Cat in a Red Hot Rage

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “So she’s ring-mastering those wild and crazy red-and-purple women around the hotel?”

  “The Red Hat Sisterhood has its own homegrown PR force, I understand. Temple got involved because of Electra Lark.”

  “Alch told me.” Molina gave him another “Oh, God.”

  “So you asked me here for spiritual advice?” he said.

  She gave him a narrow look. “You should be so lucky. I agree that you and Electra Lark are two of the unlikeliest murder candidates in Clark County, but you do have the Circle Ritz in common, not to mention the ever-dangerous Temple Barr. So how did you get up on that podium between two warring factions in the battle of the sexes?”

  “It was . . . Temple’s idea.”

  “Of course. So now she has two Circle Ritz pals in the bull’s-eye for murder.”

  “Fiancé,” Matt said, not knowing why he’d spilled the beans. Maybe that word “pal” had done it.

  “Fiancé? Who’s the fiancé?”

  “Me, I’m told.”

  “Temple and you are . . . engaged?”

  He nodded.

  It took a lot to shake the stoic expression off Carmen Molina’s face, but that admission had done it. She couldn’t have looked more shocked if he had confessed to killing Elmore Lark, or Abraham Lincoln.

  She took a deep breath. “Well, that changes a whole lot of modus operandi around this town.”

  He knew she was thinking of Max Kinsella, but Matt didn’t want to go there. He said nothing while she absorbed his new status as if digesting a singularly disagreeable meal.

  “I suppose congratulations are in order, but . . . look at you! Now you’re in the middle of a murder investigation. That’s what squiring Miss Temple Barr around town will get you. I tremble to picture you two as the Nick and Nora of Las Vegas, but this town always did lean to the ridiculous. You done eating here?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. Take me for a ride in that eye-candy car of yours.”

  He shrugged and followed her out of the Toyota, which she locked manually after dumping the hamburger leavings in the nearby trash can. He followed suit, beeping the Crossfire open when they were twenty feet away.

  “Show-off.” She smiled finally, though. “Small, isn’t it? Will I fit?”

  He nodded, but Molina had to scoot the passenger seat back because it was set all the way forward, for Temple.

  “My kid,” she commented, “and your pint-size fiancée. At least my daughter will outgrow the full-frontal seat position in my car.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Ninety-three north. There’s a speed trap six miles south of one-sixty-eight, then it’s clear sailing until Ash Springs.”

  “You want me to speed, Lieutenant?”

  “I want to blow my mind clear, Devine.”

  “About the Crystal Phoenix death and attempted death?”

  “About Fontana brothers and Red Hat dames, and cabbages and queens.”

  Matt didn’t know how to respond to lines from Alice in Wonderland, so he eased the low-slung car over the pitted dirt lot and onto smooth asphalt.

  He kept the windows down, and soon the wind was whipping their hair around.

  “You keep a neat car,” she noted.

  “Tied down,” he suggested.

  “Now you really are tied down,” Molina commented.

  Matt flushed in the dark, remembering Temple’s teasing promises for his cooperation in moderating this fatal debate. Which had now made him an attempted murder suspect.

  “How did this all happen?” Molina asked. They had to shout over the wind.

  “Temple needed a likely moderator for the Red Hat Sisterhood, Black Hat Brotherhood debate she dreamed up to defuse the shouting match in front of the hotel, so—”

  “Not that. The momentous engagement. You cut out the great and powerful Max Kinsella. How’d that happen?”

  Matt was feeling really, really modest. He knew that Max Kinsella had cut out Max Kinsella by not being there for Temple. Matt felt like the lucky man by default.

  “I finally asked,” he said. “That simple.”

  “Knee, ring, and all that?”

  “Ring. No knee. Is there a reason you want all the slushy details?”

  “Maybe.” She’d leaned her elbow on the open door with the window rolled down and the wind howling past her face. She pulled herself back into the car again. “So. Is Max Kinsella out of town in some romantic funk, or something?”

  “Why?”

  “No more stalking incidents for a whole six days, that’s why.”

  “That’s a record?”

  “Lately, yeah.”

  Matt mulled the situation.

  For several weeks, Molina had discovered, her modest bungalow in Our Lady of Guadalupe parish had been entered by a stalker. Items she hadn’t owned had shown up in her closet, then on her bed, then in her daughter Mariah’s room. The objects had been harmless, but sexually taunting, including a trail of red rose petals through the house to Mariah’s bedroom and then to hers.

  She was sure Max Kinsella was behind it. She’d never been able to pin on him a double murder at the Goliath Hotel the night he left Vegas for a year. It was no secret that she had hounded Temple ever since then for information on her missing live-in lover. Even when he came back, Max had resumed a role as Temple’s phantom lover, easily evading Molina, though she knew he was in town. Only Temple and Matt knew that Max’s suspicious actions were related—not to his cover career as a magician—but to his secret role as a counterterrorist.

  Molina’s unquenchable suspicion of Max was a problem for Matt. Now that he finally had won Temple to have and to hold, the last thing he wanted was Max and what he was or was not doing at the forefront of his life again.

  “He could be out of town,” Matt said shortly. “Temple can’t reach him.”

  “Why would she want to?” Molina’s expression of amazement felt complimentary. Pride goeth before a fall, though.

  “She wanted to say good-bye.”

  “Wow. He wouldn’t want to hear that. Sure he isn’t just ducking her?”

  “I’m not sure about anything regarding Max Kinsella. Are you?”

  She set her lips. She’d eaten off what little lip gloss had ever been on them, but their color was still vivid, maybe her half-Hispanic heritage shining through.

  “No,” she finally answered. “Except that he could very well be my stalker.”

  “Temple told me about that rap. I don’t think so.”

  “No? I know you don’t. Who made you the expert?”

  “He runs on pride. It makes him a loner, but he’s too proud to sink to such sick, puppyish behavior.”

  “Lucifer wouldn’t crawl, not even to God.”

  “Something like that. You’re a policewoman. I bet you’ve ticked off a lot of bad actors, not to mention people I know.”

  She grinned at him, her short chin-brushing hairdo blowing back like a storm of dark, gleeful clouds. Molina should let herself loose more often. He still wondered about Charley’s.

  “So why’d you dislike meeting me at Charley’s?”

  Her grin faded. “You are such a wet blanket, Devine. I bet you think that was an insightful question. Shrinks suck.”

  “Met Max there sometime, huh?”

  “You just frigging turn this car around. And drive the speed limit, damn it!”

  “No turnoff on this highway for miles,” he reported. Serenely. “Kinda like life. So that’s it. Deep down, you wanted to nail Max as your stalker. A shrink could have a field day with that one.”

  “No, I did not. I am not that kind of a victim. Deep down I wanted him to be what your Miss Temple always thought he was, worth her time. But now even she’s given up on him. Hallelujah. That man has distorted all our lives. How can you even contemplate him being innocent of anything?”

  “I don’t think he’d stalk a woman. A man, maybe. Sure. He was—”

  “Two words very important th
ere. ‘Was’ and what you were going to say right after it.”

  “He’s out of Temple’s life now. Mine too, because of that fact. And because of what he was, a spy. He was a good guy, Carmen. He had been a counterterrorist in Europe since the age of seventeen. While I was in the seminary climbing the seven-story mountain to the priesthood, Max was out there on the line, trying to save lives.”

  “He was wanted by Interpol. There’s a record.”

  “He planted that record, him and his mentors. He was a teenage counterterrorist. The magician part was always the cover. That’s why I don’t see him stalking you. Oh, sure, he’d probably enjoy tweaking your whiskers, like he did mine. We’ve both done it by the book, and he hasn’t. And he probably foresaw we’d win in our plodding, methodical ways.”

  “This is how you won Temple? Plodding and methodical?”

  “Probably.” Matt shook his head, tossing off her rude questions. That was her job. He just didn’t know why she had to do it on his time.

  Temple had to deal with it being over with Max. Matt had to deal with there being no Max to act as a counterforce to his own will anymore. He actually missed that.

  “He may be dead,” Matt heard himself saying, and the thought disturbed him. Would Max really have faded like this on Temple? If he could help it?

  “No! That bastard would never leave us alone, and just die!”

  “Carmen . . .” Matt slowed the car, hit the button that closed the windows so she could hear every word. “He may very well be dead. That’s what Temple’s secretly afraid of. He had enemies from beyond Las Vegas. From far away and way back. And, contrary to appearances, he was not infallible.”

  “ ‘Was’ again, Matt?”

  He nodded. “I’m very much beginning to be afraid so.”

  “You want a live rival?”

  “Definitely preferable to a dead one. You know for sure then.”

  “A little sin of pride, there?”

  “Definitely.”

  “And if he’s dead, who done it?”

  “That’s your job.”

  She nodded. “If my stalker never shows up again, and Max Kinsella never does, then we’ll know the answer to that question.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? That’s proof positive.”

  Matt eyed her quickly. “Maybe. Enough proof for you. If we were talking about anybody else but Max. Me, I’d have to see it to believe it.”

  Chapter 34

  Molina Mia!

  Temple had some time to kill the next day before tracking down Detective Alch, so she dropped in on one of the “perkshops.” This one featured the Red Hat Candies Clown Princess vocal group, with Candy Crenshaw performing solo as “Obrah Spinfree.”

  Really, Temple just wanted to get a load off her Stuart Weitzmans—she was no Iron-ankled Natalie Newman or Iron Maiden Molina—and to think for a while.

  The Crystal Phoenix’s conference theater made a perfect double for a live talk show set.

  After the five hugely mugging Red Hat Candies sang a few song parodies, Candy “Obrah” came trudging onstage in a black curly wig and false black eyelashes two inches long. (Oprah had been wearing glam lashes for some time, so Candy was up to snuff on her impression.) She was clad in tight jeans and a rhinestone bra and dragging a little red wagon behind her, heaped, not with pounds of ugly Oprah fat but with piles of red and purple feather boas.

  “You see, ladies,” she said, “you can uplift your lives by forgetting about the fat and converting to feathers.”

  She flapped her elbows like a bird, releasing a pair of feathered helium balloons that hefted the glitzy cups of her O-bra.

  “Take a load off, ladies. Go, O-bra. It’s not Oxygen, but Helium that will make us free.”

  The act was corny but won lots of giggles and applause. And, in a way, it emphasized that women were always being converted to something: this diet or that guru or this self-help system or that celebrity role model.

  At the end Temple checked her watch. Time to find and interrogate a police detective. But he was nowhere to be found.

  She finally spotted him near her special conference room! Good. With Su. Bad. And with, amazingly, the interesting combination of Candy Crenshaw and her estranged husband, Cal, of the Black Hat Brotherhood.

  Offstage, Candy truly mixed the clown look with her P and R persona. She was an Uma Thurman–skinny gal who accessorized it with extreme fluff. The curly purple fright wig made her head watermelon-big and her face and neck the small stem of it.

  Her purple fishnet hose emphasized knobby knees and ankles. A short skimpy red chenille fabric looked more like a bed skirt than a girl skirt. Her elbows were as bony and gawky as her knees, and the huge purple, red, and black eight-foot-long boa constrictor of feathers draped over her shoulders dwarfed her toothpick-thin body. Candy’s limbs looked like they could stab somebody, but her jokes were a lot blunter.

  Cal, on the other hand, was a comfortably middle-aged man with billowing belly and double chin.

  “You are the cutest little thing,” Candy was cooing at Detective Su despite the glower she was getting in return. “You look like you’d wear a double-zero-size parachute.”

  Su was not buying. Or laughing.

  Alch swallowed a chuckle in spite of himself, more for seeing Su’s Great Dane–size dignity tweaked than the effectiveness of Candy Crenshaw’s jokes.

  “This is not an occasion for levity,” Su told the woman. “It is a murder investigation and our field of suspects is very wide.”

  “ ‘Wide’ is not a word you know the meaning of,” Candy cracked.

  “ ‘Suspect’ is not a word you know the meaning of,” Su shot back. “Alch, I want to talk to her in the interrogation room.”

  Normally that destination would give Temple an edgy feeling, but here it was just a posh Crystal Phoenix conference room. She was delirious, however, to see slight little Su herding away her giraffe-tall exotic quarry.

  “I need a word with you,” Temple told Alch.

  “Fine,” he said, jerking his head at Cal Crenshaw. “We’re done for now. No skipping town.”

  “The Black Hat Brotherhood is here for the duration, Detective.”

  “The investigation might outlast the convention.”

  “Great. That’ll give us time to get our guys on some of the local talk shows.”

  Temple and Alch watched Crenshaw stomp away on his black cowboy boots, spurs jingling like reindeer harnesses.

  “All spur and no spine,” Alch diagnosed. He turned to Temple with a grin. “So what do you want to con out of me now?”

  “I think we’ll need to talk privately in my interrogation room.”

  “Yours? You mean the conference room where you’ve set up shop to irritate Su?”

  “You do read my mind,” she answered.

  “That’s only fair. You want to pick my brain.”

  Temple produced a guilty look.

  “With that pink hat on, you could pick the brain of a slug.”

  Temple had the grace to blush. Morrie Alch was such a smart, sweet guy, and was single with a grown daughter, she’d heard. Why didn’t Molina get off her high horse and grab him? She relied on him at work. Temple supposed a lady lieutenant couldn’t marry down, but someone had to break stupid conventions and rules. Temple also supposed that Lieutenant C. R. Molina would be the last woman on earth to do that.

  “So what’s your agenda?” Alch asked as he sat on one end of the long conference table that had recently hosted red-hatted ladies. Temple turned around from shutting the double doors.

  Mr. Affable was gone. The arms folded on the detective’s chest indicated that he may be nice, but he wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Personally? I’ve got to clear Electra and get Matt out of the suspect picture. Professionally? I need to get the media heat off the Crystal Phoenix. This is their biggest convention ever, and doing it in partnership with the Goliath is a good deal for both hotels, neither of which is exactly
the new kid on the block.”

  “Your Debate of the Sexes scheme only upped the bad publicity,” he pointed out. “And upped the possible murder raps around here. And Electra Lark remains a prime suspect.”

  “I know! And it roped my fiancé into the murderous merriment going around.”

  “Fiancé,” Alch teased. “You sure like to sling that word around.”

  “Guilty.” Yeah, she did. She’d had too long a run as an almost fiancée with Max. At bottom, she was a middle-of-the-country girl, a heartland product. And her heart needed to know it had the hope of a permanent home.

  “That’s okay,” Alch said softly. “Old-fashioned values go good with that hat of yours.”

  “Molina,” she began.

  “She’s my boss. Don’t go there.”

  Temple reassembled her forces. “I really don’t want to, and I don’t think any sane man would either.” No rise from Alch. “Speaking of insane men, was Elmore Lark really a murder victim?”

  Alch nodded. “Only the word is ‘almost.’ He’ll recover. That’s top secret, by the way.”

  “Recover? Oh. That’s good news.” That was also theory-busting news. Still, Elmore had been murderously attacked, even if he hadn’t succumbed. How? “Was it the water pitcher? How could it be? A clear, tasteless substance is a lousy medium for poison. And it had to have been poison, right?”

  “I guess you’re moonlighting as a technical consultant for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation these days, huh?”

  “No. That’s a bunch of hokum, I know that. But it had to have been poison.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “The public collapse, while on camera. If the cause of the attack wasn’t natural, it had to have been induced by a lethal substance. But not in the water.”

  Alch nodded.

  That was all she was going to get from him, confirmation of her assumptions. That was more than any other detective she knew would give her.

  Temple began pacing. “Wait! He had to have carried the poison on him!”

  Alch’s expression became even more poker-faced, telling her she was moving in the right direction.

  She paced again, then stopped right in front of him, saying, dramatically, “A hip flask full of liquor.”