Unfortunately, a closet is a cul-de-sac.
My back is to the wall.
My front is to a trio of female relatives on the warpath who have tracked me down and used their carnivore claws to pull the door to my sanctuary wide and now stand shoulder to shoulder like linebackers to ensure that I am going nowhere except where they say.
Now I know how the Fontana brothers have been feeling all evening.
Only my pursuing Furies are all feline and all claws and teeth.
“There he is!” they howl as one.
“Sonny,” cries a voice. (That one is okay. It was the moniker of a mob guy in The Godfather.)
“Daddy,” cries another voice in syrupy, sarcastic tones. (That one is not okay. I am not a family guy unless it is spelled with a capital F as in fierce, fearless, feline, footloose, and fancy-free.)
Alas, I am not footloose and fancy-free now, for a third yowl comes: “Lover boy.”
What is a guy to do, held hostage in a house of pleasure along with a lot of other dudes?
Rolling over and playing dead is not an option.
I fan my shivs and snick them back into their sheaths. “Ladies, please. There is enough of me to go around.”
“In your dreams,” jeers Midnight Louise.
“You could use a street diet and some sparring time,” Ma Barker says.
“You are a one-queen kind of guy, I know it,” Miss Satin says, all moony-eyed.
Oh, Cheese Whiz! Here I am, trapped, caught between three generations of clinging females. At least I am outdoing the Fontana boys all by my lonesome self. At least only one of these dames has any serious designs on me.
One is bad enough.
I had better get some designs of my own on them. Quick!
First I spring to my four furry feet, claws unsheathed.
Then I growl, “What took you so long?”
“Us?” Midnight Louise spits in disbelief. “You are the one who was napping on the job.”
“Tut-tut.” I strut forward and brush past them, brush past Satin, that is, and into the hall. “I was not napping. I was planning the best dispersal of our agents.”
“And what have you planned, oh, sage snoozer?” Louise asks.
“We need reliable reports from all fronts on my Miss Temple’s interrogations. She is usually pretty sharp, but your eyes and ears are better equipped to spot telling signs among such a bevy of potential baddies. Satin, you will join your sister residents in the parlor. Midnight Louise will hang with the bridesmaids in the kitchen.
“Ma Barker, your alley cat instincts have not been blunted by the decadent comforts of domestic life. You still live by your eyes and ears and nose. I want you to give the murder room the going-over of your life.”
“And where will you be,” Miss Midnight Louise asks, “while I have been confined to the kitchen with the women?”
“I will be in the bar with the men. I can break their macho codes and tell when they are lying, and when they are just bragging to save face.”
“It is true that they will swagger more in your presence,” she concedes. “And bragging men often give away far more than they mean to. Your assignment roster makes a certain kind of accidental sense.”
What? Miss Midnight Louise agreeing with me?
“Good. We clear on our assignments?”
Docile head nods all around. By gummy bears, executive authority agrees with me!
I watch two sets of fluffy tails, unnervingly upright, salute as Louise and Satin turn and head downstairs, looking more like lit-termates than mother and daughter.
“That cathouse girl has some moxie,” Ma Barker growls to me under her breath, which is rank. Regular hard kibble should help that. “You do not worry about my pad prints being all over the death scene?”
“The authorities know we are notorious carnivores. They may rag on my Miss Temple and Mr. Matt and the Fontanas for not securing the crime scene better, but who can stop an alley cat from checking out dead meat?”
“Your lady friend, Satin, may know better what’s what in a bordello bedroom.”
“Yes, but I want a virgin nose on this scent.”
Ma Barker emits a curt cough. Now I know where she gets her oddly canine name. “You are dreaming, boy, but I will give it my best once-over.”
Devised to Disguise
The police professional always interviews suspects in a murder case separately, one at a time, Temple knew.
The police professional did not usually have to deal with bulk lots of suspects numbering eight or more. Nor did one have—Temple checked her bangle-style watch—less than twenty hours to do it in if Matt was to make his midnight radio advice program by the next night, Tuesday.
It occurred to Temple how thoughtful the Fontana brothers had been to hold the bachelor party on Matt’s one night off, Monday. She was sure that was a concession to her and her own engaged state.
So now she sat around several long kitchen tables with her aunt Kit and an octet of strange females aged from the mid-twenties to the beautifully preserved late-thirties. Everybody was swigging various flavored and antioxidant-laden bottled water.
There were four brunettes, three blondes, and a magenta-black redhead.
She was encouraged that blondes were in the minority, not that they were stupid, only they were so darn hard to tell apart. A Blond Miasma that went with the hair color blinded all onlookers’ senses. Temple knew that now from personal experience, not just non-blond prejudice. She’d been a bottle blonde for a few weeks, thanks to an undercover assignment for her personal pain-in-the-bleach bottle, Lieutenant C. R. Molina. Now she was rinsed and conditioned to a lively strawberry red, which was a vivid version of Aunt Kit’s faded fiery locks.
Temple was a public relations freelancer now, but her former jobs as a Midwestern TV reporter and PR person for a repertory theater in Minneapolis—and her former experiences in amateur theatrics—made her a perceptive group interviewer. As a reporter, she’d learned to spot or hear any hint of insincerity, and a little acting experience only honed that gift. Kit, being a former acting pro and now a novelist, was equally sharp in this respect.
Their quick conversation outside the kitchen had cast Temple as Good Cop, Kit as Bad Cop. Temple had decided they should have a go at it before Electra relieved Kit.
“I’ll have to go some,” Kit complained, “to reach the heights of your Lieutenant Molina in the role.” This was laughable because Molina was six foot in shoes with flat heels and Temple and Kit were five foot each, period.
“Ooh, don’t call that annoying non-woman ‘mine,’” Temple whispered before they pushed through the swinging barroom doors into the serving area. “Hi, guys,” she addressed the women sitting at two of the four tables in the area. “My name is Temple, and I’ll be interviewing you. My aunt Kit will help.”
“Oh, she must be the old hag who nailed Aldo,” someone said.
“This is going to be fun,” Kit whispered, donning her Leona Helmsley bitch-goddess manner in the next, loud sentence. “Who said that? You, the mouse-brownette with the cheek mole shaped like a turtle? Beauty marks went out with Little Orphan Annie’s freckles, sweet jowls. Get it lasered off. I’m here to extract your names, addresses, and occupations, so just spell it out for me.”
The now-abashed girlfriend produced, “Meredith Bell. I’m a lifestyle coach.”
Temple noted that down, along with the physical characteristics Kit had nailed.
The rest of the wedding party-to-be if no one was arrested were: Wanda, honey-blond and a massage therapist; raven-haired Judith, a runway model; white-blond Jill, a pharmacist; the mahogany redhead, Alexia, a horse trainer; Tracee, a dark brunette Pilates instructor; Evita, an auburn-haired ventriloquist; and Asiah, an exotic black beauty with blond hair, who was, surprise, a showgirl.
Temple didn’t even want to know which woman went with which Fontana brother, but she did ask and note down the pairings. She couldn’t help thinking that Kit and she would be ov
erwhelmed by these long-stemmed beauties in the wedding party, although Alexia and Jill were more petite.
Several of the women needed strength in their professions: the massage therapist, horse trainer, Pilates instructor, and showgirl. Yes, the showgirl. Those huge, glamorous headdresses weighed about forty pounds each. It wasn’t just Third World women who could balance heavy weights on their heads to earn their daily bread. . . .
“Okay,” Temple told them. “I think you know that a woman is dead upstairs. Apparently she’s not one of you.”
“No,” came a chorus of answers. “We’ve been together all night, except Asiah, who was driving the limo. She had to come along with the men, see them in, and guard the front door until we had them under control.”
Temple eyed the woman, who still wore the barely rear-covering blazer of a chauffeur over modest black palazzo pants now.
“You were the only one who came along to the Sapphire Slipper later, with the abducted men,” Temple said. “How’d you get driving duty?”
She answered offhandedly, “I like to drive. Dark and desert don’t bother me. I got to eavesdrop on a lot of hunky guys letting their hair down. And I got to tote the Really Big Gun at the end, making sure none of the arrivals scampered off when they realized the setup was definitely not what they’d ordered.”
“Where did the firearms come from?” Temple asked the tables at large.
“Prop shop fakes,” Tracee, the Pilates expert, said. “Pretty convincing. You can rent anything in Vegas.”
“Why did you do it?” Kit asked. “Just to ruin my wedding, or what?”
“Nothing personal,” Jill said quickly. As a pharmacist, she was used to soothing customers. As a pharmacist, she could have administered a narcotic to the victim that made her easy to strangle.
It occurred to Temple that the bridesmaids had used a formidable amount of planning and cooperation to pull off this faux abduction. Maybe it was more than a declaration of dependence on perennial boyfriends. Maybe it had been devised to disguise a murder.
Mass Matrimony
“Who are you, anyway, to ask us all these questions?”
Electra, the bridesmaids’ “housemother,” had taken over for Kit, who now babysat the house courtesans. “Now, dear . . . it is Evita the ventriloquist, isn’t it? How would you like it if you were onstage and your dummy did all the talking?”
“We are not dummies,” huffed Judith, the runway model. “Would dummies have hijacked every Fontana male in town?”
“Of course not. I’m just saying that being grilled by my friend here, Temple Barr, is a lot better than answering to teams of police detectives in small, clammy, air-conditioned rooms that smell of cigarettes and vomit.”
“Euuw,” exclaimed several of the women, Temple among them.
“You do recognize,” Electra went on, “that a young woman is tragically dead, someone your age, murdered upstairs? That the police would be hauling everybody off in paddy wagons for rude and uncomfortable grillings if you didn’t have the finest little private eye in Vegas here to get to the bottom of things.”
Electra had been doing great until unreeling that last phrase.
Temple didn’t bother denying that she was fine and little, or a PI. Whatever gave her a modicum of control over these herds of suspects.
“The idea is,” she told them, “we figure out who the victim is, and who killed her before the police and forensic teams come clomping in to put you and your boyfriends in custody. The idea is to keep Aldo’s and Kit’s wedding on schedule for next Saturday, and all you lovely bridesmaids free to waltz down the aisle with your handsome tuxedoed escorts, free of suspicion and free to be roped into matrimony by all of you.
“Wedding fever strikes a family like the Fontanas only once in a blue moon.”
“We know that!” Jill, the ethereally pale pharmacist, was almost in tears. “We thought this joke would put them on the spot. That they’d be impressed by what guys like the Fontanas admire.”
“Which is?”
“Nerve and organization.”
“Great! You proved that. So keep it up and help me solve the murder of that girl upstairs. She’s not one of you, obviously.”
“No.” Tracee, the Pilates instructor, counted noses around the table. “We’re all here, after Asiah came inside from parking the limo and guarding the front door.”
“Oh, and when was that, Asiah?” Temple asked.
“I don’t know,” the lanky black woman said. “We weren’t on a timetable, other than picking up the guys at eight sharp.”
“How’d you manage taking over that limo?”
“Hundred-dollar bill and a tongue kiss to Manny G., who’s fifty and prefers sitting in front of a twenty-one horseshoe to sitting behind the wheel of a behemoth on a trek to the desert.”
“He’d let a strange woman take over his ride?”
Asiah dug her talons into a tiny quilted purse she kept on a long chain, rather like a Chihuahua. “I have my chauffeur’s license. I made some dough that way while working on the modeling career. Leggy chauffeurs get premium pay in Vegas. I’ve driven Donald Trump.”
“Hopefully, off a cliff,” Electra muttered to Temple.
“And thanks, Tracee,” Asiah added with a toss of her blind-ingly blond long tresses, “for pointing out that I was the last one in. Real sisterhood, bitch. I hope the Down Dog breaks your back someday.”
“Hey!” Wanda, the massage therapist, was obviously the peacemaker of the group. “Let’s not panic and snipe at one another. At least none of us is dead. Are you sure someone killed the girl upstairs now, while we all were here, Miss Barr?”
“Just Temple, thanks. Save the formality for the cops, because they will have to be called. I can’t say, Wanda, when she died. Right now, I need to find out who she was.”
“Not one of us.” Alexia, the horse trainer, noted with a shimmy of her roan mane.
“How do you know?” Temple said. “Maybe she used to date one of your boyfriends.”
“That’s just it.” Judith, the model, toyed with a sealed pack of Virginia Slims cigarettes she was obviously dying to open. “We’re all veterans. We’ve dated our guys long enough to get tired of being long-term girlfriends.”
“How long?” Temple asked, and got bombarded with a blitz of years. “Nine.” “Five here!” “Seven!” “Six.” “Four.” “Five.” “Eight.” “Two,” Asiah finished. As all the others looked at her with disbelief, she added, “That’s a looong time for me.”
“So what’s with the mass rush to matrimony?” Temple wondered.
They eyed one another, wordlessly consulting on whether to tell her the truth.
“We’ve met one another,” Tracee said finally. “Hung out with one another and our guys. Heck, our periods are even in sync.”
The others nodded glumly. Temple had heard of that: women in close proximity or in families tended to ovulate, and everything else, at the same time.
The Fontana brothers’ girlfriends formed quite a little “family” of their own.
“So when Aldo broke the circle, so to speak,” Alexia said, “when he announced he was marrying a stranger, we all just went bananas for commitment.”
“Wait a minute!” Temple shouted into the muttering of bridesmaid indignation at being left at the altar unwed. “Who was Aldo’s girlfriend? Before.”
The silence that greeted her very apropos question lasted a long time.
For, of course, she was the obvious prime suspect: the woman who could never join this jolly little group again. The one Aldo never moved up from “girlfriend.” The one Temple’s aunt Kit had replaced.
“There wasn’t one, at the moment,” Wanda finally said.
“How long a moment?”
“For about a year. She was a performer at one of the acrobatic shows.”
“Was?”
“She fell and broke her neck.”
Temple felt her stomach flip over. Fell. Dead. Like Max, maybe, who lived to
tempt fate with spectacular aerial stunts. That was the nightmare, anyway.
“How awful,” Electra said, her voice throbbing with empathy.
“They’d been together nine years,” Jill added, choking a little.
“I see why—” Electra didn’t finish her thought. Why Aldo had flipped for Kit and decided to marry her. He knew what loss was.
And all these women knew it too. Time could be short.
Temple, being advertised as the city’s “finest little private eye,” had to ask herself an unpleasant question. Had Aldo’s girlfriend just had a tragic accident, or had it been murder too?
Memories of the Fall
“Garry,” Max asked the man he believed had been his mentor and “handler” since he was seventeen, “why do I have a psychiatrist assigned to me?”
Garry was wheeling him through the gardens again, after having checked the wheelchair and Max’s pajamas for recording devices the size of a flea, or not much larger. He had graduated from the butt-baring hospital gown.
“They claim it’s standard practice for victims of head injury and memory loss. That makes sense. This is a world-renowned facility. I’ve looked into Mademoiselle, or Fraulein, Doctor Schneider’s professional and personal background. She is highly qualified. Degrees from Heidelberg and the Paris Psychiatric Clinic. She travels all over the world, at stratospheric fees, to discreetly aid some very global players. Rupert Murdoch has used her, not personally.”
“Who’s paying her in this case?”
“We are. You, actually.”
“How much?”
“Fifty thousand dollars for three weeks, a renewable contract.”
“Fifty thousand? For a little knee patty-cake? I must have a lot more money than I know, but I don’t think I’d spend it on this. Fire her.”
“It might look suspicious if you didn’t get the best of everything, Mr. Anonymous world-class, rich man mountain climber. Or that I wasn’t as concerned as the doctors about your memory loss. Which I am. She might do some actual good. And what’s with the knee patty-cake?”
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