Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Mass Matrimony

“Who are you, anyway, to ask us all these questions?”

Electra, the bridesmaids’ “housemother,” had taken over for Kit, who now babysat the house courtesans. “Now, dear . . . it is Evita the ventriloquist, isn’t it? How would you like it if you were onstage and your dummy did all the talking?”

“We are not dummies,” huffed Judith, the runway model. “Would dummies have hijacked every Fontana male in town?”

“Of course not. I’m just saying that being grilled by my friend here, Temple Barr, is a lot better than answering to teams of police detectives in small, clammy, air-conditioned rooms that smell of cigarettes and vomit.”

“Euuw,” exclaimed several of the women, Temple among them.

“You do recognize,” Electra went on, “that a young woman is tragically dead, someone your age, murdered upstairs? That the police would be hauling everybody off in paddy wagons for rude and uncomfortable grillings if you didn’t have the finest little private eye in Vegas here to get to the bottom of things.”

Electra had been doing great until unreeling that last phrase.

Temple didn’t bother denying that she was fine and little, or a PI. Whatever gave her a modicum of control over these herds of suspects.

“The idea is,” she told them, “we figure out who the victim is, and who killed her before the police and forensic teams come clomping in to put you and your boyfriends in custody. The idea is to keep Aldo’s and Kit’s wedding on schedule for next Saturday, and all you lovely bridesmaids free to waltz down the aisle with your handsome tuxedoed escorts, free of suspicion and free to be roped into matrimony by all of you.

“Wedding fever strikes a family like the Fontanas only once in a blue moon.”

“We know that!” Jill, the ethereally pale pharmacist, was almost in tears. “We thought this joke would put them on the spot. That they’d be impressed by what guys like the Fontanas admire.”

“Which is?”

“Nerve and organization.”

“Great! You proved that. So keep it up and help me solve the murder of that girl upstairs. She’s not one of you, obviously.”

“No.” Tracee, the Pilates instructor, counted noses around the table. “We’re all here, after Asiah came inside from parking the limo and guarding the front door.”

“Oh, and when was that, Asiah?” Temple asked.

“I don’t know,” the lanky black woman said. “We weren’t on a timetable, other than picking up the guys at eight sharp.”

“How’d you manage taking over that limo?”

“Hundred-dollar bill and a tongue kiss to Manny G., who’s fifty and prefers sitting in front of a twenty-one horseshoe to sitting behind the wheel of a behemoth on a trek to the desert.”

“He’d let a strange woman take over his ride?”

Asiah dug her talons into a tiny quilted purse she kept on a long chain, rather like a Chihuahua. “I have my chauffeur’s license. I made some dough that way while working on the modeling career. Leggy chauffeurs get premium pay in Vegas. I’ve driven Donald Trump.”

“Hopefully, off a cliff,” Electra muttered to Temple.

“And thanks, Tracee,” Asiah added with a toss of her blind-ingly blond long tresses, “for pointing out that I was the last one in. Real sisterhood, bitch. I hope the Down Dog breaks your back someday.”

“Hey!” Wanda, the massage therapist, was obviously the peacemaker of the group. “Let’s not panic and snipe at one another. At least none of us is dead. Are you sure someone killed the girl upstairs now, while we all were here, Miss Barr?”

“Just Temple, thanks. Save the formality for the cops, because they will have to be called. I can’t say, Wanda, when she died. Right now, I need to find out who she was.”

“Not one of us.” Alexia, the horse trainer, noted with a shimmy of her roan mane.

“How do you know?” Temple said. “Maybe she used to date one of your boyfriends.”

“That’s just it.” Judith, the model, toyed with a sealed pack of Virginia Slims cigarettes she was obviously dying to open. “We’re all veterans. We’ve dated our guys long enough to get tired of being long-term girlfriends.”

“How long?” Temple asked, and got bombarded with a blitz of years. “Nine.” “Five here!” “Seven!” “Six.” “Four.” “Five.” “Eight.” “Two,” Asiah finished. As all the others looked at her with disbelief, she added, “That’s a looong time for me.”

“So what’s with the mass rush to matrimony?” Temple wondered.

They eyed one another, wordlessly consulting on whether to tell her the truth.

“We’ve met one another,” Tracee said finally. “Hung out with one another and our guys. Heck, our periods are even in sync.”

The others nodded glumly. Temple had heard of that: women in close proximity or in families tended to ovulate, and everything else, at the same time.

The Fontana brothers’ girlfriends formed quite a little “family” of their own.

“So when Aldo broke the circle, so to speak,” Alexia said, “when he announced he was marrying a stranger, we all just went bananas for commitment.”

“Wait a minute!” Temple shouted into the muttering of bridesmaid indignation at being left at the altar unwed. “Who was Aldo’s girlfriend? Before.”

The silence that greeted her very apropos question lasted a long time.

For, of course, she was the obvious prime suspect: the woman who could never join this jolly little group again. The one Aldo never moved up from “girlfriend.” The one Temple’s aunt Kit had replaced.

“There wasn’t one, at the moment,” Wanda finally said.

“How long a moment?”

“For about a year. She was a performer at one of the acrobatic shows.”

“Was?”

“She fell and broke her neck.”

Temple felt her stomach flip over. Fell. Dead. Like Max, maybe, who lived to tempt fate with spectacular aerial stunts. That was the nightmare, anyway.

“How awful,” Electra said, her voice throbbing with empathy.

“They’d been together nine years,” Jill added, choking a little.

“I see why—” Electra didn’t finish her thought. Why Aldo had flipped for Kit and decided to marry her. He knew what loss was.

And all these women knew it too. Time could be short.

Temple, being advertised as the city’s “finest little private eye,” had to ask herself an unpleasant question. Had Aldo’s girlfriend just had a tragic accident, or had it been murder too?