“White Russians still have such strong feelings?”
“You Americans have felt the first wave of anarchy in your own, sea-bound land. Russia has always been the large, unmanageable brother of western and eastern Europe, the not-quite-tamed lumbering bear. We produced more art, music, literature, and grandeur than we have ever been credited for. The Czar Alexander scepter is a symbol of that, yes?”
Temple just nodded, slowly. “What about Red Russians?”
Volpe snorted and stubbed out his exotic cigarette. “Not much left for them these days but backpedaling. The economy is lame, the mobsters have emigrated from the U.S. to our shores, not literally, but their spirits have. A proud people who held off Napoleon and Hitler are now more noted for their shopping lines and vodka consumption than their technological or artistic achievements. Bah! I salute whoever took the scepter. He who has the nerve to claim it, deserves it. He is Russian.”
Temple blinked. She didn’t see Max as a White Russian icon, but stranger things had happened.
“He was hired, remember, in our theory? Even Red Russians can hire good help.”
“Touché!” Volpe laughed, then grew broody. “Of course they could be behind it, the uneasy alliance of bureaucrats and brigands that rules Russia today. Are you a police spy, Miss Barr?”
Temple gasped. “I . . . the local police know me from my PR business around Las Vegas, that’s all.”
The dark eyes narrowed like a needle, ripe for stabbing. “I have seen spies and stooges and tools before. They were not to be trusted. Are you to be trusted?”
“I want the exhibition to go smoothly. I want the scepter back. I want the person or persons who killed Andrei and Shangri-La caught and tried and punished. I want to do my job in a crime-free zone.”
“Your list of wants is ambitious and impressive. And what of your list of likelihoods?”
Temple stood, smoothing her skirt. “This is Las Vegas. I know it inside out. I figure my odds are at least fifty-fifty.”
Volpe did her the honor of paling.
Home, Sweet Homicide
I owe Miss Temple Barr the roof over my head, the litter box that I never use under the second bathroom sink, the copious treats of real fish over my Free-to-Be-Feline health pellets, several prime Circle Ritz lounging spots, including her lap and zebra-pattern comforter, and a lot of crime scenes that need tidying up and puzzles that need solving.
It is a pretty soft life, as Miss Midnight Louise would be the first to tell me, and I can even forgive the recent presence of Miss Temple’s maternal aunt on my living room sofa.
I mean “maternal” aunt in the sense that she is Miss Temple’s mother’s sister. (Whew! These human relationships are complex. To me, aunts and uncles are nonexistent and cousins are aliens. It is bad enough that I know my own father and mother—and do not think that I do not regret it every day!). Knowing a possible daughter is . . . bizarre in the extreme.
Anyway, my Miss Temple and I go pretty far back for both of our breeds, far enough that I feel for her in her pretty nasty state of perpetual heat with two equally persistent toms on her tail. In my circles, the female is not crazy about the urge to procreate but must submit to nature and a domineering dude. In my Miss Temple’s world, the choice is solely up to her, poor thing. Much too much stress for the female brain and delicate emotional structure. Obviously, Mr. Max Kinsella has been the top dude around here, but Mr. Matt Devine is coming up on the inside. Hmm. That sounds a little racy. Come what may, I am the dude in the middle . . . of the comforter and of my Miss Temple’s delicate emotional balance.
I must do something. Since I cannot compete head to head, or whatever, with these human dudes, I guess I have to help her out in the sleuth department without nailing her main man as a perp.
What a dilemma!
Miss Midnight Louise has no idea what a narrow ethical tightrope a righteous dude like myself must tread. . . .
So, I watch my Miss Temple come home, sigh, drop her heavy tote bag by the empty couch (Auntie Libido is out with the top Fontana male again), and turn to me for comfort.
“Louie.” Sigh. “Louie.” Sigh.
I began to think I am a squeaky toy. Whoosh. Whoosh. Wussy.
This will never do. I happen to be in possession of a lot of insight from my hours hanging up top with Squeaker and the other cats big and small, like Hyacinth, high above the New Millennium exhibit space. Time to share the riches, and I do not mean the Czar Alexander scepter, only the likely disposition of who did whom in to get it.
I understand the rules of the game: Mr. Max must not be nailed. Pity. I am beginning to think he deserves it for conduct unbecoming to a progenitor of the species.
I get up and swagger into the office off the living room.
“Louie,” she calls after me. (Dames are always calling after me.)
“It is too late to work. Come back here and settle down! I promise Aunt Kit won’t roll over on you again. Louie!”
Hah! Promises are cheap and my ribs are still sore. . . . Besides, I have something in mind, and something in store. Now. How to communicate with a professional communicator of the lesser species—? It will be a challenge, which is why I like hanging with my Miss Temple.
“Lou-ie!”
She is after me like a puma on catnip. What did I tell you? I got It.
By now I have hopped up on the bookshelf opposite her computer desk, having first dislodged a few annoying impediments.
“Louie!”
She is so cute when she sounds annoyed with me. Like I do not know she will come over forthwith and scratch my chin and tickle my tummy and tell me I am a bad, bad boy. I must admit that these humans have foreplay down cold.
“Louie.”
She is crooning now, in the palm of my paw. I stretch out a foreleg, casually, and let her hold my, er, hand.
“You naughty boy! Why do you have to knock everything off a shelf before you lie on it?”
Because I can! And I am not “lying,” I am telling a bigger truth than anyone has told you on this case. Read my lips. In this case, my hips, which have dislodged a big fat clue right onto the parquet floor. Read it and weep! Read it! Well, just notice it! And then think!
I tell you, leading these humans around by the nose hairs is a very fatiguing business. What? You say I am the one with nose hairs? I beg your pardon. These whiskers are vibrassae, a high-toned Latin-language accessory if there ever was one.
But, hush! My Miss Temple is noticing. And thinking. At last. Shhhh . . .
“Gosh.” She sits on her heels and pages through a few of the paperback tomes I have cast to the floor to make room for my luxuriating torso. “I remember reading these books way back when while waiting up for Max to do his last show at the Goliath and come home.”
Now she is sniveling! Not my desired reaction!
“Short stories by H. H. Munro, known as Saki.”
“Sake?” I did not want her to turn to the bottle, although I can understand why she might want to.
“And . . . oh, my goodness. My favorite Agatha Christie.”
Warm.
“I always loved the ones with exotic settings.”
Warmer.
“This was my favorite. Reminds me of a Russian blue cat, in a way.”
Skip the rival breed! I am an all-American alley cat. And black to the bone.
“A Russian blue is an exotic breed but basically . . . gray.”
She sits up as if she had borrowed a swordfish’s spine.
“Oh! That might be why . . . that might be it . . . that might be the answer!”
Duh!
The Murderer in the
Gray Flannel Suite
Temple breezed in to the New Millennium the next morning and asked Pete Wayans for the use of the gray flannel suite.
“We are way past planning sessions, Miss Barr. In case you haven’t noticed, our exhibition is ravaged, our magic show is compromised, and our joint credibility is zilch. It’s not your fault, but
you were a major hire. C’est la vie.”
“No. C’est la key. I’d like everyone involved in the exhibition convened there, this afternoon. May I order a round of hors d’oeuvres?”
“That would cost hundreds. If you deduct it from your contract.”
“Of course, but if I solve your murders, the same amount goes to me as a bonus.”
“A bonus? I’m sorry but the police solve murders.”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I do if I must. A clean slate would give this exhibition and show a new lease on . . . death.”
By then Randy had joined them. “What’s up, chief?”
“Your little Miss Barr. She’s making bail-out noises.”
“Not me wanting to bail out,” Temple said. “Me wanting to bail you guys out.”
“We could use a bail out,” Randy said. “I advise we listen.”
“Your job is at risk.”
Randy visibly braced himself. “Could things get any worse? I say we go along to get along.”
“Crudités,” Wayans snarled.
“A large happy carrot stick to you too,” Temple said.
She couldn’t help being upbeat, although Randy winced as Wayans stalked (get it, celery!) away.
“He’s the big man, Tee. Our futures are riding on this.”
“I’m feeling very futuristic. Can you make sure that all concerned show up?”
“Yeah, but why?”
“I have places to go and people to see. See you later, defribulator.”
Randy clutched the area of his heart but headed out to do his duty.
Temple speed-dialed her cell phone. “Dear Detective Alch,” she began.
He swore. Conservatively but colorfully and with a certain paternal certainty that she would absorb every rough syllable and still twist him around her little finger. . . .
The main thing was that Molina was not here.
This was a totally not-Molina operation.
Temple glanced at Alch. He knew that she knew he was bucking the command structure. She knew that he knew that she knew he had a soft spot for earnest young women with agendas. And that Molina no longer qualified. Too old. Too wired. Too seriously screwed. Too hung up on Max. Either way.
Temple eyed the full complement of White Russian exhibition professionals around the conference table, from the aristocratic elders to the brave new proletariat.
“Two people have died in the course of mounting this exhibition,” she began.
Lips were bitten, heads lowered, crocodile tears shed, so to speak.
“In the course of mounting this exhibition, the prime piece on display, the Czar Alexander scepter, has been stolen in plain sight.”
More feet shuffling under the long conference table, more downcast eyes. Temple stood at the head of the table. Several file folders shifted under her fingernails.
Detective Alch stood, back to the double–conference room doors, fading into a forgotten gray-suited figure. Another man in a suit had slipped in just before the conference room doors closed for good. Tall, angular, sharp, the opposite of Alch, except for the gray suit.
Those gathered around the table fidgeted like the courtroom cast in a Perry Mason television mystery. Some possible witnesses, some possible perps. The semi-anonymous Moscow muscle stood at the table’s opposite, bracketing Dimitri. He was sweating.
Madame Olga’s neck was stretching longer than a swan’s. Count Volpe’s crepey eyelids sank shut like weary sails.
Swans and ships and sealing wax on bureaucratic documents, Temple thought. They were all suspects. Any one of them could have skewered the exhibition for any imaginable cause, old or new.
Except not one of them had done it. Had done anything. None of them had pushed Art-Andrei off a pinnacle platform. Had sabotaged the rigging before the dress rehearsal. Had taken the scepter. Had planned the operation.
Max, she knew, had been a wild card. The joker. The Fool in the Tarot deck. The unsuspected, unpredictable element. Ah, wasn’t he always? Temple smiled in tribute, even as she doubted she’d ever tell him about this moment. About her triumph. That he’d ever be near her again to hear about it.
This was her solo act. Her debut. Temple without Max.
Her job at stake. Her heart at risk. Her pulse racing triple time.
It would be hard to reveal the scenario she suspected without putting Max into it, without revealing that she knew who had the scepter or what she knew about the Synth and its goals.
That was her trick to perform. To paint him as an anonymous confederate of whomever here in the room had engineered the exhibition disruptions on behalf of the real confederate.
“We have two very different deaths here,” she summed up.
“One was man, one woman?” Dimitri asked derisively from his end of the table. His stooges cracked matching smirks.
“The first was a man, and there really wasn’t much point in his death. It only alerted everyone to the fact that someone had a serious eye on the scepter.” Unless that was the point, but Temple wasn’t going to mention that. Her job was to defuse, not confuse. In fact, Andrei’s death was a huge blow to anyone who planned to steal the scepter. It made any attempt harder.
“Therefore,” Temple said, “it must have been an accident.”
Alch shifted his weight unhappily against his door, though nobody but she faced him. Homicide detectives are not crazy about accidental deaths.
“What was Andrei doing up there, then?” Pete Wayans wanted to know.
“Scouting the setup, of course. He was the first one recruited to do what the man in black eventually did: steal the scepter.
“I see,” Count Volpe said. “His accident . . . his fall from grace, forced the thief to hire a new person to ‘crash’ the performance and steal the artwork.”
“But if,” Wayans argued, “he was competent to do high-wire work, why would he fall?”
“I didn’t say he was alone up there,” Temple said. “I’m thinking a difference of expert opinion. Or he wasn’t really willing to risk his bad leg on such a dicey stunt at his age. He was recruited or pressured because of his background. I think he argued with someone here, and in the course of it he overbalanced and fell.”
“Someone here?” Wayans looked around. “These people are all directly involved in sponsoring or mounting the exhibition, except for the corporate sponsors, whom I’m pleased to see you are not subjecting to this humiliation, Miss Barr.”
“It’s better than death,” she said.
“If someone on staff wanted the scepter,” said Count Volpe, delicately adjusting the silk ascot that obscured his stringy neck, “look no farther than the political functionaries. They do not respect symbols of the aristocratic rule, and see only dollar or Euro or ruble signs.”
Dimitri tried to charge out of his chair, but the boys in black held him down. For his own sake.
“And you worthless spawn of the privileged see more?” Dimitri demanded.
“Not only see it,” Volpe drawled, “but we can read it.”
“A nice show,” Temple said, eyeing the combatants, “but it was all a magic act from the beginning. Who are you diverting our eyes from now with your posturings?”
They weren’t about to look in any direction but their fingernails tapping on the exotic tabletop.
Temple eyed Madame Olga.
“He was your brother. You would have been able to persuade him to do the job. You helped design the installation. You would have been able to show him the literal ropes from a point way up high. You would have been positioned to cajole, coax, command him to do it.”
“Steal the scepter? Why would I? Silly goose girl! It is a symbol of my roots. Why would I want it in crass commercial hands?”
“Maybe you thought this Sin City exhibition was a crass commercial venue for a Czarist treasure,” Temple suggested. “Andrei wasn’t meant to fall, to die. I think you had an argument. I think you reversed roles for once up there. I think Andrei the crippled con man didn’t wa
nt to rip off one of White Russia’s most amazing artifacts. I think you had to convince him to do it. What words, spoken harshly under the cover of night? Words escalating into gestures, broad gestures? Forgetting where you were? Turning, stepping—?”
Madame Olga’s face grew paler by the instant.
“What a playwright you would have made.”
“There’s no room up there. Not for mistakes. Not for emotions. Did he demand a reason, wave his arms . . . then overbalance and, waving his arms, in the heat of anger and protest, fall, grab a bungee cord and struggle to climb up, save himself? And instead enmesh himself in it, his safety rope becoming a noose?”
“No, no!”
“And you watched, unable to do a thing, not even report it because that would betray the scheme. He hung there for hours after his death, a human pendulum, your own brother, who had taken a more noble stand than you had.”
Temple had thought and thought about what could have led to Andrei’s plunge from the platform high above the exhibition. She had theorized like a defense attorney on his mute behalf. And now she had made her case before the jury.
Madame Olga Kirkov shriveled into sobs of protest, hiding her quizzical old face in her time-veined hands.
“This is outrageous.” Pete Wayans stood. “Madame Olga is the greatest ballet artist of her generation. She has volunteered her expertise in both arranging for and designing this exhibition. She is an old lady and her brother has died violently. This must stop. My God, she’s an old lady!”
“Sit down,” Detective Alch said mildly from the door.
Pete Wayans eyed him and the silent, unnamed man next to him. He sat.
The room’s only sound was the choking sobs of Madame Olga.
“He had changed his mind about even planning the theft,” she said at last. “Gazing down at the exhibition space he felt a pride of nation I had never seen in him before. He said he would rather die than take the scepter. Andrei! My crooked brother. I would never have asked such a thing of him, but . . . I had to. He was so shocked by my demand, so horrified. He backed away . . . from me, from the very idea. I never touched him. I couldn’t save him. I could only watch, paralyzed, as he fell and . . . run away.”
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