Cat In A Vegas Gold Vendetta

Molina was stumped. First he wanted her name, then he wanted an opinion on his previous condition? Did he think she was a damn doctor? Oh. Did he think?

In the overhead light, she spotted a healing slash peeking out like a murder weapon in a game of Clue from under the lock of black hair that brushed his forehead.

Vastly … shrunken physique. Head wound … She was a detective, wasn’t she? Put two and two together.

“You’ve obviously been through hell,” she said. “You’ve seen the shield and the piece. Can I get a drink? Because you could sure use one yourself.”

“Do I know you?”

Now his disorientation was out of the closet. He’d worked for her briefly before, tracking Rafi. Why confuse the man? Or waste the gift of amnesia? She thought for a long moment.

“No, Mister Kinsella. You don’t.”

*

He couldn’t argue with her instincts. Interesting that when he had gestured through the dining room she had gone straight on through and into the kitchen.

He caught up with her, laboriously, to find her staring at the countertop. All he saw there was an empty blender and a full knife block.

“Uh,” he said, “I know where the wine cellar is, but…”

“No bar in the dining room,” she’d observed. “Hard liquor and glasses are kept up here,” she said, pointing.

“A lot of cabinets to page through.”

They started a methodical search from one end of the kitchen to the other, opening the birch doors, Max leaning on them subtly. They ultimately opened a pair into each other’s knuckles, saying “Scotch” and “Whisky” simultaneously.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“I’m the law. You are a suspicious character back in town. And I want to hire you.”

Max hadn’t heard such a tasty come-on since some long-forgotten noir film.

*

She was glad he had poured the Johnnie Walker Black neat, the European way. Jerking open all those cupboards had irritated her midsection’s taut, healing incision. Her right hand even quivered a little now. Ice would have chattered and given away her lingering vulnerability.

Maybe the nerves weren’t just from her big-time deception. If everything Temple Barr had said about this guy’s counterterrorism career was true, he was formidable—despite the shocking physical deterioration and the healing evidence of a nasty head wound. And she’d already tangled with him a time or two he’d so conveniently—for her—forgotten. Maybe. At least he was treating her like a stranger.

Clearly now, Kinsella was leaner and probably meaner, and had a pile of personal vulnerabilities. The perfect patsy.

They sat in the living room, sipping. It would not be unfair to say a contented air commanded the room.

“Why do I look like hell?” he asked after a while.

“You died.”

He only bothered to raise his eyebrows, not his heavy Baccarat crystal glass.

“Apparently, you died,” she added. “I’m willing to concede some semblance of life.”

“What did I look like before?”

“More weight, more … arrogance, less like your last best friend had passed on.”

“He did.”

“Randolph?”

Max nodded, drank.

“Too bad. Where?”

“In a forgotten spot in Ireland.”

“Northern Ireland, you mean?”

He shrugged.

“Nothing has come through on Interpol.”

“It wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

“Doesn’t reflect well on either ex.”

“‘Either ex’?”

“The ex-IRA and the ex-anti-IRA. It never ends even when it ends.”

“But you’re home on sabbatical now.”

“You could put it that way. What do you want done? I’m not an assassin. I’m not a snitch. I’m not a doctor, lawyer, or gentleman thief.”

“What a disappointment. How do you know all that if you don’t remember?”

“You don’t forget soul.” He looked into the empty hole of his glass. “Johnnie’s run out on me.”

“Sure has.” She recognized that dark, lost mood. Recent events seemed to confirm his secret “good guy” counterterrorism history and had give her many fewer bones to pick at all with Max Kinsella. Even so, a memoryless Kinsella was still better. That put her in the driver’s seat.

“I’ll get the bottle,” she said.

At least neither of them needed any ice.

Chapter 15

The Trojan Men

At last!

Max was tucked away safely at his house, and Temple finally had time to stay home of a workday morning to catch up with her public-relations business on the computer. And … she could look forward to picking up Matt at the airport at the end of it. Work and pleasure in one bracketing package with a few unexpected butterflies of anxiety fluttering in her blue sky.

By 10:00 A.M. she had fielded six phone calls and twelve texts between updating the Crystal Phoenix’s Facebook page, Tweeting for a dozen clients, and checking that all Google ads were up and working correctly.

“Now what?” Temple demanded of the Fates when her doorbell rang at 10:10.

It couldn’t be a solicitor. They never got past the lobby.

Savannah Ashleigh knew Temple was on the Violet case when she had the time.

Matt had his own key now.

Max? He’d been unnervingly distant and quiet for almost two days. Temple might almost think she’d hallucinated his return. He had her cell-phone number, not vice versa. Temple gave a small snort of annoyance. Having Max back in town and incommunicado was like returning to junior high, waiting for the boy to call … only now he’d text. Or the girl would.

Temple jerked open the door, having worked herself up into being the injured party, and demanded, “About time!”

“I agree,” her aunt Kit said, walking in. “You saw Aldo and I were back two days ago, yet I get nothing, not even an old-fashioned phone call wanting to know all about the honeymoon.”

“I’m not one to pry,” Temple said, shutting the door.

Her aunt snorted this time, a theatrical yet feminine snort of disbelief. “Hah! ‘Pry’ would be your middle name if my first name wasn’t.”

“I would love to have your nickname, ‘Kit,’ as a middle name,” Temple said, embracing her aunt. “Who on earth named you Ursula? And why?”

“Apparently there’s always been an Aunt Ursula in the Carlson family, but I never met the woman ahead of me in the ugly-name sweepstakes. She died young,” Kit reported in a dire tone, perching on the living-room sofa. “And unmarried. Unlike me, who is old and newly married.”

“You don’t look a day over forty,” Temple said.

In fact, petite women like Temple and her aunt Kit Fontana, née Carlson, and Sally Field did seem ageless. Temple was very glad of that fact. Right now, she felt she’d aged twenty years in one transatlantic phone call.

Kit’s head was poking into a chic Parisian bag she’d brought with her, her hair a soft silver-and-copper Brillo pad of loose chin-length curls. She still wore the large-framed, dated, fashion-editor glasses that made her look chic anyway. She hefted a wine bottle.

“I brought you a ton of Italian goodies, but this is a bottle from the vintage Aldo and I drank during our honeymoon at Lake Como. Scenery, water, flowers, swans, wine, walks, talks, nights of not talking. Since you’re about to become a married lady as well, I thought we could share a good mother-daughter chat over this vino.”

Temple took the gift to the kitchen to open it, calling, “You’re not my mother” from around the partition.

“My sister Karen would never drink wine and talk at the same time. Very wise, but not much fun.”

“So.” As Temple came back with two glasses of red, Kit glanced around. “Looks the same. No Midnight Louie peering over my shoulder, though. No Matt doing likewise with you?”

“He’s in Chicago,” Temple said, sitting.

“Still?”

“Some things came up.”

“Family? You said there were ‘issues.’ Maybe the Chicago ‘Family’ swarmed him and whisked him away, like the Fontana brothers here. Aldo is now off on some apparent ‘Unbachelor party’ with Fontana, Inc. That’s why I’m here crying on your wine-soaked shoulder, a deserted bride already.”

“You look in the pink for a deserted bride,” Temple said. And then she sighed.

“What?” Kit asked, sitting up straighter, as alert as a fox terrier scenting fox. “You’re not telling me something. I’ve felt it since you opened the door.”

“Well, this time and place is not of my choosing.…”

“Don’t tell me you and Matt—”

“Are fine. He’s on the brink of some big-time career opportunities, that’s all.”

“Involving what?”

“The Big O.”

“Are we back on my honeymoon topic again?”

“Decidedly not, Aunt. I was referring to Oprah. She’s ‘retired’ from network TV. Even bigger news, if you must know. I’ve heard from Max.”

“Max? What excuse did he have for disappearing this time? His nine lost brothers whisked him away?”

“Only one unrelated man,” Temple said. “A gutsy old guy who’s now dead.”

Kit stared at Temple for what felt like a full minute. “Oh. I entered stage right in a romantic comedy and here I find myself center stage in an unfolding tragedy of some sort. Drink up and tell Auntie all, my dear, because who else knows the cast of characters, and you, so well?”

“Oh, Kit, it’s a bloody mess.” Temple hadn’t wanted to dwell on this today, but Aunt Kit was like her big sister. She kicked off her heels and folded her feet under her on the sofa. “Max is a bloody mess.”

Kit’s eyes widened behind her magnifying lenses.

Temple related the sequence of his accident, his being spirited away by Garry Randolph, the coma, memory loss, and escape, Switzerland, Ireland, his tangles with the ex-IRA and alternative IRA, Kitty the Cutter’s possible death and resurrection, Gandolph’s resurrection and death. Max’s disappearance and return.

“This is a three-play cycle, at least,” said Kit, ex-actress-turned-novelist, after digesting all. “I should have brought two wine bottles. Max is really and truly amnesiac? It’s not just a sympathy ploy? No, drop that rebuking look. He is a master of deception.”

“Whatever Max is, how am I going to convince Matt I couldn’t just leave the man hanging out there among his mortal enemies, his mind blasted and his body in shock?”

“Max really does look and act that bad?”

“It’s not ‘acting.’ He’s been through hell physically, and the death of his mentor is devastating. He was at the wheel, Kit. He was driving. The bullet that killed Garry Randolph was meant for Max. It missed him by only a fluke … which was the seat belt Max insisted Garry wear. That’s what killed him. Max had no time to take safety measures himself and was jolted free of the oncoming bullet.”

“Dramatic irony fit for the Greeks,” Kit mused. “Men will get all Oedipus Rex-y about battle guilt as well as that mother thing. Obviously, Max needed a sensible woman to talk him out of his self-destructive post-traumatic stress. And he knew just where to go. Don’t worry. Matt, ex-priest or media performer, is a professional counselor. He’ll have to understand the situation.”

“He’ll understand it,” Temple said, “he just won’t like it. He also understands the appeal of a lost, wounded puppy.”

“You can’t possibly be describing Max!”

“Don’t laugh, Kit. He’s weak, he’s gaunt, maimed in body and soul. And he’s still being hunted. We all may be if Kathleen O’Connor isn’t dead. Oh, not you, Kit. I’m sure she doesn’t know about you.” Temple frowned. “Probably.”

“Well, if that bitch does know and messes with me, she’ll have Fontana, Inc., on her tail. I am Family now.”

“Kit! I’ve never seen you so fierce.”

“This is a fierce situation. There’s only one way you can soften the blow for Matt.”

“Keep this to myself?”

“Arrange a meeting between him and Max as soon as he comes back into town.”

“Are you crazy?”

“The only way to meet impossible situations is head-on. I’ll mediate, if you like.”

“No,” Temple said, taking a thoughtful sip of bloodred wine. “That’s my job.

“Again.”

Chapter 16

Social Catworking

Your average hard-boiled private eye of yore would not deign to eavesdrop on a couple dishing dames, even if they are dishy, but that is what makes me the more modern and effective sleuth.

I have already overheard enough phone calls around this joint to know that this is a second Very Bad Day for Miss Temple Barr and her Case of the Roving Romeos.

Much later this afternoon, she must again drive to nearby McCarran Airport, this time to pick up Mr. Matt Devine. I hope his long week in Chicago has left him in better physical and mental condition than Mr. Max Kinsella’s longer recent jaunt.

I rather doubt it. Being the fond object of a large extended Polish family and high-powered TV executives hunting a hot property for a week is probably about as bad as dodging political assassins.

Meanwhile, I am aware she is also planning a solo visit to Miss Violet Weiner’s residence first.

Thank God! I am not eager to encounter Miss Savannah Ashleigh and her latest portable purse pet, Captain Jack, especially after I read up on the ferret kind over Miss Temple’s shoulder. I was sitting on her desk, pretending to be slitty-eyed asleep, but, of course, my predator eyes were speed-reading everything about the breed.

It is commonly known that domestic cats were worshipped by ancient Egyptians, and we have been considered wise in all cultures and time periods. Few know that the cat god, Bast, gifted us with the ability to read some two thousand years B.C. Great Bast knew we would never again be so cherished by an entire civilization and might even be persecuted at times, as we were. Great Bast knew that hieroglyphics were not the future of human communication, although I doubt that Great Bast anticipated e-books.

I shudder to think how much more difficult our daily survival would be without some of our seeming “extrasensory” perception, although, alas, most of my peers have long ago lost my “secret weapon.”

Also, being Miss Temple works at home alone, often with me beside her, she has taken to commenting on her online researches aloud to me in a conversational tone.

“Look at this, Louie. Huh. I thought they were a weasely kind.…”

My sentiments exactly! Vermin.

“Ferrets are related to polecats. They have scent glands and do all that catlike ‘marking.’ But … wait! They do the ‘weasel war dance’ while making soft clucking sounds, called ‘dooking.’”

Oh, my scented grandmother!

“Imagine what one can do in the deepest recesses of Savannah Ashleigh’s purse. I think she has gotten accustomed to her aunt’s cathouse odors and isn’t noticing that Captain Jack has a few bad habits.

“They can live in feral colonies,” she adds, nodding my way, as if saying, See, just like you cats. “Although I doubt that polecats are your real relatives.”

I should hope not!

“You know, they remind me of mongooses, which would be handy to have along in one’s purse if you encountered any rattlesnakes. Not that I plan on doing that. I was lucky I did not meet any in that wilderness behind Violet’s house.”

That is what research does to Miss Temple, sends her off into the wild blue yonder of speculation. I can understand she would like her mind taken off Mr. Matt’s imminent arrival and greeting him with the revelation that her “ex” is no longer conveniently absent, but very inconveniently returned.

“Well,” Miss Temple says, shutting down the World Wide Web, “you can keep snoozing. I am going out and I do not need any extra passengers.”

Actually, I have my own assignation this evening, so I need to stay home and get my beauty sleep. Or so I let her think.

Chapter 17

Up for Grabs

As she headed for Aloe Vera Drive that afternoon, for all the upheaval in her private life, Temple found herself worrying about the old woman in that half-hidden house surrounded by suspicion and rescued cats.

Confined to the island of her hospital bed and mind, Violet was helpless except for the weapon of her unsigned will. The moment she selected an executor-heir … who knows what would happen to her?

Temple’s mind replayed her impressions of the sad, scary scene and the cats and people around Violet as she drove. And she couldn’t forget the ghost who haunted the whole kit and caboodle, Alexandra, the tragically dead daughter who died far away and forever estranged from her mother, thanks to the actions of a freak random killer.

Alexandra was not like the victims of the Barbie Doll Killer. A killer with such a specific trademark was actually the more common kind. Drugstore tamperers were rarer, even more random, and, when Temple did a computer search, the hardest to find. The most notorious case involved potassium cyanide–laced capsules in an OTC painkiller bottle. When family members came for one of the victims’ funeral, some stayed in the family house … and two died from taking the same contaminated headache remedy before anyone put the cause into focus. Tragically tripling the death toll for this one family alone.

Temple might find Savannah over the top, but her aunt’s situation was another human tragedy waiting to happen. Temple realized her face had assumed a grim set, despite the ever-sunny Vegas skies and the convertible ride’s breezy vim and vigor.

As she pulled to the curb in front of Violet’s place, the Miata’s small red snout was pushing at the solid white-fortress rear of a parked Chrysler 300. The muscular yet cushy model was a favorite of middle managers, or … hmm.

This time she noticed the overgrown driveway around the house’s side, snarled with stubby mesquite trees and the rears of a tattooed Volkswagen van, which was probably Jayden’s, and a dusty red Ford Focus, which made her think of Rowdy Smith. The name made her smile. He was such a homespun guy. She could see why a pampered, neurotic flower like Alexandra had been drawn to him despite her mother’s flabbergasted objections. What a way to rebel against parental authority, before death took over the job.

Temple put up the Miata’s top and approached the house, tote bag and shoulders making a solid front of it.

Before she could knock, the ponderous door swung open.

A heavyset woman filled the open frame.

Her hair was dyed ultraviolet red, white scalp showing through. She wore eighties shoulder pads and peep-toe pumps. She was shaped like an inverted pyramid or an opera singer or ocean liner of the old school, all imposing shoulders and bust and slim hips on thin stiltlike legs.

“I’m Freddie LaCosta. Who are you?” she asked, nay demanded.

“Temple Barr.” Temple bristled like a schnauzer. “Violet’s niece asked me to look after what things I could for her.”

“You’re not going to be in the will.”

“I don’t want to be in the will. I want to see Violet and the cats, and that they’re all right, and that I will do.”

“Where do you live?”

What nerve! “In Las Vegas.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “House?”

“Ah, condo.”

“Then come in, my dear.” The door swept wide and the wide woman stepped aside.

Temple reentered the house of litter dust and shadows, puzzled even more.

*

Temple headed straight for Violet’s bed, unaccountably worried.

“Hello, my little Legend of Ireland, Deirdre of Ulster, the redheaded girl.”

Violet’s voice was a soft rasp, and her pupils were as large as a cat’s could get in the dark. “I so hoped you’d come again. My Whisper is still gone, and the bewitching Rebecca, the tuxedo cat, too. Can you find them?”

Given where Max had just come from and what he’d had to say of Kathleen O’Connor using the name Rebecca, Temple felt a chill from her nape to her tailbone.

“Rebecca the tuxedo witch?” Temple said, thinking of Kitty the Cutter using the name.

“Oh, so enchanting. Black-and-white. My little baby dolls are dwindling. Savannah said you could help.”

“I want to. I will.” Temple looked up to see that Jayden and Rowdy had gathered around Violet’s bed. Neither man could bear to leave the old woman alone with a visitor.

“You’re just dreaming about cats being gone, again, dear lady,” Jayden said. “Here’s some sweet chili and chamomile tea.” Jayden put the straw to Violet’s mouth, effectively shutting her up.

He may not want her talking to anyone, but he couldn’t stay on the premises all the time. Rowdy backed out of Violet’s eyesight.

“She really doesn’t care to see me,” he whispered to Temple. “That phony bastard turns her against everyone, but she had a head start with me anyway. I’ve done the cat-litter straining and buried the evidence.”

“You do it daily?”

“Once a day, like Pedro. Violet kinda cottons to you, that’s why Jayden moves in so fast. I guess you remind her of something good.”

“Alexandra?” Temple asked the former boyfriend.

“Aw, naw. You’re a different type, nothing personal. Alexandra was, ah, more statuesque? ‘Built’ would be the word. And blond hair like on a Christmas angel. Yeah. I didn’t know what a looker like that saw in me too.” He glanced at the bed. “’Cept I didn’t have ‘expectations,’ like her old lady. Funny. They were awfully alike, but they didn’t know it. Perfectionists, you could say.”

“Thanks, Rowdy,” Freddie stepped in to say, muscling Temple away from Violet’s bed and toward the entry hall where they wouldn’t be overheard. “Now, you seem to be someone Violet can trust. No relation. Never knew her before … what—?”

“Yesterday,” Temple said.

“And you’re only here because…”

“My, uh, friend was worried about her aunt.”

Temple knew she couldn’t say, “I’m Temple Barr, PR” and expect to be taken seriously. But when Temple thought about it, she’d been schooled in criminal surveillance by a master counterterrorist and in shrinkology by a vocational expert. Plus, she was a pretty shrewd judge of people herself. Freddie, she was sure, was a smooth operator.

“Well, your friend should be worried about Violet,” Freddie said, bending to whisper in Temple’s ear. “This house is pretty old and needs updating, but the land could be cleared and worth something nowadays.”

“What about it backing onto the flood-control area where Pedro died?”

“I’m licensed to sell real estate, among other things. You never mention anything dying anywhere near a property, except maybe coyotes, and you’re okay. I hate to say it, but ole Violet is a sitting duck, and it’s hard to figure who’s gathering round for her own good and who’s hoping to profit big-time.”

“You have a seriously pessimistic view of human nature,” Temple said.

“And I shouldn’t have?”

“What do you think Violet is worth with your name on the will?”

Freddie shrugged. “I can’t talk her into any sense. I told her long ago to leave it all to an animal shelter, but there are so many she can’t make up her mind now that she’s ill and confused. That leaves everything she is and has to who wants it worst.”

“How horrible.”

“You got your will made, Miss Just-Wants-To-Help?”

“Ah, no.” Temple was going to say she was about to turn only thirty-one, but Violet had probably been saying that for forty years. Suddenly, one day you realize you’re not immortal and that you’re unprepared for defending what you most care about.

“Do you like cats?” she asked the repellent but logical Freddie.

The woman shook her ridiculously dyed head. “Not a bit. Whatcha gonna do about it?”

Temple turned to look at Jayden, who was singsonging Violet into a trance, and Rowdy, who’d retreated to the kitchen arch to sling a huge bag of cat kibble into bowls he’d fill only as long as Violet lived and his duty to dead Alexandra was over.

Temple had been here just twice, but even she noticed that the cat population was reduced from her first visit.

“My baby is missing,” came the weak keening from the bed.

Was Violet cognizant enough to know the awful truth, or was she speaking about her dead daughter?

Temple was just investigator enough to know she was dealing with an impossible situation. She was a stranger who couldn’t urge Violet to end this impasse and name an heir, and meanwhile people who could be up to God knew what for God knew what reasons were freely coming and going to and from her house in the name of tending the sick.

“What about Violet’s day helper?” Temple asked the savvy Freddie.

“Yolanda comes in early and does her best to keep the living areas litter-dust and cat-hair free, as she has for years.”

“What kind of relationship did she have with Pedro?”

Freddie’s already soaring red-penciled eyebrows almost hit her hairline. “Yolanda has a husband and three adult children. No hotsy-totsy potential there.”

“Is she in the will?”

“Violet has left five or so thousand here and there, not to her relatives, I know that.”

“What about you?”

“Oh,” Freddie said, shaking her extremely coifed head, “we used to be great friends, but we had a falling out. That’s the way it was with Violet. Like Alexandra, you find it’s got to be her way or the freeway. She was just too demanding that Alex stay her mother’s little girl. Even her niece Sue Anna came up a caricature of a girl-woman, caught up in looking like a supermodel, just like these kids today are all little Britneys and Lindsays, no matter how whacked those child stars grow up. That’s why Violet’s taken to you. You’re just a little doll.”

“I resent that,” Temple said. “Height I don’t have, and female I am, but I’m nobody’s ‘little doll.’”

“I’m just saying that Violet wanted to confine Alexandra in a box, always young and beautiful and shallow as ditch water, although she was smarter than anybody thought.”

“You don’t approve of a thing in Violet’s life, down to these cats.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yet you’re here now.”

She glanced to the bed, with Jayden hanging over it. “Violet always had a flaky streak. Mediums and magnets and New Age chicanery. It’s sad to see her weaknesses instead of her strengths ruling her last days. Like this infestation of cats. The home health nurses who stop in to monitor vital signs and change the bedpans have a fit about the unsanitary conditions, but it’s a free country, as long as you can remain sane enough to declare your wishes, and Violet won’t leave her house until she’s carried out of it.”

“You know something about the will,” she told Freddie. “Does she leave the bulk of her estate to whomever cares for her cats?”

“Not a few years ago, when we were still buddies.”

“She could have added that provision in a codicil more recently.”

“And some scam artist could know more about that than I would,” Freddie said, throwing Jayden a poison-pen look with a jerk of her head.

“Whoever inherits, I hope to get the job of selling the house,” she went on. “It will be quite a challenge clearing out all the clutter, and that stuff will be the first thing to go. I’m betting that, despite Violet’s violent wishes otherwise, whoever inherits, the second things to go will be the cats.”

Temple stared into Freddie LaCosta’s sun-damaged features and understood that she too was one of Violet’s worst enemies.

These days, who wasn’t?

Chapter 18

Unlikely Bedfellows

I am ambling through the Circle Ritz parking lot now that Miss Temple and her Miata are off on errands of an investigative nature on the hot and seamy side of town.

I am heading for my favorite oleander bush, shade in Las Vegas being a rare and beautiful thing. I am expecting peace and quiet now that my recently discovered maternal parent, Ma Barker, and her feral clowder have pulled up stakes (rather like vampire slayers) and relocated to the nearby police substation, where they can get all the fast food the folks in desert beige can share with the homeless of one stripe or another.

I have found a vermin-free patch of cool, sandy dirt and have made the proscribed three full ritual circles in tribute to Bast before I lie down. My rear member has coiled around my limbs and body in the approved manner. My eyes have shut and my ears flick only once, at the rude buzz-by of a fruit fly.

Minuscule nobody. Away. I am not a fuzzy peach turning ripe.

So I am producing a lazy buzzing-bee sound to fend off other impudent insects and also to practice the meditative mantra of my kind when I become aware of more lurking shade than I need or want.

Master of the “eyes wide shut” discipline, I allow myself to see without being seen and discern a blurry black blot on my escutcheon, the ever-iffy offspring on my family tree, Miss Midnight Louise.

“I thought you were on watch duty at the house on Mojave,” I say.

“Sorry to disturb your snores,” she replies.

“I was not snoring; I was thinking. How and why did you leave your assigned post?”

“I hitched a ride with the mailman, then switched to the nearest UPS truck until it crossed the Strip, and then it was just a long walk here. And what have you done today so far?”

“I saw off Miss Temple on her new investigative visit to Miss Violet Weiner’s premises. We will have to look further into crimes against cat on that location tonight.”

“So you are taking me off Mister Max duty?”

“Spotting Mister Rafi Nadir visiting the night before last was probably all the hot news you will get there.”

“Yet you wanted me there for a second long night of observation.”

“It never hurts to be overvigilant.”

“I guess not,” Louise says, deciding to bite a wayward toenail.

“Are you saying you saw something of interest last night? Miss Temple was safe at home in our bed here at the Circle Ritz, I can assure you.”

“And I can say the same of Mister Max. He never left the house.”

“What a relief. I must say these humans can be nocturnal wanderers, and we do not want any unsanctioned canoodling before the current favorite, Mister Matt, comes back and it really gets interesting.”

“News flash, O Snoring Sage of the Underbrush. It already has gotten even more interesting. Who do you think visited Mister Max, bold as you please, now that he is resident in the Mojave Way house?”

“Let me think. Mister Rafi Nadir already shocked the footpads off of us by turning up there. It cannot be my Miss Temple. I can account for both the quality and celibacy of her sleep last night. Hmm. Even if Mister Matt happened to slip back into town early, he would not know the house was now occupied again.”

I cannot help manicuring a nail of my own, the big scimitar of dewclaw that would be a thumb if my kind but had them. In fact, I am so stumped I gnaw off a shedding sheath.

“Do not bite yourself to the quick, Pop, trying to figure out the jaw-dropping facts.”

“I give up, Louise. Mister Max’s return was announced only to my little doll. Now it seems half of Vegas is showing up on his doorstep after the sun goes down. This one must be a dame. We black-haired guys are irresistible.”

After I spit out my nail sheath, to Louise’s distasteful silent snarl at my manners, the light dawns and does a surprised spin en pointe in my brain.

“I know!” I hiss triumphantly. “It is that shiny European blond who showed up in Vegas before Mister Max returned. She was a former schoolmate of Crystal Phoenix manager Miss Van von Rhine in Switzerland. You told me about her visiting out of the blue, and we both saw her during the recent Chunnel of Crime case. She is too hot looking to be up to any good. Miss…”—I search my slightly lulled data bank—“Revienne Schneider.”

“I must say you do remember the person in question, and I do consider her a questionable lady.”

Louise settles herself down on her haunches, her folded forelegs assuming the “mandarin position” that hides her long nails and makes her look contemplative.

“But—wrong, Daddy-o!” she spits out with younger-generation sass. “Mister Max’s visitor last night was Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina.”

I could swear she was just saying that to shock me—you know the younger generation—but I can tell by the slits of her pupils that she is shiv-serious.

“So did the lieutenant take him out of there in ankle chains?”

“No. She left. But not in twenty minutes, like your Miss Temple and then Mister Rafi Nadir the first night. What is going on at the house on Mojave Way? Some sort of anti-Synth secret conspiracy? What I was able to hear through the windows was conversational, not confrontational or cozy.”

“Hmm. That house does seem to be a place of pilgrimage since Mister Max came back to town. We definitely need to keep an eye on our sometime-compadres as well as all of Miss Violet’s feline favorites.

“If you want to put your house pets into a perilous position, make sure their care is the condition of a human inheritance. That really makes the poor things objects of jealousy, abduction, and homicide.”

Chapter 19

Shock and Awesome

Temple waited by the baggage-claim area as people surrounded the carousel, jumping up every now and then to compensate for her lack of height. The light started blinking, and baggage came banging over the end of the conveyor belt onto hard metal, but no blond head she recognized appeared on her high jumps.

The first tick of alarm reverberated deep in her stomach. The Amanda Show flew Matt first class for his appearances. No sense in having travel-frazzled guests. He was usually first off.

Temple started circling the people clustered thick as vultures around the rotating carousal, peering through akimbo elbows, around big indifferent shoulders, avoiding successful bag grabbers who turned so fast to leave they could mug her with their hard-shelled Samsonites.

Life was a cabaret when you were short.

Over what appeared to be a tattooed linebacker, who had no business being in Las Vegas since it was one of the largest U.S. cities without any Major League teams, a still-unfamiliar head of highlighted blond appeared and circled her way.

Temple backed out of the crowd and started waving her left hand, her engagement ring attracting sudden interest ranging from awe to avarice.

Before anyone with criminal intent could accost her, Matt pushed the linebacker and his matching-size bag out of the way to capture her hand in his and bring it down in his custody.

“You’re here,” Temple said. “I was beginning to worry.”

“You should worry about letting your ring cause a feeding frenzy.”

Matt grabbed her in a hard “I’m back” embrace. Nothing too Public Display of Affection.

“I missed you.” He shook his head. “The insanity. The show. My family. I’ve had it with solo schlepping from Vegas to Chicago. You’re coming along as my personal assistant until we get married.”

“And then?”

“I’ll leave you at home so I can flirt with fame.” He grinned.

“Hmph. You think. What are we waiting for? And what kept you?”

“Small roll-on and a suiter. I was too beat to bring anything on board. And … the crew wanted me to sign autographs before I deplaned.”

“That happen before?”

“No. It’s just as Ambrosia and the radio station management dreamed would happen. That silly Dancing with the Celebs reality-TV show made me instantly recognizable. A new crown of thorns for the local media freak show.”

“Speaking of crowns of thorns,” Temple said, leaning back to eye him, “looks like The Amanda Show wants to build on your dance-show redo. Blonder hair, tanner skin, whiter teeth.”

“Yeah, I look like a Baywatch rerun escapee. Don’t you pick up where my family left off.”

“Next they’ll want to give you aquamarine contact lenses. That I put my foot down on. Your brown eyes do not make me blue.”

“It’s all very head spinning,” he said, interrupting his report to grab the last two lone pieces of luggage. “This’ll put your Miata to the test.”

“Nope. I brought your Crossfire. Still not the trunk-space king, but roomier.”

“What would I do without you?”

“Don’t even think about it.” Temple grabbed the rolling bag, but Matt resisted.

She was an equal-opportunity helper, but men needed to keep building their upper-body strength, she supposed.

“It seems like I’ve been gone an age,” he said as they trotted and escalated through the vast airport. “How am I going to update you on so much so fast, when all I want to do is—”

“Ditto. My problem exactly. Which is why I’ve booked dinner at the Crystal Phoenix. Almost a home away from home, but a good place for us to come back to earth and catch up.”

“You’re brilliant, Temple. I’m starving for some one-on-one time on a scale that lives up to the way I’ve been wined and dined almost blind in Chicago. When I wasn’t being berated by family.”

“Poor, suffering media hottie. You need a private PR person to make it all better,” Temple said, wincing even as the words came out of her mouth.

What Matt needed was a couple glasses of wine before she told him of her … their … new reclamation-and-redemption project. The PR whiz did reclamation every day in her job. The ex-priest hopefully had a few more freelance redemptions left in him.

One thing she did know. She and Matt, and now Max again, knew separate pieces of a years-long puzzle that could redeem—or destroy—every one of them and what they most held dear.

*

“You look wonderful,” Matt said, when they were seated at the isolated table they’d requested in the Crystal Carousel rooftop restaurant. “Purely objective opinion.”

“Thanks.” She had tossed the tissue-thin circle coat she’d worn to the airport over the back of her chair. “I spent two hours before I decided on this fifties ballerina dress.”

“What do they call that color? It matches your eyes perfectly.”

“You’re going to have to learn all this arcane stuff to live with me and my wardrobe. Changeable taffeta. Goes from lilac to blue.”

“Yeah, they do. Your eyes. And that neckline?”

Temple shrugged. “Off the shoulder.”

“Your bare shoulders are sexier than Angelina Jolie’s … you know.”

“The fifties was a more gracious, flirtatious, feminine era. And, frankly, I can compete on shoulders and waistlines. On bustlines, not so much.”

“So why are you regaling me with the competitive you and keeping me at table’s length?”

“I’ve been making the rounds of the vintage-clothing shops while you were gone and wanted to show off. And … we have a lot to talk about.”

“Yes, I know,” he began, contritely.

That’s where she needed to have him before it was her turn to be contrite … big-time. He of all people would understand guilt.

“This Chicago media stuff is sudden, I know,” he said. “It was all show-and-tell. Nothing will get serious until my agent gets in on it. I was in phone contact with Tony Valentine all along. He told me to bask in all the perks and pretty talk and commit to nothing.”

“Oprah already retired.”

“Just from network TV, so everybody’s still trying to fill the gap.” He named a mouthy female celeb.

“And for a vote in favor of only one, I’d bet,” Temple said, “she’s abrasive.”

“Humor often is.”

“But Oprah’s appeal is being a sort of overlady of everything family and psychologically dysfunctional and physically healthy and fashionable.”

“That’s a wide swath to follow in,” Matt said. “A lot of new shows will try until something clicks.”

“Or someone.” Temple smiled as a waiter wafted a couple tall, footed glasses in front of them.

“The newest house signature cocktail,” he announced, “compliments of Mister Fontana.”

“Which Mister Fontana?” Temple asked, craning her neck, though it was most likely the owner, Nicky.

But the donor had deserted the dining room.

“What is it?” Matt asked, more to the point.

“A Silver Zombie,” the waiter said, happy to have a bit part. “Silver tequila, of course, lime vodka, Blue Curaçao, et cetera.”

“It’s those ‘et ceteras’ that get your head turned around,” Matt commented.

Temple was thinking that a zombie was the perfect drink to numb Matt’s sure-to-be major reaction to her news about Max.

“Smooth move,” Matt said, making Temple start. Was he reading her mind? “The drink matches your dress and your eyes.”

They clicked rims and sipped. Not bad, Temple thought. Like a Moonlight Margarita on steroids.

“Before we order,” she said, “I need to … address a certain change in status.”

“Believe me, Temple,” Matt put in, “this Chicago talk-show notion is just that—all talk so far. I’ve had time on the plane to think straight, and I realized I couldn’t just whisk you out of Las Vegas, where your business and home are now.”

“Yes, you can. In fact, I’d prefer to be out of town and with you in Chicago right now.”

“You’re serious?”

She nodded. “While you were gone, there was a murder connected to the Crystal Phoenix.”

“You’re right.” Matt had sipped the Silver Zombie a third down. “You do need to leave this town.”

“It also involved the … Synth. I found their hidden headquarters at the Neon Nightmare club. And Kathleen O’Connor may still be alive, Matt.”

“Kitty the Cutter? Can’t be. I identified the body.”

“You saw her, what? A couple times, and she sliced you with a razor on one of the occasions. Besides, she may have had a … body double.”

The waiter wafted a sampler tray of hot and cold running hors d’oeuvres down on the middle of the table.

“Somehow,” Matt said, “this is not the most appetizing conversation.”

“Dig in or drink up,” Temple warned him; “this is going to be a bumpy night.”

“Why?”

“Max is back.”

Chapter 20

Set ’Em Up, Max

“Max is alive?” Matt looked like he’d been poleaxed. “You’ve heard from him, then?”

Matt’s expression remained puzzled. “Wait. You said ‘back.’ In Las Vegas?”

She nodded.

“So…?”

“We were right. Someone tried to kill him.”

“Now he’s back, and the first person he contacted was you?”

“Actually, he called me from abroad and I told him to come back.”

The waiter arrived and handed them menus, waiting to deliver a long, lavish list of the night’s specials.

“We’ll order from the menu, thank you,” Matt said.

“Another round of cocktails, sir?”

“No.” Temple.

“Yes.” Matt.

She eyed their half-full glasses after the waiter left.

“We’ll make short work of these, I’m sure.” Matt grabbed his footed cocktail glass.

“Matt, I told you bald truth, but there are a busload of extenuating circumstances. You would have done the same thing in my place.”

“I kinda doubt that. We’re just getting our new life together … together … and the last thing I—we—need is Max Bloody Kinsella popping out of the woodwork.”

“He’s not Max anymore.”

“Oh, that’d be a real magician’s trick.”

“He has no memory since he came out of a coma a couple weeks ago.”

“He found you fast enough.”

“His, um, counterterrorism cohort, shall I call him?—Gandolph the Great—told him about me. And you. Max didn’t remember us at all. Still doesn’t.”

“You’ve seen him already? While I was gone? And isn’t that Gandolph guy dead?”

“His real name was Garry Randolph. He and his magician persona were presumed dead after that séance at the haunted house last Halloween, but he wasn’t. He was shot dead in Northern Ireland about a week ago days ago. In a car. With Max at the wheel.”

Matt shook his head and worked on the Silver Zombie. “And you say Kitty the Cutter may still be knocking around somewhere, too? Everybody we presumed dead … isn’t. Except for poor Gandolph?”

“That’s about it.”

“Chicago’s looking better every second.” Matt buried his face and expression behind the tall padded menu.

“Matt,” Temple said.

“We’d better eat to offset the drinks. And think.” Matt clapped the menu shut so definitely, Temple jumped.

He sighed and shook his head. “That’s why I love you. Wounded birds will not be left flapping on your doorstep, even when they’re hawks. But I am not deliriously happy.”

The waiter edged toward them. Matt ordered New York steak, medium. Temple wanted to order crow, but settled on flounder.

Matt picked up the “discussion.”

“I see why you wanted to lay this on me in public.”

“No. I wanted you to be relaxed from the flight and the hullabaloo in Chicago and whatever your family’s been up to.”

“You are a born referee, Temple. You want everyone to get a fair chance before they tear each other part. Where’s the resurrected Wonder Boy now?”

“I left him at the house he inherited from Garry Randolph, where he’d lived in hiding after his, um, first return to Las Vegas.”

“After his first abrupt, unexplained disappearance,” Matt said.

“I haven’t seen him since.”

“And that’s been?”

“For two days.”

“And you couldn’t have called me? Warned me?”

“You’d want this over the phone? Look, Matt, you’re not really jealous, are you?”

He thought about it. “No. The counselor in me realizes you’re better off knowing what happened to him. You need the closure, but me, I just want a past that’s laid to rest.”

“As with your stepfather.” Temple nodded, remembering Matt’s tenacity in tracking down the louse. That’s what had brought him to Las Vegas and the Circle Ritz and her. “Laying a past to rest can’t always be literal,” she argued. “Your stepfather is truly and sincerely dead, and he was also pretty harmless by then. If Kathleen O’Connor is still out there … not the case. She seemed to have it in for you as well as for Max. He and Garry found out all about her in Ireland.”

“I wish they all had stayed there,” Matt said as their salads arrived.

The pair of Caesar salads were too lavish to be ignored. They came with a Crystal Phoenix twist: capers instead of anchovies in the dressing. Temple didn’t remember ordering salad. She guessed they both had mechanically OK’d the first item on every course the waiter had thrown at them.

“So,” Matt said, picking at the greens, “Kinsella knows nothing of his past except a lot of juicy stuff about Kathleen O’Connor that he and the late Garry Randolph uncovered in the last week or so?”

Temple nodded. “I didn’t press him for details. He’s … not the same. Both his legs were broken as well as his head in that arranged Neon Nightmare accident. I thought the new revelations were something we should discuss together.”

“You and me.”

She nodded.

“And Max Kinsella?”

She nodded.

“Because…”

“I don’t think any of us will be safe until we lay the mystery of Max’s past with Kathleen O’Connor—or Kathleen O’Connor herself—to rest.”

Matt literally chewed it over.

“You’re the girl gumshoe,” he said. “Look. Here comes our second round and we’ve just killed our first Silver Zombies. Too bad ghosts of the past aren’t that easy to get rid of.”

Chapter 21

The Cactus Garden Cha-Cha

It is a sad day—I should say night, in this instance—when the senior partner of a firm is forced to follow the druthers of the junior partner.

That is exactly how I find myself on the hard concrete of a flash-floodwater-control channel, sneaking up on a tangle of ungoverned desert scrub with Miss Midnight Louise leading the slo-mo “charge,” so to speak.

I voice my objections again.

“We will have more stickers in our soft underbellies than a porcupine’s back has spines if we crawl over all that unfriendly terrain to the house.”

“Obviously, your night-assault skills have suffered sadly from La Vida Lazy at the Circle Ritz condo of your currently conflicted roommate,” Louise says. “I know when to zig and zag to find the soft sandy aisles between this Inquisition of cactus plants.”

“Cleverly put, my would-be flake off the paternal monument, but you forget—yowl!—one thing.”

“Keep down the noise! And what is that one thing?”

“Mine! My underbelly is a lot more complicated than yours, and I am a tad broader of beam. If I had wanted to be curry-combed I would have come back as a horse.”

“That is you, all right, the old gray nag,” she hisses over her shoulder. “There may be persons of evil intent lurking about, so keep the objections to yourself.”

Just then I spy an incandescent glow to my left, behind a tall scrawny mesquite tree. Enough with being a lowly grunt! I spring toward the slender trunk and ratchet up it with my built-in pitons.

Mesquite trees may make twenty or thirty feet in height. They are more an ambitious shrub than a real tree and thus not built for taking much weight. You do not want to mess with the young shoots, not only because of the weight problem. New growth has nasty protection—three-inch thorns that could deflate the tire on an SUV.

So I am up the tree, out on a limb, and leaping toward the light like a would-be saved soul before you can sneeze “Midnight Louise.” As I suspected, I spy a window and am soon perching claws-out on a sill.

These old adobe-style houses have thick walls and wide sills. I can relax and stare right into the living room. I love being on a high perch in a power position.

I know as I contemplate my next move that nothing bad is going down in my little corner of Vegas now that I am on the job.

As for the rest of the city, that is up to the two-foots on the official force.

The smart money is on me.

Chapter 22

All Dolled Up

The victim’s body was laid out like a corpse on an autopsy table, stiff-armed and -legged, a horrible life-size doll.

Homicide Lieutenant C. R. Molina stalked around the corpse lying on the pavement. The night was warm and dark, the shopping-mall parking lot empty except for the circle of police vehicles.

Forensics had done its grisly duty. Every iota of evidence had been photographed and collected. The meat wagon was waiting, along with Coroner Grizzly Bahr at the end of the ride. Then would come the Y-cut of the torso, the circular saw through the skull-top, and the corpse wouldn’t resemble a molded plastic doll anymore.

Molina could already hear the saw’s whine, scent the Febreze-laden, icy air of the city morgue. She was not quite ready to release this corpse from its state of suspended wholeness.

There was not a mark on the girl’s form. She was twenty or so, high-fashion-model thin, with her hipbones as prominent as an undressed department-store mannequin’s through her thin summer skirt, her small breasts supernaturally firm under the lacy top.

Her open-eyed face, though, was a mask of distortion and anguish. Most corpses, even victims of terrible accidents, even horribly damaged ones, were blessedly expressionless.

This girl, though, had stared death in the face and struggled to the moment of her last breath.

Molina was betting the Cause of Death was strangulation, from the inside out. Not a crime of passion, except for the ghastly repetition of these circumstances.

Beside the victim lay a naked Barbie doll—a tiny mini-me—its El Greco–lean torso and limbs an equally stiff version of the victim’s.

Unlike the dead girl, the Barbie doll wore marks of violence. Scarlet nail polish circled Barbie’s elongated neck at the throat, visible even beneath a tiny, throttling chiffon scarf. Scarlet nail polish dotted her tiny wrists, slashed across her slim-hipped, big-breasted torso. Her feet were half severed at the ankles, and screwdriver-size dents had impacted her face.

“Turns your stomach,” said an unexpected voice beside Molina.

She glanced at the man in shopping-mall civvies who’d appeared out of the black nowhere that was her crime-scene mind.

“What brought you here?” she asked the undercover narc called Dirty Larry.

“Heard it on the grapevine,” he answered. “Thought about your daughter.”

Molina’s hands fisted in the pockets of her khaki blazer.

“You are not a detective,” she told him in clipped, superior-officer rebuke. “You are on temporary traffic-accident duty. You have no reason to be here.”

“It is a parking lot, Loo,” he said.

“Not amusing.”

Molina walked away to quiet the hyper-heartbeat he had kicked up by mentioning her daughter, waving at the morgue attendants to claim the body. She’d wanted to be alone on the scene with it longer, but there’d be film and photos at 9:00 A.M. tomorrow.

Dirty Larry had bulled his way into her professional and personal life on sheer nerve and a smarmy hint of sexual interest. She’d let him ride that wave because she’d needed someone to do off-the-books investigating on Max Kinsella for her. She’d never trusted Dirty Larry. Now she had a disabled Max Kinsella for that kind of work, who was probably a lot better at it even without his former strength and memory. She harbored a huge need-to-know about Kinsella’s history since his spectacular fall from good health, but she could wait.

Dirty Larry was the impatient type. He followed her, still an irritant.

“You showing up at my crime scenes is getting old, Podesta.” She stopped and eyed the empty lot, wondering what the security cameras would reveal. “The first time was enterprising and ballsy. Twice gets irritating.”

“Kinda like your love life?”

Molina spun to face him. “Don’t tread on me. Or bring Mariah’s name into this crime scene. Thank God her disappearance was a misguided teen scheme and we found her quickly. You don’t have any children. You have no right to play on my parental concerns. What are you up to? It sure isn’t getting into my bed, the way you’re going.”

“No. I don’t have kids. I never married. Not with a job you can never bring home. Doesn’t mean I haven’t seen lots of kids wounded or killed by the drug trade. It doesn’t mean I don’t care as much as you do about catching this Barbie Doll Killer.”

“As much as me? Don’t you have enough grief fighting the drug wars? Why?”

“Look. I was there several nights ago when your daughter went AWOL and the mutilated Barbie doll was found in Mariah’s bedroom. She’s young for this perp’s preferences—thirteen—but how old is this dead girl? Seventeen? Twenty, tops? You’ve gotta admit to the facts.”

“Which are?” Molina used her lowest “show-me” tone.

“The Barbie Doll Killer has been circling the Southwest to the California state line for years, targeting young women who audition at shopping malls for reality-TV shows that offer them a grab at fame. Vegas is at the center of the pattern now, with two shopping-mall Barbie murders, and so is your daughter.”

“You think I need assistance putting patterns together, Officer Podesta? I’m the homicide cop. You’re moonlighting. Undercover narcs are not needed or wanted on my crime scenes.”

“I might have some offbeat insight.”

“Mentioning my daughter is not going to get me to listen. I take it as a distraction.”

He leaned close, took her elbow. “I know you’ve got to concentrate on your objectivity, Carmen. Let me look out for Mariah. You’re too close, too professional.”

“You’re too close,” she said, jerking her arm out of his confidential custody.

“You’re losing it,” he grumbled under his breath.

“Get off my crime scene.”

“I know this guy. He operates like someone high on cocaine. He can’t stop himself. We’ve got to do it.”

“He’s on my turf now,” she said. “For the second time, yes, and he’s come out of the Malibu Barbie closet. So far he’s left a dead body and mutilated Barbie doll images. This time, this crime scene, it’s come together, doll and human victim. Go play with your shattered headlights and tire patterns. I’ll do what my gender is supposed to do best from birth—play with dolls.”

*

All the lights were off at Molina’s modest bungalow near Our Lady of Guadalupe Church and School when she pulled her old Volvo into the driveway. The time must be snagged close to either side of midnight, she thought, too tired to check her watch. She was even too weary to maneuver the car into the garage and weave her way through the laundry room into the house. She’d use the front door and her key.

Mariah had a new overnight “housekeeper” now, Angela Ortega, a single homeowner in the neighborhood and former beat cop going for a law degree. What a find! Angela could burn the scholar’s midnight oil while watching Mariah, and was young and attractive enough to earn Mariah’s teen fascination. Angela made a great role model, and she’d been tops on the firing range.

Molina let the heavy driver’s door slam shut. Gotta find time to shop for a new car someday soon, she thought. Get Mariah in on the hunt. Something “cool” she could drive in … gosh, learner’s permit in two years only? Dread.

“Got a minute?” a low voice asked.

Molina didn’t think; she just spun, Glock out of its paddle holster to face the male voice at the level of her head, which was about six feet. Big guy could mean big gun.

“Tough night.” The voice hadn’t tensed at all.

Her shoulders dropped. A little. “Kinsella. Don’t you know better than to sneak up on a cop?”

“Didn’t want to wake the house. Figured you wouldn’t either. Smooth, fast draw, though. Very Wild West.”

“When you said ‘Tough night,’ just now. It wasn’t a question.”

“No, I followed Podesta to your crime scene.”

“You were lurking in that parking lot, too? You want to be considered a suspect?”

“Nothing new for me with you, I’m told. You wanted him followed.”

“So … where did Larry come from?”

“I’d hesitate to call it stalking…”

“Pot calling the kettle black?”

“… but he keeps a close eye on your movements. Is it love or is it something else I should know about?”

She looked over her shoulder toward the house. She wasn’t ready to bring Mariah into yet another semisuspicious man’s knowledge bank.

“If letting that car door slam shut didn’t wake the house, our talking won’t,” he pointed out.

“I was … thinking.” She wouldn’t admit to the crime of “tired.”

“So was I. You don’t trust either this Dirty Larry guy or this Rafi Nadir. Why is your business, but major crime is your business, too. You think either one of them might be your Barbie Doll Killer?”

“Remote possibility.”

“Yeah. One’s your ex and one’s your … wannabe current.”

“I didn’t hire you for background checks, just keeping an eye on their whereabouts.”

“You know ‘the past is present’ in all police work.”

“In Shakespeare, too,” she said. “Don’t get fancy on me. So where were the boys earlier this evening? From the time it got dark?”

“As assistant security chief at the Oasis Hotel, Nadir gets assigned mostly night shifts.”

“So he was there?”

“No. He alternates from the three-to-eleven-P.M. shift to the eleven-P.M-to-seven-A.M. turn. He went out for dinner about eight.”

“Not at the Oasis? He’d get comped.”

“Nope. Nice restaurant in Henderson. Offers this fancy fondue of several courses, steak to strawberries.”

“I know the place.”

“Then you know the spread takes a couple hours or more to eat.”

“Rafi has an alibi. How nice for him. Still, was he alone?”

“Nope.”

She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t, and she wasn’t going to ask, man or woman? They both knew Nadir was her ex, ex-live-in anyway, and the last thing she wanted to look like in front of Max Kinsella was insecure. If you’re going to be a rattlesnake handler, don’t blink.

“What about Dirty Larry?” she asked.

“Love that street name. He’s more interesting than Nadir in another way. I got on him as soon as Rafi was settled down with his appetizer course of exotic dipping vegetables, rutabagas, and snow peas.”

“That sounds so disgusting,” she said.

“The place is all the rage. Lots of couples get engaged there.”

Molina bit her lip. Was Rafi courting some … woman? Good! Maybe he’d forget his shared custody hopes for Mariah. Not likely on second thought. He’d have better luck if he was settled and married. Unlike a working mother with a demanding 24/7 job.

“Dirty Larry was another story,” Kinsella went on. “As soon as Rafi was snuggled in with his flame-melted cheeses and chilled wine courses, I looked up Podesta. He has a police radio in his car, which was sitting on the fringes of that mall parking lot when you pulled into it after the uniforms had answered the alarm.

“He has a police radio in his personal vehicle?”

“Yeah. Big old Impala. Kinda cool. Almost Barracuuudah.”

“Only to overage juvenile delinquents.” She peered toward the street. “What are you driving now?”

“You’ll never see it. Ditto Nadir and Podesta. Isn’t that what you hired me for? To be an unseen man of mystery?”

“I hired you to report without any fancy frills. So Larry was on the crime scene before I got there? For how long?”

“Long enough to have done the deed and faded into the wings until you saw him arrive later.”

“But you were there at the same time, too.”

“Ay, there’s the rub.”

“Not Shakespeare again.”

“Appropriate for the tragic death tonight.”

“Yes. It is all about the victim. Wait! Are you leaving?” The dark near her seemed less dense.

“I’m going home,” his voice said, fading, “to put Elvis on the sound system.”

“You listen to Elvis?”

“‘Suspicious Minds,’” Max Kinsella said. “Classic.”

Chapter 23

Break Dancing

Imagine my surprise to see myself mirrored in the window.

Not exactly mirrored.

The dude is the same species and gender as me, but his vibrissae are black and his brown tabby coat is longer than mine, forming a lionlike mane around his face. His eyes are as narrowed and his pupils as dark as mine.

If I had wanted to have a mirror-go-round, I could not do to better to come up with a worthy opponent. So imagine my surprise when he lays a set of hooked claws on the window crank inside and makes it do the boogie-woogie.

In an instant a wave of fully feline occupation wafts into my sensitive black nostrils as the window swings outward. We are talking clowder here, and indoor.

“Let me in by the hairs of my chinny-chin-chin,” I order. “You need outside help. Something very dark and dirty is going down here, and only I—”

“Cat burglar!” my doorman screeches. “Black as sin and hanging by his dewclaws from our doorway.”

Immediately there commences such a caterwauling as has not been heard outside a Disney animation.

The inner watchcat rolls out the window sideways, so I am almost knocked four feet back and eight feet down on my keister.

It is only by the scrabbling of my claws that I am able to dodge the opening window and to eel inside, not without plummeting down two feet to a countertop.

“Reach for the cupboard handles and identify yourself, stranger,” the big hairy dude demands. “Maverick is my name and guardian is my game.”

“Louie, Midnight Louie. Founder of Midnight Investigations, Inc.”

Immediately, hordes of housebound kitties loft up to greet me, eager for news of the outer world.

“So you are a detective? Detect. Where is our wonderful Mister Pedro?” they mew plaintively. “He always brought us Fiesta Feline bits and tended to the indoor plumbing.”

“We miss him,” a quartet of calico kittens croon. “He was our schnooky-wooky, hunny-bunny, daily-waily do-the-doo-doo kinda kind and special dude.”

“I hate to break the news, crew.” I crawl atop a cookie jar for a podium. “Your daily-waily guy-to-go-to is gone, a victim of what may be Mother Nature—as are we all—or the all-too-common Foul Play.”

The wails turn into boos and boo-hoos.

“I am here,” I howl, to overcome the winsome kitten choruses, “to make things right. But I need your cooperation and testimony.”

Several males shrink at my mention of the last word.

Maverick stares them down. “Miss Violet has always seen us properly tended, so there would be no untoward breeding. We are all righteous dudes. You do not come in unless you are litter-free. Right, cat burglar?”

I am not about to admit to this politically correct crowd that I have an escape clause, namely my involuntary vasectomy. It is too big a word for them, anyway. It is too big a word for me, too. I am not much excited about having something to do with a pansy container like a “vase.”

Wouldn’t you know that Miss Midnight Louise picks this moment to finally claw her way onto the windowsill and into my persuasive pitch?

“He and me, his essential partner in Midnight Investigations, Inc., are litter-free,” she announces, making all the female ears in the area, which are numerous, perk up. “Midnight Louise is the name.”

The females inside commence to caterwaul themselves hoarse, since they always stick together, much to male detriment. Or they do not like competition. Although I do not admit the kit-chit is an offspring, I must admit she got a share of my striking good looks from somewhere very close to me. The motives of the female of the species, any species, are always multiple and subtle.

“Maverick,” I howl, “I rely on your guidance.”

Having thus named my inside man, I leap to the kitchen floor.

Ook! It is covered with niblets of dry kibble and maybe dingleberries and ear wax. Despite the best intentions of humans and civic animal-control acts, there may indeed be “too many cats” here for one indoor clowder.

My poor Miss Temple! She is fighting a losing battle. Unless we organize these cats to protect their helpless defender and keep Miss Violet alive, we will not be able to prevent her losing her feline friends to the merciless disposition of the law, and, even worse, whatever friends and family she has who want the whole kit and caboodle … by which I mean money, not formerly feral furs.

While the resident mob gathers to look us over, I convey all my concerns to Miss Midnight Louise through soft whispers and body language.

“None of that here!” a tortoiseshell of size says, boxing my ears.

I stare into malevolent, squinty green eyes and about twenty-two pounds of muscle, fat, and fur soaking wet after a tongue-bath.

Louise’s whipping longhaired tail smashes me in the kisser as she leaps between us.

“Lay off of my aging partner, Moby Mama. He has just had a very tough climb, and we were simply conferring. Get your mind out of the alley it was born in.”

“Dumpster-diving snit,” the tortie hisses right back. “We are all street people in here, except for the Persian castoffs.”

“You got something against Persians?” I demand, that being a personal sore point with me. “They have more moxie in their smallest vibrissa than you have in your whole … um, sumo-wrestling-worthy body.”

Which she is about to throw on me, wholesale. Which I cannot allow, as my daintier daugh … duh … partner would be in the way and possibly smashed.

Maverick flips his tail tip over all our faces, so we are forced to blink.

“Calm down, ladies and gentleman. I run an easy establishment here. No unsheathed weapons or yawning maws on site. Number one, I say so. Number two, you will get one of our dear lady’s visitors coming in to check on the noise, and you know what we all think about them.”

The intense hisses that fill the room remind me of a snake pit. No one here is venomous, thank Bast, but I am facing a sea of unified and viral dislike. We of the cat clan are not loud and obvious in our hatreds, but that makes us all the more dangerous to cross.

A rangy half-year female calico dances into the middle of the kitchen floor, as young ones will.

“Our beloved Pedro went outside and never came back,” she mews. “What do the strangers know about that? Our food trays are empty and our … indoor sandboxes are overflowing. We came inside for shelter, but now—”

“Hush, youngster,” Maverick hisses. “Keep your cries below human-ear level. Our only indoor friend needs us more than we need her now.”

“This is a hostage situation,” Miss Midnight Louise growls in my ear. “These are half-domesticated homeless. Their real caretakers are both out of service—one sick and one dead. And the vultures are circling.”

“Are not they always?” I ask no one in particular.

Something is nagging at me. Besides Miss Midnight Louise and Moby Mama.

“Say, Maverick,” I begin, blowing a confidential question in his spidery-furred ear. These longhairs always make me wish I had an electric-powered nose-hair clipper. Even humans know to keep their ear hairs under control.

“Yeah, Louie?”

I have not given him permission to get past calling me Mr. Midnight, but given that he runs this gang and that my Ma Barker and her police substation posse are far away, I put up with his familiarity.

“What is this about Persians? Frankly, besides you and Miss Midnight Louise, I see few even semi-longhairs in this house.”

Maverick shakes his head. “Sad case. I do my best to run a clean clowder, but females mightily outweigh the males here.”

“Yeah.” I glance at Moby Mama, who has subsided into a Jabba the Hutt–like pile against the kitchen island.

Maverick is still shaking his head, which drifts way too much flea powder into my sensitive sleuthing nostrils. My Miss Temple manages to anoint my shoulder blades monthly with some vermin-dispensing potion that does not contribute to air pollution, although I understand care must be used.

However, I have the luxury of a one-feline household.

“So these supposed Persians?” I prod Maverick with a well-sharpened but friendly shiv. It is more of a brush than a thrust, but only because I have exquisite control when I want to, as the ladies will attest.

“A sorry lot,” Maverick said, shaking his big head. “I can only do so much as a peacemaker. They just do not fit in. How would you like to control a mixed bag of cats in a burlap sack whose Noah’s Ark is sinking? Those two do not have the basic survival skills. Look at them.”

I look around, following his on-the-floor focus.

I spot a pair of beige dust bunnies under the kitchen table, behind the wrought-iron curlicue legs, which form a briar patch of sorts.

I spot Sleeping Beauty in a thorn forest. Two of them, only they are more like Rapunzels who’ve fallen from their tower.

I look into the huge, sorrowful green eyes of the pair of woefully knotted outcasts against the wall and recognize … the Divine Yvette and the Sublime Solange.

Chapter 24

Maxed to Death

“What’s the big surprise in the parking lot you texted me about?” Temple asked as soon as she burst through Matt’s unlocked unit’s door at 11:00 P.M.

They’d gotten back from dinner after ten, both self-conscious after all the talking about Max had left the ghost of his love affair with Temple hanging over them like ectoplasmic halitosis.

Following some discreetly illicit-feeling necking in the hall leading to her door, they’d agreed that Matt needed rest before getting to the radio station at 11:30.

“Especially,” Temple had said sensibly, “with such an unexpected high-pressure week in Chicago to recover from.”

Matt had agreed, uneasily. He still felt crummy about Temple wasting her seduction-worthy dress on a half-baked hallway interlude and had stopped after climbing the stairs to his own place a floor above, thinking about going back down instantly.

Then he noticed someone loitering by the short hall to his door.

“Mister Devine?”

The guy was about twenty-four, dressed in an expensive business suit to pass as at least thirty, his hair lightly gelled into an upward eager beaver do.

Matt nodded slowly. He didn’t look like a thief, more like he was selling something. Door-to-door, at 10:30 P.M.?

“Craig Coppell.” He thrust out a tentative, moist-palmed hand that smelled of … Old Spice? “I’m sorry to disturb your evening, sir, but I’ve been waiting here since six and was instructed not to let a day pass until I gave you this. It was supposed to be here before you got back home.”

He pulled his spongy hand from Matt’s grasp and replaced it with … a set of keys.

“Is this some … sales promotion?” Matt asked, feeling steel prongs poking his palms.

“Promotion? Oh, no, sir, Mister Devine. Maybe for me. Someday. Just look down in the parking lot. With the compliments of Harvey Klinger and Dave Eckstein. Good night, sir, and, whew, sweet dreams.”

The guy was gone before Matt could react. Harvey and Dave sounded familiar, like the Harry and David mail-order catalog of fruit arrangements.…

Duh! Matt turned, but the last echoes of the determined Craig’s running footsteps were wafting up the two stories from the lobby.

If he could forget his new Chicago acquaintances so fast, he guessed he could let go of a formerly presumed-dead guy with a whacked-out memory chip. So, a bit later, he texted Temple to come up to his parlor for a parking-lot surprise.

“What is it, Matt? You’re looking stunned.”

“Like your outfit wouldn’t do it?”

She’d changed into some pink skimpy-topped pajama set with silver chocolate kisses all over them and looked good enough to put over vanilla ice cream and call it a sundae.

He nuzzled the halter straps near her neck, then put an arm around her bare shoulders and marched her to the balcony off the living room. She spotted the new feature of the parking lot below instantly.

“The liquid-silver Jag is yours?”

“Maybe. Call it a perk. Bribe. Whatever.”

“What? Who?”

“The Chicago producers. Can you believe I’d forgotten their names already?”

“No. No more MIA memories around here. How could you forget?”

“It’s all a blur.”

“They must really, really like you. I love the car. While you were ogling it, did you notice that clowder of feral cats hanging around the parking lot? I haven’t seen them recently, and I’m afraid Louie has driven them off, poor things.”

“No, I did not see any cats.” Matt turned her to go back inside.

“Why are you frowning?” she wanted to know. “I know you’re tired and don’t want company just before racing off to WCOO. All that daytime-TV business in Chicago must have been exhausting. And, say, we never discussed the family matters you said were kicking up.”

By then they were back inside and she was hanging off him like a fond climbing vine.

“Temple, you’ve got enough questions to keep the WCOO call-in line busy for the whole Midnight Hour. Yeah, it’s a bit disorienting to be back after all that’s happened, and that’s why I’m afraid I blew it tonight.”

Her sudden silence reminded Matt that he wasn’t the only one who’d returned after an absence, after a much longer and more dramatic absence than his own week-long jaunt.

“I don’t know what’s got you wired,” he told her, “but the last thing I’m going to do with the rest of the hour—before I have to leave to listen to everyone else’s troubles—is sleep, so maybe you could get me some hyperdrive, too.”

“Just get comfy on the infamous Communist couch, and I’ll bring us two Diet Cokes with lime.”

“The ‘infamous Communist couch’?” he asked when she returned to put the glasses on the matched small coffee tables fronting the sinuous length of red-suede couch.

“This is where WCOO had you do that barefoot lounge pose for their first Midnight Hour billboard. It’s by the fifties designer Vladimir Kagan, and it’s red. Red as in ‘Communist,’ back in the day. So assume the position and I’ll cozy up.”

Matt laughed as he kicked off his casual suede loafers and made room for Temple to curl up alongside him.

“When you’re on TV,” she said, “you won’t get away with wearing polo shirts and chinos, even if they come from men’s shops on the Strip.”

“You mean I’ll have to dress on camera like Regis Philbin? Then it’s no deal.”

“Okay,” Temple said. “We can discuss the details of your media future in full daylight. For now, back to my questions. The cats.”

“I didn’t spot any feral colony before I left town, and didn’t see a whisker since we got back tonight. Not even Midnight Louie’s.”

“Me neither, not in the past twenty-four hours, anyway. Which is odd. Usually he’s patrolling the Circle Ritz at night. He’s very territorial, you know.”

“I know,” Matt said, untying the soft knit bow at her nape that held up the loose top.

“I’m forgetting all those questions,” she warned.

“I think I’d like that about now.”

“Wait. This is most important. What’s up with your family?”

Matt leaned back, pulling her atop him. “The good news is our getting married would hardly ruffle a Polish feather.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s my mother’s getting married that has the extensive extended family in an uproar.”

“Your mother? Remarrying? That’s wonderful. Maybe we can make it a double ceremony.”

“Temple.” He put a hand over her mouth. “Temple, Temple. Always the PR hotshot. No, we do not want to be involved in any way in my mother’s marital plans. I did mention that a distinguished older guy seemed to be sweet on her at the tourist-spot Polish restaurant where she’s a hostess?”

“Yeah, I guess. You said she was coming out of her self-imposed shell after punishing herself for having you out of wedlock—wedlock, that does sound mandatory and icky—by marrying that abusive loser, um, Efflinger, Essing.…”

“Effinger. Cliff Effinger.”

“Right. Effinger. But he went down with the Treasure Island’s old pirate-ship attraction, after someone bound him to the bow to go to a watery grave when the ship was sunk during the evening spectacle. So your mom’s free to remarry, even by the Catholic Church’s standards.”

Matt shook his head in disbelief. “That’s not the problem. She’s perfectly free to marry. I think it’d be wonderful if she did marry someone. I would even give her away, since she’s old-fashioned and probably willing to be given away.… What would you do about being ‘given away,’ Temple?”

“Oh, I’d let my father waltz me down the aisle. I am the only daughter. I really couldn’t deprive the old folks at home of their traditional roles just because the custom is sexist.”

“That’s very sweet of you,” Matt said, kissing her just as sweetly.

Temple was not about to be diverted from the latest news as soon as the kiss ended.

“You still didn’t tell me what’s bad about your family situation. Sounds peachy to me. Postmenopausal romance, like my aunt Kit’s. Marriage to a guy who sounds like a pillar of the community, if not a Fontana brother. Don’t you think your mom deserves a second chance?”

Matt sighed and explained. “It’s not peachy. Mom’s finally met her restaurant Romeo’s family. Her new guy happens to be my birth father’s brother.”

Temple gasped and put her own hand over her mouth before it outpaced her mind. “Wow. When you tried to arrange a meeting after you found your birth father, your mom walked out, refusing to meet him. She must hate him.”

“I’ve left them all alone since my brilliant attempt at failed mediation,” Matt said. “My real dad is married, but not happily anymore, though he never said so. I don’t know if he married in the Church. And my mom—they were teenagers who met in a church, for God’s sake. He was bound out of the country for service the next day, so the attraction must have been instant and intense.… I figure they both never got over it and they’re scared to death of each other. The whole situation’s impossible.”

“That family meeting must have been horribly awkward. And your mom told her strict Catholic relatives?”

“She didn’t. She just broke off the relationship with my father’s brother, and they all think she’s crazy.”

Temple shook her head. “What a tragic mess.”

“Mister Midnight here doesn’t know what to tell anybody, except to get off each other’s case.”

“Matt.” He looked hard at her because of the “more bad news” tone of voice.

“I hate to bring this up, but if this … family tangle got out, couldn’t it hurt your reputation as an advice-giving talk-show host?”

He looked dumbfounded. “I never thought of that.”

“And that’s why I love you,” Temple said, “but PR is my business. I have to say if your media presence is due for a huge upswing, the paparazzi and Internet rumors will be all over you and everything about you. Especially your roots and family.”

“Even us, Temple? Even you?”

She fake-punched his bicep. “I’m a media girl. I can take it, big boy. I just think you better get the situation with your mother and the two brothers straightened out before this deal goes public.”

“Or goes through,” he said. “Meanwhile, tomorrow is another day.” He pulled the knit straps down past her elbows, tangling her in his embrace.

Temple looked surprised and very pleased. “Oh. We, uh, don’t have a lot of time before you need to leave for the station.”

“I’ve got a fast car and I’m from Chicago. We do everything fast and hard there,” he said, rolling her over and under him, “and Chicago girls like it that way.”

Chapter 25

Wait for The Midnight Hour

Matt got into his new car in the Circle Ritz parking lot, settled his body into the multiple adjustable settings of his choice, and said an Our Father.

His “daily bread” was getting way out of hand. Still, he enjoyed sitting back in the cushy leather, almost asphyxiated by “new car” smell. If this was a pot-sweetener, the producers were beyond serious. So was the current situation in Las Vegas. Dare he even consider leaving now? Keep the car and Chicago, and lose Temple. Or lose the car? No contest.

Matt put the luxury car in gear, glad he was slinking away unseen in the dark of pre-midnight. He could put a few miles on the odometer and still return it as a loaner.

The Jaguar prowled into smooth street speed like its animal of origin, and Matt made WCOO’s parking lot in record time. Also unnoticed, since the lot was pretty empty as local programming switched from Ambrosia’s show of classic comfort songs and her down-home style of advice to the lost and the lovelorn.

The Midnight Hour, his advice show, which was all talk, ran two hours now due to the continuous callins, but the producers clung to the magic of the original name.

Both he, aka Mr. Midnight, and Ambrosia, whose real name was Leticia, were profitably syndicated. He grinned as he whooped the gift car locked, thinking of her reaction when she came out into the parking lot after ceding him the mic tonight. He’d given her the “Blue Suede” Elvis VW Beetle he’d won, and she loved the headroom, but this glittering Baked Alaska of a car would really rev her engines.

Inside the small building with the big radio tower he passed the lit but empty reception room and went to the studio, watching Ambrosia coo into the mic as she dished out solace and songs.

She sounded like an exotic siren escaped from some noir movie. Maybe she played the sultry big-band singer, her voice soothing as melted caramel.

“Now, baby, don’t you get down. Tonight is the turn of a new day, and I’m going to play a little traveling music just for you while you’re waiting for Mister Midnight to warm up my hot seat for a while and for your chilly little hearts to lift with more sage advice than should be slung by a young, hot guy like him. So hang on this dial, girls and boys, and prepare to be inspired.”

Leticia nodded as the commercials began and doffed her headphone muffs.

“Here’s my man,” she greeted Matt as he came through the door. “Great to have you back. Your superlarge sparkling water awaits, along with all those adoring ears out there. You already had a fan asking me for a song in your honor.”

“A fan?”

“Called herself your ‘biggest fan,’ but she was forgettin’ about me, baby.”

Leticia shimmied her red zebra-striped three hundred pounds out of the broadcast chair to give him a hug. “Welcome back from Chi-Town. The phone lines are already lighting up.”

“No rest for the wicked.” Matt slipped into the upholstered swivel chair. Yup, it was still warm. Leticia was his literal mother hen.

“Wicked?” She made a skeptical face. “You? About time.”

“Eyeball my new car when you leave.”

“You just got new wheels a short while back.”

“Not gratis like this.”

“What could be foxier than that silver Crossfire? It’s even a limited edition now.”

Matt shook his head and smiled, settling into the “cockpit” of headphones and mic and lighting call-in lines. He felt as alone as a soloing pilot once the show was running on, night voices in the unseen distance.

Leticia poked her head back in, bead-decorated black plaits rattling just before airtime. “I’m waiting around for a ride after, believe it,” she warned. “And to see if Miss ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ from my program shows up on yours.”

Matt felt the frown lines forming. “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” He hoped Ambrosia’s guest wasn’t anyone with delusions of being Elvis. That would-be King caller last year was eerily accurate. Not even the FBI voice techs could say it wasn’t the Memphis Cat himself.

He also felt a figurative shiver. Max Kinsella as good as back from the dead, and now intimations of Elvis were resurrecting at WCOO-FM radio?

Naw. Matt just wanted to marry the woman he loved, do the right thing in the job market, and get along with her ever-present alley cat and his own sort-of namesake, Midnight Louie.

*

“Where were you the past week?” asked the caller.

Matt stirred uneasily in his adjustable chair. Lots of callers had already said in the show’s first hour that they’d missed him for the last week. None had asked him to account for his whereabouts. Not that anybody couldn’t tune in to The Amanda Show on their Internet connections. Usually radio listeners liked the call-in intimacy but didn’t cross the line.

“I ask the questions,” Matt said. “Don’t I get a vacation?”

“From me, Mister Midnight? No. Never. I’m your biggest fan.”

“I appreciate loyal listeners,” he said, “but I don’t think of you as ‘fans.’ More like fellow travelers in life.”

“Night fliers,” she said.

“Like night owls?” He tried to reference the cliché, because her tone had gone deep and seductive and dangerous.

“Yes. Hunters of the night.”

Oh, great. One of those vampire groupies. He’d done this gig long enough to recognize the occasional crazy.

“We’re all birds of a feather,” he said, switching to another lit line. “‘The Midnight Hour,’” he intoned into the mic. He’d learned to speak softly and be wary of kooks.

“Oh, Mister Midnight, I’ve been waiting a week to ask this. What can we adults do about school bullying? If a parent intervenes, it can make it worse for the kid. What’s the matter with kids today?”

And that launched an evergreen topic, with the call-board lighting up. For a moment Matt flashed back to his bad moments at the Dancing with the Celebs local reality-TV program, when he’d been bowed over a light board bleeding, alone in the dark in the wee hours, at the mercy of a masked attacker.

“Mister Midnight, did you hang up on me?”

The vampire groupie, back again. Was that so surprising? No.

She rolled on without pause. “That’s not polite. I just wanted to know if the rumors were true.”

He thought of his major TV offer and wondered how this creepy call-in knew about it.

“Are you really going to be doing a razor commercial on television, Mister Midnight?”

“I’m not getting or taking any commercial offers.”

“But you’re so good at bleeding.”

The air silence was Matt catching his breath, wondering how she knew he’d been stabbed by a sword recently.

“Bleeding heart,” her mocking voice continued.

And not so recently as well. Months earlier. More memorably. By a razor.

For the first time he’d detected the whisper of an Irish brogue in the voice, on the word heart.

And his blood ran cold. That cliché was true.

A diet-scam commercial blared in his headphones, so loud his pulse spiked with shock.

Leticia’s face appeared in the studio window, her expression furious.

Matt felt like he was in a movie like The Matrix, everything happening in fast, dislocating film cuts.

Then Leticia burst through the door and his senses snapped back into real-time and real-place mode.

“I am babysitting the technician until this show is over, Matt honey.” Her anger seemed to add ozone to the stuffy studio air. “I will make sure that crazy bitch doesn’t get through again. Don’t say a word. Save everything for the real callins. You the man. We talk after.”

Matt checked his watch. Forty minutes to go. For once, he was looking forward to the usual problems—dumped lovers, backstabbing co-workers, adoptive children seeking birth parents, unwed mothers seeking and sought by lost children, drug-addict brothers—all-American dysfunction with a capital D.

Leticia was right. He couldn’t let a crazy stalker make him blow the show. Especially not now. He gave her a faint smile and took the next call, welcoming a dose of ordinary, home-grown angst.

*

“Love, love, love the Jag,” Leticia said as she led him out of the station like a defensive lineman obscuring a quarterback. “It’s so you. Of course, you’re going to take me out for a drink in it.”

They neared the sculpted hunk of high-end metal, and Matt murmured “Maybe not.”

The front driver’s side tire was flat, obviously … slashed. An ice pick lay beside it.

“N … ice. What a way to treat an artwork.” Leticia shook her beaded braids until they tsked. “How’d you ever afford this baby?”

“Didn’t. It was a … gift,” Matt said, sickened by the vandalism. He wasn’t a Material Guy but he appreciated beauty. “‘Cashew leather interior with truffle trim.’ So said the owner’s manual. Very fattening to the wallet. Obviously out of my class.”

“At least she didn’t key it.” Leticia was on her cell phone, reporting the vandalism to the station security service and requesting a night guard for what was left of it while Matt looked up the dealer service number. Apparently, Jaguars weren’t allowed to languish.

“They’ll fix it and have it back to your place pronto.”

“You’re sure?” Matt asked.

“Hon, you get a twenty-four-hour nanny with cars this classy. It looks like you’ll have to ride in my Elvis Beetle, then I’ll drop you off at home. Better this way. You can drink, and you need one right now more than I do. Good thing Vegas is a twenty-four-hour town.”

The guard’s car was already entering the parking lot, and the uniformed guard who exited it was the usual middle-aged and thirty pounds overweight.

“Whew,” she whistled when she saw the XJ and the flat. “Pure jealousy. I go off duty in four hours.”

“That’s okay.” Leticia fished her set of station keys from her humongous designer bag. “Personnel comes in at five A.M.”

“A shame,” the guard told Matt. “Looks brand new.”

“One day. Be careful,” he told her. “The person who did this may still be lurking and must have had a lot of anger, and strength.”

She patted the holster on her hip. “So do I, if necessary.”

*

Las Vegas thronged with corny bars and lounges all trying to live up to the Strip’s glamour.

Leticia didn’t take him to one of those but to a freestanding building with a vintage blue-and-magenta neon sign outside.

“The Blue Dahlia,” Matt said, sounding as surprised as he felt.

“You know it?” Leticia went on without pause. “Great little club. I like the jazz trio, and sometimes a kick-ass torch singer sits in with them. Really rocks good for a white girl.”

Matt beat back a smile. Molina would get a kick out of that “review.” But the sometimes singing cop known at the Blue Dahlia as Carmen hadn’t come out to add vocal riffs to the music lately, as far as he knew, and she’d never perform this late. She had someone to watch over—not her; she was unattached and always had been since he’d known her—but her teen daughter at home needed protection.

“We close at three,” the waiter warned.

“We only need one drink—his,” Leticia said, pointing.

Matt wanted this fast and simple, so he ordered Scotch on the rocks.

Leticia was even faster on the draw when it came to getting down to business.

“Okay, Matt. Who was that woman caller who abused our shows?”

“A psychopath.”

“Ya-uh. How’d she get to be your psychopath?”

“By proxy.” Matt leaned back as his drink arrived. “She was someone else’s psychopath first, only he was harder to find than I was.”

“This is really creepy. I’ll have a Doctor Pepper,” she told the departing waiter. “And what’s the supercreamy, polyester shiny, Eurotrash, über-cool car about?”

“I’d rather discuss the phone stalker.”

Leticia’s big brown eyes grew bigger. “Am I smelling bad news here? You said that car was a gift. I can’t imagine your redheaded girlfriend letting you take anything compromising from … Madonna, say.”

Matt had to smile. “You’re right, but I’m not sure I’m keeping it.”

“I saw the temporary license plate. Is it insured?”

“By the dealership right now.”

“’Cuz those tires are mondo pricey, Jag-boy. It’s not the free original investment, it’s the upkeep. So who’s giving you my salary in cars?”

“You know your syndication deal pulls down a lot more than mine. The car is … a bribe, maybe.”

“You, take a bribe?”

“There’s a possibility of a daytime talk show.”

“Oh, my sainted seat at Oprah’s last network show and all my loot! It’s amazing she gave out VW Beetles when I already have a cooler one. You were in Chicago to visit family and do your occasional Amanda Show gig. They want you to do a solo?”

“Try a solo. Yeah. With Oprah heading her OWN cable network, the legacy network talk-show feeding frenzy is on rolling boil. OWN, Oprah Winfrey Network. That takes chutzpah. I don’t know, Leticia. Do I have the hunger for it? It would turn my life upside down just as Temple and I are planning to get married.”

“Good timing. Marriage means changing cribs, maybe even baby cribs. Producers on the level you’re dealing with would move the world for you.”

“I could bomb.”

“Yup. But my money would be on you. You got the chops and the voice all honed on radio, the most demanding form of talk show. And you got the looks. Is that why this spoiler babe showed up, just to rain on your parade?”

“Of course not,” Matt said. He didn’t say the thought that zapped his mind: Of course! Max Kinsella is back and so is Kathleen O’Connor. Both back, back from the dead.

Leticia downed half of her freshly arrived Dr Pepper, dressed up in a tall, footed glass with a spring of mint.

“My advice?” she said. “Finish your Scotch and prepare to blast home to the Circle Ritz in my ‘Blue Suede’ Beetle-rocket. What a combo! The King and the Brit bug-boys who usurped him … for a while. Betcha that fiancée is waiting up to greet you on your first night back on The Midnight Hour. You two have a lot to talk about, much more than me and thee.”

“That’s the truth,” Matt said, toasting her before draining his lowball glass.

On the small stage behind a similarly small dance floor, two couples were slow-dancing. The trio was riffing on a melody that got more familiar with every note, “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).” Set ’em up, Joe.

“It’s quarter to three,” Matt told Leticia. “I’ve got to be getting home.”

She nodded and produced cash from her bottomless bag, nodding at their empty glasses.

“I guess we had the ‘one’ for your psycho ‘baby’ and one more for the road. I just hope you’re not the one being set up.”

Chapter 26

Yves of Destruction

What do the letters YSL mean to you?

If you are a fashionista or keep abreast of au courant lists of Who’s Who in the world celebrity-name sweepstakes, you would promptly say, Yves Saint Laurent, of course, the twentieth century’s most celebrated high-fashion and therefore highfalutin French dress designer.

Alas, YSL died a couple years ago, although his fashion brand lives on.

But the YSL I am referring to is not a fancy label flaunted on a handbag. It is that immortal trio (besides the Three Musketeers) of Yvette, Solange, and Louie.

Of course we all have more than a single name. It is the Divine Yvette, the Sublime Solange, and Midnight Louie.

However, as I stare upon the startled faces and almost unrecognizable forms of the Divine and Sublime ones, I fear I am going to have to find new sobriquets for the darlings of the purebred Persian set … such as the Disheveled Yvette and the Shredded Solange.

“Yvette!” I yowl in disbelief. “Solange!”

“Louie!” they wail in echoing chorus.

The Persian formerly known as Divine turns her face from me. “I have not had my hair done in ages, Louie; you must avert your eyes.”

The Persian formerly known as Sublime is more practical. “We have been taken out of solitary confinement and put into a common holding cell full of ruffians and bullies and shorthairs. You must save us!”

This is a tall order, even for Midnight Louie. Not only R & R—rescue and release—but C & C—coiffure and comb-out.

“How did this happen?” is all I can ask.

“Our mistress sought to enhance her failing career and profile,” Solange says, idly running a clawed forepaw through her bedraggled golden ruff, “by forsaking the reigning breed of the cat world—we luxuriously furred Persians—for the chic but déclassé bug-eyed, bony, nearly naked purse pooch of the dog world, the Chihuahua.”

“Dyed pink, no less,” Yvette wails. “As if my tender pink ears and pads and rose nose were not enough!”

I can testify that the formerly Divine Yvette’s witnessing is true. Her silver-gray coat was formerly so soft and lustrous that she almost looked faintly lavender in some lights.

Who would kick out a lavender cat for a faux-pink dog? Someone very mentally disturbed, but what does one expect from Miss Savannah Ashleigh, who tried to have me totally de-tommed?

Solange brushes near so I can feel the wadded lumps in her once full and smooth shiny coat. Her huge green eyes fix on mine.

“Overnight we were considered passé by all society, Louie, even Excess Hollywood. Our mistress left us here as a temporary shelter, but she never considered that we were not suited to push and shove for our places in the world. Granted our mistress was facing a fading career of her own, but she did not understand the degree to which Miss Violet was declining both in health and mind. We had no one to aid us, to even know of our plight.”

Miss Midnight Louise is pushing past my shoulder to inspect the sorry sight. “Did it ever occur to you pampered showgirls to save yourselves?”

This challenge drives She Who Was Formerly Known as Divine to spin, hissing and spitting.

“We cannot,” the Divine Yvette answers with some of her usual, charmingly adamant hauteur. “We are French.”

Chapter 27

Lies and Alibis

“Watson. Come here. I need you,” said the voice on Temple’s desk phone.

For a moment, she wasn’t sure if Sherlock Holmes or Alexander Graham Bell was calling.

However, Sherlock Holmes would never have admitted to needing anybody, not even his faithful friend and chronicler. And Alexander Graham Bell had famously called his assistant, Watson, on the first-ever phone, all right, but he’d called him “Mr. Watson.”

Besides, the voice was female.

Temple put it on speaker, an option she used to take computer notes with the phone far enough away that the keyboard’s rapid chuckling wouldn’t make the caller self-conscious. Knowing your words are being recorded in any fashion is stifling. Temple had learned that when she’d been a TV news reporter in Minneapolis.

Meanwhile she’d placed the contralto voice putting the kink in her workday. Luckily, she’d gotten a lot done in the morning.

“You ‘need’ me where, when, and why?” she asked Lieutenant C. R. Molina. “Is this, like, official?”

“Semiofficial,” came the answer.

“You’re doing a lot of that lately.”

A long pause. “Want to make something of it?”

“Dying to.”

Another pause.

“You’re acting pretty sassy,” Molina noted, “for a woman in a seriously awkward situation between her resurrected, injured ex and her impatient fiancé.”

“You’re acting pretty high-handed for a homicide lieutenant who’s been AWOL from work for dubious reasons.”

“I guess we’re both in hot water,” Molina said. “This is for Mariah.”

Temple was surprised by the almost maternal clutch of anxiety in her stomach at mention of the policewoman’s daughter. “Is she all right?”

“So far, but the mystery of that mutilated Barbie doll in her bedroom the night she ran off is unsolved. I want to recreate that night, and, Miss Temple Barr, you … were … there.”

“So were a lot of people, starting with that creep, Crawford Buchanan.”

“You’re right to despise the man. I never want to see him again unless I’m arresting him.” Molina’s voice softened. “This is a private party. Just you and me and Detective Alch. You don’t have to worry about Max Kinsella showing up. I need people with memories.”

“How did—?” Temple was glad she wasn’t holding on to a phone; she would have dropped it.

“By now, Miss Barr, you should be quaking at my preternatural grasp of your most intimate situations. Just shut up and come as you are. My place. Two hours. Put on your thinking cap.”

“I … might have an appointment.”

Temple had planned to visit Aloe Vera Drive to check on Violet’s condition and observe her hangers-on, that is, any possible-heirs and/or homicidal maniacs. Meanwhile, she had to stage-manage the momentous meeting of Matt and Max.…

When did a PI get to work her first case? Molina was about to tell her.

“An appointment?” The hard-edged cop emerged. “Now you really do.”

Silence.

Molina was gone, leaving Temple baffled. She had until 4:00 P.M. She reached over to hang up the old-fashioned desk phone and glanced at Midnight Louie, who’d soundlessly lofted atop the desk, the way cats do, even large ones.

“That night Mariah ran off was a zoo,” she told him. “People were coming and going in Molina’s house—me and Awful Crawford, Detective Morrie Alch, Dirty Larry the narc.… Molina must be nuts to think I can help her figure out how the Barbie Doll Stalker got a foot-long 3-D calling card into her daughter’s bedroom. And why is it so urgent now?”

The rogue Barbie doll was one of the loose ends from Mariah’s recent unauthorized—but excellent to her—adventure helping a disadvantaged girl win a place in the junior division of a televised dancing competition.

Temple made a face at herself and decided to think about the night Molina had ordered her to find and bring Crawford Buchanan to her house, counting on her to know where to find her fellow PR flack. In the later flurry over capturing a murderer at the dance contest, she’d forgotten that sinister object found in Mariah’s typically overfurnished teen bedroom, a Barbie doll. Of course the kid’s cop mother hadn’t, not for one moment.

Who knew what game Molina was playing now? She must suspect somebody, Temple concluded as she changed her sequined flip-flops for a pair of red patent leather pumps, locked her unit door, and went down a floor in the tiny elevator’s elegant wood-lined box, which for the first time reminded her of a vertical coffin. Hers.

In half an hour she was parking the Miata in the shade of Molina’s well-aged neighborhood near Our Lady of Guadalupe. Molina’s almost-as-well-aged Volvo was not in the driveway for once. Instead, a white Crown Vic showed Detective Alch had beaten Temple here. Or had been here even when Molina had called.

Temple sat in the Miata for an instant. She’d left the convertible’s top up for the drive. This part of town wasn’t a fun drive and wasn’t as safe for a small woman in a small car as public streets around the Strip.

She recognized a pang of guilt for the conspicuous rides she and Matt owned when a public servant drove an old beater. Considering, Temple decided Molina was more pressed for time than money. She worked her job as if it were a religious vocation, but Temple not only had a high-pressure job in a never-stopping town herself, she also had an accidental avocation so ingrained now that Molina had asked her for help.

Well, ordered. But the fact was really something. She thought of Max’s blasted memory and shivered with sympathy in the heat. Someone had to have put that mutilated Barbie doll in Mariah’s bedroom, and it hadn’t been the Barbie Doll Killer. It had been someone with one weird motive, maybe even the unknown stalker who’d entered the house before, the one Molina had always, and bitterly, believed to be Max.

Aha! Max hadn’t been here when that Barbie doll incident had gone down. For once, he had an unbreakable alibi—two broken legs and a coma—which might not even stop the Max who Temple knew, but the nearly six thousand miles to Switzerland would.

Max had been a convenient suspect physically and emotionally for the “old” Molina. Now the woman had to know if it hadn’t been Max, it very likely had been someone even more supernaturally elusive.

Usually, Temple felt she had to help Molina for Max’s sake. Now, she mused, she had to help her for everybody’s sake.

*

Alch opened the door when she knocked.

Off a crime scene, he was a fifty-something silver fox with kind eyes. Even he was looking frazzled and weary. Temple recognized the survivor of a too-long boxing match with worry.

“Hi, Detective Alch,” she said. “You look wilted off the crime scene.”

“Wilted? Oh. You mean instead of looking ‘fresh off.’ You’re always fresh, Miss Barr, and not always in a good way.”

“I know I can be painfully perky at times, but I’m here to help. Or so I was told.”

“Me too.” Alch stood holding the front door open, or maybe it was holding him up.

“Hey, may I come in? I was invited.”

“Sorry.” He swept the door fully open with a slight bow. “I’ve been pulling a lot of overtime lately.”

“I’ll bet,” Temple said, stepping in curiously.

Why wasn’t Molina here to greet her? She did an open survey, craning her neck up and down and around. Being short, she always risked missing something. No Molina or Mariah in sight. Not even the two rescue cats. Just a lot of slouchy kid-friendly furniture.

Alch was chuckling.

“What?” Temple asked, turning his way.

“Miss Pussyfooter. You look just like a cat stepping over a threshold, anticipating turning around and running at any second. The soles of your sandals won’t burn, and Molina won’t bite.”

“Hmph. Maybe not for now.”

Alch was shutting the door, forcing her to take a step forward and commit. “You know something you’re not supposed to?” he asked.

“Probably.” While Alch frowned, visibly torn between saying something more and not, Temple added, “I can guess how much you did for her these last couple months. Merit badge time.”

“Yeah, maybe, but she’s well now.”

“I guess. What’s the rush here? Why do we need to relive the night Mariah disappeared, especially me? I was peripheral to all that.”

“Nasty new development.” Alch studied the carpeting. “It’s under wraps, but there was another parking-lot Barbie doll murder last night.”

“Oh, my gosh. Here? In Vegas?”

“Yeah. Again. And, given the weird incident of the Barbie doll left in Mariah’s bedroom…”

“Molina needs to solve that freaky fact fast for her own peace of mind,” Temple finished for him, “and maybe to unlock the whole case. So here we are—lieutenant’s little helpers.”

Alch nodded and waved a hand toward the couch.

Temple still felt leery about sitting down when Molina was not there to OK the hospitality. The last time she’d been ordered into this room she’d had that weasel, Crawford Buchanan, in tow, on Molina’s orders, and Mariah had just gone missing.

A wild, scrabbling sound erupted from around the kitchen eating bar. Two brown-striped streaks bounded over the sofa back and seat, and then to the floor and down the hall.

Alch shook his head at their vanishing tails. “I’ll never understand why adult cats will suddenly act as if a black widow had bitten them in the ass and take off like kittens,” he said.

“We’ll never understand feline behavior.” Temple felt free to sit on the couch now that the cats had run roughshod over it. “What’s up? Where are the human inhabitants? Are we for dinner, literally?”

“Mariah’s doing an overnight at a friend’s house,” Molina’s contralto voice said from the unlit hall down which the cats had vanished. “For real this time. This time I wanted her out of the way. I was printing some things out in the home office.”

Temple had leaped to her feet like a guilty schoolkid at the sound of Molina’s voice, and Alch corrected his tired slouch.

Maybe Molina was what had bitten the tiger-cat girls in their fluffy rears, but she was coming from the wrong direction.

“Sit,” Molina said. “This is not boot camp.”

Alch and Temple exchanged a sympathetic look. If either had heard a more contradictory statement, it would be a long shot.

They sat.

“I’d offer you some refreshment,” Molina said absently, shuffling her papers, “but this is an exercise in a game of Clue.” She looked up. “Maybe afterward, if you’ve been good.”

Again Temple and Morrie Alch exchanged glances.

Molina was moving slowly, probably more from mental abstraction than recent physical problems. She was dressed casually, but Temple noticed that the khaki denim slacks had tight, fashionably wrinkled legs at the calf and that Molina’s buckskin flats were fringed around the ankle strap. Her loose leopard-print linen top was astoundingly fashion-assertive for the laid-back lieutenant, and her functional brunette bob was caught back on one side with a tortoiseshell barrette—a small tortoiseshell barrette, but the first jewelry Temple had ever spotted on C. R. Molina.

Maybe not so astounding, Temple decided on second thought. The policewoman’s alter ego, the torch singer Carmen, who’d been in retrograde for months, had worn a very forties silk flower in her hair.

Alch was still frowning, detecting a change but way too male to read the small-print signs. Obviously, however you looked at it, Molina was finally feeling better … and back!

Temple wondered why. Time and healing … or something else.

Molina sat in a chair opposite the device-cluttered coffee table—Mariah’s trail—and spread the letter-size pages over its length.

Temple blinked to see her Web site head shot blown up. Alch was next, with a ten-year-old ID shot that looked focused and jaunty.

“No comments?” Molina asked.

“Wish I didn’t need Just for Men now,” Alch said.

“As if you’d use any subterfuge for anything,” Molina chided. “Distinguished gray works. Trust me.”

Molina eyed Temple.

“I need to update my Web site photo,” Temple volunteered.

“Why? You wouldn’t look any older or wiser.”

Temple made a disrespectful Zoe Chloe Ozone face.

“You’ve got that teen persona down,” Molina conceded.

She laid out another glossy sheet.

“The tiger girls aren’t banishing rats from the house?” Temple asked as she recoiled from the gleaming visage of Crawford Buchanan.

“Nice shot.” Molina leaned back to study him. “You’ve known him for as long as you’ve been in Vegas?”

“It seems like aeons longer than three years.”

The photo was truly as oily as Buchanan was, taken at that old “Hollywood slant” so his stringy neck was hidden and his jaw looked stronger, his smile pasted-on phony, and his hair a monument to trendy-until-two-hours-ago male vanity.

“I believe you call him ‘Awful Crawford,’” Molina said. “You’re not very subtle in your dislikes and likes, are you?”

“No, I’m up front and honest,” Temple said. “What’s it to you?”

“It may be a very lot.”

Temple felt her flippant, defensive gaze caught in the searchlight of Molina’s electric-blue concentrated stare and found herself saying …

“He’s sexist and sleazy, and everywhere I’ve gone there’s always been one guy like him trying to do me dirt.”

Molina nodded, her lips taut but smiling satisfaction.

“Snitch,” Alch said, dismissing the photo and Buchanan. “That’s what this guy strikes me as—sneaky, lying snitch.”

Molina tossed down another image.

Rafi Nadir. Her ex-lover, father of Mariah, long ago abandoned, or fled from, in L.A.

“I like Rafi,” Temple said.

Molina’s head reared back in surprise.

Temple smiled to herself to have shaken the cool authority figure this woman had created as much as the hot jazz singer Carmen. Talk about bipolar! Then again, “woman cop” had been an impossibility in her mother’s generation.

“He seems okay,” Alch conceded. “Still has a chip on his shoulder.”

“Still has a daughter who doesn’t know who he is,” Temple told Alch.

Alch nodded. “Fathers and daughters. It’s a … special relationship.”

“Will you two shut up?” Molina had lost her cool control. “I asked you here because I want your memory banks and your objective considered opinion. If I’d wanted personal snipers, I’d have asked … someone else.”

“Asked?” Temple asked Alch.

“It’s her way,” he told Temple. “Guys wouldn’t listen if she wasn’t emphatic; then they called her a … you know.”

“I’ve been called uppity,” Temple admitted.

“Funny. You don’t look black.”

“Same biased principle.”

“Shut up!” Molina bellowed. “You two aren’t listening to me as much as any sexist pig.”

“Do you mean ‘pig’ in the sense of an unattractive female?” Temple began.

“Or a cop?” Alch finished.

In answer, Molina slapped down the next and apparently last head shot.

“Dirty Larry all cleaned up,” Temple said in surprise.

The guy had what used to be called a crew cut, his skull shape exposed under a blondish mowed lawn, and such a beard-free shaved jaw it would have appeared naked on HDTV, which was saying something. His gaze and features were clear and sharp. He looked like the class valedictorian.

“He must be a terrific actor,” Temple said. “He totally owns the Dirty Larry persona now.”

“He’s a cop,” Molina said, eyeing the photo with an odd, almost rueful distance. “Under cover, but a cop. Probably a good one once.”

She shook off her mood and gestured to all the mug shots.

“These are the five people who were here, besides me, the evening I discovered Mariah had run off. These are the people who were here when we found, and didn’t find”—she eyed Alch—“the mutilated Barbie doll in Mariah’s bedroom. I’ve ruled out you two as having anything to do with the … manipulations that night. I want you to remember everything, every detail your naturally observant brains saw but didn’t process in the one, wacky way that would explain … everything. I’m convinced we three know something we don’t put much importance on, but it’s the key to why this house, and perhaps me and Mariah, have been targets the past few weeks.

“I want you to put your thinking caps on, study the photos and sit here until they light up and you proclaim, ‘Bingo! Eureka! Jimmy Choo-choos!’—or whatever rings your bells.”

“Jimmy Choo shoes,” Temple corrected.

Molina stared at her.

“They call them Jimmy Choo shoes. Details are important to get right, lieutenant. I believe that’s what you’re telling us. I will bet you a pair of Stuart Weitzman flats for Louboutin platform heels that we will crack this conundrum in an hour flat.”

“And I want a beer,” Alch added. “A bottle of Tutankhamun Ale, available for a king’s ransom.”

“Dream on,” Molina said. “I can offer you both a cold Dos Equis after the job’s done.” She scanned the rogue’s list of suspects. “One of these people had to have left the Barbie doll in Mariah’s bedroom that evening. It had to be an inside job.”

“You’re missing someone you didn’t even think of.” Temple leaned back with a smug expression.

“Who?”

“You.”

“Like I’m going to…” Molina unbent from leaning over the photos. “You’re right,” she told her captive guests. “Everyone should be accounted for. Back in a minute.”

Molina did a rapid soft-shoe back down the hall, which startled Temple. On the job, Molina walked with an emphatic low-heeled-boot stomp.

“You can be annoying,” Alch said, with a sigh. “Carmen’s been seriously aggravated enough by personal matters lately. I wouldn’t push it.”

Temple just shrugged. She saw where Molina was going. “She’s set up this game of real-life Clue, detective. We need every piece in place to play it.”

“Does anyone even play board games anymore?”

“On computers.”

By then Molina had returned with one last printed-out eight-by-ten.

Molina threw the last “card” down on the table, her own straightforward police ID mug shot, her expression dead serious because a woman had to mean business 24/7 in a man’s world.

That reminded Temple why she so enjoyed working in a liberal-arts area, with words, where being small and smart and female was not a triple handicap. She had to wonder how much Molina’s height—whether you considered it mannish or high-fashion-model tall—had helped her career.

Temple had seen archives on the first women in police work a couple decades back. They tended to be petite, entry-level officers with ultrafeminine hair, makeup, and nails, who made cop wives uneasy. Had they been law-enforcement groupies, or had they just not known not to use feminine wiles? Not Molina’s problem!

“What do we do now?” Alch asked in the lengthening silence as Molina studied the row of faces.

“‘Try to remember…’” Temple sang from the sentimental song.

“‘That kind of September…’” Molina dropped the singing voice and finished, “is months off.”

“‘September Song’ is my theme nowadays,” Alch said, and leaned forward to contemplate each black-and-white face. “You must have forgotten you could put the HP printer on color, Carmen,” he told Molina, “but the starker likenesses will probably shake up our memories more. This feels like a film-noir showdown, only all our suspects are mute.”

“Yeah,” Temple said, sitting up, refreshed and alert. “They can’t talk back, confuse the issue, or spout lies and alibis. Okay. You two were here when I dragged in Crawford Buchanan, per my instructions.”

“We need to go back to before you arrived, hard as that may be for Miss Zoe Chloe Ozone’s ego to take.” Molina snatched up a photo and waved it. “Dirty Larry Podesta was also here when you arrived. Do you remember seeing him?”

Temple nodded. “I remember thinking I couldn’t decide if he grew up as military brat or a plain street punk.”

Alch chuckled.

Molina glowered.

“Carmen,” Alch said, “I never figured why you were letting that insubordinate loner hang around.”

“I needed someone to do what you’ve been doing for me lately, Morrie.”

Temple sat forward, all ears and eager hopes. Just what had Dirty Larry and Morrie Alch been doing for Molina lately? If only it was something juicy that proved the hard-boiled homicide dick had female hormones.

Nothing further was said. The next photo Molina had snatched up was … Awful Crawford’s.

“You arrived with this piece of … garbanzo beans,” she told Temple, “and I needed to do a private interrogation on him, so I dragged him down to Mariah’s room, sat him in front of the computer, and showed him his questionable lecherous kiddo-performing site, which Detective Alch had found on Mariah’s ‘Favorites’ list.”

“Wait a minute,” Temple said. “Could Awful Crawford have planted the Barbie doll during your bedroom interrogation? Wow, that sounds as sleazy as he is.”

Luckily, Molina had found Temple’s idea arresting and ignored her editorial comments.

“Mariah’s room is the usual ten by eleven and piled with girlie mess,” Temple went on, “with clothes and school materials and makeup and stuffed toys and posters. It’d be easy to sneak one more item in.”

“I’d have smacked him down right in front of the computer,” Molina said.

“Precisely.” Temple stood to make her case, like a prosecuting attorney, pacing on the couch side of the coffee table, while Molina paced on the outside.

“You’d never seen Crawford’s teen-star promotion site before. Never knew that Mariah had posted photos of herself online—glamour photos, or attempts. That she yearned for a kid-star future. Were your eyes on Crawford, or the screen?”

“You’re saying that little weasel could have pulled a Barbie doll from his suit-coat armpit and tossed it onto one of Mariah’s girlie nests without my noticing?”

Alch put in a suggestion. “You were major upset, Carmen, and not in top condition from that long slash wound and always hiding that you’d been wounded. Buchanan is a born sneak. I know I didn’t see it where it was found an hour later.”

Molina corralled her nervous energy and stood her ground.

“And you’re telling me, Morrie, you weren’t distracted from guarding my back at work and at home for weeks, supervising Mariah morning, noon, and night so she didn’t suspect I had anything more than the flu?”

“Whew,” Temple said. “Way too old married couple fighting, for my sanity. I get you two were working under a lot of strain. And, remember, Mariah, being a teen, could have not cared less about your comings and goings. She was plotting a star-making career and totally involved in her own secrets.”

“What about Crawford Buchanan?” Molina asked her. “Could he be the Barbie Doll Killer? Two of the victims were in Vegas, and it looks from the other Southwestern murders that the killer has circled back here. Could Buchanan be the killer and right under our noses?”

Temple had to sit down to contemplate the big picture. She stared at the photo-studio head shot of the guy who’d intruded on her new career in Vegas from the first. He been smarmy and sexist, but that was hardly unheard of, or a crime. He’d crashed her women in media meetings, demanding they “integrate.” Cookies with Crawford. Corny but also … contemptible.

She started thinking aloud. “He’s always had this downtrodden girlfriend.”

“Abusive?” Alch asked.

“His whole personality is an affront to women. One of those sleazy, lechy guys who won’t shut up and be politically correct. Who need to challenge civility. And the way he encouraged his girlfriend’s teen daughter to take on questionable ‘modeling’ jobs, like being ring girl at prize fights and playing up her sexuality to get attention … Then we discovered that he had a site devoted to luring girls into ‘auditioning’ for all these reality-TV shows that exploit them.”

Temple jumped up. “That’s who the victims were—girls near malls wanting to audition for every singing, dancing, cat-fighting reality-TV show that comes along. Maybe Mister Entrepreneur wasn’t getting his jollies running their so-called careers. Maybe he was … oh, my God … amassing victims!”

By now Temple’s pacing had taken her behind the couch and into the kitchen and back out again.

“I’ve always, always hated and distrusted the guy, and he was always picking on me, but I never thought he could be really … dangerous.”

Molina nodded slowly. “Such a loathsome little worm. We think of serial killers as powerful because they seem to come out of nowhere and do so much damage. Yeah, we could all be underestimating Crawford Buchanan. That radio-DJ shtick allows him to go everywhere pretty young girls are, and Vegas is Casting Central for that type.”

Alch and Temple nodded in concert.

“We’d stayed out here in the living room, out of your way, with Dirty Larry,” Alch said. “Then you came down the hallway, propelling Buchanan ahead of you like a push broom once used by Typhoid Mary.”

“You,” Molina told him, “had searched Mariah’s bedroom before that and never found the doll. I shook Buchanan free of all his contacts out here in the main rooms and sent him on his way. I doubt he could have done anything with me there, no matter how upset I was.”

Temple almost jumped up and down with a new suggestion. She really “liked” Crawford for the Barbie Doll Stalker.

“Maybe he didn’t leave,” she said. “Someone could have snuck around the house side and opened the bedroom window to throw the Barbie doll in while we were all out here.”

Alch eyed Molina. “This old house must have sash-style windows. Easy to break into. You reinforce them?”

She shifted her weight uneasily. “Everybody knows this is a ‘cop house.’ The locals don’t foul their own nest, and the neighboring gangs know to stay off their turf.”

“That’s good enough for breakins,” Alch said, “but for a stalker? Didn’t those earlier incidents get your guard up?”

Molina’s head shook so hard her hair shimmied. “That stalker made a point of getting in and out without leaving a trace of a breakin, like he had a key or was a—”

“Magician?” Temple asked. “That’s why you thought it was Max. The seamless entry and exits.”

“That and … some other reasons.”

“What?” Temple wasn’t about to let go of past motivations on a subject she’d always wondered about. “You thought he was after you because you were after him for that Goliath Hotel murder, right?”

“Right,” Molina mumbled.

Molina never mumbled. Temple knew the woman was hiding something. Something embarrassing. Molina was never embarrassed.

“What exactly did that stalker in your house do?” Temple demanded.

“None of your business.”

“Yes, it is. You made it mine when you ordered me here to remember. How can I remember anything if I’m not fully informed? One wild idea leads to another that leads to a productive advance. Nothing happens in a vacuum.”

“She has a point, Carmen.” Alch folded his arms. He wasn’t budging.

Molina pushed her short-nailed hands into the hair at her temples. “You two are worse than Mariah when she really, really wants something. Okay. I made a big mistake. I thought the incursions were aimed at me. They happened in my bedroom first.”

“And naturally you thought that was Max,” Temple said, pouncing.

“First, it was just my closet being rifled. Then one of my performance gowns seemed to be … new.”

“You mean those wimpy pre–World War Two velvet numbers you wear to sing in?” Alch asked.

“I think he means ‘skimpy’ or ‘slinky,’” Temple translated, wickedly.

“Alch means neither,” Molina declared. “He means that bias-cut vintage silk velvet is so … thin and compact in a closet. And they are. The lot barely takes up a foot of rod space. And they’re all dark colors, so I can’t be sure to this day that the one that seemed new wasn’t one I’d bought and forgotten about. It’s not like I did the singing gig every day. Once or twice a month, tops.”

Temple raised and waved her hands. “Wait another minute. You think a stalker went out and found just the right vintage dress to slip into your closet? Vintage shops have gone all eighties and nineties now. You can’t find those really old thirties and forties treasures anymore. Trust me, I look. Who are we talking here being the Good Fairy of your closet, Bob Mackie? Send him over to the Circle Ritz. He can stalk my clothes rack anytime.”

“This is not about me or my wardrobe.” Molina’s voice was edging into a bellow again.

“It is,” Alch said. “You’ve been doing some mighty crooked thinking a lot longer than I thought.”

“Okay. The stalker seemed very adult and focused on me,” Molina said between her teeth, loss of control seeming a syllable away.

“Because it was sexual, you assumed it was Max?” Temple wouldn’t let go. “What do you think you’ve got, girlwise—which I’ve been using all my life while you’ve kept it in cold storage for years, like a fur in Las Vegas—that would attract Max or any other man in that way?”

“I have been way off base for a long time, on everything. All right?” Molina’s cheeks flushed a dusky burgundy. She truly did look beautiful when she was mad. “I’ve been a bad cop, and I’ve been a bad mother.”

Alch shook his head. “Not for lack of trying to be great in every venue.”

“The point is,” Molina said very slowly, “the last … sign of the stalker was the most deviant. Rose petals through the house and down the hall. A radio playing. Not in my bedroom. Mariah’s.”

“And that’s,” Temple said, “when you first thought your suspicions of Max might be wrong.”

“On the stalking charge. Not on the Goliath murder, and not on deceiving you.”

Temple rolled her eyes and swallowed the B word. “At least you don’t have his photo on your suspects table.”

“He has a cast-clad alibi. What I want to know, and you two are here to help with, is who doesn’t?”

Temple and Alch sighed in tandem, exchanged glances, and began again. They would almost make a vaudeville act, Alch and Barr. No. Barr and Alch.

“Why don’t you move the photos around for where the people were?” Alch said. “So Buchanan is outta here, but maybe not off the exterior premises. Dirty Larry is still on the couch. Does that guy ever sit up straight?”

“Drug dealers don’t,” Molina said. “You have to realize D. L.’s undercover persona has become second nature. He’s not such a bad guy, just a good cop with too many years on a rugged beat.”

“He showed up out of nowhere, to hear Detective Alch tell it,” Temple pointed out. “Could he have been your stalker? He did act kind of boyfriend-y during Mariah’s reality-TV stint.”

“I let him act ‘kind of boyfriend-y.’” Molina looked at Alch, not Temple. “Frankly, I was using him to check up on my ex, and on your ex.” This time she eyed Temple. “Just an all-around handyman.”

“Kinda cold, Carmen,” Alch said.

“He’s a kinda cold guy, Morrie. Cold nerve is what keeps you alive in undercover. I don’t know what he wanted from me. I’m not as naive or”—she eyed Temple—“as self-deluded as you two think. He wanted something I don’t think he got.”

“Yet…” Alch pronounced, slumping Dirty-Larry-deep in the upholstery.

Ooh, Temple thought, ye olde faithful guard dog is ready to bite someone.

“So,” Temple said, being the good PR woman and discharging the edgy emotions around her, “the lovely and enterprising Crawford Buchanan is off the scene, perhaps to do dirt outside, perhaps not. He was in his Hummer H2 and on the cell phone when I came outside to leave.”

“A Hummer H2?” Alch questioned with disgust.

“Orange,” Temple added.

For a moment they all mused on whether the driver of an orange Hummer H2 could be a stalking slayer of young women.

Much too recognizable a vehicle.

A glum silence prevailed.

“Wait a minute!” Temple said.

Blue eyes and brown eyes regarded her with equal resignation.

“Dirty Larry left the main room.” Temple took a deep breath. “He’s always so low-key you automatically ‘erase’ his presence. That’s his day and night undercover job. Not to be noticed.”

She had their attention and went on.

“During all the sound and fury of Crawford Buchanan being given the bum’s rush out, I think Dirty Larry got up and faded … down the hall to Mariah’s room.”

“Can you swear to that?” Alch asked.

“Can you swear you saw a ghost? You were sitting on the couch,” Temple told Alch, “and Molina joined you after Buchanan was escorted out. So. Where was Dirty Larry?”

Alch jumped up. “That’s true. I try not to see the jerk, he’s so annoying. He’s got that act down good.”

“Why would Larry do it?” Molina asked.

“Mine is not to reason why,” Temple quoted an old nineteenth-century military poem. “Mine is to say there’s something rotten in the cast of characters on your coffee table, lieutenant.”

In the ensuing silence, the tiger-stripe girls came running through again. Barreling out from the kitchen, they touched down on the sofa back and seats, then took off for points unseen.

Midnight Louie followed in semihot pursuit, slip-sliding across the coffee table and pushing off the photo of … Dirty Larry Podesta. Louie skidded to a stop on the slick surface, claws out as four feet stapled it into the carpet.

Dirty Larry’s photographed face slip-slid away, shredded like a horror movie monster’s victim.

“Where did that cat come from?” Alch asked.

“Apparently,” Temple said, “he hitched a ride with me and snuck into the house, maybe through an old, insecure sash window?

“Clearly,” she added, “Midnight Louie ‘likes’ Dirty Larry for the dirty deed. Or deeds. Any objections?”

Molina had one. Or two.

“I told you to put your thinking cap on,” she told Temple. “Not your ‘thinking cat.’”

“We go together, like Mickey and Minnie, like oregano and olive oil, like spunky and funky.”

“Okay, Zoe Chloe. We’re done. Get the hell out, with your tiny red shoes and your big cat, too.”

Chapter 28

Home Invasion

Lieutenant C. R. Molina sat on her homely couch after everyone but her housecats had gone.

She’d cleared the decks, had Mariah safely away for the night, had rerun the night in question, and had ended up in an unpleasant place.

She wished she smoked. She wished she’d cultivated some vice besides generating an impressionable daughter for whom she felt she had to supply an impeccable model. Which Mariah’s father certainly wasn’t. Or was he?

She got up to fetch a beer from the fridge, listening to the two visiting vehicles depart outside as she leaned on the breakfast bar. Was the person who’d planted the Barbie doll on her premises Dirty Larry or Crawford Buchanan?

The next, almost laughable question? Was either one of them a serious Barbie Doll Killer candidate? Molina pressed the beer bottle’s cold glass against her forehead.

Larry made the more believable serial killer, yet she’d never gotten that vibe off of him. Lots of minor warning blips, but no serious suspicion. Was she slipping? Not a subject for debate. She had slipped.

A deep but easy breath told her the long and winding slash scar had finally settled in. Her own damn fault. All she’d learned from that insane B and E at the house on Mojave was that she and Max Kinsella might share the same enemy. Who?

Or … had Kinsella wanted someone to think that? Had his mentor, Gandolph, arranged for a watchdog as a diversion? Anything was possible.

A sharp pounding on her door made her heart jump. She put the beer down and got up to grab the Glock in her kitchen drawer. With Mariah out for the night, she hadn’t needed to use the gun safe that was in her closet and was suddenly glad.

The police-invasion-level pounding resumed.

Molina stuck the firearm down the back of her beige denims and pushed her face against the door’s peephole. Too dark.

“ID yourself,” she shouted loud and hard.

“Carmen, it’s me,” came a male voice.

Not many would say that. Alch or Rafi. And this wasn’t either voice.

She opened the door and stepped back.

Dirty Larry, looking particularly sullen, burst in …

… in the firm custody of Max Kinsella, the evident pounder.

“Who the hell are you?” Larry snarled at Kinsella.

“I don’t know. If you put it existentially. Or aren’t you feeling too existential now?”

What a bizarre nightmare! Mr. Light and Mr. Dark making a home-invasion duo with two faces.

“What’s going on here?” she demanded as she swept all the coffee table photos into a pile, which she moved to a hall-table drawer.

Kinsella propelled D. L. to the sofa like she’d propelled Crawford Buchanan to the door a few nights before. She had to admire his total control, despite a forced, stiff-legged gait. It still served for a perp walk. She understood now why his pounding had been so urgent. He hadn’t expected to maintain control of a pro like Dirty Larry for long.

“You have any idea,” Kinsella asked, breathing hard after dumping D. L. on the couch, “how much time this bozo spends tailing you?” He paused for more breath and to smooth his hair with his fingers.

Dirty Larry wouldn’t have been an easy takedown.

“That’s what you’re paid the big bucks to find out,” she told him while regarding Larry, who was massaging his right shoulder and keeping his eyes down.

“What was Temple doing here?” Kinsella asked.

“Okay.” She returned her weapon to the drawer, a gesture Kinsella saw, but not Larry. Molina shook her head. “Even without a memory, you’re her self-appointed guardian angel. Now we know why you broke your cover and muscled Dirty Larry inside. Did I want this degree of disclosure? No.”

“Look.” Kinsella eyed her beer. “How about one of those? I’ve been getting as buggy and sweaty as Podesta eavesdropping on your big confab. You know this old house’s windows are doors … and listening devices.”

“Just another thing I was going to fix someday,” she said. “Okay, I’m going to let you two duke it out in my living room to do what I seem to do best tonight—fetch beer.”

She got two bottles from the fridge, put them on the breakfast bar, and returned to the living room to sit in a chair opposite the couch.

Then she eyed the two men. Kinsella had collected the beers and was handing Dirty Larry Podesta one. Had she ever dreamed of such a day…?

“There’s no one here but us and the cats,” she told them, “so … spill. Guts would be nice, but explanations will do for a start.”

Dirty Larry cracked his shoulders and accepted the cold brew from Kinsella. Even Temple Barr could handle twist-off tops, so the opening ceremony offered no macho one-upmanship.

“I was just protecting you,” Larry said, after his first long pull on the beer.

“From what?” she wondered.

“Yourself, maybe.”

Molina eyed his angular face with the faint glint of gold beard growth and the slitted, defiant eyes. She remembered Temple Barr’s comment: grew up as a military brat or a plain street punk.

“You had no reason to be lurking outside now, Larry.”

“I came over, saw you had company. Figured you didn’t want your underling and that Sally Field on K-9, er, Kat-9 patrol to know too much about me.”

“And what would be ‘too much’ to know about you, Larry?” Molina braced an elbow on one knee and her face on her hand. “That you transferred to traffic from undercover at your request, not your superiors’? That you weren’t ‘burned out’ on drug casework? That even a distracted, concerned mother like me figured out you had some hidden reason for worming your way into my office, my confidence, my life?”

“You’d listen to a freaking cat? These old walls are Swiss cheese. I heard that black devil’s owner saying that he ‘liked’ me.”

Larry’s burning blue gaze fixed on Kinsella’s deceptively casual figure upholding the low wall between the kitchen and the living room. “You’d listen to this questionable guy even you pegged as a killer?”

“I agree he’s questionable, Larry,” she said, “but so are you.”

She eyed Kinsella, not fooled. He’d braced his back to the wall, legs straight out. That’s about all they’d do after the exterior tussle. He looked like he’d taken a stance far from the fray, but his injuries had forced it.

Molina sighed. She had a gimp and a cop with a lot of gray areas on her hands. Both were probably armed.

She resumed her interrogation of Dirty Larry. Kinsella had faced her with that prematurely, the bastard, and had forced her to conduct it in his presence. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have been able to do that if she hadn’t hired him to tail the man and if Larry hadn’t been lurking.

Just like on the night Mariah had disappeared?

Tabitha and Caterina came tearing through the room again, rushing past Larry’s back and making him duck.

“Merely the thunder of little cat feet, Larry,” she told him. “Nothing to be nervous about here but me. So. Did you plant that messed-up Barbie doll in my house?”

“God, no, Carmen. Sure, I sniffed around the place. I was trying to help. I’ve had a lot of experience with runaways. The drug beat is filled with them.”

“That night you told me that Mariah wasn’t a runaway. Not the type, you said. And you were wrong.”

“Not really. She wasn’t running away from home, or from you. She was running to something—that constant media and Internet hype that kids can be stars. Look at Justin Bieber, the pre-boy-band phenom, and the preteen wannabe Pussycat Dolls freaking out on alcohol and drugs and S-and-M fashion. I don’t blame you for being a hard-ass about your kid. You’re right.”

Molina eyed Kinsella, drinking beer standing up.

He shrugged. “You want me to leave, since you two are so in tune on the horrible state of teendom nowadays? Not my field.”

“I want you to shut up and sit down.” Molina saw his eyes flare with defiance. Max Kinsella didn’t need to sit down, not him. “Sit,” she spat out.

She jerked her head at the breakfast bar with its high, hard stools. He could manage that better than a mushy upholstered chair, and she sure didn’t want him on the sofa with Podesta. This smelled of her first, horrific days of seniority on the force, when every guy “under” her needed to prove a point. To prove his superior force and masculinity.

“Larry,” she said. “I don’t see any reason why you’d want to hurt my child or my career.”

“Swear to God, Carmen.” His voice was hoarse with emotion. “Never. I have the greatest respect for you as an officer and a detective. You have always laid it on the line for the job. Never a gender thing with me. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think you had the drive and the stones to catch the Barbie Doll Killer. Me, I just put away scum who kill people slowly with drugs. You take down murderers.”

The sound of two hands clapping, slowly, ended the Law & Order moment.

Max Kinsella, of course, ever the cynic, even without a functional memory.

“I believe you, Larry. Every word,” she said.

And she did.

“Get along now. It’s been a long, nasty night. I’ll set Kinsella straight.”

Behind Podesta’s back, Kinsella toasted with his beer bottle and a crooked grin. No one could have “straighter” legs than he did.

Dirty Larry fidgeted on the couch, rubbing his neck and alternating with slugs of beer to finish the bottle. Molina understood his reluctance to leave the scene to this iffy newcomer at the breakfast bar. She had to swallow a grin. Setting up these guys against each other was the smartest move she’d made lately.

Dirty Larry finally stood and heel-dragged out of the house as if his dingy Reebok sneakers sported steel cleats. He’d been so sure he’d had her confused, wounded, and alone, like a stray dog, so he could play the hero.

Only after the front door had slammed shut did Kinsella move.

First he held the beer bottle to his forehead. She could get that.

Then he finally rested his rear on the stool she’d sent him to. The only thing missing was the corner and the fool’s cap.

“He’s a low-life wrangler and a midnight tangler,” Kinsella said. “You choose your stalking horses well.”

She lifted an eyebrow with her Dos Equis bottle. “What’s the difference between a ‘stalking horse’ and a ‘cat’s-paw’?”

“A horse has steel hooves. A cat has a steel ego, assuming you’re referring to Miss Temple’s Midnight Louie.”

“Why’d you force the issue with Dirty Larry? Bring him in?”

“Because my legs were getting damned tired of following him around shadowing you. You knew when you asked me to watch him he was up to something.”

“I asked you to watch Rafi Nadir, too.”

“Not to knock your taste in men then and now, but Nadir is truly not as interesting as Dirty Larry. In a criminal sense.”

“You think Podesta is criminal?”

“No more so than this Crawford Buchanan character I heard you talking about.”

“And you’re going on … what? With legs that threaten to capsize you and a memory made of cheesecloth?”

“Instinct. That’s why I’m still here, and why you still want me.” He made a deprecatory gesture before she could jump on his phrasing. “Alch won’t cut it anymore. You need someone more ruthless, without a life and a career to ruin. Your conscience wouldn’t allow that. Enter moi, just in time. We didn’t get along, did we?”

Molina couldn’t stop a low, confirming chuckle. “An understatement.”

“You made a mistake about me, yes? So now you need me to vet and uncover your current mistakes.”

“Simple job. I wanted a discreet report on a couple guys normally not objects of professional police interest. I may have a personnel problem, but you’ve got personal problems, too.”

“There’s nothing personal in my life, or my memory. Except … Garry Randolph.”

“Are you sure? I bet you’re finding that you like Temple Barr a lot more than you thought you would.”

“That’s odd about what I remember. I do recall my druthers.”

“And?”

“Not my type.”

“What is?”

His smile was reminiscent. “I’ll know it when I see it.”

“You already did,” Molina surmised. “Men. God, you’re like Stephen Hawking, committing infidelity from a wheelchair.”

“As I understand it from the lady in question, and her very-present fiancé, I was and am free to commit whatsoever I choose with anyone of my choice.”

“I’m sure women the world over rejoice. Back on topic, why the hell did you out Dirty Larry? I just wanted him followed, not confronted. You put him on notice.”

“When a guy is Johnny-on-the-spot for a murder scene one night and skulking outside the investigating officer’s the next, he should be put on notice. That’s when mistakes get made. Also, I overheard the byplay about your underage daughter. I get why you went supernova when she disappeared. You want me to investigate that Crawford creep, too? If Temple loathes him, he must be scummy.”

“You’re doing too much as it is.” She rose to collect the empty bottle from his hand and weighed it to match her mental processes.

Max Kinsella waited.

“Anything else you want me to tell you?” she asked finally.

“Anything and everything about Larry Podesta, from the moment he showed up, and your stalker, and the Barbie doll killings.”

“That’s very restricted personal and professional territory.” She dropped her hand with the beer bottle, moving from hostess to challenger.

“That’s the beauty of it. I have no restrictions. I’ve got a totally fresh outlook on the facts. I’m not emotionally attached to anyone involved, and I find the whole sequence of events I’ve heard so far seriously troublesome.”

Molina considered. “I suppose you’d take another beer. I can’t interest you in a cushy chair?”

“Beer is fine, but I need to stay as close to vertical as I can be these days.”

“Most pricks do,” she tossed behind her back as she went for the fridge, walking straight into and out through the probably unintended implication.

She slammed two fresh beer bottles on the breakfast countertop and took an opposing stool.

“What did I ever do,” he asked, “to make you an enemy?”

“Left town before I could interrogate you.”

“Interrogate me.” He opened his hands to prove he had nothing to hide.

“Too late. I guess I’ll have to let you interrogate me.”

“Okay. Dirty Larry. I already know you never trusted him. As you don’t trust me now that I’m playing the same role for you—undercover investigator. The only man you really trust is Detective Alch.”

“True enough. As you only trusted Garry Randolph.”

“After what he did for me through the years, just the past two months of this year…”

Molina turned the now-damp beer bottle in her hands. Her palms had already gone sweaty with career memories. Losses. Cops would die for each other, but civilians weren’t obliged to. She wished she’d met “Gandolph the Great.” Her sympathy for Kinsella’s unfading grief at losing him made her respect both men.

Temple Barr had believed to that terrier-tough core of hers that Max Kinsella was a “good guy.” Still to be proven to Molina. And now she was about to do what she’d never done with Dirty Larry. Tell Kinsella her secrets. Admit that she’d been so obsessed with him as a cop she’d believed he could be obsessed with her as a woman. As Mariah would moan in her melodramatic teen way, “Tres embarrassing, mo-ther!”

“All the chalk has been wiped away,” Kinsella said to get her started. “It’s that old cliché, a fresh slate. Maybe now I am the murderer you always thought I was, by default.”

“Quit whining. That was never in your jacket. Randolph’s shooting was the universe’s fault. We’ve all screwed up. Whatever was wrong about my assumptions these past two years, about you or Temple Barr or Dirty Larry or my stalker or my daughter—or my ex—is my fault. My watch.”

“Okay.” She saw her hands—large, strong, plain—clutching the thick bottom of the beer bottle. “I decided to ‘use’ Dirty Larry as an off-the-books investigator because I couldn’t find you. I knew Temple was seeing you regularly, that you were out there. When Larry did it, when he tracked you to your hidey-hole, your house on Mojave, it happened to be just after your Phantom Mage persona had crashed and burned at the Neon Nightmare club. Randolph must have been an even better magician than you.”

Kinsella just nodded. She had to credit him with being a good listener.

“Getting you out of the Neon Nightmare wall-banging scene as a DOA, and then, presto, you never got to a hospital on the other end—I didn’t believe it. But I didn’t know about that incident when Podesta followed you home from a rendezvous with Barr and got an actual, genuine street address for you.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I didn’t trust anybody. I went over myself.”

“The house is equipped with embassy-level security,” he said. “It almost managed to spit me out when I returned.”

“I had to do a B and E.”

“Illegal.”

“Naturally.”

Kinsella lifted his beer bottle. “I like your style. Hard on a police career, though.”

“Even harder on me was the stalker inside.”

“Already there?”

“Maybe. The biggest butcher knife was missing from the kitchen block when I went through the back. One of those now-you-see-it, later you-really-“see”-it, bite-you-back situations.”

Kinsella gave a rueful grimace. “I hate it when your instincts are ahead of your brain.”

“I heard someone else there not much later and ducked into the hall closet.”

“Not the greatest cover. Shallow. Louvered wooden doors like toothpicks. Not much in there, but not much protection either.”

“I didn’t know the house. Then I … heard what I later knew to be the sound of a knife shredding someone’s wardrobe. Yours. It sounded like a big cat on a rampage.”

“Very Psycho.”

“Exactly. That’s when I knew I had to get out of that closet. I heard someone coming, tried to surprise the intruder by banging through the flimsy louvered folding doors.”

“You had a weapon.”

“Glock. Of course. But I didn’t want to use it randomly. I fended off the perp with my right forearm, but the knife was already sweeping down in the darkness.”

“Ouch,” he said. “If it was a Norman Bates–type attack…”

“No. Slashing, not stabbing. And I was a moving target. The cutting edge did a bouncing glissando on my ribs, left a blood trail, but didn’t damage any critical organs.”

“All pain and no glory.”

“You got that right.”

“So there you are, in the dark, bleeding, hurting, armed, and alone.”

“Don’t I wish.”

“You saw the attacker?’

“You tell me. I figured my attacker was gone, got myself to the living room, and discovered someone was still in the house with me.”

“Not the attacker?”

“So he claimed when he explained himself.”

“At the barrel of a GLOCK?”

“And in the light of a lamp.”

“First lamp in the main room off the hall?”

She nodded.

“Dirty Larry.” He said the name thoughtfully.

She nodded.

Max Kinsella whistled softly, but waited.

“Larry said he’d been watching the house and came in after me.”

“So might the attacker have done.”

“Right.”

“Or the attacker might have been lying in wait, quietly, until you were fully committed to … housebreaking. In a vulnerable position.”

“Right.”

“Anybody admit to seeing the attacker leave?”

“Larry, you mean? No. I was bleeding a lot. He had to get me out of there.”

“How’d he explain being there?”

“He thought I’d stood him up.”

“You were on dating terms?” The slightly disbelieving tone in Kinsella’s voice was either flattering or insulting.

“I’d used Dirty Larry to find your address and then didn’t invite him to the B and E party. He figured something was up and followed me. Ironic, huh?

“Oh, better than that, lieutenant.” Kinsella actually grinned as he considered the Vegas police version of “Spy vs. Spy.” “Maybe that’s how my wardrobe ended up shredded on the closet floor. It looked expensive.”

“It certainly looked like someone hated your guts, and your Guccis.”

“I must have made a lot of money on the Strip. I notice I have expensive tastes.”

She shook her head. “So you’re rich. Big sin. Can you access any of that wealth?”

“Haven’t tried yet. Don’t remember where, actually. Wanna help?”

“Your tough luck.”

“You wouldn’t have to pay me anymore. Have you done any digging into Podesta’s background?”

“His record’s with us. He worked in Flagstaff earlier.”

“I mean, where he and his people came from, family, and school—all that jazz?”

“No. I suspected he had some self-serving scheme going, but nothing truly shady. His file jacket here as a narc is impeccable.”

“His recent behavior sure isn’t. Cops aren’t immune from overcontrolling women. Maybe he wanted you freaked about danger to your kid and depending on him.”

“But I didn’t.”

“Who did you depend on during that challenging time when your daughter was missing? What? You look like I’d handed you a pickle for a Havana cigar.”

“Ugh. What a distasteful figure of speech either way.”

“So who?”

Molina made another pickle-smoking face. “My ex, Rafi. And … a crazy teen alter ego of your Miss Temple Barr called Zoe Chloe Ozone.”

“She’s nobody’s Miss Temple Barr but her own. ‘Zoe Chloe Ozone’? That sounds rather … disturbing.”

“It is. Check the Web. I guess ZCO caught some buzz. Anyway, we caught up with Mariah and her little dancing friend. There’d already been another Barbie doll killing at a mall audition out of state. The captain wanted all of us undercover at the dancing competition, which was being sabotaged. Larry was among the security and police forces there.”

“And the Barbie Doll Killer wasn’t behind anything, or caught?”

“No. Actually, the saboteur was after Matt Devine.”

“Why would anybody be after an ex-priest radio counselor?” When he saw she wasn’t talking about the case, he added, “I suppose no public personality is safe these days. Mister Midnight or Zoe Chloe Ozone. Well.”

Kinsella put his finished beer bottle on the countertop as if planting a flagpole. Firm and targeted. “It’ll be harder to shadow Podesta now, but I’ll manage. I’ll also look into the deepest and darkest corners of his past. You?”

“Larry’s games are just a distraction. I’m going over all the Barbie Doll Killer incidents, lethal and just creepy, until I squeeze a viable suspect out of those files. There’s got to be a loose end somewhere.”

Kinsella stood, wincing. “You’re surrounded by loose ends, including me.”

She watched his stride stretch out after the long time sitting, as he moved to the front door. He was walking pretty damn well for two months off two broken legs. She needed to keep in mind that magicians were often athletes.

Once he’d left, she allowed herself to remember their one set-to, when she’d tried to subdue and cuff him. He’d been frantic to get to Temple, rightfully worried, it turned out.

But while Temple was waltzing with the Stripper Killer and a can of pepper spray in another local strip-club parking lot, she and Kinsella had been tangoing in closest quarters with matched skill and strength at Baby Doll’s.

Recently, forced to watch Dancing With the Celebs with Mariah and Temple/Zoe, seeing the five competing couples do the tango, including Matt Devine with unsuspected macho fire, she’d felt her face heating with memory.

To break her hold and concentration, Kinsella had begun taunting her about her Iron Maiden nickname. She’d recognized a ruse to distract and anger her, but for just a furious moment, she’d thought, I could show you a thing or two, you bastard, just like I showed all the sexists on the force. I could heat you up and then shut you down so fast your brain cells would go nova, if I wanted to.

Luckily, his desperation to get away had ultimately ended that old Argentinean tango she/he impasse. He’d folded, let her take him down, hard, cuff him, and haul him into her Crown Vic while they headed for the other strip club. Only he’d slipped the cuffs off like Houdini and left her cuffed to the steering wheel. He got to the other club first, but Temple was already safe.

Loose ends, Molina thought, smiling as she locked the door after him.

Max Kinsella was completely up for grabs now, and he didn’t remember how he’d tried to seduce her in the heat of battle. She still might like to show him something, after this case and its other loose ends were dead and buried. She had the mental advantage now, although they both had been through the wars. She had a memory.

With Mariah out for the night, she had the bathroom to herself for once. She headed down the hall, now glad that Dirty Larry had been outed. Progress on the case.

She needed, and could get in blessed peace, a muscle-relaxing, pulsing shower. Umm, too Psycho. Why not a long, luxurious soak, courtesy of Mariah’s perfumed Hello Kitty bubble-bath set?

Even Iron Maidens had the occasional day, or night, off. And Mama had a lot of eligible men worrying her mind, some of them even deliciously dangerous.

Chapter 29

Big Pussycats Have Sharp Ears

Mr. Max Kinsella is not the only expert “tail” in the shamus business.

Everyone assumed that I would meekly follow my Miss Temple out of chez Molina and go home of a night.

Hah!

The night was my basinet and is now my beat and my business.

Some people barhop. I carhop. Not as in serving fast food to anybody but myself. I am a high-level low-ender. With my natural coat of cat-burglar black, I can enter pretty much any vehicle on the planet. Not to brag. So I got there with Miss Temple, but I felt no obligation to leave with her, even if she “brung” me, loathsome expression.

I had a quiet corner chat with the hiss-and-run combo of Caterina and Tabitha and arranged the artful chase that allowed me to literally point out that Dirty Larry has been skulking around crime scenes far too long for anyone’s good.

Some private dicks would dust off their trench coats and say, “My work here is done.”

Not Midnight Louie. Have coat, will travel. Or stay put. I got these feelings that put more than my neck hairs on parade salute. Tonight my hunches raised my hackles all the way down my spine to the end of my second-most-valuable member.

So I hunkered down during the farewells to settle into a quiet evening with Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina and her two somewhat dim-witted rescue girls.

Not everybody can be the brains of the operation, and I do employ freelance assistants at Midnight Investigations, Inc., when necessary.

So not only did I get the chance to alert my Miss Temple and associates to the suspicious lurking behavior I have long observed in Dirty Larry—not that lurking is suspicious when I do it—but I got to see and hear Mr. Max Kinsella come along after my revelation and give the same warning, if at more tedious length. I am always short and to the point. I was born that way.

Moreover, I did not alert Larry to anyone’s being on guard about him, as Miss Lieutenant certainly chewed out Mr. Max for doing.

Plus, I overheard lots of juicy back-and-forth that would have had my Miss Temple salivating, could I but convey long narratives to her.

Let us just say I have more insights on all sorts of actions and reactions among the human sort. One cannot underestimate the usefulness of on-scene snoopery.

Miss Midnight Louise will be so burned up about what she missed.

Chapter 30

Boys’ Night Out

“I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to get to know each other,” Max Kinsella’s strong, familiar voice told Matt over the phone the next day, “but since I’m not sure of much of anything, including my past, I’ll have to take Temple’s word on it. And yours. You’re the professional shrink.”

“Not a shrink. A counselor, and I think it’s best we meet on neutral ground.”

“Not your place or my place, then?”

“No.” Matt couldn’t stomach seeing Max back at the Circle Ritz. And although Kinsella’s residence might reveal things the man himself wouldn’t say, Matt wasn’t curious enough, or stupid enough, to venture onto his territory.

“The Crystal Phoenix?” Max suggested.

Matt mentally rejected that idea. Too much “Temple” all over that place. He got a wicked idea, and it was out of his mouth before he could weigh it.

“How about a jazz club called the Blue Dahlia? The background music keeps conversations private without being strident.”

“What an intriguing name,” Kinsella said. “Let’s try it. Have I ever been there?”

“Not that I know of.”

“But you have?”

“A couple times. My WCOO producer took me out for a nightcap there. Actually, early this morning.”

“Male or female?”

“She also has her own syndicated show under the name Ambrosia.”

“Ah, the after-dark Siren of Sympathy and Schmaltz.”

“She helps a lot of people. You’ve heard her, so you must remember that?”

“You must remember this: I only remember trivial things from years ago and only a couple weeks in Europe from before I came back to Vegas. The house I … inherited here … is … empty.”

Matt held a pause that would be far too much “empty” airtime.

Of course, Matt thought. The man who’d owned that house and to whom Max owed so much was dead now. Kinsella must have been checking out The Midnight Hour and caught Ambrosia’s show, too.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Matt said. “And Ambrosia, she’s less siren than sister,” he added, “to everybody.”

Now Kinsella kept quiet for too long.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “It’s easy to be cynical if you haven’t suffered. I hope they serve cool drinks at the Blue Dahlia, along with the hot jazz.”

“Of course.”

“It’s six now. How about dinner at eight?”

Matt had his marching orders, as he imagined Kinsella did, so the connection was broken with mutual but gruff, “All right”s.

Except nothing was “all right,” Matt thought as he pocketed his cell phone.

And it was getting wronger by the minute. He’d checked his latest messages and recognized the several megs of a pictorial porn solicitation from RazorGrrl666@hitmail.com and deleted it. Again. He’d have to figure out how to block it. He wasn’t ready to declare that Kitty the Cutter was on his trail again, until he had better proof.

Maybe the Blue Dahlia wasn’t the best rendezvous site. Temple had mentioned that Max was drinking hard the night he came back, but he’d just run out on that homicidal mess in Belfast. He’d had his reasons.

Matt had some reasons, too.

What rotten timing that his talk-show career was going stratospheric just as Kinsella made his dramatic return. Max had pried Temple loose of Minneapolis and her family to follow him to Vegas. Did Matt have the moxie to pull Temple away from her new Vegas home to follow her man? Did he want to? He now had family “issues” in Chicago, and any new life for him and Temple—and Midnight Louie—would have to deal face-to-face with that mess.

That couldn’t be as bad as dealing face-to-face with the new Max. Tough for him, but really rough on Temple and her sympathetic soul. Matt had to forget his insecurities and do what was best for Temple.

First things first.

Matt agreed with Temple that all three needed to discuss their interlocking pasts and possible mutual enemies, and that he and Max needed to meet before she became involved.

Still, they hadn’t discussed bringing Molina into the case. Molina’d had a lot of family business on her mind and had stopped performing undercover as Carmen, the Blue Dahlia’s come-and-go torch singer.

Temple would be the first to swear that Matt didn’t have a mean bone in his body, but he felt a distinctly wicked tingle in his funny bone right now.

What if Molina showed up at the Blue Dahlia to sing for some insanely remote reason and saw her most elusive suspect sitting in the audience?

Now that would be a psychologically satisfying confrontation to mediate.

*

Matt pulled the Jag into the Blue Dahlia parking lot two hours later, wondering if a law-enforcement pro like Molina remembered, every time she arrived, the dead body found near her car here, many months ago. The words She left had even been painted on her Volvo. No wonder “Carmen” hadn’t been on the Blue Dahlia menu lately. Now Molina had “left.”

So she probably remembered, but with less of the sudden sadness that Matt felt. That killer had been caught. Her job was done on that case. Or maybe not.

He checked the parking lot for a car Kinsella might have driven, but spotted nothing in the Mystifying Max’s trademark black. Matt turned to punch the lock button and jumped, less at the sharp bleep the device made than at the voice so close behind him.

“Look who won the lottery.”

He turned to find Max looming, looking gaunter and therefore even taller than his six-four.

“How’d you recognize me if you don’t remember me?” Matt asked.

“WCOO Web site. You’re all over it. Ambrosia, on the other hand, is just an exotic set of dark eyes, close-up.”

“Radio personalities are usually camera-shy.”

“That’s usually because they’ve had a lifetime of designing their personalities to be heard, not seen. You’re not that type.”

“You can tell?”

“I’m not that good. I was told you were an ex-priest.”

“By Temple?”

“By Garry Randolph.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t know him,” Matt said, walking toward the club entrance. “Temple said he was a great guy, and your mentor.”

“Yes, and yes.”

They were inside, where Max was sizing up the place like a gunfighter picking the best back-to-the-wall seat. The Blue Dahlia wasn’t a family draw. Its small tables held mostly couples, or foursomes of friends, all fairly mature.

The hostess in Max-black from her flats to her leggings to her short dress and the matching menu cover eyed the room.

“The corner table all right, gentlemen? You look more like talkers than listeners.”

The spot she led them to was perfect, isolated on the side wall, with a 180-degree view of the musicians’ small riser and the tiny dance floor in front of it.

“We are here to discuss business?” Matt commented as they followed the hostess to the setup.

“You’ve been here before, haven’t you, sir?” she asked Matt as both men took room-facing chairs, putting each other at right angles.

Matt was surprised. The hostess had already gone home by the time he and Ambrosia had hit the joint in the wee hours of today.

“It’s been a while,” Matt said, referring to an earlier prime-time visit. “You have a remarkable memory,” he added with a smile. She was old enough, in her fifties despite the youthful dress, to appreciate that compliment. And she reminded him of his mother.

A brooding silence at his right made Matt realize he’d just uttered a dirty word—memory.

The hostess smiled wide enough to be on a tooth-bleaching commercial. “Oh, there’s a reason I remember you. I also saw you recently on Dancing with the Celebs and recognized you, Mister Devine. Well, I almost didn’t. Those were some wild costumes the celebrities got to wear.”

“Had to wear,” Matt said, sitting and opening the menu to end the conversation.

Too late.

“Dancing with the Celebs?” Max repeated, on the verge of disbelief.

“For charity.” Matt kept his eyes on the menu, forcing the hostess to be on her way. “Complete disaster. It attracted a homicidal loony, but he’s awaiting trial.” Matt had worn his long T sleeves pushed up, so he flashed the inside of his left wrist.

Max stared at the thin, vertical, shiny pink line of the scar alongside his veins. “A suicide slash, not self-inflicted. Someone meant business. That must have bled like crazy.”

“Yup. Almost as bad as the razor slash Kathleen O’Connor carved into my side a year ago.”

“So you’re a two-time knifee. I guess radio-show hosts attract a lot of hostility these days.”

“Not usually. The dance-show stalker bore a grudge because I’d talked his abused wife into leaving him. He’d killed her just days before I was announced as a contestant.”

“Sorry,” Max said.

“And I owe the cat slash from Kitty the Cutter to her fixation on your hide, not mine.”

“Sorry again. Maybe we’d better order some food and drink for a mellow rerun before this exchange gets too dark to deal with.”

Matt kept his eyes on the menu, not really seeing it. “I guess you’ve had a lot of grief lately.”

“At least I can’t remember most of it,” Max said, lightly. “What goes with jazz?”

Matt found himself focusing. “The, uh, the sirloin tips are good. That’s what I had here. Grilled Chicken Picata.”

“Sounds like a Temple Barr preference,” Max said, of the chicken entrée.

“Actually, I was here with Lieutenant Molina. I’ll have the Salmon Fettuccini.”

“You’re a brave man.” Kinsella let his comment confuse Matt for a long moment then continued: “artichoke, purple onion, and garlic all in one go.”

“I apparently like to eat dangerously. They have a great pale ale here, even Guinness stout.”

“No beer, ale, or stout for me,” Max said. “I’m allergic now.”

“Oh. Well, you don’t look like a wine guy.”

“Not like you were.”

It took Matt a second to realize Max Kinsella had been reared Catholic and understood ex-priest almost as well as he did.

“No,” Matt said, “sacramental wine hasn’t been on my menu lately, either. Why not just skip the well-aged angst and order the hard spirits of our choice?”

Max laughed with genuine appreciation. “Gandolph didn’t tell me you were easy to underestimate, too. Scotch whisky it is for me, a double. A doughty drink. Neat,” he added, to the now-hovering waiter, whose brow furrowed. “No ice,” Max added in explanation.

“I’ll have…” Matt observed that Max had ordered the most manly drink first. “… A vodka gimlet. Ice, no sugar, and a lime wedge.”

“So she’s sweet and you’re sour,” Max commented.

“Are we talking about Kathleen O’Connor or Temple?”

Max chuckled softly again. “You’re not what I expected.”

“And you expected—?”

“Mister Nice Guy.”

“I am.”

“You won that.” He glanced at Matt’s wrist.

“Not by much.”

“Doesn’t matter by how much, trust me.”

“I can’t.”

“On that you can. Listen. I don’t like this any more than you do.”

“What’s not to like?” Matt asked. “Guys’ night out. I can … help you with a lot of those blank areas in your memory. It’s my business. Trust me.”

“I can’t.”

“You should.”

The waiter brought their drinks and waited like an expectant chipmunk for their food orders. Even food-service jobs in Vegas were hard to come by nowadays. Matt ordered his salmon and Kinsella his Caribbean Spiced Prime Rib of Pork, just to be left alone for a while.

“Talk about eating dangerously,” Matt said. “Pork with habanero-banana salsa and Diablo Sauce?

“Have to keep up with the competition.”

“Look,” Matt said. “I’m glad you’re alive, but I’m not happy about you coming back to Vegas from the dead. Temple is a true-blue soul. She’d never leave you out there, twisting in the wind with serious losses to deal with and no memory.”

“And you?”

“Me neither,” Matt heard himself almost snarl. “So you’re our pet project. I want to help you on your merry way to mental health and new places and faces, okay?”

Max took a long slug of Scotch, nodding. “Self-interest I can buy. Meanwhile, chew on this: I don’t remember much, Devine. Frankly, I don’t know much, but I do know that Temple is not my type.”

“How do you know?”

“I encountered it … her … on my escape route.”

“You’re with another woman?”

“I was.”

Matt let a lot of vodka and lime fill his throat before he answered. “That’s … crummy.”

“What? You’d want me back, whole, picking up where I’d left off?”

“No.” Matt sipped some more of his mixed vodka-sour feelings. “Temple shouldn’t be that easy to get over.”

Max lifted his amber glass. “I’ve made my point. I’m a cad without a memory. You have nothing to fear … but Kathleen O’Connor. I’m here not because of Temple or any memory or feelings I have of or for her. I’m here because we all three have a mutual enemy. And Kathleen’s like that vengeful wife abuser from your once-innocent airtime advice show. She won’t go away and stop hurting people, mainly us, until we catch her and stop her and put her away. Sláinte.”

Max held out his glass. The word predestination crossed Matt’s mind before he chimed rims with his second-worst nightmare. Kinsella was right. Handicapped but right.

It would have to be a battle to the death with the banshee from Max’s past and Matt and Temple’s future. Matt had been uneasily relieved to hear his attacker had at one time been declared dead, by Max, at the end of an attempt to hound the object of her twenty-year vendetta into a deadly auto accident. The deadly auto accident had just happened months later and five thousand miles away … to another man.

None of this was what it appeared to be, and not so simple. They needed to collaborate, again, Matt and Temple and Max, to find out what had really happened, what hadn’t, and what was in store for them.

Matt had evidently ID’d the wrong body with a very wrong feeling of relief. Old sins come back to haunt you. And, for him, hard.

Kathleen O’Connor rides again.

Chapter 31

Every Silver Cloud …

Temple sat at home alone on a Friday night, her only companion a cat, and racked her brain to pick some neutral territory where she and the M&M boys—Matt and Max—could meet to discuss their precarious physical and mental situation.

She’d heard about last evening’s raw and recent M&M rendezvous at the Blue Dahlia from Matt. She didn’t want to risk Carmen showing up for the 10:00 P.M. show, if the trio met there. Matt and Temple and Max and Molina would not make a “fantastic foursome.”

Temple was too well known at the Crystal Phoenix.

And Planet Hollywood was suddenly “too Max.”

Anyone’s place of residence? The Circle Ritz condo address that all three had shared at one time was also the only place she had slept with both men … at different times, Temple reminded herself.

She couldn’t help being a serial monogamist—life threw love at you as unpredictably as a twenty-one dealer threw players aces—but she certainly wasn’t a two-timer, and her fiancé and ex would probably gang up together on anyone who implied that.

Wait! What about that commodious old house Orson Welles had once lived in? It looked bland but was supersecure. No. Max was living in it again, out of perversity or penance, and its forever-link to his slain mentor Gandolph was too memory-laden.

So, Barr, you’re a PR whiz kid. Come up with the perfect location.

No more restaurants. They were impersonal and noisy, especially in Vegas, fine for breaking bad news to the men in your life so they couldn’t go too postal in public, but not for serious strategy sessions complicated by deep-seated male competition.

Another good controllable environment skidded to a premature stop in her mind. No. They could hardly reserve Electra’s in-house wedding chapel.… True, the only ears in the place were on Electra’s imaginative soft-sculpture “congregation,” including Elvis. But the connotations of wedded bliss hit way too close to home.

Temple was totally flummoxed.

This was unheard of.

She prided herself on being the Go-To Guru for whatever or whomever you needed to know in or about Sin City. She was the PR concierge for the whole damn city. The Vegas Magus. The Sage of the Strip. The Info Icon. The utterly In-the-Know Nabob. She of all people would intuit where to take your ex and your current fiancé to solve mutual mysteries without devolving into past issues and public spectacles.

Not a clue.

So she called her aunt Kit.

“Don’t whimper,” Kit said, when she’d heard Temple’s complaints of failure to be innovative, or even sensible. “You’re simply too emotionally involved.”

“Not news,” Temple said.

“A cooler head would list the necessities.”

“A sword for my own hara-kiri?”

“Nonsense. Suicide is gainless. You need to control the horizontal. You need to control the vertical.”

“I don’t believe in attempting to ‘control’ men,” Temple said loftily.

“Not the men, silly. The circumstances. What do you need for this ‘meet’?”

“‘Meet’? Kit, you’ve been hanging with the Fontana family too long already.”

“Answer my question.”

“Uh, privacy,” Temple said. “So a restaurant won’t do. It’s a busy Friday night anyway.”

“And—what else?”

“Liquor should be available as social lubrication, but in moderate amounts. Matt doesn’t drink much—yet, but Max is a melancholy Celt in mourning and fresh from the Ould Sod. So a bar is too tempting as well as too public.”

“What about a pub? Ale is less intoxicating.”

“Auntie! Pub? Max lost his best friend, twice, two decades apart, in Irish pubs. Or near them.”

“Oh.” Kit sounded stymied. “No, beer would not be good. Champagne is all right, though?”

“I doubt anybody will be celebrating this reunion.”

“Privacy, limited liquor…” Kit repeated.

“And nobody can see us.”

“I was an actress and I am a writer, so I can assure you that cloaks of invisibility are not only fictional but a very difficult stage effect. Maybe Max could—”

“Max is not the mastermind here. I am.”

“And your mind is out to lunch. Hush. No protests. You’re so emotionally unstrung. Two wonderfully eligible bachelors on your hands. It would make a terrific reality-TV show.”

“Been there, done that. Bloody murder resulted. Two of them. It may be awkward to have present and past guys in my life, but I can’t afford to risk both of them being killed.”

“And so you shan’t. Lovely verb, isn’t that? Shan’t. So British. Thank you for allowing me to feel very Emma Thompson. I’ll handle it all.”

“You’re not coming along, Kit.”

“Certainly not! And make it a foursome? I’m a married woman now, Temple, to a hot-tempered Italian who brooks no rivals and springs for no free drinks for other guys. I just happen to have thought of the ideal solution. I’ll get back to you in a lickety-split moment.”

Temple shut off her cell phone.

Midnight Louie jumped up beside her, rubbing his nose against her arm.

He was a very nosy cat.

“You remember Aunt Kit?” she asked him. “From our magical, mystery Christmas trip to Manhattan a while back?” Her fingers circled his ears, the way he liked it. “You were on the brink of stardom as a spokescat, and I—”

Temple suddenly clapped her palms to her ears. She just remembered that their jaunt to the Big Apple had ended with her being suddenly whisked away by Max for a night of sex in the city.

What woman on earth wanted to be “caught between the moon and New York City,” between an old lover and a new one? Oooh. That sounded so tacky. Like she was a Material Girl who couldn’t make up her mind.

Stop whining.

Kit was right.

Max was now a memory-impaired mess, and Matt was too earnest for his own good.

Both of them had been targets of Kitty the Cutter’s most homicidal rages. Someone had to make up for male gallantry and take the bad “grrrrl” down.

Temple didn’t believe in calling women “bitches.” She did believe in fighting evil of any gender tooth and nail. Well, with her tenacious teeth and—she eyed Louie—his ferocious claws now and again.

*

A half hour later she was leaving cryptic messages on both men’s cell phones.

“The Kitty the Cutter Club meets at eight P.M. In the Circle Ritz parking lot.” She left that message for Matt and hung up.

“The Kitty the Cutter Club meets at eight-twenty P.M.,” she purred into the unanswered ether of Max’s cell phone. “On the corner of Mojave and Juniper.”

Temple left the message, as instructed, and hung up.

This mission was like those animal riddles about how prey and predator cross a river. Kit decreed that the men shouldn’t be left alone with each other.

What a diplomat Kit would have made. Actually, as the latest famous bachelor-brother Fontana bride, Kit already had to be one. Temple pictured Kit Ursula Carlson Fontana and Vanilla von Rhine Fontana, wife of Nicky, the youngest Fontana brother, at odds.

It was not a pretty sight.

Good thing they were all “Family.”

Meanwhile, Temple waited, mystified, on the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo in front of the neon row of dancing flamingos at 7:40 P.M., as ordered by her aunt.

The sunlight sinking behind the western mountains faded as the facing chorus lines of Strip light works intensified. Temple loved these magical minutes when natural and artificial light duked it out for mastery of the night.

She stood there like a schoolgirl in her demure navy fifties suit and vintage clear-Lucite-heeled red pumps, a modern version of the Ruby Slippers, with her large red patent-leather tote bag—or should she think “Toto” bag?—clasped in front of her.

The last time she’d met with both Matt and Max, she’d still been Max’s girl.

She bit her lower lip but forbore to chew, and vowed not to pick at her cuticles. This was crime-and-punishment business, mutual self-protection stuff, deadly serious business they all could handle like the civilized adults they were.

So why did she also feel like Alice about to attend a Very Mad Tea Party?

While she was putting herself into every girl-empowering scenario she could muster, she realized something was blocking her view of the iconic hotels across the Strip and even of the mountains’ gentle sawtooth peaks.

Oh.

Something long and pale and metallic and, well, slithering had obliterated everything but her gliding close-up view. Its arrival so much resembled a movie-camera pan that her mind went into slo-mo and she only tardily ID’d the apparition as a Rolls Royce stretch Silver Cloud limo to die for. Or to ride in as one wheeled directly into automotive and vintage heaven.

Temple had been woolgathering so hard in the children’s literature of an earlier day that the driver had already stopped, deplaned, and come around to open the very, very distant back door for her.

Even the driver’s shiny-billed black cap couldn’t disguise a glossy full head of Fontana-brother razor-cut hair. As he bowed to open the door, Temple wracked and rolled her brain cells. Obviously not Nicky. No solo earring, therefore not Ralph nor Emilio. No discreet thread of silver in that coif, therefore not Aunt Kit’s new consort, Aldo. That left Rico, Ernesto, Eduardo, Julio, Emilio, and Giuseppe.

Temple realized the Fontana brothers had individual differences. They just so often appeared in well-tailored, Italian gelato smoothie, six-plus-pack that they overwhelmed the female ability to discriminate, and a woman usually fell head over heels “in like” with all of them.

“Miss Temple,” the chauffeur said.

“Gracious Gertie. I didn’t expect Gangsters to provide the ride tonight, and even to have the honor of one of the owners at the wheel…”

“Emilio, Ernesto, Giuseppe, Eduardo, Julio, and I did resort to gambling to earn this honor.”

Aaah. He’d cued her, just like a Fontana brother would. Always in command, even when you, the mere mortal, were not.

“Thank you, Rico,” Temple said, taking the long lunge she needed to get inside the huge passenger compartment. She was short and the Silver Cloud was soooo looong.

A bit of warm Vegas sidewalk heat entered with her, at calf level.

It was not only a sensual waft on her bare leg, it was butch-cut black fur on the clawed hoof.

“Louie,” she hissed in a whisper. “You were not invited. You must have tailed me here, you … sneak.”

Fortunately, he blended so well with the black carpeting underlining the Silver Cloud’s ivory leather upholstery and fancy wood interior that Rico stared in vain past her ankles for the object of her surprise.

He did look in the right direction. Down.

“Nice Gianmarco Lorenzis.” His voice dripped approval of all things Italian. For a moment, Temple thought he was naming three cousins. Oh, her designer shoes.

So that’s what they were. Like the Rolls Royce, they’d been “previously owned,” by a resale shop in her case.

Then Rico stood up straight as a staff sergeant and got all serious and squinty-eyed before he shut the door on her.

“This vehicle is a nineteen-sixty-one Rolls Royce Silver Cloud One. That ‘One’ is written as a capital I, to indicate the Roman numeral one, because it is fit for an emperor. There are very few stretch Rolls Royce Silver Clouds in the world, Miss Temple, because the model is so revered that only the most profligate and fashion-conscious purveyor of rides would dare to stretch one. Gangsters are some of the ballsy few, so only a handful of people have been so conveyed. You have to ask yourself, do you have the chutzpah to deserve such a world-class ride, Miss Temple? Well, do you?”

“Absolutely,” she said, “and I feel very lucky to have one, too.”

At that the door shut with a soft but firm whoosh of hot night air and absolute cool.

Louie had come out of flattened, belly-down-to-the-black-carpeting camouflage mode and was sniffing around the handsome curly-maple bar with its dazzling armada of cut-glass decanters and Baccarat glasses.

Temple recalled the recipe for détente she had recited to Kit. Absolute privacy. A controlled environment that called for self-control. A certain amount of high-proof liquidity to file off any raw edges. Presto!

Rico lowered the tinted window between her and his capped self, fourteen feet away.