Cat In An Orange Twist

Previously in

Midnight Louie’s

Lives and Times .. .

I have always been what you might call an afishionado. Those large, fancy Asian finsters called koi, in particular, tickle my

palate. I like to snag my own. Literally.

So when I hear that feng shui is coming to town, I figure Las Vegas is getting some new variety of finned delicacy. No such luck. Feng shui, I learn, is something between a trend and a religion, and Las Vegas is always religiously trendy, so it is a big deal here.

Naturally, my lively little roommate, the petite and toothsome (even though she is of the human species) Miss Temple Barr is up to her Jimmy Choo rhinestone-buckled ankle straps in this shui-phooey business. She is, after all, a freelance public relations specialist, and Las Vegas is full of public relations of all stripes and legalities.

I should introduce myself: Midnight Louie, Pl. I am not your usual gumshoe, in that my feet do not wear shoes of any stripe, but shivs. I have certain attributes, such as being short, dark, and handsome. Really short. That gets me overlooked and underestimated, which is what the savvy operative wants, anyway. I am your perfect undercover guy. I also like to hunker down under the covers with my little doll. My adventures would fill a book, and in fact I have several out. My life is just one ongoing TV miniseries in which I as hero extract my hapless human friends from fixes of their own making and literally nail crooks. After the dramatic turn of events last time out, most of my human associates are pretty shell-shocked. Not even an ace feline PI may be able to solve their various predicaments in the areas of crime and punishment … and PR, as in Personal Relationships.

As a serial killer-finder in a multivolume mystery series (not to mention a primo mouthpiece), it behooves me to update my readers old and new on past crimes and present tensions.

None can deny that the Las Vegas crime scene is a pretty busy place, and I have been treading these mean neon streets for sixteen books now. When I call myself an alpha-cat, some think I am merely asserting my natural male dominance, but no. I merely reference the fact that since I debuted in Catnap and Pussyfoot, I then commenced to a title sequence that is as sweet and simple as B to Z That is when I begin my alphabet, with the B in Cat on a Blue Monday. From then on, the color word in the title is in alphabetical order up to the current volume, Cat in an Orange Twist. (Yeow! I do so detest citrus!) Since I associate with a multifarious and nefarious crew of human beings, and since Las Vegas is littered with guidebooks as well as bodies, I wish to provide a rundown of the local landmarks on my particular map of the world. A cast of characters, so to speak:

To wit, my lovely roommate and high-heel devotee, Miss Nancy Drew on killer spikes, freelance PR ace MISS TEMPLE BARR,

WHO HAS REUNITED WITH HER ONLY LOVE . .

… the once missing-in-action magician MR. MAX KINSELLA, who has good reason for invisibility. After his cousin SEAN died in a bomb attack during a post-high school jaunt to Ireland, he went into undercover counterterrorism workwith his mentor, GANDOLPH THE GREAT, whose unsolved murder last Halloween while unmasking phony psychics at a s�ance is still on the books.

Meanwhile Mr. Max is sought by another dame, Las Vegas homicide LIEUTENANT C. R. MOLINA, mother of preteen MARIAH …

… and also the good friend of Miss Temple’s handsome neighbor, MR. MATT DEVINE. He is a syndicated radio talk-show shrink and former Roman Catholic priest who came to Las Vegas to track down his abusive stepfather, MR. CLIFF EFFINGER, who is now dead and buried. By whose hand no one is quite sure.

Speaking of unhappy pasts, Lieutenant Carmen Regina Molina is not thrilled that her former flame, MR. RAFI NADIR, the unsuspecting father of Mariah, is in Las Vegas taking on shady muscle jobs after blowing his career on the LAPD …

… or that Mr. Max Kinsella is aware of Rafi and his past relationship to hers truly. She had hoped to nail one man or the

other as the Stripper Killer, but Miss Temple prevented that by attracting the attention of the real perp.

In the meantime, Mr. Matt drew a stalker, the local girl that young Max and his cousin Sean boyishly competed for in that

long-ago Ireland …

… one MISS KATHLEEN O’CONNOR, deservedly christened by Miss Temple as Kitty the Cutter. Finding Mr. Max impossible to trace, she settled for harassing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine .. .

… who is still trying to recover from the crush he developed on Miss Temple, his neighbor at the Circle Ritz condominiums, while Mr. Max was missing in action. He did that by not very boldly seeking new women, all of whom were in danger from said Kitty the Cutter.

In fact, on the advice of counsel, i.e., AMBROSIA, Mr. Matt’s talk-show producer, and none other than the aforesaid Lt. Molina, he tried to disarm Miss Kitty’s pathological interest in his sexual state (she had a past penchant for seducing priests) by attempting to commit loss of virginity with a call girl least likely to be the object of K the Cutter’s retaliation. Except that hours after their assignation at the Goliath Hotel, said call girl turned up deader than an ice-cold deck of Bicycle playing cards. So did he, or didn’t he? Commit sin … or maybe murder.

But there are thirty-some million potential victims in this old town, if you include the constant come and go of tourists, and everything

is up for grabs in Las Vegas 24/7: guilt, innocence, money, power, love, loss, death, and significant others.

All this human sex and violence makes me glad I have a simpler social life, such as just trying to get along with my unacknowledged daughter …

. MISS MIDNIGHT LOUISE, who insinuated herself into my cases until I was forced to set up shop with her as Midnight Inc.

Investigations, and who has also nosed herself into my long-running duel with .. .

… the evil Siamese assassin HYACINTH, first met as the onstage assistant to the mysterious lady magician .. .

… SHANGRI-LA, who made off with Miss Temple’s semi-engagement ring from Mr. Max during an onstage trick and has not been

seen since except in sinister glimpses .. .

… just like THE SYNTH, an ancient cabal of magicians that may deserve contemporary credit for various unsolved deaths around Las Vegas.

Well, there you have it, the usual human stew, all mixed up and at odds with each other and within themselves. Obviously, it is up to

me to solve all their mysteries and nail a few crooks along the way. Like Las Vegas, the City that Never Sleeps, Midnight Louie, private eye, also has a sobriquet: the Kitty that Never Sleeps.

With this crew, who could?

Chapter 1

Expiration Date

“Well, as I live and breathe! Or maybe I don’t.”

Temple looked up from her trudge across the condo parking lot. Albertson’s plastic grocery bags dangled from her every extremity. She’d been thinking, however, less of cabbages and more of furniture kings, her next freelance public relations assignment.

“Electra.”

There her sixty-something landlady stood like somebody’s favorite fairy-godmother-cum-conscience, arms akimbo on broad muumuu-swathed hips.

“Let me help you with those bags before you break a fingernail,” Electra said.

Temple stopped, happy to let Electra strip her of assorted burdens. She hadn’t seen Electra Lark in what seemed like

ages, given all the clandestine excitement in her own life lately.

Apparently that was a major omission, because something was radically different about Electra. For one thing, she looked fifteen years younger.

“Electra. Your hair is brown.”

“Well, aren’t you the ace detective! Correction. My hair used to be brown.”

“And so it is again. Hey. It looks great this way. And what did you mean by ‘maybe you don’t’ live and breathe?”

Electra leaned close as they resumed plodding toward the side door of the Circle Ritz apartments and condominiums, a round ’50s building that was, architecturally speaking, as charmingly eccentric as its owner.

“It seems this old place is haunted.”

“Haunted? Oh, I don’t think so, Electra.”

“Don’t believe in ghosts?” “Not here.”

By now Electra had tugged-and Temple had elbowed-the door open and they squeezed through together.

Inside, the hall was cooler, but not much. Summer had not yet turned Las Vegas streets into one big sizzling Oriental wok.

“Why should the Circle Ritz be immune from ghosts?” Electra asked.

“Because I live here and I really don’t need another complication in my life right now.”

“You live here. Isn’t that amazing?’ They had reached the small but handsome lobby. Electra pressed the up button for the sole elevator with one elbow and the expertise of a longtime resident.

“I don’t live here?” Temple was getting alarmed.

Electra’s usual mode was unconventional rather than cryptic. She’d always used her snow white hair as a palette for a rainbow of temporary colors to match the vivid tones in her everpresent muumuus.

Brown was alarmingly ordinary for one of Electra’s expressive bent.

“Is this your subtle way,” Temple asked, “of trying to kick me out? You can’t. I own my place. On the other hand, you could kick out Matt Devine. He only rents.” As if anyone would ever want to kick out Matt Devine.

“Matt who?”

“Electra! You’re acting ultraweird. Maybe Miss Clairol has gone to more than your head. The moment I dig my key out

ofmy tote bag and let us in, I’m going to fix a cup of tea or a snifter of brandy and find out what’s going on with you.”

“Funny, I was planning to ply you with brandy, if you have any.”

Temple temporarily transferred some grocery bags to Electra’s arms while she plumbed the jumbled depths of her everpresent tote bag. The keys surfaced tangled around a giant can of paprika. Some of her purchases hadn’t fit into the six bags she could conceivably carry.

She dropped the paprika into a bag in Electra’s custody, then unlocked the door.

She never glimpsed her own place without an internal sigh of satisfaction. No “unit” in the Circle Ritz was the same, another aspect of the vintage building’s charm. Temple’s place was Mama Bear size: medium, partly because it had been bought for two.

The Baby Bear-size entry hall showed views of a blackand-white kitchen just the right size for Goldilocks and, farther in, the pie-slice-shaped living room. Its handsome rank of French doors led to a small triangular patio. Off each side of the main room were two bedroom suites with tiled baths. One of them served as Temple’s home office, because for the year that Max had lived here openly, no way did they need separate bedrooms.

Temple’s current live-in roommate sprawled on the off-white sofa dead ahead. Okay, he was often lazy, but he always looked good, which was more than some of her women friends could say about their slacker layabouts.

“That’s no ghost,” Temple said, admiring the black hairy body lounging so fluidly on her furniture.

Electra snorted. “I’ve seen more of Midnight Louie lately than I have of you. And he’s a real Houdini when it comes to

slipping in and out of this place.”

“I’ve been busy.” Temple proved it by heading for the kitchen to unload her week’s worth of the Craven Cook’s convenience foods, frozen stuff first. “And why do you need to ply me with anything alcoholic?”

Electra unloaded canned and dry goods onto the tiled countertops in silence. Nothing in the Circle Ritz had ever been updated except the owner’s hair color.

The rhinestone-festooned Felix the Cat clock on the wall swung its molded black plastic tail back and forth, telling time as

quietly as a cat.

Temple finished stowing the refrigerated foods, then turned to the still-startling brownette beside her. “Weird how radical

`ordinary’ looks on you. Would Dr Pepper on ice in my best Baccarat glasses stand in for the brandy I don’t have?”

“Absolutely. I’ve squeezed out some the world’s deepest, darkest secrets over Dr Pepper. So misunderstood.”

By the time they’d iced their soft drinks and headed for the living room sofa, Midnight Louie had obligingly moved to the white faux goathair rug under the coffee table. There he lounged like a Playgirl centerfold in desperate need of a full body waxing.

“This is nice.” Electra leaned back into the neutral-colored sofa cushions.

Inspired by her recent research into decor, Temple decided she really needed a fashion-forward seating piece with as much 000mph as the red suede ’50s couch she had found at the Goodwill for Matt, a floor up.

Electra wiggled into the cushions. “I do like sitting down with a resident in one of my units. Unwinding. Not worrying about ghosts.”

“First, explain the hair. I’ve gotten used to the Color, or Multicolor, of the Week, but … brown. Who wants to be brown?”

“Brown is back, big-time.” Electra hefted the mahogany-shaded soft drink in her glass. “And sometimes you’ve been fashion-forward for long enough that you yearn for some stability. Like residents you know and occasionally actually see.”

“I’m getting the idea that you think I’ve been running around town too much. You are not my mother, Electra.”

“Heaven forbid! My own kids were enough to get educated and out on their own. It isn’t just you, Temple, dear. That darling boy Matt Devine has been even more of a ghost around here than you lately. And when I have run into him in the parking lot, ‘run’ is the word for it, as in ‘hit and.’ He doesn’t stopand chat like he used to, or offer to help me with something. He just skedaddles like I was Typhoid Mary in a toxic muumuu.”

“Don’t take that personally,” Temple advised, although she certainly had when it first started happening to her. “After all, he’s got that nightshift radio counseling job. Doesn’t exactly get him out and about early in the day. And now there are out-oftown speaking engagements. So he’s been a bit distracted lately. The price of being a semicelebrity.”

“Distracted, hell. He’s been avoiding me. And now you are too. Plus, you’re making lame excuses for him. Why?”

“I felt the same way, Electra, until I realized all that Matt had going.”

“He’s always been busy, but never … aloof. I’m worried about him. Something is wrong.”

Electra’s frown accentuated two of the amazingly few lines on her face. Even the darker hair color didn’t age the plump contentment of her features. Temple guessed Electra had never been a pretty girl, but she was heading toward being a gorgeous old lady.

She almost leaned over to pat Electra’s hand … and tell all. Only there was so much to tell and it really wasn’t her story

to spill.

“Matt’s all right,” Temple said firmly. She wished she really believed that.

“And then there’s my favorite phantom,” Electra said ominously. “He’s running on a short leash.”

Temple glanced to the cat-shaped rug that was rubbing its permanent five-o’clock-shadowed jaw on the toe of her Via Spiga pump.

“Louie has always been a night person. He’s proven he can take care of himself, and then some, and he’s not reproducible.”

“Not that phantom. I mean Max.”

“Oh.”

“Oh. Hello? Pardon my slang, but you and he did buy this place together. As far as I’m concerned, he’s been AWOL since he vanished a year and a half ago. ‘Absent without Leave.’ Without my leave, if not yours.”

“Electra, I really can’t discuss why Max moved out, or why he didn’t move back in, actually, when he … turned up again. I keep up the mortgage payments, don’t I?”

“I don’t care about the mortgage. I care about you. Here I have this attractive young career-gal tenant who has associated with two of the-well, in my age group, the word was ‘eligible,’ but I’m sure you young things have a much raunchier way of putting it nowadays … hot hunks?-guys to hang out at the Circle Ritz, and she seems to have lost both of them sometime, somewhere, somehow.”

Temple tried to answer but the “hot hunks” phrase had temporarily muted her.

“Oh,” Electra went on, gesturing widely enough to make Louie jump up as if she held a hidden treat in one of her hands, “I knew Max was still my Invisible Tenant. What a second-story man! As good as Louie at discreetly eeling in and out the place, which one would expect of a professional magician. They never can do it the easy way.”

Electra peered owlishly over the titanium rims of her often present reading glasses. “I don’t know if that applies to everything about them, but we’ll let that go. Anyway, Max’s hide-and-seek act added some Cary Grant caper charm to the place. So romantic. But he hasn’t been eeling in and out, or out and in, like he used to. Matt’s been vague and distant. And you’ve been looking way too worried for a natural redhead for far too long.”

Temple heard her out, turning the cold crystal glass in her palm. Electra had put her flower-appliqu�d fingernail on the unflowery bottom line: Temple and the two men might have faced extraordinary dangers in the past few months, more might still be facing them, but the upshot was that Temple’s personal life wasn’t very personal at all anymore. With anyone.

“I don’t mean to depress you, dear, but I’m worried. Max I enjoy worrying about. I know if he gets himself into a tight corner, he’ll get himself out of it, and you along with him. But you and I know that Matt’s background doesn’t exactly equip him for living in city full of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. I would hate to see that sweet boy get into something he’s not ready to handle.”

“Ex-priests are more resilient than you think:‘“You think so, dear?”

“I hope so. Listen, Electra. I can’t say much about it, but you’re right. We’ve all three been under tremendous pressure. I don’t want to scare you, but it could have touched the Circle Ritz. Even you. Now I think, and hope, it’s over. Or the worst of it, anyway.”

Electra sat forward.

“I really can’t say more.”

“A tiny hint of what kind of danger you’re talking about might help my insomnia. You know, up in the penthouse I can see a lot of comings and goings. Not that I snoop on my tenants, of course. You’re saying you’ve kept me in the dark because it’s ‘good’ for me? Honey, ignorance is never bliss.”

Temple bit her lip. She recognized the truth of Electra’s reverse aphorism. She owed her an explanation. So she spilled the bizarre beans everybody had been keeping secret from each other for too long.

“Matt had a stalker. But it’s over now. Definitely over.”

“A stalker? From his radio job? Media personalities attract nuts sometimes.”

Temple shook her head. “That’s what’s been so … awkward. The stalker was someone who wanted to harass Max but

couldn’t find him.”

“How would he find Matt, then? They have nothing in common but you. Oh.”

“That’s why they’ve both stayed as far away from me as they could. They didn’t want the stalker finding me. And the Circle

Ritz.”

“Nothing in common but you and the Circle Ritz?” Electra looked down at Louie, who rewarded her attention by performing an impossibly long stretch that torqued his body in two opposite directions and showed off all of his, er, undercarriage.

“Amazing,” Electra mused as Louie’s yawn showcased sharp white teeth and crimson tongue. “Was this stalker a woman, by chance?”

“Yes. What an amazing deduction, Electra. The vast majority of stalkers are male.”

“Deduction, phooey! I just remembered seeing Matt down by the pool months ago talking to some strange woman. I don’t

often see strangers in the rear pool area.”

“How strange was she?”

“Not strange weird, just strange as in ‘unknown.’ She was a knockout, actually. Wore a jade green pantsuit, more formal than you usually see in Vegas, especially poolside. I couldn’t see her features very well, but she had Louie coloring.”

“Louie coloring?”

“Naturally black hair and lots of it. Red lips, not natural in her case; white teeth, maybe helped along by bleach. I’m guessing she had green eyes like Louie too. The two of them made a striking picture near that oblong of blue water, that’s why I stopped to study it. Matt so blond and lightly tanned and so very unclothed, she so white skinned, yet boldly colored and overdressed. That’s what struck me, how pale she was, as if she never went out in the sun. Not a native, that’s for sure.”

Temple, mesmerized, contemplated the vivid picture Electra had painted. She’d never seen the woman in the flesh tones, in Technicolor, but that’s how the lively Electra always thought. Even Janice Flanders’s “police” portrait had been executed in charcoal gray. Executed. Strange word for the act of making art, but apropos in this case.

“Kitty the Cutter.” Temple murmured the sobriquet she had given the woman months before.

Electra hissed out a breath and sat back. “That bad, huh?”

“Her first attack was her worst.”

Temple supposed that Matt’s lightly tanned body still carried the scar. Not that she was into dwelling on Matt’s lightly

tanned body. Kitty, though, had been into ruination, all right. She felt a surprising surge of anger.

“You say it’s over.” Electra was prodding.

“It’s over. She left. She’s gone.”

“Hmmm.” Electra sounded properly skeptical. “She must have left a lot of damage in her wake. So both men had to stay away from you for your own protection.”

“Kitty was a jealous god. If she was after a guy, nobody female close to him was safe, not even Molina’s daughter-” “Lieutenant Molina?” Temple nodded.

“I thought you two haven’t gotten along ever since Max disappeared and the lieutenant was questioning us all. She seemed sure he’d been involved in a murder at the Goliath Hotel the night he vanished.”

“We don’t,” Temple said. “Get along. Then, when she was persecuting Max, and now.”

“You poor thing! Trying to hold the fort with all this going on. No wonder you’re so confused about your love life.”

“I’m not confused about my love life, I just haven’t had much of one lately.” Temple clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Oho! Now it comes out. I wasn’t born in those exciting days of yesteryear for nothing, dear. You are blowing opportunities

left and right, girl.”

“I’m not blowing them, circumstances are. Max can’t get married-”

“Why not?”

“For reasons I find reasonable.”

“And Matt can’t do anything but get married, I imagine, given his Church’s strict position on everything carnal. No wonder everyone has been so cranky lately.”

“We have not! Been cranky. Just stressed.”

Electra chugalugged the last of her Dr Pepper and stood.

“Disgraceful. All this sex on TV, sex on the Strip, sex on the billboards, and here we have three healthy young people who

can’t seem to get around to it.”

“This is all so none of your business, Electra. You don’t know the whole story.”

“Whoever does? When you figure it out, tell me. I’d like to see two people in this unit again.”

“You’re such a romantic.”

“Even if it’s only you and Molina.”

“Electra! That’s outrageous.”

“Not the way things are going around here. Give my regards to whichever phantom you see first. Adios, Louie.”

With that Electra let herself out. Temple considered shouting denials after her, but rose, went to the French doors, and opened one onto the balcony patio.

Her plants looked a little droopy. The pool, kept filled year round, glistened like a huge, wet, emerald-cut aquamarine in the

sunlight.

Now Temple was seeing phantoms: Matt and the strikingly described woman Temple had never met, but who had bedeviled the lives of two men who were important to her.

Electra had stirred up a lot of ghosts in the process of complaining about them.

Temple turned to regard her familiar rooms, running reels of her memory back and forth, pausing on certain indelible

pictures.

Max’s fingerprints were all over this scene. On the stereo system, in the kitchen, the bedroom. They’d lived together here for six ecstatic crazy-in-love months, flirting with marriage but not quite saying so. Temple moved suddenly across the room, causing Louie to scramble upright at full alert.

In her bedroom she went straight to the row of louvered closet doors.

The soaring chords of Max’s favorite Vangelis CDs seemed to ricochet like musical bullets off the walls.

Digging in the deepest, darkest corner, she pulled out the last remaining performance poster of the Mystifying Max, the one Lieutenant Molina had insisted on borrowing after she’d deduced, merely from the blue-toned sweaters he’d left behind, that Max’s compelling cat-green eyes were contact-lens enhanced.

It always galls to have an enemy tell you something you should have known in the first place.

Temple unrolled the glossy poster. Max the professional magician emerged, the top of his thick dark hair first, his devilishly arched Sean Connery the Younger eyebrows, then the phoney but compelling green eyes. He was wearing his trademark black silk-blend turtleneck sweater, long-fingered hands posed like sculpture on each opposite arm. Max was six four and sinewy, as strong and lean as steel cable, an aesthetic athlete. He wasn’t handsome in a classical sense, but he didn’t have to be. Sexy was good enough.

And for an all-too-few long, loving months, it had seemed that he was all hers.

Temple let the poster roll up like an old-fashioned window shade. Now you see him. Now you don’t.

One week he was admitting her into his undercover life, like a partner. The next week … vanished again, without ever leaving town. Something had happened on the night Matt’s stalker had died pursuing Max’s car. Something that was taking Max away from her. Something that, if it kept on, might be taking her away from Max.

She’d seen fire and she’d seen rain, and she’d stood by him. Electra had just reminded Temple how hard it was to stand by a phantom. It had been that way after Max had first disappeared, when big, bullying Lieutenant Molina had badgered Temple to crack like the small-boned, petite woman she could be mistaken for.

tT d!ehtasH i f -mah ow t nevE hadn’t done that.

No, Temple’s key problem wasn’t Las Vegas’s hardest-boiled female homicide lieutenant. It was Max. Always and ever the charmer, always and ever impossible to pin down.

Temple put the rolled-up poster back in the corner of her closet, her fingers brushing soft black jersey in the dark. The Dress. The rather out-of-date dress. For a vintage clothing aficionado like Temple, nothing was ever really out of date. Not even the stuff in her refrigerator that she always seemed to get around to only past the expiration date.

The Dress. Max had been back again, then, in Las Vegas and in her bed. But. Matt Devine had been there when Max hadn’t, and something got cooking there. He’d seemed so safe for a white widow (with a significant other gone, but not legally pronounced dead) like Temple: ex-priest, handsome as hard candy, nice as someone else’s big brother, and too ethical to take advantage of any woman. Perfect prom date. No unromantic groping. No danger.

Except that one time, after his vile stepfather’s funeral. Funerals always let out the demons. The phantoms of the past.

On her sofa. Temple walked back into the living room. That one. Broad daylight. Matt’s fingers on the long bright hard row of black buttons up the center of That Dress.

Something happening. Oh, very definitely. And definitely to her taste. His too.

Temple sank into the cushions, reliving those-ha! Bring on the film noir flacks-“forbidden moments.” She could sure see why they were forbidden. Way too addictive.

So. Did Matt really mean it? Feel it? Of course. But did he want to? Maybe not. Did she? Maybe not … oh, yeah. But she was spoken for. And very nicely too, when Max was around to speak for her.

But he hadn’t been, not lately.

And he hadn’t told her why. A poster is a poor excuse for a man, even a charismatic one.

Temple squinched down in the cushions and picked up her cell phone from the coffee table. She would try calling Max one more time today.

Her phone bleeped at her and shot a little message graphic into her heart.

Message. From Max? All her internal mutterings faded. At last.

She pressed the right buttons and then a couple wrong ones, and groused aloud and tried again, putting the phone to her

ear.

“Hey, Little Red.” Max’s baritone vibrated through the earpiece. If you could sell that on the Web via spam … “Sorry we’ve been playing phone tag. That is definitely not what I’d like to play with you. Too much has come up for phones. I’ll be in touch when I can. Ciao.”

Something soft and sensuous stroked her forearm. Temple looked down. Midnight Louie had silently lofted up next to her.

His long black tail was just barely swiping her skin.

Temple gritted her teeth.

Electra had been right. Midnight Louie was the most constant and attentive male in her Circle Ritz life these days.

Did relationships have an expiration date too? And how far past that date did you dare nibble on the past without getting poisoned?

Chapter 2

Tooth and Nail,

Feng and Claw

“Well, Louie, what do you think? Am I feng enough to satisfy the Queen of Shui-ba?”

Huh? Since when did my daring and darling roommate, Miss Temple Barr, consult me on fashion matters?

I am a gentleman of the old school, from my polished nails to my formal black tie and tails that are a blend of Fred Astaire and gangsta record mogul.

One can never go wrong wearing black. Perhaps Miss Temple’s crisis of confidence in the mirror is because she is

wearing silver.

I do love those burnished sea shades, though. The memory of glints of gold and silver-the shiny-scaled koi that swim in them-reminds me of my dear old dad, Three 0’-Clock Louie. He retired to Vegas a while back from a Pacific Northwest salmonfishing boat.

There is nothing golden-or fishy-about my Miss Temple, however. She has red-hot cinnamon fur, yum-yum, and baby-big

steel blue eyes. She also is heir to the sad human fate of wearing a union suit that is all skin and virtually no hair, like the unfortunate Sphinx breed of my own cat kind. Today Miss Temple is wearing a short skirt and skimpy sweater set in gray-silver. This is a knockout with her fur color but the outfit does make her look about twelve years old, always a worry for a petite public relations woman who has to elbow her own way to the fore of a competitive profession.

Miss Temple tries to pull her skirt an inch or two below her kneecap, which I agree is an ugly human attribute and hairless to boot.

The ploy does not work, though I have to admit the legs below the kneecap are pretty elegant despite their unfurred condition.

“This damn Wong woman,” she tells herself, the mirror, and me, “is supposed to be hell on Jimmy Choos.”

I normally do not deign to answer the meaningless growlings of discontented humans, even my own.

Sherlock Holmes had the newspaper agony column. I have the remote and daytime TV. Thus I instantly recognize the AsianAmerican celebrities that Miss Temple refers to: Amelia Wong, the decor design queen of this feng shui mania, and the red-carpet footman to the stars, a spikemeister named Jimmy Choo. Except it turns out that the force behind Jimmy Choo is really an enterprising female named Tamara Mellon, who built the business under a male business name, like Laura Holt on TV’s Remington Steele, which brought us Pierce Brosnan. (I have been told by female admirers that we have similar hair and sex appeal.) Anyway, I must ponder what celebrity females adore more: the aforesaid Jimmy’s costly and kicky footwear .. . or simply referring to their “Choo shoes,” which sounds like something that used to chug into train stations.

My Miss Temple is no slug herself when it comes to slingbacks. She has a world-class high heel collection, including one covered

with diamond-bright Austrian crystals. These updated Cinderella slippers bear my likeness in coal black crystal on the heels, so you could say they come with a Prince Charming attached. You could say it. I cannot, without sounding conceited. I guess the true Prince Charming in this case is Mr. Stuart Weitzman, who designed the fabled footwear.

But, hark, my Miss Temple addresses the mirror one last time.

“Well, I cannot dally.” She spins from the mirror to snatch up a burgundy patent-leather tote bag that matches her burgundy patent-leather Nine West clogs. (Now that Miss Temple has discovered platform clogs increase her height by two to three inches without the need for stiletto heels, she reserves her high-rise shoes for dress-up.) Also, she can outrun crooks better in clogs, crooks being a little hobby of hers ever since I have known her.

The fact is that I am the pro PI in our m�nage a deux here at the Circle Ritz. Still, Miss Temple is racking up quite a crime-busting r�sum� of her own … for a two-footed amateur sleuth.

Mind you, she is cute (which some benighted souls have erroneously said of me, to their regret) and smart. But I never like my mysteries dominated by little doll amateurs, even if those little dolls are my own personal property.

I hear Miss Temple scrape the car keys off the coffee table in the living room. A moment later the door plays patty cake with an open-and-shut case. I am alone in our digs at last.

I jump down from the zebra-pattern coverlet that is such an excellent backdrop for my midnight good looks and pad into

the living room.

The Las Vegas papers, both morning and evening, are splayed open on the coffee table. Both feature ballyhoo about the imminent advent of the “dowager empress of enterprising interior designs, Amelia Wong.” The accompanying photo pictures a domestic dominatrix of sleek but severe expression. I would not want to meet her in a dark disco.

Hmmm. I wonder briefly if I should tail my little doll to her meeting with this media Medusa. But, no. She is thirty now. It is time I let her face the big, bad world on her own occasionally. Since she is an ace PR freelancer with enough charm to sell Cheerios

to Eskimos, I am sure she will handle the upcoming challenge with almost the same skill I would.

I settle into my favorite snoozing spot on the couch … dead center, stretched full out, so no one can sit there until I vacate the

premises, and especially not if I garf up a hairball … and soon tiptoe through the catnip-dusted tulips of dreamland.

Chapter 3

Live at High Noon

Temple parked her so-new-it-squeaked red Miata convertible behind Gangsters Casino, a three-story building designed to evoke a Prohibition speakeasy.

She didn’t have to put up the car’s top because it had never been down. Wouldn’t want to ruffle her hair-sprayed headful of natural curls before she met the great goddess Wong.

It wasn’t as if Temple was part of the Wong entourage and needed to meet and greet the incoming party. She was strictly a local liaison. But the first Wong media appearance was at a TV station where Temple, as a local public relations freelancer, was definitely persona grata. So she was here to grease everyone else’s wheels, and this rendezvous had been prearranged. She would ride alone in the limo to the airport. There she’d meet Wong and entourage in the private jet area. Then they all would wheel away to a full day’s program of promotional appearances.

Temple was uneasy with the arrangement. First, she liked to drive more than she liked to be driven, even in a block-long limo. And in Vegas, where the blocks were as long as the latest luxury hotel-casino grounds, stretch limos looked like they’d got their lube jobs on a medieval rack.

If you absolutely had to use a limo, though, Gangsters was the place to put up with. The stand-alone casino, having no attached hotel rooms to provide a gambling base, made its mark with a clever gimmick. It ferried customers to and from the major Strip hotels in an array of custom “gangland” limos.

The fanciful stretch limos and their gangster-suited chauffeurs had proven so popular that a separate limo biz evolved:

Gangsters Legendary Limos.

Temple walked in the warm morning sun to the small rental office, passing an awesomely long lineup of limos.

The Elvis model was a hot pink 1957 stretch Cadillac burnished with a hunka-hunka burning chrome. The Bugsy? That was a hump-backed black ’40s number emblazoned with real bullet holes. The Marilyn was a metallic platinum blond ’60s Chevy. And the Sinatra was a sleek ’70s felt-fedora gray Buick Park Avenue. Every limo was all-American vintage. No foreign models went on the rack at Gangsters.

More celebrity limos filled out the fleet, including the whitetiger-striped Siegfried and Roy, but today only these few sat idle on the lot, and the S&R model had been retired with honors after Roy Horn’s tragic onstage injuries a few months ago.

The limo Temple was to ride in had been selected for its feng shui political correctness: the Newman. It was the color of money, a green Lincoln.

This wasn’t an Irish green, or an olive green but a muted midtone green that Temple hoped would find favor with the feng shui maven. From her recent reading, green and blue both signified hope. Lord knew that Amelia Wong insisted on all the favorable signs for her expeditions.

Inside the air-conditioned building, Temple blew a soggy lock off her forehead. She approached the Edward G. Robinson clone manning the desk in a pinstriped dark wool suit despite the tropical-weight weather outside.

“I’m supposed to accompany the Wong party limo to the airport. My name is Temple Barr.”

“There are no wrong party limos here at Gangsters,” hecracked wise out the side of his mouth. “And Temple Bar is on

Lake Mead.”

“I am not the geographic Temple Bar,” she said. “I am the PR Temple Barr. Two r’s.”

He winked at her and checked a log book. “The Newman has been preempted by Warren Buffet, the financial whiz. You’re now in the Chan. Solid black. Around back?’ Hmmm, in the feng shui color system black signified power and authority (good), but also gloom and death (not good). Temple had read of a school called Black Sect Feng Shui, however, and hoped, greenly, that Amelia Wong liked it. Anyway, done was done.

Temple nodded and turned away. Then turned back. “Is that limo named for Charlie or Jackie?”

His shrug didn’t dislodge his Klingon-broad shoulder pads. “Black is for black belt. Who’s Charlie?”

“Never mind.” Temple hustled out into the heat again, carrying on a crabby interior monologue.

Who’s Charlie? Didn’t anyone watch vintage films anymore? Charlie Chan and his pithy Oriental wisdom and number-one son weren’t totally pass�. Hadn’t this skunk-striped bozo heard that Lucy Liu was going to star as Charlie Chan’s granddaughter in a new flick? Of course there’d be some Jackie Chan-style martial arts on display.

By now she was nearing the limo. The driver catapulted out of the front seat to hotfoot half a mile back to the rear door.

Somebody at Gangsters had tumbled to the Asian connection, but this driver looked Japanese. Uh-oh.

Temple ducked into the dim, cushy interior behind the India-ink window tint.

She was instantly tush-deep in kid-glove leather. Since she was so lightweight she couldn’t sink into beach sand with barbells on her ankles, this was some cushy cowhide!

The limo’s layout was fit for a rock band or a prom party. That meant seating in the squared round, like a ’60s conversation pit. Above Temple’s head was a limo-wide row of control buttons and LED readouts it would take a fighter pilot to master. Burlwood doors were sunk here and there into the limo upholstery. She was sure they concealed a TV, full bar, and plenty of snacks.

Despite all the tempting buttons waiting to be pushed, Temple felt like Alice in a high-tech Wonderland. No way was she going to touch anything here. Who knows? She might suddenly shrink or swell. Although any swelling inside this conspicuous consumption-mobile was likely to be of the ego variety, she thought, if one got used to rodding around in such elongated glory.

Speaking of which, the limo pulled smoothly out of the lot. The driver was remote behind a glass barrier Temple had no idea how to lower. The limo glided into an endless turn onto the side street.

Temple didn’t really look forward to meeting Amelia Wong, the feng shui darling of Wall Street. She kept running the proper pronunciation of the phrase in her head. Not Amelia Wong. That was child’s play. Feng Shui, though, was pronounced “fung shway.” Strange language, this mystical interior design dialect.

While the frantic suburban development around Las Vegas made it one of the fastest-expanding cities in the nation, the

Las Vegas Strip and environs were still as simple as pie: the Strip was one long, busy eight-lane street called Las Vegas Boulevard. It was lined with enough Fantasylands to make the late Walt Disney so jealous he was liable to go into premature cryogenic meltdown. And right next to the hotels, McCarran Airport. To thirty-some million annual visitors, that’s all Vegas was: the palm-greased skid from driver to bellman to dealer, from airport to hotel-casino to airport.

Temple never tired of gawking at the high-rise hotels and their various iconic towers along the Strip. The Paris’s Eiffel Tower. New York, New York’s Gotham skyline and Statue of Liberty. The MGM lion. The Luxor’s Sphinx…

She eyed one of the limo’s burlwood chests. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. She could use a bottled water, but didn’t dare

go hunting for it like one to the limousine born.

In minutes, anyway, the limo slowed to a stop in the executive terminal area of the airport.

Temple, who always aimed to be fast out of the starting gate, had to tap her clogs while the driver dismounted and walked the long, long way around his black steel steed to release her from the buggy section in back. Barging unaided out of a chauffeured limo seemed the height of low-brow anxiety.

Temple was aware that everyone stared as she emerged.

“Everyone” was only a couple of jeans-wearing mechanics, but it was more than enough to make her glad she had kept her

sunglasses on, like the ersatz starlet they took her for.

A sleek white baby jet was just taxiing toward them.

Temple boosted her tote bag onto her shoulder and turned with everyone else to watch its arrival. A welcoming party of three: one in Nine West, two in axle grease.

Here on the tarmac you could hear the engines whine down to a dying wheeze. You could feel the sand in your contact lenses and the vibration under your feet. (Even, in Temple’s case, through two inches of foam-enhanced platform shoe.) It felt like the days of early aviation.

Too bad, Temple thought, that Amelia Earhart wasn’t about to deplane.

The door behind the cockpit cracked open and fell toward the tarmac, its interior stairs resembling a stopped escalator People began pouring out: first men, then women.

Temple had memorized the names, rank, and suspected gender of the Wong party, but as they swarmed out like ants, all presumptions vanished from her mind.

The first woman helped out by the first two men to deplane caught herself up face-to-face with Temple.

Temple introduced herself, then added. “I’m doing local PR for the Maylords opening.”

“Baylee Harris.” The woman extended an unenthusiastic hand. “Ms. Wong’s personal assistant.”

Baylee. A girl. Okay. Tall, blond, and ultra-WASP. Next.

“Tiffany Yung.” Another assistant, this one a personal beautician. Definitely female. Also short, bespectacled, brunette, and Asian.

“Carl Osgaard.” Male. Tall, blond, and Scandinavian. What was he doing here? “Ms. Wong’s dietician and personal trainer.” Oh.

So far they were all in their late twenties to early thirties. Temple was relieved that she fell on the cusp of that. At least there would be no age gap.

“Pritchard Merriweather, Ms. Wong’s media liaison.” Tall, dark, handsome. A black woman with mucho presence. “I really don’t require a local media rep.” But not male, no way. In fact she was an archetypically female, first-person-possessive female! A bit like a tall, dark, and authoritative female homicide lieutenant Temple knew. And sometimes loathed.

“I actually represent Maylords,” Temple said. Mildly. “Kenny Maylord, the CEO of Maylords, will meet us at the TV studio for his joint appearance with Ms. Wong on Las Vegas Now!”

Feeling surrounded by two tall women, she lowered her voice and asked the only burning question on her mind. “What’s with the guys in Men’s Wearhouse suits and Matrix Reloaded sunglasses?”

Only Baylee deigned to answer her. “Death threats.”

Death threats? Temple eyed the sinister duo again. They made the ersatz mobster behind the Gangsters desk look as quaint as an antique pump organ.

How could advice on dressing your house for success earn death threats? From aggravated contractors forced to install fountains at the front door? That would run up the water bills in an arid climate like Las Vegas, sure, but feng shui had swept all the chichi world. Get over it.

“If you’d rather not ride with us-” Pritchard suggested hopefully.

“No problem.” Temple was dying to see how the burlwood trapdoors worked. “Death threats are old hat here in Las Vegas.

The cat’s fedora.”

Nobody got her last quip because they’d all swiveled to salute the queen bee. B as in bitch, it was reported.

At last she arrived, the brand name underwriting theflunkies: Amelia Wong, the woman who had made fashion, food, and home furnishings into a spiritual discipline, who had whipped simple domestic arts into a form of metaphysical and merchandising martial arts.

She was tiny. Tinier than Temple and Tiffany Yung. Bird boned, if that bird were a stainless-steel blue jay. Older than she looked, which was about forty. All spine, like a Victorian spinster. Gorgeous in that deceptively serene Asian way. Charming.

Like a cobra swaying before it strikes.

“What is that car?” she asked the moment she laid eyes on Temple, the native Las Vegan.

“The Chan.”

“Chan? What is this? An abbreviation of channel? Did that TV station send it?” “No. And yes.”

Crow-black eyes fixed on Temple. “You are being intentionally cryptic?’

“I am being intentionally precise. The limo’s name is not an abbreviation of ‘channel’ but a tribute to two great Asian film stars: Jackie Chan-”

Amelia Wong snorted. The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz had said of her evil plans for Dorothy: “These

things must be done dellll-i-cately.” That is exactly how Amelia Wong snorted.

Temple went on. “-and the purely fictional, but immortal, Charlie Chan.”

“Rampant racist stereotyping.”

“But … ultraintelligent and charming, all the same.”

“Is that a compliment, Ms.-?” Ms. Wong glanced to her entourage.

“Barr,” Baylee supplied.

“Barr?”

Temple inclined her head. “A compliment is only as good as the spirit in which it is given … and taken.” “What is your birth sign?”

“Gemini in the Zodiac. I was born, however, in the year of the Tiger-”

“Ah. So. A creature of passion and daring, and the sign that wards off fire, thieves, and ghosts. You do not look like a

Tiger. I am expected someplace. No doubt.”

Amelia Wong’s entourage flocked around her, wafting her into the limo-cum-rec room.

Temple ended up, sans bottled water and built-in bar, riding up front with the chauffeur, Yokomatsu. She learned nothing about the limousine’s exotic inner workings, except the automatic shift, which was very old news to her. The chauffeur’s given name? Charlie, of course. An unemployed twenty-sixyear-old blackjack dealer with a degree from Caltech, delivering a monologue on the pits a down economy was for the freelance soul all the way into town.

Temple began to enjoy herself for the first time that morning.

Lacey Davenport was adamant, and willing to say so.

“I’m sorry. The green room can’t accommodate a crowd like this. Especially not now. We had a sudden opportunity to book some normally reclusive Las Vegas celebrities. We have the white tigers and lions with us today.”

“So does a zoo,” tall, dark Pritchard said.

“This is a very rare TV appearance for two very endangered species,” short, dishwater-brown-haired Lacey Davenport answered. Firmly. “And Siegfried and Roy are heroes in this town, especially now. It was an eleventh-hour photo op, so we simply can’t accommodate you all in the Green Room. Not with lions and tigers in residence. It’s not safe.”

The bears, Temple thought, would be the Wong entourage. Ill-tempered bears.

“Ms. Wong requires all her personnel with her at all times,” Pritchard said.

Lacey leaped. “In that case, we have an empty office down the hall. But you’ll have to crowd in. And there are no mirrors.” “Foul feng shui,” Amelia Wong mentioned to the ceiling.

By then the party had swelled with the addition of Kenny Maylord, CEO and president of Maylords. Maylords home furnishing store was new to the Las Vegas market and aimed todebut with a splash, perhaps of fountains, thanks to week-long special appearances by Amelia Wong.

“The lions and tigers can move,” Pritchard said. She herself moved toward the closed door behind Lacey.

Something within roared. Not growled, not snarled. Roared.

Pritchard jumped back. “This is ridiculous. Ms. Wong is a billion-dollar corporation. You can’t palm a mere office off on

Wong Inc.”

The men in black, still wearing sunglasses, either placed their hands over their hearts in preparation for reciting the pledge of allegiance or to massage their not terribly well-concealed Glocks.

Temple cleared her throat. Her voice always had a slight raspy tone, which served well for catching people’s attention.

“Lacey, isn’t Studio B empty right now, until the noon news? Couldn’t you install the Wong party there? There would be plenty of room, and … no one would expect them to wait there, so security measures would be even better.”

Lacey loosed a deep sigh. Temple had worked with her many times before. “Sure. If that’s what you want.” She flashed

Temple a relieved grin. “We’ll send in pages with soft drinks.”

“No soft drinks.” Pritchard again. “Our faxes clearly stated that only Vita Clara lime-flavored bottled water is used by Ms.

Wong. Her associates prefer Evian.”

She glanced at the distinct midwesterners in the party: the intimidated Kenny Maylord and Temple. “I don’t know what these people drink, but all of our needs were clearly laid out. Didn’t you get my faxes?”

_ “Yes, but all the bottled water we have has been put out for the lions and tigers,” Lacey said, deadpan. “They get agitated in a TV studio, where the lights are hot, and they pant. A lot. They use roasting pans for water dishes when they’re away from their compound. And the Cloaked Conjuror and Shangri-La are also here with their leopard and panther, so there isn’t a drop of bottled water anywhere, except the nearest convenience store.” She eyed the entourage. “Perhaps someone on your crew could dash out-”

Even more clear than bottled water was the fact that it was bad feng shui for a Wong flunky to fend for oneself. “We’ll wait

in the studio,” Pritchard said shortly.

The bodyguards flowed into lockstep behind Lacey as she led the way down the hall.

Baylee looked worried, and Amelia Wong looked as though she were on another plane-or wished she was, literally, one out of this tank town-ignoring all the fuss about arrangements.

Baylee caught Temple’s arm and held her back from the parade for a while.

“Is it always like this in Las Vegas?” she asked in a whisper. “Like what?”

“Lions in the Green Room?”

Temple nodded. “You have to understand. Las Vegas is home turf to the world’s most exotic acts. Visiting celebrities seldom can compete with the homebodies, especially if the locals weigh a few hundred pounds and are lavishly furred. Sort of like Liberace on testosterone.”

That image stopped Baylee cold for fifteen seconds. Then she frowned. “Ms. Wong isn’t used to this sort of treatment.”

“Luckily, I am.”

“So. Thank you for coming up with an alternative to the Green Room. And a page boy dashed out for the requisite brands of bottled water. If he hadn’t volunteered, I thought Pritchard was almost ready to set the two Dobermen on somebody?’ Temple smiled at Baylee’s nickname for the Wong muscle.

“They’ll be kept busy now,” she said. “The studio is huge and filled with dozens of cables of uncertain origin. Checking them out should keep the Dobermen occupied until showtime. I asked Lacey to make sure a healthful appetizer tray is delivered too. Nothing like gnawing on crudit�es to soothe the savage soul. Funny how white lions and tigers and media stars like their meals raw these days.”

Baylee’s smile was nervous. “I see why you’re needed here. Our party’s endangered predators should be purring by now.”

“Thanks. And now I’ll leave things to Team Wong. I need to check out something back in the Green Room.”

Temple was pleased to notice Baylee watching her exit with aslight expression of dismay. Apparently not all of the Wong minions had been browbeaten into institutional arrogance.

She turned and retraced her steps, pausing when she was out of sight around a corner. Then she waited. Two minutes later, a harried Lacey Davenport came along on her soundless Nikes, all the better to not disturb filming.

“Temple!” Lacey jumped back as she rounded the corner at a speedy clip. “You scared me. Are these fen shouey people from Mars or what?”

Lacey was solid through and through, from her hefty but deft figure to her unflappable attitude.

” Tung Schway,’ ” Temple said. “I hope the interviewers got the phonetic pronunciation I wrote out for them or there’ll be

Hong Kong to pay.”

“It’s on their cheat sheets, but I don’t have to bend myself out of shape trying to remember it now.” Lacey shook her no-fuss permed head. “Why aren’t you baby-sitting that crew? They could use it:’

“They made clear that they want to stew over the situation without an outsider as witness. Besides, I’m more personally

interested in your first act.”

“That’s right. You have a cat at home. These animals are magnificent!”

“This is a spot to support the Siegfried and Roy zoo breeding program?”

“Of course.”

“And the Cloaked Conjuror and Shangri-La serve as spokespersons now that Roy has been so badly injured? Will their leopards be on camera too?”

“Leopard and black panther. Yes, but leashed.”

“Not to worry. They’re the same critters, all leopards. Just the color is different. Listen. Can I hang out on the studio fringes to watch the cat act?”

“I don’t know. We’re taping the Big Whites from the Green Room, can’t risk them on the set with people after what happened when Roy’s tiger dragged him offstage by the throat. Imagine: Las Vegas’s hottest ticket and a new multimillion-dollar ‘lifetime’ contract history in just a few seconds! That’s the trouble. We now know anything can happen with the big cats. You know how to behave yourself on a set, Temple, but … why are you so hot to watch this segment in person?”

“Let’s just say I can’t resist magnificent animals in the flesh.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen that magician-boyfriend of yours. Or is it ex-boyfriend? I never see you two around much anymore:’

“Max is … touring.” Temple shrugged. “Really, I’d love to see those cats close up, live, and in person. Okay?”

“Sure. Anything you want for getting those crazy decorator people off my case. Who do they think they are?”

“In tune with the universe. Only it’s theirs, not ours.”

“If they try to rearrange my cameramen, it’s all off.”

“And I’ll already be on the scene to baby-sit them when you bring them out from the other studio.”

“Deal.”

Temple nodded and peeled away from Lacey to follow a nondescript hall until she encountered a wall of black linen curtains. She peeked between the first opening.

The Las Vegas Now! set sat in a concrete-floored, high-ceilinged warehouse environment. It was surrounded by a web of thick black cables on the floor and three manned cameras.

The usual “living room” setup of sofa and chairs had been supplemented by banks of large potted palms. Imported pedestals on either side showed off the visiting big cats to advantage.

Yes, Temple had a big cat at home: a big alley cat named Midnight Louie. Yes, she liked to see the magnificent felines, who outweighed a baby grand piano, in person and performing, even though that was recognized for the risk it was since the tragic incident that had instantly closed Las Vegas’s biggest show not that long ago. Siegfried and Roy deserved a standing ovation for their work in preserving the white tigers and lions now lost to the wild.

But what Temple really, really wanted to see was the lesser act and the lesser cats, now on the set and being interviewed and admired. And she didn’t really want to see the Cloaked Conjuror, the masked magician who’d made a hot ticket out ofunmasking the illusions of other magicians. As the significant other of a “legitimate” magician, Temple wished him bad cess, as they used to say in antique plays.

No. She wanted to eyeball, up close and very personal, the woman who had tricked her out of Max’s friendshipcumengagement ring. A very decent little emerald from Max gleamed on her hand at this very moment, but it was a consolation prize, a mere crackerjack token compared to the opal and diamond ring he’d given her for Christmas in New York City almost six months ago.

Temple felt she still contained the heart of a wrathful tiger as she remembered her previous encounter with Shangri-La when the woman magician had played the Opium Den. How easily Temple had been lured onstage as the audience shill. How she had been magically stripped of her romantic ring and then kidnapped with intentions to cross state lines … not hard in Las Vegas, which was cheek-by-Hoover-Dam with Arizona. How weeks later that very ring had turned up on the fringe of a murder scene. Ultimately it had come into the custody of Max’s and her worst enemy, homicide lieutenant C. R. Molina, a seriously overgrown woman whose hands wore nothing more exciting than a big, clumsy class ring, and probably never would.

Temple had last glimpsed the delicate Tiffany construction of her ring in a plastic evidence baggie on Molina’s desk.

That was too detestable to take sitting or lying down, or even standing up, as she was now.

Shangri-La had wrested the ring away and vanished.

Now the Asian enigma had reappeared after several months, newly partnered with the Cloaked Conjuror. Both magicians performed in masks. CC-another target of death threats; was that this year’s trendy problem or what?-wore a striped full-head mask that included a device that garbled his vocal patterns, so he sounded like a secret witness on a TV tabloid show.

Shangri-La was more subtle. She was masked by makeup, painted like a figure from a Chinese opera. A dead white ricepowder face with flagrant red wings shadowing her eyes made her into an effective icon. She leaped about the stage in tattered robes, flaunting snaky tendrils of hair and long mandarin fingernails as curved and sharp as tiger claws.

She was long overdue for a comeuppance for the ring caper, but Temple had not seen hide nor hair nor unfiled fingernail of

her until now.

Now that the Wong party was safely sucking French bottled water and California broccoli florets in their studio-in-waiting, Temple was darned if she was just going to lurk in the wings and watch the thieving witch’s on-camera performance. It was time to confront Shangri-La coming off the set and demand to know how the ring charmed off Temple’s finger onstage had ended up weeks later on the fringes of a parking-lot crime scene.

Chapter 4

MADD TV

Before Temple could work herself up into attack mode, she watched in dismay as the two magicians and their big cats were suddenly signaled to hustle off-camera.

The Cloaked Conjuror and his animals exited left first. Then Shangri-La cartwheeled off to the right.

Paralyzed by the two sudden exits, Temple stood there like a dumbstruck person born in the year of the Ox.

Eve Castenada, the host/interviewer, faced the camera, her aspect disconcertingly sober.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry to interrupt the live feature on the big cats and the valuable efforts to breed them for posterity. I’ve just been informed that the president of MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is attending a conference in Las Vegas and is here to comment on the rush-hour tragedy in Henderson.”

Temple’s mind immediately recalled the front-page story in that morning’s Las Vegas Review Journal: three teens wiped out the previous evening by a drunk driver.

The president of MADD was probably the surviving parent of a similar tragedy. Temple watched the set literally darken as the heavyset, serious woman walked into camera range.

Temple’s own mood plummeted from high dudgeon to fellow feeling. When she’d been a TV reporter in Minnesota she’d most dreaded covering survivors. She hated the personal questions she’d had to ask on-camera so much that she’d eventually left the job.

Temple also empathized with the host’s switch from feel-good feature to hard-hitting news item. Pros made the transition look easy, but the people behind the smooth facades paid for their professionalism with nerves later.

Temple felt bodies crowding behind her at the curtain to watch. One of them whispered in her ear.

“What’s this?” A man’s voice.

“President of MADD commenting on that terrible wreck last night.”

“Someone came into the other studio and said we were scratched.”

Temple looked over her shoulder. Kenny Maylord stood there in his bland midwestern business suit and receding hairline, looking worried.

“News bulletins happen on TV,” she said. “Even on feature shows.”

From her left came another insistent push. The blond Baylee Harris.

“Ms. Wong is furious. She has friends among the network stockholders. She does their condos and vacation homes.”

“They’re too far away to make a difference now,” Temple whispered back. “And be quiet. This is a TV studio.”

“This is a disaster for us!” Baylee sounded more sad than angry.

“We’re losing our media momentum. What can we do?” Pritchard asked from behind her.

Temple pulled the curtain shut. “Follow me,” she ordered the Maylord and Wong contingent, retracing her steps as silently as possible.

At least they followed suit until they were out in the deserted hall.

“You don’t understand,” Kenny Maylord said. “Maylords hosts its grand opening only once and that’s tonight. A Friday

daytime slot is crucial:’

“Ms. Wong seldom appears at small-time events like this,” Pritchard added. “It just happens that some of her biggest Asian clients keep pied-�-terres in Las Vegas. Her next gig is with the sultan of Dubai. She’ll never be available in Las Vegas again.”

“Maylords needs the publicity,” Kenny insisted.

Temple turned on both of them. “At the expense of pushing off that tragic news story? I don’t think so.”

Both groaned, only Kenny’s was more of a moan.

“Okay.” Temple’s sigh blew the curls off her forehead. When she was good, she was very good. And when she was bad, she was with Max, or had been. “Who came in and said your appearance was scratched?”

“One of the page boys.”

Temple checked her watch, then eyed Pritchard and Maylord. “Weren’t you supposed to announce a twenty—

thousanddollar donation to the local arts group?”

“Yeah,” Kenny said. “From Maylords. Ms. Wong was going to present it.”

“Okay. I suggest you make the donation to the Nevada chapter of MADD instead.”

“MADD? That has nothing to do with interior design.”

“It has a lot to do with interior sympathies in Las Vegas at the moment. If you can do that, I might be able to get you and

Ms. Wong on-camera for a minute or two.”

“But the details of the store opening-”

“The contribution of Ms. Wong to national culture-”

“Are not the act to follow this. Do you have children? Mr. Maylord? Ms. Merriweather?”

Pritchard shook her lacquered jet black bob, but Kenny Maylord nodded.

“How old are they?”

“Six and four,” he said.

“Add ten years and imagine how you’d feel if they’d just died in a car crash caused by a drunk driver. Not a time to mention cocktail opening receptions for anything! Just get on, let Ms. Wong and Mr. Maylord be introduced. Offer your sympathies to the families and community, and make your donation. Okay?”

Two dazed heads nodded. They followed in Temple’s wake as she skittered faster than a water bug along the slick concrete floor, hunting Lacey Davenport.

Everything went down according to her improvised plan. A briefed Amelia Wong was the soul of gracious sympathy and Kenny Maylord’s balding dome only shone with modest sweat under the brutally bright TV lights. The producer had been more than willing to squeeze in the squeezed-out guests if they became instant donors.

Temple watched from the curtained wings, Lacey at her side.

The Maylords opening was mentioned. Once. Ms. Wong’s expertise was bowed to. The astounded president of MADD accepted a fake check in lieu of the real one, thanking them both so very, very much.

“We’ll flash a card on the Maylords opening time and place at the end of the hour’s final news segment and throughout the day’s programming,” Lacey said. “What was the money really going to go for?”

“The arts fund and a feng shui makeover by Ms. Wong of a local Montessori school.”

“Not bad PR,” Lacey conceded, “but this was even better, more newsy and immediate. I hope your clients appreciate you saving the day for feng shui folk everywhere.”

“I know the twenty-thousand-dollar check will do some real good. And that has got to be better feng shui for the Maylords opening tonight.”

Chapter 5

Another Opening,

Another Shui

Miss Midnight Louise and myself sit side by side, our noses pressed to the glass.

This is not an uncommon position for our species.

It is, however, an uncommon occupation for us, who are seldom so at ease with one another. And what has caused this unprecedented truce? We are witnessing a sight that I, at least, view with considerably mixed emotions.

Observe: my neighbor at the Circle Ritz apartment building, Mr. Matt Devine, is sitting on a sofa of vibrant hue. He is looking right at home, although he is dressed up in a caramel-colored linen blazer over a cream-colored silk shirt. With his blond head-fur, he looks like the cat’s meow, if that cat were a shaded golden Persian like my acquaintance Solange.

It is not Mr. Matt Devine and his unusual state of nattiness that disturb me.

It is the lady sitting right beside him on that highly colored sofa.

‘This looks bad,” I mutter into my whiskers. Actually, it is more of a growl.

“Lighten up,” Louise instructs me. Being female from head to tail, she is very good at instructions. “What is bad? Who is that strange

lady with Mr. Matt?”

I am not about to tell her she has put her kittenish mitt right on the heart of the problem.

She goes on building her case. “I have not seen her around and about the Circle Ritz or the Crystal Phoenix Hotel or any of the usual hangouts that your personal humans patronize.”

“I do not know who she is either,” I admit.

What she is I can tell without a program. She is a New Lady in Mr. Matt’s life.

While my roomie, Miss Temple Barr, has maintained a long-term relationship with Mr. Max Kinsella, there is no doubt that she would

not cotton to Mr. Matt getting so cozy with a strange female. And humans talk about “dogs in the manger”! They are way up on canines in this regard, if you ask me.

But no one does, and I would not answer anyway.

Of course I do not see why my Miss Temple cannot cozy up with both Mr. Kinsella and Mr. Devine, a la the feline species. Often the

same litter will share serial fathers, hence the endlessly innovative colorings of my kind. But, no, humans insist on degrees of separation that are way more strict than the rest of the animal kingdom adheres to, which in human relations causes everything from hissy fits to homicide.

“Mr. Matt looks splendid in a cream coat,” Miss Louise remarks a bit dreamily for a fixed female. “If only he did not have those creepy

brown eyes.” She shudders delicately. “They always remind me of dogs.”

It is true that a cat the color of his clothes would sport green or gold or even blue eyes, but humans cannot help sharing an eye color

with dogs. So I tell Miss Louise, who shrugs and begins the favorite female pastime of all species, picking apart another lady. I do not forget that Miss Louise lived briefly with Mr. Matt when she first hit town and probably has a secret crush on him, like all the other females in town, despite her feline distaste for his eye color.

Big brown doggy eyes do have a certain appeal to the nondiscriminating.

“She is a lot bigger than your Miss Temple,” Louise notes.

“Miss Temple is exquisitely petite, like the Divine Yvette.”

“That feather-headed Persian!” Louise spits. “You always did go for those shallow showgirls. The lady sitting with Mr. Matt looks

solid. Good breeding stock, but brains too. At first glance I took her for Miss Lt. C. R. Molina, but I see now that she is a different sort altogether.”

While we are speculating, someone walks into the picture beyond the glass we peer through.

It is Miss Temple Barr herself, all dressed up in the sparkly silver ’60s knit suit she had tried on for my approval earlier and my

signature pumps of solid Austrian crystal stones, with my suave black profile glittering subtly on the heels!

“Ooooh!” Louise transfers her weight from mitt to mitt in anticipation. “I predict a cat fight of major dimensions.”

I admit that my neck tenses. This will not be pretty.

But Miss Temple merely stops before them and chats. Everybody smiles. The strange lady nods at Miss Temple while Mr. Matt

introduces her. I wish I could hear what they are saying! It is like watching the opening scene of a film without a sound track.

There is more odd about this scene that the nauseating cordiality of all concerned. The sofa Mr. Matt and his new lady friend perch

upon is not the red suede vintage number my Miss Temple found for his apartment at the Circle Ritz. It is not a free-form Vladimir Kagan design from the ’50s that would make a great museum piece. It is a vivid orange leather that simply cries out for an elegant noir kind of dude like me to stretch out on it … and knead my front shivs into its soft, hide-scented surface. Ummmm.

‘That sofa is good enough to eat,” I cannot help remarking. “Orange is definitely our color,” Louise agrees. Like me she is as black

as the jack of spades, except she is a jill.

“And I was born on Halloween,” I add. “Some would consider this a bad omen for a dude of my coloring, but I sneer at silly

superstitions.”

“You sneer at a lot of things, Daddy Dudest,” she notes dryly. “I do not know when I was born,” she adds.

.

This is a dig, because she is convinced that I am responsible for her advent on earth and should be mensch enough to at least remember the month.

“Halloween is months away,” I say vaguely. “I wonder what they are all doing here.”

“It is a big Las Vegas opening,” she points out.

“It is a very minor Las Vegas opening.”

“Then why did we come?”

“I heard Chef Song was catering it and there will be lots of leftover shrimp scampi and other saltwater delights.”

“Then should we not scampi around back by the Dumpster and be first in line?”

I gaze into Louise’s narrowed golden eyes, so cynical for one so young.

My own eyes are green, limpid, and as innocent as a three-dollar bill.

As one, in this if nothing else, we head for the buffet-lineto-be out back, leaving our humans to handle their own messy

affairs for once.

Chapter 6

Chatty Catty

“So what are you doing here?” Matt asked Temple. This didn’t sound as smooth a conversational transition as he had hoped. “I’m doing PR for Maylords. And you?”

“Uh, Janice is on the staff.”

“Oh, really?” Temple took the opportunity to perch beside Janice on the sofa arm.

Maybe her high heels were killing her, Matt thought, though they seldom did. So maybe it was curiosity.

Temple continued, “I heard everyone on staff went through a tough six-week training session before the opening. Boot camp for the retail set. But on salary. Pretty impressive. Maylords is really slinging the cash around for this opening. What do you do here?”

Janice’s amused expression grew quizzical. “I’m in an odd position. I’m not a fully qualified interior designer yet, but I

directed the overall look of the artwork in the displays. The staff is either designers or sales force, so I’m a bit of both.”

“Listen,” Temple said, “I’ve seen some of your own artwork. You’d be qualified to photo-style the Taj Mahal, I’d bet.”

“And you’ve done a fabulous job with the opening party and the press. Matt has always said you were very creative.”

“Oh, he has? How nice.”

Temple looked at him. Janice looked at him. Why did Matt feel like chum dangling between two attractive but circling ,

sharks?

“I envy you both,” he said. “Your minds are always concocting something out of nothing. I just sit in a chair nights and psychoanalyze strangers for fun and profit.”

“Being a radio shrink is not an easy gig.” Temple tolerated no self-deprecation except on her own behalf. “You do actual good for people.”

He wished he could do some good for himself and escape this awkward situation. Why it was awkward, he couldn’t say,

but it was.

“So.” Temple turned to Janice again. “I see the store will be doing monthly art shows in the framing area. Any of your pieces scheduled?”

“No.” Janice shook her head as she smiled. “However upscale it is, Maylords is a furniture store. It shows and sells art that would be considered … wallpaper. Nothing too meaty.”

“And you’re meaty.” Temple nodded. “I’ve heard so much about you, but have never had a chance to compliment you. I saw those police-style portraits you did from Matt’s descriptions. It’s too bad computers have superceded police sketch artists, but how lucky that ‘Lieutenant Molina suggested Matt try you for help in finding his stepfather. Those sketches you did for him, both phenomenal … at least the one of the man was. I met him once. Briefly.” She shuddered slightly at a brutal memory Matt wished they both could forget. “I never did see that woman face-to-face.”

“From what Matt said about her, you were lucky.”

When, Matt wondered, had he been totally cut out of this conversation?

Temple smiled grimly in agreement. “We’re all going to be lucky to see or hear no more of her. Matt did tell you?”

Janice just nodded. Matt could see Temple softly riffing hertangerine (she never missed a nuance) enameled fingernails on the silver metal evening purse in her lap. He knew she loathed short, uninformative answers, being an ex-TV news reporter and professional wordsmith. Words were her paint, and Janice was keeping her personal profile very sketchy indeed right now.

While Matt tried to think of something to say-it had to be his turn by now-their trio suddenly became a quartet. “Temple, you minx, you’ve been hiding!”

The man’s frame was as wiry as his cannily bleached, curly blond hair. Matt knew him, so he was free to spring up and shake hands.

“Danny Dove, the choreographer,” Temple said, glancing at Janice. “Janice Flanders is an artist and was in charge of the store’s opening look.”

“Fabulous!” Danny’s waving hand indicated the overall ambiance, then captured one of Temple’s hands. “I hate to drag you away, munchkin, but there’s someone I’ve been dying to have you meet.”

“We can’t have Las Vegas’s premier choreographer dying,” Temple answered, nodding farewell to Matt and Janice. “If you’ll excuse us?”

Matt was left standing, his hands in his pants pockets. Janice stood up beside him.

“Danny Dove,” she said. “Wow. He’s big-time in this town.”

“Funny, no matter how massive the Las Vegas tourist trade gets, it’s still called a town. Temple worked with him on a couple of special shows.”

“She’s one multitalented little murichkin,” Janice said. “True.”

“In fact, she’s adorable.”

“Temple would cringe to hear that. She hates being reminded that she’s small and cute; she wants to be taken seriously.” “Danny Dove didn’t get a rise out of her.”

“He calls everybody pet names. Choreographer’s habit, I guess. Besides, he saved her bacon.”

“Hmmm.” Janice gazed at the dressed-up people filtering in twos through Maylords’s maze of model rooms filled with modern, and very expensive, furniture. The orange leather sofa was $4,800, Matt had noticed.

He eyed Janice, wondering how Temple had seen her: a tall woman with short brown hair, wearing a beige linen top and skirt hand printed with rather cryptic images, like three wavy lines and a fish. Not pretty, but pleasant and strong looking.

“So she’s the one.” Janice’s mild tone set alarm bells clanging all along his circulatory system.

” ‘The one?’ “

“Don’t play dense, Matt. The one-something-almosthappened-with-except-she-was-taken.”

“Did I mention-?”

“Yes, once, a while back.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I do. So. Is she the one?”

“How did you guess?”

Janice gave him the same narrow perceptive look that she applied to the subject of a sketch before she began slicing the charcoal across the paper.

“By the very thorough once-over she gave me. She knew who I was from ten feet away.” “She did?”

“Made me with one glimpse of my name tag.”

Matted eyed the small rectangle of plastic plastered to Jan-ice’s left shoulder. “Janice” was incised into it, no more.

“I’m sure she was just interested because she’d seen those two sketches you’d done for me. She said they were great.”

“I’m sure not. Matt, don’t be naive,” Janice said. “I wouldn’t underestimate that munchkin for a minute. She’s smart as a whip and faster than a speeding bullet and other assorted clich�s, and doesn’t miss a thing. I don’t blame you for falling for her.”

“Well. Am I right?”

He was now thoroughly lost in no-man’s-land. Janice had invited him to be her escort for the landmark occasion of her first full-time position since her divorce. Now here she was grillinghim about his feelings for another woman. Even an undersocialized ex-priest understood that this was a lose-lose situation.

Janice laughed. “It’s okay. The real world is filled with the echoes of unfinished symphonies. I’m just saying you couldn’t find two more opposite women than she and I.”

Matt silently objected. Lt. Molina and Temple were even greater opposites, but he didn’t intend to inject Carmen Molina into this mess.

“You think it’s odd,” he ventured, “that I could like two such different … people.”

“Fudger!” Janice laughed again, then put her hand on his forearm, a comforting gesture. She wore one ring on her second

finger: a sherry-colored citrine in sterling silver with gilt accents. “It’s okay. I’m just glad that awful woman who stalked you is out of the picture. I can handle adorable, but I cannot cope with psychotic.”

“Funny; I’m the other way around.”

“That’s because you’re a counselor,” Janice said. “Speaking of psychotic, did I fill you in on the corporate dynamics around this place?”

Matt gazed at the softly lit vignettes of perfect rooms, the ambling magazine-chic couples clutching wineglasses. “They sell furniture. What corporate dynamics?”

“Very odd.” She leaned in, leaving her hand on his arm, whispering. Matt smelled something light and elusive, like very pleasant soap. “That’s what I thought. Selling furniture. Not a noble profession, but a necessary one.”

“Who’s arguing?”

“Well, our esteemed manager, for one. Did you see a pudgy, red-faced man in a wrinkled oatmeal linen suit scurrying around?”

“Yeah. He’s the manager?”

“The one and only Mark Ainsworth. When we got our final pep talk before opening, Kenny Maylord himself addressed us en masse. He said what a fabulous group of designers and sales associates this was. Well, they should be; they all jumped ship from the other major furniture showrooms in town. Anyway, it was all about how great we are. Then he left and pigeon-toed Ainsworth took over and stood up in front of God and everybody and said, get this, ‘In three months half of you will be gone.’

We’re all still blinking at that one.”

“Gone? Like … let go?”

“That’s what he said.”

“In three months? After paying you all for six weeks of training? Doesn’t make sense.”

“No. I had a strong impression of good cop/bad cop being played on the discount mattress front.”

“Discount mattress?”

“Don’t let all the fancy furniture fool you; the real duel for home furnishing power in Las Vegas is over mattress sales. Figures. Everybody’s got to have them and they need periodic replacement. Plus the markup is retail heaven. Not to mention the psychosexual implications.”

“Mattresses?’ He had noticed a low-lit area off to one side furnished with naked box springs and tufted brocaded mattresses but it hardly seemed the glamour part of the showroom. That was reserved for the parade of lavishly accoutered room arrangements that fanned off the central courtyard.

The centerpiece of that courtyard right now was a vivid burnt-orange Nissan Murano SUV, the object of a prize drawing.

Somehow mattresses seemed way out of its league.

“Guess how I spent my day getting ready for this do?” Janice asked.

“Hanging pictures?”

“Hell, no. All the pictures I hung were taken down and rearranged by some self-important babe from Accessories. I spent the day on my back-”

“Janice! This place isn’t that bad-?”

“On my back under the frigging mattresses writing down stock numbers as all good little Maylords workers had been directed to do, while Missy Modern Art Museum was flitting about whipping display guys into undoing everything I’d done:’ “I can’t believe it.”

“Welcome to the working world. I’d forgotten about office politics.”

Matt was about to go into a sincere riff about how superior Janice’s artistic instincts were when a figure suddenly appeared before them.

She was a tall woman with dark hair, like Molina, but unlike Molina her hair brushed her shoulders in soft, Miss Muffet curls. She was willowy to the point of scrawniness. Her face was pale and the expression on it was stern and supercilious at the same time. “People, please! No fraternizing between staff. We’re supposed to mix with guests.”

“He’s a customer,” Janice answered.

“Janice, please.” The laugh was short and denigrating. “We don’t have ‘customers,’ we have ‘clients.’ I know it’s hard for a former full-time wife like you to know the difference, especially after your mall work-”

“Mr. Devine is not on staff. He’s a potential client.”

The woman frowned at him, displaying impressively deep vertical tracks between her brow for someone in her late twenties.

“You’re not on staff?” She eyed him with sudden smarm. “Well. I’m Beth Blanchard, and if I can direct you to any department or sales associate-?” she suggested with sudden and unbelievable sweetness.

“She’ll get fifty percent of the commission for that,” Janice said, “and I won’t.”

“Well.” Beth Blanchard laughed in an unconvincing manner and shrugged her sharp shoulders. “You always have a choice at Maylords, and that includes in sales associates.”

Janice put her hand through Matt’s arm. “If Mr. Devine wants to buy something, I’ll be happy to sell it to him all by myself?’

“Uuuh’ Beth’s face twisted into irritation again. “We do not ‘sell’ anything at Maylords. Haven’t you learned a thing on probation?”

Matt decided to speak up. “I suppose you give it away, then,” he said pleasantly. “Most impressive.” “We ‘place’ pieces with clients. We don’t sell furniture.” “Will I have to sign adoption papers?” he asked.

She glared at Janice, then turned and flounced away, which she could do because she was dressed in fashionably

fluttering floral chiffon, as tattered as Cinderella rags.

“That woman acts like she’s queen bitch at the ball,” Janice said under her breath. “See what I mean about this place? It’s schizy. We’re supposed to be the best and brightest new staff Maylords has ever had, according to Kenny Maylord himself, but the minute he vanishes-and he does because the main store is in Indianapolis, with another in Palm Beach-the Wicked Witch and her Hying Monkeys come out to shake the stuffing out of us.”

“I don’t get all this fuss about the word ‘sell.”

“

“They never use the word ‘sale’ in their ads. It’s all part of the upscale impression Maylords wants to make. They’d planned to donate twenty thousand dollars to the local arts fund, but nobody is objecting to this ignorant woman running around and undoing all my art placements. I did do sketches and caricatures in the mall, but I know what people like and how to present it to sell well. She hasn’t got a clue, but she tells me I’m not doing my job right, like she was somebody big’s bimbo mistress.”

“Maybe she is.”

Janice sighed. “Sony, Matt. I didn’t mean to dump my workplace woes on you. This was supposed to be a party.”

“It is. Let’s hit the buffet table again. Temple got Chef Song from the Crystal Phoenix to do the food.”

“That’s spectacular,” Janice agreed. “And I didn’t see bitchy Beth Blanchard hanging around the tables rearranging his parsley sprigs.”

“Chef Song would have taken his meat cleaver to her for that. On several occasions I understand that he’s almost de—

whiskered the former hotel cat, Midnight Louie, for taking liberties with the koi in his special pond.”

Janice was staring into the crowd that had swallowed Beth Blanchard, invisible pointed black hat and all.

“I hope somebody does take at least a mat cutter to her,” Janice said. “I suppose I’ve ‘goofed off’ enough. We’re actually on salary here. The witch has already berated me for notpunching my time card tonight. I thought, like with museum openings, staff attended the ceremonials as part of their jobs, without pay, but, no, it’s all on the time clock. Mind if I desert you to troll for clients who may want to … uh, can I say `buy’ … something?”

Sure.” Matt hoisted his glass of pale wine to show he was set for a while, and Janice left.

He strolled along the beige travertine tiles circling the store’s perimeter, eyeing a smorgasbord of empty rooms with furniture too grand to imagine oneself using.

He tried to spot something he could legitimately “acquire,” to give Janice a commission. Every interesting table he came near enough to read the undersized tags was way too costly for his druthers, if not his income. No wonder Temple exulted in secondhand chic: it saved dough.

He paused before what passed for beds nowadays, a behemoth on tiered platforms, canopied and covered with enough brocade and pillows to resemble a setting from which a Louis the Someteenth might have given royal decrees.

Matt supposed his spare box spring and mattress could use some upgrading, but Versailles or Buckingham Palace wasn’t what he had in mind.

“Fabulous, isn’t it?” The voice rang a bell. Perhaps the one at Notre Dame?

Matt turned. A slight man holding a large painting of rather overblown peonies also stood gazing at the Renaissance master bedroom vignette.

“Too much,” Matt said, surprised to recognize his viewing partner.

“I guess we were trained to the simple life.” Jerome Johnson smiled, balancing the frame edge on an upholstered chaise longe.

“Monastic this is not,” Matt agreed.

“So … what are you doing here-?” they each began in disconcerting sync.

“I work here.” Jerome.

“Oh, right.” Matt. “When you buttonholed me outside the radio station the other night to say hello, you mentioned that you were a ‘framer.’ ” Matt nodded at the painting. “It didn’t connect with me, what you framed.”

Jerome had also mentioned their years in the same Catholic seminary and how vividly he remembered Matt. Far too vividly for Matt’s comfort zone.

“So you work for Maylords,” Matt said, still feeling awkward.

“Yeah. Tote that assembly-line original.” Jerome made a face into his sandy beard. “Did you come because-?”

Matt had to stop that notion in the bud, the peony bud. “Janice. Janice Flanders. She works here now. A friend of mine,” he said. Firmly. “She asked me to come tonight.”

“Oh. Janice. She’s okay.”

Matt was about to say that Janice was more than “okay,” when he noticed someone walking briskly toward them. This was a social event. People stood and talked, or ambled and gazed.

“Jerry!” Beth Blanchard was bearing down on another hapless victim. From Jerome’s expression, he hated being called Jerry. “I want that painting in the French vignette. Now. No point dawdling in front of the displays. You can’t collect a commission anyway. You’re just a drone.”

Matt had the impression that she had not failed to see him, but enjoyed displaying her vicious streak in front of a witness.

Matt’s idealistic instincts urged him to defend a former fellow seminarian from this harpy in heels. His knowledge of human nature told him that interfering would only deepen the humiliation.

She finally allowed herself to notice him. Her features showed surprise before the expression “you again” made them scowl … again. She was a young woman, quite presentable. There was no visible reason for her to act like Elvira Gulch on the trail of Toto, but reason seldom ruled some personalities.

By now, he-the hapless stranger-had irritated her controlling personality as much as anybody she worked with and, God

forbid, lived with.

Matt became a placid shore on which her fury broke in vain. Jerome cast him a farewell wince, then moved along like a whipped cur. Matt had never seen such a graphic illustration of that clich� before. He knew Jerome felt it all the more because of his feelings for Matt himself.

Unreturned feelings. He understood that unpleasant situation. Poor Jerome. Matt’s hands were fists, he discovered. He consciously relaxed his fingers, eased out his breath. Under the normal surface of everyday life stirred the monsters of the deep: everybody’s history and hurts, roiling like crosscurrents. Matt stopped himself from watching the unlikely couple leave, and turned back to stare at the vignette, seeing only the baroque curlicues on the brocades writhing like embroidered serpents.

“Hey, you,” said a voice soft and insinuating behind him. “You’d better get those world-class buns back on the floor and

start mixing with the clients.”

Matt turned.

A tall, grinning, bucktoothed man stood leering at him like a Renaissance devil.

Matt didn’t have to say or do a thing.

The man’s expression collapsed. “Sorry. I thought you were … sorry?’ He whirled and left so fast that Matt wondered if he’d even recognize him again.

Chapter 7

Imagine Meeting

Y o Hu e r e …

Temple had been dying to remain glued to the orange leather sofa, interrogating Janice Flanders while pretending to make

small talk.

Why was Matt here, of all places? Because he was with Janice, obviously. Hadn’t Molina mentioned that he was seeing Janice? Temple couldn’t remember, but then so much had happened lately.

“It’s been ages. Where have you been hiding yourself?”

Speaking of small talk, Danny Dove expertly tossed it over his shoulder to Temple while weaving an elegant path through the crowds. He kept her hand in custody and therefore, Temple in tow.

“Haven’t had any show-biz related projects lately,” Temple said. “I’ve never seen anybody cut a faster wake through a mob

than this.”

“Hate crowds, except onstage,” Danny explained, finally leading her into an Art Deco vignette that made her want to redo her whole place right away.“Here we are,” Danny said.

And there was indeed a “we” here.

A pudgy, short, red-faced man in a wrinkled, oatmeal-colored linen suit was gesticulating like a manic mime at a slim, tall man wearing a suit the same silky color and texture as Baileys Irish Cream.

It was like watching Oliver Hardy berating Bond, James Bond, the Roger Moore incarnation.

They turned, actors noticing an audience.

“I’m done,” the short man said … shortly. He favored Temple with a particularly venomous look, then left.

“Who is Grumpy, Dopey, and Pissed Off all put together?” Danny asked.

“The manager of the whole enchilada,” the other man answered.

He was one of those guys so dreamily handsome that the savvy woman figured out he was gay before she allowed her heart to skip a beat or her hormones to rev their engines. “This is my partner, Simon Foster,” Danny said. He drew Temple forward to introduce them with such beaming pleasure that each instantly knew the other was too important to dismiss on mere sexual preference grounds.

Temple looked past the gorgeous suit, the hair, the eyes to a smart and slightly diffident personality.

“You’re the crime-fighting PR woman,” Simon said.

“Oh, Lord.” Temple laughed. “Danny’s been casting me in some musical in his mind again. Freelance PR Superwoman. It’s just that I sometimes run across crooks:’

“Don’t we all?” Simon smiled and sighed at the same time. “What’s your gig?” Temple asked.

“Gig? Isn’t she the little trouper?” Danny asked rhetorically. “Simon is an interior designer.”

“I’ve been freelance until now,” Simon added. “The lure of Maylords was a regular paycheck, but I’ll still be able to work with my previous client list, and hopefully expand.”

Temple read the underlying message obvious in both Janice and Simon’s presence on the staff of Maylords. Times were tough. The Clinton budget overage had morphed into the Bush megadeficit. Free spirits everywhere were hitching their stars to any steady job they could find.

“Did you design this room?” Temple asked.

When Simon nodded Temple shook her head in awe. “You’ve just convinced me to jettison my whole decor and go into deep debt.”

“Maybe a little debt,” Simon answered. He glanced around, his laugh lines reversing course into a frown. “Gawd, that woman has been at my Ert� prints again.”

“Janice?” Temple asked.

“Janice? Hardly. She’s got an eye Ert� would’ve envied. It’s that Blanchard witch who thinks she’s curator-in-chief around

here. Ignorant slut.”

Simon exchanged the positions of two chrome-framed prints of elegantly attired women. The vignette gained a dynamic that had been missing before.

Temple was startled to notice how much Simon resembled Matt when his back was turned, if Matt had ever been dressed or coifed spectacularly enough to turn heads.

“Amateurs!” Danny shook out his French cuffs with a dancer’s disdainful grace. “Everybody’s an artist in his or her own

mind, and/or a critic.”

“It does sometimes seem the world of personalities veers between two poles,” Temple agreed, “the positives and the negatives.” She turned back to Simon. “It must be terrific fun to play with a string of fantasy rooms, like an ever-changing set design.”

“Or a dollhouse for adults. I wanted to put mannequins into mine, but Ainsworth, the general manager you just saw leaving, nixed that. Each designer does two or three vignettes from scratch, but management has the final say. And sometimes would-be management, like large Miss Blanchard.” Simon frowned at the fall of a drape and adjusted it. “The rest of the room settings are fairly stock arrangements meant to showcase certain lines of furniture.”

“Mannequins are a great idea!” Temple always waxed indignant to hear a creative notion quashed. “This is Las Vegas.

Anything goes. Say … if ‘management’ found mannequins too hard-edged, how about soft-sculpture people? They’d be more subtle. Do I know a source for that!”

Even Danny, who thrived on pushing real people around make-believe settings, perked up at the suggestion. “Who’s your source? I could choreograph a fabulous number mixing soft-sculpture people with real dancers.”

“My landlady at the Circle Ritz, Electra Lark, is the queen of creative soft-sculpture crowds. She fills the pews in her wedding chapel with them, even Elvis.”

“The Circle Ritz!” Simon’s face lit up like Kleig lights spotlighting Fred Astaire in a ’30s musical. “What a post-Art Deco

’50s hoot! I love driving by that round building. And you live there?”

“Me and my faithful feline companion, Midnight Louie. So does Matt Devine, who’s here tonight. Danny’s met him.”

“Any openings?” Danny asked, catching Circle Ritz fever. “We’d love a pied-a-terre closer to the Strip.”

“Electra would know. I’ll check with her.” Temple was glad the subject of her cool digs had distracted Simon from the crushing of design ideas. This was Maylords’s opening night and her PR party. Everybody should be happy, at least for the evening.

“I’d better mingle and make sure everything’s going well,” she said, suddenly sorry for lapsing into two personal conversations while on duty.

She hurried back onto the pale cream travertine road, feeling a little like Dorothy en route to the wizard. She should ensure that the Maylords brass was happy with the event.

Being congenitally short, despite the Midnight Louie black-cat heels sparkling on her feet, Temple searched for

recognizable hair, feeling rather like a scalp hunter.

Amelia Wong’s shiny black bob, with its intimations of ’20s femme fatale film stars like Louise Brooks, was a low-profile constant, a mobile, lacquered mushroom cap. Taller heads orbited her like heavenly bodies, some of them literally so, such as the equally statuesque blond Baylee and black Pritchard. Not to mention the X-Files alien-FBI types in opaque black shades.

Mark Ainsworth, the dorky, unimaginative manager, had a greasy, curly poll of dishwater brown. Kenny, Maylords’s CEO, second generation and just past thirty, wore a Walter Mondale tonsorial chop job that screamed “midwestern” in a trendy international town like Las Vegas.

Temple was so busy hunting hair she didn’t notice someone marking her out from the milling herd, although she was probably the only fast-moving person without a bent elbow holding a wineglass in the place.

Temple’s eyes paged past a knot of people, then froze and paged back.

Oh, vaulting Vladimir Kagans! That Iranian-secret-police guy in a navy suit fit for a funeral wearing a name tag reading “Joe.” That was someone she knew, who did not know her, thank God. What was C. R. Molina’s ex-squeeze Rafi Nadir doing here, and why was he passing as “Joe”?

What was he ever doing anywhere? Security work to hear him tell it, a.k.a. stalking to anyone who knew what nasty crimes he was suspected of.

And now he was walking toward her, black eyes narrowed like a hunting hawk’s.

Temple tried to pretend she hadn’t noticed him. As she turned to veer in the opposite direction, though, he somehow ended up as a roadblock. She had to stop-or careen into him. And physical contact with Molina’s bad-apple ex-cop SO was to be avoided at all costs.

The so-called Joe was still staring at her. “I know you.”

“No, you don’t?’ She tried to weave past but he held up a hand. She stopped rather than crash into it chest first.

This was the only man she had ever seen put the fear of the Lord into her own intrepid SO, Max Kinsella. And Max was a pro at skullduggery and derring-do. Temple was just a gifted amateur.

“I know you.” Nadir stared at her face, and glanced down to take her measure.

He was the creepiest guy she’d ever met, a cross between the mad guru Jim Jones, who’d poisoned all his followers in Guyana three decades ago, and Qaddafi. He had that same dark Mideastern handsomeness that age was melting into the face of a corpse laid out for viewing, something once good gone terribly wrong.

Molina had told Max, reluctantly, that Nadir was a rogue L.A. cop driven off the force. It took some doing to be driven off the L.A. force, from what Temple had heard. But Nadir had been turning up in all the wrong places in Las Vegas lately. That was especially bad news for Molina, who had hoped she and their daughter, Mariah, had vanished from his life years ago, before he even knew he had a daughter.

Nadir’s forefinger pointed at Temple’s naked face like a gun barrel. “Starts with a T.” “What?” Temple’s icky thoughts had scared her into a distracted state.

“Your name.”

How could he know her name? She had crossed paths with him when she was investigating the clubs in search of the Stripper Killer, but that guy had been caught-trying to abduct Temple-when she had laid him low with her pepper spray. Sure, Nadir had come on the scene and decked the guy after, but she had been wearing a long brown wig that, thankfully, had stayed firmly pinned on during the entire incident.

And she’d used a pseudonym in the clubs, posing as a seller of lingerie to strip off.

“Tess!” he said. “Tess the Thong Girl.”

Temple glanced around to see if any of her temporary bosses were within hearing distance. She’d thought that undercover persona of hers was safely history, along with the armful of stripper unitards that she sold by the spandex yard at the clubs while hunting the Stripper Killer. So had anyone heard this revealing challenge? Thankfully, no. Worryingly, no.

“That’s who you are,” he said. “I never forget a face, even if the hair over it changes.”

Temple decided to embrace the moment. “Yeah, but that’s not who I really am.” “Who are you, then?”

She realized she did not, absolutely not, want to give him her real name.

“Well, I wasn’t who you thought I was:’

“I get that.” He looked around. “This looks like your kind of crowd, the upscale pricks and princesses who live the chichi

life.”

“Oh, no, I’m just a working girl.” Wrong phrase. “I mean, an ordinary Jill who works for a living. I’m a … secretary. Sort of.” “What were you doing in the clubs, then?”

“It’s true, what I told you then. Sort of. My sister was involved. She danced a little and, with the Stripper Killer loose, I was worried about her.”

He nodded, coming to the conclusion she’d desperately been implying. “So you got the crazy idea of going undercover in the clubs? If you hadn’t been carrying that pepper spray, babe, you’da been strangled with your own spandex unitards.” “Hey, you know what they’re called. That’s pretty impressive?’

“I spend a lot of time in the clubs, doing security?’

“You did come along just in time to save my skin.”

“Yeah.” When he smiled his face lost some of its sinister cast. “What were you thinkin’? Little girl like you takin’ on the Stripper Killer. You went right over and sat with me before that. I was a strange guy. You ought to be more careful:’ Yes, Temple had risked a lot to sit down and try to pump Rafi Nadir. He was the only man to instill fear in both Max and their bete noir in blue, figuratively speaking, homicide lieutenant C. R. Molina, who were the two most formidable people Temple knew. One she loved, the other she loathed. Not hard to say which was which!

“Anyway,” Rafi was saying, “you look a little harried. I guess they have you running your ass all over the place on opening night. You deserve a rest. Why don’t you sit down on this, uh”-he stared at an ostrich-pattern ottoman shaped like a giant mushroom-“leather thing and I’ll get you a glass of wine. Red or white?”

“Ah . white. Please. Thank you. Joe.”

“My name’s really Rafi. This is just a cover.” His thumb and forefinger flicked the name tag, dismissive. “They call me

Rd.”

“Thanks. Raf.”

Temple sat as directed, no longer harried, or worried, but amazed.

When opportunity falls into your lap, and comes bearing free wine in a plastic glass … you’d better play along and learn something.

“Won’t they miss you?” she asked when Rafi returned with the proper-colored wine.

“Nah. Tonight the security’s for show. What they’re really worried about happens when things are quieter.” “Really? What?”

“Can’t talk about that. So. What’s a nervy little secretary like you doing with a stripper for a sister?” “It happens in the best of families.”

“I did security for a lot of the clubs. Would I know her?”

“Maybe, but’s she’s back in Wisconsin now. That killer scare made her finally go home and make peace with the folks.”

He nodded. “Usually you can’t go home again, someone said. I sure can’t. Strippers don’t often make it. You must be a good example. Anybody cared enough about me to risk her neck in a strip club with a killer at large, I’d be real grateful. You’re a ballsy little broad.”

Temple tried hard not to blush at such heartfelt praise. All three words set her teeth on edge, although she did sort of

cotton to “ballsy.” Wait’ll she told Max.

Then again, maybe she wouldn’t tell Max that she was Rafi Nadir’s new poster girl.

“You know,” he went on, waving his hand at the crowd, “I can’t sit down, by the way. Duty-but, you know, it’s real hard to turn a stripper around. When I was a cop, you’d try to get them to testify on something, or report a DV, and they just wouldn’t do it.”

“DV?”

“Domestic violence. That’s why I burned out on police work. It was a losing battle, and even your fellow officers and the brass couldn’t do any good.”

Well! Rafi Nadir as a misunderstood knight in blue? It was just possible, Temple thought. She never liked to believe the Gospel according to Molina, and according to Molina, Nadir was a brute worth keeping away from twelve-year-old Mariah even at the cost of her mother’s career.

Poles. Positive and negative. His truth and her truth. Both possibly right, and right about each other?

“So why’d you leave police work?” Temple, the ex-TV reporter, asked. “Burnout I can understand. But it must have been something more.”

Rafi surveyed the crowd, more to avoid looking her in the eye than for surveillance purposes, Temple guessed.

“I had a partner. Not a job partner, a personal one. She, uh, was the right gender and the right minority. Went up like a helium balloon. I was the wrong minority and the wrong gender. I got sick of the hypocrisy. I left.”

“The job or the significant other?”

“Both.” He looked back at her. Shrugged. “I helped her at first. Built her confidence, clued her in. Didn’t see it coming.

Then it was Hasta la vista, baby. She split so fast and so totally I couldn’t even find her to ask why.”

Temple didn’t like the raw edge in Raf’s voice. It was angry and it was honest. He said. She said. The same old story, quest for love and glory. As time goes by. He was Bogart; Molina was Bergman. Not! Temple had an overactive theatrical imagination. She’d be the first to admit it.

“But that’s bygones,” Rafi said, smiling.

Smiling at her!

“You got an address?”

No, she lived under a Dumpster! Now what, ballsy little broad? she asked her nervier self.

Now Matt Devine to the rescue.

He had eased onto the scene like Cool Hand Luke. “Sony to interrupt,” he told Temple, nodding impersonally at Nadir.

“Some ceremony at the central atrium where the car is. They need you.”

Temple jumped up. “Sony,” she told Rafi. “Gotta run.”

His lips tightened, his expression saying thanks for reminding him that he was just scummy hired help and had no business talking to a woman whose life he had saved.

“I enjoyed talking to you,” Temple said in farewell.

And she had. She had really enjoyed learning that the Molina scenario might have another side.

Still, she was glad to go off with Matt.

“Who was that guy?” he was asking as suspiciously as Max would. “He sure was monopolizing you.” “Do they really want me anywhere?”

“Yeah.” Matt stopped now that Rafi Nadir was three vignettes behind them and out of sight. “I do. Here.”

“Really.” Temple wondered what a genuine ballsy little broad would say to a provocative statement like that.

Chapter 8

Hot Sauce

“This place gives me the creeps,” Matt said. “Not to mention the company you were just keeping.” He looked around the elegant, empty rooms. “Is there any place we can talk confidentially?”

“Any place that isn’t orange. That’s the fashion statement of the evening, and that’s where people congregate. Hey. There’s a green office vignette just next door. A designer named Kelly did it.”

“Good.” Matt took Temple’s elbow to usher her into the adjoining vignette. He urged her into a corner behind a huge entertainment center-in an office?

The nook was cosy and intimate and Temple could see that Matt was too upset to see just where he’d placed them.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“This place. The whole … mood feels wrong. Half the employees seem to be trolling around to attack the other half.”

“You’ve never worked for a large company, I see.”

“And who was that thug you were chatting up?”

“You didn’t give me time to introduce you. And I was hardlychatting him up. He waylaid me. Like you did just now. What’s really bothering you?”

Matt looked over his shoulder and shook his head. “I don’t know. I think I was just sort of hit on.”

“Well, it can’t have been me, or you’d have noticed. Janice? She looks like such a reserved lady…

“Not Janice! Someone else I don’t even know.”

“That’s been known to happen.”

“Not to me. I’ve got some sort of psychic Teflon coating. People don’t mess with me that way.” ” `People.’ Ah. It was a guy.”

He looked disappointed that she figured it out. “Yeah. I mean, I’m just standing there. .

“Highly inciting. Shouldn’t do it.”

“Temple!”

“You’re not responsible for other people’s actions, or reactions. Forget about it.”

“It’s hard,” he admitted after half a minute. “Here I’ve got Jerome from seminary hanging around, and-”

“Didn’t you get this sort thing in the seminary? From the recent news-”

“No. I didn’t. I walked under this Teflon umbrella all through it. A lot of us did. Calling us naive hardly begins to describe it. It’s just that I’ve seen Janice and Jerome lit into by some witch on wheels, and now I see you getting cosy with Jabba the Hut in a corner … all you’re missing is the chain-mail bikini.”

“I can get one,” Temple said brightly.

“What?”

“A chain-mail bikini. I know a guy in the desert, name of Mace. He custom makes them. Knives too.”

“Temple. That was just a figure of speech. And how did you run into an outlaw character like that?”

“I have my ways. Matt, lighten up! This is the opening event for a big new commercial venture. People are going to be nervous. They are going to be crabby. They are going to be paranoid.”

“You think I’m overreacting.”

“Did I say that?”

“No. But I knew what you were thinking.”

“Then will you get it for me for Christmas?”

He sighed then, and really looked at her. “You’re right. This other stuff is mostly nothing. I was worried about who I saw you with.”

“I wasn’t worried about who I saw you with.”

“No?” He stepped a little closer as all expert interrogators do. “She said you were.”

“She did?”

“Who?”

“Whoever we’re talking about.”

Temple realized that they hadn’t been this near, or this alone, since a close encounter in the hallway to her apartment before everything went to hell a couple weeks ago. If you could call having everyone you know involved in a suspicious death

“hell?’

“Look,” she said. “It’s been a rough couple of weeks. I think everyone is a little edgy. I was supposed to be finding my meal ticket. Apparently something is ‘Wong’ in the Maylords world right now.”

“That’s a terrible pun, but I guess she deserves it, from what you’ve implied. So what’s keeping you?”

Temple shrugged, and waited for him to catch on.

He stepped back. “Sony. Guess the paranoia is catching.” She scooted around him and hit heels to travertine to head for

the front of the store.

She wasn’t surprised Matt was a little gun-shy after all he’d been through with his truly terrifying stalker. This crowd was trendy and filled with temperamental artist types. Temperamental artist types were often in-your-face. Kind of like Amelia Wong. Actually, Wong remained a cipher. It was her staff that was in-your-face.

Speaking of which, Temple had no sooner touched toe to the festive central area than she saw Amelia Wong finally facing off with someone in person. That someone was her Asian opposite: master chef Song of the Crystal Phoenix.

Call him Yang (although Temple had never known his first name). Call him Yang can cook. Call her Yin. Call her Yin-Yang can’t abide disharmony.

Call this a Zen shoot-out.

Kenny Maylord noticed Temple’s presence with a huge relieved sigh and came skittering over on the QT. “Thank God.

She’s rearranging his buffet table and he looks ready to restyle her hair-do with his chopping cleaver.”

“Never argue with a chef. They’re armed and dangerous.”

“Can you do anything with them? The TV videographers have been eating up this unpleasant scene.”

Temple braved a gantlet of four-hundred-watt lighting to enter the fray, which was spotlit by the small sun of a TV camera

light.

“Can I help?” she asked.

Chef Song, who knew her by sight as the PR rep for his employer, the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino, stopped gesticulating like an armed windmill. He folded his arms, and cleaver, across his chest.

“This lady changes my buffet.”

“This man,” Wong said, “offends the inner yin with the inharmonious color of his arrangement. I cannot allow people to eat from such an ungoverned display.”

“Food is set out delicately,” said Chef Song, “in a fan of flavor, like scented flowers in a garden. Color is in second place.” “The eye and spirit must always be paramount.”

“What does a movie company have to do with Song’s buffet table? Only movie company in Las Vegas is the MGM-Grand Hotel and the three-story lion out front would make you eat your foolish words, if he were here.”

Temple took a deep breath. Chef Song was first-generation Chinese. His grasp of the language in times of stress grew colorful, to say the least. She knew his history. He had been an enormously wealthy Hong Kong businessman who had lost everything at the gaming tables … and then had reinvented himself in midlife in a foreign country as a chef. The career change had been fortuitous. He attacked his new role with youthful passion.

Apparently his commitment had found some answering pas in that media ice maiden, Amelia Wong. Ms. Wong’s American first name was the hallmark these days of a second-or third-generation AsianAmerican torn between two worlds and doing quite spectacularly in both, thank you.

“Shrimp can be here,” Amelia Wong declared. “Shrimp is orange and delicate in taste. Pork must be to the extremes. It is strong and earthy.”

“Sweet and sour,” he riposted. “Sauce for each dish is sweet-and-sour. You keep sweet-and-sour together. For balance.

As with yang and yin.”

“Ym and yang. You can’t even get that right.”

“I have get everything all right until you come on scene.”

Temple considered that many a feng shui client might think the same thing after a domestic makeover according to Wong.

People were generally torn between acting as immobile as a herd of sheep or snapping up every convenient trend that sprang up around them like clover. And so they were ready to knock over the traces and leave the trends behind in an empty pasture … with other, earthier leavings.

“Isn’t there some compromise?” Temple asked, stepping between the combatants.

He said: “No. Food does not compromise. Chef never compromise.”

She said: “How can one compromise with divine harmony?”

Temple lowered her voice. “Listen. Maylords is paying you both princely sums to enhance their opening festivities. Surely the universe of divine harmony recognizes fiscal balance. Bottom line? Checkbook?” “Principle,” Ms. Wong declared through grape-glossed lips, “is everything.”

“In financial matters as well as spiritual ones,” Temple pointed out.

Ms. Wong received this observation in silence.

Hooray, Temple had rung a bell. Maybe on a cash register.

“I can move the pork down three places, no more.” Chef Song pointed magnanimously with the cleaver, to which a few translucent flakes of raw onion clung like … yuck, tissue.

Ms. Wong’s obsidian eyes followed the gesture and studied the suggestive CSI-like evidence clinging to the broad steel blade.

Her eyes and voice matched the cleaver’s sharpness. “That would be sufficient. I must have my shrimp central and foremost.”

He bowed. “Shrimp is the empress of appetizers.” “Agreed. It was never about the shrimp.”

Ms. Amelia had to look up to look down her snub nose at him. She had accomplished this while accessorized with… Temple, impressed, sneaked a quick peek downward. Wow! Seattle space-needle-high Jimmy Choo heels, several seasons newer than Temple’s.

For Temple owned a pair of Choo shoes herself. They had been acquired at a resale shop, were only three inches high and four years old. Ms. Wong’s model, however, had graced the feet of Lucy Liu in the most recent issue of InStyle magazine.

Temple wondered briefly if there was an offshoot of feng shui called Feng Choo. Either way, Temple could sympathize with pint-size women seeking a leg up on the competition in the business world.

Amelia Wong moved the length of horseshoe-shaped table, switching the placement of plum and mustard sauce bowls according to some universal order known only to a domestic arts master.

Chef Song shook his head and muttered words Temple could not translate, fortunately.

Beyond them both loomed an overpoweringly orange backdrop: the spotlit gleaming bulk of the Nissan Murano. This was one of those crossover vehicles: a kinder, gentler SUV doing all it could to avoid any stylistic hint of an old-fashioned station wagon. A local dealer had provided the new model as the door prize for the Maylords end-of-the-week raffle. Amelia Wong’s last act would be selecting the winner.

Kenny Maylord and his wife edged over to Temple now that the former celebrity combatants were contentedly plying the buffet table and switching each other’s arrangements around. Flowers, food … it was all musical chairs.

“I’m used to temperamental interior designers,” Kenny said, “but this takes the cake. Honey, this is Temple Barr, the local PR hiree.” As Temple acknowledged the introduction to Kenny’s thirty-something wife, he told her, “I understand from Ms. Wong’s PR gal that your work at Las Vegas Now! saved our skin as far as TV coverage goes. I guess I didn’t get it at the time.”

Temple accepted his sheepish smile as an apology. “The situation was out of our control. We needed to spin the dial back our way again. Sometimes it takes extreme measures.”

Mrs. Maylord, a bland-brown-hair clone of her husband, stepped closer to speak under her breath. “Things are so … dramatic in Las Vegas. We never would have had that kind of problem back home in Indianapolis.”

Such a Ken and Barbie couple: same height, same coloring, same plastic Stepford-spouse look, with more than a touch of

American Gothic behind it. No way would they understand Las Vegas and its high-rolling ways without spending some time here. It was a far cry from Indianapolis.

Temple, herself an escapee from the sound-alike city of Minneapolis, felt sorry for this poster couple for stable midwestern values. Las Vegas lived and died on a fault line of change and hype. There was nothing stable or midwestern about it, but, on the other hand, it was fun.

“I think the chop shui crisis has been handled,” she said.

She eyed the two artistes, who were each rapidly undoing each others’ adjustments. It was like watching two neighboring nations moving guard stations on the border.

Amazing how unnecessary busywork defused tensions.

“I’ll just be happy when the opening huzzahs are over,” Mrs. Maylord said, with feeling. She extended a hand. “I’m Barbara, by the way.”

Temple, shocked by the name, shook a palm that was as dry as white cotton gloves, amazed at her own prescience. Ken and Barbie.

“Temple Barr.”

“What an interesting first name.”

“I don’t know how I got it, and I used to hate it. Wanted to be an Ashley in the worst way, but now I kind of like it.”

Mrs. Maylord leaned inward. “You don’t know what I’d give not to be a Barb. I always feel like a fishing lure.”

Temple laughed out loud. Maybe bland hid unsuspected spice.

“That’s why our kids are named Kelly and Madison. Guess which one is the girl.”

“Wouldn’t even try. I think that’ll be a big step forward in the future, gender-neutral names, I mean.”

“Don’t tell Kenny,” she confided. “He thinks we’re being Eastern and trendy.”

Temple nodded, finger to lips, and turned to check on Song and Wong. Oh, no! Asian surnames had a monosyllablic simplicity her own echoed, but lent themselves to the most outrageous English wordplay.

She thought of Merry Su, the small but assertive detective who worked for Molina. A good role model. Temple considered herself small but assertive.

Speaking of assertive, where had the newly protective Matt got himself to?

She turned, satisfied to leave Wong and Song at opposite ends of the buffet table, still moving dishes like chess pieces in an elaborate game.

While she watched, the central display of queen shrimp on beds of crushed ice exploded into a salmon-white fireworks of

flying chips and flesh.

Her ears thundered with a dull knock-knock-knock sound. Who’s there?

Flying shards of plate glass joined the ice chips exploding in air.

“Hit the ground!” a male voice shouted.

Temple did a four-point landing on her knees and the heels of her hands without thinking. Both stung, maybe bled.

Above her foodstuffs spattered in time with a staccato whomp-whomp-whomp sound, almost like a hovering helicopter.

“Hit the lights!” another male voice bellowed.

Temple recognized Danny Dove’s commanding choreographer’s bark.

Temple glanced around. Wong and Song had vanished behind their buffet table. The Maylords lay belly down beside her. Nothing much was moving but the sudden sleet of glass and ice and food from the buffet.

She had toured the store before opening, from stem to stern. She’d seen a big light-control panel on some wall … but where?

No one seemed to be moving.

The sounds continued, relentless, obviously from a distance, obviously from a high-powered weapon aimed at the bright

store interior surrounded by windows, spitting like an Uzi into a giant fishbowl.

Wait. The light panel was near the employee lounge, toward the back of the store and the loading dock.

Temple pressed her burning palms into the stone floor and put the soles of her shoes in motion.

Chapter 9

Power Play

Matt hit the deck on instinct.

Cries and muffled sobs echoed all around him, where only moments before conversations and laughter had provided a counter to the Musak pouring over the loudspeaker.

That soft, jazzy beat made a bizarre counterpoint to the punctuation of repeated gunfire now.

Maylords was under siege.

His not to wonder why. His but to do or die … and people could have died already.

He’d been visiting the vignettes, looking for Janice, working his way back to the central entrance.

His cheek rested on salmon-colored plush carpeting. A testered Colonial-style bed loomed above him.

So did the darkness of a Las Vegas night outside the showroom window.

As he watched, the glass shattered like spun sugar. A celadon vase on the nearby dresser blossomed into flying pieces.

One grazed his temple.

Temple. Where was she?

Matt elbow-crawled onto the central path of cool stone and lay there for a moment to listen.

Danny Dove’s commanding cry, “Hit the lights,” struck him with relief. That was the first line of defense. He bet cell phones were hitting 911 all over the store.

He didn’t carry one. Mr. Behind-the-Times. From now on he would, an urban guerrilla armed with technology instead of a personal firearm.

But … where was Temple?

He crawled over the glass-gritty floor, aware that she had last been called to the reception area.

“Stay down, people!” another voice ordered. Deeper and darker than Danny Dove’s, but no less commanding.

Temple took her role as public relations rep responsible for everything running smoothly like some updated quest in the Philip Marlowe school. Matt knew she wouldn’t be taking this attack lying down.

She’d respond to Danny Dove’s call with every theatrical instinct in her soul. She’d be trying to get to the lights, to shut them down, to end this ugly act and make the store into a dark enigma instead of an overlit shooting gallery.

He put his forearm over his eyes, both to see better against the glaring lighting system above the scene and to defray the bits of glass and food that were raining down in an unholy hail on them all.

He crawled past downed couples tangled like fallen mannequins in the vignettes, muttering into cell phones pulled from pockets and purses.

He glimpsed a glint of silver on the move as he neared the central area, low and erratic, but visible to him … and

therefore visible to the shooter.

Matt pushed up into a crouch and went zigzagging through the empty rooms, past prone bodies hopefully only playing

dead and dialing for their lives.

“The employee lounge,” someone bellowed. He recognized Janice’s voice, coming from far across the central space.

Lights. Employee lounge. At the back? He hadn’t seen it in the front, didn’t make sense in the front, and the bit of moving quicksilver had been heading deeper into the store… .

Matt dodged from ottoman to desk legs to bedskirt to decimated buffet table, aware of people lying everywhere.

He skittered like a beetle, edged like a roach.

The occasional gun report shattered something precious, and hopefully, not sentient.

The shots were interspersed with sobs and moans. Who knew how many had been hit?

He could have been still facedown like most of them. Waiting for the nightmare to end. Except … he saw a bigger nightmare. A flash of silver and red suddenly splashed like well-veined shrimp across the entrance atrium.

Matt heard something scream at his heel, and pushed forward. Chips of shattered travertine spit into his calves.

He dove under the looming orange body of the Murano, eyeing the undercarriage, then crawled past and through, working

back into the darker parts of the store. Into the interior shadows, where the light panel lay.

In the distance, he heard the wail of oncoming sirens, still far, far away.

A glimpse of ground-level silver fluttered like a startled dove past a Barcelona chair. Matt lunged after it, hearing a bullet

ping off the chair’s stainless-steel frame.

The bastard was aiming … aiming at movement. At Temple. He was outrunning the bullets, catching up, overtaking. Matt dove for the only moving element ahead of him. And … the lights went out.

Chapter 10

Shrimp Cocktail

Well, this was the night the lights were blazing in Georgia, but they sure went out in Maylords. Here is how it all went down from my point of view. My own personal lowdown, so to speak, which is as low down as you can get. Ankle level, in point of fact.

As soon as the blasts of gunfire turn Maylords into an exploding glass factory, Miss Midnight Louise and I swing into

action.

We streak from the anticipated chow line out back to the firing line up front.

Luckily, we operate well under the line of fire and are able to tiptoe through the broken glass and into the besieged home decor store. Only in America.

We still have to keep under the sofas, being careful to avoid being seen by carpet-hugging humans who are crawling around on our level for once. It is not a pretty sight. I find that I much prefer socializing with various brands of sniffy footwear than ineffective applications of underarm deodorant.

Although, to be fair, these humans are in a state of primal fear.

They are not used to being hunted on the streets of Las Vegas, as Louise and I have been, merely for the simple sin of being homeless.

Nowadays, of course, we have whole buildings to call home. Louise has bagged the elegant Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino, where she has taken over my old job as house detective. I hang my unused collar at the retro-funky Circle Ritz apartments and condominium, where I am in permanent residence with my live-in, Miss Temple Barr.

Still, our roles in law enforcement matters are not self-evident. When we boogie around the city on business we are in constant danger of being snagged by Animal Control and treated like disposable nobodies. Makes one almost succumb to wearing a collar, but give one inch and pretty soon Big Brother Vet will be imbedding eavesdropping chips in our brains.

Anyway, before we can thoroughly scout the place, another series of shots riddles the plate glass.

Immediately the downed humans start mewling and whimpering like whipped curs. Louise and I roll our eyes at each other.

With everybody face down, now we can paddy-foot where we please, as long as we avoid using a prone human as an area rug. (Which role reversal, actually, would be kind of fun, but I know what Miss Louise would think of such unprofessional behavior.) We soon make our way to the abandoned entrance area, where tender curls of fallen shrimp strew our path like rose petals carpeting the footsteps of conquering heroes.

Should we help ourselves? I do not mind if we do, for night troops travel on their stomachs. Or so I hear. Of course, we must chew our morsels well, as ground glass is not a seasoning for the weak stomached. However, both Louise and I grew up on Dumpster picnics. We are pretty savvy about avoiding slivers of glass and tin cans, not that anything from a can would be found in a Chef Song buffet.

A voice booms out in the darkness with such authority that for a fleeting moment I fear the world will be created again.

Miss Louise hunkers against me, not from fear but the better to whisper in my ear. “Who is on the loudspeaker?’

“That is no loudspeaker, dear girl, that is a theatrically trained voice projecting. Sometimes I envy these humans their immense, and immensely wasted, vocal range. In fact, I know the possessor of that stainless-steel foghorn”

“You always claim to know everyone in this town.”

“Mostly, they know me,” I retort modestly. “That happens to be the commanding voice of Danny Dove, the eminent choreographer. At least someone two-legged in the place has the sense to call for the lights to be put out.”

As we listen, we hear the answering scrabble of a few footsteps. Someone besides us is up and about now.

Louise and I dispose of the last shrimp within reach and duck under the floor-length tablecloth as a new burst of gunfire rakes across the china, making for a rainfall of chips that are useful at no casino in town.

In the fresh quiet after the storm, I hear at least two or three people in motion. Peeking my nose out from under the watersoaked linen, I spy a sight that would turn my whiskers whiter, were they not already so colored.

“What is it, Daddikins? You have stiffened like roadkill.”

“Roadkill. That is a good name for it. My roomie has lost her mind and is on the move in this shooting gallery:’ “How do you know?”

“I have glimpsed the fugitive sparkle of what can only be my Austrian crystalized Stuart Weitzman signature shoes. Miss

Temple must be looking for the light-control mechanism in answer to Danny Dove’s clarion call. I must go to her aid:’

“And what can you do?”

“I do not know, but I can be there in case. Stay here, under the tablecloth. And do not eat all the shrimp!”

Without a backward look, or a burp in mourning for the abandoned shrimp, I streak in the direction I last saw Miss Temple’s shoes crawling in four-four time. At least she has the sense to assume a four-limbed mode of locomotion. On the other hand, I hate to contemplate my namesake shoes scraping their delicate crystals on all this scattered glass … speaking of which, ouch! I might be better off with some protective booties myself.

Sure enough, the megawatt glimmer of those dazzling white Austrian crystals are as easy for a seasoned tracker like myself to follow as breadcrumbs for a bird.

Ker-plough ack-ack-ack. Whoever is shooting has a lot of ammo, not to mention nerve. I crouch down, hoping my Miss Temple has had the sense to do likewise. But someone else is moving despite the fresh shots.

Someone pale and sensibly low is following Miss Temple too.

I scramble right on those vanishing heels, which are dull brown leather and not nearly as simple to tail as synthetic diamonds.

And then all the lights go out.

Luckily, I am blessed with phenomenal night vision.

So it is a bit of a surprise when I hear thumps and whispers ahead in the dark, and find myself forced to screech to a stop.

That is a only a figure of speech. Were I truly to “screech to a stop,” the entire set of hunkered-down humans in this building would be clapping their hands over their ears. I have quite an effective screech in my repertoire.

No, this is a metaphorical screech. It means that were I a motor vehicle stopping so quickly, my brakes would scream bloody murder.

As it is, I stop on a dime without a sound, a master of the feline change of direction in midair. I am only sorry that all the lights are out and no one is here to see it. Especially Miss Midnight Louise.

I land silently, but not without great effort. There is a lot of me to land silently.

Although the most immediate humans in the area are right in front of me, I must do a sniff test to make sure of their suspected identities.

This I manage with my usual undercover delicacy. My supersensitive vibrissae (whiskers to you crude human types) twitch near the presumed face of my lovely little roommate.

It is Miss Temple indeed, flat on her back and utterly safe from flying bullets, even in the dark.

My delicate vibrissae reach out again … to confirm the near proximity of Mr. Matt Devine, who has rushed to my Miss Temple’s rescue with my own admirable speed and dedication.

In fact, he has covered her body with his to protect her from flying bullets.

This I too would do, save he is much bigger and better suited to the task.

All is well, so I retreat into the dark that disguises my watchful presence.

I am sure that they do not need me.

In fact, I am urgently needed elsewhere: at the scene of the crime.

Somewhere out there. In the dark Las Vegas night. Under the bright desert stars intermittently lit by the bright Las Vegas neon.

Assured of my Miss Temple’s safety, I am free to be fully feline and embrace the dark night; to track down the perpetrators of this uncalled-for assault on Miss Louise’s and my midnight snacking buffet.

You might call it a snack attack, as far as I am concerned. And that is motive enough for swift and merciless pursuit.

Chapter 11

Dark Victory

The utter darkness that ended the shooting spree seemed to end the world also.

Stunning silence stalked the shattered mock rooms inside Maylords. Nothing moved. Now no one spoke, whimpered, even seemed to breathe.

A spiderweb brushed Temple’s cheek, followed by a felt penpoint, cold and wet. She must be hallucinating sensations in the absence of her prime sense, sight.

She was not alone in the dark. At all. Temple started to struggle free of the living, breathing weight atop her.

It lifted, somewhat, but again something tangled in her hair. Then an ice-cold palm cradled her cheek.

“Temple?” Matt whispered in the dark.

“I think so. How did you-?”

“What were you doing moving around in this madness?”

“You too!”

Matt’s rapid breathing echoed her own startled-rabbit pulses. Maybe it was her imagination-it was pitch-dark-but it seemed the whole universe had held its breath and everybody else was pretty damn quiet too.

She tuned in the reviving sound of shifting bodies and furniture, of muffled curses and sobs. An elbow dug into the carpet a bit too close to her ribs and then the weight lifted away and she was able to breathe all on her own, alone. Too bad.

“God, what were you thinking of?” he asked.

“I remembered where the light panel was.”

“So did somebody else, somebody probably a lot closer. Are you hurt?”

“I can’t tell yet.”

His hands helped her struggle to sit up from what she could only regard as a compromising position.

Her breath still came like hiccoughs, in ragged jerks. Action, moving had made her feel better, more alive. Sitting here in the dark absorbing the terror of the attack made her into a puddle.

Matt put an arm around her shoulders, which obligingly shuddered. She hated that! His hand, warmer now, slid along her cheek to her neck.

He was taking her damn pulse! As if his wasn’t in overdrive too.

She shook herself loose. “I’m okay. Did you hear the punching of eight million cell phone buttons?” “Yeah.”

“I suppose anything I might do here is redundant.”

“Nothing you could do would be redundant.” His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, an obvious accident in the dark or … omigod, maybe he was going to kiss her, and, well, everything would change forever faster than a shot in the dark… .

“Okay, people!” Danny Dove’s voice, mellow and commanding, could make eighty chorines twitch their ostrich feathers in perfect sync. It could also command mass hysteria to shut up and take a debutante bow.

Temple laughed softly, relieved to hear it, and leaned into Matt, who gave her shoulders a comradely squeeze.

So dissipates the fragile aphrodisiac of mutual danger.

“We are in control of the darkness and the light,” Danny’svoice announced, carrying as only a theatrical history could make it. “We are in control of the vertical and the horizontal:’ he went on, paraphrasing the old ’60s science-fiction TV show, The Outer Limits. “Actually, we’re all pretty horizontal, which is the best place to be, folks, until the police arrive.

“Now behave, you all. I don’t want a population explosion going on here, folks. I can’t stand bastardized furniture.” Nervous chuckles replaced the pervasive sound of heavy breathing. Sobs turned into shaky laughter.

Temple turned her head into Matt’s shoulder, a darker dark. His hand covered the exposed side of her face.

“Just wait quietly,” Danny said more softly, “until the pros come to tell us it’s safe to awake and sing. Keep the rhythm

slow and just shuffle, folks. It’s not up to us to do anything but mark time.”

A distant whine yodeled closer. Lots of them.

Temple didn’t move anymore. Nor did Matt.

They sat clutching each other like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, waiting for the Wicked Witch.

But Beth Blanchard was nowhere to be seen. Even after several squad cars roared into the Maylords lot and grew silent, nothing much happened inside.

A bullhorn soon admonished them much more roughly than Danny had: Stay down.

“Guess we didn’t do that,” Matt said in her ear.

It made Temple wish that they had. No! This was very had thinking. Intense situations made for intensely regretted impulses.

“Everyone inside,” came the magnified male voice. “We’ve secured the perimeter. Don’t move. Stay right where you are. We’re coming in. Any movement will be regarded with suspicion. Stay absolutely still, please, no matter your condition. If there are any perpetrators still among you we need to isolate them. Ambulances are coming for the injured. We’ll get you all out as soon as we can.”

The lights didn’t come on again.

Instead, flashlights came lancing out of the darkness, held by shadowy figures bristling with Kevlar vests and belts full of sinister equipment.

It reminded Temple of the opening scene from ET, when security forces were hunting an alien lost on earth.

The lights played over her and Matt’s faces, knowing more about them than they knew about themselves at the moment.

Temple resented her instinct to blink her eyes shut.

The dark, spacewalkerlike figures moved on, men and women insulated with the weapons and defenses of their jobs.

Finally, about twenty minutes later, the general lights came on, except for those that had been shot out. “Ladies and gentlemen. Stay where you are until we get you sorted out.”

Temple shifted; her left leg had gone to sleep under her.

Matt was sitting in the knees-akimbo, ankles-crossed position of Eastern meditation. Temple wished she’d thought of that; it prevented the pins and needles of too much pressure on one limb.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Once my circulation system gets moving again.” She stretched out the numb leg and made a face. “Shake your legs out. When they say we can stand I’ll help you up.” Promises, promises.

But the chaos visible all around banished the glamour of the dark.

Everyone Temple could see had the dazed look of deer in the headlights. The contested buffet table, only thirty feet away, resembled a picnic attended by ants bearing Uzis.

“What a mess.” Temple shook her head instead of her legs. “This is going to be such bad press.”

Matt sprang upright, disgustingly tingle free, and extended a hand to pull her up. Temple used his support to take off first one, then the other of the Louie shoes.

“No footwear until the feeling is back in my feet.” She looked around. “Better head to the reception area.”

“I need to check on Janice,” Matt said. “I left her in the framing area.”

They nodded before parting ways, Temple hotfooting off to the entrance where a baker’s dozen of cops huddled. They wore vests marked LVMPD, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, and SWAT.

This was the SWAT team. Whew. It felt good to still be standing in a situation that had brought out the heavy troops. Temple joined Kenny Maylord, Mark Ainsworth, a cluster of staff surrounding Amelia Wong, Danny Dove, and Simon Foster inside a larger ring of police personnel.

“Anyone caught or arrested, officer?” Kenny Maylord asked. “Not yet. Shooters tend to hit and run.”

A heavyset man in civilian clothes took charge. “Okay. We need to get the inside scenario down. You folks are key

players in the party tonight. Who turned off the lights?”

“I hollered that they should be out,” Danny Dove said.

A beige-uniformed cop with a notebook muttered something in the head guy’s ear. Point taken. “Okay, Mr. Dove, you had the theatrical experience. Good thinking to douse the lights. Who actually did it?”

Temple, who had been earnestly sprinting toward the rear area, said nothing, because she hadn’t made it. Intention didn’t count for much in an emergency.

“I did.”

Temple almost gasped when Rafi Nadir shouldered into the inner circle, looking like the world’s biggest chip was even more firmly implanted on his shoulder.

In that instant she glimpsed a replay of the attitude that had ended his law enforcement career in L.A.

“And you are?” the big guy asked with the same suspicious drawl John Wayne might have used.

“One of the security hirees for the evening,” Temple said. “Maylords put on extra crew.”

Danged if she hadn’t saved Nadir from his evil attitude by calling attention to herself. What was wrong with her? Just because he’d maybe saved her life once . .

“Who are you?”

“Temple Barr. I do freelance PR and am handling this event for Maylords. I heard Danny suggest we kill the lights and was trying to get to the control panel when they went out.”

Several police eyes focused on her bare feet and the glittering Midnight Louie shoes dangling from the first and second

fingers of her right hand.

So she looked like a vagabond shoe tree. So sue her. Another cop with a notebook stepped up and whispered sweet nothings from his notebook.

The big guy looked them all over again. “Okay. You, you, and you. And the, uh … communal … you. The Wong group. Stay here. We’re in the process of counting noses and taking testimony. Looks like there are no fatalities, but we have some injuries caused by flying glass. Paramedics are fanning out through the store. Once we have the bystanders recorded and sent to the emergency room or home, we’ll get down to the interviews. Sorry, folks, but make yourself comfortable on whatever pieces of cushy furniture around here that aren’t coated in glass. We have a long night ahead of us. We’ll try to get you out of here as soon as possible, but this is one big crime scene. Remain calm, cooperate, and you’ll be on your way sooner.”

Reluctant people dispersed into the nearest vignettes, stringing themselves out on various sofas, chairs, and ottomans like birds on a wire. Ottomans were apparently big again, Temple thought, settling on an orange suede one herself.

Feeling like a limp cafeteria entree under the artificial glare of the warming lights, looking out at the pockmarked night through the shattered glass store windows, Temple examined the dreamy, numb apathy of the victim that gripped her.

Nothing about the attack seemed personal. Its very remoteness was freaky. She watched attendees straggle out. Their

particulars taken, they let police officers escort them to the parking lot.

This was a major news story in these terrorism-haunted days, the retired newshound in Temple noted dully. That daily headline dog wouldn’t hunt for her tonight. She was as dazed and glazed as any other innocent bystander.

Everything seemed a dream, including … or especially… the strangely charged interlude with Matt on the floor. In the dark. Scared to death. Of bullets. Or of something else. Getting horizontal with someone of the opposite sex always made those ol’ devil hormones act up. And Matt wasn’t just “someone.”

It still haunted her. The strange lonely interlude in her life when her only serious significant other ever, Max Kinsella, was utterly gone-vanished. Just then Matt had turned up at the Circle Ritz … equally mysterious, and sincere, vulnerable … needing something. Maybe her. Now Max was out of reach again, and it unnerved her. Maybe she needed people who needed people. But who needed her the most? Who did she most need? Whom. If she could debate grammar she was still in one piece.

Danny and Simon came to share her huge ottoman. “How’re you doing, munchkin?” Danny asked.

“Not a yellow brick road in sight.”

“Overrated,” he said. “I prefer pothole-free asphalt. Gad, I wonder when they’ll let us go.”

“I was glad to hear your voice. I hadn’t thought of the lights.”

“Stagecraft Rule Number One. When in doubt, dowse the lights, people! What they can’t see, they can’t criticize.” Danny

laughed heartily.

“How’d you and Simon manage to find each other?”

“My gently modulated taskmaster voice, how else? I haven’t drilled fifteen million clumsy feet into oblivion without being able to give marching orders.”

“I was heading for you, too,” Temple said. “You were the only one sensible enough to keep us all grounded.”

“Danny isn’t sensible,” Simon put in. “He was making a damn-fool target of himself.”

“So I’ve been told by an associate myself,” Temple said. “It’s hard to just crouch there and do nothing.”

Danny nodded at Nadir, standing off by himself, watching the police action with a glower.

“He’s the guy who got to the switch. Funny. I’d peg him for the shooter. Talk about a bad actor.”

Temple sighed as she contemplated Nadir’s sullen face. She had a hunch all his buttons were being pushed in tandem

tonight.

Something moved in the fringe of her vision. She saw Matt escort Janice to a police officer, who checked his notebook, then nodded them out. It was odd to see Matt as part of a couple.

Temple shook her left leg, which still tingled. “How long can they keep us here?”

“We’re already cleared,” Simon said. “Danny wanted to stay and make sure you got home all right.”

“Hey,” Temple said in her best West Side Story gang-member voice. “I’m okay. Officer Krupke will see me safe to my

wheels. You guys peel outta here. I’ll be fine.”

Danny’s forehead crinkled with doubt under his tight blond curls. He looked like an obsessive-compulsive Cupid.

She punched him on the arm. “It’s okay. I’m okay. You’re okay. I just have to stay and make sure all my little chickens are okay. Head on home while there are still some macho men left to escort you to the parking lot.”

Simon rolled his eyes, but Danny grinned. “Aren’t they the Village People all over again? I adore retro. ‘Bye, darlin’.” He air kissed her cheek and headed out with Simon.

The lights were bright and the night looked bleak. Temple felt wrung out.

She eyed the two uniforms who were taking many notes from the Wong commune. Somewhere in the center of all those tall people was a little woman who was a major cultural force and who was worth millions. Martha Stewart for the transcendental set.

Death threats.

It was so obvious, it must be so even to the local authorities who had probably never heard of Amelia Wong before.

Chapter 12

Hot Saucy

Hours passed.

Finally, after almost everyone else had been released, including the Wong party, a female officer approached Temple on

booted, big-cat feet.

The fog still inhabited Temple’s head. She tried to gather her thoughts as she walked out of the now-deserted furnishings store, past the shattered display windows that lay in puzzle pieces on the ground outside and dusted the elegant furniture inside.

Morning was warming. What Temple could see of the horizon-some low rooftops and trees-was rosy, but the parking lot lamps still glimmered eerily against the pale sky. Temple wove a little on her reinstalled high heels as Officer Paris walked her to her car.

Hardly any vehicles hunkered in the lot now.

“It’s been a long night,” the woman said. “Sure you can make it home?”

A man was leaning against Temple’s new Miata, his silhouette melding with the base of the security lamp she had parked it under. Temple inhaled fast enough to be heard.

Officer Paris’s hand went to her hip.

“It’s okay,” Temple said, not entirely sure that it was. “I know him.”

“He was attending the opening?”

“Yeah. We didn’t know we’d both be here tonight. Neighbor.”

“I’ll drive you home.” Matt had stepped into the half-light and Officer Paris shifted to attention with something quite different

from wariness … interest.

“I can drive,” Temple said. Crossly. “And … what about your car?”

“You can drop me off to pick it up tomorrow.”

“Let him drive, honey.”

“Officer Paris, that’s kinda sexist. Also the pet name.”

“Sometimes sexist is just right.” She put a hand on Temple’s arm, not custodial, just friendly.

Temple sensed the latent tremor in herself the moment somebody touched her.

“Thanks, sir.” Officer Paris adjusted the umpteen pounds of weaponry on her utility belt. “Good, um, night. Or morning.”

“I’d never be a patrol officer,” Temple commented as they watched the woman walk away. “The uniform makes you look way too hippy.”

Temple turned to face Matt over the embarrassingly shrimpy profile of her new sporty car that she apparently was too shook up to drive.

“How’d you get out of here so early?” she asked.

“I pled the necessity of my live midnight radio show.”

“So they let you walk?”

“They interviewed Janice and myself right away. Some of the cops are actually among my ‘Midnight Hour’ listeners.”

“And that’s all it takes to get a Go Home Early card at a mass shooting scene?”

Matt looked uncomfortable. “I had the name of a personal reference too.”

“Personal reference?”

“Molina.““Molina? She’s the enemy!”

“Not when she’s a homicide lieutenant and you need a favor. Besides, it’s Kinsella she’s after.”

“As I recall, she had her sights on you as a suspect in the call girl death.”

“I pretty much cleared myself.”

“You did? How? When? How come I don’t know anything about it?”

“Maybe because it wasn’t your business.” Temple mulled that one in silence.

“Don’t look like a kicked kitten,” Matt told her. “Carmen didn’t want me to broadcast the facts, mainly because the case is still open, even if it’s no longer open season on me.”

“Or Max?”

“He’d been caught on surveillance tape at the Goliath Hotel front desk earlier that evening, but he claims he was just looking out for me. I seem to have had a lot of people on that detail lately,” he added pointedly. “But even Molina can’t connect him to anyplace else in the hotel that night. Besides, a ‘Midnight Hour’ listener is a counselor. She let me know that she got a call from the victim’s cell phone moments before the death.”

“Call girls have counselors? And Molina believes her?”

“Has to. Their conversation stopped suddenly and the cell phone was found when the police checked the counselor’s story.

Carmen’s hands are pretty much tied.”

” ‘Carmen,’ huh?” Temple was miffed enough about that to not spare Matt her next question. “You do lead a charmed life. So your close encounter with a call girl had her phoning for help the minute you were gone. I assume you left, covered in glory, if not success.”

“I shouldn’t have told you that,” Matt said, flushing slightly. Temple thought it was more from annoyance than embarrassment, which was a new mode for Matt.

“Great! Then I’d really be in the dark. If your friendly neighborhood stalker weren’t out of the picture, I’d almost make her for this Maylords attack.”

“Assault rifles? Come on! She was just one woman, no mat-ter how warped. And she is out of the picture. Permanently.” He flinched a bit, reminded of someone else. “I’m thankful I didn’t have to see that poor call girl dead. Listen, it’s true that someone could have come along and pushed the woman over the edge, but the social worker didn’t hear anything but the phone cutting out … no sounds of surprise or struggle. Nothing.”

“Why would she fall?”

“Deborah, the counselor, says Vassar was … agitated, hyper, probably pacing on those sky-high heels of hers. That rail is only four inches wide. Maybe she’d perched on it to talk. Just lost her balance. It’s a mystery!” he finally said, exasperated.

“You can’t solve them all.”

“It seems to suit everybody to lay one poor dead call girl quietly to rest. What I don’t understand-”

“What?” Matt asked, coming around the car.

She lurched a little with fatigue, but that was her body, not her mind. “I don’t get why Vassar felt like calling a therapist immediately after an assignation with you.”

Matt’s footsteps stopped cold. She immediately regretted being petty at a time like this, but she was so exhausted she felt surreal and annoyed at everyone who told things to other people behind her back.

Matt grabbed her upper arm to steady her. “Maybe you should try it sometime and find out.”

Whoa! What had they just been talking about? Maybe Matt the churchly celibate had made more time with the late call girl than he had let on to anyone.

Temple blinked, then found it hard to open her eyes again. “You’re dead on your feet.” It sounded like an apology. He turned her toward her car.

“Better than being dead off your feet, like Vassar.”

“Temple, just shut up. You don’t know what you’re saying right now.”

She sighed and nodded. “I’ll put the top down. My mind could use some fresh moving air.”

Then she realized something, almost with a sense of panic about something, someone, totally forgotten.

“What about Janice?” She looked back to the cool beige building, glowing faintly pink in the dawn.

“We left early, remember? I followed her home before I went to WCOO. She’s fine.”

“And you came back here? Why? It’s almost morning.”

“I wanted to make sure you got home to the Circle Ritz. Temple, we’re neighbors, like you said. How am I going to head home and wait to see when, or if, you make it? I don’t have to drive.” She needed control of something tonight.

“I just said that to get rid of the cop,” he explained. “Apparently everybody is ready to get rid of me tonight.” He came

around the car, opened the door, and waited for her to get into the driver’s seat.

“You probably shouldn’t drive, Temple, but maybe you need to concentrate on something.”

“I speed.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“We might get arrested all over again.”

“If they didn’t arrest you here, they’re not going to bother now. At least not for a while.”

She turned to settle her tote in the Miata’s vestigial backseat. “I suppose you think this car is impractical, and uncomfortable.” She glanced over as he settled into the passenger seat. “Nope. Can’t quite stretch my legs out, but otherwise it feels fine.”

Temple switched on the ignition and had a momentary blank about exactly where the drive position was.

She shouldn’t be driving, but she’d be damned if she let on. She pushed the shift into reverse and made a sudden arc out of the parking space before hitting the brakes. Matt put a hand on her knee. “Relax.”

And how the heck-?

Temple shifted into drive and roared out of the lot, passing several parked squad cars and the SWAT van.

No one bothered them, though, and the cool night wind whipped through their hair and sinuses.

The streets and highways were still occupied, but not crowded. Temple settled down and drove like a sedate schoolteacher until she reached the turn into the Circle Ritz parking lot. She screeched up the small incline and whipped the Miata into a sharp ninety-degree turn to occupy its usual spot under the big old palm tree.

The headlights flooded the palm tree’s crusty trunk with Hollywood-bright glare.

She pushed the shift into park, then shut down. Her hands remained on the steering wheel. They were shaking.

After a while, Matt reached over and turned off the ignition. He had to reach past her to push the headlight button off, and his arm brushed her body like an erotic push-broom.

She shivered and crossed her arms to hold the heat in, or maybe keep the cold out.

“Yeah,” Matt said. “A taste of battle fatigue, right here in Las Vegas. I feel like I’ve been up for five days straight.”

“Somebody shot at us. Again and again.”

“Not us, specifically.”

“Whoever shot didn’t care who they, he, it hit. So they were shooting at us.”

Matt’s fingers touched her upper arm. “I think you keep a mediocre bottle of whiskey in your kitchen cupboard.”

“I do.” She tossed off some of the shock by shaking her head slightly. “Only it’s not mediocre anymore. Max left me the

bottle of really good stuff you and he started.”

Temple didn’t add that was the last time Max had visited the Circle Ritz, and her. Several nights ago. Where was Max?

When he should be here with her? Protecting his turf. Keeping her from feeling uncertain and lonely. Was he involved in new mysterious missions of counterterrorism, Mr. Magician-cumspy … or was he just not interested in her enough anymore? They’d gone from months of living together to months apart and now to meeting clandestinely for almost six months. Wasn’t that all backwards? Shouldn’t the clandestine come before the flagrant?

Matt was watching her, surprised that she knew about the two men’s recent midnight tete-a-tete.

“You remember,” she told him. “Max showed up on yourbalcony with an irresistible invitation: a bottle of Bushmill’s Millennium, which I gather is the whiskey of the gods. Imagine. You and Max sharing a drink instead of glaring whenever each other’s name is mentioned. Remember that night? When you were both mourning your lost youths and opportunities. He brought me the dregs. Of the bottle. Not of your wasted lives. Actually, the bottle was almost full. Guess you two are too mutually suspicious to even booze together.”

Matt looked away. Out the window. Mentioning Max had made for three’s-a-crowd in the Miata’s cozy seating arrangement.

Temple had to wonder if some reflexive impulse of survival instinct had made her do that deliberately.

“He started that bottle without me:’ Matt finally said, getting out to put the top up.

Temple still couldn’t move, just sat there like life was a dream and she was sleep-walking through it.

Matt opened the driver’s-side door and put out his hand. “Wait a minute:’ she said. “What about your car?”

“I left it in the Maylords lot, remember? You can drop me off there tomorrow. Well, later today. Much later today.”

“Oh.” Temple put both feet on the asphalt, observing the glitter of the Midnight Louie shoes with an odd third-party sort of detachment.

Matt took her hand and pulled her upright, shut the car door, hit the lock button on the key chain.

“What’s the matter with me?” she wondered with small interest.

“Shock and exhaustion. Come on, I’ll walk you in.”

“It feels like I’m really drunk without the buzz.”

His arm around her shoulder steered for the building’s side door.

When they got there she shook herself alert. “I’ll take the keys. I’m awake and singing now.”

But the key tip stuttered in the lock before she finally found the right touch. And when they took the elevator up a floor and got to her front door, she fumbled the keys again.

“You’re still cold.” He took the keys from her fingers to unlock the door.

“How come you’re Mr. Steady as She Goes?”

“I had to go on the air live to do my show tonight. Sobers the emotions right up.”

“The show must go on. I used to know what that meant.”

She flicked the light switch by the door, then gazed into her living room, dead ahead. It looked so normal, especially the newspaper sections tossed all over.

In a couple hours the Las Vegas Review-Journal would be in the same place, full of front-page news and photos of the shooting spree at Maylords. Oh, her aching PR-person head!

“I’ve got to get on this first thing tomorrow,’ she said, mostly to herself. “Today.”

Matt steered her into the kitchen. “Where’s that Kinsella firewater stored?”

“Cabinet under the coffeemaker. Maybe I should have caffeine.”

“No. One nightcap and you’ll sleep like a baby. Caffeine first thing in the morning, which will be about noon for you.”

Temple nodded, almost nodding off. Matt lifted her onto a kitchen stool to get her out of the way. That brought her head on a level with his and their glances crossed for the first time since leaving Maylords.

She swayed toward him. He hesitated, then brushed his lips across hers, more hit-and-run than kiss, but they didn’t … hadn’t … kissed casually before. Temple was feeling anything but casual, yet this moment seemed too natural to comment on.

Now Matt was squatting in front of the cupboard, shoving aside the Old Crow bottle for the tall, dark, and expensive model beside it. Kinda looked like Max himself.

Matt rose, poured it neat into two glasses from the cupboard, Irish cut crystal, and handed her one, curling her fingers securely around the wide, low glass.

“To the end of all bad things.” He raised his glass.

Temple couldn’t help feeling it was a toast to all the undear departed who’d made all their lives so miserable, from Matt’s evil stepfather to Max and his stalker. But not even they couldhave been behind the terrifying attack on Maylords. They were so very dead. And Temple was dead tired.

She sipped the fiery gold liquid. It cleared her sinuses like Chinese mustard.

“Kickapoo Joy Juice.” She blinked tears out of her eyes. “What an irreverent name to call one of the world’s choicest

whiskies. I really don’t like hard liquors straight. You don’t have to drink all of it. You look a lot better already.”

“How?”

“It’s true you don’t need much help in looking better usually, but you were pretty pasty-faced.”

“I think that was a compliment. The first part. Not the pasty-faced part. Unless you like pasty-faced.”

“I like someone who looks like the blood is running through her veins again. You and Danny were right on the lights thing, but I bet the long wait for the police interviews was more wearing than anything else. Did, ah, Molina make it out there while I was off being Mr. Midnight for WCOO?”

“No. Not a rhinoceros-thick hide in sight. You were lucky they questioned and let you go early. Not only because you made your showtime but you avoided the stultifying tedium of that many people being interviewed, very sympathetically, by the police. I can’t believe the police actually can have a heart. Maybe it was because Molina wasn’t on the case. It’s hardly homicide.”

“But it could have been. Still, it was obviously a random attack.”

“Was it? I mean, how do we know someone special wasn’t the target? Like Amelia Wong.”

“Because nobody was hit, which is downright miraculous in a mob like that. The police seem to think it’s malicious

mischief, attacking the building, not the people in it. They said the land the store is built on was a vacant lot for a long time.”

“I didn’t know.”

Matt nodded and sipped his drink, leaning against the kitchen counter. “That’s what they told me. A lot of the local hoodlums liked doing target practice on the site. Probably resented that Maylords took their fun away.”

“I’m relieved to know that, and glad that you could see me home, but I feel kind of rotten about abducting Janice’s escort

for the evening.”

“The evening is over, or hadn’t you noticed?”

She checked her watch. “Five A.M., good grief! It’s hardly worth going to bed.”

“This is when I usually do.”

“This late? I mean, early?”

“I get home from the radio station about three, unwind a bit and presto! Five o’clock in the morning.”

“At least you’re in no danger of waking up with the three A.M. blues.”

“No. Are you? I can stay.” He nodded to the living room sofa. “Matt, what about Janice?

“Shouldn’t you be asking what about Max first?”

“Is this like a game Concentration? Which cards are two of a kind? Max. Janice. They’re … both not here.”

“But I am, and I don’t want you waking up scared and alone.”

She almost pushed it by answering, “You don’t want me?” But then they’d both be stuck with whatever he answered. “I don’t need baby-sitting.” She pushed herself off the support of the kitchen countertop. Surviving a mass attack was like getting very drunk very fast. “I’ll have you know I’ve been called a ballsy little broad by a professional bodyguard.” “My phrase for it would be stubborn and proud.”

“I don’t believe that stubbornness is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.”

“It could be.” Matt shook his head. “Just call if you can’t sleep.”

He went to her door before she could summon an answer. “I’ll sleep,” she called after him down the short entry hall. It sounded like an afterthought. Like bravado.

I just hope to Hannah I don’t dream, she told herself as she turned the key to lock Matt out and herself in. Locked in.

She had hoped Midnight Louie would have been home togreet her, but when she reached her bedroom there was no sign of the big black cat … except for several black hairs on her comforter. Were any of them Max’s? she wondered.

Here yesterday, hair today. The story of her singular single life.

Chapter 13

Mad Max

Gandolph the Great stood by the kitchen island literally whipping up a magical postmidnight snack of crepes a la Orson.

Max Kinsella watched his mentor’s sleight of hand with the wire whisk. Gandolph still had the dexterity for cooking gourmet dishes, but his age-thickened knuckles were past their prime for magical illusions one couldn’t eat. “Temple,” Max observed, “can’t cook.”

“Won’t cook. Everyone can.”

“But not exquisitely. She has always appreciated the few simple kitchen tricks I learned from you.”

“I wish I could meet her.” Garry Randolph, the man behind the stage name, looked up from under bearish eyebrows. “Being presumed dead can be damned inconvenient. I never thought you’d settle into any kind of domestic arrangement, not with the tigers you had on your tail.”

Max sat on a sleek aluminum-and-leather stool. “I shouldn’t have.”

“But you did even though you shouldn’t have. What kind of siren is this Temple Barr, anyway?”

That question made Max smile. “Remember Charlie Brown’s ‘little redheaded girl?’ She’s like that, only all grown up, with sense and spirit.”

“Hmmm. And she knows about your past?”

“Pretty much.”

“Never all, though. We can never tell all.”

“No.” Max pulled an apple, a red Roman Beauty, from the wire fruit bowl playing centerpiece on the cold stainless-steel countertop. He balanced it on his fingertips for a moment, as if contemplating making it vanish. Instead, he bit into it.

The crisp sound echoed in the hard-surfaced kitchen.

Garry turned to the huge industrial stove to pour batter into a copper-bottomed pan sizzling with melted butter.

“I’m in training again:’ Max complained mildly. “I should be on protein and complex carbohydrates.”

“Even the Olympic athlete deserves dessert once in a while. It is so good to be back in this kitchen.”

“It’s good to have you back. Your supposed ‘death’ fooled me completely. I thought your new career of exposing fraudulent mediums had finally pushed you over to the Other Side.”

“No, no, no, Max. I genuinely hate phony mediums, of course.”

“It was nice to know that you’d retired to such a benign pursuit.”

“So that you could too, with your little redheaded girl?”

“That was the general idea. Once, a year or so ago, before the past caught up with me.”

“I saw the notices of your ‘abrupt departure’ from Vegas. What happened?”

Max took another bite of the apple and chewed over his thoughts before speaking again.

“I was finishing up a run at the Goliath. I never told anybody this, but the Crystal Phoenix was offering me an even bigger bundle and a multiyear contract to develop a new act for them, a boutique magic show, small and stunning, a one-man Cirque du Soleil. Anything I wanted to work up.” Max found a rueful smile on his face. “I never told Temple. She’s got an in at the Phoenix.

We almost would have been working together.”

“And-? Because none of this happened, did it?”

“The past showed up. Two IRA hit men.”

“Took ‘em long enough to finally catch you. What? Sixteen years?”

Max picked another apple from the basket. And one more. He began juggling all three.

“It turned out they wanted money first, then murder.”

The aromas of butter and brandy on the crepes almost made Max miss an apple. But he didn’t.

“I used my magical arts, under duress, to get them into the crawl space under the Eye in the Sky setups over the Goliath

casino floor.”

“And then?”

“Why do you think there’s an ‘and then’?”

“Max, my boy, you are never less than four-dimensional.”

“I led them over a highdollar craps table where they could observe the money-changing-out routine. Only it’s always easier

to enter air-conditioning ducts than to get out again, unless you’re double-jointed. I left. They didn’t. But that turned out not to be such a clever act, after all.”

Garry turned from the stove to slip two pairs of fruit-filled crepes onto two crystal dessert plates. “Yes?”

“They tried to shoot me.”

“In an air-conditioning duct? What idiots.”

Max caught one spinning apple and held it between his thumb and little finger while keeping the other two apples bouncing between his hands and the ceiling.

“One shot the other, which should have gotten both of them off my back, except the deadweight of the victim fell through the flimsy ceiling panels right smack onto the middle of the hot craps table.” He caught the second apple, and held it.

“Not discreet.”

“Not discreet. I got out of there, but I couldn’t go home again.”

The last apple came to rest in the palm of his free hand. Max heard his own voice, hard and ironic. He’d been an exile for seventeen years, and still found new places, and people, to be exiled from.“So you left the little redheaded girl and fled …

where?”

“Canada.”

“Refuge for many a conscientious objector.”

“The only thing I was objecting to was false imprisonment. I worked as an itinerant corporate magician/comic and didn’t dare contact Temple for almost a year.”

“So you lost her?”

“No.”

“No? She waited for you, despite hearing nary a word?”

“Redheads are stubborn. And Temple is tougher than she looks.” Max took the extended plate artfully drizzled with raspberry sauce and melted dark chocolate. “Let’s just say she took exception to a certain relentless homicide lieutenant who thought I’d done the dirty deed and that Temple had to know why and where I’d gone to. Ah. You haven’t lost your gourmet skills.”

“Very satisfying work concocting a difficult dish. I could be content to remain … er, dead, and allowed to indulge my palate, here in this house that my fellow gourmand Orson Welles once owned. I feel quite willing to let my legend rest in peace.” “I can’t understand how you managed to quit the counterterrorist game, Garry. God knows I’d do it if I could.”

“Being presumed dead helps, Max. But I haven’t quit. Not at all.”

Max stopped enjoying the seduction of tender, sweet, warm crepes on the tongue.

“Damn it, Garry. You had retired. That’s why you gave me the use of this house that time forgot, and luckily everybody else. You were off to see the wizard, unmasldng phony mediums.”

“Tut. Just a cover, my boy. I’m glad even you accepted it. I’ve never retired.”

“But your book.” Max was standing now, angry as much as surprised. “Your book on fraudulent mediums. I was finishing it in your honor. In memoriam.”

“Such a nice thought, my boy. I’m quite touched.”

“I’ve been banging away at that computer keyboard like a cow in boxing gloves. I’m no typist, no writer. It’s the toughest

thing I’ve ever tackled.”

Garry chuckled through the forkful of crepe he’d hoisted into his mouth like a prize. “Very flattering, Max. In every way. If

we both survive the next, critical few months, I’ll certainly share a byline with you on it.”

“I don’t want a byline, I want a life!”

“I’m afraid, my lad, that the only way you’ll get it is by courting Lady Death one more time.”

Max frowned as he nodded in concession. It was Temple he should be courting now, before it was too late. From what Gandolph said, though, this one last assignment would make him a free man, And, ultimately, that would make Temple a happy woman.

Chapter 14

Clean Sweep

Midnight Louise and I pussyfoot through the empty lot that is dead center across from Maylords.

“Coyote,” she declares after a long sniff of the ground. “So what else is new? That Wild Bunch runs this town after dark.” “Might be a witness.”

“You that eager to see a coyote after one almost made you the main course?”

“A witness is a witness,” she says. “Besides, that other one would never have come within shiv range had I not been thrown from the motorcycle saddlebag and knocked out.”

“Well, you were, and it is lucky that I was around to face off Fangpuss.”

“Good job, Popster! His two front teeth must have been older than your latest whisker growth, though.”

“That was a primo coyote and you would have been Instant Appetizer, had I not been there. Next time you may not be so quick to

secretly tail a bad actor. That motorcycle joyride into the desert dark could have fricasseed your fantail. If I had not been tailing your tail they would not have been able to peel you off the asphalt in the morning.”

“Yadda, yadda,” she says. This younger generation has no respect for anything but MN. “Nose to the groundstone, Daddyo. Everybody and his brother and sister and second cousin have been marking territory on this lot. Not much vacant land left in Vegas.”

The chit is correct on both counts: bare desert scrub is a rarity inside the city limits. Where it exists, every life form except alien invaders tries to establish a beachhead. I sniff coyote, all right, and domestic dog. Ugh! And rat and mouse, and several of the lizard variety, even tortoise.

What I am looking for, though, is Man. Not woman. I am not about to cross woman off my suspect list, but high-powered rifle attacks usually indicate the male of the human species. Unless we are talking somebody aberrant, like Miss Kathleen O’Connor, whom I have seen dead with my own eyes, after my associate Miss Louise offed her on a desert road.

Of course, I do not tell Miss Louise that she offed her. I encourage the fiction that it was an accident. I like my little dolls feisty, which means that I do not want them feeling guilty about their lethal tendencies.

“We can clearly see here,” I note, “the shell casings where the dastard crouched to take aim. I am sure that this

once-vacant lot will soon be crawling, quite literally, with crime-scene investigators.”

“We should brush out our tracks.” Louise sits and twitches her long, bushy extremity over a swath of dirt, sand, and

gravel.

Showoff! She is more than somewhat vain about her long hair. She makes it clear that my buzz-cut one is not a very efficient broom. Just as well. I do not do women’s work.

I am forced to stand back from the mini-dust storm her cleanliness fetish is stirring up.

While doing so I detect something interesting: pads other than ours have been all over this lot for a long time. My practiced sniffer gets into the act. After several impassioned sneezes and a long walk around the perimeter I return to Miss Louise and her obsessive-compulsive cleaning motions.

“Forget the yard work,” I tell her.

“Why? You want the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to come calling at the Circle Ritz and the Crystal Phoenix with

plaster casts of our feet?”

“Forensics is not into pad-prints. Besides, this place is loaded with them, not just ours. Nice, fresh ones. I think we have a few dozen witnesses to track down. From the way they scattered in all directions, they must have been on the premises when the first shots were

fired.”

“A colony?” she asks.

“Not exactly,” I answer.

“Then what?”

“A gang.”

“Oh, great. Gangsters will not unbutton their lips for us.” ‘This gang will. I know the top cat. One Ma Barker.”

“Ma Barker! What a name for a self-respecting feline! She must be one lowdown excuse for female empowerment.”

“I cannot say,” I answer mildly. “All I know is that she could be your grandmother.”

Miss Louise’s big gold eyes widen like headlights on high power. “That is the old dame who claimed to be my elder at the cloaked

conjuror’s place?”

I cannot wait to bring her home to mother.

Chapter 15

Hot Car

Temple and her Miata returned Matt to the Maylords parking lot at a time of morning much brighter and earlier than a nightshift man was used to.

When she mentioned this, he smiled ruefully. “Maybe I need to shake up what I’m used to. Having had a stalker decree your every move, your every moment, makes you question yourself on a pretty deep level about what’s important.”

“Like having the world’s most demanding home-room teacher.”

He laughed. “We all kinda freeze in the high school hierarchy somehow, don’t we? Getting it in our heads what we are and what other people think of what we are way too early.”

“It’s the first serious institution we tangle with. But you’re right; a lot of people are still trying to ditch their high school preconceptions in midlife crisis.”

“Maybe I should thank Kitty O’Connor, if I could.”

“Thank her? Why on earth?”

“She really knew how to play me, play my conscience.Made me see I needed to reexamine my … I won’t say that old

clich� ‘priorities,’ but maybe my premises. I’m feeling strangely freer.”

“You are. Free of that harpy! Freer is good.” Temple smiled and looked up to the open sky as the warm breeze riffled their hair. It was like getting a scalp massage by the wind.

This was another cloudless Las Vegas morning, except for the straight chalk marks of jet vapor trails from Nellis Air Base. The day’s heat was still set low on simmer, and the sky was so blue it looked like a cool pool to jump up into.

Ahead of them the facade of Maylords’s one-story beige stucco building glittered like a high-end junkyard, though. Its glassless windows with their jagged-edge frames seemed almost deliberately arty. Helmut Newton territory.

In fact, a photographer was busily shooting away at the shot-out windows, either recording damage or creating a postmodern catalogue for the store.

When a security guy swaggered around the building’s corner, overbuilt legs and arms as stiff as a puppet’s, the whole area looked like a crime-scene wannabe.

Temple was so busy eyeing the damage and estimating the time and cost needed to repair it that she was startled when Matt tapped her on the shoulder.

“Stop over there.”

“Where? This lot is deserted. I don’t see-”

She scanned a line of mature pine trees that bordered the lot on the east.

Something hunkered in the early morning shade, something streamlined and silver. Matt had taken the Hesketh Vampire to the opening? The vintage motorcycle, formerly Max’s and famous for its screaming engine whine at high speeds, was a spectacular ride, but it was hardly a Datemobile.

Temple had gone for a spin on it once, long ago, with Max, but she couldn’t picture tall, dignified Janice Flanders riding

pillion with Matt … maybe she just couldn’t picture Janice Flanders with Matt, or didn’t want to.

No mystery was too small for Temple’s busy brain to ponder.

How had Matt gotten Janice home? Her car? Then how had he gotten back here for the Vampire? And why would he leave such a valuable bike in an unprotected parking lot? Forget hands! Idle questions are the devil’s_ workshop.

Even as Temple’s mind worried the question, one part of her cerebellum spun the Miata’s small steering wheel right. The car glided into the shade.

There Temple’s vision acclimated enough to reveal her mistake.

This was no Hesketh Vampire before her eyes. This was a candy-coated, supercool, streamlined silver, automotive baby the likes of which she had never seen.

“Matt? What is this thing?”

“A Crossfire.”

“Yeah. We did have a lot of that here last night. Bang, you’re toast … or tawny, or beige. Galloping gasoline prices, did

this thing sit on the lot the whole time? During all that destructive snap, crackle, and pop?”

“Yeah. It’s fine. I checked it out last night before I collected you for the ride home. Lucky I parked it in the most protected

and low-profile area of the lot.”

Temple followed him out of the Miata to circle the stranded car. It struck her as low and sleek enough for Las Vegas’s famous Fontana brothers (who favored Dodge Vipers) to lust after in triplicate. The two-seater had that squinty-eyed rear window all the newest speedsters sported.

“I see you have a vestigial backseat too,” Temple noted, trying shamelessly to attach herself and her new Miata to the Crossfire’s chrome dual exhaust pipes.

“It does look kinda impractical.” Matt’s sheepish frown only underlined his good looks. “But I don’t need a big vehicle shuttling back and forth from WCOO.”

“You could have made do with a golf cart. So what’s with the eye-candy car?”

Matt shrugged. “Maybe I’m tired of certain people complaining about my modest tastes. I don’t know, Temple. I guess I got carried away. I could, so I did. I’m feeling a lot that way lately. Big mistake, huh?““Not if you take me for a ride in this baby. What’ll it do?”

“I’m not sure. One-forty? Kind of pointless.”

“The most fun things in life are kind of pointless, or hadn’t you noticed?” Temple circled the Crossfire. “It makes my Miata

look like a Tinker Toy.”

“I don’t think this is a contest.”

“Cars are always a contest.” Temple didn’t ask what she figured the Crossfire cost: around thirty-five grand.

Hmmm. Matt was still resisting buying a microwave and a cell phone, but he sprang for this?

“When’d you get it? I mean, this is a major decision. I just bought a car. I would have been glad to help.”

“It was either a Prius or this. This gets okay gas mileage. And I did all the Internet research, so I didn’t need much help.” Temple shook her head. News flash: Matt was one severely conflicted ex-priest. This glitzy Crossfire road burner was like the evil twin to an eco-friendly, gas-saving Prius.

“Canned heat on wheels,” Temple diagnosed. “I think it’s great you got it, after running around in-”

And then Temple got it. Of course! This was his bustin’- free-of-his-stalker car. No more slinking around in Electra Lark’s old pink Probe painted white to blend into a landscape where boring bathtub white cars repelled the desert sun.

That reminded Temple of Max and his all-black cars and all-black wardrobe in the nation’s hottest city. What did that say about contrariness? Always living on the edge of invisibility. When was the last time she had seen him in the light of day?

She returned to admiring Matt’s new car. “Crossfire. Cool. It must have set you back a bundle.”

“Certain people,” he said, through slightly gritted teeth, “have been urging me to become a conspicuous consumer.” Oh.

That might have been her. She? Whatever!

“It rocks!” she said. “You’ll have to give me a ride sometime.” “I’d like to.”

Hmmm. The expression in his caf� noir brown eyes might even mean it literally.

Or Temple was fantasizing again, an unwelcome new development. She had to be responding to something new in Matt, something edgy and even a little hot. No! Matt was still too innocent to make sexy double entendres. Wasn’t he? Who knew what he had learned from a couple hours with a high-end Vegas call girl? Anyway, Temple was too committed to Max, even with their current enforced semiseparation, to think about other men’s meanings. Wasn’t she? She gritted her mental teeth. She must be the only woman in the world dithering about an ex-priest on one hand, and an ex-magician on the other. The only thing they had in common was in being uncommonly attractive. And her, of course. Youch!