Cat in an Orange Twist

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  She had been hassled by Beth Blanchard, who probably recognized and went after the one other woman of power employed by Maylords. Some of the women interior designers had looked hard, but none had looked strong like Janice did.

  Darn. She looked a lot stronger than Temple herself.

  Maybe that was why Matt . . . but she would not go there.

  Also, if Janice were the murderer, she certainly was centrally located enough to slip to and from any vignette with no one the wiser.

  The minute Temple spotted Janice in her long linen Blue Fish dress laying prints out on the handsome work island, she knew she didn’t want her to be guilty.

  She was a craftsperson . . . well, personified. Temple watched Janice’s total absorption in her task, an enviably childlike concentration despite her innate adult dignity.

  Drat! She liked the woman. Janice could not be the inside tipster. What she could be shortly was unemployed again. Temple felt a twinge of anger with the Maylords system, that hyped its employees’ hopes and best visions and then callously bled them dry and threw them away.

  Such a policy could easily result in bloody murder, and Temple had to wonder where it came from. And from whom? Kenny Maylord? He was CEO. But it didn’t mean he was in control.

  So then . . . who was?

  Janice must have sensed Temple’s scrutiny, because she looked up.

  “Hi. Hear about the mess last night?”

  Temple just nodded. She didn’t want to explain her inglorious part in it. First she’d lost her weapon. Then she’d lost her verticality for an ignominious exit rear-up on a motorcycle.

  “What an operation.” Janice didn’t even look around to see if anyone was eavesdropping. Way too straightforward for a crooked joint like Maylords. “No wonder they had so many private security people on the payroll. Drugs. I thought this place was paranoid—you had to fill out a form to check out a Band-Aid if your mat cutter slipped—but I guess the management had reason.”

  Temple struggled up on one of the high stools provided for customers and hooked her ankles around the top rung.

  “What’s the word around the floor? Was it really just the security force themselves who was in on it?”

  “Oh, yeah. One of the guards who was let go just yesterday was taken away by the police. Plus this whole biker gang. They were the . . . middlemen, I guess you’d call them. Mark Ainsworth is strutting around here like the head cop on Law and Order. He says it was his ‘sting’ operation that revealed the smuggling plot.”

  “What does Kenny Maylord say?”

  “Haven’t seen him. Or his Barbie-doll wife. He’s always been a lame-duck leader anyway.”

  “Then Ainsworth is the real big cheese around here?”

  Janice laughed and pushed away a print of a tearful clown holding a bouquet of balloons. “Little Mozzarella Lite? Yeah, I’m afraid he’s it. Sad, isn’t it? I haven’t been handed my walking papers like three-quarters of the design department, but I’ll be shuffling on too. I’m an artist. I don’t look back. And I don’t take direction easily.”

  “I thought you needed the job.”

  Janice’s level hazel eyes studied Temple. “Matt’s been tattling. Ex-priests. They don’t really understand girl dynamics, do they?”

  “So what has he been tattling to you?”

  Janice stood, towering over Temple. “I’m not sure he knows, and I’m not sure you could handle it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Right. Well, your job here is over after tonight. I envy you freelancers. I need to stick out the full week so I get a last paycheck. Boring but realistic.”

  “That’s so sad. This store concept has a lot of promise, particularly in the people it hired. And will apparently fire just as fast.”

  “And a lot of problems.” Janice shook her head as if dislodging cobwebs of hope and disillusion. “ ‘Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: “It might have been!”’ ”

  Janice shrugged, grinned, and pulled her t-square toward her to mat the next crying clown print.

  Matt.

  They weren’t art, but they were popular.

  Temple wasn’t sure if Janice had quoted Whittier’s “Maud Muller” for Maylords, or for something . . . or someone . . . else.

  Matt.

  She decided she really didn’t want to know. Matt and Janice were delivering so many mixed messages lately that she felt like a dyslexic Western Union clerk. If they wanted to get mysterious, she could outdo them at that game anytime.

  Because she had just decided what she needed to do next.

  It was risky and it was far out, but something was needed to upset the rotten apple cart around here.

  Luck of the Draw

  That evening was Thursday, end of the week-long event schedule. Temple found Team Wong fully accounted for in the atrium and ready to rock ‘n’ roll.

  Free-standing fountains tinkled like bladder-challenged poodles in a circle around the outré orange Cadillac. Somehow Temple couldn’t picture someone singing “Orange Cadillac.” But she could picture Clint Eastwood in a movie of that name. He was definitely not a pink kind of guy.

  Tonight was the night. Amelia Wong would draw from the huge Plexiglas barrel that contained the names of every last soul who had visited during Maylords’ opening week and had lusted after the prize Murano, now turned, like a pumpkin into a carriage, into an orange Cadillac.

  Temple eyed the low-riding luxury sedan with relief, glad the compromised Murano was gone. She would never have cared to own such a big, high vehicle even before it had housed Simon’s dead body.

  Maybe the mood of the country was growing less pugnacious and obvious.

  Maybe her mood was appreciating the quiet versus the obvious.

  Matt versus Max?

  Why was she thinking like this? She was on her own here. Neither man was on the premises. Only the notion of them. Which was more than enough for her.

  They were all here:

  The Maylords “über management couple. Kenny and Barb.”

  The thinning ranks of hot-shot (literally) decorators (already the predicted personnel slaughter had begun). Which meant the mass of suspect disgruntled ex-employees had swelled.

  Amelia Wong and her now-familiar minions.

  Jerome, still looking whipped despite the loss of his personal crown of thorns.

  Janice, arms crossed as if she were daring the evening to be interesting.

  A suite of potential Maylords clients, all middle-aged and prosperous looking, but not Steve Wynn level.

  Chef Song, alert at the buffet table with his ultrasharp cleaver cocked in the crook of his white-coated arm.

  And Danny Dove, pale and terse, but all business, as a choreographer-turned-inside-man should be. He’d played a key role in tonight’s setup, and Temple wanted him to witness the denouement he deserved.

  Temple nodded imperceptibly at Song and Wong. Both had risen to the occasion and buried the hatchet (or cleaver) in service of the common good.

  She was careful not to acknowledge Danny, but his presence reassured her about the informal, even secret, safety precautions she’d put into place. Dancers were artists with rhythm, you know. She knew.

  She didn’t see Rafi Nadir anywhere, but . . . at the rear, back and center, stood her angels with dirty faces: the Fontana brothers in almond-pale suits with a really butch five days’ growth of beard. White chocolate with a discreet drizzle of dark, to mean business: the beards and the invisible Berettas, of course.

  Tonight the huge Plexiglas drum would turn . . . and turn. Hundreds, even thousands of hopefully-filled-out contest entry forms would tumble in a spin-dry cycle of luck.

  Until Amelia Wong reached in a French-manicured hand and pulled out a plum. A winning entry. Then the orange Cadillac would have a home and all the hoopla and homicide at Maylords would be over.

  Or would it?

  This was her final night as Maylords’s Las Vegas PR rep. Temple was dressed to kill, but h
er handy Colt was still in police custody. Like they needed more firepower.

  New Age music with an Asian accent wafted from the sound system, Enya in Mandarin. The delicate scent of freesias reminded Temple of . . . yes, a funeral parlor.

  While the Wong party and Maylords brass lined up for the usual unimaginative shots for the newspaper society pages, Temple edged as quietly as she could in high heels down the beige travertine road.

  Her weight was on the balls of her feet. She glimpsed her passing self in lacquered ebony cabinet doors, in glints of mirror, on polished brass.

  No one else was moving among the maze of model rooms, dimly lit with accent lights for the evening. Everything looked like home, if you’d spent $40,000 per room.

  Temple moved along, her soles scraping ever so softly on the polished stone floor. There were rumors of ghosts. Some of the departing employees hadn’t been forced out by discovering Maylord’s hidden cut-and-slash method of management; some had been unnerved by the two murders on the premises and quit.

  Temple knew she would see Beth Blanchard’s body spinning as idly as a soft-sculpture mobile for a long, long time in her nightmares.

  She gazed at the hanging art, so oddly static in its usual places now that Beth’s nervous, commanding energy was gone, now that she didn’t need to endlessly undo others’ good work simply to put her own stamp on the whole place.

  She had been an obnoxious woman, so much more eminently kill-able than the likable Simon Foster. Yet something linked the two murders, Temple was convinced.

  No one would kill the sweetest guy and the sourest woman on the staff just because . . . because sweet and sour was a Chinese condiment.

  And Amelia Wong had something to do with it. What a murderous triangle: A gay man and two presumably straight women, one an uppity employee, the other a media diva. Surely the murderer made it a quadrangle. But who?

  Temple couldn’t even hear the echo of the droning speeches now. She was deep within the Maylords maze.

  Alone. Accompanied by ghosts.

  Her steps faltered.

  Something pale moved in one of the vignettes.

  Temple stepped onto the cut-plush wool of a model room carpet to muffle her steps. She edged into the slim cover of a pillar of pooled velvet draping the four-poster bed.

  As her eyes adapted to the low mood lighting she saw a pale-suited man moving in Simon Foster’s Art Deco vignette. Moving and . . . moving pictures.

  It was . . . Simon Foster. The casually perfect highlighted and styled hair, the impeccably cut suit. A ghost in Gucci, moving Erté prints from one position to another. Over and over again, as if perpetually restoring what Beth Blanchard had wrought, over and over again.

  She held her breath.

  His arms raised as if worshiping something unseen. The Erté glided down onto its hook and held. The next one was hung. He stepped back, presenting a well-tailored suit back of featherweight wool blend with Italian double vents at the sides. Maybe not Gucci. Maybe Zegna. Still expensive.

  And then the man again approached the false wall, lifted his arms and took down one print, then another. And switched their places. Over and over again.

  His movements mimicked an automaton. Down, back. Up, switched. Step back. View. Pick up and change. A strange eerie box waltz with the dead. With dead intentions. Change and restoration, like the seasons. Death and rebirth.

  Temple was too mesmerized by it to move.

  Someone else wasn’t.

  Another pale figure suddenly bloomed in the vignette. One moment it wasn’t there, in another it was.

  Its pale arm was raising too. Just one. It needed to do nothing as symmetrical as lift a framed print from a hook. It was poised for a downstroke. This arm was armed. Something dark and thin glinted in one pale fist at the end of one pale sleeve.

  Ghosts were murdering ghosts?

  Temple’s muscles tightened as she prepared to test dream with reality.

  But another pale suited figure multiplied in the dark vignette. And another. Another. A gaggle of ghosts.

  Temple’s fingers tightened on the top of her weapon-empty evening bag. Her role was decreed. Witness.

  She heard grunts, explosive breaths muttering four-letter words.

  “Got the bastard,” someone muttered behind her.

  She turned. It was Rafi Nadir, staring toward the scene as tensely as she was.

  “It’ll be your capture,” she said. “I’m the witness.”

  “That oughta fry Her Lieutenant Highness’s kneecaps. Okay. Confess. Who is it?”

  “I think we can move in. He looks pretty unconscious.”

  “I figure one of those freaky Fontana brothers knows the Vulcan neck pinch, is what I think.”

  Another pale-suited figure vaulted into view, then joined them in gingerly approaching the scene of the almost-crime.

  Danny Dove.

  “Who is it?” he said. “I want to know who it is.”

  “I’m with you, brother,” Rafi said. “I don’t like being downsized to backup.”

  “Amen.” Danny sounded grimmer than he ever had. “But it’s probably just as well for my future liberty.”

  Temple, flanked by her Odd Couple of attendants, was as deeply curious. She’d figured out why, but not who. Although she had her suspicions.

  The plethora of pale suits so typical in sunny Las Vegas confused matters in this ill-lit pseudoroom.

  One Erté print hung on the wall. The other leaned against it.

  On the floor a crowd of bent backs held someone down.

  “Simon” stood alone, upright, watching.

  He turned to face the oncoming trio. The pinpoint spotlight meant to illuminate an Erté print edged his face.

  “It’s all right,” Matt told Temple the moment he picked her face out of the crowd, which was almost instantly. “He never got near me.”

  A bent back straightened and turned.

  “Are we not sheer lightning in Gucci loafers, Miss Temple?” Aldo asked. Or Eduardo. Or Ralph.

  “Slicker than a yellow raincoat,” she said. “So who is buried under Mount Fontana?”

  Danny’s hand on her elbow tensed. He’d insisted on being here for the “kill,” even if it was a metaphoric one.

  The brothers stepped aside as two of their number dredged up their half-swooning “catch.”

  By the wrinkled linen suit ye shall know them.

  Ainsworth the manager! Temple thought in triumph. A thoroughly dislikable but likely candidate. “Where’s the weapon?”

  A Fontana brother pulled a latex glove from an abnormally flat side suitcoat pocket and dove for and then flourished a decorative pewter letter opener. Temple recognized the Chinese character hilt. Maylords must have bought and laid out a dozen of the things for the Wong week of events.

  “Baggie,” he ordered. Several brothers whipped out lunch-size plastic bags from which he selected with great care, depositing the weapon within.

  “Operation over,” another brother pronounced. “Who gets the capture credit?”

  Rafi stepped forward. “I do.”

  For a mad, mad moment, Temple imagined a wedding ceremony including Molina. But she didn’t have time for surreal dreams. She found herself edging forward to peer at the captive. The height was right, the build, even the hair. But this wasn’t Ainsworth. This was his literal evil twin.

  By now Janice had edged into the picture, standing next to Matt. God, he looked great!

  Temple refocused on the exceedingly less great-looking Ainsworth clone.

  Fifty pounds overweight, dressed and coifed to imitate, done up to pass unnoticed in Maylords, to be avoided even, like the micromanaging Ainsworth. A makeover, as Matt was for the murdered Simon, thanks to Danny’s sleight of hand. How that must have hurt.

  “What’s going on?” a whiny voice queried petulantly from behind them all.

  Will the real Mark Ainsworth please stand up?

  The eyes that had turned to regard him were n
ow all coming to rest on Temple.

  She considered the captive, his head hung as low as possible to hide his features. But she didn’t need a road map now; she had found the destination. It was a dead end, in fact.

  Two dead ends.

  “This is the guy. He murdered Beth Blanchard at least, and maybe Simon. Take it away, Raf.”

  The words had the effect of inviting Jackie Gleason to consort with chorus girls. Nadir stepped forward to clamp the poor man’s Ainsworth into his custody.

  Temple weighed her cell phone in her hand, ready to speed dial Molina herself. She really deserved this collar. And Temple really deserved to see Rafi hand over the perp to Molina personally.

  Instead, Temple thought a little longer. If the criminal events at Maylords—high-powered rifle attack, two murders, and a drug bust—were to fit together nicely in a box for the LVMPD, some fancy ribbon tying was needed to gift-wrap the package.

  Temple was good at ribbon-cutting events. Maybe she had even more to offer in the ribbon-tying department.

  And she knew she had to present a fully wrapped package to turn the media coverage into a positive instead of a negative.

  There was no getting away from the fact that Maylords had been the scene of some major-league evil deeds. But if it could be shown at the same time that Maylords itself, and its employees, i.e., her, solved their own mess . . . it would make the survivors heroes instead of idiots.

  So far her plans had proved productive. But, she hoped, the best was yet to come, the Sting of Stings. All she needed was Redford and Newman, and, heck, Matt was a pretty good Redford substitute. Max wasn’t Newman, by any means. Newman was too medium cool for Max. But he’d done a pretty good Mel Gibson imitation with the motorcycle. . . .

  Whatever, she wanted Simon, and Danny, to rest easy with a job well done. Her job. So much more than mere public relations. Some good people had gone down and some not-so-good people would have to answer for it.

  If all went well. And why wouldn’t it. She was a primo events manager, wasn’t she? Call her Nemesis, wired.

  Temple holstered her cell phone and set about doing what she did best: arranging successful public events. Even when they revealed very private motives.