Lord, she wasn’t even a peri-menopausal woman and here was a man comparing her to his grandma! Kit had been right: all downhill from thirty. Except for the Red Hat ladies and her red hot aunt.
“So,” Aldo asked, standing in front of Max’s ultra-secure door like the pale ghost of Fuller Brush salesman from the days when housewives were at home and hucksters went from door to door instead of unsolicited e-mail to e-mail. “This is where the Mystifying Max hides out. He had the coolest disappearing onstage act in town.”
Temple quailed at that “had,” but rang the doorbell.
Need any red-feather dusters here? Beat-up Purple Hearts still beating? A memory-erasing vacuum that really doesn’t work very well? All returns guaranteed.
But nothing happened, which was a huge relief to Temple. The house was unoccupied. Quiet. Empty. The way Max had designed it to be seen forever. A movie-set facade that only the initiated could see behind.
Temple was sure she wasn’t the initiated anymore.
And then the faceless front door opened.
“Yes? You did read the no soliciting sign out front?”
Temple was speechless.
Speechless.
“So sorry, miss,” Aldo said in whipped-cream-on-cappuccino tones. “We were seeking the previous resident.”
“I have no idea who that was, handsome. The Realtor found me this perfect place and the price was so very right that I couldn’t refuse.”
Temple had used Aldo’s charm time to survey the apparent new owner: a leggy brunette about six feet tall with a dangerously curved figure that screamed “showgirl.” She was not only stunned, but madly jealous. Go figure.
“Ah,” Temple managed. “So you’ve only been here—”
“A week, sweets. I got this place at a bargain bistro price, and wasn’t gonna waste time taking possession before somebody recovered their sanity.”
“Was the previous owner . . . was the furniture—?”
“Clean as Whistler’s mother.”
“No . . . equipment in the extra bedroom?”
“No, I brought my own home gym.”
Temple had been thinking of Gandolph the Great’s and Max’s retired magic props. “No opium bed in the north bedroom?”
“Hey, I don’t do anything heavier than Starbucks, sweetie. You want to come in and sit a bit? You look a lot green around the gills.”
“That would be very nice.” Aldo grabbed Temple’s elbow and swept them both inside, understanding that any peek inside would be insightful. “Miss, uh—?”
“French. Dolly French.”
Oh, please! Temple thought. Pseudonym City in a city made for phony monikers.
The woman batted her double-wide false eyelashes at Aldo. “And you and your lady friend?”
“Aldo Fontana, at your service, Miss French.” He somehow made “French” sound mildly obscene, which of course the rest of the world had been doing for centuries. “Miss Temple Barr is an employee of my”—Aldo cleared his throat like an operatic baritone—“Family.”
“Say, I’ve heard of you Fontana brothers. Want a drink? Your brother’s employee looks like she could use one.”
“That would be delightful. Would you permit me to mix it?”
“I’d permit you to do a lot of things.”
While this B-movie dialogue was unrolling, Temple’d had time to eye the premises. Oh, man! Oh, Max! Everything was gone. Every bit of furniture or wall decor that she knew. Even the super-security touches, like metal interior shutters, were only a dream in Temple’s head.
She toddled after Aldo into the kitchen, which was the whole point in him playing bartender: seeing more of the house.
The stainless-steel appliances and countertops were the same, but the high stools were a whole different breed and the stone floor now echoed to Dolly French’s stilettos stomping around on them.
“You in the entertainment biz, sweetie?”
“No, public relations.”
Dolly stopped on a dime, holding three footed glasses expertly in one long-clawed hand and a bottle of vodka in the other.
“Not that kind of public relations,” Temple said through her teeth. “I represent the Crystal Phoenix hotel’s publicity and promotional interests.”
It was all some ghastly nightmare. A familiar place taken over by unfamiliar things and people. How could what Orson Welles, Garry Randolph, aka Gandolph the Great, and Max Kinsella had created here become so quickly a staging area for a stereotypical Las Vegas woman of iffy morals?
Aldo, as cool as some Italian . . . gelato, was making some sort of stirred not shaken martini and trying to catch Temple’s eye with sympathy, and caution.
“Did you know,” Temple heard herself saying, “that this house originally belonged to Orson Welles?”
“Orson who?”
“He was a boy genius, a noted gourmand, writer, and film director. But he’s dead now, of course.”
“I thought you said his first name was Orson?” Dolly blinked her fuzzy lashes.
“I did.”
“Now you’re saying it was ‘Ormand’? Isn’t that French?”
Ormand Welles. Well, it had a Las Vegas ring to it.
Ring. She thought of Max’s little emerald one tucked into her scarf drawer now that she was otherwise “engaged,” and the gorgeous one she’d forced Matt to hide in a floor safe because she wasn’t ready to come out as his fiancé.
Maybe now was the time to “ring” in the new, “ring” out the old. Max was gone. Only her memories of Max in this house remained.
It was as if a brutal hand had erased everything here in the most hurtful, sweeping way to make her face the facts, and the present, not the past.
Nothing here to cling to, but regret. She sipped the drink Aldo had made while he “allowed” Dolly French to take him on a guided tour of the house. Temple kept staring at the Sub-Zero refrigerator like the Abominable Snowman it was: a lurking vision in a mist, once an old friend, but now mostly an old and fading legend.
“Max, wherefore are thou, Max?”
He had appeared in her life in another place at another time like an answer to a dream. Now the dream had ended, and Max was gone. All trace of him. The perfect exit for a magician.
Maybe she’d better get used to life without everyday magic. Maybe she’d better concentrate on making sure Electra didn’t face a nightmare of her own too real to write off.
Chapter 16
Electra’s Larks
The Circle Ritz penthouse where Electra lived and presided always felt like it was off-limits, even when you were expected.
Temple had only been up here a few times, so she knocked gingerly on the door, then rang the doorbell right after that, convinced that her petite knuckles wouldn’t rouse a flea.
The door jerked open to reveal Electra back to wearing her usual wildly floral muumuu.
“What’s happening at the convention?” she asked.
“Not much,” Temple said. “There’s more going on in that hot jungle print you’re wearing.”
“I don’t feel up to wearing imperial purple at the moment. But you look pretty in pink. You never used to wear that color.”
“I wasn’t planning on masquerading as a Pink Hatter before, and it never went with my natural red hair color.”
“It goes great with your new blond do. Come in, dear.”
Electra’s entry hall was a hexagonal affair lined in mirrored blinds, so multiple muumuus greeted Temple’s eyes. Also multiples of her still foreign-looking blond self.
Maybe if she dyed her hair back to its natural red shade, she’d find Max. That was superstitious thinking, but desperate people turn to symbolic notions.
Temple passed herself coming and going in the mirrored blind slats. Now that she was clad in Pink Lady hues she looked as nauseatingly sweet as a tropical drink to a beer buff.
Electra’s living room was the usual dim and mysterious, not to mention occupied by hulking pieces of forties-vintage furnit
ure.
Temple loved vintage, but one had to draw the line somewhere, and for her, oversize forties jungle florals in shades of forest-green and chartreuse were it.
She sat gingerly on the only floral-free chair in the room, a plain maroon mohair lounge chair. Mohair was a stiff, buzz-cut wool texture as welcoming to the epidermis as falling into a native stake pit.
Electra sat with a grateful “oof ” on the long lumbering sofa hunched against the wall. Lights were dim here, but a green glint caromed off the huge glass ball sitting atop the vintage blond-wood TV set. A pair of small, eerie red lights blinked like Christmas bulbs at Electra’s ankles.
Since this was firmly spring, as much as Las Vegas ever admitted to such a pleasant, moderate season, Temple assumed the red lights were the reflective eyes of Electra’s psychotically shy cat, Karma, the mystic Birman.
Come to think of it, the atmosphere up here was thick enough to slice with a chain saw. Electra might very well be a Las Vegas strangler with a gender-bending mission . . . Instead of the literal lady-killer Bluebeard, she could be a blue-haired lady killer of husbands.
“Did you get the family tree written down?”
“I tried, but I just can’t concentrate enough right now. Finding a dead woman, even if she turned out to be someone I had no sympathy for, is very discombobulating.”
Temple picked up the notepad and pen that Electra had only managed to doodle on.
“Okay. We’ll do this as an interview. You said you had five husbands.” Temple asked, pen poised, “Where are they all now?”
“Goodness, dear, I don’t know! What’s the point of leaving them if they’re still on your Christmas card list?”
“You must have known Elmore and Oleta were in Reno, though.”
“Nope.” Electra gazed at the green globe over the dead TV as the red lights danced at her ankle level. “He was easy to forget.”
“I imagine most of them were, from what you said, but I need to know the who, where, and when on all of them.”
“Not the why, though?”
“No. That would be prying,” Temple said demurely, as befitted a Pink Lady.
As soon as she got through with this convention she was going to ditch this ditzy hat for something red, even if it was a wig the color of her real hair.
“I’m glad you’re leaving something for me to have and to hold,” Electra said dryly. “Just how serious do you think this being under suspicion is for me?”
“Very. It turns out your next Mrs. Lark was writing a memoir and mailing bits and pieces all over the Internet.”
“What would Oleta have to write about? Elmore was dull, dull, dull.”
“Not according to one tidbit gleaned from Oleta’s compulsive Internet confessions, or maybe it was just canny book promotion: she said her long ‘marriage’ ended when she was abandoned in a ghost town in Nevada by a bigamist.”
“Bigamist!” Electra jumped up as the little Rudolph-red noses at her ankles vanished under the sofa’s swaying cocoa-colored fringe.
Her shock reassured Temple. She hadn’t heard it from Oleta, then.
Electra was still in angry orbit. “Oleta is saying that bastard didn’t really divorce me? Where is he? I’ll kill him now if she didn’t do the job first before coming here.”
“Am I glad this is just between us and the fire-eyed feline under the couch, because murder suspects must never threaten to slay new victims in public. Unless you’re a third-world dictator. Are you?”
“Of course not? What are you getting at?”
“The fact is, I don’t really know anything about your private life. When a murder happens, no life in the vicinity is private anymore. In this case, especially yours.”
Electra sat again in the dimness. Her sigh almost stirred the dark floral draperies at the doors to her patio.
“Well, darn, Temple. I came here to forget all about my past life. It wasn’t that successful.”
“But you’re an entrepreneur. You own and operate this building and the attached Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel. You’ve got energy, singular style, and tenants who adore you.”
“Really, you guys adore me?”
“What’s not to adore? You’re patient, creative, fun, and always listen. You’re our dorm mother.”
“ ‘Dorm mother.’ I like that.” Electra’s hands curled together on her chest.
Temple realized for the first time that she’d never seen any rings, nary a one, on those busy, plump fingers. And here was Temple with a seriously significant ring she wasn’t quite ready to flash, like a novice stripper with a G-string and no nerve to wear it. At least Temple had a couple thoroughly painful thong panties in her lingerie drawer.
“You already know Elmore was number three,” Electra was saying in a monotone, subdued voice. “You put that in your notebook. I never bothered to write any of this down—unlike dear, dead Oleta!”
“Whenever you talk to the police again, none of these theatrics. Pretend you’re a Stepford wife. Only say what you have to and without any emotion whatsoever.”
“When, not if?”
“When, not if, Electra. You were too darn convenient to the body. Somebody else probably figured that out too. But don’t worry, the Red-Hatted League is on it.”
“I want to be there with them!”
“We’ll see.” Temple found the pen slipping between her fingers and rolling under the sofa fringe. “Electra, what is that under your couch?”
Electra looked down. “Ah, besides dust bunnies? Maybe my cat, Karma.”
“Is she declawed?”
“Never!”
“Thanks, I guess I won’t risk patting around down there in the dark. I’ll try to remember what you say and write this down later.”
“Try to re-mem-ber,” Electra quavered in a thready soprano.
“Husband number one,” Temple demanded.
“I’ve never really counted him.”
“Electra!”
“That’s what we girls did in my day, my dear. We either married any man who ever kissed us, or we never married at all and got known as hippies. Darren and I eloped in senior year of high school, and he then further eloped with a bottle of rye a few weeks later. I’ve never seen or heard from him again, and am the better for it. I don’t think that minister was real, anyway, and I never thought to ask to see the license. Boys would do anything to get into your girdle in those days.”
“Girdle?”
“Tubes or panties with industrial-strength elastic you had to spend ten minutes getting on. They were tight enough to bite like a snapping turtle, believe me, if any roaming fingertips roamed too far. I didn’t lose my virginity until my second husband.”
Temple cleared her throat. “Darren must have really liked that bottle. It’s awfully dark and hot in here. I may swoon.”
“That’s all right. All the floors are covered in Persian carpets; lots of nap.”
“So who was number two?”
“Another elopement. Billy was a filling station attendant with an urge to—”
“Don’t say it!”
“—go to refrigeration school. Between his double shifts, I somehow got left out. I divorced him and I moved yet again to forget.”
“And then came Elmore.”
“Not a moment too soon. I actually had delusions about him.”
“You mean ‘illusions.’”
“No, just delusions. I had so many delusions that Curtiss actually came along a full nine months after them. I really enjoyed being a housewife and mother. Elmore was always on the road, selling insurance policies. Curtiss and I had six happy years together before Elmore came home one day and said he’d found another woman. What he’d meant was that a conniving cheerleader had found him and his house payment and steady job and little family to fling out on the stoop.”
“That was Oleta.”
“Yup. She always was a little—”
“I get the picture,” Temple said quickly, trying to evade hearing ano
ther rough word from her landlady’s mouth: slut.
“—snip. That’s why I kept the last name ‘Lark.’ Just to annoy her. And it did.”
“Why? You had moved on to Vegas and the Elmore Larks were in Florida.”
“By then, I was old enough to start getting mad about being betrayed.”
Temple bit her lip and thought about feeling like a betrayer, which she did now. She’d always taken Electra at face value as a free spirit. She’d never guessed how many decades it had taken her to get that way.
“Men and women,” Temple said, “seem to have a hard time getting in sync with each other in any era.”
Electra’s face lost its pained, in-the-past expression and resumed the sweetly sharp look Temple knew so well. And relied upon. She was two thousand miles away from her mother, but they’d never quite evolved into girl talk, anyway. Kit and Electra made excellent stand-ins.
Electra pursed her lips, as if to say: Enough about my little murder rap and me. “You care to discuss what’s happening on the Max-Matt front? I’ve been dying to know. Really. Dying.”
Temple didn’t care to, but she could feel herself blushing, which was a dead giveaway in a modern girl that something was happening.
“How much do you know?”
“I’m a landlady. I always know more than I’m supposed to.”
Temple nodded and wished she’d been an old-fashioned girl with a handkerchief to knot.
“I know,” Electra said, “that our darling boy Matt Devine has made major updates to his bedroom decor. About time! And that you’ve been up there admiring the changes.”
“Electra!”
She shrugged. “You’ve always had an interest in interior design. And I know Max hasn’t been around lately. Except for the time he called and you weren’t in, so he took me for a ride on the Vampire.”
Temple was stunned silent. Max had been here, at the Circle Ritz? Recently? When she hadn’t been? And he’d taken Electra for a ride on the vintage motorcycle he had traded to Electra for a down payment on the Circle Ritz unit back when he and Temple had been almost-marrieds?
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