Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Command Post

Temple decided that she needed a command post.

Imagine: her acting like Lieutenant Molina. Actually, she was beginning to sympathize with the problems of the police force.

“I need to interview suspects separately someplace private,” Temple told Miss Kitty when she returned to the parlor.

The Sapphire Slipper girls were playing computer games, including solitaire. Weird.

“We got plenty of private rooms upstairs. Take your pick. They’re not going to see any action tonight.”

“The murder room did.”

“Don’t use that one then.”

As if she would!

Temple returned to the bar, went up to Matt, and tapped him on the shoulder, jerking her head to the exit.

Hoots and laughter followed them out into the parlor, then whistles and kiss-kiss sounds hounded them into the foyer.

“I’m glad they’re all having so much fun with that dead girl lying alone upstairs,” Matt said.

“She’s not alone. Emilio’s gone back up there already to guard her door.”

“I guess that’s a girl’s dream death in this town: Fontana brothers at your door.”

“Matt. Chill! I know it’s rough to find someone dead. You tried to revive her. It was too late.”

“I said the prayers anyway. That’s never too late. Good God, Temple, can you imagine what it’s like to be feet away from a murder, and not know it?”

“Like a baptism of fire on the battlefield,” she said seriously. “No, I can’t imagine that. No one here admits to recognizing the girl. That is so . . . unbelievable. Was she brought in just to be killed in this mob scene, so the motive is forever obscured?”

“You’re right. I can only help her now by making sure whoever did this doesn’t walk out of here tomorrow free. We need to get the police out here. There may be evidence in that room, on that body, that would reveal the murderer.”

“There’s surely evidence there that would implicate you. And Nicky. And the press will be all over any lurid headlines involving Fontanas. I’m thinking this death was planned to take advantage of the mock-kidnapping.”

“But the only ones who knew about the abduction in advance were the girlfriends, although the brothel staff knew a big party of men was expected.

“Thank you, Mr. Clarity. At least all those people are strangers to us, not our nearest and dearest, or friends, anyway.”

“So what did all the women tell you?”

“Nothing. Less than an embarrassed Fontana brother. None of them admitted to knowing the dead woman’s face.”

“It’s an easy lie. Simon Peter found it came trippingly to the tongue in the Garden of Gethsemane, three times.”

It took Temple a full minute to switch to childhood New Testament studies to remember the betrayals of Christ that night by Judas, the designated turncoat. And by St. Peter, the best and the brightest disciple. Peter, the rock upon which Jesus would found his church, denied even knowing Christ three times before the morning cock crowed, as Jesus had predicted.

The lesson was that, in moments when stand-up courage is called for, everybody can be weak-kneed. That might be the case here. A houseful of the sex queens of denial. Certainly the hookers denied the tawdry reality of the their life work. The girlfriends denied the charming elusiveness of the Fontana brothers that domesticity might destroy. The brothers denied growing older and up.

What did she and Matt deny?

That a murder was more than something to solve to get him and Nicky out of an awkward position? That Max Kinsella going missing so suddenly just made him an ex-boyfriend better out of the picture, and not another puzzle that would tear at their separate and joint needs and desires.

Oh, shoot!

Temple had examined the rooms upstairs (wild) and downstairs (standard hotel), and decided on using the office adjoining the cigar bar.

This was where male clients were put on hold while the logistics of the girl and the room and the fantasy were rotated on the madam’s office computer. Yes. Sex for sale was microman-aged these days.

Temple could imagine male clients eyeing each other warily.

What are you here for?

It felt very nineteenth century, and so did the ambience of the Sapphire Slipper.

Sex. The Final Frontier. Then and Now.

The office had flocked purple velvet wallpaper, a neat compromise between the blue theme of the whorehouse and the presumed red-blooded male vitality of the clients. A miasma of blue smoke haunted the intimate room.

Temple commandeered the rolltop oak desk and the rolling, golden oak, leather-upholstered desk chair, both big enough for Judge Roy Bean. She felt like Alice sitting on a mobile mushroom, but no need to tell anyone else. Her first task: to discover who were the usual denizens of the place, and who had been imported for this travesty of a bachelor party. Who was out of place, in one way or another? Besides the naked and the dead.

Sitting here, alone, Temple felt the despair Matt must have known on discovering the body. She could picture him chest-tapping and blowing into those still-warm lips, trying to coax life back into a frame it had only so recently deserted.

Matt, bent over a seminude woman, kissing her back to life.

She was proud of him. She might have been too squeamish to try to raise the dead with the pound, pound, pound of hands on chest and the pinched nostril Kiss of Life.

She knew he had given it his all. And so Nicky had found him.

Sad that trying to undo death made you look like a suspect.

Nicky Fontana had tremendous faith in her, enough to gamble his brothers’ lives and freedom on it. He counted on her to get him and his enterprise out of any hot water before the Las Vegas law’s zeal for arrests could boil over to scald clan Fontana.

This was a third-degree burn. Every male Fontana on the planet was front and center as a suspect, just for being here, especially Nicky, and even Aldo, Kit’s late-life love. Damn! Had someone meant to ruin Temple’s life and that of everyone she cared for? No. That was paranoid. This murder was a fluke intruding into the serene unwinding of her life and that of those she loved. And who loved her.

This murder was a hate crime. Sudden. Opportunistic, not caring about anyone she herself cared about. The motive was likely old. And ugly. And well concealed. Easy to assign to someone unconcerned and utterly innocent. So it was diabolical. Dangerous for the very randomness of the act.

Temple put her fist to her mouth and breathed a sigh on it. It was really pedal to the metal time.

No time for amateurs.

And no time.

She had to come up with a likely suspect before the police had to be called out here in a fistful of hours. Maybe ten.

Max would have known what to do here, where the Obvious intersected with the Devious. That’s what magic acts were all about: the outward motions seemed open and obvious, but deceptions lay behind every apparently simple move and motive.

Temple was surprised to be missing Max as much she was. Not as a bed partner—a neglected love life, no matter how electric once, couldn’t compete with a l ong-smoldering attraction suddenly cooking on all burners—but as a thinking partner.

Max had let her in on the mental gyrations of a counterspy. Taught her how to see beneath the illusions most people throw up around themselves in self-defense. Beneath the deceptions of people who truly mean to do other people ill.

A lot was on the line in Vegas’s legal brothels. Competition among women for customers, everybody’s—courtesan and client alike—sexual potency and self-esteem, the crass bottom line of giving or getting one’s money’s worth.

Max, being a professional deceiver onstage, was almost impossible to deceive.

Yet he was gone, too suddenly. Had he finally been deceived? Or was he finally finishing the ugly business that had put his life in danger, and had contributed to their drawing apart despite themselves?

Temple didn’t know. With Max, one never could.

And one could never count him out. He knew how to breathe life back into dead relationships. She missed him. Wouldn’t count him among her dead and gone yet.

How could she? He was perfect. Immortal.

Wasn’t he?