlightening.

Skoal, she read, was a leading manufacturer of chewing tobacco, along with Copenhagen, Red Seal, and Rooster. My, but the color red came up a lot, if you considered that roosters had that scarlet coxcomb.

She didn’t know any users, thank goodness, and understood women’s distaste for that male affection for the stuff known as “spit” tobacco, or “dip” (as in “dipwad”?), or “chew.”

That “pinch between your cheek and gum” she’d seen advertised now and again (and had ignored) offered a nicotine rush and a risk of mouth cancer to go with it.

Hmmm. Other effects were increased heart rate and blood pressure, not to mention decreased smell and taste, which would make a man a prime candidate for poisoning.

And the stuff came in “compact little tins.”

That Alch! Had he led her on, without ever lying!

Her eyes nearly popped out of her head when she read the next paragraph. Spit tobacco contained such lethal additives as arsenic, cadmium, DDT, formaldehyde, and hydrogen cyanide, the poison used in gas chambers.

Wasn’t that what Cold War spies had implanted in their teeth for instant suicide if caught? Cyanide capsules. A clever person with access to cyanide certainly could “roll” his or her own. Empty a harmless pill capsule, fill it with cyanide, and dump the poison in Elmore’s ever-present tin of chew.

Temple remembered him hawking into a handkerchief at the debate table. He probably used the tobacco in the john before and after appearing in public. Maybe that last chaw was already disagreeing with him. If enough cyanide to fill a tooth could be instantly fatal, so could a dose taken in a wad of tobacco.

She looked up “Skoal” as a toast, just for fun. It didn’t seem directly relevant, but the entry she found was certainly grisly.

It seemed that at the full moon, in early northern European caves, the priests of the Norse god Odin would toast him using the skull of a fallen foe as a sacrificial cup.

Well, wasn’t that special?

She quickly called Electra on her desk phone.

“I have two questions. Where were you at 2:20 P.M. yesterday?”

“Assisting in a perkshop demonstration of hair extensions. Is that important?”

“Important and good. That’s when Kit was mistaken for me and attacked.”

“I heard about that, also that she’s going to be all right. Such a shame. You had to ask me?”

“Yes. That puts the kibosh on the police’s suspicion of you.It doesn’t clear you of Oleta’s death, but it sure upsets the Railroad Electra trend.”

“I should hope so! Although I’d never want anyone to be hurt just so I was cleared.”

Temple decided to keep mum about her upcoming brilliant hokey plan.

“What was your second question?” Electra asked. “Did Elmore use chewing tobacco?”

“Not when I knew him, or I’d have never ‘married’ him. He always was a sports addict. Don’t a lot of athletes use chewing tobacco because it doesn’t affect their wind the way cigarettes do?”

“Skoal!” Temple crowed.

“Ah, have we got something to celebrate?”

“Yes, I know now what almost killed Elmore. It’s not `Skoal’ as in a toast, Electra. It’s a brand name! Elmore’s now hooked on chewing tobacco, and that’s where the poison was placed. Remember the cyanide capsules foreign agents had built into their teeth in all those old spy movies? This was to be a vintage death.”

“Whatever you say, dear. But I left Elmore before he had any such disgusting habit as chewing tobacco. I can put up with a lot of things, but stinky brown spit every few minutes isn’t one of them. There are spitting lizards I could cohabit with if I’d wanted that.”

“Don’t you see? Whoever tried to kill Elmore knew his nasty habits, and used them. And must have known him after you did.”

“But the police won’t believe that I never knew him to use that vile stuff.”

“I’ll just have to find out who did know he used chewing tobacco, and used it to try to kill him.”

“That’s nice, dear, but do be careful! Now just go get some Crystal Light to toast yourself and use some other word than Skoal, and calm down. You sound really overheated.”

Subdued, Temple complied and returned to her living room, wondering how she could nail a killer with a small tin of chewing tobacco. Still, she only had to figure out who wanted Elmore Lark dead and knew enough about him to hit on the perfect method.

Meanwhile, her first trick to trip up the killer was a corny scheme, but centered on a hat and would attract attention. What more did she need for bait at this particular convention? Except maybe herself.

Ouch.

Would that stop Viking stock? No!

Temple lifted her glass of Crystal Light and envisioned the recent computer graphic of Viking warriors chug-a-lugging from a dead enemy’s skull.

“Skoal!”

Chapter 54

The Red Hat Rage Brigade

My partner is still off on her own private crusade working the missing Mr. Max Kinsella case when it becomes clear from eavesdropping on the recent hullabaloo that my Miss Temple has plans to put her life in danger.

I see her set the bait this morning and soon the word gets all around the convention. People come to gawk and spread even more word around. By the time all the conventioneers exit to attend the two simultaneous banquets tonight, Miss Temple’s bait will be left for someone bad to come sniffing around it.

I expect her to be lying in wait, and I intend to be lying in wait with her, unbeknownst to her, of course. I am your unbeknownst go-to guy.

What good will it do if Miss Midnight Louise finds Mr. Max alive and in the meantime Miss Temple has been offed? That is what you would call an ironic situation, although it is more of a moronic situation, in my opinion.

I know it is up to me. As per usual. Because, of course, the Fontana litter are off seeing to Aldo and Miss Kit Carlson. Even the police are no longer hanging around here as much. The Red Hat ladies will be tuckered and tucked away for the night while visions of purple plums dance in their heads after the evening’s banquet.

This being Las Vegas, plenty of patrons and hotel personnel are stirring on the Crystal Phoenix’s main floor, but the Red Hat Sisterhood’s public spaces are shut down.

I realize I will need reinforcements before this case is over, but have nowhere to turn. The police are not expecting more mayhem on-site. The hotel security forces are top-notch, but they are only human.

What is needed here is the superhuman sight and hearing of my kind. I am ready to gnaw my nails in frustration, except that I will need them later, when a bright idea occurs to me.

It is not only fresh and exciting, but it will improve my status among the desirable ladies of my species.

I dash through a moving parade of feet to the elevators. How convenient that I was hanging about the lobby when the first convention-goers arrived, for I then burned a particular suite number into my inboard memory device.

The first carload only takes me a few floors up before emptying. I prance with impatience waiting for another elevator to stop where I have been marooned. Several stop, because I have leaped repeatedly at the call button until it depresses. I hang out of sight behind a cigarette butt stand while riders grouse about thoughtless people who call the elevator, then decide to walk and leave the doors opening on nothing.

Oh contraire, grousers! It is actually a very thoughtful feline who has summoned you to this floor. I wait until a car opens that is crammed with people yet to disembark, for I seek the hotel’s top floor. Too bad the particular guest I seek is not top-drawer to match!

Of course, I must time my leap aboard to the second. Whilethey are all craning their necks looking left and right down the hall, I slip among their pant legs, trying not to brush my softly furred sides against any sensitive bare female gams. (Not for personal reasons, of course. Normally, I am only too happy to massage female gams. Here, however, I am trying to remain undercover as well as underfoot.) It is my good luck that only one highly intoxicated (a redundancy, I fear) gentleman remains aboard when we arrive at the top floor containing the suites.

I follow his lurching path out of the car onto purple plush carpet.

I was blending into the bellman’s dark pant legs four days ago when I heard him instructed to take Miss Savannah Ashleigh’s gaudy luggage cart to the Baccarat Suite.

Knowing the Crystal Phoenix layout from my days as house detective here, I leave the amiable sot playing with his room key card outside his quarters and speed to the address in question. And they say we cannot be trained!

Something also in question is whether Miss Savannah is in residence at the moment or not. Although the time is late, past my namesake hour, it would best serve my emergency plan for her to be making merry elsewhere right now.

I scratch softly low on the door.

In an instant I am answered by the snare-drum scritch of delicate pads on paint. Pads, plural. Both Ashleigh sisters are awake and ready to rock!

It is true that I and the Supine Yvette, formerly known as the Divine Yvette, are on the outs, but Solange is still in my little black book. Okay, my large black book.

I can stomach the snobby Supine Yvette if the Benign Solange is in the picture.

I hiss under the door that they need to unlock it.

They plead the deadlock and the safety chain.

I ask if they have a pipe access door in the bathroom.

After a few minutes, Solange reports that they do, but that Yvette’s tail has become caught in the opening.

Manx! If I had been installed in a penthouse suite, my first piece of business would have been checking the air-conditioning and plumbing systems for egress. A dude always needs a back door.

But what can you expect from Persians? They are not exactly designed for street smarts. On the other mitt, they are sublimely designed for other purposes.

Speaking of the Sublime Solange, she is hissing at me under the door that there is another interior door at two-jumps level in the bathroom.

I sit down and think. I always think better sitting down, without pressure on my footpads.

Of course, all Las Vegas knows the Crystal Phoenix as a very classy hotel. It was classy before the many new mega hotels made a conscious effort to spend millions on high-end art collections. In fact, the powers that be along the Strip (and there are a lot of them) are eager to disavow the place’s gangster history.

But you can’t keep a good hood down. Or a good ‘hood.

Rumor has it that one obscure room dating back to the Bugsy Siegel era can still be found at the Flamingo Hilton. Bugsy, of course, built the first Flamingo and began the dot on an empty map’s evolution into Billionaire’s Row.

And here at the Crystal Phoenix, room 711 is still decorated with the forties flair popular in the day of its founder, Jersey Joe Jackson. They say when he lost his fortune he lived on in that small suite. They say he still lives on there in the dust motes that take human shape from time to time.

Me, I like to use the place for siestas. The hotel never rents it. And I may have seen a ghost there while in the twilight state between dreaming and waking up.

Right now I’m daydreaming about how this hotel used to be the Joshua Tree when Jersey Joe founded it. How it sat deserted and ruined until Nicky Fontana came along with mondo millions of clean dough from his grandma’s pasta empire and remade the place with the help of an imported little hotel marketing doll named Van von Rhine.

Of course, since then the Phoenix has been redone inside and out, and added onto up, down, and sideways. But its functional core is the old Joshua Tree, with its then-fancy “futuristic” features.

One comes to mind just when I need it. I seem to recall that it has a central vacuum system for cleaning.

No. I am not contemplating sending the Ashleigh sisters down a central vacuum system. That would be cruel, although speedy. And it would really wreak havoc with their hairdos.

However, I also recall from my early prowls of the premises when I was house detective, the old Joshua Tree had a system of linen handling that involved that old-fashioned, low-tech approach of … laundry shoots.

Two jumps up. I guess that even the pampered Ashleigh sisters could manage that if motivated. One waiting to bat the hinged door open while the other leaps through; one to perch on the sink surround and open the door manually (mittually?) and leap through after the first has gone.

It will take acrobatics not usual to short-legged Persians. It will take cooperation between sisters of a different color. It will take massive persuasion from Midnight Louie, perhaps with a soupcon of disinformation.

But my dear associate’s life is at stake, and species loyalty is worth two tins of sardines and a catnip spray can, under the circumstances.

I need reinforcements below, pronto! (To quote the Fontana brothers.) Fire in the hatch! Even if it’s a pair of furious felines!

I instruct Solange on how to get her and Yvette launched. I tell them that they will land on Cloud Nine.

And then I race back to the elevators, leap to hit the down button, and hope for the best.

Chapter 55

Red Tide

Temple’s connections at the Crystal Phoenix got her easy and secret access to a passkey that allowed her to sneak back into the locked ballroom housing the Red Hat stores.

Nicky Fontana had not been crazy about her doing that, but she explained that she wanted to search the premises without anyone, including Van, knowing.

She told him a small but reasonable lie about smuggling via the shops that might explain Oleta’s death, if not the attempt on Elmore’s life. She didn’t want, she said, to embarrass the hotel and the Red Hat Sisterhood if her suspicions were wrong.

Nicky recognized that as a noble and necessary motive.

So she’d tucked her blond hair under a big red hat restingatop a red-knit turban and had donned huge gold circle earrings. This was not a Temple Barr look. It was more a mini-Carmen Miranda look.

That 1940s Latina entertainer had worn towers of fake fruit on her head. Temple had settled for red chiffon roses and ostrich feathers nestled in veiling. She also resorted to red running shoes in another effort at disguise. It had worked: the mirror told her she resembled a walking crimson mushroom with a very lavish cap.

Nobody glanced at her twice as she left the bathroom off the lobby and headed toward the ballroom areas. Red Hat ladies had been sweeping past en masse en route to the big dinner events at both the Phoenix and the neighboring Goliath. She was just a late-goer. While half the Red Hat Sisterhood attended a program and banquet in the Phoenix’s Crystal Court ballroom, the other half made merry at the Goliath Hotel across the Strip.

The Hatorium Emporium ballroom had doors on three sides, one set far down a dark hall abutting the hotel’s cavernous service and kitchen areas. Temple unlocked the padlock and chains with no witnesses. Any Marley’s Ghost clanking sounds she made were masked by the loud muffled sounds of stage announcements and laughter coming from the hotel’s huge central ballroom.

She knew better than to shut the slightly open door behind her. These things could make terrific thumps, as convention-goers who try to sneak out of boring presentations find out. She often wondered if that was meant to keep people inside.

Once she slipped inside the ballroom, she paused to orient herself.

This place was not on anyone’s most-wanted list for the evening. The demonstration stages circling the room stood empty and still. The ballroom was silent, as it should be. Yet the air-conditioning gave it the look of a deserted dressing room. All the dozens and dozens of racks of hats and clothes trembled in the interior breeze, especially with so much of it feathered.

So the room seemed occupied, anyway, by a mute congregation of twitchy wearing apparel. Temple felt a bit twitchy too.

She’d promised everyone from Matt to Kit to Nicky to Detective Alch to avoid risks. But the Red Hat Sisterhood would be flowing out of Las Vegas in a giant Red Tide starting tomorrow. And with them might go a murderer.

That would leave Electra to take the blame for the death of Oleta and the attempted murder of Elmore Lark. Temple didn’t know if a prosecutor could get a conviction, but she didn’t want the matter to come to trial so they all could find out. Despite the offer of Macho Mario’s personal defense attorney, Temple did not trust in law and order to resolve these crimes.

So she’d do what none of the people closest to her would understand or approve. But Max would.

If you want to catch a crook, you don’t need a crook. You just need some high-profile bait. And it wasn’t her, for a change. She was just here to hide and watch.

Because there it was. Her bait. By the light of the ballroom’s red exit signs (a rather chilling sight) and the low-level security lights still on in the ceiling high above, Temple glimpsed the giant-size piece of cheese she’d placed in the ballroom this morning. Surely a human-size rat couldn’t resist trying to take it tonight.

It was Oleta’s lost hatbox that had been stored in the conference room. Its top was mounded high again with computer paper, redecorated and glued. Under that carpet of lavender net roses, lay … blank sheets.

That morning Temple, in red hat and heels, had noisily donated it to the booth to raise money for a memorial for Oleta. Everyone could buy chances to win it, and Temple had announced she’d filled the hatbox with ten-dollar bills. She bought fifteen five-dollar chances to start the hatbox rolling.

Of course, all the folks at the stages surrounding the booths had paused in their glamour photos, hairpiece displays, and makeup hawking to announce the “Oleta Lark Memorial Hatbox” prize over their mikes.

At noon luncheons at both the Phoenix and Goliath, Temple was introduced by Her Royal flatness herself as a “generous donor” of a “magnificently decorated personal hatbox” belonging to “our late beloved sister so brutally taken from us.”

Nothing like murder and lavender net roses to stir up a crowd.

Now, Temple was willing to bet, someone would be slinking into the closed ballroom to “win” the prize before anyone else could. Someone who suspected it might contain what Temple had found: Oleta’s complete manuscript, not worthy of publishing, not full of clues to her murder, but perhaps inadvertently able to draw out an insecure murderer.

Temple eyed the situation. She decided high ground would help her spot a sneak thief in the semidark. Tiptoeing on her rubber-soled and well-named sneakers, she climbed the four steps to a demonstration area that would permit her to watch the hatbox booth from a height.

A nearby mannequin dressed in full feather was perfect to hide behind. She got into place, then eyed the area she’d chosen. Lots of clothes and hats hung on racks up here too. A table, empty now, sat in front of a folding screen.

Temple couldn’t decide what this booth hawked, besides the clothing. Didn’t matter. At least it provided a dummy to hide behind. Even better were the curtains behind it. She retreated farther, sticking her head out of the part in the curtains.

No sooner had she settled down to wait than she heard something move. Clothing brushing, feet shuffling. The sound wasn’t coming from the distant, locked ballroom doors. It was coming amid the rows of booths.

Oh. An intruder wouldn’t be able to beg or borrow a security passkey from the hotel owner. An intruder would have to hide, like Temple, and wait until the room was empty.

Had the intruder heard Temple arrive? Get into place? She’d been quiet about it. The stealthy sounds continued, micelike rustles anybody else would dismiss. The stealth made Temple think the person hadn’t heard or spotted her presence.

Temple didn’t want to lose her vantage point, but she hunkered down farther behind the standing female mannequin. Those things were always six feet tall with linebacker shoulders, anyway. They could conceal three Temples, four on a day when she wasn’t wearing high heels. Like today. Tonight.

Her retreating back heel hit something narrow but hard. She craned her neck backward. Just a glint of light off the metal legs of a light plastic chair. Another mannequin was sitting there, all dressed up with no place to go. Too bad. Temple could have sat on that chair and watched in comfort.

Ooh. A shadowy figure was moving behind the boas in Oleta’s booth.

Temple crouched lower, this time brushing the mannequin’s shod foot. The sole slid out of place a bit, making that telltale sandy drag that you hear in a soft-shoe routine.

In this big empty ballroom, it sounded like a spurt of sound from a chain saw.

Temple gritted her teeth and held perfectly still.

Then she glanced back at the betraying shoe, finally realizing where she’d chosen to hide.

This was a Red Hat Sisterhood onstage demonstration vignette. The Red Hat Sisterhood colors were red and purple, with a tad of lavender and pink, shades that were discernible in the twilight of the distant security lights.

This shoe was … green.

A six-inch-high green platform espadrille.

Temple’s hand reached to check out the mannequin’s ankle and calf. Nothing personal.

It was, as expected, cold and hard and stiff.

She lit her micro-flashlight to briefly illuminate the model’s face before snapping it off.

That face had been cold and hard and stiff.

As in life, actually. Only it was dead now.

Temple felt the same deadly chill in her bones.

Damn! Her prime suspect for the murder sat there murdered herself. In fact, her dead body was perfectly placed to keep watch with Temple while the real murderer went for Temple’s bait a hundred feet across the room.

Temple couldn’t think of anything to do but flash her pinpoint light over the moving figure. And scream bloody murder.

Maybe announcing hers. Because who, besides Nicky, had she notified of her scheme who was anywhere around to hear? No one.

She’d always known this was a hat-brained idea that everyone would ridicule, and now it might prove fatal.

On the other hand, this room was one big overstocked clothes closet, and the perfect place to play hide-and-seek until help came. If it did.

Chapter 56

Crack Cocaine for Cats

My sharp ears have been awaiting the signal.

Yvette and Solange are still panting with suspense behind me.

The suspense that has them panting was landing in the giant hotel linen cart at the bottom of the fourteenth-floor laundry shoot. Neither had been on a theme park ride before. Neither understood that such a speedy exit down two stories to a central gathering station was the ride of a lifetime. That people paid for such thrills and repeated them regularly, even religiously.

I had to explain all that to them after I’d clawed them free of tangled 400-count sheets reeking with human foot odors and worse.

But you cannot keep prima donna Persians down. They werehappy to heckle me unmercifully all the way down in the empty elevator I snagged for them, playing hide-and-seek through the hotel’s service regions to the back ballroom doors my Miss Temple has so conveniently left ajar. The door is open just enough for her slender self and some super fluffy felines to slip through.

I, naturally, had seen her preparing her rather amateurish little trap at our home base. She sacrificed a half ream of printer paper to create the proper mound on the hatbox cover. I immediately saw through her ruse, but was mystified as to how I could do my duty and provide her effective backup.

Not that I alone am not sufficient for the task, but extra sets of shivs are always welcome when dealing with a rogue human of unknown origin. Miss Midnight Louise, of course, has been stubbornly pursuing the Missing Max case. (If you ask me, she is way too interested in the comings and goings of dudes of another species.) So it is just me and the Ashleigh girls, who are now plenty riled from their dive and digging out, just as 1 needed them to be. I realize that I have led them into what would be the equivalent of an opium den to my forebear shamus, Sherlock Holmes. And I have then expected them to contain themselves until the exact right moment.

Even my PI-hardened senses have been twitching at the air of universal prey wafting around this huge, darkened, empty ballroom. Everything our night-piercing eyes view through the crack in the door trembles temptingly with tension.

The air-conditioning wafts the scent of all the things that trigger our predatory instincts. Feathers. Feathers small and coarse, as from turkeys and chickens. Feathers airy and long, as from ostriches and emus. Feathers soft and frilly, as from the elusive marabou, perhaps a relative of the elusive caribou, who knows? Feathers fan-long and colored like deadly poisons, from the stately peacock.

We also scent fake fur. Umm. Soft and plush and so claw-able. Microfiber! Double-knit! Spandex! Fabrics, not feathers, but also divinely designed by the great Bast for joyful stalking and rending and reducing to tatters.

I am reminded of the stalker whom Midnight Louise said had shredded Mr. Max’s wardrobe. A very sick individual, as humans go, but there was something of the jungle cat in that primitive action. I too lust after the soft dangling attractions inside human closets. Of course we domesticated cats have learned, mostly, to control these primitive destructive urges. However, we never avoid a legitimate reason to unleash them.

Taking down a murderer will do nicely.

My shivs are slipping in and out of their sheathes, eager to impress themselves on human skin and all the intervening surfaces. I can hear the rip and roar now.

But my doughty roommate’s scream is our version of the late, lamented blue-light special at Kmart stores. The Ashleigh girls, released from pampered civility by a nod of my sagacious head, surge past me, rapacious streaks of riffling fur.

“Not the one who bears my scent,” I remind them with a final snarl, and gallop forward myself, heading for the elevated area where I had earlier spied the tiny light winking as bright as a Birman’s eye.

My well-prepared missiles have hit their shambling target on the ballroom floor by the time I leap up onto the stage.

I hear the mingled screeches and screams of two species, the sublime sound of shivs skiing down several feet of snagged fabric, above and below the belt line. In my observation, there is nothing like the dainty and fluffy Persian for ripping the heck out of anything.

By now the arias of feline fury and human pain have summoned reinforcements. Security people thunder through the front double doors. Some thoughtful person has found the lights and put them all on full power.

Human eyes blink in the glaring light, but my pupils shrink to slits as I focus on my Miss Temple, clearly visible on the Glamour-Glo PhotoLaser stage not twelve feet away. Her low-shod, high-hatted red ensemble is enough to put my fangs on edge, but no one else present is rocked by her shocking and unusual lack of taste.

She is conferring with Fontana brothers three who have materialized with the lights, over the pale-painted mannequin in the hot seat.

Meanwhile, I turn to regard the ballroom floor, where the Ashleigh girls have the target down and are voraciously pummeling a pile of red-and-purple rags that appears to be still moving. And moaning.

Since my Miss Temple is surrounded by sufficient human muscle, I hurtle after my accomplices. Much as I would enjoy joining in on the fun, my position in the community as an upholder of law and order forces me to put a damper on the Ashleigh girls’ exuberant killer instincts.

“Sit and pummel,” I order, moving around to examine our catch.

Whoever described the human female as “a rag, a bone, and a hunk of hair” must have come upon one after a full frontal, two-pronged, thirty-two-nailed feline epidermis workout.

Even I am impressed. I cannot wait to hear what Miss Midnight Louise thinks about the very recent exploits of Louie’s Angels.

Chapter 57

The Naked Truth

“Nasty,” Julio said, gazing with his brothers and Temple at the seated corpse of Natalie Newman.

Temple was still shuddering, which encouraged Ernesto to put a bracing arm around her shoulders.

If Oleta Lark’s corpse had looked unnervingly alive, Natalie was definitely dead according to the TV crime scene stereotype. Her exposed flesh was bluish gray. Blotches of pooled blood streaked her narrow legs like horrible varicose veins.

Even worse, what held her upright was the scarf that had throttled her. Its ends were wrapped around the upright of the wooden chair she sat in. The scarf was purple with a flock of flying red birds. It was not the lethal Oleta Lark scarf design, at least.

“She must have been killed hours and hours ago:’ Temple suggested.

Ernesto nodded, pointing to the black-surfaced floor of the portable stage.

“Drag marks,” he said. “She was killed much earlier and hidden behind this curtain background.”

“No one working the photo presentation must have gone back here:’ Temple said. “Not until I ducked behind the curtain to hide. Darn! With her death, there goes my main suspect.”

“For the Oleta Lark murder?” Julio asked.

Temple nodded unhappily.

“Then,” demanded Ernesto, “who’s that facedown on the ballroom carpeting under the killer cats?”

“I have no idea. Whoever it is was determined to lay hands on the manuscript of Oleta Lark’s autobiography. I salted the dead woman’s booth with a fake version. I figured that would draw the murderer, but I figured the murderer was Natalie Newman.”

Julio eyed Ernesto and Emilio. “We’d better rescue the unknown lady from the feral felines and turn her over to the police for questioning.”

“Hey, that’s Louie,” Temple said as they got closer. “And the frantic felines who shredded everything in sight are Savannah Ashleigh’s pampered Persians.”

They all paused to study another body, this one definitely alive, but prone and moaning faintly.

Temple took in the purple fishnet stockings and wedgie shoes, red-satin elbow gloves, purple wig, crushed red hat … the microfiber muumuu snagged over every visible fold by the Persian girls’ fancy footwork.

“Candy Crenshaw,” she breathed, “the convention’s singing clown princess. I haven’t even dug up a decent motive for her yet.”

“Good,” said a gruff voice behind her. “You’ll leave something for the local police to do.”

She and the Fontana trio turned as one.

Detective Alch stood there, looking officially severe.

“You four get out of here. You’re contaminating the crime scene, whatever it is.”

“Scenes,” Temple said, pointing out the lethal vignette onstage a hundred feet away.

It took Alch a few seconds to realize he was gazing on a model corpse.

“Su,” he called, “secure the stage and the body.”

Temple saw the other detective leaping up on the stage, sans stairs, to do just that. Louie distracted her from that sad scene by swaggering over to massage Temple’s calves with his sides.

“The cats stay,” Alch ordered. “Our crime techs will need to get their, urn, claw prints. So, who do we have here?”

“Candy Crenshaw, a member who heads a girl group of singers here at the Red Hat Sisterhood convention,” Temple said.

“Did she kill the woman up there?”

“That’s Natalie Newman, aka Markowitz. I suspect so. Somebody did,” she answered.

“And why do you suspect so?”

“Well, Natalie’s real last name was Markowitz.”

“A name like Markowitz or Alch, say, is alone cause for suspicion?” Morrie was sounding nettled.

“Oh, no. But I found out that her mother was a Red Hat Sisterhood member in a New Jersey chapter.”

“There are laws against that?” he asked.

“Maybe against New Jersey,” Temple said, grinning, “but not against being in a Red Hat Sisterhood chapter. The suspicious thing is that Natalie changed her name just three years ago.”

“No laws against that.”

“That’s also when her mother left the New Jersey Red Hat Sisterhood chapter,” she pointed out.

“And you know this how?”

“From her sister chapter members, of course. They’re all here. You can confirm everything I say with them.”

“I’ll have Su do it. She’s so good with glitzy ladies like you and Miss Lark.”

A Fontana brother snickered. Alch nailed him with a glance. “I hope nobody here is illegally carrying, because I have plenty of uniforms arriving to handle even minor infractions of the law.”

Temple sensed a wall of absolutely still and law-abiding Fontana brothers behind her.

“I’m not,” she said virtuously, “and I can’t leave until Louie is released. He’s my … roomie.”

Louie stretched up her side to lick her hand. Right on the engagement ring finger. Cats were so territorial.

“Okay, boys,” Alch told the Fontanas. “I won’t look too hard at any bumps in your tailoring if you don’t remain in view for more than twenty seconds. I’ll take care of Miss Barr and her cat. Cats.”

Temple felt the faint aromatic stir of Brut cologne as they faded away like old mob soldiers.

Alch didn’t leave her long to regret their absence. “Why’d you suspect the convention camera woman?”

“She was an outsider, but she obviously had issues with the Red Hat Sisterhood, and despised them. She was filming a deliberately unflattering view of the women at the same time as she did the standard version. I found out her real last name was Markowitz. It’s not unusual for a media personality to take a less ethnic name, but not in reporting. You build a reputation under a byline; you want to keep it. Even if you marry. But Natalie didn’t. Newman. She was a `new man’ avenging her father. She also didn’t want any members recognizing her last name and remembering the scandal. With e-mail, it was all over the Web. Tracking some Red Hat Sisterhood chapter gossip, I found out a certain Mollie Markowitz was a `scandalous’ Red Hat Sisterhood member in New Jersey. Then it was a question of: if Natalie secretly despised Red Hat Sisters, and her unflattering hidden recordings sure made it look like she did, did Natalie despise her mother too? And if so, why? All I had to do was use the network here to find out more.”

“And you found?”

“Mollie Markowitz resigned the Red Hat Sisterhood because of a red hot scandal. She found so much post-menopausal zest after she joined that she also found a new, younger man and left her husband for him. It was during an outing to a male strip club she’d arranged.”

“A new, younger male stripper?” Alch’s eyebrows rose at this significant piece of news.

“Forty.” Temple lowered her voice. “But I’m told that’s ‘boy toy’ age for certain women.”

Alch groaned. “Any age is ‘boy toy’ age for the benighted male of the species. You girls wrap us around your ring fingers. Don’t deny it! You yourself have two in thrall. And maybe three,” he added, looking down at Midnight Louie.

Unwittingly, Alch had touched on a sore point with Temple. Missing Max. As in Max was missing, not as in she was missing Max, because, of course, she had moved on, and Matt was Divine.

Thinking of Divine, what were Savannah Ashleigh’s cats doing here, except having an unlawful rendezvous with Midnight Louie? There’d be hell to pay with Savannah Ashleigh too. It wasn’t either her or Midnight Louie’s night.

She asked Alch, “Are you serious about the cats being, ah, claw-printed?”

“Yup. They scratched that poor creature on the floor semi-comatose. They could be rabid. Could be a lawsuit in it.”

“Even if that woman’s a murderer?”

“Civil law is not criminal law.”

0 Savannah! Temple thought. Her pampered Persians in quarantine would not be the cat’s meow.

Alch reacted to squeaking leather and jingling metal over his shoulder as two uniformed officers approached.

“Help the lady up,” he ordered. “Let’s see what the cats dragged down.”

The spindly hose-covered legs wobbled as the cops lifted her in one sustained swoop. Wig and hat fell over her eyes. Feathers from the savaged boa sprinkled down like gaudy ticker tape to the carpet at their feet.

She lifted a red satin-covered forearm to her eyes against the glare of fully illuminated ceiling lights.

“How badly have these cats clawed you, ma’am?” Alch asked, always the gentleman.

At this point, Temple was only a luckless bystander. The hatbox sat untouched three feet away. Temple had no proof that it had lured the woman here.

“Ma’am?” one of the young cops asked, sounding worried. Something was wrong with the woman, beyond cat scratches. Her head hung like sunflower on a gossamer stem. Her ankles kept turning out so her feet slipped off the wedgie shoes to the floor, twisting the ankle straps.

It was like trying to keep the Strawman from The Wizard of Oz in upright custody. Impossible.

Liquor? Temple wondered. Drugs?

“We need to have this lady walk the line,” one of the uniform cops suggested.

Alch regarded the three cats still milling around her bony ankles and tattered fishnet hose like they thought real fish might be in there somewhere.

“Off with her hat,” he said.

After a tiny pause, one of the cops obliged. The purple wig came with it, to reveal a bald head.

Temple gasped. The poor woman had alopecia or cancer!

She felt terrible that her cat’s purebred posse had attacked her. Maybe the poor thing “shopped” the convention store alone at night to select what she needed, not wanting to face exposure by daylight. Maybe she didn’t want Oleta’s hatbox at all! Maybe it was all a terrible mistake. Hers.

Alch pulled away the boa to reveal bony shoulders and no breasts.

Cancer, surely! This public undressing was cruel!

Why were the uniformed cops chuckling?

“Say, Detective. Guess we have a shemale here. Must be from one of the shows down the Strip.”

Okay. Temple turned her expectations 180 degrees around.

Tall. Boney. Ankles like silly putty on the high wedge heels. No hair on head. No boobs on torso. This was not Candy Crenshaw, however thin. This was not a transsexual in transition. This was a regular guy! In disguise.

Temple watched the red-gloved hand pulled down to reveal badly made-up lips and eyes. Almost clownish. No wonder Temple had assumed the person was Candy Crenshaw… .

“Elmore Lark?” Temple couldn’t have sounded more astounded if she had tried.

Good thing that Molina wasn’t here to hear that amazed squawk. And why wasn’t Molina here? She’d have to ask Alch before they all scattered for the night.

Louie, meanwhile, was strutting and hissing as if he’d always known the identity of the attackee. Louie was even better than Temple at putting on a show of omniscience.

“You were trying to steal Oleta’s hatbox,” Temple accused.

“It was my life too,” Elmore said. It sounded suspiciously like a whine. “I just wanted to make sure she hadn’t said any dam damning things about me. Women are so vindictive.”

“Some men are so worthy of it,” Temple answered.

“I’ll conduct this interrogation,” Alch said. “First, Mr. Lark. Do you need medical attention?”

“Sure. Those cats’ claws are like an arpeggio of needles. Mainly, I hit my head going down after they ambushed me. So I got nothing to say until I reach my lawyer in Reno.”

Temple watched the two officers escort their broken-down Red Hat lady out of the ballroom.

Alch was shaking his head.

“Here we have Keystone Kops and on the stage we have a Wax Museum of Horror. We can hold this goofball for unlawful entry and false impersonation, I guess. I want custody of that hatbox, but not the cats. The department can only handle so many silly elements at once. I think we can sort all this out unaided. You and the Pussycat Patrol are outta here.”

Temple didn’t object as another officer took her arm and escorted her to the now-gaping double doors to the ballroom. The Ashleigh girls, herded by Louie, wafted alongside her ankles like overgrown marabou bedroom slippers.

High-intensity lights and crime scene investigators were flooding the lobby outside.

Temple hadn’t even had a chance to fully explain Natalie Newman’s motives, which now that she had been murdered, were moot. She certainly hadn’t had a chance to read everypage of Oleta Lark’s book manuscript, but she would now, in what was left of tonight, before Alch discovered the dummy book in the hatbox lid.

Hat. Lid. Box. Dummy.

Temple’s mind was in freefall as she passed a shrieking Savannah Ashleigh at the doors.

“Yvette! You’re covered with common turkey feathers! And Solange! I thought you were missing. Mummy was so distraught.”

The overdone actress squealed with a strange combination of delight and distaste when two put-upon officers lifted an overexcited Yvette and Solange into each of her beseeching arms. Then all four clawed feet windmilled, slashing their mistress’s clothes. Savannah began shrieking again. For real.

Louie was no longer making like a wreath around Temple’s ankles; he probably had other things to attend to, as did she, and had vanished into the crowd of onlookers.

Temple sleepwalked to the hotel entrance, numbed by the unexpected death and the spectacular public failure of her attempt to set a hatbox trap for a murderer. Elmore Lark looked like a vain jerk for falling for her stupid stunt, but if just being in the ballroom after hours made someone Natalie’s murderer, then Temple herself was a prime suspect.

She was so puzzled and upset she wondered if she was up to driving her Miata home.

Outside the hotel the air was hot and still, like warm soup, despite the late hour. The parking valets were inside gawking at Elmore Lark’s debut as a Red Hat Sister in drag.

Then a low black car purred under the porte cochere and paused. The passenger door opened. A pale-clad arm and an inviting baritone suggested she needed a ride home.

Temple fell into the leather seat.

She sat speechless, thinking, watching the lights of the Strip speed by like long, electric strands of neon taffy.

Chapter 58

Dude with Hattitude

A gentleman always escorts his ladies home for the night.

I am pleased that my Miss Temple recognizes that my first allegiance is to my species, especially to the vixen-clawed hellcats who took down the individual who fell into her hatbox trap.

Imagine. A fully grown human male tripped up by a hatbox and a pair of Persian Mixmasters. Do I know how to pick my associates, or what?

Unfortunately, Miss Savannah Ashleigh comes to her senses as she enters the elevators and notices my presence.

“Out, you foul alley cat!” she screams. “My poor darlings have blood all over their enameled nails, thanks to you, some of it mine! Out, out, damn inkspot!”

I have never been dismissed in such Shakespearean termsbefore, so I pause to preen while the elevator doors close and sever me for the nonce from my little razor-nailed fluff puffs. Well, for the night, at least.

But, never fear, sharp-edged femme fatales are never far from Midnight Louie’s front, rear, or side view.

“Some excitement at the Crystal Phoenix!” Midnight Louise notes from behind me. “While I am absent following up on your roommate’s affairs, you manage to turn a whole division of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department loose in my hotel.” I turn, quickly smoothing my ruffled bib. “I was only discovering another murder victim and unmasking a transgender impostor. All should be hunky dory and the usual peaceful by morning.” Louise sits, shaking her head. “How unfortunate that restraining orders do not apply to rogue male cats.”

Hmm. I rather like that “rogue male” soubriquet. Reminds me of an elephant. Something big and imposing and good at crushing impediments.

“Do not get your whiskers in a self-congratulating twist. You can tell me what you think went down here later. I have news from the front.”

I swallow. Above all, I am my Miss Temple’s sworn defender. I know that she remains perplexed by the absence of her former beloved. She does not like to leave any mysteries unsolved, particularly her own.

“Yes, Louise?”

“That house might be a police department training course. When I returned for another exploration, I found that since the dustup with Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina there, another person has been on the premises. In fact, two.”

“This is interesting.”

“One is an apparent insurance investigator. He was rather like you: middle-aged, short, somewhat overweight, otherwise nondescript.”

“I say, Louise–”

“The other was like me: smooth, silent, slick, and, lamentably, unlike me. Also a human male.”

“This is all you have to report?”

“The first man came by day. The second by night. The first I do not know from Asphodel. The second I have seen with Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina.”

“Detective Alch?”

“No”

I am forced to wrack my brain, which is pretty wrecked by now. “I cannot guess. Like yourself, Miss Lieutenant Molina does not have a lot of friends of the male persuasion.”

Louise taps a foreclaw on the marble tile of the floor. It makes a sharp, impatient sound.

“Anyway,” I say. “I have no time to sit around luxury hotels and speculate. Ma Barker’s gang is back at the Circle Ritz, wondering where their headwaiter is. I need to get home to feed the homeless. Chef Song here at the hotel wouldn’t have any tidbits suitable for starving relatives?”

She hisses at me. “You know that Chef Song does not do takeout. I will retum with you to the Circle Ritz and help you distribute nuggets of your unwanted Free-to-BeFeline to your poor relations.”

That is not exactly how I would describe my charitable endeavors, but at least I will have company back to the Circle Ritz, where my Miss Temple is no doubt breathlessly awaiting my company and insights. Or maybe I mean Mr. Matt’s company.

Chapter 59

Curb Service

Ralph, the youngest Fontana brother next to Nicky, was just as dreamy-looking as the rest, but somehow his all-American name didn’t convey the same mystique.

However, he was every bit as eager to oblige, which is an excellent thing in a man.

After dropping her off at the Circle Ritz, he promised to return shortly.

Temple had barely trundled upstairs, changed into a bellbottomed jumpsuit, ditched the red headgear, and settled down again with Oleta’s manuscript, when her doorbell rang.

Ralph awaited without, bearing equipment. She could run the DVD disc on her computer, but wanted to see the video on the bigger living-room TV screen. In no time he’d replaced her outdated VCR (that only Max had heretofore managed to program with a bit of magic). Then he ran her through the new DVD player’s workings, particularly the pause, fast forward, and reverse. Finally, he opened the hideously expensive bottle of wine he’d brought, poured the first glass, and put the bottle on a coaster on the coffee table.

Oh, and made a bag of popcorn in the microwave.

A Fontana Brothers Production was nothing if not thorough. Assured that Temple wanted for nothing (besides a murderer with a cast-iron motive), he bowed and left.

To read or just sit back and watch? That was the modem Hamlet’s dilemma.

She and Matt were a new couple. There was no tacit plan to spend their nights together either here or there. Temple, on her own for more than two years, preferred suspense to habit by now. Max had trained her well for his unexplained absences.

Except this one. Was Molina right? Had he been the Phantom Mage? He hadn’t missed a beat when dealing with the White Russian exhibition acrobatics. He seemed in peak form. Something may have gone wrong, but Temple couldn’t saddle her new relationship with worries about an ex-boyfriend.

She sipped the wine, turned down the lights, and ran Natalie’s secret recording, a notebook on the sofa arm, roller-ball pen in hand. The manuscript would be next.

Chapter 60

A Fool and His Honey

Temple woke up with daylight oozing through the sheer curtains on the French doors to the balcony.

A set of those doors were ajar and a trail of Free-to-BeFeline nuggets—like large, army-green ants—were marching from there to the kitchen. Or vice versa.

“Louie?”

The protesting meow came from the other side of the couch. Louie was coiled there like a furry snake, his one open green eye looking very annoyed.

“I guess you had a big night last night too,” she admitted, patting his head.

He barely restrained a hiss.

On the other hand, his access to the Ashleigh girls had been suddenly cut off.

“I didn’t get any last night, either,” she consoled him. Oddly, this didn’t seem to console Midnight Louie. He yawned to show his fangs and tongue, then licked his whiskers. “More food? You’ve been going through that Free-to-BeFeline like there’s no tomorrow lately.”

He jumped down to the floor, then stalked to the kitchen, where he turned and glared accusingly at her.

Temple pushed herself up from the corner she’d been curled into and went to open another ten-pound bag. What was going on here? Louie would soon be the size of Nero Wolfe.

While she was up, Temple poured and drank a glass of milk, then dribbled the dregs over the Free-to-BeFeline.

Louie remained bowed over the bowl, but only making the occasional crunching sound. No wonder he was full! He’d been through three bags of it in the last week.

With him taken care of, Temple went to shower, sharpen her brain, and gather her evidence for a fast trip to the LVMPD Crimes Against Persons unit.

Did she have a crime scenario for them! All thanks to Oleta’s manuscript, Natalie’s film, and Fontana brother wine.

Luckily, nice Detective Alch was in when she phoned, although he was sure it was unnecessary to see her.

“I have physical evidence as well as theories,” she said. “You’ve been holding something back from the police?” Nice Detective Alch was sounding sharp.

He’d been looking frazzled lately, come to think of it. Molina must be riding the rag. Okay, that was sexist. Shame on Temple! But she felt no rules of politically correct behavior applied when it came to her, and Max’s, archenemy.

“Have you still got Elmore Lark in custody?” she asked.

“No. We don’t have any crime scene evidence connected to the murder of Natalie Newman, aka Markowitz, and we don’t have any on Oleta Lark.”

“But Elmore nearly killed himself trying to make Electra look guilty.”

“We don’t have enough evidence on her either. And Elmore Lark is an obvious loon, dressing up in that crazy drag outfit to pursue your obvious trap of the hatbox. This whole case is laughable.”

“But any other possible suspects are leaving town with the convention.”

“We’re not closing the case. We just don’t have one on anybody yet.”

Temple decided arguing with the police was a lost cause. She made her good-byes and hung up. She had a feeling something was distracting Alch these days. Maybe a personal problem.

At least Electra wasn’t in danger of imminent arrest, but she wasn’t completely cleared either.

Maybe it was time for the Red-Hatted League to take matters into their own hats and swing into action.

Six hours later, Temple and Electra and the core Red-Hatted League members were hunkered down in a minivan way too new for the Araby Motel parking lot. They’d had a lot of fun wetting down the dust in a vacant lot and throwing handfuls at the vehicle until it acquired a disreputable patina.

They were all wearing scruffy clothes anyway, jeans and faded velour jogging suits saved as car-washing rags. Temple even had white tennis shoes on.

The older women were the utter opposite of their gaudy, glitzy Red Hat selves.

Except for Starla. Her lips and nails were a fresh, gleaming crimson color. She was out of her Red Hat Sisterhood red and purple, but poured into denim glitz: low-rise rhinestone-decorated jeans and matching jacket, low-cut white T-shirt featuring a sequined image of a sexy cowgirl on a bucking bronco horse.

Her frankly bleached blond hair was sprayed into a hussy hive of bedhead waves and her painted red toenails peeked out from strappy hooker-high heels.

She was “strappy” someplace else: in the recording wire taped to her torso. The ex-bounty hunter had all the right equipment for going undercover, if not under the covers, with Elmore Lark.

“It’s wonderful you know how to get wired,” Electra commented.

“When you’re a bounty hunter,” Starla explained, “sometimes you gotta surprise ‘em, or ambush ‘em. And sometimes you gotta trick ‘em.” She heaved her breasts higher in the tight T-shirt, giving the cowgirl a potent buck. “And sometimes you gotta seduce ‘em.”

“In Elmore’s case,” Electra said fervently, “I’m glad you gotta do that, not me. But I can hear every word in the van, right?”

“You all can. Ole Elmore is not only gonna be recorded, he’s gonna be broadcast live. You think that anonymous bottle of Johnnie Walker we sent over four hours ago has done the trick?” she asked Electra.

“He and Johnny must be bosom buddies by now. He was never a drinker, but he never had this much pressure.”

“I just hope he hasn’t passed out:’ Temple said.

“If he has, these’ll wake him up. When high-tech equipment lets you down, the low-tech equipment never fails.” Boosting her boobs again, Starla tested the spandex in her jeans by leaving the van, then minced across the hot parking lot to one of the ground-floor doors.

Temple slid the van door closed as soon as Starla’s last spike heel was out of the way. That quick glance around showed an abandoned lot, except for two bejeaned guys with scruffy dark jaws working a junker sixties Impala blistered with Las Vegas sun psoriasis.

Starla’s knuckles were hitting a faded, painted door. “Y’ all in there, honey? I’m that friend of Johnny’s.”

Starla turned to wink at the van a moment before the door opened and she vanished inside.

“What do you hope Starla will get out of Elmore?” Electra asked as she and Judy and Phyll and Mary Lou hunkered down beside Temple by the radio receiver. An attached recorder was taping away.

“Bragging. Unguarded answers. I prepped her on where to lead the conversation. Shh! We’re rolling.”

“Sit down, honey,” came Elmore’s smarmy voice. “Bed’s fine. This dump hasn’t got a chair you could put more’n a wastebasket on without breaking, and you’ve got a bod born to break beds, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so. So you sent me this nice full bottle of whiskey! What was the ‘Congratulations’ note for? When did you join my fan club, which is purty low on applicants lately?”

“I just thought you got a raw deal. I don’t like dames who kiss and tell. That Oleta deserved having her neck wrung.”

There was a clink of glass on glass. “I’m glad,” came Elmore’s slurred voice, “I’da hoped the person who sent me this would show up. I left a little Johnny for you to have some. I ain’t got anything personal against Oleta. Or didn’t, that is. And I wasn’t the one wrung her neck, that’s for sure. She just was causing me a bucket of problems with that ‘memoir’ thing and all those e-mails calling me every kind of whipsnake there ever was on earth.”

“Hurts a man’s pride,” Starla prodded.

“Pride, heck! Coulda flattened my pocketbook.”

“Couldn’t have hurt that much, judging by this place.”

“Hell, this is jest a hideout. Doesn’t mean I ain’t got a wad or a lot of ‘em up north in Reno. Or maybe something big comin’ in. Doesn’t mean I can’t take a hot little number like you out for a real big night on the town. What’s yer name again, honey?”

“Starla.”

“Now ain’t that purty? Almost as purty as Mr. Walker here, he is some flash dude, huh? I kin be a flash dude, too, when I wanta be. What can you be?”

“A lot of fun, honey.”

“Waal, my little sweet potato, you sure are cinched in tight to all those sparkly clothes. Maybe I can help ease up the bindings under your saddle blanket.”

“That old lech,” Electra fumed. “He wasn’t any hot stuff when he was thirty years younger.”

“Viagra,” Judy said, rolling her eyes. “Makes a man into a blowhard.”

“First,” Starla said over the wire, “I gotta make sure you won’t throttle me accidentally in your sleep.”

“Nah. I never throttled anything lately but this bottle. I was mad at Oleta, but I never woulda killed her.”

The women in the van exchanged glances. This wasn’t the damning confession they needed.

Temple leaned forward. “Go, Starla! Push it.”

“You were hanging around the convention with the Black Hat Brotherhood,” Starla prodded. “You must have wanted something from her, or you’d have stayed away.”

“I asked her to can the memoir crap. Nicely.”

“And she said?”

“Never.”

“You sure you didn’t kill her to stop her?”

“I didn’t have to, honey. Someone else did it for me.”

“Your non-ex-wife, Electra.”

“Don’t you call her that! Everybody’s claimin’ to be my ex or my current or my soon-to-be. A guy gets tired of that. His past trailin’ after him blightin’ his future. I wished they’d all jest go away.”

“If Electra had been charged with Oleta’s death, that would have happened.”

“Yup. But that didn’t happen.”

“Elmore sounds real regretful about that,” Electra commented sarcastically.

“Stop that, you naughty thing!” Starla said, giggling. “I’ll have a tad more scotch.”

“Me too,” Elmore said.

Glasses clinked again.

“This is sooo0 sleazy,” Phyll commented enthusiastically. “It’s like on TV.”

“Soap opera or cop show?” Judy asked.

“Maybe both.”

“Shhh!” Temple said. “Sleazy” wouldn’t help solve the murders.

“What about that woman who was taping the events?” Starla probed between giggles. “She was dead in that chair in thestores area when you were making like a female impersonator. What on earth made you even try that?”

“Oleta’s stupid ‘Hat Heaven’ booth. See, she’d always fancied herself a writer. Liked to play with words. When that `lost’ hatbox showed up and went out for all to see, I spotted that it was the only hatbox she’d ever had with a mounded top. That was all wrong. See, women stack those things. Oleta had one closet all with stacked hatboxes inside. You don’t make the tops mounded.”

“Ah, real smart, Elmore.”

“Right. I knew right away that would be where she’d hide her tell-all manuscript. It would be with her even when she was outta town, see? By then I was a suspect character, so I figured that if I looked like all those dressed up dolls, no one would spot me.”

“It worked.”

“Except for that miserable little Pink Hat brat. She’s the one who put the hatbox up for bidding, and I bet she found the manuscript before she did it. She deserved a nice little throttle, but—”

“But—?” Starla’s voice was tight with hope and tension. Elmore stayed silent as the women in the van held their breaths and waited for a damning confession.

“But,” he finally said after an audible bolt of scotch, “someone else beat me to it. These hands ain’t made for strangling. They’re made for—”

“Stop that!” The sound of a slap. “Those hands aren’t touching anything on me until I know you didn’t kill those women.”

“I didn’t, I tell you.”

“That’s not good enough. I need evidence. I need to know who did.”

“Now, sweet potato, why would I know that?” he wheedled. “You wouldn’t starve a man because of what he didn’t know.”

“He’s lying,” Electra said.

“Yes, but what about?” Temple said, frowning.

“Come on, girl, you don’t want to hold out on your future sugar daddy.”

“All the sugar you’ve got’s in your lying words.”

“No. Swear to God. I’m gonna have a pile as high as the Luxor. I’ve got me ranch land up in Reno. Dirt-poor, but it’s like you, sweet potato. It’s what’s under the surface—”

A scuffle was heard. Starla giggled and pretended to pretend to resist, that much was clear.

“We might have to rescue her,” Judy said. “I don’t know how much pawing a Red Hat woman should have to put up with.”

Temple hesitated. This scheme had been a bust, except for the store that had sold them the bottle of Johnnie Walker.

“Wow!” Phyll whispered from the front of the van, peering between the seats through the tinted windshield. “Who’s that heading for Elmore Lark territory?”

They all crowded to hunch behind her while the receiver broadcast sounds of heavy breathing and slap and tickle as Starla tried to fend off Elmore without turning off his expansive tipsy monologue.

A tall, thin woman in blue jeans and boots and a plaid blouse was striding toward Elmore’s door. She never hesitated to knock, but jerked it open.

Starla screamed on the receiver. A thump sounded as she or Elmore fell to the floor.

“You idiotic bastard!” the newcomer shouted in a deep, disgusted voice. “I leave you alone for a few hours and you’re with some drunken floozy.”

“Hey, lady. I’m not drunk. He is.”

“Even worse!” the woman shouted. “Get out of here.”

“I just need to get my things together.” Starla was playing for time, wanting to record this interloper who apparently knew Lark well.

“Cheap whore! Go, or you’ll be sorry.”

“Just a minute. My—my purse.”

“Forget it. You’re not getting paid for anything.” There was a silence where all the rapt listeners could hear was heavy breathing from all parties involved.

“Bunnie, honey,” Elmore began wheedling.

“You’re not just a little out of it,” the new woman said. “You’re downright drunk. What did you tell her?”

“Nothin’, honey. I told her nothin’. I said nothin’, I told her I did nothin’ to those women, jest got dolled up a bit in those Red Hat duds. Even Dustin Hoffman does drag sometime.”

“Get outta here, you stupid chippie!” The woman obviously had Starla by the jacket lapels and was shaking her. “I oughtta wring your neck.”

“And she’s the one who did it!” Temple jumped up, only avoiding braining herself on the van’s ceiling by being so short. “Come on!”

Phyll and Judy put their weight into pushing the side van door open so all of them could pour out onto the hot pavement.

The two guys fiddling with the car suddenly jumped up and headed for the door, one pulling it open before Temple and company could reach it.

Starla had been leaning against the door. Around her neck was a Red Hat scarf. The strangling ends of it were in the hands of the long tall woman who’d popped in on Elmore Lark.

Losing the support of the door, Starla fell into the supportive custody of the man who’d jerked it open.

The other guy had the strange woman’s hands behind her back … and tied there with her own scarf in thirty seconds flat.

Elmore was weaving on his feet in the seedy motel room, clinging to a cheap plastic cup still in its plastic wrapper but filled with expensive scotch …

… which Temple was going to have a big bolt of when she got home.

They’d nailed the strangler, but Temple had never seen her before and had no idea on earth who the hell she was.

Chapter 61

Footnotes

Detective Morrie Alch came into the tiny LVMPD conference room where Temple, Electra, her Red-Hatted League sisters, and the two car guys, aka Armando and Ralph Fontana, were waiting.

He wore his scary, emotionless police face and his first words were: “Elmore sang like—excuse the expression—a lark.”

That broke the tension as the ladies laughed and eyed him with interest.

“Is it true, Miss Temple Barr,” he went on, “that you have no idea of who the woman who tried to strangle Starla is?”

“True, but I have a footnote.”

He chuckled, gazing at her deliberately dirty white tennis shoes.

“You usually have an interesting footnote, but I hope today it’s a lot better-looking than those skaggy tennies.”

“I’m working undercover, Detective,” she rebuked him. “You know I’d never be caught dead in these shoes otherwise.”

“At least you weren’t in danger of being caught dead this time.” He glanced at Starla. “I remember when you were doing bounty hunting, Miss Starnes. You always had a lot of nerve. This was a flea-brained and dangerous scheme,” he added with almost-Molina-like severity, looking back at Temple. “Fontana brothers in reserve or not.”

And where was Molina anyway? Temple wondered. “So,” Alch asked her directly. “What is your footnote?”

“First, I have some papers to leave with you: my copy of Oleta’s full manuscript and my notes on Natalie Newman’s recordings, with a copy of both DVDs. But my ‘footnote’ is in the form of a statement, like on Jeopardy! ‘Dressed Elmore Lark in drag for his raid on the hatbox.— Alch’s law enforcement expression thawed again as he threw a wallet stuffed with credit cards and IDs down on the table.

“Right on, Little Red. And the question is: ‘Who is Candace Crenshaw?’ “

Electra and her gal pals squealed as one. Their reactions were swift and universal.

“But she’s a Red Hat celebrity!”

“She performed at the convention.”

“She’s a star! What did she want with Elmore?” That was Electra.

“It’s complicated,” Alch said. “And it’ll come out at the trial. After Miss Barr found some references in Oleta’s manuscript, we checked some sources up north. Elmore was suddenly sitting on some very uranium-rich acres up there in Reno. A vengeful and illegitimate ex, not to mention other not-really-exes, not only confronted him with doing time for bigamy until death did him in at the prison, but the common-law wife and ex-wife legalities—once his good luck got out, and it would have—would tie up the land and the fortune for years.”

“What was Candy Crenshaw’s stake in all this?” Temple asked. “She seems to have come out of left field.”

“Not really, if you dig a bit. We found out she was a member of the same Red Hat group as Oleta. Say she’d become Elmore’s latest but secret sweetie up in Reno, so when big money entered the picture, she wanted to be the wife of record with a legal claim to his bucks.”

“And Elmore would go along with this?” Electra was indignant.

“He’d always been a weasel and a fool for women. He did what she said down here, like shadowing Oleta. We don’t know if he knew she killed Oleta, but when Candy Crenshaw got what legal entitlements she wanted, he’d probably have been strangled by his bolo tie and left to rot in the desert.”

“Instead he’ll rot in prison,” Temple told Electra, who just shook her head, bewildered by both of them.

That was all that Alch was going to tell them for their trouble, so they left the busy, bustling building (murder was big business in Las Vegas) and stood outside in the hot sun, unwilling to just disband in an anticlimax.

The two Fontana brothers were the first to peel off, hunting a change of clothes and a close shave of a different sort than Starla’s.

Starla sighed as they watched them walk to the junker Impala. “I almost like the Brothers F more down and dirty and a little unshaven.” The other women murmured seconds, but Temple was too exhausted to join the chorus.

“I need to get home and get out of these disreputable jeans and sneakers,” Temple said. “And don’t nobody say they like me better this way.”

The Red-Hatted League linked arms and chanted, “We like you any way!”

“Thanks, doll!” Electra broke free to give Temple a hug that almost lifted her off her feet. “I can finally retire Elmore to the Dump of Dubious Exes.”

“Aren’t you coming back to the Circle Ritz with me?”

“No, I’m going out for a celebratory drink of Johnnie Walker scotch with the girls. You’re welcome to join us.”

“No, just bring me back to my Miata at the Crystal Phoenix.”

“I’ll take her back.” Alch was suddenly out on the sidewalk with them.

That broke up the gang.

“I want to talk to you privately,” he added, smiling to watch the other women scatter like squirrels in the presence of a cat. “Come on back up.”

Temple did.

The main room was still teaming with desks and detectives and intense talk and shrill phones ringing. Alch’s corner was just like that, and probably a perk. Even a lieutenant like Molina had only a tiny hidey-hole of an office.

Temple had been on red alert since arriving, but had not spotted a trace of Molina, although Su was glowering at her from another desk-computer setup.

“Get you some coffee?” Alch asked.

Temple had spied the large aluminum urn on her way in. The sides were spattered with dark brown spots and it was surrounded by stacks of foam cups and spilled packets of powder and granules that looked like a dope dealer’s rejects.

“No, thank you.”

“You look like you’ve been up all night.”

“Gee, thanks. I was.”

Alch softened. “That ring of yours still sparkles like the morning dew.”

“Thanks.” Temple had forgotten it and glanced at the reassuring rubies, red for truth and devotion. The color of love, of blood, of the Red Hat Sisterhood.

She saw her copies of the video recordings on Alch’s paper-covered desk.

“Why was Newman making a second set of recordings?” he asked now that no one was around to overhear.

“That’s her motive. I told you a little about it. Her mother joined the Red Hat Sisterhood. That was either proceeded by, or simultaneous with, Mollie Markowitz deciding that her marriage was stultifying and over with.”

“So. That happens every day all over the U.S. of A. That happened with my own marriage. And beg your pardon, Miss Barr, but ‘proceeded by’ and ‘simultaneous with.’ Are you testifying in court as an expert witness, or what?”

“I’m an expert video watcher now!”

“Aren’t we all nowadays?”

“You mean all the live TV news ‘chases.’ While Natalie was secretly taping another distorted side of the convention, she was inadvertently capturing someone else operating clandestinely.”

“How’d she do this secret recording?”

“Like the undercover TV news investigators do it. Concealed camera in a bag. They’re so small today. It’s a snap.”

“Why she’d do it?”

“Her motive. Her mother left her father after she joined the Red Hat group. Natalie was her father’s daughter. He’d been a newspaperman back in the days when print media mattered. I looked him up online. Jacob Markowitz, a crusading reporter of the old school, reporter’s notebooks and typewriter. Did some noteworthy stories on Vietnam vets when nobody wanted to look at their side of the story the public had sickened of. Sixty-seven years old. Retired. Expecting a calm life. He had a heart attack and died. Not uncommon for a retiring newspaperman. Deadlines will eat up your cardiac system. Natalie must have blamed her mother and the Red Hat Sisterhood, where the longtime homemaker suddenly started wanting to get around with the girls.”

“What did getting around with the girls mean?”

“Well, she met this male stripper. I bet it was just some silly, post-menopausal crush. If everybody had left it alone, it would have vanished. The Jersey Lily Redbirds chapter reported that Jacob demanded a divorce and Natalie came home to support him. Before the couple could divorce, or reconcile, Jacob died, the mother inherited the mantle of bereaved widow and the estate, and Natalie had a lot of scores to settle.”

“So someone at the Red Hat Sisterhood knew she was doing them a dirty turn and talked about it, tipping off Candace?”

“My aunt Kit, an ex-actress, tipped me off about the camera. But Candace, having murdered once, was probably watching us all like a red-and-purple hawk.““Your aunt. Aldo’s new girlfriend.”

“Right.” Temple waited for him to comment on the age difference, given that it mirrored what Mollie Markowitz had done. “Cool lady,” was all Alch said. “Might have asked her out myself if I wanted to ruffle some Fontana feathers.”

“Don’t mention feathers! I have seen enough of them at this convention to even swear off pillows plumped with the stuff.”

Alch chuckled. “So what did you find on that video recording?”

“I didn’t see it at first, but I was-looking at the unflattering portrayal of the Red Hat Sisterhood, which is an indirect client of mine.”

He nodded.

“Last night I went through sections frame by frame in that clever stop-action mode that DVD players have.”

“You can run a DVD player? This new technology has me beat. Lucky Matt Devine. Can you program a TiVo? I might offer him some competition.”

“I can run it because a Fontana brother gave me an extensive short course, Detective. I’m not a techie, either.”

“I’m crushed, but you’re a credit to your gender anyway.”

“I slowed down the segments of them setting up the convention shops, before Oleta’s body was discovered, and the segments before the Black Hat/Red Hat debate.”

Alch nodded seriously, all joshing over.

“I found some things I think Natalie did too. Only she made the mistake of doing something about them.”

“Blackmail?”

“Right.”

“That will get a body killed. It’s a rewarding crime, because if you shut up the source, the entire problem goes away forever. What’d you spot, kid?”

“Elmore Lark.”

“We’ve processed the physical evidence around Newman’s body. Nothing ties Elmore Lark into it.”

Temple sighed. “Natalie’s video ties him into Oleta’s murder scene, and the attempt on his own life.”

“How?”

“I didn’t see it until several run-throughs, but he’s one of the hotel setup guys working on Oleta’s booth. He’s wearing a painter’s jumpsuit and cap, but it’s clearly Elmore.”

“And—?”

“She caught him on video before the debate, by the hall drinking fountain, gulping down some sort of capsule.”

“You mean he didn’t chew the poison, but took it before?”

“Right. He could probably control the dose better. And, from the recording, he seems to be faking the collapse. Probably to make it look worse than it was.”

“Trying to poison himself is just stupid, it’s not a crime. And the Black Hat Brotherhood is a protest group. They might have sent a member in undercover. None of this proves anything.”

“It proves Natalie could have tried to blackmail him, which drove Candace to kill her.”

“Why?”

Temple had to think about that one. “Maybe Natalie didn’t try to blackmail him. Maybe she recognized she had a big story in her little camera. Maybe she tried to interview him, get some more prime video, and gave away that she knew too much. She didn’t know when to stop. She’d been pretty heavy-handed about filming the convention.

“Of course, Elmore would tell Candy. He was penny-ante, and so were his schemes. All he wanted, I think, was to keep his errant wives out of the picture up in Reno. He wanted to see and get Oleta’s book because the bigamist charge would alert Electra to their legitimate marriage and her stake in his property. He must have searched Oleta’s house in Reno after she came down here, for the book and not found it.”

“We searched the house after her death,” Alch admitted. “There was a computer, but the hard drive was missing.”

“Right. Elmore disabled the computer, but didn’t find a printout there, so that’s why he was hanging around the Hatorium setup hoping to search the stuff Oleta brought down here. When Electra was discovered with her body, he faked his own poisoning to help get Electra sent upriver. He may even have thought Electra did the deed. With both of them out of the way, in his limited way of figuring it, the fortune in uranium was histo splurge on a grasping woman like Candace Crenshaw. Reno’s always been a big uranium area; I bet Candy found out about his land before he did.

“His expedition in Candy’s clothes to snag the hatbox was his own hot idea, I bet. She may have let him do it, but mainly to muddy the waters about the death of Natalie Newman, whom she’d always recognized as a bigger threat than the police. She attacked my aunt, thinking it was me, to muddy the waters even more, using the scarf I’d bought at Oleta’s booth and left in the conference room. Notice how those Red Hat outfits make everyone look alike at first glance? Candy was just another anonymous leaf in a forest, and she could always throw Elmore to the wolves if someone came too close to suspecting her.

“Elmore may never have suspected that Candy was the killer. And he sure didn’t know Natalie was dead, or he’d never have put himself in disguise on a murder scene.”

Alch was silent while the room hummed around them with reports of crimes in the making.

“All conjecture. Luckily, now that we know about Candy Crenshaw, we can build a good case. What’s interesting, though, is that we found Newman’s camera and equipment when we checked her hotel room. And there wasn’t any recording media in that itty-bitty camera with the viewing eyehole through her tote bag. Nada.”

Temple gaped. “Have you tested the bag for Elmore’s or Candace’s prints?”

Alch smiled. “No, but we will now, though even Elmore may have been smart enough to wipe off the purse, and Candy certainly was. It’s one of those big tote bags like you carry, and people don’t always remember where their fingertips have been. Our crime lab is almost as good as those pretty TV folks at bringing up latent prints. If we get a good print, we have that copied video recording of yours, which will then be worth something.”

Temple nodded, and looked around for Molina again. “She’s under the weather,” Alch said. “Off work. I’m sure otherwise she’d be here to congratulate you.”

Temple rolled her eyes. “That assumption would not hold up in court, Detective Alch.”

“You never know about people,” he told her, his gaze both intent and kind. “You never know.”

The truism was, well, true, but it made Temple think about Max again, and about never knowing. Never.

But, then again, Molina wouldn’t either.

And that made all the difference.

Chapter 62

A Dazzling Engagement

While thousands of Red Hat Sisterhood members and their hatboxes spread through McCarran Airport on their way home hither and yon, confounding security personnel, the Crystal Phoenix and Circle Ritz crowds had taken over the revolving rooftop restaurant known as the Crystal Carousel.

The central head table was reserved for Nicky and Van, Temple and Matt, Kit and Aldo, and Electra Lark. Surrounding tables of four held a mixed bag of guests. Two hosted the black-tie glory of the remaining Fontana brothers. Their uncle “Macho” Mario Fontana and wife and “private secretary” and bodyguard occupied another table. The Circle Ritz residents filled four more tables. At another table sat Detectives Alch and Su. Lieutenant Molina had sent her regrets. She said she wasn’t feeling well.

Temple would bet she wasn’t, having again failed to lay an-tither crime at the feet of Temple’s ex-nearest and dearest.

Even Savannah Ashleigh had been invited, and commandeered a whole table for her Rodeo Drive–attired pair of Chihuahuas. Yvette and Solange, the Persians, were undressed for the occasion. Their magnificent coats shone like actual silver and gold under the restaurant’s sparkling mirrored ceiling lined in crystal lights.

Danny Dove was there, with Leticia Brown, aka Ambrosia, Matt’s WCOO-FM’s producer-personality. And somewhere, on the dark carpeted floor, Midnight Louie and Midnight Louise were doing security detail mixed with a casual nosh offered by various diners now and then.

The Fontana males were resplendent in Gangster-Hollywood formalwear: cream silk ties on black silk shirts with black dinner jackets and cream trousers.

Very near them were two tables of the Red-Hatted League, all glittery in red rhinestones and a crimson rage of satin and flowered and feathered cocktail hats.

Temple wore an emerald taffeta fifties dress that was short in front but had a long bustle-topped fall in back, all the better to show off her Stuart Weitzman Midnight Louie Austrian crystal pavé pumps with the green-eyed black cat silhouette on the heels.

The dress was short at the knee, tiny at the waist, and had a band of vestigial off-the-shoulder sleeves.

Her blond hair was smoothed into a Van von Rhine updo, probably the last time her hair would be blond and sleek.

After dinner she kept her left hand in Matt’s under the table. It was cold, something new for her warm nature. Her engagement ring was in its box in Matt’s pocket. After the after-dinner speeches, they were going to rise and announce something of their own, their engagement. Some in this room knew about it already, but this would be the formal, public, official announcement.

Temple only pecked at her plate all through the many dinner courses, which kept Louie and Louise at her side, catching the morsels of chateaubriand steak she dropped down to them.

“I’ve never seen you this nervous,” Matt leaned in to whisper. “Not even when a killer was coming for you.”

“Killer-schmiller,” she whispered back. “They’re a dime a dozen in this town. Now, an engagement announcement, that’s a one-off for me.”

His brown eyes warmed. “Glad to hear that. Happy to be here for it.”

She took a deep breath. Nicky had stood and was playing master of ceremonies with the usual Fontana aplomb.

“Van and I are especially happy to welcome you all here for a rather unusual celebration. A celebration of a whole host of things.

“First of all, we celebrate the Crystal Phoenix’s successfully hosting the largest convention group in our history. They are going, going, gone now, but here’s to the Red Hat Sisterhood!”

“Here, here,” cried Electra, rising along with her Red-Hatted League members. Her hair was all snowy flyaway flips under the red-rhinestone-dotted cage of a tiny pillbox with an immense veil. She looked marvelous, darling.

“And, then:’ Nicky said, “I suppose I should recognize the notorious among us.”

Macho Mario and the Fontana brothers stirred like a flock of starlings pointed out by the city fathers.

“I refer,” Nicky went on, “to our esteemed but vindicated murder suspects, Miss Electra Lark of the Circle Ritz and Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel—”

Electra had remained standing, circling her right hand gracefully in the royal wave affected by Queen Elizabeth II.

After the applause and cheers from the Circle Ritz tables faded, Nicky went on.

“And, all too briefly to cause the proper stir, Mr. Matt Devine of the Circle Ritz and radio station WCOO-AM. Even before his brief moment in the lineup, he had a gangster nickname befitting a murder suspect, ‘Mr. Midnight of the Midnight Hour,’ where he purports to advise solid citizens on troubles far less felonious than his.”

Amid laughter, the whole room stood up and applauded. Matt stood up to acknowledge their affection, swinging Temple’s and his linked hands high between them in a victory gesture.

“And then I must acknowledge,” Nicky said, “the sleuths who saved the good name of the Crystal Phoenix. We have with us tonight Detectives Morrie Alch and Merry Su of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department”

To applause and whistles, they stood and took a bow. Morrie wore the usual black dinner jacket and tie, but the tie was Columbo-askew. Su was a revelation in a black sequin-trimmed riding jacket and long, thigh-high slit skirt. All she needed was the whip.

The whistles from the Fontana brothers table grew piercing.

“And, of course, last but never least,” Nicky said, “our own public relations wizard, erstwhile redhead, and resident gumshoe in designer spikes, Miss Temple Barr.”

Temple stood and waved her tiny emerald-rhinestone vintage evening purse at the diners. They laughed when the elderly clasp gave and spilled cough drops she was carrying for Kit onto the tablecloth.

Something small in formal shiny black materialized at Nicky’s elbow.

Midnight Louie sniffed at the contents of his wineglass.

“Ah, that reminds me. A final toast to our littlest but hardly least resident sleuths, whose stout resort to tooth and nail saved our friends and associates from arrest and murder.

“On my left is Mr. Midnight Louie, formerly of the Crystal Phoenix but relocated to the Circle Ritz.”

Louie lifted his head and gazed on the assembly.

Another black form lofted onto the table at Nicky’s left, to laughter and applause.

“And, oh yes, Miss Midnight Louise, currently engaged here in Mr. Louie’s stead and doing a heck of job, Blackie.”

The laughter resonated up to the mirrored ceiling.

Louie patted Nicky’s sleeve, then looked out over the room.

Nicky make a slight face, but plowed ahead. “And I must thank our guest security force, the beautiful and deadly feline fatales, Miss Yvette and Solange Ashleigh, proteges of our esteemed Red Hat Sisterhood celebrity guest, Miss Savannah Ashleigh.”

Savannah leaped to her feet to reveal that she was clad in a formfitting strapless tube of ivory sequins. The gown must have cost a fortune, but unfortunately it only made her look like a very long, pallid, glittery noodle surmounted by a pair of pearl onions.

Fortunately, Solange and Yvette were trained to recognize a curtain call. The long-haired Persians leaped atop the table and began licking daintily at their mistress’s vanilla-caramel ice cream parfait.

Everyone laughed and began sitting again.

Matt’s hand tightened on Temple’s. Their momentous announcement would be the last item on the program.

A heavy silver spoon tapped on a glass, drawing attention.

Someone was quieting down the guests for a final announcement.

Temple craned her neck along the head table to see who. Not Nicky, but Aldo.

How did he know?

“Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for a surprise announcement among friends. One regarding not murder, but endeavors of the marital sort.”

The crowd oohed and began looking around.

“I am here to announce an engagement.”

Temple tightened her hand on Matt’s. This wasn’t in their personal script, but

“I am pleased and happy to announce that a beautiful and clever redhead—”

Well, it wasn’t back to red yet, and “beautiful” was a little excessive …

“—is engaged to be my wife. Miss Kit Carlson.”

He held out his hand and Kit stood, shakily, next to him. She outshone Savannah with her midnight-blue column of sequins with the batwing sleeves and off-the-shoulder white rhinestone neckline.

A pear-shaped diamond solitaire winked on the left hand she held up before her face so everyone could see.

Everyone at the head table and in the room stood to applaud. Temple’s bare hands clapped together as she and Matt were surrounded by standing people, their own formal stance lost in the celebration.

They sat with the rest, finally.

Kit spoke, the slight vocal rasp she shared with Temple much rougher still, but understandable.

“I came to Las Vegas simply to visit my beloved niece.” She flashed a tearful smile Temple’s way. “But I found a beloved. And almost lost him.” Her voice and head had lowered, then lifted as the actress rose to her own most special occasion. “I imagine I’ll be seeing a lot more of Las Vegas from now on, and all of you dear, delightful people.”

Few would have believed this group capable of more applause, whistles, and hoots, but led by the Fontana brothers, the chaos clamored on for another three minutes. Everybody loves a wedding, or the promise of one.

Matt whispered to Temple during the mania, “We could still add our news to the evening.”

She shook her head. “It’s Kit’s moment. After what she’s been through, she doesn’t need me making an anticlimax.”

“But everyone we know is here, we’re all dressed up to celebrate, and I know you—”

“I can wait,” she told him. “We have decades and decades to go. Kit doesn’t. Can you figure it? Another married Fontana brother at long last. And my very own aunt brought the eldest of the clan to his knees. Go, Kit!! Here’s to the Carlsons,” she said gamely, lifting her glass. “I guess I shouldn’t say `Skoal,’ under the circumstances.”

Matt sighed, despite his grin of surrender, and lifted her bare hand to his lips for a kiss. Right where his engagement ring would have gone public.

Chapter 63

Future Perfect

Temple and Matt stood on his balcony in the dark, gazing down on the shadowy forms of feral cats eating from the dishes they’d all set out for them under Electra’s direction.

Electra was in a mood to embrace everything. Freedom, her small kingdom of residents, even the clan of feral cats who had followed Midnight Louie to the Promised Land.

If Electra Lark had anything to do with it, the Circle Ritz would deliver.

The round Circle Ritz building now had an outer, separate ring like Saturn’s, but this was composed of fur and claw: wild guardian cats.

If Matt and Temple had looked up, they could have seen Electra’s penthouse balcony three floors above. She was hack in her aerie with her mystical Birman, Karma. All was right with the Circle Ritz world.

Except for the one topic that they didn’t bring up right now. Where was Max, and in what condition? That was something for Molina to figure out, and she was obsessed enough with Max to do it.

Temple sighed and inhaled the scent of jasmine on the dry desert air. The long, hot summer was here.

Her hands rested on the balcony railing. In the combined glow of the moonlight and grapefruit-pink sodium iodide parking-lot lights, her engagement ring gleamed galaxy-bright, just for the two of them.

“I suppose,” she said, “it’s just as well that announcing this didn’t work out tonight. We probably have more groundwork to do before our distant friends and family are ready to accept a new reality.”

“You’re saying—?”

“That we should let Kit and Aldo have the stage for now. She wants me to be her ‘maid of honor,’ which I can’t do married.”

“You could be her matron of honor.”

“Matt, I wanted to celebrate Electra’s exoneration by having her marry us in the Lovers’ Knot.”

“A civil ceremony? You’re sure?”

She could hear his voice weighing what her decision really meant. Was it a stopgap, an easy out, as he had proposed? With divorce always an option. Or was it a first step?

“But now I’ve changed my mind. Let’s not distract anyone from Kit and Aldo. They’ve never been married.”

“Neither have we,” he pointed out.

“Yes, but we’re young. Anyway, the reaction to Kit and Aldo tonight had me rethinking things. We should visit Chicago and Minneapolis and meet the folks, so they don’t feel hurt by a sudden announcement from far away.”

“Whew,” Matt said. “My mom would freak at the idea of a civil ceremony.”

“My mom wouldn’t. I could get married in a Quonset hut beside a swamp by a swami. Unitarians are highly inclusive. She won’t even mind my marrying a Catholic. She will freak atthe idea of my marrying someone she doesn’t know. Or hasn’t met.”

“And my cousin Krys—”

“Yes? Boy or girl?”

“Girl. First year of college.”

“Ah. First crush too, huh?”

“You sure you want to involve families? They’ll try to tell us what to do. And anything we do won’t appeal to someone on one side or the other.”

“Weddings are always like that, from what I’ve seen. That’s why we scout the territory first. To figure out if they’ll make a later ecumenical church wedding too divisive to handle.”

“If we’re making a pilgrimage to the old folks at home, why even come back and get a civil marriage here?”

“To show them we’re serious. Otherwise, they might raise holy hell. Ask us to wait forever. Decide to hamstring us by insisting on a religious ceremony they know the ‘other side’ can’t stomach.”

Matt eyed her with mock suspicion. “You know a lot about tribal behavior in the matter of weddings. I’ve officiated at many, and your low opinion of relations between families at such times is terrifyingly accurate. Like the unlamented but still-not-late Elmore Lark, do you have a few weddings of your own under your belt?”

“Always a bridesmaid, never a bride,” she said lightly. “But I took notes.”

He tightened his arms around her. “I want to have a church wedding, I want you to be a bride, to watch you coming down an aisle toward me looking like an angel, to take you to a hotel room after and seal the ceremony and the sacrament in bed all night.”

He made a honeymoon sound so sexy, so seriously sexy, that Temple felt her knees get watery. He made being married sound like living in officially sanctioned sin. She could hardly wait. This boded well for them not wearing out their passion.

Their kisses grew so warm that Temple couldn’t take the heat. Max had been sexually superb from a skill standpoint, but Matt’s innocent intensity pushed her emotions as well as her body to a climactic peak. Sometimes it scared her, feeling these new depths in herself.

She kissed him lightly and pulled away to speak again. Lightly. “It all sounds so old-fashioned. Will your church expect me to wear off-white?”

His grip tightened. “Hardly. We’ve been winking for years at couples who rent separate apartments a few months before the wedding, as I was reminded recently.”

“But you’d still be living in sin after a Lovers’ Knot ceremony?”

“Semi-sin,” he told her, smiling. He had a hard time discussing sin with her. “Some devout Catholics cleave to all the traditional rules, and some devout ones veer far from them, all in the name of God and the good of humankind. I went to seminary to learn how to be a priest. Maybe I needed to go to bed to learn how to be a husband.”

Temple laughed. “I know a Unitarian minister who would say you were self-justifying.”

“Really, though? Are you sure about these two-tiered wedding plans?”

“Why wouldn’t I be sure?”

Matt was silent for a bit. “You haven’t had a chance to—”

“To say good-bye to Max? I can’t say I won’t always wonder what happened to him, but I don’t need to close one book to start reading another. Life is like that. No neat answers. We just go on. Besides, if Max is out there to be found, Molina will find him. Some way, someday.”

Matt laughed in his turn. “There’s a match made in hell.”

He turned Temple to face him, pulled her close again. “So if we make a couple trips north first, then have a pre-wedding at the Lovers’ Knot at some point, when do we schedule the formal wedding?”

“When my miserable, messed-up hair has all grown out in its natural color again. I am not going to walk down any church aisle with a dye job on my hair instead of my shoes.”

Matt was laughing when he kissed her, and then they were too busy again to laugh.

One of the cats outside wailed like a banshee in the dark. Temple hoped it wasn’t Irish. Or Midnight Louie, registering his opinion of their plans. He was sure to have them, and make them very well known. In his own good time.

Chapter 64

You’ll Take Me Home

Again, Kathleen

The man was portly and in his fading sixties, with still a certain flair to his expression and his voice, but moving deliberately, and perhaps heavily, as though burdened.

He lowered himself onto the leather-upholstered chair before the desk and sighed unconsciously at taking the load of himself off his burdened feet.

All in all, he was the kind of man easily overlooked in a crowd: travel-wrinkled suit, more bags under his eyes than he probably had brought across the Atlantic with him.

He offered his passport over the desk to the younger, nattier man who sat behind it. Draped windows framed a misty day and the smoke-blackened walls of stately buildings from the last two centuries.

A teapot whistled faintly from an office kitchen a decent distance away. The sound was both shrill and alarming, and somehow comforting.

In the British Isles, tea was the soothing social drug of choice. John Kelly took the passport. He was an assistant to the undersecretary to the U.S. Consul-General in Northern Ireland, and the stately buildings outside the windows of Danesfort House were in Belfast.

“You look as if you could use a spot of tea, sir,” he suggested to the visitor.

“I’ve just hopped the Atlantic. A bit confining for a lot of time for a man of my age and heft.”

“You should have decompressed in a hotel room.”

“Despite my condition, I’m eager to get on with this . task.”

“Your phone call said something about wanting to track the trackless. Rather intriguing.”

“I’d hoped it seemed so. I’m after an IRA agent from, oh, fifteen or more years ago.”

“Ah.”

A fiftyish female assistant, with hair as gray as her severe tweed suit, had arrived with a silver tea service. For a few moments liquids poured while utensils and china clinked.

When she left, the two men eyed each other through expression-concealing curtains of steaming tea. They sipped as cautiously as they talked.

Kelly spoke first. “Your name is apparently still potent in State Department circles, although no one would say why.”

“That is how it should be, in an ideal world.”

“Hmmm,” Kelly said. “This world is seldom ideal, but the Irish ‘troubles’ are now a cautiously optimistic mark on the global hot-spot map.”

“Is it true? Have 9/11 and the Mideastern terrorists so upped the ante on mass terrorist destruction that the Irish rebels have lost heart?”

Kelly templed his fingers. “In a post-falling-twin-towers world, yes; mere political-religious Western anarchy pales by comparison to Mideastern political-religious violence. Of course, unrepentant IRA holdouts still wreak some havoc, but the mainstream IRA has no stomach for pub and bus bombings now. I give them credit for that. They’ve seen the true and vicious face of modern terrorism, and they don’t want to be on that Most Wanted list.”

“The civil and religious wrongs that created this rebellion over five hundred years ago still persist.” The elderly gentleman set his teacup down on its saucer with almost supernatural quiet.

“Yes. But they modify. As do we. As for this former IRA agent you seek … I’ve heard of Kathleen O’Connor. Everyone has. She left very little trail. I take it, from your sparse hints, that you have evidence that she died in the U.S., unnoted. I’m not surprised. She was a legend here. Legends should die somewhere quiet and far away, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in South America. From what I’ve heard, she was an angry, beautiful woman, an effective agent, and a terrorist who would never give up the fight even when it moderated.”

“Yeats and Maude Gonne.”

“What?”

“The great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, loved a beautiful Irishwoman, Maude Gonne. But Maude was fiery, totally committed to revolution. She became the Cause. She had no time for beauty or love. Or poetry or Yeats. He mourned her before she was dead, because she was dead to any man in her passion for the motherland.”