Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Slippery Slope

If Temple’s fingernails were bitable, she would have nibbled them off on the long, bouncing drive into the dark of desert. But they were disgustingly strong and her current coat of nail polish always wore out before they did.

Trying to read the map screen on Van’s dashboard, while jolting over obscure roads was like translating Sanskrit when you didn’t even know Latin.

“I’m really not sure why we’re all rushing to a murder scene at a bordello,” Temple said.

“It could be fun?” Electra suggested. “I kinda got into crime-solving at that Red Hat Sisterhood convention. We really should have called my Red-Hatted League chapter members in on this. We were a great team.”

“No.” Van wrestled the wheel around a tight curve and slowed down. “The fewer people who know about this the better. There it is.”

Kit and Electra craned their necks over the front seat backs to stare through the middle of the windshield.

A cluster of gleaming yellow and blue lights glittered like an electric oasis in the dark.

“They must have their own generator and well out here,” Van murmured. “They’d have to be totally independent operationally. And the cell phone limitations wouldn’t bother them.”

“Why not?” asked Kit, the New Yorker who was always plugged into something. “Oh! Right. They wouldn’t want customers getting rung during interesting moments.”

“They must have some reliable way of communicating,” Electra said. “They have to make appointments and such.”

“Awesome,” Kit said. “Imagine men driving all the way out to this wilderness to get a little nookie. This is the real West!”

“It’s an adventure,” Van said. “Some customers don’t feel satisfied with entertainment that’s too easy to come by. The Strip has everything at hand. Coming out here feels special. It’s a marketing ploy. What’s hard to get is better.”

“How can sex for sale in Las Vegas be hard to get?” Electra wondered.

“Harder,” Van explained with a smile in her voice. “Selling sizzle is always a mystical process.”

“I suppose,” Kit said, “that what Minnesota-born and bred girls like Temple and me will have to keep in mind, when we see our intendeds in the ambiance of a brothel, is that such establishments are perfectly legal here.”

“What you and Temple have to keep in mind,” Van said grimly, “is that our nearest and dearest were kidnapped to this slightly seedy environment . . . and immediately phoned home to us for help.”

“Yeah,” Electra said, “but that was only aftera dead body turned up.”

“So says the cynic,” Temple put in, “the five-times-married woman. I can promise you that Matt would have never gone willingly along with this prank.”

“Nor Nicky,” Van said.

There was a silence.

“I’m not sure about Aldo,” Kit said, “which is what makes him so interesting. I can hardly wait to confront the dirty dog and extract suitable promises of ‘making it up to me.’”

Temple sighed. They could joke about it, but this jaunt to a bachelor party had turned into a very sticky wicket. How was she going to clear everybody’s favorite guy in less than twenty-four hours when they were dealing with a totally unknown cast of possible victims and predators?

Van nudged her knee. “We are going in there like gang-busters. We control the vertical and horizontal. They will all do as we say while we sort things out. Girls who are bridesmaids or bedmates, boys who are the innocent ours. We either run the investigation or we call in the police, right?”

Temple winced at the idea of calling in the police, which to her always meant surrendering to Lieutenant Molina.

But Electra pounded Van’s headrest with a woman-power fist. “We are Charlie’s Angels on the case!”

“Without a Charlie to dictate to us,” Temple said. “We are the dictators. Way better.”

“Way!” all three women shouted.

Van squealed the Rover around the last driveway curve its bright headlights illuminated, and they pulled up under the huge neon image of a sapphire-blue high-heeled slipper.