Was it possible that she was a most-wanted child? That her noisy, bossy older brothers had not been enough?
Amelia Wong bowed her head, almost in tribute. “You are a last daughter? I honor your parents. In China, a first daughter is an abomination.”
“I don’t get it,” Temple said. “In your culture, women are both unwanted and yet expected to succeed?”
“To justify our unfortunate existence. This is not China, yet still the media stands in for parents, and views me with shame and anger.”
“Successful women scare men in every culture.”
“You?”
Temple glanced at the collapsed Lhasa apsos, like so many stuffed pillows.
“I’m too small and cute to scare anyone.”
“You should. You have big bite.” Wong smiled. “I am not a Dragon Lady, but that is the only incarnation the world respects. So . . . I breathe fire.”
“Okay, Amelia. Then forget the protective image. Tell me what’s really going down with you, your enterprises, Maylords, the death threats. My Stealthy Protector. I desperately want to know who you have in mind there, girlfriend.”
Wong laughed.
“I was going to order green tea for us, but I think . . . a well-chilled green-apple martini would do better.”
“Yep. It’s been stressful and my piranha bite could stand to chill out.”
“Spelling bees,” Amelia Wong intoned contemplatively over the first martini, which had been delivered with panache by the Fontana brother. He probably had supervised the blending process for poison.
Temple was sure now that there would be a second. She nodded sagaciously. “Your people win them.”
“This is an interesting culture. Winners are both idolized and abhorred. One day an ‘American Idol,’ the next . . . the nexus of scandal.”
Temple nodded sagely. Green-apple martinis did that to one. “The conflict between our Puritan past and entrepreneur future. Henry Ford authoritarianism versus Enron greed. All yang, if you ask me.”
“I embody that conflict, I know that.”
“And that’s why someone wants to murder you.”
“No. Someone wants to ‘stop’ me. Murder is merely a means of expressing a political agenda. A racial and gender agenda. Do you believe me?”
“I do,” Temple said solemnly. Odd, this felt like a marriage of true minds. Must be the vodka. “High achievers engender antagonism. But that isn’t exclusive to American culture. It’s universal, isn’t it?”
“Yes. The more international I go, the more true I find that premise.” Amelia refilled their glasses from the pitcher, then poured some of her vivid drink into a shallow bowl, smiling as the Lhasa apsos gathered around, tasted, then shook their sagacious beards and ears. They reminded Temple of very short mandarin emperors.
“I am impressed,” Amelia said, “by the diversity of your allies.”
When Temple, stunned, remained silent, Amelia went on.
“You know the police. And the police know you. You know both Danny Dove and the talented Janice Flanders in Maylords’s Art Department. You know the Fontana brothers, all of the many Fontana brothers, apparently. And chauffeurs and talk show producers . . . and even more obvious hired muscle.”
“Well . . . how do you know all this?”
“I am smarter,” the petite-chic Amelia Wong said, “than people like to think a media fad is. And tougher than I look,” she added.
“How tough?”
“The Tongs and the Triads have been trying to infiltrate my retail empire for years. My bodyguards aren’t just for death threats from fanatical feng shui adherents.”
Temple raised her eyebrows, trying to think on an international scale. “Smuggling?”
“Of course. I am an international entity. I import and export to and from both East and West. I am therefore good press. That gives me entree and privileges that the ordinary citizen of Hong Kong or Shanghai wouldn’t have. I am the perfect ‘front woman,’ except that I am my own woman.”
“And that’s why your life is in danger?”
“Maybe.” Amelia sank back into the cushy sofa, her dogs heaping around her like so many hairy designer pillows.
“Maybe,” Temple said. “Or not.”
Amelia lifted a delicately arched eyebrow. But said nothing.
“Why are you doing this Maylords gig?” Temple asked next. “You don’t need to expose yourself to the public this way. You could do the weekly TV show and your national magazine and stay far away from imminent danger.”
Amelia sipped her martini, sighed. Regarded Temple. “Benny May-lord helped me early in my career. I did weekend specialty presentations at his launch store. It is the least I can do to reciprocate.”
“You mean Kenny.”
“I mean Benny. The other brother. He was CEO then.”
“The brothers trade off running the business?”
“They did once,” she said. Her lips puckered before they sipped the deliciously tart martini again.
“There has to be a story there.”
“I don’t know it. I offered Benny a chance to fill me in, but he was as tight-lipped as we’ll be after finishing these green-apple martinis.”
“So it’s a family matter. Understandable that you feel you owe the family, but still—”
“My stints at Maylords got me media attention. It began the entire buildup. I owe Benny Maylord. We started out together. I’m less impressed by the brother, but family is family.”
“Tell me about the fanatic fans.”
“That is a redundancy.”
“I know. The word ‘fan’ came from ‘fanatic.’ So the mania is built in. So, I suppose, is a possibility of violence. I thought feng shui instills order and harmony.”
“Properly used, yes. And it is merely a method of ordering the world around you to enhance your own needs and ambitions. We all systematize our environments, even the most untidy. Feng shui is a conscious commitment to installing order instead of disorder.”
“So why would feng shui practitioners go berserk?”
“Some use it as a guaranteed system for good luck. When their luck doesn’t visibly change, they blame the method, not their own manias.”
“The word ‘maniac’ comes from ‘mania,’ ” Temple noted.
“Anything that encourages people to search their inner souls and assuage their deepest needs can bring on obsession. Religion. Dieting. Gambling. The number of my demented former fans is small, but they can be vocal. Some have blamed me for bankruptcy, even the death of a spouse or a child.”
“They blame that on rearranging the furniture?”
“Feng shui is much more than that. And furniture is an important part of the domestic landscape, which, after all, so intimately reflects the inhabitants’ interior landscape. Think about it.”
Temple did, sipping delicately at the sweetly tart green liquid in her martini glass. But the first significant piece of furniture she fixated on wasn’t anything in her rooms—except maybe Louie, who followed his own feng shui in choosing where to artistically display his bonelessly sleeping form—the first furniture that came to mind was Matt’s red suede ’50s couch.
In his sparsely furnished rooms it screamed “major Hollywood motion picture” among a bland array of small, doomed independent productions.
Of course the Vladimir Kagan designer relic was a coproduction: Temple had found it at Goodwill and forced Matt to buy it because . . . because it was cool and actually valuable, it turned out. And it wouldn’t fit in her rooms, with all her accumulated stuff that was so much less interesting.
“You’re thinking of something both pleasurable and troubling,” Amelia said. “I’m almost afraid to ask what, and I’m never afraid to ask anything.”
“What? Oh, I was wondering if two people can share custody of a single couch.”
“They can with children.”
“But children are so much easier to move.”
Amelia laughed. “You obvi
ously don’t have any. Nor stubborn dogs.”
“Only a stubborn cat.”
“Cats are too clever to be stubborn. They appear to go along with what you want, then turn it into what they want. I prefer the childlike directness of dogs.”
“Do you have children?”
“Grown.” She smiled.
“And their father—?”
“Outgrown.” Her smile stayed the same, slight but pleased.
Aha! Temple wondered how Mr. Wong liked being cut out of the picture now that Amelia was Ms. Media Millionaire Sweetheart.
“Perhaps your . . . ex is unhappy about missing out on an empire.”
“It was his own idea to leave.”
“That makes it even worse.”
“No,” she answered with a smile that was both sympathetic and oddly impersonal. “The settlement was far more than generous. From me to him, of course. Now you tell me this.”
Amelia Wong set down her martini on the gold-leafed coffee table. She clapped her hands. The dogs jumped off the sofa in a golden wave and undulated back into the room from which they’d been called.
She eyed Temple with laser-ray intensity. “Why is a temporary public relations representative so interested in me? Or in the bizarre attack on Maylords, for that matter?”
“Public relations people are only supposed to care about the glitz and the glory, not the problems behind the scenes?”
Amelia made an impatient clicking noise, like an aggravated beetle. Her irises seemed as dark and shiny, and impervious, as a beetle shell.
“This is a matter for the police. It is not your business. It is not my business. We are businesswomen, not policewomen. It is not our duty to tidy up every untoward happening that we witness.”
Temple could have given her reasons. She could have quoted John Donne that “no man is an island.” She could have mentioned her knack for unraveling crimes.
Temple put down her empty martini glass too. The truce in Amelia Wong’s frenetic, singled-minded work style was over.
Wong had bodyguards enough to survive a shooting spree without quivering. But Temple had been among the innocent extras who could have been caught, fatally, in the crossfire. Pampered Amelia Wong wouldn’t understand that if fear didn’t kill you, it made you angry.
Temple decided in ending the interview to go for inscrutable and just smile.
Too bad her next social appointment-cum-interrogation was going to give her zilch to smile about. And then some.
Hot Water
A cafeteria was an unlikely place to rendezvous with a big bad bogeyman from a homicide lieutenant’s past, Temple thought, eyeing the joint.
But maybe the apple-pie ambiance was just the right unlikely setting for a “date” with Rafi Nadir. Temple spotted him already seated by a window, a brown tray serving as a portable place mat before his folded arms.
His swarthy looks and solo state made him look out of place among Wonder-bread families chowing down at all the surrounding tables.
She shuffled through the line in her turn, trying to quiet the butterflies in her stomach. Rafi Nadir was one bad dude. Everybody said so. He was a rogue ex-cop turned hired muscle for shady operators. He liked to hang out at strip clubs. His former significant other regarded him as the Great Satan even after thirteen years apart.
Temple was nuts to meet him alone like this, but he seemed to like her for some unfathomable reason. Temple, and the ex-reporter in her, could never resist an easy source, no matter how dangerous.
So she shuffled through the line in her summer espadrilles, too nervous to eat much, nailing the last lime Jell-O dish to accompany her red dye #3 barbecue-sauced pile of beef brisket. Her tray had an unseasonably Christmassy air, but it couldn’t be helped. Cafeteria food was not her favorite.
She filled a huge paper cup with a cataract of tiny ice cubes and watered them well before she joined Nadir.
Nobody she knew would approve of her coming within six tables of separation from him. But Temple suffered from congenital curiosity, a feline predisposition that sometimes manifested itself in other species.
Nadir looked up from an uninspired mound of ketchup-frosted meatloaf and nodded. She sat to deploy her dishes on the plastic veneer tabletop. If he got too frisky she could heave the plate of brisket at him . . . or season the encounter by drawing the pepper spray from her straw tote bag.
“Now I see why you’re so little,” he said.
Temple eyed her meat-and-Jell-O meal. “I’m on the go a lot. I got used to odd foods.”
“Why didn’t you want to meet on the Strip?”
“It’s so noisy and crowded.” And there’s too much chance of my being recognized there.
Nadir sipped his black coffee. “I’da figured you to want as many people around as possible. Why are you afraid of me?”
“Well . . . I don’t know any guys who hang around strip clubs.”
“You think you don’t know any guys like that.”
She didn’t argue. It would be too hard to explain that the guys she knew best included an ex-priest.
Temple shrugged and pushed the beef away after nibbling two slices. The Jell-O was more fun, and challenging, to eat.
Nadir shook his head. “I met you at a strip club, remember?”
“Yeah, but I was there on a mission of mercy. So to speak.”
“Maybe I was too.”
“You? I mean, you did help me out by decking the Stripper Killer, but that was just because you happened along.”
“Maybe not.”
“You were following me—?”
“Not that way. Don’t get your Jell-O in a puddle. I’m an ex-cop. I’ve got a suspicious mind.”
“So do I.”
“That’s good. Little girls who stick their noses in big messes should have suspicious minds.”
“Big guys who put down little girls who carry pepper spray should wear big goggles.”
“Jeez, women today have more chips on their shoulders than the Jacksonville Jags have shoulder pads.” He tore open a blue packet of Equal and poured the powder into his coffee, as if sweetening it would sweeten up Temple. “You weren’t making a name for yourself as Tess the Thong Girl in that club because your sister sells spandex by the Strip side. No way. And you’re not a cop, city payroll or private. And secretaries don’t rate the attention you get. So what the hell are you?”
“You heard last night at Maylords: a public relations consultant.”
“Now, that’s a job title that’s subject to interpretation,” he said with a semi-official smirk. “But that I believe. So why were you pretending to be someone else at the strip club? Don’t tell me that’s how you snag new clients.”
Temple sighed and pushed away the green Jell-O, which was melting like the Wicked Witch of the West. “I did PR for a stripper convention over a year ago and met some of the women. When they started getting killed, I talked to a few of my contacts and . . . I was a TV reporter years ago. I smelled a story, that’s all.”
“I smell a story too. ‘Years ago.’ What are you? Twenty-four?”
“Thirty!”
“You won’t be so fast to give your age in a few more years, cookie.” He grinned. “So. You don’t trust me because you found me in a strip club.”
“I don’t trust you because I don’t know you. And you sure rushed away before the police came. Why? You could have played the hero.”
“You sprayed the guy. I just made sure that he stayed down. But I can see your point. I look like a loser.”
“Not a loser—” Temple couldn’t stand to see anyone putting himself down. She realized that this was a bad habit, smacking of enabling. Every good deed had a diagnosis these days. Even Rafi Nadir lifted skeptical eyebrows.
“You wrote me off as a loser. And a bad dude on top of it, maybe even—”
“The Stripper Killer, right. I was wrong there.”
“Apparently.” He laughed. “You’re a lot tougher than you look. Listen.” He leaned
forward, his intensity fixing her to the spot. “Being a cop is like being in a secret club. The secret is that no one knows what it’s like except another cop. You’re a necessary evil twenty-four hours a day. Sure, citizens are glad to see you on a crime scene, but drive along the street and watch even the most innocent avert their eyes. You’re a cop. You could object to how they’re driving at any moment, pull them over. And you never know when you pull a traffic violation over whether it’s Miss Tess’s harmless aunt Agatha . . . or an escaped con with a concealed weapon. You gotta trust no one to be what they seem. Ever. So I’m not surprised even a nice, safe-streets little lady like you isn’t what she seems.”
“I’m sure it’s rough—”
“Cops aren’t that different from strippers, see? No one really knows much about their lives, except to avoid them or use them if they have to. That’s the way it gets with cops and crooks and strippers. We’re all on opposite sides of the law when cops are enforcing ‘community standards,’ but we’re part of the same club. On the inside.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
He grunted as he tucked into his meatloaf. “You never thought. So what did you want to know?”
“You said something funny was going on at Maylords,” Temple began.
He nodded again. “The management has an awful high level of anxiety for a furniture store. They kept some of us hired security guys on after the opening. I’d figured they were worried about that Wong woman. I can’t see why she would get death threats.”
“She’s a lifestyle Nazi,” Temple said promptly. “Nothing hits as close to home as that. Some people swear by her and some people hate her house-remaking guts. I’d bet the death threats come from true believers, though, who think her advice somehow done them wrong.”
“Maybe. All I know is the Maylords management is playing amateur G-men, trying to catch what they say is a furniture-stealing ring.”
“The management? Kenny Maylord himself?”
“Nah, that lard-ass manager, Mark Ainsworth. Acts like a little J. Edgar Hoover. Probably as much of a fairy too.”
Temple had idly tried another mouthful of lime Jell-O and almost spat it out. “Sexual persuasion shouldn’t matter—”
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