Carmen waited. Mariah sipped bitter coffee, a bigger sip, less of a face.
“I guess they try at OLG.” She rolled her eyes. “Next fall they’re having a Father-Daughter dance. Oh, goodie.”
“Um. Well, at least you get to dress up, right?”
“Yeah! But they already put out a list of what we can’t wear: no bare midriffs, no miniskirts, no hip-huggers, no bustiers. What a drag!”
Carmen had to swallow her laughter with a big gulp of coffee to imagine Mariah finding a bustier in 29A-tween size.
Then she sobered. She suspected that finding a “father” for an escort was the real problem. Who? Morrie Alch was a sweetheart, and had a grown daughter of his own. He’d understand this stage.
Carmen eyed her daughter, reading the unsaid plea behind the disparaging words. Every teeny bopper, as they’d said in her day—which was irrevocably a “day,” she realized—wanted to play Cinderella.
“Maybe,” Carmen said with a strange reluctance, “Matt Devine would be available.”
“Matt? Really? Oh, Mom, he’s so hot!”
Carmen blinked at the reaction. No mo-ther, she noticed.
Mariah jumped off the stool, antsy with excitement. “That would be so rad! All the girls would be so jealous! I mean, he’s almost young! And such a babe!”
Where, oh, where has my shy, retiring daughter gone?
Morrie would have known how to handle this hot preteen potato. Would Matt? Sure. He’d been dealing with grade school crushes since seminary. Not to worry.
“You want me to ask him?”
“No.”
Carmen blinked again. She’d thought she had a sure sell there.
“I want to ask him. I need practice calling up guys, anyway. Do you have his phone number?”
On my one-touch dial system, daughter mine. Only I don’t have your nerve.
Carmen nodded, then frowned maternally. “No bare-midriff dresses, though. Not until . . . high school.”
She couldn’t believe what she was saying. Maybe that fashion fixation would be toast by high school, along with pierced navels. Maybe not.
“Oh, moth-er!”
“Maybe I should drive you over to Melody’s,” she said, rising from the stool.
Her cell phone rang, answering that suggestion.
“Gotta go,” Mariah said, already using the call to fade halfway out the door.
Carmen stood there, semipleased and half-distracted out of her mind.
The voice on the other end filled her in, fast and emotionlessly.
Her maternal frown gave way to a professional one.
“What do you mean ‘celebrity involvement?’ Amelia Wong? And who else? Danny Dove? Celebrity suspects? If Alch and Su are up for this case, by all means, let them have at it. No, Captain, I don’t think Su will have any problem handling America’s most successful Asian-American entrepreneur. I don’t. Yes. I should. I’ll get on it.”
Lieutenant C.R. Molina, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Crimes Against Persons Division, a.k.a. CAPERS, a.k.a. Homicide, pressed the cell phone off and slammed it down on the kitchen countertop.
She headed for the bedroom, unzipping her jeans and walking out of her flip-flops for the cats to have at, the key to the gun safe, which she always wore on an unseen chain around her neck, in her fingers.
Sunday morning, and all’s normal in Las Vegas. Hell to pay for Saturday night.
Cat Crouch
I am back home in my favorite thinking position, supine on the couch, when I watch my Miss Temple enter our rooms at the Circle Ritz, red eyed and shaky.
She walks out of her spunky high-rise clogs as soon as the door is locked behind her, letting her bare feet luxuriate in the faux longhaired goat rug under her coffee table before she collapses onto the sofa, a.k.a. (all too often, in my opinion) the love seat.
I, of course, am entrenched there in one of my Playgirl poses, but she ignores my manly chest hair. I see in an instant that what she needs is a cocktail table, but I am no barkeep.
She digs her trusty cell phone from the bottom of her signature tote bag and pushes a single button.
I can guess who she’s dialing: my rival for her affections, the first and only Max Kinsella, the once and future Mystifying Max. The man who would be king, and still her live-in, except that I am here now, bud.
I figure I better earn my pride of place and bestir myself to cozy up to her hip, running my tongue down her wrist, always a ploy that drives the ladies crazy.
She waves me away, redialing.
“Answer, Max! Answer” she beseeches the cell phone, poor little thing. Oh, man! This is so lame. “Answer. I need you!”
No. She needs me. Usually she knows this. How can I get through to her? We communicate without words, but right now she is too distressed to sense our usual rapport.
She punches another button. And waits.
“Matt? Oh, thank God!”
Well, I thank Bastet myself, but that is a somewhat old-fashioned practice, I admit. Still, it is better than thanking Elvis, which I have been known to do on occasion. Any deity in a storm.
I recall my own traumatic reunions in recent hours and resort to the self-soothing regimen that proved so effective for catkind. I stretch out along my Miss Temple’s hip, purring up a furry hurricane. She strokes me absently. Absently!
“Matt, I just had to tell Danny Dove that Simon Foster, his significant other . . . oh, God . . . is dead.”
Is my Miss Temple saying that God Is Dead? That is so over.
Well, there is no one faster to intervene in a crisis than a priest, even if he is an ex (the most dangerous kind, in my opinion).
“No, I’m all right,” she says, clearly not.
Why do people lie about their states of affairs? When I am down in the dumps or fit to be tied, everyone around me knows it, and can take appropriate measures. But no, people have to waylay each other with polite lies. No wonder homicide only happens to Homo sapiens. Hey, that is kind of catchy! Not to mention alliterative. Too bad I am not a tunesmith.
Well, Mr. Matt will be here in a Las Vegas minute, which is how long it takes to lose fifteen hundred dollars at the craps table.
I roll away, miffed. No one notices. Still, despite the humiliation, I should hang around to overhear what’s going on. So low has the role of the private dick sunk in the present day. Sam Spade would never have put up with this.
Miss Temple cannot even wait for him to arrive, but starts for the door on her little cat feet, barefoot. On her naked pads! Without defensive shivs!
If my petite miss were a vegetable, she’d be a radish: small and colorful, with bite. Right now, her bite has become all gum and no fang. I hate to see her acting like an overcooked broccoli, which is pretty limp to begin with.
Mr. Matt Devine’s knuckles barely brush hardwood before she has the door wide open.
I sneak behind the sofa, so as not to inhibit my subjects, and crouch into position with my ears cranked forward, on high fidelity.
Sudden-Death Overtime
Matt seldom saw Temple without any shoes on, and particularly without any shoes on that added height.
She looked shrunken and sad today, and the out-of-focus blur of her eyes alarmed him.
“Temple?” He followed her into the living room. “I’m sorry. I don’t know who Simon is.”
“Sure you do. You must have met him at the Maylords opening. You saw Danny there too, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Well, I met Simon there. Danny introduced us.”
“I didn’t know that Danny . . . ”
Matt decided it was safer not to say what he didn’t know about Danny Dove. He knew three things, none of them apparently sufficient for this situation: that Temple had known the famed choreographer for longer than anybody in Las Vegas except Max Kinsella, that they were fond of each other, and that Danny was gay.
If Danny were dead, God forbid, he could understand Temple’s emotional st
ate. But . . . who was Simon?
She shook her head. “How could you have missed him? Simon was way too good-looking to be let off a movie screen. Blond, like you. In fact, when I saw him, his body, at first I thought—”
“You saw his body?”
“It fell out of the Murano at Maylords during the orange-blessing ceremony.”
Matt couldn’t help looking completely lost, no matter how much he knew that it was important right now to look sympathetic and knowing.
“Murano?”
“That was the orange SUV crossover that’s the Maylords opening door prize, there by the entrance.”
“Oh, that’s what that orange thing is called. He died in the, um, crossover vehicle?”
Temple clapped a hand to her mouth. “You’re right,” she said through her fingers. “I guess it was literally a ‘crossover vehicle,’ all right. I’ll have to get him to replace it. Kenny Maylord. Get a new giveaway car. One nobody died in. Yet.”
“Hey, don’t get hysterical.” This sentiment seemed to require stepping nearer to Temple, and putting a hand on her shoulder.
That seemed to require her to look up at him through teary eyes and edge into an embrace.
Comforting the afflicted had never felt so good.
Matt cleared his throat. “You’d better sit down.”
Or he had better. He got her perched on the end of the couch and looked around for large black impediments before he sat beside her.
“Simon,” he said again. “The name doesn’t ring a bell, but I do remember some blond guy moving around opening night.”
“Like you.”
“Well—”
“At first glance he looked like you. When that . . . crossover . . . car door opened and he tumbled out onto the floor, I assumed for a moment—”
“He didn’t really look like me. Maybe similar hair color, similar height.”
“Maybe that’s enough! Matt, Kenny Maylord told me that at the hospital they discovered he had been stabbed in the back.”
Matt patted her shoulder. Why did people always pat people who were feeling sorrowful? Because of how mothers instinctively soothed infants? Did we try to mother others in times of sorrow? People who pat people . . . are not the luckiest in the world, maybe just the most inarticulate.
“What are you saying, Temple? That I was the target?”
“No . . . just that it’s odd.”
“Look. I’m tired of being a target. Anybody’s target. I never would have been anywhere near Maylords if it weren’t that—”
“That what?”
Matt sure hadn’t wanted to spell this out to Temple, of all people. “That I was there with Janice. She’s the Maylords connection. I was just a casual escort.”
“Casual? Didn’t look like she thought so.”
“We’re friends, all right?”
“Of course it’s all right,” Temple said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“It is. So this Simon was Danny’s—”
“Partner. Life partner. I know your Church doesn’t—”
“Spare me. You’re not talking to my Church. You’re talking to me. And you had to be the one to tell Danny? Why, Temple?”
“Who else was gonna do it? Some . . . I don’t know who they would have sent. Probably a detective. Would you want Molina telling you your life partner was dead?”
“She wouldn’t do that. Not herself. She’s an administrator.”
“Oh, great. So he would have gotten a what, a beat cop? Or some snarly old detective who thinks there ought to be a law against gay people?”
“You’re stereotyping the other way, Temple, but I can see why you wanted it to be you.”
“It was worse because I’d just found out about Simon, had just met him. Danny was letting me into a part of his life he didn’t open up to just anyone. It was much worse. They seemed so happy with each other.”
Matt could say nothing to that, so he just patted her back as she choked up and tried to stuff her feelings back down with a crumpled tissue and a fist at her mouth.
After a while he asked, “You don’t really think someone mistook him for me? She’s dead, Temple. Thoroughly dead. I saw the body in the morgue myself.”
“I don’t think it’s your stalker, no. We can’t blame ghosts.”
“Why would anyone at Maylords have it in for me? I’d never set foot there before, and I’ll likely never do it again.”
“Not even to see Janice?”
“I can see her other places much better.”
Oops. He wished he could swallow that reassuring comment gone terribly wrong. Why? Why should Temple care? She had Max. Didn’t she?
Temple grew quiet, then blinked and shook her head as if shrugging off the tears.
“Still,” she said. “It’s odd that you two looked alike.”
“We didn’t look that much alike, did we?”
That forced her to really look at him, forced her out of the black box inside her. “No . . . you didn’t. But didn’t someone at the opening mistake you for another man?”
“Only from behind!”
“Simon was only stabbed from behind!” she reminded him.
“Will you forget that? I haven’t got a mortal enemy left in the world, now that the two worst ones are dead. Come to think of it, I’m pretty hard on mortal enemies, rather than vice versa.”
She smiled thinly at his reassurance. “Anyway, it’s lucky you didn’t manage to attend the orange blessing. If the police had spotted any resemblance between you two you’d probably still be downtown having a tête-à-tête with Molina and her minions. Where were you, anyway?”
Matt didn’t know how to say what he needed to without sounding terminally shallow. “I did stop by. So late that nothing was left but the orange peels. No wonder the place seemed deserted. I was late because . . . my booking agent called and there were a lot of dates he had to cross-check with me.”
“Speaking dates,” Temple said.
“That’s about the only kind I have time for these days.”
“I’m sounding stupid. Sorry. All I knew about Simon was how important he was to Danny. Seeing him dead, and then hearing how afterwards . . . Who’d want to kill someone as amiable as Simon? He was new to the staff, everybody was. No time for murderous hatreds to develop.”
“Turning the place into a shooting gallery opening night sounds like a pretty murderous hatred.”
“That had to be someone outside Maylords. Literally. Given the elements inside and outside the store, one might suspect some sort of gay gang war. But a stab in the back is as up close and personal as murder can get. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s not sudden death’s job to make sense. It’s our job to make sense of it for ourselves. What does Kinsella think about this Maylords mess?” he asked.
She leaned back and away, shrugged. Temple was never offhand. He read the truth instantly.
“You haven’t told him yet, have you?”
“No,” she said. Shortly. Everything Temple did was shortly, but he liked it.
He stared, watching her momentary high color fade. It was odd how paper white redheads could go under stress. Even if they had few freckles, like Temple, stress brought out every one. Not that he objected. So she hadn’t told Mr. Undercover about this latest trauma? Max Kinsella had always been Temple’s partner in crime solving. Had always been her partner, period. Even when he had vanished for months without explanation, Temple’s loyalty remained hard-rock solid.
But this time she hadn’t told Max. This time Matt was on the inside, not the outside. How really great he felt about that sudden switch was a good indication of just how dangerous this was. Even Janice had nailed, in a split second, the subterranean sizzle between Temple and himself. None of his Las Vegas adventures, even when they had been somewhat lurid, had prepared him to confront something as simple as what he really wanted. And maybe act on it. Irrevocably. But . . . baby steps first.
“I suppose,” he said, trea
ding lightly on the new and unstable ground he sensed had opened up between them, “Janice might have some insights. I suppose, you . . . we, owe it to Danny to find out.”
Temple’s head was nodding up and down like the little chihuahua on a low-rider’s dashboard.
“I owe it to Danny to find out,” she mumbled, catching on to the one course she could act upon. “And I owe it to Maylords to do damage control and keep the bad publicity to a minimum. There’s got to be a way I can spin it and still stay honest, and somehow . . . save the day. I’ve got to go back, find out what was going on. I will do that. I owe it to my profession, and, most of all, I owe it to Danny.”
Matt remembered how Danny Dove had come to her rescue during a dangerous investigation a few months back.
And now he recalled his one glimpse of Simon Foster at the Maylords opening, who had seemed an innocent figure of light in an environment of dusk and shadow. Matt had sensed fear in the festive atmosphere. Something dark. Darkness he knew a bit about. And strong emotion, hidden agendas, lies. Not sex and videotape, though. He hadn’t gotten to that stage. Yet.
He didn’t particularly want to go gently into that dark night of ugly human behavior where hidden motives become unholy murder, that he knew.
But he would.
And so would Temple.
Neither of them could help it now, she for Danny’s sake, he for the sake of every seen and unseen freckle on her body.
Her teary interlude ended with a hiccough and an expression of true grit.
Janice was right. He thought it was adorable.
Uh-oh
All About Maylords
Temple sat tapping her toes on the floor and tapping her pencil on the tabletop at Goldie’s Old-fashioned Cafeteria.
Matt had arranged a quickie tête-à-tête with Janice Flanders at the restaurant.
You can get anything you want . . ..
Trouble was, Temple didn’t want anything she could get from Janice Flanders.
Okay. Temple herself was a significant other of long standing. Almost two years. She shouldn’t care about other people’s significant others. But in this case she did.
Temple was POed. Piqued off. Max had been incommunicado a bit too long. Sure, that was his usual MO. Modus operandi. But Temple was not a cop. She was his SO. She hated initials, especially the letters CR. As in Crusading Retrowoman. Temple hated shorthand, period. And she was beginning to feel that she’d gotten the short end of the stick from everyone she knew.
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