“This wedding stuff has made them snap,” Eduardo said. “Simple as that.”
“How long have you been going together?” Temple asked absently, still mourning the fact that Van’s and Kit’s brilliant choice of bridesmaid gowns was not only a washout, it had incited a rebellion.
Their answers echoed the women’s. “Six years.” “Three.” “Four.” “Three.” “Five.”
“Uh, guys. That’s a pretty stable amount of time. Didn’t it ever occur to you that they might be expecting some more permanent commitment?”
“They have jobs,” they chorused again.
“Jobs, hell. Careers.”
“Nobody was clamoring for bambinos, and that is sure not gonna happen for Aldo and Kit.”
“They liked a good time, and we had ‘em. Why ruin it?”
As the Fontana boys listed their grievances against their suddenly martially minded significant others, Temple mulled recent polls she’d seen that women were slow to tie the knot nowadays. That they no longer needed men to support them financially, or even to give them babies. They were totally independent. Then why did these eight go over the edge?
This whole scheme was beginning to look like a prank that had gone very wrong when someone used it as cover to kill a young woman nobody here knew. They all said they didn’t, anyway.
Temple turned brisk. She wanted some one-on-one time with Matt. He was the most at risk.
“Okay, guys. Were any of you not in full view of the others at any time after you left the limo out front?”
Another long silence. Fontana boys did not squeal.
Van stepped in. “Only Nicky and Matt. They were able to split off from the main group because they weren’t the objects of the kidnappers’ affections and objections. And the staff here didn’t know a Fontana from a Fontana from a tall, blond stranger. Nobody missed them.”
That meant that she and Temple were the only ones whose significant other was in the murder suspect runoff.
Oh, goodie.
Command Post
Temple decided that she needed a command post.
Imagine: her acting like Lieutenant Molina. Actually, she was beginning to sympathize with the problems of the police force.
“I need to interview suspects separately someplace private,” Temple told Miss Kitty when she returned to the parlor.
The Sapphire Slipper girls were playing computer games, including solitaire. Weird.
“We got plenty of private rooms upstairs. Take your pick. They’re not going to see any action tonight.”
“The murder room did.”
“Don’t use that one then.”
As if she would!
Temple returned to the bar, went up to Matt, and tapped him on the shoulder, jerking her head to the exit.
Hoots and laughter followed them out into the parlor, then whistles and kiss-kiss sounds hounded them into the foyer.
“I’m glad they’re all having so much fun with that dead girl lying alone upstairs,” Matt said.
“She’s not alone. Emilio’s gone back up there already to guard her door.”
“I guess that’s a girl’s dream death in this town: Fontana brothers at your door.”
“Matt. Chill! I know it’s rough to find someone dead. You tried to revive her. It was too late.”
“I said the prayers anyway. That’s never too late. Good God, Temple, can you imagine what it’s like to be feet away from a murder, and not know it?”
“Like a baptism of fire on the battlefield,” she said seriously. “No, I can’t imagine that. No one here admits to recognizing the girl. That is so . . . unbelievable. Was she brought in just to be killed in this mob scene, so the motive is forever obscured?”
“You’re right. I can only help her now by making sure whoever did this doesn’t walk out of here tomorrow free. We need to get the police out here. There may be evidence in that room, on that body, that would reveal the murderer.”
“There’s surely evidence there that would implicate you. And Nicky. And the press will be all over any lurid headlines involving Fontanas. I’m thinking this death was planned to take advantage of the mock-kidnapping.”
“But the only ones who knew about the abduction in advance were the girlfriends, although the brothel staff knew a big party of men was expected.
“Thank you, Mr. Clarity. At least all those people are strangers to us, not our nearest and dearest, or friends, anyway.”
“So what did all the women tell you?”
“Nothing. Less than an embarrassed Fontana brother. None of them admitted to knowing the dead woman’s face.”
“It’s an easy lie. Simon Peter found it came trippingly to the tongue in the Garden of Gethsemane, three times.”
It took Temple a full minute to switch to childhood New Testament studies to remember the betrayals of Christ that night by Judas, the designated turncoat. And by St. Peter, the best and the brightest disciple. Peter, the rock upon which Jesus would found his church, denied even knowing Christ three times before the morning cock crowed, as Jesus had predicted.
The lesson was that, in moments when stand-up courage is called for, everybody can be weak-kneed. That might be the case here. A houseful of the sex queens of denial. Certainly the hookers denied the tawdry reality of the their life work. The girlfriends denied the charming elusiveness of the Fontana brothers that domesticity might destroy. The brothers denied growing older and up.
What did she and Matt deny?
That a murder was more than something to solve to get him and Nicky out of an awkward position? That Max Kinsella going missing so suddenly just made him an ex-boyfriend better out of the picture, and not another puzzle that would tear at their separate and joint needs and desires.
Oh, shoot!
Temple had examined the rooms upstairs (wild) and downstairs (standard hotel), and decided on using the office adjoining the cigar bar.
This was where male clients were put on hold while the logistics of the girl and the room and the fantasy were rotated on the madam’s office computer. Yes. Sex for sale was microman-aged these days.
Temple could imagine male clients eyeing each other warily.
What are you here for?
It felt very nineteenth century, and so did the ambience of the Sapphire Slipper.
Sex. The Final Frontier. Then and Now.
The office had flocked purple velvet wallpaper, a neat compromise between the blue theme of the whorehouse and the presumed red-blooded male vitality of the clients. A miasma of blue smoke haunted the intimate room.
Temple commandeered the rolltop oak desk and the rolling, golden oak, leather-upholstered desk chair, both big enough for Judge Roy Bean. She felt like Alice sitting on a mobile mushroom, but no need to tell anyone else. Her first task: to discover who were the usual denizens of the place, and who had been imported for this travesty of a bachelor party. Who was out of place, in one way or another? Besides the naked and the dead.
Sitting here, alone, Temple felt the despair Matt must have known on discovering the body. She could picture him chest-tapping and blowing into those still-warm lips, trying to coax life back into a frame it had only so recently deserted.
Matt, bent over a seminude woman, kissing her back to life.
She was proud of him. She might have been too squeamish to try to raise the dead with the pound, pound, pound of hands on chest and the pinched nostril Kiss of Life.
She knew he had given it his all. And so Nicky had found him.
Sad that trying to undo death made you look like a suspect.
Nicky Fontana had tremendous faith in her, enough to gamble his brothers’ lives and freedom on it. He counted on her to get him and his enterprise out of any hot water before the Las Vegas law’s zeal for arrests could boil over to scald clan Fontana.
This was a third-degree burn. Every male Fontana on the planet was front and center as a suspect, just for being here, especially Nicky, and even Aldo, Kit’s late-life love. Damn!
Had someone meant to ruin Temple’s life and that of everyone she cared for? No. That was paranoid. This murder was a fluke intruding into the serene unwinding of her life and that of those she loved. And who loved her.
This murder was a hate crime. Sudden. Opportunistic, not caring about anyone she herself cared about. The motive was likely old. And ugly. And well concealed. Easy to assign to someone unconcerned and utterly innocent. So it was diabolical. Dangerous for the very randomness of the act.
Temple put her fist to her mouth and breathed a sigh on it. It was really pedal to the metal time.
No time for amateurs.
And no time.
She had to come up with a likely suspect before the police had to be called out here in a fistful of hours. Maybe ten.
Max would have known what to do here, where the Obvious intersected with the Devious. That’s what magic acts were all about: the outward motions seemed open and obvious, but deceptions lay behind every apparently simple move and motive.
Temple was surprised to be missing Max as much she was. Not as a bed partner—a neglected love life, no matter how electric once, couldn’t compete with a l ong-smoldering attraction suddenly cooking on all burners—but as a thinking partner.
Max had let her in on the mental gyrations of a counterspy. Taught her how to see beneath the illusions most people throw up around themselves in self-defense. Beneath the deceptions of people who truly mean to do other people ill.
A lot was on the line in Vegas’s legal brothels. Competition among women for customers, everybody’s—courtesan and client alike—sexual potency and self-esteem, the crass bottom line of giving or getting one’s money’s worth.
Max, being a professional deceiver onstage, was almost impossible to deceive.
Yet he was gone, too suddenly. Had he finally been deceived? Or was he finally finishing the ugly business that had put his life in danger, and had contributed to their drawing apart despite themselves?
Temple didn’t know. With Max, one never could.
And one could never count him out. He knew how to breathe life back into dead relationships. She missed him. Wouldn’t count him among her dead and gone yet.
How could she? He was perfect. Immortal.
Wasn’t he?
Dead of Night
Max was having a great dream.
He was doing a trapeze act with a girl in a red velvet swing.
They must have been in the circus. The arena was high and surrounded by applauding throngs. He knew it was a dream because he couldn’t hear the roar of the crowd, could only see those wonder-struck, ravening, open mouths oohing and aahing at his daring swings back and forth.
He was perfect, immortal, his hands changing holds, swift and sure. He was dancing on air, hanging by a hair . . . and by a hand from his own lifeline.
The girl in the red velvet swing above him had dainty legs hidden by a froth of Victorian lace beyond the knee. She was winking at him, peeking over her full short velvet skirts, and she had red hair. It was a coppery, strawberry red, and it clashed with her valentine-red velvet swing ropes.
Which suddenly turned into DNA spirals of thick, coagulating blood.
A bronze-scaled snake was swiveling down those gory ropes, toward him, just as he thrust out his hand to catch the swing and spin off into the distance, safe.
The snake undulated toward his grasping, muscled forearm, suddenly naked, the arm, not the snake. The snake’s fangs dripped slowly. Like an IV.
The crowd now surrounded an operating table. Max was laid out on it in a skimpy white hospital gown. No, not an operating table, a morgue dissecting table, and the snake’s yawning fangs were turning saw-toothed to become the coroner’s cranial cutting saw . . .
His still-living limbs flailed, seeking a secure purchase, on the trapeze or the red velvet swing.
He heard metal clattering, felt the pain of being cut open without anesthetic, twisted away from the treacherous arena, tore the girl from her red velvet perch. They fell struggling into the abyss, sawdust and sequins sparkling like a reverse night sky at the bottom of the circus ring. One ring to rule them all. Three rings, including the Worm Orobouros. Opal. Unlucky. Emerald. Fragile.
“Wake up,” said a voice.
Hands shook his shoulders. Someone shook him hard enough that the back of his skull rapped a hard surface.
God!
Are you sleeping, are you sleeping, dormez-vous? Morning bells are ringing. Ton. Ton. Ton. Morning bells are ringing. Frère Jacques. Brother John. Auprès de ma blonde, je dèsire dormir. Auprès de ma blonde . . .
A tiny flashlight beam was drilling into his left eye.
“Wake up, Mike!”
That “Mike” did it. Woke him up to a lie. A fresh lie he recognized. He instantly knew where he was, who he was supposed to be, and that something bad had happened.
“Revienne?” he asked the dark behind the dentist’s drill of light into his brain.
“Mike.” Her voice, with that ambiguous, charming, accented English.
Are you sleeping, brother John?
“Mon Dieu, Mike! He was trying to kill you. Can you get up?”
He sighed. Not easily.
She hadn’t turned on the room’s general lighting.
“An assassin! Mon Dieu. The only explanation. Here, in such sanctuary. If I hadn’t been thinking about you, hadn’t had an insight on your therapy, I’d have never come by so late. Mike. Say something. Speak.”
“Was it an . . . injection?”
“Oui. Ja. Da. Yes! In your veins. We must find the needle. It fell to the floor when you struggled and he ran. We need it for testing.”
We.
Testing here? Not bloody likely. He felt the floor for a dropped hypo and found nothing. Time to move on. He pushed himself up using the strength of his arms, the ones so invincible in the dream. They were pretty stable. Good. His legs?
“The leg casts,” she said as if reading his mind. “Perhaps you can do without. But not here. Not yet.”
Her breaths came fast and frantic in the silent room, betraying the rapid search and reject of her brain cells. “Murder. Here! That is of all places supposed to be safe! Mon Dieu.”
He thought, irrelevantly, that a fervent “sacré bleu” would be a nice alternative.
“Nothing else to do,” she muttered to him, to herself. “We must leave. Gather forces. How do I move you? Mike! Is your brain clear now? Can you do as I say?”
Yes. Yes. Do I want to?
“An assassin has breached this . . . what is the word? . . . citadel of civilization. I can’t believe it yet. Who are you? Why? Who’d want to kill a helpless man?”
Not quite helpless.
“We must get you out of here.”
We again?
“I must . . . must . . . take you out. It’s the middle of the night. You have a seizure. I’m taking you to the laboratory for treatment.”
Laboratory? Ouch.
“No, not an emergency. Everything is fine. Just an . . . adjustment. I am, of course, authorized. Can you get yourself back up on the bed?”
So he was on the floor. Someone had wrestled him there.
She heaved. His arm muscles took hold and helped.
“Good. God. Good. It’s all right if you look drugged. They’re used to serious conditions here. They’re used to me, moving around. I will take you out. Just . . . let me do it. Say nothing. Do nothing. Mike, do you hear me?”
More than you know, sweetheart.
“Mein Gott! They will kill you if they can.”
He didn’t like hearing that, but he didn’t doubt it. Now. So she spoke fluent German as well as French. And what else? For now, her shock and stress rang true. He could let her lever and scam his hampered body out of here. He agreed. They had to leave.
After that, away from the drugs and control—and, unfortunately, his only contact, Garry Randolph—he would be stronger, his mind clearer. He could decide what to do next, and what to do about her.
A Fine Kettle
of Fish
It is hard to realize that I am best out of the way for the moment, and that the others are probably better off for it.
Perhaps Mr. Max Kinsella and I face the same quandary.
We are soul mates in several ways. (Now that he is not here to joust me for bedspread room I am finding more and more that we have in common.)
Like a master magician, I set my assistants about their appointed tasks. Some may not even know that I am pulling their strings. Or whiskers, in my case.
It is better I stay upstairs so that Miss Satin and Miss Midnight Louise, who are virtual twins (if not mother and . . . shudder . . . daughter) can roam the downstairs area like mobile bugs. Not the big, many-legged roach kind of bug, I hasten to explain, but as furry listening devices.
They are much larger than the real thing, but also as easily overlooked. If you are perceived to be “mute,” you are also considered “dumb.” This is where the phrase “dumb animal” originated. A big mistake, but your average Homo sapiens are experts at that kind of underestimation.
I also realize that the axiom Out of sight, out of mind pertains here.
While everyone downstairs hustles, tattles, lies, and dodges as my Miss Temple investigates their motives, means, and opportunities, the dead woman lies in a tawdry, disheveled state up here behind a guardian accoutered in Ermenegildo Zegna tailoring and Beretta and Rolex accessories, a high-end combo she had likely never seen in her brief life.
I shiver. They have lowered the air-conditioning to preserve the body. Even my luxuriant hair is not proof against chills.
Mr. Max also lies in a forgotten state in some people’s minds. I know my partner is not letting the mystery of his possible fatal accident lay unexamined, but even she recognizes that we must ride to the rescue of Mr. Matt, who is not mysterious at all and firmly on the suspect list.
A pity his sterling scruples and blind Justice have put him in a perfect frame: too noble to peer at a nearby, possibly sleazy sex scene and therefore an ignorant and useless witness. Too compassionate to forgo saving a possibly dead person, and therefore caught red-handed performing the Kiss of Life on the body. Thus leaving DNA traces all over it.
Cat in a Sapphire Slipper Page 17