Cat in a Red Hot Rage

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Slightly warm,” he said.

  “Flasks carry straight liquor. The taste is strong and overbearing. It would mask almost any poison if Elmore had swigged some down in the men’s room before going to the panel and on camera. Even the deadliest poison takes a few minutes to act.”

  Alch shrugged and nodded. “I’d put you on CSI.”

  “So.” Temple paced some more in her smart hot pink, high-heeled slides.

  Her pink hat wasn’t the only thing Morrie Alch liked about her, and friendly paternalism only went so far with even the most decent of men. Maybe he missed his daughter at cajoling sweet sixteen.

  Temple had never been a cajoler, but she liked to let her imagination loose.

  “Elmore didn’t carry a hip flask,” she both asked and stated outright.

  He nodded.

  She paced again, recalling the hokey Western outfits he wore.

  “Something else he carried was tainted, then. In his jeans’ hip pocket.”

  Alch’s expression betrayed surprised agreement.

  “I feel like I’m on the old Family Feud game show. I have to guess the top five most likely answers. Breath mints or those little strips!”

  Alch’s expression grew even more deadpan.

  She’d missed. “No, I guess Elmore Lark wouldn’t be as self-conscious as a computer nerd on a date at this stage of the game, would he?”

  Alch chuckled.

  “Wait. Tobacco! It can be lethal. Poison-spiked cigarettes. A whole pack of them. It would work slowly, then, bingo, the dose would build up and a quick ciggie to ease the tension of the debate could be the Camel that broke the weak straw that was Elmore Lark’s back.”

  Alch laughed out loud. “Nice way to put it. Yeah, if you’re talking Fu Manchu or some other pulp villains of the early twentieth century. This is the twenty-first century, kid.”

  “But Elmore Lark was a twentieth, even a nineteenth-century kind of guy, especially in regard to women.”

  Temple sighed. No poison in the water. Or in any liquor or cigarettes Elmore could have carried on him. Maybe he bit his nails!

  She said as much to Alch, who bent over double from laughing. “Creative, but he’d need a daily manicure of poison to do the job.”

  “Some seductive Red Hat honey maybe could have talked him into a harmless clear nail polish, then, wham-o!”

  “You think you could talk me into some harmless clear nail polish?”

  “If I wasn’t engaged, maybe I could.”

  “No. Real men don’t do their nails. Elmore’s a real man.”

  “Yeah. Lying, lazy, deceptive, womanizing . . .”

  “Agreed. The guy’s a rat. A lot of people like to poison rats. And his kind of rat, the poisoner would likely be a woman. Poison is a woman’s weapon.”

  “But Elmore’s a man’s man, in the worst interpretation of that.”

  Temple tapped her toe, beating a fast, impatient beat on the stone-cold floor. That’s how cold she felt her guesses were. Alch was still sitting here playing the game only because her earlier guesses had been in the ballpark.

  Time to slam something into far left field.

  “If it was in his jeans pocket, it had to be as small as a tiny flask or cigarette case. What are both of them? Metal?”

  Alch had stopped grinning and was looking ready to be impressed. She couldn’t stop now. Family Feud. She’d always felt sorry for the players who were last to guess after all the most obvious answers had been taken.

  Elmore Lark. Aging urban cowboy. High-heeled boots, big-buckled belt, neckerchief, ten-gallon hat. A man’s man while taking women to the cleaners.

  “You’re right,” Alch said consolingly, “that it was something that would fit in a jeans pocket.”

  “Not cigarettes? Wait. A cigar?”

  “Nicotine is somewhat toxic,” he admitted, “but not in this amount, and not instantly. Besides, a smoker would have built up resistance.”

  “And he wasn’t a smoker?”

  Alch shook his head. “Although nicotine can be lethal in more than cigarettes over years of inhalation, it wasn’t in this case. In this case it was a, er, smoke screen.”

  “So something else was lethal to Elmore Lark? He was a drinker. Maybe one of those airplane-sized bottles of scotch was how he concealed it. That would fit in a jeans pocket.”

  Alch paused. He didn’t dare speak too loudly, or plainly.

  “Let’s just say that Elmore Lark wasn’t toasting his own health.”

  Temple felt she had pushed Alch’s envelope to the seam-splitting point. She said her thanks and good-bye, and mulled the detective’s parting words as she left the room for the colorful chaos of the Red Hat Sisterhood–populated lobby.

  Elmore Lark “wasn’t toasting his own health.”

  A toast had killed him? Alcohol? Sure, you could kill yourself by overusing alcohol, usually over years. But how could someone else kill you with it if not with poison in it? And Alch had implied alcohol wasn’t the medium.

  If something at the debate hadn’t poisoned him, the attempt looked much more premeditated and distant. But ifs were all she had. She sure wasn’t going to get any more information about it from the LVMPD.

  At least Matt and the water pitcher were off the hook.

  Except hers.

  Chapter 35

  Hints and Intimations

  Temple eyed the swirl of red and purple pooling around her, the echo of laughing voices exploding from all the shiny hard surfaces that lined Las Vegas hotel-casino’s public areas.

  If you could hear yourself think in a Las Vegas hotel-casino, they weren’t doing their job right. The cheerful clatter and clinks of slot machines kept up that subliminal cash-register chatter, while excited human voices competed with them.

  And then she realized, what with all her concentration on Elmore Lark’s possible habits and many means of poisoning, no one—at least not her—had checked out Oleta Lark’s hat habit.

  She wove through the crowd, jousting brims with ladies of different colors, red, pink, lavender, until she reached the ballroom that hosted the Red Hat Sisterhood stores, aka the Hatorium Emporium.

  Oleta had bought a merchandise booth here, not the one where she was killed. Presumably it had been set up before her death and was still standing. At least Temple would learn something about Oleta’s personal taste, if nothing more.

  But the convention “store” was a riot of cheerful disregard of taste, at least in the conservative sense. The atmosphere of women-only shoppers jostling each other at tables filled with frivolous fun products jogged more than her body. It triggered her memory, spurring one of those déjà vu feelings of slipping back in time.

  That’s when Temple remembered where she’d bought the costume jewelry ring reminiscent of the one Max had bought her and Shangri-La the magician had stolen onstage.

  For some reason Matt came to mind. A flashback slide of him rooting through her scarf drawer. There was something intimate and sexy about that act, that memory. Wow. Her scarf drawer and the rings that resided in it are now a Freudian paradise . . .

  Of recovered memory!

  Temple stood shock-still as people and conversation flowed around her. She’d been handling PR for the annual women’s show at the convention center a few months ago. Such shows were orgies of girly self-indulgence, showcasing products that soothed the savaged soul: massage and bath oils, jewelry and clothes.

  Just as here and now, there were how-to sessions on using hairpieces and false eyelashes for fun, and for older women who were getting scanty in both outgrowths. Cooking seminars with kitchen gadgets. New cosmetics. That’s where Temple had first seen the Besamé vintage color cosmetics and the mineral-only makeup powders that were now a commercial rage.

  And that’s where, on the show’s Sunday sell-off before closing, she’d spotted the ring uncannily like the one she’d lost and had never stopped missing. The woman behind the display discounted it to less than forty bucks (it had real c
ubic zirconias) and slipped it into a little box and then into a little bigger paper bag.

  And . . . sometimes your subconscious could kick up a long forgotten and buried memory, one not openly noted at the time. And the . . . the bag had sagged a little on Temple’s arm as she’d turned to leave the booth.

  It had almost felt like the lightest touch snagging her bag, providing a second’s worth of drag.

  Had that been when the second ring box bearing the worm Ouroboros ring that Kathleen O’Connor had dumped on Matt had found its way into her possession?

  Temple was always busy. She’d dumped the paper bag on her dresser top, and later, dumped the ring box in her favorite catch-all spot, the scarf drawer.

  Why would anyone lay that sinister ring on her? Who would have had it? Only Kitty the Cutter O’Connor.

  People intent on shopping continued bumping into Temple. This was a room of constant movement and female chatter, shopping nirvana. But Temple stood still, frozen in thought, beating the fringes of her memory.

  What had she looked and sounded like, that vaguely noticed saleswoman?

  Short. Like Temple. Kitty had been maybe three inches taller than she. Still qualified as “short.” A typical saleswoman, all perkiness and persuasion. She had “talked” Temple into the first ring, almost as if she had known it would appeal to her. Because she knew it was similar to the real opal and diamond ring? No. Shangri-La knew that.

  Temple was mixing up her villainesses. If Kitty O’Connor had been masquerading as the saleswoman . . . No, that would have been too difficult to arrange just to taunt Temple with a mock ring. She was a saleswoman on that day, for some reason, and she was a saleswoman who had taken advantage of an amazing opportunity. A second chance to snooker Temple. Except it was Shangri-La who’d relieved Temple of Max’s ring.

  Okay, no one had ever figured this out at the time, not even high and mighty Lieutenant C. R. Molina.

  Like Sherlock Holmes had said—now that she’d encountered “The Red-Hatted League” she was recalling her childhood acquaintance with the Canon—“Once you eliminate the possible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Or something to that effect.

  Ah. Temple ignored a particularly intense bump that almost knocked her off her feet. She was almost knocked out of her shoes.

  “My sweet Stuart Weitzmans!” she murmured.

  Shangri-La was Kitty O’Connor. Or, rather, Kitty O’Connor was Shangri-La. That could be the only explanation if Matt’s worm Ouroboros ring had gotten into Temple’s possession on the same day a double for Max’s semi-engagement ring had. Who else would recognize that the cheap imitation ring bore a striking resemblance to the one from Tiffany’s and Max? It all made terrifying, mind-boggling sense.

  Random thoughts, more like twinges, hit Temple then too.

  But Kitty O’Connor was dead. Max had seen her die in a solo motorcycle accident out on Highway 61. No, that route was in Minnesota and from an old Bob Dylan song. Kitty must have spun out on Highway 95. Temple had never asked Max where, only accepted the what.

  Unless Max had been lying and Kitty hadn’t died. Or he’d been mistaken somehow. No, she was buried.

  But Shangri-La wasn’t.

  Except she had died recently too, in costume. Or had she?

  If the two women were the same. They were both dead. Or not.

  Temple looked around the room thronging with women squealing and flaunting red or purple feather boas and umbrellas and stockings and satin gloves at each other.

  “Look!” they were caroling. “Look. Look at what I found! No, over here! It’s fabulous! It’s too great to be true! Let me see it!”

  Temple turned, blindly, and pushed her way out of the room that had just served as her personal time machine.

  She needed some peace and quiet. She needed to escape from the red and purple mania. She needed to figure out what had really happened that Sunday, so long ago, and what had really happened to her.

  Chapter 36

  Loving Dangerously

  Temple went home and poured herself a stiff drink from Max’s Millennium scotch. For the first time, she didn’t go into a funk over something related to him. To them. She had big-time conundrums to solve.

  She then unearthed every item in her scarf drawer. It gave up no more ring boxes.

  Then she sat on her living-room sofa, her bare feet up on the glass coffee table and her heels lying askew on the faux goat-hair rug, and sipped really good scotch very, very slowly.

  “Once you eliminate the possible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

  Round and round her mind went. The thought, the suspicion, the idea, was incredible. She tried out the impossible first: Kathleen O’Connor was Shangri-La. That was impossible because of what had happened at the New Millennium a week ago. Shangri-La had been revealed as an illegal immigrant and an Asian acrobat. However, ignoring that, it was possible because Shangri-La was all costume and mask of makeup. She was also an acrobat, but a lifelong double agent like Kathleen O’Connor would know martial arts and that was only a skip and jump from being an athletic magician.

  Max had found the profession of magician to be the perfect cover for his activities. Why wouldn’t Kathleen O’Connor come to the same conclusion, especially since she knew all about him and would have relished using his own methods to track him and bring him down. Maybe Shangri-La wasn’t always the same person. Hai Ling was illegally in this country. Maybe Kitty the Cutter forced her into stepping aside at times when it suited Kitty to masquerade as Shangri-La. For criminal activities! Like that designer drug smuggling operation at the Opium Den!

  Everything was amazing . . . and fit . . . and, Temple mused, utterly useless. Because Kathleen was dead and buried. Temple’s brilliant insight had come too late. It didn’t matter, except that it proved that Matt was eternally free of Kitty the Cutter’s sick, violent stalking, as was Max.

  If she could only find Max to tell him so! He’d be so proud of her reasoning, her revelation. Except he was noncommunicado, as he’d so often been lately. Too absent to even keep her chronic attraction to Matt from finally exploding into consummation. Not that she regretted a moment of that, but Max could have at least tried to prevent it, instead of pushing her into Matt’s bed like some heroic doomed lover passing her onto a new romance and a better life.

  So her elated mood at having solved the biggest mystery afflicting them all dropped like a stone. She was still sipping her way through that one expensive glass when she got up to answer the knock on her door, hoping that it wasn’t someone wearing purple and red.

  She’d had enough of P and R PR to last a lifetime.

  She lucked out in that respect. She faced a wall of plain khaki-colored cotton pantsuit.

  Lieutenant C. R. Molina was poised with a fist still raised.

  That vision shook Temple out of her fog and into combat alert.

  “Should I cringe now or later?” she asked.

  “I’m greedy,” Molina said. “I want both.”

  “And you still expect me to invite you in?”

  “Oh, that would be nice.” Said sarcastically. “Actually, I have some questions that you might really want to know the answers to.”

  Temple stepped back from the door, resigned. Molina followed her into the living room, but neither woman sat. Their relationship, always at odds over Max, was too thorny for simple actions like that.

  “Have you seen Kinsella lately?” Molina asked, eyeing Temple’s glass of scotch.

  Still the same old tune. Only this time, with Max vanishing again, it really stung. Molina was the last person Temple wanted to know that Max had left Las Vegas, maybe. Had left her, certainly.

  “Seen Max? Not recently,” Temple said casually. “We’ve never lived in each other’s hip pockets.”

  “Heard from him?”

  “Not recently.”

  Molina nodded. “Were you aware of a magician working at Neon Nightmare?”


  “I know the nightclub, but no.”

  “He wore a cape and a mask and performed as the Phantom Mage. He bounced around the dark interior walls on bungee cords and did magic effects in literal thin air. I understand he was quite popular.”

  “Sounds like a comic book superhero act.”

  “Sounded like Max Kinsella to me.”

  “He hasn’t performed in almost two years.”

  “Exactly why he might want to polish his skills anonymously. What do you think? Even better, what do you know?”

  “Nothing about this Phantom Mage. Why ask me? Why not trot over to Neon Nightmare and interview the magician in question? Surely you and your shield can sweet-talk only a mask off a man.”

  “I would, except I didn’t learn about him until he stopped performing.”

  Temple rolled her eyes. “This is such a non-issue, then. Guess we’ll never know who the Phantom Mage was.”

  But she was wondering now if it had been Max. He’d talked about rehearsing again, about putting a new act together. It had been his excuse for remaining distant lately. Maybe that’s why he’d left. To train in Europe or someplace safe. Right, and not tell her he was going?

  “Maybe we’ll all soon know who he was,” Molina said, watching her. “Have you seen or spoken to Max Kinsella since last week? Telling me won’t betray him. I know you’ve been in close contact for months.”

  Temple had to take a few moments to mentally backtrack. Her mind had been pretty occupied by Matt and his dinner date and engagement ring recently . . .

  “No,” she said finally.

  “That’s interesting. You might want to sit down.”

  Temple remained standing. Molina sat on the sofa’s broad arm, a position that put their faces on a level.

  “The Phantom Mage left a huge puzzle behind him.”

  “He’s gone, then? He left?”

  Molina shrugged. “Hard to say. Witnesses are divided about whether he died on the scene or not.”

  “Died?” Temple spoke quickly to keep from focusing on her stomach doing a swan dive. Died? “What scene? I haven’t read anything in the newspaper about the Neon Nightmare.”