Cat In An Aqua Storm

4

Crawford Sees Red

Temple hated Mondays. Her normally creative brain always marked time until past noon. It had been true on the job, and it was equally true when she was her own boss, working at home. She made a face at her personal computer screen, then got up from the glass-topped desk in the spare bedroom and wandered to the row of French doors in the living room, cosseting a condensation-dewed glass of Crystal Light clad in a terry-cloth sleeve.

Opening a door, she stepped barefoot onto the warm stones of the tricorn-shaped patio, keeping under the shade of the generous eaves.

The sole palm tree on Electra’s property scrubbed the cloudless sky a brighter blue with its weathered green fronds. Oleanders hoarded a lingering bright red bloom among their spiky leaves. The pool’s lucid blue looked cooler than an ad for Aquavit.

Something moved below, vague enough to make Temple clutch her glass and agitate the last floating islands of ice. A white shadow shifted in the ground-level shade two floors below.

Her breath eased out when a smooth blond poll blazed as a figure stepped into full sunlight: Matt Devine, night-shift man, up at high noon and ready to exploit his off-hours.

She watched him with idle detachment, through a frozen, lazy pool of thought and emotion. He wore the white, loose-fitting martial-arts outfit she always thought of as pajamas. Barefoot, barehanded, bareheaded, he began pantomiming the graceful motions of some Eastern discipline. Tai chi maybe, or preliminary warm-ups for something more lethal, judo or tae kwon do.

Matt melted from one subtle movement into another, a butterscotch-topped Dairy Queen in motion, a small, remote figure on a painted parchment backdrop of cool blue water and hot white concrete edged with softly swaying green. God, he was good-looking, in an impersonal, artless way, she mused. Or was she only moonstruck by him?

Temple turned from contemplation, leaving Matt Devine to his more arduous ritual, and ambled back into her apartment. Her own bare feet polished the walnut parquet, scratching her insteps on the occasional raised cracks.

In the black-and-white kitchen, Louie’s banana split bowl overflowed with brown-green pellets. Free-to-Be-Feline was costing a pretty penny as fodder for the garbage disposal.

The cat was off on errands of his own, no doubt scrounging garbage cans for unhealthy but toothsome grub. Temple perused the open refrigerator while mulling a snappy lead for a press release on the Button Collectors of West Las Vegas. Yogurt would be smooth and chill, but she craved something sweeter. Maybe green grapes. She opened the fruit drawer. She had no green grapes. She had only a half-wilted fan of romaine lettuce, ruffled edges curled like ostrich plumes. And a deformed grapefruit. Grapefruit was not grapes.

And her press-release lead wasn’t coming. She should take an invigorating walk. All right, a hot, drying walk. She should exercise, like Matt, who even now might be stroking smoothly through the aquavit water. Join him. Eeek. Did she want to be seen in last year’s neon tank suit? The sun planted instant freckles on her shoulders. Definitely not sexy. What to eat?

A knock at the door saved her from freezing in the refrigerated air while making up her mind. She glanced quickly at her knit shorts and top while hurrying to answer it. Uninspired but neat. Maybe Matt—

“Oh, hi, Electra. What’s up?”

“Not the rent, don’t worry,” the landlady answered with a grin. “I come bearing what the paperboy dumped in the azaleas this noon. The whole building’s supply ended up as lizard carpet. Thought you might have missed it.”

“I didn’t,” Temple admitted. “Been fighting the button collectors all morning. While you were out beating the bushes for news, did you happen to spot Midnight Louie?”

“No. That scamp gone AWOL again?”

Temple nodded as she took the Las Vegas Review-Journal Electra offered. She stepped back to reveal the pyramid of untouched Free-to-Be-Feline. “He’s not eating his low-ash, low-fat, low-magnesium, high-fiber, high-protein food fresh from the vet’s.”

“I don’t know as I blame him.” Electra frowned at the brown pellets in the banana split dish, then turned to the expression on Temple’s face. “You look kind of peaked, dear. Are you sure you’re eating right?”

“I’d eat everything in sight if I’d let myself. You want some Crystal Light?”

“No, but a beer would be nice.”

Temple explored her refrigerator and discovered one lone Coors Light necklaced in plastic trailing an empty string of five matching rings, probably dating to the last days of Max.

“Does beer spoil?” she asked, wrenching the cold can free of its plastic collar.

“Only if it’s open.” Electra accepted the beer and headed for the French door Temple had left ajar. “Maybe your rogue tomcat is basking on the patio.”

“No, I looked—” Temple began, too late to head off Electra’s singled-minded course.

When Temple caught up with her outside, Electra was by the retaining wall smacking her lips and enjoying the scenery. “I forgot your unit had a pool view. Matt has added a lot to the Circle Ritz’s ambience since he came.”

“Really?” Temple sat on the cushioned lounge chair.

Electra plunked down on the matching ottoman. “Really. How are things going between you two?”

“What things? You make us sound like an item.”

“Well, you did go out with him a time or two after the ABA hullabaloo.”

“He was just being nice.”

“Hmm. He’s good at that.”

“He is. He’s the most genuinely nice man I’ve ever met.”

“Why do you sound so disappointed then?”

“I don’t know.” Temple sipped her poisonously sweet low-calorie drink. “Nice is great if it’s an opening curtain. If it’s the whole show—”

“No spice.” Electra nodded sagely. “Like my second husband. Perfectly nice, kind to widows and wackos. Boring.

“Matt’s not boring, just reserved.”

“You’re just spoiled by the ex-Max.”

“What’s spoiling about someone who can walk out on you without a word?”

“It’s not boring.”

Temple sat back, remembered Max. “No.”

Electra leaned forward to pat her knee, her armful of silver bracelets jingling like the spurs of song and story. “Don’t fret, dear. Men are always more interesting at a distance, or when they’ve just come or just gone. It’s a trait of the breed. Take my ex-husbands, but then I really couldn’t wish them on anyone.”

Temple laughed. “Thanks for the paper, Electra. And the pep talk. I think.”

The landlady winked, rose with her beer and let herself out.

Temple remained in the lounge chair, listening to the faint, rhythmic plash of water as Matt swam laps below. She sighed and unfolded the newspaper.

“No kidding!” She seldom spoke to herself, but had been doing it more since Louie’s arrival disguised it as pet talk.

Her eyes whipped back and forth along the short lines of front-page type like a Singer sewing machine set on zigzag. Words leaped out: fraud... dead... Goliath... stripper... suspected murder.

Temple leaped up in unholy shock. “Good grief, a thief! Murder at the strippers’ convention. And it’s in Awful Crawford’s own damn lap! I can’t believe it.” Below her, the water stilled. Matt was standing in the shallow end, a shading hand to his eyes, looking up at her balcony.

“I’m okay,” she shouted down. “I just learned that my worst enemy, who was boasting about snagging the strippers’ convention away from me, has landed in the middle of a juicy murder. Not me this time, him!”

“Are you jubilant,” Matt shouted back, glistening golden in the sun, “or jealous?”

Temple sobered. A woman was dead and Crawford Buchanan wasn’t equipped to do anything about it but wring his pale white hands. She sat down and considered Matt’s question again, seriously. Then she rose, leaned over the patio wall and invited him over for supper.

“Supper,” she repeated when she opened the door to Matt’s prompt ring at five o’clock. “Not dinner. I don’t do dinner.”

“What’s the difference?” He presented her with a chilled matte black bottle of Freixenet. He was wearing a champagne linen short-sleeved shirt that made his tan and his brown eyes sing like the Song of Solomon.

“This says dinner.” Temple hefted the wine bottle before depositing it on the table. “But it can stay for supper anyway. Supper is a little deli this, a little leftover that. For supper you can over-garlic the bread and bum the beans. For dinner you have to be perfect. For supper you can have your wine in a supermarket glass. For dinner”—she went up on tiptoe in her high-heeled Anne Klein emerald leather sandals, opened the shallow cabinet high over the stove hood and batted at the long-stemmed glasses just out of reach.

Matt came over and took down two of the hand-blown cobalt goblets.

Temple settled back to earth with a relieved sigh. “For dinner you drink out of craftware.”

“Very nice.” Matt set the princely glasses at the colorful Fiesta ware places already set in the dining room corner. “I’m glad I brought dinner.”

“And heeeere’s supper.” Temple swooped the plates of deli breads, homemade crab salad, cold baked beans and artistically arranged fresh veggies from the refrigerator.

They settled down to the food without a lot of small talk or fanfare, which she liked, although she belatedly realized that the large, handmade wineglasses would hold a lot of sparkling bubbles.

“I hope you don’t think I’m too much of a ghoul after my outburst this morning,” she said as soon as the main dishes had made the rounds.

“You do seem to have a certain detachment about murder.”

“Well, the first time, it created a crisis on my job. It’s hard to empathize with a fly in the ointment, especially when he’s as widely loathed as the late Chester Royal turned out to be.”

“What’s the story on this murder at the Goliath? Why are you so...”

“Excited by it? Simple. You see, I could have had that strippers’ convention PR job, only I turned it down. Not Crawford Buchanan. He’s too greedy to reject any sure thing. So it could have been me and not Crawford Buchanan who’s up to his neck in a murderous mess. If I’d stumbled onto a body a second time, you can bet that Lieutenant Molina would have put me in thumbscrews.”

“That homicide detective! He sounds like a terror, or a throwback to the days of brass knuckles.”

Temple chewed crab salad and her impulses, then forbore telling Matt that her bête noir of the law was female. It made her look less in need of sympathy.

“Why did you turn the convention down?” he asked.

“This is one of the few times when I can grandly say, ‘principle.’ All that flesh on parade makes me uneasy, the notion of teasing a bunch of paying customers. Even regular working women are sometimes tempted into acting or looking like bimbos to get male attention.”

“Aren’t there men strippers now, too?”

“Oh, sure, but it’s the same thing. Besides, they’re all overblown plastic musclemen, about as attractive as steroid robots.”

“Then you don’t like them because you don’t find their type attractive?”

“And stripping seems demeaning. On the other hand, I guess they make a lot of money doing it, so who can blame them?”

“You can. You blame Crawford Buchanan for being greedy.”

“Don’t make me sound like a prude or a pauper. What upsets me is that I came closer than I want to think about to getting tangled in another murder. Which explains my unholy glee.”

“You had a hand in solving the last one. What’s wrong with that?”

“That’s not my job. My job is getting good publicity for my clients. I hate messes, and murder makes a mess you wouldn’t believe. But this time it’s in Crawford’s lap, not mine.”

“I’ll drink to that.” Matt lifted his glass. “What’s the story on this Crawford guy?”

“The bane of my life since I got to Vegas. Goes everywhere. Writes a sleazy woman-chasing column about the nightlife for the Las Vegas Scoop. Has no sense of shame or ethics. Would steal a client from the Pope.”

Matt choked on his wine at her heated description.

“Really, Matt! He’s the most slimy, sexist, smug, smarmy... PR person to pollute a press club.” Temple settled back for a sip of her own wine. “I shouldn’t let him get to me.”

“Is he getting to you, or the murder?”

“You keep asking these pointed questions.”

Matt smiled. “That’s my job.”

“You’re good at it. I always seem to need to explain my motives to you.”

“That’s not the idea. My questions are supposed to help you explain your motives to yourself.”

“You’re a model counselor,” she admitted more seriously before rising to dash into the kitchen for the crème de menthe chocolate mousse that would crown their plain supper. Temple was adept with desserts if nothing else edible. “A lot of people wouldn’t understand why Buchanan infuriates me,” she said when she came back and sat down after placing the dessert dishes.

Matt nodded. “It’s the injustice of it all, of Buchanan’s golden survival while he breaks every rule. In a way, you envy him.”

“I do not!” Temple meditated over her parti-colored mousse, dipping tiny spoonfuls from the deep narrow dessert glass and then letting them melt on her tongue. “Maybe I do envy his chutzpah.”

“We all envy the insensitive people of the world. They suffer less.”

“True.” Temple had noticed Matt’s wry tone on the last comment. “You must talk to a lot of suffering people.”

“You mean in my job?”

“You’re saying the sufferers are all around us. They are us.” He ate his mousse as methodically as she, in silence. “The ones who call you, though,” she said finally, “must be doubly desperate.”

“They don’t call me. They call the hot line. They call a distant, nonjudgmental voice. Someone who can’t see them, find them, accuse them. A disembodied conscience or savior.”

“Doesn’t it ever get to you? Dealing with all that misery?”

He shrugged almost imperceptibly. “Sometimes you help.”

“You can never know how much, though. Some callers you’ve given up on may have saved themselves. Some you’re sure will make it, won’t.”

The wine bottle tilted in Matt’s hand as it bowed deeply to Temple’s glass. That’s when she realized that they had drunk a lot, that her cheeks were flushed even as she felt suddenly sober, unbuoyed by bubbles, thinking about life and death. He was slow to answer.

“No, you can never really know what happens to the voices on the line when they hang up. Some you hear from again after a long silence. Some just vanish.”

Temple swallowed hard. “Not knowing must be the worst thing on earth,” she said fiercely.

Matt’s warm brown eyes met hers, broke the polite barrier they always erected, penetrated hers like burning swords. “No. The worst thing is knowing.”