16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

“And I am not going to run around all the time, like Lieutenant Molina, in a navy pantsuit that an ex-nun wouldn’t be caught dead doing social work in!” “Lieutenant Molina.”

The name, once mentioned, occasioned serious nods among the gathered Fontanas.

“We are sure,” said one, “that she is familiar with all the usual places of concealment, not to mention our … um, personnel folders in the police department.”

“You have personnel folders at headquarters?”

“Our personnel, their folders,” Aldo said.

Next to her, Ralph hissed two ugly words in her ear. “Rap sheets.”

Oh, galloping gangsters! The Fontana brothers weren’t just Nicky’s uniformly colorful brothers. They weren’t just welltailored figureheads who hung out at the Crystal Phoenix, they were the real megillah. The actual remnants of Las Vegas’s good old wise-guy days. They might even be … dangerous.

Temple smiled. “I’ll holster my olive oil, boys, if you’ll break out whatever’s behind that burlwood door. After all I’ve been through, I could use a Mountain Dew.”

Two brothers slapped palms above her head, perhaps the equivalent of a mob welcoming ceremony. “I told you,” one crowed to the other. “Redheads rock!”

Chapter 33

Mumm’s the Word

The Fontana boys didn’t oblige Temple with a Mountain Dew. She probably didn’t need the extra caffeine at the moment any-way.

Instead they uncorked some Mumm’s Champagne that foamed into a host of flutes hidden behind one of the burlwood doors.

Funny, but her hands shook a little. The Brit bubbly burbled over her glass lip onto the limo’s carpeting.

“Oh! I don’t know why I’m so clumsy!”

“It’s the rough ride,” Julio crooned consolingly. (Was his middle name Iglesias?) Temple frowned. “This limo is as smooth as a cloud.”

“No doubt your dainty little hands are fatigued from hanging onto that big olive oil spray can for so long,” Ernesto sans earring suggested suggestively.

“Extra-virgin olive oil,” Aldo corrected.

“Will you get off the sexual state of my cooking oil!” Temple was shocked that her temper had frayed so easily. It wasn’t

like her.

Ralph tilted the glass toward her lips. “Chugalug this A-one English bubbly and you’ll feel steadier. It takes a lot of energy

to hold off a flock of Hell’s Angels.”

“They weren’t Hell’s Angels! They were a lot weirder, if not any less mean. Why were they after me?”

“We don’t know,” Guiseppe said. “But we’ll find out.”

“We’ll also get you a new can of”-Ralph glanced at his brothers-“that Julia Child stuff.”

The limo lurched gently as it took the long slow swing into the Circle Ritz parking lot.

The boys picked up her tote bag, and her, practically. They eased them both out of the limo’s cocooned shadow into the bright Las Vegas sun.

Temple blinked, her sunglass case buried in her tote bag. “My car,” she remembered. “My keys.”

A red roadster (like Nancy Drew’s?) roared up the short incline into the parking lot. Eduardo stepped out, looming over the Miata like Paul Bunyan (if the legendary Minnesota woodsman had lost a lot of weight, seen a world-class hair stylist, wore thousanddollar suits, and had a Beretta instead of a giant blue ox as a sidekick).

“Your keys are right here, Miss Temple,” he said with a courtly bow, dropping them into the bottomless Black Hole of her tote bag.

“Thanks.”

She looked at the half-circle of dark-favored men in light-c o l o r e d s u i t s , l i

Runyon-Frank Capra movie. And not really men, really something infectious and boyish about them, despite their hunky good looks.

They were trying to distract her from what had been a pretty scary attack.

Emilio had grabbed the Champagne bottle and her glass from the car. “We’ll see you in. Get you settled.”

“I’ll do it,” said Armando, who had thus far not spoken. Or was it Armando?

Funny. None of their mouths had moved.

She looked where they were looking. Behind her.

Oh. Matt. Looking utterly unlike a Fontana brother, except for being buff and a bachelor, but looking as annoyingly overprotective as they did. But sweet, really. Huh?

Just how much of that Champagne had she “chugalugged” on the ride home?

Anyway, somebody had her by the arm and someone took her tote bag off the other arm.

Temple accepted the Champagne bottle that was thrust into her maternal care, but refused the glass.

“Who’s this guy?” Aldo asked. Fontana brothers relinquished nothing easily, even their good manners.

“My neighbor,” Temple said. “It’s all right. He’s a priest,” she added airily.

Fontana jaws dropped in unison. They stood paralyzed. On the one hand, they were reluctant to surrender Dorothy. On the

other, to a priest … well.

“Ex-priest,” Matt said over her head. “And current neighbor. I take care of her in the daytime. It’s all right. I’ll get her settled

safely. I’m a black belt in karate.”

Temple tried not to look shocked. The Fontar.a brothers didn’t bother to disguise it.

“He’s giving me lessons,” she explained.

They looked even more shocked.

“In self-defense. Hai-ya! See?” She almost dropped the Champagne bottle.

Someone pulled her away, toward the building.

“I’m all right,” she told Matt. “I’m just a little tiddly. They plied me with Champagne in the limo after I fought off the Rocky

Mountain Horror Show biker gang with a spray can of extra-virgin olive oil. It was all very innocent.”

“The Rocky Horror Show biker gang was innocent?”

“No, the Champagne plying afterward. They thought I was shaken up. Not the Champagne. Me. They’re not as … er, organized as they look. We go way back. They’re Nicky Fontana’s brothers. You know, he and Van own the Crystal Phoenix, which I work for. I’m the brothers’ sort of … mascot, like Shirley MacLaine and the Rat Pack in ’60s Las Vegas.” She finally looked at him instead of the wavering ground. “Oops! That apparently isn’t as reassuring as I meant it to be.”

“Come on, Shirley-Temple or MacLaine, or Shirley, Justice, and Mercy, or whoever you are this week-you can tipple all you like in your own place.”

Matt guided her into the elevator and punched the button for the second floor.

“Lucky you happened to be around,” she said, leaning against one varnished wooden side of the small, vintage elevator as it creaked upward. An elevator made for two. Or three. Or four. Or more. Wasn’t that some old song lyric? Oh. “Just Me and My Gal.” And the we-will-have-a-family. What was in that Fontana brothers’ Champagne? Or Gangsters Champagne, really. It came with the car.

“I was waiting for you,” Matt said. It seemed a long time before she really noticed his comment, and the silence, afterward.

“It could have been a long wait.”

“I don’t have much to do all afternoon. The advantage of a midnight job. I get to look after you in the daytime.”

“I don’t need looking after. Yes, there was an incident, but I was taking care of it, very innovatively, I don’t mind saying. I would be fine if I hadn’t asked the Fontanas to explore what was behind all those damn burlwood doors in the Gangsters limos. I

wanted a Mountain Dew.”

Matt hefted the condensation-dewed Champagne bottle from her arms. “I see Mountain Dew has a whole new marketing future. Where are your door keys?”

“In the absolute bottom of my tote bag, where the helpful Fontana brother dropped them. It’s not his fault. They’re all bachelors and they don’t know a thing about women’s purses.”

“I’m with them,” Matt said. Grumbled. Putting the Champagne bottle on the carpet and digging in her tote bag. “At least you won’t break a nail,” she observed.

“As a bachelor who doesn’t know a thing about women’s purses, I bet I and the Fontana brothers are pretty much clueless on the extreme trauma of that kind of event, too.”

“Well, it hurts like hell if it pulls back against the quick too much and it takes ages to grow out.”

“Here.” He flourished the keys. “I’d say, cut ‘em short, but then I may be missing something I wouldn’t want to.”

Temple wondered if she was hearing the implication she thought she was hearing. Mumm’s was definitely not the word for

her.

Matt opened her door. “I’d better get the Champagne, and you, settled down. I think you’ve both been shaken up too much

and are a little too bubbly.”

“It’s very scary to be almost mowed down by motorcycles that look like they’ve escaped from Disney’s Fantasia. We have

a right to ‘bubble.’ “

“Right.” Matt took the heavy bottle and put it in her refrigerator. “You’re way too involved in the Maylords crimes. You’re a

PR woman, not a PI. I know Danny’s a pal, but you can’t solve everybody’s troubles. It’s not safe.”

“It’s my job.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Are you saying I’m in the wrong career?”

“I’m saying you have the wrong attitude. It’s not your job to micromanage murder investigations.”

“You sound like Molina.”

“Maybe Molina’s not always wrong. Is that faintly possible?”

“I suppose.” Temple put her hands to her temples, which were ringing with tiny bubbles hitting high notes on crystal.

“Look at you:’ Matt was saying. “You may laugh it off, but you’re unnerved by that motorcycle attack. And you should be.

You can’t look after everybody, Temple.”

“Who should I look after, then?”

“Yourself first.”

“And how do I do that??

“I don’t know. Find out what makes you happy and follow your bliss, like Joseph Campbell says.”

“What if I don’t know what my bliss is anymore?”

Matt smiled. “Hang on, like the rest of us, until you figure it out. Trying not to get killed is a good start.”

“What did you mean downstairs, telling the Fontana brothers that you took care of me daytimes? That was pretty possessive.” He was silent for several seconds. “That’s the only time I have off.” He shrugged slightly. “Did it bother you?” “Not at all, oddly enough.”

The silence was mutual.

Temple regretted that she’d gotten too tiddly to do anything but gape as he turned and left.

Chapter 34

Minimum Maxposure

Monday, Monday, and the Orson Welles house was still his to occupy, but even Max was uneasy not knowing where Gandolph’s latest bolt-hole was, though he shouldn’t have been.

After all, his mentor had been playing the role of Invisible Man since before Max had been born.

Max was getting pretty good at the part himself, he reflected, brooding about how Gandolph’s sudden reappearance had interfered with Max’s time with Temple. Max’s personal life was suddenly on the back burner again. It was his fault for daring to have a personal life.

So Gandolph might just turn up on the doorstep of his former house when the mood took him, or when he felt it was safe. Max had let Garry in that first night they had connected in the labyrinth of the Neon Nightmare club with mixed feelings: excitement to be working with an old partner again, and with the nagging certainty that Temple was instantly cast as second fiddle for the immediate future.

Now the man who had been Gandolph, Garry Randolph,was on Max’s-his own-threshold again, and Max felt like it was a home invasion.

“You look distracted.” Gandolph shrugged out of the paint-spattered workman’s jumpsuit he wore over his usual slacks and sweater as a disguise for getting in where he wasn’t expected, or wanted. Dead, or alive.

“I’ve been printing out our ‘book’ so you can read it. I’m also working out seriously again, as you recall, for my new act.”

“My return has inspired a fresh yen for the stage? Wonderful news, my boy! I never approved of your ‘retirement.’ “

“Not a career renaissance, I’m afraid. If the Synth is potent to any degree, we need to infiltrate it. I’ve got a gig, all right. The Phantom Mage is turning tricks nightly at Neon Nightmare.”

“Turning tricks?” Gandolph looked truly distressed.

“Cirque du ‘Inferno,’ dear master. I’ll be pushing these retired joints through acrobatic legerdemain high over the mosh pit at the NN.” Max sighed, then smiled. “I’m actually looking forward to inventing the magic act from hell. I confess: I’m a sucker for High Concept. Literally.”

“First things first,” said Gandolph.

“The kitchen?”

“Don’t I wish! This house has the finest kitchen I used to own. I suppose you only manage to boil water in it now that you have no sweet young thing to impress … never mind. What’s on my mind is the book, first, and your new act, second. You’ll have to be very, very good, and very, very different, to fool the Synth into thinking the Phantom Mage is someone totally new.”

” ‘Someone totally new.’ That’s what I’ll have to become, isn’t it, if I’m going to infiltrate the heart of darkness? Not much room in there for someone totally old.”

“Nonsense, my boy! You’re not old at all at … what? Thirty-four now?”

But Max hadn’t been thinking of himself. He’d been thinking of Temple, who was good at coming here discreetly, with proper precautions, for improper purposes, and who hadn’t

lately. At all. He needed to find out what was going on with her. Instead of the magician sawing the lady in half, Max had split his magical identities in order to masquerade at Neon Nightmare in hopes of finding out … what? Anything that was worth keeping Temple in the dark when he had promised…

“Listen,” Garry said. His rotund form rolled ahead of Max into the kitchen like the bouncing ball you’re supposed to follow when you almost know the words of the next song.

“Listen, Max. Separately, you and I have happened on the same trail.”

“The Synth. They are something sinister, then.”

“Oh, yes. Unless they simply like to think they are. They could be a senior version of this Goth kick the youngsters are on.

Bizarre dress, arcane symbols, evil attitudes and all so much drama.”

“Then why am I risking breaking my neck to infiltrate them?” And risking breaking up with Temple, he added mentally. Where was she? She must be involved in something consuming to stay away so long. Or maybe she was involved with someone consuming, and he knew where to look for that usual suspect. Sure, she’d been calling him, but he hadn’t been able to answer.

Yet. Damn and double damn!

“Are you listening, Max?”

“What? Yes. Of course. You’re saying the Synth is a paper tiger. A cheesecloth coalition. Smoke and mirrors, the smoke stale and the mirrors cracked.”

“How you put things! 1 can’t wait to read your additions to my book. I’m saying quite the opposite. I think the Synth is key to a number of things that have happened in Las Vegas since you followed me here, and they are definitely what has been up our alley all those years on the Continent.”

Max frowned. He’d been a green, angry boy when an IRA bomb had leveled a pub and his post-high school traveling

partner, his cousin Sean, with it.

Max could have been there, johnny on the spot to save Sean or go down with him. But he’d won their stupid adolescent competition for a comely Irish lass named Kathleen O’Connor and he’d been off losing his so-called innocence while Sean broke apart and burned.

So he’d done what he could. He tracked the bombers and turned them over to the British. Unholy treason for an IrishAmerican boy, but also an impressive achievement.

He’d been recruited and whisked out of harm’s way by Gandolph and his associates in international counterterrorism. They worked to stop the bloodshed, not avenge it, and magic had been both man and boy’s cover. Gandolph explained how ideal that occupation was: one traveled, one moved mysteriously, one mastered the arts of subterfuge, even apparent invisibility. That appealed to Max, who had been an amateur magician since grade school.

“So we’ve ended up in the same fix again,” Max said finally. “On the run, occasionally presumed dead, and trying to save the world from itself. When do we get to save ourselves and our little worlds?”

“Now.” Garry’s dark eyes were gleaming in his plump Santa Claus face. “The Synth isn’t just disgruntled magicians uniting to fight the trend to expose the secrets of our ancient illusions, to bring down the Cloaked Conjurors among us. I believe that someone is using it for geopolitical purposes, and has been for some time. I think that if we find out who, and why, we will solve a lot of worrisome matters both here and abroad.”

Max groaned. “Good Lord, Garry. You’re saying I can save the world by swinging on a star at the Neon Nightmare every night?”

“Well, you’ll have to do more than swing, my boy. You’ll have to investigate. I’ll be there when I can, as backup. And I don’t say this assignment will be fast, or easy. But it could be more important than either of us guesses.”

“I bloody well know how important this assignment is.” Max had almost gritted his teeth.

Garry nodded, impressed by Max’s renewed vow of passion for the cause.

But Max the good agent wasn’t considering the global picture. He was thinking about the confined orbit of his own little life, a domestic life that he’d managed to build with Temple between the bullets and the subterfuge.

She wouldn’t wait forever for the normalcy he kept promising and failing to deliver.

Neither would anybody else, whether it was Lieutenant Molina, or Matt Devine.

Chapter 35

Lying Down on the Job

What did I overhear my Miss Temple and Mr. Matt discussing? Biker gangs? Gay biker gangs?

This is not a milieu in which I see my loving roommate making much headway.

Much as I admire her quick thinking and fast trigger finger on a can of cooking oil, I decide it is time for Midnight Louie to investigate Maylords, pronto and solo.

Louise and I have not taken vows never to part, thank Bastet. So Tuesday morning as soon as the big hand nears the

twelve and the little hand is past the nine I ankle and hitch my way over to the furniture store.

Getting in is a problem. Even a dude who prefers a cat condo to a Barcelona chair knows that such stores are Snoozer City until the working folk come in to browse on the nights and weekends.

So how am I going to crack the case if I cannot crack the doors into Maylords without being painfully obvious as out of place? It is not as if I can carry a credit card concealed on my person.

As usual, the out-of-sight service areas are my best shot.

I linger behind the always-welcome Dumpster, waiting for the store to open so they can rev up the delivery trucks. There is not much action and I almost snooze off myself, until I hear a suspicious scraping sound.

I open one weary eye. I am staring at a rat-sized furball with a comma for a tail and cubby cheeks. Not a rat. Not a squirrel. Hmmm. Perhaps an escaped exotic pet, like a gerbil or a hamster.

“Eek!” The creature scoots under the Dumpster.

Great. I will have to conduct my interrogation cheek-toasphalt.

“Whoa, there, son,” I say. It never hurts to establish a relationship with a source, no matter how tenuous. “I mean you no harm. I have breakfasted on Fancy Feast and Free-toBe-Feline and am full up in the prey department. I just want to know if you live around here.”

A series of cheeps comes from under the battered brown metal. Ah, this is a chicken of sorts: the humble prairie dog. I

feel pity for any creature unjustly tagged with a canine appellation, so tsk sympathetically at the little fellow.

“I will not bite,” I promise.

Apparently it has heard this line before, because it clucks and cheeps and skitters farther under its metal sanctuary.

“Honest,” I say, which does not calm the creature. “You happen to visit the vacant lot across the street?”

Well, imagine trying to interpret Peter Lorre on speed. Sam Spade never had to put up with this. I get a lot of nervous

chatter and finally a stuttered “Ya-ya-ya-yes.”

“Okay. I want to know about some bad actors. Big. Human. On nasty, noisy wheels.”

I glimpse something gleaming: beady eyes. “Huh-huhhuh-huge. Human.”

“Depends on your point of view. They are just big to me. So they have been hanging out there?”

“Only re-re-recently.”

“Since this big furniture store opened, right?”

“Fah-fah-fah-furniture store? What is that?”

`The building they just put up here, that made your Dumpster lunch line possible.”

“Oh. The Gi-gi-gigantic man-mountain.”

“Right!” If that is what this little guy wants to call a prime retail location, fine.

“Ya-ya-ya-yes. But as soon as the man-mountain came, the snorting, howling beasts came and then the Big Boom and I had to move.”

I guess that the Big Boom was shooting gallery night at Maylords Friday last. But I am fully satisfied with the interrogation,

if not with the condition of my stomach, which is, in fact, growling.

This tidbit in motion must be getting my old hunting instincts in gear.

At least I know now that the bikers who hassled my Miss Temple are not fast-food-emporium parking-lot muggers, but are, as I suspected, connected to Maylords. They may even have been the shooters on Maylord’s opening night. Hmm.

“What was that you said, sir?” the quavering voice inquires from under the Dumpster.

“I said, ‘Beat it, before I make a prairie omelette of you. And stay away from that vacant lot. I am redeveloping it as a highdollar gated community for some low-riders from North Las Vegas.”

I hear only a frantic scrabbling for an answer. This prairie dog was chicken.

It only takes a couple of hours and fending off an invasion of fire ants with hopes of using my person for an ant-hill, but at last I hear

the shifting gears of a monster truck.

Before you can say “Lift that bale,” I am out of jail and waiting patiently behind a parked tire for human feet to enter Maylords. Work boots soon do just that and I bide my time.

I want to enter as they exit, for then they will be toting some big piece of furniture I can use as an awning when I sneak in. There is nothing like toting three times their own body weight to distract people from looking too hard at what is underfoot.

So I have flattened myself against the wall near the door when it whooshes open, letting out a frosty breath of air-conditioning and two grunting, cursing men in support belts.

They should take a lesson from the humble ant, I muse as I observe a conga line of said critters, who can move many times own weight over long distances … 000ps! On the other hand, the humble ant is humble precisely because it is so easily stomped on by a size twelve work boot. So much for trying to use Midnight Louie’s nose as a sun shade!

I whisk around the size twelves in question and into the cool environs of Maylord’s shipping and receiving area. The floor is unembellished concrete, but these pads have trod Las Vegas’s meanest streets and are as silent as melting snow as I waltz in and around and under shrouded pieces of furniture and into a hall that leads to a repair shop that connects to the showrooms.

Voila!

I stand in a hall of mirrors. And ottomans. And breakfronts. And credenzas and etageres and everything elegant that my ladylove, the Divine Yvette, would adore.

I have entered an upholstered and carpeted world, salted with the tangy scent of leather, every surface a potential scratching post or snoozing spot. Every potential scratching post or snoozing spot is costly and oh-so-accessible. I am, in fact, in Cat Heaven.

Before I go ape without the aid and abetting of catnip, I resolve on a course of action. I must be invisible. I must be all

ears. I must absorb the sights, sounds, personalities and underlying criminalities that swirl into an unsavory stew in this place.

Hmm. Savory. Stew. Is that a lambskin ottoman I see before my very nose?

No. I must leave no trace, not even a genteel marking ceremony to memorialize my presence.

I soon pad along the cool tiles until a sight strikes a blow of familiarity to my eyes. It is simply two framed prints, but Ihave

heard my Miss Temple swooning over them. They feature long, narrow ladies in elegant dress and were perpetrated by an artist known as Er … Tay. Rather sounds as if the chap was burping. Ur-tay.

I loft atop a lovely lavender leather sofa in a neighboring room setting and proceed to curl up on it until I resemble a pillow. An

extraordinarily large, furred pillow, but one as motionless as stone.

Like the bearskin-hatted guards at Buckingham Palace, I am impervious to distraction. Nothing will disturb my concentration or

Sphinxlike immobility. I am on duty, as statu e s q u e a n d s t i l l watching a s green Ba passinga s t

observer might notice is like the Egyptian glyph of a human eye. It knows all, sees all, but is as motionless as the dead.

Actually, this whole place is as dead as a tomb. It is hard to keep from drowsing off. In the rooms a few people come and go, but

seldom, and they are amblers shuffling along from vignette to vignette.

I do hear the authoritative click of high heels in the distance. The sound is sharp and brisk enough to be my Miss Temple. I freeze even more than motionless as I hear those emphatic footsteps heading my way.

My Miss Temple has observed me at my leisure on a sofa too often to be taken in by my act when it is on the road. My cover is as

transparent as a G-string at the Saran Wrap strip joint. So I squeeze my peepers totally shut. It is primitive instinct to hope that if you cannot see, you cannot be seen. I know better, but I will try anything.

My ears reverberate. Stilettos have not pounded ground so hard since the railroaders nailed down the Golden Spike at Promontory,

Utah, and that was two centuries back, give or take a few decades. Speaking of which, that is what every second feels like to me now. I do not want Miss Temple to think that I am spying on her.

The footsteps come within a couple feet of me and stop cold.

I continue playing dead and wait for the whistle to blow.

Only my Miss Temple will not whistle. She will whisper, and demand what I am doing here, even though I cannot answer, for more reasons than one.

I hear the sound of one toe tapping. Ooh. She is really mad.

I crack one eyelid the teensiest bit.

Well, that is a high heel and the toe is tapping, but it is way too big to belong to my charming roommate. It must be big enough to cradle a kitten, a size eight, say, or even a nine. Ugh. We are getting into Molina territory with that shoe size, and what my Miss Temple decries, I despise as well.

But this is not Molina, not with that much leg showing, although it is as spindly as that of a giraffe. I follow the figure upwards and see its back is toward me.

Well! Am I not sufficiently riveting even when comatose that an unbiased observer would give me a second glance?

The figure is slim and surmounted by a curly fall of matte black hair. The person is apparently staring at the vignette now between me and it, a snazzy Art Deco design that I heard Miss Temple say was the work of the late and very lamented Mr.

Simon Foster.

There have been no more footsteps approaching but suddenly I spot another person arriving on the scene.

The woman who has the toe-tic suddenly senses his presence, but not mine, and turns. She has pale narrow features set in a perpetual sneer.

“Jerome! You startled me.”

Jerome does not look like he could startle a gerbil, but I see he wears those thick-soled tennis shoes, so he certainly could pad around as soundlessly as I do.

“Just carting your latest accessories to the model room you wanted to revise.”

“Good. Maybe you can tell me who switched these Ert� prints again.”

“It cannot have been Simon. He is dead. I figured you had done it.”

“No! I made sure they were the way I wanted them as soon as he was dead.”

Silence greets this confession.

“Uh,” she says, “they were never hung right and I caught that nosy PR woman switching them, so I, urn, thought it only fitting to rearrange them as a final memorial.” She frowns as she turns back to the ersatz wall on which the prints under discussion are displayed.

“Cannot leave even the dead alone, can you, Beth?”

“Jerome. You are pushing it.”

“At least I am not pushing daisies, no thanks to your continual carping. You have no right to boss me around. You have no

official authority over anyone in this store.”

“The worm wiggles, but it does not quite manage to turn, poor thing. Maybe I do not need official authority, Jerome. Maybe

I have a better kind of authority.”

“What? Blackmail? I never thought you could sleep your way up, even at a Hell’s Angels rally. Blackmail. You would be game for that, but I can’t see who or how. Everybody knows that half the staff is gay, so you cannot ‘out’ anyone. Or can you?”

Okay, I am trying to put this modern parlance into play on the crime scene here. I did not know half the staff was gay, although I have known a few gays among my own kind. That gets to be a very gray area for catkind, because sometimes the most heterosexual dude is so high on testosterone that he would mistake a fun fur for a romantic target. This has never happened to me, I hasten to reassure. I am thoroughly fixated on the female of the species … er, any species. That is just the way I am, as others are another way. We all live in the same skins, after all.

“Maybe it is Simon’s ghost.” Jerome is staring at the Ert� prints. “He never did like you messing with his design layout. Maybe he has come back to switch prints just to spite you, Beth.”

She is quiet a heartbeat too long.

Jerome goes on: “It is weird how all the artwork on the walls keeps changing around here. I really think we have a dead decorator in residence. What do you think?”

“I think the world is ‘designer,’ schmuck, and that you had better tote that ugly clown painting where I told you to, and shut up.

You are right. One word and you will not have a job.”

“A hollow threat. Maybe someday the Maylords ghost will hang you up to dry, although I doubt your hide would do much for

the walls.”

“You-”

Jerome glides away on his Reekboks, i.e., smelly, rubber soles, so the only person to hear the end of her epithet is me. - asshole.”

That is when I join the entire staff in taking an eternal dislike to Miss Beth, despite my usual tendency to revere and assist her gender.

“Ghost!” she harrumphs out loud.

And steps up to the wall to reverse the position of the prints. This is one obsessive-compulsive lady.

The next set of footsteps are firm and readily detectable. “Beth. What are you doing?”

“Mr. Maylord.”

“Well?”

“I was changing these prints.”

“Why? They look fine the way they are.”

“Simon would have preferred-”

“Simon. Yes. Poor fellow.”

I study a man in his early thirties, well dressed, with an air of eager authority. Eager authority never cuts it, I have found. If

you have true authority, you do not need to be eager for anything. He who can wait, rules. Observe the humble housecat.

And I can outwait any of them.

“You know, Mr. Maylord, I merely want the showroom floor to be as perfect as possible?’

“Yes. Well. I have heard that your methods have riled some of the employees, including the late Simon Foster. We are looking for employee synergy here at Maylords, Miss Blanchard, not controversy. Perhaps you had better leave the walls designed by others alone. You have your own space, do you not?”

“Yes, Mr. Maylord.” Her tone is insolent. “I suppose your brother would have the same philosophy.”

“My brother-? He has nothing to do with this location. Nothing. Surely there is something you could do elsewhere. Sales to be made, perhaps.”

“You mean clients to be enlisted.”

“Right. Carry on.”

And he leaves the field to her. She glances around, a bit nervously, her eyes skimming past me as if I were Dumpster fungus. Then she steps up to the wall and reverses the prints despite everything.

Still, she looks a little unnerved, so I loose a hiss beneath my breath and escalate it into the faintest, ghostly wail.

“Stupid!” she tells herself just as harshly as she berates others. “Nothing haunts this place but blind fools it is a pleasure to make bigger fools of. Simon, see what you got for blowing me off and messing with my adjustments? Burn in hell!”

And she stomps off like an army of Jimmy Choos on parade.

I am so relieved that I have not had to explain myself to my Miss Temple (although I never would or could; I am a firm believer in the Sphinxlike expression as the best course in touchy situations), that I do drift off to sleep upon my Donna Karan leather sofa. Everything is designer-something nowadays. Perhaps I need a corporate logo for Midnight Inc. Investigations.

Maybe a tie-in reality TV show: Las Vegas MSI: Midnight’s Scientific Investigations.

This is but a dream. I wake to the limpid tones of a heavenly host.

No, I have not joined the late, lamented Simon in the afterlife. It appears that I have been “discovered” by a shopper possessing true taste.

“Goodness! I had never seen a more ingratiating and lifelike stuffed cat. Well, ‘stuffed cat’ hardly fits this magnificent

faux feline. This is a work of soft-sculpture art. I must have it!”

“Uh, ma’am.” The unprepossessing Jerome is back and glancing around nervously. “I am not a sales associate. I just do .

. . windows.”

“You do? Young man, I may have a part-time job for you.” The speaker is a woman of that certain age and weight that permits her to be described as a “matron.” Since the only “matrons” I have run into are keepers of female prisoners, I am a bit disconcerted. Does this woman wish to remove me to a place on incarceration? I think not.

“Display windows, ma’am,” Jerome says with surprising firmness. Apparently even a professional jellyfish may develop a spine. “Let me find a sales associate.”

“I only want to know how much this handsome fellow is … Funny, there is no tag around his neck.”

Right on, lady. Collars are for dogs and sex slaves. “Perhaps it is on the rear. We should turn him over.” What?!

“Sometimes they put a little satin tag there, just where the … well, you know, would be.”

I discern that Jerome is as appalled by this shocking lack of sensibility as I am. “I do not know, ma’am. Let me get you a sales associate.”

“Sales?” She arches a penciled eyebrow. “I understood Maylords shied away from such commercial terms.”

“Well, ordinarily, ma’am. I will find an … article placement person for you. No doubt this, uh, soft sculpture is listed on a

computer, along with its price.”

No way, Jose. I have no price and no computer record ei-ther, thank you very much.

“Oh, this lovely beast is priceless,” the lady proclaims, resting on my head a chubby hand with the fingers swelling against several carats of large, obvious diamonds. “No wonder there is nothing as obvious as a price tag on it. He is the Eternal,

Mysterious Black Cat. I must have him!”

Would that the Divine Yvette felt so strongly! Oh, well. Icringe as Jerome skedaddles in search of some crass commercial agent. Obviously this dame would pay plenty for me. I daydream what the computer might turn up. Six hundred dollars. A diamond collar to go? I may have a day job here. The lady has turned to view Simon’s vignette. “Art Deco! He was such a fabulous designer! I love everything he does. I had no idea Maylords employed him. Now where did that rabbity young man go?

Imagine not tagging a wonderful accessory like a black velvet panther.”

She waddles off and I take the opportunity to hit pad to pavement-cool polished travertine, in this case, not parboiled Las Vegas asphalt-and get myself out of this madhouse.

At least I have not run into Miss Temple, but I have plenty of things about Maylords to consider, including the fact that they could use a Midnight Louie signature accessory line. Amelia Wong, watch out!

Chapter 36

G a i n f u l E m p l o y m e n t

Temple couldn’t believe what a quick Tuesday afternoon stop at Maylords had netted her: Rafi Nadir cruising past before she’d made it out of the atrium and dropping several typed sheets into the Black Hole of her everpresent tote bag.

What a smooth snitch!

Temple had some free time. Perfect! No Wong events were scheduled until the arts council reception in the Maylords atrium tonight to celebrate Maylords’ support of local cultural issues. Now if only nothing scary and violent and worthy of a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation script happened… . No shot-out windows, no stabbed sales associates.

Even a seasoned PR person like Temple found it hard to believe the week’s schedule of events, with slight adjustments for murder and mayhem, just kept rolling along. A bunch of UFO fanatics had trespassed at Area 51, which swept Simon’s murder to a few short paragraphs inside the newspapers. A pop tart girl singer had French-kissed a boxer dog onstage at the Oasis, which pushed TV film of the murder Murano to a fifteen-second flash at the end of the news. She found Kenny Maylordhappily watching Amelia Wong and assistants presenting one of their daily feng shui demonstrations to a standingroomonly crowd in the small auditorium off the caf� area. It was as if Simon Foster had never been part of the hoopla, as if he’d never been here, excited to debut his vignette designs, eager to adjust every picture frame and fluff every silk-tasseled pillow.

Even the Murano no longer stalled at stage center in all its gory orange glory. Kenny had wanted to replace the impounded vehicle with a new one, but the dealer wasn’t about to take back a murder car, even though the police said that Simon had been stabbed elsewhere and placed in the Murano long after blood had flowed. Temple had convinced Kenny to bring in an equally new and hot orange model: the Cadillac CTS.

Changing out vehicles didn’t shut out reality. Temple closed her eyes. This was all about Simon. The viewing was tonight. She’d have to leave the party, abstentemious, and rush, uh, drive safely to the funeral parlor. Matt had asked her, gingerly, about when and where the visitation would be and had offered to escort her. Temple had declined. Mostly because he looked too much like the dear departed, from the back.

Had somebody been after Matt all the time? Hard to believe, but then who would have believed he’d have attracted a homicidal stalker either. Although in that case he had only been a handy substitute for the real prey, Max.

Just then Matt’s seminary friend, Jerome, came shuffling by, toting something as usual, looking like a total flunky. Temple caught a glimmer of distaste in his expression as he passed her.

Why pick on her? She was nice to people. Oh. People included Matt. Strange places, those seminaries. Male clubs, really. Even though token women were now finally admitted, they couldn’t aspire to any real power. Matt had admitted as much.

In a sense, Matt had rejected Jerome. Would that merit a knife in the back, even if it was the wrong back? Underdogs could show surprising nerve … especially if the counterattack was cowardly.

Temple shook her head. She’d check out the ex-employees on Rafi’s list before speculating further. Someone who’d been let go so soon might have an even bigger grudge against those who’d stayed, and especially those who’d stayed because they were gifted at their jobs, like Simon.

God, she dreaded tonight.

Temple drove off the Maylords lot and stopped the Miata at a curb two blocks away in a pittance of shade under some overgrown oleander bushes.

She dug out Rafi’s papers, her fingers clumsy with excitement. Maybe someone on this list would have a clue as to why murder had become a key accessory at Maylords Fine Furnishings.

Jubilation was her first reaction when she scanned the list. It was blessedly thorough: name, address, phone number-even e-mail address-for each employee. Every newsie, every PR person’s heart rejoiced to see hard facts marshaled like little tin soldiers in black type on white paper.

She frowned at the cryptic words after each name. Avatar. Genji. Mongrel. Bebe. Whipped Cream.

Some names had been crossed out, with dates penciled next to the Xes.

Okay, she’d just have to ask … “Caesar,”

“Grandview,” and “Saltlick,” three of the former employees, what the nicknames meant.

Let’s see. Who was closest?

Temple pulled out her map of greater Las Vegas, and triangulated on the first target.

” ‘Grandview’ it is.”

There had been an Art Deco-vintage movie theater in St. Paul by that name. Temple chose to regard this fairly remote coincidence as a good sign.

She put the Miata in gear and shot off to the Granada Apartments. Surely a recently unemployed person would be at home, sending r�sum�s via the Internet.

The Granada Apartments were thirty years old, not quite antique enough to be chic. Lord, Temple hoped that description did not describe her! Then she felt an instant pang as she recalled Danny Dove’s enthusiasm for moving into the Circle Ritz with Simon.

One moment, a stable happy life. The next, history. She tried to imagine how she’d have felt if Matt had fallen victim to his stalker. Do not go there. Or if Max had lost to Molina, and was facing decades in prison on some trumped-up charge. Do not go

there.

It did occur to her to wonder why all the men in her life … well, both … well, the one man in her life and the runner-up. .

faced mortal danger so often. Was she possibly an unlucky omen?

Do not go there.

Temple pulled onto the cracked concrete parking lot of the Granada Apartments. Three stories. Beige stucco. Ticky-tacky tiny balconies just big enough for a discount-store fold-up chair and a geranium planter. Genteel getting by.

Temple checked her list. “Grandview”-Glory Diaz was the name-had been fantasizing if she’d come up with that word while looking out from her balcony here. Who could blame her for dreaming, though?

Temple hustled out of the Miata (newest car on the lot) and hurried to the second-floor unit.

The unit’s doorbell didn’t give when pushed, so Temple knocked. And knocked. Until her knuckles stung. From inside came the strains of ’40s swing music, which Temple normally liked, when it wasn’t interfering with her pursuit of a victim, witness, or suspect. Listen to her: Nancy Drew on Xenadrine.

Finally, she heard the chain lock scraping open. The doorknob turned.

There stood Glory Diaz, a bottle blonde wearing dead-hooker black Maybelline eyeliner. Makeup caked in the furrows of her face despite the glamour look: her chorus-girl height was enhanced by strappy high heels from Wild Woman cheapo shoe store in the mall. Platinum hair and leopardskinprint spandex skimpy in all the wrong places finished the look, and how!

Temple felt “Grandview” didn’t have much of a future vista. In fact, she couldn’t imagine Maylords hiring this hard-edged dame in the first place, despite her very passing resemblance to a worn-out chorine. Still, one had to make the best of a bad deal.

“Hi! I’m Temple Barr. I’m doing publicity for Maylords. Some bizarre things have been going on there. I thought that you, as a former employee, could clue me in on a thing or two.”

“Honey, have I got news for you! Come on in. Would you like some Pernod?”

“Uh, no.” Temple had never figured out what exactly Pernod was, so she decided she was best off avoiding it at all costs. When in doubt, don’t fake it.

Glory Diaz, who must be brunette under that Marilyn Monroe coif-was it a wig?-tsked like a grandmother, then licked her exaggerated lips. “Lime Kool-Aid, then?”

“Cool.” Temple stepped onto the orange shag carpet. Ick. Whatever marketing guru had decreed orange temporarily chic again had been temporarily insane.

Temple took the offered seat on a long, terminally floral sofa. It made Electra Lark’s Hawaiian muumuus look restrained.

Glory sat, her own floral sheath shifting well above her bare, Mystic Tan-tawny, albeit knobby, knees.

Her shoes were Plexiglas spike platforms that Temple had never seen outside of a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue. Hey, everyone has a secret vice or two. Hers were catalogues and fairly adventuresome shoes, so she couldn’t be too hard on Glory’s fashion sense.

Glory was busy pouring limeaid from a plastic pitcher on the coffee table into clear plastic glasses with paper cutouts of butterflies embedded between two clear layers. She either kept it ready for company or had been drowning her unemployment sorrows in a poison-green sugar OD.

“So you’re the PR gal. Aren’t you the cutest thing?”

No, Temple thought. I’m not. Not a “gal,” or a “thing” and not cute! But these darn butterfly glasses.sure are!

Glory Diaz was one of those sad women with absolutely no feminine physical graces who dressed like a Barbie doll.

Temple had often cursed the inescapable femininity of a short, small woman bequeathed to her by some Billie Burke, Good-Witch-Glynda-style godmother, but she’d never felt like a caricature of it, the way Glory looked.

This woman had been way too obvious for the Maylords corporate culture. Maylords hired few women: Janice, several understated female interior designers uniformed in smooth bobs and low-heeled pumps, and of course that witchy woman Beth Blanchard, another Human Resources Department mistake.

And then there was the exhibitionism rumor. No wonder Glory had been fired while her orientation seminar seat was still warm. Apparently very warm.

“So,” Temple said, never one to beat around the er, bush, “who hired you and who fired you?” “I wasn’t fired. I left.”

Temple nodded, then sipped mouth-curdlingly tart-sweet limeade. “So who hired you?”

“Mark Ainsworth, that rascal.” Glory had simpered on the word “rascal.”

The only “rascal” Temple could picture the anxious, snobby manager playing was the role of weasel.

“And why did you decide to part ways?”

Glory, coy, leaned back into the couch corner. “Darling? Can’t you guess?” “No—”

“Maybe you don’t know Maylords’s nickname among the initiated.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

Glory simpered again. “Gaylords, darlin’.”

Temple nodded. Slowly. Trying to decide if this was rampant homophobia or … a clue.

“I should tell you I’m a friend of Danny Dove’s,” she said. “Oh, what a sweetie! Always so respectful, but very hip, if you know what I mean.”

“Oddly enough, I do. How did you meet him?”

“He came around a lot during orientation to visit Simon. It’s hard to miss star power on that level! DD was so charmingly proud of Simon. Poor boy. Never had a chance. I read in the paper what happened to Simon, though I’m not surprised.”

“Not surprised that Simon was killed?”

“That somebody was killed. The way that place is run is murder. Dear Simon. Such a doll. And Danny was so nice to me when he came in. A class act. More than I can say for Mark Ainsworth. Probably because I wouldn’t give out. I have my standards.”

“Wait a minute. You wouldn’t ‘give out.’ But … you just said, `Gaylords.’ “

And now that Glory Diaz had mentioned it, Temple had to agree that a lot of the store’s staff was gay. It had never occurred to her, maybe because she’d always worked in the arts. So … Gaylords. More gay men on staff than in any artistic endeavor? Maybe. Funny. Kenny Maylord didn’t look or act like Mr. Liberal. Temple would bet he was straight, although having a wife and kids didn’t always prove it.

A pattern was trying to form in her mind, but something in her fought it. Something was keeping her from getting it… .

She glanced at Glory, whose long-nailed fingers were fanned on her knee, ruffling the hem of her skirt, which was retreating upward.

And got it. The woman exhibitionist who had been quietly fired after the first days of the training sessions.

Grandview, of course!

“Does the name ‘Grandview’ mean anything to you?” Temple asked.

“You little minx! How did you find out my computer password?”

“Computer password?”

“For Maylords, for as long as I was there, which wasn’t long. That was my password. I picked it myself. We all did.” “What did you put on the computer?”

“Oh, any possible friends or clients I knew who might patronize Maylords. I put in the entire cast of La Cage au Folles and the Shemale Celebrities Revue at the Oasis Hotel. Judy and Joan and Marilyn and Madonna. It was all pretty sketchy, dear. Most of my friends don’t have the money to buy those Maylords things. They’re all putting it into wax jobs and laserhair removal and boob jobs and hormones, honey. You do know what I mean by hormones?”

Temple was speechless. “You’re … in transition, aren’t you?”

“How nice of you to put it so dellll-i-cately. Indeed diddleyoh-doo, darlin.’ I am not to the manner born, believe it or not.”

“You’re a transvestite.”

“Oh, my, no. I’m so much more than that.”

“An exhibitionist transsexual?”

“If you think so.” Glory snickered and pulled her hem up a discreet two inches more. “We are so misunderstood.”

“Why did you take a job at Maylords, and then blow it, by playing with your skirt at the orientation sessions?”

“Oh! You’ve heard of me. I created a stir. That rascal Ainsworth acted as if I hadn’t raised an eyebrow. Just dumped on me after leading me on.”

“Leading you on how?”

“Giving me this pitch about what a ‘special’ environment Maylords is. How certain lifestyles are fine there. I think he got miffed when I wouldn’t let him into my Olgas on the first interview. I was dead meat after that. And I only lasted a few days more, which is probably eons more than that Ainsworth wuss would have lasted in any interesting sense of the word. A bunch of cowards, if you ask me. Pretend to be so with it, and such simps anyway.”

Temple considered all she didn’t know about the gay world, the lesbian world, the transvestite world, the transsexual world. It would fill Lake Mead.

Temple wondered again if Simon had been killed because he was gay. Not just because he was gay but because he didn’t fit into this particular gay world. He was basically invulnerable to the kind of pressure that seemed to rule Maylords. He had a protector, Danny. How awful if Simon’s very relationship with Danny had doomed him! The protector had been a liability.

And why hire a transvestite, and fire her? Him. Almost immediately. Temple didn’t believe Glory had quit. She had to have been ousted. Just a power play? Maybe it was all about power, which would explain the illogic. Control was a terrible thing to waste.

“Honey, you are lookin’ in need of something stronger than Kool-Aid. I have some very nice Pernod absinthe, lovely licorice taste and divine poison green color, like lime Kool-Aid crossed with Kickapoo Joy Juice.”

They were back to another world Temple knew little of: the snobbery of alcohol consumption combined with abstruse pop culture references she knew nothing about.

She shook her head. “No. But what about the straight men and women on the staff? There must be some.”

“Oh, a few. But they’re birds of passage. Once they’re sucked dry, they’re outta there.”

Temple was afraid to ask, but she did. “`Sucked dry’?”

“That’s the real game. People aren’t hired to do their jobs. They’re suckered in to get vamped.”

” ‘Get vamped’?” This was getting kinkier by the second.

“Drained, dearie. All those former sales staff and designers from the other, less upscale furniture palaces in town. What do they have that’s valuable?”

“They’re experienced professionals,” Temple said, merely to keep the dialogue going. She was beginning to get that qualifications were the last thing on the management minds at Maylords.

“Aren’t you the cutest thing! Especially when you recite that bullshit. You do see that’s the last reason Maylords would hire anyone.”

“I do?”

“It’s the designers’ contacts, dummy! Their mailing lists that they just so happily type into their Maylord iMacs, each one offered the color of his or her choice. What a classy operation! They’re so not used to the down-and-dirty retail world, and Maylords’s snob act has them fooled. So there they are typing their life’s blood into those treacherous little i-machines, professionally speaking, spilling decades of building a client list.”

“Which remains at Maylords when they’re let go after the first three months, as Ainsworth threatened would happen.”

“Those lists are sucked back out as soon as they’re entered,darlin’. Deliciously vicious, isn’t it? Not even a long, slow kissoff. Just empty ‘em out and shovel ‘em into the unemployment line.”

“I can’t believe all that evil energy would be expended on … selling furniture. I mean, Mozart had his murderous rival Solari and Snow White had her Evil Queen, but that was for really elevated purposes like art and … a beauty contest. But for furniture-?”

” ‘Who’s the most beautiful bitch of all?’ Life is a bitch, darlin’, and I’m doing my best to become one as fast as I can.”

“Speaking of which, where does Beth Blanchard fit in all this? She acts like she has some secret inner track.” “Have you ever heard of a fag hag?”

“I am from the midwest, but I wasn’t born in a cornfield. Whatever, I don’t see what’s in it for her.”

“She can be head bitch. And”-Glory sipped her Kool-Aid until her collagen-enhanced lips puckered-“like all of those delusional types, she was the devil in the heavenly chorus cherishing the notion of seducing a choirboy to the other side.” Temple considered. “Which choirboy?” But she already knew.

Who was the fairest of them all? Simon.

Glory shook her permanently curled poly-something locks. “Poor lad. Blind as a bat to that sort of predatory nuttiness.

Polite, charmingly aloof, living in his own world, not understanding the chaos he caused.”

Temple squirmed on the floral poppies upholstering the sofa. That could describe Matt too. Both men attractive and too decent to use it. Both unavailable. Perhaps maddeningly unavailable to some… . Women had been suffering from that kind of problem for millennia. It was mind-bending to see that some men did too. Was it really getting to be an equal-opportunity world, even down to victimization?

“Oh, my dear girl. Don’t get weepy on Glory. The world is mean and man uncouth, or why would I want to be what I want to be?”

“That’s Brecht!” Temple accused.

“What! I’m not Brecht. What is Brecht?”

“That ‘world is mean and man uncouth’ line.”

“I heard it in a trans revue, dear. It could be Rod McKuen, for all I know. Or Shakespeare. Speaking of dear old Willie, that

Blanchard babe is typecast for that play.”

Temple ran Glory’s wild free associations through her head. ” ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?”’

“Very good! You should try out for Attack of the Forty-Foot Woman or Invasion of the Booby Snatchers.”

“I don’t have the physical attributes for either role. You’re saying Beth Blanchard could have stabbed Simon?’

“Well, honey-dew, she did everything on earth a real she-male could do to seduce the poor bloke. And he turned her down, cold. I saw it myself. As they say, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ I can’t wait until I get there myself. I’m ready for dispensing a little fury, you see what I mean?”

“I do,” Temple said, standing up. “I really must be going, but thanks for clueing me in. On so much. And you’re really not bitter about being fired by Maylords?”

” ‘Of all the gin joints in the world,’ it ran on pure venom. But it was a fun gig while it lasted. I shall always remember Paris. I wore my very best stainless-steel garters, specially purchased at a vintage shop to go with my pink Schiaperelli hose. One of my finer moments, despite the outcome. My dear, I adore your tangerine nail polish. It is s0000 Maylords this month. Perhaps you should seek permanent employment there, but do beware.”

Temple leaned forward to lap up this last scoop.

“Do not pull your hems above your panty line. Not that you have a panty line. That I can see from here. Perhaps if you gave me a head start-”

Mortified, Temple blushed, thanked Glory for her candor, and got the heck out of there.

In the stairwell, she paused to jerk at her panty line. Maybe she needed to buy a thong to prevent further embarrassment.

Sure.

Chapter 37

Dead Zone

Temple only had time after her intriguing interview with Glory Diaz to rush home and leave a fresh heap of Free-to-beFeline in the bowl for Louie to reject … when he came back from wherever he was to reject it, and he would.

And to rifle her closet for something funeral-worthy.

She began to panic when she realized that the newer fashions nowadays were as gauzy and floral as something Loretta Young might have worn in a ‘ 30s film, and she had scarfed up a bunch of them.

It was true that black was welcomed at weddings now, while color was appropriate at funerals. Yet she felt she needed to symbolize the desolation she felt on Danny’s behalf. He was theater people: symbols soothed him.

She was startled when a huge furry tarantula leg brushed her bare calf. And jumped a little.

Louie had eeled in from somewhere and stood gazing up at her with soulful green eyes. No doubt he had just surveyed the fresh Free-to-beFeline in his bowl and was begging for a reprieve.

“If only,” she told him, “I had been born in the basic black you favor, I’d be set for every occasion. I don’t suppose cats go to wakes or funerals.”

He blinked solemnly. Temple checked the oversize watch dial on her wrist. No time to dither. In her closet she paged past overblown roses sprinkled with sequins and colorful sweater sets, everything too bright and breezy for such a sorrowful occasion.

Finally she fingered the clothing in the farthest corner of her closet, looking for something she’d forgotten about.

She found it. Boy, did she find it. Her fingers rubbed solid knit. Better.

She pulled out the possibility.

Black knit.

Even better. Not too heavy for the time of year, but appropriately opaque. No panty line issues here. Long, full skirt, long sleeves, high neck.

Oh.

This was indeed her “wake” dress. She’d last worn it at Cliff Effinger’s wildly unattended and deeply unmourned showing.

Her fingertips traced the long row of shiny black round buttons from neck to skirt hem. The dress was several seasons old, but simple enough to be a classic. The buttons reminded her of Catholic rosary beads.

Maybe that’s why the last time she had worn it she and Matt Devine had almost had a nuclear meltdown on her living room sofa. The memory warmed her cheeks. She was never going to wear this dress again.

But … it was the only appropriate thing and Matt would definitely not be attending this wake, so Temple began frantically working pea-shaped buttons out of too-tight buttonholes. Temple kept the Miata’s top up and the air conditioner on all the way to the Bide-a-Wee Mortuary.

Like wedding chapels, funeral parlors were established LasVegas landmarks. The Bide-a-Wee was as high-end as a theme mortuary could get in this town, and catered to star performers.

Its notion of tasteful restraint ran to slabs of polished black marble and pewter and gilt accents, very Egyptian temple. Temple herself was wearing her Stuart Weitzman black suede pumps with the steel heels. They were several seasons old, but age did not wither nor custom stale Weitzman chic.

The Miata was too much a clown car on this sad occasion, all gleaming red grin, but at least the black cloth top sat atop it like a sober homburg.

Temple had abandoned her signature tote bag for a simple black file clutch bag. She felt nervous, and wiped her palms on

the flowing skirt.

She hadn’t seen Danny since she’d brought him the news of Simon’s death. How he was holding up, she had no idea. She could guess, and didn’t want to imagine any more.

The entry door was coffered and painted black, centered with a huge brass Ebenezer Scrooge knocker. One might easily glimpse the face of a ghost of one’s choosing in that reflective surface.

Not Simon, though. Simon’s face had faded. Temple had only met him once, and forever after would confuse him with Matt. That fact made her even more uneasy. She was confused enough about Matt already. Luckily his face did not show up in the knocker.

The door opened easily for its size and her steel heels were sinking into ultraplush carpet the moment she stepped inside. Aubergine plush carpet; in other words, royal purple.

Temple mushed her way across the entry area, hearing the faint tones of Enya, supposedly the top musical choice of chichi spas and New Age harbors of all things massage, acupuncture, aromatherapy, and outrageously expensive.

Apparently top-drawer funeral parlors were on the same play list.

The faintest odor of ylang-ylang was in exquisite harmony with the delicately echoing music. She didn’t know why such elegant touches played on her nerves, but they did. She’d identified a body a few months before in a New York City medical examiner’s facility, which was worlds away from this overrefined environment. Still, they felt like cousins under the skin. And she was here to see another dead body, no matter how formally displayed.

Imagine her shock when a Fontana brother in a dead black suit appeared before her like a welltailored angel from a 1940s Frank Capra movie, only this was the angel of death.

“Rico?” she guessed.

“Emilio,” he corrected. Gently. “You are here for the Foster viewing, I assume.”

“I am. What are you here for?”

“Likewise.” He pulled his somber sleeves down over his white cuffs and the diamond-studded onyx Harley Davidson cuff links that peeked out despite his best efforts. “It was short notice,” he apologized. “May I show you to the viewing chamber?”

“I don’t understand why you’re … uh, officiating.”

“Danny Dove is highly regarded by all the major hotels and casinos in Vegas, especially the Crystal Phoenix. We are acting as chauffeurs and general factotums for the sad formalities.”

“You’re driving the hearses?”

“There are no hearses. Only the Lauren, Versace, St. Laurent, and Elton for those closest to the bereaved.”

“The Fontana brothers are acting as chauffeurs for Gangsters Legendary Limos?” “And security.”

Temple knew each carried an appropriately black steel Beretta. “I don’t get it.”

“We have a small financial stake in Gangsters,” Emilio noted modestly. “It was the least we could do, making our fleet available to the bereaved. The Malachite Room is to your right, first door.”

Temple followed directions, digesting the oddity of a Fontana brothers funeral.

Another coffered door awaited, this one covered in gold leaf. Inside the carpet was the emerald green of Irish grass, and the walls were covered in malachite mirror tiles.

Temple signed herself in at the gilt-edged book, and wrote a sentiment on the small card and envelope provided. She turned to face the room. Er, chamber.

Brocaded Louis XVI furniture groups dotted the dark green rug like oases of tapestry. The room was sparsely populated so far, but some people gathered at the fringes. The open casket of solid copper at the room’s far end blared like the final trumpet on Judgment Day.

Temple looked for the living first. Danny was … over there, next to Amelia Wong, of all people.

The Wong entourage clustered in one furniture oasis, mostly standing and looking uncomfortable. Especially the muscle in polyester suits and, even here, sunglasses.

Temple headed for Danny.

As she neared, she saw he looked utterly pale and dessicated, as if all the life had been kiln-dried out of him. Even his curly hair looked brittle, like wood shavings on the head of a puppet who longed to be a real boy.

“Munchkin,” he said in a tragic voice when he saw her.

His fingers curled around and crushed hers. “Thank you for coming.”

She couldn’t muster anything to say, and he added, “Not only here, but before, with the awful news.”

N o w s h e c o u l d n ‘ tdrummed up-“So tragic, so senseless, so sorry.” s a y a n y t h i n g i n a

He bowed his forehead toward hers, and they said nothing. Someone else was edging near Danny; Temple found herself off to the side, facing Amelia Wong.

“What a waste,” Ms. Wong said. “He was young, but yet a very old soul. I sensed it.”

“It’s … kind that you came.”

“I was called. I offered my services for the ceremonials, that all should be harmonious. Mr. Dove is a great artist of his day, and Simon would have been recognized in his own right in time. I had agreed to tutor him in my methods.” “Tutor Simon?”

“I am setting up a network of … emissaries.”

“A franchise.”

Wong’s black eyes glittered with annoyance. “If one would be so crass.”

Pardon her! Temple didn’t usually let crass commercial words pass her lips at a funeral parlor. She was, however, intrigued to know that Wong had been mentoring Simon. Another reason for some competitive Maylords drudge to hate him.

Temple braced herself to approach the coffin. Who liked funerals? Never having lost anyone close to her, other than elderly relatives presumably relieved to escape their last illnesses, she never knew whether she preferred to see the dead person glorified by the undertaker’s art into a Glamour Photo effigy or just represented by a discreet photograph.

Each method was cold, intolerably cold, in its own way. Two kneelers, empty, were paired before a handsome casket surrounded by its sophisticated floral arrangements. The hard part was edging close enough to look into the coffin. Oh, my. Simon, beautiful in life, gorgeous in death. She felt a presence beside her. Danny.

” ‘Mine eyes dazzle; he died young,’ ” she murmured through the tears. She evoked one of the most striking lines in three thousand years of dramatic literature. Danny, showman that he always was, recognized the paraphrase immediately.

The line was from The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster’s dark seventeenth-century drama. Those six words had lived as a paean of utter grief into the twenty-first century, a tribute to premature death, to murderous death, to the death of the beloved.

Danny’s hand stole into hers. “He would have adored your eulogy. I’m sorry you had just met him.” “No, I hadn’t.”

Danny’s red-rimmed eyes met hers with surprise.

“I knew you, so I had always known Simon.”

He squeezed her hand, ebbed away in a haze of her own eyes’ making.

And through that haze, she made the same mistake that so many people at Maylords had: she saw Matt lying there like the noble young knight slain by monsters.

She turned away, as if she saw a ghost.

The ghost of her own emotions, and the ghost of her own ever-analyzing brain.

The pattern blurred and came into too-brief focus again. The reason for murder just eluded her, but it was there, thumping like a heartbeat under her skin.

If only she could cut loose from her own fears and expectations, she might make some headway.

The only way to guarantee that was to push her nosy way forward, searching for answers.

Finding the murderer wouldn’t help Simon, but it might console Danny and it sure as heck would overcome her own unreasonable, itchy fears for Matt’s safety, now and forever and ever. Amen.

Chapter 38

Pillow Talk

Once my Miss Temple is safely en route to her date with death, I head back to Maylords and my new undercover role as a stuffed toy. So I am once again lying there, hoping for enlightenment, but observing pretty much nothing, when I hear a shrill, lamentably human voice. It again appears to be directed at yours truly.

“Oh, my goodness! Look at that. Look at that, will you?” Well, I would, except that I am playing Statue.

“That is fabulous! That is so amazing. That is the best, absolutely best, soft-sculpture cat that I have ever seen. Do not you think so, Irma?”

Not again. Is there no end to my charisma? Yes, Irma, you do think so. You are not alone. But I am a rock, get it? I am an island. Get

off my naval chart! You will blow my cover!

“Where is a salesman? I must have a salesman. Look at this.”

Probing nails finger my ruff. My well-groomed, handsome ruff, I might add.

“Where is the tag? There is no tag.”

“Maybe,” Irma suggests in an uncertain voice, “it is on the rear.” No! Not again! Nothing is on the rear but the … er, rear.

“I cannot believe they would not tag such a perfect specimen.”

That is exactly what I felt during my serial unhappy interactions with the so-called animal shelter in this town, a.k.a. the city pound.

The name must have something to do with the disposability of a pound of flesh, and fur.

“I must have it.”

You are not the first female to feel that way, lady. “Where is the salesman?”

“Uh, Patsy. This lady here seems to want to help you.”

“Can you sell me this fabulous fake cat?”

“I cannot ‘sell’ you anything, madam. Maylords does not sell. Selling is vulgar. We ‘place’ exquisite objects with appreciative acquisitors.”

“Huh?”

I am with Irma. Huh indeed.

“There is no tag on this animal,” she says, quite accurately.

“Even I haven’t seen it out before. Probably some … inventive person slipped it into place without the proper paperwork.” “Can you fix it?’

“Of course. I will simply look this item up in the computer.” This item!?

“Thank you, Miss-?”

“Blanchard. Beth Blanchard.”

“Well, I must have it. Look at the quality of the faux fur. The expression! So utterly feline. So utterly … out of it. I cannot imagine why Maylords would not tag such an exquisite item.”

Exquisite item. Okay, that is more like it.

“You have to understand the Maylords way,” Beth Blanchard says. “Everything we have is exquisite. We have no need to ‘push’ product at a gullible public. We seek a clientele, like yourself, who has the taste to discover the superb palette of perfection we offer.”

Wow A superb palette of perfection. In midnight black. That is me. Especially when / am playing dead. Superbly.

“If you ladies will wait in the caf� I’ll look up this item’s SKU number and have the full particulars to you in a few minutes.”

They duly depart, leaving Miss Beth Blanchard staring at me. I have to keep my eyes open and motionless, of course, like taxidermy eyes.

“A cat-shaped pillow!” she mutters. “What bozo bought this tacky piece of junk?”

I brace for a fist pounding into me, which is what people like her do to furniture accessories they do not like. Luckily, Miss Beth Blanchard takes out her frustrations elsewhere. She enters the Art Deco vignette and moves Mr. Simon’s Ert� prints back the way they were before she rearranged them this morning.

Talk about obsessive-compulsive! She reminds me of a rat on a wheel running first one way, then the other. As if it much makes a difference in the daily rat race that is Maylords. I know one thing: here the rats are winning.

Chapter 39

Hunting Grounds

for Murder

Temple found herself feeling the opposite of what she had expected after Simon’s wake: eager to race back to Maylords and the arts council reception … and Beth Blanchard.

A knife in the back.

Other than the fact that this seemed general operating procedure at Maylords-oh, let her count the ways-she was thinking that this was a maddened woman’s method. This was up close and personal.

And Beth Blanchard was another one of those towering examples of womanhood nowadays, like Lieutenant Molina. She’d have the height, and the strength, to strike down hard at a man’s back.

Even to manhandle his dead body into a vehicle. Or … maybe she had help. Jerome Johnson had been suspiciously servile when taking her orders around the showroom. Maybe he had to be. Or maybe Jerome had done it. Why? Well, he certainly was oversensitive about Temple’s nonrelationship with Matt Devine. And Matt had indicated Jerome had uncomfortable ideas (from Matt’s literally straitlaced view) about himself.

Maybe Jerome had mistaken Simon for Matt from the back and … whammo.

Because there was Matt, associated not with one but two of the few women who worked for Maylords: Janice and Temple

herself.

Hadn’t they all had terrifying recent evidence of how lethal a crush gone wrong could be?

But mostly Temple liked Beth Blanchard for Simon’s murder. She was a Bad Attitude walking. Temple could easily see

that temper getting the better of her.

Still, that didn’t explain the frightening shooting attack the night of the opening. Was it coincidence? A Wong-motivated international terrorist attack on the one hand, maybe involving hmmm, foreign trade, the Chinese tongs. If so, where did the overthe-top bikers harassing her come from? A local revue? The Good Ship Lollipop? Everything was so disparate. Guns and gays, media icons like Amelia and Danny, feuding low-level employees like Jerome and Beth. And in-house sexual harassment by both genders, for Beth had been after Simon.

But if Beth was the murderer what did she use? What weapon-? Most people don’t tote long sharp knives around with them. Temple’s theory made the stabbing a crime of balked passion. Why else would the murderer have had to resort to hiding the body in a motor vehicle that was the center of attention? Did the killer want the body to be discovered with a flash of media fire? Or just hidden long enough to arrange an alibi? And could Beth have dragged Simon there? Yes, if it hadn’t been too far. And she would have been frantic to hide the evidence of her act.

If obscuring the time or place of the murder was a goal, the Murano’s heavy window tint made it a pretty clever and safe

bet.

Temple hated the almost opaque black window tints people used now. I n a desert climate like Las Vegas’s it was supposed to block out heat. But Temple always liked to check out who was poking along at minus-zero miles per hour, or zigzagging in and out of traffic like a berserk attachment on an Italiansewing machine. Not that she had ever done anything more with sewing than hand stitch pants legs hems up. That was why she preferred skirts that she could always roll up at the waist.

Temple was in the Maylords parking lot before she knew it, habit allowing her to drive the familiar route without impeding

her theorizing.

She checked her watch before she grabbed her tote bag. Less than two hours before the reception. Amelia Wong was coming from Simon’s viewing too, and had still been there with her whole entourage before Temple left.

That meant Temple had time to look up Beth and Jerome to ask some subtle leading questions she hadn’t quite thought of yet… . She did not relish approaching either one now. BB had been born hostile and certainly showed that side of herself to Temple. And Jerome didn’t seem to like her. Or like the fact that Matt did.

The store was oddly deserted, a testimony to the recently turgid economy even for a hot new ticket in town like Maylords.

The only way to find her usual suspects was to cruise the aisles. Beth Blanchard would come running at any sign or sound of a customer to hijack, Temple knew, not disturbed that her steel-heeled Weitzmans were clicking away like an old-fashioned telegraph key on the polished stone.

She really didn’t see how Simon’s death could have had anything to do with the Amelia Wong hullabaloo. It must have been a coincidence. As for the window-blasting spree, mischievous malice was nothing new for Maylords, which apparently axed employees as early and often as the French Revolution guillotined aristocrats.

Temple was lost.

The store was laid out like a maze, meant to surprise and astound, not to be predictable.

Her heels echoed like bullets hitting glass. She usually liked the sound of her own progress, the sense that she was moving forward briskly.

Now she began to wonder if “briskly” was such a good idea. One man had already died in this upscale Wonderland. She

had raced in here expecting to nail a killer.

Maybe a killer would nail her.

Where were the Fontana brothers when you needed them?

At Layaway Land, or wherever, watching over Amelia Wong and Company, i.e., her Flying Monkey minions.

So Danny wasn’t here. Max sure wasn’t here. Matt was not here. And the Wonderful Wizard of Ahs was out to lunch.

Temple tried to distract herself from her nerves by casting a musical “yellow brick” road show of her own.

She was Dorothy. Danny was … the scarecrow. Max was … the Wizard himself. Matt was … hmmm, the Tin Woodman, who was looking for a heart or maybe just a libido. The Wicked Witch was Beth Blanchard and the Flying Monkeys were the Maylords security forces.

And Toto was …

Holy not-cow! Louie!

What was Midnight Louie doing here, right in front of her just when she was feeling most abandoned, swaggering his tail

left to right like a metronome, leading her? …

Leading her through the maze that was Maylords, a physical and a psychological maze.

Was it really him?

He stopped, growled, and regarded her with the expression a cat would reserve for a termite.

Yup. It was Louie his own self.

Hey! Sometimes a faithful cat is the best a girl can do. Temple moved forward, cheered by the company. They rounded a corner and she stopped.

Creepy, where they’d ended up. Right at Simon’s wonderful Art Deco room vignette.

Temple could have bawled, except she saw an all-too- familiar form standing in front of the paired Erte prints.

That witch couldn’t let a dead man rest in peace for even three days. She was fooling with Simon’s design yet again! Well, who’s afraid of the big, bad witch?

Not Temple when in full defense-of-friend Mode.

“Can’t even wait for the internment to ruin his room setting, can you?” she challenged.

At her ankles, Midnight Louie rubbed back and forth, back and forth, as if intent on impressing his presence on her.

Beth Blanchard turned stiffly, like Freddy on Elm Street or Jason on Halloween.

Omigosh. The woman was demented. She hardly seemed human the slow, deliberate way she turned to face Temple.

Major creepy. Over the edge. Temple had been all too right.

She glanced down at Midnight Louie. He didn’t look like a SWAT team, which is what Temple figured she would need when the chair swung around to reveal the desiccated, dead face of Mrs. Bates Motel… .

Beth Blanchard swung around. Her frozen expression sneered at Temple. The knife … the dagger glinted in the overhead

track lighting.

It was embedded in Beth Blanchard’s sunken chest. Yo ho ho. Temple reared back. She saw the track lights reflecting on a metallic hangman’s noose that let Beth Blanchard twist slowly in the air-conditioning.

Picture-hanging wire, Temple thought. Strangled with picture-hanging wire and strung up right in front of the Erte prints she had never been content to leave as Simon had hung them. As she had never been content to leave Simon alone.

And so someone had seen to it that she had been left alone at last.

The body spun again in some whimsy of the air conditioning. She seemed to slow dance in the perfectly lovely vignette. Waltzing with the dagger in her heart.

Which was … the perfect weapon to find in a home furnishings showroom, the perfect weapon to seize and plunge into the passing torso, whether Simon Fosters’s or hers.

A letter opener.

A solid pewter letter opener with a spiky Chinese symbol for a handle that was as sharp as the blade itself.

What we have here is a feng shui felony.

Double felony, Temple thought.

Now that she looked closer-and who could take her eyes off an outr� scene that seemed to belong on the silver screen? -Beth had been hung from the top rail of the chrome four-poster bed.

Let the punishment fit the crime: she had rearranged the designs of others, now someone had arranged her into a death scene of his or her own design, for his or her own reasons.

Although the head was tilted, and the wire had cut into the flesh of her throat, there was little blood and the face was amazingly undistorted. The hanging must have come after.

And who, Temple wondered, had been expected to find her like this?

Some unwary shopper?

A fellow worker?

Surely not Temple herself, who even now had her cell phone in her shaking hand and was dialing 911. Looking around, she couldn’t even spy Midnight Louie. The store, and she, was truly deserted at the moment.

She glanced over her shoulder, hunting a murderer-at-large, or ghosts? Simon’s ghost? He had been murdered much less brutally than Beth Blanchard, and his body had been hidden, not displayed like a hunting trophy.

Temple shivered. She thought she heard footsteps on the slick surface, felt disembodied heavy breathing on the back of her neck. At least she didn’t have to bring the news of this death to a loved one, like Danny.

All she had to do was remain calm and alert the authorities. But Temple suddenly felt so very alone by her trusty cell phone. She could call Max, but he wasn’t answering lately. She’d never called Matt much and hated to involve him further. Maybe Electra was right: she’d blown it. Two men interested in her, once so close and yet so far lately. Now this, the second murder on her professional turf; a dead body to watch twisting slowly in the wind of the air conditioning, and who was she gonna call? Ghostbusters?

Why not the police? They’d be more likely to come running than any significant other male recently, except for Midnight Louie. She had Molina’s number on her instant-dial list, but Temple’s finger just wouldn’t go running to Molina. She’d call the general number and let police routine have its way.

She didn’t want to attract Molina’s attention to her any more than she had to. Or to Matt, who had actually become involved with Maylords through Janet. Or to Max, though he was miles away from this crime milieu, unlike the last one they all had in common, thank God. She was looking out for her friends and lovers. Lover.

Where the heck was Max keeping himself these days any-way?

Chapter 40

Witless Protection

Program

Temple perched on the leopardskin chaise longue on the perimeter of Simon’s vignette, feeling more like prey than predator.

Beyond her crime-scene technicians videotaped and photographed the gruesome Halloween poster child that Beth Blanchard had become.

Opposite Temple sat two of C. R. Molina’s best: detectives Morrie Alch and Merry Su.

Their eyes were set in deep-purple bezels of fatigue. You could tell they’d been on the Maylords case-now cases-night and day.

Alch was a comfortably fifties guy. Not the era, the age bracket. He did not have abs or eye pouches of steel, but he broadcast a laid-back sort of humanity that was very refreshing in the 24/7 Las Vegas world.

Su … well, she was a shih tzu (not feng shui) on amphetamines. Pure canine tacking machine in a tiny overachieving body even smaller than Temple’s.

“Why did you come early to the Maylords reception?” Su’s black felt-tip pen was poised, like a dagger, to strike.

Alch wielded a pencil, a mellow yellow number two. And he seemed ready to cut Temple a break. “So you do PR for Maylords as well as the Crystal Phoenix?”

“Maylords is a new client,” Temple told Alch, ignoring Su. Probably not a good idea, but comforting.

“And you knew Beth Blanchard?” Su asked.

” ‘Knew’ is too strong a word. I ‘encountered’ her in the store, during the course of doing my job.” ” ‘Encountered.’ Was it friendly?”

“Absolutely, Detective Su. I’m a PR person. All my encounters are friendly, or I’m out of a job.”

“So it wouldn’t have been friendly if your job hadn’t depended upon it?”

Before Temple could rise to that occasion and protest too much, Alch intervened.

“Miss Barr means that she had no personal relationships with anyone on staff.”

Su’s face tightened into an I-don’t-believe-in-sugar-plumfairies visage. “I’ll be the judge of what Ms. Barr means.”

Uh-oh. Someone had been taking Molina lessons. Temple quirked a knowing smile at Alch.

He quirked back, which annoyed Su no end.

“Tell us,” Alch suggested, “everything about how you found the body.”

Temple told it.

Then they asked her about the deceased.

She wasn’t willing to cite Glory Diaz as a source. “Fag hag” sounded a bit prejudicial, to everybody.

“She had an abrasive personality,” Temple settled on saying. “How abrasive?” Su asked. Abrasively.

“Like number-thirty sandpaper.”

Su consulted Alch.

“The coarse-grained, really rough stuff,” he explained. “Will wear down steel.”

“What you say,” Su allowed, “agrees with information we got from other employees.”

“In fact,” Alch said, “Blanchard was a chief suspect in the Simon Foster killing.”

Su scowled at him like a foo dog on palace guard duty for revealing that.

“What motive?” Temple asked.

“None of your business,” Su said.

“Actually, yes, it is. I am PR maven for this enterprise. Do you have any idea of what having blinking police-car headache racks circling the front door and ambulances screaming away and crime-scene technicians crawling all over the expensive wool area rugs can do to a glitzy furniture store opening, and only me here to fend off every kind of media from the local sharks to Hollywood Access and Women’s Wear Daily?”

“My Jimmy Choos bleed for you,” Su said sarcastically.

Temple gawked at the detective’s size three feet (her own were a comparatively large five), but saw only Sam and Libby’s retro-Mary Janes, clunky but cool. Probably a kids’ size.

“Anyway,” Temple said, “it behooves me to help the police as much as possible and get this opening extravaganza done with as little bad publicity as possible while still keeping Maylords in the feature spotlight. So I need to know what’s happening to keep the media out of my hair, and yours. Getting back to Beth Blanchard. Are you thinking she was indulging in sexual harassment?”

“Obsessive crush,” Alch explained. “Discovered the object of her affections was gay.”

“That wouldn’t be front-page news around here:’ Temple said. “Straight guys are the exception.”

“Some women do have a habit of falling for the unobtainable.” Su’s dark eyes drilled into Temple’s as if she had secret information about her soul.

Tell me about it, Temple thought. “I believe they’re called fag hags,” she said instead. Demurely.

Alch’s shaggy pepper-and-salt eyebrows raised at her use of the term. Her father all over again!

Su zeroed in. “What might Amelia Wong have to do with this Maylords bunch?”

“Very little. She’s high-cost, hired-celebrity help. She comes in for an outrageous amount of money, does her media thing for a week, and is soon off to some other continent.““She has had death threats.”

“I’ve heard. So has every other media household name.”

“First a serious sniper shooting,” Su said, “that almost smacks of terrorism. Something distant and impersonal, more

directed against an institution, a building, than the people in it. Then a knifing and the display of the corpse in an outr� location. The prize Murano. Somebody was saying this Simon Foster was a prize nobody could have. So we’re talking a personal target, an intimate suspect. Love triangle maybe. Now a second stabbing, with an even more elaborate display of the victim. Plus the overkill of the knife and the picture wire.”

“You’re thinking Blanchard killed Foster, and then someone killed Blanchard? Revenge for the first killing?”

“Blanchard was … mounted in the late Simon Foster’s design area. Apparently she took it upon herself to rearrange the works of others. Now she herself has ended up ‘rearranged’ into a gruesome addition to the first victim’s interior design.”

Alch clapped softly. “Nicely done. A design for dying.”

Su did not pause for praise, but thumbed through her notes. “Are you familiar with a Janice Flanders?”

“I was familiar with her name, as an artist some friends of mine … admired. I only met her last week, here at Maylords, where she’s now an employee.”

“Apparently she was one of the people irritated by Beth Blanchard, but she was the only one to protest in a formal memo to management.”

“If you’ve met Janice, you know that she’s not afraid to speak out.”

“She is also the girlfriend of a man who has no particular relationship to Maylords, but who bears an amazing superficial likeness to the dead designer. Do you know a Matt Devine?”

Did she? Temple wondered. “He’s a neighbor.”

Su was surprised enough to dart Alch an inquiring glance. He retained his affable poker face, letting Su lead.

“And,” Temple added, “a friend of Lieutenant Molina, as well.” “Molina!” Su reared back as if snakebitten. “He’s a friend of hers?”

Alch smiled into his mustache.

Temple was beginning to really like him.

He finally bestirred himself. “We ran into Mr. Devine during that nutsy Star Trek investigation. I’m surprised, Su, that a savvy young up-and-comer like you forgot a babe like him. Molina certainly didn’t. And you, Miss Ban. You saw both men, Foster and Devine. You knew Devine. Could one have really been mistaken for the other?”

A key question. Temple gave it the long consideration it deserved.

“I’d say no, except that their coloring and height was similar, and their clothing shades matched that night. Simon was far more fashion-forward, though.”

“But from behind-?” Su prompted, on the edge of her seat. “In a dim room setting,” Temple conceded. “Yeah. It could happen.”

“So who,” Alch asked, “would want to kill this friend of Molina’s who was here with Janice Flanders?” He chuckled. “This

Devine’s a pretty good-looking guy. Maybe Molina herself?”

“God, no!” Alch had shocked Temple into a revealing outburst, but it was too late to backtrack. “I said Matt was a `friend’ of Janice’s. I meant ‘friend.’ Maybe that’s too strong. Acquaintance might be better.”

“You don’t invite a mere acquaintance of the opposite sex to a Hallmark moment like the opening ceremony of your new employer.”

“Janice is a single mother,” Temple told Su. “There are a lot of occasions when a single woman wants a male escort at a

social event, just so she doesn’t look like a loner. Or a loser. No one takes that kind of setup too seriously.”

Alch wasn’t convinced. “Maybe someone did this time, only they axed the wrong guy.”

“But Beth Blanchard knew Simon and had seen Matt. Why would she mix them up?”

“Maybe she decided this was the perfect time. Maybe she was hoping we’d wonder who the real target was.”

Temple mulled over Alch’s theory. The woman had indeed acted like she had a major burr under her instep that evening.

“Maybe you have a point,” Su told Temple. “Maybe someone didn’t like Devine’s escort duty.” Before Temple could say that was highly unlikely, Su found her own unwelcome link. “You, maybe,” she added.

“Me?”

“Your fingerprints are all over this environment and the people in it. I hear you were the one who rushed right over to the

Oasis to tell Danny Dove about Simon’s death.”

“We’re friends.”

“You’re friends with an awful lot of suspects in this case.”

“Danny? A suspect? You must be crazy.”

“Murder is an intimate act, Ms. Barr,” Su said. “We look first at close associates. Spouses, lovers.”

“I know, but you’re wrong! It’s something here at Maylords. The bad vibes in this place would have knifed Caesar, trust me.”

“Do you know a Rafi Nadir?”

“Uh, casually.”

Su snorted, as if her point about Temple was made.

Alch leaned forward, elbows on knees. (No wonder his polyester-blend suits were baggy in both locations, like his face, well worn and trustworthy.)

“This case is a mess, I agree. We got a gangland-style hit … on a bunch of display windows. We got a gay man and a straight woman knifed to death. We got friends of friends hanging around this place. Then there’s one Big Mama of a media maven tossing orange peels right and left, into a murder vehicle. I tell you, it gives me nightmares.”

Not you, Columbo Jr., Temple thought admiringly. Su was the rat terrier, but Alch was the bloodhound on this team.

“So,” he said, hunching farther forward. “I hear you have something of a reputation for creative crime solving. Who do you

think did it?”

Temple took a deep breath.

“Nobody I know,” she said.

Su glared at her. Alch stared at his wing-tip shoes. She stared back. It was what she had heard called a Mexican standoff.

To PR or not to PR.

That was the question the LV Metropolitan Police Department CAPERS unit (Crimes Against PERSons) had to decide.

Was she going to be considered a suspicious person and put on ice one way or another, or were they going to let her do her job?

Which Matt said was too enabling. What did a radio shrink know anyway? Maybe her.

“As long as we can isolate the crime scene,” Alch said, “I vote we let Ms. Barr go to the atrium and do her ringleader bit.”

Su frowned. Her eyebrows had been plucked into Chinese brush strokes, an amazing configuration of thick and thin, reminiscent of the handle of the letter opener/dagger that had done in Beth Blanchard.

Temple always admired creative cosmetics, but didn’t dare tell the intimidating Su.

Su considered. She silently consulted Alch. He beamed encouragement. Even Temple felt the glow. She liked the guy. He reminded her of her father when her mother wasn’t talking him into being anxious about his only daughter.

Alch winked at her, so swiftly that Su never noticed.

“All right,” Su said, none too happily. “But if Molina’s not happy with this, it’s your scalp.”

Alch shrugged. “There’s so little left to scalp.”

Temple winked back at him. He had nothing to worry about but self-deprecation.

So she was set free.

Temple headed for the atrium and the forthcoming media ceremonials. She’d persuaded Kenny Maylord that good PR required coughing up a public donation to the local arts council, since the MADD money donated on TV had originally been earmarked for them.

S h e w o u l d h a v e Ainsworth, t o tmake o sure n eKenny dMaylord o wdid nall the ttalking h eto the

press. He always acted like he was on valium, which is what this situation needed. Getting most of the media attention focused on Amelia Wong would bring out her telegenic charmand have Maylord beaming like a winning team owner at the Superbowl. Dogs. She would mention the dogs. Maybe send for them. Media types were dog people, usually. All those hairy, bow-topped little heads would save the day. Maybe some of the Maylords staff could fetch them … no, get Amelia’s personal staff out of here on dog duty. The way they swarmed around her made her look too pampered and powerful. Yeah, that would work… .

Temple had lots to think about in a short time. And that was good.

That meant that she would not think about Beth Blanchard twisting slowly in the air conditioning. She would not think about wishing Beth Blanchard off the planet. Or about who else might have done so, including Janice Flanders, or Matt Devine on Janice Flander’s behalf. Or Jerome Johnson. Or even … Danny Dove, who must have known Blanchard had harassed his lost better half.

For once, the only suspect du jour not on the menu in this case was Max.

Or … could Molina somehow drag him into it? It wouldn’t do to underestimate the homicide lieutenant’s obsession with blaming something on Max.

Or … had he been playing Mr. No-can-see in order to keep a surreptitious eye on her at Maylords? Max had a guardian angel complex. Still, she was sure he’d been up to something she didn’t know about. That meant it was dangerous, but Maylords didn’t seem to be dangerous to anyone other than its own.

Temple was suddenly glad Max had made himself scarce lately, for whatever reason. She just hoped the reason provided

an alibi.

Chapter 41

Imagine Meeting You

H e r e I I …

A glare of TV lights surrounded the scene in the atrium half an hour later.

Temple was really sorry to see that. Normally PR people loved to attract the glare of the spotlight for their clients, but not when they had to tell everybody to fast-forward the party and go home.

She winced to see the thorough attendance her PR wizardry had mustered on darn short notice.

All of Wong’s minions were present, as well as Kenny and Barb Maylord, and staff members with stress lines drawing down their mouths: the tall, ugly, bucktoothed guy Matt had mentioned making a pass at him; toady manager Mark Ainsworth, sweating hard under the TV lights; a flock of genteel lady decorators, looking sullen.

Also prominent was the Wong cortege, Baylee Harris, Pritchard Merriweather, Tiffany Yung, and the exercise guru, Carl Osgaard, including the two nameless dudes with sunglasses implanted in their eye sockets. No dogs. Amelia had nixed the dogs.

And, rounded up fast, the MADD president and some of her staff, the sober-looking women who clustered together like a PTA group.

Temple decided she would tell the arts council people-luckily, they were a sleed and civil lot-the bad news first. Lingering check-passing ceremonials didn’t belong on a crime scene.

Especially an extraordinarily well-covered check-passing photo op. Damn, she was good! And that was bad. In this instance. The police had made no bones about it: get the public off the scene ASAP, and leave it to them.

A local radio personality, a heavyset jocular man called Nevada Jones, was oozing into a mike. Behind him lurked Crawford Buchanan, mouthing a soft-voiced play-by-play into his live radio mike as if he were the ghost of Howard Cosell.

The whole thing was terminally hokey, nothing Temple would have dreamed up in her worst nightmare. And to her, the phantoms of the recent deaths hung over the proceedings like halitosis.

Temple noted that not only were Amelia Wong’s bodyguards obviously on duty but Maylords had rousted its entire security

force to ring the entire area.

She marked Rafi Nadir among them, dark suited and as theatrically glowering as a Gangsters chauffeur.

He saw her and winked.

Man, first Alch, now Nadir. How come nobody remotely available winked at her? Max, where are you when you are sorely needed?

Amelia Wong stepped to the front of the Maylords group, bracketed by the Sunglasses. Behind her, blond Baylee was lost behind a giant cardboard check.

Before Ms. Wong could say a word, Temple dashed forward to intercept her with the most negative announcement of her generally positive PR life. The show’s oven folks. My client, Maylords, is a multiple murder site. Forget the festivities, the good deeds, and get the hell out of here before you die. And so will my career reputation.

But before Temple could do the right thing and commit ca-reer suicide in front of Crawford Buchanan and everybody, another figure pushed through the fretting circle of official police observers, right between Alch and Su.

It was tall, dark, clad in navy blue, and meant business.

Oh, my great-aunt Thumbelina, it’s Lieutenant C. R. Molina. What on earth is she doing here? Maybe a double murder and

assault-weapon attack would attract the literally lofty personal attention of a homicide lieutenant.

Temple felt the slo-mo agony of watching an inevitable accident of epic proportions. She did a double take in four-four time. From Molina to Nadir, from Nadir back to Molina.

When would one notice, and recognize, the other?

Who would be first to see, and to move? And how?

Temple only had eyes for Rafi Nadir. And Carmen Molina.

Molina had noticed Temple. She frowned suspiciously and let her slick gaze slide past the hoopla to study the crowd, looking for what had attracted Temple.

Great. Temple had gone from cooked PR whiz to human pointer and police snitch.

Janice next received Molina’s steely passing gaze and instant ID, but never even noticed.

Alch and Su watched their boss’s scrutiny with studied indifference.

Molina panned past the TV videographers. Then Amelia and company. Her laserlike vivid blue gaze moved on, taking

instant photos of everyone present. Inevitably, it found and lingered on the outer circle of hell at last.

On the Maylords private security force, each and every one. On … finally, Rafi Nadir.

Only Temple fully understood what this inevitable meeting of old allies turned intimate enemies might mean.

Nadir sensed Molina’s intense observation, and looked back. Shock. Mutual paralysis. Sparks. Fury without sound. Molina had frozen into angry ice.

Nadir looked like he would spontaneously combust.

You! The unspoken challenge jumped like heat lightning from opposite sides of the circle of onlookers.

The crowd buzzed on, unaware.

Temple held her breath. This was one scene she wanted to savor in mental rerun for years. Except it was her job to avert public scenes. Drat and darn and damn Yankees! She’d better concoct a distracting tactic fast.

Chapter 42

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Who’da cast a furniture store as the setting for a clash of titans?

Temple wasn’t the only witness flash-frozen into horror when Nadir’s eyes met Molina’s. None of the other onlookers knew the history of these two contenders, though.

“Listen, people,” Temple heard herself saying. “This check-passing ceremony would really film much better thirty feet

back, in front of the central fountain. Let’s move, shall we?”

The splashing water of the central fountain would also muffle any imminent fireworks up front.

Temple shooed her tight knot of cardboard-check clutchers backward. Media cameras and mikes obligingly followed. It only took ninety seconds to get the group in motion en masse, but Temple’s ears were tuned to the action behind her.

For such dedicated antagonists, their reactions were in total harmony.

“You!” each spat like fighting alley cats. Temple backed up behind the videographers, nodding to encourage the check passer, then turned and sped back to the crime scene in progress.

Interesting. Temple detected no fear on Nadir’s side, but plenty of high anxiety on Molina’s.

Not that the Iron Maiden of the LVMPD broadcast anything but authoritarian steel. Still, Temple had spent … oh, hours … trying to figure the woman out. She noticed the classic Shakespearian giveaway in the lieutenant’s demeanor: mainly, way too much cold control. Methinks she doth repress too much.

“What are you doing here?”

The pair spoke in embarrassing concert again.

“Security,” Nadir said in answer.

Molina glanced over her shoulder at a puzzled Alch. “You have a file on this guy?”

“I do, Lieutenant,” Alch said.

Both Nadir and Molina jumped at the sound of her title.

Nadir’s surprise instantly iced over with resentment. Molina froze like a cat on a hot tin roof who had just been fingered by animal control. If her situation weren’t precarious enough already, they had to make TV news of it.

“Make sure you keep that file current,” she snapped, then turned to leave.

“Wait!” Nadir moved to stop her, maybe just follow her. “I need to talk to you.”

“Not my need at all,” she said. “Thank your unlucky stars for that. Stay out of my way. I don’t need to tell you to stay out of trouble either; that’s a waste of time. If you’re cleared on this, I do suggest you stay out of Las Vegas. Permanently.”

This time when she turned her back on Nadir she was unstoppable, leaving in her wake only the whip crack of her bootheels smashing into travertine.

Nadir instinctively started to follow, but Su, tiny flower of Asian womanhood, stepped forward to block his way. He assessed her, moved ahead.

Su grabbed one hand and did some twisty thing with his thumb that had Nadir’s knees buckling.

“The lieutenant doesn’t want to see you,” Su said. “Got it?” She released his thumb and stepped back in a martial arts

stance, hands up and spread to indicate she was willing to let him off if he didn’t push it.

Rafi shook his hand. “Tricks. You women are full of ‘em.”

It wasn’t what Temple would have said to diffuse the situation, but Su just grinned, complimented. Then she turned on her own low-heeled Mary Janes and exited, quiet as a crouching tiger.

That left … Detective Alch. And Temple.

He caught Temple’s eyes as she met his. They had seen each other on the fringes of several investigations under Molina’s supervision. Temple knew Alch was one of Molina’s top detectives. Alch knew Temple for a gifted amateur sleuth who was a perennial thorn in his boss’s hide. They both shrugged. An unspoken understanding had been reached.

Alch ambled off after the macho women on his team. Temple ankled over to macho man Rafi Nadir. “What did she do to your thumb? Is it okay?”

“Yeah. After the numbness wears off. Some tricky Chink stuff. They’re little people and they make up for it with all that marital arts hooey. Makes sense for them. I wasn’t ready for that, from her. Jesus. Carmen.”

Temple wasn’t ready to hear those last two words in tandem.

“What?” Nadir looked around, saw they were alone. At last. He figured out the source of Temple’s surprise, at least. “I’m Christian, for Christ’s sake. Lebanese-American, like Ralph Nader. I get to swear.” - Temple put up her hands, realizing too late she was mimicking Su’s hand’s-off stance. But from her it was a peace sign.

Nadir’s hand checked the back of his neck for tension. “What the hell was she doing here?” He eyed Temple. “You know her?”

“Urn, she knows me, and not in a necessarily friendly way. I imagine she wanted to view the Wong juggernaut in action. It must be tough investigating murder among the media icons.”

“A lieutenant. Sure, why not? Women and blacks and Latinos are the gender and color scheme of the decade in public service jobs. What do you know about her?”

“A little,” Temple said. “I bet you know a lot more. Maybe we should talk about it”

“I don’t get off for an hour.” He looked around. The fountain area was still ablaze with TV lights.

“I can wait,” Temple said. She had a little exercise in crowd control to finish first.

The check passing was over and recorded for six seconds on the nightly news. Videographers were on the floor in obeisance, packing their equipment in oblong black boxes that struck Temple as coffins for cameras.

“How did it go?” Temple asked Kenny and Amelia Wong after she’d thanked the MADD representatives and sent them on their way with the media.

“We did as you said:’ Kenny reported like a dutiful fourth-grader. “Anytime they asked about the death on site, I said I hadn’t been briefed by the police yet and to check with their spokesperson.”

“We kept some of the focus on MADD,” Amelia added, “as you suggested. It made them look crass to badger us about the death here with grieving mothers who had lost children looking on. Media are sheep.”

“Not always,” Temple cautioned. “They can bite like packs of wolves sometimes. But they do have hearts and if you can

find a way to stir their collective conscience, you are much better off than being the target of their relentless curiosity. If either of you are contacted for statements again, express your sincere sorrow at the death. That’s all. Over and over again, in different words if you have to. Let the police make the official statements.”

Having settled down her power players, Temple headed back to Rafi Nadir. He was staring out the front windows at the parking lot, and was startled when she came up to him.

“I thought you were hobnobbing with the big cheeses.”

This was it: her chance to pump Rafi for every shred of insight into Early Molina. He was obviously shocked out of his shoes. Max would love this.

Holding Rafi Nadir’s hand on the occasion of his unexpected meeting with Carmen Molina, Temple discovered, involved (sigh) a rendezvous at a strip club, the only place he would agree to go.

At least she had talked him into patronizing Les Girls after his shift was over. Les Girls was the only strip club in Vegas owned and operated by (gasp) women. Women strippers, retired … or not.

Temple was known there from a previous PR job, and, on the pretext of visiting the Maylords ladies’ room, an oddly inapt expression, called ahead on her cell phone. She reached the manager, Lindy Boggs. That assured a reserved table where Temple could hear what Nadir was saying over the cranked-up music.

Did she have pull in this town or what?

They went in separate cars. Nadir would never consent to playing passenger in her Miata. Ride shotgun in a pussy car? Hell, no: unshakable evidence of a wuss. And Temple wasn’t keen on sharing the shabby charms of the ‘89 Grand Prix that turned out to be his.

So out of the lot and over to Les Girls they drove in single file, Temple bringing up the rear and wondering how she could

dig up all the dirt she was dying to know about Molina’s lurid past. Hey, if it involved Rafi Nadir, it had to be lurid!

Chapter 43

Ottoman Empire

Since everyone is leaving Maylords as if fleeing the Titanic, I find it expedient to trail the human footwear leaving my cushy gilded cage, a.k.a. the scene of my recent retail triumphs.

Despite having been hailed as the most chichi household accessory since the Teddy bear, my ears are twitching as if fleabitten. I have heard more than I wanted to during my day undercover atop the upholstery, and do not yet know what to make of it.

And then there is the bloody murder I have witnessed. No, I did not see the abrasive Beth Blanchard done in and hung as decoratively as a string of dried red peppers. But I did witness the epic reunion of Miss Lt. C. R. Molina with her long-absent former squeeze, Rafi Nadir. Was that an emotion-wringing spectacle! I love to watch humans spat.

Meanwhile, I slip out with the Wong party and the media mob. The videographers carry long black boxes full of lighting equipment that I can trot under like a shadow. Anyone of my acquaintance might spot my tricks.

Luckily, my Miss Temple is so fascinated by the Molina-Nadir scene that she would not notice a giant cockroach

hitchhiking on her instep.

I split off from the crew outdoors and scurry for the store’s foundation plantings. I have not reckoned on a surprise reunion of my own, however.

Miss Midnight Louise leaps out of an oleander clump and claws me on the shoulder.

“Not so fast, partner. When can I expect to see the holiday line? A skeletal you for Halloween would be truly chic.”

“I imagine you noticed that I was quite a hit among the home furnishings set.”

“I noticed that you were about as `undercover’ as an orange on St. Paddy’s Day. So. What did you learn? Who killed the latest corpse? What is going on? What does the lady lieutenant have against the Maylords security guy?”

I burrow out of sight, not wanting to be seen being harangued by my own associate. “Let me catch my breath, Louise.”

“Like you were not catching your breath, and about forty thousand winks, on the Maylords cushions all day?” “A lot has gone on.”

“So I observed through the windows. But what does it mean?”

“Unfortunately, I was not near the murder scene before my poor Miss Temple happened upon the dead woman.”

“That was no doubt the time you played dead when the woman moved you to the other sofa to see how you would look against gray suede.”

“How did I look against gray suede?”

“Puffed up, lazy, and unobservant.”

“Louise! I had to act like I did not have a bone in my torso. It was bad enough that she would have detected my body heat in a few seconds, had she not set me down.”

“I am surprised that you did not go into the usual comatose state that you adopt on furniture. That reduces your metabolism to dust-bunny level. So you have nothing to report that I could not have seen from my outside watching posts?”

“Actually, though I was on lunch break at the Dumpster out back at the probable time of the murder, I did happen upon it soon after. And I saw a lot of suspicious characters slinking in and out of the model rooms beforehand. There was the late Miss Beth Blanchard herself, who had a fetish for rearranging pictures. There was a squat, chubby man in a linen suit who seemed to be spying on everybody. There was Mr. Rafi Nadir, who also seemed to be watching everybody. I noticed a nondescript man with a beard who was keeping a close eye on the murder victim as well. That list does not include a rather scruffy, tall fel-low wearing a great quantity of cow leather, who apparently had come in the back way. I saw him watching La Blanchard hang pictures, but then he just vanished. He was wearing boots and sunglasses.”

“Hmmm.” Miss Louise does not allow her comment to es calate into anything so pleasant as a purr. “It could have been the hit man … or I wonder if that could have been your roomie’s previous live-in, Mr. Max Kinsella? He has been strangely absent lately.”

“That is fine with me. It is a lot less crowded on the king-size without him. Do you think he could be working undercover at Maylords?”

“No more so than you,” she says acidly.

I immediately get the implication. “I have made a lot of progress, Louise, it is just not obvious yet.”

“And when will it be obvious? At the rate people are dying in Maylords, customers will have to schedule s�ances to consult

the staff.”

“Clients,” I correct her. “Only low-brow establishments have ‘customers.’”

“I see.” She looks me over as if I were human belly-button lint. “So you are well rested, but you have learned nothing

useful.”

“What I have learned will be very hard to convey to these insensitive humans. I will need to develop a long-range plan.

Do not rush me, Louise. I must have time to lay my plans.”

“You sound like a hen.”

Before I can respond to this rank accusation, Miss Louise stares in the direction of the parking lot.

“I see your roomie is going off with the sinister-looking Nadir guy that gave Lieutenant Molina the heebie-jebbies. Maybe you should follow her.”

“No,” I say, surprising the vibrissae off of her. “Miss Temple can take care of herself, but there is something else only I, and you, can do, and it is not around here.”

She presses me for details, but I only have a hunch, and am not about to blow it. Besides, I am eager to get outside and eavesdrop on what is going on inside Molina’s car.

Chapter 44

I t ‘ s M y P a r t y …

In the Maylords parking lot, Molina had hurled herself into the passenger seat of the Crown Vic and sat there, arms crossed on her chest, staring through the windshield into the glare of the Las Vegas lateafternoon sun.

Morrie Alch got in, and started the engine. The fan, set on high, washed them with lukewarm air.

“Su do any prosecutable damage?” she asked.

Alch chuckled. “You got eyes in the back of your head, don’t you? No. Just cooled him down some. I get a charge out of how she can ice those macho guys. She looks so dainty and acts so alpha.”

“Yeah.” Molina sighed. “The psychology of surprise. I could never use that. I’m too big. For a woman.” “Not in my book.”

She shot him a glance, half surprise, half warning. She didn’t encourage fraternizing.

Alch figured this was no time to accommodate what Carmen Molina didn’t encourage.

“This is bad,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“Very bad. Want to tell me why?”

“No.”

“Need to tell me why?”

She nailed him with a don’t-mess-with-me glance, then, seeing it wasn’t working, sighed again.

“Off the record,” he said. “Out of the ball park. Like we, weren’t cops, weren’t superior and inferior. Like we were . veterans of the same war, reminiscing years after.”

“You’re not anybody’s inferior.”

“Chain of command says so. But screw chain of command. Command isn’t going to help you on this one, is it? When we

get back to headquarters, why don’t we grab our own cars? I can meet you at, oh, some barbecue joint or pizza parlor. We can talk and no one will overhear us.”

Molina shook herself out of her atypical funk long enough to eye him suspiciously. “Is this a date you’re proposing, Alch?” “Naw, Lieutenant. It’s a friendly bull session between coworkers.”

“Bullshit.” She rubbed her left temple with the heel of her hand. “All right. Tell me where.”

He named a favorite of his, just a strip shopping center BBQ joint, and gave her the coordinates.

His lieutenant nodded, as surly as his daughter when she had been a typical teenager. Thank God Vicky was safely married and someone else’s problem. Doing fine, really, past all that youthful single-girl angst and on to young-married stress.

He’d been in the army. Germany. Well remembered how the noncoms had taken the green lieutenants in hand. They were underlings, but they looked out for those naive, smart, upwardly-bound doofuses with something bordering on paternal affection. Didn’t envy them the pressure one little bit. No way. So this was not his first duty call baby-sitting a suddenly rudderless superior officer. Usually the young lieutenants were blind drunk on the town, though. They weren’t blind-mad female furies, which was another critter entirely.

It was probably career suicide to get too friendly with hisfemale boss, but … God knew he knew how to raise a daughter into a woman. And in some unnamable way, the formidable C. R. Molina had always struck him as a motherless child.

He wasn’t even sure she would show, but drove his Honda Civic to the place they’d agreed upon. At least he’d get good ribs and a light beer out of the deal, either way. Light beer tasted like a urine sample, but his metabolism didn’t burn off selfindulgence like it used to now that he was fifty.

How old was Molina? Nowhere near her fifties, for sure. Maybe forty, though. She was notorious for having no personal life beyond her only daughter. Mariah. Must be eleven or twelve now. Alch winced. Bad age. Bitchy age. Going through all that social and hormonal upheaval. No picnic. Not for a single mother. Not for a single father.

Because he’d done it. Raised a daughter pretty much by himself. Got through “training” bras and the unspeakable tampon transition, and all those sticky intrasex issues that were embarrassing even when you were unrelated and middle-aged. Vicky never alluded to that old stuff, but she treated him with affection and an expected amount of tolerance. He was her “old man” now, and she could never imagine that he had ever been anything else to anybody else, especially her mother.

Alch was musing on that when he went through the food line. Then the rich smell of hot smoke-flavored sauce returned him to the present. He found an isolated table and now sat nursing his beer. Fewer calories that way. He wondered if he should wager with himself whether Molina would show up.

She did, entering the place like a SWAT team member forced to go through a school cafeteria line. She scoped out the

people in line, checked out the tables, spotted him, all in one second flat.

He nodded from across the room. She grabbed a tray and shuffled through the long line of options like any bewildered cafeteria customer. It was hard to pick a meal in a few split seconds.

They’d each ordered and paid for themselves. Only way Molina would allow it, he knew.

Man, that woman would be hard to date.

Not that Alch did that much. Got out of the habit when he was raising Vicky. She was paramount. His kid. And now she was gone. Job over. Position phased out. Except for his day job.

Alch made a minor effort to rise as Molina brought her brown tray to his table, but her hand waved him back down, like a

faithful dog.

She sat and removed her plates from the tray, then frowned at his place setting.

“What?” he asked.

“I didn’t know they sold beer.”

“Sure. You can go back for one.”

“What do they have?”

“A bunch of brands. I always get the Amstel Light. Unfortunately. It’s better than Coors Light, at least.”

“I’ll be back,” she said, utterly unaware of parroting the Schwarzenegger catch phrase from The Terminator flicks.

Alch pulled a face at her vanishing back. Beer with the lieutenant. Well, well.

She returned not only with a beer but with two, neither light. “Dos Equis. You deserve full flavor after this afternoon’s debacle, Morrie. And so do I, God help me.”

He wisely didn’t follow up on that opening. Better to let the food and drink take effect first. He’d learned that from Vicky, even if it had been Pizza Inn and Dr Pepper in her case.

“T h i s i s g r e a t b r C. R… . i s k Carmen e t said, , ” after tseveral h eminutes l of i silent e umutualt e

eating and sipping. - All around them people came and went. The din of sliding trays and clanking silverware and plastic tumblers hitting Formica tabletops echoed, creating a benign, vaguely muffled background, like they were in a movie scene instead of real life. “So who was that masked man?” Morrie finally asked.

She shook her head. “You sure know how to kick off an interrogation, Detective.”

“Don’t think of me as a detective.”

“What should I think of you as?”

“I don’t know. Maybe what you need at the moment.”

“Need. That’s the second time you’ve used that wimpy word.”

“It’s not wimpy. It’s … reality. Look. I know you’re the boss. I know you’re tough. More than that, I know you really care

about how you do the job, how we all do the job. I also know you’re a girl. Hey! Don’t bristle. It’s true. I raised a girl. By myself. I know the territory, even if I’m only a grudgingly tolerated visitor to it.”

“Your daughter makes you feel like that?”

“All kids make you feel like that. You’re a parent. Whoever wants to be ‘a parent’? You always thought you were more

interesting than that.”

She shook her head at him, but it wasn’t denial, it was recognition. “I was an accidental parent.”

“Who would do such a thing deliberately?”

“Lots of people set out to do it.”

“They’re crazy. They have no idea what it involves, do they?”

“No, they don’t.”

“So what’s the problem? You know you’ve got to name it or go crazy. I’ve been almost driven crazy by my daughter. Because of my daughter. Because I love her more than anything and I’m just a way station on her life journey. Because I’m bound to be left behind, but if I can do anything to make her life better, or brighter-”

She interrupted with her hand, clamping hard on his forearm across the table. “Does she appreciate it?”

“Hell, no. Not now. When I’m gone … maybe.”

“Oh, Morrie-”

“Drink your beer. It’s solid stuff. It’s solider than ninety-eight percent of what we do every day. Enjoy every calorie. You look back, and that’s all you got. So what’s the trouble?”

“I don’t do this,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Tell. Tattle. Whine. Admit. Admit guilt, failure, lack of control.”

“Me neither.”

She laughed. “Why do I feel I’d like you for a father?”

“Because you don’t know the hellion I used to be. True.” She didn’t laugh, though he’d meant her to. “This violates every

professional rule I’ve set myself.”

“Maybe you set yourself the wrong rules.”

“Apparently. My daughter is spiraling out of control, asking unanswerable questions. And now, I meet an unanswerable .

fragment from my past.”

“That guy at Maylords.”

“Guy. Don’t I wish. Just some ‘guy.’ Unfortunately, he’s Mariah’s father.”

“Whoa. Holy shit. She know it?” Silence held. “He know it?”

“I know it. That’s all.”

Morrie chugalugged real beer, trying to make Molina’s messy personal life jibe with her impeccable professional trajectory.

None of the messiness really mattered, except to her.

“You’re a single mother,” he said finally. “It’s rude of anyone to speculate. It certainly doesn’t enter into job history, like it used to. Those were the bad old days. I can’t tell you the speculations made then about me and Vicky. A father with one daughter. Wife dead? Wife divorced? Wife run off? Wife murdered? Whatever the scenario, I was considered weird. Father with daughter. Not the norm.”

“That’s why I respect you so much.” It was murmured. Muttered.

“Me?”

“You. It shows in how you partner Su. She’s a handful. She has issues. She respects you. I wish I’d had a partner as good when I was in her position.”

He literally sat back, absorbed this information. He wasn’t here to garner kudos. But he was touched. Maybe it wasn’t just Vicky. Maybe it was Su. And … my God, Molina?

Uh-oh. Morrie Alch, professional father substitute. Not quite what he was willing to settle for. Yet.

“Let’s call it a mutual admiration society,” he said.

“That’s why it’s so hard. But … who else could understand?”

Morrie nodded. He was doomed to “understand.” Not to be understood. All single parents were. Not a voluntary occupation.

“So,” she asked, “who was your daughter’s-Vicky, isn’t it?-mother?”

“You sure don’t dance around questions like this in interrogation. I guess I should be flattered you changed your style for me. What you really want to know is why we split and what happened to her.”

Molina shrugged as she pushed away her empty plate and drew the beer mug closer. “You tell, I tell.”

Alch heard himself chuckling again. “I feel like a snitch. Odd role reversal.” He put his plate with its ruddy smear of sauce onto the brown tray on top of Molina’s.

“Okay. She was a nurse. Emergency room. We figured maybe our odd hours would work out better together than with

some nine-to-fiver or other. And they did. At first.”

“So it wasn’t the hours. Or the overtime. Or being on call?”

“Nope. All the logistics were fine. Little Vicky worked out too. I did my share of diapers, feedings, drop-offs at preschool

later, things most nine-to-five fathers miss out on.”

“Diapers. I always knew you were an unsung hero, Morrie.” They smiled in mutual remembrance of smelly times past.

“Anyway,” he said. “Time went by. Enough time to think about another kid maybe.”

“What happened.”

“Job burnout.”

“Really?” Molina sounded surprised. “You’re the most unburned-out detective on my staff.”

“Hers. I learned my laid-back lifestyle the hard way. Emergency room is crazy, the hours, the stress, the danger, the dying. She started using. I never spotted it until it was a habit as big as the Goliath Hotel. All those rushing, come-and-go hours had ended up in needing a rush.”

“That’s how you got custody. Fathers didn’t often back then.”

“Sure, make me feel good about my age.”

“It’s a good age, Morrie. I just hope I get there with my sanity intact.”

“You will. Maybe it doesn’t look like it now. Adolescence is hell at any age. So what’s your story?” “You breathe a word-”

“Hey, I told you about my junkie ex-wife. Your history is worse?”

“No. I’m sorry. Losing someone to drugs is … the worst. Staying sane, and sober yourself, through it, that’s a major medal, even if you’re the only one who knows you earned it.”

Alch nodded, sipped beer. Was glad he didn’t have to speak.

“Okay. My turn.” She bit her lower lip, which didn’t hurt her makeup. She wore so little, if any, that no lipstick stained the beer mug. “Show and tell. ‘That guy.’ I’ve known he was in town for some time. I hoped, prayed, he’d never know that I was living here. Now it’s public record.”

“Who, what, when, where, and why?”

“Rafi Nadir, ex-police uniform, fifteen years ago, Los Angeles. And why? God knows I ask myself that plenty. I was a half—

Chicana woman on the force. You can imagine what that was like then and there. They put me patroling the streets of Watts.”

“Oh, great, playing the race card. Blacks versus Hispanic cop.”

“And the gender card: macho men versus woman in uniform.” She stared into the bottom of her empty beer mug. Alch got

up. “I’m buying this round.”

“Big spender.”

Around them families came and ate and went and came again.

Alch returned to the table, thinking he should have suggested a bar and grill. Except that this family chain restaurant was oddly apropos to their business.

And it was business. This was all about being dedicated cops and alienated ordinary citizens.

“You like Dos Equis?” she asked as he set the frosty mug in front of her.

“Beer is beer, but some is better than others.”

“Same could be said of people. Rafi’s Arab-American. An odd-man-out minority. At first, to me, he seemed sympathetic, supportive.”

Alch nodded.

“He had a future, Morrie. You know there are certain professions that demand your body and Soul. Police work. Medical work. Newspaper work, maybe.““Not banker, lawyer, accountant.”

“Nothing greedy. Nothing where you make much money.”

“Ask me about doctors nowadays!”

“Back then. When we were young.”

Alch nodded. He liked thinking about that, about then. When his back and his feet didn’t hurt, but things a lot more

interesting did, in a good way.

“Anyway, Rafi was on my side. It wasn’t fun being me on patrol. You know how they haze the new guys? Imagine how they can haze the new female. So, Rafi and I I… we were partners in prejudice: his ethnic origins, my ethnic origins and my gender.

“We lived together.” She checked him for disapproval level. “Bet your family loved that.”

“My family didn’t know that. I was on my own then. God, I was in my mid-twenties, I should have been on my own, but girls raised in ethnic cultures are always a bit retarded when it comes to knowing about real life. They like us to be helpless and innocent.”

“I’m betting that’s where Mariah comes in.”

“No. That’s where I left. I got a promotion, and he didn’t. It wasn’t much of a promotion, but it was something. That’s when I found out I was pregnant.”

“So? Things happen.”

“Not with a pinprick in a diaphragm, Morrie. Right then. Right after I got promoted! He knew I was raised Roman Catholic. He knew. What was I going to do? Abort? How was I going to handle more responsibility and weirder hours with a kid? I’d have to quit. Get some part-time brain-numbing job. Maybe stay at home, off the streets, change those diapers until I croaked of ammonia fumes.”

“He punctured your diaphragm to get you out of the picture on the job? He didn’t want to just dump you?”

She shook her head, then took a deep swallow of beer. “He wanted to own me. He wanted me barefoot and pregnant and

dependent on him. I saw it all through the pinprick of light in my little rubber artificial birth control device. That’s what the Church calls contraception. ‘Artificial.’ Like false fingernails or something. And getting pregnant is ‘natural.’ Maybe in my case it was God’s punishment for using birth control, I don’t know. It sometimes felt like that. Rafi had forced me into an impossible position, an impossible decision. I just knew I had to get out of there, right away, and never let him find me again.”

“And he didn’t. Until today. So what did you tell Mariah?”

“That her father was a cop. Who was killed. Helping a mo-torist on the freeway, ploughed into by a drunk driver.”

“Dead hero. Guess there wasn’t a convenient foreign action going on at the time.”

“No, there was just convenient lies.”

“That’s bad, Carmen,” Alch said. “Very bad.”

“I know.”

“That’s why you’ve been so jittery lately. You knew this Nadir guy was in town.” “I’ve been jittery?”

“Well, more like wired and jittery. Like-”

“If you say ‘on the rag’ I’ll choke you, Morrie.”

“Sounds like my Vicky talking. But I noticed something was wrong. Hell. We all did.”

She suddenly put her head down on her folded arms. “So it didn’t work. My soldiering through. I demoralized my own

troops.”

“Not … demoralized.” Alch twisted his neck, trying to see her face. “Maybe you motivated them.” “Huh?” She looked up, her face red from the lowered position.

“We’re all human, Carmen. Maybe we like to see a little of it in our bosses. Our ‘superior’ officers.”

“You’re enjoying this?”

“No, I’m enjoying getting to see that you’re human too. Just like the rest of us. You set yourself an impossible standard, you know. This Rafi Nadir can’t hurt you any more than you’re willing to hurt yourself.”

She straightened up. Thought that over. “What would you do now?”

“Figure out a way to tell my daughter the truth before somebody who didn’t like me had a chance to tell it to her first.” A long sigh, a longer swallow of beer.

“You’re right. Mariah comes first and foremost. I thought I was protecting her, but I suppose I was fooling myself. She’ll

like knowing her father’s a failure?”

“She’ll want to know her father, and make up her own mind. You can’t stop that. You can only supervise that.”

“Not good news, Morrie. Not what I had hoped for at all.”

He nodded at her. “Believe it or not, that’s a step forward, Carmen, not a bad step forward. At all,” he echoed her. Deliberately.

She glared at him-the Molina he knew and liked and who scared the hell out of him sometimes, in a good way he could rely upon-and then slapped a fin down on the table.

“I pay for my own beer.”

“Sure. But my advice is free. You can’t buy experience.” She left.

Alch reflected that this was the first time he’d ever had the last word with her.

Chapter 45

.

I

‘C.

l

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I

Want To

“What a bitch!” he said.

What a bummer of a beginning, Temple thought with a sigh.

She and Rafi Nadir shared a table near the front of Les Girls, the better to avoid the performers attempting intimate relationships with a stainless-steel pole onstage.

“Why couldn’t she have been a real girl? Like you?” he asked.

“How am I different?” Temple asked. Let me count the ways.

“You’re-” Rafi’s eyes grew unfocused. “You’re nice. A guy feels good taking care of you. And you’re spice. You think you

can take care of yourself. I like that. I like … knowing you can’t, always.”

Temple figured this was as real as it got with Rafi.

“You’re conflicted,” she returned in fine Dr. Phil form. “You like girlie girls, but you also need women who don’t kowtow to anybody. You only think you like me, because you don’t know me. Do you?”

He blinked, sipped his Sprite on the rocks. ifig, bad Rafi Nadir.“You’re just trying to keep me away from her:’ he said. “Of course. You’re a bum combo, brother.”

“Brother? That’s how you think of me?”

“I have five.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. They hassled me and overprotected me and probably saved me some grief more often than I admit, and at times I could have strangled every one of them.”

“That’s it! Why don’t you broads appreciate what we guys can do for you?”

“Because we need what we can do for ourselves.”

“Without us.”

“Maybe. But it’s better with you guys.”

Rafi shook his head. “I never thought I’d see her again.”

“Good … or bad … that you finally did?”

“I don’t know.” He siphoned Sprite down to the ice cubes. “All I know is everything turned crappy after we split.” She’s gone.

Temple recalled the two words scrawled on Molina’s car outside the Blue Dahlia nightclub and restaurant.

Later those same words had magically showed up on the midriff of Gandolph the Great’s dead ex-assistant in the Las Vegas medical examiner’s facility.

How many romantic hearts had that primitive jungle beat been pounded into: She’s gone. He’s gone. It was in her own blood.

It had echoed eternally when Max had disappeared with no word.

She could understand Rafi Nadir’s confusion and uncertainty. What did that make her? Make him?

Only human.

“You’re a strange little duck,” he said.

“Me?”

“I’ve been brushed off by bimbos with diseases that’d make your DNA curl. You … you’re different.”

“I’m not-”

“No. I get that part. You’re not up for grabs. I don’t get why you bother with me when nothin’s in it for you, or me. Or why you’re so nosy about murdered strippers and homicide lieutenants when you’re a PR woman, for God’s sake. I shouldn’t be giving you the time of day. I don’t know why I am.”

“Maybe,” Temple suggested, “you’re really a nice guy. Somewhere in there.”

“No,” he said. “Not really. It’s you that’s way off-base.”

That’s when she began to regret being here. With him. Not much redeemable social value there. Still, if she could figure out how he and a straight arrow like Molina had ever gotten together, had conceived a child together, she might know why Molina was such a bulldog about incriminating Max in something.

Temple had to concede to herself that she was becoming exhausted by Molina’s eternal hints and allegations about Max, by how the woman used her position to harass Temple … and Max by proxy.

A twang of honesty made Temple also admit to herself that it hadn’t done their relationship any good. Temple could be as loyal as a Boy Scout oath, but the stress and suspicion had worn her down. Even pit bulls had to let go finally, out of sheer exhaustion.

“Say.”

Temple looked up. Rafi Nadir was regarding her almost sympathetically.

“I just meant:’ he said, “that you’re a whole different ball game than Carmen.”

“Was she always so buttoned down?” When he frowned at the expression, which didn’t mean much in an inborn burqa worldview, she went on. “Why is it she judges everybody by some inflexible standard, and doesn’t cut the rest of us any slack?”

He was nodding now, either a smile or a smirk (depending on your point of view) tilting the corners of his mouth.

“Yeah. She was always hard to read. That sorta was what fascinated me.”

Temple was fascinated by the fact of any man being fascinated by Molina. She knew her eyes probably widened.

Rafi would like that, saucer-eyed female audience. It would soothe his male ego.“I wasn’t used to women like that,” he

said.

“Like what?”

“Women trying to be like men. You’re right. I liked parts of it. Other parts-” He shook his head, his mouth twisting into

distaste as if the Sprite in his glass had turned to vinegar.

“Was that what you had in common? Excuse me, but you were both from cultures with a strong tradition of stomping on women.”

He stared at her, his dissolute hawk’s face focused totally on her.

Temple swallowed without having even sipped her white wine spritzer. (She knew the management; the management owed her. So she could order an effete white wine spritzer in a strip club. Or at least this strip club. And get it darn cheap too.) Temple picked up her spritzer. Sipped. Tried to look buttoned up and cool and calm. Like Molina.

Rafi burst out laughing. “You nailed it. I was a sexist pig, trying to get with a little looser male-female culture. She was an uptight servile broad, trying to get ahead in a very wired male sexist-pig environment. We were made for each other.”

Bitter as the last words were, a thrum of truth underlay them.

“So what happened?” Temple asked.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Fact is, Molina’s on my boyfriend’s case. The more I know about where she comes from, the more I know about where

he’s going.”

“He that Anglo dreamboat I saw you with at the opening?”

“No! Matt’s just a friend.”

Rafi shrugged. “You knew who I meant right off. Just a friend? Couldn’t tell it by me. Kinda strange, isn’t it, how the dead guy in the Murano looked so much like him?”

“Creepy, but Matt has nothing to do with that crowd. He was there with Janice Flanders.”

“He `just a friend’ of hers too?”

“Uh . I don’t know. She’s divorced.”

“And you got a boyfriend.” Rafi’s desert-dark eyes drilled into hers.

“Right. My boyfriend wasn’t anywhere near Maylords, thank God, otherwise Molina would have made him on the murder.

Trust me. She’s had it in for him ever since a killing at the Goliath Hotel where he was working, over a year ago.”

Rafi nodded all through her little speech. He looked about as convinced as Molina had when Temple had tried to explain

her personal situation in the past.

What was it about her? Didn’t she look as truthful as an A-plus lie-detector graph on sight? She certainly felt that way.

“About Carmen and me.” Rafi’s fingers played with his Sprite glass as idly as if it had contained straight vodka.

Appearances were deceiving, Temple reminded herself. She had seen Rafi with a glass of clear iced liquid half a dozen times at strip joints when she had been trying to be a one-woman amateur undercover operative to save Max’s skin. And never once had it dawned on her that he was drinking soda pop.

“About Carmen and you,” she prompted.

He smiled. “You can’t wait to get the goods on her, can you? I almost feel sorry for her.”

“That would be a first! Anyone feeling sorry for the Iron Maiden of the LVMPD!”

“Is that what they call her?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“She was a maiden once, but she wasn’t always iron.”

Temple pasted on her stock deeply inquisitive look and kept silent. That had always gotten her a revealing monologue or two when she had been a TV news reporter.

She was innately inquisitive, and had always been looked on as harmless as a head-cocked West Highland white terrier. As an independent woman she had come to loathe her nonlethal appearance. Except that people routinely forgot that terriers were bred to root out vermin. Mercilessly. Which worked to her advantage, didn’t it? Sometimes “cute” was camouflage.

Rafi Nadir obviously found her harmless enough to bare his soul to … or past parts of it.

“We were both token minorities on a force notorious for ethnic prejudice.” His eyes grew distant. People’s did, when they were zeroing in on their pasts. “Maybe we each envied something about the other. She was so wary and controlled, had tobe, like a panther. I was-it was a macho place and time, and I had that down-but I wasn’t quite the right kind. So. She toned me down. I pumped her up. It worked for a while.”

“Was she always so unfeminine?”

“Some women came into police work early. They were all female. Not cute like you. Pointed. Nails. Heels. Tits. Caused a lot of the wrong kind of trouble. Most cops have wives who find the job competition enough, much less the temptation of women cops. Carmen, she went the other way. All business, no gloss. That sorta intrigued me. I tried to help her live up to her name.”

“The opera, you mean?”

“Yeah. I know something about opera, at least what they were named.”

“Did she … sing when you knew her?”

“No.” He folded his arms on the slick Formica tabletop, leaned closer.

Temple heard the deep bass boom-badda boom-badda boom boom throbbing in the background, vibrating the table surface under their folded arms. That primitive beat would never back the soulful wail of classic torch songs that Carmen belted out at the Blue Dahlia. Even that selfindulgence happened only on the odd nights when she felt like dumping Lt. C. R. Molina. Then Carmen came out of the dressing room in a black velvet ’40s evening gown and scatted like a contralto archangel.

Rafi stabbed a droplet of tabletop condensation with a pristine fingernail (Temple always found it creepy that, for such a

jerk, his nails were clean as a whistle). One of those fingerails drew the drop into a comet trail.

“I found out that she sang. On key. Had sung in school choir. Had soloed. I talked her into finding a no-name club and working it off-the despair and downers. I created Carmen.”

Well! Temple was well and truly blitzed. Rafi Nadir as impresiario? As Brian Eno, manager to the Beatles? Colonel Parker to Elvis Presley? Get outta here!

“It’s a fact.” He’d read and answered her skepticism in half a heartbeat. “I got her patronizing the vintage stores, buying into the ’30s and ’40s looks. She always thought she was too big to be attractive. She always thought being attractive was a sm. Christianity is one woman-hating, repressive religion.” Temple blinked.

“Yeah. I know. But I’m not Muslim. My family is Christian. It’s okay to dis your own race or religion.” Rafi laughed. He sipped his Sprite as slowly as if it were 100-proof vodka. “We dudes are all the same, under the foreskin.”

Gack! He had made a rather sophisticated, if crude, play on words, and cultures. Not to mention a self-enlightened one.

“Are you sure you’re the Great Satan Molina thinks you are?” she asked.

He laughed, not nicely. “Hell, yes. I am now. Then, I was as stupid as Carmen was. Only I got nailed by it, and she just sailed free of all that. Teflon Woman.”

He drained the harmless dregs of melted ice cubes. “I lost my career. Okay, it was partly my fault. When the cards are stacked against you, sometimes you make the deck turn faster, just to get it over with.

“What I don’t get, or forgive, is the way she dumped me. Maybe she saw that my career was sinking like a stainless-steel stone. Whatever, she just left. That was it. Not a word, not a note. Gone. She was gone. No explanations, no reasons, no apologies, no hysterics. Nothing left behind that I could blame. Except me. That was cold. And that’s why I’ll never forgive that

-”

Temple cut him off. “Is that when you decided that underachievement was your business, your only business?”

“You’re one of those annoying reformers, aren’t you? Always looking on the bright side. Let me tell you, there’s no bright side in the real world. You work law enforcement, you see the dark side. You don’t need no black helmet, no light saber. You see the dark side every day. There is no Good Ship Lollipop. No wonderful world of Oz. Trust me.”

“Maybe I should. Maybe you’re not really the rotten guy everyone thinks you are.”

“Maybe.” He leaned over the table. Very close. “Maybe you’re wrong. The world is full of wrong dead women. Born optimists. Maybe Carmen got it right. Cut and run. Maybe you should do that too. Now.”

Temple did not believe in turning tail.

On the other hand, maybe Rafi Nadir had a point. If he really was a redeemable guy, this was a warning. If he was not, this was a Warning.

Temple turned tail, and left.

Chapter 46

A Rubdown with a

Velvet Glove

Temple made the parking lot of the Circle Ritz, and counted herself lucky.

She turned off the ignition.

She then deplaned. Or, in the case of the chic little Miata, first she got her left foot out of the car. Then she got her right foot on the tarmac. Then she shimmy-shimmied like her non-sister Kate… .

And found Matt Devine waiting to help her to her feet. Ankles, do your duty!

“Matt! Hi.”

He pulled her up.

Whew. He pulled her up. Close.

“Hi.” Temple wasn’t used to repeating herself. “Am I your sister Kate?”

“Are we on the same planet?”

“Maybe not. What are you doing here?”

“Making sure you’re safe.”

“Why shouldn’t I be?““I don’t know. I was worried.” Temple was worried too. About her composure.

If Matt wanted to ensure she was safe, telling him she’d found a dead body would hardly ease his mind. Something held her back from mentioning Beth Blanchard’s death, maybe just shock.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“Who wants to know?”

Matt stopped her. Stopped them. Stopped their progress into the Circle Ritz. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“I don’t know. Not at this time. It could be a deranged fan stalking Amelia Wong. Something rotten in the retail furniture business. Something criminal on the fringes.”

Matt’s hand on her arm stopped her. “Not that. Not that Maylords stuff. I meant, with you. What’s going on with you?”

“Oh. That. I I… bought a new car.”

He glanced at the Miata. “So did I. Notice something?”

“Huh?”

“Both of our new cars are built for two.”

“So?”

“So where does Max fit in all this?”

Temple stared at Matt. “You’ve never called him that before.”

“Called him what?”

“By his first name.” She resumed walking into the building. “You both always use last names, like you were, I don’t know,

grade-school teachers calling out the roll.”

“It’s a form of depersonalization, Temple. We use last names to distance ourselves from people we can’t deal with.” “Mr. Midnight. Mr. Late-Night Shrink. Is that true?”

He nodded as he pressed the elevator button for her floor. “Yup. The only thing Kinsella and I have ever had in common

has been our mutual distrust. Born of our rivalry for you.”

“Rivalry? I’m Max’s … significant other. Always have been.”

“Always?”

Oh, what a night. She had recently heard those words blasting off the oldie radio station in her car. In this case, what the song brought to mind hadn’t been a night. It had been an afternoon. And it hadn’t been Max with her. It had been Matt. Oh, what a

night … not!

“Well, not before Minnesota,” she admitted about Max and her, about when they had met. Matt followed her down the short hallway to her unit door. “But I thought, you know, with your special background, you have to get it all right the first time. Get married. Have sex. Have children. That’s way too intimidating for a modern girl. We believe in free samples.”

There! That ought to scare him back into his uncomplicating, unavailable self.

Instead, Matt leaned against the wall, smiling slightly.

“It sounds like you’ve become overly dependent on my hang-ups.”

Temple turned the key in her door and the wide mahogany expanse swung slightly ajar. It was like Alice’s rabbit hole. Should she fall down it and get away from the real world, or should she take somebody with her? Besides a kitten or a white rabbit.

“Is that a free drive-time assessment?” she asked, sounding a little brittle even to herself.

“My radio show isn’t on during drive-time. It’s on during middle-of-the-night wonder time. I wonder if you ever listen?’

“Sometimes.” What a liar. As often as she could manage it. On the air, he was good. He was very good. Don’t tell her that now applied to personal appearances. Not on her doorstep, anyway.

Matt kept smiling at her like a man who knew what she wanted. She wasn’t used to feeling nervous with him. The shoe should be on the other foot.

She backed up almost imperceptively, before she could stop herself.

He put out a hand to steady her, not that she was shaky externally. The back of his fingers smoothed down her cheek and then his hand curved around the nape of her neck and shivers ran down her spine, arms, legs, and anyplace else shivers had a hankering to take off for.

“Matt!”

“I lost my freedom and maybe almost lost my life, Temple. It’s made me think about what everyone else has been saying, one way or another.”

It was great that Matt was having an epiphany or whatever, but did he have to have it on her doorstep? In the hall? Alone? Well, with her?

Like Hamlet, he seemed inclined to soliloquize, which was fine because she was too shocked to say a word anyway. “Who am Ito be so perfect?” he asked.

She nodded. Perfection was a bad idea. Her neck seemed to be rubbing against his hand like a purring cat’s. “Aren’t I setting myself up to judge others without knowing anything about what they face?”

Well, yeah…

“The Catholic Church does have the sacrament of what used to be called confession. Why can’t I err and confess it later,

like everybody else? Why can’t I be human?”

Temple found her voice. It was either that or losing her composure completely.

“I don’t know. You’ve got a point. I’m very happy for you. Except that I personally wouldn’t want to be confessed by

anybody as part of an ‘err.’ “

“And I don’t think I could ever honestly regret anything that happened between us.”

Wow.

“Actually,” he said, explaining it to her as if she were a student in the class of Religious Guilt 101, “not doing anything confessable is a sin of hubris, when you think about it. Pride. One of the Seven Deadly Sins.” “Isn’t … ah, lust one of them too?”

“But love isn’t.”

Temple shut her eyes. Do not go there. I can’t handle it. Matt kept on talking. His voice sounded a lot closer. “I’ve tried,

Temple. I’ve tried to see other women. Tried to see them as more suitable, more available than you. You know what?”

She shook her head, like she did in the dark when his radio show was on. He gave great voice.

“I’ve even discovered that each one has her own beauty, her own attraction. I’m honest enough with myself now to feel it,

that elemental pull.”

Temple kept her eyes shut. Do not go there.

“But they’re not you. It’s as simple as that. It’s you. That’s all.”

And of course he kissed her, deep and long.

“Will you go away now?” she asked, as soon as she could speak, which was way, way too late.

Silence.

She kept her eyes closed.

“No,” he said.

Oh, my God.

Her blood was pounding so hard her ears were ringing.

When she opened her eyes, he was gone. She was alone.

But of course he hadn’t gone away, really, and she wasn’t alone, really. Her life with Max had just become way more complicated than even a master magician could handle. If he really wanted to.

The thought rankled. Maybe Max no longer wanted to enough. There was no maybe about Matt. He finally wanted to enough.

So what was she doing, standing alone on her doorstep, all revved up with no place to go?

Argghh! Down with men!

She’d probably think about it tomorrow. And no doubt fantasize about it tonight.

Chapter 47

Anticlimax

Temple’s bedside clock read eleven-forty.

She could read the red LED figures even without her contact lenses in.

So. Was she going to play the good little saga heroine like Scarlett and wait until tomorrow?

Was she going to just lie here? Was she going to turn on the radio, which was tuned to WCOO like any pathetic Mr.

Midnight fan, and soak up the voice that had been practically inside her ear long-distance for two whole hours?

No.

Hell, no!

After tossing and turning for exactly one hour and thirty-eight minutes … and driving Midnight Louie away from the bed to a sulking position in the living room, Temple got up.

Great. It wasn’t just human males she apparently was good at driving away. Now it was cats. Well, cat singular in this instance. Louie was a very singular cat and would not like being lumped in with his whole species.

Neither would Max, which was why she had to find out what was going on with him. Or wasn’t. Maybe it was her. She? Wotthehell, as mehitabel the alley cat had used to say decades ago. Temple was beginning to feel a tad alley-cat tough about her love life, or recent lack thereof.

She dressed in her stretch capris, clogs, and a loose black knit top.

Then thought about it.

And redressed. A good word, redress. That’s what she was looking for. Redress for a case of terminal neglect.

She switched to her high-heeled slip-ons with the corset-laced pewter vamp.

Vamp. Had it come to that? Trying to vamp her ex-live-in?

She added a ’30s-style trumpet skirt and a whisper of trashy Old Money, a newly chic skimpy sweater set with sequin trim.

The Las Vegas night was as warm as green-chili salsa. She paused to take down the Miata’s top, even though it was nearly midnight and convertibles were risky driving for single females.

But she wasn’t a single female! She was a significant other. Time to find out what was so Significant to her Other that he had totally missed noticing that she was up front and center of a news-making mess.

Not to mention totally failing to return her calls.

The warm night wind did its best to soothe the savage breast, only Max could do that so much better … if he’d only bother.

On the way to his house in an older subdivision, Temple reflected that she wasn’t being fair. She considered the fact that she had gotten used to Max as her omniscient protector. Everything he’d done that might have looked like a desertion to the outer world had been for her safety.

First and foremost had been his totally vanishing a year ago: from her life, from his job at the Goliath Hotel. Snap your fingers. And he was gone.

When he’d returned, he’d been forced to finally explain himself to Temple. He wasn’t only a world-class magician, he’d been an international counterterrorism Kent even longer, ever since his first cousin Sean had been blasted to bits by an IRA bomb in a Londonderry pub. If a fortune teller had warned Temple years before that she’d one day be on the real-life fringes of events and personalities from an international espionage novel, she’d never have believed it.

Guilt had always made their relationship into a m�nage a trois, secretly at first, and now openly.

Max felt guilty for loving Temple, and letting her love him, when his past made him a lifelong magnet for danger. Max felt even more guilty about dallying with Kathleen O’Connor twenty years ago while Sean was being blown to kingdom come.

When Kathleen showed up in Vegas a few months ago, she joined Lt. C. R. Molina in discovering that even the returned Max Kinsella was still the Invisible Man. So Kitty the Cutter started harassing Matt in Max’s place.

Which gave Temple a good dose of Max’s displaced guilt. Now it was all moot … Sean, Kitty, Matt, whoever. Maybe.

So why had Max become the Invisible Man again? And why now, when things between them were stabilizing again?

She’d stuck by Max through the cliched thick and thin, the fat and skinny. Now she was tiring of playing faithful female companion.

Maybe she’d become too dependent on his distant but infallible protection service. Maybe that’s what really irritated and scared her. Maybe she’d lost not just a lover but her guardian angel.

Temple parked the Miata several doors down from Max’s house.

Never do anything direct or obvious.

She put up the top and locked the car.

Never leave yourself or anything that belongs to you open and vulnerable.

She approached his door, checking for midnight observers.

Never assume you are unseen.

She went up the walk and faced the door with a huge sigh. Never act impulsively. Emotions are not only stupid but dangerous.

And she knocked lightly on the steel door made to look like mere wood.

Never blow your contact’s cover.

She would count to thirty and then leave. Temple waited. Fifty. Well … another twenty. Maybe she should knock again.

Maybe she shouldn’t have knocked at all.

Seventy.

Going once, going twice, going, going … gone.

What an idiot! She sighed and turned away. The crack in the opening door acted as a period to her sigh.

She turned back.

“Temple!”

Max sounded, and looked, astounded to see her.

It wasn’t that she had not been here before, many times. But never unannounced.

“What’s wrong?” he asked at once.

“That was what I was going to ask you.”

“At midnight?”

“That’s when what’s wrong usually rankles the most.”

He glanced up and down the deserted street. “Better come in.” At least he didn’t sound angry.

She moved into the crowded entryway.

The door closed and was locked. Max took her hand in the dimness and led her into the kitchen.

“What’s happened?” he asked as soon as the low-level fluorescent lighting made it possible for them to see each other.

“That was my question.”

She stared at Max, tall, dark, and leaner than ever. All steel nerves and tendons. His features were intense rather than softly handsome, but she’d never cared for the Rob Lowe type. His longish hair (was he cultivating a ponytail again, after the last one had been shot off?) was damp. It curved around his angular face like rivulets of India ink.

“Working out,” he said in immediate response to her look. “In the middle of the night?”

“I’ve been working on the book, day and night. Just neededsome exercise after all that intense sitting and thinking. Don’t you find yourself in the same boat?”

His smile grew wry, and then quizzical.

“Sometimes. But I don’t see you as an editorial slave.”

“I owe it to Gandolph,” he said. Fiercely. “Garry.”

She understood that Garry Randolph had been far more than Max’s magical mentor since his late teens. Garry had been the only father figure remaining to Max. The murderous events in Ireland had cut him off from his family, forever.

“Then it’s going well? You’re finishing it?”

Max nodded. Grimly. The effort was taxing. “Yes, I’m getting there.”

He tried to grin, but bit his lip instead. She understood, with relief. Max’s recent absence was due to his determination to do his dead mentor justice.

“Max, you don’t have to sweat all this writing stuff alone. That’s my kind of magic. I can edit it for you.”

“It has to be right before you see it.”

“Not really-”

“That’s the way I feel.”

Temple nodded. She was actually relieved to see Max caught up in a web of creative fervor instead of international

politics. If he paid his debt to the past, they could get on with their future, especially now that their greatest threat was dead.

“I was worried not to hear from you, that’s all;’ she said. “I couldn’t raise you on the cell phone.”

“Oh, that. I just locked myself away. Things started cooking … I lost track of time, everything.”

“I do understand. In fact, I’m glad we have the altered state of writing in common now. It’s the pits and the … oh, the-” “The pinnacle?” he suggested.

“Right.” Imagine Max, the man of action, a midnight scholar. Poor guy. “Hey, do you have any food around here? I’m suddenly famished.”

She didn’t mention she hadn’t been able to eat any dinner, for some reason, some worry beginning with the letter M. And M.

Max loved the role of host, but now he glanced around the seriously enormous stainless-steel kitchen as if he’d never seen

it before.

“I’ve really been playing the hermit. I don’t even know what I have in the house.”

“Yeah, and how do you get your foodstuffs anyway? Somehow I can’t picture you cruising an Albertson’s aisle with a shopping list in one hand and a Beretta in the other.”

“I don’t carry firearms. Well, almost never. And the groceries are delivered.”

“Of course. Since you’re so zoned out on writing fever, and I do understand, let me whip something up for you.”

She headed for the huge Zero King refrigerator-freezer that the house’s previous owner before the late Gandolph-Orson Welles, no less-had installed.

“I can’t speak for the supplies,” Max said hastily.

But the huge refrigerator was more fully packed than she’d ever seen it. Fresh berries, including expensive raspberries and blackberries. A whole shelf of exotic mustards. French bread. Lots of greens with unpronounceable names. She’d never seen such a well-stocked larder.

“Hey, even I can cook up something from all this,” Temple announced. “Something deli-licious. Just sit down on the stool

and I’ll cut and paste for once.”

He obeyed her, which was a first.

Temple pulled out rye bread so dark and meaty it was almost black, cheese, lettuce, an onion, olives, and a package of shaved roast beef lean enough to be anorexic.

“You look like you haven’t eaten in three days,” she said. “I’ve been eating and drinking the book project night and day for I don’t know how long.”

“Then it must be going well.”

“Progress is being made,” he said guardedly. “You look pretty deli-licious yourself.”

Now, that was the Max she knew and loved.

“If you’ve been cave-manned away, you probably don’t know that I’m up to my old tricks.” “Counseling Matt Devine?”

“No!” Temple almost sliced off part of her thumb with a wedge of cheese. “Haven’t you seen the papers? About Amelia Wong, the feng shui maven, hitting town for the Maylords furniture opening? I’m handling all that. Well, the Las Vegas end, anyway. Wong has a whole platoon of personal assistants and PR people and bodyguards.”

“The only papers I’ve seen are Garry’s rough draft. Bodyguards? Feng shui is dangerous? I thought it was some gentle domestic art, not a martial one.”

“It is. Speaking of gentle domestic arts, I not only can slice a mean sandwich, but I’ve been reading up on feng shui, and your entryway could use a whole lot better chi.”

“I could use a whole lot better chi.” Max began sampling from the bowl of washed berries she had plunked down on the black granite countertop in front of him, on which he had once plunked her down. Yum. “But you’ll do for now.”

She glanced up and found the heat back in his blue eyes. He had looked so uncharacteristically stressed when she’d arrived. Max had always led a superstrenuous life, but he had always managed to conceal the cost. Maybe he was opening up to her on a whole new level now, letting her see him sweat. Temple frowned. Max never sweated.

What was going on?

“So tell me the news I missed,” he said, visibly relaxing.

“Let’s see. I was in a group shooting spree, as shootee, not shooter. I found two dead bodies and have managed not to be bothered by Molina on a single one.”

“Shooting spree? You found? Two dead bodies?”

She basked in the comforting aura of Max’s astonishment and concern, not sure which was the more comforting. Max’s readiness to ride to her rescue or a certain pride that she hadn’t needed him on this one? Yet.

“Well, the first time I was part of a crowd that didn’t exactly find the body. We had it personally unveiled to us by Amelia

Wong during her orange-blessing ceremony.”

Now that she had engaged Max’s interest and brought him out of the strange, distant mood she’d found him in, quirky explanations of tragedy suddenly couldn’t cut it.

“Oh, Max. It wasn’t just a dead body. It was … Simon. Simon Foster. Dead. In the Murano. At Maylords.”

None of those cold, hard facts meant anything other than Martian to him, but her emotional undertone did.

He was beside her, wrapping her in the damp velour of his workout sweats, to which she added her own long-delayed dampness.

He didn’t say or ask any more, just held her.

“And I’m not even cutting any onions yet,” she finally said. Thickly. Much later.

“I don’t like onions anyway. Skip them. And maybe you better put the knife down. It’s sticking into my ribs.” “Oh!”

Max removed the long sharp knife from her fingers and took over slicing the bread.

“There’s an open bottle of wine in the chill compartment,” he said. “Very red, very dry, and very expensive. French, of course. You pour the wine, and I’ll cut the cheese.”

She laughed, shakily, at the allusion to her reckless knife wielding, and did as he suggested.

French wine always made her lips pucker, but sipping it felt virtuous. Maybe it was like communion wine. Too austere to

be a sin, not at all silky and sensual, like a white zinfandel or a merlot.

Max lifted her up onto the kitchen stool, reminding her of another man and another lift. Not good.

Then he smiled and linked arms and glasses with her and they drank that hokey old-movie way, together. Good. “Tell me

about it,” he said.

“Simon Foster is Danny Dove’s significant other. Was.” She sipped again, on her own. “I’d just met him at the Maylords opening.”

“Maylords is your account?”

“Right. Amelia Wong et al. is their guest guru for the opening week’s events.”

“And the Murano?”

“A door prize for the opening. It was orange.”

Max winced. Like Louie, he personified the sophistication of black, pure black.

Temple felt obliged to defend her client’s color scheme. “The whole week’s theme was … is orange. It’s the hot new merchandising color this year.”

“Louie must love that.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Black cat. Orange. Halloween.”

“I guess.” Temple felt misery descend on her like parachute silk, soft but engulfing and blinding, doing nothing to cushion the impact of landing on her own inadequate feet.

“So whose was the second body?”

Max knew how to pull her out of an emotional tailspin. Engage her puzzle-solving mind.

“I found her. Personally. Alone. Swinging from picture-hanging wire in Simon’s brilliant Art Deco interior vignette, with a

letter opener stuck in her chest.”

“Temple! That’s ghastly.”

“Not as bad as finding Simon. He had been stabbed too, and then put in the Murano. But he was just plain nice. Beth Blanchard was a witch. Bitch. There. I said it, even if it speaks badly of the dead. I saw her in action and she was incredible.

Every clich� you ever heard about a bitch on wheels. Still, it was awful to see her dead.”

Max nodded. “I know what you mean. Much as Kathleen O’Connor wronged me and mine for twenty years, and as much as I would have cheerfully and personally have wrung her neck, I’m glad Devine had to ID the body, not me.”

“You mean that?”

“Which? The neck wringing or ID-ing the body?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Yes.”

“So you don’t hate Matt.”

Max pushed her always unruly hair behind one ear. “Wish I could.”

“But you don’t.”

“Don’t tell anyone.”

“Only you.”

He caught her in a bone-crushing embrace then, and she watered his velour again, not sure if it was for Simon or Danny,

or Matt, or Max, or herself.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Not once, but twice or more.

He never did say why, and she didn’t think to wonder about that until much later.

They pulled apart and ate the sandwiches, not with relish but with a mutual pretense of appetite.

They drank the wine.

Max asked her all the right questions, and soon he was painlessly caught up on all the painful things that had happened to her. She didn’t mention collaborating with Rafi Nadir. That was even worse than mentioning Matt.

Max just shook his head at Danny’s loss, frowned at her description of the Maylords house politics, and laughed at the extra-virgin oil incident. Not even Max could take a gay biker gang that seriously. Maybe that was a mistake.

As comforting as it was to be consulting with Max again, he never offered to see her back to the Circle Ritz.

He held her in the entryway, and kissed her six ways from Sunday.

But he never asked her to stay.

Temple left in a slight wine glow that was rapidly waning as the hearty sandwich absorbed it. Talk about an anticlimax!

She’d writhed with guilt over smooching Matt in the hall, tossed and turned herself out of the bed in the middle of the night. Rushed over to Max’s place to confirm their scintillating couplehood, only to find Max acting like he was the ex-priest, not Matt!

Oh, he had sympathized, encouraged, theorized, but he had never volunteered to barge back into her life, protect her honor, and solve the crimes.

He had pled the exhaustion of the book, of his recent workout. He had not taken advantage of the visit to make love to her. He had never, for a moment, acted like the old Max. At all. She had left the house wined and dined, and somewhat pet-ted, but suspiciously unfulfilled.

This was a first. And not a good one.

But maybe she had learned what she had cow here to find out, after all.

Chapter 48

Dry Red Wine

Max leaned his weight against the shut front door, both ensuring its security and regretting the fact that it was shut more

than anything in his life since Ireland. “Lad?”

The voice behind him was tentative, almost cajoling. He sighed and turned to face Gandolph.

The old man’s smooth fleshy face was riddled with wrinkles of anxiety.

“I apologize, Max. I’d no right to bring my sorry dead skin back into your life, to interfere with … the young and the living.”

“Save it, Garry.” Max pushed himself off the closed door, off the recent, regrettable past. “That sounds like the title of a

TV soap opera: The Young and the Living. What does that make us? The Old and the Dead?”

“In my case, yes.”

“Well, you’re not dead yet.”

Gandolph chuckled. “Your position on my age is noted. Seriously, Max, she’s a lovely, lovely girl, inside and out. She’d have to be to win you from your self-imposed emotional exile. I would have found a discreet way to exit the house, believe me. There was no need to turn the lady out. Our cause may be noble, but it doesn’t require martyrdom of such a personal nature.”

“It’s not only your being here, and the need to keep your survival secret from the Synth. All that damn, difficult physical catching up on my acrobatic and magical skills. I don’t think I could do her justice tonight, and if Temple deserves anything of me, it’s justice.”

“Nonsense. You young men are so self-exacting. Women rarely demand as much as we believe they ought to. And you love her. That’s why you’re too proud to let her see any hint of weakness on your part. Pride, not weakness. And yet, pride is weakness.”

“Oh, shut up, Garry. You’re a great magician, but a lousy Ann Landers.”

“I believe she also is dead.”

“Does it matter? Her work, her column, goes on. And so does yours.”

“I hate having to stay undercover, letting you take all the risks.”

“If I bust the Synth, neither of us will have to worry about staying undercover again. Ever.”

“You’re now that convinced that they’re the key to the past, and our future?”

Max nodded. “Want a sandwich? There are plenty of fixings in the kitchen.”

“Sandwich?” Garry sniffed. Derisively. “Your young lady is a sweet little thing, but she has no culinary skills whatsoever.”

Max laughed. “You know what? Frankly, my dear Gandolph, I don’t give a damn.”

They retreated to the kitchen anyway, where Max chatted with his mentor while Garry whipped up an exotic hot dish that soothed his own soul and that Max had no appetite to taste.

Instead, Max drank way too much of costly dry, red wine.

Chapter 49

House of Dearth

Temple was emotionally exhausted the next day. (She certainly wasn’t physically exhausted. Wonder why not?) First she had to buzz by Maylords. Damage control. Not even the best PR ace could put a good face on a double homicide on the same scene.

The place looked deserted, and any staff she ran into wouldn’t meet her eyes. It wasn’t her. It was the miasma of suspicion and anxiety haloing Maylords like a New Age aura.

She met with Kenny Maylord and Mark Ainsworth. One had no clue, the other was arrogantly indifferent.

“We need to concentrate on the Wong factor,” she told them. “Amelia is a symbol of interior peace, of spacial harmony.

We need to emphasize her shtick. Maybe another blessing ceremony. I don’t know! We’ve got to get beyond reality.”

“Amen,” Ainsworth sneered. “I guess all PR people can offer is pie in the sky.”

“It’s better than Murder in the Model Rooms, which is what you’ve got now.”

“We’ve,” Kenny Maylord said, looking both pouty and threatening. “We’ve.”

“I guess,” Temple said, “in the design field you figure out early that you can’t make a silk purse out of a boar’s ear.”

“That’s wrong,” Kenny said, vaguely, because he hadn’t quite tumbled to how or why.

“I don’t do sows,” Temple said, and left the meeting.

She knew, though, she had a tough obligation she couldn’t dodge: paying a call on Danny Dove. She hadn’t confronted feeling like a third wheel on a gay community bicycle built for two, and Danny deserved better of her.

He would not be back at work yet, but Temple knew where he lived. The paper had done a big feature spread on the place only months ago.

How sad to realize now the obvious reason for the article about the usually superprivate Danny Dove. His newly redecorated house. Decor by that dazzling young talent, Simon Foster. Temple hadn’t known about Simon’s place in Danny’s personal life when she read how he had transformed Danny’s vintage house into a contemporary showplace. Now she understood why the sudden publicity peek into Danny’s lifestyle.

The article wasn’t about Danny and his wealth and success but the little-known Simon, and his talent and designing future. Danny had opened the doors to his life only to get Simon’s interior designs some local recognition, and clients.

The Las Vegas opening of an upscale design/furnishing operation like Maylords must have seemed like manna from heaven for Simon’s future.

Temple shook her head as she guided the Miata down the winding streets of the city’s most established area where huge, two-story houses dated to past decades. These old places were the estates that time had forgot.

Nowadays, Las Vegas personalities who liked privacy would buy them quietly and redo them. And Simon would have had a whole neighborhood to reinvent.

Temple loved vintage architecture-Mediterranean, provincial French, Italian villa. She had cruised by this area morethan

once just to glimpse the stately terra-cotta tile and slate roofs.

So she knew right where Danny’s place was. Because it was her favorite. Or at least the roofline was: ’40s moderne, all angles and no visible roof at all, just pure geometry in blazing white stucco with black marble trim.

She didn’t know if Danny would welcome visitors yet, even her.

Most of these homes hid behind high solid walls. Danny’s was a ten-foot-high wash of stucco reminiscent of Siegfried and Roy’s poured-concrete compound, a Taj Mahal built to house themselves and their regal white tigers and lions, and now a memorial to an outstanding career cut short.

Temple sat in the idling Miata before a wide black wrought-iron gate, looking for the security box.

It was, of course, too highly placed for her to use without getting out of the car that was as short as she was, automotively speaking.

Even standing nose-to-nose with the stucco pillar she had to stretch to push the button.

The box remained silent. She waited a decent interval, then pushed again.

A voice answered, either hoarse or distorted by static. “Yes?”

“Temple Barr to see Danny Dove,” she told the sun-bleached, painted steel box that acted as major domo.

Temple always felt like an imposter using one of these screening devices. As if she were a demented fan desperately seeking an idol, or some flunky delivering garlic. As if even someone who knew her wouldn’t possibly admit her to an inner sanctum.

The gates clanged as an electronic link ordered them open. It seemed a long time before they swung wide enough to admit even an automotive midge like the Miata.

Temple jumped back into the sun-warmed leather seat and nudged the gas pedal down as soon as the portal was wide enough.

The house beyond was a two-story fantasy domain. Assorted white stucco wings studded with rows of glass blocks turned it into an albino Mondrian painting. Since Mondrian paintings were usually colorful, it was like viewing a ghost … a ghost painting, a ghost house.

The greenery along the driveway and around the house was clipped like an Irish poodle into topiary shapes set off by the house’s sun-washed walls.

Despite the place’s post-Art Deco geometry, it also felt very Mediterranean. And the rectilinear lines couldn’t help but remind Temple of white-marble graveyard monuments and mausoleums.

The Miata stopped before the low steps leading to the entry. Ever the photo stylist, Temple knew the car’s shiny red silhouette would gleam like a ripe tomato against the greenery and white stucco, creating an Italian flag color scheme.

She also knew that the inside of the big white house held nothing lively now, only the depressing aura of recent loss and death.

Glass blocks bracketed the sleek double doors. She sensed watery movement behind them before she could knock or ring. Then, one door opened.

She didn’t know what she expected. Not Danny himself, wearing a black silk turtleneck with the long sleeves pushed up to his elbows, and black denim designer jeans.

“Come in.” He pulled her inside with one hand. One cold hand.

The foyer was two stories high, all white and silver and black, with filtered sunlight pouring through glass blocks along a stairway that curved up one wall, a sinuous brushed steel railing snaking alongside it like a platinum anaconda.

The floor was blackand-white marble and the effect was spectacular.

She didn’t dare say so to the ghost of Danny Dove who had greeted her, his Harpo Marx blond hair looking as dry and gray as a steel-wool pad against his ashen skin tones.

Still, his hand squeezed hers. Hard.

“You are a ray of red in a monochromatic life,” he said. “Thanks for coming to the interment. I didn’t have a chance to say so before.”

Temple had been an awkward mourner at a mostly gay community ritual. The others had seemed inured to early death, thanks to the AIDS epidemic. She had been there, paid her respects, and left quickly.

“All that golf-course-tended sod must have been hell on your Via Spiga heels,” Danny added.

Temple almost gasped. “You noticed?”

“You were the only one there in heels smaller than a size ten. You were no ‘darling Clement-turned-Clementine in big old bootsies number nine!’ Don’t think I didn’t appreciate it. Cross-dressing may be amusing, but it is damn out of scale. You are a perfect size five, right?”

Temple just nodded. She hadn’t expect Danny’s trademark acerbic wit … not yet.

“Everyone is avoiding me like the plague.” He led her into a vast two-story living room. “You’d think I was HIV positive instead of suffering only from the fact that life is a bitch, and sudden death is infinitely worse and there ain’t no overtime for the survivors, no matter how much we might wish it.”

While Temple perched on the spindly-legged moderne sofa he led her to, Danny turned his attention on a steel-and-glass bar cart accoutered with authentic ’20s cocktail glasses and a chrome soda siphon.

“Want a drink? Please say yes. I will not allow myself to drink alone. I have been damnably sober for the three worst days

of my life and I am dying for a martini. I promise to sip it.”

“A martini it is.” Temple set her tote bag on the floor beside her. “Danny, the house is spectacular.”

“So glad you noticed. I suppose if a man must have a memorial, better it be a house than some graveyard sentimentality nobody ever sees. This is Simon’s true headstone. This house and everything in it.”

“Including you,” she pointed out.

Danny came over with two low, footed glasses. “For now. I know that he wouldn’t wish me to languish here. He was an amazingly generous soul. Ah. Bombay Sapphire with just a whisper of vermouth. Now. What business are you here upon, Little Red? And what have you in your basket as you trundle through the woods? I believe that you were hunting wolves, the last I heard.”

Danny sat on an Eames chair-an original ’30s black leather Eames chair with matching ottoman. He regarded Ternple with the inquisitive look of a sparrow begging bread crumbs.

That’s when she understood the role in which fate and Danny had cast her now: part detective, part avenger, and part

therapist.

“That Maylords opening was a … an opportunity and a hope for so many,” she said. “Simon. My friend Matt’s friend

Janice.”

“Friend?” Danny called her on it. “Isn’t that a weasel word? Remember, I met your ‘friend’ Matt some while back. Unfortunately straight, but otherwise delectable. I can’t believe that you haven’t noticed yourself.” Danny sighed. “He was, of course, the same physical type as Simon. Could he have been the intended victim?”

“I looked into that. It’s possible, but Simon’s murderer may have been a woman named Beth Blanchard, and Matt only met her at the opening night, and barely then. She did mistake Matt for an employee, though.”

Danny’s blue eyes focused into lasers. “Beth Blanchard.” The name dripped with disdain. “Who was she?”

“The past tense is right. Beth Blanchard was just found dead at Maylords herself. Stabbed as well-and, as an additional decorative touch-hung by picture wire in Simon’s Art Deco vignette. From the chrome bedpost. I found her.”

Danny took in all that information while sipping rapidly from his petite martini glass.

“Did Simon ever mention her?” Temple asked.

“A woman? Hardly.”

“But this one was mean. She loved to ride roughshod over everybody at Maylords, and apparently management let her.”

“The classic management distraction tactic.”

“They wanted the other employees to hate Beth Blanchard.”

“And thus to ignore their own hateful ways.”

“Simon told you this?”

“No. Simon told me nothing of his problems at Maylords.” Danny sounded self-accusatory.

“Then how did you know?”

“Munchkin mine! I’ve been around the block and, what’s more germane, around major production companies for aeons. Creative temperament is my middle name, and group politics is my master’s degree. It’s the oldest management trick in the book: create an untouchable monster for all the troops to hate. Presto! It’s a diversion while management pulls a lot of nasty strings and no one notices. If Maylords was tolerating a Gorgon, something must have been wrong there.”

He shook his head.

Like Temple, he had been cursed with curls, and seldom was taken seriously because of that. Curls were youthful and

frivolous. Or at least had that frustrating reputation.

“Simon was not one to whine,” Danny said. “He tried to give every situation its most generous interpretation. I suppose you would call him an optimist.”

“I would call him a person of substance in a shallow world.”

“Exactly. I had noticed signs, but I put them down to opening night nerves. God knows I’ve had bouts of that all my life. I should have read between the lines, Temple. I should have seen that all was not calm, all was not bright in Simon’s new position.”

“It looked so benign, Danny. I researched the whole thing: Maylords, Amelia Wong. Both ideals of American entrepreneurship. Wong has had death threats, a lot of them. I wonder how much the events at Maylords had to do with her.”

“Simon would not be mistaken for Amelia Wong.”

“But his death, and Beth Blanchard’s death, spoiled the Wong special appearance. Turned it into front-page news, and made her a footnote.”

“You’re saying Simon was murdered as a distraction? That would be brutal to accept.”

“I don’t know. Not yet. I need expert consultation.”

“Mine? Dear heart, there is no dancing involved. Except to a funeral march.”

“But there is a gay element, and I admit I’m at a loss there.”