“At least I don’t look got up as a grease monkey,” she said. “Who’s just escaped from somewhere in a jailhouse jumpsuit.”
“At least I don’t clash with the feng shui vibes around this place.”
“What are you doing here anyway?”
He shrugged his head over a brightly plush shoulder. Ugh!
“Haven’t you heard? I’m doing radio spot news for KREP.”
“KREP?”
“It’s French for tasty little roll of powdered sugar,” Awful Crawford explained with a customary leer.
“Who would hire you as a journalist?”
“It’s an all-news, all-talk format, not some Musak-talk mush-’n’-slush station like WCOO that your friend Matt Devine works for.”
“I’ll take a slush station over sleaze any day. Excuse me.”
A mike appeared in Crawford’s white-knuckled fist. “All right, listeners, we’ve just buttonholed Las Vegas’s favorite flack Temple Barr on her way into Maylords . . . and this little gal has some buttons worth holing—”
Temple, regretting her distant collection of instep-spearing high heels, drove her clog into Crawford’s tennis-shoe-shod instep on the way past.
“Oops!” He coughed, then went on gamely. “She’s been called away by the head feng shuister. Meanwhile, here’s a glass-totin’ man hauling sixteen tons of plate into Maylords’s front window. Let’s hear what he has to say.”
“Outta my way, dork, I drop this and you’re sushi under glass. Shrimp sushi.”
Temple grinned as she entered the building, then paused to sense some of Friday night’s terror settling back on her shoulders. She dusted them off, as recommended in yoga class to release muscle strain as if it were dandruff.
The simple gesture did banish a certain tension.
She moved ahead into the central atrium, prepared to do her duty.
Instead of the long buffet table of Friday night, a round orange damask-draped model sat at the circular space’s exact center.
Like a bull’s-eye, Temple thought sourly, glancing around for any protruding gun barrels.
Amelia Wong, her handmaidens, and bodyguards were lined up behind the table.
On it sat a giant wooden salad bowl like Temple’s mother still had from the ’60s, heaped with oranges.
Tall vases sprouting vivid orange tiger lilies flanked the . . . um, Orange Bowl.
Temple bit her lip. Giggling did not seem to be the proper ceremonial reaction here.
Amelia Wong’s black eyes noted her arrival. A flick of her lashes ordered Temple to a position behind the table.
Maybe it was an altar.
She edged closer to Baylee Harris. The tall blond young woman seemed the most realistic of the bunch, maybe because she was such a physical opposite to their grand dame, Amelia Wong.
“What’s going on?” Temple whispered.
Baylee squinched down so Temple could hear the answering whisper. “She is about to do the Three Secrets Reinforcement.”
Temple stood at attention. She had never seen a Three Secrets Reinforcement before, although she had a few secrets of her own.
Amelia Wong stood as straight as a tin soldier behind the bowl heaped with oranges.
“Twenty-seven oranges,” Baylee managed to whisper before falling silent.
Amelia Wong cradled one hand in another, then began chanting what sounded like Sanskrit: “ ’Ga-tay ga-tay, para ga-tay, para sum ga-tay, bhodi swaha.’ ”
New Age was the trail mix of culture. Nine times she repeated the mantra.
Then she lifted an aluminum pitcher and poured water into the bowl until it was three-quarters full.
Systematically, her long, lacquered fingernails tore the rinds off the piled oranges, letting them sink into the water.
The oranges themselves were cast into a plastic trash bag at her Manolo Blahnik-clad feet.
Lifting the heavy wooden bowl, Amelia moved ceremonially toward the front door.
“Isn’t this all sort of futile?” Temple asked Baylee. “I mean, the windows are blasted away. You could walk through them. Where’s the protection?”
“It’s the why, not the where,” Baylee said solemnly. “This blessing is best used on a place where security has been compromised. That’s the cool thing about feng shui. It works in the past, present, and future.”
Temple thought about it. Like all mystical things, feng shui was in the eye of the believer.
She nodded, feeling the same about it as she did about religious and superstitious gestures in general: what the heck. It couldn’t hurt.
Amelia folded the middle fingers of her right hand into her palm, leaving only the pinkie and the forefinger erect.
Behind her back, Temple tried this position and found her muscles rebelling. It must take practice, like bullfighting. Or bull throwing.
Rapidly, Amelia flicked her folded fingers outward. Temple counted nine times. It was a bit like the shoulder-dusting gesture of yoga, designed to release tensions.
Next, Amelia cradled the fingers of her left hand in her right, her thumb-tips touching.
Then she performed a two-handed finger weave. Temple blinked. She saw the curled little fingers touched by the thumbs, the ring fingers straight up, the middle fingers crossed and touched by the index fingers.
This was an amazingly complicated position. Temple felt her knuckles ache just to witness it.
Cradling the bowl of orange peels in one crooked arm, Amelia Wong marched right to the store’s entrance doors. With the same flicking motion, she sprinkled the water on the hard-surface floor.
Temple watched Kenny Maylord’s brow morph into pale corrugated cardboard. Water droplets would be as lethal to upholstery in an interiors store as they were to Wicked Witches in Oz.
Amelia Wong was too busy chanting some new mantra: “ ‘Om mani pad-me hum.’”
It reminded Temple of the classic kid’s trick: getting some innocent to chant, syllable by syllable, “O wah ta goo Siam.”
Temple concluded that children’s games often carried over to adult life.
Beside her, Baylee chanted her own descriptive mantra in a discreet whisper. “She is cleansing the area. The Six True Words will remove all the bad luck and negative chi, or life force here. The finger flicking is called an Expelling Mudra. It would help if we all joined in to visualize the evil being removed.”
Temple flowed into the procession that followed Amelia Wong as she sprinkled and chanted her way through the store, watering every model room.
Kenny Maylord looked dazed, no doubt wondering if orange spots would soon be busting out all over his showroom.
Temple flowed into visualizing the water spots drying and leaving no trace. That was the only kind of positive chi she could imagine as the outcome of this ritual, so vaguely religious in nature.
It took almost an hour for Amelia Wong to return to the front entry and the table, or altar. Plenty of time for all the videographers to shoot their hearts out.
“Next,” she announced, “the Three Secrets Reinforcement.”
She turned to place the bowl on the table, and froze in midgesture, frowning.
Temple was perfectly situated to see her glowering profile and follow her stare right to the gleaming bitter-orange Murano.
A car, Temple supposed, was a sort of room, and it had not been blessed with water spots.
Amelia Wong was clearly about to take care of that omission.
First she walked solemnly around the vehicle, chanting and sprinkling. “ ‘Om ma-nipad-me hum.’ ”
Temple couldn’t help hearing that as “Oh Ma, no pat my bum.”
Having completed her ceremonial circuit, Amelia pulled the driver’s door open with her sprinkling hand, keeping the water bowl lifted in the other.
Something came tumbling out from inside the deep black tinted window glass and painted orange steel. It fell to the beige travertine tiles, a sack of pale laundry.
Amelia Wong’s tiny high-heeled feet stut
tered backwards like a Yorkshire terrier’s: click, click, click.
The falling body, for it was exactly that, settled lumpily on the hard shining floor.
The bowl fell beside it, flooding the area with orange peels and water.
Apparently the Murano’s bad chi had been more thoroughly expelled than expected.
Feng Shui Can Be Mudra
Videographers surrounded the huddled corpse like technobuzzards.
Their rush to tape the scene squeezed Amelia Wong outside the circle of T-shirt-and-jeans-clad ghouls.
She stood back stunned, her complexion gone ghost white. A stray orange peel had washed up on the toe of her beige-silk pump.
Temple nodded to the nearest Wong associate, Pritchard Merri-weather. “Call nine-one-one, right away.”
Kenny Maylord stood helplessly witnessing the lurid discovery from the fringes.
“Get your security people,” Temple told him. “Someone needs to try CPR. And if it’s too late for that, these media people are messing up what may be a crime scene.”
“M-may be?”
“We can’t even tell the gender of the person yet, much less the identity.” Temple turned to the six people hunched over their shoulder-held cameras like hyenas.
“Back, you camera goons!” she ordered in the gruffest basso she could produce. “This person may need air!”
Before she’d finished, two Maylords security guys and Amelia Wong’s shade-wearing bodyguards, all attired in dark suits, were grabbing T-shirts and manhandling men, women, and machines out of their way.
The body curled into a fetal position on the floor looked lonely. Temple knew how to demand order, but she wasn’t quite up to exploring the condition of the fallen figure.
One of the suits went down on one knee and slowly lifted a shoulder off the floor.
Temple glimpsed blond hair, short blond hair and a smudge of features . . . forehead, chin.
For a second she was sure it was Matt, and her heart stopped.
Then she saw it was Simon.
She thought she made a tiny sound of denial, but it could have come from someone else.
The scene turned instantly surreal.
One of the suits turned the person over, pounded the chest, worked the chest like a bellows, pounded and pushed. No “kiss of life” nowadays, no mouth-breathing, not since AIDS had made blood and saliva dangerous.
Temple watched, numb.
“Who is it?” someone asked over her shoulder.
“I don’t know.” Nobody unofficial should make that call yet. “Wait.”
Sirens wailed in the distance.
Temple watched for any flicker of an eyelash, any heave of the chest.
There was only the dead, implacable rhythm of CPR, of using a motionless chest as a drum skin and trying to beat it back into a semblance of life.
The sirens rose to a deafening shriek and then stopped. EMTs in jumpsuits landed on Maylords’s interior turf like paratroopers, rushing, pushing aside the guy who was working on Simon, towing a gurney and an urgent attitude behind them.
Latex-gloved figures bent over him, muffled his face with an oxygen mask to breathe for him, looking to spark some life still within him.
Temple found herself eyeing an empty spot on the floor. Beside it, a crouching man, hands braced on knees, gasped to recapture his own spent breath.
Rafi Nadir.
She stared.
He recovered enough to look up and notice her. The EMTs had lifted Simon onto the gurney. Wheels were skidding over the polished floor and through the main entrance. Everyone else had ebbed away, following the storm’s center to the parking lot.
“He’s . . . gay,” she said.
Nadir looked to the side, angry. “Christ. You don’t get it. Talking the talk is just shorthand. Street shorthand. I do my job.”
She didn’t get it.
He straightened. “I’m too damn out of shape. Too damn out of shape to do anyone any good.”
“You did all you could.”
“Not enough.” His face curdled with disgust. Self-disgust. “Don’t look at me like that. Get outta here.”
She spun on her heel and did as he said, racing to the parking lot where the ambulance was screaming away into the late-afternoon Las Vegas traffic.
Media vans screeched in its wake.
The people marooned on the asphalt watched with dead eyes.
“What hospital?” Temple asked Pritchard, who stood tall and alone by a second parked Gangsters limo. Lime green. The Kermit. Kids loved it.
“Mercy? You have one here named that?’
“No, but shouldn’t everyone?”
Temple stood staring after the vanishing ambulance: it was headed for Sunrise Columbia Hospital. She ached to follow it, but that wasn’t the most effective thing she could do. Kenny Maylord was doing that, and they had each other’s cell phone numbers.
First, she had to go inside to calm down Amelia Wong and company, and the Maylords staff. Second, she had to brief Mark Ainsworth on what to give, and not give, the media. Mr. You’ll-be-axed-in-three-months was not a promising candidate for suave media management. Third, as a fail-safe, she had to touch base with all the local media by cell phone to make sure she was their first, and last, contact on any follow-up. And in the middle of all this damage control, she needed to make a radical detour for a mission of mercy. Thank God for cell phones that would keep her finger on the pulse of events even when she was on the road.
Her major personal priority right now had to be off the record: escaping the scene of the crime to find and tell Danny Dove what had happened.
In this world of constant wireless contact, only a face-to-face would do. Temple also understood that actually and finally knowing for sure what had happened . . . and why . . . would only come much later. If ever.
Slow Dancing
Temple headed to the sprawling pseudo-Saharan Oasis Hotel.
Danny was drilling dancers there, working up a huge new show. Rehearsing night and day. The start-up cost was millions. Temple recalled Simon lightly chiding Danny for his frequent recent absences the night of the Maylords opening. A fond pride. An intimate’s good-natured complaint.
Like she would joke about Max being the Invisible Man in her life.
She found herself walking into the Oasis’s Zero-King air-conditioning, moving among murmuring crowds into the noisy heat of action and risk.
Theaters always were located at the rear of Las Vegas hotels, discreet marquees meant to be resorted to only when gaming was temporarily deserted.
This theater marquee was dark. A placard announced the future opening of another Danny Dove spectacular. Toddlin’Towns, a tribute to the world’s great show cities. Paris, Chicago, London, New York . . .
Temple pushed through the easy-opening double doors into the back of the huge, raked house.
Far below, the stage was a black postage stamp pierced with pinpoints of lurid light.
Antlike, people milled in kaleidoscopic patterns below. Danny’s art. Making motion into emotion. Patterns into phenomena.
Temple walked down the carpeted aisle, her heels digging in like pitons against the inevitable pull of gravity that tried to make her stutter into a trot and finally a run. Digging in against inevitability.
As she got closer, she could hear Danny exercising his voice like a ringmaster cracking his whip. Conductors commanded and cajoled with mute arm movements and expressions. Stage directors ruled with pages of postperformance lined notes. Choreographers created with voice and motion, physical presence and command.
They took your breath away.
And then you did more than you had ever imagined you could.
Temple needed to do more now than she had ever imagined she could.
Eventually the company noticed the lone figure stomping down the raked aisle. Their group gaze flicked away from their maestro to the distraction. Nobody ever interrupted a Danny Dove work session.
He finally sensed th
e diversion and turned, imperially annoyed. Saw Temple. Paused. Melted a little. Saw her expression, or lack of it. Frowned.
He turned back to his troops. “All right, people! If you’re going to be distracted you are no damn use to me. Off! Go contemplate your sins! Try to manage a four-four-time trot as you leave. Take a break. Hustle, children! You are movers and shakers, not cigar-store Indians! Dance your exit, damn it! Haven’t you learned anything about making a final bow?”
They clattered away on their taps, a herd of percussionists in leotards.
Danny turned on Temple as she approached. “I’ve never seen you steal a scene before, toots, especially from me. You know rehearsal is sacred. So what’s the big occasion? It had better be.”
She went on silently, until her toes hit the stage-left stairs and her feet moved up onto the black hardwood stage and thundered at every step.
“Danny, I’d rather die.”
“Nobody ever dies in a Danny Dove production.” He waited until she came even with him. “It’s ‘Face the Music and Dance’ all the way.”
He held out his arms like a swain in a ’30s movie.
Temple tilted her head in bewilderment. That released a tear that had been dammed by her eyelashes.
Danny swept her into a box waltz, the dopey, basic four-step every kid had been taught in grade school. Temple stumbled anyway, but Danny was such a superb dancer, such a superb leader, that her stumbles meant nothing.
They moved around the stage, in the silent mathematics and music of dance steps.
“Tell me,” he said.
Temple’s voice was as clouded as her eyes. “I was there. Everything that could be done, was done. All the way to the hospital. Everything that could be done, was done.”
Danny said nothing, but he moved inexorably. Back, forward, side to side. He gave her time. Time, time, time, in a sort of runic rhyme.
He kept her moving, her head spinning faster than her emotions. He was the still, upright hands at the center of the dial. Midnight. Unmoving midnight.
“Simon,” she said. “It was Simon. I’ve been on the cell phone checking every few minutes with Kenny Maylord all the way over here. Everything was tried. At Maylords. In the ambulance. At the hospital. It was too late.”
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