Cat in a Red Hot Rage

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Cin-cin,” said Armando, pronouncing the Italian toast “Chin-chin.”

  “Salud,” said Eduardo in turn, using another romance language, Spanish.

  “Prosit,” said Emilio, resorting to German.

  “And Skoal,” finished Ralph, going Nordic.

  “L’chayim,” Temple finished in Yiddish, saluting life with her water glass, hoping they’d recorded a clue to untimely death with this session.

  Temple eyed her co-conspirators for one last toast in English. “To the Red Hat Sisterhood! Your inspection line not only may remove a murderer hiding in their midst, but it was a high point of the day for all the women I overheard raving about their time in the ‘Guy Line.’ ”

  “Those,” Eduardo said, obviously leaving Natalie Newman out, “were charming ladies. They have a zest for life that is quite Italian.”

  “We will have the proper equipment delivered to your Circle Ritz domicile so that you can see both recordings completely.”

  “Thanks, but I think I know what’s she up to now. About six-three with those shoes.”

  “Those are knockoff Versace,” Eduardo sniffed, opening the double doors to release Temple back into the noisy flood of P and R adherents. “Just as she is a fake.”

  Chapter 52

  Ms. Apprehension

  Temple returned to the lobby to be greeted by a shrill, Hitchcockian film scream. Before she could triangulate on the direction it came from, she saw the flock of Fontana brothers behind her racing past, cell phones glued to their ears.

  She spun on a resale Jimmy Choo spike heel and trailed them through a crowd of excited, muttering women that gave way as the Fontanas charged past.

  What the women muttered wasn’t encouraging.

  “Another murder—!”

  “Strangled.”

  “Boa?”

  “No, scarf.”

  “Are those guys hot! D’you think they’re undercover cops?”

  By then Temple was weaving in and out of the gathered conventioneers, trying desperately to catch up to the Fontanas.

  The crowd around the entrance to the Hatorium Emporium was particularly thick. Temple found herself using elbows and heels to pick her way through, leaving a chorus of ows in her wake.

  “It’s another Pink Hat,” someone cried.

  Her own pink hat got several tugs.

  “Don’t go in there!”

  “It’s death to Pink Hatters.”

  Someone swiped the hat off her head, but Temple snatched it back and carried it.

  No way the police would be on-scene for this latest attack. She and the Fontana brothers were the first responders. Maybe they’d catch the perp.

  Suddenly she’d caught up with them, but they were a ring holding everyone back.

  “Ernesto!” she asked the first one whose attention she could snag. “What’s happened?”

  Their expressions were as grim as death, their locked jaws and forbidding arms braced to hold back the mob.

  Even her.

  Especially her.

  “You don’t wanta rush in,” Ernesto warned. “Aldo’s there.”

  Aldo? Well, of course, if they were all on red alert. He would be there. He was the eldest. He was . . .

  Temple’s heart and jaw dropped in concert.

  “A Pink Hatter?”

  “She needs air,” Ernesto said gruffly as Temple strained to see past him.

  She could hear sirens screaming down the hotel driveway again.

  “K-Kit?”

  “Coming out,” someone shouted with such authority that the babbling mob fell back.

  Ernesto swept Temple out of the way, holding her close to some really great Italian tailoring covering a body of steel.

  Aldo raced past, carrying Kit swagged in his arms like a doll, her arms swinging with the motion, her soft strawberry-red hair bare.

  “You won’t want to be a Pink Lady anymore,” Ernesto muttered.

  “She’s—?”

  “Alive, but someone sure tried to change that.”

  Armando raced past, carrying a pink hat and purple scarf with red flowers on it.

  “That scarf design sold out,” Temple told the Fontana brother who was providing her spine at the moment, choking on the words. “They were all gone. I got the last one. I’m storing it in the conference room.”

  “We’ll see if you still have it there,” Ernesto suggested ominously. “But first, we’ve got a hospital run to make.”

  Temple was swept out of there almost as limply as Kit, thrown into the front seat of a black Viper, just one in a train of the powerful sport cars.

  With a roar like an Indy 500 race, a cortege of Vipers shot out from under the Crystal Phoenix porte cochere.

  They caught up to the ambulance in no time, but Temple was too woozy and worried to notice how’d they’d managed to weave through the clogged Strip traffic at 4:00 P.M.

  All she could think was Kit . . . Kit . . . Kit like a pulse pounding in her forehead, interrupted by a my fault . . . my fault . . . my fault. For who’d want to kill Kit? But killing a nosy ex-TV-reporter turned PR person was another matter.

  The Fontana brother driving—Giuseppe, she thought—had her left hand in tight custody and was rotating the steering wheel one-handed. The brakes pushed them almost into the windshield when the car stopped under another, smaller, plainer porte cochere.

  Ernesto opened the passenger door and pulled Temple out. With a conjoined roar, the black Vipers growled away to the parking lot.

  Temple’s ankles were wobbling on her Choos, but Ernesto took her arm and rushed her inside. Aldo was slumped in one of the plastic shell waiting-room chairs.

  Temple had never seen a Fontana brother slump before.

  The pink hat was turning in his flaccid hands, around and around. Ernesto left her standing beside him and rushed to the desk.

  “We have a relative here now, yes,” he was saying. “Niece.”

  “Aldo,” Temple asked, gasped, “what happened?”

  “They won’t let me see her. Not related.”

  “What happened at the hotel?”

  He still stared into the distance, turning the frivolous hat through his hands.

  “I did CPR. Got her breathing again.”

  “Again! Who—?”

  “Disappeared into that mob. No one realized what had happened at first.” He pulled the scarf from his side coat pocket to show her a tight knot with a slashed end. “No one had a pocketknife to cut the garrote until I got there. I don’t know how long—”

  “Oh, God. And that’s the scarf I got with Oleta’s hatbox. Someone snatched it to do this.” Temple wanted to sink down on the chair next to him, but she was afraid to bend her knees for fear she’d never stand up again.

  A hand caught her elbow. “You can go in,” Ernesto said. “The doctor will see you.”

  Aldo was still brooding over the murder weapon. The attempted murder weapon, God willing. He knew a nonrelative couldn’t see Kit.

  Temple put a hand to her mouth to push back any emotions and let Ernesto lead her to a closed door, where a nurse on the other side said, “Come in, miss. It’s only a few steps.”

  A few steps were about all she could manage. She was led through another door into an office, and given a clipboard of papers.

  “How is she?”

  “The doctor will tell you. First, you need to fill these out.”

  Temple tried to focus on the questions, half of which she didn’t know answers to. Kit was her New York City aunt she’d only seen again in the last year. She didn’t know her exact street address, so she put in her own at the Circle Ritz. She didn’t know her health history or her doctor. Not even her age! Not exactly.

  The nurse came to collect the sheet.

  “I don’t know. So much. She’s visiting from out of town.”

  The nurse’s eyes flicked over all the empty lines. “Doctor will be right in.”

  “Doctor” was never right in. It was always
an eternity later.

  Temple jumped at the sound of passing footsteps in the hall, however muffled. Her door remained shut, until she wanted to leap up, open it, and gaze rudely up and down the hall.

  But her role was to wait until called upon.

  And poor Aldo in the waiting room outside had no role at all.

  Temple ran her fingers into her hair and let loose a mental scream. What would she tell her mother? What could she tell her mother? Kit was single and lived in the country’s biggest city. She must have dozens of New York friends, and no significant other there. No one but Aldo here, and he was a sudden fling. New, unexpected. Likely not permanent. Temple was the only permanent next of kin available.

  The door cracked open so suddenly she twitched. Could a thirty-year-old have a heart attack?

  The doctor was an Indian woman. A woman of Indian extraction. She wore glasses and a warm expression.

  “This is your aunt?”

  “Kit. Yes. Um, Ursula’s her formal first name. Carlson the surname. Kit’s the nickname. Kit Carlson.”

  The woman in the white coat smiled and consulted the clipboard she carried.

  “We are missing much data, but that is not critical. Nor is your aunt’s condition. She lost her consciousness, but it was restored in time. She will be weak. Her voice will be . . . rough. She may have forgotten the incident that led to this condition. But she will recover. Would you like to see her?”

  “I would. God, yes, I would. And so would the man who gave her CPR.”

  “A quick thinker. Certainly. Remember, she will not recall what you think that she should just yet. And I’ll keep her overnight here for observation. Merely a precaution.”

  Temple could hardly keep from jumping up and down.

  “Yes. I understand. Can I get Aldo now?”

  “Aldo?”

  “Her . . . significant other.”

  The doctor smiled. “A very good idea at such a time.” She turned to leave, then turned back. “This was an attack. The police have been notified. I don’t know if they will assign her a guard.”

  “I can assign her a guard.”

  “You?”

  “Aldo. If you’ll permit him to stay overnight.”

  “He is too involved, perhaps. And someone with law enforcement experience is needed.”

  “He has that. He’s a member of the Fontana Family.”

  The doctor’s eyebrows lofted high above her upper glasses rims. “Oh. I see. I suppose there is no choice in this matter, then?”

  “He would be solo.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m going to go home and have a nervous breakdown.”

  “Excellent idea.” The doctor smiled. “You and Mr. Fontana may join me in Miss Carlson’s room. If I decide your plan is suitable and will not interfere with operations, Mr. Fontana may occupy a chair outside her door for the night.”

  Temple didn’t mention that her idea of a nervous breakdown was reviewing all footage taken by both of Natalie Newman’s cameras, then reading Oleta’s memoir and laying out every page of the Red Hat Sisterhood convention material.

  Then she would grill her brain for anything she might have done that could have led a murderer to believe that she was almost ready to name a killer.

  Chapter 53

  Drop-Dead Red

  Late that evening at the Circle Ritz, Temple determined to go back to the convention first thing tomorrow, Fontana brothers be darned!

  She would, however, ditch wearing the pink hat on advice of counsel. She’d return in a hot red hat from her vintage collection even though that was “illegal.” At least it would help disguise her from the convention strangler. And she wouldn’t leave until she’d fingered a killer and an attempted killer.

  In fact, she had a hat-brained plan to smoke out the killer, one that everyone she knew would object to on grounds of insanity, hers. So she wouldn’t tell anyone. Most of what she needed was locked up in the conference room, but it required a slight modification.

  Working on a craft project is supposed to be relaxing. As Temple assembled her materials she hummed to herself. Nothing special, just an absorbed, happy sound.

  The Fontana brothers’ playful toasts of yesterday echoed in her mind: salud, prosit, skoal. Those guys were true bon vivants, French for high-livers. What would that be in Italian? Toasting with a good drink was a universal trait from sunny Mediterranean climes to the frozen northlands. A Vôtre Santé, toasted the French. To your good health. Most countries’ toast word or phrase was used in other languages as commonly as Joyeux Noël or Feliz Navidad.

  Wait! Alch had said Elmore Lark “wasn’t just toasting his health” on the panel when he fell ill. Was the detective implying a foreign substance, or that someone foreign was a suspect? Or was it the toast? What had the Fontana brothers fallen back on after using the Italian variation yesterday? Prosit. Salud. Skoal.

  Common variations . . . “Eureka!” Temple said, nearly slicing off a chunk of her forefinger before she dropped the scissors.

  Something small that would slip into a jeans pocket in a bottle or a . . . tin! Something easily doctored with poison. Something that other people knew about or saw Elmore using.

  Temple abandoned her coffee table craft project to take her home office computer for a spin on the Internet. She couldn’t help wondering how Sherlock Holmes would have ever impressed anybody with his instant store of vast but specialized knowledge if he’d had to compete with Google.

  She typed in the suspect word and came up with usual 3,869-plus sites.

  The top entries were most enlightening.

  Skoal, she read, was a leading manufacturer of chewing tobacco, along with Copenhagen, Red Seal, and Rooster. My, but the color red came up a lot, if you considered that roosters had that scarlet coxcomb.

  She didn’t know any users, thank goodness, and understood women’s distaste for that male affection for the stuff known as “spit” tobacco, or “dip” (as in “dipwad”?), or “chew.”

  That “pinch between your cheek and gum” she’d seen advertised now and again (and had ignored) offered a nicotine rush and a risk of mouth cancer to go with it.

  Hmmm. Other effects were increased heart rate and blood pressure, not to mention decreased smell and taste, which would make a man a prime candidate for poisoning.

  And the stuff came in “compact little tins.”

  That Alch! Had he led her on, without ever lying!

  Her eyes nearly popped out of her head when she read the next paragraph. Spit tobacco contained such lethal additives as arsenic, cadmium, DDT, formaldehyde, and hydrogen cyanide, the poison used in gas chambers.

  Wasn’t that what Cold War spies had implanted in their teeth for instant suicide if caught? Cyanide capsules. A clever person with access to cyanide certainly could “roll” his or her own. Empty a harmless pill capsule, fill it with cyanide, and dump the poison in Elmore’s ever-present tin of chew.

  Temple remembered him hawking into a handkerchief at the debate table. He probably used the tobacco in the john before and after appearing in public. Maybe that last chaw was already disagreeing with him. If enough cyanide to fill a tooth could be instantly fatal, so could a dose taken in a wad of tobacco.

  She looked up “Skoal” as a toast, just for fun. It didn’t seem directly relevant, but the entry she found was certainly grisly.

  It seemed that at the full moon, in early northern European caves, the priests of the Norse god Odin would toast him using the skull of a fallen foe as a sacrificial cup.

  Well, wasn’t that special?

  She quickly called Electra on her desk phone.

  “I have two questions. Where were you at 2:20 P.M. yesterday?”

  “Assisting in a perkshop demonstration of hair extensions. Is that important?”

  “Important and good. That’s when Kit was mistaken for me and attacked.”

  “I heard about that, also that she’s going to be all right. Such a shame. You had to ask me?�
�

  “Yes. That puts the kibosh on the police’s suspicion of you. It doesn’t clear you of Oleta’s death, but it sure upsets the Railroad Electra trend.”

  “I should hope so! Although I’d never want anyone to be hurt just so I was cleared.”

  Temple decided to keep mum about her upcoming brilliant hokey plan.

  “What was your second question?” Electra asked.

  “Did Elmore use chewing tobacco?”

  “Not when I knew him, or I’d have never ‘married’ him. He always was a sports addict. Don’t a lot of athletes use chewing tobacco because it doesn’t affect their wind the way cigarettes do?”

  “Skoal!” Temple crowed.

  “Ah, have we got something to celebrate?”

  “Yes, I know now what almost killed Elmore. It’s not ‘Skoal’ as in a toast, Electra. It’s a brand name! Elmore’s now hooked on chewing tobacco, and that’s where the poison was placed. Remember the cyanide capsules foreign agents had built into their teeth in all those old spy movies? This was to be a vintage death.”

  “Whatever you say, dear. But I left Elmore before he had any such disgusting habit as chewing tobacco. I can put up with a lot of things, but stinky brown spit every few minutes isn’t one of them. There are spitting lizards I could cohabit with if I’d wanted that.”

  “Don’t you see? Whoever tried to kill Elmore knew his nasty habits, and used them. And must have known him after you did.”

  “But the police won’t believe that I never knew him to use that vile stuff.”

  “I’ll just have to find out who did know he used chewing tobacco, and used it to try to kill him.”

  “That’s nice, dear, but do be careful! Now just go get some Crystal Light to toast yourself and use some other word than Skoal, and calm down. You sound really overheated.”

  Subdued, Temple complied and returned to her living room, wondering how she could nail a killer with a small tin of chewing tobacco. Still, she only had to figure out who wanted Elmore Lark dead and knew enough about him to hit on the perfect method.

  Meanwhile, her first trick to trip up the killer was a corny scheme, but centered on a hat and would attract attention. What more did she need for bait at this particular convention? Except maybe herself.