“Not everyone is helping with setup. And you’re too young to be a Red Hatter, which is age fifty and over, just like AARP. Although you could be a Pink Lady, dear.”
“Since they appear to have a short life span, maybe not. And a Pink Lady is—”
“A member-in-waiting to turn the golden age of fifty and be eligible for the Red Hat, kind of like a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, don’t you know? They never let anybody too young into the full sisterhood; it might upset the applecart.”
“Or lead to murder?”
“No, it’s just that the Red Hat Sisterhood is one of the few things in life that older ladies can call their very own. Whatever. I was just trying to help out that helpless Pink Lady. She’d fallen facedown, I’d thought. I didn’t know she’d been strangled. A lot of us wear scarves and boas to hide the jowls, you know.” Electra patted at the scarlet feathers making her face into an island without a telltale neck.
“Okay. Which Pink Lady?”
Electra’s voice and expression hardened. Temple was glad Su and Alch were out of earshot. “Just some bimbo, dearie, who maybe wished she was old enough to be a real Red Hat Sister.”
“And why is this anonymous ‘some bimbo’ attached to your movements and motivations?”
“Um, there’s an awkward connection the police found out about.”
“What awkward connection?”
“The good detectives—”
“There are not good detectives in a case like this, just suspicious and determined and not on your side.”
“Whatever. Anyway, I’d been seen earlier at the preregistration desk, showing newbies how to tie their scarves.”
“Around their throats to hide awkward wrinkles and sags, I presume.”
“Exactly, dear. Hides the turkey wattle and all those nasty sagging horizontal lines. What more could a woman do for her sisters?”
“And?”
“When they found the Pink Lady dead a few hours later, strangled by a scarf, naturally I came to mind.”
“Because—?” Electra was being way too evasive.
“I did use her earlier to demonstrate properly tying a scarf to the other ladies.”
“Not good, but not damning. So—?”
Electra looked down and wrung her hands. She even wore red and purple rings and some looked like real rubies and amethysts.
“Electra?”
“This convention meant so much to me. I wanted our chapter to shine, Temple. I wanted the Red Hat Sisterhood to have a stellar time in our uniquely glitzy city. I just wanted to help.”
“So what was the problem with that particular Pink Lady?”
“She was from Hollywood.”
Temple waited.
“Florida.”
“So?”
“So was my third husband.”
“But that must have been long ago. You’ve ditched several more husbands since then.”
“Oh, yes. We split almost thirty years ago. I’d thoroughly washed my hands of the cad after I found out he was stepping out on me, and this was back when I still looked like someone who shouldn’t be stepped out on.”
“You still do,” Temple said, putting a firm hand on Electra’s nervous ones.
Tears filled Electra’s gray eyes. “It was the name tags. So cute. Our chapter designed them. A chorus line of high-kicking red Eiffel Towers on a lavender border. The Eiffel Tower in Paris was originally painted red, you know.”
Temple shook her head. She didn’t know, and she didn’t know what that had to do with anything. Electra probably didn’t either at this point.
“Everything was perfect,” Electra went on, “was going to be perfect, until she came along.”
“The name tags. The Pink Lady’s name—?”
“Was Lark, just like mine. I hadn’t noticed it during the scarf-tying demonstration.”
“I had no idea you knew your way around scarves and knots, because I certainly could use tutoring in that knack.”
“Call on me anytime, dear, if I’m not in jail.”
“And you didn’t know you were advising an ex-rival?”
“Honey chile, she’d changed as much as I had. And my attention was on her neck, not her name tag. But when I saw it, after I’d done the scarf demonstration, I knew she was the formerly teenaged bimbo who’d lured Elmore Lark away from me. It wouldn’t have mattered, except I’d kept his last name because it turned out to be the only thing I liked about him.”
“So . . . Lark met Lark.”
“Then she got insulting. Said she’d never have recognized me and I said the same, because, believe me, those husband-stealing teen tootsies who shine at that age lose it faster than Bruce Willis loses hair.”
“Apparently you discussed your mutual revelations and revilements in front of God and everybody.”
“No. If God had been there, He would have struck her dead for illegal parking with my then-legal husband.”
Temple winced. “And within hours, she was really dead.”
“I didn’t do that. I respect a Red Hat Sisterhood scarf too much to wring that witch’s neck with it. Even with a lesser Pink Lady version. It is a sacred trust.”
“So is a marriage,” Temple said, who’d had reason to think about that very thing long and hard lately. “You know that. You operate a wedding chapel, after all.”
“Yes.” Electra sniffled. “That is my expression of optimism in a pessimistic world and time. I may have wanted to wring Oleta’s cheating neck, Temple, but I never would have killed her. And that’s why I was so surprised to find the fallen woman, excuse the expression, that I tried to help was her. Again.”
Electra’s purple-mascara-loaded lashes beat hard to drive back the tears.
Temple believed her. Wanting to wring someone’s neck was a common urge and almost never acted upon.
But maybe someone who’d had it in for this particular Pink Lady had witnessed Electra’s shock and fury and had decided to ride on it. . . .
An opportunist among a . . . brimful . . . a feather . . . a hat pin . . . of innocuous Red Hat Sisterhood ladies.
Or maybe not innocuous. Not all of them.
Chapter 6
Louie Among the
Sisterhood
It is not a cakewalk to ease unseen into a suite at the Crystal Phoenix, much harder than fronting on down a yellow brick road out in Las Vegas proper, and there are plenty of yellow brick roads in this town, only they all are covered in green felt.
Thankfully, I know these Crystal Phoenix grounds and buildings well from my stint as an unofficial house detective here. Those room-service carts always hide the tableware and such under a thick white linen cloth. And I was always to the fine linen born.
So today I have gotten the lay of the land and the dramatis personae through a tablecloth, darkly. Thank heaven and Bast for these sharp black ears of mine.
I manage to sneak a peek or two when nobody is looking. Since I am always at ankle level, nobody is looking most of the time.
First of all, I cannot believe that Miss Electra Lark, major dame-o of the Circle Ritz, has sprayed her hair completely purple! It was one thing when she went multicolored. I know a lot of cats with coats like that. But I have never seen a purple cat. And Miss Electra does not even have the excuse of St. Paddy’s Day and green. Does she not realize that white-haired ladies tinting their hair blue is a cliché? That purple is just one half step up from that? That Blond is the New Blue for the post-sixty set?
Of course, I also cannot believe that Miss Electra Lark (even if she is a reformed “Mrs.”) would off some so-called Pink Lady just for the act of lassoing her man some decades before. If he was so lasso-able, he was lose-able in my estimation.
We all have our issues, and hopefully outgrow them. Like I have forgotten and forgiven Miss Midnight Louise for taking over my primo PI position here at the Phoenix.
Not!
Okay. I am a cool dude. I go where I am needed, I do what I must, and I always keep
my whiskers dry.
I know my Miss Temple will not sit still for our beloved landlady being railroaded for murder one, so we both are here for the duration.
I also know that if Miss Electra Lark is not returned soon to the Circle Ritz, someone will have to assume the duties of feeding and watering her reclusive Birman cat, Karma. And that will not be me! Every time I am around that mystical feline dame I get the heebie-jeebies. I do not know what the “heebie-jeebies” are (maybe a relative of cooties), but they are not conducive to the hair lying flat along my spine. Unless I wish to be known as the feline Rod Stewart, I will keep myself away from Karma and any hair-raising encounters.
In a way, though, I am glad this has happened. It will keep my Miss Temple’s mind off her romantic dilemma. That is the trouble with romance, in my view; it always leads to dilemmas.
I advocate the way cats of my kind do it: wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, and off to one’s dudely pursuits until the next free-forall called “heat” comes along.
Humans are so primitive in certain matters.
Chapter 7
Fatal Flair
Nicky Fontana himself escorted Temple to the scene of the crime after she’d left Electra at the registration desk doing volunteer work.
This was a relatively quiet corner of the ballroom holding dozens of Red Hat Sisterhood shopping booths and ringed by stages featuring products of allied interest.
It was all a girly shopper’s paradise, but with racks of clothing and feathers on three sides, the booth in question formed a perfect cul-de-sac for murder, now sheltered from the public gaze by freestanding screens. Inside them, yellow crime scene tape looked like a garish and tacky ribbon garlanding all the flower-shop reds, purples, lavenders, and pinks.
You’d have thought they were filming C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation on-site. Worker bees were teeming over the body and its surrounding area. None of them were Attractive Babes Showing Lots of Cleavage on the job. None of them were Nerdy Young Brainy Guys with Possibilities.
They were just average working people, squinting through spectacles, wearing wrinkle-free khakis, and free of nipple-showing T-shirts and blouses. Their salaries were likely lower than hers, and she was a risk-laden freelancer.
Temple compared their ordinariness to their TV alter egos to avoid staring rudely at the corpse. But now she did.
Oleta Lark’s face was turned Temple’s way. She looked like a fallen department store mannequin lying there. Several were already on display in the ballroom, some of them decked out in unabashedly girly doses of pink and lavender. Oleta’s own skin color was still normal, lifelike, but her eyes were open and glassy, sightless, so unnervingly still. Her pink hat had fallen aside to reveal hair so highlighted that any base color was lost in the red-gold-brown blur.
Though the pink hat proclaimed her as under fifty, it wasn’t by much. The dead flesh was pasty and slack and her body had a sack-like look that an upright position and animation might have made hard to notice.
The Lolita of yesterday who’d stolen Electra’s husband had been history long before someone had wrapped the purple scarf dotted with red flowers around her neck and pulled until dead.
“The detectives okay this?” a CSI woman asked Temple, rising from the floor next to the corpse. She didn’t have chiseled features and a hot haircut. In fact, she had a double chin and a couple of nottelegenic zits.
“Detective Alch did,” Nicky said, turning on a hundred-watt smile. “I’m Nicky Fontana. This is my hotel, and this is my PR representative, Miss Barr. I want her to be able to give an accurate account of where we’re all not at on this.”
Nicky being modest and genuine was pretty irresistible. He may have been married, but he still had that Fontana brother charisma down pat.
The woman smiled.
“We’re just working the scene. Detective Alch will make what he sees fit available to the hotel and the press. If it’s okay with him that you gawk for a while, gawk. Even we won’t know a thing until the lab processes everything. It ain’t as fast as on TV.”
“Understood,” Nicky murmured.
Temple took that invitation at face value and gawked to take in more detail.
She’d seen a few dead bodies in her time and on her sensitive job of making Las Vegas safe for good news, not bad.
She’d never seen a strangling victim before.
She’d been relieved that Oleta Lark’s tongue wasn’t extended and black in a pallid post-death face. The scarf wound around her neck did not cut into flaccid flesh like a piece of barbed wire. It looked like an accessory. There was a “Got Milk” ad slash of foam on her bright pink lipstick and her open blue eyes were bloodshot.
Still, if ever a wronged wife had wanted to see a rival brought down, this postmortem image would do it. Temple couldn’t have wished anything more demeaning on Kitty the Cutter, and God knew she had her reasons, number one being Max, number two being Matt.
Electra hadn’t done this. It would take not only strength but deep, long-simmering hatred to pull tighter and tighter until a body’s breath was just a memory. Temple couldn’t believe Electra would ever succumb to such a rage.
Temple liked to think no woman could or would do this, and most strangulation murderers were indeed men, something sexual about the process. Often they were sons of smothering mothers. But Temple had learned to know her own gender in all its proud and petty glory, and didn’t underestimate the female of the species.
Anyone would have the strength to do this, if determined: man or woman. And, face it; this was a convention of women drawn from all over the country. Grudges recognized no borders. Women were more than their ages, despite social assumptions that cast them as either pursuable young bunnies or uninteresting maternal mama rabbits.
Oleta had started out to be someone’s bunny and had ended up a helpless rabbit choked to death. But why?
For what she knew? For what she was?
Or for what she was not?
Chapter 8
Honorary Older Women
“Okay,” Temple told Electra when they were safely back in the bosom of the Red Hat Sisterhood thronging the hotel’s main floor. “You haven’t been arrested. Yet. Su would love to; Alch is Mr. Wait-and-See. I need to be on the scene.”
“But here you are! And you work for the hotel.”
“No. I need better credentials. A reason to be able to enter all the convention event rooms. And,” she added, spotting Kit’s hand waving above the milling hats as her aunt spied them and darted forward, “it wouldn’t hurt to have Aunt Kit on our side.”
“Easy,” Electra said. “We get you both registered for the convention. We could say she’s a Red Hat hottie from Manhattan. I’ve been handling registration among some other things. That’s it! We have the Sinsinatti Reds chapter. Why not the Ragin’ Red Manhattan Hatties? And you? You’re such a baby. You have to be a Pink Hat.”
“So think Pink.”
Electra cupped her double chin in her hand and thought. She straightened, grinning. “I know! You solve crimes, right?”
“Sometimes.”
“The Hot Pink Panthers chapter!”
“Seems to me a lot of the Red Hat Sisterhood chapter names use the word ‘hot.’ Is there a hidden statement in that?”
“Hat. Hot. They’re so close. I guess we think women who wear hats are hot.”
Kit joined them. “Make mine pink.”
“That’s cheating,” Temple said.
“What’s cheating?” a passing Red Hat woman stopped to ask with the speed of an ice skater turning on the toe of a blade.
All three were struck dumb with guilt.
“It’s great to see new members enlisting at the convention,” she went on. “Are you from Las Vegas?”
“I’m from Las Vegas,” Electra said quickly. “The Red-Hatted League chapter.”
“I’m a Vegasite too,” Temple admitted.
“Manhattan,” Kit said.
“Wonderful! I’m Jeanne Johns
on.”
The name struck Temple as familiar. Maybe because it was a good Nordic Minnesota name and Jeanne Johnson had that natural blond, semiathletic look about her. Like she could ski down an Alp on tennis racquets if she had to, enjoying the below-zero windchill. In other words, one cheerfully determined woman.
Then Temple got it, encouraged by Electra’s elbow digging into her side. She’d seen the name in the Red Hat Sisterhood program book she’d been studying.
“Oh! You’re the founder.”
Jeanne released a six-hundred-watt grin.
“My official title is ‘Her Royal Hatness.’ Who would have believed that we supposedly over-the-hill dames can all don tiaras and be queens of our own inclusive kingdom? Who would have believed in a few short years we’d be a national phenomenon with hundreds of thousands of members? It’s all based on a poem, you know. Not many organizations are.”
“A poem,” Kit asked. “That’s pretty amazing. Something from Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale?”
“No, it’s by Jenny Joseph, about a woman musing that when she’s older she’ll indulge herself by wearing purple, and a red hat that doesn’t go with it by conventional standards.”
“Free spirit,” Kit summed up.
“Exactly. Women of a certain age often find themselves with empty nests, or divorced or widowed, with no intense job commitments and falling faces and fannies. The Red Hat Sisterhood encourages them to band together. Sure, we have crazy, mixed-up fun, but we have a thirst for moving in new directions and mutual support too. And even spreading good cheer among the less fortunate than we.”
“I can’t wait until I’m a full Red Hatter,” Temple said, catching Red Hat fever.
Her Royal Hatness assumed a sober expression. “We’d love to have you then, but don’t wish your youth away. Too many women do. Now, what can I do for you? You looked at a loss standing here.”
So Temple explained the difficulty straight out.
“Oh.” Jeanne’s natural buoyancy flattened. “That killing was awful. The hotel was wonderful about sparing the poor woman public display, and the police have been cooperative too.”
Cat in a Red Hot Rage Page 4