Leading Questions
It was now high noon and Temple was getting butterflies in her stomach.
Van von Rhine called the LVMPD to report the situation, which meant Molina would soon know about her latest and most bizarre crime scene involvement yet. Aldo and Nicky comforted her by saying that Nye County would have had to call in the Vegas CSI unit anyway. Temple’s investigative calls on Madonnah’s hidden number must have stirred some powerful forces into action. The idea of helicopters, plural, had really upset her.
Van worked under her maiden name, so at least the volatile surnames of Fontana and Barr need not come up right off the bat. And it would look better for all concerned if they called the authorities before the distant Big Guys showed up.
Matt was standing close behind Van to back up her story, and intervene if Lieutenant Molina got involved and went ballistic. The homicide detective had always liked him.
All of it made perfect sense, but Temple couldn’t bear staying with the barroom crowd and listening to Van’s end of the conversation. They now knew the “why” but not the “who,” which made this a pretty half-baked effort on her part.
She’d been imported to the Sapphire Slipper to solve the murder, and without a murderer identified, everyone, including her nearest and dearest, was still a prime suspect. Plus, the first scheduled clients were driving out of Vegas even now to add to the Sapphire Slipper’s already overcrowded population.
Temple was a proven failure.
She ambled through the parlor and the dozing courtesans into the deserted foyer to brood. No one noticed or missed her. Even with the hectic events of the past few hours and all the new faces she’d met, nagging worries about Max danced in and out of her mind.
You can’t worry about the whole world, she told herself.
She was so exhausted she’d start hallucinating soon.
And then something came floating down the stairs from the deserted second floor. The supposedly deserted second floor.
Her mind refused to believe her eyes.
A disembodied crimson thong trimmed in marabou feathers floated down toward her. Madonnah’s ghost was up and walking? Or crawling, rather. Even creepier!
The apparition was already breezing past her to the front door when she finally made out the black feline form whose neck it adorned. Finally! After all these hours out here, she had been granted a glimpse of her own elusive cat!
It had to be Louie. His broad-cheeked tomcat face squeezed out a snarl as his paw scratched a gash into the door’s dark wood.
Temple started laughing, hysterically. Louie in boudoir wear? A flaming red thong? Louie a panty sniffer? A pantywaist? A red-hot thong-head?
She almost doubled over from laughing, but figured that the small resident cat probably had a petite box that no one had remembered to change lately, and Louie might desperately need a potty break.
She went to the door, and opened it.
Into the shockingly bright daylight Louie bounded. The bordello was like a casino in that all sense of “outside” disappeared when one was inside. Time stopped. Night was eternal.
Louie had just reminded her that a bright, sunlit world surrounded them. The light also showed how alarmingly tight the wisp of nylon was around his neck.
“Wait! Louie! That thing could choke you if it caught on something.”
He stopped, as if understanding her. Temple ran to catch him. He darted off, around the building’s corner.
Darn! Trust a cat to act independent just when he most needed a little human help. Temple stomped over the hard, shifting sandy ground through the desert scrub.
The building’s exterior looked rough and tawdry in daylight. The courtesans’ quarters off the main building’s kitchen was just a string of linked single-wide trailers.
Louie led her around them into higher brush and cactus that raked her bare calves. Temple stopped, blinking in the hot sunlight.
“Louie, you dork! I am not chasing you over the equivalent of the Ethel M Chocolate Factory cactus garden. I refuse to follow you another step.”
Silence. Then a pathetic yowl from out of sight.
Temple glanced back at the Sapphire Slipper. The front entrance was almost out of sight. She sighed and trudged forward again, surprised when a rough-sided wooden structure came into view.
She edged closer, hearing something faint and tinny.
A radio?
Someone was out here? A caretaker? No one had mentioned . . .
The sound cut off, as if it had been a mistake.
A gash of bright red near the worn wooden barn door ajar on its shaky hinges made her tiptoe over the sand.
Louie had found something out here he was returning to. Maybe food. She saw shreds of what looked like cooked meat on the sand near the door. Or, he had found someone.
Radio Silence
The last thing I expected to hear from the barn was a blast from the past.
But there it was, for a few unguarded seconds, some soul anthem, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”
I realize at once what has happened, especially since the radio went dead again, fast. Our resident killer has gotten one of the three disabled vehicles going, and the radio had been left on when it was stopped.
The reviving vehicle could be the brothel Jeep Tracker, or its van, or it could be the Gangsters’ Vanillamobile. That station sounded like something the long-stemmed Asiah would listen to once the limo’s dividing window was up and no sound would flow through to the main body of the stretch Rolls.
Whatever the vehicle and whoever the driver who had tuned into that station, now an escape vehicle is coming to life, and my Miss Temple and I are caught like deer in the headlights. Well, headlights are not very strong in daylight, but the fact is something inside the barn is primed to start moving again soon and we must get our rears in gear too.
I wheel around and dash toward my Miss Temple at a gallop, finding she is only twenty feet behind me, which is good trotting for a short-legged breed like her, but not good enough for effecting a fast, quiet, and unseen retreat.
I hear the barn-door hinges squeal behind me, and watch Miss Temple’s face register dismay in front of me.
Talk about caught between a car and an accident waiting to happen!
I expect Miss Temple’s face to register some joy or relief at my presence on the scene, but she is busy freezing in midturn and looking behind me and putting her palms up in the air to test the desert breeze.
I do a one-eighty and would put up my dukes too, if I didn’t need them to stand on at the moment.
The villainous Gherken is poised with the shadow of the barn behind him, wearing a sinister five-o’clock shadow and a lean and hungry look that would do a wolf proud. A very real Uzi is pointed at my Miss Temple. And he does not even need fishnet hose to wield it with scary style and confidence.
“Just what I needed,” he says. “My ticket out of here.”
The nasty black metal nose of the Uzi beckons us into the barn.
We go.
I do not know if the villainous Gherken notices me, or cares, but as soon as I am back in the shadows, I dive into the barn’s deeper darkness, trying to work the stupid lingerie off my neck. All it will do now is attract the wrong kind of attention.
“You picked the perfect time for a stroll,” he tells my roommate. “Good for me, bad for you.”
I can see him check his watch.
“You are coming with me as a shield. The johns will be wheeling in any minute now, but I intend to be on the highway by then.”
He looks around and spots the ditched thong.
I hunker down behind the Tracker in shame and fury as he uses my former neckerchief to tie Miss Temple’s hands behind her.
“You will ride shotgun with me,” Gherken says, dragging her into the front passenger seat of the Rolls. “We are leaving in style. If you’re good and I can spare the time, I will drop you off somewhere in Death Valley. Even alive maybe, baby.”
He gives out t
he evil laugh beloved of villains everywhere. My Miss Temple tries to get her feet out the door before it shuts, but he kicks her ankles back in, making her bite her lips in protest.
She buys me just the time I need to slink onto the black floor carpet and squeeze my capacious guts through a slit the size of Satin’s tail into the limo’s main body. Luckily, the Brits were still making those high-end snooty cars as roomy as Checker cabs back when this vintage beauty was created.
Okay, two of us are taken hostage now.
Much better.
I notice that the villainous Gherken has left the dark window behind the driver’s seat up.
Excellent. I could use a little traveling music.
Luckily, I saw Fontana Inc. and their expert fingers and enviable opposable thumbs manipulate the limo’s many functions from the long thin control console set into the padded leather ceiling. Of course, this useful unit was not designed for a guy of my height, one foot at the shoulder.
It will take multiple bounds up and a delicate touch on the controls, but there is only one simple function I crave.
The engine starts with that leopard purr of a really big, fine vintage motor.
The walls of the Sapphire Slipper should be shaking and baking now.
So this villainous dim-bulb, Gherken, thinks that the sound of one of their legendary limos starting up will not draw a sharp Fontana ear, much less ten of them?
I add my purr to the Rolls’s throaty roar.
Jump. My shivs have split ends, but I punch a spot I noticed before. Manx! There are more tiny controls on human communication devices lately than on a Victorian high-button shoe! If I ever have to rely on text messaging, I am a dead dog.
It takes only the pointed end of one shiv to manipulate this console. Too bad I was never much of a game boy, although I know my way around a television remote.
Jump.
Punch.
Miss.
Jump. Punch. Very near miss.
The limo is inching onto the rough desert pathway, trying to sneak past the bordello.
I have lift-down!
I hear a stir at the Sapphire Slipper’s port cochere as the Rolls glides by on a muffled growl.
I have three inches (not to get personal) and am going for four.
Jump. Punch.
This is a jerky process, but then we have a jerky driver.
Jump. Punch.
I let out an ear-piercing battle cry unmistakable to my kind. It is so ear-piercing I could open a shopping mall kiosk with it.
Jump. Punch. Jump. Punch. Seven inches. Jump. Punch. Jump. Punch. Nine inches. We are getting into X-rated territory now . . . Jump. Punch.
And Miss Midnight Louise lofts through the lowering side window into the moving limo.
Jump. Punch. Jump. Punch. The Rolls is picking up speed. Gherken knows he has been seen. Satin, panting a bit, tumbles inside beside me.
Jump. Punch.
I hear an exterior piercing scream and spot eight shivs clinging to the three inches of window still up. A mighty leap for mankind and also for Ma Barker.
Miss Midnight Louise plants her forepaws on the leather door upholstery, sinks in her shivs, and grabs her granny (maybe; I do not lose my wits even in a life-and-death crisis), by the nape of the neck and throws her into the limo with us.
“I must lower the chauffeur’s window next,” I advise my troops.
Out the open window, I spot Fontana brothers, bearing Berettas, running to pursue us. The Rolls is accelerating to full speed.
Jump. Punch. Jump. Punch. Jump. Punch.
I am getting the rhythm. The dark glass behind the driver goes down like the evening sun, fast at the end.
The villainous Gherken’s neck is pale and bare and great meat for the three midnight-black, blood-lusting brides of Dracula I have summoned.
Through the clear windshield, I see a white car with a red blinking light on the roof careening toward us, followed by two white vans swerving alternately on two wheels, with a big hairy man behind the wheel of the lead van, grinning like a Hell’s Angel.
The Rolls is gathering real speed. It is the Power Ranger of the Gangsters’ fleet. Reinforcements will be too late once it hits the highway, although a helicopter can pursue it. But a highspeed chase in such a cumbersome vehicle is bound to hurt someone.
I order the attack. “You go, girls!”
Before you know it, Gherken is wearing a fang and claw necklace and screaming his head off, his hands also off the steering wheel, just as the zing of Beretta bullets takes out all four tires on the Rolls.
We Rolls to a lamentedly lumpy stop.
I leap into the front passenger seat, right into Miss Temple’s lap, and plant a big, wet juicy one on her sadly furless little cheek.
“Louie, ow, that scratches! And, watch it, your claws are sharper than broken glass. Louie, are you all right?”
Now I am.
Peace in the Valley
“Asylum?” he asked.
“Alyssum,” her voice answered, laughing. “Sweet alyssum. It’s a flower.”
He was lying on the mountainside, every sinew and joint aching. Somewhere half a mile above was the civilized comfort of the clinic. He was mired like the Cowardly Lion in a field of flowers, his legs weighted by plaster casts.
If he hadn’t been a mountain climber before, he damn sure was now. His chest heaved for air, and his shoulders and arms shook from using the metal crutches as pitons to dig into the tough sod and pull his plaster-weighted legs behind him.
She wafted the small blossom under his nose again. “I need to get to one of these high mountain farmsteads. Ask for food, beer, a saw.”
“Not water?”
“Beer is water here. I need a road.” She sat up to eye a snake of paved darkness twisting up the Alps, and sighed. “I need a reason to say I’m stranded. I’ll probably have to trek back a gallon of unneeded petrol.”
She stood, shaking out her chic suit. She looked like someone stranded. “I’ll get you out of those casts. You think you can put weight on your legs again?”
“I’ll have to.”
“You Americans. Always what must be done. Never what is pleasant to be done.”
He thought on that parting remark long after the hip-high grasses and knee-high flowers had swallowed her pink-suited figure.
Here, he was truly helpless, his body anchored by the means of its recovery. Yet his mind soared like the distant clouds. He rubbed his left inner elbow. He still smelled the acrid rubbing alcohol scent, felt the ting of the hypodermic needle tip tasting his vein, as a serpent smells, with the bitter end of its toxic tongue.
Death rode on that thin, hollow steel reed; he knew it. His death.
This woman had interrupted that, and by duplicitous means had wafted him away from the clinic, from his would-be killer and also from the only man he trusted.
That made her the only woman he trusted.
That made trust a necessity rather than an option.
He knew this Max person he was didn’t like necessity as a partner.
He inhaled the heady scent of mountain wildflowers. Their only escape route had been on foot. For now, he was helpless and, rid of the leg casts, might be more helpless still. Yet his mind was working, weighing. His mind wouldn’t let him sink into complacency.
Complacency. “The refuge of the inferior mind.”
That motto rang true, like history. He’d been warned against complacency. Over and over again.
Twilight was falling on the valley below before she returned.
“Did you think I wasn’t coming back?” she asked.
“I didn’t think. That’s the advantage of being an invalid.”
“I deliberately stopped us by this haymow. It’ll be as cozy as an inn. But, first—”
She knelt in the long grass, the action releasing the scent of crushed wildflowers as he lay back on his elbows.
“They had a saw.”
He viewed the sturdy, ragged edge of a
small, hand-size hacksaw and winced.
“I’ve only time to do one cast before the light fades. You were due to have them removed two days from now anyway. Think you can bear an early exodus?”
Her language was quaint, laughable. Exodus. “Saw away. If you hit skin, you’ll know.”
Still, he steeled himself, feeling the hard-edged plaster rocking back and forth as she sawed. She knew where the seam lay, and attacked the cast on his right leg top and bottom, then pulled, then sawed . . . finally the cast opened like an almond shell. Two halves, clean. The setting sun made the revealed white skin of a man’s leg glow in its angled rays. The dying light revealed a horrifying degree of muscle waste in a mere six weeks.
“Ye gods,” he murmured, “it’s so pink and puckered and ghastly.”
There was a silence.
“My leg,” he said firmly.
Come Into My Parlor
The siren screams of police and emergency vehicles racing to the Sapphire Slipper continued into early afternoon.
A number of Vegas cabs and private SUVs that were driving up hastily turned around. Inside the Sapphire Slipper, the resident courtesans had a new client to lavish exclusive attention on.
“That was the bravest thing I ever saw,” Babette said, stroking Midnight Louie’s fevered brow.
At least his tongue was very warm anyway.
“He’s so cute!” purred Kiki, Lili, and Niki, tickling his tummy.
“Look at these nails!” Angela and Heather intoned together. “Shredded. And his pads are bleeding.”
They looked with accusing fury at Lieutenant C. R. Molina, Detective Alch, and Coroner Grizzly Bahr.
“I will tend him immediately, my dears.” Coroner Bahr hovered over Louie’s lush nurses. “Some styptics and gauze bandages should set the little guy right. And then I’ll see to you ladies.”
“What about the D.B.?” Molina asked.
“In a minute. This, uh, Good Samaritan needs tending.”
Temple shook her head at Louie’s moment in the spotlight. She was sitting on a blue sofa with Matt down on one knee, attending her kicked ankle.
Cat in a Sapphire Slipper Page 26