Cat in an Orange Twist

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Trouble in Store

  Maybe it was because today was Sunday, but furniture stores in the late afternoon reminded Temple of churches.

  This was when both were formally decked out for company, but usually deserted.

  Temple had wanted to check in the store before it closed at 7:00 P.M. She prowled Maylords’ concentric aisles, visiting the landmarks of the grand opening without the distraction of a mob.

  She had glimpsed a suited man loitering in the big boxy area, around the corner from the entrance, reserved for unglamourous goods like mattresses and carpet samples.

  The harried shirtsleeved man she saw pushing a huge dolly bearing a credenza was Matt’s friend from seminary, whom he’d pointed out at the opening.

  Temple cruised past vignettes she was beginning to recognize, regarding them as side “chapels” to round out her church analogy.

  At one she stopped, almost ready to light a votive candle, had there been any.

  This was Simon’s design, a temple to Art Deco revival. He had been so talented. Her eye moved from one piece to another, torn between pure aesthetic pleasure, a lust to own everything she saw, and an impulse to weep.

  Her gaze flipped back the way she might return to an earlier-read page. Something was . . . wrong.

  In her memory, Simon again stepped up to the lacquered gray wall and exchanged one Erté print’s position with another. The improvement was instantaneous.

  Now it was back the old way, and all wrong. Temple stepped up to the wall, and stretched to lift one framed print off its hook. She leaned it against a leopard-print sofa cushion, then strained to remove the other.

  She was too short for this job, but Simon deserved to have his vignette the way he had wanted it.

  “What are you doing there?” The question was sharp and commanding.

  Temple didn’t stop what she was doing. Neither did her inquisitor.

  “Lady, I’m talking to you. Customers can’t just walk in this store and start rearranging furniture.”

  “Why not? You do it.” Temple turned, facing the tall woman standing in the aisle like an affronted statue come to life. “The last thing I saw Simon Foster do when he was alive”—Temple lifted the Erté print of a woman in a gauzy black and orange chiffon gown, to the hook on the left—“was to restore the placement of these two pieces. Like this. Some yahoo had come through and moved them back again.”

  “There’s no computer connection to Yahoo here,” the woman said scathingly.

  “Yahoo,” Temple explained, “is an ignorant being, not an Internet service. See Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.” When the woman looked blank, she added, “Ted Danson played the title role in a TV miniseries. He ran into a lot of yahoos. A yahoo is a member of a race of ignoramuses.”

  Beth Blanchard blinked. Slowly. “Ted Danson. Cheers. Right. We have nobody named ‘Gulliver’ here.”

  She was tall and thin with a hyperthyroid look: bulging blue eyes. She was also incredibly unlearned.

  “And,” Blanchard added, “you’re the . . . ignoramus if you think you can walk into Maylords and rearrange the room settings. I’m going to call security.”

  “Get Raf Nadir while you’re at it,” Temple said. “And Kenny Maylord. He’s the one who hired me.”

  “If you were hired you can get fired.”

  “Apparently that’s the rule around here. Unfortunately for you, I have a contract with the corporation.”

  While Beth blinked in confusion, Temple stepped back into the aisle to eyeball her quick-change act.

  “Much better. Simon had an impeccable eye. See how the spiral right-facing movement of the orange piece complements the scroll on the bedposts?”

  “You’re nuts, lady. I don’t see anything.”

  “My point exactly. You should let people who can see things do their jobs unmolested.”

  The woman blinked again. Temple concluded that she was not only ignorant but a tad stupid. They didn’t always go together, but when they did you got a dangerous person. Nothing would stop her from running roughshod over people much sharper, and more sensitive, than she. Even when they were dead.

  Temple hated bullies, especially when they were standing right beside her and had nine inches on her.

  Another voice joined the discussion. “You mentioned my name?”

  Rafi Nadir was standing there in all his brute glory; navy mobster suit and five o’clock shadow.

  Beth tensed beside Temple. “This woman is vandalizing the vignette. Escort her out of the store.”

  Nadir turned to Temple. He looked stern. “Anything I can help you with, Miss Barr?”

  “This woman is undermining the work of her fellow Maylords employees. Get her off my back.”

  “Well!” Beth started to say more, but Rafi turned and gave her a look Temple recognized as cop-not-to-fool-with.

  “Your days are numbered, though you don’t know it,” Beth told Rafi.

  Temple sucked in a breath. That sounded like a death threat. Maybe Simon had received the same warning.

  Beth hoarded one final salvo in her mediocre mind, a shot at dishonoring the dead. She stared toward Simon’s vignette, then said, “I guess he won’t be collecting any commissions on that stuff, no matter how it’s arranged.”

  The sound of her furious retreating heels echoed for a long time.

  Nadir stared after her. “Castrating bitch,” he noted without rancor, then turned for an expected chastisement from Temple.

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” she said.

  “You are full of surprises.”

  “So, sometimes, are you.”

  “She’s right. The extra security guys like me are only contracted until the Wong woman leaves. Then it’s down to the skeleton crew of regular security . . . a bunch of Marx Brothers who think like police reserve wannabes. Amateurs.”

  “Maybe she meant ‘your days are numbered’ literally. And I hear the entire sales force has been put on notice.”

  “Is that right? Everybody’s expendable? After the dough Maylord spread around getting ready for this opening? Doesn’t figure.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But how does Simon’s murder figure into it?”

  “He was queer.”

  “That’s no reason to kill someone.”

  “In some circles it is.”

  “Not in upscale home furnishing stores.”

  Nadir shrugged, declining to argue, but not changing his mind, or his prejudices.

  “Listen,” she said, “all I know is that people are leaving the staff already, one way or the other. I need a list of how many have quit so far. If, as the charming Ms. Blanchard says, your days here are numbered, could you get that for me?”

  “You want me to pass privileged information on to you? You want me to play snitch?”

  “Ah . . . yeah, that’s about it.”

  He shook his head and laughed. “You know how low snitches rank in the game of cops and robbers?”

  “Lower than a snake belly?”

  “Even lower.”

  “I don’t suppose you know how to run the kind of computers they probably use around here anyway. Maybe you could get me into the administrative offices after-hours—?”

  “Worse plan. And I am computer literate. But you don’t need to do technoespionage, kid. You just want to interview the employees who were dumped, or ran, right?”

  “Right. Just talk to them.”

  “Okay. I’ll get you a list.”

  “How?”

  He waited a beat. “I should impress the hell out of you and not tell you how.”

  “If you can get me that list, I’m already impressed. It’s a good idea, isn’t it? Interview the malcontents?”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m no detective, not even a private one.”

  “So how are you going to get that list?”

  He shrugged. “No magic. They keep a list of authorized employees in the security office. They’ve checked off the exes, including t
he Foster guy. They’re real nervous about the disgruntled ones doing them dirt. Heard, or overheard, that they had an incident recently in Palm Beach when an angry ex-employee shot out their illuminated display windows at night.”

  “Wow. So there’s precedent, then. And the rain of terrorizing bullets could have been from one of the people just fired?”

  He shrugged. “You’re the girl detective. I’m just a grunt. All I’ve gotta be is copy-machine literate. You okay with that?”

  Temple nodded. “More than okay. I’m impressed. Simple is better than complicated. Don’t get caught.”

  “Right. Like you wouldn’t be relieved if I did.” He walked away.

  Even when he proved unexpectedly helpful, Rafi Nadir’s pervasive bad attitude, BA, hung over him like BO, body odor, canceling out any possible redeeming qualities. It made Temple yet more curious about his long-ago relationship with Molina. Apparently he was why she’d sworn off men. How mind-boggling to imagine the hard-edged homicide lieutenant Temple knew being young and vulnerable enough to associate with Nadir. Or had Nadir’s worst characteristics surfaced afterwards?

  “Miss Barr?” The voice was a whisper at the edges of her consciousness.

  She looked around and saw the credenza pusher.

  He reminded her of Sisyphus from the ancient Greek myth, forced to roll a rock up a hill and always losing ground before he reached the top. She seldom encountered anyone so obviously beaten down, especially not in Las Vegas, a city that rewarded chutzpah. Jerome was the quintessential Nice Guy metamorphosized into schmuck: a mild-mannered man, obviously, in his early thirties, but already his hairline was beating a swift retreat along with everything else in his life. He’d tried to compensate with a beard, but even it was thin and tentative.

  “I’m Jerome. Jerome Johnson.” He looked around again, then stepped nearer. “I’d like to talk to you. I’m a . . . friend of Matt’s.” He eyed her uneasily. “Too.”

  “Talk? Sure. There’s the shopper’s café at the back of the store.”

  Jerome shook his head, still looking around.

  “Maybe the employee lounge would be more private.”

  His watery gray gaze fixed on her face with horror. “Not there. Someplace out of the store, where nobody from here would be likely to go.”

  This desperation for privacy intrigued her, but his request also stumped her. Las Vegas was a city designed to attract tons of people everywhere. And what would be the opposite of a place that Maylords employees would hang out?

  “There’s a Chunk-a-Cheez Pizza place off Flamingo. It’s noisy.”

  “Noisy is good,” Jerry said. “I can get away at one P.M. I’ll see you there tomorrow.”

  “Jer-ry,” came a clarion call from the lovely and cultured Beth Blanchard. “This credenza is six inches off-center, just like your brain.”

  Temple could hear the woman’s oncoming heels beating travertine like a drum.

  Jerry winced an apology at her, then scurried to meet the enemy. She had to admire his dogged courage. Temple could hear Blanchard’s admonishing monologue as she slipped through the store the other way around and finally ended up at the entrance.

  Something was indeed rotten in the not-so-merry old land of May-lords. The bland Kenny didn’t seem up to overseeing a seriously dysfunctional workplace, but evil can wear an unlikely face.

  Speaking of dysfunction, the feng shui surrounding Amelia Wong reeked of superficiality and sycophants. Celebrity produced the worst kind of power, and attracted the worst sort of psychopath. That rain of bullets smacked of some sort of Wong involvement. Larger-than-life empress, big-time attacks.

  Simon’s murder smacked of the intimate, the small: one-on-one. Neither act of violence made sense. Each was wholly destructive, with no hint of even something as constructive as personal gain underneath.

  Well, that would have to be found out, Temple thought, surveying the clumps of sleek furniture grazing around the polished stone floor like elegant sheep in an upscale meadow. Where there is conspicuous consumption, there is probably conspicuous crime.

  This was Temple’s scene for the moment, her little world for the term of her contract. Nothing was supposed to go wrong in it, and everything had. The publicity attracted was not positive but negative and lurid. It could not go on, or more and worse events might result. Temple eyed the deceptive stillness.

  A faint orange fragrance lingered, overcoming even the discreetly savage smell of leather. Orange. Blossoms. The scent should have reminded her of weddings, if not her own, but she’d think about that tomorrow.

  Instead, this scent had a citruslike, bitter undertone, like the rind of an orange. It reeked too much of the mysterious concoction Temple thought of as domestic Agent Orange, the ubiquitous scent morgues used to cover the smell of decay. Temple had taken a tour of the Vegas medical examiner’s facility when she was repping a medical convention. It had been a clinical yet creepy environment.

  It occurred to Temple that this scent of gussied-up decay was oddly appropriate for Maylords.

  Undercover Cats

  “This place is one big napatorium,” Ma Barker notes when I show her the illuminated display windows of Maylords Fine Furnishings. “I always like a long Sunday nap.”

  She is up and about, despite her injuries. I hijacked a bottled-water truck in North Las Vegas to bring her down-Strip in style.

  Now she is looking with lust upon all the upholstered furniture our kind cannot afford to dig our shivs into.

  Many of us cannot afford even a Dumpster Dive Decor.

  “You know people who work inside this davenport dream?” she asks.

  “A few,” I admit. “Most I do not know. And one of them could be a murderer.”

  “Murderer-schmurderer,” Ma Barker notes with a sneer. “It is all a matter of point of view. Am I a murderer? I eat dead things. Oh! Sorry to offend your domesticated sensibilities, my boy. I guess I should say I eat . . . well-done-in meat. There. Is that better? That is what your human friends do every day, and you do not wince when they discuss their eating habits.”

  “Let us agree to disagree,” I say, “and admit to what disagrees with us.”

  Ma Barker turns from gazing into the display windows to regard the sandy empty lot across the way.

  “You are right, Grasshopper. Now that our population is stable we need a better class of empty lot.”

  I am right! The old dame has admitted I am right!

  “But this place will not stay empty for long,” she adds. “And window shopping will wear on a clan used to getting its claws into life. Rodeo Drive is not for us.”

  “Well, there is Three O’clock’s place out by Lake Mead.”

  “We are an urban community.”

  “How about that Cloaked Conjurer’s spread, the residential joint behind the cemetery with the Big Boys on board, where you took out those rottweilers and I pasted the ears back on that she-devil Siamese?”

  “That feisty little girlfriend of yours did the take-down that time, Grasshopper.”

  “Ah, Ma Barker, we gotta talk about that.”

  “It is all right, son. No need to be embarrassed about a steady girlfriend. I understand that a righteous dude must be responsible these days or the Behavior Police will nail his nuts to the wall. Boys cannot be boys the way they used to be, for the good of the species. And there is the age difference. Not that I have anything against that. I believe that little Louise has had the operative procedure. She is a modern girl. Yet she has accepted tradition enough to bear your name. You could have done worse. I might have liked grandkits now that my mothering days are over, but I understand.”

  “I do not think you do.”

  At which point she swats me firmly on the kisser. “No back talk. You are still a kit to me. Ma Barker knows best.”

  Swing Shift

  Max buckled the bungee cord to his leather cummerbund and checked it twice.

  Up here at the pyramidal peak of the club called Neon Nightmare
the only music from below that drifted up was the thrumming beat of the earthshaking bass.

  Earplugs.

  That was the next piece of equipment he needed to add to his arsenal. Tonight he’d have to work in the matrix, though.

  That was the heart of his new act: movie Matrix- style leaps and capers, not to mention vertical wall walking.

  The black stretch velvet cape swirled around him, obscuring the hooks and wires that made his current magic act fly.

  He was like a puppet on a hundred-foot-high stage, clinging at the top of the flies to a tiny parapet at the pyramid’s peak, waiting to take the plunge into the limelight.

  At thirty-four, this was a hell of a way to go without a stunt double, but he’d been training hard to press his advantage in having breeched the Synth’s secretive walls as a whole new performing personality.

  The Phantom Mage. Part Batman, part Spider-Man, part Matrix-man. What a way to reinvent his performing career, and all for the sake of espionage, not fame and fortune.

  When he’d been a full-time magician, the Mystifying Max had been renowned for defying gravity.

  Now, in this new act, he’d be defying both gravity and death. The gravity of death.

  If it worked and his act pulled the attention of the self-absorbed party people below, he would prolong his chance of learning something solid about the sinister Synth, which might be the magicians’ version of Murder Inc.

  If it didn’t work, he’d be another magician/acrobat that couldn’t, and would have to start all over again from square one to position himself inside the heart of darkness known as the Synth.

  Death-defying leaps into free fall seemed the better course.

  Max pulled once more on the steel hook, waiting for the pulsing drumbeats that were his curtain-raiser, and leaped into the dark noise below.

  The rush of wind, his cloak billowing like wings, the stomach-churning swoop caused an adrenalin rush.

  He was upside down like a bat (Count Dracula was another compelling media role model), but he forced his body to stay loose, so he wouldn’t fight the sudden jerk at the end of his elastic tether.