Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  Now he was reading her moods! Temple got up and wandered around the desk. She went to the bookcase and pulled out the books again, this time looking inside every one. Just computer manuals and reference books, the kind of things you'd expect to find in an office.

  She frowned and looked down at the counter's littered surface. There was one thing you didn't expect to find in an office, especially Darren Cooke's office, since he was notoriously not the domestic type. A recipe box. But it was the right size for office index cards.

  She opened the lid. Flower-decorated labels popped up above the level field of index cards like spring crocuses. "Appetizers. Main Courses. Hot Tamales. Pastries. Sugar-and-Spice.

  Sweetmeats. Exotic Drinks."

  Well, the exotic drinks probably fit in with his lifestyle, at least.

  Temple suddenly clapped the box shut, as if it were Pandora's hope chest.

  Max bolted up from the chair. "What is it? You heard something?"

  "Yeah, my little gray cells turning pure silver and hitting pay dirt."

  "All the secrets I'm finding on this computer are financial manipulations. What have you got?"

  Now he was coming over to gawk at her find, and she didn't even know what she had. Just suspected.

  Temple took the box to the desk lamp, set it down and opened it as if she expected a rattlesnake to pop out.

  "Recipes?"

  "Maybe."

  She pulled out an index card behind the label "Sugar-and-Spice." A smaller white card was taped to its lined face, a handwritten "For my only darling!" scrawled across it. Underneath was hand-printed: "Miranda Cummings," then an address and phone number. And a notation: "A sultry dish with paprika hair and legs long enough to make an octopus jealous." And a date.

  Temple pulled out another index card. This one had a business card affixed, but a similar coyly written summary.

  "Cooke!" she said. "This is Darren Cooke's little black book! His wife must have found my card in here, not at the hotel room, as she said. I didn't think the police would have overlooked searching under the mattress." She looked up at Max. "That must have been an eerie task, his widow coming here to go through this box of. . . forbidden treats. And, look, the dates are sequential in each category--aha, three days before I was hit on... Dana, the nanny! His own daughter's nanny. Did that man have no sexual conscience?"

  Max took the box and began paging through. "Of course not. He was infamous for it."

  "The nanny could have been the mousy miniskirted woman who visited Cooke's suite last week!"

  "His wife?" Max wasn't really paying attention.

  "No, the nanny."

  "What category do you suppose you were under?"

  "I don't know, maybe Appetizers.' Is there a section for food allergies?"

  "Let's see what 'Desserts' is like."

  "Let's not." Temple snatched for the box. "This is a lascivious little stockpile. It could be used to blackmail a lot of women."

  "I know. It's always handy to have something on the rich and famous."

  "It's not our business to read it. We'll have to turn it over to the police. Why do you suppose Michelle left this here?"

  "Safer. Hardly anyone knew about the office. And she didn't want to make the personal assistant suspicious; just told her to transfer the computer financial records to those piled disks, checked the front of all the categories to see who was most recent on her husband's Hall of Fame recipe files and used your card to contact you."

  "Why would he put me in here with all these pushovers? And when?"

  "He could have come here Sunday between brunch and midnight."

  "Why?"

  "To look at his records. Maybe to meet someone in a discreet place."

  "Maybe ... he liked to play games, and if you like to play games, you don't cheat at them.

  Maybe he had my card along because he intended to contact me again, and whoever met him here didn't know and put me in the file."

  "Someone who knew about it."

  Temple nodded. "I figured it out." She eyed the dark office lit by the lone island of light. "But no manila envelope."

  "That he'd put somewhere really secure, like a literal safe. His conquests were not a secret.

  Nothing here. I checked the walls and floors when I first came in."

  "That's why it seemed you were gone forever!"

  "Maybe you just missed me."

  She ignored that. "But the police checked with the Oasis front desk. Darren Cooke hadn't rented a safety-deposit box."

  "Maybe not there. If he kept his black book at the office instead of in the bedroom, maybe he kept the letters in another hotel safe."

  Temple nodded. "With all the hotels in town, it'd be like searching for one light bulb in a whole galaxy."

  "Not necessarily. He couldn't resist the Cooke recipe box. It's a pun of sorts, it refers back to himself. You might think of someplace significant to him right now."

  "Not right now. It's too late to think. What do we do? Leave the box?"

  "We have to. But. .. there's a copier in the outer office."

  "Copy the cards? There must be dozens and dozens. The machine will make a heck of a noise in this tombstone area at this time of night."

  "We can lay out several to a page. We'll set up a system and it'll go fast." Max checked his glow-nvthe-dark watch face. "It's after one. Should only take half an hour or so. Then you won't have to worry about clues and evidence vanishing."

  Temple nodded.

  They hurried to the outer office and warmed up the machine, which made a telltale wheezing sound in operation.

  "Wait!" Temple stopped Max from laying out the cards. "This machine has a reduce feature.

  We can get more cards to a page that way." She adjusted the setup, then Max began dealing out index cards faster than the eye could see.

  Temple pushed the copy button, kept the paper feeder full and stacked the finished pages.

  They worked fast, with a sense that the activity might attract someone at any instant. The cards seemed endless, even copying eight to a page. Temple felt feverish. She felt l ike a robot stacking the copies. Max was a machine himself, slapping cards to the glass copier surface in supernaturally neat rows.

  "Had a lot of practice at this," he said once.

  It took forty minutes, but the recipe-box contents were copied and back in their categories, and Temple had a sheaf of something to take out of the break-in site.

  "Copier off. Paper tray refilled to the previous level," she announced.

  They both studied the outer office for anything out of place.

  "No discards in the wastebasket." Temple nudged it with her foot.

  "Lights out here, then." Max snapped off the outer-office desk lamp.

  They edged their blind way to the inner office, where the box was replaced, the clutter was reinstituted, the laptop and desk chair replaced and the desk lamp turned off.

  The flashlight flared at the same instant.

  They edged through the rear storeroom and out the back door.

  "Go to the car," Max said. "I'll reset the alarm."

  Temple went, counting the moments until she was off the street, with her armload of white papers, and safe within the Taurus's dim interior ... which was still there, not stolen, hallelujah!

  Temple scrunched down in the front seat, watching Max's dark figure fuss around the light-colored door. A car drove by on the main street. She hadn't dared slam her door shut, so she still felt vulnerable.

  Any moment a bogeyman could spring out of the dark and jerk her door open ... A bogeyman filled the passenger-side window even now. Temple jumped. And then Max slid into the driver's seat, leaving his door unslammed, and stripped off his thin latex gloves.

  "You can toss yours now too." He glanced at her hands clutching the papers on her lap.

  The latex gloves still felt oddly creepy. They hit the floor as soon as she could yank them off.

  The Taurus, once started, crept onto the bette
r-lit main street. After a couple of turns and a few blocks, they entered Charleston Boulevard. More cars joined them. Soon they were merging with Strip traffic.

  Max had been right, as he had been all too often lately. She was back at the Circle Ritz by 2

  a.m.

  Max parked beside her Storm.

  "How's your book going?" she asked.

  "A mess, but mine own, now that Gandolph's gone."

  She nodded. Trying to organize a dead man's notes and computer files must be maddening.

  "I could look at what you've got, divide it into sections."

  "Maybe we can use index cards, like Cooke's recipe book?"

  She laughed. So did Max, but then he sobered.

  "I've used my international contacts to check on the psychics present at the seance when Gandolph died. Oscar Grant of Dead Zones and D'Arlene Hendrix made several trips to Russia and Eastern Europe before and after the Iron Curtain collapse, investigating psychic phenomena."

  "Isn't that routine for them?"

  "Possibly. But they could have encountered terrorist agents. Maybe someone offered tit for tat: kill Gandolph and get Russian trade secrets from their years of secret psychic research."

  "You still think Gandolph was murdered?"

  "I'm still not satisfied that he wasn't."

  "And until then, you're not going to let it go?"

  "Would you?"

  "No, but it isn't personal for me."

  "You were there. Don't you hate being hoodwinked?"

  "Not as badly as a professional magician might." Temple smiled. "I guess I came through my first breaking and entering without any neurotic damage."

  "You found something, which is more than I thought possible. And keep trying to think of where Cooke might have hidden those letters. They could be the key to his death."

  "Another maybe-murder."

  Max shrugged. "Life is not as neatly compartmentalized as Cooke's recipe box. Neither is love."

  She looked at him.

  It felt just like it had in Minneapolis when they had first started dating . . . what, almost two years before? Coming home to her apartment in a warm cocoon of car, the winter night as close as the frosty rolled-up windows and as far away as Mars.

  People courted in cars in a northern state like Minnesota, risking carbon-monoxide poisoning. She remembered the engine idling in park, the heater blowing, the headlights off and the conversation not stopping because nobody wanted to open a car door and let in the cold.

  Because then they would have had to dash through the subzero weather for her apartment-building door, and dashing always ruined the moment. Lingering on the stoop was impractical, so he'd drive away until the night the moment was right to not drive away.

  No, it all had to happen in the car, with the engine off but the dashboard lights on, with the radio playing so low it was almost inaudible.

  Max leaned forward to turn on the radio, but not very loud.

  Temple felt like Pavlov's dog, her figurative tongue hanging out. When he pulled her across the center console like a rag doll, she felt an aching rush as if they had never made love. Yet their mouths meshed like gears, and the kisses never seemed to stop. They knew how to maximize each move and moment, and how to avoid each other's noses. Soon they were bumping the steering wheel and shift stick. Max's hands were finding areas they shouldn't have been able to reach in such close quarters, and Temple was rediscovering the pleasures of pent-up desire. It was like the very first time, the outcome was inevitable and the feeling was divine.

  Uh-oh.

  Temple disentangled herself.

  "Wow. Max, give me a moment to think."

  "I've had too many moments to think about this. Don't think, Temple, just let me love you."

  She melted at his voice, his dimly seen face, the hands that had given her pleasure. They belonged together and came together again, until their breaths were deep and shaky.

  "Let's go in," Max said.

  And Temple hesitated.

  His hands tightened. "Why not? We don't even have to practice safe sex. Do you know what a gift that is nowadays? Do you know how hard it was to be without you all that time I was gone?"

  "Of course I do. I felt it too. It isn't sex, Max."

  "What? Still out of trust because I didn't tell you my background? I've told you now. I shouldn't have, but I did."

  "I know." She couldn't say what stopped her. She couldn't say anything, just choked on a lump of indecision.

  Max's hands left her to bang down on the steering wheel. "Damn Devine!"

  "It's not Matt, either."

  "Isn't it? You keep saying he's not the rival I think he is, but you won't say why. Something is holding you back."

  "Maybe . . . it's reality. When you left I couldn't fantasize that we were the real thing. You mentioned marriage again, at the Welles house, but now you're caught up in whether Gandolph was killed or just died, and that kind of quest could go on forever."

  Max stared ahead, his hands on the wheel as if he were still driving. His eye whites glistened in the light of a streetlamp. Otherwise, she could hardly see him, and certainly not his expression.

  "My mistake," he said finally. "In Minneapolis I thought I could do it: lose the past, start a future with you. I still think it sometimes. I'm not just trying to avenge Gary, if he were killed. I'm worried that if someone got him in that clandestine way, someone could get me. And then getting married is a fantasy; besides, you don't trust me--"

  "I don't trust myself anymore."

  "It would clear up matters if you'd just tell me Devine's big secret."

  He was right. She swallowed, licked her lips. No words came.

  "Then you're more loyal to him than you are to me."

  "No! I just can't betray a confidence."

  "Would you tell him my history if he asked?"

  "No."

  "If a lot depended on it, like he might go away and you'd never see him again?"

  "No."

  "Your loyalties really are divided, right down the center. It can't be pleasant. How did that happen so fast, Temple?"

  "It wasn't fast. It was worry so constant I couldn't stand to think about you anymore. It was Lieutenant Molina always probing about you, showing me how little I knew. It was those men in the parking garage. Everything would have been bearable, Max, if I'd had even a rough notion of what was wrong. I wouldn't have told."

  "You can't know that. You can't imagine the extreme methods to make you tell that exist in the shadow world next to this one. Now you do know. You have something to not tell. You're worse off than before, and so am I if you punish me for protecting you. So now what?"

  "I need to think about it. Maybe go away for a while."

  "I think you need to go to bed with me, to remember what we had feels like."

  "That's so tempting . . . that's why I hesitate. I shouldn't be just tempted, I should be jumping at the chance."

  "I still say Devine is playing a bigger part in this than you admit."

  Temple shook her head in the dark. She didn't know anymore. "I was considering going away for Christmas."

  "Home to Minnesota?"

  "No. To see my aunt in New York."

  "City?"

  She nodded slightly, then realized he couldn't see the gesture. "Yes."

  "Temple, don't cry."

  "I guess I will if I have to."

  "I'll miss you."

  "There's always New Year's."

  He sighed, a huge heave of frustration. He was entitled to it, Temple thought. Great erotic moments that go awry always turn into great letdowns.

  She opened the car door. "I'll let you know ... if I go."

  He was silent. Then, "I love you."

  "I love you too," she said before slamming the door shut.

  She was glad he didn't walk her in; she could hardly see for the stupid tears and stumbled like a drunk on the low threshold.

  She turned in the doorway, and saw the Taurus's headlight
s abruptly spear the darkness. It began to nose away as her door shut.

  You could be upstairs in bed with Max right now, she berated herself in the elevator. You could be setting records in the sexual Olympics. That long separation, the tension of the break-in tonight cutting loose. As Michelle put it, oh-la-la . Instead you need a cold compress and a pain pill and your head examined.

  She let herself into the dark apartment, not bothering to turn on lights, just feeling her way blindly to the bedroom. Instead, all you have in your bed is a black cat who tries to ease you right onto the floor.

  Temple turned on the overhead light, wincing as the bedroom leaped into immediate clarity.

  She could see Max walking toward the bathroom, bare as Hamlet's bodkin.

  Ghosts she could conjure. What she suddenly realized she couldn't see was Midnight Louie.

  She scanned the room, called his name. He liked his comforts enough to come home nights.

  Where was he? Drat! Temple realized that if Max had come up, they wouldn't even have had to worry about dislodging Louie.

  ******************

  Temple nearly hit the ceiling. She had finally fallen asleep when the phone rang in the dark of night. The wriggly red numbers on her bedside clock read three'thirty.

  Had Max--?

  She answered, her heart still drumming from the abrupt awakening.

  "Temple."

  Matt's voice. Or was she confusing the two men? Now she could understand how Darren Cooke might feel.

  "Matt? You must be just home from work."

  "Yeah. I hate to disturb yo u, but I tried calling all night. From after midnight on, anyway. You must have had the phone ringer turned off."

  That sounded lame even to her. No use trying to fool a professional phone man.

  "Not really. I was . . . out," Temple said.

  "Out?"

  "I can't say where or why, but it involves Darren Cooke."

  "Can you say 'with whom'?" he asked pointedly.

  "Ah--"

  "None of my business," he added. Too hastily. "I thought you'd want to know this as soon as possible."

  "Know what?"

  "Tonight. He called."

  "He called?" She was thinking of Max again, for some reason. And was confused.